CIA SECRETS REVEALED From JFK To 9/11 And Beyond!!!
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His latest is Dangerous Injustice, How Democrats Weaponize the DOJ to Protect Biden and Persecute Trump.
You're not going to want to miss it.
Buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
We are now joined by Joseph Sweeney.
Joseph, thank you so much for being here.
Before we get into the book and why you decided to write it and what's in it, why don't we get a little background on yourself?
Sure.
I did my undergraduate work at the United States Military Academy, and I graduated West Point in 1987.
After that, I volunteered to go into the infantry, and then I volunteered to go to airborne school and ranger school and a host of other schools.
I did most of my career in the 10th Mountain Division.
And then after retiring from the Army or leaving the Army at about the 10-year mark, I went to law school, went to Vermont Law School.
And upon graduation from law school, I was accepted into the CIA National Security Law Honors Program.
And then I did the next 25 years of my life as a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency.
My career there was a little unusual in that I did half my career on the operational side.
So I was assigned over the years to six different components within the Directorate for Operations, assisting them to perform their missions in a lawful manner.
And then the other half of my career was in the CIA litigation division, where I served as a line attorney, a deputy, an acting chief, and eventually a chief of the litigation division for about four years.
It's unusual for someone, a lawyer at the CIA, to spend that much time in the litigation division, but I just enjoyed the work.
And in that time, I specialized in high-profile civil and criminal cases, any type of case where the agency had an equity in some way, shape, or form that needed to be protected from disclosure, and worked on many high-profile terrorism and espionage prosecutions.
Any federal prosecution that I worked on involved classified information.
And one of my areas of expertise is just that, federal criminal cases that involve classified information.
And as a result of that, I worked on many Espionage Act prosecutions over the years to include cases that involve the mishandling of classified information.
This is going to be an extremely interesting conversation.
So let's just say I've been a little skeptical and critical of the CIA over the past 20 years that I've been doing this.
And hopefully that's fair enough.
Yes.
So obviously you've seen a lot.
In a 20-year career in the Central Intelligence Agency, what can you tell me about actual diversity?
Not what they sell us on right now with the DEI and identity politics.
When I'm talking about diversity, I mean differing opinions within the agency, real challenges to power within the structure, and really a system that tries not to go off the rail as too corrupt.
I mean, do you kind of see where I'm going?
I mean, obviously, you've seen more and probably can't talk about a lot of it.
But I mean, your book is how the Justice Department has been completely and totally weaponized.
And I think that has obviously been an incremental process.
And although not wholeheartedly run by the Central Intelligence Agency, I would argue also a lot of the Intel community throughout not only the three-letter agencies, but their subsidiaries and their private contractors are very much behind that agenda.
So what are your thoughts on all that?
So I did see during my time at the CIA, you know, an increased emphasis on the DEI type of diversity, right?
Where we started hiring people based on their race and their gender, where we were looking for particular races and genders.
However, I would also say in my office, we did have good diversity of thought, which for me personally is the only type of diversity that should matter, diversity of thought.
So for instance, I came to the CIA office of general counsel right from law school.
No experience whatsoever, in real world experience.
I had interned for a federal judge in downtown D.C. in the DC district court, but I was brought right from law school.
And that is one of the streams for hiring that my office pursued.
They also hired attorneys with 20-year careers who had just, say, retired as a colonel, a JAG attorney from the Army.
So we had good diversity of thought.
But over the years, I did see, you know, the type of diversity that you're talking about, the unfortunate kind where people are just looking for a particular race or gender and not so much a meritocracy.
Overall, what I saw in my time in the intelligence community was unfortunately an increased politicization of the intelligence community.
I did see that.
I lived there through that timeframe.
It was unfortunate, but it's also kind of a reflection of our society.
Armies, the federal government, the executive branch, they are reflections of our society.
And as our society became increasingly politicized, so did our government.
You know, my book focuses on the politicization and weaponization of DOJ and the FBI, but it's really the entire executive branch.
And I give many examples throughout the book of how the entire executive branch was weaponized by the Democratic Party, which is what I found in my research.
So let's talk about that for a second, because I would argue before the Democrats are even in power, you have this executive within an executive, really brought up through post-World War II era, highly compartmentalized, gains power through continuity of government, et cetera, and then these bureaucracies where you could start with the Department of Justice and Russia, Russia, Russia, right?
You know, you bring Mueller in as a special counsel.
This is the ex-director of the FBI.
And by the way, he was very much in the Justice Department, working with guys like Bill Barr all the way back in the 80s on the Noriega situation.
People don't know that they were buddies, but I mean, they literally came up together.
