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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-gabbard-cult-like-group_n_6a398974e4b058c5d1c15588?origin=home-latest-news-unit
A lengthy investigation by The Washington Post published Sunday shows the extent to which former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appears to have been (and still could be) under the influence of a breakaway Hare Krishna group called the Science of Identity Foundation and its eccentric leader, Chris Butler.

The story poses troubling takeaways for national security and vetting in the Trump administration, given Gabbard's recent role overseeing the nation's intelligence-gathering efforts.


Reporter Jon Swaine reviewed more than 25,000 pages of emails, memos and other messages shared with Gabbard by senior leaders of the group seemingly on behalf of Butler.

The documents were shared with Swaine by a former member of SIF after a falling-out.

Swaine found "unmistakable parallels" between the directives sent by the group and Gabbard's political decisions, from specific lines Gabbard used in appearances on national media to legislation she introduced in the House....

A 2017 deep dive into Gabbard's belief system by The New Yorker encountered a system wherein Butler demanded absolute fealty, with followers sometimes sprinkling his nail clippings in their food to demonstrate devotion.

The group has long been a source of political intrigue, with particular interest swelling around the time Gabbard ran for president in 2020.

Previous reporting by the Honolulu Civil Beat noted Gabbard's parents, Carol and Mike Gabbard, held prominent roles in SIF, and her husband, Abraham Williams, has deep roots there as well.

"Your expectation is that a director of national intelligence is going to be this impartial broker of intelligence information to national leadership," Larry Pfeiffer, the head of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University, told the Honolulu Civil Beat after Trump nominated Gabbard to oversee national intelligence.

"And if there's any question that that individual is under some undue influence by anybody, a religious figure, a corporate figure, a foreign figure, that raises questions about their ability to be impartial."

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/tulsi-gabbard-senate-hearing-sect-b2688454.html
Tulsi Gabbard's campaign paid a firm to "mask connections" to an alleged pyramid scheme linked to a secretive sect she grew up in, according to a report.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is set to grill President Donald Trump's pick to serve as director of national intelligence on Thursday over her questionable connections and background. Since she was named as nominee to the post, she has faced questions and pushback given her previous statements and her history with foreign nations.

Lawmakers have been scrutinizing Gabbard's ties to the Science of Identity Foundation and the Hong Kong-based marketing firm QI Group, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Gabbard was raised in the secretive sect whose members pledge absolute loyalty to its reclusive guru, Chris Butler. The sect has long been tied to QI — accused of running a pyramid scheme in several countries.

Gabbard attended a Science of Identity boarding school in the Philippines and spent her formative years and schooling sheltered from outside influences, her late aunt told The Independent in 2022.

According to the Journal, Gabbard's campaign paid the PR firm Potomac Square Group, based in Washington D.C., to "mask the connections" between the sect, the marketing firm, and the politician. But the clean-up was reportedly steered by a former follower of the sect — Sunil Khemaney — who is also a long-time political fundraiser to Gabbard and sits on the board of a QI subsidiary.

Tulsi Gabbard is set to be grilled by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. But now reports of her 'paid to mask connections' to a sect in her past have come to light
open image in gallery
Tulsi Gabbard is set to be grilled by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. But now reports of her 'paid to mask connections' to a sect in her past have come to light (Getty Images)
Potomac managing director Christopher Cooper told The Independent that the firm worked with Gabbard's campaign for a few months in 2017 "to help it manage online attacks related to her religion."

"We provided support and advice in two specific categories: to demystify the issue by helping Rep. Gabbard publicly discuss the details of her spiritual life and relationship with SIF, and to correct errors of fact," Cooper said in a statement. "PSG wasn't directed to mount a 'pressure campaign' to silence or target reporters and we didn't conduct one [and] PSG was not hired to conceal Rep. Gabbard's relationship with SIF and we did not do so."


Cooper added that the firm worked "briefly" with the sect and there was "no involvement from the Gabbard campaign."

Hong Kong-based QI and the sect have been linked for years. The company was founded in 1998 by Vijay Eswaran and Joseph Bismark, a Filipino businessman who is also reportedly a Science of Identity follower. It began as an e-commerce operation selling commemorative gold and silver coins in developing countries.

