Feb. 4, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
10:12
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| Joining me now, I believe he's there, we've got Stephen Friend on the line, FBI whistleblower. | |
| Stephen Friend, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show. | |
| Well, thanks very much for having me today. | |
| How you doing, Carl? | |
| I'm doing all right, Steve. | |
| All right, so let me just ask you just quickly, give us your take on the confirmation hearings that we witnessed last week with Kash Patel. | |
| How do you think he did? | |
| What did you like? | |
| What did you dislike? | |
| Well, I've liked everything that Cash was able to put out there. | |
| The guy is eminently qualified. | |
| His bona fides are out there for all to see. | |
| He's got a background in national security and as a federal prosecutor, as a defense attorney, which is very important. | |
| So any sort of criticisms in that regard were just not really relevant to the conversation. | |
| But he also presented himself, acquitted himself really nicely under the spotlights on the X and to actually get the Republican members. | |
| Several of them to openly say that he had their support, I thought, was really the key and the symbol that he's whipped the votes and we should expect to see him confirmed fairly shortly. | |
| Were you surprised to see that Democrats were, especially Adam Fuller Schiff, were just so adamantly opposed to the guy? | |
| I mean, it doesn't seem surprising, but I would expect that one would have been somewhat kind to him. | |
| What do you think they're concerned about? | |
| Why the pushback? | |
| Well, I think that it's a lot of dog and pony show that goes on in these hearings. | |
| I don't think any of these members are changing their opinions there. | |
| They're just trying to really get... | |
| They're seven minutes on camera and hopefully get some fundraising, maybe get on cable news sometime tonight. | |
| So it's a little bit of a show there. | |
| But their real opposition to Kash Patel is, one, he's associated with Donald Trump, but also he has a proven track record of rooting out corruption within the FBI. I mean, the guy became a prominent person because he was able to expose the Russia collusion hoax that the FBI perpetrated in the 2016 election that then hamstrung. | |
| Donald Trump's administration for two years Steve, you did a podcast with me not too long ago, and honestly, it was something you said. | |
| I mean, I love Kash Patel, but it was something that you said specifically where I was like, okay, I know this is a guy. | |
| I mean, Stephen has written about what he would do if he were to take control of the FBI, basically dismantle the thing. | |
| But you said something that was somewhat surprising to me. | |
| I mean, you said if anybody could reform the FBI, if anyone should give it or could give it the old college try, it would be Kash Patel. | |
| Why do you say that? | |
| I think that what he led with in the congressional hearing is why. | |
| I mean, he talked about making transparency one of the foremost pillars that he's interested in, and then getting the FBI back to what its directive should be, and that is its interest solely in following the process, the due process that we're all supposed to have under a constitutional form of government. | |
| Where the law enforcement apparatus gathers the facts and presents them. | |
| And whether or not you're found guilty or acquitted at trial does not reflect on the law enforcement. | |
| It's just whether or not the facts supported a conviction or not. | |
| But as we've seen in the last few years especially, the FBI is now putting its entire arm on the scale and trying to get an outcome. | |
| And they're picking winners and losers politically. | |
| So Kash Patel, having seen both sides of that coin as a prosecutor and a defense attorney, I think is really important there. | |
| And he did an excellent job of laying that out. | |
| Okay, now here's something. | |
| I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. | |
| And I think it's – obviously the DOJ exists under the executive branch. | |
| I don't know why so many people are getting their draws up in an uproar over this. | |
| But Trump immediately released 17 inspectors general, and the left went nuts. | |
| And I think he did a – I think this was a smart thing to do. | |
| What's your take on that? | |
| I approve this. | |
| Really, it's the canard that is the inspector general where we're all supposed to sit back and call out from the stands that they're doing a great job of rooting out corruption when, in fact, they're basically all running protection schemes for the various agencies. | |
| And it's understandable because inspectors general report to their agency. | |
| So as it pertains to the FBI, you have the Office of Inspector General under the Department of Justice, and they basically will stretch out their investigation for years and years on end by the time that anybody who is... | |
| Guilty of having committed some sort of infraction will have already resigned or retired and moved on. | |
| And then the inspector general says, oh, we can't do anything about it. | |
| And you know what? | |
| We're not going to make a referral over for some sort of criminal prosecution. | |
| We've seen it across the government. | |
| And we need to actually have inspectors general who are interested in holding people accountable and doing it forthwith. | |
| And don't do the drip drip until people just lose interest or patience with the entire internal investigation. | |
| The days of the government investigating the government and finding that the government did nothing wrong have to go away. | |
