The Megyn Kelly Show - Trump FIRES Bondi, CIA's ＂MK Ultra＂ History, and ＂Two Weeks＂ Talking Point, with John Kiriakou, Sean Davis, and Sohrab Ahmari ｜ Ep. 1287

00:00:00.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:12.220 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.340 We've got a former CIA officer coming on in just a bit who has some wild stories about being a spy

00:00:21.380 and unique thoughts about everything from the war in Iran to Jeffrey Epstein,

00:00:26.040 and I'm really looking forward to this talk.

00:00:28.020 But we begin today with Trump's talking about regime change in Iran and the numerous reports that he's planning big changes to his own administration.

00:00:39.180 That regime change does seem underway in some way, shape or form.

00:00:43.320 Last night, The New York Times breaking the story that the president is considering firing Attorney General Pam Bondi.

00:00:49.500 Mr. Trump reportedly upset at her handling of the Epstein files and her lack of aggression in going after his political enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey et al.

00:01:07.360 The report was quickly confirmed by multiple news outlets. According to The Times, Mr. Trump is considering replacing Bondi with current EPA administrator Lee Zeldin and Semaphore this morning, a news outlet reporting that the president has informed Ms. Bondi that, quote, her time as attorney general is nearing an end, end quote.

00:01:29.700 And a formal announcement is expected soon.

00:01:32.540 As always, with Donald Trump, Semaphore is reporting he could change his mind before going through with the plan.

00:01:37.680 But that's not all.

00:01:39.580 The Guardian, just as we came to air, dropping a report that Donald Trump is privately polling his top advisers

00:01:46.660 about whether he should replace the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

00:01:52.620 The answer is no, he shouldn't.

00:01:54.860 The president apparently upset that Tulsi did not condemn Joe Kent, the former National Counterterrorism Center director who resigned over Joe's opposition to the war in Iran.

00:02:07.000 Before he left the government, Kent reported to Tulsi before he resigned.

00:02:11.680 He worked for her as their chief of staff and then went over to counterterrorism and did speak to Tulsi before he resigned.

00:02:17.240 They spoke to the vice president and then he went and directly spoke to the president about leaving.

00:02:21.720 The Guardian also reporting that Trump is not happy that Tulsi, a longtime opponent of foreign interventions, has appeared somewhat reluctant to defend his actions in Iran.

00:02:33.940 There's a lot going on here. Joining me now to react to all of this is Saurabh Amari.

00:02:39.080 He's U.S. editor of UnHerd and Sean Davis, who is CEO of The Federalist.

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00:03:40.460 and get back to what matters. Guys, thank you so much for being here. I can't think of any

00:03:45.620 two guys I'd rather have on for what we just saw last night in the news this morning. We got lucky

00:03:50.620 having you here. So let's start with the potential firings, Sean. I guess I'm not shocked he may or

00:03:58.140 may not be wavering on Tulsi because the Joe Kent thing clearly was a bee in his bonnet. But I am

00:04:04.460 kind of surprised about the Pam Bondi thing because my impression of the Pam Bondi thing was

00:04:09.520 she handled most of that exactly the way he wanted her to. So what do you make of,

00:04:15.520 let's start with the Bondi report first. Yeah. So I think to understand the whole

00:04:19.120 Bondi thing, you have to go back to the first Trump administration. His initial AG was Jeff

00:04:24.420 Sessions, one of the first people in Congress who ever got on his side back in 2015.

00:04:29.500 Trump thought he would be great. He was an immigration hawk and he ended up being a

00:04:32.960 disaster. He turned over the department to the deep state. He recused himself during the Russia

00:04:37.800 hoax. And then we had Rod Rosenstein for several years. And in comes Bill Barr. So at that point,

00:04:44.940 Bill Barr was maybe not the most loyal guy, but was seen as very, very competent. He dispatched

00:04:50.260 the Mueller probe and is a special counsel, but then kind of fell apart at the end. He didn't

00:04:57.180 really follow through with what he needed to do on Russiagate accountability, and then ended up

00:05:01.640 kind of going crazy towards the end. He and Trump have a breakup. And so I think Trump with Bondi

00:05:06.720 decided that what he wanted was not someone who may have been ideologically on his side.

00:05:13.100 He wanted someone who was loyal above all else.

00:05:16.040 He tried the competent but not loyal thing with Barr.

00:05:18.900 This time he wanted someone who was loyal.

00:05:21.300 I think, unfortunately, she was very loyal.

00:05:24.540 Absolutely.

00:05:25.400 She wasn't particularly competent.

00:05:27.560 I think she dropped the ball on a ton of things.

00:05:29.840 The Epstein handling was a farce.

00:05:33.260 the way she handled that initial White House meeting, the handout of the binders.

00:05:37.520 And I think it did extreme damage to Trump, the way she handled it. So I don't blame him. And I

00:05:43.720 don't find it particularly surprising that he's probably had enough, especially when you look at

00:05:48.280 what happened with Tish James, with James Comey, with so many things falling apart. I think he

00:05:52.260 understands now, yeah, loyalty is important, but you need to have somebody who can actually do the

00:05:55.740 job competently every day. I mean, I'm wondering, Saurabh, if he's seeing his dwindling poll numbers

00:06:02.040 now and looking for somebody to blame. And there is no question that when it comes to Trump's base,

00:06:10.100 the two things that arguably have hurt him with that base, well, we're seeing some erosion thanks

00:06:17.620 to Iran, but the Epstein files is definitely on the list. And I don't, is there a chance he's

00:06:24.060 blaming Pam Bondi for that as opposed to himself? Because we watched, yeah, she was way out ahead

00:06:30.880 of her skis with her PR campaign around the Epstein client list is on my desk and all the

00:06:35.620 Fox News appearances and all that. But like in terms of we're done giving you any more disclosures

00:06:41.540 goodbye that we saw Trump on camera saying all that himself. Yeah, I think that's the price you

00:06:48.460 pay when you campaign on full disclosure of the Epstein files and then sort of renege on that,

00:06:56.480 whether it's for understandable reasons or not. I think some of it is understandable.

00:07:00.880 There are people who are on the so-called list who I know, you know, just happened to

00:07:05.980 be there because they had some interaction with Virginia Jeffrey, but they were not at

00:07:10.560 all accused of being on the island or done any wrongdoing.

00:07:14.260 Yet if there was a kind of full, unredacted disclosure, their lives would be destroyed.

00:07:20.120 So whatever the reason, the fact is that I think Pam Bondi is basically executing what 0.99

00:07:25.440 the president wanted to do some disclosure, but not the full that would be super destructive.

00:07:29.820 So I think the blame lies there. I will say one thing. There is one specific area which is kind of wonky, but it's important. And that has to do with antitrust, meaning breaking up monopolistic businesses.

00:07:43.040 That was an area where kind of left wing and right wing populists had begun to see eye to eye going back to the first Trump administration.

00:07:50.940 And part of it falls under the Department of Justice.

00:07:53.620 There is a specific antitrust unit within the Department of Justice.

00:07:58.180 And over the past year, you know, the person who was put in charge of that, her name is Gail Slater. She came from J.D. Vance's office and was seen as a as a mega populist, someone who would translate the mega populist agenda into going after big tech and other companies. 0.90

00:08:14.280 That is not the free market, right? Businesses colluding to buy each other and ultimately so that consumers only have one choice to go to, whether that's in technology or ticket prices with Ticketmaster and the like.

00:08:27.400 That's not free market capitalism. And antitrust is a way to correct for that.

00:08:32.160 Unfortunately, the Bondi DOJ was pretty actually bad in that regard.

00:08:36.920 Gail Slater, the person who was, again, put in charge of the antitrust unit, was basically had all her power taken away.

00:08:44.680 Firms that had reached basically settlements with the Department of Justice were able to sidestep her so that the normal scrutiny that goes into how a settlement was reached.

00:08:54.880 This happened, for example, with the merger between two companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks that provide like Wi-Fi and networking services to big stadiums, hospitals and things like that.

00:09:06.920 They basically they reached a settlement with a DOJ, but one that where it was done behind in a kind of behind closed doors, literally over cocktails, which raises serious legal questions.

00:09:19.800 And when Gail Slater's team objected to this, one of her deputies was fired and then eventually she herself was fired as well. 0.88

00:09:27.480 So it's one of those instances where, you know, what looks like populism on the campaign trail and then under Bondi, it cashed out as kind of crony capitalism.

00:09:39.880 So that was an area of disappointment.

00:09:41.580 I have no idea whoever comes next will do anything different.

00:09:45.180 Gail Slater is now gone and she was seen as like one of the one of the real populist anchors of this administration.

00:09:51.140 I don't think Bondi did right by her.

00:09:53.800 That's interesting.

00:09:54.700 OK, that's I didn't know about that.

00:09:55.940 That could be a potential ding she suffered behind the scenes, as opposed to the ones

00:10:00.120 we saw publicly, Sean, which were, you know, there in front of the scenes for all to see.

00:10:05.400 Who could forget this moment?

00:10:06.800 This is Fox News, February 21st of last year.

00:10:10.160 Sought zero here.

00:10:11.420 DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.

00:10:15.400 Will that really happen?

00:10:17.060 It's sitting on my desk right now to review.

00:10:20.040 That's been a directive by President Trump.

00:10:22.680 I'm reviewing that.

00:10:23.440 and reviewing JFK files, MLK files. That's all in the process of being reviewed because that was

00:10:29.220 done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies. So have you seen anything that

00:10:33.460 you said, oh, my gosh? Not yet. OK, that was an embarrassment. It turned out, I guess,

00:10:41.480 not to be true or so they would later tell us. And then even more recently, Sean, she was asked

00:10:46.280 it was at a cabinet meeting and clearly she was trying to run cover on this issue and change the

00:10:52.040 subject from Epstein when she got asked a question to the Dow, you know, the surging Dow, like, hey,

00:10:57.120 look at this. It's so much better. Look what Trump did. And it was just inept. We pulled it. We never

00:11:02.820 got to this a couple months ago, but here it is. Zero B. The American people need to know this.

00:11:07.380 They are talking about Epstein today. This has been around since the Obama administration.

00:11:13.660 This administration released over 3 million pages of documents, over 3 million, and Donald

00:11:22.260 Trump signed that law to release all of those documents.

00:11:27.480 He is the most transparent president in the nation's history.

00:11:33.040 And none of them, none of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word

00:11:41.260 about Jeffrey Epstein.

00:11:43.000 How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump, the Dow, the Dow right now, is over, the Dow is over $50,000. I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over $50,000 right now.

00:12:02.640 The S&P at almost 7,000 and the NASDAQ smashing records.

00:12:09.600 Americans, 401ks and retirement savings are booming.

00:12:14.400 That's what we should be talking about.

00:12:17.360 Is it over? Is it over, Sean?

00:12:20.460 Like, let's be honest, she's not an effective messenger for the administration. 0.97

00:12:25.040 No, and I think what she didn't understand and what a lot of people didn't understand

00:12:28.700 was that the Epstein case was not just about Jeffrey Epstein.

00:12:32.900 It was a proxy for a shadow government,

00:12:36.160 a bunch of corrupt people who could lead the nation around by the nose,

00:12:40.100 get rich, and never have any accountability.

00:12:42.720 That's actually what the whole thing stands for.

00:12:45.260 And I understand that there are specific crimes

00:12:46.980 that people are very upset about and want accountability for.

00:12:50.120 But when Trump kind of went out during the campaign

00:12:52.280 and made a big deal that he was going to be the one to get all this stuff out,

00:12:55.600 he was going to be the one who'd get to the bottom of it,

00:12:57.340 people really believed him. And they said, oh, well, finally, this is going to be the guy,

00:13:01.480 this outsider that they tried to kill, that they tried to put in prison, that they tried to

00:13:05.760 bankrupt. This is going to be the guy who's finally going to hold everyone accountable.

00:13:09.920 And I think, you know, he has done that to a large extent, but not with the Epstein thing.

00:13:14.320 And so you had a lot of people who really felt disillusioned when they saw him come out and say,

00:13:18.840 oh, it's a hoax or this and that. He was very poorly advised by whoever did that,

00:13:25.060 whether it was the FBI, whether it was Bondi. And that began, I think, a series of significant

00:13:31.620 missteps from him that eroded key demographics. When you look at his victory in 2024,

00:13:38.060 he won every swing state. It was an overwhelming victory. And it was largely done on the strength

00:13:42.700 of what people were calling the podcast bros. These are guys who speak to 20, under 30 men

00:13:48.340 who are fairly apolitical, who are kind of sick of all the crap, who don't trust anyone. They said, 0.98

00:13:52.480 You know, this guy's going to be the one who gets it done.

