A young Air National Guardsman may have leaked top-secret documents from the Defense Department to the press, but who is the leaker? And why did he do it? Plus, China says they have 7 police stations in the United States.
00:00:00.000Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs, and this is The Great America Show with truth, justice, and the American way every day.
00:00:07.780Great to have you with us, and here we go.
00:00:10.560House Speaker McCarthy looking for President Biden to negotiate on federal spending, of which there's far too much.
00:00:17.480And McCarthy says he'll go along with raising the debt ceiling now and raise it substantially.
00:00:23.780He'll take it up another $1.5 trillion, which would cover expected government spending through next March.
00:00:31.260In return, McCarthy says he wants Biden to agree to cut $130 billion of federal spending.
00:00:37.700That would mean clawing back billions in COVID slush funds, end student loan forgiveness, get rid of market-distorting green energy credits,
00:00:47.360and repeal that $80 billion to the IRS and the hiring of nearly 90,000 new IRS agents and auditors.
00:00:57.520We have a deficit and a debt crisis because of Biden's out-of-control spending.
00:01:03.540This year's deficit approaches $1.5 trillion and will run at least $2 trillion a year for the next decade if spending isn't brought under control.
00:01:14.380The national debt now is approaching $32 trillion.
00:01:18.840That means President Biden has watched the national debt rise $10 trillion since he took office.
00:01:25.640It will have risen 50% in just three years.
00:01:30.120And the size of our economy, our GDP, just can't keep up.
00:01:34.120It's now at $26 trillion, and Wall Street is talking recession at the end of this year.
00:02:28.420And the House Judiciary has another whistleblower, this time from the IRS, who says there's a reason that it's taken seven years to investigate Hunter Biden's taxes and his obvious crimes contained in his laptop.
00:02:44.140The whistleblower's attorney says his client witnessed Biden-White House interference in the case.
00:03:52.100As far as doing in-depth analysis work, I would doubt that he's in that position.
00:03:58.420I would think that he's more likely some sort of a sysadmin paper shuffler to get these documents to the right places they need to go.
00:04:06.740So I'm not sure whether this was at the just secret level, which is a system called CIPRNET, or whether this was at the TSSCI level or top secret sensitive compartmented information level, which is a computer system called JWICS.
00:04:22.020But the JWICS system, if he had access, is a lot worse than just the CIPRNET.
00:04:26.400And to look at these early descriptions, the gaming crowd that he was hanging around with in Cyberland, they seem to have a high opinion of him.
00:04:41.660Young, smart, charismatic, nothing that sounded like a description of a surly leaker who is operating out of some form of malice towards the country or toward the military.
00:04:59.940Well, perhaps there's no political motive here.
00:05:04.940And he's just trying to impress his friends at the kind of information that he has access to.
00:05:11.260Or perhaps a young lady you might want to date is trying to convince her how important you are to impress her.
00:05:20.160But it sounds like they've put the information in the hands of someone who's too immature to be able to understand the gravity of what's going on.
00:05:32.880When the Pentagon is made to look like fools with this young man putting this material out on social media and wasn't detected for just about a month.
00:05:47.740I mean, when we have the level of sophistication and advanced technology that we have available to our intelligence agencies, are you surprised that they wouldn't pick up something like this on the web?
00:06:39.120But having found him, how do you suppose they did find him, by the way?
00:06:44.100What was involved in your judgment to go back over his trail and figure out who it was?
00:06:53.620Well, first, you've got to find out, you know, I would go in and do a document search, like you would for anything document on the computer, and put in keywords.
00:07:04.360And I do that in that environment, that dark web environment, to try to pull up all the documents that you think might be associated.
00:07:12.220Now, once you do that, then you've got to find out, all right, you ID the documents, then you need to find out who had access to those documents.
00:07:21.880You know, where, you know, and that's going to be a lot of folks, probably, especially if it was at the secret sipper net level.
00:07:27.060And then you've got to start winnowing it down from that point to, you know, in some places, other places, they might only have some of those documents, but not all of them.
00:07:40.320So you start to, then you start to pin down a location.
00:07:43.540What location would have had someone had access to that particular lot of information?
00:07:48.860So then once you pin it down to a location, then you start looking at individuals that had access, and then you start looking into the backgrounds of those information.
00:07:58.200But obviously, once this was realized, this has been a full court press to find this individual, and it looks like they found them quickly, which in that respect is a good thing.
00:08:08.380But the fact that it languished for weeks without someone realizing it is concerning.
00:08:42.840I think, you know, we call them snake eaters in the world.