| Is there any way that that position could work under a Trump administration or any administration? | |
| If they're beholden to the department itself, I mean, how would that even work? | |
| I'd like to see somebody be creative and maybe look at an enforcement mechanism where you have very much like the way an FBI works with the DOJ, where you have the cops, the agents who are investigating. | |
| And then the prosecutors over at Maine Justice. | |
| Why couldn't we do something similar in that fashion with an inspector general where there's an investigative arm? | |
| And then if there is a violation of the law, I think we should all expect a prosecution of that. | |
| If you're in a position of public trust and you abuse it, then there needs to be a high accountability for it as opposed to just running out the clock and giving a person the opportunity to just resign anonymously. | |
| Because the other thing to remember is in so many of these reports, they don't name the names of the people. | |
| So they go on to lucrative Yeah, I mean, it's a good point. | |
| I'm speaking to Stephen Friend, FBI whistleblower. | |
| Steve, real quick, where can people go to find you online and to follow what you're doing? | |
| They can follow me on x@realstevefriend and I also have a podcast called the American Radicals Podcast, which streams on Rumble and also available iTunes and Spotify and iHeart. | |
| Okay, let me ask you this. | |
| Donald Trump just recently as well, or his administration, the 51 spies that were connected to, what was it, that Russian dossier, or at least lying about the Hunter Biden laptop. | |
| Hey, no more special privileges for you. | |
| We're revoking your security clearances. | |
| As a matter of fact, more recently, you're not even allowed into federal buildings. | |
| Your take on that? | |
| Well, it's an appropriate use of the adjudicative guidelines that they have for security clearances. | |
| They vary guidelines that were weaponized against me and other whistleblowers like me because the intelligence community has that latitude through the Supreme Court, Navy versus Egan, to bequeath or to suspend or revoke a security clearance. | |
| And then they put you in limbo and they go after you for your whistleblowing, but they allege that, well, we're investigating some sort of transient offense. | |
| It's not related to that. | |
| It just happens to sync up perfectly. | |
| So here in this case, These people who held a security clearance, maybe they were actively employed by the government, maybe they held the clearance afterwards like so many of them do and go work in the private sector and make a ton of money. | |
| They lied to the American people. | |
| They attempted to influence and successfully influence the presidential election. | |
| I think the polls bear that out. | |
| A significant number of people would have changed their votes if they had known that. | |
| And the entire thing was spun up within six hours because Antony Blinken, as an advisor to Joe Biden, called up the CIA and asked for it. | |
| Man, it's so crazy, Steve, to sit here and think that we have, I mean, literally people within our federal government, or at least had, that seem so hell-bent on the downfall of America. | |
| Even in these intelligence agencies, am I going too far with that? | |
| Is it just Trump against Trump, maybe? | |
| I think we've seen the mask be pulled away. | |
| For a long time, intelligence collectors in these various agencies, people like to call the deep state. | |
| They're the administrative state. | |
| They say administrations come and go, but we're going to remain here forever. | |
| They do what is good for the agency. | |
| That's where the politics lay. | |
| But now, thanks to the hiring practices we've seen for almost 20 years, since Barack Obama became the president, so 16 years, almost a full generation of government hiring has gone on. | |
| They're frankly just communists. | |
| And they will use the power to reward their friends and punish their enemies. | |
| And we see nothing better as an example to that, the way that the FBI went after people because of their conservative beliefs, praying outside of abortion clinics or standing outside the Capitol steps or going to a school board meeting. | |
| We're at the bottom of the slippery slope here. | |
| We're at the point where you have the FBI deeming that if you have a preference for small government and you want to actually pare back the FBI's capabilities, that that makes you a terrorist and they feel fit to use all their assets to go after you. | |
| All right. | |
| I'm speaking to my guest, Stephen Friend. | |
| Steve, can you stay with me for one more segment after this? | |
| We only have about 45 seconds or so left in this, or do you need to go? | |
| No, you got it. | |
| I'll stick with you. | |
| OK, so in just 30 seconds and then after the break, I want to talk to you about what's happening with J6 prosecutors and a few more questions. | |
| But just briefly explain what the FBI did to you where literally you couldn't go find a job for God knows how long and how they punished you for being a whistleblower. | |
| 29 months, unpaid, indefinitely suspended. | |
| The FBI pulled my security clearance, eventually revoked it when I testified to Congress. | |
| And I've been unable to successfully gain employment here for the better part of two and a half years, just as retaliation for bringing protected whistleblower disclosures to the Inspector General and to Congress. | |
| All right, you're speaking to FBI whistleblower Stephen Friend Trump. | |
| We've got to do something about this. |
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