The transformation of Tulsi Gabbard from former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate to Donald Trump supporter has confounded many.
But statements in the past month from Mikki Willis, an infamous conspiracy filmmaker who claims to have been a close friend of Gabbard for over a decade, may help explain how the Hawaiian National Guard veteran has gone from being a supporter of Bernie Sanders to being Trump’s pick to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Willis shot to fame in 2020 when he released the hugely influential and widely debunked pseudo-documentary Plandemic, which suggested Covid-19 was released to profit those in positions of authority and that vaccines were ineffectual. He has since become a leading figure in the anti-vaccine movement while expanding his reach to other areas, including politics. In the wake of Trump’s victory last month, Wilis described how Gabbard, who at the time had recently bowed out of her bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination, called him after seeing the film.
“I remember when my friend @TulsiGabbard was facing her own political awakening,” Willis wrote on X. “She called me shortly after I released the first Plandemic documentary in 2020. Having recently come off her presidential campaign tour, she was feeling disillusioned with the Democratic Party. She wanted to hear my reasons for walking away. We spoke for 90 minutes. Well, I spoke for 90 minutes while she listened—she’s a great listener.”
In an appearance in late November on a conspiracy podcast called The Missing Link, which broadcasts on Rumble, Willis expanded on his relationship with Gabbard. He claimed that they have been friends for 11 years and worked together on numerous projects. He traveled with her when she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, he said, and produced a video series for X in recent months called “Tulsi Truths.”
He also revealed that he is “doing a documentary with her right now about the border, the San Diego border.” Willis made a similar claim in an X Space in October, according to reporting from Media Matters.
Willis—whose extremist worldview, to go by what he said on The Missing Link, has expanded beyond Covid to incorporate QAnon conspiracy theories and claims that the Biden administration could trigger World War III to prevent Trump from being inaugurated—appears to now be trying to leverage his relationship with Gabbard into a more central role in Trump’s new administration. And it seems to be working, at least in his telling.
“Many of his new appointees are personal friends of mine,” Willis posted on X on November 14. “They are truly incredible human beings who are risking it all to save our country. I’m privy to private conversations taking place behind the scenes, and what I’m hearing is profoundly inspiring!”
The post on X was accompanied by a picture of Willis and his wife at Mar-a-Lago alongside Elon Musk and Trump’s former wife Marla Maples, who describes him as “a dear friend.” Willis was also at Trump’s resort on election night, reporting live from the scene for Alex Jones’ Infowars show.
One supporter responded enthusiastically to WIllis’ X post, saying they were delighted that Willis and Del Bigtree—a prominent anti-vaccine activist who worked as communications director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign—were part of the Trump team. “Rolling up my sleeves to work,” Willis wrote back.
“Willis’ claim that he is ‘privy to private conversations’ with Trump’s transition team about public health policy and vaccines is extremely alarming, as he was behind one of the most viral and harmful pieces of social media misinformation during a pandemic that killed millions of Americans, and now, according to Willis, Trump is allegedly ‘waking up’ and ‘now believes the vaccines were dangerous,’” Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters, tells WIRED.
Trump transition spokesperson Alexa Henning told WIRED that Gabbard had visited the border but did not respond to a question about whether she is producing a documentary with Willis. She also refused to comment on Willis’ claims of insider access to discussions among members of Trump's new administration. Gabbard and Willis did not respond to requests for comment.
Willis is a former model and actor whose biggest claim to fame before he produced Plandemic was a short clip he posted to social media in 2015 showing his ecstatic reaction to his son’s decision to buy a Little Mermaid doll—a video he has since deleted.
Willis claims on The Missing Link that he first met Gabbard 11 years ago, though he does not explain how the pair met. At the time, Gabbard was living in Hawaii and had just been elected to the US House of Representatives, while Willis was living in California and producing low-budget films like Neurons to Nirvana: Understanding Psychedelic Medicines.
Both Gabbard and Willis were supporters of Bernie Sanders in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Willis told The Missing Link that it was while he was on the road with the Sanders campaign that he began to wake up, and that he called Gabbard to tell her what he had learned.
“Do you know the history of the Democratic Party?” Willis claims he asked Gabbard. “Because I didn't know it. I didn't know they fought for slavery. I didn't know the Republican Party fought against slavery. That's something they've kept from me here in California my whole life.”
Willis added that he sent Gabbard links to content to read on the topic.
Four years later, as Gabbard was failing to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, Willis was going viral.
The first installment of the Plandemic series was a 26-minute conspiracy film released during the Covid lockdowns. It centered on an interview with discredited virologist Judy Mikovits and made a number of false claims, including that Mikovits was jailed without charges as part of a conspiracy led by US public health authorities, that wearing masks “literally activates your own virus,” and that flu vaccines increase the chances of contracting Covid. In all the pseudo-documentary intimated that the pandemic was the creation of sinister forces that sought to profit from it, including a vaccine industry pushing a product that “causes medical harm.”