00:13:54.760 And then you have Bondi get in there. 1.00

00:13:56.100 She does the whole stupid stunt with Epstein. 0.99

00:13:58.500 She ignored everyone who told her, hey, by the way, you should probably just get a special 0.99

00:14:01.820 counsel to go in and review these items and slowly release them to make sure it's all

00:14:07.360 done properly, because she wanted the attention.

00:14:09.700 She wanted to go on television and talk about it.

00:14:11.660 She wanted to be the hero.

00:14:12.960 Well, I've got bad news for you.

00:14:14.260 When you want to be the face, you're going to be the one who takes the fall.

00:14:16.660 And it looks like she's finally taken the fall.

00:14:19.600 That is so right with the influencers who could forget this moment where she had them all come to the White House.

00:14:26.200 These are some of the president's most loyal social media, you know, warriors, and she humiliated them by having them to the White House.

00:14:34.500 We were told that she actually didn't even front to them when she got them to come, that it was going to be about Epstein.

00:14:40.660 But then she handed out these binders and sent them out, understanding that they would all be photographed by the press sitting on the White House lawn with the binders.

00:14:48.420 and there was nothing in them, nothing new.

00:14:50.380 She humiliated them.

00:14:52.100 But, you know, it's tough to say it's,

00:14:54.440 I mean, this is just embarrassing to watch

00:14:55.820 because I like these people and I blame her.

00:14:58.100 They didn't know that she had effed them over.

00:15:01.640 So Saurabh, it's hard though to blame it squarely

00:15:04.700 on Pam Bondi when like, who could forget this moment?

00:15:08.380 I said that the other thing was at a cabinet meeting.

00:15:10.220 It wasn't, it was Pam Bondi testifying in front of Congress.

00:15:12.620 But there was this meeting with Trump and Bondi

00:15:15.120 early on in the Epstein scandal where we were all,

00:15:17.660 It was right after the DOJ had released that two-page memo saying, like, we're done.

00:15:22.240 You're getting nothing else.

00:15:23.520 This is a long time ago, right?

00:15:24.640 This is like last summer.

00:15:25.620 We were all like, what?

00:15:27.960 And then when Trump got on camera, he wasn't like, sorry, never mind.

00:15:32.740 The DOJ went rogue.

00:15:35.100 This is what happened.

00:15:36.520 Could you resolve whether or not he did?

00:15:38.560 And also, can you say why there was a minute missing from the jailhouse team on the night

00:15:42.560 of the Senate?

00:15:42.820 Yeah, sure.

00:15:43.340 Could I just interrupt for a second?

00:15:45.140 are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years.

00:15:51.620 You're asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things.

00:15:56.600 And are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.

00:16:03.480 Do you want to waste the time? And do you feel like answering?

00:16:06.180 I don't mind answering.

00:16:07.460 I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this.

00:16:11.040 Okay. That's not great. All right. Now my team is just sending me this. All right. This is trying to see the source of this article. Daily Mail. Pam Bondi begged Trump not to fire her during dramatic White House showdown as insider reveals his final straw.

00:16:29.080 It reports AG Pambani begged Trump not to fire her in an explosive showdown at the White House after he accused her of an unforgivable offense. 0.98

00:16:37.040 He informed the AG last night, shortly before his Iran speech, that she would soon be leaving the Justice Department, according to a senior administration source.

00:16:44.400 She responded by pleading to give her more time in the role, but Trump remained firm that her time leading the agency was over.

00:16:50.840 She was unhappy and tried to change his mind, said the source.

00:16:53.520 However, the president told her she was fired and that an announcement would be made shortly.

00:16:57.400 The announcement is set to be made on Friday, but is now imminent because of all the media attention.

00:17:02.360 His reasoning for the sudden dismissal comes in part because the president believes Bondi tipped off Eric Swalwell.

00:17:08.960 OK, this is not on our bingo card, guys.

00:17:12.100 Tipped off Eric Swalwell about the FBI's efforts to release investigative documents related to his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy, our old pal Fang Fang.

00:17:23.460 The FBI was preparing a cache of documents on Swalwell's relationship with Christine Fang.

00:17:29.860 She's intervening in those matters.

00:17:31.800 This is a quote.

00:17:32.500 The White House was not pleased she was intervening due to her personal friendship with Swalwell, said the source. 0.98

00:17:38.000 I call bullshit on that. 0.93

00:17:39.600 I don't believe that's the reason. 0.98

00:17:41.120 I just don't believe that.

00:17:42.980 It's over.

00:17:44.860 The FBI getting ready to release the file on Swalwell from 2015, which it reportedly is.

00:17:51.260 which reportedly is, they didn't find any wrongdoing, but Swalwell doesn't want the

00:17:57.140 report coming out because he's running for governor and the election's May 2nd in California.

00:18:01.260 I don't believe that, but your thoughts, Sareb?

00:18:04.100 Yeah, look, there's a sort of great deal of crumblinology that goes on with any

00:18:08.640 Trump administration. I'm trying to think, and I want to be fair about this, but it is remarkable

00:18:15.800 how messy these Trump administrations are.

00:18:19.880 We're now a year and a half into the second one.

00:18:21.760 I'm trying to think back to the Biden administration.

00:18:24.460 And, you know, the guy was really senile,

00:18:28.160 like drooling senile, you know, bless him.

00:18:30.880 But, you know, they held it together

00:18:33.020 until fairly, you know, almost to the end.

00:18:36.440 Because he wasn't making any decisions.

00:18:39.040 They were like, gee, should we fire ourselves?

00:18:41.000 No. Does everyone agree?

00:18:42.540 Yes, exactly right.

00:18:43.460 But, you know, then you compare this

00:18:45.580 And look, I mean, if the if the previous administration, if the first Trump administration is any guide, if there was indeed a scene that involved her begging him not to fire her, you can almost bet that there is going to be three years of Bondi serving as a source to the press, getting a book deal.

00:19:03.980 what i saw up close and of course like the you know the irresponsibility of this president and

00:19:09.500 so on and so forth having you know been you know perfectly eager to do those sessions where they

00:19:14.460 sit around in the cabinet and each of the cabinet members goes by one one by one and says sir your

00:19:19.700 presidency really is better than abraham lincoln's it's amazing she was doing that just as much

00:19:24.560 but she'll be leaking against him it's very uncomfortable it's very uncomfortable i mean

00:19:29.540 i'm a trump supporter and i like most of the people in the administration but the the cabinet

00:19:33.560 meetings and like the constant fluffing of Trump is very Pravda-esque. It makes me uncomfortable.

00:19:37.900 Like, just stop, just like stop with the obligatory compliment. It reminds me of what I saw in Russia 0.54

00:19:42.740 with Vladimir Putin. If you watch a press conference over there, I mean, all the entire

00:19:46.340 Russian press corps is like, isn't he fabulous? He's even more fabulous than we thought he was,

00:19:50.580 isn't he? He's amazing. Now our press isn't like that, but certainly the cabinet is. It's just

00:19:54.400 too much. It's like, okay, whatever. It's like, it's fine. I forgive Trump the need to be, to have

00:19:59.700 his ego stroked because he gets just ripped by everybody so often. So I get it. Okay, Sean,

00:20:05.060 here's what I think. I think it's probably more of what we said in the intro, which is she's not

00:20:12.260 bringing indictments against the people who tried to put him in prison and bring down his first

00:20:19.400 presidency. You know, we have not seen an indictment of John Brennan. We have not seen a renewal of the

00:20:24.500 charges against Tish James. The Comey matter, too, is on the ropes because of a judge ruling

00:20:30.080 that the indictment was improper. And I I bet Trump actually is very angry about that stuff

00:20:36.400 and maybe is blaming Pam Bondi. Like if I had to put my own money on it, that's where I'd put it.

00:20:41.800 Yeah, I think it's a whole collection of things. You know, if you look at his presidency so far,

00:20:46.280 which we forget how bad Biden was. Thank goodness he is president now and we don't have to deal with

00:20:52.760 all that nonsense. But I think he's had kind of two major missteps. The big political one was

00:20:58.540 the Epstein thing, which we've covered. But I also think his administration had a fairly

00:21:03.080 significant strategic misstep in how it was handling what I call the judicial insurrection,

00:21:08.740 these collection of completely corrupt, inferior, unelected district judges, to a certain extent,

00:21:13.820 circuit court judges. This was something that started very early in the administration,

00:21:18.580 where you just had a bunch of judges with no authority to do this, nonetheless saying,

00:21:23.380 hey, Mr. President, we get that you're the head of the executive branch, but you don't get to do

00:21:27.060 anything unless you get unanimous consent from a bunch of chuckleheads with law degrees who

00:21:31.660 managed to somehow get appointments to district courts. And I think there was a strategic

00:21:35.680 calculation made early on that rather than taking them head on immediately and saying, 1.00

00:21:41.380 we're not going along with your stupid lawless nonsense here, you can issue all the opinions 1.00

00:21:45.660 you want. We're not going along with them. We're not going to pretend they're valid. And we're 1.00

00:21:50.300 going to do what we're going to do. And if the Supreme Court wants to step in and somehow back

00:21:53.820 you up, they can have at it. And I think now, whether it was at the advice of the White House

00:21:58.460 counsel's office or the AG, I think Trump now understands that he's been in a bit of a hole

00:22:03.040 by how his administration has decided to handle these courts. And when you add that up to all the

00:22:08.580 other missteps with Bondi, the appearances, the embarrassing hearings, the Epstein thing,

00:22:13.520 I don't see how Trump had any other decision to make other than it's time for you to go and we're going to put someone else in there.

00:22:21.420 You made some of these comments in a taped interview we did for our AM Update podcast, which we release every day.

00:22:26.520 And my husband and I were listening to it this morning, as we always do, over our coffee.

00:22:30.040 And he you really gave him a lot to think about.

00:22:32.460 He was saying my husband was saying, like, how good your points were and was saying, you know,

00:22:37.100 how is it that we have all these district court judges who have lifetime appointments who want

00:22:40.920 to, you know, ding Trump and pretend that they're little mini presidents and get plaudits at the

00:22:46.020 Georgetown cocktail parties with no skin in the game? Like they don't care anymore if they get

00:22:50.460 chastised by the circuit courts above them who, you know, depending on the jurisdiction, never

00:22:54.960 will chastise them anyway. The only chance is when it goes up to the Supreme Court. They don't care.

00:22:59.800 They all hate Trump so much. They have such TDS. We never impeach them. We do abide by their

00:23:05.100 rulings, you know, anyway, you persuaded him. And if people missed AM update this morning,

00:23:09.120 you missed something good. You can still go back and listen to it on YouTube or on podcast.

00:23:13.260 Here's the other thing. The Tulsi news, I really hope not. It's the Guardian, Saurabh. I don't know

00:23:18.560 how great the Guardian sources are inside the administration and what the motive here might be.

00:23:24.600 I believe Tulsi Gabbard wants to stay and that she doesn't think her neck is on the chopping block,

00:23:30.960 But the report is that it is. I'm going to read what the Guardian has reported.

00:23:37.360 Trump has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his DNI, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy meeting Joe Kent.

00:23:45.880 It's not clear that Trump will actually fire her over the episode. There's no standout candidate to take the job.

00:23:51.380 It's an ominous development for Gabbard that he's doing this polling, given that he does tend to poll his advisers when he starts to seriously consider whether he should change.

00:24:00.960 a post. The nature of Joe Kent's departure and his criticism of the war had already angered Trump,

00:24:06.940 but he expressed particular frustration about Gabbard seemingly defending Joe Kent and appearing

00:24:12.180 reluctant to defend the administration's position to attack Iran. He was asked on March 29th,

00:24:18.980 just days ago, whether he still had confidence in Tulsi on Air Force One. Here's what he said

00:24:23.620 in SOT1. She's a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn't make

00:24:33.100 somebody not available to serve. Okay. That was pretty tepid. Yeah. It doesn't make somebody

00:24:42.060 unavailable to serve. Like this is not a ringing endorsement. Yeah. I think here's what's happened

00:24:49.120 is what my sources in the administration,

00:24:52.240 including lots of people who've in the security apparatus

00:24:54.940 or the Pentagon, this is what they tell me,

00:24:57.140 is that the so-called restraint camp,

00:25:00.280 people who are conservative

00:25:01.620 but believe that the U.S. should leave forever wars,

00:25:05.180 especially wars of regime change,

00:25:06.980 and especially in the Middle East behind,

00:25:08.780 the people who want to pivot away from that

00:25:10.700 and focus either on domestic development

00:25:13.120 or because they see China as the greater threat.

