Charlie Kirk was killed on a college campus while the Secret Service still has to answer for a string of security failures that left a president who had already survived one bullet continually vulnerable.
Now a witness before Congress just connected that murder to a CIA program that turned American citizens into unwitting test subjects.
And what he said about how far that program has evolved will keep you up at night.
The First MKUltra Hearing in 49 Years
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna convened the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on June 30 for the first congressional hearing on the CIA's MKUltra program since 1977.
Luna told the committee the CIA administered LSD, electroshock, and psychological torture to American prisoners, hospital patients, and veterans – without their consent, for 20 years, on American soil.
She called it crimes against humanity.
Then she reminded the room that CIA Director Richard Helms personally ordered the destruction of the MKUltra files when he left office in 1973.
Luna put it plainly: the CIA committed the crimes, then destroyed the evidence.
What the Witnesses Said
Author Stephen Kinzer – who wrote Poisoner in Chief about MKUltra architect Sidney Gottlieb – told the committee Gottlieb operated with an effective license to kill issued by the U.S. government.
Kinzer described how the CIA ran its experiments through universities, hospitals, and private institutions – cut-outs designed to keep the agency's hands clean.
Then he delivered the warning that hung over the entire hearing.
With advances in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cyber technology, Kinzer told Congress, modern intelligence agencies may now have access to mind control capabilities that Gottlieb never could have imagined.
Investigative journalist Tom O'Neill – author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties – went further.
O'Neill told the committee the CIA lied to Congress in 1977 when it characterized MKUltra as a failure.
He submitted documents showing the CIA's own earlier records flatly contradicted what the agency told lawmakers in 1977 – key findings on LSD experiments had been stripped out before the report reached Congress.
Burchett Asks the Question Everyone Is Thinking
Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee asked both Kinzer and O'Neill point blank whether advanced versions of MKUltra techniques – now driven by algorithms and computer targeting rather than drugs – could be used to turn a lone individual into an assassin without his knowledge.
He named the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting attempt on President Trump.
Then he asked about Charlie Kirk.
O'Neill declined to speculate directly but said the CIA developed capabilities the public has never been told about, many years ago, and those capabilities have almost certainly evolved into something far more powerful today.
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Burchett pushed harder.
He suggested the program wouldn't even need to target a specific individual – that a broad algorithmic net cast over vulnerable loners could produce an outcome the operators could later deny, because they never directed a single person to act.
After the hearing, Luna announced she was contacting the CIA directly to demand full release of remaining records – and declared that expert witness testimony had identified both Jack Ruby and Charles Manson as connected to the MKUltra program.
The CIA Said Nothing Has Continued – Which Is What the CIA Always Says
The agency has denied any continuation of MKUltra-style programs, calling such claims absurd and damaging.
That denial landed with the same credibility as every other CIA denial that preceded it.
These are the same officials whose predecessors told a Senate committee in 1977 that MKUltra was a failure – testimony that O'Neill told Congress on Tuesday was a lie.
These are the same officials who destroyed 20 years of program records when the director left office.
The only reason the full scope of MKUltra ever became known was an accident: a routine Freedom of Information request in 1977 turned up seven boxes of MKUltra financial records stored in the wrong building – the one set of files that survived the destruction order because nobody thought to look there.
Without that accident, the program would exist today only as a rumor.
What Congress Is Now Demanding
Luna announced that new MKUltra documents are in the process of being declassified as part of the task force's ongoing transparency push.
Kinzer told the committee the key next steps are full unredaction of existing documents and a serious investigation into whether any successor program exists today using modern neuroscience and AI.
O'Neill told the committee the CIA's 50-year cover-up produced exactly the outcome the agency's secrecy was designed to prevent – a public that trusts nothing and suspects everything, including who ordered the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk.
The CIA has been lying to Congress since 1977.
You already knew that – and now Congress finally does too.
Sources:
- House Oversight Committee, "Hearing Wrap Up: Declassifying Information is Important for Preserving Public Trust," House Oversight Committee, June 30, 2026.
- House Oversight Committee, "Luna Opens Hearing on MKULTRA Project Transparency," House Oversight Committee, June 30, 2026.
- Anna Paulina Luna, "Luna Announces Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Its Impact on Public Trust," House Oversight Committee, June 23, 2026.
- Bob Unruh, "Witnesses Tell Congress MKUltra Could Still Be a Threat," WND, June 30, 2026.
- "Congress Confronts MKULTRA: Testimony Warns of Ongoing CIA Mind Control Capabilities," Modernity, June 30, 2026.
- Staff, "Legacy of CIA's MK-Ultra Program Examined by House Panel," NewsNation, June 30, 2026.
- Staff, "MKUltra Hearing Turns Into Intense Grilling of NIH Researcher," Washington Examiner, June 30, 2026.
