The Tucker Carlson Show - The 9⧸11 Files： The Cover-up Commission ｜ Ep 2

00:00:00.960 In January 2000, as the CIA was tracking two future hijackers as they journeyed to Los Angeles,

00:00:08.200 George W. Bush was seven months into his presidential campaign.

00:00:11.520 What we're going to do is we're going to do something no other presidential candidate has been able to do.

00:00:15.620 The near impossible, remember what it was? The near impossible turn like that.

00:00:19.920 One of the most exhilarating moments of my political career in years too.

00:00:24.680 His campaign was working to take down his opponent at the time, Arizona Senator John McCain, 1.00

00:00:30.040 by spreading rumors he'd fathered a black bastard child with a prostitute. 1.00

00:00:34.040 You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed. 1.00

00:00:36.200 The following December, two other hijackers, Muhammad Adda, the ringleader of the plot,

00:00:41.020 and Marwan Alshehi, were finishing their pilot training in Venice, Florida on the West Coast.

00:00:46.680 In Washington, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush had won the 2000 election.

00:00:51.820 John McCain wanted to get political revenge.

00:00:54.880 When he got his chance 10 months later, it would have historic consequences.

00:00:58.240 The official story of what happened on 9-11 comes from a single report.

00:01:03.680 The 9-11 final report of the National Commission.

00:01:06.580 In the two decades since it was released, it has become the basis for all media coverage of terror attacks that day.

00:01:12.900 What the media never mention is that the commission itself was a farce.

00:01:16.680 It was intentionally underfunded.

00:01:18.760 It was poorly structured. 0.73

00:01:20.440 It was, from top to bottom, corrupt.

00:01:22.680 Two years after the report was released, the commission's own chairman admitted it was set up to fail.

00:01:28.640 Americans have many questions tonight.

00:01:31.860 Americans are asking, who attacked our country?

00:01:36.100 Beginning in the first hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,

00:01:40.320 the Bush administration began leveraging the tragedy to launch their next project, a so-called global war on terror.

00:01:47.840 The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda.

00:01:57.180 In a normal country, its leaders would insist on an answer to the simple question.

00:02:01.460 How did a terror network, closely monitored by the United States intelligence agencies,

00:02:06.740 including a unit dedicated to following them at CIA headquarters in Langley,

00:02:11.560 how did a group like that manage to pull off the 9-11 attacks in broad daylight?

00:02:16.380 That's the question.

00:02:18.280 But this is not a normal country, and it was never answered.

00:02:20.980 In fact, the Bush administration ferociously opposed any attempt to look carefully at what happened that day.

00:02:28.440 And that presents a bigger question.

00:02:31.260 Why?

00:02:32.300 What did they have to hide?

00:02:34.220 My name is Kristen Breitweiser.

00:02:36.080 My husband Ron was killed on September 11th.

00:02:38.860 Breitweiser is one of four 9-11 widows who became famous at the time as the, quote, Jersey Girls. 0.89

00:02:44.740 They were some of the only people in public life in the United States who wouldn't let it go.

00:02:50.040 They didn't believe the official 9-11 story, and they often said so.

00:02:54.040 They were all over the media for several years.

00:02:56.360 They were all over the years, determined to identify government officials who may have been complicit in the tragedy.

00:03:01.600 In the end, they were ignored.

00:03:03.880 We were looking at a Bush administration that really was not interested in looking backwards.

00:03:09.260 There was a push to immediately go to war.

00:03:11.780 There was an invasion into Afghanistan, and then there was the queue up for the war in Iraq.

00:03:17.500 I can hear you.

00:03:19.120 The rest of the world hears you.

00:03:21.020 And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

00:03:31.020 Rather than get to the bottom of what actually happened, the Bush administration immediately exploited the crisis to push for what it really wanted, which was an invasion of Iraq.

00:03:43.360 In his book, Against All Enemies, George W. Bush's counterterrorisms are Richard Clark said that when he went back to the White House immediately after 9-11,

00:03:51.260 he, quote, expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks would be, what our vulnerabilities were.

00:03:59.100 Instead, he realized with what he called almost sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.

00:04:10.300 And that's exactly what they did.

00:04:12.200 On the afternoon of September 11th, Rumsfeld said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time, not only bin Laden.

00:04:20.260 The day after the attack, Bush asked Clark to see if Saddam did this, see if he's involved in any way.

00:04:28.240 And while meeting with the president on September 15th at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.

00:04:37.840 We learned quite quickly that we were not going to get the answers that we really wanted with regard to the murder, the homicide of our 3,000 loved ones.

