John Kiriakou - Ukraine War, Mass Surveillance, Trump, UFOs & CIA Torture Tactics

Full transcript: John Kiriakou on London Real

2:49 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer, counterterrorism expert, author and whistleblower. You worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004, notably as the chief of counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan due to the 9-11 terror attacks. Here, you refused to participate in the training of enhanced interrogation techniques, later identified as a torture program.

3:24 In 2009, with an interview with ABC, you became the first former government official to confirm the use of waterboarding against Al Qaeda suspects. And in 2012, you were charged with leaking classified information to journalists and sentenced to 30 months in prison. As a result, you lost friendships, your job, and were vilified in the mainstream press. Today, you focus on fighting for human rights and supporting those that face similar consequences. And you ultimately believe there are things we should never do, even in the name of national security, and the US government should stop participating in immoral and unethical practices.

3:59 John, welcome to London Real. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Looking forward to jumping into it. I think you once said, I’m a patriot, I love my country, I want it to succeed, but I think it’s making a lot of mistakes.

4:13 And I’d love to get your opinion on kind of what’s happening in the world. I think I’ll start off with a situation that’s close to home over here, and that’s the war in Ukraine. And I was just wondering, what is your take on what’s happening there? We’re, what, 500 and some days into it. The US is pumping tons of money, tons of weapons into that.

4:34 We recently saw this Wagner quote-unquote coup happen. You know, you work for Sputnik Radio, and so maybe you know a few things about Russia that we don’t. What is your take on the situation as we see it now? I’ve got a take that isn’t terribly popular, either at work or amongst my friends. My position is, look, if we’re going to be supporters of peace, then we have to be supporters of peace.

5:03 I understand why the Russian government took the decision to enter Ukraine. I understand that the United States was behind a coup, a soft coup in 2014, but if we’re going to be peaceniks, then we have to oppose war, period. And so on the day of the invasion, I said on my radio show, which is on Sputnik Radio here in Washington, it’s a Russian government owned radio network, I said at the start of the show, I unequivocally oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I urge Russian troops to leave Ukraine immediately.

5:41 With that said, I equally strongly oppose US and NATO intervention in Ukraine. We told the Russian government repeatedly, and I’m talking about President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, we told them repeatedly that we would not support Ukrainian membership in NATO. And we never meant that, we were lying to them to placate them. And so knowing that that was a Russian red line, we did it anyway. And we started talking to the Ukrainian government about entering NATO.

6:17 We promised the Russian government that we would not allow NATO to expand to its borders. And we did repeatedly with the Baltic states, for example, and Poland. So to then point the finger at the Russians and say this is all a result of Russian hegemony, of Russian imperialism, is disingenuous. I think at the very least, everybody should be sitting at the table, and we should be trying to negotiate a settlement to this thing. Why do you think the Biden administration has seemed to go kind of all in on this war?

6:50 I mean, is it something as simple as, you know, it’s easy to get reelected in wartime? As a matter of fact, I think there’s almost like 100% correlation. Or is it much deeper? Because they’ve really grabbed on to this. And, you know, it seems like one of their core platforms is that we are fighting for whatever reasons, and we’re going to take this all the way.

7:11 Not always the party of war in the past. And just curious on why you think they did that. And was it obvious they would do that from the start? I think that’s a very important question. And I think the answer is several fold.

7:28 Number one, yes, you’re correct. I think this was a strategic reelection move. Number two, and I don’t mean to sound cynical, but I really believe this. I think that Joe Biden, like every other president, is constantly thinking about his legacy. Every president, for better or worse, wants to be a wartime president, right?

7:49 That’s how you enter the history books, is as a wartime president. And, you know, we were pulling out of Afghanistan after two decades. We were pulling out of Iraq after nearly two decades. What better way to make a name for yourself for generations to come than to take on one of the world’s greatest powers in Russia and to do it for what you say is the right reasons. So I think that’s a part of it as well.

8:18 And you know, one of the things that’s utterly perplexing to me is what you’ve just alluded to. It’s the flip that we’ve seen in the Democratic Party, where the Democratic Party used to lead demonstrations in the streets in opposition, for example, to the Vietnam War. It was the Democrats who came out in opposition to the little tiny mini war that we had in Grenada in the early 1980s. The only opposition to the first Gulf War was among a handful of Democratic senators.

8:53 It was only Democrats that opposed the second Iraq War. Well, what happened? Why are the Democrats all in? And they’re all in without giving long-term thought to how exactly we’re going to pay for all this. And what does victory look like?

9:11 Nobody’s ever actually quantified what that’s going to be. At what point do we declare victory and go home? Is it the utter defeat of the Russian military? Because that’s never going to happen. The Russian military is 20 times the size of the Ukrainian military, and it has nuclear weapons.

9:33 So again, what is victory? I think we should begin to temper our expectations, and whether we like it at this early stage or not, get everybody to the negotiating table. Yeah, what does victory look like? I think I had Colonel McGregor on a couple weeks ago, and he brought that to you. He’s great.

9:50 He’s fantastic. He brought that same question up, and you’ve heard it so many times throughout history. You asked that question about Vietnam, you asked that question about Iraq, you asked that question about Afghanistan. So many people have openly asked it, and yes, right now, here we are. And you’re like, well, what the hell does victory look like?

10:06 I bet you couldn’t even get an answer from that out of DC. And you’ve got the Republican side. People like Donald Trump, which I guess 10 years ago, you’d think this guy, of course he would want war. He’s saying, the crazy thing is both Donald Trump and RFK, and I know you’ve had conversations with him, and we have as well, they both said I could end this war with a phone call, and it’s over. That’s right.

10:29 First of all, do you think that’s true, John? Do you think both of those guys could end it with a phone call? That’s a tough one. Perhaps. I hate to be wishy-washy.

10:41 I apologize for that. It’s possible. First of all, let me say, Doug McGregor’s a dear friend of mine, and I have absolutely deep respect for not just his knowledge and understanding of these complex issues, but for his willingness to go out on a limb, even when his positions are unpopular. We need more people like that in Washington, not fewer. Doug was supposed to be the US ambassador to Germany, and the Republicans blocked his nomination.

11:13 Now, how ridiculous is that? I don’t want to get too far off topic, but yeah, I suppose it would be popular if the Russian side were able to trust an American leader, and I think that they would trust Donald Trump and Bob Kennedy on this issue. I think that could lead to some sort of a settlement, and how ironic is it, how odd is it, that it’s the Republicans who have begun saying, look, we can’t afford this over the long term. This is not a cost that the American taxpayers should bear.

11:51 This is not a war that we need to be involved in. It’s a war of choice. Why aren’t the Democrats saying that? Why do we have the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supporting appropriations for continued war, or Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren? I just don’t understand the role reversal that we’ve seen in this war.

12:17 It doesn’t make any kind of sense to me. Yeah, and meanwhile, there’s like hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians dying. There’s tons of money being pumped in, and I want to ask you about your theories on the wartime economy, because it comes up here for sure. And then on top of that, I don’t know what you see in America, but here in the UK, you see a massive mainstream media bias towards Ukraine being the victor. Oh my God.

12:44 I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And I pull up The Guardian and The Times, and then I look at The New York Times, sometimes occasionally I still do. And I just look at it, and I’m just like, guys, I mean, if there’s any tiny little bit of victory, they magnify it from Ukrainians, and if there’s any tiny slip in the Russians, they magnify it. Luckily, I get to talk to guys like Jim Rickards and Colonel McGregor, and they’re like, look, this is not the truth on the ground.

13:10 And if you know that, you look at the media, and even the media can’t sell me on it. So why do you think that’s happening, and what do you see? Do you see the same thing? Oh, I absolutely see the same thing. And the worst offenders are The New York Times and The Washington Post.

13:26 You just can’t trust coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Like you said, they’ll take the smallest setback on the part of the Russians and blow it up to the end of the wars at hand. They’ll take the smallest victory by the Ukrainians and say that this is David and Goliath. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that analogy. In fact, when the Ukrainians had set out to begin the counteroffensive, which was actually several weeks late, it was the Ukrainian military that predicted that by this point in the summer, they would have moved 60 miles inside Russian territory, and they would have divided the Russian military into two in Crimea.

14:15 In fact, here we are months after the start of the counteroffensive, they’ve moved five miles inside Russian territory, they’re nowhere near Crimea, and they have not split the Russian military. Well, that’s a loss. That’s not a victory. But what was the banner headline on The New York Times today? It was an analysis of how Vladimir Putin was almost overthrown in what they’re now calling the Wagner coup.

14:44 There was no Wagner coup. It just never happened. It was an ill-fated march a third of the way to Moscow that the Russian government was able to negotiate out of, and the leader of this coup attempt has been exiled. So rather than to focus on made-up, patriotic falsities, why don’t we tell the truth, the real truth, and encourage an end to this conflict? Why do the major outlets in the American media have to be cheerleaders for American government policy?

15:24 That just doesn’t make any sense to me. It hasn’t been like that in the past, at least not to this degree. But this is what we’re up against, where you just can’t find reliable news. Yeah, I’ve had Seymour Hersh on here who used to work for The Times, and now when he comes out with his theory on the Nord Stream bombing, which I might get your thoughts on, they won’t even talk or print what he’s referring to, and they make some other story up. And you spent a lot of time in the CIA, and you know about PsyOps, and you know about surveillance.

15:56 When you look at the New York Times, how do you explain that to yourself? Is there someone at the top that just says, we take the left narrative and we magnify it? It can’t be that simple. Or do they really believe in what they’re doing? No, it’s not that simple.

16:14 Yeah, they do believe in what they’re doing. And you know what, I’m going to answer your question with a short story. My last job at CIA headquarters was as the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations. Very important job, access to literally everything, and long hard hours. So I had hit a lull in my day, my boss was off in a meeting, and I kind of kicked back in my chair like this.

16:44 And I was looking out into the hallway, and I was just relaxing momentarily, looking out into the hallway, and Bob Woodward walked past my office. Bob Woodward being the famed, acclaimed Washington Post senior investigator reporter. And my brain didn’t believe what my eyes had seen. So I said to the secretary, hey, was that Bob Woodward that just walked past the office? And she said, yeah.

17:14 I said, without a security escort, Bob Woodward is just walking the halls of CIA headquarters. And she said, oh, you didn’t see the director’s email? And I said, no. She said, yeah, they gave him free reign, he’s writing a book, and we’ve all been ordered to cooperate with him. I refused.

