Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) shared pointed concerns Tuesday about one of President-elect Donald Trump’s top national security nominees — saying at a POLITICO Live event that former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard had not done enough to win his vote for confirmation as director of national intelligence.
Curtis separately said he remained undecided about Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Defense secretary, saying he was closely monitoring his hearing Tuesday and the results of a FBI background check done for the Senate Armed Services Committee.
But he sharply noted that Gabbard, unlike Hegseth, had not yet met with him and compared his views on her nomination to a blank sheet of music.
“The biggest problem for me is she’s been so low-profile,” he said. “The others have come to my office and so if you go back to that analogy of a sheet of music, her sheet’s pretty blank for me. I need more information to start filling that in, and, look, if I can’t fill that in, I can’t vote for her.”
Curtis’ comments represent a new threat to Gabbard’s confirmation. The former Democratic lawmaker is confronting skeptism on both sides of the aisle over her past criticism of the U.S. national security establishment and her dealings with now-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
With Republican senators facing pressure from Trump and his supporters to march in lockstep with the returning president, Curtis sketched out his general views on assessing presidential appointees.
Questioning nominees, he said, is “not going against the president — in my view, that’s actually helping the president.”
“You want your trusted people around you to tell you what they’re seeing,” he added. “And I think it’s not only consent, it’s advice. Well, I can’t give the president advice if I’ve not thoroughly investigated and understood every moving part to this nominee.”
Curtis also stressed that personal character is a “huge” part of his personal evaluation criteria but added, “We’re all flawed, and the question is: At what point do you cross that line?”
Curtis, a freshman who is considered a relative moderate inside the Senate GOP, also said he continues to look into Hegseth’s nomination as Defense secretary, making calls to people who know Hegseth and reading his book in an attempt to get to know the former Fox News personality more closely.
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