No Wonder They Have Betrayed the Legacy of Frank Church
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was established in 1977 as a consequence of post-Church Committee reforms intended to prevent the perpetuation of CIA abuses that were exposed in the 1975/76 Church Committee.[1]
The first chairman of the HPSCI (1977-1985), Edward Boland (D-MA), was known for sponsoring a 1982 congressional amendment barring aid to Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries who had been armed by the CIA to sabotage Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista revolution.[2]
Boland was an avid anti-communist and early supporter of the Vietnam War, but told The Boston Globe: “I don’t think our government ought to be involved in the process of overthrowing…or destabilizing governments.’’[3]
By the late 1990s, the HPSCI had lost much credibility as a body that tried to critically scrutinize the CIA’s operations. One of the heads of the committee in that period, Porter Goss (R-FL 1997-2004), was a former CIA spy who subsequently became CIA director (2004-2006).[4]
Journalist Fred Kaplan noted that, as chairman of the House committee, Goss “had the reputation of…just chumming up to the intelligence community, not really posing any difficult questions, challenges, oversight.”
In 2015, when the HPSCI established a special CIA subcommittee, it was headed by Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a proponent of aggressive U.S. foreign policies and key purveyor of the Russiagate conspiracy theory that had been manufactured by U.S. intelligence agencies to drum up support among liberals for a proxy war in Ukraine.
While pushing for hard-line policies toward Russia, Swalwell expressed views out of the 1950s-era John Birch Society, a right-wing, conspiracy-oriented organization financed in part, ironically, by Fred Trump.[5]
Recipient of more than $1 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Swalwell used his position on the HPSCI CIA committee to try to advance the Abraham Accords, an alliance between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, reactionary Arab monarchies that serve U.S. imperial agendas in the Middle East.
Swalwell, additionally, supported large-scale U.S. military aid to Ukraine and extension of the war in Iraq, championed a regime-change operation in Nicaragua, and helped push the CIA’s narratives accusing China of genocide in Xinjiang and North Korea of being a “rogue regime” engaging in “saber-rattling” and “aggression” when the U.S. had surrounded it with military bases and bombed it back to the Stone Age in the Korean War.[6]
Though Swalwell’s days in Congress are now over thanks to him being brought down in a sex scandal, his neo-conservative spirit lives on in the HPSCI’s CIA Subcommittee.
The committee is now headed by a collection of ex-Special Forces and Navy veterans, FBI agents, AIPAC benefactors, and board members of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot specializing in propaganda.
Most of the Democrats on the committee promote the view that Trump is a Russian agent even though Trump has torn up arms control agreements with the Russians and escalated U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
Though media outlets have reported on the CIA’s setting up 12 bases following Ukraine’s February 2014 Maidan coup, you will not find any probing investigations or demands for disclosure about this among the HPSCI’s CIA Subcommittee.
Instead, the members remain fixated on Russia’s supposed election interference in the U.S., which has never been factually established.
Kentucky Party candidate Geoff Young has pointed out that the U.S. Congress today is more compromised by big money interests and its ties to the military-industrial-intelligence complex than ever before.
The Congressmen on the HPSCI CIA Subcommittee embody that and reflect the evisceration of the constitutional principles of separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches.
Below are profiles of the members of the HPSCI CIA Subcommittee:
Chairman Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Holding a J.D. and MBA from Penn State University, Fitzpatrick served for 15 years as an FBI Special Agent and was embedded with U.S. Special Forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to his website, the FBI deployed Brian on counterterrorism and counterintelligence missions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Besides the HPSCI CIA Subcommittee, Fitzpatrick has served as a congressional representative to NATO and, with four other HPSCI colleagues, a member of the Americans For a Free Syria, a congressional lobby group supportive of the CIA’s deadly Operation Timber Sycamore. In 2023-2024, Fitzpatrick received a whopping $283,462 in campaign contributions from AIPAC and $357,852 in total from pro-Israel political action committees (PACs).
Following the February 28 U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Fitzpatrick wrote that “the Iranian regime has methodically built a network of terror, proxy militias, missile proliferation, and regional coercion designed to destabilize the Middle East, threaten American interests, and openly calls for the destruction of sovereign nations.”
After his illegal kidnapping, Fitzpatrick called Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, “an illegitimate narco-terror dictator” who “terrorized his people, dismantled democratic institutions, and turned the machinery of government into a state-backed criminal enterprise—exporting drugs and cartel violence into the United States, with devastating consequences for hundreds of thousands of American lives. His ouster and prosecution are long overdue. We are thankful for the incredible bravery of the men and women of the U.S. military and our national security professionals.” This kind of rhetoric validating imperialistic U.S. foreign policies is right out of the CIA’s playbook.
Joaquin Castro (D-TX)
In 2023, Castro was appointed to the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot founded in the 1980s with the purpose of promoting U.S. government propaganda in foreign nations and fomenting regime-change operations.