17:40 I mean, one of the holy of holies at the CIA is that you never, ever talk to the media for any reason. Well, I came to learn that, of course, you talk to the media when you know the media are willing to carry your water for you. You know exactly who to leak to, and who you’re going to leak to are Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, Joby Warwick at the Post, David Ignatius at the Post, and a half a dozen people at the New York Times. And then there are a couple of other people, NBC News and the LA Times and Wolf Blitzer at CNN, because they’re going to report exactly what you want them to report.

18:26 So it’s not as clear cut as most Americans believe. I’ll give you another example. I was only on the job for a couple of weeks. This was in 1990, and I saw Wolf Blitzer walking the halls with a camera crew, no less, and no security escort. And he was doing a stand-up with his microphone right in front of a sign that said CIA Historical Intelligence Collection.

18:54 It was an offshoot of the CIA library, and I remember looking at him and just shaking in my head as I was walking out like, well, somebody ought to be arrested for this, probably Wolf Blitzer and the CIA security person who’s not escorting him right now. And I walked out. But this kind of thing happens all the time. We like to think that there’s this Chinese wall between the CIA, and especially senior CIA officers and the American media, and in fact, they’re in bed together.

19:28 Wow. Wow. It was funny because I talked to Seymour about his theory on the Nord Stream bombing, and then a couple weeks later I saw the New York Times article again with this – when you hear the details that Seymour gives you and then you see the New York Times article, it was this wacky theory about some Bulgarians that rented a boat and went down there. And I was just like, look, I’d never spent any time in CIA headquarters, but it didn’t take an expert to realize that story sounded – it sounded like somebody fed it to them.

19:58 Ridiculous. And they just printed it up just to satisfy some things and just keep it moving. And it just had a bunch of holes in it that even I could see from one hour with Seymour. But I guess the American public doesn’t really know any better. They read it and they keep moving on.

20:14 And so this is a PSYOP that works – you fool most of the people most of the time. And so it proceeds. One of my closest friends used to be a boss of mine when I was on a two-year rotation to the State Department. So he’s a very senior former State Department official. In fact, I’m going to have dinner with him tonight.

20:32 And when this explosion took place on the Nord Stream pipeline, I called him and I said – I said, we had to have done this, right? I mean, it couldn’t be anybody else. It had to be us. And he said, no, no, the Russians did it. And I said, do you think the Russians blew up their own pipeline?

20:56 What could they possibly have to gain by blowing up their own pipeline? Well, he said, it would be embarrassing for us. I said, Don, with all due respect, that doesn’t make any kind of sense at all. And I talked to Si Hirsch about it. And I said, this was us, right?

21:14 And he said, well, it could be us. It could be the Ukrainians. And I said, yeah, if the Ukrainians had a mini-sub that would allow them to go down there. But do they even have that kind of technology? I mean, we’re the only ones that have that kind of technology that I know of.

21:30 When I say we, I mean the United States and NATO. I just don’t get what anybody else on the other side would have to gain from something like this. And sure enough, Si was mostly right. If it wasn’t us, it was the Ukrainians. We all suspected it, even though the mainstream media doesn’t want to actually come out and say it.

21:51 And let me add something about Si Hirsch, too. This is a guy who, for the last 60 years, has been one of the most highly honored, highly awarded journalists in America. The guy was the definition of investigative journalism in the second half of the 20th century. And he literally cannot get published anymore. I’m a member of a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

22:21 It’s a group of retirees from the CIA, the FBI, NSA, and the US military. And we give an award every year called the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. We gave the award to Si in 2017, and he complained that, that he was under such pressure from the mainstream media here in the United States, that the only place he could get his pieces published was in the London Review of Books, which is great. It’s highly respected, but nobody reads the London Review of Books.

22:53 They might have a few thousand subscribers. Now, here we are five years later, and he can’t even get himself published in the London Review of Books. And so he’s had to take to Substack to publish himself and to get the truth out there. That’s how bad things have gotten here in the United States. Yeah, if there was ever a perfect example, it’s that.

23:15 I mean, again, look at what he did with MyLai Massacre. I mean, this is a guy, I mean, this is a guy who had, you know, he’s shown that he has a commitment to like, to journalism and to integrity enough to where, you know, he was hated and vilified by the military, but he’s brings that same ethics to what he’s doing today. And now that the same publications won’t touch him. And it’s like he, Si hasn’t changed the media house, right? Oh, you’re exactly right.

23:45 The media has changed. You’ve changed as Americans, but can you imagine, for example, the United States ever being able to point to someone, some media figure and say, you know what, he’s the new Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite’s dead and gone. There will never be another Walter Cronkite. There will never be another media figure that a majority of Americans has respect for, to the point where every four years, people say, you know, what would be really great is if Walter Cronkite would run for president.

24:22 That will never, ever happen again. Never. Wow. Because there’s nobody with that type of integrity in that space anymore. Yeah.

24:30 That person doesn’t exist. It’s a brand new world. I guess at least we could see it happening, you know, with people like Si. And I know he’s had some success on Substac, which is great. And I always love talking to him.

24:42 He’s my only guest that rocks in a rocking chair while he talks. And it doesn’t matter because everyone watches him. So yeah, look, that’s great to see. Just to finish, how do you think this plays out with Russia? Like what do you think happens, especially if you take it all the way up to the election?

25:01 At the CIA, in our analysis, we used to use this term all the time, muddling through. So many people just naturally, their brain defaults to an either or choice when they try to prognosticate. And oftentimes, what was true was that the parties in the conflict just sort of muddled through and things just didn’t change over the medium term. And I think that that’s what we’re looking at here. The Russians aren’t going to use nuclear weapons.

25:32 I don’t think they’ll even use tactical nuclear weapons because they’ll lose the propaganda advantage of saying, look, the only country in the history of the planet that’s ever used nuclear weapons is the United States. And they did it twice, right? They don’t want to be lumped in with that. They want to be able to continue to point at the United States like they’ve done since 1945. They don’t need to use nuclear weapons, even tactical ones.

25:57 Now they have a virtually unlimited supply of suicide drones that they’re getting from both the Chinese and the Iranians and are attempting to purchase from the Indians. And so what’s better than a small payload on a drone that costs you $14,000 rather than the $100,000 or $200,000 that American missiles cost? And you can just lob them into buildings or into military bases or onto airfields. I think that they’re just going to continue to do that. I think we’ll see a slight upgrade in the level of Russian technology that they’re able to either develop or to purchase on the open market.

26:40 I think that here in the United States, we’ll continue to arm and to train the Ukrainians in basically whatever they want up to and including the F-16. And then I think as we approach the American elections, the Republicans are going to have a real campaign issue going home and saying, why should we be paying for all this? We have bridges falling into the rivers below them. We have international airports that are international embarrassments for anybody who’s ever traveled around the world.

27:22 We have an interstate highway system that would take a trillion dollars to repair. And we want to move the world’s microchip manufacturing out of Taiwan and Singapore and into Ohio and Arizona with what money? With the money that we’re sending to Ukraine, this has to come to a stop. And God knows already our NATO allies don’t want to pay for it. Their national debts as a function of GDP are worse than ours.

28:02 They want us to pay for it. And so I think we’ll muddle through the short term and maybe the medium term and then it’s going to become a political issue here in the United States where American voters just say, look, enough, enough with this. We don’t want to pay for it anymore. This has to be settled. And I think eventually it will be.

28:22 You know, we, a lot of us said this at the very beginning too and I should repeat this. I think in the end, the Russians are going to keep Donetsk and Luhansk. They’re going to keep the Crimea. There will be a promise that Ukraine will not join NATO, but the United States will declare Ukraine a major non-NATO ally like Israel or Japan or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. And Ukraine will be fast-tracked for membership in the European Union.

28:53 I think that’s how this ends. And do you think this could lose the Biden, the reelection, or do you think with all the propaganda going on, it will not be a major enough issue for people to say enough is enough? I don’t think it will be enough of an issue. I think it’s going to drag on longer than that. I think it’s going to drag on through the election.

29:15 Now, if Joe Biden were able to run for election again in 2028, which of course he’s not, even if he were to be alive in 2028, I think by 2028, everybody’s going to be sick of this. But I think 2024 is practically upon us. And look around, I’m looking over, for example, right now as we speak, not McPherson Square, but Farragut Square. I’m one block from the White House, and we’re not seeing people in the streets. We’re not seeing people marching with signs and placards saying end the war.

29:53 We’re not. People are just going about their normal business. They generally don’t care because it doesn’t affect them directly. But when we have to keep raising taxes to pay for these weapons systems, and all this money goes to US defense contractors, and they get rich while you and I get poor, and we continue to neglect our infrastructure, then finally I think people are going to get sick of this. Well, let’s talk about that, John, because this is kind of IP that’s unique to you, because I’ve heard you say the following, that if we were not at war or producing weapons for war, we would immediately go into a recession.

30:40 And you’ve argued that’s the case for the past couple decades. Can you explain that position? Because a lot of people would be surprised to hear that. Yeah, I’ve been saying this for a little while now. In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, we transitioned into what has become a permanent wartime economy.

31:01 Pre-9-11, the wealthiest place in America was Silicon Valley. It had the most millionaires per capita of anywhere in the United States. That is no longer true. Now Washington, D.C. is the wealthiest place in America, and it’s because of the trillions, with a T, trillions of dollars that we have spent on the military-industrial complex.

31:27 There are literally thousands of beltway bandits. These are military and intelligence community contractors that ring the capital beltway that surrounds Washington, D.C. And now there are more millionaires per capita in Washington, D.C. than there are anywhere else in America. It’s because of 9-11, and it’s because of our government’s commitment to spend literally unlimited amounts of money on what is deemed to be national defense.

31:59 Well, we’ve gotten so used to sucking the teat, so to speak, of the American taxpayer that we now can’t shut off that flow of money to these beltway bandits, these defense contractors without pushing the country into recession. That’s how much money we’re spending. We can’t move that money. We can’t move those appropriations to something else like transportation, for example, or infrastructure, or education, or the environment, including environmental cleanup.

32:44 We just can’t. They can’t absorb those gigantic amounts of money. It took us 20 years to get where we are with defense. You know, I’ll add another thing, and I promise not to throw too many statistics at you, but our defense budget is now bigger than the next nine largest countries combined, right? You take China, Germany, the UK, France, Japan, the next nine largest countries combined, and we still spend more.

33:24 Why? To prepare for what? To give free money to the Ukrainians, or money to these countries of the Sahel. Now, this is all supposed to be a big secret, but we’re pumping billions of dollars into Niger, and Mali, and Burkina Faso, and Guinea Conakry, and Guinea Bissau. For what reason?

33:51 That’s a French problem. Why aren’t the French pumping their money into those countries? Why does it always have to be us? And why is it a secret? Don’t the American taxpayers have the right to know where their money’s going and to decide if that’s an appropriate expenditure?

