After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Trump's Next Iran Move, and Havana Syndrome Cover-Up, with Bryan Dean Wright, PLUS Stephen A. Smith’s Political Future

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Emily Jashinsky opens the show with a look at President Trump’s news conference on Iran with Bryan Dean Wright, Former CIA Ops Officer and host of “The Wright Report.” They discuss how the U.S. and Mossad tracked down the Iranian leadership, the prospect of boots on the ground, the truth about honeypots, intel sharing, and what happens next. Then the discussion turns to a stunning new report from CBS’ 60 Minutes on Havana Syndrome, what could explain the symptoms, and why the CIA is keeping tight-lipped about it. Emily and Bryan also dive into Racket News’ new reporting on the FBI’s secret set of books, the ISIS-inspired attack outside the NYC mayor’s home, and the firing of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Emily wraps up the show with analysis of Stephen A. Smith’s new comments that he likely won’t run for president in 2028.   Cardiff: Get fast business funding without bank delays—apply in minutes with Cardiff and access up to $500,000 in same‑day funding at https://Cardiff.co/EMILY   Stash Financial: Don't Let your money sit around. Go to https://get.stash.com/EMILY to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures.   Lean: Discover why LEAN is becoming the choice for real weight‑loss results—shop now at https://TAKELEAN.com use code EMILY.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Acro Party, everyone. Happy Monday. I'm coming to you live this evening from the Harvard campus because I am, of course, an intellectual giant and am exactly where I have belonged all. I was talking to some students here today and am excited to talk through this wild news cycle. The president just wrapped. I mean, that's one of the good things about doing a show at night. These news cycles do not quit. And Donald Trump does not quit a news cycle.

and the man can drive news no matter what hour it is so often we get a news cycle. Like today's, he just finished a press conference just within the last couple of hours. He's at Doral in Florida. He spoke to reporters. He's there meeting with Republican lawmakers, but took time behind the podium and filled out all kinds of questions that made huge news. I'll give you a little bit of a tease. He said, actually, that he thinks the war is almost over at one point. So we have that video and audio coming up in just one.

moment. As a reminder, please do subscribe. It helps us out so much. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast, like, comment, all of that stuff. It is enormously helpful to us as we bring you independent journalism here on After Party. All right. So tonight's guest I'm so excited about, you may remember I had Brian Dean Wright on Federalist Radio Hour. Like if you go way back with me, you remember Brian Dean Wright. It wasn't that long ago, actually. It was shortly before I left the Federalist. He's the host of a really, really interesting show. You actually, in fact, he's here because many of you asked me to talk to Brian.

Once again, it's called The Wright Report, going to bring him in in just one moment. But this is really the perfect news cycle because what's happening in Iran is heavily dependent on intelligence and on the shadowy world of intelligence, domestic intelligence agencies and foreign intelligence agencies. So we're going to kind of peel back the layers of that. we're also going to talk about what happened in New York City with the foiled, apparently, terror attack the last couple of days, wild reactions from Mayor Mamdani, politicians like Brad Lander that have since been walked back, I think rightfully so, but we're going to dive into all of that. Another reason that we had the perfect news cycle to get Brian here,

CBS dropped a massive segment full of original reporting on Havana syndrome, just last night, like years worth of reporting on Havana, Havana syndrome in a like half hour segment. So there's a lot to discuss. If you aren't up on Havana syndrome, you're not going to want to miss this because, I mean, even if you are, you're not going to want to miss this, because it's this Pandora's box of what we can trust in media,

what we can trust from intelligence agencies and where we are in this new or maybe continued Cold War period. You know that I'm obsessed with Cold War history And this story really, like, touches on a lot of different layers of that. Christine Nome out at DHS. There's so much to discuss. Also, Stephen A. Smith, apparently ruling out a run for presidency, kind of bad news for Democrats. And I'm not actually totally joking on that front.

So there's tons to get to tonight, as you can see. I mean, even just going through the president's news conference that just wrapped alone is going to be some heavy lifting. and I'm excited to get into all of it. First, though, going to take a quick break. Stay with us. Brian will be with us at the other end of this break. Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, but getting funding from traditional banks is an uphill battle.

