Russ Tice, a former senior NSA intel analyst and whistleblower, joins us to talk about the need for an Intelligence Budget. He also talks about the deep state and how we need to get rid of waste in the intelligence community.
00:07:23.060You've got, Russ, especially at places like NSA and CIA, you have tons and tons of contractors that work side by side.
00:07:32.720And they do a lot of the they build the systems.
00:07:35.080And then we're going to talk about a little waste.
00:07:37.960And there's a lot of waste that's involved there, too.
00:07:39.740But, you know, there's a lot of things that go on in the intel service that aside from, you know, you know, whether you have a president in there and everyone's going to forget their job and start spying on Americans or, you know, whoever's going to a Catholic service in Latin and using your spying capabilities or, you know, collecting every daggone communication to the country and send it to Bluffdale, Utah.
00:08:03.320You know, there's there's a lot of things that are going on that need to be stopped and a lot of waste that needs to be stopped.
00:08:11.700Yet you've got to remember, there is a legitimate, a legitimate reason for these services for national security.
00:08:19.000And that's that's that fine line that has to be walked.
00:13:02.360So I'm looking at something right here, something from WikiLeaks, which, full disclosure, I don't know Julian Assange or I've never met him before.
00:13:12.060But according to some of the studies he's done, he's saying maybe over 100,000 work at just the CIA alone.
00:13:19.240Now, that's the only one that you can't get an estimate on after looking through it.
00:13:23.180You said about 60,000 NSA, 45, about 40,000 the FBI, 20,000 at the DIA.
00:13:29.380I mean, those are just the three main ones.
00:14:11.880I have a brother and his job is to build racks and facilities with equipment that we do some of our, you know, things, you know, surveillance things with.
00:14:27.520And he works for a contractor, so the agency will say, we need a system to do this with this kind of equipment.
00:14:35.660He designs it all, and they go out, and they install it wherever, you know, they need it.
00:14:40.360Now, that's a valid job because we're going overseas.
00:14:43.940We build these systems, and we put on our big ears, and we listen to hopefully bad guys doing bad things or, you know, planning bad things.
00:14:51.840That's what the agency is for, but then you've got, you've got, you know, we haven't got into the waste thing.
00:14:58.280You've got agencies or you've got contractors that are basically looking mainly for a clearance, for someone with a clearance, and it doesn't matter.
00:15:09.520They need the equivalent of a computer programmer for writing code for some, you know, whatever algorithms for a capability.
00:15:19.440And the person they find has a, you know, a bachelor's degree in accounting, and they hire them because they have a security clearance to be coding, you know, for an end system to do surveillance.
00:15:37.600It's basically, instead of shopping for the position, and then looking for the right people, then clearing them, they look for the clearance first, then plug people into jobs that they don't have a clue what they're doing, and hopefully they can catch on somehow.
00:15:54.940It quite often is failures, and that in itself blows billions and billions of dollars just by shopping for clearance, not capability.
00:16:02.900And a lot of that is because they went to a lot of contractors versus keeping government employees with designated positions.
00:18:51.080It turns out he gets a pardon as Joe Biden leaves, which makes you wonder what he really did more than what we know.
00:18:57.360Do you think Donald Trump gets a fair shake this time?
00:19:00.220Will the intel community keep intel from him anymore, or will he have an intel community that is fully transparent in what's going on?
00:19:10.480Well, first, you know, I think he learned his lesson the last time where he picked people that were backstabbers.
00:19:15.280And then ultimately the intel service, they just ignored him, said, we're just not going to do anything he wants, or we're not going to tell him anything.
00:19:44.500You know, he's found people that are loyal to the cause.
00:19:47.960Now he needs to find people that are specialists in the field that know where to find these things to help those loyal people,
00:19:56.180to help those directors and secretaries to do the job that he needs to follow his agenda.
00:20:03.180Otherwise, like I think I've said in the past, there's going to be the intel community especially will try to blow smoke up the, you know,
00:20:12.240the executives and the closest to the White House executives, you know, cabooses to just, you know, bells and whistles, dog and pony shows.
00:20:23.160And because, you know, I can give you examples of briefings that I've seen where they change the name of programs,
00:20:32.220and they say, well, we can't tell you this because you're a committee on defense because that's intel.
