The Tucker Carlson Show - Joe Kent Reveals All in First Interview Since Resigning as Trump’s Counterterrorism Director

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00:00:14.820 We want to start tonight with a clip from January of 2024.

00:00:20.340 This is from this show, and this is Joe Kent, who later went on to become, until yesterday, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

00:00:28.620 Here it is.

00:00:29.060 What do you think the immediate and then longer term effects of a war with Iran would be on the United States?

00:00:37.280 Immediately, it would be very bloody.

00:00:38.740 I have no doubt that we could probably defeat some of their air defense and go in there and have another shock and awe campaign.

00:00:45.080 But again, like we saw how the shock and awe campaign in Iraq really didn't actually work in the long run.

00:00:50.300 So I have no doubt that we'd have some immediate results that people would cheer about here in the United States.

00:00:54.900 But Iran, Persia has always been an empire.

00:00:58.180 It's been around longer than any of the other players in the modern Middle East right now, and they are not going anywhere.

00:01:03.740 If we get deeply involved and deeply entangled with Iran, we are playing right into China's hands because China would like nothing more than for us to be committing our military industrial base to a war in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, and then to be committing our conventional military power, our blood and our treasure back in the Middle East.

00:01:23.680 that will make the Pacific, our actual border, extremely vulnerable to Chinese aggression. Or

00:01:30.160 China will simply just watch us bleed out economically as we bleed out on the battlefield

00:01:35.380 on these couple of different theaters. It's absolute insanity. It's opening up Pandora's

00:01:39.980 box. And again, for what gain to the American people? So the very first thing you notice about

00:01:46.440 that clip, which was shot almost exactly a year before the current president was inaugurated,

00:01:52.340 is that it was right. It was prescient. He called it. He called the general outline. Not that it was

00:02:00.240 hard to call, but Joe Kent knows what he's talking about. He spent a lot of his life

00:02:04.900 in that region. And he said a year before this current presidency began, this is a big,

00:02:10.600 serious country. It's the oldest civilization in the region. And if we went to war with Iran,

00:02:18.260 there would be a momentary sugar high americans would support it because they support their own

00:02:23.720 country and they certainly support their military and people would approve of it but very quickly

00:02:28.120 you could see a process by which we got caught there trapped there bear trap hard to extricate

00:02:34.840 yourself from that and sitting on the sidelines would be our chief global competitor china who

00:02:42.080 would be silently nodding along with a slowly spreading grin knowing that they were the main

00:02:47.060 beneficiary of what they were seeing, of our waste of American lives and treasure, as Joe

00:02:54.560 Kent said. So we haven't reached that stage, thankfully. We're moving toward it, and everyone

00:03:01.620 who's watching carefully knows that. And if you're honest, you know that. So this is a very serious

00:03:06.840 moment we're in, and we're watching not just a war in Iran, but potentially a total realignment

00:03:12.340 of the world and the loss in some sense of what the united states has globally this could be

00:03:18.560 the beginning of the end of our influence in a lot of the world and that's just the beginning

00:03:23.680 so again that's a big deal it's starting to dawn on people and that leaves joe kent as one of the

00:03:31.840 relatively few people connected to this administration who said it in public is that good

00:03:37.020 or bad? Well, it may seem good. Of course, you want to be around people who have clarity about

00:03:43.620 what's going to happen next, but in practical terms, it's bad. In fact, it's always bad.

00:03:49.680 Whenever you have somebody who stands up and says, don't do this, here's what could happen,

00:03:55.360 and then you do it anyway, and it turns out that person was right, your first instinct is not to

00:04:00.140 apologize and correct your behavior. Your first instinct is to crush the person who called it

00:04:05.760 correctly. And that's your instinct because, and it's the lowest of all instincts, but it's a human

00:04:11.520 instinct, that's your instinct because his correct prediction is an indictment of you, of course,

00:04:20.080 and it's a way to deflect attacks on you and your own culpability by blaming the guy who told you

00:04:28.340 it was going to happen before you did it. And this is a long-standing fact of human life, and in the

00:04:35.500 last 60 years in this country, it has been the iron law of foreign policy, which is to say when

00:04:40.940 things go wrong, the only people who get punished are the people who criticize the adventure in the

00:04:46.360 first place. You can imagine General Westmoreland attacking Walter Cronkite of CBS News, whatever

00:04:51.380 you think of Walter Cronkite, in my case, not much. But fundamentally, it was Walter Cronkite

00:04:55.800 sitting very much on the sidelines saying, hey, this war is not going well. And there was General

00:04:59.740 Westmoreland prosecuting the war, but General Westmoreland argued till the end of his life

00:05:05.680 in some way successfully that he lost the war because Walter Cronkite criticized the war.

00:05:11.320 Hmm, is that really true? How many troops did Walter Cronkite command? Was he in charge of

00:05:16.480 strategy? Don't think so. He was a newsreader in New York, but you can see why Westmoreland did

00:05:23.020 that why a lot of people believed it agreed agreed with westmoreland you saw the same thing happen

00:05:30.000 in the days after the tragic and incredibly stupid afghan withdrawal under joe biden

00:05:37.200 that didn't help the united states of course we had to get out of afghanistan but the way we did

00:05:42.080 it who would argue that was a good thing it was a terrible thing and resulted in the deaths of a lot

00:05:46.000 of americans so who was punished for that as far as we can tell and we've checked only one person

00:05:52.320 And that would be Colonel Stu Scheller of the United States Marine Corps.

00:05:55.180 What was his crime?

00:05:56.360 Planning the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

00:05:58.140 Oh, no.

00:05:59.680 No, Stu Scheller's crime was saying out loud, boy, that didn't work very well.

00:06:04.360 And why did we do this?

00:06:06.000 And for that, he went to jail.

00:06:07.280 The people who actually did it, who gave the orders or who carried them out without asking questions about them, which was everybody else, they're fine.

00:06:15.260 You don't even know their names and they certainly haven't been penalized.

00:06:17.440 so there is a long history because this is a standing feature the way people are that you

00:06:24.080 criticize those who told the truth and who were right who called it ahead of time now in a

00:06:29.120 functioning society you get a hold of yourself and you understand that people are like this

00:06:32.640 but if you want to be successful as a society you have to restrain that impulse because

00:06:37.680 it's low and it's counterproductive and if you silence people who tell the truth you end up

00:06:43.940 making the same mistakes again and again and again, and maybe that's why we're here at this pivotal

00:06:48.260 point in our war with Iran. So that's the first thing you notice. Joe Kent was right, therefore

00:06:55.560 Joe Kent must be destroyed. And there is, of course, this ongoing effort to do that, to

00:07:00.340 dismiss Joe Kent as a tool of the Islamists or a leaker or say he's married to someone who works

00:07:06.640 for Hezbollah or lie after lie after lie, but they're all aimed at Joe Kent the man,

00:07:12.100 at his motives at his character at his personality at his wife

00:07:16.320 and that's by design because none of them touch on his reason for resigning as director of the

00:07:23.260 national counterterrorism center because if you focused on that you would have to answer his

00:07:26.840 questions you'd have to answer is this true is what joe kent who possessed highest level

00:07:32.700 intelligence clearances who was really barred from knowing no secret in the u.s governments

00:07:37.880 as he was one of our top intelligence officials until yesterday seems like a pretty informed guy

00:07:43.840 is what he's saying true that's the last conversation anyone in washington wants to

00:07:49.700 have so just attack him and you're going to see a lot more of that the people who said this war

00:07:55.860 was a bad idea will be punished and the more it turns out they were right which is to say the

00:08:02.760 worse this project goes, the more it becomes obviously kind of productive to American interests,

00:08:08.500 the more vigorously they will be punished unto and including jails. Stu Scheller went to jail.

00:08:13.940 Probably not the only one who will going forward. So you should just know that and understand what

00:08:19.500 you're seeing in those terms. The second thing that comes immediately to mind when you watch

00:08:23.960 Joe Kent from January of 2024 talk about what would happen if we went to war with Iran

00:08:28.520 is that what he said that day a year before donald trump's inauguration could have been said by

00:08:33.800 donald trump maybe with a different style he was making donald trump's case the case of donald

00:08:39.040 trump has made for a very long time donald trump as everybody knows became the republican nominee

00:08:44.780 in 2016 10 years ago in part because he was the only republican running for president that year

00:08:52.340 out of a field of nearly 20 people who was willing to say what everyone else knew but was afraid to

00:08:56.280 say, which is the Iraq war, didn't help us. It hurt us. It was a dumb idea. And it went on way

00:09:02.680 too long. And it became the quagmire that people like Donald Trump predicted it would be.

00:09:06.900 And the American public, so relieved to hear the truth about something they already knew,

00:09:11.520 made him the Republican nominee, despite maybe some concerns. But they did it because, hey,

00:09:16.080 he was right. And he's the only one brave enough to say so. And Donald Trump made

00:09:20.320 varieties of that case for the next 10 years and in many cases specifically about iran

00:09:27.100 because trump has seen long before most people in washington before almost anyone in washington

00:09:32.740 the big picture the outline which is this is a contest between the united states in the west

00:09:37.280 and china in the east a rising power that matches or maybe exceeds our economic power globally and

00:09:43.700 we have to figure out how to apportion power. And we don't want to get sidetracked with

00:09:49.440 engagements like, I don't know, another endless Middle Eastern war, because in the end, the only

00:09:55.100 winner of that conflict is China, is China in this specific case. Whoever in the end settles

00:10:02.800 this conflict, whether it's the United States or some other power, whoever comes in at whatever

00:10:09.000 the end of it is and says enough this is hurting the world each side has made its point but the

00:10:17.000 global economy has a critical interest in the persian gulf that's energy and we're going to

00:10:23.020 stop this now whoever that person is will become more powerful than ever and everyone else will

00:10:29.260 become less powerful the person who settles disputes is in charge not the person who starts

00:10:35.740 them not the person who wins them the person who stops them when dad comes home and stops the

00:10:42.060 fighting between brother and sister who's in charge dad because he stopped the conflict

00:10:47.800 all of which is to say if at the end of this conflict it's china that comes in china which

00:10:54.080 has a vested interest in what happens in the region since they're a major consumer of gulf

00:10:58.760 energy, if it's China that comes in and restores the energy flows out of the Persian Gulf and

00:11:05.740 restores some version of peace, gets the fighting to stop, then China is in charge of the Persian

00:11:11.460 Gulf. That's just a fact of nature. And so a lot is at stake, as Joe Kent knew, as Donald Trump

00:11:18.840 knew. And so the question is, how did Donald Trump, after 10 years of saying one thing,

00:11:26.640 do in the pivotal act of his presidency exactly the opposite? That's not just an academic question.

00:11:34.100 It's not the beginning of a conspiracy theory about some shadowy lobby. It's the most important

00:11:39.580 question we face because this is not the first time the United States has entered into this

00:11:44.540 kind of war against the wishes of its own population and in clear contravention of

00:11:49.580 its own interests, against its interests. This isn't good for us. No one has made the case that

00:11:54.540 it's good for us. And increasingly, as the days pass, it becomes obvious to everyone why it's not

00:12:00.180 good for us. And if you don't believe that, then check the prices of food and fuel and everything

00:12:10.260 you buy, because everything you buy is dependent on the price of energy and the production of

00:12:14.720 fertilizer, both of which are affected almost immediately by the closure of the Straits of

00:12:21.540 Ramos. So we did this again. It's not exactly clear how or why we did this, but we need to

00:12:30.360 find out. And there is great resistance to finding out. And you've noticed that in the last 36 hours

00:12:37.000 since Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Terrorism Center, one of our top Intel

00:12:42.020 officials, because the attacks on him have prevented an honest conversation about what

00:12:47.620 he's actually saying. And what he's saying is, and he says it clearly, and we're going to ask

00:12:51.960 him about it directly in just a moment, Israel got us into this war. Its lobby in the United

00:12:58.960 States pressured the president, and its prime minister in Israel told the president, we're

00:13:03.880 going without you. Join us, because if you don't, your troops in the region, your interests in the

00:13:10.200 region, your citizens in the region will all be at risk. You have no choice. They led the way.

00:13:13.700 that's joe kent's position and rather than push back against that and say no actually he's wrong

00:13:21.560 they're telling you to shut up and why are they doing that well there's only one reason people

00:13:26.140 ever become hysterical and slanderous start screaming at you rather than answering you

00:13:30.980 it's because they're lying and the truth is this is not the first time you've watched

00:13:36.420 people in charge lie this has been going on a long time and lies give way to a whole bunch of

00:13:44.140 bad things more lies once you tell lie you bolster it with further lying hysteria the fear of being

00:13:51.840 caught lying the rage and slander if the person catches me lying he wins in the zero-sum game of

00:13:59.720 lying i die you go in the attack to cover your lies and bad judgment you can't make wise decisions

00:14:08.600 on the basis of lies because they're not true they're not based in reality that didn't actually

00:14:13.320 happen or in this case it did happen but you're pretending it didn't so a country based on lies

00:14:18.980 like a family based on lies like an individual life based on lies cannot succeed in fact it's

00:14:27.120 hellish as all of us have experienced in our lying and so the only way out of this is to stop lying

00:14:36.840 is to tell the truth now probably 63 years after we should have started telling the truth

00:14:45.180 but it's never too late to tell the truth now about everything because it's never as painful

00:14:51.940 as you think it will be it's actually an act of liberation in fact it's the only real act of

00:15:00.720 liberation telling the truth sets you free because the truth itself sets you free that is always and

00:15:08.200 everywhere a fact and the longer you delay doing that the more horrible the consequences of your

00:15:16.160 lies. So let's hope that tonight, with this conversation with Joe Kent, is the beginning

00:15:22.600 of the long-overdue truth-telling, which is the only thing that will save this country.

00:15:28.880 And one final note about Joe Kent, who I spent the last 24 hours with. Joe Kent's resume

00:15:36.120 hardly needs explanation, because everyone is aware this is a man who deployed on 11

00:15:42.820 and combat missions to the global war on terror.

00:15:46.840 This is sort of the perfect representation

00:15:49.880 of the GWAT generation.

00:15:52.580 This is one of those guys we often celebrate

00:15:54.880 but too rarely hear from,

00:15:56.480 who we sent out to fight the so-called war on terror

00:15:59.980 that began on 9-11.

00:16:02.940 And it's an entire generation of men,

00:16:05.560 men who look and sound, for the most part,

00:16:07.840 very much like Joe Kent.

00:16:09.500 so the implication of course he doesn't care about security or he's soft on iran joe kent spent

00:16:15.700 well the majority of his 20s and 30s fighting iranian proxies and watching his friends get

00:16:22.560 killed by them so this is someone who has actually earned the right to speak about iran

00:16:26.860 and the war on terror and of course he was the director of the national counterterrorism center

00:16:31.760 so he's thought a lot about terrorism in this country and the blowback from events like this

00:16:36.340 So we're going to ask him about that as well.

00:16:37.940 But the other thing to notice about Joe Kent, and it may be his defining factor, is that

00:16:43.000 he doesn't slander anyone.

00:16:44.300 His resignation letter was not an attack on Donald Trump.

00:16:47.020 It wasn't a promised way to tell all memoir about what he saw on the inside or to aggrandize

00:16:51.340 himself or to get a job on a TV show or sell something.

