Files detail bid to contain fallout from Tulsi Gabbard meetings with Assad
Trip to Syria in 2017 is expected to be a focus of questions from senators weighing her nomination to be director of national intelligence.
The timeline, which has not been previously reported, said that Gabbard and Bashar al-Assad met at 12:15 p.m. on Jan. 16, 2017, and that her next appointment was with Assad’s wife at 3 p.m.
Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff replied that the Assad meeting seemed “rather long” and asked if any “formalities” could be broken out to “cut down on the time that it appears you two sat and talked.” Her press secretary asked if the Assad meeting could be grouped with encounters with other dignitaries so it would “appear more like” one in a series of “protocol meetings.” The report Gabbard eventually submitted to Congress said that the meeting with Assad lasted 90 minutes, and that the meeting with his wife began at 2 p.m. The actual duration is unclear.
The exchanges were part of a days-long scramble by Gabbard’s team to account for her time in Syria and limit the political fallout of the trip, which has drawn renewed scrutiny in the weeks since President Donald Trump nominated her to be the next director of national intelligence, overseeing all U.S. spy agencies. The 2017 trip is expected to be a focus of questioning from senators at her confirmation hearings this month, particularly from Democrats who have said it served to legitimize the dictator.
Emails, text messages, Google Doc edit logs and other records reviewed by The Post show that Gabbard’s team had been left largely in the dark about her schedule in Damascus. Her itinerary had changed drastically from a version approved by the Ethics Committee before she left, which listed no meetings with Syrian politicians or officials.
Four former staffers who were involved in the discussions told The Post they were alarmed to learn only after the fact that Gabbard had met with Assad — twice in three days. The aides, one of whom had advised against such a meeting, said they struggled to get direct answers from Gabbard about who she had met with and for how long. The experience led one staffer to quit and contributed to other staffers’ decisions to later leave, they said. Like some others quoted in this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
One former staffer recalled that the first meeting was listed as “somewhere around three hours. I remember thinking, ‘That’s insane.’ What do you talk about for three hours in a supposed unplanned meeting?”
In response to detailed questions from The Post, Trump transition spokeswoman Alexa Henning called this story a “Deep State smear campaign filled with gross misrepresentation and conjecture” and said the documents it is based on are confidential. She emailed statements in defense of Gabbard from allies including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), now Trump’s national security adviser.
Gabbard has previously said she did not expect to meet Assad but the opportunity arose. Henning said the meeting “was not scheduled prior to her departure.”
Gabbard has said little publicly about the substance of her conversations with Assad, and the records reviewed by The Post do not illuminate those discussions. She has stood by the decision to meet with him, saying that world leaders must be willing to communicate to achieve peace.
During her February exchanges with aides, Gabbard appeared attuned to the fact that the disclosure of new details about her trip could spur additional controversy.
“Once it’s filed, it will be public record and can be accessed by anyone in the public. This could spark another round of media,” Gabbard wrote in an email. “If you have any areas of concern or areas where you think there should be more/less info, please let me know.”
Gabbard’s nomination caps a remarkable transformation over the past decade from liberal Democrat to favorite of the Republican right, even as she sometimes alarmed colleagues from both parties by defending Assad and his longtime ally, Russian president Vladimir Putin. Gabbard has made statements that echo Kremlin talking points and expressed skepticism about U.S. assessments regarding Russia’s and Syria’s actions.
As spy chief, Gabbard would oversee 18 intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency, and be charged with helping to protect the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
In the months after she met with Assad, Gabbard’s office turned over copies of many of the records that The Post would later examine to the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body in the House that is separate from the Ethics Committee, for a review that has not been previously reported.
Interview transcripts show that the congressional investigators took note of the internal scramble to account for Gabbard’s time in Syria.
“I’m just trying to understand, why was everyone so worried?” one investigator asked Kainoa Penaroza, Gabbard’s chief of staff. “I mean, to be frank, it looks like the entire office got together to have to prepare a post-travel itinerary.”
Penaroza replied that the advisers “were in a time crunch” and wanted to ensure the paperwork was accurate. He did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The investigators’ review centered on the trip’s funding arrangements and was eventually dropped after no violations were found, current and former federal officials familiar with the inquiry said. A spokesman for the office declined to comment.