00:25:15.740 those people of whom Tulsi was very much one, as everyone pointed out, like her 2020 campaign

00:25:22.240 sold T-shirts that said no war with Iran. Those people won many of the staffing battle inside

00:25:28.420 the administration, meaning they got these jobs up and down the Pentagon, the intelligence community

00:25:34.720 and so on. And but what's happened is that that's not who the people who ultimately made the really,

00:25:41.440 really big policy call, which is to invade Iran. Mark Levin did. It's these outside, 0.97

00:25:46.620 they call them outside voices like Mark Levin, like Senator Lindsey Graham, like Senator Tom

00:25:51.600 Cotton, these kind of uber hawks. Miriam Adelson, who has the president's ear very close. 1.00

00:25:57.000 She's our real president. Well, I wouldn't go so far, but I'll let you say so you say.

00:26:02.480 I'm being facetious, but she's her two hundred million dollars really did get her a bang for 1.00

00:26:07.380 her buck. And so so, you know, at some point that that's going to come to a head is there

00:26:11.540 are these people in the administration who were brought on on the premise that this was going to

00:26:15.820 be the the administration that was not going to do this one thing, which is to launch a war against

00:26:21.280 Iran, a big war, especially rather than like a quick intervention. So here they are. What do 0.99

00:26:27.480 they do? And all of them are facing this pressure. Do they just like grind it out and grit their

00:26:32.500 teeth and do you know execute policies that ultimately leave them unhappy and feel like

00:26:37.700 this against their conscience i think she's prepared to do that it may well be or do they 0.65

00:26:42.700 resign or even if they don't want to resign do they get um you know thrown out for lack of

00:26:48.520 sufficient enthusiasm and i think maybe she's in that third right right or lack of sufficient

00:26:54.120 enthusiasm or in her case there is a tie to joe kent and if the president is somehow

00:26:58.560 hanging Joe Kent around her. Yeah, he could potentially make her suffer for it. But Sean,

00:27:03.980 I mean, we can't, to lose Joe Kent and then to lose Tulsi Gabbard too, it's like the restrainer

00:27:10.560 wing of the Republican Party, which is already unhappy with Trump. If he fires Tulsi, that's

00:27:17.960 not going to help the poll numbers. He doesn't need to give the neocons another gift. He needs

00:27:23.340 to worry about the other part of the Republican Party that feels as Tulsi does, or at least as

00:27:29.420 she did prior to joining the administration. I'm assuming she secretly feels the same way,

00:27:33.000 just keeping a quiet out of loyalty to him, which is we don't want this war.

00:27:37.180 Right. So I have something of a different perspective. Having been a staffer, I worked

00:27:41.260 on the Hill for a long time. I worked for a presidential campaign. And when you're a staffer,

00:27:45.700 you have, I think there's a certain code you need to adopt, which is that you don't matter.

00:27:50.440 You are there entirely to serve the person that you're working for. And Joe Kent was a staffer.

00:27:56.320 Tulsi's a staffer. You might even say J.D. is a staffer. The only important one there is Donald

00:28:02.140 Trump. And I think as a staffer, when you have made the decision internally that I can't work

00:28:07.520 for this person because I can't in good conscience implement these policies, I personally find it

00:28:13.520 distasteful to see people do the big public spectacle. Here's why I'm quitting. I think

00:28:18.740 you have a responsibility to quietly quit and go your separate ways. Now, in defense of Joe Kent,

00:28:24.980 he could have done what so many people in Washington have done for decades, which is

00:28:29.280 stew privately and then do everything he possibly could to backstab and delegitimize the person he's

00:28:36.140 working for. Okay, that's what everyone in Washington does. So bless him for actually

00:28:41.500 having a- Old-fashioned way. Yeah, taking a stand and saying, I can't do this. But I have a hard

00:28:46.640 time faulting Trump for being disappointed with that. Because if there's one thing Trump cannot

00:28:50.680 stand, it's number one, being disloyal, and number two, making yourself the story over him.

00:28:55.420 And I love Tulsi. I think she's great. I think she's a very important voice to have in there.

00:29:00.000 But I don't think you can be surprised when Trump says, hey, this was your guy,

00:29:03.840 and he went and did that. Are you really on my team? I think that's probably a fair question.

00:29:09.920 Right. And I think he accurately senses her skepticism about the war. And maybe he just

00:29:14.220 doesn't want that right now because he wants all loyalists around him to promote his agenda.

00:29:18.380 But then that's how you make really big mistakes is the only people who, I mean,

00:29:23.140 there's a video going around kind of a downfall, like it's a Hitler movie,

00:29:27.620 making fun of the decision to go to war. And the Trump in it says, like, I'm in this because I

00:29:33.880 just brought so many askers around me and no one to say, hey, like Mr. President, Iran is not like

00:29:40.580 Venezuela or Iran is not like Iraq, it's going to be a while and it's going to be a big war. 0.95

00:29:45.640 I think, you know, like loyalty is very important. But sometimes loyalty means actually putting your

00:29:52.040 neck out there and saying, Mr. President, this is a really bad decision. Yeah, because there's

00:29:56.440 no way Trump isn't seeing the collapse of the coalition that put him in office. You know,

00:30:01.500 the latest polling out we've talked on the show this week about the loss of the Hispanic voters,

00:30:06.480 the loss of the young voters, the loss of the men. He's lost men, young men in particular,

00:30:12.300 but men across the board now no longer favor Donald Trump. And of course, the women have

00:30:16.220 hated him for a long time. Now today, the latest is he's lost the working class, 0.98

00:30:20.820 the working class vote for Trump, which has always been his bedrock, is now he's underwater

00:30:26.440 with them. So he sees this and he looks around for like a clean way to get out of Iran. It's not 0.97

00:30:32.400 there. And it's because of this escalation trap that Professor Pape has been talking about that

00:30:37.080 we're falling into. And then last night, there were reports that he was going to go out and

00:30:42.160 announce that we were pulling out, we were de-escalating. It wasn't true. I heard nothing

00:30:48.640 new last night. I heard a restatement of his truth social posts, which basically say we're staying.

00:30:56.560 He said maybe two to three weeks, but he said he wants the Iranians to do what we want them to do. 0.98

00:31:02.320 to cut a deal, or we're going to do all the stuff he said in the True Social post, which is bomb

00:31:06.600 their electric plants and their energy plants. He didn't mention the desalination plants, which he

00:31:11.960 said in the True Social. But did you hear anything new? And what did you make of last night's

00:31:16.020 White House address? Well, I did hear one thing that was new, which is in a very disturbing way,

00:31:21.000 is the president has said, you know, it's not possible. It's not possible for the U.S. to pay

00:31:27.880 for Medicaid, Medicare, daycare, quote, we're fighting wars. And now wait, wait, hold that

00:31:34.840 thought that because that wasn't at the White House address. Correct. But he did. But this is

00:31:40.040 a separate story. And it's we can get into it. Yeah, you're right. That's where the working

00:31:43.280 at the White House. They put a post up on YouTube, apparently erroneously of his remarks to this

00:31:51.380 private group. And there was a devastating soundbite by Trump. It's now been pulled down.

00:31:57.580 but everybody has it. We all have the feed that was up there for some time. And here's the sound

00:32:02.600 bite to which you refer in SOT 9. Because the United States can't take care of daycare. 1.00

00:32:09.120 That has to be up to a state. We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states.

00:32:15.140 We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. You got to

00:32:20.240 let a state take care of daycare and they should pay for it too. They should pay. They have to

00:32:25.180 raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them

00:32:30.040 to make up. But it's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these

00:32:36.440 individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal. We have to take care

00:32:42.240 of one thing, military protection. So that is a big departure from the Trump of 2016, from the

00:32:52.100 Trump of 2020 and the Trump of 2024. The whole thing with Trump was he repeatedly said, I am

00:32:59.040 not going to touch your entitlements. I am not going to touch your entitlements, including in

00:33:03.720 the 2024 GOP, the Republican platform. One of the planks is, you know, protect and preserve

00:33:10.040 entitlements. And that means Social Security, Medicare, and there are even White House

00:33:15.620 statements you can find in which that says we are not going to touch Medicaid either.

00:33:19.360 Now, for the voters who are the marginal voters whom Trump brought into his coalition in 2016, then again in 2020 and even bigger in 2024, these are I'm not talking about the MAGA hardcore, the MAGA hardcore.

00:33:33.100 If he converted to Shia Islam tomorrow, they would continue. 1.00

00:33:36.400 But I'm talking about those marginal voters, half of Hispanic men, a fifth of African-American men, young men who are antiwar.

00:33:44.120 For those people, what stood out about Trump was that unlike Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, the kind of old Republican Party of 2015, he would say, I'm going to protect your entitlements and the foreign wars have been a disaster.

00:33:57.820 This is the complete reversal from that, because he's saying Medicaid, Medicare, all of these things are under the under the chopping under chopping block, potentially, and it should be a state problem.

00:34:09.500 Maybe we give them some discount, which is not how they're set up, certainly not for Medicare.

00:34:14.120 And then but what is not on the chopping block is the war I just launched in Iran, which is going to add at a minimum is going to cost 200 billion, which is what is being asked for from Congress.

00:34:25.660 So that's like literally a switcheroo. And I'm sorry, I know that was not from the from the the the original address he gave us.

00:34:33.640 I didn't hear anything new in the address last night. No clear timetable, you know, no sense of even like again, the shifting of the mission.

00:34:41.360 Is it to open the strait? Is it to denuclearize? Is it regime change? All of these things, depending on which Trump you ask or which member of the cabinet, it shifts literally every 12 hours.

00:34:51.820 So whatever. It was another address. It sounds like we're in for the big war.

00:34:55.540 It shifts along with a message, no matter who it's from, of we've been perfectly clear from the start.

00:35:02.240 And then what follows is some new like another explanation that isn't clear. But OK, whatever.

00:35:08.880 I mean, I really don't care. Like I don't, I don't, I don't care anymore about like the retroactive justifications. I just want us to get out and I don't care what excuse we have to use. I'm perfectly happy to go along with the excuse. I really am. I just, just get out. Like his, I hope his advisors tell him they'll buy it. Yes. Just get out. The straight, it's not fair to the Europeans to say it's your fault. I mean, it's your problem now. The straight of Hormone is being closed. You deal with it. It's not fair, but I don't care about that either.

00:35:34.640 I just want us out. I don't want any more troops over there. And I think he can do it if enough

00:35:39.740 people get in his ears and if enough people show him these polls, Sean. But your thoughts on

00:35:43.600 both the soundbite we ran just there and on the address last night.

00:35:47.520 Yeah. So I was actually pretty encouraged by the address last night. And I am where you are. Like,

00:35:52.560 I don't think this was a wise action to take. I think it's a distraction. I think it's making

00:35:56.560 it harder to do things that need to be done here domestically. And it was the domestic agenda that

00:36:01.380 got him reelected. But what I saw, I saw a couple of things. So he talked about a few different

00:36:07.480 things. He said the objectives were largely completed. He said Iran was no longer really

00:36:12.020 a threat. It's a direct quote, that regime change wasn't a goal, that there were maybe two to three

00:36:16.440 weeks left, and that the Strait of Hormuz is just going to have to open up on its own.

00:36:20.600 So what I saw in that was an admission that, hey, we're not going to do this big ground invasion to

00:36:25.520 open up the strait. It's not our problem. Look, we may have been the reason it got screwed up.

00:36:29.380 You're going to have to deal with it. I was encouraged by all that because it suggests to me that he understands that this is not popular, that people didn't want it, that it's a distraction, that it's hurting him.

00:36:40.620 And it reminded me of a New York Post article that ran right after the war was launched.

00:36:46.080 And there was a quote in it that was very uncharacteristically Trump, where he said something along the lines of, well, I don't care what the polls say.

