Reiter described first meeting Epstein in 2002 when the financier made a donation to a scholarship fund for the children of police department employees. In 2003, Epstein called the police about stolen money and a gun, but he solved the crime himself using his own cameras and found out it was a butler. Around September of 2004, there was a call about a suspicion vehicle in the driveway of Epstein’s Palm Beach estate, but an officer discovered it was a high school girl who said she was allowed to use Epstein’s pool and the property manager immediately recognized her. Reiter wasn’t even notified about the call by his department and only found out about it years later.

It’s the call the department got on November 28 2004 that is of interest when it comes to the question of whether or not Trump really did play a significant role in the initial investigation into Epstein, something long suspected. It was a complaint to the police that young women were coming and going from Epstein’s place during the day. We don’t know who made the complaint, but it’s the fact that Epstein and Trump were in a bidding war over a piece of real estate just two weeks earlier, a bidding war that appears to be the real source of the end of their friendship, that makes Trump a prime suspect for being the source of that complaint. Also, Mar-a-Lago was about a mile from Epstein’s mansion so he really was in a position to make a complaint like that about a neighbor.

The investigation into Epstein by the Palm Beach police got into full swing in March of 2005 when a mother made a complaint her underage daughter was molested by Epstein. That’s when Recarey was put on the case. More complaints about Epstein poured in and they assembled a powerful roster of evidence and prepared to lay charges against Epstein. Initially, State Attorney Barry Krischer was on board. But Epstein lawyered up, with Alan Dershowitz on the team, devising a strategy of demonizing the girls as money-hungry prostitutes, convincing Krischer it was a case the state couldn’t win. Krischer even told Reiter the girls could have been charged with child prostitution charges. Reiter also recounts how he is confident there was a mole in the department or state attorney’s office who was feeding tips to Epstein, citing an October 2005 raid of Epstein’s mansion where all the computers had already been removed. Reiter and Recarey continued their investigation and demanded Krischer charge Epstein but Krischer handed it to a state grand jury instead. Recall how the state prosecutors portrayed the girls as prostitutes to the grand jury, and, surprise, the grand jury chose to let Epstein off with a misdemeanor.

At that point, Reiter went to the FBI, asking them to investigate. As we’ll see, the federal prosecutors soon froze Reiter and Recarey out of their investigation too. The lead federal prosecutor, Marie Villafaña, told the FBI in 2020 that they kept the Palm Beach police out of the loop to keep their evidence confidential, which is a remarkable claim given that Reiter and Recarey were the ones who came to them with a trove of evidence. Although maybe it wasn’t such a corrupt move given the apparent mole who was feeding secrets to Epstein’s team. Either way, Villafaña started experiencing obstacle of her own, with her bosses beginning negotiations on a secret plea deal in July of 2007.

At that point, Reiter decided to meet directly with Villafaña’s boss, Alex Acosta. During that meeting, Reiter pointed out that he was actually at Acosta’s 2005 swearing in ceremony in Miami for his presidential appointment as a US Attorney. Reiter went on to lay out his argument for why Acosta had the authority to decide whether or not to prosecute Epstein, saying ‘I’m here to ask you to live up to the principles that you espoused when you were sworn in.’ Acosta gave a very measured response along the lines of ‘We have been receiving some guidance from main justice and the defense attorneys have done a very effective job in stalling the case.’ No mention of Epstein ‘belonging to intelligence’, but a hint of some kind of higher-up directive.

In 2019, Reiter called the FBI about two boxes of Epstein case files that were found by Recarey’s widow which included an imaged copy of a laptop, asking them to pick the boxes up. It was only then that the FBI interviewed Reiter about the case. Reiter told the agents about all the obstacles he ran into but they weren’t interested in getting an account of the past mishandling of the case and it’s unclear if the imaged laptop was ever examined. Instead, the agents were interested in any evidence Reiter might have about Ghislaine Maxwell’s involvement in Epstein’s crimes. This brings us to a very interesting set of details involving Donald Trump’s actions in trying to get Epstein investigated: Reiter recounted how, in July of 2006, after Epstein was first arrested, Trump called him to inform him that Epstein’s activities with teenage girls were well known in both New York and Palm Beach. Trump went on to describe Maxwell as Epstein’s “operative” and that “she is evil and to focus on her”. Trump even shared that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there.’ ” So Trump literally called up Reiter after Epstein’s arrest to encourage them to pursue the case and even involve Maxwell in the investigation. Also, he insisted that everyone in New York and Palm Beach knew about Epstein’s activities.

It’s a remarkable detail in the Trump/Epstein saga, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Trump clearly does not want to talk about this. Why would Trump be so reticent about touting his role as the guy who tried to take Epstein down? What’s hiding under this rock? This is a good time to recall that email exchange between Epstein and Maxwell in 2011 where Epstein wrote, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. Virginia spent hours at my house with him „ he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.” Maxwell replied, “I have been thinking about that.” And, of course, as we’ve also seen, Virginia Giuffre herself alleged that her father, who was also an employee of Mar-a-Lago, was even paid hush money by Epstein. A claim that becomes all the more intriguing when we learn about the hours Trump allegedly spent alone with Giuffre as Epstein’s home. And then there’s the fact that Trump has long claimed that he first broke ties with Epstein over Epstein’s recruitment of Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago, which happened in 2000, and yet there are public reports of Epstein and Trump hanging out post 2000, including the infamous 2002 by Trump about how Epstein was a “Terrific guy...He’s a lot of fun to be with...It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And int 2003, New York Magazine reported that Trump dined at Epstein’s Upper East Side Manhattan. 2004 was the year Epstein and Trump were no long seen together, not 2000.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Epstein’s former Ponzi scheme partner, Steven Hoffenberg, once claimed that Trump was ‘crazy’ about Maxwell. “Donald liked Epstein,” according to Hoffenberg, “But he was crazy about Maxwell, a very charming lady.” Flash forward to 2006, and Maxwell is a “evil” and Trump is imploring the police to “focus on her”. Something change in Trump’s relationship with Epstein in 2004 and all indications are it was a real estate bidding war that went very sour. But, again, if Trump really did implore investigators to look at Epstein and Maxwell, why is Trump so scared to talk about it? It’s the kind of circumstance that points towards a very ugly explanation.

Ok, first, here’s a Washington Post report from July 31, 2019, a week and a half before Epstein’s ‘suicide’, describing how the friendship between Epstein and Trump appeared to collapse in 2004 in the wake of the bitter real estate feud. Not 2000 or 2002 or even 2003. The friendship ended in 2004, somewhat suddenly and seemingly precipitously. Because it was just two weeks after Trump won the property in the bidding war that the Palm Beach police got a complaint about all the young women coming and going from Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion:

The Washington Post

Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partied together. Then an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion came between them.

By Beth Reinhard, Rosalind S. Helderman and Marc Fisher
July 31, 2019

For the better part of two decades starting in the late 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump swam in the same social pool. They were neighbors in Florida. They jetted from LaGuardia to Palm Beach together. They partied at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and dined at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.

And then, in 2004, they were suddenly rivals, each angling to snag a choice Palm Beach property, an oceanfront manse called Maison de l’Amitie — the House of Friendship — that was being sold out of bankruptcy.

Before the auction, Epstein and Trump each tried to work the ref; the trustee in the case, Joseph Luzinski, recalls being lobbied by both camps.

“It was something like, Donald saying, ‘You don’t want to do a deal with him, he doesn’t have the money,’ while Epstein was saying: ‘Donald is all talk. He doesn’t have the money,’ ” Luzinski said. “They both really wanted it.”

...

“They knew each other a long time,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump aide who said he pressed the candidate about his ties to Epstein in late 2014 as the real estate mogul considered a White House run. “Bottom line, Donald would hang out with Epstein because he was rich.”

...

Trump has not said why their relationship ruptured. “The reason doesn’t make any difference, frankly,” the president said.

Fifteen years ago, the two men squared off over the Palm Beach mansion. Just a few months later, local police began investigating allegations that Epstein was sexually abusing minors. Trump has also said — without providing details — that he at some point banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago.

...

“Terrific guy,” Trump said of Epstein in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with.”

Within two years, public sightings of the two had ended.

‘They were good friends’.

...

The Epstein-Trump relationship didn’t exist in isolation but as part of a larger Palm Beach social swirl. In the early years after Trump bought the private Mar-a-Lago estate in 1985, Epstein and Trump were spotted together at Palm Beach events, including a pre-pageant dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 1992, according to people in attendance.

“They were tight,” said one person who observed them together and requested anonymity to avoid retribution. “They were each other’s wingmen.”

...

“Donald liked Epstein,” said Steven Hoffenberg, a Trump acquaintance who was Epstein’s business partner at a New York private equity firm in the 1980s and ’90s, until Hoffenberg was convicted of running a massive Ponzi scheme. “But he was crazy about Maxwell, a very charming lady.”

...

Trump also dined at Epstein’s Upper East Side Manhattan mansion in 2003, according to New York magazine. “The dialogues are so engaging,” Epstein told the magazine, “that serving even the most extraordinary food sometimes seems inappropriate.”

But according to Stone, Trump turned down numerous invitations to Epstein’s private island and his Palm Beach home. In a 2016 book, Stone quoted Trump as saying that “The one time I visited [Epstein’s] Palm Beach home, the swimming pool was full of beautiful young girls. ‘How nice,’ I thought, ‘he let the neighborhood kids use his pool.’ ”

‘Palm Beach egos going at it’

...

In November 2004, Trump, who was starring in NBC’s “The Apprentice” at the time, declared himself intent on winning “the finest piece of land in Florida and probably the U.S.,” an estate that had been seized as part of the bankruptcy of nursing home magnate Abe Gosman.

...

Epstein was also enraptured by the property, and he, in contrast to Trump, seemed interested in living at the place. Harley Riedel, an attorney for Gosman, said the previous owner had filled the mansion with pricey art and “really did have in his heart that it would be nice if someone moved in and lived there.”

...

As the competition heated up, Trump and Epstein began talking each other down to the trustee, Luzinski said.

On Nov. 15, 2004, the bidders, their representatives, and a small cavalry of lawyers representing the creditors and the Gosman family gathered in a courtroom at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in West Palm Beach. Trump was connected by phone.

...

Trump “had made up his mind to get it no matter the price,” said Charles Tatelbaum, a lawyer for one of Gosman’s creditors, JPMorgan Chase Bank.

...

It is unclear whether Trump and Epstein were in contact after the house sale. That month, Trump left two messages for Epstein at his home in Palm Beach, according to records obtained by Vice News — the last known interaction between the two men.

Four years after he bought the Gosman mansion, Trump sold it to Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million, more than doubling his investment.

‘He’s a real creep’

It is unclear when Trump learned of allegations that Epstein was preying on teenage girls. In a 2002 interview, he gave no indication of concern, telling New York magazine that Epstein “enjoys his social life.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said.

On Nov. 28, 2004 — less than two weeks after the mansion auction — Palm Beach police fielded a tip that young women were seen coming and going from Epstein’s home, then-Police Chief Michael Reiter said in a deposition. Reiter declined to comment.

Four months later, in March 2005, police received a complaint from a woman who alleged that her 15-year-old stepdaughter had been paid $300 by Epstein to massage the financier while partially undressed, according to the police report. The Palm Beach police investigation identified more than a dozen possible victims, the report shows.

...

Nunberg said that when he quizzed Trump about his relationship with Epstein, Trump told him, “He’s a real creep, I banned him.” Trump told Nunberg that Epstein had recruited a young woman who worked at Mar-a-Lago to give him massages. Nunberg said Trump told him he issued the edict against Epstein years before the police investigation became public.

...

Trump also appears to have been helpful to Epstein’s accusers.

Brad Edwards, an attorney for some of the alleged victims, said in an interview last year that when he was seeking information from Epstein’s acquaintances in 2009, Trump was “the only person who picked up the phone and said: ‘Let’s just talk. I’ll give you as much time as you want. I’ll tell you what you need to know.’ ”

Edwards declined to say what Trump told him but said he was “very helpful in the information that he gave.”

...

————-

“Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partied together. Then an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion came between them.” By Beth Reinhard, Rosalind S. Helderman and Marc Fisher; The Washington Post; 07/31/2019

“Fifteen years ago, the two men squared off over the Palm Beach mansion. Just a few months later, local police began investigating allegations that Epstein was sexually abusing minors. Trump has also said — without providing details — that he at some point banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago.”

It’s quite an interesting sequence of events: the police investigation into Epstein that started in late 2004 came shortly after Trump and Epstein seemed to have a falling out. And while Trump has long since insisted that his falling out with Epstein had to do with the recruitment of a young woman (Virginia Giuffre) from Mar-a-Lago, which happened years earlier, the reality that there was no indication of a falling out between Trump and Epstein until this real estate squabble in 2004:

...
“Terrific guy,” Trump said of Epstein in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with.”

...

Trump also dined at Epstein’s Upper East Side Manhattan mansion in 2003, according to New York magazine. “The dialogues are so engaging,” Epstein told the magazine, “that serving even the most extraordinary food sometimes seems inappropriate.”

...

Nunberg said that when he quizzed Trump about his relationship with Epstein, Trump told him, “He’s a real creep, I banned him.” Trump told Nunberg that Epstein had recruited a young woman who worked at Mar-a-Lago to give him massages. Nunberg said Trump told him he issued the edict against Epstein years before the police investigation became public.
...

Intriguingly, while Trump and Epstein had long been each other’s ‘wingmen’, Steven Hoffenberg claimed that Trump was “crazy about Maxwell.” It’s an interesting detail when considering the evidence that Trump was the figure who likely instigated the investigation of Epstein:

...
“Donald liked Epstein,” said Steven Hoffenberg, a Trump acquaintance who was Epstein’s business partner at a New York private equity firm in the 1980s and ’90s, until Hoffenberg was convicted of running a massive Ponzi scheme. “But he was crazy about Maxwell, a very charming lady.”
...

And then we get to the timeline of the real estate fight. By November 2004, Trump and Epstein were fighting of the same property, which not only resulted in the pair trash talking each other and seemingly ending their friendship, but by the end of the month, less than two weeks after the completion of the auction, the Palm Beach police responded to a tip about young women seen coming and going from Epstein’s home, as then-Police Chief Michael Reiter recounted in a deposition:

...
In November 2004, Trump, who was starring in NBC’s “The Apprentice” at the time, declared himself intent on winning “the finest piece of land in Florida and probably the U.S.,” an estate that had been seized as part of the bankruptcy of nursing home magnate Abe Gosman.

...

As the competition heated up, Trump and Epstein began talking each other down to the trustee, Luzinski said.

On Nov. 15, 2004, the bidders, their representatives, and a small cavalry of lawyers representing the creditors and the Gosman family gathered in a courtroom at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in West Palm Beach. Trump was connected by phone.

...

It is unclear whether Trump and Epstein were in contact after the house sale. That month, Trump left two messages for Epstein at his home in Palm Beach, according to records obtained by Vice News — the last known interaction between the two men.

...

On Nov. 28, 2004 — less than two weeks after the mansion auction — Palm Beach police fielded a tip that young women were seen coming and going from Epstein’s home, then-Police Chief Michael Reiter said in a deposition. Reiter declined to comment.

Four months later, in March 2005, police received a complaint from a woman who alleged that her 15-year-old stepdaughter had been paid $300 by Epstein to massage the financier while partially undressed, according to the police report. The Palm Beach police investigation identified more than a dozen possible victims, the report shows.
...

It’s that timeline of events brings us to the recent interview of Michael Reiter, the former head of the Palm Beach police department who oversaw the initial investigation into Epstein back in 2004. And also oversaw how Epstein seemingly had a mole in the department and the legal system working on his behalf. But there was one factor not working in Epstein’s favor: Donald Trump, who contacted Reiter in July of 2006, imploring him to continue the investigation into Epstein and even look into Maxwell. In fact, Trump said “she is evil and to focus on her”:

The Miami Herald

Exclusive: The Palm Beach cop who Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t stop

By Julie K. Brown
Updated June 6, 2026 11:44 AM

Michael Reiter is one of the most important figures in the Jeffrey Epstein case who you’ve probably never heard of.

Yet if Reiter had never been born, or had never become a cop, Jeffrey Epstein would probably still be living his best life, behind the walls of his waterfront Palm Beach mansion, where the laws that protect children were inconveniences that could easily be fixed with a promise, a payoff or an army of lawyers.

...

Until now, Reiter has never fully told the story about the contentious — and ultimately unsuccessful — battle he waged to arrest and prosecute Epstein, or the powerful forces that tried to intimidate him, get him fired and threatened to harm him and his family.

...

As he read the files, he became appalled by how many people helped Epstein escape criminal prosecution — and the ongoing effort by the Justice Department to withhold the rest of the case files.

“This case, in many respects, felt like the people who work for our government were working more for Epstein than they were working for the victims and protecting the public,” Reiter says now.

...

“The biggest challenge in leading a professional police department usually isn’t the police work, it’s the politics,” Reiter said. “In the Epstein case, those obstacles proved insurmountable, even though we tried our very best.”

More than once, he was pressured by prominent leaders in the Palm Beach community to “leave it alone.” And there were times, after the story broke in 2005, that some people on the island would see him and cross the street just to avoid acknowledging him.

Palm Beach operates on two primary principles, “maintain the privacy and the pipeline at all costs,” writer Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, referring to a code of silence surrounding the misdeeds among the island’s wealthy.

Reiter, however, broke that code a long time ago. Of all the law enforcement agencies involved in the case, Reiter and his lead detective, the late Joe Recarey, stood alone in the battle to put Epstein behind bars for good. In some ways, he has paid the price ever since.

...

How Reiter First Met Epstein

Reiter (pronounced RYE-TER) first heard the name Jeffrey Epstein in April 2002, after Epstein donated money to a scholarship fund for the children of police department employees. As was his custom with donors, the chief wrote a letter thanking him for the contribution.

...

In 2003, the eccentric financier reported to police that thousands of dollars in cash and a gun were stolen from his mansion on El Brillo Way, a dead-end street that ended on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Epstein had done some of his own detective work by purchasing a spy camera to catch the culprit, who turned out to be a former butler. In the end, the butler agreed to pay back the money, and Epstein decided not to prosecute.

But during the probe, Epstein learned that the Palm Beach Police Department did not have the equipment to view his video. He donated $36,000 for a forensic video analysis system, which didn’t seem unusual at the time since residents often made contributions to boost the town’s crime prevention efforts.

Reiter wrote another thank you and offered Epstein a tour of the police station and a demonstration of how the new equipment worked. Epstein arrived on his bicycle, with an attractive blond woman who waited in the lobby when Epstein met Reiter in his office.

...

Then in the summer of 2004, police were summoned again to Epstein’s home on a report of a suspicious vehicle in his driveway. According to the police report, the driver of the vehicle, a 17-year-old girl, identified herself. The property manager immediately recognized the girl and quickly told cops he had forgotten she was coming to pick up an envelope that Epstein had left for her.

“I can’t talk, I can’t talk. I’m at school. I gotta go,” she told police, still sitting in her car. She explained that Epstein had let her come by to use his swimming pool, according to the report.

Two months later, in November 2004, Epstein cut police a check for a $90,000 firearms simulator. At the time, Reiter didn’t know about the girl in Epstein’s driveway; he didn’t learn about the call until years later.

Around the same time, detectives investigated another complaint — that young women were coming and going from Epstein’s home during the day. Unlike the prior incident, Reiter was told about this complaint.

“I remember receiving the information that the detectives stopped a few young females on the way to the house, got their identification, and they were over 18, so they were adults. They said they were paid by Epstein to answer phones,” Reiter said.

Reiter, however, began to suspect that Epstein’s altruistic endeavors had ulterior motives. He shared his concerns with the town manager, and they agreed to hang on to the money for the simulator and not purchase it for the time being.

His instincts proved prescient. In March 2005, a woman reported that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been molested by a wealthy man who lived on El Brillo Way in the Town of Palm Beach. It didn’t take detectives long to figure out that it was Epstein.

From that one girl’s story, police learned that Epstein had been molesting dozens of girls from a West Palm Beach high school. One girl led them to another girl, and then another. They interviewed the girls on camera, and they collected evidence, including obtaining phone records to build a case against Epstein.

Epstein, suspecting that something was up, called Reiter to ask about his earlier donation and to offer them another $130,000 for a fingerprint system. Epstein also suggested paying for the services of a chiropractor for the officers.

...

Reiter Fights Back

One of the things that people outside of South Florida often get wrong about the Epstein case is where the crimes happened and which law enforcement jurisdictions were responsible for holding Epstein accountable.

Epstein lived in a mansion in the Town of Palm Beach, which is an island off the coast of Palm Beach County — separate from the City of West Palm Beach, which is over a bridge on the mainland. The Town of Palm Beach and the City of West Palm Beach each have their own police departments. Palm Beach County, which encompasses both the Town of Palm Beach and the City of West Palm Beach, has a county sheriff’s office with jurisdiction over towns and cities in the county that don’t have their own police departments.

Geography is important to understand how the case fell apart. For example, the sheriff’s department had oversight of Epstein’s incarceration because it operates the county jail, and the county stockade, where Epstein was eventually sentenced to be incarcerated.

The Palm Beach Police Department has no jurisdiction over the county jails.

Palm Beach County also has a state attorney who prosecutes cases for the entire county, including the Town of Palm Beach. At that time, State Attorney Barry Krischer was the most powerful figure in Palm Beach, having served for 13 years; the sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, who has now been in office for 22 years, was a close second.

Most of the girls who were victims lived in West Palm Beach and attended Royal Palm Beach High School. Epstein’s crimes, however, happened at his mansion on the island.

His operation was set up so that each girl was recruited from the mainland, mostly from West Palm Beach, and brought by car or taxi to Epstein’s house, ostensibly to give him “massages,” which were really a code word for sex. On their initial visits, most of the girls believed they were earning money to give him a massage.

Since the crimes happened at his mansion, the Palm Beach Police Department had jurisdiction to investigate it.

Reiter knew that Epstein had a lot of friends in high places. He assigned one of his top investigators, Recarey, to the case and notified Krischer that they were preparing a sexual battery case against an affluent resident who was molesting and sexually assaulting girls from West Palm Beach.

At first, Krischer was supportive. He told Reiter he had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein. He signed off on the investigation, telling Reiter that a man who was molesting so many girls should be put away for life.

But Epstein hired a powerhouse legal team, headed by some of the most aggressive lawyers in America. Alan Dershowitz, a friend of Epstein’s, met with Krischer and the lead assistant state attorney, Lanna Belohlavek, and launched a scorched-earth attack on the girls and their families.

It worked. Krischer came to believe it was a case that he couldn’t win, largely because Dershowitz claimed they were gold diggers who lied about their ages and been paid money by Epstein, court files show.

Their social media showed they smoked marijuana, drank alcohol and talked about sex with boys. By the laws that were still on the books in Florida at the time, the girls could have been charged with child prostitution, Krischer argued.

...

Recarey, who has since died, told the Miami Herald in 2018 that he unsuccessfully argued with Belohlavek that having sex with minors, regardless of whether money was exchanged, was still a serious crime. The age of consent in Florida is 18, and almost all the girls were 13–16 years old.

Epstein had also used fraud, luring them there under the false pretense that they were being hired to give him massages —and later that fraud turned to coercion, as he began threatening them and their families.

Reiter and Recarey were undeterred. They continued piecing together the case. Recarey drafted arrest warrants and probable cause affidavits, but the state attorney refused to sign off on them. Krischer informed Reiter he wanted to close the case by writing Epstein up on a misdemeanor.

Reiter refused to let up. He wrote a letter to Krischer demanding that the state attorney either sign the warrants or recuse himself from the case. Finally, Krischer decided to hand the decision over to a state grand jury to let them decide whether to indict Epstein on more serious criminal charges.

Even that process raised questions, as Belohlavek failed to present evidence showing Epstein had been sex trafficking dozens of underage girls. Instead, she called one victim to testify and made sure the grand jury knew the girl had committed the crime of prostitution.

Neither Krischer nor Belohlavek have ever explained why they didn’t present the case as a sex trafficking case, given that a new sex trafficking law was passed in Florida in 2004.

...

“No matter what we did, the fact of the matter was — in the state attorney’s mind — the view of the case was that these were prostitutes,” Reiter said.

...

Reiter in the Headlines

...

Epstein and his team went after Reiter with guns blazing. They had private investigators tail him. They dug into his garbage and planted stories about his divorce. They accused him of an anti-Semitic conspiracy against Epstein, who was Jewish, telling the New York Post he was a “born-again nut case.”

“In the case of Palm Beach financier Jeffrey Epstein, it seems at times as if two men are accused of wrongdoing: Epstein and Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter,” was the lead sentence in a Palm Beach Post story headlined “Palm Beach Chief Focus of Fire in Epstein Case.”

...

The pressure didn’t stop there, as things took a dark turn when Reiter found out that one of Epstein’s beefy bodyguards had moved into a house right next to his, as if to send a message “we are watching you.”

Reiter suspected — and still believes — that Epstein had a mole in the police department or the state attorney’s office who was leaking aspects of the case to him and his lawyers. He was so sure of this that he had Recarey move all their Epstein files to a separate computer server that could only be accessed by them.

When police showed up with search warrants at Epstein’s mansion in October 2005, it was clear he had been tipped off — all the computers had been removed.

Reiter wasn’t certain who was leaking information about the investigation. But in a 2009 civil court deposition, Reiter said C. “Gerry” Goldsmith, a prominent member of Palm Beach society who was also chairman of the police pension board, pressured him to stop investigating Epstein.

Reiter said Goldsmith, who died in 2021, told him that “in Palm Beach we wash our own laundry, and he said I made a huge federal case over this to the embarrassment of Palm Beach and I would always be remembered for that.”

...

When the state grand jury returned a decision to charge Epstein with one state felony charge of solicitation of prostitution, the New York tabloids characterized Epstein as the victim — without ever noting that the real victim, whom they called “a hooker,” was a 14-year-old girl.

“It looks like New York billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein got off easy when he was hit with a charge of soliciting a prostitute for a ‘happy ending’ in Palm Beach,” the New York Post announced on July 27, 2006.

“A state grand jury found the witnesses in the case were not credible and threw out all but the single charge of soliciting a hooker in his luxurious Palm Beach home. Epstein’s lawyers and friends now say he’s the hapless victim of a vendetta by Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter whom they describe as a ‘born-again nut case.”

...

Reiter only found out about Epstein turning himself in on the solicitation charge by reading the newspaper.

“Once that happened it was clear to me that justice would not be served by the state attorney, and we referred it to the FBI and then there were many, many more victims after that time,” Reiter told the Miami Herald in his first public interview on the case in 2018. The interview was part of a three-part series in the Herald about the case, “Perversion of Justice.”

...

Meets with U.S. Attorney in Miami

Even after the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami began building a federal case against Epstein, Reiter and Recarey found themselves still on the outside. After spending 11 months gathering evidence, interviewing two dozen tearful girls and their parents, then being stonewalled by state prosecutors and attacked in the media, they were then ostracized by federal prosecutors, who took over the case in early 2007.

In the DOJ’s Epstein files released in January, documents revealed that this was by design. The lead prosecutor in the case, Marie Villafaña, later told federal investigators probing the case in 2020 that they felt the need to keep the Palm Beach police out of the loop because they wanted to keep their evidence confidential.

But as weeks turned to months, Reiter was facing questions from victims and their families. Many were angry that police had vowed to put Epstein behind bars, yet no one from the state attorney’s office or the FBI would even return their phone calls. Meanwhile, the victims were still being intimidated by Epstein’s private investigators.

“They had, you know, cars running them off the road, flashing headlights into their home and phone calls and people showing up at their door,” Reiter recalled.

...

At some point, some of the victims who were initially willing to cooperate had lost their patience and turned to private attorneys to sue Epstein.

Behind the scenes, Villafaña was encountering some of the same resistance about prosecuting Epstein. Her supervisors expressed doubts about a successful prosecution, once again noting that the girls had committed prostitution, even though a federal sex trafficking law was passed by Congress in 2000.

Behind her back, her bosses began negotiating a secret plea deal in earnest with Epstein’s lawyers in July 2007.

In a statement contained in the DOJ’s files, Villafaña listed 19 instances in which she disagreed with the decisions or was disturbed by the conduct of her supervisors. She singled out the Miami U.S. Attorney, Alex Acosta, and the criminal chief, Matthew Menchel, as causing her the most concern, although she noted she found nothing illegal in what they did, and she felt duty bound to comply with their directives, according to the document.

...

As the case dragged on, Reiter finally took the unusual step of asking for a meeting with Acosta.

This is the first account of that meeting.

“Acosta was in his office, along with the first assistant U.S. attorney, Jeff Sloman. He started the meeting by saying, ‘This is the first time in my career that a law enforcement officer asked the U.S. attorney to meet with him concerning a case,” Reiter recalled.

Reiter began by recalling Acosta’s swearing-in ceremony that he had attended in Miami after Acosta’s appointment in 2005 by then-president George W. Bush. Reiter reminded Acosta of some of the promises he had made in his speech that day.

“He pledged to have honest and fair prosecutions of people that did things to harm citizens of South Florida, and he said that his co-workers called him ‘the last boy scout’ and he said all sorts of lofty things about how he was going to conduct his office as U.S. attorney.

“And I told him I remembered all that, and I said: ‘I’m here to ask you to live up to the principles that you espoused when you were sworn in,’ and then I asked him, ‘Who has the authority to make the decision of whether or not to federally prosecute Epstein?”

He reminded Acosta that Epstein could be still abusing young girls as the case languished in his office.

“‘We turned it over to you. We did most of the work, and the assistant U.S. attorney told us she usually gets 10 years for each count, and we had maybe 100 counts and probably 24 or so cooperating victims. So whose authority is it?’” Reiter asked.

Acosta didn’t respond.

“And so I said, ‘I’ll tell you the answer to that question. You are a presidential appointee, and my research is that it is your decision.’”

Reiter said he suspected that Epstein’s team was manipulating the U.S. Attorney’s Office the same way they had successfully manipulated Krischer.

“I basically told him to do his job. I knew it was his authority, and he answered that by saying a very measured response … He said, ‘We have been receiving some guidance from main justice and the defense attorneys have done a very effective job in stalling the case.’”

The deal that was negotiated gave Epstein and four named co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution. In exchange, Epstein agreed to plead guilty on June 30, 2008, to the state charge the grand jury had indicted him on: Solicitation of prostitution and an additional charge of procuring a minor for prostitution. He was sentenced to 18 months. He was also required to register as a sex offender. The entire deal, however, was kept under seal so it took almost a year before anyone knew the details of Epstein’s plea.

By then, his sentence got watered down by Epstein’s lawyers. He served only 13 months and most of his jail time was spent on work release, which was approved by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Acosta’s attorney, Jeffrey A. Neiman, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida decided that “the best resolution at the time was to get the certainty of a guilty plea and have Mr. Epstein serve prison time and register as a sex offender, both of which happened.”

...

But it soon became clear to Reiter that Epstein wasn’t letting the sentence get in the way of him continuing to corrupt the criminal justice system.

There were so many unusual privileges Epstein received from the sheriff’s office that Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement into his incarceration after the Herald’s series. Ultimately, the probe cleared the agency — and the state attorney — of any wrongdoing.

In an interview with FDLE, Bradshaw claimed that Epstein didn’t receive any special treatment because at the time, sex offenders in Palm Beach were allowed work release.

...

The Lone Man

The FBI finally interviewed Reiter in 2019, but only because Reiter called them to pick up two boxes of Epstein case files that were found by Recarey’s widow years after his death.

Recarey, 50, died of natural causes in May 2018, and his widow moved out of the area. Reiter notified the FBI after the boxes were turned over to him. He told the FBI that one of the boxes contained an imaged copy of a laptop computer. It’s not clear whether the FBI ever examined the computer.

In his sworn 2019 FBI interview, he told agents all the obstacles he faced during the early probe, from someone tipping off Epstein before the search warrants to Krischer’s effort to slow walk the investigation. The agents weren’t focused on the early mistakes made in the case, however.

Instead, they asked about whether he found any evidence pertaining to Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and whether anyone else had reported her involvement to police.

Reiter recalled that in July 2006, after Epstein’s arrest, Donald Trump called him on the phone to inform him that Epstein’s activities with teenaged girls were well known in both New York and Palm Beach.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter, according to the FBI interview contained in the Justice Department’s Epstein case files.

Reiter told FBI agents that Trump also revealed that Maxwell was Epstein’s “operative,” and that Trump said “she is evil and to focus on her,” according to the report.

Trump told Reiter that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there,’” the report said.

Reiter never saw any evidence that Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago estate is about a mile from Epstein’s mansion, was involved in Epstein’s crimes.

But Reiter is nevertheless troubled that Epstein’s behavior went unchallenged by so many people in positions of authority for decades. He considers the case the worst failure of the criminal justice system in recent history — one that needs to be examined so that it never happens again.

...

This story was originally published June 4, 2026 at 1:39 PM.

———–

“Exclusive: The Palm Beach cop who Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t stop” By Julie K. Brown; The Miami Herald; 06/04/2026

““This case, in many respects, felt like the people who work for our government were working more for Epstein than they were working for the victims and protecting the public,” Reiter says now.”

The people who work for the government were working more for Epstein than they were working for the victims and protecting the public. That’s how Michael Reiter, the head of the Palm Beach Police Department summarized his experiences with the Epstein investigation. As he recounted, he first heard of Epstein in 2002 when Epstein donated money to a scholarship fund for the children of police department employees, of all things. Then, in 2003, Epstein contacts the department about a stolen gun. But it turns out Epstein solved the crime with his own spy cameras, catching a butler. That incident then resulted in Epstein buying the department forensic video equipment. And despite being the head of the department, Reiter wasn’t even made aware of some of the calls to Epstein’s home in the following years. It’s all part of the context of Reiter’s suspicion that Epstein had a mole in the department who was tipping Epstein off. Reiter grew so paranoid about the mole that he and lead detective Joe Recarey actually moved the Epstein files to a separate computer that was only accessible by them:

...
Reiter (pronounced RYE-TER) first heard the name Jeffrey Epstein in April 2002, after Epstein donated money to a scholarship fund for the children of police department employees. As was his custom with donors, the chief wrote a letter thanking him for the contribution.

Even after that, Epstein’s name wasn’t on Reiter’s radar and, as head of the department, he wasn’t informed about some of the subsequent calls to Epstein’s waterfront home until a pattern emerged years later.

In 2003, the eccentric financier reported to police that thousands of dollars in cash and a gun were stolen from his mansion on El Brillo Way, a dead-end street that ended on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Epstein had done some of his own detective work by purchasing a spy camera to catch the culprit, who turned out to be a former butler. In the end, the butler agreed to pay back the money, and Epstein decided not to prosecute.

But during the probe, Epstein learned that the Palm Beach Police Department did not have the equipment to view his video. He donated $36,000 for a forensic video analysis system, which didn’t seem unusual at the time since residents often made contributions to boost the town’s crime prevention efforts.

...

Reiter suspected — and still believes — that Epstein had a mole in the police department or the state attorney’s office who was leaking aspects of the case to him and his lawyers. He was so sure of this that he had Recarey move all their Epstein files to a separate computer server that could only be accessed by them.

When police showed up with search warrants at Epstein’s mansion in October 2005, it was clear he had been tipped off — all the computers had been removed.

...

Reiter wasn’t certain who was leaking information about the investigation. But in a 2009 civil court deposition, Reiter said C. “Gerry” Goldsmith, a prominent member of Palm Beach society who was also chairman of the police pension board, pressured him to stop investigating Epstein.

Reiter said Goldsmith, who died in 2021, told him that “in Palm Beach we wash our own laundry, and he said I made a huge federal case over this to the embarrassment of Palm Beach and I would always be remembered for that.”
...

That apparent corruption of the Palm Beach police department brings us to the remarkable timeline around the investigation that led up to Epstein’s ‘sweetheart deal’. It started in the summer of 2004 (likely September), when police were summoned to Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion over a report of a suspicious vehicle in his driveway, which turned out to be driven by a 17 year old who claimed she was there to use Epstein’s pool (which sound in line with Roger Stone’s recollections of Trump’s experience at the home). Then, in November 2004, the same month of the bidding showdown between Trump and Epstein, Epstein cuts a $90k check for a firearms simulator around the same time police were investigating complains about young women coming and going from Epstein’s home during the day. Was Trump the source of the complaint? Either way, it doesn’t appear the investigation into that specific complaint went far, with investigators discovering young women over the age of 18 were among those coming and going. Instead, it sounds like a March of 2005 complaint by a parent that her 14 year old had been molested by Epstein ended up snowballing into the discovery of the rampant under-age molestation:

...
Then in the summer of 2004, police were summoned again to Epstein’s home on a report of a suspicious vehicle in his driveway. According to the police report, the driver of the vehicle, a 17-year-old girl, identified herself. The property manager immediately recognized the girl and quickly told cops he had forgotten she was coming to pick up an envelope that Epstein had left for her.

“I can’t talk, I can’t talk. I’m at school. I gotta go,” she told police, still sitting in her car. She explained that Epstein had let her come by to use his swimming pool, according to the report.

Two months later, in November 2004, Epstein cut police a check for a $90,000 firearms simulator. At the time, Reiter didn’t know about the girl in Epstein’s driveway; he didn’t learn about the call until years later.

Around the same time, detectives investigated another complaint — that young women were coming and going from Epstein’s home during the day. Unlike the prior incident, Reiter was told about this complaint.

“I remember receiving the information that the detectives stopped a few young females on the way to the house, got their identification, and they were over 18, so they were adults. They said they were paid by Epstein to answer phones,” Reiter said.

Reiter, however, began to suspect that Epstein’s altruistic endeavors had ulterior motives. He shared his concerns with the town manager, and they agreed to hang on to the money for the simulator and not purchase it for the time being.

His instincts proved prescient. In March 2005, a woman reported that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been molested by a wealthy man who lived on El Brillo Way in the Town of Palm Beach. It didn’t take detectives long to figure out that it was Epstein.

From that one girl’s story, police learned that Epstein had been molesting dozens of girls from a West Palm Beach high school. One girl led them to another girl, and then another. They interviewed the girls on camera, and they collected evidence, including obtaining phone records to build a case against Epstein.
...

And as we can see, while State Attorney Barry Krischer was initially supportive of prosecuting Epstein, that soon changed of Epstein’s lawyers launched a scorched-earth campaign on his victims and their families, portraying the girls as money-hungry prostitutes. The tactic worked:

...
At first, Krischer was supportive. He told Reiter he had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein. He signed off on the investigation, telling Reiter that a man who was molesting so many girls should be put away for life.

But Epstein hired a powerhouse legal team, headed by some of the most aggressive lawyers in America. Alan Dershowitz, a friend of Epstein’s, met with Krischer and the lead assistant state attorney, Lanna Belohlavek, and launched a scorched-earth attack on the girls and their families.

It worked. Krischer came to believe it was a case that he couldn’t win, largely because Dershowitz claimed they were gold diggers who lied about their ages and been paid money by Epstein, court files show.

Their social media showed they smoked marijuana, drank alcohol and talked about sex with boys. By the laws that were still on the books in Florida at the time, the girls could have been charged with child prostitution, Krischer argued.

...

Reiter and Recarey were undeterred. They continued piecing together the case. Recarey drafted arrest warrants and probable cause affidavits, but the state attorney refused to sign off on them. Krischer informed Reiter he wanted to close the case by writing Epstein up on a misdemeanor.

Reiter refused to let up. He wrote a letter to Krischer demanding that the state attorney either sign the warrants or recuse himself from the case. Finally, Krischer decided to hand the decision over to a state grand jury to let them decide whether to indict Epstein on more serious criminal charges.
...

And brings us to the handling of the federal side of the investigation, where Reiter and Recarey were systematically left out of the loop, ostensibly on the pretext that federal prosecutors needed to keep their evidence confidential according to the lead prosecutor in the see, Marie Villafaña. And yet Villafaña discovered that her own bosses at the DOJ had begun negotiating a secret plea deal in earnest with Epstein’s lawyers in July 2007. Villafaña ultimately singled out Alex Acosta, then a US Attorney, as one of people whose actions she was most concerned about:

...
Even after the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami began building a federal case against Epstein, Reiter and Recarey found themselves still on the outside. After spending 11 months gathering evidence, interviewing two dozen tearful girls and their parents, then being stonewalled by state prosecutors and attacked in the media, they were then ostracized by federal prosecutors, who took over the case in early 2007.

In the DOJ’s Epstein files released in January, documents revealed that this was by design. The lead prosecutor in the case, Marie Villafaña, later told federal investigators probing the case in 2020 that they felt the need to keep the Palm Beach police out of the loop because they wanted to keep their evidence confidential.

...

Behind the scenes, Villafaña was encountering some of the same resistance about prosecuting Epstein. Her supervisors expressed doubts about a successful prosecution, once again noting that the girls had committed prostitution, even though a federal sex trafficking law was passed by Congress in 2000.

Behind her back, her bosses began negotiating a secret plea deal in earnest with Epstein’s lawyers in July 2007.

In a statement contained in the DOJ’s files, Villafaña listed 19 instances in which she disagreed with the decisions or was disturbed by the conduct of her supervisors. She singled out the Miami U.S. Attorney, Alex Acosta, and the criminal chief, Matthew Menchel, as causing her the most concern, although she noted she found nothing illegal in what they did, and she felt duty bound to comply with their directives, according to the document.
...

And Villafaña wasn’t the only person who saw Acosta as the primary obstacle to a real federal prosecution. It turns out Reiter actually met with Acosta and basically told him how Reiter viewed Acosta as the person who had the ultimate power to decide whether or not to prosecute Epstein. Reiter also indicate that he suspected Epstein’s legal team was manipulating the federal prosecutors in the same way there manipulated Krischer locally. Acosta seemed to deflect all of these charges by suggesting that he had been receiving some guidance from main justice and the defense attorneys have done a very effective job in stalling the case. No mention of Epstein ‘belonging to intelligence’ as we were later told:

...
As the case dragged on, Reiter finally took the unusual step of asking for a meeting with Acosta.

...

“And I told him I remembered all that, and I said: ‘I’m here to ask you to live up to the principles that you espoused when you were sworn in,’ and then I asked him, ‘Who has the authority to make the decision of whether or not to federally prosecute Epstein?”

He reminded Acosta that Epstein could be still abusing young girls as the case languished in his office.

“‘We turned it over to you. We did most of the work, and the assistant U.S. attorney told us she usually gets 10 years for each count, and we had maybe 100 counts and probably 24 or so cooperating victims. So whose authority is it?’” Reiter asked.

Acosta didn’t respond.

“And so I said, ‘I’ll tell you the answer to that question. You are a presidential appointee, and my research is that it is your decision.’”

Reiter said he suspected that Epstein’s team was manipulating the U.S. Attorney’s Office the same way they had successfully manipulated Krischer.

“I basically told him to do his job. I knew it was his authority, and he answered that by saying a very measured response … He said, ‘We have been receiving some guidance from main justice and the defense attorneys have done a very effective job in stalling the case.’”
...

Lastly, we get to Reiter’s regarding the FBI’s questions of interest when they finally interviewed him in 2019. Not surprisingly, the FBI had no interest in the past investigative corruption that Reiter described in the sworn testimony he gave to the FBI. Instead, they were focused on Ghislaine Maxwell and whether or not there was a record of a police investigation into her. Interestingly, Reiter recalls a call he got from none other than Donald Trump in July of 2006, informing him that Epstein’s activities were well know in both New York and Palm Beach. Trump also revealed to Reiter that Maxwell was Epstein’s “operative” and that “she is evil and to focus on her”:

...
The FBI finally interviewed Reiter in 2019, but only because Reiter called them to pick up two boxes of Epstein case files that were found by Recarey’s widow years after his death.

Recarey, 50, died of natural causes in May 2018, and his widow moved out of the area. Reiter notified the FBI after the boxes were turned over to him. He told the FBI that one of the boxes contained an imaged copy of a laptop computer. It’s not clear whether the FBI ever examined the computer.

In his sworn 2019 FBI interview, he told agents all the obstacles he faced during the early probe, from someone tipping off Epstein before the search warrants to Krischer’s effort to slow walk the investigation. The agents weren’t focused on the early mistakes made in the case, however.

Instead, they asked about whether he found any evidence pertaining to Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and whether anyone else had reported her involvement to police.

Reiter recalled that in July 2006, after Epstein’s arrest, Donald Trump called him on the phone to inform him that Epstein’s activities with teenaged girls were well known in both New York and Palm Beach.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter, according to the FBI interview contained in the Justice Department’s Epstein case files.

Reiter told FBI agents that Trump also revealed that Maxwell was Epstein’s “operative,” and that Trump said “she is evil and to focus on her,” according to the report.

