Danny Jones Podcast - #385 - “Trump’s Worst Nightmare Just Came True” CIA Spy on Iran War | John Kiriakou
Aired: 2026-04-06
Duration: 02:44:37


=== Meta Canceled My London Tour (05:15) ===

[00:00:07]  Because of this podcast, Julian and Dalton, I got picked up by that speakers bureau in London.
[00:00:15]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:00:15]  Right?
[00:00:16]  So that went well until Meta just decided they didn't like me.
[00:00:24]  And so everything was canceled.
[00:00:26]  I gave 50 speeches.
[00:00:28]  Yeah, we were advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
[00:00:31]  Uh huh.
[00:00:33]  And.
[00:00:34]  I had 15 dates, started in Belfast, went to Cork, Dublin, Waterford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester, all over the doggone place.
[00:00:46]  Right.
[00:00:47]  Selling out weeks in advance.
[00:00:49]  Every single seat sold out, sold out, sold out, every venue.
[00:00:54]  And then I had a break of a week, and then we had five nights in London, five different venues in London.
[00:01:02]  So I said, rather than go all the way back to Washington for just a week, I'm going to go to Greece.
[00:01:07]  So, my girlfriend and I went to Greece.
[00:01:10]  And the guys called me in London.
[00:01:11]  They said, Hey, we have a serious problem.
[00:01:13]  I said, What kind of problem?
[00:01:15]  They said, We've had 55,000 clicks on the buy tickets button.
[00:01:21]  We've sold seven tickets.
[00:01:23]  And I said, Seven tickets?
[00:01:25]  It's got to be a directed denial of service attack.
[00:01:28]  He said, That's what we thought.
[00:01:29]  That's not it.
[00:01:30]  When you click on the button, it just goes to a blank white screen.
[00:01:35]  I was like, Oh my God.
[00:01:37]  So, they said, Do you think it's the agency?
[00:01:40]  And I said, no, the agency doesn't give a shit about me anymore.
[00:01:43]  All my detractors are either dead or long retired.
[00:01:46]  Nobody cares.
[00:01:47]  I said, what about MI6?
[00:01:49]  And they said that they have a retired MI6 officer in their stable of speakers.
[00:01:56]  And he went back to MI6 and asked them, they said something interesting.
[00:01:59]  They said, while we are aware of Mr. Kiriakou's tour, we have done nothing to impede it.
[00:02:07]  And I said, then it has to be meta, right?
[00:02:11]  Right.
[00:02:12]  And he said, you know what?
[00:02:13]  My ex-wife is the assistant general counsel.
[00:02:16]  I'm going to call her.
[00:02:18]  So he calls her and he's like, did you guys do this?
[00:02:21]  And she said, yeah, we did it.
[00:02:23]  We don't like him.
[00:02:25]  And he said, you can't just take $100,000 in advertising and then just say, fuck you.
[00:02:31]  And she said, so sue us.
[00:02:34]  So I said, you're going to sue them?
[00:02:38]  And he goes, no, because all of our business is with Meta.
[00:02:41]  You're the only one that they're blocking.
[00:02:43]  So I fucking sued him.
[00:02:45]  In the Northern District of Texas.
[00:02:47]  You sued Meadow.
[00:02:48]  Yeah.
[00:02:50]  They put me out of business.
[00:02:51]  This was a major source of income.
[00:02:53]  I was making 25 grand a night.
[00:02:56]  And you're, are you allowed to use the information that your ex wife gave up that they did?
[00:03:01]  His ex wife.
[00:03:02]  Oh, his ex wife, not your ex wife.
[00:03:04]  His ex wife.
[00:03:04]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:04]  That's like the basis of the suit.
[00:03:06]  Oh, my God.
[00:03:07]  So I hired this asshole who represents both the governor and the attorney general of Texas in their various lawsuits.
[00:03:15]  And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, this is, we'll take this.
[00:03:18]  I said, I don't have any money to pay you.
[00:03:19]  He said, We'll do it on contingency.
[00:03:21]  I believe in this.
[00:03:22]  No fucking way.
[00:03:24]  Yeah.
[00:03:25]  So, anyway, because of you, Julian, and Dalton, it kind of lifted me to a higher level of podcast, right?
[00:03:39]  That gave me better exposure in the UK and Ireland.
[00:03:42]  They love me in Ireland.
[00:03:43]  And Rogan.
[00:03:44]  You went on Rogan.
[00:03:45]  And then I did Tucker and then I did Patrick Bettini.
[00:03:47]  And then I did Rogan.
[00:03:48]  Rogan sort of broke the dam.
[00:03:50]  Right.
[00:03:52]  And then.
[00:03:53]  Rogan led to Diary of a CEO.
[00:03:55]  Oh, yes.
[00:03:55]  I forgot about that.
[00:03:56]  That was, that made everything crazy.
[00:03:59]  Really?
[00:04:01]  How so?
[00:04:03]  There's a kid in Texas, 20 year old kid at the University of Texas.
[00:04:08]  He took my Diary of a CEO interview and he chopped up the stories into shorts and gave me an Elvin and the Chipmunks voice.
[00:04:21]  Oh, I saw those.
[00:04:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:22]  Lasers shooting out of my eyes.
[00:04:25]  My niece calls me one morning, seven o'clock in the morning.
[00:04:27]  She goes, Uncle John, you went viral on TikTok overnight.
[00:04:30]  I go, Why?
[00:04:32]  And she says, I don't know.
[00:04:34]  And then the phone just started ringing off the hook.
[00:04:38]  But I was leaving for Dubai the next day.
[00:04:41]  So I fly to Dubai and then I get a call from CAA, the Creative Artist Agency.
[00:04:49]  And the guy goes, Tell me you're not represented.
[00:04:52]  And I said, No.
[00:04:54]  And they're like, You are now.
[00:04:59]  You're a star, John.
[00:05:00]  Life changed dramatically just in the last couple of weeks.
[00:05:03]  That's amazing, man.
[00:05:03]  It changed dramatically.
[00:05:04]  But it started in the last couple of months.
[00:05:05]  I'm happy to hear it, man.
[00:05:05]  You deserve it.
[00:05:06]  You deserve it, man.
[00:05:07]  Thank you.
[00:05:07]  Are we allowed to put any of that in the show?
[00:05:08]  Or, oh, yeah, I'll, I'll, uh, the stuff about the meta stuff, the, yeah, I'll, yeah, sure, that whole story about suing them and all that, sure.
[00:05:15]  Okay, cool.
[00:05:16]  I just want to make sure because that was also a great story.
[00:05:18]  We will leave out the other story, which was, thank you, bananas.
[00:05:20]  Oh, no, but I have one more.

=== Viral Fame in Dubai (08:28) ===

[00:05:22]  I wish we could keep that on there.
[00:05:23]  I, I have one more that I'll, I'll protect the source of the story, yes, but, uh, that you'll like very much.
[00:05:31]  Okay, very much.
[00:05:33]  Okay, cool.
[00:05:33]  We'll get into it, but good to have you back, man.
[00:05:36]  Good to be back.
[00:05:36]  I'm very excited to talk to you.
[00:05:38]  You have the, Most deep analysis of everything that's going on in the world, which it seems like.
[00:05:45]  I'll tell you, there's so much going on.
[00:05:47]  Yeah.
[00:05:47]  There's so much to analyze.
[00:05:48]  It's too much, right?
[00:05:49]  It's too much.
[00:05:49]  Like I was telling you before we started, I'm like, I don't know what to do because I'm just being beaten over the head with information every day.
[00:05:57]  Too much information.
[00:05:58]  And I'll tell you what's different this time than in previous conflicts.
[00:06:01]  I'm thinking about Iraq, Afghanistan, even Syria, which is more recent, Libya, which is more recent.
[00:06:09]  We didn't have to deal with AI videos.
[00:06:12]  And that kind of disinformation and misinformation, like we do today.
[00:06:16]  Today, we read articles or we watch videos, we genuinely have no idea if they're real.
[00:06:22]  Right.
[00:06:22]  And so you have to be very, very careful about jumping to a conclusion.
[00:06:27]  You know, you've got to rely on people on site, people you trust, not just, you know, a podcaster that you happen to like, because it's easy to be duped.
[00:06:41]  So I don't know.
[00:06:42]  I'm finding it very challenging to separate.
[00:06:46]  Fact from fiction.
[00:06:47]  Yeah, and not only like just analyzing whether stuff's real or not, but like the fact that, I mean, I think Netanyahu's alive, right?
[00:06:54]  That's pretty much it.
[00:06:55]  I'm sure there was like a week or two where everyone was not sure, right?
[00:06:59]  And there were these AI videos, I think they were actually AI.
[00:07:02]  I don't think they were Netanyahu.
[00:07:04]  I'm confident they were AI.
[00:07:06]  So if they, if, why is Netanyahu releasing fake AI videos of himself if he's alive?
[00:07:12]  Is that just to like confuse people and draw attention away from something else?
[00:07:16]  I think there were two different kinds of videos.
[00:07:18]  I think there were videos that were not released by Netanyahu or his team that were AI.
[00:07:24]  Well, no.
[00:07:25]  All AI.
[00:07:25]  But then the ones that were released by Netanyahu, you notice they showed him.
[00:07:29]  Like in the coffee shop.
[00:07:30]  Yeah.
[00:07:31]  That was on his Twitter account.
[00:07:32]  Yeah.
[00:07:34]  I think that was AI.
[00:07:35]  I think I'm pretty sure that was AI.
[00:07:36]  Yeah.
[00:07:36]  He's not going to go out just randomly to a coffee shop while his country's at war and being bombed.
[00:07:45]  Yeah.
[00:07:45]  Or he was at like a roadside rest, you know, in the Golan Heights.
[00:07:50]  It's like, what's that?
[00:07:51]  No, he's not.
[00:07:52]  But his ears were weird.
[00:07:53]  They were kind of sticking straight out.
[00:07:55]  They weren't his normal ears.
[00:07:57]  His head was a little bit more elongated than it is in real life.
[00:08:01]  And he had six fingers.
[00:08:04]  I saw the one with six fingers.
[00:08:05]  Yeah, he had six fingers in the one on his, I guess it was his left hand.
[00:08:13]  But there were a couple of videos that he released where he's surrounded on three sides by Israeli flags.
[00:08:19]  So there's the podium, the lectern in the middle, Israeli flags on three sides.
[00:08:24]  That could have been taken literally anywhere in the world.
[00:08:28]  So, you know, there were rumors at the same time as there were rumors that he was dead.
[00:08:33]  There were rumors that he was in Germany hiding, that he was in Cyprus hiding or trying to get out of the range of Iranian missiles.
[00:08:43]  So, who knows?
[00:08:44]  He may have been in a bunker in Jerusalem.
[00:08:46]  We don't have any idea.
[00:08:48]  And they're not talking.
[00:08:49]  Yeah.
[00:08:50]  Or I heard that he was in his plane, just flying around in a plane the whole time.
[00:08:53]  Who knows?
[00:08:54]  It's hard.
[00:08:54]  Yeah, it's too much.
[00:08:56]  It's too much fake stuff going on right now.
[00:08:58]  And, like, man, I don't know.
[00:09:02]  What to make of the state of this country right now?
[00:09:06]  It just, it, again, I've only been paying attention for so long, you know, the past less than 10 years, I've really been checked into like the news cycle and what's going on in politics and like starting to like learn the history of all this stuff.
[00:09:20]  So I'm very new.
[00:09:24]  And obviously, like back during like the Cold War and like leading up to where we are now, we didn't have social media and cell phones and all that stuff.
[00:09:31]  So, It's hard to know what it's like now compared to what it used to be like.
[00:09:35]  But at least in my lifetime, man, it feels like we've never been closer to like an actual revolution in this country or like at least the concept of, not the concept, but like the reality of what, how fake politics is and how everything is a lie and how corrupt everything is.
[00:10:05]  Danny, this is exactly why I'm not.
[00:10:07]  A member of a political party because they're two sides of the same coin, they're both corrupt as corrupt as the day is along.
[00:10:15]  If you don't like Donald Trump, you can't look to the Democrats to be any better, right?
[00:10:23]  And similarly, if you don't like whomever the Democrats happen to be, you know, throwing at us on any given day, lately it's Pete Buttigieg, who I think doesn't have a prayer of ever becoming president.
[00:10:40]  Worst Transportation secretary in American history.
[00:10:45]  You can't go to the Republicans because the Republicans are in a state of civil war.
[00:10:49]  You know, the neocons are ascendant again.
[00:10:53]  John McCain, if he were alive, would be dancing a jig.
[00:10:57]  Right.
[00:10:58]  And the MAGA people are like, what just happened to us?
[00:11:03]  I thought we were running the place, you know?
[00:11:06]  Do you think it's possible that there could ever be a real revolution in this country?
[00:11:10]  You know, I said to a friend of mine the other day, excuse me.
[00:11:15]  I said to a friend of mine the other day, I have some of my very earliest memories are of the spring and summer of 1968.
[00:11:25]  I was four years old.
[00:11:26]  I was three years old, almost four.
[00:11:28]  And I remember sitting on my dad's lap and he was watching the news.
[00:11:32]  And I remember seeing fires.
[00:11:35]  And I asked him why everything was on fire.
[00:11:38]  And I remember he said that a very bad man killed Martin Luther King and black people were very upset.
[00:11:45]  And then I remember my mom bawling a couple of months later when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
[00:11:51]  But then, having studied the spring and summer of 68, you know, between political assassinations and the Vietnam War and Eugene McCarthy being pushed out and Kennedy being killed, and then, you know, McGovern standing in for the Kennedy delegates at the 68 convention, but then the DNC imposing Hubert Humphrey on us, a pro war, you know, moderate Democrat,
[00:12:22]  and then riots in the streets.
[00:12:24]  And at the same time, the summer of love happening.
[00:12:27]  Right.
[00:12:28]  Like the country was in a state of chaos, utter chaos, really from 67 to 69, if you want to include the Kent State shootings.
[00:12:37]  So I mentioned to this friend of mine, this is like the summer of 68.
[00:12:41]  And he said, this is like the spring of 61, 1861.
[00:12:47]  And I said, you really think it's that bad?
[00:12:50]  And he said, yeah.
[00:12:51]  I said, I don't.
[00:12:52]  I'm not there yet.
[00:12:53]  Yeah, I don't think it would be.
[00:12:56]  The only good thing I can say about it is I don't think it would be left versus right.
[00:13:00]  I think it would be the people versus the politicians.
[00:13:03]  I think that's it.
[00:13:04]  I think that's it.
[00:13:05]  Yeah.
[00:13:05]  I think people are genuinely frustrated with governance and they want something different.
[00:13:12]  But we've given ourselves, especially over the last hundred years, almost exactly a hundred years, this two party system that just simply doesn't work.
[00:13:22]  You know, a hundred years ago, we had five, six viable parties.
[00:13:28]  You know, Eugene V. Debs ran for president from prison and got whatever it was, two million votes.
[00:13:35]  Yeah.
[00:13:36]  We had the Democrat Farmer Labor Party in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
[00:13:43]  We had the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, the Bull Moose Party that Teddy Roosevelt ran on, like legit parties.

