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(WASHINGTON) — Since becoming President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard’s rosy posture toward Moscow has prompted some Democratic critics to suggest that she could be “compromised,” or perhaps even a “Russian asset” — claims the ex-Hawaii representative and Army officer has forcefully denied.

But former advisers to Gabbard suggest that her views on Russia and its polarizing leader, Vladimir Putin, have been shaped not by some covert intelligence recruitment as far as they know — but instead by her unorthodox media consumption habits.

Three former aides said Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT — formerly known as Russia Today — which the U.S. intelligence community characterized in 2017 as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”

While it was not clear to those former staffers whether or when she stopped frequenting the site, one former aide said Gabbard continued to circulate articles from RT “long after” she was advised that the outlet was not a credible source of information.

Doug London, a retired 34-year veteran intelligence officer, said Gabbard’s alleged penchant to rely at least in part on outlets like RT to shape her view of the world reflects poorly on her suitability to fulfill the responsibilities of a director of national intelligence.

“That Gabbard’s views mirror Russia’s narrative and disinformation themes can but suggest naïveté, collusion, or politically opportunistic sycophancy to echo whatever she believes Trump wants to hear,” London said, adding, “none of which bodes well for the president’s principal intelligence adviser responsible for enabling the [U.S. intelligence community] to inform decision-making by telling it like it is.”

Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, said in a statement to ABC News that “this is false and nothing but a few former, conveniently anonymous, disgruntled staffers.”

“Lt. Col. Gabbard’s views on foreign policy have been shaped by her military service and multiple deployments to war zones where she’s seen the cost of war and who ultimately pays the price,” Henning said.

‘The Russian playbook’

Former congressional and campaign advisers said it was unclear to what extent Gabbard’s views were shaped by what she read in RT — and they emphasized that she would consume news from a wide range of outlets, including left-wing and right-wing blogs.

But over the past decade, Gabbard’s views on Russian aggression in Europe have evolved in a particularly dramatic fashion.

In 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea, Gabbard — then a first-term Democratic U.S. representative from Hawaii — released a statement advocating for “meaningful American military assistance for Ukrainian forces” and for the U.S. to invoke “stiffer, more painful economic sanctions for Russia.”

“The consequences of standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine are clear,” she wrote at the time. “We have to act in a way that takes seriously the threat of Russian aggression against its peaceful, sovereign neighbor.”

By 2017, however, her tune had changed. In a lengthy memo to campaign staff laying out her views on foreign policy, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, Gabbard blamed the U.S. and NATO for provoking Russian aggression and bemoaned the United States’ “hostility toward Putin.”

“There certainly isn’t any guarantee to Putin that we won’t try to overthrow Russia’s government,” she wrote in the memo from May 2017, titled “fodder for fundraising emails / social media.”

“In fact, I’m pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that,” she wrote.

She also condemned the very sanctions she had previously supported, writing that, “historically, the U.S. has always wanted Russia to be a poor country.”

“It’s a matter of respect,” she wrote. “The Russian people are a proud people and they don’t want the U.S. and our allies trying to control them and their government.”

Gabbard’s sentiment in the 2017 memo is “basically the Russian playbook,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration.

“It’s dangerous,” said Daalder. “That strain of thinking is not unique to Tulsi Gabbard, but it is certainly not where you would think a major figure in any administration would like to be, intellectually.”

By 2022, at the outset of the latest Russia-Ukraine conflict, Gabbard suggested on X that Russia’s invasion was justified by Ukraine’s potential bid to join NATO, “which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border” — a narrative perpetuated by Russian propaganda channels, including RT, and denounced by the U.S. and NATO as “false.”

Gabbard’s messaging has at times aligned so closely with Kremlin talking points that at least one commentator on Kremlin state media has referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.”

A ‘nefarious effort’

The U.S. government first called out RT as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Kremlin in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, three years after Gabbard was elected to Congress.

This past September, the State Department wrote that it had evidence that “RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.” The U.S. also issued fresh sanctions against executives at RT, including its editor-in-chief, who the U.S. accused of engaging in a “nefarious effort to covertly recruit unwitting American influencers in support of their malign influence campaign.”

