Jan. 29, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Even more important than where it came from, the Chinese leadership knew that they had a pretty damn contagious, relatively lethal virus on their hands by the fall of 19, and decided to put tens of thousands of people on airplanes and murder, and I say that intentionally, murder hundreds of thousands of people all across this country. | ||
| They had a choice to make. | ||
| The choice they made was load airplanes, send them to Milan, Italy. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party must be held accountable for this. | ||
| Look, they don't care about human life. | ||
| So be it, but when you transmit that to the rest of the world, and you kill people all around the world, there's a place for real accountability. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the former director of the CIA, former Secretary of State, and author of the new book, Never Give an Inch, Fighting for the America I Love, Secretary Mike Pompeo. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, it's great to be with you. | ||
| I mentioned to you right before we started that I just did an hour show blowing up the people of the World Economic Forum, and now I get to talk to an actual American, so I'm very relieved at the moment. | ||
| That's how we're starting this interview, with just relief on my part. | ||
| I hope that's okay with you. | ||
| That is a great way to begin an interview. | ||
| And you did note that you are not in Davos. | ||
| Can I ask where you are? | ||
| Yeah, I'm in my home. | ||
| I'm in Virginia today. | ||
| Great, great. | ||
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unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, there's a ton to talk to you about, obviously. | ||
| Before we get into all of the CIA stuff and Secretary of State stuff and Trump stuff and Biden stuff and all that stuff, can you give me like a minute or two just kind of Mike Pompeo 101, a little bit of your history that led you to doing all of these things? | ||
| Oh, goodness. | ||
| So, look, I grew up in Santa Ana, California. | ||
| My parents wanted to chart a better life for their kids. | ||
| I have an older sister, younger brother, much like many parents in America. | ||
| And then I got really lucky. | ||
| I got into West Point. | ||
| And so I went to the United States Military Academy, served a little over five years on active duty. | ||
| I had a great assignment. | ||
| Ronald Reagan was my commander-in-chief. | ||
| I was patrolling the East German border in my M1 tank. | ||
| There's not much better for a 22-year-old kid than rolling up and down a Soviet communist border in an M1 tank. | ||
| It's all really good stuff. | ||
| And then I went to law school, practiced law for a couple of years and started a company in Kansas with my three best friends in the whole world. | ||
| Married to a lovely woman named Susan. | ||
| We have one son, Nick, who's now 32 years old and married to a great Christian lady named Rachel. | ||
| And then I lost my mind after about eight or nine years in the private sector, ran for Congress. | ||
| And that led me to ultimately getting the opportunity to serve America in the Trump administration in those two roles. | ||
| All right, that's the abbreviated bio, let's say. | ||
| Let me start this way for the real portion of the interview. | ||
| You know, right now, when people say CIA, FBI, when people are hearing all of what's going on with the Twitter files and seeming government intelligence agency collusion with big tech and all of these things, there's a real, I think, warranted skepticism about these agencies. | ||
| So can you just talk to us a little bit about What the agencies are like, is all of this stuff warranted? | ||
| Is some of our worries unwarranted, etc, etc? | ||
| No, the concern of governmental power is one of the reasons I ran for Congress. | ||
| Too much power in Washington, D.C., unchecked, is something that America has always had a responsibility to protect against, and you can see it. | ||
| I can speak most directly to the intelligence agencies, the CIA. | ||
| I worked with the FBI on some projects, but I was never responsible for it in the same way that I got a chance to peer inside CIA. | ||
| I took over from a man named John Brennan, the previous director, who had politicized that agency deeply. | ||
| I write about this in Never Give an Inch. | ||
| He worked on this thing that incorporated the Steele dossier that became the Russia hoax in ways that were antithetical to good analysis, good intelligence, that is so important for the United States of America. | ||
| And I had to go back and rebuild pieces of that. | ||
| But the good news was, And this is different from the State Department, which is a big bureaucracy, which frankly... | ||
| We can talk about is hugely problematic but different at the CIA at the CIA. | ||
| Most of the folks are people who want to do America's mission. | ||
| And so when I came in and President Trump came in. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| This is the direction you're going. | ||
| We're going to go bang our head against the wall. | ||
| We're going to go break through it. | ||
| We're going to deliver for the American people as you have directed us to do. | ||
| These are young men and women who you know, they just want to put a dagger in their mouth and go out and collect intelligence for us. | ||
| And the risk is that you have political leadership and in the end presidents own that you have political leadership that undermines both America's confidence in the institutions, which is the skepticism you're referring to but as equally bad as that as troubling as the the absence of confidence in the institution is is they're not effective. | ||
| They're not on mission. | ||
| When they're spending their time training on diversity, equity, and inclusion, when the green agenda and the LGBTQ agenda come to dominate the focus inside these institutions, you're undermining incredibly powerful American tools that have kept us all safe for an awfully long time. | ||
| So when you took the gig, was it like day one that you realized how politics and the Obama staffing and everything that Brendan was doing, did you realize it on day one how dirty the whole thing had become and how tough is it to go in and try to clean up some of that stuff? | ||
| So I'd seen it even before that. | ||
| I served on the House Intelligence Committee. | ||
| So I had been watching the DNI operation, the CIA operation, all of the intelligence folks for four or five years. | ||
| And so I knew that Brennan, look, this is a director of the CIA who refused to say that the agency spied on foreigners. | ||
| It's task is to go do really good collection so presidents can have good data sets to make informed decisions. | ||
| And so I knew that Director Brennan had taken this agency off mission off its focus. | ||
| And so literally it's the case Dave on day one. | ||
| I went in built my team some of from the outside most of it frankly from the inside that we're still great and still are great people there. | ||
