Nikki Haley on Wednesday slammed former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence — over her 2017 “photo-op” with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“He was massacring his own people. She said she was skeptical that he was behind the chemical weapons attacks,” said Haley of Gabbard on her SiriusXM show.
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“Now, this to me, is disgusting.”
Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Trump, pointed to a 2017 speech she gave where she held up pictures of Syrian children who were victims of a chemical weapons attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun.
Gabbard, just months before the attack, met with Assad during a secret trip to Syria and, in 2019, would declare that the Syrian president was “not an enemy” to the United States.
“For her to say that Assad was not behind that, literally, everything she said about that were Russian talking points, every bit of that, that was Russian propaganda,” said Haley before adding that the Democrat-turned-Republican also blamed NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
She continued, “And the Russians and the Chinese echoed her talking points and her interviews on Russian and Chinese television.”
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Elsewhere in her SiriusXM show, Haley — a harsh Trump critic amid her 2024 bid before eventually endorsing his campaign — noted that the president-elect’s pick also once opposed his withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and opposed sanctions on the country, as well.
“So now she’s defended Russia, she’s defended Syria, she’s defended Iran and she’s defended China. Now she has not denounced any of these views, none of them. She hasn’t taken one of them back,” Haley said.
She later added, “DNI … This is not a place for a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.”