The Tucker Carlson Show - Bernard Hudson： New Orleans Attack, Cybertruck Explosion, CIA Corruption, & Tulsi Gabbard

00:00:00.000 So, you served in the CIA for how long?

00:00:02.720 28 years.

00:00:03.680 28 years.

00:00:05.100 You joined when?

00:00:06.600 1989, January.

00:00:08.140 1989.

00:00:08.860 And what did you do, roughly speaking, for CIA?

00:00:12.300 So, I was a case officer.

00:00:14.000 Yes.

00:00:14.200 Which means my job was, I was focused on foreign governments and foreign posts where you're trained up, given language skills, given set of skills to manage what we call tradecraft.

00:00:30.000 How to operate clandestinely and safely overseas.

00:00:33.780 And then you're assigned undercover to an embassy.

00:00:37.000 And that sort of becomes your career with stints back in what we call headquarters in Virginia.

00:00:52.420 Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show.

00:00:54.240 We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else.

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00:01:06.760 Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com.

00:01:09.860 Here's the episode.

00:01:11.380 What countries did you serve in?

00:01:13.640 So, I served throughout the entire Middle East.

00:01:16.020 I was in Iraq.

00:01:17.260 I was in Africa.

00:01:18.700 I was in the Levant.

00:01:19.820 I was in Pakistan.

00:01:20.460 Where in the Levant?

00:01:24.220 Jordan.

00:01:26.300 Interesting.

00:01:27.300 What was Pakistan like? 0.69

00:01:30.340 So, Peshawar, Pakistan.

00:01:33.660 You were in Peshawar?

00:01:34.520 Yeah, but before 9-11 was the most alien place that I've ever gone.

00:01:39.780 I wasn't there permanently.

00:01:40.840 I was just, I would go in for business.

00:01:43.660 But that was an alien place.

00:01:45.240 You think?

00:01:45.740 I was there two weeks after 9-11.

00:01:46.980 I've never seen anything like that.

00:01:48.000 Yeah, it's even alien.

00:01:49.760 Even Pakistanis who live in Islamabad or Ralpindi or Karachi, when they go into Peshawar, will 1.00

00:01:54.640 remark, this is a different country.

00:01:57.240 This is really Afghanistan.

00:01:58.820 It just happens to be inside Pakistan's borders.

00:02:01.620 It's a cool town, don't you think?

00:02:02.480 It is very, if you like that sort of man-who-would-be-king vibe.

00:02:07.620 The Flashman Hotel is there.

00:02:09.580 If you like the Flashman Hotel, if you like that sort of British late colonial chic, it's

00:02:15.240 the place to go.

00:02:16.700 The last flag bearer from the retreat from Kabul.

00:02:20.420 The last guy who survived.

00:02:22.400 Yeah, rode in.

00:02:25.260 Interesting.

00:02:26.180 Okay, so you served in an interesting post doing the kind of work that people associate

00:02:30.280 with the CIA, not reading, you know, foreign telegram posts back at headquarters.

00:02:35.460 No, I was thankfully spared that.

00:02:37.760 I was able to actually serve, again, you know, sort of undercover, you know, working, trying

00:02:42.560 to recruit what we call human sources and foreign intelligence to go back to our government.

00:02:51.220 How did it change, the agency, over the 28 years?

00:02:54.380 So, there were three CIAs that I served in.

00:02:58.920 So, there was the Cold War CIA that I joined in 1989.

00:03:03.160 Now, I joined, like, only nine months before the wall came down.

00:03:07.220 But the ethos of that place up until, say, 91, was always focused on Russia and the Soviet

00:03:13.220 Union, Warsaw Pact.

00:03:15.940 And then it went, and I won't call it an identity crisis, but certainly a change in its character

00:03:22.340 as the United States sort of moved into the peace dividend era, say, sort of 91, when

00:03:27.420 the Soviet Union is no more and NATO starts expanding westward.

00:03:32.680 In that period, you know, you had a lot of, basically, a struggle to figure out what does

00:03:38.200 the agency really want to focus on?

00:03:40.160 And it never really came to a clear answer until Tuesday morning, 11 September.

00:03:45.520 And then it became the third agency that I served in.

00:03:48.900 Where were you?

00:03:49.360 So, that morning, I was at home.

00:03:54.180 I was in an apartment getting ready to go to an assignment overseas during my final preparations.

00:03:59.220 I saw that the news had said a plane had just struck a building in New York City.

00:04:04.600 I thought, you know, that was pretty weird.

00:04:06.980 Clear day.

00:04:07.960 You know, a little suspicious.

00:04:10.540 Jump in my car to go to CIA headquarters.

00:04:13.060 On the radio, I hear that they had just hit the second tower.

00:04:18.300 And I get into the parking lot, and there's, you know, a lot of things going on.

00:04:23.660 A woman tells me, I didn't know this person, but they said, you know, in the way things had

00:04:27.720 happened on that Tuesday, people would talk to you who didn't normally talk to each other.

00:04:31.500 Hey, somebody just blew up the State Department.

00:04:35.900 Now, that was obviously a garble of the plane hitting the Pentagon.

00:04:40.540 So, I went into the building, went to the Near East section, which was my home division.

00:04:46.760 Your home office was called the division in those days.

00:04:48.840 And at that point, there was a report that there was a missing fourth plane headed to

00:04:55.380 Washington.

00:04:56.260 And the director of CIA, probably smartly, decided to evacuate the building because he

00:05:02.460 didn't know where the target for the fourth plane was going to be.

00:05:06.180 But when you're young and aggressive, I decided I wanted to ignore that order.

00:05:11.500 And so, sort of enlisted a friend of mine who was, you know, as we were being told by the,

00:05:16.120 they were called security protective officers, who are basically the guard force and the

00:05:20.620 security force inside the agency were telling everybody to leave.

00:05:24.140 It was the first time I'd ever directly disobeyed an order in CIA.

00:05:28.060 And instead, got a friend of mine to go with me over to what was called the counterterrorism

00:05:33.240 center, where a friend of mine who I'd worked for before was the director and said, listen,

00:05:40.340 you know, this is why I joined the CIA.

00:05:42.440 You know, I joined it to be ready to do something for my country when that time took.

00:05:46.120 And you never really know when that time is.

00:05:48.880 And that for me and for everybody else who was in the CIA in those years, that became

00:05:55.260 the dominant mission.

00:05:57.420 You know, prevent another 9-11.

00:06:00.120 Figure out what the real threat is, find, fix that threat, and then, you know, do something

00:06:08.540 to make sure it doesn't ever happen again.

00:06:10.820 So, where did you go from there?

00:06:12.940 So, you're on your way somewhere.

00:06:15.020 Did you change destinations?

00:06:16.440 No, I still went to the Middle East, to the Gulf region.

00:06:19.680 Perfect.

00:06:21.420 And served there for a number of years, supporting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

00:06:27.500 What you learned in the early days of the global war on terrorism is that it really was a global

00:06:33.020 effort.

00:06:34.300 You know, the United States in those days, and it's kind of hard to understand now, had an

00:06:39.060 enormous moral hand when it came to trying to get other countries to enlist with us to

00:06:45.820 work against the counterterrorism threat.

00:06:47.500 And a lot of that, I think, was basically because a lot of countries woke up and realized that

00:06:53.380 accommodating terrorists or turning a blind eye to them was injurious to their own fate

00:06:59.760 and were eager to partner with the United States in those days.

00:07:05.780 In those days, do you think that's changed?

00:07:08.280 Well, certainly.

00:07:08.800 I mean, so, you know, you have the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which, unfortunately, you know,

00:07:15.700 the intelligence that led to the decision to go in there was deeply flawed.

00:07:20.720 And that had an enormous hit on the American intelligence community's credibility and U.S.

00:07:26.540 foreign policy credibility.

00:07:28.040 Was there soul searching within the CIA after that?

00:07:32.740 I think there was.

00:07:34.280 I mean, I think what's unclear and what probably has to happen when something that egregiously

00:07:41.260 wrong goes, occurs, there's got to be a public facing piece of this.

00:07:47.380 I think that was absent in the post-2003 environment.

00:07:52.440 I personally believe that this was the greatest intelligence failure of the American intel

00:07:59.860 community in my, certainly in my time in government.

00:08:04.280 Well, sure, and a million people died and it reset.

00:08:07.420 It changed so much that I don't understand why they couldn't find some, somebody to say,

00:08:14.780 we're going to punish this person, a guilty person, one would hope.

00:08:18.800 So, what tends to happen in a modern bureaucracy, at least in the American version of it, is those

00:08:26.080 type of mistakes are considered, I'm not saying this is proper, but this is sort of how they

00:08:31.040 approach it, it's a systemic problem.

00:08:34.320 And so, we're going to take all these steps to change the things that we think led to this.

00:08:40.980 It is less-

00:08:41.540 Not including firing the leaders of that system, I notice.

00:08:44.340 That is true in the 2003 example.

00:08:47.860 You know, what you don't have is what you might have in, say, a private sector company where

00:08:51.680 you get something really, really wrong.

00:08:53.820 It's hard to compare, you know, the magnitude of the 2003 mistake on intel with anything a

00:08:59.860 private sector company would do.

00:09:01.260 But, you know, you got bureaucratic reform out of it, but what you didn't get, and it's

00:09:08.240 fair to say this, is you didn't get, say, 20 identified people who were told, you know,

00:09:12.720 you have to leave now.

00:09:14.780 Yeah, because, I mean, it's, you made the point by implication earlier that one of the

00:09:18.500 reasons countries participated in the global war on terror with the United States, helped

00:09:22.460 the United States, was because they had the example of countries that refused to participate

00:09:27.680 or who worked against our interests, and they got overthrown.

00:09:30.720 So, there's something sort of instructive about punishing someone because it teaches

00:09:36.540 everybody else not to do that thing, right?

00:09:38.400 Well, I think in the case of counterterrorism and the cooperation we got after 2001, I think

00:09:44.780 the reason these countries cooperated is their own fear that radical Islamic terrorism was

00:09:50.220 a threat to them as well.

00:09:51.700 What I think disturbed them after 2003 wasn't that anybody lamented the Saddam Hussein 0.95

00:09:57.660 regime going away.

00:09:59.400 It's, here's the United States, the global remaining superpower, getting something so

00:10:05.460 tragically wrong, where along the way, many of the countries that are allies of the United

00:10:10.720 States were cautioning, are you really sure that you've got this story right?

00:10:16.320 I think what happened, what you start to see the glimmers of in the aftermath of the Iraq 0.99

00:10:21.220 invasion is sort of that deference to American foreign policy begins to be questioned.

00:10:28.300 Yes.

00:10:28.480 And I think in the, you know, immediate years after 2003, you know, Russia and China are

00:10:34.320 still not peer rivals of the United States at that point.

00:10:38.060 But, you know, the repercussions, the ripples that came out of the Iraq invasion in regards

00:10:46.220 to Americans' alliance system and how countries view it, I think underwent another change, certainly

00:10:52.860 by 2015, 16, with the rise of China's economy and the return of sort of a more confrontational

00:10:59.640 Russian policy in Syria.

00:11:04.800 Within CIA, was there anyone who said, you know, wait a second, we should figure out exactly

00:11:10.220 how this series of intel assessments got to the president and policymakers and like, how

00:11:18.080 did we do this and anyone who participated in it should be fired or did anyone say that?

00:11:22.040 So, certainly many people said all of the points you made up to firing people.

00:11:28.380 There were some people who said that, you know, there needs to be accountability, personal

00:11:33.620 accountability to named individuals.

00:11:37.220 The decision essentially was that we would hold the system accountable and they introduced

00:11:43.680 a number of reforms.

00:11:44.720 One of them was to create a director of national intelligence, which didn't exist before 9-11.

00:11:52.040 I mean, 9-11 is actually when they created it, but it was empowered by what happened in

00:11:56.740 2003.

00:11:58.400 So, you know, if you were looking for, you know, a single event where somebody could say,

00:12:05.580 you know, these people are personally held accountable, that did not happen after the

00:12:09.340 Iraq invasion.

00:12:11.000 And it's not just the WMD intel that remained unpunished.

00:12:15.640 It's like everything since then, every disaster since then, has been without an author, I notice.

00:12:20.440 You know, again, the precedent was set.

00:12:26.300 Yeah.

00:12:26.660 So, I mean, again, the way it tends to work in an American bureaucracy is you get sort of

00:12:32.160 collective punishment, if you will, or collective change.

00:12:36.420 It's like systemic racism.

00:12:37.580 Everyone's against it, but no one can quite describe what it is.

00:12:40.160 Yes, or, you know, you don't point out a particular individual.

00:12:44.360 Right, exactly.

00:12:45.720 So, the DNI is one of the bureaucratic bolt-ons, one of the responses to the obvious intel failure

00:12:55.280 in the war in Iraq.

00:12:56.940 What is...

00:12:57.560 To the war in 2001, actually.

00:12:59.460 So, it was the...

00:13:00.600 No, it was 9-11.

00:13:01.400 I'm sorry.

00:13:01.960 Right.

00:13:02.220 It was 9-11.

00:13:02.600 It was 9-11.

00:13:03.740 I beg your pardon.

00:13:05.780 What exactly is it?

00:13:07.600 It's a good question.

00:13:08.780 So, you know, it's changed over time.

00:13:11.540 So, essentially, the DNI, Director of National Intelligence role, is to make sure that there's

00:13:18.060 a single accountable person to the president who is responsible for all of the production

00:13:24.400 and all of the assessments that come out of the intel community.

00:13:27.640 So, there are 18 agencies, including the Director of National Intelligence as an office, not

00:13:32.480 a person, inside the U.S. intel community.

00:13:36.300 Before there was a DNI, the Director of CIA had two hats.

00:13:41.040 Hat one, Director of the CIA.

00:13:43.400 Hat two, Director of something called Director of Central Intelligence, which is essentially

00:13:48.880 the process by which the president and the senior leadership get something called the

00:13:53.760 President's Daily Brief, which is called the PDB.

00:13:56.020 It's a classified newspaper that speaks to, you know, issues of interest overseas to the

00:14:02.420 American government.

00:14:03.800 So, the DNI was created.

00:14:06.000 It was given the authority to manage that classified newspaper, if you want to call that.

00:14:11.000 That was one of its duties.

00:14:12.660 Duty two was you, as the DNI, are responsible for looking at how do we do collection across

00:14:19.680 the board, agency by agency.

00:14:22.820 Which agency is collecting what type of information?

00:14:25.360 Is there duplication?

00:14:26.760 Is that duplication necessary?

00:14:29.680 It also has, you know, sort of a mundane but important role in determining budgets and

00:14:35.960 managing not necessarily the execution of, not so much execution of budgets, but pulling

00:14:41.140 a budget together for the IC and being accountable to talking to Congress about it.

00:14:46.280 But as it is lived, you know, there are issues that some people have and questions people

00:14:53.380 have raised over the years about why does the DNI need to be as large as it does.

00:14:57.880 It doesn't collect unique information.

00:15:02.260 Unique information is collected by the 17 other agencies that are out there.

00:15:05.720 But it collates it.

00:15:06.420 It collates it.

00:15:07.400 The one thing that some folks have talked about, a role that the DNI could do, but it

00:15:12.620 hasn't to date, is a more aggressive assessment of how each of the agencies really contribute

00:15:19.560 to the overall IC mission, essentially grading the homework.

00:15:23.100 Can you list the 17 other members of the intelligence community?

00:15:28.080 For points, I guess I could probably do it.

00:15:29.840 So, nine of them are within the Department of Defense.

00:15:33.140 Nine?

00:15:33.480 Nine of them.

00:15:34.300 So, Army Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence.

00:15:40.300 Don't forget the Air Force.

00:15:42.120 You have the National Security Agency, which is part of DOD, the National Geospatial Agency,

00:15:48.040 which is an agency that looks at exploiting imagery and making sense of pictures.

00:15:52.940 If you think of the Cuba Missile Crisis and the analysts who are looking at crates and

00:15:58.800 boxes to determine, is that just a crate or is that a crate carrying a Russian missile?

00:16:04.160 That's the modern version of where those people went.

00:16:07.500 It's a very little known agency, but it actually has a really important mission.

00:16:12.120 The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages America's satellite system.