Trump told Reiter that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there,’” the report said.
...

So after Trump likely first contacted the Palm Beach police in November of 2004, weeks following the real estate dispute, he was was still pushing the police to investigate Epstein July of 2006, and even extended his wrath to Maxwell. He apparently wasn’t crazy about her anymore. What changed? And, more importantly, why isn’t Trump celebrating his role as Epstein’s eventual adversary? We don’t have an answer, although we can be pretty confident we would have that answer if it wasn’t horrible.

It’s not ambiguous. Emails provided by Rebecca Saltzburg, a former senior member of Butler’s Science of Identity Foundation (SIF) who was directly involved in the management of Gabbard’s political performance, don’t just show the group offering Gabbard advice on matters related to her office. They are effectively orders, typically delivered in messages with no attribution which former followers attribute to Butler’s fixation on secrecy and not leaving signs of his influence. And as the report also makes clear, Gabbard followed those orders. Time and again, a message demanding some sort of public statement, often with specific verbiage, or a proposed policy as a member of congress is followed by Gabbard doing exactly that days or weeks later.

But Butler’s influence of Gabbard’s political career wasn’t limited to secret demands and critiques from Butler and his coterie of senior advisers. There was a public dimension, albeit an anonymous one: teams of SIF members ran an array of social media profiles designed to run pro-Gabbard messages through internet comments. It was hardly a new tactic when this was taking place in the 2011–2017 time frame of the email, but it showed how the manpower of SIF was being deployed in ways to secretly assist Gabbard’s political ascent and manage her image.

Keep in mind that Gabbard was serving as the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2013 until she resigned in 2016 to endorse Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary. All moves Butler presumably ordered. We don’t know, although Butler did reportedly order her to “stay out of the presidential race” after it came down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And then she met with Trump in Trump Tower that November, which, again, was presumably Butler approved. We don’t know what exactly he was ordering during this period, but the report makes clear he was issuing orders and they were being followed. Which is also a reminder that Gabbard sure was in a great position to leak the DNC’s emails.

Also keep in mind that the social media management they were secretly doing manually back then is presumably much easier to do today in the age of AI. If teams of SIF members were managing large number of social media accounts back in 2014, before ChatGPT existed, imagine what they can do today? There could be thousands of pro-Gabbard AI-run bots operated by that same SIF team. And that possibility brings us to an important detail in this report: at least seven of the pro-Gabbard sock puppet accounts that were identified from the email trove were still in operation in 2025 as Gabbard was undergoing her Senate confirmation. In other words, the SIF network is still in operation, and presumably was delivering all sorts of secret directives throughout her term as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). What was Butler demanding of his disciple? We don’t know, but we can be confident he was making those demands.

Part of what makes the question of Butler demanded of Gabbard as DNI so intriguing is that he reportedly views the CIA as being behind all sorts of treachery including psychically In fact, it sounds like Butler believes the CIA and other spy agencies bugged his family home to monitor his father when he was a child and he has warned that the national security agencies are filled with demonic “power-hungry madmen.” Also, the spy agencies wanted to use psychic powers to control people. It’s not hard to imagine a cult guru making such claims. What’s harder to imagine is one of his disciples being appointed the Director of National Intelligence. Except it’s not hard to imagine. It just happened. Ironically, former followers of Butler describe him as being obsessed with politics and infused with ambitions to control the world. There’s undoubtedly too many power-hungry madmen. Chris Butler just happens to be one of them.

Which brings us to the fact that Gabbard’s resignation announcement as DNI came two days after the WaPo informed her office they were moving ahead with this story. We don’t know how Butler has been puppeteering Gabbard during her term as DNI but we can be confident it was happening. Her super secret political puppeteering didn’t just stop when Tulsi Gabbard became one of the US’s top spies:

The Washington Post

Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career

I obtained hundreds of confidential memos detailing politics and policy guidance for Gabbard from her years in Congress, then embarked on a quest to identify who was behind them.

By Jon Swaine
06/22/2026 5:00 am EDT

The first time I spoke with Rebecca Saltzburg, she told me Tulsi Gabbard was a freethinker who took orders from no one.

“I didn’t always agree with Tulsi on everything,” Saltzburg, who worked on digital strategy for several of Gabbard’s congressional campaigns, said in November 2024. “But as for the core of her life and political path? I can vouch 100 percent, that is her own.”

Saltzburg had heard I’d been asking people about Chris Butler, the eccentric religious leader Gabbard once described as her guru. Gabbard grew up in Butler’s breakaway Hare Krishna group. Her parents held senior positions in the organization. Saltzburg said that she herself had been a member since moving to Hawaii with a college friend in the 1990s.

Butler’s followers practice a form of Hinduism that involves devotion to a single deity, in their case Krishna, and certain expectations around meditation, yoga and diet.

Some former members, however, have called the group a cult and said disciples were isolated from the outside world, characterizations the group has denied. Former devotees had been telling me for weeks that Butler controlled his followers’ major life decisions and demanded total obedience and secrecy. They said he spent years working to extend his reach into politics — and they suspected Gabbard’s rise in Washington was the culmination of that effort.

Now that Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, had been picked by President-elect Donald Trump to be director of national intelligence, I wanted to understand: Just how much influence did Butler have on her?

Not much, Saltzburg told me in that first conversation. She also played down the importance of Butler’s organization, the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF). “I don’t even really see it as a real group,” she said.

Nine months later, Saltzburg, then 53, got back in touch. This time, she had a different story to tell. She didn’t want to say much on a regular phone line, so we switched to an encrypted messaging app.

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.

She thought she had deleted most of them, she said. But when Saltzburg logged into an old Gmail account, she found hundreds of emails from her SIF days, many from Nine Isles accounts. She shared some with me.

Their content was extraordinary.

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.”

...

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.

Saltzburg kept searching her email and social media accounts, and sending documents. Eventually, the files she shared ran to more than 25,000 pages, including hundreds of memos reflecting guidance for Gabbard between 2011 and 2017, most from her first two terms in Congress.

In the months to come, the documents would reveal that some of the same SIF members who received the memos were involved in a separate effort that used fake social media accounts to boost and defend Gabbard online.

None of this, however, would turn out to be straightforward. One person close to both Gabbard and Butler would claim the words in the memos that focused on politics were not Butler’s. SIF’s president would decline to answer my questions, saying they were based on false premises. Gabbard’s team, without addressing specifics, would attack my reporting as amplifying “hostility against her Hindu faith.”

And Saltzburg’s history with SIF would be messier than it first appeared.

But before all of that occurred, 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.

An Oct. 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.”

The documents, together with Saltzburg’s explanation of them, raised remarkable questions: Had a reclusive guru been secretly trying to steer Gabbard’s actions as a public official? And could that shed light on the improbable arc traced by one of the most unconventional shape-shifters in modern American politics?

...

Gabbard, 45, was asked by one of my Washington Post colleagues in 2019 whether Butler had mentored her politically. Her answer was emphatic: “No, no, not at all.”

Either way, I thought, the documents suggested that someone had been telling Gabbard what to do. And at least in the few cases I had looked at, she appeared to have done it.

...

The son of a radical left-wing physician, Butler began teaching Krishnaism and meditation after dropping out of the University of Hawaii in the late 1960s. Tall, lean and charismatic, he attracted devoted followers who believed that he was in direct communication with Krishna. In 1970, two devotees told a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser that they would do anything Butler asked, including kill themselves.

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.

When asked by the newspaper why he and the others “ke[pt] quiet about the Krishna connection,” one candidate, Bill Penaroza, reportedly said: “It was a practical problem. Most people would misunderstand it.” It’s not clear from Advertiser stories how or whether Butler responded to the newspaper’s findings.

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.

Among 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.

In the early 1990s, the Gabbards stepped into the political spotlight. With SIF’s backing, the family launched a forceful campaign against same-sex marriage in Hawaii. It included a TV ad that featured Tulsi, then a teenager, and that warned legalization would lead to people marrying their dogs. (Tulsi later declared her support for same-sex marriage and apologized for her past stance.)

Carol Gabbard, who has described herself as Hindu, was elected to the Hawaii state education board in a nonpartisan contest in 2000. She acknowledged on an ethics form that she served as SIF’s secretary, but neither she nor her husband has said much publicly about their association with the group. Mike Gabbard, who has said he is Catholic, ran for a seat in the state Senate as a Republican six years later and then defected to the Democratic Party once in office.

Tulsi Gabbard, meanwhile, was elected to the state legislature in 2002. She then deployed to Iraq with the Army National Guard and, after a short stint on the Honolulu City Council, was elected to the House in 2012. She took the oath of office on the Bhagavad-Gita and has said she was proud to be the first Hindu American member of Congress.

...

I also drove to the home of Kainoa Penaroza, a former Gabbard chief of staff and, former SIF members say, a Butler devotee. He is also the son of the 1976 IGG candidate Bill Penaroza.

A family member answered the door and said Penaroza wasn’t home. Later that day, Penaroza posted images of me from his doorbell camera to X. Penaroza wrote that I had flown to Hawaii to “harass and stalk” former Gabbard staffers.

“This is creepy, wrong, and disturbing,” he wrote.

Gabbard’s account reposted Penaroza’s tweet to her more than 3 million followers. Trump’s “War Room” account shared it, too.

Nine Isles first cropped up a few weeks later.

I was trying to figure out who was behind the company that had bought an Oklahoma home from Gabbard in 2012, a sale that Brown had noticed came just before Gabbard made $98,000 in loans to her first congressional campaign. I was deep down a rabbit hole of Australian corporate records when I came across an email address ending in “@nineisles.com.”

A Google search of “@nineisles.com” fetched just one result, but it made me sit up in my chair.

It was a site that listed people’s contact details, based on information harvested from the web, and it connected the email domain to a “Sunil Khemaney.”

I knew that name. Former SIF members had told me Khemaney was Butler’s “right-hand man.” News reports described him as a fundraiser or adviser to Gabbard. I had seen one report that Gabbard, speaking at an event for an Indian political party in 2014, likened Khemaney to an uncle.

Digging around more, I learned that “Nine Islands” in Hindi is Navadvipa, a city in India’s West Bengal region that serves as a pilgrimage site for Hare Krishna devotees. It was intriguing, and it made me wonder whether SIF and perhaps Butler were more deeply involved in Gabbard’s political life than was publicly known.

But I had reached a dead end — until Saltzburg got back in touch in August 2025 to air her concerns about SIF.

Many of the emails she shared had come from please.confirm@nineisles.com. Some were signed with initials that corresponded to the names of people Saltzburg identified as Butler secretaries. The emails typically included the memos as attachments but little else.

Saltzburg told me Butler 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 Khemaney, 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.

...

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.

“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.

...

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.

...

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.”

Memos sent before Trump entered politics suggested an affinity for some of the ideas he would later adopt. In two of them, an unnamed adviser said the government needed to think “America first,” which famously became a slogan of Trump’s movement. Another recommended occupying inner cities with the National Guard.

During the 2016 campaign, Butler devotees researched senior Trump advisers, including Stephen Miller and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, emails show.

In July of 2016, Gabbard delivered the nominating speech for Sanders at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. It was a breakout moment for her, placing her in the national spotlight as a rising star — however briefly — in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.

Later that summer, Gabbard said that she would vote for Hillary Clinton, by then the Democratic nominee. That evening, a memo shows, an unnamed speaker advised against sharing a Facebook post that was critical of Trump — an unusual move for a Democratic member of Congress. “Just stay out of the presidential race,” the speaker in the memo said.

After Trump won in November 2016, Gabbard shocked Democrats by meeting him at Trump Tower.

Hundreds of other documents in Saltzburg’s trove told the story of the effort to inflate the appearance of public support for Gabbard on social media and in the comments sections of news websites.

Central to the commenting effort were dozens of social media accounts that were anonymized, and other accounts that one document referred to as “pseudonym profiles,” which displayed fake names. Some of those featured bogus biographies, including false education and job histories, or avatar photographs copied from elsewhere online, according to a report circulated among Butler devotees at the time.

The documents show, for instance, that profiles for “Sandy Thomas” and “Jeremy K” were actually controlled by someone named Anna. “James Cade” — a purported father, guitar player, woodworker and tree planter — was a woman named Becky. And accounts for a “Jason” and a “Sara” were both controlled by a person named Ellen. The three people behind the accounts did not respond to my questions.

Saltzburg told me she had a prominent role in the project, at times effectively leading it.

...

Saltzburg allowed me to view emails and Skype messages where she advised members of the commenting group on how to keep their efforts from being detected. “Whenever possible, use different/anonymous names for new accounts,” she wrote in one memo. For each post they made about Gabbard, they were to make two that were not about her. And if they lived abroad, they should use encrypted services to mask their locations.

The group energetically commented on stories about Gabbard on the websites of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaii’s biggest newspaper, and Honolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit news organization. The effort grew to include other publications, along with posts about Gabbard on social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Medium.

Sometimes, Gabbard herself appeared to weigh in. In group chats, messages from her personal Skype account flagged online articles and social media posts as warranting replies. Some of those messages dictated what the comments should say and chided the group if it failed to defend her.

“Why didn’t we get our talkers to comment?” a message from her account asked in one chat, after no one replied to a 2018 article about what it called her “loony foreign policy positions.”

...

Gabbard contributed to Skype group chats where the use of pseudonymous profiles in the commenting effort was explicitly discussed, but it’s not clear from the chats whether she was aware of them. One message suggested to me that she may have been. In September 2014, Gabbard emailed Saltzburg from her congressional account to recommend adding an avatar to a Twitter account Saltzburg was using in the commenting operation. “The egg shape icon is a red flag that it’s not a real account,” Gabbard wrote.

The effort appears to have been overseen by a person occasionally referred to by the team as “he” or “him,” or sometimes “our friend,” messages show. Sometimes, commenters referred to the person as “S.” According to Saltzburg and four other former members, “S” is a shorthand for Butler, who is known as Srila Prabhupada and Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa. (Often, references to Butler also include the title “Jagad Guru,” which means spiritual teacher.)

In October 2014, the commenters feared reporters were about to expose their use of bogus profiles. A flurry of memos shows an unnamed person — an individual referred to as “our friend” — demanding answers from leaders of the commenting group about potential weaknesses in the biographies, including one that claimed the user attended the University of Hawaii, Butler’s alma mater. The person instructed Hoen to search the university’s online directory to see if it was complete, in which case reporters could use the absence of the fake name to disprove the attendance claim. “See if my name is in it,” according to a transcript.

“I found Kurt Butler, but not Kris or Chris Butler,” Hoen replied.

...

The memos told devotees how to defend Gabbard, SIF and Butler online, and provided them with language to use in their posts. Leaders of the commenting group “sent up” reports, sometimes daily, on comments they had posted. The reports were then sent back, from a Nine Isles address, unsigned but annotated with commentary — often scathing — about the quality of the work.

In a memo suggesting comments for the Fox News website, the unnamed speaker warned that since regular internet users “speak stupidly,” the group would need to dumb down approved posts to make them sound authentic. “I’m too smart, so it looks like it’s the same guy, a smart guy writing something here,” the speaker said. “Want to make some of the comments stupider too, like idiot talk rather than all thoughtful.”

A separate memo, after someone on Facebook questioned Gabbard’s credentials as a military expert, documented a complaint from an unnamed speaker that the commenters “didn’t f—ing do anything.”

“Why the hell did this go on and we don’t have any of our people responding, defending TG?” the speaker said. Records show that a bogus account then posted a defense of Gabbard using points the speaker had suggested.

And in a phone call, a person who was not identified harshly criticized Gabbard for allowing negative comments to sit uncontested on her official Facebook page, according to a transcript.

“Could you please explain that to me?” the person asked.

“I don’t have an explanation,” she replied.

...

In March, I wrote detailed letters to Butler, Gabbard and Khemaney, outlining the memos I had seen and what I had been told about them. Understanding that Butler doesn’t use a computer and has no email address, I sent the letter meant for him to SIF President Jeannie Bishop.

Neither Gabbard nor her spokeswoman answered my questions. Instead, the spokeswoman urged me to drop the story. “I cannot imagine WaPo’s readers would be interested in yet another uncredible, bigoted attack on the DNI’s faith,” she wrote.

Bishop sent a letter saying that SIF would not answer my specific questions because they included “many embedded premises and characterizations that we do not accept.” She did not specify what she was disputing. She asked, though, that I make clear Butler “was following a different spiritual path” in 1970, when followers told a reporter they would kill themselves for him. Two years later, he was initiated as a disciple of the Hare Krishna movement’s founder and “began a fundamentally different chapter of his life,” Bishop wrote.

A vice president at a Manhattan-based public relations firm also contacted me on SIF’s behalf. He agreed to speak if he was not identified in the story, and he provided me with a statement: “Hinduphobia, anti-Hindu religious bigotry, that’s all this is,” the statement said. “When a Hindu public figure has a spiritual teacher or shares views with a Hindu religious figure, that alone is somehow evidence of sinister control.”

The statement claimed that the source of the story — Saltzburg — was a “malicious liar.”

...

While attacking Saltzburg’s motivations, SIF did not question the authenticity of any of the material she shared with me. I sent Gabbard’s parents and Hoen letters with detailed descriptions of and questions about the documents I had studied. None of them replied.

But then I heard from Khemaney. He offered an explanation that surprised me. In retrospect, perhaps I should have anticipated it.

Khemaney claimed that he, not Butler, was behind most of the memos.

“The vast majority of these materials from more than a decade ago came from me and other advisers, including her father, State Sen. Mike Gabbard. I worked with Congresswoman Gabbard on media, speeches, and policy messaging over many years,” Khemaney told me in an email. “One or two may have come from Chris Butler, specifically regarding the teachings of the Bhagavad-gita, Hinduism, and the Vedic guru system.”

Then Khemaney said something that highlighted how the unusual nature of the memos made his assertion hard to assess. “There is no evidence supporting the claim that this body of work can be attributed to Chris Butler,” he said. “File names, shorthand, and selective excerpts do not establish authorship.”

I thanked Khemaney and asked him to specify which man had written which memos. He did not reply. I asked again a couple of weeks later. He still didn’t respond.

Several things I had noticed over the past 18 months — about the documents, SIF and the organization’s unorthodox ways of communicating — seemed at odds with Khemaney’s explanation.

Deep within the 173-page compilation of policy advice for Gabbard, in a section on immigration and jobs, was a reminiscence about working as a teenager in Hawaii. Butler grew up in Hawaii. Neither Khemaney nor Mike Gabbard was raised there.

Other memos contained far more direct indications of authorship. In a March 2015 discussion about whether Gabbard should reveal in a press interview that she was a Butler disciple, the speaker expressed concern that she would be made to answer for Butler’s past controversies.

“Everything I have taught, said, lectures is going to all be laid on you. So that’s my concern,” the adviser said.

There were others like that. Eventually I found the adviser appeared to identify himself as Butler in 19 memos. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those memos tended to be about Gabbard’s faith — where the identity of her guru was an inevitable talking point — rather than matters of politics or policy.

Nothing in those documents distinguished them from the hundreds of others where the unnamed adviser did not self-identify. If, as Khemaney claimed, these files contained a mix of advice from different people including himself and Mike Gabbard, how were the recipients to know whose advice they were reading? A more logical explanation, it seemed, was that there was only one unnamed adviser.

Other clues pointed toward Butler, too. In a handful of the documents, team members referred to requests from “S,” the nickname for Butler. Despite his first initial being S, Khemaney is widely known within SIF as “Syd,” according to documents and former members. Syd is an abbreviation of Syamasundara Das, the “initiate name” he was given when he became a Butler disciple, according to former members. One memo I found about a SIF legal issue was addressed from Syd to S, indicating they are different people.

...

The anonymity in the memos was in keeping with the secrecy that former SIF members told me Butler demanded. By contrast, Khemaney openly advised Gabbard when she was in Congress. He accompanied her on official trips and on the campaign trail. He carried a Gabbard campaign business card. Similarly, Gabbard and her father had spoken candidly about their political discussions and disagreements. I could see in Saltzburg’s documents that Khemaney and Gabbard’s father both openly emailed Gabbard about politics. So why would they in other moments shield their private advice to her behind anonymity and encrypted documents?

...

There were people in Butler’s inner circle from that period who probably knew the truth. Almost all ignored my calls, and none agreed to speak. I expanded my search to earlier years, for people who might have known how Butler’s office operated, even if they weren’t present for Gabbard’s rise.

I spoke with a family member of one of the candidates who had run for Independents for Godly Government in 1976. She said she feared retribution from SIF and agreed to talk with me as long as I didn’t publish her name. She told me that Butler had advised the IGG candidates while working to hide his connections to them, and that he avoided written communications, instead using intermediaries to deliver his campaign advice. She said Butler was obsessed with politics.

He wanted, she said, “to rule the world.”

The time frame of documents we reviewed meant they could not show whether Gabbard continued receiving guidance after she left Congress and eventually joined the Trump administration. But I found echoes of years-old guidance in her more recent remarks. One phrase in particular stood out.

In 2014, Hoen emailed Gabbard a statement for posting online that said Gabbard made every decision through the prism of “the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.” She repeated that phrase in the first paragraph of her 2024 memoir, and after she was nominated by Trump, Gabbard made it her mantra, using it in her Senate confirmation hearing, her inaugural statement as DNI, her presentation of this year’s annual threat assessment and many other occasions.

On May 20, having received no answers from Gabbard to my questions for two months, I emailed her, her press secretary and her chief of staff. I let them know we planned to proceed with a story about her association with Butler. I again invited Gabbard to address my questions.

_Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard — whose departure had been rumored for months — would be leaving the position of DNI this month because her husband had been diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. Some commentators observed that she still had a promising political future, maybe even more so because she was not aligned with Trump on the Iran war and other unpopular policies.

...

As I had worked on this story, I had kept tabs on the social media accounts that had been part of the campaign to defend and boost Gabbard online while she was in Congress.

At least seven of those accounts were still posting about Gabbard on X in early 2025 as she went through the Senate confirmation process, I found. By following a link buried within the years-old Skype messages Saltzburg had provided, I also found a Google Doc where the commenting group flagged social media posts about Gabbard for potential response. The document was still being updated daily as recently as April of last year.

Some of the accounts piped up again in the days after Gabbard announced her resignation, posting a set of soundalike comments.

“DNI Gabbard is a true patriot and will be missed,” wrote @ImACruzn, who describes herself as “Just an island girl living the island dream.”

The Sandy Thomas account reposted a similar message: “Tulsi Gabbard is a Patriot. She will be greatly missed.”

A third account, named only as Dawn, echoed the sentiment: “Tulsi will be missed! She is truly one of a kind and a true patriot!”

———–

“Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career” By Jon Swaine; The Washington Post; 06/22/2026

“Some former members, however, have called the group a cult and said disciples were isolated from the outside world, characterizations the group has denied. Former devotees had been telling me for weeks that Butler controlled his followers’ major life decisions and demanded total obedience and secrecy. They said he spent years working to extend his reach into politics — and they suspected Gabbard’s rise in Washington was the culmination of that effort.”

A cult operating around demands of total obedience and secrecy, run by a man with ambitions to extend his reach into politics. That’s how former members of Chris Butler’s Science of Identity Foundation (SIF) characterized Tulsi Gabbard’s political career. It was the culmination of Butler’s cult guru ambitions. This isn’t a new revelation. What is new is the access to a trove of internal emails from the 2011–2017 period provided by former SIF member Rebecca Saltzburg. Emails from the NineIsles.com email domain used exclusively by Butler and his secretaries and select disciples that demonstrate just how extensive Butler’s puppeteering of Gabbard really was during her two terms in the House from 2013–2017:

...
The first time I spoke with Rebecca Saltzburg, she told me Tulsi Gabbard was a freethinker who took orders from no one.

...

Nine months later, Saltzburg, then 53, got back in touch. This time, she had a different story to tell. She didn’t want to say much on a regular phone line, so we switched to an encrypted messaging app.

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.

She thought she had deleted most of them, she said. But when Saltzburg logged into an old Gmail account, she found hundreds of emails from her SIF days, many from Nine Isles accounts. She shared some with me.

...

Saltzburg kept searching her email and social media accounts, and sending documents. Eventually, the files she shared ran to more than 25,000 pages, including hundreds of memos reflecting guidance for Gabbard between 2011 and 2017, most from her first two terms in Congress.

...

While attacking Saltzburg’s motivations, SIF did not question the authenticity of any of the material she shared with me. I sent Gabbard’s parents and Hoen letters with detailed descriptions of and questions about the documents I had studied. None of them replied.
...

Interestingly, while Butler was seemingly the author of many of these emails that delivered harsh criticisms and stern demands of Gabbard, Butler rarely signed his messages, which appears to be a reflection of his fixation on secrecy:

...
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.

...

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.”

The documents, together with Saltzburg’s explanation of them, raised remarkable questions: Had a reclusive guru been secretly trying to steer Gabbard’s actions as a public official? And could that shed light on the improbable arc traced by one of the most unconventional shape-shifters in modern American politics?

...

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.
...

Notably, it appears Butler’s group has effectively renounced his political leanings from decades ago when he first formed the Independents for Godly Government (IGG) political party in 1975. According to a family member of one of those IGG candidates, Butler was obsessed with politics and wanted “to rule the world”. And that was 1975. 50 years later, and one of his disciples was the DNI:

...
The son of a radical left-wing physician, Butler began teaching Krishnaism and meditation after dropping out of the University of Hawaii in the late 1960s. Tall, lean and charismatic, he attracted devoted followers who believed that he was in direct communication with Krishna. In 1970, two devotees told a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser that they would do anything Butler asked, including kill themselves.

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.

...

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.

...

In March, I wrote detailed letters to Butler, Gabbard and Khemaney, outlining the memos I had seen and what I had been told about them. Understanding that Butler doesn’t use a computer and has no email address, I sent the letter meant for him to SIF President Jeannie Bishop.

...

Bishop sent a letter saying that SIF would not answer my specific questions because they included “many embedded premises and characterizations that we do not accept.” She did not specify what she was disputing. She asked, though, that I make clear Butler “was following a different spiritual path” in 1970, when followers told a reporter they would kill themselves for him. Two years later, he was initiated as a disciple of the Hare Krishna movement’s founder and “began a fundamentally different chapter of his life,” Bishop wrote.

...

I spoke with a family member of one of the candidates who had run for Independents for Godly Government in 1976. She said she feared retribution from SIF and agreed to talk with me as long as I didn’t publish her name. She told me that Butler had advised the IGG candidates while working to hide his connections to them, and that he avoided written communications, instead using intermediaries to deliver his campaign advice. She said Butler was obsessed with politics.

He wanted, she said, “to rule the world.”
...

Adding to the questions of how Butler might abuse his DNI guru authority is the fact that he apparently thought the CIA wanted to use psychic powers to control people. What kind of wild directives was he giving Tulsi during her time as DNI? What are the odds Butler wasn’t directing Tulsi when it came to her many public comments while DNI hinting at the existence of aliens? It’s hard to imagine Butler was asking Gabbard to give him access to all sorts of state secrets:

...
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.
...

And then there’s the fact that Gabbard’s former chief of staff, Kainoa Penaroza, also happened to be a Butler devotee, which raises the question of how many more SIF members did she have in her congressional delegation?

...
I also drove to the home of Kainoa Penaroza, a former Gabbard chief of staff and, former SIF members say, a Butler devotee. He is also the son of the 1976 IGG candidate Bill Penaroza.
...

It’s also rather notable that Tulsi’s father, Mike Gabbard, had a political party switch of his own when he ran for a seat in the state Senate as a Republican but then became a Democrat once in office:

...
Among 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.

In the early 1990s, the Gabbards stepped into the political spotlight. With SIF’s backing, the family launched a forceful campaign against same-sex marriage in Hawaii. It included a TV ad that featured Tulsi, then a teenager, and that warned legalization would lead to people marrying their dogs. (Tulsi later declared her support for same-sex marriage and apologized for her past stance.)

Carol Gabbard, who has described herself as Hindu, was elected to the Hawaii state education board in a nonpartisan contest in 2000. She acknowledged on an ethics form that she served as SIF’s secretary, but neither she nor her husband has said much publicly about their association with the group. Mike Gabbard, who has said he is Catholic, ran for a seat in the state Senate as a Republican six years later and then defected to the Democratic Party once in office.
...

Intriguingly, in 2016, Gabbard didn’t just resign her role as vice chair of DNC in order to endorse Bernie Sanders. Butler was effectively telling Gabbard to ‘stay out of the race’ in 2016 after it became clear it was a race between Hillary Clinton and Trump. And then Gabbard met with Trump at Trump Tower in November of 2016. Which is also a reminder that Gabbard was perfectly situation to serve as a mole who could have, say, leaked emails or other sensitive documents while she was in that senior DNC role:

...
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.

...

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.”

Memos sent before Trump entered politics suggested an affinity for some of the ideas he would later adopt. In two of them, an unnamed adviser said the government needed to think “America first,” which famously became a slogan of Trump’s movement. Another recommended occupying inner cities with the National Guard.

...

In July of 2016, Gabbard delivered the nominating speech for Sanders at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. It was a breakout moment for her, placing her in the national spotlight as a rising star — however briefly — in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.

Later that summer, Gabbard said that she would vote for Hillary Clinton, by then the Democratic nominee. That evening, a memo shows, an unnamed speaker advised against sharing a Facebook post that was critical of Trump — an unusual move for a Democratic member of Congress. “Just stay out of the presidential race,” the speaker in the memo said.

After Trump won in November 2016, Gabbard shocked Democrats by meeting him at Trump Tower.
...

And then there’s the social media dimension to Gabbard’s role as a SIF operative, where teams of SIF members created an array of make online profiles designed to seem authentic but strategic serve as pro-Gabbard messengers. Importantly, at least seven of these known sock puppet accounts appeared to still be active in 2025. So while the email trove provided for this report only went up to 2017, we shouldn’t assume Gabbard’s role as a SIF operative suddenly ended:

...
In the months to come, the documents would reveal that some of the same SIF members who received the memos were involved in a separate effort that used fake social media accounts to boost and defend Gabbard online.

...

Hundreds of other documents in Saltzburg’s trove told the story of the effort to inflate the appearance of public support for Gabbard on social media and in the comments sections of news websites.

Central to the commenting effort were dozens of social media accounts that were anonymized, and other accounts that one document referred to as “pseudonym profiles,” which displayed fake names. Some of those featured bogus biographies, including false education and job histories, or avatar photographs copied from elsewhere online, according to a report circulated among Butler devotees at the time.

...

Saltzburg allowed me to view emails and Skype messages where she advised members of the commenting group on how to keep their efforts from being detected. “Whenever possible, use different/anonymous names for new accounts,” she wrote in one memo. For each post they made about Gabbard, they were to make two that were not about her. And if they lived abroad, they should use encrypted services to mask their locations.

...

The effort appears to have been overseen by a person occasionally referred to by the team as “he” or “him,” or sometimes “our friend,” messages show. Sometimes, commenters referred to the person as “S.” According to Saltzburg and four other former members, “S” is a shorthand for Butler, who is known as Srila Prabhupada and Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa. (Often, references to Butler also include the title “Jagad Guru,” which means spiritual teacher.)

...

The memos told devotees how to defend Gabbard, SIF and Butler online, and provided them with language to use in their posts. Leaders of the commenting group “sent up” reports, sometimes daily, on comments they had posted. The reports were then sent back, from a Nine Isles address, unsigned but annotated with commentary — often scathing — about the quality of the work.

In a memo suggesting comments for the Fox News website, the unnamed speaker warned that since regular internet users “speak stupidly,” the group would need to dumb down approved posts to make them sound authentic. “I’m too smart, so it looks like it’s the same guy, a smart guy writing something here,” the speaker said. “Want to make some of the comments stupider too, like idiot talk rather than all thoughtful.”

...

As I had worked on this story, I had kept tabs on the social media accounts that had been part of the campaign to defend and boost Gabbard online while she was in Congress.

At least seven of those accounts were still posting about Gabbard on X in early 2025 as she went through the Senate confirmation process, I found. By following a link buried within the years-old Skype messages Saltzburg had provided, I also found a Google Doc where the commenting group flagged social media posts about Gabbard for potential response. The document was still being updated daily as recently as April of last year.
...

Lastly, note how the announcement of Gabbard’s resignation as DNI came just two days after Jon Swaine notified Gabbard that he was going to proceed with the story:

...

On May 20, having received no answers from Gabbard to my questions for two months, I emailed her, her press secretary and her chief of staff. I let them know we planned to proceed with a story about her association with Butler. I again invited Gabbard to address my questions.

_Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard — whose departure had been rumored for months — would be leaving the position of DNI this month because her husband had been diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. Some commentators observed that she still had a promising political future, maybe even more so because she was not aligned with Trump on the Iran war and other unpopular policies.
...

Welp, she’s gone now, replaced with Trump shill Bill Pulte filling in her place. Someone who, incredibly, might be even more dangerous that Gabbard in that position. Maybe. Or maybe not. Only Chris Butler, and his NineIsles.com crew, really knows.

Yes, we’ve had another foiled Trump assassination attempt. And once again, it appears to be a far right assination plot. As we’ve seen, in addition to the Satanic Nazi plot Nikita Casap was involved with, the July 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, was carried out by Thomas Matthew Crooks, someone whose online history didn’t just include extensive antisemitism and calls for murdering Democrats but also involved the exhortations by Bjorn Leif Hjelmerud, the Norwegian Nazi who went by the handle ‘Willy Tepes’. And while far right plots targeting far right leaders like President Trump should always be viewed with suspicion, part of what makes this such a grimly fascinating story is the fact that, based on the stated aims and ideology of the plotters, they may have some genuine grievances with the Trump administration.

In particular, it sounds like the network of plotters were deeply animated by a sense of betrayal over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, along with anger over the impact of Artificial Intelligence on small towns. In fact, we’re told that the group — which is apparently started with a TikTok group calling themselves The Vanguard of the Old Guard — includes individuals who claim to be ex-military and Christian and who believe the US is on the wrong track and needed to be torn down so it could be rebuilt. Which sure sounds a lot like the kind of accelerationist Christian Nationalist agenda we might expect from a group like the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a mens-only project seemingly designed to prepare for the collapse of the US government and a period of warlordism, founded by millionaire Charles Haywood, who has expressed a desire to operate an ‘armed patronage network’ that will rebuild a new theocratic American society after everything collapses. So last year, we learned about a plot to kill President Trump using explosive drones coming from a network of Satanic Nazis. This time, another explosive drone plot involving multiple people, but it’s coming from a ‘Christian-based’ extremist network. Or at least that’s what we’ve been told.

Now, as we should also expect, just because this network claims to be Christian-based doesn’t mean it’s not also filled with Nazis. Which brings us to the alarming story we’re getting for how this plot was uncovered by authorities in the first place. Because it appears that the only reason federal authorities discovered the plot in the first place was due to the mother of one of the plotters, 19 year old Tycen Proper, contacting the local police about the people her son had recently started interacting with online. The parents referred to “concerning statements,” including “making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook.” Local police found weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition after searching the family home, including a recently purchased rifled with an American flag painted on it. The next day, they contacted the FBI. That was how federal authorities apparently learned about this plot, just four days before the UFC event. No FBI plants like Joshua Caleb Sutter — the FBI paid informant who spent two decades as one of the leading figures in the contemporary accelerationist Satanic Nazism movement — tipping off authorities. It was a concerned parent, who made the call just days before the plot was set to unfold.

As a result of the tip, we’re told an advanced threat interdiction team at the Secret Service sought a subpoena for an encrypt Signal chat threat that was being used by the group, where they found a discussion of the plans. But we’re told there were actually two Signal chats. One chat had 19 participants and was dedicated to discussing strategy and tactics. But then there’s a second Signal chat that included just four or five participants. We’ve been told nothing else about this second chat, what it was being used for or who the participants were.

And those questions about the nature of this second, smaller Signal group brings us to the remarkable details around the person identified by the FBI as the ringleader of the plot: Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, of the five individuals already arrested and who went by the handle “Shepherd” in the chat groups. Alvarez even identified an abandoned church in Nebraska, where he lives, that would be be used as a “fall back location”, which is an indication that the participants in this plot weren’t necessarily planning on dying.

Tycen Proper reportedly thought Alvarez was ex-military and “described him as aggressive in tactical planning.” And that questions about Alvarez’s status as ex-military becomes all the more interesting when we learn that he isn’t actually a US citizen. Instead, Alvarez came to the US from Mexico as a child on tourist visa in 2001, never left, and was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status in 2014. So the guy apparently leading this group of potentially two dozen (or more) far right insurgents animated by a desire to spark a revolution was, himself, a DACA recipient. As we should expect, that detail is being heavily touted by federal officials.

But then we get to this very intriguing detail about the ‘tiered’ structure of the group: Alvarez devised a ‘tier 1′ through ‘tier 4’ membership structure, with tiers for those willing to put themselves in harm’s way; members who could be getaway drivers or drone operators; supply and logistics operators; and funders and influencers. Yes, there was a funders and influencers tier apparently. Which is the kind of tier that should raise major questions about who is actually behind this entire operation. Was a DACA recipient really the person orchestrating all of this?

On June 13, just one day before the UFC event, authorities arrested Proper and moved to immediately seal the case so they could continue investigating and identifying additional suspects. But then, on June 16, just two days after the UFC event, FBI director Kash Patel decided take to social media and triumphantly declare the thwarting of this plot, at a point when we are told 10 of the suspects had yet to be arrested an placed in custody. Keep in mind that we are told 5 people were arrested, 19 were roughly participating in the text chat, and roughly two dozen people are suspected of being involved overall. So if 5 people were arrested and 10 have yet to be arrested, that leaves around 9 people who have yet to even be identified. Investigators have acknowledged that more suspects could be identified. Normally, it would be tempting to suspect at least some of the remaining unidentified plotters are federal agents or informants. But we’re told the FBI only learned about this plot when the Proper family called the police on their son. The unidentified suspects are presumably real extremists who were involved in the plot.

Now, on the one hand, odds are the unidentified plotters would have known two days after the planned attack that things didn’t go as planned based on the fact that no attack happened regardless of Kash Patel’s social media posts. But they wouldn’t necessarily have known the whole thing was in the process of being uncovered, with members of the plot already arrested. Kash Patel was giving the remaining suspects an official warning to cover their tracks.

Also keep in mind that, when it comes to future attempts at similar plots, it appears that this network was largely comprised of people scattered across the US who didn’t know each other. Tycen Proper lived in Ohio. Alvarez was from Nebraska. Bryan Omar Roa and Michael Alan Thomas were friends from California who went shooting together, so they stand out as knowing each other. Thomas even reportedly admitted to the FBI that he encouraged others to participate in the plot. It’s unclear if that meant other people he knew offline. Then there’s Daniel K. Eskridge of Missouri, who told members he was preparing his garage to be their “safe house” and was building a “bunker” under the floorboards of his shed. Other than Roa and Thomas, these appear to be people who knew each other exclusively through the internet, first with the The Vanguard of the Old Guard TikTok group and later the Signal chats. Roughly two dozen people who didn’t know each other coming together for a plot like this. An internet-based social network of mostly strangers who shared a far right world and set of grievances, some very real grievances like the handling of the Epstein files, and who decided to ‘take action’ and ‘spark of revolution’ through a public mass casualty event targeting right-wing elites. Right-wing elites no less, based on what we’re learning. It’s not hard to imagine something like this getting organized again. The formerly MAGA-loving ‘red-pilled’ young men who have completely lost faith in everything, including Trump, has got to be one of the fastest growing demographics in the US today. This was a disturbingly potent terror template that’s only been quasi-busted, thanks, in part, to the incredible bungling by director of the FBI.

That’s the remarkable story that has been unfolding over the last few days. The kind of story that, on the one hand, isn’t really a surprise. Far right plots against Trump aren’t new. But this wasn’t your typical plot, with just one or two radicalized individuals, typically suicidal, who may have been motivated by a larger online network and plan on dying. This was a shockingly large plot, comprised of two dozen (or more) individuals animated by far right populist grievances, intent on sparking a revolution, and yet, seemingly, led by a DACA recipient. This is an odd one by many measures. Odd and shockingly close to coming to fruition. And with the Trump administration continuing its increasingly corrupt and blatant obstruction of the Epstein files and cowtowing to the AI industry, it’s not like these far right antipathies are going anywhere. Which is part of what makes Kash Patel’s public disruption of the investigation so grim. Some part of this network is likely to survive the investigation thanks to the director of the FBI. Might these be the funders and influencers? If so, we can’t exactly be shocked to one day learn they kept funding and influencing the increasingly jaded far right base with the aims of giving this plot a second try.

Ok, first, here’s a report from June 16, the day Kash Patel took to social media, describing how the families Tycen Proper first contacted their local authorities after getting concerned about the fact that Tycen had “recently begun interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based” and has also recently started saying positive things about Hitler:

NBC News

FBI arrests 5 in alleged plot to attack White House UFC event with explosives-laden drones and guns

Some of the suspects espoused fringe conspiracy theories, and their families had raised concerns about their recent actions, law enforcement said.

June 16, 2026, 6:38 AM CDT / Updated June 16, 2026, 4:54 PM CDT
By Megan Lebowitz, Gary Grumbach, Michael Kosnar and Tom Winter

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials disrupted a plot to attack the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House over the weekend, according to court papers unsealed Tuesday that say the conspirators discussed flying drones loaded with explosives over the event and then shooting into the fleeing crowd.

Five people have been arrested across the country and charged with conspiracy to commit murder, among other counts. Investigators recovered firearms, ammunition and encrypted text messages of 19 people suspected to have taken part, who shared maps and photos of the area and who talked about the need for escape routes after the attack, according to court documents.

The investigation is ongoing.

Some of the suspects espoused fringe conspiracy theories and made antisemitic remarks, and their families had raised concerns about their recent actions, law enforcement said.

Fox News first reported the suspected plot.

...

Law enforcement learned about the threat Wednesday, four days before the mixed martial arts party on the White House South Lawn, FBI Director Kash Patel said Tuesday on X. “And thanks to the rapid action of the FBI, our partners, and the Department of Justice in a multi-state operation, multiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold,” Patel wrote.

Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in a statement on X that his agency “worked closely with the FBI throughout this investigation.”

...

Among those arrested was Tycen Proper, 19, who was apprehended in Ohio, where authorities found thousands of rounds of ammunition and weapons. His mother called local police to express concerns about her son because of “recent conduct,” including firearms purchases and communications with “random” people online, according to court documents.

He was in custody, and his lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Proper’s family also said he recently made “concerning statements,” including “making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook.”

When the Knox County sheriff’s officers arrived at the family home, they found thousands of rounds of ammunition, an assault-style rifle and a bullpup rifle — purchased June 5 — painted with an American flag, authorities said.

The sheriff’s office took Proper to a hospital for emergency admission “based on homicidal ideations,” FBI task force officer Christopher Betts wrote in court documents.

The next day, the sheriff’s office contacted the FBI.

Proper’s mother told law enforcement that her son had “recently begun interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based,” according to court documents.

After he was arrested, he identified the usernames of people in encrypted group chats, law enforcement said.

Federal authorities also arrested Daniel Eskridge, 32, of Missouri, charging him with conspiracy to commit murder after they searched his home over the weekend. According to chats reviewed by the FBI, Eskridge told members he was preparing his garage to be their “safe house” and was building a “bunker” under the floorboards of his shed.

Another suspect, Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, is accused of sharing a screenshot that listed potential people for the group to target, including “1,” who the FBI says it believes is “likely identifiable with President Trump”; “2,” who the FBI says it believes is “likely referring to Vice President JD Vance”; “N,” who it believes was “referring to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”; and “Musk,” referring to Elon Musk.

...

Two men from California, Bryan Omar Roa and Michael Alan Thomas, were arrested Saturday and charged with conspiracy to commit murder after their homes were searched and evidence was found establishing their involvement, authorities said.

...

Roa’s family believed he intended to commit an act of violence during the trip because he had been increasingly shooting his weapons and there had been a marked change in his behavior, according to court documents.

“Family members also stated that within the last three months, Roa began spending more time with a new group of online friends,” FBI Special Agent Mark Prator said in court documents.

————

“FBI arrests 5 in alleged plot to attack White House UFC event with explosives-laden drones and guns” By Megan Lebowitz, Gary Grumbach, Michael Kosnar and Tom Winter; NBC News; 06/16/2026

“Five people have been arrested across the country and charged with conspiracy to commit murder, among other counts. Investigators recovered firearms, ammunition and encrypted text messages of 19 people suspected to have taken part, who shared maps and photos of the area and who talked about the need for escape routes after the attack, according to court documents.”

