☕️ INTELLIGENCE ☙ Tuesday, June 23, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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It’s an intelligence roundup: Fauci panics and tries to withdraw offer to testify after Tulsi’s disclosures; Democrats panic as ‘mass layoffs’ begin in the IC; Trump’s pick lands on deep state turf.

JEFF CHILDERS

JUN 23READ IN APP

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Today’s roundup ties a thread through several breaking stories: more fallout from Tulsi Gabbard’s covid disclosures, as Dr. Tony “Mengele” Fauci tries to withdraw his offer to testify in the Senate and gets subpoenaed; corporate media silence on the ODNI disclosures might be a kind of narrative-setting we didn’t expect; Acting DNI Bill Pulte tag-teams in and makes a dramatic entrance on his first day; Democrats panic over potential intelligence cuts and over potential disclosures; and so begins the final boss battle on enemy territory.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Well, well, well. Mere days after former DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified 1,600 pages of secret intelligence community emails and work product from the first months after the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci has had a sudden, but sincere, change of heart. Yesterday, SFG Media reported, “Anthony Fauci Refuses to Testify Voluntarily Before Congress on COVID-19.” It’s ironic. Having run the world’s premier allergy agency, Fauci has suddenly become allergic to testifying.

Once upon a time, Fauci was everywhere.From 2020–2024, Fauci was arguably the single most ubiquitous public‑health figure in American media. For years, he did daily White House briefings. He had endless cable hits. He got a glossy PBS “American Masters”–style documentary. He testified before Congress countless times. He wrote a book, went on Urban Hip-Hop podcasts, and had a line of bobblehead dolls.

He was universally marketed by corporate media, not to mention by himself, as the trusted narrator of the pandemic story, the sober ‘doctor’ who’d never treated a patient but who would “just follow the science” on everything from masks to six-foot distancing to school closures.

Frankly, until late last week, Fauci practically refused to shut up. Why should he? Folded in his pocket is the broadest, least specific pardon in American history. (The Autopen nearly caught fire the day it signed that one.) To remind you how grotesque the coverage was, ‘enjoy’ this supercut of media lionizing Fauci to his ratlike face:

CLIP: obsequious corporate media boosting its pandemic narrative hero (2:12).

But that was before Tulsi Gabbard declassified a five-inch binder’s worth of emails and reports showing Fauci personally misled the country over covid’s origins— right when knowing where it came from could have helped end the pandemic before it ever got started. The documents are so damning that corporate media has completely embargoed them, not even bothering to fact-check the claims— a remarkable journalistic omission that’s like the 911 call center calmly listening to phones ring without picking them up.

Amusingly, corporate media’s stubborn refusal to cover the story gave Fox News a hilarious chance to report on their non-reporting:

This is a telling reminder that “media omnipresence” is not the same as transparency. Someone can saturate corporate media while serving the narrative, but can disappear without an iota of follow-up when the inconvenient rubber finally hits the road of truth.

In case you wondered whether Fauci even noticed Tulsi’s disclosures, here is your answer. Before the document drop, he’d voluntarily agreed to testify before Rand Paul’s committee. But right afterwards, he withdrew his agreement and said he wasn’t coming (prompting Senator Paul to subpoena the former bureaucrat’s attendance).

Obviously, we can’t know what’s in Fauci’s head (nor do we want to know; yecch.) But the timing is suggestive. I can think of at least two good reasons Fauci would want to avoid testifying now that Tulsi’s evidentiary blow has landed.

First, social media is buzzing over the prospect of catching him in a new lie under oath, a delightful scenario that could result in prison, notwithstanding the Autopen pardon. So the stakes in testifying just got much higher. Second, there are now 1,600 brand-new documents that he could be questioned about, and these documents are not only inherently problematic, but they also tend to contradict the lies that Fauci’s foul face-hole has previously excreted. So the questions will be much more difficult.

Thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, who never forgot about him, Fauci is now dangling on the hook— and he knows it. But do you know what’s even more interesting than it looks on the surface? Corporate media’s utter silence.