00:36:54.280 It's the right thing. I need to do it. I don't care what the polls say.

00:36:56.660 And it's very, very rare for Trump to ever say something like that because it's an implicit

00:37:02.620 admission that what he's doing isn't popular. I think he's known all along that this was going

00:37:08.120 to be a drag, but for whatever reason, he felt compelled to do it. He felt he had to do it.

00:37:12.560 The overall vibe and impression I got from that speech last night was a president who

00:37:17.440 understood that it's a drag on him, it needs to be wrapped up, and it's time to move on.

00:37:22.260 And say what you will about Trump. Unlike, I think, every other president I have experienced and seen as an American, the man does listen. He has a pretty incredible political radar and political instinct. It's how he got elected twice, three times, depending on where you sit. The guy's not an idiot. He's not a political neophyte. He survived attempts to imprison and bankrupt and even murder him. And he's in president again.

00:37:46.260 So I was encouraged because I think I saw a president who understands this thing's got to get wrapped up and we got to move on.

00:37:53.580 I hope you're right.

00:37:54.660 I get a little worried when I see, you know, Levin tweeting out perfect speech.

00:37:58.420 So I'm like, whoa, wait, why is he so happy?

00:38:01.100 I get nervous, but maybe it's true. 0.99

00:38:04.160 Maybe we're not going to use all those ground troops that we sent there, the some 5,000.

00:38:07.960 We've got 50,000 in the region now, which is 10,000 more than normal.

00:38:11.980 Or there's always the possibility that the speech telegraphing a wind down over the next

00:38:17.220 few weeks was a head fake and that we are going to see the use of those ground troops.

00:38:21.960 How did you read it?

00:38:24.000 I simply don't know.

00:38:25.400 I think I just would not count on this being I want I want Sean to be right.

00:38:31.960 I want this to be basically an indication of we're going to like do a bit more.

00:38:37.540 And so it'll look like we've really hurt the Iranians now. 1.00

00:38:40.340 And then that gives him domestic justification to to leave. I hope that that's correct. But, oh, you know, the pattern has been one of has been on a kind of escalatory ladder.

00:38:52.480 And so what I worry is two kinds of ground deployments that either or or both, I think would be terrible. One is to try to take this Karg Island or some portion of Iran's southern shore. The problem with that is that that area, the Iranians have so fortified. And I watch Iranian state TV and you can say, yeah, it's all their propaganda and stuff. 0.95

00:39:13.640 But at some point, there's some nexus between propaganda and reality. And I think the Iranians really, really want that to happen because it'll get them a chance to get up close and get far more U.S. deaths than they've been able to achieve, even if it means they also rack up lots of deaths. 1.00

00:39:32.080 But to them, it's like it's martyrdom, right? They like glory in it. So they don't mind that. But if they can rack up like more kills and it provides a static target to if you're landing on an island, it's pretty easy for them to like drone it, you know, and other forms of targeting that they can do.

00:39:50.180 That's one. The other, which is, I think, even crazier, is this idea of landing special forces to try to retrieve several hundred pounds of enriched uranium, which are in tunnels. And obviously the Iranians aren't like cartoon villains to keep all their enriched uranium in one underground site. It's multiple tunnel cities across the country where they've placed these. 0.84

00:40:13.700 So the idea of sending in special forces on this, to me, it seems like a wild goose chase.

00:40:19.600 So I laugh because it's but it's grim because it's also obviously very, very it's a very dangerous thing to do for those for the special forces operators.

00:40:28.740 So, I mean, like the only way to do the really big thing of, quote unquote, defeating Iran is to do an invasion that takes 500000 troops at a minimum. 0.94

00:40:38.540 And that's what Mark Levin really wants.

00:40:40.980 It's obvious from all of live-in type messaging.

00:40:44.700 It'll become a U.S. problem for two decades.

00:40:48.040 Short of that, let's not go there.

00:40:51.320 Let's just leave.

00:40:52.120 I mean, I'm just saying, let's please leave.

00:40:54.160 But my problem is I just can't be sure that in order to maintain credibility, he's not

00:40:59.440 tempted by the escalation trap that eventually leads to the 500,000.

00:41:04.260 Because why isn't he leaving now?

00:41:06.040 I mean, I think last night should have been, we're leaving.

00:41:08.520 We did a lot.

00:41:09.360 Here are all the great things we did.

00:41:10.540 and we're piecing out.

00:41:11.800 Like, I don't really know what's happening

00:41:13.180 over two to three weeks.

00:41:14.100 They said that they hit all of their targets.

00:41:16.480 They said they were running out of military targets

00:41:18.420 because our, of course, our Air Force has been so effective.

00:41:21.380 So what are we hitting?

00:41:22.380 What are we doing over these three weeks?

00:41:23.780 And, you know, is it going to be escalatory?

00:41:27.440 Guys, got to run.

00:41:28.500 Thank you both so much for coming on today.

00:41:30.020 Really appreciate it.

00:41:30.840 Thank you.

00:41:31.800 See you both.

00:41:33.820 Okay, coming up, more reaction to the Iran speech

00:41:36.540 last night and an in-depth interview

00:41:38.640 with the real live American spy.

00:41:41.680 I'm gonna ask him everything about the CIA spying on you

00:41:46.080 and MKUltra and all the stuff

00:41:50.040 that you ever wanted to know about the CIA.

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00:42:54.760 No missed calls, no missed connections.

00:42:57.060 my next guest is a former cia officer who spent more than a decade inside the agency

00:43:07.880 eventually rising to become chief of counterterrorism operations in pakistan

00:43:12.380 at the height of the war on terror after 9-11 and that's some responsibility during his time there

00:43:18.340 he was involved in high stakes operations against al-qaeda including efforts tied to the capture

00:43:22.820 of a senior operative. After leaving the agency in 2004 to work in the private sector,

00:43:28.920 his life took a dramatic turn. During an interview with ABC News in 2007,

00:43:34.720 he became the first U.S. official to publicly confirm the CIA's use of waterboarding on terror

00:43:40.760 suspects. And at the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do.

00:43:45.420 And as time has passed, and as September 11th has moved farther and farther back into history, I think I've changed my mind.

00:43:55.880 And I think that waterboarding is probably something that we shouldn't be in the business of doing.

00:43:59.480 Why do you say that now?

00:44:01.400 Because we're Americans and we're better than that.

00:44:04.640 But at the time, you didn't feel that way.

00:44:06.500 At the time, I was so angry, and I wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the United States,

00:44:13.980 that I felt it was the only thing we could do.

00:44:16.440 And with Zabeda, you think that was successful?

00:44:18.360 It was.

00:44:19.320 And we have reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was also waterboarded.

00:44:22.840 I was out of it by then, but it's my understanding that he was also waterboarded.

00:44:26.940 But those were really the only two?

00:44:28.680 To the best of my knowledge, yes.

00:44:30.220 And bottom line, as you sit here now, do you think that was worth it?

00:44:33.180 Yes.

00:44:33.520 Did it compromise American principles or did it save American lives or both?

00:44:37.220 I think both. It may have compromised our principles, at least in the short term.

00:44:42.700 That interview put him at the center of a national firestorm over interrogation techniques and U.S. policy in the war on terror.

00:44:50.720 Years later, Kiriakou was charged under the Espionage Act and ultimately pleaded guilty, with the feds breathing down his neck, to revealing the identity of two covert CIA officers to journalists.

00:45:02.940 He believes he was targeted for speaking out about the enhanced interrogation program.

00:45:06.500 He ultimately spent just under two years behind bars.

00:45:10.260 John says he has no regrets about speaking out.

00:45:12.440 And in recent years, he's become a major player on the podcast scene, revealing some of the

00:45:16.440 agency's tactics and strategies and speaking out about Jeffrey Epstein and what really

00:45:21.120 motivates U.S. foreign policy decisions.

00:45:25.660 Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou joins me now.

00:45:30.200 John, what a pleasure to meet you.

00:45:31.220 Oh, the pleasure is all mine.

00:45:32.340 Thanks for the invitation.

00:45:34.080 Of course.

00:45:34.800 I'm really looking forward to this discussion

00:45:36.360 and I've been enjoying your podcast tours as well.

00:45:38.860 Thank you very much.

00:45:39.140 So you're on a lot of places and I'm like,

00:45:40.300 I gotta know this guy.

00:45:41.780 There's so much I wanna go over.

00:45:43.400 Before we get to your amazing story and background,

00:45:45.700 which is spectacular,

00:45:47.340 can I just get your reaction

00:45:48.980 on where we are right now in this Iran war?

00:45:51.020 Because you know a lot about this

00:45:52.220 and you've got, I know, strong thoughts

00:45:54.260 on what we're doing over there.

00:45:56.040 Did you hear anything last night

00:45:57.540 that encouraged you in any way?

00:45:59.560 Not really. What I had been hoping for, having watched Donald Trump for the last six plus years, longer than six plus years, 10 plus years, I was hoping that he would declare victory and announce that the boys are coming home.

00:46:18.380 And that's not what we saw.

00:46:20.300 What we saw was that we're winning or we won, which I don't believe we are.

00:46:25.560 And and we're going to keep fighting for weeks.

00:46:28.720 That's probably going to stretch into into months.

00:46:31.480 But one of the things that really disturbed me the most was the president threatened again to attack Iran's infrastructure, specifically its electrical grid.

00:46:39.540 And that is quite literally a war crime. 0.54

00:46:42.680 It's very unusual for a president to go on TV and announce, I'm going to commit a war crime.

00:46:48.540 But that's what we saw last night.

00:46:50.620 You know, and I think that we made a policy decision to accept and to believe Israeli intelligence at face value.

00:47:04.960 I think that the Israelis had a vested interest in lying to us and pulling us into this war to do their dirty work for them. 0.99

00:47:12.680 And that's exactly what happened.

00:47:14.600 The Iranians weren't the threat to us.

00:47:17.980 Yep.

00:47:18.640 I mean, it seemed clear because the administration admitted it early on.

00:47:21.840 And then when they realized that the public had a strong reaction to that, started changing

00:47:25.860 that story.

00:47:28.040 I always get worried when I see Mark Levin happy or Lindsey Graham happy.

00:47:32.560 And they were very happy last night, which alarmed me.

00:47:36.240 Lindsey Graham was on Sean Hannity's program.

00:47:38.700 Listen to this.

00:47:39.620 Five.

00:47:40.140 Do you believe this is pretty much wrapped up in two to three weeks?

00:47:46.660 In two or three weeks, we'll have completed the objective of destroying their ballistic

00:47:50.860 missile program.

00:47:52.100 In about two to three weeks, those objectives will have been met.

00:47:55.760 And how does this movie end?

00:47:57.600 What people don't realize is that they were two to three weeks away, Iran, from going

00:48:02.440 from 60% to 90% enrichment.

00:48:05.960 Trump said, okay, I've got two or three weeks to act.

00:48:08.820 I'm going to act now two to three weeks that I had enough material to make eight or 10

00:48:13.480 nuclear weapons and Trump blew up their enrichment facilities so they couldn't go from 60 to

00:48:18.100 90.

00:48:18.680 But what I learned tonight, Iran's going to have a choice in two to three weeks.

00:48:22.960 By the way, I don't even think they have two or three weeks, Senator.

00:48:26.140 That's two or three weeks when their infrastructure would be blown up.

00:48:29.620 Now, we have two or three weeks left to achieve our military objectives, destroying their

00:48:34.440 missile program, making sure they could never have a pathway to a nuclear bomb and putting them out

00:48:39.200 of the state-sponsored terrorism business. We're about two or three weeks away. But at the end of

00:48:43.840 two or three weeks, what happens next? Wow. Do you think he's trying to get a certain time frame

00:48:49.380 in our heads, John? Seems to me like something might happen in the next two or three weeks.

00:48:57.160 This is ridiculous. I don't like this guy is driving our foreign policy. You know, Megan, 0.89

00:49:02.120 And I have to say, in all the years that I was in the CIA, literally every time an Israeli 1.00

00:49:09.420 prime minister came to the United States and they come all the time, regardless of who

00:49:14.200 happened to be the president, whether it was Ronald Reagan all the way into Donald Trump's

00:49:19.360 first term, every single Israeli prime minister would come and say, please bomb Iran, please

00:49:24.600 bomb Iran, please bomb Iran. 1.00

00:49:25.940 And every president would say, no, we're not going to bomb Iran until this president.

