The real scandal is not that Tulsi had a guru whispering through the incense machine. Washington is full of men taking orders from donors, think tanks, lobbyists, cable producers, and whatever haunted meatloaf advises Stephen Miller. The scandal is that the Senate saw the strings, read the warnings, checked the file, and still handed her the keys to the intelligence cathedral. They didn’t miss the red flags. They saluted them.
It’s the same exact committee that produced a bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that conclusively establishes that it happened, that it was intended to support the election of Donald Trump, and that Trump as well as countless individuals in Trumps campaign and businesses were fully knowledgeable and complicit in the interference, welcoming it, strategizing around it, and coordinating campaign activities and messaging to coincide with Russian activities before they even happened. It’s all right there set forth in 700 pages of report and record under the committee chair Marco Rubios signature. And the republicans then took a professionally written report stock full with evidence of treason by Trump and his campaign and the wrote a summary statement that declared Trump fully exonerated and found “no collusion,” despite all the treason and collusion the report documented. Same committee, probably some of the same members. And when you live already sold this country out to an enemy like Russia, what’s adding a little Hawaiian cult guru to your betrayal afterall?
Spot on. The buck should have stopped at the Senate. I so miss the days when Congress and SCOTUS were respected and we could count on the 3 branches of government to keep each other in line.
Yes! More directly: Bibi Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, who is taking us over the oil brink in the US-Israel war with Iran in 4 weeks (from 6/17), according to Trump at the G7. Trump said this will be “economic catastrophe” that will bring on “depression” (not just a recession or the 70’s oil shock).
Iran says it won’t open the Strait of Hormuz unless Israel stops attacking Lebanon. Trump’s angry calls to Netanyahu to get him to stop attacking Lebanon haven’t worked.
Might want to call your reps in Congress: Capitol Switchboard, 202-221-3121.
Just the opposite, for the hard-core CN. Rapture-instigators want the meld for protection/expansion of Israel, then they’ll have more Jews for to covert/kill at the Rapture. Why US Ambassador Huckabee was alarmed about a ceasefire, claiming “The US would not exist without Israel” (aka, CNs and their theocratic version of the US are the “real” Americans).
See section 219 (last I saw renumbering) of the National Defense Authorization Act that’s in the works. Alarmingly, it passed committee with bipartisan support (looking at you, Senator Kristen Gillibrand, D-NY,
Is it any wonder Trump nominated a merger & acquisitions guy with zero intelligence experience to be Director of National Intelligence (DNI)? A contracts guy to handle paperwork meld requires, while not thinking too much about loss of national sovereignty?
The Israelis have always been glad to take their money (keeping eye-rolling discrete); it’s why rank-and-file CNs sometimes puzzled when they get less than warm reception from Israeli tour guides (who know their view and are not enthusiastic about being converted/killed by CNs’ version of Jesus).
Enablers are complicit. The corruption of Cornyn is harder for voters here in Texas to see since he is generally a good man who is evidently supremely weak and compromised by partisanship, probably as a result of staying too long in office. With Republican senate nominee Ken Paxton being an overtly corrupt candidate and Democratic senate nominee James Talarico being an extremely forthright, principled and talented candidate, we actually have a chance to start flipping Texas in 2026. Most of the down ballots are grassroots and good candidates also. We need to get Talarico over the line- we do that and we cut the head off of the snake, reimagine electoral college maps, and we start getting this thing out of the ditch. I used to think people outside of Texas should not bother with Texas politics, since they cannot vote here. I don’t think that anymore. We are all in this boat together and we will need the nation’s grassroots to help to change our trajectory in all
Gross! He isn’t fighting for all of us. If he had, he wouldn’t be the primary nominee. That election was oppressed and suppressed. Yall scream electability, while 10,000,000+ Texans don’t even vote, because yall do disloyal shit like this, while the nominee ignores the obvious disenfranchisement of the voters, who he hopes to represent. Tallarico is the problem with US politics. Texas is ignoring the lessons of 2024, and it will bite us all in the ass. Yall better wake up and start courting the non-voter, instead of chasing the MAGA chud, which only pushes this country further to the right.
What??? ‘Tallarico is the problem with US politics’???