00:21:55.740Usually you hear fights about wasteful spending.
00:21:58.740And, you know, the Democrats are all in favor of spending more.
00:22:03.440And the Republicans are in favor of spending more.
00:22:04.860Now you're hearing them complaining about wanting to cut backspending because there's wasteful spending in all aspects of the government.
00:22:12.880Can you give me an assessment looking at the IC, the intelligence community, on where the bloat is, how much can be cut, the total budgets that need to be slashed, and where we start?
00:22:26.740A lot of that bloat is with those contractors.
00:22:50.860And then we're going to pay this person $130,000 a year to take notes at meetings and type them up and ship them to the people who are at the meeting and or to whoever might be interested in what happened in the meeting that is cleared for that program system, what have you.
00:23:09.800So there's crazy stuff like that going on, and that is the first place to look is the contractors.
00:23:17.600When you have people like Hayden that basically – and I'll hit one per – I mean, I've got a whole list of things we can talk about here.
00:23:25.420But there's a system called Trailblazer or a program called Trailblazer.
00:23:30.080It's where they tried to take a lot of things and give them to contractors to do that was being done by GSs and government service people.
00:23:39.800And the system was to do – to bring in a lot of information that – by the way, ultimately, they used to spy on Americans, which is what I blew the whistle on.
00:23:52.080But there's a guy named Bill Binney who was in charge of the tech program that they came up with another system.
00:23:58.740By the way, Trailblazer was billions of dollars, and General Hayden was picking out all these contractors.
00:24:05.520There's the – and Bill Binney came up with – and some of his folks came up with a system called ThinThread that would cost just a few hundred million, like two, three hundred million to do the same thing.
00:24:18.400And it had an audit capability, and it culled and filtered information out before it even would be collected.
00:24:28.340And Hayden went with the multibillion-dollar program instead of the one that would cost like 200 million.
00:24:35.060They had far better capabilities and audit capabilities to make sure if anybody's dipping in there to do nefarious things, which is what they did to spy on Congress and to spy on the executives and to spy on all the pushers and shakers in D.C. and elsewhere, that you could find out with an audit system.
00:24:53.760They didn't want an audit system, but they – and they spent billions of dollars on Trailblazer, which was a disaster.
00:25:02.080Now, notice this is called Groundbreaker.
00:25:03.820Groundbreaker was to be able to take IT services and consolidate them and bring in contractors to do that particular job.
00:25:12.140The problem was back to hiring people that had clearances versus the technical capabilities.
00:25:18.060And if a government service wants to hire, you want to hire a GSIT guy, you find the person with the specialties, the degrees and the capabilities and the certificates, and then you vet them and look in their background, make sure they're not axe murderers or what have you.
00:25:35.360And then you hire them, and that takes time, but at least you get the right person for the job.
00:25:40.100You know, I'll give you a little example.
00:25:42.380I worked in a vault for doing SAT programs, special access programs, and it's a very, very, very classified environment as far as the restrictions of who could be allowed in there.
00:25:58.660The ringer on the phone went out of my phone.
00:26:02.760Now, instead, a little light would still flash, but the ringer went out.
00:26:06.200So I put in a work order to have my phone fixed, right?
00:26:10.100Now, this is an unclassified phone, but it had what's called Stu capabilities.
00:26:13.900A Stu card is you put it in, plug it in your unclassified phone, and someone you're calling, if you're in New York and you have a Stu, you plug your Stu card in, and we can talk at a super classified level on an unclassified line because it's encrypted.
00:26:28.200Well, it's that kind of a phone, but all I needed was the ringer, you know, ring, ring.
00:26:57.320The order is to fix the ringer on the phone.
00:27:00.460And she's the person to fix the phone.
00:27:04.980Me and my coworkers are, and when she finally came to fix the phone, we're trying to give her hints like, gee, I'm so sorry that I didn't get in touch with you.
00:27:14.860I just, you know, if only I could have gotten one of your calls.
00:27:19.260It never once did it faze her that the thing she was there to fix the phone for was the same thing she was trying to notify me because she could not get into the vault because of all the super classification security arrangements to get her into the vault.
00:27:32.660And it's just stupidity like that, this kind of, but, you know, that's just, you know, more wasted money for things of that nature.
