Kyle Seraphin, former FBI special agent and whistleblower, exposes the bureau’s hidden "prohibited access files"—unaccountable digital archives shielding operations like Epstein’s ties to intelligence networks—while critiquing U.S. escalation in Iran after the Ayatollah’s death, calling it a proxy war with $100/barrel oil risks. He links FBI overreach—domestic surveillance of school board parents via FISA 702—to systemic corruption, where agents prioritize metrics over justice, and warns of retaliation for his disclosures. The episode ties Iran’s theocratic governance, rooted in Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, to U.S. interventionism, framing Middle East conflicts as a zero-sum struggle for energy choke points like the Strait of Hormuz, where no side is purely "good." [Automatically generated summary]
The United States and its partners have launched Operation Epic Fury, one of the largest, most complex, most overwhelming military offensives the world has ever seen.
Nobody's seen anything like it.
We have hit hundreds of targets in Iran, including Revolutionary Guard facilities, Iranian air defense systems.
Just now, it was announced that we knocked out nine ships plus their naval building, all in a matter of literally minutes.
Iran's formerly supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, is dead.
But let's go back to the blood of hundreds and even thousands of Americans on his hands and was responsible for the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent people all across many countries.
Last night, all over Iran, the voices of the Iranian people could be heard cheering and celebrating in the streets when his death was announced.
The entire military command is gone as well, and many of them want to surrender into saving their lives.
They want immunity.
They're calling by the thousands.
Combat operations continue at this time in full force, and they will continue until all of our objectives are achieved.
We have very strong objectives.
They could have done something two weeks ago, but they just couldn't get there.
Earlier today, CENTCOM shared the news that three U.S. military service members have been killed in action.
As one nation, we grieve for the true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation.
Even as we continue the righteous mission for which they gave their lives, we pray for the full recovery of the wounded and send our immense love and eternal gratitude to the families of the fallen.
And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends.
You know, I tried to downplay this in my mind before leading up to this, but as it's starting to happen, you're just starting to understand the gravity of the situation.
I have a friend that literally, me and my boy tried to talk him out of going, but essentially, he is now stationed in Kuwait at the exact base that is getting bombed at this moment.
I don't have any ability to communicate with him.
They probably don't even have access to phones.
They can't do any of those things.
And it just makes me understand now that it's someone that's within my immediate circle.
Like I literally hung out with this dude like three weeks ago before he actually left.
No, when you, when you back, uh, you know, we'll call it a wild animal, but I'm not saying the people of Iran are wild animals, but you call it like it is.
When you back an animal into a corner, they're going to fight for their.
And you can do it to a weaker nation like Venezuela, but because of Iran's location, because they're so far away and because of their heavy ballistic missile capabilities, even though we're superior to them in capability, far superior, they are a near peer and they can't hurt us in the region, especially our bases, especially Israel.
You know, they're not necessarily the biggest fans of Iran themselves, but like just imagine being one of those countries and not really having a say on what goes on and that people just decide, well, you know, tonight, tonight will be the night.
Well, there were reports of MBS being on the phone with Trump encouraging the strikes while, you know, to save faith saying that he didn't want it to happen.
So Iran has not directly threatened it, but they kind of have, right?
And Yemen at the same time.
It's interesting because now all of the wartime, I'm sorry, all of the trade routes have now stopped because they don't even want the risk of having their vessel taken over.
And guys, this is going to affect you and I back at home.
And to go back to my earlier point, like I really just had to sit down and think about it.
Like, why did we start drilling so much more?
Why did we go ahead and just start taking Venezuela's oil?
I mean, things seem like they're accidents, but you can draw a clear correlation.
If we know that there's not going to be any conflict on this side of the world, oil is really the only thing that we care about in that region for the most part.
Yes, our next guest is Kyle Serafin, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Air Force veteran who served in counterintelligence and surveillance roles within the Bureau.
As a federal whistleblower, he publicly raised concerns about internal practices at the FBI, including issues related to investigative priorities and institutional accountability, which led to his indefinite suspension.
He is a member of the group known as the Suspendables, former agents who have testified before Congress on matters of FBI operations and civil liberties.
Today, Kyle hosts the Kyle Seraphin Show, a daily program available on RumbleX and other platforms where he provides analysis on national security, law enforcement, politics, and current events.
He is also a husband and father, really want it life there, and has been cited in discussions with FBI Director Kash Patel regarding bureau reforms.
So that gives a lens on the timeframe that I grew up.
I graduated high school in the year 2000.
So I was an 80s and a 90s kid.
I grew up in a family where my dad ran radio stations.
And I don't always bring that up, but I had a really keen awareness of news from a very young age because my dad ran the biggest news station in California, KCBS, which is the flagship for CBS Radio in San Francisco.
So he was the news director the year that I was born.
And interestingly enough, I've kind of had this really strange life where I've gone places and then I've gone back to places and touched the same base.
And so my second job out of college was working at the radio station that my dad was running the year I was born.
And people that he hired knew me from the time I was a baby.
So anyways, I've had some kind of like, you know, I've had a high awareness of current events and these kind of things.
I've been around microphones for a long time.
I never wanted it.
I never aspired to be a podcast guy.
I never aspired to have a social media presence.
I'm kind of like the exact opposite.
I wanted to go and bring bad feelings to people who needed to be ended.
And so, you know, I joined the military when I was 27.
I was looking around.
I was working for Warner Brothers at a movie studio and I was doing finance and it was a really good game.
It was super easy and it was fun and there were pretty girls and my life was pretty good in Burbank.
And I was like, this is pretty cool.
What am I doing?
You know, like, what is my, why am I on this planet?
I'm not creating anything.
I'm not destroying anything.
I'm not leaving any indelible marks.
So I got a motorcycle and I make a good paycheck and I get to be able to like afford to take my friends who are, you know, broke actors and writers out for drinks.
But that's not really what I feel like we're called to do in this planet.
So I enlisted at 27.
I went into an Air Force program.
I actually ended up in two different Air Force programs and I did a bunch of hard training and I planned on going to war and I didn't go to war, which was kind of a disappointment.
But I did meet my wife when I was right out of basic training.
And so we waited.
And I actually waited until I got out of the Air Force to be able to get married because I was really worried about like, I didn't want to leave a widow.
I didn't want to leave a woman who, you know, been off more than she could chew and realize I come back and I'm not the same guy or I don't have all of my parts or something is not working.
And, you know, so anyway, it was like a very conscientious decision, but 31, got out, got married, ended up joining the FBI after working in Austin as a paramedic and kind of running around trying to figure out what we were going to do there.
And then I worked for the Bureau for six years.
And I'll just tell you guys, people have this expectation of what it is.
And I'll just, we'll probably talk about it, but the FBI is not what people think it is.
And their expectation of what it is is why we have so many problems, I think, because people think it's this movie, you know, law enforcement going after bad guys.
And it's really a different animal.
It's really an intelligence agency.
And I was this, I was like last week old to find out that the FBI actually has a third part that I didn't realize.
There's sort of like the main part of the FBI that does law enforcement people recognize.
There's this sort of shadowy part that people know exists if they're paying attention.
It's the Intel agency.
And then there's this like undisclosed thing that's going on in the background that probably some people have been aware of, but they really couldn't prove it until very recently.
And outside of some real tight kept intelligence circles, they didn't even know.
So I found out that there's almost like this third animal that's living back there.
It's deputy director priorities.
It's the shadowy thing.
And gents, one of the things I used to always tell people was like, you know, the deep state is not a bunch of like sexy, cool things where people are doing like shady stuff.
It's just like a bunch of dudes that are trying to get their pension and they're working in, you know, crappy 80s carpet and they've got leaks on the ceiling tiles and there's a desk that's got a burn on it from some coffee pop put there in the 80s or whatever.
And, you know, they're just people that are doing what's best for them.
It just turns out it's best for their agency and that's how they retire.
And I think there might actually be something that's actually more nefarious.
I, you know, I grew up in an era when the X-Files was big.
And so the joke was kind of like, you know, who's the cigarette smoking man?
Where's the dark room where the guys are plotting the demise of all like American freedoms?
And I used to think that was stupid and kind of theatrical.
And there may be something more akin to that than not based on what we learned in the last week or so.
And it's not really hitting the news in any meaningful way.
So I'll bring attention to it wherever I can.
And it doesn't matter what the audience size is.
People walk away knowing more because there's evidence that there's some of that going on.
So the thing that's crazy and the thing that I really agree with what you just said there, both our domestic and foreign policy just makes absolutely zero sense.
There's no rhyme or reason to any of it on the surface.
Number one, it's the opposite of what we vote for every single time, whether that's Democrat or Republican.
Number two, now they think that they can just inform us on the decisions they've made to rule our lives.
This is the ongoing question that I think people that are doing commentary or it doesn't matter what your level of exposure.
Look, I was a brick agent in the FBI.
So that means I had some exposure to what kind of, you know, front end operations are.
I sat and they said, this guy might be a terrorist.
So go and investigate him.
So I would sit there in a car and pee in a bottle and talk on a radio and take pictures or stalk him into the desert where he's doing drills to do things that look dangerous.
And you go, okay, fine.
So there, we're building this case, you know.
I worked on an Indian reservation.
My goal was to get as far away from anything politically hot or interesting in Washington, D.C., because I spent five years in the D.C. area and I was like, get me to somewhere else.
I want to go to Montana or New Mexico or wherever nobody cares that I am.
That's where I want to be.
That was always kind of my goal.
And, you know, the question is, is when we're having these conversations, because, you know, it doesn't matter if somebody is a federal agent.
It doesn't matter if somebody is working as a case officer in the CIA or they're working in the State Department.
Like we all have these conversations with our friends and neighbors and we always use this, this term they.
This is what they did to us, right?
But nobody knows who the they is.
It's just they.
And I, and I don't know either.
And, you know, this is the, this is the problem is that some people align at different answers.
They come up with it.
Oh, they think it's some religious group or they think it's some foreign country.
And I think that there must be a group of people that seem like it's totally okay to rule over the ashes.
And I think this has always been the case.
There's always been people, the goal of being part of they, I think Tucker Carlson alluded to it the other day, sort of a super governmental organization or group of people.
They have interests that span the globe.
Their interests are their own.
And they're not tied to one particular demographic or one particular, particular, you know, geological location or geographic location or any particular government.
These are people that kind of can move around.
And so that was, that was what I think Jeffrey Epstein represented to a lot of people.
This is what people saw as like a guy who can move around a bunch of different circles, work with intel agencies that are sometimes friendly and sometimes not.
There are people that are access agents.
There are people that work and live lives that are very different than what any of us are living here in the Austin, Texas area.
They're not worried about whether it costs $3.75 to fill up their truck with diesel.
I promise you that.
They're just, they're very different than what we're doing.
So Rainbow Six is the one I want to kind of hone in on.
He made it.
He wrote a bunch of really great books.
But the craziest thing that I keep learning is that there's something closer to the enterprise that took place in the book Rainbow Six.
The book was great if you didn't read it.
So give it a look.
But essentially, it was people that had sort of this climate paganism and they were going to save the world from the world.
They were going to make sure that it's almost like a mother Gaia type of thing, but they wanted to make sure that there was still going to be a planet for them to have.
And we saw this during COVID where the policies didn't reflect anything unless you just didn't want a lot of people to survive stuff.
If you wanted people to turn on each other and wanted to kind of, you know, the depopulation sort of attitudes.
But even before we talk about they, I want to take a step back because you unpacked a lot very early on, especially around the FBI, which you have a lot of information about, as well as how the inner workings.
I want you to educate me because I'm one of those guys who said, well, the FBI seems like this cool agency and they seem like they do some pretty dark stuff, but I'm not really sure what it looks like.
There's a bunch of things, but I want to start with like the beginning of the origin because I'm sure you had some preconceived notions before going in.
And then it's like, how do you just get a job at the FBI?
Like, this isn't just something you can just go off the street and pick up.
It was on USA Jobs, which is the bulk clearinghouse for federal jobs at the time.
And so I'd gotten out of the out of the military.
I had an uncle who retired from the federal government.
He worked for the Office of Personnel Management and he worked for the Customs and Border Patrol before it became before ICE was even created.
And so I think he was integral and kind of helping hire for that.
And I talked to him, I go, Hey, I kind of want to do some cool stuff and I have these ideas.
And he goes, cool.
Are you a computer programmer?
I said, no.
And he said, do you speak another language?
I said, no.
And he said, are you an accountant?
And I said, no.
And he said, are you an attorney?
I go, no.
I was like, you know, Uncle John, this is kind of a downer.
And he goes, well, if you don't have any military experience, you're not going to get hired by the FBI.
You're probably not going to make it to the CIA.
You're probably not going to make it into the things that you're thinking might be kind of cool to go do.
And, you know, I'm at this time, I'm probably like 26, 27-year-old, kind of red-blooded American.
It might have been even earlier than that, where I'm just trying to figure out like, what am I doing in my life, right?
You know, like I said, I was working for Warner Brothers, doing finance, working on the movie lot.
That was kind of fun.
And so I just put it in an application, or I thought about putting in applications, realized it wasn't going to actually work.
I looked at the job credentials and it was like, yeah, you get points for being a veteran.
And so I was like, well, all right.
Well, military service is also interesting.
So how do I get into that?
So then I started looking around.
And so I ended up enlisting in the Air Force.
And I went in and did just shy of four years.
I actually left a little bit early on, my fourth year because I got into a disagreement with my command about what it meant to be having a 31-year-old sit around and push a broom and not advancing through any of this stuff.
I was waiting on a halo date and some army guy stole it from me.
Anyhow, I ended up getting out and then I'm like, okay, well, now I've got this background.
I'm a paramedic.
I'm an air traffic controller.
I've got some skills, but training, but no actual combat deployments or anything that I wanted to go do.
How do I go fight bad guys?
Like, how do I go find evil in this world and try to root it out?
I thought that was kind of my job as a kind of red-blooded man.
And so I applied for the FBI, applied for State Department, CIA, a couple others, kind of just tossed in a bunch of packages.
went to work like everybody does.
