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May 10, 2024 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
01:22:38
Inside Our Intel Agencies, a Lack of Intelligence: Former Deputy DNI Cliff Sims Knows Why | TRIGGERED Ep.135

Inside Our Intel Agencies, a Lack of Intelligence: Former Deputy DNI Cliff Sims Knows Why | TRIGGERED Ep.135 PublicSquare Grow the Patriot Economy. Go To www.publicsquare.com --- Protect against inflation with the Birch Gold Group. Text DonJR to 989898 to get your free infokit on gold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
Tonight, I'm gonna be talking with my good friend Cliff Sims.
Cliff worked in the Trump administration and he was a top intelligence official.
He's got some great stories about life inside of the swamp and so much more.
He also has a new book called The Darkness Has Not Overcome, lessons on faith and politics from inside the halls of power.
It'll be a fun one.
Today, I have to have a friend on because I literally, I am,
About exactly 24 hours out of knee surgery.
So, uh, not Hunter Biden.
I've managed to avoid the drugs, uh, for the most part.
But, you know, a little rough.
Surgery in New York.
Flew back here this morning.
Uh, got cleared to fly.
Hobbling on crutches with a, you know, messed up knee and a meniscus.
All that crap.
So, uh, it's gonna be fun to have a friend on because...
I'm gonna let him do most of the work, but this will be a fascinating conversation one way or the other.
We'll lay out a vision to get this country back on track.
I need you guys, make sure that you're hitting the like button.
Share, subscribe, let's keep getting the message out.
I'm reminding it a little bit early because the show's just building up now, so I gotta remember to...
Remind you guys to like this later, but do that so we can get it out.
The rest of big tech is obviously stacked against us.
We have to work harder to make sure we break through all the noise and we grow the movement, because the movement is America.
It is America first, and we have to grow that.
Not communists first, America first.
Remember, also, guys, you can go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you missed the show here on Rumble.
If you have friends that get their podcasts perhaps that way, an awesome way to do it, you know.
And you can also make sure you can get the Rumble app on your big screen TV.
If you're at Roku, any one of those apps, download the Rumble app there and you can watch me
On the big screen, in your home, with the kids, and I'd say 99.9% of the time, it's a very family-friendly show.
The other, you know, .1, maybe not as much, but it's also real, and we live in the real world, and we gotta not pretend that we don't, and therefore, it's probably good for the kids anyway.
So, for all the top headlines that we spotlight here on the show, make sure you go over to my news app, MXM News, like minute by minute, MXM.
News.
For mainstream news, without the mainstream bias.
Remember, you know, the left?
They'll feed you all this garbage, whether it's Google or Apple or whatever.
It's all biased.
It's all crap.
You gotta see both sides.
They always said, you know, oh, you don't like it?
Build your own.
Guys like me and some of our friends, like, we actually go and do that.
We do that work to make it accessible for you.
So if you guys can support us, that would be awesome.
It allows us to get it out there better.
More effectively, that allows us to win in the end because I believe our message is 100% right, but when you're up against a trillion dollars of big tech, up against a trillion dollars in the mainstream media, it's a problem.
So go check out MXM News.
And now, folks, let's get into some of those top headlines that I got from MXM News.
Starting on a lighter note, you know it's going poorly for Joe Biden when even a stand-up comedian
A very liberal group of people are starting to make fun of him.
Look at what happened to this when one guy admitted that he worked for the Biden administration at a recent comedy show.
Okay, what do you think of Biden?
What a six-year-old job you have.
I can't believe you admitted that in front of all these people.
You have the fear to lie.
You could have said you were a hooker and I would have been proud of you.
What do you do?
You guys are stopping to try to sell on Biden?
What the f*** are you talking about?
What the f***?
What are you talking about?
That's your f***ing job?
Hey, listen, I know you guys like Trump, but Biden, I mean... Wow.
Um, are you ready to be unemployed, or what's your mind?
Guys, Joe Biden is literally a joke.
He's a butt of jokes.
Other countries' comedians are doing the same thing.
Our country is divided in many ways, but almost everyone can agree that Biden is a weak, bumbling idiot and a clown.
A clown.
He just read out the phrase, last name, from his teleprompter.
Again.
Remember, pause for applause.
Then he read out pause again last week.
How many times do we have to cover this before we understand that Biden clearly has dementia or something similar?
And it's obvious to everyone, people I know who are in the medical field,
Say he has to be jacked on something just the way he behaves it's the side effects of the drugs that they put him on to keep him I don't want to say lucid because I don't think anyone could believe that he's lucid for even one second but I guess keep him upright for at least 75% of the time and stumbling through whatever it is that he's doing.
My theology professor at the Catholic school I went to
Guys, a new poll just came out of Pennsylvania showing that my father is leading Joe Biden.
It found that a majority of voters say that the Trump presidency was a success, while the majority of voters think Biden's presidency is a failure.
That is objective fact.
There's no ambiguity there.
Look at the numbers.
And what's unique about this election, folks, you will have lived
For an entire term under both people on the ballot.
When were you better off?
If that sounds familiar, that's because that's exactly what CNN found in a recent poll.
CNN!
When Joe Biden loses CNN, it's a problem, folks.
Now, I'm sure they'll make up for that with extra cheating and extra nonsense and extra help from big tech, but it's a problem.
This is the story of the 2024 election.
Voters get to compare two presidencies, as I discussed earlier.
One that was a success, and one that is an abject failure.
The failing far-left media is so out of touch that they think this headline from Rolling Stone makes us look bad.
And I quote, Trump is planning to send kill teams to Mexico to take out cartel leaders.
Sounds like a terrible idea.
We should just allow these people to take advantage of our open borders, to send fentanyl, to rape women and children crossing the borders that they're organizing and taking their life savings from.
We should allow them to continue to kill 100,000 Americans a year.
You know, just two Vietnams.
Two Vietnam Wars a year.
We should allow them to do that forever.
I don't know.
Doesn't seem like a terrible headline to me, but like everything else, this is the left.
They don't even get that.
It would be a dereliction of duty for us to not go after the cartels.
They are terrorists.
They are killing tens of thousands of Americans every single year.
Now, on Monday, I did a deep dive on RFK Jr.'
's record.
For years,
For years, he supported the Democrat Party and its agenda.
He campaigned for Hillary and attacked the NRA as a terror group.
In case I wasn't clear enough on Monday, here's RFK Jr.
in yet another video, in 2018, mocking Republicans as dumb and saying that NPR, you know, National Public Radio, is the truth.
Watch for yourself.
80% of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on, who aren't paying attention.
And, you know, I think a lot of it is people really aren't paying attention.
I was in Alabama two weeks ago, and I was driving from Huntsville to Birmingham.
And you know, the AM dial is all right-wing talk, right?
It's completely, there's nothing progressive or liberal.
But in Alabama, the FM dial is also 100% right-wing talk.
There's five stations and all of them are extremely, really like poisonous racial stuff.
Stuff that you would not, you know, believe was happening in America.
And there's one NPR station.
Of course, public radio is not liberal.
It's just, you know, neutral.
It's just truth, right?
Wow, again!
Again!
I mean, you know, he wanted open borders.
He's a radical zealot on the environment.
He hates guns.
He thought, what, people who questioned climate change should be thrown in jail.
Now he's pretending to love conservatives.
What's the deal with this guy?
Can he not remember any of his past statements?
Well, it turns out that may actually be the case.
He literally has a brain worm!
Watch for yourself!
Can I just ask you guys one more thing?
The New York Times, and this has nothing to do with, well, it has to do with the presidential election, has just come out with this extraordinary, bizarre article on RFK.
And they're reporting that doctors, in a deposition, that RFK said doctors found a worm in his brain that had eaten part of his brain and then died there.
I mean, you laugh, but I mean, what might this mean?
I mean, what might this mean to an election hearing that he said this in a deposition?
It probably means, and one of the things that I tell my clients all the time is try not to go into depositions high.
That's usually what I would suggest.
And I would, that would be my words of wisdom.