You look at somebody like Leon Panetta, who's held all sorts of intelligence titles, and he was very much Russia, Russia, Russia.
Anybody that paid attention to that and looked at the evidence knew that was a hoax from the very beginning and a contrived narrative to try to smear and persecute and prosecute Trump.
So is that where you start to begin with the book in that era?
And what are your thoughts on that era?
Because that's really almost right out of the gates.
So what I do in my book is I start with the raid on Mar-a-Lago, which was 8 August of 2022.
So I start with that because it's kind of the culmination, right?
We have this increased politicization that eventually reaches a point where it becomes very blatant, right?
It's when you raid the home of a former president and not just a former president, but the former president from the opposing political party who also happens to be the likely challenger to the incumbent in the upcoming election, that is kind of the height of it.
So I started with that and analyzing Trump's case and then Biden's case.
But then I do backtrack and I go all the way back to what you're talking about, which was Trump's first presidential campaign and how the FBI and DOJ targeted that campaign unlawfully with intelligence collection mechanisms, right?
Very secretive things and highly intrusive collection mechanisms.
I go all the way back to that.
I call that Russia collusion hoax coup because it really was kind of a soft coup.
And so I start with that and I trace it all the way through Trump's first presidency, right?
There was first the Russia collusion hoax coup and then there was the prosecution of Trump's national security advisor, General Flynn, on trumped up charges.
And then also, you know, the two impeachment hoaxes, the J6 hoax, you know, one thing after another.
I go through all of them and show how all of them were just political actions, not true prosecutions.
There was nothing good faith about any of those efforts.
They were all just political actions dressed up as something else.
So one of my issues is I hate both parties.
I am certainly not a conservative or a Republican, a liberal or a Democrat.
I've been politically homeless since I've gotten in this game.
I think there's a handful of people on both sides at any given Sunday that are decent.
Mike Lee, Rand Paul on the right.
You know, Dennis Kucinich always maintained anti-war left and he was a part of the RFK Jr. campaign for some time this time around.
But again, very, very few.
Now, you just mentioned the espionage case, right?
Now, for me, obviously ludicrous.
Number one, I remember when I was a kid going to the FDR presidential museum, his home in Hyde Park.
And we had the guy come out and talk about, and this is back in like 97, you know, how some things were still classified and that was okay.
So I knew that they had classified documents there at the time in the 90s from, you know, the World War II era.
So when I heard this whole thing and, you know, being politically astute, I'm like, all presidents do this.
You know, I watched George Bush yuck it up with Bill Clinton when they opened up his library and vice versa when they would do events.
This is a normal thing.
And yet it seemed like a setup.
Now, at the same time, I felt like, you know, the one thing you didn't mention that was very dangerous is that a lot of us believe that Trump actually won 2020.
So he's not just the political opponent.
He's the guy who actually won the last election on top of it all.
You see these documents, K.
And one of my big criticisms for Trump is that he didn't drop the charges against Assange and he let Pompeo run wild.
We know the reports of whether or not they were going to kidnap or possibly assassinate Assange.
And it was never lost on me that they had charged Assange with the Espionage Act, ultimately successfully, right?
I mean, they cut that deal.
He had to sign off on it a little bit.
And now they've charged Trump with the same thing.
Had he dropped that, you know, I think that would have been more astute.
At the same time, that case has gone by the wayside, at least at this point.
And I don't know if it's going to make a return.
So, what are your thoughts overall?
I mean, you prosecuted espionage cases.
Let me know.
What do you think?
I think no justice system is ever going to have perfect equity, right?
Justice systems are run by human beings, and we all have strengths and weaknesses, and pros and cons, and there's never going to be perfect equity.
That being said, the higher-ranking people do tend to get away with a whole lot that lower-ranking people go to jail for.
And I give specific examples of this in my book of cases where, like, there was a guy named Ford who worked for the NSA.
And after he left the NSA, he took home with him a couple boxes of highly classified information.
He had one in his kitchen and one of his bedroom.
And when he broke up with his girlfriend, she called the FBI and told them that he had classified documents that he was going to sell to a foreign country.
And he was on his way to like Dulles Airport or something to do that.
Now, that latter part was not true.
You know, hell hath no fury and all.
But it was true that he had the classified documents.
So the FBI did a raid of his home.
He was prosecuted.
I think he got sentenced to six years, six years in jail for two boxes of classified documents that he had retained.
And as far as the government knew, only showed to one person, his girlfriend.
Okay.
So that's an example of how a lower-level person is treated under the Espionage Act.
Now, in our nation's history, there were four senior government officers, executive branch, cabinet level, who were caught mishandling classified information on a large scale.
It just so happened I worked on three of those four cases.
So I have the history of how these cases are handled.
