00:02:18.360President Trump's national security advisor, that would be Colonel Mike Waltz, Green Beret, is sidelining roughly 160 career government employees on temporary duty at the White House National Security Council, administration officials told the Associated Press.
00:02:35.580I want to bring in Ezra Cohen, Josh Steinman, two of the really the stalwarts in President Trump's first term, first administration.
00:02:47.520I talked about this this morning, that when General Flynn was there, I asked him, you know, in the first couple of days, and I ran this by you guys, to give me an organization chart, and he came back, and there was 292 billets.
00:03:01.000Seventy percent of these are 75 percent filled with what we call detailees, these people that come from the agencies, come from the Defense Department.
00:03:09.980And I said, and I said, when I was in the Pentagon back in 1981, the NSC had 25 people and ran the world.
00:03:20.380And Lieutenant General Flynn moving to do what Waltz just did is what got him turfed out.
00:03:27.240So talk to folks about—we're going to talk about transition over there, but just this news today that Waltz, with the president, was able to convince the president we've got to get rid of these detailees.
00:03:49.200Well, thanks again, Steve, for having us on.
00:03:51.100You know, Josh and I were the ones that built out the org chart for the NSC in 2016, going into 2017.
00:03:58.600The detailees are people that are brought in from the different departments and agencies.
00:04:02.860They're hand-selected by the politically appointed NSC staff.
00:04:07.540So really what you have there is the people that were there that Mike Waltz very judiciously and prudently sent packing today are people that were hand-picked, by name requested in many cases, by the Biden political appointees.
00:04:24.220So President Trump has come in right off the bat on day one, and his aim is to break, shut down the autopilot so that you don't continue the policies, the failed policies of Joe Biden.
00:04:37.940So the people that are hand-picked by their staff need to go.
00:04:43.020Otherwise, you will have a continuation of those policies until somebody actively steps in and shuts them down.
00:04:49.680So how can you lose, Josh, how can you lose 160, 160 detailees?
00:04:59.140Are these coming from the Pentagon, CIA?
00:05:00.940I mean, how can Waltz, the criticism on MSNBC tonight, and they're going to have David Ignatius, mark my words, David Ignatius will be in Morning Joe tomorrow, say the nation's unsecure.
00:05:12.940They're crazier now than they were in 17, right?
00:05:16.240Because now they've effectuated the plan.
00:05:18.300Flynn and Cohen and Steinman and Bannon just crafted a plan that was never fully executed and led to the impeachment of Trump because the deep state fought it.
00:05:37.180How can you rock that little baby of yours, Steinman, asleep, knowing the nation's unsafe because Trump's a madman and is ripping apart the National Security Council, sir?
00:05:48.900I think, first of all, we should level set, which is that when Ezra and I came in with General Flynn in 2017, January 2017, we were there minute one, day one.
00:05:59.420We brought in with us less than 25 people that the president had chosen, including the National Security Advisor or Deputy National Security Advisor.
00:06:09.220So, every other person on that NSC staff on day one, last time, had been someone who, though a career civil servant, had been screened, interviewed, and then hired by the Obama team.
00:06:22.920And that was exactly what was going to happen.
00:08:22.040We made a conscious decision that we weren't going to run wars out of the National Security Council.
00:08:27.260And people should understand this is a fundamental—there's two ways a National Security Council can be a coordinator and an advisor to the commander-in-chief,
00:08:34.400or it actually can be we actually run the wars.
00:08:38.360This is the big struggle when I was in the Navy as a junior officer of the Chief of Naval Operations.
00:08:43.060Even though they didn't want a Kissinger, they didn't want a Zigbee Brzezinski, this guy, Richie V. Allen, the White House still ran the wars.
00:09:07.440When you guys are relieved to watch, who's in charge, particularly when you see 160 of these guys going to the Pentagon, CIA, everything, who's on watch?
00:09:15.460Yeah, so, look, we're in a—we're coming in here to a crisis situation after four years with Biden.
00:09:22.300So step one, we've got to stem the bleeding.
00:09:24.940Part of stemming the bleeding is getting people out that are not on the same page of music.
00:09:30.160Now, ideally, what would have happened is we would have already selected new detailees to come in, and we could have done this hot swap.
00:09:39.600That's obviously not going to happen for many reasons.
00:09:43.400But right now, the key thing is stop the existing policies.
