Former U.S. Navy Intelligence Analyst Russ Tice joins Lou Dobbs on the Great America Show to talk about his career in intelligence, his experience as a whistleblower, and his views on the surveillance state that America has undoubtedly become.
00:00:00.000Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Great America Show. I'm Lou Dobbs, and delighted you're with us.
00:00:06.080One thing we can all agree on is Joe Biden has made a mess of this economy in two long years.
00:00:12.960Even the hard left in this country is tiring of pretending that Biden is really, truly the President of the United States.
00:00:21.640He's not, and no one man in charge could have messed the country up this much, not even Biden.
00:00:28.520No, America's so messed up, it has to be the work of some kind of committee.
00:00:35.000Maybe a dark, secret cabal of crazed Marxists who pull all the strings of our puppet President.
00:00:42.960Biden with another mental moment, by the way, another mental moment or two, when talking about the number of bank failures rising by the day.
00:00:52.520Biden promises banks are safe. Taxpayers won't be covering bank losses.
00:00:59.180And he blames Trump and says the Silicon Valley bank executive should be fired, by golly.
00:01:06.320Someone might tell the President that the FDIC fired them a few days ago.
00:01:13.000Speaking of a mess, Congressman Mike McCaul made a mess of his moment in the TV lights this past weekend,
00:01:19.980declaring Mike Pence was right to condemn Trump for January 6th.
00:01:25.640And McCaul says the January 6th videos will not show what he called tourism at the Capitol.
00:01:32.640The problem is, that's exactly what those videos show.
00:01:36.800Unfortunately, McCaul was so busy trying to tell people what he wanted them to see that he missed the video that already has made liars out of the Marxist Dems and the Liz Cheney Republicans.
00:01:49.920And now, with the intelligence community and so many of the recent reports and central to the issues facing the nation,
00:01:57.800whether Chinese spy balloons, the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, the Russian war against Ukraine, or domestic surveillance of American citizens,
00:02:08.520we thought now would be a good time to bring in people who've worked in intelligence gathering
00:02:14.640and get their perspectives on the surveillance state that America has undoubtedly become.
00:02:21.140Our guest today is former NSA intelligence analyst Russ Tice.
00:02:27.360Russ worked as an analyst and operations officer for the Air Force,
00:02:32.980the Navy Intelligence's Naval Security Group, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.
00:02:40.960Russ conducted many global intel missions, including those related to the Kosovo War,
00:02:47.820the USS Cold Bombing, Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
00:02:53.720Russ Tice was also a whistleblower, speaking out publicly in 2005 about NSA retaliation against him
00:03:02.660for revealing the agency's covert spying on American citizens.
00:03:07.780We'll be talking about Russ's career, what he lived through as a whistleblower,
00:03:12.880about his service to the nation, and today, his views on what is happening in this current era
00:03:19.160of espionage and surveillance in America.
00:03:23.320Russ, thanks for being our guest, for being here today.
00:03:26.560What is your perspective of what's happening now in our country to our country?
00:06:35.120We're approaching the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FISA Surveillance Act.
00:06:44.760And we're going to require a reauthorization of Section 702, which is the basis for all of this wiretap, or at least much of it, that goes on in this country.
00:07:02.060What are your thoughts about that impending vote?
00:07:06.940Well, under the W. Bush administration, NSA totally ignored the FISA regulations illegally and unconstitutionally
00:07:16.940and started off on their campaign with the collecting metadata.
00:07:23.380So then we see abuse after abuse, and then they say they're going to come out with a new ability to control this,
00:07:31.920and then they're going to, now we're going to go to the FISA court, now we find out the FISA court has been ignored again, or they've been lied to.
00:07:38.720The interesting thing about the FISA court is they have no means of pushback.
00:07:42.040They have to take whatever the intelligence community tells them as gospel and trust that they're honorable people.
00:07:50.200Unfortunately, these are not honorable people anymore.
00:07:52.540So the entire system has been basically jumped to the point where there is no oversight anymore.
00:08:05.160And we have a system where Congress itself can possibly be blackmailed by, and the former president, by the way,
00:08:14.260because in 2004, NSA started collecting all of, targeting all of Barack Obama's and a whole lot of other important folks' communications.