Five arrests in a plot to execute a mass casualty terror attack at the White House with at least 19 suspects involved. Five arrests is a start, but there’s clearly a much larger threat that needs to be handled. But perhaps the most disturbing detail we’ve learned is that the whole plot was apparently only discovered four days before the UFC event after the mother of the one of the suspects, 19 year old Tycen Proper, called the local police to express concern over the “random” people her son was interacting with online. There wasn’t some ongoing FBI investigation. This was sheer luck:

...
Law enforcement learned about the threat Wednesday, four days before the mixed martial arts party on the White House South Lawn, FBI Director Kash Patel said Tuesday on X. “And thanks to the rapid action of the FBI, our partners, and the Department of Justice in a multi-state operation, multiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold,” Patel wrote.

...

Among those arrested was Tycen Proper, 19, who was apprehended in Ohio, where authorities found thousands of rounds of ammunition and weapons. His mother called local police to express concerns about her son because of “recent conduct,” including firearms purchases and communications with “random” people online, according to court documents.

...

When the Knox County sheriff’s officers arrived at the family home, they found thousands of rounds of ammunition, an assault-style rifle and a bullpup rifle — purchased June 5 — painted with an American flag, authorities said.

...

The next day, the sheriff’s office contacted the FBI.
...

And as we should expect, one of the things that alarmed Proper’s mom was the “concerning statements” made by her son including “making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook.” Intriguingly, she went on to inform law enforcement that the online group her son recently started interacting with “was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based.” So, at least on the surface, this online network is ostensibly some sort of radical violent Christian revolutionary group. In other words, this wasn’t Antifa. It’s also worth noting that this plot sounds A LOT like the plot Nikita Casap thought he was involved with, where attacks by that online network of extremists targeting figures like President Trump would hasten the collapse of the government. Blame would be pinned on Russia, with the goal of starting a US/Russian war. But Casap was immersed in Nazi Satanism. So when we see how the network behind this UFC event plot was apparently a “Christian-based” group of Hitler fans, it’s a reminder that Nazi accelerationist terror strategies aren’t limited to the Satanic wing of the broader movement:

...
Proper’s family also said he recently made “concerning statements,” including “making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook.”

...

Proper’s mother told law enforcement that her son had “recently begun interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based,” according to court documents.

After he was arrested, he identified the usernames of people in encrypted group chats, law enforcement said.
...

And as we can see from the following LA Magazine piece, Justice Department officials put the number of people involved in the plot at roughly two dozen, with an attack plan that involved first deploying armed explosive drones against the crowd on the White House lawn, with the goal of sending panicked spectators into the path of a firing squad. Snipers would also target high value targets like President Trump. That was the plan being organized by the Vanguards of the Old Guard TikTok group, which appears to be animated by an accelerationist desire to collapse society and rebuild it from scratch:

LA Magazine

Terror Plot To Attack White House UFC Event Thwarted

Two Riverside County men were allegedly among the five rounded up for a terrifying extremist plot to ‘jumpstart a revolution,’ by attacking the White House, Justice Department officials say

Michele McPhee
06/16/2026

FBI SWAT teams arrested five people – including two Riverside County men – in a series of coordinated raids across the country connected to a thwarted drone attack plot against White House UFC Freedom 250 event this past weekend, a terrifying plan that was spawned in part, prosecutors say, by fury at the Epstein files.

Roughly two dozen conspirators allegedly planned to deploy drones armed with explosives in and around the UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House lawn, which would send panicked spectators running into a firing squad, Justice Department officials said Tuesday. The group “planned to deploy snipers to fire upon high value targets within the fleeing crowd,” officials say.

******

The Californians, Bryan Omar Roa, 24, of Calimesa, and Michael Alan Thomas, 32, of Pinon Hills, were arrested on Saturday, the day before the fight, and have since made their initial court appearances in California’s Central District. Three other men have also been arrested. Others in an extremist TikTok group chat known as Vanguards of the Old Guard are being sought, officials say.

A search warrant executed on Roa’s home and vehicle led to the recovery on an AR-style rifle, a Glock 19 handgun, a tactical belt, an ammo can full of bullets, a two-way radio, and an infrared laser target pointer, court records show. Roa denied participating in the active murder conspiracy, but he reportedly admitted to investigators that he had planned to drive to Washington, D.C., to protest the UFC event.

Roa often practiced shooting with Thomas, who allegedly admitted his involvement in the plot to law enforcement when interviewed. Thomas said he also “encouraged others to take part in it.”

The terrifying and deadly plot unraveled, according to court records, when the parents of one of the conspirators in Ohio overheard his plans and called police. That man, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, used money he had received for his recent high school graduation to buy guns, tactical vests and thousands of rounds of ammunition for the attack, his parents told the FBI.

Proper’s father told investigators that he had met “random” people online and planned to leave the weekend of the UFC event to meet with the people he met online. He had been planning “recons” with these people, the father told authorities. Soon the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was fanning out across the country hunting members of Proper’s TikTok group, some of whom described themselves as ex-military. The chat called itself “Vanguard of the Old Guard,” and was about to launch a sophisticated attack on people they called “high value” targets.

The group, which included the friends from Riverside County, expressed the ideology that people involved with Jeffrey Epstein should be taken out, and were angry about Artificial Intelligence and its impact on small towns. “The members of the group stated that they wanted to protect the United States, which they believed was headed in the wrong direction,” the complaint said. “Members of the group believed that the United States needed to be torn down so that it could be rebuilt.”

...

————

“Terror Plot To Attack White House UFC Event Thwarted” by Michele McPhee; LA Magazine; 06/16/2026

” Roughly two dozen conspirators allegedly planned to deploy drones armed with explosives in and around the UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House lawn, which would send panicked spectators running into a firing squad, Justice Department officials said Tuesday. The group “planned to deploy snipers to fire upon high value targets within the fleeing crowd,” officials say.”

Roughly two dozen are suspected of being involved. With just five arrests. And when we see how the two California residents arrested were friends who often practiced shooting with each other, with one of the friends admitting that he also “encouraged others to take part in it,” it becomes apparent that the roughly two dozen estimate for the number of people involved might even be an undercount:

...
A search warrant executed on Roa’s home and vehicle led to the recovery on an AR-style rifle, a Glock 19 handgun, a tactical belt, an ammo can full of bullets, a two-way radio, and an infrared laser target pointer, court records show. Roa denied participating in the active murder conspiracy, but he reportedly admitted to investigators that he had planned to drive to Washington, D.C., to protest the UFC event.

Roa often practiced shooting with Thomas, who allegedly admitted his involvement in the plot to law enforcement when interviewed. Thomas said he also “encouraged others to take part in it.”
...

And when we see the apparent ideology of this group revolving around the notion that people involved with Jeffrey Epstein should be taken out and AI is destroying American towns, it also becomes apparent that this far right group might legitimately have a beef with the far right Trump administration. As we were recently reminded with the story of role Norwegian Nazi ‘Willy Tepes’ may have played in the online radicalization of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the far right goals of carrying out strategic political assassinations on figures like Donald Trump is far from new. Strategically assassinating ideologically aligned figures isn’t an unprecedented tactic, especially for accelerationist movements. But with the Trump administration’s blatant cover up of Epstein files and wholesale embrace of the AI oligarchy, it’s not hard to imagine that a number of far right groups really have turned against Trump in a very sincere way and really do view him as ‘the enemy’. That’s part of what makes this such a fascinating story. The grossly corrupt and hapless nature of the second Trump administration might actually be undermining the far right’s faith in Trump as an ally, at least among the Nazi ‘grassroots’. Most elite Nazis aren’t going to care about the fate of American small towns in the age of AI. But these guys do:

...
The Californians, Bryan Omar Roa, 24, of Calimesa, and Michael Alan Thomas, 32, of Pinon Hills, were arrested on Saturday, the day before the fight, and have since made their initial court appearances in California’s Central District. Three other men have also been arrested. Others in an extremist TikTok group chat known as Vanguards of the Old Guard are being sought, officials say.

...

The terrifying and deadly plot unraveled, according to court records, when the parents of one of the conspirators in Ohio overheard his plans and called police. That man, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, used money he had received for his recent high school graduation to buy guns, tactical vests and thousands of rounds of ammunition for the attack, his parents told the FBI.

Proper’s father told investigators that he had met “random” people online and planned to leave the weekend of the UFC event to meet with the people he met online. He had been planning “recons” with these people, the father told authorities. Soon the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was fanning out across the country hunting members of Proper’s TikTok group, some of whom described themselves as ex-military. The chat called itself “Vanguard of the Old Guard,” and was about to launch a sophisticated attack on people they called “high value” targets.

The group, which included the friends from Riverside County, expressed the ideology that people involved with Jeffrey Epstein should be taken out, and were angry about Artificial Intelligence and its impact on small towns. “The members of the group stated that they wanted to protect the United States, which they believed was headed in the wrong direction,” the complaint said. “Members of the group believed that the United States needed to be torn down so that it could be rebuilt.”
...

And as we’re going to see, it appears the suspected ring-leader of the plot to stoke a revolution, Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, isn’t actually a US citizen. He’s someone who came to the US as a child and became obtained DACA status back in 2014:

Nebraska Public Media

Updated: Nebraska man was alleged ‘key ringleader’ in plot to attack White House UFC fight

By Molly Ashford
June 16, 2026, 11 a.m.

Federal prosecutors allege that a Nebraska man helped plan an attempted shooting and explosive drone attack at the White House UFC fight that took place on Sunday.

Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, who lives in Omaha, was charged via criminal complaint in federal court with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States. He appeared for an initial hearing Tuesday.

Alvarez is one of at least five people arrested in connection with the plot, according to reporting from CBS News. According to the complaint, the planned attack included snipers and explosive-laden drones, with the primary targets including President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who did not attend the fight) and Elon Musk.

The complaint alleges that the attack was motivated by “ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions.”

Investigators were tipped off to the plot after the family of 19-year-old Ohio man Tycen Proper became alarmed at his amassing of firearms and extensive communication with an online group. After Proper told his family that he planned to meet up with the online group last weekend, his family called the police, and a search warrant was executed at his home and electronic devices on June 11.

According to the complaint, the search revealed that Proper was communicating with a group on TikTok called “Vanguard of the Old.” The conversations then moved to Signal, an encrypted messaging app, where the plans were discussed in greater detail.

Investigators believe that Alvarez was known as ‘Shepherd’ on TikTok and Signal and was the “primary person” involved in the planning. Messages from ‘Shepherd’ included discussions of where snipers should be placed, the building of explosive drones and escape plans after the attack.

‘Shepherd’ also identified an abandoned Methodist church in the village of Western, Nebraska, as a “fall back location.” A photo was posted to Facebook on Monday of FBI agents searching the church.

...

The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday that Alvarez was in the country illegally, having come to the U.S. from Mexico as a child in 2001 on a tourist visa. He was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status in 2014.

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“Updated: Nebraska man was alleged ‘key ringleader’ in plot to attack White House UFC fight” By Molly Ashford; Nebraska Public Media; 06/16/2026

“The complaint alleges that the attack was motivated by “ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions.””

Ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments. That’s the stated motive. Remarkably, we are told the suspected ring-leader behind this plot, Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, is, himself, not actually a US citizen. Instead, he’s a someone who came the US from Mexico as a child and became a DACA recipient in 2014:

...
Investigators believe that Alvarez was known as ‘Shepherd’ on TikTok and Signal and was the “primary person” involved in the planning. Messages from ‘Shepherd’ included discussions of where snipers should be placed, the building of explosive drones and escape plans after the attack.

‘Shepherd’ also identified an abandoned Methodist church in the village of Western, Nebraska, as a “fall back location.” A photo was posted to Facebook on Monday of FBI agents searching the church.

...

The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday that Alvarez was in the country illegally, having come to the U.S. from Mexico as a child in 2001 on a tourist visa. He was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status in 2014.
...

And as the following article notes, Tycen Proper described Alvarez as “aggressive in tactical planning” and was apparently under the impression that Alvarez was ex-military. So was Alvarez a DACA recipient who served in the US military? That’s yet to be revealed. But it’s interesting to note that Alvarez conceived of a four ‘tier’ system for membership in the plot, with members being the put into different roles like those who were willing to put themselves in harm’s way; members who could be getaway drivers or drone operators; supply and logistics operators; and funders and influencers. The fact that there’s a “funders and influencers” ‘tier’ should raise significant questions about just who was actually leading this plot and was ultimately involved. So we have to ask, was Alvarez really the leader? Or just the guy being paid to lead it?:

CBS News

Feds reveal details of alleged plot to attack White House UFC event with explosive drones

By Sarah N. Lynch, Melissa Quinn, Jacob Rosen, Pat Milton, Kaia Hubbard
Updated on: June 16, 2026 / 7:41 PM EDT / CBS News

Washington — The FBI said Tuesday that it disrupted an attempt to attack Sunday’s UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House. Court records detail an alleged plot to use small drones carrying explosives and snipers to target senior government officials and wealthy attendees.

Five people have been charged for their alleged roles in the scheme: Tycen Proper of Ohio, Daniel Eskridge of Missouri, Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez of Nebraska, and Bryan Omar Roa and Michael Alan Thomas of California.

...

The potential targets laid out in the court filings included President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk. A number of elected officials were also named, including Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and members of West Virginia’s congressional delegation.

The defendants have each been charged with at least one count of conspiracy to commit murder. Proper, 19, faces three additional charges, according to court filings.

Two law enforcement sources told CBS News that officials seized weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition and tactical gear from the suspects during the execution of search warrants. Sources said that no drones have actually been recovered. Use of the drones was believed to be in the discussion-and-research phases, the sources said.

Federal investigators became aware of the alleged plot based on a tip from Proper’s mother, who was concerned about his recent behavior, according to an affidavit submitted by an FBI agent in his case.

The alleged plot

The affidavit in the Proper case lays out the details of the alleged plot and the origins of how the FBI learned of it.

Proper told investigators that he began communicating with others via a TikTok group called “Vanguard of the Old” in March, whose members all said they wanted to protect the U.S. and believed the nation was headed in the wrong direction, according to the affidavit.

Communications among the group members continued on the encrypted messaging app Signal, where the FBI said they planned the attack for the UFC fight. There was one large chat, with approximately 19 individuals, dedicated to coordinating the attack, and smaller groups consisting of four or five users.

The FBI said discussions centered on the UFC event at the White House by early June. Eskridge allegedly said the group should obtain $1,300 to buy “drones and charges.”

The group was split up into tiers, ranging from “tier 1” to “tier 4.” The tiers included those who were willing to put themselves in harm’s way; members who could be getaway drivers or drone operators; supply and logistics operators; and funders and influencers.

The affidavit in Alvarez’s case said Proper identified a user known as “Shepherd” as the leader of the group. Proper “described him as aggressive in tactical planning” and said he believed him to be a former member of the military, according to the FBI.

The FBI included multiple messages from “Shepherd,” including maps of Washington, D.C., and instructions for carrying out the attack. The FBI said it traced a TikTok account back to Alvarez and identified him as “Shepherd.” Investigators said Alvarez devised the tier system.

The group’s plan to attack the UFC event involved staging a “demonstration” on the north side of the White House, the court filings said. The group would then fly drones “laden with unspecified explosive devices which would detonate over the north side of the UFC arena,” according to the filing in Proper’s case.

When the drones exploded, the group then planned to force attendees of the UFC event and “high value targets” to evacuate to the south, the affidavit said. Proper told investigators that the plan was for group members to “act as snipers and additional shooters,” shooting fight attendees and the “high value targets” as they fled from the explosions.

...

“It was a serious threat,” U.S. Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn said during a briefing Tuesday morning. He said he could not provide too many details because it remains an active investigation, but said, “They were planning to attack the Freedom 250. ... There are still suspects at large, and we’re going to work it until everyone’s been identified.”

Quinn added, “The event itself, I am confident in saying, was never at risk due to the great investigative work.”

...

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“Feds reveal details of alleged plot to attack White House UFC event with explosive drones” By Sarah N. Lynch, Melissa Quinn, Jacob Rosen, Pat Milton, Kaia Hubbard; CBS News; 06/16/2026

“Communications among the group members continued on the encrypted messaging app Signal, where the FBI said they planned the attack for the UFC fight. There was one large chat, with approximately 19 individuals, dedicated to coordinating the attack, and smaller groups consisting of four or five users.”

So there were two Signal chat groups. A larger one involving 19 individuals and a smaller group of four to five users. What was the purpose of the smaller chat group and who was part of that group? We have no idea. But investigators have revealed the four ‘tiered’ system that Alvarez reportedly devised. A tier system that includes “funders and influencers”. Have any “funders” been identified?

...
The group was split up into tiers, ranging from “tier 1” to “tier 4.” The tiers included those who were willing to put themselves in harm’s way; members who could be getaway drivers or drone operators; supply and logistics operators; and funders and influencers.

The affidavit in Alvarez’s case said Proper identified a user known as “Shepherd” as the leader of the group. Proper “described him as aggressive in tactical planning” and said he believed him to be a former member of the military, according to the FBI.

The FBI included multiple messages from “Shepherd,” including maps of Washington, D.C., and instructions for carrying out the attack. The FBI said it traced a TikTok account back to Alvarez and identified him as “Shepherd.” Investigators said Alvarez devised the tier system.
...

And as we can see, the targets included a number of elected officials, including Senators Marsha Blackburn and Tom Cotton, both Republicans. This far right group appeared to have Republicans as their primary target:

...
The potential targets laid out in the court filings included President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk. A number of elected officials were also named, including Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and members of West Virginia’s congressional delegation.

...

The group’s plan to attack the UFC event involved staging a “demonstration” on the north side of the White House, the court filings said. The group would then fly drones “laden with unspecified explosive devices which would detonate over the north side of the UFC arena,” according to the filing in Proper’s case.

When the drones exploded, the group then planned to force attendees of the UFC event and “high value targets” to evacuate to the south, the affidavit said. Proper told investigators that the plan was for group members to “act as snipers and additional shooters,” shooting fight attendees and the “high value targets” as they fled from the explosions.
...

Remarkably, Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn, asserted that the event “was never at risk due to the great investigative work.” Again, the only reason this plot was reportedly uncovered was due to Tycen Proper’s relatives contacting the police:

...
“It was a serious threat,” U.S. Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn said during a briefing Tuesday morning. He said he could not provide too many details because it remains an active investigation, but said, “They were planning to attack the Freedom 250. ... There are still suspects at large, and we’re going to work it until everyone’s been identified.”

Quinn added, “The event itself, I am confident in saying, was never at risk due to the great investigative work.”
...

And as we should expect, the Trump DACA status of the alleged ring-leader is the detail federal prosecutors are now publicly emphasizing, at the same time investigators acknowledge that additional suspects could be identified. How long before this gets spun as some sort of ‘illegal immigrant plot’?:

Newsweek

Alleged UFC 250 Attack Leader Abraham Alvarez Is Obama DACA Recipient—DHS

Billal Rahman
By Billal Rahman
Immigration Reporter

Published Jun 18, 2026 at 09:01 AM EDT
updated Jun 18, 2026 at 10:43 AM EDT

The alleged ringleader of a foiled plot targeting an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House is a Mexican national who received deportation relief under an Obama-era program after overstaying a tourist visa, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said.

Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez entered the United States on a B‑2 visa but did not depart after it expired in December 2001, the DHS said in a press release on June 18. He was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status in 2014, it added.

The FBI has accused the 31-year-old of Omaha, Nebraska, of leading a plan to attack the UFC “Freedom 250” event held on the White House grounds on June 14. The televised event drew thousands of attendees and included President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and other members of their family, secretaries of state and business leaders.

“This illegal alien from Mexico should never have been allowed in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed terror attack targeting UFC Freedom 250 at the White House,” DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a press statement. “He and his co-conspirators now face charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit violence on White House grounds. He will face justice and swiftly be removed from our country.”

The FBI assessed that Alvarez, also known as “Shepherd,” was responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the planned attack, allegedly posting in a group chat, “This is the best action I see. Position your teams in the purple dots (counter sniper and drones) Long range (circled area) (great shot) Easy out into the river.”

Kelly Steenbock, an attorney for Alvarez, told Newsweek her office does not comment on pending cases.

The investigation remains ongoing, and officials have said additional suspects could be identified. If convicted, Alvarez could face federal sentencing as well as removal proceedings under federal immigration law.

...

———–

“Alleged UFC 250 Attack Leader Abraham Alvarez Is Obama DACA Recipient—DHS” By Billal Rahman; Newsweek; 06/18/2026

“The FBI assessed that Alvarez, also known as “Shepherd,” was responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the planned attack, allegedly posting in a group chat, “This is the best action I see. Position your teams in the purple dots (counter sniper and drones) Long range (circled area) (great shot) Easy out into the river.””

As we can see, the FBI has concluded that Alvarez was indeed the leader of the group, responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the whole plot. Predictably, federal officials are publicly focusing on the alleged ringleader being a DACA recipient while ignoring the nearly two dozen co-conspirators who all appear to be US citizens. Or at least the co-conspirators who have been identified, but officials acknowledging that additional suspects could be identified:

...
“This illegal alien from Mexico should never have been allowed in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed terror attack targeting UFC Freedom 250 at the White House,” DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a press statement. “He and his co-conspirators now face charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit violence on White House grounds. He will face justice and swiftly be removed from our country.”

...

The investigation remains ongoing, and officials have said additional suspects could be identified. If convicted, Alvarez could face federal sentencing as well as removal proceedings under federal immigration law.
...

And that update on the still unfolding investigation into this plot brings us to another sadly predictable part of this story: the Secret Service is apparently livid with FBI director Kash Patel over his decision to announce the initial round of arrests, possibly thwarting the investigation into the rest of the network:

MS Now

Kash Patel ‘jumped the gun’ with announcement of UFC plot arrests, sources say

Secret Service officials are angered by the FBI director’s early morning social media post that was shared before some suspects were arrested.

By Carol Leonnig, Ken Dilanian, Marc Santia and Lisa Rubin
Jun. 16, 2026, 3:53 PM EDT

Secret Service officials are angered that FBI Director Kash Patel prematurely announced on Tuesday the details of a largely sealed and ongoing criminal investigation into an alleged plot to attack Sunday’s White House UFC event with drones, according to three people familiar with the incident.

Secret Service and FBI agents had been partnered on the investigation into a group of individuals discussing plans for a drone attack at the White House in the last week, and had discussed unsealing the case and making a joint announcement Tuesday afternoon, according to sources.

The problem with Patel’s social media announcement, the sources say, was that the case had been sealed in court and roughly 10 suspects had not yet been arrested and placed in custody at the time Patel shared his post. The people said Secret Service and FBI officials were surprised by Patel “jumping the gun.”

“We all woke up this morning to see this on Twitter,” said one administration official, who, like others, asked to speak confidentially to discuss sensitive matters.

The threat to the UFC event became known to the Secret Service and FBI in the last week when a relative of one of the suspects contacted local police in the Cincinnati area, according to two people briefed on the probe, and reported that their relative was talking about engaging in a vague plot in Washington.

An advanced threat interdiction team at the Secret Service, with the help of the FBI, began seeking a subpoena for an encrypted Signal chat thread and was able to identify the plot being planned and some of the people discussing using drones and possible snipers to attack the UFC fight event at the White House’s South Lawn.

Authorities then arrested one suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper of Ohio, on June 13 and moved immediately to seal the case so the FBI and Secret Service could continue investigating, identifying and arresting additional suspects.

...

Before the UFC event, the Secret Service had dramatically increased its security plans as a precaution and issued an alert to its law enforcement partners to be on the lookout for people with drones in downtown Washington and other identifying information.

Matt Quinn, the Secret Service’s deputy director, appeared to allude to Patel’s premature announcement in a Tuesday news conference but did not use his name and said the Secret Service made a conscious decision not to reveal the existence of the probe prematurely.

“I’ll tell you a phrase I learned early in my career in the New York field office and that’s ‘Don’t choke on your own smoke,’” he said. “I’ll tell you the Secret Service led that investigation from the beginning. I’ll tell you that case is ongoing. In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”

He said he was choosing not to discuss extensive details of the case because at least some charges remained sealed and ongoing.

Patel’s public announcement of the probe fits a trend in which the FBI Director has often rushed to make announcements that credit the FBI with stopping a possible attack or catching a criminal suspect in a high-profile case.

...

————–

“Kash Patel ‘jumped the gun’ with announcement of UFC plot arrests, sources say” By Carol Leonnig, Ken Dilanian, Marc Santia and Lisa Rubin; MS Now; 06/16/2026

“The problem with Patel’s social media announcement, the sources say, was that the case had been sealed in court and roughly 10 suspects had not yet been arrested and placed in custody at the time Patel shared his post. The people said Secret Service and FBI officials were surprised by Patel “jumping the gun.””

Kash Patel just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He just had to go onto social media while roughly 10 suspects had yet to be arrested. And as we can see, with authorities only learning about the plot four days before the attack, it’s not like there was a lot of time for investigators to establish the identities of the plotters. A Signal chat thread was targeted where discussion of the plot was happening. But the first arrest only happened on June 13, the day before the planned attack, and that was the arrest of Tycen Proper. And it was sealed immediately after his arrest that the case was seal so the FBI and Secret Service could continue investigating, identifying and arresting additional suspects. Kash Patel was effectively acting as a public warning system for the broader plot:

...
The threat to the UFC event became known to the Secret Service and FBI in the last week when a relative of one of the suspects contacted local police in the Cincinnati area, according to two people briefed on the probe, and reported that their relative was talking about engaging in a vague plot in Washington.

An advanced threat interdiction team at the Secret Service, with the help of the FBI, began seeking a subpoena for an encrypted Signal chat thread and was able to identify the plot being planned and some of the people discussing using drones and possible snipers to attack the UFC fight event at the White House’s South Lawn.

Authorities then arrested one suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper of Ohio, on June 13 and moved immediately to seal the case so the FBI and Secret Service could continue investigating, identifying and arresting additional suspects.

...

Matt Quinn, the Secret Service’s deputy director, appeared to allude to Patel’s premature announcement in a Tuesday news conference but did not use his name and said the Secret Service made a conscious decision not to reveal the existence of the probe prematurely.

“I’ll tell you a phrase I learned early in my career in the New York field office and that’s ‘Don’t choke on your own smoke,’” he said. “I’ll tell you the Secret Service led that investigation from the beginning. I’ll tell you that case is ongoing. In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”
...

Also keep in mind that we are only told that 5 had been arrested and roughly two dozen are known to have been involved, so if there were 10 suspects yet to be arrested that also suggests there were roughly 10 people who have yet to be identified and who now know the whole thing was busted and they had better cover their tracks.

What would have happened if Tycen Proper’s family hadn’t called authorities? Were we really this close to having the UFC event turn into a mass terror event with dozens of people behind it? Based on available evidence, yes, we were that close. And based on the pretty mainstream grievances of the plotters — Epstein file, AI, and the direction of the country — it’s hard to imagine this is going to be the last one. Although it isn’t hard to imagine this will be the last one seemingly led by a DACA recipient.

As we also seen, part of what makes Epstein’s estate incredible wealth so alarming is that its investments aren’t any typical investment. It’s heavily tied up in investments in Valar Ventures made back in 2015 and 2016. A venture capital fund set up by Peter Thiel. In other words, don’t be shocked if Epstein’s estate joins the billionaires club sooner rather than later. If posthumously fathering children is in the works, it’s going to be very well funded. And that all brings us to another story that’s disturbing on its own but is now Epstein-adjacent: the rise of genetic-engineering services for human embryos. The kind of services that are essentially next-generation CRISPR-Cas9 technology, offering the ability to make virtually modification to the DNA of a cell. But in this case, the changes are made to the initial fertilized cell, leading to every cell in the baby’s body having the modifications. It’s powerful technology that is almost available. The main technological impediment is the potential for ‘off-target’ modifications and the fact that the long-term effects of such off-target effects aren’t known, in part because there have been almost no genetically engineered humans have ever created. The only known instance are the twins born in a secret experiment conducted by a rogue Chinese scientist using CRISPR-Cas9 with the goal of conferring resistance to HIV, ostensibly to protect the twins from the disease due to their father’s HIV positive status. The scientist, biophysicist He Jiankui, was convicted by the Chinese authorities and ended up serving three years in prison. And while He’s experiment did indeed modify the DNA of the twins, it didn’t actually modify the intended parts of the DNA and instead created ‘off-target’ effects. And yet, the embryos were brought to term . Adding to the infamous nature of He’s experiment is the fact that there has been no follow up on the medical status of the twins. If there were lessons that could have been learned about the risks of using CRISP-Cas9 on human embryos, those lessons aren’t being learned. At least not publicly. Despite that, genetically-engineered human embryo services are on the way. They aren’t quite here yet. At least not legally speaking. But efforts are underway to make that happen, with a Thiel-backed firm leading the way.

Forms human genetic engineering aren’t new. As we’ve seen, services like embryonic selection — where a number of embryos are created by a couple and then genetically assessed, with only the ‘most desirable’ embryos being selected to be brought to term — are legal in the US, with companies like Orchid and Genomic Prediction already offering such services. And these companies aren’t just offering services that allow for the selection of embryos lacking vulnerability to heritable diseases. They are offering the option to select the ‘best’ embryo based on highly complex traits like IQ that can involve thousands of genes. And as we’ve also seen, the figures behind the companies offering these services hail from exactly the same kind of networks we should expect. Genomic Prediction was founded by Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. And Orchid’s young founder, Noor Siddique, was the recipient of a Thiel Fellowship, where Thiel pays college students $100,000 to drop out of college and start a company. As we should expect, another young Thiel Fellow, Cathy Tie, is the person behind the next step in legal modern eugenic technologies.

Tie’s company, Origin Genomics, isn’t yet offering genetically-engineered-baby services to the public quite yet because it’s not offering any services at all. Instead, the company appears to exist solely for the purpose of convincing regulators that such services are safe and ethical, with engineered human embryos being created for up to 14 days before being destroyed according to the US’s “14-day Rule”. The company touts what it describes as a more accurate next-generation of CRISPR-Cas9, so part of the purpose of these experiments is presumably to demonstrate fewer ‘off-target’ effects from the genetic engineering treatment like the kind experienced by the Chinese twins modified by He Jiankui.

Tie also insists that the focus of her company is purely to fix simple heritable diseases. The kind of diseases that could be avoided through the modification of single site in the DNA. And while that’s a far cry from the kind of eugenic potential this technology offers — like selecting for ‘high IQ’ or aspects of athleticism — it still presents an ethical conundrum due to the fact that any genetic modifications made to an embryo at conception will impact every cell in the body, including germline cells like testes and ovaries, meaning any genetic edits or are going to be passed on to that embryo’s hypothetical descendants. These are decisions that last potentially much longer than the lifespan of the genetically modified baby. As such, germline editing for reproductive purposes is banned in the US, UK, and China.

Now, germline editing alone presents a number of ethical conundrums that we have yet to work out. But it’s also apparent from Tie’s comments that she isn’t envision this technology be limited to making single targeted edits to an embryo’s DNA for the purpose of curing disease. As Tie repeatedly makes clear, she views human genetic engineering as not just inevitability but as the next strategic technological ‘race’. In fact, back in September, when Chinese premier Li Qiang announced new draft regulations on medical technologies that at emphasized “the need to promote innovative development” and “accelerate R&D and commercialization”, Tie responded with a tweet declaring “Welcome to the dawn of the biological arms race....Global superpowers are rushing to control the most important technology of humankind, one that has the power to direct evolution for the rest of humanity.” Tie has gone on to argue that “There’s a big geopolitical component to this,” and even nicknamed Manhattan Genomics, an earlier human genetic engineering firm she started, as the Manhattan Project.

Interestingly, Manhattan Genomics and Origin Genomics were both started in 2025 and aren’t even the only companies Tie started that year. She founded another company that year, the Los Angeles Project, dedicated to creating genetically engineered pets for the wealthy, with goals of creating animals like glow-in-the-dark rabbits, ‘unicorns’, and ‘dragons’. It’s unclear why exactly the company failed but a co-founder who left the an y, Eriona Hysolli, said she and Tie parted ways due to “a Cayman-based entity” founded by Tie “which confounded the open and transparent mission.” When asked about Hysolli’s claims, Tie replied, “I don’t want to talk too much about that,” which is a particularly ironic answer given that Tie’s quest to win over regulators appears to be based on a commitment to transparency. Tie has also refused to identify who works at her Origin Genomics or the investors.

But there’s another topic that Tie appears to be even more reticent to talk about: her short-lived marriage to He Jiankui last year. Yep. Tie traveled to Beijing in January of 2025 to meet He, a relationship bloomed, and a marriage was announced a few months later, with the couple posting pictures with custom-made DNA double helix wedding bands. “Those trained in the scientific system are too brainwashed and financially paralyzed to act with agency and think for themselves”, Tie posted in a tweet beneath a photo of the wedding bands. Tie went on to make a tweet in May of 2025, “When I met He Jiankui, I realized he was different. He was clearly a heretic. When I spoke to him in 2023 after he had served his prison sentence, he said he wanted to double down on germline gene editing. Despite being cancelled countless times, he stood his ground.” But their marriage fell apart after Tie wasn’t allowed back in to China and He wasn’t allowed to leave. Tie called from help from “crypto people” at one point, and a meme coin was even launched to raise money for He’s new lab with the faces of He and Tie used to promote it. That’s the short-lived, very recent relationship Tie apparently doesn’t want to talk about now that she’s made herself the public face of transparent genetic engineering services.

So does Tie publicly opposed human genetic ‘enhancements’, like higher IQs are greater athleticism. When initially pressed on the matter, Tie deflects by pointing out that the technology for such ‘enhancements’ isn’t yet ready. “Right now, the technology is not ready for that. It can only make very precise corrections and variant changes. Enhancements are complex: IQ,height– thousands of genes contribute to that, we’re nowhere close to being able to, one, understand it, and two, correct it,” Tie recently emphasized. But when asked about whether or not such enhancements should happen when that technology becomes available, Tie answers by asserting that she would rather not go into that topic and that it’s really a societal choice. As Tie put it, “As of right now, I have a very strong gut reaction that I don’t want to go into that. But society is complex, and at every point in my career I want to engage with all stakeholders to make informed decisions on what’s best.” It’s was definitely not a “not interested” answer.

For now, Tie insists the company will only focus on curing “severe” diseases, althogh the definition of severe should really be left up to patient advocacy groups, she adds. Which brings us to one particular class of likely patient advocates that we should keep in mind as the probably earliest adopters of this technology as ‘enhancements’ become available: the wealthy. And, especially, the class of utterly ruthless, morally rudderless tech-obsess ultra-wealth folks who end up in the orbit of people like Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein. The ‘Epstein class’, so to speak. It’s hard to imagine they aren’t going to be enthusiastic buyers of genetic enhancement services for their children. When asked about how much she expects her gene editing services to cost, Tie suggested that would be up to each country and their respective health care systems. When pressed about the fact that, under the US’s health care system, the wealthy would likely be the only ones who could afford this technology, Tie replied that, “Just because something is initially expensive, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist at all.”

And if it seems like Tie might be embracing the “move fast and break stuff” Silicon Valley ethos for human genetic modification, Tie made her views abundantly clear in a recent debate with Harvard bioethicist I. Glenn Cohen when Tie warned how, “We talk often about the danger of moving too fast. I want to name the danger of moving too slow, and the fantasy of waiting for global consensus, which will not arrive.” “Eugenics is a very heavy word,” Tie added during the debate. “I would prefer to stop throwing that word around.” She not exactly hiding her beliefs at this point. This is a good time to recall the individual who has come to take the “move fast and break stuff” ethos to a literally religious level: Peter Thiel, who has gone on a public speaking tour where he shares his view, rooted in the theology of Nazi legal theoretician Carl Schmitt, that the Antichrist is manifesting in the modern age as a force warning about the dangers of technology and holding humanity back from the tech-powered future God intends for us. For Peter Thiel, ‘move fast and break stuff’ is a mandate from God.

And that brings us to another detail in this story that could become a very relevant factor in the question of how the religious conservatives that Thiel is ideologically aligned with might feel about genetically engineering babies: As Tie argues, the direct genetic engineering of embryos is actually more ethical than the embryonic selection technology because it theoretically enables ALL embryos to be brought to term because any identifiable genetic ‘problems’ can be ‘fixed’. “We shouldn’t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix – we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing the whole person away.,” according to Tie. Ethical concerns about the disposal of unused embryos created by the polygenic selection industry can be addressed switching to a new model of just creating a single embryo and genetically engineering it as desired. Might we see genetic engineering get embraced by religious conservatives as a kind of ethical ‘fix’ to the issues with the already-legal embryonic selection industry? This is also a good time to keep in mind the remarkable overlap of pro-eugenic interests with the growing far right pro-nativist movement pushing for people, white people specifically, to have many more children. Not only should we expect A LOT of today’s ultra-wealth to partake in genetic engineering services, but we should also expect them to end up having a lot more kids.

That’s all part of the disturbing context of the revelation about the yet-to-be-determined fate of Jeffrey Epstein’s sperm deposits. And don’t forget that there’s to nothing prevent this estate from just waiting until technology and regulations are all in place. Or maybe they’re create a secret ‘test’ super-Epstein baby this year and a super-duper one a hundred years from now.

Also keep in mind there technically isn’t anything blocking the secret creation and study of genetically modified children. And who is more qualified to pull that off than the Epstein class? It’s the kind of dystopian super-villain-ish scenario that would be easier to dismiss were we not literally demonstrated ruled by the Epstein class and had Epstein not a eugenicist who desired some sort of personal mass insemination program. It’s the Epstein class’s world and were just living in it:

The New York Times

Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him

Mr. Epstein banked his sperm several years before his death and said that if he died, it should be left in the control of his estate.

By Jacqueline Mroz and Maggie Astor
June 1, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, but his genetic material may live on.

Emails and records in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department indicate that Mr. Epstein had been banking his sperm for at least several years before his death, and that he did not want the cryobank to discard it if he died.

Mr. Epstein deposited his sperm with California Cryobank sometime before October 2012, and he signed a new contract in 2016. The files contain an email from 2012 notifying him of an upcoming renewal payment for his storage with California Cryobank, as well as the 2016 contract with his signature.

The contract, dated May 9, 2016, laid out the terms of Mr. Epstein’s sperm storage. (The sperm remained in his ownership; this is different from sperm donation.) The contract specified that, if he died, his sperm would fall under the control of his estate or of another legal representative. The arrangement was not publicly known until the Justice Department files were released earlier this year.

It’s unclear whether Mr. Epstein’s sperm is still being preserved — and, if so, where. CooperCompanies, which has owned California Cryobank since 2021, said the bank “does not currently store any samples associated with Jeffrey Epstein” but did not answer further questions. A representative for Mr. Epstein’s estate did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

...

Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies reproductive technology and bioethics, said that whether it was ethical for a sperm bank to accept sperm from a sex offender was a matter of debate in the fertility industry.

...

Mr. Epstein left much of his money and possessions to his girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, through a trust administered by his lawyer, Darren Indyke, and his accountant, Richard Kahn. About 40 other people are also named as potential beneficiaries, though no one, including Ms. Shuliak, has yet received anything. A lawyer for Ms. Shuliak declined to comment.

But the trust document does not mention Mr. Epstein’s sperm. Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in trusts and estates, said that any dispute over how its terms should apply to the banked sperm would most likely be resolved under the laws of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Mr. Epstein’s private island was there, his estate is being administered there and the trust document specifies that its provisions should be interpreted under those laws.

Professor Cahn said the administrators’ legal obligation was to dispense Mr. Epstein’s property in the interests of the trust and its beneficiaries. “They have a great deal of discretion so long as they exercise that discretion in good faith,” she said.

It is not clear how reproductive technology providers would respond if a beneficiary received the sperm and tried to use it to become pregnant. Under the ethical principles generally applied in the industry, the sperm could be used posthumously if Mr. Epstein explicitly indicated he would have wanted that, said Dr. Louise King, the director of reproductive bioethics at Harvard Medical School.

...

People close to Mr. Epstein said shortly before his death that he had dreamed of widely spreading his DNA by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch.

...

————-

“Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him” By Jacqueline Mroz and Maggie Astor; The New York Times; 06/01/2026

“The contract, dated May 9, 2016, laid out the terms of Mr. Epstein’s sperm storage. (The sperm remained in his ownership; this is different from sperm donation.) The contract specified that, if he died, his sperm would fall under the control of his estate or of another legal representative. The arrangement was not publicly known until the Justice Department files were released earlier this year.”

Yes, the Epstein estate owns Epstein’s sperm donations. And while we don’t know the contents of the estate’s 1953 Trust directives, Epstein’s desires to use his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico to impregnate a large number of women and seed his DNA into the future isn’t a secret at this point:

...
It’s unclear whether Mr. Epstein’s sperm is still being preserved — and, if so, where. CooperCompanies, which has owned California Cryobank since 2021, said the bank “does not currently store any samples associated with Jeffrey Epstein” but did not answer further questions. A representative for Mr. Epstein’s estate did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

...

But the trust document does not mention Mr. Epstein’s sperm. Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in trusts and estates, said that any dispute over how its terms should apply to the banked sperm would most likely be resolved under the laws of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Mr. Epstein’s private island was there, his estate is being administered there and the trust document specifies that its provisions should be interpreted under those laws.

...

It is not clear how reproductive technology providers would respond if a beneficiary received the sperm and tried to use it to become pregnant. Under the ethical principles generally applied in the industry, the sperm could be used posthumously if Mr. Epstein explicitly indicated he would have wanted that, said Dr. Louise King, the director of reproductive bioethics at Harvard Medical School.
...

And that update on dystopian options available to Epstein estate brings us to the following Guardian piece about Cathy Tie and her quest to show the world that human genetic engineer is a safe and ethical practice. How will she demonstrate this? Apparently by creating lots of genetically engineered human embryos that are allowed to germinate for 14 days and using this to proves to regulators that everything should be fine, eventually leading to the legalization of the practice. It may not be the most coherent business model. But as a former Thiel Fellowship recipient, Tie has the most import resource of all for a story like this: the backing of Peter Thiel, arguably the most significant and influential person in the entire Epstein class of people running the world today:

The Guardian

‘There is no way to stop this’: ‘Biotech Barbie’ Cathy Tie on her mission to genetically modify babies

The Canadian entrepreneur has always pushed the boundaries of gene editing, once attempting to turn horses into unicorns. Now she is set on modifying human embryos – something her controversial ex-husband was jailed for doing

Jenny Kleeman
Sat 30 May 2026 01.00 EDT

On a Friday evening in late April, Cathy Tie, the Canadian serial entrepreneur and self-styled “Biotech Barbie”, is centre stage at New York City’s famous Carnegie Hall, performing Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No 2 on a gleaming Steinway grand piano, accompanied by an orchestra. Her floor-length pink tulle gown shimmers with gold sequins; her dark hair cascades in waves over her caped shoulders. The music is passionate, but Tie’s expression is impassive. Her eyes dart between the piano keys and the sheet music in a flurry of concentration, but the rest of her face is totally still. She isn’t lost in the music; she’s focused on the job.

...

Tie likes to make an impact in whatever she does – but she’s a difficult person to pin down. Since the start of 2025, Tie has launched three separate biotech companies and lived in three different cities (Los Angeles, Toronto and New York). She tried to live in a fourth (Beijing), only to discover that she was banned from China – the country of her birth – while she was en route to begin a new life with her Chinese husband. This time a year ago, Tie had just married one of the most notorious scientists on the planet, the biophysicist He Jiankui, who served three years in prison after he illegally created the world’s first gene-edited babies.

Tie and He separated three months after their wedding. Last summer, Tie arrived in New York with little more than a suitcase and her shih-tzu, Charlie, to announce a new venture: a startup that will conduct the same kinds of procedures that had earned her ex the nickname “China’s Dr Frankenstein”. Tie wants to edit the genes of embryos – to alter the building blocks of human life – to prevent diseases including cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s and hereditary cancers. Unlike He, she says she wants her work to be done openly and transparently, with the blessing of regulators – and powered by the rocket fuel of venture capital investment.

The hardest thing about genetically engineering a baby is getting permission to do it; the technical part is not particularly complicated. Ever since the Crispr-Cas9 gene editing tool was invented in 2012, so long as you know the sequence of DNA in a genome that you would like to change, you can seek it out, then alter or delete it. It’s a bit like using the find, copy, cut and paste functions on a computer. You don’t even need to be a very experienced molecular biologist to do it.

If you edit the sequence of DNA of germline cells – the eggs, sperm and very early embryos that form the first stages of human reproduction – the changes you make will be reproduced in all the other cells of the human being ultimately created from those cells. And not just that particular human: every generation of their descendants will inherit those changes. Of all the possibilities presented in biotechnology, this is arguably the one with the highest stakes for humankind. That’s why the use of germline gene editing for reproductive purposes (rather than research) is banned in the UK, the US and China, and there is widespread international agreement that no research should be conducted on embryos that could grow to term and be born as babies.