One of QI's enterprises is an alleged pyramid selling system where customers become distributors, selling gadgets, jewelry, beauty products and more for a share of the profits. Customers, according to the Journal, are encouraged to recruit others to join the scheme and if successful, earn a cut from their sales.

Sri Lanka, Nepal and Rwanda banned QI's subsidiaries in 2000 after they were declared pyramid schemes, the outlet reports. The firm's direct-selling business, Qnet, has been accused of being "a Ponzi scheme in the guise of direct selling business" by prosecutors in India who carried out several raids in 2023.

Indian authorities also filed criminal charges against 25 people connected to Qnet's network, the Journal reports, including a senior Science of Identity figure. According to the newspaper, there were more than 32,000 alleged victims involved and Qnet's local network settled with approximately half of them. The case was closed in 2020.

Trump has tapped Gabbard to be his pick as Director of National Intelligence (Getty Images)
In further evidence of ties between Science of Identity and QI, in 2007 the company purchased Healthy's, the parent company of the Down to Earth grocery store chain which was founded and operated by sect followers, according to the Journal.

The chain has six locations in Hawaii.

Gabbard's longtime fundraiser Khemaney, who she has described as "an uncle," sits on Healthy's board, along with QI's founders Bismark and Eswaran who joined in 2015 and 2016, corporate records seen by the Journal reportedly show.

While Gabbard considered a 2020 run for the presidency and her political profile grew, her campaign, Tulsi For Hawaii, hired Potomac Square Group.

Potomac worked "under Khemaney's direction" to shroud the links between the then-Democrat and Butler, and QI and the sect itself, according to documents reviewed by the Journal citing a person familiar with the matter. Potomac was paid $19,400 by the campaign in October 2017, according to the Journal, citing FEC records.

The Independent has contacted QI and the Science of Identity Foundation for further comment.

A QI spokesperson told the Journal that the seat Khemaney held on Healthy's board was "solely as an inactive, non-executive director."

"The QI Group has no knowledge of, and has had no involvement in the Congressional Campaign of Ms. Gabbard," the spokesperson added....

In 2022, Gabbard's late aunt Dr Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard told The Independent that her niece's bid for the presidency in 2020 was the culmination of four decades of effort from the sect's founder, Butler, to seek political influence.

www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a71667211/tulsi-gabbard-chris-butler-religious-alt-right-puppet/
Has Tulsi Gabbard Been the Weird Little Puppet of an Alt-Right Religious Guru Her Entire Political Career?
Yet another reason to be thankful that she no longer leads our intelligence "community."

By Charles P. PiercePublished: Jun 22, 2026 2:20 PM EDT

One of the problems of growing up in a dizzy cult is, one day, Daddy gets fired because he blew the leader's breakfast order. From The Washington Post:

Among [Chris] Butler's disciples were Mike and Carol Gabbard, who moved to Hawaii in the early 1980s with their children, including young Tulsi. Mike Gabbard for a time also oversaw Butler's personal affairs—until he was fired for lapses that included failing to ensure a supply of fresh mangoes for Butler's breakfasts, according to an internal SIF memo.
Our week begins with a whopper of a story about Tulsi Gabbard and a guru named Chris Butler who may have directed her entire public career according to his weird improv Krishnaism. Rumors about Gabbard and her ties to Butler's bizarre precepts swirled around her during her time as a member of Congress, during her abortive presidential run in 2020, and throughout her erratic journey that ended up with her becoming this administration's director of national intelligence. Jon Swaine of the Post worked one Rebecca Saltzburg, a former member of Butler's Science of Identity Foundation until Saltzburg grew disenchanted with Butler's cult, and she gifted the reporter with reams of documents that prove, among other things, that Tulsi Gabbard should have been kept at least half a continent away from national intelligence information at all costs.

