Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ( ATF) Joe Biden joins Jemele to discuss his career in law enforcement, including his time as ATF Director. He also talks about how the agency is doing a great job combating the growing problem of fentanyl.
00:00:27.000What did you think it was going to be like?
00:00:29.000And what was different once you got in there?
00:00:33.000I thought that we were going to be able to come in with the movement that President Trump came in with, the administration, to fix the errors that the leadership of the FBI previously made, not like the 37,000 change people.
00:01:01.000And what that showed me was the people at the Bureau, literally, people who've been there, 30-year agents, they're coming up to me and be like, dude, we wanted to do that 15 years ago.
00:01:12.000And then my question was, you guys are the pros.
00:01:15.000My job as the director, I'm not chasing down bad guys, I don't know how to do that, is to give them what you need and get the hell out of the way.
00:01:21.000And they were like, dude, all they did was get in the way.
00:01:24.000So, like, what kind of stuff specifically did you – Simple.
00:01:32.000the one that I've taken the biggest heat for.
00:01:34.000You know, when I said, hey, there are...
00:01:42.000I don't know where else to go because nobody else does these, right?
00:01:45.000In the last calendar year, not this one, the year before last.
00:01:48.000100,000 people were dying of drug overdoses a year.
00:02:50.000One agent out in Indian country, one agent out in Texas, Arkansas, Washington state, prevents a homicide, conducts a major drug bust, stops a ton of fentanyl or meth from coming into our country.
00:04:41.000They've got hundreds of companies standing up in mainland China shipping this stuff out into the world.
00:04:48.000Now, their cover is that – OK, so there's like a minimal use for it.
00:05:02.000And what the CCP has done is they've come out and said this is like the biggest like talk about the devil pulling the wool over the world's eyes.
00:05:14.000They just give you all the ingredients for it and ship it to Mexico.
00:05:18.000And then what they did was, to trick the world, they came out and said, hey, we're going to not sell Precursor X. They're like, so now we're out of the fentanyl trade entirely.
00:05:30.000The problem is, there's 14 other precursors you can use to make fentanyl, and they're still shipping all of those.
00:05:36.000So what we did when I got to the bureau is we stood up this massive enterprise to go after fentanyl precursor companies in mainland China.
00:05:45.000And they're probably not going to like that.
00:05:47.000And what they're doing now to get cute is they're shipping that stuff not straight to here.
00:05:51.000They're going to places like India, and I'm also doing operations in India.
00:05:55.000And they're having the Mexican cartels now make this fentanyl down in Mexico still.
00:06:01.000But instead of going right up the southern border and into America, you know what they're doing?
00:06:06.000They're taking the precursors up to Canada, manufacturing it up there, and doing their global distribution routes from up there because we were being so effective down south.
00:08:39.000And so I'm asking for their help to shut down those factories and production facilities.
00:08:44.000And I'm asking the Mexican government's help to come and say, hey, your drug trafficking organizations are now exporting the manufacturing of fentanyl and getting creative in the ways in which they obtained fentanyl precursors.
00:08:56.000So they'll say, oh, we didn't get it from China.
00:10:24.000People can go use fentanyl and get killed on fentanyl.
00:10:27.000Then what they do is they manufacture as part of this, they being the drug trafficking organizations, once they get the precursors from the CCP, they take their pill presses and they make fake oxycodone.
00:10:37.000So like literally, I'm just giving an example.
00:10:39.000Make tens of thousands of pills of fake oxycodone and we bust them for it.
00:10:46.000It's laced with fentanyl that kills people.
00:10:49.000Then the drug trafficking organizations, to make it appealing for the youth, shape this illicit narcotic in the form of like candy and gummy bears.
00:10:59.000So you hear about kids in New York who just happen to have like a trace amount touching it somewhere, also dying from it.
00:11:08.000Absolutely no rules or boundaries whatsoever when it comes to how they deploy fentanyl to get into our population.
00:12:34.000So my FBI is over there working with the heads of their government, law enforcement authorities, to say, we're going to find these companies that buy it and we're going to shut them down.
00:13:54.000But if the United States government and Uncle Sam and your commander-in-chief said, hey, I need your X amount of people looking here, I can't clone that army to look back at fentanyl.
00:14:04.000Plus, we have to follow the chain of command.
00:14:07.000It's so crazy that they would say climate change and DEI were the priorities for the FBI.
00:14:17.000So I was – in the end of the last Trump administration, I was chief of staff at the Department of Defense, one of the greatest jobs – at the time, I thought the greatest job I'd ever have.
00:14:25.000And when we left, we said, hey, Iran is a huge threat.
00:14:29.000We got to never let up on the counterterrorism mission.
00:14:32.000We still have hostages out there we got to find and bring home.
00:14:35.000And the narcotics mission is a big priority.
00:14:37.000We handed off our playbook and we said, look, this is not a political issue.
00:14:41.000This is protecting the American people and our allies.
00:14:44.000So we hope you guys continue this effort.
00:15:29.000What would incentivize all these people to get on board with it without someone logically stepping in and saying, hey, this is not our top priority?
00:15:36.000I think at its – so that was something I tried to answer when I was out of government for the last – And the answer laid in the first Trump term.
00:15:52.000We were doing things so effectively on national security that hadn't been done before in such speed and volume that the media hated us for it because the other party had tried to do it and failed.
