The Tucker Carlson Show - John Kiriakou： CIA’s Secret Torture Programs, MK-Ultra, 9-11, and Jailing Political Opponents

00:00:00.000 Do you think it is possible to get people to commit acts that they wouldn't otherwise commit?

00:00:06.760 I do.

00:00:07.420 MKUltra caused people to jump out of windows and commit suicide.

00:00:12.260 Yeah.

00:00:12.560 You said there are a lot of shrinks at CIA.

00:00:14.720 I used those shrinks on operations.

00:00:17.900 We even hypnotized one guy.

00:00:19.960 He was hypnotized with his arm in the air for two hours.

00:00:22.560 Would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency?

00:00:26.000 Not anymore.

00:00:26.380 It used to be until 9-11.

00:00:28.360 And then it became a paramilitary organization.

00:00:32.040 What they would rather do is fancy high-tech satellites and drones.

00:00:37.040 And they're not really in the business anymore of recruiting spies to steal secrets.

00:00:41.280 I got a call from a Japanese diplomat.

00:00:43.560 And he said, hey, let's have lunch.

00:00:45.360 I said, great.

00:00:46.000 He said to me, so what's next for you?

00:00:48.200 And I said, I think I'm going to resign soon.

00:00:51.280 And he says, no, if you give me information, I can give you money.

00:00:56.800 He was an FBI agent.

00:00:58.980 What?

00:00:59.820 Trying to get me to commit actual espionage.

00:01:03.120 The FBI did that to you?

00:01:05.180 Mm-hmm.

00:01:05.480 You've got to burn the government down, actually.

00:01:07.560 I mean, your only crime was an ABC interview in which you say, yes, the CIA does have a

00:01:13.940 torture program.

00:01:14.580 I know because I worked there.

00:01:15.520 And the president authorized it and lied about it in public.

00:01:18.400 That's your sum total of your crimes.

00:01:20.420 That was it.

00:01:20.740 It's pretty unbelievable you went to jail.

00:01:43.700 I think when 9-11 happened, you were one of how many CIA officers at the Counterterrorism

00:01:51.520 Center or spoke Arabic?

00:01:53.200 Oh, at the Counterterrorism Center?

00:01:55.020 Two?

00:01:55.780 Two.

00:01:56.940 So you have this distinguished CIA career.

00:02:00.080 No one outside the CIA has heard of you.

00:02:01.860 But in the CIA, you're very well known, helped capture an Al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan, risked

00:02:11.380 your life as an operations officer.

00:02:15.200 And then you leave CIA.

00:02:17.520 And you mention in an ABC News interview in 2007 that the CIA is torturing people, which

00:02:24.600 it was.

00:02:25.320 Yes.

00:02:26.220 Illegally.

00:02:27.080 Yes.

00:02:27.360 And is a stain on the country, didn't make the country safer.

00:02:31.080 You say that and you wind up in jail.

00:02:34.860 I sure did.

00:02:35.920 Did any of the people who were torturing other people wind up in jail?

00:02:39.620 Not a single one.

00:02:41.440 The torturers.

00:02:42.420 I'm sorry.

00:02:42.780 It's so crazy.

00:02:43.580 It's nuts.

00:02:44.080 It's nuts.

00:02:44.840 The torturers didn't go to jail.

00:02:46.240 The people who conceived of the torture, the people who funded the torture, appropriated

00:02:50.920 taxpayer money for the torture, the people who implemented it.

00:02:55.080 Nobody went to prison but me.

00:02:57.360 And what's, I guess what's so funny is when you think of whistleblowers complaining about

00:03:01.920 something like torture, you think of like, I don't know, some, you know, the Berrigans

00:03:06.900 or some, you know, professional peace activist.

00:03:08.840 Right.

00:03:09.100 But you were like a...

00:03:10.840 I was a true believer.

00:03:12.100 You were a CIA operations officer.

00:03:13.780 Yes.

00:03:14.160 Like doing the war on terror.

00:03:16.440 Specifically a counterterrorism operations officer.

00:03:19.960 Yes.

00:03:20.340 And so you were hardly, you were hardly some like...

00:03:23.500 No, I was no bleeding heart.

00:03:24.520 Peace now type.

00:03:25.080 Right.

00:03:25.400 No.

00:03:26.520 And you went to jail.

00:03:27.840 Amazing.

00:03:28.400 So can you just, just to come to the point of the story where you're, you're out of the

00:03:34.720 CIA, you're working at Deloitte.

00:03:36.400 Yes.

00:03:36.700 And you give this interview to Brian Ross at ABC.

00:03:41.300 Right.

00:03:41.640 One of the few, I think, pretty honest ABC reporters who of course left ABC.

00:03:45.380 Agreed.

00:03:45.780 Too much honesty for them.

00:03:46.640 Um, and, and what happened then?

00:03:51.300 This was, that was 2007 during the Bush election.

00:03:53.060 It was in December of 2007.

00:03:54.620 Yes.

00:03:54.920 So I, I went on this interview with Brian Ross and I said three things.

00:03:57.980 I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.

00:04:00.340 I said that torture was official US government policy.

00:04:03.260 And I said that because President Bush had specifically said, we do not torture.

00:04:08.520 I knew that wasn't true.

00:04:10.120 Where did he, where did he say that?

00:04:11.220 He said that in a press conference at the White House in December of 2007.

00:04:15.440 And I said that the, that the torture had been personally approved by the president, which

00:04:20.740 was also true.

00:04:22.240 And so within 24 hours, the CIA.

00:04:25.360 How did you know that by the way?

00:04:27.440 Oh, because I was, were you just guessing?

00:04:29.500 Oh no, I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.

00:04:34.760 So I was intimately involved in the planning for all of this nonsense, not just torture,

00:04:41.980 but the Iraq war as well.

00:04:43.420 And I was watching the rule of law just be thrown to the dogs almost on a daily basis.

00:04:51.500 And I decided whatever Brian Ross was going to ask me, I was going to tell the truth.

00:04:56.120 That's what I did.

00:04:57.800 Um, so that was in late 2007, late 2007, December of 2007.

00:05:02.440 So the president, uh, authorized this, um, again, didn't make the country any safer.

00:05:08.860 No.

00:05:09.040 So the whole thing really hurt the country, but, um, and then lied about it in public,

00:05:13.260 which you're not supposed to do.

00:05:14.060 I mean, let's, you're not supposed to do that.

00:05:16.040 And no, you're just not supposed to.

00:05:17.660 You said those three things, which are factually true.

00:05:20.080 Yes.

00:05:20.980 Yes.

00:05:21.940 And then what happened?

00:05:22.760 Well, the FBI began investigating me the next day and they investigated me for a full year

00:05:27.940 from December of 07 to December of 08.

00:05:30.500 Did they tell you they were investigating you?

00:05:32.200 No, I read about it in CNN.

00:05:34.240 So how are they, how are they investigating you?

00:05:39.740 You know, I don't know.

00:05:41.200 They never sought to interview me.

00:05:43.200 I ran out and I hired an attorney and, um, and we leaked that to the press that, oh, I'm

00:05:49.580 represented by this legal giant in Washington, DC.

00:05:52.600 It was, uh, it was Plato Kacharis, who's no longer, no longer living.

00:05:56.660 But one of the most famous lawyers in the United States.

00:05:57.860 One of the most famous lawyers, the greatest in Washington.

00:06:01.060 And, um, they never contacted him.

00:06:04.060 I, I really don't know what constituted an FBI investigation.

00:06:07.820 But a year later in 2008, they dropped the case and they said that I had not committed

00:06:12.880 a crime.

00:06:13.900 But when they investigate you, what is that?

00:06:15.600 Do you have any sense of what that means?

00:06:17.400 Like, are they?

00:06:18.300 In the subsequent investigation, which we can get to, it was very clear what it meant.

00:06:23.020 But in that year, I think what they did, and I'm speculating here, is that they went

00:06:29.080 over the ABC News interview and a subsequent interview I did with the New York Times.

00:06:34.300 They parsed it and they decided that I had not committed a crime.

00:06:38.580 Now, in the declination letter that they sent to my attorney, declining to prosecute me,

00:06:43.000 they said that it was illegal to classify a program if the program is illegal.

00:06:49.600 Wait, can I ask you, is it a federal crime to say the president is lying?

00:06:54.200 No.

00:06:54.940 Oh, it's not.

00:06:55.560 Oh, so you're allowed, in the United States, you're allowed, if you see a politician lying,

00:06:59.680 you can say that person's lying?

00:07:01.200 You can call them on it.

00:07:01.920 Okay, okay, just one of them.

00:07:03.480 Because it is America, after all.

00:07:04.680 Right, just want to make sure, okay.

00:07:06.760 So, the FBI spends a year investigating you because you say the president is lying?

00:07:13.660 Yes.

00:07:14.680 Totally normal.

00:07:16.040 Yeah.

00:07:16.440 And you don't know that they're investigating you because they never contacted you or your

00:07:19.460 lawyer?

00:07:19.820 Never contacted you, one of us.

00:07:21.220 So, then 2008 rolls around, Bush leaves after two terms, Obama gets elected.

00:07:26.560 And he's very much the peace candidate.

00:07:28.400 He's for transparency.

00:07:29.300 Well, I like to say that it was Saint Obama that came down from the heavens into the White

00:07:34.760 House to save us.

00:07:35.260 Black Jesus returns.

00:07:36.020 That's right.

00:07:36.780 And, but he's very much, I mean, I remember, in fact, being on television saying, you know,

00:07:44.320 he was this wild-eyed peacenic lefty guy.

00:07:47.260 Oh, no, he wasn't.

00:07:48.760 Oh, he wasn't.

00:07:49.780 You know, this is something that I've puzzled over for a long time.

00:07:54.060 And I've come to the conclusion that the CIA, at the top levels of the CIA, they really

00:08:01.420 love it when a new president is elected and he has no background in intelligence or foreign

00:08:07.720 policy.

00:08:08.500 Usually, Donald Trump is a very unique figure in this scenario.

00:08:14.260 Very unusual.

00:08:15.060 But Barack Obama, two years as a senator, two years as a senator, no experience in foreign

00:08:21.760 policy, no experience in intelligence.

00:08:24.320 The day after an election, the director of the CIA authorizes a president-elect to begin

00:08:30.300 receiving a PDB, a president's daily brief.

00:08:32.840 And so the day after the election, they go with this, this 16 page document marked at six levels

00:08:41.600 above top secret.

00:08:42.800 And they say, Mr. President-elect, wait till you see the cool things we're doing all around

00:08:47.720 the world.

00:08:48.660 And they've sucked him in.

00:08:50.120 They made him one of the guys.

00:08:51.680 And every day they're like, wait till you see the update on what we told you yesterday.

00:08:55.660 It's incredible.

00:08:56.360 And then we get the feedback at the CIA.

00:09:00.180 Oh, the president loved this.

00:09:01.520 The president had a follow-up question on that.

00:09:03.540 Oh, the president said, oh my God, when he read this.

00:09:07.340 Well, that's-

00:09:07.780 It almost sounds like you're psychologically profiling the president.

00:09:10.780 Oh, I think that's exactly what they do.

00:09:13.140 And don't forget, they have an entire staff of psychiatrists and psychologists that do exactly

00:09:19.060 that.

00:09:19.460 And so they use the tools that they have employed for decades to subvert foreign governments

00:09:26.820 to subvert their own government?

00:09:28.220 Yes.

00:09:29.160 But they smile while they're doing it.

00:09:30.920 And they say, no, no, we're just trying to forge a good working relationship with the

00:09:34.580 president.

00:09:35.160 In fact, for a while in the 90s, they didn't even call him the president.

00:09:39.300 They called him the first customer.

00:09:41.660 Come on.

00:09:42.520 I swear to God.

00:09:44.160 I know we're getting far afield and we will get back to your story, but it doesn't sound

00:09:52.580 like-

00:09:53.180 So if you look at the org chart, the president controls CIA.

00:09:55.760 Yes.

00:09:56.580 But you're describing a situation where CIA kind of controls the president.

00:10:00.540 You know, this is another problem.

00:10:03.080 It's that presidents come and go every four years, every eight years.

00:10:07.680 But these CIA people, they're there for 25, 30, 35 years.

00:10:13.200 They don't go anywhere.

00:10:15.080 And so if they don't like a president or if a president orders them to do something that

00:10:19.340 they don't want to do, they just wait because they know they can wait him out.

00:10:23.840 And then he's not going to be president anymore.

00:10:26.000 And they can continue on with whatever plan the blob or the deep state wants to implement.

00:10:31.560 You know, Donald Trump took a lot of guff in his first term when he used on a regular

00:10:37.680 basis the term deep state.

00:10:40.180 And I argued from the very beginning, it is a deep state.

00:10:44.060 Maybe you don't like the terminology.

00:10:45.920 You don't have to call it the deep state.

00:10:47.800 You can call it the federal bureaucracy.

00:10:49.840 You can call it the state.

00:10:51.940 But the truth is that it exists.

00:10:55.360 I would say by definition, I mean, you just described it, the president.

00:10:59.620 And by the way, the elected representatives who are the instrument of the population through

00:11:04.040 which they control their government, you know, are perennial.

00:11:07.160 They come and go.

00:11:08.200 But the people who carry out those orders remain.

00:11:12.520 So over time, they are the ones with the power, right?

00:11:14.780 And then when they get caught, they scramble.

00:11:16.460 I remember Jane Harmon.

00:11:17.760 She was a congresswoman from Venice, California.

00:11:21.840 She was the chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee during the Iraq War.

00:11:26.180 And she was briefed on the torture program.

00:11:28.900 Well, when I went public on the torture program, reporters had questions.

00:11:33.520 Well, did Congress approve this?

00:11:35.260 Of course, Congress approved it.

00:11:36.940 And Congress appropriated money for it.

00:11:39.140 So she's the chairman.

00:11:40.780 And reporters went to her and said, hey, what about this torture program?

00:11:45.040 And she said, I didn't know anything about the torture program.

00:11:48.660 She's a liar.

00:11:49.380 She was lying.

00:11:50.480 And I said, and I remember saying it to the New York Times.

00:11:52.940 I said, she was in the room when it was briefed.

00:11:57.180 And when she was challenged, she said, oh, yeah, I remember that day.

00:12:02.520 But you know what?

00:12:03.140 I got up and I left early.

00:12:05.000 And I left one of my aides as a note taker.

00:12:07.460 And he never briefed me, which is also a lie.

00:12:10.840 Yeah.

00:12:11.300 Well, she was just a pure tool of the intel agency.

00:12:13.520 That was it.

00:12:13.920 And of foreign government.

00:12:14.860 And that's an ongoing problem on Capitol Hill is rather than being overseers, they're cheerleaders for the intelligence.

00:12:21.120 So that is absolutely true.

00:12:22.660 And I've known them all.

00:12:24.220 And, you know, if you criticize any of the intel agencies, particularly CIA, which is the most powerful, they're immediately defensive about it.

00:12:33.220 You know, like it's their job to defend these agencies when, in fact, their job, as you said, is to oversee these agencies and to keep them within the boundaries of the Constitution.

00:12:42.760 How does that happen?

00:12:44.000 You know, I say all the time that we really did have real oversight for a while from the 70s into the 1980s, a decade, a decade and a half, where people really did exert influence over intelligence policy by really examining some of these covert action programs.

00:13:07.200 But Pat Moynihan is dead, and Barry Goldwater is dead, and all these other senators and congressmen, Otis Pike, they're all gone.

00:13:18.780 They're all dead.

00:13:20.200 And now we've got people who just egg on the intelligence communities.

00:13:24.540 And I'll give you an example.

00:13:25.380 Oh, I know them.

00:13:26.080 I'll give you an example.

00:13:27.560 When I got out of prison, I was invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence.

00:13:32.080 And I went, and there was a senator there, a Democratic senator there, who's a member of the Intelligence Committee.

00:13:40.600 And so he came up to me, and he said, hey, welcome home.

00:13:43.560 We were really worried about you.

00:13:45.460 And I said, oh, thank you.

00:13:46.540 I said, Senator, I've got to tell you, I was disappointed that you didn't say anything.

00:13:52.220 You didn't express any support or anything related to my case.

00:13:56.740 And he got very angry, and he said, listen, it took everything I had just to not lose my security clearance.

00:14:03.380 And I said, so you're afraid of them?

00:14:06.840 That's what this is.

00:14:08.400 And he walked away.

00:14:10.440 That's disgusting.

00:14:11.960 That's disgusting.

00:14:13.800 But I think you can go through, certainly in the Senate, you can go through the roster of the, you know,

00:14:20.380 the hundred members of the Senate, and then compare it to the list of the permanent, you know,

00:14:26.600 the Committee on Intelligence, and those are the worst, those are the most dishonest people.

00:14:31.260 Yeah, they are.

00:14:32.140 They are.

00:14:32.780 The most rotten, the most morally compromised, the most dishonest by far.

00:14:38.060 I have to agree.

00:14:39.820 That was my experience.

00:14:40.300 How does that happen?

00:14:41.200 Like, sitting on the Senate Intel Committee is, like, just a sign that, you know, you're one of the in crowd.

00:14:52.440 Worse than that.

00:14:53.480 Yeah.

00:14:53.680 Like, you're not someone I would invite to dinner at my house.

00:14:56.780 No, I agree.

00:14:57.820 How?

00:14:58.420 How do they identify the most morally compromised people?

00:15:03.140 I wonder if this began with 9-11.

00:15:08.200 I think that it didn't.

00:15:09.600 I think it began earlier than that, like, during the Clinton administration, where everybody just, where the intelligence community was seen as a force for good.

00:15:24.820 Yes.

00:15:25.220 Which was odd to me.

00:15:27.000 Well, I mean, that's how I grew up, thinking that, for sure.

00:15:30.540 I mean, it was not even questioned.

00:15:31.640 When I first joined the agency, they were still sort of getting over the whole church committee era.

00:15:40.940 And then when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, we were told that there were going to be big changes at the agency.

00:15:47.720 And indeed, one of the things that Clinton did was he ordered what they called a cull.

00:15:51.520 So, we had to go through the files of literally every recruited agent in the CIA.

00:15:57.140 And if they had any human rights problem, they were fired.

00:16:01.260 Right?

00:16:01.600 We just cut off contact with them.

00:16:03.160 And I remember thinking, wow, they're actually serious about this.

00:16:06.600 I'm very pleasantly surprised.

00:16:08.840 But then 9-11 happened.

00:16:11.680 And not only did that go out the window, the pendulum swung so far to the other side that it has yet to go back to its point of equilibrium.

00:16:23.160 And then just naturally, inevitably, predictably, the tactics that that and other agencies used against foreign governments were used against the U.S. government, the elected government, and the population of the country.

00:16:35.760 I know you and I agree on this.

00:16:36.980 We've talked about this in the past, but the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on American citizens, as is NSA.

00:16:44.740 It's a part of NSA's charter that it may not collect the communications of American citizens or U.S. persons.

00:16:52.980 NSA spied on me and leaked the information to the New York Times.

00:16:56.060 And leaked the information.

00:16:57.420 I remember it very well.

00:16:59.220 To control me.

00:17:00.420 Right?

00:17:00.800 Oh, it's illegal.

00:17:01.800 Guess what happened?

00:17:02.840 Nothing.

00:17:03.160 And here again, Congress just says, well, what are we going to do?

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00:19:33.960 So, we'll get back to all this, but I just want to return to the thread of what happened to you.

00:19:39.640 So, Obama gets elected, and you've got to think, because your real crime was calling the president a liar, George W. Bush, you had to have thought that once he was gone, you know, it was going to be forgotten.

00:19:54.100 Because what you said was true.

00:19:55.320 That's right. And when my attorneys received this declination letter, my wife and I actually went out and celebrated that night.

00:20:00.540 We went out and had dinner.

00:20:02.600 I had no idea that three weeks later, when Barack Obama became president, that that's when my trouble was really going to start.

00:20:10.720 Obama initially named John Brennan as the CIA director.

00:20:15.980 Liberals were up in arms at the time.

00:20:18.240 And so, that nomination was withdrawn, you may recall.

00:20:21.680 And he named Brennan instead the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism.

00:20:27.180 John Brennan and I always hated each other.

00:20:31.340 I don't know why he hated me.

00:20:33.060 I hated him for what were very clear reasons.

00:20:34.780 How weird he seems like such a marvelous guy.

00:20:36.160 Such a sweetheart.

00:20:37.700 I found him to be a very dark figure, very dangerous, willing to take risks that no one should take without appropriate congressional oversight.

