Former Democrat congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard testified at the initial hearing of the newly created House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and had strong words for Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) who accused her of treason.
Last year, the sanctimonious failed Republican Party presidential candidate suggested that the ex-Hawaii lawmaker was a puppet of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a baseless smear that has repeatedly been brought against critics of the corrupt regime, especially when it comes to its wars.
“Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives,” Romney wrote in a March 13, 2022 tweet after Gabbard raised questions about reports of biolabs backed by the U.S. in Ukraine shortly after Putin gave the order for the Russian army to invade the neighboring country.
Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) March 13, 2022
“U.S. Senator Mitt Romney accused me of treason, a crime that is punishable by death under our laws,” Gabbard said during her Thursday testimony. “I challenged him to back this serious allegation up with evidence, what was this based on?”
“There was no response, no explanation, no evidence, and certainly no apology,” she added of Romney’s cowardly refusal to prove his grave claim.
Calling out Mitt Romney. pic.twitter.com/JeN3i4iWVj
— TallTanOne (@TallTanOne) February 10, 2023
“Now these accusations are often shrugged off as ‘well hey, it’s politics, people say things about each other all the time,’ that may be easy for some of you to say but for somebody who wears the uniform, this is serious,” said the military veteran who served in Iraq during combat.
“And it’s serious not only to me but to my fellow service members and veterans, every one of us making a decision at some point in our lives to raise our right hand, prepared and volunteering to lay our life down for this country,” she said.
“What does that mean in reality?” Tulsi asked. “It means that before every deployment, in our own hearts, we have to make peace with the possibility that we may not come home.”
The tough-talking chickenhawk Romney, like so many other Washington, D.C. warmongers, never served in the Armed Forces, ducking the draft during the Vietnam War.
Gabbard also called out Romney’s fellow sore loser Hillary Clinton who also accused her of being in cahoots with the Kremlin, telling the committee that the former secretary of state “accused me, a sitting member of Congress, a soldier and a candidate running for president of being ‘groomed by the Russians.’”
“Her baseless smear worked as intended. It was something that was repeated over and over, headline after headline, article after article, pushed online in every way,” she said in her statement which drew on her personal experiences with Big Tech censorship, a chilling assault on free speech, and a preferred tactic of those who have used the “public-private partnership” in order to weaponize the federal government against dissenters.
“When those who dare to challenge the establishment targeted by this powerful conglomerate of government, corporate media and Big Tech weaponizing all that they have against the people for their own selfish gain, it has a dangerous, chilling effect on free speech, and it sends a very powerful message: if you dare to challenge us, we will come after you,” Gabbard said.
She added: “The more we allow this to happen, we start looking less and less like a democratic republic and more and more like a banana republic.”
