Joe Kent Reveals All in First Interview Since Resigning as Trump’s Counterterrorism Director

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

This is from this show and this is Joe Kent, who later went on to become until yesterday,

the director of the National Kenner Terrorism Center.

Here it is.

What do you think the immediate and then longer term effects of a war with the run would

be on the United States?

Immediately it would be a very bloody.

I have no doubt that we could probably defeat some of their air defense and go in there

and have another shock and awe campaign, but again, we saw how the shock and awe campaign

in Iraq really didn't actually work in the long run.

So I have no doubt that we'd have some immediate results that people would cheer about here

in the United States, but Iran, Persia, has always been an empire.

It's been around longer than any of the other players in the modern Middle East right

now, and they are not going anywhere.

If we get deeply involved and deeply entangled with Iran, we are playing right into China's

hands, because China would like nothing more than for us to be committing our military

industrial base to a war in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, and then to be committing our

conventional military power, our blood and our treasure back in the Middle East.

That will make the Pacific our actual border extremely vulnerable to Chinese aggression,

or China will simply just watch us bleed out economically as we bleed out on the battlefield

on these couple of different theaters.

It's absolute insanity.

It's opening up Pandora's box, and again, for what gained to the American people.

So the very first thing you notice about that clip, which was shot almost exactly a year

before the current president was inaugurated, is that it was right.

It was pression.

He called it, he called the general outline, not that it was hard to call, but Joe Kent

knows what he's talking about.

He spent a lot of his life in that region, and he said a year before this current presidency

began, this is a big, serious country.

It's the oldest civilization in the region.

And if we went to war with Iran, there would be a momentary sugar high.

Americans would support it because they support their own country, and they certainly support

their military, and people would approve of it.

But very quickly, you could see a process by which we got caught there, trapped there,

bear trap, hard to extricate yourself from that.

And sitting on the sidelines would be our chief global competitor, China, who would be

silently nodding along with a slowly spreading grin, knowing that they were the main beneficiary

of what they were seeing, of our waste of American lives, and treasure, as Joe Kent said.

So we haven't reached that stage, thankfully, removing toward it, and everyone who's watching

carefully knows that, and if you're honest, you know that.

So this is a very serious moment we're in, and we're watching not just a war in Iran,

but potentially a total realignment of the world, and the loss in some sense of what

the United States has globally.

This could be the beginning of the end of our influence in a lot of the world, and that's

just the beginning.

So again, that's a big deal.

It's starting to dawn on people, and that leaves Joe Kent as one of the relatively few people

connected to this administration, who said it in public, is that good or bad?

Well, it may seem good, of course you want to be around people who have clarity about

what's going to happen next, but in practical terms, it's bad, in fact, it's always bad.

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

and then you do it anyway, and it turns out that person was right, your first instinct

is not to apologize and correct your behavior, your first instinct is to crush the person

who called it correctly.

That's your instinct because it's the lowest of all instincts, but it's a human instinct.

That's your instinct because his correct protection is an indictment of you, of course, and

it's a way to deflect attacks on you and your own culpability by blaming the guy who

told you it was going to happen before you did it.

This is a longstanding fact of human life, and in the last 60 years in this country, it

has been the iron law of foreign policy, which is to say when things go wrong, the only

people who get punished are the people who criticize the adventure in the first place.

You can imagine General Westmoreland attacking Walter Cronkite of CBS News, and everything

of Walter Cronkite, in my case, not much, but fundamentally it was Walter Cronkite sitting

very much on the sideline saying, hey, this war is not going well, and there was General

Westmoreland prosecuting the war, but General Westmoreland argued till the end of his life

in some way successfully that he lost the war because Walter Cronkite criticized the

war.

Is that really true?

How many troops did Walter Cronkite command?

Was he in charge of strategy?

Don't think so.

He was a newsreader in New York, but you can see why Westmoreland did that.

Why a lot of people believed it agreed, agreed with Westmoreland.

You saw the same thing happen in the days after the tragic and incredibly stupid Afghan withdrawal

under Joe Biden.

That didn't help the United States.

Of course, we had to get out of Afghanistan, but the way we did it, who would argue that

was a good thing.

It was a terrible thing and resulted in the deaths of a lot of Americans.

So who was punished for that?

As far as we can tell, and we've checked, only one person, and that would be Colonel

Stu Scheller of the United States Marine Corps.

What was his crime planning the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

Oh, no, no, Stu Scheller's crime was saying, out loud, boy, that didn't work very well

and why did we do this?

And for that, he went to jail.

The people who actually did it, who gave the orders or who carried them out without asking

questions about them, which was everybody else, they're fine.

You don't even know their names and they certainly haven't been penalized.

So there is a long history because this is a standing feature, the way people are, that

you criticize those who told the truth and who were right, who called it ahead of time.

Now in a functioning society, you get a hold of yourself and you understand that people

are like this, but if you want to be successful as a society, you have to restrain that impulse

because it's low and it's counterproductive.

And if you silence people who tell the truth, you end up making the same mistakes again

and again and again.

That's why we're here at this pivotal point in our war with Iran.

That's the first thing you notice.

Joe Kent was right, therefore, Joe Kent must be destroyed and there is, of course, this

ongoing effort to do that, to dismiss Joe Kent as a tool of the Islamist or a leaker

or say he's married to someone who works for Hezbollah or lie after lie after lie, but

they're all aimed at Joe Kent the man at his motives, at his character, at his personality,

his wife.

And that's by design because none of them touch on his reason for resigning as director

of the National Counterterrorism Center because if he focused on that, you'd have to answer

his questions.

You'd have to answer, is this true?

Is what Joe Kent, who possessed highest level intelligence clearances, who was really

barred from knowing no secret in the US government, since he was one of our top intelligence

officials until yesterday, seems like a pretty informed guy is what he's saying true?

That's the last conversation anyone in Washington wants to have, so just attack him.

And you're going to see a lot more of that.

The people who said this war was a bad idea will be punished and the more it turns out

they were right, which is to say the worst this project goes, the more it becomes obviously

kind of productive to American interests, the more vigorously they will be punished

unto and including Jail, Stu Scheller went to jail, probably not the only one who will

going forward.

So you should just know that and understand what you're seeing in those terms.

The second thing that comes immediately to mind when you watch Joe Kent from January

of 2024, talk about what would happen if we went to work with Ron, is that what he said

that day, a year before Donald Trump's inauguration could have been said by Donald Trump, maybe

with a different style, he was making Donald Trump's case.

The case of Donald Trump has made for a very long time.

Donald Trump, as everybody knows, became the Republican nominee in 2016, 10 years ago,

in part because he was the only Republican running for president that year out of a field

of nearly 20 people who was willing to say what everyone else knew, but was afraid to say

which is the rock war didn't help us.

It hurt us.

It was a dumb idea and it went on way too long and it became the quagmire that people

like Donald Trump predicted it would be.

And the American public so relieved to hear the truth about something they already knew

made them the Republican nominee despite maybe some concerns, but they did it because

hey, he was right and he's the only one brave enough to say so.

And Donald Trump made varieties of that case for the next 10 years and in many cases specifically

about a run because Trump has seen long before most people in Washington, before almost anyone

in Washington, the big picture, the outline, which is this is a contest between the United

States and the West and China in the East, a rising power that matches or maybe exceeds

a economic power globally and we have to figure out how to apportion power.

And we don't want to get sidetracked with engagements like, I don't know, another endless

Middle Eastern war because in the end, the only winner of that conflict is China, is China.

In this specific case, whoever in the end settles this conflict, whether it's the United

States or some other power, whoever comes in at whatever the end of it is and says enough,

this is hurting the world.

Each side has made its point, but the global economy has a critical interest in the Persian

Gulf.

That's energy.

And we're going to stop this now.

Whoever that person is will become more powerful than ever and everyone else will become

less powerful.

The person who settles disputes is in charge.

Not the person who starts them, not the person who wins them, the person who stops them.

When dad comes home and stops the fighting between brother and sister, who's in charge?

Dad, because he stopped the conflict.

All of which is to say, if at the end of this conflict, it's China that comes in, China

which has a vested interest in what happens in the region since there are a major consumer

of Gulf energy.

If it's China that comes in and restores the energy flows out of the Persian Gulf and

restores some version of peace gets the fighting to stop then China is in charge of the Persian

Gulf.

That's just a fact of nature.

And so a lot is at stake as Joe Kent knew, as Donald Trump knew.

And so the question is, how did Donald Trump, after 10 years of saying one thing, do in

the pivotal act of his presidency exactly the opposite?

That's not just an academic question, it's not the beginning of a conspiracy theory about

some shadowy lobby.

It's the most important question we face because this is not the first time the United States

has entered into this kind of war against the wishes of its own population and in clear

contravention of its own interests against its interests.

This isn't good for us.

One has made the case that it's good for us and increasingly as the days pass, it becomes

obvious to everyone why it's not good for us.

And if you don't believe that, then check the prices of food and fuel and everything you

buy because everything you buy is dependent on the price of energy and the production of

fertilizer, both of which are affected almost immediately by the closure of the straight

survival moves.

So we did this again.

It's not exactly clear how or why we did this, but we need to find out.

And there is great resistance to finding out.

And you've noticed that in the last 36 hours, since Joe Kent resigned as director of the

National Charism Center, one of our top intel officials, because the attacks on him have

prevented an honest conversation about what he's actually saying and what he's saying is.

And he says it clearly.

And we're going to ask him about it directly in just a moment.

Israel got us into this war.

It's lobby in the United States, pressure of the president, and its prime minister in Israel

told the president, we're going without you, join us, because if you don't, the troops

in the region are interested in the region, your citizens in the region will all be at

risk.

You have no choice.

They led the way.

That's Joe Kent's position.

And rather than push back against that and say, no, actually, he's wrong, they're telling

you to shut up.

And why are they doing that?

Well, there's only one reason people ever become hysterical and slanderous, start screaming

at you rather than answering you, it's because they're lying.

And the truth is, this is not the first time you've watched people in charge lie.

This has been going on a long time.

And lies give way to a whole bunch of bad things.

Once you tell lie, you bolster it with further lying, hysteria, the fear of being

caught lying, the rage and slander, if the person catches me lying, he wins in the zero

of some game of lying, I die, you go in the attack to cover your lies and bad judgment.

You can't make wise decisions on the basis of lies, because they're not true.

They're not based in reality that didn't actually happen, or in this case, it did happen,

but you're pretending it didn't.

So a country based on lies, like a family based on lies, like an individual life based

on lies, cannot succeed.

In fact, it's hellish, as all of us have experienced in our lying.

And so the only way out of this is to stop lying, is to tell the truth now, probably 63

years after we should have started telling the truth, but it's never too late to tell

the truth now about everything, because it's never as painful as you think it will be.

It's actually an act of liberation.

In fact, it's the only real act of liberation, telling the truth sets you free because the

truth itself sets you free.

That is always and everywhere a fact.

And the longer you delay doing that, the more horrible the consequences of your lies.

So let's hope that tonight, with this conversation with Jo Ken is the beginning of the long overdue,

truth telling, which is the only thing that will save this country.

And one final note about Jo Ken, who I spent the last 24 hours with, Jo Ken's resume

hardly needs explanation because everyone is aware, this is a man who deployed on 11 combat

missions to the global war on terror.

This is sort of the perfect representation of the GWAT generation.

This is one of those guys we often celebrate, but too rarely hear from who we set out to

fight the so-called war on terror that began on 9-11.

And it's an entire generation of men.

Men who look and sound, for the most part, very much like Jo Ken.

So the implication, of course, he doesn't care about security or he's soft on Iran.

Jo Ken spent, well, the majority of his 20s and 30s fighting Iranian proxies and watching

his friends get killed by them.

So this is someone who's actually earned the right to speak about Iran and the war on terror.

And of course, he was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

He's thought a lot about terrorism in this country and the blowback from events like

this.

And we're going to ask him about that as well.

