Kash's Corner - Kash Patel: Inside the Israel-Hamas Conflict and Politicization of National Security

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Nov. 10, 2021 - Kash's Corner

30:21

Kash Patel: Inside the Israel-Hamas Conflict and Politicization of National Security

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	Cash Patel, I want to say great to have you on American Thought Leaders, except that this isn't American Thought Leaders.
	We're here on Cash's Corner.
	You know, we've had some great, great conversations in the past about a slew of issues, frankly, and that, of course, got us both thinking maybe we should do something a little more regularly together.
	And there's actually quite an amazing story as to how we came up with the name.
	Well, a dear friend of mine reminded me of my high school football days when I was a kicker.
	And basically, all my friends for every Saturday high school football game would section off a corner of the stands and they would get a flag of India and they would write, this is Cash's Corner with K's on it.
	And I would have this entire fan base behind me.
	It was pretty cool.
	So maybe we can build that again.
	Well, maybe those folks will be viewers.
	We'll have to go back to Long Island and check it out.
	Look, it's great to be back with Epic Times and I'm very appreciative that you guys took a chance on me.
	Hopefully this works out.
	But I always have fun with you guys and you guys talk about topics that matter.
	So this is definitely worth the time.
	Well, exactly.
	And I mean, your acumen actually spans quite a range of areas that are of great, great interest to, you know, to myself as a Canadian and of course the American people more broadly.
	You know, you've been in the DOJ for decades, you know, and sort of in non-political appointments, so to speak, as a prosecutor.
	You know, correct me if I'm wrong about anything.
	You've been in the Department of Defense as the chief of staff, in fact.
	You've been in the NSC as the head of counterterrorism.
	You've also, frankly, you've worked at the UN for the U.S., of course, at the UN, trying to forward some human rights issues, even.
	Very, very broad range of interests.
	And I found your analysis very interesting.
	This is what we're going to do here, just for the benefit of our audiences.
	Yeah, I think it'll be fun.
	You know, best laid plans seem to be the theme of my life.
	When I left law school, or when I went to law school, I was like, I'm going to go be a rich corporate lawyer and make as much money.
	I want to be the guy in suits, that TV show.
	And my life went the other way, and I went into government service.
	And I thought, I'll do this for a couple years.
	And it turned into 16.
	So, yeah.
	And it couldn't have worked out better.
	Honestly, couldn't have worked out better.
	Worked for multiple administrations, DOJ, DOD, Intel community, White House.
	I mean, just some amazing adventures.
	And it's sad to see it come to an end, but this is fun.
	I get to do this now.
	Well, right.
	And I mean, at one point, you were even the carrier of the nuclear football.
	Is that right?
	So the way it works is the military handles the responsibilities, obviously rightly so around security and transportation.
	And they assign very experienced and skilled military aides to execute that.
	And obviously it has to go wherever the commander-in-chief is, just in case.
	That's the whole point.
	Always be ready.
	But on the advisory side of the house, it's also good.
	And this is what every White House has done going back decades, is they have a national security representative from the NSC travel with the president and the military aid in case something happens so he's able to give advice or bring in the right people for the president before he has to make a decision in that circumstance.
	So you know, I think we've seen...
	Where are my new football cufflinks?
	I was going to say, in the movies, we've seen these little huddles.
	It seems to be like a popular theme in movies, actually, to have that moment where the nuclear football has to come out and there's a bunch of people debating what's going to happen, right?
	Or, you know.
	Yeah, I think thankfully, you know, the doomsday scenarios are in the movies and not in real life.
	So, you know, we're prepared to execute wherever we are, on the road, overseas, in D.C., where have you.
	We're always ready to go.
	And, you know, I was confident in the abilities of the people I was working with.
	And luckily, we never ran into a situation where we had to go all in.
	Well, so let's put on your counterterrorism hat here, or the, or the, you know, your, let's, let's dig into that, that, that part of your expertise.
