Laura Loomer, an informal adviser to President Donald Trump, has blasted his administration for a “lack of vetting” following a damning report alleging that Tulsi Gabbard was being advised for years by the reclusive guru of a spiritual movement while in Congress.
Gabbard served her final day as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence on Thursday, two days before The Washington Post expose was published, to spend more time with her husband, who has been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer.
The report alleges that Chris Butler, the leader of the Science of Identity Foundation group in which Gabbard was raised in Hawaii, was behind hundreds of memos containing policy advice and talking points on everything from Syria to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Although the memos cited in the report spanned 2011-2017 and predate Gabbard’s tenure overseeing America’s intelligence agencies, they have led critics — including Trump allies — to question how she was later appointed to the top job.
“The lack of vetting inside the Trump administration is truly a crisis,” Loomer reacted to the report Monday in a post on X.
open image in gallery“I have been warning for over a year that not enough vetting was done on some of the terrible nominees who were forced onto President Trump by people who lie to him daily and hide opposition research from him,” she wrote.
Loomer claimed that Gabbard was “forced” on Trump by former supporter-turned-critic Tucker Carlson and one of the president’s confidantes, Roger Stone. Stone characterized The Post’s report as “bulls***.”
The newspaper could not substantiate whether Gabbard continued to receive advice after she left Congress, where she had served as a Democrat, before defecting to Trump.
The Independent has contacted Gabbard, the White House, and the Science of Identity Foundation for comment.
Whistleblower Rebecca Saltzburg, who worked on Gabbard’s congressional campaigns, shared more than 25,000 pages of emails with The Post, which contained memos from Butler, she claimed. “Everyone who received the memos knew that the voice behind them was Butler’s,” the newspaper reports, citing Saltzburg, also a former member of Science of Identity. She decided to come forward now because she believes that Gabbard, SIF and its insiders are “dangerous,” she wrote.
Some critics have questioned how the Science of Identity —a fringe breakaway of the Hare Krishna movement— members show absolute loyalty to the group’s leader, 78-year-old Butler, who founded the group in 1977,
A former member told The Independent in 2022 that she recalled Gabbard was a rising star within the group, and that it was “inconceivable” that anyone involved was not being directed by Butler. “I feel like when you vote for somebody who is heavily tied into [Science of Identity], you’re not voting for that person, you’re voting for Chris Butler, as a servant of the servant of God,” the former member said.
The memos, which The Independent has not independently verified, reportedly contained guidance and advice on policy and talking points ahead of TV interviews, according to The Post, which she often complied with, per the newspaper’s analysis comparing the memos to her publicized comments.
open image in gallerySyria was reportedly the subject of “many” of the memos, and one consisted of tactical advice that later became one of Gabbard’s signature policies—urging the U.S. not to oust former Syrian President Bashar Assad, who she met in 2017. One memo quoted an unnamed adviser, calling on Gabbard to “reiterate her opposition to U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war.”
“The CIA is the one that started this thing,” the unnamed adviser reportedly reasoned in the memo. Three years later, Gabbard made this claim, according to The Post.
Like Gabbard, Butler also had expressed skepticism about the U.S. national security sphere, claiming that the CIA and other agencies had bugged his family home to monitor his father when he was a child, according to transcripts of lectures another former member shared with The Post. Butler allegedly characterized the people who work at U.S. intelligence agencies as “power-hungry madmen.”
Another memo in 2014 instructed Gabbard to post a tweet directed to then-President Barack Obama. The post, which was about the plight of Kurdish fighters amid an attack from Islamic State, was shared by Gabbard verbatim, according to the outlet. “Sent tweet,” Gabbard reportedly replied.
Not all orders were about policy. Some instructed Gabbard “not to do the eye thing” during TV interviews, referring to a clip when she appeared on CNN with her eyes wide open while speaking, while another told her: “Don’t forget to smile etc.”
The Post compared TV remarks Gabbard made between 2014 and 2016 with instructions in the memos. During that period, the newspaper found that Gabbard used language in the memos almost verbatim on 24 occasions.
Science of Identity said The Post’s reporting was “Hinduphobia” and “anti-Hindu religious bigotry” in a statement via an anonymous vice president at an unnamed Manhattan-based public relations firm. The group refused to answer most of the newspaper’s questions because it does not accept the “many embedded premises and characterizations” in the report.
open image in galleryScience of Identity also said Saltzburg was “a malicious liar,” and claimed she attempted to extort the group for $250,000.
The Independent has contacted Saltzburg’s attorney for comment.
Gabbard has not publicly responded to the report.
Her then-chief of staff told The Post that “the attacks on Director Gabbard’s faith and loyalty are not only false — they are a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry.”
Media pundits and analysts joined Loomer in questioning how Gabbard rose to Director of National Intelligence amid the report’s revelations.
“I still can’t believe Trump nominated her to this role and I’m sure we still haven’t even scratched the surface on all the mess she probably made during her tenure,” said Nadav Pollak, a former Israeli intelligence analyst and research fellow at the Washington Institute. “She was a national security threat from the get go.”
“We began warning people about Tulsi Gabbard being a national security risk before 2020,” said Travis Akers, a retired Navy intelligence officer.
John Jackson, a U.S. veteran, former GOP lawyer and geopolitical analyst according to his social media profiles, called for Butler to “answer for his role in puppeteering” through Gabbard.
“These events raise severe questions as to how Gabbard got a security clearance while in the military and ended up as the Director of National Intelligence,” Jackson said. “It further raises the question of how many other politicians, political positions, and otherwise are simply manufactured out of whole cloth or otherwise the subject of outside influence. Clearly, the background check and vetting processes are broken.”
Kareem Rifai, a research fellow at the University of Tokyo with a large social media presence, said the report was “an utterly insane story.”
“This woman was leading the world’s largest intelligence apparatus,” Rifai said.