00:04:48.840 My husband, Ron, was 39 when he was killed.

00:04:51.920 He was a really good man.

00:04:53.180 He was smart and a good dad.

00:04:55.680 And he had called me on the morning of September 11th.

00:04:58.800 I was rushing out the door to take my daughter to speech therapy.

00:05:02.860 And I had no idea what was going on.

00:05:04.480 I didn't have the television on.

00:05:05.620 And he was like, sweets, it's me, I'm okay.

00:05:07.840 And I had no idea.

00:05:08.960 I'm like, okay, I'm glad you're okay.

00:05:11.120 And he was like, no, no, he's like, put the television on.

00:05:13.820 And he's like, it's not my building.

00:05:14.860 I knew you would be worried.

00:05:15.680 It's not my building.

00:05:16.960 And I put the television on and I was still on the phone with him.

00:05:19.800 And I was like, oh my God, like, what is that?

00:05:22.860 And he was like, you know, there's an explosion in the building next to me, but it's not my building.

00:05:27.120 I'm safe.

00:05:27.660 I'm fine.

00:05:28.740 And I was like, it's really bad.

00:05:30.520 You know, it looks bad.

00:05:31.700 And he was like, that's why I called.

00:05:32.860 Don't worry, it's not my building.

00:05:34.360 And he's like, and then his voice cracked and he was like, sweets.

00:05:37.740 He's like, people are falling out the windows.

00:05:40.380 I'm like, just, you know, what are you, what are you, what are you going to do?

00:05:43.160 And he's like, well, I'm going to go down to the trading floor and see if I can find a television to see what's going on.

00:05:47.640 We don't know anything.

00:05:49.380 He's like, but I didn't want you to worry.

00:05:50.760 I love you.

00:05:51.600 He's like, I'll call you back.

00:05:53.260 And, you know, that was the last I spoke to him.

00:05:56.260 And, um, like three minutes after, um, we got off the phone, I still had the TV on and I saw his building explode right where he was.

00:06:05.340 And, um, I just, I wish I told him to run.

00:06:09.240 I wish I told him to get out.

00:06:10.520 I wish I told him, you know, it's not safe.

00:06:13.080 Something's wrong.

00:06:14.100 Get out.

00:06:14.880 Um, but I just, I didn't.

00:06:18.440 I think, you know, feeling that way, feeling like, why didn't I know?

00:06:23.100 Why didn't I have, um, a woman's instinct to be like, get out? 0.99

00:06:27.140 Made me want to fight for the commission and for everything else because I felt like the American public deserves to know.

00:06:34.460 The Bush administration, which at the time was enjoying a historic 90% approval rating, was pushing a very clear storyline.

00:06:42.040 They told the country that Osama bin Laden had simply caught American authorities off guard.

00:06:48.400 There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9-11 attacks.

00:06:52.140 That was a lie.

00:06:53.720 And by May of 2002, more than two-thirds of Americans understood that it was a lie.

00:06:58.860 They wanted an investigation into the so-called intelligence failures that led to the attack.

00:07:03.980 The initial effort to investigate 9-11 was a joint congressional commission led by Senator Bob Graham,

00:07:09.220 a Democrat of Florida, and Congressman Porter Goss, a former CIA officer who would later become the agency's director, appointed by Bush.

00:07:17.480 These public hearings are part of our search for truth.

00:07:22.040 Cheney did not want anyone looking into his failures that day, the administration's failures, and more than anything,

00:07:27.960 I think he and the political strategist Karl Rove were very focused on the president's reputation, on ensuring that he would get re-elected.

00:07:36.720 The lengths that the Bush administration went to kill the investigation into 9-11 are shocking.

00:07:43.060 In the winter of 2002, Dick Cheney called the then-Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and made a threat.

00:07:50.240 The Veep told Daschle the leaders of the war on terror would be too busy to get bogged down in preparing for and testifying in front of the committees.

00:07:57.660 The strong implication of this, if you insist, will say you're interfering with the war effort.

00:08:03.200 The committee moved forward anyway.

00:08:06.720 On June 19, 2002, they discovered that the NSA had intercepted messages from al-Qaeda operatives from the day before the attacks,

00:08:14.920 saying, quote,

00:08:15.700 The match begins tomorrow, and

00:08:17.940 Tomorrow is zero day.

00:08:20.300 It couldn't have been clearer.

00:08:22.140 Someone on the committee leaked those messages to the news media.

00:08:25.360 CNN broadcast them.

00:08:26.440 And in retaliation for this, for telling the truth, the Bush administration sicked the FBI, then run by Robert Mueller, on the committee.