00:16:16.740 Then you have seven agencies that are part of other government cabinets-level agencies.

00:16:27.880 So, for example, Treasury's Intel section.

00:16:31.560 The Department of Energy's got an Intel section.

00:16:34.500 The State Department has something called the Intelligence and Research, INR.

00:16:39.060 You've got the Coast Guard, and you have Department of Homeland Security.

00:16:47.700 Why would the Department of Energy have its own Intel component?

00:16:50.560 So, unique to the American Intel community, the Department of Energy has got a bunch of

00:16:56.840 authorities dealing with nuclear weapons and the design of nuclear weapons, both in the

00:17:01.980 United States and what we need to know about potential adversary or partner countries that

00:17:06.320 have nuclear weapons.

00:17:07.260 And so, they have a very small, it's a very small office inside the Department of Energy.

00:17:12.820 But it's a fair question.

00:17:13.840 People will say, you know, why don't we just have one agency that takes care of all of this

00:17:19.220 for so many different organizations?

00:17:21.180 And I think over the years, certainly within DOD, for the nine agencies they've got, they

00:17:27.440 feel these are technical enough, and they need them focused particularly on that particular

00:17:33.140 service.

00:17:33.700 Like, the Air Force has a particular set of things that they need to carry out their mission

00:17:38.500 that are not necessarily the types of information the CIA might collect.

00:17:42.620 Some of the things CIA might collect would be of use to the Air Force, but there's a lot

00:17:46.740 of things that CIA wouldn't collect that the Air Force, for example, might need.

00:17:51.180 And that they prefer to have their own unit.

00:17:53.620 It's mostly analytical to assess foreign air developments.

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00:19:55.740 So the Director of National Intelligence sits in some way, but not literally, atop all of

00:20:02.440 these other agencies?

00:20:03.580 So they sit atop it.

00:20:05.680 You know, it gets a little complicated when people think, you know, is there a org chart

00:20:10.940 that says the Director of National Intelligence can give an order that one of these other agencies

00:20:16.520 have to follow?

00:20:17.420 Or could it cut their budget if the Director of National Intelligence wanted?

00:20:21.660 That becomes more of a political issue, and some of that has to do with how money is allocated

00:20:26.620 by Congress.

00:20:27.760 So we talked about, you know, how nine of these agencies are actually within the Defense Department.

00:20:33.580 Well, that means their ultimate boss is the Secretary of Defense.

00:20:36.900 And the Secretary of Defense has an enormous say in how those agencies are operated.

00:20:42.740 So really, you know, the DNI's authorities are looking at how these agencies really contribute

00:20:49.880 to the overall American collection and exploitation of information effort.

00:20:54.540 President Trump has nominated former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director

00:20:59.640 of National Intelligence.

00:21:02.060 She's facing enormous resistance in Washington, most of it not public.

00:21:06.520 You came out publicly in support of her.

00:21:09.520 Why did you do that?

00:21:10.660 So I've noticed her career from early on when she was a congressman.

00:21:15.700 And myself and others, you know, CIA officers and other people in the government, I think

00:21:21.460 we're sort of interested in here's somebody who has served her country.

00:21:25.760 She was still, in fact, I believe she was a congressman and serving as an Army reservist,

00:21:30.580 who actually raises some thoughtful questions about, you know, the purposes of American foreign

00:21:39.020 policy.

00:21:40.440 And, you know, during her run for president with the Democratic Party, you know, her comments

00:21:46.340 in some of the debates I found to be extraordinarily unusual for an American politician.

00:21:51.120 You know, in particular, when she challenged, you know, the front runner Hillary Clinton on, 1.00

00:21:58.180 you know, the effects of some of her foreign policy decisions, I think in particular on Libya.

00:22:04.360 So I thought, you know, Tulsi Gabbard was a solid choice to be the DNI.

00:22:10.860 And I was, I've been a bit surprised by some of the vitriolic response to her nomination,

00:22:18.080 because when you look at, on paper, you know, her background, it's consistent with other

00:22:24.060 people who've had senior jobs in the U.S. intel community.

00:22:28.240 Mike Pompeo, John Ratcliffe, in some ways, Avril Haynes, who's now the current director

00:22:33.900 of national intelligence.

00:22:35.760 You know, some of her background is not at all dissimilar to some of them.

00:22:39.640 And in fact-

00:22:40.020 Well, I don't think Tulsi Gabbard ever ran a pornographic bookstore while Avril Haynes 1.00

00:22:43.920 did, I think, in Baltimore.

00:22:45.300 I'm not aware of her background on that.

00:22:49.000 But I just, for the record, I don't think that Tulsi Gabbard ran a pornographic bookstore.

00:22:52.920 I wouldn't think so.

00:22:54.200 Okay, yeah, no.

00:22:54.520 She would seem to be inconsistent.

00:22:57.340 What was also sort of interesting to me was, you know, she took a lot of heat for being 1.00

00:23:07.740 skeptical on things that I'm not so sure it wasn't right to be skeptical on.

00:23:12.300 Such as?

00:23:12.800 So, in particular, you know, I am sympathetic to when she was a congressman and went to Syria

00:23:20.280 and, you know, was essentially trying to do a fact-finding mission to figure out, you

00:23:25.400 know, what is U.S. policy interest in Syria?

00:23:30.480 And, you know, was also trying to get to the bottom of, I think, in her mind, and I can't

00:23:34.060 speak for her, but, you know, it's my outside assessment.

00:23:36.540 You know, the question about whether or not the Assad regime used chemical weapons on its

00:23:42.080 own people.

00:23:44.500 Now, the Assad regime was brutal.

00:23:46.700 Both the father and the son ran one of the most diabolically brutal regimes that they've

00:23:51.100 ever had in the Middle East.

00:23:52.080 However, you know, what she was trying to look at was, had they escalated the use of chemical

00:23:59.140 weapons?

00:24:00.440 You know, when you think about all the people who were participating in what we call the

00:24:05.100 global war on terrorism or the Iraq veterans, I wouldn't blame any of them for being skeptical

00:24:11.240 about what the U.S. intelligence community might have said about another Arab state having

00:24:17.220 a weapon of mass destruction?

00:24:19.040 On the basis of no disclosed proof at all.

00:24:22.620 Well, you know.

00:24:25.160 I pushed the State Department if this is true.

00:24:27.120 Like, what do I know?

00:24:27.880 I'm not there.

00:24:29.000 But where's the evidence?

00:24:30.280 Well, and a lot of the goodwill and trust had been extinguished by what happened in 2003.

00:24:38.500 So, you know, again, in my view of Tulsi Gabbard and other veterans of the Iraq war and

00:24:45.320 occupation, which was an opposed occupation, it got fairly bloody at times.

00:24:50.260 So, if you're there in that country serving, and at some point you ponder, you know, how

00:24:55.200 did we exactly get here?

00:24:57.320 And somebody tells you, well, it's, you know, the American intel community, you know, assessed

00:25:01.900 that there was WMD here.

00:25:03.760 They got it wrong.

00:25:05.240 Flash forward, now you're a congressman.

00:25:06.920 And someone is, you know, laying out yet another case that there might have been chemical

00:25:11.280 weapons use.

00:25:12.820 Maybe you're concerned that is this a prelude to not only just tagging and assigning culpability

00:25:19.800 to an evil regime, but some sort of opening move in a much more aggressive U.S. involvement

00:25:27.020 in that country.

00:25:27.740 So, I, on that, you know, just as a, as someone who myself was in Iraq, and very familiar with

00:25:36.100 other people who've served there, I don't blame any of them for wanting to ask two, three,

00:25:40.200 four questions about the existence of WMD in an Arab state in the first, you know, say,

00:25:47.520 decade after, after an incident, like 2003.

00:25:50.100 Even bigger picture, I never understood, like, when did Congress pass the law requiring me

00:25:54.620 to hate Assad?

00:25:56.260 There are lots of brutal regimes in the Middle East, some of which we support. 1.00

00:25:58.720 I would argue as brutal as Assad's regime, just my view, but whatever.

00:26:03.120 But there are other countries, and, but why was I required?

00:26:06.500 I'm agnostic about Assad.

00:26:08.440 I support him to the extent he protected Christians.

00:26:11.000 That's my personal view.

00:26:12.140 But I, when did it become, like, some requirement that, you know, all good people hate Assad?

00:26:16.660 Where did that come from?

00:26:17.640 I was just confused by it.

00:26:19.560 Well, I mean, you, you get sort of, you know, sometimes shifting standards on what, you know,

00:26:25.860 what constitutes a threat.

00:26:27.280 Yes.

00:26:27.540 I do believe that probably by the end of his administration, even the Obama people had

00:26:34.100 come to conclude that Syria was probably not a direct actionable threat to the United States.

00:26:43.740 Now, it's fair to say that during the occupation of Iraq, that the Syrian government knowingly 0.58

00:26:49.700 allowed plenty of people to cross that border who were going to, you know, attack U.S. troops

00:26:55.280 in that country.

00:26:55.860 But, you know, there are ways to deal with that.

00:27:01.020 And I think, again, when you, you look at U.S. policy towards Syria, it's always been 0.87

00:27:06.240 fairly hostile.

00:27:07.520 You know, it's never outside of a very short period of time in the first Gulf War when

00:27:12.960 Bashar Assad, the father, or Hafez Assad, the father, had gone along with the Americans

00:27:19.100 to push back Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.

00:27:21.260 We've always had a bad relationship with that regime.

00:27:24.560 So...

00:27:25.000 Any reason?

00:27:25.540 It was particularly brutal.

00:27:28.860 It was also, you know, as a legacy of the Cold War, very close to the Soviets.

00:27:35.800 They, and it's easy to forget now, but the Syrian regime under the Assad family hosted

00:27:40.900 a number of terrorist organizations that, you know, did attack American interests in Europe

00:27:48.320 and other places.

00:27:49.500 They hosted, you know, terrorist groups.

00:27:52.440 They helped destabilize Lebanon, which was an important, you know, small ally of the United 1.00

00:27:57.160 States at the time in the 70s and 80s.

00:27:59.080 So, you know, that gets us back to sort of the third world movement and Soviet surrogates.

00:28:07.060 The non-aligned countries.

00:28:08.080 Non-aligned countries.

00:28:09.180 And then you add on to that just sort of a uniquely strange cult of personality where,

00:28:15.840 for example, you know, in Iraq, you know, the name Assad also means, you know, it's a lion

00:28:21.140 in Arabic.

00:28:22.620 People wouldn't want to use the word for lion in Arabic because that would require them to

00:28:28.560 say the president's name, the name of the president's family.

00:28:31.060 The fear that the average person had in Syria was astounding.

00:28:37.720 I remember going there on a trip at one point and just, it was, it was saturated with secret

00:28:45.820 police everywhere.

00:28:47.060 I would call it the not-so-secret police because you'd be walking around Damascus and you could

00:28:51.180 see clearly these guys there.

00:28:53.680 And really, their focus was domestic repression.

00:28:59.640 You know, it was really not looking for foreigners.

00:29:01.960 So, it's not to say that you're absolutely right.

00:29:04.060 There are many terrible regimes in the world.

00:29:07.540 The Assads, you know, were at least noteworthy within the Arab context.

00:29:13.040 Interesting.

00:29:13.100 So, she dared to go talk to Assad, went to Syria, Tulsi Gabbard.

00:29:21.640 But, you know, that was seven or eight years ago and she never endorsed Assad or anything

00:29:27.500 like that.

00:29:28.040 She's got pretty conventional views on most issues, I would say, foreign policy issues.

00:29:33.500 She's not like anti-Israel or she's, you know, she's within the mainstream of most things.

00:29:37.980 Um, but the resistance to her is very, very intense.

00:29:43.160 Where do you think that comes from?

00:29:45.060 I think some of it seems to come from a sense that she is not deferential to the foreign policy

00:29:52.700 consensus.

00:29:54.680 And within Washington, you know, there's, there is a sense that there, I mean, there clearly

00:30:01.080 is a foreign policy consensus, you know, and that's true of almost any government.

00:30:05.380 You know, any government that has a foreign policy and that has security services, you

00:30:09.460 know, there tends to be sort of a, a worldview that's coalesced, you know, that generally coalesces

00:30:14.860 and is held by the majority of the people who work there.

00:30:18.340 I think she's a bit of a disruptor when it comes to that and is willing to challenge things. 0.58

00:30:24.640 I would agree with you that I don't really understand sort of the vitriol of some of this.

00:30:29.700 I don't think it really is warranted.

00:30:31.300 Calling her a traitor to her country.

00:30:32.380 Well, this gets to the sort of absurd lengths that people have sometimes fallen to about

00:30:42.700 trying to go after their domestic opponents.

00:30:44.640 I mean, here we have somebody who was and is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, which

00:30:51.120 means she has security clearance, probably a top secret clearance.

00:30:53.940 And, you know, making statements as serving government officials or recently, you know,

00:30:59.900 retired government officials, that this person is probably a Russian agent.

00:31:04.380 You know, I, I find it curious that the same group of folks who might say that, you know,

00:31:09.640 the McCarthy era was extreme.

00:31:13.680 Well, they've embraced it completely.

00:31:14.960 Yeah, it's, you know, the McCarthy era is not a how-to manual.

00:31:18.460 Well, it was a cautionary tale.

00:31:20.620 I mean, they got us into a war with Russia, from my perspective, on the basis of this hysteria.

00:31:25.500 It's, it's beyond belief.

00:31:28.040 So here's my concern.

00:31:29.780 Trump gets elected on the explicit promise to end pointless wars, defend the United States

00:31:33.960 when necessary, but we're not, no more wars of choice.

00:31:35.940 They haven't helped.

00:31:36.880 The foreign policy consensus, moreover, isn't working, obviously.

00:31:41.340 It's not helping the United States in any measurable way.

00:31:43.960 And people are very sick of it.

00:31:45.720 And he said that in 2016, got elected.

00:31:47.860 He said it again in 2024 and got elected.

00:31:50.740 And yet the overwhelming majority of the nominees so far are well within the foreign policy consensus.

00:31:57.100 They're neocons.

00:31:58.360 And she's not.

00:31:59.780 And so don't you think Trump voters deserve an appointee once in a while?

00:32:04.420 I guess that'd be my view.

00:32:05.580 But that's like too much for DC.

00:32:07.100 This is my read.

00:32:08.360 They can't, you can't have anybody who disagrees with Mike Pompeo, like not allowed.

00:32:12.220 That seems pretty dysfunctional to me.

00:32:17.600 Well, I don't get consulted on these sorts of issues.

00:32:19.380 No, but as an observer, like what?

00:32:21.980 So, you know, part of, I think part of what you're seeing here is, you know, that sort of

00:32:30.820 independent thinking and really questioning in some ways what we got for our efforts of

00:32:37.980 the last 25 years, you know, certainly since 2003, you know, to essentially assess that

00:32:46.960 you've developed inside the United States something I liked or something I've heard people call

00:32:50.920 militarism without victory, where you have this sort of consistent push to the most aggressive

00:32:58.880 options on the table.

00:33:00.420 But you're not Sparta.

00:33:01.740 You keep losing.

00:33:02.780 Well, and we certainly, you know, we don't gain much even from some of the ones that we've

00:33:07.620 won on.

00:33:08.340 That's right.

00:33:08.780 And so I think I'm not sure that a lot of the professional national security establishment

00:33:19.380 has as a group really come to that conclusion yet.

00:33:23.800 I think individually, you know, when you talk to folks who had careers in the military, the

00:33:29.640 security services, State Department, they'll privately admit that, you know, if you name

00:33:34.640 Libya, Iraq, certainly the occupation of Afghanistan post the death of Osama bin Laden, that it's

00:33:43.020 really hard to say that we really got very much as a country out of that.

00:33:47.440 But there certainly, you know, is, you know, relevancy that you get as the United States

00:33:55.740 by being able to sort of impose your will on situations.

00:34:00.160 And it's important if you're going to be a superpower to be able to impose your will if

00:34:04.560 you have to do so.

00:34:07.540 What has changed, I think, over the last 20 years is the threshold to want to impose that

00:34:13.220 will seems to have gotten down to a fairly hair trigger.