Tallarico is a tiny flame of hope that y’all in Texas won’t continue to support destructive, corrupt, power-hungry Republicans who damage the country & the world through their closed-minded attempts to hurt not help, through supporting billionaires on the take who want to keep all profits - usually ill-gotten! - for themselves, and ignore the Constitutional imperative to ‘promote the general welfare’.
Also the ill-informed &/or mean Texans who vote for those corrupt Republicans, or are so clueless they don’t even vote! I know voters in more enlightened parts of Texas - such as Austin or San Antonio, really suffer because of being surrounded by y’all.
When Graham Platner recently was running for the Democratic nomination to run against Susan Collins in Maine, Substack posts came in to malign him about his tattoo and his behavior with past girlfriends. There will be much to sort through in the next few months as Republicans throw everything they’ve got into staying in power.
We really are all in this together. We may not live in the candidate’s state but we are being asked for donations. Help each person you know how important it is to register, confirm the accuracy of their registration, and plan how and where they will vote.
Agree! I ran into this Indivisible Neighbor 2 Neighbor campaign and I encourage everyone to check it out. It empowers you to reach out to neighbors and will help you identify neighbors to converse with so you can support each other getting to the polls.
I hope Graham Platner jumps on this and makes Susan Collin’s vote for Tulsi an issue in his campaign. Since the press will move on from this and the Senators won’t be held accountable for their votes to confirm her, the Dems going into the midterms can and should keep this issue alive.
Because the safety and security of our country and the intelligence agencies’ ability to prevent terrorist attacks really don’t matter compared to the significance of a drunk 22 year old vet who got a skull and crossbones tattoo
“The van Duyn letter warned exactly this, in writing, before the vote: any sensitive intelligence Gabbard is privy to will be communicated to her guru.”
Another masterpiece Michael!
And therein lies the rub! Bernie Sanders voted against her nomination, he’s not a democrat, but rather an independent.
And let’s not forget, Sanders had previously called Gabbard “one of the important voices of a new generation of leaders,”  while she had taken a real political risk endorsing him for president in 2016–even resigning as the DNC vice chair in 2016, specifically to endorse his presidential campaign.
What’s interesting is this is just the tip of the iceberg. We saw Trump completely annihilate the NSC by tweet and by the recommendations of social media influencers like Laura Loomer—who may or may not be a Russian stooge, or asset!
We’ve watched as Trump and Hegseth gut our military leadership, replacing them with unqualified and unserious morons, while refusing to promote our best and brightest.
We’ve watched Trump put tariffs on allies, bully and threaten them, while refusing to enforce sanctions on Russia or arm Ukraine—all the while threatening to extract ourselves from NATO and refusing to deliver Patriot Systems and Several missile systems to NATO members.
And all along, while Trump and his minions are undermining our military, intelligence and domestic security agencies, his party in Congress is more than complicit!
Bottom line, when this is all over, Republicans will never again be able to claim they are strong on defense. They’re strong on defense spending, but weak when it comes to defending US interests—which includes our allies.
No nation is an island, and superpowers are only superpowers when they have strong allies and a rule of law. We currently have neither! Let that sink in….)
Okay. This blew my mind. Every day when you think you have a handle on what is going on something like this cracks open and my mind is gobsmacked anew.
So my question is this: why did Trump want Gabbard in this position? If the Senators were afraid to vote against Trump’s wishes, what were his motives for nominating her? Surely he was aware of her connections and obedience to her guru.
The McConnell vote is the structural proof that breaks the whole defence. One senator who had announced he was leaving voted no. Every senator who still needed the party voted yes. The oversight function worked for exactly one person, the one person with nothing left to lose. An oversight system that operates only when the overseer has no personal cost to pay isn't an oversight system. It's a coincidence that fires when political circumstances happen to align with institutional duty, and the rest of the time it doesn't fire at all.
That's the design flaw underneath the specific case, and it's the one that survives after the names fade. The committee doesn't need different members. It needs a structure where the cost of approving a compromised nominee exceeds the cost of blocking one. Right now it's the reverse, because blocking costs you standing in the party and approving costs you nothing until the damage surfaces years later, and by then the accountability has diffused across enough names that no single vote carries the weight. The system is built to make confirmation the path of least resistance regardless of the file, and the file was right there, and they confirmed her anyway, because the incentives told them to.