I went to got some GI Bill education, thought I was going to go be a doctor, actually.
That's what I thought.
I was getting a bunch of advanced classes and pre-recs knocked out.
I had applied for PA school.
I was trying to figure out med school or PA school, kind of the fastest route, having friends who are doctors.
Because, you know, by the time you're like in your, in your mid-30s or your early 30s, your friends are already doctors if they wanted to be a doctor.
Like they've already got that figured out.
And they're like, hey, man, it's like, you know, $250,000 worth of debt.
And you could go be like my wife and go be a PA and you could go faster.
So we're working that out.
And I ended up moving up to Connecticut briefly with my wife and moved my package, which was initially in the Austin area or the San Antonio field office up to Connecticut.
And they gave me a call right away.
And I don't think they had a lot of guys that were military veterans and paramedics and whatever.
And they go, hey, let's come in for a meet and greet.
Let's start talking about it.
You know, they didn't, the woman who was recruiting me didn't realize that paramedics were a recruitable skill in the FBI.
When I got there, there were about 51 special agent paramedics of 14,000 agents.
So not a lot of guys had that background or particular skill set.
And, you know, there's an operational need for it.
So that was it.
It was like, okay, I got called in.
There's an interview.
There's this like writing test.
There is all like the weirdest interview you've ever heard of.
It's a panel interview with three people that don't smile or look at you in the face while you're responding to the answers.
So they give you a question.
They're not allowed to give you any visual feedback to it.
So you're just answering and like you'll say like a pretty good zinger or a joke in there and you're being personable.
And then they just look at you and they look at the weirdest part of the interview.
I found out afterwards, it's called phase two or being on a phase two board.
And it's just a, it's a check mark for some of the worst people to get promoted further up in the organization.
They have to go do phase two where they help recruit People in.
And so they just, their goal is to try to remove the human element from the recruiting process.
So it's supposed to be like mechanical and nobody gets like, oh, well, you were friendly.
And so therefore you get a leg up.
But like, don't you want to hire people that are good teammates that get along with human beings?
And what that does, it actually, it actually has a downstream problem because if you just write down the answer to what someone said and you do it as a transcript, and you don't have the interaction of like, oh, that person made really good eye contact, had a good handshake, you know, was able to establish rapport and trust and was otherwise a likable human being who could elicit information out or could gain the trust of the public.
Then you end up with weirdos who end up being FBI agents and they go do weird stuff like knock on a door and then not want to show their credentials or knock on a door and say things like, your name came across my desk.
And then somebody goes, what does that mean?
And they go, I don't know.
I just, I just say these words, but they don't have any meaning.
So then you get these kind of like strange kind of automatons.
And I found that a lot of people in the FBI would have been better off if we had recruited outdoor salespeople that knocked on the door and sold Kirby vacuums.
You know what I mean?
If you had people that did business to business sales that had to knock on a door and like based on the interactions with another human being, they made a living or didn't, you'd get a lot more human beings that were much more savvy.
But that's not what you get in the Bureau.
And so this is going to actually go to explain what the FBI is.
People think it's this law enforcement agency.
That's what you see in the movies.
You know, maybe they're doing counterterrorism, but it's all based on like, there's a crime.
And then they're going to go find the person who did the crime.
And that's maybe 40% of the FBI, but probably 55% of it is this Intel agency.
And so for people's understanding, this is something I'll reach back into my first couple of days of doing interviews and explain this.
Criminal law enforcement is a linear process.
All right.
So gents, just picture a line.
At some point in time on the timeline, someone commits a crime.
And then it's the job of the detectives, if you're doing, you know, state or local, or it's the federal agents, the special agents to go out there and find out who did it and why and how can you prove it and what evidence can we gather and so on.
And then we may do some interviews and we do some subpoenas and we'll do some search warrants if we get to, you know, if we get all the good stuff.
And then we're going to bring you in, we're going to arrest you and then we're going to accuse you of it and interrogate you.
And then we go to trial or you plea out.
And then the jury kind of has this like bifurcated choice.
They can acquit you or they can find you guilty.
And then there may be some appeals, but that's it.
That's the straight line of you commit a crime, we try to put you in jail, the end.
And so that's 40% of the FBI, let's say.
And then there's this other big chunk and it's the Intel agency.
And if people don't believe the FBI thinks of themselves as an Intel agency first, all you got to do is go look at this thing called the DIOG, which is a publicly available document.
It's the Domestic Intelligence Operations Guide.
It's the Attorney General's rulebook for how the FBI does business.
And the first thing in there, it says FBI as intelligence agency.
There is, but it shouldn't be like that because the FBI doesn't really have a true intelligence mission.
And the reason why is because we have things like the Bill of Rights, which should be utterly problematic for people who are doing intelligence work.
Here's the reason why.
And so I explained the linear nature of the criminal work.
Let me explain intelligence in a different way.
Intelligence is a circle.
And so a circle has no beginning and no ending.
And that's what intelligence work is about.
It's like we can drop in at any point and we just start going around and tracing the loops.
And so, you know, I want to talk to Rex.
And so I'm going to find out who Rex talks to.
And I'm going to have different people that are in your circle.
Well, now I can spin off investigations into them.
And the difference between a criminal and an intelligence type investigation, in a criminal investigation, there's the allegation or information that a federal crime took place and then someone did it.
It's the same, except Homeland Security doesn't have a dialogue.
So I would say that Homeland Security, DHS, and sort of the entities underneath it.
So your HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, and others, they don't use them as wildly as they could, but they don't even have the guardrails that the FBI has.
And the problem with a threat like that, and here's why it can't be in an intelligence agency and a law enforcement agency.
This is my argument.
This is what I made to Kash Patel.
I thought he understood it.
He said he did.
He said the same things to Glenn Beck, some others.
Like he made these arguments, Sean Ryan, he was saying the same thing on the Sean Ryan show.
The argument is, if I am in the business of getting information, which is what the CIA does, it's what the NSA does, it's what the DIA does and other, you know, other entities that are out there, national, geospatial, and so on.
If your job is information for its own sake, then there doesn't have to be an outcome.
So that's fine.
If you're a non-outcome-based thing, now you may be able to use that, brief that information to a kinetic arm.
So CIA has like, they have the, what do they call it?
Oh, man, the ground branch and the, and the, the maritime branch here, is it right?
So they have the capabilities of doing paramilitary operations, but those are going to be, those are kinetic operations pushing overseas where they don't have constitutional rights.
When you start playing that game here, right?
If, if you start playing that game in the United States and the entirety of what I'm doing is trying to get to the outcome, well, the FBI's best outcome is arrests, prosecutions, and jail time.
So this is where we necessarily get sort of this tyrannical agency because all of this is post-9-11.
Like the FBI always had problems.
You can go back to before it even called itself the FBI.
Like, first of all, the FBI lies about its birthday.
That seems like a problem.
The FBI claims it was founded in 1908, but it wasn't.
There was this thing called the Bureau of Investigation.
It was unarmed.
It didn't actually represent anything like what we see today's FBI like.
And the modern FBI was born in 1935 when Congress created the FBI.
So calling the 1908 as the birthday is pretty weird.
And even during that time, before it became the FBI, it was still doing things that were considered utterly unconstitutional.
People can go read about the Palmer raids.
There were people that were doing investigations over ideology and political thoughts that were not fashionable, but still legal.
Like you would go after communists, generally speaking.
But you're allowed to be a communist in America.
You're allowed to be an a-hole, it turns out.
You're allowed to do all kinds of things in America, even if we don't generally like it.
So having a governmental entity apply like really strong force and investigative capabilities to it is troubling.
And they did the same thing going through the Red Scare.
They did the same thing going through the civil rights movement.
They went after a bunch of people in the civil rights movement.
They went after people during the PATCON.
So in the 90s, there was a lot of targeting of people.
It didn't matter.
So anybody who thinks it's like, oh, it's all about going after people on the left or going after people on the right.
Historically, more people on the left were targeted by the FBI.
You see it not just in the FBI, but you just see how it happens in companies, corporations.
Some event happens.
There's a reaction to that situation.
Rules are created in that situation to address whatever happened.
And then the rules just continue to go on.
And then there's so much distance between when that crisis happened and when the rules are made versus all the people who have now come in maybe 20 years down the line.
And then you ask, why are we doing this?
Why are we have these rules?
And the people who are there don't even know because more often than not, there's already been a turnout of the people who were there originally for those decisions.
And then everybody keeps adding a new layer on top of another layer of new rules based off of something that didn't exist to begin with, off of one crisis.
So I always tell people that the way the military looks at things, and I had some, I had some really good training while I was at the Bureau.
And one of them was we brought in a group called DECO, which are a bunch of former Delta operators.
They were guys that were like on the ground in Mogadishu and they're freaking legends.
And what Delta Force does or CAG or whatever they go by as far as names, it changes.
But what that tier one unit does better than anybody else is they assess their mission capabilities and then they hone in on what is required to accomplish them and whether or not they have the school, the skills or the material and the capabilities to actually apply to the problem.
And so they always talk about it.
This is a military term, task and purpose.
So the task is what do we need to do and how do we, you know, like, what do we need to accomplish?
And the purpose is the why.
And what you're describing is a divorcing.
A lot of government is divorced.
They've, they've lost, they know what the task is, but the task keeps feeding more and more tasks to accomplish the task more fully, but they've completely forgotten the purpose.
And so we have a government that is devoid of the why.
And it doesn't even ask that question anymore.
It doesn't look to say, you know, when I show up at work, how am I serving the American people?
That's not what's being asked.
It's like, well, our mission of this agency is to do the following.
And nobody's going like, hey, man, is this even serving any, is it, is it even helping Americans?
I'll give you a quick little like timeline from 9-11, how the, how the Bureau got sideways.
And it's true for other agencies, but my knowledge is tight on this one.
We looked for a thing called international terrorism starting like right after 9-11.
And international terrorism is very easily defined as people who are overseas with ideologies that are based overseas.
So I just want to get people kind of, that's what we call IT.
And so they looked for all the IT that was available, but it turns out the U.S. military was like breaking things over in Iraq and Afghanistan and, you know, the Philippines and other places.
So they were tying up a lot of the IT.
And so they ran out of that relatively quickly within about four years, five years.
They had to move on to something else.
And that something else was called HVE or homegrown violent extremists.
And that's really easily done as people who are legally in the United States, like they're immigrants, or they are first generation and second generation.
A lot of times, like they've become like kind of reverse radicalized by being here.
And then they feel like they've been, you know, maybe they feel like they've been discriminated against or their community is not treated well or they see some sort of like ideological version of what's going on and they represent themselves for the homeland because they're isolated.
So HVEs are domestic people with foreign ideology.
And when we started looking for people that were inside the United States as terrorists and using the tools like FISA and some of the other sort of capabilities, national security letters and whatnot, targeting Americans, both American citizens or what are called LPRs, legal permanent residents, you're like looking for people inside these communities, they ran out of them too, because it turns out like America doesn't have that many of them.
And so it's hard to do that.
And if you are being judged and your budget is 100% decided on how many of these cases are you going to have, the FBI is the opposite of most local law enforcement.
Imagine if you had a local sheriff who came in and he was like, I need you guys to approve like a little bit more money.
We have knocked down crime 25%.
And I want to continue to add deputies to our patrols.
We're going to have community outreach.
We're going to have a school resource officer.
Like we need more money and budget because we are winning here and we are making this the safest community in America.
The FBI is like, oh my God, we had 215 terrorist investigations in Houston, Texas last year.
And this year we predict 300.
Their goal is to grow the threat.
And that grows the budget.
And so again, task and purpose being divorced, the FBI is counter, like counterintuitively incentivized to get more and more money in budget and to find more and more problems, but they're also lazy because they're the federal government.
So it's not like they're doing like the best work that's ever been done.
So it's much easier to set people up with this stuff, which is why you end up with like the basically the equivalent of entrapment.
Tim, that is a really, really astute question because of course there is and most people would be shocked to hear it.
So the way that the FBI is organized, there's a headquarters building.
I actually have a picture of it on my screen right now because there's an article that's on my screen.
I'm like looking at the Hoover building.
I'm like, there's a headquarters structure and then there's like 56 field offices and each one of those field offices has a person called the special agent in charge, which is a senior executive service role.
They're off the GS pay scale and they become a bonus based, you know, they have a certain amount of money they make and then they get a tiered bonus.
And the bonus works if they hit all the metrics.
Imagine this like traffic cop getting all of his speeding tickets in, but we're talking about now like the mayor or the police chief in this case.
If all the officers go green and get all the speeding tickets they're supposed to give out.
So that's going to be your counterterrorism guys, your counterintelligence guys, your white collar crimes, your drugs and gang squads and so on and so forth.
And they get all kinds of weird incentives.
So it's like, did every single squad supervisor take all of their agents to three diversity events?
This is how this is when the task and the purpose are divorced.
So the way that this happened is sometime in the mid-2000s.
So it may have been like 2000, somewhere between 2008 and like 2014.
I can't, there is an answer to this.
I just don't remember it.
This consulting firm called McKinsey came in and they're a major consulting firm and they do big dollar work and they come up with all kinds of like really great ideas, I'm sure, for corporations, but also really bad ideas for government.
And what they wanted to do was do measurable corporate C-suite-like outcomes with financial incentives for government employees, which is like the worst idea you could come up with.
And the way that it works is that every FBI field office, and so think of the field office as being run by this special agent in charge, the senior SES, and that person, you know, has all these underlings, but all the underlings are working to make this SAC, you know, get the bonus because when they get promoted, they're going to take the people up with them that were in their chain of command.
What they do is they negotiate with headquarters about what the metrics need to be for them to be able to hit.
And so they go, last year you had 215 terrorism investigations for, you know, for jihadis.
This year, we think you might have 265.
And then he goes, oh, you know, we're looking at the package here and what we've seen in our chatter.
And I think we can probably only get like 235.
And they go, okay, we're going to hold you accountable for 238.
And then they'll hold them accountable for all these other different things too.
One of the things they get rated on is how fast do they respond?
Do certain people like me respond to an email that comes in about what's called a threat to life.
