Dan Bongino, former Secret Service agent turned conservative media fixture, took direct aim Thursday at what he called a “disgrace” — an alleged confrontation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that has rattled Washington insiders and transparency advocates alike.
At the center of the storm sits a startling claim: that CIA officials physically removed classified documents from Gabbard’s office — documents that were actively being prepared for public release.
Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican who leads the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, fired the opening shot by alleging the CIA “raided” Gabbard’s workspace and walked out with materials tied to two of the most historically charged topics in American government.
Those materials, according to Luna, included records connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and documents related to Project MKUltra — the CIA’s now-infamous Cold War program that subjected human beings to covert psychological and chemical experimentation in pursuit of mind control capabilities.
Luna did not make the allegation in passing. She embedded it within a formal preservation letter attached to testimony delivered before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, lending the claim an official weight that proved impossible to ignore.
The source behind the allegation was not a whistleblower or anonymous tipster.
According to Luna, a CIA employee directly testified that agency personnel retrieved roughly 40 boxes of records — specifically identified as “JFK files and MKUltra files being processed for declassification.”
The number drew immediate attention. Forty boxes of documents, pulled from the office of the nation’s top intelligence overseer, allegedly without authorization — the claim detonated across conservative media within hours.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence moved swiftly to contain the damage, with a spokesperson flatly rejecting the characterization that any “raid” had taken place at Gabbard’s office.
That denial did little to slow Bongino down.
Taking to his program Thursday, Bongino tore into the media coverage, the alleged leaks, and what he described as a coordinated effort to destabilize the Trump administration from within its own ranks.
“Donald Trump’s CIA, raided or invaded or whatever, unauthorized entry, I don’t know, play the euphemisms games all you want,” Bongino said, dismissing the semantic debate over what to call the alleged incident.
He saved his sharpest words for the broader narrative taking shape in media coverage — the suggestion that U.S. intelligence agencies were operating outside the control of President Trump. Bongino called those claims “total bullsh*t.”
“How many times do I have to tell you guys, please? Listen to me. I said, please. I’m trying to help,” Bongino said, growing increasingly pointed as the segment continued.
Bongino then escalated, accusing unnamed individuals inside the White House of running an active operation against the very movement that put Trump in power.
“Because as I’ve said to you, there are people out there already running a political operation from inside the White House against the MAGA movement,” Bongino claimed.
He also pressed hard on the timing, pointing out that President Trump was abroad at the moment the story broke, engaged in high-stakes foreign policy dealings with China.
“The president’s overseas right now dealing with the most existential crisis of our time,” Bongino said, referencing the standoff with the Chinese Communist Party.
He labeled the leaked controversy “kiddie bullshit,” accusing those behind it of engineering a distraction while the president navigated one of the most consequential diplomatic moments of his administration.
The JFK assassination files have sat at the intersection of government secrecy and public demand for decades. Trump previously committed to pursuing aggressive declassification of those records.
MKUltra, exposed through congressional investigations in the 1970s, remains a source of deep public distrust toward the intelligence community.
Together, the two subjects represent perhaps the most politically explosive combination of classified material the government holds.
As the dispute between Luna’s office and the ODNI continues to play out publicly, no documentary evidence has yet emerged to confirm or fully refute the allegation that 40 boxes left Gabbard’s office without her blessing.