The story isn’t really about the senate. It’s about Donald Trump. Again the media points the finger elsewhere as if this man has no responsibility at all. As if he were a child. The senate was too intimidated to properly function, that’s the story. Of course it’s obvious why he places clowns in these sensitive security positions. They won’t pose a threat to his nefarious activities. Same is true at Justice and the FBI.
So the “new perspective” is that the Senate failed? Really? No, the real new perspective is that the media has failed to objectively report on Trump from the very start. Had the media rightfully savaged this guy from the very start. We may not be where we are today. If Kristen Welker had stood up and said Mr. Trump, I’m not gonna let you lie to the American people and I’m not gonna let you talk to me like this. The interview is over instead of whining that she had traveled all the way from New York to Wisconsin we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Mike, your numbers aren't adding up and it calls into question, at least for me, the credibility of your argument--if not necessarily in this piece, then the credibility of your argumentation overall.
You say the committee vote was party-line, 9-8. But then you list only eight Republicans who voted in favour of Gabbard's nomination in committee. It would appear that you missed Ted Budd at multiple points in the piece.
You then say that "[t]he eight Republicans on the Intelligence Committee" and "[t]he forty-five Republicans on the Senate floor" voted yes; however, there are fifty-three Republicans in the Senate (which would be eight plus forty-five, except...), and earlier in the article you correctly (https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1191/vote_119_1_00050.htm) note that only fifty-two Republicans voted in favour because Mitch McConnell broke ranks.
Similarly with "One Republican did. The other forty-five did not." The math you present simply does not add up.
These simple, easily avoidable errors make me question the validity of the rest of the factual claims you make, and therefore the correctness of the analysis you present atop them.
Re the line "The question of what was communicated is now an empirical question with a binary answer. Either it was or it was not." Are you claiming that either Ms. Gabbard communicated all intelligence or none, that there is no possibility that she communicated only some (which would, to be sure, be bad enough, particularly from my perspective if any of it was intelligence shared by Five Eyes partners)?
I would also add that this is arguably not even the biggest scandal within which the US intelligence community is currently embroiled; there is an effort in the US Congress (which would have major implications for my country, and some of those in personal union with it, due to Five Eyes intelligence-sharing) to meld the US and Israeli intelligence services and mandate US intelligence-sharing with Israeli agencies, despite US assessments reportedly classifying Israeli intelligence agencies as high-risk for espionage in the US and the Pentagon's service recently (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/7/why-has-the-pentagon-raised-the-risk-of-israeli-spying-to-the-highest-level) upgrading that to "critical"; certainly they are not the sort of trusted partner that countries like the Five Eyes are.
Thanks for the reminder about the US-Israel military plus intelligence MELD in the FY2027 defense budget (FY 2027 starts 7/1/26). This essentially gives up our military-intelligence sovereignty as a nation: just what the Christian Nationalists want. Also why Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu is not stopping his attacks on Lebanon, despite Trump’s repeated angry calls.
Even if all media were responding proportionally to their consumers' interests, so many excuses are available for not wanting to read/print on religious/religion-adjacent topics other than "waronchristmas😱" and "radicalIslamism😱"
The real scandal is not that Tulsi had a guru whispering through the incense machine. Washington is full of men taking orders from donors, think tanks, lobbyists, cable producers, and whatever haunted meatloaf advises Stephen Miller. The scandal is that the Senate saw the strings, read the warnings, checked the file, and still handed her the keys to the intelligence cathedral. They didn’t miss the red flags. They saluted them.
Senate Republicans.
…for their führerchen told them so…
You mean “Fuhrer?”
You got that right. But despair comes from the fact that voters will never vote them out.
It’s the same exact committee that produced a bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that conclusively establishes that it happened, that it was intended to support the election of Donald Trump, and that Trump as well as countless individuals in Trumps campaign and businesses were fully knowledgeable and complicit in the interference, welcoming it, strategizing around it, and coordinating campaign activities and messaging to coincide with Russian activities before they even happened. It’s all right there set forth in 700 pages of report and record under the committee chair Marco Rubios signature. And the republicans then took a professionally written report stock full with evidence of treason by Trump and his campaign and the wrote a summary statement that declared Trump fully exonerated and found “no collusion,” despite all the treason and collusion the report documented. Same committee, probably some of the same members. And when you live already sold this country out to an enemy like Russia, what’s adding a little Hawaiian cult guru to your betrayal afterall?
