The New York Times is preparing to publish a deep state hit piece on President Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. The piece is purportedly based on National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance of a pair of anonymous terrorists.

Two people familiar with the matter told The Federalist the Times will accuse Gabbard, a former Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii, of meeting with then-Lebanese Hezbollah Supreme Leader Hassan Nasrallah on a Middle East trip in 2017. The paper of “all the news that’s fit to print” is expected to run the deep state smear against Gabbard as early as Tuesday afternoon, two days before a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Bernard Hudson, who was director of counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2016 and 2017, called the story by the Times, “one of the most bizarre allegations against a serving member of the U.S. military I have ever heard.”

“It strains credulity at every level,” Hudson told The Federalist.

“This is the kind of cheap skullduggery for which the Deep State has become infamous with the American people,” said Dave Reaboi, a national security expert and fellow at the Claremont Institute. “We entrust these people with tremendous power to operate in the shadows and keep secrets from us, imagining that they are professionals dedicated to safeguarding our national security. Instead, many of the IC’s senior leadership have undermined the faith we placed in them, using the capabilities their profession affords them to make war on their domestic political opponents.”

“I’d like to see the media and Senate Democrats go after Hezbollah with half as much venom as they’ve been directing toward Tulsi Gabbard,” Reaboi added. “This scrap of intelligence — hearsay from two terrorists — wasn’t taken seriously by anyone for a decade.”

The tale of Gabbard’s supposed secret meeting with one of the Middle East’s most dangerous terrorists almost a decade ago had never been reported even as the former vice chair of the DNC pursued her party’s presidential nomination in 2020.

The New York Times’ planned hit designed to thwart Gabbard’s confirmation to run the intelligence community follows Republican senators complaining anonymously to Semafor about the nominee’s 2017 meeting with then-Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad, which was approved by a House ethics panel. Former Secretary of State John Kerry also met with Assad several years before the Senate voted 94 to 3 to confirm his nomination to lead the State Department in 2013.

Last week, anonymous GOP senators also expressed concern about Gabbard’s past criticism of deep state spy programs that had been used to investigate Trump’s first presidential campaign. While she was in Congress, Gabbard proposed legislation with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Gabbard, a nearly two-decade veteran, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, and a long-time critic of America’s forever wars, is no stranger to deep state interference. Last year, the former Democrat presidential candidate became the subject of surveillance under a counterterrorism program by the U.S. Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS). Gabbard was targeted just “one day after she criticized the Biden Administration” on Fox News, according to a letter from the whistleblower watchdog group Empower Oversight.

While Gabbard faces deep state smear campaigns published in legacy news outlets, dozens of former intelligence officials wrote a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee this week recommending her confirmation.

“As former collectors, analysts, consumers, and enablers of intelligence, we support Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard to lead the IC,” they wrote, according to Fox News. “She has the integrity, and moral courage, to restore objectivity and professionalism to the nation’s intelligence agencies.”

Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Todd Young of Indiana are considered two Republican swing votes on the committee where Gabbard can’t afford to lose one, according to The Hill.