00:16:57.060 I asked him at dinner last night, what are your plans?

00:16:58.760 None.

00:17:00.560 He did this purely because he believes, as he'll explain in a second, this is the only

00:17:05.740 way to save the United States from certain disaster.

00:17:09.620 Tell the truth.

00:17:11.700 Air the secrets.

00:17:12.700 Be honest for once in decades about what is actually happening, things that everybody

00:17:17.080 who lives here suspects are happening.

00:17:19.120 In some cases, we're probably wrong.

00:17:20.740 We've come to the wrong conclusions.

00:17:22.640 That's okay.

00:17:24.200 Tell us what actually happened.

00:17:25.340 Tell us why you did this.

00:17:26.920 And let's reorient this country where it should be, which is around its own citizens.

00:17:35.100 Make the decisions that you make based on one criterion, is this good for my people

00:17:39.540 or not, in the way that a father would lead his family or an officer would lead his troops.

00:17:45.020 It's not complicated.

00:17:47.240 Everybody wants that.

00:17:48.240 That's not a partisan question.

00:17:49.240 That's a human question.

00:17:51.020 And that's the question Joe Kent is posing.

00:17:53.880 Why can't we do this?

00:17:54.880 Why can't we say this?

00:17:55.880 It's not attacking anybody.

00:17:56.820 Joe Kent himself does not attack anybody.

00:18:00.300 this is a last-ditch attempt, not simply to save the country from disaster in Iran,

00:18:08.140 but to save the country, period. And as you listen to him speak, ask yourself,

00:18:13.880 is this a man who's working for Hezbollah, or is an egomaniac, or a leaker, or is this a man

00:18:19.860 who says very little when he has nothing to say, who speaks straightforwardly and with honesty,

00:18:24.860 self-evident honesty, is this a man of dignity and decency? Is this a man that America once had a

00:18:34.680 lot of? Is this a man who was once, in effect, the American archetype, the guy you looked up to,

00:18:40.740 the guy you wanted your son to be? Whether you agree with him or not, maybe you're reaching

00:18:45.240 completely different conclusions. But as you listen to him speak, ask yourself, is this the

00:18:50.780 kind of person who makes me proud to be a fellow American because it's really a referendum on us

00:18:56.560 if we can't see that Joe Kent whatever you think of his opinions is the kind of man this country

00:19:04.380 should be producing and should be elevating and should be proud of if we can't see that

00:19:09.340 then we've failed the test and we've lost but judge yourself here's Joe Kent

00:19:16.840 Joe thanks a lot for joining us so I appreciate this so I want to go through the letter that you

00:19:26.600 sent yesterday as you resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center

00:19:30.360 and basically through the big points and give you a chance to to explain them you've been spoken

00:19:36.360 for quite a bit over the last 24 hours so I think it'd be really helpful to all of us if you would

00:19:42.620 speak for yourself and flesh out some of these points I'm just gonna read the first one

00:19:45.940 I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran Iran posed no imminent threat to our

00:19:54.160 nation Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation how did you reach that conclusion I think

00:20:01.220 this is this is key I mean this would be more challenging to explain had the secretary of

00:20:05.960 state the president and the speaker of house the house not come out and said that we conducted this

00:20:11.120 attack at this time because the israelis were about to do so so that takes away the argument

00:20:17.900 that there was an imminent threat as in iran was planning to attack us immediately that just

00:20:24.320 simply did not exist may i ask you to pause and so um i've heard people say that and this just

00:20:30.220 happened but history has a way of getting rewritten in real time and then you look back 10 or 15 20

00:20:35.340 25 years later and no one seems to understand the things that you saw because they've been

00:20:39.760 eliminated so i think it's important to stop and say here's what we actually know so i'd like now

00:20:44.240 if we could just to play one of the statements that you alluded to and that's from marco rubio

00:20:48.580 the secretary of state and this was shortly after this war commenced and he was explaining in a as

00:20:54.320 is his habit in a thoughtful precise way why here's secretary of state marco rubio and so the president

00:21:00.660 made the very wise decision we knew that there was going to be an israeli action we knew that

00:21:05.420 That would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed.

00:21:16.520 And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't happen.

00:21:20.840 Okay, so that is his almost contemporaneous explanation, and it's not offhand.

00:21:26.620 He reasons it out.

00:21:27.920 He explains there's a logic chain there, and he says, we knew not that Iran was going to attack.

00:21:32.920 He did not say that.

00:21:33.660 He said we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran, and in retaliation for those attacks by Israel against Iran, Iran might attack American forces.

00:21:44.080 So the imminent threat that the Secretary of State is describing is not from Iran.

00:21:48.460 It's from Israel.

00:21:50.220 Exactly, and I think this speaks to the broader issue.

00:21:53.320 Who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East?

00:21:55.920 Who is in charge of when we decide to go to war or not?

00:21:58.120 In this case, with what the secretary described and later on the president, later on the speaker of the house and the way the events played out, the Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events, meaning the Iranians would retaliate.

00:22:15.260 Now, I think there's a potential there where we could have done several different things.

00:22:18.440 We could have simply said to the Israelis, no, you will not.

00:22:21.200 And if you do, then we will take something away from you.

00:22:24.700 I think that it's fine that we offer defense to Israel, but when we're providing the means for their defense, we get to dictate the terms of when they go on the offensive, otherwise they stand to lose that relationship.

00:22:38.760 And the Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, that they could go ahead and take this action and we would just have to react.

00:22:48.920 And so that speaks to that relationship. But also, it just shows that there was a lobby pushing for us to go to war. I know we'll get into that later on in the statement. But we had a real potential, I think, knowing what we know of the Iranians and how they react, and in particular, how they react to President Trump's leadership.

00:23:05.340 The Iranians under President Trump's leadership, especially in his second term, they have shown that they take a very calculated approach to the escalation ladder.

00:23:15.320 For instance, in the lead up to the 12-day war before Midnight Hammer, the Iranians didn't attack us.

00:23:21.480 They were engaged in negotiations with us.

00:23:23.560 When President Trump came back into office, they stopped their proxies who were attacking us under the Biden administration because they knew Biden was weak.

00:23:31.340 They stopped their proxies from attacking us as well.

00:23:34.240 So they knew President Trump was someone who wanted to negotiate.

00:23:37.740 But more importantly, they knew that President Trump was not someone to mess with because he killed Qasem Soleimani.

00:23:43.360 He killed Abu Mahdi Mohandas.

00:23:45.140 He had defeated ISIS.

00:23:46.340 They knew that President Trump was a man of action.

00:23:48.080 He is militarily strong.

00:23:50.420 And so they said before we take an action, we need to make sure that it's calculated.

00:23:54.500 So I think in this scenario, even if the Israelis told us we're going to strike on this date at this time and we didn't try to negotiate with the Israelis and say, hey, we'll take something away from them.

00:24:05.000 I think we still could have back channeled to the Iranians and said, hey, if something happens here in the next couple of days, it's not us.

00:24:10.800 We're still serious about negotiations and we don't want to escalate this because it's well known what the Iranians plans were.

00:24:18.260 We knew that they were going to hit our – potentially our bases in the region, potentially our allies.

00:24:21.960 We knew about the Straits of Hormuz.

00:24:23.640 All of these things, I think, were fairly well known.

00:24:26.360 And the Houthis' ability to close the Red Sea, which is not yet done, but which would be catastrophic to the world.

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00:26:09.480 getting ready for a game means being ready for anything like packing a spare stick i like to

00:26:19.860 be prepared that's why i remember 988 canada's suicide crisis helpline it's good to know just

00:26:26.020 in case anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder

00:26:30.820 anytime 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in canada

00:26:35.780 good

00:26:38.020 so but

00:26:39.360 for the purpose of explaining your position

00:26:42.120 or fleshing it out more so people can understand it

00:26:44.200 because this is your most

00:26:45.880 high profile resignation

00:26:47.480 by far in a long time

00:26:50.040 and there's a lot

00:26:52.340 of commentary on this and I kind of took a

00:26:54.260 quick trip through it this afternoon and

00:26:56.040 one of the consistent themes is well

00:26:57.640 I mean of course there's a lot of slander

00:27:00.260 which we can talk about but the

00:27:02.040 substantive attack on you

00:27:03.960 and it is an attack or refutation of your letter, is that, well, actually, Joe Kent was totally for

00:27:10.040 using military action. He supported the Soleimani killing, for example. He seemed fine with the

00:27:15.640 12-day war, for example. So he doesn't have a problem on principle with an engagement with Iran.

00:27:25.660 You're saying what to that? What's your response?

00:27:28.980 Well, I have no compunction about really fighting anybody who threatens our country,

00:27:33.000 and the Iranians have posed a threat in the past, and the Iranians have a way of threatening

00:27:38.380 America. They have the capability. And we always talk in the intelligence circles about capability

00:27:43.100 and intent, what your enemy is capable of doing and what they actually want to do.

00:27:47.860 And again, back to the data that we have on the Iranians, they use the escalation ladder. We saw

00:27:52.280 that deliberately during the 12-day war. When they struck back after Midnight Hammer, it was very

00:27:56.940 deliberate. They fired an equal amount of missiles as we dropped bombs on the nuclear facilities.

00:28:03.000 And they basically hit a part of a base in Qatar that they knew we didn't have any troops on.

00:28:07.620 They didn't want to escalate any further than we were willing to go.

00:28:12.480 But also the Iranians, when they pose a threat to us, they usually do it with their proxies.

00:28:18.100 And if their proxies stick their heads up and their proxies come after us, this is basically the Trump doctrine.

00:28:22.420 We hammer them and we hammer their high profile leaders.

00:28:25.640 Qasem Soleimani was highly effective and highly revered in Iran because the previous presidents prior to President Trump,

00:28:31.940 Obama and Bush, let Qasem Soleimani run around, raise proxy armies, kill Americans, and no one

00:28:37.500 ever did anything to him. President Trump rightfully killed Qasem Soleimani. We got his

00:28:41.900 deputy, Abhimani Mohandas, who had American blood in his hands, took them off the battlefield.

00:28:46.760 But then President Trump stopped. He took those two key players off the battlefield. And he said,

00:28:53.140 I'm not going to further escalate with Iran unless you escalate with us, knowing that if we struck

00:28:58.640 Iran and we truly struck the regime, that would only strengthen the regime. So then President

00:29:03.860 Trump did something that's incredibly smart, use that decisive military action. But then he coupled

00:29:08.580 it with an economic package of sanctions, maximum pressure sanctions. We can debate whether or not

00:29:13.380 we should be using sanctions as the prime reserve currency holder or whatever. But he pressured the

00:29:17.420 Iranians economically after punching them in the mouth and showing that, hey, I won't take this.

00:29:21.560 I'm not Obama. I'm not Bush. If you cross a line, I will come after you. But then he really put the

00:29:27.740 pressure on them economically and if you look at the effect of the economic sanctions that's what

00:29:32.300 got the iranian people on the streets actually protesting against the ayatollah's government

00:29:38.580 which is ostensibly what we would like we would like to see a bottom-up regime change where we

00:29:43.500 get rid of the ayatollah but it's the will of the people and they have a new successful government

00:29:47.860 that's stable that we can deal with the one way to throw that all out the window and this isn't

00:29:53.100 just joe kent's opinion many many scholars and i think a lot of intelligence assessments have been

00:29:57.420 written about this too, I know for a fact they have, is that if we struck the regime, it would

00:30:02.420 only strengthen it. And that's not, I think that's just basic common sense. I mean, I think of myself

00:30:07.980 and probably you're in this camp as well. We didn't like Joe Biden. We didn't like Barack

00:30:11.780 Obama. But if an outside force were to come in here and try and topple them while they were the

00:30:16.360 president, I would 100% rally around the flag. That's just common sense. So if we wanted to

00:30:21.520 strengthen- Well, you actually did. You joined the military under Bill Clinton, whom I assume

00:30:26.820 you didn't vote for right um right you joined in 1998 you've you've gone the whole cycle of the

00:30:32.040 of the war on terror i noticed um and served out as an nco i think your your entire nco and warrant

00:30:39.420 officer and warrant officer 20 years um and i should just say i hate ever to refer to a man's

00:30:45.100 resume as like a data point because your ideas exist separately because but in this specific

00:30:50.900 case meaning you you spend most of your time fighting iranian proxies yeah a good deal of it

00:30:56.680 yeah yeah so uh you're aware of the threat from iran you have personally used violence against

00:31:03.860 that threat i have yep a lot of it i think and and you supported the president's policy

00:31:10.440 up until fairly recently right and you've said that a lot in public in fact you went to work

00:31:16.700 for him he hired you yeah right but here's the from what i can tell is the central question

00:31:22.580 imminent threat now the president has said many times to many people including the public

00:31:27.760 iran can't have a nuclear weapon i'm sure he must have said that to you you don't have to say it but

00:31:31.860 he said it to everybody is that fair that's fair yeah they can't have a nuke whenever i asked we

00:31:36.360 say let's just start here they can't have a nuke okay got it everyone agreed with that conceptually

00:31:41.360 was iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon no they weren't you know three weeks ago when this

00:31:49.740 this started and they weren't in june either i mean the the iranians have had a religious ruling

00:31:54.980 a fatwa against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004 that's been in place since

00:31:59.840 2004 that's available in the public sphere but then also we had no intelligence to indicate

00:32:04.760 that that fatwa was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted the iranian strategy

00:32:10.760 it's actually pretty pragmatic the iranians are obviously aware of what's taking place

00:32:15.200 in their region and their strategy was to not completely abandon their nuclear program because

00:32:21.080 they saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya when he said, hey, I've got no more nukes.

00:32:25.460 I'll do what you say. I'll give up my nukes. And we gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:32:29.640 Yeah. Regime changed him and he was executed by his own people in the most horrific way.

00:32:34.340 Oh, sodomized by a bayonet. Right. Okay. So that's the lesson I think that the entire

00:32:39.840 region took from that when Hillary Clinton-

00:32:42.000 Unfortunately, that is what the neocon, neoliberal warmongers – that's the lesson that they showed everyone in the region.

00:32:49.200 And then conversely, the Iranians also knew that if they came out and said, OK, we've got a nuke, whether they were bluffing or not, Saddam Hussein, Iraq right next door.

00:32:58.780 So they kind of had this –

00:32:59.420 And he hung, I think.

00:33:00.380 He was hung by his own people after a bloody war that's still essentially going on inside of Iraq.

00:33:07.080 So the Iranians' position when viewed from the lens of the region was actually fairly pragmatic.

00:33:13.200 They were preventing themselves from developing a bomb, but they still wanted the ability.

00:33:17.920 They wanted the ability to enrich.

00:33:19.500 They wanted the ability to have some components so that they weren't completely stripped of it.

00:33:23.980 And we always assessed that they were either several months or a year, two years away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon.

00:33:30.840 And that's not because the Iranians are stupid people.

00:33:32.880 I think we can tell right now that the Iranians are anything but stupid.

00:33:37.500 They had the ability, I think, the brainpower to actually develop one.

00:33:40.680 Or they could have simply traded a ton of oil with Pakistan or with someone else to actually get a nuclear weapon.

00:33:47.520 They were not doing that.

00:33:48.640 We had no intelligence to indicate that they were.

00:33:52.720 Then why was the president – was he told that they were on the brink of it?