But the other thing to notice about Jo Ken, and it may be his defining factor, is that

he doesn't slander anyone.

His resignation, whether it was not an attack on Donald Trump, it wasn't a promised

way to tell all memoir about what he saw on the insider to aggrandize himself or to get

a job on a TV show or sell something.

I asked him in dinner last night, what are your plans, none?

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

way to save the United States from certain disaster.

Tell the truth.

Air the secrets.

Be honest for once in decades about what is actually happening, things that everybody

who lives here suspects are happening.

In some cases, we're probably wrong.

We've come to wrong conclusions.

That's okay.

Tell us what actually happened.

Tell us why you did this.

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

Make the decisions that you make based on one criterion.

Is this good for my people or not in the way that a father would lead his family?

Or an officer would lead his troops.

It's not complicated.

Everybody wants that.

That's not a partisan question.

That's a human question.

And that's the question, Jo Ken is posing.

Why can't we do this?

Why can't we say this?

Back on anybody?

Jo Ken himself does not attack anybody.

But this is a last ditch attempt, not simply to save the country from disaster and Iran,

but to save the country period.

And as you listen to him speak, ask yourself, is this a man who's working for Hezbollah

or is an egomaniac or a leaker or is this a man who says very little when he has nothing

to say, who speaks straight forwardly and with honesty?

Well, evident honesty, is this a man of dignity and decency?

Is this a man that America once had a lot of?

Is this a man who was once in effect the American archetype, the guy you looked up to, the

guy you wanted your son to be?

Whether you agree or not, maybe you're reaching completely different conclusions.

But as you listen to him speak, ask yourself, is this the kind of person who makes me proud

to be a fellow American?

Because it's really a referendum on us if we can't see that Jo Ken, whatever you think

of his opinions, is the kind of man this country should be producing and should be elevating

and should be proud of, if we can't see that, then we've failed the test and we've lost.

But judge yourself, here's Jo Ken.

Jo thanks a lot for joining us.

So I appreciate this.

So I want to go through the letter that you sent yesterday as you resigned as director

of the National Counterterrorism Center.

And basically through the big points and give you a chance to explain them, you've been

spoken for quite a bit over the last 24 hours, I think if you really helpful to all of us,

if you would be for yourself and flesh out some of these points, I'm going to read the

first one.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.

Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.

Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.

How did you reach that conclusion?

I think this is key.

I mean, this would be more challenging to explain, had the Secretary of State, the President

and the Speaker of House, the House not come out and said that we conducted this attack

at this time because the Israelis were about to do so.

So that takes away the argument that there was an imminent threat, as in Iran was planning

to attack us immediately.

That just simply did not exist.

May I ask you to pause?

And so I've heard people say that, and this just happened, but history has a way of

getting rewritten in real time, and then you look back 10 or 15, 20, 25 years later.

And no one seems to understand the things that you saw because they've been eliminated.

So I think it's important to stop and say, here's what we actually know.

So I'd like now, if we could, just to play one of the statements that you alluded to and

that's a Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State.

And this was shortly after this war commenced, and he was explaining in a, as is habit in

a thoughtful, precise way, why here's Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

And so the President made the very wise decision.

We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.

We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.

And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks,

we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed.

And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't have it.

Okay, so that is his almost contemporaneous explanation.

And it's not offhand.

He reasons it out.

He explains there's a logic chain there.

And he says, we knew not that Iran was going to attack.

He did not say that.

He said we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran and in retaliation for those attacks

by Israel against Iran, Iran might attack American forces.

So the imminent threat that the Secretary of State is describing is not from Iran, it's from Israel.

Exactly.

And I think this speaks to the broader issue.

Who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East?

Who is in charge of when we decided to go to war or not?

In this case, with what the Secretary described, and later on the President, later on the

Speaker of the House, and in the way the events played out, the Israelis drove the decision

to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events, meaning the Iranians

would retaliate.

Now I think there's a potential there where we could have done several different things.

We could have simply said to the Israelis, no, you will not.

And if you do, then we will take something away from you.

I think that it's fine that we offer defense to Israel.

But when we're providing the means for their defense, we get to dictate the terms of when

they go on the offensive, otherwise they stand to lose that relationship.

And the Israelis felt in bold in that no matter what they did, no matter what situation

they put us in, that they could go ahead and take this action, and we would just have

to react.

And so that speaks to that relationship.

But also it just shows that there was a lobby pushing for us to go to war.

I know we'll get into that later on in the statement.

But we had a real potential, I think, knowing what we know of the Iranians and how they

react.

And in particular, how they react to President Trump's leadership.

The Iranians under President Trump's leadership, especially in his second term, they have

shown that they take a very calculated approach to the escalation ladder.

For instance, in the lead up to the 12-day war before midnight hammer, the Iranians didn't

attack us.

They were engaged in negotiations with us.

When President Trump came back into office, they stopped their proxies who were attacking

us under the Biden administration because they knew Biden was weak.

They stopped their proxies from attacking us as well.

So they knew President Trump was someone who wanted to negotiate.

And more importantly, they knew that President Trump was not someone to mess with because

he killed Kossum Solmani.

He killed Abumadi Mahandas.

He had defeated ISIS.

They knew that President Trump was a man of action.

He is militarily strong.

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

So I think in this scenario, even if the Israelis told us we're going to strike on this

date at this time, and we didn't try to negotiate with the Israelis and say, hey, we'll take

something away from them, I think we still could have back-channeled to the Iranians

and said, hey, if something happens here in the next couple of days, it's not us.

We're still serious about negotiations.

And we don't want to escalate this because it's well known what the Iranians plans were.

We knew that they were going to hit our, potentially our bases in the region, potentially

our allies.

We knew what the straights and form moves.

All of these things, I think, were fairly well known.

And the Houthi's ability to close the Red Sea, which is not yet done, but which would

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For the purpose of explaining your position or flushing it out more, so people can understand

it, because this is your the most high-profile resignation by far in a long time, and there's

a lot of commentary on this, and I took a quick trip through it this afternoon, and one

of the consistent themes is, well, of course, there's a lot of slander, which we can talk

about, but the substantive attack on you, and it is an attack or refutation of your letter,

is that, well, actually, Joe Kent was totally for using military action.

He supported the Soleimani killing, for example.

He seemed fine with the 12-day war, for example, so he doesn't have a problem on principle

with an engagement with Iran.

You're saying what to that?

What's your response?

Well, I have no compunction about really fighting anybody who threatens our country, and

the Iranians have posed a threat in the past, and the Iranians have a way of threatening

America.

They have the capability, and we always talk in the intelligent circles about capability

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

And again, back to the data that we have on the Iranians, they used the escalation

ladder.

We saw that deliberately during the 12-day war.

When they struck back after midnight hammer, it was very deliberate.

They fired an equal amount of missiles as we dropped bombs on the nuclear facilities,

and they basically hit a part of a base in Qatar that they knew we didn't have any troops

on.

They didn't want to escalate any further than we were willing to go.

But also, the Iranians, when they pose a threat to us, they usually do it with their

proxies.

And if their proxies stick their heads up, and their proxies come after us, this is basically

the Trump doctrine.

We hammer them, and we hammer their high-profile leaders.

Cosmosolmani was highly effective and highly revered in Iran, because the previous presidents,

prior to President Trump, Obama and Bush, let Cosmosolmani run around, raise proxy armies,

kill Americans, and no one ever did anything to him.

President Trump rightfully killed Cosmosolmani.

We got his deputy, Abwadi Mahandas, who had American blood in his hands, took them off

the battlefield, but then President Trump stopped.

He took those two key players off the battlefield, and he said, I'm not going to further escalate

with Iran unless you escalate with us, knowing that if we struck Iran and we truly struck

the regime, that would only strengthen the regime.

So then President Trump did something that's incredibly smart, used that decisive military

action, but then he coupled it with an economic package of sanctions, maximum pressure sanctions.

We can debate whether or not we should be using sanctions as the prime reserve currency

holder or whatever, but he pressured the Iranians economically.

After punching them in the mouth and showing, hey, I won't take this, I'm not Obama, I'm

not Bush.

If you cross a line, I will come after you.

But then he really put the pressure on them economically.

If you look at the effect of the economic sanctions, that's what got the Iranian people

on the streets actually protesting against the Ayatollah's government, which is, extensively,

what we would like.

We would like to see a bottom-up regime change where we get rid of the Ayatollah, but it's

the will of the people, and they have a new, successful government that's stable that

we can deal with.

The one way to throw that all out the window, and this isn't just Jo Kents opinion, many,

many scholars, and I think a lot of intelligence assessments have been written about this, too.

I know for a fact they have, is that if we struck the regime, it would only strengthen

it.

And that's not, I think that's just basic common sense.

I mean, I think of myself, and probably you're in this camp as well, we didn't like

Joe Biden, we didn't like Barack Obama, but if an outside force were to come in here and

try and topple them while they were the president, I would 100% rally around the flag.

That's just common sense.

So if we wanted to strengthen the Ayatollah, you joined the military under Bill Clinton,

I assume you didn't vote for.

Right.

Right, you joined in 1998.

You've gone the whole cycle of the war on terror, I notice, and served out as an NCO, I think

you're entire.

NCO won't officer.

And won't officer 20 years.

And I should just say, I hate Everett's refer to a man's resume as like a data point because

your ideas exist separately, because in this specific case, meaning you, you spend most

of your time fighting Iranian proxies.

Yeah, good deal of it.

Yeah.

So you're aware of the threat from Iran, you have personally used violence against that

threat.

I have.

There's a lot of it, I think, and you supported the president's policy up until fairly

recently.

Right.

And you've said that a lot in public, in fact, you went to work for him.

He hired you.

Yeah.

Right.

But here's the, from what I can tell is the central question, imminent threat.

Now the president has said many times to many people, including the public, Iran can't

have a nuclear weapon.

I'm sure he must have said that to you, you don't have to say it, but he said it to everybody,

is that fair?

That's fair.

Yeah.

Whenever asked, we say, let's just start here.

They can't have a nuke.

Okay.

Got it.

Everyone agreed with that conceptually?

Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon?

No.

They weren't, you know, three weeks ago, and this started, and they weren't in June either.

I mean, the, the Iranians have had a religious ruling, a fatwa against actually developing

a nuclear weapon since 2004, that's been in place since 2004.

That's available in the public sphere, but then also we had no intelligence to indicate

that that fatwa was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted.

The Iranian strategy, it's actually pretty pragmatic.

The Iranians are obviously aware of what's taking place in their region, and their strategy

was to not completely abandon their nuclear program because they saw what happened to

Muammar Qadafi in Libya when he said, hey, I've got no more nukes.

I'll do what you say.

I'll give up my nukes.

And then we gave them the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yeah.

We, we, we, regime changed him and he was, you know, executed by his own people in the

most horrific way.

He was randomized by a bayonet, great.

Okay.

So that's what, that's the lesson, I think, that the entire region took from that when Hillary

Clinton.

Unfortunately, that, that's what the Neocon neoliberal war mongers, that's the lesson

that they showed everyone in the region.

And then conversely, he, the, the Iranians also knew that if they came out and said, okay,

we've, we've got a nuk, whether they were bluffing or not, Saddam Hussein, Iraq right

next door.

So they kind of have the hung, I think.

He was hung by his own people, you know, after a bloody, you know, war that's still

essentially going on inside of Iraq.

So the, the Iranians' position when viewed from the lens of the region was actually fairly

pragmatic.

They were preventing, you know, themselves from developing a bomb, but they still wanted

the ability.

They wanted the ability to, to enrich.

They wanted the ability to have some components so that they weren't completely stripped of

it.

And when we always assessed that there were either several months or a year, two years

away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon.

And that's not because the Iranians are stupid people.

I think we can, we can tell right now that the Iranians are anything but stupid.

They had the ability, I think, that the, the brain power to actually develop one or they

could have simply traded a ton of oil with Pakistan or with someone else to actually

get a nuclear weapon.