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apply now for, again, up to $500,000 in same-day business funding at cardiff.co-slash-emily. Again, that's cardiff.com. slash Emily. Real growth, fast funding, Cardiff, borrow better. All right, so excited to be joined tonight by Brian Dean Wright. He's a former CIA ops officer and he's host of The Right Report, which I highly recommend you all check out. Brian, thank you so much for being here.

It's great to be here. Congratulations, great show. Look at you go. Love it. Well, it's so good to talk to you in the midst of this insane news cycle. Wild, yeah. And for your purposes, I mean, do you get, this is a very random question, but as I just mentioned, you're a former CIA ops officer,

people who listen to your show know that. Do you ever get like phomo now that you're out? Do you watch some of this stuff go down and you're like, man, if I were there? Yeah, of course. I mean, look, once you become an intel officer, you know, I started when I was, let's see, 24. So I was a pretty young guy when I went in, so that was, you know, pushing 20 plus years ago. So yeah, when I see a lot of ops go down abroad or like, I see something, I'm like, I think that's an intel op right there. I'm like, oh, boy, but I wouldn't give me back. So, yeah, yeah, there's a little bit, a little part of me that wishes I could be back inside doing good work.

But that's all right. I mean, I'm here with you. That's good. I was going to say, you're here on an after party, which is, I'm sure, very similar to special ops. It's pretty much the same thing. Yeah. It's just like, right now, you are in Doha and this is your life. You're my asset.

I'm going to start debriefing. I'm going to get to Iran. Let's go through the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, crypto process, why can I pay you? Actually, you can teach something up that's really important, which is how do people communicate when you're inside of Iran? And there's some really interesting, like old school, like Morse code-like stuff that's floating around there on shortwave radio right now,

trying to talk. We're not really sure exactly what it is. We can talk about that. Maybe Iran is trying to signal its terror networks abroad to start killing people, blowing stuff up. Maybe it's a CIA working inside of Iran, telling its assets to get going. So there is all kinds of stuff in this news cycle that's below the headlines that's really, really interesting and very impactful for people's lives in ways that you might not even know. Oh my gosh, you just made me even more excited to dive into this.

So let's start with some big news from Donald Trump's Florida press conference just this evening. So here are a couple of big clips from that, like the headline type clips. This is S1. We'll start with us. Nope, we're queuing it up. Live audience. Don't me to do my best. impression, I can just say something. The war to run and winning. Nobody else can do me.

It's amazing. The BessiAA. Let's try S3. Let's see if this works. Okay, we don't have any sense. Okay, so basically, let's actually, we'll get to the Sots in just one second. I want to, since this goes with exactly what we were just talking about, I was going to ask you about this anyway, but you kind of teased it. So let's dive right into it. Al Monitor reported, this is F3. The headline here, CIA, Mossad, bolster Iran's Kurds as U.S. Israel seek to ignite military revolt. And this question that we were actually just going to play Trump answering is about how long the war goes. And we have this thought.

Let's go with S1. This is a clip of Trump from this evening. The Navy is gone. It's all lying at the bottom of the ocean. 46 ships. Can you believe it? In fact, I got a little upset with our people. I said, what quality of ship?

Excellent, sir. Top of the line. I said, why did we just capture the ship? We're going to use it? Why did we sink them? He said, it's more fun to sink them. He said, that's a... They like sinking them better.

They say it's safer to sink him. I guess it's probably true. But think of it. We knocked out 46. It actually took three and a half days. Their terrorist leaders are gone or counting down the minutes until they will be gone.

Think of it. We had leaders and they're gone, that we had new leaders and they're gone. And now nobody has any idea who the people are that are going to be the head of the country and will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated. Okay. Brian, nobody knows, but there's some public indication that there's a CIA app with the Kurds, although that's also been disputed, which is interesting. Before I get your reaction, let's roll S3 here too. on Iran you called it an excursion you said it would be over soon are you thinking this week it will be over no but soon i think so okay and with respect very soon look everything they have is gone

including their leadership in fact there are two levels of leadership and even actually as it turns out more than that but two levels of leadership are gone most people have never even heard about the leaders that they're talking about so uh it's obviously been very very powerful very effective. This is a really important point, Brian, because the intelligence that the USA appears, so this apparently was CIA communicating to Israel, the location of the Ayatollah, who obviously was killed,

it seems because of that intelligence. And as you're looking at this from your vantage point, how much of this seems like grand strategy and how much of this seems like, well, the intelligence was you take out the Ayatollah, what comes next? We'll figure it out. The Kurds.

