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March 3, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:18
ZELENSKY’S LAST DANCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1032
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Thank you.
Thank you.
I'll discuss the full ramifications of the Trump-Zelensky meeting, and I'll argue that Trump actually has the best formula, the best plan for saving Ukraine.
J. Michael Waller, author, senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, really smart guy, joins me.
We're going to talk about the role of the police agencies of the government, the CIA, the FBI, in the Epstein paper scandal, the Epstein list, and also in our politics more generally.
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I want to talk in this opening segment, in fact, probably for most of this podcast, about Zelensky and Trump and the deal that broke down.
Why it broke down and what is the key difference between the way that Trump sees all this versus how Zelensky sees it.
I don't think in the end this is simply a dispute about Zelensky not wearing a proper outfit, he's not wearing a suit.
Trump does value those things and I think he does have a respect for the White House and the Oval Office and so he was a little annoyed.
But that is a triviality.
That's not really why there was this expulsion of Zelensky from the White House.
Now, before I get to that, I want to say a word about Pam Bondi and the release of the Epstein documents, because although some of it appears to be a squabble between Pam Bondi and Laura Loomer, I think it's actually more than that.
There are a lot of the MAGA influencers who are saying that this has been terribly mishandled.
And I do have to agree.
Now, Pam Bondi, in a way, created the problem herself, I think, because she went on Fox News and she said, I have the Epstein files on my desk.
Okay.
Well, if you have the Epstein files on your desk, let's see them.
And then we didn't see them, or at least we didn't see anything beyond what we had already seen.
And the whole seeming fanfare release of the folders to the influencers turned out to be a complete dud because there was really nothing new in those folders.
So that was clearly not...
The release of Epstein documents per se.
And then Pam Bondi moves on to a sort of a second approach, and she puts out a post saying, in effect, the SDNY, the Southern District of New York, is holding up these documents.
They've got them.
I demand that they release them to me by 8 a.m.
tomorrow morning.
Tomorrow morning would have been Friday.
And then, dead silence.
Did she get the documents?
If she didn't get the documents, why aren't there FBI agents surrounding the SDNY? Why aren't they subject to a raid?
Why aren't they being let out in handcuffs?
Why aren't arrests being made?
Why is this refusal to comply, seemingly?
So there are two possibilities.
They've given Pambani the documents, and again, that brings us back to point number one, where are they?
Or they haven't.
And that raises the question, who's really in charge here?
And I think this, who's really in charge here, is at the heart of all this.
Because, yes, it is about the Epstein files.
Yes, I do think that the MAGA base, most of us, believe that if we're going to have an era of transparency...
Then it's not sufficient to say, as Bill Barr did, well, Epstein killed himself.
Trust me, I've looked at all the facts.
We don't care if you've looked at all the facts.
We don't trust you.
And I don't think Pam Bondi can get away with it either.
I've seen the files.
I'm not really going to share them with you.
I'll do what's necessary.
That really doesn't fly anymore.
And so this is a...
Becoming the potential for a real problem and a bit of a showdown.
Now, the last thing Pam Bondi wants here is to drag in Trump into this and make him have to weigh in and arbitrate the issue.
So, I think something does need to happen here.
And when I said earlier that it's about who's in charge, here's what I mean.
One of the nagging questions, if you watched our film Police State, It would give you a very riveting, alarming, and in some ways depressing picture of the degree to which the intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, have subverted our government, have weaponized our government.
And appear to be the ones really running things, running things not just in the governmental sector, but also to a degree in the private sector.
They leave government.
They then become the chief counsel at Twitter.
They go into the other digital networks where they become advocates of censorship.
So this is a very dangerous and poisonous octopus.
So the question is, has the incoming Trump administration truly taken over?
Or is it the case, as Debbie likes to say, we may be in control, but we're not really in charge.
The police state is still running things.
They are the ones telling the Trump team what to do and not the other way around.
At least this is, as I say, the fear.
So it's very important to allay that fear, to set it aside, to show that it's groundless and that Trump really is numero uno.
He really is in charge.
His people really are running things.
The FBI isn't rogue anymore.
It is answering to Kash Patel.
The DOJ isn't rogue.