34:09 I would say yes. So there’s no reason for us to be spending this kind of money. I’ll tell you something else, too. A couple of weeks ago, a policeman was shot in Paris, shot and severely wounded. And the gun, the rifle that he was shot with, was confiscated by the police.

34:27 And the serial number on this rifle was an assault rifle. The serial number matched the serial number from a shipment of assault rifles that we had sent to Ukraine about six months earlier. How in the world did that assault rifle come into the possession of a criminal in Paris? I’ll tell you, because it had been sold on the black market. So where’s the oversight for these billions and billions of dollars that we’re turning over to the Ukrainians?

34:57 Now, we’re not just writing a check and sending cash. We’ve learned our lesson to not do that. We did that in Iraq. Iraq, right? Yeah, we did in Iraq.

35:05 So we’re writing these checks to the defense contractors. And the defense contractors then send the equipment to Ukraine. Well, the equipment’s then for sale on the black market for pennies on the dollar. Why? Why do we permit that?

35:22 Where is the congressional oversight? And not even congressional oversight. Where are the inspectors general at DOD and CIA and these other organizations that are active on the ground there? This is really a great, vast disservice to the American people. Wow.

35:39 So if enough people’s paychecks depend on it, these beltway bandits, then it’s just going to happen. Because you can’t shut down all of their livelihoods, so they’re going to find a way to make it happen. It’s like a weird kind of a shadow government, a bit of momentum there. And they’ll use whatever it takes to get there. And I guess selling war or selling defense is maybe an easy thing to do for humans, because you can introduce fear or uncertainty.

36:05 And also, I don’t know how many guns it takes to fight that scary thing over there, right? Yeah. Right. And so it’s maybe the perfect business model. Oh my God, yes.

36:17 You’re exactly right. It’s the perfect business model. And you look at some of these appropriations votes. I don’t mean to smile. I mean, I’m smiling, I guess, ironically.

36:27 You look at these appropriations votes. And you have some of the most conservative, Bible-beating members of Congress joining hands with the most liberal, democratic, socialist members of Congress and voting yes on these budgets. Because they represent this area and the excerpts of Washington, D.C. And that’s what makes Washington recession-proof, right? It will never be a recession in Washington, because the business of Washington is government.

37:01 But it’s not just government. It’s government. And it’s what my former CIA colleague, Ray McGovern, calls the Mickey Map. I say the military-industrial complex. He says the military-industrial-congressional, I forget whatever else, it’s a whole list of things complex that makes this city run.

37:27 It’s the lobbyists. And it’s the defense contractors. And it’s the consultants. And it’s the lobbyists, in addition to Congress. And he’s absolutely right.

37:39 Nobody is going to allow you to take this away from them. Not after 20 years of getting rich. It’s no wonder now that this is one of the most expensive real estate markets in America now. And it’s to laugh about markets like San Francisco and Honolulu and Manhattan saying, my God, I’m glad I don’t live there. Who could afford to live there?

38:01 Well, now that’s what our prices are like in real estate. And it’s because there are so many people who are rich that they can afford to buy houses at these inflated prices, because they’re the ones making this government money. Wow. Wow. And also, I’m guessing if you’re a member of Congress or the Senate, your local constituency, wherever it is, has a big chunk of their revenue probably coming in from some type of defense contracts.

38:29 And so if you want to get reelected, first of all, you want to be supported by the lobbyists. And then you also want to make sure jobs aren’t lost. And so it just becomes this flywheel and everybody just lets it go. Oh, yeah, you’ve hit that nail right on the head. And that’s what happens even by members of Congress who vote against these appropriations. Sure, they’ll vote against the appropriation when they know that there are no votes not going to kill the bill.

38:55 Right. And then they’ll go back home and say, for every dollar that we send to the federal government in our taxes, I bring in a dollar 17 in federal aid or in contracting from these these defense contractors. And people say, wow, that’s great. That’s what congressional representation is all about. It’s like the perfect handshake arrangement.

39:25 Everybody’s happy. Everybody makes money. And then the rest of us, when we realize what’s been happening right under our noses, it’s too late to do anything about it. So how does this end, John? Or does it?

39:40 You know, I’m not sure how it ends short of the most devastating recession or depression in American history that forces us to reassess our priorities. You know, there is no reason, none whatsoever, why our military budget should be should be greater than the next nine largest countries in the world combined. Why did the Chinese, for example, go all around the world buying ports and airports and factories and building roads in exchange for bonds and and becoming the go to superpower in places like like Africa, for example, or all across Asia? Why is that?

40:28 An African diplomat told me just recently he was here with with his president for this White House summit. He said, you know, the thing about you Americans is you always offer us democracy and military aid and the Chinese offer us food and new roads. So they go with the Chinese. They don’t want democracy. They can’t make democracy function anyway.

40:52 And military aid, we’re going to give that to them anyway, because, you know, terrorism got to stop terrorism. And so the Chinese go in and say, well, this will pave that road that you’ve been wanting to build from your capital city out to the hinterland. And all we ask in exchange is you give us the international airport and then you give us five billion dollars that you repay over 30 years using Treasury bonds. And they say, hey, that sounds like a pretty darn good deal.

41:24 And the next thing you know, the Chinese have bases all over Africa. And in Washington, here at the State Department, they ask themselves, how did that happen? We didn’t see that coming. Yeah. Yeah.

41:39 It’s what do they say? You’d catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That’s the expression. Right. Or there’s the expression about the two bulls on the ridge, the Poppa bull and the young bull.

41:49 And the young bull says to the Poppa bull, let’s run down and fuck one of those cows and the Poppa bull says, no, let’s walk down and fuck them all. And so it’s America, America, right? So is that America? America is this new country, you know, we, we, we were aggressors, maybe America as an aggressive nation anyways. And so we, we, we do business one way and then the Chinese are meanwhile thinking maybe a thousand years out and saying, guess what, we’re going to go in, we’re going to give them all everything they want.

42:21 And then later, maybe they can pay us in Yuan later, maybe they’ll take our 5G monitoring systems and then later, maybe they’ll join our currency and they win. You’re exactly right. And we’re seeing it happen right now in slow motion in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and all across Africa. And the Kuwaitis just made their first ever oil deal in Yuan and not in dollars. Yeah.

42:48 So yeah, this is, this is a trend I want to add something to this story is a little bit of an old story, but the, the, the, the lesson I want to convey is part of our problem here in the United States, and especially in, in the state department, the CIA, the white house Capitol Hill is that we think we’re smarter than everybody else, everybody else. The day before the United States attacked Iran, I was working in this position as the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations. And we had our final secure video teleconference before the launch of hostilities.

43:30 So my job was to be note taker. This was something called a deputies committee meeting. They have principals committee. Actually, this wasn’t the deputies. This was the principals committee meeting.

43:42 So the CIA was represented by CIA director George Tenet. We were in a vaulted room. So George was on the camera and I was directly behind his shoulder taking notes. The, the meeting was chaired by vice-president Cheney. Uh, Connie Rice was the national, what was she at the time?

44:01 National security advisor. Uh, she was on the call. Colin Powell was on the call. Uh, we had the, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and his deputy. So everybody was there along with their note takers.

44:16 And, um, the first thing that the vice-president did when he started the meeting was he asked the commander of CENTCOM central command to give us, uh, something called an order of battle update. I was always bored by order of battle because I don’t really understand the order of battle. It’s just boring and meaningless to me. So he’s standing in front of this map and he’s saying, we have elements of the first army core are here and they’re going to move here.

44:46 And the fifth division is going to move there. And then we have this group that’s going to move here. And he’s just moving these little men on a map. And then he said, if all goes according to plan, we can be in Tehran by August. And George very discreetly reached up and turned off his microphone, George Tenet, and he leaned back and he said to me, did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad? And I said, he said Tehran.

45:20 And George says, have these people lost their minds? And then he turned the microphone back on. Well, after all these briefings were done, the senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council said, at this time tomorrow, the Iraqi people are going to be throwing flowers at American troops as they cross the border. And I said to George, has nobody studied the Middle East? My degrees are in Middle Eastern studies and I’ve lived for years in the Middle East. And he said, no, none of them have studied the Middle East.

45:59 So I went back down to the deputy director’s office or it wasn’t down. It was up to the deputy director’s office. And he said, how’d the call go? And I said, did you know we were going to invade Iran? And he said, oh, they’re still talking about that.

46:17 And I said, yeah, I said, it was right at the start of the briefing. And he goes, yeah, nobody’s going to invade Iran. He said, these guys don’t have any idea about anything in the Middle East. And I said, clearly, they didn’t. Well, that’s still part of our problem 20 years later.

46:38 Is we think we’re smarter than everybody else. And actually, the Chinese are smarter than we are. And in some cases, the Russians are smarter than we are. And a lot of other countries leaders are smarter than we are. And we’re seeing this as we incrementally begin to fall behind.

46:58 And you mentioned these these deals with the yuan being the de facto currency. That’s that’s a setback for the United States. That’s something we should be deeply worried about if we intend to be and to continue to be the big boy on the block. And it’s like we’re we’re puzzled as to how to to confront this. Well, it’s easy, just do what the Chinese are doing and stop spending so much money on unnecessary defense expenditures.

47:31 But we’re smarter than everybody else is. So we’re not going to do that. You mentioned the bricks. We see these nations now getting together in a massive way, now talking about kind of a new currency that might be based, goal based, but one that they’ll actually use. And it I had Jim Rickards on recently and it looks it looks like a potentially scary thing. Like you said, one of the greatest ways the US has dominated the world for the last 70 years is through the dollar and the petrodollar.

48:04 And now you’ve got these nations actually talking about having an alternative and coming together and pushing back. Yeah. What do you see there? I think they’ve got a big meeting in South Africa coming up soon, but it feels like they’re making advances there. So, yeah, what do you think they are?

48:18 Yeah, there are several, several different tracks here. You have the the BRICS countries that are very seriously considering some sort of a new joint currency, something akin to the to the euro, for example, you also have what might become in the next five years a joint currency of South American countries, too. So we know that the Brazilians, for example, are in talks with Chileans and the Argentines and the Mexicans and a handful of others, while at the same time carrying on talks with the South Africans and the Indians and the Chinese and some of these bigger world economies.

48:55 This is something we should be deeply worried about because we’re rapidly getting to the point where these countries don’t need the dollar anymore. They don’t need to rely on us. They don’t need to have every literally every electronic transaction be routed through New York, which would then make everybody susceptible to U.S. sanctions, which we’ve overused to the point where now countries are objecting to them. That’s number one.