=== Why Two Parties Fail (14:14) ===

[00:13:50]  I was reading an article just the other day about Salmon P. Chase, who was the Secretary of the Treasury under Abraham Lincoln.
[00:13:57]  Over the course of his Political career.
[00:13:59]  He had been governor of Ohio.
[00:14:00]  He was secretary of treasury.
[00:14:02]  He was a member of the Supreme Court.
[00:14:05]  Over the course of his political career, he was a member of six different political parties.
[00:14:09]  Every time his party would take a position that he didn't like, he would just leave and go to another party.
[00:14:15]  That's what it should be like.
[00:14:16]  Yes.
[00:14:18]  And we're not like that.
[00:14:19]  Well, now you can be a member of six different political parties.
[00:14:22]  You don't have to change any of your ideas.
[00:14:24]  They just change.
[00:14:25]  They're all the same.
[00:14:25]  Like Hillary.
[00:14:26]  Hillary was like super MAGA back in the early 2000s.
[00:14:28]  Oh, yes, she was.
[00:14:29]  She was so hawkish on borders.
[00:14:31]  And then Ronald Reagan was like, Emigrants, immigrants.
[00:14:34]  Right.
[00:14:35]  Yeah, things have changed.
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[00:15:50]  The other day, I had Glenn Greenwald in here and he was saying that he thinks Tucker could win the presidency.
[00:15:59]  I'm going to speak with Tucker in a couple of weeks.
[00:16:04]  And I'm going to tell him, look, it's none of my business to tell you what to do, what not to do.
[00:16:09]  But if you run for president, I am all in 100%.
[00:16:15]  Glenn says that he talks to him in private about it.
[00:16:18]  Brushes it off and laughs at it.
[00:16:19]  See, the last time I talked to him, he brushed it off.
[00:16:21]  And I said, I'm serious.
[00:16:22]  He said, I'm not interested.
[00:16:24]  He could win.
[00:16:25]  Yeah.
[00:16:26]  But goddamn does he need some beefy security?
[00:16:29]  You know, he lives out in the sticks.
[00:16:31]  He lives a couple, he has a house a couple hours from here.
[00:16:33]  Oh, does he?
[00:16:34]  Yeah.
[00:16:36]  I went up to Maine last time I saw him and he lives out in the sticks.
[00:16:39]  And I'm like, buddy, I said, you need security out here.
[00:16:42]  And he's like, no, not out here.
[00:16:44]  Really?
[00:16:44]  Yeah.
[00:16:45]  In fact, I'll tell you a funny thing.
[00:16:47]  He was a half an hour late for.
[00:16:49]  For our podcast, because he was fly fishing.
[00:16:53]  He's an avid fly fisher, accomplished fly fisher.
[00:16:57]  And then when he pulled his reel in to walk back to the car and come to the podcast, there was a moose standing there.
[00:17:05]  And he said, What a great excuse.
[00:17:07]  He said, They can be dangerous.
[00:17:09]  They weigh a thousand pounds.
[00:17:10]  Oh, yeah.
[00:17:11]  Right?
[00:17:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:17:11]  Spindly legs, they'll jump up and hit you.
[00:17:14]  They're super dangerous.
[00:17:14]  So he said, He just had a face off with the moose.
[00:17:17]  He just stood there for half an hour and the moose is looking at him and he's looking at the moose.
[00:17:22]  And then finally, it just walks away.
[00:17:23]  Yeah.
[00:17:24]  Wow.
[00:17:25]  Yeah.
[00:17:25]  What a great story for being 30 minutes late.
[00:17:29]  Better than my excuse, right?
[00:17:30]  No, he, it's just crazy, man.
[00:17:33]  It's just, I was talking to Glenn about this.
[00:17:35]  I'm like, I'm kind of stunned how fearless he is.
[00:17:39]  He is utterly fearless.
[00:17:40]  And I'll tell you, I know a lot of really smart people.
[00:17:44]  He might be the most brilliant person that I've ever encountered.
[00:17:49]  He's certainly the most well informed person I've ever encountered.
[00:17:52]  And another thing, too, in addition to just being a sweet guy, He's a genuinely good guy.
[00:17:58]  What you see is what you get with him.
[00:18:01]  The way he appears on camera, that's Tucker.
[00:18:05]  He's a genuinely nice guy.
[00:18:08]  He loves the country.
[00:18:10]  He's very devout in his faith.
[00:18:13]  He loves his family.
[00:18:16]  And I think he would be an inspired leader.
[00:18:19]  I don't, I'm conflicted on that because then we would lose the voice.
[00:18:24]  Yeah, that's the only thing.
[00:18:25]  That's the only thing.
[00:18:26]  Can't be both.
[00:18:27]  Yeah.
[00:18:28]  That's right.
[00:18:29]  I'm afraid that it takes a certain type of person to really be a politician or a president, you know?
[00:18:36]  And, you know, I wonder too if he would be necessarily comfortable in today's Republican Party or if he would have to run as an independent or make his own party.
[00:18:45]  You know, back, you and I talked about this years ago.
[00:18:49]  Back in 2016, I traveled to 12 states with Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee for president in 2012 and 2016.
[00:19:03]  I consider myself to be a libertarian.
[00:19:09]  And there was such upheaval in the campaign, not the libertarian campaign, but the presidential campaign that year.
[00:19:16]  Donald Trump had the Republican nomination.
[00:19:17]  Hillary had the Democratic nomination.
[00:19:20]  And this guy from the agency, I forget his name, he was running as an independent.
[00:19:26]  I forget his name.
[00:19:30]  And so the polls were just in this weird state of flux to the point where.
[00:19:36]  We really believed that Gary was competitive in both Utah and New Mexico.
[00:19:45]  We ended up doing well in Utah.
[00:19:47]  We got like, I don't know, 18% or 16%.
[00:19:51]  And he ended up getting a higher percentage of the vote, 3%, higher than any libertarian ever has gotten since the creation of the Libertarian Party.
[00:20:02]  And I mentioned to him one time, you know, this is something we can really grow on.
[00:20:06]  And he said, no, it's a fluke.
[00:20:09]  And I said, what makes you say that?
[00:20:11]  He said, because unlike the Democrats and the Republicans, we don't have a patron, we don't have a billionaire who can just Dump $100 million in the campaign.
[00:20:20]  There was a guy who was a donor to the campaign.
[00:20:23]  I never learned his name.
[00:20:24]  He was only described to me as the canned tomato king of California.
[00:20:29]  That's where he made his money canned tomatoes.
[00:20:32]  And he donated money for us to buy a used Winnebago that we drove around all these states in to go from campaign event to campaign event.
[00:20:44]  The only place we flew was to Alaska because it was too far to drive.
[00:20:48]  But, um, yeah, that's the problem with it.
[00:20:50]  But he was right, you know.
[00:20:52]  The libertarians went right back down to one, one and a half percent, and that was kind of the end of it.
[00:20:57]  Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
[00:20:59]  I don't know how you get rid of it, I don't know how you fix that unless you just demolish the whole thing and build it from the ground up.
[00:21:04]  That's it, that's it.
[00:21:05]  But I can't help but think that there are enough people frustrated with the two party system that with the right leadership, a third party might be attractive.
[00:21:18]  Although, part of the problem is this ongoing.
[00:21:22]  Debate over whether or not you start at the grassroots and run people for the local water board and the city council and the school board, and then work your way up to the point where you nominate a presidential nominee.
[00:21:36]  Oh, interesting.
[00:21:37]  Or if you get a big name like Ross Perot and you create this party around him and then work down from there.
[00:21:45]  That hasn't worked.
[00:21:47]  But then the libertarians, I was on the Libertarian Party mailing list for years, and I'd get these breathless emails like, oh my God.
[00:21:55]  We just had a libertarian elected trash commissioner of Green Bay, Minnesota, Green Bay, Wisconsin.
[00:22:03]  Congratulations.
[00:22:05]  I'm like, you guys, what are you doing?
[00:22:07]  Trash commissioner of Green Bay.
[00:22:11]  I went to the libertarian Christmas party in, well, I mean, being libertarians, of course, they couldn't get their act together.
[00:22:17]  So it was in the middle of January, right?
[00:22:20]  Seriously.
[00:22:22]  It's in Alexandria, Virginia.
[00:22:23]  We all have these name tags.
[00:22:25]  Hello, my name is.
[00:22:26]  Right?
[00:22:27]  I wrote John Kiriakou.
[00:22:28]  And this guy walks up to me and he's looking at my name tag and he goes, Oh, John Kiriakou, I'm so glad I ran into you.
[00:22:34]  I'm so and so.
[00:22:35]  I'm the head of the Libertarian Party for Virginia.
[00:22:38]  I said, Oh, nice to meet you.
[00:22:39]  Shook his hand.
[00:22:40]  And he says, Listen, would you be willing to run for governor?
[00:22:44]  I said, Absolutely not.
[00:22:46]  Just like that.
[00:22:47]  He said, Really?
[00:22:48]  Why not?
[00:22:49]  I said, Listen, I like you guys.
[00:22:51]  You're all really nice guys.
[00:22:53]  But you can't even get your act together to schedule a Christmas party before Christmas.
[00:22:59]  And I know it's going to happen.
[00:23:01]  I'll say yes, I'll run for governor.
[00:23:04]  Everybody will abandon me.
[00:23:06]  I'm not going to raise any money.
[00:23:08]  I'll end up being out of pocket for everything, including my own travel around the state.
[00:23:13]  And then I'll get 1% and make an idiot of myself.
[00:23:15]  Right.
[00:23:16]  And he's like, well, fair enough.
[00:23:18]  Yeah.
[00:23:19]  Yeah.
[00:23:19]  I don't know.
[00:23:20]  I don't know if that would be a good idea for Tucker to run.
[00:23:22]  I mean, in theory, it's a good idea, but, you know, see, I think I'd rather have the media voice that's pushing back against power.
[00:23:29]  Yeah.
[00:23:30]  I think.
[00:23:31]  Yeah.
[00:23:31]  You know, I don't know.
[00:23:32]  He's very, very effective and has millions of followers.
[00:23:37]  People like him.
[00:23:38]  They trust him.
[00:23:39]  They understand his analysis.
[00:23:41]  He doesn't speak down to people.
[00:23:43]  Like the average American, I think, can connect with him.
[00:23:45]  Right.
[00:23:46]  I have a lot of dear friends who always questioned my friendship with him.
[00:23:52]  And I was like, you know, first of all, I never, ever judge anybody on their politics.
[00:23:56]  Never.
[00:23:57]  If you and I, frankly, I mean, you and I have known each other for years now.
[00:24:00]  I've learned all my politics from you, John.
[00:24:03]  I was going to say, I don't have any idea what your politics are because we've never really talked about it.
[00:24:07]  I've formed my ideas from listening to you.
[00:24:09]  I mean, that's how I fucking, you know, learn about all this shit.
[00:24:12]  I thought you were kidding.
[00:24:13]  Thank you very much.
[00:24:14]  That's very nice.
[00:24:14]  Thank you.
[00:24:16]  So, You and I are friends first.
[00:24:21]  If we agree on political issues, ah, that's great.
[00:24:23]  If we don't agree, I don't care.
[00:24:25]  We're still friends.
[00:24:26]  I like you.
[00:24:28]  I have this core of friends, my best friends from high school.
[00:24:32]  We're all in each other's weddings and we're godfather to each other's kids.
[00:24:36]  It was five of us all together.
[00:24:38]  One has passed away now, but two Democrats, two Republicans, and an Independent.
[00:24:43]  But it never mattered because we never talked about politics, or when we did, we'd kid each other.
[00:24:48]  So, um, With Tucker, he's so truly independent that even my friends who questioned my friendship with him have told me recently, now we've really come around on Tucker.
[00:25:03]  Yeah, he's a truth teller.
[00:25:05]  Yeah, there was a great skit that I saw yesterday.
[00:25:08]  I think Joe Rogan reposted it on his Instagram story.
[00:25:12]  Steve, I'll send you the link to it so you can play it.
[00:25:14]  It's from George Carlin talking about politics and identity.
[00:25:24]  And basically, how you know fusing your identity with your political ideas is always a bad idea, it's always a bad choice.
[00:25:34]  Because then, when people attack your ideas, they're attacking you and your character.
[00:25:41]  Instead, you should be more disconnected from it.
[00:25:43]  And when you start to be absorbed by your ideas or your political beliefs, then you just, it's just like you're arguing just for the sake of arguing because you're just defending yourself.
[00:25:57]  Here it is.
[00:25:58]  This is great.
[00:25:58]  Just throw, can you throw it on the headphones?
[00:26:00]  Yeah.
[00:26:00]  Go ahead, hit it.
[00:26:06]  When your identity is your ideology, congratulations, you've officially screwed yourself.
[00:26:11]  Because now it's not just an idea, now it's you.
[00:26:14]  And when the idea gets challenged, you don't hear disagreement, you hear an attack.
[00:26:19]  So what do you do?
[00:26:20]  You build a bubble.
[00:26:22]  A nice, soft, padded little bubble where everyone agrees with you, uses the same words, hates the same people, and claps at the exact right moment.
[00:26:30]  And you will defend that bubble at all costs, even if it makes you sound incredibly stupid.
[00:26:34]  Facts don't matter anymore.
[00:26:36]  Logic's gone.
[00:26:37]  Humor?
[00:26:38]  Dead.
[00:26:39]  Because admitting you're wrong would mean admitting you are wrong, and that's unacceptable.
[00:26:44]  So you double down.
[00:26:46]  Louder, angrier, dumber.
[00:26:49]  And that's how you end up defending nonsense like it's sacred scripture.
[00:26:54]  Not because it's true, but because without it, you'd have to actually develop a personality.
[00:27:04]  So true.
[00:27:06]  Oh my God.
[00:27:06]  He was a fucking genius, man.
[00:27:09]  What a genius.
[00:27:11]  Yeah, that's so true.
[00:27:12]  Yeah.
[00:27:13]  Yeah, I think people are starting to wake up to that because, you know, now with independent journalism, you know, becoming more and more popular and normal fucking media like Fox and CNN starting to die down and people not taking it as seriously anymore.
[00:27:28]  It's just like sanctioned propaganda from the state.
[00:27:31]  Yes.
[00:27:32]  It's like, I see more and more people starting to.
[00:27:35]  Admit that they were wrong about things, which is hopeful.
[00:27:38]  I'm glad to hear that.
[00:27:39]  That is hopeful.
[00:27:40]  Yeah.
[00:27:40]  I was attacked over the weekend on X by Linda Loomer.
[00:27:44]  I'm sorry.
[00:27:45]  Laura Loomer.
[00:27:45]  Laura Loomer.
[00:27:46]  Yeah.
[00:27:46]  See, I don't even know her name.
[00:27:48]  Linda.
[00:27:48]  We'll call her Linda.
[00:27:49]  Yeah.
[00:27:50]  So somebody said, she attacked you this morning.
[00:27:53]  And I said, what'd she say?
[00:27:55]  She called you a communist.
[00:27:56]  Oh, that was nice.
[00:27:57]  I was like, I'm not a communist.
[00:27:59]  I'm actually decidedly a capitalist.
[00:28:02]  And are you going to respond?
[00:28:03]  And I said, no.

=== Responding to Communist Accusations (02:41) ===

[00:28:04]  Why not?
[00:28:06]  I said, she's not important enough to respond to.
[00:28:10]  It's just not worth it.
[00:28:11]  Because it drives people get paid by X to post, you know?
[00:28:15]  Like, X will pay you based on your engagement, I think.
[00:28:21]  So, like certain people, I guess if you're a part of their partner program, they serve more ads based on how many views your tweets get.
[00:28:29]  So, people are incentivized just to be more inflammatory and to repost more crazy shit or to pop off on people.
[00:28:38]  So, it's weird.
[00:28:39]  It's a little incentive there for people just to get louder on there.
[00:28:42]  So, my brother's got a friend who's like an A list star.
[00:28:47]  And, um, The first time I ever realized that people were getting paid for tweets was when I saw this A list star tweet, just sitting home enjoying a cold diet Coke.
[00:29:02]  What?
[00:29:04]  What are you talking about?
[00:29:06]  Then I was like, oh, no, of course.
[00:29:07]  It's an advertisement.
[00:29:08]  Paid advertisement.
[00:29:09]  That's beautiful.
[00:29:10]  What year was that?
[00:29:11]  Oh, it was.
[00:29:11]  That had to have been a long time ago.
[00:29:12]  At least 10 years ago.
[00:29:13]  Oh, yeah, for sure.
[00:29:15]  Yeah, now you don't even have to do an ad.
[00:29:17]  All you have to do is just get more views because they bake the ads into everything.
[00:29:20]  I see.
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=== Mando Deodorant for Long Workouts (11:11) ===

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[00:30:55]  So, uh, What is your take on this whole Joe Kent resignation?
[00:31:01]  Oh, I sent you the clip of what was her name, Whitney Webb, yeah, who I like.
[00:31:08]  I love her stuff, yeah.
[00:31:10]  I'm halfway through her book, one of her books right now.
[00:31:12]  I think she's super smart, very diligent.
[00:31:16]  Um, and you know, when I heard her make this take about Whitney Webb, I'm like, okay, maybe she's connecting some dots or seeing some fractal pattern that I'm incapable of seeing because she's done so much research, right?
[00:31:29]  Um, but.
[00:31:30]  We'll talk about that.
[00:31:31]  What is your whole take on it?
[00:31:32]  Normally, she's great when it comes to some of these issues.
[00:31:36]  She's great, for example, on the Epstein files.
[00:31:38]  Yes.
[00:31:39]  Just wonderful.
[00:31:40]  Oh, yeah.
[00:31:40]  And on other issues.
[00:31:42]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:31:43]  That's right.
[00:31:44]  Deep research.
[00:31:46]  I think she's just plain wrong on Joe Kent.
[00:31:49]  Funny, you know, I didn't support his nomination to be the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
[00:31:58]  I just thought he wasn't qualified.
[00:32:00]  When did he first become the director of the National Counterterrorism Center?
[00:32:02]  A year ago.
[00:32:03]  A year ago, okay.
[00:32:05]  He's young, and I thought he was too young for a position like that.
[00:32:09]  I mean, you're essentially the head of an independent agency.
[00:32:13]  And one of the things, just to clarify for people, by the way, I think what Whitney Webb's take on it was.
[00:32:19]  Was that he?
[00:32:20]  She said he was a top spook.
[00:32:22]  No, he was not.
[00:32:23]  Okay, so he's not, I don't know.
[00:32:25]  Not in any definition of the word spook.
[00:32:28]  Okay, so she, what she said on Jimmy Dore's show, I think last week or a couple days ago, was that when somebody comes from the CIA or is a top spook, in her words, and resigns, she thinks that he might be trying to garner public trust in order to do some sort of a misdirection or whatever.
[00:32:50]  And she used the explanation.
[00:32:53]  She referenced a speech that Elizabeth Newman gave during Trump's first presidency about domestic terrorism and focusing on far right, anti Semitic, right wing nationalists or whatever, focusing on them for domestic terrorism.
[00:33:18]  And I guess my best understanding of what she was saying was that they might be trying to use Kent.
[00:33:25]  To corral all those people together and trying to make it easier to target them or something?
[00:33:32]  Is that just not real life?
[00:33:35]  MKUltra is over.
[00:33:36]  It finished in 1975.
[00:33:39]  That kind of stuff just isn't a part of reality.
[00:33:45]  I'm a member of this group called VIPs, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
[00:33:53]  So it's made up of retired CIA, FBI, NSA, some DOD.
[00:33:59]  People, a lot of spies.
[00:34:02]  And they researched the daylights out of this and decided to give him the Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence because they believe, we believe, that what we see is what we're getting.
[00:34:20]  Yeah, that he resigned because of his personal opposition to the war in Iran.
[00:34:25]  He believes that the intelligence was ignored.
[00:34:29]  He believes that the intelligence that was not ignored was given to us by the Israelis and it was false intelligence.
[00:34:37]  And I say amen to that.
[00:34:40]  So, no, I don't believe that there's any kind of like behind the scenes subterfuge.
[00:34:49]  And Joe said, I think on Tucker's podcast, that he still had full access to all information before he resigned, which means that he wouldn't have been being investigated.
[00:34:59]  Before he resigned, the investigation was much a media narrative hit or something like that.
[00:35:04]  Right.
[00:35:05]  And, you know, investigation is a word that is thrown around a lot inappropriately.
[00:35:12]  What happens if somebody goes on TV, let's say, and makes a revelation, and the information may be classified or could be construed as classified?
[00:35:25]  The CIA or ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will file something called a crimes report with the Department of Justice.
[00:35:35]  99% of the crimes reports are ignored, right?
[00:35:40]  Only if it's something egregious or it's seen as something egregious will DOJ actually initiate an investigation.
[00:35:50]  And there's no evidence that any serious investigation is taking place.
[00:35:55]  Interesting.
[00:35:56]  Yeah, it seems like it's a standard operating procedure for the government against whistleblowers.
[00:36:01]  They're a Kremlin agent, basically.
[00:36:03]  Right, right.
[00:36:03]  This is how they treat them all, right?
[00:36:04]  Yes.
[00:36:05]  Exactly right.
[00:36:06]  And he also said, which was wild.
[00:36:09]  That he was sort of shooed off the Charlie Kirk investigation because he thought that he wouldn't.
[00:36:13]  That is wild.
[00:36:13]  He said he wasn't able to do the adequate research or analysis on whether a foreign asset.
[00:36:21]  He wasn't accusing Israel.
[00:36:22]  He was very measured about that.
[00:36:23]  I was just going to say that.
[00:36:24]  He was not making any accusations.
[00:36:27]  He was just saying that there were loose threads that he wanted to run to ground.
[00:36:34]  And he was not permitted to do that.
[00:36:35]  What do you make of that?
[00:36:36]  What do you think that is?
[00:36:37]  That bothers me very, very much.
[00:36:40]  You know, on the one hand, Candace Owens sometimes sounds like a crazy person when she says, Oh, when Charlie Kirk was killed, the Egyptian Air Force was flying in this pattern and it coincided.
[00:36:57]  It's like, what are you talking about?
[00:36:59]  The Egyptian Air Force did not kill Charlie Kirk.
[00:37:02]  That just sounds crazy.
[00:37:04]  That's not what Joe Kent was talking about.
[00:37:07]  Joe Kent was talking about clandestinely collected information that did not easily fit into.
[00:37:17]  The general consensus that this kid shot Charlie Kirk.
[00:37:22]  I mean, it looks like he did, but who knows?
[00:37:25]  You don't know until you investigate.
[00:37:27]  And so you want to run to ground these little isolated bits of information that people are collecting, whether domestically or overseas.
[00:37:38]  And he wasn't allowed to do that.
[00:37:40]  I have no idea why he wouldn't be allowed to do that.
[00:37:44]  Have you ever heard of another case similar to this where people would be?
[00:37:47]  Kicked away from the case?
[00:37:48]  No, yeah.
[00:37:48]  JFK, maybe?
[00:37:49]  I was just going to say, even in the JFK case, the information was collected.
[00:37:53]  It just has never been released, but it was collected.
[00:37:58]  Yeah.
[00:37:59]  And the story just came out yesterday that the bullet that hit Charlie Kirk was not the bullet from that gun that they found that the FBI said was his.
[00:38:08]  Oh, I didn't see that.
[00:38:09]  Can you find that, Steve?
[00:38:11]  Oh.
[00:38:13]  Daily Mail.
[00:38:14]  The bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did not match the rifle allegedly used by the suspect Tyler Robinson.
[00:38:19]  New court filing claims.
[00:38:21]  That's a Court filing.
[00:38:23]  A what filing?
[00:38:24]  It's a court filing.
[00:38:25]  It's not just some guy shouting it on the street corner.
[00:38:28]  Zoom in.
[00:38:29]  This was reported everywhere.
[00:38:35]  Yep.
[00:38:36]  His defense attorney now argued that the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was unable to identify the bullet recovered at the autopsy to the rifle allegedly tied to Mr. Robinson.
[00:38:48]  Wow.
[00:38:49]  Oh, so they didn't say it was not.
[00:38:51]  Right.
[00:38:51]  It just says they couldn't identify it.
[00:38:53]  So maybe it was destroyed.
[00:38:55]  You know, when it ended up hitting whatever, the ground, the wall behind him, whatever it was.
[00:39:00]  Yes.
[00:39:00]  But either way, it says it's being seen as exculpatory.
[00:39:05]  It could be exculpatory, which is exactly why you need to run down these other allegations.
[00:39:12]  And also, none of the story makes sense.
[00:39:16]  I mean, it doesn't make sense.
[00:39:18]  Like in the very early part of this, when the stuff that Candace was doing, like the research that she was doing and talking about, and I mean, like, I kind of get it from her angle, she's doing it live.
[00:39:27]  Every single day.
[00:39:28]  Sure.
[00:39:28]  And she's going on again.
[00:39:30]  Like maybe a week later, there'll be new stuff that will point out to what her recording a week ago was false.
[00:39:35]  And she'll make it clear, whatever.
[00:39:36]  She's doing the best she can.
[00:39:38]  But, like, she's right.
[00:39:39]  A lot of this shit does not line up.
[00:39:41]  There's a lot of stuff that does not make sense, that was not explained by the FBI properly.
[00:39:47]  You know, that's another thing.
[00:39:48]  If I could interrupt you for a second, why is the FBI involved in this?
[00:39:53]  Charlie Kirk was killed in Utah by a kid from Utah who left his house in Utah, drove to the university in Utah, and allegedly shot Charlie Kirk.
[00:40:08]  Nobody ever crossed a state line.
[00:40:09]  There's literally nothing in this case that would make it federal, unless there was a conspiracy, in which case it would be a federal case and the FBI would be involved.
[00:40:21]  So, Kash Patel was asked this early on, and he said, We're just offering the FBI's expertise to the Utah State Police.
[00:40:31]  Like, really?
[00:40:32]  Is that just what it is?
[00:40:35]  Because offering your expertise means sticking stuff in a FedEx.
[00:40:39]  And sending it to Utah so they can do with it what they want.
[00:40:42]  Or maybe you put one FBI lab person at their disposal.
[00:40:48]  You don't have the FBI director fly out there with a plane load of FBI agents.
[00:40:53]  It's not a federal case.
[00:40:56]  I don't understand.
[00:40:58]  What, if you could put on your tinfoil hat for a minute, what could you speculate that that really means?
[00:41:05]  I think that it's bigger than they've told us.
[00:41:09]  I think that there may be something.
[00:41:12]  Maybe not Candace Owens' Egyptian Air Force conspiracy, but maybe it was a conspiracy of some sort.
[00:41:21]  Maybe there are others involved.
[00:41:22]  Maybe this kid was duped or tricked or recruited or something.
[00:41:29]  How come we haven't heard anything from this kid yet?
[00:41:31]  See, and that's another thing.
[00:41:32]  Why haven't we heard anything at all?
[00:41:34]  Not even from his lawyers.
[00:41:37]  In my own case, the only way we could combat Justice Department leaks.
[00:41:42]  To the Washington Post and the New York Times was to leak our side to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
[00:41:49]  But this kid's, what's his name?
[00:41:50]  Robinson?
[00:41:51]  Tyler Robinson.
[00:41:52]  Tyler Robinson.
[00:41:53]  His lawyers aren't saying anything to anybody.