I, you know, I have political issues with RFK, but this is just a little bit beyond my pale of expertise.
I don't even know what to say.
If a worm ate his brain.
Yeah.
Okay, maybe this explains it because no one I know in history has ever done an entire 180 in a six-month period on political beliefs that they have held for half a century.
That does not happen.
It certainly doesn't happen if you come from one of the biggest Democrat dynasties in the history of America, if not the biggest.
So, okay.
Maybe this makes sense.
RFK Jr.
just doesn't know where the hell he is, perhaps.
He should be resting or getting help, but not running for president.
And trying to help Joe Biden win.
Maybe the brain worm did enough damage to reverse those traits.
That doesn't mean you give him the nuclear football, either.
Literally, no one does that.
But I guess they figured out a lane.
And they're trying to hurt conservatives by putting someone who's been a lifelong Democrat, remember?
Just on Monday when he couldn't remember, he doesn't know.
He doesn't know if, I don't know, doing the gender transition surgeries on minors, you know, he doesn't know enough about it.
You know, it took him a solid 48, 72 hours to come out with a statement.
Now, upon a little bit of reflection, once he got killed by the people he's trying to woo, pretending to be a conservative, well, now he's not really for it.
But, you know, three days ago, I don't know.
I don't know enough about it.
I mean, I think probably totally normal to chop a child's genitals off and stick them on drugs for the rest of their lives.
If you don't know that answer, like this, off the top of your head,
If you can't say no, that's ridiculous.
You are probably not a conservative.
You are a fucking lunatic.
RFK and Biden are competing for who is further left, and apparently also for whose brain is rotting more.
And by the way, if you see so-called right-wing accounts, and I've seen a lot of them, promoting RFK Jr., it's safe to assume that they are being paid.
I'm not shocked at all by this because months ago I started seeing him flooding my Instagram account from either accounts I didn't follow or people that I knew were sort of right-wing influencers, but the Daily Caller just unveiled a plot by an RFK firm that includes buying, buying off right-wing influencers.
He's trying to trick MAGA into thinking he's a conservative.
Don't fall for it.
I said this to a group of friends.
Cliff Simms, who will be on the show later, was one of them, where I was like, hey man, I'm seeing all this RFK stuff.
This has to be a PSYOP, right?
Then you start looking into his policies.
I'm like, I don't know how they can pull this off.
There are probably people that aren't radical left-wing people that you could get to take a right-wing position and say, hey, this makes a little bit of sense.
But now it's totally clear.
It was obvious to me because I know some of these people.
I created half of these people not because I was paying them but because I like their content in 16 and I was boosting them or retweeting them or whatever.
You see them do that and you're saying, I don't know.
They're politically astute enough to know that this is a radical but
I guess you put him on the payroll and maybe Trump won't or didn't because we don't need to.
We kind of do it enough on our own.
I guess that's what's going on.
So it explains it.
Don't fall for the PSYOP.
There are two radical left-wing Democrats in this race and one conservative.
Donald Trump.
Meanwhile...
Meanwhile, House Republicans are taking some action against the Democrats' lawfare.
The House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight Committee just sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department for Michael Cohen.
Cohen lied to Congress apparently six separate times.
If he's not charged for this, then we truly have no rule of law left in this country.
But again, this is also Alvin Bragg's star witness in the New York bogus sham case against my father.
The star witness is a known liar and a disbarred attorney.
Think about that.
A known liar and a disbarred attorney, committed perjury all over the place, but hey, you can be a star witness as long as you're against Trump.
The other major witness in the Alvin Bright case is Stormy Daniels, who admitted yesterday on the stand that she owes over $500,000 in court-mandated legal fees to my father and refuses to pay them.
So she's lost.
Definitely not bitter.
I'm sure she's going to be objective.
She's going to be a great witness for the left after being in debt
Half a million dollars.
This isn't a vendetta, folks.
This is a totally credible witness, obviously, right?
Obviously.
The left is having to say ridiculous things to pretend like she's a serious individual.
Look at this headline from Breitbart News.
Actress Mia Farrow praises Stormy Daniels as a strong woman, and I quote, there's nothing wrong with being a hooker.
You can't make it up!
You literally, you can't make it up.
I mean, this is Mia Farrow, a liberal activist.
She's absolutely batshit crazy.
Uh, and like, this is her defensive story.
I mean, you know, no, no, no.
She's a great witness.
There's nothing wrong with being a hooker.
Like.
Great job, Mia.
I appreciate you.
You're like MVP for our team.
That's just wonderful stuff.
Thank you.
The Manhattan case is a joke, and it looks like the only case that will go to trial before the November election.
The documents case in Florida has been delayed indefinitely after it was revealed that Jack Smith, the lead prosecutor there and in other cases, failed to preserve critical evidence.
I wonder why they would do that.
Because it would probably exonerate Trump.
You know, they can manipulate other things or whatever, but like, you know, this is not exactly an honorable guy.
This is not a guy that has a stellar track record.
This guy is a partisan piece-of-shit hack.
Jack Smith rushed to prosecute in order to try to take out Joe Biden's political opponent.
And naturally, there are a lot of issues with this case.
So, hopefully he gets what's coming to him.
Bad guy, terribly dishonest person, but that's of course why they chose him to be the guy to prosecute it, because you need someone with no morals, with no moral compass, who will do anything to win because all that is is a political hit.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, yet another winner, an appeals court will hear whether Fannie Willis should be disqualified from the case.
If you remember, Fannie hired her lover as the prosecutor, someone who'd never tried this kind of case, to lead the Trump case, and paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, $675,000 approximately, or to be almost exact, and then she lied to the court about it.
She should clearly be disqualified.
That's taxpayer money that she was then vacationing with, amongst other things, but
Hey, I digress.
This is the world that we live in today.
I'm glad that it's all coming out and getting exposed.
Now, that doesn't mean you're gonna get a fair trial in New York, no matter how ridiculous it is.
It doesn't mean you're gonna get a fair trial in Atlanta, even if they remove Fannie Willis.
That was the point of choosing those venues, those people, those prosecutors, and those judges.
But...
Anyway, at least the American public now get it.
So guys, make sure you're liking, sharing, subscribing.
Okay, I've given you a few minutes of an intro.
Enough people are watching now.
Do that.
That's how we get the message out.
That's how we break the algorithm.
That's how we make sure that other people see the truth.
And we're gonna get to cliff sims in just a few moments.
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Put their kids through camp instead of some corporation that's gonna give their money back to the trans community, whatever insanity they're pushing these days.
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And with that, we're gonna go to Cliff Sims.
Well, guys, joining me now, former Special Assistant to President Trump, your favorite president in the White House, and former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, the author of The Darkness Has Not Overcome, Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power, my buddy Cliff Simms.
So, Cliff, first of all, really good to have you here.
Thanks for having me, man.
Excited to be on.
So, Cliff, we have a little thread with a couple of our other buddies in politics, and they wanted to know is, have you ever seen Caitlin Collins and Dylan Mulvaney in the same room?
I mean, you worked in intelligence.
Listen, you were the Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
This should not be a difficult question for you.
I have not in all of you know, with all the intelligence resources we have, you know, CIA, NSA, spy satellites, everything that we have not yet gotten to the bottom of this one.
Maybe we'll have a chance to reprioritize some things we get back in there.
Maybe we bump this one up a little bit higher on the list.
But this is what happens when we're in a text thread.
Yeah, hey, you started it with, hey, what should I break Don's balls with?
So I was like, I want to, you know, I know, you know, there was a time you may have been buddies with a certain CNN anchor slash correspondent, whatever it may be, you know, in the White House.
And so we got, I have to ask these questions.
Inquiring minds want to know, Cliff.
Caitlin's from Alabama.
She's a fellow Alabama grad, so we can we can unite over that even if we part ways on basically everything else, so that's... But was she once a conservative?
Is she... was she a fake conservative?
Is she now a real liberal?
What are your thoughts?
Oh my god, you are the worst.
She worked at the Daily Caller.
