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.”

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’s career trajectory has taken her from socially conservative Democrat to progressive darling, Bernie Sanders ally and presidential hopeful, and then to Fox News contributor, MAGA Republican and, eventually, Trump’s top intelligence official, a role that granted her access to some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets.

If Butler was guiding Gabbard’s political career, the two of them had kept it under wraps.

Butler, 78, once reportedly said he did not tell Gabbard how to vote in Congress. For politicians, he told the New Yorker in 2017, taking a position on an issue “is something that every individual has to deal with on their own.”

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.

By the time Saltzburg first contacted me, I had dug up old newspaper articles showing that Butler’s interest in politics long predated the founding of SIF.

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.

Eager to learn more about Butler and his political ambitions, I tried to reach the guru and his devotees by phone. For weeks, no SIF representatives acknowledged my calls or emails, let alone returned them.

Over Thanksgiving 2024, my Post colleague Cate Brown and I traveled to Kailua, a beach town on the eastern shore of Oahu. Among our first stops was a three-bedroom house that a former SIF member had identified as one of several where Butler lived.

Before long, a Honolulu police car pulled up, and an officer asked us to leave. Someone in the house had complained, I later learned.

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.

One memo I noticed in particular was from 2014 and was labeled “Call with T.” The unnamed speaker in that document argued that to avoid delays in medical treatment, veterans should be able to get care at any hospital and be reimbursed by Veterans Affairs, and they should be able to do so without first obtaining government approval.

“Actually put forward legislation. Get it done,” the speaker said.

Three weeks later, Gabbard endorsed a version of that policy in an op-ed in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. But she omitted any discussion of prior approval — a key idea that distinguished the unnamed adviser’s plan from remedies pushed by other Democrats.

Soon after the op-ed was published, Hoen emailed Saltzburg.

“He was pissed she didn’t say that they should get private care withOUT pre-approval,” Hoen wrote. She did not say who “he” was. Saltzburg told me she understood it to be Butler.

A month later, Gabbard introduced a bill that made explicit that veterans would not need preapproval for private care.

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.

A June 2014 memo Hoen emailed Gabbard ahead of a TV appearance was direct: “Don’t forget to smile, etc. Don’t do the eye thing.”

On YouTube, I found a clip of Gabbard on CNN the following day. At several points, she opened her eyes wide while speaking.

“Well, from what I saw, she’s doing the f---ing eye thing again,” an unnamed speaker told Hoen later that day, according to a transcript of their conversation emailed to Saltzburg and others. “She’s still doing the eye thing.”

The communications were among many memos that reflected concern about Gabbard’s media performances, or guidance about what she should say during them, at a time when she was just beginning to gain a national reputation. They coincided with memos documenting advice on how she might run for president in 2016.

A January 2015 memo documented an unnamed adviser’s proposal to attack John F. Kerry, then secretary of state, for saying violent activity by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda was rooted not in Islam but in “alienation, poverty, thrill seeking and other factors.” If that were true, the adviser said sarcastically, the way to deal with terrorists would be to “give them a trophy, a big hug, increase their self-esteem, give them a good paying job.”

In a Fox News interview later that day, Gabbard repeated the Kerry quote and gave a similar mocking punch line. “If that’s really the cause, then the solution would be give them a trophy, give them a hug, give them a good-paying job,” she said.

I wanted to know whether Gabbard had used the talking points in her other TV appearances.

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.

After the Fox interview, Hoen emailed Gabbard a suggested apology to the host, Greta Van Susteren. “I’m sorry I didn’t fully explain why the situation on the ground right now in Iraq is not the best time and place to strike ISIS,” it said. The subject line read, “pls check and send if ok.” It’s not clear from the documents whether Gabbard sent the apology. Van Susteren told me she had no recollection of it.

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.

“I did a lot, for sure,” she said in a message. Saltzburg said she regretted the work but thought at the time that it served a higher purpose: “I did genuinely believe we were fighting for the environment, against regime change war, etc.”

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.”

In several exchanges, Gabbard appeared to tell commenters to tone down their criticism of Assad as they responded to claims that she was an apologist for him. “There’s no need to call him a brutal dictator,” said one such message.

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.

In many of the memos about the commenting initiative, though, there is no identifying information about the speaker.

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.

“Well, maybe you ought to think of one,” the person replied. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, why are you doing it?”

Having spent months analyzing the documents, I felt I finally had enough information to seek interviews with those at the center of the story.