00:16:14.000It used to be counterterrorism was a big portfolio.
00:16:16.000I ran it for the White House, the National Security Council, and the first Trump administration.
00:16:20.000We brought home, people don't know this, President Trump in his first term brought home and rescued over 50 hostages and detainees from around the world.
00:16:28.000That's more than every president before him combined.
00:16:33.000Did you hear about the successes of reuniting families with lost loved ones from Africa and the Middle East or these operations that the president was courageous enough to greenlight to go into places like Afghanistan and do these hostage rescue ops and use SEAL Team 6 and Delta or take out guys like Baghdadi and Soleimani?
00:16:51.000President Trump's directive was simple.
00:17:05.000And I think there was such a resounding success that the media had such a hatred for President Trump and his administration.
00:17:13.000They just said, one, we're not going to give you the credit.
00:17:15.000Two, we're going to put out a ton of disinformation, which we can get into.
00:17:18.000And three, when it came time to transition governments from Trump to Biden, they just said, we're not going to do – and this is my opinion – we're not going to do anything.
00:17:35.000And I keep asking people to prove me wrong.
00:17:38.000Like, tell me something you did in that administration that carried out the apolitical national security mission to a T. I mean, you had the Secretary of Defense in the Biden administration go down, go to a hospital, MIA, literally AWOL, and didn't tell the Commander-in-Chief.
00:17:58.000And broke the National Command Authority.
00:18:00.000There is a reason, and I was a guy responsible for that nuclear football for part of my time at the White House, that that thing, and there is an unbroken chain of command between the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Command Authority at all times, because shit happens.
00:18:15.000And what if it had happened in that one or two weeks the guy was in the hospital, and maybe something did, and we don't even know, right?
00:18:21.000But no one, including the President, Didn't know the Secretary of Defense was in the hospital.
00:18:26.000I can't tell you how big of a cataclysmic failure for the national security mission that is.
00:18:32.000And what I tell people when they're like, that's all right, it's not that big of a deal.
00:18:35.000What if Hexeth took a week out and said, I'm going to the hospital, I'm not telling anyone.
00:18:40.000What do you think the media would do to that guy and Trump if that were to happen now?
00:20:03.000And he would come out later to say, well, I just wanted to keep it private.
00:20:06.000And I said, hey, man, your life when you're the secretary of defense, director of the FBI, director of the CIA, it ain't about being private.
00:21:02.000Could you imagine a time in the United States of America in the 21st century where a political party...
00:21:22.000Then take that material, package it, walk it to the FBI, literally, and say, hey, we need you to surveil the opponent.
00:21:31.000Of our political party who happens to be running for the president of the United States, then convince the FBI to go into a secret federal FISA court that I used to use to manhunt terrorists and say, hey, I need you to wiretap essentially all the comms in and around Trump camp because of the material we gave you and then have that FBI lie to the federal court and the judge in that warrant application, which is a felony.
00:21:56.000Intentionally remove information of innocence from that application just to get it above the threshold so the judge would sign it.
00:22:22.000But when I did that, when I exposed that initially as a staffer on the Hill, Adam Schiff comes out and has his cronies leaked to the world that I – There was actually an article that called me- Genocidal dictator?
00:23:07.000They didn't care because they knew what I had on earth was the biggest political criminal But hang on, that's the kicker.
00:23:24.000So what people don't know about Russiagate that weren't paying attention was that warrant that initially kicked off the FISA surveillance on the Trump campaign writ large was substantiated by FBI leaks to the media.
00:23:39.000Two of the articles cited in that warrant from, I think, Mother Jones and Yahoo News were leaks of information from the same leadership at the FBI, Peter Strzok, Andy McCabe, James Comey and company.
00:23:52.000And then they, in the application, would be like, hey, it's not just us saying that Trump's a Russian asset, right?
00:23:59.000Look at this article, Mr. Judge, on the federal FISA court.
00:24:05.000And they included it in that application.
00:24:07.000So this was a coordinated conspiracy to take down your political opponent by weaponizing government.
00:24:34.000But the damage they did, they, the media, and the people that wanted to take out Trump, and I didn't care what you thought about.
00:24:41.000And remember, back then, I hadn't met Trump, never spoken to him, didn't know him.
00:24:45.000I took that job at Congress on one condition.
00:24:48.000I said, whatever we find, we're putting out.
00:24:50.000I'd been in for 16 years at that point, Democrats, Republicans.
00:24:53.000I was a national security guy, intel guy.
00:24:55.000That's what I wanted to do, chase terrorists, chase bad guys, bring hostages home and help protect the homeland.
00:25:01.000And I said, I don't know if Trump did this.
00:25:03.000I don't know if he was colluding with whoever.
00:25:06.000I didn't know it turned out like this, that they would actually manufacture and make it up.
00:25:10.000But half of America to this day still believes the narrative that the CNNs of the world pushed for five years.
00:25:16.000And if you look on their shows now, Russiagate keeps coming back up because we keep exposing the documents that showed how bad these guys were.
00:25:25.000And most Americans are like, no, no, they're already convinced.
00:25:28.000So in order to fix that disease temple.
00:25:31.000It is just that much harder of a lift for me to go back into the FBI.
00:26:24.000They kneecapped Trump from the beginning by participating in the Russiagate collusion conspiracy with the FBI.
00:26:32.000It's so crazy that someone could do something like that and a whole enormous group of people could do something like that with no repercussions.