| We identified leaders. | ||
| We identified people who were pipe hitters who were willing to go crush it on behalf of America and change the focus of the agency to deliver for the president. | ||
| So how is that now change since you're gone and obviously we have a new administration and I suspect they probably like a lot of those Brennan appointments that were there and ideas. | ||
| Yeah, it's it's different. | ||
| I will say this the current director director Burns is not John Brennan. | ||
| And so I think that's I think that's fantastic. | ||
| John along with director coming at the FBI were a pair of truly bad actors who and I write about this in the book who on January 6 2017 when the president had not yet been sworn in. | ||
| Went to Trump Tower. | ||
| I was invited to be there. | ||
| I was still just a member of Congress. | ||
| I was the nominee to be the CIA director. | ||
| Went to Trump Tower and basically told Donald Trump that he was a Russian asset, or that they believed so. | ||
| And I am now even more convinced that they knew that wasn't true, that they knew it was based on unreliable, unverified for sure information, and the harm that they did. | ||
| Forget to me or to Donald Trump. | ||
| The harm that they did to our country is just among the most dangerous things I have seen come out of the intelligence community in my lifetime. | ||
| What do you make of how nobody seems to ever pay a price for these things? | ||
| So when you talk about, you know, the Steele dossier coming out of this or the 50 former intelligence officials that basically said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, which we know obviously it now was not. | ||
| I think one of the frustrations for average people is they see this and they go, well, nobody seems to ever get fired. | ||
| Actually, the people who lie end up with gigs on CNN or in the government. | ||
| Yeah, one of my biggest challenges was John Brennan was out there on MSNBC talking about all this stuff while I was trying to run the CIA. | ||
| It was hugely problematic because you had some fraction of the workforce that wanted to follow him. | ||
| And more importantly, you had this confusion. | ||
| Are you guys not told beforehand? | ||
| I don't know who would tell you, but I mean, shouldn't there be some sort of code? | ||
| Like if you ran the thing, you can't be on MSNBC or Fox a week after you leave to tell the secret? | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, that was common practice, pretty common practice. | ||
| Look, I don't have any problem if what you're going out there is to talk about the greatness of the institution that you led and the people, really the people, right? | ||
| But when you're out there telling stories to your point about the Russia hoax, John Brennan and the folks who signed that document clearly knew that this was likely not Russian disinformation. | ||
| And so they caveat it to be clever. | ||
| But the truth is, I think they all knew, but they had a political agenda. | ||
| And that's that's the danger. | ||
| You know, these institutions matter an awful lot. | ||
| We haven't spent as much time talking about the FBI, but to your point about accountability, we know that McCabe lied. | ||
| We know that the FBI concluded that McCabe lied. | ||
| And, you know, he's out on CNN telling stories, pretending he was a good actor inside that institution, when in fact, he, along with the cohort around him, undermined the most basic principles of our republic. | ||
| Who do you really put the blame at with all of this? | ||
| Do you feel that that's Brennan to blame, or was that purely that he was doing basically what Obama appointed him to do? | ||
| You know, Dave, I always hold the senior leaders accountable. | ||
| Uh, and that holds true for our administration, too. | ||
| The things we got wrong were my responsibility or the president's responsibility. | ||
| This isn't a partisan shot. | ||
| So I owe President Obama responsible. | ||
| In fact, with respect to this dossier and the intelligence report that was written, Obama had directed that report be written and publicized in the fall of what would have been 2016. | ||
| After the election, he directed that they write this report and that they make a classified version and an unclassified version that was released that that's unheard of to have that happen. | ||
| And so this was directed from the highest levels last thought people matter. | ||
| And so every president has to be incredibly focused from before day one. | ||
| I'm bringing the right people in that not only share their policy views, but their value set And I think you can see one of the things I regret is that Director Comey wasn't replaced immediately at the beginning of our administration. | ||
| He sat inside of our team while he was trying to undermine everything it was that we were doing. | ||
| So, do you blame your former boss for that? | ||
| Like, do you think he was just not, didn't realize the magnitude of the problem? | ||
| So, because that is one of the things. | ||
| People say, hey, Obama, you may not like what he did, but he did staff these places the way that he wanted, while Trump didn't realize how many layers down. | ||
| Something to that effect. | ||
| That's one of the kind of memes out there on this thing. | ||
| Yeah, I even think President Trump himself has said that he came in new without knowing a whole lot of folks in town, which was a positive, a good thing. | ||
| I'm in support of that, but also had the downside of the fact that he had some missteps at the front end in terms of people. | ||
| The second thing is, is we didn't get our team on the field. | ||
| So not only were there some selections that weren't the right ones, we spent an awful lot of time waiting for our folks to get the clearances complete, get the Senate to confirm them, get them in position. | ||
| We lived the first year and a half or two of our entire time, of half of our time, working with folks who'd been appointed by a president other than the one that the people had elected in November of 2016. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| Whoever the next conservative president is, they've got to get that right. | ||
| They've got to show up, day one, helmet on, ready to drive these people into the team so that we have our team, we have our leaders, they are out executing with a viciousness that is required to push back against the administrative state. | ||
| So speaking of that administrative state, I'm sure you've seen some of the Twitter file leaks and the emails that went from intelligence agencies to the employees at Twitter. | ||
| I mean, were they overstepping their bounds? | ||
| And at what point is that a violation of our First Amendment if the government is, in essence, coercing a company to silence people? | ||
| Yeah, you can either have command and control or you can have coercion in this case, right? | ||
| And the net effect is identical. | ||
| I think you can think you can pretty clearly see this was coercion. | ||
| So lawyers can all tell us whether that invokes the first step right or if you have government action or not. | ||