00:34:15.840 And so things that I would think, you know, we would have stayed out of when we had a

00:34:20.800 standoff with the Soviet Union or at least thought twice about, people are now a little

00:34:26.100 bit of a knee-jerk reaction that, you know, let's move this two steps up the escalation

00:34:31.240 ladder.

00:34:33.720 Not always warranted.

00:34:35.980 Well, and reckless because the consequences of misjudging, and you can only control one

00:34:41.900 side, of course, yours.

00:34:42.780 Well, you know, back to your, you know, it gets to your question on, you know, why Tulsi

00:34:47.140 Gabbard.

00:34:47.560 I like skepticism in senior intelligence officers.

00:34:51.360 In my experience, you know, being overly credulous or being willing to sort of believe the most

00:34:58.440 extreme version of an event, even if it later turns out to be true, certainly at the senior

00:35:03.760 levels, it's well worth it to be, to have some people in the loop.

00:35:08.340 Yes.

00:35:08.940 Who are prepared to ask some very hard questions and to suffer the consequences from asking

00:35:13.960 those hard questions.

00:35:15.500 If you really want to be an effective director of national intelligence, you probably have

00:35:20.100 to go into work every day with the expectation that this might be my last day.

00:35:24.840 I might be forced to say something or do something that will be unpopular, unwelcome, but I think

00:35:31.020 it's necessary for the system to have a couple of folks around who are prepared to take that

00:35:36.780 risk.

00:35:38.780 And from what I saw of her career, and I don't know her personally, she seems like somebody

00:35:42.200 who, despite being on the fast track in the Democratic Party, she was the vice chair of

00:35:47.380 the DNC, a presidential candidate, was willing to put her personal ethics and personal views,

00:35:56.880 you know, on the table and say, you know, for this, I'm prepared to suffer.

00:36:01.100 And that's, and that's a good thing to have for, for the American intel enterprise, in my

00:36:07.920 opinion.

00:36:09.360 It seems vital.

00:36:12.160 So then the question arises, like, where's the oversight of these incredibly powerful

00:36:17.240 agencies, which have, you know, by definition, the power to spy on people and kill them and

00:36:23.060 do.

00:36:24.320 Someone from outside should be making certain that what they're doing is within the bounds

00:36:28.500 of the Constitution and just decency.

00:36:31.720 And I don't see anybody, I see the House and Senate intel committees as completely controlled

00:36:36.340 by the IC.

00:36:37.400 I mean, I've seen it.

00:36:39.080 Is that, like, what's the view from within CIA on that?

00:36:42.520 There's any, like, anybody in the House and Senate, particularly the Senate, who will say

00:36:47.040 you can't do that, will pull your budget if you do that?

00:36:49.320 So I think there have been instances where, you know, you've had that sort of oversight.

00:36:55.160 Right now, some of it, you know, goes back historically, so, you know, church committee.

00:36:59.100 So, which is the, you know, long-

00:37:00.080 Fifty years.

00:37:00.560 That's a long time ago.

00:37:01.880 That's sort of the high watermark of, you know, oversight having a significant effect

00:37:08.300 on the IC.

00:37:10.260 You know, since then, and, you know, in my experience was mostly, you know, post 9-11

00:37:14.200 in dealing with Congress, that there was fairly robust interest in what the agency does.

00:37:20.160 To be fair, there was a lot of support, you know, for the IC in the, in Congress.

00:37:27.560 Historically, it generally is.

00:37:29.360 You know, the CIA would say that that's because, you know, they try to be consistent with what

00:37:34.420 they think, you know, Congress will accept and what the administration wants.

00:37:37.980 It's always worth remembering that the IC, in the end, works for the executive branch and

00:37:43.040 the president.

00:37:43.820 Obviously, their budgets and some of their authorities are controlled by the laws that

00:37:47.760 Congress puts on them.

00:37:52.440 Your question is a really good one on, is in a low trust society or a society where trust

00:37:59.820 is now at a premium, you know, how does the IC manage the suspicions of an increasingly

00:38:08.000 larger number of people in the American population?

00:38:10.800 I'll just say, as a son of a federal employee who spent most of his life in D.C., I always

00:38:14.620 wanted to trust the government and, in fact, did.

00:38:17.380 And it was, you know, learning that what government was doing with my money and my name, I was so

00:38:23.080 outraged by it.

00:38:23.820 I have no more trust.

00:38:25.540 And so, I think that, I mean, that's just my perspective.

00:38:27.980 I'm sure everyone has a different perspective.

00:38:29.400 But I applied to CIA and didn't get in.

00:38:33.700 But that's a measure of how much I believed in the system.

00:38:37.500 And so, from my perspective, it's low trust because they violated our trust.

00:38:41.020 And I think, you know, however we got here, I think one of the things that I would like

00:38:47.840 to see the IC and those who manage it accept is that we really are here.

00:38:52.580 That this is, you know, a situation where it's a highly partisan atmosphere in the United

00:38:57.100 States.

00:38:58.720 Not everybody is going to reflexively trust the security services.

00:39:02.220 And if they really want to be able to perform their mission appropriately and effectively,

00:39:06.840 they've got to be in a place where the people trust them.

00:39:10.160 But on whose behalf are they performing it?

00:39:12.100 I mean, they have no authority at all other than that conferred to them by the president

00:39:17.780 of the United States.

00:39:18.720 That's it.

00:39:19.320 Period.

00:39:19.920 Because his authority comes from voters.

00:39:21.520 It's our system.

00:39:22.800 And he confers that to the executive branch agencies of which CIA is one.

00:39:26.700 And so, if he doesn't want them to do something, they have no moral or constitutional right to

00:39:31.040 do it.

00:39:31.480 Period.

00:39:32.380 I don't see another read of the constitution.

00:39:34.300 As a legal measure, you know, if the president, you know, as long as it's lawful.

00:39:39.020 Exactly.

00:39:39.420 Yeah, it gives an order to the, you know, to the IC, especially the CIA, which directly

00:39:43.520 works for the president, doesn't even work.

00:39:45.480 You know, we talked about the nine other intel agencies.

00:39:48.060 They work for the secretary of defense, by extension, the president, of course.

00:39:53.280 Yes, they, you know, they have to obey lawful orders that are given to them.

00:39:56.460 But they're not allowed to freelance.

00:39:58.800 Like, by whose authority are they doing that?

00:40:01.020 How can, how can, and not just CIA, I don't mean to pick on one, the most famous of all the

00:40:05.140 federal agencies, but I mean, there are many others, maybe all of them, doing things that

00:40:10.540 the president ran against, that he did not authorize, which, in other words, they have

00:40:16.220 no legal or moral right to do, but they do it, and no one's ever punished.

00:40:20.420 Like, on whose authority do they think they're acting?

00:40:24.060 Again, I think, you know, come 20 January, you know, we're going to, once the executive,

00:40:30.200 and one presumes that there'll be a number of executive orders that will come out of the

00:40:34.240 White House, you know, that the president will be able to lawfully provide.

00:40:37.880 At that point, you know, if people in the IC or the IC leadership is not responsive, you

00:40:44.800 know, there's plenty of mechanisms for a president and a White House, a national security advisor 0.70

00:40:49.440 to determine, you know, if they're not, in other words, they say in the IC, not aligned

00:40:55.380 with what the president wants them to do.

00:40:57.900 President and the director of CIA have very broad authority to remove people, very broad.

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00:43:29.820 Dr. Casey Means.

00:43:30.760 I'm hardly an expert on CIA.

00:43:46.640 I am an expert on elected officials in DC, and they're all afraid of getting killed or

00:43:50.960 blackmailed.

00:43:51.760 They think that the intel agencies will kill them.

00:43:53.600 They actually think that.

00:43:54.720 I don't know if you're aware of that.

00:43:55.820 I'm aware of that.

00:43:57.120 So they think that.

00:43:57.960 Why do you think they think that?

00:43:58.840 You know, that wasn't my experience, you know, working with, you know, oversight when

00:44:04.940 I work with them.

00:44:06.580 You know, I've sadly just never heard anybody say that to me.

00:44:10.960 I had a member of the, an intel committee, elected official, tell me that he was on the

00:44:21.420 oversight committee, you know, overseeing the IC, that they were spying on him, that

00:44:27.640 they were reading his texts and listening to his calls, and there was nothing he could

00:44:30.260 do about it.

00:44:31.020 And I said, why don't you hold a press conference?

00:44:32.580 I mean, that's like so outrageous.

00:44:34.540 It's illegal.

00:44:36.200 You can't do that.

00:44:37.940 You saw the chairman of the Senate intel committee violated some agreement.

00:44:46.800 The CIA thought that she had with them, and they spied on her.

00:44:49.560 They spied on Senate staff.

00:44:50.780 They got caught, and no one, right?

00:44:53.080 So, and actually, the Senate didn't do anything about it.

00:44:55.540 They didn't say, you know, we're going to expose your black budget or, you know, defund

00:44:58.960 parts of you. 0.95

00:44:59.580 We're going to fire you. 0.95

00:45:00.760 No one did anything.

00:45:02.420 So, what does that tell you?

00:45:03.620 If the agency can spy on sitting senators who are supposed to be in charge of them, or

00:45:08.440 their budget anyway, what does that tell you about how afraid people are?

00:45:13.380 So, let me take this in reverse order.

00:45:16.080 Yes.

00:45:16.280 So, I think you're talking about the Feinstein statement.

00:45:18.560 That's exactly right.

00:45:19.820 So, as, you know, my understanding of how that happened is that they accused the agency

00:45:27.800 of being able to look at the computers.

00:45:29.720 Correct.

00:45:29.980 In the Senate.

00:45:32.380 That were in the CIA building that the Senate staff had access to, and that there were government

00:45:39.680 computers with CIA information on it, and that all of those computers come with a warning,

00:45:46.420 both written on the cover of the computer and when you boot it up, that this is a government

00:45:54.120 system, and it's fully auditable.

00:45:56.400 So, it's my understanding that the computers in question, you know, that, you know, Senator

00:46:02.580 Feinstein said were improperly accessed by the agency were, in fact, you know, CIA computers

00:46:09.080 that were made available to them, but with the clear warnings that anything on this computer

00:46:13.800 that you do, not some other computer that you would be on, not your personal handheld

00:46:18.260 device, those computers are accessible by CIA security, just like every other computer

00:46:26.060 computer that the CIA buys and makes available for its own employees, so that there's an audit

00:46:31.520 function on all of that.

00:46:33.700 Now, I had never heard, you know, that the allegations ever extended to other computer

00:46:39.280 systems that people in the Senate were using that were not provided by the CIA.

00:46:44.260 Now, again, I'll caution that I, you know, I'm not, I wasn't directly involved in that.

00:46:48.800 I'm pretty sure that Senator Feinstein said and alleged that CIA was spying on her staff

00:46:55.300 in order to push back against, her expected pushback against them, in other words, to control her.

00:47:02.360 I was aware she said that.

00:47:04.020 Again, you know, my understanding is the only, you know, audits that were going on of any

00:47:09.360 computers were ones that were clearly marked as this is a computer owned by the government

00:47:13.720 subject to audit.

00:47:15.260 So, I, I can't speak to, you know, I mean, what I can't speak to is never in my career

00:47:20.960 did anybody ever approach me and say anything about.

00:47:26.100 Spying on members of Congress.

00:47:27.620 Never.

00:47:28.280 No one ever, no one ever asked me to do it.

00:47:30.780 No one I know ever told me that they were involved in it.

00:47:34.400 And it's a fairly small place.

00:47:36.100 Right.

00:47:36.640 I'm not saying that.

00:47:37.600 So, if a member of a congressional intel oversight committee says, I believe CIA or NSA is spying

00:47:45.760 on my personal communications in an effort to control me, do you think that's a crazy

00:47:50.280 thing to say?

00:47:52.500 I think it's troubling if any member of Congress believes that.

00:47:56.340 Well, not only believed it, like, I think the person believed it, told me in a restaurant.

00:48:00.720 But I said, that's like completely outrageous.

00:48:03.140 And actually, you can't have a democracy under those circumstances.

00:48:05.580 So, you should hold a press conference and say, I can't do that.

00:48:08.520 So, really, to me, it's unprovable whether or not they were spying on his phone. 0.97

00:48:12.560 Maybe he's a nutcase. 0.99

00:48:14.620 He's a pretty famous person, but could be a nutcase. 0.96

00:48:17.700 But what I was struck by was the fear, like, I can't do that.

00:48:20.800 And that's, I would say, what you've just told me.

00:48:24.420 That would be, if I was still in government, that's the thing that would trouble me.

00:48:27.640 Yeah.

00:48:27.940 Is that if our relationship with our oversight has reached this sort of a level where they

00:48:33.040 would entertain that type of a...

00:48:34.400 Where CIA is more powerful than the people overseeing CIA.

00:48:37.540 That's not good.

00:48:38.140 I mean, again, in all my interactions when I would go down and testify or provide background

00:48:44.420 briefings to Congress, it was always with the understanding that the CIA has an office

00:48:50.640 that deals with collaboration and oversight.

00:48:55.080 It was always like, you've got to make sure everything you say is accurate.

00:48:58.380 If you say something that's not accurate, you've got to come back and explain that you

00:49:02.200 got it wrong, that you submitted something that was in error.

00:49:04.840 However, it was always deferential in my level and with what I experienced.

00:49:13.140 But if I had become aware that, you know, a senior senator had said something like that

00:49:17.820 or a congressman at any level, I'd say we definitely have a problem.

00:49:22.660 You know, we need to reestablish trust.

00:49:24.360 Well, I have...

00:49:25.400 However, it has to happen.

00:49:26.380 And if somebody had ever told me that we're spying on, you know, congressmen, you know,

00:49:32.760 I wouldn't have followed an order like that.

00:49:34.840 And most of my friends that I know who were there wouldn't have followed an order like that.

00:49:40.500 I just, I never believed any of this stuff.

00:49:43.040 And then the closer I got to it, the more I thought there's something really wrong here.

00:49:46.220 And that the, almost with that exception, the members of Congress who are the most vocal

00:49:50.460 cheerleaders for the IC are the ones with the most to hide in their personal lives. 0.96

00:49:55.800 I've definitely noticed that theme.

00:49:59.540 Definitely.

00:50:01.420 And I feel like there's probably a connection.

00:50:03.580 Does that make sense?

00:50:04.320 Again, I, I never saw, heard, or even, you know, got a whiff of anything like that.

00:50:14.220 You know, Washington does play by some pretty hard rules, you know, within the political world.

00:50:18.480 But, you know, again, if I'd ever been in a meeting, you know, where somebody had said,

00:50:24.080 hey, you know, we're going to, you know, dish some dirt on some congressman, it would have been utterly shocking and appalling.

00:50:33.200 Yes.

00:50:33.560 And I think, again, most of the employees I know would refuse to carry out an order like that.

00:50:39.460 We would actually think this is some sort of bizarre joke.

00:50:43.100 I just, I just can't see how you would easily be able to do that without other people knowing.

00:50:50.200 It's a very gossipy place, the CIA.

00:50:52.680 It's just, it's so striking to me that members of Congress who represent districts where, just for example,

00:51:01.240 you know, the overwhelming majority in Republican districts, the overwhelming majority of their voters

00:51:05.900 don't want to send another $20 billion to Ukraine, just to give one among many examples.

00:51:11.340 And then they show up, they go into the SCIF, they get the briefings,

00:51:16.420 and they're in favor of doing something that their own constituents hate.

00:51:21.340 And so there's a control mechanism in place there, obviously, whether it's, you know, as sinister as,

00:51:27.800 you know, whether it's sinister or not, I don't know.

00:51:29.960 But what is that?

00:51:31.240 Well, I do think, you know, just like any mature bureaucracy, you know, the intel community,

00:51:38.200 any federal agency can make a very good case for why they think something needs to be done.

00:51:43.480 And I mean, a case on its merits, you know, so, you know, Kissinger used to have an old joke

00:51:48.820 that he would get three types of briefings, you know, one is, or three types of options.

00:51:54.320 Total nuclear war, abject surrender, and then something in the middle.

00:51:58.820 You know, it, that's still a fairly common play across the U.S. government.

00:52:05.240 So it is entirely possible that, you know, busy congressmen and senators who have an awful lot

00:52:13.060 of things that they've got to be focused on, they come in to deal with an agency that they

00:52:18.680 have oversight on.

