On June 6, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) returned Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to the House Intelligence Committee, and added Steve Cohen (D-TN), expanding the committee’s membership to 27 by unanimous consent.
The addition of Cohen was a concession to Johnson by the House chamber for reinserting Stefanik, who had been on the committee since 2017 but then left it after she was nominated by President Donald Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
When Stefanik’s nomination was withdrawn, she continued to serve in Congress and has now been reinstated the House Intelligence Committee.
Both Stefanik and Cohen are awful additions to this committee, which was established in the wake of the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s to provide effective public oversight of the CIA and other intelligence agencies and to hold them accountable for rogue activities.
Unfortunately, the House committee and its Senate counterpart have repeatedly betrayed their original mission by rubber-stamping CIA operations and covering up for its abuses and crimes.
The current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rick Crawford (R-AR), aligns with the CIA in supporting harsh legislation targeting leakers and whistleblowers and favors sustaining the pattern of secrecy by which the CIA can carry out illegal covert operations with impunity.
Claiming that Trump did a “fantastic job” with the June 21 Iran strike, Crawford suggested after his appointment a need to “re-focus our nation’s intelligence and counterintelligence community against our adversaries,” adding that “right now, terrorists, rogue regimes, and foreign state-actors are rapidly developing new ways to exploit and harm America’s national interests, and it’s our responsibility to ensure intelligence agencies remain three steps ahead of our enemies.”[1]
The terrorists and rogue regimes Crawford has in mind are China, Iran, North Korea, and leftist regimes in Latin America hated by the MAGA right, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, which have immeasurably improved living standards for their people through socialist economic policies and by asserting national control over their natural resources.
Crawford’s suggestion that the intelligence agencies need to remain “three steps ahead” was a signal for giving them carte blanche to do whatever they believe is necessary to succeed—meaning there will be no proper oversight of their activities.
Hawkish Swamp Monster
Stefanik is a protégé of ultra-conservative former House Speaker Paul Ryan and former aide to George W. Bush, who made a name for herself interrogating university presidents for allegedly being too soft on anti-genocide protesters whom she baselessly claimed were anti-Semitic.
Journalist Dave DeCamp described Stefanik as a “hawkish swamp monster whose political career was primed in some of the most odious neo-conservative think tanks in Washington.”
One of the House’s largest recipients of hedge fund contributions, Stefanik’s racist views were evident in her repeated warnings about immigrants “swarming our streets.”
She ridiculously accused the UN of being plagued by “anti-Semitic rot” while proposing to block funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees at a time of growing desperation of the Palestinian population.
These positions are not surprising in light of the fact that Stefanik took in $359,494 in campaign donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2023-2024, and $774, 178 from pro-Israel groups in total.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Stefanik issued a press release denouncing Joe Biden’s supposedly weak foreign policy and offering a prayer for “the safety of innocent Ukrainians as they endure an unwarranted and unjustified invasion by a gutless, bloodthirsty, authoritarian dictator….Vladimir Putin… a war criminal and deranged thug.”
Stefanik continued: “We must stand with democracies under assault. If peace is to prevail, the United States and NATO must respond with the only language Putin understands—strength. It’s long past time President Biden take swift and devastating action to cripple the Russian economy and impose severe irrecoverable consequences on the corrupt regime of Vladimir Putin.”
These comments show Stefanik’s support for a hawkish foreign policy vis-á-vis Russia and world view in alignment with the disinformation advanced by U.S intelligence agencies.
A CIA operation in Ukraine that she supports includes the CIA’s involvement in the February 2014 Maidan coup and its establishment, thereafter, of 12 bases in Ukraine to carry out an attack on Russia.
Stefanik’s statements make it seem like Ukraine was a democracy defending itself against an authoritarian regime, when Ukraine’s government has banned 12 political parties and its CIA-trained intelligence services have assassinated political opponents, even those in exile.