=== Leaking Intelligence Reports (15:23) ===

[00:41:57]  It stinks to high hell.
[00:42:00]  It really does.
[00:42:01]  And again, you don't want to point any fingers, but like, why is the second he's dead, Netanyahu all over every news station?
[00:42:12]  Yeah.
[00:42:12]  We didn't do it.
[00:42:13]  Talking about, oh my God, he was the best.
[00:42:15]  Biggest supporter of Israel.
[00:42:16]  We loved him.
[00:42:18]  We're going to put a statue of him in Tel Aviv.
[00:42:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:21]  And at the same time, you have all this other information coming out that contradicts that.
[00:42:26]  Which is why I worry about Tucker.
[00:42:29]  Right.
[00:42:30]  Last time you and Andy Bustamante were here at the old studio, we were talking about Hamas and the Gaza war and all that stuff and how it was being funded and how it all ties back to Iran.
[00:42:47]  Mm hmm.
[00:42:50]  And now we are so deep into this Iran debacle.
[00:42:58]  I don't even know what's up, what's down.
[00:43:02]  What is your take on everything that's going on in Iran?
[00:43:05]  The world's gone nuts.
[00:43:06]  What's going on?
[00:43:07]  I'll tell you.
[00:43:08]  Are we losing this war?
[00:43:09]  Yeah.
[00:43:11]  And I'll tell you why.
[00:43:12]  Because for us to win, we have to destroy the regime.
[00:43:19]  We have to install a pro American government, or maybe even a pro American, pro Israeli government, which is just beyond the pale, for the Iranians to win.
[00:43:35]  They just have to survive.
[00:43:37]  And they've been there for 5,000 years.
[00:43:41]  You know, we're going to have to occupy this country.
[00:43:43]  Think of it this way, too.
[00:43:45]  We had 170,000 troops in Iraq.
[00:43:48]  That was at the height of the conflict, 170,000 troops.
[00:43:57]  Iran is 3.8 times the size of Iraq with more forbidding terrain.
[00:44:05]  Iran is the size of the whole of Western Europe.
[00:44:10]  Well, we only have 50,000 troops in the region and two carrier attack groups.
[00:44:16]  We can't occupy Iran and overthrow its government.
[00:44:22]  Where things to me were especially egregious, and I can go on about this for some time, was that Netanyahu convinced the president that as soon as we fire that first rocket, the whole place is going to come down like a house of cards.
[00:44:40]  And I guarantee to you, I base my reputation on it no CIA analyst or State Department analyst or Defense Department analyst bought into that.
[00:44:52]  Anybody who knows anything at all, the most basic, rudimentary information on Iran, would tell you that they're not going to see us as liberators.
[00:45:03]  They're going to see us as invaders and occupiers.
[00:45:07]  And not just that, but the Israelis.
[00:45:11]  The Iranians believe that the Israeli government came out of the fires of hell.
[00:45:16]  They're not going to welcome them as liberators.
[00:45:20]  And I don't care what these Iranian Americans in Beverly Hills say, because they're not mainstream Iranians with their Shah flags.
[00:45:29]  You mean Patrick Bet David?
[00:45:31]  You know, I like Patrick.
[00:45:32]  He's a nice guy, but he's wrong on this issue.
[00:45:34]  Yeah.
[00:45:35]  He's just wrong.
[00:45:37]  Isn't it true that a lot of the Iranian population like Israel?
[00:45:41]  No.
[00:45:42]  That's not true?
[00:45:42]  It's true that a lot of the Iranian Jewish population likes this movie.
[00:45:48]  And they're very vocal.
[00:45:50]  The Iranian Jewish community in Southern California is gigantic and it's very, very wealthy.
[00:45:58]  Interesting.
[00:45:59]  And so they have, I was just in LA last week, they've got billboards, you know, welcoming Reza Pahlavi to return.
[00:46:09]  I've gotten a lot of threats lately because I said, On a podcast, and I meant it, and I'm going to repeat it that Reza Pahlavi is a clown.
[00:46:19]  Number one, he doesn't want to go back to Iran.
[00:46:23]  He said so to Patrick Bet David.
[00:46:25]  He's like, I've been here since 1979.
[00:46:28]  My kids are Americans.
[00:46:29]  I have my life.
[00:46:30]  It's in McLean, Virginia.
[00:46:32]  He doesn't want to go back.
[00:46:34]  Third, his wife is cheating on him with her French personal trainer, and everybody knows about it.
[00:46:42]  And it's in the pictures of them together in the French media all the time.
[00:46:46]  So, no, these religious people in Iran are not going to welcome him.
[00:46:51]  And I said, if he were to return to Iran, he wouldn't survive the walk from the plane to the terminal, let alone to come and, you know, here I am, the Shah and Shah, to liberate my people.
[00:47:04]  Why would he survive?
[00:47:05]  Because they hate him.
[00:47:08]  Why do they hate him?
[00:47:09]  Because his father created Savak, the dreaded, feared Iranian intelligence service that would scoop you off the street.
[00:47:19]  And they'd find your head on one side of town and the rest of your body on the other.
[00:47:23]  Whoa.
[00:47:24]  His father overthrew the only democratically elected prime minister in the history of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, 1953, with the CIA and MI6.
[00:47:36]  Right.
[00:47:37]  So there's no love, except for the royalists and these Jewish American Iranians, mostly in Southern California.
[00:47:48]  There is no love of this family, the Pahlavi's.
[00:47:52]  And I mean, they stole the country's riches, everything they could pack on their plane.
[00:47:59]  In February of 1979, there's a revolution in the streets.
[00:48:03]  The Shah and the entire royal family decide to go skiing in Switzerland.
[00:48:09]  And then they never went back because they took all their gold bars and their gems and jewels and Picasso's and loaded it all on the plane.
[00:48:19]  And what, now after 50 years?
[00:48:21]  Right.
[00:48:22]  Or not 50, it's 47 years.
[00:48:26]  Now they want to go back and take the country again.
[00:48:29]  Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
[00:48:32]  So did you see that?
[00:48:33]  The truth social that Trump did yesterday about, um, he said that all the other countries around there, including the U.S., they need to like stop crying and learn how to fight for themselves or something like that.
[00:48:44]  Well, that's kind of rich because you know, the whole idea.
[00:48:47]  Can you find that X post so we can find out what it exactly says?
[00:48:52]  I was working on the Gulf at the CIA before there was any American presence there, with the exception of Bahrain.
[00:49:00]  So, there it is.
[00:49:03]  To all the countries that can't get jet fuel from the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in this decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you.
[00:49:10]  Number one, buy from the US.
[00:49:12]  We have plenty because they got it from Venezuela, right?
[00:49:14]  That's right.
[00:49:16]  Number two, build up some delayed courage and go to the Strait and just take it.
[00:49:21]  You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself.
[00:49:23]  That's funny.
[00:49:24]  The USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.
[00:49:28]  Iran has been essentially decimated.
[00:49:31]  The hard part's done.
[00:49:33]  Go get your own oil.
[00:49:35]  Okay, so there are like several different war crimes there.
[00:49:41]  Admitted.
[00:49:43]  You can't take another country's oil.
[00:49:45]  It's like quite literally written into the war crimes law, right?
[00:49:50]  You can't steal the natural resources of another country.
[00:49:53]  It's the definition of a war crime.
[00:49:55]  You can't do that.
[00:49:56]  Number two, buy from us.
[00:49:59]  We have plenty in the US.
[00:50:00]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:50:02]  It's more expensive, but sure, they could do that.
[00:50:05]  Build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait and just take it.
[00:50:08]  That's also a war crime.
[00:50:09]  It's sovereign Iranian territory.
[00:50:12]  The only legal way for the United States or any country to move into Iran is if the Iranians invite us, right?
[00:50:22]  If the Iranians attack us first, which they didn't, or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council, which hasn't even met on the issue because we would veto it.
[00:50:33]  So it's a war crime.
[00:50:35]  You can't do it.
[00:50:36]  Plain and simple, you can't do it.
[00:50:37]  Now, Donald Trump, not even just in the same day, the same like, Part of the day said, We don't need NATO.
[00:50:47]  They're weak.
[00:50:48]  They don't do anything.
[00:50:50]  Well, if you don't need them, why are you yelling at them to come and take the straight?
[00:50:54]  Why don't you take the straight?
[00:50:55]  You're already there.
[00:50:56]  Just take it if you want to take it.
[00:51:00]  So, you know, either NATO is weak or it's not weak.
[00:51:04]  Either it's cowardly or it's not cowardly.
[00:51:07]  He said something the other day about NATO that was also false.
[00:51:10]  He said that NATO's never done anything for us, they've never helped us.
[00:51:14]  That is.
[00:51:15]  Patently untrue.
[00:51:17]  The only time in history where Article 5 was invoked and a country asked, a NATO member country asked the rest of NATO to come to assist was on September the 12th, 2001.
[00:51:32]  We invoked it and we asked NATO to help us fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and they agreed.
[00:51:39]  It's the only time.
[00:51:39]  They've never asked us for help.
[00:51:41]  Never.
[00:51:42]  Never in history since the formation of NATO in 1949.
[00:51:47]  So he's just wrong.
[00:51:49]  So that's it.
[00:51:51]  So, what is like the high level, what is your high level takeaway from his state of mind when he wrote this?
[00:52:00]  What is, yeah, what do you think is happening?
[00:52:02]  I think that he's, what is he seeing?
[00:52:04]  I think he's frustrated for two reasons.
[00:52:06]  I think he's frustrated because Netanyahu lied to him.
[00:52:10]  He lied to him.
[00:52:11]  And I'll get back to that in a second.
[00:52:13]  But I think he's frustrated because he believed, mostly because Netanyahu told him so.
[00:52:21]  Taken in a lot of Israeli finished intelligence, written intelligence.
[00:52:24]  We can talk about that too.
[00:52:26]  He really believed that as soon as we fire the first shot, that government's just coming down.
[00:52:32]  Especially when we decapitate it, we kill the Ayatollah, we kill the entire military leadership, we kill the entire nuclear leadership, and they just keep going like nothing happened.
[00:52:44]  That's not what Netanyahu told him to expect.
[00:52:47]  And I think you're on record saying the Joint Chiefs told him that this wasn't going to work?
[00:52:51]  Yes.
[00:52:52]  He ignored them.
[00:52:53]  Yes.
[00:52:54]  It's been my experience at the CIA that the Joint Chiefs are the last ones that want to go to war because they know how hard it is.
[00:53:03]  You know, this was one of the most valuable lessons I learned when I was at the CIA during the Iraq War.
[00:53:10]  I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.
[00:53:13]  And so we started planning the Iraq War a year in advance.
[00:53:17]  And one of the things that I came to learn was that it's easy to invade a country.
[00:53:26]  It's easy to overthrow its government.
[00:53:29]  It is impossible to be able to get out intact.
[00:53:34]  There's never an exit strategy.
[00:53:36]  There's no exit strategy here in Iran.
[00:53:38]  There was no exit strategy in Afghanistan.
[00:53:40]  There was no exit strategy in Iran.
[00:53:44]  We're still in Syria, albeit in small numbers.
[00:53:48]  There's never an exit strategy.
[00:53:50]  And the Joint Chiefs know this.
[00:53:51]  They're like, why would we commit to fighting a war indefinitely?
[00:53:55]  We just got out of two 20 year wars.
[00:53:57]  Right.
[00:53:59]  Why would we want to do it again?
[00:54:00]  And to what end?
[00:54:01]  Let me add one other thing.
[00:54:02]  I've said this before.
[00:54:03]  I'm going to say it again because it's important.
[00:54:05]  And this is not specific to Netanyahu.
[00:54:08]  But every single Israeli prime minister from the mid-80s onward, when they would come to Washington, and they come to Washington all the time, would ask every single president from Ronald Reagan onward, please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran.
[00:54:28]  And every single president said, no, I'm not going to do it.
[00:54:31]  Until this one.
[00:54:32]  There was a story just a couple of days ago about Bill Clinton.
[00:54:38]  I'm sorry, not Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, where Netanyahu came and said, We want you to attack Iran.
[00:54:44]  And he said, I'm not going to do it.
[00:54:46]  And Netanyahu said, We're thinking of using nuclear weapons.
[00:54:50]  And Obama called his bluff and said, Go ahead.
[00:54:54]  We're not going to help you.
[00:54:56]  Did the same thing happen with Trump?
[00:54:57]  Mm hmm.
[00:55:01]  That's the way I hear it from people in those circles.
[00:55:05]  The same thing happened with Trump.
[00:55:06]  And then he thought he was doing the world a service by bombing.
[00:55:12]  Remember, we used the Moab, the mother of all bombs, the 30,000 pound bomb on the bunker last year?
[00:55:19]  I think the president really believed that he was doing that to save Iran from a nuclear attack from the Israelis.
[00:55:28]  So, if all these presidents, including Trump, campaigned on not going to war with Iran, and at the same time, you can play video clips and read tweets of Donald Trump talking about how stupid it would be to invade Iran, and you could play those videos and they wouldn't be done until next week.
[00:55:45]  Why is he the first one to do it?
[00:55:47]  And in his first term, didn't he kill Soleimani?
[00:55:51]  Is that his name?
[00:55:52]  Soleimani.
[00:55:52]  Soleimani.
[00:55:53]  He killed Soleimani.
[00:55:54]  Yeah.
[00:55:55]  And what did they do in response to that force?
[00:55:58]  Nothing.
[00:55:58]  They did nothing.
[00:55:59]  In fact, scholars created a name for that.
[00:56:04]  It was strategic patience.
[00:56:08]  Strategic patience.
[00:56:10]  Sure, they could launch a rocket at some American military base in the Gulf, but they didn't.
[00:56:17]  They could send a hit team out to do something.
[00:56:19]  And they didn't.
[00:56:20]  Now, remember, what was it, a week ago, two weeks ago, there was news about these Iranian hit teams that are everywhere from Chicago to Honolulu sleeper cells.
[00:56:30]  All that shit's made up.
[00:56:32]  That all came from Netanyahu.
[00:56:34]  And it was to try to change American public opinion.
[00:56:37]  He reads the same polls we read.
[00:56:39]  And the polls say that Americans don't want to be in this war.
[00:56:43]  And so he's like, well, you know, the intelligence shows a grave danger.
[00:56:47]  No, you're just making it all up.
[00:56:49]  There's no grave danger.
[00:56:50]  When he killed, when he hit the strikes that killed Soleimani, do you think he was trying to start a war there or do you think that he knew they weren't going to retaliate?
[00:57:02]  I think he calculated that they would not retaliate.
[00:57:04]  And I think the analysis coming out of the CIA probably was that they wouldn't retaliate, that they would be so taken by surprise, yet reticent to poke the hornet's nest, that they would just let it go.