It is answering to Pam Bondi.
The SDNY isn't rogue.
They are answering to both Kash Patel and more to the DOJ. This is, I think, what the issue is here.
All right.
Now, let me turn back to the issue of Ukraine and the incident with Trump and Zelensky.
Which I want to analyze a little more closely.
The first thing to be said is that Trump and Zelensky had a different goal for this meeting.
Trump's goal appears to have been somewhat prosaic, which is to say ordinary or formulaic.
It's a typical meeting.
Zelensky comes in.
All the work has been done beforehand.
They've agreed to a rare minerals rev share.
By rev share, I mean that Zelensky cuts a deal in which he gives the United States a stake and therefore a share in the value of these minerals.
This is part of a payback, if you will, for the enormous amount of money that the U.S. has put into that war.
And Trump's view, which is, by the way, hardly unique, This was also a view that George Bush took during the Gulf War.
George H.W. Bush took it earlier.
And the other view is that, hey, if we are fixing Iraq, Iraq should pay something.
And hey, if we're repelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, Kuwait should pay something.
So there's nothing really radical about Trump's idea that Ukraine should bear part of the costs.
But Trump, I think, had a second motive, which is actually quite pro-Ukraine.
So let me spell it out very clearly.
Trump's motive was, listen, if the United States makes a bargain with Ukraine, basically saying that the two of them, i.e.
the U.S. and Ukraine, are going in it together on the rare earth minerals, then the United States is...
Creating a physical, tangible, commercial stake in Ukraine.
We're tying our fate to Ukraine.
And that's, in a way, a message or a warning to Putin, in a sense, saying, hey, listen, don't mess with Ukraine because you're messing with us.
Don't think that you can level Ukraine or overrun Ukraine because we have an interest there as well.
An attack on Ukraine in that sense becomes, at least in part, an attack, if not on the US, then on US interests.
So this is actually very good for Ukraine.
But Zelensky came thinking that he could get something more.
And what is that something more?
A, quote, security guarantee.
Now, Biden didn't give Zelensky a security guarantee.
No one really can.
The Europeans can't.
Nor are they really willing to.
No one can guarantee that they will pay any price, bear any burden for Ukraine.
Why?
Because we're not Ukraine.
By and large, people have to bear any price, bear any burden to protect their own liberties.
They can never expect other people to bear those exact same prices or withstand those same burdens.
So Zelensky, I think, thought, listen, I'll come over there.
I will invite the media to put Trump on the spot, and then I will spring this added condition.
Yeah, we'll do the minerals deal, but you've got to give me a security guarantee.
And I say this because this is what Zelensky now is saying in all the European interviews he's giving.
He's like, well, we just weren't able to work out a security guarantee.
This is a case of showing up to a negotiation.
The agreement is already...
Drafted.
It's ready to be signed.
Kind of like if you show up to, you know, pay off the mortgage on your house and suddenly you spring some new condition, which the other side is A, not aware of.
And B, not willing to agree to.
And C, then you start badgering them so they become kind of offended because you're the one that has broken the rules.
You're the one that has sort of violated the pact.
You have changed the meaning of this meeting.
It now becomes a negotiation.
And quite honestly, if it was a negotiation, it should have been done behind closed doors.
You don't actually negotiate in front of the media.
That is a little bit more of a tableau.
It's a little bit more of a theatrical.
Basically saying we've worked out a deal and we're here to formalize it by giving it our public signatures.
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I want to continue my discussion of Trump and Zelensky and Ukraine.
And Trump's goal, I think, here is very clear.
He wants to be the guy who made peace between Russia and Ukraine, just like he wants to be the guy who made peace between Israel and its adversaries and brought just like he wants to be the guy who made peace between Israel and its adversaries and brought peace to But to do this, Trump is willing to put pressure on both sides.
That's the difference.
The Democrats wanted to put pressure on Russia.
They did everything they could, from sanctions to cutting Russia out of the global financial system.
This has all pushed Russia closer, by the way, to China.
I think Trump sees all that as not a good thing.
Why push Russia, which doesn't really want to be intertwined with China, would rather be a part of the West, even if an uneasy part of the West.