So if a crazy person picks up the phone, calls 1-800 FBI tips and says, you know, somebody is coming to kill, fill in the blank person, okay, whoever it is.
And then the operator there takes it in and goes, like, okay.
And like, you know, what's your source of information?
And be like, the man in the moon talks to me every single night and he whispers sweet little threats to me and I know who it is.
And that person goes, okay, so they write this up: crazy person, man in the moon, threat to life, send it down to the squad that handles the threat to life.
And then it goes to me where I'm working in my little remote agency.
I'm, you know, in a satellite office.
So I get the email.
It's like Saturday.
If I don't answer that in like 24 hours and reach out to that person or interview that person or call them up and have some sort of positive movement on that, then there's like, it goes from green to yellow.
And then after a couple more days, it goes from yellow to red.
So you've got people that are running around trying to talk to wackos and crazy people that are trying to do real serious work because somebody wants to keep their metric clean on the threat to life.
And almost all these are garbage.
And by the way, whenever you find out, like this person was known to the FBI and they were, you know, they were previously whatever investigated, almost all the crazy people that eventually do something crazy, they've been reported during one of these times, but you just can't have indefinite investigations into weirdos.
So I mean, I used to work in Round Rock, right, where you guys are like out of.
And so like I was at Dell and I would get the same kind of angry people calling in and I'd have to be nice to mean people who'd be really pissed off that they bought a printer, but the printer didn't have infinite ink with it.
And you're like, okay, man.
So then you, yeah, you're talking to people that sometimes are just unhinged.
So they're doing customer service.
The problem is, is that's how January 6th got kicked off.
Hundreds and thousands of people.
I think at one point in time, we had over 500,000 outstanding leads.
Like 500,000 people called from around the country and also around the world.
And they made allegations.
Like, I saw this person's picture and it looks just like this guy on Facebook.
And he says he likes Ronald Reagan.
So you guys should go kick down his door.
And the problem is a lot of FBI agents read that and went like, oh, okay, I better go knock on that guy's door and find out what his deal is.
And maybe that guy didn't go to January 6th, but he knew somebody who did.
And it led to somebody going to prison over it.
Meanwhile, if you give me that lead and I read it and it's like some wacko who has no allegation or information that a federal crime took place, my answer is that like without an allegation that this person did something illegal, then what we're talking about here is a First Amendment protected activity.
And making the allegation that somebody attended a political rally is a First Amendment protected activity.
So this is what happens when you get people that have sort of left the why.
They've left the purpose and they're just focused in on the task, like go and do these interviews.
And again, a lot of this stuff is just sort of like, it's an outgrowth from that 9-11 mentality where they were looking for IT.
They started looking for HVEs.
And then once you're looking inside your house, you might as well find the other thing, which is the thing most people are familiar with now, domestic violent extremists.
I see this because I'm an engineer and I work within companies.
I also do project management, also engineering at the same time.
So it's like, it's so weird to see the correlation with how some of these massive companies work and how efficient the processes are as well as the people.
And it does that exact same thing.
I was under the impression that the United States had more of its, you know, shit together.
And I though, I don't think, yeah, I don't think anybody should think that.
Most of the federal government employees are part of the federal jobs program.
I mean, they get hired, but they don't necessarily have.
We had this famously frustrating thing in my field office in Washington, D.C. I called it the nail room.
There were three ladies working there and they were supposed to be mailing packages and receiving things and sending evidence around the country and stuff like that.
We FedEx all the time or we're sending inner office mail of equipment and things like that.
And you'd walk in there and they were always just painting their nails, these three ladies, and they're just like, they're absolutely useless.
And if you ask them where our tax dollars at work, you are 100%.
All made, you know, they all made like between 50 and 75,000 a year.
And they'd been working there for 25 years, and they'd worked there for another 15 years.
They retire with 38 years on the books.
And the thing that they added to value was nothing.
They were just in the way.
So there's a lot of that.
And it's, you know, it's kind of scary, but it also, anybody who's ever worked with any government, like you've been into a DMV, just imagine at a bigger scale.
And the further the government is away from you, the less accountable it is from you because you're not going to run into people that run the FBI at HEB when you go grocery shopping, but you might run into the mayor of Leander or you might run into the mayor of, you know, my little town.
If you, if you're in Liberty Hill, you could go out there and find somebody who's sitting on the city council and you like look at him.
You're like, hey, A-Hole, like, I know what you did.
I saw what you voted.
We need a stop sign over here, like that kind of thing.
So it goes from like, you know, it goes from one to 15.
15 are your senior GS managers.
GS is general schedule.
It just means what you get paid.
And then they have what's called SES or senior executive service.
And I would, I would argue that the lower SES and the upper GS scale, so GS 14s and 15s, depending on the agency, and then that SES, they actually have it backwards.
So the SES 5, I think, is the lowest.
SES4 is the next.
And then like a Kash Patel or a Tulsi Gabbard would be like an SES one.
So the way that those things end up being is like, yeah, you're probably your SES three, four, and five.
And then your upper GS people, those are the people that are running it.
And it's kind of interesting because Tim mentions kind of the way that, you know, after a period of time, the system gets away from itself and it's serving a purpose, but doesn't even know why it's doing these things in the first place.
Let me hone in on that because after 9-11, particularly in the federal law enforcement range, they started recruiting more Intel people.
And anybody who knows what Intel looks like, like, so if you have an engineering background, you know, there are different types of fields in different types of degrees.
And engineers tend to be pretty like either apolitical or a little bit more right-leaning because they're more logical thinking.
I spent two years in engineering school.
Not always the most fun people to go kick it with, but good thinkers, problem solvers, systematic approach, like that kind of thing.
And so right-wing mentality makes sense to them given, you know, they'd rather be fiscally conservative because they'd rather keep their own stuff.
Then you got the other side and the people that are doing geopolitical analysis, people that are doing complex national security type degrees, people that are getting in, becoming attorneys.
The longer you spend in school, the longer they have to sort of indoctrinate sort of a leftist ideology.
And there's a 95% slant in the academic population.
So, we're going to see the longer you spend in school.
If you have a master's degree or a PhD, you're very likely to have a lot more exposure to left-leaning ideology.
And so, the people that they recruited at the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Homeland and others, a lot of these people, especially the people that came into kind of the kinetic jobs, those more desirable law enforcement and analytical roles, they're left-leaning.
And they have been, and they have become recruited more and more.
Even the people that may come out of a military background, if people have ever met somebody who's been in the military that does a rotation out of headquarters as an officer, they go in as like a major or like a lieutenant colonel who is like your guy, and then they end up in the Pentagon and they get their, you know, they get their full bird and they come back and like you don't recognize them and they say weird things.
It sounds like a robot program them.
And you're like, what in the hell happens at the DOD when you get up to the Pentagon?
And just being in that orbit, Washington, D.C. in and of itself is just a weird animal.
It's a vortex between power and money and very, very left-leaning because every single thing there depends on government.
And so that's a left-leaning sort of idea.
So anyway, I just, that's how the capture, I think, happens.
And I think it's just, it's, it's, it's not, it's not evil and it's not nefarious.
It's just, you know, some guy who used to work for the FBI and used to have a podcast and now has a podcast used to say personnel are policy.
Apparently he forgot that when he got there, but I actually have a four-minute plan to be able to fix the entirety of the FBI.
And we gave it to Cash Battelle and apparently they don't want to do it.
But I could explain it to you guys and you would be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.
Like it would be, it's, it's actually not even that hard.
So now, in your own personal experience, because I think within your whistleblowing, you did point to certain things about senior management, but walk me through like what caused you to do to speak out.
What was happening that made you like, just explain the situation, because even I don't fully understand what was, what was said and what they ended up doing and coming after you for it.
So walk us through the whole whistleblowing incident and what the details surrounding that.
I was probably disappointed in the FBI within the first couple of hours of being at Quantico.
Like I got there and it was not hardcore.
It wasn't elite.
I mean, it's like 75th percentile and up type people.
So you get some really capable, you know, but you also get some just kind of rule following people that are just above average intelligence, but they're not, you know, they're not crushing everything.
So, you know, my first, within my first year, I was still technically on probation at the time.
They, they being my supervisor and her boss and the Washington Field Office counterintelligence office was having me look into Chinese FISA.
That's pretty much what I did.
I don't speak Chinese.
I don't have any background in Chinese culture.
I had a background as being a guy who like put my hands in people who were bleeding to death.
I was a paramedic and, you know, it's like, I don't know what I'm doing here, but I don't much care about China and I don't know anything about it.
And it was like, at least we should have a Chinese linguist on the squad, right?
No, no, we did not.
And so they gave me access to working, you know, intelligence operatives who were not domestic, they weren't in the United States, and they were not going after things that were classified.
So the things they were looking for didn't constitute a federal crime.
So I'm doing a non-criminal, non-U.S. based sort of like observation operation.
And the scary thing for me about doing that is that I ended up with a bunch of what's called FISA 702.
So there's two sort of pieces to FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows us to do, it's the national security version of a Title III wiretap.
So we can get phone calls, we can get your Skype calls, your video, and so on, but we also can read like your entire email box and stuff like that.
And so I'm getting, and I didn't know this was new, but that was new at the end of the Obama term.
In 2016, Obama actually updated and allowed the FBI to get raw FISA straight from the NSA.
So I'm reading through, you know, overseas operatives stuff.
And then I find out, like, of course, you're also going to get the Americans that are in there, you know, if they're communicating with Americans, which is what they're sort of targeting.
And there's no, what we call derogatory information on it.
It's just a, you know, innocuous, if somebody were to just email you, you didn't know what they were, you thought they were a business person, then maybe you're having a conversation about business.
And then there's this FBI a-hole who's sitting there reading all your stuff.
And then they can take your email address and see what other Chinese targets or whatever Russian targets or whatever Israeli or you know Iranian targets you might be talking to.
So if your name appears anywhere in collection, we can search for it.
And I went to my boss and I'm like, I don't understand what we're doing here.
And I don't understand how this is legal.
Like, I'm pretty sure that everything we do here is actually explicitly illegal.
I think it's called reverse targeting.
And reverse targeting is when you take somebody's name that appears in a non-defamatory or non-derogatory way, and then you plug it back into a targeting website that has access to all this information.
And then you go run a case on them simply because they showed up in a place with someone that you were investigating.
Again, circles off circles, like I was explaining at the beginning.
And that's what counterintelligence basically is.
And it's not necessarily even the fault of the agents doing it, if I'm going to be fair about it, because imagine if your job, if you are a TSA security worker and your job is to make sure no guns get on the airplane, right?
And so they send everybody through a metal detector that will beep if a gun goes through.
But you're, as a TSA agent, now told you're not allowed to use the metal detector to look for the presence of guns.
You have to find them another way, but don't let any guns on the aircraft.
You're kind of in this spot where like your job is to make sure nobody is spying on the U.S. and you're trying to do it in a right way, but the only tool that actually works to do the thing you need is the tool that you expressly can't use in that way.
And so, you know, I brought this up to my boss.
I'm like, what the hell are we doing here?
Like, I don't understand actually.
And I said, What do we do with this information?
Because a lot of these people are not committing crimes, even if you go out there and find out they're talking to spies, which you're allowed to do, it turns out.
If you're not doing espionage, if you're not trading technology or doing something illicit or immoral.
So, anyway, I brought that up then and I told them I really couldn't see myself doing that work very long.
My boss and I had this really funny conversation.
She sits me down at about, I think I've been there for about 13 or 14 months.
And she gives me one of these classic, like, corporate, this is like the legacy of corporate stuff.
She's like, Kyle, where do you see yourself in the next five years in this organization?
You know, that kind of thing.
And I go, um, if I'm still on this squad by June, then I'm going to resign.
That's where I see myself.
Like, I see myself not working for you or this part of the organization or anything to do with whatever you guys are doing here.
I just, I'm not going to do it.
And so she's like, oh, you're so funny.
It's like, no, no, I'm serious.
I told my wife, I was like, we're going to have to, I'm going to find another job.
We just bought this house.
We moved out here.
We got a baby.
I can't do this stuff.
This is crazy.
Like, I'm not going to do that.
And so at the 18-month mark, she ended up, my daughter was sick at one point.
I got called.
My wife calls me.
I go home.
I take sick leave, you know, for a sick kid.
And my boss calls me at like seven o'clock at night.
And she was atrocious.
And she's a senior manager now.
She's like all the worst people.
And so she calls me up and she was like, Hey, you didn't send me like a sit rep for your cases.
And I go, Well, there's nothing that needs to be reported that can't be reported tomorrow.
And my daughter was sick and I went home because we had to take a shit of fever.
And she was like, You need to have that report to me before nine o'clock tonight, or I'm going to take steps to fire you, which they can't even, they can't even do that.
Um, they can't actually call you back to active work if you're on sick leave.
There's no mechanism in federal employment law that allows you to do that, particularly as a federal employee.
But I'm not going to play that.
So I drive into the office like 45 minutes and I go and I work up this report.
And basically, the report is that there's nothing to report because I've been doing training and I was out of the office for a couple of days doing some work stuff that was unrelated to my cases.
So there's nothing to, there's no updates.
And there's not always updates on these kind of cases.
They're very slow.
But she wanted to, you know, brief somebody about how great her squad was.
And so she needed me.
And so I'm like, okay.
I wrote that up and then I started compiling every single conversation we had.
And I ended up going to the people at the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is like the kind of like internal affairs.
I go, Hey, I got this whole binder of all this stuff my boss is doing.
She's breaking federal employment law.
She's doing all this like terrible management stuff.
Can I get out of here, please?
And they ended up giving me the job at the surveillance squad because nobody wanted to do it.
And so I'd been asking for six months to be transferred out there.
And when I broke probation and left, sort of like her purview, they immediately sent me to this, to this other space.
So I got out of there and I started doing whistleblowing there too.
I was like, immediately I found out they were not paying people overtime.
They were scheduling people for overtime and then stealing from them.
I think we did the numbers on it over three years.
I think the federal government owes me, I don't know, tens of thousands of dollars in overtime because they would have us work like 16, 18 hours or not hours, 16 or 18 days in a row with no break.