00:26:40.000And to be able to operate and say they're the trusted source of news.
00:26:45.000And you were a part of something that was one of the biggest scandals in political history.
00:26:50.000But just because it's targeted towards Trump, people look the other way.
00:26:55.000Like if that was targeted towards Obama, could you imagine how psychotic?
00:27:00.000The response would be people would be up in arms and furious.
00:27:04.000But the same people that would be up in arms and furious if somebody tried to do that for Obama are completely silent if it's happening to Trump.
00:27:13.000What if me as the FBI director in the Trump administration, right, during a presidential cycle went out there and said, hey, Republican National Committee, do you guys have dirt on whoever's running?
00:27:24.000For the Democratic nomination to be president of the United States.
00:27:27.000If you don't, can you go overseas and pay a foreign national who used to be an MI6 guy?
00:27:33.000Then I, as the FBI director, will authorize a warrant, a leak to the media while I'm doing it, take their articles, put it in that warrant, and then go surveil the opponent so he doesn't get elected.
00:27:43.000I would be in prison, which I should be for doing anything like that.
00:29:32.000Bruce Orr was like the number four at the Department of Justice, and he was the one who introduced the world to Christopher Steele, the guy that started Russiagate.
00:29:40.000Well, the entire time her husband was doing that at DOJ, she, Nellie Orr, was working on an outside contract to dig up dirt on Donald Trump.
00:29:49.000So she goes to the Hill and testifies as a result of our investigation right under oath.
00:29:53.000She said, I never worked, and I'm paraphrasing, I never worked with my husband on any of that.
00:30:03.000The Nellie Orr documentation that the FBI hid to the world, that we gave them, where Nellie Orr is caught red-handed providing information to her husband, thumb drives related to Trump-Russia collusion, directly proving that Nellie Orr lied to Congress.
00:30:34.000And in this age of transparency because of the internet and social media and independent news, everybody knows about it now.
00:30:42.000If CNN and all these left-wing news sources, MSNBC, and it was only Fox on the right, and that was all we had, and we had no internet, all this would be completely secret.
00:30:55.000No one would have known the Russiagate collusion, all that stuff would be...
00:31:03.000It would probably take decades before someone wrote a book where people started to really take it seriously and really realize that there was something fucked up about it.
00:31:45.000But the reason I wrote it is, one, I never thought I was going back into government service.
00:31:50.000And two, part of the job to completing the mission was exposing what people didn't ever think could happen in the United States of America.
00:31:59.000And it was not just disinformation, misinformation, but your government and leaders in government weaponizing it for political purposes, not just FBI and DOJ, but others in the IC.
00:32:09.000And what it shows you is the back end of that too, the rewards, right?
00:32:15.000The guys that – wrapping it back up or reversing it back up.
00:32:21.000The guys that were in charge of Russiagate at the FBI, Andy McCabe, right?
00:32:29.000Agreed to set in motion a plan with the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the time to have him wear a wire into the Oval Office to record President Trump.
00:32:40.000Those documents we found, we released them.
00:32:44.000While Andy McKay was in charge of the Trump-Russia gate collusion investigation, his wife was running for political office in the state of Virginia.
00:32:53.000Do you know who's funding her campaign for political office to tune to $600,000?
00:33:36.000Peter Strzok, the head of the counterintelligence unit that had that affair with Lisa Page, who basically put out those text messages, who was running that investigation with Andy McCabe and said, Trump people smell in Walmart and we're never going to let him win.
00:33:53.000For putting on this disinformation campaign, for this illegal activity, because the media will never correct, or some portion of the media will never correct the record.
00:34:03.000Remember, these guys got Pulitzers, New York Times, same thing.
00:34:06.000These guys got the biggest award in journalism.
00:34:08.000They were proven wrong, not by me, by the own evidence created by, you know how I caught these guys?
00:34:16.000Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down.
00:34:35.000Now, is there a statute of limitations on those crimes?
00:34:37.000So generally the statute of limitations on crimes for process crimes that we call them, it's five years.
00:34:44.000But if you can tie them to an overarching conspiracy, there is no statute of limitations.
00:34:48.000So if there was more egregious conduct that no one knew about before that we are just finding and we are investigating, then we'll have to relook at it.
00:34:57.000The one thing we will do is put out all that information to the American public once we actually get through it.
00:35:05.000And if we can work with our partners at DOJ to come up with it.
00:35:08.000The disturbing thing about all this to me is how people on the left are willing to look the other way because this is just a dangerous precedent.
00:35:21.000If the federal government is doing this, and they're doing this to someone you consider an enemy, what's to stop this from doing it against your candidate?
00:35:30.000Like, this is unprecedented behavior that's tolerated and coordinated with the media.
00:36:30.000So while I was doing the Russiagate investigation, do you know what Trump's own DOJ, Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General of the Department of Justice, Christopher Wray, then Director of the FBI, did to me and a dozen other staffers who were working Russiagate?
00:36:47.000They subpoenaed all of our information while I was running the Russiagate investigation.
00:36:54.000Because these guys were so vindictive.
00:36:57.000They went to the federal court and not only got a search warrant.
00:36:59.000They got a judge to say to all the telecom companies, Google, Facebook, everybody else, your banking companies, everybody, do not tell them for five years that we authorize this subpoena.
00:41:12.000So I was a public defender back in the day.