A CIA-linked website—which openly advertises that it is headquartered in Langley, Virginia—has celebrated the deaths of recently murdered opposition leader Andriy Portnov and former head of the Socialist Party in Ukraine’s parliament Ilya Kyva, along with a number of journalists.[2]
If the House Intelligence Committee were doing its job, it would investigate the Myrotvorets website and its links to the CIA and Ukrainian intelligence services’ establishment of blacklists for assassination.
During the Vietnam War, congressional figures carried out an investigation of the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, run by the CIA, and offered condemnation of it.[3]
If honorable people were placed on the House Intelligence Committee, they would examine how modern-day Phoenix programs are again being carried out.
NED As Somehow the “Good Guys”
Steve Cohen is as tainted a figure as Stefanik. A zealous Russia hawk, he appears to have strong connections to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-front organization that specializes in political propaganda and finances regime-change operations worldwide.
In July 2024, Cohen presented the NED’s Democracy Service Medal to Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident who had lobbied for sanctions on his own country with billionaire con man William F. Browder and was so close to neo-conservative war hawk John McCain that he served as a pallbearer at his funeral.[4]
Cohen referred in his presentation to the NED as the “good guys in Washington.”
These “good guys” have been involved in criminal regime-change operations that violated the sovereignty of multiple countries around the world, and caused mass chaos and violence.
The House Intelligence Committee should in theory be involved in the investigation of NED—which operates with minimal public transparency.
However, with people like Cohen on it and other supporters of the NED like Joaquin Castro (D-TX), who is on the NED’s board of directors, there is no chance of that.
Stefanik in the past has also served on the NED’s board.
On his website, Cohen—who opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq—touts his support for NATO, Israel and toughened sanctions against Russia.[5]
In July 2018, Cohen said that Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections [which has never actually been proven] amounted to “an act of war,” which the U.S. needed to counter with “cyber attacks against the Kremlin.”
Speaking to Hill TV, he argued that Russia “invaded our country” by attacking free elections, and thus should be “crippled” by a retributory cyber attack that would have “made Russian society valueless”
After his appointment to the House Intelligence Committee, Cohen released a statement saying, “I am keenly aware of how important intelligence is during a time of wars in Gaza and Ukraine and ongoing cyber and other threats from Russia, China and around the world. I appreciate Leader Jeffries’ confidence in placing me on this very important committee.”
These statements show that Cohen’s priorities are totally misplaced and not in alignment with what the House Intelligence Committee was set up to do: Be a watchdog, not cheerleader, for the intelligence agencies.
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Tom Cotton As New Head of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Is Frank Church’s Worst Nightmare,” CovertAction Magazine, January 23, 2025. ↑
Ukraine’s intelligence services, trained by the CIA, openly took credit for murdering Kyva in December 2023, stating that the “criminal was liquidated by using small arms,” the BBC reported. Andriy Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence, told Ukrainian TV, “Yes, we can confirm Kyva is no more. This fate will befall other traitors of Ukraine and puppets of Putin’s regime.” ↑
See Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990). ↑
A British citizen, Kara-Murza was an adviser to Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s Minister of Fuel and Energy in 1997 and Deputy Prime Minister from 1998 to 1999 who was involved in corrupt privatization schemes that enabled the looting of Russia by foreign capitalists. Kara-Murza has been a staunch supporter of Western policies in Ukraine against his own country’s interests. Part of the basis for the treason charge was Kara-Murza’s association with the Free Russia Foundation, which has been accused of being a front for Western intelligence agencies’ efforts to destabilize Russia and promote regime change under the guise of democracy promotion. In October 2017, Kara-Murza authored an article in the NED’s Journal of Democracy comparing Putin to Mussolini, falsely claiming that the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 in a coup d’état, and advocating for a color revolution in Russia modeled after ones supported by Western intelligence agencies in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “National Endowment For Democracy Continues to Weaponize Human Rights,” CovertAction Magazine, May 20, 2024. ↑
Though Cohen boycotted Benajmin Netanyhu’s speech to Congress during the last year of the Biden administration, he voted to provide Israel with support after October 7, 2023. ↑
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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 for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). 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.
