Ms. Gabbard, President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was briefly subject to special scrutiny on airline flights last year, but not, officials say, for the partisan reasons she has alleged.

By Mark Walker, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes

Reporting from Washington

Jan. 28, 2025, 2:39 p.m. ET

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.

Shortly after her visit, U.S. spy agencies intercepted a phone call between two Hezbollah members concerning Ms. Gabbard, according to current and former officials briefed on the intelligence.

The intercept was of a Hezbollah member reporting that Ms. Gabbard had met with a person whom he identified euphemistically, using a word in Arabic that can be translated as “the boss” or “the big guy.” The Hezbollah member did not say the name of that person in the communication, prompting some speculation among U.S. intelligence officials as to who was being referred to.

Some U.S. intelligence officials assumed that “the big guy” referred to a senior Hezbollah official. Others assumed that it could be a reference to some Lebanese government official who had strong ties to Hezbollah and who met with Ms. Gabbard during her 2017 trip.

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Ms. Gabbard has denied that she met with anyone from Hezbollah, and people who traveled with her also said she did not meet with the group. Ms. Gabbard acknowledged at the time of her trip that she met with a variety of Lebanese officials, including some who are close to Hezbollah such as Lebanon’s intelligence chief at the time.

People close to Ms. Gabbard said she disclosed all of her meetings with Syrian and Lebanese government officials and community leaders during her trip, and they said the intelligence in question was misinterpreted.

Ms. Gabbard’s 2017 trip is expected to be a focus of questions from senators during her confirmation hearing in the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

The intercept that mentioned Ms. Gabbard appeared to have no implications for her security clearance, which she had in connection with her role in the Army Reserve, where she serves as a lieutenant colonel.

In contrast, Ms. Gabbard’s 2024 trip to Italy had implications on her status as a traveler.

After Ms. Gabbard went public with her allegations about being punished by the Biden administration, Republicans in Congress demanded answers. Late last year, U.S. transportation officials briefed members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs on why she was subjected to additional scrutiny after the Vatican visit.

Two senior U.S. officials walked The New York Times through the chain of events surrounding the trip on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing sensitive intelligence matters.

Ms. Gabbard flew to Rome in July to attend a meeting in Vatican City organized by a European businessman who runs a foundation.

That businessman, according to the two senior U.S. officials, appeared on a watch list maintained by the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center. His involvement in Ms. Gabbard’s visit prompted the Transportation Security Administration to place her and her husband, who accompanied her to Rome, into a program called Quiet Skies.

According to the Terrorist Screening Center’s website, the watch list contains information on people “reasonably suspected” of being involved in terrorism or what it calls “related activities.”

The placement of Ms. Gabbard and her husband in the program required that additional security be added to their subsequent flights.

A person close to Ms. Gabbard said that she had no relationship with the European businessman before or after the meeting, and that she did not know that he was on the F.B.I. watch list.

The Times is not publishing the businessman’s name because the U.S. officials would not explain why the F.B.I. put him on the watch list or say whether he was still on it. The F.B.I. declined to comment. According to the Terrorist Screening Center’s website, “for security reasons, the T.S.C. does not confirm anyone’s status on the watch list.”

Allies of Ms. Gabbard have complained that Democrats and their allies among national security officials were using anonymously sourced accounts of classified intelligence to undermine her nomination. They continue to assert that she was placed on the Quiet Skies list as political retribution by the Biden administration, citing an unverified assertion from an air marshal.

Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for Ms. Gabbard, said the explanation of why Ms. Gabbard was placed on the list was “documented proof” of how Democrats had “weaponized the government against conservatives.” As the director of national intelligence, Ms Gabbard will not allow the office to be “politicized,” Ms. Henning said.

Ms. Gabbard declined to answer repeated questions from The Times about whether the European businessman paid for the trip or made the airline reservation.

The businessman has described himself as a private equity investor who had previously invested in Russia, among other countries, and who went on to establish a foundation that holds meetings periodically at the Vatican that bring together Americans, Russians, Ukrainians and other foreign nationals.

In 2015, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a nonprofit organization, published what it said was a social media post in which the European businessman appeared to pose with, and praise, Igor Girkin, a former Russian intelligence officer who helped Moscow annex Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Mr. Girkin went on to lead pro-Russia separatist militias in eastern Ukraine, and in 2022 a court in the Netherlands found him and two others guilty of murder for their roles in the downing of a passenger jet — Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 — above eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The businessman said that the social media post in question was fake and that he had no relationship with Mr. Girkin.

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman who served as the acting White House chief of staff and the director of the Office of Management and Budget during Mr. Trump’s first term in office, said he invited Ms. Gabbard — who by then was no longer in Congress and was supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign — to attend the July meeting in Vatican City.