00:41:15.000I used to spend a lot of time in jails and a lot of time in segregated housing units, shoes as we call them, right?
00:41:25.000People that have committed suicide in these cells.
00:41:28.000And I know how you get in, how you get out, who works the system.
00:41:32.000And so the way, based on public information at the time, that he ended up putting the pictures and him hanging himself.
00:41:39.000I was like, man, that guy killed himself.
00:41:42.000There's just no way that you could have run an op and had people go into that cell and not have any video of it and not have any people come out and say, Hey, yeah, I saw that guy.
00:41:54.000He shouldn't have been there, the guard or this guy.
00:41:56.000There's just no access points into places like this in the detention center he was in, which I've been in.
00:42:01.000So correct me if I'm wrong, but what I was told, what I'd read, was that the guards were not paying attention or were sleeping.
00:42:10.000Yeah, and in short order, you'll see it.
00:42:58.000He's a pathologist and he reviewed the case and it was his determination that it was a homicide because of the way his neck was broken.
00:43:08.000What he said was it was indicative of a ligature strangulation.
00:43:12.000And it was because of the positioning on the neck where the marks were, that it wasn't indicative of someone hanging by their weight, which had been higher on the chin.
00:43:20.000And there's a specific break of the bones and the vertebrae that's consistent with someone who is just strangled to death.
00:43:52.000So this guy, Dr. Michael Badden, he had a long career of catching murderers, you know, exhuming bodies, finding trace amounts of poisons, different kinds of things.
00:44:07.000It was a show like from the early 2000s, I believe.
00:44:11.000But this guy was a very well-respected forensic scientist who would analyze these bodies, and it was his determination that he was murdered.
00:45:04.000I think the evidence points to homicide rather than suicide, to Dr. Badden, who observed the autopsy done by city officials.
00:45:10.000Dr. Badden, a former New York City medical examinationer and a Fox News contributor, said, I have not seen in 50 years where that occurred in suicidal hanging case.
00:45:20.000Findings by Dr. Batten were strongly disputed by the city's chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson.
00:45:29.000Dr. Sampson also dismissed Dr. Batten's contention that the circumstances around Mr. Epstein's death suggested other people may have been involved.
00:45:55.000Their office had done a complete investigation, taken into consideration information gathered by law enforcement in making the determination.
00:46:04.000So this is a perfect example of going back to my public defender and prosecutor days.
00:46:09.000This is what we call a war of experts.
00:47:45.000...hanged himself in jail in August while serving trial on federal sex trafficking charge.
00:47:50.000He pleaded not guilty to abusing dozens of girls, some as young as 14. Soon after Epstein's death in August, two of the CCTV cameras outside his cell had malfunctioned and were being examined by the FBI.
00:48:02.000Found semi-conscious in his prison cell with injuries on his neck on 25 July after this incident, he was placed on suicide watch.
00:48:13.000I'm saying we've got footage and you're getting it.
00:48:15.000And then you can make up your own mind.
00:49:47.000But I'm telling you, I'm giving you the tape from the tape.
00:49:51.000You know, there's just like I'm giving you the documents from the vault, just like I'm giving you information to Congress on COVID origins or what have you.
00:50:38.000You could see why very powerful people wouldn't want him talking.
00:50:41.000If he was murdered in segregated housing, in isolation, after being on suicide watch in a place in a detention center that I've physically been in myself, it would be fiction.
00:50:53.000It's just, in my experience, that is not doable.
00:50:57.000It's not doable even for the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world?
00:51:02.000Wouldn't you think though that like if, Sure.
00:51:18.000You would have the resources that we couldn't even possibly comprehend all pointing towards eliminating this one person that it could be done.
00:51:27.000But, I mean, so many people have been implicated, right, already.
00:51:30.000And some of that information, what they did to Prince Andrew and everybody else is already out there.
00:51:35.000And so that's the conspiracy stuff that me and Bongino and the folks have to say, look, we will give you everything we can and then we will have done our job.
00:51:49.000Also, if I had a shred, me, Kash Patel, had a shred of evidence.
00:51:54.000The Russiagate guy, the Jan 6 guy, the COVID origins guy, had a shred of evidence that this guy was murdered.
00:51:59.000I would be the first guy to bring this case hard and fast.
00:52:03.000And I would do even doing press conferences every week on it.
00:53:57.000They decide to target his family if he testifies against them.
00:54:00.000I could see where I, if I thought that it was, like, I'm going to be in jail for the rest of my life, or I tell and my family winds up being killed or destroyed or who knows.
00:54:13.000Maybe you'd say, look, the honorable thing is to end it in prison.
00:55:09.000to be but that's the other thing right we're reviewing We're reviewing everything as meticulously as we can because that's what we owe the American people.
00:57:32.000Is it possible that the video was taken and destroyed?
00:57:37.000Well, you're talking about what decades worth of stuff, right?
00:57:40.000Remember, we have what we have pursuant to lawful search warrants and authorities from the case that was done however many years ago was done.
01:00:14.000Is it all these people across the country?
01:00:16.000Are Catholics being targeted as domestic terrorists?
01:00:20.000What ended up happening was Ray said, oh, it's just one office, one memo, nothing to see here.
01:00:25.000Well, what we just roll out again to Congress this week to Chuck Grassley, who put it out, was that, in fact, it was multiple offices, multiple memos that were weaponizing law enforcement to target a religious group during an election cycle.
