She Fired the Firewall: Tulsi Gabbard’s War on the Shadow Chain of Command

Why haven't any "insiders" ever told you about the SNIS?

The political class is furious. Intelligence insiders are leaking. And the usual media organs are howling about “overreach” and “chaos.” Why? Because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just did the one thing no one expected—and everyone in power feared:

She fired Tamara A. Johnson, the Acting Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.

Over the years, I’ve issued clear and relentless warnings about entrenched holdovers—the career operatives who quietly ascend to high-level posts within the Intelligence Community, shielding the machinery of deception under the illusion of continuity. One such name I flagged long before it reached the spotlight was Erin Turnmeyer—a central architect of the WMD narrative manipulation campaign, later rewarded with a promotion to ODNI Human Resources, where she became a gatekeeper of personnel pipelines feeding the very system she once helped deceive. I know because I was there. I worked alongside them.

Another name—far more dangerous by subtlety—is Tamara Johnson. I knew her from my years embedded in the system, during my time as a PMC contractor, when the lines between covert logistics, “non-traditional support,” and black-budget operations blurred in the field and on the books. Tamara wasn’t flashy. She was precise, procedural, and lethal in her bureaucratic loyalty. She didn’t need a podium—she had access. She rose not by reform, but by perfecting the art of sanctioned silence, becoming exactly the type of official the IC promotes when it needs a trusted warden to guard the architecture of the Fourth Branch.

On the surface, her dismissal by Director Gabbard looks like a bureaucratic shake-up. But underneath, it’s a seismic shift—a direct blow against the unelected, unaccountable apparatus often referred to as the Fourth Branch of Government: the permanent intelligence and security state.

Tamara Johnson wasn’t just a senior official. She was a fixture—a 20-year insider, deeply embedded in the ICIG's web of compliance theater. Her long tenure saw her rise quietly through the ODNI and CIA support layers during Obama’s controlled reform era, remain untouched through the Russia Collusion fabrication, and ultimately act as the custodian of secrecy during a time of expanding surveillance and institutional immunity.

Tulsi Gabbard didn’t assume the role of Director of National Intelligence to play ceremonial dress-up, passively consuming curated briefings, or rubber-stamping narratives handed down from entrenched bureaucrats. She came to tear the machine open—to shine light into the shadowy corridors of the intelligence community where leakers operate with impunity, oversight dies behind redacted walls, and manipulation is coded into policy. Her decision to remove Tamara Johnson from her post wasn’t personal—it was surgical, strategic, and necessary.

Johnson wasn’t just another career official. She was a legacy node of the system—the kind of embedded operator who survives administrations because her loyalty isn’t to law or country, but to the self-sustaining machinery of the Fourth Branch. She stood guard over the intelligence community’s most egregious abuses: its calculated silence during the CIA’s illegal surveillance of Senate investigators; the institutional rubber-stamping of FISA abuse during Crossfire Hurricane; and the quiet suppression of dissent from analysts who questioned the now-debunked Trump-Russia narrative.

Even after Gabbard took office, Johnson reportedly worked to obstruct internal audits, blocked key staff reassignments, and leveraged her longstanding relationships with hostile actors in the Senate intelligence apparatus to undermine reform from within. She was not an impartial inspector. She was a firewall—not to protect the Republic from abuse, but to protect the abusers from the Republic.

Tulsi Gabbard understood the stakes. She knew that as long as Johnson remained in place, the intelligence community’s ability to self-police would remain a façade. So she did what no one before her dared to do—she cut the wire.

Who is Tamara Johnson?

Tamara Johnson's rise through the ranks wasn’t incidental—it was timed perfectly to Obama’s theater of reform. In October 2012, the Obama administration unveiled Presidential Policy Directive 19 (PPD-19), marketed as a landmark move to protect intelligence community whistleblowers in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations. It was presented to the public as a commitment to transparency and internal accountability. But behind that curtain, Obama’s team was engaged in the most aggressive crackdown on dissent the intelligence community had ever seen.

While touting whistleblower protections, the administration prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined. Whistleblower lawsuits were systematically shut down using the "state secrets" privilege, a legal black hole where accountability goes to die. Insiders who used internal channels—those who followed the rules—were offered no clemency, no protection, and no future. The message was clear: speak out and be destroyed.

It’s in this hostile climate that Tamara A. Johnson quietly advanced. By 2012, she was already embedded in the oversight infrastructure—ODNI and the IC Inspector General’s office—not as a reformer, but as a functionary who understood how to manage the optics. Between 2012 and 2015, she held key internal roles: overseeing logistics, planning, and administration—the machinery behind the machinery that controls oversight, access, and narrative flow. And then, right when the Senate torture report exploded and the CIA was caught spying on congressional investigators, Johnson was promoted. In May 2015, she was elevated to the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS), handpicked during the administration’s “damage control” phase.

