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

[muriel_volestrangler]

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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/06/21/tulsi-gabbard-her-guru-mysterious-messages-that-helped-shape-her-political-career/?

There's a gift link at https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/06/the-science-of-identity-foundation-candidate , whose comment is:

I wish I could be more surprsed that Tulsi Gabbard was for all intents and purposes the sock puppet of a crackpot cult leader, but:
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Whatever other errors the Democratic primary electorate has made, Tulsi finishing in 37th place or whatever in 2020 was not one of them.

And Trump put her in charge of US intelligence. What happened to government vetting? I'd have thought that Republicans, or Trump himself from a purely narcissistic point of view, would also have been appalled at someone else's sock puppet having that access and power? Did Trump just think "she's my sock puppet now"?