She worked for Tucker Carlson, and then at some point she went and worked for CNN, and you know, the incentives being what the incentives are, it's maybe a little bit different ballgame over at CNN, and so we are where we are now.
So let's talk about that a little bit, not specifically her, but in general.
I mean, are there people they get to D.C.
and it's just easier to survive as a liberal?
I mean, do you see that in the agencies?
I mean, you worked as an intelligence individual, right?
I mean, is it just easy to be?
On the left, do people who don't necessarily do that, do they come in there and then it's like they just get eaten and enveloped by the swamp and it's just easier to give the swamp what it wants and that's the faster path for success and the careers?
Yeah, you know, as we often say, the swamp is undefeated.
There's no doubt about that.
And so I do think a lot of people go there and maybe even went with good intentions, and once they get there, things change.
It erodes people's character in a hurry.
There's no doubt about that.
But I think one of the things that I saw in the intelligence community was, with intelligence community reporters, there's a specific kind of
I would almost compare it to like agency capture.
You know, it's the old thing where people who regulate a certain industry, once they leave that regulatory body, they want to get a job at one of these places that they used to regulate.
So maybe we're going to go a little bit softer on them.
And so I can get this, you know, high paying job when I get out in the intelligence community.
It was really interesting to see this own kind of agency capture that exists between the reporters and some of the entrenched bureaucrats in there.
And it's basically that these reporters are subservient to these entrenched bureaucrats because they're the ones who feed them this inside information.
And so the narrative that we always get from national security and intelligence reporters, there's a reason why it's
It's always from the perspective of those entrenched bureaucrats that don't want any reform, that don't want anything to change.
And it's its own kind of agency capture.
I could give you a million examples of this.
The most famous one is the old 51 former intelligence officials who lie and say that the Hunter Biden laptop is probably Russian disinformation.
And it was Natasha Bertrand at Politico at the time, now at CNN, who was the stenographer on that.
I dealt with Natasha and her colleagues all the time.
There are multiple examples, and I've actually got several really long threads on Twitter where I unpack
How I tried to tell them the truth, even about the Hunter Biden laptop.
I told them before they weren't, but they weren't interested.
I mean, they were, they were part of it.
You're right.
There's, I mean, I I've seen that, right?
The Washington Post has their political reporters, but they have the one guy that seems to be like the, the spokesperson for the CIA.
You know, when the Pentagon wants it, they go to this one guy, and he almost signals it.
Like, you saw it, I forget the guy at WAPO, but like, you saw it when, like, you could see the swamp had sort of had enough with Joe Biden, and so they were signaling, well, Hunter may be in trouble.
And then, like, this guy's just, he's just their scribe.
Like, whatever the narrative they want out there, it has nothing to do with the truth, but they basically work for them as a mouthpiece to help sort of
Through the vicious cycle, just get the end result that they want by printing stuff that's nonsense, just like they did with Russia, Russia, Russia, with their, you know.
We'll leak a story to the New York Times, they'll print it, we'll use that as the justification to start the investigation and the wheels of Washington and the swamp go.
No, that's exactly right.
That's exactly how it works.
It's an incestuous, not virtuous cycle that you see happen over and over and over again.
And at some point, it's just like, I just got through my hands up.
It's like, well, I'm just not going to deal with these people anymore.
We're going to do our thing.
They're going to write what they're going to write.
There's nothing you can do about it.
I mean, we were there.
Dealing with the New York Times national security reporters.
At some point, my boss, Director Ratcliffe, was like, just don't talk to them anymore.
They call you and they ask for a comment on a story.
It's not like they're going to change what they're writing if you say, hey guys, that's not exactly right.
It's going to be what it's going to be.
So why waste time during your day dealing with it?
And frankly, Trump completely changed
You know, as a communications professional, like, the approach to some of this stuff, because, like, historically, you know, you try to engage with the reporter.
We're going to try to get it to a place where it's not as bad.
And Trump, at some point, was just like, forget these people.
By the way, that was the same with us, right?
I mean, when we were, you know,
Pretty out there for, you know, decades prior to ever getting into politics.
My father was like, I'd be like, I didn't call that guy back because he was, what do you mean you didn't call him back?
You got to fix it.
You speak to him and you can make it a little bit better.
And, you know, it was interesting.
So he always had that mindset.
He got on the phone with it and he probably could.
When you were a New York real estate guy, like, hey, you know,
You getting on the phone, you know, hey, you fix this, you make it right, I'll take care of you later.
In another story, I'll give you access and exclusive, whatever it may be.
You know, I think he actually initially even tried doing it with politics.
Eventually, I was the guy to being like, stop.
There's no reason to engage.
These people hate your guts.
It doesn't matter what you do.
And I think, you know, I was the first person to kind of just try to break away from the mindset that we had previously had of like, no, you got to talk to all these people because you could probably fix it.
You get the truth out there.
It's like, I could give them the truth with evidence and corroborating witnesses, notarized, signed, stamped, sealed, delivered.
It's like, doesn't matter.
Russian disinformation.
It never ends.
No, that's right.
It's interesting.
I haven't really thought about this before, but I wonder if there was also a little bit of a shift in dynamic from time in New York real estate, where at the time, you know, I remember reading stories about certain developments that were happening that the entrenched bureaucracy in the New York City government was trying to do their, you know, swampy stuff.
And Trump was a threat to that.
But because
The reporters didn't like them either, the administration in power.
They would allow him to get his word in there against them, but now he's a threat to their, to everything that they do.
The irony is incredible.
Completely changed.
I always use the example of the golf course we built at Ferry Point, right?
So it's right over the bridge there in New York.
It was literally, it was like a landfill site for 25 years, 30 years.
And it was basically a mob job, right?
The city was paying, I think they had like $150 million into this thing, and they were paying contractors to build a golf course.
But, you know, it doesn't take that long.
And, you know, I think we built it in less than 18 months.
But they were moving dirt from here, they'd move it to here, then they'd move it back to here.
And then for 20 years, someone was moving dirt on a tractor, but nothing was ever done, and they just kept paying and paying and paying.
So finally, my father was like,
Uh, why don't I fix this?
He gets a lease, everyone's mad because, you know, they spent $150 million on nothing.
You know, we built it in under 18 months with a clubhouse, with this, it was spectacular, right?
They're like, oh wow, this is a great example of a public-private partnership after what was clearly, like, just, you know, a mob job milking the city, taxpayers, and everyone else for 25 years to get this thing done, you know, and then it's operating great.
Then we get into politics, and then it's, we're gonna remove him from the lease, we don't, I mean,
This thing would still be a landfill and you'd still be paying, you know, $15 million a year for literally nothing to get accomplished.
But because no one's checking and everyone's probably on the payroll, all of a sudden then they were like, we're gonna throw Trump out of here right away.
We're gonna try to pull it away from him for nothing.
It's like, same with Walman Rink.
You know, it was the same thing.
He built that in Central Park.
He watched it from his office for 10 years, not get built, not get done.
He took it over.
In six months, the thing's up and running great.
Citi thinks they're great all of a sudden.
They pull it back from him.
Within six months or a year, the thing fell apart again, that he took it over and had it for 25 years.
But, you know, it's just, it's, you know, that's the government, I guess.
It's funny how his impulse as a builder and his life coming up in all of you guys, like the world pre-politics, it still can't help but come out sometimes.
I mean, I saw DJT was tweeting or truthing today about the FBI building, which I remember when I was there, he would be like, this is the ugliest building in the city.
Post-communist crap architecture.
Now, I don't think we should be building them a new building, unlike the morons in Congress.
Like, we're gonna take an agency that's been spying on Americans, that's been abusing the FISA Court, that, you know, has villainized and bastardized Catholics, uh, anyone that's MAGA, you know, they, terrorists, that's fine, that's different.
They're, you know, they're probably trans and so it's fine.
Uh, but let's build them a new billion dollar building.
Uh, they deserve to have their building burnt down and like just the entire agency demolished.
Like that's what they actually deserve these days.
One of my favorite stories that I tell all the time, and I actually wrote about it in the new book, The Darkness Is Not Overcome, is about when Trump got there and he finds out, you know, everybody gets to remodel the Oval Office when they become president.
