Cliff Sims was a top intelligence official in the Trump administration. He also has a new book called The Darkness Has Not Overcome: Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power. In this episode, we talk about his time in the swamp, Joe Biden's knee injury, and why he thinks Joe Biden is a fuckboi. He also talks about why he doesn t think Joe Biden should have a job. And he gives us the inside scoop on Joe Biden s new book, The Dark Side of the Swamp: Inside the White House and the Secret Life of a Swamp Dweller . And of course, he talks about the Joe Biden stand-up comedy routine that s getting a bad rap from the liberal comedy community. This episode is sponsored by MXM News. MXM is a news app that focuses on the intersection of technology and politics. You can get all the news you need to know about what's going on in the world today. Subscribe to MXM to get the latest news and listen to the newest episodes of the show wherever you get your news and opinions from the internet. If you like the show, share it on your socials! and spread the word to your friends about it! and share it to your circle of friends and family about it to let them know it's awesome! friends and everyone you care about it. Tweet me if you're listening to the show! :) to let me know what you thought of the latest episode and what you think of it. I'll be posting it on the show and what a great episode you're watching! Timestamps: or share it in your thoughts on it on Insta: . and tag me on your Insta in the comments section! Thanks for listening ;) Thanks again for listening! for supporting the show for the support! - Timestar - PYTEe - Tom & for the love and support I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys! Tweet Me Outtrope <3 - Tom Bresnan :) - Tom PYtee xoxo - Tom & Gorms - - Jack - Sarah ~ - Joe Biden - @pYTETEe - @ Thank you for listening?
00:07:30.000Remember, also guys, you can go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you missed the show here on Rumble.
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00:07:56.000The other, you know, .1, maybe not as much, but it's also real, and we live in the real world, and we gotta not pretend that we don't, and therefore, it's probably good for the kids anyway.
00:08:06.000So, for all the top headlines that we spotlight here on the show, make sure you go over to my news app, MXM News.
00:08:55.000And now, folks, let's get into some of those top headlines that I got from MXM News.
00:09:00.000Starting on a lighter note, you know it's going poorly for Joe Biden when even a stand-up comedian, a very liberal group of people, are starting to make fun of him.
00:09:15.000Look at what happened to this when one guy admitted that he worked for the Biden administration at a recent comedy show.
00:09:26.000You work for the Biden administration.
00:09:29.000It's your job to wake up her when she's down.
00:10:54.000Then he read out pause again last week.
00:10:58.000How many times do we have to cover this before we understand that Biden clearly has dementia or something similar?
00:11:06.000And it's obvious to everyone, people I know who are in the medical field, say he has to be jacked on something just the way he behaves it's the side effects of the drugs that they put him on to keep him I don't want to say lucid because I don't think anyone could believe that he's lucid for even one second but I guess keep him upright for at least 75% of the time and stumbling through whatever it is that he's doing my theology professor at the Catholic school I went to
00:11:39.000Guys, a new poll just came out of Pennsylvania showing that my father is leading Joe Biden.
00:11:51.000It found that a majority of voters say that the Trump presidency was a success, while the majority of voters think Biden's presidency is a failure.
00:13:03.000We should just allow these people to take advantage of our open borders, to send fentanyl, to rape women and children crossing the borders that they're organizing and taking their life savings from.
00:13:16.000We should allow them to continue to kill 100,000 Americans a year.
00:15:54.000The New York Times, and this has nothing to do with, well, it has to do with the presidential election, has just come out with this extraordinary, bizarre article on RFK.
00:16:06.000And they're reporting that doctors, in a deposition, that RFK said doctors found a worm in his brain that had eaten part of his brain and then died there.
00:16:16.000I mean, you laugh, but I mean, what might this mean?
00:16:20.000I mean, what might this mean to an election hearing that he said this in a deposition?
00:16:25.000It probably means, and one of the things that I tell my clients all the time is try not to go into depositions high.
00:16:47.000Okay, maybe this explains it because no one I know in history has ever done an entire 180 in a six-month period on political beliefs that they have held for half a century.
00:17:34.000And they're trying to hurt conservatives by putting someone who's been a lifelong Democrat, remember?
00:17:40.000Just on Monday when he couldn't remember, he doesn't know.
00:17:43.000He doesn't know if, I don't know, doing the gender transition surgeries on minors, you know, he doesn't know enough about it.
00:17:50.000You know, it took him a solid 48, 72 hours to come out with a statement.
00:17:54.000Now, upon a little bit of reflection, once he got killed by the people he's trying to vo- woo, pretending to be a conservative, well, now he's not really for it.
00:18:03.000But, you know, three days ago, I don't know.
00:18:26.000RFK and Biden are competing for who is further left, and apparently also for whose brain is rotting more.
00:18:34.000And by the way, if you see so-called right-wing accounts, and I've seen a lot of them, promoting RFK Jr., it's safe to assume that they are being paid.
00:18:45.000I'm not shocked at all by this because months ago I started seeing him flooding my Instagram account from either accounts I didn't follow or people that I knew were sort of right-wing influencers.
00:18:55.000But The Daily Caller just unveiled a plot by an RFK firm that includes buying, buying off right-wing influencers.
00:19:05.000He's trying to trick MAGA into thinking he's a conservative.
00:19:34.000It was obvious to me because I know some of these people.
00:19:36.000I created half of these people, not because I was paying them, but because I liked their content in 16 and I was boosting them or retweeting them or whatever.
00:19:43.000You see them do that, you're saying, I don't know.
00:19:46.000They're politically astute enough to know that this is a radical, but I guess you put him on the payroll and maybe Trump won't or didn't because we don't need to.
00:20:54.000A known liar and a disbarred attorney, committed perjury all over the place, but hey, you can be a star witness as long as you're against Trump.
