Starting last summer, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard publicly berated the Biden administration, claiming that she was placed on what she called “a domestic terror watch list” as punishment for critical comments she had made about Vice President Kamala Harris.
The reality was more complicated. A federal agency responsible for protecting flights did briefly subject her to special scrutiny — but not for the reason she asserted, according to two senior U.S. officials briefed on the matter. Rather, they said, the additional security measures were triggered by an event she attended at the Vatican that was organized by a European businessman who appeared on an F.B.I. watch list.
There is no indication that Ms. Gabbard, now President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, did anything wrong by making the trip. And it is not clear why the F.B.I. had placed the European businessman on the watch list or whether he was placed on it by mistake.
But the travel to Italy, combined with a 2017 visit that Ms. Gabbard made to Syria and Lebanon, has raised questions about the extent to which Mr. Trump’s nominee to serve as the nation’s top intelligence official adequately weighed the implications of her foreign travels and associations.
Ms. Gabbard has long been a contrarian voice, staking out positions on Syria and Russia at odds with the Washington foreign policy establishment. Her public remarks sometimes have made her a darling of Russia’s vast state media apparatus. The day after Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she blamed the United States and NATO for provoking the war by ignoring Russia’s security concerns.
While in Syria in 2017, Ms. Gabbard, who at the time was representing Hawaii in the House as a Democrat, met with President Bashar al-Assad, an authoritarian leader backed by Russia, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah until December, when rebel groups seized the Syrian capital.
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