Leaked Documents Show Gabbard Family’s Deep Ties To Sect Leader?
Report says Science of Identity founder told former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard what to do in Congress and her father, a state senator, was also involved.
Honolulu Civil Beat/June 25, 2026
By Nick Grube
New revelations about former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard following the dictates of her spiritual guru while she was a member of Congress have resurrected interest in her family’s involvement with Chris Butler and his Kailua-based Science of Identity Foundation, which defectors often describe as a cult.
Details about Butler’s influence over Gabbard and her decisions, including orders telling her what policy positions to take and bills to support, were described in leaked Science of Identity Foundation documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Gabbard was born into the Science of Identity Foundation through her parents, Mike and Carol Gabbard, who are long-time devotees of Butler and have maintained their relationship with him while holding various positions in public office, including on the state Board of Education, Honolulu City Council and Hawaiʻi State Legislature.
Mike Gabbard continues to serve as a state senator and is currently running unopposed. Former insiders say he’s still closely aligned with the sect, which is an offshoot of Hare Krishna, and have pointed to video evidence of him singing at organization gatherings as recently as 2019.
For years, the Gabbards have denied and dodged the suggestion that their deep and persistent ties to the organization have had any bearing on their decision-making. Its devotees, the Gabbards included, have long held political ambitions and have pushed messages echoing Butler’s own teachings, which center around spirituality, yoga and vegetarianism, but also veer into screeds against gay people, Muslims and the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
Mike Gabbard did not respond to Civil Beat’s requests for an interview. But, in 2019, while Tulsi Gabbard was running as a Democrat for president, he told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that Butler had no bearing on his or his daughter’s policy positions, saying there was no evidence to support such an assertion.
“Although I’ve sought spiritual advice from Chris Butler over the years, I’ve never spoken to him about legislative policies and have never been influenced by him in any policy or legislative decisions,” he said. “Nor has Tulsi, to my knowledge.”
The report from Post has challenged those denials with respect to Tulsi Gabbard after the newspaper obtained hundreds of secret memos, transcripts and encrypted messages totaling more 25,000 pages that showed ways Butler and his inner circle made repeated attempts to exert significant covert control over her political career and public messaging from 2011 to 2017 when she was representing the islands.
The report detailed how Butler and his coterie, which included her father, instructed Gabbard on what bills to introduce, policy positions to take — even what to say while she was on television.
In 2014, for example, just before Gabbard was set to make a TV appearance, one of Butler’s associates emailed the congresswoman: “Don’t forget to smile, etc. Don’t do the eye thing.” After the TV spot aired, a transcript of a conversation between that associate and someone believed to be Butler recorded his reaction. “Well, from what I saw, she’s doing the f—ing eye thing again,” he said. “She’s still doing the eye thing.”
On occasion, the transcripts showed, Gabbard would be subjected to harsh criticisms and invectives. At times she was told “nobody gives a shit what you think” and was called everything from “mealymouthed” and “chickenshit” to “intellectually lazy.”
‘Sadness And Trauma’
Rebecca Saltzburg is the former Science of Identity Foundation insider who ultimately blew the whistle about what she’d witnessed while working on several of Gabbard’s congressional campaigns. Among her reasons, she told Civil Beat, were disagreements with the organization’s leaders over how they responded to allegations of abuse and sexual assault within the sect.
She also told Civil Beat that she carried “sadness and trauma” for her part in helping keep Gabbard in office.
“Over the years, I sadly came to realize that Tulsi, her parents Mike and Carol, and her guru Chris Butler simply use people for personal gain, without regard for the truth or what is pono,” she said. “Making these files public is my way of trying to set things right. The people of Hawaii, and all Americans, deserve to know the truth.”
Messages left with the Science of Identity Foundation have gone unanswered.
In response to the Post, Sunil Khemaney, a long-time advisor to Gabbard and top lieutenant in Butler’s sect, dismissed the assertions that Butler was the one providing guidance to the then-congresswoman and said that the “vast majority of these materials from more than a decade ago came from me and other advisers, including her father, State Sen. Mike Gabbard.”