| I don't really. | ||
| Well, here's what we know. | ||
| We know with absolute certainty that The political actors in the White House were giving guidance to these folks to censor conservative ideas, not viewpoint neutral, not this is not about keeping the Taliban or ISIS off of Twitter. | ||
| This is about political actors seeking to manipulate. | ||
| Speech in America in a way that promoted a governmental viewpoint that is dangerous. | ||
| I'm happy to say that the American people can see it because then the end Dave, you know, this most of the recourse to your point about accountability. | ||
| Most of the recourse comes through political accountability. | ||
| Justice departments are responsive to the president's that. | ||
| put them together while they have a element of independence. | ||
| Make no mistake about it, the attorney general works for the president of the United States | ||
| of America. | ||
| And we can see that playing his day to day in the way Merrick Garland is delivering this | ||
| Justice Department and weaponizing so much of what they're doing there. | ||
| So let's let's talk about that, actually, because obviously the big thing at the moment | ||
| are these classified documents. | ||
| You know, we went through six months ago what Trump had at Mar-a-Lago and the president | ||
| is allowed to declassify things. | ||
| But, you know, the media was telling you the walls are closing in again. | ||
| OK, it doesn't seem as as if much has happened. | ||
| But now Biden's in the midst of one of these scandals himself. | ||
| What actually is the policy on this sort of thing? | ||
| One of the things that I've heard Biden say a couple times is, well, it was a small amount of documents, as if that somehow makes it a little bit better. | ||
| I'm pretty sure you don't want any classified docs out, right? | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| It seems right. | ||
| If it's classified, it has a place and it places it next to your Corvette in the garage. | ||
| By the way, it's also not at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| And by the way, it wasn't on your BlackBerry when you were Hillary Clinton. | ||
| The first time I dealt with this when I sat on the Benghazi committee with Jim Jordan and Trey Gowdy, when you had senior American officials exchanging classified information across an unsecured BlackBerry and you had all this stuff in the server up at Hillary Clinton's place in New York. | ||
| I lived this where we were trying to unpack exactly the risk she had created to America by doing this. | ||
| My theory on this one again, not partisan, classified information protected. | ||
| If it shouldn't be classified, if it's over classified, fine, declassify it, get it out, release it to the Washington Post, sign me up. | ||
| But if the decision was that this is needed to protect an American secret or American soldiers or sailors or airmen or Marines somewhere in the world, then for goodness sakes, no, we're not a president, not a CIA director or Secretary of State. | ||
| No one should be absolved from responsibility for managing that information appropriately. | ||
| And so, I hope this will be managed in a way that is neutral. | ||
| And I'd say one last thing, Dave. | ||
| Neutral in two ways. | ||
| One, it shouldn't be political, R's, D's, conservatives, liberals. | ||
| But neutral also, and I write about this in the book, we didn't prosecute, we didn't get anything to Hillary Clinton. | ||
| There were lots of young soldiers, young Marines, who had made mistakes in how they handled classified information. | ||
| They were punished. | ||
| And so we should make sure that you don't get off scot-free just because you have power and influence and you are punished if you are someone who is more junior whether you're a GS-12 at the Department of Energy or a young private in the Marines. | ||
| We should make sure that in America the law is applied evenly both both left and right and up and down. | ||
| That would be refreshing. | ||
| I don't even know if you're allowed to answer this next question, but how do you guys actually decide what really is that highest level classified? | ||
| Is there a standard policy on everything or do they bring things to your desk and you have people making arguments for you that you have to make that final call on? | ||
| Some of each. | ||
| So there's a process, a detailed classification process within the United States government. | ||
| The Department of Defense has a process. | ||
| The intelligence agencies each have a process. | ||
| They roughly mirror each other, but decision makers at every level are making decisions about how to classify their categories of things. | ||
| If there's things about operatives somewhere in the world, it gets a certain classified. | ||
| So there is a rubric designed to try and get these classification levels right. | ||
| I look at the edge. | ||
| I'm sure there's people making judgment calls, maybe some of them political. | ||
| I didn't see much of that inside the CIA. | ||
| Mostly I saw people trying to get it right. | ||
| And then there were many, many occasions when things were brought to me, and for whatever reason, I wanted them declassified. | ||
| I felt it was important that the American people knew. | ||
| I thought that the risk, whatever that might have been two years ago, five years ago, was diminished. | ||
| And so I would send back down and say, we need to declassify this. | ||
| A little bit of process, but in the end, between the senior leadership and the president, we could always get it to the right level of classification. | ||
| Every handful of times I went the other way, I saw something like, what the heck's that doing? | ||
| Free space. | ||
| We need to try to make sure we secure that information at least for a little while. | ||
| Are you worried at all that as people kind of see how dysfunctional Washington is or just how crazy the machine seems to be as we've, you know, because of technology, we can look under the hood now in a way that you couldn't say 40 years ago, that we're not going to get the quality person that you want working in these agencies because people are just going to say, no, I'd rather be in the private sector. | ||
| I just see this thing as a big freaking mess. | ||
| I mean, I understand you're saying there's obviously a lot of great people there, but | ||
| that over time that there will be a sort of a draining of that. | ||
| Yes, I'm worried about in two respects. | ||
| One, in the true sense that you described. | ||
| Good people will decide not worth the candle. | ||
| For financial reasons, family reasons, who needs the headache reasons, all of the above. | ||
| The second reason I worry about this, and I write about this, and this is why you can't give an inch. | ||
| That's why I titled the book the way I did. | ||
| The bias will be that people of the left will say, yeah, I want to be part of government. | ||
| And conservatives will say, I want to go live my life, right? | ||
| And that bias, I think, already exists inside these bureaucracies. | ||
