April 24, 2021 - Epoch Times
06:40
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| When you go after people who have been in government for decades, of course they're going to try and stop you. | |
| I first learned about Kash Patel while reading Lee Smith's book, The Plot Against the President. | |
| And attacks against him by people connected to that plot have persisted to this day. | |
| A former Department of Justice prosecutor, he was personally recruited by Congressman Devin Nunes to investigate allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. | |
| I was fascinated with Kash Patel's story, a man who's now held key roles across a large swath of America's national security apparatus. | |
| He led counter-terrorism at the National Security Council, Served as the right-hand man to the acting director of national intelligence and was at one point the presidential aide responsible for the nuclear football. | |
| From hunting down the notorious terrorist al-Baghdadi to exposing the genocide in Xinjiang, China, he's been an important figure in much of Trump-era foreign policy. | |
| Who is this man really? | |
| And what is his response to recent anonymous allegations against him, saying he leaked classified information? | |
| This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. | |
| Kash Patel, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. | |
| Thanks so much, John, for having me back. | |
| Great to be with you. | |
| So, Kash, you know, we talked about in the last interview, we talked a lot about your work with HIPSI, the House Permanent Select Committee on Investigations, as it's called. | |
| You know, got a lot of really great feedback from our viewers at the time and thought we should expand a little bit on going to your work with the administration subsequently. | |
| But before we do that, there is actually this Washington Post piece that recently came out by David Ignatius, where it's alleged basically that you've been leaking classified information. | |
| I wanted to give you a chance to speak to that. | |
| Well, thanks very much for having me back and allowing me to speak on a number of matters. | |
| Your audience and your company is fantastic, so I'm happy to be here. | |
| As far as the WAPO piece from David Ignatius, I'll say the following. | |
| I think it's the height of hypocrisy and irony That the individual who wrote that piece is the one that intentionally and knowingly published classified information in December of 2016 to instigate the massive Russia hoax. | |
| And then fast forward five years later and he writes not an actual news story but an op-ed in the Washington Post where he couldn't even get it published as actual news that says that I possibly may be under investigation. | |
| For leaking classified information. | |
| Well, anyone in the universe may possibly be under investigation for murder. | |
| All that allows you to do is allows the fake news media to jump on and say, Kash Patel's under investigation. | |
| And you know what, if the Department of Justice thinks that's actually true, well then bring it on because I know the truth and I've never leaked classified information in my life. | |
| Beyond that, I'm in discussions with my lawyer as to what to do with the Washington Post. | |
| And we'll see what he decides. | |
| So you haven't been approached by Department of Justice officials or FBI officials or anybody up to this point? | |
| Nothing. | |
| Zero. | |
| Fascinating. | |
| So Kash, while you were at the National Security Council, and I think this is something that actually a lot of the people that are very familiar with your work with Congressman Nunes, for example, might not know, is that you actually played a really significant role in exposing what the Chinese regime was doing to the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province. | |
| Tell me about this. | |
| For me, you would think acts of genocide by a state, by a country, are something that all of the public would want to know, not just Democrats and Republicans. | |
| And you would think that not just Democrats had the monopoly on being able to investigate and publicize about it. | |
| Made it no small story that human atrocities around the world would be investigated by his national security apparatus. | |
| And if we could shed light on them, we would. | |
| And I think Xinjiang is the perfect example of where we started that project early on in his administration. | |
| And we finished finally, before we left, with actually publicly stating that genocide had occurred in China and is occurring. | |
| Well, so what was happening then? | |
| Presumably we're working, I guess, with the UN, that would be the obvious multilateral organization. | |
| Well, you're exactly right. | |
| I mean, the UN is, and probably rightly so, the global mouthpiece for Atrocities, humanitarian rights issues, and genocide. | |
| And so we thought we would leverage the United Nations and our allies around the world because you can't take on a China or Russia unilaterally in an issue like this. | |
| You need to engage with your allies and show them this is what's going on because there's so much trade and business and economic impact when you go on and take on China. | |
| And we use the United Nations platform and UNGA to deliver that message and raise awareness for the issue because That's what you have to do to start. | |
| It's a serious allegation and then you have to prove it to the world with facts. | |
| What was the reaction? | |
| Unfortunately, it was one of those things where I thought, being relatively new to the multi-lot world, that this would get a lot of traction pretty quickly. | |
| It got a lot of traction at the United Nations and it got a lot of traction from our allies. | |
| But I don't think the media picked up on it as much as I thought they would have back then. | |
| And I'm not really sure what the reason for that was. | |
| But we did show With evidence that we were allowed to publish at the time that China was actually putting Uyghurs in certain encampments, enclosures and fenced in tent cities, subjecting them to re-education campaigns, and basically performing acts of genocide against that population. | |
| So I thought that was enough to get going, but it took a little longer than I thought. | |
| As you probably know, YouTube has shown itself to be ready to censor all sorts of important news and content. | |
| This isn't really acceptable to us here at the Epoch Times, and I don't actually want to be sitting around thinking about what YouTube may or may not want when I'm deciding who to interview or what I'm going to talk about. | |
| Furthermore, YouTube has actually demonetized us. | |
| It's been over two months now since that's been the case. | |
| It's been under review. | |
| We're not being terribly, terribly hopeful about this. | |
| So what are we going to do? | |
| Well, we're launching Epoch TV. Epoch TV is a whole platform where we're going to have multiple programs, American Thought Leaders, of course, Crossroads with Joshua Phillip, The Larry Elder Show. | |
| Awesome stuff. | |
| $4.99 a month. | |
| That's what it's going to open with. | |
| And I invite you to see the rest of the interview here on our platform. |
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