...

***

Money is flowing into human genetic engineering. Since Tie arrived in New York last August, some of the richest men in the world have begun investing in her rivals. Gene editing startup Preventive launched in October with the stated aim of “preventing disease before birth”, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, along with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, are among its investors.

Seven months before Preventive’s launch, Armstrong coined the term “the Gattaca stack” – after the dystopian 1997 sci-fi film about a near-future society dominated by genetically engineered super-beings – in a post on X describing technologies he says will be routinely used to create the babies of the future. Gene editing “for disease prevention, or enhancement” was included in Armstrong’s list. For him, at least, this is about improving babies, as well as avoiding disease.

Another item in Armstrong’s Gattaca stack – preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), so you can “choose the embryo that best matches what you want” – is already routinely used in the US. It’s unremarkable enough that the PGT company Nucelus Genomics advertises on the New York subway with the tagline “Have your best baby”, promising to maximise parents’ chances of having a child that is taller and smarter as well as healthier. PGT is embryo selection – sorting and choosing, rather than editing – but over the past decade it has become a regular part of fertility treatment for many Americans. Eugenics might still be a dirty word in most circles but, in the US at least, it has become quietly acceptable to use whatever tools reproductive technology can provide to optimise future offspring.

...

China, of course, has already demonstrated what gene editing can do. It was Chinese researchers who made the very first edits to human embryos in 2015, and a Chinese scientist – Tie’s former husband, He Jiankui – who implanted gene-edited embryos for the first time, creating twin girls known as Lulu and Nana, the first genetically modified human beings ever born.

He announced Lulu and Nana’s birth in a presentation at a Hong Kong conference in 2018. He had edited their embryos with the intention of giving them immunity to HIV; the twins’ father was HIV positive, and He was trying to introduce a gene mutation that would protect them from infection. But, according to his own data, he failed to do this; edits were made to the twins’ genetic code, but not the ones he had intended, yet he still allowed the embryos to be implanted and brought to term. The furore after their birth earned He a 3m yuan fine (about £330,000), as well as three years in jail. As for Lulu and Nana, no one knows what happened to them: there is no available information on their health or wellbeing eight years on from He’s experiment.

Since he was released from jail in 2022, China’s Dr Frankenstein has emerged as an unlikely social media star, with close to 150,000 followers on X. His posts over the past year have been unrepentant, but also – intriguingly – uncensored by the Chinese government. “Silicon Valley this and that – you are not the only country in the world that has investors,” he wrote in August, followed by, “Designer babies, super smart or super good-looking, are inevitable.” At the same time, China’s biotechnology ambitions have rapidly expanded. On 12 September, premier Li Qiang announced new draft regulations on biomedical technologies that emphasised “the need to promote innovative development” and “accelerate R&D and commercialization”.

“Welcome to the dawn of the biological arms race,” Tie posted on X in response to Li’s announcement. “There’s a big geopolitical component to this,” she says. This is one of the reasons why she chose to call her first human gene-editing company the Manhattan Project – the same name as the programme that produced the atomic bomb in 1945. It was also known as Manhattan Genomics, but “I like to call it Manhattan Project”, Tie says. (She earned the nickname Biotech Barbie after she commissioned a promotional video of herself in the style of the Barbie movie. “Both Oppenheimer and the Barbie movie came out at the same time in 2023,” she explains. “It was Barbenheimer summer.”)

...

***

Despite her declared commitment to openness, much of Tie’s work seems as shrouded in secrecy as the original Manhattan Project. She won’t tell me how many people are working on her team or who they are (“I’m working with pioneers. I’m unable to name them, unfortunately”) or who has invested in her company (“I’m unable to disclose their names, but these are very motivated individuals and funds”). She doesn’t want me to reveal where her work is based, other than that it’s in New York (it’s not in Manhattan).

It is also no longer the Manhattan Project. By December, the gene-editing startup Tie launched last August had shut down. “I made a fundamental mistake that a lot of early-stage startup founders do, which is choosing the wrong co-founder,” she tells me. Eriona Hysolli was the former head of biological sciences at Colossal, a company that uses biotechnology to try to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. Hysolli has said she and Tie parted ways because of “a Cayman-based entity” founded by Tie “which confounded the open and transparent mission”. When I ask Tie to tell me more, her reply is terse: “I don’t want to talk too much about that.”

But Tie is more than happy to speak at length about the mission of Origin Genomics, her current gene-editing startup. Its aim, she says, is to eliminate severe disorders caused by single gene mutations. “It’s about preventative pre-birth care for the patients that are carriers of these well-known mutations. The goal of Origin Genomics is to help prevent suffering via the newest gene editors applied before birth.”

Older gene editors – including the versions of Crispr-Cas9 used by He when he created Lulu and Nana, although Tie doesn’t mention this specifically – were more prone to “off-target” effects, resulting in the wrong edits. “There are new advances in gene editing that make this process a lot safer than it was even five, eight, 10 years ago,” Tie continues. “We sequence the cells before and after the genetic change to ensure that it is safe, and that no unintended genetic changes were made.” In accordance with US federal law, none of the embryos Tie’s company is working with at this stage are implanted, or allowed to grow older than 14 days’ gestation.

“This is to prove to the world – the public, the scientific community, the regulators, the bioethicists – that this technology can be safe, if the data shows that it is, and that it should be considered for clinical use,” she says. “I would love to change the global norms of this. I think it’s inevitable, and someone needs to do it right.” (During our conversation in her office, Tie uses the word “inevitable” 12 times.)

But there are other ways of treating the same conditions that don’t result in genetic changes that will be passed on to every future generation. Gene therapies work on cells that aren’t involved in reproduction. They are given to carriers of a genetic disease after the patient has been born, and they affect only some, not all, of the body’s cells. Once researchers devise a way of delivering the gene therapy to the right cells, they can correct the relevant genetic mutations. Gene therapy is already being used to target a wide range of conditions, including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), once the most common genetic cause of death among children under two years old.

Tie is unconvinced. “Many of those therapies have failed in clinical trials,” she says. “It is actually safest to explore this when a human is in its earliest stages of development, because you have fewer cells to deliver the genetic changes to.” Gene therapies can be extremely expensive – Zolgensma, the gene therapy for SMA, had a list price of £1.79m when it was approved on the NHS in 2021; the treatment for sickle cell, Casgevy, has a similar price. “Casgevy is a three-to-six-month process. Patients have to go through chemotherapy and other really invasive procedures,” Tie says. This isn’t the case for all gene therapies, I point out; Zolgesma is given in a single dose, delivered over a few hours. Tie blinks. “I’m not too familiar with that example. The research I’ve done shows gene therapy is quite invasive. And it’s all relative. When you have an embryo that grows up without the mutation, that’s a lot more ideal.”

Why not screen embryos and implant those that don’t carry these disorders, instead of editing those that do? Families often don’t have the choice, Tie replies; sometimes all their embryos are affected. And, as we move further into an age when women are having children later in life, they are often less able to produce enough eggs to create a meaningful range of embryos to choose from. “That’s why patients believe their embryos are very precious. And so do the IVF doctors,” she says. “Not to mention that it’s extremely taxing on the woman’s body to go through multiple rounds of IVF to achieve that idealistic philosophical vision of only using embryo selection, and no germline gene correction. I think both options should be available to families.”

Editing embryos is morally more defensible than choosing between them, Tie argues. “We shouldn’t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix – we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing the whole person away.”

I ask Tie how much gene editing will cost. “I don’t have a number because this will be determined by each country,” she replies. “Every country has a different healthcare system.” Tie is Canadian, so she and I are used to a very different healthcare system to the US. Does she feel uncomfortable that, in the country where her company is based, only the wealthy will be able to afford the incredibly powerful technology she is creating?

She pauses. “A lot of technologies are only available at a very high cost when they are first developed,” she says eventually. “Just because something is initially expensive, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist at all.” But this isn’t a new electric car or a piece of lab-grown meat. It will give the first people to use it a generational head start on everyone else. “I think this is where it’s very important to have the public be engaged with this conversation and why I participate in these interviews,” Tie says. Once again, her commitment to transparency feels like a smokescreen.

It would be easy to take Tie at her word that she only wants to use gene editing to alleviate human suffering. But a little over a year ago she was using this technology to biohack pets – trying to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and even dragons that would be sold on to consumers – with her first ever gene editing startup, the Los Angeles Project. “I’m personally really interested in the unicorn,” Tie said at the time.

...

When Tie was 18, she won a Thiel Fellowship – a then $100,000 grant funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel awarded to people aged 22 or younger who are willing to drop out of university to “build new things” – and left the University of Toronto. “It made so much sense to me to impact more people through the markets rather than wait another 10 years to get my PhD and postdoc,” she says. “It empowered me to pursue things way more aggressively than I would have otherwise.”

Tie moved to San Francisco and in 2015 founded the genetic testing company Ranomics. She was named as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 notable people under 30 in 2018, when she was 21. Her second company was Locke Bio, a digital health platform that allowed pharmaceutical companies to sell direct to consumers. After 10 years in California, Tie had planned to moved to Austin, Texas, and focus on the Los Angeles Project. But then she fell in love with He Jiankui.

Of all the things that Tie does not want to talk about, her relationship with He is top of the list. They met through a friend in Shanghai in 2023. She interviewed him for her YouTube channel in January 2024, asking highly scripted softball questions and telling him he is “very inspiring”. Tie travelled to Beijing in January 2025 and they began a relationship. On 18 April that year, He announced on X that they had got married. Their wedding bands were custom-made DNA double helixes.

“Those trained in the scientific system are too brainwashed and financially paralyzed to act with agency and think for themselves,” Tie posted on 18 May 2025, underneath their wedding photographs. “When I met He Jiankui, I realized he was different. He was clearly a heretic. When I spoke to him in 2023 after he had served his prison sentence, he said he wanted to double down on germline gene editing. Despite being cancelled countless times, he stood his ground.” She revealed his new company, Cathy Medicine, was named after her.

But she was stranded in Manila, her post continued, and she had no idea why the Chinese authorities had banned her from entering the country to be with her new husband; the government was also preventing him from leaving it. (To this day, Tie doesn’t know why she was banned. Perhaps the Chinese government wanted to keep her and He apart; perhaps they didn’t want a second biotech entrepreneur with a high-profile social media presence in the country.)

In a series of now-deleted tweets, Tie called for help from “crypto people”. A meme coin was launched to raise money for He’s new research lab, and He used his and Tie’s faces to promote it. “I only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie and continue my gene editing research,” He posted to his X followers, adding the hashtag $GENE.

“I just want to clarify: I was not legally married,” Tie tells me, her face reddening. Did they split up only because they couldn’t be in the same country? Tie nods. “Yeah. Mmm-hmm.” Her shoulders are hunched. She is squirming. “Do you mind if I use the restroom?” she asks. “I really have to use the restroom. I’ll be right back.”

...

In a video she made to launch the Manhattan Project in August 2025, Tie talks about He’s “experiment” and says, “The biggest problem, in my opinion, was that it was done in secrecy.” Does she still stand by that? “Yup.”

He was editing the genes of healthy embryos that did not carry a heritable condition, I say. He made the edits in an effort to prevent the twins from perhaps contracting a disease they might be exposed to because there was an HIV positive person in their family. She pauses. “I said the biggest problem was the secrecy. But, yeah, it should have started with disease-causing mutations.”

But the edits didn’t work. He created unintended, unknown changes to the genomes of the two embryos, yet chose to implant them anyway. “I am not familiar enough with the exact sequences of post-gene editing and how it may or may not lead to HIV protection,” Tie replies, contradicting a post she made a few days before our conversation, naming the specific gene He had been targeting and inaccurately stating how his work “helped make the twin girls immune to HIV”.

“The biggest problem, in my opinion, which I still stand by,” Tie repeats, “was the lack of global transparency.”

...

***

It may be possible to make a convincing argument that serious heritable diseases linked to a single gene should be edited out of human embryos. But once the world has agreed on using genetic engineering to combat disease, where do we draw a line? Should we be happy to create babies who will have lower cholesterol and are less likely to have heart disease, or stronger bones to combat osteoporosis? Will being less smart or not as tall one day be viewed as a correctable condition?

...

But when I ask whether she will always be opposed to gene editing for enhancement, she pauses. “Right now, the technology is not ready for that. It can only make very precise corrections and variant changes. Enhancements are complex: IQ,height– thousands of genes contribute to that, we’re nowhere close to being able to, one, understand it, and two, correct it.”

If and when it does become possible, would she want to do it?

“As of right now, I have a very strong gut reaction that I don’t want to go into that. But society is complex, and at every point in my career I want to engage with all stakeholders to make informed decisions on what’s best.”

Barely a year ago, Tie had no qualms about making enhancements – to animals. She was trying to turn horses into unicorns, in the belief that there would be a market where the wealthy would pay for genetically engineered pets. The growing number of parents willing to pay to have the genomes of their frozen embryos tested and ranked so only the tallest, most intelligent or otherwise most optimal will be given a chance at life shows there will be a market for enhanced babies, too.

Tie thinks this shouldn’t be her concern. “This is where regulators need to step in and regulate on the correct and safe use cases of this technology. At some point, my job ends at giving the data to the people who are democratically elected to protect society.”

For now, Tie is focused on severe disease – but she says the definition of “severe” should be left up to patient advocacy groups. “I think it’s immoral to have bioethicists and regulators that don’t have these diseases say, ‘This is not bad enough.’ While those families that have those diseases are suffering, and they know that they have to pass it down to their children, it’s very devastating for them.”

As long as reproduction is a genetic lottery, there will be parents who can argue that they don’t have the right numbers. Once it becomes possible to edit the numbers, those parents will be able to make a case that anything suboptimal is serious enough to be changed. When it comes to mission creep, the stakes of what Tie is doing are dizzyingly high.

Tie is weary of arguments such as this. “In the late 70s, IVF was invented, and there were the exact same comments from reporters. People called them ‘test tube babies’, ‘Frankenstein’s monsters’. People said it was very consequential. So this is not new.” At the same time, she says she understands why some people are deeply troubled by genetic engineering. “I have the same concerns,” she says, her hand over her heart. “I would not want to use this tomorrow, but I believe the only way to move forward is not to delay the research further.”

This sounds like the “move fast and break things” mentality of Silicon Valley we now realise is responsible for a level of damage we’re only just beginning to comprehend. But when I put this to Tie, it makes her visibly irritated. “I don’t know anyone who’s applying that mentality in the space. No one is trying to move fast and break things here. Everyone’s moving at a pace that is appropriate by scientific standards.”

...

***

The night before Tie takes to the stage at Carnegie Hall, she is on another stage, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in a livestreamed public debate with the Harvard lawyer and bioethicist Prof I Glenn Cohen, organised by the Hastings Center for Bioethics. Tie spots me in the audience and waves down at me. She looks immaculate, in a leather skirt and black cape, with a circular handbag featuring an ornate, gilded clock face. The bag is eye-catching and dramatic, but it’s too small to contain her iPad, which pokes out of the top.

“We talk often about the danger of moving too fast. I want to name the danger of moving too slow, and the fantasy of waiting for global consensus, which will not arrive,” Tie says in her opening remarks.

“It’s complex, in that it imposes possible benefits and risks, and we’re talking about future generations who have not consented to either of those things,” Cohen says. “It touches on very sensitive questions, like the values of communities, questions of eugenics.”

“Eugenics is a very heavy word,” Tie says just before taking questions from the floor. “I would prefer to stop throwing that word around.”

...

———–

“‘There is no way to stop this’: ‘Biotech Barbie’ Cathy Tie on her mission to genetically modify babies” by Jenny Kleeman; The Guardian; 05/30/2026

“Tie likes to make an impact in whatever she does – but she’s a difficult person to pin down. Since the start of 2025, Tie has launched three separate biotech companies and lived in three different cities (Los Angeles, Toronto and New York). She tried to live in a fourth (Beijing), only to discover that she was banned from China – the country of her birth – while she was en route to begin a new life with her Chinese husband. This time a year ago, Tie had just married one of the most notorious scientists on the planet, the biophysicist He Jiankui, who served three years in prison after he illegally created the world’s first gene-edited babies.”

2025 was indeed quite a year for Cathy Tie. Not only did she launch three biotech companies in three different cities, but she also happened to get married to “China’s Dr Frankenstein”, He Jiankui, the infamous researcher responsible for the world’s first genetically engineered babies. The couple separated after just three months, and Tie insists that her desires to genetically engineer embryos won’t suffer from He’s infamy. She’ll be open and transparent and receive the blessing of regulators. That’s the claims from someone who launched a now-failed company last year to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits, ‘dragons’, ‘unicorns’, and other genetically engineered pets:

...
It would be easy to take Tie at her word that she only wants to use gene editing to alleviate human suffering. But a little over a year ago she was using this technology to biohack pets – trying to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and even dragons that would be sold on to consumers – with her first ever gene editing startup, the Los Angeles Project. “I’m personally really interested in the unicorn,” Tie said at the time.
...

And as we should expect, for all of Tie’s proclamations about openness and transparency, Manhattan Genomics was shut down after a few months when one of the co-founders left, citing a “a Cayman-based entity” founded by Tie “which confounded the open and transparent mission”. Tie chose not to answer questions about this topic. But she was willing to talk about the current gene-editing company, Origin Genomics, which appears to offer no services. Instead, it’s just making genetically engineered human embryos that get destroyed after 14 days of gestation, apparently solely for the purpose of swaying regulators, presumably by demonstrating fewer ‘off-target’ genetic modification than has been seen in older gene-editing technologies like the Crispr-Cas9 technology used by her ex-husband. And she wasn’t willing to disclose Origin Genomics’s employees or investors. It’s rather selective transparency:

...
Despite her declared commitment to openness, much of Tie’s work seems as shrouded in secrecy as the original Manhattan Project. She won’t tell me how many people are working on her team or who they are (“I’m working with pioneers. I’m unable to name them, unfortunately”) or who has invested in her company (“I’m unable to disclose their names, but these are very motivated individuals and funds”). She doesn’t want me to reveal where her work is based, other than that it’s in New York (it’s not in Manhattan).

It is also no longer the Manhattan Project. By December, the gene-editing startup Tie launched last August had shut down. “I made a fundamental mistake that a lot of early-stage startup founders do, which is choosing the wrong co-founder,” she tells me. Eriona Hysolli was the former head of biological sciences at Colossal, a company that uses biotechnology to try to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. Hysolli has said she and Tie parted ways because of “a Cayman-based entity” founded by Tie “which confounded the open and transparent mission”. When I ask Tie to tell me more, her reply is terse: “I don’t want to talk too much about that.”

But Tie is more than happy to speak at length about the mission of Origin Genomics, her current gene-editing startup. Its aim, she says, is to eliminate severe disorders caused by single gene mutations. “It’s about preventative pre-birth care for the patients that are carriers of these well-known mutations. The goal of Origin Genomics is to help prevent suffering via the newest gene editors applied before birth.”

Older gene editors – including the versions of Crispr-Cas9 used by He when he created Lulu and Nana, although Tie doesn’t mention this specifically – were more prone to “off-target” effects, resulting in the wrong edits. “There are new advances in gene editing that make this process a lot safer than it was even five, eight, 10 years ago,” Tie continues. “We sequence the cells before and after the genetic change to ensure that it is safe, and that no unintended genetic changes were made.” In accordance with US federal law, none of the embryos Tie’s company is working with at this stage are implanted, or allowed to grow older than 14 days’ gestation.
...

But if it seems like a business model dedicated to creating and destroying genetically engineered human embryos purely to persuade regulators that the technology is safe might be the kind of business that could enrage a number of constituencies, most notably ‘pro-life’ advocates who oppose things like IVF technology and want to see every embryo treated as a full human being, note how Tie is defending genetically engineered babies as being a more ethical approach to preventing heritable diseases than the embryonic selection technology that already legally operates. As Tie puts it, “We shouldn’t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix – we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing the whole person away.” It’s a grimly fascinating dynamic emerging: at the same time embryonic selection companies are offering eugenic-like services that will ultimately destroy the vast majority of embryos produced, we have Tie putting forward the idea that genetically engineering embryos is the ethical alternative. Instead of creating a large number of embryos and selecting the ‘best’ one, you just create a single embryo and engineer it as desired. Also keep in mind that the embryonic selection technology is offering services like selecting for complex multi-gene traits like IQ, so if direct embryonic gene editing was to fully replace embryonic selection, it would have to include possibly modifying the embryo’s DNA at a large number of sites:

...
Editing embryos is morally more defensible than choosing between them, Tie argues. “We shouldn’t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix – we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing the whole person away.”
...

But, of course, Tie isn’t actually solely interested in eliminating severe heritable diseases that can be fixed by a single genetic modification. When asked about whether or not she will always be opposed to gene editing for “enhancements”, she deflects by suggesting that this is really a broader question for society to answer. But then she goes on to point out that it should really be up to patient advocacy groups to determine what constitutes a “severe” disease. It’s not hard to see where this is going, especially when we see Tie issuing warnings about moving too slow and the lack of any sort of global consensus:

...
But when I ask whether she will always be opposed to gene editing for enhancement, she pauses. “Right now, the technology is not ready for that. It can only make very precise corrections and variant changes. Enhancements are complex: IQ,height– thousands of genes contribute to that, we’re nowhere close to being able to, one, understand it, and two, correct it.”

If and when it does become possible, would she want to do it?

“As of right now, I have a very strong gut reaction that I don’t want to go into that. But society is complex, and at every point in my career I want to engage with all stakeholders to make informed decisions on what’s best.”

...

For now, Tie is focused on severe disease – but she says the definition of “severe” should be left up to patient advocacy groups. “I think it’s immoral to have bioethicists and regulators that don’t have these diseases say, ‘This is not bad enough.’ While those families that have those diseases are suffering, and they know that they have to pass it down to their children, it’s very devastating for them.”

As long as reproduction is a genetic lottery, there will be parents who can argue that they don’t have the right numbers. Once it becomes possible to edit the numbers, those parents will be able to make a case that anything suboptimal is serious enough to be changed. When it comes to mission creep, the stakes of what Tie is doing are dizzyingly high.

Tie is weary of arguments such as this. “In the late 70s, IVF was invented, and there were the exact same comments from reporters. People called them ‘test tube babies’, ‘Frankenstein’s monsters’. People said it was very consequential. So this is not new.” At the same time, she says she understands why some people are deeply troubled by genetic engineering. “I have the same concerns,” she says, her hand over her heart. “I would not want to use this tomorrow, but I believe the only way to move forward is not to delay the research further.”

This sounds like the “move fast and break things” mentality of Silicon Valley we now realise is responsible for a level of damage we’re only just beginning to comprehend. But when I put this to Tie, it makes her visibly irritated. “I don’t know anyone who’s applying that mentality in the space. No one is trying to move fast and break things here. Everyone’s moving at a pace that is appropriate by scientific standards.”

...

“We talk often about the danger of moving too fast. I want to name the danger of moving too slow, and the fantasy of waiting for global consensus, which will not arrive,” Tie says in her opening remarks.

...

“Eugenics is a very heavy word,” Tie says just before taking questions from the floor. “I would prefer to stop throwing that word around.”
...

And as we can see, Tie is already creating excuses for why it will be fine if her gene-editing services are only available to the wealthy. Not surprisingly, it turns out Tie’s start as an biotech entrepreneur started when she was the recipient of the Thiel Fellowship and dropped out of college. Which makes this a good time to recall how Noor Siddiqui, the founder of the embryonic selection company, Orchid, was also a Thiel Fellow and the found of Genomic Prediction was a principal at Thiel’s Founders Fund. Thiel’s influence is all over this space:

...
I ask Tie how much gene editing will cost. “I don’t have a number because this will be determined by each country,” she replies. “Every country has a different healthcare system.” Tie is Canadian, so she and I are used to a very different healthcare system to the US. Does she feel uncomfortable that, in the country where her company is based, only the wealthy will be able to afford the incredibly powerful technology she is creating?

She pauses. “A lot of technologies are only available at a very high cost when they are first developed,” she says eventually. “Just because something is initially expensive, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist at all.” But this isn’t a new electric car or a piece of lab-grown meat. It will give the first people to use it a generational head start on everyone else. “I think this is where it’s very important to have the public be engaged with this conversation and why I participate in these interviews,” Tie says. Once again, her commitment to transparency feels like a smokescreen.

...

When Tie was 18, she won a Thiel Fellowship – a then $100,000 grant funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel awarded to people aged 22 or younger who are willing to drop out of university to “build new things” – and left the University of Toronto. “It made so much sense to me to impact more people through the markets rather than wait another 10 years to get my PhD and postdoc,” she says. “It empowered me to pursue things way more aggressively than I would have otherwise.”
...

Of course, tech oligarch interest in something like this isn’t going to be limited to Thiel. Kind of like how Epstein wasn’t the only member of the Epstein class. The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein has a lot of like-minded friends. Alive and well and presumably sharing the Epstein estate’s desires to own the future.

It was an international far right gathering to promote the concept “remigrating” millions of citizens, stripping them of citizenship on the grounds that they aren’t the ‘right kind’ of person for the nation. As we’ve seen, the concept of “remigration” has taken on a new level of organizational seriousness in the US with the ongoing radicalization of the Christian Nationalist movement that underpins much of the Trump administration’s second term agenda. Recall the project to politically capture Jackson County, Tennessee, being organized by the religious network founded by Doug Wilson, the pastor who co-authored a book with co-found of the League of the South that argued the Confederacy was a biblically aligned society and that slavery wasn’t so bad. The project envisions removing everyone from the US who doesn’t fall under a “Heritage American” definition limited to European Americans who had ancestors in the US during the Civil War and African Americans who can trace their ancestry to slaves. Everyone else has to go. The concept of remigration is only gaining momentum in right-wing circles, whether the term “remigration” is being used or not.

Nor is this the first ‘remigration’ gathering organized by Sellner or the first time we’ve heard about a prominent Trump administration official promoting a policy of mass remigration. As we saw, Sellner organized a secret in Potsdam, Germany, in November of 2023 with neo-Nazis and members of the AfD where they discussed a plan to deport “unassimilated citizens” of non-German ethnicity to a so-called “model state” in North Africa. By the fall of 2024, Stephen Miller declared “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” in anticipation of a second Trump administration. News about that secret gathering resulted in German protests. Miller’s public embrace of remigration one more step in a mainstreaming of Sellner and his ideas that’s been going on for years. Back in 2018, when Sellner was operating an anti-migrant campaign to harass migrants with boats, Alt Right troll Charles Johnson helped to fund raise for Sellner’s anti-migrant boat campaign. Christchurch Nazi shooter Brenton Tarrant was already a big fan of Sellner’s “Generation Identity” group. In May 2017, two US Marines unfurled a banner with a Generation Identity logo at a neo-Confederate rally. One of them, Sgt. Michael Chesny, went on to help organize the “Unite the Right” rally months later. When Sellner was banned from entering the UK that year, Tucker Carlson used his Fox New show to spring to defend Sellner. And that’s all part of the reason why Bovino’s attendance at Sellner’s latest ‘remigration summit’ should hardly be a surprise. Martin Sellner is a right-wing celebrity at this point.

A day before heading to the event, Bovino posted a message on X.com with an image of him giving a straight armed salute that sure looks like a sieg heil. This was a day after the publication of an interview where he made clear just how much ‘remigration’ he has in mind: according to Bovino, the US has 100 million illegal immigrants, a number that vastly exceeds all but unheard of even among the most extreme anti-immigrant voices. Illegal immigration poses the greatest threat the US has ever faced, according to Bovino, with Europe facing a similar threat. That wildly high figure is also part of the context of Bovino’s embrace of ‘remigration’. Because if you plan on deporting vast numbers of people, including legal immigrants and even citizens, having an absurdly high deportation goal will probably be very helpful, at least from a propaganda standpoint.

Bovino also engages in a rather reveal form of self-flattery in the interview, where he described how history at times thrusts “field agents” like himself into roles where they capture the public’s imagine and are forced to serve as the public face for something. Bovino sees himself as having successfully maintained public support while lamenting that, had he not been fired, the scale of the deportations would have been several times greater than what’s been seen so far. In fact, Bovino puts himself in the same category as other great leaders who were similarly forced into public roles. Leaders like General Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, J. Edgar Hoover, and Erwin Rommel. Yep, Bovino favorably compared himself to Hoover and Rommel. And given the way he frames these immigration issues as an existential war, with the West fighting for its own survival, it’s pretty clear he really does view himself as some kind of general in a war.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that Bovino wasn’t just playing a role in the ongoing mainstreaming of Martin Sellner and the concept of remigration. Bovino attending that summit alongside Jared Taylor is just the latest in Taylor’s long path towards the mainstream of conservative politics too. Recall how Taylor’s Taylor’s American Renaissance is a recipient of Pioneer Fund money. He’s also served as the spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens. In 2006, Taylor was a scandalous invite at a “Conservatism and Race” conference at the now-defunct Robert A. Taft Club, organized by Richard Spencer and Kevin DeAnna when Epstein was working for the CNP-connected “Leadership Institute”. In 2016, Taylor was a speaker at the H. L. Mencken Club, an ‘Alt Right’ oriented group formed in 2008 and that has regularly included figures like Richard Spencer. Trump administration speachwriter Darren Beattie also spoke at the event, resulting in Beattie’s ouster from the White House in 2018. By 2024, Taylor was a VIP guest at the first Natal Conference, a gathering people obsessed with the “Great Replacement” concept and falling white birthrates. Jared Taylor, like Martin Sellner, is basically a right-wing celebrity too.

That’s all part of what makes Greg Bovino’s decision to attend the ‘Remigration Summit 2026’ both notable and entirely predictable. Of course the recently fired Border Patrol chief attended an event organized by Martin Sellner. That’s where we are and have been for a while. It’s only a matter of time before “remigration” becomes a standard part of the conservative political platform, at least as a concept. And probably only a matter of time before figures like Sellner and Taylor are effectively kingmakers in conservative primaries. The question of ‘what comes after Trump’ is looming large over the conservative movement right now. Greg Bovino just gave us a peek into the likely future of conservative politics. It’ll more of the same, but worse:

Politico

AfD, Vox mingle with ex-US Border Patrol chief, white nationalist leader at ‘remigration summit’

Gregory Bovino and Jared Taylor flew in to support activists once deemed too toxic even by European far-right parties.

May 31, 2026 10:36 am CET
By Marion Solletty

PORTO, Portugal — European far-right activists who advocate the mass deportation of immigrants and their descendants are getting a boost from the Trump administration’s embrace of their key catchword: remigration.

Some 500 activists and influencers gathered south of Porto on Saturday to discuss the concept, once a fringe term only whispered in far-right circles. The United States’ former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and American white nationalist Jared Taylor were VIP guests at the tightly controlled event, which also included elected officials from Spain’s Vox and Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties.

Other leading European far-right parties, most prominently France’s National Rally, have avoided the term or rejected the policy as too extreme because it targets migrants based on their ethnicity or religion. But U.S. President Donald Trump’s use of the word and the American State Department’s pledge to create an office for remigration put wind in the sails of longtime advocates of the policy in Europe.

“When the word is acknowledged by the president of a major power … one can no longer say that it is marginal,” Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a former MEP for the French far right under Jean-Marie Le Pen, said at Saturday’s “Remigration Summit 2026”.

...

“I am very happy to come over and lend some expertise to the Europeans” to tackle “illegal aliens destroying European culture,” said Bovino at an impromptu press conference at the gate.

In an interview with a far-right website ahead of the summit, Bovino — who didn’t wear his controversial coat — referenced Nazi Germany’s lead general Erwin Rommel as an inspirational figure and offered his help to end what he described as a “creeping horror,” echoing racist terms used by far-right extremists to describe migrants.

...

Sellner’s moment

The Porto summit was co-organized by Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, who first came into the spotlight in 2024 after holding a secretive meeting in Potsdam, Germany, where he discussed the remigration concept with AfD politicians. News of the Potsdam gathering triggered large-scale protests in Germany at the time, with many pointing to parallels with early plans for the mass deportation of Jews during World War II.

Two years later, a confident Sellner made himself available to journalists for interviews at the remigration summit, dwelling on concepts that he says are now going mainstream.

...

At least three AfD politicians attended the event, including Kay Gottschalk, a member of the Bundestag and one of the party’s cofounders. Gottschalk said he was there “to listen” as “a visitor.” Lena Kotré, an AfD member and representative in the Brandenburg state legislature, spoke on stage. Sven Tritschler, a member of the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament, also was in attendance.

Vox MPs Rocío de Meer and Carlos Quero featured on the summit’s speakers list. Activist Sammy Woodhouse, a supporter of U.K. right-wing party Restore Britain, was also among the speakers.

...

Among the speakers were Dries Van Langenhove, a former Belgian MP twice convicted for hate speech, and far-right Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a promoter of the so-called great replacement conspiracy theory, according to which mainstream and political elites are conspiring to bring in large numbers of non-white migrants to replace white populations. The theory was referenced in the event’s promotional material.

Attendees also queued to take selfies with Taylor, the U.S. white nationalist who is a high-profile promoter of racialist ideology. “The United States influences Europe more than the other way around,” Taylor said outside the venue. “But among dissidents and identitarians, at least, there is a great deal of interest in Europe.”

...

“I don’t consider myself a hateful person,” said Canadian activist Daniel Tyrie, who was on one of the panels. “I don’t go around spitting on people of color because they’re in my country.”

“I just don’t think they belong here.”

————

“AfD, Vox mingle with ex-US Border Patrol chief, white nationalist leader at ‘remigration summit’” By Marion Solletty; Politico; 05/31/2026

“The Porto summit was co-organized by Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, who first came into the spotlight in 2024 after holding a secretive meeting in Potsdam, Germany, where he discussed the remigration concept with AfD politicians. News of the Potsdam gathering triggered large-scale protests in Germany at the time, with many pointing to parallels with early plans for the mass deportation of Jews during World War II.”

Another “remigration” summit organization by Martin Sellner. This time, at least, it wasn’t in secret, unlike the secret summit with the AfD Sellner organized in November of 2023 that resulted in German protests after it was discovered. And this time we find the recently fired former former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino alongside Jared Taylor, arguably the leading white nationalist in North America, with Bovino aggressively embracing the “remigration” agenda. As one attendee remarked, “When the word is acknowledged by the president of a major power … one can no longer say that it is marginal.” And it’s hard to argue with that assessment. Remigration remains the Trump administration’s open ambition:

...
Some 500 activists and influencers gathered south of Porto on Saturday to discuss the concept, once a fringe term only whispered in far-right circles. The United States’ former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and American white nationalist Jared Taylor were VIP guests at the tightly controlled event, which also included elected officials from Spain’s Vox and Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties.

Other leading European far-right parties, most prominently France’s National Rally, have avoided the term or rejected the policy as too extreme because it targets migrants based on their ethnicity or religion. But U.S. President Donald Trump’s use of the word and the American State Department’s pledge to create an office for remigration put wind in the sails of longtime advocates of the policy in Europe.

“When the word is acknowledged by the president of a major power … one can no longer say that it is marginal,” Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a former MEP for the French far right under Jean-Marie Le Pen, said at Saturday’s “Remigration Summit 2026”.

...

“I am very happy to come over and lend some expertise to the Europeans” to tackle “illegal aliens destroying European culture,” said Bovino at an impromptu press conference at the gate.

In an interview with a far-right website ahead of the summit, Bovino — who didn’t wear his controversial coat — referenced Nazi Germany’s lead general Erwin Rommel as an inspirational figure and offered his help to end what he described as a “creeping horror,” echoing racist terms used by far-right extremists to describe migrants.
...

Yes, Bovino really did reference Nazi general Erwin Rommel as an inspirational figure in an interview he did just days before the “remigration summit”. And as we’ll see in the following translation of that interview, Rommel wasn’t the only ‘field agent-turned-public leader’ Bovino cited as inspiration. He listed Rommel, Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, and J. Edgar Hoover all as examples of “field agents” who were circumstantially thrust into a role where they were forced to serve as the public face for the operation they were heading and succeeding in that public leadership role. And he clearly views himself as being another example of this kind of successful public leadership. But the comparison to Rommel seems particularly apt since, as Bovino’s comments make clear, he views the mass deportation agenda as a war against the greatest existential threat in the history of the United States and Europe, with at least 100 million illegal immigrants in the United States alone according to his estimates (translated via Firefox):

Breizh-Info

Gregory Bovino, the man who steered Trump’s operations against illegal immigration, speaks to Europe

Interview by Matisse Royer
28/05/2026

Thirty years at the American Border Patrol, a graduate of the prestigious National War College, Gregory Bovino has become, under the second term of Donald Trump, the most exposed operational and media face in the fight against illegal immigration in the United States. Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans: wherever the confrontation has hardened, we have seen it on the front line. A theorist of strategy as well as a man of the field, Gregory Bovino gives to Voxeuropa and Breizh-info, exclusively, an internship: on the internal war he has waged against the Washington bureaucrats, his dizzying figure of a hundred million illegals, the help he wants to give to Europe, and what he calls, without blinking, “the march towards total victory”.

How does a field agent become, in the space of a few months, the most public face and the most controversial of American migration policy?

Gregory Bovino: New strategic concepts — or those long ago forgotten — inevitably attract attention as soon as they are implemented nationally or internationally. Normally, it is the management of the agency that assumes the role of spokesperson, and the field command focuses on the operational. But it happens, as history has repeatedly shown, that singular circumstances force an operational leader to also assume the strategic and public dimension of an operation. Think of Rommel in Germany, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, in Patton in the United States, or Lawrence of Arabia in the United Kingdom: everyone combined a unique expertise with an exceptional situation that upset the classical communication hierarchy. They were perhaps the only ones who could—and who should— publicly embody their situation. By necessity and personal expertise, they have captured the imagination of the public while conducting effective operations at the strategic level. They grasped the overall strategy where others, in government or in the political class, did not see it or refuse to see it. Strategic expertise combined with field command, especially in chaotic and exposed events, is the rarest. That is why it is rare to see this phenomenon take shape before his eyes.

Let’s take Operation At Large, conducted across the United States. Within Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security (CBP/DHS), there was no command with the expertise to conduct an operation of this magnitude, also publicly exposed — with the exception of a single sector of the Border Patrol. That of El Centro, which I had ruled for five years, already mastered the application of migratory laws inland. I had conducted the first real domestic operation of national scope in decades, on July 29, 2010, with Operation Don’t Let ‘Em Ride, in Las Vegas. Subsequently, I spent two years sharpening these operations as Chief Patrol Agent of the New Orleans sector, hitting the illegals and smuggling networks in Louisiana, Alabama, eastern Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas. The expertise was therefore undoubtedly present in El Centro.

I also spent five years working with the exceptional teams of El Centro to build an internal application strategy capable of expelling tens of millions of illegal immigrants from the heart of the country. At El Centro, we held our border portion during the Covid period, and since our sector was the only one that remained under real operational control both during Covid and during the disastrous years of open border under Biden, we were able to refine this strategy over time. When domestic operations really started in Bakersfield, California, in January 2025 — still under Biden — CBP and DHS management was miserably unprepared and did not want any at any cost. When we spoke in Los Angeles a few months later, the two immigration career professionals, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and Border Czar Tom Homan, not only had no experience in full enforcement of migration laws, but refused to speak publicly during operations. Their reluctance triggered the singular economic situation I mentioned above. I have neither sought nor asked to become the public face of the operation; but for this type of operation, there can be only one. The responsibility came back to me.

Although I have been a field leader, the Border Patrol trains in its ranks strategists that can be mobilized at all times for higher functions. Fortunately, the Border Patrol — on the impulse of Chief Patrol Agent Paul Beeson and the Associate Chief Steven Pastor, now both retired — sent me in 2008 to the world’s best strategic school, National War College, to learn about strategic formulation and especially integrate it into Border Patrol operations. Being thrown into an unprecedented national operation was part of my training: I had been preparing for it for years. It should also be remembered that the Border Patrol is already engaged in state-of-the-art operations that can at any time switch to the national spotlights; Operation At Large was therefore not so different from what I had been doing for thirty years. She was for the Rodney Scott (a single high school graduate) or the Tom Homan, bureaucrats of the status quo, but not for seasoned Border Patrol leaders like Chief Mike Banks, Chief Jason Owens or myself.

...

How do anti-fascist groups help turn ICE operations into violent friction points?

Gregory Bovino: There are no anti-fascist groups. I call them pro-fascist groups, because they have much more in common with fascism than with the organizations they claim to fight. These pro-fascist groups are richly funded and organized to stop, delay or obstruct law enforcement officers. In doing so, they put everyone in danger. During an episode in Minnesota, I remember an anarchist who hit law enforcement vehicles and then rushed straight to a school area to maximize the media “effect.” In a few minutes, this school area was invaded by dozens of rioters and anarchists determined to assault the agents while posing as victims in front of the cameras. This tactic was developed by similar pro-fascist groups during the Vietnam War, and we reviewed it at work during the recent domestic operations. Their tactics did not end the operations, but their collusion with the pro-fascist media managed to frighten the DHS’s cautious bureaucrats, as well as the usual procession of politicians more concerned about polls than the damage caused by tens of millions of illegal immigrants.

At CPAC, you said you want to expel one hundred million people. Pew Research puts forward the figure of fourteen million. What is your estimate?

Gregory Bovino: I estimate at one hundred million the number of illegal immigrants currently present on American soil. The figure of Pew Research has not moved since the 1970’s: it is, in every way, meaningless, anchored in political correctness and in poor research — they rely on census surveys. When I joined the Border Patrol in 1996, the estimate ranged from twelve to fifteen million. Thirty years ago, illegal immigrants were absent from large portions of American territory. Concentrated mainly in California, Oregon, Washington and a little Arizona, they were rarely seen elsewhere. Around 2000, I started to notice in the Southeast. However, the estimate remained centered around twelve to fifteen million. After 2000, the valves opened and the number increased exponentially. Entire villages in Mexico have been emptied of their men between the ages of 18 and 45. Once these millions arrived, their family members began to join them, by the millions more. I saw him for thirty years at the border, and I saw it in every locality in the interior where I went. However, Pew’s number remained unchanged.

I began to seriously examine these figures in 2008, when I wrote a research paper entitled Illegal Aliens and Destruction of Natural Resources, dedicated to the destruction of our precious natural resources by the massive influx of illegal immigrants. In order for illegal immigrants to have a devastating effect on natural resources at the national level, their number necessarily had to be considerable — far greater than Pew’s. I was particularly interested in the work of Bear Stearns, which, around 2006, put forward a figure of more than twenty million. I found this figure still below reality, but it was the first research of its kind conducted by an organization without political interest, which honestly sought to establish the real number of illegal immigrants living in the United States. Bear Stearns was a bank that sought to beat its competitors by anticipating the effect of illegal immigrants on various fiduciary issues — construction, money transfers, etc. Driven by financial interests and not political demagoguery, I considered this study as a reference work.

With this figure of more than twenty million in 2006, I saw an uninterrupted flow of illegal immigrants across the border, without any domestic application capable of producing mass evictions. From 2006 to 2026, our borders were only donkey backs. Clandestines and smugglers knew that once the border was crossed, they were virtually immune to any consequence. In twenty years, and especially under Biden, millions of people have joined the interior of the country.

It was during operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte that the figure of one hundred million became clear. One of the indicators we examined is the commute times from home to work. For these times to be considered “good”, it is necessary to withdraw between 15 and 20% of commuters from traffic. In Charlotte, there are about 153 000 commuters per day. As soon as we launched Operation Charlotte’s Web, travel times did not go into “good” category: they went into “excellent” category. Estimates indicated that 30% and more of commuters were no longer travelling. This means that at least 30% of them were most likely illegal immigrants. That’s about a quarter of Charlotte’s commuters. And this figure, you guessed, fits perfectly with the total of one hundred million: out of 420 million inhabitants in the United States, I estimate that one hundred million are illegals. The same is true for children absent from Charlotte schools: more than 30% of students were missing. These were, of course, illegal children or children of illegal immigrants. This is again a quarter of the population. Understanding the reality of America deep in the face of illegal immigrants, cross-referenced with my direct knowledge of the border and confronted with my own research as well as the current work, leads me to the conclusion that there are a hundred million illegals in the United States. This includes visa overruns and all categories of illegal immigrants. Recall that the United States has been the global discharge of illegal immigration for four years under the Biden puppet.

You have criticized Tom Homan and Markwayne Mullin for favoring “the worst of the worst” over mass evictions. Has the Trump administration abandoned its promise of a central campaign?