00:20:49.080 And frankly, I said this on your show one time, and I don't mean to sound like, you know, that guy, but I thought he was in over his head intellectually in that position.

00:21:01.880 He was not cut out for that position.

00:21:02.880 When did you meet him?

00:21:03.440 I met him in 1990, January of 1990.

00:21:07.520 Over 35 years ago.

00:21:08.740 Yes.

00:21:09.080 Okay.

00:21:09.380 So, it's fair to say you-

00:21:10.560 Oh, I knew him very, very well.

00:21:12.720 In fact, when I was the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, John was the-

00:21:19.640 First, he was the deputy executive director and then executive director of the CIA.

00:21:24.300 So, he was the number three officer in the CIA, while I was the assistant to the number four officer in the CIA.

00:21:32.580 So, I briefed him every single morning, and we just did not like or respect one another.

00:21:38.840 Why didn't you like or respect him?

00:21:40.520 First of all, I thought he was unqualified, number one.

00:21:45.440 John made a life in analysis, but he struck up a very close friendship with George Tenet when George was at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.

00:21:57.460 George became the deputy CIA director and then CIA director.

00:22:00.220 And every time George got promoted, he promoted Brennan, but he promoted him into jobs that he simply wasn't qualified for, like the station chief in Riyadh.

00:22:08.700 This is a guy that had been an analyst for, you know, 20-something years, and you're going to make him the station chief?

00:22:15.300 Not only has he never recruited an agent, he's never even met one.

00:22:19.260 And that's who you want in charge of operations?

00:22:23.060 In Riyadh?

00:22:23.500 In Riyadh.

00:22:24.040 In Riyadh, one of the most important places in the Middle East.

00:22:26.980 Complicated place.

00:22:27.860 Very complicated.

00:22:28.780 And then when he went back, he named him the deputy executive director.

00:22:35.060 So he's running the day-to-day operations of the entire CIA, the whole thing.

00:22:40.340 It just didn't make sense to me.

00:22:42.460 So you thought that he was unqualified, but it sounds like you thought that he was morally unqualified also.

00:22:48.240 Oh, I always believed he was morally unqualified.

00:22:50.940 John had a reputation as being vindictive.

00:22:54.260 He had once worked for a woman who didn't like or respect him, and she let him go.

00:23:03.660 He got a job briefing George Tenet at the National Security Council.

00:23:08.640 And then when George was promoted, he promoted John to the point where he called this woman in and he fired her.

00:23:17.240 Like, was that really necessary?

00:23:19.240 You could take the high road.

00:23:20.800 There's no reason to be that guy that you just go in and start, you know, trashing your enemies.

00:23:26.140 But that's what he did.

00:23:27.620 And there was a group of guys that came of age with him, and he all promoted all of them with himself, with his rising boat.

00:23:39.260 They all went to the top.

00:23:41.320 And I'll tell you, too, I was in operations at the time working for people who had spent 30 years in operations,

00:23:48.320 and they disliked him with a special kind of passion.

00:23:53.420 And it was because they didn't respect him either.

00:23:56.480 It was clear.

00:23:58.620 Interesting.

00:24:00.580 You said he was dangerous?

00:24:02.820 I always thought that he was dangerous.

00:24:05.100 Why?

00:24:05.500 Yeah.

00:24:06.640 That's a strong thing to say about somebody.

00:24:08.440 Yeah.

00:24:09.460 You know, I'm going to get on my soapbox again, so forgive me, but we're a nation of laws, right?

00:24:16.420 We're a nation of laws, and whether you like the law or you don't like the law, you have to respect it.

00:24:21.580 Or you work to change it.

00:24:24.600 You can't just pretend that the law doesn't exist.

00:24:27.640 Oh, we're the good guys.

00:24:29.120 So let's talk about the torture program for a second.

00:24:32.880 Here he is, the number three in the CIA, and the leadership wants to implement a torture program.

00:24:40.600 Okay, we've got this thing called the Federal Torture Act of 1946 that says you can't do that.

00:24:45.260 In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs.

00:24:52.180 We executed.

00:24:52.800 That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody.

00:24:55.780 In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.

00:25:05.560 The day that that picture was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an investigation.

00:25:12.100 That soldier was arrested.

00:25:13.260 He was convicted of torture and sentenced to 20 years at Leavenworth.

00:25:19.240 But then in 2002, like magic, it's all legal.

00:25:24.600 So waterboarding has been around a long time.

00:25:26.380 Oh, it's been around a long time.

00:25:27.940 The Chinese actually invented waterboarding.

00:25:29.840 Of course they did.

00:25:30.300 In like the 15th century.

00:25:32.880 Can you explain waterboarding for a moment?

00:25:35.240 Sure.

00:25:35.420 So a prisoner is strapped to a board with his feet elevated compared to his head.

00:25:43.040 There's something put in his mouth like material, a cloth, burlap, whatever.

00:25:48.980 And then water is poured on his face.

00:25:51.440 So it's supposed to give you the feeling that you're drowning.

00:25:56.620 In fact, in many cases, you are drowning because a lot of water is getting past that cloth.

00:26:02.300 In the case of Abu Zubaydah, and we can talk about him later if you want, we drowned him.

00:26:07.880 His heart stopped beating and he had to be revived so that he could be tortured more.

00:26:13.460 That's what waterboarding is.

00:26:14.760 Why is it done?

00:26:17.520 The idea is, this is a term that the CIA came up with.

00:26:22.140 The idea is to instill the feeling of learned helplessness in the prisoner.

00:26:28.020 So that the prisoner is so terrified of you, so terrified of what you can do to him,

00:26:34.260 that he'll whimper as soon as you walk into the room and just confess everything that you want him to confess to.

00:26:40.480 But the problem is that torture just simply doesn't work.

00:26:45.140 This is a proven fact that decades of scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists have proven it doesn't work.

00:26:53.380 And so the prisoner will tell you what he thinks you want to know just to get you to stop torturing him.

00:27:00.920 You know, we know from prisoners held in North Vietnamese prisons, American prisoners,

00:27:05.880 that when asked, well, who was on your ship?

00:27:08.760 What were the names of the men on your ship?

00:27:10.300 They would recite, like, you know, the Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line from 1968,

00:27:16.600 or just make up names or childhood friends just to get them to stop torturing.

00:27:22.640 So it just doesn't work.

00:27:24.920 So what was the process post 9-11 for waterboarding?

00:27:30.200 I mean, I noticed that in the later reports, some of these guys were waterboarded, KSM, for example.

00:27:37.000 187 times.

00:27:38.240 187 times.

00:27:39.080 So was he coming up with the offensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers every time?

00:27:46.740 Like, why would they keep doing that?

00:27:47.980 Well, he even – well, they were convinced that he knew the location of Osama bin Laden

00:27:53.160 and that he knew what the plans were for the next attack on the United States.

00:27:57.440 Well, there were no plans for the next attack.

00:28:00.980 Sometimes there would be, you know, 10 or 12 guys sitting around a campfire in Afghanistan saying,

00:28:05.460 you know what we should do?

00:28:06.280 We should attack, you know, we should attack the Chicago Stock Exchange.

00:28:11.860 Oh, yeah, that's what we should do.

00:28:13.240 Okay, that's not a plot.

00:28:15.580 That's just some guy at a campfire just throwing it out there.

00:28:18.260 So they were convinced that there was another plot planned and they wanted to get it.

00:28:23.800 But 187 times.

00:28:28.240 And KSM ended up confessing to the Daniel Pearl murder, which we know for a fact he wasn't even in Pakistan when Daniel Pearl was murdered.

00:28:36.900 He confessed to it?

00:28:38.080 He confessed to it.

00:28:38.660 And then when they showed him the video showing that it wasn't his arm that was sawing off Daniel Pearl's head,

00:28:45.260 he's like, no, look, look at the hair on that arm.

00:28:47.140 My arm's that hairy.

00:28:48.460 That's my arm.

00:28:49.340 No, you didn't kill Daniel Pearl.

00:28:51.320 Stop saying that you did.

00:28:51.920 A lot of hairy people in the region.

00:28:53.280 Yeah, exactly.

00:28:55.660 But 187 times?

00:28:58.120 And Abu Zubaydah, 83 times.

00:29:00.760 They waterboarded him 83 times?

00:29:02.060 It was worse than that.

00:29:03.360 You know, there's this conventional wisdom that waterboarding was the worst.

00:29:07.260 It was sort of the top of the list of torture techniques.

00:29:11.940 There were worse techniques.

00:29:13.920 We killed people with other techniques.

00:29:16.660 For example, the cold cell.

00:29:18.600 So you're stripped naked.

00:29:20.720 You're chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling so you can't sit or kneel or lay or get comfortable in any way.

00:29:27.140 Your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:29:29.800 And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into your cell and throws a bucket of ice water on you.

00:29:35.260 And people died of hypothermia.

00:29:37.260 The Justice Department didn't say we could murder people.

00:29:40.980 They said we could use these, you know, different techniques.

00:29:43.820 They didn't say we could use this cold cell.

00:29:45.480 That was just made up.

00:29:46.680 And people died?

00:29:47.560 Mm-hmm.

00:29:48.240 There was another one.

00:29:49.500 Well, sleep deprivation.

00:29:51.260 The American Psychological Association, the APA, has published studies saying that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep.

00:30:01.100 They begin to die at day nine.

00:30:04.820 Their organs begin to shut down.

00:30:06.500 But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days.

00:30:11.220 And people just drop dead as they're being kept awake with that eye bolt in the ceiling again and strong lights and hard rock, you know, death metal music 24 hours a day on a loop.

00:30:23.760 You go crazy and then your organs just don't work.

00:30:27.440 Do you have any idea how many people died under torture?

00:30:30.140 The CIA has never said.

00:30:32.100 They – it was in the Senate torture report, but it was redacted.

00:30:37.360 So we don't know the number.

00:30:38.980 What's your sense?

00:30:40.560 At least a half a dozen.

00:30:42.600 We're tortured to death.

00:30:43.660 Yeah, to death.

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00:33:49.900 Do you think, obviously, you're very much part of the story.

00:33:55.320 You went to prison because of it, so it's kind of hard to, you know, you have an interest in this.

00:34:00.320 Sure.

00:34:00.760 But as objectively as you can, do you think there was a lot of useful information produced by all this torture?

00:34:08.700 No, not by the torture.

00:34:10.540 Listen, it's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI.

00:34:15.820 It really is.

00:34:16.620 You know, when I've had 22 FBI agents raiding my house and taking all my stuff.

00:34:22.320 But if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations.

00:34:28.080 And they proved it with Abu Zubaydah.

00:34:30.840 They proved that if you treat a prisoner with respect and engage in rapport building and take some time to build this relationship,

00:34:40.220 the prisoner will tell you everything that you want to know.

00:34:43.080 And that's what happened with Abu Zubaydah.

00:34:44.540 But every time the CIA would step in and begin torturing him, he would clam up, like completely clam up.

00:34:51.840 And then the FBI would have to go back in, try to reverse the damage and start the whole thing over again.

00:34:57.420 So you gave that interview at the end of 2007, in which you said, really just, it was a pretty spare interview.

00:35:08.520 It was.

00:35:08.760 You didn't go into any detail.

00:35:10.640 No.

00:35:13.180 Investigation happens, it's dropped, Obama gets elected.

00:35:16.840 A month later, John Brennan, I interrupted you.

00:35:19.760 I had no idea that John Brennan asked Eric Holder to secretly reopen the case against me.

00:35:26.600 Why do you think he did that?

00:35:29.520 Of all the problems that were going on in the world.

00:35:31.960 No other problems in the world, right.

00:35:33.940 I think for two reasons.

00:35:35.280 Number one, he genuinely disliked me.

00:35:38.860 And he has this history of going after people using lawfare, which now we all know what that means, using lawfare to take down his enemies.

00:35:50.280 Number one.

00:35:50.820 Lawfare understates it, violence, I mean, they came to your house, they cuffed you, they threw you in a cell.

00:35:56.880 Oh, yeah.

00:35:57.360 Like, those are acts of violence, physical force they're using against you.

00:36:00.420 Very much so.

00:36:01.140 Right.

00:36:01.620 That's right.

00:36:02.200 So if you'll do that, if you'll take a man from his five children and lock him in a cell for years.

00:36:08.420 And they fired my wife just because she was married to me.

00:36:11.920 She was a senior CIA officer.

00:36:15.560 Okay, so you've answered the question, how is John Brennan a dangerous man?

00:36:18.600 So he goes to the then Attorney General, Eric Holder, and says, we need to reopen.

00:36:23.500 Of all the problems that we've got, we need to make sure John Kirikou goes to jail.

00:36:28.960 Yeah.

00:36:29.380 We received 15,000 pages of classified discovery in my case, but we found in that discovery three memos.

00:36:37.200 There was a memo from John Brennan to Eric Holder saying, charge him with espionage.

00:36:42.720 Espionage?

00:36:43.540 Espionage, which can be a death penalty charge, I might add.

00:36:47.360 Who are you spying for?

00:36:48.280 Exactly.

00:36:50.120 Who?

00:36:50.400 Well, did they allege you were spying for somebody?

00:36:52.380 No.

00:36:52.840 What they said is that I told the media that the CIA had a torture program.

00:36:58.440 And so because the media published it, our enemies knew that we had this top secret program.

00:37:03.900 But how is that espionage?

00:37:05.080 I know.

00:37:05.660 It's not.

00:37:07.100 So Holder writes back and says, my people don't think he committed espionage.

00:37:11.160 Yeah.

00:37:11.440 And then Brennan wrote back and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.

00:37:18.080 Try not to use the F word.

00:37:19.160 This is my new thing.

00:37:20.760 Self-improvement journey I'm taking.

00:37:23.320 But it's making me mad hearing this because, I mean, you were in, I happened to be in Pakistan around the time you were a very dangerous country.

00:37:31.520 Oh, I wasn't.

00:37:31.680 I wasn't even doing anything dangerous.

00:37:33.140 Oh, no.

00:37:33.520 It was super dangerous place.

00:37:34.700 The most dangerous place I've ever been.

00:37:35.820 On earth at the time.

00:37:37.560 Yeah.

00:37:38.040 And so you're, it's not an overstatement to say you're risking your life, father of all these kids, to fight the war on terror against the Islamic terrorists.

00:37:47.220 And now they're accusing you of aiding those terrorists?

00:37:50.820 Aiding the enemy.

00:37:51.600 It gets worse.

00:37:52.700 That's really over the top.

00:37:54.340 Oh, yeah.

00:37:54.820 I don't think I've ever told you this story.

00:37:56.860 But when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was the senior investigator.

00:38:00.880 And so one of the great things about that job is you get to have lunch with diplomats from around the world and just talk about the issues.

00:38:09.420 You were working for CIA at the time?

00:38:10.660 No, I was working for John Kerry.

00:38:12.580 Yep.

00:38:12.940 When he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

00:38:15.660 When was this?

00:38:18.240 2009 to 2011.

00:38:20.680 Yes.

00:38:21.560 So I got a call from a Japanese diplomat and he said, hey, let's have lunch.

00:38:27.200 I said, great.

00:38:27.900 So we meet at a restaurant on Capitol Hill.

00:38:29.940 Well, his English was so bad that we had to do the lunches in Arabic, right?

00:38:35.700 He was an Arabist and I'm an Arabist.

00:38:38.520 And so we would have our lunches in Arabic.

00:38:40.900 And I remember what we talked about in that first meeting.

00:38:43.740 I know it's absurd, isn't it?

00:38:44.740 You and the Japanese guy speaking Arabic.

00:38:47.680 I'm surprised somebody didn't call the cops.

00:38:50.280 So we talked about the Israeli election, the Turkish election.

00:38:54.820 We talked about the peace process.

00:38:56.640 I remember it very clearly.

00:38:57.940 And at the end of it, he said to me, so what's next for you?

00:39:02.440 And I said, I think I'm going to resign soon.

00:39:05.680 I promised Senator Kerry that I would give him two years.

00:39:08.220 It's been two and a half and I have five kids that I need to put through college.

00:39:12.240 And he says, no, don't do that.

00:39:15.060 If you give me information, I can give you money.

00:39:20.560 And I said, what in the world is wrong with you?

00:39:25.040 Do you have any idea how many times I've made that pitch?

00:39:29.020 Shame on you for cold pitching me.

00:39:31.120 And I indignantly got up and walked out and I went directly without stopping to the office

00:39:37.420 of the Senate security officer.

00:39:39.140 And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer.

00:39:42.220 I need to report it.

00:39:43.440 He said, was it that damn Russian again?

00:39:45.620 And I said, no, it was Japanese.

00:39:47.600 He said, Japanese.

00:39:49.180 Well, occasionally they're poking around looking for trade secrets.

00:39:53.400 So he said, sit at the standalone computer, write it up, and I'll send it to the FBI.

00:39:58.540 I said, fine.

00:39:59.120 I wrote the entire thing as a memo.

00:40:00.940 He sent it to the FBI.

00:40:02.140 The next day, he calls me and says, two FBI agents are going to come up.

00:40:05.180 They want to interview you.

00:40:06.020 I said, great.

00:40:06.980 I go back down to the security vault and these two young FBI agents come.

00:40:12.080 I tell them the story again.

00:40:13.400 And they said, okay, here's what we want you to do.

00:40:15.480 We want you to call him back and invite him to lunch and try to get him to tell you exactly

00:40:21.000 what information he's looking for.

00:40:23.000 And what he's willing to pay for it.

00:40:25.220 And because I'm a patriot, I said, do you want me to wear a wire or something?

00:40:29.500 And they said, no, we'll just be at the next table.

00:40:31.600 We'll listen to everything.

00:40:32.540 You're such a Boy Scout.

00:40:33.940 I know, right?

00:40:35.020 I love my country.

00:40:36.620 Everyone who lives in DC has had something like what you described, but I've never heard

00:40:41.180 of anybody going to the authorities over it.

00:40:43.840 So the morning of the lunch, they called me and said, something came up.

00:40:49.100 We can't do it.

00:40:50.160 So do the lunch and write another memo.

00:40:52.300 So I did.

00:40:53.820 And I wrote up a comprehensive report.

00:40:56.120 I sent it back to the FBI.

00:40:57.240 Then they asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time, which I did.

00:41:02.440 And in the final lunch, it was a place in Georgetown.

00:41:05.420 Which place?

00:41:06.500 It was on lower Wisconsin, the famous Italian place.

00:41:11.120 Oh, where they give you after dinner drinks at the end.

00:41:16.620 Yes.

00:41:17.340 And the ladies in the front window making the pasta.

00:41:19.860 Such a great restaurant.

00:41:21.180 Filomena.

00:41:21.620 Filomena.

00:41:22.080 Thank you.

00:41:22.620 Sorry.

00:41:22.920 It's been forever.

00:41:23.840 Sorry.

00:41:25.480 I love Filomena.

00:41:26.640 It's wonderful.

00:41:27.620 It really is wonderful.

00:41:28.720 So I do it.

00:41:32.340 And in that final lunch, he says, I got promoted.

00:41:35.800 I got my dream job.

00:41:37.340 I'm going to be the number two at the Japanese embassy in Cairo.

00:41:40.840 I said, congratulations.

00:41:42.040 I shook his hand.

00:41:42.840 I never talked to him again.

00:41:43.800 A year later, I've been arrested and we get discovery and we see that there never was any

00:41:52.640 Japanese diplomat.

00:41:54.040 He was an FBI agent.

00:41:56.260 What?

00:41:56.940 Trying to get me to commit actual espionage.

00:42:01.320 But I kept reporting the meetings back to the FBI.

00:42:05.900 And then there was a memo to Peter Strzok who actually put the cuffs on me.

00:42:13.800 In 2012.

00:42:16.860 The Peter Strzok?

00:42:17.620 The Peter Strzok.

00:42:19.240 He actually, I'll get to that in a second.

00:42:21.680 But one of the FBI agents wrote to Peter Strzok and said, we should end this operation.

00:42:27.940 He's clearly not going to take the bait.

00:42:30.960 No way.

00:42:32.500 And I said to my lawyer, why would they do this?

00:42:34.720 I'm a patriot.

00:42:35.920 The FBI did that to you?

00:42:38.080 Mm-hmm.

00:42:39.360 Mm-hmm.

00:42:39.800 Because I hadn't committed espionage.

00:42:41.880 We've got to burn the government down, actually.

00:42:43.580 Yeah.

