Ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou argues the U.S. war with Iran served Israeli interests, citing 2003 intelligence estimates that denied a nuclear program and alleging the administration ignored allies while prioritizing Israel over American security. He claims the CIA neglected drug cartels to weaken rivals and highlights the controversial rehabilitation of the MEK by both parties despite its history. The discussion critiques the decline of Congress under executive dominance, questions suppressed assassination allegations against Trump, and notes John Kerry's pursuit of a pardon supported by MAGA Republicans who value constitutional rule over current administration policies. Ultimately, Kiriakou warns that adopting foreign priorities threatens U.S. sovereignty and global alliances. [Automatically generated summary]
So, a lot of us have been trying to figure out how we got into this war with Iran.
I think the reporting is clear at this point that there was really nobody at the White House or in the American intelligence community who was telling the president, yeah, this is going to be really easy.
So, why would you, as a practical matter, need to consult other countries?
Because there is this sense, like, as an exceptional nation, we don't need anyone's permission to act.
But again, not as an ideological matter or a matter of politeness or good form, but as a practical matter before launching a war, why do you need to talk to the Europeans in the Gulf states?
And at the hotel, they told me I was probably going to have to leave extra early for the airport because they were expecting the largest demonstration in Irish history, which took place the next morning.
And it was all because of home heating oil prices and gasoline prices.
We didn't consult with the Irish or the British or anybody else before launching this thing.
They were already having problems because of the cutoff of home heating oil coming from Russia because of the Ukraine war.
And then this was just doubly difficult for them.
And so gas was, we figured it out.
Gas was $12.5 a gallon.
I mean, if you don't have gasoline, gasoline, $12.5 a gallon.
And home heating oil was astronomical to the point where people were just, you know, freezing and they're blaming us for it.
So you want to be able to consult our friends and allies so that they have a chance to come up with a plan.
To make the hurt on their own people a little bit less severe?
You said it's been a close relationship you were for many, many years.
That's true, since the formation of the country, really, 1948.
And there's always been pressure to help Israel go along with its priorities.
But have you seen other instances when you served in government where the United States government put Israel's interests above those of the United States?
In fact, to the contrary, in the Gulf War, The 1990 91 Gulf War, and again in the Iraq War from 2003 onward, we specifically made decisions that were in the best interests of the United States to the point where the Israelis complained vociferously to us that they wanted us to do A and instead we did B because B was better for the United States.
And, you know, we would say, well, you know, that's foreign policy.
You have your interests.
We have our interests.
There's no such thing as permanent friends.
There is such a thing as permanent interests.
This is our interest and this is what we're going to do.
And that's just not, it doesn't seem to be the case.
Today, I don't understand how attacking Iran was in U.S. national interests.
I fully understand how this was in Israel's interest, and the Israelis have long wanted us to attack Iran and to overthrow the regime in Tehran.
I get that, it's in their interest.
But I've never believed, I don't think any CIA officer, past or present, believes or has believed that the Iranians were anywhere near a nuclear weapon.
They don't have a delivery system.
That could deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States.
And, you know, when you've got two national intelligence estimates, a national intelligence estimate is a sense of the entire intelligence community, all 18 organizations within the U.S. intelligence community, unanimously concluding that there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program twice, as well as the late.
Either it's a country that issues fatwas and takes them seriously, and therefore we should be afraid of them because they're a theocracy, or it's a country that issues fake fatwas because they don't really believe in the idea of a fatwa.
The IRGC being a military organization was going to run the country as a military dictatorship would.
I think we should have addressed it that way.
We shouldn't have gotten wrapped around the axle on, on theocratic issues.
We shouldn't have been afraid to engage, uh, the Iranians or maybe not even afraid, just refusing to engage the Iranians.
We should have been constantly engaged, whether it was through the Qataris or the Omanis or even the Algerians.
There were different ways in which we could speak with the Iranians and we just never, never bothered.
I will add, I do not have rose colored glasses when thinking about the Iranians.
I know what the Iranians have done.
The Iranians made an attempt to kill me several decades ago.
I haven't forgotten that.
I know that they're bad guys.
