Trump Appointed Tulsi Gabbard to Lead U.S. Intelligence, Then Kept Her After Reporting Alleged She Was Directed by Her Guru, Leader of a Group Critics Call a Cult

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On February 12, 2025, the Senate confirmed President Trump's nominee Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence—the official who oversees the country's 18 intelligence agencies and serves as the president's top intelligence adviser—in a 52–48 vote. The administration advanced the nomination over bipartisan unease and warnings from former intelligence officials and ex-members of the religious group in which Gabbard was raised. Sixteen months later, days after she left the post, a Washington Post investigation reported the most detailed account yet alleging that the official Trump installed atop U.S. intelligence had, during her years in Congress, taken political direction from an outside religious leader.

This entry tracks an executive-branch decision and its aftermath: the administration's choice to nominate, confirm, and retain Gabbard despite a documented record of warnings, and what the June 2026 reporting shows about that decision. The vetting and appointment of an intelligence chief is among the executive's more consequential personnel powers; the question is whether the administration's vetting was adequate and what the consequences may have been.

The Appointment, Over Warnings the Administration Had

Trump named Gabbard in November 2024. The nomination drew criticism from both parties: a former Democratic congresswoman with no intelligence experience, a record of echoing Russian narratives, and a 2017 meeting with Syria's Bashar al-Assad. One former senior intelligence official told Politico the choice was "a left turn and off the bridge."

The administration also had specific notice of the guru concern. In December 2024, Anita van Duyn, who said she spent 15 years inside the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), wrote to lawmakers including Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, warning that she feared sensitive intelligence Gabbard accessed could be relayed to the group's leader, Chris Butler. Larry Pfeiffer, who heads George Mason University's Hayden Center and was once chief of staff to CIA Director Michael Hayden, said there was room for questions about undue influence, noting that any suggestion an intelligence chief is swayed by an outside religious, corporate, or foreign figure undercuts the impartiality the role demands. Congressional staff reviewing background materials reportedly flagged the SIF ties before her hearing.

The administration rejected the concern. A Trump transition spokesperson said in late 2024 that Gabbard had no affiliation with the foundation and called attacks on her faith bigoted. At the confirmation hearing, no senator pressed her directly on Butler or SIF, and the committee did not examine the matter. The Senate confirmed her with Mitch McConnell the only Republican opposed, and Attorney General Pam Bondi swore her in the same day.

What the Post Investigation Found

On June 21, 2026, The Washington Post published a year-long investigation by Jon Swaine drawing on more than 25,000 pages of emails, memos, and other material—including hundreds of memos containing directives and advice for Gabbard from 2011 to 2017, most from her first two House terms. The memos instructed her on what legislation to propose, which policies to embrace, and how to conduct herself on television. They arrived as encrypted attachments from the email domain NineIsles.com—"Nine Islands," a rendering of Navadvipa, a Hare Krishna pilgrimage city—which the Post reported was used by Butler's office and secretaries. Recipients were a small "political team" that included Gabbard's parents, Mike and Carol Gabbard, both senior figures in Butler's organization; Allison Hoen, Butler's top aide, then married to Sunil Khemaney, Butler's "right-hand man" and a Gabbard fundraiser and adviser; and Rebecca Saltzburg, the former member who later provided the trove. Butler does not use a computer; secretaries transcribed his spoken remarks, and recipients were told to avoid writing his name down. The memos carried no attribution—deliberately, Saltzburg said, to mask his identity.

The parallels to Gabbard's official record were extensive and specific. A 2014 memo of a "Call with T" pressed her to back veterans' private-care legislation and complained—as Hoen relayed—that "He was pissed she didn't say" it "withOUT pre-approval"; Gabbard endorsed the idea in a Honolulu Star-Advertiser op-ed three weeks later and introduced a matching bill about a month after. Another 2014 memo demanded legislation penalizing countries whose citizens fought for the Islamic State—"Get it started in the morning... Don't dick around"—and Gabbard released a statement the next day and introduced a bill about a week later. An October 12, 2015, memo titled "CNN Wolf Blitzer Talking points (Final)" contained a "boohoo" jab at her own party that she delivered almost verbatim on air. In all, the Post compared her remarks in 32 television interviews from 2014 to 2016 against the talking-points memos: in 24 she used memo language almost verbatim, and in the other eight she promoted the same ideas in different words. A June 25 follow-up laid several of these matches out side by side.

The guidance was granular and often harsh. A 173-page 2014 dossier titled "TG Issues" compiled advice on dozens of topics. Memos called Gabbard "chickenshit," "mealymouthed," and "intellectually lazy," and complained about "the f---ing eye thing"; one documented a 75-minute late-night call assuring her that "no matter how badly you f--- it up, that me and Krishna still love you." August 2016 memos on Syria show the adviser directing what became her signature anti-interventionist stance, including the claim that "The CIA is the one that started this thing"—an assertion Gabbard made publicly three years later.