00:21:03.000The other major witness in the Alvin Bright case is Stormy Daniels, who admitted yesterday on the stand that she owes over $500,000 in court-mandated legal fees to my father and refuses to pay them.
00:22:21.000The Manhattan case is a joke, and it looks like the only case that will go to trial before the November election.
00:22:28.000The documents case in Florida has been delayed indefinitely after it was revealed that Jack Smith, the lead prosecutor there and in other cases, failed to preserve critical evidence.
00:22:41.000Because it would probably exonerate Trump.
00:22:44.000You know, they can manipulate other things or whatever, but like, you know, this is not exactly an honorable guy.
00:22:49.000This is not a guy that has a stellar track record.
00:22:51.000This guy is a partisan piece of shit hack.
00:22:55.000Jack Smith rushed to prosecute in order to try to take out Joe Biden's political opponent.
00:23:03.000And naturally, there are a lot of issues with this case.
00:23:06.000So, hopefully he gets what's coming to him.
00:23:09.000Bad guy, terribly dishonest person, but that's of course why they chose him to be the guy to prosecute it.
00:23:15.000Because you need someone with no morals, with no moral compass, who will do anything to win because all that is is a political hit.
00:23:25.000Meanwhile, in Georgia, yet another winner, an appeals court will hear whether Fannie Willis should be disqualified from the case.
00:23:33.000If you remember, Fannie hired her lover as the prosecutor, someone who'd never tried this kind of case, to lead the Trump case, and paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, $675,000 approximately, or to be almost exact, and then she lied to the court about it.
00:25:28.000They'll help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold, tax and penalty free, so you don't pay a penny out of pocket.
00:25:36.000To learn more, text Don Jr, just text D-O-N-J-R to the number 989898 and get your free info kit.
00:25:45.000That's text D-O-N-J-R to the number 989898.
00:25:50.000Learn more, educate yourself, inform yourself, make an informed decision to protect yourselves and your families from the insanity that we see going on every day.
00:27:01.000We have to vote with our wallets, okay?
00:27:04.000We have to not take the easy way out and go on Amazon where your hard-earned dollars are weaponized against you.
00:27:10.000When you're on Public Square, you literally sign off.
00:27:12.000You believe in Freedom of speech, and so many other things that we stand for.
00:27:17.000If you're a business on there, you truly believe all of what we believe.
00:27:21.000If you're traveling, you know, find the coffee shop that's on Public Square.
00:27:24.000If you're at home, support the businesses that are there.
00:27:26.000Put their kids through camp instead of some corporation that's gonna give their money back to the trans community, whatever insanity they're pushing these days.
00:27:35.000Go to publicsquare.com, download the Public Square app, check it out.
00:27:39.000And with that, we're gonna go to Cliff Sims.
00:27:42.000Well, guys, joining me now, former Special Assistant to President Trump, your favorite president in the White House, and former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, the author of The Darkness Has Not Overcome, Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power, my buddy Cliff Simms.
00:28:01.000So, Cliff, first of all, really good to have you here.
00:28:07.000So, Cliff, we have a little thread with a couple of our other buddies in politics, and they wanted to know is, have you ever seen Caitlin Collins and Dylan Mulvaney in the same room?
00:28:22.000You were the deputy director of national intelligence.
00:28:24.000This should not be a difficult question for you.
00:28:27.000I have not in all of, you know, with all the intelligence resources we have, you know, CIA, NSA, spy satellites, everything that we have not yet gotten to the bottom of this one.
00:28:39.000Maybe we'll have a chance to reprioritize some things.
00:28:43.000Maybe we bump this one up a little bit higher on the list.
00:28:45.000But this is what happens when we're in a text thread.
00:28:49.000Yeah, hey, you started it with, hey, what should I break Don's balls with?
00:28:52.000So I was like, I want to, you know, I know, you know, there was a time you may have been buddies with a certain CNN anchor slash correspondent, whatever it may be, you know, in the White House.
00:29:02.000And so we got, I have to ask these questions.
00:29:23.000She worked at the Daily Caller, she worked for Tucker Carlson, and then at some point she went and worked for CNN, and you know, the incentives being what the incentives are, it's maybe a little bit different ballgame over at CNN, and so we are where we are now.
00:29:36.000So let's talk about that a little bit, not specifically her, but in general.
00:29:40.000I mean, are there people they get to DC and it's just easier to survive as a liberal?
00:29:46.000I mean, do you see that in the agencies?
00:29:48.000I mean, you worked as an intelligence individual, right?
00:29:52.000I mean, is it just easy to be On the left, do people who don't necessarily do that, do they come in there and then it's like they just get eaten and enveloped by the swamp and it's just easier to give the swamp what it wants and that's the faster path for success and the careers?
00:30:09.000Yeah, you know, as we often say, the swamp is undefeated.
00:30:24.000But I think one of the things that I saw in the intelligence community was with intelligence community reporters, there's a specific kind of I would almost compare it to like agency capture.
00:30:36.000You know, it's the old thing where people who regulate a certain industry, once they leave that regulatory body, they want to get a job at one of these places that they used to regulate.
00:30:48.000So maybe we're going to go a little bit softer on them.
00:30:51.000And so I can get this, you know, high paying job when I get out in the intelligence community.
00:30:56.000It was really interesting to see this own kind of agency capture that exists between the reporters and some of the entrenched bureaucrats in there.
00:31:06.000And it's basically that these reporters are subservient to these entrenched bureaucrats because they're the ones who feed them this inside information.
00:31:16.000And so the narrative that we always get from national security and intelligence reporters, there's a reason why it's always from the perspective perspective of those entrenched bureaucrats that don't want
00:31:26.000any reform, that don't want anything to change. And it's its own kind
00:31:49.000I dealt with Natasha and her colleagues all the time.