The Justice Department also indicted two RT employees in September for their alleged role in what the DOJ called a scheme to pay right-wing social media influencers nearly $10 million to “disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government.”

In the decade since Gabbard arrived in Washington, experts say she has regularly promoted views consistent with those espoused in RT and other Russian propaganda channels.

In its 2017 assessment, for example, the U.S. intelligence community wrote that RT “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks” and “routinely gives [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States.”

Gabbard has long been an outspoken supporter of Assange, arguing in a June 2024 appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher” that “[Assange’s] prosecution, the charges against him, are one of the biggest attacks on freedom of the press, that we’ve seen, and freedom of speech.”

In Congress, Gabbard also co-sponsored a resolution calling on the federal government to “drop all charges against Edward Snowden,” the former contractor for the National Security Agency who supplied WikiLeaks with secret documents in order to expose what he called “horrifying” U.S. government surveillance capabilities.

RT frequently reports glowingly on Snowden, who has for more than a decade lived under asylum in Russia.

‘Undeniable facts’

But it is Gabbard’s framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has most galvanized her critics in the national security sphere.

In March 2022, Gabbard posted a video to Twitter — now X — sharing what she said were “undeniable facts” about U.S.-funded biolabs in the war-torn country, claiming that “even in the best of circumstances” they “could easily be compromised” — a debunked theory regularly promoted by RT and other Kremlin propaganda channels.

Experts say RT and other Russian state-controlled news agencies have frequently capitalized on Gabbard’s public comments to support the biolab conspiracy theory and other disinformation, recirculating clips in which she repeats the Kremlin propaganda as evidence backing the false claims — effectively engineering an echo-chamber to magnify their propaganda machine.

Even so, Brian O’Neill, a former senior intelligence official with experience in senior policymaker briefing, expressed confidence that career intelligence officials can support Gabbard with “a constant barrage of new information” that will help shape her understanding of emerging world events.

“New appointees in such roles always bring preconceptions, but like her predecessors, she will be subject to comprehensive briefings grounded in solid evidence provided by individuals of high integrity and expertise,” O’Neill said.

“That said,” O’Neill cautioned, “Trump’s well-documented hostility and skepticism toward the [intelligence community] will shape the environment she steps into. If she adopts a similar posture, there’s a risk she might deprioritize intelligence community input or dismiss inconvenient truths presented to her.”

ABC News’ Shannon Kingston contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump is projected to win the presidential race by ABC News, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in a frenzied contest to stage an improbable historic comeback.

Trump ended up with at least 279 electoral votes after clinching wins in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. Harris has won at least 219 votes. The race was marked by literal history, including two assassination attempts and 34 felony convictions against Trump, already having been impeached twice and faulted for mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Maybe even more memorable was President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race after a ruinous June debate in which he struggled at times to form sentences.

Trump’s victory underscores just how deep voters’ frustrations were surrounding inflation and immigration, Republicans’ two top issues this election cycle as polls consistently showed Americans’ unhappiness with how Biden handled them.

His return to the White House also suggests that Democrats were not motivated enough by the prospect of electing the first female president and that its base’s fury over the Supreme Court’s revocation of constitutional abortion protections has waned since 2022.

For Trump personally, the win offers both political vindication and legal protection. Since his win, he and his brand were soundly rejected in 2018, 2020 and 2022. And once in office, he’d be able to undermine criminal cases against him surrounding his handling of classified documents while out of office and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” Trump said in his victory speech.

Trump’s victory is likely to set off transformations in both parties.

His win will likely help cement his “Make America Great Again” brand of politics as the dominant strand of Republicanism for the foreseeable future, with Vice President-elect JD Vance seemingly well positioned to carry on Trump’s mantle after the current administration ends in a little over four years.

Democrats, meanwhile, will likely have to sift through the rubble to understand what voters found so unappetizing about them that they’d choose instead to support a twice-impeached convicted felon who had already been voted out of office once.