Gregory Bovino: I have not criticized either Homan or Mullin. I just told the truth, because I care about America. If they or others perceive it as a criticism, it may be their position that they should question, not mine. “The worst of the worst” — what’s also called targeting — is all that Homan, Scott and now Mullin are familiar with. I cannot directly blame them for not having acquired the knowledge, skills and abilities to, on the one hand, understand the problem, and on the other hand, to solve it. If there were to be criticism, it would target the fact that they are using a tactic — “the worst of the worst” — by brandishing it as if it were a global strategy capable of serving national interests. “The worst of the worst” is just one tactic among others in the full implementation of migration laws. Tactics are not strategy, and confusing the two at the political-bureaucratic level has produced disastrous results throughout history. “The worst of the worst” has its place in a migration system already under control, where an adjustment here, an arrest there is enough to keep the whole thing in efficient operation. We are very far from this situation today, and the way they manage the current disaster reveals their commitment to the status quo and their lack of skills to implement a comprehensive migration strategy. Homan has not made any arrests in twenty years, Scott was originally a technocrat, and Mullin is a good plumber. Experienced professionals with strategic formulation, rich in years of training, expertise and field experience, are invaluable. Professionals who aspire to the status quo are a ball.

I don’t believe Trump gave up his campaign promise. I believe that his “advisors” do not bring him up the reality on the ground. Those I have cited, like others — all foreigners in the field of border security — are not familiar with the application of migratory laws. Most don’t even know the difference between ICE and the Border Patrol — plainclothes investigators on one side, highly trained uniform agents on the other — much less what full application entails. If it were to be done again, I would have briefed Trump directly several times, rather than relying on that close circle that might have interests elsewhere. Trump is the best president I’ve ever worked for, and I think he’ll be back to that campaign promise soon.

Is Trump hampered by his close circle, or does he manage the electoral pressure of the upcoming midterms?

Gregory Bovino: The midterms undoubtedly influence this close circle. They are worried about the polls, while Americans are killed by illegal immigrants. I don’t care about polls and politics: my position is apolitical. This is probably what fuels friction between the two sides — the full application on one side, the circle close together. Strategists must take into account the entire context, which I do, but that does not exclude conflict. I expected it, since we were in unexplored territory. What I didn’t expect was to have to fight a war on two fronts. Fighting criminals on one side, and those in government supposed to support you on the other: it is a difficult position, a war on two fronts. If we return to the rare moments of history when a leader emerges as the absolute focal point of an operation, all have had to face this type of conflict. Patton collided with Eisenhower and Omar Bradley; Hoover broke the careers of those he feared would delight his status — Melvin Purvis, for example.

What does this period reveal about the link between operational firmness, public image and electoral support?

Gregory Bovino: The three are intrinsically linked, they have always been and always will be. Uncontrolled immigration to the United States is now the biggest threat to our culture and our very existence — it’s also true for you in Europe. Sometimes you have to give everything you have, and that’s one of those moments. The public image and electoral support remained high, and we were only at the beginning of the operations! In a few months, the scale and depth of the migration operations would have been several times greater than what you have seen. Patton understood what was being played out in his march across Germany. He was supposed to let Montgomery reach Berlin first, but he grasped the stakes and accomplished what he had to accomplish. Operational firmness, public image and electoral support are not mutually exclusive. I felt that as domestic implementation unfolds, support in these three areas would continue to progress. We were on the march towards total victory, ladies and gentlemen.

...

At CPAC, you told the Spiegel that you are “happy to help Germany.” What can Europeans realistically get from the American experience?

Gregory Bovino: Europe is in a critical situation. Uncontrolled immigration to Europe is now coming to a fatal end. Europeans look at this chapter that opens up in the United States as a point of reference for their own problems. At CPAC, I spoke with countless Europeans, looking for both the lessons to be learned and, above all, viable strategies in the face of their own migration problem. What happened in the past year is great news for Europe. First, it demonstrates the extent of the migration problem; then it traces a feasible, sustainable and acceptable strategy for Europe. Above all, it aroused the interest of citizens across the continent and gave them hope. They now know that it is feasible: we have just provided you with a roadmap. As for helping Germany or anyone else: passport in your pocket, ready to go! Help our European brothers and sisters. We understand what your innocent citizens are facing. It is time to deport massively from Europe. I would love to visit parts of Europe where I’ve never set foot and raise a few glasses of Scottish single malt or sip a pint of Guinness in Manchester, without having to worry about cultural change or crime! Americans care about the well-being of Europeans. Come on, Europe!

Jared Taylor told Voxeuropa that remigration would take a different form in Europe and America. Do you agree? What is the real goal of a large-scale expulsion policy?

Gregory Bovino: The goal is something else entirely. It is cultural recovery and assimilation. Illegal immigrants, and many of the immigrants who have arrived in the United States and Europe for the past two decades, have no intention of assimilating to our culture. This is arguably the biggest threat to the United States since the country’s founding. With millions of strangers on American soil rejecting our culture, our heritage, our traditions, our exceptionalism, our values, it is our formula of success that touches on its twilight. I see the same thing happen in Europe. You — we — are besieged. We have reached the tipping point. Today, our main fight is not with illegal immigrants or unassimilated immigrants: it is with the bureaucrats of the status quo and the cautious politicians, determined to suspend the action or wait for the next electoral cycle. It is the same in both our spaces.

Jared Taylor is right in saying that remigration may take a different form in Europe. It is possible. If and when we manage to overcome these cumbersome bureaucrats and politicians — the popular base will take care of them for us — the precise tactics of getting those who are to be left may take different forms in Europe and the United States. But it will have to be done on both sides if the crops are to survive.

In Europe, remigration is driven by movements such as the AfD, and personalities such as Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Renaud Camus and Martin Sellner. Do you follow this dynamic, and do you see the echo of your own fight?

Gregory Bovino: The fight is very close in Europe and the United States. The same thing is at stake: illegal immigrants who do not share your values. The AfD in Germany is in the real, in my opinion. They reject political correctness for the benefit of German culture and identity. I’m proud of the AfD, like Restore Britain and others. Never sacrifice your citizens and your culture to people who do not care who Lawrence of Arabia was or whether Alexander Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo. They have nothing to know if your grandfather fought in the Great War and died at Belleau Wood, or whether Henry IV was a great king. This should terrify every European on their soil. It’s strange, but I fear for Europe. The conversations at CPAC with excellent interlocutors from your home convinced me. We face the same creeping horror on a global scale. Why not work together to solve it?

The American conservatives see us as a global brotherhood in the face of the migration problem. Progressives are not part of it, and are frankly against you. A common enemy or a common problem unites like nothing else. Some of your daughters are raped and your sons killed in Europe by immigrants that your authorities have brought in, just like here in the United States. The same problem in different geographies. Why not unite and solve it once and for all, all over the world? It’s been a long time since I’ve felt united with Europe — Brexit has been a good time — but in recent years, opportunities have been rare. If only you had the freedom to carry guns... This migration problem has definitively put me by your side. Brothers in arms, if you will. Good luck, Europe: millions of us are in your camp. We want to find our old Europe!

...

————-

“Gregory Bovino, the man who steered Trump’s operations against illegal immigration, speaks to Europe” by Matisse Royer (translated via Firefox); Breizh-Info; 05/28/2026

“Gregory Bovino: There are no anti-fascist groups. I call them pro-fascist groups, because they have much more in common with fascism than with the organizations they claim to fight. These pro-fascist groups are richly funded and organized to stop, delay or obstruct law enforcement officers. In doing so, they put everyone in danger. During an episode in Minnesota, I remember an anarchist who hit law enforcement vehicles and then rushed straight to a school area to maximize the media “effect.” In a few minutes, this school area was invaded by dozens of rioters and anarchists determined to assault the agents while posing as victims in front of the cameras. This tactic was developed by similar pro-fascist groups during the Vietnam War, and we reviewed it at work during the recent domestic operations. Their tactics did not end the operations, but their collusion with the pro-fascist media managed to frighten the DHS’s cautious bureaucrats, as well as the usual procession of politicians more concerned about polls than the damage caused by tens of millions of illegal immigrants.”

There are no anti-fascist groups. They’re all pro-fascist. That was one of the messages Greg Bovino recently shared in an interview published days before his attendance at the “Remigration 2026 summit” organized by Martin Sellner. An interview where Bovino doesn’t just praise General Rommel and J. Edgar Hoover as examples of the kind of “operational leaders” who were circumstantially forced into a public communications role where they excelled at becoming the public face of a larger operation. Bovino views himself as having been such a leader. One who had to fight a ‘war on two fronts’: a war against criminal and war against the political establishment, with maintaining public support being a critical function. And Bovino clearly views himself as having been very successful on both mass deportations and keeping high public support. At the same time, we can see Bovino bemoaning the lack of support from officials while asserting that the scale of the deportation operations would have been “several times greater than what you have seen” had he been allowed to continue, while calling illegal immigration the “biggest threat to our culture and our very existence”, along with Europe’s existence. He wasn’t the head of Border Patrol. He was a general bravely fighting a two front war. Like Rommel:

...
How does a field agent become, in the space of a few months, the most public face and the most controversial of American migration policy?

Gregory Bovino: New strategic concepts — or those long ago forgotten — inevitably attract attention as soon as they are implemented nationally or internationally. Normally, it is the management of the agency that assumes the role of spokesperson, and the field command focuses on the operational. But it happens, as history has repeatedly shown, that singular circumstances force an operational leader to also assume the strategic and public dimension of an operation. Think of Rommel in Germany, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, in Patton in the United States, or Lawrence of Arabia in the United Kingdom: everyone combined a unique expertise with an exceptional situation that upset the classical communication hierarchy. They were perhaps the only ones who could—and who should— publicly embody their situation. By necessity and personal expertise, they have captured the imagination of the public while conducting effective operations at the strategic level. They grasped the overall strategy where others, in government or in the political class, did not see it or refuse to see it. Strategic expertise combined with field command, especially in chaotic and exposed events, is the rarest. That is why it is rare to see this phenomenon take shape before his eyes.

Let’s take Operation At Large, conducted across the United States. Within Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security (CBP/DHS), there was no command with the expertise to conduct an operation of this magnitude, also publicly exposed — with the exception of a single sector of the Border Patrol. That of El Centro, which I had ruled for five years, already mastered the application of migratory laws inland. I had conducted the first real domestic operation of national scope in decades, on July 29, 2010, with Operation Don’t Let ‘Em Ride, in Las Vegas. Subsequently, I spent two years sharpening these operations as Chief Patrol Agent of the New Orleans sector, hitting the illegals and smuggling networks in Louisiana, Alabama, eastern Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas. The expertise was therefore undoubtedly present in El Centro.

I also spent five years working with the exceptional teams of El Centro to build an internal application strategy capable of expelling tens of millions of illegal immigrants from the heart of the country. At El Centro, we held our border portion during the Covid period, and since our sector was the only one that remained under real operational control both during Covid and during the disastrous years of open border under Biden, we were able to refine this strategy over time. When domestic operations really started in Bakersfield, California, in January 2025 — still under Biden — CBP and DHS management was miserably unprepared and did not want any at any cost. When we spoke in Los Angeles a few months later, the two immigration career professionals, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and Border Czar Tom Homan, not only had no experience in full enforcement of migration laws, but refused to speak publicly during operations. Their reluctance triggered the singular economic situation I mentioned above. I have neither sought nor asked to become the public face of the operation; but for this type of operation, there can be only one. The responsibility came back to me.

Although I have been a field leader, the Border Patrol trains in its ranks strategists that can be mobilized at all times for higher functions. Fortunately, the Border Patrol — on the impulse of Chief Patrol Agent Paul Beeson and the Associate Chief Steven Pastor, now both retired — sent me in 2008 to the world’s best strategic school, National War College, to learn about strategic formulation and especially integrate it into Border Patrol operations. Being thrown into an unprecedented national operation was part of my training: I had been preparing for it for years. It should also be remembered that the Border Patrol is already engaged in state-of-the-art operations that can at any time switch to the national spotlights; Operation At Large was therefore not so different from what I had been doing for thirty years. She was for the Rodney Scott (a single high school graduate) or the Tom Homan, bureaucrats of the status quo, but not for seasoned Border Patrol leaders like Chief Mike Banks, Chief Jason Owens or myself.

...

Is Trump hampered by his close circle, or does he manage the electoral pressure of the upcoming midterms?

Gregory Bovino: The midterms undoubtedly influence this close circle. They are worried about the polls, while Americans are killed by illegal immigrants. I don’t care about polls and politics: my position is apolitical. This is probably what fuels friction between the two sides — the full application on one side, the circle close together. Strategists must take into account the entire context, which I do, but that does not exclude conflict. I expected it, since we were in unexplored territory. What I didn’t expect was to have to fight a war on two fronts. Fighting criminals on one side, and those in government supposed to support you on the other: it is a difficult position, a war on two fronts. If we return to the rare moments of history when a leader emerges as the absolute focal point of an operation, all have had to face this type of conflict. Patton collided with Eisenhower and Omar Bradley; Hoover broke the careers of those he feared would delight his status — Melvin Purvis, for example.

What does this period reveal about the link between operational firmness, public image and electoral support?

Gregory Bovino: The three are intrinsically linked, they have always been and always will be. Uncontrolled immigration to the United States is now the biggest threat to our culture and our very existence — it’s also true for you in Europe. Sometimes you have to give everything you have, and that’s one of those moments. The public image and electoral support remained high, and we were only at the beginning of the operations! In a few months, the scale and depth of the migration operations would have been several times greater than what you have seen. Patton understood what was being played out in his march across Germany. He was supposed to let Montgomery reach Berlin first, but he grasped the stakes and accomplished what he had to accomplish. Operational firmness, public image and electoral support are not mutually exclusive. I felt that as domestic implementation unfolds, support in these three areas would continue to progress. We were on the march towards total victory, ladies and gentlemen.
...

And then we get to his incredible estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the US: 100 million. A wildly high number that happens to serve as a great pretext for mass deportations on a scale previously unimaginable. Which is very convenient if “remigration” is the ultimate plan:

...
At CPAC, you said you want to expel one hundred million people. Pew Research puts forward the figure of fourteen million. What is your estimate?

Gregory Bovino: I estimate at one hundred million the number of illegal immigrants currently present on American soil. The figure of Pew Research has not moved since the 1970’s: it is, in every way, meaningless, anchored in political correctness and in poor research — they rely on census surveys. When I joined the Border Patrol in 1996, the estimate ranged from twelve to fifteen million. Thirty years ago, illegal immigrants were absent from large portions of American territory. Concentrated mainly in California, Oregon, Washington and a little Arizona, they were rarely seen elsewhere. Around 2000, I started to notice in the Southeast. However, the estimate remained centered around twelve to fifteen million. After 2000, the valves opened and the number increased exponentially. Entire villages in Mexico have been emptied of their men between the ages of 18 and 45. Once these millions arrived, their family members began to join them, by the millions more. I saw him for thirty years at the border, and I saw it in every locality in the interior where I went. However, Pew’s number remained unchanged.

I began to seriously examine these figures in 2008, when I wrote a research paper entitled Illegal Aliens and Destruction of Natural Resources, dedicated to the destruction of our precious natural resources by the massive influx of illegal immigrants. In order for illegal immigrants to have a devastating effect on natural resources at the national level, their number necessarily had to be considerable — far greater than Pew’s. I was particularly interested in the work of Bear Stearns, which, around 2006, put forward a figure of more than twenty million. I found this figure still below reality, but it was the first research of its kind conducted by an organization without political interest, which honestly sought to establish the real number of illegal immigrants living in the United States. Bear Stearns was a bank that sought to beat its competitors by anticipating the effect of illegal immigrants on various fiduciary issues — construction, money transfers, etc. Driven by financial interests and not political demagoguery, I considered this study as a reference work.

With this figure of more than twenty million in 2006, I saw an uninterrupted flow of illegal immigrants across the border, without any domestic application capable of producing mass evictions. From 2006 to 2026, our borders were only donkey backs. Clandestines and smugglers knew that once the border was crossed, they were virtually immune to any consequence. In twenty years, and especially under Biden, millions of people have joined the interior of the country.

It was during operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte that the figure of one hundred million became clear. One of the indicators we examined is the commute times from home to work. For these times to be considered “good”, it is necessary to withdraw between 15 and 20% of commuters from traffic. In Charlotte, there are about 153 000 commuters per day. As soon as we launched Operation Charlotte’s Web, travel times did not go into “good” category: they went into “excellent” category. Estimates indicated that 30% and more of commuters were no longer travelling. This means that at least 30% of them were most likely illegal immigrants. That’s about a quarter of Charlotte’s commuters. And this figure, you guessed, fits perfectly with the total of one hundred million: out of 420 million inhabitants in the United States, I estimate that one hundred million are illegals. The same is true for children absent from Charlotte schools: more than 30% of students were missing. These were, of course, illegal children or children of illegal immigrants. This is again a quarter of the population. Understanding the reality of America deep in the face of illegal immigrants, cross-referenced with my direct knowledge of the border and confronted with my own research as well as the current work, leads me to the conclusion that there are a hundred million illegals in the United States. This includes visa overruns and all categories of illegal immigrants. Recall that the United States has been the global discharge of illegal immigration for four years under the Biden puppet.
...

And as we can see, Bovino didn’t just share the VIP status at the recent remigration summit with Jared Taylor. Bovino is basically aligned with Jared Taylor’s worldview, portraying immigration over the past couple of decades as “the biggest threat to the United States since the country’s founding”. And when we see Bovino agreeing with Taylor’s suggestion that “remigration” could take different forms in the US and Europe, keep in mind the “Heritage American” vision of the US that will be limited to European Americans who had ancestors in the US during the Civil War and African Americans who can trace their ancestry to slaves. A lot of European countries without a history of slavery will presumably be even more exclusive in their definitions of who constitutes a “Heritage” citizen:

...
Jared Taylor told Voxeuropa that remigration would take a different form in Europe and America. Do you agree? What is the real goal of a large-scale expulsion policy?

Gregory Bovino: The goal is something else entirely. It is cultural recovery and assimilation. Illegal immigrants, and many of the immigrants who have arrived in the United States and Europe for the past two decades, have no intention of assimilating to our culture. This is arguably the biggest threat to the United States since the country’s founding. With millions of strangers on American soil rejecting our culture, our heritage, our traditions, our exceptionalism, our values, it is our formula of success that touches on its twilight. I see the same thing happen in Europe. You — we — are besieged. We have reached the tipping point. Today, our main fight is not with illegal immigrants or unassimilated immigrants: it is with the bureaucrats of the status quo and the cautious politicians, determined to suspend the action or wait for the next electoral cycle. It is the same in both our spaces.

Jared Taylor is right in saying that remigration may take a different form in Europe. It is possible. If and when we manage to overcome these cumbersome bureaucrats and politicians — the popular base will take care of them for us — the precise tactics of getting those who are to be left may take different forms in Europe and the United States. But it will have to be done on both sides if the crops are to survive.
...

Finally, and ominously, note how Bovino is touting the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies as a potential model that could be used by Europe. At the same time, Bovino not only describes progressives as “a common enemy” outside of the “global brotherhood in the face of the migration problem”. He also laments the relative lack of access to guns in a lot of European countries while casting European far right anti-immigrant activists as fellow “Brothers in arms”. This isn’t exactly subtle:

...
In Europe, remigration is driven by movements such as the AfD, and personalities such as Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Renaud Camus and Martin Sellner. Do you follow this dynamic, and do you see the echo of your own fight?

Gregory Bovino: The fight is very close in Europe and the United States. The same thing is at stake: illegal immigrants who do not share your values. The AfD in Germany is in the real, in my opinion. They reject political correctness for the benefit of German culture and identity. I’m proud of the AfD, like Restore Britain and others. Never sacrifice your citizens and your culture to people who do not care who Lawrence of Arabia was or whether Alexander Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo. They have nothing to know if your grandfather fought in the Great War and died at Belleau Wood, or whether Henry IV was a great king. This should terrify every European on their soil. It’s strange, but I fear for Europe. The conversations at CPAC with excellent interlocutors from your home convinced me. We face the same creeping horror on a global scale. Why not work together to solve it?

The American conservatives see us as a global brotherhood in the face of the migration problem. Progressives are not part of it, and are frankly against you. A common enemy or a common problem unites like nothing else. Some of your daughters are raped and your sons killed in Europe by immigrants that your authorities have brought in, just like here in the United States. The same problem in different geographies. Why not unite and solve it once and for all, all over the world? It’s been a long time since I’ve felt united with Europe — Brexit has been a good time — but in recent years, opportunities have been rare. If only you had the freedom to carry guns... This migration problem has definitively put me by your side. Brothers in arms, if you will. Good luck, Europe: millions of us are in your camp. We want to find our old Europe!
...

“If only you had the freedom to carry guns... This migration problem has definitively put me by your side. Brothers in arms, if you will.”

What kind of ‘freedom’ is Bovino wishing his European “brothers in arms” were able to exercise? We’ll probably just have to wait for next ‘Remigration Summit 2027’ to find out. Or maybe just wait for the armed mobs in search of the 100 million ‘others’ needing to be purged.

This isn’t the first time Rep. Luna has speculated about the interdimensional nature of UFOs. Which is kind of the point. She keeps bringing it up, over and over, including a post on X.com last month simply stating “Read the Book of Enoch”. As we’ve seen, when Rep. Luna is talking about the Book of Enoch, she’s referring to a piece of scripture seen by some as biblical references to human interactions with extraterrestrials, with the book describing how angels came to earth and procreated with humans, leading a race of giants in the time before the biblical flood. It’s a narrative aligned with the ‘ancient astronaut’ themes that have long been popularized in the media, with white supremacist ‘Aryan super-civilization’ notions hiding just beneath the surface. Were the miraculous events described in the Bible the work of extraterrestrials? Are the aliens really angels? Maybe they’re fallen angels! Watch out!

And while Rep. Luna hasn’t seemed to need a reason to regularly promote the Book of Enoch, she does have a new reason: a collection of 46 UFO videos that congress demanded be publicly released in April were finally released last week. One of the videos includes an object that appears to slowly shape-shift, at one point taking a shape that could almost be humanoid with wings. Another video shows an object with ‘wheels within wheels’ that some suggest fits the description of the biblical Cherubim.

But as we’re going to see, Rep. Luna isn’t the only person in government who is apparently issuing warnings about the interdimensional, possibly demonic, nature of the UFO phenomena. Pastor Joseph Zupetz and evangelist Tony Merkel recently shared with the Daily Mail how they were invited to a private meeting in Tennessee back in February where intelligence insiders and former military personnel discussed the idea that the unidentified objects could be ‘interdimensional beings’ or advanced technology. The organizers of the gathering apparently repeatedly compared the disclosure of this phenomena to the biblical End Times prophecy of a powerful spiritual crisis that precedes the return of Jesus. Zupetz warns there is a growing belief amongst Christians that these beings were “interdimensional evil spirits, fallen angels or demons.”

There’s another interesting detail to note in this latest release of 46 new videos: the video of the Cherubim-like shapeshifting entity was reported by the US Indo-Pacific Command in 2024 while the angel-like entity was spotted in June of 2020. Considering the decades of UFO sightings, it’s hard not to notice that the most provocative sightings are so recent. Why aren’t there all sorts of videos of shape-shifting entities going back decades? The aliens/demons who have been allegedly been interacting with humanity for millennia presumably haven’t had a number of technological advances in recent decades.

That’s the toxic theological mess unfolding as the ‘UFO disclosure’ process continues to play out, with Rep. Luna leading the way. Which makes this a good time to recall the Christian Dominionist theocratic underpinnings of the MAGA movement and the reality that Rep. Luna was recruited for conservative politics by none other than Charlie Kirk. A capture of society’s institutions by these forces has long been underway, with massive ambitions for a further consolidation of power including the ongoing efforts to trigger an Article V Convention of States that could rewrite the US Constitution. And then there’s the sad reality that Donald Trump has been repeatedly portrayed by his Christian fundamentalist backers as some sort of divinely ordained agent of God who has been tasked with fighting the agents of Satan. And here we are, with the Trump administration and its MAGA allies in Congress pushing the idea that this big ‘UFO disclosure’ process isn’t just revealing alien life. This ‘disclosure’ process is part of the End Times! A great deception that precedes the return of Jesus! That’s the message being sent to the public. Which also makes this a good time to recall some sort of apocalyptic war is also presumed to be part of the End Times. It’s long been obvious that some sort of ‘UFO disclosure’ process could easily be turned into one of the greated propaganda opportunities in history. And here we are, with some sort of ‘UFO disclosure’ process playing right into End Times propaganda. Buckle up:

Vanity Fair

Anna Paulina Luna Is on a Mission to Reveal the Government’s Biggest Secrets

Forget the Epstein files. With the Trump administration’s latest declassification dump of materials related to unidentified aerial phenomena, the Florida congresswoman tells Vanity Fair that questions about extraterrestrial life are more pressing than ever.

By Dan Adler
May 20, 2026

Before Anna Paulina Luna was elected to Congress, she had a concerning conversation with an Air Force pilot.

Luna enlisted as an airfield manager at 19 years old, working with pilots on their flight plans and airfield inspections, and during her active duty in Portland, Oregon, one of them relayed to her an ominous account of an airspace incursion.

“He had basically implied it was a UAP,” Luna told me last week in a phone interview. “Couldn’t talk about it. He was really kind of spooked.”

The 37-year-old Florida Republican congresswoman has never personally seen a UFO, and prior to her political career, she largely put extraterrestrial issues out of her mind. But the incident remained formative—she has tied her thinking around the possibility of “interdimensional beings” to an ancient religious text—and in her three years in her office, Luna has made releasing the government’s classified materials related to unidentified aerial phenomena, along with the files on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Jeffrey Epstein, one of her calling cards as the leader of Congress’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. This month the Pentagon began releasing its UFO files at the direction of Donald Trump. So far, about 160 files, ranging from the 1940s to the near present and presented as raw material with no further context or analysis, include eyewitness statements, photos, and videos of distant objects—enough to stoke more intrigue, but nothing that has landed as a bombshell yet. In an increasingly familiar ritual in the age of the Epstein files, new materials will be released every few weeks, according to the White House.

...

For Luna, the release of the UFO files represents a sort of culmination of her work in Congress after taking an uncommon path to politics. While serving in the military, Luna picked up some modeling work— Maxim named her a “Hometown Hottie,” while Sports Illustrated listed her as a “Lovely Lady of the Day”—and she started to grow her social media following. She had no political identity to speak of. But through her work with veteran nonprofits, she became fixated on the subject of human trafficking at the US-Mexico border, and one of the videos she recorded about the topic went viral. Charlie Kirk, who was then building his conservative youth movement, saw her potential in the online political ecosystem. In 2018, the day before Luna was set to leave for medical school, she says Kirk called her about joining Turning Point USA and its campus tours as national Hispanic outreach director. He thought that, along with another new protégé, Candace Owens, he had a star on his hands. For the first time, Luna began thinking of herself as a conservative.

The next year, Luna decided to make her first run for Congress. After one failed campaign to represent the district spanning Pinellas County on Florida’s Gulf Coast, she entered office in 2023. In the course of five years, her political awakening had led to her arriving in Washington as part of a new Trump-aligned MAGA caucus including Marjorie Taylor Greene and JD Vance. “I remember people started saying,” Luna told me last year, “you’re really the first influencer who came to Congress.”

In office, Luna has carved out a distinctly Trump-era pop culture imprint, a path that she traced over several phone and Zoom interviews as I sought perspective on a variety of head-spinning developments in the celebrity-politics nexus. She has advocated for the pardon and release of Canadian rapper Tory Lanez, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for shooting Megan Thee Stallion, after connecting his incarceration to her own backstory. (Luna has said that her late father struggled with drug addiction and was in and out of jail during her childhood—“I understand the pitfalls of the prison systems,” she told me.) She helped broker the president’s alliance with Nicki Minaj, with whom she shares some overlapping social circles of hip-hop-adjacent personalities including Kanye West ex Amber Rose, and filed legislation to engrave Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore. (In endorsing Luna for reelection on his Truth Social platform last year, Trump described her as a “MAGA Warrior” and “WINNER.”) She has appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where she discussed several of his pet fascinations, including her UAP work and her belief in the multiple-shooters theory of JFK’s assassination, during one of his signature marathon conversations. Right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool has described her as the “most based”—or coolest—member of Congress.

Luna’s other priorities in office have included tightening federal voting restrictions and cracking down on congressional stock trading, but leading the declassification task force has drawn the most public intrigue. The panel, established last year, is made up of seven Republicans, including representatives Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, and six Democrats, Representative Jasmine Crockett among them. It is focused on investigating and facilitating the release of sealed federal records related to American mysteries that have endured across decades. Luna notes that her inquiries into such mysteries are of particular interest to the younger, more online generations.

“I just think that younger people are more—we have more tech that we’re able to access whereas historically the government did kind of try to silo this information and gaslight people,” she said. “And so I think right now the aspect of, ‘Hey, maybe we’re not the only thing out there’ is a very real question that many people ask themselves, and the stigma doesn’t seem to be as strong with the younger generation starting with Gen X onward.”

The president, in announcing the declassification of the UFO files, made a similar acknowledgement. “I thought I’d save it for this crowd,” Trump told the young conservative audience at a Turning Point USA event in April, “because you’re a little bit out-there.” Doubling down on his outreach, he recently posted an AI-generated meme of himself and Secret Service officers escorting an alien in handcuffs.

...

During her first term in office, Luna went to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida with then congressman Matt Gaetz and Tennessee Republican congressman Tim Burchett. (Luna and Burchett now spearhead an informal UFO caucus along with congressmen Eric Burlison (R‑Mo.) and Jared Moskowitz (D‑Fla.).) A few pilots at the base had claimed that the Air Force was covering up UAP activity there. “We then started really pulling the string,” she said, “and oh what a glorious string that was to pull.” After Trump was reelected the following year, she started seeing broader cooperation among intelligence agencies to release previously sealed files. “This is something that started out with, ‘Hey, we’re going to just follow up on a lead and turn it to a national thing,’” Luna said, “and now we’re seeing declassification.”

Still, if the disclosure campaign was meant to quell conspiracy enthusiasts by providing answers to their questions, in some high-profile cases it is doing the opposite.

“What doesn’t totally make sense is why now disclosure?” Rogan said on his show this month, linking the timing of the release to Trump’s war in Iran. “We need something to distract us.”

“Trump…declassifying the UFO info—by the way, we’re in a war with Iran, the Epstein files…are not gonna see the light of day,” comedian and Rogan affiliate Tim Dillon said on his podcast. “Gas prices are dramatically rising, the cost of food is rising…. They’re telling us, ‘We’re the government. Leave us alone.’”

With more videos from the Pentagon’s UAP files set to be released, Luna believes the fight for transparency about the government’s knowledge of extraterrestrial life is just beginning. She’s also interested in the theories surrounding a cluster of dead and missing scientists who are thought by some to have dealt with classified UAP information. Asked about the scientists, she couldn’t help but toss out a theory of her own.

“I mean, for all we know, could be related to China,” she said. “But it’s definitely interesting.”

———–

“Anna Paulina Luna Is on a Mission to Reveal the Government’s Biggest Secrets” By Dan Adler; Vanity Fair; 05/20/2026

“The 37-year-old Florida Republican congresswoman has never personally seen a UFO, and prior to her political career, she largely put extraterrestrial issues out of her mind. But the incident remained formative—she has tied her thinking around the possibility of “interdimensional beings” to an ancient religious text—and in her three years in her office, Luna has made releasing the government’s classified materials related to unidentified aerial phenomena, along with the files on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Jeffrey Epstein, one of her calling cards as the leader of Congress’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. This month the Pentagon began releasing its UFO files at the direction of Donald Trump. So far, about 160 files, ranging from the 1940s to the near present and presented as raw material with no further context or analysis, include eyewitness statements, photos, and videos of distant objects—enough to stoke more intrigue, but nothing that has landed as a bombshell yet. In an increasingly familiar ritual in the age of the Epstein files, new materials will be released every few weeks, according to the White House.”

They aren’t UFOs. They’re interdimensional beings. That’s the message Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is continuing to push as part of her ongoing role as the leading ‘disclosure’ member of congress. It’s the same message she’s been repeatedly publicly pushing for the last year. Along with suggestions like China being behind the clusters of dead or missing scientists that remains unexplained. Rep Luna doesn’t hesitate to irresponsibly speculate. It’s kind of her job at this point:

...
During her first term in office, Luna went to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida with then congressman Matt Gaetz and Tennessee Republican congressman Tim Burchett. (Luna and Burchett now spearhead an informal UFO caucus along with congressmen Eric Burlison (R‑Mo.) and Jared Moskowitz (D‑Fla.).) A few pilots at the base had claimed that the Air Force was covering up UAP activity there. “We then started really pulling the string,” she said, “and oh what a glorious string that was to pull.” After Trump was reelected the following year, she started seeing broader cooperation among intelligence agencies to release previously sealed files. “This is something that started out with, ‘Hey, we’re going to just follow up on a lead and turn it to a national thing,’” Luna said, “and now we’re seeing declassification.”

...

With more videos from the Pentagon’s UAP files set to be released, Luna believes the fight for transparency about the government’s knowledge of extraterrestrial life is just beginning. She’s also interested in the theories surrounding a cluster of dead and missing scientists who are thought by some to have dealt with classified UAP information. Asked about the scientists, she couldn’t help but toss out a theory of her own.

“I mean, for all we know, could be related to China,” she said. “But it’s definitely interesting.”
...

But, of course, Rep Luna’s speculation around “interdimensional beings” isn’t limited to suspicions about the trans-dimensional nature of UFOs. It’s biblical. Or, rather, it’s written in the Book of Enoch, a piece of scripture that’s been removed from the cannons of most Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. Yes, Rep Luna can’t stop publicly wondering if the UFOs are some sort of confirmation of the tales of the Book of Enoch, which described how angels arrived on Earth and procreated with humans, creating a now-deceased race of giants that preceded the biblical flood. As Rep Luna suggests, the removal of the Book of Enoch from official cannon is actually part of a cover up regarding ET contact in ancient times. In other words, we aren’t just looking a major UFO disclosure process. This is going to be divine disclosure, where we learn about the biblical cover up that has long obscured our divine extraterrestrial origins:

New York Post

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna claims ancient Bible story about fallen angels depicts aliens invading Earth: ‘The truth is in plain sight!’

By Ben Cost
Published April 22, 2026, 2:04 p.m. ET

This puts the “resurrection” in “Alien Resurrection.”

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Fla.) is drawing shocking parallels between extraterrestrials and the Bible in a series of viral X posts with millions of views.

“Read the book of Enoch,” the pol wrote in one of the posts, which is pinned to the top of her account.

Luna, who is the acting chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee tasked with declassifying state secrets, was referring to a Jewish religious text written between 300 and 100 BC that referenced Noah’s great-grandfather, Enoch.

Dubbed Enoch’s “Book of Watchers,” the divisive scripture describes how a coalition of 200 angels, known as the Watchers, arrived on Earth and procreated with human women, who later gave birth to an ancient race of giants that preceded the biblical flood.

Like a theological version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the Promethean beings also bestowed humanity with knowledge on forbidden subjects ranging from sorcery to arms-making.

Often viewed as controversial, the scripture has been stricken from the standard religious canon taught by most Jews, Protestants and Catholics.

However, Luna has repeatedly referred to this text, which she claims was omitted from the Bible to cover up info regarding ET contact during ancient times.

Aliens may not have built the pyramids, but perhaps they interacted with Noah’s great-grandad and Jesus’ mom.

The Republican’s apparent Martian-related Bible stories aren’t limited to the Old Testament, either. Just minutes after her initial X post, the lawmaker uploaded an image of “Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John,” a painting credited to Domenico Ghirlandaio that depicts the Virgin Mary praying with the baby Jesus.

Colloquially known as “Our Lady of the Flying Saucer” or “Madonna of the UFO,” the opus has drawn attention due to the inclusion of a circular object seemingly shooting rays, which some claim is a dome-shaped spacecraft.

The cryptic series of posts had conspiracy theorists’ tinfoil hats at full mast.

“I’m glad you are bringing this to the light, I [had] already seen all these paintings and knew all about this for a while,” wrote one believer. “It’s awesome you are showing and talking about it.”

...

Others were more skeptical, particularly concerning Luna’s prescription for reading the Book of Enoch.

“A book rejected as not being God’s Word,” scoffed one naysayer. “It was never considered to be literally the writings of Enoch. There’s some truth in it, but take it all with a big grain of salt.”

“It’s comic book written thousands of years after Enoch was taken by God,” said another. “There is no proof of authorship attribution to Enoch whatsoever. That’s why it wasn’t canonized in the Bible. Might as well tell people to read Infinity War.”

Luna has stuck to her guns when it comes to the alleged “Da Vinci Code”-esque connection between extraterrestrials and the Bible.

During a 2025 appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” the congresswoman said that while she had not “seen a spaceship personally,” she had observed photo evidence of aircraft that she felt were not made by mankind and therefore have “historical significance.

“Is there multiple events that go back to, I would argue, maybe even before the time of Christ, that have been documented in text?Yes,” Luna declared.

She has also encouraged people to read the Book of Enoch for background on modern UFO theories, claiming that we might’ve mistaken extraterrestrials for angels.

She feels the tradition of obfuscating ET findings persists today. Earlier this month, Luna accused the Pentagon of not meeting the April 15 congressional deadline to release 46 videos of UFOs as promised — although President Trump vowed that the disclosure would come “very soon.”

The Pentagon chalked up the delay to a clerical error — an excuse that did not sit well with the pol.

“[I]t appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities. How convenient,” Lunafumed on X. “Nonetheless, we will be getting the requested list.”

————

“Rep. Anna Paulina Luna claims ancient Bible story about fallen angels depicts aliens invading Earth: ‘The truth is in plain sight!’” By Ben Cost; New York Post; 04/22/2026

“She has also encouraged people to read the Book of Enoch for background on modern UFO theories, claiming that we might’ve mistaken extraterrestrials for angels.”

The Book of Enoch is the Rosetta Stone of the UFO phenomena. At least that’s Rep Luna’s interpretation that she keeps publicly sharing, along with suggestions that the widespread rejection of the Book of Enoch in official religious cannon is part of some sort of cover up:

...
Dubbed Enoch’s “Book of Watchers,” the divisive scripture describes how a coalition of 200 angels, known as the Watchers, arrived on Earth and procreated with human women, who later gave birth to an ancient race of giants that preceded the biblical flood.

Like a theological version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the Promethean beings also bestowed humanity with knowledge on forbidden subjects ranging from sorcery to arms-making.

Often viewed as controversial, the scripture has been stricken from the standard religious canon taught by most Jews, Protestants and Catholics.

However, Luna has repeatedly referred to this text, which she claims was omitted from the Bible to cover up info regarding ET contact during ancient times.

Aliens may not have built the pyramids, but perhaps they interacted with Noah’s great-grandad and Jesus’ mom.

The Republican’s apparent Martian-related Bible stories aren’t limited to the Old Testament, either. Just minutes after her initial X post, the lawmaker uploaded an image of “Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John,” a painting credited to Domenico Ghirlandaio that depicts the Virgin Mary praying with the baby Jesus.

Colloquially known as “Our Lady of the Flying Saucer” or “Madonna of the UFO,” the opus has drawn attention due to the inclusion of a circular object seemingly shooting rays, which some claim is a dome-shaped spacecraft.
...

And that biblical cover up is being perpetuated by the Pentagon to this day, according Luna, who accused the Pentagon of not meeting an April 15 congressional deadline for the release of 46 UFO videos that had been previously promised. Even President Trump weighed in to vow that the videos would be released “very soon”:

...
She feels the tradition of obfuscating ET findings persists today. Earlier this month, Luna accused the Pentagon of not meeting the April 15 congressional deadline to release 46 videos of UFOs as promised — although President Trump vowed that the disclosure would come “very soon.”

The Pentagon chalked up the delay to a clerical error — an excuse that did not sit well with the pol.

“[I]t appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities. How convenient,” Lunafumed on X. “Nonetheless, we will be getting the requested list.”
...

And that complaint last month about a Pentagon cover up in relation to a collection of 46 UFO videos brings us to the following report in the Daily Mail on the belated release of those videos. And as should surprise no one at this point, this Daily Mail report can’t help but point out how the seemingly shape-shifting UFO captured in one of these videos somewhat resembled the biblical Cherubim. Intriguingly, it’s not Rep. Luna who is publicly issuing the words of caution about the possibility that these UFOs could be divine in origin. Instead, it’s a pair of pastors, Pastor Joseph Zupetz and evangelist Tony Merkel, who shared how they were invited to a private meeting in February where intelligence insiders and former military personnel discussed the idea that the UFOs could be ‘interdimensional beings’ or advanced technology. Zupetz and Merkel go on to warn that the organizers of this gather repeatedly warned how this ongoing UFO disclosure process parallels the biblically prophesied spiritual crisis that is to precede the return of Jesus and that there’s a growing belief among Christians that these interdimensional beings are NOT benevolent but instead fallen angels:

The Daily Mail

New biblical fears as declassified UFO files reveal ‘angels’ in flight

By CHRIS MELORE, US DEPUTY SCIENCE EDITOR

Published: 14:33 EDT, 26 May 2026 | Updated: 14:35 EDT, 26 May 2026

The Trump Administration released a fresh wave of UFO files last week, including never-before-seen footage of mysterious objects some have compared to entities in the Bible.

The latest batch in the White House’s push for UFO disclosure arrived Friday, including 46 videos Congress has been demanding the Pentagon release for months.

Some of the clearest footage involved two incidents where US satellites captured oddly-shaped UFOs flying over undisclosed bodies of water for several minutes.

One of those videos appeared to show a small figure in flight that some have claimed looks like a person with wings, moving through the air as protrusions from its upper body moved back and forth.

‘Out of all the newly released files, this one is easily the wildest. The object almost appears humanoid, with visible arms and legs,’ one person said.

‘This UFO looks almost like an angel. Pretty amazing video,’ another commenter added on social media.

The other new UFO incident followed a strange object for over ten minutes flying over water. However, as the US military satellite zoomed in, the object appeared to have several protrusions or tentacles on all sides.

It was the latest strangely shaped object that somewhat resembled a biblical object known as the Cherubim, the multi-faced, winged angelic beings described in the Bible’s Book of Ezekiel.

‘The shape shifting, the sensor struggling to lock on, the object behaving unlike anything familiar — it triggers that “this shouldn’t exist” feeling,’ one social media user said.

The newly declassified video was the second time a UFO was compared to the biblical vehicle described as having ‘wheels within wheels’ this month.

Another video from the first batch of UFO files released on May 8 revealed footage of an ‘eight-pointed star,’ darting through the darkness with uneven, shape-shifting arms.

Texas pastor Josh Howerton said on X that the eight-pointed object resembled the strange heavenly structures described in the Book of Ezekiel, which recounted glowing entities and the mysterious wheels moving beside God’s throne-chariot without turning.

‘What I am trying to point out is the very possible overlap between a Biblical cosmology and some of the things you’re seeing on your timeline,’ Howerton shared.

The new video was reported by the US Indo-Pacific Command in 2024. It is America’s largest military unit and is responsible for all operations across the Pacific Ocean, East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, the alleged angel sighting took place on June 1, 2020, when a military satellite used by US Central Command captured the object in flight. CENTCOM is responsible for US military operations in the Middle East and parts of Central Asia and Africa.

...

Pastor Joseph Zupetz and evangelist Tony Merkel told the Daily Mail prior to UFO disclosure that they were invited to a private meeting in remote Tennessee in February.

At the meeting, intelligence insiders and former military personnel discussed the idea that the unidentified objects could be ‘interdimensional beings’ or advanced technology.

However, they added that the organizers repeatedly compared disclosure to the biblical End Times prophecy some Christians believe signals a powerful spiritual crisis before the return of Jesus Christ.

‘The great lie in this is that these interdimensional entities — the actual UFOs and every kind of supposed alien — are not benevolent,’ Zupetz claimed, adding that there was a growing belief amongst Christians that these beings were ‘interdimensional evil spirits, fallen angels or demons.’

Pastor Perry Stone, a well-known evangelist who was told about these secret meetings said last month:‘You’re going to have people who are going to say if there are galaxies and there are allegedly other creations in the galaxies, then the whole creation story is a myth.’

‘You’re going to have people that’s going to apostatize and turn from the Christian faith because they have no answer for what they’re about to hear,’ he continued.

...

Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett, who has long been advocating for disclosure, said on X: ‘Remember the Feds told us these files didn’t exist and [Donald Trump] stood up to the deep state. The 1st drop will be big, but in comparison to what is coming they will be a drop in the bucket. I would say “Holy Crap” is coming.’

More UFO files are expected to be released by the Pentagon, but an exact date for the third release has not been announced.

———–

“New biblical fears as declassified UFO files reveal ‘angels’ in flight” By CHRIS MELORE; The Daily Mail; 05/26/2026

“The latest batch in the White House’s push for UFO disclosure arrived Friday, including 46 videos Congress has been demanding the Pentagon release for months.”