	Right now, we have this, you know, you have Hamas attacked Israel, and there's a whole, of course, there's a whole scenario, and there's a lot of messaging around that, and there's a lot of kind of frankly confusion about what exactly is going on, right?
	So let's dig into that to start.
	You know, how do you see what's happening there?
	Sure, that's a great.
	So if I'm anything, I'm a counterterrorism guy.
	I was a terrorism prosecutor, did a lot of intel terrorism work, and then my first tour as a civilian in the military was targeting terrorists with our special forces guys.
	So unfortunately, you have a juxtaposition of two policies involving the Middle East.
	President Trump obtains the impossible with multiple peace deals with Israel and Middle Eastern countries and African countries.
	And then fast forward in 120-some plus days in the Biden administration, they're making fun of the peace deals that President Trump achieved.
	And now Israel and Hamas are basically at a war.
	And I think that basically shows the difference in leadership, the priorities that President Trump placed on our relationship with Israel and going after terrorist organizations.
	So make no mistake about it, Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization.
	That FTO designation, it means something in the U.S. law.
	It means they are terrorists by law under the United States.
	And we cripple them with sanctions.
	We limit their ability to move.
	Why do we do that?
	Because they've conducted terrorist activities around the world, killing Americans and American allies.
	And so it's a very high bar to meet.
	And for people to go around and say, oh, Hamas isn't a terrorist organization anymore, is just careless and reckless with how that organization has carried itself out.
	Well, so how is it even that there's a discussion about this?
	I think Hamas has earned the designation, or at least from everything I know, many times over through basically lack of value of human life, right?
	Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, you hit it right on the head.
	I mean, how do they earn it?
	They kill people, you know, senselessly.
	And based on their religious ethos and their differences, there's nothing wrong with their religion.
	It's how they utilize it to execute others who don't abide by it.
	And that's what literally makes any terrorist organization a terrorist organization.
	The great thing about America is you can have a million religions here and no one's going to kill you for it.
	That's the whole difference between us and them.
	And you see it, and you have seen it with Hamas and Israel for decades, not just recently, but unfortunately for decades.
	And it's been a problem that needs more than a diplomatic gesture at the United Nations to bring it to a halt.
	Israel is being actually accused itself of both genocide and ethnic cleansing in terms of what it's doing, I guess now in the Gaza Strip, because that's where the Hamas attacks are coming from.
	So, you know, I guess this similar sort of language says Israel kills people.
	Israel kills people indiscriminately.
	That's what's being said.
	I don't know that there is an equal transfer between when you say that with Hamas versus when you say that with Israel.
	Because Israel doesn't kill indiscriminately within its borders like America doesn't because of a religion that you have.
	Israel has Christians, Muslims, Jews, what have you, all sorts of different religions, and you're not killed for it.
	But when you face an attack coming in from an outside terrorist organization, obviously you have to defend yourself and you have to do what America did leading up to 9-11 and in response to 9-11.
	You have to go on the offensive to tamp out these terrorist networks, otherwise they're going to keep killing your people and your allies' people.
	And that's, I think, the difference between a Hamas and a position that Israel takes.
	And for America, we have to decide.
	Are we going to stay true to our allies in the Middle East, like Israel?
	Or are we going to say it's okay because the mainstream media has gotten on board with accepting a foreign terrorist organization?
	And if you talk badly against them, then you're a racist, which is ridiculous.
	I mean, the president, the administration has both voiced its unequivocal support for Israel, from what I understand.
	I mean, it doesn't seem like that's different.
	Well, I think President Biden finally came out and said, yes, we want peace in the Middle East, which is what everyone wants, and obviously we're going to support our allies in Israel.
	But that doesn't get you peace in the Middle East.
	That doesn't get you a lasting ceasefire between Israel and a Hamas terrorist organization.
	If you're going to get in the game, then you have to get over there and sit down with them at the table and say, how are we going to bring this to a resolution?
	And I haven't seen that from this administration.