00:49:32.760 And the Israelis from 1986, the Israelis have been saying that the Iranians were six months away from a nuclear bomb.

00:49:42.000 Just simply not true.

00:49:44.480 The CIA in the last 20 years has written two national intelligence estimates.

00:49:49.340 Now, this is a sense of the entire intelligence community concluding both times that the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program, besides the fact that Ayatollah Khamenei, the late Ayatollah Khamenei, issued a fatwa, a religious decree in 2003 saying that it was a sin to have a nuclear weapons program and that the government was forbidden from doing so.

00:50:12.480 There's no evidence that they had a nuclear weapons program except for what the Israelis have been saying, and I think the Israelis made it up. 0.99

00:50:20.040 And our own intelligence assessment, as we heard from Telsey Gabbard when she testified publicly, is that they did not have a nuclear weapon and that they were not close to getting a nuclear weapon.

00:50:29.340 And even our president told us that their nuclear weapons program was obliterated last June.

00:50:34.020 So this is why many of us are having trouble believing anything other than Israel had an agenda, and we decided to help them, as you point out, the same agenda they've had for many years.

00:50:42.480 there's much, much more to do. John, stick with us. We've got to take a quick break and we will

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00:51:50.380 You've been hearing me talk a lot about Pure Talk lately.

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00:53:22.540 Back with me now, former CIA counterterrorism officer, John Kiriakou.

00:53:27.560 John, so you're at GW University from 82 to 86,

00:53:31.620 a boy from Pennsylvania, and Middle Eastern studies is your thing. And one day a professor

00:53:40.140 pulls you aside and makes an extraordinary admission and offer to you. Tell us.

00:53:45.800 Right. I got a degree in Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University. And to tell you

00:53:50.880 the truth, I wasn't ready to go into real life yet. So I stayed for a master's degree

00:53:54.740 in legislative affairs with a focus being on American foreign policy analysis.

00:54:00.740 And I was taking a class called the psychology of leadership with Dr. Gerald Post, who was an

00:54:07.060 eminent psychiatrist. He gave us an assignment, quite a controversial assignment to shadow our

00:54:12.220 bosses and then to write a psychological profile of our bosses. I did that. And

00:54:18.980 it was a, I worked for a sociopath and I called him on it. And so I got my paper back at the end

00:54:31.080 of the week and I got an A and Dr. Post wrote in the margin, please see me after class. So I went

00:54:37.100 to his office to see him. He had me close the door. And then he said, look, I'm not really a

00:54:42.800 professor here. I'm a CIA officer undercover as a professor here. I'm looking for people who might

00:54:49.220 fit into the CIA's culture. And I think you would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be

00:54:54.260 a CIA officer? And the truth is, you know, I wanted to go into public service. I wanted to

00:54:58.700 see the world. But the real truth was I was getting married in six weeks and I didn't have a job.

00:55:03.940 So I said, yeah, sure. I'd love to join the CIA. And the next thing I knew, I was in the CIA.

00:55:10.960 So what was it about you? Just your ability to profile people?

00:55:15.420 That was the start of it. Yes. It turned out that I was hired by the office that he had created

00:55:20.860 about six years earlier called the Political Psychology Division. So I was assigned to Iraq.

00:55:26.540 I became Saddam Hussein's classified biographer. And I did that for years before making what at 0.71

00:55:34.740 the time was a very unusual switch to counterterrorism operations. But the agency gave

00:55:40.860 me opportunity after opportunity. I learned to speak fluent Arabic that went with the fluent

00:55:46.300 Greek that I had. And yeah, I mean, one day you're sitting in a college class and the next day you're

00:55:52.760 in the Oval Office trying to think of, you know, how not to sound like an idiot when you're speaking 1.00

00:55:56.640 to the president. And yeah, the rest, the rest was history. And so do you do you are you was 1.00

00:56:04.180 this the kind of hire that you could tell anybody about? Or like when you joined the CIA? Or do they

00:56:07.780 say no, your cover is going to be you two are a university professor? Well, at the beginning,

00:56:11.860 I was an overt employee. So I wasn't under formal cover. But what that meant, for all intents and

00:56:19.100 purposes was that I could tell those closest to me that I was working for the CIA. And then that

00:56:24.440 was it. I mean, even my own wife, she knew that I was a CIA officer. She had no idea what I did,

00:56:32.020 which caused all kinds of problems later. And frankly, it led to our divorce.

00:56:35.640 You know, you come home and you say, she says, how was your day? You say, great.

00:56:41.240 Would you do nothing? Who would you talk to? Nobody. And then your phone rings at 11 o'clock

00:56:47.360 and you say, you know, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plane. And then you leave until

00:56:51.160 six in the morning. And that's just not conducive to a smooth marriage.

00:56:58.000 A healthy marriage. Did you really use little phrases like that? Like the pearl is in the

00:57:01.780 river? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes if you're not close to the person that you're trying to trigger

00:57:08.160 an emergency meeting with, it would be easy to say, hey, Constantine, let's have coffee. I'll

00:57:14.800 meet you tomorrow morning at nine. Well, tomorrow morning at nine really means tomorrow morning at

00:57:19.840 eight in the abandoned parking lot behind the sweater factory, because you've arranged that

00:57:26.080 all in advance. So if somebody's listening to your phone, and nowadays everybody's listening

00:57:30.360 to your phone, they don't have any idea what you're going to do. Well, I was interested in

00:57:35.380 your, I want to get to all that, but I do, I am interested in your relationship with your wife.

00:57:39.600 You've had two wives, as I understand it. And I heard you tell the story in part, and I wanted

00:57:44.480 to hear the rest of it. So you were in Greece and I think this is the first wife, right? My first

00:57:50.680 wife, your son, your son said something shocking to you. Can you tell us that story? Yeah. I was

00:57:57.500 so focused on the job and, and trying not to get killed. You know, there was a, there was a terrorist

00:58:04.900 group active in Greece at the time called revolutionary organization, 17 November. That

00:58:09.960 was the whole reason why i was in greece at the at the in the at the basis of it all uh it was to

00:58:18.260 to try to infiltrate this group to disrupt their attacks and really to destroy the group from the

00:58:22.320 inside they'd killed the cia station chief two u.s defense attaches the turkish ambassador the

00:58:27.740 deputy ambassador the minister of finance they just killed they killed 28 people and so she was

00:58:36.740 a first generation American. Her parents were, were from Greece and she inherited her grandmother's

00:58:42.060 house on, on one of the Greek islands. And so she started going to the island on the weekends and

00:58:48.040 taking the kids. I thought that was a great idea. The kids can get to know their cousins. Well,

00:58:54.040 leaving Friday, coming back Sunday became leaving Thursday, coming back Sunday,

00:58:58.600 then leaving Thursday, coming back Monday, the kids are missing school. And then one day I'm

00:59:04.060 shaving getting ready for for work and my then six-year-old is sitting on the floor next to me

00:59:09.560 and we're talking about his day and what his day is going to look like and then he said to me I

00:59:14.440 told mommy not to kiss uncle Stelios on the lips I told her to kiss only you on the lips and she 1.00

00:59:20.740 told me to mind my own business I felt like I had been electrocuted and so I went into the bedroom

00:59:27.280 and I kicked the bed. She said, what? I said, who is Stelios? And she said, where did you hear

00:59:34.520 that name? I said, who is he? And she said, don't believe everything a six-year-old says.

00:59:41.000 And I said to her, and I said it very plainly and clearly at the time, I'm going to leave right now

00:59:46.740 before I do something that's going to dog me for the rest of my life. And so I didn't even

00:59:52.520 finished shaving. I finished shaving at work. I got in the car and I drove to the embassy and it

00:59:58.180 was all downhill from there. As it turned out, 17 November murdered the British defense attache a

01:00:04.680 few months later, Stephen Saunders. Stephen was a friend of mine. We were next door neighbors.

01:00:09.300 And a couple of months later, they mailed a manifesto to a leftist newspaper and they said

01:00:15.480 in the manifesto, we saw the big spy, but we knew that he was armed and he was

01:00:22.460 driving an armored car. So we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal 0.92

01:00:27.960 Saunders. Well, I got to the office and the chief said, he came just barging into my office. He said,

01:00:34.960 did you see the manifesto? I said, what manifesto? He said, the Saunders manifesto. I said, they

01:00:40.260 didn't leave a Saunders manifesto. He said, no, they released it today and you're in it. I said,

01:00:45.680 what do you mean I'm in it? He said, they set out to kill you that morning. And I said, oh my God. 0.94

01:00:51.400 He said, you have to go.

01:00:53.220 I said, go where?

01:00:54.680 He said, home, like to Washington.

01:00:57.260 I said, I just dropped my kids off at school.

01:00:59.620 I can't just up and go home.

01:01:01.320 He said, listen, you get in an armored car.

01:01:03.780 We're taking you to the airport.

01:01:05.140 We're going to pick up your kids.

01:01:06.520 We're going to pick up your wife. 1.00

01:01:07.720 So we all met up at the airport.

01:01:10.080 And I said to her, I am so sorry.

01:01:12.940 And she said, I want a divorce. 0.79

01:01:15.060 I'm not living like this anymore.

01:01:17.320 And so the plane landed in New York.

01:01:19.520 I caught a connection to Washington. She caught a connection to Cleveland.

01:01:23.660 And that was the end of it. Was that the end of it for Stelios too?

01:01:29.300 Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, they didn't wind up together. Oh no.

01:01:34.380 The guy could barely read. That was, uh, no,

01:01:38.060 she was feeling lonely and it was because I was so focused on the job.

01:01:42.240 It was very hard to maintain a marriage in the CIA. Very much so. Very,

01:01:45.360 very much so. And you know, I'll tell you another thing. Um,

01:01:48.060 Two years later, I was in Pakistan and I'm dating a CIA officer. And in Pakistan, we had this trunk line. So it was just a normal phone, but it was a 202 area code. So it's like you're making a local call. So I think we were like 11 hours ahead of Washington or 10 and a half hours ahead of Washington.

01:02:07.400 And so I would call her every morning when I got to the office because it was already evening the previous day for her.

01:02:15.680 And one of the guys in my branch, they were all retirees in my branch.

01:02:20.660 They were all either former chief or deputy chief of Near Eastern operations.

01:02:27.180 And and so one of them heard me say, OK, I love you.

01:02:31.980 And I hung up the phone and he said, so are there wedding bells in the future?

01:02:36.960 And I said, oh, I don't know.

01:02:38.760 I just got divorced and I really don't want to be a two-time loser. 0.95

01:02:42.660 And he says, two-time loser.

01:02:44.600 He says, I've been married four times. 0.82

01:02:46.420 Jim, how many times have you been married?

01:02:48.160 Jim says, five for me.

01:02:50.020 Bill, how many times have you been married?

01:02:51.760 He says, I have four.

01:02:53.440 Dave, Dave has three. 0.96

01:02:55.140 He says, two-time loser. 0.94

01:02:56.560 Welcome to the CIA, kid. 0.99

01:02:59.220 Wow.

01:03:00.260 I mean, I guess I'm not surprised.

01:03:01.880 It doesn't really breed intimacy.

01:03:03.820 Or honesty.

01:03:04.500 Not to mention your psychological profiling skills, which if used against the wrong person

01:03:10.120 could be an annoyance to a spouse, but it's something you're really good at.

01:03:13.800 And when you're, you know, you're going to do a day trip or something, you're take your

01:03:16.580 kids to the, you know, Luna Park or whatever, and you're taking some crazy way.

01:03:20.500 She says, where are you going?

01:03:22.680 And the answer is, well, I don't want anybody to shoot us on the way there.

01:03:26.320 And that's like a legitimate fear.

01:03:27.940 It's a problem.

01:03:28.440 Yeah.

01:03:29.600 Yes.

01:03:30.440 So tell me about the CIA,

01:03:33.220 because the CIA has a very bad reputation

01:03:35.740 in the circles that I travel in.

01:03:37.340 I think most people are very suspicious of them

01:03:39.320 in today's day and age.

01:03:40.720 They're not supposed to be spying on Americans,

01:03:42.820 but they are.

01:03:44.140 They're masters of the dark arts. 0.95

01:03:45.900 They have people killed.

01:03:47.700 And I think the question is like, how many people?

01:03:51.020 Like Americans? 0.98

01:03:52.180 Like what are the most shocking things they do

01:03:56.100 in your experience that you need people to know about?