00:52:20.440 Generally speaking, that agency has an information advantage over them on, you know, details and

00:52:26.080 can lay out a very good case for what it is they want to do.

00:52:28.780 I'm not saying it's necessarily a wise case, but they can lay out a compelling case.

00:52:33.200 And there is a sense, I did notice in my career, of a deference to, well, these are the experts,

00:52:42.540 you know, they're careerists who've been doing this for all their life, you know, pushing back

00:52:47.900 on that could make, you know, it's a bit of a lonely place to be.

00:52:53.100 So I think, you know, in some ways, you know, Senate and House staffs, they don't have a lot

00:52:59.520 of them, you know, they have a lot of people think they do.

00:53:02.100 But when you think about all the things that they've got to evaluate, especially when they

00:53:06.700 deal with, you know, complex issues, war and peace, national security, there's an awful

00:53:12.640 lot of deference that does apply to the agencies.

00:53:16.740 When Senator Chuck Schumer, the head Democrat in the Senate, says to Rachel Maddow, man, Trump

00:53:22.000 made a huge mistake messing around with the IC, they'll screw you six ways to Sunday.

00:53:26.520 Yeah, that's a hard one to square.

00:53:30.740 That's a, you know, I remember when that statement was made.

00:53:34.700 And again, you know, wasn't in the part of the CIA that I had any access to.

00:53:40.760 But that's the side of statement that doesn't contribute in any positive way.

00:53:47.660 But does it reflect reality?

00:53:51.600 It certainly didn't reflect a reality that I was a part of.

00:53:54.380 You know, I retired in 2017.

00:53:58.060 Clearly, it's become fairly toxic, you know, in Washington.

00:54:03.620 And, you know, it's not unfair to say that some of that toxicity does, you know, reach

00:54:09.420 into, you know, the government, you know, the federal agencies.

00:54:12.920 But when people make statements like that, you know, whether it's bravado or, you know,

00:54:21.040 they think it's true, it fuels that mistrust.

00:54:25.200 So, one of the things that the intel community could do to restore trust is declassify things

00:54:33.100 that have no legitimate reason to be secret, like any files pertaining to the Kennedy assassination

00:54:38.520 from 62 years ago.

00:54:40.760 And yet, they are ferocious, the CIA in particular, ferocious opponent.

00:54:45.480 In fact, because I bumped up against it myself, ferocious opponents of declassifying that information.

00:54:51.200 Why do you think that is?

00:54:54.240 So, there is a sort of a reflexive circling of wagons when it comes to secrecy in the IC.

00:55:03.160 I think in the case of the Kennedy assassination, and probably things certainly dating back,

00:55:07.300 maybe even less than that, there's an overwhelming public benefit to sharing that data.

00:55:13.300 But in that specific case, it was so long ago, so many books have been written about it.

00:55:19.120 It's a cliche, it's almost a parody at this point.

00:55:21.740 The Kennedy assassination, it's like, if you can't give an inch on that.

00:55:25.080 And by the way, as of two weeks ago, I happen to know, they were still fighting it, like, ferociously.

00:55:31.500 No, you cannot appoint that person.

00:55:32.820 That person might disclose those files.

00:55:36.220 What?

00:55:37.460 Like, what is that?

00:55:38.840 So, what I'll say next, I'll say as a person who spent most of my adult life, you know, in the intel community.

00:55:47.760 I would be very curious as to how somebody would try to justify that.

00:55:53.240 I mean, the only thing that I could think of is that, you know, government files would include theories of a crime or an event that later get to be disproven.

00:56:03.960 So, in the early days of, you know, some kind of an event, you know, you're going to have agencies and parts of your agency generate things.

00:56:12.700 But I think American democracy can handle that.

00:56:16.700 Well, it demands it.

00:56:17.580 Who's the president of the United States?

00:56:19.260 Well, I mean, the president has absolute declassification authorities.

00:56:23.600 I'm aware.

00:56:23.840 So, people can dislike it, but if the president says, you will declassify everything related to subject X, his declassification authority is as broad and absolute as his pardon power.

00:56:41.420 Why would Pompeo fight so hard to keep those files secret?

00:56:45.160 I don't, I really don't know.

00:56:46.380 So, it's a, if the president had said that they wanted something declassified, I don't understand why they would say that, you know, they would push back on it.

00:56:58.540 Do you think CIA had a role in the president's murder in 1963?

00:57:02.360 I personally don't.

00:57:03.820 You know, if I had to guess, you know, could I see a situation where dots didn't get connected?

00:57:11.220 That should have been connected.

00:57:12.900 You know, things dropped off the table.

00:57:14.200 Somebody looked at a piece of information and said, well, that's not really all that important.

00:57:22.100 That said, you know, I have friends of mine who are retired, you know, CIA officers who at least entertain the idea that the agency of 1962, 1963, you know, it's possible.

00:57:36.020 I don't personally see that.

00:57:38.440 But this could all be cleared up if they just put out whatever they have.

00:57:46.340 Yeah.

00:57:46.460 I mean, it, it seems very unlikely to me after all these years, there could be anything in those files, which are, of course, physical files.

00:57:54.580 Yes, they're all paper.

00:57:55.660 Yeah, of course.

00:57:56.600 You know, really, they're still there sitting in a manila folder, like telling us who the assassin was working for or whatever, telling us the truth.

00:58:05.880 I have a lot of trouble believing they'd still be there if they were ever there.

00:58:11.720 The only reason that I'm focused on it is because I know for a fact that there are CIA employees.

00:58:16.800 I know this for a fact, dead certain fact.

00:58:18.300 I just was hearing about it are trying to prevent certain people from getting jobs on the basis of their belief that those people will push for declassification.

00:58:27.580 Again, I, for the people I knew when I was in the agency and the people I know who are still there, if I were still in, I would reflect, my reflexive position would be, okay, there's, there's really no reason that something's that long ago can't be declassified in toto.

00:58:48.880 What about the 9-11 files?

00:58:51.200 So we're moving on, you know, we're getting close to 25 years later.

00:58:56.100 All the governments in that region are different from what they were, Saudi government's completely different.

00:59:02.660 I don't understand, and there are all these theories about what actually happened, and it's clear that we don't know the full story, whether the full story is sinister or not, you know, I hope not, you know, but I don't, you would do a lot to heal American society by putting doubts to rest.

00:59:19.740 And if these really are, like, dangerous conspiracy theories, then prove it.

00:59:22.940 Like, why wouldn't they release all those files?

00:59:27.920 Well, I'll go on the record as saying, you know, I believe 9-11 was perpetrated by who we said it was.

00:59:33.140 Yes.

00:59:33.380 You know, and some of those people are still down in Guantanamo Bay waiting for justice.

00:59:38.260 Others are dead.

00:59:42.340 I'm very confident the IC had nothing to do.

00:59:45.400 You know, there was no deep state actors or, you know, putting demolitions in the, you know, towers in New York.

00:59:53.560 There really was a plane that hit the Pentagon.

00:59:55.440 I think you could make a good case that there's no reason not to declassify most of this stuff.

01:00:05.060 What I would expect, you know, might be troublesome.

01:00:08.040 It's possible that, you know, you know, some of the early documents are wrong, you know, materially wrong.

01:00:16.520 You know, you're, when you're reporting on contemporaneous events, some of your reports will be wrong.

01:00:21.540 I think people can understand that, okay, this is something that came out, you know, a week after 9-11.

01:00:27.940 It's incorrect.

01:00:29.220 It was proven.

01:00:29.840 It was a theory of the crime that was disproven.

01:00:32.120 And I personally believe if it would advance, you know, building more trust with the government and the IC, which I think is absolutely critical to having, you know, effective national security defense, I personally don't think that there's any reason you can't declassify most of those things, if not all of them.

01:00:51.860 I agree with you on all counts.

01:00:54.980 It is critical to national security and defense to have trust between the population and the government it employs to protect it, right?

01:01:03.360 So, trust is not just like this thing you wish you had.

01:01:07.320 It's this thing you need in order for the system to continue.

01:01:10.780 So, yeah, and if people believe that there wasn't a plane that flew into the Pentagon or that the CIA or Mossad or somebody else other than the 19 hijackers did this, prove them wrong.

01:01:22.280 Like, wouldn't that, it would just be good for everybody, would it not?

01:01:25.340 Yeah, I mean, you know, I remember years ago, actually, you know, some people in Al-Qaeda discussing this, you know, weirdly that, you know, they were upset that people were trying to take their credit from them for, you know, doing what they did on 9-11.

01:01:39.540 Because, you know, for them, it was an important part of their, you know, of their credibility with their own folks that they were able to pull this off.

01:01:46.980 So, I see no reason that they probably can't.

01:01:50.240 It was five years ago this month that people started to drop dead in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

01:01:56.200 Five years since the beginning of COVID.

01:01:58.480 Tens of millions dead.

01:02:00.180 Societies reordered completely.

01:02:02.660 Economies destroyed.

01:02:03.580 And yet, for some reason, we still don't know answers to the most basic questions.

01:02:08.260 Where did this virus come from?

01:02:09.660 How did it get here?

01:02:11.100 Why did the government tell us to do things they knew wouldn't work?

01:02:14.440 None of those questions have been adequately answered.

01:02:16.720 And one man knows those answers.

01:02:18.600 His name is Dr. Tony Fauci.

01:02:20.340 Until now, nobody has really pressed.

01:02:23.080 And now, a documentary filmmaker called Jenner First is out with a new film explaining exactly what happened.

01:02:30.480 The film was called Thank You, Dr. Fauci.

01:02:32.780 Jenner First spent years trying to get answers.

01:02:35.040 And in that time, as he awaited Dr. Fauci's response, he went through tens of thousands of pages of documents.

01:02:40.980 And pieced together the story, which is shocking.

01:02:43.220 We are proud to host that documentary here on TCN from December 20th to January 19th.

01:02:48.700 You will see it exclusively here on TCN.

01:02:51.000 Again, it's called Thank You, Dr. Fauci.

01:02:53.580 And it's worth it.

01:02:54.520 Then why the effort, and CI has, I think it's been, well it has been documented, participated in this effort to discredit people who ask questions or who have alternate theories.

01:03:22.100 Why not prove them wrong rather than resort to character assassination, conspiracy theorists, etc.

01:03:28.540 So, again, you know, when I was in the agency and what me and my colleagues did, we were focused on collecting foreign, actionable foreign intelligence abroad.

01:03:37.800 You know, if somebody on the internet had something to say, you know, that was completely at odds with what we knew to be the truth, you just sort of baked that in to how you did what you did.

01:03:52.880 It's a political question.

01:03:54.200 It's really a White House decision.

01:03:55.960 You know, if the White House had decided, you know what, it's in our national interest to put everything out on the table that we have.

01:04:04.440 You're making a fair point, a true point.

01:04:06.780 And a president can make that happen.

01:04:10.260 Just like a president can pardon anybody, a president can bulk declassify data if they want to.

01:04:16.000 And there's literally nothing the federal workforce or the agencies could do to push back on that.

01:04:23.360 I'm praying for that to happen because I think it's necessary for healing, sincerely.

01:04:28.040 Too much is classified.

01:04:30.880 Too much is secret.

01:04:31.900 It's unfair on its face, but it's also corrosive of trust, I think.

01:04:35.940 That's my view.

01:04:37.320 Tell us about security clearances.

01:04:38.920 Security clearances, let me just say for context, as someone who lived in D.C., are held by a lot of people who are not federal employees, a lot of contractors, a lot of retired people.

01:04:47.200 I have security clearances, and they use those to make money in the private sector or from government working as contractors.

01:04:56.500 And it seems like people leave government service and just continue on with their security clearance, which from my perspective as a U.S. citizen who's paid his taxes for 55 years seems a little unfair.

01:05:07.960 Like, why should John Brennan, who's not a federal employee, get to see top-secret information, but I can't?

01:05:13.040 Like, what?

01:05:13.480 He's not a federal employee.

01:05:14.720 I don't really understand that system.

01:05:17.420 So, you know, I'll caution this by I'm not an expert on how they do what we call contractor clearances.

01:05:24.140 Yeah.

01:05:24.700 But, you know, in the years after 9-11, the federal workforce didn't grow as much as the work grew.

01:05:32.360 And so what happened was there was an increasing reliance on private companies to do and to augment the federal intelligence community.

01:05:44.520 Those companies would have to hire people who would need to get security clearances, and those security clearances have to be the equivalent of the ones that a federal employee had to do the same work.

01:05:54.800 So, in many cases, what you had were federal employees who reached the point of retirement, but let's say they're still relatively young, 50, 52, and they go to work for these contracting companies that have contracts back in the government.

01:06:13.540 And in that case, they need to maintain their clearance and can lawfully retain their clearance because they're working on a government contract through an approved vendor.

01:06:23.280 Right.

01:06:24.800 Now, you probably have a much smaller number of instances where people who don't fit into that category might still be authorized to have access to a security clearance and occasional briefings from the government.

01:06:41.500 And what happens, again, that's, again, a very narrow number of folks, usually cabinet secretaries, people who have careers where they're still, you know, engaged with, say, you know, foreign policy in the private sector.

01:06:58.060 And the government deems that it's advantageous to keep these people updated on certain developments.

01:07:04.880 Usually, they don't get access to the same information that a in-service federal employee might get, but they might be given a briefing on, you know, developments in a certain part of the world because they travel there a lot.

01:07:17.920 And they are, they can still be an effective voice for American policy if they're informed, but that's a very tiny.

01:07:26.740 So, Tony Blinken, for example, is now the Secretary of State.

01:07:29.280 He will be until January 20th, God willing.

01:07:31.400 And his views are completely at odds with those of the incoming president, completely at odds, and he's working hard to undermine the incoming Trump administration in Ukraine, pushing to get Ukraine and NATO or some insane thing like that.

01:07:48.340 He plans to retain his security clearance.

01:07:50.760 He's hired a lawyer to argue the case if it comes to that.

01:07:53.460 But, I happen to know, why, on what grounds could Tony Blinken, even if he thought he did a good job as Secretary of State, which I want to say, once again, I don't, but, like, why does he have a right to a security clearance when he leaves federal service as an appointee?

01:08:09.140 Well, nobody has a right to it.

01:08:10.480 Right.

01:08:10.640 And, again, you know, the DOD and whatever the home agency is where your clearance is, quote, being held, have an absolute right to grant, revoke, or not issue a clearance.

01:08:26.520 And, certainly, a president, if the president decided this person does not need access to classified information, it would be unusual for a president to sort of name somebody like that.

01:08:36.720 But, as far as I understand, it's well within his authority to say, this person doesn't need a security clearance.

01:08:45.200 And, the person would have to be able to articulate, even if a president wasn't involved in making a decision like that, the person petitioning to get a clearance or to keep it would have to have a reason that's actionable and to the benefit of the government to do so.

01:09:00.260 You know, I'm not aware of the specifics of, you know, a former cabinet-level officer trying to keep a clearance.

01:09:07.540 I would imagine if the new administration said that they didn't approve it or concur, that it's essentially an unreviewable decision.

01:09:17.960 Probably, it's being Washington, you could probably find an attorney who would take your case on.

01:09:21.680 But, you know, presumably, even if you had a clearance, they don't have to actually give you any access to anything.

01:09:30.080 Just because you have a clearance, it isn't a badge that allows you to get into a physical place and access data.

01:09:35.340 Somebody still has to proactively check that you have a clearance and then brief you.

01:09:39.860 Right, but the reason I think that it's significant is because it sets up legal penalties for the transfer of classified information to you if you don't possess a clearance.

01:09:49.300 So, in other words, if you're Tony Blinken and you leave January 20th and you want to continue to undermine the administration, which he does, you can remain in contact with your former employees at state or throughout the U.S. government, your allies, and receive classified information and no one's breaking the law.

01:10:04.500 But if you don't have a clearance, you know, then you could get John Karakud for it.

01:10:09.860 So, and again, an administration has broad authorities about who can have a clearance.

01:10:16.960 And just because a former official wants one, they don't have a right to keep it.

01:10:24.860 What do you make of these apparent terror attacks in New Orleans?

01:10:30.320 Well, the attack in New Orleans and then the exploding cyber truck in Las Vegas.

