Former Democratic congresswoman, 43, has been publicly suspected of being ‘groomed’ by Russia

Tulsi Gabbard’s biography has some rare distinctions, including being the first Samoan and the first Hindu elected to the US Congress, where she sat between 2013 and 2021 as the Democratic representative for Hawaii.

But nothing marks her out so much as being almost certainly the only prospective head of American intelligence to have been publicly suspected of being “groomed” by Russia – a suggestion made by Hillary Clinton, Trump’s defeated Democratic opponent when he was first elected president, in a 2019 podcast.