00:33:58.560 Why, at the beginning of every conversation about Iran, would the president say, I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?

00:34:04.400 Why was that the central question when, and you would know since you were the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, why would he say that if there was no intelligence or evidence that they were actually developing a nuke?

00:34:17.400 So a couple of things. This is what I talk about in the letter about this ecosystem of information that's laundered through a lot of prominent neoconservative types that are very sympathetic to the Israeli cause.

00:34:30.600 And then also Israeli government officials who give us things in semi-official channels.

00:34:35.300 What they did was they created basically a shifting red line or a new red line.

00:34:40.600 So if the president's red line was Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, we've actually got a lot of trade space in there for a deal to be made because of what I just described with the Iranian policy, essentially the Iranian saying, OK, well, we don't want a nuclear weapon.

00:34:53.920 Well, that means we basically are at a point where we can start negotiating and we can come up with a deal.

00:34:58.100 And the president is a fantastic dealmaker.

00:35:00.620 So if your goal is to move us away from any kind of deal and your goal is to move us into a conflict, you have to shift that red line.

00:35:08.540 And that's where a lot of this, I would say, what became a de facto U.S. policy of Iran can have no nuclear enrichment.

00:35:17.380 It was laundered through a lot of the different talking heads, Mark Levin, Mark Dubowitz.

00:35:21.900 You've got the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

00:35:24.140 You name it.

00:35:24.620 Washington, D.C. has plenty of pro-Israeli lobbyists who will come and say those things, who will publish think pieces on it, who will go on the media, who will run op-eds in the Wall Street Journal to talk about this, why they can't have any enrichment whatsoever.

00:35:37.080 And then we have a high degree of engagement with Israeli government officials who will come in and say, well, they're enriching and they could enrich or they could enrich more and that will get them closer to a nuclear weapon.

00:35:49.140 So then enrichment basically became the new U.S. policy.

00:35:53.960 And the only official I've heard – and folks are welcome to look for this – that said this in the first Trump administration was Mike Pompeo.

00:36:01.200 He said it.

00:36:01.760 The president didn't say it.

00:36:02.720 The president has been very consistent.

00:36:04.240 He said they can't have a nuclear weapon.

00:36:05.960 But again, like I said, that puts us at a place where we actually could have negotiations. And only President Trump, I think, could successfully have negotiations with Iran because he actually punched them in the face. And the Iranians had been walking all over us. They had been killing our soldiers. All of that is true. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Iranians, what their proxies were doing.

00:36:24.820 President Trump level set that when he killed Qasem Soleimani and he killed Aboumadi Mohandas.

00:36:29.780 The folks who wanted to push an actual regime change war in Iran knew this and they knew there was a potential to get a deal or there was a potential for President Trump just to continue the policy of maximum pressure sanctions.

00:36:42.760 And if you come after us, we will hit you hard.

00:36:45.440 And that got the protesters out on the street in Iran.

00:36:48.080 And that's actually what the regime feared the most.

00:36:50.080 I don't think the Ayatollah feared dying, not because he, you know, is some crazy lunatic.

00:36:55.740 I'm sure some degree of the Shia martyrdom culture played a factor in that.

00:37:00.120 However, I think he knew that if he was killed, the regime would survive because the people would rally around the regime.

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00:39:18.600 I believe you predicted this, you know,

00:39:20.740 some years ago.

00:39:21.720 I think we're watching.

00:39:23.100 I mean, it's hard to know exactly what we're watching,

00:39:24.600 but it seems consistent with what we are watching.

00:39:27.180 So I'm just focused on this question of imminent threat

00:39:33.020 because that's really the only justification

00:39:36.140 i think most americans would accept for a preemptive war certainly otherwise just like a

00:39:40.820 war of choice done because bb told you to and no one no one wants no one wants to get behind that

00:39:46.280 because it's obviously illegitimate so imminent threat you're saying that there was no intelligence

00:39:54.140 that you saw with the highest level clearance obviously involved in this conversation that

00:39:59.980 showed an imminent threat from iran to the united states no unless we took certain actions unless

00:40:05.500 we came after them in a way that they thought threatened the regime then we basically knew what

00:40:10.640 they were going to do well okay right of course right but like any but like any country so if you

00:40:14.220 attack any country we know that they're going to have a reaction we face an imminent threat once

00:40:17.760 we attack you fantastic yeah exactly but there was no intelligence that said hey on whatever day it

00:40:23.260 was march 1st the iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack they're going to do some

00:40:27.420 kind of a 9-11 at pearl harbor etc they're going to attack one of our bases there was none of that

00:40:32.200 intelligence again back to what we know about the iranians they're they're very very deliberate

00:40:36.520 with the escalation ladder and again they're only deliberate under president trump's leadership

00:40:41.560 because they knew and they took president trump very very seriously so i mean it's just i just

00:40:46.960 think it's a remarkable thing to nail down because you're not some guy on twitter you're a senior as

00:40:52.860 of yesterday you were a senior u.s intelligence official who's not hostile to president trump

00:40:58.960 who's not going to hear to write a tell-all book

00:41:00.840 or launch a media career.

00:41:02.660 So I think you're a sober voice on this.

00:41:05.720 And just to be clear,

00:41:06.820 there was no intelligence that showed imminent threat.

00:41:09.260 There was no intelligence that showed

00:41:10.660 they were on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon.

00:41:12.280 There was no intelligence, indeed,

00:41:13.320 that showed they were trying to build a nuclear weapon.

00:41:16.040 And nobody you know said,

00:41:19.860 I've seen it, but you haven't.

00:41:21.540 It exists, but you just haven't seen it.

00:41:23.060 Did you ever hear anybody say

00:41:24.240 there is intel that shows this?

00:41:26.060 I did not, no.

00:41:26.820 But I know how this works.

00:41:27.880 I know the Israeli officials, some in intelligence, some in government, will come to U.S. government officials, and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn't true.

00:41:40.760 And they'll say, hey, I'm giving you a preview.

00:41:42.200 It's not an intelligence channel yet, but here's what's going to happen.

00:41:45.120 And that doesn't usually come to a solution.

00:41:47.420 second i mean i thought that u.s policymakers made their decisions on the basis of intelligence

00:41:54.660 collected and or vetted by our intelligence that's why we have intelligence agencies that soak up

00:42:00.420 hundreds of billions a year but you're saying that israeli officials short-circuited the entire

00:42:06.640 u.s government just went right to american policymakers and said it doesn't matter what

00:42:11.900 your country says here's what we know don't you say usually they're they're they're pretty slick

00:42:16.240 And they'll say, hey, this isn't in intelligence channels yet because it's going to take some time to get there.

00:42:21.960 And here they're on the cusp of building a bomb.

00:42:24.780 You know, they're going to, I don't know, you pick your topic.

00:42:28.080 A lot of times they'll sample different things until they find what sticks.

00:42:30.640 But in general, the narrative about, you know, they're going to do a preemptive attack or really just they're going to build a nuclear weapon.

00:42:38.260 And if we don't stop them now, they're going to build a nuclear weapon.

00:42:41.280 And enrichment is the pathway to that.

00:42:43.580 They're going to continue enriching at whatever percent. Enrichment became the narrative. And so that hung up and that short-circuited and really sabotaged the entire negotiations because the Iranians basically said like we're not going to negotiate if the whole starting point is no enrichment.

00:42:59.980 And again, that had nothing to do with a nuclear weapon and the Iranians essentially agreed to that. So the Israelis came in. They moved that red line and they would do a lot to say like, oh, they're enriching and you know what that means.

00:43:10.100 That means in X amount of time, they could have a nuclear bomb.

00:43:13.260 You have to ask now.

00:43:14.300 And then the way the ecosystem would work is that the talking heads on TV, you know, your Mark Levin's, Sean Hannity's, et cetera, they would say basically the exact same thing that night on TV.

00:43:24.020 Or there would be a piece written in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times that would say something very, very similar.

00:43:30.420 Yet if you looked in classified intelligence, we didn't see any of that.

00:43:36.120 I mean that must have been such a weird experience for you.

00:43:39.360 bizarre since you have access to the biggest and most powerful and presumably the best

00:43:44.980 intel agencies in the world um and you're seeing people say things as fact when you know that

00:43:52.340 they're not facts right what was that like uh infuriating um and and i think that's why

00:43:59.340 in general in the lead-up to this last iteration um a good deal of key decision makers were not

00:44:05.580 allowed to come express their opinion to the President. Not allowed by whom? I think it's

00:44:13.820 important for me right now just to stay on the facts. I don't want to point names. I don't want

00:44:18.960 this to become a name calling or, you know, this guy did this on this day. But any leader has

00:44:23.060 gatekeepers. And so you're saying that you were prevented from bringing this information directly

00:44:27.380 to the President by gatekeepers. Well, there wasn't a robust debate. So in general, because

00:44:32.240 our assessment really hadn't changed. You know, we would send those up through intelligence

00:44:36.140 channels. Everybody's kind of reading the same intelligence. But then what actually gets briefed

00:44:40.560 to the president can be very, very different depending on who and how it's delivered.

00:44:46.120 And without a level set from the intelligence community, someone like D&I Gabbard coming in

00:44:50.960 and saying, Mr. President, like, here's the full scope of the intelligence and what it means,

00:44:55.700 you're kind of lacking that sanity check of where we're at, or at least a good sampling,

00:45:00.580 you know to to gauge how accurate what the israelis is saying are saying is and and that

00:45:06.260 process in my view um was largely stifled in the second iteration there was robust debate

00:45:12.440 and robust discussions uh leading up to the 12-day war into midnight hammer uh but this

00:45:18.080 the second round to me and i'm sure others will refute this and disagree with me but what was

00:45:24.860 conducted by just a handful of small of advisors around the president that is true i i believe what

00:45:29.580 you're saying is true um my sense though and you would know more than i is there weren't a lot of

00:45:36.360 people directly around the president who work there who work at the white house his you know

00:45:41.100 the principles who are making an aggressive case for this war do you think there was i mean was

00:45:47.640 there a majority of like his top 10 advisors who were saying we must do this now i think the i

00:45:53.260 think the circle that was that he that was around him was very very tight and very small and i

00:45:59.500 think they were all on the same sheet of music and i think a lot of them were getting their

00:46:02.060 information from the ecosystem that i described um and i think we'd be in a different place if

00:46:06.980 we would have talked about uh the actual what the intelligence picture is and what our what

00:46:11.240 our interest so israeli government talking points laundered through fox news and the wall street

00:46:15.460 journal is that the ecosystem you're talking about yeah and then the israeli officials coming

00:46:18.840 in and basically either ahead of time or after the fact saying the same thing like the enrichment

00:46:23.600 is going to get them a nuclear bomb in said amount of time.

00:46:26.000 Do you believe that you and the DNI, for whom you worked until yesterday,

00:46:33.400 had as much face time with the president as Israeli officials did?

00:46:38.800 I don't know.

00:46:39.880 I don't know that for sure because I don't know exactly how frequently

00:46:43.060 the Israelis were engaging directly with the president.

00:46:46.400 It did seem like Benjamin Yahoo was, you know,

00:46:49.960 obviously it was all public that he was in the White House.

00:46:52.700 Seven times.

00:46:53.060 Quite a bit. Yeah, quite a bit. And then his other officials as well, Dermer, etc. Those guys were in. They were making phone calls. Just a lot of engagement from them. And again, when we would hear or you'd hear what they were saying, it didn't reflect in intelligence channels.

00:47:10.460 Even intelligence that we shared with the Israelis, that the Israelis were giving us in many cases.

00:47:15.160 So there was a clear gap between the intelligence and then the information that the president was given and the decisions that the president was making.

00:47:27.160 I don't want to put you in a comfortable position.

00:47:28.720 Obviously, you're not going to divulge anything that's classified.

00:47:31.420 I don't think you would.

00:47:32.880 You definitely shouldn't because there are people who hurt you for that.

00:47:36.340 And you shouldn't.

00:47:37.620 uh so without encouraging you to do that it's yeah i think it's a common place it's understood

00:47:43.180 in washington i've heard from many people who work in your business that a substantial portion

00:47:48.540 of our information touches israel at some point either it's collected by them uh it is shaped by

00:47:54.820 them it's not purely american is that a fair is that do you think it's fair especially in the

00:47:59.940 middle east i would say i mean look the israelis are tactically very proficient yes they have a

00:48:04.820 very competent intelligence service. And there's a lot that we can learn from them in the craft of

00:48:10.180 intelligence. So they're very proficient. They're very good. However, whenever we get information

00:48:15.580 from a liaison service, I think it's incredibly important to realize that it could be given to us

00:48:22.480 to influence us as well as to inform us. And the way that I would see Israeli information,

00:48:28.820 in particular, coming from senior officials directly to our senior officials, that caveat

00:48:34.240 God just wasn't given frequently enough. And there's a lot of times, some of this is just

00:48:38.640 because of, you know, bureaucratic practice. But a lot of it, I think, is just we feel very

00:48:42.700 comfortable with the Israelis. A lot of them are dual citizens. They sound like us. They don't

00:48:46.460 feel foreign. We kind of go into a more complacent mode where we trust a lot of what they have to

00:48:53.780 say, not keeping in the back of our mind that they have their own agenda and we have our own

00:48:59.060 agenda at the end of the day. Now, I'd say a lot of times we have the same agenda. You know,

00:49:03.060 It's very tactically the same when it comes to fighting Hezbollah, when it comes to fighting terrorism.

00:49:09.760 Sure.

00:49:10.020 But when it comes to what's our strategic goal in a war that's going to have ramifications for our nation, for the region, for global energy supplies, I think most folks right now at the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, they would say us and the Israelis actually have a different objective here.

00:49:25.920 I don't believe that our objective has been clearly defined because we're shying away from regime change.

00:49:30.900 The Israelis are not shying away from regime change.

00:49:32.720 They want to knock out, lock, stock, and barrel the current government.

00:49:36.800 They don't seem to have a plan for what comes next.

00:49:39.200 Well, that was my next question.

00:49:40.480 I think you would have heard tell of such a plan.

00:49:43.440 So if you're going to take out a government, I think it's fair to ask what replaces it.

00:49:47.280 And I have asked a bunch of people, many people, this question.

00:49:50.240 Never gotten any answer whatsoever other than there's no plan.

00:49:53.160 The Israelis don't have a plan because they don't care.

00:49:55.340 Do you think that's fair?

00:49:56.800 I think that's completely fair.

00:49:58.340 I think as Americans, rightfully, we want a clear stated objective and end state for war.

00:50:05.000 I think that's something that was born out of the GWAT, was born out of the Vietnam era.

00:50:09.220 Americans want to know why we're going to war, what the end state is, and they can get on board in general if that's clearly articulated.

00:50:17.720 That's not the case with Iran.

00:50:19.480 The Israelis are different.

00:50:20.340 I think a lot of times, again, because a lot of them speak English, they culturally feel the same.

00:50:24.600 But the Israelis have a much different tolerance for how and why they're going to war and for their endurance for war.

00:50:32.440 The Israelis are completely fine with Iran slipping into chaos.

00:50:36.620 That means that the Ayatollah and the IRGC can't really threaten them anymore.

00:50:40.560 Hezbollah's money might be cut off in their head.

00:50:43.700 And so complete chaos in Iran, it's not necessarily a bad thing for the Israelis.

