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(WASHINGTON) — Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s confirmation hearing began with a personal confrontation between fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul as Mullin seeks to take over the Department of Homeland Security from its embattled leader, Kristi Noem.

Paul, the Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman, sparred with Mullin over comments the Oklahoma senator reportedly made earlier this year regarding Paul’s voting record and assault by a neighbor in Kentucky in 2017.

“You told the media that I was a ‘freaking snake’ and that you completely understood why I had been assaulted,” Paul said.

Paul also pointed to Mullin’s previous public confrontations and said Mullin had “low impulse control.”

“Tell the world why you believe I deserve to be assaulted from behind, have six ribs broken and a damaged lung. Tell me to my face why you think I deserved it. And while you’re at it, explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues,” Paul said.

Paul questioned, “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits of the proper use of force.”

Before his opening statement, Mullin fired back at Paul.

“I said I could understand, because of the behavior, you were having, that I could understand why your neighbor … did what he did,” Mullin said. “As far as my term of ‘snake in the grass,’ sir, I work around this room to try to fix problems. I’ve worked with many people in this room. It seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us.”

Mullin, who President Donald Trump earlier this month tapped to take over the agency from Noem, asked Paul to let him earn his respect and that he will be secretary for all Americans. 

Paul later played a montage of Mullin challenging people to a fight, including a tense moment at a November 2023 Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing when Mullin stood up from his seat and appeared to prepare to physically fight Teamsters Union President Sean O’Brien.

“I get it it’s about character assassination for you,” Mullin said to Paul. “That’s the way this game is played. I understand it. And you are making this about you, which is fine.”

Mullin noted that O’Brien came to the hearing on Wednesday as a “close friend.”

“As you can notice over my shoulder is my good friend, Sean O’Brien. Both of us have had conversations and shaken hands and agreed we could have done things different,” Mulin said. “Sean has become a close friend. We talk all the time. I have been on his podcast. It is how you handle your differences. Not like this, chairman.”

Lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security Committee are expected to grill Mullin through the day as the department he’s seeking to lead remains shut down due to a funding stalemate, with no clear end to that shutdown in sight.

Parts of DHS — from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Transportation Security Administration — are shut down amid a funding fight over Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Democrats have said they will fund the department only if changes are made to the agency in the wake of the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal law enforcement in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Mullin may also face questions about threats to the homeland after DHS warned of potential lone-wolf and cyberattacks amid the ongoing strikes in Iran, according to a law enforcement bulletin obtained by ABC News.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee is scheduled to vote on his nomination on Thursday. After that vote, if his nomination is confirmed, it would then head to the Senate floor where he could be confirmed as soon as next week.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(WASHINGOTN) — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard returns to Capitol Hill this week for an annual set of hearings on worldwide threats — her most significant public appearance in months and her clearest opportunity yet to address the intelligence picture surrounding the war in Iran.

Lawmakers are expected to press Gabbard on the administration’s handling of the Iran conflict, homeland security concerns, election integrity and the broader global threat environment at a moment of rising tension.

The hearings will also offer a rare extended look at an intelligence chief who has spent much of the past year largely out of public view. The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hear from her on Wednesday, March 18, with the House hearing set for Thursday, March 19.

She heads into the hearings under fresh scrutiny after the resignation of Joe Kent, the administration’s top counterterrorism official, who stepped down Tuesday over his objections to the Iran war — the highest-profile administration official to resign publicly over the conflict.

An ODNI official told ABC News that Gabbard was not asked by the White House to fire Kent, pushing back on a report first aired by Fox News.

Kent’s resignation sharpened questions already hanging over the administration’s case for war — whether Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.

In his resignation letter, Kent said he could not “in good conscience” support the war and argued that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the nation, directly undercutting President Donald Trump’s repeated public justification for the conflict.

Trump has previously said Tehran posed an imminent threat and was “very nearly” in a position to strike.

Hours after Kent’s resignation became public, Gabbard moved to publicly back Trump’s authority to make that call.

In a post on X, she said the president, as commander in chief, is responsible for determining “what is and is not an imminent threat” and whether action is necessary to protect U.S. troops, the American people and the country.

She added that ODNI’s role is to coordinate and integrate intelligence, so the president has the best information available to inform his decisions, and said Trump had concluded Iran posed an imminent threat after reviewing the available intelligence.

She did not directly address Kent’s allegations or mention him by name.

The moment is especially striking for Gabbard because few figures in Trump’s orbit spent more time warning about regime change wars, intelligence failures and the cost of Washington interventionism.

As a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, she was so vocal in her opposition to war with Iran that she sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News last year, she again spoke about diplomacy, military restraint and the human cost of conflict in terms that reflected a worldview she has carried for years.

In that interview, Gabbard said the stress of her first deployment in her mid-20s turned part of her hair white, and that she kept the streak as a reminder of the high human cost of war.

“War must always be the last resort, only after all measures of diplomacy have been completely exhausted,” she told ABC News in the interview.

This week’s hearings will also unfold against the backdrop of Gabbard’s broader and unusually quiet tenure. Before taking office, she was rarely far from public view, frequently appearing on television, podcasts and social media.

As DNI, that version of her has largely faded from public view.

In recent months, she has appeared mostly in glimpses, at major administration moments.

Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and the first person in U.S. history to serve as DNI while in military uniform, appeared in uniform at Dover Air Force Base earlier this month during the dignified transfer of six American soldiers killed in a drone strike in Kuwait in the opening hours of the war with Iran.

She also heads into the hearing with other controversies still hanging over her.

Gabbard has drawn scrutiny for her role in the administration’s election integrity push, including her appearance outside the FBI’s operation in Fulton County, Georgia, in January, where federal agents seized election materials tied to the 2020 election, and her subsequent acknowledgment that she arranged a call between President Donald Trump and the agents involved. She has also faced continuing questions about her investigations into election security in Puerto Rico and Arizona.

ABC News previously reported that Gabbard arranged a call between Trump and FBI agents involved in the seizure of election materials in Fulton County, an unusual move given the sensitivity of the investigation. In Arizona, a senior administration official told ABC News that Gabbard was not on the ground but was still “working across the agency to ensure election integrity.”

The hearing is shaping up as more than a routine annual threat assessment.

It will be the clearest public test yet of how Gabbard explains the role she has carved out inside the Trump administration, and how she reconciles the anti-war politics that helped define her rise with the office she now holds at the center of a war she is being asked to defend.

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