Russia would rather do business with us than with Xi Jinping.
And I think Trump recognizes that there's great value for the United States, for our interests, for Russia to do that, for Russia to be looking West rather than to be looking East.
Now, is this all a way of being a Putin apologist and thinking that Putin is a good guy, because there's all this posting all over the social media platforms that Russia is really happy about this, Putin's really happy about this.
And I think it was Ian Brenner, the Democratic liberal analyst, who goes, you know, if the Kremlin is happy about this, then it's obviously bad U.S. policy.
Now, I want to challenge that way of thinking by posing not a rhetorical, but actually an historical question.
The United States was in fact allied with Stalin against Hitler in World War II. Wasn't the Kremlin happy with FDR when he allied with...
Stalin?
Sure.
They were thrilled.
They were excited.
FDR was, in their eyes, a great man.
They echoed FDR's talking points, and to some degree, he echoed theirs.
This was all part of what we now call the Allies.
The Allies made up Of not only Britain, not only the so-called Free French, but also the old Soviet Union, led by a true monster, somebody far more murderous and brutal than Putin.
And so you see here why the logic fails.
Because if your premise is, if the Kremlin thinks it's good, then it must be very bad for us to do.
It breaks down when you consider...
Now, why did we do that alliance?
Because we were triangulating, right?
We did the alliance because we recognized that Hitler posed a greater threat at the time.
So foreign policy is often not simply a two-man, black and white, he's up, I'm down.
It's sometimes a little more complex than that, as we see in this case I've just mentioned.
The idea that Putin simply...
Invaded Russia and therefore, I'm sorry, invaded Ukraine and is therefore the bad guy, misses the point that there was a context to all this.
And to illustrate that point, here's a little quotation from CIA Director Bill Burns.
He's writing in 2008. And he basically says, quote, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for Russia.
And he says it will be viewed, it cannot but be viewed as, quote, a direct challenge to Russian interests.
So if you keep pushing Ukraine toward NATO, Russia goes, these guys are right on our back door.
Remember, at one point Russia wanted to be part of NATO but was refused entry.
So this would be seen as an aggressive move by NATO to recruit.
It would be similar, for example, to Xi Jinping.
For example, recruiting Mexico or Canada into its orbit in a defense alliance against the United States.
This would make us nervous, to put it mildly.
So this is the background to all this, and therefore I think the mere assertion that Putin is the one who took action misses what provoked him to take action in the first place.
And let me say a word about these Europeans, because...
They are now saying, hey, we need to do more.
And by the way, I'm sure that Trump is on the sideline cheering.
It's kind of amazing how these people who will criticize Trump.
He's such a fool.
He's doing the most mindless thing.
He's breaking with all precedent.
And then they do exactly what he says.
Trump's point from the beginning has been, this is in your neighborhood.
You need to do a lot more to protect yourselves, which is to say Europe.
Ukraine is your neighbor, not our neighbor.
If Ukraine is on fire, it's like your neighbor's house is on fire.
You need to be the one showing up with the buckets and the hoses, not calling upon someone in the next town or faraway town, namely us, to rescue the...
Ukraine from this firefight, if you will.
The Europeans all are talking tough right now, and I'm actually glad they are, because as I say, they do need to do more.
But quite honestly, I don't think that they will.
I just saw a survey that shows that the Europeans all think, a lot of these countries, the majority of people think, yeah, we should do more to help Ukraine, but not us, not our country.
Somebody else should do it.
And so here we come to the principle, which, you know, you have to say is a little bit universal, a principle that is a little bit universal in human nature, namely, people always feel really generous when they're spending other people's money.
So the Europeans think, yeah, it'll be a great idea to rescue Ukraine.
Okay, United States, put up the dough.
You say, well, how about you put up some?
Well, no, see, I've got a lot of uses for it.
I really can't spare it right now.
This is what we're dealing with with the Europeans.
And what makes things even more alarming in the European sense is they have let so many illegals, so many migrants, they've done so much to wreck the civic culture of their own societies, that now when you conduct surveys in Europe, you discover that most of these Europeans say, listen, forget about dying for Ukraine.
I don't want to die for my own country.