How are you analyzing what happened from the outside here? Yeah, so let's start with the beginning of how they were able to find the Ayatollah. You know, there's some really incredible operations going on inside of the CIA and within side of Mossad. What they're able to do was crack cameras throughout the city of Tehran. And they were able to watch the bodyguards that they believed that were responsible for protecting the Ayatoll and other regime officials. And they would watch them going from their homes to different, locations throughout Tehran. That's how they were able to understand exactly

where Ayatollah would be on any particular day. So the pattern of life information was able to get hacked by the CIA, by Mossad, and that's how we were able to know where everybody was gathering that Saturday morning and we could then take him out. It just so happened that that meeting happened that morning and that day. The plan was not for everybody to be there at one time. And that's why the president, the CIA,

gave that material to the Israelis and said, look, if you want to take these guys out, Let's do it. It was a big op. And I think it changed a lot of planning. I don't think that we had any indications that everybody was going to be gathered that morning. And so it was a shot that we took that took out the Ayatollah, a lot of the regime leadership, which is great. But as the president said, like, who comes second?

Who comes third? Well, we just wiped everybody out. You know, the CIA and others at the Pentagon were counting on, you know, who was going to take over after the Ayatollah. Well, we killed everybody or the Israelis did, that's right. So now we have the real great change of who comes next, not just for the United States. the Ayatollah, which obviously the Khomeini's son has been chosen now, but then also, you know, future leadership within what's called the IRGC, which is the regime's main military that supports it. So there was just, the point is from the average Americans' perspective, like,

why should we care about that? Well, you've got to negotiate with somebody to end a war. And when you wipe out all of your leadership, like, who do you talk to? You don't know. And, you know, Trump kind of jokes about it, but it really, really is serious when you try to look at an off-ram to how do you end this war, now that the price of oil is going from like 80 to 120, barrel, dollars a barrel down back to 80. It's really wild and it's very intense. A lot of people's lives are impacted by this. So that CIA op is a great off. We're able to find the IATOLA, a lot of the regime leadership, and unfortunately, we took out a lot of people that we thought would be the number two or number three, our preferred choices. So that's why that particular op

mattered. And on that point, I'm curious with Trump saying it could be over very soon. I mean, that could mean a lot of different things. How much does our ability to, I mean, Cole and Powell had famously the, you break it, you buy it, maxim. It's contrasting, I think, in a lot of people's minds with Venezuela, where nothing was entirely broken. There was a very, very different, not so much customary, quote, regime change operation in Venezuela. And is, from your perspective, I mean, we're looking at these reports of the Kurds that we just head up on the screen with Al Monitor, the commandant. son is an IRGC guy, he was serving the IRGC, I think, like in the 80s.

How much of this depends on our ability to piece together some alternative to the IRGC or to turn Kamani's son into Delsi Rodriguez, which seems laughable? Do we have to put it back together again with CIA boots on the ground, or is there a way to just kind of let Kamani's son take over and, hope for the best. That's the million-dollar question that a lot of people are asking. So, look, let's start with your main point, which is the president, I think the Pentagon, we're believing that this operation in Iran could be somewhat similar to Venezuela.

We take out, you know, 80% of the regime leadership. We leave the top person in charge, and they'll be our puppet. That's really the Venezuela model. What's very different about Venezuela as compared to Iran, Venezuela is pretty much one country with one group of people, one ethnicity, one religion, not a lot. long history of other nations around it, you know, invading. So that was that experience. It is, although Venezuela's a pretty good-sized country,

but the point is it's not historically as complex, religiously, ethnically, and the rest of it. Iran, on the other hand, thousands of years of different competing empires and religions and ethnic groups and all the rest of it, it is a hornet's nest of a mess to try to get into. With about 60% of the Iranian people, Persian, you've got about 20% who are Kurds, another 10% or so Azaris, and then in the far eastern part of the country,

people called the Baluch. So it's a really challenging place to try to govern. And in years gone by, not only does the current regime understand that, but you've got the different previous, the Shaz and then the other families that came before. So I think this idea that I heard from the White House that somehow this is going to be the same as Venezuela or similar.