At the time of Gabbard’s trip, Syria, long designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, was almost six years into a bloody civil war. No member of Congress had visited since 2011, shortly after the regime gunned down peaceful protesters during the “Arab Spring.” More than 11 million Syrians had been displaced and hundreds of thousands had been killed, including in chemical weapons attacks by the regime.
The United States had suspended diplomatic relations with Syria and issued multiple rounds of sanctions against Assad and other government leaders for human rights abuses against civilians. The Obama administration was advocating for Assad’s removal from office and providing support to rebel forces.
Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who has said her military experience left her resolutely opposed to “regime change wars,” had urged restraint in dealing with Assad since joining Congress in 2013. She proposed legislation barring the U.S. government from supplying funds or weapons to militant groups trying to oust the Syrian leader.
Shortly before Trump was first elected in November 2016, Gabbard was invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to Syria and Lebanon by Bassam Khawam, a Cleveland-based activist affiliated with pro-Assad groups. The invitation said the visit would give Gabbard the opportunity to meet Syria’s foreign minister and “other prominent political dignitaries.” The document has not been previously reported.
In a Nov. 21 email reviewed by The Post, a representative of the nonprofit told Penaroza that they had commitments from people they were to meet. “Most of the meetings are agreed on the other side,” he wrote.
Gabbard’s trip was eventually scheduled for mid-January 2017. The itinerary she submitted to the House Ethics Committee said the trip was a “fact-finding mission” sponsored by Bassam and his brother Elias under the auspices of AACCESS Ohio, an Arab American community nonprofit where the brothers held senior roles.
That pre-trip itinerary said Gabbard would spend five days in Lebanon and two in Syria, where she would meet religious leaders, refugees and other civilians. The committee approved the plan on Jan. 12, two days before Gabbard left Washington for Beirut.
One of the brothers contacted the U.S. Embassy in Beirut several days before the trip and said they planned to travel to Syria and that Gabbard would be meeting Assad, according to two people familiar with the matter. It was unclear if Gabbard herself was aware of that plan, they said.
Elias Khawam told The Post that he informed the U.S. ambassador about the planned trip. At one point he answered affirmatively to a question about whether he said the group would be meeting Assad, but in a later text message he said he could not recall whether he mentioned the meeting.
The former staffer who was puzzled at the length of the meeting told The Post: “Looking back, I will go to the grave believing that she lied to us. Her claim is that it just sort of happened. How did you just happen to meet with the leader of [a police state] not once, but twice?”
Gabbard landed in Beirut around 7 p.m., according to her post-trip report. She was accompanied on the trip by former congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a fellow antiwar Democrat who met Assad during a 2011 visit backed by the same nonprofit. Gabbard and Kucinich each brought their spouses.
Reached by telephone, Kucinich declined to comment. In a statement relayed by Henning, he said the meeting with Assad was not scheduled before departure, and he called Gabbard a “champion of peace.”
About an hour after landing, the report said, the group was at Syria’s embassy in Beirut to obtain visas. The next morning, rather than remain in Beirut for the day of meetings Congress had approved, Gabbard traveled to Damascus. Her first meeting was with Assad.
In the days that followed, the report said, Gabbard met again with Assad and with Syria’s ambassadors to Lebanon and the United Nations, its minister for reconciliation, unnamed government officials for a border security briefing, a member of parliament and — as the invitation had promised — Syria’s foreign minister.
Gabbard had made no public announcement about the trip. But on Jan. 18, Foreign Policy reported that she had secretly traveled to Damascus. Gabbard’s spokeswoman confirmed to the magazine that she had met government officials but declined to say if that included Assad.
Gabbard returned to the United States on Jan. 22. Three days later, she confirmed publicly that she had indeed met with Assad.
Lawmakers from both parties were sharply critical. Some said she had handed the dictator a propaganda coup. “To say I’m disgusted would be an understatement,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) said at the time.
The next day, Gabbard’s scheduler alerted her that she needed to file the post-trip report to the Ethics Committee within 15 days of her return, emails show. The scheduler noted that Gabbard should “include any additional meetings that were added on the ground and not pre-approved.”
