Tulsi Gabbard

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii torched President Donald Trump on Thursday night over his decision to launch a missile strike against airfields in Syria.

Gabbard said Trump "acted recklessly" in authorizing the strikes on Shayrat airfield and nearby military infrastructure controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The operation was a response to a chemical weapons attack that killed at least 80 civilians in northwestern Syria earlier this week.

Gabbard said: "It angers and saddens me that President Trump has taken the advice of war hawks and escalated our illegal regime change war to overthrow the Syrian government." The Democrat congresswoman made similar remarks after returning from a "fact-finding trip" to Syria and Lebanon days after Trump's inauguration.

During her January trip to Syria, Gabbard met with Assad. Following Monday's chemical weapons attack in Syria, Gabbard tweeted, then deleted a statement saying that ISIS or al-Qaeda could have committed the strike.

The congresswoman, an early supporter of Bernie Sanders, met with President-elect Donald Trump in late November to discuss how to avoid "the drumbeats of war" that may lead to US intervention in Syria, among other national-security concerns, Business Insider's Natasha Bertrand reported in January.

Gabbard on Thursday night called the strike "short-sighted," and said it would lead to "more dead civilians, more refugees ... and a possible nuclear war between the United States and Russia."

Her statement represents one of the strongest condemnations of Trump's strike order, and a departure from a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers who cautiously applauded the commander-in-chief's action late Thursday night.

Read Rep. Gabbard's full statement below:

"It angers and saddens me that President Trump has taken the advice of war hawks and escalated our illegal regime change war to overthrow the Syrian government. This escalation is short-sighted and will lead to more dead civilians, more refugees, the strengthening of al-Qaeda and other terrorists, and a possible nuclear war between the United States and Russia. This Administration has acted recklessly without care or consideration of the dire consequences of the United States' attack on Syria without waiting for the collection of evidence from the scene of the chemical poisoning. If President Assad is indeed guilty of this horrible chemical attack on innocent civilians, I will be the first to call for his prosecution and execution by the International Criminal Court. However, because of our attack on Syria, this investigation may now not even be possible. And without such evidence, a successful prosecution will be much harder."

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