00:42:43.780 I mean, that's...

00:42:44.420 Yeah.

00:42:45.480 John Brennan specifically said, charge him with espionage.

00:42:48.820 Well, I hadn't committed espionage.

00:42:51.320 And so they're trying to get me to commit it so they can charge me.

00:42:54.760 I kept reporting it back to them.

00:42:56.480 So who was the guy?

00:42:57.800 The Japanese diplomat?

00:42:58.900 No, he was just an Asian FBI agent who didn't speak a word of Japanese, but he did speak Arabic.

00:43:05.180 So he pretended...

00:43:06.640 Oh, no!

00:43:06.900 You're blowing my mind.

00:43:07.920 He pretended to not speak English so that I wouldn't be alerted.

00:43:11.720 Are you sure this happened?

00:43:12.820 100%.

00:43:13.560 It's all...

00:43:15.000 It was all in the discovery.

00:43:17.300 But Brennan said, charge him with espionage.

00:43:20.320 And they were like, okay, well, we've got to charge him with espionage.

00:43:22.700 We have to create the crime in order to fit the charge.

00:43:25.320 And what happened?

00:43:26.420 They charged me with three counts of espionage.

00:43:28.620 Wait, how can you believe any...

00:43:30.080 So, like, I have friends who have a lot of interesting information on the Oklahoma City bombing.

00:43:36.080 Ooh.

00:43:36.480 And my brain doesn't want to go there.

00:43:39.140 Same with January 6th.

00:43:40.720 Same with a bunch of different operations the FBI has been involved in where it seems pretty obvious they're trying to get people to commit felonies.

00:43:48.560 Acts of violence.

00:43:49.460 Acts of terrorism.

00:43:50.920 And I'm like, I just...

00:43:52.020 I can't bring myself to believe that that happens in the United States.

00:43:56.180 But you're describing it.

00:43:57.440 Oh, Tucker.

00:43:58.060 I was in prison with this poor guy.

00:44:00.020 This guy was just a dope.

00:44:02.240 And he and a couple of buddies were in a bar one day in Cleveland.

00:44:08.040 And this other guy was there drinking with him.

00:44:11.180 And he said, hey, you know what would be fun?

00:44:12.700 We should blow up the Route 82 bridge.

00:44:14.620 And they were saying...

00:44:15.540 They were drunk.

00:44:16.120 They said, yeah, that would be so much fun.

00:44:18.100 I'll get the explosives.

00:44:19.760 Well, he's an FBI informant.

00:44:21.440 The FBI gives inert explosives.

00:44:23.400 These idiots go out to the Route 82 bridge and try to blow it up.

00:44:27.240 It doesn't blow up.

00:44:28.300 And then the FBI comes out from behind the bushes.

00:44:30.240 They got 20, 25, and 30 years in prison.

00:44:34.620 Why would they do that to these guys?

00:44:36.140 Why would they do that?

00:44:37.260 It wasn't their idea to blow up the stupid bridge.

00:44:39.360 But why were they targeted?

00:44:41.240 Because this is how FBI agents get promoted.

00:44:44.320 They don't get promoted by not arresting you.

00:44:47.320 They get promoted by arresting you and heaping charges on you

00:44:50.780 so that eventually you go bankrupt and you give up.

00:44:53.940 And then they say, okay, here's the deal.

00:44:55.740 We'll drop all the charges but one.

00:44:57.740 You take a guilty plea to a felony.

00:45:00.240 And then you do, you know, two years or whatever.

00:45:04.300 But these guys went to trial because they said, no, it wasn't our idea.

00:45:09.040 It wasn't our explosives.

00:45:10.400 It was the FBI's explosives.

00:45:11.820 And it was the FBI's guy that talked us into doing it.

00:45:15.500 We were just having drinks that night.

00:45:17.120 We weren't going to blow up a bridge.

00:45:18.340 But that's how they get ahead in Washington.

00:45:22.980 That is, but they're, I mean, they're targeting American citizens for destruction.

00:45:30.040 Sure.

00:45:31.300 Sure.

00:45:32.860 That's what they do.

00:45:33.820 You need to shut down the FBI right away.

00:45:37.820 I would not object to that at all.

00:45:42.040 And in my case, they charged me with three counts of espionage.

00:45:45.280 What is the fucking point of all of this?

00:45:47.340 Yeah.

00:45:47.640 Pay your taxes.

00:45:48.700 I know, right?

00:45:49.340 Hoist the flag on your front lawn.

00:45:50.820 I do those things.

00:45:51.800 Yeah, I do too.

00:45:52.340 And then they try to destroy you?

00:45:56.580 Yeah.

00:45:56.920 And you're, because your crime is, you didn't like John Brennan when you both were junior

00:46:02.600 guys at CIA.

00:46:03.840 Yeah.

00:46:04.240 And I aired the dirty laundry.

00:46:04.540 Because you correctly said the president, George W. Bush.

00:46:09.920 Was lying.

00:46:10.820 Was lying.

00:46:11.540 Because he is a liar, unfortunately.

00:46:15.800 And so, like, let's spend millions of dollars.

00:46:20.000 Six million dollars of the taxpayer.

00:46:22.340 The taxpayer's money is what they spent on my credit.

00:46:24.040 To destroy you.

00:46:25.760 Six million dollars.

00:46:26.540 And you need a pardon right away from Trump.

00:46:29.640 But, okay.

00:46:30.000 Sorry, sorry.

00:46:30.860 You're making me emotional.

00:46:32.300 This is just too ridiculous.

00:46:33.800 I've known you a while.

00:46:34.880 I didn't know the details.

00:46:36.840 Yeah, it was ugly.

00:46:38.320 Okay, so, can we just go back?

00:46:39.960 Sure.

00:46:40.760 Brennan orders this investigation.

00:46:42.980 The second Obama takes office, goes to Eric Holder.

00:46:47.920 Holder says, we, actually, our staff attorneys don't think that he committed.

00:46:52.920 Espionage.

00:46:54.140 Then what happens?

00:46:55.300 Like, do you know that they're investigating you again?

00:46:57.440 No idea.

00:46:58.860 No idea that I'm being investigated.

00:47:00.960 So, I'm going on my merry way.

00:47:02.680 I'm trying to build a business in consulting.

00:47:04.920 I have some big name clients.

00:47:07.140 Things are starting to look up.

00:47:08.440 In fact, I was going to New York so often that my wife said, you know, maybe we should buy a little pied-a-terre there.

00:47:15.540 So, instead of staying in a hotel, because things are going really well right now, you should talk to a real estate agent.

00:47:20.920 It was so exciting, right?

00:47:23.140 And then 22 FBI agents raid my house.

00:47:25.880 When?

00:47:26.900 Uh, January 12th, 2012.

00:47:32.180 2012?

00:47:33.200 2012.

00:47:34.120 They investigated me for three years.

00:47:37.840 Did you know they were investigating you?

00:47:39.540 No.

00:47:39.900 And then when we got the discovery.

00:47:41.220 But they investigated you for three years.

00:47:42.840 And this is now, like, quite a few years after.

00:47:46.680 The only thing you've done wrong is you gave an interview to ABC News saying three things.

00:47:50.900 The president lied.

00:47:51.660 We had a torture program.

00:47:52.640 And what was the third one?

00:47:53.300 Uh, and the, the torture was, was, and was signed by the president.

00:47:57.460 Yes.

00:47:57.780 Mm-hmm.

00:47:58.380 All true.

00:47:59.020 All true.

00:47:59.920 And so, for five, six years, they investigate you without telling you.

00:48:05.260 Mm-hmm.

00:48:05.600 Now, what were they doing to investigate you?

00:48:07.700 They were, they had my phones tapped.

00:48:10.060 Actually?

00:48:10.620 Actually tapped.

00:48:11.760 Yep.

00:48:12.500 They, um, intercepted all of my emails.

00:48:15.320 And I'll tell you something funny about that.

00:48:17.460 For real?

00:48:18.020 Well, there's a service that you can pay, like, $36 a year, called ReadNotify.com.

00:48:24.340 So, if I want to write you an email, I put, you know, Tucker Carlson at AOL.com dot ReadNotify.com.

00:48:33.280 And when you access it, it'll show me.

00:48:36.100 Tucker Carlson read your email.

00:48:37.800 He read it for two minutes and 37 seconds.

00:48:40.260 He forwarded it.

00:48:41.500 He deleted it.

00:48:42.480 He filed it.

00:48:43.480 Whatever.

00:48:44.140 And this is where he was located.

00:48:45.560 And it has a, a, a town.

00:48:48.840 And it'll have sometimes geo-coordinates.

00:48:51.500 Damn.

00:48:52.140 So, I, I wanted to write a Freedom of Information Act request.

00:48:56.660 Because I was thinking of writing a book about a, a, an author, a novelist from the 50s.

00:49:01.800 And I wanted to know whether he had worked at the CIA.

00:49:04.220 So, I sent this Freedom of Information Act request.

00:49:07.520 Um, actually, I, I, I called a journalist that I knew who writes these things every day.

00:49:14.360 And I said, I don't want it to get rejected.

00:49:16.380 So, can you walk me through the process?

00:49:18.260 He said, yeah, just send me what you have.

00:49:20.300 And I'll, I'll correct it for you.

00:49:22.520 So, I sent it to him.

00:49:23.800 And I got a ReadNotify notification.

00:49:26.180 And I looked at it.

00:49:27.420 And it said, accessed in Washington, D.C.

00:49:30.580 And I said to him, I called him.

00:49:32.780 And I said, you're not in Washington today, right?

00:49:35.280 And he said, no, I'm in L.A.

00:49:37.420 Why?

00:49:38.140 I said, because somebody just accessed the email.

00:49:40.000 And it's in Washington.

00:49:40.980 I said, hold on, because it has geo-coordinates attached to it.

00:49:44.540 So, I took the geo-coordinates.

00:49:46.080 I put it into Google Earth.

00:49:47.680 And you know, Google Earth, it shows you the whole planet.

00:49:49.360 And then it kind of zeroes in on the FBI's Washington field office.

00:49:53.180 No way.

00:49:54.460 And he said, are they looking at you?

00:49:56.560 Or are they looking at me?

00:49:58.120 I said, I haven't done anything.

00:50:00.200 They're probably looking at you.

00:50:01.580 Because you didn't even know you were under investigation.

00:50:04.280 No idea.

00:50:04.920 But they were looking at me, and they were accessing all of my emails.

00:50:09.460 They even followed my family and me into church, into Target, to go shopping.

00:50:15.820 And they would write these stupid reports.

00:50:18.280 Subject and his family went to church, sat in the first pew.

00:50:21.740 Hour and 15 minutes later, subject and family went home.

00:50:25.420 All because you called the president a liar?

00:50:27.380 Mm-hmm.

00:50:27.580 I was in a restaurant the other night, in fact, this weekend.

00:50:31.520 And I had a little trouble hearing what people were saying.

00:50:34.280 And I thought to myself, I'm a little young to go deaf.

00:50:36.820 Why?

00:50:38.040 Well, because I grew up shooting, bird hunting, target shooting.

00:50:42.060 And I remember my father saying, just stick a Marlboro filter in your opposite ear and you'll be fine.

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00:52:48.840 Am I missing part of this?

00:52:50.660 I don't...

00:52:51.080 Brendan complained that I had aired the CIA's Dirty Laundry.

00:52:54.680 But that was, I think, more of just an excuse to cover up his own, you know, narcissism.

00:53:01.460 But I mean...

00:53:02.300 Right.

00:53:03.300 But like airing Dirty Laundry, calling liars liars...

00:53:07.000 Yeah.

00:53:07.400 These are not crimes.

00:53:08.460 No, they're not crimes.

00:53:09.520 Exactly.

00:53:10.480 There was no crime committed.

00:53:10.960 But am I missing something?

00:53:12.000 I mean, did you kill anybody?

00:53:13.380 Were you dealing heroin at all?

00:53:15.080 Nope.

00:53:16.320 Nothing.

00:53:17.660 And then...

00:53:18.060 You didn't start some kind of fake cryptocurrency company?

00:53:20.340 I wish I had thought of it.

00:53:21.580 I'd be rich today.

00:53:23.440 Yeah, exactly.

00:53:25.460 Exactly.

00:53:26.760 Right.

00:53:27.220 I hope at some point we can talk about all the actual criminals who are now richer, living in my neighborhood.

00:53:31.600 Right.

00:53:32.080 Richer than ever.

00:53:32.620 Okay, so, but you don't know any of this is going on.

00:53:35.500 When do you get confirmation that you're the target of an investigation?

00:53:39.300 The FBI called me.

00:53:40.880 I was sitting at my computer one morning writing an op-ed, and the FBI called me, and I looked at my phone, and it said Federal Bureau of Investigation.

00:53:46.900 And I thought, what in the world is that?

00:53:49.380 So, I answered it.

00:53:50.520 I said, hi, this is John.

00:53:52.040 May I help you?

00:53:52.980 And he says, hi, this is Special Agent, I forget what.

00:53:56.580 Do you remember that case that you helped us out with when you were on Capitol Hill?

00:54:00.380 Because remember, I didn't know that this Japanese guy was an FBI agent yet.

00:54:04.860 I said, sure.

00:54:06.220 This is so freaking bonkers.

00:54:07.940 Like, yeah.

00:54:08.580 And he said, well, we have another case, and we need your help.

00:54:11.440 And I said, because I'm an idiot and a patriot, I said, anything for the FBI.

00:54:18.040 What do you want from me?

00:54:19.560 That's what I told him.

00:54:20.680 He said, can you come down here tomorrow at 10?

00:54:22.840 I said, absolutely.

00:54:24.580 So, I went at 10 o'clock, and I said, what do you want me to do?

00:54:29.680 Was this to the FBI building downtown?

00:54:31.300 Yes.

00:54:31.880 I said, is it, what, the Russians?

00:54:34.340 Who is it?

00:54:36.060 Well, you know, before we get to that, he says, I wanted to ask you, you know, I just read your book.

00:54:41.440 Which was a lie.

00:54:42.320 I had a book that had come out two years earlier.

00:54:44.520 I just read your book, and I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions.

00:54:47.160 And it was all about the torture program.

00:54:49.280 And I'm getting more and more nervous.

00:54:53.040 And finally...

00:54:53.720 What were the questions?

00:54:55.360 Well, when you were in Pakistan, and you were describing this piece of technology,

00:55:02.000 did you get that cleared by the CIA?

00:55:04.600 I said, of course I got it cleared.

00:55:05.980 I said, it took me nine months to write that book, and 22 months to get it cleared at the

00:55:10.440 CIA's Publications Review Board.

00:55:13.780 Well, you know, what about this guy?

00:55:15.660 You mentioned this guy.

00:55:17.000 Do you remember, you just say John Doe.

00:55:18.900 Do you remember his name?

00:55:20.160 I'm like, yeah, I remember his name.

00:55:22.520 And then I said, what are we talking about here?

00:55:26.600 And then one of them said, well, we probably should tell you that as we're speaking right

00:55:31.300 now, we're raiding your house, we're confiscating all of your electronics, and...

00:55:37.000 Holy shit!

00:55:37.780 You're going to be charged with a lot of crimes.

00:55:39.980 What?

00:55:40.420 That's what he said.

00:55:42.060 And thank God...

00:55:43.540 Wait, as you were talking, they were raiding your house?

00:55:46.900 My wife later told me that as soon as I got on the metro to go to the FBI, they just broke

00:55:54.160 down the door.

00:55:54.780 Was she home?

00:55:55.560 With our two-month-old son.

00:55:58.400 Mm-hmm.

00:55:58.720 Mm-hmm.

00:56:02.840 Yep.

00:56:03.540 And then one of the female FBI agents...

00:56:05.340 I don't think Drain the Swamp is not strong enough.

00:56:08.860 No, it's not.

00:56:09.420 Burn it down.

00:56:09.800 Burn it down.

00:56:11.240 Burn it down.

00:56:12.640 Yes.

00:56:13.400 You know, this is neither here nor there, because my opinion is not important.

00:56:16.880 But when Kash Patel was named the director of the FBI, I wrote an op-ed for a leftist news

00:56:24.040 outlet, celebrating this appointment, saying, this is exactly what we need to do.

00:56:29.880 We need to tear the place down to its studs.

00:56:33.460 If there's going to be a federal law enforcement organization, this one needs to be scrapped and

00:56:40.340 rebuilt.

00:56:41.040 And nobody else has the guts to do it.

00:56:43.040 Yeah.

00:56:43.660 Let's build them in your headquarters, though.

00:56:45.560 Yeah.

00:56:46.100 Yeah.

00:56:46.340 In Kansas, maybe.

00:56:50.360 Yeah, Leavenworth.

00:56:52.080 Oh, excuse me.

00:56:53.880 One final sentence.

00:56:55.740 I thank God that I had the presence of mind to say, I want to speak to my attorney, and

00:57:00.460 I'm not saying anything else.

00:57:01.880 And that was the only reason they didn't put the cuffs on me right there.

00:57:05.860 So I said, I want to leave.

00:57:07.560 And I got up.

00:57:08.340 And they said, just a minute, just a minute.

00:57:09.680 I said, no, if I'm not under arrest, that means I'm free to leave.

00:57:12.900 And as I walked out, Peter Strzok was standing there.

00:57:16.800 And he said, did he implicate himself?

00:57:19.820 And the guy says, not really, but I'll tell you about it in a second.

00:57:23.320 And he turned to me and he said, you're free to go.

00:57:27.720 Did you have any idea what this was about?

00:57:29.900 No.

00:57:30.600 No idea.

00:57:32.700 No idea.

00:57:33.360 They charged me with me.

00:57:35.740 This is like a bad dream.

00:57:37.380 It was a nightmare.

00:57:38.720 It was a nightmare.

00:57:39.720 I went outside.

00:57:41.540 I called my lawyer.

00:57:43.080 He told me, come to the office immediately.

00:57:45.180 I went, told him everything that happened.

00:57:47.640 He told me, try to take it easy.

00:57:49.440 I said, this is a death penalty case.

00:57:51.920 He said, just take it easy.

00:57:53.400 They're not going to seek the death penalty.

00:57:54.240 What was happening?

00:57:54.660 Did you call home and ask your wife?

00:57:56.440 Yeah.

00:57:56.900 And she was just wonderful.

00:57:58.940 She, she was as calm as I wished I could be.

00:58:05.440 And she said, the FBI is here.

00:58:07.800 I said, I know.

00:58:08.980 I said, are they treating you with respect?

00:58:11.560 And she said, well, one of the female agents said, why don't you sit with that beautiful

00:58:16.500 baby and don't get up?

00:58:20.120 Why don't you go fuck yourself?

00:58:21.700 Exactly.

00:58:21.960 Actually, excuse me.

00:58:23.080 Exactly.

00:58:23.440 Talking that way to your wife with a newborn baby.

00:58:29.380 And then within hours, of course, they leak it to the media immediately.

00:58:33.820 So within hours, all four of my clients, and these were like household name clients that

00:58:40.320 I had for this consulting business I was trying to get up and running.

00:58:44.060 All four of them dropped me.

00:58:46.360 That day?

00:58:46.780 That day.

00:58:47.960 And then immediately.

00:58:49.240 Profiles in Courage Award.

00:58:50.520 Oh, I'll tell you.

00:58:51.220 The phone, we got, we counted actually.

00:58:56.320 We got something like 65 or 67 calls from the media that night.

00:59:02.360 I just shut my phone off.

00:59:03.860 We unplugged the, we had landlines back then.

00:59:07.540 One of the local networks put a truck in front of our house with a spotlight on the house.

00:59:12.760 No way.

00:59:13.280 Oh, it was humiliating.

00:59:15.160 Just utterly humiliating.

00:59:16.800 And I just want to say for the fifth time, because at this point, I mean, you're being

00:59:21.800 treated like El Chapo.

00:59:23.180 Okay.

00:59:24.340 Your only crime was an ABC interview with Brian Ross in 2007, in which you say, yes, the

00:59:32.880 CIA does have a torture program.

00:59:34.220 I know because I worked there and the president authorized it and lied about it in public.

00:59:37.960 That's, that's, that's your sum total of your crimes.

00:59:40.080 That was it.

00:59:40.420 I'm going to cut to the chase here.

00:59:44.160 This is so unbelievable.

00:59:45.360 So you go to your lawyer's office, you find out you're being charged with espionage.

00:59:49.140 I called my wife.

00:59:50.140 She came and picked me up and I told her, I'm going to kill myself.

00:59:54.560 This is a death penalty case.

