Church and Pike Commissions

The Church and Pike Commissions were two parallel committees run in the US House and Senate investigating illegal activities by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the 1970's.

References and Links: Church Committee:

• Wikipedia Church Committee
• Brookings institute on the Church Committee

Pike Committee:

• Wikipedia on the Pike Committee
• The CIA themselves on the Pike Committee

Quotes

I've tried to document the ways in which people have been brought down before, and he last time we really cleaned house and the intelligence community was in the mid-seventies with the Church & Pike commissions. And we learned a ton about these untraceable ways that a Goliath--which sometimes is emergent and sometimes conscious--can take somebody down and you don't realize that the story that got written about you was planted by the government. And if that sounds crazy to you, you actually have a problem because this is fully documented. There's no conspiracy theory. This is “conspiracy fact”. What we don't know is what happened since Church/Pike.

And this is why, for example, with the Nunes memo—I think it's completely a partisan stunt, it's a partisan stunt that may actually have an underlying reality as well—those two things are not one--you can't say, "well, because it's a partisan stunt, then I don't want to investigate."

So there's this thing where Eisenhower said: “beware of the military-industrial complex” in his final farewell address. I would say that this needs to be updated to be aware of what I call TIM: Technology, Intelligence, and Media.

And there's something about the fact that all of our personal information is housed on the servers of a few large tech companies. The intelligence community has not been vigorously, vigorously, vigorously investigated for a very long time, and media is in some sort of relationship to both of those that we don't understand. My real concern is that the people who threatened the dominant “Gated Institutional Narrative”, have to beware of TIM: technology, intelligence, and media working behind the scenes in ways that we don't understand, which is the expectation, post Church/Pike commissions. That is, the default should be that this is the way the world normally works, that wasn't an anomaly, and if you believe that that doesn't happen anymore--absolutely--then the burden of proof is on you. If you want to take it up, please. But otherwise we have to imagine that fundamentally we're all vulnerable to having all of our email in a Gmail account, all of our personal interactions in our Facebook account, what we are doing with direct messages, being read by Twitter engineers. You know, I don't love James O'Keefe, but he seems to have unearthed some stuff at Twitter. We should be very, very worried.

-Eric Weinstein on The Rubin Report @ 1 hr 48 min

On X

2016

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

@mikejcasey @balajis This is fascinating. It doesn't square with anything I know. Church commission. Mockingbird. Bernstein on CIA. Etc...

2:29 AM · Dec 12, 2016

2017

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

2/ The only time we have tried "draining the swamp" of the US DeepState in memory was around the so-called Church Committee in the mid '70s.

11:32 PM · Jan 16, 2017

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

@OwenBenjamin Rosenstrasse protest
McCollum memo
COINTELPRO, Jean Seberg, Fake News, MSM and Church/Pike
Witold Pilecki
Johann Trollmann
Powell Memorandum
Operation Mockingbird
Meena Keshwar Kamal

5:31 PM · Dec 11, 2017

2018

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

So, having lived through the Church commission revelations of Cointelpro inside FBI, I want the safe parts of the memo released so I can see if it’s a big deal over nothing. Thus, I’m for releasing the memo and hoping the #ReleaseTheMemo movement is a stunt. But it may not be...

4:51 AM · Jan 25, 2018

2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

1/ WE NEED A NEW CHURCH COMMITTEE: Fred Hampton Edition.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the US assassination of our own citizen Fred Hampton, inventor of the Rainbow Coalition. This year is the 40th anniversary of our killing of Jean Seberg via the FBI direction of our Press.

6:10 PM · Dec 4, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

2/ With the inexplicable “Perfect Storm” death of Jeffrey Epstein & likely govt direction of our corporate press not to seek categorical denial of our intelligence community w regard to ANY link to Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia & traffic in minors, we MUST investigate our own IC.

6:10 PM · Dec 4, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

3/ We would never have learned about our own Government crimes against MLK Jr, Dick Gregory, Jean Seberg, Fred Hampton & others if we the people were not in control of our permanent Government class.

Without investigation, the people are no longer in control of our Govenrment.

6:10 PM · Dec 4, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

4/ What‘s the emergency? It’s the silence & bizarre behavior around Epstein:

Q1: Ghislaine Maxwell has a passport. Where and when was it last recorded and why is this of interest to no corporate media?

Q2: Where is the categorical denial or refusal to comment on IC ties to JE?

6:10 PM · Dec 4, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

5/ Q3: Prince Andrew’s interview is close to the most bizarre thing I‘ve ever seen on video. Those questions were all expected. What was that?

Fred Hampton reminds us that our permanent class in Gov’t can kill extrajudicially. Jean Seberg reminds us it uses our press against us.