00:09:47.400I can just tell you as an example, Steve, in 2017, when Josh and I stepped into the Situation Room, actually five minutes before the president was sworn in,
00:09:57.480and we were the first people into the White House compound, we immediately started getting phone calls to try to get us to authorize operations that were ongoing or that the Obama administration had put in place.
00:10:28.300So that's what I think is going to happen now.
00:10:30.240We're just going to have a quick pause here.
00:10:32.860And then at the agencies, you know, this is another problem, and maybe you want to get to this, but we do not have control yet at the agencies.
00:10:41.140We don't have political appointees anywhere except the State Department.
00:10:56.800Steinman, in the entire apparatus, how can you even staff with anybody?
00:11:02.120The apparatus, the way your career progresses, like when I was in the Navy, it was before they had the joint, really the joint commands were very weak,
00:11:09.020and you kind of, the deadbeats got dumped there.
00:11:10.780It was only later when they went to the joint unified command structure that you've got a career enhancement by going.
00:11:16.700Before, the biggest enemy we had was not the Russian Navy.
00:11:19.420It was the U.S. Army taking resources.
00:11:21.300My point is every institution has their own outlook, right, on national security, of how you progress this career.
00:11:29.900To be at the top, and they only take the best.
00:11:32.660Are there any best, having spent their careers 10, 15, 20 years at that level, to be equivalent to get second deed or seconded over to the National Security Council,
00:11:46.080that don't have the mindset of America the imperial state?
00:11:50.480America first, it's like, that's like a bacillus.
00:11:54.260Yes, the institutions reject it, not just the personnel, but the institution rejects it.
00:11:59.540So where do you get and get any detailees that can actually come into the National Security Council,
00:12:06.100since we don't have control of those institutions, which we'll get to in a second,
00:12:09.620that could actually be supportive of an America first agenda and keep the country safe?
00:12:14.160I mean, Steve, this is the deep, dark secret of the swamp, which is that, you know, being a good NSC staffer is not actually a hard job.
00:12:29.600And so, you know, I am—it's like that line about I'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than the, you know, faculty of Harvard College.
00:12:41.360You know, smart, dedicated professionals who know how to write, know how to think, and know how to uphold the Constitution can be good NSC staffers.
00:12:51.820What you're talking about is the way in which Washington has groomed, you know, this class of mandarins for the past 50 years.
00:13:00.300And look, in my opinion, it's like, you know, what's that memetic concept with the Swedish fish, right?
00:13:09.420These people, they are, you know, multiple generations past the great statesmen that they claim to be the inheritors of, you know, their, you know, their mantle.
00:13:22.560And instead of actually being great thinkers or great warriors as those folks in the 1940s and 1950s were, instead, what's actually going on is they just participated in the forums.
00:13:35.380These are the people that were like, oh, you know, Zig Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger got PhDs at Harvard.
00:13:42.160I'll go get a PhD at Harvard, and I'll be Kissinger.
00:13:44.940It's like that's not how it works, you know?
00:13:47.180And so what you're talking about is when you ask this question of, oh, do we have the people that can do it?
00:13:53.880I mean, not anyone, but lots of people can do it.
00:13:55.860But the point is, how does Washington, how does establishment Washington like to groom people for these positions of, you know, named authority?
00:14:07.920All that to say that there are plenty of folks in the U.S. government that I think are well-qualified and could be effective NSC staffers, and many of us have been going out and finding them over the past few years.
00:14:19.900And so I'm confident that we'll get a good crop, and I think many of them are already coming to the NSC staff right now who absolutely will be able to do that job.
00:14:28.540The interagency process, this is where everything gets leaked, everything President Trump wanted to do, the phone calls got leaked, everything got leaked.
00:14:36.640Higgins, Sergeant Higgins wrote a memo that was very controversial, led to his being removed by ministers from the White House that walked through.
00:14:43.960He took the detailees and walked through who the traitors were, and it turned out in the impeachment, you just go right through that list.
00:14:53.320Let me play, I want to get to it, let's play, I want you to listen to Russ' vote taking incoming from Warner today at his hearing on Office of Management and Budget.
00:15:04.960Sir, I do appreciate the fact one of the things you said, which was you think it's important for the federal government to keep our nation safe.
00:15:14.460Probably the most important thing I've done in this job is I've, my work with the intelligence community.