And I talk about all of those.
Let me stop for a second.
I got to ask.
Is one of those cases Sandy Berger and the 9-11 documents stuffed down his pants?
I'll start with that one.
Yes.
Thank you.
It's nice for me to talk to someone who actually remembers that case because most people do not.
And so Sandy Berger, and this is a big case.
Sandy Berger was Clinton's national security advisor.
So that's a cabinet-level position.
And after Berger was out of the government, he was helping Clinton to prepare for testimony before the 9-11 Commission.
And then he was also reviewing documents to see if Clinton wanted to claim executive privilege over some of the presidential records so that they were at the National Archives.
And if Clinton claimed that privilege, he wouldn't have to produce them to the 9-11 Commission.
And that's all lawful.
That's all permitted under the Presidential Records Act.
And so while Berger was doing this review in the National Archives, the archivists became aware that some of the documents were not all coming back to them.
So they started marking them.
And then what they discovered is that Berger was stealing them.
And what came out, excuse me, what came out later was that he was sticking them down his pants and in his socks and hiding them in a nearby construction site.
Now, these are top secret presidential records that were uncategorized.
And so Berger took them home and destroyed them.
Now, the rumor going around Washington at the time was that what Berger was trying to erase from history was the fact that the Clinton administration had the opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden before 9-11, but decided not to take the action.
False Official Statement Penalty00:04:04
I don't know if that's true, but whatever the reason was, it was something that was so important to Berger to erase from history that he was willing to take such an unlawful action.
So he gets caught and then he lies to the FBI and he blames the archives.
He says they must have screwed up.
Now, when you lie to an FBI agent like that, that's normally called a false official statement.
That's a felony.
That's five years in jail, right?
Just the lie.
So Berger lied.
Eventually he came clean.
And in his case, he was not prosecuted for a felony.
He was prosecuted for a misdemeanor.
He got a slap on the wrist.
He got probation and a small fine.
And that was it.
So that's a great example.
And by the way, all of the precedents, and like I said, there are four of them, all were senior Democrats who were treated.
So let me stop you right there because we do got to take a break.
And before we get too far away from Berger, you know, I think it's so important to talk about that, folks.
I mean, again, 9-11, something that we don't talk about enough.
I really do hope if Trump does get back in, he is true to his word on not only declassifying the JFK documents, other assassination documents, but the 9-11 documents.
I guess what we have left of them anyway, as well.
We're going to come back.
The book is Dangerous and Justice: How Democrats Weaponize the DOJ to protect Biden and Prosecute Trump.
Back after this with more making sense of the matters.
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Berger's Classified Controversy00:09:36
And we are back with Joseph Sweeney.
So, Joseph, you just pointed out, and obviously I knew the story, had no idea that you had worked on this case.
Berger basically lived out the rest of his life.
I think he died like last year, happily ever after, you know, never to have to answer for this.
As far as I know, no journalist really prying into that story.
We have no idea.
Like you said, I remember that story.
They talked about basically in the late 90s, having that opportunity in the intelligence where Bin Laden was to take him out and not taking that opportunity.
Whatever.
The guy, like you said, had it in his underwear and socks.
They didn't prosecute him for a felony.
He lied.
Now, you look at what happened to Flynn, who I just had on the program last week.
And here's a guy who didn't know he was in any kind of an official meeting, really had not done anything wrong.
And they colluded against him to charge him with the Logan Act.
And Biden, by the way, is the one that brought up the Logan Act.
Now, this was a doozy for me.
I had been talking about the Logan Act and still do to this day for a decade plus in regards to international private meetings, such as the Bilderberg Group.
You know, when you have high-level politicians, I mean, people like David Petraeus, who's been the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Google executives, Goldman Sachs, all these guys meeting in secret with no record of the meeting, I would argue that's more Logan act-esque than what they eventually got Flynn with.
And you talk about a soft coup.
They also went after Bannon, however imperfect of a being he is.
You see Man, Roger Stone's another one.
And I mean, I know you've also alluded to January 6th.
I don't want to get too far off the rails here, but the bottom line is we're now at a point where thought crimes are a real thing.
And I mean that in the sense that you can hate Enrique Tario.
You can hate the Proud Boys.
You could even believe there was some kind of insurrection on January 6th.
Obviously, it didn't happen, but believe that.
They just gave 20 years to a guy that wasn't even there and didn't plan anything, you know, basically for some mean text, social media posts, and because they don't like this guy.
So we've really gone off the rails.
And, you know, something we haven't talked about is what?
We're a couple weeks away from a sentencing on Donald Trump on 34 felony counts, none of which were real crimes.
And I truly believe, I've been saying it, they're putting him in prison, period.