00:59:57.320 I haven't done anything wrong.

00:59:58.520 And she's like, you're not going to kill yourself.

01:00:01.740 Let's just take this one step at a time.

01:00:04.200 What did the lawyers say?

01:00:06.000 And then we started taking it from there.

01:00:10.300 When did you get arrested?

01:00:12.520 January, January, no, four days later.

01:00:15.560 That was on a, ah, so this is another trick that they use.

01:00:18.640 And they did this with the J6 people.

01:00:20.520 The FBI loves, loves, loves to make their arrests, um, on Fridays, right?

01:00:28.600 Or Thursdays after five, because there are no federal arraignments on Fridays.

01:00:34.380 So you get arrested on a Thursday evening and you have to spend Thursday night, Friday night,

01:00:39.980 Saturday night, and Sunday night in jail.

01:00:42.500 And then you get to go to arraignment on Monday.

01:00:46.140 No, only because I asked to see my attorney.

01:00:48.760 And so they told me I had to turn myself in at the FBI, uh, Monday morning at 10.

01:00:56.100 Tucker, when I tell you, I had these guys on me from Thursday to Monday, like white on

01:01:01.900 rice, I mean, six feet off my bunk, my bumper, everywhere we went.

01:01:05.620 Even one of my neighbors called to say he had gotten up in the middle of the night to go

01:01:09.580 to the bathroom and he looked out the window and he said, buddy, there are like carloads

01:01:14.600 of people out there at three o'clock in the morning, just staring at your house.

01:01:18.760 And I said, I know, I know it's the FBI.

01:01:21.700 There's nothing I can do.

01:01:23.700 And so they followed us.

01:01:25.820 Like there were FBI cars on either side of us and behind us as we drove to the FBI that

01:01:31.620 Monday morning.

01:01:32.420 And then when I got out of the car and walked into the FBI headquarters, they broke off.

01:01:37.580 And then they, they chained me to a, to a metal bench.

01:01:42.140 So I'm, I'm like this with a handcuff.

01:01:44.900 I, yeah, yeah.

01:01:46.600 And I said, and struck was there.

01:01:48.500 Oh yeah.

01:01:49.020 He was there.

01:01:49.680 And you know, but I didn't know, I didn't know he was Peter struck until I got a call

01:01:55.360 in 2019 from a reporter at the Washington post 20, no, no 2017 reporter for the Washington

01:02:03.240 post.

01:02:04.180 And he said, Hey, I wanted to get your thoughts on Peter struck being fired from the FBI.

01:02:10.260 I said, I don't know anything about Peter struck other than what I've read in the Washington

01:02:15.100 post.

01:02:15.600 He said, no, Peter struck arrested you in January of 2012.

01:02:20.040 I said, that was Peter struck.

01:02:22.340 He said, yeah, it was Peter struck.

01:02:24.260 He was the head of the counter intelligence division.

01:02:27.900 It was Peter struck that wrote the reports on your arrest.

01:02:31.140 He's the one that physically put the cuffs on you.

01:02:33.640 And I said, Oh my God.

01:02:35.120 I said, yes, I'll give you a statement.

01:02:36.560 He said, what's the statement?

01:02:38.580 And I said, the statement is that the statement is that karma is a bitch and now it's his turn.

01:02:47.560 Yeah.

01:02:48.040 So all they printed was now it's his turn.

01:02:50.380 I think he wound up getting like a million dollar settlement.

01:02:53.220 Yeah.

01:02:53.400 Actually.

01:02:53.780 He did.

01:02:54.380 And there was a GoFundMe.

01:02:55.900 He got richer.

01:02:56.860 He got richer.

01:02:57.580 And there was a GoFundMe that raised another half a million dollars.

01:03:01.420 Yeah.

01:03:03.200 This is so.

01:03:04.220 It's a nightmare.

01:03:04.800 So, okay, you're charged just to.

01:03:09.600 Yeah.

01:03:09.900 Three counts of espionage.

01:03:11.360 Three counts of espionage.

01:03:12.640 One.

01:03:13.020 But not specifying who you spied for.

01:03:15.180 Nope.

01:03:16.080 There was never even an accusation that I had spied for anybody.

01:03:19.380 One count of making a false statement.

01:03:21.700 We were never exactly sure what the false statement was supposed to have been.

01:03:26.460 It had something to do with the clearance process for my book.

01:03:29.260 And one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

01:03:34.920 Did you reveal the identities of anyone?

01:03:39.720 Here's that story.

01:03:40.720 In the summer of 2008, six months after I blew the whistle, I got an email from a journalist

01:03:49.340 who was writing a book on the CIA's rendition program.

01:03:53.100 I told him, I don't know anything about renditions.

01:03:55.780 Kidnapping was not my thing at the agency.

01:03:57.900 I can't help you.

01:03:59.260 So, he sends me a list of a dozen names.

01:04:01.280 He said, can you introduce me to any of these people so that I can interview them?

01:04:04.900 I said, I don't know any of these people.

01:04:06.660 Then he sent me a second list of a dozen names.

01:04:09.760 And I said, look, you clearly know this better than I do.

01:04:13.760 I don't know any of these people.

01:04:16.480 And then he said, there's a guy that you mentioned on like page 165 of your book.

01:04:24.760 You called him John.

01:04:26.240 Can I mention, can I interview him?

01:04:29.920 And I said, oh, you're talking about John Doe.

01:04:33.600 I don't know whatever happened to him.

01:04:35.180 He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere.

01:04:38.360 They got me.

01:04:39.960 I confirmed the surname of a former colleague.

01:04:45.120 That was it.

01:04:46.700 That's the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

01:04:52.140 And they knew that because they were listening to the call.

01:04:56.240 Well, it got worse.

01:04:57.400 They didn't recognize that as a violation until the journalist, who wasn't really writing a book, gave the name to Human Rights Watch.

01:05:12.620 Human Rights Watch gave the name to the Guantanamo defense attorneys.

01:05:16.200 The Guantanamo defense attorneys wrote a classified motion telling the judge at Guantanamo, we'd like to interview this John Doe.

01:05:24.820 The judge said, hey, this name is probably classified.

01:05:28.520 He gave it to the FBI.

01:05:30.200 They gave it to the CIA.

01:05:31.520 The CIA gave it to John Brennan.

01:05:34.540 This is crazy.

01:05:35.320 What do you mean the journalist wasn't really writing a book?

01:05:37.680 He was pretending to write a book on the Abu Omar rendition from Milan.

01:05:42.460 There really was no book.

01:05:44.360 He was really working for the Guantanamo defense attorneys as kind of a private eye without telling anybody.

01:05:51.260 What?

01:05:51.960 Yeah.

01:05:52.300 Man, the level of treachery in and around Washington.

01:05:56.320 Yeah, welcome to Washington.

01:05:58.020 It's that bad.

01:05:59.640 Oh, I'm very aware of that.

01:06:01.660 Yeah.

01:06:01.900 Mm-hmm.

01:06:02.580 I'm so glad I'm not there anymore.

01:06:04.440 Oh, my God.

01:06:04.940 I can't wait until the day I can leave.

01:06:08.540 It's like nothing is as it seems.

01:06:10.940 Everyone's lying.

01:06:12.020 Everyone's pretending to be something he's not.

01:06:13.920 Mm-hmm.

01:06:14.760 And underneath it all is the willingness to hurt people, to kill them.

01:06:19.340 I mean.

01:06:20.020 Yeah.

01:06:20.480 Yes, exactly.

01:06:21.840 It's not just like, you know, we're competing and I'm elbowing you out of the way.

01:06:25.940 I'm going to get that promotion before you do.

01:06:27.580 It's like if I need to make sure you die in prison, that's okay.

01:06:31.740 That's really safe.

01:06:32.980 Speaking of which, I took a plea to make the, first of all, they waited until I went bankrupt.

01:06:40.100 And then they dropped all three of the espionage charges.

01:06:45.120 Okay.

01:06:45.700 So what were you facing initially?

01:06:47.440 You get charged.

01:06:48.300 You get.

01:06:48.900 Forty, 45 years.

01:06:50.920 Forty-five years in prison.

01:06:52.380 Mm-hmm.

01:06:52.740 And one of the, one of the attorneys in, in the Obama Holder Justice Department said to me at the first proffer meeting, they offered me 45 years.

01:07:03.560 And this woman says, take the deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.

01:07:09.340 Who, what, do you remember her name?

01:07:10.700 I don't.

01:07:11.180 I remember she had a Vietnamese name, like Nguyen or Tran or something like that.

01:07:15.760 But she ended up like getting promoted in the Biden Justice Department.

01:07:20.180 Really?

01:07:20.640 Very, very important.

01:07:22.220 Yeah.

01:07:24.420 Yeah.

01:07:25.180 I hope, I hope that she becomes famous for that.

01:07:28.120 I hope so too.

01:07:28.980 Because that level of cruelty to another human being is, there's no justification for that.

01:07:33.080 They wanted me to die in prison.

01:07:35.320 That was the plan.

01:07:37.160 And so my attorney said, you haven't done anything wrong.

01:07:40.380 We're going to go to trial, right?

01:07:42.020 We're going to go to trial.

01:07:43.100 And I said, okay, let's do it.

01:07:44.160 Let's go to trial.

01:07:44.520 Can I say, did anyone allege that you lied ever?

01:07:46.540 Ever.

01:07:46.960 Never.

01:07:48.340 Never.

01:07:49.180 And you know, that's a really important point.

01:07:51.600 And we talked about that.

01:07:53.020 We talked about me testifying in my trial because literally everything I said was the truth.

01:07:58.380 In fact, fast forward to December of 2014, I'm going to be released from prison in six

01:08:04.720 weeks.

01:08:05.440 And I called my wife and I was allowed to call her for 15 minutes every other day.

01:08:10.080 And I said, how was your day?

01:08:11.580 And she said, it was great.

01:08:13.280 And I said, great.

01:08:14.440 Why was it so great?

01:08:15.960 And she said, because the Senate torture report came out today and it proved that everything

01:08:20.160 you said was true.

01:08:21.420 So I said, you know what?

01:08:24.820 That made it worth it.

01:08:26.200 So you went to prison.

01:08:27.060 You were facing life and actually you're facing the death penalty initially.

01:08:29.780 Yeah, death penalty.

01:08:30.220 Because you told the truth about other people's lies.

01:08:35.420 Correct.

01:08:36.440 So the truth teller, and I'm just, I want to put a very fine point on this because I

01:08:40.160 think it is a trend and I think it's a sign of evil.

01:08:43.600 You know, the definition of evil is lies, lying.

01:08:46.720 And the truth teller faces death.

01:08:51.080 The liars thrive.

01:08:53.220 Yes.

01:08:53.560 So that's a system that can't continue.

01:08:55.600 That's not a virtuous system.

01:08:56.820 That's an evil system.

01:08:57.560 You're exactly right.

01:08:58.440 And may I add a statistic?

01:09:01.520 The Espionage Act was written in 1917.

01:09:04.920 Yes.

01:09:05.240 To combat German saboteurs during the First World War.

01:09:08.600 1917 being one of the darkest periods in American history.

01:09:11.380 One of the, when it comes to civil liberties, one of the darkest periods.

01:09:14.400 The most anti, almost un-American moment, really.

01:09:18.320 Without any question.

01:09:18.920 Probably one of the worst presidents we ever had, Woodrow Wilson.

01:09:21.520 Double without any question.

01:09:22.740 Yeah.

01:09:23.040 Destroy Christian Europe for no reason at all.

01:09:25.680 Right.

01:09:25.960 Yeah.

01:09:27.060 It, the Espionage has never been meaningfully updated.

01:09:30.820 In fact, it doesn't even mention the words classified information because the classification

01:09:34.680 system wasn't invented until the 1950s.

01:09:36.540 Most Americans didn't have electricity in 1917.

01:09:38.560 Exactly right.

01:09:39.480 Right.

01:09:39.680 Between 1917 and the election of Barack Obama, three Americans were charged with espionage

01:09:48.800 for speaking to the press.

01:09:50.460 Under Barack Obama, eight people, almost three times, all previous presidents combined, were

01:09:58.640 charged with espionage for speaking to the press.

01:10:02.280 Three times.

01:10:03.980 And none of them was charged with lying.

01:10:05.920 Not a single one of them.

01:10:07.700 Because lying is not a crime.

01:10:09.660 That's right.

01:10:10.260 Telling the truth is a crime.

01:10:11.900 That's it right there.

01:10:12.140 That's all you need to know.

01:10:13.320 That's it right there.

01:10:13.580 You can't support a system in which telling the truth is a crime and lying is rewarded.

01:10:18.560 Sorry.

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01:10:55.300 I mentioned to you last night privately that one of my attorneys really put this whole

01:11:04.200 thing into a couple of sentences and it was so powerful, so profound what he said that

01:11:08.780 it has stuck with me.

01:11:10.080 I decided to turn down the Justice Department's best and final offer of two and a half years

01:11:16.280 in prison.

01:11:16.980 I said, I haven't done anything wrong.

01:11:19.440 And I had this stupid idea that as soon as I get in front of a jury, they're going to

01:11:23.620 see how ridiculous this is and I'm going to be acquitted.

01:11:26.840 Well, that's nuts.

01:11:28.900 So he said to me, you know what your problem is?

01:11:33.260 Your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice.

01:11:37.400 It's about mitigating damage.

01:11:39.540 Take the deal.

01:11:41.300 And so I took the deal.

01:11:43.920 What was I going to do?

01:11:45.420 I have five kids at home.

01:11:47.520 Should I take two and a half years?

01:11:49.000 I'm going to do 23 months or should I roll the dice?

01:11:51.960 And I said to him, I said, if I turn the deal down, what am I realistically looking at

01:11:56.920 here?

01:11:57.380 And he said, 12 to 18 years.

01:11:59.960 Take the deal.

01:12:03.300 So I took it.

01:12:05.580 For telling the truth in an ABC interview.

01:12:07.540 How long was that ABC interview?

01:12:11.100 30 minutes, 40 minutes.

01:12:14.400 If you had to replay your life, live it again, would you have done that?

01:12:18.420 Yes.

01:12:19.000 Actually, I would have.

01:12:20.840 The only thing I would have done differently is I would have had my attorney sitting with

01:12:24.720 me.

01:12:25.640 I had to be reactive by hiring an attorney after blowing the whistle.

01:12:30.680 So we had to respond to the media and respond to the Justice Department.

01:12:34.880 I would have hired the attorney first.

01:12:37.100 But yes, somebody had to say something.

01:12:40.200 Somebody.

01:12:40.640 It's these Bush people and the Obama people who covered up the Bush administration's crimes

01:12:48.120 that were the criminals.

01:12:50.560 The amazing thing is that Barack Obama, I mean, I was there.

01:12:53.900 I mean, I knew Obama.

01:12:55.520 He ran against all that stuff.

01:12:57.600 Yeah, he did.

01:12:58.700 Right?

01:12:59.040 Iraq was the bad war.

01:13:00.880 Afghanistan was the good war.

01:13:02.220 And he ran a campaign against that.

01:13:06.440 You know, but he ended up throwing into prison the guy who told the truth about it.

01:13:12.980 Mark Halpern and John Heileman wrote a book about the, well, both the 2008 election, the

01:13:18.140 2012 election.

01:13:19.120 And in the second book, they quote Obama twice, saying things that just put it all into perspective.

01:13:26.180 Number one, he said, I never said I was a liberal.

01:13:30.960 Like, why are the liberals so mad that he's a warmongering, you know, neocon?

01:13:36.660 I never said I was a liberal, he said.

01:13:38.420 And the other thing he said that really struck me, he was talking about the drone program.

01:13:42.380 He killed 10 times more people with drones than George W. Bush did.

01:13:46.420 And he said, you know, I never realized I would be so good at killing people.

01:13:51.360 He's a cold human being.

01:13:52.900 What is that?

01:13:53.420 That's sociopathy.

01:13:55.140 Yeah, well, for sure.

01:13:56.020 You have to be a sociopath to even think that way.

01:13:59.380 Yes.

01:14:00.320 But he surrounded himself with other sociopaths, like John Brennan, who, for sport, would ruin

01:14:05.900 people's lives to the point where they're actively considering suicide or making plans

01:14:11.460 to die in prison.

01:14:13.120 These are Americans he's doing this to.

01:14:15.120 Americans.

01:14:16.440 Mm-hmm.

01:14:18.360 Clearly a man capable of great violence.

01:14:21.060 And you wonder if he's involved in plotting physical violence against Americans now.

01:14:28.300 Would not surprise me at all?

01:14:29.480 I would not be surprised by anything anymore.

01:14:31.920 You know, when President Trump, I had to laugh, when President Trump stripped him of

01:14:37.900 his security clearance, I went on one of the networks, well, I went on Fox, but I think

01:14:41.960 I also went on MSNBC that week to say, why does John Brennan deserve a security clearance?

01:14:48.640 Exactly.

01:14:49.000 Why don't I have one?

01:14:49.360 He's a private citizen.

01:14:50.300 Do you have one?

01:14:51.040 I don't.

01:14:51.800 I don't either.

01:14:52.580 See?

01:14:53.260 So why does John Brennan get one?

01:14:54.580 I agree.

01:14:54.860 So I said, of course the president should strip John Brennan of his security clearance.

01:14:57.800 And then when he disallowed Brennan from entering into a government building, I went on Fox and

01:15:05.760 they said, is this legit?

01:15:07.080 I said, of course it is.

01:15:08.280 This guy is so dangerous that he shouldn't be anywhere near a federal building.

01:15:15.300 With what we know he's plotted in the past, God knows what he's cooking up today.

01:15:21.360 No, I wouldn't trust him in a federal building.

01:15:23.460 I wouldn't trust him in a position of trust.

01:15:25.920 And I wouldn't trust him with a security clearance.

01:15:28.860 He's dangerous.

01:15:31.260 Well, all these people have security clearances, which really are the currency in Washington.

01:15:35.440 Very much so.

01:15:36.060 They can't conduct business without one in D.C. because everything is classified.

01:15:39.180 That's right.

01:15:39.620 Not to protect American national security, but for the obvious power advantage, it gives

01:15:44.620 the holders of those clearances.

01:15:46.040 That's right.

01:15:46.880 So, you know, I think there should be a real attempt to do that to a lot of people, like

01:15:52.080 a lot of people.

01:15:53.520 But there won't be.

01:15:54.860 No.

01:15:55.080 As you know.

01:15:55.600 No, there won't be.

01:15:56.640 So anyway, you plead, you get how much time?

01:16:01.400 I got 30 months.

01:16:02.360 And at sentencing, my attorneys asked that I be sent to a minimum security work camp.

01:16:10.980 There are no bars on the windows.

01:16:13.000 There are no locks on the doors.

01:16:14.340 You're free to come and go.

01:16:15.380 Most of those guys worked in town at the local university, sweeping the floors or whatever.

01:16:19.700 And there was a possibility that I could get out in 17 months with good behavior and halfway

01:16:28.460 house, not halfway house, but home confinement.

01:16:31.500 So I said, okay, this will be easy.

01:16:34.920 So I get to the prison.

01:16:39.040 It's very strange when you go to prison.

01:16:41.280 If you're not remanded at sentencing, you have to physically drive to the prison and

01:16:46.460 knock on the door and say, yeah, I'm here to turn myself in.

01:16:50.560 The opposite of a jailbreak.

01:16:52.020 Yes, it's nuts.

01:16:53.620 It's nuts.

01:16:54.560 And of course, I've got, you know, two cars with me.

01:16:57.200 There's a documentary film crew and my lawyers and my cousin.

01:17:01.960 And we have this caravan that go to the prison with us.

01:17:07.280 So you've already said goodbye to your children.

01:17:08.580 Already said goodbye to my children.

01:17:09.860 What was that like?

01:17:10.440 They were very young.

01:17:11.500 And so I said, I said, you remember I had that fight with the FBI?

01:17:16.180 And they said, yes.

01:17:17.740 And I said, well, I lost.

01:17:19.580 And so I have to go to Pennsylvania for a while.

01:17:23.780 And I'm going to teach bad guys how to read and write.

01:17:28.060 Because I figured I'd probably teach a GED class or something.

01:17:33.020 And I said, but you're going to come and visit me all the time.

01:17:35.800 And then I'm going to come back home and everything's going to be great.

01:17:38.820 How old were they?

01:17:39.420 They were eight, six, and one.

01:17:43.620 Your little kids.

01:17:45.940 Eight, six, and one.