=== Polls Say Americans Want Out (15:11) ===

[00:57:21]  And they did, they let it go.
[00:57:22]  They bitch about it all the time.
[00:57:24]  There were demonstrations in the streets, something like 700,000 people went to the funeral, but they didn't respond.
[00:57:33]  I gotta be honest jeans have always been a problem for me.
[00:57:36]  The cool ones feel like cardboard, and the comfy ones make me look weird.
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[00:57:56]  They still look sharp.
[00:57:57]  That's the part that surprised me.
[00:57:58]  You get the clean, fitted look, but it feels like you're wearing something way softer.
[00:58:02]  I've tested these out in every situation podcasts, workouts, skateboard sessions.
[00:58:07]  I forget I'm wearing jeans.
[00:58:09]  They got a ton of fits too.
[00:58:11]  Sizes from 26 to 50 waist, so you're not forcing your body into some random template.
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[00:58:17]  And at around 80 bucks, they're honestly a better value than most of the stiff, overpriced denim I bought before.
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[00:58:37]  How real is the nuclear threat with Iran?
[00:58:41]  Oh, I think.
[00:58:41]  From Iran?
[00:58:42]  From Iran.
[00:58:43]  Oh, no.
[00:58:43]  Not to nuke Iran, like the excuse that everyone on Fox is giving that they were so close to a nuke.
[00:58:49]  No, there were two, count them, two, not even CIA, intelligence community, national intelligence estimates saying that.
[00:58:59]  The Iranians had no nuclear program.
[00:59:01]  A national intelligence estimate.
[00:59:02]  But weren't they close to, didn't they have like the enrichment level at a certain percentage?
[00:59:07]  No, but they could have gotten there.
[00:59:09]  Okay.
[00:59:09]  Yeah.
[00:59:10]  They could have gotten there.
[00:59:11]  But two things.
[00:59:13]  A national intelligence estimate is the highest level piece of analysis that comes out of the intelligence community.
[00:59:20]  They're usually written by CIA analysts, although they can be written by anybody in the community.
[00:59:29]  And it's a sense of the community paper where literally everybody in the all 18 intelligence organizations in the American intelligence community agree.
[00:59:41]  I wrote one once on Iraq.
[00:59:43]  Wow, 18?
[00:59:44]  We have 18 intelligence services in our country.
[00:59:47]  That's fucking bananas.
[00:59:48]  Yeah, it's nice.
[00:59:49]  Because most countries have one.
[00:59:50]  And they all work together on this?
[00:59:51]  Yeah, you have to.
[00:59:53]  So it's under the auspices of the DNI.
[00:59:57]  When I wrote my NIE, there was no DNI.
[00:59:59]  So it was under the auspices of something called the NIC, the National Intelligence Council, which now sits under the DNI.
[01:00:05]  So I wrote the paper, it took me a couple of weeks.
[01:00:11]  Services, everything from DIA and NSA and State Department Bureau of Intelligence Research to Coast Guard intelligence.
[01:00:22]  Everybody gets one.
[01:00:24]  And then there's a big meeting.
[01:00:26]  You're all around this, all 19 or all 18 of you plus the National Intelligence Officer for the region.
[01:00:35]  You're all sitting around this conference room table.
[01:00:36]  The NIO chairs the meeting and everybody's got the paper in front of them.
[01:00:41]  And then he says, okay, everybody, first sentence.
[01:00:45]  And he reads the first sentence, any objections, any changes.
[01:00:48]  And you go around the table, all 18 of you, and you go line by line by line.
[01:00:55]  Sometimes it takes weeks to coordinate this paper.
[01:00:59]  They did this twice.
[01:01:01]  And both times, the conclusion, the unanimous conclusion of all 18 intelligence services in the U.S. government was that the Iranians don't have a nuclear program.
[01:01:13]  Besides that.
[01:01:15]  What does that mean, a nuclear program?
[01:01:17]  A nuclear weapons program.
[01:01:19]  They're not seeking a nuclear weapon.
[01:01:22]  They're not enriching uranium for a nuclear weapon.
[01:01:25]  They're not seeking one.
[01:01:28]  So that doesn't mean they're not enriching uranium at all.
[01:01:31]  Oh, no.
[01:01:31]  And they were clear that they were enriching uranium, but they were using it for medical research and nuclear power.
[01:01:40]  They were talking to the Russians and the Chinese about building a nuclear reactor.
[01:01:44]  Yeah, they were not enriching it to levels necessary for a nuclear weapon.
[01:01:48]  Got it.
[01:01:49]  And then people were like, well, what about a dirty bomb?
[01:01:52]  What about a dirty bomb?
[01:01:54]  If you have intelligence that they were working on a dirty bomb, I urge you to call the director of national intelligence and inform her because nobody else thinks that's the case.
[01:02:03]  The other thing is, as far back as 2000, I think it was 2003, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa saying that the government was forbidden from building a nuclear bomb because it was un Islamic.
[01:02:20]  So there was no nuclear weapons program.
[01:02:24]  It just didn't exist.
[01:02:26]  This notion that they were, you know, six weeks away, they've been six weeks away from a nuclear bomb, according to the Israelis, since 1985.
[01:02:34]  Right.
[01:02:35]  So this is all just Israeli propaganda.
[01:02:38]  And now, where do we get that?
[01:02:39]  Do we have people in there embedded in there?
[01:02:42]  No.
[01:02:42]  See, that's the thing.
[01:02:45]  We have been notoriously bad about developing human sources inside Iran going back decades.
[01:02:51]  We don't have an embassy there.
[01:02:53]  You know, it's hard.
[01:02:55]  You have to do it through cutouts or third countries.
[01:02:59]  And, you know, I met a guy once from one of the CIA's sister agencies, he was always talking.
[01:03:04]  We were in training together, always talking about my guy, my guy, my guy.
[01:03:08]  I got to call my guy.
[01:03:10]  Who is your guy?
[01:03:11]  And I'm thinking, I'm from the CIA.
[01:03:13]  I haven't heard any of this stuff.
[01:03:15]  His guy's a freaking taxi driver in San Jose, California.
[01:03:19]  And he's got a cousin in Tehran.
[01:03:21]  He's like, Yeah, everything's good over here.
[01:03:24]  Nothing going on.
[01:03:25]  I saw some cabinet member drive by the other day and he's like typing it up as intelligence.
[01:03:30]  That's not intelligence.
[01:03:31]  Your guy, he's not giving you anything.
[01:03:34]  The Israelis, though, the Israelis do have a presence.
[01:03:40]  They're very, very good at recruiting spies to steal secrets.
[01:03:44]  What they've focused on in recent years is recruiting, for targeting purposes, recruiting Afghan refugees.
[01:03:54]  Iran's a poor country.
[01:03:55]  They don't provide for refugees.
[01:03:57]  So if you come across the border from Afghanistan, you don't get food, you don't get housing, you don't get medical, you don't get squat.
[01:04:05]  You're eating out of the trash can.
[01:04:07]  So the Israelis go up to you and say, hey, listen, I'll give you $100 a month.
[01:04:12]  If you just watch that apartment right there.
[01:04:15]  And write down the times that the nuclear scientist leaves his apartment every single day, and then what time he returns $100 a month.
[01:04:22]  Well, you hire 5,000, 10,000 people like that.
[01:04:27]  And then in the meantime, you have your hackers hacking into the Tehran traffic cameras so you can actually watch the generals and the scientists driving down the street.
[01:04:39]  You know exactly where they're going to be, at exactly what time.
[01:04:43]  And that's when you rocket them.
[01:04:47]  It's good tradecraft, is what it is.
[01:04:50]  Totally.
[01:04:51]  But the thing is, that's tactical intelligence.
[01:04:55]  It's not long term analysis.
[01:04:58]  They don't have anybody in the Ayatollah's office to say, hey, listen, the Ayatollah, he just made that fatwa just for public consumption.
[01:05:05]  What's really happening is this there is no such person, there is no such recruited asset.
[01:05:12]  And so the Israelis make it up and then they send it to the CIA.
[01:05:15]  I don't know that, though.
[01:05:16]  Oh, I still have friends in the CIA.
[01:05:17]  They tell me the Israelis send this garbage intelligence all the time.
[01:05:21]  That they know is false because they act like we don't know anything at all that's going on.
[01:05:27]  We actually do know some of the things that are going on.
[01:05:29]  We don't have assets on the ground necessarily, but we'll read this stuff and we'll say, ah, they're making this up.
[01:05:37]  There was another service that did this.
[01:05:40]  I'm not going to say which one, but there was another service that did this with Iraq back in 2002.
[01:05:45]  And I remember going to a meeting one time, a bunch of analysts, I went representing the deputy director.
[01:05:54]  And the intelligence report that this liaison service gave us, it wasn't even formatted properly.
[01:06:01]  Like it wasn't even in the right font.
[01:06:03]  And I'm like, you guys, this is clearly a forgery.
[01:06:06]  And everybody's like, yeah, it's clearly a forgery.
[01:06:10]  And we just threw it away.
[01:06:12]  Well, the Israelis aren't that stupid.
[01:06:14]  They at least say, listen, we've got a source, very sensitive.
[01:06:17]  We can't tell you who it is.
[01:06:18]  Take our word for it.
[01:06:19]  We polygraphed him so we know he's telling the truth.
[01:06:22]  And here's what he says.
[01:06:23]  And it's just all made up.
[01:06:26]  Next thing you know, you're in a war.
[01:06:30]  It's so insane.
[01:06:33]  You know, this is another thing.
[01:06:34]  The Israelis always say that Iran is an existential threat.
[01:06:38]  Yes.
[01:06:39]  To them.
[01:06:40]  Not to us.
[01:06:41]  Right.
[01:06:42]  Even if they had a nuclear weapon, which they don't, they don't have a delivery system for it.
[01:06:47]  You know, they fired two rockets at Diego Garcia the other day.
[01:06:51]  What they did to reach Diego Garcia, because they normally cannot fire a rocket that far, is they stripped it down so there was nothing in it.
[01:06:59]  It had no payload.
[01:07:00]  It was just an engine and a cone.
[01:07:03]  Huh.
[01:07:04]  Just to see how far it could go.
[01:07:06]  And it got to Diego Garcia.
[01:07:09]  Well, did it mess anything up?
[01:07:10]  No, it was intercepted.
[01:07:11]  They were both intercepted and shot down.
[01:07:13]  But that was Diego Garcia is a creepy one.
[01:07:17]  I heard somebody told me that once that that's the Area 51 of the Indian Ocean or something.
[01:07:21]  Who knows?
[01:07:22]  Because nobody's ever been there.
[01:07:24]  Pull up Diego Garcia on a map.
[01:07:25]  It's wild looking.
[01:07:26]  It's like one of those atoll islands where it's like a big circular island and it's all water in there.
[01:07:30]  It's all water.
[01:07:31]  You know, it belonged to the Brits for, you know, 200 years.
[01:07:35]  And then we just sort of.
[01:07:36]  Demanded it and they gave it to us.
[01:07:38]  Fascinating looking.
[01:07:39]  It's like a Bond villain place.
[01:07:42]  Yeah.
[01:07:42]  But if you look at where it is on the world map, it's like crazy.
[01:07:48]  There's an American military base in this place.
[01:07:51]  Yep.
[01:07:52]  It was a great place to hide shit.
[01:07:53]  There was talk about making that Guantanamo.
[01:07:57]  What?
[01:07:58]  And then we decided that it was far easier just to do it in Cuba because we already had the infrastructure.
[01:08:03]  Right.
[01:08:04]  Quicker flight.
[01:08:05]  Yeah.
[01:08:05]  Much.
[01:08:08]  Yeah.
[01:08:08]  I don't know anybody who's ever been there.
[01:08:10]  Look at that.
[01:08:11]  Yeah.
[01:08:12]  Talk about the middle of nowhere.
[01:08:13]  Good lord.
[01:08:14]  If you can.
[01:08:16]  That's where you would want to hide UFOs, not in New Mexico.
[01:08:19]  That's right.
[01:08:21]  If you can, go to the southernmost point of Argentina.
[01:08:23]  Argentina.
[01:08:26]  South America, Steve.
[01:08:28]  Yep.
[01:08:28]  South America.
[01:08:29]  Keep going left.
[01:08:29]  There you go.
[01:08:30]  Okay.
[01:08:30]  So if you can, right at the very bottom, zoom in on that.
[01:08:35]  Crazy as I am, I went there on my honeymoon.
[01:08:38]  And you see the island that one right there?
[01:08:44]  Punch in on it, Steve O.
[01:08:47]  I went to Antarctica by boat.
[01:08:51]  On one of those cruises they do around the.
[01:08:52]  This was just a tramp steamer.
[01:08:55]  Oh, really?
[01:08:55]  Yeah.
[01:08:56]  I'm not into the luxury things.
[01:08:58]  It was frigging freezing down there.
[01:08:59]  No, no.
[01:09:00]  Yeah, but they have a.
[01:09:01]  Yeah, it's not like a luxury cruise, but it's like, yeah, one of those steamboats where a bunch of people can go on there, like a couple hundred people maybe.
[01:09:06]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:09:07]  There's a prison on that island.
[01:09:09]  What?
[01:09:09]  That the Argentine junta built.
[01:09:12]  And they maintained it as a prison until the mid 1980s.
[01:09:15]  You can take a tour.
[01:09:16]  I took a ton of pictures in there.
[01:09:19]  My wife was so freaked out by it, she didn't even get off the boat.
[01:09:22]  But I went because I wanted to check it out.
[01:09:24]  We begged the Argentines to let us have that prison so we could put Al Qaeda prisoners there.
[01:09:30]  Really?
[01:09:30]  And they were like, you guys really don't want to come down here.
[01:09:33]  It's so far, it's cold all the time.
[01:09:37]  There's no way to land.
[01:09:38]  You have to get there by boat.
[01:09:40]  And we were like, yeah, forget it.
[01:09:41]  We'll just use Guantanamo.
[01:09:43]  Oh, because the terrain.
[01:09:44]  There's no airports there.
[01:09:45]  No, there's nothing.
[01:09:46]  There are no human beings there.
[01:09:48]  Whoa.
[01:09:48]  All I saw were penguins, cormorants.
[01:09:51]  Wow.
[01:09:51]  Look at that.
[01:09:52]  It's so desolate, man.
[01:09:53]  It's crazy.
[01:09:54]  I saw mountains.
[01:09:55]  Yep.
[01:09:57]  It's rough.
[01:09:59]  Wow.
[01:10:00]  I've been to some funky places.
[01:10:02]  I never felt as far away from home as I did there.
[01:10:04]  I bet.
[01:10:06]  Icebergs and shit floating around.
[01:10:07]  I saw a whale.
[01:10:09]  I saw a walrus.
[01:10:10]  Wow.
[01:10:11]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[01:10:13]  That's so wild.
[01:10:14]  What do you think happens next with this whole Iran thing?
[01:10:18]  Because it seems like the Strait of Hormuz seems to be like the focal point of all of this.
[01:10:23]  It really is.
[01:10:24]  And, you know, because so much of the strait's not navigable, right?
[01:10:28]  There's a very, it's like 16 miles across the strait.
[01:10:31]  That doesn't mean you have 16 miles to bring your ship through.
[01:10:35]  The navigable part is very, very narrow, and most of it is in Iranian waters.
[01:10:40]  You mean like the channel where you can actually pull, yeah, where the deep water is?
[01:10:43]  Yeah, it's deep enough.
[01:10:44]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:10:45]  So.
[01:10:46]  The Iranians just in the last like day announced that they're going to start charging a toll and that it could raise them as much as $100 billion a year.
[01:10:59]  Wow.
[01:11:00]  Yeah.
[01:11:00]  Russia's getting rich as shit off this too.
[01:11:01]  Yeah, they are.
[01:11:02]  Yes, they are.
[01:11:03]  Because all of a sudden they can't sell their gas fast enough.
[01:11:07]  And then the Iranians allowed an Indian flagged ship to go through a couple of days ago for two reasons.
[01:11:17]  Number one, the ship was carrying oil from the Arab Gulf states, I think it was from the UAE, but carrying it to China.
[01:11:27]  And China's friendly with Iran.
[01:11:30]  And they paid for the oil in yuan, not in dollars.
[01:11:34]  And that's like the nightmare scenario for the American economy.
[01:11:39]  Because all of the oil that passes through there has to be sold in American dollars.
[01:11:45]  Correct.
[01:11:46]  That's how we get the petrodollar.
[01:11:47]  That's it.
[01:11:48]  And that's what keeps America.
[01:11:50]  And all that money gets reinvested into the American economy.
[01:11:54]  And it's like this crazy cycle that props us up and keeps us the number one superpower, right?
[01:12:00]  That's exactly right.
[01:12:01]  I want to make another point, too.
[01:12:02]  I think this is important, and nobody's talking about it.
[01:12:06]  Barack Obama, and you know my feelings about Barack Obama.
[01:12:11]  Yeah.
[01:12:12]  Yes, strong feelings.
[01:12:14]  I have to say that the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal is what it was known as.
[01:12:25]  The JCPOA was a good idea.
[01:12:29]  Give it to people who aren't familiar with it.
[01:12:31]  Break it down in simple terms.

=== Obama and the Iran Deal (15:34) ===

[01:12:32]  And the Israelis hated him for that.
[01:12:34]  They hated him for negotiating this deal with the Iranians, but it was a good deal and it worked.
[01:12:40]  So the idea was that the Iranians said, we don't have a nuclear program.
[01:12:46]  The United States said, we're not sure if we can believe you.
[01:12:51]  We think you might have a nuclear program or you might not, but we want to inspect it.
[01:12:55]  So that's where the two sides entered into the negotiations.
[01:12:59]  The final deal, to make a long story short, was that the Iranians agreed to essentially the same deal that the United Nations had in Iraq during Saddam Hussein.
[01:13:13]  Where you would get spot inspections by UN weapons inspectors.
[01:13:20]  No announcement.
[01:13:20]  They just show up and you've got to let them in.
[01:13:23]  Like a random drug test.
[01:13:25]  Like a random drug test.
[01:13:26]  This is a random nuclear inspection.
[01:13:28]  Yep.
[01:13:30]  The areas that could be used to enrich uranium were closed and sealed with lead seals that the United Nations controlled.
[01:13:44]  And then.
[01:13:45]  Security cameras were installed like 360 so that at the UN or the IAEA or Langley or Jerusalem or wherever, they could watch the cameras 24 hours a day and make sure nobody's messing with the seals.
[01:14:04]  Okay, so it was working.
[01:14:08]  And Donald Trump, in the first couple of weeks of his first term, just tore it up and threw it away and said it made us weak.
[01:14:17]  He's going to negotiate a better deal.
[01:14:19]  And the Iranians are like, we just now negotiated this like a year ago with Obama.
[01:14:24]  He did that and then he moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
[01:14:28]  Yeah, that was.
[01:14:29]  Oh my God.
[01:14:32]  I blame Bill Clinton for that.
[01:14:34]  Really?
[01:14:34]  Yeah, I do.
[01:14:36]  Why has he got to catch a stray for that?
[01:14:37]  Because Congress passed this stupid bill mandating a move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, provided that the president.
[01:14:53]  Signed a document saying that the Israelis were abiding by our demands for peace talks with the Palestinians.
[01:15:01]  So long as there were viable peace talks, then we would move the embassy to Jerusalem.
[01:15:07]  Well, there were no viable peace talks.
[01:15:09]  And so every year, presidents would say, nope, we can't move the embassy.
[01:15:17]  Nope, the Israelis aren't negotiating with the Palestinians.
[01:15:19]  Nope, we're not moving the embassy.
[01:15:21]  Clint should have vetoed that stupid bill when he had the chance.
[01:15:25]  But he kowtowed to the Israelis and to AIPAC and its supporters in Congress.
[01:15:32]  He's like, okay, I'll sign the bill, but there has to be an amendment in the bill that will allow me to delay the move of the embassy because the Israelis aren't serious about negotiating peace.
[01:15:44]  And then Trump's like, screw it, move the embassy.
[01:15:47]  And Sheldon Adelson paid for it out of his pocket.
[01:15:51]  He did.
[01:15:51]  There's a big brass plaque at the embassy now saying, thank you, Sheldon Adelson, for paying out of your pocket to move the embassy.
[01:16:00]  Like, is there anything that the Israelis wanted that we haven't given them?
[01:16:04]  It's so crazy.
[01:16:04]  What do we get out of this?
[01:16:06]  If they're so effective at controlling the United States government, how are they so horrible at controlling the PR?
[01:16:20]  Yeah.
[01:16:20]  And if they are so powerful, and you have these people like Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel and all these other tech.
[01:16:29]  Billionaires who won't say one single negative thing about them.
[01:16:32]  I mean, Elon hasn't said one thing about the FBI.
[01:16:34]  Because then you're branded as a self hating Jew.
[01:16:37]  And nobody wants to be called that.
[01:16:39]  So, how are they letting it?
[01:16:42]  It seems like if you go on the internet, no one is on Israel's side.
[01:16:46]  There's a few people, like the Mark Levins and whoever.
[01:16:48]  And Ben Shapiro.
[01:16:50]  And Ben Shapiro.
[01:16:50]  That's pretty much it.
[01:16:51]  That's pretty much it.
[01:16:52]  And Patrick Bed David.
[01:16:53]  Yeah.
[01:16:53]  And Patrick Bed David.
[01:16:55]  Who's not even Jewish.
[01:16:56]  Oh, God.
[01:16:57]  Yeah.
[01:16:58]  Yeah.
[01:16:58]  And his whole panel of people that he put, I love how he does his podcast and he has all of his co hosts.
[01:17:03]  Sit in these little like kindergarten desks next to him.
[01:17:06]  He has this like giant, like, look.
[01:17:09]  I will say, a friend of mine who knows him warned me before I went on his show that Patrick can come out swinging.
[01:17:19]  And I went on the show and he was absolutely lovely to me, respectful.
[01:17:24]  We had a terrific conversation and we've actually stayed in touch, not all the time, but we've stayed in touch.
[01:17:33]  He was perfectly lovely to me.
[01:17:35]  We just.
[01:17:36]  Disagree with each other on Israel strongly.
[01:17:38]  But I'll add another thing too, if I can interrupt you for one more second.
[01:17:42]  Piers Morgan.
[01:17:44]  I'm on the Piers Morgan show all the time.
[01:17:46]  I'm a fan of all of your debates on Piers Morgan.
[01:17:48]  Thank you.
[01:17:50]  Thank you.
[01:17:51]  Especially with the Alan Dershowitz.
[01:17:55]  Yeah, Alan doesn't like me anymore.
[01:17:57]  What?
[01:17:58]  I know, right?
[01:18:00]  Anyway, I'm cool with that.
[01:18:02]  But Pierce.
[01:18:06]  Pierce likes having me on.
[01:18:07]  I was on again yesterday.
[01:18:08]  He likes having me on because I don't interrupt people.
[01:18:10]  You know, I was raised to believe that was rude to interrupt somebody.
[01:18:14]  So I try not to.
[01:18:16]  And when I do interrupt, I apologize for interrupting.
[01:18:18]  But anyway, it's like SmackDown on that show half the time.
[01:18:22]  Three or four appearances ago, I'm going to say this is probably like six or eight months ago.
[01:18:28]  Pierce said to me, I was on this panel with Scott Horton, who is absolutely friggin' brilliant.
[01:18:33]  Oh, yeah, he's insane.
[01:18:34]  He's amazing.
[01:18:34]  I could just sit and listen to him talk all day long.
[01:18:36]  The guy is so smart and so grounded.
[01:18:40]  He and I were on what was supposed to be the pro Palestinian side.
[01:18:47]  And then.
[01:18:47]  I love how they make it so binary.
[01:18:49]  Yeah.
[01:18:49]  Yeah.
[01:18:49]  And then the other side was some former head of Mossad and some journalist.
[01:18:57]  This was yesterday?
[01:18:58]  No, no.
[01:18:58]  This was six or eight months ago.
[01:19:00]  I saw this one.
[01:19:00]  And then some journalist.
[01:19:01]  I don't remember who it was.
[01:19:03]  But these guys were just killing each other, interrupting each other.
[01:19:08]  I expected that if they were in the same room, we were all remote, but if they had been in the same room, they would have gotten up and we would have seen fisticuffs.
[01:19:16]  One of my favorite words.
[01:19:18]  So.
[01:19:20]  At the end, Pierce says, John, you haven't said much.
[01:19:25]  He said, Do you believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization?
[01:19:29]  And I said, Well, I believe that it was created as an organization of national liberation.
[01:19:33]  But in terms of October 7th, if you're attacking a civilian population for the purpose of instilling terror for a political goal, then yes, of course, Hamas is a terrorist organization.
[01:19:48]  He said, Do you believe October 7th was a terrorist attack?
[01:19:51]  And I said, Yes, again, if.
[01:19:54]  If you're attacking civilians at a music festival and you're just killing people and snatching them and taking them hostage, yes, of course, that's a terrorist attack.
[01:20:04]  And he said, Then what's your objection to the Israeli response?
[01:20:09]  I said, Pierce, you can't have as your policy kill everybody women, children, the sick, the elderly, bulldoze the hospitals, bulldoze the schools, the homes, the businesses.
[01:20:22]  That is the very definition of a genocide.
[01:20:27]  Like, has anybody here bothered to read the genocide law?
[01:20:30]  That's the definition of a genocide.
[01:20:33]  If your goal, and Donald Trump told us what the Israeli goal was, it was to push out all Palestinians and to develop the property.
[01:20:41]  His words, it would be better than Monte Carlo.
[01:20:45]  That is the very definition of ethnic cleansing.
[01:20:50]  You can't do that.
[01:20:52]  And then Pierce said, I think this is the first time on the show.
[01:20:57]  That we've all agreed on something.
[01:21:00]  And then later he told me that it was that response that made him change his mind on Israel.
[01:21:07]  Really?
[01:21:08]  I was like, I get it.
[01:21:11]  I get the Israeli frustration.
[01:21:13]  I really do.
[01:21:14]  People were slaughtered that day.
[01:21:15]  It really was Israel's 9 11.
[01:21:17]  I get it.
[01:21:18]  But the response can't be a thousand times more than what the Israelis got.
[01:21:27]  As good as Israel is at Controlling us and control, not us, but the American government and getting them to do whatever they want, specifically this administration.
[01:21:37]  How is it, how are they so terrible at PR?
[01:21:41]  And how do they, if they are so good, if the Mossad is such one of the most capable spy agencies in the world, how do they not foresee the next presidential election and the next, I mean, I don't, I think it's probable, and Glenn Greenwald laid this out for me, how he believes that the next presidential election in the US, one of the biggest.
[01:22:02]  Points will be not taking Israeli money.
[01:22:06]  We're already starting to see it.
[01:22:08]  We're seeing candidates for offices at lower levels announcing proactively, I'm not taking any APAC money.
[01:22:17]  I think I've got two answers for you.
[01:22:19]  On the one hand, I think that the Israelis, and not just the Israelis, but American supporters of Israel, lobbyists, APAC people, I think they genuinely cannot understand why the rest of us.
[01:22:37]  Don't see it the way they do.
[01:22:39]  Like, I know these guys, right?
[01:22:42]  I know them from my time on Capitol Hill, from my time at the CIA.
[01:22:47]  They really believe that if they don't do everything that they're doing now, they're going to end up either dead or scattered all around the world.
[01:22:58]  They believe it in their hearts, number one.
[01:23:01]  Number two, I think they actually have a shorter term view of the world.
[01:23:06]  As Americans, we have an incredibly short term view of the world.
[01:23:09]  That's why we keep losing these wars.
[01:23:11]  I think the Israeli worldview is even shorter.
[01:23:15]  They don't care.
[01:23:16]  Who's elected president next?
[01:23:18]  They'll deal with that when it comes.
[01:23:20]  Right now, they've got a war to fight.
[01:23:22]  They have an Iranian government to overthrow.
[01:23:25]  And as soon as they overthrow it, then they'll deal with the next election.
[01:23:30]  But that's very short sighted.
[01:23:31]  That's shocking.
[01:23:33]  You know, you and I talked about something last time I was here that I think is important.
[01:23:37]  We talked about AIPAC and the incredible political acumen that AIPAC exhibits.
[01:23:45]  They have this down to a science.
[01:23:47]  If you stray even one iota.
[01:23:51]  From the pro Israel political line, they will primary you, right?
[01:23:57]  They'll run somebody against you.
[01:23:58]  If you're 99% pro Israel, they're going to run somebody against you that's 100% pro Israel.
[01:24:06]  Well, you know, that strategy is not working out very well.
[01:24:09]  And I'll give you an example.
[01:24:10]  Massey?
[01:24:10]  Massey's won.
[01:24:12]  There was a congressional race in New Jersey recently where an incumbent, there's been some redistricting, an incumbent congressman who's pro Israel.
[01:24:23]  Was running in this race.
[01:24:25]  There were a bunch of other Democrats running against him.
[01:24:29]  And there was one woman, her name escapes me now, who is not pro Israel.
[01:24:38]  AIPAC supported a third Democrat who was like a little more pro Israel than the incumbent.
[01:24:45]  And instead, the pro Palestinian one won because the pro Israel vote was split.
[01:24:51]  Oh, wow.
[01:24:51]  And there's a possibility of that happening in a district in Pittsburgh.
[01:24:55]  There's a possibility of that happening in a district in St. Louis.
[01:25:00]  And I think that maybe they got a little too big for their britches.
[01:25:08]  Do you see this new guy who's running for governor of Florida, this fish backed guy, young kid?
[01:25:14]  I think Tucker did have him on his head.
[01:25:16]  Oh, yeah.
[01:25:16]  Tucker had him on.
[01:25:17]  I'm smiling because on my own podcast one morning, somebody wrote in the chat John, what do you think about this guy, fish backed in Florida?
[01:25:26]  And I said, oh, yeah.
[01:25:27]  I said, I know that guy.
[01:25:29]  I said, Tucker had him on.
[01:25:30]  And I think that his position on Israel is very well considered.
[01:25:36]  And it's sort of emblematic of how this new generation of political candidates is rethinking the U.S. Israel relationship.
[01:25:48]  Within minutes, I see on X, John Kiriakou endorses Fishback for governor.
[01:25:54]  Oh, no.
[01:25:55]  I was like, oh, no, I didn't.
[01:25:57]  There's a video I sent you of him, Steve.
[01:25:59]  Yeah.
[01:26:00]  I mean, first of all, he's polling like 3%.
[01:26:03]  Right.
[01:26:03]  He's not going to win.
[01:26:04]  He's not going to win.
[01:26:05]  Who's the other guy who's going to win?
[01:26:07]  This was last.
[01:26:09]  When was this posted?
[01:26:10]  Yesterday?
[01:26:12]  Energy to crowd the Fishbacks rally in Orlando, Florida is insane.
[01:26:15]  Fishback just said he will suspend the enforcement of unconstitutional anti Semitic hate speech laws.
[01:26:19]  But he's right about that.
[01:26:20]  Those laws are unconstitutional.
[01:26:22]  I was in Miami the other day.
[01:26:23]  Uh huh.
[01:26:24]  And in the Miami, what's it called?
[01:26:27]  The Miami Herald.
[01:26:29]  There was an article about this woman in Miami Beach who posted on Facebook Free Palestine.
[01:26:36]  Oh, yes, I saw it.
[01:26:38]  And then the cops, did you post this on Facebook?
[01:26:43]  It's like, yeah, what is this?
[01:26:45]  The Gestapo?
[01:26:46]  Yeah.
[01:26:46]  We have freedom of speech in this country.
[01:26:50]  Yeah, that was crazy.
[01:26:50]  I saw that story.
[01:26:51]  It's crazy.
[01:26:52]  You know, but he also wants to, the two other things he wants to do is he wants to put a moratorium on any immigration into Florida.
[01:26:59]  Yeah, that's nuts.
[01:26:59]  And he wants to put a 50% sin tax on OnlyFans people.
[01:27:04]  Yeah, it's nuts.
[01:27:06]  And he wants to, like, you know, execute abortion doctors.
[01:27:10]  Yeah, it's fucking crazy.
[01:27:11]  Yeah, dude.
[01:27:12]  I think there's something, I don't know, maybe it's just the way I grew up in Florida.
[01:27:18]  Like, You know, I grew up on the beach.
[01:27:24]  I never fucking paid attention to who the fucking president of the US even was, probably until my mom forced me to watch some Clinton speech or something when he was getting impeached for the whole fucking Monica thing.
[01:27:39]  I was so young, but I didn't really care.
[01:27:42]  I was too worried about surfing and skateboarding.
[01:27:43]  And when I see people as young as this guy, who are like.
[01:27:47]  He's 31 years old.
[01:27:49]  Yeah, it's insane.
[01:27:50]  Yeah.
[01:27:51]  People like him, people like Nick Fuentes, who are just like political pundits in their 20s and 30s.
[01:27:59]  Yeah.
[01:28:00]  And running for fucking office.
[01:28:02]  It's like, what?
[01:28:03]  Yeah.
[01:28:04]  I just, I guess I just came from a different fucking world than these people.