The Sock-Puppet Operation

The trove also documented a network of fake social-media accounts—dozens of anonymized and "pseudonym profiles" with fabricated biographies—used to defend and amplify Gabbard in the comment sections of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and Civil Beat and on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Medium. Saltzburg at times effectively ran the operation, and the documents show Gabbard was not merely its beneficiary: she participated in Skype group chats flagging articles for response, dictated the content of comments ("There's no need to call him [Assad] a brutal dictator"), and in September 2014 emailed Saltzburg from her official congressional account with advice on making a Twitter sock-puppet look authentic: "The egg shape icon is a red flag that it's not a real account."

The operation outlived the memos. The Post found at least seven such accounts still posting about Gabbard on X in early 2025, during her Senate confirmation, and a Google Doc coordinating the accounts updated daily as recently as April 2025—while she was serving as Director of National Intelligence. After her resignation was announced, some of the accounts posted soundalike farewells calling her "a true patriot" who "will be missed."

The Authorship Dispute

Whether Butler personally authored the memos is contested. When reached, Khemaney claimed that he, not Butler, was behind "the vast majority" of them, along with other advisers including Mike Gabbard; he then did not respond when asked to specify which memos were whose.

The Post assembled evidence pointing to Butler. In 19 memos the adviser identifies himself in terms that fit Butler—"Everything I have taught, said, lectures is going to all be laid on you"—and the documents refer to guidance from "S" (Butler's initiatory name is Siddhaswarupananda) as distinct from Khemaney, known as "Syd." Some memos are marked "from CP," which Saltzburg said meant the "Car Port" at Butler's Kailua house. A first-person reminiscence about being a teenager in Hawaii fits Butler, who grew up there, but not Khemaney, who did not. Swaine also commissioned a stylometric analysis—run with the AI chatbot Claude using 13 statistical models—comparing the memos against Butler's roughly 7,000-page lecture archive and against writings by Khemaney and by Gabbard's father, state Sen. Mike Gabbard. The analysis concluded the memos were the work of a single author, much more likely Butler, citing idiosyncratic vocabulary such as the non-word "duplistic" (once in the memos, nine times in Butler's lectures) and "judgmentalism."

The Source and the Counter-Narrative

The documents came from Rebecca Saltzburg, 53, a former SIF member who once worked as a secretary for Butler and handled digital strategy for several of Gabbard's congressional campaigns. The Post disclosed complications in her departure from the group: she had fallen out with SIF leaders over their handling of abuse allegations and had been arrested for briefly housing a teenage runaway who alleged abuse tied to the group—a child-custody-interference case Texas prosecutors declined to pursue, citing insufficient evidence. After her arrest she sent a 38-page letter to a senior disciple demanding $250,000, which she showed the Post; an SIF statement called her a "malicious liar" and Gabbard's office cast the reporting as allegations tied to a failed $250,000 extortion attempt by a "disgruntled former volunteer." Saltzburg said she came forward because "Everyone was lied to. The people of Hawaii were lied to." Snopes reported it could not independently verify the documents, and as of late June no other outlet had authenticated them.

The Group the Administration Was Warned About

Butler, 78, founded SIF in the 1970s after breaking from the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. The group blends Gaudiya Vaishnava Hinduism with yoga and strict lifestyle rules; supporters call it a legitimate spiritual community, while many former members describe a controlling environment in which Butler is treated as an extension of God. His documented record includes calling homosexuality "abnormal" and "unnatural" in a surfaced recording and, per former members, Islamophobic teaching.

His political ambitions are long-standing. In 1976 he launched a Hawaii party called Independents for Godly Government, fielding 14 candidates—all Krishna devotees, several his followers—while concealing his connection to them; a 1975 pamphlet argued that "inept politicians should be removed" and replaced with "saintly persons." A family member of a 1976 candidate told the Post that Butler advised candidates while hiding his ties, avoided written communications, was obsessed with politics, and wanted to "rule the world." Relevant to the position Gabbard would hold, Butler's lecture archive shows deep hostility to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, which he derided as run by "power-hungry madmen"—a view that overlaps with the distrust of the intelligence community Gabbard brought to the job.

An overlap between Gabbard's positions and Butler's views is not, by itself, proof she took orders; many officials' stances track the communities they come from. The Post argued, with documents and stylometry, that the link was more direct than coincidence.

The Administration's and Gabbard's Response

Gabbard's office and the foundation framed the reporting as an attack on her faith. Her team did not address the documents' specifics; a spokeswoman called the story "yet another uncredible, bigoted attack on the DNI's faith," her chief of staff called the allegations false and "a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry," and an SIF representative called the coverage "Hinduphobia." SIF's president, Jeannie Bishop, declined to answer the Post's questions, saying they contained "embedded premises" the group did not accept. Gabbard has long denied Butler steered her; asked in 2019 whether he was her political mentor, she said, "No, no, not at all." Her former colleagues still in the administration—who placed her over the CIA, FBI, and NSA—were largely silent after the report.

The defense reflects a tension. Scrutiny of a person's religion can shade into bigotry, and minority faiths warrant protection from suspicion of devotion alone. The countervailing principle, voiced by intelligence professionals across the spectrum, is that the question is not whether Gabbard is Hindu but whether anyone—religious, corporate, or foreign—held undue influence over an official with access to the nation's secrets. Vetting standards exist to surface that kind of exposure regardless of its source.

