John Swaine
speaker
191 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Jul
John Swaine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then a month later, Tulsi Gabbard introduces a bill in the House that does include that detail.
My colleague Aaron Schaefer and I kind of painstakingly went through 32 of these documents that were specifically marked as talking points for interviews that Tulsi Gabbard was due to give.
And we went through the videos and the transcripts and found that 24 times she used phrases from these documents almost verbatim, and the other eight times she used ideas from them, if not the actual phrases themselves.
And throughout this trove of documents, there's a real concern and preoccupation with how she appears on TV, whether she's sort of smiling, whether she's doing a strange sort of tick with her eyes that the advisor gets angry about.
And all of that really seems to be part of a plan to raise her national profile and have her run for president one day.
I think what struck me was that this seemed to be a very unusual advisor-politician relationship.
You know, politicians obviously have advisors, they have informal people that they trust to give them tips and talking points.
But I had never known of a public official, like a member of Congress, being dressed down in this way and insulted and spoken to quite demeaningly, like someone was basically in charge of them.
And as you said, she's insulted.
For things she's said in statements, for appearances she's made on TV, it's suggested to her that she apologized to cable news anchors for having been bad on their shows.
And even sometimes for allowing criticism from commenters to stay unanswered on her Facebook page.
She's sort of yelled at, if you like, by this advisor.
From the start, I noticed that in some of these documents, occasionally, even though they were unattributed, occasionally the speaker would give a little clue as to who they were, saying, for example, I'm your guru and you're my disciple.
And Tulsi Gabbard was on record saying Chris Butler was her guru, her spiritual guru.
The 19 documents in all, out of hundreds, where the speaker did self-identify, it always seemed to point to Chris Butler.
The group itself, in their comment to us, claimed that it was other people, that it was Tulsi Gabbard's father in some cases, that it was a man named Sunil Kameni in others.
He's been known as Butler's right-hand man.
and was known to have advised Tulsi Gabbard, so his involvement would have been less controversial.
But every time I found a clue or a self-identification, it pointed to Butler and not to those two men.
And I tried other things as well.
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