I know that they've carried out terrorist attacks and that they've killed Americans in many of those terrorist attacks.
But we're talking single digits over the last several decades.
Now, support for Hezbollah in the 80s, the 90s yes, very bad, very big problem.
The Houthis are a little bit of a thorn in our side.
The Hamas thing, the CIA was late to the game on the Hamas thing because the analytic judgment for a long time was incorrectly, I might add, that the Iranians are not supporting Hamas because the Iranians are Shia Muslim and Hamas is Sunni Muslim.
That was wrong.
They were supporting Hamas.
I get all that.
But again, Hamas has never carried out an anti American terrorist attack.
So was it in US national interest to attack Iran for supporting Hamas?
I first came to this realization when I first joined the CIA.
We always have this need to have a boogeyman, whether it was, you know, Bolshevism in the 1910s, whether it was, you know, socialism in the 20s and the early 30s, Nazism, legitimately so.
But then, you know, in the 70s, the 80s, it became.
Islamism.
It's like we always have to have an enemy to rally around.
When I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 2009 to 2011, end of 2011, I told the then chairman, John Kerry, I wanted to go to Afghanistan to do a formal Senate study on the heroin poppy crop.
And the reason I have come to that conclusion is not because I'm any smarter than anybody else, but do you know how much of the world's heroin was produced in Afghanistan in the last year of Taliban rule, 2000?
And I also don't know why Russia's our enemy, but big picture, but even if it, There was a good reason to have Russia as an enemy, I still wouldn't be for flooding their cities with heroin.
Right after the Russians invaded Ukraine, I was one of seven independent journalists who were invited to lunch with the Russian ambassador in Washington.
And what he wanted was our ideas on how the U.S. and Russia could continue to cooperate diplomatically, even during a time of war.
And I said, I was actually proud of what I said.
I went prepared and I said, The US and Russia have identical interests in counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counter narcotics.
We should never stop cooperating on those three issues.
And I said, and you know what?
There's a fourth thing.
I said, Your Excellency, when you arrest an American, a female American basketball player, and give her a draconian 10 year sentence for having a little bit of weed oil, it's a bad look.
That was the only time he got angry.
And he said, Do you have any idea how many Russians are in American prisons?
1500.
I know that it's 1500 because I have to send my staff out to visit them.
So if you want to talk about not arresting people, talk to your own government about it.
Well, frankly, I would see that as an opportunity.
So some of my friends, some of my former friends won't speak to me because they say I'm far too conservative, that I've gone over to the MAGA and they just don't want to be friends anymore.
And that's fine, I don't care.
Because then they weren't real friends anyway.
But the issue is, I agreed with Donald Trump's policy about building the wall.
I lost a lot of friends because of that.
And I said, you know, you have to look at it this way.
I read the Greek press every single day.
I'm a recently, relatively recently, a dual U.S. Greek citizen now.
And Turkey takes something like a billion and a half euros every year to hold economic refugees in camps in Turkey.
Until they can be processed and resettled in places like Germany and Sweden and France, et cetera.
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No, I completely agree.
So just back to the focus of counterterrorism, really, the focus of the entire U.S. government.
Has been on Islamic extremism, has been on Israel's enemies for over 20 years now.
You don't hear any, or you don't see a mobilization of men and money to fight the drug cartels, who are responsible objectively for so many more deaths in our country.
So in seasons one and two, just as the DEA is going to go in and grab Pablo Escobar or grab the gentleman of Cali, the CIA station chief comes in and just screws the whole thing up.
That's in that show because that's what happens in real life.
The CIA at the time cared only about communism and stopping communism.
And if the drug cartels were going to tell the CIA, Where the communists were hiding, then the CIA was A OK with drug cartels.
I will say, I wrote a piece, I don't even remember for whom, when President Trump first declared that the drug cartels would be reclassified as foreign terrorist groups.
And everybody was laughing and making fun and how silly this was.
I said, no, no, no, no.
You're underestimating him.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
It's not, he's not doing this for the PR of naming the cartels as terrorist groups.
He's doing it because legally it frees up some agencies' abilities to act unilaterally against the cartels.
