Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career
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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.”
In another, Gabbard was described as “chickenshit” and “mealymouthed” for her comments on a policy proposal.
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.”
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