01:10:36.400 So, you know, it's early.

01:10:38.820 And one of the things I learned, you know, in my time dealing with terrorist actions and in the intel world is, you know, you want to be careful about what you think you believe.

01:10:47.600 You still get the story.

01:10:48.540 What we know so far about New Orleans is it looks like other types of attacks we've seen over the years, sort of somebody becomes self-radicalized and then carries out, you know, an extreme act with little preparation time ahead of the actual attack.

01:11:06.320 So, often in these type of cases, you know, somebody may have been thinking about doing some violent action.

01:11:14.040 Something happens in their life.

01:11:15.560 They see, think, or believe something and they simply are triggered.

01:11:18.600 Yeah.

01:11:18.740 Now, the, you know, initial information, you know, from, you know, that I was reading earlier today was that the attack or whatever happened, you know, the explosion in front of Trump Hotel is not related to, or they haven't detected any connections with what happened in New Orleans.

01:11:36.660 Now, I think as a, if I was still in government and two events happened on the same day or within, you know, 24 hours of each other, that has sometimes been the hallmark of an organized terror attack.

01:11:49.320 And as a working theory, it's worthwhile to at least look into it.

01:11:52.880 You know, however, what little we know and we don't know much about the attacker in Las Vegas, he doesn't seem to be the same political persuasion.

01:12:04.820 Again, we don't know a lot yet of the attacker in New Orleans.

01:12:11.380 Now, you have two possibilities here.

01:12:14.740 You know, one, they're connected, which means that it was an organized effort and somebody missed it.

01:12:20.540 Initial indications are that's probably not the case.

01:12:22.880 The other option is, is that you've got two independent attacks, you know, if this is really an attack, if it's really political in Las Vegas.

01:12:36.560 What that would tend to tell you, and especially when you add in the attack or the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, which was clearly, in many ways, an act of political terrorism.

01:12:49.280 Is something changing in the political atmosphere, which is already toxic, that is triggering a certain set of our population to say, you know what, whatever my personal beliefs are, they are so pushed to the edge.

01:13:05.620 That at this point, I feel I've got to execute or make some kind of a violent statement that I've been sitting on for quite some period of time.

01:13:15.500 So, I think it's too early to tell, you know, are we looking at my, you know, is this sort of the new normal where as politics becomes more toxic in America, that people decide, you know, to take violent action on their own.

01:13:30.440 We do know that violent acts tend to open the door to other violent acts, you know, people who are inclined to do these type of things when they see a violent political act will often, you know, see that as like, well, you know, that that person can do it, I can do it.

01:13:48.200 We just simply don't know.

01:13:50.920 So, there's no indication that you've seen, I mean, because everything you've said suggests you think this is just domestic entirely, there's no foreign actor.

01:13:59.100 I don't, I mean, inspired, so the guy in New Orleans apparently, you know, was consuming ISIS type propaganda and, you know, according to the, you know, what's in the papers or the, you know, the news media had produced a couple of videos en route to the attack site making pro-ISIS statements.

01:14:17.100 So, in that case, yes, he's inspired by ISIS, a foreign terrorist group, but it doesn't sound like, you know, he was getting any direction or had any help, which is its own troubling type of terrorism.

01:14:32.040 When they do this on their own and they don't require a conspiracy, it's very hard to catch them.

01:14:38.000 Of course.

01:14:38.200 I mean, there have been an early report, you know, that the vehicle involved had come across from Mexico.

01:14:44.500 Yeah.

01:14:45.740 You know, that seems to maybe not be true, but it does bring up an interesting point, which is, and part of the reason I think that had a lot of currency, it's very hard to have an effective counterterrorism policy if you don't have border control.

01:15:02.480 Because terrorism is about people, because terrorism is about people, it's people who carry it out.

01:15:07.000 You know, in the last four years, we've had something like 9 million people show up at our borders unannounced and have been allowed to come in and stay.

01:15:17.560 9 million people, if you aggregate it out on a monthly basis, is one U.S. Marine Corps worth of people every single month for four years.

01:15:27.620 It's impossible to vet or to know anything meaningful about a Marine Corps' worth of people coming into this country every month for four years.

01:15:37.940 As a, you know, former intelligence official myself, somebody responsible for counterterrorism operations at Intel, if somebody had told me, well, we need you to guarantee that, you know, you've got a screening process where we could look at who these people are so we know who we're letting in, that's impossible.

01:15:58.300 You don't even know what these people's real names are.

01:16:00.380 You don't know anything about their backgrounds.

01:16:01.620 It's an enormous black hole of information that there's no easy solution.

01:16:11.260 If you're not going to have border controls that are effective, it's very hard to have an effective CT policy.

01:16:19.420 Counterterrorism policy.

01:16:20.440 Counterterrorism.

01:16:21.020 So, you know, you left in 2017, I think you said.

01:16:25.160 I did.

01:16:25.500 But, you know, your friends who stayed who were in counterterrorism, I mean, they must have looked on with horror at this.

01:16:34.100 I think there have been, you know, I've never heard anybody tell me that if you don't have control of your borders, that you can have good counterterrorism policy.

01:16:44.060 In fact, I remember when I was in service, you know, like many of us, I had a chance to actually talk to people who'd been terrorists, you know, honest to goodness, you know, gun-carrying terrorists.

01:16:56.000 And you ask them sort of, okay, of all the things that governments do that make it hard for you to do what you do as a bad guy, what are some of those things?

01:17:06.380 The top two were, the number one was getting across borders where they ask a lot of questions.

01:17:14.640 They said that's an extremely tough thing to get around.

01:17:20.100 You know, that's, it's the single easiest thing a government can do to isolate itself from at least a big element of terrorism, which is transnational terrorism.

01:17:30.860 Yeah, I mean, I'm not a counterterrorism official, but that was obvious to me.

01:17:34.800 How could Biden administration officials who abetted this not know that?

01:17:41.520 I can't think of any credible counterterrorism official I know who, if asked the question,

01:17:47.760 can you guarantee that you're able to validate up to 200,000 people a month who are coming through our border?

01:17:55.480 Like, that's on, you know, that's not possible.

01:18:00.360 It's simply impossible to know even what their real names are.

01:18:06.480 Oh.

01:18:07.880 So, I think the implication is that you would not be surprised if we see acts of terrorism in this country accelerate.

01:18:15.960 No, I mean, without effective border controls and in a world where you, America has legitimate enemies.

01:18:27.260 It does.

01:18:27.860 You know, you may, people may say, well, we shouldn't have made that person or that country an enemy, but we live with the reality that we have.

01:18:33.700 You're, it's a needless and avoidable risk that we've taken that we could easily do something to prevent and tighten that up very quickly.

01:18:47.100 No, it's an act of hostility toward the United States, I would say, to allow that.

01:18:50.680 What are the things that we've done that have engendered hostility?

01:18:53.300 Well, it's, so there's, you know, there's two ways that you can engender hostility.

01:18:59.220 One, you know, carrying out something that's important to you that, you know, in the course of events, you know, you have to impose your will on a foreign country or a foreign organization because it's in your legitimate interest.

01:19:10.280 And people don't like it.

01:19:11.180 And they don't like it, you know, and that's an awful lot of this.

01:19:14.000 You know, in other cases, you know, you know, some of the long occupations that the United States has, some of its foreign policy decisions, you know, which, you know, may or may not be controversial with the American people, which maybe there's no consensus on, will tend to generate ill will with a certain percentage of the world's population.

01:19:44.000 So, when you were in all these countries, and I loved how you referred to the region, not the country, but quite a few countries, it sounds like, over 28 years, carrying out tasks that you were asked to carry out.

01:20:02.220 Were you struck when you came home about how little your fellow Americans knew about how we were projecting power abroad?

01:20:09.000 So, you know, the thing about narrative is that the people who tend to buy the narrative the most are your own people.

01:20:19.920 And so, what I, it's easy as an American not to really understand how you are perceived in another country.

01:20:31.680 Yeah.

01:20:32.700 And, you know, part of what I liked about being in the CIA was that it gave you an opportunity to be able to go out and find out what do these countries and interest groups really think about us?

01:20:44.140 Yes, exactly.

01:20:44.760 And, you know, often, you know, people didn't want to hear what you had to say because, you know, you want to believe that, okay, this policy that we're pursuing is either at least, if not popular with country X, is at least accepted by its leadership.

01:20:58.480 And in many cases, that's simply not true.

01:21:01.560 Now, many times, these countries were either powerless to do anything about it.

01:21:05.460 You know, it was something they disliked, but it wasn't going to have a negative impact, meaningful impact, on their relationship with the United States.

01:21:14.840 But, generally speaking, I would say that Americans don't have a great understanding of how the rest of the world works.

01:21:25.420 I mean, we're a huge country.

01:21:27.160 You know, you don't have to engage with foreigners a lot.

01:21:30.260 You don't have to, I mean, you can travel, but it's touristic.

01:21:33.260 If you don't speak the language, there's a lot of things you don't pick up.

01:21:35.960 You know, part of what and why having a security service or an intel service is critical, and, frankly, also a foreign service, a state department that's good at its job, is you need people who know what the reality on the ground is in these countries so that, despite whatever the popular narrative is, that at least the American leadership is informed.

01:21:59.740 Here's what these guys really think about subject X.

01:22:03.000 And if we pursue subject X further, it's likely to have results that we can't stop or we're going to have to stop at an elevated cost to ourselves and our own interests.

01:22:15.520 But you would bring that information back and you would get supervisors who just weren't not that interested in hearing it.

01:22:22.180 So, I would say, generally, within the CIA, you know, you've got a fair hearing about what it is you collected.

01:22:29.160 Now, whether or not the policymakers who consume the information the CIA produces, whether or not they believe it, or they believe it's significant, or they believe it's outweighed or not outweighed by other information they have access to, that was really up to them.

01:22:45.840 I'd say something that has changed in the last 20 years that makes this much harder is the rise of instantaneous information through the internet, you know, the handheld device, you know, that everybody's got.

01:23:00.860 Where in the past, the security services, I think even globally, the IC in the United States, if they didn't have a monopoly on foreign information, they certainly had a large, hard to challenge degree of access that nobody else did.

01:23:24.220 And what often, I think, happens now, and we've seen glimpses of this, you know, even come out in the media, is you have senior leaders of countries, senior leaders in the U.S., who, yes, they will consume that president's daily brief that's produced every morning.

01:23:40.060 But they've also got contacts around the world who send them an email or send them a video.

01:23:45.140 That's right.

01:23:45.620 And I remember several bizarre instances in the early days of the Ukraine war where people were commenting on videos purportedly coming out of Ukraine that were actually clips from video games.

01:24:02.700 Yes.

01:24:02.960 And, you know, in some cases, these were, you know, senior people or senior former people who just didn't realize that, you know, this wasn't what it purported to be.

01:24:16.560 And now that you've got.

01:24:17.060 Well, they're lying.

01:24:17.780 I mean, I don't understand.

01:24:19.020 So, Russia has 100 million more people than Ukraine in much deeper industrial capacity.

01:24:25.000 And it's, and nationalism, which actually matters in war.

01:24:29.440 And so, like, there was never a chance, I think, any objective person would say that Ukraine was going to, like, crush Russia, which was, I just don't think it was going to happen.

01:24:39.500 And it hasn't happened.

01:24:40.540 But you saw all these intel-adjacent people or members of Congress who've been briefed, you know, repeatedly by the IC say, you know, tell you that with a straight face.

01:24:51.440 And so, like, where's the breakdown in information there?

01:24:55.840 If members of Congress are getting honest briefings, they're going to have a clearer sense of the reality than they seem to have.

01:25:04.400 Like, what is that?

01:25:06.300 So, you know, I think, I mean, Ukraine's instructive on a couple of levels. 0.53

01:25:12.100 You know, one, if you think the 2003 invasion of Iraq was mishandled by the American intel community, and it was, you know, the information on that, think about being the intelligence guys who told Putin that it would be a walkover to get into Ukraine.

01:25:30.500 Because, you know, all indications are, he was told, we'll be in Kiev in a week.

01:25:37.960 And, you know, we will be able to, you know, within a few months, be able to reimpose some type of a government in this country that's more to our liking.

01:25:45.340 And clearly, you know, the Ukrainians who have their own nationalism, and it's been, I think, deepened by, you know, the violence of this war.

01:25:54.220 I mean, they've, you know, they've really pushed back.

01:25:56.260 And it's bizarrely, Vladimir Putin has helped create more of a Ukrainian national identity than almost any other Ukrainian politician's ever done.

01:26:04.780 People can unite against a common foe.

01:26:06.340 So, you know, as to the long-term consequences.

01:26:11.240 Can I say?

01:26:12.080 Sure.

01:26:12.460 But it's not, I think, I think what you said is fair.

01:26:15.540 But it's only one of the intel failures.

01:26:17.840 If you're the Biden administration and you send your vice president over to Europe to encourage in public Zelensky to join NATO, what happened to Bill Burns, who wrote the famous memo, who now runs CIA, said, if you do this, Russia will go to war.

01:26:34.220 I mean, it's existential for them.

01:26:36.180 Yep.

01:26:36.340 You can't put NATO on their borders.

01:26:39.200 Where is the intel briefer who puts that in the PDB?

01:26:43.020 Like, don't, if you do this, you should know there's a non-zero risk of nuclear war.

01:26:48.440 Like, where was that guy?

01:26:49.380 And we certainly just, we don't know because, you know, currently the, I'd assume the current administration is not interested in, you know, providing a, what would they call it, track B analysis, you know, an alternative analysis.

01:27:01.620 How about casualty numbers?

01:27:02.480 I can't find a member of Congress, most of whom, you know, probably don't want to know.

01:27:07.460 But just give a straight answer, like, how many Ukrainians have died?

01:27:10.700 Oh, we don't know that.

01:27:11.760 Really?

01:27:12.160 You get these briefs all the time in your little skiffs?

01:27:14.540 Yeah. 0.99

01:27:14.740 Going through all your little bullshit kabuki and you can't tell me how many Ukrainians have died? 1.00

01:27:17.880 You sent them to your desk with this money and you can't tell me how many died? 1.00

01:27:21.060 No.

01:27:21.680 No one's ever mentioned that.

01:27:23.220 Like, what is that?

01:27:24.980 Yeah.

01:27:25.360 I mean, it's clearly a knowable fact.

01:27:27.060 Yeah.

01:27:27.280 Well, yeah.

01:27:27.980 And, you know, whether or not, you know, they were briefed on it, you know, they chose not to talk about it or whether they've never been briefed on it, I personally don't know.

01:27:36.520 I mean, I think based on public comments from the incoming administration, you know, I think they've got a very different plan about how to try to bring this terrible, horrible conflict to some sort of a resolution.

01:27:51.780 I sure hope so.

01:27:52.600 I, you know, I hope so.

01:27:54.420 But I just think as you're prosecuting the war and paying for the war and your weapons and your advisors are making the more possible, whatever you think about the morality of the war or its cause or whatever, but you're definitely driving the war.

01:28:07.220 One side of it.

01:28:08.500 Don't you have an obligation to know how many of these people are dying?

01:28:12.520 Like, I just don't understand that.

01:28:13.900 I mean, I can only say that were I advising somebody who was on, you know, the oversight, I would say that you have a very broad writ to be able to ask anything that you want to ask.

01:28:26.480 And I would think that, you know, nobody in the IC, if asked, would say anything to them other than, okay, here's what we know.

01:28:33.660 Now, maybe they don't know or maybe they haven't gone out and collected it.

01:28:37.220 But in the case of, you know, casualties in Ukraine, I'd be surprised if a congressman really wanted to know that, that they couldn't get that answer or force the system to give it to them.

01:28:49.800 And if the system didn't, then that's a problem.

01:28:52.900 That's a problem.

01:28:53.560 I just would think that would be like one of those baseline numbers.

01:28:57.740 Like, there's one of those Wikipedia numbers that just like, these are like facts that you should know.

01:29:02.120 Like, what are the casualty numbers?

01:29:03.560 And by the way, everyone has an incentive to lie about them always in every conflict.

01:29:07.840 And both sides are lying about them.

01:29:09.480 I get that.

01:29:10.040 But my impression was the intel agencies are supposed to be like purveyors of reliable information.