Haunted meatloaf! 😆☮️
Spot on. The buck should have stopped at the Senate. I so miss the days when Congress and SCOTUS were respected and we could count on the 3 branches of government to keep each other in line.
🤮🤢💩
It’s not shocking to me.
They confirmed Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Markwayne Mullin, RFK Jr., and - don’t forget - failed to convict an insurrectionist on impeachment charges.
This is nothing new.
If you substitute the word "pastor" for "guru", couldn't the same things be said about all the christian nationalists?
Yes! More directly: Bibi Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, who is taking us over the oil brink in the US-Israel war with Iran in 4 weeks (from 6/17), according to Trump at the G7. Trump said this will be “economic catastrophe” that will bring on “depression” (not just a recession or the 70’s oil shock).
Iran says it won’t open the Strait of Hormuz unless Israel stops attacking Lebanon. Trump’s angry calls to Netanyahu to get him to stop attacking Lebanon haven’t worked.
Might want to call your reps in Congress: Capitol Switchboard, 202-221-3121.
I’m surprised the Christian Nationalists didn’t raise holy hell about this. Krishna is of the devil in their view.
Just the opposite, for the hard-core CN. Rapture-instigators want the meld for protection/expansion of Israel, then they’ll have more Jews for to covert/kill at the Rapture. Why US Ambassador Huckabee was alarmed about a ceasefire, claiming “The US would not exist without Israel” (aka, CNs and their theocratic version of the US are the “real” Americans).
See section 219 (last I saw renumbering) of the National Defense Authorization Act that’s in the works. Alarmingly, it passed committee with bipartisan support (looking at you, Senator Kristen Gillibrand, D-NY,
Is it any wonder Trump nominated a merger & acquisitions guy with zero intelligence experience to be Director of National Intelligence (DNI)? A contracts guy to handle paperwork meld requires, while not thinking too much about loss of national sovereignty?
The Israelis have always been glad to take their money (keeping eye-rolling discrete); it’s why rank-and-file CNs sometimes puzzled when they get less than warm reception from Israeli tour guides (who know their view and are not enthusiastic about being converted/killed by CNs’ version of Jesus).
Enablers are complicit. The corruption of Cornyn is harder for voters here in Texas to see since he is generally a good man who is evidently supremely weak and compromised by partisanship, probably as a result of staying too long in office. With Republican senate nominee Ken Paxton being an overtly corrupt candidate and Democratic senate nominee James Talarico being an extremely forthright, principled and talented candidate, we actually have a chance to start flipping Texas in 2026. Most of the down ballots are grassroots and good candidates also. We need to get Talarico over the line- we do that and we cut the head off of the snake, reimagine electoral college maps, and we start getting this thing out of the ditch. I used to think people outside of Texas should not bother with Texas politics, since they cannot vote here. I don’t think that anymore. We are all in this boat together and we will need the nation’s grassroots to help to change our trajectory in all
states.
Let's do this! Talarico in the senate would(will?) be amazing.
Gross! He isn’t fighting for all of us. If he had, he wouldn’t be the primary nominee. That election was oppressed and suppressed. Yall scream electability, while 10,000,000+ Texans don’t even vote, because yall do disloyal shit like this, while the nominee ignores the obvious disenfranchisement of the voters, who he hopes to represent. Tallarico is the problem with US politics. Texas is ignoring the lessons of 2024, and it will bite us all in the ass. Yall better wake up and start courting the non-voter, instead of chasing the MAGA chud, which only pushes this country further to the right.
Yall don't make a lick of sense 🤔
What??? ‘Tallarico is the problem with US politics’???
Tallarico is a tiny flame of hope that y’all in Texas won’t continue to support destructive, corrupt, power-hungry Republicans who damage the country & the world through their closed-minded attempts to hurt not help, through supporting billionaires on the take who want to keep all profits - usually ill-gotten! - for themselves, and ignore the Constitutional imperative to ‘promote the general welfare’.