Retention, Then a Resignation on Other Grounds

The administration kept Gabbard in place through a contested tenure, though it never treated her as the president's chief intelligence adviser—a role that by law belongs to the DNI but that CIA Director John Ratcliffe filled informally, according to The Atlantic. Excluded from major decisions, Gabbard sought Trump's approval through other means. She accused former officials of a "yearslong coup" against Trump, worked to undermine the bipartisan Senate finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and revoked the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials seen as Trump's adversaries. She declassified intelligence material, at times over CIA objections, and misrepresented what the documents said; she fired two senior analysts after they produced an assessment contradicting Trump's effort to link Venezuela's president to a criminal gang, a link Trump later cited in justifying the U.S. attack on Venezuela. Current and former officials told The Atlantic that her decision to place politics ahead of objectivity discouraged analysts from reaching conclusions at odds with the administration's preferred narratives. William Walldorf, a politics professor at Wake Forest University and senior fellow at Defense Priorities, said her tenure showed how an agency lacking a clear mission can become politicized and drift from the objectivity intelligence work requires.

That concern later drew quantified, if unpublished, corroboration from within the workforce itself. In July 2026, The Atlantic reported that the CIA's annual internal survey—conducted by the agency's ombudsman for analytic integrity and covering the prior year—showed a significant rise, since Trump returned to office, in the number of employees concerned that the objectivity of analysis is being undermined by political influence. The results have not been made public; they were described to the magazine by several people familiar with them, and it is not known how many of the agency's analytic workforce responded to the voluntary survey, which pairs multiple-choice questions with an open-ended section for written feedback. Analysts who submitted written comments objected most often to Gabbard specifically, according to a person familiar with the results, citing the two episodes noted above: the dismissal of the two senior officers after one of her deputies tried to rewrite their assessment that Venezuela was not directing Tren de Aragua, and her revocation of the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former officials without cited evidence of wrongdoing. A majority of respondents nonetheless said they were satisfied with how their own managers protected objectivity—an indication, the reporting noted, that standards remained generally intact at the rank-and-file level even as pressure came from above. People familiar with the survey cautioned that it should not be read as criticism of Gabbard alone, but as reflecting broader unease about a political climate in which the president has misrepresented intelligence to the public and pressed advisers to find evidence supporting his claims. CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other senior leaders are aware of the findings, which will be sent to Congress for oversight review; a CIA spokeswoman, Liz Lyons, said the agency "is committed to providing objective analysis to policymakers to ensure they always have a decisive strategic advantage," citing the Iran strikes ("Midnight Hammer") and the operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro ("Absolute Resolve").

Her disputes with the White House were substantive as well as positional. In spring 2025, Gabbard testified to the intelligence community's assessment that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon; Trump responded, "I don't care what she said," and later justified the 2026 Iran war by citing an imminent threat. She did not publicly endorse the war, and one of her top deputies resigned over it. She was also present during a January 2026 FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, election office, drawing criticism that the DNI was inserting herself into a domestic criminal matter, and was accused of stonewalling a whistleblower complaint.

On May 22, 2026—two days after the Post told her team it would proceed with the guru investigation—Fox News reported that Gabbard would leave the DNI post, and she announced her resignation, citing her husband Abraham Williams's rare bone cancer, effective at the end of June. Her departure had been rumored for months amid her misalignment with Trump over the Iran war, and the stated personal reason is specific and partly verifiable; there is no public confirmation the story drove her exit, and the available evidence establishes no causal link either way.

The Open Questions

The leaked memos run only through 2017 and, by the Post's own account, cannot show whether Butler's guidance continued—through her 2020 campaign, her move to the GOP, or her sixteen months running U.S. intelligence. No memo in the trove touches her DNI tenure, and no evidence has surfaced that classified information reached Butler or the foundation, or that any intelligence decision was affected. The specific concern van Duyn raised to senators in 2024 remains unproven. Two threads, however, reach into that period. The Post noted that a stock phrase Hoen emailed Gabbard in 2014 as approved language—"the safety, security, and freedom of the American people"—recurs in the first paragraph of her 2024 memoir, her Senate confirmation hearing, her inaugural statement as DNI, and the annual threat assessment she presented. And the sock-puppet apparatus documented in the trove remained active during her confirmation and, per the coordination document, into April 2025, while she held the office.

Presented with years of warnings and, later, detailed documentary reporting, the administration nominated, confirmed, and retained Gabbard. Reaction to the Post's report split along party lines. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said no one knows who Butler really is or where the instructions came from, and called for answers; MSNBC observed that Senate Republicans who confirmed her faced difficult new questions, and the writer Anne Applebaum said the story showed Gabbard "was directed throughout her career by the leader of the cult she grew up in"—an assessment, not an established fact. The Las Vegas Sun editorial board called for a congressional investigation into whether Gabbard took direction from outside government and whether any sensitive information was compromised, while noting that a Republican Congress is unlikely to pursue it. Sen. Mark Warner has pushed legislation to require a Senate-confirmed line of succession for the DNI.