Reporting for the Washington Post, Jon Swaine writes:

[Rebecca] Saltzburg [former staffer for Tulsi Gabbard and former member of a breakaway Hare Krishna group to which Gabbard also belonged] told me [Chris] Butler [founder of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF)] did not use a computer. Instead, he delivered his advice for Gabbard verbally, she said, sometimes to her directly over the phone and other times to his secretaries or other followers. The secretaries transcribed his remarks and turned them into memos.

It was clear from the documents that the emails, with the memos attached, were often sent to a small group of people, in varying permutations, who I knew from my reporting were close to both Butler and Gabbard. They included Saltzburg, Gabbard’s parents and a few other devotees. Saltzburg said this group was known as Butler’s “political team.”

One frequent recipient was Allison Hoen. Saltzburg told me Hoen was the college friend with whom she had moved to Hawaii in the 1990s and was, in the years the emails were sent, Butler’s top aide. Hoen was also married during that period to [Sunil] Khemaney [Butler’s “right-hand man”], court records show.

According to Saltzburg, everyone who received the memos knew that the voice behind them was Butler’s. They spoke about it openly but had been told by Butler to avoid writing his name down, she said.

The attachments to emails sent from the please.confirm account were encrypted — another measure intended to preserve secrecy, according to Saltzburg. With her help, I was able to read the decrypted files.

I dove in. I wanted to determine how often Gabbard followed the advice they recorded and whether Saltzburg’s assertion that Butler was the speaker could be verified.

One memo I noticed in particular was from 2014 and was labeled “Call with T.” The unnamed speaker in that document argued that to avoid delays in medical treatment, veterans should be able to get care at any hospital and be reimbursed by Veterans Affairs, and they should be able to do so without first obtaining government approval.

“Actually put forward legislation. Get it done,” the speaker said.

Three weeks later, Gabbard endorsed a version of that policy in an op-ed in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. But she omitted any discussion of prior approval — a key idea that distinguished the unnamed adviser’s plan from remedies pushed by other Democrats.

Soon after the op-ed was published, Hoen emailed Saltzburg.

“He was pissed she didn’t say that they should get private care withOUT pre-approval,” Hoen wrote. She did not say who “he” was. Saltzburg told me she understood it to be Butler.

A month later, Gabbard introduced a bill that made explicit that veterans would not need preapproval for private care.

The memos covered a dizzying range of matters. I found a 173-page dossier from 2014 titled “TG Issues.” It compiled advice for Gabbard on dozens of topics — from taxes to the mysterious disappearance that year of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and more. The document was peppered with imperatives. “Start introducing bills,” it said on one issue. “Need to get on it and hit hard. Stop being weak,” it said on another.

Syria was the subject of many of the memos, including one from August 2016 that documented tactical advice on one of Gabbard’s signature policies: preventing the United States from ousting then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

The memo quoted an unnamed adviser saying she should reiterate her opposition to U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war, even as a shocking image of a wounded 5-year-old made headlines. “The CIA is the one that started this thing,” the person said. Gabbard made that claim publicly three years later.

As I examined the document, eight months after Gabbard’s confirmation as director of national intelligence, I found it striking that such deep suspicion of U.S. intelligence appeared to have been fed to someone who would later coordinate the CIA, the National Security Agency and more than a dozen similar agencies.

Butler had expressed similar skepticism of the national security establishment. I had been reading SIF transcripts of his lectures, an archive of nearly 7,000 pages that a former member had shared with me. Butler claimed the CIA and other spy agencies had bugged his family home to monitor his father when he was a child. In one lecture, he warned the agencies were filled with demonic “power-hungry madmen” and wanted to use psychic powers to control people.

Reading over the documents, I found more on Syria, including a directive Hoen sent to one of Gabbard’s personal email accounts in 2014.

“IMPORTANT TO DO: must tweet around 9am,” said the subject line. It contained a pre-written tweet, with a link to a video, on the plight of Kurdish fighters in the city of Kobane, which was under siege by the Islamic State.