01:29:16.860 Again, I would imagine that they must have a pretty darn good idea.

01:29:20.760 Do you know what those numbers are?

01:29:21.720 I've heard various ones.

01:29:24.160 I mean, so, you know, I've heard on the very low side, I've heard something like 50,000 Ukrainian dead.

01:29:31.740 I don't believe that one.

01:29:32.640 I think it's probably, you know, more like 120 to 150 dead.

01:29:39.180 I think Russian maybe half again that, if not double.

01:29:44.580 I think one of the things that, you know, you see when you go to Ukraine is an astounding number of people with, you know, traumatic amputations and, you know, grievous injuries.

01:29:55.080 And those, you know, all these are indicators of just how bad this conflict really is and how it's ground up so many young lives.

01:30:11.540 Yeah.

01:30:12.880 Yeah, I don't, I, yeah, well, I agree with that.

01:30:16.740 Is the President's Daily Brief written in a way to influence the president one way or the other?

01:30:24.000 It's not supposed to be.

01:30:25.460 And it's supposed to be the job of whoever is the director of national intelligence to, you know, to the degree, you know, humanly possible to not put a heavy editorial slant on it.

01:30:37.880 You know, whether they achieve that in everything, you know, it's human enterprise.

01:30:42.080 I'm sure there are instances when it doesn't.

01:30:44.080 But maybe that's why they don't want Tulsi Gabbard in there.

01:30:45.860 I think there seem to be a lot of reasons why they, you know, they're uncomfortable with somebody who doesn't accept the foreign policy consensus.

01:30:55.240 And, you know, since I wrote that article endorsing her, you know, I've had people I know, people I like, you know, say that, you know, why, you know, why her?

01:31:05.340 And I've had a lot more actually also reach out and say, we agree with you.

01:31:10.460 You know, somebody who's going to be skeptical and challenge the assumptions that we, you know, we far or were too easily willing to continue to traffic in.

01:31:21.320 You know, it's, we can afford to have a couple of skeptics around.

01:31:25.980 How many moments during your 28-year career did you have moral qualms with what you were asked to do?

01:31:31.220 I did not have a moral qualm with anything that I was asked to do.

01:31:36.660 You know, some of the things you get asked to do are hard.

01:31:39.300 Oh, yeah.

01:31:39.940 You know, probably, you know, I'd say in a war situation, and I'll expand this beyond myself,

01:31:52.220 you could find yourself in situations where, you know, you might be supporting one side or another in a conflict.

01:31:58.660 And it becomes the policy of your country that it's no longer going to support either side, or it's going to withdraw support.

01:32:06.400 You know, that can be a very bad thing to experience, where, you know, you've got to deliver a message that says,

01:32:13.260 I know we were supporting you before, and we've been doing that for some time.

01:32:20.280 Priorities have changed, and we're not going to support you.

01:32:23.200 Now, that's completely within the lawful authority of the director of the CIA, the National Security Council, and the president.

01:32:32.420 It doesn't make it easy to do that.

01:32:34.200 But did I have, you know, you know, was ever asked to do anything where I said, you know, that's completely outrageous or immoral?

01:32:42.800 No, but, you know, maybe they save those questions for somebody else.

01:32:49.180 But, you know, in my case, you know, I took a pretty aggressive view towards what America's role in the world should be.

01:32:56.980 You know, like a lot of other folks, you know, who went to war zones.

01:33:01.660 You know, now we don't equate what we do to what combat soldiers do.

01:33:05.780 But, you know, you've got to make decisions sometimes that affect life and death.

01:33:08.680 I think the first casualty in the war in Afghanistan was a CIA officer.

01:33:12.460 It was.

01:33:13.580 Mike Spann.

01:33:14.080 Mike Spann, who was killed, you know, early on.

01:33:16.660 So, yes, I did not.

01:33:18.500 I did not.

01:33:19.120 I knew, you know, other members of his team.

01:33:21.280 And I remember the night when he was killed in Kalajangi Prison.

01:33:24.560 You know, when a prisoner riot happened.

01:33:27.540 And, you know, it's a job that has elevated risk, especially if you are overseas, you're in conflict zones.

01:33:36.040 You know, sometimes, you know, it's hostile action.

01:33:38.240 Sometimes it's bad luck.

01:33:40.000 You know, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

01:33:42.620 You know, something falls out of the sky and it gets too close to you and you're, you know, you're injured or killed.

01:33:48.240 But it was a great career, you know, for a young person who's interested in the world, who, you know, sort of wants to challenge themselves and is willing to make a sacrifice.

01:33:58.980 You know, if you can keep your ethics while you're doing it, you know, there's nothing else like it in the world, in my experience.

01:34:05.420 I believe that.

01:34:06.400 A lot of divorce.

01:34:07.860 I've known a lot of case officers who are almost all divorced.

01:34:11.780 Those type of careers, sort of like some of the careers.

01:34:14.120 Is that a fair thing to admit?

01:34:15.120 It's, it's, and, you know, it's heavily skewed towards, you know, case officers and people who have multiple assignments overseas.

01:34:22.040 Yeah, yeah, I'm not talking about the analysts at home.

01:34:23.960 Yeah, I'd say, you know, similar to, you know, the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, which are, you know, Delta Force, Navy SEALs.

01:34:33.720 Yeah, you get, you have enormous stresses on families.

01:34:38.420 You, to do this type of job and to really love it and to want to do it, you've really got to be willing to sacrifice.

01:34:44.980 And that's something that they don't, they will tell you this when you first join.

01:34:50.080 You know, what's the old joke?

01:34:51.300 What, what do young people really know about certain things?

01:34:54.640 You know, and as you matriculate through your career, you'll realize that, okay, you're going to need to give this up and this thing might be important to you personally.

01:35:03.980 You're, maybe you're not going to go to that assignment that you wanted to go to because they're redirecting you to some other crisis that, you know, you were never interested in having anything to do with.

01:35:14.380 But you, you joined to serve at the leisure of your directors and your bosses.

01:35:21.240 And I, you know, in my case, I never turned down an assignment.

01:35:25.660 You know, even though, you know, I tallied it up once of all the places I ever went, I never actually asked to go to any of them.

01:35:32.900 I was just told, like, we know you put down, you wanted to go to some nice place in Europe.

01:35:38.820 Somebody will just tell you, well, back to Sudan.

01:35:42.840 Back to wherever you're going again.

01:35:44.460 What's the worst post you had?

01:35:47.540 So, you know, Sudan and Africa was pretty, pretty dicey and a pretty interesting place in the early 90s. 1.00

01:35:56.820 You know, you know, there's no cell phones.

01:36:03.280 It's, you know, it was a hotbed of bad guy terrorism back in those days.

01:36:09.780 You know, Osama bin Laden was literally driving around Khartoum in a Toyota Hilux pickup truck.

01:36:15.320 The government of Sudan was highly radicalized and had literally an open door, open door policy towards almost every bad guy organization on planet Earth.

01:36:30.080 Which led to some very peculiar situations where they would, I remember at one point they had a meeting at the Khartoum Hilton Hotel, which is near the Nile River.

01:36:40.160 And it was literally a conference for every jihadist group on planet Earth.

01:36:45.320 So, the jihadis prefer Hilton?

01:36:48.360 Is that what you're saying?

01:36:48.840 You know, it seems, you know, they had good discounts.

01:36:51.340 You got the point.

01:36:52.440 They had, you know, and if you're going to have non-alcoholic drinks, you know, super sugary, they had some pretty nice offerings.

01:36:59.200 But, you know, it was a different world on terrorism prior to 9-11.

01:37:04.020 I mean, the Sudanese government in those days, quite literally, and this is not an exaggeration, advertised a conference.

01:37:12.180 I think it was in December of 1993.

01:37:15.520 Come to Khartoum.

01:37:17.420 We're going to be hosting everybody at the Khartoum Hilton.

01:37:20.360 Bring, if you want to bring Hamas, bring Hezbollah, bring Islamic Jihad, bring the IRGC, bring far-flung terrorists of the groups that, you know, almost no one else has ever heard of.

01:37:35.860 And these people showed up for two days, you know, to talk about, you know, sort of the unfair American hegemony that, you know, they felt had been imposed upon the world.

01:37:49.580 Did you go to the conference?

01:37:51.380 I did.

01:37:52.520 So, it was...

01:37:55.280 What did you put on your name badge?

01:37:57.480 I should have put, like, Swiss delegation or something, but I actually, I remember I was sitting next to...

01:38:03.320 Again, the government at the time in Sudan was proud of this.

01:38:07.260 They thought it was important.

01:38:08.500 It was their way to establish a role for themselves.

01:38:12.040 And, you know, I was a young guy.

01:38:15.660 I was, like, 26 years old.

01:38:16.980 And I wound up in this conference hall where the opening chant is, the army of the prophet is against the Jew. 0.89

01:38:26.380 So, that goes on for a couple of minutes to get the crowd going.

01:38:29.860 And, again, you know, I'm there not to advocate for what these people do.

01:38:32.980 I'm there to try to figure out who they are and what they're up to.

01:38:35.580 And if they want to invite me to their extremist event, because they're proud...

01:38:40.180 Why would they invite a lot of CIA officers to the party events?

01:38:43.700 I didn't put that on our name card, but it was, they were okay with foreign embassies that were accredited to their country showing up.

01:38:54.520 And so, I remember I was seated...

01:38:55.860 You went as a U.S. embassy employee. 0.99

01:38:57.200 I was the only U.S. embassy person dumb enough to go to this thing. 0.93

01:39:00.860 And the guy sitting beside me was the Swiss Chargé. 0.91

01:39:05.420 And very nice guy.

01:39:08.020 Chargé de Ferris.

01:39:08.740 Chargé de Ferris.

01:39:09.400 Number two guy in the embassy.

01:39:10.440 Number two guy in the Swiss embassy.

01:39:13.740 And Switzerland, because the Red Cross, had a fairly big presence there.

01:39:18.220 And when this number starts with the opening chant, he and I had been sort of small talking.

01:39:24.300 And he just said, I'll never forget this.

01:39:27.100 I'm sorry, my dear boy.

01:39:28.280 I hope you will understand.

01:39:29.560 I'm going to go away from you now.

01:39:31.700 I was like, that's all right, you know.

01:39:34.460 And that was because, you know, it was like, you know,

01:39:36.940 death to America was always the second chant.

01:39:39.920 Yeah.

01:39:40.700 After that.

01:39:41.500 And again, the peculiar thing about it was, despite all that hostility,

01:39:47.180 you'd actually get Sudanese, who are congenitally very friendly people.

01:39:52.480 Yes.

01:39:52.620 Even their kind of extremist government, they'd come up and ask you afterwards, like, you know,

01:39:57.360 during a break, are you having an okay time?

01:39:59.220 You know, you're getting, are you getting, you know, a cool drink?

01:40:02.660 You know, it's a little hot, even though it's December.

01:40:04.600 I'm like, I'm good.

01:40:06.460 So, you know, it was, it was a very different world on terrorism.

01:40:10.980 Yeah.

01:40:11.100 You know, these groups could operate fairly openly.

01:40:14.020 And, you know, there just wasn't a Western response like there was after 9-11.

01:40:18.340 And I know, I've had friends of mine tell me, like, that can't possibly be a true story.

01:40:22.600 I'm like, you can look it up on the internet, you know.

01:40:25.640 I mean, not what I just said, but that they actually had a conference like this.

01:40:28.600 You know, they had even Sunni and Shia groups at the same, at the same thing, same event.

01:40:36.960 Ecumenical terrorist group.

01:40:37.900 It was the most ecumenical group of bad guys you'd ever meet.

01:40:42.120 So, what's the story with the drones over the United States?

01:40:45.240 In December, there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unconfirmed,

01:40:49.740 but citizen reports of drones over in New York, New Jersey, Mid-Atlantic, Pennsylvania.

01:40:55.440 At night, with lights.

01:40:57.340 Yep.

01:40:57.560 So, why would drones be flying with lights at night?

01:41:01.720 So, I think this is a, I think from what I've looked into and what I've talked to people who I think know something about this,

01:41:09.380 that there's no foreign threat here.

01:41:11.740 This isn't any kind of hostile action.

01:41:14.420 But it absolutely points out some longer, some immediate problems that the United States has.

01:41:20.180 Can we begin with what it was?

01:41:21.360 So, what it appears to be is, you know, people were saying that I'm seeing what I believe to be a drone.

01:41:27.560 In the sky in the evening hours.

01:41:29.400 Now, what it appears to have been going on is there were some fair amount of misidentification of, you know, manned aircraft or other things that people would report,

01:41:40.160 hey, I think this is a drone.

01:41:41.200 In other cases, you know, the Federal Aviation Administration, which controls the U.S. airspace,

01:41:49.660 had in the last year, I believe, changed the rules that said you could now operate a drone at night under certain conditions if you put lights on it.

01:41:58.820 So, it appears that at least some of what people were seeing were people who were lawfully accessing the airspace with their private drone,

01:42:08.400 most of the time were probably hobbyist drones,

01:42:11.060 that people are kind of seeing things up in the sky that they wouldn't have seen before.

01:42:16.260 What was really peculiar about this was the sort of fumbled response from the nation.

01:42:23.500 Wait, so you're saying it was nothing?

01:42:24.460 I believe, and I have no evidence that this was an Iranian mothership,

01:42:29.680 that there were, you know, some kind of government, sensitive government operation or testing.

01:42:38.180 I mean, the government has plenty of other places to test drones.

01:42:41.160 And if you're going to test out military drones doing sensitive missions,

01:42:45.060 you're not going to bother to put lights on them.

01:42:47.360 Well, of course.

01:42:48.440 And in Ukraine, you know, where they've been using like a million, literally a million drones a year,

01:42:53.520 you know, nobody puts lights on their drones.

01:42:55.060 So, if you're a hostile actor, you don't do that.

01:42:57.440 Of course not.

01:42:58.380 But what this has pointed out is there's really not a unified plan in the United States.

01:43:03.900 Well, right.

01:43:05.080 And, you know, the more paranoid among us, like me,

01:43:08.580 might say that like a unified plan, you know, not all unified plans are great.

01:43:12.160 But can we just go back to just a pause?

01:43:13.500 Sure, of course.

01:43:14.500 So, you think every, you know, the scores, hundreds of videos of lighted drones or things,

01:43:21.400 lights in the sky at low altitude hovering,

01:43:24.320 those were all hobbyist drones with lights on them.

01:43:27.520 I mean, some of them could be, you know, there are, in the commercial drone world,

01:43:31.620 there are drones that are, you know, that people use for commercial purposes,

01:43:35.940 most of photography, I would say that I have become suspicious over the last couple of years

01:43:44.300 in believing things that I see on videos.

01:43:47.760 Well, for sure.

01:43:48.300 Just because so many of them are, you know, you don't know the Provence of them.

01:43:51.940 I'm in the news business.

01:43:53.100 I can promise you suspicion is warranted.

01:43:55.560 However, there's so many of them that I'm just, I'm just interested.

01:43:59.100 I mean, I don't know what they were.

01:44:00.060 I personally believe, you know, that these were hobbyist drones or misidentification of other types of aircraft.

01:44:08.500 Planes.

01:44:09.080 Planes, you know.

01:44:12.380 Helicopter.

01:44:13.040 Helicopter, you know, something else that's authorized to be there that's flying.

01:44:16.080 But, boy, the government could have really made this much easier on everybody if they just said,

01:44:24.720 we're going to take three simple, easy steps to resolve this.

01:44:28.840 You know, one, we'll explain who's actually responsible for the airspace

01:44:32.460 because there really isn't an easy-to-understand plan on that.

01:44:36.700 Two, they could put up a few government drones of their own to go look and try to see who's up there.

01:44:43.000 Third, they have plenty of detection gear that you could use in a civilian area

01:44:48.520 to determine if there's actually a drone up there

01:44:51.420 because drones have to have a radio connection between the operator and the person flying it.

01:44:57.940 Yeah.

01:44:58.120 It's understandable and well-known what those frequencies are.

01:45:03.060 That type of equipment is available to the government.

01:45:05.840 They could have within a few days.

01:45:07.480 It's available to the civilian.

01:45:08.400 It's available to civilians.

01:45:09.500 And, you know, the government could have easily gotten, you know, made people, could have calmed the situation down.

