| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Budget Battles in Intelligence
00:04:54
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| You talked to me in the green room and you said, basically, we haven't, you know, our president hasn't been able to appoint his own team. | |
| They act like, well, he's firing all those people. | |
| He's supposed to fire them. | |
| I have first-hand experience with the process that you just described, with the policy that when a new president comes in, they try to get rid of people who they think don't have the same views as the president. | |
| They want to replace them. | |
| or ship them out someplace else. | |
| Because this happened to me, or they tried to do this to me during the Clinton administration. | |
| When I was working at the CIA, I have a personal anecdote on this. | |
| Bill Clinton, when he came into office, wanted to dramatically cut the defense budget. | |
| And he also wanted to drastically cut the budget for the intelligence community. | |
| Because the Cold War was, his line was the Cold War is over, and we're going to grow the economy by putting all this money in the defense budget and the intelligence community into our economy and into other government spending programs, domestic spending programs, and increased welfare payments and things like that. | |
| And this money will help grow the economy. | |
| And therefore, we don't need these Cold Warriors anymore, the people that won the Cold War. | |
| It's after the Cold War. | |
| The Cold War is over. | |
| But Clinton didn't want to go out there and take the political heat on his own responsibility for cutting the intelligence budget, especially. | |
| Because a lot of people were saying, well, if you're going to cut the defense budget, so we're going to gut the military, we probably should actually increase the intelligence budget just in case we're wrong about these threats that face us. | |
| Because in the aftermath of the Cold War, we're facing a new world that we've never been in before. | |
| And there could be other threats from terrorism or from other countries wanting to get the bomb, other threats that we are unaware of. | |
| And so maybe we actually need a stronger intelligence community, not a weaker intelligence community. | |
| So Clinton, what he wanted to do, and he sent the orders on to the people that he assigned to the top levels of the intelligence community, the Clinton intelligence community, he said, I want you to go and meet with all of the senior intelligence analysts, all right? | |
| And so that I can say that the question has been put to them about can we scale back on the intelligence community budget? | |
| Can we stop paying so much attention to nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, especially from Russia? | |
| And get the proper answer from these people. | |
| I want you to get the politically correct answer that they all agree with you, and they all agree with me on this. | |
| And therefore, I, the President of the United States, am not making this decision all on my own. | |
| But I've been advised, even by my top intelligence people working in the CIA and elsewhere, that they agree with me. | |
| And I was taken aside. | |
| They were going through every branch of the CIA that worked on nuclear weapons and nuclear missiles to ask that question, okay? | |
| And I was told, I was told by my superiors and by the superiors over my superiors. | |
| They had a meeting with me to say, keep your mouth shut, you know, don't, because they knew I was going to disagree. | |
| And they say, you know, we're afraid of you getting fired if you tell the truth, what you really think, and that we can't afford to cut the intelligence budget, that we actually need to be more watchful. | |
| And that in fact, Russia could even be a bigger threat in the aftermath of the Cold War because it's so unstable. | |
| Anyway, the great day came and they had a meeting with my branch. | |
| And I had warned my superiors, I was not going to lie. | |
| And I thought just sitting there and being silent and not expressing opinion would be a lie. | |
| I think there comes times in your life when you're put to the test, that God puts us to the test or fate or history puts you to the test. | |
| And I thought this was the time for me to stand up and be counted. | |
| And I basically made the argument. | |
| I said, no, I didn't agree that we should be cutting back on intelligence, that we need to actually be more watchful than ever when it came to these nuclear threats. | |
| And what happened to me after that, okay, is I was sent into a new training program for interpersonal relations training. | |
| They wanted to re-educate me as an economist, to move me off of nuclear weapons, and send me and my whole family to Indonesia so that I would count rubber plants in the jungles to count rubber plants in the jungles of Indonesia. | |
|
Look What Happened to General Flynn
00:00:58
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| And that was going to be my new job for the CIA, okay? | |
| Now, fortunately, it didn't happen. | |
| Certain high-ranking colleagues in the CIA came to my defense and said, no, this guy's indispensable. | |
| We can't do without him. | |
| So I was kept on. | |
| But I know most people don't have those kinds of friends and that kinds of defense. | |
| But that nearly happened to me. | |
| So I know from firsthand, look what happened to General Flynn. | |
| Obama fired General Flynn. | |
| He was the director of the DIA. | |
| There's an example, whatever one may think of General Flynn in terms of his imprudent behavior afterwards. | |
| He was an excellent director of the DIA when he was there. | |
| And he was just telling President Obama the truth, things that he didn't want to hear. | |
| And so if you're willing to fire the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, what's going to happen to analysts who don't have name recognition, analysts who are down in the trenches? | |