And by the way, I think that that sentiment was also increasing in America under Biden and Harris because what they're doing is you demoralize people in your own country.
And the type of people who are most likely to sign up for the military don't want to.
Let alone the fact that some of them become demonized because, oh, you're white or you're male or you're from the South, you must be a racist.
So all of this is going on.
And the same thing or something analogous is happening in Europe as well.
So it's going to be a very big question as to what these Europeans will actually do to rescue Ukraine.
And what does rescue Ukraine mean here?
Because...
I don't think anybody really thinks that the Ukrainians are going to beat Putin.
I don't think anyone even thinks that Ukraine is going to get all of its territory back.
That's one problem in a war is that your territory gets occupied and then the occupiers don't want to give it back.
I mean, look what happened when the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe.
They eventually gave it back.
But they occupied it in 1945 and they didn't give it back till 1989. So this is unfortunately the cruel nature of war.
I think Trump's view is let's figure out a way.
It's not good for anyone.
It's too expensive for us.
It's expensive for Europe.
It is destructive for Putin and Russia.
It's destructive for Ukraine.
It's kind of in everybody's best interest to figure out a way.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Michael Waller.
Actually, Mike is a guy I've known since my old days in Washington, D.C. We've both come a long way.
He is currently a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy, former professor of international communication at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.
You can follow him on x at jmichaelwaller, W-A-L-L-E-R, the website center for securitypolicy.org.
Welcome and thank you for joining me.
There seem to be so many things going on and I thought it'd be helpful to ask you to draw some connections here.
We have a new head of the DOJ. We have Cash Mattel and Bongino now at the FBI. But we also have, it seems, a mounting resistance.
Maybe some of it could be described as inertia.
I say inertia because I'm thinking about the SDNY, the Southern District of New York.
Like, we're not going to turn over all the Epstein files.
We seem to be hanging about how all of this is going to play out.
Give us a little bit of a lay of the land in where things are, because things seemed really dire toward the end of the Biden-Harris administration, and it's not clear to me to what degree this new Trump team is fully in charge.
Well, first, we need to remember Chuck Schumer's warning from 2017. When he said, if you take on the intelligence services, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.
So we're starting to see some of the symptoms of this right now, by no means all, and the fight has barely begun.
But when you have the Attorney General of the United States and the Director of the FBI being not just defied, but deceived by other elements in the Justice Department, you know that fight is taking place.
Yes, and I don't think that we, I mean, perhaps Pam Bondi is not telling us what the fight really is, because it seems to me that if it is a simple case that the Southern District of New York has these documents and they're not turning them over, well, it may be time to...
Do an FBI raid.
Surround the place.
Bring people out in handcuffs.
Put some charges on them.
Take over the computers.
So this is the dog that hasn't barked.
Now some will say, Dinesh, calm down.
It's only been five weeks and you have to let these people kind of get a firm grip on the saddle before they begin to execute these maneuvers.
But do you think, I think the reason for the anxiety over all this is precisely because the Trump supporters, the kind of MAGA faithful, if you will, are not sure if the police state is still running things.
Oh, it is still running things, for sure.
It's not like this was a surprise when Pam Bondi becomes Attorney General and says, hey, let's release the Epstein files.
This is what President Trump has said all along.
He said it in the very first days of his presidency.
He promised to have the documents out very quickly, and they're not out yet.
So when Attorney General Bondi went to the White House in a prepared event, she was expecting to turn over a lot of material that just wasn't there.
So people in the pipeline are resisting, they're defying, and they're not just defying the Attorney General, because to defy the Attorney General is to defy the President, but they're defying the President himself.
I think that's undeniable.
And so what you're saying is that this is a bigger deal than a simple matter of...
A kind of a bureaucratic snafu in the way that these documents were released.
Some people are looking at it in those sort of political optics terms.
But I think what you're saying is that this is a kind of, a little bit of a struggle to the death, so to speak, with this Python, which is the police state.
What options are available?
Let's say that Trump is fully aware of what's at stake.
He has, does he not, the executive and legal and constitutional authority to hit these people really hard.
What would possibly be stopping him from doing that?
Nothing's going to stop him.
It's just a question of getting his attention.