01:17:48.280 In the visiting room, there was a sign on one of the doors that said inmates only.

01:17:54.460 And my eight-year-old said, dad, what's an inmate?

01:17:58.900 And without thinking, I said, it's a prisoner.

01:18:00.960 And he said, wait a minute.

01:18:02.620 Are you a prisoner here?

01:18:05.060 Or are you a teacher here?

01:18:08.060 And I said, buddy, I'm a prisoner here.

01:18:13.180 But we're going to get past this.

01:18:15.020 It's going to go quickly.

01:18:16.240 And I'm going to be home.

01:18:17.740 And everything's going to be good again.

01:18:19.380 And it took everything I had not to.

01:18:23.980 Ah, it makes me emotional.

01:18:25.680 Yeah.

01:18:25.960 Oh, that's bad.

01:18:27.440 Yeah.

01:18:28.860 I'm out of adjectives, actually, for that.

01:18:31.640 So you didn't wind up in the work camp?

01:18:34.020 No.

01:18:35.000 The CIA, under John Brennan, who was...

01:18:39.780 He was director by this point.

01:18:40.880 No, but he was soon to be director.

01:18:43.240 Actually, 2012?

01:18:45.720 Yeah.

01:18:45.940 He was director at that point.

01:18:47.080 Yes.

01:18:47.660 Yes.

01:18:48.300 Thanks for correcting me.

01:18:49.700 The CIA objected.

01:18:51.040 They objected to my placement in a minimum security camp.

01:18:53.860 Well, they're vindictive, aren't they?

01:18:55.800 I guess ask Julian Assange how vindictive they are.

01:18:58.120 Well, I got there.

01:18:59.460 Exactly.

01:19:00.480 Exactly.

01:19:01.340 Ask Julian Assange.

01:19:02.740 They almost killed him.

01:19:05.840 So...

01:19:06.440 Under...

01:19:07.040 Mike Pompeo plotted his murder.

01:19:09.540 Literally.

01:19:10.260 Who's still free, by the way.

01:19:11.240 Is Mike Pompeo in jail?

01:19:12.300 I haven't seen in the announcement that he's been...

01:19:14.220 Are you allowed as an appointee to a government, not elected, just an appointee,

01:19:19.080 are you allowed to plot the murder of people who embarrass the agency?

01:19:22.500 You are not.

01:19:23.220 Oh, you're not allowed.

01:19:24.080 Okay.

01:19:24.700 You are not.

01:19:25.560 So you can't use federal funds to murder people who embarrass you?

01:19:29.860 Only if you're Barack Obama.

01:19:31.380 But anybody else, no.

01:19:32.460 You can't do that.

01:19:33.040 So if you do that, have you committed a crime?

01:19:36.580 Yeah.

01:19:37.280 A serious crime.

01:19:38.300 A serious crime would be attempted murder, I think, plotting a murder.

01:19:41.460 There's a former CIA officer, Bob Baer, who was given a choice to either be charged

01:19:48.400 with attempted murder or resigned from the agency for talking to a Kurdish group about killing

01:19:55.320 Saddam Hussein.

01:19:57.620 So why wasn't Mike Pompeo arrested for talking about or planning?

01:20:01.540 He did more than talking.

01:20:02.620 They planned to murder Julian Assange.

01:20:05.720 I don't know.

01:20:06.560 That's a whole different conversation.

01:20:07.600 You're threatening to sue me for saying that.

01:20:09.200 Well, the facts are a defense.

01:20:10.720 I hope he will.

01:20:11.600 I hope he will.

01:20:11.780 There you go.

01:20:12.780 Discovery would be fun.

01:20:14.500 Anyway, sorry.

01:20:15.520 So I was in prison.

01:20:16.460 It's also frustrating.

01:20:16.960 So you say goodbye to your children.

01:20:18.240 I do.

01:20:18.440 I say goodbye to my children.

01:20:19.320 The CIA makes certain you don't go to the work camp.

01:20:21.520 You go to a prison.

01:20:22.840 Yeah.

01:20:23.320 It was five days before I got access to a phone at the prison.

01:20:26.900 And I called my lawyer.

01:20:28.860 What was that like?

01:20:28.880 The first five days?

01:20:29.560 It was, you know, looking back, I think I was in shock.

01:20:32.920 Did you think about fleeing?

01:20:38.520 Everybody does.

01:20:40.340 Yeah.

01:20:40.800 I don't know that I would submit to that.

01:20:42.360 I mean, you never know until you're there.

01:20:44.140 You find yourself constantly looking at the fences, constantly calculating how bad you'll

01:20:49.760 get cut up with the concertina wire.

01:20:51.760 No, no.

01:20:51.780 I mean, before you report to prison, did you think, like, I served this country.

01:20:55.320 I grew up here.

01:20:56.600 You're from a middle class family, pro-America.

01:21:00.620 No.

01:21:01.540 You never thought about fleeing the country?

01:21:02.760 No.

01:21:03.340 Why?

01:21:03.620 No.

01:21:04.100 Because I was right and they were wrong.

01:21:06.800 And, you know, the truth, Tucker always has a way of coming out.

01:21:11.620 Always.

01:21:12.800 Sometimes it takes a while, but the truth always comes out.

01:21:15.800 And, in fact, the deputy director for operations at the CIA under Brennan, Jose Rodriguez, another

01:21:23.920 notorious murderer, tweeted at me the night before I left for prison.

01:21:29.720 And he said, don't drop the soap.

01:21:32.760 He actually tweeted that at you?

01:21:34.980 And I tweeted back at him and I said, Jose, I am on the right side of history and you

01:21:40.080 are not.

01:21:40.620 These people are morally diseased.

01:21:42.580 When Michael Avenatti, who I mocked for years as the creepy porn lawyer went to prison, I

01:21:49.680 felt sad for him.

01:21:50.400 Sure, because you're a human being.

01:21:51.680 I despised him, but he's in prison.

01:21:54.560 Ever been to a prison?

01:21:55.540 I've been to many prisons.

01:21:56.600 You don't want to be in prison.

01:21:57.360 You've served in prison.

01:21:58.240 You don't want to be in prison.

01:21:59.080 To cheer when a man goes to prison and your only crime was embarrassing them by telling

01:22:03.940 the truth.

01:22:04.940 Whatever happened to the Jose character?

01:22:08.340 He took his $6 million book advance and moved to Florida.

01:22:13.040 Actually?

01:22:16.560 Doesn't this, I mean, why are you not insane?

01:22:19.260 I know.

01:22:19.480 There's a lightness to you that...

01:22:20.920 Thank you.

01:22:21.900 And maybe I'm an idiot, but I really believe that I'm on the right side of this and I'm

01:22:29.580 hopeful that President Trump will pardon me.

01:22:33.120 I have an amazing amount of support.

01:22:36.760 I hope that you get a pardon this afternoon.

01:22:40.320 I really do.

01:22:40.760 Thank you.

01:22:40.840 This is horrifying.

01:22:42.660 His enemies are the people who did this to you.

01:22:45.660 Yes.

01:22:46.160 He ran against this kind of behavior.

01:22:48.400 Yes, he did.

01:22:48.780 And he righted it with the J6 people, with Rod Blagojevich.

01:22:54.320 I wrote Rod Blagojevich a letter when he went to prison.

01:22:57.680 This is before I was ever in trouble.

01:22:59.820 Yeah.

01:23:00.080 I wrote him a letter and I said, you don't know me.

01:23:02.640 I don't live in Illinois, but this is a travesty.

01:23:05.780 It was.

01:23:06.600 I remember.

01:23:06.840 There's no crime that was actually committed.

01:23:09.060 Oh, I know.

01:23:10.340 And then 14 years?

01:23:12.340 Have people lost their minds?

01:23:14.440 I know.

01:23:14.780 But the president, you know, you and I were talking about this privately.

01:23:20.800 The president has been unlike almost every other president in that he's not waiting for the political safe period to issue pardons after an election.

01:23:32.000 Right?

01:23:32.700 He just issues them as they come to him.

01:23:34.800 To pardon Mark Rich because he's sleeping with his wife.

01:23:37.120 Precisely.

01:23:37.720 For example.

01:23:39.280 Precisely.

01:23:40.900 You know who else did that?

01:23:43.180 Historians have told us, historians have documented that Abraham Lincoln used to sit up late into the night pardoning people by candlelight because he said, for example, that army deserters shouldn't be executed for cowardice.

01:24:00.640 I agree.

01:24:01.020 He didn't wait until after a congressional election, and neither does this president.

01:24:06.960 Yeah, the British Army disgraced itself by—they murdered a lot of their own men.

01:24:12.080 Yes, they did.

01:24:12.700 Who snapped.

01:24:14.040 Cowardice is contemptible, of course, but you shouldn't kill a boy because he runs away.

01:24:18.600 Exactly.

01:24:19.200 It's disgusting.

01:24:19.940 It's disgusting.

01:24:20.880 It's like, you know, regain your senses for a second.

01:24:24.320 So, anyway, the first five days, you were in shock.

01:24:28.580 I was in shock.

01:24:29.320 I was in prison for 40 minutes, and the only thing that the cop who processed me said to me was, if somebody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression.

01:24:41.160 And I said, great, thank you.

01:24:43.020 And then he walked away.

01:24:44.560 And sure enough, these two guys walk in.

01:24:47.860 One of them had a swastika that took up his entire neck, came up onto his face.

01:24:53.660 The other one had, fuck you, tattooed on his eyelids.

01:24:57.660 It's like kind of a movie.

01:24:58.780 It was nuts.

01:24:59.900 And I jumped up, and I said, what do you want?

01:25:02.600 Because I thought, it's two of them, it's one of me, but I'm going to do my best.

01:25:06.000 You got to, yeah.

01:25:07.780 And the one with the swastika said, are you the CIA guy?

01:25:11.180 And I said, yeah, so?

01:25:13.020 And he said, are you a fag?

01:25:15.060 And I said, no, I'm not a fag.

01:25:18.280 You know, I haven't even said that word in so many years.

01:25:20.940 We're not in Georgetown anymore.

01:25:22.420 And he says, are you a rat?

01:25:26.260 I said, no, I'm not a rat.

01:25:27.740 I didn't have anybody else in my case.

01:25:29.760 And he said, are you a chomo?

01:25:31.340 I said, I don't know what that word means.

01:25:33.640 And he goes, chomo, like I'm stupid.

01:25:36.680 Chomo, child molester.

01:25:38.340 I said, no, I'm not a child molester.

01:25:40.580 And he says, okay, you can sit with the Arians in the cafeteria.

01:25:43.720 And I said, oh, okay then.

01:25:47.280 And you know, funny thing, a year later, I lived right across the hall from a senior captain,

01:25:55.380 the number three in one of New York's five families, right?

01:25:59.400 And he said, great guy, not even good guy, a great guy.

01:26:04.980 I would give him the-

01:26:05.780 A good fellow, really.

01:26:06.360 He was a good fellow.

01:26:07.160 I'd give him the New York Times every day.

01:26:09.240 He would give me the New York Post.

01:26:10.780 So we traded papers every day.

01:26:14.140 So, you know, he got a Christmas card one year from Derek Jeter.

01:26:19.400 That really impressed me.

01:26:21.180 I've met Derek Jeter, nice man.

01:26:22.500 Sweet guy.

01:26:23.080 Yeah, absolutely.

01:26:23.680 So anyway, he said to me, let me ask you something.

01:26:26.900 Why do you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria?

01:26:32.140 I said, I don't know.

01:26:33.380 My first day here, they told me to sit with them.

01:26:35.460 And he says, very dramatically.

01:26:37.160 From today, you're with the Italians.

01:26:42.060 And so from that day, I was with the Italians.

01:26:45.640 And you're still friends with some of them.

01:26:47.020 I am.

01:26:47.360 We were talking about a dinner last night.

01:26:48.820 We talk frequently.

01:26:51.100 Good guys.

01:26:52.340 Yeah.

01:26:52.760 That was a misapplication of federal power.

01:26:55.040 It's like, you know, obviously you don't want, you know, organized crime.

01:26:58.900 On the other hand, like if that's your number one, look at what has happened to America post-mafia.

01:27:03.800 Has it gotten a lot better?

01:27:04.960 Oh, no.

01:27:05.540 I don't think so.

01:27:07.100 No, it hasn't.

01:27:07.740 Bensonhurst is not improved.

01:27:09.300 No, it hasn't.

01:27:10.540 No, I'm aware.

01:27:12.440 I'm aware.

01:27:13.600 They did a better job with Staten Island than the current rulers have.

01:27:17.560 So, at this point, your case is well known, not well, it's known.

01:27:26.460 Okay.

01:27:26.680 I was, I'm in the media, so I'm sort of following it, but I don't really know.

01:27:31.580 It's a leak investigation.

01:27:33.160 You've somehow betrayed your country.

01:27:34.940 That's all we know.

01:27:35.940 Right.

01:27:36.120 But there are some people who are paying attention and they're making a lot of noise, but it doesn't matter.

01:27:43.440 No.

01:27:43.840 It doesn't matter.

01:27:44.940 You know, it's funny.

01:27:45.920 My support came from people on the hard left.

01:27:51.980 Yes.

01:27:52.640 And people on the libertarian right.

01:27:54.340 Right.

01:27:54.500 It led me to the conclusion that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line.

01:27:59.660 No.

01:27:59.920 It's a circle.

01:28:00.740 And it meets at a certain point.

01:28:02.140 Yes.

01:28:02.360 Where civil liberties are concerned.

01:28:04.060 I agree.

01:28:05.100 And so, I started following other people's cases that would never have interested me in the past.

01:28:10.900 And it was always cases dealing with government overreach.

01:28:14.240 Like reassessing Ruby Ridge, right?

01:28:18.820 Or Waco.

01:28:21.080 I mean.

01:28:21.260 I mean, Ruby Ridge was really just absolutely murdered the guy's.

01:28:24.500 In cold blood.

01:28:25.540 Child and his wife.

01:28:26.840 And his wife.

01:28:27.380 Shot his dog.

01:28:29.440 Randy Weaver because his shotgun was two inches too short or something.

01:28:33.560 That's right.

01:28:34.460 Lon Harucci, I think, was the name of the FBI sniper.

01:28:37.600 I want to say it again.

01:28:38.220 That's right.

01:28:38.360 Lon Harucci.

01:28:39.220 Murdered them in cold blood.

01:28:41.400 And shot a woman?

01:28:42.300 Really?

01:28:42.480 Yeah.

01:28:42.700 A woman.

01:28:43.220 Who's just standing in the door.

01:28:44.320 Holding a baby.

01:28:44.960 Holding a baby.

01:28:45.900 Uh-huh.

01:28:47.160 That's right.

01:28:48.240 Yeah.

01:28:48.420 And that was, and by the way, that was not only never punished, Lon Harucci was never

01:28:54.180 punished for that.

01:28:54.980 He should have gone right to prison for murder.

01:28:56.980 And his superiors should have gone right to prison for authorizing that murder.

01:29:00.460 But it was like, at the time it was like, oh, were you a Ruby Ridge person?

01:29:04.880 Like you care?

01:29:05.940 Right.

01:29:06.440 Like you're a wacko or something?

01:29:07.720 So you're some kind of right-wing extremist.

01:29:09.440 Yes.

01:29:10.100 If you say.

01:29:10.420 I was a right-wing extremist.

01:29:11.720 So I knew about it and I was really bothered by it.

01:29:14.800 Right-wing in the sense that I believed in the Bill of Rights.

01:29:17.240 I don't think you should be able to murder women for no reason.

01:29:21.860 People began sending me books by John Whitehead.

01:29:25.540 And I remember just blowing through these books saying, why have I never heard of this

01:29:31.100 guy before?

01:29:31.820 I don't know.

01:29:32.280 I mean, he's talking sense here about government overreach.

01:29:36.240 He had case after case after case.

01:29:37.840 All documented.

01:29:38.800 I have that book on my shelf in my office.

01:29:40.700 Government of Wolves.

01:29:41.400 It's unbelievable.

01:29:43.200 But the media, not to blame everything on the media, but it is kind of the mouthpiece

01:29:47.960 of the blob.

01:29:50.200 Yes, it is.

01:29:51.140 Yeah.

01:29:51.520 The Praetorian Guard, really.

01:29:52.960 The protectors, the bodyguards of the murderers and the liars.

01:29:56.900 They just, man, they swarmed anybody who expressed concern about these cases.

01:30:02.740 That's right.

01:30:03.460 They try to paint you as a radical.

01:30:05.480 A conspiracy theorist.

01:30:06.680 A conspiracy theorist, a term that was created by the CIA, by the way.

01:30:10.580 Yes.

01:30:11.400 Who shot the man's wife.

01:30:13.260 So this, so you, your views, and I should have done a, people can Google you and I hope

01:30:19.460 that they will, but it's hard to overstate the departure that this turn is from the rest

01:30:24.720 of your life.

01:30:25.540 Oh, yeah.

01:30:25.780 Because you weren't a CIA paramilitary.

01:30:28.460 You were an actual, just like officer.

01:30:30.780 Case officer, yeah.

01:30:31.540 Case officer.

01:30:32.000 Recruiting spies to steal secrets.

01:30:34.580 Multilingual.

01:30:35.260 You speak Greek.

01:30:36.000 You speak Arabic, which is like considered basically impossible for native English speakers.

01:30:40.280 You're a scholar, literally, and kind of an academic in some ways.

01:30:46.000 I mean, right?

01:30:46.800 I'm a professor of intelligence studies now at the University of Salamanca in Spain,

01:30:51.560 and I taught for four years at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

01:30:56.520 Right.

01:30:56.940 And it's funny, when they called me to hire me, I said, wow, I'm flattered, but you and

01:31:02.520 I probably disagree on 99% of the issues.

01:31:05.540 Why would you want me to teach in the Jesse Helms School of Government?

01:31:09.780 And the dean said, because torture is not Christian.

01:31:12.920 It certainly isn't.

01:31:13.820 And I said, you know what?

01:31:14.660 I'll take the job.

01:31:15.460 It certainly isn't.

01:31:16.380 And I love those guys.

01:31:17.400 I'm still in touch with them.

01:31:18.640 Because unarmed, defenseless people is immoral.

01:31:21.620 It is.

01:31:22.080 And it's also just dishonorable in the most secular terms.

01:31:25.080 That's right.

01:31:25.640 If a man is handcuffed, you don't punch him in the face because it's bad for him, but

01:31:29.040 it also degrades you.

01:31:30.280 That's right.

01:31:30.800 It does.

01:31:31.140 It degrades you.

01:31:32.000 It's not how honorable men behave.

01:31:33.720 PTSD and moral injury are real.

01:31:36.480 I totally agree.

01:31:37.380 We damage ourselves.

01:31:38.740 It's also disgusting.

01:31:39.680 Like, what is this anyway?

01:31:41.280 I mean, I sort of believe that the country was good because it was virtuous.

01:31:45.860 And like, certain things we don't do because we're above that.

01:31:49.660 We don't send our wives to go fight wars for us.

01:31:51.880 We don't torture people who are chained because they can't fight back.

01:31:56.280 That's right.

01:31:57.320 What is this anyway?

01:31:58.540 What is this?

01:31:59.800 And then what happens when you go in and you say, oh, I accidentally killed him.

01:32:03.780 Oh, well.

01:32:05.280 Just bury him out back.

01:32:06.520 That's literally what they did.

01:32:08.180 Actually.

01:32:08.540 Just bury him out back.

01:32:09.560 Yeah.

01:32:12.020 It's just hard to make a moral case for the things that you're doing when you behave that way.

01:32:17.820 Agreed.

01:32:18.260 And to see once again, the only man who tells the truth face the penalty and the liars thrive is really dispiriting.

01:32:29.900 It is.

01:32:30.660 I'm confident things are going to turn around.

01:32:32.500 I think so, too.

01:32:33.340 I hope so.

01:32:34.180 I pray that.

01:32:34.860 Thank you.

01:32:35.000 So, how long were you in prison in the end?

01:32:37.220 23 months.

01:32:38.300 I didn't get a single day of halfway house time.

01:32:42.740 They made sure that I did every day of that sentence.

01:32:46.620 They had to take seven months off for good behavior.

01:32:50.040 They had to because it's legally mandated.

01:32:53.720 But I was in that prison for every last day that they could get out of me.

01:32:58.600 Were any elected officials sympathetic at all?

01:33:06.200 Yeah.

01:33:07.260 Well, yes.

01:33:09.840 But none were really willing to go out on a limb.