So he's, like, psyched about it.
Like, okay, we're about to, like, roll up my sleeves here.
We're about to remodel this place.
And he's like, it's a total, you know, some of this place is a dump.
What were the Obama people doing in here?
Which he wasn't wrong about.
And Clinton was stealing the furniture, so yeah.
There was some truth to it there in the West Wing.
And so he picks out this wallpaper.
That he loves from York Wall Coverings in Pennsylvania.
And so he's like, this is the wallpaper I want.
So they call up York Wall Coverings, and they're like, hey, the President of the United States wants this wallpaper in the Oval Office, and they think it's a prank.
So they hang up.
They think it's not really the White House calling them.
So they realize, oh no, it's for real.
And then they freak out because the wallpaper that DJT had picked, they had stopped making it three years before.
So they had to drop everything that day, make 96 panels of double-sided wallpaper, and they delivered it to the Oval Office by dinner time that evening.
And it's like, even in the Oval Office, we're getting things done, you know, under budget and ahead of schedule.
We're getting it there before dinner time.
So it's like, a builder at heart, it never goes away.
Can't help it.
Yeah, you know, even the stories about all those things, it's sort of funny how he, you know, that builder mindset always comes back, you know, driving through DC that they, I mean, you know, what he did with the old post office there.
I mean, that took an act of Congress and then, you know, and then they don't want him to be able to do it.
He's the only guy that could have got something like that done.
It's a spectacular place, but I guess...
Well, you know, since we're talking about these agencies, I mean, you were Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
You worked directly for John Ratcliffe, who did a great job, you know, I guess, you know, going up against the swamp.
But, you know, what needs to be done, Cliff, to clean out these agencies, right?
You write in your book that the first time you were in CIA headquarters, you saw, you know, a pro-trans poster.
I mean, they probably didn't even have their president up.
They probably still had Obama, you know, or someone else.
But, you know,
At the CIA, how does that happen?
And how do you fix it?
Yeah, you know, it was fascinating when Director Ratcliffe and I got there.
You know, one of the things that I realized early on is that there are a lot of good people in the intelligence community who actually do just want to protect America.
You just don't want to get killed.
You don't want to get Clintoned.
You're just saying that, are you?
I'm going to tell you what we need to do.
Just don't say anything bad about Boeing, Cliff, or they're going to come after you too.
No, your tweet the other day about Elon risking his life tweeting about Boeing.
Listen, you know, Boeing's only got two whistleblowers that magically died in the last two weeks.
You know, that pales in comparison.
It's a tiny fraction to, what is it, the 58 friends and family of Bill Clinton that were involved, you know, or Hillary, that magically died.
Like, literally no one in history has more people
In their inner circle that have committed suicide than the Clintons.
But, you know, minor details.
I digress.
Yes, you did.
So, you know, basically these people that we saw, they're frustrated by the stuff that you're talking about.
Like, they just want to wake up every morning and protect Americans' national security.
And what we realized very quickly is that these DEI offices in the intelligence community have become extremely powerful.
You know, at a time in our country where, you know, getting called a racist could ruin your life.
Or, you know, whatever, I mean, not using someone's appropriate pronouns that they have chosen could get you, you could ruin your life.
And so you have people inside these intelligence agencies, like they woke up one day, and one of the most powerful elements of the of the community are these diversity, equity and inclusion offices.
And they're doing things like, you know, I saw a couple of months ago,
They had this internal publication inside the intelligence community, and they put out an op-ed by a current intelligence official who was explaining how being a cross-dresser makes him a better intelligence analyst.
I mean, it's like... Well, okay, so I, yeah, I remember the one, I made fun of it a while ago, when they had, it was the CIA recruitment video, and it had a guy, and they're like, you see him, and he's like, I suffer from extreme anxiety, and the CIA was incredibly welcoming.
I'm like, holy...
Shit, like, this guy, like, he literally, I'm like, wait, wait, that guy's a spy.
Like, if you were to pick, like, if China got a hold of this guy, the over-under on how long it would take to break him was measured in less than a second.
It was like, I put it at .2 seconds.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, and I'm like, but they're like, look at how inclusive we are.
I'm like, hey dude, if you have an extreme anxiety guy, I think it's wonderful.
But like, this is not the guy you need on the front lines of defense.
Like, let's stop this.
It's just like, you're not putting, you know, you know, my daughter was a great basketball player before she got into golf.
It's like, she's not going to start for the Lakers.
Like, it's just not what you do.
And yet it doesn't matter.
So, but how does it get to that point?
Cause I get, you're right.
I joke about it all the time.
Cause it's,
You almost have to, because people have to understand just how much the disease has taken over, right?
But it has taken over, so there may be great people in there, but imagine how much more productive they could be if they weren't doing DEI training at all.
If they were just focused on killing bad guys or finding them, or, you know, it was like my buddies, I got crap, I think you remember this, because I woke up to like a shitstorm on one of our threads,
One morning, because I guess I said on the podcast, or like, maybe I tweeted about it, but like, hey man, like, I know a bunch of SEALs that, like, literally have reached out to me and been like, we spend more time doing diversity training than we do shooting.
And like, CNN was like, Don Jr., how would he know?
I'm like, dude, I know...
Like, I know 150 people in that community, like, intimately.
Like, they tell me, and then of course, you know, Rob O'Neill jumps in who killed Bin Laden, he's like, Don's right, and it's a problem.
Carl Higby, like, all these guys that are out there already, but like, yeah, this thing's enveloped even the operator community.
It's not just the people who work the desk jobs.
I mean, the guys that are supposed to literally be on the ground killing the bad guys are doing...
You know, DEI training and they have to have, you know, it's lunacy.
It's going to get people killed.
And so, you know, so it's happening.
It's coming from the top.
How do we stop it?
Well, there are a few things that I think are really important when President Trump gets reelected and has an opportunity to put people in leadership positions at these agencies to make some of these changes.
There's a few things I think are worth thinking about right off the bat.
First of all, the talent recruitment for the intelligence community historically has come out of a lot of Ivy League institutions.
You know, I think we've got to do a better job of attracting some of the top students from state schools, from HBCUs.
I mean, these so-called elite institutions have become, you know, woke indoctrination factories, meaning that the IC's pipeline of talent is being disproportionately filled with individuals who are trained to prioritize ideological conformity over critical thinking.
And not to mention, in light of the alarming rise of anti-Semitism on these campuses, it's really hard to make the argument that these are the institutions where you could actually train a truly diverse workforce.
The other thing is, you know, diversity actually is important in intelligence, but let me tell you how.
When we were there in the middle of COVID, and we're getting all of this intelligence from, you know, the virus originated in China, we're getting all of these streams of intelligence coming in out of China, and we're trying to deal with a virologist with a pandemic here.
It would be really helpful to have virologists in the intelligence community who speak Mandarin.
Okay, that's some diversity that would help us.
If we're trying to be on the streets of Tehran, it's probably good to have an ethnic Persian who speaks Farsi as opposed to me and you walking down the street.
You're saying your albino ass would not...
Would not blend.
Yeah.
Probably not going to work out.
I've got a little bit of a beard.
Borderline ginger.
Like, yeah, probably not going to be awesome.
I mean, exactly.
And by the way, I'm totally fine with that.
You know, they're just like, you know, guess what?
If, you know, if it's a ginger, if it's a black guy, if it's a Hispanic guy, like if they're the best pilots, that's also who I want flying my plane.
It does not need to be, you know, a white haired, you know, white dude.
I don't care.
But when I see someone, you know, and I hear the stories and now because I've talked about it so much on the show, you know, on the planes, like, well, we're on an airline.
I was on an airline today.
I'm 24 hours out of knee surgery.
So if I'm hyper, maybe it's the drugs, although I've managed to avoid taking them so far.
So maybe it's just the leftover from yesterday's general anesthesia.
But
You know, they're talking, like, Don, you got to hear this, like, they just announced, like, you know, I'm a trans pilot and this is what I make, like, and I'm like, oh my God, like, you're going to die.