01:00:48.000You'd have to ask the people that got here before I did.
01:00:50.000Did you have any suspicion of what kind of motivation they would have to do that?
01:00:55.000I think when you use – it goes back to Russiagate.
01:00:58.000If you're willing to use Mickey Mouse journalism, if you're willing to use the Fusion GPS and Christopher Steeles of the world like the leadership at the FBI then did, then it has a chance to replicate itself and that's what happened.
01:01:10.000I don't know if you know anything about the Southern Poverty Law Center but it's – they literally are the ones that sent information to the FBI and the FBI said, oh, we'll write a memo.
01:01:20.000That's the type of work that I think gives credibility back to the Bureau, us exposing it, us giving Congress the truth, Congress coming back in and saying, hey, you actually didn't give us the Heisman.
01:01:33.000And if there are criminal referrals to come out of that, then let's do that.
01:01:36.000I mean, we just had a great breakthrough this week on Fauci.
01:01:40.000So Senator Rand Paul, Senator Kennedy, and I hate naming names because I always forget people, are doing a great job with us on COVID origins.
01:01:50.000We've got multiple investigations open on that.
01:01:53.000But they had always been looking for Fauci's original phone, or not original, but phones and devices he used while he was Fauci back in Trump on during COVID.
01:02:53.000So whether it's Richmond Catholic memo, whether it's Fauci COVID origins, whatever becomes a great Russiagate crossfire hurricane, whatever becomes a great public importance, that's a big part of what we do at the FBI too.
01:03:06.000The crossfire hurricane one is bananas.
01:03:42.000And so that's part of the learning curve for me too.
01:03:44.000Trying to figure out what the balance is.
01:03:49.000You know, should I be given this so much attention, so much resources?
01:03:52.000But then when I have to call a parent because their kid's dead from fentanyl or when I have to call a cop's family and I call every single line of duty death that we have in this country, I call everyone's chief and I call their families.
01:04:05.000And I'm glad that the numbers are going down in terms of how many have been killed this By over 15% so far.
01:05:06.000We're already, and look, we got six more months to go, so we're not done yet for the year.
01:05:10.000But we're already down 20% from last year and we broke it this week that right now the murder rate, if we, the FBI and our government partners achieve the mission, we'll give the American people the lowest murder rate in decades.
01:07:01.000The terrorist that blew up 13 US soldiers in the Afghan withdrawal.
01:07:07.000I did it with my interagency partners in a week.
01:07:11.000In a week, we found that guy, went to Pakistan, brought him back here.
01:07:15.000Now there's others responsible for it and we're chasing them down too.
01:07:19.000But the question the American people should be asking is why didn't the prior administration putting aside the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, a plan that they – We handed off them a proper way to do it and methodical way to do it.
01:07:35.000And they just said, F you, we're doing it this way.
01:07:37.000And you saw the videos and you saw people plunging from our aircrafts.
01:07:41.000And you saw Abbey Gate and 13 Americans dead.
01:07:45.000Why didn't anyone go get justice for those families?
01:07:48.000Well, that's the priority that the president said.
01:08:01.000It's so hard to believe that it's really that simple, that it's just they weren't given the resources and they weren't given the support to let cops be cops and that they could have done this all along.
01:08:10.000I don't know if that's the only answer.
01:08:40.000It was just an intentional decision to say, we're going to let all these people into our country and let them stay.
01:08:45.000The result of that is, you know, this is another part of the lift that we're doing at the Bureau.
01:08:51.000We call them KSTs, known or suspected terrorists.
01:08:55.000They get pinged at the border, the northern border and the southern border, and then the last administration said, you guys can come in.
01:09:05.000And then one of the most terrifying things I heard was my predecessor, Christopher Wray, went to Congress a year or two ago and said, well, the last year's annual statistics for KSTs was a few dozen and we don't know where they are in America.
01:09:19.000What do you mean you don't know where they are?
01:09:21.000How is that not a national security crisis?
01:09:24.000And so what we're doing while we're doing these raids and chasing down illegals is trying to target those with terrorist affiliations, those who are terrorists, those who are in our homeland because the last administration let them be here.
01:09:38.000And that's – you can say I'm being political.
01:09:42.000But that's me being the FBI director and saying Americans come first and we're protecting our own.
01:09:49.000And we're chasing them down and DHS is doing a great job and so is our intelligence community and so are the local police departments who are now working with us and not living in sanctuary cities and allowing police stations to be burnt to the ground, working with us and not having law enforcement attacked constantly for just doing the job of protecting the American people.
01:10:13.000I think that's a tectonic shift in the mentality.
01:10:17.000Of what this administration has brought in.
01:10:19.000Now, people are still vilifying us for doing that.
01:10:23.000How dare you separate families, they'll say.
01:10:26.000And I'm like, how dare you separate a mom from a kid on a fentanyl overdose?
01:10:32.000How dare you separate an American soldier's mom or dad from the guy that got blown up at Abbey Gate?
01:10:41.000And so that's the ethos I'm bringing to the Bureau.
01:10:44.000I appreciate everything you guys are doing.
01:10:46.000I'm baffled to try to come up with any kind of an explanation why anybody would let known or suspected terrorists into the country and just let them loose.
01:10:54.000I mean, I know you can't speculate, but when you take office and you realize all this is going on, what is going through your mind?