00:15:19.160I'm chair and vice chair now. We've got thousands of men and women who work in the intelligence community without a lot of fanfare.
00:15:29.240You realize, of course, I hope, that to become a CIA agent, it takes about a year to get a secure clearance.
00:15:36.800All right, so in your Project 25, Magnus, you put forward the idea that somehow breaking up the CIA and moving it around the country would make our nation more safe?
00:15:50.640Do you not understand, sir, that if President Trump, by having the intelligence community close to him, to have ability from folks from NSA to CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, in this region,
00:16:08.720your idea of let's somehow go on this ideological jihad to break up the intelligence community's effectiveness?
00:16:16.320I would ask you, sir, can you show any evidence that somehow we would make our nation safer if you put your political litmus test and, you know, this idea of bringing trauma to the federal workforce
00:16:35.960by taking the intelligence community, which has been supported on a bipartisan basis, year in and year out, and somehow breaking it up and spreading it hither and yon, just for a political purpose?
00:19:26.220And you just see right there, Russ, vote we're going through are very logical.
00:19:29.260There's been years in the making from the first administration and the bridge, which we call either 2025 or America First Priorities, Brooks Rollins.
00:20:15.760But the key thing is I just want to push back on a few things that were said there that are not accurate.
00:20:21.620One is this idea that somehow you have to be physically located in the same place to be productive.
00:20:29.400First of all, one, over the past four years, even the intelligence community has been in large part remote.
00:20:36.500People are not having in-person meetings.
00:20:38.500President Trump's going to fix that, and things have just been working just fine, according to Senator Warner.
00:20:44.540Second of all, we also have a problem, and I think Tom Cotton pointed to this very well in John Radcliffe's hearing, which is the intelligence community is incredibly distracted, and it has lost sight of the core objective.
00:21:02.580We do not need people in the IC focused on influencing the policy process or getting involved in making policy.
00:21:13.560Their job is to inform the policymaker, not influence, and that's very important.
00:21:20.000And unfortunately, the overemphasis within these agencies on what's happening on the politics inside of the Beltway has reduced their mission effectiveness.
00:21:29.480We need them focused on the politics of our adversary, not on the politics at home, and one way to do that is to get people physically out of the Beltway.
00:21:40.940And by the way, the CIA is one of the most geographically dispersed agencies in the world, and again, according to Senator Warner, they are functioning fine.
00:21:51.760So I just think some of the core assumptions there are just not accurate.
00:22:28.400The President wants a clean sweep of this.
00:22:30.800I mean, you guys were the tip of the tip of the spear for him, the first administration.
00:22:34.680Now, with more experience and, quite frankly, a bigger win, as they said in Davos today, the greatest come-from-behind win ever, so he's kind of unbeatable now.
00:22:44.500How do you go about actually taking on the deep state?
00:22:50.760Well, Steve, it sort of goes back to Aristotle.
00:23:05.380And that's why some of the biggest, in my mind, initiatives that have come out over the past 36 hours, 48 hours since the president took the oath of office have been the stand-downs, the let's hold off on, the 90-day freeze on foreign aid, the similar activities happening across the Department of Defense, et cetera.
00:23:26.760So I think the whole point here is that good leadership, and good leadership comes from the top.
00:23:34.440Good leadership here is about stopping the things that the U.S. government is doing that are against the interests of the American people.
00:23:43.480And I think that's one of the most powerful things that a National Security Council staff can do, which is deeply get into the weeds with these departments and agencies.
00:24:14.980They would have your head turning so much and chasing false rabbits.
00:24:17.920If you had to go over, and your mission was quite simple, from the President of the United States, guys, number one, I want to get CIA involvement out of the Pentagon.
00:24:55.680And, in fact, last time, I mean, you know, we had a handful of people that deeply understood the intelligence community and the Department of Defense as political leaders.
00:25:03.800And we absolutely were able to get our hands around it.
00:25:06.580You know, if you understand how those mechanisms in the IC actually work, which Ezra does, which I do, there's a critical bureaucratic process that you can take control of on day one that absolutely pulls things to a standstill.
00:25:22.360And so this is where I think it's so critical that we have people that understand the intelligence community, that have been intelligence community operatives and then have gone on to be political supporters of the president.
00:25:34.260This is why it's so critical that we have those people in the most senior roles in the government.
00:25:39.840And that includes the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Principal Deputy D.N.I., Deputy Director of CIA.
