Exposing the Personnel of the Military Corporate State, Part Two: Republican ex-lawmakers pivot to push a deep state agenda
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
In recent reports, Restoration News investigated former Democratic intelligence officers who have entered politics in the Trump era with the explicit intention of protecting the intelligence services and the larger military corporate complex from populist scrutiny. From New York to California to Texas to Virginia to New Jersey to Michigan; from the Senate to the House to the mayoralty of a major city and the governorship of a major state, these players look likely to exercise influence on the Democrats' liberal and progressive wings for years to come. But they are not the only operators working behind the scenes to strengthen the military corporate complex.
On the Right, this activity looks like the inverse of what's occurring on the Left: The jumping from the ship of politics of Republicans who can no longer sustain their militarism inside a party remade by Donald Trump. Instead, the RINO politicos have gone home to their backers: Working directly with weapons contractors and interventionist think tanks and consultancies to push their interests with the Pentagon, the CIA, and politicians from both parties.
Probably the three most prominent of these ship-jumpers are former U.S. Representatives Will Hurd and Mike Gallagher and former Trump Deputy National Security Adviser (in Trump's first term) Matthew Pottinger. Tracing their moves these past few years, particularly since the start of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, reveals a concerted effort, sometimes in direct cooperation with each other, toward a dangerous endgame. This endgame is domestic surveillance and a regime change project regarding the CCP—not out of geopolitical necessity but for the financial benefit of the uni-party.
RINO Representatives Rise with the Backing of Militarists…
Will Hurd and Mike Gallagher both won their congressional seats in the 2010s (2014 for Hurd, 2016 for Gallagher) and served until the 2020s (2021 for Hurd, 2024 for Gallagher). Both came to Congress from intelligence backgrounds: Hurd served in the CIA from 2000 to 2009; Gallagher as an intelligence officer for the Marines from 2006 to 2013. After the CIA, Hurd worked for FusionX, a cybersecurity company with Pentagon contracts later folded into the contracting behemoth Accenture. Gallagher did his undergraduate at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Center, where his adviser was ex-CIA. He then followed his B.A. with an internship with RAND, the largest think tank in America, followed by a Masters from National Intelligence University in 2010 and a PhD from Georgetown University in 2015, where his thesis adviser was ex-DoD.
Hurd and Gallagher were funded in their runs for congress by military corporate players. Gallagher's top donors in 2024 included AIPAC, representing America's defense industry's most reliable foreign client Israel; Google, a major contractor with the Pentagon; and, via a de facto shell company, T.J. Rodgers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, which does regular business with the DoD. Hurd's top donors included NuStar Energy, which contracts with the Pentagon for fuel storage services to the tune of $75 million in 2023 alone; and Southern Co., which contracts with the Pentagon to install solar facilities on military bases in the name of advancing renewable energy. Another main Hurd backer was Allen & Co., the boutique investment firm, overseen by such national security luminaries as former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey and former CIA director George J. Tenet.
2014 and 2016 seemed, at least to Washington media observers, like auspicious years for people with Hurd's or Gallagher's backgrounds and backers to enter Congress, as cyber-security and other emerging threats hit the desks of an aging legislative membership unsure how to navigate them. Hurd, Gallagher, and their Democratic intelligence veteran counterparts Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin were heralded in Washington media as just the kind of experts that Congress needed to change with the times—without much apparent thought about the dangers of intelligence loyalists dominating legislative policy. And, for a few years, Hurd and Gallagher made good on the promise. They were also, like their Democratic counterparts Pat Ryan and Jimmy Panetta investigated by Restoration News in part one of this report, adept at masking their real loyalties by matching their support for military corporatism with bipartisan domestic initiatives that softened their images.