And then you'd come back in and then they'd be like, oh, well, just like say that you're not working on these days when you actually are supposed to be working.
Like you just don't come in, but claim that you're working then.
And I, and I went to, um, I went to senior management with this whistleblower activity who says, look, if I'm out there doing surveillance on a day that I'm not supposed to be working and my time card says I'm not working and I've sworn that I'm not working on that day because every time you do a time card, federal government, you swear in a test that it's true.
So now you have a sworn statement that I wasn't working on this day, but now I'm also generating like evidence that some guy was doing drug deals or some terrorist was like, you know, buying a gun or whatever other crazy stuff that we're documenting.
So you're going to show that I was not working.
And also I claim that I was working.
And all they do is they put that on as a defense and they say, which, which time were you lying, Agent Serafin?
And then I'd have to go, oh, I was lying about the time card because I was totally watching your client.
And they go, cool, what other things have you lied about?
And then you have what's called Giglio.
Then you can never testify again.
So I brought that up in 2019.
And I just kept doing these small little sort of whistleblower activities inside my chain of command, which is what your chain of management is more accurate.
So I started doing this and it wasn't going anywhere.
Like none of this stuff ever, you know, they just basically take your letter and they throw it away and then they don't pay the overtime and they don't fix the problem, which is more problematic.
So all of that kind of gets me to the point where 2021, I moved to a new office in New Mexico and I was really thrilled to be there.
We bought a beautiful house in the middle of the desert up against the mountains.
My job was cool.
I was working on an Indian reservation doing like major crimes.
So death investigations, sexual assault, stuff like that, like, you know, bad guys locally where you could actually make a difference in some small people's lives.
And nobody in DC cares about Indian crimes.
That's what they call it.
So it's like the smallest kind of red-headed stepchild of the FBI.
So I'm not going to be in a political space, I didn't think.
And then I get one of my coworkers comes up and he goes, hey, man, did you see this email?
And I go, no.
And he goes, I'll send it to you.
Well, it wasn't meant to come to me in the first place.
It wasn't meant for people at my level.
And it really wasn't meant for his level, to be fair.
It was something that the senior executives had come up with.
They sent it down to the heads of the field offices.
And it turns out the head of my field office, a guy named Raul Bohanda, sent it down to all the supervisors that worked for him.
And what it said was, is that the FBI was going to be creating a threat tag, which was EDU officials.
A threat tag is like a hashtag.
So it's like a searchable little tag in an investigation or in a part of an investigation.
So people can go and find like, oh, there's this thing in it that I'm looking for.
And in this case, EDU officials referred to threats to school board members, which is not generally speaking a federal crime, but it was something that the National School Board Association had asked Merrick Garland to do.
And then he went under oath and said that they weren't going to use any counterterrorism tools.
But the email that we got was signed off on by the assistant director of counterterrorism.
So that internal watchdog problem that we were talking about, that sort of like self-licking ice cream cone where you start taking the watchtower and you're looking for bad guys overseas that are doing bad stuff overseas.
And then you see the inside guys that are doing the stuff from overseas domestically.
And then you start looking for domestic terrorists called DVEs.
They started pointing it at parents.
It's like, I'm a parent.
What the hell are we doing here?
So, and more importantly, the attorney general lied about it under oath, as far as I could tell.
So my allegation that I made in October of 2021 was that he lied under oath about using counterterrorism resources against parents at school boards, which is an explicit problem.
Like there are ways you could investigate some parents that are protesting at school boards if they're making threats on the internet.
It's called interstate threats.
So there's, there are some federal statutes, but it's definitely not like to the level the FBI should be paying attention to nationally.
And more importantly, you can't lie about it when you're under oath in front of Congress.
So that's what I brought up.
And then while I was there, I just dished them like pages and pages of crazy stuff that had been going on for the last couple of years about FISA 702, like we kind of brought up a little bit, the access the FBI had to raw databases.
I mean, I just, I just dumped on the stuff.
I told him about stuff that was going on at the Afghan refugee camps because that was the big news of the day at the time.
And for my troubles, I ended up being suspended indefinitely over something that was not a suspendable offense.
In fact, they should have given me a high five for it.
I just told a local cop that I wasn't going to obey not law when we were standing on federal land.
I was shooting on public land and he told me, go somewhere else.
You know, could you go to the range?
And I go, no, I don't think I can do that.
And, you know, I'm allowed to do it.
And here's the state law.
And I'm not trying to be a problem for you, but, you know, other people shoot here too, including my neighbors.
So, you know, I had a paycheck and I was living out there.
I hadn't even been there a year and a half.
And I have to look around.
My wife and I decide like, okay, well, it also was related to the COVID shot scenario.
And I wasn't going to get those at all.
And my wife is a big pro-life advocate.
She actually converted to Catholicism and Christianity in general.
She actually was baptized the day before they took my badge and my gun.
So I actually think there's a faith component that really kind of stepped in for me.
But we're sitting here and it's like, okay, I told her, I was like, I'm not going to get the shots and I'm not going to kowtow to them.
And I'm going to be on the radar.
And by the way, I went to Congress.
So they're probably going to try to screw me over.
And she was like, that's okay.
I go, okay, well, we're going to lose the job.
So we did.
They suspended me and then they suspended my pay June 1st of 2022.
So, we made a decision right away.
We're not going to have like a mortgage hole in the bucket.
We're going to get out of this problem.
We're going to keep whatever net worth we have.
We're going to go ahead and try to pull whatever equity we have out of our house, and then we're going to try to figure out what to do next.
So, we put the house on the market, which was crazy.
And then I did another kind of wacky thing where I went and I actually accidentally sort of subverted a federal case against Project Veritas and James O'Keefe.
Where I flew out to Washington, D.C. in May while I was still on the payroll and I sat down with O'Keeffe and I explained some things that were, I think, violations of federal law being done by the DOJ.
And it turns out the DOJ agreed because they ended up dropping the case against Project Veritas.
So, we saved them a little bit there, just explaining that they had lied in some court filings.
The FBI had said one thing, the DOJ said another.
But that was all done kind of like hidden.
And so, the FBI is investigating me, trying to find me and trying to screw me over.
And like, we were worried about getting killed in our sleep and all the other dumb things that you don't know if it's real or not, but it seems like it could be.
So, I slept with a rifle next to my bed.
My wife did too.
And then we decided to sell the house.
We got offers.
We closed.
We sold the house having nowhere to move into.
I didn't have another house.
I didn't have another job.
So, I couldn't tell anybody, like, here's my income.
Let's go buy another smaller place or something else.
So, my wife and my kids, and I had three at the time, drove out to Arizona to go stay with my folks in their three-bedroom little house, you know, with our family of five.
And I drove straight down to the airport in El Paso with no home, left my truck, and I flew to Miami and I took a car up and I sat down and did my first interview with Dan Bongino, which is very bizarre.
I mean, like, full disclosure, when I met Dan for the first time, he told me he was going to keep my story alive, that he was going to fight for me like an advocate.
He didn't need the money.
He had all this money from Rumble.
And so, like, that was, you know, that's a great thing to tell somebody.
And I felt good to know that there was a kind of a loud voice that was going to make sure I wasn't going to fall down.
Because most people who go out and speak out against the federal government, you don't really hear from them very much and then they get destroyed.
So I, I, uh, yeah, Bongino and his wife, uh, you know, agreed, wanted to interview me.
I didn't necessarily want to do this.
They actually talked me into this.
Look, look, here's the deal.
I didn't want to do any of this stuff in public.
I didn't want to have a studio here.
I didn't want to run a podcast.
No one knew who I was on purpose.
Like I was 41 years old with no social media and that was not an accident.
You know, the only people I followed on Twitter is I bookmarked their page on, you know, on twitter.com so I could review what they had posted.
But like I didn't, I didn't have an account anywhere.
I didn't have a Facebook and none of that and on purpose because I thought it was toxic and I still do.
And even though I do it and I make money on it, I hate it.
Like I hate what we've become as a society.
If I could push a button and go back to the 80s, I'd do it.
So intentionally, I didn't want to do this.
Bongino went out on his podcast multiple times and said, you know, to whoever the whistleblower is or the men or women that are doing this, like I'll give you the protection of the microphone.
Come out and speak.
I've got some clips that I could show you guys at some point.
I'll send them over.
But essentially, he begged for someone to come forward and put their face to the FBI whistleblower, you know, things that Jim Jordan and others were talking about because no one knew who they were.
And I knew who they were.
Like I knew who I knew I knew about a third of them.
And so he said it'd be really powerful if we could get someone to really be the face of what's what's going on in this corruption.
And then Carrie Pickett, who's a friendly journalist over at the Washington Times, I talked to her the other day for about an hour or two.
Carrie Pickett called me up.
She said, look, I'm friends with Dan Bongino.
He's asking you to go on his show.
Would you consider doing that?
Like, he doesn't know your name, but he knows that you exist.
And I said, I'd have to talk to him.
So I ended up having this conversation with Dan with a producer.
Dan ends up talking to me for about 45 minutes as I'm sitting out doing the final touches, my punch list as I'm selling my house.
And I agreed to fly out there and do the interview.
So I went out there and, you know, my, my interactions with Dan personally are pretty limited.
We were on the phone a fair amount.
We were, I did maybe 20 radio interviews with him.
I probably did six times on his Fox show.
I was on his podcast three, four times.
So we had a lot of professional interactions that way.
But Dan, every single time he talked to me, learned something about the FBI because he never worked there.
And so you can't fake having five years of time in the DC area.
So and this may, this may be a fun time to get into kind of the weird part.
I didn't realize there's another part of the FBI until a couple of days ago.
And I probably should have because I do this for a living now.
Margot Cleveland wrote a piece in June of 2025 called the FBI's ability to disappear evidence that calls for transparency stat.
And I didn't catch it.
It's in the Federalist, which I don't always read.
And then it goes on the sub headline is the FBI used prohibited access coding on a widespread basis.
The ramifications would be enormous.
Well, I worked at the FBI for six years.
I was unpaid for 14 months after that.
So they considered me an employee for like almost eight years, seven and seven and change.
And I never heard of prohibited access.
That wasn't a thing.
There's no such thing as a prohibited file.
And I asked people who had been there for nine years and they'd never heard of it.
And I asked a guy who'd been there for 15 years.
I asked a guy who was a supervisor doing national intelligence work for 20 or for 12 years.
He'd never heard of it.
Then I reached out to somebody who had been in a position at the Hoover building and he was like, it's a thing, but it used to be something we thought was just a legend.
We didn't know it was real.
We just thought it might exist.
A prohibited access file is kind of like the Pirates of the Caribbean when Johnny Depp is explaining where the Isla de la Muerta is, whatever it's called.
Right.
It's the island that can only be found if you already know where it is.
And if I search it, it pops up and then I can go in there and I can read all the stuff in it.
And it's like, that's a file.
So no big deal.
And then some of them are restricted.
And that means I can search it and I can find the name and I can find out what it's about and I can find out who's involved in it, but I won't be able to read the stuff that's inside of it unless I'm part of the access roster.
And then some of them are public, but the access roster are the only people who can contribute to it.
So I could read it, but it's like read-only permissions on a, on like a shared drive, but I don't have edit capabilities.
So those are some of those.
Prohibited files, you'd need to know the URL, which is essentially, this is like a, you know, it's like an online type cloud-based database.
You'd need to know the URL of the case.
And if you found it, if you happen to have that URL written down on a piece of paper and you pulled it up and you weren't part of the access roster, then you wouldn't even be able to see anything at all.
So these are deniable operations that don't even really exist.
And they're not being run by anybody that would be able to know about it.
They're not auditable.
And here's where it gets problematic for people that are constitutionalists.
They're not going to be FOIAable because they won't show up in a FOIA search.
They're not going to be something that shows up in discovery.
If they had exculpatory evidence that said that you didn't do something, but it was a prohibited access file, then it wouldn't show up.
Let's say maybe you did a green light of a dirty operation where you allowed, let's say, I don't know, like some child sex trafficker or somebody that was involved in like minors that were underage prostitutes compromising politicians so you could get information.
You could put that in a prohibited access file and you would never have to show that you approved it or allowed it to happen on your on your watch.
I had a, I had about a, like kind of a washed over breakdown last week when I started kind of looking at the implications of this.
Uh, so J.A. Hoover leaves the bureau, he dies, and they leaves it in the hands of the next director, and that's someone who's appointed politically, right?
And so then we started getting these political terms that were 10 years long.
They're supposed to go past any one president, supposed to be apolitical.
So you start getting like politician types, judges, and lawyers, and friends of politicians and stuff like that get appointed in.
So how does the FBI insulate itself?
Because, you know, the original FBI under Hoover, allegedly, they were paper files.
There's a lot of stories about this.
He had a female secretary that maintained an entire cabinet, you know, rank of paper files of blackmail and all the kind of dastardly deeds people had.
And he could lean on it to protect the FBI from the outside world.
And there's a guy named Mike Waller who's worth talking to at some point.
Waller did like a biography on Hoover.
He taught me things I didn't know about Hoover, but essentially he said that even though Hoover was kind of a gangster, which is what he was, he was a gangster that protected the FBI's core mission and he did what he thought was right for America.
And so he kept both politicians, left and right, kind of out of the work of the FBI.
And so generally speaking, they went after just like communists and whatever he thought was the problem.
And so that was kind of, it didn't really affect people in a major way, especially not people that were in the mainstream left or right.
Well, what happens when you don't have Hoover there anymore?
The deputy steps up.
And the first deputy director after Hoover was a guy named Mark Felt.
And when you start applying the idea of a prohibited file and off-books investigations and the idea that this sort of organization now has a digital way of doing the same thing that it did forever, paper, burn on read, access, you know, operational personnel, the only ones who know about it and everybody else is deniable.
There are operations that have been told happened under Comey that included targeting of Donald Trump.
And so the political animal, that third FBI that I didn't really realize was out there, and it doesn't have to be very big, but if that's the priority of what the deputy director does, and as we talked about that kind of mission creep and maybe even more importantly, the sort of political bias of the Bureau has changed as they brought in more and more Intel people.