And it's scary.
But when it's going on in the agent, I don't know that trans helps you, frankly, anywhere.
Like, you know, and by the way, it doesn't mean you're not great at something, but like,
I'm not sure.
Like again, I have a feeling if you're not quite sure of your gender, you're probably not going to be the greatest person in the world of intelligence and gathering and covert ops.
But again, what do I know?
I'm just, hey, I'm one of these guys that went to these Ivy League schools.
So perhaps I thought they were elite and they were already ridiculous at the time.
And so maybe, maybe you're right.
I think maybe what could save America right now, Cliff, is like,
Some of these frat boys from Alabama and otherwise in their pastel shorts seem to be saving America.
It's like truckers and like frat boys.
That's like the potential saviors of the Republic.
No doubt.
Well, you know, in the intelligence community or really any organization, the most important role of a leader is to set clear priorities.
And what has happened in the intelligence community is the priorities right now.
Look, don't take my word for it.
Go look at the Biden administration's National Intelligence Strategy.
It's an unclassified document.
Anybody can see it.
You know what number two is on their list?
It's various diversity, equity and inclusion benchmarks.
Listen, you know, whatever you think of all that, let me just tell you, China is national security threat number one.
DEI, global warming, go down the list of the things that they have outlined as the biggest national security threats that we have.
Yeah, and number two is the morons pushing this DEI crap at the expense of number one.
That's exactly right.
So, I mean, my view is,
You need to abolish these DEI offices, and you need to take that money that's being funneled toward that stuff right now, that's being funneled toward lining the hallways with DEI posters about people's identity, and we divert that money toward the China Mission Center, toward China, China, China.
National security threat number one.
If we get China right, other things will flow down from there.
But that's another thing that we've got to do is just get rid of these DEI offices in there that have become too strong and frankly just bullying a lot of people into submission.
A lot of people who just want to keep their head down and not get caught in the line of fire on this stuff.
So, I mean, let's talk a little bit more about China.
I mean, you mentioned sort of the Wuhan lab leak.
Talk more about how overwhelming the evidence of the lab leak was at the time.
You know, what's that process like investigating something like that?
I mean, for me, it was like one of those, like, of course it, like, of course it came from the lab.
Now, if you said that you were me, I just got, you know, shadow banned on social media.
But if you were an academic that took the, literally, the most plausible outcome
Uh, you were thrown out of academia.
If you were a doctor, you lost your, you know, your funding.
If you did research for the government, like, you know, Fauci'd have you off.
Even though, like, of course it came from the Wuhan lab.
Like, no, no, no, no, no.
It didn't come from the Wuhan lab.
It came from seven and a half feet outside of the Wuhan lab by freaking magic.
But, but what was that like?
Because the intelligence people had to know.
And yet,
It didn't get out and they weaponized it.
Like, how could Trump say that it came from the lab that studies the exact virus in question in the exact town that was ground zero?
I mean, that's just ridiculous.
Yeah, no, exactly.
Well, you know, your initial impulse in situations like this is to want to give people some grace in the midst of chaos that where everybody's trying to figure it out.
But like you said, it doesn't take long where you're like, so the Wuhan bat coronavirus lab here
And we've got a bet coronavirus, you know, whatever.
Like, this was not, by the way, you don't need to be an intelligence.
You don't need to be a virologist.
You don't need to be, like, you don't need to go to high school.
Like, it's like, I don't know.
It's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, like, there's no bet, like, including my life, that I would not have taken to be like, yeah, you know, a billion dollars versus my life.
That happened.
Like, 100% taking that bet every time.
No, just a little bit of common sense.
But you know, I think we have seen over the last couple of years, a very, very slow march to the truth.
And eventually, every US intelligence agency, and everybody around the world will acknowledge that that virus started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But the delay?
But the delay is the problem, right?
Because we see this, right?
Like, oh yeah, the truth comes out.
We now know that the Hunter Biden laptop is real.
Oh, I'm so shocked.
We now know that he lied on his reports.
We now know that the 51 intelligence officers that signed on that had no information based on that, and the guy that led the charge, Anthony Blinken, became Secretary of the State.
That was his payoff for that.
So yeah, we know all of that now, but the problem with all of these things
They got what they wanted at the time.
There's no accountability.
No one's punished retroactively, so they keep doing it.
So until there's that sort of retroactive punishment, what's to stop them from just lying to us again?
Like, it didn't take a genius, but like, people are like, I'm not gonna lose my job to tell you the truth.
Well, I guess we'll play along and we'll, you know, we'll do the job.
Yeah.
But it was always a lie, but I guess, yeah, we know the truth now, but it doesn't matter, and they're sitting there laughing their ass off, like, hey, we can't wait to do it again, because we will, and we'll get a two-year grace period.
By the time we do that, we'll have Joe Biden in power, who will make sure that no one's held accountable.
That's the problem with all of it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, going back to that time period, and I think you're right, accountability has got to be number one.
The people who are involved in this, you know, whether it's China in spawning it and covering it up, or frankly, a lot of the members of the U.S.
scientific community and global scientific community that at the time
One of the things that we did not have a full appreciation of as a country, as people in the government, as people who are trying to figure this thing out, was how compromised certain members of the scientific community were.
And I'll give you a specific example.
Anthony Fauci, obviously now the most famous slash infamous person attached to the entire thing,
As Fauci is kind of pouring cold water on the lab leak theory, and really kind of participating in a very insidious way in, you know, being complicit in the idea that that was a racist thing to say that, you know, all this kind of stuff.
One of the things that I feel like we didn't have a full appreciation of was that Anthony Fauci's entire career had been devoted to gain-of-function research.
Now, all of us know what it is now, or most of us do, but if you haven't followed it, gain-of-function research is basically take a virus, put it in a lab, genetically change it, I'm not going to use the right scientific terms, I'm no virologist, but you change it in a way, actually make it more viral, and your goal is
I'm going to figure out how I would have an anecdote for this, like a vaccine or whatever.
If this were to happen in the wild, we would have some way to stay ahead of it and be able to head it off.
And he wrote a paper in his career in which somebody broached the subject.
Well, hold on just a second.
What's going to happen if one of these viruses that we're studying in one of these labs gets out and sparks a global pandemic?
And Fauci's argument in response to that was basically
This is a possibility, but I think it's such a low and remote possibility that I believe the upside of everything that we're doing in gain-of-function research outweighs that possibility.
Now, it looks like we've had a pandemic that was spawned doing gain-of-function research in a lab somewhere, and now if you're Anthony Fauci and you've devoted your entire scientific career, your entire life, to defending and advancing this line of scientific research,
You're probably not the most unbiased person to get out there and make the case that, whoops, maybe I was wrong.
Maybe the potential downside of this actually is so catastrophic that it does not justify doing it and certainly does not justify U.S.
taxpayer money.
But he knew that anyway because there's a reason he's funding it in China and not in the United States.
There's a reason we have biolabs in the Ukraine and not the United States, because we know we're not legally allowed to do it here, but he was doing it anyway.
Then he lied to Congress about it, and that's the thing.
You can believe, you know, and again, I don't believe anything that he says, because if you look at his emails during the time, his emails to his colleagues, who actually were doctors and knew what they were doing, read very differently than the press conferences he was giving on a daily basis, because this clown, while he's never been right since the early 80s as it related to AIDS, certainly
Never met a camera he didn't love.
And that's what it was.
He was probably the worst doctor, but he was the best bureaucrat.
That's sort of the problem with all of these agencies.
The best spy isn't the guy that gets to the top.
It's the guy that can manipulate the media.
It's the guy that takes credit for other people's work effectively.
The guy that snakes all of that.
Actually, I had a Secret Service detail.
I saw all of the bullshit that went on in government bureaucracy.
The inefficiencies, just because this is the way it is.
Because that's the way it's always been.
And as a business guy, I can't be like,
Why don't you do this?
They're like, you're 100% right, but it's like, if I even bring this up to the chain of command, someone's buddy's on the payroll somewhere along the way and they'll go work for them eventually one day and be taken care of, that no one tries to fix anything.