01:33:13.460 Gus Bilirakis, who's a congressman from Florida, he was very supportive and friendly.

01:33:19.240 I should add, it wasn't just Gus.

01:33:21.000 Gus is a sweetheart of a guy.

01:33:22.880 It was the whole Greek-American community.

01:33:25.180 I was going to say, man, they're cohesive.

01:33:27.440 They are.

01:33:28.100 We stick together.

01:33:28.800 I'm aware of them.

01:33:29.700 Yes.

01:33:30.080 So, they really went to the mat for me.

01:33:31.760 I got fantastic press coverage in Greece.

01:33:34.460 The Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law when I got out of prison.

01:33:39.240 It was my first trip.

01:33:40.300 I had to get permission from the judge to travel because I had just gotten out of prison.

01:33:45.800 So, that was fun.

01:33:47.480 But really, and Jim Moran, who was a Democratic congressman from, Jim was very helpful.

01:33:54.980 Very, very helpful.

01:33:56.920 But that was it besides the two of them.

01:33:59.620 Moran was, I don't even know if he's still alive.

01:34:01.680 I knew Moran pretty well.

01:34:03.640 Yep.

01:34:03.880 Drank too much, had a florid and wild private life, like crazy town.

01:34:10.080 And I disagreed with him on all domestic policy issues passionately because he was very liberal.

01:34:15.880 But his foreign policy views were out of the mainstream.

01:34:19.820 Yes.

01:34:19.960 He was not a neocon.

01:34:21.220 Right.

01:34:21.820 And boy, watching the job they did on Jim Moran.

01:34:26.460 How many times did they primary him?

01:34:28.500 Jeremy Bash ran against him, ghouls like that.

01:34:30.520 Right.

01:34:30.680 Who was just like on the merits.

01:34:32.600 So, Jim Moran seemed like possibly hadn't honored his marriage vows and drank too much.

01:34:37.580 Okay.

01:34:38.080 Okay.

01:34:38.620 And he was like a loud mouth and he was always ready to beat people up.

01:34:41.440 He was like this big Irish guy.

01:34:43.320 Okay.

01:34:43.760 Got it.

01:34:44.140 Those were his sins as I understand them.

01:34:46.400 The people who were against him had like committed genocide.

01:34:49.020 Yeah.

01:34:49.400 Right.

01:34:50.440 Right.

01:34:51.000 And they were like, it was crazy.

01:34:53.420 It was crazy.

01:34:54.240 And they systematically destroyed Jim Moran's life.

01:34:59.080 Uh-huh.

01:34:59.400 They did.

01:34:59.660 They were asking like pretty obvious questions.

01:35:01.400 Like, why did 9-11 happen?

01:35:03.360 Right.

01:35:04.100 No, they don't want to talk about that.

01:35:04.900 Shouldn't we know?

01:35:06.100 You'd think.

01:35:07.020 Assuming that it was exactly what they told us it was, which was this group of 19 Arabs,

01:35:12.760 mostly Saudis, decided to, you know, attack the United States, whatever.

01:35:16.060 Let's just say that's true.

01:35:17.960 I'm assuming it is true.

01:35:19.400 Mm-hmm.

01:35:20.420 Why did they do that?

01:35:21.480 Why were they willing to die for that?

01:35:22.800 Like, what were they mad about?

01:35:24.040 But that's the question.

01:35:24.300 What were they mad about?

01:35:25.380 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:25.560 That's what Jim Moran asked.

01:35:26.760 And I'm like, oh, by the way, Jim Moran.

01:35:28.700 And then they like plastered, they Glenn Greenwald him.

01:35:32.560 Yes.

01:35:33.040 Big time.

01:35:33.480 They did.

01:35:34.320 And they kind of drove him out.

01:35:36.080 And I think he lost his seat in the end.

01:35:38.660 He retired.

01:35:39.720 Oh, he did.

01:35:40.200 Okay.

01:35:40.340 And he's at a political consulting from McLean, Virginia.

01:35:45.000 I ran into him at a conference about a year ago.

01:35:47.120 No way.

01:35:47.620 Yeah.

01:35:48.080 He's a lovely man.

01:35:49.960 He really is.

01:35:50.480 I always secretly liked him.

01:35:52.180 I had him on.

01:35:52.900 I interviewed him a lot.

01:35:54.420 And he would get, you know, per his ethnic stereotype, he'd get like red in the face.

01:35:58.980 I was sort of like, spit would come out.

01:36:02.340 But I kind of, you know, he was like a, I liked him.

01:36:05.200 Yeah.

01:36:05.860 Still, sorry, not to.

01:36:07.120 And Gus Bilirakis is one of those guys who's just a genuinely nice guy.

01:36:12.440 And he's actually, he's quite an accomplished legislator, which he doesn't get a lot of credit

01:36:17.520 for, but he's a good guy.

01:36:21.340 And so, you know, a fellow Greek American needed some help and he was there to help.

01:36:26.580 Wow.

01:36:27.220 Have you ever had any contact with CIA since you got out of prison?

01:36:31.640 No.

01:36:32.460 Well, not other than sending articles and books in for clearance.

01:36:38.260 Right.

01:36:38.820 No.

01:36:39.400 You know, when I got out of prison, I finished house arrest.

01:36:43.220 I had 90 days of house arrest.

01:36:44.700 And, uh, and people started calling me, Hey, let's meet for lunch or let's have a pizza

01:36:49.400 or whatever.

01:36:50.800 And every time I would go to meet them, I'd be under surveillance.

01:36:54.340 And the first few times still.

01:36:56.240 Yeah.

01:36:56.600 But from whom?

01:36:58.140 It had to be the FBI.

01:36:59.880 It could have been the CIA.

01:37:01.380 On what basis could they justify surveilling you?

01:37:03.080 They sent you to prison for an ABC interview.

01:37:05.100 And it's done.

01:37:05.780 It's all done.

01:37:06.580 I'm just going to go have a pizza.

01:37:07.860 And moreover, by this point, a congressional investigation has confirmed that you were telling the truth.

01:37:13.300 You're exactly right.

01:37:13.980 And this is just, this is now on Wikipedia.

01:37:17.820 But Barack Obama was still in the White House.

01:37:21.440 Now, why was he mad at you?

01:37:23.740 I don't think he knew who I was one way or the other.

01:37:26.700 I think that Brendan White-Timmons said, there's this very dangerous guy, insider threat from the CIA.

01:37:32.740 He leaked to the press.

01:37:34.420 And Obama just said, vaya con Dios.

01:37:37.780 You know?

01:37:38.420 He's a cold man.

01:37:39.760 Yeah.

01:37:39.900 He doesn't care.

01:37:40.640 No, he doesn't care.

01:37:41.340 So, part of the reason that this has to be precedent, they cannot allow a CIA officer to break ranks.

01:37:48.000 This is what's very dangerous.

01:37:49.700 There actually was a legal precedent that was set in my case.

01:37:53.300 And it was one of the things used against President Trump in the documents case.

01:38:01.100 I was charged in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is called the espionage court, for a couple of reasons.

01:38:07.700 No, I'm aware.

01:38:08.380 No, no national security defendant has ever won a case there, ever.

01:38:13.280 And it's the home of the Pentagon, the CIA, all the defense contractors.

01:38:17.220 So, we made 100 motions to use 100 classified documents that we received in discovery in my defense.

01:38:30.500 And we asked the judge to block off three days to hear our motions.

01:38:34.160 And we walked into the courtroom, and she says, I'm going to make everybody's day much easier, and I'm going to just deny all 100 of these motions.

01:38:44.840 You can't use any of these documents in the case.

01:38:48.220 And my lawyer said, Your Honor, it's our whole defense.

01:38:52.480 You're saying that we can't mount a defense.

01:38:54.800 And she said, Classified is classified.

01:38:57.400 So, you can't use the classified documents to defend him.

01:39:01.680 So, as we were walking out, I said to my lawyer, What just happened?

01:39:06.980 And he said, We just lost the case.

01:39:08.620 That's what happened.

01:39:09.660 And I said, Well, now what do we do?

01:39:11.200 He said, Now we talk about a plea.

01:39:12.960 So, the government charges you with a death penalty offense and gets to decide what you can talk about in court?

01:39:20.080 In fact, they made a list of words that I wasn't allowed to use in court.

01:39:23.360 Like, I could not use the word whistleblower.

01:39:26.300 I had to use the words swimming pool.

01:39:29.400 There's a whole list.

01:39:31.000 So, Swimming pool?

01:39:32.460 Uh-huh.

01:39:32.900 Because the word whistleblower, in and of itself, they deemed to be classified.

01:39:37.980 And so, I couldn't say, I'm a whistleblower.

01:39:40.620 On what grounds?

01:39:41.900 How is it classified?

01:39:42.580 They say so.

01:39:44.040 The secret word?

01:39:44.740 Uh-huh.

01:39:45.200 So, they invoked something called the CIPA, the Classified Information Protection Act.

01:39:50.760 So, they would clear the courtroom every time I had a hearing.

01:39:54.520 They would put plastic tarp over the windows and tape it up so nobody could shoot a laser beam at the window and listen to the vibrations and hear classified information.

01:40:04.120 There was the list of banned words, like whistleblower.

01:40:08.080 Wait.

01:40:09.120 Yeah.

01:40:10.500 Whistleblower.

01:40:12.100 Absurd.

01:40:12.580 So, the physical security of the United States depended upon you not using the word whistleblower.

01:40:18.740 Yeah.

01:40:19.400 That was it.

01:40:20.660 And so, my lawyer said to the judge, well, the judge said, his reason for blowing the whistle is irrelevant.

01:40:32.920 The question is, does the intelligence community say that he violated the Espionage Act?

01:40:37.900 The answer is yes.

01:40:38.680 And my lawyer said, your honor, are you saying that a person can accidentally commit espionage?

01:40:47.200 And she said, that's exactly what I'm saying.

01:40:50.160 Who is this judge?

01:40:51.060 Her name was Liany Brinkema.

01:40:52.680 She was a Clinton appointee.

01:40:55.420 Was she not bright or was she just so committed to the status quo, to the intel community?

01:41:02.420 Oh, she's committed.

01:41:03.280 She reserves every national security case for herself.

01:41:05.680 They're supposed to go into a wheel, right, and be chosen randomly.

01:41:09.520 She had Julian Assange.

01:41:10.820 She had the Ed Snowden case, which never came.

01:41:13.420 She had my case.

01:41:14.360 She had Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA whistleblower.

01:41:17.200 Every national security case.

01:41:18.180 She had Zacharias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker.

01:41:21.760 So, she reserves these cases for herself and everybody gets the maximum.

01:41:25.000 So, she said, in response to my attorney.

01:41:30.900 She sounds like a scary person.

01:41:32.500 Oh, she was terrifying.

01:41:34.880 That the definition of whistleblower.

01:41:37.280 First, she said, I'm not respecting a precedent set in the Federal District of Maryland.

01:41:42.240 She's not respecting it in the Tom Drake case, where the judge ruled that there had to be some harm to the national security.

01:41:49.440 There was no harm in my case.

01:41:51.280 Nobody was harmed, literally.

01:41:53.320 The name that I confirmed was never made public.

01:41:57.040 Never.

01:41:58.160 So, nobody was harmed.

01:42:00.380 So, she says, the definition.

01:42:03.540 And actually, you were speaking out against harm.

01:42:05.860 Yeah, I was speaking out against harm.

01:42:07.240 She says, the definition of espionage is providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.

01:42:16.600 Period.

01:42:19.120 That's espionage?

01:42:21.280 In her view.

01:42:22.920 I mean, it may be illegal, but it's not.

01:42:25.420 Espionage is spying for a foreign country.

01:42:29.260 Correct.

01:42:30.380 Daniel Ellsberg called me.

01:42:31.900 He and I became very close friends over this whole thing.

01:42:35.040 And he said, I'm going to ask you to do something that's completely selfless.

01:42:39.740 I'm going to ask you to go to trial because we can only challenge the constitutionality of the Espionage Act if somebody goes to trial and is convicted.

01:42:49.840 I said, Dan, I have five kids.

01:42:52.380 I can't go to trial.

01:42:53.880 So, he asked Jeffrey Sterling to do it.

01:42:57.060 Jeffrey did go to trial, was convicted.

01:42:59.840 The judge saw that this conviction was kind of trumped up.

01:43:03.120 And so, he was convicted of nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage.

01:43:08.200 And to use her words, I'm giving you Kiriakou plus 12 months.

01:43:13.400 That's what she said at sentencing.

01:43:15.340 I'm giving you Kiriakou plus 12 months.

01:43:17.360 Who is he alleged to have spied for?

01:43:20.460 No one.

01:43:21.140 He gave an interview to the New York Times about the racial discrimination suit that he had filed against the CIA.

01:43:32.340 They passed him over for a promotion just because he was black.

01:43:36.100 And then they had the temerity to tell him, we're not promoting you because you're black.

01:43:42.060 And he said, when did you realize I was black?

01:43:44.400 Like, the irony is that there's a lot of espionage in Washington.

01:43:50.440 Apparently, yeah.

01:43:51.960 Well, I mean, there is.

01:43:52.580 Every intelligence service in the world has its officers in Washington.

01:43:57.420 There are also people who work for the U.S. government who, without any kind of authorization,

01:44:01.980 give highly relevant classified information to foreign governments.

01:44:07.000 Yes.

01:44:07.620 Yeah.

01:44:08.480 Every day.

01:44:08.840 I know that for a fact.

01:44:10.520 And I know people who've done it.

01:44:12.700 And none of them is in jail.

01:44:14.400 No.

01:44:16.000 No, none of them.

01:44:17.200 None of them is in jail.

01:44:18.140 And it's also fair to say the U.S. government is penetrated by foreign actors.

01:44:23.360 Yes.

01:44:23.940 Yes.

01:44:24.760 And it has been for a long time.

01:44:26.420 Yes, I'm aware.

01:44:28.580 And I don't think anyone goes to jail for that.

01:44:31.100 No.

01:44:31.780 Right.

01:44:32.040 You know, I tried a couple of times to get a pardon under Presidents Obama and Biden thinking

01:44:42.100 that most of my contacts in the Greek American community had access to those presidents.

01:44:47.700 I was laughed out of the room under Obama.

01:44:50.920 And I knew I would be.

01:44:53.440 Under Biden, there's a Greek Orthodox priest who very generously offered his access to the White House.

01:45:02.800 That, can I just, just note parenthetically, I don't think there are a lot of Greek liberals left.

01:45:07.840 No, there aren't.

01:45:08.640 There used to be.

01:45:09.500 There used to be.

01:45:10.040 They used to be almost all liberals.

01:45:11.680 Yeah.

01:45:11.920 And they've all moved.

01:45:13.080 I've noticed.

01:45:14.300 I don't think I've met a Greek liberal in a long time.

01:45:17.180 No.

01:45:17.860 They're just not out there anymore.

01:45:19.260 Yeah.

01:45:19.720 So he said, look, you know, I've known Biden since the early 70s.

01:45:23.040 I can help you.

01:45:24.760 And then nothing.

01:45:26.580 And I called him and I said, Father, forgive me for being so blunt, but maybe if I had been,

01:45:32.260 you know, a crackhead relative of the president or a Chinese spy or a judge that sold children

01:45:41.260 into bondage in Pennsylvania, maybe then I would have had a chance.

01:45:45.860 But Joe Biden doesn't want to hear about a case like mine.

01:45:49.600 And the truth is, and I mentioned this to you yesterday, my support comes exclusively from

01:45:57.780 the Republican Party, the libertarian movement, and the conservative movement.

01:46:02.980 And I embrace it.

01:46:05.140 That's just wild, though.

01:46:06.640 Because they're the ones thinking about civil liberties now.

01:46:09.960 They're the ones thinking about individual freedoms.

01:46:14.700 You know, what's his name?

01:46:16.820 Hakeem Jeffries the other day said, Vladimir Putin is an avowed enemy of the United States.

01:46:25.280 No, he's not.

01:46:26.540 That's a neocon position.

01:46:28.580 When did he take a vow?

01:46:30.600 He said he was an avowed enemy.

01:46:32.860 When did he take a vow that he was going to be an enemy of the United States?

01:46:36.320 No.

01:46:36.580 Stop trying to lie us into a war or trick us into a war.

01:46:41.360 But that's today's Democratic Party.

01:46:43.160 Oh, I'm aware.

01:46:45.420 It's, um, are you, do you think, I mean, the kind of casual cruelty and violence in the CIA

01:46:55.080 that you describe, I haven't seen any meaningful attempt to stop it.

01:46:59.520 Oh, no, no.

01:47:00.520 No, no, I agree.

01:47:02.120 Very strongly.

01:47:03.420 Do you believe that the CIA has hurt other American citizens?

01:47:08.700 Yes.

01:47:09.660 I'm sure of it.

01:47:11.560 Yes.

01:47:12.000 What about physically?

01:47:14.140 Well, there are two very well-documented cases where Barack Obama used a drone to murder

01:47:20.700 Anwar al-Aki.

01:47:22.100 Yep.

01:47:22.820 And whether you like the man's politics or not, he was an American citizen who had never

01:47:27.900 been charged with a crime.

01:47:29.180 And then a week later, Obama droned his 16-year-old son and 14-year-old nephew who were sitting

01:47:36.820 in a coffee shop having a cup of tea.

01:47:40.880 Also, American citizens who had never been charged with a crime and they were children.

01:47:45.540 So, yeah, the CIA does all kinds of things like that.

01:47:48.920 What about domestically?

01:47:50.580 Well, you know, I keep thinking back to Eric Holder's testimony before the Senate Armed Services

01:47:58.980 Committee when Rand Paul asked him, does the president have the legal authority to murder

01:48:04.740 an American on U.S. soil?

01:48:07.780 Well, Senator, you know, just answer the question.

01:48:11.600 Say yes or no question.

01:48:13.420 Yes.

01:48:14.320 He has the authority.

01:48:16.160 Now, has he done that?

01:48:17.700 We didn't know.

01:48:19.160 But the attorney general of the United States said that the president can murder an American

01:48:24.660 citizen in the United States if the president believes that he presents a clear and present

01:48:31.360 danger to the national security.

01:48:33.520 That's sick.

01:48:35.160 It's unbelievable.

01:48:36.240 It's anti-constitutional.

01:48:38.620 Not just unconstitutional.

01:48:40.120 It's anti-constitutional.

01:48:42.140 Do people who work at the CIA have a sense that maybe they're not?

01:48:45.540 Not serving good?

01:48:47.860 Generally, no.

01:48:50.160 Generally, these are, I mean, at the working level, these are hardworking, really smart,

01:48:57.580 patriotic people.

01:48:58.340 Some of them are really smart.

01:48:59.380 I can confirm that.

01:49:00.160 Yeah, really smart.

01:49:01.880 At the upper levels, you know, they believe they're the smartest people in the room.

01:49:08.520 They're smarter than whoever happens to be president at any given time.

01:49:12.000 And if they don't like this president, they just wait him out.

01:49:15.260 He'll be gone in four years.

01:49:16.560 They'll still be there in their still senior positions.

01:49:19.120 And they're going to do exactly what they want to do.

01:49:21.380 You know, this is why they panicked when Ronald Reagan named an outsider as the deputy director for operations.

01:49:30.220 Remember?

01:49:31.100 Do I remember?

01:49:31.900 They lost it.

01:49:33.500 Because they were like, oh, my God.

01:49:34.900 Okay, you appoint your campaign manager, the director.

01:49:38.520 That's one thing.

01:49:39.420 But now operations, you're going to bring a friend from Wall Street or wherever he was.

01:49:43.020 He was an attorney.

01:49:44.720 Yeah.

01:49:45.520 Yeah.

01:49:46.060 I would.

01:49:46.800 I think that's when they called in Bob Woodward to blow them up, right?

01:49:50.120 The former naval intel officer, Bob Woodward.

01:49:52.540 Oh, I'll tell you.

01:49:53.180 Yeah, not the only time Bob Woodward has been called in by the national security state to destroy Americans.

01:49:58.620 Well, when I was the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, I had just finished writing a cable.

01:50:05.960 I had this lovely private office, and it looked out past the secretary into the hallway.

01:50:11.280 So I finished writing, and I leaned back like this in my chair, and I happened to be looking at the hall, and Bob Woodward walked by.

01:50:18.380 And I said to the secretary, was that Bob Woodward that just walked by the office?

01:50:24.640 And she said, yeah.

01:50:26.160 And I said, without a security escort, like he owns the place.