00:08:35.340 The FBI, you know, really came down hard on the joint inquiry.

00:08:40.200 They polygraphed, they interviewed, they made all kinds of threats. 0.96

00:08:45.500 And so, you know, when the FBI comes after you, it's kind of scary, because you're looking at not only, you know, potentially losing your position in Congress, but also imprisonment.

00:08:58.820 It was pure intimidation.

00:09:01.260 And so, it had a very chilling effect, in my opinion, on the progress of the inquiry and their investigation.

00:09:08.220 In the end, Congress did make some interesting discoveries, most of which were redacted in the final report.

00:09:15.460 The Jersey girls continued to push for the truth. 0.68

00:09:18.100 They were furious.

00:09:19.160 They demanded an independent commission.

00:09:21.460 George W. Bush's political enemies agreed.

00:09:23.980 John McCain's revenge was an independent commission that would explore the truth about what happened on 9-11.

00:09:29.020 I think it's legislation that calls for a blue ribbon commission to examine the facts surrounding September 11th.

00:09:35.720 On November 27th, 2002, President Bush, fearing major political blowback if he vetoed the commission, signed the bill into law.

00:09:45.120 But he managed to neuter the commission in the process.

00:09:48.400 His allies in Congress gave the commission weak subpoena power and limited them to a strict 18-month timeline.

00:09:54.940 They appropriated for the entire investigation just $3 million.

00:09:58.940 By Washington standards, it was nothing.

00:10:01.020 By comparison, Congress gave 13 times more funding to investigate the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

00:10:07.180 It appropriated 11 times more funding for Robert Mueller's investigation into Russiagate.

00:10:12.080 The administration and the Congress simply didn't want the public to know what happened on 9-11.

00:10:16.700 But that wasn't the only thing they did to subvert the truth.

00:10:19.920 The White House, one of the ways that they controlled the commission was they were going to choose the chairman.

00:10:25.380 Their first choice was Henry Kissinger.

00:10:27.300 Today, I'm pleased to announce my choice for commission chairman, Dr. Henry Kissinger.

00:10:33.080 At the time, I was like 30 years old, so I had known Kissinger, but I didn't really, you know, as a stay-at-home suburban housewife,

00:10:40.420 it's not like I, you know, had dived into all of Henry Kissinger's horrible acts and his status as a war criminal.

00:10:49.020 Dr. Kissinger is one of our nation's most accomplished and respected public servants.

00:10:54.020 Kissinger had served as national security advisor and then secretary of state under Richard Nixon.

00:11:00.100 He pushed a massive expansion of the Vietnam War, including secret bombings in Cambodia and Laos.

00:11:05.740 There are questions about his role in Vietnam, his role in the coup in Chile.

00:11:10.680 When we first met him, he gave us this long talk about how honored it was,

00:11:14.040 and it was like the, you know, opportunity, not the opportunity, but like a responsibility of a lifetime.

00:11:19.120 It is a great honor to be appointed by the president to be chairman of the nonpartisan independent commission.

00:11:30.600 In 2002, he was running a lucrative consulting business called Kissinger Associates.

00:11:35.540 I really spent a bit of time researching him, predominantly his clients, and we had grave concerns that he was chosen by the vice president and the president and Karl Rove because he was really good at what he does.

00:11:51.040 And so we were also concerned about his clients and that he had a huge conflict of interest.

00:11:56.140 And so we were invited to meet with him at his offices on Park Avenue.

00:12:00.400 We were put into his office.

00:12:02.000 It was kind of close quarters.

00:12:03.100 It was really, really hot.

00:12:05.420 He had the heat turned up to like 100 degrees.

00:12:08.980 And, you know, it was the winter, so we had like turtlenecks on and sweaters and stuff.

00:12:14.240 So we're like sitting there like sweating.

00:12:15.860 And he's just sitting there calmly.

00:12:17.780 Cranking up the thermostat is a well-known manipulation strategy.

00:12:21.380 If you make a room uncomfortably hot, the discomfort puts pressure on the other negotiating party to make concessions more quickly.

00:12:27.760 So at one point after we got through the niceties, one of the widows had asked him whose clients were.

00:12:34.760 Do you represent any Saudi royals?

00:12:36.640 Do you represent anyone in the bin Laden family?

00:12:38.760 And, you know, at the time, it wasn't that much of an outrageous question because there were members of the bin Laden family who had relationships with, you know, the Bush family and others.

00:12:52.240 And so it wasn't like it was an outrageous question.

