The email came from an aide to Tulsi Gabbard specializing in military affairs. “Conversation Request,” read the subject line of the October 2017 inquiry to a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
How a contrarian MIT professor fueled Tulsi Gabbard’s doubt about Syrian gas attacks
Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence disregarded U.S. assessments of chemical weapons attacks and instead looked to contested academic research.
January 28, 2025
But Gabbard, then a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, was interested in an alternative explanation. So her aide sought the perspective of an iconoclastic MIT professor, Theodore A. Postol, who in the months after the attack had released preliminary research suggesting that the use of chemical weapons in Syria had been staged by opposition forces.
The 2017 outreach, recorded in emails that Postol shared with The Washington Post, marked the beginning of his years-long engagement with Gabbard. The interactions, which included in-person and virtual briefings, help explain her contrarian views of atrocities in Syria, including past statements expressing doubt about the regime’s responsibility for the use of poison gas.
Those statements — which Gabbard made a centerpiece of her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 — are now complicating her nomination to be President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, a position overseeing all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. Republicans wavering on Gabbard, who switched parties and joined the GOP last year, have raised concerns about her record on Syria, including a trip she took there in early 2017 that included meetings with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who fled the country at the end of last year as rebel forces seized power.
In 2019, Gabbard cited Postol in campaign materials criticizing the Trump administration’s policy toward Syria, namely its decision to launch missile strikes in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons. In a since-deleted portion of her website, Gabbard argued that the atrocities attributed to the Syrian government might have been staged by opposition groups intent on drawing the United States deeper into the war.
A four-page summary of declassified U.S. intelligence, released a week after the April 4, 2017, attack, warned that claims shifting blame to rebel groups reflected “false narratives” spread by Syria and its patron, Russia. The summary came on the heels of a missile strike ordered by Trump just two days after the attack.
Gabbard’s embrace of dissident narratives illustrates her distrust of the intelligence establishment she could soon oversee as well as her willingness to entertain, and elevate, unconventional views.
“Tulsi would look to whatever source of information made her out to be correct,” said a former aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal. “It was annoying at the time; now being nominated for the top spy position in the country makes it dangerous.”
Gabbard spokeswoman Alexa Henning said the suggestion that the Trump nominee had questioned U.S. intelligence was “inaccurate and misleading” but did not address questions about her campaign website or interactions with Postol. Gabbard has offered varying accounts of responsibility for the use of poison gas in Syria. During a campaign stop in Virginia in 2020, she was asked whether she believed Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people and answered, “Yes.”
Postol, who became emeritus at MIT in 2014, is an unusual interlocutor for a would-be director of national intelligence. A physicist with training in nuclear engineering, he worked for the Pentagon in the early 1980s before gaining prominence as an outspoken critic of its defense technologies. He has uncovered flaws in antimissile plans and errors in analysis conducted by esteemed scientific bodies. His own research, however, has drawn fervent criticism for what some see as significant mistakes in studies of topics ranging from Israel’s Iron Dome to North Korean missiles to nerve agents in Syria.
Gregory D. Koblentz, director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and a former student of Postol’s at MIT, called the professor a “discredited conspiracy theorist” in a letter transmitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is scheduled to question Gabbard at a public hearing Thursday.
“Tulsi Gabbard’s track record of denying Syria’s responsibility for using chemical weapons, rejecting the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community and international investigations, echoing Russian and Syrian disinformation, and relying on a conspiracy theorist for her position on an important national security issue raises serious questions about her qualifications to serve as Director of National Intelligence,” the letter states.
Postol said he maintains that U.S. and international findings about Syrian chemical weapons are flawed. And he praised Gabbard for taking his work seriously.
“She was hands-down the most professional member of Congress I’ve ever worked with,” he said in an interview.
After the Gabbard aide’s outreach in October 2017, Postol’s engagement with her office deepened early the following year, he said. In January 2018, an early-morning alert in Hawaii mistakenly warned of an incoming ballistic missile amid escalating tensions with North Korea, setting off panic on the Pacific islands.
Postol was then developing a missile defense concept, he told The Post, that “might actually work against long-range missiles launched from North Korea.” Emails in the summer of 2018 show Gabbard’s staff relaying questions from the Hawaii congresswoman to Postol about whether his concept would also work against Russian and Chinese missiles.