She rose not because she fought the system, but because she protected it from exposure. While the public was told reforms were underway, Tamara Johnson was placed precisely where she could contain the rot, ensuring that internal control was solidified just as external scrutiny reached its peak. She was the perfect custodian for an era of simulated transparency and actual repression. That's not a coincidence. That’s the system reinforcing itself. I know—I’ve worked with these people. I watched it happen in real time.

John Owen Brennan

In 2014, the CIA—under Director John Brennan—was caught red-handed spying on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) while it conducted a review of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. This wasn’t a minor policy dispute—it was a full-scale surveillance operation against congressional oversight, a direct assault on the constitutional separation of powers. The CIA accessed and searched Senate staffers’ computers, deleted documents, and even attempted to block the release of the Torture Report. Brennan flat-out denied the spying publicly, calling it “beyond the scope of reason”—only to later admit it happened. And just like that, no one was fired, no one was prosecuted, and the CIA Inspector General’s findings were quietly buried. The system protected itself.

Now, let’s talk about where Tamara Johnson fits into all this. At the time of this constitutional violation, Johnson held key roles at the ODNI and within the Inspector General’s oversight architecture. She was either Chief of Staff or serving as Assistant Inspector General. She had previously been stationed inside the CIA’s Directorate of Support, tied explicitly to the Non-Traditional Support Program (NTSP)—the same part of the agency that handles covert logistics, operational backstopping, and gray-zone surveillance infrastructure.

This means Tamara Johnson wasn’t just in the neighborhood—she was operationally adjacent to the systems and personnel that executed and later sanitized the surveillance of Congress. She had access to the internal IG pipeline, where whistleblower complaints might have gone—and where they likely died. She also had direct influence over how audits were framed, what compliance language was used, and most critically, how the agency’s actions were narratively managed during the fallout.

She was perfectly positioned to manage the internal narrative, absorb the scandal, protect senior leadership, and ensure nothing fundamentally changed. Her career didn’t stall; it accelerated. Within a year, she was promoted to the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS). That wasn’t a coincidence. That was a reward—the system doesn’t encourage people who threaten its continuity. It elevates those who know how to enforce silence while smiling for the reform cameras. Tamara Johnson didn’t blow the whistle—she helped muffle it. And I say that as someone who saw this culture up close, who worked beside the very machine that rewards the protectors of institutional betrayal. She’s a praetorian.

Tamara’s Test

Obama’s so-called intelligence reforms—particularly Presidential Policy Directive 19 (PPD-19)—were nothing more than a carefully worded umbrella of suppression, designed to deflect criticism while consolidating control. On paper, PPD-19 appeared to offer new protections for whistleblowers within the Intelligence Community. But in reality, it was a toothless document, strategically crafted to project reform while neutralizing dissent.

Let’s be clear: PPD-19 offered no private right of action, meaning whistleblowers couldn’t sue even when their rights were violated. It explicitly excluded anyone who disclosed information outside internal channels—including to Congress or the press—ensuring that legitimate warnings about abuse could be punished if they didn’t pass through the very agencies being accused. And worst of all, it relied entirely on Inspectors General to self-police the intelligence bureaucracy, creating a circular system where the fox watched the henhouse and called it oversight.

At the time, both the CIA Inspector General and the IC Inspector General (ICIG) offices were either co-opted or influenced by leadership loyal to Brennan and Obama’s larger intelligence framework. These weren’t reformers. They were institutional preservationists—people who understood that the real threat wasn’t external exposure, but internal dissent that might unravel the carefully constructed myth of self-accountability.

It’s in this climate that Tamara Johnson was promoted to the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS) in May 2015, right after the Senate torture report scandal and CIA spying on Congress. Her elevation was no accident. It was a signal to the inner circle: those who stay quiet, who control leaks instead of investigating them, and who enforce the illusion of oversight, will be rewarded. Tamara wasn’t promoted for challenging the system—she was placed as a strategic asset, a gatekeeper in the IG framework who would ensure that PPD-19 remained policy on paper but a hollow promise in practice.

This wasn’t reform—it was regime maintenance. The message was simple: you can expose mass surveillance to the public, and they’ll get a press conference and a PDF in response. But the architecture of secrecy? That remains untouched, because it’s not designed to be accountable. It’s designed to survive. I’ve seen this firsthand. This is how the game is played.

Here is where scrutiny is required. Suppose you examine the post-2013 trajectory of the CIA and broader Intelligence Community through the lens of data consolidation, whistleblower suppression, and tight narrative control. In that case, Tamara Johnson’s role becomes not only visible but central. She wasn’t just another name on the org chart. She operated behind the scaffolding of oversight, managing the administrative and procedural arteries of the very offices meant to protect transparency. Her power didn’t come from headlines—it came from structural positioning, from owning the mechanisms that determine what gets investigated, what gets buried, and who gets silenced.

Johnson managed the support systems behind the oversight infrastructure—from internal audits and compliance logistics to personnel placement and internal reporting chains. She wasn’t conducting the reforms; she was building the walls around them. The architecture she helped erect wasn’t designed to fix oversight—it was designed to contain it. This wasn’t an accident. She worked within a framework engineered to simulate accountability while keeping the real levers of power immune from disruption.

Her later appointments as Acting Inspector General of the Intelligence Community—first in 2021 and again in 2025—are not promotions in the traditional sense. They’re institutional reinforcement. She helped shape the ICIG’s internal procedures, access controls, and escalation chains, ensuring that whistleblower reports were never made public unless pre-filtered. In short, she became the gatekeeper of narrative containment, placed precisely where the illusion of reform needed to be most convincing.

Tamara Johnson is not just a bureaucrat—she’s a systems enforcer. A loyalist to the procedural shield that guards institutional abuse from exposure. Her rise mirrored the Obama administration’s polished but hollow narrative of reform, while quietly facilitating the erosion of meaningful oversight. Her methods aligned neatly with Brennan’s philosophy of expansion without constraint, where surveillance mechanisms doubled as tools of internal discipline. She doesn’t need to shout—she knows precisely where oversight is weakest, how to exploit ambiguity, and how to leverage procedural legitimacy to maintain systemic immunity.

In a structure where the most dangerous actors aren’t the visible ones—but the ones who write the rulebook—Tamara Johnson has long been the invisible hand, ensuring control endures no matter which party is in power. That’s the kind of operator the Fourth Branch rewards. That’s who Tulsi Gabbard was up against.

RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA, Ukraine and “IRANIAN” CASH on a plane.

Let’s be very clear: Tamara Johnson was embedded deep inside the oversight infrastructure during the entire life cycle of what many now understand to be the manufactured Russia collusion narrative. From mid-2016 through 2019, as the Intelligence Community aggressively pushed claims of Trump’s ties to Russia, Johnson held senior-level positions inside both the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the IC Inspector General’s office (ICIG). While she wasn’t on the front pages, she was inside the machine, holding titles like Assistant Inspector General for Planning & Operations, Assistant IG for Management & Administration, and occupying Chief of Staff roles with direct access to compliance operations and audit frameworks. By 2015, she had already been promoted to the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS), confirming her high-level clearance and bureaucratic authority.

Now, let’s look at what happened during that period. In January 2017, the ODNI—under James Clapper—released the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian interference. This document became the cornerstone of the collusion narrative, even though it was later revealed that dissenting analysts, particularly from NSA and DIA, were either excluded or overruled. That alone should have triggered an IG review. Between 2017 and 2019, we saw FISA abuses, the exposure of Crossfire Hurricane, and mounting evidence—confirmed by DOJ IG Michael Horowitz—that the intelligence apparatus misled the FISA court and suppressed exculpatory information. Oversight mechanisms, which should have acted as guardrails, were either silent or complicit. And Tamara Johnson? She was right there. In position. With access. With authority.

This isn’t conjecture—her job was to oversee compliance, report abuse, and protect whistleblowers. If analysts were shut out of the ICA process, her office would have been in the review loop. If internal complaints were raised about FISA manipulation or politicized intelligence framing, they would have moved through the very IG offices she helped run. And if nothing was done—if complaints were buried, ignored, or slow-walked—then she was part of the mechanism that allowed it.

She wasn’t an outsider. She wasn’t powerless. She was at the bureaucratic center of the storm, not tasked with building the narrative, but with legitimizing it through the language of compliance and oversight. That’s where institutional cover is built—not in press briefings, but in audit memos and redacted review summaries.

Now, we have Tamara Johnson serving as Acting Inspector General of the Intelligence Community—the same office that failed to detect misconduct during the Russia hoax, the same structure that enabled the abuse of surveillance tools, and the same personnel who watched the system collapse and called it accountability. And yet, there’s been no correction. No reform. No admission of failure. Only continuity. That’s not an oversight system—that’s a protection racket.

Based on her roles, her timing, and her bureaucratic footprint, Tamara Johnson’s fingerprints are on the institutional defense of the Russia collusion hoax. She wasn’t exposed in the Durham Report or named by Horowitz, but make no mistake—her power was in what didn’t get reported, in the complaints that went nowhere, and in the silence that followed systemic abuse. And now, she presides over the very watchdog office tasked with preventing the next abuse. That should terrify anyone who still believes this system can police itself.

This depiction shows how Tamara Johnson was never the public face of these events, but was always in a position behind the scenes to enforce procedural legitimacy, filter complaints, and quietly manage the system’s internal firewall.

THE REAL CLUB of INTELLIGENCE

The Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS) is the invisible elite class of the U.S. Intelligence Community, a cadre of senior operatives and administrators whose power rivals that of the more publicly visible Senior Executive Service (SES)—but with none of the transparency, and exponentially more control over classified operations and covert funding mechanisms. Where SES members are subject to oversight, audits, and public record laws, SNIS officials operate in a classified ecosystem, shielded by legal firewalls, internal-only accountability channels, and the doctrine of “need-to-know.” Their authority is not symbolic—it is strategic, financial, and operational in nature.

Established to run the most sensitive components of the intelligence architecture, SNIS members manage black budget allocations, oversee clandestine programs, and direct the compartmented flow of intelligence across agencies like the CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, and ODNI. They are the internal general officers of the surveillance state, tasked with supervising collection programs, technical exploitation, and counterintelligence operations, often at levels that bypass even Congressional awareness. Their role is to implement and protect the deepest capabilities of the U.S. intelligence infrastructure.

To compare: Members of the SES are visible civilian leaders across federal agencies. Their names, pay bands, and titles are publicly available through federal directories. They serve as policymakers, interagency liaisons, and organizational managers. In contrast, SNIS members are intentionally hidden—their identities, roles, and financial privileges are classified, sometimes even from internal agency peers. Their oversight is internalized, their accountability is nonexistent to the public, and their power is derived not from open governance but from the preservation of secrecy itself.

Where SES members manage policy and agency funding, SNIS officials are plugged into the black budget system—a classified segment of the federal budget that now exceeds $90 billion annually. This funding powers everything from satellite surveillance and cyberweapons to psychological operations, false-flag capabilities, and Special Access Programs (SAPs). SNIS personnel authorize, allocate, and supervise these funds without public disclosure. Their signatures carry financial weight in ways few Americans understand: an SNIS official can direct millions—sometimes billions—into operations so deeply buried in classification that even congressional appropriators are shown only fragments.

Most concerning of all is the firewall SNIS status that creates around whistleblower accountability. Unlike SES officials, who are bound by Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rules and can be investigated by entities like the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), SNIS personnel operate in a world where accountability is an internal loop, closed, classified, and hostile to outside scrutiny. If an SNIS member obstructs an investigation, buries a report, or misuses funds, the only entities capable of holding them accountable are part of the same closed ecosystem that promoted them.

This is what made Tamara Johnson’s promotion to the SNIS in 2015 so significant. It wasn’t a routine administrative advancement—it was a formal induction into the command layer of the Fourth Branch, granting her structural immunity and classified financial authority just as the intelligence community was entering its most politically fraught phase: the post-Snowden lockdown, the surveillance of Senate investigators, and the covert build-up of the Russia collusion narrative. SNIS status allowed her to administer the illusion of oversight while securing operational continuity for the very programs oversight was supposed to challenge.

So when you hear “SNIS,” don’t think of a job title. Think of an oath to secrecy, a license to bury, and a key to the black vaults of the intelligence state. These are the people who run the programs no one is supposed to talk about, and Tamara Johnson was—and is—one of them.

The Senior Executive Service (SES) and the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS) work hand in glove to authorize, launder, and protect funding for black projects, including politicized intelligence operations like the Trump–Russia hoax. While SNIS operates as the deep-core executive class within the intelligence apparatus, SES functions as its public-facing counterpart in civilian agencies, providing black operations with bureaucratic cover, budgetary access, and plausible legitimacy.

Most people think the Senior National Intelligence Service (SNIS) is just a classified executive club—bureaucrats with higher clearance. They have no idea. SNIS isn’t just the top tier of intelligence leadership. It’s the ledger where the ghosts are kept. It’s the quiet registry of operations, assets, contractors, handlers, and facilitators that don’t officially exist but run the system underneath the surface. And I would know—because my Private Military Company (PMC) operated under SNIS purview.

Let me break that down: when people talk about black budgets, they imagine off-the-books drones or surveillance satellites. What they don’t understand is that the real currency is human infrastructure. People. Teams. Deployable operators with deniable missions. SNIS isn’t just cutting checks for technology—it’s funding people like me, whose names are nowhere in federal directories, whose roles are classified into oblivion, and whose work never sees daylight unless something goes wrong. Even then, we’re buried in footnotes, redacted in IG reports, or memory-holed entirely.

SNIS holds the line-item called “you don’t want to know.” It’s the umbrella that funds “non-traditional support,” “external liaison functions,” “interagency coordination platforms”—labels that say nothing but conceal everything. They’re how operators like me are activated, paid, protected, and erased. You won’t find us in civilian HR databases. We’re not subject to the same clearance revocation protocols. If one of us goes rogue, it’s not a legal matter—it’s a containment event.

And here’s the kicker: this is where all the bodies are buried—not