How Tulsi Gabbard's Secret Task Force Imploded

The Director's Initiatives Group was created to restore trust in the intelligence community. It was shuttered after it helped smear an innocent woman as the January 6 pipe bomber.

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Correction Appended

James Erdman testifies on Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

In April 2025, DNI Tulsi Gabbard announced a new task force charged with restoring transparency and accountability to the Intelligence Community. Less than a year later, the panel was shuttered after it managed to smear an innocent woman as the January 6 pipe bomber.

The Director’s Initiatives Group, or DIG, was a secretive panel set up to review documents for potential declassification, including information related to COVID-19 origins, the JFK, MLK, and RFK assassination files, the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, “Havana Syndrome,” and more.

“President Trump promised the American people maximum transparency and accountability,” Gabbard said in a DNI news release announcing the panel.. “We are committed to executing the president’s vision and focusing the intelligence community on its core mission: ensuring our security by providing the president and policymakers with timely, apolitical, objective, relevant intelligence to inform their decision-making to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the American people.”

Exactly who would be carrying out this work was a secret. Even efforts by members of Congress to learn the identities of DIG members were rebuffed.

On Wednesday, James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer, emerged from the shadows and testified that he led the DIG’s investigation into COVID origins, Havana Syndrome, and UFOs. He also revealed what he called the behind-the-scenes “drama” that doomed the panel.

A former member of the elite Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment who joined the spy agency in 2013, Erdman testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel, their investigations, and their contact with whistleblowers.

Erdman co-founded Feds for Freedom, a not-for-profit that battled the government’s COVID-19 vaccine on behalf of federal workers and members of the military. Reuters previously identified another Feds for Freedom board member, Carolyn Rocco, as a member of a separate DNI body, the Interagency Weaponization Working Group, which sought to root out members of the so-called "Deep State." The overlap suggests a coordinated effort to place ideologically aligned operatives across multiple DNI review bodies.

Erdman’s written testimony, released Thursday by committee chairman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., goes further. Erdman explained that the CIA monitored DNI personnel who were involved in drafting a memo based on the allegations of a journalist for a right-wing media outlet who identified the wrong person as the January 6 pipe bomber.

Journalist Steve Baker, then with The Blaze, claimed that “forensic gait analysis” determined with an “up to 98 percent match” that the person who planted bombs outside the headquarters of the DNC and RNC on January 5 was Shauni Kerkhoff, a CIA security officer and former Capitol Police officer.

Baker was not a reliable source. He had pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts stemming from his participation in the January 6 riot before receiving a pardon from President Trump. But he found a receptive audience at DIG when he reached out in October 2025 with his findings.

Erdman said that the DIG did not have the means or legal authority to verify Baker’s information, but after consulting with the DNI’s Office of General Counsel and the office of Aaron Lukas, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, the DIG began drafting a memo to circulate Baker’s information around the intelligence community, only to be told to hold off sending it.

According to Erdman, Lukas called his counterpart at the CIA, Deputy Director Michael Ellis, to pass along the information. Lukas shared a copy of the DIG’s draft memo with Ellis. Within a few hours, that memo circulated to senior Trump administration officials across several agencies.

In its story, which ran in November, The Blaze claimed that its findings had been "confirmed by several intelligence sources." The article set off a wave of harassment against Kerkhoff, who was interrogated by the FBI, had her home searched, and was placed on administrative leave, before a video of her playing with her dog established her alibi. Attorneys for Kerkhoff did not respond to a request for comment.

In December, Brian Cole Jr. was charged as the pipe bomber. The Blaze took down Baker’s story, and he was subsequently fired for refusing to submit his pipe-bomb reporting for editorial and legal review.

“The memo and the ensuing drama that unfolded as a result helped spark a pause in the DIG’s work in December 2025, and its ultimate dissolution in January 2026,” Erdman wrote in his written testimony.

Sometime shortly after, the CIA began monitoring the computer usage of DIG officers involved in handling Baker’s information and pulling their electronic communications, Erdman said. The CIA also opened investigations into these individuals and began contacting them, demanding that they report to a separate facility for interviews—a location known for conducting polygraphs. A CIA contractor who had come to the DIG as a whistleblower was fired one day after meeting with the group.

The DNI and the CIA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

After DIG members became aware of the investigations, a complaint was filed with the Intelligence Community Inspector General. It was not the first time the CIA appeared to have been monitoring DIG communications. According to Erdman, individuals involved in the DIG’s investigation into the mysterious constellations of symptoms afflicting diplomats and spies overseas, known as “Havana Syndrome,”
discovered that third parties were listening to secure phone calls at intelligence community facilities, including during a conversation with a whistleblower. The status of the Inspector General complaint is unclear.

The pipe bomber memo was not the only casualty of the DIG’s dissolution. Erdman testified that after the DIG was shut down, the CIA retrieved 40 boxes of JFK and MKUltra assassination files that were being processed for declassification. MKUltra was the CIA’s illegal mind control program, which ran from the early 1950s through the 1970s and included drug experimentation on unwitting subjects, at least one of whom died.

The retrieval was a bitter pill for a task force whose stated mission was transparency. Among the DIG’s earliest accomplishments, Gabbard had trumpeted the declassification of the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassination files as evidence that the program was working.

Erdman’s account of the DIG’s demise differs in one significant respect from the picture painted by ODNI at the time. CBS News reported that Gabbard distanced herself from the pipe bomber memo, telling senior officials the information had spread without her knowledge while she was traveling abroad. An ODNI official told CBS the draft memo had not been reviewed or approved by agency leadership. Erdman’s testimony describes a more deliberate process, in which the DIG consulted with the Office of General Counsel and senior ODNI leadership before the memo was drafted and the Lukas-Ellis call was arranged.

In the end, a task force created to restore trust in the intelligence community instead helped set in motion a chain of events that destroyed an innocent woman’s life. Shauni Kerkhoff’s wedding was postponed. Her mother’s obituary was defaced with political memes. Strangers threatened to shoot her. In April, Kerkhoff filed a defamation lawsuit against Blaze Media, Baker, and his co-author Joseph Hanneman.

No one in government has been held accountable.

Correction: Shauni Kerkhoff filed her defamation lawsuit in April, not May.