01:50:29.740 And she said, you didn't see the memo?

01:50:32.000 I said, what memo?

01:50:33.720 She said, George, George Tenet.

01:50:35.580 She said, George sent a memo saying that Woodward's writing a book, and we're all ordered to cooperate with him.

01:50:40.820 I said, I'm not talking to Bob Woodward.

01:50:45.080 I couldn't believe it.

01:50:46.180 He's just a great reporter.

01:50:47.320 Come on, John.

01:50:48.820 He's free to walk around.

01:50:49.820 That's called shoe leather.

01:50:50.580 He's not.

01:50:51.140 You're talking about people that have been undercover or deep cover for decades, and he's just walking the halls.

01:50:56.440 He's not an instrument of the government.

01:50:58.840 He's a counterbalance.

01:51:00.500 He's a check against their overreach.

01:51:02.660 Right.

01:51:03.060 He's a journalist.

01:51:04.140 They're going to run with that.

01:51:06.200 It's so absurd.

01:51:08.000 I was shocked.

01:51:10.220 What did you think of Bill Burns?

01:51:12.320 I wrote an op-ed when Bill Burns was appointed.

01:51:16.640 The former ambassador to Russia.

01:51:18.880 Yes.

01:51:19.520 And then up until January, the CIA director.

01:51:22.480 I said that I disagreed with his position on Russia, as I think every free-thinking American should, but we needed an outsider in that job.

01:51:37.420 Having insiders is a mistake.

01:51:40.080 You know, Obama proved that.

01:51:42.860 Having insiders.

01:51:43.740 Clinton proved that.

01:51:45.180 It's just a mistake.

01:51:46.760 It's incestuous.

01:51:48.180 And they feed on each other.

01:51:50.160 Yes.

01:51:50.220 So, you needed an outsider.

01:51:52.240 Bill Burns was one of the most highly respected ambassadors that we had in the State Department.

01:51:56.180 That is true.

01:51:56.840 And I called him the adult in the room.

01:51:59.440 Mm-hmm.

01:51:59.880 And I thought, you know, if we have to have a Washington insider in that position, he was a good choice.

01:52:09.080 Yep.

01:52:09.660 That sounds right from everything I know about him.

01:52:12.200 So, when you worked there, did anyone ever talk about the murder of the president in 1963?

01:52:21.200 Yeah.

01:52:23.900 Oliver Stone and I got into quite a spirited argument about this one time.

01:52:29.060 Because I made the mistake of saying that I didn't think we had given enough thought to the involvement, the possible involvement of Santo Traficante.

01:52:41.020 And the mob.

01:52:43.920 And he said, oh, you're so full of shit, he says.

01:52:46.740 And he just started yelling at me.

01:52:49.800 I came to my own conclusion.

01:52:52.440 I talked to Bobby Kennedy about this, too.

01:52:54.720 Actually, he's the one that pushed me over the edge and led me to this conclusion.

01:53:01.080 I believe that elements of the CIA were responsible for the assassination of the president.

01:53:07.380 I don't agree when people say it was a CIA operation because John McCone was the head of the CIA and he was Bobby Kennedy's best friend.

01:53:16.980 A name forgotten to history.

01:53:18.240 That's right.

01:53:18.880 And a good and decent man.

01:53:20.300 But there were a lot of people, unfortunately, one was a Greek American who, very famously, very famous Greek American, his name does not bear repeating, who hated John Kennedy for not providing air cover for the Bay of Pigs.

01:53:40.040 Yes.

01:53:40.300 And wanted revenge against Kennedy.

01:53:42.720 And these guys were still in constant touch with the Dulles brothers, who were also just dark stains on American history.

01:53:50.960 And so I came to the conclusion that, yeah, there were CIA officers who were responsible for carrying this thing out.

01:53:58.480 Did you think that when you worked there?

01:53:59.900 No, I didn't.

01:54:01.300 In fact, I thought it was so absurd, I couldn't believe people were even talking about it.

01:54:05.180 Really?

01:54:05.800 Yeah.

01:54:06.780 Yeah.

01:54:07.220 It's like, we're the good guys.

01:54:08.780 Yeah.

01:54:09.060 Why would we kill the president?

01:54:10.380 I thought the same.

01:54:12.900 Why haven't all the files been released?

01:54:18.180 I genuinely don't know.

01:54:20.560 For JFK, I think they have been.

01:54:23.240 No, they have not.

01:54:24.020 They have not.

01:54:24.660 No.

01:54:25.980 That frightens me.

01:54:27.220 You know, there were a couple of explosive revelations in the last tranche.

01:54:32.100 The fact that James Angleton, the deputy director for counterintelligence, wanted to recruit, to formally recruit Lee Harvey Oswald, is exactly the opposite of what the CIA has been telling us for so many years.

01:54:47.060 Yes.

01:54:47.380 For 60 years.

01:54:49.880 Why?

01:54:50.320 If the Russians came to the conclusion that he was just a nut when he was living in Minsk and didn't want him to come back, why was the CIA involved, or interested rather, in recruiting him?

01:55:05.900 What was he doing in Mexico City in October of 1963?

01:55:12.620 He said, or not he said, but the CIA has said over the years that he was there to go to the Cuban and Soviet embassies to try to get visas.

01:55:20.340 Why was he meeting with Americans?

01:55:22.400 And were those American CIA officers?

01:55:24.740 Of course they were.

01:55:26.280 Why else would he have gone to Mexico City?

01:55:28.400 Yes.

01:55:28.500 I'm actually more interested in the RFK and the MLK documents.

01:55:34.980 There is so much that we don't know about those two, especially RFK.

01:55:41.100 They recovered one more bullet than Sirhan Sirhan's gun held.

01:55:48.420 And Thomas Noguchi.

01:55:50.140 And this is confirmed.

01:55:51.280 Yes.

01:55:51.940 And Thomas Noguchi.

01:55:53.220 Well, then that's kind of case closed.

01:55:54.840 Then.

01:55:55.620 There it is.

01:55:56.600 Right.

01:55:56.840 I mean, we don't know what happened.

01:55:58.640 We know the official explanation is untrue.

01:56:00.540 It's untrue.

01:56:01.760 So.

01:56:02.180 Because it was a revolver.

01:56:03.200 It was a .22 caliber revolver.

01:56:04.740 Correct.

01:56:05.240 It was like a nine shot.

01:56:06.300 That's right.

01:56:06.720 .22s fit a lot in the cylinder.

01:56:08.960 Mm-hmm.

01:56:10.560 Is that, I did not know that.

01:56:12.300 Yeah.

01:56:12.660 And Thomas Noguchi, the coroner.

01:56:14.640 Yeah.

01:56:14.880 Said that the death shot came from behind.

01:56:19.060 Yep.

01:56:19.620 At an angle from down on the ground.

01:56:23.200 But Sirhan was in front of him.

01:56:24.940 Yes.

01:56:25.260 There was a, there was a security guard there who was not associated with the Kennedy campaign

01:56:31.600 or with the.

01:56:33.940 Ambassador Hotel.

01:56:34.840 Yeah.

01:56:35.120 The Ambassador Hotel named Caesar.

01:56:37.900 Mm-hmm.

01:56:38.600 He was a well-known racist and white supremacist.

01:56:44.300 On video, you see him lifting a gun out of his belt and then you hear bang, bang, bang,

01:56:50.200 bang, bang, bang.

01:56:50.860 And he puts it back in the belt.

01:56:52.480 He never got it fully out.

01:56:53.620 In the 90s, the National Geographic channel tracked him down to Mississippi or Alabama

01:57:00.900 or something.

01:57:01.780 And they interviewed him.

01:57:02.860 And they said, did you shoot Robert Kennedy?

01:57:05.340 And he said, no, I was going to.

01:57:07.960 But that Arab fella got him first.

01:57:11.080 Well, we know that there had to be somebody else in the kitchen at the Ambassador.

01:57:15.620 And we know that the shot came from behind.

01:57:19.480 We know that there was a second gun because there were too many bullets.

01:57:24.680 So why hasn't this been released?

01:57:27.300 Yes.

01:57:27.820 And it raises the really obvious question, which was, I mean, we know Sirhan had a gun.

01:57:34.480 Yes.

01:57:35.000 Fired.

01:57:35.360 Fired the gun.

01:57:35.780 He was on film.

01:57:37.380 Correct.

01:57:38.100 Lots of people there, including lots of famous people.

01:57:40.300 Yeah.

01:57:40.420 Rosie Greer.

01:57:41.020 Rosie Greer.

01:57:41.980 Yeah.

01:57:42.200 Right.

01:57:42.580 God bless him.

01:57:42.920 So Kennedy had just won the California primary.

01:57:45.620 Johnson had announced a few months before that he's not running.

01:57:48.660 Bobby Kennedy clearly is going to be the Democratic nominee.

01:57:52.340 He's murdered that night after his victory speech, walking through the kitchen of this

01:57:56.300 now demolished hotel in Los Angeles.

01:57:58.300 Yes.

01:57:59.700 Sirhan Sirhan, a Christian Palestinian from a very poor family, was arrested for it.

01:58:06.420 His apartment is searched, and there are all kinds of papers where he writes,

01:58:10.600 RFK must die, RFK must die, over and over again.

01:58:15.120 He has said, he's still alive, by the way.

01:58:17.280 Oh, yeah.

01:58:17.580 And still in prison.

01:58:18.740 Yes, he is.

01:58:19.780 And, I mean, that was before I was born, and I'm 56, so it was quite some time ago.

01:58:25.840 What was that?

01:58:27.860 Well, that's the $64,000 question.

01:58:31.500 Yes.

01:58:32.440 Because now there are rumors that when he was at whatever it's called, Los Angeles Community

01:58:42.180 College or whatever the community college there was, that he may have participated in experiments

01:58:48.900 that fell under a CIA operation then known as MKUltra.

01:58:53.680 Yes.

01:58:53.980 So, what's the truth?

01:58:56.680 Now, Director Helms, during the Nixon administration, or during, I guess it was the Ford administration,

01:59:04.740 ordered that the MKUltra documents be destroyed.

01:59:07.320 Which they were.

01:59:08.060 Which they were.

01:59:08.760 After being specifically told it's a crime to destroy federal documents.

01:59:14.540 And they don't belong to you.

01:59:15.520 Right.

01:59:16.480 Exactly.

01:59:17.580 Do you think it's, and this is a debate about, you know, a lot of different people in Louis

01:59:23.380 Drill and West and the CIA-affiliated psychiatrists.

01:59:27.020 Right.

01:59:28.140 Do you think it is possible to get people to commit acts that they wouldn't otherwise commit?

01:59:36.960 I do.

01:59:37.700 You do?

01:59:38.280 I do.

01:59:39.140 You said there are a lot of shrinks at CIA.

01:59:41.380 Oh, my God.

01:59:42.280 There are offices where everybody is either a psychiatrist or a psychologist.

01:59:47.980 And they're operational psychiatrists and psychologists.

01:59:50.560 So, you take them with you on an operation to consult with them on how do you get this

01:59:54.960 guy to crack.

01:59:55.900 You want him to just lose his mind.

01:59:57.360 What do I need to do to push this guy over the edge?

01:59:59.780 Right.

02:00:00.160 Or what do I need to do to convince this guy to do something that he definitely doesn't

02:00:03.740 want to do?

02:00:05.080 I used those shrinks on operations.

02:00:08.200 We even hypnotized one guy.

02:00:10.280 He was hypnotized with his arm in the air for two hours.

02:00:13.000 Never saw anything like it in my life.

02:00:14.540 And then when he took him out of the hypnosis, his arm fell down.

02:00:18.080 He looked around.

02:00:18.880 He said, what happened?

02:00:19.700 And then he vomited.

02:00:21.280 I've never seen anything like it in my life.

02:00:24.080 So, people-

02:00:25.100 Did it work?

02:00:26.020 It did work.

02:00:27.740 Yeah.

02:00:28.000 We asked him, I'm getting a little off the subject, but we asked him-

02:00:32.800 No, this is definitely the subject.

02:00:34.140 ...about a political assassination that had taken place that he had claimed to see.

02:00:39.100 So, the guy didn't speak any English.

02:00:44.320 So, the shrink is asking questions, and I'm translating the questions as softly and as

02:00:50.160 gently as I can.

02:00:51.580 Right?

02:00:51.980 Into Arabic.

02:00:52.240 Yes.

02:00:53.840 And I'm asking him, what did you see?

02:00:56.880 Well, the guy had stopped at a mosque, at this little small roadside mosque to relieve himself.

02:01:04.860 So, he's behind a tree, and a car pulls up.

02:01:10.340 And it's these people who had been identified as the shooters in an assassination that had just taken place.

02:01:18.440 And I said, so, describe the guys.

02:01:20.620 And he's describing what they're wearing.

02:01:22.740 And I said, what kind of car are they driving?

02:01:24.760 They're driving a van.

02:01:26.500 I said, does the van have a license plate?

02:01:29.240 He said, yes.

02:01:30.500 I said, can you see the license plate?

02:01:32.900 And he goes, his eyes are closed, and he goes like this.

02:01:36.020 And then he reads off the numbers and letters to me.

02:01:39.620 So, I hand it to another officer that was in the room, runs into the next room,

02:01:45.640 does a cable to the country, intelligence service.

02:01:52.700 It comes back, stolen plates.

02:01:56.540 I said, my God, he actually did see the plates.

02:01:59.980 The plates were stolen specifically for use in that assassination.

02:02:04.720 Amazing.

02:02:05.540 So, you can convince people to do things that they otherwise would never dream of doing.

02:02:11.220 So, mind control is not a sci-fi fantasy?

02:02:14.460 No.

02:02:15.720 No.

02:02:16.420 MKUltra did far, far more damage.

02:02:20.440 Caused just grief and misery to hundreds of people, maybe more.

02:02:27.280 And there are subsets, like MK Chickwit.

02:02:30.660 And there are like five or six other sub-operations that were part of MKUltra

02:02:35.440 that just caused people to jump out of windows and commit suicide, jump off bridges.

02:02:42.820 Well, the defense secretary did.

02:02:44.760 Yeah, he did.

02:02:45.540 James Forrestal.

02:02:46.420 Yep.

02:02:47.100 Committed suicide.

02:02:49.040 Yes, he did.

02:02:49.640 Well, sure he did.

02:02:51.640 Yeah, that's quite an amazing story.

02:02:54.420 I don't think that's on Wikipedia.

02:02:55.940 No.

02:02:56.300 So, but I would encourage people to look into that because that is definitely worth knowing about.

02:03:03.360 Is it possible to infect people with cancer?

02:03:05.500 Not while I was there.

02:03:08.840 People talked about it a lot, but-

02:03:10.960 They talked about it a lot.

02:03:11.840 Yeah.

02:03:12.240 Like, do you think it's possible?

02:03:13.680 Can we do it?

02:03:14.560 I mean, you know, if we could do it, what would we do with it?

02:03:17.240 But this is something that the Venezuelan government and the Cuban government have both accused us of doing.

02:03:23.620 Oh, yes.

02:03:24.200 When I was there-

02:03:25.340 And many governments around the world believe that that is real.

02:03:28.700 Yeah.

02:03:28.960 Now, remember, I left 20 years ago, so who knows?

02:03:34.240 I don't know.

02:03:36.780 Is, would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency?

02:03:41.480 Not anymore.

02:03:42.280 No.

02:03:43.200 It used to be.

02:03:44.620 The deputy director for whom I worked was very fond of saying, and he used to say this all the time,

02:03:49.380 the job of the CIA is to recruit spies, to steal secrets, and to analyze those secrets so that our policymakers can make the best informed policy.

02:03:58.740 Okay, so I thought that was the whole idea behind creating the agency, right there.

02:04:04.300 Yes.

02:04:04.780 That was it, until 9-11.

02:04:07.400 And then it became a paramilitary organization.

02:04:11.000 You know, the director gave a speech the other day in which he said that we need to focus on human source intelligence.

02:04:16.840 True.

02:04:17.120 True.

02:04:17.840 Every director says that when he becomes the director.

02:04:20.880 But the truth is, what they would rather do is fancy high-tech, you know, science stuff.

02:04:28.780 Satellites and drones and, you know, computer intrusions and stuff like that.

02:04:34.540 They're not really in the business anymore of recruiting spies to steal secrets.

02:04:38.820 They should be, but they're not.

02:04:40.700 It's not directly related, but we know because it's public information that somebody bet big against United Airlines and American Airlines right before 9-11.

02:04:52.300 So people knew it was coming.

02:04:53.360 Now, the people who planned it knew it was coming.

02:04:55.040 Yes.

02:04:55.300 Do you think that those bets, those stock bets, shorting those airlines, that Al-Qaeda did that?

02:05:06.960 No, I don't think Al-Qaeda did it.

02:05:10.460 I think that...

02:05:12.140 In other words, who else knew it was coming?

02:05:14.280 I think there were intelligence services out there, foreign intelligence services that knew it was coming.

02:05:18.380 But it was in their interests for the U.S. to be at war.

02:05:23.640 I think that's where this came from.

02:05:26.200 Did you think that when you worked there?

02:05:30.120 No.

02:05:31.340 And I'll tell you why.

02:05:33.000 On July 6th, 2001, totally normal day, I was entertaining a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers, which we did every day.

02:05:45.000 They come in, we do a day of briefings, we exchange gifts, they get a photo op with the director, and then we take them out to a fancy theater.

02:05:51.620 This is at Langley.

02:05:52.500 Yes, at Langley.

02:05:53.700 So I had this group of Arabs that day.

02:05:56.440 And I had gone to this very young junior analyst on Al-Qaeda at the counterterrorism center.

02:06:05.760 And I said, hey, I've got this delegation.

02:06:07.340 Can you come in and give us 30 minutes on Al-Qaeda?

02:06:09.700 He said, sure.

02:06:11.040 So it comes time for the briefing.

02:06:12.860 And instead of this junior analyst showing up, Kofor Black shows up with the chief of operations.

02:06:18.840 And who was Kofor Black?

02:06:19.660 Kofor Black was the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, later Ambassador Kofor Black.

02:06:24.680 He was the special coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department.

02:06:28.460 Then he went on to Blackwater and great wealth.

02:06:32.340 So I jumped up and I said, oh, I said, gentlemen, this is Kofor Black.

02:06:37.920 He's the director of the counterterrorism center.

02:06:40.460 And this is the chief of operations for the Osama bin Laden group called Alec Station.

02:06:44.760 And I mean, I had no idea why somebody as important and as busy as Kofor would come in.

02:06:52.920 He sits down and he says, he starts off by saying something terrible is going to happen.

02:06:59.220 We don't know exactly when or where, but we're hearing communications from Al-Qaeda that tell

02:07:06.240 us that something big that we've had, we've never seen before is going to happen.

02:07:12.100 We're hearing code words for a huge attack.

02:07:15.360 The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey.

02:07:18.920 There's going to be an enormous wedding.

02:07:21.260 There's going to be a great football match.

02:07:23.520 We're hearing Al-Qaeda camp commanders on the phone with their students and they're crying

02:07:28.680 and saying, I'll see you in paradise.

02:07:30.940 He said, we have no idea when and where this attack is going to come.

02:07:36.500 He said, I'm begging you, if you have any sources inside Al-Qaeda, please help us.

02:07:44.300 And they just kind of sat there and looked at each other and he got up and he shook their

02:07:48.800 hands and walked out.

02:07:50.240 So at the end of the day, I'm thinking about this all day.

02:07:53.520 At the end of the day, I send them back to their hotel.

02:07:56.580 I said, I'll pick you up at the hotel.

02:07:58.320 We'll take it.

02:07:58.760 I'll take you to dinner.

02:07:59.420 But I went back to Kofar's office and I said, I said, Kofar, I want to thank you for coming

02:08:03.440 and talking to those guys.

02:08:04.260 But I have to ask, were you serious or was that for their benefit?

02:08:09.100 And he said, oh, I'm dead serious.

02:08:11.420 Something terrible is going to happen.

02:08:14.160 And then it happened.

02:08:16.040 On the morning of September 11th, Kofar and I had a meeting scheduled with Condoleezza Rice

02:08:22.120 for the stupidest idea.

02:08:24.640 Now in retrospect, the government printing office was going to print.

02:08:29.420 A volume of declassified cables called Foreign Policy of the United States, 1949 to 1967,

02:08:40.000 Greece, Turkey, Cyprus.

02:08:41.820 Nobody's ever going to read this thing, right?

02:08:44.120 Not one person.