And it frees up a great deal of money to be used by CIA, NSA, DOD against the cartels.
It's hard to think that that could happen now, considering that all resources of government, certainly all attention in government, is focused on this Iran war.
In the 91 Gulf War and in 03, the State Department initiated this policy called burden sharing.
Really, what it is was a nice way of saying, we want all of our allies to pay for this.
But it worked.
The Kuwaitis in 1990, the year that they were invaded by Iraq, for the very first time in their history, they made more from their investments than they made from oil.
So they had this bottomless pit of money.
They paid for most of the liberation of their own country, but the Europeans also paid.
And so it ended up not costing us anything.
We went down the burden sharing road again in 2003, and a lot of it came out of our own pockets, but our European and Gulf allies also paid for it.
This time, nobody was consulted.
And so this is all coming from our own pockets.
And I think that's unsustainable over the long term.
You know, I'm glad that you brought that up too, because that is also not true.
And a lot of people are saying it.
The Iranians did something recently that was interesting in that they took two of their medium range missiles, they stripped them down to the point where it was just the missile.
And the engine, and that was it.
There was nothing inside of them just to see how much distance they could get.
And they made it almost to Diego Garcia, which is far.
So if you instead point them toward Europe, yes, without anything inside these missiles, they could reach Western Europe.
That's not a delivery system.
That's just smoke and mirrors.
They can only go that far if they're completely empty.
If you weigh them down with explosives, or God forbid, with You know, nuclear material, even if it's just to make a dirty bomb, they can't get that far.
They could get to Cyprus.
They could get certainly to Israel and easily to the Arab Gulf countries.
So the IC, the American Intel community, those 18 agencies you referred to, did anybody in those agencies say to the president, this is a major threat, the nuclear program in Iran?
You recall in the first term when President Trump met with Vladimir Putin, he did not take his intelligence people into the meeting with him.
Putin took his intelligence people into the meeting with him because the president said he trusted.
The other side's intelligence people more than he trusted his own.
And I get it.
I get that he believes that he was under direct threat from, you know, the deep state and the John Brennans of the world.
I understand that.
But I'm surprised that that feeling, that belief has held over all this way into the second term where you would believe the Israeli information before you would believe your own people's information, especially when you know that the Israelis have a vested interest in you doing their dirty work for them.
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You want to hear an interesting coincidence?
I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but on 9 11, on the actual day, September 11th, there were four planes.
Two hit the World Trade Center, one hits the Pentagon, the fourth, which was late, Flight 93, wound up crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
We know that the vice president gave an order to shoot that plane down because Understandably, by the way, believed it was headed into Washington, which I think it was.
I don't know anything beyond what I just said, but I just think that's such an interesting fact.
So, okay, let's say you're the, and I've never heard a bad word about General Kane other than he did not take a strong position on the Iran war before it started.
I think there's a lot of backfilling going on through leaking.
But when it came down to it, General Kane did not say this is a bad idea.
He did not say that.
In fact, he said it's not my job to say things like that.
My question to you is is it his job to say things like that?
Like, if you're him, if you're a senior briefer, if you're John Ratcliffe at CIA or any of the people who advise the president on foreign policy questions, wars, what's your view of what they should say to him?
If you think this is a terrible idea, should you say that?
The CIA is not supposed to be a policy organization, it's supposed to be a policy support organization.
So the CIA director should never take a position on things like that.
They do, obviously, but they're not supposed to.
When George W. Bush was president in his second term, he changed the structure of the PDB, the President's Daily Brief.
It used to be, for most of the articles, a paragraph of fact and a paragraph of analysis.
He ordered a third paragraph to be added, policy recommendation.
And it was like setting the building on fire.
Nobody wanted to be responsible for telling the President of the United States what he should do about a policy.
That's just not what the CIA was created for.
Behind closed doors, of course, they're going to offer advice.
When I was there, The Joint Chiefs almost always deferred to the Secretary of Defense, but they were also almost always of one mind.
When we attacked Iraq in 2003, there was a very significant split where it was the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the NSC that were the pro war faction.
So many of my friends have been to Iran relatively recently before the hostilities began.