=== Young Pundits Running for Office (02:06) ===

[01:28:07]  The country's changing.
[01:28:10]  Yeah.
[01:28:10]  Yeah, it's bizarre.
[01:28:12]  But you know, look at this line here.
[01:28:13]  If you want to call Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal, be my guest.
[01:28:15]  The crowd went wild in applause.
[01:28:18]  This is a sea change.
[01:28:19]  Yes.
[01:28:20]  We've never seen anything like this before.
[01:28:23]  Yeah.
[01:28:23]  And I think you're right.
[01:28:24]  I think there's going to be an impact in the 20, well, first 2028, but in the 2030 presidential race.
[01:28:31]  I think there's going to be an impact.
[01:28:32]  And this is going to affect the Democrats just as much as the Republicans.
[01:28:36]  When Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, not the most recent trip, just before hostilities, but the one before, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, was filmed literally running.
[01:28:52]  Like running like OJ Simpson through the airport and those old ads, running so that he could make the picture with Netanyahu and all the Democratic senators.
[01:29:01]  He didn't want to be left out of the picture.
[01:29:03]  Yeah.
[01:29:05]  Yeah.
[01:29:06]  It's fucking insane.
[01:29:07]  There's a guy running for Senate, for U.S. Senate from Michigan.
[01:29:12]  His name is Abdul Asayed.
[01:29:14]  His actual name is Abdurrahman Asayed, but he just goes by Abdul because people can't remember.
[01:29:19]  It's like an 11 syllable name.
[01:29:22]  It actually is an 11 syllable name.
[01:29:24]  He was joking about it the other night.
[01:29:25]  But I went to a fundraiser.
[01:29:28]  At a friend's house for him the other day.
[01:29:30]  And what was interesting to me was that the whole night he talked about healthcare, healthcare, healthcare, healthcare, the whole night.
[01:29:38]  Not about this stuff.
[01:29:39]  It was all about healthcare.
[01:29:41]  He was like, Yeah, I'm Palestinian.
[01:29:42]  Yeah, I support Palestinian human rights, but I'm a medical doctor.
[01:29:46]  He said, I went to the University of Michigan.
[01:29:49]  I went to medical school at Columbia.
[01:29:50]  I became a Rhodes Scholar and I studied epidemiology.
[01:29:53]  We've got a serious problem in this country with healthcare and health insurance.
[01:29:58]  We're ranked like 18th in the world in quality of medical care.
[01:30:03]  What's up with that?
[01:30:04]  And I thought, you know what?
[01:30:05]  This guy's talking sense.
[01:30:07]  I like this guy.
[01:30:08]  We've all seen the headlines lately about these massive data breaches, but the real danger isn't just a leaked password.

=== Vance on Healthcare Crisis (15:11) ===

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[01:31:22]  Take your data back today.
[01:31:24]  Yeah, the Massey stuff is crazy too.
[01:31:26]  Yeah, the Massey stuff is crazy.
[01:31:28]  Mary Madelson is like funding his opponent or something, trying to get him out.
[01:31:31]  And he's getting a lot of popular support now, though.
[01:31:34]  She dumped $100 million into the Trump super PAC in this last.
[01:31:39]  She has like unlimited funds.
[01:31:41]  Her husband owned, what was it, Caesar's Palace or whatever, one of the giant casinos in Vegas.
[01:31:48]  And then most of the casinos in Macau.
[01:31:51]  And the Chinese are degenerate gamblers.
[01:31:53]  I mean, it's even more profitable in Macau than it is in Vegas.
[01:31:57]  So she's swimming in money and just dumping millions and millions of dollars into Massey's opponent's campaign.
[01:32:07]  You know, but how does it like, does that not have a Stryze hand effect when everyone's aware of it?
[01:32:12]  It has to.
[01:32:14]  It has to.
[01:32:15]  Yes.
[01:32:17]  I was going to say one of my best friends is a prominent constitutional attorney.
[01:32:23]  Deputy Attorney General during the Reagan administration.
[01:32:26]  His dad was a third baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers back in the day in the 50s.
[01:32:30]  And so he's a great baseball fan.
[01:32:33]  So he has season tickets.
[01:32:34]  We go to a bunch of games every year.
[01:32:36]  And sometimes Massey comes with us.
[01:32:40]  He is one of the most honorable people I've met in Washington.
[01:32:45]  I disagree with a lot of what he stands for, but he's as honest as the day is long and an honorable guy.
[01:32:54]  If he wasn't in this feud with President Trump, I think he would probably win, you know, 80%.
[01:32:59]  But the money, I mean, this is going to be the most expensive house race in the history of the Republic.
[01:33:06]  Really?
[01:33:07]  It might already be there.
[01:33:09]  Yeah.
[01:33:09]  God.
[01:33:10]  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
[01:33:11]  So when does this happen?
[01:33:12]  This is the midterms?
[01:33:13]  Yeah, this is November.
[01:33:14]  This is coming in November.
[01:33:15]  Yeah.
[01:33:16]  Yeah.
[01:33:17]  And if I lived in that district, I'd be ready to strangle everybody associated with politics because, like, every single commercial.
[01:33:27]  Is politics.
[01:33:28]  It's all about this race.
[01:33:29]  Every single commercial, they're buying up every minute of commercial time.
[01:33:34]  But who even watches commercials?
[01:33:35]  I know, right?
[01:33:36]  Just boomers?
[01:33:37]  I guess.
[01:33:39]  But they also are the ones that vote in the highest numbers.
[01:33:42]  They are, aren't they?
[01:33:46]  Yeah.
[01:33:48]  It's so crazy, man.
[01:33:49]  I think Massey could probably be a good potential for the next president, maybe.
[01:33:53]  I don't know how that works.
[01:33:54]  But he's got so much popular support, I feel like.
[01:33:56]  He really does.
[01:33:58]  I think that.
[01:33:59]  See, there's a problem there.
[01:34:03]  He's a libertarian true believer, like Ron Paul was.
[01:34:06]  Not Rand Paul.
[01:34:07]  Rand Paul's a fake libertarian.
[01:34:10]  He is.
[01:34:11]  But Ron Paul was a true believer.
[01:34:14]  He energized his people, and they're like, they're going to win it.
[01:34:19]  And then he gets 10% in the Iowa caucus, and then he just nobody hears about him again.
[01:34:25]  And I fear that if Massey were to run as a Republican, the exact same thing would happen to him.
[01:34:31]  His supporters would be loud and broad, and he would be out there campaigning every day in Iowa, and then he's going to get 10%.
[01:34:39]  And then it's over.
[01:34:40]  But if you ran as an independent, that's different.
[01:34:43]  You know, I remember one time when I was in college, one of my professors speculating on an independent candidacy.
[01:34:50]  In 1980, there was a liberal Republican congressman named John Anderson who ran as an independent for president.
[01:34:57]  The final vote was 51 for Reagan, 41 for Carter, and seven for John Anderson.
[01:35:04]  So people were like, hey, you know, maybe it's time for a third party.
[01:35:07]  1980, we're talking 46 years ago.
[01:35:09]  Maybe it's time for a third party.
[01:35:11]  You know, John Anderson, he made a go of it.
[01:35:12]  He got 7%.
[01:35:14]  And then it just sort of went away.
[01:35:15]  My professor was speculating, you know, a third party that might work is somebody from the hard right and the hard left.
[01:35:25]  And he said, what would happen if Jesse Helms were to run for president with Jesse Jackson as his vice president?
[01:35:36]  And we all laughed.
[01:35:38]  And he said, no, think about it.
[01:35:39]  Think about it because in other countries, these marriages of convenience happen in politics.
[01:35:45]  You'll have the fascists and the communists running together as a ticket.
[01:35:49]  He said it could happen here.
[01:35:51]  Well, I wonder if Tucker were to run.
[01:35:55]  A lot of people consider Tucker to be conservative.
[01:35:58]  He is on some issues, he's not conservative on others.
[01:36:02]  I would call him a libertarian.
[01:36:03]  But what happens if Tucker runs with a progressive?
[01:36:09]  What happens if Massey runs?
[01:36:10]  As a conservative libertarian and runs with a liberal libertarian or a leftist libertarian.
[01:36:17]  I don't think we really know what would happen because it's just never been done before.
[01:36:21]  Right.
[01:36:23]  Something that I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing.
[01:36:26]  Yeah, totally.
[01:36:28]  And, you know, again, my biggest concern is like you see how promising these people can be prior to a presidential election or running for any office.
[01:36:38]  And then once they get in, it's like the same thing that happened with Dan Bongino and Kash Patel and unfortunately now Tulsi Gabbard.
[01:36:46]  Who I think, like, right before the June of last year bunker busters that we did, the Midnight Hammer or whatever, she came out and said that, like, they're not a threat or something.
[01:36:56]  She came out and went in front of Congress and said, They're not a threat.
[01:37:00]  And now she's like, I defer to the president.
[01:37:02]  If he thinks it is, it is.
[01:37:04]  I'm surprised she didn't resign.
[01:37:07]  It's probably not good for her that now Kent resigned first.
[01:37:11]  Yeah.
[01:37:11]  I agree with that.
[01:37:12]  Somebody asked me the other day, why do you think she didn't resign?
[01:37:15]  And I said, Honestly, I think she needs the money.
[01:37:18]  She doesn't come from wealth.
[01:37:20]  You know, I mean, she was living on her paycheck when she was in Congress.
[01:37:27]  But it's like, on one hand, you stay in and you lose all the trust.
[01:37:33]  Yeah.
[01:37:34]  And you lose, I guess, any potential for like a future.
[01:37:39]  Maybe you don't lose the potential for a future like job in politics.
[01:37:42]  Sure.
[01:37:43]  But no one trusts you anymore.
[01:37:46]  Or B, you save your reputation, what's what there is left of it, even though like you're still resigning.
[01:37:51]  After Kent, like it's not as noble, but at least you're still like being honest, right?
[01:37:58]  Like you at least can save face a little bit.
[01:38:00]  Yeah.
[01:38:02]  In 1980, the Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance.
[01:38:09]  Vance was a prominent attorney.
[01:38:11]  His son was most recently a district attorney in New York City.
[01:38:19]  Cy Vance was one of these, like, Old school intellectuals, you know, a giant from the 60s and 70s.
[01:38:26]  He had been deputy secretary of state.
[01:38:28]  He became secretary of state.
[01:38:30]  And then he just up and resigned one day out of the clear blue sky.
[01:38:37]  People are like, what the heck happened?
[01:38:39]  Cy Vance resigned as Secretary of State.
[01:38:41]  Why?
[01:38:42]  Well, he resigned because Jimmy Carter decided to launch a rescue operation to try to rescue the American hostages that were being held by the Iranian government.
[01:38:53]  And Vance said, I think this is a terrible idea.
[01:38:56]  I think the risk of failure is very high.
[01:38:59]  And in good conscience, I can't support it.
[01:39:02]  And Carter said, I'm overruling you and we're going to go for it.
[01:39:06]  And so, just out of Sheer conscience, he resigned two weeks before the operation.
[01:39:15]  He didn't say why he resigned, he just resigned and then went quietly off to academia.
[01:39:22]  But time was when people did that.
[01:39:25]  You resign on principle, you resign because it's the right thing to do.
[01:39:31]  And I think for the most part, I mean, we saw that, of course, with Joe Kent, but.
[01:39:40]  For the most part, we don't really see much of that anymore.
[01:39:42]  Or you to a way more extreme degree, not just resigning, but blowing the whistle.
[01:39:47]  I went to the mat.
[01:39:52]  Again, I said this the other day, but the way you and Bustamante explained it to me when you guys were both here together, how there's that six to seven year limit in politics and in the agency and any other government agency where it's like you're either going to be a forever bootlicker or you're going to leave because of your morals.
[01:40:14]  It did.
[01:40:14]  You can provide, you have a certain skill set that's valuable in the marketplace.
[01:40:20]  Which is funny because the culture at the agency is that there's nothing else you can do.
[01:40:28]  Your skills are so specific to espionage that there's nothing else you can do.
[01:40:35]  Unless you're an analyst, you can go be a journalist and make a third of what you're making at the agency.
[01:40:40]  But yeah, but that idea is not true that there's nothing else you can do.
[01:40:46]  There's a lot that you can do.
[01:40:48]  Right.
[01:40:48]  They just don't want you to leave and they want you to keep your mouth shut.
[01:40:51]  Right, right.
[01:40:54]  Pause right there.
[01:40:55]  I'm going to take a pee real quick and we'll be right back.
[01:40:57]  Yeah, this is going to be a big split within the Republican Party between the MAGA people and the neocons.
[01:41:04]  The neocons are ascendant again, you know?
[01:41:07]  And Lindsey Graham's got to be dancing.
[01:41:12]  Yeah.
[01:41:13]  This is going to be a problem for the Republicans.
[01:41:17]  Do you see the photo of him at Disney World yesterday?
[01:41:19]  Yeah.
[01:41:19]  Oh, my God.
[01:41:22]  Oh my God.
[01:41:22]  And then he posted on his Twitter that he was out shooting clay or something.
[01:41:27]  And there was a, there was a, he posted on his Twitter a photo of him shooting clay, you know, like looking like a tough guy.
[01:41:35]  And somebody used AI in the comments and like made it so he was shooting like a Disney wand with bubbles.
[01:41:42]  It was fucking hilarious.
[01:41:45]  I almost wish I lived in South Carolina just so I could run against him.
[01:41:48]  I think I sent you something about, oh, there it is.
[01:41:51]  Lindsey Graham spent some time breaking clays in Edgefield County today.
[01:41:55]  Doesn't get much better than that.
[01:41:57]  Now scroll down.
[01:42:03]  Oh my God.
[01:42:05]  Trying to get Mickey's attention at Disney World.
[01:42:08]  Yeah.
[01:42:09]  Oh God.
[01:42:12]  The fact that he is like the big one of the biggest cheerleaders for this war is just disgusting.
[01:42:18]  And all those videos I saw, all the videos of all the troops I saw yesterday on.
[01:42:23]  I think it was yesterday.
[01:42:25]  The troops that are like deploying over there, and they were like, their families were around them.
[01:42:29]  They're like crying.
[01:42:30]  I can't tell you the phone calls I've gotten from guys who have been ordered to deploy and they just don't want to go.
[01:42:38]  Really?
[01:42:39]  I've referred a couple of them to a group called Quaker House, which is at Fort Bragg, just outside the gates of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
[01:42:47]  It's a group of Quakers, but they provide assistance to conscientious objectors.
[01:42:53]  Like, you know, there are people who want to serve their country and they just do not believe that they should risk their lives for Israel.
[01:43:06]  And why aren't the Israelis sending ground troops?
[01:43:08]  Right.
[01:43:08]  They said they're going to send them to Lebanon, right?
[01:43:10]  Well, how many wars are you going to fight against the Lebanese before you finally come to the conclusion that you can't beat them?
[01:43:17]  That's another example where you can't just kill everybody.
[01:43:20]  There are 900,000 internally displaced Lebanese right now.
[01:43:26]  900,000 people.
[01:43:29]  Like, how much more human misery are you going to inflict?
[01:43:33]  And I wonder what the families are saying of the American soldiers that have died already.
[01:43:36]  Exactly.
[01:43:37]  Was it worth it?
[01:43:38]  Hegseth is saying that they told me to finish the job.
[01:43:42]  Bull.
[01:43:42]  I don't believe that for one second.
[01:43:44]  Yeah, I don't think I believe that either.
[01:43:45]  No.
[01:43:46]  I'm really curious to hear what they have to say.
[01:43:48]  I had Judge Napolitano on my show the other day, and I said to him, Judge, you co hosted a show on Fox with Pete Hegseth for 10 years.
[01:43:58]  What's your analysis, your assessment of his time as Secretary of Defense?
[01:44:02]  And he said, Pete Hegseth is an incompetent boob and a serial killer.
[01:44:09]  He says, He's a nice guy.
[01:44:12]  But he's an incompetent boob and a serial killer.
[01:44:15]  Yeah.
[01:44:16]  It doesn't seem like there's any public support, or like I haven't even heard any coherent argument for this.
[01:44:24]  No.
[01:44:25]  Which is crazy.
[01:44:25]  And like the worst part is that the people that are doing it came and keep the story straight.
[01:44:30]  No.
[01:44:31]  Everyone is coming out with a different reason why they want to do it.
[01:44:36]  Yeah.
[01:44:36]  Like that we did it because Israel did it first.
[01:44:38]  And if we didn't jump in, they were going to attack us.
[01:44:41]  They were going to attack us and we would have suffered more.
[01:44:43]  What?
[01:44:44]  What a crock.
[01:44:45]  And then they kind of walk that back afterwards and say, oh no, they were about to have a nuke.
[01:44:49]  Do you want to get nuked?
[01:44:51]  It's like at least with the Iraq War, they kept their story straight.
[01:44:54]  You know, and that's another thing.
[01:44:55]  Before the Iraq War, George W. Bush crisscrossed the country for months to drum up public support, right?
[01:45:04]  We didn't do anything for this one.
[01:45:06]  We just invaded, attacked.
[01:45:09]  Right.
[01:45:10]  There was no attempt to drum up public support.
[01:45:13]  There were no speeches, no events, no explanation on the.
[01:45:17]  On the Sunday morning talk shows.
[01:45:20]  Nothing.
[01:45:21]  We're just expected to fall in line.