00:50:48.100 For us, for global energy, Straits of Hormuz, our partners in the GCC, mass migration problems in Europe, this is a major problem.

00:50:58.560 It's a catastrophe for the world.

00:51:00.720 For the world, yeah.

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00:52:30.780 Right, and it's a little galling

00:52:32.500 that I was treated to lectures for a couple of weeks

00:52:35.420 about the valiant people of Iran

00:52:37.460 and how we needed to save them.

00:52:39.320 And then a lot of the exiled communities

00:52:41.640 here in the united states of of iranians a lot of really nice people they jumped on board we got to

00:52:47.900 save our people but by your telling and by the facts by the way this is not really an opinion

00:52:53.620 there's no plan for what happens after regime change like the people pushing that line would

00:52:58.560 just would be happy to see a permanent civil war there which is insanity so if you if you if we do

00:53:03.580 want a real regime change and we want the people to rise up and want it to happen fairly organically

00:53:07.420 going aggressively after the ayatollah was the last thing that we ever should have done

00:53:12.020 again like i'm no fan of the former supreme leader you know like i mean i however um he was

00:53:18.780 moderating their nuclear program he was preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon if you take him

00:53:24.540 out if you kill him aggressively people are going to rally around that regime and the next ayatollah

00:53:30.120 that you get and i think this is the case by all data that we have with the sun the next ayatollah

00:53:34.080 that you get is going to be more radical because he has to show the people that he's going to push

00:53:38.560 back. And there's always a tension inside of Iran between the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary

00:53:44.900 Guard Corps, and the clerics who run the country. They have a healthy, I think, tension between the

00:53:50.500 two, a rivalry. IRGC's leadership, these are Qasem Soleimani's troops. These are the guys that

00:53:56.440 Soleimani trained. These guys, most of them cut their teeth in the Iraq-Iran war. A lot of them

00:54:01.220 cut their teeth fighting us in Iraq. They cut their teeth fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

00:54:06.720 They created Hezbollah. They trained and armed Hezbollah. So these guys are actually pretty

00:54:12.640 serious and pretty hard line, and they're willing to fight and they want to fight.

00:54:17.220 And so by killing the Ayatollah, we've given them more power because now internally they can go and

00:54:24.020 they can say, hey, all you guys who thought that we could negotiate with the Americans, you're

00:54:27.060 chumps, we have to fight them. So I think the longer this goes on, the more negotiators, the

00:54:33.280 more moderates that are killed off, like we just killed, you know, Ali Laranjani, who was a

00:54:38.380 negotiator, who was eager to get us a deal. Again, look, I've got no love for the IRGC. I've got no

00:54:44.760 love for the for the Iranians. But you've got to realize to be clear, in case you're cheating or

00:54:49.560 now you fought their proxies, I fought their proxies. I mean, I put countless of them in

00:54:54.960 flex cuffs are much worse uh i've gone after the iranians i was in you know specialized outfits

00:54:59.800 that went after the iranians and their proxies um these are very serious people uh they're not

00:55:04.740 you know supermen by any means they're they're humans um but they're serious and if you give

00:55:11.200 the irgc a reason to take more control and they get support from the people because again you know

00:55:16.580 you kill off the ayatollah they can say hey the last guy was too moderate look at what it got us

00:55:20.780 like give us more more control i get it and the iranian people are going to be like well actually

00:55:25.180 yeah i don't like getting bombed by the americans and the israelis maybe we do need to listen to

00:55:29.080 the irgc so a lot of these uh the points that you're making i think are insightful but they're

00:55:34.380 also pretty obvious if you kind of game it out for 10 seconds so it seems like you've got two

00:55:40.420 different goals you've described israel's goal as just regime change permanent chaos take iran

00:55:47.540 off the map as a coherent nation state just tie them up with internal chaos whatever the effects

00:55:53.400 of that are on the rest of the world all of them disastrous then on the american side you have the

00:55:58.700 president's stated goal which is we can't let iran have a nuclear weapon which they didn't have and

00:56:02.500 weren't trying to build in any imminent way right okay so if you join those two together in a common

00:56:09.920 mission in a war like that's our partner in this war yeah then you create all kinds of

00:56:16.600 very bad incentives and now larjani i think was killed by the israelis you saw the israelis

00:56:24.540 blow up qatari natural gas facilities today in the qatari natural gas field which feeds the rest

00:56:32.820 the world lng those seem like very obvious steps not to minimize the threat from iran but to

00:56:40.980 lock down the united states in perma war we can't get out after we do that you kill the negotiator

00:56:46.720 you attack our closest ally in the region is probably qatar you attack qatar apparently

00:56:53.540 like no one thought this might happen and there's no there's no reins on the israelis

00:57:01.040 unfortunately i mean we we continue to refer to them like as our partners are equal to the best

00:57:04.920 partners we've ever had but at the end of the day the israelis couldn't do any of this without us

00:57:09.080 and so we have to be acting against our interests in a in a very obvious and very serious way and

00:57:15.880 again it's obvious if we've stated that our goal is just to take away their ability to ever even

00:57:21.800 enrich and to take away their ballistics and to take away their navy all these kind of tactical

00:57:26.600 objectives if we say that that's that's our objective and that's when we can come to a

00:57:30.560 place where we can just exit it's in the israelis interest to get us more and more entrenched in

00:57:37.260 this exactly and that's exactly what they're doing right now you know i i when the israelis

00:57:41.360 killed learn johnny i think i may have misspoke and said we killed we didn't kill him the israelis

00:57:44.620 the israelis struck him um but i do believe in iran at this point in the war they they view it

00:57:49.700 as whether we like it or not i think they view it as we us and the israelis kind of as the same

00:57:55.640 thing we've described it that way because we the israelis couldn't do any of this without us and

00:58:00.760 then that's where the relationship is just way off kilter if they have different objectives than us

00:58:05.080 then what are we doing letting them drive the war so you just said something that's been disputed

00:58:10.500 many times by the mark well i'm not going to name anybody but by advocates for israel it's

00:58:15.840 it's a pr department here in the united states which is huge and you said they couldn't do any

00:58:21.200 of this without us you often hear its promoters um its lobbyists say israel just wants to fight

00:58:29.580 its own wars back off and let us do it is that not i'd love i'd love just to run the experiment

00:58:35.760 we try that what would happen you know the israelis again they have great they have the

00:58:42.120 ability to go out and collect great intelligence they have a very capable military but they're a

00:58:46.360 very small country. I think Israel would be able to defend itself. I think it could conduct,

00:58:51.680 you know, limited strikes on its borders. I think it could continue carrying out pretty impressive

00:58:57.480 targeted assassinations against its adversaries. And so I think you would see it relatively

00:59:02.600 contained. What it couldn't do is go topple entire governments. It couldn't do something like

00:59:08.760 the Iran war, the Iraq war. It couldn't aggressively destabilize Syria. These big,

00:59:15.000 heavy lifts of regime change that America has been engaged in Israel could not do on their own

00:59:21.680 which is where you get back to the the Israeli lobby being just so potent and so powerful and

00:59:26.680 so aggressive so that and I want to ask about that because that's the line um that you're being

00:59:31.200 attacked for and so I want to go through and have you explain more fully if you would why you said

00:59:36.820 what you did and read it but before I do that one last question did was any of this debated that you

00:59:42.360 know of before this war commenced three weeks ago did anyone say well wait a second if we do this

00:59:49.260 and kill the ayatollah because that was like the first order i think what are the the effects

00:59:55.940 after and like what's the goal did these debates ever i know they happened heavily before the 12

01:00:03.140 day war i think that when the israelis came back around and said they they wanted to do this i just

01:00:09.100 don't think there was any debate i i think just based on the ecosystem and the amount of influence

01:00:13.840 that was exerted um because in some ways this is a little humiliating since we were told i was told

01:00:20.780 the whole country was told that after the 12-day war there was no iranian nuclear threat we got

01:00:25.180 rid of it i'm not imagining that it just happened last summer yeah do you recall those statements

01:00:32.160 yeah i mean operation midnight hammer yes destroyed their nuclear capability so so how

01:00:39.280 was it that we wound up six months later getting another lecture about their nuclear capability

01:00:45.480 and it's imminent threat to the united states and nuclear tip ballistic missiles aimed at miami and

01:00:49.820 and the whole thing and nobody first of all there was no organized protest against this like in a

01:00:54.940 normal country i think people rise up and be like whoa whoa whoa whoa you just told us six months

01:00:59.140 ago the exact opposite what did internally in the intel world people say what the hell is going on

01:01:04.340 i i just think that it the planning for this was so compartmentalized that there was no debate as

01:01:11.840 in it was a foregone conclusion maybe the exact timing they didn't they weren't exactly aware of

01:01:16.640 or that had to be debated when when do we do it but it seemed to be a foregone conclusion and i'm

01:01:22.020 sure others will will say no that's not the case at all but there was no robust debate um like there

01:01:27.360 was going into the 12-day war because a big question that a lot of us had that were skeptical

01:01:31.080 of Operation Midnight Hammer was, OK, so we do this. We know the Israelis' whole goal is regime

01:01:37.860 change. What makes us think they'll stop? And if they do stop for a period of time,

01:01:43.180 why won't we just be back in the same place in six months where they're saying that we have to

01:01:47.400 go back in? And that's essentially exactly what happened. So this was raised? This was raised,

01:01:53.900 to my knowledge in June. This was like, hey, what happens next? So you take out the ability

01:01:59.280 for them to enrich and to potentially develop a nuclear weapon. That's done. We know the Israelis

01:02:06.000 have a completely different goal. Part of that strike, Midnight Hammer, was also to get the

01:02:10.980 Israelis to wrap up the 12-day war. But we knew because the Israelis told us that this is the

01:02:17.640 time to take down the regime. They don't want the Ayatollah to be in power. They want a regime

01:02:21.760 change they want a new government there so we said okay knowing that we know that this strike

01:02:27.240 this limited strike that we're going to do isn't going to be enough at some point the israelis are

01:02:30.900 to come back to us and say hey we have to go again and with that knowledge and i think because

01:02:36.040 so many of us had pointed that out and because these israelis had said it um there wasn't a big

01:02:42.440 debate this last time you know they they i think they they had that discussion you know behind

01:02:47.960 closed doors and there wasn't a chance for any dissenting voices to come in but you would think

01:02:52.620 well i've seen it before you know when a question like this arises the people making the decision

01:02:58.920 go immediately to their own intel agencies and in your case agency that you know has jurisdiction

01:03:04.520 over those agencies and say all available intel on the question of the iranian nuclear program

01:03:08.980 all available intel on the question of icbms or its ballistic missile program all available intel

01:03:14.140 and what might happen if we topple the regime in place.

01:03:17.140 Like, this has all been gamed out for a long time.

01:03:19.260 There's a constant process of gathering intel on it, correct?

01:03:21.980 Yeah.

01:03:23.100 And that's what we did in the lead-up to the 12-day war.

01:03:26.220 But this time, no.

01:03:27.120 But this time, no.

01:03:27.740 Not to my knowledge.

01:03:28.340 And I'm sure the administration will come out and say,

01:03:30.620 no, you just weren't invited.

01:03:32.500 But I've got a pretty good idea of how those meetings look.

01:03:34.460 And even if I wasn't invited,

01:03:35.480 I at least would have known that they took place.

01:03:37.840 Again, it just seemed to be a foregone conclusion

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01:04:56.140 So I almost don't want to bring this up because it's so distressing, but I have to

01:05:00.560 ask a question about blowback the effects yeah the downstream effects of military action

01:05:06.440 terrorism in the united states and i have the feeling we're going to see some of it but i want

01:05:11.900 to ask you but since you are an acknowledged expert on that question and since you spent your

01:05:16.900 adult life fighting iranian proxies and because we're always hearing some of them are in the

01:05:21.720 united states did anyone go to you and say if we do this what are the odds that we will have terror

01:05:28.680 attacks in the homeland here in the u.s that was a that was a piece or a an intelligence product

01:05:34.020 that we we worked up on our own i bet um and coordinated throughout the the intelligence

01:05:39.380 community basically we talked about you know the the iranians ability to conduct you know sleeper

01:05:45.960 cell like attacks which is actually pretty limited um the whole idea of sleeper cells or a cell

01:05:52.600 operating um is challenging in today's environment because cells have to communicate with each other

01:05:57.600 And we're pretty good at picking up on that.

01:05:59.400 The real threat, and most major terrorist organizations have kind of moved to this model, is the lone actors.

01:06:05.780 It's inspiring people that are already in place by using the media.

01:06:09.700 There was already a ton of blowback because of the Gaza war.

01:06:13.080 Hamas used propaganda very, very effectively to, I think, curry a lot of favor with younger people here in the United States and abroad.

01:06:22.380 And there was multiple terrorist attacks in America in the last year where Gaza was cited because they consumed some of the propaganda coming out of Gaza.

01:06:32.000 And these people weren't infiltrated Iranian agents.

01:06:34.820 They were here folks that were homegrown.

01:06:36.860 And so we said, hey, the biggest threat right now isn't that the Iranians are going to like sneak some guys over and they've been waiting here for years and they're Quds Force operatives.

01:06:45.500 That's always possible.

01:06:46.420 Well, again, the Iranians are very competent as well, and they have tried something like that before in the past back under the Obama administration when they tried to kill the Saudi ambassador in Georgetown.

01:06:55.380 So we were worried about that, but what we were more worried about was the fact that Biden had the border open for four-plus years.

01:07:01.440 And I testified publicly in Congress laying out the 18,000 known suspected terrorists that potentially could be in the country.

01:07:09.320 Since then, we've discovered potentially more.

01:07:12.200 The problem is the bookkeeping under the Biden administration was kind of like the border.

01:07:15.500 It was wide open.

01:07:16.080 And so we don't know how many folks are actually in the country that shouldn't be here.

01:07:19.840 It's millions.

01:07:20.520 How many of them have ties to countries that are adjacent to Iran or that are Iranian?

01:07:25.380 We're still – as I left, we were still working on some of those numbers.

01:07:29.140 But we've seen several terrorist attacks since these operations began in America.

01:07:33.640 And they all fit that lone actor-inspired model.

01:07:37.240 So the blowback is the longer this goes on and the more the propaganda inevitably gets weaponized, we are going to see more than likely more people here that are radicalized.

01:07:45.660 Now, frankly, I think that none of the – and this is another great thing about President Trump.

01:07:50.000 None of these people should be in the country.

01:07:51.800 We should have tighter immigration policies.

01:07:54.180 We should be focused right now.

01:07:56.140 Our focus should be on finding everyone who shouldn't be in our country right now and getting them out as soon as possible, not on another foreign adventure.

01:08:03.600 I wonder – I mean, so you've already seen in the wake of a recent terror attack, neocons use that attack as a way to try and censor, shut down, maybe even imprison critics of the decision to go to war in Iran.

01:08:18.820 So it's almost like you control both sides.

01:08:21.760 Like you advocate for a war which inevitably stokes religious hatred because you advocate for the killing of a religious leader, okay?

01:08:28.820 So you're helping to create religious war, permanent generational religious war.

01:08:33.600 And then when your country or the country you happen to be living in that you don't really care about feels the effects, when Americans are killed as a result of that, you use their deaths to justify the silencing of people who criticized you.