Mr. Mulvaney said he did so because “Tulsi and I are friends” who served together in the House, and because he knew of her interest in foreign policy.

At the time, Mr. Mulvaney was on the advisory board of the foundation that organized the meeting, which, he said, took place under the auspices of Pope Francis’ second-in-command and chief diplomat, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

Mr. Mulvaney said he had attended some of the foundation’s previous meetings at the Vatican, including one held there in April 2024.

After that meeting, Jan Figel, one of the foundation’s other advisory board members, was quoted in a newspaper article as saying that the group had brought together representatives of the United States and Russia with the goal of improving relations between them and fostering talks to stop the war in Ukraine.

A spokesman for the Vatican confirmed that the foundation’s meeting in July took place at Casina Pio IV, a 16th-century building in Vatican City.

Before attending, Mr. Mulvaney said he asked the European businessman and other organizers “the specific question: Is anybody coming who is sanctioned? And they absolutely assured me the answer was absolutely not.”

Mr. Mulvaney said he also reiterated to them that he and Ms. Gabbard would not be interested in “discussing any specific plans for Ukraine, and we did not.”

Some Russian nationals attended the July meeting, Mr. Mulvaney said. But he said he does not remember their names and added, “It wasn’t like we were meeting with Putin’s inner circle.”

The European businessman and Mr. Figel declined to comment on who attended the meeting, citing confidentiality agreements with participants.

In the brief time Ms. Gabbard was in Italy, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. dropped his re-election bid and endorsed Ms. Harris as the Democratic nominee. Ms. Gabbard made appearances on Fox News in which she criticized Ms. Harris as being inexperienced and weak.

“Kamala Harris does not have the strength to stand up to the military industrial complex, the national security state,” Ms. Gabbard said.

The Transportation Security Administration works with another federal agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to secure flights and screen travelers entering the country.

One way they do that is by automatically screening travelers entering the country from abroad, looking for potential connections between them and people in a database of known or suspected terrorists maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center.

When computer systems used by the agencies compared the travel records of Ms. Gabbard and her husband to the database, they got a hit.

Two pieces of personal information linked to the businessman were found in the records, according to the two senior U.S. officials briefed on the matter. The officials declined to say what those pieces of personal information were, but said they could be a phone number or an email address associated with the man.

The match automatically placed Ms. Gabbard and her husband in a T.S.A. program called Silent Partner that prompted Customs and Border Protection agents to interview them upon their arrival back in the United States on July 23.

Simultaneously, Ms. Gabbard and her husband were automatically added to Quiet Skies, the U.S. officials said.

The officials said that Ms. Gabbard’s comments about Ms. Harris had nothing to do with her addition to the programs and that the timing was coincidental.

In an interview before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a spokeswoman for T.S.A. declined to discuss Ms. Gabbard’s case specifically, but said Quiet Skies was not a terrorist watch list and disputed the idea that the program was a burden on travelers.

When a traveler in the Quiet Skies program books a flight, the T.S.A. will assign an undercover U.S. agent known as a federal air marshal to travel along. The marshal is supposed to watch the cockpit door and provide an extra layer of security during the flight, not follow the traveler, the two senior U.S. officials said.

Almost immediately after Ms. Gabbard was placed in the program, an air marshal alerted a professional organization for those employees and asserted that Ms. Gabbard had been targeted unfairly by T.S.A.

Sonya LaBosco, the executive director of the organization, the Air Marshal National Council, said the air marshal told the association that Ms. Gabbard was not just monitored on the flights but was also followed outside the airport.

Ms. LaBosco, in turn, informed Ms. Gabbard.

The air marshal who made the complaint declined multiple interview requests from The Times. But Ms. Henning said the air marshal’s statements made clear that Ms. Gabbard was added to the list for partisan reasons.

“Whistle-blowers with the federal air marshals came forward exposing the truth that Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard was added to a domestic terror watch list the day after she criticized Kamala Harris and the Biden administration,” Ms. Henning said.

Ms. Gabbard got out of the program, the two U.S. officials said, the same way that she got in — automatically. Travelers fall out after a designated number of flights within a set period. The two senior U.S. officials said the T.S.A. keeps those specific parameters secret for operational security reasons.

Ms. Gabbard, according to the two officials, was on the Quiet Skies list for less than two weeks.

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Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman contributed reporting from Washington, and Charles Homans from New York.

Mark Walker is an investigative reporter focused on transportation. He is based in Washington. More about Mark Walker

Adam Entous is a Washington-based investigative reporter focused on national security and intelligence matters. More about Adam Entous

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-trump-intel-pick-watch-list.html