And they, they posted videos on YouTube of just walking down the street in Tehran and the restaurants are open and the cafes and there's music and people laughing and having late dinners and it's just normal life.
But one of the most amazing pictures I think I've ever seen was a picture of a very butch looking lesbian type woman with a nose ring standing in Tehran, standing at an intersection, waving a photograph of the Ayatollah after he was killed.
And the point is, this is exactly the person who opposed him while he was still alive.
But now that we've killed him, You got all the lesbians of Tehran are all of a sudden for the Ayatollah.
Look at it this way if I don't like whoever happens to be in the White House and I go to demonstrations and my fist is in the air and I don't like this person's policy and then the Russians attack, I'm going to pick up a gun and I'm going to fight the Russians.
And when you're the only analysis that you're getting or paying attention to is from either the Israelis or the MEK, the Mujahideen Akhalk, which is really no more than a.
Quasi communist cult, you know, then you can't rely on the information.
So, they were founded by a husband and wife team back in the 60s.
And in the 70s, they were based in Iraq, northeastern Iraq, and they would launch these cross border attacks into Iran, deep into Iran, like in Tehran, terrorist attacks.
They, they, uh, Attempted to murder the American ambassador.
They attempted to murder a three star general who was the senior most American military official in Iran.
They've carried out anti American terrorist attacks over the course of decades.
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So, and I'm sure they did it by saying, you know, we're the enemy of Israel's enemy, therefore we're your friend.
You know, from the very beginning when they were rehabilitated in 2009, I just started shaking my head like, what are we doing?
What are these Obama people thinking?
But it turned out it wasn't just the Obama people.
The MEK, first of all, had the money to hire all these multi million dollar lobbyists.
And they were smart in that they did it across the political spectrum.
Democrats did it from rich Iranian exiles who were willing to hold their nose over the You know, personal ideology of the organization and just say, well, if you're going to kill, you know, Ayatollahs and Hojatollahs, then okay, I'll write you a check.
And when his father was deposed, he was only, what, 19 years old, 18, 19 years old.
So he came to the United States with his family.
The Shah got sick almost as soon as he came to the United States.
He developed cancer.
He was treated in, I think it was in Houston.
The Iranian government under the Ayatollahs objected so vociferously that they raided the American embassy and took our diplomats hostage, held them for 444 days.
He went to the Bahamas for a while, then to Panama, and then ended up finally settling in Cairo, and he died in Cairo.
Well, his family stayed here in the United States, both in Northern Virginia, Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince in Northern Virginia, the mother in North Carolina, and Reza's younger brother in Boston.
Reza Pahlavi is not equipped to lead anything.
He is a playboy.
He had an affair with his brother's wife.
His brother actually turned to drugs and committed suicide.
His own wife, Reza Pahlavi's wife, is having a very public affair right now with her personal trainer.
The Parisian press is just crazy over it.
And they have pictures, they publish pictures of the two of them together all the time.
It's humiliating in anybody's culture, let alone in Iranian culture, which is supposed to be very pious and very Muslim.
So, on top of that, he has said repeatedly, most recently on the Patrick Bett David podcast, That now he doesn't think he wants to go back to Iran.
He's made a life here.
He's very wealthy.
His kids are Americans.
There's really no reason to go back to Iran.
Okay, so why are we talking about you then in the first place?
I think there are a lot of people who pine for those days and think that, well, in a perfect world, if Reza Pahlavi were Reza Shah, then Israel and Iran would be friends and all the Iranian people would fall into line and we could all live happily ever after.
But is there any indication that the people of Iran, at the extent their view matters, obviously it doesn't, but let's just say it did, that they want to exchange a theocracy for a monarchy?
And by the way, some of the most entertaining people in the world, some of the warmest people in the world are the Persian Jews of Southern California.
I mean, in the face of like 100 years of failing to pull off these schemes, why does no one pause and say, we can't just install someone to run a foreign country?
We don't even speak the language, we know nothing about it.
And, uh, and we're not the smartest people in the room and we don't know history.
I've told this story a million times.
The night before we attacked, uh, Iraq, we, we had the final principles committee meeting.
Principles committee is normally chaired by the president.