The 46 videos were finally released, a month after the congressional deadline. And they didn’t disappoint, at least when it comes to being provocative and open to feverish speculation. In one case, a shapeshifting object that almost looks like a person with wings was captured on video. And then there’s the ‘wheels within wheels’ Cherubim-like entity:

...
Some of the clearest footage involved two incidents where US satellites captured oddly-shaped UFOs flying over undisclosed bodies of water for several minutes.

One of those videos appeared to show a small figure in flight that some have claimed looks like a person with wings, moving through the air as protrusions from its upper body moved back and forth.

‘Out of all the newly released files, this one is easily the wildest. The object almost appears humanoid, with visible arms and legs,’ one person said.

‘This UFO looks almost like an angel. Pretty amazing video,’ another commenter added on social media.

The other new UFO incident followed a strange object for over ten minutes flying over water. However, as the US military satellite zoomed in, the object appeared to have several protrusions or tentacles on all sides.

It was the latest strangely shaped object that somewhat resembled a biblical object known as the Cherubim, the multi-faced, winged angelic beings described in the Bible’s Book of Ezekiel.

‘The shape shifting, the sensor struggling to lock on, the object behaving unlike anything familiar — it triggers that “this shouldn’t exist” feeling,’ one social media user said.

The newly declassified video was the second time a UFO was compared to the biblical vehicle described as having ‘wheels within wheels’ this month.

Another video from the first batch of UFO files released on May 8 revealed footage of an ‘eight-pointed star,’ darting through the darkness with uneven, shape-shifting arms.
...

And those seemingly biblical interpretations of the released videos brings us to the very intriguing claims by a pair of Christian leaders, pastor Joseph Zupetz and evangelist Tony Merkel, who claim to have been invited to a private gathering in Tennessee back in February where intelligence insiders and former military personnel discussed the idea that the unidentified objects could be ‘interdimensional beings’ while also warning that the planned UFO disclosure could be triggering the spiritual crisis foretold in the Bible’s End Times prophecies. As they put it, there’s a growing belief among Christians that these ‘interdimension beings’ are indeed angels, but fallen angels, playing a role in a ‘great lie’:

...
Texas pastor Josh Howerton said on X that the eight-pointed object resembled the strange heavenly structures described in the Book of Ezekiel, which recounted glowing entities and the mysterious wheels moving beside God’s throne-chariot without turning.

‘What I am trying to point out is the very possible overlap between a Biblical cosmology and some of the things you’re seeing on your timeline,’ Howerton shared.

...

Pastor Joseph Zupetz and evangelist Tony Merkel told the Daily Mail prior to UFO disclosure that they were invited to a private meeting in remote Tennessee in February.

At the meeting, intelligence insiders and former military personnel discussed the idea that the unidentified objects could be ‘interdimensional beings’ or advanced technology.

However, they added that the organizers repeatedly compared disclosure to the biblical End Times prophecy some Christians believe signals a powerful spiritual crisis before the return of Jesus Christ.

‘The great lie in this is that these interdimensional entities — the actual UFOs and every kind of supposed alien — are not benevolent,’ Zupetz claimed, adding that there was a growing belief amongst Christians that these beings were ‘interdimensional evil spirits, fallen angels or demons.’

Pastor Perry Stone, a well-known evangelist who was told about these secret meetings said last month:‘You’re going to have people who are going to say if there are galaxies and there are allegedly other creations in the galaxies, then the whole creation story is a myth.’

‘You’re going to have people that’s going to apostatize and turn from the Christian faith because they have no answer for what they’re about to hear,’ he continued.
...

Last, and interestingly, note how these videos of seemingly shape-shifting entities aren’t from decades past. They’re from 2020 and 2024. And yet governments have been allegedly collecting this footage of these UFO events going back decades. Will there be detectable advances in the apparent technology of these ‘UFOs’ once a more complete collection of videos have been released? We’ll see:

...
The new video was reported by the US Indo-Pacific Command in 2024. It is America’s largest military unit and is responsible for all operations across the Pacific Ocean, East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, the alleged angel sighting took place on June 1, 2020, when a military satellite used by US Central Command captured the object in flight. CENTCOM is responsible for US military operations in the Middle East and parts of Central Asia and Africa.
...

Where are the older films of shapeshifting UFOs? Shouldn’t we have footage from the 50s and 60s? Again, it’s not like ancient aliens need a few decades for technological advances like shapeshifting. Humans intent on using secret advanced technology to pull off a sinister UFO hoax, on the other hand....

These critters were carrying the Sin Nombre variant of hantavirus, which can be spread from rodents to humans but not from one person to another

By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron

May21, 2026

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hantavirus-found-in-shocking-number-of-pacific-northwest-rodents/?utm_campaign=sprinklr&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&fbclid=IwT01FWAR9zSpleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR6PAJ7o2VpSTZNBF_6Y1shtsNiQ4dz7kv6cCgRyspHKJLePDYBiknbmUhALhQ_aem_QpW0jUmwcpfI-ozPnQMm8g

A surprising number of rodents captured during a recent study in the Pacific Northwest were carriers of the Sin Nombre virus, a type of hantavirus that belongs to the same family as the Andes type behind an ongoing outbreak that has so far killed three people and sickened several others.

The number of rodent carriers were higher than previously suspected, says Stephanie Seifert, an assistant professor at Washington State University and co-author of the study, which was published in late April in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The research was conducted in the summer of 2023, predating the current hantavirus outbreak, which began on a cruise ship in April. The researchers collected fecal and tissue samples from a total of 189 rodents of various kinds, including several types of voles, mice and chipmunks, on farms and in other areas in eastern Washington State and western Idaho. The samples were tested for hantavirus antibodies, which can indicate if a rodent has ever carried the virus, and for viral RNA, a sign of active infection.

The results showed that around 10 percent of the animals had Sin Nombre at the time the samples were taken, while almost 30 percent had detectable antibodies.

Sin Nombre is not transmissible from human to human, unlike the Andes virus at the center of the cruise ship outbreak. Instead people become infected when they are exposed to rodents and their excretions, such as their feces and urine. That limitation has made Sin Nombre cases scarce, but it is still deadly: The virus was first identified in 1993 after 11 people died and almost two dozen more got sick in the Four Corners region of the U.S. It has a mortality rate between 35 and 50 percent.

Human cases of hantavirus are relatively rare in the U.S., with most cases occurring in the Southwest. But a disproportionate number of the total cases have been seen in the Pacific Northwest: Of the 864 cases in the U.S. between 1993 and 2022, 109 were in Idaho, Oregon or Washington State, according to the study. Even so, few studies have examined how common the viruses are in the area’s rodents. That makes it hard to say if the number of rodents carrying the virus there has grown over the years, Seifert says.

Still, climate change may play a role in the virus’s spread, Seifert says. Wetter winters can lead to increased vegetation, which, in turn, can support a larger rodent population. Warmer winters can also cause prolonged breeding seasons and improved odds of surviving the cold, which can also boost the population. The way humans use the land can also increase their exposure to the animals. Seifert notes that farmers in the area have begun using techniques that don’t employ tilling, which would scare the critters off.

“We know tilling is disruptive to rodents, which flee the croplands to surrounding refuge, including rural homes and outbuildings,” she says. “Will conversion to no-till lead to fewer human-rodent interactions or support more robust and diverse rodent communities that continuously expand outward to neighboring homes and support a higher baseline prevalence in [Sin Nombre virus]? I don’t know the answer.” But more research could promote a better understanding, she adds.

Whether such a study will take place is an open question, however. Seifert says her team’s current funding for the project has run out.

“If there is anything folks in the U.S. should take from this, it’s that expertise on infectious disease systems is not like a faucet that you can turn on and off when convenient,” she says. “If you want hantavirus or [Ebola-causing virus]experts to be here, ready to jump into action with answers and solutions, then we need to fund our public health research and basic science.”

But it’s important to keep in mind that groups like 764 or the Com aren’t necessarily only inspire acts of random terrorism. They’re focused on targeted political assassinations too. For example, recall Nikita Casap and the presidential assassination plot that he was enlisted into through members of the Maniac Murder Cult. These are accelerationist movements. Targeted destabilizing political assassinations are very much on the agenda. Which brings us to a recent update about an investigation into another act of high profile political violence: the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July of 2024 by Thomas Matthew Crooks. As we’ve seen, while the evidence strongly pointed towards Crooks as being animated by a far right political ideology, what was never clear was his motive for the actual shooting.

And yet, we did sort of get a clue regarding Crooks’s motive back in November of 2025, when Tucker Carlson released a video about the investigation that raised a host of new questions and pushed a narrative about Crooks undergoing some sort of political transformation into an anti-Trump leftist back in 2020. The narrative was based on an analysis of Crooks’s voluminous political online posts from a “Tomcrooks2178” Youtube account in 2019 and 2020, when Crooks was just 15–17 years old, and seemingly ignored by the FBI in its investigation. As this right-wing analysis observed, Crooks seemed to start off as vociferously pro-Trump in the 2019 comments, including a December 2019 call to “MURDER THE DEMOCRATS”. But that sentiment had shifted by early 2020, with Crooks growing increasingly critical of Trump’s pandemic response. It was a narrative that suggested Crooks had a political transformation into a left-wing sympathizer. But that narrative left out the fact that Crooks’s Youtube account went silent shortly after a series of interactions in the Youtube comments section with a member of the Norwegian neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement going by the name “Willy Tepes”, and who was very clear in his desire to promote assassinations across the political spectrum. And as we also saw, it was 2023 when Crooks started using a VPN to hide his internet traffic but also started using the encrypted email service Mailfence based out of Belgium. And that’s kind of where this investigation was left stuck. With the revelation about a series of ‘Willy Tepes’ interactions in August of 2020 touting the necessity of political assassination, shortly before Crooks’s online comments went quiet.

Well, it turns out ‘Willy Tepes’ decided to do an interview with the Daily Mail, where he confirms that his identity is that of Bjorn Leif Hjelmerud, a Norwegian member of the Nordic Resistance Movement who has been very prolific in his online promotion of terroristic violence over the years, earning him the label the ‘Osama bin Laden of the Nazi underworld.’ Hjelmerud insists he had no additional contact with Crooks after their brief series of Youtube comment interactions in August of 2020, while also suggesting that the Butler, PA, shooting was part of a deep state plot using a patsy to boosts Trump’s popularity.

And while it’s possible that Hjelmerud isn’t lying when he claims he had no additional contact with Crooks, it’s worth keeping in mind that Hjelmerud is part of an international network of neo-Nazis who are aggressively making connections with extremists around the world. In other words, there’s no reason to assume Hjelmerud was the only person in this extremist network how was in contact with Crooks. Especially when we know Crooks was using the Mailfence encrypted email service but still have no idea who he was communicating with.

In fact, as we’ll see in a 2021 piece below about the internationalist nature of the Nordic Resistance Movement, the group, which as estimated to have around 150–300 active members and many more supporters, actually split in August of 2019, with several leading members including the founder Klas Lund leaving the group to form Nordisk Styrka (Nordic Strength), a group even more elitist, violent, and clandestine. This split came six months after a March 2019 ruling by the Finnish Supreme Court that banned the Nordic Resistance Movement. So while we know Crooks was in contact with a prominent member of the Nordic Resistance Movement, we have to ask if he was in contact with Nordisk Styrka too.

It’s also worth recalling how, in October of 2019, 40 House Democrats submitted a letter to the State Department calling for the designation of both Azov and Nordic Resistance Movement, along with the UK-based National Action, as terrorist organizations. 2019 was rough year for the Nordic Resistance Movement, legally speaking.

Interestingly, as we’ll see, it was in the early months of 2019 that a delegation of Finnish Nordic Resistance Movement members traveled to Kyiv to visit with the Azov Regiment. Which isn’t the first time we’ve heard about links between the groups. Recall how, back in March of 2018, Azov’s “international secretary”, Olena Semenyaka, was interviewed by a Nordic Resistance Movement member and complained about how the Ukrainian government was hindering Azov’s attempt to bring in foreign recruits for the then-civil war, expressing hopes of creating a foreign legion someday. And Azov is just one of a number of European neo-Nazi organizations the Nordic Resistance Movement has been networking with in recent years. Which, again, is part of the reason we should really be asking who else Crooks may have been secretly in contact with.

Could Crooks have possibly been in contact with Azov? It’s a question we have to ask, in part because of who else unambiguous had ties to Azov: the second would-be Trump assassin of 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh. Did we have two Azov-connected near-assassination attempts on Trump in the span of just a couple of months in 2024? Maybe. We know at least one of them was Azov-connected.

But there’s another network here to keep in mind when considering the extremist links to the Nordic Resistance Movement: 764 or other accelerationist extremist groups like Atomwaffen. Because it appears that, between 2011 and 2017, around 20 members of Nordic Resistance Movement were also users of the Iron March online forum. And as we’ve seen, it was Iron March that played a key role in the popularization of both nihilistic violent satanism and James Mason’s accelerationist tome SIEGE and the rise of groups like Atomwaffen during this period. Was Crooks in contact with 764-style online nihilistic accelerationist communities? We still don’t know, and probably won’t even know for sure. But as more and more evidence slowly emerges, the more it points towards Crooks having the kind of far right accelerationist motives we might expect from a member of Atomwaffen. Or a member of 764. Or maybe a member of the Nordic Resistance Movement. Or their fellow travelers in Azov. Or maybe all of the above. This isn’t an either/or situation:

ABC7 Chicago

Teen suspects in San Diego Islamic Center shooting could be tied to online extremist groups

By Mark Rivera and Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Tom Jones

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 7:08PM

CHICAGO (WLS) — For months, the ABC7 I‑Team has been reporting on sadistic online groups that sow chaos in communities across the globe. Sources tell ABC News the now-dead San Diego Islamic Center shooting suspects may have been connected to similar nihilistic violent extremism online. Those connections should have triggered immediate intervention according to a former Department of Homeland Security expert.

“As with most of these cases, these people were on the radar screen, meaning that their behaviors were being noticed, and often those behaviors of concern were being reported,” said John Cohen, Former Assistant Department of Homeland Security Secretary for Counterterrorism.

...

Sources say last year police in nearby Chula Vista made contact with one of the suspected shooters, Caleb Vazquez, who was then a juvenile, after someone who knew him raised concerns he was interested in extremist ideology and mass-casualty attacks.

An officer reviewed Vazquez’s social media accounts, allegedly finding neo-Nazi rhetoric.

But sources say the concerns did not rise to the level of an arrest and it is unclear whether there was any follow-up.

“The law enforcement organization that receives that information needs to not just determine whether there is an arrestable offense that’s taken place, but they need to conduct a threat assessment,” said Cohen.

The I‑Team recently traveled to US Secret Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., profiling the work of the National Threat Assessment Center whose research is designed to prevent targeted violence like the shooting in San Diego. NTAC trains law enforcement agencies, schools and communities across the country, including in the Chicago area, to identify troubling behaviors and intervene before it’s too late.

...

Investigators say they’ve now seized more than 30 firearms from two homes connected to the teen attackers.

———–

“Teen suspects in San Diego Islamic Center shooting could be tied to online extremist groups” By Mark Rivera and Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Tom Jones; ABC7 Chicago; 03/20/2026

“For months, the ABC7 I‑Team has been reporting on sadistic online groups that sow chaos in communities across the globe. Sources tell ABC News the now-dead San Diego Islamic Center shooting suspects may have been connected to similar nihilistic violent extremism online. Those connections should have triggered immediate intervention according to a former Department of Homeland Security expert.”

It would hardly be a surprise to learn that the San Diego Islamic Center suspects were fans of 764 or a similar nihilistic online community. It would almost be a surprise if they weren’t at this point. And while we don’t have validation of what these sources are telling reporters, it does sound like at least one of the suspected shooters, Caleb Vazquez, was investigated just last year someone tipped off the police about his interest mass-casualty attacks, with an officer discovering neo-Nazi rhetoric in after a review of his social media accounts. It’s pretty clear the internet was playing a significant role. Was he encouraged by an online community to carry out this attack? We don’t know at this point, but, again, it would hardly be a surprise:

...
Sources say last year police in nearby Chula Vista made contact with one of the suspected shooters, Caleb Vazquez, who was then a juvenile, after someone who knew him raised concerns he was interested in extremist ideology and mass-casualty attacks.

An officer reviewed Vazquez’s social media accounts, allegedly finding neo-Nazi rhetoric.

But sources say the concerns did not rise to the level of an arrest and it is unclear whether there was any follow-up.
...

And that update on the San Diego Islamic Center shooting brings us to another recent update about an ongoing investigation into the motives of another high profile shooting: the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt of July 20224. An assassination attempt that was both preceded by a cascade of ‘security failures’ by the Secret Service and also followed up with a cascade of ‘investigative irregularities’. And as we saw, one of those investigative irregularities had to do with the FBI’s initial insistence that Thomas Matthew Crooks’s social media history showed no signs of extremism. And yet, it was Tucker Carlson who revealed in November of 2025 that Crooks had a Youtube account that directly interacted with a Norwegian neo-Nazi, ‘Willy Tepes’, back in August of 2019, shortly before Crooks went silent on social media, with the two sharing sentiments about the necessity of political assassinations in the YouTube comments section. Well, it turns out ‘Willy Tepes’ decided to do an interview with the Daily Mail, revealing himself to be Bjorn Leif Hjelmerud, a Norwegian member of the Nordic Resistance Movement, and someone who has been dubbed the ‘Osama bin Laden of the Nazi underworld’:

The Daily Mail

EXCLUSIVE Mystery online figure who contacted Trump shooter Thomas Crooks is finally UNMASKED... and his messages raise chilling questions about Butler

By DANA KENNEDY, SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER
Published: 11:55 EDT, 11 May 2026 | Updated: 11:56 EDT, 11 May 2026

The shadowy figure known as ‘Willy Tepes’ who made contact with wannabe Trump assassin Thomas Crooks is 55-year-old Norwegian neo-Nazi Bjorn Leif Hjelmerud, he confirmed exclusively to the Daily Mail.

...

Hjelmerud, who the Daily Mail learned is married with children and lives in Spydeberg, an Oslo suburb, reached out to Crooks four years before the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life at an event in Butler, Pennsylvania, after Crooks tagged Tepes in a YouTube comment section of a California gun control-related video.

‘If a gun and a badge is all that is needed,’ Hjelmerud told Crooks, ‘then authority obviously comes from the barrel of a gun.

‘We have more guns than they do ;) There is no way we can avoid a war at this point, so you better just get used to the idea.’

Crooks’s YouTube went dark shortly thereafter, and he was deemed to have no other social media presence.

Hjelmerud, however, continued to freely post inflammatory, violent, often antisemitic messages on the Telegram app — as recently as last week — where he’s contributed between 4,000 and 5,000 posts since 2021.

He called for ‘drone swarms and assassins’ and intentions to kill ‘every single leader, politician, media personality and Jews.’

Dubbed the ‘Osama bin Laden of the Nazi underworld,’ the Norwegian even singled out Trump in one post, saying ‘Thank you Mr Trump. Those words will be used to hang you!’

Hjelmerud is a proud member of the neo-Nazi group, Nordic Resistance Movement — and is reportedly missing two fingers on his right hand possibly due to his interest in weaponry.

Investigators and online researchers have questioned whether Crooks may have been influenced by the Norwegian’s hate-spewing rhetoric on Telegram or some other app, though Hjelmerud disavowed any relationship with Crooks beyond brief comments between the two seen online.

‘No,’ he told the Daily Mail when asked if he and Crooks moved their online interaction to another, more untraceable app like Telegram after their communication in 2020.

‘I believe it was a US intelligence operation using a patsy to boost Trump’s popularity,’ he said. ‘Crooks was not censored but I was. YouTube does not allow calls for violence.’

Hjelmerud also downplayed his contact with and knowledge of Crooks in his text messages with the Daily Mail, calling it a ‘nothingburger.’

...

Hjelmerud’s admission comes as Helen Comperatore, the widow of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter killed at the Butler rally, and Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Florida) have said separately in recent days that they believe the Trump rally shooting was an ‘inside job.’

He was on police radar at least as far back as 2022 when a Norwegian antifascist website identified him as a member of the NRM, a disseminator of Nazi propaganda, and said cops had at one point seized firearms that he had stored at home.

NRM was designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department one month before Crooks shot Trump — and the official designation was published into the federal register on July 9, 2024, just days before the shooting.

...

Many don’t believe the official version of the incident, especially since the FBI originally said Crooks had almost no online digital footprint — and certainly did not disclose that Crooks exhibited violent, radical tendencies online.

The FBI then had to walk that back in November 2025 when Tucker Carlson released a documentary ‘Who is Thomas Crooks?’ on November 14 with extensive and authenticated proof of Crooks’ radical online presence — and revealed the existence of ‘Willy Tepes’ for the first time.

Carlson said in the video that a source was able to retrieve Crooks’ social media accounts from his Google drive account after many if not all of them had been wiped off YouTube.

Right after Carlson’s video went up, on the same day, FBI Director Kash Patel released a statement describing what he said was an extensive investigation into ‘nearly 500,000 digital files’ from ’13 seized digital devices’ as part of the Crooks case.

The FBI also created what it called the ‘FBI Rapid Response’ on X in response to Carlson’s video.

In one of its first posts it wrote: ‘This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint ever.’

But a community note added to the post pointed out that during a Senate hearing shortly after the assassination attempt, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate did vaguely disclose a social media account believed to be associated with Crooks but went on to describe a ‘general absence of other information to date from social media.’

The FBI’s handling of the case has been confusing from the start.

On November 17, 2025, three days after Carlson’s video aired, Patel, then FBI deputy director Dan Bongino and a senior FBI official sat down with Fox News to reiterate that Crooks acted alone — and issued an official FBI statement that appeared to be from their website but has only ever been available on the Fox News website.

The FBI admitted that a Willy Tepes had mentioned Crooks in four YouTube comments but said that Crooks himself had never directly communicated with Tepes.

That statement was disproven by the discovery of a YouTube video comment on August 5, 2020 showing Crooks responding to Tepes in a lengthy post that included this statement:

‘IMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building (and) set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders and try to assassinate them.’

Three weeks ago, an online activist organization called Citizens Commission released a video called ‘Who is Willy Tepes?’

It tracked Tepes’ full digital footprint, infiltrated the extremist Telegram channels he was active in, and recovered thousands of his messages — many of which explicitly encouraged political violence, including assassinations.

Citizens Commission used an online tracking tool, TGDB, to parse most of Tepes’ roughly 5,000 Telegram messages in 83 different channels on the app — the first one dating back to May 16, 2021.

‘What I don’t understand is how this guy is still able to keep posting violent stuff if the investigation into Crooks was thorough,’ said a spokesman for the group.

‘How was this Tepes character missed? Or if they knew about him why did they omit it in speaking about the investigation?

...

Comperatore’s widow, Helen, made it clear this week that she does not believe the official account either.

‘If you think that kid just got out of bed and went and shot the president and shot my husband you’re batshit crazy,’ she told the Daily Mail Monday.

Comperatore said she believes that two people ‘high up’ at the federal level who were there during the Biden Administration and are still in their positions, are responsible in some way for the assassination attempt.

‘I will find out what happened to him and I will continue focusing on this until the day I die.’

————-

“EXCLUSIVE Mystery online figure who contacted Trump shooter Thomas Crooks is finally UNMASKED... and his messages raise chilling questions about Butler” By DANA KENNEDY; The Daily Mail; 05/11/2026

“Hjelmerud, who the Daily Mail learned is married with children and lives in Spydeberg, an Oslo suburb, reached out to Crooks four years before the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life at an event in Butler, Pennsylvania, after Crooks tagged Tepes in a YouTube comment section of a California gun control-related video.”

It was Bjorn Leif Hjelmerud who first reached out to Thomas Matthew Crooks as ‘Willy Tepes’ back in August of 2020 in the Youtube comments section. We already knew he was a member of the Nordic Resistance Movement. But now we know his name and the fact that he’s a highly prolific online provocateur who has spent years promoting a strategy of targeted assassinations. He’s even been dubbed the ‘Osama bin Laden of the Nazi underworld.’ He has such a prolific pro-terrorism online in recent years we almost have to ask which other prominent shooters has he also interacted with and possibly influenced. Keep in mind that Hjelmerud presumably wasn’t just promoting targeted political assassinations. The kind of accelerationist Nazism he promotes would be very on board with mass shooting sprees:

...
‘If a gun and a badge is all that is needed,’ Hjelmerud told Crooks, ‘then authority obviously comes from the barrel of a gun.

‘We have more guns than they do ;) There is no way we can avoid a war at this point, so you better just get used to the idea.’

Crooks’s YouTube went dark shortly thereafter, and he was deemed to have no other social media presence.

Hjelmerud, however, continued to freely post inflammatory, violent, often antisemitic messages on the Telegram app — as recently as last week — where he’s contributed between 4,000 and 5,000 posts since 2021.

He called for ‘drone swarms and assassins’ and intentions to kill ‘every single leader, politician, media personality and Jews.’

Dubbed the ‘Osama bin Laden of the Nazi underworld,’ the Norwegian even singled out Trump in one post, saying ‘Thank you Mr Trump. Those words will be used to hang you!’

Hjelmerud is a proud member of the neo-Nazi group, Nordic Resistance Movement — and is reportedly missing two fingers on his right hand possibly due to his interest in weaponry.
...

And let’s not forget that the only reason there’s any discussion at all about Crooks’s interactions with ‘Willy Tepes’ was due to a video released by Tucker Carlson back in November, when the interactions of Crooks’s Youtube account with Tepes was flagged. It was only after Carlson’s video that the FBI seemed to suddenly start an investigation into ‘nearly 500,000 digital files’ from ’13 seized digital devices’ involved with the Crooks investigation:

...
Many don’t believe the official version of the incident, especially since the FBI originally said Crooks had almost no online digital footprint — and certainly did not disclose that Crooks exhibited violent, radical tendencies online.

The FBI then had to walk that back in November 2025 when Tucker Carlson released a documentary ‘Who is Thomas Crooks?’ on November 14 with extensive and authenticated proof of Crooks’ radical online presence — and revealed the existence of ‘Willy Tepes’ for the first time.

Carlson said in the video that a source was able to retrieve Crooks’ social media accounts from his Google drive account after many if not all of them had been wiped off YouTube.

Right after Carlson’s video went up, on the same day, FBI Director Kash Patel released a statement describing what he said was an extensive investigation into ‘nearly 500,000 digital files’ from ’13 seized digital devices’ as part of the Crooks case.
...

Adding to the FBI’s suspicious behavior around this case is the fact that, three days after the Carlson video aired, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and a senior FBI official issued an official FBI statement that appeared to be from the the FBI’s website but has only ever been available on Fox News’s website. And then there’s the FBI’s claims that Crooks never responded to Tepes, which also isn’t true. The one time Crooks responded, it was to share his opinion that terrorism style attacks were the only option for fighting the government:

...
The FBI also created what it called the ‘FBI Rapid Response’ on X in response to Carlson’s video.

In one of its first posts it wrote: ‘This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint ever.’

But a community note added to the post pointed out that during a Senate hearing shortly after the assassination attempt, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate did vaguely disclose a social media account believed to be associated with Crooks but went on to describe a ‘general absence of other information to date from social media.’

The FBI’s handling of the case has been confusing from the start.

On November 17, 2025, three days after Carlson’s video aired, Patel, then FBI deputy director Dan Bongino and a senior FBI official sat down with Fox News to reiterate that Crooks acted alone — and issued an official FBI statement that appeared to be from their website but has only ever been available on the Fox News website.

The FBI admitted that a Willy Tepes had mentioned Crooks in four YouTube comments but said that Crooks himself had never directly communicated with Tepes.

That statement was disproven by the discovery of a YouTube video comment on August 5, 2020 showing Crooks responding to Tepes in a lengthy post that included this statement:

‘IMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building (and) set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders and try to assassinate them.’
...

And then there’s the remarkable overlap in Hjelmerud, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, and Helen Comperatore, who all suspect the assassination attempt involved some sort of Deep State operation and ‘inside job’. And while it’s certainly the case that the Secret Service’s security failures were extensive enough to warrant serious suspicion of some sort of ‘inside job’, it’s rather notable how Comperatore believes responsibility lies with two people ‘high up’ at the federal level who were there during the Biden Administration and are still in their positions. It’s going to be interesting to see if Comperatore’s suspicions ever start to include suspicions over why those responsible for the assassination attempt retained their positions with the Trump administration. It’s not as if this has been an administration hesitant to fire people:

...
Investigators and online researchers have questioned whether Crooks may have been influenced by the Norwegian’s hate-spewing rhetoric on Telegram or some other app, though Hjelmerud disavowed any relationship with Crooks beyond brief comments between the two seen online.

‘No,’ he told the Daily Mail when asked if he and Crooks moved their online interaction to another, more untraceable app like Telegram after their communication in 2020.

‘I believe it was a US intelligence operation using a patsy to boost Trump’s popularity,’ he said. ‘Crooks was not censored but I was. YouTube does not allow calls for violence.’

Hjelmerud also downplayed his contact with and knowledge of Crooks in his text messages with the Daily Mail, calling it a ‘nothingburger.’

...

Hjelmerud’s admission comes as Helen Comperatore, the widow of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter killed at the Butler rally, and Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Florida) have said separately in recent days that they believe the Trump rally shooting was an ‘inside job.’

...

Comperatore’s widow, Helen, made it clear this week that she does not believe the official account either.

‘If you think that kid just got out of bed and went and shot the president and shot my husband you’re batshit crazy,’ she told the Daily Mail Monday.

Comperatore said she believes that two people ‘high up’ at the federal level who were there during the Biden Administration and are still in their positions, are responsible in some way for the assassination attempt.

‘I will find out what happened to him and I will continue focusing on this until the day I die.’
...

And then we get this remarkable coincidence: Hjelmerud’s Nordic Resistance Movement was designated a terrorist organization by the US State Department a month before the Butler shooting, which was only published on July 9, 2024, four days before:

...
He was on police radar at least as far back as 2022 when a Norwegian antifascist website identified him as a member of the NRM, a disseminator of Nazi propaganda, and said cops had at one point seized firearms that he had stored at home.

NRM was designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department one month before Crooks shot Trump — and the official designation was published into the federal register on July 9, 2024, just days before the shooting.
...

So with Hjelmerud openly talking about how he communicated with Crooks, while denying he had any ongoing communications with Crooks, brings us to the following 2021 article describe the internationalist nature of Hjelmerud’s Nordic Resistance Movement. A group with a focus on creating an international fascist network, with ties to groups that include the Azov Regiment. Which, in turn, should raise serious question about who else from this international network Crooks may have been in contact with in the years leading up to the shooting. We know Crooks was in contact with someone using the Belgian-based encrypted Mailfence email service. But we still have no idea who that may have been. Was Crooks in secret communication with Hjelmerud? Another Nordic Resistance Movement member? Or maybe one of the group’s many fellow travelers:

Belltower News

The Pan-European “Ikea Fascism” of Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen

The Nordic Resistance Movement has an ambitious aim: to establish a pan-Scandinavian neo-Nazi state. The movement has chapters in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, and is well-networked internationally. It is responsible for numerous attacks and murders in Nordic countries in recent years. But the movement is in crisis: In Sweden, the group has split in two and in Finland, the NMR was banned by the Supreme Court last year.

Nicholas Potter 6. Januar 2021

This article was first published in German.

Jyväskylä, 2013: Three neo-Nazis stab a man in the Finnish student city after they are denied entry to an event on right-wing extremism at the city library. Stockholm, 2013: a peaceful anti-racist demonstration in the suburb of Kärrtorp is attacked by 40 armed neo-Nazis. They throw bottles and fireworks at demonstrators. Gothenburg, 2016: Two men carry out a bomb attack on the Syndikalistiskt Forum, a left-wing info store and antifascist hangout. Attacks on two asylum centres follow, one man is seriously injured. Helsinki, 2016: A Finnish neo-Nazi kicks an anti-racist activist to the ground. He dies six days later from head injuries. Oslo, 2019: Two neo-Nazis hijack an ambulance with an Uzi and shotgun and hit passers-by. Jämsä, 2020: Two right-wing extremists visit a local politician of the radical populist-right Finns Party at home and attack him with a hammer. He suffers broken ribs and head wounds. The authorities treat the attack as attempted murder.

Behind all of these attacks lies a pan-Scandinavian neo-Nazi network: the Nordic Resistance Movement, in Swedish Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen, abbreviated as NMR. The movement was founded in Sweden in 1997 by the neo-Nazi Klas Lund as Svenska Motståndsrörelsen, and later renamed to the more-inclusive Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen. Lund was already a well-known face in the Swedish far right – as a leading member of the violent neo-Nazi group Vitt Ariskt Motstånd (White Aryan Resistance).

Since then, chapters of the NMR have emerged in Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, all of which are also called the Nordic Resistance Movement in their respective languages. Internationally, the group is often referred to by the English translation of their name. Their goal: to establish a Nordic neo-Nazi state for “white people”. Countless racist and homophobic acts of violence, attacks, and even some murders against perceived “political opponents” can be attributed to the movement. However, the NMR network is currently in the midst of a crisis: In Finland, the group was banned in 2019, and in Sweden, the movement is now split after a strategic dispute over the political direction of the group. Nevertheless, the NMR remains a very real threat.

“From 2015 to 2019, the NMR had a leading role in the Swedish far-right”, explains Morgan Finnsiö, a far-right researcher at the anti-racist Expo Foundation in Stockholm in interview with Belltower.News. “Their focus on violence, their openly Nazi ideology, their almost bureaucratic organisation, and their prolific propaganda output set the benchmark in the far-right scene.” In 2019, several leading activists including movement founder Klas Lund left the NMR to form the group Nordisk Styrka (Nordic Strength), a self-proclaimed paramilitary “fighting organisation” that is said to be more clandestine, elitist and radical than the NMR. Other new far-right groups have also emerged in Sweden, with a less overtly far-right outward appearance. “Even if these groups challenge the NMR’s monopoly on power, it remains the most dangerous and important far-right actor in Sweden”, Finnsiö concludes.

Propaganda rounds and parliamentary ambitions

Among the NMR’s various activities are the usual far-right hobbies: martial arts training, paramilitary exercises, walks in the woods with their brothers in arms, and marches in uniform. Distributing their propaganda also plays an important role: local chapters of the NMR plan, for example, outings to other towns where they spend hours sticking stickers, handing out leaflets, hanging banners and hoisting flags – all donning the movement’s logo and name. Some of these materials contain threats. One sticker, for example, depicts and a noose with the phrase: “This is what we will do to the traitors of the people”. Anyone who criticises or tries to prevent these far-right promo tours can often expect a violent confrontation.

According to the Expo Foundation, there were 2,801 such propaganda tours in 2018 alone. In 2019, there were 1,658. In addition, the movement organises 125 to 265 demonstrations and rallies annually in Sweden. Expo estimates that there were between 150 and 300 active members of the NMR before the split of the movement in 2019, as well as many other passive members and supporters. There are no official government figures on the size of the movement. “At the height of the movement, the NMR was able to mobilise 600 to 700 people for its demonstrations”, Morgan Finnsiö estimates.

The NMR in Sweden also has parliamentary ambitions: In 2014, two members of the movement were elected on the radical-right party Sweden Democrats‘ ticket in the municipal councils in Ludvika and Borlänge. In 2015, the NMR was registered as a political party. This change of course is thanks to Simon Lindberg, head of the NMR in Sweden since 2015 and a former member of the neo-Nazi party Nationalsocialistisk Front (NSF). However, the movement’s parliamentary breakthrough has so far failed to materialise: In the 2018 general election, the party received 0.03 percent with around 2,100 votes – less than all other splinter parties. This focus on parliamentary politics is also likely to have been one reason for the split of the movement. A year later, after the founding of Nordisk Styrka, the party received only 644 votes in the EU election.

The split may also have ideological reasons, however. Swedish historian, publicist and author of the book Älskade fascism (Beloved Fascism), Henrik Arnstad, describes Sweden as a fertile ground for fascism after 1945. In interview with Belltower.News, he explains: “After World War II, Sweden was one of the few countries where fascists could still meet and organise – for the most part quite openly. As a result, fascism flourished in the country.”

But unlike many nationalist variants of fascism around the world, Swedish fascism is characterised above all by transnationalism: it strives for a pan-European fascist nation. “I call this internationalisation ‘Ikea fascism’”, Arnstad explains. And that’s not just a play on words: Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was an active member of the fascist organisations Nysvenska Rörelsen (New Swedish Movement) and the neo-Nazi party Svensk Socialistisk Samling (Swedish Socialist Union), the successor party to the Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet (National Socialist Workers’ Party).

Too extreme for Hitler

Although Hitler is also idolised to some extent in the Nordic Resistance Movement, he is also seen as a loser, Arnstad explains. “He ultimately lost the war, then killed himself.” Rather than the NSDAP, the Romanian fascist Iron Guard movement led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu serves as inspiration for the NMR. “Both movements use the colours green and white, both organise in so-called ‘nests’”, Arnstad notes. “The Iron Guard was even more antisemitic than the NSDAP. Hitler called them radicals; their antisemitism was even too extreme for him.” The cult of personality around Codreanu is also attractive for the NMR: “He died a heroic death: he was executed by the Romanian government in 1938 and is seen as a ‘saint’”.

...

But the pan-Scandinavian ideology of the NMR also has its limits: parts of the Swedish movement don’t see their Finnish comrades-in-arms as equal Aryans, but as “ethnic hybrids” who do not belong to Scandinavian culture. This attitude, in turn, leaves traces in the ideology of the Finnish chapter of the movement. Oula Silvennoinen, a historian at the University of Helsinki who studies right-wing extremism in Finland, explains in interview with Belltower.News: “This is another reason why the NMR in Finland doesn’t attach such great importance to a future Nazi state in Scandinavia. They also communicate only in Finnish, although Swedish is also a second official language in the country.” Still, the group has close ties with their Swedish counterparts. But there are also differences in political strategy: the Finnish offshoot thinks little of the parliamentary ambitions of its Swedish brethren.

...

Friends abroad

One of the greatest achievements of the movement in Finland has been the so-called “612 March” – an annual nationalist march in Helsinki on Finnish Independence Day. The demo route ends at Hietaniemi Cemetery, where a monument to the Finnish Volunteer Battalion of the Waffen SS is located. Before the covid-19 pandemic, the demonstration used to attract up to 3000 participants annually. It functions as a meeting place for the far-right scene: not only Scandinavian neo-Nazis from the NMR and the Soldiers of Odin attend, but also international right-wing extremists, for example from the UK, Greece and Germany, flock to Helsinki for the demonstration.

Internationally, the Nordic Resistance Movement is extremely well connected: According to the broadcaster Yle, between 2011 and 2017, around 20 members of the movement were users of the international neo-Nazi forum Iron March. Here, the NMR came into contact with neo-Nazi parties such as Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) in Greece and Casa Pound in Italy, but also with far-right terrorist groups such as the now-banned National Action in the United Kingdom.

...

The NMR also has links to the Ukrainian Azov Regiment: The far-right podcast “FashCast” published an interview between a member of the Finnish NMR and Olena Semenyaka, the so-called “First Lady” and spokeswoman of the far-right paramilitary volunteer battalion in Ukraine. In the interview, Semenyaka mentions a “foreign legion” in Ukraine that international volunteers could join, as well as military training camps at the Azov camp in eastern Ukraine. A delegation of the Finnish NMR visited the Azov Regiment in Kyiv in 2019.

That’s not to say, however, that the NMR as a whole is partisan in the Ukraine conflict: Two members of the Swedish NMR, who were responsible for the series of bombings in Gothenburg in 2016 and 2017 mentioned at the beginning of this article, participated in a training camp organised by the far-right paramilitary and pro-Russian Russian Imperial Movement in 2016 in eastern Ukraine, which fought against Ukrainian forces – including the Azov Regiment.

In Germany, the neo-Nazi party Der III. Weg (The Third Way) is an important partner for the NMR. Members of the NMR have visited their far-right friends in Germany several times: At a demo of Der III. Weg in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen on October 3, 2020, Fredrik Vejdeland, a leading figure of the Swedish chapter, gave a speech in German. In Würzburg in 2017, NMR leader Simon Lindberg spoke at one of the party’s demonstrations.

The exchange has been mutual, with members of Der III. Weg also travelling to Finland: In 2019, party founder Klaus Armstroff visited the head of the Swedish NMR, Simon Lindberg, in Helsinki. Together with a delegation of his fellow party members, Armstroff took part in the “612 March” on Finnish Independence Day. Holiday snaps from their Helsinki trip are even on the party’s website: The delegation visited a tank museum and the Finnish-German military cemetery. There also appear to be links between the NMR and the Junge Nationalisten (Young Nationalists, JN), the youth organisation of the German far-right party NPD. In 2017, the JN also participated in the “612 March” in Helsinki.

Despite the successes of the NMR so far across Scandinavia, the future of the movement is uncertain. In 2019, the Finnish NMR suffered a major setback after they were banned by the Supreme Court. In September 2020, the ban was upheld by the court. How successful the ban will be, however, remains to be seen. The historian Olena Silvennoinen is sceptical – with good reason. The very day after the ban, the Finnish NMR held a demonstration in Tampere, southern Finland. The green and white flags were the same as always, only the logo of the now-banned group was missing. “To observers of the far-right scene, it was completely clear that this was the NMR marching”, Silvennoinen says frustratedly. Even before the court ruling, the Finnish NMR formed several new organisations with different symbols in case of a ban – such as Suomi Herää (Finland Wake Up), Kohti Vapautta (Towards Freedom) and Kansallisradikaalia Toimintaa (National Radical Action).

In Sweden, the split of the NMR has also weakened the group, but the newly formed Nordisk Styrka is considered more violent, more radical and operates underground. As right-wing extremism researcher Morgan Finnsiö sums up: “Even though the NMR appears to be in decline, it is still the most important and dangerous far-right actor in Sweden. But it remains an open question whether they will manage to adapt and retain their position of power on the far right.” Current trends in Sweden and Finland point to an end of an exportable “Ikea fascism” in Scandinavia. But even from the underground, the movement will continue to foster its close international ties

———–

“The Pan-European “Ikea Fascism” of Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen” by Nicholas Potter; Belltower News; 01/06/2021

“Internationally, the Nordic Resistance Movement is extremely well connected: According to the broadcaster Yle, between 2011 and 2017, around 20 members of the movement were users of the international neo-Nazi forum Iron March. Here, the NMR came into contact with neo-Nazi parties such as Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) in Greece and Casa Pound in Italy, but also with far-right terrorist groups such as the now-banned National Action in the United Kingdom.”

The Nordic Resistance Movement isn’t just a Scandavian neo-Nazi group. It has extensive international connections, some of which were presumably cultivated from the 20 or so members of the movement who frequented the Iron March online forum from 2011 to 2017. As we’ve seen, it was during this period that the Iron March forum played a key role in popularization of James Mason’s accelerationist tome ‘Siege’ among groups like Atomwaffen. Given everything we’ve seen from ‘Willy Tepes’, he’s clearly an accelerationist Nazi terrorist. As are, presumably, many of his fellow Nordic Resistance Movement members. But they aren’t operating alone. This is a global network:

...
Since then, chapters of the NMR have emerged in Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, all of which are also called the Nordic Resistance Movement in their respective languages. Internationally, the group is often referred to by the English translation of their name. Their goal: to establish a Nordic neo-Nazi state for “white people”. Countless racist and homophobic acts of violence, attacks, and even some murders against perceived “political opponents” can be attributed to the movement. However, the NMR network is currently in the midst of a crisis: In Finland, the group was banned in 2019, and in Sweden, the movement is now split after a strategic dispute over the political direction of the group. Nevertheless, the NMR remains a very real threat.

...

Although Hitler is also idolised to some extent in the Nordic Resistance Movement, he is also seen as a loser, Arnstad explains. “He ultimately lost the war, then killed himself.” Rather than the NSDAP, the Romanian fascist Iron Guard movement led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu serves as inspiration for the NMR. “Both movements use the colours green and white, both organise in so-called ‘nests’”, Arnstad notes. “The Iron Guard was even more antisemitic than the NSDAP. Hitler called them radicals; their antisemitism was even too extreme for him.” The cult of personality around Codreanu is also attractive for the NMR: “He died a heroic death: he was executed by the Romanian government in 1938 and is seen as a ‘saint’”.
...