| I come from a place where government is something that you look at and you go, yeah, I'm a little skeptical. | ||
| And the private sector should be flourishing and delivering in churches and synagogues and Boy Scout troops. | ||
| That's the place America was made. | ||
| And so conservatives tend to say, you know, I'm good. | ||
| I'm living here. | ||
| I'm living my great life in Texas or my wonderful life in Southern Illinois, wherever you are, and say, you know, I went out and got a Washington for it and liberals are dying for that power. | ||
| And so not only not only do you have a net decrease in talent that I worry about and excellence, but you'll get a bias the best people who are conservative thinkers people who are good operators will say nah, you know, I'm not going to go do that. | ||
| What do you do about that? | ||
| I mean, that one seems almost unwinnable to me because that's just the nature of power versus the individual, and you're just going to self-select out because you want to go do something in a functional, free atmosphere, and that's not really the government. | ||
| I mean, is there any solution to that? | ||
| Yes, I'm going to provide the solution right now to your entire audience. | ||
| Go spend some part of your life serving. | ||
| Doesn't have to be in Washington, D.C. | ||
| It doesn't even have to be in government. | ||
| But, you know, different people will be in different parts of their life. | ||
| Take a couple years, four years, two, whatever it is, and go serve. | ||
| You can do it as a deacon at your church. | ||
| You can do that coaching someone's literally Baseball team you can do it in Washington DC. | ||
| You can run for city council or even better still run for school board and go fix the crap that's being taught in our schools today. | ||
| And so I'm not only going to tell you that there's a solution to this. | ||
| I'm going to I'm going to be part of the solution by urging people who who share our value system who understand the Judeo-Christian heritage of America in the most fundamental way. | ||
| And say, alright, I get it, it's really wonderful to be out here living my own life, but at some point, in your 20s, in your 30s, in your 50s, whatever, go spend a little bit of time. | ||
| This is the greatest nation in the history of civilization and we each can find a way and a place to give back just a little bit. | ||
| So let's shift a little bit to the second portion of your job in the Trump administration. | ||
| So you had about a year plus as CIA director, and then you had the last couple years as the Secretary of State. | ||
| Did you expect that kind of transition? | ||
| Did the phone just ring one day? | ||
| Were you looking for a new gig? | ||
| Yeah, a little different than that. | ||
| I got a quick heads up that the President was thinking about making a change. | ||
| It was apparent to the whole world that he wasn't pleased with the current Secretary of State, or then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. | ||
| So that didn't come as a surprise to me. | ||
| But I got a little bit of heads up from then Chief of Staff Kelly, and then one day the President asked me to stay behind after I had briefed him and said, hey, I'm thinking about making this change. | ||
| I'm thinking about maybe you. | ||
| I loved what I was doing, Dave. | ||
| And I had a lot of work to do, still, at CIA. | ||
| And so it was very mixed feelings. | ||
| But in the end, when the president asked you to serve, you do it. | ||
| And it was a couple weeks later, I think, he called me and said, hey, I want you to come do this. | ||
| I, of course, immediately said, yes, sir. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Helmet on. | ||
| Let's get after it. | ||
| And what kind of shift is that? | ||
| Because obviously, these are extremely different positions. | ||
| Big shift. | ||
| You had the glory at the CIA of never having to deal with the media and immediately moved to the State Department where they are front and center and they sit in the back of your airplane when you travel around the world. | ||
| And you had a team that was much bigger, 70,000 or so people at the United States Department of State. | ||
| And you also had a bureaucracy that had three unions set of civil service rules that mean you essentially can't fire anybody a fundamentally different institution that also had good people but who. | ||
| It is a left of center organization, but even more troubling, it is an establishment organization. | ||
| So whether Republican or Democrat, that institution, the inertia inside of the Department of State was something that we all just struggled to light a fire on, get after them, make them effective, make them efficient, and turn their focus on delivering, putting American people first in the way that President Trump and I were thinking about our place in the world. | ||
| But you got stuff done. | ||
| I mean, we got a couple peace deals in the Middle East, which I thought everybody was for. | ||
| My whole life, everyone was for that sort of thing. | ||
| Suddenly, when Trump does it, it's no good, right? | ||
| It turns out that we didn't get the plaudits that it so deserved. | ||
| But you know, in the end, this isn't about getting kudos. | ||
| In the end, it's about delivering good outcomes. | ||
| These Abraham Accords, and I spent a fair amount of time talking about it. | ||
| It wasn't just me. | ||
| Jared Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, we had two great ambassadors, David Friedman and John Ricolta in the Emirates. | ||
| We had a great team just working this problem set. | ||
| The Lord blessed us with Prime Minister Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Mohammed bin Salman in the kingdom, MBZ in the Emirates, great leaders who are prepared to take some risks. | ||
| And the great news is we got peace. | ||
| These nations now aren't trying to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. | ||
| That is a wonderfully good thing. | ||
| But importantly for the American people, the chance that we have to send our kids to fight and die in the Middle East now is lower. | ||
| There's more stability, more prosperity, more peace. | ||
| And as I always thought about it, that was the best outcome of the Abraham Accords. | ||
| The fact that we now have friends and partners. | ||
| We had isolated Iran and it was much less likely that some president someday is going to announce that we're deploying Marines and soldiers and Air Force guys and gals to the Middle East to fight some Middle East war. | ||
| America doesn't need that. | ||
| The Middle East doesn't need it. | ||
| And that's why I'm just so happy that we were able to get that done. | ||
| It's so weird because even though it was only, you know, basically three years ago, it's like, it feels like a real distant memory that this administration, you know, at first they were saying, don't even say Abraham Accords, and they really didn't want to give any credit. | ||
| How tenuous was it as you guys were making these deals? | ||