It includes the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, the chairman of the joint chiefs, the vice chairman, and in this case, the head of CENTCOM, and then a bunch of senior level NSC people.
And everybody brings a note taker.
I was George Tenet's note taker.
He was the director of the CIA at the time.
And for whatever reason, the president didn't attend this meeting.
And I said, did you know we were going to attack Iran?
And he said, are they still talking about that?
We're not going to attack Iran.
That's just a pipe dream that these people at the White House have.
And I said, do they know nothing about history?
And he said, no.
They know nothing about history.
As we were walking out of that meeting, one of the NSC people, a guy who I disrespected, I think the most of my colleagues at the NSC, he said giddily as we were standing up to walk out of the meeting, he said, When we cross that border tomorrow, they're going to throw flowers at us.
And I thought, Buddy, have you never read a history book?
They're not going to see us as liberators, they're going to see us as invaders.
And occupiers.
And, you know, we thought, well, not we, so many of my contemporaries thought, well, we're going to move into southern Iraq, and that's the Shia part.
And they've been just so brutalized by Saddam Hussein.
They're going to greet us as liberators.
We're going to arm them, and we're going to go together to Baghdad and liberate Baghdad.
It's like, no, first of all, we scared the hell out of them when we crossed the border.
There was this very tense standoff where we moved into Najaf, which is one of the holiest sites in all of Shia Islam.
And There was a huge group of people, and several ran inside one of the mosques to take refuge and were like, No, no, no, we don't mean you any harm.
We came to liberate you.
And they were like, Get out of our city.
And so finally, what the military guys did is they set down their weapons and they asked to see the tribal leaders.
And so they met with the tribal leaders inside the mosque and said, We came here to liberate you.
And the tribal leader said, We don't want your liberation.
If you're here to fight Saddam, go fight Saddam.
Leave us out of it.
And so that's why we didn't have support in the South.
So, just to your point about the president believing that Iran was a house of cards that just needed one swift push to collapse, where did he get that idea?
It's a real country with a proud history stretching back millennia.
Yes.
Iranian American friends, some quite close, and they never stop talking about the history to the point where I have to say, please, can we please talk about something other than, you know, the Persian Empire?
Whether we like it or not, especially whether the Israelis like it or not, we are going to have to sit across the table from these people and come up with an agreement.
It's going to be an agreement that we are not going to be 100% happy with.
Okay, so back, I just want to ask one last question about how we got here.
So, two or three weeks after this war began, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned.
In his resignation letter, he said, I believe.
He didn't say this in his letter.
He said it in an interview with me shortly after the next day.
He said, I believe the Butler assassination attempt, the other assassination attempt in Florida, a couple of breaches of Donald Trump's personal security, Secret Service detail, and Charlie Kirk's murder may all have played a role in convincing the president to go to war with Iran.
But I would not be surprised if a person or multiple people got into the president's ear and said, This isn't a coincidence that there were these three events.
There were these three events because the Iranians are behind it.
They've got these cells, they're around the United States.
We can't identify them, we can't catch them, but they're gunning for you.
And Charlie Kirk was a practice hit, or Charlie Kirk was a message, or whatever.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the president would believe something like that.
If people he trusts are telling him there's a problem and the problem originates in Iran, whether it's true or not, that he would respond to that.
People told him Iran is out to kill you, the Butler assassination attempt, Iran was behind it.
People were saying that fact.
But where that theory falls down is.
Is with the Charlie Kirk assassination.
So, if you were trying to claim that the Iranians were behind it and there were leads from the National Counterterrorism Center or the ODNI that suggested foreign involvement, who knows if they go anywhere, you would follow up on those leads.
You know, I'm one of these people that believes that in almost all cases, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one.
But when word came out, thanks to Joe Kent and his brave actions and revelations, that he was not permitted to follow up on these leads, well, call me a conspiracy theorist, but that's the only place I can go.
So, somebody like the president who has taken such a strong stance against that deep state, you would think would be the first person to want to run these allegations to ground.
He had been a long time Secret Service agent and was the creator, the founder of the Secret Service's intelligence division.
He started under Eisenhower.
He was in Dallas with Kennedy.