A lot of the people that have ended up in that deputy director spot have come out of the New York field office, which is interestingly corrupt.
There's a guy named Charlie McGonagall, which I kind of told Tim about earlier, but Charlie McGonagall was famous for being convicted for taking bags of cash to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And he was getting them from legitimate Albanian spies on behalf of Russians or God knows what.
And so he's in prison right now, but he was never charged with espionage because they take care of each other.
And I've been told that's pretty much the deal.
So, you've got this weird animal in the New York field office, which, by the way, is the ones that have the ear of Kash Patel and almost all the guys.
The current deputy director of the FBI, his name is Chris Raya, came out of the New York field office most recently.
He was the Adick up there.
And so, you get this sort of like this pathway.
Andy McCabe was a New York field office guy, Paula Bate, New York field office guy.
So, you end up with these guys that come out of what we call the New York mafia, which is really what we call it inside the bureau, where they all kind of anybody who worked in the New York field office kind of looks out for and knows guys that came out of New York.
And it's kind of a little, it's a click within the bigger agency.
I know it's so the problem for me on that is it's more personal, but it also like it's the hypocrisy angle.
And so this is just for people's awareness.
I'm not just speaking out of turn here.
I sat and had dinner with Kash Patel January of 2023.
We spent most of the day together and I sat at a dinner table with just two other people, three other people.
It was Cash and two others.
And we talked about the FBI director using the private jet.
He helped me get in touch with Josh Howley as a whistleblower.
And I called out some very specific abuses that Chris Ray had.
People can go look up my name and look up the Daily Wire piece that came out in January of 23.
And so about four days after Kash Patel and I were sitting at that table, they ended up putting out a really good investigative piece showing the millions of dollars that Chris Ray squandered on the jet.
And Kash Patel went out and did that famous talking with Glenn Beck and saying, hey, you know, I'm ground the jet.
He shouldn't have this taxpayer-funded jet for vacations, all the stuff.
Cash was very anti-government jet abuse right up until the moment when he got access to it.
So for me, it's about hypocrisy.
But he personally, he and I have had conversations about this.
And you guys can look, but in November of 2022, Josh Halley called Chris Ray to the carpet using my letter, which I've put out on X. People can read the letter.
And the first sentence says, I got your name from Kash Patel.
And then it's me going to Josh Howey's office.
So a lot of this stuff ends up people are like, oh, you're bitter because you're a former employee.
It's like, I'm not bitter.
I just don't like it when people lie to me.
I'm not trying to be a jerk about it.
But if you lie to me to my face and we had a conversation about something and then you hypocritically act in a certain way, I'm going to find that kind of offensive.
And I think the American people in general, that's why this hit.
Anyway, Patel tried to spin that whole like hockey thing.
And he did so by releasing, oh, they were spying on my, you know, the FBI spied on me and they did this stuff and they put it in prohibited access files.
And they did the same thing to Susie Wiles.
And it's like, that was actually the bombshell last week, but nobody actually realized what the implications are.
And now you guys are kind of getting a taste of it.
It'll take days for you to kind of digest what it could mean to have an unaccountable, funded program that cannot be audited, is not accountable to congressional oversight, and doesn't actually even have to be read to the FBI director who goes out in front of Congress because then you have a director who has plausible deniability.
You've only seen an FBI deputy director in front of Congress, maybe once because it was Dan Bongino, and once Paula Bate, who was the previous one, did it.
If you'll eat bacon and you'll eat beef and you'll eat dairy and you'll eat a bun without crying about gluten allergies, like you're essentially the most common part of our dominant culture.
If I give you a burger at a backyard barbecue and I say, do you want cheese on that?
And the answer is yes, which is most people, and I worked in restaurants a lot.
Maybe a week and a half ago, maybe two weeks ago, somewhere in the last 14 days, we found out Dropsite News was the first one I saw publishing it.
Megan Kelly did a piece on it as well.
So good for her.
I'm not a big fan of hers, but good for her on this.
And they pointed out that the, and I did this with, I did this with Alex on InfoWars.
We talked about how the Israeli permanent mission to the UN was providing physical and technical security surveillance for Epstein's apartment in New York.
And that's just one piece of information, but it tells us a lot of things.
Everybody's always said, well, Epstein belonged to intelligence.
They cited a 2008 alleged conversation that Alex Acosta may have had with some unnamed Trump staffer, but we can't substantiate where that happens.
So how do you get that connection to say, okay, well, he obviously was working with Intel services?
It's really simple.
Most consulate jobs, most permanent missions to the UN, most embassies have some intelligence capability associated with them as well.
You're going to have diplomats coming in with dual hats.
It's known as official cover.
So you're a spy full-time, but you're listed as being the so-and-so attache or you're the so-and-so advisor or whatever.
If you're doing security and you're doing so in the United States for a foreign country, you are most likely dual-hatted with the Intel service from your country.
So it doesn't matter whether it's Shinbet or whether it's Mossad or whether it's IDF components, whatever, some version of intelligence from the Israeli side would have been involved and Epstein would have been a very good get when it comes to a Intel sort of target.
Okay.
You want to find people that have money, that have access, that have power.
When you evaluate people for source placement, the two things we want to know are what's your placement and what's your access?
So are you physically in a place where you might rub shoulders with the people that I would want to know about?
And then do you have access to those people to be able to make questions of them or engage in conversations or introduce things?
And Epstein most likely was probably an access type agent or what we call a cutout sometimes.
So he doesn't have to be the center of all the things, but he's like the center of his wheel with many spokes coming out that you can connect people to.
And if you have the Israeli security involved in that, and we know that they did because that's what the emails say, that the Israeli mission was involved in physical security at his apartment.
Well, that means that the CIA is involved, and so is the FBI, and so is the NSA, and probably some others, maybe DIA as well.
I don't know.
But you know for a fact that we are not letting the Israelis run something where we have access to an American citizen in the United States in the single biggest FBI footprint for counterintelligence, which, by the way, also apparently they're susceptible to bribes and other weird stuff.
But you're not going to let an operation run in your backyard without having your own sort of hooks into it.
Now, whether that's overt or covert is another animal.
But there is no question in my mind that the FBI would have known what he was up to, that he would have been a significant target for counterintelligence purposes just because of all the people that he had and the amount of travel he did.
He also would have been a target for the CIA for what's called NR or National Resource, which is their domestic wing.
NR basically goes and finds American business people and travelers, like you know, missionaries and stuff like that, and bumps them and says, Will you represent us overseas if we need an introduction to like, I don't know, somebody in Nigeria?
Or could you hand this thing off to this person when you're overseas for us?
And we'd love to pay your, you know, would you do it to help us out?
Or we have this bad, you know, derogatory stuff on you.
So you sound like a crazy person, Kyle, because the government told me that Epstein never trafficked anybody.
One 17-year-old made a mistake.
It is, it is what it is.
I mean, the official narrative on Epstein is so crazy compared to just like the minor amount of unredacted stuff that we have, half of the released emails.
I think there's two ways that we know that we're being lied to dramatically.
Thing number one is we were told that there were no co-conspirators.
This is the memo going back to July of last year that was released in the Axios leak of it.
There are no co-conspirators.
Kash Patel said as much under oath.
There are no additional indictments pending and nobody else did anything wrong, right?
He trafficked to himself.
The problem is, we've seen north of a dozen very high-profile people who are getting destroyed overseas.
We had a member of the royal family.
We had a former prime minister of Norway.
We had ambassadors in the UK, and they're all getting sopped up and arrested.
And they're all resigning from board positions that are lucrative.
They're selling off their companies.
We're seeing people in the United States do the same thing, whether it be Kathy Rumler has done it.
She was with the Obama administration as a fixer or something to that effect.
She was an attorney, right?
We're seeing Karp, Brad Karp.
We're seeing various other people in law firms step away from their more lucrative positions in their public face.
And they did so why?
Because they just sent flirty text messages to Gillay Maxwell like 15 years ago, or maybe because their name in the files is embarrassing to everybody, but everybody could just get context.
Like imagine if you said you're like, they find out Kyle Seraphin's name's in the files because I talked about it on a podcast.
They'd go, your name's in the files.
I go, yeah, because I talked about it in a podcast.
There's a place called Press.tv or Press TV or something like that.
And Press TV was the official state-sponsored media of the Iranian government, which is undoubtedly going to be compromised by some of their intel assets because that's just what you do.
When Press TV reaches out to me and sends me a DM, that's enough predicate for the FBI to open a full investigation into me being targeted by the Iranians and they can get everything I have.
They can get my bank records.
They can get my emails.
They can get my DMs.
They can get all my social media.
They could probably go get all my phone tolls and stuff like that, right?
And they could do it under an overt or whatever.
There's no question with just the physical capabilities of the Irani or the Israelis at Epstein's apartment that there's not going to be a full CI investigation either because he's a potential victim or because he's a potential bad actor.
So there has got to be stuff on there and it's not showing up.
So I know that they're holding back things that are going to be substantial.
And then we find out that there are these prohibited files.
And again, if you had a guy operating like Epstein in the backyard, here's the last part of it.
You have to understand.
The job of senior executives in the bureau, specifically, I'm sure this is true for other agencies, but this is my personal insight into that little space.
When you get to about GS15 or you become an SES 5432, your primary goal is to try to figure out how to take your $180,000 to $250,000 a year government salary and retire and make a half million, three quarters of a million or a million dollars a year.
That's your primary goal.
How do you get out of here and monetize this to live the way that you always felt like you should?
Because you were a king of the universe.
You were the special agent in charge, the top law enforcement guy for the FBI for a whole huge region, let's say.
You think that you should now be.
So that's how you end up with people that are at Twitter or they're at Meta or they're at, you know, my, the woman who suspended me forever, who is a world-class piece of garbage, who couldn't even recognize that her own husband was a pedophile and he went to jail for child pornography while she was an FBI agent.
She managed to stay on.
Then her second husband died of cancer from 9-11.
And eight days after she buried him, she became my boss as one of the most, probably most powerful people in Washington, D.C.
She was in charge of the Intel division on 9-11, sorry, on January 6th in the Washington field office of the FBI.
So that should have been a catastrophic failure.
She ended up as the number four person in the entire FBI.
She was in charge of all human resources and all training and all sort of management there.
And she's a bimbo, man.
She's like a dim-witted, blonde, like day drinker, like a white wine, just complete disaster area.
And people told me, like, she would come into work drunk.
I think it actually involves, wouldn't it be nice if somebody made a phone call and said, hey, one of ours is leaving and we're going to need a spot over there.
It'd be a real shame if somebody knew what your particular appetites were.
The stuff that's going on in whatever we've had, one, Epstein is not a one-off.
He's indicative of sort of a bigger problem, which is that we have unaccountable bureaucratic types that work in the that work in the intel agencies and they trade in information.
Information is their version of power.
Some people in the banking world, they can move money, you know, but Intel people, they trade in info on people and how it gets gathered and the technologies that come around it, which is why you keep finding spooks from the CIA and from the FBI's counterintelligence side.
They all end up over in places where there's information, whether it be at Meta or whether it be at Twitter, or that's what the Twitter files proved.
That a lot of these people are in jobs where you're like, why in the shit is a former CIA guy there?
Why in the shit is a former counterintelligence investigator working over there at a freaking social media place that's named after a bird that is basically a bunch of dudes like posting racist memes and shit talking each other.
Like, why is that?
Because of what it gives them access to.
And then the last part of that is, is that because they're part of the team and because they were always part of the team that came up underneath, you know, these agencies, they know that their job is to protect the agency because the agency put them where they are.
It's the basis of their credibility.
So, you ask, like, what is my concern?
My reach is so squished for a guy that has almost a quarter of a million followers on X. Everywhere I go, no matter what I do, it's always going to be dramatic.
I'll do a post and get 1,500 views or 2,500 views.
And it's absurd because I had that kind of reach when I had 10,000 followers.
I had someone show me some back end code that said I'm anti-kosher because of my bacon cheeseburger nationalist position, which by the way, is also anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu.
It's not anti-anything per se.
It just says the dominant culture of Americans is America.
Regular Americans who just don't that like I didn't grow up knowing any Hindu people, not that I have any beef with them in particular, but when they go, you should follow my religion.
I go, No, I'm going to have a steak.
That's what I'm going to do.
And I don't care what you think.
You know, it's like, I'm not trying to be mean to you.
Your dog could eat them and might if you, if you keep playing your cards right.
Look, I mean, at the end of the day, do I sleep with a gun everywhere I go?
Yes.
Did I take a did I take an AR-15 with me to church today?
I did.
I put it in my truck and I was like, I saw what happened in downtown Austin last night.
And we'll probably segue to this.
My view on the foreign stuff always has to come back to the domestic.
Like, I don't really care other than the money we're spending.
I'm not a big fan of us doing interventionalism anywhere.
I asked my buddies who have done a lot of geopolitics.
There's not a huge, there's no, there's no success you can point and be like, hey, what are we trying to achieve in Iran?
Oh, we're trying to do the blank model.
There is no blank model.
All the blank models are corrupted by either the CIA doing a bunch of shady stuff or regimes eventually coming and fighting us in the, you know, in the very near future.
So there's no like turnover regime shames where I'm like, oh, well, what we're trying to do is here's the golden example.
Yeah, we had a lot of failures, but we could do it like this.
There is no this, as far as I can tell.
Maybe somebody will educate me and tell me when did the United States topple another regime?
And then we got like a really great outcome out of it.
And you know what the craziest thing is and how I know there's no reform?
I know there's no reform because I'm currently suing the FBI.
In fact, I think we have a possible settlement talk coming up next week.
I don't have any high hopes.
I'm suing the FBI because I will never be able to be in law enforcement again.
They definitely blackballed my job.
When I was working there, I tried to leave and go somewhere else and I couldn't do it.
Like I got, I got the job.
I got shown my office and then I never got another call again from another federal agency that was going to take me on.
I was the senior person applying with the most experience, with the highest pay grade and veterans preference.
I'm a disabled vet, so like I get 10 points on the, on the hiring process.