They were not doing that.

We had no indicate, no intelligence to indicate that they were.

Then why was the president, was he told that they were on the brink of it?

Why at the beginning of every conversation about Iran with the president say, I don't

want to run to a nuclear weapon.

Why was that the central question when, and you would know since you were the director

of the National Counterterrorism Center, why would he say that if there was no intelligence

or evidence that they were actually developing a nuke?

So a couple of things, this is what I talk about in the, in the letter about this ecosystem

of information that's laundered through a lot of prominent, new conservative types that

are very sympathetic to, to the Israeli cause.

And also Israeli government officials who give us things and semi-official channels.

What they did was they created basically a shifting red line or a new red line.

So if the president's red line was Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, we've actually got

a lot of trade space in there for a deal to be made because of what the Iran, what I just

described with the Iranian policy, essentially the Iranian saying, okay, well, we don't want

a nuclear weapon.

Well, that means we basically are at a point where we can start negotiating and we can come

up with the deal.

And the president is a fantastic deal maker.

So if your goal is to move us away from any kind of deal and your goal is to move us into

a conflict, you have to shift that red line.

And that's where a lot of this, I would say, what became a de facto U.S. policy of Iran

can have no nuclear enrichment.

It was laundered through a lot of the different talking heads, Mark Levin, Mark Dubuets.

You've got the foundation for the offensive democracies.

You name it.

Washington DC has plenty of pro-Israeli lobbyists who will come and say those things,

who will publish think pieces on it, who will go on the media, who will run op-eds in

the Wall Street Journal to talk about this, why they can't have any enrichment whatsoever.

And then we have a high degree of engagement with Israeli government officials who will

come in and say, well, they're enriching and they could enrich or they could enrich

more.

And that will get them closer to a nuclear weapon.

So then enrichment basically became the new U.S. policy.

And the only official I've heard in folks are welcome to look for this that said this

in the first Trump administration was Mike Pompeo.

He said it.

The president didn't say it.

The president has been very consistent.

He said they can't have a nuclear weapon.

But again, like I said, that puts us at a place where we actually could have negotiations.

And only President Trump, I think, could successfully have negotiations with Iran because he actually

punched them in the face.

And the Iranians had been walking all over us.

They had been killing our soldiers.

All of that is true.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Iranians, what their proxies were doing.

President Trump level set that when he killed Qasim Solman and he killed Avamadi Mahandas.

The folks who wanted to push an actual regime change war in Iran knew this and they knew

there was a potential to get a deal.

Or there was a potential for President Trump just to continue the policy of maximum pressure

sanctions.

And if you come after us, we will hit you hard.

And that got the protesters out on the street in Iran.

And that's actually what the regime feared the most.

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

I'm sure some degree of the Shia-Martin culture played a factor in that.

However, I think he knew that if he was killed, the regime would survive because the people

would rally around the regime.

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You've been there, settling in for an evening of TV only to waste half the night scrolling.

I believe you predicted this, you know, some years ago, I think we're watching, it's

hard to know exactly what we're watching, but it seems consistent with what we are watching.

I'm just focused on this question of imminent threat because that's really the only justification

I think most Americans would accept for a preemptive war.

Certainly.

Otherwise, just like a war of choice done because BB told you to and no one wants to

get behind that because it's obviously illegitimate.

imminent threat, you're saying that there was no intelligence that you saw with the

highest level clearance, obviously involved in this conversation that showed an imminent

threat from Iran to the United States.

No.

Unless we took certain actions, unless we came after them in a way that they thought threat

in the regime, then we basically knew what they were going to do.

Well, okay.

Of course.

But like any country, so if we attack any country, we know that they're going to have a reaction.

We faced an imminent threat once we attacked you.

Yeah, exactly.

But there was no intelligence that said, hey, on whatever day it was, March 1st, the

Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack.

They're going to do some kind of a 9-11, Pearl Harbor, et cetera.

They're going to attack one of our bases.

There was none of that intelligence.

Again, back to what we know about the Iranians, they're very, very deliberate with the escalation

ladder.

And again, they're only deliberate under President Trump's leadership because they knew

and they took President Trump very, very seriously.

So I mean, it's just, I just think it's a remarkable thing to nail down because you're not

some guy on Twitter, you're a senior, as of yesterday, you were a senior US intelligence

officials who's not hostile to President Trump, who's not going to hear to write a telebook

or launch a media career.

So I think you're a sober voice on this.

And just to be clear, there was no intelligence that showed imminent threat.

There was no intelligence that showed there on the cusp of building your nuclear weapon.

There was no intelligence, indeed, that showed they were trying to build a nuclear weapon.

And nobody you know said, I've seen it, but you haven't.

It exists, but you just haven't seen it.

Did you ever hear anybody say there is intel that shows this?

I did not know.

But I know how this works.

I know these really officials, some in intelligence, some in government, will come to US government

officials and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply

isn't true.

And they'll say, Hey, I'm giving you a preview.

It's not an intelligence channel.

It's yet, but here's what's going to happen.

And that doesn't usually come.

Wait a second.

I mean, I thought that US policy makers made their decisions on the basis of intelligence

collected and or vetted by our intelligence.

That's what we have intelligence agencies that soak up hundreds of billions a year.

But you're saying that Israeli official short circuited the entire US government and

just went right to American policy makers and said, it doesn't matter what your country

says.

Here's what we know.

So true.

I mean, usually they're pretty slick.

And they'll say, Hey, this isn't in intelligence channels yet because it's going to take

some time to get there.

And here, they're on the cusp of building a bomb, you know, they're going to, I don't

know, you pick your topic a lot of times, they'll sample different things until they find

what sticks.

But in general, the narrative about, you know, they're going to do a preemptive attack

or really just, they're going to build a nuclear weapon.

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

And enrichment is the pathway to that.

They're going to continue enriching it, whatever percent enrichment became the narrative.

And so that hung up and that short circuited and really sabotaged the entire negotiations

because the Iranians basically said like, we're not going to negotiate if the, if the

whole starting point is no enrichment.

And again, that had nothing to do with the nuclear weapon and the Iranians essentially

agreed to that.

And they always came in, they moved that, that red line.

And they would do a lot to say like, oh, they're enriching and you know what that means.

That means in X amount of time, they could have a nuclear bomb.

You have to ask now.

And then the way the ecosystem would work is that the talking heads on, on TV, you know,

your Mark Leven's, Sean Hannities, et cetera, they would say basically the exact same thing

that night on TV or there would be a, you know, a piece written in the Wall Street Journal

of the New York Times that would say something very, very similar.

That if you looked in classified intelligence, we didn't see any of that.

I mean, that must have been such a weird experience for you, bizarre.

Since you have access to the biggest and most powerful and presumably the best intelligences

in the world, and you're seeing people say things as fact when you know that they're

not facts.

Right.

What was that like?

Confirigating.

And I think that's why in general, in the lead up to this last iteration, a good deal

of key decision makers were not allowed to come express their opinion to the president.

Not allowed by whom.

I think it's important for me right now just to stay on the facts.

I don't want to point names.

I don't want this to come in name calling, or you know, this guy did this on this day.

But any leader has gatekeepers.

And so you're saying that you were prevented from bringing this information directly to

the president by gatekeepers?

Well, there wasn't a robust debate.

So in general, because our assessment really hadn't changed, you know, we would send those

up through intelligence channels, everyone's kind of reading the same intelligence, but

then what actually gets briefed to the president can be very, very different depending on who

and how it's delivered.

And without a level set from the intelligence community, someone like DNI, Gabbard coming

in and saying, Mr. President, like, here's the full scope of the intelligence.

And what it means, you're kind of lacking that sanity check of where we're at, or at

least a good sampling, you know, to gauge how accurate what the Israelis are saying is.

And that process, in my view, was largely stifled in this second iteration.

There was robust debate and robust discussions leading up to the 12-day war into midnight

hammer.

But this, the second round to me, and I'm sure others will refute this and disagree

with me, but what was conducted by just a handful of other advisors around the president.

That is true.

I believe what you're saying is true.

My sense, though, and you know more than I, is there weren't a lot of people directly

around the president who work there, who work at the White House, his, you know, the

principals, who are making an aggressive case for this war.

Do you think there was, I mean, was there a majority of like his top 10 advisors who

were saying we must do this now?

I think the, I think the circle that was, that he, that was around him was very, very

tight and very small, and I think they were all in the same sheet of music.

And I think a lot of them were getting their information from the, the ecosystem that

I described.

And I think we'd be in a different place if we would have talked about the actual, what

the intelligence picture is and what are, what are, what are interesting.

So Israeli government talking points laundered through Fox News and the Wall Street Journal

is that the ecosystem you're talking about?

Yeah.

And then the Israeli officials coming in and basically either ahead of time or after

the fact, saying the same thing, like the enrichment is going to get them a nuclear bomb

instead of amount of time.

Do you believe that you and the, the DNI for whom you worked until yesterday had as much

face time with the president as Israeli officials did?

I don't know, I don't know that for sure, because I, I don't know exactly how frequently

the Israelis were, were engaging directly with the president.

It did seem like Benjamin at Yahoo was, you know, obviously that was all public that

he was in the white house.

Seven times.

Quite a bit.

Yeah.

Quite a bit.

And then his other officials as well, uh, Dermur, et cetera, those guys were, were in,

they were making phone calls.

Just a lot of engagement from them.

And again, when, when we would hear, or you'd hear what they were saying, it didn't reflect

in intelligence channels, even intelligence that we share with the Israelis that the Israelis

were giving us.

In many cases.

Um, so there was, there was a clear, you know, gap between, you know, the intelligence

and then the information that the president was given and the decisions that the president

was making.

I don't want to put you in a comfort position.

Obviously, you're not going to divulge anything that's classified.

I don't think you would.

You definitely shouldn't because there are people who don't hurt you for that.

And you shouldn't.

Uh, so without encouraging you to do that, it's, yeah, I think it's a commonplace that's

understood and watched.

And I've heard from many people who work in your business that a substantial portion

of our information touches Israel at some point.

Either it's collected by them, uh, it is shaped by them.

It's not purely American.

Is that a fair?

Is that do you think it's fair?

Especially in the Middle East, I would say, I mean, look, the Israelis are tactically

very proficient.

Yes.

They have a very competent intelligence service.

Um, and there's a lot that we can learn from them in the craft of intelligence.

Yes.

They're very proficient.

They're very good.

However, whenever we get information from a liaison service, I think it's incredibly important

to, to realize that it could be given to us to influence us as well as to inform us.

And the way that I would see Israeli information, in particular coming from senior officials directly

to our senior officials, that, that caveat just wasn't given frequently enough.

And there's a lot of times, some of this is just because of, you know, bureaucratic practice,

but a lot of it, I think, is just we feel very comfortable with the Israelis.

A lot of them are dual citizens.

They, they sound like us.

They don't feel foreign.

Um, we kind of go into a more complacent mode where we trust a lot of what they have to

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

our own agenda at the end of the day.

Now, I'd say a lot of times we have the same agenda, you know, it's very, very tactically

in the same when it comes to fighting, has below when it comes to fighting terrorism.

Sure, but when it comes to what's our strategic goal in a war that's going to have ramifications

for our nation, for the region, for global energy supplies, I think most, most folks right

now at the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, they would say, us and the Israelis actually

have a different objective here.

I don't believe that our objective has been clearly defined because we're shying away

from regime change.

The Israelis are not shying away from regime change.

They want to knock out, lock, stock and barrel the current government.

They don't seem to have a plan for what comes next.

Well, that was my next question.

I think you would have heard tell of such a plan.

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

And I have asked a bunch of people, many people, this question never gotten any answer whatsoever

other than there's no plan.

The Israelis don't have a plan because they don't care.

Do you think that's fair?

I think that's completely fair.

I think as Americans, rightfully, we want a clear stated objective in in state for war.

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

Americans want to know why we're going to war, what the in state is, and they can get

on board in general if that's clearly articulated.