00:27:45.480There's things like, I mean, NSA went out and bought web data, you know, for millions and millions of dollars.
00:28:43.700It's these military contractors who come in and make a boatload, a $2 million contract here, a $3 million contract here and there and there.
00:28:53.740And you send them over to Afghanistan and you send them over to Iraq and you send them to fix things diplomatically and to clean up places.
00:29:02.100And they only leave it worse off than it was when they come back.
00:29:06.800But it's just mind blowing to me that we have this many people working in the intelligence community when it seems like, Russ, there's really no intelligence.
00:29:18.500I mean, I understand there's probably attacks on the homeland each and every day that are thwarted.
00:29:24.840But, you know, you hear about a few every now and then.
00:29:28.800But you think about the ones that weren't thwarted and looking at a smaller scale, Russ, and anytime anyone's life is lost, it's obviously not small.
00:29:37.520But I'm saying relatively speaking to something like 9-11 where there was over 3,000 people killed.
00:29:42.280But you look at school shootings, right?
00:29:44.240You look at the guy out in San Bernardino, California.
00:29:48.020You look at the guy up in Buffalo who shot up a grocery store.
00:29:51.420And, Russ, time and time again, you know what we find out?
00:29:54.900I don't think in the last, we'll say, 10 years there's been a shooting, a mass shooting, a casualty somewhere, where it didn't come out afterwards that somebody knew about it.
00:31:30.920We're collecting all this information.
00:31:32.820Remember, I'm doing my satellite stuff, and I'm collecting a lot of stuff.
00:31:35.920And a lot of my stuff isn't being processed because we don't have the linguists.
00:31:41.460And I'm like, we need linguists desperately.
00:31:44.460Hell, even get a freaking cab driver in the country who speaks, you know, and just have them filter stuff, just translate stuff at a lower level,
00:31:54.840and then have an analyst look at to see, you know, filter out where the threat might be.
00:31:59.560But he kept buying all these web warriors.
00:32:01.620Now, you know, at that point, NSA was falling behind as far as some of the tech stuff.
00:32:07.620And Hayden, at one time at a Pentagon meeting, he got rimmed for that.
00:32:32.520It's, and I've got a whole bunch more examples of crazy, crazy crap that some of it is just hubris that, and you can't imagine that, you know,
00:32:44.000if you want to hear them, I'll give you some more.
00:32:45.660But it's just, it's just insane some of the stuff that goes on as far as the waste.
00:32:49.840It blows my mind up, Russ, because I know, being a New Yorker, how many people died on 9-11 that I was friends with, how many kids I went to school with whose father didn't come home because he was a firefighter or he was a cop.
00:33:02.020I had an uncle who passed away in September from brain cancer from cleaning up 9-11 to break.
00:33:08.160You know what it was like for his family, for my cousins, for my aunt who passed away just before him to get $250,000 out of the city, that they were squeezing the families for $250,000 money that from the victim's compensation fund that the city wouldn't give to them.
00:33:23.120How sick and demented this country has gotten, Russ, it's mind-blowing and so troubling to me.
00:33:30.840And wasn't that after the governor of New York said that the atmosphere, the air is perfectly fine?
00:33:41.020Russ, they said masks helped us during COVID from a cough, but you didn't need to wear a mask down at ground zero from the asbestos, from the pipes burning, from the metal melting, from the carcinogens, from the bodies that were burning.
00:36:57.800So I'm all for Mr. Musk and his musketeers to go down there and find the hell out.
00:37:05.580Just like, you know, we need to have some of the same ilk in our intel services.
00:37:10.940But, I mean, it's fighting these Democrats for doing any of this.
00:37:15.200I mean, this is, first of all, it's under the executive.
00:37:18.420And that just happens to be a guy named Trump, if I recall, to run the executive service.
00:37:24.340So how can these judges say that there's no, you know, they have no ability to do so when they've been given the gratis of the President of the United States to do, you know, do they expect the President of the United States to go to Fort Knox and count the gold bars?
00:37:42.500So, you know, I think they wanted Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and Jim Biden to go down there and count the and do a great account.
00:37:52.020I mean, bring the rest of his crackhead friends with him.
00:37:55.020Bring Bob Menendez down there with you.
00:38:00.120Bring them all and go check the place out.