And I got, I, they showed me where I was going to work.
My 30-minute interview was four hours long.
The guy was showing me on the map where I might want to live.
And then I didn't get the job afterwards.
They just never, they didn't hire anyone, by the way, because if they, if they hired someone other than me, I could have sued them.
So they just didn't hire anyone for that job because of the FBI.
So we're in the middle of a lawsuit where I have sued the FBI for their malfeasance under the COVID regime.
And so not only was I a guy who said I'm not going to get the COVID shot, which I wasn't going to get under any circumstances, I also told them that I wasn't going to get nasal swabs every 72 hours to prove I didn't have the disease that I didn't show any symptoms for.
I said it's inherently discriminatory.
I said I'm a Catholic and I don't need to tell everyone my religion by taking time off to go get my freaking nose swabbed three times a week because it goes to me, then it goes to my chief timekeeper, then it goes to my boss.
It goes to every single person in the office that knows where's seraphin always swabbing his nose.
So I refuse to do any of the COVID mitigation BS because it was obvious by the time they did this stuff under Biden, that is exactly, anybody could have gotten it, right?
So all of the stuff that I saw about the government overreach that happened under COVID is something that I can see happening under anybody.
It doesn't matter because the government always, like I said, task and purpose.
Its task is do what you're told.
We got orders from on high.
We're going to carry them out.
Nobody asked like, hey, is this wrong?
To the point where when I told my boss, hey, man, I'm not getting this test and I'm certainly not getting the shots.
He goes, Yeah, my wife's sick with COVID right now.
She got the shots.
And I'm like, Yeah, obviously.
He goes, What you're saying is correct.
What you're saying is right.
And I actually agree with everything that you're doing, but I can't back you up because I can retire in two years and that's when I'm going to get my pension.
And I have, he said, I got a mortgage and I also owe my ex-wife alimony.
I went through my own COVID experience because I lived in New York and I used to be more Democrat left-leaning because most African Americans are left-leaning by default.
Everything changed for me during COVID as well.
Specifically to what you're talking about with the vaccine and all those different things.
I didn't even have access to that information.
When you were in New York, you were like, you look at somebody like, I'm a slut shame.
You'll make sure that you wear that mask.
I'm going to make sure you get that shot.
And they told us specifically at school as an engineer that I could not go to classes.
I listened to every single thing because I'm going to be honest.
I believed full wholeheartedly in my government that people were adults and that were making, that they were making adult decisions and had my best interest in mind.
Just having this conversation with you right now just solidifies more and more to me that it's not okay to just put your head in the sand and just pretend like everything's okay.
The bride is supposed to carry something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.
I don't know where the hell this comes from or who said it or why anyone says it, but someone reminded me of it.
So I got my wife these three little bangle bracelets.
They were not very expensive.
They were hand stamped out by this cool lady on Etsy and they are little bracelets and they say something on the outside and they say something on the inside.
They're little messages.
And one of the messages, it said, from here on out, from here to like here until the end of time, on the inside, it says it's you and me against the world.
And like, that was the mindset of not just me, but also my wife.
We have this idea.
It's like, it's a biblical idea.
A man leaves his parents and clings to his wife and become one, right?
Like that is that my wife and I are inseparable on that.
Like I've had people go like, does your wife know you talk like that?
I'm like, there is zero daylight between my wife and I and our opinions.
If you heard her mouth, you would be terrified.
She, she swears like a sailor.
She says mean things.
She thinks all the worst things about you that I think too.
So, you know, just we're just, we are very, very closely aligned.
And when she said, don't get this shot under any circumstances, we'll figure it out.
I go, I'm going to lose the job.
She goes, I know.
I said, we're going to have to sell the house.
She said, I know.
I said, I don't know how I'm going to earn a living.
She said, you're going to figure something out.
I said, okay, we're going to, we're going to liquidate all the stuff we have.
We're going to have to, you know, start speaking out loudly.
And we're going to also lose our anonymity.
And that's the biggest thing that I told the Bureau in our lawsuit.
It's not that I lost the job.
And it's not that I lost my faith in government, which I did serve as a military veteran and I got about 10 years of military service and law enforcement combined.
So the time that I spent working for this organization, that's gone.
You know, I don't have any trust in that.
My five-year-old daughter, she's eight now, told me that the FBI is our enemy at five, gents.
She's way ahead of you guys.
She's way ahead of any of us.
Okay.
When that's where you're at, where you're five-year-old and you're four-year-old, and now my girls are, you know, eight and seven, and my son is about to be five and my youngest is two.
And they're all going to grow up knowing that the federal government is an enemy of this family because of what they did to this family.
And that doesn't mean that everybody who works there is, but the entity that is the federal government is not to be trusted with any power because they've already shown what they would do arbitrarily.
And you know, I feel the same way after what's been done to us with the government funding of the lawsuits.
Of course, all of it.
I mean, I know you cover that with my dad frequently.
For people that just want to be normal and just want to be good and just want to exist in the world and do their job and pay their taxes, they don't really want to confront the idea that something rotten is going on in the state of Denmark.
And you know what they did during that time period?
They made his father, they made everybody associated.
I didn't have the pleasure of knowing you during that time period, but had you been at this level at that point in time, they would have pointed to this group of people and they would have said, they are trying to deceive you.
Don't listen to these people, suppress them, make sure nothing that their agenda doesn't get pushed and they're liars.
So she lives in Connecticut and she's a nice lady and she's she's a good grandmother.
And I don't have negative things to say about her, but I think it's funny when she tells me something about Alex Jones.
And it's like, have you ever really listened to Alex?
I would never.
It's like, yeah, of course not.
God forbid.
I listen to everybody that I disagree with.
I do it on a frequent basis.
I do it intentionally.
I go listen to Rachel Maddow because I think she's what she's saying.
She's too smart to be saying the things she's saying because I think they are dangerously dumb.
But I listen to them because I want to know what she says.
If I have someone that I would think would be my enemy, and here's the other crazy thing, gents, I guarantee you this.
If we sat down and if I sat down with the most like extreme left-wing, you know, blue-haired lesbian in Austin, Texas, I guarantee we could find 75% of the things we would agree on that that are really actually important in life.
And so that, that is the real thing.
It's like, you've got me focusing in on minutia and stuff like hypotheticals that I have no, you know, I like, if I had the choice, if they're like, Kyle, you're king for a day, what would you do?
And I'm like, I'm repealing every amendment after the 15th, 16th and on.
Late 1780s, going into 1790, as they, as they approved the Constitution, it was that they were concerned they just had overcome what they thought was an oppressive government, which had nothing on what our government does.
And what they wanted to do was try to figure out how do we put in enough checks?
How do we put in enough roadblocks so that government can never get there?
And they came up with the Bill of Rights, which was the compromise with the anti-federalists who were correct in the end.
And up until we got to 1913, this country didn't have the ability for centralized power because it didn't have the ability to pull money.
They could convince it out of the states, but they couldn't directly tax the person.
And right about, I mean, that's what the 16th Amendment is.
For people who don't know, it authorized a federal income tax.
It was sold to the American people as a way to make sure the quote unquote rich paid their fair share.
Just think about where that comes from.
Think about what it means.
Once you sell that to people, and that's the oldest sin, right?
The first one is pride and the second one is greed or avarice, envy.
Take your pick.
It's a biblical problem where they sold it.
Like these rich people are not paying their fair share and they should be tapped and we should take money.
They actually sold the 16th Amendment to the average person saying that they were going to go after high net worth and high income individuals.
And what did it do?
It turned the working class and the poor into wage slaves.
The pop culture answer is that it's about Israel's sort of concerns.
I'm sure that some of it has to weigh in on some level, that it is an Israeli concern and a threat there.
The argument that Israel is essentially like the least expensive battleship or sorry, the least expensive aircraft carrier that we have in the Middle East, like there is an argument to be said that having bases there, fine.
I think it's probably more about China.
If anybody's kind of looking at the sort of a broader one, said it.
There's some significant sort of capabilities there.
That's the same reason I think that Venezuela needed to be done the way that it was.
So that all ends up being maybe Trump taking a broader and a more aggressive stance on China.
The issue is, and I do think that we have some antiquities that need to be handled.
Like the Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war, but it doesn't say how it can be done.
And so if we had a real serious government, if we had a government composed of adults that wouldn't go and try to make you stick stuff up your nose and get a shot that you don't want to get, we would have people that would say, look, in the modern information age, we need to have the ability to do a secret vote for declaration of war.
We need to authorize the president so he can take it to his office and he can go forward and declare war.
And anybody who exposes it prior to the first, like whatever the open attack is, is like, you know, going to be hung for treason, that kind of thing, because they're giving aid and comfort to the enemies.
And so we're going to put some real aggressive teeth in, but we should be able to declare war without everyone seeing it until we do it.
Well, look, I'm sitting in a this could be a bedroom or a media room in my rental house.
And so, yeah, again, this is the reason why, this is the reason why the signal can't be stopped.
This is what happened during COVID for whatever it's worth that will make, you know, however many thousand people end up seeing this thing.
The folks that are watching it are the reason why they can't pull over the bullshit on you anymore.
Excuse me, but this is why.
We watched people move the goalposts.
We saw, and there were enough logical, intelligent, capable thinkers who either got the shot or didn't, but looked at it afterwards and did like their own sort of like, um, you know, they did a post-mortem on their experience.
And they went, doesn't it usually take like a year before we get the uh the upstated death stats from every single place in the country?
How was someone running a real-time ticker of COVID deaths on the side of CNN and Fox News?
So, what we're talking about, though, is basically we watched the media apparatus.
We watched whatever the sort of governmental, you know, the governmental power that wanted to push forward something move their own goalposts that they set up.
And we watched them move it in real time and tell us that it didn't happen.
And in the age of the internet, in the age of searchable timelines and AI analysis of, you know, what were previous video clips, I can go to, I can go to X right now and pop into Grok and ask him, hey, what was a video clip when Donald Trump said that we shouldn't have war with Syria?
You know, what was Donald Trump's like, you know, five major speech points on what days, you know, was he talking about Iran and whether or not we should have war there?
Boom, And it'll tell me what network aired it and where it was.
And, you know, other people that spoke at the rally, like we have weaponized intelligence as well.
And until we have something like China has, where they can actually filter the internet for us, as long as we have a relatively open system, then they can't do that anymore.
And so they're working on outdated models of lies, which is why if you go to social media right now, whether it be on Facebook or Reddit, or if you go to X, what you'll see are swarms of people saying very similar messages that even if you didn't like the war, you have to support the troops.
Like, no, F you, dude.
I don't have to do anything.
I'm a citizen.
I don't have to do whatever you want.
And you can't grassroots this astroturf garbage and try to act like something that didn't get said previously got said.
It got said.
He said, no, no, wars.
We've already lost three people.
Those are three men, most likely, who will never be able to watch their children grow up.
I have friends that have, I have friends that, you know, that didn't come back to their kids.
And many people who are old enough to remember you got a GWAP veteran friend, you got somebody who didn't come back the same, or they, you know, have a buddy that, you know, my, my friend, uh, and how many of them have lost to suicide?
My buddy Garrett, also an FBI whistleblower, you know, he's been to like six funerals from guys from his from his Iraq unit.
Like he's, he's one of the last three or four guys left of 12.
There's just not many people that didn't, you know, they walked away not unscathed.
Got to think about what you've done, or what you've seen other people done, or what you've witnessed, or what you've witnessed your government do, right?
Like, they're the guys that want to have a bar fight for no reason.
They're the guys that like, you need to put them in a place that's dangerous so they can hurt other people because that's what they're good at.
And they're, they're, they're known as like the worst troops in garrisons.
You bring them home and they just like, you know, they screw other people's wives or they go rob a bank or like they just do like a logical or break glass in case of war type of people.
And we've always had those kind of people and we used to have a good place for them.
And, you know, there's only so many we can have.
But again, I also think that the mindset of having kind of like the dual-hatted, you know, warrior slash actual worker, the National Guard model, it turns out like we didn't have a standing army for a lot of the time that the United States was in existence.
Because you have the knowledge base to understand what happens behind the curtains, which is what we're looking for.
That's right.
But then you're also very critical of whoever's just doing wrong.
It's just wrong.
And you're not necessarily the beautiful part about this interview, is you did not try to spin it in a way that leaned towards a particular side just to appeal to a base.
I mean, my base are just regular people at the end of the day.
My base are parents.
Like, I talked to a guy the other day and he was super excited about analog life.
And he makes he makes t-shirts that are like, you know, 80s meme type whatever messaging.
And he hates the Republicans and he hates the Democrats.
He's just like a goofy, weird dude.
And he had all these wild theories.
He would have been a great like InfoWars watcher, probably.
And, you know, some of the stuff I'm like, I don't know if that's real or not.
But you know what?
He spent like six years working in the Navy on military intelligence stuff.
So he's got access to different information than I do too.
And he was just a wild zany dude.
But at the end of the day, you know what we had in common?
We both wanted our kids to be more educated.
We wanted them to be safe.
We wanted them to be happy.
We thought it was super cool when they learn neat skills.
His daughter was learning Latin and he was really excited about that.
And I remember learning Latin when I was a kid.
And I was like, yeah, it's freaking cool to have a parent look down and then want their kid to have something that they don't have access to or didn't have access to.
And he's given it to her.
And it's like, that's what America was about.
Can I give my kids a better life?
And this is my generation in particular, like people in their, like their 30s and 40s are looking at really one of the first Americas where they're not 100% sure they're handing them a better America.
Because everybody I know that's my age bracket and that goes down about five years younger maybe, maybe six or seven years younger, and certainly most of the people older than me.
If we could push a red button, that would get rid of the internet.
Yes, we wouldn't have this conversation.
Yes, we wouldn't have been able to meet this way, but we used to know people in real life.
We used to actually have like human relationships that were so much more real.
I'm talking about this a comedian, Gal Scalco, something like that.
Anyway anybody, somebody will put in the chat.
They'll know what i'm talking about.
He does this bit about how, back in the day when we were growing up, when I was growing up, if people came and knocked on your door and company showed up, like that was like a, that was a holiday, like that was an exciting moment.