00:31:52.000There are multiple examples, and I've actually got several really long threads on Twitter where I unpack How I tried to tell them the truth, even about the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:32:02.000I told them before they weren't, but they weren't interested.
00:32:04.000I mean, they were, they were a part of it.
00:32:07.000There's, I mean, I I've seen that, right?
00:32:09.000The Washington post has their political reporters, but they have the one guy that seems to be like the, the spokesperson for the CIA.
00:32:16.000You know, when the Pentagon wants it, they go to this one guy, and he almost signals it.
00:32:20.000Like, you saw it... I forget the guy at WAPO, but you saw it when, like, you could see the swamp had sort of had enough with Joe Biden, and so they were signaling, well, Hunter may be in trouble.
00:32:29.000And this guy's just, he's just their scribe.
00:32:31.000Like, whatever the narrative they want out there, it has nothing to do with the truth, but they basically work for them as a mouthpiece to help sort of Through the vicious cycle, just get the end result that they want by printing stuff that's nonsense, just like they did with Russia, Russia, Russia, with their, you know.
00:32:47.000We'll leak a story to the New York Times, they'll print it, we'll use that as the justification to start the investigation and the wheels of Washington and the swamp go.
00:34:34.000And I think, you know, I was the first person to kind of just try to break away from the mindset that we had previously had of like, no, you got to talk to all these people because you could probably fix it.
00:34:55.000I haven't really thought about this before, but I wonder if there was also a little bit of a shift in dynamic from time in New York real estate, where at the time, you know, I remember reading stories about certain developments that were happening that the entrenched bureaucracy in the New York City government was trying to do their, you know, swampy stuff.
00:35:35.000I always use the example of the golf course we built at Ferry Point, right?
00:35:38.000So it's right over the bridge there in New York.
00:35:40.000It was literally, it was like a landfill site for 25 years, 30 years.
00:35:45.000And it was basically a mob job, right?
00:35:47.000The city was paying, I think they had like 150 million into this thing, and they were paying contractors to build a golf course, but you know, doesn't take that long, and you know, I think we built it in less than 18 months, like, but they were moving dirt from here, they'd move it to here, then they'd move it back to here, and then for 20 years, there was someone was moving dirt on a tractor, but nothing was ever done, and they just kept paying and paying and paying, so finally my father was like, Uh, why don't I fix this?
00:36:09.000He gets a lease, everyone's mad because, you know, they spent 150 million dollars on nothing.
00:36:12.000You know, we built it in under 18 months with a clubhouse, with this, it was spectacular, right?
00:36:16.000They're like, oh wow, this is a great example of a public-private partnership after what was clearly, like, just, you know, a mob job milking the city, taxpayers, and everyone else for 25 years to get this thing done.
00:36:28.000You know, and then it's operating great.
00:36:30.000Then we get into politics, and then it's, we're gonna remove him from the lease, we don't, I mean, This thing would still be a landfill and you'd still be paying, you know, $15 million a year for literally nothing to get accomplished.
00:36:42.000But because no one's checking and everyone's probably on the payroll, all of a sudden they were like, we're going to throw Trump out of here right away.
00:36:49.000We're going to try to pull it away from him for nothing.
00:37:07.000Within six months or a year, the thing fell apart again that he took it over and had it for 25 years.
00:37:12.000But, you know, it's just, it's, you know, that's the government, I guess.
00:37:16.000It's funny how his impulse as a builder and his life coming up in all of you guys, like the world pre-politics, it still can't help but come out sometimes.
00:37:26.000I mean, I saw DJT was tweeting or truthing today about the FBI building, which I remember when I was there, he would be like, this is the ugliest building in the city.
00:37:39.000Now, I don't think we should be building them a new building, unlike the morons in Congress.
00:37:43.000Like, we're gonna take an agency that's been spying on Americans, that's been abusing the FISA court, that, you know, has villainized and bastardized Catholics, uh, anyone that's MAGA, you know, they, terrorists, that's fine, that's different.
00:37:55.000They're, you know, they're probably trans and so it's fine.
00:37:58.000Uh, but let's build them a new billion dollar building.
00:38:01.000Uh, they deserve to have their building burnt down and like just the entire agency demolished.
00:38:07.000Like that's what they actually deserve these days.
00:38:10.000One of my favorite stories that I tell all the time, and I actually wrote about it in the new book, The Darkness Is Not Overcome, is about when Trump got there and he finds out, you know, everybody gets to remodel the Oval Office when they become president.
00:38:44.000that he loves from York wall coverings in Pennsylvania.
00:38:50.000And so he's like, this is the wallpaper I want.
00:38:51.000So they call up York wall coverings and they're like, hey, the president of the United States wants this wallpaper in the Oval Office and they think it's a prank.
00:39:00.000They like think it's not really the White House calling them.
00:39:03.000So they realize like, oh no, it's for real.
00:39:06.000And then they freak out because the wallpaper that DJT had picked, they had stopped making it three years before.
00:39:13.000So they had to drop everything that day, make 96 panels of double-sided wallpaper, and they delivered it to the Oval Office by dinner time that evening.
00:39:23.000And it's like, even in the Oval Office, we're getting things done, you know, under budget and ahead of schedule.
00:39:28.000We're getting it there before dinner time.
00:39:29.000So it's like, a builder at heart, it never goes away.
00:39:33.000Yeah, you know, even the stories about all those things, it's sort of funny how he, you know, that builder mindset always comes back, you know, driving through DC that they, I mean, you know, what he did with the old post office there.
00:39:43.000I mean, that took an act of Congress and then, you know, and then they don't want him to be able to do it.
00:39:47.000He's the only guy that could have got something like that done.