00:12:56.840 And he immediately got flustered and, you know, went to pick up a cup of a cup of tea or coffee and spilled it on the table.

00:13:06.620 He feigned that it was his fake eye, which didn't know that he had a fake eye.

00:13:11.660 And we immediately went to, like, clean it up like moms, you know, like, oh, it's OK. 0.99

00:13:16.160 And then he just never answered the question.

00:13:18.400 And then the very next day he resigned.

00:13:20.880 Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stepped down from the position Friday.

00:13:25.100 Scrambling to find a new chairman, Bush's top political advisor, Karl Rove, called former New Jersey Governor Tom Kane and offered him the job.

00:13:33.540 Why was George W. Bush's political bag man making this phone call?

00:13:37.500 No one's ever explained.

00:13:39.340 Tom is the nicest guy on the planet.

00:13:41.280 He's very much a gentleman.

00:13:42.920 He does not go for the jugular.

00:13:44.460 After he accepted the job, Kane was dragged to the White House where the president's top advisors told him,

00:13:50.260 we want you to stand up.

00:13:52.020 You've got to stand up.

00:13:53.720 You've got to have courage.

00:13:55.360 We don't want to run away commission.

00:13:57.720 In other words, do what we say.

00:14:00.720 The White House's fingerprints were certainly all over the commission.

00:14:04.460 Chairman Kane ultimately admitted the commission was, quote, set up to fail.

00:14:08.320 And that's absolutely true.

00:14:09.840 But in addition to a meaningless budget, the tight timeline, and weak subpoena power, there was another problem.

00:14:15.540 The man Kane selected to run it.

00:14:18.540 On January 27, 2003, the commission issued a press release announcing they'd selected an academic called Philip Zellicoe to be the commission's executive director.

00:14:27.800 He was sold to us as a historian.

00:14:32.500 I was responsible for the research for Zellicoe to make sure that he didn't have any conflicts of interest.

00:14:38.320 He had a lot of conflicts of interest.

00:14:41.220 The release describes Zellicoe as, quote, a man of high stature who had distinguished himself as an academician, a lawyer, author, and public servant.

00:14:49.200 The release did not note that Zellicoe was an active Bush administration official.

00:14:54.280 He served on a White House intelligence advisory panel.

00:14:57.360 It also failed to note his extensive ties to Condoleezza Rice.

00:15:01.180 He'd served on her transition team.

00:15:03.320 He'd co-authored a book with Rice in 1995.

00:15:05.720 In 2002, at Rice's behest, Zellicoe authored a policy paper championing preemptive invasions.

00:15:14.140 And this cemented his role as a key architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

00:15:19.620 Zellicoe was the perfect person to keep the commission from finding the truth.

00:15:23.640 I believe he was placed there to, again, play the gatekeeper, to ensure that the commission would not unearth the truth, and more than anything, to protect the Bush administration, and also lay the groundwork for the war in Iraq, in addition to other things.

00:15:41.200 Zellicoe's first move was to pre-write the entire report before the facts were in.

00:15:46.060 In March of 2003, before the investigation had even begun, Zellicoe had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings.

00:15:56.980 He kept all of this a secret from the rest of the staff.

00:15:59.620 As it turned out, his outline is nearly verbatim to what the final book looks like.

00:16:04.900 And so what I believe is that he just basically had the outline, knew that it was a quote-unquote safe outline.

00:16:11.660 It was probably approved by the Bush administration.

00:16:13.620 His second move was to consolidate his power.

00:16:16.980 Zellicoe gave himself total control over the hiring process.

00:16:20.420 He at first tried to block the staffers from communicating with the commissioners.

00:16:25.880 In a now-public memo, Zellicoe cut off his staff's access to the commissioners.

00:16:30.680 Quote,

00:16:31.260 If you were contacted by a commissioner with questions, please contact Deputy Director Chris Kojum or me.

00:16:37.360 Zellicoe restricted access to documents.

00:16:39.900 He divided the staff into separate teams.

00:16:41.860 He siloed them from each other, and he closely supervised Team 3.

00:16:45.680 That was the group that dealt with classified information from the White House and the CIA.

00:16:49.640 One of Zellicoe's first moves was a secret agreement with the Justice Department to block access to the files of the congressional inquiry until the White House had had a chance to review them first.

00:16:59.640 Zellicoe was sort of limiting access to documents.

00:17:03.240 When people were requesting specific things, Zellicoe would block it.

00:17:08.320 Notably, the final report contains a full 61 references to finding no evidence of certain claims about 9-11.