That's not the case with Iran.

The Israelis are different.

I think a lot of times again because they, a lot of them speak English, they culturally

feel the same, but the Israelis have a much different tolerance for how and why they're

going to war and for their endurance for war.

The Israelis are completely fine with Iran slipping into chaos.

That means that the IOTOLA and the IRGC can't really threaten them anymore, as well as

money might be cut off in their head.

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

For us, for global energy, straights of hormones, our partners in the GCC, mass migration problems

in Europe, this is a major problem.

It's a catastrophe for the world.

For the world.

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Thank you.

Right, and it's a little galling that I was treated to lectures for a couple of weeks

about the valiant people of Iran and how we needed to save them, and then a lot of the

ex-out communities here in the United States of Iranians, a lot of really nice people.

They jumped on board, we got to save our people, but by your telling and by the facts,

by the way, this is not really an opinion.

There's no plan for what happens after a regime change.

The people pushing that line would just be happy to see a permanent civil war there, which

is insanity.

If we do want a real regime change, and we want the people to rise up, and we want it

to happen fairly organically, going aggressively after the Ayatollah was the last thing that

we ever should have done.

Again, I'm no fan of the former Supreme Leader, like Aminaya however, he was moderating

their nuclear program, he was preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon.

If you take him out, if you kill him aggressively, people are going to rally around that regime,

and the next Ayatollah that you get, and I think this is the case by all data that we

have with the Sun, the next Ayatollah that you get is going to be more radical because

he has to show the people that he's going to push back.

There's always attention inside of Iran between the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard

Corps, and the clerics who run the country, they have a healthy, I think, tension between

the two, a rivalry.

IRGC's leadership, these are Qasim Somani's troops, these are the guys that Somani train.

These guys, most of them, cut their teeth in the Iraq Iran War, a lot of them cut their

teeth fighting us in Iraq, they cut their teeth fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

They created Hezbollah, they trained in armed Hezbollah, so these guys are actually pretty

serious and pretty hard line, and they're willing to fight, and they want to fight.

By killing the Ayatollah, we've given them more power because now, internally, they can

go and they can say, hey, all you guys who thought that we could negotiate with the Americans,

your chumps, we have to fight them.

I think the longer this goes on, the more negotiators, the more moderates that are killed off,

like we just killed, you know, Ali Laranjani, who wasn't a negotiator, who was eager

to get us a deal.

Again, look, I've got no love for the IRGC, I've got no love for the Iranians, but you've

got to realize it's clear if you want it in case you're seeing it or no, you've fought

their proxies.

I've fought their proxies.

I mean, I've put countless of them in flex cuffs are much worse.

I've gone after the Iranians, I was in specialized outfits that went after the Iranians and

their proxies.

These are very serious people.

They're not, you know, supermen by any means, they're humans, but they're serious,

and if you give the IRGC a reason to take more control, and they get support from the

people, because again, you know, you kill off the Ayatollah, they can say, hey, the last

guy was too moderate.

Look at what it got us.

Like, give us more, more control.

I get it.

And the Iranian people are going to be like, well, actually, yeah, I don't like getting

bombed by the Americans in Israel, maybe we do need to listen to the IRGC.

So a lot of these, the points that you're making, I think we're insightful, but they're

also pretty obvious if you kind of game it out for 10 seconds.

So it seems like you've got two different goals.

You've described Israel's goal as just regime change, permanent chaos, take Iran off the

map as a coherent nation state, just tie them up with internal chaos, whatever the effects

of that are on the rest of the world, all of them disastrous.

Then on the American side, you have the President's stated goal, which is we can't let Iran

have a nuclear weapon, which they didn't have and weren't trying to build in any imminent

way, right?

Okay.

So if you join those two together in a common mission, in a war, like that's our partner

in this war, then you create all kinds of very bad incentives.

And now, Largiani, I think was killed by the Israelis.

You saw these Israelis blow up Cotari natural gas facilities today in the Cotari natural

gas field, which feeds the rest of the world, LMG.

This seems like very obvious steps, not to minimize the threat from Iran, but to lock

down the United States in perma war.

We can't get out after we do that.

You kill the negotiator, you attack our closest ally in the region, it's probably Cotari.

You attack Cotari, apparently.

Like no one thought this might happen.

And there's no, there's no reins on the Israelis, unfortunately.

I mean, we continue to refer to them, like as our partners are equal to the best partners

we've ever had.

But at the end of the day, the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us.

But they're acting against our interests in a very obvious and very serious way.

And again, it's obvious, if we've stated that our goal is just to take away their ability

to ever, even in rich and to take away their ballistics and to take away their navy, all

these kind of tactical objectives, if we say that that's our objective and that's when

we can come to a place where we can just exit.

It's in the Israeli's interest to get us more and more entrenched in this.

Exactly.

And that's exactly what they're doing right now.

You know, when the Israelis killed, learned Johnny, I think I may have misspoke and said,

we killed, we didn't kill him, the Israelis, the Israelis struck him.

But I do believe in Iran at this point of the war, they view it as whether we like it

or not, I think they view it as we, us in the Israelis, kind of as the same thing.

We've described it that way.

Because the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us.

And that's where the relationship is just way off-kilter.

If they have different objectives than us, then what are we doing letting them drive

the war?

So you just said something that's been disputed many times by the Mark, well, I'm not

going to name anybody, but by advocates for Israel, it's a PR department here in the

United States, which is huge.

And you said they couldn't do any of this without us.

You often hear its promoters, it's lobbyists say, Israel just wants to fight its own wars,

back off and let us do it.

Is that not?

I'd love, I'd love us to run the experiment, we try that.

What would happen?

You know, the Israelis, again, they have great, they have the ability to go out and collect

great intelligence, they have a very capable military, but they're a very small country.

I think Israel would be able to defend itself.

I think it could conduct, you know, limited strikes on its borders.

I think it could continue carrying out pretty impressive target assassinations against

its adversaries.

And so I think you would see it relatively contained.

What it couldn't do is go topple entire governments.

It couldn't do something like the Iran War, the Iraq war.

It couldn't aggressively, you know, destabilize Syria.

These big, heavy lifts of regime change that America has been engaged in, Israel could

not do on their own, which is why you get back to the Israeli lobby being just so potent

and so powerful and so aggressive.

And I want to ask about that because that's the line that you're being attacked for.

And so I want to go through and have you explain more fully if you would why you said what

you did and read it.

But before I do that one last question, was any of us debated that you know of before

this war commenced three weeks ago, did anyone say, well, wait a second, if we do this and

kill the Iatola, because that was like the first order, I think.

What are the facts after and like, what's the goal to these debates ever have been heavily

before the 12th day war?

I think that when the Israelis came back around and said they wanted to do this, I just don't

think there was any debate.

I think just based on the ecosystem and the amount of influence that was exerted.

Because in some ways this is a little humiliating since we were told, I was told the whole

country was told that after the 12th day war, there was no running nuclear threat.

We got rid of it.

I'm not imagining that.

It just happened last summer.

Yeah.

Do you recall those statements?

Yeah.

I mean, Operation Minute Hammer?

Yes.

Destroyed their nuclear capability.

So how was it that we wound up six months later getting another lecture about their nuclear

capability in its imminent threat to the United States and nuclear tip ballistic missiles

aimed at Miami and the whole thing and nobody, first of all, there was no organized protest

against this.

In a normal country, people would rise up and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you just told

us six months ago the exact opposite.

What did internally and the Intel world people say, what the hell is going on?

I just think that the planning for this was so compartmentalized that there was no debate

as in it was a foregone conclusion.

Maybe the exact timing they weren't exactly aware of or that had to be debated when

we do it, but it seemed to be a foregone conclusion and I'm sure others will say, no,

that's not the case at all, but there was no robust debate like there was going into

the 12-day war because the big question that a lot of us had that were skeptical of Operation

Minute Hammer was, okay, so we do this.

We know the Israeli's whole goal is regime change.

What makes us think they'll stop and if they do stop for a period of time, why won't we

just be back in the same place in six months where they're saying that we have to go back

in?

And that's essentially exactly what happened.

So this was raised to my knowledge in June.

This was like, hey, what happens next?

So you take out the nuclear, the ability for them to enrich and to potentially develop

a nuclear weapon, that's done.

We know the Israelis have a completely different goal.

Part of that strike minute, Hammer was also to get the Israelis to wrap up the 12-day

war.

But we knew because when the Israelis told us that they wanted, this is the time to take

down the regime and they don't want the IOT to be in power, they want a regime change,

they want a new government there.

So we said, okay, knowing that, we know that this strike, this limited strike that we're

going to do isn't going to be enough.

At some point, the Israelis are going to come back to us and say, hey, we have to go again.

And with that knowledge, and I think because so many of us had pointed that out and because

the Israelis had said it, there wasn't a big debate this last time.

I think they had that discussion behind closed doors and there wasn't a chance for any

dissenting voices to come in.

But you would think, well, I've seen it before, when a question like this arises, the

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the regime in place.

Like this is all been gameed out for a long time.

There's a constant process of gathering intel on it, correct?

Yeah.

And that's what we did in the lead up to the fall of the war.

But this time, no.

But this time, no, not to my knowledge.

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So I almost don't want to bring this up because it's so distressing, but I have to ask

a question about blowback, the effects, the downstream effects of military action, terrorism

in the United States.

And I have the feeling we're going to see some of it, but I'm going to ask you, but since

you are an acknowledged expert on that question, since you spent your adult life fighting

Iranian proxies, and because we're always hearing some of them in the United States,

did anyone go to you and say, if we do this, what are the odds that we will have terror

attacks in the homeland here in the U.S.?

That was a piece or an intelligence product that we worked up on our own.

I bet.

And coordinated throughout the intelligence community, basically we talked about the

Iranians' ability to conduct sleep or cell-like attacks, which is actually pretty limited.

The whole idea of sleeper cells or a cell operating is challenging in today's environment

because cells have to communicate with each other, and we're pretty good at picking

up on that.

The real threat, and most major terrorist organizations have kind of moved to this model, is the

lone actors.

It's inspiring people that are already in place by using the media.

There was already a ton of blowback, you know, because the guy's a war.

The Hamas used propaganda very, very effectively to, I think, curry a lot of favor with younger

people here in the United States and abroad, and there was multiple terrorist attacks in America

in the last year, where Gaza was cited because they consumed some of the propaganda coming

out of Gaza, and these people weren't infiltrated Iranian agents.

They were here, folks that were homegrown, and so we said, hey, the biggest threat right

now isn't that the Iranians are going to like sneak some guys over, and they've been waiting

here for years, and there could be force operatives.

That's always possible.

Again, the Iranians are very competent as well, and they have tried something like that

before in the past, back under the Obama administration, when they tried to kill the Saudi

ambassador in Georgetown.

So we were worried about that, but what we were more worried about was the fact that Biden

had the border open for four plus years, and I testified publicly in Congress laying

out the 18,000 known suspected terrorists that potentially could be in the country since

then.

We've discovered potentially more the problem is the bookkeeping under the Biden administration

was kind of like the border.

It was wide open, and so we don't know how many folks are actually in the country that

shouldn't be here.

It's millions.

How many of them have ties to countries that are adjacent to Iran or that are Iranian?

We're still, as I left, we are still working on some of those numbers, but we've seen several

terrorist attacks since these operations began in America, and they all fit that lone

actor-inspired model.

So the blowback is, as long as this goes on and the more the propaganda and neverly gets

weaponized, we are going to see more than likely more people here that are radicalized.

Now, frankly, I think that none of the, and this is another great thing about President

Trump, none of these people should be in the country.

We should have tight immigration policies.

We should be focused right now.

Our focus should be on finding everyone who shouldn't be in our country right now and

getting them out as soon as possible, not in the other foreign adventure.

I wonder, I mean, so you've already seen in the wake of a recent terror attack, Neocons,

use that attack as a way to try and censor shutdown, maybe even in prison, critics of the

decision to go to war in Iran.