Hurd sided with Democrats on several high-profile House votes and went so far in pursuit of bipartisan comity as to live-stream a 1,600 mile drive from San Antonio to Washington D.C. he took during a snowstorm with then-U.S. Representative from Texas Beto O'Rourke. The effort earned both men the 2018 Alleghany College Prize for Civility in Public Life and a burst of publicity, which even the supportive local paper the San Antonio Current hazarded was their aim to begin with. But, all the while, Hurd was busiest with security issues: Serving on the Homeland Security Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Gallagher, for his part, was part of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, mostly made up of Democrats and Republicans fond of "good government" rhetoric and backed by military corporate interests. Gallagher also infuriated his Republican colleagues with his "bipartisan" vote against the impeachment of then-Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas. At the same time, Gallagher was founding chairman of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation; and he served on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
…then Jump Political Ship to Work in the Military Corporate Complex
But Hurd's and Gallagher's political careers quickly took a turn, because the times did not change in the direction congressional observers had thought they would—one that favored centrist militarists. Instead, Donald Trump won a surprise presidential victory and led the Republican Party in battling the intelligence services and their elite legal allies. Hurd and Gallagher eventually left Congress as a result, retreating to the most obvious, and lucrative, place at the table: Positions with their deep state backers.
Hurd became a trustee of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm; Managing Partner at Allen & Co., his former funder when he ran for Congress; board member at Sam Altman's OpenAI; and then Chief Strategy Officer at CHAOS Systems, "a technology company building the next generation of defense and national security systems." The Executive Chairman as of 2025 is former George W. Bush CIA director George J. Tenet, who until this year was Chairman of the Board of Allen & Co. ("I've been fortunate to have had a fun career," goes Hurd's LinkedIn, the adjective "fun" not quite preparing the reader for the rolodex of military corporate positions that follow, "as an intelligence officer, cybersecurity professional, congressman, AI policy pioneer, author, investment banker, presidential candidate, C-suite executive, and husband.") Among the investments of these companies of Hurd's are not just, for example, drone technologies for Ukraine and Israel, but technologies that reach much deeper into American life. A telling example is In-Q-Tel's "molar mic," which was reported on earlier this year, queasily, by Fortune Magazine:
The "Molar Mic" captures the voice with high fidelity, even in surroundings of extreme noise, and wirelessly transmits audio signals to the wearer by vibrating the nerves of the inner ear. It makes the Airpod-to-iPhone interface look like tin cans on a string, and you can just imagine how valuable it might be to, say, a commando in a firefight…Normally, you'd be thrilled if Fortune called you up with a chance to tell the world about it. But there's one, huge problem: Because real-life national-security types are your ideal customers for the Molar Mic—indeed, may already be buying it—you're forbidden from talking about it very much at all.
Gallagher resigned before the end of his fourth term, after previously announcing he would not run for another term. He explained his decision not to run again by stating that "the Framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then return to their private lives." Gallagher's definition of "returning to private life" was becoming head of Defense for Palantir, a defense-technology government contractor whose early and crucial financial backing came in part from the federal government. As Restoration News reported recently, Palantir is likely the key tech player in a new cross-government integration project that will collate data on Americans from different government agencies, raising fears among constitutionalists and civil liberties advocates as well as some of Palantir's own employees of a "Total Information Awareness" program to monitor citizens.
During Gallagher's time at Palantir, Palantir has also been a major backer of what some of these same critics see as a direct infringement on civil liberties in the name of combating China: The ban of the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok. According to a recent report in The Washington Times, the genesis of this ban was Palantir CEO's Alex Karp's view that America should imitate "China's policy of military-civil fusion" where "private companies…work with the government" in the name of "opposing China's technology sector." At a recent conference, Gallagher himself privately revealed another reason why the TikTok ban was in American defense contractors' interest. According to The Washington Times,
the conflict in Israel — not concern about China — created the spark for opposing TikTok on Capitol Hill. "We had a bipartisan consensus, we had the executive branch. But the bill was still dead until Oct. 7," Mr. Gallagher said, referring to Hamas' deadly attack on Israel in 2023. "And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again."
Whatever one's opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a statement like this combined with the reality that Israel is weapons and tech contractors' most reliable client makes it difficult to avoid the suspicion that military corporate interests, not national security ones, were the drivers of the TikTok ban.
They Hawk Militarism in the Media…
But this is not what Hurd and Gallagher say in public, and they have both gone public quite often since leaving Congress—taking up positions as de facto ambassadors for the military corporate state.
Hurd's public ambassadorship has been the subtler and more political of the two, though no less tone deaf. He has made genial appearances in military corporate mouthpieces like The Atlantic Magazine, which ran a 2022 piece titled "Revenge of the Normal Republicans" with Hurd in the starring role. The piece described Hurd as "a young, robust, eloquent man of mixed race and complete devotion to country, someone whose life is a testament to nuance and empathy and reconciliation," and was subtitled "Will Hurd thinks there are enough normal voters to deliver him the 2024 Republican presidential nomination." The occasion for its publication was the release of Hurd's book Reboot: An Idealist's Guide to Getting Big Things Done, blurbed by a former CIA director and Defense secretary for "appealing to the middle" and "charting a forceful path forward for America's technological future."
More recently Hurd has appeared in the online magazine The Free Press: An energetic champion of American Empire which has as one of its main investors the boutique investment firm Allen & Co, where, again, Hurd served on the board. (This last connection went unacknowledged in The Free Press's description of its podcast on which Hurd appeared, though this description did take pains to quote The Atlantic's genial description of Hurd as president-in-waiting.)
Gallagher's public ambassadorship for military corporatism has been more aggressive and unfiltered. In 2024, as debate bubbled up in Republican circles over the "hawk" and "pragmatist" foreign policy practitioners vying for Donald Trump's ear, Gallagher co-authored the much-"amplified" Foreign Affairs essay No Substitute for Victory. This essay used China's inarguable geopolitical challenge to the United States to argue not for competition and rearmament but for regime change in Beijing. Its logic was that China was not a pragmatic rival but, like the USSR, an ideological enemy to be defeated. This was a starkly minoritarian position among accredited spokespeople for an increasingly populist Republican Party—though not, tellingly, for neoconservative think tanks like the Hudson Institute, where Gallagher promoted it. Namely, both Elbridge Colby, now the Undersecretary for Defense, and J.D. Vance, now Vice President, see striving for a balance of power with China while prioritizing the homeland with industrialization and rearmament as the right approach, rather than regime change. This is the policy the Trump Administration is now overtly pursuing, obviously with Trump's approval.
In the face of populist Republican disinterest in his views, Gallagher, like Hurd, took his argument to non-MAGA Right-leaning venues which uphold American empire like The Wall Street Journal and The Free Press, the latter of which loudly identifies with the American Right regarding free speech while pushing a political economic agenda amounting to militarism abroad and financialization at home. There, under the headline of arguments most Republicans can agree on like sending home Chinese students at Ivy league universities who report to the CCP, Gallagher doggedly worked in variations of his real point, which is the point of "No Substitute for Victory." Namely, 21st century China is the reincarnation of the Soviet Union, an ideological rival driven by expansion which must be stopped with militarized policing abroad.
"The current moment," so this argument goes, "bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1970s," when "the Soviet Union was undermining U.S. interests across the world." Citing the Reagan Administration's aggressive policies against the USSR in the 1980s, No Substitute for Victory argues that "Washington must adopt a similar attitude today." This attitude includes aggressively combating "expansionist dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela" as well as
to make it possible for Chinese citizens to communicate securely with one another. Tearing down—or at least blowing holes in—the "Great Firewall" of China must become as central to Washington's approach today as removing the Berlin Wall was for Reagan's.
This is not, it goes without saying, America First as Donald Trump conceived it. It is an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy of intervention and aggression that is also explicitly modelled off American foreign policy in the 1980s—the policy that molded our subsequent actions over the next four decades in Bosnia and Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria and Ukraine.
…and Work with Deep State Lobbyists for Regime Change in China
When it comes to where Mike Gallagher gets these notions about China, the answer is a telling one. It is Garnaut Global: "A consulting firm that bills itself as a Chinese politics interpreter for financial firms," whose founder, John Garnaut, Gallagher calls a member of his "kitchen cabinet." Garnaut Global was founded not long after the First Trump Administration turned America's attention to China's infiltration of American institutions. The firm has accrued power with not just Gallagher but with certain financial firms by convincing them that China is a "Marxist-Leninist" regime bent on endless expansion which Garnaut alone is able to interpret via its textual analysis of CCP leaders' speeches. From there the firm claims it can advise investors on how much to invest in China and when to invest and when to cut and run. But there is an extremely political side to Garnaut, as revealed by investigating some of the operators involved in its work.
One of Garnaut's star employees is David Feith: A former writer for the Wall Street Journal and the son of Douglas Feith, the Pentagon official who, along with Paul Wolfowitz, was most responsible for pushing the line that Saddam Hussein was an ideological threat in 2003. More tellingly still, Garnaut's co-founder is Matthew Pottinger, a former National Security Council member in the First Trump Administration whose focus was China, and who was Gallagher's co-author on "No Substitute for Victory."
Pottinger's father was a prominent deep state player with ties to the Watergate and Jeffrey Epstein scandals, and Pottinger Jr.'s close connections also come from this military corporate world. One is his childhood friend, John Avlon, the CNN anchor and pusher of "Russiagate" and its offshoots like the "Spies who Lie" letter of 2020. Avlon ran for Congress in New York in 2024 with a support committee "Republicans for Avlon" featuring Pottinger, former conservative federal judge and prominent Never Trump Republican J. Michael Luttig, and ex-Republican lawmaker and "never-Trumper" Adam Kinzinger. Pottinger also holds a position at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)—arguably the most hawkish Republican think tank in Washington known for pushing the invasion of Iraq and military interventions in Iran. Major funders of FDD include Douglas Feith's father (David Feith's grandfather) as well as Michael Steinhardt—the latter of whom Restoration News has reported on in the past. Steinhardt was the main bankroller of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) which put Bill Clinton into office in 1992 on an agenda of financial-and-weapons-contractor- conglomeration at home and military interventions abroad.
All of these players, including Pottinger, are longtime proponents of regime change against purportedly implacable threats (namely Iraq and Iran). All of these players are also repeat critics of Pottinger's policy rival Elbridge Colby, who argued against regime change in Iraq 22 years ago—and who, again, takes the view (along with J.D. Vance) that the threat of China exists to be managed with a defense-industrial buildup—not a regime-change push. And, most tellingly, all of these players have ties to "centrist" Democrats now embracing a hard anti-China line in the same venues as Gallagher—players like ex-Clinton staffer Rahm Emanuel who backed military corporate plays like the Iraq War and interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. “Far be it from me to point fingers,” wrote Emanuel, addressing, or not addressing, the question of who’s to blame for America’s recent disunited and weakened state, “but we shouldn’t fail to acknowledge how the George W. Bush years saw Americans steer into a series of self-inflicted disasters”—neatly avoiding pointing the finger at his own work in the Clinton and Obama White Houses which empowered China and facilitated the foreign interventions that caused disunity and division at home.
Centrist Democrats like Emanuel endorsed those past military corporate plays, purportedly, to promote democracy and protect America's security. But those military corporate plays also redounded to the benefit of powerful investors and operators deeply tied to centrist Democrats (and Republicans). Indeed, the unspoken truth of those past interventions, like the unspoken truth of a prospective regime change in China, is that there is a great deal of money to be made by government-tied firms and advisors when Washington, D.C. opens a previously closed foreign market through military pressure. This may be why these same centrist Democrats now taking Gallagher's and Pottinger's line on China were backers of and profiteers from the failed "free trade with China" policies of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s meant to fully open China's market to the West. In context of this history, it seems likely that what these centrist Democratic players are pushing now is not a prudent and firm foreign policy focused on a demonstrable outside threat, which China is. What these players are pushing is a strategic pivot for profit, where the profit comes from war and not the peace they tried before.
Those Americans who believe in America First should be aware, and wary, of Hurd's, Gallagher's, Pottinger's and their centrist Democratic allies' influence on their elected representatives. The political endgame these players are pushing for America has many specific beneficiaries, but almost none of them are Americans.