The slickly-produced film’s claims were quickly and exhaustively debunked and it was removed from social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook—but not before it was seen by tens of millions of people. Willis quickly used that notoriety to claim the bans were part of a grand conspiracy to silence truth tellers like him from informing people about what was really happening in the world.
Part of the reason the film was so successful is because it was so well produced.
“He’s a good filmmaker,” Erin Gallagher, a disinformation researcher, told WIRED. “Skillwise, his work is well executed; the editing is tight. His films look good, and that gives them more legitimacy and makes for stickier media content.” The subjects he chooses to make films about, she says, are “batshit conspiracies but because the films look slick, they've got legs.”
Over the course of the four years after Plandemic’s initial release, Willis leveraged his new-found fame to become one of the more prominent anti-vaccine voices on the right, producing three more films in the Plandemic series and most recently releasing Plandemic: The Musical. Willis, who in 2020 was looking into establishing a secure enclave and “eco-resort” constructed on Austin’s Lake Travis—a tax forfeiture filing in February of this year suggests the enterprise never got off the ground—has also become a fixture on the alternative far-right speaking circuit that emerged in the wake of the Covid lockdowns and Trump’s election loss in 2020.
Willis claimed on The Missing Link that he was contacted by someone close to Donald Trump Jr. who wanted to speak to Willis in order to help convince the then president that he was wrong about vaccines. (The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about this claim.) While that conversation never happened, Willis said, he believes that Trump is now coming around to a more negative view of vaccines.
“He was dead wrong [in 2020],” Willis said on The Missing Link. “He was led to believe by a lot of people around him—people he thought he could trust—that he was right, and then he just became very bullheaded and not willing to admit that he had done harm when he thought he had saved lives.”
Throughout this time Willis appears to have maintained his relationship with Gabbard and in the run up to the 2024 election, he says, he helped produce a series of short, pro-Trump videos featuring the Hawaii native paid for by the Make America Healthy Again Alliance, a super PAC “dedicated to inspiring the supporters of Robert Kennedy Jr. to vote for Donald J. Trump.” (The CEO of the organization is Bigtree, the anti-vaccine figure and Kennedy aide.)
About a week after his election victory, Trump announced Gabbard as his pick to be director of national intelligence—a role that, if confirmed by the Senate, will see Gabbard oversee 18 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the NSA.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the wake of 9/11 attacks to facilitate better intelligence-sharing between the different agencies, but it has never achieved the level of control initially envisioned for the role.
Trump may seek to change that, however, based on suggestions contained in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump presidency. In the chapter on the intelligence community, the document suggests that the ODNI should be the only agency drafting the daily intelligence briefing for Trump and should have full oversight of the entire intelligence community’s budget.
Since Gabbard was announced as the ODNI nominee, many Democratic lawmakers have criticized the decision, pointing out Gabbard’s lack of experience in the intelligence community and her questionable views on Russia and Syria.
Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a member of the House Intelligence Committee from Virginia, wrote on X she was "appalled at the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard,” adding: “Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin.”
Gabbard has a long history of embracing controversial viewpoints on foreign policy as well as being connected to conspiracy theories.
Gabbard has been linked for years with an extremist offshoot of Hare Krishna, called the Science of Identity Foundation. The group, which some former members have described as a cult, is led by Chris Butler, who is worshipped by some of his followers as a deity and whom Gabbard has described as her “guru.”
She gained a level of national notoriety in 2017 when she met in person with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad during what her office called a “fact-finding” mission to the Middle East. She later raised doubts about the US intelligence agencies’ assessment that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons against civilians, and called US airstrikes against Syrian targets in response to the chemical attacks "reckless and short-sighted.”
Upon leaving the Democratic Party in 2022, she criticized it using phrasing reminiscent of the coded language used by followers of QAnon, labeling her former party an “elitist cabal of warmongers” driven by “cowardly wokeness.”
In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard made comments that some interpreted as justifying Putin’s decision, claiming that if the US “had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns” in relation to Ukraine seeking to join NATO, the war could have been avoided.
She also made comments that were used to fuel the Russian-backed conspiracy theory that US-funded biolabs in Ukraine would be used to launch biological weapons. When Trump announced that Gabbard was his pick for DNI, Russian state TV presenters celebrated the news.
In 2022 Gabbard also campaigned for Kari Lake in her failed gubernatorial race in Arizona. Lake was at that point one of the most vocal proponents of election denial conspiracy theories about Trump’s election loss in 2020 and would spend years claiming, without evidence, that her own loss in 2022 was caused by election fraud.
Gabbard did not respond to repeated requests for comment about her links to Willis, but in an interview last April, she did mention the fact that she was visiting the border and making a documentary—though she did not mention Willis’ involvement.
“I just got back last night from a few days on the border in California. It's a part of the border in our country that just hasn't gotten much attention,” Gabbard told the Kelsi Sheren Perspective podcast. “I'm putting together a short documentary. I went there and brought my husband, who's a cinematographer, and a few cameras specifically, because most people in America don't know what's happening.”