An unidentified public relations consultant representing the Science of Identity Foundation also issued a statement to the newspaper calling Saltzburg a “malicious liar” and contending that the story was rooted in “anti-Hindu religious bigotry.”
Bart Dame, a long-standing Democratic progressive activist who grew up in Kailua in close proximity to Butler and his sect, said the documents Saltzburg released confirmed what many in the islands already suspected about Tulsi Gabbard and her guru. Butler wasn’t serving just as her life’s coach, he said, but was “micromanaging it in detail.”
Dame said he views Tulsi Gabbard differently than her father, in part because of the prominence of her public persona. “Tulsi’s the golden child,” he said. “She’s the culmination of the decades that Chris has spent trying to cultivate a devotee.”
Mike Gabbard’s actions have no doubt been influenced by his guru, Dame said. But to what extent isn’t plainly obvious, at least not now that he’s a relatively quiet member of the state senate.
“He is an alpha male in the inner circle of that group and so he’s not going to do anything inconsistent with what Chris wants,” Dame said. “But I just don’t see where Chris’s attitude had resulted in Mike doing things that I would find offensive.”
Senate President Ron Kouchi kept his comments brief when asked whether he was concerned about Mike Gabbard’s ties to Butler or whether the guru had undue influence over him.
“The answer is no,” Kouchi said. “He’s run a good agenda and we’ve passed bills together that align with the will of the Senate.”
Decades Of Involvement
The Gabbards’ ties to Butler and the Science of Identity Foundation are well-known in Hawaiʻi and have been the subject of several Civil Beat stories over the years, including a 2019 investigation into hundreds of thousands of dollars Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign was funneling to individuals and companies tied to the foundation.
Mike Gabbard has often escaped the same level of scrutiny, at least recently, despite the fact that he and his wife, Carol Gabbard, have been key figures in the organization and its history.
While Mike Gabbard publicly describes himself as a Catholic, former members of the religious group have told Civil Beat that he was still deeply aligned with Butler while his daughter was in Congress and they are the ones who shared video of him participating in Science of Identity Foundation gatherings as recently as 2019, when she was running for president.
Mike Gabbard’s sister, Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, told Civil Beat in 2019 that Butler’s influence on her brother and his daughter’s politics was obvious. Tulsi Gabbard in particular, she said, was a “pawn” and a “mouthpiece” for her guru. Sinavaiana-Gabbard, a poet and former University of Hawaiʻi professor, died in 2024 after a violent assault. The woman who attacked her died in prison while awaiting a verdict in her murder trial.
Unlike his daughter, Mike Gabbard has maintained a relatively low profile since he was elected to the Senate in 2006. He currently serves as chair of the Agriculture and Environment Committee and this past session introduced bills to protect and conserve parrotfish, restrict the use of certain pesticides on state lands and create a special fund to respond to climate disasters.
Gabbard was a Republican when he first took office, but later switched parties to join the Democratic majority. In general, he’s not known for being outspoken or taking on controversial positions that would make him stand out among his peers.
That hasn’t always been the case, however. In the 1990s, Gabbard was a vocal anti-gay activist. He ran a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality America and hosted a radio show called “Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii,” where he pushed those views to a wider audience.
He once had his own national ambitions and in 2004 ran for Congress against U.S. Rep. Ed Case, who at that time represented rural Oʻahu and the neighbor islands. He lost badly, by a near 2-to-1 margin, but his ties to Butler surfaced during the race.
When Gabbard was questioned via email by a Honolulu Magazine reporter about his relationship with Butler and his sect, Tulsi Gabbard, then a state representative, was the one who responded with an angry email that has grown in notoriety over the years.
“I smell a skunk,” she said. “It’s clear to me that you’re acting as a conduit for The Honolulu Weekly and other homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case.”
That same year a complaint was filed with the FEC accusing Mike Gabbard’s campaign of accepting illegal pass-through contributions from Science of Identity Foundation members to mask the true identity of the donor and source of the funds. A lawyer for Gabbard’s campaign called those allegations “preposterous” and the FEC ultimately dropped the case.
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