01:08:47.720 Does that make sense?

01:08:48.800 No, exactly.

01:08:49.720 Yeah.

01:08:50.660 So how much are you concerned we're going to see more of that?

01:08:53.580 I'm very concerned.

01:08:54.260 I think we – I pray we won't, but the odds are not in our favor just considering how open our borders have been.

01:09:02.160 Obviously, this type of propaganda radicalizes people.

01:09:04.420 Again, we've already seen attacks.

01:09:05.720 We saw attacks inspired by the conflict in Gaza.

01:09:08.840 So I think we're going to see more of this and then just – I made the mistake of opening up Twitter a couple times today.

01:09:14.900 There's people calling for dissenting voices to be charged, to be locked up, et cetera.

01:09:21.020 And so –

01:09:21.800 And they may be.

01:09:22.240 The erosion of civil rights, I think, during a time of conflict is nothing new.

01:09:25.740 Unfortunately, we've seen it before.

01:09:27.000 It's the rule.

01:09:28.080 But I wonder, though, is like people talk through or maybe they didn't talk it through, but did anybody in the lead up to this – I just want to ask it again to make sure I understand the answer.

01:09:37.320 In the lead up to this war, which is now a regional war, potentially a global war, big war, biggest war of our lives, did anyone come to you and say, what's your projection for like what the effects on the United States will be?

01:09:51.020 Like, how many Americans could die at the shopping mall because of this or at school?

01:09:57.680 We proactively wrote an assessment, which is what we tend to do anyways.

01:10:02.480 But again, there just wasn't a huge process and a debate about this last iteration.

01:10:08.060 But you're worried about it?

01:10:09.380 I'm very concerned about it.

01:10:10.520 I am, too.

01:10:11.180 I am, too.

01:10:12.440 Yeah, I am, too.

01:10:13.500 Okay, so let me read you the most controversial, and you've addressed this to some extent, but I'd like you to flesh it out a little more, if you don't mind.

01:10:21.020 You say I support the values, the foreign policies that you campaigned on during three

01:10:24.840 campaigns and that you enacted.

01:10:26.440 You understood up until June of 2025 that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that

01:10:30.860 robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity

01:10:34.240 of our nation.

01:10:36.380 Early in this administration, this is the change, high-ranking Israeli officials and

01:10:40.620 influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly

01:10:45.220 undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war

01:10:50.260 with Iran.

01:10:51.020 This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that you should strike now.

01:10:58.360 There was a clear path to a swift victory.

01:11:00.400 This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.

01:11:10.800 We cannot make this mistake again.

01:11:12.940 So I think you've explained how the echo chamber and the lobbying campaign worked.

01:11:19.400 It wasn't just on Fox and the Wall Street Journal.

01:11:21.400 It was by telephone and text message.

01:11:23.620 It was in person.

01:11:24.920 And it was relentless.

01:11:27.240 And there was no countervailing campaign.

01:11:29.240 There was almost nobody who went to the president and said,

01:11:32.540 well, actually, here's the American view, which is frustrating.

01:11:39.240 But then you allude at the end of that to the Iraq War.

01:11:44.140 And I think you told me at dinner last night,

01:11:46.320 I think you spent five years total.

01:11:47.820 You had 11 combat deployments.

01:11:49.020 you spent about you think five years yeah i mean uh nine of those deployments were to iraq for

01:11:53.500 six to eight months so yeah okay so you've had some time to think about the iraq war

01:11:58.820 yeah yeah yeah more time than is healthy yeah can i just say because it makes me so here you go you

01:12:05.740 join the army at 18 18 18 yeah you spend your whole young life there go to all these wars 11

01:12:13.260 deployments you spend five years in iraq over seven deployments and you reach a series of

01:12:19.680 conclusions fighting and being shot at by iranian proxies and now you say i don't think this war is

01:12:27.020 good for america and you're being slandered as a bad unpatriotic quitter who secretly sympathizes

01:12:35.400 with the ayatollah i just have to ask you how that feels i mean they love you when you're just

01:12:41.560 saluting and moving out, but then the second you say, I don't think we should be doing this,

01:12:44.840 and I have an opinion now, then all the attacks come at you. But I truly believe that God put me

01:12:50.420 where I am right now, really putting me through everything I've been through in my life to bring

01:12:56.580 me to this point. I don't believe that God said, hey, you're here now in this moment to just sit

01:13:03.080 back and be a good soldier for this iteration. I've had lots of friends who have said, hey,

01:13:07.360 I think you would have been more value staying in the administration with your experiences.

01:13:10.640 And I understand that and I'm flattered by it. But considering all that I've seen, the conclusions that I've reached, I feel like I'm here for a reason and something I think, you know, probably on my third or fourth deployment, as I was realizing that we were lied to to get us into Iraq and that we had a whole mess that we now had to had to clean up and how much it mirrored and echoed Vietnam.

01:13:34.600 I remember as being in my mid to late 20s, being very frustrated with a lot of the Vietnam veterans who did not speak up against.

01:13:43.580 I know some did, but especially Vietnam veterans who stayed in service, as I had intended to do, who stayed in service and who advocated for the Iraq War.

01:13:52.620 Colin Powell is someone who I have a lot of respect for, for the way he fought in Vietnam, his leadership in Desert Storm.

01:13:59.460 But then the way that he was part of lying to get us into the Iraq war and then staying on and continuing those lies, knowing full will, having all the experiences of being a guy on the ground in a feudal war that was basically – we were deployed to under false pretenses.

01:14:17.800 He had all that knowledge and because he wanted to be loyal to I think the president and I think he wanted to be loyal to what he felt was the government that would eventually get it right.

01:14:27.520 he didn't step out and say, we shouldn't be doing this. And I just remember reflecting on that and

01:14:33.440 said to myself at the time, and this might seem silly and idealistic, but said to myself at the

01:14:37.780 time, if it's ever my turn, if it's ever my generation's turn, I'm going to do everything

01:14:42.200 that I can to make sure this doesn't happen to the next generation. So a real breaking point for

01:14:47.340 me, I did the best I could for a couple of weeks as this war started from the inside to try and

01:14:52.760 find off ramps, to try and provide information, to see what I could do from the inside.

01:14:57.520 But watching the casualties roll in, and I don't want to use anyone's loss as a political talking point.

01:15:04.320 But for me personally, watching more casualties come in, I just couldn't stand by as both a veteran and then as a Gold Star husband and say, like, I'm just going to continue to soldier on in this.

01:15:16.200 It's time to try something different.

01:15:17.620 I know this path that we're on.

01:15:19.680 It doesn't work.

01:15:20.600 I've seen enough data.

01:15:21.880 It's time to do something different.

01:15:24.120 How hard a decision was it?

01:15:27.520 It became really clear to me over the weekend, this past weekend, that our message just wasn't

01:15:34.800 getting through. And I was like, I know what happens if I stay. If I stay and I go along with

01:15:42.100 this, I'm going to be knee deep in it, trying to just chip away and make a difference. But my

01:15:48.540 ability to have my voice heard to present data that runs contrary to the trajectory and the

01:15:56.160 agenda that the administration's on, that's going to be squashed before it even really

01:16:00.180 reaches the White House.

01:16:01.760 And so I knew I had kind of hit my limit of effectiveness in that capacity.

01:16:06.600 So really, it should have been a hard decision.

01:16:08.520 But for me, it was crystal clear.

01:16:09.840 It was like, number one, I can't be a part of this in good conscience.

01:16:12.900 And I need to do everything I can to actually speak out about it and speak out in a way

01:16:18.620 that I hope resonates with the president and with some of my former colleagues.

01:16:23.200 I understand they might be mad at me.

01:16:24.260 They're getting hard questions from the media.

01:16:25.840 But I really want them as we descend even further into this war, I really hope that they take the time to reflect and to realize that we still have time to get us out of this.

01:16:35.600 And then also for the 77 million people who voted for President Trump, who voted for no new wars, who voted for the foreign policy that President Trump enacted in his first administration, the foreign policy that I described.

01:16:46.160 I mean, President Trump's first foreign policy, the one that he ran on, the one that he destroyed the Republican neocon establishment on, was incredibly pragmatic.

01:16:56.000 We're not saying you have to be some kind of a pacifist.

01:17:00.860 We are saying, though, that you have to be very, very deliberate and judicious in how you use force.

01:17:05.840 And you also have to use the full scope of the American toolbox.

01:17:10.520 You use diplomacy.

01:17:11.500 You use our economic leverage.

01:17:12.920 And again, this isn't something that I came up with. President Trump came up with this. President Trump enacted this. And this is why 77 million people voted for him. It's probably not the only reason. But the no new wars, put America first, don't let us bleed out in the Middle East. That's what people voted for. And that's what I think you campaigned for. And I think that's something he could get us back to if he just takes a look and assesses how we got to where we are right now.

01:17:40.160 I want to get to that in a minute, your solution.

01:17:43.160 Yeah.

01:17:43.740 And, you know, I just want to be transparent about my motives.

01:17:48.160 Not in this to attack anybody.

01:17:50.680 Right.

01:17:52.280 I'm concerned to the point of agitation about where this is going and its effects on the United States.

01:17:59.420 I think, I hope I'm wrong, but I believe it.

01:18:02.380 And I think you do too.

01:18:03.580 I think this is the most serious thing that's happened in my lifetime.

01:18:06.300 So I want to fix it.

01:18:08.300 and i don't want to happen again exactly and i don't want history to be written in real time

01:18:12.980 by liars in such a way that no one understands what we're going through

01:18:17.520 and then we make the same mistakes and this is a principle that any parent applies to his own

01:18:22.740 children no say out loud what you did and you're less likely to do it again so before i say that

01:18:28.640 i just want to pause just on on your personal experience i'm i know you hate talking about

01:18:33.000 I'm not going to make you uncomfortable by pushing too much, but you just, you feel, I feel as an observer, such sadness for the men who've been used, including you.

01:18:46.060 And I wonder how, given everything you've done and everything you've just said, how you don't feel bitter at the response that you've gotten from people, some people.

01:18:58.080 How do you keep the bitterness out?

01:18:59.700 uh i i think faith i've got a great wife god's blessed me twice with with my late wife shannon

01:19:06.740 my wife heather our two boys colt and josh who i think are watching this hopefully um so faith

01:19:12.200 and staying grounded on what's important yes um but then also look the people who are who are

01:19:16.580 coming after me uh i believe that the internet is like 25 real i think there's a lot of bots

01:19:22.720 there's a lot of people who got delivered a talking point and they're going to get a paycheck

01:19:25.440 for it, or they just, you know, they, they, they want the, the adoration. So I just don't take most

01:19:30.620 of it seriously. Uh, and again, look, I know there's some of my former colleagues, people

01:19:33.740 who I do like who have had to come after me. And I understand that too. Like I, I get it. Like

01:19:38.840 they're still there. They've got to discredit everything I'm saying right now. They're watching,

01:19:42.140 taking notes. Um, so I'm not bitter about that. I literally just want to focus on the task at hand

01:19:48.320 and the task at hand is stopping us from getting deeper into this, this quagmire. Um, because again,

01:19:55.180 And like just looking back on my experiences in Iraq, I don't feel like this happened.

01:19:59.360 There wasn't the ability to.

01:20:00.700 There wasn't this platform.

01:20:01.780 There wasn't, you know, the free independent media that existed in a real way that could

01:20:06.040 reach people.

01:20:06.840 That's right.

01:20:07.320 And so to me, we have this opportunity.

01:20:09.140 So I'll be bitter and angry later when, you know, I read Twitter and somebody who I used

01:20:13.240 to like says that Joe Kent's a traitor and we're going to fire him tomorrow anyways.

01:20:16.440 You know, we don't have time for that.

01:20:19.660 Like, as you pointed out, major things are happening right now in this war.

01:20:23.220 And the president is facing some very, very challenging decisions.

01:20:27.220 So I personally just hope that he and his closest advisors listen and think.

01:20:33.760 And that's the main priority.

01:20:36.560 So I strongly agree.

01:20:37.720 And we can't allow hatred of us to inspire hatred in ourselves.

01:20:42.280 You can't become a hater.

01:20:43.480 It'll destroy you.

01:20:44.320 It's what they want.

01:20:45.320 So I salute you for avoiding that.

01:20:48.280 And it's absolutely real.

01:20:49.080 I spent a lot of time with you.

01:20:49.840 And you're not a hater at all.

01:20:50.940 You don't even seem that bothered.

01:20:51.840 So that's incredible.

01:20:53.220 given where you are. It's amazing. It's an act of faith. And I love it. End of the history portion

01:20:58.900 of the segment. But I just think it's important to establish why you said, first, the war in Iraq,

01:21:04.600 second, the conflict in Syria, which took the life of your wife, why both of those were driven by

01:21:10.460 Israel? Well, the war in Syria never would happen without the war in Iraq. I mean, so had we not

01:21:15.100 gone in and invaded Iraq, we wouldn't have had the conflict in Syria. But Syria was always a

01:21:21.260 major problem under Assad for the Israelis, both under his father and under the Bashir al-Assad,

01:21:28.400 Hafez al-Bashir, because of their support, the relationship with the Iranians, their support for

01:21:32.400 Hezbollah. Makes sense. And so they wanted to get rid of Assad as well. They saw Iraq as a vehicle

01:21:40.100 for not just taking down Saddam Hussein, who posed a threat to them as well, but also as a way,

01:21:46.300 a lily pad if you will to get rid of of syria um and basically so assad must go which is a slogan

01:21:54.160 that all of a sudden emerged out of nowhere right that was not like an organic american desire it

01:22:00.440 wasn't like americans woke up and were like you know the problem the problem really is

01:22:03.420 this ophthalmologist from syria he must go it was that would that reflected the priorities of israel

01:22:10.300 not israel and then i think you had the echo chamber as well because you you had all the

01:22:13.840 usual suspects you had fdd and you had all these different other organizations that were out there

01:22:18.320 saying that like now's the time to you know break up barry weiss barry weiss break up true expert

01:22:23.660 on syria the next thing you know like well there'll be a syrian thomas jefferson that'll take

01:22:27.500 over and instead we got the former leader of al-qaeda um but a big reason that syria became

01:22:34.100 next after iraq in iraq we screwed the whole thing up so badly um that we we toppled saddam

01:22:40.860 destabilized fought a bitter insurgency the sunnis eventually aligned with al-qaeda but then we beat

01:22:47.240 them down so heavily because the shias are the majority of the country the shias took over shias

01:22:51.840 largely the shias that we installed in iraq the dawah party badr skiri etc you know heavily aligned

01:22:58.180 with iran and so at the end of the iraq war under obama you know there was this whole like oh crap

01:23:04.240 We just handed basically the keys to Baghdad to the Iranians, who, again, hostile to us.

01:23:11.360 Qasem Soleimani is running all over the place, funding proxies.

01:23:15.220 It's a great deal.

01:23:16.120 It helps Iran circumvent sanctions, their relationship with Iraq.

01:23:19.400 And we just spent trillions, lost nearly 5,000 Americans there.

01:23:24.260 And now we have this Shia super state.

