Tulsi Gabbard Just Dropped the Truth Bomb Democrats Didn’t Want to Hear

Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing for her appointment as Director of National Intelligence kicked off with the usual spectacle: Democrats grasping at soundbites like children clawing for candy. Their latest attempt? Trying to get Tulsi to label Edward Snowden “brave” or “patriotic.”

Guess what? She didn’t take the bait. But you know what she also didn’t do? She didn’t call him a traitor, either.

Tulsi laid out a nuanced, thoughtful truth that made the committee’s gotcha game look embarrassingly petty. “Edward Snowden broke the law,” she said. “But he also released information that exposed egregious, illegal, and unconstitutional programs that are happening within our government that led to serious reforms that Congress undertook.”

And she’s absolutely right.

Without Snowden, we’d be blind to the inner workings of our intelligence community and the way they twisted FISA court rulings to suit their own political agendas. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was supposedly set up as a safeguard—an oversight body. Instead, it’s been a rubber stamp for unconstitutional surveillance on American citizens, including the disgraceful targeting of President Trump.

Technically, the FISC is a federal court, but don’t be fooled. It doesn’t operate like a regular judicial entity. It’s an arm of the intelligence community—essentially, an executive branch hit squad disguised as an impartial overseer. This is the system liberals weaponized to spy on their political enemies, only to turn around and pretend they’re shocked when someone like Tulsi opposes it.

The current defense of FISC pretty short-sighted on the part of Democrats, to be honest. All of this executive power they’ve been expanding for years? It’s now under Trump’s control. Every executive board, agency, and committee—including the intelligence community’s pet projects—is under the President’s authority. The left seems to have forgotten this little detail while they were busy handing over unchecked power to bureaucratic elites.

The FISA courts and the intel agencies don’t have Constitutional autonomy. They operate at the pleasure of the President. The power they flaunt is borrowed, and it can be taken away by any executive who chooses to restore actual constitutional authority. In fact, most of the rules they cling to—including classification guidelines—aren’t even laws. They’re executive regulations, meaning they can be tossed out with the stroke of a pen if someone in the Oval Office decides enough is enough.

Let’s be real: The intelligence agencies have been drunk on power for too long, and Snowden’s leaks forced a reckoning. I’m not here to knight him as some flawless hero, but I will say this—Tulsi had it right. Without the actions of Edward Snowden, we wouldn’t have known just how deeply the rot had set into our national security infrastructure. We wouldn’t have understood how the FISA courts betrayed their duty or how the government was snooping on its own citizens with impunity.

So, when Tulsi Gabbard refused to call Snowden a traitor, she wasn’t being soft. She was being smart. And in a political climate where intelligence officials are so often NOT smart, that’s a breath of fresh air.