01:03:58.420 Americans, that's the $64,000 question right there. The answer is we don't know because they

01:04:05.300 won't tell us. You know, years ago when Senator Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, was

01:04:10.880 questioning then Attorney General Eric Holder, I think it was in the Senate Armed Services

01:04:16.840 Committee, he asked Holder directly, does the president of the United States have the legal

01:04:22.240 authority to assassinate an American citizen? And after some hemming and hawing, Holder said yes.

01:04:29.740 And then he asked a follow-up question. Does the president have the authority to murder an

01:04:33.600 American citizen on U.S. soil? And Holder wouldn't answer the question. Well, we murdered Anwar 0.99

01:04:41.380 Aulaki, who was a bad guy, but had never been charged with a crime. He had never faced his 0.87

01:04:49.300 accusers in a court of law. He had never stood before a jury of his peers. We just decided we

01:04:56.280 didn't like his politics. And so we blew him up. And then a week later, we blew up his 16-year-old

01:05:01.240 son and 16-year-old nephew, also American citizens. They had never been accused of a crime.

01:05:06.780 So either we're going to be a nation of laws or we're not going to be a nation of laws. We have

01:05:12.360 to choose. But we can't pretend to be the one while really being the other. We need to make

01:05:18.120 a policy decision here. But may I answer further, to answer more specifically your question?

01:05:26.260 Way back in the bad old days, in the early 1970s, a dear friend of mine started as a 22-year-old at

01:05:32.760 the agency, and his initial job was in the Counterintelligence Center, which was then

01:05:37.980 headed by the notorious James Jesus Angleton. And on his first day, the secretary was walking him

01:05:45.080 around the office and she pointed to an entire wall of file folders. And she said, you may find

01:05:51.900 yourself alone in the office every once in a while. You are not permitted to look at those

01:05:56.300 files. Well, of course, what's he going to do? He's 22 years old. As soon as he's alone, he's

01:06:00.380 going to run and look at the files. And he said, and now he's in his seventies, he said every

01:06:05.980 single one of those files was on an American citizen. Now that was patently illegal, but they

01:06:12.940 were doing it anyway. We all thought that with the Church Committee and Pike Committee reforms

01:06:19.220 of 1975 and 1976, that we had cleaned all that out. And maybe we did, at least for a while.

01:06:26.360 But September 11th changed everything. And the CIA went back to the battle days with largely

01:06:34.700 the support of the American people, at least for a while, and certainly the support of both

01:06:39.960 democratic and Republican administrations. So, but what about now? Because what I'm noticing

01:06:47.280 is I think post COVID were much more conspiratorial than we were pre because all of our

01:06:53.740 conspiracies came true during the COVID era. So it made, it made everybody like, I trust nothing

01:06:58.760 and no one. But, you know, for example, I know there are a lot of people questioning whether

01:07:04.600 the cia had some control over the butler shooter of president trump right there's been a question

01:07:11.440 about whether they had any knowledge whatsoever about what happened to charlie kirk um do you

01:07:17.940 think that the cia possibly has any role in in cases like that i don't know but i can tell you

01:07:26.680 it's absolutely possible you know when when joe kent whether you like joe kent's politics or not

01:07:32.940 You cannot doubt the man's patriotism. He's walked the walk. And if he says that he was

01:07:41.600 forbidden from having his analysts follow investigative leads, you have to ask why.

01:07:50.360 Why do we not know more about the Butler shooter and the circumstances surrounding the Butler

01:07:59.140 shooting. I grew up 15 miles from Butler. We never missed a county fair and farm show. I've

01:08:04.160 been there a thousand times. That should have been easy to investigate, right? They're all

01:08:10.080 patriotic people. It's a red county and in a red part of the state. And then the president of the

01:08:15.720 United States takes a shot to the ear. So why were comprehensive, full, complete investigations not

01:08:25.000 carried out. Why was Joe Kent told that he could not pursue investigative leads in the Charlie

01:08:29.460 Kirk case? And one other thing about the Charlie Kirk case that I've always been confused about,

01:08:35.300 why is the FBI involved at all? The crime took place in Utah. The shooter is from Utah. He set 0.83

01:08:46.100 out that day from Utah. He went to a location in Utah. This is a state police case for the Utah

01:08:54.140 State Police. Why in the world is the FBI calling the shots unless they know something that we don't

01:08:59.960 know, unless they know something, something that they haven't revealed that indicates, you know,

01:09:05.960 either cross interstate, some investigative lead that came across state lines or some kind of

01:09:14.560 international involvement. But my God, transparency is everything. And like you said, Megan, in the

01:09:20.580 post-COVID era where we've learned definitively that we can't trust what the government is telling

01:09:27.180 us, then wouldn't transparency make that all go away? Well, as I understand it, I haven't really

01:09:36.020 been conspiratorial in my adult life at all, in any part of my life. But I do want to understand

01:09:44.420 the theories because some of them do turn out to be right over time. And as I understand it,

01:09:48.860 the theory kind of revolves around MKUltra.

01:09:52.200 Yeah.

01:09:52.820 Like either, you know, they unleash an operation

01:09:55.760 on a vulnerable target to try to get that target,

01:09:59.540 possibly the shooter and butler,

01:10:01.320 to do what they want him to do.

01:10:03.420 But can you walk me through what you know about MKUltra?

01:10:06.920 Sure, MKUltra was a CIA operation

01:10:10.420 that was conceived in 1952.

01:10:13.280 It began to be implemented in 1953

01:10:15.840 and really took hold in 1955. It did a lot of different things. There were even sub-operations

01:10:24.120 within MKUltra, MKChickWit, MKMidnight something or other, lots of them. The bottom line was this.

01:10:32.160 There was a source that the CIA recruited, a Chinese communist source, who said that the

01:10:38.480 Chinese government was experimenting with mind control. That's where the idea of the Manchurian 0.99

01:10:45.220 candidate came out, which led to a popular movie in the late 1950s starring Frank Sinatra.

01:10:52.080 In fact, the Chinese were not experimenting on mind control. The Russians were,

01:10:56.760 and the source was wrong. But the CIA believed that it was behind the eight ball. And if the

01:11:01.540 Chinese were experimenting in mind control, then we needed, by God, to experiment in mind control 0.99

01:11:07.120 and to figure out if we could sort of create a Chinese zombie who could then work his way through 0.78

01:11:14.520 the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party and take over China and then do away with 0.65

01:11:19.520 communism and we all live happily ever after. That's how it started. So the CIA went about

01:11:25.060 doing this in all of the worst possible ways. Right around the time that MKUltra was being

01:11:31.860 hatched, a scientist in Switzerland invented something called LSD. And LSD did these incredible

01:11:42.320 things. And it could manipulate your mind. You could see colors that didn't exist. You could see

01:11:48.900 people that didn't exist. And maybe if we microdosed people with this new LSD, then maybe

01:11:55.340 we could control their minds. The CIA began by using it on their own people. Now, we know that

01:12:03.200 one of those CIA contractors actually jumped out of a hotel window and committed suicide because

01:12:08.520 he thought he could fly. That's been well documented. Then they decided, you know,

01:12:13.480 maybe experimenting on our own people isn't the best way to go about this. Maybe we should just

01:12:18.940 experiment on random citizens in San Francisco. And so they went to San Francisco. They rented

01:12:26.280 a safe house. They recruited a bunch of prostitutes and sent the prostitutes out on the street to pick 1.00

01:12:33.920 up dates, bring the dates back to the safe house, dose them with LSD without their knowledge,

01:12:40.180 and then try to get them to reveal their innermost secrets just to see if the CIA could collect those.

01:12:48.980 Another part of MKUltra, also in San Francisco, was they decided to create a virus or a bacterium.

01:12:59.040 in this case, it was a bacterium, that they could just push out into the air and see how many people

01:13:07.100 they could infect. They waited until an unusually foggy day where the air is very heavy and sitting

01:13:13.380 close to the ground. And all around the city of San Francisco, as well as on the public transit

01:13:19.060 system, they released this bacterium. And eight people came down with this very rare upper

01:13:26.460 respiratory infection. So then they tried to couple that and the release of the bacterium with

01:13:32.640 the LSD. Can we release LSD into the air? They experimented in a small village in France by

01:13:39.680 dosing the yeast in the village's only bakery with LSD. Everybody in the village ate bread

01:13:50.000 from that bakery and everybody went nuts for a day or two. And so that was another, you know,

01:13:55.520 a successful operation. In the end, nobody's mind was taken over. We didn't bring down Chinese 1.00

01:14:05.400 communism or Russian communism or anything else. It was a failure. But then Congress got wind of

01:14:11.520 it. The church committee got wind of it in 1975 and called the director of central intelligence

01:14:16.600 to testify. And then at the testimony, specifically ordered him to not destroy the documents.

01:14:25.520 He immediately went back to CIA headquarters and told everybody, destroy everything.

01:14:32.000 That's why what we have today is only 15 percent of the MKUltra documents.

01:14:38.340 Everything else was destroyed in 1975.

01:14:40.620 Now, he was held in contempt of Congress and by God, he was fined one hundred and fifty dollars.

01:14:45.420 And right. Yeah. And all the CIA employees chipped in to pay the one hundred fifty dollar fine for him.

01:14:50.860 Yeah. And a negative presumption was against him that he had something to hide.

01:14:54.960 That's exactly right.

01:14:56.120 But I think as a result of that,

01:14:58.380 it's part of the reason why people now suspect

01:15:01.040 government involvement in everything.

01:15:03.260 There it is.

01:15:04.000 You know, the things that we don't feel

01:15:06.080 like we're getting full transparency on,

01:15:08.100 it's a CIA conspiracy or maybe an NSA conspiracy

01:15:11.500 or maybe an FBI conspiracy.

01:15:13.820 And it's undermining what probably are CIA

01:15:19.120 and FBI conspiracies.

01:15:20.500 Do you know what I mean?

01:15:21.060 Like, not everything is a conspiracy by the government,

01:15:23.460 but for sure they are doing some things that we should know about. So how do you tell the

01:15:28.180 difference? I think you're exactly right. And the only way to tell the difference

01:15:31.980 is through robust congressional oversight, something that we have not had since the early

01:15:38.500 1980s. And we're screwed. We're screwed. Because what are they? They're cheerleaders for the CIA 0.95

01:15:44.280 and the FBI on the intelligence committees and on the judiciary committees. They're cheerleaders. 0.96

01:15:50.240 You know, when I got home from prison, I was invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence, and I went there.

01:15:57.720 And there was a Democratic senator there who happens to be a member of the Intelligence Committee.

01:16:03.820 And I went up to him.

01:16:05.540 He came up to me, actually, and he said, hey, welcome home.

01:16:08.920 We were really pulling for you.

01:16:10.900 And I said, thanks, Senator, but I got to tell you, I expected more from you.

01:16:16.140 I thought you would have been more helpful to me.

01:16:18.080 And he got angry and he said, look, it took everything I had just to not lose my security clearance. And I said, oh, you're afraid of them. You're not overseeing them. You're afraid of them. And he walked away from me. But I was right. He was afraid of them. They're all afraid. And so they just tow the line.

01:16:39.960 Well, remember who was it that said about Trump, like you mess with the three letter agency, you mess with CIA and they will make you pay for the rest of your life.

01:16:50.000 That was Chuck Schumer. He said they have nine ways from Sunday to make your life miserable.

01:16:55.180 To make you pay. But here's my question, because I heard you on Diary of a CEO saying the CIA can they can they can rest control of your car.

01:17:07.060 You know, our cars have these big brains now that, I mean, you know, if the car company can't, like whatever the service is, if you get into an accident, you can just sort of say, help me.

01:17:15.740 If they can get in there, sure, I bet it's hackable by somebody else to the point where they could potentially drive your car right off the road.

01:17:22.100 If they could do that, then why would they ever have to do anything more explicit?

01:17:28.480 Why would they ever have to do mind control over anybody at a rally in Pennsylvania if that's what they want?

01:17:34.020 You know, like there are, there would be ways of getting rid of you that would be so undetectable

01:17:38.500 and, and not suspicious that they could be doing that all the time. They wouldn't have to go about

01:17:43.400 mind control, MK ultra LSD. You know what I'm saying? So that to me, that's, that undermines

01:17:48.060 the theory that they're doing any of these public executions explicitly or behind the scenes.