| Like, did you feel like at any moment the whole thing could fall through or there was gonna be a leak that was gonna ruin it for another country or whatever else? | ||
| Yeah, Dave, we suffered lots of leaks and leaks on this particular, This particular effort were very real and put a lot at risk because you had Middle East leaders taking real risks inside their countries, the historic argument that the street will rise up and they'll be writing and bad things and overthrow regimes and the Palestinians will, you know, start. | ||
| Creating chaos, there'll be World War 3 was very real. | ||
| That didn't change. | ||
| That perception didn't change. | ||
| So yeah, it was tenuous till the end. | ||
| None of these deals are ever over till they're over. | ||
| We had to get a lot of moving parts headed the right direction at the same time. | ||
| And so there was complexity. | ||
| But it took, and it took us two and a half years to actually deliver from conceptual idea to execution on the South Lawn of the White House. | ||
| A glorious day, good stuff for those countries, and important for our country, too. | ||
| What kind of pushback did you guys get from that sort of state that you describe of these people that don't change much? | ||
| Because I had Netanyahu on about a month and a half ago, and that's what he was talking about, that all of the policy people said, you do it the other way. | ||
| You do the Palestinians first, and then the rest will happen. | ||
| But he said, no, we're going to try it this way. | ||
| And it actually worked. | ||
| But in essence, you're saying these guys, they don't like change. | ||
| So I'm guessing you're getting pushback from your own people as these things are happening. | ||
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Of course. | |
| And you can see that, by the way, when we leave, they immediately begin to fudge a little bit on where the embassy is going to be, whether it's really going to be in Jerusalem. | ||
| Are we going to have a consulate there too for the Palestinians? | ||
| So you can see the machine start to push back against it even after we leave. | ||
| But we certainly suffered that. | ||
| Uh, we were mocked, right? | ||
| Uh, Jared's proposal was called, you know, deal of the century, just dripping with, uh, dripping with sarcasm. | ||
| But in the end, we, we understood something. | ||
| I think that frankly, Republican and Democrat administrations alike hadn't recognized. | ||
| We came to believe that these nations, the Gulf State Arab nations, knew that the Palestinian cause was important, but it wasn't their highest priority. | ||
| That is, I want good things for the people that live in Judea and Samaria, whatever ethnicity, whatever religion they are. | ||
| I want good things for people in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. | ||
| But in the end, we're going to go deliver good outcomes. | ||
| And Abu Mazen, the leader of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, he's a terrorist. | ||
| And there was no chance that guy was going to cut a deal. | ||
| So we didn't waste any time trying to get a deal done, right, to draw lines on the map. | ||
| We just, we threw that out in the way that Bush and Obama and all of them had tried to negotiate. | ||
| We knew there was a solution that said, we're happy to work on the Palestinian issue, happy to drive towards a conclusion. | ||
| But in the meantime, we're going to go deliver peace in the region. | ||
| And we did. | ||
| Do you think either in that region or really all over the world that other countries kind of miss that American leadership that does seem to be lost? | ||
| As I said, I just did an hour show on the World Economic Forum. | ||
| We seem to be outsourcing all of our decision-making to groups that have nothing to do with our laws or our founding or anything like that. | ||
| I don't have to guess. | ||
| I know it to be true. | ||
| I still stay in touch with a handful of folks around the world who call me and say, what the heck is going on? | ||
| And it's not even just David, it's not even that we agreed with him always. | ||
| We had big knock-down, drag-out fights with friends, with allies, with our adversaries. | ||
| But you could, when I was Secretary of State, you could get me on the phone. | ||
| You could have a serious conversation. | ||
| I would tell you very much what America was going to do, how we were going to behave. | ||
| I would listen, take on board their ideas. | ||
| If we could make it work, we would. | ||
| But you didn't have to guess. | ||
| You didn't have to wonder. | ||
| I wasn't apologizing for America every day. | ||
| I was talking about America as a force for good in the world. | ||
| And I think I think that leadership in the world is something that these nations, even those that aren't particularly friendly to us, I think those nations miss that true North anchor inside the United States. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because our media seems to hate it more than the countries, right? | ||
| The other countries seem to want it, that's what you're saying, but it's our own media which seems to actively despise our ability to have influence. | ||
| You see this. | ||
| You see this in every element of American policy, not just in our national security policy. | ||
| In our schools, they're teaching kids that America is a racist nation. | ||
| There's an oppressor class in our universities. | ||
| They can't understand that there's just two genders, right? | ||
| These are ideas that undermine the central propositions that have made America so exceptional for 250 years. | ||
| whether it's a national security or education at home or a crime always | ||
| these folks are working the edges and you know I've had some folks say Mike | ||
| you have to compromise you were diplomat you have to give an inch but the truth | ||
| is there's places you can compromise If my son wanted to go to bed at 8.30 and I thought 8 was the right time, 8.07 sounds good, right? | ||
| But on things that really matter, the American value system, the central understandings of family, the idea that this is in fact the most noble nation to ever Exist in the history of civility on those things you can't round the corners You can't you little because once you begin to say well, you know, you it's a good point You're done because they will drive a truck through the damn thing and we just simply can't let that happen | ||
| So what do you think is really going on here with this globalist situation and these meetings that they have in Davos and all these other places where a whole bunch of people, nobody seemingly to represent the United States, nobody to represent the individual. | ||
| We send Americans there, but they very rarely talk about America. | ||
| Actually, on my show the other day, we played a clip of 2018 when President Trump went and he started talking about America and they were not very happy with him. | ||
| What is the actual influence of these groups? | ||
| Is it as scary as it seems when we're watching these clips on YouTube and everywhere else? | ||