He's probably the busiest person on earth right now, and he likes to devote time and attention to everything he's working on.
I think it's a good thing that it's happening the way it is for a bizarre reason.
That's because it's showing us Front and center, that the apparat inside, the deep state, is alive and well, and they're fighting back.
Now, imagine this.
They're fighting back to protect the Epstein client network.
They say they're doing it only because, oh, well, we have to protect the victims.
That's a very valid reason to delay things.
But it's not a hard thing to do to just redact the names of all of the victims and keep the client list.
At least release the client list, which is what they're protecting, and you have to ask why.
So let me ask you that.
In other words, there are many theories about all this.
One of them is that Epstein was running a blackmail ring and that he had ensnared very powerful figures from big tech, from the corporate sector, maybe from the media, maybe government officials, maybe some congressmen and senators.
But that even doesn't answer the question of running a...
A blackmail ring on whose behalf?
I mean, it seems unlikely that Epstein said, well, guess what?
I'm going to spend my time creating a blackmail ring.
No, most likely this would be in cahoots with some or multiple intelligence agencies.
So what are your thoughts about what is the most likely scenario?
Because that would help us understand why all these people need to be somehow protected.
Yeah.
Well, first, he was a sicko, obviously, so sickos like to do sicko stuff, and maybe he got his jollies compromising people.
But that's a big, big, big effort right there.
So if I was a foreign intelligence chief who was hostile to the United States, or maybe even one who was friendly to the United States, but I still have my own country to consider first, wouldn't I make use of somebody like an Epstein?
To blackmail American politicians and big tech and, you know, big money and big media and everything else.
That's perfect sense.
So whether it's the Chinese, whether it's the Russians, whether it's some people say the Israelis, whoever it might be, we have to get that out.
This cannot happen because that means that a foreign power has blackmail control over the most influential Americans on earth.
And let's say it's not a foreign power.
I mean, in some ways, I'm thinking back now to the old J. Edgar Hoover model, which was basically, Hoover thought, you know what?
If I've got something on Martin Luther King and if I've got something on this powerful senator over here and that guy over there, not only does that consolidate my own power, but I can achieve all kinds of goals because I've got these people at my beck and call.
And so it would not exactly be a new model for people high up in the intelligence agencies to recognize the great value of being able to essentially have at your control, at your behest, all these people who have somehow succumbed and found themselves all these people who have somehow succumbed and found themselves now ensnared in this elaborate Epstein network.
Hoover spied on politicians and others' sex lives, but to my knowledge, he didn't set them up in honeypot traps.
This was used against foreign spies.
I don't know evidence that it was done domestically, apart from just wiretapping the guy and setting out informants.
The president who loved listening to these stories most, there were two.
There was Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
But that was just a matter of political control to monitor people here.
This is much more dangerous and much more powerful than Hoover ever was or ever could have been because it's actually recruiting and luring networks of people offshore for the purpose of either setting them up or exploiting them.
So it's a honeypot.
It's a KGB-style honeypot.
Let's take a pause.
We'll be back with J. Michael Waller.
We're talking about the latest book, Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.
Guys, I'm back with my friend Michael Waller.
Senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy.
Centerforsecuritypolicy.org is the website.
Follow him on x at jmichaelwaller.
And the book, as I mentioned, Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.
Now, it seems like the premise of your book, Mike, is that the CIA and the FBI were doing a lot of good stuff.
In the Reagan era, which is when, of course, we first met.
We were both very much on board with the Reagan agenda.
I think it's fair to say that if you had asked us about the CIA and the FBI, we looked favorably on both those organizations.
We saw them as domestically and abroad, basically looking out for our protection.
And what you're describing in the book is the way in which these organizations somehow became radically Part of it's a cultural shift in American society where you have people going into government,
come from universities where they have been taught, trained, radicalized, and then they go into government.
And especially in the case of the FBI, what demand is there for Commercially, for radicalized lawyers.
Social justice warrior lawyers.
There isn't.
So you create a demand in the government and you bring them into the government.
That explains part of the shift.
The same thing with the CIA. Where do you get your analysts from?
Where do you get your intelligence officers from?
You get them recruited from the universities.
