After serving nearly seven years in office, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard announced Thursday on her presidential campaign website that she will not seek reelection to Congress in 2020.
“Mahalo, Hawaii,” the message says on the Tulsi Gabbard for President website.
She also asks the people of Hawaii for their support for her candidacy for president of the United States.
She said the country is so divided, and “closer to being sucked into another even more disastrous war in the Middle East.” Tensions are mounting in nuclear-armed countries like Russia and China, “leading us to a new Cold War and nuclear arms race,” she adds.
“In light of these challenges, I believe I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your President and Commander-
in-Chief,” she writes on the website.
Gabbard represents
Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, and has served on the Homeland
Security, Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees.
She grabbed national headlines after Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 and former secretary of state,
alluded to Gabbard, though not by name, being a Russian asset.
President Donald Trump weighed in Monday, saying of Gabbard, “She’s not a Russian agent.”
Clinton appeared to call her “the favorite of the Russians” in a recent interview, saying she believes the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” The Associated Press reported.
Trump said he thinks Clinton’s attack boosts Gabbard and his own political chances, claiming it shows concerns about Russian interference are just a “sham,” the AP said.
Gabbard responded to Clinton in a tweet saying: “You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.
“From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation,” she continued. “We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
“It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me,” she tweeted. “Don’t cowardly hide between your proxies. Join the race directly.”
In response, someone retweeted Gabbard’s apparent support for Russian President Vladimir Putin when Gabbard tweeted, “Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did.”
Gabbard was polling at 2%, managing to qualify for the October televised debate of 12 Democratic presidential candidates. She had threatened to boycott it to protest a “rigging” of the election by the Democratic National Convention and corporate news media but participated anyway.
During the debate she repeated her goal of ending “regime change wars.”
She said, “Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria,” criticizing The New York Times and CNN with smearing her and other veterans for calling an end to such wars.
She said the Times put out an article saying she
was “a Russian asset and
an Assad apologist.”
But the Times said the article she refers to says the congresswoman is a frequent topic of Russian state news media, but did not imply she is a Russian asset.
She also paid a visit to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in January 2017 in his country.
The Times reported that she has said Assad is not the enemy of the United States, but in August called him a brutal dictator.
In a Wednesday Newsweek opinion piece, the
author of “How to Catch
a Russian Spy,” Naveed
Jamali, wrote that the Times on Tuesday changed its reporting that Clinton never suggested Gabbard is being groomed to be a Russian agent, but rather Clinton said she is being groomed by Republicans as a third-party candidate and is used by the Russians as an asset.
“Agents are groomed and directed, while assets are used — often unwittingly,” he wrote.
Gabbard met with Trump after he was elected in 2016, and news reports said she had been considered for jobs in his Cabinet.
She resigned in 2016 as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee when she endorsed Bernie Sanders for president instead of Clinton in the
primaries.
Politico reported that was when the blowback against her came and a Clinton Foundation director wrote to her saying he and a friend would no longer help her campaign raise money.
The 38-year-old is an Army National Guard major and has served for 16 years and deployed twice to the Middle East.
Gabbard says her campaign is powered completely by people and does not accept contributions from corporations, lobbyists or political action committees.
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