Also the ill-informed &/or mean Texans who vote for those corrupt Republicans, or are so clueless they don’t even vote! I know voters in more enlightened parts of Texas - such as Austin or San Antonio, really suffer because of being surrounded by y’all.
100%, absolutely agree!!
When Graham Platner recently was running for the Democratic nomination to run against Susan Collins in Maine, Substack posts came in to malign him about his tattoo and his behavior with past girlfriends. There will be much to sort through in the next few months as Republicans throw everything they’ve got into staying in power.
We really are all in this together. We may not live in the candidate’s state but we are being asked for donations. Help each person you know how important it is to register, confirm the accuracy of their registration, and plan how and where they will vote.
Agree! I ran into this Indivisible Neighbor 2 Neighbor campaign and I encourage everyone to check it out. It empowers you to reach out to neighbors and will help you identify neighbors to converse with so you can support each other getting to the polls.
https://neighbor2neighbor.io/campaign/076d5e4c-509f-46e5-ad91-5989941a18c6/form?referral_id=a4474631-219c-4353-9676-f3e251bce35f
I hope Graham Platner jumps on this and makes Susan Collin’s vote for Tulsi an issue in his campaign. Since the press will move on from this and the Senators won’t be held accountable for their votes to confirm her, the Dems going into the midterms can and should keep this issue alive.
I’m sure Susan Collins is very concerned.
How long can her pearls hold up to all the anxious twisting?
Yeah, but that Platner guy had once an inappropriate tattoo, so that's much, much worse than the implication of Collins' vote for Tulsi, no?
Absolutely! S/
Because the safety and security of our country and the intelligence agencies’ ability to prevent terrorist attacks really don’t matter compared to the significance of a drunk 22 year old vet who got a skull and crossbones tattoo
S/
“The van Duyn letter warned exactly this, in writing, before the vote: any sensitive intelligence Gabbard is privy to will be communicated to her guru.”
Another masterpiece Michael!
And therein lies the rub! Bernie Sanders voted against her nomination, he’s not a democrat, but rather an independent.
And let’s not forget, Sanders had previously called Gabbard “one of the important voices of a new generation of leaders,”  while she had taken a real political risk endorsing him for president in 2016–even resigning as the DNC vice chair in 2016, specifically to endorse his presidential campaign.
What’s interesting is this is just the tip of the iceberg. We saw Trump completely annihilate the NSC by tweet and by the recommendations of social media influencers like Laura Loomer—who may or may not be a Russian stooge, or asset!
We’ve watched as Trump and Hegseth gut our military leadership, replacing them with unqualified and unserious morons, while refusing to promote our best and brightest.
We’ve watched Trump put tariffs on allies, bully and threaten them, while refusing to enforce sanctions on Russia or arm Ukraine—all the while threatening to extract ourselves from NATO and refusing to deliver Patriot Systems and Several missile systems to NATO members.
And all along, while Trump and his minions are undermining our military, intelligence and domestic security agencies, his party in Congress is more than complicit!
Bottom line, when this is all over, Republicans will never again be able to claim they are strong on defense. They’re strong on defense spending, but weak when it comes to defending US interests—which includes our allies.
No nation is an island, and superpowers are only superpowers when they have strong allies and a rule of law. We currently have neither! Let that sink in….)
Further proof that Susan Collins is supremely unfit for public office.
But she is still very concerned.
Okay. This blew my mind. Every day when you think you have a handle on what is going on something like this cracks open and my mind is gobsmacked anew.
So my question is this: why did Trump want Gabbard in this position? If the Senators were afraid to vote against Trump’s wishes, what were his motives for nominating her? Surely he was aware of her connections and obedience to her guru.
Maybe her guru is in the Epstein files.
This should be a BLOCKBUSTER headline as big as Watergate.
The McConnell vote is the structural proof that breaks the whole defence. One senator who had announced he was leaving voted no. Every senator who still needed the party voted yes. The oversight function worked for exactly one person, the one person with nothing left to lose. An oversight system that operates only when the overseer has no personal cost to pay isn't an oversight system. It's a coincidence that fires when political circumstances happen to align with institutional duty, and the rest of the time it doesn't fire at all.
