Valuetainment - July 09, 2025


＂John Brennan Is A BAD Guy＂ - CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou EXPOSES Former Director’s Secrets

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
John McLaughlin George W. Bush Martha Kessler John Brennan Obama George Tenet Clinton McCain
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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

145.68

Word count

1,175

Sentence count

124

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Former CIA Director John Brennan was a man of many talents. He was a brilliant linguist, a brilliant strategist, and a brilliant human being. But he was also a bad guy. John Brennan is the man responsible for one of the most infamous torture programs in the history of the CIA.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'll tell you a story that I've never told publicly.
00:00:02.300 Go for it.
00:00:03.660 So when I got hired, John was a GS-14 nobody.
00:00:07.340 He was the deputy director of the Arab-Israeli analysis group.
00:00:16.720 And he worked for a woman who was really one of the great minds, the great thinkers on Syria.
00:00:26.500 And they didn't get along.
00:00:28.620 He had been sort of imposed on her.
00:00:31.300 And so he went to her one day and said, I think I'm ready for a promotion.
00:00:37.980 I'm ready for the senior intelligence service, and I'd like your blessing.
00:00:41.460 Her name was Martha Kessler.
00:00:43.960 Martha, yeah, Kessler.
00:00:46.720 So she said, not only are you not ready for the senior service, I don't even want you to work for me anymore.
00:00:54.180 You're fired.
00:00:54.820 Well, at the CIA, if you're fired, you're not really fired.
00:01:00.120 You have six weeks to walk the halls and find another job.
00:01:03.540 And if you can't find a job in six weeks, any job, then they escort you out.
00:01:08.780 They take your badge and you're actually fired.
00:01:10.640 So this happened right around Christmas.
00:01:16.280 There are no jobs open at Christmas.
00:01:18.960 The job turnover is in the summer.
00:01:20.980 So he's having a heck of a time finding a job.
00:01:26.540 Finally, he goes to the PDB staff, the president's daily brief.
00:01:30.980 And it just so happens that they have an opening for a briefer for the lowest ranking person on the National Security Council who's entitled to a PDB briefing.
00:01:40.700 That is, the director of intelligence programs that just happened to be, at the time, George Tenet.
00:01:49.460 So Brennan and Tenet immediately hit it off.
00:01:53.700 They are both alpha dogs, you know, cigar smoking, hard drinking, pockmarked faced, you know, guys.
00:02:04.840 Hit it off totally.
00:02:06.380 And wouldn't you know, George gets promoted to become the deputy director of the CIA.
00:02:16.440 He becomes the deputy director and he names John the director of the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, Martha's boss.
00:02:25.680 He calls Martha into the office and he says, now you're fired. 0.95
00:02:30.520 And she retired.
00:02:31.900 The office was reorganized and so John got squeezed out, but George made him station chief in Riyadh.
00:02:41.180 Now, this is a guy who has not had five seconds of operational experience in his life, who's now the station chief in one of the most important countries in the world for the CIA.
00:02:52.480 It was John Brennan who oversaw the granting of the visas to the 9-11 hijackers, for God's sake.
00:03:00.500 So John comes back and becomes the executive director of the CIA, the number three ranking official in the CIA when George becomes the director.
00:03:13.540 So it's George, John McLaughlin, John Brennan.
00:03:19.280 Well, I'm the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations at the time.
00:03:24.300 So John is in my briefings every single day.
00:03:28.340 And John was just torture, torture, torture.
00:03:31.560 We've got to torture these guys.
00:03:32.760 We've got to do this. 0.99
00:03:33.460 We've got to do that. 1.00
00:03:34.140 We need to start killing more people. 1.00
00:03:35.600 We need to get out there and start shooting. 1.00
00:03:37.360 He's talking like this. 0.98
00:03:38.540 Oh, yeah.
00:03:40.700 He never got along with the deputy director for operations.
00:03:43.620 And the deputy director went to George and said, come on, man.