00:08:25.380So, you know, Barack Obama at first said he was going to clean up the intelligence community,
00:08:30.600and to be honest, I was kind of for Mr. Obama, even though I'm basically a conservative, you know, with that promise.
00:08:39.660Of course, once he got in there, he just doubled down on the intelligence collection, and I believe he was compromised.
00:08:47.000Now, you're making that very clear, implying certainly now saying it straight out.
00:09:24.140Whatever they want, it goes right through Congress, and there's no opposition.
00:09:29.780So you've got to wonder if no one is throwing up a red flag and saying, you know, what's going on here, and everyone just kowtows that something is going on here.
00:09:45.060And I believe that the NSA is the lifeblood of the deep state, and this is a bipartisan thing.
00:09:53.920And, you know, whether you're conservative or liberal or whatever, you know, this thing can be turned against anyone.
00:10:00.580So this is not just a, oh, this is against Republicans or this is against this organization or that.
00:10:06.800This is basically an internal cabal that is controlling our government.
00:10:15.060The deep state, as we refer to it on this podcast, that is the permanent bureaucracy and the group of Marxist Dems who, with the deep state, are managing the federal government.
00:10:32.800It's as if the presidency is a sidebar to the entire governance of the nation.
00:10:40.920When you mention NSA, and we probably said NSA here more in the first few minutes of this podcast than most people have heard the reference in probably years.
00:10:55.840NSA is just not an agency that people talk about.
00:11:00.040It doesn't seem to make its way into the news.
00:11:02.680As a matter of fact, reading a number of articles recently talking about 702s, the NSA wasn't even mentioned in the stories.
00:11:16.440Well, you've got to wonder what kind of clause the deep state with NSA has within the press as well.
00:11:22.920So they perniciously now control what's going on to the point where information is power, and the top of the heap as far as information is NSA, and they try to keep a very low profile.
00:11:40.060So then they have these little campaigns of positive press, or they just try to pretend like they don't exist.
00:11:48.600As a matter of fact, way back when, when I first started at NSA or in the business, the moniker was NSA meant no such agency.
00:12:01.660And things, of course, have gotten a little, you know, people kind of, you know, they hear NSA and they go, oh, I kind of heard of them.
00:12:08.680They're like, you know, they collect the information.
00:12:13.320Well, yeah, they do, and they're collecting it onto you, the American citizen, illegally and unconstitutionally.
00:12:19.480The American people are being told by their elected representatives in the House, the Senate, and the Gang of Eight.
00:12:26.680I want to talk with you about the Gang of Eight situation here as we discuss this further.
00:12:32.620But the idea that it's metadata, that there is this vast, overarching collection of data, but they don't get down into the detail or the minutiae of single words or sentences spoken by an American citizen, because that would be unlawful.
00:12:52.880Is that the reality as you understand it to be?
00:13:13.500But what happens is they have mechanized the system that it goes through all sorts of filters.
00:13:20.300First of all, all the information is stored at this huge facility in Bluffdale, Utah.
00:13:25.680This humongous data system as far as a memory collection system that they put out there.
00:13:34.920A giant black cube out of the middle of Utah.
00:13:41.300Well, it's more expansive than just a cube, and it has the ability to expand if wanted.
00:13:48.180But there's no way that that system, that facility, was there just for metadata.
00:13:54.440Metadata you could put into a building the size of, I don't know, the Trump building or less.
00:14:01.480But so this thing is designed to collect everything.
00:14:06.320So basically what they're saying, their semantics and their little wiggle is that they don't consider anything a collected or surveillance until they have someone who is listening to it and actively working that information.
00:14:22.840So they're playing a little game with us.
00:14:26.380Well, it's a game, but it's a deadly game in point of fact, because we have seen this country change markedly since September 11th.
00:14:35.840And part of that reason is the upsurge in the activities of our intelligence agencies.
00:14:46.100We talk about 17 agencies, 18 agencies.
00:14:50.100And Russ, recently we learned that the Department of Homeland Security has an intelligence organization within it.