	So, you know, I was talking about this with an American thought leader's guest the other day, but, you know, of course, the U.S. did broker these Abraham Accords with a number of countries, you know, and, you know, ostensibly leading to potentially one with Saudi Arabia.
	Is that, in the current situation, do you feel that's endangered?
	Well, I think it's the perfect way to highlight the politicization of the National Security of America.
	When I was serving under President Trump, we were accused of politicizing everything we did because it was under President Trump.
	Like, we literally, and I had nothing to do with it, but Jared and his team did this amazing job in getting the Abraham Accords across the finish line and achieving lasting peace agreements.
	And now the headlines read, fast forward to last week, Jared Kushner is basically fake and false peace agreements don't withstand the test of time.
	That's actually not true.
	If you look at it, the countries that we have the peace agreements with aren't jumping in the melee right now.
	They're not diving into the Hamas-Israel issue.
	They're staying on the sidelines, which is what you want when you sign a peace agreement because we made a deal with them.
	And hopefully the Biden administration recognizes that even though that happened under President Trump and they hate it, that it is a lasting agreement that's working and they need to be moving forward with it, not backwards.
	So what do you see as a solution here?
	I just don't think it's going to be resolved anytime soon with cheap rhetoric from 10,000 feet above.
	You have to figure out an actual plan.
	What are we going to do?
	Not go to the podium and make a phone call.
	That's not how you engage the Middle East.
	So until this administration decides what it wants to do, I don't think we're going to have any clarity.
	President Trump made it very clear what he wanted to do in the Middle East and did it.
	And that's the difference.
	Well, and I mean, the other sort of unspoken element here is that, of course, I think it's generally understood that Iran supports Hamas.
	I mean, that's the other thing, right?
	Iran, the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world, America's arguably number one enemy, has its proxy force fighting our America's number one ally in the region, Israel.
	So that's the other thing that you have to take into account when you say, okay, we're going to work with both sides.
	Well, if you're working with Hamas, you're working with the Iranians.
	You're working with the Ayatollah, and you're working with the Quds force.
	And those guys are responsible for more American soldier casualties than any one organization in American history, or modern American history.
	So that's a great point.
	And I don't think people understand the connection between Hamas and Iran as they should.
	Okay.
	So it's not generally understood.
	I guess as I said, I assumed it was.
	No, I mean, you know it, and a lot of people that follow your programming know it, but I honestly don't think the majority of the world realizes the nexus between Hamas and Iran.
	And it's bad.
	So how does that work exactly?
	Yeah, so basically, I'll give you the Iranian squeeze play, okay?
	So Iran has its proxy forces around the world, right?
	So they have, you know, Hamas, Lebanese, Hezbollah, out in the western part of the Middle East, right?
	From Lebanon through Israel.
	Down south in the Middle East, you have in Yemen, Iran's other proxy force, the Houthis.
	Now, these are all foreign terrorist organizations, by designation, by the United States government over multiple administrations, which means they have killed and murdered innocent civilians, American allies, and launched attacks against an American military.
	So it's about as bad as you can get.
	But a stark example of the problem that the Biden administration is facing is that the Houthis, the Iranian proxy in Yemen, which borders our ally, Saudi Arabia, President Trump designated them a foreign terrorist organization, and rightly so.
	President Biden reversed that designation a couple of weeks ago.
	So now the Houthis, the Iranian fighting force in Yemen, fighting against our allies in Saudi Arabia and fighting against American soldiers, is no longer a terrorist designation, so their sanctions have been removed.
	And that's a problem.
	And that's how Iran wins around the world.
	And so how exactly does it win?
	Well, when you remove the Iranian proxy force from a terrorist designation list, they're no longer subject to sanctions that we put on them and the community, the global community puts on them.
	Banking, moving money, moving supplies, getting goods in and out through them.
	And also their leadership structure is no longer sanctioned.
	So they have open means to transportation and goods and services.
	And that's how you grow a terrorist organization.
	So I guess, so what's the idea behind doing this in your mind?