00:17:16.060 The cute way of explaining why Zellicoe uses that phrase is that if you don't look for the evidence, you don't find the evidence.

00:17:24.660 And so you're not lying when you say we found no evidence.

00:17:27.460 At one point, a staffer overheard Zellicoe pressuring a CIA employee to accept Condoleezza Rice's recollection of Intel briefings before the 9-11 attacks.

00:17:37.620 Most damning of all, phone logs kept by Zellicoe's assistant show that he was regularly taking calls from both Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove, George W. Bush's top political advisor in the White House.

00:17:49.940 We reached out to Karl Rove for an explanation of this, and he denied having been in regular contact with Zellicoe.

00:17:56.440 But that is untrue.

00:17:58.600 Even Zellicoe himself acknowledges he received multiple calls from Karl Rove, but he claims they did not discuss the commission.

00:18:06.900 He doesn't say what they did discuss.

00:18:09.240 None of it is plausible.

00:18:10.820 It wasn't even like he was on the National Security Council.

00:18:13.460 He didn't really have any information that would be helpful to the commission.

00:18:17.360 Why is the commission's staff director having communications with the White House's political strategist?

00:18:24.260 From the outset, the commission started to advance the interests of Bush's neocon foreign policy agenda.

00:18:30.040 When Team 3, the counterterrorism group, submitted their draft to Zellicoe, he inserted sentences that tried to link al-Qaeda to Iraq to suggest the terrorist network had repeatedly communicated with the government of Saddam Hussein in the years before 9-11.

00:18:43.860 And that bin Laden had seriously weighed moving to Iraq.

00:18:47.540 In the end, those sentences were removed after staffers alerted the commissioners.

00:18:51.400 But the commissioners did not prevent Zellicoe from stacking public hearings with discredited neocons who towed the White House line about Iraq's connections to al-Qaeda, none of which were real.

00:19:01.820 The first outside expert to testify to the commission was the Hoover Institute's Abraham Sofar.

00:19:07.120 His written remarks, the commission, include eight references to Iraq and five references to Saddam Hussein.

00:19:13.520 Keep in mind, this was a hearing on 9-11, which had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or Iraq.

00:19:19.100 Sofar spent most of his time at the public hearing talking about the need for preemptive invasions.

00:19:25.360 The need for preemptive actions stems ultimately from the conditions of modern life.

00:19:30.380 At the third hearing, Zellicoe produced a florid and widely discredited neocon called Lori Milroy from the American Enterprise Institute. 0.98

00:19:39.740 She appeared as a witness.

00:19:41.040 There is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds are Iraqi intelligence agents.

00:19:46.700 By April of 2004, former Senator Bob Kerry of Nebraska, a Democrat, confronted Rice about Zellicoe's ties to the administration.

00:19:54.520 Let me just ask you directly, and you can just give me a, keep it relatively short, but I wanted to get it on the record.

00:20:00.480 Since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zellicoe any questions about terrorism during transition?

00:20:05.640 Since he was a second person carded in the National Security Office and had considerable expertise.

00:20:12.220 Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues that we were facing.

00:20:18.760 Philip was, in fact, as you know, had worked in the campaign and helped with the transition plan.

00:20:24.320 So, yes.

00:20:25.500 Yes, you did talk to him about terrorism?

00:20:26.940 We talked, Philip and I, over a period of, you know, we worked closely together as academics.

00:20:32.200 Just in the, during the transition, did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?

00:20:36.420 Oh, to do anything on terrorism?

00:20:38.020 To help us think about the structure of the terrorism, the, Dick Clark's operations, yes.

00:20:44.380 Incredibly, the man in charge of the official story of 9-11, Philip Zellicoe, was the Bush administration advisor who decided to demote the White House's counterterrorisms, our Dick Clark, in the months before 9-11.

00:20:58.780 Yet, somehow, these details, central though they are, were left out of the commission's final report.

00:21:06.220 The 9-11 commission report was a cover-up from beginning to end.

00:21:10.340 That is true.

00:21:11.780 And that's the most important starting point for those seeking to understand what actually happened on September 11th.

00:21:18.600 The official story is a lie.

00:21:20.720 What isn't clear is why our government and subsequent governments, under subsequent presidents, would want to continue that lie and cover up what actually happened on 9-11.

00:21:32.380 What exactly were they hiding?

00:21:34.460 And more important, who were they protecting?

00:21:37.880 We found out.

00:21:39.240 That's in the next installment of our 9-11 series.

The Tucker Carlson Show - September 30, 2025

The 9⧸11 Files： The Cover-up Commission ｜ Ep 2

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