00:14:58.900We found out that the Energy Department has an intelligence agency within it, from which we are learning that they decided to pronounce Wuhan as the Wuhan laboratory as the source of what most of us speculated at least was the source, and that is the Wuhan virology lab.
00:15:21.080So how many intelligence agencies, do you have any idea yourself of how many intelligence agencies are operating?
00:15:28.900Well, technically, I think they say there's 16, but think about it.
00:15:34.060Now we're sharing all this information is being tapped into or being allowed to tap into by NSA, by the post office, by Homeland Security, by the IRS, by all these organizations are using NSA's collection databases to go after people.
00:15:58.040And obviously what we're seeing is for political reasons and also to go after what was a current president, now a former president of the United States.
00:16:09.840This is just all inclusive, and there's no bounds.
00:16:18.840I mean, if they can do this to a president of the United States, what capability do us little people have against such a capability system?
00:16:28.000Well, yeah, we have none is, I think, the correct answer.
00:16:32.520And it's really very important that the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate make a real determination on the reauthorization of 702 to be very careful what they do.
00:16:45.980In 2000, I believe it was 2018, President Trump had argued against the reauthorization of the 702 section of the FISA Act and then suddenly changed his mind.
00:17:03.820Actually, I've never talked to him about it.
00:17:06.140It was just so disappointing because I truly believe that a lot of pain and suffering, including some of that of the president, could have been at least mitigated if those 702s had not been reauthorized then.
00:17:21.480So here we are six years, almost six years later, after 2018, about to do the same thing again.
00:17:29.820The Republicans, many of them, are saying that they'll fight against it.
00:17:33.400Your thoughts about whether they should, and your judgment, your assessment of how critical the 702 FISA section is to national security.
00:17:44.740Well, I imagine as far as President Trump changing his mind about this, I imagine that these profligates in the intelligence community came to him and gave him some song and dance about, oh, if we don't do this, American citizens will be at the whim of terrorists all over the world, and now they'll be in our backyard.
00:18:09.300So they basically did the old scare tactic, and Mr. Trump not being someone – I mean, obviously, he's from the business world, so he's a savvy guy, but he just did not understand at all what he was in for when he was dealing with this crowd.
00:18:27.220So I think they gave him the song and dance, and he fell for it, and hence the extension thereof.
00:18:38.240I think the man has woken up to what's out there.
00:18:41.800But as far as the 702, an extension or not, it doesn't matter whether they do.
00:18:46.720NSA is going to do this regardless of what the law says because that is their history.
00:18:52.680They've violated the law over and over and over again.
00:18:56.280And then they just – they move back to another wall and say, okay, well, we won't go beyond this wall.
00:19:01.780And then once you realize that they're lying on that one and you tear that wall down, they have another wall behind that one and another – just a labyrinth of walls.
00:19:10.940So it's – until we hold them accountable.
00:19:16.160Remember, these are criminal statutes that in violation, for instance, initially it was, I think, a $50,000 fine and five years in jail for one violation.
00:19:30.080Now, who has been held accountable when General Michael Hayden started this off?
00:19:37.100Michael General Hayden should be in jail right now for billions of violations of the law.
00:19:44.040Except you see him on talk shows or he was one of the guys that signed the 51 intelligence professionals that signed the letter that said that the folks about –
00:20:01.720The laptop from hell was Russian disinformation, they claimed.
00:20:20.020It was interference in a presidential election.
00:20:22.860Straight up, it was interference in a presidential election by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, Bill Barr, the attorney general, and the FBI.
00:20:33.200And apparently some parts of the military is inclusive with General Milley basically committing treason with the Chinese in what he said.
00:20:47.080And, you know, you just can't – you can't do something like say, well, I will – I will cavort with our enemies if it's something that I don't like or I don't agree with.
00:20:55.240But that's not how the military works that – I do believe that, you know, in wartime, basically, you know, the remedy for that is a rope around your neck and dangling from there, you know, from an oak tree.
00:21:10.000So this thing is now incredibly expansive.
00:21:18.420And because Mr. Trump could not be controlled, he could not be bribed because he has his own money.