And finally, he was successful in.
In creating this intelligence division to work with the CIA and the FBI to head off threats to the president, he starts getting these letters at the White House from Sarah Jane Moore of San Francisco, California.
And she's saying things like, you know, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
Well, he flies out to San Francisco and he knocks on her apartment door.
And she answers, he's got his badge.
I'm with the Secret Service.
He said, Sarah Jane, you keep threatening the president in these letters.
What's going on with this?
And he told me, she said, No, I didn't mean it.
My social security check was late and I got mad.
And so I wrote to the president and I threatened him, but I didn't really mean to threaten him.
And he said, You're not going to try to kill the president, are you?
And she said, No, I'm not going to kill the president.
And two weeks later, the president goes to San Francisco and she's there bang, trying to kill the president.
So, given that we both have conceded we don't know the answer to this question, tell me, as someone who spent a lot of his life abroad working for the U.S. government as a CIA officer, assessing the workings of other governments and drawing rational conclusions.
So, let's say.
The facts, as we just have agreed, are real, which they are, applied to pick a country, Bahrain, where you lived for years.
What would you conclude?
The head of state of Bahrain has had a couple documented assassination attempts against him and possibly others that have never been written about.
But if you found out that the head of state, the emir of country X, was not investigating an assassination attempt against himself, what would you conclude?
Like I say, I don't think a single American would have been surprised or.
Unsupportive if he had come down with an iron fist.
First of all, everybody in Butler that day in the Secret Service and everybody in the Secret Service leadership should have had their badges confiscated and walked to the door.
You're fired and you're not working in government again.
You allow an assassin, a child, to get onto the roof of a building and say, on my walkie talkie, there's a guy on the roof over there with a high powered rifle and he's pointing it at the president.
What should I do?
Do I have authorization to shoot?
What is that?
I can't even imagine somebody behaving in that way.
There's something deeper in the system that's not permitting him to go forward or that's not permitting the government, the rest of the government, to conduct an appropriate investigation.
What are historians going to say about this 20, 30, 50 years from now?
Okay, so if you were running the United States for its own benefit, of course, you would be closest to the countries that share the language, the culture, the religion, and certainly the border, the longest border is Canada.
What does it mean for U.S. national security and economic interests going forward if Canada becomes a South Asian country run by the Chinese, which is what it's becoming?
You know, just like I do, that it wasn't always like this.
The APAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, only became a major player in American politics beginning around 1970 when President Nixon formally changed U.S. policy toward Israel to guarantee the safety and security of Israel.
That changed things.
What he should have done at the same time was to force APAC to register as a foreign agent.
You know, there has been credible reporting over the years that the Israelis may have had something to do with the Kennedy assassination, may have had advanced warning about the Kennedy assassination, and that they either participated in it or allowed it to happen or didn't warn the United States that it was going to happen because Kennedy.
Not just refused to give them nuclear technology, he actively stood in the way of them acquiring nuclear technology to create a bomb.
You don't go to a country where people don't think that's true.
That's right.
But I don't know if it is true.
But it's just interesting that Lyndon Johnson was such a slave that he attacked Americans for talking about the murder of Americans by a foreign power.
I think that APAC really does have to register as a foreign agent.
It really does.
Listen, if I had to register as a foreign agent because the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce hired me to write four op eds and I had to go to fara.gov and register, then APAC should be registered.
They have a much longer term view of these things than we do.
They began to try to implement this policy in the 60s, and it finally came to fruition.
It's prime minister after prime minister after prime minister cultivates not just American political figures, but wealthy American Jews and says, look, you know, we've got a lot of lobbying to do.
If there's a diplomatic resolution, which I think there would be, a common sense would suggest because the global economy hangs on this question, there's going to be a lot of pressure at some point, even from China, to like, let's just get this fixed.
Getting it fixed leaves Iran in a stronger position than at the outset of the war, a much stronger position.
Okay, so I'm trying not to be, I'm trying to like stay calm and everything, but like if you're calling for a land invasion of Iran, a draft to back it up, the public hates this.
There's no polling that suggests otherwise.
Elections are this fall, they're clearly going to be punished.