So it's almost like you control both sides.

You advocate for a war which inevitably stokes religious hatred because you advocate for

the killing of a religious leader, okay?

So you're helping to create religious war, permanent generational, religious war.

And then when you're a country or the country you happen to be living in that you don't

really care about, it feels the effects when Americans are killed as a result of that,

you use their deaths to justify the silencing of people who criticize to you.

Does that make sense?

Exactly.

Yeah.

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

I'm very concerned.

I think we, I pray we won't, but the odds are not in our favor.

Just considering how open our borders have been, obviously this type of propaganda radicalizes

people.

Again, we've already seen attacks.

We saw attacks inspired by the conflict in Gaza.

So I think we're going to see more of this and then just, you know, made the mistake of

opening up Twitter a couple of times today.

There's people calling for, you know, dissenting voices to be charged, to be locked up, etc.

And so, you know, the erosion of civil rights, I think during a time of conflict is nothing,

nothing new, unfortunately, we've seen it before.

It's the rule.

But I wonder though is like people talk through or maybe they didn't talk it through, but

did anybody in the lead up to this, I just want to ask it again to make sure I understand

the answer, in the lead up to this war, which is now regional war, potentially a global

war, big war, biggest war of our lives.

Did anyone come to you and say, do you have a, what's your projection for like what the effects

on the United States will be?

Like how many Americans could die at the shopping mall because of this or at school?

We proactively wrote an assessment, which is what we, what we tend to do anyways.

But again, there just wasn't a huge process in a debate about this last, this last iteration.

But you're worried about it.

I'm, you know, I'm very concerned about it.

I am too.

I am too.

Yeah, I'm too.

Okay, so let me redo the most controversial and you've addressed this to some extent,

but I'd like you to flush that a little more if you don't mind.

You, you say to support the values, the foreign policies that you campaigned on during three

campaigns that you enacted, you understood up until June of 2025 that the wars, the Middle

East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives or patriots and depleted the

wealth and prosperity of our nation.

Early in this administration, this is the change, high ranking Israeli officials and influential

members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined

your America first platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.

This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat

to the United States and that you should strike now.

There was a clear path to a swift victory.

This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous

or rock war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.

We cannot make this mistake again.

I think you've explained how the echo chamber and the lobbying campaign worked.

It wasn't just unfoxed in the Wall Street Journal.

It was by telephone and text message.

It was in person and it was relentless and there was no countervailing campaign.

There was almost almost nobody who went to the president and said, well, actually,

here's the American view, which is frustrating.

But then you allude at the end of that to the Iraq war.

I think you told me it didn't last anything.

You spent five years totaling or you were 11 combat deployments.

You spent about, you think, five years, nine of those deployments were to Iraq for six to eight months,

so yeah.

Okay, so you've had some time to think about the Iraq war.

More time than it's healthy, yeah.

Can I just say because it makes me, so here you go.

You joined the army at 18, 18.

18, yeah.

You spend your whole young life there.

Go to all these wars, 11 deployments.

You spend five years in Iraq over seven deployments and you reach a series of conclusions

fighting and being shot at by Iranian proxies.

And now you say, I don't think this war is good for America.

And you're being slandered as a bad unpatriotic quitter who secretly sympathizes

with the Ayatollah.

I just have to ask you how that feels.

I mean, they love you when you're just saluting and moving out.

But then the second you say, I don't think we should be doing this.

And I have an opinion now, then only attacks coming.

But I truly believe that God put me where I am right now,

really putting me through everything I've been through in my life to bring me to this point.

I don't believe that God said, hey, you're here now in this moment to just sit back and be a good

soldier for this iteration.

I've had lots of friends who have said, hey, I think you would have been more value staying

in the administration with your experiences.

And I understand that and I'm flattered by it.

But considering all that I've seen, the conclusions that I've reached,

I feel like I'm here for a reason.

And something I think, you know, probably on my third or fourth deployment,

as I was realizing that we are lied to, to get us into Iraq and that we had a whole mess

that we now had to clean up and how much it mirrored and echoed Vietnam.

I remember as, you know, being in my mid to late 20s, being very frustrated with a lot of the

Vietnam veterans who did not speak up against. I know some did, but especially Vietnam veterans who

stayed in service as I had intended to do, who stayed in service and who advocated for the Iraq war.

Colin Powell is someone who I have a lot of respect for for the way he fought in Vietnam,

his leadership in Desert Storm, but then the way that he was part of lying to get us into the

Iraq war and then staying on and continuing those lies, knowing full well, having all the experiences

of being a guy on the ground in a feudal war that was, you know, basically we were

re-employed to under false pretense. He had all that knowledge and because he wanted to be loyal to,

I think the president and I think he wanted to be loyal to what he felt was the government that

would eventually get it right, he didn't step out and say we shouldn't be doing this. And I just

remember reflecting on that and, you know, said to myself at the time and this might seem, you know,

silly and idealistic, but said to myself at the time, if it's ever my turn, if it's ever my

generations turn, I'm going to do everything that I can to make sure this doesn't happen to the

next generation. So a real breaking point for me, I, you know, did the best I could for a couple

weeks as this war started from the inside to try and find, you know, off ramps to try and provide

information to see what I could do from the inside. But watching the casualties roll in and I

don't want to use anyone's, you know, loss as a political talking point. But for me personally,

watching more casualties come in, I just couldn't stand by as both a veteran and then, you know,

as a gold star husband and say like, I'm just going to continue to soldier on in this. It's time

to try something different. I know this path that we're on, it doesn't work. I've seen enough data.

It's time to do something different. How hard a decision was that?

It became really clear to me, you know, over the weekend, this past weekend that our message just

wasn't getting through. And I was like, I don't, I know what's, I know what happens if I stay.

If I, if I stay and I go along with this, I'm, I'm going to be, you know, need deep in it trying

to just chip away and make a difference. But my ability to have, you know, my voice heard to,

to, to present data that runs contrary to the trajectory and the agenda that the administration's

on, that's going to be squashed before it even really reaches the White House. And so I,

I knew I had kind of hit my, my limit of effectiveness in, in that capacity. So really,

it should have been a hard decision. But for me, it was crystal clear. It was like number one,

I can't be a part of this in good conscience. And I need to do everything I can to actually

speak out about it and speak out in a way that I hope resonates with the president and with some

of my former colleagues. I understand they might be mad at me. They're getting hard questions from

the media. But I really want them as, as we descend even further into this war. I really hope that

they take the time to reflect and to realize that we still have time to get, get us out of this.

And then also for the 77 million people who voted for President Trump, who voted for no,

no new wars, who voted for the, the foreign policy that President Trump enacted in his first

administration, the foreign policy that I described. I mean, President Trump's first foreign policy,

the one that he ran on, the one that he destroyed the Republican Neocon establishment on,

was incredibly pragmatic. We're not saying, you know, you have to be some kind of a, you know,

pacifist. We are saying, though, that you have to be very, very deliberate and judicious in how

you use force. And you also have to use the full scope of the American toolbox. You use diplomacy,

use our economic leverage. And again, this isn't something that I came up with. President Trump

came up with this. President Trump enacted this. And this is why 77 million people voted for him.

It's probably not the only reason, but the no new wars put America first. Don't let us bleed

out in the Middle East. That's what people voted for. And that's, that's what I think, you know,

you can't pay in for. And I think that's something he could get us back to. If he just takes a look

in assesses, how we got to where we are right now. So I want to get to that in a minute. Your

solution. And, you know, that I just want to be transparent about my motives. Not in this to attack

anybody. Right. I'm concerned to the point of agitation about where this is going. And it's

effects on the United States. I think I hope I'm wrong, but I believe it. And I think you do too.

I think this is the most serious thing that's happened in my lifetime. So I want to fix it.

And I don't want to happen again. Exactly. And I don't want history to be written in real time

by liars in such a way that no one understands what we're going through. And then we make the same

mistakes. And this is a principle that any parent applies to his own children. No, say I love what

you did. And you're less likely to do it again. So before I say anything, I just want to pause

just on your personal experience. And I'm, I knew you hate talking about some. I'm not going to make

you uncomfortable. I'm pushing too much. But you just, you feel it. I feel as an observer,

such sadness for the men who've been used, including you. And I wonder how given everything you've

done and everything you've just said, how you don't feel bitter at the response that you've gotten

from people, some people. How do you keep the bitterness out? I think faith. I've got a great

wife. God's blessed me to ice with with my late wife, Shannon and my wife, Heather.

Our two boys, Colton Josh, who I think are watching this hopefully. So faith and staying grounded

on what's important. Yes. But then also look, the people who are coming after me,

I believe that the internet is like 25% real. I think there's a lot of bots. There's a lot of people

who've got delivered a talking point and they're going to get a paycheck for it. Or they just,

you know, they want the the adoration. So I just don't take most of it seriously. And again,

look, I know there's some of my former colleagues, people who I do like, who have had to come after me.

And I understand that too. Like I get it. Like they're still there. They've got to discredit

everything I'm saying right now. They're watching taking notes. So I'm not bitter about that. I

literally just want to focus on the task at hand and the task at hand is stopping us from getting

deeper into this this quagmire. Because again, like just looking back on my experiences in Iraq,

I don't feel like this happened. There wasn't the ability to. There wasn't this platform. There

wasn't, you know, the free independent media that existed in a real way that could reach people.

That's right. And so to me, we have this opportunity. So I'll be better and angry later when,

you know, I read Twitter and somebody who I used to like says that joke ends a traitor. And we're

going to fire him tomorrow anyways. You know, I don't we don't have time for that. Like as you

pointed out, major things are happening right now in this war. And the president is facing some

very, very challenging decisions. So I personally just hope that he and his closest advisors

listen and think. And that's that's the main priority. So I strongly agree. And

and we can't allow hatred of us to inspire hatred in ourselves. You can't become a hater. It'll

destroy you. It's what they want. So I just I salute you for avoiding that. And it's absolutely

real. I spent a lot of time with you. And you're not a hater at all. You don't even seem

that bothered. So that's incredible. Given where you are. It's amazing. It's an active

faith. And I love it. End of the history portion of the of the segment. But I just think it's

important to establish why you said first, the war in Iraq, second, the conflict in Syria, which took

the life of your wife. Why both of those were driven by Israel? Well, the war in Syria and everyone

happened about the war in Iraq. I mean, so have we not gone in and invaded Iraq? We wouldn't have had

the conflict in Syria. But Syria is always a major problem under Assad for the Israelis, both under

his father and under the Bashar al-Assad, half a same bus year. Because of their support,

the relationship with the Iranians, their support for Hezbollah. Right. Makes sense. And so they

wanted to get rid of Assad as well. They saw Iraq as a vehicle for not just taking down Saddam Hussein,

who posed a threat to them as well, but also as a way, a lily pad, if you will, to get rid of Syria.

And basically, so Assad must go. This is a slogan that all of a sudden emerged out of nowhere.

That was not like an organic American desire. It wasn't like Americans woke up and were like,

you know, the problem, the problem really is this ophthalmologist from Syria, he must go.

It was that reflected the priorities of Israel.

Israel, and then I think you had the echo chamber as well, because you had all the usual suspects,

you had FDD, and you had always different other organizations that were out there saying that

like now is the time to, you know, break up. Very wise. Very wise. Break off the shackles on Syria.

The next thing you know, like, although we have Syria and Thomas Jefferson, they'll take over,

and instead we got the former leader of al-Qaeda. But a big reason that Syria became next

after Iraq. In Iraq, we screwed the whole thing up so badly that we toppled Saddam, destabilized,

fought a bit of insurgency. The Sunnis eventually aligned with al-Qaeda, but then we beat them

down so heavily because the Shiites are the majority of the country. The Shiites took over,

Shiites largely, the Shiites that we installed in Iraq, the Dauoparti, Bauders, Syria, etc.,

you know, heavily aligned with Iran. And so at the end of the Iraq war under Obama, you know,

there was this whole, like, crap, we just handed basically the keys to Baghdad to the Iranians,

who, again, hostile to us, cosmosomani is running all over the place, funding proxies.