Someone at your door It was like, we've got company.
And so, like, everybody's like, open the door, like, come on in.
Like, can you stay?
Would you like to have dinner with us?
You know, can we bring up some more chairs?
Like, we're so excited to see people at our door.
Imagine someone knocks on your door today, either of you.
How many of you are you psyched that someone's at your door?
And hopefully, people get some benefit out of that.
I hope they walk away with a couple points.
I used to do a lot of tactical training, and the guys that were the best, like Delta Force operators, FBI HRT, they're like, you can spend all week at something.
And that's a lot like doing a long podcast like this.
If you walk away with one thing that you learn that you can do later, you can apply, then you're winning.
And so, yeah, you're not going to remember everything we talked about.
But if you walk away with one thing of value, we're like, aha, I actually agree with this, or I don't agree with this.
And here's why, at least I know why I don't agree with it, then you win.
It's if it's like the mission is: hey, if you're working hard on something for a week, these special forces guys, if they guys, if they learn one thing, they're happy.
Especially with the deep dive that we're going to get into tonight.
should get a bigger one it should be a slightly bigger middle they should rename it trump the trump the trumpet he would totally do that 100 he would totally do that well let's play the uh trump lies the war in iraq we spent two trillion dollars thousands of lives we don't even have it iran is taking over iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world obviously it was a mistake so George Bush made a mistake.
Now, I don't doubt that there's some type of nuclear program in some capacity, but it's probably not the extent in which we have to have a new justification.
I don't trust the whole story is basically what I'm saying.
I think at some point they really were trying to develop a nuclear program, and they have done several attempts by killing their officials and the people who were developing that technology.
But there's always more to the story.
I think that's just one angle, but it's the one that's the scariest to latch onto, which justifies the reason, just like, you know, Venezuela and the drugs.
Okay, so here he's talking about the things that Americans really care about.
And this is one of the reasons why Americans, including myself, voted for.
We thought that we were going to focus on domestic things and fixing things for Americans and actually spending that money on things that would benefit us, right?
You cut the corporate tax rate.
That's $800 billion.
You send $600 billion to Ukraine and Israel.
At the end of the day, that's $80 trillion that you didn't spend on making the American people's lives better.
If you come out and criticize it and you say these people lied and people are dying, people will tell you that you're not trusting the plan, that you're not a fan of these people and that you're kicked off the team.
We don't want to be on your team.
We just don't want people to die ultimately, right?
Drop in freaking Delta Force, take out somebody's president, no casualties.
Grabbed and grab Maduro and then now take out like literally the top leaders, including the ultimate supreme leader, all in like such a, this is like two months.
It's like a two-month span.
This is absolutely insane.
This isn't something that we've ever really seen in such rapid succession.
And that's the thing I talk about the escalation is like, where does this end up, right?
And you can say, well, Russia and China are involved in their own things and they don't want to be involved, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's just like we talked about earlier with Syria, right?
Like there are second, third, fourth order causalities to these things.
And you go, well, why are we helping the Ukrainians?
Why are we doing this?
Massive loss of life, massive loss of treasure, massive loss of blood.
Well, we wanted to secure the Middle East for ourselves and Syria was a big part of that.
We had to get rid of Assad.
So even if it is a big loss for us, just because the Russians have to pull out temporarily and they don't have the support, if we can get one country to fall, we will do anything.
We'll literally do anything possible.
Like CIA people probably line up in the breach, get ready to die just so that one of these countries will fall.
Oh, be like, please, I'm on my deathbed.
I'm about to die.
Please let me do another suicide mission so we can topple Iran.
But here's the thing: you were right because I said this was going to happen last year, and then I stretched it over to January.
You said you think it's going to happen for sure.
You don't know when it's going to happen, maybe a little bit longer.
It's safe to say that Tim won the bet.
I think it was like three or four months from us initially having the conversation and having the slight argument about it, but can't argue with it now.
And I think it's like you say, going back to Venezuela, saying, like, this is all in two months.
Like, this is the start of a pattern that's going to continue on forward.
You know, but Iran's an Islamic Republic, which is what right, you know, so it's like, but Iran is different.
Iran has, and you can cut back to us, Andrew.
Iran has a deep tie with the religious culture.
Say what you want about Islam, but one thing they do not play around with is Islam and Allah in the name of God and all the things that come with the religious package itself.
Okay, yeah, and I'll cover where the that's Sula Monk, and I will cover where the bases are in the deep dive and show you specifically where we do have those bases in the Gulf states.
But like I said this early on the stream, and I'll repeat it again right now.
It shook me to my core because, you know, we look at it and we're so far removed from the events themselves.
But then as you start to grapple and see that it's escalating, and then you have people that are directly now involved.
Like I have one of my friends over there, my friend group left literally like two to three weeks ago.
They said he's going to, he said he's going to go out there for nine months.
They're stationing him in Kuwait.
In Kuwait.
It's not a coincidence that they stationed.
I didn't put two and two together, you know, four months ago when they said he was going to go get stationed out there.
I was like, oh, they just kind of sometimes need to go put people in different places.
But no, he's in the army.
That was a strategic spot because they knew what they were gearing up for a long time ago.
They weren't playing games.
And my best friend told him, Hey, you need to make a real decision right now because if you go over there, you may not actually come back after nine months.
The only way he could have gotten out of that, and he just like got into like a long-term relationship with somebody who he truly loves, she's dealing with it too.
But the only way all this time gets sent off to war.
Gets sent off to war.
And she's sobbing.
I'm also friends with her.
She's sobbing at home.
And this is hitting home for her as well.
You can't get out of it.
The only way he could do is if like he decided to break his leg or like, you know, some type of discharge.
But like, there's so many rules and things that like they were like, okay, well, we will not honorably discharge you if you do something on purpose to where you lose your pension.
You lose the paycheck that they would give you for disability.
You look at what happened to this country in Vietnam.
You look at what's happened to this country in Korea.
Look at what's happened in this country in Iraq and Afghanistan, right?
And the thing is, you can make an argument as to we got to do it because they got nuclear weapons and they threaten anyone's blood missile.
We voted against it, and I think the thing that we're realizing is our vote doesn't mean anything at all, right?
And the person can literally, like, with all the other presidents, you got someone like Obama, very professional, you got someone like Biden, people thought he was professional.
If they go up there and they do the HR language and they do the bland talk, you're just like, well, you know what?
They're evil, but the whole system is evil and they kind of just represent the system at the end of the day.
And if you don't think that they spent as much time trying to do those things, honestly, there's a strong case that Iran was potentially behind the assassination attempt of Trump.
Well, let me help you out here because I totally agree with the point you're making.
The greatest advantage that they have is the disadvantage of who they have to fight against, which would be the Mossad.
That's their enemy, right?
So if you see like Russia, Ukraine, Russia, objectively, they have the best, most modern, most trained ground forces in the world because they've had to fight this war, right?
Who has second best?
And this is everyone geopolitically agrees on this.
The Ukrainians, because they have to deal with the Russians on the ground.
So who are the second best, nearly as good drone operators?
The Ukrainians.
Who are the second best, nearly as good jammers?
The Ukrainians.
The same way with their intelligence.
And it's the same way with the Mossad and then with the Iranian intelligence.
You have to be good.
You don't have an option to be bad because if the intelligence agency they have is bad, then they would have fallen already.
Western corporations and advertisers were actually present.
Like it looked like Iran was going towards the West.
And there was a different political structure.
But let's watch that video showing what Iran looked like during the 70s.
Yes, we are going to touch upon this.
The CIA coup in the 50s and the 50s, that is actually what allowed the current Shah, or not current, but the Shah to actually come into power was during that coup.
Well, go ahead and play this clip.
unidentified
A country brimming with energy, exploding with construction and development.
A dynamic state with a thriving capital.
On today, women even playing soccer.
Symbol of a radical revolution against deep-rooted taboos, habits, prejudices.
And so somebody had mentioned the 1950s revolution that happened where the Shah eventually actually got into power and that era started to where that family was in control.
This wasn't declassified information from the U.S. involvement.
And for many Iranians, this became proof of like foreign powers could actually shape Iran's leadership.
And that belief lasted for decades.
Most people didn't, people didn't forget about this.
And so as you see more of the Western countries coming in, you see the women no longer being religious, but they now are dressed like you know, Velma from Scooby-Doo.
You know, they got their hair out and they're flowing and they're dancing and they're kind of skimpy and looking good.
But the Shah's family controlled major assets through this foundation, which by the late 70s held stakes across the banking, hotel, construction, industries, Western intelligence assessments.
Basically, they estimated that the royal linked assets were in the billions of dollars.
So they had all of these hands and ties, just kind of like in very similar to what we have, right?
Where the Trump has all of these assets that are also part of the political system.
And so when you have corruption, people get really pissed off.
And so there was a when the Shah left in 17 in 1979, it was estimated that between $1 billion and $20 billion of wealth was tied to the royal network, of which they actually.
So by the 70s, you know, you have a lot of the political exclusion, economic resentment, religious backlash to the actual westernization of the countries like the UK, the United States.
Like, guys, these people, it's a religious state.
They don't like the Western culture and what we bring.
Like, we're demonic in some aspects.
Yes.
We're very demonic in terms of some of the aspects of what the Quran teaches about, right?
So then what ends up happening is you've got the mosques that become organizing centers and they basically become like these centers in which they operate outside.
Like the resistance starts to operate outside inside of these mosques.
And so you had clerks that had credibility and they had networks that they used in order to actually shift the trajectory.
And then Khomeini basically, the way he got in power is he offered a clear anti-Shah stance.
And then by 1979, the Shah fled, like we've all seen.
Not going to go too much in specific.
That's all a deep dive in itself.
But basically, the military was fractured and the revolution actually succeeded.
And then you had different forms of power that came in.
But that's when the government kind of changes significantly, right?
Like before the Shah, I talked about they have the military that's loyal to the Shah, the prime minister is appointed, the parliament is subordinate, elections, procedurals, all those things fall within the Shah's control.
But then after, let's go ahead and pull up that graphic that's showing the Iranian government as it stands today.
Yes, the Shah secret police of torturing and ending people is a big important thing.
Now, the thing is, is like I had this question for myself, and I'm sure a lot of other people are wondering because we know how our government works, but we're like, how does Iran actually, how does Iran actually function?
Especially now that you have a new leader, a supreme leader that comes into play.
How does this government actually function?
So now you've got the supreme leader on the left side there.
But then you have the voters part that like kind of makes you feel like you still have a say instead of what the shah was doing, where he voted everything in and decided what he wanted like a king.
This kind of does a hybrid of that.
But essentially, I mean, just think about it.
You don't think the supreme leader still doesn't have influence on all the rest of the people?
I just, I think the supreme leader, here's the thing: with a country like Iran, it's not like America where we have weak neighbors and then we have fish to our left and right.
Like they're under threat.
They're under potential threat of invasion like we're seeing right now, Obama campaigns, all of it, terrorist attacks.
And they have their own interests and their own proxies that they're funding.
The supreme leader to me, it is a military role.
It's kind of in the name.
Like you're the supreme leader who makes choices for the, it's like we call our guy the commander in chief.
Actually, it is partially, but it's actually not, right?
This is getting perfect into my next, my, my next point.
You can go ahead and pull up the picture of the supreme leader, Khomeini himself, who's no longer, who's no longer alive, unfortunately, right?
But this is the guy, right?
Everybody has seen this guy a million times, but do you guys actually know who the supreme leader really is and why he's being martyred or why he's even important?
Guys, this isn't a joke.
Like this is a very big deal.
And I've alluded to it earlier, but I'm going to clearly explain why the supreme leader's death has significant importance because it's not just a regular political thing.
This hits in a spiritual level religious aspect, right?
So the supreme leader isn't just, you know, some political leader.
His position is rooted in a doctra, doctrine.
And I'm going to butcher this, but it's like, I, you know what?
Let's just call it a doctrine because I can't pronounce these words, right?
But basically, he's the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, right?
And but just because God doesn't govern people directly, well, God is, sorry, God is the ultimate authority, but because God doesn't govern directly, top Islamic legal scholar must decide that the country must decide and guide the country until the return of the hidden Islam, right?
And the true God himself, because they're kind of believing he's going to come back.
They're waiting for an Imam because the Shia Islam people, they believe that the last Imam died.
Okay, that's why they don't call the Ayatollah the Imam.
And they're waiting for that guy to come back.
That guy is also supposed to come back with Jesus.
And then the Sunni, they believe completely different.
They believe in their Imams and they believe they have legitimate religious teachers.
So you got to keep in mind, this guy comes from a branch of Islam that is so, we'll just use, for lack of a better word, devout, that they don't even believe that they have religious teachers and that this guy is the closest thing that they have to a connection to God.
It's a mandate, and it's framed religiously on the grounds of guidance for the country, right?
It's what elevates his role.
The president just manages the government operations, but the supreme leader literally defines the boundaries of the system itself on a religious basis.
So that's a significantly different look than how America works.
And go ahead and let's play this clip of Khomeini itself because I wanted to understand how does a guy like this come into power?
Who is he?
I don't think a lot of people know who this guy is.
So we'll play a little bit of that YouTube video that's going to cover who he is.
When Iran's first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died in 1989, his disciple Ali Khomeini took power.
His manner lacked the fire of his predecessor, but he was just as brutal at crushing dissent, just as adept at antagonizing the West, and supporting a network of terror groups across the Middle East and the world.
He was born in 1939 in a remote corner of Iran, where he began studying religion.
His studies brought him in contact with the young Khomeini and joined his revolutionary movement against the US-backed Shah of Iran, eventually taking power in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Life in Iran changed dramatically under Islamic rule.
Women forced to wear the veil, mixed gender gatherings banned.
Iran became a sworn enemy of the United States, the great Satan, and Israel, the little Satan.
I mean, look, I mean, you look at what 1970s was like, clear Western influence in terms of the culture, right?
And I'm not going to say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
I actually think that's a good thing.
People are going to sit there and criticize me for it, but I stand on the fact that if they can figure out a way to blend it with the, you know, I got little sisters, man.
