Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) could be the GOP’s wild card in Tulsi Gabbard’s hopes of securing Senate confirmation to become the next director of national intelligence.
Curtis was first elected just over two months ago. Now he is one of the few Republicans who has yet to express support for Gabbard, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the country’s intelligence community.
When her Cabinet nomination comes up for a Senate vote in the coming weeks, Gabbard can afford to lose only three votes from the Senate Republican Conference to assume the position.
Curtis said during a Politico Live event Tuesday that he remained uneasy about her nomination because, unlike other Trump Cabinet nominees, he hadn’t had a face-to-face meeting with her.
“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.”
By and large, Republicans have coalesced around Trump’s Cabinet appointees such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who was nominated to be the next secretary of state.
However, just a few holdouts from skeptical GOP lawmakers, such as Curtis, could derail or stall some nominations, including Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense.
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Curtis signaled Tuesday that he would be open to supporting both Gabbard and Hegseth. However, the Utah freshman reiterated that before coming to a decision, he wanted to spend time thoroughly vetting all the nominees by reading their books, asking them for character references, and speaking with people who knew them well.
Similar to his comments last month, Curtis said he wasn’t trying to actively resist Trump but rather was trying to “help” him by making sure the president-elect has the most qualified nominees possible.
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“I can’t make a good decision, whether it’s somebody that’s as controversial as Pete Hegseth or noncontroversial as Marco Rubio if I don’t look at the entire sheet of music,” Curtis said.
“In my view, that’s actually helping the president. … [My role] is not only consent, it’s advice. I can’t give the president advice if I’ve not thoroughly investigated and understood every moving part,” he added. “You want your trusted people around you to tell you what they’re seeing.”