I mean, people think that he's not going to jail.
He's going to jail.
So I know I went on a rant and off the rails on the Sandy Berger topic, but I'm going to let you take it from there.
Sure.
And so one last thing with Berger before we go on to these other cases.
In his case, there was no legal compulsion, right?
So there was no subpoenas, no search warrants, no raid of his house, no compelled testimony.
So it was the entire thing was handled with kid gloves.
So that's one case.
Now, you just mentioned David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA who I worked for.
I also worked on his criminal case because Petraeus is one of the two CIA directors who got caught mishandling classified information.
It's a very sordid tale because Petraeus had a biographer, Paula Broadwell.
He was having an affair with her and he had shared with her some of his classified notebooks.
He had basically been hoarding classified information throughout his time as a general.
And he had about eight notebooks of highly classified information in his home and some of which he had shared with Broadwell.
So all that unraveled.
Petraeus also, again, lied to the FBI, felony, five years, obstruction of justice.
And he was also just a slight tap on the wrist.
He was an Obama appointee, prosecuted under an Obama administration.
It was a misdemeanor with just a fine and little bit of probation, and that was it.
And so that's another example of a Democrat mishandling classified information, a high-level Democrat who got off very easily.
Now, that was the second CIA director to be prosecuted for mishandling classified information.
I also worked on the case.
Let's talk about this for a second because I think this is so important.
Isn't that one of the huge parts of the problem is that, all right, he's not the head of the CIA, but I'm looking at it right here.
Again, he was at Bilderberg this year.
He's now the chair of KKR Global Institute.
You know what I mean?
So this guy is still very much involved in policy, you know, behind the scenes in the military-industrial complex.
And as you've stated, we've had no criminal accountability for any of the serious players.
It's even worse.
They get better deals.
They get paid better outside of the Central Intelligence Agency to work for these organizations.
Go ahead.
Not all of his actions are even behind the scenes because right after he was prosecuted, this was reported in the news.
He was still serving as a national security advisor, informally, but as a national security advisor to President Obama.
I mean, which means they didn't even take his security clearance.
Any rank and file employee in the executive branch who got caught doing what Petraeus did would absolutely lose their security clearance and they would never get it back.
And back to Sandy Berger, he lost his security clearance for three years, only three years.
That was right in the plea agreement.
And so, again, just examples of how leniently these people are treated.
And of course, then they go on to continue using all of their government connections to make a lot of money.
Now, the first CIA director was also the first executive ranch officer to ever be prosecuted for mishandling.
I worked on his case, and that was John Deutsch in the late 90s, you might remember.
Now, Deutsch, as director of central intelligence, had brought home over 300 classified documents.
He was doing it on thumb drives and working on uncleared computers, open computers, you know, without any encryption that were hooked up to the internet.
These were, although they were unclassified computers, they were CIA computers and they had big green stickers on them.
Unclassified, do not process classified on these computers.
But that's what he did.
And he had to return the computer at the end of his service.
And they did a normal forensic analysis that they would do when a laptop is turned back in.
And they found hundreds of highly classified documents on Deutsch's computers.
Deutsch had also tried to delete all of them before returning the computers.
Now, when DOJ doesn't like you, they call that obstruction of justice felony, five years.
So in the Deutsch case, it's a fascinating case.
And I go into this in quite a bit of detail in my book.
So Deutsch is caught.
He's got very good attorneys.
And Deutsch finally signs a plea agreement for a misdemeanor for one classified document, retention of one single secret document, even though he had hundreds and hundreds of documents, some of which were at the top secret level.
So he got, again, he would have gotten a slap on the wrist.
But Deutsch signed his plea agreement at 7 o'clock on a Friday night.
The next morning, Saturday morning at 10 o'clock, was Clinton's last day in office.
And Clinton pardoned Deutsch.
And so even with all the leniency Deutsch got from a Clinton administration in the first place, Clinton then pardoned him anyway.
Now, the Deutsch pardon never got any publicity because the other pardon that Clinton handed down that morning at 10 o'clock went to a man named Mark Rich, who was a fugitive from justice, who had been on the FBI's top 10 most wanted list.
was currently being prosecuted in absentia in the Southern District of New York for wire fraud, tax evasion, trading with the Iranians during the hostage crisis.
You know, what a guy.
So that pardon got all the publicity because it did not go through the DOJ pardon office.
That pardon was approved by one man at the Department of Justice.
He was a little-known assistant attorney general.
His name was Eric Holder.
So that's, and then it came out that before that pardon issued, Mark Rich's wife, Denise Rich, donated $1 million to the Democratic National Committee, $450,000 to the Clinton Library, and $100,000 to Hillary Clinton's Senate run.