00:40:25.000Yeah, you know, it was fascinating when Director Ratcliffe and I got there.
00:40:30.000You know, one of the things that I realized early on is that there are a lot of good people in the intelligence community who actually do just want to protect America.
00:41:39.000Or, you know, whatever, I mean, not using someone's appropriate pronouns that they have chosen could get you, you can ruin your life.
00:41:46.000And so you have people inside these intelligence agencies, like they woke up one day, and one of the most powerful elements of the of the community are these diversity, equity and inclusion offices.
00:41:56.000And they're doing things like, you know, I saw a couple of months ago, They had this internal publication inside the intelligence community, and they put out an op-ed by a current intelligence official who was explaining how being a cross-dresser makes him a better intelligence analyst.
00:42:16.000I mean, it's like... Well, okay, so I, yeah, I remember the one, I made fun of it a while ago, when they had, it was the CIA recruitment video, and it had a guy, and they're like, you see him, and he's like, I suffer from extreme anxiety!
00:42:36.000Shit, like, this guy, like, he literally, I'm like, wait, wait, that guy's a spy, like, if you were to pick, like, if China got a hold of this guy, the over-under on how long it would take to break him was measured in less than a second.
00:43:20.000Cause it's, You almost have to, because people have to understand just how much the disease has taken over, right?
00:43:27.000But it has taken over, so there may be great people in there, but imagine how much more productive they could be if they weren't doing DEI training at all.
00:43:36.000If they were just focused on killing bad guys, or finding them, or, you know, it was like my buddies, I got crap, I think you remember this, because I woke up to like a shitstorm on one of our threads, One morning, because I guess I said on the podcast, or like, maybe I tweeted about it, but like, hey man, like, I know a bunch of SEALs that, like, literally have reached out to me and been like, we spend more time doing diversity training than we do shooting.
00:43:59.000And like, CNN was like, Don Jr., how would he know?
00:44:38.000Well, there are a few things that I think are really important when President Trump gets reelected and has an opportunity to put people in leadership positions at these agencies to make some of these changes.
00:44:47.000There's a few things I think are worth thinking about right off the bat.
00:44:51.000First of all, the talent recruitment for the intelligence community historically has come out of a lot of Ivy League institutions.
00:45:01.000You know, I think we've got to do a better job of attracting some of the top students from state schools, from HBCUs.
00:45:07.000I mean, these so-called elite institutions have become, you know, woke indoctrination factories, meaning that the IC's pipeline of talent is being disproportionately filled with individuals who are trained to prioritize ideological conformity over critical thinking.
00:45:22.000And not to mention, in light of the alarming rise of anti-Semitism on these campuses, it's really hard to make the argument that these are the institutions where you could actually train a truly diverse workforce.
00:45:34.000The other thing is, you know, diversity actually is important in intelligence, but let me tell you how.
00:45:41.000When we were there in the middle of COVID, and we're getting all of this intelligence from, you know, the virus originated in China, we're getting all of these streams of intelligence coming in out of China, and we're trying to deal with a virologist with a pandemic here.
00:45:59.000It would be really helpful to have virologists in the intelligence community who speak Mandarin.
00:46:06.000That's some diversity that would help us.
00:46:08.000If we're trying to be on the streets of Tehran, it's probably good to have an ethnic Persian who speaks Farsi, as opposed to me and you walking down the street.
00:46:16.000You're saying your albino ass would not blend?
00:46:33.000You know, if it's a ginger, if it's a black guy, if it's a Hispanic guy, like, if they're the best pilots, that's also who I want flying my plane.
00:46:40.000Like, it does not need to be, you know, a white-haired, you know, white dude.
00:46:45.000But when I see someone, you know, and I hear the stories, and now because I've talked about it so much on the show, you know, on the planes, like...
00:46:54.000I'm 24 hours out of knee surgery, so if I'm hyper, maybe it's the drugs.
00:46:58.000Although, I've managed to avoid taking them so far, so maybe it's just the leftover from yesterday's general anesthesia.
00:47:05.000But, you know, they're talking, like, Don, you got to hear this, like, they just announced, like, you know, I'm a trans pilot, and this is what I make, like, and I'm like, oh my god, like, you're gonna die.
00:47:18.000But when it's going on in the age... I don't know that trans helps you, frankly, anywhere.
00:47:21.000Like, you know, and by the way, it doesn't mean you're not great at something, but, like, I'm not sure.
00:47:26.000Like, again, I have a feeling if you're not quite sure of your gender, you're probably not going to be the greatest person in the world of intelligence and gathering and covert ops.
00:47:35.000I'm just... Hey, I'm one of these guys that went to these Ivy League schools, so perhaps I thought they were elite and they were already ridiculous.
00:47:45.000I think maybe what could save America right now, Cliff, is like some of these frat boys from Alabama and otherwise in their pastel shorts seem to be saving America.
00:47:53.000It's like truckers and like frat boys.
00:47:55.000That's like the potential saviors of the Republic.
00:48:49.000So, I mean, my view is, You need to abolish these DEI offices, and you need to take that money that's being funneled toward that stuff right now, that's being funneled toward lining the hallways with DEI posters about people's identity, and we divert that money toward the China Mission Center
00:49:11.000If we get China right, other things will flow down from there.
00:49:15.000But that's another thing that we've got to do is just get rid of these DEI offices in there that have become too strong and frankly just bullying a lot of people into submission.
00:49:24.000A lot of people who just want to keep their head down and not get caught in the line of fire on this stuff.
00:49:30.000So, I mean, talk, let's talk a little bit more about China.
00:49:32.000I mean, you mentioned sort of the Wuhan lab leak.
00:49:34.000Talk more about how overwhelming the evidence of the lab leak was at the time.
