Mother Jones illustration; Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP; Mattie Neretin/CNP/Zuma

These days, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is a faithful servant for President Donald Trump, going so far as to cook up a phony intelligence report so Trump’s Justice Department can pursue investigations of his perceived enemies. But not so long ago, Gabbard slammed Trump for being a warmonger supporting a “genocidal war” in order to score billions of dollars in arms sales and for pushing an “insane” policy “to protect al-Qaeda.”

These blistering criticisms of Trump came during the first Trump presidency, when Gabbard was a Democratic House member from Hawaii and a founding fellow of the Bernie Sanders Institute, a nonprofit the socialist senator from Vermont set up after his 2016 presidential campaign to promote progresssive policies. In the fall of 2018, Gabbard, who had supported Sanders’ presidential bid, recorded a video with Jane Sanders, the senator’s wife and a co-founder of the institute, in which she accused Trump of profound perfidy.

Gabbard not only blasted the Trump administration’s policy as misguided; she asserted that Trump was backing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen to protect $2 billion in US arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Gabbard excoriated the “disastrous decisions” of the US government that had led to “regime-change wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Referring to the “genocidal war that Saudi Arabia” was then waging in Yemen, she noted that it had created the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world,” and she decried the Trump administration for “standing shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia in this war, as they commit these atrocities against Yemeni civilians.”

Gabbard referred to this conflict as “an illegal war that the United States is waging” with Saudi Arabia. She added that Trump was using US taxpayer dollars to “refuel Saudi planes, to provide precision missiles” that were attacking weddings and school buses. She called for stopping all US military support for Saudi Arabia—a government with which Trump was striving to forge a closer bond.

Gabbard not only blasted the Trump administration’s policy as misguided; she asserted that Trump was backing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen to protect $2 billion in US arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. She leveled a serious charge at the Trump White House: “These leaders are making decisions for profits on the backs of the lives of these innocent civilians in Yemen. It’s heartbreaking to see how these millions of people’s........

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