02:08:45.360 No.

02:08:45.500 Even the Cypriots will ignore it.

02:08:47.400 Not interested.

02:08:48.780 But it mentioned three people who were still alive who had been informants for the CIA.

02:08:57.000 And the law says that if they are outed, we have to offer them resettlement.

02:09:03.320 So rather than go through that whole rigmarole, we made an appointment with Condi to ask her to just remove those three cables.

02:09:13.440 Nobody's going to miss them because nobody's ever going to read this book.

02:09:16.200 But just in case.

02:09:18.800 So I walked over to Kofar's office to tell him that our car was ready.

02:09:22.600 And his secretary-

02:09:22.920 So you were at Langley that morning early.

02:09:25.380 I was.

02:09:25.840 I was there early.

02:09:26.960 And his secretary had a small TV on her desk.

02:09:31.180 You couldn't watch TV on your computer in those days.

02:09:33.840 And I said, what happened to the World Trade Center?

02:09:36.660 And she said, a plane flew into it.

02:09:39.580 And because I'm an idiot sometimes, I said, you know what?

02:09:42.420 That happened once before.

02:09:43.840 In the 1930s, a plane flew into the Empire State Building.

02:09:47.780 But it was really foggy and raining that day.

02:09:51.220 It's so crystal clear today.

02:09:52.600 How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center?

02:09:55.780 And then the second plane hit.

02:09:57.800 And she turned to me and she said, did you see that or did I imagine it?

02:10:03.540 And I ran back to my office.

02:10:05.020 I said, guys, we're under attack.

02:10:07.380 Two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center.

02:10:10.280 We all ran up to the front where Kofar's office was.

02:10:13.840 And you have to imagine this big bullpen where there are maybe 150 or 200 people in

02:10:20.060 partitioned, you know, cubbies.

02:10:23.740 And then there are private offices all around the perimeter.

02:10:26.300 And then there are TVs hanging from the ceiling above Kofar's office on, you know, BBC, CNN,

02:10:32.880 Fox, Canal Plus, RT, from all over the world.

02:10:37.080 And they're all showing the same thing.

02:10:39.500 And there's silence.

02:10:40.940 And then somebody behind me shouts, will somebody please lead?

02:10:46.480 And Kofar said, oh, yes, you go to the director's office and tell him this.

02:10:51.040 You go to security.

02:10:52.560 You go to operations.

02:10:54.380 And the rest of us are like, what do you want us to do?

02:10:58.900 Evacuate.

02:11:00.100 Nobody's evacuating.

02:11:01.540 Literally not a single person evacuated.

02:11:03.720 Finally, the CIA cops came in and said, if you don't evacuate, you'll be arrested.

02:11:08.000 So we evacuated.

02:11:10.520 I got about halfway home, had to abandon my car.

02:11:14.260 So I started walking.

02:11:15.680 Why?

02:11:16.460 It was gridlock like World War Z, like the end of the world, you know?

02:11:21.820 I mean, on the George Washington Parkway, which is four lanes, it's like 12 cars wide.

02:11:29.720 And everybody's just parked.

02:11:31.880 That parkway passes right by the Pentagon.

02:11:34.540 And that's right, right by the Pentagon.

02:11:36.240 When I got to the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, I lived just up from the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge.

02:11:43.420 I saw the deputy national security advisor with no shoes evacuating.

02:11:49.620 And I said to this guy next to me, how could this happen?

02:11:54.960 That's the deputy national security advisor.

02:11:58.200 He ran out of the White House without shoes to save himself.

02:12:03.720 I ended up, my ex-wife and I, we climbed to the roof of my building, but we were engaged at the time.

02:12:13.440 And we watched the Pentagon burn for a little while.

02:12:15.400 And finally, I said, this is ridiculous.

02:12:17.440 We have to get back to work.

02:12:19.460 And so I walked back to my car, drove across the median, went back to CIA and stayed there for the next four days.

02:12:26.320 I just slept under the desk, an hour, two hours at a time.

02:12:29.160 And your fiancée also worked at CIA?

02:12:30.780 Mm-hmm.

02:12:31.120 She did the same thing.

02:12:34.060 I mean, and then, you know, the world changed and your life in particular changed.

02:12:37.900 I could never, ever have predicted the changes either for me personally or for the CIA in the country.

02:12:44.220 So you didn't think is one of the only Arabic speakers at the counterterrorism center at CIA in Langley.

02:12:51.840 Of course, you knew you would play a significant role in what came next.

02:12:55.320 I expected that.

02:12:55.680 And you did.

02:12:56.740 But you never expected you'd go to prison, did you?

02:12:59.400 Never.

02:13:00.540 Not in a thousand years would I have said, eh, I'll do the prison experience for a little while, see how that works out.

02:13:06.980 So I just want to ask you one last question.

02:13:09.380 Of all the things you've said, which I've known you for a while, but I'm, and we just had dinner last night, but I'm shocked by some of the things that you have said, actually.

02:13:18.360 And I grew up around this stuff, and I'm still shocked.

02:13:20.020 Right.

02:13:20.660 So the story that you told about the fake Japanese diplomat trying to set you up is remarkable.

02:13:31.280 That's a remarkable story.

02:13:32.740 Sick.

02:13:33.460 It is sick.

02:13:34.320 It's unbelievable that they would do that to an American citizen.

02:13:36.980 Particularly one with a demonstrated record of serving the country at personal risk.

02:13:42.580 So, but outrage aside, it does sort of reframe your understanding of how things actually work.

02:13:47.500 That happened to you.

02:13:48.440 That's a real thing.

02:13:49.360 Yes.

02:13:49.700 Provable.

02:13:50.900 And you said that it had, in fact, changed your view of how things actually worked.

02:13:54.560 And you reassessed your understanding of things that had happened in American history, and maybe they're not exactly what they seem to be.

02:14:02.740 That's right.

02:14:03.140 Can you go into a little more depth about what you're thinking now?

02:14:06.320 The short version is I have come to believe very strongly that Ronald Reagan was right when he said that government is the problem.

02:14:16.880 It's not the solution to the problem.

02:14:19.600 He was right.

02:14:20.920 He recognized it, and the rest of us failed to see it.

02:14:24.920 So, now when I hear about standoffs, let's say, between American citizens and the Bureau of Land Management, for example.

02:14:35.340 Yes.

02:14:35.660 Or ATF or DEA, I no longer believe what is reported in the media.

02:14:45.780 I no longer believe the strategic leaks that come from whatever bureau or agency to spin the story.

02:14:55.680 I've gotten to the point where I'm obsessed with doing my own investigations.

02:15:01.840 Yes.

02:15:02.200 And I read all source material because the truth has to be out there somewhere.

02:15:07.240 I just feel like I have to put it together for myself.

02:15:11.420 So, now when we talk about the Kennedy assassinations or RFK, I mean, or MLK, or as we said earlier, Ruby Ridge or Waco, whatever it is, I default to doubting the government account.

02:15:31.980 So, you worked for the government during Waco.

02:15:35.700 That was my first day working at a newspaper.

02:15:40.020 So, I remember the chaos in the newsroom when that happened.

02:15:42.600 So, that was 93.

02:15:43.800 93.

02:15:44.680 That must have been the spring of 93.

02:15:46.660 Mm-hmm.

02:15:47.100 Correct.

02:15:47.480 Is that right?

02:15:47.960 Yes.

02:15:48.900 So, boy, over 30 years ago.

02:15:50.980 But you worked for the government then.

02:15:52.360 I was at the CIA at the time, and it was on every TV in the CIA.

02:15:55.800 And I remember looking at it, not really having an opinion, and my boss saying, well, it's about time they finally moved on that operation.

02:16:05.320 So, what was that?

02:16:07.160 Boy, that's really a forgotten moment in American history.

02:16:10.060 So, there was a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians, or that's what we called them.

02:16:14.740 That's right.

02:16:15.180 A guy called David Koresh.

02:16:16.700 That was his cult name anyway.

02:16:19.040 Right, right.

02:16:19.520 And they were accused of mistreating children.

02:16:22.720 Yes.

02:16:23.260 Which maybe they were.

02:16:24.240 I have no idea.

02:16:24.720 And hoarding weapons.

02:16:25.920 And hoarding, of course, and hoarding weapons.

02:16:27.860 And they were surrounded by federal agents at their compound in Waco, Texas.

02:16:32.760 And that standoff culminated in a shootout in which federal agents were killed.

02:16:37.480 Yes.

02:16:38.000 And most of the occupants of that compound were burned to death.

02:16:41.840 Mm-hmm.

02:16:42.340 I think it was something like 27 of them.

02:16:45.200 And half of them were children.

02:16:47.220 Yeah.

02:16:47.560 Like young children.

02:16:48.820 Yeah.

02:16:49.060 I think it was maybe more than 27.

02:16:50.780 More than 27.

02:16:51.140 Yeah.

02:16:51.420 It was.

02:16:52.200 A lot.

02:16:52.660 It was awful.

02:16:54.120 But what was it?

02:16:55.160 Was that more than what we were told it was, do you think?

02:16:59.720 Well, the spin was this was a dangerous lunatic.

02:17:03.500 And he had to be stopped before he used those guns to go out and kill people.

02:17:07.540 The truth of the matter is you're allowed to buy as many guns as you want.

02:17:11.760 I've proven that.

02:17:12.720 Yeah.

02:17:13.820 I have.

02:17:14.560 Good.

02:17:15.020 You're not allowed to buy guns because you're a convicted felon.

02:17:17.360 I'm a convicted felon.

02:17:18.240 And you've done nothing wrong.

02:17:19.280 And I really hope you receive that presidential pardon soon.

02:17:21.780 Thank you.

02:17:22.120 And on top of losing my gun, I lost my pension.

02:17:28.280 The Obama Justice Department seized my federal pension.

02:17:31.980 Why?

02:17:32.300 20 years of proud service.

02:17:35.720 $770,000.

02:17:37.180 I'm going to have to work until the day I die.

02:17:40.580 Only a pardon.

02:17:42.060 How could you have worked at CIA for all those years and not wound up rich?

02:17:47.020 Yeah, right.

02:17:48.060 I have to say that is the story that no one ever tells.

02:17:51.660 And I just know it from my personal life, just living in D.C. my whole life.

02:17:57.420 They're all rich.

02:17:58.200 Have you noticed this?

02:17:59.120 They are all rich.

02:17:59.880 Why are there all these former CIA officers who are rich?

02:18:04.640 Some of them, excuse me, some of them get enormous book advances.

02:18:11.160 Others make this odd transition into venture capital or consulting or butts in the seats kind of, you know, Booz Allen style firms.

02:18:22.480 A lot of them go overseas and stay overseas.

02:18:26.680 So the CIA pays for everything.

02:18:28.680 The only thing you pay for is your phone bill.

02:18:31.520 And they just invest, invest, invest for 30 years and come out with plenty of money.

02:18:37.640 I've lived in nice neighborhoods for a long time.

02:18:41.060 And there are always CIA people on my street.

02:18:44.520 Half of McLean, Virginia is CIA.

02:18:46.740 Yeah, and the District of Columbia in Florida.

02:18:48.820 And it's just like legit rich.

02:18:51.380 Yeah, rich.

02:18:53.700 That's not a good sign, is it?

02:18:55.800 No, it's not a good sign.

02:18:57.100 Because you're not supposed to capitalize on a position.

02:19:00.740 Not when you have the power of life and death over people.

02:19:03.240 That's what bothers me.

02:19:04.300 It's not just like people from the Labor Department of Commerce who are like leveraging their skills to riches.

02:19:09.760 It's like people who have information that they're the only ones legally allowed to possess.

02:19:15.940 The true inside information and the power to kill people.

02:19:19.780 That's right.

02:19:20.180 Like that's one category.

02:19:22.820 With no questions asked.

02:19:25.020 May I add one thing?

02:19:26.740 Yeah.

02:19:27.080 I recently received an email from someone I'd never heard of.

02:19:34.520 But this is the third such email that I have received.

02:19:38.920 And I wanted to mention it.

02:19:40.920 So, of all things, I received it through eBay.

02:19:49.920 Right?

02:19:50.400 I was selling something on eBay.

02:19:52.220 And somebody saw that.

02:19:53.520 Because I'm an open book.

02:19:55.420 So, I'm just like John Kiriakou on eBay.

02:19:57.560 Yeah.

02:19:57.920 So, I received this thing through eBay and it says,

02:20:01.300 Dear John, it's so nice to finally speak to you.

02:20:04.420 I've been watching your YouTube videos and I love all the content and I've been wanting to reach out to you for many years.

02:20:10.020 I'm one of the FBI agents who wants to personally apologize to you for the disgraceful way that the FBI and our federal government treated you.

02:20:17.380 I worked on your case with both headquarters and the Washington field office team.

02:20:22.500 And I know many of the personnel that you're familiar with, unfortunately.

02:20:25.240 That case was directed and driven by senior most officials.

02:20:30.040 Many mid-level and street personnel were against it.

02:20:32.580 But nevertheless, we just followed orders.

02:20:34.980 Anyway, I've always felt bad about what we did to you and for the way you and your family were treated.

02:20:39.920 And I want to personally apologize.

02:20:41.640 Well, God bless that man.

02:20:43.320 Mm-hmm.

02:20:43.840 Do you think that's real?

02:20:44.800 Yeah.

02:20:47.000 Yep.

02:20:47.760 Two other FBI agents sent similar emails to my attorneys.

02:20:51.780 They're sorry they did as they were told.

02:20:56.140 It's nice, but...

02:20:57.260 Do you worry about anything further happening to you?

02:20:59.860 I did for a long time, yes.

02:21:02.800 I...

02:21:03.120 There were people inside the Justice Department with whom I was friendly who said,

02:21:08.640 Ooh, the CIA is really mad that you only did 23 months.

02:21:12.960 Like, they really wanted you to die in there.

02:21:15.020 So, be on your best behavior because they're watching everything you do.

02:21:19.000 And then that wore off about two years out of prison.

02:21:23.760 I didn't see the surveillance anymore.

02:21:27.040 Never got any funny emails.

02:21:29.200 As soon as I got home, I was home for a couple of days from prison.

02:21:32.880 And I got an email from a guy who claimed to be an attorney saying he had some classified information that showed a crime and he wanted to send it to me.

02:21:40.420 And I said, Don't you dare.

02:21:41.460 I don't want any classified information.

02:21:43.420 Call the FBI and give it to them.

02:21:45.960 But I figured it's just some nut trying to set me up.

02:21:49.400 So, anytime I had a question, I would just call the lawyers, refer people to the lawyers, and then it ended up just going away after a while.

02:21:56.620 So, the story that you just told over the last couple of hours is very distressing to hear as someone who grew up in this country, believes in the country, loves the country.

02:22:08.840 I can't even imagine what it must be like to be you, and yet you tell it complete without bitterness and no self-pity whatsoever.

02:22:16.500 How have you been able to maintain emotional equilibrium, wisdom, perspective, and peace in the middle of everything you've been through?

02:22:24.700 Thank you for asking that.

02:22:26.040 When I was in prison, I read constantly, including biographies of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

02:22:36.580 And I thought, Wow, what these guys went through?

02:22:39.320 And they just forgave over and over.

02:22:41.520 Nelson Mandela especially, the way he was treated and kept in solitary confinement on Robben Island, and he forgave.

02:22:50.140 And then there was a biography of a 20th century Greek Orthodox saint called Saint Nektarios, Nektarios of Aegina.

02:22:58.080 And he had been the Greek Orthodox bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, and other priests who were jealous of his rapid rise accused him of having an affair with a nun.

02:23:07.940 And so, he was stripped of his office.

02:23:10.460 He never attained high office again, but he forgave everybody for what they had done to him.

02:23:17.200 And he hadn't done it.

02:23:18.400 No, he hadn't done anything.

02:23:20.580 And I thought, You know what?

02:23:22.000 These people went through so much more than I did.

02:23:24.580 It was so much worse for them.

02:23:26.740 And I've become friendly with one of the former prisoners at Guantanamo, Mohamedou Uldslahi.

02:23:37.340 The CIA kidnapped Mohamedou from Mauritania while he was attending his cousin's wedding.

02:23:42.420 We tortured him mercilessly for 14 years.

02:23:47.540 14 years?

02:23:48.440 Mm-hmm.

02:23:48.940 And then we decided, Eh, wrong guy.

02:23:51.180 Let him go.

02:23:51.880 Actually?

02:23:52.440 Mm-hmm.

02:23:52.660 Yeah, which happens with more frequency than you might think.

02:23:57.700 And so, when he got out, he went on to Twitter, and I tweeted at him.

02:24:04.280 And I said, Mohamedou, you don't know me, but my government will never apologize for what it did to you.

02:24:11.060 So, I want to apologize.

02:24:12.980 I am so sorry for what happened over the last 14 years.

02:24:16.320 And his attorney called me and said, Would you be interested in a conversation?

02:24:21.760 I said, Absolutely.

02:24:22.980 We've been friends ever since.

02:24:24.380 He actually lectures to my grad school class at the University of Salamanca.

02:24:29.260 He comes on Zoom.

02:24:30.660 The poor guy couldn't go back to Mauritania.

02:24:34.400 He was afraid they'd kill him.

02:24:36.020 No country wanted him because he had been in Guantanamo for 14 years.

02:24:39.960 Finally, the Dutch said, We'll give you citizenship.

02:24:42.740 And so, he has gotten married, he has children, he got an education, living happily ever after in the Netherlands.

02:24:52.480 And zero bitterness.

02:24:54.800 And I said to him one day, he said to me in front of my class what you just said,

02:24:59.460 You're not bitter at all for what happened.

02:25:01.080 And I said, Me?

02:25:02.240 I said, You?

02:25:03.480 You're like Mandela.

02:25:05.280 How can you not be bitter after what we did to you 14 years?

02:25:10.560 I was 23 months.

02:25:13.760 And he said, What would bitterness accomplish?

02:25:17.200 Nothing.

02:25:18.060 He said, Bitterness would put me right back into that cage.

02:25:21.920 And I don't want to live in there.

02:25:24.440 So, that's the position that I've come to take.

02:25:26.840 There's a very, that's a rational explanation of it.

02:25:30.800 And I think it makes total sense.

02:25:32.320 I think it's true.

02:25:32.760 But forgiving people is kind of the next step, which I've also done.

02:25:38.840 And I, like, what's the purpose of that?

02:25:41.900 I've forgiven for myself.

02:25:45.120 I'm sure that John Brennan doesn't give two shits if John Kiriakou forgives him.

02:25:51.040 But I feel better having that monkey off my back.

02:25:54.960 Yes.

02:25:55.880 So, I did it for myself.

02:25:57.580 I don't care what John Brennan's feelings are.

02:26:01.160 And John Brennan, as you described, is a grudge holder.

02:26:03.780 He's the opposite.

02:26:04.380 Oh, yes, he is.

02:26:05.240 And a prisoner of that.

02:26:06.320 Yes.

02:26:09.360 John, I really appreciate all the time that you've taken to tell your story today.

02:26:13.120 I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.

02:26:14.620 And I hope that you are vindicated in the-

02:26:17.100 Thank you.

02:26:17.520 To the fullest extent.

02:26:18.780 Thank you very, very much.

02:26:19.640 And I hope that you're engine back.

02:26:20.920 Thank you.

02:26:22.400 Truth-telling should be rewarded, not punished.

02:26:24.000 It should be.

02:26:24.640 You know, like I said, I'm very, very fortunate, blessed to have the support of people like you and Dr. Phil and Bruce Fine and Brett Tolman and Doug Deason and people who understand the import, not just to me, but the import to all Americans of protecting our civil liberties from a government out of control.

02:26:48.340 We have to make sure that we never go back there.

02:26:50.480 You have to reward the truth and punish lies.

02:26:53.940 And if you invert that, then it's a system you can't live under.

02:26:57.440 That's right.

02:26:58.300 Because it's evil.

02:26:59.180 It is.

02:26:59.700 It's evil.

02:27:00.880 John, thank you.

02:27:01.540 Thank you.

02:27:01.980 Very much.

02:27:02.480 Thank you.

02:27:02.880 We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day.

02:27:10.500 We know the people who run it, good people.

02:27:12.480 While you're here, do us a favor.

02:27:14.260 Hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode.

02:27:18.480 We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter.

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02:27:27.180 Thanks for watching.

The Tucker Carlson Show - June 04, 2025

John Kiriakou： CIA’s Secret Torture Programs, MK-Ultra, 9-11, and Jailing Political Opponents

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