01:45:15.240 But they didn't.

01:45:15.920 And it went on for over a month.

01:45:17.640 And the internet was just crowded with these videos.

01:45:21.920 Hysteria was rising.

01:45:23.140 And not only did the government not make, at all levels, the state of New Jersey, state of New York,

01:45:27.420 and then, of course, the Biden administration made no effort to calm people down at all

01:45:33.100 and said contradictory, weird things, some of which were clearly untrue, but it was unclear what was true.

01:45:39.940 I mean, it just seemed like if you wanted to calm people down, it's the opposite of what you would have done.

01:45:45.180 I got the sense that they just didn't take people's concerns seriously.

01:45:50.480 Again, but, you know, I work in the drone industry.

01:45:52.900 Yes.

01:45:53.220 And so, you know, from everybody I've talked to who I think is, you know, credible and thoughtful on this,

01:46:00.020 none of them believed that this was some sort of nefarious thing.

01:46:03.820 That it was a government operation.

01:46:05.560 That it was like, you know, that they were looking, what was one of the stories I heard?

01:46:08.180 That they were looking for, you know, lost nuclear materials in Jersey.

01:46:11.680 You know, as a friend of mine said, how could you tell, you know, with everything else in Jersey, you know.

01:46:17.080 Fair question.

01:46:19.420 But that's not really how you would look for lost nuclear material anyway.

01:46:23.840 And I think what happens in the absence of the government providing some kind of an answer,

01:46:30.720 the void has to be filled by something.

01:46:36.340 I'm willing to, I mean, I don't know the answer, as I've said,

01:46:38.960 but I'm certainly willing to believe everything that you have said.

01:46:42.500 What I am hung up on is the government response.

01:46:46.500 Because at best, it betrays, at worst, it betrays some sort of sinister plan to make people more paranoid,

01:46:52.020 which is not inconceivable.

01:46:53.700 But at best, it suggests that you just don't care at all what the public thinks about anything.

01:46:58.700 And that's a very bad attitude that should be punishable by jail time.

01:47:01.960 In my opinion, that's anti-democratic.

01:47:04.260 Like, you don't care?

01:47:05.120 I'll put it this way, you know, I and other folks I know in that industry are all of a single mind that they could,

01:47:14.280 you could easily know what this was and you can make, you know, definitive statements about it with a little bit of investigation.

01:47:20.660 I think the, I think they just didn't take the concern seriously.

01:47:25.060 And when they did try to look into how to do this, they realized that they have a mishmash of authorities.

01:47:32.580 So, just as a very simple one, people don't realize that there's no legal authority to knock a drone out of the sky

01:47:39.380 outside of a very few narrow use cases that only the government has.

01:47:45.700 And not all the government.

01:47:46.740 But I understand, like, as a bird hunter, I mean, I would, if a bird, I would immediately shoot a drone down over my house.

01:47:52.600 I wouldn't even think about it.

01:47:53.320 And why did nobody do that?

01:47:54.520 What a nation of.

01:47:55.640 And maybe it was because, you know, this is, maybe that's why that we had this story in New Jersey and not Texas.

01:48:00.820 That's right.

01:48:01.760 No, that's a fair point.

01:48:03.540 I, you know, I, I remember when I understood that there really is no authority to knock a drone out of the sky.

01:48:12.580 And in fact, if someone was to shotgun somebody's drone out of the sky, the FAA on paper could actually charge you with interfere,

01:48:21.220 literally interfering with an aircraft in flight, you know, which is a rule that was designed to keep manned aircraft and, you know, crewed aircraft safe.

01:48:29.500 But that law still covers, you know, anything that flies.

01:48:34.440 And so, you know, you are at some legal jeopardy, you know, if the government chose to prosecute a person for, you know, you know, taking your AR-15 and, you know, knocking a drone out.

01:48:46.300 That'd be a very good shot.

01:48:47.460 That would be a very good shot.

01:48:49.120 Maybe if they had the lights on, it makes it a little bit.

01:48:50.800 Yeah, but with a tightly choked 28 gauge, you could definitely bring it down. 0.98

01:48:53.740 So I was not surprised when some idiot member of Congress claimed it was from the Iranian mothership because they want a war with Iran, because they're paid to want a war with Iran. 0.99

01:49:01.920 This is my view. 0.99

01:49:03.900 And they blame everything on Iran, which clearly doesn't want a war with the United States, but whatever.

01:49:08.200 But it does raise the question, could a hostile nation park a ship offshore and attack us with drones?

01:49:14.420 Yes, they could.

01:49:16.080 There's currently very little defense in the United States against a deliberate use of drones against any major target.

01:49:28.040 And that's, you know, so we, you know, take a look at the situation in Ukraine where they've now literally, I think last year, Ukraine used 1.4 million drones.

01:49:36.880 That's the population, that's almost the population I think of like San Antonio, Texas, one drone per person.

01:49:44.720 But they used small attack drones, 1.4 million of them.

01:49:48.920 That's not including the rights.

01:49:49.660 When you say attack drones, what are those drones capable of doing?

01:49:51.500 What do they do?

01:49:52.100 So those drones would be about as big as, you know, two big boilers that you might have in your house, could carry, you know, two, maybe two, three pounds of explosives, fly anywhere from 8 to 15, 20 kilometers, 11 to 15 miles, something like that, and be delivered precisely within inches of what you're trying to hit.

01:50:18.280 So if you were to look at some of these Ukraine war videos, where people are literally driving drones through the hatch of a tank from miles away, that's absolutely happening right now.

01:50:33.440 In addition to that, you know, people have developed drones that can fly 1,000 kilometers and hit a target within inches.

01:50:41.040 The Ukrainians have actually taken out very expensive, hard-to-replace Russian strategic bombers that were on an airfield that would be very hard to hit in flight.

01:50:51.980 But they decided, you know what, we're not going to wait for that airplane to go into flight.

01:50:55.320 We're going to hit it on the ground where it's extremely vulnerable.

01:50:58.440 That could easily happen in the United States.

01:51:01.260 There is no comprehensive protection against small drones.

01:51:05.580 The U.S. air defense was created around the concept that we're trying to stop either SCUD missile-type threats or manned aircraft.

01:51:18.100 I'll give you a good, you know, fairly tight scenario.

01:51:22.480 So the Patriot missile, which is, you know, America's preeminent, you know, air defense system that's deployed all over the world,

01:51:30.660 it's got something like 36 missiles in it.

01:51:33.140 It costs quite a bit of money to have one of those systems.

01:51:39.520 You can quite literally overwhelm all of that, all of its defensive systems with 30 or 40 cheap drones.

01:51:46.800 It would cost you less than $100,000.

01:51:51.920 And the operators of that defensive system would have to expend all of their missiles

01:51:59.040 because they'd see this threat coming and they'd shoot, you know, at least one rocket per target.

01:52:04.340 And then they're down to zero.

01:52:06.540 That's sort of kind of what you've been seeing on the Red Sea recently.

01:52:10.380 Yes.

01:52:10.760 Between the U.S. Navy and the Houthi militant movement.

01:52:13.000 Where the U.S. is spending millions of dollars per missile strike to take out a $10,000 drone.

01:52:22.340 You know, the math is unsustainable.

01:52:24.880 And so, the U.S., like most countries in the West, are very vulnerable to this issue right now.

01:52:32.680 I mean, when air power is no longer tied to airfields and it doesn't need a pilot,

01:52:38.880 you know, you've democratized air power in a way that's very discomforting to Americans.

01:52:43.600 I mean, I assume there are drones with, like, big payload capacities now.

01:52:49.480 There are.

01:52:50.140 So, you know, when you think about, you know, sort of the drones of the global war on terrorism,

01:52:55.540 the Predators, the Reapers, these are proper aircraft.

01:52:58.880 You know, they're large, but they're also very easily seen on radar and they're expensive.

01:53:03.960 You know, they can cost, you know, tens of millions of dollars to some of them.

01:53:08.640 You know, some of the big surveillance drones are $100 million worth of electronics and equipment.

01:53:14.500 But we've reached a world where, I mean, again, back to the Ukrainians, you know, 1.00

01:53:20.440 they've been able to knock out, you know, five, you know, $2 million, $3 million tanks with $1,000 drones

01:53:28.520 because of the precision and the lack of defense that, you know, often the Russians have.

01:53:34.940 And then you add into, you know, robotic, what we call military robotics, drones at sea,

01:53:41.720 where, you know, it's increasingly possible, and the Ukrainians have done this as well,

01:53:47.620 to use a $250,000 drone boat to sink a $50 or $60 or $100 million ship.

01:53:58.100 Ukrainians have physically been able to do that on the Black Sea.

01:54:00.940 You know, for a country like the United States, which really relies on a blue water navy,

01:54:06.840 you know, we are very likely to face opponents who will be able to put up hundreds,

01:54:12.900 if not thousands of drones at a time.

01:54:14.840 That would easily overwhelm, you know, the defense systems we've got.

01:54:19.280 So, if you ever go online and look at, I would call something called Chinese drone shows. 0.96

01:54:25.000 This is where, you know, they'll have a Chinese company at some event in China

01:54:29.740 or around the world where they sort of rent out this capability,

01:54:34.660 where they've got a dragon flying in the air.

01:54:36.780 And maybe it's 4,000 drones or 5,000 drones that they've got up in the air

01:54:41.380 that they are controlling all at one time in some of these bigger shows.

01:54:45.120 Four or 5,000 flying devices.

01:54:47.620 I've seen them.

01:54:49.700 What if they put a pound of explosive on each one of them

01:54:53.060 and then fired them over a city?

01:54:56.040 Or fired them at, you know, a sensitive military facility?

01:55:00.200 That's well within reality,

01:55:03.160 and it's only going to get more acute in the coming years.

01:55:07.960 And right now, you know, the United States is still,

01:55:11.100 despite some efforts, you know,

01:55:12.780 that I'll give them some credit for on the Biden administration

01:55:14.620 to try to look at this,

01:55:16.140 we're woefully behind.

01:55:18.600 Ukraine has got a far more sophisticated drone program

01:55:21.540 than the U.S. does right now.

01:55:25.200 And so does Russia. 0.85

01:55:27.140 I mean, that just seems like criminal negligence.

01:55:29.860 You know, I think a lot of it was, you know,

01:55:33.560 the global war on terrorism favored very large aircraft.

01:55:38.380 And so small drones were not really a thing for the U.S. military.

01:55:42.680 They were first used in warfare, I think,

01:55:45.680 during that Iraq and Afghanistan.

01:55:47.960 Is that not right?

01:55:48.720 So at, you know, at scale, small drones, no.

01:55:52.840 So, I mean, they just were not, you know,

01:55:55.420 they weren't battlefield significant for quite a period of time.

01:55:59.140 But I'll, you know, a quick fact.

01:56:02.520 You know, I looked this up.

01:56:04.580 Up until about two years ago, I think 18 months ago,

01:56:07.960 no U.S. servicemen, no army,

01:56:11.980 nobody in the army had been killed by an enemy airstrike since Korea.

01:56:17.220 When that drone strike took place

01:56:19.980 on the Jordanian-Syrian border against U.S. military base

01:56:23.040 that I think killed four or six U.S. servicemen,

01:56:26.160 it's the first time U.S. servicemen, army folks,

01:56:31.700 had been killed by hostile air action in decades.

01:56:39.240 Like 70 years.

01:56:40.280 70 years.

01:56:41.160 So, I mean, the U.S.,

01:56:42.620 which has long relied on the fact

01:56:45.300 that we completely dominate the airspace,

01:56:47.160 any future marine or army operation

01:56:52.140 will have to factor in

01:56:53.340 that there are cheap,

01:56:56.360 large numbers of surveillance and strike aircraft

01:56:59.300 that the enemy have access to

01:57:01.200 that really change the calculus

01:57:05.240 on how much risk we're taking.

01:57:06.700 Are micro-drones likely to play a role,

01:57:09.860 tiny swarms of,

01:57:11.660 large swarms of tiny drones

01:57:12.920 likely to play a role in future warfare?

01:57:15.580 Absolutely.

01:57:16.240 I mean, I would define tiny as probably,

01:57:18.300 you know,

01:57:18.980 something that can carry about a pound of explosives.

01:57:21.680 You know, there's really two things you do with a drone.

01:57:24.040 One, you use it for surveillance.

01:57:25.480 Yes.

01:57:25.760 So you know where the enemy is.

01:57:28.200 Two, you use it as a weapon.

01:57:31.980 And absolutely, there's no technical reason

01:57:34.220 that in the, you know,

01:57:36.460 the next five or seven years

01:57:37.780 that an average, you know, military unit

01:57:40.180 might carry 10 or 15 small drones on it

01:57:43.020 that don't cost an awful lot of money

01:57:46.540 but can go up and search out enemy vehicles,

01:57:50.300 locations, fortifications, and strike them.

01:57:53.980 I would also suggest that probably on a civilian level,

01:57:57.320 and this is my speculation,

01:57:59.400 within 10 to 15 years,

01:58:03.480 your first engagement with law enforcement

01:58:05.520 or the traffic stop will be with the drone.

01:58:08.720 That, you know,

01:58:09.520 instead of being pulled over by a cop who gets out

01:58:12.200 and comes up and talks to you,

01:58:14.360 that I suspect that it will be,

01:58:18.320 every cop car, every police car

01:58:19.760 will actually have a small drone in it

01:58:21.400 that they will be able to sort of send forward

01:58:23.800 once they've got you at a stop.

01:58:26.080 They'll have a camera in there,

01:58:27.760 they'll have the ability to talk to you through it,

01:58:29.400 and that will be your encounter with law enforcement.

01:58:33.780 And you already see that in some ways

01:58:35.660 with, you know, cops using small drones

01:58:37.820 to go into tactical situations

01:58:39.840 and take a look around before sending an officer in.

01:58:43.100 Yeah.

01:58:45.420 I want to just give them nuclear weapons. 0.94

01:58:47.320 You know, I mean, right.

01:58:48.940 So, people are not thinking through the effect.

01:58:51.420 I mean, when DOD started transferring hardware

01:58:53.440 to police departments,

01:58:55.180 I'm as pro-cop as anybody,

01:58:56.580 but you could sort of see the end of civil liberties right there.

01:59:00.300 Yeah.

01:59:00.680 I mean, on this one, you know,

01:59:02.200 I mean, I think you're talking about the,

01:59:04.040 I think it was at the end of

01:59:05.300 maybe the Bush administration

01:59:07.800 where there was a lot of former mill kit.

01:59:10.140 Oh, of course.

01:59:10.660 That was made available.

01:59:11.420 I remember very well.

01:59:11.780 Yeah.

01:59:12.340 I mean, yeah.

01:59:14.060 I mean, in this case, you know,

01:59:15.240 I was just thinking of a civilian version

01:59:17.160 of a police drone.

01:59:19.420 I mean, your civil liberties question, though,

01:59:22.060 is appropriate

01:59:24.300 because what drones will allow someone to do

01:59:26.520 is at extremely low cost

01:59:29.120 to put complete blanket surveillance

01:59:32.180 over any city they want to.

01:59:34.980 Well, sure.

01:59:35.340 This is why they don't care.

01:59:36.520 So, to answer your question or my question

01:59:38.240 or both of our questions,

01:59:39.060 like, why didn't they care

01:59:40.440 that people were afraid,

01:59:42.020 you know, in the run-up to Christmas

01:59:44.300 in a sacred time?

01:59:45.680 Like, people are anxious

01:59:46.740 about these lights in the sky

01:59:47.980 and no one in the government feels like

01:59:49.900 I need to calm people down

01:59:50.920 and, you know, explain this.

01:59:52.900 Yeah, I don't understand it.

01:59:54.000 Because they're looking at a future

01:59:55.360 where there's complete control

01:59:56.780 of the population through technology.

01:59:59.220 That's exactly what they don't have to care.

02:00:01.140 And on this, you know,

02:00:02.780 when people talk about, you know,

02:00:04.980 civil liberties concern,

02:00:06.020 this is an actual one

02:00:07.840 that I think technologically

02:00:10.460 were already there.

02:00:12.580 They could do it if they wanted to.

02:00:13.880 Any country could.

02:00:15.060 You could put a grid of drones

02:00:16.520 over a major city

02:00:17.660 and do two things.