Saltzburg told me she had worked for Butler as a secretary in the 1990s, and lived for a time with Gabbard's parents and other devotees in a rented property. She said she had recently fallen out with the leaders of SIF, who she believed were mishandling allegations of physical and sexual abuse by some members of the organization. A few months earlier, she said, she had been arrested for briefly housing a teenage runaway who alleged abuse by a parent associated with the group. Saltzburg claimed SIF members had engineered her arrest. It all seemed a little conspiratorial and hard to follow, and I was deep into another story. But there was a minor mystery that had been nagging at me since I had looked into SIF the previous year, a name I'd stumbled on deep within some records.
"One question," I wrote to Saltzburg last September. "Do you know what Nine Isles is?" Her answer surprised me, and it sent me on a nearly year-long quest to better understand Gabbard, who left office last week. Saltzburg told me NineIsles.com was an email domain used by Butler's office, one reserved for his secretaries and select disciples. She said she herself had received emails from Nine Isles addresses when she worked on Gabbard's campaigns.
And the floodgates opened.

Dozens of attached memos appeared to document directives and advice for Gabbard from her time in Congress. Some contained instructions on what legislation she should propose, which policies she should embrace and how she should conduct herself on television. They had an air of authority. A memo about a proposal to partition war-torn Iraq into three states quoted an unnamed person as saying it was "time for TG to come up with this idea." Some of the language was harshly critical. One memo I found, from January 2015, contained a derisive assessment of a statement Gabbard was to give in response to President Barack Obama's annual address to Congress.
"In the first place, nobody gives a shit what you think about his State of the Union speech, unless you're going to say something of interest," the memo quoted someone as saying. "You're not even trying. You've become really intellectually lazy." In another, Gabbard was described as "chickenshit" and "mealymouthed" for her comments on a policy proposal.
I noticed that Gabbard for the most part was not listed as a recipient of these emails, though many went to people around her, including her parents. The attached memos appeared to be transcripts, often fragmentary, of spoken remarks or conversations. Some of the memos had file names that included "Call with TG" and attributed remarks to Gabbard, while in others the spoken remarks referred to Gabbard in third person. But the main speaker in each memo—the person who appeared to be issuing directives and sometimes castigating Gabbard—wasn't named. There was simply no attribution or mention of who they were. When I asked Saltzburg about this, she seemed amused. It was Butler, of course, she said. No one else could speak to Gabbard like that, she added. Saltzburg said the memos were unattributed precisely to mask Butler's identity if they ever became public.
Tim Walz was correct. These people are just flat weird.

I compared the content of the memos against Gabbard's record in the House and I found unmistakable parallels. The main speaker in a 2014 memo pressed for her to propose legislation penalizing countries with citizens who had fought for the Islamic State, and to issue a statement about it. "Get it started in the morning," the person said. "You need to be the leader in this regard. Don't dick around." I found that Gabbard released a statement the following day. A week after that, she introduced a bill in the House.
Weird. And dangerous.

Dance, monkey, dance!

An October 12, 2015, memo labeled "CNN Wolf Blitzer Talking points (Final)" contained this language about reports that she had been asked by Democratic leadership not to attend a presidential debate: "It's not a 'boohoo, I don't get to go to the party' situation, Wolf." I dug up the clip of her appearance that day and found that she had used the line almost verbatim: "The issue here is not about me saying boo-hoo, I'm going to miss the party."
The limited remarks attributed to Gabbard in the memos appeared to show her enthusiastically embracing the guidance. "TG: That's perfect, that line right there," said one transcript labeled "Iraq notes—call." A line attributed to "TG" in another transcript said, "That's a great way to put it."
All of this comes out as Gabbard is preparing "files" to "prove" that the Evil Doctor Blackheart, Anthony Fauci, was the linchpin in an international conspiracy to make everyone wear a mask and get shots. And as another "investigation" into the results of the 2020 election may be ramping up among the flying monkeys in Congress. So it's not exactly reassuring to learn that the American intelligence "community" was headed by a person whose allegiance also belonged to a guy who fires people over mangoes, or lack thereof.

I found Butler had said in a 1975 pamphlet that "inept politicians should be removed from their seats." He suggested they be replaced by what he called "saintly persons."
The following year, a new political party, Independents for Godly Government, sprung up in Hawaii with 14 candidates for federal, state and local offices, records show. IGG claimed to be nonsectarian. None of the IGG candidates won their elections. Afterward, an investigation by the Advertiser concluded that several were Butler followers, and all were Krishna devotees. In 1977, Butler formally incorporated his own organization and eventually settled on the SIF name. His teachings belonged to no political tribe: He inveighed against Muslims, homosexuality, gun control, and public schools, but also promoted environmentalism and anti-capitalism.