01:17:54.040 I think that's right. But think of it this way too. I'm going to tell you a little funny,

01:17:58.880 little anecdote about one of my promotion panels. I had been working with a psychologist in the CIA's

01:18:05.700 Counterterrorism Center to come up with outside the box ideas on how to recruit spies to steal

01:18:12.140 secrets. And she happened to also sit on my promotion panel. And she said in my promotion

01:18:17.860 panel, in great support of my promotion, she said, John Kiriakou will come up with 40 different ideas

01:18:24.900 for an operation. 36 of them are insane, but four of them are going to be really good.

01:18:30.740 So imagine sitting around the table and somebody comes up with an idea to put an explosive 0.81

01:18:36.040 in Fidel Castro's cigar. Well, that's a stupid idea. If you're going to get close enough to put 1.00

01:18:42.720 an explosive in the cigar, just shoot them in the head, for example, if that's what you really want 1.00

01:18:48.500 to do. So there are a lot of people sitting around a lot of conference room tables at the CIA coming 0.99

01:18:53.360 up with really stupid ideas. And then there are nodding heads all around the table saying, 1.00

01:18:59.280 yeah, that's a great idea. We should do that. So, you know, the bottom line is this. We know

01:19:04.380 thanks to WikiLeaks and the Vault 7 revelations that the CIA can remotely take over your car.

01:19:10.020 They can make you drive off a bridge or into a tree or into an abutment and kill you if they

01:19:17.460 want to. They can turn your smart TV into a microphone. They can reverse engineer your

01:19:23.000 speaker to turn into a microphone so they can listen to everything you're saying, even when

01:19:27.740 the TV is off. The technology is 20 years ahead of what anybody else thinks the technology is.

01:19:36.080 I don't want to be a Pollyanna about it, but they're not supposed to do that without a warrant. 0.99

01:19:40.860 Are they doing that shit without a warrant? Without a warrant. You know, at the CIA. 0.99

01:19:46.100 In training, they used to tell us all the time, our job is to break the law.

01:19:52.260 And I remember saying, yeah, but not here.

01:19:56.280 The job is to break the law over there.

01:19:59.320 I was perfectly happy and on multiple occasions actively participated in breaking into people's houses or offices and planting bugs and cameras.

01:20:08.620 We're the good guys.

01:20:09.700 That's what we have to do.

01:20:10.720 This is to protect the United States.

01:20:12.220 But not here.

01:20:14.620 You need a warrant.

01:20:15.600 And besides, the CIA is forbidden by law from doing anything operationally inside the United

01:20:20.780 States.

01:20:21.220 That's what the FBI is for.

01:20:22.820 I just never understood this.

01:20:24.540 Like, why isn't it that clear to everybody?

01:20:26.940 I don't know.

01:20:29.140 Do you think the FBI is doing similar behaviors or is this all CIA?

01:20:33.680 You know, it was my experience when I was working with the FBI and I worked with the

01:20:37.900 FBI for years and years that they really were sticklers for the law where the CIA wasn't.

01:20:44.240 I remember even saying one time, I'm going to I'm going to fudge the details here for obvious reasons, but they we were talking a couple of us CIA people were talking to a group from the FBI and they were saying what difficulty they were having infiltrating a domestic terrorist group.

01:21:02.580 And I said, oh, no, I got you covered. I said there was this group that that we took care of. We just didn't have access to them. So what we did is we found one of them.

01:21:13.100 It was only like six members of this terrorist group.

01:21:15.800 We found one and we said, hey, listen, Muhammad, your friend Abdullah, I'm from the CIA.

01:21:21.520 And Abdullah told me that that you'd be a good guy for me to talk to because Abdullah works for me.

01:21:27.060 And he said, you'd like to work for me, too.

01:21:29.220 Well, the guy runs screaming from the room, but he goes back and he kills Abdullah.

01:21:33.240 And then we and then we tell Rashid, hey, listen, we were talking about about Abdullah with Muhammad.

01:21:39.360 You know, Muhammad's one of our guys, and he told us that Abdullah was a bad guy.

01:21:44.080 And then Rashad kills Muhammad.

01:21:46.560 And then by the end of the year, this terrorist group doesn't exist anymore.

01:21:51.220 And the FBI guy said, oh, my God, that's so illegal.

01:21:55.400 We couldn't possibly do that.

01:21:58.260 And I was like, oh, it never even occurred to me that that might be illegal.

01:22:01.900 So the FBI does kind of pay closer attention, at least they're supposed to, to what's legal and what's not legal.

01:22:07.600 But with the CIA operating overseas, you know, who cares what's legal and what's not legal?

01:22:13.880 They can do anything they want over there.

01:22:15.680 And what about domestically?

01:22:17.480 I mean, I was a big fan of that show, The Americans.

01:22:20.580 Oh, me too.

01:22:21.100 With Matthew Reese.

01:22:21.840 Wonderful show.

01:22:22.620 Right?

01:22:22.920 It was so good.

01:22:24.400 Is that real?

01:22:25.400 I mean, do you think there are a bunch of foreign spies, like sleeper spies here in America?

01:22:29.920 Oh, yes, yes, yes.

01:22:31.320 That show was written and created by Joe Weisberg.

01:22:34.260 Joe was a colleague of mine in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center.

01:22:36.860 He was a brilliant writer.

01:22:39.020 And I went to the office one day and he walked up to me and he said, hey, listen, I quit

01:22:43.560 this morning.

01:22:44.060 And I was like, what?

01:22:45.220 Why would you do that?

01:22:46.860 And he said, this job is just not for me.

01:22:49.680 I'm not married.

01:22:50.580 I don't have any kids.

01:22:51.480 I'm going to go to Hollywood and find my fortune.

01:22:54.260 And he went to Hollywood and he created the Americans. 0.70

01:22:56.980 And the reason why it was so successful was because it was completely real.

01:23:02.020 Just in the last two years, I happened to live in Arlington, Virginia.

01:23:05.200 In the last two years, one of my neighbors was arrested.

01:23:09.460 She was an elementary school substitute teacher.

01:23:13.220 She was arrested because she was a Russian sleeper agent just sitting in place and waiting 0.93

01:23:19.420 to be activated by the SVR.

01:23:22.260 This is something that the Russians have always been very good at, the long game. 0.86

01:23:27.100 They'll recruit an agent, put them in place, have them pretend to be an American, and just

01:23:31.820 let them sit there for 20 years, 30 years until they need to be activated to carry out some

01:23:36.940 operation. Wow. Wow. I mean, the odds are we've all met one and have no idea. That's incredible

01:23:43.960 to think about that they've been lying and wait. The Russians will play the long game. The Chinese 1.00

01:23:48.580 will play the long game too. That's one of the problems we're up against. They're thinking

01:23:51.800 generationally. They're thinking the next 50 years, how will they be positioned versus how

01:23:57.540 will we be positioned? And this is part of our problem. I just want, forgive me for diverting

01:24:02.740 the discussion, but this just breaking. Pam Bondi is out. As we reported at the top of the show,

01:24:08.800 we had heard she would be. The president just tweeting, Pam Bondi, or posting on True Social,

01:24:14.660 is a great American patriot and a loyal friend who faithfully served as my AG over the past year.

01:24:20.800 She did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown on crime across our country,

01:24:24.180 with murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.

01:24:27.040 We love Pam, and she will be transitioning 1.00

01:24:29.580 to a much-needed and important new job

01:24:32.080 in the private sector

01:24:33.780 to be announced at a date in the near future.

01:24:36.540 Okay, I don't know what that means.

01:24:37.980 And our deputy attorney general

01:24:39.940 and a very talented and respected legal mind,

01:24:42.360 Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as acting AG.

01:24:46.540 So we'll see.

01:24:47.420 The earlier reports with that,

01:24:48.720 he was probably going to give the replacement

01:24:51.440 to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

01:24:54.180 Todd Blanche makes a lot more sense, not only because of his job title, but because I hear

01:24:57.640 he's very well liked over there.

01:24:58.700 That's right.

01:24:59.660 So we shall see.

01:25:01.120 Pam Bondi's officially out.

01:25:02.480 Did you have any thoughts on that?

01:25:03.620 Like, why now?

01:25:05.040 Why is Pam Bondi gone now? 1.00

01:25:06.200 You know, I've always heard the loveliest things about Pam Bondi, that she's a sweetheart 0.99

01:25:13.940 of a person.

01:25:15.140 She's loyal to the president.

01:25:17.180 I also heard that she never really wanted to be attorney general.

01:25:21.460 The president insisted that she be attorney general.

01:25:23.920 And, you know, when when a president calls you and says your country needs you, you say, of course, Mr. President, I'll do whatever the country needs.

01:25:33.040 And I think that's what she did.

01:25:34.400 I think she really wasn't happy in that job.

01:25:36.680 And then after a year, it was probably time to move on.

01:25:41.680 I wonder because, I mean, the reports are that he was unhappy with her, which is why she she got pushed out.

01:25:48.040 But I mean, I will say it's such a thankless job.

01:25:51.040 You can't win.

01:25:51.840 My information is they're all miserable over there in DOJ for good reason.

01:25:55.660 They have way too many cases and way too few bodies.

01:25:58.960 And they had a bunch of people quit over the politics of the administration.

01:26:01.960 So that's even fewer bodies.

01:26:03.400 But like a lot of lawfare, you know, by the Trump administration, against the Trump administration, these judges who think they're mini president.

01:26:09.880 Like, it's just zero free time, zero thanks, zero love, you know, coming back from the public.

01:26:17.400 Whatever Pam Bani is going to do next, especially if it's private sector, I guarantee she's going to be happier. 1.00

01:26:21.840 so we'll see what happens with Todd Blanche. Okay, but back to you. So the CIA doesn't have

01:26:28.960 any real rules overseas. The FBI domestically does. I've heard you say before, another group

01:26:34.500 that has no rules is the Israelis. And that seems really clear right now. I mean, one of the 1.00

01:26:42.400 dynamics of this war has been the president going out there saying, we are talking to somebody. I

01:26:47.760 can't tell you who it is because I'm worried he'll get killed. And then, of course, left unsaid is

01:26:52.020 killed by exactly. Obviously, it's the Israelis. So what was your experience with them? 1.00

01:26:57.600 It was universally negative on in my very first briefing. I had only been on the job as an Iraq

01:27:06.120 analyst for six weeks. My boss said to me, I want you to participate in a group briefing. You're

01:27:11.880 going to brief the Israelis. They have a Shin Bet representative and a Mossad representative.

01:27:17.760 And he said, we don't we don't speak to the Israelis in the building.

01:27:21.060 They're not permitted in the building because every time they would come to CIA headquarters, they would bring gifts.

01:27:26.020 And the gifts were always laden with listening devices and batteries.

01:27:30.760 And, you know, we we would x-ray everything and and we would tell them, stop trying to bug our conference rooms.

01:27:37.080 And they would say, oh, OK, OK, you know, you caught us.

01:27:41.340 OK. So finally, we said they just can't come in anymore.

01:27:44.860 So we have a safe house where we meet with the Israelis.

01:27:48.460 So it was like eight of us, the senior Iraq analysts, the military analysts, the political

01:27:53.760 analysts, the econ analysts, the oil analysts, everybody's doing their thing.

01:27:57.540 And because I was the most junior, I went last.

01:28:01.440 And I said, because I was an overt employee, my name is John Kiriakou, and I'm going to

01:28:07.480 brief you today on Saddam Hussein's state of mind.

01:28:10.080 And the Mossad representative looked over his glasses at me and he said, spell your name.

01:28:16.880 So I spelled it.

01:28:18.200 And he says to me in front of everybody, he says, you are Jewish?

01:28:24.360 And I said, I am not recruitable.

01:28:27.500 Don't even think about trying to recruit me.

01:28:30.420 Shame on you.

01:28:31.620 So I went back to the office.

01:28:33.260 My boss said, how'd it go?

01:28:34.600 I said, I'm so angry right now.

01:28:36.380 I could explode.

01:28:37.080 I said, he practically pitched me right there in the meeting and asked if I was Jewish.

01:28:41.840 And he laughed and he said, they've done that to every single one of us.

01:28:47.580 On my...

01:28:48.060 Trying to get you to turn against your country for them.

01:28:50.100 Exactly, for them.