49:21 Number two, and forgive me for falling back on these stories, but I’m seeing real parallels over the years. The United States, as I said, always wants to be the global power. In 1995, I was stationed in the U.S. embassy in Manama, Bahrain, which is a very teeny tiny country in the Persian Gulf. It’s the same size and same population as as Pittsburgh.

49:48 But it’s a very important U.S. ally because it’s the headquarters of the of the fifth fleet, the U.S. Navy’s fifth fleet. Well, peace between Israel and the Palestinians at the time looked like it was actually going to happen. And the Bahrainis were asked to host the Arab-Israeli peace talks on the environment.

50:09 This was an international effort. And so I was instructed to collect my Russian counterpart and to go jointly to the Bahraini foreign ministry and to invite the Bahrainis to host the Arab-Israeli peace talks on the environment. Literally minutes before I left the embassy with my diplomatic demarche, I received a hair on fire cable from the State Department saying, don’t pick up the Russian, go to the foreign ministry by yourself and make this an invitation just from the U.S. State Department.

50:50 So I stopped by the ambassador’s office. I worked for this awesome guy named David Ransom, one of the finest ambassadors I’ve ever worked for. And he said, I said, did you see this cable from from state? And he said, yeah, it’s pretty fucked up. And I said, what do I do?

51:06 He said, well, you have to you have to do it. I said, the Russians are going to be pretty angry about this. And I have a relationship with my counterpart. His name was Andre. I said, I have a relationship with Andre.

51:15 He’s a good guy. He’s going to be pretty upset. He said, well, these are our instructions. So I drove over to the to the foreign ministry and I said, the U.S. government invites you to host this thing.

51:26 And, you know, please set up the new I forget what it was called the peace, the Arab Israeli peace conference on environmental protection, some silly thing that never came to pass. And and sure enough, he called me and he’s like, dude, what are you doing? This is a joint thing. This is not an American an American program. This is a joint U.S.

51:48 Russian program. And I said, dude, I’m sorry, but I was instructed to cut you out and you have my deepest apologies. But you know, what am I going to do? Well, you know what? Other countries are tired of us cutting them out.

52:00 They’re tired of having to answer to the United States. And so they’ve finally decided they’re going to go it alone. And sometimes going it alone means partnering with other countries that are tired of the United States. And so we should not be surprised to see Brazil, India, China, Russia, South Africa say, hey, if we put the power of our economies together, we can actually make this work. And we don’t have to rely on on the swift banking system.

52:34 For example, we don’t have to rely on the Treasury Department approving all of our our international business deals. We could just do this by ourselves and cut the Americans out. And that’s what we’re very rapidly coming to. China is a big part of that. What’s your quickish take on China?

52:53 Because I’m sure we can talk hours on it. But what is what is China actually doing versus what are we being told that they’re doing? And, you know, maybe Taiwan is a good example as far as what’s actually happening versus what we’re told is happening. What is your take? Yeah, that’s that’s a good question.

53:10 That’s a good question. And it goes to this this idea that we’re being fed propaganda by the by the American media. Again, you know, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that we would adopt the one China policy. We dropped our diplomatic representation in Taipei and we recognize the Beijing government as the legitimate representative of the Chinese people. It was a big deal.

53:37 The Taiwanese were thrown off the U.N. Security Council. The Chinese entered the U.N. Security Council. And we recognize one China that someday will be reunited after a period of negotiations.

53:52 OK. And we formally exchanged ambassadors with the Chinese in 1979 done. So in the intervening years, we’ve maintained a very large what’s called an American interest section in Taipei. We don’t have an ambassador there. We have a U.S.

54:13 Trade representative and a consul general and everybody’s been happy. Right. We don’t call it an embassy. We don’t call it official representation. But at the same time, we have very robust trade relationships with the Taiwanese and vice versa.

54:31 And we sell them lots and lots and lots of weapons and F-16s and F-18s. So why don’t we just leave well enough alone? Why have we decided that now we also want to stick our thumb in the eye of the Chinese? Why? Why upset the apple cart?

54:51 I just don’t see what the United States gains by deliberately sabotaging our our diplomatic relations with China. It doesn’t make any sense. And this is not specific to either Republicans or Democrats. They’re both doing it. You know, Donald Trump unleashed these new sanctions on China, which made no sense at the time.

55:15 You know, maybe the idea of trying to protect the American farmer made sense. I would concede that. But these other sanctions just didn’t make any sense at all. And in fact, they’ve they’ve harmed American manufacturers and producers, for example, of wines. We just can’t sell American wine in China anymore.

55:33 Just can’t do it. Why has never been explained? We’re just told to get with the program and to support the decision that’s been made here in Washington. Both parties say the same thing. Another thing that’s bothered me very much in terms of sticking our thumb in the eye of the Chinese and both parties are doing it, it’s these high level visits to Taiwan.

56:00 This is something that generally isn’t done. If a governor makes a visit to Taiwan, it’s always always as part of a trade mission. Totally cool because your state is producing goods. You want to sell your goods to Taiwan. You’re the chief executive officer of your state.

56:16 By all means, go to Taiwan and sell them your grapes or your wheat or your whatever, your shoes, whatever. There’s no reason for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House to go to Taiwan. There’s no reason for Mike Pence to go to Taiwan as a presidential candidate and a former vice president of the United States. There’s no reason for Kevin McCarthy to go to Taiwan. And then when Nancy Pelosi went, the Biden administration lied to the American people.

56:46 This was a bald faced lie by saying, oh, we didn’t know she was going because she’s she’s the the Speaker of the House. It’s a different branch of government. That’s bullshit. I’ll tell you how it works. The highest ranking state department officer in any country around the world is called the chief of mission.

57:10 Sometimes that’s an ambassador. Usually it’s an ambassador. Sometimes it’s a deputy chief of mission, DCM or charge a fair or in the case of Taiwan, the chief trade representative. And what happens is if you want to go to that country and you work in any capacity in the American government, you have to send something called a country clearance cable. So you send a letter to the state department and you say, hi, my name is Nancy Pelosi.

57:43 I would like to visit Taiwan. And they’ll cut and paste that into a cable and they send it to the chief of mission in Taiwan and say, Nancy Pelosi wants to visit Taiwan. She is the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. And it’s this is just pro forma.

58:02 This is just so it’s on the record. And then the chief of mission will send something called a welcome cable. And it says chief of mission Taipei welcomes the upcoming visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. John Kiriakou has been assigned to be your control officer. He will pick you and your delegation up at the airport, blah, blah, blah.

58:24 Okay. Number one, the state department knows that you’re doing this because they’ve approved it. Number two, nobody as senior in the American government, as the Speaker of the House can make any international trip anywhere without the National Security Council knowing about it. And if the National Security Council knows about it, that means it’s been approved by the Oval Office, the executive office of the president, EOP, they’ve approved it. On top of that, Nancy Pelosi let slip that she was taking a military aircraft.

59:04 So the Secretary of Defense has also approved it and has allocated assets for her to make this trip. Nancy Pelosi did not drive to Dulles Airport and get on a United flight to Taipei. That’s not how it works. Literally everybody at the White House, the state department and the defense department knew she was going and approved of the trip. So the fact that the president said that she was a, you know, she’s in a different branch of government.

59:33 I didn’t, I didn’t know anything about any trip. She’s just going on her own. That is nonsense. This is part of a well coordinated policy to put pressure on the Chinese. But then you have to ask yourself what the point of the policy is.

59:48 Again, what the point is has not been articulated to the American people. Why do we want to challenge the Chinese Navy in, in the Taiwan Straits? And then we object when the Chinese send a ship off the coast of Cuba. Why do we want to challenge the Chinese or anger the Chinese by ramping up arms sales to the, to the Taiwanese? What do we, what do we gain out of this?

1:00:19 How does this make us stronger? How does this improve our economy? How does this keep the American people safer? No party has ever articulated this. So I feel very strongly about this, this China policy.

1:00:33 It’s, it’s a failure. Both parties have failed, not just failed to articulate, failed to implement in any, in any smart way, why we have decided to challenge the Chinese and to cast doubt on the one China policy after decades of claiming that it was working. I mean, is this back to what we’ve been talking about the whole time? Is it all about the military, industrial, congressional committee? And if you can lean towards conflict, that just needs more money for everybody.

1:01:05 Yes. Okay. That’s exactly what it comes down. So it’s that simple. It’s power and money.

1:01:10 It’s that simple. Right. And future cash flows and not messing with the status quo where everybody is getting rich and they want it to continue. And so, and then maybe, maybe even subconsciously, you start making those choices, you know? Oh, sure.

1:01:24 Because, because it becomes the norm. Right. And if that’s your livelihood, they always say, if you, it’s very hard to convince a man when his livelihood is based on this, that it might be the wrong answer. You know, even someone that’s very measured and very ethical, if that your livelihood is based on that, subconsciously, you can find a reason to justify it. You’re absolutely right.

1:01:45 And that’s what we’re saying. I’ll give you another example. From 2009 to 2012, I was the, the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, senior job, and John Kerry was the, was the chairman of the committee. So he decided that he wanted to, to pass an authorization bill. Now, every committee is supposed to pass both an authorization bill and an appropriations bill for the governmental entities that they are supposed to be exercising oversight over every year.

1:02:22 And they don’t, they just don’t get around to it, but that, it just goes to show you how ridiculous the, the daily life on Capitol Hill is, just because you’ve not authorized the state department to continue running and to continue spending money, doesn’t mean that it’s not going to continue to run and to continue spending money. So just to put a band-aid on it and not look silly, Kerry said to us, you know, we should, we should write a, we should write an authorization bill, you know, authorizing the state department to continue operating. I said, okay.

1:02:55 So then he said, you know what, maybe we can add a couple of things to it. We can add something about climate change and we can add something about China All right, fine. We get, we gather everybody together. A couple of days later, I go into the office and I shared an office with three other guys, quite a big office. Three of us, four of us had our desks in there and there are four strangers sitting in our desks.

1:03:21 And again, I’m a senior staff member. I’m not some kid who just walked in off the street. So I go to the front office and I said to the chief of staff, who are these people sitting in the office? And he said, oh, those are the lobbyists. I said, what lobbyists?

1:03:37 He said, the lobbyists that are going to write the authorization bill. I said, I thought we were going to write the authorization bill to our committee. He said, Oh, no, no, no, we don’t do any of that. We just have the lobbyists write it. So I ended up sitting in the cafeteria until these clowns wrote my bill.

1:03:54 And then that’s what Congress passed. I don’t even know what was in it. I was never asked to comment on it. None of us were. We just accepted whatever it was that the lobbyists had handed over to us.