00:49:41.000You know, what's that process like investigating something like that?
00:49:44.000I mean, for me, it was like one of those, like, of course it, like, of course it came from the lab.
00:49:49.000Now, if you said that you were me, I just got, you know, shadow banned on social media.
00:49:53.000But if you were an academic that took the literally the most plausible outcome You were thrown out of academia.
00:50:00.000If you were a doctor, you lost your, you know, your funding.
00:50:02.000If you did research for the government, like, there's, you know, Fauci'd have you off.
00:50:05.000Even though, like, of course it came from the Wuhan lab.
00:50:32.000Well, you know, your initial impulse in situations like this is to want to give people some grace in the midst of chaos where everybody's trying to figure it out.
00:50:41.000But like you said, it doesn't take long where you're like, so the Wuhan bat coronavirus lab here And we've got a bet coronavirus, you know, whatever.
00:50:54.000Like, this was not, by the way, you don't need to be an intelligence.
00:51:04.000It's like, I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, like, there's no bet, like, including my life that I would not have taken to be like, yeah, uh, you know, a billion dollars versus my life.
00:51:16.000Uh, that happened like a hundred percent taking that bet every time.
00:51:50.000We now know that he lied on his reports.
00:51:52.000We now know that the 51 intelligence officers that signed on that had no information based on that, and the guy that led the charge, Anthony Blinken, became Secretary of the State.
00:52:49.000Well, you know, going back to that time period, and I think you're right, accountability has got to be number one.
00:52:54.000The people who are involved in this, you know, whether it's China in spawning it and covering it up, or frankly, a lot of the members of the U.S.
00:53:03.000scientific community and global scientific community that at the time One of the things that we did not have a full appreciation of as a country, as people in the government, as people who are trying to figure this thing out, was how compromised certain members of the scientific community were.
00:53:25.000Anthony Fauci, obviously now the most famous slash infamous person attached to the entire thing, As Fauci is kind of pouring cold water on the lab leak theory and really kind of participating in a very insidious way in, you know, being complicit in the idea that that was a racist thing to say that, you know, all this kind of stuff.
00:53:51.000One of the things that I feel like we didn't have a full appreciation of was that Anthony Fauci's entire career had been devoted to gain-of-function research.
00:54:01.000Now, all of us know what it is now, or most of us do, but if you haven't followed it, gain-of-function research is basically take a virus, put it in a lab, genetically change it, I'm not going to use the right scientific terms, I'm no virologist, but you change it in a way, actually make it more viral, and your goal is I'm going to figure out how I would have an anecdote for this, like a vaccine or whatever.
00:54:26.000If this were to happen in the wild, we would have some way to stay ahead of it and be able to head it off.
00:54:33.000And he wrote a paper in his career in which somebody broached the subject.
00:54:39.000What's going to happen if one of these viruses that we're studying in one of these labs gets out and sparks a global pandemic?
00:54:46.000And Fauci's argument in response to that was basically This is a possibility, but I think it's such a low and remote possibility that I believe the upside of everything that we're doing in gain-of-function research outweighs that possibility.
00:55:02.000Now, it looks like we've had a pandemic that was spawned doing gain-of-function research in a lab somewhere, and now if you're Anthony Fauci and you've devoted your entire scientific career, your entire life, to defending and advancing this line of scientific research, You're probably not the most unbiased person to get out there and make the case that, whoops, maybe I was wrong.
00:55:26.000Maybe the potential downside of this actually is so catastrophic that it does not justify doing it and certainly does not justify U.S.
00:55:34.000But he knew that anyway, because there's a reason he's funding it in China and not in the United States.
00:55:39.000There's a reason we have biolabs in the Ukraine and not the United States, because we know we're not legally allowed to do it here, but he was doing it anyway.
00:55:47.000Then he lied to Congress about it, and that's the thing.
00:55:49.000You can believe, you know, and again, I don't believe anything that he says, because if you look at his emails during the time, his emails to his colleagues, who actually were doctors and knew what they were doing, read very differently than the press conferences he was giving on a daily basis, because This clown, while he's never been right since the early 80s as it related to AIDS, certainly never met a camera he didn't love.
00:56:38.000But it's like, if I even bring this up to the chain of command, someone's buddy's on the payroll somewhere along the way, and they'll go work for them eventually one day and be taken care of.
00:57:11.000And, you know, he said history's gonna prove us correct, and certainly that's no vindication, just like, oh, history proved us correct.
00:57:18.000Like, there needs to be some accountability on this stuff, and my only hope is that we have an opportunity to get back in there and be able to hold some folks accountable, and frankly, get some of the intelligence that exists declassified so that the world can see how clear it is where this started.
00:57:37.000So tell us a little bit more about the book.
00:57:40.000What motivated you to write this book?
00:58:24.000Everything was wonderful, but I had to expend quite a bit of political capital to make this thing happen.
00:58:31.000So now you're at it again, so hopefully you won't get sued again.
00:58:35.000Well, we're a few days into the book release, we haven't been sued yet.
00:58:37.000Things seem to be going a little bit better this time.
00:58:40.000I've said it many times behind closed doors, even though you're giving me a hard time here, I have to give you credit, tell people all the time, Don Jr.
00:58:48.000a real friend. He's not a fake friend because at a time when it was not particularly in vogue
00:58:54.000in the Trump world and even the Trump family, to be my friend, Don Jr. was always my friend.
00:59:00.000And then we got it resolved. And of course, everybody realized that all is well with the
00:59:04.000world. So no harm, no foul. Many things, but I am loyal, oftentimes to a fault.
00:59:08.000No doubt about it. No doubt. Now, this book is different.
00:59:14.000When I left the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it caused me to think a lot about what that time period of my life meant for me, and maybe some of the lessons that I had learned from all of these experiences that we went through.