01:11:40.000A lot of them are going to be narco-traffickers, which when you allow narco-traffickers in the country, you're automatically bringing sex traits trafficking, human trafficking, and drug trafficking automatically.
01:11:50.000And the drug traffickers have partnered with the terrorist organizations and our adversaries.
01:11:54.000We haven't even talked about Russia and the CCP and how they've combined forces over the last however many years to infiltrate America, not just with people, but our cyber capabilities and our infrastructure.
01:12:04.000And so when I come into a job like this, patience is one of the hardest things you have to manage because you can't fix everything overnight.
01:12:47.000And people think it's a political decision.
01:12:50.000Taking the FBI out of the historic Hoover building.
01:12:52.000Yeah, because I don't want people to die.
01:12:54.000And I think they deserve a better workplace than something that's 70 years old that has pipes exploding literally every single week, every week.
01:13:02.000And also, we're going to save the taxpayer money.
01:13:04.000We're going to get out of a building that would cost billions to fix.
01:13:07.000And we're going to move into a location that's already built instead of a 15-year government boondoggle an hour outside of D.C. And we're going to stay in D.C. We're going to stay near our partners in government.
01:13:16.000And we're going to put out – But all of that takes time.
01:15:00.000And we put out Operation Not Forgotten where we deployed this month and this summer.
01:15:08.000I can't remember how many agents and intel analysts, specifically to remote tribal locations to solve crimes that have not been solved for years, specifically the most violent.
01:15:19.000And we're going to double down on that.
01:15:20.000And as Bongino likes to say, this summer, we are unleashing a massive operation across the country.
01:15:26.000As Dan calls it, it's a bad day to be a bad guy this summer because the FBI is putting out all these extra agents and personnel into the field, and we're going to come find you.
01:15:36.000If you think you can nest in our communities and find safe haven, you're going to prison.
01:16:13.000From my perspective, it's a national security decision.
01:16:16.000And they failed on the national security mission.
01:16:19.000But I think where the decision from that administration to do that was a political one.
01:16:25.000That's what I'm trying to sort of separate.
01:16:28.000I've always viewed it singularly, protecting the border, preventing drugs from coming in, preventing terrorists from coming in, preventing people from— But what political decision could be made that makes any sense at all to not do that?
01:16:41.000But unfortunately— They did it anyway.
01:16:44.000Do you think it was just that Biden was just not there and everyone else that was really running things was completely incompetent, was focused on other things, was focused on maybe the optics of border protection, that somehow or another there was some negative connotation to it politically?
01:18:41.000The CCP isn't just coming at us with fentanyl and coming at us in our cyber infrastructure and our capabilities in space and underwater.
01:18:49.000They are literally exporting people to the United States of America, having them end up being senior researchers like this individual at the University of Michigan.
01:19:02.000And the bureau picked up on this and said, wait a second, why are you bringing you and her husband is also indicted, but he's in mainland China, so he's not here.
01:19:16.000And what's public now is that he also tried to come to this country to do the same thing.
01:19:21.000So they are making the connections on that.
01:19:23.000But what they did was literally bring in a mushroom that.
01:19:31.000Technically alone exists in the US, but in an altered state, causes billions of dollars of damage to wheat, to corn, to maize, and to agricultural industry, and also could wipe out your livestock and causes reproductive damage to human beings.
01:19:49.000And so this is the lethality in terms of the mindset of people that want to do harm to our country.
01:19:55.000In this case, I didn't know, this is one of those things where I knew it would garner a lot of attention.
01:20:04.000And I'm glad it's everywhere because for me it highlights the multiple levels of operation that our adversaries are looking to do harm on us.
01:21:38.000I get that we're the United States of America, and we want to give everybody a chance, and you gave this kid a chance.
01:21:44.000But that's different than literally inviting our adversaries into our country and saying, well, as long as you build X or dump enough money into your state, we can look the other way.
01:21:56.000So what can be done about the land that our adversaries own outside of military bases?
01:22:14.000What we can do at the federal level are things that you've seen the State Department under Marco Rubio do, revoking visas in certain places, in certain sectors of the economy.
01:23:14.000The Post will write about it one way and it probably won't even make the headlines in a number of other outlets because they don't want to talk about that.
01:23:21.000Has the New York Times written about this, John?
01:23:41.000And that's the thing about your show that I agreed that I wanted to do it is because… Getting out to a population that has stopped listening to mainstream news and reaching out to them and challenging them with information and how we're doing things and saying, look, this is our priorities, this is what I'm doing, is so hugely important because the audience, the influence of that manpower on the electorate is huge, is huge.
01:24:10.000And if we can reach through on some of these issues, then we're going to win collectively.
01:24:15.000Like, I can only arrest so many bad guys.
01:24:18.000But if we arrest them and people don't know who we're arresting and why we're arresting them and what the threat is, then it almost becomes irrelevant.
01:24:27.000But if we can get more and more people talking about these things and saying, look, the national security of our country is of what's most important to me, not who wins the next election, but also we need to work with our communities to say, who's in our communities?
01:24:44.000How many registered sex offenders are there?
01:24:59.000I wonder what heavy lifting has to be done to separate national security issues from political issues.
01:25:05.000And for everybody just to say, listen.
01:25:08.000All the other stuff that the Democrats disagree with or the Republicans disagree with, put that aside.