1:04:06 Like, okay, there it is. Passed unanimously. All hundred members of the Senate. No problem. That’s Capitol Hill.

1:04:13 And that was in 12. Now we’re 10 plus years later. That’s still happening. That’s kinds of things still happen. Absolutely.

1:04:22 Absolutely. The lobbyists run Capitol Hill period. Man, I, I got to come to DC sometime. You got to show me around. Cause I got, I got no DC game.

1:04:30 I spent time on Wall Street, spent time here, but I don’t, I don’t, I have no DC game. And it sounds like a fascinating place. Uh, yeah, you’re going to be disappointed, I suspect. Okay. See, that’s why most Capitol Hill staffers are like 24 years old and make $30,000 a year.

1:04:47 Cause they’re not actually doing any work. It’s the lobbyists that are doing it and they do it for free. Right. Quote unquote free. They’re getting paid by someone else.

1:04:55 Free. Right. Exactly. Got it. All right.

1:04:57 That makes sense. Um, just finished with China. Uh, is Taiwan in danger of a Chinese invasion? I think probably not. Uh, at least not now, if they were to be in danger, it would be because of a U S provocation.

1:05:16 Again, I think what we need to do is to reassert our, our support for the one China policy and allow the Chinese and the Taiwanese to do what they always have done. And that is to, uh, to continue talking. You know, something like, something like 68% of Taiwanese have close family members that live in China, in mainland China. There’s no desire on either part to begin slaughtering each other’s relatives. And this one China policy has worked all these years.

1:05:49 It’s the U S that’s seen as the thorn in the policy. So I think we need to back off and let these guys just do what they’ve always done successfully. And what about China? You know, long-term with the U S what do you think is going to happen? We, we, we seem to be constantly provoking them.

1:06:07 I know you’ve talked about, you know, the Chinese balloon and again, you’ve really questioned the narrative around that. Was that just something to continue this defense narrative? I heard you talk about that on a couple of shows where you said like, come on guys, this, this, but the media told us it was a spy satellite, but it had no evidence of being one, but it fits right in with the narrative that also comes from maybe the left by these left leaning, uh, media publications.

1:06:33 But yeah, if you want to comment on that, but also I got a bunch of things to ask you, how does this play out with China? We just continue trying to escalate. Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s the American policy right now is to continue escalating, uh, the Chinese are perplexed. Um, I met with a Chinese embassy official just in the last like three weeks. And he said, you know, I’ll tell you the truth. We just simply don’t understand your policy.

1:07:00 There’s a famous quote by Gamal Abdul Nasser, uh, the former president, uh, Arab nationalist president of Egypt. He said something that I’ve used in our beds several times. And this is a direct quote. He said, the thing about you Americans is that you never make clear cut stupid decisions. You always make complicated stupid decisions, which make us think that there’s something to them, which we are missing.

1:07:26 And he’s right. We come up with these very complicated policies that, you know, you’re like, what, what’s the goal here? And I think that’s what we’re seeing with China, where the Chinese who are very sophisticated, very smart, very worldly, and they’re like, look, we just don’t understand your policy at all. What are you trying to gain? Do you want to fight us?

1:07:51 Cause that doesn’t make sense either. So I think that we’re not going to get a sane policy from the Biden administration, just like we didn’t get a sane policy from the Trump administration, uh, or, or from the Obama administration. It was Barack Obama who initiated this, you know, pivot to Asia, which was a mistake. He meant pivot to provocation of Asia. And, you know, even the Australians are starting to say, well, we just got this from the Australian state before yesterday.

1:08:22 They were like, Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why do we have to increase defense spending? Why do we have to fight China? You’re the ones with the problem with China.

1:08:34 We don’t need more F-35s. We don’t want to fight the Chinese with F-35s. We have a good, good trade relationship with the Chinese. And now you want us to jeopardize that because you want to pick a fight with them. And even Singapore is like, whoa, wait a minute.

1:08:48 You know, we’re the banking center of East Asia and a lot of that money comes from China. And we have a lot of Chinese here. We don’t think we like the direction of this American policy. And so I think eventually the U.S. is going to have to back off.

1:09:04 You know, you can you can call it whatever you want. You can call it a new era of detente, let’s say, or a new chapter in the relationship. Call it whatever you want. But the bottom line is we have to back off. I appreciate that.

1:09:19 Let’s fast forward to November next year. We’re days before the election. What has happened? What has happened next year as we come up to the elections in terms of media, social media, you know, artificial intelligence, deep fakes. Who who’s out there?

1:09:37 Is RFK still involved? I guess maybe not by then. Is Biden and where is he? Where is Trump in this race? What do you think is going to happen? What do you think of the dangers of of next year?

1:09:50 I don’t follow anything in my life more closely than politics. From when I was a little kid, I’ve been obsessed with it. So I have some thoughts. They may be wrong, but I have some thoughts. I’ve I’ve I consider Bobby Kennedy to be a friend of mine.

1:10:06 And a couple of weeks before he announced his candidacy. First of all, I was thrilled that he was he was thinking of running for president. I didn’t think he could win. I still don’t think he could win, but I was thrilled at the prospect that there would be an alternative voice out there in the Democratic Party. His strategy at the very beginning was to be competitive in five states, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island and California.

1:10:33 And what he was hoping to do was to replicate what Senator Eugene McCarthy did in New Hampshire in 1968. Eugene McCarthy was a Senator from Wisconsin who was an antiwar liberal, and nobody took him seriously, but he announced his candidacy for president. He ran in the New Hampshire primary and he got 35 percent or 32 percent. This was such a shock to the White House that the incumbent president Lyndon Johnson subsequently announced that he was dropping out of the race and he was retiring.

1:11:06 And that just opened the Democratic field for everybody. It looked like Bobby Kennedy senior was going to win the nomination. He actually was going to win the nomination, but he was shot and killed in June of 1968. One thing led to the other and the vice president, who was also pro-war, Hubert Humphrey, ended up winning the nomination. Bob was hoping he could get in, build some momentum in those early races and convince a very old, very tired Joe Biden that perhaps it was better to drop out of the race.

1:11:41 The Democrats were very much afraid that that would happen when they saw these early polls showing Bob pretty consistently at 20 percent. 20 percent is gigantic against an incumbent president who’s been an elected official since 1972. OK. And so at first they tried to ignore him and his numbers were maintained at a pretty healthy level of 15, 17, 20 percent. And so then the Democratic National Committee changed its its its policy toward Bob.

1:12:24 They decided to attack and they have brought the mainstream media in on these attacks. And so, again, here we go back to the Washington Post in the New York Times. If you just read the Washington Post in the New York Times, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is some kind of a lunatic, some kind of a raving madman who who believes that Bill Gates is trying to implant a chip in your body through the use of vaccines and who believes that, you know, the United States is experimenting on our children and any number of crazy fringe QAnon, you know, silly conspiracies.

1:13:11 None of that is true. Bob is not an anti-vaxxer. He’s vaccinated and all of his children are vaccinated. Right. Number two, he never said that Bill Gates was trying to implant chips or that the mRNA vaccine was, you know, some kind of a secret government plan.

1:13:32 He said that the covid vaccines had not undergone the same rigorous testing that other vaccines had undergone. And he’s right. That’s true. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the Democratic National Committee has been successful in painting him as some kind of a nut. I had a guy today tell me, well, you know what?

1:13:55 Even if it’s true that he’s not a nut, the fact that that he has the raspy voice, which he probably got from a covid vaccine, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That’s just not true. I said he has a very well documented defect in his vote reports. He’s had it since 2007, not since covid in 2007. He went on ABC News, gave an explosive interview and explained what this condition was. It’s well documented.

1:14:29 And who cares if he has a raspy voice or not? I don’t care. If the man has a raspy voice, OK, sorry, that’s a long way of saying I think he’s not going to make it to the general election. Well, and then the latest ammo is the anti-Semitism, which oh, my God. And then the censorship hearing with that.

1:14:48 There was the woman, I guess, the Democrat just was just trying to stonewall him with the Wasserman Schultz. Oh, gosh. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is one of the most despicable people of either political party here on Capitol Hill. Listen, the one issue that Bob Kennedy and I disagree on is Israel, Palestine, right? He says he is 1000 percent pro Israel.

1:15:15 He believes in the state of Israel, et cetera, et cetera. I believe that Israel is an apartheid regime. I believe in human rights for the Palestinians. We’ve agreed to to part company on that issue. So the the unmitigated gall that this liar and phony Debbie Wasserman Schultz has tried to propagate over the last week or so that Bobby Kennedy is some sort of an anti-Semite is made up out of whole cloth.

1:15:42 Listen, all you have to do is watch the first 10 seconds of the clip. He did not say that the covid vaccine was designed to protect Jews. He said there have been reports that, et cetera, et cetera. He didn’t he didn’t state it as as fact. He said that these rumors are out there.

1:16:07 Go ahead and debunk them. That’s fine. But he never said that they were true. He said that people have reported that there are reports that but the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz have conveniently left that part out. And it’s because they’re really worried that he’s going to make inroads against Joe Biden.

1:16:27 Yeah, it’s it’s it’s the nuclear weapon of defamation. It’s your it’s your last. It’s usually at the very bottom of the ammo barrel. It’s the nasty, slimy stuff. That’s usually what they throw when they’ve got nothing left at you.

1:16:38 Right. Yeah. And they throw that same thing against against American Jews. And they say, oh, you’re a health. You’re a self hating Jew.

1:16:46 You support Palestinian rights. You’re ashamed to be Jewish. You’re a self hating Jew. It’s like, no, actually, I’m you know, I mean, I’m not Jewish, but my Jewish friends who support Palestinian human rights say this is something that they have to fight all the time every day from the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who I might add, who I might add, help to steal the 2020 and 2016 nomination from Bernie Sanders by 2016, at least by giving the Clinton campaign the debate questions in advance and then had to resign as chairman of the DNC because she got caught doing it.

1:17:26 So you can’t believe anything Debbie, Debbie Wasserman Schultz says. And so how does this going to play out? I mean, we’re seeing him get tons of traction. He’s doing the podcast route. He’s getting a lot of converts because yeah, Bobby, I had Bobby on the show back in May of 2020 when Covid was in full effect and I had him on.

1:17:45 I I was I walked into the show basically a believer of vaccine science because I I went to MIT. I got an engineering degree and I was in I was in love with the science and blinded by the science. And I had Bobby on and he walked me through the the the legal aspects behind the science. And by the end of the show, I thought two things. Wow, I had no idea how much control the pharmaceutical industry was in these things and how and how there’s none of these safeguards in the vaccine act from 86.