=== War Without Congressional Approval (04:37) ===

[01:45:24]  And so, what does it mean that, and I don't fully understand, I understand the high level that in order to declare war, Congress has to do it, right?
[01:45:37]  Correct.
[01:45:39]  And is this the first time we've done it without Congress?
[01:45:42]  No, we haven't done it with Congress since 1941.
[01:45:45]  Oh, okay.
[01:45:46]  We never declared war on the North Koreans.
[01:45:49]  Or the Chinese.
[01:45:50]  We never declared war on the Vietnamese or on the Afghans or the Iraqis or anybody else.
[01:45:56]  Not since the day after Pearl Harbor, December 8th, 1941.
[01:46:01]  Because Congress is a collection of 535 cowards.
[01:46:05]  That's why.
[01:46:06]  Cowards.
[01:46:08]  And then they came up with, oh, half measures where the president can send troops for 30 days, the War Powers Act, but then he has to come back to Congress and ask for funding for them.
[01:46:23]  Well, you've already sent the troops.
[01:46:27]  What district are you running in where you're going to go back and say, I'm going to leave our boys stranded over there with no funding?
[01:46:35]  Vote for me for reelection.
[01:46:37]  Come on.
[01:46:37]  The fix is in from the beginning.
[01:46:40]  So, yeah, they're all cowards.
[01:46:43]  That's so crazy.
[01:46:44]  Because they're literally going against the Constitution.
[01:46:47]  Literally going against the Constitution.
[01:46:49]  And this is something that Thomas Massey talks about all the time that the Constitution is crystal clear.
[01:46:57]  Clear that if we're going to go to war, there has to be a congressional declaration of war.
[01:47:03]  You know, another thing too, never in American history, and I mean this quite literally, never in American history has Congress so readily ceded its authority to the executive.
[01:47:14]  The Constitution is also crystal clear about three co equal branches of government, right?
[01:47:22]  The executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
[01:47:25]  But it's not co equal anymore.
[01:47:28]  The leadership in Congress, both in the House and the Senate, simply does whatever the president tells them to do.
[01:47:35]  Right.
[01:47:36]  They all seem to be cheerleaders for the president.
[01:47:38]  Exactly.
[01:47:39]  You know, when Jimmy Carter was president, Tip O'Neill, who was a liberal Democrat from Boston, John Kennedy's old congressional district, was the Speaker of the House.
[01:47:50]  And Tip O'Neill is one of these old school, you know, cigar smoking, backroom Democratic deal makers.
[01:47:58]  Everybody loved Tip O'Neill.
[01:47:59]  But Tip O'Neill's job.
[01:48:02]  As Tip O'Neill saw it, was to keep Congress relevant, right?
[01:48:09]  The president, sure, the president can come and ask for them to create the Department of Education, for example.
[01:48:17]  The answer is not necessarily yes.
[01:48:19]  The answer is we'll consider it.
[01:48:22]  And if we think it's good for the country, we'll create a Department of Education.
[01:48:28]  But now, for example, recently, this is just a recent kind of silly example.
[01:48:35]  The president announced that the name of the Department of Defense is changing to the Department of War.
[01:48:41]  Newsflash presidents don't get to choose the names of the departments.
[01:48:45]  Congress does.
[01:48:47]  So your party controls both houses of Congress.
[01:48:52]  Why don't they just pass a law changing the name from the Department of Defense to the Department of War?
[01:48:57]  They haven't.
[01:48:58]  Yeah, he changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, too.
[01:49:01]  Yeah, that he can actually do.
[01:49:03]  Oh, okay.
[01:49:03]  Yeah, that he can do.
[01:49:04]  Like the next day, it was on Google Maps.
[01:49:06]  Yeah, yeah, that he can do.
[01:49:08]  But in terms of a Of a federal department?
[01:49:11]  No, he can't do that.
[01:49:12]  Yeah.
[01:49:13]  But Congress is like, oh, whatever he wants, okay.
[01:49:17]  We work for him.
[01:49:18]  We're here to serve the president.
[01:49:19]  Actually, no, you're not.
[01:49:21]  You're here to serve the American people and to represent the American people on that lower level, that constituent level, which you're not doing.
[01:49:31]  One of the things that scares me the most about all this stuff is right now we seem to be in this like little Goldilocks zone with free speech online.
[01:49:41]  Which feels crazy.
[01:49:43]  And it doesn't feel like it's going to last forever.
[01:49:45]  And I'm really afraid when the next United States regime comes along, I don't know what it's going to look like, but I always think about the worst case scenario.
[01:49:56]  We get another sort of Biden sort of media lockdown with the next president.

=== Serving the American People (14:14) ===

[01:50:02]  And they decide to take all the people who have been talking about this and exposing it and talking negatively about Israel, as you will.
[01:50:11]  And now these people are suddenly getting flagged as like, Right, hardcore right wing anti Israel people.
[01:50:19]  Yeah.
[01:50:20]  And now they are like, they have some sort of a limiter on them.
[01:50:22]  Like the pendulum always swings.
[01:50:24]  Yeah, it does.
[01:50:25]  And I'm terrified.
[01:50:27]  I have to agree with you.
[01:50:29]  I posted an article on Facebook yesterday about this new law that was just passed by the Knesset yesterday calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in Israel.
[01:50:41]  So Israel did away with its death penalty in 1956, with the exception of Adolf Eichmann.
[01:50:47]  Eichmann was snatched in Argentina and rendered back to Israel.
[01:50:51]  He stood trial for war crimes that he committed during the Holocaust, he was convicted rightly, and executed.
[01:50:59]  But otherwise, there has been no death penalty in Israel since 1956 till yesterday.
[01:51:06]  But it's only for Palestinians.
[01:51:09]  Is this the video of Ben Gavir pouring champagne?
[01:51:13]  Yeah.
[01:51:15]  Yeah.
[01:51:16]  So only Palestinians will be executed, Jews won't.
[01:51:21]  And we're okay with that as a government.
[01:51:27]  And this was passed in the Knesset yesterday?
[01:51:29]  Mm hmm.
[01:51:32]  Ben Gavir, outside the Knesset chamber, celebrates the passing of the death penalty law for Palestinian detainees, describing it as historic.
[01:51:40]  That's Ben Gavir in the red tie?
[01:51:41]  Yep.
[01:51:42]  And saying, soon we will count them one by one.
[01:51:45]  Play it.
[01:51:58]  For people who don't know about Ben Gavir, why don't you give a little background on that?
[01:52:01]  Yeah, Ben Gavir is a convicted felon.
[01:52:03]  He has been convicted on multiple counts of anti Arab and anti Muslim hate crimes.
[01:52:10]  In Israel, the Israeli courts convicted him of hate crimes.
[01:52:18]  But now he's what, the National Security Minister, I believe is his title?
[01:52:22]  And he's specifically in charge of security in Gaza and the West Bank.
[01:52:34]  One of the craziest things to me about this is that Lawrence Wright recently wrote a book about this.
[01:52:44]  He went to Israel and he was doing research for a novel that he was writing.
[01:52:51]  A novel?
[01:52:52]  Yeah, it was a fictional book.
[01:52:54]  Interesting.
[01:52:55]  Yeah, but he was.
[01:52:56]  He's one of the leading thinkers on these issues.
[01:52:59]  Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
[01:53:01]  I mean, some of the work that he's done and the books that he's written is just incredible.
[01:53:05]  I think he won a Pulitzer, didn't he, for going clear, the Scientology book?
[01:53:09]  Yeah.
[01:53:10]  Or not, was it a Pulitzer or what?
[01:53:11]  Or the National Book Award?
[01:53:13]  What was the award Lawrence Wright won?
[01:53:16]  I think you're right.
[01:53:17]  It's Pulitzer.
[01:53:18]  So, one of the things he said to me when he was on the podcast was that it's so bizarre that these groups of people at war with each other for so long are quite literally, they share the same exact genetic.
[01:53:38]  Yeah, that's true.
[01:53:40]  They're genetically identical.
[01:53:41]  Identical, and that's true.
[01:53:42]  Same exact ancestors going back to like the Canaanites, right?
[01:53:46]  That's true.
[01:53:46]  How crazy is that?
[01:53:48]  It is crazy.
[01:53:50]  Yeah, it's really.
[01:53:50]  Have you seen this video that's been making the rounds of this evangelical Christian American woman, Asian woman?
[01:53:58]  She goes to Jerusalem and she's filming herself and she's like, Israel, Israel.
[01:54:06]  And these young Jewish students spit on her, they spit right in her face.
[01:54:10]  No, I had not seen it.
[01:54:11]  And she's like, It's okay.
[01:54:12]  It's holy spit.
[01:54:13]  It's holy spit.
[01:54:15]  It's Jewish holy spit.
[01:54:17]  And then she goes to the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, and she's trying to interview people.
[01:54:26]  And a guy hits her hard, knocks her down.
[01:54:29]  She starts crying.
[01:54:29]  He's calling her a whore.
[01:54:31]  And she's crying.
[01:54:32]  She's like, But I love Israel.
[01:54:33]  Why are you doing this?
[01:54:34]  I love Israel.
[01:54:36]  It's like, This must be your first time in Israel.
[01:54:39]  Why were they doing it?
[01:54:39]  Because this shit happens all the time.
[01:54:41]  There she is.
[01:54:43]  So, why was this happening to her?
[01:54:45]  Because this is how they treat us.
[01:54:50]  It's holy spit.
[01:54:51]  It's okay.
[01:54:54]  Kids?
[01:54:55]  Yeah.
[01:54:55]  Spitting on her.
[01:54:57]  They spit on Orthodox and Catholic priests all the time.
[01:55:02]  See?
[01:55:02]  Look.
[01:55:03]  Took a swing at her.
[01:55:04]  He punched her right in the face.
[01:55:05]  Oh my God.
[01:55:07]  Yeah.
[01:55:08]  But because she's American?
[01:55:10]  Yeah.
[01:55:10]  Because she's not Jewish.
[01:55:11]  Because she's not Jewish?
[01:55:13]  How do they know she's not Jewish?
[01:55:14]  Because she looks Chinese?
[01:55:16]  I guess.
[01:55:17]  Look at her.
[01:55:18]  Now she's crying.
[01:55:18]  Like, how could this happen?
[01:55:19]  Love Israel.
[01:55:22]  But she was also filming.
[01:55:24]  So we really don't know what the context is of this, right?
[01:55:30]  It seems like she's trying to, she knows what's going to happen.
[01:55:35]  You know, like maybe she's out there doing some sort of stunt, knowing.
[01:55:38]  Is she known for trying to provoke people?
[01:55:43]  I don't have any idea who she is.
[01:55:47]  It's always important to understand the context of these people and what they're doing.
[01:55:50]  I know Catholic priests complain all the time.
[01:55:53]  Of being spat on.
[01:55:55]  Really?
[01:55:56]  Yeah, all the time.
[01:55:58]  One of the weirdest things about this whole conflict that's going on right now is the religious undertone of the whole thing.
[01:56:06]  Like, did you see this report of all of these people in different branches of the military coming out and complaining about their leaders telling them that Trump was anointed by Christ?
[01:56:17]  Yeah, anointed by Christ.
[01:56:18]  He's going to ride in on like a white horse or something like this.
[01:56:21]  And Jesus Christ told him to start this war.
[01:56:23]  Yeah, religion's a dangerous fucking force.
[01:56:26]  Seriously.
[01:56:30]  It's not just scary that it's happening, it's scary that senior military officials believe this.
[01:56:36]  Yeah, but do they?
[01:56:38]  If they're passing it down the chain.
[01:56:39]  One of the reports was saying that the military leader who was telling his troops this was laughing as he was saying it.
[01:56:49]  Why say it?
[01:56:51]  If the Secretary of Defense orders me to say something like that, I'd say, with all due respect, sir, the answer is no.
[01:56:57]  Not doing it.
[01:56:57]  You can fire me.
[01:56:59]  Not doing it.
[01:57:00]  Yeah.
[01:57:02]  Yeah, there's a.
[01:57:06]  That's one of the scariest things to me, especially when you see people going in front of Congress saying that, like, Israel has a biblical right to this territory.
[01:57:17]  Yeah.
[01:57:18]  Like, based on the Bible, they have this.
[01:57:22]  Exactly.
[01:57:24]  It's like the whole Israel has a right to exist thing.
[01:57:26]  It's like special privileges based on scripture, on some ancient fucking scripture.
[01:57:34]  The question is never asked.
[01:57:36]  Palestine has the right to exist.
[01:57:38]  Right.
[01:57:38]  Does America have the right to exist?
[01:57:40]  Do we have the right to exist?
[01:57:41]  Exactly.
[01:57:42]  Who gives us the right?
[01:57:43]  Like, where do we get the right?
[01:57:44]  Right.
[01:57:45]  Exactly.
[01:57:46]  Yeah.
[01:57:47]  You know, Tucker's interview with Mike Huckabee was so egregious.
[01:57:54]  Huckabee, first of all, Huckabee should have been fired for welcoming that fucking traitor, Jonathan Pollard, into the embassy and fetching him like a hero.
[01:58:05]  This is a fucking guy who spied on the United States, not even just for Israel.
[01:58:10]  That's bad enough.
[01:58:12]  But the Israelis traded the top secret documents that he stole from the Pentagon, traded them to the Soviet KGB in exchange for a plane load of Jewish refugees.
[01:58:27]  So he was essentially spying for the KGB, did every day of a 30 year sentence.
[01:58:34]  Sheldon Adelson sent a plane, a private jet, to fly him to Israel.
[01:58:40]  He got off the plane, kissed the ground.
[01:58:43]  Was met there, plain side, by Benjamin Netanyahu.
[01:58:47]  And then he told an Israeli journalist that American Jews should take up arms against the American government.
[01:58:56]  The American government.
[01:58:57]  He said that.
[01:58:58]  Yeah.
[01:58:59]  Now he's running for Knesset.
[01:59:01]  Yeah.
[01:59:02]  And he was welcomed into the embassy by Mike fucking Huckabee, who then just a couple of weeks later gave this interview to Tucker and said, Yeah, they can take the whole Middle East out.
[01:59:13]  And Trump pardoned his handler.
[01:59:15]  Yeah.
[01:59:15]  Is that right?
[01:59:15]  He pardoned.
[01:59:17]  The handler, yes.
[01:59:19]  The Israeli Mossad handler.
[01:59:20]  Israeli Mossad handler.
[01:59:21]  Who hadn't even been charged with a crime, just proactively pardoned him.
[01:59:25]  Oh, so this person, this handler, was never imprisoned?
[01:59:28]  Never.
[01:59:28]  No, never.
[01:59:31]  Oh, my God.
[01:59:32]  Never.
[01:59:34]  Yeah, there you go.
[01:59:35]  What was this?
[01:59:38]  Oh, this is a different story.
[01:59:39]  Oh, no, that's different.
[01:59:40]  Pardon industry offers rich offenders a pass.
[01:59:43]  Yeah, that was in the Times.
[01:59:45]  One inmate paid a lobbyist and lawyers with ties to the president's team and walked free.
[01:59:50]  Others followed the blueprint.
[01:59:52]  Oh, is this the guy that opened the nursing home or had like the.
[01:59:55]  Yeah, this is the nursing home guy.
[01:59:56]  Yes.
[01:59:57]  Yeah.
[01:59:57]  So this guy had a nursing home that was like.
[02:00:00]  They called him the fraud king.
[02:00:02]  Abusing seniors.
[02:00:03]  People were dying and getting sued.
[02:00:05]  They were suing him because their fucking family members were dying because he wasn't taking care of them.
[02:00:10]  And Trump just pardoned him.
[02:00:14]  Yep.
[02:00:17]  Crazy.
[02:00:18]  How much of.
[02:00:22]  All of the shit that is happening right now has to do with Epstein, in your take.
[02:00:27]  You know, I find it hard to believe we launch a war just to distract from Epstein.
[02:00:32]  But if I'm on the fence, the Epstein thing, and if I have a lot of Epstein blackmail on me and I'm on the fence whether I want to do it or not, that could be the thing that pushes you over.
[02:00:43]  You know, to me, it would have been far easier and would have involved far fewer people just, you know, in the dead of night to destroy the documents that you don't want to get out.
[02:00:55]  Right?
[02:00:56]  I mean, God knows the CIA has done that a million times over the years.
[02:00:59]  Yeah.
[02:01:00]  But I'm the least conspiratorial person I know.
[02:01:06]  I can see why people believe that this could be the case.
[02:01:10]  But I think that there were easier ways to protect your friends, which is what he said that releasing the last tranche of three to three and a half million documents would embarrass his friends.
[02:01:23]  But isn't it easier just to not release the documents that would embarrass your friends?
[02:01:28]  Right.
[02:01:29]  That's what we've done with JFK all these years.
[02:01:31]  Right.
[02:01:32]  Just don't release them.
[02:01:33]  Congress passes a law.
[02:01:34]  We're going to ignore that law.
[02:01:35]  What are you going to do about it?
[02:01:36]  What are you going to arrest me?
[02:01:39]  Nothing ever happens.
[02:01:41]  Yeah.
[02:01:43]  Well, with the JFK thing, didn't Trump say he was going to release the JFK files and then the CIA just never did it?
[02:01:49]  Trump said he was going to release them and didn't.
[02:01:52]  And then Congress passed them.
[02:01:54]  But was it his fault that they never got released?
[02:01:56]  It's my understanding that there are still 10,000 to 15,000 pages that haven't been released.
[02:02:01]  Okay.
[02:02:01]  And the reason they haven't been released is that they point to one very specific foreign country.
[02:02:07]  No.
[02:02:07]  That we don't want to offend.
[02:02:09]  For real?
[02:02:11]  That's what my agency friends tell me.
[02:02:15]  Talking about Cuba.
[02:02:17]  No, I'm not.
[02:02:21]  You know, funny, if you go back in the original JFK documents, like within 20 minutes of JFK being killed, the KGB sends us a message saying, We swear to God it wasn't us.
[02:02:34]  And then, like a minute later, the Cubans sent a message saying, We swear to God it wasn't us.
[02:02:39]  I had a guy in here.
[02:02:40]  Who was it?
[02:02:40]  There was a guy in here who was literally sitting in a meeting.
[02:02:43]  With Castro when the news came out.
[02:02:46]  And he said he was sitting.
[02:02:47]  God, I wish I could remember who this was.
[02:02:49]  We had somebody on the pod who was, he said he was a journalist.
[02:02:52]  He was sitting in the fucking room with Castro as soon as that news dropped.
[02:02:56]  And Castro, someone handed Castro the fucking memo or whatever.
[02:03:00]  And Castro said, they're going to blame me for this.
[02:03:05]  When I was in Pakistan, I was the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9 11, just as background.
[02:03:12]  And I had a group of.
[02:03:15]  A group of seven guys working for me.
[02:03:18]  They were all contractors and they had all been senior intelligence service, senior officials at the CIA.
[02:03:25]  All of them had been either the chief or deputy chief of Near Eastern operations at the time, at least.
[02:03:31]  One of them had been the ADDO, the associate deputy director for operations.
[02:03:35]  So these are serious, high level, high powered guys.
[02:03:39]  But because they were retired and they came back as contractors, they couldn't lead the branch.
[02:03:43]  So I led the branch and they worked for me.
[02:03:47]  Which sounds odd.
[02:03:48]  I learned so much from these guys.
[02:03:50]  I learned more in that tour in Pakistan than I did over the rest of my entire career.
[02:03:54]  But anyway, that's not the issue.
[02:03:56]  The issue is we were talking about an operation one day, and one of the guys said, You should ask Gately about that.
[02:04:04]  And I said, Gately?
[02:04:05]  Who's Gately?
[02:04:06]  He's like, What?
[02:04:07]  Gene.
[02:04:09]  And I said, Old man Gene?
[02:04:11]  Is Gene Gately?
[02:04:13]  And he goes, Yeah, you didn't know Gene's last name?