01:25:13.000We should all be concerned with stopping fentanyl, stopping gang members and cartel members and terrorists from coming into the country.
01:25:21.000How that becomes political to me is just fucking bananas.
01:25:24.000It really is crazy because it's just like if one side supports it, the other side has to be against it.
01:25:30.000Trevor Burrus: You raise the reason it's so politicized and the reason it's so sort of in many sectors of government is because of the answer to that question.
01:25:46.000The leaks from inside of government and then the spin on that information by the media is what's causing the most harm, in my opinion, to the American public.
01:27:18.000Tash Patel upends, and I'm paraphrasing, the ethos at the FBI.
01:27:23.000How dare he cut down the morning briefing cycle and Why don't we do that?
01:27:35.000But the Times comes in and kicks us in the face with this leak that's not even true because they go out and say anonymous source this and retired person that.
01:27:45.000It might sound small to you but now a reader is going to read that, a new kid who's like, oh, maybe I want to join the FBI and they're going to look at it and say, this place is a circus.
01:29:45.000And so to your point on like social media does have a great use in terms of me and – so the reason Dan and I don't do a lot of media is because we're the FBI.
01:30:30.000Do you know – I mean I've already told you I've been called a genocidal dictator, which is ironic since I'm the son of a man who fled a genocidal dictatorship in East Africa and his parents lawfully immigrated to this country and had me and now their kid is the FBI director, first-generation Indian kid.
01:31:31.000So you want to talk about the ultimate weaponization and total disinformation combining forces, right?
01:31:37.000A week before – A guy who used to be in the intelligence community says, oh, we got to bring the Hunter Biden laptop thing into play, knowing it was bogus.
01:31:55.000And they come out and they basically say the FBI, even though knew that Hunter Biden's laptop was a righteous piece of investigatory material and were examining it and at the time knew.
01:32:08.000That they were going to work up criminal leads on it.
01:32:13.000The intelligence community comes in and says, we got to get this information out because the guy who would end up becoming Biden's secretary of state was advising him and saying, hey, we got to squash this Hunter Biden laptop thing.
01:32:27.000Let's do the Crossfire Hurricane play.
01:32:29.000So they go to the CIA and they go to then-director Gina Haspel, who, by the way, There's no coincidence in government, Gina Haspel was chief of station London when Russiagate was launched in London.
01:32:44.000So now she's director of CIA and we're on the eve of an election.
01:32:49.000And there's this thing called a pre-publication process.
01:32:51.000So like when I had to put my book out as a government server, whatever you call it, it has to go in and everybody's got to read it and they got to chop it and whatever.
01:33:01.000It takes forever, even if it's a two-page document.
01:33:05.000The 51 Intel letter was written by these same people, some of who participated in Russiagate.
01:33:12.000And the person that has to authorize that is the director of the CIA before it goes public.
01:33:16.000Do you know how long she took to authorize the release of the letter?
01:33:20.000Knowing the information in the letter was false.
01:33:23.000Knowing that a laptop with Hunter Biden's information on it was true and accurate and being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for criminal purposes.
01:33:39.000We spent the last four years proving up – and we've got more information coming on that too – proving up how those former secretaries of defense, CIA, NSA, deputy directors of the intelligence community all came together to politicize intelligence once again because they got caught on Russia and don't care.
01:33:59.000And they wanted President Biden to win so badly they were willing to lie to the American people.
01:34:58.000I was chief of staff at DOD on January 6th.
01:35:02.000Days before January 6th, I was in the Oval Office with the president, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a foreign matter.
01:35:11.000And on that day, he goes, hey, how's it looking for January 6th?
01:35:30.000But in order to do that, the president has to, one, authorize it, and two, the mayor or governor, so it's D.C., so it's the mayor and the Capitol Police and the Speaker of the House are in charge, have to request the deployment of troops.
01:35:46.000We went to them days before January 6th.
01:37:03.000So what we just released to Congress was, I think we're still digging through it, is there was a couple of dozen sources that were involved with January 6th.
01:37:14.000And so we're getting Congress those files and the American people are going to learn the extent of that.
01:37:18.000We're doubling down on our investigation on the pipe bomber because we think it's of great public importance that someone almost blew up.
01:37:25.000The headquarters for the RNC and DNC and, oh, by the way, the vice president of the United States happened to be in the vicinity of that pipe bomb.
01:38:32.000Well, there's like a known guy who likes coke.
01:38:35.000Who happened to be at the White House at the same time.
01:38:38.000Well, again, also I don't want to jump to conclusions because I've done this for a long enough time where even the most obvious suspect, you're like, well, shit, it wasn't him, it was her.
01:39:02.000In a Trump administration, what do you think the media would say?
01:39:04.000What a wild motherfucker doing coke in the White House.
01:39:07.000You know how wild you have to be to be doing lines in the bathroom of the White House?
01:39:12.000I was like dancing the line when I was using the bathroom that I wasn't supposed to use because I wanted to go to the East Wing and they had a nicer setup.
01:40:37.000We've done a lot in 100 days to get it back.
01:40:39.000And I think if you wait for the rest of this year, you're going to see some massive, massive actions taken over the summer.
01:40:48.000And our priorities, and I changed it, are sort of our website and our pillars.
01:40:55.000Uphold the Constitution, defend the homeland, crush filing crime, and rigorous constitutional congressional oversight so that we restore trust.