00:03:47.040 You've got to get him out.
00:03:48.180 So George made him the head of what was called the TTIK, the Transnational Terrorist Information Center.
00:03:54.020 That became the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center.
00:03:57.960 And John wanted to be the head of his own agency because he was telling everybody who would listen at the time that he wanted to be secretary of defense.
00:04:12.180 So he goes to the TTIK, and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
00:04:20.200 And so he retires a year before George W. Bush finishes his second term.
00:04:25.740 Well, then, and this is the role of serendipity, there was a huge wave of retirements in 2008.
00:04:40.240 And about half the people at the senior level who retired went to the McCain campaign, and the other half went to the Clinton campaign.
00:04:48.080 John was the only one who went to Obama.
00:04:52.300 And so Obama won.
00:04:54.320 So John's the guy.
00:04:56.440 John says, I want to be CIA director.
00:04:58.620 The liberals went crazy.
00:05:00.060 They said, absolutely not.
00:05:01.940 He was one of the godfathers of the torture program.
00:05:05.180 Obama says, okay, I'm going to make him deputy director of the National Security Council, deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism.
00:05:12.540 Then he started doing the kill list.
00:05:14.380 Well, by 2012, the liberals forgot or didn't care or whatever, were distracted.
00:05:20.080 They make him CIA director.
00:05:22.080 And then he starts just wreaking vengeance on all of his enemies.
00:05:27.720 Wow.
00:05:28.180 This is a bad guy.
00:05:30.080 John Brennan was a very bad guy.
00:05:31.500 From day one, he was a bad guy.
00:05:33.240 Who liked him in the CIA that worked with him?
00:05:36.180 Who was he liked?
00:05:37.120 Who was he liked by?
00:05:38.200 There was a group, even on the analytics side, there was a group of guys who were, you know, these hard-drinking, most of them were single, but hard-drinking, you know, tough spy wannabes.
00:05:53.600 And they gravitated toward John.
00:05:57.020 And he took good care of a lot of them.
00:05:59.820 In what way?
00:06:00.560 He got them promoted into the senior service.
00:06:03.080 Like, we would get these promotion lists, and I would say, you've got to be freaking kidding me.
00:06:07.580 So-and-so got promoted to the senior intelligence service?
00:06:10.960 Seriously.
00:06:12.340 But, you know, they were protégés of John's.
00:06:19.500 It's an ugly story.
00:06:20.620 Well, he just doesn't look like a friendly guy.
00:06:24.720 He's not.
00:06:25.180 He looks like a...
00:06:26.620 He looks like exactly what you read about him.
00:06:30.720 Like, that's the guy.
00:06:31.900 Yeah.
00:06:32.260 The look fits the profile of how he would be.
00:06:35.080 That's right.
00:06:35.740 You know, that picture right there, the third one.
00:06:37.860 Not the first, the second, the third one.
00:06:39.620 That kind of gives me the vibe of who he is.
00:06:41.500 That's him.
00:06:42.180 Yeah.
00:06:42.560 That's him.
00:06:43.160 So, yeah, when you...
00:06:44.540 And by the way, if you listen to this, folks, I'm sure a lot of you guys are enamored by the conversations we're having.
00:06:48.480 You can manect John.
00:06:50.620 John's officially on Manect.
00:06:53.000 You can ask him questions.
00:06:53.940 I'm sure the audience has got a lot of other questions.
00:06:55.680 I'd be delighted.
00:06:56.300 Rob, if you can put the Manect handle somewhere, QR code, so they can go to him.
00:07:00.020 And if it's in the description, you can go ask him questions.
00:07:02.240 Hi, everybody.
00:07:03.020 I'm John Kiriakou, former CIA officer.
00:07:05.980 Please find me on Manect.
00:07:07.160 We have a lot to talk about.
00:07:09.040 CIA, FBI, DOD, torture, secret prisons, international renditions.
00:07:15.040 Maybe you or your child want to apply for a job at the CIA and are looking for some tips.
00:07:20.000 Let me know.
00:07:20.820 There's a lot we can talk about.
00:07:22.960 You pick the subject.
00:07:23.940 We'll make it happen.
00:07:25.000 Again, it's on Manect.
00:07:26.620 Thanks, and I'll see you soon.
00:07:28.460 If you enjoyed this video, you want to watch more videos like this, click here.
00:07:31.180 And if you want to watch the entire podcast, click here.
00:07:33.960 We'll see you soon.