00:21:26.540You know, any foibles and discretions he's had because he's lived in a fishbowl are known, and he's been forgiven for those.
00:21:33.880And, you know, he basically can't be blackmailed because of that.
00:21:38.700So he is – as far as the intelligence community and the deep state and the cess swamp that is D.C., he is a bull in a china shop, and he is an existential threat to their existence.
00:21:50.660And I'll be honest, I would love to see him back in the White House, and I would love to see him just tear them asunder, which is what needs to be done.
00:22:00.080The question becomes – and by the way, I agree with you.
00:22:04.160I would love to see that as well, and tens of millions of Americans want it as well.
00:22:08.820But what we're witnessing right now are oligarch after oligarch stepping up to say, I want Ron DeSantis.
00:22:20.520I want Pompeo, Mike Pompeo, whomever it may be.
00:22:26.540Anybody, anybody but Trump seems to be the view of the Republican establishment.
00:22:34.000And it's an awesome amount of power – excuse me – it's an awesome amount of power that they are bringing to bear against this president.
00:22:44.820And we're some – you know, we're quite distant from the election.
00:22:47.980But it's also the reason that we saw the January 6th committee to destroy Donald Trump.
00:22:54.000It's the reason that we saw two impeachments and now a second special counsel investigation.
00:22:58.880And from all of it, over the course of what is now almost seven full years, not one single instance of wrongdoing, I have to say, he is the only candidate who is certifiably clean.
00:23:13.960Because if there had been anything, anything in their – in the intelligence agencies, the FBI, anyone's scanning of his career, his life, it would have been out there in bold, bright letters put up against the night sky.
00:23:33.360It is just – it's just stunning to see the immense and, as you say, the formidable force of these intelligence agencies acting together as they have, but with one target, and that is Donald J. Trump.
00:23:48.820Well, I imagine this has been a learning process for Mr. Trump because – and the stamina and the fortitude of this guy to be able to put up with this and still come out with all the different policies that turned our country around and got our economy going and, you know, the peace and the process in the Middle East and all the things that he did, which, of course, will not be installed in the press, the mainstream press.
00:24:17.720But this has also been a learning process for him.
00:24:21.940And the reason it needs to be, Mr. Trump, is like I said before, he cannot be bribed and he cannot be blackmailed.
00:24:36.800And that's what we are watching the deep state and the Marxists of the Democratic Party trying to do here and the intelligence agencies and the FBI, the Department of Justice.
00:24:47.720All bringing that awesome power, trying to destroy this one man.
00:24:54.860They've given up in trying to scare him.
00:24:58.060They've given up in trying to intimidate him.
00:25:01.240They have given up on so many levels because they could not produce the material necessary.
00:25:08.020But what they can do is support his enemies, support his rivals in politics and business and try to crush him.
00:25:21.860And I truly believe that's the only explanation for what has been going on for seven years.
00:25:27.820We've never seen anything like this in the country.
00:25:30.280And we can extol all of his virtues and his terrific values, all of which are immense and, frankly, I think unprecedented.
00:25:38.040But what the American people aren't doing is learning from the experience.
00:25:44.580You're talking about he's learned a lot.
00:25:46.120The American people don't seem to have learned a lot.
00:25:49.020And our government, our two political parties haven't learned a lot.
00:25:53.800They are running over this man to this very day, trying to prosecute him in state courts and federal courts.
00:26:02.440And they still have, what, 800 political prisoners that they're holding in D.C. area jails and prisons for January 6.
00:26:13.960So, you know, I just wonder, where do you believe the intelligence agencies are in all of this?
00:26:22.940Well, they are at the heart of all of this.
00:26:25.780They are the lifeblood, especially, you know, Fort Meade and NSA.
00:26:32.640And basically, when you have, you know, omniscience, then there's, you know, there's nothing that you can't do.
00:26:46.200All these other candidates, you've got to wonder, you know, can they be bribed, you know, when you say, we're going to make you a multimillionaire?
00:26:54.920Or, you know, can you find out that they've had an affair in the past or that they've had some sort of, you know, issue, a land deal or stock trades or whatever it may be that can be used against them to control them?