💉 Status Labs, a brand-management consulting firm, recently published an article titled, “Why Silence Is No Longer Golden in Digital Crises.” Modern crisis‑communications theory is clear: not responding is a response. Studies of “strategic silence” show that audiences now interpret quiet as avoidance, guilt, or indifference rather than prudence. In an always-on, AI‑summarized, social‑media ecosystem, every single hour without a statement lets other actors congeal their own narratives in the public mind harder than a cheese casserole left sitting outside overnight.

Some social media consultants concede that, in rare cases, silence can still be strategically useful, such as when a story is fringe, based on weak rumors, or likely to burn out on its own if not amplified. But the consultants stress that it’s more about timing and triage, not actual neutrality. Once serious documents or whistleblower claims surface, “ignore it and it will go away” becomes a terrible strategy, because it concedes the narrative frame to adversaries.

Whenever there is actual smoke, the “silence” strategy is like trying to put out a kitchen fire by leaving the room and hoping for the best. Other consultants have concluded silence is never a valid choice, not least because it’s very hard to tell up front which stories will ultimately grow legs and become stinging centipedes of bad publicity. Article from MyJoyOnline.com, April:

If you look at it through the lens of crisis communications, the near‑blackout of the ODNI/Tulsi Fauci files (and the Rand Paul subpoena, for that matter) on major corporate media platforms isn’t just an oversight. It is actually a form of narrative framing— framing by omission.

Media‑criticism pieces point out that the lack of coverage of conflicts or scandals has long served to shape perception just as much as saturation coverage does— deciding what to leave out is also part of constructing reality for audiences.

Corporate outlets have chosen strategic silence over the detailed allegations and hard evidence that Fauci manipulated covid intelligence assessments and misled Congress. That allows social media, the podcastverse, and conservative outlets from Fox to JustTheNews to concretize a narrative.

It maps almost perfectly onto the crisis‑comms pattern where institutions stay quiet, when speaking up would either implicate them or rope them to a sinking narrative. In other words, by refusing to defend Fauci, corporate media is laying down arms and walking away. They are surrendering the narrative ground to Fauci’s enemies, allowing the anti-establishment narrative to carry the day unopposed.

Why, through their inaction, are they throwing their favorite bioweapons engineer under the bus? It could be that the Tusli disclosure documents are so incriminating that the media just cannot credibly defend them. I’m not sure, though. After all, they manage to sell all kinds of other goofy ideas to progressives, like convincing them that cow flatulence is literally destroying Planet Earth, biological sex is a social construct, and the most important thing about selecting a surgeon is whether they use the right pronouns.

No, I suspect the real reason for their reluctance is that the disclosure documents are so incriminating that corporate media can see that Fauci is going down, and it doesn’t want to go down with him. When the outlets that canonized St. Fauci in 2020 refuse to speak up in his defense now, they’re not protecting Fauci— they’re protecting themselves.

And there’s one more fascinating possibility. Corporate media’s failure to defend him also suggests that Fauci has lost his deep state plot armor. If he still had it, we’d expect to see the usual trio of tricky media moves meant to prevent a needed figure from falling:

(1) the instant fact-checking (“nothing to see here”),

(2) the nonstop ad hominem attacks framing critics as cranks, cultists, or conspiracy theorists, and,

(3) the saturation of feel‑good narratives about the protected figure.

If Fauci still retained a working set of plot armor, we would expect to see the deep‑state/media complex spend political capital to preserve the legend. The fact that they are now mostly avoiding his name suggests he’s no longer mission‑critical; perhaps he has even become expendable.

Let’s expend him.

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Now that Tulsi Gabbard has formally stepped down, Trump’s interim appointee Bill Pulte has assumed command at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He isn’t wasting a single minute. Yesterday, NBC reported, “Top intelligence agency begins mass firings under new Trump appointee, source says.”

When she declassified those 1,600 pages last week, what Tulsi really disclosed was not so much Fauci’s foulness (a fact largely taken for granted), but it was the catastrophic incompetence of an 18-agency intelligence community that could allow itself to be co-opted by a single conflicted public health bureaucrat in the most important project on which its living members had ever worked.

Putting it another way: the entire apparatus of American national intelligence, with its satellites, analysts, black budgets, and approximately 97,000 people with security clearances, got played by a 5’4” guy with a bobblehead doll.