	As I've said for the first few months here, I'm happy to analyze any actual foreign policy strategy that the Biden administration has on Iran, on Russia, on China, on the Middle East.
	But unfortunately, the thing they keep coming back to is what did President Trump do?
	We're going to do the opposite.
	And that is extremely dangerous for American national security.
	And I honestly, unfortunately, keep being proven right with the actions of this administration.
	I can understand if they have a substantive reason to go a different way, but they haven't voiced that, and that's not what the American people voted for.
	Okay, well, you know, another sort of let's talk about terrorism a little more, right?
	Because, you know, domestic terrorism has actually been identified as, I think, one of the top, if not the top, national security issue, right?
	And that led to this 60-day standdown order, which is now a little bit in the military, which is now a little bit past 60 days, I believe, since it was initiated.
	So, well, you know, tell me about that.
	This is just another example, in my opinion, of you're putting politics before national security.
	I was a national security prosecutor at DOJ, and I handled domestic terrorism cases.
	Domestic terrorism cases currently, as it is today, are at their lowest point in modern U.S. history.
	That's the fact.
	So, if there was evidence to say that domestic terrorism is on the rise, we would have seen it or heard about it.
	And for the president to currently go out and say domestic terrorism and white supremacy are the number one national security issue highlights to me what I was telling you earlier, that all they care about right now is feeding a political narrative and not protecting the United States.
	Because there is no way that domestic terrorism and white supremacy in the United States military are the number one threats to the United States.
	It's just factually incorrect and it's not supported by the intelligence.
	Maybe they're defining it differently.
	I don't think you can define it differently.
	I mean, domestic terrorism is very well defined within our statutes and our federal guidelines, and white supremacy is kind of self-explanatory.
	And yes, unfortunately, there are a few bad apples when you have a three-million-person enterprise as big as the Department of Defense, but to say that it is rampant throughout, and as you noted, they first identified their sort of quote-unquote national security threat as white supremacy is rampant within the DOD.
	And then they issue a standdown order, and they force it on our men and women in uniform across the world.
	Where's the evidence?
	What did they find?
	And Jan, you know this.
	If they found anything to support their claims, it would have been all over the news by now.
	And it's been dead silent.
	So I think a lot of people might not know what exactly is a standdown order.
	So that's a great question, and most people shouldn't know, you know, unless you've been in or around the United States military and under its leadership, it's not in your verbiage.
	But a standdown order is a pretty severe order given in either times of war or operations across the world that the United States military is in.
	It's literally stop and get out or type of deal if we're breaking it down to its simplest form.
	So when the Pentagon says I'm issuing a stand down order for white supremacy hunting within the ranks of the DOD, I think, and I've spoken to our men and women in uniform that I used to work with, and they just said, we don't understand what the purpose of this is.
	What are they asking for?
	We report routinely if we see criminal activity in our ranks.
	If we see racist behavior, we tell our leadership structure.
	They already do it.
	To say and issue a standdown order is to just politicize the Department of Defense and the career men and women that work there.
	And that's what the mainstream media wants to hear, so they're feeding it to them.
	What's going to happen next?
	I mean, we've had 60 days.
	Is there any resolution at this point?
	Or did it just sort of automatically run out?
	Or how does it work?
	Well, two things.
	They'll either just create another narrative and hope the world forgets about this one when they don't find anything and the mainstream media will help them.
	Or they'll find a scapegoat and they will find someone who unfortunately has associations with white supremacy groups and then they will exploit that to fit the media narrative rather than allow the facts and evidence to fit the marching orders of what the Department of Defense should be doing.
	So I think it's one of those two things.
	Either way you go, you've already hurt the credibility and the confidence of our men and women in uniform and you're going to continue to degrade that if you keep focusing on phantom threats that don't exist instead of real threats like Iran, like Russia, like China, like Hamas.
	Well, and you know, as you mentioned, to be fair, of course, there are white supremacists in America.
	There are, you know, there is some kind of domestic terrorist activity.