So, you know, this is, you know, we've all been through the radicalization of our, you know, for what, 40 odd years now of the university.
So you can see.
How that would happen naturally.
The CIA brought people in, started going out of its way to bring in like-minded people because they don't really like a diversity of views.
They talk about diversity in the DEI sense.
They don't really like a diversity of views in the intelligence analytical and in the intelligence production process.
So they go for like-minded people and they get groupthink.
But I think that's natural.
Now, add DEI to this, where you have an ideological basis for going out of your way to recruit these people.
The CIA will hire conservatives.
It will hire middle-of-the-roaders.
Not a problem.
But it seeks out, or until recently anyway, sought out DEI militants to bring them up.
Now, they're not going to win on their own merits because they don't have the talent or whatever else.
So they're recruited on the DEI excuse.
Then they're promoted inside as DEI to the supervisors, upper management, and then you get a diversity strategy imposed from above when Obama came in to impose this from above.
So that DEI leadership reached in from below to artificially elevate these radicals into the nerve center of the whole intelligence community.
In the Human Resources Center, the General Counsel Center, and the whole analytical base.
So that's the CIA part.
FBI was sort of the last one to go, and this happened under Comey, and it really took a jump under Chris Wray, who Trump named to replace Comey.
But Chris Wray doing it, he was a moderate Republican.
He was a Beltway lawyer.
He was not a radical.
But his hardcore embrace and pulling up of DEI and imposing it on everyone in the FBI shows he never really ran the FBI. The FBI ran him.
I mean this is so telling Mike because really what it shows is that he Probably being a somewhat shrewd opportunist himself, recognized that the vectors of power, the force of the current at the FBI, was going in the left direction.
And so if he wanted to, quote, lead the agency, I mean, one of the ways you lead an agency if you don't want to create friction is you just figure out which way it's going anyway, and then you run in front and declare yourself to be leading it.
Looks like that's part of what was going on.
I remember in the early years when I was writing, We're not going to make you CEO of the company.
We're not going to put our bottom line.
We're not going to give you a sway over the actual practical decisions we make about markets.
New products, innovations, none of that.
But it seems like in the governmental agencies, basically the inmates took over the asylum.
Yeah, exactly.
In corporate America, it was mostly virtue signaling.
And you saw how quickly Amazon and Google and these other companies just ditched all that stuff right away.
Sometimes even days before Donald Trump even was inaugurated.
So they saw what was coming.
In the government, it's very different.
It's like the old Zampolit system in the Soviet Union, where you have political commissars enforcing a political orthodoxy and eliminating anyone who was not just against that orthodoxy, but who was insufficiently for that orthodoxy.
So the way the FBI and the CIA were reshaped under Obama was to enforce a political orthodoxy so that if you were not, it wasn't enough just to be a good professional and keep your head down and do your job.
You had to actively go out there and become what they call an ally.
And if you were not proactive in this, that counted against you.
So they forced people to go against their conscience.
These are law enforcement professionals, intelligence professionals.
Force them to go against their conscience to do things and advocate for things.
That they had no desire to do at all.
They were morally opposed to doing.
And those who stood up to it ended up getting purged.
I mean, I think that, to put it slightly differently, and tell me if you agree with this, if you're in the private sector, your mission is given from the outside.
And by that I mean, it's a profit motive.
You've got to please the customer.
If you don't do that, your stock is going to go down.
Everybody's going to know your company is a failure.
People will start dumping your stock.
People don't buy your products.
You suck.
You're going to be pushed out.
It's simple, right?
In the government, on the other hand, if you think about it, there's no profit motive at all.
So the mission of these agencies is dictated from within the agency.
And if the agency says, well, you know what?
Our operating premise is that if you're not diverse or an ally of the diversity movement, then you're not a good intelligence officer.
There's no external check, no profit motive, no diminishing stock, nothing from the outside world that's going to come in and say, This just isn't going to work.
I mean, the only thing I think that could happen is that, you know, you have another terrorist incident or you have another explosion and then the FBI goes, see, this is a greater need for our services.
You now need to fork over more money and expand our bureaucracy even more.
Right, right.