1:18:20 And then I thought, wow, this guy’s a really intelligent, credible guy. And so I knew early on that he was nothing like what people said. And then he was basically boxed out of the media for a long time. Then the vaccine narrative. And then when I heard he was running for president, I was so happy because now because of that, people actually are starting to get to know him.

1:18:41 And man, when he speaks, yeah, I’m telling you, when he speaks, I mean, I’ve never heard a politician like him in my era. You know, I wasn’t around when his dad was speaking, but it’s like you can tell this guy he really wants the best for Americans. They try to go to me to us attacking his opponents. And he says, no, no, no, I’m not doing that. I’m not playing that age old game.

1:19:07 You want me to play in the media. I’m here to unite everybody. And like, I don’t know. It’s amazing. Like I I’m so impressed.

1:19:14 And I’m it’s almost like I have a little hope left in the leaders. Right. Right. I feel the same way about this candidacy. You know, he said something to me very early on that I think is very important.

1:19:26 He said, I am not anti-vax. I’m anti-big pharma. And he’s right. And somebody should be anti-big pharma. You know, we haven’t talked about Joe Manchin, the Democrat, the Democratic senator from West Virginia.

1:19:40 Joe Manchin’s daughter is the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company here in the United States. It’s a company that that manufactures something called the EpiPen, right? I have a shellfish allergy. I have to carry an EpiPen. All my life, an EpiPen has cost me one dollar, right?

1:20:00 It’ll save my life if I need it. One dollar. When she became the CEO, she said, wow, this EpiPen could be really profitable for us. So now when I go to get an EpiPen with my prescription, it’s six hundred dollars. So rather than getting one every year, I keep it for three years, even though it’s expired, because I can’t afford to shell out six hundred dollars for one EpiPen.

1:20:23 Well, another thing that she did was her company’s based in West Virginia. She enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh. And I follow news from the University of Pittsburgh because my dad got his PhD there and my sister got her degree there and my son had gotten into one of my sons, got into the University of Pittsburgh and I’m from Pittsburgh. So she enrolled in this PhD program and she just never went. She just never went to class.

1:20:52 She never wrote a thesis. And so she wrote an email to the dean saying, hey, yeah, I never went to class and I didn’t write a thesis, but I’m the CEO of this big pharmaceutical company and I want to make a giant donation and I want you to give me the PhD. And they said, OK, OK, we’ll give you the PhD, but we want this big donation. Well, somebody somewhere at the University of Pittsburgh saw these emails and said, what? This is nuts.

1:21:23 I’m going to leak this to the media. And they did. There was a whistleblower who’s never been made public. And then the university did to say, well, yeah, we told her we’d give her the PhD because she’s rich and she’s charging, you know, six hundred dollars for the EpiPen. So she has a lot of money.

1:21:42 This is exactly the kind of thing that Bobby Kennedy is fighting against. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens every single day in America with medications that are pennies or dollars overseas that Americans are being robbed to pay for. Why are we being robbed? Why do we not fight back against Big Pharma? Well, the only person who’s even talking about Big Pharma is Bob Kennedy.

1:22:10 And I think that this should be one of the preeminent political issues in the 2024 race. Thank goodness that for him it is. So gameplay this out. What happens and what could happen?

1:22:26 There was a piece in Politico yesterday that said, for whatever reason, the Kennedy campaign’s falling apart in New Hampshire. And many of us had real hopes that he could get 30 percent, 35 percent in New Hampshire and scare the pants off of Joe Biden. It looks like that’s not going to happen. Now, he may sweep to victory in Massachusetts, but one of the reasons why we had hope in New Hampshire was Joe Biden, being the head of the Democratic Party as an incumbent president, he elected to take the first in the nation’s primary status away from New Hampshire and give it to South Carolina, right, which is a far blacker state than New Hampshire is.

1:23:10 Well, that’s all fine and good, but New Hampshire has an actual law on the books that says they have to be, by one week, they have to be the first state. So they’re going to have their primaries and Joe Biden is not going to participate on it. He’s going to be on the he’s not going to be on the ballot. That ought to give us pause pause. Let me rephrase that ought to give us cause to celebrate because Bob Kennedy is going to be on the ballot and Joe Biden’s not.

1:23:42 But Politico reported yesterday that Joe Biden still gets 60 percent as a write in. And Bob Kennedy is only at 15 percent. So I’m very worried about New Hampshire. I think he’s going to be a beast in Massachusetts and in California. But California’s primary isn’t until June, right?

1:24:05 Can he make it from February to June? Yeah, I don’t think he can because I think the money is going to dry up. I hate to say this, man. I really do, but. But I think that we’re going to see a geriatric campaign.

1:24:22 Between an 82 year old confused Joe Biden and a 78 year old confused and probably indicted Donald Trump. And I think, frankly, that Donald Trump is the only person that Joe Biden can beat. The only one just like Hillary Clinton was the only person that Donald Trump could beat. I think it’s going to be just awful. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see record low turnout.

1:24:55 And I think you think Biden could beat anyone else but Trump. He couldn’t beat it. No, I think that any other Republican in America beats Biden. Oh, because they’re not hated. Trump doesn’t look confused to me.

1:25:11 Trump actually looks more grounded and resilient than I’ve seen him in a while, at least he did a couple of months ago when he started talking. You see something I don’t I don’t know. Well, maybe I misused the word confused in this context. Confused to me in that he easily moves into tangents in which he just attacks people that that these tangents don’t win him any votes or any support at all. Right. You know, the name calling thing was fun for a little while.

1:25:42 You know, low energy jab and Marco Rubio standing in a puddle of his own piss. So we all got a good laugh out of that stuff. That was fun. It was fresh and it was new in politics. And now people are just tired of it.

1:25:56 You know, I wrote this op-ed a year ago that my editor entitled don’t charge Donald Trump with espionage and the subtitle was and don’t charge anyone else. Because both the Democrats and the Republicans have used the Espionage Act as a cudgel to destroy their enemies, whether they are Donald Trump as a formidable political candidate or whistleblowers who embarrass the likes of the CIA and the FBI and the White House. But. I’m afraid for Donald Trump that at 38 felony charges and counting.

1:26:42 They’re going to get him on something. And it’s going to take him out. And that’s that’s not what the electoral system is all about. But what’s what’s happened to us as a country, that this is how we address each other. This is how we how we engage each other politically to ruin each other permanently, to send each other off to die in prison.

1:27:05 Where’s Gerald Ford when you need him to offer a pardon? My God, for the good listen, I hate Donald Trump. I think he was a terrible president. But the very first thing that I would do would be to pardon him and get this behind us. And move on and rebuild our country and rebuild the bipartisan system that we once had.

1:27:24 I mean, absent that, we really desperately need viable third and fourth and fifth parties. We really do. And I don’t mean Joe Manchin and Joe Lieberman creating yet another right of center party. I mean, real political parties. Yeah, it’s really well said.

1:27:44 And it’s hard to watch. It’s hard to watch, you know, if them throw charges and just the way it’s kind of spiraled down. So you see most likely Biden, Trump going head to head in November. There’s no debate probably in the ends or maybe there has to be one. I doubt it.

1:28:01 I doubt it. The DNC has already said that because the head of the party is a Democrat. I’m sorry, that the head of the party is the president. That there will be no debates. So there’s no opportunity for Bob Kennedy to get his message out there any better than what he’s doing right now. There will not be a debate against Biden.

1:28:21 And then for the general election, if Joe Biden, you know, if he if he’s able to make it to the general election, I don’t think he has anything to gain politically by debating Donald Trump. I think he cuts it out. He cuts Trump out. See, and again. Again, here’s here’s a problem with our political system.

1:28:43 You and I, I’m a little bit older than you are, but we’re of the same generation where we can remember presidential debates being sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Right. This was an organization that is utterly completely nonpartisan. And they were like the C-SPAN of presidential debates where their job was just to organize it. And, you know, I remember Jimmy Carter debating both Ronald Reagan and John Anderson.

1:29:15 I remember George W. Bush debating Al Gore and Ralph Nader. And then after that 2000 election, the two parties said, this is bullshit, where we have these these nobodies join us on stage and and suck votes from both of us and then end up as the spoiler in the election. How about if we set up this new organization called the commission on presidential debates, and it’s going to be run equally by the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, and we force everybody else out, no matter how important they are, no matter how serious they are. Ross Perot, 30 percent, screw him.

1:30:03 He’s not going to be invited. And that’s what they’ve done. And so in the event that we do have a debate, it’s only going to be the Democrat and the Republican, even if there is a real independent or a real third party, a formidable third party candidate. Nobody’s even going to know because the duopoly that we have running us has has pushed them all out. Yeah, that needs to change.

1:30:34 And everyone’s co-opted into that duopoly from the media, from the media to everyone. It’s just yeah, it works for everyone to keep it that way. It’s good business for everybody. And so it continues. I mean, I won’t get into it now, but I ran to be the mayor of London a couple of years ago as an independent.

1:30:51 And I know I was really, I didn’t I was really angry about the lockdowns here and I was ruining businesses and ruining people’s lives. And I looked at the candidates and I thought they were jokes. So I decided to run for political office for the first time in my life. But one thing I learned, John, very quickly, is that the mainstream media here is a big part of the survival of the two party process. And so the book is the betting agencies had me as a two to as a second place favorite at one point.

1:31:20 And yet. Oh, my God. Yeah. And yet the BBC would not invite me to a four candidate, I think later a six candidate debate. And then the mainstream media itself was just as if they were my political opponent sometimes, having me on and then just, you know, then and then, of course, the British press.

1:31:37 I mean, they’re the best. They’re the gladiators of press. Like they go for the throat. So it was a great, great education. I got my PhD in political silent and political science.

1:31:48 But I did learn at the end of the day, there are two brands. It’s like Coke and Pepsi. And, you know, people go and it’s like, oh, labor, the party of the working man. Not true. Yeah.

1:31:58 My dad voted for labor. So I’m going to vote for them. And trying to cut through is very difficult to do. Very difficult. You know, I spent the happiest year of my life in London, 1985 to 1986, studying in London.

1:32:12 And for the initial period that I was there, I lived with a host family and my host father happened to be a member of the British Parliament. And he was one of the very few who was a member of the the Liberal Party. That’s when Liberal was a was a standalone party and the SDP, the Social Democratic Party, was a standalone party. And my God, he was so hopeful and so and so principle driven. I was thrilled when the Liberals became a part of the government not so many years ago.

1:32:47 And then they ended up being exactly like, you know, the Tories and the and the Labour Party. They just immediately bought into the status quo and and fell on their faces. And we see that every day right here in the United States. Yeah, I appreciate your thoughts on that. And let me ask you about the Twitter files, because.