01:28:50.620 On my very first day at the CIA, where, you know, you put your hand up in the air and

01:28:54.860 you swear to uphold and protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

01:28:59.240 We had a briefing by the CIA's director of security.

01:29:02.100 And he told us that there are two intelligence representatives at the Israeli embassy, one from Mossad, one from Shin Bet.

01:29:10.260 He said, but the FBI has been able to identify 187 other undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread out all across America, working to steal secrets from American defense contractors.

01:29:25.760 but politically the relationship is so close that you don't want to rock the boat and uh you know

01:29:34.280 start arresting people spying for israel look at jonathan pollard he does every day of a 30-year

01:29:39.880 sentence and then is welcomed like some kind of a conquering hero at the american embassy in

01:29:45.020 jerusalem jerusalem it made me sick to my stomach well when you said the comment about how everybody

01:29:51.840 in Congress is afraid of the CIA. The same is true when it comes to Israel. I don't know if

01:29:57.180 afraid is the word, but controlled by. I mean, one of the dynamics of this, the wake of the Iran 0.99

01:30:02.780 war, John, has been not just like the loudest, but kind of the only front-facing critics have

01:30:11.140 been from the more isolationist right. Where are the Democrats? Where are they? They don't say

01:30:17.380 That's the question right there. Where in the world are the Democrats? They are utterly silent.

01:30:22.960 In fact, I'll tell you, I was especially furious with Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey.

01:30:29.420 Not the last time Netanyahu came to Washington, but the time before. 1.00

01:30:34.260 Cory Booker literally ran through the halls of Congress to get to a photo op so he could stand behind Benjamin Netanyahu with his big, stupid grin on his face. 0.99

01:30:44.660 like even now after gaza after the start of iran now you're running like oj simpson through an 0.99

01:30:52.680 airport in in the old i'm dating myself but in the old uh whatever it was commercial yeah hurts

01:30:58.060 commercial you want to be in a picture with benjamin netanyahu some of them are afraid of

01:31:03.840 being primaried and and god knows that that apac if you are not 100 pro-israel in your voting

01:31:10.900 record, they will primary you and they will spend millions of dollars to defeat you. That scares

01:31:16.540 most members of Congress. And so they're just not willing to challenge anybody. I'll tell you

01:31:22.380 another thing. I used to be the chief investigator in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I did

01:31:26.020 that from 09 to 11. And a couple of days after I started the job, these two guys came in clearly,

01:31:36.180 obviously from APAC, and they said, hey, welcome to Capitol Hill. I said, thanks. I've worked on

01:31:43.280 Capitol Hill before. We want to invite you for an all expenses paid trip to the Holy Land. They

01:31:51.360 didn't say Israel. Totally. And I said, thanks, guys. I can pay for my own vacations. I'm not

01:31:56.340 interested. It's all expenses paid, and we're going to take you to all the Christian holy sites.

01:32:01.620 I go, guys, I'm not taking APAC's money. I'm not interested. But I don't think a single day went

01:32:10.440 by where I didn't see those two. They were they practically had offices up there. And then

01:32:16.840 individual House members say that there are APAC reps that will go to their office every day and

01:32:23.660 just sit on the couch. And if constituents come in to meet with staff or to meet with the member

01:32:29.860 of Congress, these guys will get up like it's their office and say, remember, Israel, Israel,

01:32:34.840 Israel, Israel, remember. What is that? That's not the American way. 0.98

01:32:41.200 I think that the manipulation is so ubiquitous, you almost just don't even know it's happening

01:32:46.520 because everyone's singing from the same hymnal. And so it's like, yeah, this is what we all think.

01:32:52.620 I remember at Fox News, it was like a knee jerk thing. You had to say like in Israel, 0.91

01:32:56.800 We have a very special relationship.

01:32:58.760 You know, they're our most important ally in the Middle East.

01:33:01.400 And every once in a while, I would remember to ask, why?

01:33:05.020 Why?

01:33:05.120 Why again?

01:33:05.860 Like, you know, to have somebody explain that to me.

01:33:08.140 Yes.

01:33:08.720 And it always kind of petered out after that.

01:33:10.880 Like, why again?

01:33:12.140 It was always about demonizing the Arab states. 0.99

01:33:14.440 You know, we're supposed to hate them because they're Muslim. 1.00

01:33:16.340 We're supposed to love Israel because they're supposedly with us in the Judeo-Christian, you know, narrative.

01:33:22.980 I it's there's been such a manipulation paid for a paid for manipulation that I think many of us

01:33:29.540 just starting to see Benjamin and Yahoo said something that was very very much overlooked

01:33:35.320 and I think very disturbing last week he was giving he had given a speech and an Israeli 1.00

01:33:40.500 reporter asked him a question about the American Israeli war against Iran and he corrected her and

01:33:48.240 he said it's the american war against iran we are america's ally and i thought oh buddy that's not

01:33:54.820 what you were saying two weeks ago now now we stand alone doing your dirty work but that's

01:34:01.980 what it's come down to that's clearly where it is and he's already saying there are many reports out

01:34:07.620 from israeli tv saying if we do go boots on the ground it won't be with them that's right

01:34:11.900 their their boots on the ground in lebanon they've got another issue they've taken on where

01:34:16.100 a million Lebanese have been displaced because really Israel wants to be the hegemon of the 0.91

01:34:20.780 region and saw an opportunity here. And so we'll be on our own. It'll be American blood and treasure

01:34:25.480 that spills on Karg Island. I think you're exactly right.

01:34:29.680 Our, right. Our super tight allies will let us do their bidding. I mean, it's just,

01:34:34.820 I believe every word of what you said about how they've tried to get every president to do this.

01:34:38.540 And unfortunately, Trump was the taker. Trump was the one who was talked into it.

01:34:43.740 He watches too much Fox News and he got persuaded by the messaging that's there.

01:34:48.580 Okay, but back to you, back to you. 0.72

01:34:50.480 One of the things I heard you say about yourself is that you have sociopathic tendencies.

01:34:54.840 Now, what does that mean?

01:34:56.880 The CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies, not sociopaths.

01:35:03.800 Sociopaths have no conscience.

01:35:06.120 They don't feel guilt or remorse.

01:35:07.880 They blow right through the polygraph because they don't react to anything.

01:35:11.820 People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience.

01:35:15.360 They do feel guilt or remorse, but they're willing to break the law or to work in legal,

01:35:22.020 moral, and ethical gray areas if they believe it's the right thing to do.

01:35:26.100 So I mentioned earlier that on multiple occasions, I broke into people's houses or businesses

01:35:31.840 and planted microphones or listening devices.

01:35:36.080 I was very happy to do that because I believed we were the good guys.

01:35:40.360 And this was to protect America, right? We've got to disrupt that next attack. We need to take apart this terrorist group. And if that means, you know, identifying a terrorist apartment and renting the apartment underneath and drilling a hole through the floor so I can stick a pinhole camera and listen or a microphone and listen to everything that's being said and then report it back to CIA headquarters, I'm going to do it. That's what a sociopathic tendency is.

01:36:06.100 to you. Are you able to go anywhere now or rent an apartment? Like, I mean, are you constantly

01:36:12.800 wondering where this is, this is being done to you? Oh yeah. Oh, I, I just assume that it is

01:36:18.780 sure. And you know, that's why one of the reasons why I'm so vocal and so public is I figured it's

01:36:25.960 safer for me because more people would miss me if something were to happen. I will add,

01:36:31.220 And I will add that an investment in a good bulletproof vest is always wise as well.

01:36:38.060 Oh, my gosh.

01:36:38.940 What do you have that just sitting in your house?

01:36:40.540 What's that doing right next to you?

01:36:42.000 I gave a speech the other day, and it was so uncomfortable.

01:36:44.580 I took it off when I got home.

01:36:47.020 But, you know, after Charlie Kirk and after these revelations from WikiLeaks about what

01:36:51.320 the CIA does and what the FBI does and what the Israelis do, they kill everybody who they 1.00

01:36:56.460 don't like.

01:36:57.740 So, you know, better safe than sorry.

01:36:59.620 I mean, let me ask you like without getting too graphic, but like, let's say you're, you know, you're being intimate in your home. You're in an intimate position. Like, do you, do you remove all phones? Do you make sure there's no TVs in the room? Like, is it at that level where it's like everything's exposed?

01:37:18.500 Yeah, it's at that level.

01:37:20.220 Yes, I hate to say it.

01:37:22.140 You know, all I have is like a little,

01:37:23.500 one of those waterproof shower radios

01:37:25.460 so I can at least listen to the news in the morning.

01:37:27.420 But yeah, that's pretty much it.

01:37:30.100 Are you not into smart technology for this reason?

01:37:33.080 You know, forgive me 0.98

01:37:34.960 because I'm gonna sound like a hypocrite, 0.77

01:37:37.380 but I do have, I'm not gonna say the name 0.81

01:37:39.620 because it's gonna light up an A-L-E-X-A in my kitchen

01:37:43.660 because I sometimes ask for recipes or the weather.

01:37:47.520 And I don't say anything in the kitchen, you know, what am I, who am I going to talk to myself?

01:37:52.620 So, yeah, but that's, that's the only, that's the only smart technology that I allow myself.

01:37:58.640 I mean, I, my own thought has been, you just kind of have to be a relatively good person

01:38:04.260 or just accept that your foibles are no more bizarre than anybody else's because

01:38:08.560 they probably do know everything. I mean, that's, I'm going to blow my own whistle or blow. Yeah.

01:38:13.280 blow my own horn here. Uh, when the FBI raided my house, when John Brennan took out this vendetta

01:38:20.860 against me, um, they confiscated all of my electronics and they gave it all back to me a

01:38:27.140 year later. And one of the FBI agents said, you know, this was the first time in my career that

01:38:32.740 we ever, uh, took somebody's electronics and we didn't find any porn. And I said, what do you

01:38:37.300 think I'm an animal? Oh, no way. Yeah. No way. Well, you know, my understanding too, is that

01:38:44.220 the Israelis own a couple of the big porn sites. The one guy just died. He owned OnlyFans. I don't 1.00

01:38:52.460 remember if he was an American or Israeli, but either way, it was very sympathetic towards

01:38:57.520 Israel. But that's another way, because if they can turn that camera around at you, I mean, 0.55

01:39:02.140 you're done. That'd be a great way to blackmail. It sure would be. Yeah. They they've been

01:39:07.760 the kings of the porn industry for decades, whether it's in Brooklyn, it's heavily based

01:39:14.220 in Brooklyn or in what's it called? Hawthorne, California up by Northridge. Yeah, that's the

01:39:21.580 two bases of the porn industry. And it's almost exclusively Israeli. Wow. Yeah. The guy who owned 1.00

01:39:27.660 OnlyFans was Ukrainian-American,

01:39:29.880 but a big fan of Israel

01:39:32.320 and it donated a lot of money.

01:39:33.940 It's all like, I have said many times,

01:39:35.940 in today's day and age,

01:39:36.860 it's not enough to pretend

01:39:37.720 you actually have to be a good person now. 1.00

01:39:40.200 It's gonna be a massive pain in the ass. 1.00

01:39:41.860 Oh my God, yes. 0.99

01:39:42.560 But we're gonna have to just grin and bear it,

01:39:45.420 try to be better people.

01:39:47.020 John, I really hope to continue this conversation.

01:39:49.560 I wanna hear so much more about you and your opinions.

01:39:52.540 Loved, loved, loved meeting you.

01:39:53.580 The pleasure is all mine.

01:39:54.460 Thanks again for the invitation.

01:39:55.680 It was very kind.

01:39:57.200 Oh, to be continued.

01:39:58.460 All the best.

01:39:59.560 Wow, what a fascinating guy.

01:40:01.220 I mean, what a life, right?

01:40:02.760 Like to be in the intel agencies,

01:40:04.460 to be recruited by your college graduate school professor

01:40:07.260 and then wind up in prison.

01:40:09.240 We didn't even get to the prison stuff,

01:40:10.920 but lots to go over.

01:40:12.520 Okay, tomorrow we are back with Maureen Callahan

01:40:15.660 for the full show.

01:40:16.960 We will see you then.

01:40:19.080 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:40:21.020 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - April 02, 2026

Trump FIRES Bondi, CIA's ＂MK Ultra＂ History, and ＂Two Weeks＂ Talking Point, with John Kiriakou, Sean Davis, and Sohrab Ahmari ｜ Ep. 1287

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