It's a great deal. It helps Iran's circumvent sanctions, the relationship with Iraq,

and we just spent trillions, lost nearly 5,000 Americans there. And now we have this Shia super

state. And so then there was a ton of pressure coming from not just the Israelis, but I think also

a lot of the gulf to say, hey, we've got to get rid of Assad as well. Because now you have this

Iranian land bridge that goes basically from Damascus all the way to Tehran, and then you can hook

that down into the Lebanese area where hezbollah is. So next thing you know, well, if you want to get

rid of the guy Assad, who's in Iraq, he got a country full of, like, really angry Sunnis,

and what are those guys going to turn into? And so next thing you know, we're now on the side of

ISIS and al-Qaeda. ISIS gets out of control, and we have to deploy back to Iraq, back to Syria,

to put out essentially the brush fire that we created. And so that's why I put all of those

together. Because again, without Israel's influence, would all of this have happened,

would the Iraq War have happened? Maybe, but they heavily lobbied for it. I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu,

you can pull up tapes on YouTube, like the guy was lobbying heavily back in 2002 for us to do

regime change in Iraq, and he has stayed in power ever since. Ariel Shron, who initially was the PM

in the lead up to the Iraq War, initially was against it because he wanted us to focus on Iran,

but then towards the end, he got on board as well. But the LeCoud party that's in power and has been

driving Israeli politics now for most of my adult life, they were heavily in favor of the regime

change war in Iraq, which again led to she had domination led to the rise of ISIS,

led to the rise of al-Qaeda, and then heavily fueled the Syrian civil war. So again,

this country is real, who they can be a good partner in some regards. I'm not anti-Israeli.

I've worked with the Israelis again, very competent intelligence service, very wonderful people,

but they have different objectives than we do. So to put them in the driver's seat of our foreign

policy and to let them dictate our foreign policy is a disservice to the American people.

Well, I think, you know, I think you're under you're understating the effect to disservice

suggests like an inconvenience. Now we're looking at bankruptcy and death and collapse of the dollar,

and like lots of them, I'm not blaming Israel. By the way, I'm not blaming Israel for any of it.

I'm blaming supine-American leadership that takes this. I don't understand it at all.

And that kind of leads to the most uncomfortable question of all, and I don't know if you can answer it.

I don't think I can answer it. But since all of these dynamics are very well known to everyone

in Washington, everyone in Pretensis is not real. The Tom Cotton's, the world in Cgrams, or whatever,

you know, the liars. Everybody knows. Everybody knows. Pro-Israel people know. Anti-Israel people know

that what you're saying is true. I don't think there's any debate about any of it.

So since it was clear that we were being pushed by the Netanyahu government into this war that they

were choosing the timing, they chose the timing, right? I mean, yeah. I'll take Marco Rubio's word for it.

Yeah, I'll take Marco Rubio's word for it. Was it ever discussed the option that you mentioned

at the beginning like, how about no? Not that I know of. Okay, so then you have to ask,

I'm just following the logic train here, how could what kind of pressure does it require to get

a president who campaigned against exactly this thing for 10 years to do exactly this thing? What does

it take to do that? I wish I knew definitively. I think there's two potentials or two schools of

thought. I mean, one is the media echo chamber, the donors, the way the Israelis come in and kind

of a lot of the information like I described previously. And then the other option is much darker.

I mean, we still don't know what happened in Butler. We don't know what happened with Charlie Kirk.

And by no means am I saying like, you know, if the Israelis did this or any of that, but I'm saying

there's a lot of unanswered questions there. And there is enough data to at least say that there's

a good chance that President Trump feels like he is under threat. We're not allowed to ask,

basically, was there any linkage between what took place with us of merchant who was recruited by

the Iranians to come to America to recruit proxies to kill President Trump? FBI put a confidence

human source at him. All this is public now. This is all out there in the open. And he's arrested,

and then two days later, a sniper takes a shot at President Trump. We think Mershant,

and we know the CHS was talking about the human source that the FBI put at Mershant.

They were talking about, hey, we could kill the President potentially with a sniper rifle.

But then they arrest him. Two days later, Butler happens. And Crooks, according to the official

narrative anyways, is an enigma. We don't know anything about him. We can't get into his devices.

If we did get into his devices, maybe there's nothing there. No more questions are allowed to be

asked about Thomas Crooks. The DHS IG is currently being blocked from investigating Butler as well.

That's out in the media. That's all well known. Your investigative journalist found that Crooks

did indeed have an online persona online footprint. And he was talking to people. So it's like,

why aren't we investigating this? I mean, if an attempted murder of a presidential candidate,

and then there's another assassination attempt, there's been multiple public breaches of President

Trump's security over the last year. And then, you know, Charlie Kirk has killed publicly

in a very horrific way. And we're not really even allowed to look into that at all. And Charlie

Kirk was one of President Trump's closest advisors. And he also advocated heavily against a war

with Iran. He was in the Oval Office in the lead up to the 12-day war. I wasn't particularly close

with Charlie. He was very gracious to me when I was running for Congress, very, very supportive.

So we knew each other. And the last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June,

in the West Wing in the stairway. And I said, hi to him. And he looked me in the eye. And he said,

very loudly. And it's a small, you've been in the West Wing. It's a small, it's a tight space.

And he said, Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran. Very loudly. He was single-minded.

And he walked off. And I believe into the Oval. So when one of President Trump's closest advisors

who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink at least our

relationship with the Israelis. And then he suddenly publicly assassinated. And we're not allowed

to ask any questions about that. It's a data point. It's a data point that we need to look into.

What do you mean when you say we're not allowed to ask any questions about that?

We've been told that this individual Robinson is alone government. And maybe he is.

But the investigation that I was a part of, the National Counterterrorism Center was a part of,

we were stopped from continuing to investigate. And the FBI will say that they stopped that because

they wanted to have, to turn everything over to the Utah State authorities, everything's going

to trial. It's very, very sensitive. But there was still a lot for us to look into that I can't

really get into. But there was still linkage for us to investigate that we needed to run down.

And I'm not making any conclusions. I'm not saying because of this, this happened. I'm not saying

that at all. I'm just saying there's unanswered questions. We know the pressure because of the text

messages that have been made public that Charlie was under a lot of pressure from a lot of pro-Israel

donors. And again, we know Charlie was advocating to President Trump against this war with Iran.

And we knew at the end of the 12-day war at the end of midnight hammer that the Israelis

were going to come back and ask us to go back to war again. So we have a lot of data points

between Butler, the assassination attempts against President Trump, the breaches of his security

what happened to Charlie Kirk. Can I ask you to pause on the Charlie Kirk just because it upsets

me to hear what you're saying, to be reminded that he was murdered, but also to hear you confirm what

was reported in the media several months ago that your office had been blocked from investigating

his murder. That does not make sense to me. I don't understand why you would ever turn down

help in an investigation from a US agency with a lot of experience in gathering intelligence

on things that's your job. The FBI will say, and the DOGJ will say that because it's an ongoing

case, it's a Utah state case, that back off they've got it, they've got a smoking case,

they've got the fingerprints on the gun, and they've got the case. But the FBI was involved in the case.

Yeah, the FBI was involved, the FBI's basically said that they're deferring to Utah because it's

now a case. They've established a precedent for federal investigation of this crime. Yeah. And

the National Counterterrorism Center's mandate is to investigate any foreign ties, to see if

there's potentially any foreign ties. If we don't find any foreign ties, we back off.

What I'm saying about getting into too much detail is there was more for us to investigate.

There was, you believe there was reason to investigate foreign ties to Charlie Kirk's murder and

were told by the FBI, DOJ? FBI and DOJ, yeah. No, you're not allowed to investigate that. Stop. It's

done. They basically cut off our access to be able to get into that information. I didn't even

say necessarily that I believe there's 100% foreign ties. There were data points that we needed

to investigate. I mean, I think anybody who's even looked at any kind of police investigation,

you get 100 leads, you run them down, and 99 don't mean anything. We still had a lot more leads

to run down that pertained to some kind of a foreign nexus that we were stopped from investigating.

That just strikes me as inconceivable that that could happen. And again, I was aware of it from

reading about it, but not really to the extent that you've just described. So I would love to hear

the justification for that. And can you flesh that out a little bit more? What were you told was the

reason to prevent you as a federal intelligence official running the National Counterterrorism Center

from looking into the murder when you had reason to look into it? Well, the way the bureaucracy

works is they can just kill things in process. So initially, we were cut off pretty early on

from being able to access the files and being able to send people out there. We sent people out

initially to work in the task force. After the crisis period, the first week or so, that dispersed,

and we basically were told that, hey, we'll get back to you if we find any kind of foreign ties,

et cetera, that we want you guys to look into. Meanwhile, we had already dug up a decent amount of

leads. Again, I'm not saying that we had anything concrete, but we found more work that we need to do

to say that we had done our due diligence. We were then told that, hey, you guys need to stop,

you can't work on this anymore. I had a bureaucratic dispute about it. Eventually, we were allowed to

continue to investigate. But then, in very short order, all the requests that we would make

that normally different parts of the interagency with the FBI being on point would facilitate

data sharing. Data sharing is a big thing that NCTC does. Those requests were just never met,

or, in my opinion, not an honest effort was given to fulfill those requests. Just basic information

that any competent police service, which I believe Utah has, and the FBI, that they would have

access to, to help us run down the leads to either confirm or deny some kind of foreign activity.

So we were cut off from that. They didn't ever officially come back and say, you can't look at

this anymore. All of their requests just continued to die on the vine with the various agencies that

we needed to actually fulfill those requests. I just can't imagine a legitimate justification for

that. I mean, maybe I'm missing something, but from a non-specialist perspective, something

horrible has happened. The U.S. government is, it's core function is to investigate crime,

particularly murder. Here you have an agency whose job it is to run down the rabbit trails you've

described, and you're stopped from doing that. We don't want the information. Right. Why would

any person engage in a legitimate pursuit, say, I don't want more information?

I mean, especially considering there was people posting online prior knowledge of what was about

to happen. So a lot of a lot of the justification for stopping us from investigating hung on. Hey,

we've got, we've got the guy, his fingerprints around the gun. We got a video of him jumping off

the roof. Like, this is a slam dunk case. Okay, even if it is a slam dunk case that he took the

shot, what about all the people who had prior knowledge? All of this, the basic investigative

questions. How do you get there? You map it out. This isn't rocket science. I mean, this is

anything that anyone with common sense would know to ask. But basically, once they caught him,

once he turned himself in, and his fingerprints were on the gun, it was basically pencils down. Utah

has the rest of it. There's nothing else to see here. And I'm over there thinking I'm in

crazy town saying like, no, we have all these different leads that we need to run down. Just

from my perspective, now that the people who had prior knowledge, I think I believe most of them

were American citizens. So that would be on the FBI to go run down. But again, not without saying

anything specific, there was more work for us to do on the potential of a foreign nexus. Again,

not saying there is one, but we had more work to do and we were blocked from doing that.

I can't, my heart is pounding. Listen to this. I mean, I just want people listening to this to

assess two things. One, are you over your skis or are you making claims you can't prove? No.

Two, is there any conceivable motive, dark motive that you would have for wanting to know more

about this murder, to wanting to investigate it? And I don't think any rational person could

construct a bad motive for wanting to know what's your job. It's the government's job. And so I

think the onus is on people who are preventing the collection of information to describe why they're

doing that. That's the question for them. Why wouldn't you want to know?

Specifically, you may not know the answer of the people who demonstrated prior knowledge

of Charlie Kirk's murder online. And there were a number of them. Are you satisfied that all of

them were interviewed by the FBI in person? I have no idea. I don't know. I just think considering

they knew the guy, they knew Charlie was going to be assassinated. And there was enough of them

that it wasn't just some rando who maybe he tags every TPUSA post with that. There was enough of

them that there's something there. I don't know what that something is. Well, by definition.

