The National Review seems to have outdone itself in throwing truth and logic to the wind in order to publish an unhinged diatribe against Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s nominee as Director of National Intelligence.
“Gabbard has been ideologically hostile to the job she’s been selected for,” writes the editorial board. Why? Because “she long opposed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” What is the National Review's concept of intelligence, if supporting the Fourth Amendment’s protections against warrantless searches is “ideologically hostile” to it? “This is like a secretary of defense nominee being opposed to building tanks,” they brazenly analogize.
Then they come to Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed the overreach of the National Security Agency. The National Review's illiterate writers say that after gathering a trove of documentation, he “handed it over to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks [sic] … and subsequently defected to Russia.” Edward Snowden did not provide material to WikiLeaks. In Hong Kong, he gave his material to precisely two people: journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. And Snowden of course did not “defect” to Russia. He was attempting to travel from Hong Kong to Ecuador (where he planned to have asylum) and had a layover at a Moscow airport. When the U.S. canceled his passport, he could not board his flight, and was stranded in Russia.