00:25:47.040You need people who are politically on the same page as the president and then deeply understand the intelligence community in those roles, because if you know how the mechanism operates, you can absolutely put your hands on the steering wheel and get control of it.
00:26:06.020I'm going to ask you to just stay through a short commercial break.
00:26:07.880I want to talk to Senator Rubio, Secretary of State, laid out a new vision of America first at the end of the post-war international rules-based order.
00:26:20.960That's the one big fetish that runs the hegemon.
00:26:24.820But the internal fetish is the interagency process.
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00:32:06.240My theory of the case is this is how it is.
00:32:10.040If you're in the National Security Council, or I would get the calendars of the National Security Council guys, the senior guys, Flynn, Kellogg, and then McMasters.
00:32:22.420You could be in meetings down there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and only get about half the work done of meetings.
00:32:31.180They got deputy meetings, assistant meetings, everything, and they got the agencies, and they're getting all the different departments.
00:32:44.500When I saw this interagency process, and it's sacred.
00:32:47.280The interagency process, the reason they hated Trump right out of the box is that it's Trump.
00:32:52.280He doesn't care about interagency process.
00:32:53.880He wants to get facts, things, make decisions, move on.
00:32:56.540The interagency process, I believe, is the mechanism that the CIA uses to control the entire process.
00:33:05.080All they're different, and they have major nodes of power in every one of the principal, what I call the power departments, Treasury, DHS, Justice, and FBI underneath it.
00:33:16.520Obviously, the Department of Defense, and DNI, which is the oversight, not the operational control, but the oversight of 17, labor in these things, State Department also.
00:33:46.920Yeah, Steve, I mean, I think you do point at one problem we have, which is that the intelligence agencies are – again, they're supposed to be influencing – they're supposed to be informing the policymaker, not influencing.
00:34:03.100But then you have about 50 percent of the detailees at the NSC are all CIA bodies.
00:34:08.900So it's not just that they're filibustering with a plethora of meetings and policy proposals, which aren't going to go anywhere.
00:34:16.080But they're also then back-channeling things to people on the NSC staff to manipulate the process, which is supposed to be isolated.
00:34:24.640So they're really coming at it from both ways.
00:34:28.120I do think that there is a need to have a centralized control cell element that basically pulls together – I mean, I think if you look at what we did with China, right, we needed to find a way to pull together the American power from the Treasury Department, from the State Department, from the Department of Defense.
00:34:50.280We needed to find a way to synthesize them all together to create a focused action against the enemy.
00:34:55.640And I think that really the NSC is the place to do that.
00:35:00.660The key thing, though, is you've got to keep the intel agencies out from making policy.
00:35:06.620And actually, this is where I've got to give it up to Mike Waltz.
00:35:09.320If you look at NSPM1, which is really that core document, the rules of the road for the NSC, they popped that on day one.
00:35:17.500It took us the first term several weeks because McMaster's wanted to relitigate it three or four times.
00:36:33.480Has the CIA, no matter what Waltz does, had they become a modern Praetorian guard like in ancient Rome?
00:36:40.960Would they actually select who your leaders are?
00:36:44.360And they select, then, the field of actual action and effort that the leader, if they disagree with the leader, of actually what they can actually do?
00:36:52.200And even if they agree with the leader, they funnel it in a way that is self-supporting of them, sir?
00:36:59.060Yeah, Steve, you know, it's an interesting point that you raise.
00:37:01.400And I think, you know, what we're really seeing here is the fact that the modern American state is incredibly complicated, right?
00:37:08.980It's not as simple as things used to be.
00:37:11.500You know, we used to be able to handle statecraft and international relations, you know, with letters and communiques and, you know, singular individuals dispatched with, you know, small staff over to Paris or, you know, down to Rio de Janeiro with very simple ambassadorships.
00:37:31.460And so, you know, I think what we're really seeing here is the fact that that complication affords bureaucratic topological advantage to people that deeply understand the mechanisms, right?
00:37:46.100And so they know that if they change this memo over here, that they can then control these outcomes here.
00:37:52.940They can control what outcomes get offered up to senior leadership.
00:37:56.340And I just think that that advantages people that have been in that system for a very long time.
00:38:01.880And this is why I think it's so critical that we have people that understand those systems but are also loyal to the Constitution and to the first sentence of Article 2, which is, you know, the executive power shall be vested in a president.
