Feb. 1—The first day of hearings before the Senate committees responsible for confirmation of two of President Trump’s nominees went as advertised, turning at times into contentious attacks from defenders of the establishment status quo. Both Tulsi Gabbard, the choice for Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and Kash Patel for FBI Director, were effective in rebutting the assaults from their detractors, who were intent on defending the weaponization and politicization of agencies responsible for protecting American citizens and upholding the Constitution. The candidates’ opponents on the committees, including some Republicans, demonstrated in their attacks on the nominees why a drastic reform of the agencies they will head is urgent and essential.

In announcing in November why he selected them, Trump said he needs fighters, because “There is something wrong with the institutions,” the agencies don’t function, and there is a need “to be challenged and reconstructed.” He said he believed Gabbard and Patel were the kind of fighters the American people need to root out the “rot” in the “Deep State.” In their responses to the at-times harsh grilling they were subjected to by some of the Senators who will determine their fate, both demonstrated the toughness that Trump expects of them, to fulfill their assignments.

The background to the hearings was a virtual nonstop series of media allegations fulminating against the two. Typical were articles in The Economist, the mouthpiece of the City of London, with an unacknowledged subtext of defense of the “Special Relationship” of U.S. and UK intelligence collaboration. On January 28, a lengthy article charged that Gabbard was chosen to purge any employees of the 18 agencies she would command for being “disloyal to the President.” It focused on two Executive Orders issued by Trump, which call for the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to undertake a “sweeping review of the intelligence community’s activity during the Biden administration, to identify people who ‘weaponized’ intelligence or interfered in domestic politics, and to take disciplinary action—including dismissal—against offenders.”

The Economist article on Patel, Trump’s choice for FBI Director, published on January 29, the day before the hearings, was less polite. Titled “Kash Patel Is a Crackpot,” it warns of his “animus toward the national security establishment,” evident in his role as a leading investigator into violations of law involved in the long-running “Russiagate” campaign against Trump. It accuses him of taking “every opportunity to exaggerate mistakes or faults by the intelligence agencies,” with nary an admission that the “mistakes and faults” included violations of law which seriously tarnished the election campaign of Trump—identifying him as a “puppet of Putin”—and disrupted his efforts to improve relations with Russia. The article also fails to mention that those responsible for the intelligence “failures,” which have been widely acknowledged as based on lies to support a political bias, have evaded accountability, and many Senators, such as Adam Schiff, who is on the Judiciary Committee deciding the fate of Patel, still repeat these lies at every opportunity.

The assault on the two selected by Trump is coherent with a report from the British House of Lords released in December 2018, “UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order,” which warned that were Trump to be reelected in 2020, the “Special Relationship” between the British and U.S. political and intelligence establishment would be threatened, if not ended. The Special Relationship is identified in the report as the means through which City of London operatives steer U.S. policy. The report asserts that it remains “our top priority and cornerstone of what we wish to achieve in the world.”

Similar warnings of the threat to “business as usual” if the pair were approved were omnipresent throughout coverage in major media, including London dailies and the New York Times–Washington Post echo chambers, and were reflected in the interrogation by Senators, who engaged in a high-stakes game of “gotcha” during the hearings.

Intelligence versus Ideology

In asserting her belief in the urgency of the confirmation of Gabbard and Patel, the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the necessity of rejecting adherence to the ideology of “geopolitics,” which has been central to the Special Relationship and responsible for repeated violations of international law. The wars, regime change coups, assassinations, etc., which have dominated international relations since the assassination in November 1963 of President John F. Kennedy—from the war in Vietnam, to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine—are products of the application of geopolitics, in which the Anglo-Americans assert their imperial right to impose their “rules” on the rest of the world as the “sole superpower.” As stated by Zbigniew Brzezinski—one of the principal architects of this revision of the classic doctrine of Mackinder’s geopolitics—the U.S. must prevent the emergence of any rival in Eurasia.

The attacks launched against Gabbard in particular reflect unquestioning loyalty to this ideological belief in geopolitics. One main point of opposition to her raised in the hearing stems from her refusal to accept what turned out to be false findings used by the intelligence establishment to justify wars. War hawks from both parties on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence accused her of placing her beliefs ahead of the assessments of the intelligence community, which would threaten “national security” were she to be confirmed. Gabbard’s counter reflected the quality which should be most prized in the office of the DNI, that is, she refuses to affirm false claims, to say something which she doesn’t believe, for the sake of getting along.

When pressed, for example, on why she met with Syrian President Assad in 2017, she defended her decision, saying that she believes that it is necessary, when possible, to meet with those you may disagree with, before deciding to risk American lives by going to war—an unacceptable position for those who defend the Biden administration’s rejection of any diplomatic contact with Russian President Putin regarding Ukraine! There was no response from members of the Committee when she pointed out that her concern in Syria was that the Obama and Biden policy, as acted on by Hillary Clinton and her successors, of providing support for “moderate rebels” in a regime change war, could lead to a victory there by ISIS/Al Qaeda terrorists, which has just occurred. In her opening statement, to prove her point, she quoted from an email sent by Jake Sullivan to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February 2012, which said, “AQ (Al Qaeda) is on our side in Syria.” Sullivan, who later served as National Security Advisor to President Biden, was Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff when he wrote that email.

Gabbard has frequently defended the importance of verifying assessments before approving action. An example she cites is the intelligence failures which led to the disastrous war in Iraq. She addressed this during her presidential campaign in 2019, when she explained why she questioned “findings” which can lead to war. “I served in a war in Iraq,” she said at a CNN town meeting, “a war that was launched based on lies, and a war that was launched without evidence. So as a soldier, as an American, as a member of Congress, it is my duty and my responsibility to exercise skepticism any time anyone tries to send our service members into harm’s way or use our military to go in and start a new war.”