00:38:02.020But they don't want Elon Musk to go down there, a man who doesn't need to steal, a man who doesn't need another dollar for the rest of his life, a man who has really no skin in the game here.
00:38:13.380He's not going to make another dollar.
00:38:14.460He gets government contracts regardless if he's friends with Trump or not, because the truth of the matter is, you may recall, we don't have a thing called NASA anymore.
00:38:28.320So the people who are saying Elon Musk is doing this to garner business, this is hurting his business.
00:38:34.040He's probably going to sell less cars this year from these liberals who buy electric cars.
00:38:38.640His government contracts are what they are and will be what they will be.
00:38:41.760And he said anything that has to do with his businesses, he will keep completely separate and he will not get involved in with the federal government.
00:38:55.960I think he truly wants to make a difference in this world and cut spending like we've never seen before.
00:39:02.540But the Democrats, Russ, are losing their mind over Fort Knox.
00:39:07.040They're also losing their mind over him auditing the IRS.
00:39:10.060So one of Elon Musk's guys, his Doge boys, a guy named Gavin Klinger, he's a software engineer who works with Doge.
00:39:18.700He's going to be based at the IRS for 120 days and will reportedly have access to the tax agency's data, according to CNN reporting.
00:39:27.620Klinger, he will work as a senior advisor to the IRS acting commissioner.
00:39:31.460OK, it's one guy, one guy who's going to go in there and probably this goes back to what I was saying before about a million people.
00:39:38.140There is this one guy who's probably the job of 10 people with the click of a button and technology.
00:39:42.160He'll be able to figure out abnormalities and trends and things that aren't good.
00:39:46.800OK, so they're they're melting down about this.
00:39:50.220There was a Treasury report back in twenty twenty three of September that as many as nine hundred and nineteen individuals had access to unmasked IRS data under Joe Biden.
00:40:01.040One person, nine hundred and nineteen people.
00:40:03.800Yet they're having a total meltdown about it.
00:40:07.000What's your thoughts, Russ, about him auditing the IRS, the folks who come and audit us?
00:40:13.080Well, the Democrats are trying to make this a Sisyphusian task to get this this boulder up this mountain.
00:40:20.480And we would just find out that the Social Security is sending checks to to thousands of people that are that are one hundred and twenty, one hundred and fifty years old or more.
00:40:35.940I'd like to meet some of these folks and get there, you know, what their recipe is for longevity.
00:40:40.380But, you know, the fact that they're that they're doing everything they can means that they're part and parcel to this.
00:40:50.460And every time it comes out, they look bad.
00:40:53.400And then you're going to find out that they've got their fingers with the contractors that have stuff that's involved with this.
00:40:59.640And that's how that's how someone who walks into Congress is worth two hundred thousand walks out, making two and worth two hundred million.
00:41:19.920And there and then this information is going to be used.
00:41:23.500Oh, by the way, Mr. Tax, Mr. Democrat, you you tried to keep Mr. Musk's musketeers from finding this information out.
00:41:33.500Uh, uh, uh, rough fighting tooth and nail and sick in the, uh, the sycophant, uh, uh, liberal judges, these, uh, legislative judges, you know, to try to do everything to stop it.
00:41:46.420And and and you're you are the people that are supporting this government being out of control that to the point where we were thirty six trillion dollars in debt.
00:41:56.140Um, so, I mean, they supported that, you know, even the raging Cajun down there in Louisiana has said, you've got to you, you've got to be stop being stupid because we can use this as a as a cudgel to beat the hell out of them.
00:42:11.480And then the next, you know, ten elections.
00:42:14.320Yeah, I've never heard, Russ, if someone called me and said I can save you, what's the Geico commercial, 15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance.
00:42:23.660If someone calls me and says they can save me money on this, I'm all for it.
00:42:27.780If you can save me on credit cards, if you can save me on car insurance, anywhere you can save me money, I'm going to be all in favor of it.
00:42:33.040It's so strange that the Democrats are seemingly so against it.
00:42:37.100Russ, before we head over to Ukraine and get your take on what's happening over there, I want to turn to a war we're having on here at home.
00:43:53.100And, you know, these drug traffickers and human shelling little girls into sex slavery and killing the fentanyl, killing 100 or more thousand of our young people every single year.
00:44:34.580They should register for LLCs and pay taxes.