But we haven't seen any arrests. So to me, there's more work to be done. And because that could have

been posted from anywhere that would be in the purview of the FBI or in CTC or if there overseas.

And to me, I personally did not see any effort being taken to continue to run that down. Now,

I'm sure they will say, hey, we're open to anything. We'll continue to investigate. But,

we're coming up on several months now. Why hasn't this been done? Are you bothered by it?

I'm very bothered by it. I'm very bothered by it. I personally did not know Charlie well.

But Charlie Kirk is a generational figure. I mean, he led a movement. He was speaking to millions

of young Americans who came out and who voted for President Trump. And he was just a genuine great

man, husband, father. I mean, how can you not like Charlie Kirk? But also the fact that he was murdered

so publicly. And yes, there's been a lot of sympathy and his movement has grown, etc. But actual

curiosity about getting to justice, to figure out what happened. That makes me furious that we're

being blocked from that and that we're not we're not allowed to ask the question anymore. We're

just not allowed to talk about it anymore. And I think that's absolute insanity. And what does

that mean? What does that mean that there are people and there's entities out there that don't

want us looking into this? And I'm sure they're preparing the response right now. And they're

saying that's because we don't want to screw up the Robinson trial. Like, okay, if the Robinson

trial is so slam dunk, then don't worry about it. You know, he's got his fingerprints on the

rifle, etc. But there was people publicly posting. They had prior knowledge of this. And I'm

here telling you as someone who's involved in the investigation, there was more stones for us to

overturn. And every time we ask, we're blocked. And then they, you know, leaked a near time,

so we had to blow up and we had to throw them out of the room because they're crazy, etc.

So it's incredibly frustrating that there's not more, especially considering how pivotal

Charlie was to the Maga movement and to President Trump, that there hasn't been a more concerted

effort to find the truth and to find justice. Do you think there will be? I pray there is. I hope

this helps. I know, you know, I'll probably take some black for it. I don't know why. And I doubt

it'll be. Yeah, it's at a certain, but I've really tried not to say anything about it because I

don't, I don't know the answers. And, but I want them to be found because I believe in justice and

because I love Charlie and, but I think everything you have said, you know, maybe dismissed as crazy

or evil. Tell me how with reference to the words you've just spoken, I don't see how someone could

level a legitimate attack on you and won't stop them. You mentioned the breaches of the president's

security that had been reported. One that was reported, and I can't say whether it's true, I'm

only asking to see if you know that it is true, but it's been reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu's

security tail was caught twice by secret service attaching some kind of device to the president's

emergency secret service emergency response vehicle. I don't know if that's true. Have you heard

that? I've read it in the media. I don't know if that's true. Okay. I think the president and the

vice president and several members of the cabinet going out to dinner in DC and the code pink protestors

having a heads up about that to rent the table. And that's hard to do. They had to figure out where

they rent the table. They had to kind of get the restaurant on board to a certain extent.

To me, that's kind of a almost like counting coup. It's a soft flex. I can touch you whenever I want.

It was good. They weren't going to do anything. We know they're just going to be kind of crazy

in annoying. However, what does that mean? It means you get real problems with your security detail.

And then a few weeks later, you have an armed police officer who's off duty who's not part of

the president's detail come right up and shake the president's hand. And the guy's probably

patriotic American, whatever. He probably just want to shake the president's hand legitimately.

But that got a lot of publicity and what does that mean?

In the president, again, President Trump is very smart. I think President Trump has a gift for

interpreting large sets of data and making very, very key strategic decisions. And so when the

president sees that he's got issues with his own security detail, when he sees what happened in

Butler with the other assassination attempts, when he sees what happened with Charlie,

I think it's reasonable to believe that somewhere in his head, he thinks that maybe I don't have a

choice. Maybe they could harm me or they could harm my family. And if they can't keep me safe,

I believe the president deeply cares. I believe he's very courageous. I think it was just a matter of

he worried about his own physical safety. I don't think he cares. We saw that in Butler,

but he does love his family and he's got a big family. And so somewhere in his head, if they can't

keep me safe, what about my family? So look, maybe the president was just simply

deceived by the echo chamber we described. And that's how we got to this place.

But it's also there's a potential that there's an element of coercion, intimidation,

whatever words you want to use there that is also influencing his decision making.

If you were assessing a similar situation in another country, a country not your own,

and you as an expert on these questions, which obviously you are, I gave you the same data set

you've just presented to me. And I said, would you say that's just crazy even to bring that up

as a possibility? Not at all. I mean, when you map out those data points, I would just say,

this moves from being a possibility to potentially, depending on how you look at it and interpret it,

this could be a likelihood. It would be something that I'm sure that we would debate rigorously,

but nobody would dismiss it altogether with all this data. It's not nothing. It's something that

has to be looked into. Is it being looked into? Again, I don't think it is. I think that you're with

Butler, your investigative journalist found more about crooks than the entire government.

The response I received from the FBI was so hostile that it confused me and it still does.

Confused me. A lot. It confuses me a lot since I didn't approach the question with anything like

that in mind. I mean, we put this documentary out. We got information, the information

described. We got a lot of his online activity, which we've been told didn't exist. And this was

not an attack on the FBI. This was, of course, during the last administration with a different

director. So this was hardly a partisan hit job. This is the president of the United States,

who I campaign for and voted for and like and have liked for many years. So like, it's not

the attack. And the response that I got was hysterical. That's not an overstatement. And it

confuses me. Do you have you had experiences like that? There was a level of, you know,

just hostility coming from really the FBI. And some of it, I think, is just like rivalry.

Like, why are you looking at me? Yeah, I got this. I'm very familiar with that. I mean,

you know, we're the same way in the military. So I totally get that they were treated like

you were in the Air Force kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Like, I want you know, like, we're the FBI,

like, got you. But, you know, we had a role to play. And the way that we were aggressively blocked

from that, I found the hostility to be above and beyond what you would, what you would think that

you'd find with just typical, you know, rivalry, bureaucratic rivalry, turf wars, those types of

things. Some of that was at play, but the level of like, you cannot look at this. And then for them

to escalate it to attempt to get us kicked out of the case, that to me was very surprising. Same

thing with Butler, when we first started asking questions about Butler, I thought because especially

that happened in the Biden administration that, hey, we would come in and we would get the truth

because, you know, the previous administration really screwed this thing up. And there just wasn't

curiosity there. There wasn't curiosity and there wasn't a tolerance whatsoever for us going

after just the key questions of like, hey, did the, the, the, the informant that you had that was

interacting with this guy, Mershant, was he in communication with anybody in Butler? I mean,

basic questions to ask again, this is nothing that's going to blow any investigator socks off.

Just those basic questions, like, no, no, the two aren't related. Like, you can't talk about it,

you can't ask any of those questions. Even when we found data actually needed to be looked at. Yeah,

I mean, they would say at the time, like, well, the Mershant case is ongoing, etc., like we can't,

we can't interfere with that case is over. So, I mean, at this point, I do not understand. I think

this is like a new rule, which is to say a fake rule that you're not allowed to gather information

about anything that might potentially intersect with an ongoing case that's not directly related.

Like, what, that, I think you made that up. I think that's just made up. I don't, I don't,

because then how do you ever investigate anything? What law school did you go to? And I asked this

question, and I was like, yeah, cases have been overturned on this basis. And it's like, well,

case number turned on many bases. But, right. How is that? Is this like the new standard,

because you would not be able to investigate anything? Right. Exactly. And we want to get to the truth.

So, what is that for those of us falling along at home who don't have a high level of familiarity

with the process? What could that possibly be? The current president was the subject of a near

successful assassination attempt like recently. Yeah. And we're just not going to look into very

obviously it's or divulge information that everyone knows they have. For example, this surveillance

tape from the shooting range at which Thomas Crook's trained, because it would answer the question,

was he training with somebody? And if so, who? They have that footage and they won't release it.

What could possibly be the explanation for that? I know what the result is. The result is people

come to their own conclusions. And this is where like crazy conspiracy theories come from.

And then those conspiracy theories usually are easy to debunk or make the people saying them sound

crazy. So then the actual question never gets answered. Right. Sorry. Can you say that

for people who haven't lived in Washington? Okay. I try to explain this to people all the time

because this has been ongoing since at least the Kennedy assassination. But this is a very serious

and reoccurring thing. It's a tactic. And you just explained it better than anyone ever. Can you

do that again if you can recall it from them? Yeah. I mean, so basically you give no information

whatsoever on something that's obvious that there should be information. Like you you outline

like there's potentially footage. Yeah. Crook's at the shooting range again. Police 101. Go get

the tapes. Let's figure it out. If you don't want to address that question, then you just you

go silent and you say you can't ask that question. Which then creates people who come out of

it kind of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions. Right. Knowing the way the internet

works. I mean, half of them, if not more, are probably going to be so far off in left field and

made by legitimate cooks or bots. That then you can just be like, oh, these people asking these

questions about the tape at the video range. It's space aliens. Crazy conspiracy theorists. They say

it's a UAP or whatever. And so then you've just, you know, diverted all attention away from the

thing that you're trying to conceal. And now everyone's focused on the crazies. And then the

second someone asks the legitimate question, they're crazy. I hope everyone watching will just clip

that tape and keep it on your phone and replay it every day because that is one of the primary ways

that the intelligences and federal law enforcement influence public opinion, influence elections.

That's the way they influence the perception of what's going on. But more than anything,

it's the way that they hide their own behavior from the public. Yeah.

So at the beginning of the administration, I think it was October and rather it was January 23rd

was like right after the inauguration, the president issued an executive order calling for the total

declassification. Release of all documents relevant to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy

in November of 1963, all of them. And also documents relevant to the assassination investigation

into Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general.

I don't think all the Kennedy documents have been released, have they?

They were supposed to be. I mean, that was the president's order. That's what was in the executive order.

It's a law. It's the president. The president said it and sent the executive order.

Maybe you can't go there because. So yeah. So I just want to say again, and not from you,

I have been told conclusively that that has not happened.

So without divulging anything that's classified, like anything from 1963 should be classified.

The whole thing is insane and an insult to citizens. I'm a middle-aged man. I wasn't even born then.

It was six years before I was born and they're telling me I can't see it. Okay. It's infuriating and

it's the end of democracy. But what could possibly be the justification for keeping classified

a document that that must under law be released? Yeah. And that was produced generations ago. Yeah.

I think more of this goes to the deep state, the system, the machine, wherever you want to call it.

They're not hiding something in the Kennedy files, in my opinion, because it's not like they

the assassins wrote down on this day. We're going to kill JFK and they put it in a file at CIA or FBI.

Right. That didn't happen. So I don't really think there's anything that's in particularly

would be earth shattering inside the files themselves. The system doesn't want to get us used to

things being rapidly declassified. They don't want a president to be able to come in and say,

here's an executive order and I said declassify it because the people demand it and it happens

like that as fast as it could happen. They don't want that to happen. They want to condition us

that like, okay, the president of the American people elected, he may have come in and lawfully

given us an order, but there's a process here. There's an interagency process. Everyone gets

to check to make sure there's nothing still classified or still ongoing, even if it was from

1963 or even further back, because again, they don't want us conditioned to weaken just

have access to this information. And I think there's probably times where that would be appropriate,

something declassifying, something that happened last week, for instance. There's going to be

equities there and I think the American people would understand that. But a lot of this I think

is power. And so the bureaucracy, when the president says declassify this, regardless of what it is,

from decades ago, they can't just let them have it. They all want to have their cuts on it,

they want to be able to control it. And this is the way like the bureaucracy and the career

bureaucrats roll. And they just tell the new political appointees like, hey, we just, you know,

we really can't do that. But we'll get us to a place that mostly will get you what you want

eventually. And then it all just gets killed off in process. And there's literally no transparency

at the end of the day or limited transparency. But that's what I think the game is here. They don't

want to condition us that you can elect a president and he can automatically change the bureaucracy.