01:23:26.480 And so then there was a ton of pressure coming from not just the Israelis, but I think also

01:23:30.980 a lot of the the gulf to say hey we've got to get rid of assad as well because now you have this

01:23:36.940 this iranian land bridge that goes basically from damascus all the way to tehran and then you can

01:23:44.400 hook that down into uh the lebanese area where hezbollah is so next thing you know well if you

01:23:51.080 want to get rid of the the guy assad who's an awet well we got a country full of like really

01:23:56.380 angry Sunnis. And what are those guys going to turn into? And so next thing you know, we're now

01:24:01.080 on the side of ISIS and Al Qaeda. ISIS gets out of control, and we have to deploy back to Iraq,

01:24:07.420 back to Syria, to put out essentially the brush fire that we created. And so that's why I put all

01:24:14.200 of those together. Because again, without Israel's influence, would all of this have happened with the

01:24:20.500 Iraq war have happened? Maybe, but they heavily lobbied for it. I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu,

01:24:25.580 You can pull up tapes on YouTube like the guy was lobbying heavily back in 2002 for us to do regime change in Iraq, and he has stayed in power ever since.

01:24:35.340 Ariel Sharon, who initially was the PM in the lead-up to the Iraq war, initially was against it because he wanted us to focus on Iran.

01:24:42.340 But then towards the end, he got on board as well.

01:24:44.480 But the Likud Party that's in power and has been driving Israeli politics now for most of my adult life, they were heavily in favor of the regime change war in Iraq,

01:24:54.440 which again led to Shia domination, led to the rise of ISIS, led to the rise of Al-Qaeda,

01:24:59.880 and then heavily fueled the Syrian civil war. So again, this country, Israel, whom they can be a

01:25:07.300 good partner in some regards. I'm not anti-Israeli. I've worked with the Israelis. Again,

01:25:10.840 very competent intelligence service, very wonderful people, but they have different

01:25:15.180 objectives than we do. So to put them in the driver's seat of our foreign policy and to let

01:25:20.560 them dictate our foreign policy is a disservice to the american people well i think and you know

01:25:28.880 i think you're under you're understating the effect to disservice suggests like an inconvenience

01:25:35.180 dangerous yeah yeah yeah um now we're looking at bankruptcy and death and yeah collapse of the

01:25:39.760 dollar and like lots and i'm not blaming israel by the way i'm not blaming israel for any of it

01:25:44.260 i'm blaming supine american leadership that takes this right don't understand it at all

01:25:50.400 um and that that kind of leads the most uncomfortable question of all and i don't

01:25:55.100 know if you can answer it i don't think i can answer it but since all of these dynamics are

01:25:59.400 very well known to everyone in washington everyone who pretends this is not real the

01:26:02.800 tom cottons of the world lindsey grahams or whatever you know the liars everybody knows

01:26:07.880 everybody knows pro-isro people know anti-isro people know that what you're saying is true

01:26:12.040 i don't think there's any debate about any of it

01:26:14.920 so since it was clear that we were being pushed by the netanyahu government into this war that

01:26:22.560 they were choosing the timing they chose the timing right i mean yeah i'll take marco rubio's

01:26:28.000 word for it i'll take marco rubio's word for it um was it ever discussed the option that you

01:26:34.720 mentioned at the beginning like how about no not that i know of okay so then you have to ask i'm

01:26:42.060 just following the logic train here how could what kind of pressure does it require to get a

01:26:48.720 president who campaigned against exactly this thing for 10 years to do exactly this thing

01:26:55.260 what does it take to do that i i wish i knew definitively i think there's two potentials

01:27:02.440 two schools of thought i mean one is the media echo chamber the donors the way the israelis come

01:27:07.780 in and kind of laundered the information like I described previously. And then the other option

01:27:13.980 is much darker. I mean, we still don't know what happened in Butler. We don't know what happened

01:27:18.800 with Charlie Kirk. And by no means am I saying like, you know, the Israelis did this or any of

01:27:24.220 that. But I'm saying there's a lot of unanswered questions there. And there is enough data to at

01:27:28.820 least say that there's a good chance that President Trump feels like he is under threat.

01:27:34.440 um we're not allowed to ask basically was there any linkage between uh what took place with

01:27:41.440 asif merchant who was recruited by the iranians to come to america to recruit proxies to kill

01:27:46.240 president trump the fbi put a put a confidential human source at him all this is public now this

01:27:51.660 is all out there in the open um and he's arrested and then two days later a sniper takes a shot

01:27:58.940 president trump um we think merchant and the ch we know the chs was talking about the the human

01:28:04.660 source that the fbi put at merchant they were talking about hey we could kill the president

01:28:09.560 potentially with a sniper uh rifle but then they arrest him two days later butler happens and and

01:28:16.240 crooks according to the official narrative anyways is an enigma we don't know anything about him we

01:28:20.880 can't get into his devices if we did get into his devices maybe there's nothing there no more

01:28:25.140 questions are allowed to be asked about thomas crooks um the dhs ig is currently being blocked

01:28:30.680 from investigating butler as well that's out in the media that's all well known um your investigative

01:28:35.760 journalists found that crooks did indeed have an online persona quite an online footprint and he

01:28:40.440 was talking to people so it's like why why aren't we investigating this you know i mean if an

01:28:47.400 attempted murder of a presidential murder of a presidential candidate and then there's another

01:28:50.880 assassination attempt. There's been multiple public breaches of President Trump's security

01:28:54.800 over the last year. And then, you know, Charlie Kirk is killed publicly in a very horrific way.

01:29:02.920 And we're not really even allowed to look into that at all. And Charlie Kirk was one of President

01:29:07.680 Trump's closest advisors. And he also advocated heavily against a war with Iran. He was in the

01:29:14.200 Oval Office in the lead up to the 12 day war. I wasn't particularly close with Charlie. He was

01:29:19.920 very gracious to me when i was running for congress very very supportive so we knew each

01:29:23.640 other and the last time i saw charlie kirk on this earth was in in june um in in the in the

01:29:30.600 west wing in the stairway and i said hi to him and he looked me in the eye and he said very loudly

01:29:35.240 and it's a small you've been in the west wing it's yes it's small uh it's a tight space and

01:29:39.500 he said joe stop us from getting into a war with iran very loudly he was single-minded and he walked

01:29:44.980 off and he went i believe into the oval um so when one of president trump's closest advisors who is

01:29:50.920 vocally advocating for us to not go to war with iran and for us to rethink at least our relationship

01:29:58.340 with the israelis um and then he's suddenly publicly assassinated and we're not allowed

01:30:04.640 to ask any questions about that it's a data point it's a data point that we need to look into

01:30:09.840 what do you mean um when you say we're not allowed to ask any questions about that

01:30:13.920 And we've been told that this individual, Robinson, is a lone gunman, and maybe he is.

01:30:22.180 But the investigation that I was a part of, the National Counterterrorism Center was a part of, we were stopped from continuing to investigate.

01:30:28.620 And the FBI will say that they stopped that because they wanted to turn everything over to the Utah state authorities.

01:30:35.720 Everything's going to trial.

01:30:36.500 It's very, very sensitive.

01:30:37.720 But there was still a lot for us to look into that I can't really get into.

01:30:41.080 but there was still linkage for us to investigate that we needed to run down i'm not making any

01:30:47.180 conclusions i'm not saying no i don't think you are because you know because of this this happened

01:30:51.320 i'm not saying that at all i'm just saying there's unanswered questions we know the pressure because

01:30:55.460 of the text messages the text messages that have been made public that charlie was under a lot of

01:30:59.880 pressure from a lot of pro-israel donors and again we know charlie was advocating to president trump

01:31:05.340 against this war with iran and we knew at the end of the 12-day war at the end of midnight hammer

01:31:10.500 that the Israelis were going to come back and ask us to go back to war again.

01:31:14.900 Right.

01:31:15.500 So we have a lot of data points between Butler,

01:31:17.420 the assassination attempts against President Trump,

01:31:19.360 the breaches of his security, what happened to Charlie Kirk.

01:31:22.800 Can I just ask you to pause on the Charlie Kirk just because it upsets me

01:31:26.920 to hear what you're saying, to be reminded that he was murdered,

01:31:30.660 but also to hear you confirm what was reported in the media several months ago,

01:31:35.800 that your office had been blocked from investigating his murder.

01:31:40.500 That does not make sense to me.

01:31:42.100 I don't understand why you would ever turn down help in an investigation from a U.S. agency with a lot of experience in gathering intelligence on things.

01:31:54.240 That's your job.

01:31:54.960 The FBI will say and the DOJ will say that because it's an ongoing case, it's a Utah State case, that back off.

01:32:02.580 They've got it.

01:32:03.200 They've got a smoking case.

01:32:04.420 They've got the fingerprints on the gun and they've got the case.

01:32:07.700 But the FBI was involved in the case.

01:32:09.240 The FBI was involved.

01:32:09.860 the fbi's uh basically said that they're deferring to utah because it's now okay but they've

01:32:16.000 established a precedent for federal investigation of this crime yeah and the national counterterrorism

01:32:20.900 center's mandate is to investigate any any foreign ties to see if there's potentially any foreign

01:32:25.820 ties if we don't find any foreign ties we back off what i'm saying about getting into too much

01:32:30.320 detail is there was more for us to investigate there was you believe there was reason to

01:32:35.800 investigate foreign ties to charlie kirk's murder and were told by the fbi doj fbi and doj yeah

01:32:41.800 no you're not allowed to investigate that stop it's done they cut basically cut off our access

01:32:46.780 to be able to get into that information um and look i i didn't even say necessarily i believe

01:32:52.340 there's 100 foreign ties there were data points that we needed to investigate i mean i think

01:32:57.380 anybody who's even you know looked at any kind of police investigation you get 100 leads you run

01:33:02.360 them down and 99 don't mean anything we still had a lot more leads to run down that pertain to some

01:33:07.920 kind of a foreign nexus that we were stopped from investigating and you know that just strikes me as

01:33:14.780 uh inconceivable that that could happen and again i was aware of it from reading about it uh but not

01:33:20.520 really to the extent that you've just described so i would love to hear the justification for

01:33:24.520 that and can you flesh that out a little bit more what were you told was the reason to prevent you

01:33:29.900 as a federal intelligence official running the national counterterrorism center from looking in

01:33:36.820 to the murder when you had reason to look into it well the way the bureaucracy works is they can

01:33:42.200 just kill things in process so initially we were cut off um pretty early on from being able to

01:33:47.680 access like the the files and being able to you know send people out there we sent people out

01:33:52.420 initially to work in the task force after the the crisis period the first week or so that that

01:33:58.200 dispersed and we basically were told that hey we'll we'll get back to you if we find any kind

01:34:03.580 of foreign ties etc that we want you guys to look into meanwhile we had already dug up a decent

01:34:08.740 amount of leads again i'm not saying that we had anything concrete but we found more work that we

01:34:13.820 needed to do to say that we had done our due due diligence we were then told that hey you guys need

01:34:20.020 to stop you can't work on this anymore i had a bureaucratic dispute about it um eventually we

01:34:24.520 were allowed to continue to investigate. But then in very short order, all the requests that we

01:34:30.900 would make that normally different parts of the interagency with the FBI being on point

01:34:35.620 would facilitate data share. Data sharing is a big thing that NCTC does. Those requests were

01:34:42.080 just never met or in my opinion, not an honest effort was given to fulfill those requests.

01:34:49.840 Just basic information that any competent police service, which I believe Utah has,

01:34:54.520 and the FBI that they would have access to, to help us run down the leads to either confirm or

01:34:59.700 deny some kind of foreign activity. So we were cut off from that. They didn't ever officially

01:35:04.840 come back and say, you can't look at this anymore. All of the requests just continued to die on the

01:35:09.440 vine with the various agencies that we needed to actually fulfill those requests.

01:35:14.600 I just can't imagine a legitimate justification for that. I mean, maybe I'm missing something,

01:35:18.920 but from a non-specialist perspective, something horrible has happened. The US government is,

01:35:24.260 its core function is to investigate crime, particularly murder. Here you have an agency

01:35:30.020 whose job it is to run down the rabbit trails you've described, and you're stopped from doing

01:35:35.920 that. We don't want the information. Right. Why would any person engaged in a legitimate pursuit

01:35:42.480 say, I don't want more information? I mean, especially considering there's people posting

01:35:45.980 online prior knowledge of what was about to happen. So a lot of the justification for stopping

01:35:53.420 us from investigating hung on hey we've got it we've got the guy his fingerprints are on the gun

01:35:58.700 we got a video of him jumping off the roof like this is a slam dunk case okay even if um it is a

01:36:05.120 slam dunk case that he took the shot what about all the people who had prior knowledge you know

01:36:10.460 all this the basic investigative questions how do you get there you map it out you know nothing

01:36:15.700 this isn't rocket science i mean this is anything that anyone with common sense would know to ask

01:36:20.400 But basically once they caught him, once he turned himself in and his fingerprints were on the gun, it was basically pencils down.

01:36:27.560 Utah has the rest of it.

01:36:29.340 There's nothing else to see here.

01:36:31.380 And I'm over there thinking I'm in crazy town saying like, no, we have all these different leads that we need to run down just from my perspective.

01:36:37.900 Now, the people who had prior knowledge, I think I believe most of them were American citizens.

01:36:42.020 So that would be on the FBI to go run down.

01:36:44.100 But again, not without saying anything specific, there was more work for us to do on the potential of a foreign nexus.

01:36:49.600 Again, not saying there is one, but we had more work to do,

01:36:52.840 and we were blocked from doing that.

01:36:54.920 I can't.

01:36:55.440 My heart is pounding listening to this.

01:36:58.640 I just want people listening to this to assess two things.

01:37:02.000 One, are you over your skis?

01:37:03.820 Are you making claims you can't prove?

01:37:05.200 No.

01:37:06.220 Two, is there any conceivable motive, dark motive,

01:37:10.240 that you would have for wanting to know more about this murder

01:37:12.680 to wanting to investigate it?

01:37:14.460 And I don't think any rational person could construct a bad motive

01:37:18.040 for wanting to know.

01:37:18.840 It's your job.

01:37:19.600 yeah it's the government's job and so i think the onus is on people who are preventing the

01:37:25.640 collection of information to describe why they're doing that it's that's the question for them why

01:37:32.920 wouldn't you want to know specifically you may not know the answer of the people who

01:37:39.420 who demonstrated prior knowledge of charlie kirk's murder online and there were a number of them

01:37:45.000 are you satisfied that all of them were interviewed by the fbi in person

01:37:49.620 I have no idea.

01:37:50.920 I don't know.

01:37:52.020 I just think considering they knew the guy – they knew Charlie was going to be assassinated.

01:37:55.540 And there was enough of them that it wasn't just some rando who maybe he tags every TPUSA post with that.

01:38:01.280 There was enough of them that there's something there.

01:38:03.960 I don't know what that something is.

01:38:05.240 Well, by definition.

01:38:06.500 But we haven't seen any arrests.

01:38:10.040 So to me, there's more work to be done.

01:38:12.460 And because that could have been posted from anywhere, that would be in the purview of the FBI or NCTC.

01:38:18.920 or if they're overseas um and to me i i personally did not see any effort being taken to continue to

01:38:25.880 run that down now i'm sure they will say hey we're we're open to anything we'll continue to

01:38:29.560 investigate but you know we're we're coming up on several months now um why hasn't this been done

01:38:35.980 are you bothered by it i'm very bothered by it i'm very bothered by it like i i personally did

01:38:40.900 not know charlie well um but charlie kirk is a generational figure i mean he led a movement

01:38:47.540 He was speaking to millions of young Americans who came out and who voted for President Trump.