01:41:12.000Does the pardon cover—like if you find that Fauci lied to Congress, like when Rand Paul was talking to him about gain-of-function research, clearly he was being deceptive.
01:41:40.000We'll work it up and we'll say this is what we found and then legal minds will have to come in and chop on – Is that the same sort of thing applied to the 51 intelligence agents that lied about the laptop?
01:41:54.000I think the same scenario applies to anyone who got the pardon.
01:41:57.000I can't remember exactly who off the top of my head got it, if there was some of them or none of them or what happens.
01:42:01.000But that's never happened before in the history of the country.
01:42:04.000So there's literally no legal precedent, as we say, to figure out how that goes.
01:42:09.000But what I can do, irrespective of the pardon and how it applies, is produce the information in the documents.
01:42:18.000What a crazy place to come into, you know?
01:43:44.000What you don't want your FBI doing is having New Orleans and Super Bowl.
01:43:47.000And having another known terrorist come in there and run people over and kill them and then have the FBI go to the podium and say this is not an act of terrorism.
01:43:55.000That is the politicization of the FBI.
01:43:59.000And I think the American people are seeing it and I think our results are speaking to it.
01:44:04.000But that doesn't even make sense that The New York Times would criticize that and criticize the description of it as an act of terrorism when it – But the action itself, you're throwing Molotov cocktails on human beings that are at a political, peaceful rally.
01:44:49.000These people that used to run the FBI are coming in there and they would have made the same decisions.
01:44:55.000It's just the fact that we're making them and they got fired because they got caught conspiring against the United States of America and weaponizing the FBI and CNN has given them a platform.
01:45:05.000They keep crippling this country by putting out these stupid statements or not stupid, these intentionally False statements to attack us.
01:45:13.000And again, you can hit me and Bongino all you want.
01:46:20.000We investigated that as an act of terrorism because that's what it is.
01:46:24.000That's what the American people deserve to hear.
01:46:27.000I'm not saying they don't have a presumption of innocence.
01:46:29.000I'm not saying that they're going to be convicted at trial.
01:46:32.000But I'm telling you as the director of the FBI what I'm doing as the number one cop in this country and who is in charge of investigations.
01:46:39.000That's my call to make and I'll make it every time.
01:46:42.000I just don't understand how the media, particularly the thing in Colorado, how they could print.
01:46:49.000That this is not an act of terrorism and not diminish all of whatever credibility they have left.
01:46:55.000I just don't understand why they would even be willing to do that.
01:46:58.000I think it all goes back to the same derangement syndrome that people have.
01:47:06.000Their hatred for certain individuals and people who dare to work in those administrations is so great that they don't care about the truth.
01:47:55.000They just want it—you know, they want a quick fix.
01:47:57.000And when you're dealing with four years of whatever the hell was going on and nine million people being released into this country and all the stuff that comes with it, it just would stand to reason.
01:48:09.000It would take a long time to unravel all that or to fix all the problems that were created.
01:48:54.000Calling out the people who corrupted the place in the past is hugely important.
01:48:58.000But leaving the American people, an FBI, a DOD, a CIA, a functional national security apparatus is my ultimate goal.
01:49:11.000So the apparatus that was in place before that was so riddled with corruption, what do you think happened between Trump's, between when he was in for the first term and the four years?
01:49:40.000They completely shifted the priorities.
01:49:43.000But how does that encourage corruption amongst the top officials?
01:49:48.000Because the priorities themselves were corrupt.
01:49:51.000Focusing on DEI and climate change is a political potshot to weaponize the Department of Defense and the intelligence community and the law enforcement community to say we're going to promote you based on your background and beliefs rather than your ability to get through the pipeline.
01:50:09.000Another thing we're doing is we're changing the PFT, the physical fitness test at the Federal Bureau of Investigation for new agents and for current agents because it's wholly insufficient.
01:50:20.000I'm not asking you to be a special forces operator, but I am asking you to be able to take down a dude running away from you in a 100-yard sprint who may be twice your size and detain him and safeguard the American public.
01:50:30.000And so when you don't focus on those things for years, years.
01:50:35.000And you focus on promoting people based on, I'm not here because of the color of my skin, but when you do that, this is what happens.
01:50:43.000And then when the media celebrates these victories, people are like, oh yeah, I'm going to subscribe to that because I hate the other side so much.
01:51:25.000They know about all this shit that happened.
01:51:27.000Like, their faith in media, especially after the pandemic, their faith in media has been deteriorated so badly that I can't imagine they wouldn't just, for self-preservation reasons, shift course.
01:51:43.000But the problem is they have been able to persevere.
01:53:04.000They've changed a bunch of things in that regard.
01:53:07.000It's still, like, some of the panel talks they have, you're just like, what fucking planet are you guys even living on?
01:53:13.000Right, and the problems we're facing, he does a good job of highlighting.
01:53:16.000He's like, hey man, these pro-Hamas positions didn't happen overnight.
01:53:21.000They happened because we let in all these people from all over the world, and they came in, and they started attending our universities, and they started getting together, and they started seeing in the media that that was a quote-unquote popular thing to do.
01:55:19.000The biggest threat we have from a counterterrorism standpoint is Iran and that's why the president is trying to achieve a peaceful resolution with them and end this war that Hamas started in October in Israel and Gaza.
01:55:34.000Nothing would be a better solution than a peaceful one to that because we talked about hostages before.