National Defense

CIA Spooks Spied On Tulsi Gabbard’s Team As It Probed Deep State, Whistleblower Alleges

White House Photo by Daniel Torok

The CIA listened in on the interviews and watched the computer activity of a task force working under Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, the letter alleges. Gabbard’s team, the Director’s Initiatives Group or DIG, sought to review and declassify documents related to spy world abuses, including suppressed scientific evidence that COVID-19 was lab-made and fabricated intelligence painting President Donald Trump as a tool of Russia. CIA officer Jim Erdman, a member of the DIG, made the explosive allegation in written testimony to Sen. Rand Paul’s Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, which Paul published as an attachment to a congressional letter to Langley on Thursday.

The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Erdman declined to comment, directing questions to his attorney.

As spy chief, Gabbard oversees the CIA. But America’s most secretive spy agency bristled at the scrutiny, the letter indicates. CIA spies “constantly” monitored the team’s fledgling attempts to apply oversight and often impeded them, Erdman wrote.

Erdman, who led the team’s efforts on the origins of COVID, testified in a Senate hearing Wednesday about a pattern of obstruction that elevated the work of scientists close to Fauci who promoted the theory that COVID emerged from an animal over the work of some of the intelligence community’s own biological weapons experts, who often favored the theory the pandemic emerged from a lab. But his written testimony provides greater detail about his allegations of CIA obstruction.

Committee witnesses’ written testimony is typically published before a hearing gets underway, but Erdman’s statement was initially held back for fear of CIA retaliation.

“I am testifying here today because, in my year with DIG, the CIA obstructed lawful oversight related to the DIG’s work and retaliated against the DIG with what I believe were illegal investigations into DIG members,” Erdman wrote.

In addition to spying on the group’s work, the CIA withheld documents and information ordered for declassification, denied the team access to necessary information, and withheld information from Gabbard herself, the letter states. This limited the team’s access to documents related to the assassination of President John. F Kennedy and anomalous health incidents (AHI), or “Havana syndrome.”

Erdman alleges the team investigating anomalous health incidents  found that third parties listened in on their interviews, even in secure rooms.

“Individuals involved in our AHI investigation discovered third parties were listening into secure phone calls at Intelligence Community facilities,” Erdman wrote. “In one instance, it was during a conversation with a whistleblower.”

Erdman said the team confirmed with an IT expert that this eavesdropping ability would have required someone to specially request a technical change.

Suspicions of eavesdropping heightened when a CIA contractor interviewed by the task force was fired the next day, Erdman said.

The task force’s whistleblower members, each drawn from one of the 18 spy agencies that make up the intelligence community, were often knocking on the door of their own employing agency for answers, Erdman’s attorney Carol Thompson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

One spy agency retaliated against an employee who took up the assignment to work on the DIG, Thompson told the DCNF. The DCNF is not naming the spy agency in order to protect the individual’s identity. Thompson represents both Erdman and the unnamed individual.

The CIA had retaliated in other ways too, per Erdman’s testimony, including the headline-grabbing claim that the agency had revoked documents set for declassification about the assassination of JFK and MKUltra, psychological experiments the CIA conducted in the 1950s.

Erdman’s testimony provoked a rare public rebuke from a Republican cabinet member of a Republican-chaired hearing.

“The Committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an Agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously,” said Liz Lyons, a spokesperson for CIA Director John Ratcliffe, in a public statement Wednesday. “The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul.”

“This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing,” she said. “As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”

Biological Secrecy

Erdman connected the lack of accountability for the intelligence community’s missteps and abuses with the secrecy around the American biodefense program. This biodefense program may have contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic through its promotion of gain-of-function research that soups up viruses in the lab, often in coordination with Chinese labs.

After the 9/11 anthrax attacks and concerns about biological weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the George W. Bush administration surged money for biodefense through Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It also recruited biological experts to advise the IC through a group it dubbed the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), Erdman said.

Even after the discovery that the anthrax had originated from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Iraqi WMDs did not exist, the biodefense build-up and the advisory group remained, Erdman wrote.

“The BSEG scientists assisted in vetting the scientific value of raw intelligence, drafted white papers in support of background analysis and finished intelligence, and conducted lab research on sensitive WMD topics,” Erdman wrote. “Personnel responsible for handling the BSEG waived the typical counterintelligence requirements needed to properly manage risk.”

Scientists advising the U.S. intelligence community on biological weapons had connections to Chinese scientists through the National Academy of Sciences that posed a counterintelligence risk, Erdman said.

The DCNF first reported in 2025 that University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, a close collaborator of the Wuhan lab on engineered coronavirus, was a member of the BSEG. Baric recently retired from UNC, Science reported on May 12.

“This is a national security crisis caused by the inability to provide real oversight,” Erdman said on Wednesday. “CIA did not comply with lawful oversight during the DIG’s investigation.”

“These were Americans being spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the president and under the authority of the director of national intelligence,” he said.