01:38:53.000 And he was just a genuine great man, husband, father.

01:38:56.740 I mean how can you not like Charlie Kirk?

01:38:58.080 But also the fact that he was murdered so publicly.

01:39:02.140 And yes, there's been a lot of sympathy and his movement has grown, et cetera.

01:39:08.240 But actual curiosity about getting to justice, to figuring out what happened, that makes me furious.

01:39:15.320 that we're being blocked from that and that we're not we're not allowed to ask the question

01:39:19.520 anymore we're just not allowed to talk about it anymore and i think that's absolute insanity and

01:39:24.060 what does that mean what does that mean that there's there are people and there's entities

01:39:27.400 out there that don't want us looking into this and i'm sure they're preparing the response right

01:39:32.440 now and they're saying that's because we don't want to screw up the robinson trial like okay

01:39:35.360 if the robinson trial is is so slam dunk then don't worry about it you know he's got his

01:39:39.240 fingerprints on the rifle etc but there was people publicly posting they had prior knowledge of this

01:39:44.020 And I'm here telling you, as someone who's involved in the investigation, there was more stones for us to overturn.

01:39:49.640 And every time we asked, we were blocked.

01:39:51.680 And then they leaked the New York Times.

01:39:53.240 We had a blow up and we had to throw them out of the room because they're crazy, et cetera.

01:39:58.400 So it's incredibly frustrating that there's not more, especially considering how pivotal Charlie was to the MAGA movement and to President Trump, that there hasn't been a more concerted effort to find the truth and to find justice.

01:40:13.420 Do you think there will be?

01:40:14.900 I pray there is.

01:40:15.820 I hope this helps.

01:40:17.040 I know you and I will probably take some black for it.

01:40:19.380 I don't know why, and I doubt I'll be...

01:40:22.700 No, I...

01:40:23.700 Yeah, at a certain point,

01:40:25.560 I've really tried not to say anything about it

01:40:27.080 because I don't know the answers.

01:40:29.300 But I want them to be found

01:40:30.780 because I believe in justice and because I love Charlie.

01:40:35.060 But I think everything you have said

01:40:37.100 may be dismissed as crazy or evil,

01:40:40.560 but tell me how.

01:40:41.200 with with reference to the words you've just spoken i don't see how someone could

01:40:46.120 level a legitimate attack on you and won't stop them um you mentioned the breaches of the

01:40:53.700 president's security that have been reported one that was reported and i can't say whether

01:40:57.860 it's true i'm only asking to see if you've if you know that it is true but it's been reported

01:41:02.460 that um prime minister netanyahu's security tail was caught twice by secret service attaching some

01:41:09.800 kind of device to the president's emergency secret service emergency response vehicle i don't know

01:41:15.740 if that's true have you heard that i i've read it in the media i don't know if that's true okay i

01:41:20.340 think the president and the vice president and several members of the cabinet going out to dinner

01:41:24.940 in dc and the code pink protesters having a heads up about that to rent the table and that's hard

01:41:33.200 to do they had to figure out where they rent the table they had to kind of get the restaurant on

01:41:37.040 board to a certain extent to me that's kind of a uh almost like counting coup it's a soft flex

01:41:42.560 it's a it's a i can touch you whenever i want it was good pink they weren't gonna do anything we

01:41:46.480 know they're just gonna be kind of crazy and annoying however what does that mean it means

01:41:51.080 you've got real problems with with your security detail and then you know a few weeks later um you

01:41:57.640 have an armed police officer who's off duty who's not part of the president's detail come right up

01:42:02.880 and shake the president's hand you know uh and the guy's probably patriotic american whatever he

01:42:08.180 probably just want to shake the president's hand legitimately but that that got a lot of publicity

01:42:11.980 publicity and what does that mean you know and the president again president trump is very smart

01:42:16.900 i think president trump has a gift for interpreting large sets of data yes and making very very key

01:42:23.500 strategic decisions um and so when the president sees that he's got issues with his with his own

01:42:28.360 security detail when he sees what happened in butler with the other assassination attempts

01:42:33.060 when he sees what happened with charlie i think it's reasonable to believe that somewhere in his

01:42:38.080 head he thinks that like maybe i don't have a choice maybe they could harm me or they could

01:42:42.640 harm my family and if they can't keep me safe i believe the president deeply cares i believe he's

01:42:47.140 very courageous i think if it was just a matter of he worried about his own physical safety i don't

01:42:53.160 think he cares we saw that in butler but he does love his family and he's got a big family and so

01:42:57.900 somewhere in his head if they can't keep me safe what about my family um so look maybe the president

01:43:05.260 was just simply um deceived by the echo chamber we described and that's how we got to this place

01:43:11.920 but it's also there's a potential that there's an element of coercion intimidation whatever words

01:43:17.960 you want to use there that is also influencing his decision making if you were assessing

01:43:22.880 a similar situation in another country a country not your own and you as an expert on these

01:43:29.740 questions which obviously you are i gave you the same data set you've just presented to me

01:43:34.160 and i said would you say that's just crazy even to bring that up as a possibility not at all i

01:43:41.520 mean when you map out those data points i would i would just say this is this this moves from

01:43:45.120 being a possibility to potentially depending on how you how you look at it and interpret it

01:43:49.240 this could be a likelihood um it would be something i'm sure that we would debate rigorously but

01:43:54.240 nobody would dismiss it altogether with all this data it's not nothing it's something that has to

01:44:00.040 be looked into um is it being looked into again i don't think it is um i think that you're with

01:44:07.160 butler your investigative journalist found more about crooks than the entire government and the

01:44:13.220 response i received from the fbi was so hostile that um it confused me and it still does confuse

01:44:19.880 me uh a lot it confuses me a lot since i didn't approach the question with anything like that in

01:44:27.940 mind i mean we put this documentary out we got information the information described we got a

01:44:34.200 lot of his online activity which we've been told didn't exist and this was not an attack on the fbi

01:44:39.280 This was, of course, during the last administration with a different director.

01:44:44.020 So this was hardly a partisan hit job.

01:44:46.040 This is the president of the United States who I campaigned for and voted for and like and have liked for many years.

01:44:50.620 So, like, it's not an attack.

01:44:53.580 And the response that I got was hysterical.

01:44:58.320 That's not an overstatement.

01:44:59.840 And it confuses me.

01:45:02.260 Have you had experiences like that?

01:45:05.300 There was a level of, you know, just hostility coming from really the FBI.

01:45:11.200 And some of it I think is just like rivalry.

01:45:13.380 Like, why are you looking over your shoulder?

01:45:14.480 Like, I got this.

01:45:15.360 I'm very familiar with that.

01:45:16.700 I mean, yeah, we're the same way in the military.

01:45:18.480 So I got it.

01:45:18.960 I'm sure that's right.

01:45:19.660 Totally.

01:45:20.020 I totally get that.

01:45:20.920 They were treated like you were in the Air Force kind of thing.

01:45:22.620 Yeah, exactly.

01:45:23.180 Like, hey, what do you know?

01:45:23.760 Like, we're the FBI.

01:45:24.580 Like, gotcha.

01:45:25.800 But, you know, we had a role to play.

01:45:27.960 And the way that we were aggressively blocked from that, I found the hostility to be above

01:45:33.120 and beyond what you would what you would think that you'd find with just typical you know rivalry

01:45:38.100 bureaucratic rivalry turf wars those types of things um some of that was at play but the the

01:45:44.340 level of like you cannot look at this um and then for them to to escalate it to attempt to get us

01:45:50.140 kicked out of the case um that to me was very surprising same thing with butler when we first

01:45:54.700 started asking questions about butler i thought because especially that happened under the biden

01:45:58.520 administration that hey we would come in and we would get the truth because you know the previous

01:46:02.660 administration really screwed this thing up uh and there just wasn't curiosity there uh there

01:46:08.500 wasn't curiosity and there wasn't a tolerance whatsoever for us going after just the key

01:46:13.300 questions of like hey did the the informant that you had that was interacting with this guy

01:46:17.460 mershon was he in communication with anybody in butler i mean basic questions to ask again this

01:46:23.860 is nothing that's going to blow any investigator socks off just those basic questions like no no

01:46:28.980 the two aren't related like you can't talk about it you can't ask any of those questions

01:46:32.900 even when we found data actually needed to be looked in yeah i mean they would say at the time

01:46:36.940 like well the merchant case is ongoing etc like we can't we can't interfere if that case is over

01:46:41.060 so i mean at this point i don't understand i think this is like a new rule

01:46:46.280 yeah which is to say a fake rule that you're not allowed to gather information about anything that

01:46:54.000 might potentially intersect with an ongoing case that's not directly related like what that who

01:46:59.280 made that up i think that's just made up i i don't i don't because then how do you ever investigate

01:47:03.460 anything what law school did you go to and i asked this question and was like yeah cases have been

01:47:08.300 overturned on this basis and it's like well cases have been overturned on many bases but right how

01:47:14.600 is that is this is like the new standard because you would not be able to investigate anything

01:47:17.940 right exactly and we want to get to the truth and so what is that for those of us falling along at

01:47:22.680 home who don't have a high level of familiarity with the process what could that possibly be

01:47:28.480 the current president was the subject of a near successful assassination attempt like

01:47:34.080 recently yeah and we're just not going to look into very obvious leads or divulge information

01:47:40.640 that everyone knows they have for example the surveillance tape from the shooting range at

01:47:44.940 which thomas crooks trained because it would answer the question was he training with somebody

01:47:48.380 and if so who they have that footage and they won't release it what could possibly be the

01:47:55.000 explanation for that i know what the result is the result is people come to their own conclusions

01:48:01.000 and this is where like crazy conspiracy theories come from and then those conspiracy theories

01:48:05.040 usually are easy to debunk or make the people saying them sound crazy so then the the actual

01:48:09.320 question never gets answered right sorry can you say that for people not who haven't lived in

01:48:14.900 Washington. Okay. I try to explain this to people all the time because this has been ongoing since

01:48:20.620 at least the Kennedy assassination, but this is a very serious and reoccurring thing. It's a tactic

01:48:26.360 and you just explained it better than anyone ever heard. Can you just do that again if you can

01:48:29.440 recall it from memory? Yeah. I mean, so basically you give no information whatsoever on something

01:48:35.640 that's obvious that there should be information. Like you outlined, like there's potentially

01:48:39.580 footage of crooks at the shooting range again police 101 go get the tapes let's figure it out

01:48:45.600 if you don't want to address that question then you just you go silent you say you can't ask that

01:48:51.240 question which then creates people who come out of kind of nowhere and they start drawing their

01:48:56.280 own conclusions right knowing the way the internet works i mean half of them if not more are probably

01:49:01.400 going to be so far off in left field and made by legitimate kooks or bots that then you can just be

01:49:06.720 like oh these people asking these questions about that tape at the video range it's space aliens

01:49:10.220 crazy conspiracy theorists they say it's a uap or whatever and so then you've just you know

01:49:15.740 diverted all attention away from the thing that you're trying to conceal and now everyone's

01:49:20.900 focused on the crazies man and then the second someone asks a legitimate question they're crazy

01:49:26.120 i hope everyone watching will just clip that tape and keep it on your phone and replay it every day

01:49:30.660 because that is one of the primary ways that the intel agencies and federal law enforcement

01:49:36.260 influence public opinion influence elections that's the way they influence the perception of

01:49:41.440 what's going on but more than anything it's the way that they hide their own behavior from the

01:49:45.900 public yeah so at the beginning of the administration i think it was uh october

01:49:53.140 rather it was january 23rd was like right after the inauguration the president issued an executive

01:49:58.980 order calling for the total declassification release of all documents relevant to the

01:50:05.820 assassination of president john f kennedy in november of 1963 all of them and also documents

01:50:11.580 relevant to the assassination investigation into martin the king and robert f kennedy

01:50:17.380 the attorney general i i don't think all the kennedy documents have been released have they

01:50:24.680 they were supposed to be i mean that was the president's order that's what was in the

01:50:29.380 executive order it's the law it's the president the president said it and it's in the executive

01:50:33.820 of order um maybe you can't go there because so yeah yeah so i just want to say again uh and not

01:50:40.800 from you i have been told conclusively that that has not happened so without divulging anything

01:50:47.920 that's classified like anything from 1963 should be classified the whole thing is insane and an

01:50:52.600 insult to citizens i'm a middle-aged man i wasn't even born then it was six years before i was born

01:50:57.700 and they're telling me i can't see it okay it's infuriating and it's the end of democracy but

01:51:02.360 what could possibly be the justification for keeping classified a document that the that

01:51:11.140 must under law be released yeah and that was produced generations ago yeah i think more of

01:51:20.080 this goes to the the deep state the system the machine whatever you want to call it they they're

01:51:26.520 not hiding something in the kennedy files in my opinion because you know it's not like they the

01:51:30.800 assassins wrote down on this day we're gonna kill jfk and they put in a file at cia or fbi right

01:51:34.920 like that didn't happen so i don't really think there's anything that's in particularly you know

01:51:39.720 would be earth shattering inside the files themselves the system doesn't want to get us

01:51:45.020 used to things being rapidly declassified they don't want a president to be able to come in

01:51:50.440 and say here's an executive order and i said declassify it because the people demand it

01:51:54.600 and it happens like that as fast as it could happen they don't want that to happen they want

01:51:59.420 to condition us that like okay the president of the american people elected he may have you know

01:52:04.560 come in and lawfully given us an order but there's a process here there's an interagency process

01:52:09.200 everyone gets to check to make sure there's nothing still classified or still ongoing even

01:52:13.000 if it was from you know 1963 or even further back because again they don't want us conditioned to

01:52:19.100 we can just have access to this information and i think there's probably times where that would

01:52:24.340 be appropriate uh like something declassifying something that happened last week for instance

01:52:28.600 yeah there's there's going to be equities there and i think the american people would understand

01:52:32.180 that i agree but a lot of this i think is power and and so the bureaucracy when the president

01:52:37.280 says declassify this regardless of what it is um from decades ago they can't just let them have it

01:52:43.740 they all want to have their cuts on it they want to be able to control it um and this is the way

01:52:49.300 like the bureaucracy and the career bureaucrats roll and they just tell the new political appointees

01:52:53.680 Like, hey, we just – you know, we really can't do that.

01:52:56.860 But we'll get us to a place that mostly will get you what you want eventually.

01:53:02.840 And then it all just gets killed off in process and there's literally no transparency at the end of the day or limited transparency.

01:53:09.500 But that's where I think the game is here.

01:53:12.660 They don't want to condition us that you can elect a president and he can automatically change the bureaucracy.

01:53:17.840 I mean, this fact, the fact that the government doesn't have to tell you what it's doing, even though you pay for it, just invalidates the whole concept of consent to the governed.

01:53:29.500 Like, how can you give consent to something you know nothing about?

01:53:33.160 Yeah.

01:53:33.420 Right.

01:53:34.240 But more than that, it creates a moral poison at the center of the society.

01:53:38.700 Lying is a sin.