Yep.
Well, this is one of the issues where I got to give director John Ratcliffe a lot of credit.
He said at the time, I don't care what criticism that we get for this.
We're going to tell the truth, which is that this started in China.
It started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He's been very consistent on that from day one.
Well, they tried calling him a liar about it though, also.
Oh 100% and you know he said history is going to prove us correct and certainly that's no vindication just like oh history proved us correct like there needs to be some accountability on this stuff and my only hope is that we have an opportunity to get back in there and be able to hold some folks accountable and frankly get some of the intelligence that exists declassified so that the world can see how clear it is where this started.
So what, you know, tell us a little bit more about the book.
What motivated you to write this book?
You know, what are the major takeaways?
You know, you did a book a couple years ago.
We'll get into that in a little bit.
Oh, you thought you were getting a hall pass?
So we're clear, guys.
Oh, here we go.
So we're clear.
Cliff Simms is one of the few people actually fired by Donald Trump who was able to... We got him back.
Hold on a second.
I was not fired by Donald Trump.
I did get sued by Donald Trump.
Okay, fine.
One way or the other, you got the Cobra.
Now, you know, we can talk about some of the unsavory characters that sort of did the snaking to make that happen.
It took me a little while to fix, but we fixed it.
I think we're all good now.
Everything was wonderful.
But, you know, I had to expend quite a bit of political capital to make this thing happen, so...
So now you're at it again, so hopefully you won't get sued again.
Well, we're a few days into the book release.
We haven't been sued yet.
Things seem to be going a little bit better this time.
I've said it many times behind closed doors, even though you're giving me a hard time here, I have to give you credit, tell people all the time, Don Jr.
is a real friend.
He's not a fake friend, because at a time when it was not
Uh, particularly in Vogue, in- in the Trump, uh, world, and even the Trump family, to be my friend, Don Jr.
was always my friend, and then we got it resolved, and, of course, everybody realized that, you know, all is- all is well with the world, so no harm, no foul.
I- I- I'm many things, but I am loyal.
You're oftentimes to a fault.
No- no doubt about it.
No doubt.
No, this this book is different.
You know, when I when I left the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, I really, you know, it caused me to think a lot about like what that time period of my life meant for me and maybe some of the lessons that I had learned from all of these experiences that we went through.
And I started journaling about it and thinking about those things.
And I realized that a lot of the lessons that I had learned for myself would apply to anybody's life.
No matter where they're coming from, you know, walking through the fire or dealing with anxiety or trying to figure out, you know, how to, you know, what dreams to pursue and, you know, all these different things we all struggle with in different ways in life.
And so I wanted to tell some of the stories that we have from the White House and CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but then use each of them to jump into
We're good to go.
You know, inside the nuclear bunkers, what's inside the President's nuclear football, to inside the, you know, Air Force One and all of that.
But each of them used to jump into a faith lesson.
And so, it's out this week and so far it's doing great.
So, talk about the title.
How'd you choose that one?
Yeah, so the darkness is not overcome.
It comes from the Gospel of John 1, 5.
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
And I thought it was particularly relevant to where we're at right now as believers and people of faith in this particular moment in American politics.
It feels so dark, feels so divisive.
In a lot of ways we're facing persecution in ways that we have never have before.
And so I wanted to give some positivity in that
You know, we can take God's promise to the bank that the light will not be overcome by this darkness, even why it does seem pretty dark in the moment.
So that's where the title comes from.
Well, yeah, I imagine, you know, while I guess the FBI DOJ has really specifically singled out Catholics as domestic terror threats, I imagine the evangelicals are right up there because if you bought a Bible with your credit card anytime around January 6th, you were also on a list.
So, I guess it's only a matter of time until they come after you pesky evangelicals.
Yeah, no, that's right.
And look, there are things that President Trump did while he was in office that really didn't get the attention that they deserved, but certainly that people in the faith community recognized the importance of them.
One of those is, there's been an effort for decades from the left to keep
Churches, pastors, non-profit organizations who have a faith lean to them from speaking into political issues.
Basically there was an implied threat that we'll take away your non-profit status if you lean too far in on this issue, and the president told the DOJ we're not doing that anymore.
The other thing was, you know,
A lot of these mandates that we were half joking about at the beginning of the conversation about people's pronouns and, you know, all kinds of stuff in these government mandates that exist now, the precedent was very clear.
President Trump was that we're not going to compel people serving in my government to ever violate their sincerely held beliefs, religious beliefs, to be able to work here in government.
They have a First Amendment right to not have to violate their their sincerely held beliefs.
And it was really a restoration of
Something that I love, you know, in DC the Jefferson Memorial is my favorite memorial there in the city.
It's the most beautiful one to me.
And inside the dome has a Jefferson quote, I have sworn eternal hostility against any tyranny over the minds of man.
And I think President Trump really restored some of that spirit that we're not going to oppress or tyrannize people of faith in this country who want to be able to live out their sincerely held beliefs.
There's many other examples that I could point to this, but that's some of the stuff that I think was really, really below the surface that the president didn't get enough credit for that he did for the faith community while he was in office.
So listen, obviously the faith community is good and there's so many great Americans that are incredibly devout and believe every aspect of it, but there also seems like there's a lot of those who have made a lot of money
You know, within some of those things, who don't actually have any belief in it, but they have a lot of, you know, but they have a lot of vested interest in pushing some of these things, some of which are divisive, or, you know, let's call it, wouldn't be politically astute these days, but you see that happening.
A lot.
I mean, I know you and I have had a lot of conversations sort of in the background because I'm like, hey, man, like, I don't get it.
What's going on here?
But it seems like there are those who truly believe and then there are those who will prey on those people because it gives them power and money in D.C.
And I think it probably hurts
Conservatives much more than Democrats, because I think the Democrats are sort of much more aligned.
You know, there's plenty of grift there, too.
But, you know, what are your thoughts about some of that?
Because I see it from some of the most powerful organizations on the right, and it's just like the grift is so palpable, it's so disgusting, and yet...
You know, people buy into it, and I think it, honestly, it hurts our chances every time because you turn off people from things that, or you turn them on to things you're never gonna win anyway, and it becomes their one issue, and then, well, I'm just gonna sit out that if it's like, well, but it was never gonna happen anyway.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
Well, it reminds me of, this is like from way back in my past, but like a totally different time period in my life where I was in a band, I was a singer in the band, and we would meet some of these- We gotta get some visuals up for this one, by the way.
There we go.
I shouldn't even brought this up.
I'm actually shocked you led me to this.
But one of the things that happened as part of that time period of my life, I started to meet a lot of the Christian bands that I had really grown up listening to.
And it was demoralizing sometimes because, you know, you meet them and, you know, like it is when you meet many of your heroes, I guess, it's not quite what you expected.
Sex, drugs and rock and roll in the Christian band community.
Yeah, maybe a little of that.
So it's kind of shocking.
And so I will say, I was less surprised when I got to D.C.
and realized that some of the leaders of these organizations that you're talking about, it's really a money-making operation.
And a lot of what they do is just looking for their opportunity to drive donations.
Yeah, they're not looking to solve a problem or come up with something that everyone kind of
I don't know.
Yeah, no, and especially now at this time in the election season.
I mean, to me, look, I'm supporting President Trump to tell other people how to vote, but here's how I look at it.
It's very, very clear what you're going to get from the Biden administration.
And it ain't what you want.
None of these issues that we're talking about right now, that these advocacy organizations, conservative advocacy organizations in Washington, D.C., are in favor of, at least they say they're in favor of, are going to get one inch down the road under the Biden administration.
In fact, they're going to be under an all-out assault.
And there's a little bit of a, there's a little bit of the rub.
The dirty little secret is a lot of these organizations make more money, bring in more money.
In opposition.
Being the opposition, as opposed to trying to actually make real progress.
And so I think, you know, as a believer, you know, I'll say this.
When I went on with the fine ladies of The View,
And did an interview.
And got my teeth kicked in, but you know what?