00:38:16.680And so the whole point here is that you need people that understand those mechanisms as much as the people that have been in those mechanisms for 30 years.
00:38:33.080And so we need people, and we have people, whether it's Ezra, myself, I mean, you know, National Security Advisor Walls, the team that he's assembled.
00:38:42.620Many of the people on that team have this type of expertise.
00:38:46.400I'm quite pleased with the folks that he's assembled there.
00:38:49.360But the whole point is you need folks that understand the mechanisms, understand the bureaucracy, and then are able to utilize those tools in order to affect the president's priorities.
00:38:59.500When you don't have that, when you have people that don't have experience in these areas or maybe they've had some, you know, a year or two of experience on the Hill, then those folks can get snowed by the true professionals that have been living in that environment for 20, 30 years.
00:39:16.040So, you know, do I think that there is some, you know, man behind the curtain?
00:39:20.760No, but I just think that there's a lot of people that understand this complicated system that we've created.
00:39:26.860I think we should absolutely simplify that system.
00:39:29.140I think that these things are unnecessarily complicated, and they can be boiled down very simply.
00:39:35.920But the whole point here is you need people that can cut through the BS, cut through the bureaucracy, and continue to drive the process towards the outcomes that the president has directed, which is completely constitutional.
00:39:49.260Josh, your Twitter feed, you did a thread, I think about a week or so ago, about the National Security Council that was very illuminating to many people.
00:40:01.520Where do people go and get you on social media, sir?
00:40:05.220Yeah, it's just, I'm on Twitter, Joshua Steinman.
00:40:08.460And that's my, that's my, that's my at.
00:40:11.600Yeah, feel free to, feel free to hit me up there for folks that want to, want to follow along.
00:40:30.840Why, why would the media have any comment besides the fact that we're, we're less safe tonight?
00:40:36.340What, what other reason would the media have for, for gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair about 160 national security bureaucrats, apparatchiks, going back to their departments, sir?
00:40:51.220They want to get the call transcript for the president's foreign calls, which are going to happen this week, passed through the White House fence.
00:40:58.080And, you know, the people that did that are, are the people that were held over last time around.
00:41:05.160And what Mike Waltz has done is just taken all their sources off the playing field.
00:42:07.280There is a permanent government here, a, a fourth branch that was never, ever envisioned by the founders and framers at all.
00:42:15.840And you've got the administrative state, which is that massive fourth branch that kind of runs the bureaucratic nature of it.
00:42:20.440And that's why DOGE is so important and why what, uh, what, um, um, um, Elon has been working on is so important because we're 60, we're 58 days away from, uh, having to get a budget, no more CRs.
00:42:38.920The only way you're going to deconstruct is you got to cut off their oxygen first.
00:42:41.740But on this interagency process, which is the way they kind of come to consensus of what you're going to do in the National Security Council, the advice you're going to give the president, the CIA is everywhere.
00:42:51.180And I'm not a guy that runs around, oh, the CIA, this, say this, but ask anybody.
00:46:26.260For President Trump's plan going forward, remember, it's significant spending cuts coupled with tariffs are now part of an external revenue service.
00:46:35.260They're looked at as a cash flow that comes in, not just punitive tariffs on Mexican avocados.
00:46:41.500So if people got to get to work, we're burning daylight, and your mandate, your remit does not include investments the president makes.
00:46:50.800If you've got a problem with it, instead of implying that the president has not performed appropriate due diligence before he takes time away in these crazy first three or four days to go to the Roosevelt Room for the first time,
00:47:02.600which is right outside the door of the Oval Office, and put up Larry Ellison in SoftBank and OpenAI as paragons of the future, understanding you have all these problems, you tell him that privately and tell him even beforehand, not probably get into your feud with OpenAI.
00:47:23.620And I understand you guys are fighting at a whole different level about this, but the place not to do it is outside.
00:47:29.380And this is why I think, and I've advocated this, there's got to be guardrails.
00:47:34.640Number one, your focus is probably the most important focus we can have now on getting the financial plan together, which is deconstruct the administrative state in massive cuts in spending.
00:47:44.200That should be occupying yourself 24-7.
00:48:00.600Jim Rickards has become one of the most prominent of our contributors.
00:48:04.660One reason is that the other contributors are at the OMB, Secretary of Treasury, Special Assistant, Special Counsel Peter Navarro to trade and manufacturing.