=== CIA Museum in Havana (10:34) ===

[02:04:17]  I said, No.
[02:04:17]  Gene was the oldest of the guys, he was about 80.
[02:04:21]  And I said, Gene Gately, the commander of the Bay of Pigs operation, is working for me.
[02:04:27]  And he's like, You should ask him at dinner.
[02:04:29]  We all lived in the same guest house, so we all had dinner together.
[02:04:33]  So that night, I go, Gene, I had no idea you were Gene Gately, the Gene Gately.
[02:04:40]  And he goes, Yeah, who'd you think I was?
[02:04:42]  I was like, I don't know.
[02:04:43]  It's just an old man named Gene.
[02:04:45]  And I said, Gene, the Bay of Pigs?
[02:04:49]  What's up with that?
[02:04:52]  And he said something that has been seared into my mind ever since.
[02:04:56]  He says, fucking Kennedy, we could have won that thing.
[02:04:59]  Yeah.
[02:05:00]  Wow.
[02:05:01]  Because he didn't send air support.
[02:05:04]  I went to, me and Steven went to a museum in South Florida, Miami.
[02:05:09]  One of the only interviews we've ever done where we traveled to Felix Rodriguez.
[02:05:13]  You did not.
[02:05:16]  You interviewed Felix Rodriguez?
[02:05:17]  Yeah.
[02:05:19]  What was that like?
[02:05:21]  So we, the craziest part of, honestly, one of the things that freaked me out the most was the day before we went down there.
[02:05:28]  I had Danny Sheehan on the podcast talking about the whole Kennedy assassination plot and about all the Bay of Pigs Cubans, the anti Castro Cubans who were involved in that.
[02:05:39]  And I go, huh, I'm going to Miami tomorrow to interview a guy named Felix Rodriguez.
[02:05:44]  What do you know about Felix Rodriguez?
[02:05:45]  And he goes, I deposed Felix Rodriguez.
[02:05:48]  Oh my God.
[02:05:49]  He goes, he was on the fucking team that killed the president.
[02:05:51]  This is what Danny Sheehan is telling me.
[02:05:53]  I mean, this is what Danny Sheehan is telling me.
[02:05:54]  You know, legendary Harvard lawyer who defended all these people and was part of the Watergate thing.
[02:06:00]  Yeah.
[02:06:00]  He's a giant.
[02:06:01]  Oh, yeah.
[02:06:02]  So we go down there.
[02:06:05]  We get to the museum, and it's like this old museum of all about, you know, all about Cuban history and the Bay of Pigs.
[02:06:12]  And we walk into one office while we're waiting for Felix.
[02:06:18]  And one of his buddies, his war buddies, was there.
[02:06:22]  And he was showing me his book.
[02:06:24]  And it was the picture of Kennedy's face with a fucking bullseye on it.
[02:06:29]  And he had like pictures of Kennedy on the wall with like fucking bullseyes on his head and shit.
[02:06:34]  Like, Like fucking slashes through his face and stuff.
[02:06:37]  They all hated Kennedy.
[02:06:39]  Yeah, they did.
[02:06:40]  They hated Kennedy.
[02:06:41]  Every one of them.
[02:06:42]  There's, I'm sorry to say, there's a Greek American, George Giannidis, who was a, he was the chief of Miami Station at the time.
[02:06:51]  And there are a lot of fingers that point right at George, too, as having been involved.
[02:06:56]  One of the crazy things that I took away from Felix was that, like, he, when he got into the The mill, I mean, the first thing he did was Vietnam.
[02:07:08]  I think he was in the Vietnam War, yeah.
[02:07:10]  Didn't he also kill Che Guevara?
[02:07:12]  Yeah, yeah, he told that story.
[02:07:14]  That's crazy.
[02:07:15]  He kept his finger as a souvenir.
[02:07:17]  He had denied that.
[02:07:18]  I asked him, I thought I asked him, like, I heard you kept his Rolex.
[02:07:20]  He's like, No, no, no, no, I never kept his.
[02:07:22]  I heard that too.
[02:07:23]  And uh, you know, he was in the Vietnam War like mowing down civilians and mowing down people from helicopters, like the same that Billy Waugh was doing, like him and Billy Waugh, like, when you're that young.
[02:07:36]  And you're just fucking slaughtering people.
[02:07:39]  Yeah.
[02:07:39]  Mass murder.
[02:07:40]  What does that do to your psyche?
[02:07:43]  You know?
[02:07:44]  And going to do that fucking assassination on Che Guevara.
[02:07:48]  Like, yeah.
[02:07:50]  Like, I don't know what it.
[02:07:54]  Like, there's certain, there's two types of people.
[02:07:56]  There's people like Billy Waugh and Felix Rodriguez who, like, either they have this predisposition to be able to kill without thinking twice about it and not have a conscience about it.
[02:08:09]  And there's like, The other group of people, which were like, they went to go do the Iraq war and they didn't have that in them.
[02:08:16]  It's just like they had a couple options.
[02:08:17]  I could go to college.
[02:08:18]  I could go get a job or I could go, you know, fight this war.
[02:08:21]  This seems like a cool option.
[02:08:23]  And then they go out there and then they end up being traumatized because they weren't built for that.
[02:08:27]  That's right.
[02:08:27]  And they come back with like insane PTSD and trauma and things like that.
[02:08:33]  And with, I forgot where I was going with this.
[02:08:38]  We're talking about the Bay of Pigs and Felix Rodriguez and all that stuff.
[02:08:42]  And the museum.
[02:08:43]  And the museum.
[02:08:44]  I went to the, on the flip side of that.
[02:08:46]  Yeah.
[02:08:46]  I went to Havana two years ago and I went to the CIA museum in Havana, which has all the shit that they confiscated from the likes of Felix Rodriguez.
[02:08:57]  No way.
[02:08:57]  At the Bay of Pigs.
[02:08:58]  Uh huh.
[02:08:59]  Yeah.
[02:09:00]  That's crazy.
[02:09:01]  It's nice too.
[02:09:01]  It's a nice, it's in the best part of Havana.
[02:09:04]  It's across the street from the Tunisian embassy and it's in a mansion and they've converted it into a museum.
[02:09:11]  Wow.
[02:09:12]  Has their CIA IDs, their weapons, all kinds of stuff.
[02:09:16]  Yeah.
[02:09:18]  So, like, you know, I feel like Felix and Billy Waugh were kind of like very similar people, you know?
[02:09:27]  And I feel like the war, like, just their experiences really did that to them, you know?
[02:09:31]  Like, I've heard the stories that Andy Jacobson tells about Billy Waugh, like in his late 70s, going to the CIA, trying to get them to send him back overseas.
[02:09:41]  They did.
[02:09:42]  I know.
[02:09:43]  I went with him.
[02:09:44]  That's how I met Billy.
[02:09:46]  He and I did an operation together in the Middle East, we were there for months.
[02:09:49]  months.
[02:09:51]  You know, he would tell these stories too.
[02:09:53]  I mean, the guy's a legendary figure.
[02:09:54]  He would tell these stories.
[02:09:57]  He had a personalized license plate on his car.
[02:09:59]  He lived in Niceville, Florida.
[02:10:02]  And he had this license plate on his car that said 17 hits.
[02:10:06]  And then it had a purple heart next to it.
[02:10:07]  It was a purple heart vanity plate.
[02:10:11]  And I said to him, Billy, there's no way you have 17 purple hearts.
[02:10:16]  And he said, Oh, yes, I do.
[02:10:18]  I said, That has to be some kind of record in American history.
[02:10:23]  His mouth was filthy.
[02:10:24]  He says, No, there's some sorry ass son of a bitch in North Carolina that has 18.
[02:10:32]  Yeah, and then crazy, man.
[02:10:35]  I ran into him.
[02:10:39]  We came back from the Middle East on September the 9th, 2001.
[02:10:44]  And just on my second day back, 9 11 happened.
[02:10:49]  And so, you know, people are busy, you're doing stuff, you lose touch.
[02:10:54]  And then I see him in the hall at the end of October.
[02:10:59]  And I go, Billy, I said, where have you been?
[02:11:02]  And he goes like this.
[02:11:03]  He looks around.
[02:11:03]  He goes, I've been in Afghanistan.
[02:11:07]  I said, What are you doing in Afghanistan?
[02:11:09]  And he goes, I've been killing people.
[02:11:12]  What do you think I've been doing?
[02:11:15]  And I was like, Oh my God, that's why they haven't sent me.
[02:11:19]  I kept volunteering over and over and over again.
[02:11:23]  I'm like, There are 16 people in the CIA that are fluent in Arabic.
[02:11:27]  There are two of us in the counterterrorism center that are fluent in Arabic.
[02:11:31]  And you won't send me?
[02:11:32]  Why won't you send me?
[02:11:34]  It's because they didn't need a translator.
[02:11:36]  They weren't translating anything.
[02:11:38]  They were just killing everybody.
[02:11:41]  Wow.
[02:11:42]  Billy, he used to tell these stories.
[02:11:44]  You know, he was in Korea, he was in Vietnam, he was in Grenada, he did all this stuff, right?
[02:11:51]  One of the first stories in Annie Jacobson's book about Billy Waugh, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, which I can't fucking forget, was how I think it was, I don't want to fucking get this wrong.
[02:12:03]  I'll just say it was one of her sources.
[02:12:05]  It may have been Billy.
[02:12:06]  I don't remember if it was Billy or not.
[02:12:08]  Explained to her how his first kill was using his fucking serrated dagger to cut the throat of a woman in Vietnam.
[02:12:19]  Yeah, he told me that same story.
[02:12:21]  Oh, that was Billy?
[02:12:22]  Yeah.
[02:12:22]  Okay.
[02:12:23]  He told me another story and I cracked on him.
[02:12:26]  We were driving.
[02:12:28]  We were in the car at one point for hours.
[02:12:30]  God, he used to play this.
[02:12:34]  Who was this piano player in the late 60s, early 70s?
[02:12:39]  It was like.
[02:12:42]  Like Liberace kind of music.
[02:12:43]  It would drive me crazy.
[02:12:45]  Anyway, so hours.
[02:12:48]  So just to get him to shut the piano off, I would turn it down.
[02:12:51]  Hey, Billy, let me ask you about Vietnam.
[02:12:53]  Right.
[02:12:54]  And then once he starts talking, there's no stopping him.
[02:12:58]  One of the princes came up to me and he says, You're friendly with Billy.
[02:13:02]  And I said, Yeah, I'm friendly with Billy.
[02:13:04]  He says, Please, please tell him no more F word and please never, never GD.
[02:13:13]  And I was like, I'm sorry.
[02:13:14]  He's got a filthy mouth.
[02:13:17]  Nothing's going to stop him now.
[02:13:18]  He's almost 80 years old.
[02:13:19]  Anyway, he used to tell these stories over and over and over, and they would always get a little bit more exciting with each telling.
[02:13:26]  And then finally, he was telling me about his Silver Star.
[02:13:29]  He got shot down behind enemy lines in Vietnam, and the pilot was killed.
[02:13:34]  Right.
[02:13:35]  Right.
[02:13:35]  So he just starts the trek south.
[02:13:39]  He's trying to get to the front line so he can slip across at night.
[02:13:42]  And I remember the story his leg was like rattled with bullets, it was shredded.
[02:13:47]  And he's walking.
[02:13:48]  He walked like 25 miles.
[02:13:50]  But then, like the third or fourth time he told me the story, he comes up upon this cow or ox or whatever it was in a rice paddy.
[02:14:03]  And he had a knife and he cut the cow's leg so he could cut an artery.
[02:14:09]  And he's drinking the blood to get nourishment.
[02:14:12]  And I was like, I go, that was a scene from Apocalypse Now.
[02:14:16]  You didn't do that.
[02:14:18]  And he starts laughing, goes, Well, I did all kinds of shit that was like that.
[02:14:21]  Ha ha ha ha.
[02:14:26]  Billy.
[02:14:27]  Oh my God.
[02:14:29]  Never had kids.
[02:14:31]  No, never had kids.
[02:14:32]  Yeah.
[02:14:33]  Yeah.
[02:14:34]  The government was his life.
[02:14:36]  The military was his life.
[02:14:37]  After that first, I read in that first deployment, Andy's book, he said after that first deployment, when he got his leg shot up and he came out, that's what gave him his first Purple Heart and he had to have surgery on it.
[02:14:47]  And he was like, they said, You're disabled now.
[02:14:49]  Congratulations, you're disabled.
[02:14:50]  He said, Screw that.

=== Billy's Government Obsession (15:02) ===

[02:14:51]  Yeah.
[02:14:52]  He freaking like hitchhiked across the country again and got like, tried to like lie to them and tell them, I'm good.
[02:14:57]  I can sprint.
[02:14:57]  I'm full speed.
[02:14:58]  Send me back out there.
[02:14:59]  Yeah.
[02:14:59]  He meant it.
[02:15:00]  Yeah, he wanted it.
[02:15:03]  Yeah.
[02:15:04]  I asked him one time if he was going to write a book, and he said, No, he said, I'm not much for writing, but he said, My niece, my niece is going to write my biography.
[02:15:13]  And she did.
[02:15:14]  It came out, I guess, just before he died.
[02:15:17]  It's out there on Amazon.
[02:15:18]  I've seen it, I've not bought it.
[02:15:20]  Interesting.
[02:15:20]  Annie Jacobson is an absolutely fantastic writer.
[02:15:24]  The Surprise Kill Vanish book was amazing.
[02:15:26]  Yeah, she's really great.
[02:15:28]  She's working on a new one right now.
[02:15:31]  Supposedly about, I don't know if I can talk about it, but it's going to be similar to her latest one about nuclear war, I heard.
[02:15:37]  Great.
[02:15:39]  So, how much of this shit in these Epstein files have changed your view on 9 11, if at all?
[02:15:51]  On 9 11, no.
[02:15:53]  My view is generally mainstream.
[02:15:59]  I believe that the Israelis had advanced notice and that they made a Strategic policy decision to not tell us because they knew what the response would be.
[02:16:12]  They knew we would just go out and just start killing everybody, which we did.
[02:16:15]  We killed 2 million Muslims in the next 20 years after 9 11.
[02:16:20]  And that was good for Israel because it led to the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
[02:16:26]  And remember, Saddam Hussein was an existential threat to Israel.
[02:16:31]  You know, they would come and beg us, please attack Iraq, attack Iraq.
[02:16:35]  Even with these emails, like about the Shadow Commission and all the zines.
[02:16:38]  That bothered me very, very much.
[02:16:40]  And like the missing tranche of emails right around 9 11.
[02:16:42]  Yeah, it's missing.
[02:16:44]  Yes, all of that bothered me very much.
[02:16:46]  I mentioned the Shadow Commission on a podcast, I don't know, a few weeks ago, three, four, five weeks ago, whatever it was.
[02:16:54]  And somebody wrote to me afterwards and said, The Shadow Commission is bullshit.
[02:16:59]  It was private.
[02:17:00]  Nothing ever came of it.
[02:17:02]  It never turned into anything.
[02:17:04]  Well, how the fuck do you know?
[02:17:05]  Who are you anyway reaching out to me?
[02:17:08]  It's some name I don't know.
[02:17:09]  I don't know how the guy got my email address.
[02:17:12]  The email's from Ed Epstein.
[02:17:14]  Glenn was talking about him.
[02:17:15]  Yeah, Ed Epstein.
[02:17:16]  You know about him?
[02:17:17]  He's not related to Jeffrey Epstein.
[02:17:18]  He was like at Harvard or something like that.
[02:17:21]  Yeah, I think so.
[02:17:21]  Yeah.
[02:17:22]  And he's not talking.
[02:17:24]  No.
[02:17:26]  No.
[02:17:27]  Another thing that bothers me very much is the depth with which the Rothschilds had a relationship with Epstein.
[02:17:34]  Yeah.
[02:17:35]  Do they do no due diligence?
[02:17:37]  I actually get it that Les Wexner.
[02:17:41]  I personally believe that Les Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein had some sort of sexual thing.
[02:17:46]  Yeah.
[02:17:49]  That's just my belief.
[02:17:50]  I don't have any proof.
[02:17:52]  But I get that maybe Les Wexner had a crush on him and sort of, you know, seeded his career and gave him $100 million and got him started and whatever.
[02:18:04]  But the Rothschilds are the Rothschilds.
[02:18:06]  They've been filthy rich since the 18th century.
[02:18:09]  Right.
[02:18:09]  They do no due diligence to see that this guy, his credentials are that he was a seventh grade math substitute teacher and that he never went to college.
[02:18:20]  Well, there's the email that he sent to Ellie de Rothschild, where he sent her something from Harvard that Harvard professors were teaching the students that Hitler was taken care of in a homeless shelter that was owned by the Epsteens and the Rothschilds.
[02:18:37]  And then she comes back and she's like, Oh, is that a conspiracy theory?
[02:18:40]  And he's like, No, this is 100% true.
[02:18:41]  The Epsteens and the Rothschilds.
[02:18:45]  So it's like, maybe he came from some big noble family.
[02:18:52]  I've spoken to his brother.
[02:18:53]  His brother's just like, you know, Joe normal guy.
[02:18:56]  Yeah, I don't know.
[02:18:57]  His brother seems.
[02:18:59]  His brother, something seems off about his brother.
[02:19:02]  I think the brother's been traumatized.
[02:19:04]  Probably.
[02:19:05]  His brother's the one that's like saying, I saw his body, right?
[02:19:08]  The brother.
[02:19:08]  He's definitely dead.
[02:19:09]  Accompanied the body to the crematorium.
[02:19:11]  So would it be fake?
[02:19:13]  Would there be a possibility?
[02:19:14]  If the brother did see a body, could his brother be fooled by a body?
[02:19:18]  I asked him that.
[02:19:20]  And he said, It was my brother.
[02:19:22]  I identified the body.
[02:19:23]  Okay.
[02:19:24]  Yeah.
[02:19:24]  Okay, I'll give him that.
[02:19:26]  But if you are his brother and you know your brother, if you know Jeffrey is still alive, wouldn't you want to just tell the public that he's really dead to protect him?
[02:19:36]  Sure, you would.
[02:19:37]  But also, if you're doing this in cahoots with your brother, don't you think your filthy rich billionaire brother would have at least given you a couple of dollars before he decided to vacate the scene?
[02:19:46]  Yeah, how do we know he did it?
[02:19:48]  I mean, the feds have confiscated everything.
[02:19:52]  Everything's tied up.
[02:19:53]  Oh, you think there would be proof that he gave him some money or something?
[02:19:56]  Yeah, I don't know.
[02:20:00]  It just does seem weird, you know, that the photographer was out there and ready to go.
[02:20:03]  Well, he's adamant that this was an assassination and that it was, you know, the CIA and cahoots with the Bureau of Prisons and cahoots with this one and that one.
[02:20:13]  It's this big conspiracy, but that he's dead.
[02:20:16]  Yeah.
[02:20:16]  And it's also crazy that Wexner and Bill Clinton, in both of their recent videotaped depositions, are giving up the Rothschilds when they're not even asking them about the Rothschilds.
[02:20:29]  Right.
[02:20:29]  What's up with that?
[02:20:30]  That's kind of wild.
[02:20:31]  Yeah, I interviewed David Boyce a couple of weeks ago.
[02:20:36]  He's the legendary criminal defense attorney.
[02:20:39]  He's represented, we represent Hillary Clinton right now.
[02:20:42]  And he said something that was very interesting.
[02:20:44]  He said that he's got this huge staff at Perkins Cooey, I guess is the name of the firm.
[02:20:51]  He's got this enormous staff.
[02:20:52]  They went through every page of those 3 million documents.
[02:20:56]  And he said there was no evidence of any crime having been committed by Bill Clinton or by Donald Trump.
[02:21:04]  In the release files.
[02:21:05]  Right.
[02:21:06]  So then why not release the rest of them?
[02:21:10]  If there's no evidence of any crime, whatever happened in transparency, let's just release them.
[02:21:17]  You know, have we learned nothing from Watergate?
[02:21:21]  It's always the cover up that's worse than the crime.
[02:21:25]  Yes.
[02:21:26]  Always.
[02:21:27]  Yeah.
[02:21:27]  And some of the people that have been just completely exposed for stone cold lying to the public about their ties to Jeffrey Epstein with no repercussion.
[02:21:35]  Oh, yeah.
[02:21:36]  Nothing.
[02:21:37]  Look at Catherine, what's her name?
[02:21:40]  Remler?
[02:21:41]  Catherine Remler.
[02:21:43]  Oh, my God.
[02:21:44]  Oh, man.
[02:21:44]  I didn't know shit about her until this.
[02:21:47]  Neither did I.
[02:21:47]  And I heard you guys talking about the kill list.
[02:21:49]  Yeah.
[02:21:51]  Yeah.
[02:21:52]  Why would this woman, this random woman, the White House counsel that nobody's ever heard of, why would John Brennan give her the CIA's highest honor, which is normally reserved only for officers killed in the line of duty?
[02:22:08]  Why would she seek repeatedly to connect John Brennan with Jeffrey Epstein?
[02:22:14]  She apparently failed.
[02:22:16]  There's no evidence that they ever met, but she tried repeatedly to get them together.
[02:22:22]  And then lie about her relationship with him to Goldman Sachs, which then made her general counsel.
[02:22:31]  General counsel.
[02:22:32]  Can you imagine what she must have been making as the general counsel for Goldman Sachs?
[02:22:37]  It had to be eight figures.
[02:22:40]  What is the story of this kill list that she was a part of?
[02:22:43]  So, this was a story broken by, I think it was the New Yorker back in 2009, 2010.
[02:22:51]  It might have been Atlantic Monthly.
[02:22:53]  I can't remember.
[02:22:53]  But anyway, John Brennan, when he became the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism in Obama's first term, remember, he was Obama named him CIA director and the liberals went crazy and they said, oh, no, you don't.
[02:23:05]  He was one of the founders of the torture program.
[02:23:08]  And so Obama made him the deputy national security advisor, which doesn't require Senate confirmation.
[02:23:14]  After he got fired when he asked for a raise and then he went around and found a new job and then ended up fucking deputy director.
[02:23:20]  Exactly.
[02:23:20]  Insane.
[02:23:22]  He became director.
[02:23:23]  Director.
[02:23:24]  Yeah.
[02:23:24]  Yeah.
[02:23:24]  So.
[02:23:28]  He convened this group that they called the Tuesday morning kill list meeting.
[02:23:34]  It was mostly lawyers, the White House counsel, deputy White House counsel, attorneys from the OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, the CIA General Counsel's Office, and then CIA Counterterrorism Center operators.
[02:23:56]  And they would come up with a list every week of people to kill.
[02:24:00]  Right, so all the lawyers would agree, yes, we're gonna kill him.
[02:24:04]  And Brennan had been who specifically is killing people, the CIA.
[02:24:08]  The CIA, so Brennan was seconded by the president to sign on the president's behalf on the kill list each Tuesday morning.
[02:24:15]  They fan out the teams around the world, they kill the people on the list, and then they all meet up again the next Tuesday and come up with a list of the next group of people to kill.
[02:24:26]  It's sick.
[02:24:28]  Is this still happening?
[02:24:30]  I don't think so, but keep in mind.
[02:24:33]  None of these people had ever been accused of a crime.
[02:24:37]  None of these people.
[02:24:38]  All foreign?
[02:24:39]  All foreign, we think.
[02:24:41]  They won't say.
[02:24:43]  In fact, at the very end of the Obama administration, Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, was questioning the attorney general at the time, Eric Holder.
[02:24:54]  And he asked him, Are you saying, you're talking about these kill lists, are you saying that the president has the right to kill anybody he wants?
[02:25:02]  And Eric Holder said, If that person presents a clear and present danger, right?
[02:25:08]  That's the terminology that they use a clear and present danger to the United States, to American citizens, or American installations.
[02:25:17]  Then, yes, the president can kill that person or order that person to be killed.
[02:25:21]  And then Rand Paul says, Does that include American citizens?
[02:25:26]  Well, the answer was yes, because we had already killed Anwar al-Aqi, the spokesman for Al-Qaeda, and his 16-year-old son and 16-year-old nephew.
[02:25:36]  None of whom, none of them had ever been charged with a crime.
[02:25:40]  And then Rand Paul says, What about an American citizen on U.S. soil?
[02:25:48]  And then Holder's like, Well, we can go off the record or we can, you know, behind closed doors in closed session.
[02:25:55]  I'll answer your question, but not in front of the media.
[02:25:58]  What the fuck is that?
[02:26:01]  Either we're a nation of laws or we're not.
[02:26:05]  Pick one.
[02:26:07]  Another thing that's really.
[02:26:12]  Disheartening about all of this is that it's coming out after all of these files about all of these people are coming out only after the Statue of Limitations is up.
[02:26:26]  You know, that's, I think that's the thing that makes me the angriest about this whole Epstein situation is that no matter how terrible the revelations become, no one will ever face justice.
[02:26:40]  No one.
[02:26:42]  And is the statute of limitations, do they only cover specific crimes?
[02:26:48]  Yeah, there's no statute of limitations on murder.
[02:26:52]  I believe that there's no statute of limitations on terrorism or on the use of a weapon of mass destruction.
[02:26:59]  And then somebody told me the other day that I was wrong about conspiracy, that there is no statute of limitations on conspiracy.
[02:27:07]  I haven't researched it, but I think they're wrong.
[02:27:10]  I think there is a statute of limitations.
[02:27:12]  For most federal crimes, it's five years.
[02:27:16]  Some it's a year, two years, you know, making a false statement or whatever, failing to fill out the FARA form online.
[02:27:22]  Right.
[02:27:23]  And what a coincidence that we're just over five years since Epstein died.
[02:27:29]  Isn't that interesting?
[02:27:29]  And now it's all coming out.
[02:27:33]  So theoretically, now it's safe.
[02:27:36]  Which is yet another reason to release the files.
[02:27:40]  All right.
[02:27:40]  Your friends are going to be protected.
[02:27:41]  They're not going to go to prison.
[02:27:44]  And if your friends are.
[02:27:45]  Files society needs to be protected from them, so I'd like to know who the files are.
[02:27:51]  Thank you very much.
[02:27:53]  Key aspects of the conspiracy statute of limitations general federal limit the standard federal statute of limitations for conspiracy is five years.
[02:28:01]  Five years, so I was right, he was wrong.
[02:28:06]  Interesting, and um, you know, that whole Bannon interview with him was crazy too.
[02:28:13]  I think only a couple hours of it got released, I think there was like Over 10 hours he filmed with him, allegedly, is what I heard.
[02:28:21]  But we only got like that one or two hours where, like, some people say that you know, Bannon was trying to do some sort of a PR campaign to revive his public perception of him when he did that.
[02:28:37]  But I don't know if you watch that, like, Bannon was really coming at him.
[02:28:42]  Wow, I wonder why he would do something like that.
[02:28:44]  I mean, why Epstein would agree to something like that.
[02:28:47]  Maybe just because they were friends.
[02:28:48]  Did you happen to see this piece in the New York Times?
[02:28:51]  Uh, last week, about this society woman, um, that he was giving money to, and she helped to reintegrate him into New York society.
[02:29:01]  Oh, yes, she wore stripes the day that he was released to show solidarity with his time in prison.
[02:29:07]  The New York socialite lady, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[02:29:10]  Yeah, she was trying to help him find a baby mama, so he was allegedly a whole other, you know, issue that came out in these files.
[02:29:19]  Yeah, yeah, there was what is this kid's genetics?
[02:29:22]  It looks like he's having kids, it looks like he has kids out there, yeah.
[02:29:26]  Yeah, they had to be perfect specimens.
[02:29:28]  Right.
[02:29:28]  Looking for Ukrainian girls.
[02:29:30]  That's what he was telling her.
[02:29:31]  Yeah, like telling her, this is the kind of girl I want.
[02:29:33]  But she's like saying, Oh, well, you gotta find a girl who's not gonna get too attached, not gonna try to get any of your money.
[02:29:41]  Like, we gotta find the right girl.
[02:29:42]  We can find her.
[02:29:43]  Yeah.
[02:29:45]  It's not good.
[02:29:49]  It's crazy.
[02:29:49]  And the whole trilateral commission thing, how he's telling Steve Bannon about this trilateral commission.