6:10 PM · Dec 4, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

6/ Learn to listen for the “sounds of silence”. Silence around @AndrewYang and @TulsiGabbard. Silence around Ghislaine. Silence around Epstein’s Villard House office in NYC and trading records. Silence around IC ties. And silence around the Church & Pike Committees. #BackToChurch

6:10 PM · Dec 4, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

End/ I’m calling on @AndrewYang, @BernieSanders, @TulsiGabbard & other Mavericks to LEAD the charge asking about the silence reaching epidemic proportions. It‘s time to investigate ourselves which has always been A NORMAL PART OF DEMOCRACY. It has nothing to do w tinfoil 🎩s.🙏

6:10 PM · Dec 4, 2019

2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

What have I been telling you all for years? The DISC is real.

Wake the hell up. It is time for Church/Pike II. What is the hold up?

Republicans: put up or shut up. Stop talking “red-pilling”. Start an investigation of TIM: Tech-Intelligence-Media.

#BackToChurch #SlipTheDISC

11:15 PM · Oct 29, 2020

Tucker Carlson

@TuckerCarlson

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish

11:15 PM · Oct 29, 2020

2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

It is time for a return to a second version of the Church and Pike Committees.

To regulate speech companies or provide a public version of Twitter, FaceBook and Google as well as ISPs so that our speech cannot be throttled according to anything other than the laws of our nation.

4:50 PM · Jan 16, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Normally I would think that our interests would be best served by self-investigation of the IC through redoing the Church/Pike Committees.

But given the hands closing around the throat of free unsurveiled action and open idea exchange, pardoning Assange and Snowden makes sense.

6:40 AM · Jan 18, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Or more simply put: if our bizarre press and elected representatives refuse to ASK about Jeffrey Epstein’s links to the Intelligence world, what choice do we have but pardoning those who do the work abdicated by government & the press while they cowardly refuse to do their jobs?

6:40 AM · Jan 18, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I should also say that the problem isn’t as simple as Assange & Snowden. Assume for the moment that they both acted in a principled fashion and did so with great care. You’d still have the issue that pardons send a signal to less principled actors which could be catastrophic.

6:48 AM · Jan 18, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

We need an intelligence community we can trust to *not* be open. That is the conundrum we face. How do we gain oversight and protect ourselves against a secret world that we want to remain opaque?

This is a giant liability of not being able to rest on a shared national culture.

6:48 AM · Jan 18, 2021

2022

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

@elonmusk Been using #BackToChurch for years to call for this.

5:09 PM · Dec 20, 2022

2024

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Donald Trump is poised to actually overturn the order in Washington DC. Most importantly for the SuperTicket, this includes the intelligence services and covert operations groups for the first time since the Church and Pike committees of 1975-1976.

This move by McConnell is sabatoge that is at least parliamentary in nature. Quite honestly I am surprised that this is in any way surprising.

Whether it ends there or not I don’t know, but I would be shocked if it did. I believe that the American people have given Donald Trump and JD Vance a mandate to overhaul Washington DC, and that this is not acceptable to many who will watch their life’s investment dismantled. Mandate or no mandate, I fully expect the sandbagging and sabatoge to continue.

Not to beat the same dead horse as on @PiersUncensored, but I also can’t shake concern for even the physical safety of the incoming president and vice president. It feels crazy to say it, but the two shooters (particularly the second) weigh heavily in my mind. Two shooters is a lot, but there are still those who feel that any such concern is *always* a fever dream. Ignore them.

The SuperTicket is playing with fire. I would highly recommend that someone in the transition team get Gary Hart on board, who is one of the last living links to the Church Committee, and could thus advise as to what it is actually like to frontally engage the covert and intelligence operations groups in a hostile fashion.

Washington hasn’t been overhauled at this level since the 1970s. I was just a kid, but I remember it as being *very* tense the last time it happened. I remember it being so crazy that we just couldn’t fully process it and kinda even had to forget what we learned as a result. It was wild.

If McConnell’s move is surprising, it can get a lot worse even without any violence at all; it might pay to go back to these tumultuous hearings, as it is our only such data point in the modern era. The presidental election was likely just the beginning of “stop at nothing” opposition to the groundswell. I remember being shocked as a kid at the pressure to prevent the public revelations of planned political killings by the Church committee. I think America has forgotten what this was like.

Hope I am wrong. Apologies if so in advance. 🙏

11:00 AM · Nov 10, 2024

2025

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

@edfrenkel @coreyum It’s hard for people to hear it. We haven’t seen this in earnest since like Iran-Contra or thereabouts. Or maybe Abu Ghraib. Dunno.

Church committee was too long ago.

1:07 AM · Jul 23, 2025

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Related Pages

• 25: The Construct: Jeffrey Epstein
• Technology Intelligence Media (TIM)
• Tech-Carthyism
• The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (The DISC)
• Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN)