You don't know anything about MKUltra, which is the purpose of this hearing.

On June 30, 2026, the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing titled "Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA's MKULTRA Project." The subject was the CIA's Cold War era program that dosed American citizens, prisoners, and hospital patients with LSD and other substances without their knowledge, in some cases fatally. Two witnesses were called specifically to address it: Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief, and Tom O'Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. A third witness, Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former NIH research psychologist, appeared as the minority's witness to discuss policy at the NIH, not MKUltra.

When the chair recognized Rep. Nancy Mace for her five minutes, she used roughly the first two of them on a different subject.

The Fauci detour

Mace opened by confirming Ginexi no longer worked at the NIH, then moved straight to COVID-19:

"Did you ever speak with Anthony Fauci or any of your NIH colleagues when you were there about the NIH's role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the development of COVID-19 virus?"

"Do you believe that the NIH or Dr. Fauci lied to the American people about COVID?"

"Do you think that the COVID shots harm American citizens?"

"Do you think that the COVID shots cause turbo cancers?"

"Turbo cancer" is not a term used in oncology. Public-health fact-checkers have traced the phrase to online vaccine-skepticism claims with no supporting clinical evidence, not to any recognized medical diagnosis.

Ginexi answered "no" or some version of "not my area of expertise" eight separate times over the exchange, including:

"I am not aware of any harmful tracking, and this is not my area of expertise, no."

"I am not an MKUltra expert."

Mace's response to that:

"Why did the Dems send you here if you're not an MKUltra expert?"

Then, in her own words, she named exactly what she had just spent nearly two of her five minutes doing:

"Okay. But you don't know anything about MKUltra, which is the purpose of this hearing."

The MKUltra questions, once there was time left for them

With roughly three minutes remaining, Mace turned to the hearing's actual subject matter witnesses. She asked Kinzer for the worst abuses he was aware of. He described a group of African American inmates at a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, segregated and dosed with escalating amounts of LSD every day for 77 days under a documented CIA protocol.

"Did they all survive?"

"We have no idea what happened to them. This has stuck with me ever since I wrote that book."

"What happened to them? Did they ever find out what was given to them? Did they think they were going crazy? Do you think we're still experimenting on prisoners or people in prison today?"

"I don't have any information about that."

"Okay. I'm hoping there'll be another book about what's happening now."

She then turned to O'Neill, who described the death of CIA scientist Frank Olson as a murder rather than a suicide, tied to his plans to go public about the government's biological-weapons program and MKUltra's lethal experiments, and a safe house in Germany where, he said, people were "experimented to death" and are now buried under what has since become an apartment complex. Asked whether the German government had known, O'Neill described a memo from West German intelligence to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who he said chose not to investigate further. With her time nearly gone, Mace asked one more question:

"I have one more question because I have 15 seconds. Is this a massive cover-up by the US government?"

"It's certainly a cover-up of what happened in the past."

"Mr. O'Neill?"

"Oh, absolutely, yes."

"Thank you, and I yield back."

Full committee hearing, official House Oversight Committee livestream, June 30, 2026. Mace's questioning begins after the chair recognizes her.

What the clock shows

None of this required outside interpretation. Mace supplied the framing herself, on the record: she told Ginexi directly that MKUltra was "the purpose of this hearing" in the same breath as acknowledging Ginexi couldn't speak to it, after spending most of two minutes asking that same witness about an unrelated subject. The math is on the video: roughly two of her five minutes went to Fauci, COVID origins, and vaccine claims addressed to a witness who told her repeatedly it wasn't her area, before she turned, with time running out, to the questions the hearing was actually called to answer.

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