00:59:29.000I started journaling about it and thinking about those things, and I realized that a lot of the lessons that I had learned for myself would apply to anybody's life.
00:59:37.000No matter where they're coming from, you know, walking through the fire or dealing with anxiety or trying to figure out, you know, how to, you know, what dreams to pursue and, you know, all these different things we all struggle with in different ways in life.
00:59:50.000And so I wanted to tell some of the stories that we have from the White House and CIA
00:59:54.000and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but then use each of them to jump into a lesson
01:00:00.000learned from the halls of power, particularly lessons that I was able to take from my time
01:00:04.000studying the Bible and thinking about the faith lessons that I learned.
01:00:08.000And so that's what this book is all about.
01:00:09.000I would call it like a political junkies dream devotional book, basically, because it's got
01:00:16.000all those cool stories from, you know, inside the nuclear.
01:00:18.000bunkers, what's inside the president's nuclear football, to inside the you know
01:00:23.000Air Force One and all of that, but each of them used to jump into a faith lesson
01:00:26.000and so it's out this week and so far it's doing great.
01:00:29.000So talk about the title, how'd you choose that one?
01:00:33.000Yeah so the darkness is not overcome It comes from the Gospel of John 1, 5.
01:00:38.000The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
01:00:41.000And I thought it was particularly relevant to where we're at right now as believers and people of faith in this particular moment in American politics.
01:00:52.000In a lot of ways we're facing persecution in ways that we have never had before.
01:00:58.000And so I wanted to give some positivity in that, you know, we can take God's promise to the bank that the light will not be overcome by this darkness, even while it does seem pretty dark in the moment.
01:01:11.000Well, yeah, I imagine, you know, while I guess the FBI DOJ has really specifically singled out Catholics as domestic terror threats, I imagine the evangelicals are right up there because if you bought a Bible with your credit card anytime around January 6th, you were also on a list.
01:01:29.000So I guess it's only a matter of time till they come after you pesky evangelicals.
01:01:34.000And look, there are things that President Trump did while he was in office that really didn't get the attention that they deserved, but certainly that people in the faith community recognize the importance of them.
01:01:45.000One of those is, there's been an effort for decades from the left to keep Churches, pastors, non-profit organizations who have a faith lean to them from speaking into political issues.
01:01:59.000Basically, there was an implied threat that we'll take away your non-profit status if you lean too far in on this issue, and the president told the DOJ we're not doing that anymore.
01:02:10.000The other thing was, you know, A lot of these mandates that we were half joking about at the beginning of the conversation about people's pronouns and, you know, all kinds of stuff in these government mandates that exist now.
01:02:22.000The president was very clear, President Trump was, that we're not going to compel people serving in my government to ever violate their sincerely held beliefs, religious beliefs, to be able to work here in government.
01:02:34.000They have a First Amendment right to not have to violate their sincerely held beliefs.
01:02:39.000And it was really a restoration of Something that I love, you know, in DC, the Jefferson Memorial is my favorite memorial there in the city.
01:02:49.000And inside the dome has a Jefferson quote, I have sworn eternal hostility against any tyranny over the minds of man.
01:02:59.000And I think President Trump really restored some of that spirit that we're not going to oppress or tyrannize people of faith in this country who want to be able to live out their sincerely held beliefs.
01:03:11.000There's many other examples that I could point to this, but that's some of the stuff that I think was really, really below the surface that the president didn't get enough credit for that he did for the faith community while he was in office.
01:03:22.000So listen, obviously the faith community is good and there's so many great Americans that are incredibly devout and believe every aspect of it, but there also seems like there's a lot of those who have made a lot of money You know, within some of those things, who don't actually have any belief in it, but they have a lot of, you know, but they have a lot of vested interest in pushing some of these things, some of which are divisive, or, you know, let's call it, wouldn't be politically astute these days, but you see that happening.
01:04:01.000But it seems like there are those who truly believe, and then there are those who will prey on those people because it gives them power and money in DC.
01:04:10.000And I think it probably hurts Conservatives much more than Democrats.
01:04:15.000I think the Democrats are sort of much more aligned.
01:04:30.000And I think it, honestly, it hurts our chances every time because you turn off people from things that, or you turn them on to things you're never going to win anyway.
01:04:44.000Well, it reminds me of, uh, this is like from way back in my past, but like a totally different time period of my life where, um, I was, uh, I was in a band.
01:04:53.000I was a singer in the band and we would meet some of these.
01:04:56.000We got to get some visuals up for this one, by the way.
01:05:01.000I'm actually shocked you led me to this.
01:05:05.000But one of the things that happened as part of that time period of my life, I started to meet a lot of the Christian bands that I had really grown up listening to.
01:05:14.000And it was demoralizing sometimes because, you know, you meet them and you know, like it is when you meet many of your heroes, I guess, it's not quite what you expected.
01:05:23.000Sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the Christian band community.
01:05:31.000And so I will say I was less surprised when I got to D.C.
01:05:35.000and realized that some of the leaders of these organizations that you're talking about, it's really a money-making operation.
01:05:43.000And a lot of what they do is just looking for their opportunity to drive donations.
01:05:48.000Yeah, they're not looking to solve a problem or come up with something that everyone kind of Agrees with that they're looking to create more problems that magically only they can solve and you know they never quite get to solving it because once you solve the problem the money stops and so I've seen so much of it it always sort of disgust me and it prevents us from actually you know getting a lot of the unity that I think we need as a country.
01:06:10.000Yeah, especially now at this time in the election season.
01:06:13.000I mean, to me, look, I'm supporting President Trump to tell other people how to vote, but here's how I look at it.
01:06:21.000It's very, very clear what you're going to get from the Biden administration.