So it was unsurprising that Bill Pulte had some restructuring in mind. Pulte, you’ll recall, is the terrific Fannie/Freddie director who referred several Democrats for mortgage fraud prosecution— already quite productive. Now he is also serving as Acting DNI, replacing Tulsi Gabbard until a permanent replacement can be confirmed by the Senate. As NBC’s headline reported, Pulte didn’t waste any time.

Yesterday was his first official day, and NBC says the mass firings have already started. The horror!

For some reason, Democrats are panicking at the very thought of any intelligence agency cuts or more disclosures. Headline from Sunday night’s New York Times, practically vibrating with anxiety:

According to the Times, Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) sent a nastygram letter to Pulte ‘welcoming’ him on his first day at work with roughly the same warmth as a cease-and-desist notice. The letter “warned him against making substantial cuts to his office or declassifying information.”

The Warner-Himes letter scolded Pulte. It didn’t even try to cushion the blow, bluntly pointing out that he lacks credentials. “Given your lack of experience within the Intelligence Community,” the Democrats wrote, “it is difficult to imagine that in such a short amount of time you have already developed fully informed views as to how to shrink ODNI without incurring risks to national security.”

This was a fascinating argument from the party that insists the intelligence community functioned perfectly during the pandemic, despite 1,600 pages of documents suggesting otherwise.

Warner-Himes also demanded that Pulte promise not to cut any spooks without Congress’s approval, since he is “just” an Acting Director. “Our expectation is that you will not take actions while temporarily serving as the Acting Director of National Intelligence that are more appropriately left to a Senate-confirmed Director.”

In other words: sit down, shut up, and sit still till we install someone we can manage.

The Democrats also warned Pulte, more than once, to preserve all his records, “including, but not limited to, any actions regarding declassification, publication, or release of classified materials, as well as any personnel actions.” It was an unsubtle threat. Keep your records, because later we are going to give you a microscopic proctological exam. (With footnotes.)

But what are they afraid he might declassify? That is no secret. Unnamed “officials” —presumably Democrats— fear he will declassify classified documents related to the 2020 election or the 2018 Russiagate scandal. “Given the extremely sensitive nature of intelligence,” Warner-Himes wrote, “we expect that you will not declassify properly classified information that would compromise intelligence sources and methods, or weaponize the declassification process for partisan political purposes.”

The word ‘weaponize,’ it should be noted, is doing a heroic amount of work in that sentence.

Ironies aside, if you’ll allow me a momentary digression, declassification is one thing that might actually benefit from weaponization. If each administration expected the next administration would declassify its secret documents, there might be a lot more transparency to start with. I say let’s trymutually assured declassification. At bare minimum it would quickly produce classification reforms, which we sorely need. But never mind.

Tulsi has already cut 40% of ODNI’s staff, reducing headcount to 1,300. But the office was so bloated that the Times admitted, “there is bipartisan support in Congress for shrinking the office further.” So … what’s the problem? The problem is that, “there is also concern about how Mr. Pulte would make those cuts.”

In DC-speak, that means, “we’re fine with cuts in theory, as long as none of ourpeople get cut.”

In an article published late yesterday afternoon, CNN quoted a source saying, “The deep state firings have begun.” The anonymous source “declined to give details on how many jobs had been cut.” Two other unnamed sources said Pulte asked “all offices to provide a list ranking their personnel by Monday.” It wasn’t completely clear whether “all offices” meant departments within the ODNI or something else.

For whatever reason, Bill Pulte is driving Democrats bonkers unlike any of Trump’s other cabinet staff pick, even including misfires like Matt Gaetz, the fiesty Florida Congressman whose nomination for Attorney General had the shelf life of below-average gas station sushi.

Pulte wants to gather no moss, hit the ground running, or however you say it. He’s moving. He is moving fast, against the deep state’s crown jewels, its final castle, its home turf.

Bill Pulte is picking the final boss fight. It is, after all, Trump’s Year of Action. Onward and upward.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Race back tomorrow morning for more essential news and caffeinated commentary. You won’t want to miss it.

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