The CIA/ODNI Custody War Over JFK and MK-ULTRA
Records, the Resignation of DNI Tulsi Gabbard, and the
Pattern of Institutional Obstruction by the Central Intelligence Agency and Its Auxiliary Press

SOTN Editor’s Note: Just as quickly as it captured the world’s attention this May 2026, the unparalleled CIA ‘raid’ on DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s office, her subsequent resignation on May 22nd, and the testimony provided by CIA whistleblower — Operations Officer James E. Erdman III — to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on May 13th, the explosive story has all but disappeared from the both the mainstream and alternative media.  Therefore, this Alt Media platform highly commends J. Keven Hofeling for his detailed memorandum posted below, which both documents and renders an important analysis of these weighty and highly consequential events.

Perhaps the most alarming “bottom line” of this unparalleled sequence of events is that the Central Intelligence Agency actually operates as a RICO-level international crime syndicate as well as enforcement arm of a supranational body of both foreign and domestic elites who do not serve the interests of the American Republic.  Of course, there is a long and sordid history of CIA treachery beginning with the treasonous assassination of President John F. Kennedy followed by the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and Thomas Merton. See: C.I.A. Assassin Admits To Killing Famous Trappist Monk And Influential Vietnam War Protester

KEY POINT: Not only do the new JFK Files reveal that Yitzhak Rabin
and Israel’s IDF were present in Dallas when JFK was assassinated,
CIA Chief of the Counterintelligence J.J. Angleton helped Israel
procure the A-Bomb!

State of the Nation
May 27, 2026

Finding 1. A senior CIA operations officer, James E. Erdman III, gave sworn testimony to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on May 13, 2026, that after the shutdown of Gabbard’s Director’s Initiatives Group (the “DIG”) in April 2026, the CIA “took back” approximately forty boxes of JFK assassination and MKULTRA records that ODNI was processing for declassification under Executive Order 14176, and further alleged that the Agency had illegally monitored DIG personnel’s communications during the year preceding. See Senate HSGAC letter and testimony packet, available at https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/letter-and-testimomy.pdf.

Finding 2. The disclosure by Officer Erdman is corroborated by the prior public record, including the November 25, 2025 Reuters exclusive describing the April 2025 ODNI “hunters” operation that forcibly extracted assassination records from a clandestine CIA archival facility. See Phil Stewart and Jonathan Landay, Reuters, available at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-gabbards-hunters-pounced-secret-cia-warehouse-kennedy-files-2025-11-25/. This establishes that an interagency custody war over politically explosive historical records preceded the publicly reported “raid” controversy by more than a year.

Finding 3. The mainstream press response, and particularly the rapid amplification followed by the equally rapid retraction of Fox News’ “CIA raids Tulsi’s office” framing, operated as a textbook limited hangout / strawman correction maneuver. By focusing public debate on whether agents had physically raided Gabbard’s personal office (which no serious witness ever claimed), the press dispatched the entire substantive controversy without ever addressing Officer Erdman’s actual sworn allegations. Compare The Hill, available at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5877734-tulsi-gabbard-odni-office-fbi-raid-reporting/, with ODNI spokeswoman Olivia Coleman’s narrow denial at https://www.newsweek.com/dni-denies-cia-tulsi-gabbard-raid-11949426.

Finding 4. Director Gabbard’s stated reason for resignation, her husband Abraham Williams’s diagnosis with a rare bone cancer, is credible on its face and unchallenged in the public record. See PBS at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-tulsi-gabbards-full-resignation-letter-as-director-of-national-intelligence; Fox News at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/exclusive-tulsi-gabbard-resigns-from-trump-cabinet. However, the official reason coexists with, and conveniently provides honorable cover for, a documented year-long pattern of CIA obstruction, White House friction over the Iran war, the protest resignations of her closest counterterrorism aide Joe Kent on March 17, 2026 (see BBC at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4g66r3z40o) and Deputy DNI Amaryllis Fox Kennedy on May 19, 2026 (see Washington Post at https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/19/top-intelligence-official-amaryllis-fox-kennedy-gabbard-ally-resigns/), and Reuters’ simultaneous reporting that the White House had in fact forced her out, available at https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-05-22/white-house-forced-top-spy-gabbard-to-resign-source-says.