As I wrote in CovertAction Magazine upon his selection, Castro was a “perfect choice to cloak the NED with a progressive veneer since he is known for opposing Donald Trump’s immigration policy and supporting the rights of Mexicans living in the U.S. as a six-term congressman from San Antonio, where he also founded a large literacy campaign and book drive.”
Castro meanwhile endorsed a near trillion-dollar military budget and advanced CIA disinformation in support of a U.S. regime-change operation in Syria by claiming that the Bashar al-Assad government had carried out a chemical gas attack in Douma.
Further, Castro praised NATO as “the single most important military alliance that has set the foundation for national security in the last 70 years,” has supported regressive anti-China legislation and Sinophobic rhetoric, and adopted a hawkish stance on Ukraine, calling for extending the Russia sanctions to the social and cultural realm by “making sure that sporting organizations and other American organizations [and] international organizations aren’t doing any kind of business or work in Russia.”
Evidence of Castro’s close alignment with the interests of the CIA was apparent in his being hosted by the Asia Society in October 2018.
A counterpart of the CIA financed Asia Foundation, the Asia Society was founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III, whose oil-stained family has strong connections to the CIA. The Asia Society promotes U.S. imperial intervention in the Asia-Pacific, often through soft power. Castro was introduced at his talk by Charles Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller III’s grandson.
After he took to the podium, Castro thanked the Rockefeller family for their years of philanthropy and support for the Asia Society, which he said had helped “forge important alliances for the U.S. in Asia.”
These alliances included some of the region’s most sordid dictatorships (Suharto, Marcos, Rhee, Diem, Thieu-Ky, Lee Kuan-Yew), which provided the Rockefeller family with huge revenues, though Castro of course left this out.
Jason Crow (D-CO)
A former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, Crow promotes on his website his role in securing provisions within the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to help finance Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado as part of his goal of making Colorado a global aerospace leader.
Buckley Space Force Base is headquarters of the U.S. Space Command, which follows a Nazi blueprint of trying to dominate the world by militarizing and controlling outer space.
Since Ukraine has been a key theater for testing new space-based weapons, it is no surprise that Crow is a staunch supporter of that war and has established close friendships with Ukrainian military and political leaders who have turned their country into a neo-colonial vassal.
Crow claims that “Taiwan will eventually fall if we’re not able to help Ukraine win.”[7]
To avert this outcome, he has called for increased military training to Ukraine and sending more long-range weapons and missiles to hit inside Russia, which he wants to sanction even more than it already is.
A member of Americans For a Free Syria who has received more than $1 million from AIPAC, Crow supported legislation with Mike Walz (R-Fl), then Trump’s National Security Adviser, to strengthen U.S.-Israeli intelligence sharing in the Gaza War, stating that his years fighting terrorism taught him that “intelligence is the key to effective counter-terrorism.”
One of Crow’s biggest donors is Palantir Technologies, a data-analytics company founded with CIA seed money, which signed a major cooperative agreement with the Israeli Defense Ministry while providing artificial intelligence (AI) software used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for bomb-targeting and for accumulating data on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
Palantir has also played a key role in the Ukraine War by tracking Russian military movements and helping Ukraine to coordinate battlefield maneuvers along with bomb-targeting, and there is concern that the company’s AI software platform also is being weaponized against ordinary Americans.
Dan Crenshaw
A Texan who has received $871,815 from AIPAC, Crenshaw lost his right eye during his third deployment to Iraq while serving with the U.S. Special Forces. Refusing to quit, he went back to Iraq on another deployment and then served with the Special Forces in South Korea in 2016.
On his website, Crenshaw advocates for aggressive foreign policies, writing that “the best defense is often a strong offense. We must maintain our military strength to continue leading the free world, protect American security, and safeguard American interests globally….It is no secret that many bad actors would go to extreme lengths to see the United States of America harmed. This is why an enabled intelligence community is crucial to defending and protecting American citizens, forces, rights, and interests.”
In 2021, Crenshaw wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing those who wanted to put a stop to “endless wars.” He advocated for a strategy adopted in early 20th century Philippines and favored by the CIA of placing small residual forces in countries that conduct lethal counter-terror operations.[8]
Crenshaw’s anti-China views were apparent in his sponsoring legislation that would give Americans the right to sue China over COVID-19 damages since, as he claimed, “China lied and tried to cover up their role in starting and spreading this global pandemic.”
The latter statements appear to be part of a CIA disinformation operation designed to build public support for the military encirclement of China and to cover up the CIA’s role in sponsoring illegal gain-of-function research that led to the manufacture of COVID-19 as a bio-weapon.[9]
Darin LaHood (R-IL)
A former terrorism prosecutor for the Justice Department who received $28,710 from AIPAC in 2023-2024 and $420,511 throughout his career, Lahood was appointed in 2022 to serve on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a relic of the McCarthy era that has advanced a Sinophobic discourse and hard-line anti-China foreign policy.