The former and future president has not substantively outlined his goals for a second term — at his debate with Harris he boasted of having “concepts of a plan” when it comes to health care — though he has warned that he could go after his political opponents and journalists. He also could use his familiarity with the federal bureaucracy to help install civil servants who are loyal to him.

He will at least have a friendly, GOP-controlled Senate, though the House majority remains up in the air.

Among the chief policy areas where Trump could leave his imprint are on the world stage, where he has forecasted less support for Ukraine; on trade, where he has boasted of tariffs of as high as 100% on some imports, and on immigration, where he supports a mass deportation force and eliminating the Temporary Protected Status program.

He’s also vowed to “drill, baby, drill” and lower costs, though his tariffs would likely raise the price of many goods, economists say, and he promised to eliminate tax on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits for seniors.

Perhaps more than anything, though, Democrats will be on the lookout for any form of retribution from a candidate who repeatedly dubbed his detractors the “enemy from within,” though he never went after Hillary Clinton after leading chants of “lock her up” in 2016.

Trump’s victory this year was far from assured.

Republicans across the spectrum panned Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol to stop certification of the 2020 election, with even allies like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., suggesting the party should move on from the former president and his brand. That nascent push was largely abandoned weeks later when then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., ventured down to Mar-a-Lago to make amends and discuss House strategy.

Republicans’ disappointing 2022 election results tore open those divides once again. After an anticipated red wave instead gave way to the loss of a Senate seat and only marginal House gains, GOP leaders wondered if the time had come to elevate other lawmakers as the party’s future.

Buzz mounted around Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a younger Republican and culture warrior who could synthesize Trump’s brawler style into more widespread appeal, with Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis calling him the party “leader.” Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence offered more traditional conservative credentials in a snapback of sorts to a pre-Trump party.

Millions of dollars flooded a crowded 2024 GOP primary field, with DeSantis in particular leaning on a historically well-heeled and involved super PAC to proselytize his fighter credentials.

None of it mattered.

Pence dropped out before the calendar even turned to 2024. DeSantis ended his campaign before the New Hampshire primary after falling far short of expectations in Iowa. And while Haley stuck around for months, even drawing thousands of votes in primaries after she ended her own campaign in March, no candidate ever held a candle to Trump’s share of the primary electorate.

All of the 2024 contenders endorsed Trump except for Pence and former Govs. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Chris Christie of New Jsersy, none of whom made close to a dent in the nominating contest.

Even though he dominated he clinched the nomination as the GOP’s dominant figure and former president, Trump’s campaign was ultimately anything but conventional.

Trump was dogged by a slate of investigations into his handling of classified documents upon leaving office, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and payments made to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. He was able to fend off or delay many of the federal investigations he faced, and while he was convicted in a New York trial of 34 felony counts over the Daniels payments, his sentencing was delayed until after the election.

Compounding on the history of the election were two assassination attempts against Trump, the first of which, in July, saw him grazed in the ear by a bullet. Trump was able to use the threats to juice his fundraising and expound on his victimhood narrative, though they did not lead to any fundamental polling shifts.

But perhaps more than anything, Trump’s campaign was roiled by chaos in the Democratic Party.

Trump appeared to initially struggle to figure out how to attack Harris once she took over as Democrats’ nominee, even continuing to go after Biden.

However, Trump eventually settled on a line of attack that Harris had four years to fix the country’s woes, mocking her argument about what she’d do on Day One, arguing that day one was in 2021.

Still, Trump kept Republicans nervous by mixing in messages of grievance up until the very end of the race, veering off a script on inflation and immigration that operatives believed was more effective in winning over persuadable voters.

In the end, though, Trump’s playbook was just enough to win.

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(WASHINGTON) — Ever since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he has been vocal about his plans to “Make America Healthy Again.”

Kennedy has vowed to crack down on dyes in the food industry and to reduce pesticides in the farm and agriculture industry.

He has called for restrictions on ultra-processed foods as part of an initiative to address the high rates of chronic disease in the United States, and he’s said more research needs to be conducted on vaccines.

Those plans could require him to override regulations set in place by the Food and Drug Administration or Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, and/or perhaps see new regulations put in place.