Finding 5. The MKULTRA dimension is the single most evidentiarily significant aspect of Officer Erdman’s disclosure. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of MKULTRA operational files in January 1973; the publicly available record consists almost entirely of the Inouye-Schweiker “financial records” discovered in 1977. If forty boxes of MKULTRA-related material existed in late 2025 in any form processable for declassification, that fact alone contradicts a half-century of sworn CIA representations to Congress and the public. See National Security Archive at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly and https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2025-10-30/top-secret-testimony-cias-mkultra-chief-50-years-later.

Finding 6. The conduct of the CIA in this episode is structurally indistinguishable from the conduct that G. Robert Blakey condemned on his deathbed. CIA officer George Joannides was deployed in 1978 to act as liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations while concealing his own 1963 operational role with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, the very organization whose contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald the HSCA was investigating. Blakey: “The agency set me up. … I no longer believe anything the Agency told me.” The 2026 episode, in which a CIA officer (Erdman) detailed to a presidentially mandated declassification task force testifies that career CIA elements monitored, obstructed, and ultimately clawed back the very records the task force was created to disclose, repeats the Joannides pattern at a higher level of institutional brazenness.

Finding 7. Within the serious JFK research community, the early skepticism voiced by Russ Baker (relaying Jefferson Morley) that the forty boxes “were actually empty,” and Charles Drago’s “plot device” hypothesis positing that Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s elevation may itself be a managed operation, are not refutations of the underlying allegation but rather additional grounds for suspicion. If the boxes were empty, then the question becomes who emptied them, when, and under what authority; if they were full but contain only “limited hangout” chaff, that too is significant. The Agency’s history affords no benign explanation that fits the facts.

Finding 8. The most defensible interpretation of the totality of the evidence is that Director Gabbard’s resignation cannot be reduced to any single cause. The personal explanation is true. The Iran-policy friction is true. The CIA’s institutional war against the DIG and its declassification mandate is also true. These causes are not in competition; they are concentric. The CIA-coup interpretation advanced by Rep. Luna, Senator Mike Lee, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Paul Dragu (The New American, available at https://thenewamerican.com/us/politics/cia-strikes-again-agency-seizes-boxes-of-jfk-and-mk-ultra-files/) overstates the evidence on direct causation but accurately identifies the structural mechanism by which the position of any DNI committed to genuine assassination-records transparency becomes, and is made, untenable.

Finding 9. Mainstream coverage of this episode, and particularly that of Reuters, CNN, the BBC, NBC, and Mother Jones, has uniformly subordinated the substantive Erdman allegations to the narrative of right-wing conspiracism, performing the same propagandistic service the establishment press performed during the Warren Commission, Garrison investigation, House Select Committee, and Assassination Records Review Board eras. The pattern is by now so consistent that it is itself evidence.

Finding 10. Senator Ron Johnson’s open call for a new Church Committee, and Senator Rand Paul’s disclosure that the unredacted original 1976 Church Committee report has been withheld from him for two years by the CIA, together constitute the most significant institutional crisis of intelligence-community oversight since 1975. The research community should treat this moment as exactly that.

First, Erdman is a serving CIA operations officer testifying under subpoena. He is not a partisan operative, a journalist, or an outside critic. He is a member of the institution he is accusing, testifying against its institutional interest, under penalty of perjury. The Agency itself has not denied that he made these statements; it has objected to the process by which his testimony was taken. See https://thenewamerican.com/us/politics/cia-strikes-again-agency-seizes-boxes-of-jfk-and-mk-ultra-files/, citing the CIA’s procedural objection rather than substantive denial. This is a tell.

Second, the allegations are factually specific: a particular number of boxes (40), a particular subject matter (JFK and MKULTRA), a particular temporal trigger (the DIG shutdown), and a particular custodial sequence (ODNI processing to CIA repossession). Vague allegations are easy to deny; specific allegations require the denying party to engage the facts. The CIA has not engaged the facts.

Third, the surveillance allegation, namely that the CIA monitored DIG personnel’s communications including communications with whistleblowers, is a felony allegation. If true, it constitutes a violation of 50 U.S.C. Section 3033 (protections for intelligence-community whistleblowers) and, depending on the means of surveillance, potentially 18 U.S.C. Sections 2511 and 1030. The mainstream press has not pursued this aspect of the testimony at all.