That's the Deutsch story.
So there you got three people who were all treated with extreme leniency by DOJ, all Democrats.
And then there's the last precedent.
This is the case everyone knows.
Stop right there because we got to take another break before we get to another one.
And when we come back, you know, you mentioned Iran and the hostages.
I want to get a little into the Iran-Contra scandal because that's really the last time we saw any criminal accountability, in my opinion, at any sort of high or even mid-level within the intelligence communities.
Iran-Contra Scandal Insights00:17:26
But I want to get your take after this.
More making sense of the madness.
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And we are back.
So you mentioned Iran-Contra.
And, you know, I often say that the last time that we had any real kind of accountability was the Iran-Contra scandal, as limited hangout as it was, as many slaps on the wrist and commuted sentences and pardons as it was.
And really, my big issue is that they made Oliver North the face of it.
And certainly he had his role.
But what happened to Oliver North?
He got book deals.
He was on TV shows.
He got radio.
You know, he became a multi-millionaire out of it, really.
And, you know, as far as I saw, even Lee Hamilton, who I don't have a lot of respect for, we're talking Iran-Contra, 9-11 Commission.
I believe Hamilton's also on the Warren Commission when he's getting started as well.
He actually says, after the fact, that George H.W. Bush probably had a lot more to do with Iran-Contra than he led on in testimony.
No kidding.
I mean, this guy was an intelligence guy forever.
So in that regard, you know, it's been 30, 40 years.
You could say that Scooter Libby did some jail time in the Enron scandal after the fact, but even Trump pardoned him and he seemed like the fall guy for Cheney and others.
Am I missing something?
Am I missing any accountability at that executive or intelligence level on a large scale in a scandal?
Because we've had plenty of scandals.
You know what I mean?
That have at least, you know, graced some of the mainstream media over the years.
I haven't seen the prosecutions.
Yeah, I don't disagree with you.
There was one other person who got prosecuted in Iran-Contra.
He was the deputy director for operations of the CIA, the top spy.
His name was Claire George.
So yeah, since then, no, I mean, the closest we would come would be the prosecutions of Deutsch and Petraeus, which, you know, as I noted, were not true investigations and, you know, they were treated with great leniency.
And that's just a fact.
All right.
So then, all right.
So then that takes us into an even more corrupt time.
Now, I would argue Donald Trump's largest crime amongst the predator class, as I like to call them, is not committing enough war crimes and being starkly honest.
Because listen, I'm not in love with some of his foreign policy, right?
Like, for instance, he went in there, he talked smack about Saudi Arabia, said he might even reveal their role in 9-11, et cetera.
And then he cuts a $400-plus billion dollar arms deal with them, right?
Don't love that.
Didn't start any new wars.
I like that.
I liked what he was talking about getting out of Syria and things of that nature.
I truly believe if we are going to have any kind of peace in the Middle East and an actual end, or at least some kind of end to the Ukraine-Russia thing, Trump's the only game in town right now.
I think those are also threats.
But as you stated earlier, you know, this started immediately once his campaign was full force and he was a threat.
They used all sorts of quote-unquote intel methods.
They manufactured stuff with the steel dossier.
I mean, let's be honest, there was no validity to maybe three quarters to four fifths of that.
You know, they sprinkle in a little truth, but come on.
And then you have the Mueller report, right?
And if you read the Mueller report, there's no there there.
There's still a lot of people out there that talk about not a hack, but a direct leak of those DNC emails through a thumb drive.
Andrew McCabe is actually named in litigation with Butowski and Hirsch in those Seth Rich cases, etc.
There's no resolution there throughout.
And then what happens?
You get two impeachments on top of it.
Now, the first impeachment, you know, I thought it was kind of far-fetched.
But if you had told me that the second impeachment was going to involve the report I did on Joe Biden bragging in front of the Council on Foreign Relations with Richard Haas that they were going to withhold a billion dollars from Ukraine if the same prosecutor that was going after his son and Barisma wasn't fired and he was going to be on a plane, I wouldn't have believed you.
And that is exactly what happened.
You know, Trump gets on the phone and says, hey, what about, you know, this investigation?
And it just says, maybe we're not going to give you money.
Standard practice.
He got impeached for that.
Then you have all the criminal prosecutions.
And I'll say this.
Had he decided not to run this time around, I believe they would have just continued to assassinate his character and tried to take him down in the court of public opinion.
He ran again.
Now it's on.
Now we're putting you in prison.
They've thrown everything at the wall.
They got the conviction in New York on total lunacy.
A lot of people still had way too much opium in the idea that he was going to be able to beat that case.
Mershon waits on the sentencing till after the RNC.
You also get the assassination attempt.