It was fine.
After the interview is over with, Joy Behar comes up to me and she says, Hey, what's a nice man like you doing working for a guy like Donald Trump?
And I said, I kind of just laughed it off.
I was like, well, I'm probably not as nice as you think I am.
But I actually thought about that after I left.
Because the real question is, how can you, and I'm talking about like, especially now people of faith, how can you, as a person of faith, not agree with every single thing that a person does, but still support them?
Or even really dislike some of the actions to take, but still love them?
And the answer to that question actually punched me right in my own face.
The answer is, how can I do that?
Because I've been doing it with myself my entire life.
I've done a million things that I wish I had done differently.
I've made a million mistakes.
And yet, I still love myself.
I still support myself.
I still give myself grace to overcome those things.
And we are very slow to extend that grace to other people.
And especially when you're in the public eye.
And so, look, I'll shoot incredibly straight with you and everybody.
Is Donald J. Trump the perfect picture of the Christian faith?
Obviously.
He's not!
Clearly!
But from a policy perspective, the issues that I care about as a Christian, he has been great on those issues, and in fact, probably better than any other president that has been around in my lifetime.
And he will have my support at the ballot box, and I will go to war for him on those issues.
Time and time again.
I will give some grace to people who have looked at the same set of facts and fell in a different place than I have, but that's the way that I view it.
100%.
Yeah, I did the view, and I think, yeah, it was a little bit, perhaps a little different outcome with me and them, because I had Whoopi mother-effing the audience by the time I flipped them and turned them with some basic facts.
So, yeah, the view,
If you did not love me on there, but the irony is, you know, her saying that to you is, hey, I remember a couple of years before we were in politics, they used to kiss his ass to come on the show all the time.
Right.
You know, so it's kind of like these guys like, you know, Al Sharpton's like hanging, you know, medals for racial reconciliation around Donald Trump's neck.
I don't know.
I don't know, you know, but it's sort of amazing.
So, hey, you mentioned this earlier.
I gotta ask about this one because even I don't know and I'm kind of curious.
You talk about the nuclear football, the top secret briefcase that follows the president around so that basically he can nuke anyone, anywhere, at any time from, you know.
So, what's inside there and how does it work?
Yeah, so I write about this and the darkness is not overcome and granted a lot of the things that are in there remain highly classified and I had to go through pre-publication review and to make sure I wasn't revealing a bunch of classified information, but what I can tell you is a few things.
Number one,
The first and foremost purpose of this, the briefcase, is to verify the president's identity.
So the president, everywhere he goes, he carries with him a little laminated card with some codes on it called the gold codes.
We call that little laminated card the biscuit.
So everywhere that DJT would go, he had the biscuit with him.
And then in the event that you know something happens where there's got to be, you know, you got to crack open the nuclear football.
I've heard it described as a Waffle House menu of options for different nuclear strikes that are kind of pre-planned.
Nuke Pyongyang.
Not going to use any specific... I don't want you to get in trouble.
I mean, I have a feeling if you even said that that was an option, they'd probably throw you in jail because let's just say you're not going to get the Hunter Biden treatment, nor would I. No question.
So, you know, the scariest thing that I saw is one researcher estimated
That in the event that there was, God forbid, a nuclear attack on the United States, the window of time that the president had or would have to assess that and make a decision about how to respond could be as little as like six minutes.
Okay, like hey, six minutes for you, me, my father, like seems like a lot of time.
Six minutes for Joe Biden.
I mean, I don't know that he would actually grasp what's going on in 60 minutes.
How does that work?
No, seriously, like, you know, the guy, you know, again, today, I guess it was, you know, he read the prompter stuff that was like pause for applause stuff.
Like, you know, it's only the second time this week.
All is well.
All is well.
He's totally, totally, totally with it.
But seems like a problem.
No, there's no question.
This is like one of those kind of real life scenarios that until you really, really think about it.
You don't realize how kind of crazy it is that like literally in a six minute time span that the future of, you know, human existence could be decided.
And the idea that we're going to have Joe Biden make any decision about any life, much less that high pressure and that condensed of a time frame with that high of stakes.
I mean, you just got to look yourself in the mirror and say,
You know, mean tweets and world peace sound pretty good right now.
Yeah, and if he wins again, it's like, just send a meteor.
Just meteor 2025, like, because we deserve it.
At this point, we just deserve it.
We got to start over.
It just went wrong.
Somewhere, somewhere far, far, a long time from now, another planet will develop with other life and like, you know, but like, we've, we've ran out of like, grace.
Yeah, no doubt.
This guy can't even read a teleprompter.
He can't walk across the stage.
He can't make it to Air Force or out to, you know, Marine One without having to take a pause on the walk on the way out there, but we want this guy making a decision like that.
It's just crazy to think about.
Yeah, I always say, like, if Joe Biden pulled up, if you're shit-faced coming out of a party, something like that, and Joe Biden pulled up in an Uber, you're like, nope!
You're not getting in the Uber.
You're definitely not being like, that's the guy I want making a life or death decision.
Not just for him or someone else, but for like civilization.
That ain't the guy.
It ain't the guy.
Not the guy.
Definitely not the guy.
So you also wrote about like the doomsday bunkers, you know, back from the Cold War.
Are those still working out, you know, 60 years later?
Yeah, no, a lot of them still there, and you're right, a lot of them kind of originated during the Cold War period.
You know, one of the cool things when we went to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and I write about this in The Darkness Is Not Overcome, was that we got to, we do these exercises, like continuity of government exercises, where, you know, name a scenario, you know, if there's some kind of nuclear strike, or if there was like a giant weather incident that knocked out power on the eastern seaboard, I mean,
Use your imagination.
If you've watched a Doomsday movie and, you know, Hollywood's done, just use one of those as an example.
And I've always wondered to myself, like, does the government have plans for all of these things?
And turns out they do.
And so one day we got to go to one of these locations and kind of go through some of those exercises.
It felt a lot like the movies, like a giant metal blast door that's several feet thick opened on the side of a mountain and kind of reveals this enormous tunnel leading to an underground city.
And there's like a thin layer of moisture coated on some of the tunnel walls, which was like, you know, rainwater trickling down through the rock from many stories above.
There's like this eerie
Stillness in the cool damp air and really all you could hear was like the whir of the golf carts taking us down through there and we get there and there's like office space for us and you can see where our computers and everything are.
There's living quarters there where if the government had to be moved there in an emergency where you could sleep and do everything.
There's even like a made-to-order grill where you could go order burgers and hot dogs and all this kind of stuff.
And then they have like, you know, one of these
Uh, kind of control rooms where you could see all these video monitors where they're monitoring different things all over the country, um, and it was really kind of eerie, um, honestly.
You know what's more eerie?
You're on that list, like, you actually get to go there in the event someone else launches missiles.
My ass would have been left out on the streets and been like, you know, Mad Max stuff, so I think it's more eerie for me, but yes, I understand where you're going with.
So I haven't told this story before, but now that you mentioned it, I've got a good one on that on that topic.
So when we get to the White House, I won't say how it is, but there was a certain thing that some staffers had and other staffers didn't have.
I want to elaborate on what that was.
But the president noticed
That some staffers had this particular thing and other staffers didn't, but he didn't know what it was.
And so he finally said, he was like, hey, what what is the difference in these things?
Why do you have and why he did?
And he finds out it's evacuation protocol and who gets to go on Marine One, who gets to go to the bunker, who gets to go to the whatever.
Well, at the time... Who's shit out of luck?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, at the time, you know, I'm a, I'm a comm staffer in the West Wing, like I'm not, you know, before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, all that, so I don't have one.
The rest of the day, every single meeting, DJT would point out who had one, and he would say, Cliff's not gonna make it, boys.
Cliff's not coming.
He's with us.
So I'm with you.
It would have been me and you.
We wouldn't have made it.
But
Well, yeah, I had one of those stories.
It was, it was during a, it was during like, you know, beginning COVID, all the insanity.
And it was like when the Tiger King was going on.