02:00:19.820 You could cover almost every square foot

02:00:22.160 that's available from,

02:00:24.320 you know, line of sight.

02:00:26.620 And you could record

02:00:28.120 and keep and store

02:00:29.940 all that data for all time.

02:00:32.060 There is no practical reason,

02:00:34.220 technical barrier,

02:00:34.980 to put a drone up

02:00:36.920 over, let's say,

02:00:39.780 you know, downtown Chicago

02:00:41.000 and keep a drone on station there

02:00:44.780 day in and day out for years

02:00:46.980 and constantly build

02:00:49.240 a body of video data

02:00:52.380 on that neighborhood

02:00:54.380 that could be stored for all time

02:00:56.640 and would be available to the government

02:00:58.820 or whoever has access to it.

02:01:00.460 So that's something that

02:01:02.560 probably really does

02:01:04.820 need to be addressed

02:01:05.780 at some point.

02:01:07.020 Sure.

02:01:07.200 I mean, it may,

02:01:08.220 sooner rather than later,

02:01:10.320 there may come a point

02:01:11.180 where we sort of,

02:01:12.820 I mean, I hate crime

02:01:13.680 and I think criminals

02:01:14.700 should be punished.

02:01:16.080 But we may sort of look back

02:01:17.820 wistfully at a time

02:01:18.560 when people were able

02:01:19.180 to commit crimes

02:01:19.920 because it's not possible anymore.

02:01:22.260 Only the government

02:01:22.860 can commit crimes.

02:01:26.940 Sorry to get dark on that.

02:01:28.080 No, it's all right.

02:01:28.800 But yeah, I mean,

02:01:29.920 you can build a time machine

02:01:31.120 in the sky with these systems

02:01:32.280 and you can store the data

02:01:33.740 because it's super cheap

02:01:34.760 to store data now

02:01:35.680 or getting cheaper all the time.

02:01:38.400 Well, you know,

02:01:38.860 imagine, for example,

02:01:40.600 you have a confirmation hearing

02:01:43.520 25 years from now

02:01:45.240 and for 15 of those 20 years,

02:01:48.860 we've been able to keep drones up

02:01:51.300 over a city

02:01:52.220 and we've got 15 years of data,

02:01:55.800 you know,

02:01:56.480 you know,

02:01:57.960 of people who were

02:01:59.260 just going about

02:02:00.040 their daily lives

02:02:00.920 who later go on

02:02:01.820 to, you know,

02:02:02.140 go into politics.

02:02:03.260 Who has access to that data?

02:02:05.940 This is why I quit drinking.

02:02:09.080 That's why I never started.

02:02:11.560 Smart.

02:02:14.140 Is anybody,

02:02:15.400 I mean,

02:02:15.580 you're obviously

02:02:16.000 on the drone side of it.

02:02:17.840 Do you work

02:02:18.440 in the drone industry?

02:02:19.720 But is anybody

02:02:22.200 on the regulatory side

02:02:24.140 thinking about

02:02:24.800 how to balance

02:02:25.720 this technology

02:02:27.680 and it's, you know,

02:02:28.620 amazing possibilities

02:02:29.580 with people's right

02:02:31.000 to be human

02:02:31.640 and have civil liberties?

02:02:34.480 Not, you know,

02:02:34.960 there's a few

02:02:35.540 sort of lonely voices

02:02:36.840 out there

02:02:37.380 that are trying to,

02:02:38.600 you know,

02:02:38.940 get some attention

02:02:39.540 on this issue.

02:02:42.080 But there,

02:02:42.980 and there's some,

02:02:43.820 you know,

02:02:44.980 some legal minds

02:02:46.360 starting to think about it.

02:02:47.460 But, you know,

02:02:49.540 when you think about privacy

02:02:50.920 and, you know,

02:02:52.660 privacy in public places,

02:02:54.360 which is what kind of

02:02:55.080 we're talking about

02:02:55.600 with drone data,

02:02:57.580 the regulation

02:02:58.700 is not there yet.

02:03:00.480 You know,

02:03:00.720 personally,

02:03:01.520 I would see that,

02:03:02.380 you know,

02:03:03.240 at minimum,

02:03:04.160 you would want

02:03:05.000 some type of a warrant.

02:03:07.680 You know,

02:03:07.940 so even if you had drones

02:03:08.940 up over, you know,

02:03:09.880 an area,

02:03:10.300 let's say a high crime area,

02:03:11.780 at some point,

02:03:13.060 you know,

02:03:13.300 as you store that data

02:03:14.380 and people want to

02:03:15.320 re-access it

02:03:16.060 who are in government,

02:03:17.460 they should get

02:03:17.980 some type of a court order

02:03:19.080 to allow them

02:03:20.320 to go into that

02:03:21.000 sort of data.

02:03:21.700 Got FISA court.

02:03:24.340 Let me laugh bitterly.

02:03:25.460 Maybe we can have

02:03:26.100 a different court

02:03:26.620 than FISA court.

02:03:27.260 Yeah, maybe a different court.

02:03:29.120 And presumably,

02:03:30.020 I mean,

02:03:30.820 you know,

02:03:31.100 taking video from the sky

02:03:32.420 is not the only thing

02:03:33.080 they could do.

02:03:33.780 I mean,

02:03:33.940 they could do

02:03:34.440 thermal imaging.

02:03:36.800 I'm sure there's

02:03:37.640 all kinds of audio

02:03:38.520 recording they could do.

02:03:40.980 I mean,

02:03:41.500 you know,

02:03:41.700 you can collect,

02:03:42.600 you know,

02:03:43.300 cell phone information,

02:03:44.760 you know,

02:03:45.040 from the,

02:03:45.380 you know,

02:03:45.560 obviously from,

02:03:46.320 you know,

02:03:46.580 from the sky,

02:03:47.180 but you can do that

02:03:47.880 from the ground as well.

02:03:49.260 I mean,

02:03:49.440 frankly,

02:03:50.320 you know,

02:03:50.600 if you're a government,

02:03:52.160 you know,

02:03:52.460 say in any country,

02:03:54.140 you know,

02:03:54.500 if you want to,

02:03:55.200 you can access

02:03:55.700 your own telephone networks,

02:03:57.060 you know,

02:03:57.180 your own country's

02:03:57.760 telephone systems.

02:03:59.240 The big privacy change

02:04:01.840 on drones

02:04:02.460 is simply being able

02:04:04.120 to see privacy,

02:04:05.180 you know,

02:04:05.540 or pattern of life

02:04:07.600 information

02:04:08.220 and people going

02:04:09.760 about their daily lives

02:04:11.060 in all aspects

02:04:14.180 when they're out

02:04:15.700 of doors

02:04:16.280 and you can tell

02:04:17.400 when they go home,

02:04:18.260 you can tell

02:04:18.600 when they go to work,

02:04:19.460 you can tell

02:04:19.860 where they are,

02:04:20.480 you can tell

02:04:20.800 as they move

02:04:21.180 around the city

02:04:21.800 and again,

02:04:22.980 you can store

02:04:23.640 all that data.

02:04:24.740 So when they tell us,

02:04:25.780 when the Biden administration

02:04:26.860 tells us they know

02:04:27.620 nothing about the guy

02:04:28.920 who shot Trump

02:04:29.720 at the rally

02:04:31.220 in Butler,

02:04:31.980 Pennsylvania

02:04:32.420 in July,

02:04:33.740 I'm just going to,

02:04:35.400 I'm just going to be

02:04:36.100 skeptical right there.

02:04:37.160 When that happened,

02:04:41.120 what I couldn't understand

02:04:42.960 and I still don't understand.

02:04:44.540 You're so diplomatic.

02:04:45.220 You should be in the CIA.

02:04:46.800 What I couldn't understand

02:04:47.960 is with all the drone

02:04:49.940 tech available,

02:04:51.860 why doesn't the Secret Service

02:04:53.340 for all of its protectees

02:04:55.340 put a small number of drones

02:04:58.320 over all these events?

02:05:00.300 You know,

02:05:00.540 you can put it up

02:05:01.100 hours earlier,

02:05:02.540 you know,

02:05:02.780 just to pick up

02:05:03.620 pattern of life

02:05:04.600 and determine,

02:05:05.320 you know,

02:05:05.440 are there things

02:05:06.140 that are going on

02:05:06.860 right now?

02:05:07.560 Guys on roofs

02:05:08.220 with rifles and stuff.

02:05:09.540 You would think,

02:05:10.360 yes.

02:05:10.780 I mean,

02:05:11.580 that's...

02:05:11.900 Man with rangefinder

02:05:13.020 at magnetometer.

02:05:14.080 That,

02:05:14.580 you know,

02:05:15.140 that,

02:05:15.580 I have to say,

02:05:17.280 was among one

02:05:18.020 of the more disturbing

02:05:18.860 stories that I've ever

02:05:20.460 watched unfold,

02:05:21.900 you know,

02:05:22.120 even as a private citizen.

02:05:23.400 What was that?

02:05:26.080 Systemic incompetence.

02:05:27.720 The guy is 22

02:05:29.780 or whatever

02:05:30.360 and he has no

02:05:31.140 social media profile?

02:05:35.640 I mean,

02:05:36.200 I know less

02:05:36.980 about his backstory,

02:05:38.400 but...

02:05:38.960 But we know

02:05:39.540 nothing about him,

02:05:40.680 his motive,

02:05:41.360 nothing?

02:05:42.980 Yeah,

02:05:43.220 I'd say,

02:05:43.920 you know...

02:05:44.200 If you were covering

02:05:44.900 this,

02:05:45.160 your case officer

02:05:45.860 in another...

02:05:47.560 Country.

02:05:48.500 Yeah,

02:05:48.980 country,

02:05:49.360 but not,

02:05:49.680 you know,

02:05:50.000 not Sudan.

02:05:51.400 Okay,

02:05:51.660 but like...

02:05:52.700 Some other place.

02:05:53.600 Yeah,

02:05:53.860 a more developed country

02:05:54.780 with technology

02:05:55.840 and a,

02:05:56.500 you know,

02:05:57.840 a functioning government

02:05:59.020 and they told you

02:06:00.760 that story,

02:06:01.360 head of state

02:06:01.940 or the aspiring,

02:06:02.680 the challenger

02:06:03.240 to the head of state

02:06:03.920 just gets shot. 0.69

02:06:04.880 Yep. 0.93

02:06:05.800 And we killed, 0.98

02:06:06.620 we killed the perp,

02:06:07.820 but we don't know

02:06:08.380 anything about him.

02:06:09.260 We don't know

02:06:09.580 why he did it.

02:06:10.640 There's no story

02:06:11.640 whatsoever

02:06:12.260 that would explain this.

02:06:13.680 There are no relevant

02:06:14.180 facts about the guy.

02:06:15.440 What would your assessment be?

02:06:16.460 You go back to your superiors,

02:06:17.440 you'd say what?

02:06:18.800 They'd probably ask me

02:06:19.840 to try harder

02:06:20.660 if I came up

02:06:22.100 with that answer.

02:06:23.760 But that would,

02:06:24.480 that would raise 0.57

02:06:25.400 suspicions about

02:06:26.320 the authorities

02:06:26.820 telling you that,

02:06:27.480 correct?

02:06:29.240 It would make you think

02:06:30.540 that like,

02:06:31.000 you know,

02:06:31.140 there's really,

02:06:31.580 this really can't be

02:06:32.720 your best effort.

02:06:33.920 Yeah,

02:06:34.080 there's something going on.

02:06:34.920 Like what?

02:06:35.600 I mean,

02:06:35.880 like a lot of things

02:06:39.480 that happen,

02:06:40.160 you know,

02:06:40.700 things get memory holed

02:06:41.980 or,

02:06:42.960 you know,

02:06:43.320 forgotten about.

02:06:46.480 Again,

02:06:46.940 you know,

02:06:47.140 I'm not a

02:06:48.040 protective services guy,

02:06:50.020 but just the,

02:06:52.580 you know,

02:06:52.940 it was one of those stories

02:06:54.660 that every piece

02:06:55.920 of new information

02:06:56.820 you get

02:06:57.300 just makes it worse

02:06:58.320 and worse.

02:07:00.460 You know,

02:07:00.680 just,

02:07:01.580 about the failures,

02:07:03.260 intentional or not,

02:07:04.320 I'm not sure it matters,

02:07:05.880 of federal protective services

02:07:09.080 to protect Trump.

02:07:10.900 But I'm talking about

02:07:12.000 the guy,

02:07:12.700 the perpetrator,

02:07:13.360 the man with the rifle

02:07:14.260 who shot in the head.

02:07:15.580 Yeah.

02:07:16.200 And the fact that we know,

02:07:17.080 I mean,

02:07:17.860 I mean,

02:07:18.680 you spent your entire life

02:07:19.680 gathering information

02:07:20.460 on people,

02:07:21.260 right?

02:07:21.380 That was your job,

02:07:21.920 right?

02:07:22.040 Gather information.

02:07:22.840 You would think

02:07:23.300 you could get more information.

02:07:24.400 You think you could know

02:07:25.460 quite a bit about a person,

02:07:27.220 especially a young person.

02:07:28.440 You can,

02:07:29.120 right?

02:07:29.280 Yeah.

02:07:29.460 I mean,

02:07:29.940 I haven't looked

02:07:30.900 into his background.

02:07:31.720 No,

02:07:31.780 not him specifically,

02:07:32.660 but yes,

02:07:33.640 there's anybody born

02:07:35.340 since 2000,

02:07:38.280 you know,

02:07:38.620 certainly has,

02:07:40.080 you know,

02:07:41.020 with the rarest of exceptions,

02:07:42.520 you know,

02:07:42.680 they've got some sort

02:07:43.360 of footprint online,

02:07:45.360 you know,

02:07:45.700 they've got a search history,

02:07:46.800 they've got,

02:07:47.460 you know,

02:07:48.840 telephone usage.

02:07:49.720 It's very hard

02:07:53.060 to not leave

02:07:53.980 what they call

02:07:54.460 digital dust

02:07:55.380 in your wake

02:07:57.240 about who you are

02:07:58.360 and where you've been

02:07:59.120 and what you've done.

02:08:01.260 I would think

02:08:02.080 in a case where,

02:08:03.140 you know,

02:08:03.480 a significant crime happens,

02:08:05.920 then it would be

02:08:06.580 in the interest

02:08:07.100 of the government

02:08:07.700 to collect

02:08:09.060 and make that known,

02:08:10.220 you know,

02:08:11.040 to somebody.

02:08:14.000 And in a case

02:08:14.700 where they don't think

02:08:15.240 there's an ongoing threat,

02:08:16.320 then I would think

02:08:16.880 that there's,

02:08:18.080 you know,

02:08:19.320 the bias should be

02:08:20.560 to talk about

02:08:21.820 what they know.

02:08:23.800 That's what should happen.

02:08:26.580 What does it make you think

02:08:27.660 that they haven't done that?

02:08:29.320 What's the conclusion?

02:08:31.860 I don't have

02:08:32.540 a great conclusion

02:08:33.220 on that one.

02:08:33.900 I mean,

02:08:34.100 is that one of the weirdest

02:08:34.660 things you've seen

02:08:35.260 in a while?

02:08:37.460 I would say

02:08:38.260 that if I came back

02:08:39.820 to my bosses

02:08:40.540 and I was overseas,

02:08:42.340 they would literally

02:08:43.300 tell me,

02:08:43.760 try harder.

02:08:45.200 That you can clearly

02:08:46.200 get more information

02:08:47.080 than this.

02:08:50.800 Well,

02:08:51.160 I hope somebody

02:08:51.800 tries harder.

02:08:54.000 I appreciate

02:08:54.340 you taking all this time.

02:08:55.720 A pleasure to be here.

02:08:56.560 Thank you very much.

02:08:57.400 Thank you.

02:08:59.740 Thanks for listening

02:09:00.440 to the Tucker Carlson Show.

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02:09:12.520 Thank you.

02:09:13.380 Thank you.

02:09:13.900 Thank you.

02:09:14.640 Thank you.

02:09:15.160 Bye.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - January 03, 2025

Bernard Hudson： New Orleans Attack, Cybertruck Explosion, CIA Corruption, & Tulsi Gabbard

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