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Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

A bombshell investigative report published over the weekend by reporter Jon Swaine of The Washington Post answers a question that has shadowed Tulsi Gabbard’s entire political career: Why has she never made any sense? The answer is laid out across more than 25,000 documents obtained by Swaine after nearly a year of investigation. It turns out Gabbard’s political positions, legislative agenda, television talking points and even social media posts appear to have been shaped for years by a man named Chris Butler. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s by design. Butler is the reclusive, 78-year-old leader of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), the secretive Hare Krishna splinter group in which Gabbard was raised and which has been accused by former members of being an abusive cult. Gabbard has publicly acknowledged Butler as her guru. Per Swaine’s reporting, Butler operates through intermediaries and does not put his name on anything. From his beachfront house in Kailua, Hawaii, Butler watched his disciple ascend, with his guidance, to the most powerful intelligence position in the U.S. government.

The memos Swaine reviewed were routed through an encrypted email domain. Gabbard’s television appearances used language lifted directly from the memos. She introduced bills after being directed to do so. She even deployed a signature catchphrase—“the safety, security, and freedom of the American people”—apparently created by her cult leader’s political team, if not her guru himself. Gabbard resigned her office recently, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis. But the timing is suspect. The Post notified her the story was coming two days before she announced her departure. Butler has described U.S. intelligence agencies in his own lectures as run by demonic “power-hungry madmen.” His own acolyte oversaw them all for the last fifteen months.

It never made any sense

For more than two decades, Gabbard defied easy political explanation. She entered the Hawaii state legislature in 2002 as a social conservative, running on an anti-gay platform that opposed same-sex marriage and working for her father’s organization, which backed conversion therapy. She even appeared as a teenager in a television ad her family produced warning that legalization of same-sex marriage would lead to people marrying their dogs. A decade later, she arrived in Congress as a progressive darling, resigning as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. She delivered his nominating speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, a breakout moment that briefly made her a rising star of the party’s left wing.

She then met with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower, shocking Democrats. To make matters worse, she spent years as a Fox News fixture, ultimately embracing MAGA and joining the Republican Party at a Trump rally in North Carolina in October 2024. She would be rewarded for her conversion by being named Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.

Along this Sinema-matic pathway, she staked out incoherent political positions. She supported military action against ISIS while opposing virtually every other form of American intervention abroad. She visited Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017 on an unannounced trip to Damascus while serving as a Democratic member of Congress and defended him against accusations of using chemical weapons on his own people. She amplified the claim—one that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called “parroting false Russian propaganda”—that the U.S. maintained biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and returned to that claim on her way out as DNI, declassifying documents she said proved it. She was skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies yet appeared eager to lead them. Political observers spent years scratching their heads. The most charitable credited her as a genuine independent thinker, following her convictions wherever they led. A more skeptical reading saw her as an opportunist, tracking toward the audience of highest reward. But neither explanation could account for the specificity and consistency of positions that cut so strangely across every recognizable political category.

Swaine's bombshell offers a different, and compelling, explanation entirely.

[...]

“Stop being weak.”

Swaine’s primary source—the “disgruntled volunteer”—is Rebecca Saltzburg, a former member of Butler’s Science of Identity Foundation who also worked on digital strategy for several of Gabbard’s congressional campaigns. Saltzburg initially told Swaine in November 2024 that Gabbard was a free thinker who took orders from no one. But after falling out with SIF leadership over allegations of abuse within the organization (and rather complicatedly, her own arrest in a child custody matter that Texas prosecutors ultimately declined to pursue), Saltzburg came back with a different story. This time, she had a Gmail archive to back it up. That trove contained more than 25,000 pages of documents, including hundreds of memos spanning 2011 to 2017. Those years covered Gabbard’s first two terms in Congress. The emails were routed through an encrypted email domain, NineIsles.com, operated by Butler’s secretarial staff.

The name itself was a clue: “Nine Islands” in Sanskrit is Navadvipa, a pilgrimage city in West Bengal sacred to Hare Krishna devotees. The emails typically contained little beyond an attached memo and a request to confirm receipt. The attachments were encrypted, and the memos contained no named author, no signature and no identifying information of any kind. Butler, like Trump, famously does not use a computer or email. According to Saltzburg, he delivered his guidance verbally, sometimes to Gabbard directly by phone, sometimes to his secretaries, who transcribed his remarks and circulated the resulting memos to a small group she described as Butler’s “political team.” That group included Gabbard’s parents, top aide Allison Hoen who was then married to Butler’s right-hand man Sunil Khemaney, and Saltzburg herself. Everyone who received the memos, according to Saltzburg, understood that the unnamed voice behind them was Butler’s. He had instructed them never to write his name down.

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Now the Picture Clears

That brings us back to my opening question. Gabbard’s political career traced a path that no conventional ideological framework could explain. But Butler’s politics explain nearly all of it, and Swaine walks us through some doozies. Butler’s worldview defies the standard American left-right spectrum in precisely the ways Gabbard’s career did. He has inveighed against homosexuality, Islam, gun control and public schools—all positions that track to the cultural right. At the same time he has promoted environmentalism and expressed deep suspicion of capitalism—positions that track to the left. His interest in “America First” framing predated Trump. And his wild Syria position, which included opposing the removal of Assad and framing U.S. involvement as illegitimate regime change, aligned precisely with the posture that made Gabbard a figure of suspicion.