It's like, no, that's crazy. So the Kurds, of course, from the northwestern part of the country, got to really understand that the Kurds are not just this monolith. they are represented by all kinds of different sorts of people. There's the Syrian Kurds, there's the Iraqi Kurds, there's the Iranian Kurds. And then within each group, there are sub-trives and clans and families, and some of them are super, super far left. They're Marxist, they're communist. Some of them are much more capitalist?

So when you talk about, like, are we going to arm some of the Kurds, well, which Kurds are we talking about? And then can you actually control those people? Because maybe today you're going to find the Kurds that are from Iran, that are hunkered down in Iraq, right? now, so you're going to give them a bunch of weapons. Are they really going to be the proxy force that you want? Are they really going to stay true to what your tasking is? Are they going to go sort of off-reservation to use

that on PC term? And I think that that's one of the great challenges of any proxy force that the CIA has used over the years is how long do they stick with you? It's a very transactional relationship. So, yeah. I was going to say Tulsi Gabbard, who's now in charge of the DNI.

She's a director of national intelligence, so she's literally in charge of national intelligence. intelligence. Famously is very critical that we ended up via the CIA funding both sides of the Syrian Civil War because of the way that situation transpired. And I just have a hard time looking at the situation, again, totally from the outside, and expecting things to go differently. I don't know. Is my cynicism misplaced? No, I think that you're looking at the last 25 years of U.S. history in the region. You're saying in Iraq and Afghanistan, that hasn't worked out well. We look at Libya has not

worked out well. Syria has not worked out well. And I think if you really dig into some of the Afghanistan experience, you know, we try to work with some of the tribal leaders on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan along the brand line. And that did not work out of well either. So we've got about 25 plus years of it not going so well. So your cynicism is completely well placed in my view. And that's why when I first started hearing the president, others talking about using the Kurds. I'm like, no, no, no, don't do it. Yeah. That was really a reaction. That's super interesting. For sure.

For sure. Look, the agency has told, and I can tell you this with high confidence, the agency through Director Radcliffe at the CIA, told President Trump, as well as some of our Arab partners, has said, look, this is not the right group of people to work with. We don't have them fully vetted. We have some historical relationships with some of the Iraqi Kurds, definitely with the Syrian Kurds.

You don't like us anymore. And it's just, it's going to be a mess. So it's going to complicate things, especially as the Turks, the government of Turkey and Ankara, it's like, do not work with them. Iraq government in Baghdad. I do not work with them. So it's just gonna get really, really complicated really quickly.

And I think that the president very wisely did a U-turn and is like, all right, we're not gonna work with the Kurds. It's just gonna make things a lot more complicated. And as you teed up perfectly in today's presser, he said or emphasized a lot more focus on just the nuclear mission. Let's go after the loose nuke material. Let's go after those scientists.

Let's maybe go after the delivery systems, those ICBMs, those long-range missiles. But let's keep that mission really tight, really narrow. And let's focus on that stuff, because, per Gallup, polling 80% of Americans say it's good to focus on trying to stop the spread of nuclear weapons throughout the world. So that's something that the president politically is what would be very smart to do you turn on, get away from the regime, change stuff, turn that over to the Israelis and the Arabs, let him focus on the nuclear mission. Makes a lot more sense.

Now, this question of boots on the ground often calls to mind the images of, you know, ground troops, army, etc. and Marines, how much of that could possibly be is CIA? I'm asking this question like a dummy because it's... No, not at all. I mean, I think it seems fairly obvious to me that there are CIA operations happening in Iran right now, but I guess the question is assets versus agents versus, right? Like, explain to us what's like the way happening. Yeah.

So look, I think what you're seeing is a lot what happened in Ukraine. So we went in both of the CIA and we went in with special forces and we set up bases throughout Ukraine. And we fought the Russians. We were providing targeting intelligence to the Ukrainians to better kill Russians. So that's what we did in Ukraine. And I think that that's what we're doing here as well in Iran is that we're sitting in probably, I don't know if it's CIA officers necessarily, but definitely our assets. The people that a guy like me would have recruited, we would then put them inside of Iran to do different things like targeted packaging, putting together like. like pattern of lack behavior,

we want to kill somebody, we want to blow up a facility. What do the guards get there? How long do they stay at their post? At what time did they take breaks? How long do those breaks last? Who are those people? At what point are there no guards?