1:33:09 Yeah, I just want to know what you think of those. And I know you know a lot of detail and how they were publicized. Just a couple of things for me to note. You know, look, in 2020, on April 6th, we had the second largest YouTube livestream in the world with a guest that was asking questions about Covid and masks and distancing and ultimately vaccines. I’ve been broadcasting for nine years.

1:33:35 I had two million YouTube subscribers. And 30 minutes later, that video was deleted and banned on the channel. First time ever I experienced censorship, tech censorship. I’m from America. Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy.

1:33:48 And we went head to head with a battle against these technology companies. I was subsequently taken off LinkedIn. My TED Talk disappeared from the site. Dropbox dropped me. You know, all the other companies lockstep pretty much.

1:34:03 PayPal accounts suspended with $100,000. And we had a really hard time. And we were kind of at the tip of the spear of this very early tech censorship. And it really bothered me. And I got a lot of runarounds.

1:34:17 And I said, what about my First Amendment rights? Or there’s kind of an equivalent EU law. And they said, no, these are private companies and you opt into their community agreement and you have to vie by their standards. And again, I also thought I was a little crazy when this was all happening at once. Now, when the Twitter files came out, I thought, oh, wow, there were actually people in government that were telling these tech companies what to do.

1:34:40 And if they told Twitter to do it, I can’t wait to see the YouTube files or all these others. And I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I leave that to my guests. But I thought for the first time, wow, perhaps there was some people in government saying to this company and this company and this company, we don’t want this, this and this. And for the first time I was like, wow, maybe there was some coordinated efforts.

1:35:01 And then I was hit with the realization that my government officials told me to my face that it’s not their jurisdiction. And meanwhile, they went behind my back to the private company and violated my rights in a roundabout way. And I thought, wow, that hits even harder. And we saw the Twitter file files come out, no mainstream media coverage, not much happening in Washington. Mark Andreessen was on Joe Rogan about a week ago and he said, these are felonies that need to be prosecuted if that’s what happened.

1:35:31 That’s my context. What are your thoughts and what did you see? And also it looked like the CIA was involved with FBI, with the Senate Subcommittee. I know the CIA wasn’t mentioned by name, but also you might have a little insight there. Well, I think I do.

1:35:50 Matt Taivi’s a friend of mine as well. Matt was one of the three reporters who wrote this story. Everything you just said is true, I’m sorry to say. And it’s not just on COVID. The same thing happened to one of the outlets that I write for related to Ukraine.

1:36:09 They weren’t pro-Ukraine enough. They gave a space for dissenting voices on the Ukraine war to write. And so our PayPal account was permanently suspended and they confiscated our entire payroll, which at the time was something like $12,000. We had to file a federal lawsuit before they finally relented and let us have our payroll back. But we’re permanently banned from PayPal.

1:36:42 Getting to the Twitter files, how should I say this? It’s disappointing, colossally disappointing to think that the intelligence community and the federal law enforcement community in our country has infiltrated these gigantic tech companies and social media companies. Yet that’s exactly what’s happened. And thanks to the Twitter files, we know that the previous leadership Twitter was, in some cases, taking orders from the FBI and from the CIA. In some cases, running policies or even individual tweets by the FBI and the CIA and then taking those tweets down or suspending users just because the CIA and the FBI didn’t like their messages.

1:37:37 This wasn’t a question of trying to identify and silence Russian bots or Chinese bots or North Korean bots. This was depriving American citizens of their freedom of speech. And it’s most definitely a constitutional violation. It’s most definitely a felony. Now, they can dance around this all they want and say, well, no, that they weren’t asking that people be silenced.

1:38:05 They were just conveying the idea that they were troubled by some of the language. No, that’s not at all what they were doing. When I was at the CIA in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, I was working for a guy who I really respected and he abruptly resigned. He had been a two-time station chief of big stations, senior intelligence service. He abruptly resigned.

1:38:32 And I said, jeez, man, you’re so young. You have another 10 years here. Where are you going? And he said, oh, I’m gonna be the chief of security at Microsoft. And I said, oh my God.

1:38:43 I mean, they must be bringing you the money in a wheelbarrow. And he laughed. Well, just after that, I had other colleagues who left to go to this new thing called Facebook and then this newer thing called Twitter. And then they’re going to Snapchat and to LinkedIn and all these different places. And it’s like, my God, either these guys know something that I don’t know.

1:39:05 And they’re making more money than they can count. Or the CEOs of these companies know something and they’re trying to grease the skids inside the intelligence community. And thanks to Matt Tidy, we know that that’s what was happening. People were deliberately silenced. Dissenting voices were deliberately thrown off of these platforms.

1:39:32 And we know that if that healthy debate had been allowed to happen, I mean, a lot of mistakes would have been prevented. A lot of lives would have been saved. If, go figure, you would have had a free speech and open, honest debate about all these things that are happening, imagine, right? Imagine an actual debate, yes. Yeah.

1:39:54 John, I could talk to you all night about so many different things, but I need to hear a little bit about your personal story. I mean, in addition to you being extremely knowledgeable and also plugged in with DC and having the angle of CIA, which we really didn’t even dive into all that stuff, definitely have to have you back. I mean, you saw some really pivotal parts of American history where you were on the lines, you were in Pakistan, you saw that torture program.

1:40:23 You mentioned that Cheney was in that room there. And then I guess you saw kind of the things that went into place. Maybe I start there. What was Cheney like? Then when you were in Pakistan, kind of what happened?

1:40:35 And then how did that lead to you being in prison? Because that’s a serious thing to happen to someone. The first question’s the easiest one. Cheney was a mean, cold, sociopathic son of a bitch. Nothing at all like George W. Bush.

1:40:52 Bush was warm and friendly, not terribly bright, but the nicest guy in the world. I remember going to a briefing at the White House and the guy that I went with was very courtly.

1:41:09 And he had a kind of a handlebar mustache. And the president made a joke about the mustache. He said, I see you’ve got, let’s forget exactly what he said. I see you’ve got a so-and-so thing going. And he alluded to some entertainer.

1:41:29 And my friend said, actually, I think I’ve got a William Howard Taft thing going. I had to think about the president. Because he was so fat, these stories that William Howard Taft got stuck in a bathtub and it took six men to pull them out. It’s probably not true, but this is the story in history. And W. laughed to the point where I thought water was going to squirt out of his nose or something.

1:41:58 And Cheney just stood there like a statue. Cheney was a liar, a manipulator, when he wasn’t getting the intelligence that he wanted from the CIA. He just had the Defense Department create its own intelligence through Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, which just made it up. The CIA said repeatedly that there were no weapons of mass destruction. And Cheney insisted that, no, there were.

1:42:21 And the CIA just hadn’t found them. So the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi said there were, so we’re going to war for that.

1:42:32 I can’t believe Cheney’s still alive too with all the health problems that he’s had, but he was just one of the most despicable figures I’ve ever encountered in government. Now, after 9-11, literally everybody at CIA headquarters volunteered to go to Afghanistan and fight. And my Arabic was absolutely perfect at the time, fluently. I was very proud of my Arabic language skills. And I volunteered repeatedly to go and they just wouldn’t send me.

1:43:01 And I was enraged. And it turned out that they wouldn’t send me because I only found out accidentally. I ran into a buddy of mine, who was this legendary figure, Billy Wah. Billy was a contractor, but he had won something like 13 or 14 Purple Hearts over the course of three wars. And there was this period about six weeks that I just didn’t see him, he just vanished.

1:43:25 And I ran into him in the hall and I said, hey, Billy, where you been? And he whispers, I’ve been in Afghanistan. I said, yeah, what do you do in Afghanistan? And he looks at me like I’m crazy. And he says, I’ve been killing people.

1:43:37 What do you think I’ve been doing? And it dawned on me that that’s why they haven’t sent me to Afghanistan. They don’t need linguists. They’re not like debriefing anybody. They’re just killing them.

1:43:50 So I went into the office of the deputy director for counter terrorism, who’s an old buddy of mine. And I said, listen, if you don’t send me to Afghanistan right now, I am walking straight to Exxon and I am not looking back. And he’s like, all right, take it easy. Can you go to Pakistan? I said, yes, when?

1:44:09 He said, tomorrow. I said, yes, what do you want me to do? He said, I want you to be chief of counter terrorism operations. I said, done, let me just go home and pack. And he said, okay.

1:44:19 So I called my girlfriend who later became my wife. She was also a senior CIA officer. I said, I got to go to Pakistan. She said, when? Tomorrow.

1:44:29 She goes, okay, I’ll help you pack. She met me at my apartment. And the next morning I went to Pakistan and all hell broke loose. What do you mean by all hell broke loose? Oh, I came up with this idea.

1:44:43 I’m very proud to say we had officers like individual officers all the way up and down the US Pakistan border. And I said, you know, this is so, this is so inefficient for us to have all these people just out in the wilderness on the top of these mountains, hoping that some Al Qaeda guy is going to be coming up the path, you know, and he grabs him. I said, let’s pull everybody off the border, bring them into Pakistan. Let the bad guys come into Pakistan. They’ll end up in some safe house someplace and you know they’re going to make a mistake.

1:45:22 They always make a mistake. And then we grab them. So that’s what we did. We pulled everybody off the border. Of course, thousands, hundreds, whatever it was of Al Qaeda fighters come into the country.

1:45:34 They all go at these safe houses. And what do they do? They immediately get on their cell phone. And we’re like, thank you. Thank you NSA for the tip.

1:45:43 Two o’clock in the morning, we bust down the door and we just grab. We grabbed more people than we knew what to do. It was hundreds and hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters. And we got to the point very quickly where the Pakistani Brigadier General that I was working with most closely said to me one night, listen, we filled the jail. There’s no more room, not for one more guy.

1:46:08 You got to do something with these guys. So I called headquarters and I said, the PACs are telling me that the jail’s full. We were putting them in Raul Pindi jail because it was centrally located just outside of Islamabad. And I said, the jail’s full, we got to get rid of these guys. What do you want me to do with them?

1:46:27 And they said, put them on a C-12 and send them to Guantanamo. And I said, Guantanamo, Cuba? And they said, yeah. I said, why in the world would we send them to Cuba? And they said, well, we came up with this idea.

1:46:43 We sent them to Cuba until we can decide which federal district to try them in, either Boston, New York, Washington or Eastern District of Virginia. And then we divide them up and send them to the districts for trial. I said, oh, that’s a great idea. Okay, so we had like a fleet of C-12s that would just come in, land, we load these guys on in handcuffs and then they take off and they would all go to Guantanamo. And as it turned out, as they were arriving and populating Guantanamo, which got up to over 700 people at one point, Dick Cheney said, you know what?