I'd love to get your take on that if you're willing to speak on it.
And now here we are.
We're two months out.
The media doesn't want to talk about an assassination attempt.
Mums the word on the sentencing until it gets there.
But Trump is still Hitler, man.
Like he's still Hitler to these people.
I mean, if you watch the DNC, you're not voting for Kamala Harris.
You're voting against Donald Trump.
Yeah, you know, I do address the assassination attempt in my book.
I kept the book current right up to the date of publication.
And I address it from the angle of analyzing propaganda because I worked in the area of covert influence and I recognize it when I see it.
And it was just, I could not believe, even as biased as the mainstream media is, 95% of it, I could not believe the reporting that was coming out after the Trump assassination attempt.
I mean, the headlines were like this.
Trump falls down at Raleigh after loud noises.
Secret Service knocks Trump down at Rally.
They wouldn't even use the word shooting.
And this is from reporters who were right there.
They saw people lying dead and wounded, and they saw Trump bleeding.
And they would not even use the word shooting.
It was like 10 hours after the assassination attempt.
They still wouldn't use the word assassination.
So I went back and I researched the original reporting from the attempted assassination on Reagan.
Oh my God.
Oh, yes.
And you can find them online.
It's fascinating.
Bernard Trump made his career.
Listen, again, we're on in just because you brought that up.
I think that it really also has to be stated that we're talking about an incident that took place 43 years ago.
And that was the last time anybody got a successful shot off at a president or ex-president.
That's four plus.
I was two years old, folks.
Now, you look at the circumstance surrounding the shooting.
And I don't know if you've seen the reports today, but it was very obvious to me that this was the case after I watched the video five times that day, that there are the initial shots.
There is return fire from someone, and then there's the final kill shot that doesn't happen for like 10, 15 seconds after Trump's on the ground, clearly from the sniper.
Well, now they're admitting today that, yes, the local police did shoot Crooks first.
So he didn't get eight shots off, like Christopher Ray said under testimony.
It's ludicrous to think that you could hear it, that those were different volleys.
But clearly, it seems like that kid, and he was a kid, he's 20 years old, was killed after the fact.
You know, and we don't know no digital footprint.
I mean, I know you don't want to get too far into what you think may or may not have happened, but given the line, given the fact that now, look, does it take two months to find out who shot the guy first?
We should have known that in 30 minutes.
You know, talk about not just the framing of it, not just the history of it.
All of it seems like red flags.
Am I wrong?
No, because it's not just getting the facts out to the public.
It's getting the facts out in a way that the government can cover its ass.
I've heard conspiracy theories on both sides of the aisle, right?
The left think it was all faked, and people on the right think it was a conspiracy involving the Secret Service and the Biden administration.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist because having spent 35 years of my career in government, I know that the answer is usually government incompetence.
And if someone was brilliant enough to come up with a conspiracy like that, it would take too many people to get it done and somebody would talk.
So my sense is incompetence, but also maybe a little bit of purposeful neglect, right?
Where requests for additional resources had been made for Trump's detail and the Biden administration was denying them.
And just a couple of days before the assassination attempt, Biden literally said to a large group of people, it's time to put Trump in the crosshairs.
That kind of visual, that kind of language should never be used by a president.
It's just not appropriate.
And of course, the media has never criticized Biden for using that language.
And then even days, just days after the assassination attempt, Biden was saying Trump is still an existential threat to democracy.
I mean, it's just, it's very poor leadership and it's very disconcerting that a president.
Let me say this, Joseph, also at the DNC, not a mention that there was an attempt on this guy's life.
Forget about the rhetoric.
I mean, not what, I mean, that's pretty incredible.
And you know what?
I've been, listen, I guess I like to call myself a conspiracy realist.
I've been called worse.
All right.
But let's just look, let's just look at the Reagan assassination attempt just really quickly.
Okay.
Hinckley is a guy that, you know, people don't know about his past, but he is in a rich and wealthy family that is very close to the first Bush administration, George H.W. Bush, as he's the vice president, so much so that the day after the shooting, Neil Bush was supposed to have dinner with Hinckley's brother.
I have the news reports.
I mean, that's an open fact.
They were large donors to Bush.
And Hinkley himself was staying in a hotel the week of that, taking phone calls from a payphone down the road.
So not even taking phone calls at his hotel.
Hinckley hasn't been in prison now for 15, 20 years.
He's been under house arrest.
You know, he was house arrest for about five years.
And for the past, I think, five, six, maybe even seven years, he's on tour with his guitar.
It's a guy that shot the president.
Like, so again, call me kooky when I question all those coincidences and no one putting those together.