What are the narrow opportunities to ex-ful or infiltrate a special forces person going to grab nuclear material? That kind of information, those kind of asset networks, those are absolutely inside of Iran right now. We're collecting that intelligence. And that then allows U.S. boots

boots on the ground, but not an invasion force. We're talking about like a very small number, 15, 20, 25 guys, probably from Delta Force. They've got a specific group of guys that go after loose nuke material. So it would be those guys that once we have that good intel, the Massad, the Israelis have brilliant networks inside of Iran as well.

We collect that information and probably facilities like one's called Isfahan, other ones in the Tons, but the one of Isfahan is probably where most of the material is that not buried and entombed under dozens, and dozens of feet, but maybe just a handful of feet. That nuclear material that's enriched to about 60%. It's in containers about the size of a big scuba air tube. So that's what you're looking to figure out is what kind of security is around that.

Then with the CIA networks, Mossad networks, then you're sending in your boots on the ground. Those are the Special Forces guys, the Delta guys. They're going in with whatever period of time they think they're going to need to dig that stuff up that's in a shallow grave, as it were, grab it and then get out. Either destroy it there on site or probably more likely, you're going to send in helicopters, grab those guys, and then get them out with the material.

And that's so interesting. What is the feasibility? I mean, obviously, again, we're talking out a podcast here, but the feasibility of our current military readiness preparation. I mean, again, the Venezuela operation went swimmingly from the strategy perspective of the admin. So the feasibility of recovering nuclear material enriched 60% from your vantage point, how likely feasible of a goal is that?

Yeah, so look, there are sites that we know, are at pretty high confidence that we know where that nuclear material is at, and we know the depth at which it's buried. The stuff that's really entombed, I don't think we're super concerned about that. We want to keep a watch on that with both on the ground intel networks as well as satellite imagery. So that part, I think, is less concerning for the administration. I think what's more concerning is that stuff that isn't quite buried as deeply, or maybe we've got a collapsed tunnel, whatever number of feet and the Ronians can get back in there relatively quickly.

That's the part that the administration, the CIA and the Pentagon are worried about. And that's what Delta would go in and do. Have those guys done that work before? They have, but we really, praise God, have not had a ton of loose nuke issues to worry about. And so Delta might have to dust off their boots a little bit with this particular mission. But they can do it. This is what they trained to do. This is what the CIA does.

that they have networks on the ground to find this intel to then inform the mission. But look, it's a high risk situation. Anytime that you're going to have boots on the ground for any extended period of time, which you would probably need to have for a fair number of hours, maybe longer, even potentially days, you're going to need to control that turf to a certain degree. It just really depends on the amount of material, how deep it's buried, and how long it's going to take to get that out. Based on that, you're going to have to make some big decisions about how long to deploy guys

and how much of that turf you're really going to need to control. I think what I'm hearing from the president is that we're going to need some guys on the ground for more than just like an hour or last. We're probably going to need them there for a substantially longer period of time, which means that you're going to have to keep up this campaign. Even though we didn't say today we're not going to do it for a lot longer, I think you're going to have to keep it up for a while to really create some space in these areas like Isfahan to deploy our guys. It's either that or you get a new set of leaders in Tehran, whichever ones are alive today. and then they agree to give up some of this material and let inspectors go in there and do a proper job to find this material and get it out.

When I just wanted to go back to that point before we wrap up this segment, I wonder what perspective you could share with us on intelligence sharing between Mossad, Israeli intelligence in general, CIA, American intelligence in general, because the point you were making earlier about what could

I mean, I was also just generally curious. I'm kind of grafting two questions together here, what you made of the first week where it wasn't exactly the Bay of Pigs, but you have this idea where there's air cover and there isn't no obvious counter-revolution. You don't have everyone rising up in the streets, seizing power from the IRGC and the like. So I guess the two parts of the question are one.

Do you sense an intelligence failure that we thought something would materialize that didn't? Was it our hand being forced? And then the second part of the question is, what's the intelligence sharing like and how important is that going to be going forward? Yeah. So let me tackle the first question.

I don't think it was an intelligence failure. I think what the CIA, in fact, I know what the agency told the White House and the next to Security Council is, look, there is nobody that's rising up, in part because the regime for 20 plus 30, actually what, 40 years now, has squelched any kind of rebellion.