The memos make the transmission of these positions visible in granular detail. Most tellingly, a 2016 Syria directive instructed Gabbard to maintain her opposition to U.S. intervention even as a photograph of a wounded five-year-old boy dominated international headlines and sharpened public pressure for action. “The CIA is the one that started this thing,” the unnamed adviser said. Gabbard made that precise claim publicly—three years later. Other memos used “America First” framing and recommended deploying the National Guard to occupy inner cities—ideas that would become MAGA orthodoxy within years. What the documents cannot show, because they end in 2017, is whether Butler’s influence persisted into Gabbard’s post-congressional career and her tenure as DNI. It is logical to presume it did. The phrase Butler’s team wrote for Gabbard in 2014 was still her go-to at her confirmation hearing in 2025. The positions Butler shaped in encrypted memos were the positions she carried into the government’s most sensitive intelligence role.

Liz Dye at Public Notice:

Ken Paxton got smacked down in federal court. Again. In his 11 years as Texas attorney general, Paxton has launched hundreds of performative lawsuits and investigations. His targets included: Twitter (making Elon Musk mad); Media Matters for America (same); swing states (disenfranchising Texas Republicans by registering too many Democrats); Bexar County (same); Target (Pride T-shirts); the NCAA (trans athletes); the state bar (investigating his ethical misconduct); and the State Fair of Texas (banning guns after a shooting). For the most part, it all came to nothing. Paxton got a couple news cycles boosting his image as a culture warrior, then wandered off to the next outrage. As a crimefighting strategy, it’s worthless. But as a political strategy, it’s brilliant.

Paxton was indicted for securities fraud just weeks after being sworn in as AG; he was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 for abusing his office, only to be acquitted by the Senate after key witnesses were pressured not to testify; and he’s currently under investigation by the Federal Election Commission, which flagged nearly $883,000 in apparently illegal donations to his own Senate campaign. And yet, he was popular enough to knock Sen. John Cornyn out in the primary by implying that the longtime Republican was some kind of RINO squish.

Paxton is perhaps the purest distillation of the modern Republican philosophy that the law is a tool, shame is for losers, and the only thing that matters is using the machinery of your office to hurt your enemies and dominate the news cycle. He also pioneered the use of Texas courts — both federal and state — to project power across state lines into blue states. But this time, Paxton tried to use his office to kneecap his Democratic rival James Talarico. And now a judge in Massachusetts has shut him down in humiliating fashion, highlighting the difference between Texas law and “real” law as it’s practiced in the rest of the country.

Act crazy

Republicans have long hoped to cripple Democrats by taking out the fundraising platform ActBlue. The GOP analog WinRed racks up several times more complaints, and yet the Trump’s Justice Department is investigating ActBlue for supposedly failing to weed out foreign donors. Paxton launched his own investigation of ActBlue in 2025, when Democratic legislators left the state to deny Republicans a quorum to pass gerrymandered maps. Paxton sued Beto O'Rourke's Powered by the People PAC in Tarrant County, where a Republican judge immediately barred the PAC from paying expenses for the Democratic lawmakers and ordered ActBlue to not move any donated money out of state. The theory was that O’Rourke had violated Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), a consumer protection law, by deceiving donors about the intended use of their money. Within two weeks, the case had been reversed on appeal, and after vowing that he’d "stop at nothing," Paxton moved on to the next attention-seeking stunt.

But then on February 18 of this year, Talarico announced he had raised $2.5 million in a single day, $2.2 million of it through ActBlue. The very next day, investigators in Paxton’s shop bought a pile of VISA and Mastercard gift cards and started making $5 and $10 test donations on ActBlue (but not WinRed). Most of these donations were rejected, but in April, just as Talarico was due to file his next FEC fundraising report, Paxton turned up again in Tarrant County court with a lawsuit alleging that ActBlue violated the DTPA.

[...]

Dangerous loser

Paxton’s trollsuits almost always detonate on impact with a real court. But that doesn’t make him harmless. The donor-fraud theory — that a nonprofit or political organization has defrauded its supporters by soliciting money for one purpose and using it for another — didn’t die when Judge Mehta blocked the subpoenas, or when Judge Stearns called it out for the massive assault on the First Amendment that it is. In fact, it’s the basis for the Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which it accuses of taking donor money to dismantle hate groups while secretly funding them via a network of paid informants.

Forum-shopping has now become standard operating procedure for the DOJ as well. Just as Paxton parks cases in Tarrant County, where a friendly judge will sign off on patently illegal subpoenas of his political enemies, the Trump administration has begun parking politically harassing investigations in the federal courthouse in Fort Worth, where they’re virtually guaranteed to get in front of Judge Reed O’Connor. When the administration wanted to seize transgender children’s medical records from a hospital in Rhode Island, it went to O’Connor, a bare knuckles partisan who is perfectly willing to pretend he has nationwide jurisdiction. In some sense, Paxton is a legal vanguard for the MAGA movement. Because he’s utterly shameless and willing to breach every legal and ethical rule, he effectively clears the way, normalizing prosecutorial abuses that other Republican lawyers would previously have balked at. The legal theories and practices that he road tests wind up in the Republican mainstream. For all his buffoonery and courtroom losses, Paxton is genuinely dangerous for democracy and the rule of law. It’s up to Texas voters whether his reign of terror will come to an end, or whether he’ll get a chance to bring his particular brand of corruption to the Senate.