A trove of leaked internal records from a secretive, invitation-only group co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel has surfaced the names of Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Jim Himes, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other senior U.S. officials, placing them in a directory alongside Silicon Valley power brokers, surveillance-firm executives, and a foreign intelligence chief.
Wired published its findings Tuesday, drawing on what it described as the Dialog group's own internal directory and other records. The Daily Caller reported that the leaked documents name two current Trump administration officials, two U.S. senators, members of the so-called "PayPal Mafia," a former Middle East chief of intelligence, a current ambassador to the United States, and founders and executives from some of the largest surveillance and data-broker firms in the country.
Neither Cruz's nor Himes's office responded to multiple requests for comment from the Daily Caller.
Thiel co-founded Dialog in 2006. The group holds annual, off-the-record meetings that bring together U.S. and foreign government officials alongside Silicon Valley elites. Its 2026 retreat is scheduled for August 12, 16 near Dublin, Ireland.
Cruz, the Republican chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, appeared in a directory entry alongside Bessent, the Treasury secretary. That committee oversees the Federal Trade Commission, while the Treasury Department regulates financial data. The overlap between those regulatory portfolios and the data-industry figures listed in the same directory raises obvious questions about access and influence.
Himes, a Connecticut Democrat and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared in a separate list with U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir. The Intelligence Committee oversees agencies that contract with Palantir, which holds several contracts with the federal government and maintains close ties with the Trump White House.
General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe and head of U.S. European Command since 2025, has attended Dialog meetings since 2021, according to the records Wired obtained.
What makes the leak more than a guest list is the substance. Discussion prompts from the group's sessions included "How's Your Sex Life?", "Build-a-Cult," and "Navigating WWIII." Those are not the titles of dry policy panels. They suggest an atmosphere closer to a Davos-style salon than a congressional hearing room, and that is precisely the problem.
When senior lawmakers, cabinet officials, and a four-star NATO commander sit in the same off-the-record room with surveillance-tech billionaires and foreign intelligence figures, the public has a right to know what gets discussed and what, if anything, gets decided. The fact that the group operates on a strict off-the-record basis makes that transparency impossible by design.
Americans have grown accustomed to watching sitting members of Congress face serious personal-conduct questions while insisting the public should simply trust them. Dialog's secrecy asks for the same trust, with even less accountability.
Dialog's chairman, Auren Hoffman, founded SafeGraph and LiveRamp, two major companies in the consumer-data space. The directory also listed unnamed founders and executives from the country's largest surveillance and data-broker firms. That concentration of data-industry power in a single room, alongside the senator who chairs the committee overseeing the FTC and the congressman who sits atop the intelligence oversight apparatus, is not a coincidence. It is a feature of the group's design.
Palantir, the AI surveillance firm Lonsdale co-founded, holds several government contracts and has drawn scrutiny for its proximity to both the defense establishment and the current White House. Lonsdale's appearance in the same Dialog list as Himes and Driscoll underscores how tightly wound the connections are between the tech sector and the officials charged with regulating it.
The pattern is familiar. Officials who hold regulatory or oversight authority over an industry keep showing up in private settings with the very people they are supposed to supervise. Whether the venue is a retreat near Dublin or a cocktail party in Georgetown, the dynamic is the same, and it corrodes public confidence.
The Daily Caller noted a critical caveat: it is unclear whether Cruz and Himes are longtime participants, one-time guests, or have simply received an invitation to join the retreat. That distinction matters. A name in a directory does not prove attendance, and attendance at one dinner does not prove ongoing membership.
The leaked records do not reveal how or by whom they were disclosed. The full scope of the directory, how many total names it contains, remains unknown. So does the identity of the former Middle East intelligence chief and the unnamed ambassador.
Those gaps deserve honest acknowledgment. But they do not erase the core fact: a secretive group built around off-the-record conversations between government power and private wealth has now been partially exposed, and the names on the list include people who wield enormous authority over technology regulation, military alliances, and the federal treasury.
Scandals involving public officials and private conduct are hardly new. A Utah Supreme Court justice recently stepped down after personal-conduct allegations surfaced during a high-profile case. The thread connecting these episodes is not the specific misconduct, it is the gap between the public role and the private behavior, and the institutional refusal to address it until exposure forces the issue.
The most telling detail may be the simplest one: neither Cruz's office nor Himes's office responded to multiple requests for comment. That silence is bipartisan. A Republican senator and a Democratic congressman, linked to the same secretive group, both chose the same strategy, say nothing and hope the news cycle moves on.
Cruz chairs a committee with direct jurisdiction over the tech and data industries whose leaders populate Dialog's roster. Himes sits atop the intelligence committee that oversees agencies doing business with Palantir. Both men owe their constituents a straight answer about what, exactly, their relationship with this group entails.
The broader question of congressional ethics and accountability extends well beyond Dialog. Recent financial-conduct questions involving other House members have reinforced the public's suspicion that Washington's rules apply to everyone except the people who write them.
General Grynkewich's participation since 2021, years before he became NATO's top military commander in Europe, adds a national-security dimension. A general who now leads the military alliance confronting Russia has been attending off-the-record sessions with tech billionaires and foreign intelligence figures. Congress should want to know what was discussed.
Dialog is not illegal. Private retreats are not unconstitutional. Powerful people have gathered behind closed doors since the republic's founding.
But the scale of the conflicts embedded in this particular guest list is hard to ignore. The senator who oversees the FTC sits in the same directory as the chairman of two data-brokerage companies. The congressman who oversees intelligence agencies sits alongside the co-founder of their biggest contractor. The Treasury secretary who regulates financial data appears next to the billionaire who built the surveillance tools the government buys.
None of that is accidental. And none of it should be shrugged off just because the retreat serves good wine near Dublin.
If the people on that list have nothing to hide, they should say so, on the record, for once.