00:08:45.920But why would they have access to something like, you know, Russian hackers into Canadian, you know, natural gas networks and pipelines?
00:08:59.800And a whole lot of this, a lot of the political, you know, situations like Egypt planning to send arms to Russia secretly or Serbia, you know, wanting to arm Kiev or, you know, all these political things.
00:09:17.680Because there's no reason for anyone at Fort Bragg, even a lot of the brass to have access to that because it's really not a need-to-know issue for them.
00:09:27.880So in that respect, someone needs to go in and put some filters on this information to make sure that it only need-to-know information goes to the people that need to know it.
00:09:40.800And you just don't splatter this stuff all over the place, you know, so that it's easy access for anyone who wants to suck it all up.
00:09:50.140And to think that this is, again, 10 years after Snowden, what in the world are the intelligence agencies and the military doing?
00:10:01.920There are, we're talking about sensitive documents, top secret documents.
00:10:23.460Well, it sounds like there's an awful lot of indolence involved in this.
00:10:26.620It's so easy just to just not pay attention and just, you know, move data from one place to another and, okay, you know, I don't have to worry about a whole lot of security filters.
00:10:40.940Yes, there's a lot of questions to be asked, Lou, and especially when we've had issues, you know, and Mr. Snowden certainly released information that we needed to know, and he was a viable whistleblower.
00:10:53.260But I certainly don't think we could put, you know, an altruistic whistleblower label on this gentleman.
00:11:00.080We're talking with Russ Tice, folks, a former NSA senior intelligence analyst and whistleblower.
00:11:05.920We were talking about what is a whistleblower under the definition of Mr. Tice.
00:12:42.120And even the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act requires employees to go to the senior IG or their senior staff to tell them that they have a problem.
00:12:55.480Now, what if that problem, in my case, that problem was literally with the director of NSA,
00:13:00.240and the IG didn't even have security clearances to know what was going on.
00:13:05.240So it's kind of – there is no protection for someone in the intelligence community or the national security world.
00:13:13.000In other fields, you know, we've had whistleblowers that, you know, let us know the tobacco industry was basically, you know,
00:13:21.300knocking up the cigarettes to make that, you know, a whole lot more enticing and that sort of thing.
00:17:08.740So then they started targeting certain individuals.
00:17:11.620They targeted, like I said, the joint chiefs of staff.
00:17:16.460Then when I was working with my colleagues about – that we were finding out that they were going after law firms and lawyers and they were going after – this is all domestically now.
00:19:21.060And I was doing – I was making meetings with these folks.
00:19:24.480You know, I was doing all these sleuthiest-type things and meeting in parks in the middle of the night and having these little dead drops and the machination.
00:19:36.360Because I had – the FBI was on me at this point too, by the way.
00:19:39.560So I had to shake the FBI, make contacts.
00:20:16.120They had insulted you when you were asking just legitimate questions.
00:20:20.200And now suddenly there's an intramural, if you will, what would I call it, surveillance and spy operation within NSA about people who are concerned about what they're doing.
00:20:36.100And these other folks are – they've already got me in the motor pool.
00:20:39.340These other folks are very worried about their own careers.
00:20:42.400They're willing to help me out with the knowledge.
00:20:44.760But they all have mortgage payments and kids in school and responsibilities.
00:20:48.920So basically, I became the front man for this.
00:20:52.440And I tried to contact – I sent to my handler, this person, this woman, Divini, and I said to – I need to talk to Kemp Ensor, who's the head of security at Q Group at NSA.
00:21:06.800And she came back and said, oh, he's not going to talk to you.
00:21:08.960And then at that point, I wasn't sure whether he even knew what was going on.
00:21:23.300And I'm like, okay, well, they know they're doing – they're telling me that shut your mouth and pay your penance and grovel, and we'll let you have your big-time job back again.
00:21:35.400And that's when I had to make the choice.
00:21:37.940And ultimately, the catalyst was telling me to wipe snow off a whole heap of cars in the motor pool, where I just snapped and said, no, no, it's time.
00:22:05.320Now, the problem with the IG is they weren't cleared for any of these things that were going on.
00:22:09.060So basically, the way NSA came after me is they said, because I thought that this young lady that I worked with may have been a Chinese spy,
00:22:20.000and she exhibited all the classic tales of someone who might be involved in espionage with a DIA, who was a DIA employee, Defense Intelligence Agency.
00:23:32.540This was the avenue that they ultimately came at me and said that I was crazy because I thought a colleague might be involved in espionage.