Notably, the international nature of the Nordic Resistance Movement appears to be rooted, in part, in the fact that Swedish fascism has long had ambitions for a pan-Europe fascist state. And that internationalist focus brings us to another notable part of the history of this group: a more clandestine, elitist, and radical splinter group that is considered more violent, Nordisk Styrka (Nordic Strength), broke off in 2019. August of 2019, according to the US State Department. Hjelmerud is a self-proclaimed member of the Nordic Resistance Movement, but we have to ask if he hasn’t also maintained ties to Nordisk Styrka too, along with ties to all sorts of other fascist groups across the world:

...
“From 2015 to 2019, the NMR had a leading role in the Swedish far-right”, explains Morgan Finnsiö, a far-right researcher at the anti-racist Expo Foundation in Stockholm in interview with Belltower.News. “Their focus on violence, their openly Nazi ideology, their almost bureaucratic organisation, and their prolific propaganda output set the benchmark in the far-right scene.” In 2019, several leading activists including movement founder Klas Lund left the NMR to form the group Nordisk Styrka (Nordic Strength), a self-proclaimed paramilitary “fighting organisation” that is said to be more clandestine, elitist and radical than the NMR. Other new far-right groups have also emerged in Sweden, with a less overtly far-right outward appearance. “Even if these groups challenge the NMR’s monopoly on power, it remains the most dangerous and important far-right actor in Sweden”, Finnsiö concludes.

...

According to the Expo Foundation, there were 2,801 such propaganda tours in 2018 alone. In 2019, there were 1,658. In addition, the movement organises 125 to 265 demonstrations and rallies annually in Sweden. Expo estimates that there were between 150 and 300 active members of the NMR before the split of the movement in 2019, as well as many other passive members and supporters. There are no official government figures on the size of the movement. “At the height of the movement, the NMR was able to mobilise 600 to 700 people for its demonstrations”, Morgan Finnsiö estimates.

...

The split may also have ideological reasons, however. Swedish historian, publicist and author of the book Älskade fascism (Beloved Fascism), Henrik Arnstad, describes Sweden as a fertile ground for fascism after 1945. In interview with Belltower.News, he explains: “After World War II, Sweden was one of the few countries where fascists could still meet and organise – for the most part quite openly. As a result, fascism flourished in the country.”

But unlike many nationalist variants of fascism around the world, Swedish fascism is characterised above all by transnationalism: it strives for a pan-European fascist nation. “I call this internationalisation ‘Ikea fascism’”, Arnstad explains. And that’s not just a play on words: Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was an active member of the fascist organisations Nysvenska Rörelsen (New Swedish Movement) and the neo-Nazi party Svensk Socialistisk Samling (Swedish Socialist Union), the successor party to the Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet (National Socialist Workers’ Party).

...

In Sweden, the split of the NMR has also weakened the group, but the newly formed Nordisk Styrka is considered more violent, more radical and operates underground. As right-wing extremism researcher Morgan Finnsiö sums up: “Even though the NMR appears to be in decline, it is still the most important and dangerous far-right actor in Sweden. But it remains an open question whether they will manage to adapt and retain their position of power on the far right.” Current trends in Sweden and Finland point to an end of an exportable “Ikea fascism” in Scandinavia. But even from the underground, the movement will continue to foster its close international ties
...

And that internationalist focus brings us to another very notable affiliation of the group: the Azov Regiment, which had a delegations of Finnish Nordic Resistance Movement members visit Kyiv back in the early months of 2019. As we’ve seen, Azov has also had a very ‘internationalist’ outlook, with Azov spokesperson Olena Semenyaka playing a leading role in networking and promoting a trans-national fascist ideology with other fascist groups. As we also saw, Semenyaka was interviewed by a member of the Nordic Resistance Movement in 2018. Also keep in mind that Nordisk Styrka formed in August of 2019 and it was March of 2019 when the Finnish Supreme Court initially banned the Nordic Resistance Movement. So around the same time of the Finnish ban on the groups, months before the formation of the more radical and violent Nordisk Styrka, a delegation of Finnish Nordic Resistance Movement made a visit to Kyiv to meet with Azov. You have to wonder what kind of role that meeting with Azov played in the decision to form a more violent, clandestine splinter group like Nordisk Styrka:

...
The NMR also has links to the Ukrainian Azov Regiment: The far-right podcast “FashCast” published an interview between a member of the Finnish NMR and Olena Semenyaka, the so-called “First Lady” and spokeswoman of the far-right paramilitary volunteer battalion in Ukraine. In the interview, Semenyaka mentions a “foreign legion” in Ukraine that international volunteers could join, as well as military training camps at the Azov camp in eastern Ukraine. A delegation of the Finnish NMR visited the Azov Regiment in Kyiv in 2019.

That’s not to say, however, that the NMR as a whole is partisan in the Ukraine conflict: Two members of the Swedish NMR, who were responsible for the series of bombings in Gothenburg in 2016 and 2017 mentioned at the beginning of this article, participated in a training camp organised by the far-right paramilitary and pro-Russian Russian Imperial Movement in 2016 in eastern Ukraine, which fought against Ukrainian forces – including the Azov Regiment.

...

Despite the successes of the NMR so far across Scandinavia, the future of the movement is uncertain. In 2019, the Finnish NMR suffered a major setback after they were banned by the Supreme Court. In September 2020, the ban was upheld by the court. How successful the ban will be, however, remains to be seen. The historian Olena Silvennoinen is sceptical – with good reason. The very day after the ban, the Finnish NMR held a demonstration in Tampere, southern Finland. The green and white flags were the same as always, only the logo of the now-banned group was missing. “To observers of the far-right scene, it was completely clear that this was the NMR marching”, Silvennoinen says frustratedly. Even before the court ruling, the Finnish NMR formed several new organisations with different symbols in case of a ban – such as Suomi Herää (Finland Wake Up), Kohti Vapautta (Towards Freedom) and Kansallisradikaalia Toimintaa (National Radical Action).
...

And let’s not forget who had very direct ties to Azov: Ryan Wesley Routh. Was Crooks the first of two Azov-connected assassination attempts in the summer of 2024? It’s a possibility we can’t dismiss at this point. Then again, maybe he was being motivated by the nihilists of 764 or the Com. Or one of the many other online nihilistic accelerationist communities that has been inspiring one act of terror after another after another in recent years. Or maybe all of them. Thomas Matthew Crooks may not have had a lot of friends in real life. But it’s pretty clear at this point he would have been very popular with the kind of networks Bjorn Leif Hjelmerud runs in. Or at least would have become very popular had he not missed. Although helping propel Trump into the White House by shooting and missing was probably pretty popular with these networks too. There’s more than one way to accelerate the destruction of society, after all.

And while the impact on American democracy is bound to be highly negative, ensuring virtually every congressional race in the US turns into a gerrymandered joke, it’s important to keep in mind that gerrymandering isn’t just an issue for federal elections. Every single state legislature is about to become a gerrymandered joke too. In fact, a recent analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter that looked at 10 Southern sates found that Republican-controlled legislatures could eliminate nearly 200 legislative seats currently held by Democrats, with Black representatives currently in the vast majority of those seats. Nearly half of all majority-minority state legislative districts could disappear in those 10 states alone. And with Republican in ‘trifecta’ control of 23 states — where the governorship and both houses of the legislature are controlled by the party — it’s clear that a lot more than 200 majority-minority districts are slated for termination.

And that looming state-level gerrymandering bonanza makes this a good time to keep in mind that the theocratic oligarchic forces that brought us Project 2025 and spent decades working to stack the courts with the kind of corrupt jurists who would grant them these kinds of rulings — groups like the Council for National Policy (CNP), the Koch network, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — are also behind the ongoing efforts to trigger an Article V Convention of the States. And as we’ve seen, those ongoing efforts to trigger an Article V convention are already potentially on the cusp of succeeding. All that needs to happen now is a court ruling in favor of the legal efforts by David M. Walker to sue congress to force a convention on the grounds that the 34-state threshold needed to trigger a convention has already been met. Just one corrupt court ruling away. It’s not exactly a stretch at this point.

Adding to the constitutional danger is the fact that the rulings for an Article V convention are hardly laid out in the constitution and widely up for debate. Who gets to decide the membership of the state delegations? And should it be a one-state-one-vote scenario, where California and Wyoming get one vote each? Or will there be proportional representation? All of that is up for debate. And according to a study released in March of 2025 by the group Exposed by the Center for Media and Democracy, the if the one-state-one-vote scenario plays out, Republicans would just need to have control over 28 out of the 50 state delegations to have unilateral control over the amendment-writing process. In other words, if Republicans can rig the convention rules in their favor, the convention would be turned into an exclusively far right convention. There wouldn’t be some conservative and progressive amendments. It would be exclusively conservative. As former Sen. Rick Santorum (R‑Pa.) put it durning an ALEC gather, “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority,” Santorum said at an ALEC event, “even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.” Yep. Republicans could easily end up with super-majority control of an Article V convention without necessarily even having a majority of public support.

At the same time, the fact that none of these rules are at all hammered out and it’s very possible that a far right minority could control the entire process points towards a scenario where a new constitution is created that has almost no legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Or maybe even competing new constitutions. No one really knows how this will play out. But with Republicans having a corrupt grip on nearly all of the institutional power in the US today, it’s not hard to predict how this will generally go.

And as we’ll also be reminded oF by another recently release report by Exposed by the Center for Media and Democracy, the agenda of the groups behind this Article V push is the same agenda behind Project 2025 but far more extreme. Environmental regulations will be gutted. Federal lands will be privatized and sold off. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 will be overturned, a balanced budget amendment will be imposed that mandates draconian cuts, while taxes will be effectively impossible to raise. It will be Project 2025, but permanent.

Sure, we don’t know how this will play out. Just as we didn’t know if conservatives would ever succeed in overturning the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Or succeed in implementing Project 2025. Despite all the warnings for years that this was going to happen. We can’t say for certain how this will play out. But with one side spending decades to achieve these goals, and achieving one after another in due time, it’s going to be extremely hard to be shocked when this ‘unthinkable’ Article V scenario finally starts playing out. Hollowing out the constitution and permanently crippling what’s left of the US’s democratic institutions is kind of the next step in this decades-old agenda, after all:

The Guardian

The supreme court’s takedown of American democracy is complete

Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, the justices have dismantled Americans’ voices. The only solution is at the ballot box

Austin Sarat
Tue 12 May 2026 08.00 EDT

Writing in 1943, the historian Henry Steele Commager delivered both a stern history lesson and a warning about the United States supreme court. The court, he said, had never been a friend to US democracy, and it never would be. For anyone committed to the advancement of majority rule, he added, judicial review “is wrong in theory and dangerous in practice”.

The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.

But the Voting Rights Act decision is only the latest in a string of decisions in which the conservative-dominated supreme court has used its version of constitutional interpretation to wage war on constitutional democracy. Those decisions have opened the floodgates to the corrupting influence of money in politics, removed the federal government from the business of ensuring that states do not draw legislative districts in ways that disadvantage minority voters, and given the green light to partisan gerrymandering.

As we try to come to terms with what the court did to section 2, we need to keep those other decisions in mind. They show what Commager long ago observed: that the only reliable way to preserve and improve US democracy is to act democratically by winning at the ballot box and prevailing in the legislative process.

...

In 2010, the court took a truly significant step in that direction when it handed down its ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. That case arose, as the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “when a conservative nonprofit organization challenged campaign finance rules that stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton”.

...

The majority held that under the first amendment, “corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited … [and] that political speech is indispensable to a democracy, which is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation”.

As the Brennan Center observes: “The justices who decided Citizens United held that independent spending could not pose a substantial risk of corruption … [and] that existing transparency rules would require all the new spending they were permitting to be fully transparent.”

Both assumptions, it adds, “have proven to be incorrect”, with Super Pacs playing key roles in recent presidential campaigns and even leading voter outreach operations.

In 2013, the court took the next step in its campaign against democracy, declaring two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. One of them, section 4, contained a formula for determining which states had to obtain preclearance from the justice department before making any changes to their voting laws. The other, section 5, described the preclearance requirements.

Writing for the majority, the chief justice, John Roberts, found that the Voting Rights Act was “no longer responsive to the current conditions” in the voting districts to which they were applied. He argued that sections 4 and 5 “represent an unconstitutional violation of the power to regulate elections that the Constitution reserves for the states”.

The result was a rash of new efforts to make voting burdensome for the very groups whose voting rights had been protected by the preclearance requirements of sections 4 and 5.

Step 3 in the court’s effort to turn the constitution into a weapon against democracy came in 2019, when it said that states were free to engage in partisan gerrymandering and to draw legislative districts with the express purpose of giving electoral advantages to the party in power.

Here again, Roberts led the way, turning to history to argue that, “aware of electoral districting problems”, the Framers “chose a characteristic approach, assigning the issue to the state legislatures, expressly checked and balanced by the Federal Congress”, with no “suggestion that the federal courts had a role to play”.

The court, as the attorney Emmet Bonderant argues, disregarded “thirty years of [its own] precedent” and reached a result that allows politicians to pick their voters and limits the ability of voters to pick those whom they prefer to represent them. It also allowed state legislatures to engage in racial gerrymandering if they claim it is motivated by partisan, not racial, considerations.

So it should not have been surprising that the court would do what it did on 29 April, when it made it almost impossible for anyone to prove that race plays a role in redistricting decisions.

The court found that the only way to do so is to provide convincing evidence that the legislatures intended to discriminate when they made those decisions – and it disregarded a clear congressional statement to the contrary.

In 1982, Congress enacted legislation to make clear that “a plaintiff could establish a violation of the section if the evidence established that … [a] standard, practice, or procedure being challenged had the result of denying a racial or language minority an equal opportunity to participate in the political process”.

The court swept aside what Congress did and decided that section 2 protected minority voters only from what Justice Samuel Alito called “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting” and nothing more.

Reacting to Alito’s reasoning, the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock said that the court’s attack on section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “is nothing less than a massive and devastating blow – not only to our democracy, but particularly to people of color in the south … This question about intent is … misleading, and it ignores our history.”

In the end, the court may have ignored our history, but we should not ignore its history. Commager would not have been surprised by what has unfolded since 2010, but he would have warned Americans against despair. He would want us to get busy trying to save what is left of our democracy by using our votes and our voices.

...

———–

“The supreme court’s takedown of American democracy is complete” by Austin Sarat; The Guardian; 05/13/2026

“As we try to come to terms with what the court did to section 2, we need to keep those other decisions in mind. They show what Commager long ago observed: that the only reliable way to preserve and improve US democracy is to act democratically by winning at the ballot box and prevailing in the legislative process.”

The days of hoping for the US courts to protect citizens from rampant abuses of power are over. This is a court loyal to powerful networks that spent years working diligently to ensure a far right Supreme Court majority of their choosing was secured. By 2010, big money interests were wildly empowered with Citizens United. Then the Roberts court proceeded to systematically gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with a 2013 ruling that effectively got rid of preclearance, followed by the 2019 Rucho that opened the floodgates to unlimited partisanship in gerrymandering. That all paved the way for the recent ruling that puts the nail in the coffin of what was left of the VRA. Protecting democracy isn’t on the Roberts Court’s priority list. Quite the opposite:

...
The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.

...

In 2010, the court took a truly significant step in that direction when it handed down its ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. That case arose, as the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “when a conservative nonprofit organization challenged campaign finance rules that stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton”.

...

In 2013, the court took the next step in its campaign against democracy, declaring two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. One of them, section 4, contained a formula for determining which states had to obtain preclearance from the justice department before making any changes to their voting laws. The other, section 5, described the preclearance requirements.

...

Step 3 in the court’s effort to turn the constitution into a weapon against democracy came in 2019, when it said that states were free to engage in partisan gerrymandering and to draw legislative districts with the express purpose of giving electoral advantages to the party in power.

Here again, Roberts led the way, turning to history to argue that, “aware of electoral districting problems”, the Framers “chose a characteristic approach, assigning the issue to the state legislatures, expressly checked and balanced by the Federal Congress”, with no “suggestion that the federal courts had a role to play”.
...

But, of course, with winning at the ballot box now more important than ever, it’s also going to be more rigged than ever. And not just in the House of Representatives. As the following TPM piece reminds us, congressional districts aren’t the only kind of district that can be gerrymandered. State legislatures are set to be a focal point of the gerrymandering bonanza about to unfold, with expectations that it’s just a matter of time before nearly half of all black state representatives in the South will be replaced by white conservatives. According to an analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter, 10 Southern states along nearly 200 state legislative seats currently held by Democrats slated to be eliminated as result of this ruling, with the vast majority held by Black representatives. And that’s just 10 out of the 23 states where Republican hold a ‘trifecta’ of the governorship and both houses the state legislatures. In other words, state legislature are about to become a lot more radical and, in the case of MAGA-captured states, far more willing to further break democracy:

Talking Points Memo
Cafe

We Aren’t Paying Enough Attention to What the SCOTUS VRA Decision Means for State Legislatures

The Supreme Court’s ruling impacts much more than control of Congress.

by Gaby Goldstein
05.06.26 | 1:49 pm

In the fog of the redistricting wars to come, it may be easy to remember the audacity of President Trump demanding state legislatures immediately redraw maximally rigged maps. But this didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the next logical step in decades-long sequence of events that have led, rather predictably, to this moment.

In 2021, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brnovich v. DNC deeply eroded the Voting Rights Act, I wrote with FairVote’s David Daley that “a central goal of conservative jurisprudence is the carving back of federal protections, and the empowerment of states over vast swaths of social and civil life.” We warned that Chief Justice John Roberts had been “patiently preparing to dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act for 40 years,” and that “his careful long game may end in checkmate for majority rule as we know it.”

That checkmate has arrived. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s 6–3 ruling gutted Section 2 — the last enforceable provision of the Voting Rights Act — by requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination while allowing partisan gerrymandering as a defense. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, the “decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

The immediate headlines focused on Congress: the potential loss of as many as 19 House seats held by Democrats, including as much as 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus. These consequences are grave. But an equally consequential and far less discussed impact is what Callais means for state legislatures — the overlooked institutions that have quietly been growing in power over the past few decades, and that now hold more of it than ever, with even fewer guardrails.

The Venue Is the Strategy

The conservative strategy for consolidating state-level power has never been a secret. In March 2010, Karl Rove penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed literally titled “The GOP Targets State Legislatures.” The sub-head: “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” The piece laid out the whole playbook for Project REDMAP: by flipping a few handfuls of state legislative seats in the 2010 midterms, Republicans could redraw congressional and state legislative maps for a generation. Democrats either did not believe them or had nothing to counter it. That year, Republicans gained control of 11 additional state legislatures and ran the table on redistricting. Today, they hold 23 trifectas — a net loss of just two in 15 years.

But REDMAP was only one part of a larger architecture. The deeper strategy has three moves. First, build and solidify power in state legislatures. Second, strip away federal protections — through the courts, and by dismantling federal regulations, funding, and programs. Third, devolve that authority to the states where you’ve already built structural advantages through gerrymandering, voter suppression and long-term policy infrastructure. The linchpin of the whole operation is control of state legislatures.

The Court has been an essential partner. As Mother Jones’ Ari Berman and FairVote’s Daley have both exhaustively chronicled, Roberts’ entire career could be characterized as a crusade against the Voting Rights Act. On his watch, Shelby County removed federal preclearance. Rucho declared partisan gerrymandering beyond judicial review, leaving states free to draw lines advantaging the party already in power. Brnovich chipped further away at Section 2. And now Callais eliminates the last federal check on racially discriminatory redistricting, freeing the very legislatures that draw the maps from accountability for the maps they draw.

...

The Scale We’re Not Talking About

Most analysis since Callais has focused on Congress. But the devastation in state legislatures may be as bad or worse, and the consequences even more immediate for people’s daily lives.

A recent analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter examined 10 Southern states and found that Republican-controlled legislatures could eliminate nearly 200 state legislative seats currently held by Democrats — the vast majority held by Black representatives. Nearly half of all majority-minority state legislative districts in the South could simply disappear. And those 10 states are less than half of the 23 Republican trifectas nationwide. The full scale of the looming Republican gerrymandering monster will be vast.

This will be, first and foremost, a decimation of Black political representation — likely the largest reduction since the end of Reconstruction. And that representational decimation will be tied to policy decimation. State legislatures draw district lines for Congress and for themselves. They set election rules. They determine whether to expand Medicaid, fund public schools, protect reproductive freedom, or safeguard workers’ rights. As the Court rolls back federal protections and the administration slashes programs, these decisions increasingly fall to the states. The legislators who champion these issues — including Black lawmakers in majority-minority districts — are exactly the ones whose seats will be on the chopping block.

...

The Overlooked Arena

In 2021, Daley and I concluded our piece with a warning: “On voting rights and so much more, the buck does and will continue to stop with state legislatures. We must elect legislators who will fight to protect voting rights — down-ballot, where it matters most and is too often overlooked — or risk becoming a nation filled with democracy deserts, where your right to vote depends on where you live and your access to the polls depends on the color of your skin.”

That warning has been borne out with punishing precision. Americans can name their U.S. senators. But few can name their state representative or correctly identify what state legislators do. Yet it is that state representative who will determine whether their district is drawn fairly, whether their vote counts equally, and increasingly, whether their fundamental rights are protected at all.

The conservative movement understood this decades ago. The American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network, and Americans for Prosperity have treated state-level coordination as a core organizing principle, drafting model bills, convening officials, and spreading policy from statehouse to statehouse with discipline. Pro-democracy allies are beginning to build comparable infrastructure, with states finding ways to coordinate through interstate compacts, pooled purchasing power, and shared strategies. But the gap remains enormous, and the clock is running.

What Comes Next

Callais did not create the crisis of lopsided, weaponized state legislative power. It completed a long trajectory, one that has systematically dismantled federal protections and concentrated authority in the institutions least subject to public scrutiny and most vulnerable to structural manipulation: state legislatures.

...

————

“We Aren’t Paying Enough Attention to What the SCOTUS VRA Decision Means for State Legislatures” by Gaby Goldstein; Talking Points Memo; 05/06/2026

“The immediate headlines focused on Congress: the potential loss of as many as 19 House seats held by Democrats, including as much as 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus. These consequences are grave. But an equally consequential and far less discussed impact is what Callais means for state legislatures — the overlooked institutions that have quietly been growing in power over the past few decades, and that now hold more of it than ever, with even fewer guardrails.”

State legislatures are about to become just as gerrymandered, if not more so, than congress. It’s like the term ‘one party state’ is poised to become reality in one state after another. Most especially in the South where nearly half of present-dat majority-minority districts are expected to soon disappear. But this coming wave of state-level gerrymandering isn’t going to be limited to the South. Hyper-partisan gerrymandering at the federal and state level is inevitably going to be the New Normal everywhere. Thanks, in large part, to a corrupt Supreme Court majority that is still just getting started in its quest to hand as much power and control to private interests possible. The far right lock on the Supreme Court is likely to last decades, after all. They have plenty more damage to do:

...
Most analysis since Callais has focused on Congress. But the devastation in state legislatures may be as bad or worse, and the consequences even more immediate for people’s daily lives.

A recent analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter examined 10 Southern states and found that Republican-controlled legislatures could eliminate nearly 200 state legislative seats currently held by Democrats — the vast majority held by Black representatives. Nearly half of all majority-minority state legislative districts in the South could simply disappear. And those 10 states are less than half of the 23 Republican trifectas nationwide. The full scale of the looming Republican gerrymandering monster will be vast.

This will be, first and foremost, a decimation of Black political representation — likely the largest reduction since the end of Reconstruction. And that representational decimation will be tied to policy decimation. State legislatures draw district lines for Congress and for themselves. They set election rules. They determine whether to expand Medicaid, fund public schools, protect reproductive freedom, or safeguard workers’ rights. As the Court rolls back federal protections and the administration slashes programs, these decisions increasingly fall to the states. The legislators who champion these issues — including Black lawmakers in majority-minority districts — are exactly the ones whose seats will be on the chopping block.

...

In 2021, Daley and I concluded our piece with a warning: “On voting rights and so much more, the buck does and will continue to stop with state legislatures. We must elect legislators who will fight to protect voting rights — down-ballot, where it matters most and is too often overlooked — or risk becoming a nation filled with democracy deserts, where your right to vote depends on where you live and your access to the polls depends on the color of your skin.”

That warning has been borne out with punishing precision. Americans can name their U.S. senators. But few can name their state representative or correctly identify what state legislators do. Yet it is that state representative who will determine whether their district is drawn fairly, whether their vote counts equally, and increasingly, whether their fundamental rights are protected at all.
...

And when we have to ask ourselves if the Democrats are adequately aware of the scope of this looming threat to democratic representation, keep in mind that the Project REDMAP agenda launched in 2010 with the goal of maximizing Republican gains in the 2010 redistricting cycle wasn’t a secret. Karl Rove even wrote an op-ed about it at the time. And yet made basically no preparations of their own. Who knows, maybe now that redistricting has gone from a once-a-decade affair to a ‘whenever possible’ scenario, Democrats will actually give this threat the sustained attention it needs. But it’s hard to be optimistic:

...
The conservative strategy for consolidating state-level power has never been a secret. In March 2010, Karl Rove penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed literally titled “The GOP Targets State Legislatures.” The sub-head: “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” The piece laid out the whole playbook for Project REDMAP: by flipping a few handfuls of state legislative seats in the 2010 midterms, Republicans could redraw congressional and state legislative maps for a generation. Democrats either did not believe them or had nothing to counter it. That year, Republicans gained control of 11 additional state legislatures and ran the table on redistricting. Today, they hold 23 trifectas — a net loss of just two in 15 years.

But REDMAP was only one part of a larger architecture. The deeper strategy has three moves. First, build and solidify power in state legislatures. Second, strip away federal protections — through the courts, and by dismantling federal regulations, funding, and programs. Third, devolve that authority to the states where you’ve already built structural advantages through gerrymandering, voter suppression and long-term policy infrastructure. The linchpin of the whole operation is control of state legislatures.

...

The conservative movement understood this decades ago. The American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network, and Americans for Prosperity have treated state-level coordination as a core organizing principle, drafting model bills, convening officials, and spreading policy from statehouse to statehouse with discipline. Pro-democracy allies are beginning to build comparable infrastructure, with states finding ways to coordinate through interstate compacts, pooled purchasing power, and shared strategies. But the gap remains enormous, and the clock is running.
...

And that warning about the upcoming radicalization of one state legislature after another bring us to a report from back in March of 2025 that serves as a reminder that control of state legislatures likely translates into control of the state delegations that would be sent to carrying out an Article V constitutional convention:

Exposed by the Center for Media and Democracy

The Right’s Vision of a Constitutional Convention Would Sideline Voters and Spark a Constitutional Crisis

By ExposedByCMD Editors
| March 14th, 2025
at 1:51 PM (CDT)

The Center for Media and Democracy released a revised and updated edition of its report today documenting how a constitutional convention would give hand-picked GOP delegates supermajority control over any proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Right-wing groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Convention of States have been ramping up their campaigns in recent years to force the first constitutional convention since 1787 as a way to sidestep Congress and radically rewrite the Constitution, often using populist rhetoric about the need for people to take back control from “big government” and politicians.

However, CMD’s report, “Convention of State Politicians,” takes a deep dive into the states’ delegate selection laws across the country to reach a startling conclusion: If the Right gets its way, American voters will have no role to play in a constitutional convention.

Who would decide on what amendments get adopted and sent out to the states? Politicians chosen by — you guessed it — politicians.

The report finds that:

* To date, 22 states have enacted resolutions or legislation detailing delegate selection procedures. In 18 of those states, the legislature as a whole or legislative leadership would pick the delegates. Another three states divide that power between legislative leaders and the governor.

* Only one state, Rhode Island, includes a role for voters in choosing delegates to a constitutional convention. Indeed, eight states automatically make politicians, typically legislators or the governor, their convention delegates.

In addition, the right-wing, dark money groups lobbying for a convention take the position that each state would get one vote in the proceeding, like a super-sized U.S. Senate. That approach — already embraced by 14 states in their constitutional convention applications — would give Wyoming the same weight as California in deciding what amendments get proposed for ratification, despite California having about 70 times more people.

And it would give Republican politicians control over 28 of 50 votes at the convention. Democrats would control only 18 votes, with the remaining four likely split between the parties, the report finds.

This well-kept secret lies behind the enthusiasm for a convention shown by con con leaders like former Sen. Rick Santorum (R‑Pa.). “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority,” Santorum said at an ALEC event, “even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

...

Proponents’ method of choosing delegates and voting on amendments is not a given, as Article V of the Constitution is silent on the matter. When Congress last debated the issue in the 1970s and 80s, the prevailing view was the opposite: that delegates should be popularly elected by congressional district, with each delegate getting one vote, the report finds. And prior Supreme Court decisions suggest that Congress has the power to decide.

Nonetheless, Congress has not enacted any legislation on point, and could easily switch gears to embrace whatever set of rules offered the most advantage to the party in control at the time.

CMD’s report concludes that convening the first constitutional convention since 1787 without consensus in advance on the rules would spark a constitutional crisis where the power of the courts or Congress to intervene is unclear. And the manner in which delegates are chosen for that convention will have a significant impact on its outcome.

Absent prior resolution of these questions, the nation could face the prospect of a convention whose legitimacy is rejected by much of the populace, or even two dueling conventions, each purporting to promulgate amendments to the Constitution.

...

———–

“The Right’s Vision of a Constitutional Convention Would Sideline Voters and Spark a Constitutional Crisis” By ExposedByCMD Editors; Exposed by the Center for Media and Democracy; 03/14/2025

“Absent prior resolution of these questions, the nation could face the prospect of a convention whose legitimacy is rejected by much of the populace, or even two dueling conventions, each purporting to promulgate amendments to the Constitution.”

An Article V Convention doesn’t just risk re-writing the US Constitution according to the corporate interest behind the Republican Party. The lack of any clear rules and possibility for ‘make-it-up-as-you-go’ scenarios risks creating a farce of a convention that preemptively destroys the credible whatever emerges. And as we can see from the 22 states that that actually have spelled out how the delgate selection process would go, they overwhelmingly handed that power over to state legislatures. Beyond that, there’s question of ‘one-state-one-vote’ or a proportional system, with 14 states having already embraced the ‘one-state-one-vote’ model. Taken together, between the one-state-one-vote scenario and state legislatures choosing the delegates, it’s possible that Republicans could dominate the amendment-writing at the convention without any need for compromise by controlling just 28 out of the 50 votes at the convention:

...
Who would decide on what amendments get adopted and sent out to the states? Politicians chosen by — you guessed it — politicians.

The report finds that:

* To date, 22 states have enacted resolutions or legislation detailing delegate selection procedures. In 18 of those states, the legislature as a whole or legislative leadership would pick the delegates. Another three states divide that power between legislative leaders and the governor.

* Only one state, Rhode Island, includes a role for voters in choosing delegates to a constitutional convention. Indeed, eight states automatically make politicians, typically legislators or the governor, their convention delegates.

In addition, the right-wing, dark money groups lobbying for a convention take the position that each state would get one vote in the proceeding, like a super-sized U.S. Senate. That approach — already embraced by 14 states in their constitutional convention applications — would give Wyoming the same weight as California in deciding what amendments get proposed for ratification, despite California having about 70 times more people.

And it would give Republican politicians control over 28 of 50 votes at the convention. Democrats would control only 18 votes, with the remaining four likely split between the parties, the report finds.

This well-kept secret lies behind the enthusiasm for a convention shown by con con leaders like former Sen. Rick Santorum (R‑Pa.). “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority,” Santorum said at an ALEC event, “even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”...

And that 2025 warning from the CMD brings us to the following recent update from the CMD. A warning that is much more apparent now that Project 2025 has had over a year to play out: the impact of an Article V convention controlled by these movement could make Project 2025 look like child’s play:

Exposed by the Center for Media and Democracy

An Article V Convention Would Supercharge Project 2025

By David Super
| March 10th, 2026
at 10:26 AM (CDT)

Several groups affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been waging a well-funded campaign to call a convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution to amend our Constitution. The Heritage Foundation, the prime force driving Project 2025, has strongly endorsed the effort to call an Article V convention.

A study by the Center for Media and Democracy concluded that Republicans would have sole control over the membership of at least 28 of the 50 state delegations – with another four likely split between the parties – meaning that they could write amendments as they pleased without any need to compromise with Democrats or independents.

Although ALEC and its allies speak in generalities about what they would seek to accomplish in a convention — using vague terms such as “fiscal responsibility” and limiting “federal overreach” — they clearly see an Article V convention as a crucial vehicle for enacting the same radical agenda that drove Project 2025 and that President Trump is seeking to impose now. These intentions are evident from the enormous resources ALEC and its allies are devoting to pushing for an Article V convention. Indeed, ALEC served on the advisory board for Project 2025.

Proponents’ intentions also are apparent from the amendments proposed by the mock conventions they have convened. The most recent of these was held in August 2023 by the Convention of States Foundation (COSF) in Williamsburg, Virginia, bringing together mostly Republican legislators from 49 states:

* Echoing the Project 2025’s radical proposals (at pp. 531–32) to transfer federal wildlife habitats to extractive industries, COSF’s “Federal Legislative and Executive Jurisdiction Proposal 3” would compel the federal government to transfer large swaths of federal lands to the states. Under this constitutional amendment, the federal government would require past or future permission from state legislatures to retain almost any of the land it holds within their boundaries apart from national parks, monuments and wilderness areas that have existed since at least 1976. President Trump has taken steps in this direction, but the filibuster has prevented him from seeking sweeping legislation. Amending the Constitution would eliminate any limits on handing over federal lands.

* Project 2025 seeks to undermine civil rights, demanding an end to energetic enforcement of the rights of people seeking to access abortion clinics (at pp. 557–58) and redirecting the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to attack diversity programs (at pp. 560–62). President Trump has done so, closing numerous civil rights investigations and wielding civil rights crudely against universities, law firms, and other institutions he dislikes. COSF’s “Federal Legislative and Executive Jurisdiction Proposal 1” goes even farther, eliminating the constitutional authority for most civil rights laws by sharply restricting Congress’s authority to regulate interstate commerce to “buying, selling, or transportation of commercial goods and services across state lines.” All existing laws and regulations exceeding this authority, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, would be nullified in two years.

* This same COSF proposal to radically restrict Congress’s authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause would realize Project 2025’s goal (at pp. 60–61, 422–40, and 533–36) to gut federal environmental protection. Much or all of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and other major environmental laws that Project 2025 targets are grounded in the Commerce Clause and would be abolished in two years under COSF’s proposal.

* Numerous proposals in Project 2025 seek to maximize the impact of recent decisions by the stacked U.S. Supreme Court or demand further radical changes to empower the president that the Trump administration has been seeking from the Court (e.g., at pp. 560 and 586). CoSP’s “Federal Term Limits and Judicial Jurisdiction Proposal 2” would permanently limit the Court to nine justices, precluding any legislation to expand the Court and restore its balance. (This proposal also shows that a convention cannot be trusted to adhere to any limits on its scope as it has nothing to do with limiting federal power, fiscal responsibility, or term limits, the three purposes that CoSP claims will be the exclusive subjects of the convention it seeks.)

* Project 2025 demands that a balanced federal budget be a paramount objective (at p. 702), while proposing numerous tax changes that would reduce what the affluent pay (at pp. 695–701). This would require staggering reductions in domestic spending. Project 2025 (at p. 379) also seeks to allow the president to unilaterally rescind appropriations for programs he dislikes. President Trump has leaned into this proposal, destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies. President Nixon tried this and lost repeatedly in court, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Train v. City of New York. The Supreme Court has placed procedural obstacles in the way of challenges to President Trump’s impoundments, but has not said that the substantive law has changed. COSF’s “Fiscal Restraints Proposal 1” would cap federal spending at the average of the previous three years’ revenues, requiring these same massive cuts and providing a possible constitutional basis for unilateral presidential rescissions.

* Project 2025 proposes that 3/5 majorities of both chambers of Congress be required to increase taxes (at p. 698). This same COSF proposal outdoes Project 2025 by locking into the Constitution a requirement of 2/3 majorities in both chambers of Congress to increase taxes.

...

The key to preventing congressional Republicans from acting is to deny them enough state applications for an Article V convention to be able to make a credible claim that two-thirds of the states have applied for one, as the Constitution requires. If convention proponents can increase the number of states with Article V applications from the current 33 to the constitutionally mandated 34, the Republican Congress could seek to call an immediate Article V convention.

Although the ALEC-allied groups are well short of two-thirds of the states on any honest measure, one of the lawyers involved in the 2020 fake electors scheme has been devising exotic legal theories that would allow them to count states with old, moot, and unrelated convention calls toward the 34-state threshold. Removing as many actual applications as possible is therefore crucial and extremely urgent to block an even more radical, and permanent, version of Project 2025.

———–

“An Article V Convention Would Supercharge Project 2025” By David Super; Exposed by the Center for Media and Democracy; 03/10/2026

“A study by the Center for Media and Democracy concluded that Republicans would have sole control over the membership of at least 28 of the 50 state delegations – with another four likely split between the parties – meaning that they could write amendments as they pleased without any need to compromise with Democrats or independents.”

As we saw, Republicans control just 28 out of 50 state delegations at a constitutional convention would grant unilateral control over the amendment process in an Article V convention. In other words, the Article V convention would exclusively be a choice between far right-inspired new amendments or not. It might be a ‘runaway’ convention, but it’s only going to run in one direction. It was the kind of warning that became an blaring alarm following the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. And with 23 states already under a Republican ‘trifecta’, it’s not hard to imagine at least 28 states would have Republican-dominated delegations. And with the same powerful oligarchic interests behind Project 2025 — including the Heritage Foundation and ALEC — having long backed an Article V convention, it’s not hard to imagine these same forces that spent years planning Project 2025 have big plans already in place for an Article V scenario:

...
Several groups affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been waging a well-funded campaign to call a convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution to amend our Constitution. The Heritage Foundation, the prime force driving Project 2025, has strongly endorsed the effort to call an Article V convention.

...

Although ALEC and its allies speak in generalities about what they would seek to accomplish in a convention — using vague terms such as “fiscal responsibility” and limiting “federal overreach” — they clearly see an Article V convention as a crucial vehicle for enacting the same radical agenda that drove Project 2025 and that President Trump is seeking to impose now. These intentions are evident from the enormous resources ALEC and its allies are devoting to pushing for an Article V convention. Indeed, ALEC served on the advisory board for Project 2025.
...

And as we can see from the 2023 mock convention, the kind of ‘beyond-Project 2025’ outcomes we should expect from a Republican-dominated convention include an end the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Along with almost all federal regulations. And in a major win for ALEC and their fellow forces behind the ‘Bundy ranch’ showdowns with the federal government, federal lands would likely have to be handed over to states where they would be rapidly privatized:

...
* Echoing the Project 2025’s radical proposals (at pp. 531–32) to transfer federal wildlife habitats to extractive industries, COSF’s “Federal Legislative and Executive Jurisdiction Proposal 3” would compel the federal government to transfer large swaths of federal lands to the states. Under this constitutional amendment, the federal government would require past or future permission from state legislatures to retain almost any of the land it holds within their boundaries apart from national parks, monuments and wilderness areas that have existed since at least 1976. President Trump has taken steps in this direction, but the filibuster has prevented him from seeking sweeping legislation. Amending the Constitution would eliminate any limits on handing over federal lands.

* Project 2025 seeks to undermine civil rights, demanding an end to energetic enforcement of the rights of people seeking to access abortion clinics (at pp. 557–58) and redirecting the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to attack diversity programs (at pp. 560–62). President Trump has done so, closing numerous civil rights investigations and wielding civil rights crudely against universities, law firms, and other institutions he dislikes. COSF’s “Federal Legislative and Executive Jurisdiction Proposal 1” goes even farther, eliminating the constitutional authority for most civil rights laws by sharply restricting Congress’s authority to regulate interstate commerce to “buying, selling, or transportation of commercial goods and services across state lines.” All existing laws and regulations exceeding this authority, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, would be nullified in two years.

* This same COSF proposal to radically restrict Congress’s authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause would realize Project 2025’s goal (at pp. 60–61, 422–40, and 533–36) to gut federal environmental protection. Much or all of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and other major environmental laws that Project 2025 targets are grounded in the Commerce Clause and would be abolished in two years under COSF’s proposal.
...

As the CMD cautions, the key to avoiding this whole Article V disaster scenario is preventing an Article V convention in the first place, followed by a warning that appears to be a reference to David M. Walker’s ongoing legal efforts to sue to force an Article V convention under the legal theory that the 34-state threshold has already been reached:

...
The key to preventing congressional Republicans from acting is to deny them enough state applications for an Article V convention to be able to make a credible claim that two-thirds of the states have applied for one, as the Constitution requires. If convention proponents can increase the number of states with Article V applications from the current 33 to the constitutionally mandated 34, the Republican Congress could seek to call an immediate Article V convention.

Although the ALEC-allied groups are well short of two-thirds of the states on any honest measure, one of the lawyers involved in the 2020 fake electors scheme has been devising exotic legal theories that would allow them to count states with old, moot, and unrelated convention calls toward the 34-state threshold. Removing as many actual applications as possible is therefore crucial and extremely urgent to block an even more radical, and permanent, version of Project 2025.
...

As we can see, the forces behind this Article V push are the same forces that spent years planning Project 2025, pretty openly, and yet it was a scenario that wasn’t really taken seriously until it was too late, with almost nothing having been done to prevent it. Which sounds like the perfect recipe for more of the same, but much worse.

Sure, President Trump seems to desperately want to end the conflict as soon as possible, seemingly having been suckered into thinking this could be some sort of ‘shock and awe’ operation that would be wrapped up quickly. But he also desperately wants a clear ‘win’. And the longer this goes, the clearer that win has to ultimately be for him to safe face. And for the US’s partners in this operation — Israel and the Gulf Kingdoms in particular — anything less than regime change will be a major let down. The stakes started off incredibly high, and only seem to keep climbing.

And while regime change could involve US ‘boots on the ground’, it’s worth keeping in mind that a much more drawn out ‘arming the opposition’ regime change template is something the US is very familiar with, most notably with the US’s backing of the Saudi-led mujahedeen forces following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the civil war in Nicaragua that become a focal point of the Iran Contra affair. Years of ‘arming the opposition’ that ultimately resulted in the creation of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

It’s possible that the Trump administration could accept some sort of ‘win’ short of Iranian regime change that includes some sort of promise to abandon any nuclear ambitions, it’s hard to imagine the Iranian government isn’t more intent then ever on achieving a nuclear deterrent after everything that has happened. So with the Trump administration having seemingly led the US into a new military quagmire, possibly leading up to a regime change under the pretext of ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions once and for all, perhaps now is a good time to reflect back on the incredibly corrupt history of the US-backed ‘Islamic bomb’ covert nuclear procurement program that eventually resulted in Pakistan’s nuclear weapon. A history that makes clear that, while Pakistan may have been the primarily beneficiary of this covert agenda, it was very much a multi-national effort, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE playing especially significant roles. And the whole time, the US either turned a blind eye or actively facilitated the secret nuclear program. A new, wildly corrupt bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was formed and allowed to finance the secret nuclear program through Ponzi scheme accounting and the laundering of illicit profits from extensive arms and drugs trafficking.

As we’ll see in a New York Times piece below from back in 1998, it’s not that the US government didn’t have concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. Those concerns existed. But they somehow evaporated after Pakistan agreed to play a central role in the arming and funding of the Afghan mujahedeen. In fact, two retired Pakistani intelligence officials told the NY Times that, when Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, was approached by US officials in the early 80s to express their concerns about the nuclear program, Zia told them he had the blessings of President Reagan and CIA director William Casey to build the bomb. In fact, not only did Pakistan have the Reagan administration’s blessings, but the US was also aware that it was China that was providing much of the technical know how to build the bomb. The US’s awareness of this Chinese-designed bomb was so extensive that a replica of the Pakistani bomb was built and stored in the Pentagon. In 1985, the US Congress passed a law requiring the president to certify that Pakistan was not building nuclear weapons in order to remain eligible for continuing military and economic aid. Reagan and George Bush signed that certification every year from 1985, until 1990, the year of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. All of a sudden, the US discovered Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Next, we’ll take a look at a pair of excerpt from a book published in 2023, The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies by Iqbal Chand Malhotr, which lays out the history of BCCI’s key role in the Pakistani nuclear procurement program. A program that started back in 1972, when President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto arranged for a meeting of Pakistan’s nuclear scientists to put the nuclear procurement agenda in motion. By the end of the meeting, Butto decided to tap the Muslim Brotherhood to fund the secret program, and then left for a tour of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other Arab nations to quietly seek out support. The tour ended with the a trip to China. Two leaders who openly expressed a desire help were Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, then the first president of the UAE. This is a good time to recall how Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan’s son, the UAE Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), who made a joint offer, along with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), to the 2016 Trump campaign to assist in Trump’s presidential election using the services of the Israeli private intelligence firm Psy Group. It was apparently Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan who conceived of the need for a Ponzi-like financial institution that would ostensibly be financed by oil-rich Arab leaders but would, in reality, be secretly controlled by the governments of Pakistan and Abu Dhabi. It was at this point that Agha Hasan Abedi became seen as the person who could run this operation. But in order to do so, Abedi needed to distance himself from the Pakistani government was establishing credentials as a high profile banker. That’s where Dick van Oenen, the head of Bank of America’s Karachi office, comes into the picture, with Oenen invest $625,000 in the planned new financial institution in exchange for a 30% stake. In September of 1972, months after Bhutto’s initial meeting, BCCI was formally launched and the financial vehicle that would finance the covert creation of the ‘Islamic bomb’ was in place.