Political science experts say this may put him at odds with members of his own party, because Republicans typically advocate for fewer regulations and limited government oversight.

“I think where you would see the challenges would be on allocation of money,” Shana Gadarian, a professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York, told ABC News.

“If all of a sudden HHS is now in the business of passing more regulations on the food industry, on agriculture, we might see that a Republican Senate majority and a Republican House is less interested in allocating a budget to HHS that then would be under a different leadership,” she continued.

Praise from other Republicans

Despite Republican criticism of previous Democratic initiatives to tackle disease and childhood obesity, Kennedy has received praise from some Republicans.

“RFK Jr. has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, said in a statement earlier this month. “I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda.”

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin called Kennedy a “brilliant, courageous truth-teller whose unwavering commitment to transparency will make America a healthier nation,” and Sen. Josh Hawley called Trump’s decision to name him to head the HHS a “Bad day for Big Pharma!”

However, Gadarian said the support from some Republicans in the Senate may not translate to support among Republican constituents.

“We may want to separate what average people think about and know about [what Kennedy wants] and what elites in the party might have a vested interest in,” Gadarian said.

For farmers and others whose bottom lines might be negatively impacted by some of Kennedy’s proposed top-down policies, she said, “Those ideas of, like, removing pesticides from agriculture may actually be quite unpopular.”

Republicans’ distaste for regulation

Historically, the Republican party has been ideologically associated with a smaller, limited federal government.

During his January 1981 inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan stated, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” espousing the belief that the government should not intervene in American lives.

If Kennedy is confirmed, there may be some culling of regulations, such as the CDC decision on vaccines health insurers are required to cover, according to Gadarian.

But his confirmation may also lead to new regulations; for example, he might weigh in on which food dyes companies are allowed to use or the use of pesticides on farms.

While it isn’t yet fully clear how Kennedy could make all of his proposed changes directly through his leadership at HHS, as opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency or Department of Agriculture, he has called for restrictions on food additives, dyes and ultra-processed foods — which he could have direct influence over through the FDA.

Gadarian said this is not in line with the typical conservative view on regulations, which is to generally loosen them.

“I do think that increasing regulation on businesses like agriculture and others who use pesticides — or on the food industry — is, in fact, against a kind of idea of limited government, of loosening regulation so businesses can do business and not be encumbered by the federal government,” she said.

Robert Ravens-Seager, a professor of history and political science at American International College in Massachusetts, said he thinks the idea of Republicans being for “small” or “limited government” is a myth.

He said both Republicans and Democrats want government regulation, but they have different views on how it should be implemented.

“Once you are in the government, your dislike for government tends to diminish somewhat,” he told ABC News. “I think that in a very short amount of time, you’ve seen a change in the Republican party. They’ve changed from being a party of small government [and] I think that the government that’s going to be coming will be very heavy-handed.”

He added that he believes Kennedy could have an impact on the messaging around food and/or agriculture by advocating for consumers to buy what he says is safe and healthy. However, Ravens-Seager is not sure to what degree the impact will be.

“I definitely believe that he will have an impact on things like food additives, food safety, and the like,” Ravens-Seager said. “The food side, especially, goes against Republican orthodoxy and could make for some interesting debates, but the degree to which, on this issue in particular, he will find much support within the party seems doubtful.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, said last month he wanted to meet with Kennedy before a confirmation hearing and “educate” him about agriculture, indicating concerns about views Kennedy has expressed.

“I’m willing to have a discussion with him and find out where he’s coming from,” Grassley told reporters, according to Politico. “But I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture, and I’m willing to do that.”

Eitan Hersh, a professor of political science at Tufts University in Massachusetts, said it’s important to remember that many steps need to occur before new regulations are put in place, including Kennedy being confirmed by the Senate, new regulations being proposed and approved, potential discussion in Congress and enforcement of those regulations.

“This is all maybes, but I think that the signaling happening with putting RFK in HHS is showing some sense of priorities, and I think those priorities are not favoring, necessarily, the interest of business and protecting them from regulation,” he told ABC News.

ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.

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