	It's just like you're saying, it's just basically it doesn't exist at a scale that's notable.
	Right, exactly, of course.
	And you have to keep combating that, I think.
	And you have to keep combating that not just within government, but without government.
	100%.
	I will always agree with that.
	But when you put a label on it without supporting evidence or information like they have, I think that hurts the United States military because it hurts the men and women who signed up to serve and who abhor that kind of behavior and report it day in and day out if and when they see it.
	You know, we just had, I'm just come to think of it, you know, we just had this vote fairly recently to establish, the House voted to establish this bipartisan commission on January 6th.
	Most of the Republicans, aside from I think 35, felt that it wasn't something they wanted to do.
	I interviewed Congressman Heiss.
	Congressman Heist told me that basically there's no way this is really going to be bipartisan.
	That was his issue with it.
	But frankly, there's a lot of people that want to get to the bottom of what actually happened and feel like a 9-11 style commission would make sense.
	I mean, I don't know that that's the case because as you said, this is never going to be an actual bipartisan investigation.
	And as Trey Gowdy told me a long time ago, Congress is where good investigations go to die.
	And so basically, because of the political nature and especially in the current political environment, you know, we know what happened on January 6th.
	I was at the Pentagon as a chief of staff.
	We put out a six-page timeline of the minute-by-minute details of 48 hours before to 24 hours after.
	It is the definitive timeline that was signed off by the Secretary of Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of the Army that runs the National Guard.
	And if America wants to know what happened, it's out there.
	They don't need a year and a billion dollars worth of investigations to figure it out.
	That TikTok is the definitive piece for the January 6th events.
	What the media and some of the folks on the Hill don't want to cover is the fact that President Trump authorized two days in advance 20,000 National Guards men and women across the U.S. if the Secretary of Defense and I deemed it necessary.
	What they don't want to talk about is Mayor Bowser in D.C. sending a written letter to the Department of Defense refusing to request National Guard's men and women as required by the law.
	So those are facts that they don't want to have come out.
	They're there.
	It's not hard to find.
	You don't need a commission to do it.
	And wouldn't a commission find these facts and more, I guess is the question, right?
	Because I think the commission would almost be a rehash of the Russia Gate stuff and the impeachment episode.
	I mean, you pick your flavor of the day under President Trump.
	And unfortunately, if it was possible to set up a true bipartisan independent commission, I'd be all for it.
	It'd be great.
	But in this current environment, it's impossible.
	And the narrative would just continue, continue, continue about insurrection and people being racist.
	And that doesn't help America.
	It doesn't help our military, and it doesn't help American citizens' confidence in our government.
	Well, okay, so I guess for the record, so you don't see this systemic racism and white supremacy as being a huge problem in America right now.
	In the military, absolutely not.
	And I'm a minority who served in Obama's military apparatus and Trump's military apparatus, and I've never seen it.
	I've served overseas, I've served on the ground in every theater of war we have, and I've not once ever been subjected to it, seen it, witnessed it, or heard about it.
	You know, so that's super interesting that you say that, because right now, you know, I've become aware, and we've talked about this a little bit, of the fact that there's a plan by the U.S. military to basically use an outside contractor to study the social media of U.S. military members,
	sort of to circumvent their First Amendment protections, if I understand this correctly, in order to kind of discover some of this extremism that we've just been talking about, apparent extremism.
	So, your thoughts here?
	I think it's a total farce.
	I think that the men and women who serve the United States military, when they put on the uniform, they are as apolitical as can be.
	And I've seen that around the world through multiple administrations.
	I think when they go home at night and they talk to their family and their loved ones, they have every right to talk about politics and their beliefs.
	And they can do that on social media.
	They can do that on the telephone.
	They can do it by email, as long as they're not representing themselves as a member of the United States military and associating a political lien.
	And I think that's what 99.8% of the military does and should have a right to do.
	This is just another example of the further politicization of a mainstream media narrative because they're saying the people in the military are inherently flawed and we need, the U.S. government need to intervene so we can root out a phantom target that doesn't exist.