On Jan. 31, the records show, Gabbard’s staff told an Ethics Committee lawyer that she would repay the trip sponsors in full, from her personal funds. The following day, a senior aide told the lawyer in an email that Gabbard wanted to know if she still had to file the post-trip report. She did, the lawyer replied.
When Gabbard finally circulated the timeline to her team late on Feb. 5, aides had concerns, the records show.
The press secretary noted that Gabbard first met Assad within an hour of arriving in Damascus. She wrote that “from an outside perspective [it] will look like you were greeted by President Assad upon arrival and that it was pre-planned. This contradicts what we have said before that the meeting was not planned.”
A campaign consultant agreed. “We absolutely need a solid answer to that question,” she wrote, “including a specific answer to whether or not yall left Lebanon earlier than expected to get to the meeting with Assad that wasn’t originally planned (im hoping that’s a yes).”
The records reviewed by The Post do not show responses to that question, and it is not clear whether the matter was discussed elsewhere. Two documents state that some of the team’s discussions about the Syria trip were conducted on the encrypted messaging app Signal.
In the email appealing for “formalities” to break up the meeting, Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff said that if it could not be shortened, “we should have a response prepared for the question about why it was a ~3 hour meeting and what you discussed.”
The timeline Gabbard sent her team named additional people she said she had met in Syria and Lebanon who had not been on the version seen by Congress. The following morning, Feb. 6, one adviser emailed 15 names to be vetted by someone outside the office, and by early that evening that individual had produced a six-page report labeled “CONFIDENTIAL.” It laid out “key vulnerabilities” of Gabbard’s meeting partners.
Gabbard had met with a Syrian cleric who had threatened to activate a network of suicide bombers in the United States and Europe if Western countries militarily intervened in Syria, the previously unreported document says. She also met with two senior Syrian government officials sanctioned by the United States, it says. All three were included in Gabbard’s final report to Congress.
One person on the vetting list, Najdat Anzour, then the deputy speaker of Syria’s parliament, was said in the document to be “a fervent supporter of the Assad regime.” Edit logs show that, initially, his name was removed from the report that was being prepared for the Ethics Committee, leaving an anonymized description. Then the meeting was removed altogether before the report was submitted.
Gabbard’s timeline said that on her first evening in Damascus, she attended a “dinner with Syrian professors, academics, authors, business leaders.” Edit logs showed that the dinner was said to have been hosted by Bouthani Shaaban, a misspelled reference to Bouthaina Shaaban, a political and media adviser to Assad who was under U.S. sanctions. Shaaban was not named in the paperwork submitted to the committee.
Shaaban, who fled Syria after Assad’s downfall in December, and Anzour could not be reached for comment.
Gabbard’s team raced to meet the Ethics Committee’s deadline of 6 p.m. on Feb. 6. Late that afternoon, her press secretary circulated a link to a Google Doc where the trip timeline was being revised. “We have 40 minutes until this is due,” she wrote. They continued tinkering for two more days.
The URL in the press secretary’s email remains active and access to it is unrestricted, meaning anyone who copies it into a browser window can open the document and view its edit history, as The Post did.
In the Google Doc’s margin, a senior aide pondered whether they needed to identify participants in a meeting initially listed as a “Syria National Security Briefing.” Kucinich thought they had been briefed by a Syrian intelligence chief, the aide noted, but couldn’t remember that person’s name.
The aide wrote that Syrian intelligence had done “some pretty nasty things,” citing that as “one reason to not make it more specific.” Another cited the uncertainty on the name as a reason to keep it vague. The report filed to the Ethics Committee said the meeting was with “government officials” and was about border security and the threat from terrorist groups.
When Gabbard’s post-trip report was made public, it showed that she repaid almost $9,000. The documents obtained by The Post show that $1,350 covered what Gabbard described to an aide as “transportation within Syria/Lebanon.” Gabbard at one point told an aide that, because she reimbursed the cost of the trip, she was not required to disclose “the travel paid by the Syrian and Lebanese governments,” according to a staffer’s log of events related to the trip.
Just over two months after Gabbard’s trip to Damascus, at least 89 people in rebel-held territory were killed in a chemical weapons attack. The U.S. government attributed the attack to the regime, and Trump ordered airstrikes against a Syrian air base in response. Gabbard told CNN she was “skeptical” that Assad was behind it.
Cate Brown, Catherine Belton and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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