01:06:27.000None of these issues that we're talking about right now, that these advocacy organizations, conservative advocacy organizations in Washington, D.C.
01:06:35.000are in favor of, at least they say they're in favor of, are going to get one inch down the road under the Biden administration.
01:06:42.000In fact, they're going to be under an all-out assault.
01:06:45.000And there's a little bit of a, there's a little bit of the rub.
01:06:49.000The dirty little secret is a lot of these organizations make more money, bring in more money.
01:07:15.000After the interview is over with, Joy Behar comes up to me and she says, Hey, what's a nice man like you doing working for a guy like Donald Trump?
01:07:25.000And I said, I kind of just laughed it off.
01:07:28.000I was like, well, I'm probably not as nice as you think I am.
01:07:31.000But I actually thought about that after I left.
01:07:33.000Because the real question is, how can you, and I'm talking about like, especially now people of faith, how can you, as a person of faith, not agree with every single thing that a person does, but still support them?
01:07:47.000Or even really dislike some of the actions to take, but still love them?
01:07:50.000And the answer to that question actually punched me right in my own face.
01:08:38.000But from a policy perspective, the issues that I care about as a Christian, he has been great on those issues, and in fact, probably better than any other president that has been around in my lifetime.
01:08:52.000And he will have my support at the ballot box, and I will go to war for him on those issues.
01:08:59.000I will give some grace to people who have looked at the same set of facts and come in a different, fell in a different place than I have, but that's the way that I view it.
01:09:08.000Yeah, I did the view and I think, yeah, it was a little bit, perhaps a little different outcome with me and them because I had Whoopi mother-effing the audience by the time I flipped them and turned them with some basic facts.
01:09:22.000So yeah, the view, If you did not love me on there, but the irony is, you know, her saying that to you is, hey, I remember a couple of years before we were in politics, they used to kiss his ass to come on the show all the time.
01:09:35.000You know, so it's kind of like these guys like, you know, Al Sharpton's like hanging, you know, medals for racial reconciliation around Donald Trump's neck.
01:09:49.000I gotta ask about this one because even I don't know and I'm kind of curious.
01:09:52.000You talk about the nuclear football, the top secret briefcase that follows the president around so that basically he can nuke anyone, anywhere, at any time from, you know.
01:10:02.000So, what's inside there and how does it work?
01:10:05.000Yeah, so I write about this and the darkness is not overcome, and granted a lot of the things that are in there remain highly classified, and I had to go through pre-publication review to make sure I wasn't revealing a bunch of classified information, but what I can tell you is a few things.
01:10:20.000Number one, the first and foremost purpose of this, the briefcase, is to verify the president's identity.
01:10:28.000So the president, everywhere he goes, he carries with him a little laminated card with some codes on it called the gold codes.
01:10:34.000We call that little laminated card the biscuit.
01:10:36.000So everywhere the DJT would go, he had the biscuit with him.
01:10:40.000And then in the event that, you know, something happens where there's got to be, you know, you got to crack open the nuclear football, I've heard it described as a Waffle House menu of options for different nuclear strikes that are kind of pre-planned.
01:10:57.000Not going to use any specific... I don't want you to get in trouble.
01:11:02.000I mean, I have a feeling if you even said that that was an option, they'd probably throw you in jail because let's just say you're not going to get the Hunter Biden treatment, nor would I. No question.
01:11:11.000So, you know, the scariest thing that I saw is one researcher estimated That in the event that there was, God forbid, a nuclear attack on the United States, the window of time that the president had or would have to assess that and make a decision about how to respond could be as little as like six minutes.
01:11:31.000Okay, like, hey, six minutes for you, me, my father, like, seems like a lot of time.
01:11:47.000No, seriously, like, you know, the guy, you know, again, today, I guess it was, you know, he read the prompter stuff that was like pause for applause stuff.
01:11:56.000Like, you know, it's only the second time this week.
01:12:06.000This is like one of those kind of real life scenarios that until you really, really think about it.
01:12:13.000Uh, you don't realize how, uh, how kind of crazy it is that like literally in a six minute time span that the future of, you know, human existence could be decided.
01:12:22.000And the idea that we're going to have Joe Biden make any decision about any life, much less that high pressure and that condensed of a timeframe with that high of stakes.
01:12:34.000I mean, you just got to look yourself in the mirror and say.
01:12:37.000You know, meme tweets and world peace sound pretty good right now.
01:12:41.000Yeah, and if he wins again, it's like, just send a meteor.
01:12:45.000Meteor 2025, like, because we deserve it.
01:12:53.000Somewhere, somewhere far, far, a long time from now, another planet will develop with other life and like, you know, but like, we've ran out of, like, grace.
01:13:06.000He can't make it to Air Force or out to, you know, Marine One without having to take a pause on the walk on the way out there, but we want this guy making a decision like that.
01:13:17.000Yeah, I always say, like, if Joe Biden pulled up, if you're shit-faced coming out of a party, something like that, and Joe Biden pulled up in an Uber, you're like, nope!
01:13:42.000So you also wrote about, like, the doomsday bunkers, you know, back from the Cold War.
01:13:46.000Are those still working out, you know, 60 years later?
01:13:49.000Yeah, a lot of them still there, and you're right, a lot of them kind of originated during the Cold War period.
01:13:55.000You know, one of the cool things when we went to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and I write about this in The Darkness Is Not Overcome, was that we got to, we do these exercises, like continuity of government exercises, where, you know, name a scenario, you know, if there's some kind of nuclear strike, or if there was like a giant weather incident that knocked out power on the eastern seaboard, I mean, Use your imagination.
01:14:17.000If you've watched a Doomsday movie in, you know, Hollywood's Done, just use one of those as an example.