That's the design flaw underneath the specific case, and it's the one that survives after the names fade. The committee doesn't need different members. It needs a structure where the cost of approving a compromised nominee exceeds the cost of blocking one. Right now it's the reverse, because blocking costs you standing in the party and approving costs you nothing until the damage surfaces years later, and by then the accountability has diffused across enough names that no single vote carries the weight. The system is built to make confirmation the path of least resistance regardless of the file, and the file was right there, and they confirmed her anyway, because the incentives told them to.
The story isn’t really about the senate. It’s about Donald Trump. Again the media points the finger elsewhere as if this man has no responsibility at all. As if he were a child. The senate was too intimidated to properly function, that’s the story. Of course it’s obvious why he places clowns in these sensitive security positions. They won’t pose a threat to his nefarious activities. Same is true at Justice and the FBI.
So the “new perspective” is that the Senate failed? Really? No, the real new perspective is that the media has failed to objectively report on Trump from the very start. Had the media rightfully savaged this guy from the very start. We may not be where we are today. If Kristen Welker had stood up and said Mr. Trump, I’m not gonna let you lie to the American people and I’m not gonna let you talk to me like this. The interview is over instead of whining that she had traveled all the way from New York to Wisconsin we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Mike, your numbers aren't adding up and it calls into question, at least for me, the credibility of your argument--if not necessarily in this piece, then the credibility of your argumentation overall.
You say the committee vote was party-line, 9-8. But then you list only eight Republicans who voted in favour of Gabbard's nomination in committee. It would appear that you missed Ted Budd at multiple points in the piece.
You then say that "[t]he eight Republicans on the Intelligence Committee" and "[t]he forty-five Republicans on the Senate floor" voted yes; however, there are fifty-three Republicans in the Senate (which would be eight plus forty-five, except...), and earlier in the article you correctly (https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1191/vote_119_1_00050.htm) note that only fifty-two Republicans voted in favour because Mitch McConnell broke ranks.
Similarly with "One Republican did. The other forty-five did not." The math you present simply does not add up.
These simple, easily avoidable errors make me question the validity of the rest of the factual claims you make, and therefore the correctness of the analysis you present atop them.
Re the line "The question of what was communicated is now an empirical question with a binary answer. Either it was or it was not." Are you claiming that either Ms. Gabbard communicated all intelligence or none, that there is no possibility that she communicated only some (which would, to be sure, be bad enough, particularly from my perspective if any of it was intelligence shared by Five Eyes partners)?
I would also add that this is arguably not even the biggest scandal within which the US intelligence community is currently embroiled; there is an effort in the US Congress (which would have major implications for my country, and some of those in personal union with it, due to Five Eyes intelligence-sharing) to meld the US and Israeli intelligence services and mandate US intelligence-sharing with Israeli agencies, despite US assessments reportedly classifying Israeli intelligence agencies as high-risk for espionage in the US and the Pentagon's service recently (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/7/why-has-the-pentagon-raised-the-risk-of-israeli-spying-to-the-highest-level) upgrading that to "critical"; certainly they are not the sort of trusted partner that countries like the Five Eyes are.
Thanks for the reminder about the US-Israel military plus intelligence MELD in the FY2027 defense budget (FY 2027 starts 7/1/26). This essentially gives up our military-intelligence sovereignty as a nation: just what the Christian Nationalists want. Also why Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu is not stopping his attacks on Lebanon, despite Trump’s repeated angry calls.
Those issues bothered me as well. Also, the introduction of "the aunt" without antecedent.
It is otherwise an excellent article, well reasoned. Those errors, however, raise considerable doubt.
Republicans feared Trump due to his willingness to retaliate and to work outside the law.
The anti-moral of the story is that unethical behavior gets things done.
It’s convenient for the oligarchy to help their co-ideologue Putin sabotage U.S. governance and capability to resist.
Why hasn’t spread to other media. Where is the deep dive on Hesgeths white nationalist racist church?
Even if all media were responding proportionally to their consumers' interests, so many excuses are available for not wanting to read/print on religious/religion-adjacent topics other than "waronchristmas😱" and "radicalIslamism😱"