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.”

From the moment Saltzburg told me that she had been arrested in the teenage-runaway case and that she had fallen out with SIF leaders, I anticipated that SIF might attack her credibility. It did, but not in the way I had expected.

The PR man said that after her arrest, Saltzburg had demanded $250,000 from SIF and threatened that she would cause the organization “reputational damage” if she did not receive the money. “It fundamentally changes the lens that we should be looking at these allegations through and evaluating them, I think,” the PR man said.

I sent a message to Saltzburg: “sif is claiming you tried to extort them for 250k.”

She said she knew what they were referring to.

Saltzburg showed me a 38-page letter she sent Butler in June last year, outlining the events that led to her arrest near Austin on suspicion of interference with child custody. She had copied Gabbard, Khemaney and others on the letter, in which she referenced allegations that the runaway she sheltered and other children had been abused.

She had indeed demanded $250,000 from one of Butler’s senior disciples “to cover damages to my children and me.” She alleged that the senior disciple initially asked her to help protect the runaway, but then changed his story after the police got involved, leaving her to face a felony charge with a potential two-year jail sentence and a hefty fine.

If the senior disciple didn’t pay Saltzburg, she wrote, she would sue him. A lawsuit could make public information that would be embarrassing for Butler and Gabbard, she wrote, while a private settlement would mitigate their “reputational risks.” She added that the money would not buy her silence: “I will absolutely not tie my hands behind my back by signing an NDA or gag order.”

According to Saltzburg, Butler said through an aide that he would not communicate with her about the matter and that she should take it up directly with the senior disciple. She did not follow up, she said.

Texas prosecutors eventually declined to pursue a criminal case against Saltzburg for the allegations of child custody interference, concluding they had insufficient evidence, records show.

I mulled the significance of Saltzburg’s letter. It obviously showed she was in the mood to embarrass SIF the second time she contacted me. But it took me raising Nine Isles for her to dig out the Gabbard memos.

Saltzburg told me she decided to give me the emails not only because of her anger toward SIF leaders but because she felt Gabbard misled voters about Butler’s role and his influence on her decision-making.

“Everyone was lied to. The people of Hawaii were lied to,” she said. “I feel horrible for having been a part of it.”

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.

Other documents in the trove, many touching on political matters, pointed away from Khemaney and Mike Gabbard as the speaker. In some, the unnamed adviser mentioned Khemaney or Mike Gabbard, suggesting that neither of them was the person talking. Five of the documents were transcripts of calls between an unnamed adviser and Khemaney himself. Other documents were labeled as coming “from CP.” Saltzburg said this was an abbreviation of “Car Port,” a nickname for the house in Kailua where I’d been told Butler lived. Before the police asked me to leave, I did notice the house had such a feature.

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?

In late March, I asked Saltzburg if I could read through her personal Gmail inbox. I thought I might find additional clues embedded in messages that hadn’t seemed important enough for her to forward earlier. She gave me access. I scoured thousands more emails, sifting through SIF members’ daily chatter in search of even one line that might explicitly identify the speaker or speakers behind the memos. None did.

It seemed worth checking whether artificial intelligence could help. I asked the chatbot Claude to perform a stylometric analysis, which uses statistics to analyze the authorship of texts. Claude ran 13 statistical models to compare the memos Saltzburg had shared to the 7,000-page archive of Butler’s lectures, as well as to Mike Gabbard’s extensive writings and speeches. I also asked the chatbot to look at the few examples I could find of Khemaney’s language.

Claude said that the spoken remarks in the memos appeared to have been produced by just one person — and that the speaker was much more likely Butler than Khemaney or Mike Gabbard. It noted that “duplistic,” a nonword used instead of “duplicitous,” appeared once in the memos and nine times in Butler’s lecture archive. Other nonstandard words used in both the memos and the lectures, including “judgmentalism,” suggested Butler was the unnamed adviser, according to Claude.

But of course Claude couldn’t say for sure.

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.

On one of Gabbard’s last days in office, in response to additional inquires from me, her chief of staff sent a statement characterizing the reporting as “allegations tied to a failed $250,000 extortion attempt by a disgruntled former volunteer seeking personal profit, not truth.”

“The attacks on Director Gabbard’s faith and loyalty are not only false — they are a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry,” the statement said.

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!”

Cate Brown and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

Illustrations by Emma Kumer/The Washington Post; iStock with excerpts from documents obtained by The Washington Post.