When I look at crooks in the digital age and you're telling me a 20-year-old kid that doesn't seem, you know, obviously has the visual appearance that it's going to be rough for him to have friends, doesn't have a digital footprint, doesn't hasn't found anybody online.
That doesn't make a lot of sense either.
So again, I think that's, I think that's unfortunately something that we may not get to the bottom of.
And listen, we have to take a break.
When we come back, I want to get your take on whether or not we're going to get these documents.
If we do get the Hail Mary, we somehow get Trump in, I want to find out whether you think that can happen.
Does it make a difference if we get the JFK, MLK, et cetera, documents?
Final segment of Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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Folks, I hope you did not miss this one.
This has been a banger of an episode.
I do want to thank you, Joseph, because obviously I don't get veterans of the CIA in your regard working on cases that I followed for years all the time.
So when we're talking about Trump getting in, you know, RFK Jr., now part of the campaign.
They've even floated the idea of a CIA director.
Didn't see that one coming.
That was kind of out of left field.
I would have said Attorney General, HHS, maybe even put them on a special counsel to get all these documents because it's not just going to be CIA documents.
It's going to be FBI.
It's going to be DOJ.
It's going to be subsidiaries.
I mean, at this point, if you're getting into modern day intelligence and you get into Homeland Security, you've got fusion centers, you've got private firms like Stratford.
The list goes on, right?
The bureaucracies are huge.
Do you think if Trump gets in, we get the documents he says he's going to give us?
Because last time he promised us JFK, we didn't get them.
This time around, people have outed people like Pompeo.
In fact, Michael Flynn said it was Pence, Pompeo, and others that convinced Trump not to release the JFK documents.
I'm a big believer in transparency.
I feel like you got to tear the band-aids off.
You got to show the wounds and you got to do the surgery.
I think you would agree the bureaucracy is out of control.
One of the things I liked about Ramaswamy and his campaign was talking about cutting them in half on day one through Social Security and then finding out whether we keep them or not.
So what are your thoughts on the documents and on the bureaucracies that kind of surround them?
So there are absolutely bureaucracies that surround them.
And in my book, I describe the executive branch basically as a series of kingdoms and fiefdoms.
It's like Game of Thrones without the bloodshed, but more machinations, political machinations.
Documents And Bureaucracies00:09:39
And so, yes, there are bureaucracies within the bureaucracies, and it is a large executive branch.
As for the documents, you know, there is a special statute.
It's called the JFK Assassination Records Act.
And there have been a great deal of documents released on the JFK assassination.
Some have been withheld.
Even for the ones that have been released, there are redactions in them.
You know, my office worked on these cases.
And so I've seen the things that aren't released.
And there's not much left.
I think people will be disappointed on this because the things that have not been released.
are things that were either just not relevant or they were they needed to be protected because they went to intelligence sources and methods.
For instance, the name of a human source, right?
The CIA has a statutory duty to protect those intelligence sources.
And if we didn't protect them, we wouldn't have any left because no one would want to work with us.
And so I think ultimately, I think a little bit more will be released.
That's inevitable because over time, information does get declassified.
But I think people will be disappointed in that there's no smoking gun left.
Now, I'm the Kennedy assassination.
I myself am a conspiracy realist.
I don't think any reasonable person could think Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy.
I don't think so.
And who shot him, that I don't know, but I don't believe what I've been told.
But what I can tell you is the things that I saw from working in the litigation division who reviews all the documents that are released, I didn't see any smoking guns.
And I think people will be disappointed.
You know, you just talked about classified documents in the regard of how old and eventually they'll be released.
But, you know, I remember reading, and it came out 11 years ago, Operation Paperclip from Annie Jacobson.
And I think one of the more stunning things that she said is something like 12 or 13 million documents at that point regarding paperclip had still been classified.
Now, I do understand when you're talking about weapons technologies, propulsion technologies, why those things would be classified.
But that seems when I'm hearing 12 or 13 million, that's a lot, right?
Like obviously that seems like an overclassification, especially when we're talking about documents pertaining somewhere between the 20s and maybe the late 50s into the early 60s with a lot of these people, right, that I imagine would regard paperclip.
It's 2024, right?
Let me give you one example.
Let's say you have a human source who's reporting from North Korea or Russia or Cuba, some denied area.
Now, if that source was ever discovered, they would be executed by their country for working with the U.S. government, giving us secrets.
Also, their family would pay the price as well.
I worked with some, I worked with defectors, and I knew a woman who was resettled here in the United States under a different name.
Her husband had been executed by the Russians.
They shot him in the head.
They sent her the bill for the bullet.
And so the repercussions go down the family line.
And so you don't ever want to admit that that person worked for you.
That source has to be protected.