And they have killed lots of people. In fact, in the past six weeks or so, we're talking about 10 to 40 plus thousand people were killed by the regime. Plus, the average person doesn't have weaponry, isn't it not able to organize themselves? So I don't think anybody had any kind of belief that there would be this sort of organic uprising. So that's the first piece. I don't think there was an intel failure there at all.

Had there been something, that would have been an incredible part of like, where did these proxy forces inside of Tehran come from? We have no idea. Ask for the intelligent sharing. And this gets to some of the allegation that is Israel leading this, is Netanyahu kind of pulling Trump by the nose to get us involved in this? Look, from an intel sharing perspective, from a nation perspective, different countries have different goals and different interests.

I can tell you working with the British, who are supposed to be our number one ally and are supposed to be our best friends, right? You know, 60 plus years ago, when we were thinking about whether we should get involved in the Second World War, Churchill set up a propaganda arm inside of the United States in New York to convince FDR and the United States American people to join the war. So from that until about 10 years ago, I had a British intel officer, a gal, like, she was a honeypot. She was like, Brian, why don't you come over to the UK and we'll hang out?

You're so handsome. I'm like, okay, lady. I know I'm not like a 10. The one British woman with good teeth. They're like, I'm tempted and I'm flattered, but the answer is no. But look, the point is any foreign nation has interest and they will try to manipulate the United States to get what they want. The British do it, the French do it, and you still work with them.

In fact, we do ops on occasion with the Chinese and the Russians, even still. So with that sort of context, you have to appreciate and understand that Israel is not going to be any different. Israel also uses honeypots, and I can tell you that from another personal perspective. They will send very, very pretty girls to sit next to you on an airplane and try to squeeze you of information. So all nations do it. Is Netanyahu trying to do that with us in this war to try to get more or bigger change out of Iran? I would be shocked for the answer to the answer to no, of course I would have. imagine he is. And he's going to try to make the case with Trump to why it's in America's interest

to do that. But I think what the president is now saying, what I heard him saying in his pressure tonight is, look, we have to get back to this focus on the nukes and the missile, the delivery systems. That is a defensible position for him. It might not be whether Israelis or Netanyahu wants. And that's okay, because we have very good intel sharing with Mossad, not everything. And sometimes when you share intel, it's not to just inform. It's also to influence. So the Israelis may share intel with us. It's really good, but the whole point is to get us to do something. So you have to be really careful if you're a CIA director or you're a president.

You have to really understand that nations intend to both influence you and inform you. That includes with your intel sharing. And you've got to be really careful to make sure you stay focused on your particular country's mission. Because any contrary, from the Brits or the Chinese to, yes, the Israelis will try to pull you off if you're not real careful. Oh, my goodness. This is fascinating. Brian Dean Wright is going to be with us on the other side of this break. so we'll be right back, stick around. Have you dabbled in investing here and there

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right host of the Wright Report, former CIA officer. I opened a second beer during the commercial break and it exploded all over me. So Brian, I hope you're having a better experience with whatever's in your mug. You know what? Thank you. It's water because I'm a teedroller and I spent most of my years of the agency drinking too much, so my liver's recovering. But I appreciate a beer exploding. I've had some fun experiences out in the field with beer, some Arabs. They're naughty, naughty people since we're talking about the Arabs. A bunch of lushes. Anyway. You brought it up. But I digress, but I digress. You should go to the Middle East.

They would love you. They drink secretly. It's fine. They like the beer over there? I would think they would be more into spirits. Well, it's all the above. It's all the cinnamon. They just do it in private.

Yeah, no, the drinking and the hookers and the gambling. It's just, they just do it in private. I'm telling you. So that has to be odd in a place like Iran, just I'm on a tangent now, where you don't, especially because there's been this, like, weird softening of, like, the morality police over the last year, like just sensing out the situation in a country where it is religiously diverse and it's, I mean, that just has to be incredibly mind-melding to try, like you've got to be in a pretzel trying to figure out what to do and when.