The party doing this is going to be punished, and they don't seem to care.
So, I know that the president has real concerns about the IC.
And I think, as you said on camera or off, that one of the reasons he was willing to take Mossad's view is because he doesn't trust his own intel agencies.
And then we got to the point in the not too distant future where the CIA is so politicized that you end up with 51 senior intelligence service officers lying in writing that the Hunter Biden laptop bore all the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation, information operation.
Like, how did we get there?
I had no idea.
I'll give you another example.
The 1992 election, we had a morning meeting like we did every morning.
Every group in the entire CIA has its morning meeting at nine o'clock to just discuss whatever happened in the region that you cover the night before.
And my boss said at that end of that morning meeting, he said, I know we're not supposed to do this, but I'm just really curious who you guys voted for this morning.
And I thought, oh, yeah, we never talk about stuff like that.
I still remember it was three for Bush, three for Clinton, and two for Perot.
And I remember thinking, wow, that's interesting.
But I would never have known.
Well, now it's like, you know, everybody was in bed with Obama.
Everybody was in bed with Biden.
How did that happen?
How did we get there so quickly?
When you know what the rules are, the rules are very clear no politics.
It's all about keeping the country safe until it's not, until it's about politics.
And so I think that to reform the place, you have to tear it down.
And then rebuild.
And you have to have real rules that are really followed that you just cannot be political.
You can't.
And then, you know, maybe even this probably would be unconstitutional, but maybe you put the brakes on political involvement for 12 months or 18 months after you leave, just like there are brakes on lobbying.
You can't just go from Friday afternoon, you leave your job, and Monday morning you begin as a lobbyist, lobbying your former colleagues.
And I have to say, as I go down the roster of the members of those committees, I'm like, oh, they're the most screwed up people in the entire Congress.
You know, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's actually a good idea.
If you have a senior intelligence service that's embedded, it's not going anywhere, they're there for 30, 35 years, and they're going to be anti president or anti Republican, then maybe you do need political appointees to keep the honest people.
He has entered into something of a dispute with the Intelligence Committee, and they just won't budge.
And what he's asking for is legitimately under his purview as the chairman of another committee having to do with security, foreign policy, intelligence, whatever.
And the CIA won't budge, the Intelligence Committee won't budge.
And he said, I don't know what to do.
And I said, Well, you've got to approach leadership.
He said, That was the first place I went.
And leadership said they don't want to get involved in a dispute between two chairmen.
So, what do you do when everybody on the intelligence committee is there just to serve the CIA, not to oversee it, not to ensure that it follows the law, just to cheerlead for it?
I remember Eric Holder saying, Now, now, I got these referrals, these criminal referrals.
Everybody needs to calm down.
Nobody's going to be investigated.
What do you mean nobody's going to be investigated?
The CIA broke into the computer system of the Senate Intelligence Committee to steal the information that was being developed there about the torture program.
There are no more Frank Churches or Barry Goldwaters or, you know, real.
Leaders, real leaders.
I mean, even Tip O'Neill recognized that Congress was a co equal participant in government, which drove Jimmy Carter nuts, but allowed him to negotiate successfully with Ronald Reagan.
I have far more support among Republicans than I have among Democrats.
Far more support among MAGA Republicans.
You know, on the surface of things, it's because the Obama administration went after me.
But it's more than that, under the surface, deeper down.
I think that MAGA Republicans really do believe in the rule of law and in the Constitution.
And really, at the end of the day, this comes down to the Constitution.
When I put my hand in the air on my very first day at the CIA and I promised to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, domestic and foreign, I meant it.
And I hate to think that I was the only person in the room that day that did.
And I think for the most part, it's Republicans who respect that.
So I've spoken with very high level, well placed people close to the president, both in and out of government.
I know that the president knows that I've applied for the pardon.
I will admit to you that I disagree with the president's policy on Iran, but I don't think that's a big deal.
I would hate to say that your mild and measured criticism of the state of Israel would in any way affect your eligibility for a pardon because.
It's one thing to go to war because you're pushed by a foreign country, but to decide how you treat your own citizens based on their views of a foreign country, that is treason.