The committee’s fear-mongering was apparent in a hearing held on January 30, 2024, which featured alarmist statements from two former CIA directors, Mike Pompeo and Leon Panetta, and a video clip featuring House Speaker Mike Johnson warning about China buying up U.S. farmland, shops on U.S. main streets and supposedly establishing outposts around the U.S.
In his testimony, Pompeo invoked Bush-Cheney-era language in suggesting that China was part of a new “axis of evil” with Russia, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, while Panetta urged support for a $106 billion military aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Supportive of the Trump administration’s trillion-dollar-plus military budget, LaHood was a member of Americans for a Free Syria, which promoted military intervention and devastating sanctions on Syria based on phony pretexts.
Supportive also of draconian sanctions on Russia, LaHood wrote on his website that he was “proud to co-sponsor Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 to hold Putin accountable for his unprovoked and brutal aggression against Ukraine.” LaHood added that “recent use of drones in the Ukraine-Russia conflict has highlighted the urgency of accelerated research to counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to protect U.S. forces in combat.” This is more music to the ears of the CIA which has played a very active role in supporting Ukraine’s drone industry
Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL)
A Russia hawk who supports a greater U.S. drive into the Arctic, Krishnamoorthi has received more than $1.7 million from AIPAC and was a member of the Syria regime change lobby (Americans For a Free Syria). He was also minority party co-chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
In that capacity, he co-authored a report claiming that China was exporting its authoritarianism, committing genocide against the Uyghur, and “engaging in malign influence efforts in the U.S. designed to sow discord.”
Krishnamoorthi, further, falsely blamed China for interfering in U.S. elections and for the fentanyl crisis—claiming that 97% of illegal fentanyl entering the U.S. came from the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
In fact, China has among the strictest drug prohibition laws in the world, most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. comes from Mexican drug cartels, and fentanyl can be easily and cheaply produced by local chemists and gangs.
Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard summed things up well in an article in Filter magazine that was aptly entitled “‘Yellow Peril’—How Blaming China for Fentanyl Continues a Racist Legacy.”
Jimmy Gomez (D-CA)
California Congressman Jimmy Gomez is yet another pro-NATO Russophobe on the CIA committee and purveyor of the Russia Gate hoax who has received $2.6 million from Israeli lobby organziations and voted to support Israel following October 7, 2023.
Though now opposed to the war in Iran, Gomez supports any war that a Democratic Party president wages or is involved with. These include the covert U.S. war in Syria that toppled Bashar al-Assad and set the groundwork for war in Iran (Gomez was a member of Americans For a Free Syria), and catastrophic Ukraine War, which Gomez is firmly supportive of like the rest of California’s Democratic Congressional delegation, ensuring that he will not demand any probes into the CIA’s conduct in Ukraine—or elsewhere in the world for that matter.
Austin Scott (R-GA)
Scott, from Georgia’s 8th District, touts his role in supporting two major Air Force bases in his district and serving on the board of visitors for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Fort Benning Georgia. The latter used to be called the School of the Americas and ignited annual protests for its role in training some of Latin America’s most notorious dictators, death squad operators and torturers.
During a House Armed Services Committee meeting in early April, Scott spoke about the use of information warfare by Russia in Africa and said that the U.S. must study it to try to counteract it. Scott bizarrely wrote on X that “the days of the Chinese Communist Party dictating U.S. policy with Taiwan are over.”
Scott’s website proclaims that “Congressman Scott fights to ensure we have the best equipped and trained military in the world, including capabilities to combat adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran. He works with military leaders to strengthen the missions at Robins and Moody Air Force Bases in Georgia’s Eighth District and provide the tools our warfighters need to keep our country safe.”
Ronny Jackson (R-TX)
Jackson is a medical doctor and U.S. Navy veteran who worked in the Texas oil fields and served in a combat trauma surgery unit in Iraq. He has a son who is also in the U.S. Navy and a daughter who works as a “national security consultant,” which could mean in intelligence.
On his website, Jackson emphasizes his championing the Texas oil and gas industry, which gave him $156,684 in campaign donations in 2023-2024, and his opposition to the Biden administration’s energy policies as well as his support for the Sheppard Air Force Base in his district and Bell Helicopter production facility.
Jackson is a rarity in the group for his staunch opposition to the U.S. arming Ukraine, though he still regards Russia as a foreign adversary of the U.S., along with China, Iran and North Korea.
Recipient of $29,646 in AIPAC money in 2023-2024, Jackson is a vocal champion of U.S. Special operations forces and led a congressional delegation to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which was designed to open more opportunities for U.S. investors there so U.S. companies could better exploit the DRC’s rich mineral wealth.