00:23:41.280And nine months after my routine psych eval, which I passed with flying colors, not quite flying colors, but I passed.
00:23:47.760But they said I'm a black and white thinker.
00:23:49.720But nonetheless, they said, now you're paranoid crazy because you think a fellow employee.
00:24:03.280We'll find out what's going on with his colleagues and whether or not there was a Chinese spy ring operating within NSA when we come right back after these quick messages from our sponsors.
00:24:32.220And then I get word because I'm in this special vault, in the SAP vault where we have all the super classified stuff.
00:24:40.560And one of my colleagues came from over the office side where my boss had his nice office that overlooked the airport and the Potomac River and the Pentagon and said, you wouldn't believe this.
00:24:51.900But her mom just showed up here and is talking to our boss and demands to see her.
00:25:15.340And then he told me a couple days later that he said, this is a big deal and this is – we're doing an investigation.
00:25:20.600And then about a week and a half after that or maybe two weeks I called and said to the counterintelligence head at DIA, I said, well, what's going on?
00:25:29.180He goes, the entire investigation has been dropped.
00:25:47.920So had you told somebody that she was under investigation?
00:25:52.100They told me that she was under investigation, especially after I called and told them that the mother had showed up – had shown up at our office where she shouldn't have been.
00:26:02.360So how did that play in any way into your problems as a whistleblower and getting ready to make your decision about your life-altering change of direction?
00:26:15.300So what they're doing is they're looking for some reason to pin on me to take my clearance or at least for a period of penance.
00:26:25.760So what they did, I was in the office amidst all this stuff, getting ready for war and finding out that NSA was spying on all these people, Congress and the Supreme Court and the FISA Court and all these folks in our own government.
00:26:40.640And they came out and – oh, that's right about the time where there was two FBI agents.
00:26:46.720One, his name was Cleveland, and I think the other one was Jones or Smith or something like that.
00:26:51.140Well, both of them were sleeping with a Chinese spy and giving the Chinese spy classified information.
00:26:56.640Russ, I've got to tell you, this story is getting bigger and bigger by the moment.
00:27:30.320These two FBI guys are banging around with the same young lady, and apparently they didn't know that they were sleeping with the same girl and giving up information.
00:27:41.360So I contacted the security office at the same counterintelligence guy at DIA and said,
00:27:50.580You know what just happened with the FBI clowns that are, you know, tromping around with the Chinese spy?
00:27:58.540I said, Now you're going to tell me that there was nothing, that there was no investigation, you know, that you couldn't find anything?
00:28:05.260So basically I said, I said the FBI cannot be trusted to do counterintelligence investigations because ultimately the counterintelligence guy at DIA was working with the FBI.
00:28:28.340So right after that happened, and that was right about the time that I was contacting the same units about and finding out that NSA was domestically spying on all these important people and doing all the metadata on pretty much everybody.
00:28:42.780And so that was, I think, their justification was that under what program was that, Russ?
00:28:51.500Well, they ultimately called it the TSP, the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
00:28:58.500And ironically, there was no such thing as the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
00:29:03.300They made that name up just so that the to make it sound like for the for the public, for the public that, oh, my goodness, you know, terrorist surveillance program.
00:29:12.560You know, you know, we got to find those those terrorists.
00:29:15.280But there was actually Stellar Wind was the umbrella name of what was going on, of which of which there was a whole lot of subcategory of the programs underneath the big umbrella of Stellar Wind.
00:29:31.040Well, you know, we're going to have to we're going to have to call another cliffhanger here.
00:29:37.320You know, let's pick this up this week.
00:30:54.960And right about that time when I was in the process of pinning pinning her and her husband down, that's that's when they finally hit the press.
00:31:02.900And that was in, like, December of the December 16th of 2005.
00:31:11.040But but ironically, what came out in the in the the that initial article about domestic spying?
00:31:52.500And and to me, she's, you know, normally when you get a job in an office like that, it's you've already been in the intelligence community for a while and you've proven yourself.
00:32:00.640So so you're sort of like like the creme de la creme of the intelligence analysts and the officers in the world before you can get to that position.
00:32:09.220And I always thought she was kind of young.
00:32:11.040She went to Georgetown and she'd only been out of school for just a couple of years and with her bachelor's at Georgetown.
00:32:16.880And and she would she would ask a lot of questions that wasn't they were not in her lane and she stayed late into the evenings.
00:32:25.080All these things are, you know, indicative of someone who's in but she she vehemently did not want the United States to be involved in supporting Taiwan in any way.
00:32:33.980So these are also and she she lived a very her clothing was very expensive.