She reiterated this sense of a sacred commitment in her opening statement to the Intelligence Committee:

For too long, faulty, inadequate or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. The most obvious example of one of these failures is our invasion of Iraq based upon a total fabrication or complete failure of intelligence.

The cost of this failure, she continued, was the loss of thousands of American lives in Iraq, and the deaths of as many as one million Iraqis in America’s wars there. Her implicit message is that her opponents on the committee, who never called out the analysts responsible for the faked intelligence, demonstrate their blatant hypocrisy when they accuse her of undermining the authority of the experts by challenging their conclusions. Journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the “guardians of the status quo” on the committee were visibly angered by this truthful statement, which might cost Gabbard some needed votes.

She concluded her statement by ridiculing the charges that she is a puppet of dictators and enemies of America that have been aired by many, including anti-Trumpers like Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney.

Now before I close, I want to warn the American people who are watching at home. You may hear lies and smears in this hearing that will challenge my loyalty to and my love for our country. Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the Constitution of the United States, accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet, Modi’s puppet. Not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters.

The Snowden Litmus Test

Similarly, the “group think” which shapes their opposition was exposed by their obsession with Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor, who in June 2013 leaked documents which exposed an illegal global surveillance and data collection system run by the NSA. She was asked repeatedly during the hearing to denounce Snowden as a traitor. She declined. She admitted that he “broke the law” when he exposed the spying by the “security state,” but argued that what he exposed were “egregious, illegal and unconstitutional programs,” which deprived Americans of their right to privacy and free expression. This failed to evoke even a glimmer of recognition from her opponents, eliciting instead exasperated expressions of incredulity.

A further indication of the linear mindset of her opponents was their inability to detect the irony in an X post sent out by Snowden before the hearing. He wrote, “Tulsi Gabbard will be required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation today. I encourage her to do so. Tell them I harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff. In D.C., that’s what passes for the pledge of allegiance.” Senators were so bothered by this that it was read during the hearing and cited as serious, friendly advice to Gabbard!

A similar failure of the anti-Trump nay-sayers was their inability to discredit Patel for his role in exposing the corruption of FBI officials in their false “Russiagate” attacks on Trump. His insistence that he would focus as FBI Director on correcting the abuses which led to Russiagate was largely ignored by Democrats, many of whom continue to insist that Trump’s election in 2016 was the result of Russian meddling! In its coverage of Patel’s hearing, even the Washington Post acknowledged that he was “mostly correct” in pushing back against his charges about the systemic fraud underlying the Russiagate fable. This is especially noteworthy, as the Post shared a Pulitzer Prize with the New York Times in 2018 for what is now recognized as their false reporting on Russiagate.

Unfinished Business of the Church Committee

At this article’s deadline, the fate of these nominations is still up in the air. It is very possible that the Democrats on the Committees will unanimously reject them. If one Republican Senator on the Committees votes with the Democrats, their nominations could be defeated, setting back Trump’s effort to reorganize U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. The LaRouche Organization has been mobilizing support for the nominees through drafting and circulating a dossier, “The Liars’ Bureau,” which identifies the lies and corruption characteristic of those President Trump is out to replace.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in commenting on the need to build support in the public for the necessary overhaul of the corrupted intelligence and law enforcement system, raised the possibility of establishing a new congressional Church Committee to investigate the systematic abuses Trump wishes to end. The Church Committee, named after Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, was established in 1975 to investigate a variety of allegations of illegal activities, including U.S. agencies running covert actions, such as coups and assassinations; the use of “false flags” to justify going to war (Vietnam); illegal surveillance of Americans in the anti-war and civil rights movements (e.g., COINTELPRO); lies about the “success” of U.S. military operations (Pentagon Papers); and the involvement of CIA operatives in Watergate, among other scandals.

Ironically, the hearings on the Gabbard and Patel nominations occurred two days after the fiftieth anniversary of the vote to create the Church Committee. The work of the Church Committee was undermined by a campaign to discredit it by those it was investigating, just as Trump’s nominees today are under assault by those who fear they would be targets of a serious investigation. A release of documents by the National Security Archives on the attempt to subvert the Church Committee includes one which shows the need for something like a new Church Committee. Under the headline, “Advisers to President Ford Sought to Protect CIA’s Image Abroad,” it identifies a strategy employed to withhold “sensitive intelligence, spearheaded by Dick Cheney....”

[box: Sen. Frank Church Addresses Danger of Government Tyranny] Yes, the same Dick Cheney who was directly involved as Vice President in using fake intelligence to justify President G.W. Bush’s Iraq war, who resurfaced recently along with his daughter, anti-Trumper Liz Cheney, to denounce the choice of Gabbard as DNI. The continuity of these networks from the 1960s to today points to the urgency of bringing in “outsiders” such as Gabbard and Patel, who are not part of the “old boys” crowd. Otherwise, this “swamp” will never be drained.

One flank toward accomplishing this goal was launched by an Executive Order by the President to declassify all remaining documents related to the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Sen. Robert Kennedy, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. If confirmed as DNI, Tulsi Gabbard would have oversight of the process of declassification, with the potential to dismantle the International Assassination Bureau which continues to operate to this day.

In part inspired by the work of the Church Committee, in September 1976, the U.S. House of Representatives set up the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to investigate the killings of President John F. Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In its summary, the committee concluded that it “believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The Committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” The work of the HSCA confirmed the belief of the majority of Americans that these assassinations were the result of a conspiracy, and were covered up by officials of U.S. government agencies. But, until now, there has been no accountability for those involved.

It is long overdue for the truth to come out.