The FBI, for 49 years, has never been subject to a real congressional investigation since the Pike hearings of 1976. The CIA hasn't gone through a real oversight cleansing and check in 49 years with the Church Committee hearings.
So they've had half a century to do whatever they wanted to do with almost no checks and balances from any president and from any court and from any House of Congress.
Chuck Schumer, since he was elected in 1980, has been on the House and Senate Judiciary Committee for 45 years.
He has had oversight of the FBI personally for 45 years.
He's never once exercised it.
So when he told Rachel Maddow in 2017, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you, he wasn't merely talking about Trump.
He knew as a senator that they would come after him if they ever tried to do anything.
Yeah, this is very creepy.
And in some ways, I think what you're describing here, Mike, is this is the militarized wing of a larger unaccountable Bureaucracy, isn't it?
Because part of the resistance to Doge, for example, and Elon Musk, this kind of how-dare-you attitude suggests the arrogance of the federal bureaucracy, this idea that somehow they are the people who really run the country.
Politicians come and go.
To that degree, democracy imposes a nominal supervisory responsibility.
But the point is you're not supposed to actually use it.
You're not supposed to do anything and certainly not burrow into the career bureaucracy, which is equivalent to professors having tenure.
These people have lifetime appointments.
They do what they see fit.
And if you challenge them, then you're the one who's the problem and not them.
Yeah, they forget the student is the customer.
So in the case of the permanent bureaucracy, Oh, yes.
The democratic process is a process.
It's just a process.
We, in the government permanent bureaucracy, we know what's best for everybody.
You have this whole patronizing attitude toward the public and toward the Constitution.
And when you talk about Constitution to them, some of them literally roll their eyes.
Come on.
Come on.
Constitution.
So they know what's best.
And then you see this reflected in Congress.
Congress.
I've talked to a bunch of congressmen and senators who honestly feel like they have no business asking questions of the FBI and the CIA because they're only lawmakers.
I mean, I've seen hearings, Mike, where it seems like federal officials, not just in the FBI and CIA, they just rebuff the member of Congress and say, well, no, you can't get in this building.
No, you can't ask me that.
No, I have no intention of telling you that.
It's part of an ongoing investigation, so I can't possibly reveal anything about it.
If that is the case, then these people have created these cocoons in which they thrive, not only unmolested, but unobserved.
Completely.
Completely.
And if something is really classified, there's a lot of legitimate things that need classification.
You can always go into what they call a closed hearing for senators only or for just a few senators only.
And for very few staff who hold top-secret clearances, that's standard procedure.
So the fact that this has not been done to any significant degree, ever, really speaks very poorly of Congress, both Republican and Senators.
And as we saw in Trump's previous administration, they didn't understand the problem that they were approaching, so they were not equipped to tackle it.
So you saw this DEI revolution from Obama just going through.
What do we have now in 2025?
We have people who came in in 2009 under Obama who are now in mid and upper management throughout the government.
They control things.
They're the ones who recruit people.
They're the ones who decide who's promoted.
So they've brought this rot through the system.
And I think the greatest example that all of us can see now is what happened with USAID. If you look at what we know now about USAID, you can know pretty much what's going on in the CIA. That's very eye-opening.
And I think we'd have to say that on the optimistic side, we're seeing with Trump and the Trump team...
A willingness to go where previous, even Republican administrations have feared to go.
And Trump is altering the limits of the possible, right?
He's saying, you know, this distinction, for example, between the political appointees and the career service.
I mean, this distinction was kind of written in stone for innumerable Republican administrations, and it was unchallenged for decades.
And then the Trump people come in and go, well...
Why isn't the Korea bureaucracy just as accountable to the president as the political appointees?
They're all part of the executive branch.
Why don't they answer to the same one man who was elected by the people as a whole?
Boom!
And suddenly you realize, wait a minute, everything that people told us all over the years about, oh, you can't do that.
These people cannot be replaced.
They cannot be fired.
That may not be true.
So we're seeing some new possibilities here, which are...
Which are pretty exciting.
Guys, I've been talking to J. Michael Waller, Senior Analyst, Center for Security Policy.
The book, check it out.
Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.
Mike, as always, a great pleasure.
Thank you for joining me.
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