.@BarackObama Please show aloha to Kobani Kurds. Need airstrikes, heavy weapons. Mahalo. Must see video http://t.co/NT0BS7rMO2 #ISIS

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) September 30, 2014

“Every word of the tweet language is approved,” Hoen wrote. She added later that Gabbard should tag senior Obama administration officials in identical follow-up posts. “He’d like them to see the video,” she wrote. Once again, “he” was not identified.

I checked Gabbard’s page on Twitter, now known as X. I saw that she had posted the tweet verbatim that day and followed up with posts tagging the senior officials. Then she emailed Hoen.

“Sent tweet,” Gabbard wrote.

A June 2014 memo Hoen emailed Gabbard ahead of a TV appearance was direct: “Don’t forget to smile, etc. Don’t do the eye thing.”

On YouTube, I found a clip of Gabbard on CNN the following day. At several points, she opened her eyes wide while speaking.

“Well, from what I saw, she’s doing the f—ing eye thing again,” an unnamed speaker told Hoen later that day, according to a transcript of their conversation emailed to Saltzburg and others. “She’s still doing the eye thing.”

The communications were among many memos that reflected concern about Gabbard’s media performances, or guidance about what she should say during them, at a time when she was just beginning to gain a national reputation. They coincided with memos documenting advice on how she might run for president in 2016.

A January 2015 memo documented an unnamed adviser’s proposal to attack John F. Kerry, then secretary of state, for saying violent activity by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda was rooted not in Islam but in “alienation, poverty, thrill seeking and other factors.” If that were true, the adviser said sarcastically, the way to deal with terrorists would be to “give them a trophy, a big hug, increase their self-esteem, give them a good paying job.”

In a Fox News interview later that day, Gabbard repeated the Kerry quote and gave a similar mocking punch line. “If that’s really the cause, then the solution would be give them a trophy, give them a hug, give them a good-paying job,” she said.

I wanted to know whether Gabbard had used the talking points in her other TV appearances.

With Post colleague Aaron Schaffer, I compared Gabbard’s remarks in 32 TV interviews between 2014 and 2016 with the talking-points memos intended for them. On 24 occasions, Gabbard used language in the memos almost verbatim. In the eight other instances, Gabbard used different words but promoted some of the same ideas.

The memos reflected exacting judgment of Gabbard’s performances. The same unnamed speaker who vented about the “eye thing” also criticized her for seeming insincere, according to the transcript of those remarks. “It’s like she’s trying to express something, artificially. I don’t feel anything from her,” the speaker complained. “It’s more like kind of remembering talking points.”

Another memo, circulated to members of the team on the eve of a Fox News interview, documented a 75-minute call between an unnamed person and Gabbard that went until 10:46 p.m. in Washington, according to a transcript. “Now all you need is a good night’s sleep, knowing that no matter how badly you f— it up, that me and Krishna still love you,” the unnamed adviser told her.

After the Fox interview, Hoen emailed Gabbard a suggested apology to the host, Greta Van Susteren. “I’m sorry I didn’t fully explain why the situation on the ground right now in Iraq is not the best time and place to strike ISIS,” it said. The subject line read, “pls check and send if ok.” It’s not clear from the documents whether Gabbard sent the apology. Van Susteren told me she had no recollection of it.

As Gabbard, then 33, began her second congressional term in 2015, the unnamed speaker in one memo advised that “your position in general” should be to offer an alternative to other candidates in the “dishonest Democratic party.” Gabbard is not named in the memo, but the file name has “TG” in it.

Gabbard ultimately did not run for president that year and instead endorsed Sanders.

As the general election race got underway, transcripts show, an unnamed adviser spoke admiringly about Trump’s campaign messaging. In one, the unnamed speaker said Trump had staked out the kind of maverick position that Gabbard might have taken.
“This is right up your ally [sic],” the speaker said about some of Trump’s remarks on “Islamic extremists” in America. “Too bad you’re not running. It’s all falling into place, but for the wrong guy. Now Trump is going to be the one, and he’s a total idiot.” [Continue reading…]

Two days after Gabbard was informed that the Washington Post planned to proceed with a story about her association with Butler, Fox News reported that she would be leaving the position of DNI.