The CIA has spent decades telling the American public it has nothing left to hide.
Now a 20-year agency veteran just blew that story apart under oath before the United States Senate.
And what he said about Tulsi Gabbard, 40 boxes of secret files, and Anthony Fauci has the entire intelligence establishment in full panic mode.
What the Whistleblower Said
On May 13, 2026, CIA whistleblower James Erdman III — a senior operations officer — sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency seized approximately 40 boxes of files related to the JFK assassination and the MKUltra mind-control program directly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, just as those records were being processed for declassification.
Erdman told the Senate committee that the agency had “taken back 40 boxes of JFK files and MKUltra files being processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard,” and described the seizure as part of “documented efforts to circumvent oversight.”
ODNI oversees all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and President Trump’s executive order gives the DNI explicit authority to declassify those records. The CIA answers to the DNI — not the other way around. So the question of who authorized this removal, and on what legal basis, is not a minor procedural footnote. It goes straight to whether the CIA believes it operates above the authority of the President himself.
Erdman also alleged that the CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of the Director’s Initiatives Group personnel, their investigations, and their contacts with whistleblowers. “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.
Erdman was not presented as an outside commentator. He was a senior CIA operations officer who had recently completed a joint-duty assignment with Gabbard’s ODNI Director Initiatives Group — a unit established under Gabbard — describing the dispute from inside the intelligence world and tying the document fight to broader claims about CIA resistance to oversight.
The MKUltra Angle Nobody Wanted to Revisit
MKUltra ran from the early 1950s through the late 1960s, subjecting unwitting American and Canadian civilians to LSD, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, and psychological torture to develop mind-control and interrogation techniques. The CIA destroyed most MKUltra records in 1973; a cache of financial documents survived a 1977 FOIA request.
The agency told Congress for years that there was nothing left. As Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) put it on NewsNation: “The MK-Ultra files — famously the CIA said that all documents were released and other documents had been destroyed.”
But Erdman’s testimony raises a question the CIA has not answered: if there was nothing left, what was in those 40 boxes?
What specific records were in the 40 boxes has not been detailed publicly. Whether any formal authorization was sought or granted for the removal remains unclear.
Congress Fires Back
Representative Luna issued an ultimatum, stating: “The CIA has 24 hours to return the documents to Tulsi Gabbard’s office or else I will make a motion to issue a subpoena.”
Asked whether the CIA had jurisdiction to go into Gabbard’s office and take documentation, Luna said the fact that someone seized the files while Trump was out of the country was an internal coup. “The CIA does not have jurisdiction to work against an executive order by the president,” she added.
Luna later clarified the timing. She wrote on X: “Clarification: Took documents that ODNI has jurisdiction over. Also, this did not happen today and was not a ‘raid,’ however it did take place and we are just being made aware of it based on reporting etc.”
The CIA spokesperson’s statements focused almost entirely on attacking the Senate hearing’s legitimacy and the whistleblower’s motives. The spokesperson did not deny that documents were taken. She did not claim the removal was authorized. She did not say the files had been returned.
And ODNI’s own press secretary, Olivia Coleman, denied a “raid” took place — writing on X: “This is false — the CIA did not raid the DNI’s office.” But notably, unnamed sources in the intelligence community told NewsNation that files associated with MKUltra and Kennedy “were indeed taken by the CIA at some point last year,” confirming the event was not “a CIA raid” in the dramatic sense — just a quieter removal of documents that were headed for public release.
Fauci, COVID, and the Cover-Up That Ran Deeper
The document seizure was not the only thing Erdman put on the record that day.
When asked by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) whether the CIA downplayed the likelihood that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak, Erdman said: “It was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci, injecting himself into the IC.”
CIA scientific analysts assessed as early as 2020 that a Wuhan lab leak was the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2, with an internal vote of 5-1 in favor of that conclusion. Between 2021 and 2023, analysts repeatedly reached the same conclusion in multiple reviews. Those findings were buried, softened, or rewritten by CIA and intelligence community leadership into the public “neutral / we don’t know” stance given to Congress and the American people.
In August 2021, the CIA was actively preparing a public announcement declaring the origin a lab leak following a 90-day review. Five days later, the position was suddenly scrapped and flipped to neutral. The agency has provided zero documentation explaining why.
Erdman alleged that Fauci twice injected himself into intelligence community deliberations on COVID-19’s origins — on February 3, 2020, and June 4, 2021 — by directing investigators toward a list of scientists he said were “conflicted.”
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Fox News: “We just heard testimony that he intervened behind the scenes to try and get our own intelligence agency, CIA, FBI to change their assessment of the lab leak. Why? Because he helped fund the Wuhan lab. He supported and funded gain-of-function research, and then he tried to cover it up, and then he worked to cover it up from the American people.”
According to Senator Paul’s opening statement, CIA scientific analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that a lab leak was the most likely origin of COVID-19. “Yet those conclusions never shaped the official narrative, never made the intelligence report. Congress was never told.”
Not a single Senate Democrat showed up to the hearing.
The Pulte Problem and What Comes Next
All of this lands at a particularly unstable moment for the intelligence community. Gabbard, who had been pushing hard for declassification and directing the investigations that Erdman described, is now out. Bill Pulte, currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is lined up for the DNI role after Gabbard publicly announced she intended to leave at the end of the month to help care for her husband, who is battling cancer.
Gabbard got an unexpected call from Pulte telling her: “Today is your last day.” She was surprised. She had announced she was leaving at month’s end, not that day.
“I need to hear it from the president or the White House,” Gabbard told Pulte, according to two officials briefed on the discussion. The call was described as the latest flashpoint in the intelligence wars that erupted after Trump picked Pulte as Gabbard’s temporary replacement. After the conversation with Pulte, Gabbard reached out to Trump directly, who did not request her immediate resignation.
“What day works best for you?” the president asked, according to one of the sources. Gabbard said June 19, and Trump then posted a statement on his Truth Social account announcing her new exit date.
Trump’s appointment of Pulte led to a bipartisan revolt in Congress, which has balked at reauthorizing a key federal surveillance law because of concerns about Pulte’s lack of qualifications. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no intelligence experience or even a security clearance to handle classified information.
But the bigger problem isn’t who runs the DNI office next week. It’s whether the documents Gabbard was preparing for release will ever see the light of day — or whether the CIA’s removal of those 40 boxes accomplished exactly what it looks like it was designed to accomplish.
Luna, on the day following the hearing, maintained that it is her job to follow up when Congress is offered “conflicting narratives from different agencies,” noting that the history of the CIA destroying certain records looms large over her concerns. “For people to act like the CIA doesn’t have a history of destroying documents is BIZARO-WORLD,” she added.
The CIA destroyed MKUltra records in 1973. It has never fully accounted for what was lost. And now a career officer is testifying under oath that additional records existed, were being processed for public release, and were pulled back before that could happen.
Americans who lived through COVID lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and years of being told the lab leak was a “debunked conspiracy theory” deserve to know what was in those boxes. And they deserve to know who made the call to take them back.
Sources: Axios; Fox News; NewsNation / Katie Pavlich Tonight; Washington Examiner; Newsweek; The Daily Caller; Children’s Health Defense; US Right to Know; Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee testimony of James Erdman III, May 13, 2026.