01:14:22.000And I've always wondered to myself, like, does the government have plans for all of these things?
01:14:29.000And so one day we got to go to one of these locations and kind of go through some of those exercises and It felt a lot like the movies, like a giant metal blast door that's several feet thick, opened on the side of a mountain and kind of reveals this enormous tunnel leading to an underground city.
01:14:50.000And there's like a thin layer of moisture coated on some of the tunnel walls, which was like, you know, rainwater trickling down through the rock from many stories above.
01:14:58.000There's like this eerie stillness in the cool, damp air.
01:15:04.000And really all you could hear was like the whir of the golf carts taking us down through there.
01:15:08.000And we get there and there's like office space for us and you can see where our computers and everything are.
01:15:14.000There's living quarters there where if the government had to be moved there in an emergency where you could sleep and do everything.
01:15:20.000There's even like a made-to-order grill where you could go order burgers and hot dogs and all this kind of stuff.
01:15:27.000And then they have like, you know, one of these kind of control rooms where you can
01:15:30.000see all these video monitors where they're monitoring different things all over the country.
01:15:52.000But now that you mentioned it, I've got a good one on that on that topic.
01:15:55.000So when we get to the White House, I won't say how it is, but there was a certain thing that some staffers had and other staffers didn't have.
01:16:05.000I want to elaborate on what that was, but the president noticed That some staffers had this particular thing and other staffers didn't, but he didn't know what it was.
01:16:14.000And so he finally said, he was like, hey, what what is the difference in these things?
01:16:32.000Well, at the time, you know, I'm a comm staffer in the West Wing, like I'm not, you know, before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, all that, so I don't have one.
01:16:42.000The rest of the day, every single meeting, DJT would point out who had one, and he would say, Cliff's not gonna make it, boys.
01:17:40.000But you know, the flip side of that is if I was going to be stuck with anybody outside of the bunker in a doomsday scenario, you know, having gone to shooting with you, I would say I'll be on Don Jr.' 's team.
01:18:01.000A high first round draft pick in the zombie apocalypse draft, that's for sure.
01:18:05.000So, in all of this, sort of a crazy journey through the White House and everything, comms to the DNI, how do you reflect working, though, inside the intel community?
01:18:16.000That's going to be more exciting, obviously, than comms.
01:18:26.000I imagine you probably had a lot more enemies than friends, because I think you were a loyal Trump guy, and that was probably not all that popular in the intel community.
01:18:37.000I mean, one thing I will say is for anybody who's interested in world events, there's not much more stimulating than being in the intelligence community because you're consuming all of this information, all of this data, all of these different things that are going on there.
01:18:54.000You know, I will say one of the things about working in the intelligence community as a political appointee There ain't many of us.
01:19:02.000I mean, in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, I'm pretty sure it was DNI Ratcliffe, me, and the Chief of Staff.
01:19:09.000I think there were only three of us in the entire organization who were political appointees.
01:19:15.000And so, you know, very quickly, you know, depending on who you're talking to, you can get a sense for Some people view you as a virus that they want to expel from the body of the intelligence community, and they're gonna lay down and try to stop everything that you're doing, undermine you, slow walk it, whatever it may be.
01:19:34.000But there are also some people who, this is really interesting to me, who stepped up, who are career intelligence people, who were loyal, and I don't mean that in the way that the media derisively says, oh, they're Trump loyalists.
01:20:06.000Yeah, the activism has become, the activism against it has become, you know, seemingly the job description these days and it's the exact opposite of what was always intended.
01:20:55.000I was like, hey, send me that list, because, you know, and I frankly, I want you to be involved in that, because, you know, that's exactly what you need.
01:21:03.000And again, I don't care if they're devout leftists.
01:21:06.000If they do their job, And not the activism.
01:21:40.000And when we got the intelligence community's assessment of the 2020 election, we noticed that they assessed that China did not seek to influence the 2020 election.
01:22:57.000He finds that leadership inside the intelligence community, including some which he labeled CIA management, had pressured people to change their analysis to assess that China did not seek to influence the 2020 election.
01:23:13.000And in one of his interviews, one of the analysts said, The reason why I didn't want to say China sought to influence the election is because I don't support Trump's policies and I didn't want my intelligence used to support those policies.
01:23:30.000Because that implicitly means the policies were actually right because of what was going on.
01:23:36.000Those are the people that we've got to get out of there.
01:23:51.000She was the only person talking about, hey, they're manufacturing evidence by the FBI in the Trump case, the documents case.
01:23:58.000You, like, at any other point in history, if it was against Obama as recently as a couple years ago, even if it was against, they would be going nuts.
01:24:56.000Like so much that's not talked about, but you know, again, hopefully people are waking up to that as they are, you know, some of the other cases and everything like that.
01:25:02.000So, you know, we just need more people like that.
01:25:04.000So we just got to keep fighting, Cliff.
01:25:22.000Grab it on Amazon, Books A Million, Barnes & Noble, anywhere that you get books from.
01:25:26.000I'd really appreciate the support for it.
01:25:28.000I think it's something that we've got an opportunity as people of faith to show in the marketplace that this is the kind of content that we want to consume.
01:25:36.000And so I'd appreciate everybody's support.
01:25:39.000You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, at Cliff underscore Sims.
01:25:43.000Spell The Sims, because there's only one M. Only one M, that's right.
01:25:48.000Only one M, because that took me a while.
01:25:50.000I'm not going to say it, but I want the country to know that the level of discipline that I am showing right now to not say, unlike you, to not say what was discussed in our text thread right before this, you know the level of discipline.
01:26:04.000I'm game to play whatever you want to play.
01:26:25.000And as more of this stuff comes out, we got to talk more because there's just so much craziness in the intelligence world that I think will be important.