	Let's go look at their social media.
	It's outrageous.
	What is it that they're going to be looking for?
	Well, that's the thing.
	If they could identify, if they found a group of people in the military, a unit somewhere that had these crazy associations with a white supremacy group or a Black Panther Association or things like that, then they would be justified in looking at that group's connections and networks to properly root it out.
	But now they're saying we're going to look at every single person, and not just we, the sale they're making to the American people, and this is their version of safeguarding America's interests is a total pretext by shipping it out to a private company.
	So now we're spending taxpayer dollars, now we're spending probably 10 times more than what it would have cost us to do internally to fund some company who probably has their hand in the till with the Democratic National Party, if the past is any prologue.
	And they're going to tell the United States military what is and isn't appropriate on social media, I think it's just ridiculous on its face.
	What is then, what is the real purpose?
	Why this sort of this phantom that you've been describing?
	You know, the mainstream media wants these political headlines to continue, and you have an administration right now who's willing to spoon feed them to it.
	Be it white supremacy, be it the Hamas-Palestinian-Israeli issue, be it the counterterrorism matters we discussed earlier, or be it white supremacy within DOD, and now let's go out and after our 60-day stand-on order didn't work and we didn't find anything, well, that's because we didn't look hard enough, so now we're gonna look at everybody's social media and we're gonna pay some company millions of dollars to do it.
	If the American people don't understand that the men and women in uniform routinely root out and report through their chain of command improper behavior, then I think we've just completely lost our way.
	And I don't think that's the case.
	This is a top-down way of telling the media, here's the narrative that you want, and we're going to go find it.
	Now we're going to go hunt down this stuff on social media.
	I'm going to ask this question again because I keep thinking it, has the definition changed of this white supremacy or extremism?
	No, I think, look, racism is racism.
	It's not hard to figure it out.
	And I don't think it should be tolerated anywhere.
	Okay, I've been subjected to it all my life.
	I get it.
	But it hasn't happened when I was serving in the United States military.
	It hasn't happened when I was at the Department of Justice.
	It didn't happen when I was at the White House.
	It didn't happen when I worked for President Obama, right?
	So I don't think you need to redefine it or look for a global definition.
	Everyone knows what it is.
	And if it's happening in the United States military at a rampant scale, you would have heard about it.
	So, okay, that's interesting.
	You say you've been subjected to it your whole life.
	How did that manifest?
	Sure.
	I mean, look, I'm a first-generation Indian American kid that grew up in New York.
	And I played ice hockey and different sports my whole life.
	And those weren't something brown kids did a lot.
	So, you know, kids can be cruel.
	But as you grow up, you know, unfortunately, you do run into encounters where people just didn't accept me and my family and where we came from.
	And, you know, like many others who are Asian American or who are black or who are brown or whatever or Hispanic American, you fight through and you endure.
	And it makes you better.
	But what you have to do along the way is educate those people that, hey, I'm an American.
	So are you.
	None of that other stuff matters.
	And to me, that's always been the best part about being an American.
	I feel like this is a whole new topic.
	But, you know, so I'm trying, and there's a narrative right now that there is systemic racism in America.
	Do you feel that's true?
	No.
	I think there are many forms of racism that unfortunately continue to permeate through some parts of society.
	But to say there's systemic racism in law enforcement even, I think is totally false.
	There are some few law enforcement personnel who have racist tendencies and they need to be removed and eliminated 100%.
	Full stop.
	Same thing goes for the military.
	If and where we find it in the military, they need to be removed from those positions because those are positions of privilege that you get to serve in that capacity.
	But to say that it's rampant, to say that it's everywhere, is just to fit a political narrative that allows the mainstream media to keep parroting fake news.
	So Cash, this has been an amazing discussion today.
	Thanks for that, man.
	Thanks for having me.
	I think it's you actually talk about topics of consequence that matter.
	And if I haven't bored you to death, I'll be glad to come back.

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