It was during this same period in the early 1970s that India-born Pakistani Muhajir called Abdul Qadir Khan (A.Q. Khan) was writing letters to Bhutto, expressing a desire to share his nuclear knowledge with the Pakistani government. In 1974, Khan met with Bhutto, sharing plans for a bomb that would cost only $60,000 to build and could be use the uranium ore that had been discovered in Pakistan’s Suleiman Mountains a decade earlier.

In June of 1976, Pakistan and China signed a secret nuclear protocol. Months later, in September, another organization joined in the effort: the Safari Club was formed after a meeting of the heads of intelligence for France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, and Iran. Yes, it turns out pre-revolution Iran was a participant in the Safari Club, an organization that could be seen as a kind of outsourcing of US foreign policy. BCCI was tapped for the funding of the Safari Club’s covert operations.

It was in the late 70s and early 80s when the drug trafficking component of this illicit financing machine started manifesting in the form of large amounts of hashish and heroin hitting US streets. By 1984, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) identified Pakistan as the source of 31 per cent of the heroin in the US markets. This is, of course, a good time to recall the cocaine-trafficking component of the overlapping Iran Contra scandal that was playing out at the same time. There was A LOT of illicit narcotics trafficking during this period. To finance mujahedeen and the Pakistani bomb. Some might call that drug abuse.

But it wasn’t just that the US was turning a blind eye to all of this activity. The State Department had been actively facilitating the back-door procurement of nuclear technology through the issuance of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment that the Commerce Department refused to approve over proliferation concerns. It turns out the Pakistani government was being tipped off by the State Department about CIA and US Customs operations that were set up to catch Pakistan in this technology trafficking. Of course, with the CIA being one of the main actors in the whole mujahedeen effort and Bill Casey having given his blessings, it’s hard to imagine the agency was actually irked by this.

None of this is new. It’s all review at this point. But it’s a chapter in history that has an abundance of lessons to be heeded today given the reality that the US appears to have bogged itself down into a quagmire that has long been sought by the US’s allies in the region. A history of the US passively and actively facilitating an international covert nuclear proliferation network heavily orchestrated by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the large Muslim Brotherhood international movement. And tolerating massive drug trafficking and financial crimes in the process.

But let’s not forget about another side of this larger story: the BCCI/Safari Club/Islamic bomb story isn’t just interwined and overlapping with the Iran Contra scandal. Let’s not forget that the 1980s was the same decade the whole PROMIS scandal played out. A scandal that, as we’ve seen, included Ghislaine Maxwell’s father and sister, Robert and Christine, who targeted the key US nuclear research institutions like Los Alamos Laboratory and Sandia National Labs with bugged versions of PROMIS that likely ultimately ended up feeding key nuclear secrets back to Israel. Now, it’s true that Israel is thought to have acquired its first nuclear device in the early 1970s, but that doesn’t mean that US’s nuclear secrets wouldn’t have been extremely valuable. That’s also all part of the context of this sordid chapter in history: at the same time the Reagan administration was turning a blind eye toward the outrageous conduct of this covert Pakistani nuclear proliferation network, the administration was also engaged in the PROMIS scandal and seemingly turning a blind eye to the activities of Robert and Christine Maxwell that seemingly involved the pilfering of the US’s nuclear secrets for the benefit of Israel.

It’s all just wildly corrupt. Too wildly corrupt to be digested and taken seriously, apparently. Oh, and keep in mind that, since the ‘Pakistani bomb’ was actually an international effort, we have every reason to suspect that the acquisition of a nuclear weapons by Saudi Arabia or the UAE is probably A LOT easier to accomplish at this point than anyone would like to admit. Especially today, when the technology needed to build a bomb is likely much more accessible. So while it remains whether or not the Trump administration will be able to extract something that could be called a ‘win’ as the war with Iran continues to plays out,
try not to be surprised if it’s the kind of ‘win’ that results in a much more nuclear-armed Middle East. The covert work building towards a kind of mass-proliferation clusterf#ck started over 50 years, after all:

The New York Times

U.S. And China Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb

By TIM WEINER
June 1, 1998

WASHINGTON — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a future prime minister of Pakistan, declared in 1965, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves — even go hungry — but we will get one of our own.”

It required more than three decades, a global network of theft and espionage, and uncounted millions for Pakistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, to explode that bomb. But it could not have happened without smuggled Chinese technology and contradictory shifts in U.S. policy, according to present and former U.S. officials.

China, a staunch ally of Pakistan’s, provided blueprints for the bomb, as well as highly enriched uranium, tritium, scientists and key components for a nuclear weapons production complex, among other crucial tools. Without China’s help, Pakistan’s bomb would not exist, said Gary Milhollin, a leading expert on the spread of nuclear weapons.

But the United States, a Cold War friend that turned its back on Islamabad when that long battle was over, pursued policies that proved almost as essential to the Pakistani bomb program as the uranium and tritium, some present and former government officials say.

The United States provided Pakistani nuclear scientists with technical training from the 1950s into the 1970s. /And it turned a blind eye to the nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, because Pakistan was providing the crucial link in the CIA’s effort to smuggle billions of dollars of weapons to Afghan guerrillas attempting to drive out Soviet invaders.

But when that covert operation ended, the United States cut off a multi-billion military aid program by imposing sanctions in the 1990s — leaving Pakistan feeling defenseless.

...

Pakistan’s efforts to build the bomb began in the 1950s. Under the “Atoms for Peace” program, the United States agreed to train Pakistani scientists in nuclear-reactor technology. Washington also provided Pakistan’s first research reactor and fuel. The training continued until 1972.

That year, shortly after a crushing defeat in its third war with India since the two nations were cut free from British colonial rule in 1947, Pakistan resolved never to suffer such humiliation again. In January 1972, Bhutto, by then prime minister, summoned his nation’s best nuclear physicists and ordered them to build a bomb. Pakistan set up a world-wide smuggling ring to buy, copy or steal nuclear weapons technology, according to U.S. officials and declassified government documents.

India tested a nuclear weapon in 1974, and Pakistan greatly intensified its efforts in response. The program was closely monitored by the U.S. military, intelligence and law-enforcement services — so closely that President Jimmy Carter cut off all military and economic aid to Pakistan in April 1979, citing U.S. laws aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

That decision was reversed nine months later, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which lies on Pakistan’s border.

Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, agreed to smuggle weapons to the Afghans on behalf of the CIA. Suddenly Pakistan was the recipient of a six-year, $3.2 billion American aid package — half cash, half high-tech weapons.

But in 1983, a secret State Department report said there was “unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.” The report detailed how Pakistan had bought or stolen nuclear weapons technology around the world.

The report, based on information gathered by the CIA and recently declassified, also said flatly that “China has provided assistance to Pakistan’s program to develop a nuclear weapons capability.”

The “unambiguous evidence” included Pakistan’s secret blueprint for a nuclear bomb. That blueprint was made in China.

Pakistan had obtained the plans from the Chinese government in the early 1980s. The bomb was simple and efficient, based on highly enriched uranium, and it had been tested by the Chinese in 1966. U.S. government physicists built a model of the bomb and reported that it was a virtually foolproof design.

“The United States approached the Pakistani government at the highest levels to communicate its extreme concern” over the nuclear-weapons program, the report said.

...

But Zia indicated his belief that he had the blessings of President Ronald Reagan and the director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, to go ahead and build the bomb, according to two retired Pakistani military intelligence officials. The general clearly stated his intent in a 1986 interview. “It is our right to obtain the technology,” Zia said.

In 1985, Congress enacted a law requiring the president to certify that Pakistan was not building nuclear weapons and thus eligible for continuing military and economic aid. And every year from 1985 to 1990, Presidents Reagan and Bush certified just that.

“Reagan and Bush said it ain’t a bomb until they turn that last screw and paint B‑O-M‑B on the side,” Bearden said.

Everything changed after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when Pakistan was no longer needed as the key link in the CIA’s arms pipeline to Afghan rebels. In 1990, the United States finally acknowledged that the Pakistani nuclear weapons program existed — and, under the law, cut off military aid.

This left Pakistan’s armed forces, facing an Indian army twice their size, without a reliable source of conventional weapons, such as tanks and jets. It is still waiting for 28 F‑16’s, for which it paid the United States $650 million.

Beginning in 1990, Pakistan is believed to have built between 7 and 12 nuclear warheads — based on the Chinese design, assisted by Chinese scientists and Chinese technology. That technology included Chinese magnets for producing weapons-grade enriched uranium, a furnace for shaping the uranium into a nuclear bomb core, and high-tech diagnostic equipment for nuclear weapons tests, according to the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which tracks the spread of nuclear weapons and technology.

Now, with last week’s weapons tests, Pakistan faces fresh sanctions from the United States.

...

————

“U.S. And China Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb” By TIM WEINER; The New York Times; 06/01/1998

“The United States provided Pakistani nuclear scientists with technical training from the 1950s into the 1970s. And it turned a blind eye to the nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, because Pakistan was providing the crucial link in the CIA’s effort to smuggle billions of dollars of weapons to Afghan guerrillas attempting to drive out Soviet invaders.”

It’s not a secret. We’ve known about the US involvement in the Pakistani nuclear procurement network for decades. An arrangement directly tied to Pakistan’s key role in the CIA-backed efforts to back the jihadist in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions were seen as a huge problem by the US national security state. Until the circumstances changed and suddenly the problems just went away:

...
Pakistan’s efforts to build the bomb began in the 1950s. Under the “Atoms for Peace” program, the United States agreed to train Pakistani scientists in nuclear-reactor technology. Washington also provided Pakistan’s first research reactor and fuel. The training continued until 1972.

That year, shortly after a crushing defeat in its third war with India since the two nations were cut free from British colonial rule in 1947, Pakistan resolved never to suffer such humiliation again. In January 1972, Bhutto, by then prime minister, summoned his nation’s best nuclear physicists and ordered them to build a bomb. Pakistan set up a world-wide smuggling ring to buy, copy or steal nuclear weapons technology, according to U.S. officials and declassified government documents.

India tested a nuclear weapon in 1974, and Pakistan greatly intensified its efforts in response. The program was closely monitored by the U.S. military, intelligence and law-enforcement services — so closely that President Jimmy Carter cut off all military and economic aid to Pakistan in April 1979, citing U.S. laws aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

...

Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, agreed to smuggle weapons to the Afghans on behalf of the CIA. Suddenly Pakistan was the recipient of a six-year, $3.2 billion American aid package — half cash, half high-tech weapons.
...

And as we can see, when the State Department issued a report in 1983 showing unambiguous evidence that Pakistan was working with China in the development of a nuclear bomb and US government officials approached General Zia to express their extreme concern over this activity, Zia apparently indicated that he had the blessings of Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey to go ahead with the program. A claim seemingly backed up by the fact that the Reagan and George Bush repeatedly certified to Congress that Pakistan wasn’t building a bomb every year from 1985–1990. The US government wasn’t just aware of Pakistan’s nuclear program. It was complicit:

...
But in 1983, a secret State Department report said there was “unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.” The report detailed how Pakistan had bought or stolen nuclear weapons technology around the world.

The report, based on information gathered by the CIA and recently declassified, also said flatly that “China has provided assistance to Pakistan’s program to develop a nuclear weapons capability.”

The “unambiguous evidence” included Pakistan’s secret blueprint for a nuclear bomb. That blueprint was made in China.

...

“The United States approached the Pakistani government at the highest levels to communicate its extreme concern” over the nuclear-weapons program, the report said.

...

But Zia indicated his belief that he had the blessings of President Ronald Reagan and the director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, to go ahead and build the bomb, according to two retired Pakistani military intelligence officials. The general clearly stated his intent in a 1986 interview. “It is our right to obtain the technology,” Zia said.

In 1985, Congress enacted a law requiring the president to certify that Pakistan was not building nuclear weapons and thus eligible for continuing military and economic aid. And every year from 1985 to 1990, Presidents Reagan and Bush certified just that.
...

And that rather shocking 1998 piece in the New York Times — 5 years after the first attack on the World Trade Center and three and a half years before 9/11 — brings us top the following excerpt from a book published in 2023, The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies. As the except makes clear, while BCCI was a key institution in facilitating this secret nuclear proliferation agenda, it was far from the only one. Other supporters inlcude Muammar Gaddafi and Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan, the first president of the UAE. And the head of the Bank of America’s Karachi branch even ended up investing in BCCI, acquiring a 30% stake and a seat on the board:

The Print

Pakistan was almost bankrupt post 1971 but Bhutto went hat in hand for his nuclear quest

In The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies, Iqbal Chand Malhotra analyses how Pakistan innovatively used a dodgy bank, poppy cultivation & trade to fund its nuclear programme.

Iqbal Chand Malhotra
31 July, 2023 12:09 pm IST

On 20 January 1972, within a month of Lt Gen. Niazi’s inglorious surrender, Bhutto called all the eminent physicists and scientists in Pakistan to convene in Multan under a shamiana, or multi-coloured tent, pitched in the lush gardens of the home of Nawab Sadiq Hussain Qureshi, a wealthy landlord and close friend of Bhutto. This meeting brought together Pakistan’s scientific elite to discuss how to make a nuclear bomb. A year later, Qureshi would be appointed as the chief minister of Punjab. A key invitee to the meeting in Multan was Ghulam Ishaq Khan. In an inspiring speech, Bhutto captivated his audience. He stressed on avenging Pakistan’s humiliation. He wanted to take Pakistan nuclear.

...

Bhutto soon brought the meeting to a close. He had decided to tap the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world for funds. Pakistan was a defeated nation tottering on the verge of bankruptcy. That same day, Bhutto left on a whirlwind tour of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other Arab nations. His last port of call was China. Bhutto went hat in hand looking for coppers to fill his coffers with so that he could embark upon his nuclear quest. Out of all the leaders he met, two responded with warmth and empathy towards another ‘brown Muslim’ whom they felt ought to be helped. These were Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. The latter was also the first president of the newly minted United Arab Emirates, or UAE.

Bhutto’s fellow traveller on this tour was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, whose role was to establish contact with the top-ranking financial minister/official in each of these countries.

Abu Dhabi was the largest and wealthiest member of the UAE, an oil-rich federation of sheikhdoms formed in 1971, whose constituent rulers had absolute ownership of all the land and natural resources of their nations with no distinctions being made among the wealth of the ruler, the wealth of his family and the wealth of the nation itself. Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi was installed as the head of the newly wealthy oil kingdom of Abu Dhabi after a British-led coup against his brother in 1966. It was here that Bhutto and Ishaq Khan struck gold, so to speak.]

...

Once again, in March 1972, Ishaq Khan thought about Abedi and his capabilities. Sheikh Zayed had made a return trip to Islamabad. Abu Dhabi was willing to support Pakistan in creating a financial vehicle that would ostensibly be private and at arm’s length from the governments of both Pakistan and Abu Dhabi. In reality, it would be secretly controlled by both governments but run by Pakistan. It would be built on the fiction that it was heavily capitalised by oil-rich Arab leaders, while the reality was that all of them would only be acting as nominees, providing either only their names to the proposed entity or their names plus funds in the form of deposits to get a guaranteed no-risk return rather than fund the bank as actual investors at risk.

Who could head such an institution and successfully run it through a web of deception and deceit? Who could spread authentic-sounding disinformation about the true intentions of such an entity? One name stood out repeatedly. It was that of Abedi. Ishaq Khan had lengthy chats with Awan, who too endorsed Abedi’s name. Finally, the job was to convince Bhutto and have Abedi released from detention. Abedi, it is said, jumped at the idea of realising his dream of becoming a major player in global banking. But first, according to Awan, an international profile had to be built for Abedi, who had to be seen as wooing Sheikh Zayed. Awan was of the view that it was imperative for Abedi to appear credible as well as distant from the government of Pakistan.

...

It is still unclear and probably will remain forever unclear as to what covenants Abedi had executed in secret with the Pakistan government that permitted him to establish and independently run BCCI and also aggrandise himself with untold wealth in the process. Apart from Sheikh Zayed’s help, the enterprise needed credibility in order to crash into the world of global banking, which was still a White man’s club. Abedi had only one contact he could use to crash into this exclusive club. That was a Dutchman named Dick van Oenen, who ran Bank of America’s (Bank Am) representative office in Karachi during the time that Abedi ran UBL. Coincidentally, both had offices in the same building. It is unclear what incentives Abedi offered Van Oenen, but right after he had secured his release from house arrest, Abedi flew with Van Oenen to San Francisco for a lunch meeting with Bank Am’s legendary chairman A.W. ‘Tom’ Clausen.

The wily Abedi literally promised Clausen the keys to the kingdom of Abu Dhabi and beyond it, to introductions to members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). What resulted brings to mind Lord Acton’s saying ‘greed corrupts and absolute greed corrupts absolutely’. Clausen agreed to invest $625,000 for a 30 per cent equity stake in BCCI and a seat on its board. Abedi now had his bank in place. Abu Dhabi was the other provider of capital for BCCI. It was BCCI’s largest depositor and borrower, and for most of BCCI’s existence, its largest shareholder. The relationship between the two entities was, as the famous accounting and audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) told the Bank of England (BoE) days before BCCI’s closure, ‘very close’, with BCCI providing services to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi far beyond what an ordinary relationship between a bank and its shareholders or depositors entailed.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, holder of a 10 per cent interest in BCCI beginning in 1980, appears to have made some cash payments for its interest in BCCI, which had a book value of approximately $250 million as of 31 December 1989. An unknown but substantial percentage of the shares acquired by Abu Dhabi overall in BCCI appears to have been acquired on a risk-free basis – either with guaranteed rates of return, buy-back arrangements or both.

As a result, BCCI never had a substantial capital base and was forced from the beginning to use deposits to meet its operating expenses rather than to properly invest capital in extending legitimate loans or other financing. Not having an actual capital base, BCCI simply pretended it had one and relied on the reputation of its shareholders to assist it in doing so in order to lure others to deposit their funds with it. As BCCI officers later revealed, the bank in effect had to create retained capital out of its operating profits by juggling its books because of the lack of real capitalisation. And because there were not real profits either, the supposed profits too had to be manufactured by means of juggling the books pertaining to deposits. These deposits, in turn, could only be given a good return on investment by means of using the funds from new deposits, requiring BCCI to grow at a frenzied pace in order to avoid collapse. It was a classic Ponzi scheme designed to finance Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear programme.

...

In September 1972, at the five-star Phoenicia hotel in pre-Yom Kippur–war Beirut, Abedi launched his new venture, the BCCI. The bank was launched in the Phoenicia’s ballroom in the presence of a group of a hundred Pakistani Muhajirs, or refugees, like Abedi himself, who had their roots in north- central India. BCCI S.A. (owned directly by its shareholders) was incorporated in Luxembourg. In a matter of eight quick months, Bhutto had his financial structure in place to pursue his dream of going nuclear. However, by 18 May 1974, when India detonated its first nuclear device at Pokhran in the Rajasthan desert, nothing had been achieved on the nuclear front in Pakistan. The PAEC had drawn a blank in going down the plutonium route and was engaged in circular arguments with the international community over the terms for the purchase of a French reprocessing plant.

During this period, an India-born Pakistani Muhajir called Abdul Qadir Khan, or A.Q. Khan, was writing letters to Bhutto, wishing to share his nuclear knowledge with the Pakistani government. In August 1974, after having him vetted by the ISI, Bhutto sent for Khan. He was born in Bhopal in 1936 and migrated to Pakistan in 1952. From there, Khan made his way to Holland (the Netherlands) in 1961, where he finally obtained his Ph.D in metallurgy from the University of Leuven in Flanders in 1971. Following his doctorate, Khan got a job at FDO, a Dutch engineering firm. FDO supplied parts and expertise to Ultra Centrifuge Nederland (UCN), the Dutch partner in the uranium-enriching British-Dutch-German consortium URENCO. UCN’s plant at Almelo in Holland was running one of the most secretive projects in Europe.

...

In December 1974, Khan, his Dutch–South African wife and their two daughters arrived in Islamabad for the Christmas holidays. Khan had a meeting with Bhutto and patiently explained how superior and cost-effective centrifuge technology was over the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission’s plutonium programme. Khan’s back-of-the-envelope calculations showed Bhutto that each bomb typically required 15 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and that this would cost only $60,000 to manufacture. The icing on the cake was the discovery of a vein in the foothills of Pakistan’s Suleiman Mountains range in 1963; the country was found to have an enormous stockpile of uranium ore. Bhutto sent Khan back to Holland to collect all the data on the breakthroughs made in Germany on centrifuge design and simultaneously instructed Munir Khan to begin research on building a uranium enrichment plant.

Meanwhile, any such operation involving large-scale smuggling of technology and equipment also required an efficient logistics network. Three brothers – Abbas, Mustafa and Murtaza Gokal – had set up the Gulf Group (officially Gulf International Holdings) in Karachi. In 1969, they started Gulf Shipping Lines, the flagship company of the Gulf business group. Gulf Shipping Lines was registered and headquartered in Geneva. By 1975, the brothers were in charge of a fleet of at least 240 ships, ninety-seven of which were owned and the rest chartered. They distinguished themselves in the shipping world and began to be accepted.

However, they were not averse to breaking the law, and there is a reported case of 1983 where they attempted to bribe a British captain of a chartered cargo vessel to ‘falsify his log book’. The captain would not be bribed, but he discovered that his signature had been forged and that duplicate documents that altered the original entries in his log book had been filed with the necessary authorities. For all clandestine trade, the Gokal brothers used their Swiss company called Tradinaft. It is reported that the Gokals were involved in a highly secretive BCCI deal that bankrolled a consortium made up of Libya, Pakistan and Argentina in its quest for nuclear weapons.

By 1976, the Gokals were borrowing heavily from BCCI for reasons best known to them and to Abedi. By 1978, the brothers were in financial trouble and BCCI loans weren’t being repaid. BCCI continued lending to them anyway. To make it appear that the Gokals were repaying their loans, audit reports showed that BCCI applied unrecorded deposits – other people’s money – to their account. It also created phoney loan accounts in the names of other Middle Eastern investors and drew money from there. Money was shifted among BCCI’s lightly regulated affiliates. Sometimes the bank simply faked the paperwork to assist the Gokals. Gulf Group created seventy-one shell companies to which BCCI made ‘loan after loan after loan’ as Masihur Rahman, BCCI’s former chief financial officer, testified before a 1991 US Senate subcommittee investigating the BCCI case, despite what he called threats to his life.

Although the bank started as BCCI S.A., within a couple of years, Abedi decided to restructure it. A holding company called BCCI Holdings was created. And the bank underlying it, BCCI S.A., was split into two parts: one with its head office in Luxembourg, called BCCI S.A., and the other with its head office in Grand Cayman, the largest of the three Cayman Islands, which constitute a British Overseas Territory and are also a well-known tax haven. The BCCI S.A. bank mostly had its presence in European and Middle Eastern locations, and BCCI Overseas Bank was mostly present in Third World countries.

...

This excerpt from Iqbal Chand Malhotra’s ‘The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies’ has been published with permission from Bloomsbury India.

———–

“Pakistan was almost bankrupt post 1971 but Bhutto went hat in hand for his nuclear quest” by Iqbal Chand Malhotra; The Print; 07/31/2023

“Bhutto soon brought the meeting to a close. He had decided to tap the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world for funds. Pakistan was a defeated nation tottering on the verge of bankruptcy. That same day, Bhutto left on a whirlwind tour of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other Arab nations. His last port of call was China. Bhutto went hat in hand looking for coppers to fill his coffers with so that he could embark upon his nuclear quest. Out of all the leaders he met, two responded with warmth and empathy towards another ‘brown Muslim’ whom they felt ought to be helped. These were Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. The latter was also the first president of the newly minted United Arab Emirates, or UAE.”

The plan hatched in 1972 wasn’t just a Pakistani plot. This was a multi-national affair that relied on funds from both the Muslim Brotherhood but also Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan, then the first president of the UAE. Keep in mind that it was Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan’s son, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), who appears to have been actively involved with trying to tip the 2016 US presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, along with MBS of Saudi Arabia, and who has an infamously close relationship with the Trump family. And as we can see, the UAE played a key role in laundering the financial assets used to capitalize the secret Pakistani nuclear program, with Agha Hasan Abedi, the banker who went on to found and run BCCI, serving as a central organizer of maintaining the necessary financial fictions:

...
Once again, in March 1972, Ishaq Khan thought about Abedi and his capabilities. Sheikh Zayed had made a return trip to Islamabad. Abu Dhabi was willing to support Pakistan in creating a financial vehicle that would ostensibly be private and at arm’s length from the governments of both Pakistan and Abu Dhabi. In reality, it would be secretly controlled by both governments but run by Pakistan. It would be built on the fiction that it was heavily capitalised by oil-rich Arab leaders, while the reality was that all of them would only be acting as nominees, providing either only their names to the proposed entity or their names plus funds in the form of deposits to get a guaranteed no-risk return rather than fund the bank as actual investors at risk.

Who could head such an institution and successfully run it through a web of deception and deceit? Who could spread authentic-sounding disinformation about the true intentions of such an entity? One name stood out repeatedly. It was that of Abedi. Ishaq Khan had lengthy chats with Awan, who too endorsed Abedi’s name. Finally, the job was to convince Bhutto and have Abedi released from detention. Abedi, it is said, jumped at the idea of realising his dream of becoming a major player in global banking. But first, according to Awan, an international profile had to be built for Abedi, who had to be seen as wooing Sheikh Zayed. Awan was of the view that it was imperative for Abedi to appear credible as well as distant from the government of Pakistan.
...

But, of course, BCCI didn’t manage to pull of its years of mass fraud on its own. It had help from institutions look the Bank of America, with Dick van Oenen, the head of BoA’s Karachi office and ended up investing for a 30% stake in BCCI and a seat on the board, putting a BoA officer right in the middle the BCCI Ponzi scheme that was ultimately facilitating the clandestine nuclear program:

...
It is still unclear and probably will remain forever unclear as to what covenants Abedi had executed in secret with the Pakistan government that permitted him to establish and independently run BCCI and also aggrandise himself with untold wealth in the process. Apart from Sheikh Zayed’s help, the enterprise needed credibility in order to crash into the world of global banking, which was still a White man’s club. Abedi had only one contact he could use to crash into this exclusive club. That was a Dutchman named Dick van Oenen, who ran Bank of America’s (Bank Am) representative office in Karachi during the time that Abedi ran UBL. Coincidentally, both had offices in the same building. It is unclear what incentives Abedi offered Van Oenen, but right after he had secured his release from house arrest, Abedi flew with Van Oenen to San Francisco for a lunch meeting with Bank Am’s legendary chairman A.W. ‘Tom’ Clausen.

The wily Abedi literally promised Clausen the keys to the kingdom of Abu Dhabi and beyond it, to introductions to members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). What resulted brings to mind Lord Acton’s saying ‘greed corrupts and absolute greed corrupts absolutely’. Clausen agreed to invest $625,000 for a 30 per cent equity stake in BCCI and a seat on its board. Abedi now had his bank in place. Abu Dhabi was the other provider of capital for BCCI. It was BCCI’s largest depositor and borrower, and for most of BCCI’s existence, its largest shareholder. The relationship between the two entities was, as the famous accounting and audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) told the Bank of England (BoE) days before BCCI’s closure, ‘very close’, with BCCI providing services to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi far beyond what an ordinary relationship between a bank and its shareholders or depositors entailed.

...

As a result, BCCI never had a substantial capital base and was forced from the beginning to use deposits to meet its operating expenses rather than to properly invest capital in extending legitimate loans or other financing. Not having an actual capital base, BCCI simply pretended it had one and relied on the reputation of its shareholders to assist it in doing so in order to lure others to deposit their funds with it. As BCCI officers later revealed, the bank in effect had to create retained capital out of its operating profits by juggling its books because of the lack of real capitalisation. And because there were not real profits either, the supposed profits too had to be manufactured by means of juggling the books pertaining to deposits. These deposits, in turn, could only be given a good return on investment by means of using the funds from new deposits, requiring BCCI to grow at a frenzied pace in order to avoid collapse. It was a classic Ponzi scheme designed to finance Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear programme.
...

And as we’ll see in a second excerpt from The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies, not only was there no disentangling of this covert nuclear agenda from the Afghan mujahedeen support efforts that got underway following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, neither was there any separate the extensive heroin trafficking that was playing a major role in providing the funding for these agendas. With the US turning a blind eye the entire time as new sources of heroin flooded US streets. Pakistan’s nuclear bomb was paid for with heroin:

New Indian Express

Unholy Nuclear Nexus: Pakistan’s Story on how it built Islamic Bomb with the help of China and rogue US elements

Fresh revelations expose how Pakistan, the world’s biggest drug supplier, used money from the narcotics trade to finance and build its Islamic Bomb with the help of China and rogue US elements.

Express News Service
Updated on:
14 Jul 2023, 6:25 am

AB Awan, an officer of the Indian Police before 1947 and now director general of the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau, stood on the porch of then Foreign Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s house on the mall in Rawalpindi, waiting for his car. He wondered if his cheeks stung more from the loo or from Bhutto’s bitter tongue. Awan had just attended two back-to-back meetings of the ‘Kashmir cell’ and the ‘Liberation Cell’, both chaired by Bhutto.

Awan was unhappy because he feared all of his hard work would go to waste. How would he be able to kick-start the insurgency without a promoter to catalyse it? Awan was an old-school officer, upright and loyal to his master President Ayub Khan. Would Ayub listen to him rather than to Bhutto? As Awan debated these questions, his Austin Cambridge car drew up and he instructed his driver to take him to the PIB safe house on Convoy Road. He had a meeting with a banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, who ran the United Bank Limited (UBL), Pakistan’s second-largest bank. Abedi was supposed to activate the hawala channels that Awan was going to use to fund the planned insurrection in the Valley.

Abedi was very obsequious before Awan and understood what was needed to expand the funding being provided by the PIB to the nascent Master Cell operation in the Valley since March 1964. Abedi was now part of Pakistan’s deep state and became the first banker to Pakistan’s jihad against India. The PIB already had accounts operating with UBL. Abedi set up what he called the ‘black network’ within UBL to handle each and every demand of the PIB. The black network of UBL was to further the bank’s interests and aims in Pakistan. In later years, when UBL was nationalised and Abedi had launched BCCI, he carried the black network across to his new institution. The black network was launched to provide the Pakistani government with every kind of service it needed and involved the single-minded pursuit of cultivating key individuals who were in power.

On 20 January 1972, within a month of Lt Gen. Niazi’s inglorious surrender, Bhutto called all the eminent physicists and scientists in Pakistan to convene in Multan under a shamiana, or multi-coloured tent, pitched in the lush gardens of the home of Nawab Sadiq Hussain Qureshi, a wealthy landlord and close friend of Bhutto. This meeting brought together Pakistan’s scientific elite to discuss how to make a nuclear bomb.

During this period, an India-born Pakistani Muhajir called Abdul Qadir Khan, or AQ Khan, was writing letters to Bhutto, wishing to share his nuclear knowledge with the Pakistani government. In August 1974, after having him vetted by the ISI, Bhutto sent for Khan.

...

Meanwhile, on 1 September 1976, a covert group called Safari Club was created at a meeting at the famous Mt Kenya Safari Club resort in Nanyuki, about 200 kilometres from Nairobi. This resort was then owned by the British conglomerate Lonrho. The participants in this top-secret meeting formed a syndicate. They consisted of the following key heads of intelligence in five countries: 1. France—Alexandre de Marenches, director of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE), France’s external intelligence agency 2. Saudi Arabia—Kamal Adham, director of intelligence, Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah (Saudi Intelligence) 3. Egypt—Gen. Kamal Hassan Ali, director of intelligence, Mukhabarat (Egyptian Intelligence) 4. Morocco—Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, director of intelligence and commander of the Royal Moroccan Army 5. Iran—Gen. Nematollah Nassiri of SAVAK (Iranian Intelligence).. The Safari Club played a secret role in political intrigues involving many countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, while being primarily funded through secret back-door deals, government banks and independent operations. One of the primary sources of funds for the club’s secret operations and tasks was the BCCI.

AQ Khan had calculated that he would need at least 10,000 centrifuges for a viable bomb programme. He had selected the CNOR-designed centrifuge prototype as it was simpler to build and, most importantly, had lost the race in favour of the G‑2 centrifuge design adopted at URENCO. There were dozens of suppliers with vast stockpiles of thousands of components that they wanted to sell. However, despite the easy availability of components, the CNOR prototype had an unresolved design flaw. The attempt to resolve this was classified, and Khan was unable to access these papers. Khan had no choice but to work on removing this flaw, and he undertook several personal trips to Holland for this. All this while, Swaleh Naqvi and the BCCI branches across Europe wrote out all the cheques that Khan needed. Prime Minister Bhutto was chuffed with the progress Khan was making. He ordered several underground test tunnels to be constructed at two locations in Baluchistan—five in the Ras Koh range on the Baluchistan plateau and one 160 kilometres west of this range, beneath the sands of the Kharan Desert, also in Baluchistan. Each tunnel was capable of withstanding a 20-kiloton explosion, equivalent to the magnitude of the Nagasaki bomb.

...

Days later, at 1.45 am on 4 April 1979, Lt Gen. Arif oversaw the execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto by hanging. That same month, material handwritten by Bhutto while he was on death row surfaced at a printing press in London. The manuscript was labelled ‘If I am Assassinated’. The Indian typesetter at the press found the manuscript intriguing and made copies, one of which landed in the hands of Gary Modwell, then Indian external intelligence agency RAW’s station chief in London. The manuscript, which was later published, revealed that Bhutto had signed a secret nuclear protocol with China in June 1976. This protocol enabled Pakistan to rely on China to fill in all the knowledge, process and technology gaps to weaponise its nuclear bomb after it was built and tested.

...

The Herald of Pakistan in its September 1985 issue had reported that at least from 1982 onwards, the logistics of ferrying drugs from the heroin refineries in Baluchistan and NWFP was under the control and operation of the ISI. The trucks of the Pakistan Army’s National Logistics Cell (NLC) arrived in NWFP with arms from Karachi unloaded from ships chartered by the CIA and returned laden with heroin under ISI protection back to Karachi for global distribution. Legal cover for this activity was provided by the CIA, as a result of which this trade mushroomed to gigantic levels never before conceived. The BCCI was primus inter pares among the bankers to the jihad.

The only relationship that overshadowed this was the BCCI-Pakistan relationship. Gen. Zia was in charge of Pakistan during the boom years of BCCI, and he did the most for the bank. According to former BCCI executive Nazir Chinoy, every time Abedi visited Pakistan, he would make it a point to meet Gen. Zia, but only in the dead of the night. Abedi created the Pakistan BCCI Foundation in 1981 as a tax dodge, and his old friend Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was then finance minister, awarded it tax-free status. In return, BCCI provided $10 million in 1985 for the establishment of the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology in NWFP. Dr AQ Khan was appointed director of this institute and carried on part of his nuclear research over here. In the same period, other BCCI officials were assisting agents of the ISI in purchasing nuclear technologies paid for by ISI front companies through BCCI Canada.

The Chinese were supplying technical expertise and uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Pakistan and violating the NPT. Voluminous data on the Pakistani nuclear programme with the US Atomic Energy Commission enabled it to replicate the Pakistani bomb, which was the size of a soccer ball. This was kept in a vault in the Pentagon. Computer simulations of the warhead showed it worked perfectly. Intelligence reports also revealed that the Chinese had shipped enough weapons-grade enriched uranium to enable Pakistan to detonate a device whenever Gen. Zia would want to do so, unhindered by whether or not AQ Khan had generated enough uranium for such a test. Apparently, the Kahuta technicians had converted this uranium into a metal core which would fit into the Chinese design of the bomb that Kahuta had received. There were significant numbers of Chinese technicians at Kahuta working on triggering mechanisms, centrifuges, vacuum systems, etc. The Chinese also brought rocket propellants and super-hard metals like maraging steels.

A 1984 report by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) identified Pakistan as the source of 31 per cent of the heroin in the US markets. The US Congress was so alarmed that it dispatched a special delegation led by Senator Paul Hawkins to visit Pakistan in February 1984. Hawkins was the author of special legislation stipulating a drastic reduction of foreign aid to those nations allegedly supplying narcotics to the US and who would not wholeheartedly cooperate with the DEA. By 1985, drug trafficking was estimated to be a $100 billion industry, out of which the Pakistani mafia’s share was in the region of $30 billion. Senator Hawkins’s trip to Pakistan… was preceded by certain events that pointed to overt official complicity in Pakistan in its runaway boom in illegal and clandestine heroin exports to the US. During an official Pakistan tour in 1982, US Attorney General William French Smith and his aides discovered heroin being openly sold in a market near the Khyber Pass.

In addition to keeping back intelligence, the (US) State Department had been facilitating back-door procurement, issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment for its bomb. The commerce department had refused to licence such equipment for export for proliferation reasons. Barlow kept digging. His analysis of US cable traffic in and out of Pakistan revealed that sensitive details about the CIA or US customs operations were somehow always discovered by Pakistan before the trap was sprung. Matching incidents with the cables, Barlow discovered that the State Department had been sending detailed demarches, treacherously tipping off contacts in the Pakistan government.

Dr AQ Khan had pressed the right buttons and got Hamid Gul really worked up. In the spring of 1989, Hamid Gul, the ISI chief, began plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. He approached a mujahedeen fighter and financier based in Peshawar, who was as yet unknown in West or South Asia. This was Osama bin Laden, a Saudi dissident whose family had made their fortune in construction and had many prosperous and powerful political connections.

...

Excerpted from Iqbal Chand Malhotra’s The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies: A Tale of Deception with permission from Bloomsbury.

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”
Unholy Nuclear Nexus: Pakistan’s Story on how it built Islamic Bomb with the help of China and rogue US elements” by Express News Service; New Indian Express; 07/14/2023

“Meanwhile, on 1 September 1976, a covert group called Safari Club was created at a meeting at the famous Mt Kenya Safari Club resort in Nanyuki, about 200 kilometres from Nairobi. This resort was then owned by the British conglomerate Lonrho. The participants in this top-secret meeting formed a syndicate. They consisted of the following key heads of intelligence in five countries: 1. France—Alexandre de Marenches, director of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE), France’s external intelligence agency 2. Saudi Arabia—Kamal Adham, director of intelligence, Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah (Saudi Intelligence) 3. Egypt—Gen. Kamal Hassan Ali, director of intelligence, Mukhabarat (Egyptian Intelligence) 4. Morocco—Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, director of intelligence and commander of the Royal Moroccan Army 5. Iran—Gen. Nematollah Nassiri of SAVAK (Iranian Intelligence).. The Safari Club played a secret role in political intrigues involving many countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, while being primarily funded through secret back-door deals, government banks and independent operations. One of the primary sources of funds for the club’s secret operations and tasks was the BCCI.”

As we can see, Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program had A LOT of help. It wasn’t just BCCI, or the CIA and BoA turning a blind eye. The Safari Club, formed in 1976, established another clandestine multinational intelligence effort whose covert agendas included both Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions and, eventually, the CIA-backed mujahedeen support network in Afghanistan. A club consisting of the intelligence chiefs from not only France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco, but also pre-revolutionary Iran. And as we’ve seen, the Safari Club could be seen as a kind of outsourcing of US intelligence to Saudi Arabia. With BCCI serving as the group’s primary source of funds. And it gets worse. Because BCCI’s Ponzi-like operations weren’t the only sources of funding for this array of overlapping intelligence agendas, from the nuclear program to the arming of the Afghan mujahedeen. By the early 80s, large amounts of heroin were flowing out of Afghanistan and into US markets, with the Pakistani mafia ultimately controlling a third of that trade. Remarkably, the US State Department appears to have faciliated Pakistani diplomatics in their efforts to procure the hi-tech equipment needed to build the bomb, with the State Department repeatedly tipping off the Pakistani government about customs operations being run by US customs or the CIA:

...
The Herald of Pakistan in its September 1985 issue had reported that at least from 1982 onwards, the logistics of ferrying drugs from the heroin refineries in Baluchistan and NWFP was under the control and operation of the ISI. The trucks of the Pakistan Army’s National Logistics Cell (NLC) arrived in NWFP with arms from Karachi unloaded from ships chartered by the CIA and returned laden with heroin under ISI protection back to Karachi for global distribution. Legal cover for this activity was provided by the CIA, as a result of which this trade mushroomed to gigantic levels never before conceived. The BCCI was primus inter pares among the bankers to the jihad.

...

A 1984 report by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) identified Pakistan as the source of 31 per cent of the heroin in the US markets. The US Congress was so alarmed that it dispatched a special delegation led by Senator Paul Hawkins to visit Pakistan in February 1984. Hawkins was the author of special legislation stipulating a drastic reduction of foreign aid to those nations allegedly supplying narcotics to the US and who would not wholeheartedly cooperate with the DEA. By 1985, drug trafficking was estimated to be a $100 billion industry, out of which the Pakistani mafia’s share was in the region of $30 billion. Senator Hawkins’s trip to Pakistan… was preceded by certain events that pointed to overt official complicity in Pakistan in its runaway boom in illegal and clandestine heroin exports to the US. During an official Pakistan tour in 1982, US Attorney General William French Smith and his aides discovered heroin being openly sold in a market near the Khyber Pass.

In addition to keeping back intelligence, the (US) State Department had been facilitating back-door procurement, issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment for its bomb. The commerce department had refused to licence such equipment for export for proliferation reasons. Barlow kept digging. His analysis of US cable traffic in and out of Pakistan revealed that sensitive details about the CIA or US customs operations were somehow always discovered by Pakistan before the trap was sprung. Matching incidents with the cables, Barlow discovered that the State Department had been sending detailed demarches, treacherously tipping off contacts in the Pakistan government.
...

By the mid-80s, BCCI was not only sponsoring the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, but BCCI officials were assisting ISI agents in the acquisition of nuclear technology through BCCI Canada. The US was well aware of this progress, even building a replicate of the Pakistani bomb that was kept at the Pentagon:

...
The only relationship that overshadowed this was the BCCI-Pakistan relationship. Gen. Zia was in charge of Pakistan during the boom years of BCCI, and he did the most for the bank. According to former BCCI executive Nazir Chinoy, every time Abedi visited Pakistan, he would make it a point to meet Gen. Zia, but only in the dead of the night. Abedi created the Pakistan BCCI Foundation in 1981 as a tax dodge, and his old friend Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was then finance minister, awarded it tax-free status. In return, BCCI provided $10 million in 1985 for the establishment of the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology in NWFP. Dr AQ Khan was appointed director of this institute and carried on part of his nuclear research over here. In the same period, other BCCI officials were assisting agents of the ISI in purchasing nuclear technologies paid for by ISI front companies through BCCI Canada.

The Chinese were supplying technical expertise and uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Pakistan and violating the NPT. Voluminous data on the Pakistani nuclear programme with the US Atomic Energy Commission enabled it to replicate the Pakistani bomb, which was the size of a soccer ball. This was kept in a vault in the Pentagon. Computer simulations of the warhead showed it worked perfectly. Intelligence reports also revealed that the Chinese had shipped enough weapons-grade enriched uranium to enable Pakistan to detonate a device whenever Gen. Zia would want to do so, unhindered by whether or not AQ Khan had generated enough uranium for such a test. Apparently, the Kahuta technicians had converted this uranium into a metal core which would fit into the Chinese design of the bomb that Kahuta had received. There were significant numbers of Chinese technicians at Kahuta working on triggering mechanisms, centrifuges, vacuum systems, etc. The Chinese also brought rocket propellants and super-hard metals like maraging steels.
...

How many nukes does Pakistan have to spare today? It’s no longer a hidden nuclear program, after all. With approximately 170 nuclear weapons, Pakistan isn’t exactly lacking in nukes. It would be nice to think that Pakistan wouldn’t think of giving such a weapon to a group like al Qaeda, but what about all those sponsor states? If Saudi Arabia asked for a nuke, would Pakistan refuse? How about the UAE? Let’s hope we never have to find out. But with Iran probably more intent than ever on its own nuclear ambitions, it’s hard to see how the ‘Pakistani bomb’ doesn’t suddenly turn into the ‘BCCI investor bomb’ sooner or later. It always was, after all.