| You know, I actually think some of this is just a bunch of gas bags meeting to have confabs. | ||
| I hope you're right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But look, there is a globalist agenda out there. | ||
| It's centered at Turtle Bay in New York at the United Nations, right? | ||
| That is the hub, that is the focal point, that is the quasi-governmental organization, the NGO that drives much of this narrative. | ||
| It then bleeds over into human rights activism from the left. | ||
| And into American and global businesses as well, who don't stand up to the political pressures that they need to but I don't worry as much. | ||
| About places that where these folks go to gather some of them are just they're doing commercial deals that will end up being really great to create tens of thousands of jobs for the United States of America. | ||
| I worry about these I worry about the United States government and its unwillingness to accept that most of these institutions the UN the IAEA I could go on the WTO that they have undermined American sovereignty and we've allowed that to happen. | ||
| They could at least pay their parking tickets, right? | ||
| Isn't that a huge scandal every year? | ||
| Those are the places that actually exert influence and power and have the capacity to shape | ||
| both American thought and the way America engages in the world. | ||
| And you don't have to leave the UN, but you better make damn sure that you are not permitting | ||
| the United Nation to behave in ways that undermine America. | ||
| And we never allowed that to happen. | ||
| They could at least pay their parking tickets, right? | ||
| Isn't that a huge scandal every year? | ||
| They don't pay their parking tickets. | ||
| Yes, they should pay their parking tickets and they should stick to their knitting as well. | ||
| Were you surprised by Trump's instincts on that as a guy who wasn't part of the political class, that that really was like one of his main things from beat one, you guys are going to pay what you owe, we're not going to foot the bill on all this, we're not just going to give you endless resources, that he just kind of got that right away? | ||
| Not surprised at all. | ||
| He campaigned on it, he intuitively understood it. | ||
| He's a business guy, came from the real world, you pay your bills, right? | ||
| And if you don't, bad things happen. | ||
| I have to file bankruptcy, right? | ||
| He'd lived all of that in his life. | ||
| No, he understood too, that these things aren't infinite. | ||
| So we can survive in America, spending a whole bunch of money all across the world for a while. | ||
| But in the end, you got to make sure you take care of the things that matter most to people back home. | ||
| And he grasped that in a way that so many did not. | ||
| And I think America was better off as a result of that. | ||
| So you were Secretary of State during COVID and that kind of changed the world. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So a couple things. | ||
| One, I ran a massive airline for a bunch of months. | ||
| We had Americans stranded all over the world. | ||
| We brought back 100,000 plus Americans who'd had roadways, buses, airplanes pulled out from under them. | ||
| And so we went and tried to round them all up, which was amazing work. | ||
| The State Department, actually, I gave them full credit for having managed this process to help get these people back home out of tough places. | ||
| But more broadly, it gave us two opportunities and a couple challenges. | ||
| First challenge was, look, this virus almost certainly came from the Chinese lab, and we were immediately, I think I said this on a TV show in March of 20, maybe it was April, and, you know, just pilloried for, you know, I was a racist and the anti-China racist. | ||
| Nope, it came from the lab, almost certainly. | ||
| Also, Chinese is not a race, but that's a different thing. | ||
| No, it's all crazy. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| But even more important than where it came from, the Chinese leadership knew that they had a pretty damn contagious, relatively lethal virus on their hands by the fall of 19, and decided to put tens of thousands of people on airplanes and murder, and I say that intentionally, murder hundreds of thousands of people all across this country. | ||
| They had a choice to make. | ||
| The choice they made was load airplanes, send them to Milan, Italy. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party must be held accountable for this. | ||
| Look, they don't care about human life. | ||
| So be it. | ||
| But when you when you transmit that to the rest of the world and you kill people all around the world, there's a place for real accountability. | ||
| The good news is I think Americans came to see how bad the Chinese Communist Party really was the risk to America. | ||
| If we outsourced all of our manufacturing. | ||
| Certainly semiconductors and national security stuff, but think basic things like simple pharmaceuticals, the capacity for our medical system to operate without Chinese supply chains. | ||
| I think American people can see that that was a bad idea. | ||
| And those businesses are starting to come back to America and to places that we can count on to partners and friends. | ||
| And that is a good thing. | ||
| The last thing was COVID had the upshot of giving parents a crack and a window into what the kids were being taught in schools and ain't no mama wants their kid to be taught that America is a racist nation and that math and science and reading don't matter. | ||
| And I think we've seen a fundamental transformation about how parents think about public education and want to make sure their kids get a fair shot at the American opportunity. | ||
| And I was all across the country last year campaigning for candidates. | ||
| It didn't go as well as I would have hoped, but I was out there grinding away, listening to folks, and they are serious about this. | ||
| And, you know, the fact that we were all watching more closely what our kids were up to, I think is a net good thing for America. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, it's happening right now. | ||
| I mean, Kim Reynolds is doing School Choice in Iowa, Huckabee's gonna be doing it in Arkansas. | ||
| Clearly something good's happening here in Florida. | ||
| But on the first part of that, when you guys realized that, in essence, it was coming from China, either fully intentionally or not, and they were sending these planes at first to Italy and then everywhere, I'm guessing you got on the phone with some sort of Chinese counterpart. | ||
| I mean, did they just stonewall you on everything? | ||
| Did they admit anything? | ||
| Was there any level of accountability or anything? | ||
| Total stonewall. | ||
| I tell this story, it's an important story. | ||
| As we rounded from 2019 into 2020, The CDC, they all had counterparts in China, and they'd been talking because there was this rumor about what was going on there. | ||
| And right at the first of the year, total shutdown, locked out. | ||