00:44:37.140I mean, with the kind of business and money that they're doing, Russ, at our southern border that was allowed under none other than Joe Biden.
00:44:44.300I want to turn to before we wrap up here, Russ, Ukraine and the issue that be over there.
00:44:50.120Long war, no sight, no signs of ending yet.
00:44:56.020Putin may be open to a deal, but it turns out Zelensky now all of a sudden doesn't want peace.
00:45:25.680A modestly successful comedian, Voldemort Zelensky talked the United States of America into spending three hundred and fifty billion dollars to go into a war that couldn't be won.
00:45:38.940But a war that he without the U.S. and Trump would never be able to do or settle.
00:45:42.960The United States has spent two hundred billion dollars more than Europe and Europe's money is guaranteed while in the United States we get nothing back.
00:45:51.140Why didn't Sleepy Joe Biden demand equalization in this war that is far more important to Europe than it is to us?
00:45:57.300We have a big, beautiful ocean that separates us.
00:46:00.800On top of this, Zelensky admits that half the money we sent him is, quote, missing.
00:46:08.560He refuses to have elections, is very low in the Ukrainian polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden like a fiddle.
00:46:14.540A dictator without elections, Zelensky better move fast or he's going to have no country left.
00:46:20.240In the meantime, we're successfully negotiating to end the war with Russia, something we could all admit only Trump and the Trump administration can do.
00:47:14.540At some day, he's going to have to face a reckoning on where that money went.
00:47:20.380Donald Trump and America are going to start to demand some answers.
00:47:23.060So it's either this man runs for the hills, seeks asylum somewhere or starts to answer some questions because it doesn't make sense to me, Russ.
00:47:38.380Well, I think the answer is, you know, he will fight to the very end, to the very end of the last dollar that we send there, you know, of which half of that dollar is probably in bank accounts in Switzerland, coded bank accounts in his and some of his cronies names.
00:47:53.060That's probably where 50 percent of that goes and what happened to that.
00:47:57.260So he's had two years where, you know, hey, if that money keeps going into my Swiss bank account, you know, I'll keep fighting to the until the end of your money.
00:48:06.780Now, we just happen to have a new sheriff in town who's saying enough is enough, which and that's a problem.
00:48:12.640And he's upset that we're not going to, you know, we're going to the negotiation table right with the Russians.
00:48:19.260So, you know, even before, you know, before this war happened, Putin said, look, he said, if you go to try to go join NATO, this is a line in the sand.
00:48:33.280If you know, with what happened in Crimea under Obama, you know, if they have why would Russia want to keep Crimea?
00:48:41.440Well, they have the their their Black Sea fleet that right there, Sylvesterpol.
00:49:44.680You know, so most all of Eastern Eastern Europe is now under NATO.
00:49:51.000So so there's a reason why Russians have have done this and they don't trust us.
00:49:56.720And and and we just send hundreds of billions and hundreds of billions.
00:50:01.820And we have these war hawks and some of these damn generals I see on Fox News who were idiots.
00:50:08.060It's and then, you know, they just they're just warmongers.
00:50:11.420And I'm sure they have lots of they have states.
00:50:14.900They sit on the boards of the big defense contractors and making you scooping up millions there to make sure they sit up there and say, let's make sure war, war, war.
00:50:25.300I call them the war pigs, you know, like under the song by Ozzy Osbourne.
00:54:03.600I'm like, you guys in the CIA have way too much money.
00:54:06.560So if it's not, you know, if it's not the Glenn Levitt on the liquor cabinet, the mahogany liquor cabinet that's hidden in the wall, a hidden wall thing,
00:54:17.760to thin thread and trailblazer blowing billions.
00:54:22.080And I didn't even get to two thirds of what I wanted to talk to some of the other examples.
00:54:31.300And then a lot of the money that's been wasted was literally unconstitutionally thrown at spying at our own citizens and using that money to spy on Congress and the courts and the executive service and the movers and shakers to likely blackmail them to make sure the intel budget is whatever they want and then some.
00:54:54.340So that has to stop the intel service is the lifeblood of the deep state and the deep state needs to die.
00:55:04.140And you have to put a dagger in that heart and you've got to stop that lifeblood that's coming from the intel services as well.
00:55:11.780Couldn't have said it any better myself.