00:27:10.340The thing we know about President Trump is he cannot be blackmailed and he cannot be bribed.
00:27:15.480And that's why he is, as far as I'm concerned, to be honest, I didn't vote for President Trump.
00:27:20.780In the last few years, the last three or four elections, I do a write-in for Rand Paul every single presidential election.
00:27:31.580Because Rand Paul wants to deal with our national debt.
00:27:35.820When a whole lot of Republicans and a whole lot of Democrats are spending like drunken sailors, and that's sort of an insult to drunken sailors because at least they spend their own money.
00:27:43.100But he's, as far as I can tell, the only guy in Congress that wants to turn around our country as far as the economy, which is, by the way, a runaway economy, is a national security threat.
00:27:55.680And that's why I – and, you know, he basically is a constitutional conservative, and that's where I fall in line, too.
00:28:05.360So that's why I've been voting for Rand Paul.
00:28:07.280But this coming election, I'm on the side of Mr. Trump, and I will do everything.
00:28:13.100I am certainly going to vote for him, and I'll do anything in my power to walk around with a sign or whatever I can do to help him to get back in office to stem this tide because we are approaching an event horizon here.
00:28:26.420And at some point, when we go over that edge, there will be no coming back.
00:28:30.900We'll be sucked into a massive mega-cosmic vortex that there will be no return.
00:29:09.700My gosh, Tucker Carlson comes out with some videos of what really happened in the Capitol on January 6th, a couple years ago, and they're screaming bloody murder.
00:29:20.600Lord forbid that the American people see what actually happened.
00:29:24.380And, you know, the old sunlight disinfectant equation.
00:29:30.100So they're like vampires squealing when the holy water hits them.
00:29:39.940The deep state, the Marxist Dems, Chuck Schumer.
00:29:44.380My God, I thought he was going to break into tears at the prospect of the American people actually seeing for themselves on video what actually happened,
00:29:53.920rather than taking the word of the cretins of the January 6th committee.
00:30:00.200It's just nuts to see what the first reflex of these Marxists truly is.
00:30:10.500Let's turn to – and I want to take up in the next – our next podcast discussion.
00:30:16.960I want to take up a number of things, and that is, why is it, if NSA is so powerful, so very powerful, and omniscient, I believe, is the word you used, they are – what happened to Hillary Clinton's missing emails?
00:30:32.440What happened to those devices, and why didn't we have a record, and why didn't our agencies have a record of what was actually said on them?
00:30:47.520If you're going to have someone who you want to put in power, do you want to have someone so lily-white clean that you can't come up – a Mother Teresa candidate that you have nothing on?
00:31:00.320Or do you want a candidate that you have all kinds of dirt and skeletons in the closet that you can easily control them?
00:31:07.300Now, Mrs. Clinton is – I mean, I imagine that it's not only, you know, a thousand skeletons in her closet, but they're zombies, you know, banging on the closet door to get out.
00:31:28.540And I suspect that, you know, the reasoning is apt.
00:31:33.000But I also want to just think about Epstein.
00:31:38.520Suddenly he commits suicide in his jail in New York, and we have no – we don't have that list of names now.
00:31:48.340But we know agencies have the list of names.
00:31:50.980We know that the American people are being protected from themselves because these good, wonderful agencies of the deep state are looking out for us.
00:32:03.060Why isn't – why doesn't any of this material come forward?
00:32:08.280Well, because apparently a lot of the folks that were involved in visiting, you know, his little pedophile island down there in the Caribbean are some very powerful people that are either in the deep state or being incorporated into the deep state.
00:32:24.820And also people wonder, you know, where did this guy go all his money?
00:32:28.520Well, you know, I'm a trained intelligence analyst.
00:32:32.000And first of all, you look at all the different machinations of what happened there in that New York prison, and a five-year-old would be able to figure out that, yes, this man was assassinated.
00:32:48.140And how did he get tens of millions of dollars?
00:32:51.300Well, you know, more than likely, back to our intelligence agency and probably a couple other intelligence agencies, and now I'm going to talk about the CIA in this one,
00:33:00.240that he was involved in setting up people for our intelligence services to be blackmailed by using the sexual, you know, contact with underage girls.