| I was asked by Mr. Redfield to call my Chinese counterpart, the foreign minister and the state council. | ||
| I did nothing, not a word. | ||
| The World Health Organization gets shut out when they try to investigate. | ||
| Sadly, they just bent a knee and said, nope, everything, nothing to see here, folks. | ||
| So the WHO failed the world as well. | ||
| But yeah, they went into complete information lockdown, hiding from the world what they most certainly knew about what had happened there. | ||
| How do you, as the Secretary of State, coordinate or work with those, you know, the WHO, the NIH, the CDC, all of these things? | ||
| I mean, you're dealing with borders and planes and all of that stuff. | ||
| Are you directly telling, are they basically telling you, you've got to shut borders and you can't do this and you got to do that? | ||
| Like, who's actually in charge at that point? | ||
| Yeah, so the senior decisions about what America was going to do in the response were made by President Trump himself, with advice from me and from the Department of Defense, from NIH, the CDC, all of his advisors were around. | ||
| The vice president led the response task force. | ||
| But in the end, the big decisions about whether to close our borders or not were made by the president. | ||
| Do you guys think you botched anything? | ||
| I mean, if you were to look back, would you have done this differently or that differently or advised him differently or anything? | ||
| You know, I thought about this a lot. | ||
| Uh, in perfect hindsight. | ||
| You can see that there was information we didn't know or we weren't thinking about quite right. | ||
| I think we got good pieces of the actual physical response, right? | ||
| But I think we got some of the messaging wrong and then as time moved on and more information was available. | ||
| I think Dr. Fauci did terrible things by talking about this in a way that kept our schools closed for as long as they did. | ||
| We knew that the kids were unlikely to have serious large-scale ramifications from this. | ||
| We told teachers you can stay home when we told nurses they had to go to work. | ||
| You know, they're all important, but why on earth we didn't open our schools more quickly, why we were still closing that up and we had churches and synagogues shut down too, is incomprehensible to me. | ||
| Do you think it's fair to say that China did this intentionally? | ||
| Maybe not the leak itself, but that the export of it, and when you're being stonewalled and all of these things, that this was sort of the plan to get Western democracies to, in essence, turn against their people, become a little bit more like China, rather than China become a little bit more like us, which is what I think most people thought was going to happen, you know, for the last 30 years, something like that. | ||
| Dave, you got it exactly right. | ||
| Yes, absolutely intentional. | ||
| At the very least, we can argue knowing versus intentional as absolutely knowingly sent this virus around the world. | ||
| And I, from my perspective, the difference between knowing and intent is zero. | ||
| In this case, they intended this virus to go around and they knew it was going to kill people all across the globe. | ||
| Uh, you know, what were their motives for that? | ||
| We can all argue about. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| But here's what we know for sure. | ||
| A decent nation, a nation that cared about humanity, would have opened the doors, brought in the world's leading experts, wouldn't have let anybody travel, would have locked down that virus as best they could where they found it. | ||
| So what do we do about that? | ||
| global community, and frankly, it's America mostly. | ||
| America's best scientists, the capacity to understand what was going on there so that you can develop solutions | ||
| that actually make sense, not just for China, but for the entire world. | ||
| And they chose exactly the opposite course. | ||
| So what do we do about that? | ||
| I mean, if that actually is the case, let's say you were to have another job | ||
| in your future, perhaps. | ||
| What do you do if that really is true? | ||
| It's real. | ||
| Don't don't kid yourself about the World Health Organization saving the lives of Americans. | ||
| They're not going to you have to take this upon ourselves. | ||
| We're happy to work with folks around the world. | ||
| These these these kinds of things are global problems, but America is going to have to lead and we can't do it by providing a bunch of money to guys at the World Health Organization that don't really give a darn about the second and third order ramifications of their failures more broadly for China. | ||
| We could talk about this for an awfully long time. | ||
| Republicans and Democrats alike permitted themselves the fantasy that you just described. | ||
| We thought they'd become more like us. | ||
| And we've known for at least a decade, maybe two, that wasn't true. | ||
| And we just let it keep going. | ||
| And we let them walk all over us. | ||
| The Chinese built their massive economy on the backs of the American worker. | ||
| We don't need to let that happen. | ||
| And so I gave a speech in the spring of 20. | ||
| That basically said China's an adversary much like the Soviet Union. | ||
| Ronald Reagan said we win. | ||
| They lose. | ||
| That's what's going to have to happen here as well. | ||
| We're going to have to win and they're going to have to lose. | ||
| We have the capacity to do that. | ||
| We should make sure that China is treated reciprocally. | ||
| That is a good example. | ||
| The Chinese are trying to buy land near American military facilities. | ||
| Dave, I'd ask everybody in your audience, head out, call your real estate agent, try to buy land in China near a Chinese military facility. | ||
| Godspeed. | ||
| We should not let them... They're not giving you no money down on those? | ||
| My guess is your realtor is going to come back and say, it's just a little pricey. | ||
| Can't get there. | ||
| We should not let them use our open society against us in the ways that we have. | ||
| And American business, America's largest financial institutions are all going to have to come on board, come on sides. | ||
| If we need government power to coax them in that direction, we've got to do that. | ||
| We've got to return to making sure we take care of working class Americans here at home. | ||
| And when we do, we will Take advantage of all the challenges that the Chinese have. | ||
| They've got issues with their aging population. | ||
| They've got financial challenges. | ||
| They are not 10 feet tall, but when you lay down for them, they look like they're 10 feet tall. | ||
| And so we just simply need to stand up, push back, demand a world that looks more like ours, a word with Western values. | ||
| It means we got to get it right here at home too. | ||
| If we do those things, then the Chinese dream of an American decline will prove to be just that, a fantasy and a dream. | ||
| Let me ask you about the other big global event, obviously, Russia-Ukraine. | ||