The latter has long been a goal of the CIA, whose shady operations in Africa are not something one would expect Jackson to try to expose.
Trent Kelly (R-MS)
Kelly received his Master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and served 39 years in the Mississippi Army National Guard as a Combat Engineer, rising to the rank of Major General. In 1990, he mobilized for Desert Storm, and went on to serve two tours in Iraq during Operation Enduring Freedom.
In his April newsletter, Kelly promoted his support for a new aerospace rocket integration facility in his home district; his pride at nominating teenagers in his district for American military service academies, his dedication of a local road to two Vietnam War combat veterans whom he calls heroes, and his attending a ceremony at an Air Force base to mark the final flight of the T-1A Jayhawk fighter jet.
Kelly has devoted a lot of his energies on the intelligence committee and House Armed Services Committee to trying to raise awareness about the spread of alleged Chinese and Russian disinformation in the U.S., which he likens to external aggression.
In 2021, he said that some of this disinformation was designed to “spread misleading and false narratives to discredit the efficacy of the Coronavirus Pfizer vaccine.”
Kelly’s statements and activities bring to mind Phil Ochs’s classic 1960s song about the buffoonery of Mississippi officials, which has not changed all that much over the years.
Unfortunately, Kelly is no anomaly on the HPSCI CIA Subcommittee, whose members have deep military and intelligence ties and espouse imperialist and often conspiratorial world views.
The biggest loser in all this is the American people, who are continuously kept in the dark about the CIA’s illegal operations.
These abuses included illegal mind-control and drug-testing initiatives, coup plots, illegal surveillance and assassinations. ↑
The Boland Amendments curtailing aid were at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan officials had sought to divert funds from the sales of arms to Iran and other criminal activity to support the Contra rebels. ↑
Before passage of the Boland Amendment, Boland was considered to be rather soft on the CIA. A moderate Democrat, who served as John F. Kennedy’s campaign manager for the state of Ohio in the 1960 election and was considered by Edward Markey to be a “legislative giant,” Boland had said that the House Select Committee on Intelligence “would not be an inquisition like the Church and Pike committees.” CIA Director William Casey was hostile and evasive toward both the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees. One member of the House committee stated that “Casey treated us like mushrooms. He kept us in the dark and fed us manure.” ↑
Goss served with the CIA in the Dominican Republic in the mid-1960s and may have been involved in some capacity in a CIA regime-change operation targeting leftist Juan Bosch and in supporting Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic. He also allegedly ran agents in Berlin in the Cold War. ↑
Swalwell claimed that “it’s always smelled like collusion” with respect to Donald Trump’s mythic Russian ties. ↑
In 2014, Swalwell opposed arming “moderate” Syrian rebels but then switched to adopting more hawkish positions after his appointment to the CIA subcommittee. In light of the recent accusations directed against him, one cannot help but be suspicious that he was blackmailed by the CIA or related intelligence agencies, which had probably developed dossiers on his sexual transgressions and held that over him to ensure his loyalty. In turn, one can imagine that, when his usefulness had run out, they let things come out, ruining his quest to become California’s next governor (a position they may have wanted someone more openly supportive of Silicon Valley to hold). ↑
Crow was a Democratic Party manager for the first Trump impeachment hearing, which was based on the allegations that Trump had tried to withhold U.S. aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky so as to compel him to investigate corruption involving Joe and Hunter Biden. The Ukraine focus of the impeachment—when Trump had done so many other things wrong—and the underlying attempt to protect Biden and his son pointed to the impeachment trial having been a politicized, stage-managed event that may have been tied with Russia Gate and CIA operations to manipulate public opinion in support of the Ukraine War. ↑
See Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) ↑
Ironically, CIA officials in Mexico City had to send a cable to Langley alerting headquarters that Crenshaw was behaving like a frat brother on spring break instead of a member of Congress representing the U.S. abroad. Crenshaw was in Mexico at the time as part of his now-defunct role chairing the House Intelligence Committee’s cartel task force. Crenshaw allegedly joined a toast and unleashed a blast of crude language that stunned the room and alarmed U.S. officials. One woman present said the tone and vulgarity were “jarring and deeply inappropriate.” Apparently. the CIA agreed—enough to put it in writing. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Excellent article!!
The five countries in the world that have the most propaganda are shown below:
North Korea: Known for the highest level of state propaganda, where the government controls all media to create a strictly monitored reality.
Russia: Heavily engages in state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation, aiming to reshape international perceptions of its domestic actions.
China: Utilizes the “50 Cent Party” and extensive internet censorship to promote Communist Party narratives and stifle dissenting voices online.
Iran: Operates extensive digital propaganda to support the Supreme Leader and project its ideology abroad.
Eritrea: Maintains severe media suppression, where all media outlets serve as state mouthpieces, often utilizing harassment to silence independent reporting.