And I guess, I guess I'd put up some stupid tweet about Tiger King because it was sort of all the rage and everyone was locked at home.
So they're watching Netflix or whatever.
And it's, it's the White House press briefing.
And the first question to my father is,
Uh, you know, Don Jr.
said something about pardoning the Tiger.
No, he was like, one of your sons, he goes, said something about pardoning the Tiger King.
And this is like, literally everyone's watching the COVID press briefing.
And he goes, let me guess, it was Don.
I'm like, everyone's like, they're like, actually it was, sir.
I'm like, yeah.
So I was like, yeah, you know.
There is no doubt.
But you know, the flip side of that is if I was going to be stuck with anybody outside of the bunker in a doomsday scenario, you know, having gone to shooting with you, I would say I'll be on Don Jr.'
's team.
I'm fine.
In the zombie apocalypse, I'm probably a vital player in this game.
I've been prepping for that one for my whole life.
You're a high first round draft pick.
A high first round draft pick in the zombie apocalypse draft, that's for sure.
So, in all of this, sort of a crazy journey through the White House and everything, comms to the DNI, how do you reflect working, though, inside the intel community?
That's going to be more exciting, obviously, than comms.
What were your expectations?
What absolutely sort of infuriated you?
And who were your friends and enemies?
How did you figure that out?
I imagine you probably had a lot more enemies than friends, because I think you were a loyal Trump guy, and that was probably not all that popular in the intel community.
Yeah, definitely.
Well, it was fascinating.
I mean, one thing I will say is for anybody who's interested in world events, there's not much more stimulating than being in the intelligence community because you're consuming all of this information, all of this data, all of these different things that are going on there.
So it's fascinating every single day.
You know, I will say one of the things about working in the intelligence community as a political appointee, there ain't many of us.
I mean, in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, I'm pretty sure it was DNI Ratcliffe, me, and the Chief of Staff.
I think there were only three of us in the entire organization who were political appointees.
And so, you know, very quickly, you know, depending on who you're talking to, you can get a sense for
Some people view you as a virus that they want to expel from the body of the intelligence community and they're going to lay down and try to stop everything that you're doing, undermine you, slow walk it, whatever it may be.
But there are also some people who
This is really interesting to me, who stepped up, who are career intelligence people, who were loyal.
And I don't mean that in the way that the media derisively says, oh, they're Trump loyalists.
It's like, no, the duly elected president of the United States has intelligence priorities that he has articulated to us.
We're going to be responsive to those things and give him the best possible information that we can to make informed decisions.
That's what it means to be loyal.
That's the job.
That's the job.
That's right.
Yeah, the activism against it has become, you know, seemingly the job description these days, and it's the exact opposite of what was always intended.
Yep.
No, that's right.
And we had some people who did step up and did a great job in that regard.
And those people were, again, career people.
When we left, they were moved out of their jobs.
The good portfolio, whatever that may be, was taken away from them and given to somebody else.
They were sent out into the wilderness, you know, to never be seen or heard from again.
They were punished
Not for doing anything wrong, but for actually being willing to serve the duly elected President of the United States.
And so, coming back in, the good news is, next time around, we know those people.
Yeah.
I was like, hey, send me that list, because, you know, and I frankly, I want you to be involved in that, because, you know, that's exactly what you need.
And again, I don't care if they're devout leftists.
If they do their job,
And not the activism.
I'm totally fine with that.
That's what we need more of.
But these people who are not elected, who are like, no, no, no.
Well, I just know better.
Well, you don't actually know better.
You don't know shit.
You know what I mean?
And you got to get those guys.
So the people who are willing to do that job, that's a huge thing.
And we did not know that the first time.
That's right.
I will give you a very specific example.
China sought to influence the 2020 elections.
I'm just telling you, they did.
And when we got the intelligence community's assessment of the 2020 election, we noticed that they assessed that China did not seek to influence the 2020 election.
But there was one person.
His title, I won't say his name, his title was the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber.
And he was willing to stand up and put his name on a dissent that said, I assess that they did.
Here's the reasons why.
Here's what I saw.
Of course they did.
Trump's the only president ever stood up to China.
Like, of course they did.
Obviously.
And when we saw this, we were kind of taken aback from it.
It's like, what do you mean they didn't?
Why are you acting like there's only one person here in the whole intelligence community who actually thinks that they did?
We happen to know that there are a ton of people who believe this.
Yeah.
So this kind of launched an internal investigation.
There's this guy whose title, and this is getting down in the weeds, but I think you'll understand why it's important.
His title is the analytic ombudsman.
His job is to referee disputes between intelligence analysts.
And so because there was this dispute, he launches an investigation.
This is a career guy, not a Trump guy.
It's a career guy.
What does he find?
He finds that leadership inside the intelligence community, including some which he labeled CIA management, had pressured people to change their analysis to assess that China did not seek to influence the 2020 election.
And in one of his interviews, one of the analysts said,
The reason why I didn't want to say China sought to influence the election is because I don't support Trump's policies and I didn't want my intelligence used to support those policies.
Because that implicitly means the policies were actually right because of what was going on.
Well, those are the people that we've got to get out of there.
It's unacceptable.
That is, when we hear a lot about it, what's a threat to democracy?
But how is that not news?
I mean, like, this is the intent, like, again, I mean, it shouldn't surprise us, right?
I had Julie Kelly on the other day, you know, she was the only person talking about like, hey, they're manufacturing evidence by the FBI in the Trump case, you know, the documents case, like,
You, like, at any other point in history, if it was against Obama as recently as a couple years ago, even if it was against, they would be going nuts.
That's right.
This would be a major story.
I've heard, you know, if Donald Trump said, Merry Christmas, this is bigger than Watergate!
Everything's bigger.
I'm like, the FBI's manufacturing evidence against a former president and the leader of a political party?
Like, I don't know.
Seems like a big deal.
And yet, I mean, even the concern, you know, conservative, you know, Fox News, like,
Barely, you know, barely right of center.
You had Jerry Dunleavy on the podcast.
Jerry at the time was a reporter at the Washington Examiner.
He is one of the only reporters who covered this issue.
What I just talked about is not classified.
The ombudsman's report that he sent to the Senate is an unclassified report.
If you Google it right now, you can find that report.
And it got almost no coverage.
Seems like a really big deal.
Like so much that's not talked about, but you know, again, hopefully people are waking up to that as they are, you know, some of the other cases and everything like that.
So, you know, we just need more people like that.
So, hey, we just got to keep fighting, Cliff.
That's right.
100%.
Well, Cliff, you know, tell us more about the book, where we can find it, how people can follow you, everything like that, so they can check that out, because I think this is awesome.
Yeah, thank you.
No, thanks for having me on.
You can get the book, The Darkness Has Not Overcome.
It's available anywhere.
Books are sold now.
Grab it on Amazon, Books A Million, Barnes & Noble, anywhere that you get books from.
I'd really appreciate the support for it.
I think it's something that we've got an opportunity as people of faith to show in the marketplace that this is the kind of content that we want to consume.
And so I'd appreciate everybody's support.
Thank you so much for having me on.
You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, at Cliff underscore Sims.
Spell The Sims, because there's only one M. Only one M, that's right.
Only one M, because that took me a while.
I'm not going to say it, but I want the country to know that the level of discipline that I'm showing right now to not say, unlike you, to not say what was discussed in our text thread right before this, you know the level of discipline.
Hey, listen.
I'm game to play whatever you want to play.
I mean, it doesn't bother me.
Yeah, I've been cursing all the show.
I forgot that you're an upstanding evangelical Christian.
I'm like, I probably shouldn't have done that.
It's the nice thing about having it be my show.
Fair, fair.
Well, Don, appreciate your friendship.
Thanks for having me on.
Likewise, buddy.
Guys, make sure to check out the book, Follow Cliff.
Great stuff.
And as more of this stuff comes out, we got to talk more because there's just so much craziness in the intelligence world that I think will be important.
So I think that was awesome.
Yep, have me anytime.
I'll be back anytime.
Good to see you, buddy.
So guys, that was awesome.
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