1:47:25 Let’s not send them to those federal districts. And that’s how Guantanamo became Guantanamo. But the way I made a real name for myself at the agency, in addition to just blind luck in some of these raids, was the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who was the number three, we believed at the time was the number three in Al-Qaeda. He wasn’t the number three, but he was a very bad man. And he was the very first high value target that we were able to locate and find.

1:47:57 We had killed Mohammad Atif, who had been the director of military affairs for Al-Qaeda. We were able to drone him to death in Tora Bora, but Abu Zubaydah was the first one we took alive. And catching him that night literally changed the course of the rest of my life. My life was never the same, for better, for worse, mostly for worse. Because that’s when they wanted to torture him and that’s when you drew the line.

1:48:30 Yeah, I said, guys, have none of you read the Geneva Convention? This is the way I said it. I said, are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? We can’t do that. It’s a war crime.

1:48:45 We can’t do it. Oh, no, no, the president signed it. The Justice Department said it’s legal. I’m like, listen, I can read just as well as the next guy. And I’m telling you, this is a war crime.

1:48:58 So of the 14 people that they asked to be trained in these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, I was the only one who said no. Were you surprised? And I objected to you. You were the only one? I mean, yeah, I was.

1:49:12 Really? I was. I was surprised because, yeah, and I’ll tell you why. Because these guys were my friends. You know, our kids played together.

1:49:19 Our wives were friends. We would barbecue together. These guys were my buddies. I didn’t realize that there were monsters inside there. Like, have you thought this through?

1:49:33 You’re prepared to murder this guy in cold blood. You’re prepared to hang him from a ceiling, you know, from an eyebolt in the ceiling and beat him to death or force him to play Russia roulette. You’re really on board with this? They were like, yeah, it’s good guys versus bad guys. This is black and white.

1:49:53 I’m like, yeah, I wish I could see it in black and white. These were CIA guys? Yeah, CIA guys. With military training, too? All but two of us had military training.

1:50:05 Did that make a difference? If you had a military background, is a military background giving you a- I think it did because all of them were former special forces. Okay. And these were guys who were used to sort of pushing the envelope. Right.

1:50:18 They were training- You know, and I remember one of them telling me, it’s better to ask forgiveness later than to ask permission now. Right. Because that’s- Okay, well- That’s what you’re taught in special forces, right? We have to shoot them or they shoot us and our crew and it’s a different mentality. And with all the hype and the 9-11 just happening and you’re over there and the adrenaline and you’re with young guys, man, I’m just amazed that even you came up with that conclusion because there’s a lot of PSYOPs going on there, intentional or otherwise, to get you- And I don’t know what it was even like locally, must’ve been crazy.

1:50:54 You’re separated and all of a sudden we’re gonna do this, peer pressure. I mean that was- There’s a lot of that. Yeah, it must’ve been hard. There’s a great deal of peer pressure. The night that we captured up as Vader, we caught so many people that we had to bring them to our safe house in shifts, one paddy wagon at a time to interrogate them.

1:51:13 And the first group of guys that came in all had hoods on. And I told this one idiot that was working for me, I said, why do they have hoods on? He said, we don’t want them to see our faces. And I go, it’s a war crime. You can’t put hoods on them.

1:51:28 Like, why am I the only person that knows this? I said, take those hoods off. And he goes, wait a minute, wait a minute. He goes, if you take the hoods off, I’m gonna report you to headquarters. And I said, dude, I’m already reporting you to headquarters.

1:51:41 You’ve committed a war crime. And so I took the hoods off and we reported each other to headquarters and I got in trouble. I got in trouble. And there was a psychiatrist at the CIA who was a great friend of mine. We went to the same church, we were in the same men’s group and we worked in the Counterterrorism Center together.

1:52:01 And he happened to be a one-star general. And he pulled me aside one day and he said, they call you the human rights guy. And I said, yeah, I know that. And he said, you know, that’s not a compliment, right? And I said, Steve, I’m right.

1:52:16 And they’re wrong. And that’s what’s gonna come out at the end. So, I mean, here we are 20 years later, 22 years later. I can sleep at night. They’re sociopaths, so they probably can sleep at night too.

1:52:31 But in my heart, I know that I did the right thing. Right, and so that eventually led to you leaving the CIA, probably? You know what, it was a part of it. Yeah, the other part was that I was newly divorced and my ex-wife moved to Ohio with our kids. And I wanted to see my kids.

1:52:50 They were eight and five at the time. And, you know, little kids need their dad in their lives. And so I began driving to Ohio every other weekend. I never missed a weekend in 11 years other than the period that I was in Pakistan. So I said, I can’t keep this up because to get promoted into the Senior Intelligence Service, I had to take on the station.

1:53:10 And because I had done good work as the executive assistant to the deputy director, they offered me one of three stations. And I said, actually, I’d rather do this domestic assignment at the United Nations. And the deputy director said, ooh, he said, you know, that’s really not career enhancing at the United Nations. I said, yeah, I know, but I have 20 years ahead of me and my kids need me. So I went to the United Nations.

1:53:36 I hated every second of it. But then the Iraq war started and we got bogged down really quickly and then they started doing what are called directed assignments where they force you to go to Iraq. I was happy to go to Iraq. I had been there before. But I went to headquarters one day for meetings from New York and I was at the elevator lobby waiting to take an elevator up and somebody had posted a flyer in the elevator lobby for a class that was being held.

1:54:08 And it was called raising your children in a war zone. And I remember standing there looking at that flyer and thinking, I quit, I quit, I’m not doing this. And then to fast forward in 2009, you do the interview with ABC, you talk about it. No, actually it was in 2007. Okay.

1:54:31 And the CIA, I said three things. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that torture was official US government policy. It was not the result of a rogue. And I said that the torture program had been personally approved by the president himself.

1:54:48 So the FBI at the behest of the CIA investigated me from December of 07 to December of 08. And then the FBI determined that I had not committed a crime and they sent me what’s called a declination letter declining to prosecute. Sorry, my battery’s just about dead.

1:55:13 And then four weeks later, I had no idea that as soon as Barack Obama became president, John Brennan, who was an old nemesis of mine, asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. And so I had no idea that for the next three years, my phones were tapped, my emails were being intercepted, teams of FBI agents were surveilling me. And then finally in January of 2012, I was arrested and charged with five felonies coming out of that ABC News interview, including three counts of espionage.

1:55:55 Man, it was rough. That’s rough. And then you spent two years in prison. Like, how do you make it out with your sanity? How do you make it out to where you can…

1:56:07 Yeah. How do you get through that, John, and not lose your humanity? Because you haven’t lost it. Wow, yeah. You haven’t lost it.

1:56:14 That’s hard, that’s hard. I wrote a book while I was there called Doing Time Like a Spy, how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison. And I showed how I use my CIA skills to keep myself safe and to keep myself at the very top of the social heat. I was a serious pain in the warden’s ass. And the staff there absolutely hated me to the point where they tried to set me up a couple of times.

1:56:41 But there are fucking retards for the most part. And I was able to handle them quite easily. But I wrote this book and I made a strategic alliance with the Italians to begin with. And when I say Italians, I mean Italians named Gambino, Bonanno, Lucchese, Genovese.

1:57:07 And they took such good care of me. I actually gained 35 pounds in prison from the Italian dinners. I gained 35 pounds in two years. We ate like kings, like that scene in Goodfellas. Because they had a crooked cop on payroll and he would bring in the homemade pasta and the pork loin and the white wine for the Marsala sauce and the fresh vegetables and the big loaves of bread.

1:57:32 And we gorged ourselves every night. I made a strategic alliance with the Aryans because I was a good guy, which to the Aryans mean you’re not in on a child sex charge and you’re white. I chose not to respect racial boundaries there. And one of my closest friends was one of my black cellmates. And then on a lark, a member of the MS-13 gang, it’s a pretty violent gang, he asked me if I would write his appeal.

1:58:12 He was in on 20 years on a drug smoke recharge. I said, I’m not an attorney. He said, yeah, but you’re educated, right? I said, yeah, I’m educated. And he said, so you can write my appeal.

1:58:21 I said, yeah, why not? How hard could it be to write an appeal? So I went to the law library. I wrote an appeal. He lost, he was clearly, really obviously guilty, but he put the word out with all the other Mexicans that I was good.

1:58:33 And so I didn’t have to worry about the Mexicans. Just out of sheer serendipity, Louis Farrakhan said something nice about me. He said that I was a hero of the Muslim people because I stood up to the CIA. So the nation of Islam, even though they wouldn’t shake my hand, they said that I shouldn’t expect any trouble from them. So I was good.

1:58:55 And that drove the cops crazy, crazy, but it worked for me. That’s wild, John. That’s wild. John, how can people follow you either on Substack or on Twitter? And yeah, and what’s next for you?

1:59:11 So just those things. Thank you for asking. So I’m on Substack. It’s John Kiriakou, K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U, also on Twitter at John Kiriakou. And I’ve got a radio show every day on the Sputnik network called Political Misfits.

1:59:28 And I write a column for consortium news, and I write a column, much to the CIA’s chagrin, at a magazine called Covert Action Magazine. And I just sent my eighth book to the publisher. I have a lot of books out there. Most recently, I did a four-part series, the CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis, the Insider’s Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection, the Insider’s Guide to Lying and Lie Detection, and the Insider’s Guide to Disappearing and Living Off the Grid.

1:59:59 Yeah. So, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, and you can patch together a living. I looked up the last one on Audible, but it wasn’t there, because I want to check it out. So I know it’s on Amazon, so I’ll go check it out. But that always fascinates me.

2:00:13 Look, John, I really appreciate that. I know you’re losing power. We’re going to have to have you back on to talk about Epstein and UFOs and Assange and all these other things I wanted to cover. But look, thank you very much. Thanks for opening our eyes to what really happens in DC in so many different ways, and maybe is really going on in the world.

2:00:32 I really appreciate that. I appreciate people like you out there talking about these things. Thank you so much. I think there’s a lot of people listening, and a lot more people than we think are willing to listen to these things. And so- Oh, I hope so.

2:00:44 I really think so. That’s what makes it all worthwhile. Yeah. Think independently. There is.

2:00:50 I mean, people are listening to the Colonel. They’re listening to Cy. They’re listening to Bobby. And they’re listening to you. And I’m really bullish on the future as far as educating the masses.

2:01:01 Wonderful. And after the last three years, I think everybody knows it’s not all what it seems to be. So thank you, John. Let’s have you back on and let’s do this in person next time, too. Oh, thank you so much.

2:01:12 I relish the idea. All right, fantastic. Thank you. Follow this man, John, and we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, bye.