Nikki Haley on Wednesday condemned former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to become director of national intelligence her 2017 “photo op.” with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“He was slaughtering his own people. She said she was skeptical that he was behind the chemical weapons attacks,” Gabbard’s Haley said on her SiriusXM show.
“I find this disgusting.”
Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, pointed out one 2017 speech she gave where she held up pictures of Syrian children who were victims of a chemical weapons attack in the city of Khan Shaykhun.
Gabbard met with Assad during a secret trip to Syria several months before the attack and would declare in 2019 that the Syrian president was “not an enemy” of the United States.
“The fact that she said that Assad did not support that, literally everything she said about that Russian conversation topicsthat was all Russian propaganda,” Haley said before adding that so did the Democrat-turned-Republican blamed NATO for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
She continued: “And the Russians and the Chinese repeated her talking points and her interviews on Russian and Chinese television.”
Elsewhere on her SiriusXM show, Haley — a tough Trump critic during her 2024 bid before ultimately endorsing his campaign — noted that the president-elect also once opposed his withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and also against sanctions against the country.
“So now she has defended Russia, she has defended Syria, she has defended Iran and she has defended China. Now she has not challenged any of these views, none of them. She didn’t take one back,” Haley said.
She later added: “DNI… This is no place for a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.”