01:53:40.160 it's the core sin and lies beget lies and they like cancer destroy the body in which they live

01:53:49.900 yeah and if you care about the body this country if you're from here and you hope to live here and

01:53:55.420 have grandchildren here you have to fix that and i really think that telling the truth radically

01:54:00.660 telling the truth is the only thing that gets you there and the pain that that entails and it does

01:54:07.660 entail pain there's no doubt about it and humiliation is much smaller a price to pay than

01:54:13.960 the price that we will pay inevitably and maybe soon if we don't do it i don't think this is

01:54:18.300 sustainable this level of lying in any society no and if people don't think that their vote matters

01:54:24.360 that they can actually elect someone and change can be enacted um i i think things go to a very

01:54:29.900 very dark place um of course and people lose faith in our system that's right and our system

01:54:34.660 based on that faith that, you know, we get to have these elections. In theory, hopefully you'd hope

01:54:40.100 the elections are free and fair. We've got a lot of issues there as well. But when you finally get

01:54:44.300 your person in office, that they're going to be able to control the government that the people

01:54:48.520 pay for, that are supposed to be ran by the folks that they voted for, that they'll actually get

01:54:53.460 their will implemented, or at least what's in the best interest for them implemented.

01:54:58.560 That's right.

01:54:59.080 And that's just not the case right now.

01:55:01.020 No, it's not.

01:55:02.140 So I want to end with a hopeful note.

01:55:05.020 So we've been talking about this for 24 hours because I think that without even getting into it, anyone who's followed it carefully and is thinking clearly can see that the war with Iran is potentially like the end of a lot for the United States.

01:55:21.880 Yeah.

01:55:22.480 I mean, I don't think we could overstate the consequences of this.

01:55:25.520 And I don't think I'm being hysterical.

01:55:27.020 I've had three weeks to think about it.

01:55:28.100 I've actually had 10 years to think about it because that's how long they've been pushing for it.

01:55:31.020 uh so at this point it feels like there's no way out but you were saying to me this morning in a

01:55:40.140 really thoughtful way that gave me hope that you think there is a way out and so i'm going to stand

01:55:45.220 back and let you explain how you think that the united states can exit with a lot of its interests

01:55:51.620 intact and its honor intact and the president's administration intact because the political cost

01:55:57.420 of this is is shocking i mean it's not the most important thing but like right now it's all very

01:56:02.120 broken okay what's the answer it's going to take drastic action and the good news is i believe that

01:56:10.360 this is something that president trump is uniquely qualified to fix on his own through his sheer

01:56:17.160 willpower president trump has an amazing ability it's almost his superpower i think to be able to

01:56:23.580 kind of breathe life into ideas and again to capture large data sets and to find leverage

01:56:29.160 and right now it's clear that this conflict will just continue the way it is and get exponentially

01:56:34.920 worse especially if we go down the path of demanding a total surrender with boots on the

01:56:40.040 ground or maybe even something far far worse what president trump and that is the path we're on

01:56:44.720 that i mean inevitably if we say it's total surrender what does total surrender mean now

01:56:49.760 again, this is where President Trump is uniquely suited. President Trump can define his own

01:56:53.760 total surrender. He's in charge. I ended my letter with, you know, you hold the cards because

01:56:59.300 President Trump truly does hold the cards. He's a very powerful, very respected leader. And what

01:57:03.560 I think President Trump must do is number one, he has to address the main issue. The main issue

01:57:09.360 is what the Israelis are doing. And he needs to very forcefully and probably with a new team of

01:57:14.120 diplomats go to the Israelis and say, you're done. We will defend you. We will make sure that

01:57:21.020 ballistic missiles aren't rained down upon you. However, you are done going on the offense

01:57:25.640 because this is our war. We're paying for it. We're bleeding for it. This is not your war.

01:57:31.800 If you choose to continue this offensive operation, we're out. And as a matter of fact,

01:57:36.740 if you choose to continue, we will start withdrawing features of your defense system

01:57:42.280 so that you will be on your own.

01:57:44.020 We have to say that to them

01:57:44.840 and we have to be very blunt

01:57:45.680 and we have to be very forceful.

01:57:47.100 And I know a lot of people

01:57:47.900 who like the Israelis

01:57:49.380 are going to say,

01:57:49.940 we can't do that.

01:57:51.100 That's wrong.

01:57:51.860 They're under fire, et cetera.

01:57:53.240 But if we don't do that,

01:57:54.200 if we don't address our relationship

01:57:55.980 with the Israelis,

01:57:57.740 even if we come up

01:57:58.520 with a temporary ceasefire,

01:57:59.820 we'll be right back

01:58:00.880 in the same situation

01:58:01.860 in very short order.

01:58:03.500 So that's the first thing

01:58:04.440 that President Trump must do,

01:58:05.600 address the main issue.

01:58:06.540 The main issue is

01:58:07.460 how the Israelis are out of control

01:58:09.160 and they are driving this entire war.

01:58:12.280 address that aggressively get the israelis to stop how how realistically just having lived

01:58:17.800 through this whole thing how hard will that be it will be hard but again president trump can do it

01:58:24.160 president trump can call the prime minister of israel and and get him to the table president

01:58:32.040 trump can force it i i believe that i truly believe that he can um so i think it's doable

01:58:37.900 It's only doable with President Trump.

01:58:39.940 And then from there, once we get the Israelis to stop, we still, for now, have strong allies in the Gulf.

01:58:46.220 We have the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Saudis, the Bahrainis, all these actors, the Omanis.

01:58:51.640 They may not always agree with each other, but they're all pretty good partners with us.

01:58:55.660 I think we need to use them.

01:58:57.260 And again, I think we probably need to bring in some new diplomats and we need to aggressively engage with the Iranians while we can to get to a ceasefire and to come up with a way that we can stop the killing.

01:59:07.480 We can stop the destruction of not just these countries, not just the loss of more life, but basically the collapse of the energy system that we have right now so that we can open the Straits of Hormuz back up again and so that we can make sure the petrodollar is being used.

01:59:25.080 Because right now we didn't stop the flow of oil going to the – the Chinese are still getting their oil out and they're settling those transactions in yuan, not the petrodollar.

01:59:34.620 So we have to – once we get the Israelis to stop, we have to aggressively pursue our economic interests.

01:59:41.460 And I think the only good thing in here is that our economic interests are in line with not just the GCC countries but also with the Iranians.

01:59:50.700 Because the Iranians want this war to stop.

01:59:52.560 They want to be able to rebuild their energy sector.

01:59:54.820 They want to be able to revitalize their energy sector.

01:59:57.400 and on this mutual cooperation to open up the straits of hormones and to build back the energy

02:00:03.800 sector i think we could come up with a piece it's gonna be we'd have to lift some sanctions

02:00:07.620 we have to lift some sanctions some sanctions yeah why wouldn't we we've had sanctions for decades

02:00:12.860 and according to the neocons they had no effect on the nuclear program which posed an imminent

02:00:19.480 threat so like what is the argument we've had sanctions for decades and i don't see how we

02:00:24.980 benefited from that at all? We didn't. I mean, we just lifted sanctions on Syria because the

02:00:29.680 regime changed there, but we lifted sanctions on a guy who used to be the former leader of Al-Qaeda.

02:00:34.020 Right. Because he's pro-Israel.

02:00:35.440 I'm pretty sure we can go ahead and lift some sanctions. It would be in our benefit to lift

02:00:39.200 the sanctions. Not only would it help us in the war, but also a condition of lifting the sanctions

02:00:44.800 would be you will settle all transactions that you're going to get from your new oil industry

02:00:49.520 that will be reintroduced to the world economy. You'll settle that in the dollar. And we need

02:00:53.820 the dollar to survive if we want our country in its current state to survive as well. So the

02:00:59.020 lifting of sanctions in this case very much works out in our national interest. That to me, and I'm

02:01:06.240 sure there's lots of different variations we could have of this plan, but President Trump

02:01:10.640 aggressively enacting this and addressing the Israelis first and foremost. Otherwise, any kind

02:01:15.700 of negotiation we try to have with the Iranians or pretty much anybody else, if we don't address

02:01:20.480 the israeli factor they're simply not going to take us seriously why would they precisely why

02:01:26.220 would they and every day that this goes on again the more and i have no love for anybody in power

02:01:31.620 in iran right now but the more of the people that we more the leaders we kill in iran you're not

02:01:37.360 getting a thomas jefferson next it's not like if we kill you know 15 or 20 of them the the 16th or

02:01:43.480 the 21st guy is thomas jefferson or he's a moderate absolutely not it's very obvious to me

02:01:49.620 that some of these strikes not all but some were conducted with the intent of making a negotiated

02:01:56.900 settlement impossible and that leads me to the saddest thing you know whole cluster of sad things

02:02:02.500 but the saddest thing is the bombing of the girl school attached to the iranian naval base and um

02:02:09.120 the u.s has admitted we did it but i'm wondering about the the targeting coordinates and where

02:02:16.280 those came from is it possible that those came from israel that i that i don't know are you aware

02:02:22.560 of has it been publicly reported or in previous conflicts can you say anything that you're not

02:02:29.720 constrained by uh is it possible that that could have happened i mean have there been strikes

02:02:35.800 american strikes on targets in the past that you're aware of that have used coordinates supplied

02:02:40.860 by israel yeah and we share so much intelligence with israel so right of course so it's entirely

02:02:47.220 possible but no one has said anything about it but it's entirely possible the coordinates were

02:02:52.540 given to us by israel and why wouldn't they be because once you start doing things like that

02:02:58.980 it's intentionally or not it's very hard to get out of it and obviously from the way the israel

02:03:04.880 the israelis have conducted themselves in the gaza war and other places they have a much different

02:03:09.980 way of fighting than we do i mean america definitely makes mistakes and we we you know

02:03:14.620 we do everything that we can i can tell you as a guy who fought on the ground americans almost to

02:03:18.740 a fault sometimes we do everything that we can to prevent the loss of civilian life i mean almost

02:03:25.120 the point where sometimes we risk our own lives deliberately to not kill americans to not kill

02:03:30.680 innocent civilians um so again this is where being in partnership with a air quotes partner

02:03:39.620 that has a very different agenda than you and a stated outcome,

02:03:44.380 but then also just a different standard for how they fight.

02:03:47.280 It's very dangerous.

02:03:48.100 It's very dangerous for us.

02:03:49.500 To be in partnership with a country that has different goals

02:03:52.640 and different standards of behavior on the battlefield.

02:03:55.200 In different ways and means, yeah.

02:03:56.300 They just have a whole different way of looking.

02:03:57.540 So how would you describe the Israeli attitude toward the killing of innocents?

02:04:03.060 Look, the Israelis are in a hard spot.

02:04:05.820 And as somebody who fought for most of my life,

02:04:08.340 i think i can get into their heads pretty easily um if i was an israeli i i think i would have

02:04:16.480 the same view i think i would say like well we're going to fight them at some point anyways if

02:04:22.440 there's civilians in that area that's militarily important to us whatever like i have a job to do

02:04:27.640 i understand that but it's also important for us to understand our air quotes partners if we're

02:04:32.840 going to be in a partnership with them we have to be clear-eyed about that just because they speak

02:04:36.600 english and a lot of them went to school over here and we have dual citizens doesn't mean that

02:04:41.100 they're going to target the same way that we do we have to be clear-eyed about it and that's what

02:04:44.820 i think is is missing if we're going to do joint operations with the israelis they are going to

02:04:50.540 look we saw what happened in gaza and you can say that's a horrible thing you can say that's

02:04:55.760 that's just the way it is but that is the way the israelis fight and so we have to go into that

02:05:01.480 clear with clear eyes and understand that's how they're going to fight and now we're going to

02:05:05.620 be viewed as being not just complicit, but we're gonna be viewed as being partners in that. And

02:05:10.500 again, that's a very dangerous place for us to be because our objective, at least our tactical

02:05:14.480 objectives have been pretty clear that we want to take down the ballistic missiles, the nuclear

02:05:18.000 program, the Navy, the Army, etc. And those are military targets. But we're in partnership right

02:05:23.400 now with the Israelis, who they're going after some military targets, but they're going after

02:05:28.520 a heck of a lot more that are not military targets. It's a very generous assessment of

02:05:34.860 their motives and i mean as a compliment i i strongly disagree with you but then i didn't

02:05:39.380 spend my life fighting wars and you're making every attempt to get into their perspective even

02:05:44.380 if you disagree with it which i assume you do and i think that is the way uh to assess things

02:05:49.920 it's like what's the other guy's perspective even if i hate it well yeah and look in the middle east

02:05:54.720 you're going to do business with some unsavory characters in the world you're going to do

02:05:58.720 business with some unsavory characters so if you're going to be doing business there just

02:06:03.720 get comfortable with the fact that some of these guys are unsavory i mean the classic i think

02:06:08.880 president trump line really early on when he was asked like if he thought putin was a killer and

02:06:13.840 he's like well yeah i mean we're killers too you know what i mean he's right he was just very

02:06:18.600 logical about that and very clear-eyed about that again this is why president trump is uniquely

02:06:22.360 qualified to solve this problem because i i think he has the ability to understand things from from

02:06:29.120 multiple perspectives at the same time and then find our leverage and then find out what's best

02:06:33.500 for our objectives, for America's objectives with clear eyes.

02:06:37.700 And that's the way we have to be.

02:06:40.020 Do you anticipate you'll be speaking to the president again?

02:06:42.860 I would welcome it.

02:06:43.900 I mean, I spoke with him before I departed the administration.

02:06:46.320 How did that go?

02:06:47.840 It went great.

02:06:49.220 I mean, not the best conversation ever.

02:06:51.320 You know, I told him why I was leaving.

02:06:52.620 He heard me out.

02:06:53.480 He was very respectful.

02:06:54.660 He was?

02:06:55.420 Yeah, very respectful.

02:06:57.040 He was very kind.

02:06:58.780 He always is.

02:06:59.680 and I think we departed personally on good terms. Again, I'm an adult. I understand

02:07:06.940 the way I left and writing the letter that there's parts of his administration that are

02:07:12.240 going to have to come after me and try and discredit me. I understand that. But I think

02:07:17.700 the president is someone who listens. And so I think he's listening not necessarily just to me

02:07:23.660 and to you, but I think he is listening to a lot of different people because I think he knows

02:07:27.860 at a core level

02:07:28.900 this is not going well

02:07:30.640 and he needs to find a way

02:07:32.080 for us to get

02:07:32.860 out of this

02:07:33.820 well you're definitely an adult

02:07:36.140 and I wish there were more of them

02:07:37.980 and I appreciate all the time

02:07:39.300 you spent here

02:07:40.060 thank you

02:07:40.600 thank you Tucker

02:07:41.260 very much

02:07:41.880 Joe Ken

02:07:42.460 thank you for watching

02:07:44.040 we'll see you next Wednesday

02:07:45.120 thanks for watching

02:07:47.460 the Wednesday edition

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02:07:50.060 we stream live

02:07:51.420 every week

02:07:52.360 Wednesday 6 p.m. Eastern

02:07:53.840 on TuckerCarlson.com

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02:07:57.000 the show live. Join the members only chat and take part in the conversation in real time.

02:08:02.380 We're grateful to be doing it and grateful that you watch it. Thank you.

The Tucker Carlson Show - March 19, 2026

Joe Kent Reveals All in First Interview Since Resigning as Trump’s Counterterrorism Director

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