00:33:10.160And we are sitting here, as we discuss all of this, we are looking at historic decisions that are impending right now, and that is whether or not to reauthorize 702.
00:33:27.860We have not heard anyone try to hold to account 51 intelligence veterans who signed that letter, which gave a corrupt vice president by the name of Joe Biden, a former vice president at that time, a shield against which to meet the prying media and, of course, his opponent, Donald J. Trump.
00:33:53.620They changed history, and we know that they're changing history almost every day because the agenda is not a public agenda.
00:34:03.520It is an agenda between very powerful groups, whether they be corporate, Wall Street, educational organizations, associations, the World Economic Forum, the Davos donors, if you will, and the list goes on.
00:34:22.020Our next visit, Russ, what I'd like to do is talk about what your role was when you became a whistleblower and what your motivation was and why you stepped forward at that particular moment as you were one of the top analysts within the NSA.
00:34:40.980And I'd like to close out here today, if we may, with what is a clear clash between the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the deep state, and that's over the issue of classified documents.
00:34:56.420Only one of the people who, it's been discovered, top secret, compartmentalized, sensitive information was Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, but who has the power to reclassify, declassify any document that is in his possession, and that in his possession, it becomes his in point of fact.
00:35:19.580But Mike Pence, Joe Biden, and now others, why do you suppose there is even a debate about the powers of declassification and who has which classified documents?
00:35:37.440What are your thoughts, given your experience and your knowledge?
00:35:41.020Well, I was a classifying agent for the intelligence that I produced, so I would set the intelligence, and I was allowed to change a security clearance designator if I felt that it was needed, although I would have to contact a security control officer to let them know and give a justification for doing so.
00:36:01.940The president, as you mentioned, the president, five minutes before he was no longer president, could have waved his arm with a little wand or something, like Mickey Mouse and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, and said, I now deem all these documents in this room or wherever to be now unclassified, which would be, guess what, perfectly legal.
00:36:23.100Now, that would not be very good bookkeeping in the intelligence community, but nonetheless, he legally could do so, and that would be not a problem.
00:36:32.380Now, these other guys, you've got to wonder, are they saving documents because they want to write a book, and this is their reference material?
00:36:41.120And in one particular case, where you might have it in a garage near your Corvette, you wonder if your son isn't digging into that and using that to sell influence with foreign, potentially, adversaries, and ultimately make themselves rich by tens of millions of dollars.
00:37:02.820Let me ask you a question, just as we wrap up here.
00:37:06.900This is just a very quick answer, if you would, please.
00:38:11.360You know, when I got in this business, I was gung-ho to fight communism.
00:38:15.260It was back in the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, and I would work, you know, 12 hours a day.
00:38:22.300And I was the guy that got there early, made the coffee, and I was the guy locking up the safes and the doors on the way out at night, workaholic.
00:38:28.920And to me, you know, the communists are the ones that want to take over, and the ones have that in their literature.
00:38:41.520As far as Russia is concerned, do I believe that Putin wants to take over the world?
00:38:46.360Do I believe that he wants the same borders that he wants?
00:38:48.760And by the way, I'm a Sino-Russo specialist, so I studied the history.
00:38:52.300You know, Russia has been attacked by the Tartars, the Swedes, Napoleon, Hitler, so they're a little bit paranoid.
00:39:02.860So when they told us, you know, don't be messing with the Crimea because that's where their big military naval base is, and what did we do?
00:39:11.680And we started talking about making them members of NATO, and that's under Obama.
00:39:27.420So to me, you've got to understand where the Russians are coming from.
00:39:30.620Now, is Putin the kind of guy that you'd want your daughter to go out with and that you want to have a picnic with every Easter and that sort of thing and raise your kid?
00:40:18.940We'll be bringing you our conversations with Russ each week on our politics, our conflicts, domestic and foreign, and the modern surveillance state that America has become.
00:40:30.620We hope you'll join us for those conversations.
00:40:34.540Here tomorrow, our guest is former top DEA official and agent Derek Maltz, fentanyl, the Biden regime sellout to the cartels and the poisoning of America.