And what if over the years, that source made thousands of reports?
Well, each of those reports would be individually classified.
There's a couple thousand documents.
And you can't give up the reports because that foreign intelligence service, if they saw the reports, they figured out who the source was.
And so things are more complicated than we would like them to be.
But I can tell you that there are good people in the intelligence community.
Yes, there are politicians at the top.
And I saw the intelligence community get increasingly politicized as I worked there.
But there's also a lot of good people who are doing their best to do their jobs.
And among their jobs is protecting intelligence sources and methods.
All right.
Well, then that brings us to the last five minutes of the broadcast.
I alluded to the fact that I believe that they're going to put Trump in prison in a couple weeks.
The word is Rikers Island.
Some people are saying Bragg is going to recommend two years.
Mershon's going to give him one.
The fact of the matter is, with the kangaroo system, he could get 144 years, I believe, if they wanted to go the max.
Anything over, you know, a 20-year sentence is pretty much life for Trump.
What do you think the outcome of this is going to be?
I think it's too close to call, but I do agree with you because if they don't give him jail time, it shows that the whole prosecution was a political sham.
You can't have someone, I don't think, found guilty of multiple felonies, multiple felonies, and then not give them jail time.
Because if you don't, then it just shows it to be the political sham that it is.
So it's almost like they have to give jail time to continue the charade.
So I think there will be some.
And if there's not, then there are going to be even more blowback and repercussions because it's kind of exposing themselves for the whole thing being a political sham.
You know, I go into this in my book.
You look at this.
It is a New York, a Democratic governor of New York who basically told people who voted for Trump they were no longer welcome in New York because they didn't share New York values.
Then you get a New York district attorney, Democrat, right?
The Manhattan DA Democrat, the judge, Democrat, who violated New York ethical rules and actually donated to Biden's campaign.
That's the judge, right?
And then you got a jury that is from a largely Democratic community.
It's Democrat upon Democratic upon Democrat, just ganging up on the conservative and using the law to do it.
And so I think it's all obvious.
I think they probably got to give him jail time, which is ridiculous upon ridiculous.
But if they don't, it exposes the charade.
Well, obviously we are in historical times.
And if that happens, it is not only unprecedented, but you wonder what the next event might be.
Let's say none of that happens.
Let's say he also gets in.
Let's say January, he's sworn in and we start getting on the right road.
I think a lot of that's hopium right now.
I'd love to see it, but not necessarily there.
We talked about a lot of corruption.
We talked about how there's really no accountability.
If you were in charge, how would you bring accountability back?
Because to me, you know, the essence of checks and balances is that you really do have checks and balances, right?
And we don't have that right now, especially if you get caught up, not only a court system in New York, but D.C. Forget about it.
You're 100% going to jail.
You better plea because they're going to send you in.
It's a great question.
And I dedicate the last chapter of my book to proposing what I think are practical reforms, things that are doable and would kind of depoliticize prosecutions and DOJ in general.
You know, one of them is that we talked earlier with the Trump campaign back in 2016, how they used intelligence collection methods to target the campaign.
You know, it was after 9-11 that the FBI was given the domestic intelligence portfolio.
That should be taken from them.
That is too much power in one place.
Let them stay a federal law enforcement and there has to be work on their culture, which is dysfunctional, but take away from them the domestic intelligence portfolio, give it to a separate entity, a new agency that just focuses on domestic intelligence.
Also, there needs to be oversight on plea bargains.
Just look at the corruption.
You know, high-level people get a slap on the wrist.
The lower level people are spending years in jail.
Look at the plea bargaining for Hunter Biden up in Delaware.
It was ridiculous.
There needs to be an entity that has complete oversight over federal plea bargains.
You know, also special counsels.
There's a lot of politics involved in nominating special counsels currently done by the Attorney General.
The Attorney General should not get to pick the person.
It should be done through some kind of bipartisan process that would hopefully eliminate politics from the choice of a special counsel.
I do a lot.
I have the difference between special counsel her and special counsel Jack Smith, and they are stuck.
One is a rabid prosecutor with a history of over-prosecuting conservatives.
The other one's a nice guy, right?
So, those types of things.
And I have many more that I go into in the last chapter of the book.
Things that could work to help depoliticize DOJ and the FBI and the executive branch in general.
Well, I think we need to have some kind of oversight.
You know, I would have loved to get your take on the signature reduction program on the Pentagon in the intelligence circle that has no audit system and has been around a decade plus and not been talked about.
Joseph Sweeney, awesome guest.
We hope to have you back.
The book.
Yes, please.
Dangerous injustice: How Democrats Weaponize with DOJ to protect Biden and Persecute Trump.
You can get it over at amazon.com.
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