=== Trilateral Commission Weapons Sales (04:35) ===

[02:29:53]  Yeah, they invited me to the trilateral commission.
[02:29:55]  I bet they did.
[02:29:56]  All these other big people and had the huge backgrounds, world leaders, and then this young kid from Coney Island.
[02:30:04]  Just a good kid.
[02:30:07]  Someone.
[02:30:09]  To whom I used to be very close, she has attended these kinds of meetings, such as the Trilateral Commission, the Shangri La Summit, Davos, all of these major.
[02:30:21]  And she told me that they all take place just to sell weapons and weapon systems.
[02:30:28]  That's all anybody ever talks about.
[02:30:30]  She said, Yeah, the politicians think the big thoughts, and this is what I'd like to do, and what do you think of this idea with clean energy or whatever.
[02:30:40]  But when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, it's all about selling weapons.
[02:30:44]  The Trilateral Commission is all about selling weapons.
[02:30:46]  The Trilateral Commission, of all of these different groups, is the one that's most highfalutin, right?
[02:30:54]  The Henry Kissingers and Hillary Clintons of the world meet with the Tony Blairs and people from the CEOs of the world's biggest corporations and stuff.
[02:31:05]  And yeah, they talk about international policy and what would be best for the United States or best for the European Union or best for international banking or whatever.
[02:31:16]  But in the end, it's really all about making military sales.
[02:31:20]  Why would gun sales be of such high importance?
[02:31:26]  Oh, because that's how the American economy runs.
[02:31:30]  Post 9 11, we're in a full time, permanent, wartime economy.
[02:31:37]  So, at the highest level of the pyramid of society is arms trafficking?
[02:31:45]  Yeah.
[02:31:45]  Listen.
[02:31:47]  The Pentagon, it took them 75 years to do this, but the Pentagon has manufacturers with which it does business in literally every one of the 435 congressional districts.
[02:32:01]  Literally every one of the country's 435 congressional districts has something to do with the manufacturing of weapons, weapons systems, or associated technologies.
[02:32:15]  Whoa.
[02:32:16]  So there are jobs at stake in every congressional district in America.
[02:32:22]  That's why the votes for the Pentagon budget are almost unanimous every time.
[02:32:28]  And where do the world bankers fit into this whole equation?
[02:32:32]  Like the Rothschilds and Soros and all these folks?
[02:32:35]  I don't know.
[02:32:36]  And I think most people don't know.
[02:32:38]  And that's why these conspiracies take root.
[02:32:41]  And don't forget, too, that almost every conspiracy has a kernel of truth at its basis.
[02:32:50]  But I think we really don't know.
[02:32:52]  How it all works.
[02:32:53]  You see the story that just came out where one of the board members of the Rothschild Bank just got a job, just got hired to oversee the Vatican Bank.
[02:33:06]  Oh my God.
[02:33:07]  No, I did not see that.
[02:33:09]  Find that story, Steve.
[02:33:10]  Oh man, the world.
[02:33:12]  It's like all the craziest QAnon shit is coming true.
[02:33:16]  Yeah, it's like they're sitting around a table saying, oh, you know what we should do?
[02:33:19]  Let's pick the most egregious conspiracy and we'll make it happen.
[02:33:25]  Right.
[02:33:26]  Right.
[02:33:27]  And we'll release documents that shed a little bit of evidence to all this stuff and not give you any answers.
[02:33:33]  Yeah, no answers.
[02:33:34]  We'll just throw out all these little weird kernels out there that freak people out, set the internet on fire, and we will just shut our mouths and let chaos happen.
[02:33:46]  Vatican Bank appoints François Pauli as president of the supervisory board.
[02:33:51]  What the heck?
[02:33:54]  The Vatican Bank has confirmed the appointment of former Rothschild director François Pauli as the next president of its board of superintendents.
[02:34:02]  I think it's Francois.
[02:34:04]  Oh, Francois.
[02:34:08]  Frank Soys.
[02:34:12]  Tomato, tomato.
[02:34:13]  Board of Superintendents.
[02:34:15]  Yeah.
[02:34:15]  Sounds high level.
[02:34:17]  Mm hmm.
[02:34:18]  It's the Illuminati.
[02:34:19]  Yeah, seriously.
[02:34:22]  He's a Luxembourg national.
[02:34:25]  Three decades of experience in European finance.

=== Vatican Bank and Rothschilds (07:30) ===

[02:34:29]  Yeah, man.
[02:34:30]  All this stuff is just, it's too much.
[02:34:33]  Career began in the late 1980s.
[02:34:35]  Makes me feel like an underachiever.
[02:34:39]  Yeah, man.
[02:34:40]  Like people like this, you know, like, and people like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers previously was like, if you talk about them, you're like Alex Jones, you know, you're crazy.
[02:34:54]  Right, right, right, right.
[02:34:55]  And now that's not the case.
[02:34:56]  You're a guaranteed Semitic.
[02:34:57]  Right, right.
[02:34:58]  Yeah.
[02:35:00]  And, you know, like even the stuff that like Rockefeller was a part of, like being the back channel to Saddam, like fucking ins, what?
[02:35:07]  It sounds like something from a science fiction book or like something from like some sort of crazy conspiracy.
[02:35:12]  It's insane that it's real.
[02:35:14]  And then it comes true.
[02:35:15]  Yeah.
[02:35:16]  What's next, John?
[02:35:17]  What's going to happen next?
[02:35:18]  I don't know, man.
[02:35:18]  I'm not optimistic.
[02:35:19]  I think this Iran thing is way worse than people realize.
[02:35:22]  I think we're in it.
[02:35:24]  Unless, you know, one of the things that Donald Trump sometimes does is he just declares victory and then that's the end of it.
[02:35:32]  That would be the best case scenario if he did.
[02:35:34]  We win, we're going home.
[02:35:35]  It's all over.
[02:35:36]  Nothing to see.
[02:35:37]  He kind of hinted at that yesterday.
[02:35:39]  He said that the Iranian government has been decapitated.
[02:35:45]  And that we have already seen regime change.
[02:35:48]  It's like, okay, that's one way of looking at it.
[02:35:52]  But then the Washington Post reported this morning that multiple Gulf royal families are asking him to see it through and make sure that the whole thing collapses.
[02:36:04]  What do you think?
[02:36:06]  Do you think that's really?
[02:36:08]  I do.
[02:36:08]  Really?
[02:36:09]  Yeah.
[02:36:09]  They hate and fear the Iranians.
[02:36:12]  Huh.
[02:36:13]  You would think they'd be pissed at us.
[02:36:16]  I think they were for the first couple of days.
[02:36:20]  But, you know, it's one thing to hit Aludate Air Base, for example.
[02:36:27]  That's embarrassing to us.
[02:36:29]  But to start sending suicide drones into hotels in Dubai, that's just going to piss them off.
[02:36:36]  Right.
[02:36:37]  You blow up the Kuwait Airport runway, Bahrain Airport runway, that just pisses them off.
[02:36:44]  The Saudis spent at least a decade trying to normalize relations with Iran again.
[02:36:49]  They finally succeeded.
[02:36:51]  And the Iranian Senate Ambassador to Riyadh, the Saudi Senate Ambassador to Tehran, and now, by all accounts, American media accounts, when Mohammed bin Salman was at the White House last week, he begged the president to just go at him with both barrels and not to stop until they're done.
[02:37:12]  That's fucking bonkers.
[02:37:16]  Iran is a huge, populous country.
[02:37:21]  And, you know, talk about existential threats.
[02:37:23]  I spent.
[02:37:24]  Almost five years in the Gulf.
[02:37:27]  And every one of those GCC countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, they are petrified of a strong and offensive Iran.
[02:37:43]  They're petrified.
[02:37:44]  There are 92 million people in that country.
[02:37:48]  But if they had, if the Ayatollah made some sort of a religious declaration of not to make nukes, why would they be so afraid of him?
[02:37:57]  Because of just the religious ripped and the Sunnis initiated?
[02:38:00]  The IRGC and the MOIS, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iran, actively seek to overthrow the Gulf governments, the Gulf royal families, actively initiating, they're called active measures, coup plotting.
[02:38:17]  When I was living in Bahrain, twice these pallets of weapons in these big waterproof containers.
[02:38:28]  Like washed up on shore.
[02:38:31]  What the fuck are these for?
[02:38:32]  All these weapons and explosives and mines and bullets.
[02:38:36]  Like, who's supposed to pick these up on the beach and miss the connection?
[02:38:40]  Wow.
[02:38:41]  Yeah, the Iranians are not naifs in this whole thing.
[02:38:45]  How much of a threat do you think Islamic extremists are to America?
[02:38:53]  I think that self radicalized, homegrown Islamic extremists are a problem.
[02:39:01]  You're going to get some kid who radicalized himself by watching YouTube videos who's going to go into a shopping center and open fire on people or into a church for a church.
[02:39:10]  And how much of those are false flags, too?
[02:39:13]  You know, I'm not one of the believers that false flags are common things.
[02:39:18]  More common examples of false flags, I'll give you one that we studied at the agency.
[02:39:25]  Before you could just go onto Google Earth and look to see whatever you want to look at.
[02:39:33]  It could take six to 12 months to move a satellite from one place to another.
[02:39:39]  Right.
[02:39:39]  Right.
[02:39:39]  That's why we didn't liberate Kuwait until February of 1991.
[02:39:44]  The Iraqis had invaded August of 1990 because we had to move a satellite from over Moscow all the way over to be over Iraq and Kuwait.
[02:39:54]  And it took months to move the thing.
[02:39:57]  So some countries didn't have satellites.
[02:40:03]  At the time.
[02:40:04]  So, as this example of a false flag, the Israelis really, really wanted to know what was going on in the port of Benghazi in Libya.
[02:40:12]  Well, they don't have a satellite to look at the port of Benghazi.
[02:40:15]  So, what they did is they had a Mossad officer call the harbor master on the phone in Benghazi and say, Hi, I'm a wealthy French businessman and we do a lot of work in Libya, a lot of trade, and I represent, of A consortium of European businessmen.
[02:40:37]  We have lots and lots of money.
[02:40:40]  And we're looking for somebody to represent our interests in Benghazi, somebody who has access to the port and understands how the port works.
[02:40:50]  And we have tons of money that we're willing to spend.
[02:40:53]  Well, what's the port master going to say?
[02:40:55]  Harbor master.
[02:40:56]  He's going to say, I could do that.
[02:40:58]  Oh, you would do that for us?
[02:41:00]  You would be our consultant.
[02:41:01]  We're going to pay you a lot of money.
[02:41:03]  All we want to know is.
[02:41:05]  The names of the ships that come in every day and everything that's on the manifests.
[02:41:11]  Okay, that's protected information.
[02:41:15]  Does the information include weapons for Palestinian training camps in Libya?
[02:41:24]  Of course they do.
[02:41:26]  What about technologies from North Korea or from Pakistan or any other country that might be willing to sell nuclear information?
[02:41:39]  And so this harbor master reported to Mossad for years.
[02:41:44]  He never had any idea that he had been recruited by Mossad.
[02:41:49]  That's a false flag.
[02:41:51]  He thought he was working for a consortium of French businessmen.
[02:41:55]  That's crazy.
[02:41:56]  But that's the more likely false flag.
[02:41:58]  Right.
[02:41:59]  Right.

=== Fear of Sharia Law Narratives (02:37) ===

[02:42:00]  Yeah.
[02:42:00]  I just see the people who are the advocates for this war, a lot of them trying to paint this fear based narrative about how Islam is going to be the majority religion in the world by like 2030 or something like that.
[02:42:19]  And it's already like it's a ride.
[02:42:21]  It's the second biggest religion in the US right now, second biggest in Canada, Australia.
[02:42:27]  The UK and all this stuff.
[02:42:29]  And by 2030, it's going to be the Muslim majority, and we should all be terrified.
[02:42:35]  But it's like, I don't know.
[02:42:37]  From my perspective, it doesn't seem like the Muslims are a huge threat to us.
[02:42:43]  They're not.
[02:42:46]  No.
[02:42:46]  That's why I get a kick out of these state legislatures that pass laws banning Sharia law.
[02:42:52]  Like, why?
[02:42:55]  Right.
[02:42:56]  They're not imposing it on anybody.
[02:42:58]  Nobody.
[02:42:58]  Do you know what?
[02:42:59]  You know what Sharia law is?
[02:43:01]  Right.
[02:43:02]  So, Sharia law is, for example, if the head of the household dies, Sharia law says that the wife gets half of the estate and the sons get the other half.
[02:43:15]  Hmm.
[02:43:16]  That's Sharia law.
[02:43:19]  Sharia law says.
[02:43:19]  That's it.
[02:43:20]  Yeah, that's it.
[02:43:21]  Sharia law says you can't charge interest on a loan.
[02:43:26]  Right?
[02:43:26]  It's a sin.
[02:43:28]  So, you charge a user fee.
[02:43:31]  You could call it.
[02:43:34]  Interest, I'm going to call it a user fee.
[02:43:36]  Right.
[02:43:37]  I see.
[02:43:38]  That's Sharia law.
[02:43:39]  Okay.
[02:43:40]  Sharia law says that if you have multiple wives, which of course are not recognized in the United States, you have to treat them equally.
[02:43:50]  Right?
[02:43:50]  So if you do something for one, you have to do something for all four equally.
[02:43:54]  That's Sharia law.
[02:43:56]  So what these morons in places like Oklahoma City or Austin are so worried about, I have no idea.
[02:44:04]  It's just they just exhibit their own ignorance.
[02:44:07]  Right.
[02:44:08]  They hear, oh my God, Sharia law.
[02:44:09]  Oh my God, we have to stop it.
[02:44:11]  Muslims, they're going to blow us up.
[02:44:14]  Come on.
[02:44:14]  Yeah.
[02:44:15]  What are you doing?
[02:44:17]  It's a crazy world, man.
[02:44:18]  John Keriaku, I always appreciate your insight.
[02:44:21]  Always great to see you.
[02:44:22]  I so enjoy coming down here and doing these.
[02:44:24]  I really appreciate it.
[02:44:25]  And I will link your Substack, your YouTube, your X, all that stuff below.
[02:44:29]  Is there anything I'm missing?
[02:44:31]  No, I'm on YouTube and Rumble.
[02:44:33]  Rumble, Rumble too.
[02:44:34]  Lots of good stuff happening.
[02:44:35]  Fantastic, man.
[02:44:36]  Thanks again.
[02:44:36]  Appreciate it.
[02:44:37]  Good night, folks.