Where Postol most profoundly shaped Gabbard’s views, however, was on the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. He trained the congresswoman’s attention on what he considered inaccuracies in official accounts of the lethal sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017 — namely, that the U.N. expert panel had improperly interpreted an array of evidence, including satellite imagery and videos taken at the site.
The summary of declassified U.S. intelligence released shortly after the attack indicated that Washington’s confidence about the Assad government’s responsibility was based on “signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence, laboratory analysis of physiological samples collected from multiple victims, as well as a significant body of credible open source reporting.” The U.N. panel soon echoed those findings in pointing the finger at the Syrian air force.
But Postol argued that the panel’s work was flawed and that “the evidence now shows that the attack was staged by local opposition forces.” He shared his assessment in a May 2019 email to Gabbard aides that recounted multiple conversations with the lawmaker and her staff.
Postol’s analysis, much of which he has made public, has come under criticism from scientists and journalists. Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative outlet, took issue with Postol’s computer simulations suggesting that a crater where the chemical weapons were said to have detonated came not from a sarin-filled bomb but from an explosive warhead probably launched by rebel forces.
But Gabbard was interested in the dissenting research. Postol wrote in his May 2019 email that he anticipated meeting with her in Washington later that month and added, “Representative Gabbard also asked if I would alert the House Armed Services Committee Staff to this matter.” Postol said that the meeting took place as planned and that he did indeed transmit his findings to the House Armed Services Committee.
That summer, he raised similar concerns about analysis blaming the Syrian government for a chemical attack in April 2018 that killed dozens in Douma, a town outside Damascus. He told Gabbard aides that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which cooperates with the United Nations, had engaged in “compromised reporting” that neglected what he saw as the truth: that the attack sites had been staged.
Gabbard seized on the issue during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
Her campaign website included a lengthy section on “Reports on chemical attacks in Syria,” featuring a photo of Gabbard walking through the streets of the war-torn country. She adopted Postol’s language nearly verbatim in arguing that there was “evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces.”
She outlined a series of “inconsistencies” identified by Postol about the U.N. investigation but did not address U.S. intelligence findings. Among the details she alighted on: “a picture of a dead goat which, judging by the rope around its neck and marks in the ground, had been killed and then dragged to the scene from another location.”
And she took Trump to task for launching airstrikes over the attacks. “Rather than waiting for evidence, Trump acted on impulse and emotion, relying on social media posts and unverified sources originating from within territory held by al Qaeda,” her website stated.
James Jeffrey, an American diplomat who served as Trump’s Syria envoy from 2018 to 2020, said the intelligence attributing the attacks to the Syrian government was convincing.
“We were as close to 100 percent sure as on any issue I’ve seen in 40 years in government,” he said.
Koblentz, the George Mason professor, wrote in his letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee that overwhelming evidence already pointed to Assad’s responsibility by the time of Gabbard’s statements on the issue. He argued that Gabbard’s alternative explanation — that the attack in Khan Sheikhoun may have been a false-flag operation staged by Syrian opposition groups — “first originated on a Syrian news site owned by a pro-Assad loyalist.” Postol said he had nothing to do with the site.
Other experts have taken issue with Postol’s apparent reliance on a Syrian Australian YouTuber with training in chemistry. The YouTuber, Maram Susli, has strenuously defended Assad’s tactics and blamed opposition groups for using poison gas.
According to Bellingcat, Postol said in a 2014 podcast interview that he came across Susli on Twitter and “could see from her voice … that she was a trained chemist.” Susli did not respond to a request for comment.
Cheryl Rofer, a former longtime chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has worked on methods of destroying dangerous chemicals, said Postol’s analysis betrays “some very basic chemistry mistakes” while reflecting the pro-Assad slant of his associate, who goes by “Syrian Girl” on social media.
Rofer said she was mystified that Gabbard, as a member of Congress who has served in the military, would not look for better sources of information.
“She has access to excellent sources of information about chemical weapons,” Rofer said. “So the fact that she was going with Postol rather than the military sources suggests that her knowledge of the subject is not going to be particularly good.”