| For the term that Trump had, and while you were Secretary of State, it was pretty quiet. | ||
| Under Obama, Russia takes back Crimea, but then it's quiet under you guys. | ||
| Now, obviously, not so quiet. | ||
| What would you be doing right now? | ||
| What would you be advising Joe Biden on? | ||
| And how do you feel about this endless blank check that everybody, basically, on both sides, except for pretty much, I think, Rand Paul, maybe Ted Cruz and a couple other guys, keep signing off on? | ||
| Goodness, you know, I've been asked this an awful lot. | ||
| It was quiet on our watch and you have to believe in a lot of coincidences to think that we were just lucky. | ||
| The truth is, I think Vladimir Putin understood that we were a different cast of characters. | ||
| When the Iranians were moving about the cabin, we went and took out Qasem Soleimani, demonstrating that we were going to, in a very nuanced way, we didn't send 80,000 soldiers, we didn't go invade any place, we just sent a message with absolute clarity that we were serious and real. | ||
| Was that you, the mother of all bombs, was that you? | ||
| The strike on Soleimani was something that I certainly recommended to the president. | ||
| I write about this because it was important not just to deter Iran, but Chairman Kim in | ||
| North Korea, who I spent way too much time with, the Taliban, Xi Jinping, they all said, | ||
| oh my goodness, these guys are serious, Pompeo. | ||
| These guys are going to, if they say they're going to do something, they actually are going to do it. | ||
| And Putin saw that Biden wasn't that. | ||
| And so you lose the bubble and he invades Europe. | ||
| As for what to do today, every day this goes on creates enormous risk for us, for America. | ||
| The risk that he uses a tactical nuclear weapon, risk that he conducts a cyber campaign here in the States to send a message to us. | ||
| We got to get this to end. | ||
| I only know one way to get it to end and that is to provide the Ukrainians with the tools that they need. | ||
| I'm not for blank checks, but I am for if they're prepared to defend their sovereignty and risk their own boys and girls lives, I'm prepared to help them do that against an authoritarian regime that's killing civilians. | ||
| We should then find a solution that has two features. | ||
| One, it's going to have to be acceptable to both the Russian people and the Ukrainian people. | ||
| Everybody talks about Zelensky and Putin. | ||
| There's a lot going on here, and so you're going to have to find something that everybody can say, all right, that is good enough. | ||
| No one's going to get their maximalist dream. | ||
| Second, we need to find a solution that has a permanency. | ||
| I live in the real world. | ||
| Nothing's ever permanent, but think 10, 20, 50 years of permanency, so that six months or two years from now, Uh, Putin's not back at this or his successors not back at this again. | ||
| We have the capacity to use American power, not our not our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, but American power to facilitate a hastier conclusion to this. | ||
| And a relatively permanent conclusion that should that should be the American mission for the American people. | ||
| Is the inherent problem there? | ||
| I think sort of two things. | ||
| One, that, I mean, Putin's got nukes, as you just said, and to make the guy with nukes surrender is kind of tough, because he's got the ultimate weapon, number one. | ||
| And number two, that if he doesn't get a win out of this, if he doesn't get that off-ramp, he doesn't want to end up like Gaddafi and basically, you know, get stabbed by one of his own people on the run for the last couple of weeks of his life. | ||
| Yeah, Dave, it's complicated. | ||
| It's complicated for both leaders, I think. | ||
| Uh, each of them have constituencies and it's different. | ||
| It's not a democracy. | ||
| Nobody's going to go hold an election. | ||
| Uh, but, uh, they both have to find ways that they can move forward. | ||
| I suspect that when this ends, each of those leaders will struggle to maintain their, their, their power. | ||
| Uh, Ukrainians are going to all look around and say, look what happened to our country and the Russians are going to look at it. | ||
| Look what happened to our country. | ||
| And so, uh, what I think we should focus on is not the individuals, but the systems. | ||
| Look, Ukraine, there was a lot of corruption in Ukraine the whole time. | ||
| I was a secretary of state. | ||
| We should never blink and pretend that is not so. | ||
| But we should strive to take a country that has demonstrated its willingness to be an American partner and try to provide it with the tools to protect its sovereignty. | ||
| And if we get that right, we can find a space where the Russian people can say. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| This is quote good enough end of quote. | ||
| I'm convinced there is very few very few conflicts like this one and with one side totally annihilating and defeating the other the handful of cases, maybe the American Civil War. | ||
| Someone might give me two or three others, but boy, there's very few. | ||
| They always end up with some level of compromise. | ||
| I'm confident this one will end that way as well. | ||
| And the sooner that happens, the less destruction in Ukraine and the less, most importantly, the less risk to the United States as well. | ||
| I got one more question for you and you know what it is already, so I don't even have to ask you. | ||
| I'm not going to tell you about what's in the UFO files. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's actually what I wanted to know. | ||
| We can do that one off camera. | ||
| But of course, look, you wrote this book. | ||
| You're on the stump. | ||
| People are mentioning your name. | ||
| Your former boss has already announced he's running. | ||
| We're almost at the season where people are getting in on this thing. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I'm giving you a softball. | ||
| We're getting close to the time. | ||
| You're right where it's time for those who want to put themselves forward to make the case to the American people to do so. | ||
| Susan and I haven't made that big decision just yet. | ||
| We're working our way to try and figure out if this is the right time to do that. | ||
| If we should go make that case. | ||
| But I believe deeply in America. | ||
| I grew up in a family that understood the basic decency of our country. | ||
| That fight is something I intend to stay in. | ||
| Whether I end up seeking political office again in my life is yet to be determined. | ||
| Only the good Lord knows. | ||
| All right, now give me a little something on the UFOs and then you're free. | ||
| Here's what I'd say about the UFOs. | ||
| We got bigger problems. | ||
| Secretary Pompeo, I appreciate it. | ||
| And if anything is to be announced in the future, maybe we'll do this again. | ||
| Bless you, Dave. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Have a good day. |
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