GOP senators need to 'find a backbone' when it comes to Trump's Cabinet nominees: lawmaker

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) issued a dire warning to CNN's Alex Marquardt about the dangers of confirming Tulsi Gabbard as Donald Trump's director of national intelligence — and urged Senate Republicans to step up and do what's right.

"I want to ask you about another national security pick, Tulsi Gabbard, former Democrat, former Democrat from the House, a very unorthodox choice for the director of national intelligence," said Marquardt, playing a clip of Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) expressing his own misgivings about the choice.

"Well, we'll have lots of questions," said Lankford in the clip. "She met with Bashar al-Assad. We'll want to know what the purpose was and what the direction for that was as a member of Congress. We'll want to get a chance to talk about past comments that she's made and get them into full context. So, sure, there's comments that are floating out there, but we want to be able to know the rest of the story."

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"So Senator Lankford ... talking about her meeting a couple of years ago with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, one of many concerns that Democrats have," said Marquardt. "What do you think about that pick?"

"Well, these aren't just concerns of Democrats," said Ryan, a former Army captain in the Military Intelligence Corps during the Iraq War. "These are concerns of serious national security professionals from both parties that have seen her for over a decade now, essentially propagating as almost a puppet of [Vladimir] Putin, his language, Russian propaganda, other dictators and authoritarian propaganda on TV including right here. And that's given, again, the threats arrayed where we see China, North Korea, Russia and Iran all cooperating. And she's — any question about where her loyalty might lie is incredibly dangerous."

"Are we going to see these Republicans that seem to be dodging, in the Senate, giving actual answers, find a backbone and do what's right, not as partisans, but as patriots?" he continued. "I hope that we'll see that on Hegseth. I hope we'll see it on Tulsi Gabbard. Thankfully we did, it looks like, see it with Matt Gaetz, and now there's a precedent."

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