I mean, this fact, the fact that the government doesn't have to tell you what it's doing, even though

you pay for it, just invalidates the whole concept of consent to the government. Like, how can you

give consent to something you know nothing about? Yeah. Right. But more than that, it creates a moral

poison at the center of the society. Lying is a sin. It's the core sin. And lies beget lies. And

they like cancer destroy the body in which they live. Yeah. And if you care about the body,

this country, if you're from here and you hope to live here and have grandchildren here,

you have to fix that. And I really think that telling the truth radically, telling the truth

is the only thing that gets you there. And the pain that that entails and it doesn't

tell pain. There's no doubt about it in humiliation is much smaller a price to pay than the price

that we will pay inevitably. And maybe soon if we don't do it, I don't think this is sustainable,

this level of lying in any society. No. And if people don't think that their vote matters,

that they can actually elect someone and change can be enacted, I think things go to a very

very dark place. Of course. And people lose faith in our system. Our system is based on that faith

that, you know, we get to have these elections in theory. Hopefully, you'd hope the elections

are free and fair. We've got a lot of issues there as well. But when you finally get your

person in office that they're going to be able to control the government, that the people pay for,

that are supposed to be ram of the folks that they voted for, that they'll actually get their

their will implemented or at least what's in the best interest for them implemented.

That's right. And that's not that that's just not the case right now. No, it's not.

So I want to end with a hopeful note. So we've been talking about this for 24 hours because I

think that without even getting into it, anyone who's followed it carefully in his thinking clearly

can see that the war with Iran is potentially like the end of a lot for the United States.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think we could overstate the consequences of this. And I don't think I'm

being hysterical. I've had three weeks to think about it. I've actually had 10 years to think

about it because that's how long they've been pushing for it. So at this point, it feels like

there's no way out. But you were saying to me this morning in a really thoughtful way that

gave me hope that you think there is a way out. And so I'm going to stand back and let you explain

how you think that the United States can exit with a lot of its interest intact. And that's

honor intact. And the president's administration intact because the political cost of this is

is shocking. I mean, it's not the most important thing. But like right now, it's all very broken.

Okay. What's the answer? It's going to take drastic action. And the good news is I believe that

this is something that President Trump has uniquely qualified to fix on his own through his

sheer willpower. President Trump has an amazing ability. It's almost his superpower, I think,

to be able to kind of breathe life into ideas and again to capture large data sets and to find

leverage. And right now, it's clear that this conflict will just continue the way it is and get

exponentially worse, especially if we go down that the path of demanding a total surrender with

boots on the ground, or maybe even something far, far worse, what President Trump needs. And that

is the path. That, I mean, inevitably, if we say it's total surrender, what does total surrender

mean? Now, again, this is where President Trump is uniquely suited. President Trump can define

his own total surrender. He's in charge. I ended my letter with, you know, you hold the cards

because President Trump truly does hold the cards. He's a very powerful, very respected leader.

And when I think President Trump must do is number one, he has to address the main issue.

The main issue is what the Israelis are doing. And he needs to very forcefully, and probably with

a new team of diplomats, go to the Israelis and say, you're done. We will defend you. We will

make sure that, you know, ballistic missiles aren't rained down upon you. However, you are done

going on the offense because this is our war. We're paying for it. We're believing for it.

This is not your war. If you choose to continue this offensive operation, we're out. And as a matter

of fact, if you choose to continue, we will start with drawing features of your defense system,

so that you will be on your own. We have to say that to them, and we have to be very blunt,

and we have to be very forceful. And I know a lot of people who like the Israelis are going to say,

we can't do that. That's wrong. They're under fire, etc. But if we don't do that, if we don't

address our relationship with the Israelis, even if we come with a temporary ceasefire,

we'll be right back in the same situation in very short order. So that's the first thing

that President Trump must do. Address the main issue. The main issue is how the Israelis

are out of control, and they are driving this entire war. Address that aggressively at the

Israelis to stop. How realistically just having lived through this whole thing? How hard will that be?

It will be hard, but again, President Trump can do it. President Trump can call

the Prime Minister of Israel and get him to the table. President Trump can force it.

I believe that. I truly believe that he can. So I think it's doable. It's only doable with President

Trump. And then from there, once we get the Israelis to stop, we still, for now, have strong

allies in the Gulf. We have the Emirates, the Qataris, the Saudis, the Bahrainis,

all these actors, the Amanis. They may not always agree with each other, but they're all

pretty good partners with us. I think we need to use them. And again, I think we probably need to

bring in some new diplomats, and we need to aggressively engage with the Iranians while we can

to get to a ceasefire. And to come up with a way that we can stop the killing, we can stop the

destruction of not just these countries, not just the loss of more life, but basically the collapse

of the energy system that we have right now, so that we can open the Straits of Hormuz back

up again, and so that we can make sure the petrodollar is being used. Because right now,

we didn't stop the flow of oil going to the, you know, the Chinese, the Chinese are still

getting their oil out. And they're settling those transactions in Iran, not the petrodollar.

So we have to, once we get the Israelis to stop, we have to aggressively pursue our economic

interests. And I think the only good thing in here is that our economic interests are in line

with not just the GCC countries, but also with the Iranians. Because the Iranians,

what this war to stop, they want to be able to rebuild their energy sector, they want to be able

to revitalize their energy sector. And on this mutual cooperation to open up the Straits of Hormuz,

and to build back the energy sector, I think we could come up with a piece. It's going to be

that to lift some sanctions. We have to lift some sanctions. Yeah. Why wouldn't we? We've had

sanctions for decades. And according to the Neocons, they had no effect on the nuclear program,

which posted an imminent threat. So like, what is the argument? We've had sanctions for decades.

And I don't see how we benefited from that at all. We didn't. I mean, we just lifted sanctions

on Syria, because the regime changed there, but we lifted sanctions on a guy used to be the

former leader of al-Qaeda. Because he's proletarian. So I'm pretty sure we can go ahead and lift

some sanctions. If it would be in our benefit to lift the sanctions, not only would it help us

in the war, but also a condition of lifting the sanctions would be you will settle all transactions

that you're going to get from your new oil industry that will be reintroduced to the world economy,

you'll settle that in the dollar. And we need the dollar to survive if we want our country and

its current state to survive as well. So the lifting of sanctions in this case very much works out

in our national interest. That to me, and I'm sure there's lots of different variations we could

have of this plan, but President Trump aggressively enacting this and addressing the Israelis first

and foremost. Otherwise, any kind of negotiation we try to have with the Iranians are pretty much

anybody else. If we don't address the Israeli factor, they're simply not going to take us seriously.

Why would the way precisely? Why would they? And every day that this goes on, again, the more

and I have no love for anybody in power in Iran right now, but the more the people that we,

more the leaders we kill in Iran, you're not getting a Thomas Jefferson next. It's not like if we kill,

you know, 15 or 20 of them, the 16th or the 21st guy is Thomas Jefferson or he's a moderate.

Absolutely not. It's very obvious to me that some of these strikes, not all, but some,

were conducted with the intent of making a negotiated settlement impossible.

And that leads me to the saddest thing, you know, whole cluster of sad things, but the saddest

thing is the bombing of the girl school attached to the Iranian naval base. And the U.S.

has admitted we did it, but I'm wondering about the targeting coordinates and where those came

from. Is it possible that those came from Israel? That I don't know.

Are you aware of, has it been publicly reported or in previous conflicts? Can you say anything that

you're not constrained by? Is it possible that that could have happened? I mean, have there been

strikes, American strikes on targets in the past that you're aware of that have used

coordinates supplied by Israel? Yeah, and we share so much intelligence with the real world.

So, right, of course. So it's entirely possible, but no one has said anything about it,

but it's entirely possible that the coordinates were given to us by Israel.

And why wouldn't they be? Because once you start doing things like that, it's intentionally or not.

It's very hard to get out of it. And obviously from the way the Israelis have conducted themselves

in the Gaza war and other places, they have a much different way of fighting than we do.

I mean, America definitely makes mistakes and we do everything that we can. I can tell you

is a guy who fought on the ground. Americans, almost to a fault sometimes, we do everything that we

can to prevent the loss of civilian life. I mean, almost to the point where sometimes we risk

our own lives deliberately to not kill Americans, to not kill innocent civilians.

So, again, this is where being in partnership with a, air quotes partner that has very different,

at a very different agenda than you and a state of outcome, but then also just a different

standard for how they fight. It's very dangerous. It's very dangerous for us.

To be in partnership with a country that has different goals and different standards

that behave around the battlefield. In different ways and means? Yeah, they just have a whole

different way of life. So, how would you describe the Israeli attitude toward the killing of

innocence? Look, the Israelis are in a hard spot. And as somebody who fought for most my life,

I think I can get in their heads pretty easily. If I wasn't Israeli, I think I would have

the same view. I think I would say like, well, we're going to fight them at some point anyways.

If there's civilians in that area that's militarily important to us, whatever. Like, I have a job

to do. I understand that. But it's also important for us to understand our air quotes partners.

If we're going to be in a partnership with them, we have to be clear out about that. Just because

they speak English and a lot of them went to school over here and we have dual citizens,

doesn't mean that they're going to target the same way that we do. We have to be clear out

about it. And that's what I think is missing. If we're going to do joint operations with the

Israelis, they are going to look, we saw what happened in Gaza. And you can say that's a horrible

thing. You can say that's that's just the way it is. But that is the way the Israelis fight.

And so we have to go into that clear with clear eyes and understand that's how they're going to

fight. And now we're going to be viewed as being not just complicit, but we're going to be viewed as

being partners in that. And again, that's a very dangerous place for us to be because our object,

at least our tactical objectives have been pretty clear that we want to take down the ballistic

missiles, the nuclear program, the Navy, the Army, etc. And those are military targets. But we're

in partnership right now with the Israelis who they're going after some military targets,

but they're going after a heck of a lot more that are not military targets.

It's a very generous assessment of their motives. And I mean, that's a compliment. I strongly

disagree with you, but then I didn't spend my life fighting wars. And you're making every attempt

to get into their perspective, even if you disagree with it, which I assume you do.

And I think that is the way to assess things. It's like, what's the other guy's perspective,

even if I hate it? Yeah. And look, in the Middle East, you're going to do business with some

unsavory characters. In the war mold, you're going to do business with some unsavory characters.

So if you're going to be doing business there, just get comfortable with the fact that some of

these guys are unsavory. I mean, the classic, I think President Trump line really early on when

he was asked if he thought Putin was a killer. And he's like, well, yeah, I mean, we're killers too.

You know what I mean? He's right. He was just very logical about that and very clear

right about that. Again, this is why President Trump is uniquely qualified to solve this problem.

Because I think he has the ability to understand things from multiple perspectives at the same time

and then find our leverage and then find out what's best for our objectives for America's

objectives with clear eyes. And that's the way we have to be. Do you anticipate you'll be

speaking to the president again? I would welcome it. I mean, I spoke with him before I departed

the administration. How did that go? It went great. I mean, not the best conversation ever.

You know, I told him why I was leaving. He heard me out. He was very respectful. He was.

Yeah, very respectful. He was very kind. He always is. And I think we departed personally

on good terms. Again, I'm going to, I'm going to don't understand the way I left and writing

the letter that there's parts of his administration that are going to have to come after me and

try and discredit me. I understand that. But I think the president is someone who listens. And so,

I think he's listening, not necessarily just to me and to you, but I think he is listening to

a lot of different people because I think he knows at a core level, this is not going well and he

needs to find a way for us to get out of this. You're definitely an adult and I was through more of

them. And I appreciate all the time you spent here. Thank you. Thank you, Tucker.

Very much. Okay. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next Wednesday.

Thanks for watching the Wednesday edition of the show. We stream live every week Wednesday,

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only chat and take part in the conversation in real time. We're grateful to be doing it and

grateful that you watch it. Thank you.