I think there's things about Islam that are super strict for reasons that are religious that don't fit in today's modern practice.
And I think if they have a way that blends where they keep their culture, but then they also blend in the new version of the way the world is moving, I think it becomes a net positive.
And whether it's good, bad or the mix, but we are where we're at.
And so it's a very difficult situation.
But I mean, we do have to talk about the sanctions themselves because it's not a complete story without the sanctions.
Like everyone kind of has an idea of the sanctions, but you got to understand why is it the fact that we even put the sanctions there in the first place?
It's not just about the missiles.
There's a bunch of things that have come into play here, right?
Like Iran's economy didn't just collapse overnight.
You saw the protests.
You saw what they were, the 95% currency drop in just a short period of time.
That's all layering that's happened over the years.
And so, you know, they've had, they've been reshaped in several ways, right?
Like the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988 drained basically the country for eight years while they were in a war with their neighboring country, Iraq, and their infrastructure was damaged.
You had resources that were redirected for survival.
And the state became permanently militarized at that point.
So when a country spends heavily on defense for nearly a decade, I mean, you're talking about that's unsustainable, right?
I know you're about to go into a deep dive in all of it.
That's the real weapon that the United States of America has had available for its use.
It's the sanctions.
It's the economic warfare.
It's the control over the global financial system.
And once you start to understand that, everything else makes sense.
And the past two presidents we've had, Trump and Biden, they've done irreparable damage to our ability to manipulate that system because that system relies on us being kind of a benevolent, benign dictator.
And we've weaponized SWIFT, we've weaponized the tariffs, we've done all of that.
I'm sure you're about to get into it, but at the end of the day, a sanction is something we put on a country to limit their ability to do business, 100%, right?
And I mean, we've got, you know, I talked about the layer one, which is the war.
The second one is the sanctions, which we're going to get into.
But the sanctions have accumulated over time.
You've got things from the 1979 hostage crisis, you got terrorist designations, but let's go ahead and pull up the video that shows the sanctions, Andrew.
And it's really going to give you an understanding of, you know, how many presidents had their hands on this conflict.
It's insane.
unidentified
When it comes to trade policy, sanctions are the most used tool in the U.S.'s toolbox.
Stephanie Siegel, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic National Studies, explains.
They're there as part of the toolkit to incentivize certain behaviors.
One criticism is that they've used, been used more in a pivotive sense.
So rather than incentivizing kind of forward-looking actions, they've been used to punish past behaviors.
And there's particular concern about that because the reason that our sanctions policies can be so potent is because we have the dollar at the center of the international system.
unidentified
The U.S. first started imposing oil sanctions in 1979 to respond to growing terrorism concerns from the country.
From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, the U.S. continued imposing sanctions that focused on U.S.-Iranian imports and entities that did business with the country.
We actually don't have much of a bilateral economic relationship with Iran.
So the only way that we can actually use an economic tool to influence Iran's behavior is through third countries.
unidentified
Then in August 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency found traces of enriched uranium at one of Iran's nuclear power plants.
To the United States and its allies, it looked like Iran was inching closer to producing nuclear weapons.
In June 2005, President Bush signed Executive Order 13382, which froze assets and transactions of individuals involved with growing the supply of weapons of mass destruction in Iran, North Korea, and Syria.
The United States and other allies tried to negotiate with Iran to limit the amount of uranium produced, but Iran insisted its actions were peaceful.
Five years later, President Obama enacted the comprehensive Iran Sanctions Accountability and Disvestment Act.
It expanded on sanctions from the Clinton and Bush administrations to who could face sanctions, new restrictions for financial institutions, and eliminated exemptions on Iranian imports.
Our concept at the time was you start small, you start with the really toxic stuff, the nuclear weapons program and missile programs, and then you use that as a way of essentially building a wedge between Iran and the rest of the international community that you could use to develop other sanctions tools in the future.
unidentified
That's Richard Nephew.
He was in charge of developing and executing the U.S.-Iran sanctions strategy from 2011 to 2013.
The U.S. continued to focus sanctions on Iran's service-based industries, but it realized it had to switch tactics to have a bigger impact on Iran's economy.
But in May 2018, President Trump announced that the U.S. would be pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal.
We had the JCPOA, not a perfect document.
It allowed a number of exceptions.
Iran continued to test-fire new missiles.
There were time limits on Iranian commitments under the JCPOA that would expire after an extensive period of time.
By November 2018, President Trump reinstated sanctions on Iran's most important economic sectors, like energy and shipping, but granted six-month waivers to eight countries that purchase Iranian oil.
And each president is trying to get their credit, right?
But I mean, it's not that straightforward.
But, I mean, the sanctions were even worse than that.
Like, you had Iranian basically, you had Iran cut off from the financial banking system, Swift, right?
So when the banks are cut off from, you know, the global financial systems, even legal trade became difficult.
So like you had food, medicines.
Uh, exemptions that existed on paper but like, the payments and logistics became complete uh, complicated and costly, even though they tried to like finagle their way to where they're like.
Well, we can allow you to do these things that they're kind of important to your country but, like all the other systems that require that to function, don't work because you blanketed the entire country under this, this situation.
So, I mean, the sanctions were crippling for the economy.
You had your inflation go up basically overnight, and so now here's a structural shift.
I mean, the sanctions didn't just weaken Iran, but they changed uh they, they changed who inside Iran actually gained economic power, and that's the real story here.
Like when formal trade shrinks, it's like you've got to go other alternatives right.
So you have black markets that expand.
You have smuggling networks that start to grow.
Sure, you've got informal domestic channels that dominate, crazy lead yes, 100.
So now all the actors are connected to the security apparatus, including the uh I RGC, which is, like the the, the normal one that we know that, that's the Lamik Republic Guard yes, and you know they.
They had the infrastructure to navigate the restrictions.
So, while the broader economy suffers, you basically have these security linked networks that consolidate, centralize and concentrate on power.
Yes, make them stronger in a way, because it's the same thing as like oh, i'm sorry, the cedar fever still got me down.
The thing is, when you create a situation where you put an organism, whether that's a person, whether that's an animal, whether that's a country under stress, it's going to adapt to it because it's, it's a living thing 100.
Oftentimes people say, why are countries treated like corporations?
Or why are corporations treated like people?
It's for that very reason right, it's a living organism.
And that consolidation is, if you add the inflation, you and you add the currency devaluation, ordinary citizens basically feel this squeeze through the rising costs.
But the result wasn't just hardship, it was basically economic restructuring Under pressure, and so that war, it basically the war militarized the state, the sanctions centralized the power, and then the isolation strengthens the security aligned fracture inside of it, right?
But they're really good at just not being in the limelight for a lot of things.
It's really the United States that and Israel that get a lot of the scrutiny, right?
But like, if you look at Iran's Gulf neighbors, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Iran, those types of things, there are three drivers that define their relationships, right?
Between Iran and those countries: secretarian divide, which you've got the Sunni and Shia identity, you've got regional power and competition, and then you've got control of shipping routes.
Like, guys, these two groups don't get along, and a lot of people talk about Sunni, Shia.
Do you guys even, I didn't know, but do you guys really know what it means and what where that is driven from and what the implication?
Because people are just like, well, they're just religious groups that don't get along.
This goes back centuries very long ago, and it's almost so you know, it's almost so ridiculous how these things have played out and the ripple effect has gone generations.
But go ahead and pull up the video of like the Sunni versus Shia.
And just, I want people to understand this is what the gray area.
Go ahead, really quick before we before we play the video.
I want to read this comment from Ikirian brother: if countries that nationalize the resources were allowed to become successful, Americans would eventually want that too.
Oil corporations don't want that to happen.
I say it all the time.
Totally agree at that point.
Just wanted to say that.
And that's why BRICS has been successful, right?
Is because ultimately it's like the anti-globalism, right?
It's we're going to trade in our own resources backed by our own natural resources and our own currency.
We're dealing with ballistic missiles and the talk of nuclear weapons, the talk of ground invasions and armies, and it all dates back to when you had men on horseback killing each other.
But now, I want to put this in today's terms, right?
It's like the father dying, having a bunch of wealth, and then the two sons arguing over where the wealth goes because the will didn't really dictate on where the money went.
So if you think about this, this one situation where Somebody didn't clarify who they wanted to come in charge next, created an entire ripple effect for thousands of years that people don't even quite understand why they're even fighting about.
It could have been so normal back then to them because they're in the situation, but now we've created a layer of religion around it to where you have entire conflicts and wars that happen over something that happened super long ago where no one is even alive to understand the nuances of it.
It's insane, right?
So now you've got the Gulf countries and you've got Iran, and they don't like each other because Iran is one side.
You know, it's super easy to just sit there and I used to point blame at the United States, but as I look and peel back the onion layers, I think it's a combination, right?
The Gulf states basically align with the U.S. primarily for security guarantees, right?
They get plausible deniability because they're like, well, we're not hurting our Muslim brethren, but they send the United States and Israel as the dogs to sick and do the things for them as well.
And it's not just, it's all of them mutually benefiting from that.
That's my real takeaway from tonight's deep dive, at least so far.
And like, we think about America literally, we live in like Elysium heaven.
Like, there's literally, there's no one that can threaten us.
And then there's the oceans.
Everyone, you got the Black Sea, you got Georgia, you got Russia right up there.
Okay, then you've got the whole entirety of Europe, you've got the Mediterranean Sea, then you have Africa, then you have East Africa, then you have the Arabian Sea, you have the Indian subcontinent and Pakistan right there.
This is historically, the Silk Road ran through Persia, linking China and Europe.
And Persia, like you were talking about, it's a central transit hub.
And essentially, empires historically fought over this region and specifically for the trade routes.
That region itself in the Middle East is so important because it means everything to the entire supply chain.
That's the bigger argument here, right?
That is the bigger argument.
And then you also have to think about material.
Yeah, you've got to think about military positioning.
You've got the U.S. bases now there.
You've got strategic assets access that allows you to have quicker response time to crises.
And pretty much the presence itself acts as a deterrence if you're able to be there, right?
And then you've got the alliance entanglement.
You've got Israel security ties with the U.S.
And then you've got regional conflicts with that draw and the surrounding states.
But the thing that you guys need to understand about this whole thing, and you can cut back to us really quick, is if the United States, and this is the thing that I started to realize about this whole thing, if we're not in the region, someone else would be.
When there is a power vacuum or there is not somebody who's in charge of a specific region, they have the ability to control what happens in that area.
Iran is a religious place in and itself, right?
They operate in a completely different realm than how the rest of the world works.
And the belief systems that they have are different than what might not be best for the rest of the world, but goes by the doctrine of Islam in itself.
Like we're sitting here calling the United States like, you know, we're just imperialist and stuff.
A lot of these other countries also have their own self-everyone area, man.
Yeah, everyone has their own selfish interest in which they'll put their own country first.
So it's kind of like, you know, there could be a country and we could be decide to be the bigger man and just be like, well, you know, they should just be left alone, man, and we'll just let it happen.
But then you get screwed over by doing that.
And everybody knows that because it's a zero-sum game.
What I'm telling you guys specifically that you need to pay attention to is there are always going to be people who have the power, and there's always going to be people who are at a secondary position since the bane of time.
That is how it's happened.
There's always superpowers.
That's how it goes, right?
Until we get to a point where everybody could collectively get rid of this negative feedback loop, put down the weapons, and essentially, you know, value human life, value human life over money and resources.
If you could get everybody to agree on the same thing, then yes, it would make sense to just leave the regions alone and just let the things happen.
But the problem is, again, Russia and China and some of these other places would take over those regions and they would do the exact same thing, just on the opposite side.
So it just creates this negative feedback loop that will never end.
But at the end of the day, Iran also does not have the best interests of anyone but Iran at the end of the day.
And what Allah says, this is what I command you to do.
So if they have, if you, if the United States would just leave and just not have any influence, Iran would grow.
Iran would choke that point.
They'd probably start causing taxes to that region and say, well, you know, you might need to pay a tax here or something like that.
Speculation on a couple of things, but ultimately they would make their own decisions.
That's a fair point, pointing at the Soviet Union.
That's a fair point.
I think we could argue about what democracy is, but here's the thing: everyone has their own interests, right?
And to say that people are moral and pure and good and just, they're usually trying to get something done using that as a justification, but really they have ulterior motives.
I was thinking about this earlier today, Tim, and I think you'll agree with me.
You're like, let's just say you're just like a faceless, nameless, like middle management person in the Iranian military intelligence government, whatever.
It's like, is this person Mossad?
Is this person not Mossad?
Am I going to carry out the mission?
Do I tell this person that person's name?
Imagine the James Bond level of intrigue going on right now.
And, you know, it's like there is a lot of factors that go into, but basically, what you need to understand is that, you know, there are multiple groups that have power within Iran in and itself, but also there's people like the last thing you would want in that region is a power vacuum.
You would see, you would see the exact same thing happen with Iraq, right?
There are people that are waiting to have their day in which the government itself of whatever policies they hold is the supreme command of the situation.
And they basically squash any level of, you know, people who try to counteract that message.
And that includes like terrorist groups, guys.
Not every terrorist group is, you know, very happy with the current government in place.
And so, again, we don't need another Iraq situation.
But at the end of the day, there's not going to be regime change.
I'm almost positive in this circumstance.
It'll look more like, you know, it'll look different, but it'll be the same song, different tune.
In the deep dive and the deeper layers, because no one's going to tell you that, yes, you know, America, you know, as bad as it might be, isn't the only bad actor.
We're going to look into all these countries, all these different relationships, the things that they actually do, because they tell you the truth, right?
And like, it's, it's, it's like, if we watch that sanctions clip, it's like a nice HR lady, nice H, well, yeah, we do economic war and we try to shut down their country.
If you didn't understand what I meant by that statement, if the United States was not there, China and Russia would be sweeping that stuff up real quickly.
They would take control over that whole region.
Do you understand that China isn't like the holy savior?
There's a reason why they're not also the reserve currency.
No one trusts China, by the way.
They're not the best country.
They can be peaceful, but they have their dark side.