Jeremy Scahill over at Drop Site reviews the history of Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, who transitioned rapidly from being antiwar and supporting Bernie Sanders, running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and then endorsing Biden that year, to becoming an ardent Trump supporter.

Scahill writes that she will be a shock to the US intelligence system but that the charges that she is an undercover agent for Vladimir Putin, or at least an apologist for him, are oversimplified.mIt is a long analysis and well worth reading in full.

Here is part of it.

If confirmed as the next Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would represent one of the most unorthodox political figures to hold such a senior national security post in U.S. history. A veteran of the war in Iraq, Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012 and emerged as a sharp critic of the U.S. forever wars launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. She denounced U.S. regime change wars, including the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and consistently opposed U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth war against Yemen, which extended from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. On multiple occasions, she accused Trump of being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” taking orders from his Saudi “masters,” and of supporting Al Qaeda. She has called for pardoning whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and fought to change U.S. laws permitting domestic surveillance of Americans.

At the same time, Gabbard is not an antigen infiltrating the U.S. intelligence system. Over the past four years she has fully embraced Trump’s America First posture in explaining her dissent from the elite foreign policy consensus. Gabbard also has a history of support for a slew of standard, bipartisan U.S. national security and defense policies. She has offered die-hard backing for Israel’s war against Gaza, opposed a ceasefire, and accused Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the chief facilitators of Israel’s genocidal war, of being soft on terrorism and anti-semitism. She has also argued that the U.S. and other Western nations should wage both a military and ideological war against what she calls “radical Islamist ideology.” She has described herself as a “hawk” when it comes to using military action against “terrorists” and has advocated using “surgical” drone strikes against terror groups, a system refined and expanded under the Obama and Trump administrations. She has praised Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi for his “great courage and leadership” and, following a 2015 meeting with Sisi in Cairo, called on Obama to “take action to recognize President el-Sisi and his leadership.” In Congress, Gabbard voted to keep in place U.S. surveillance laws aimed at foreign nationals and nations and supported economic sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea. 
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While Gabbard’s nomination as DNI is being celebrated by many non-interventionists on both the left and right, reviewing years of her public statements, positions, and interviews reveals inconsistencies in her dissent from U.S. war mongering and a frequent embrace of some of the foundational language deployed by the Bush-Cheney administration as it launched the so-called global war on terrorism. “When it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” she told a newspaper in Hawaii in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.” Her support for Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza fits squarely within Trump’s Israel First national security nominees. Gabbard also has close ties to far right Hindu nationalists with an explicitly violent anti-Muslim agenda and an alliance with Israel and extremist Zionists.

Despite Trump’s self-promotion as an unconventional non-interventionist, his first term as president was a militaristic one. He expanded U.S. drone strikes, sanctioned Russia and expelled 60 of its diplomats, interfered in Venezuela, Cuba, and other nations, used the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan, waged a massive scorched earth war in northern Iraq against ISIS, bombed Syria, used U.S. special operations forces inside Yemen, continued U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, empowered Israel’s campaign to annihilate the Palestinians and to annex more of their territory, assassinated the most senior Iranian military official, and engaged in all manner of traditional American warmaking. And he often did so with the backing of leading Democrats, many of whom voted to give him sweeping and expanded surveillance authorities.
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Independent journalist Michael Tracey, who sympathetically covered Gabbard’s career and embedded with her on the campaign trail during her 2020 run for the Democratic nomination, recently accused Gabbard of cynically abandoning many of her marquee positions as she shifted to an alliance with the MAGA movement. “[A]n opportunity arose to insinuate herself into the Republican Party—which of course requires abandoning any critique of Trump,” Tracey wrote. “She has proven that she no longer holds to the positions she once espoused in any discernible fashion. No real through-line between now and the 2020 campaign can be reliably traced … she decided to overturn her prior stated convictions in pursuit of power. I consider that crass, unprincipled opportunism.”

Basically, Gabbard is political chameleon like JD Vance, who has been all over the political map with her past positions so we don’t really know what the hell she will do in any given situation that might arise in the Trump administration. This makes her a perfect match for Trump, since she will likely go along with anything he wants.