Yeah. You know, one of the huge drug trades that's going on in the Middle East right now is a drug called Capitagon. You know, there's this official veneer of the Middle East that's very pious, And that's certainly true, the royal families and a lot of people in public. But behind closed doors, there's a ton of cocaine going on all throughout the country. Cap the gun is huge. And you've got a ton of people who travel to Europe and party. Look, and I can tell you, I don't know how many Arab diplomats that I hung out with or worked with that were like big boosers and big gamblers.

And they had more mistresses, and you could shake a stick at. And they were, I don't even want to go into the radar or stuff. It gets real nasty real quick. Well, the Sultan Suleon... Terrible things for my country. Well, you probably saw the Sultan Suleum emails in the Epstein files, where he's making wildly off-color drugs. He's an Amirati.

Wildly off-color drugs talking about that. Not just jokes. Those people are dirty. They're right, dirty, Mama. Let me tell you. So that rang true to you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it's... Let me just tell you.

I want to... And I'll keep this PG-13. I went to an Arab diplomat's house, and I walked in there, and he was doing, like, a Skype session. Can I deal? with a Kuwaiti princess. And I'm not going to tell you specific details, but there weren't a lot of clothes involved

on either side of the camera. And I walk in and I'm like, just keep bringing on the black label whiskey. This is what I'm doing for my country right now. Everybody owes me, America. You're welcome. This is awful. Yeah, so it's, look, it's all these societies abroad,

you know, they've got the veneer of what they want you to believe about who they are. But then underneath that, there are different kinds of real life. It's like, real housewives of the Middle East. And all the dirty stuff happens behind the scene. Anyway, it's the next Bravo show.

You've heard of it. Well, on that note, let's talk about Havana syndrome, which if people don't follow this closely, it has been a source of enormous controversy among the kind of CIA skeptical crowd and the maybe more establishment defense policy. crowd, but also actually within, apparently the CIA itself, it seems, 60 minutes dropped a 27 minute, 27 minute, not quite 60, 27 minute expose investigation based on years of reporting into Havana syndrome on Sunday evening. Some big highlights. Scott Pelley said one of the things that makes Havana syndrome, which is, of course, if, again, people haven't been following this, you have people in the U.S. intelligence community saying,

that they feel intense pains, tinnitus, like their head is in a vice. And the suspicion is that this has been done, as the CBS report said, by literal microwaves, like in the air via a state actor. Obviously with the Havana syndrome name, you can take guesses at some of the suspects, but in the CBS report, they say that Russians

have been doing this research for decades, decades ago. The CIA believed it was unlikely. This is again, according to CBS News, in 60 Minutes. At the time, the CIA dismissed it as not possible. But here's what one former CIA officer told CBS in the package last night. This is going to be S-7. I remember feeling, you know, that this is so unusual.

I've been shot at in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd been in physical danger. But this was terrifying. He was treated for vertigo, migraines, loss of vision and trouble with memory and concentration. Disabled. He retired. Later, in 2023, his own agency was among those that concluded it is very unlikely that he and the others were attacked by an adversary. Which, of course, to me, is a betrayal because CIA is supposed to be about putting people first,

and they did not. Are you saying this is a cover-up? This is a massive CIA cover-up, and I'll say this with great regret. It's an organization that I loved. I believe in the mission. I was really good at this job. To this day, I want to see the CIA operate in a strong and effective manner. He alleges that the CIA covered it up for fear that would come from a state actor having this capability. Now, Brian, you know this as well as I do. People who are skeptics of the CIA, long-time skeptics of the CIA laugh at Havana syndrome. They're like, okay, you've got to be kidding me.

It sounds like a way to gin up militarism or hostility toward Cuba. or Russia. And so they dismiss it and say, oh, these poor CIA officers, they're making up these sob stories. Ha ha. On the other hand, this guy is saying, no, it was actually the CIA who covered up the existence of Havana syndrome. So what the hell is going on here? Yeah, so let's just step back and I'll tell you up front on a personal perspective or personal history. A friend of mine died about three or four years ago. And one of the things that she suffered from. She believed that she was attacked by one of these directed energy weapons, and it was, part of what drove her ultimate ailments that took her life. So this is a personal issue, but I also

can be a little bit, I guess, have a bit of distance from this. And let's just start here. Directed energy weapons, there's nothing new about them. There's nothing new about the suggestion that we should create these and use them. The idea, of course, is whether it be a laser, whether it be microwave, whether it be sound waves, whatever it is, that you create this and you direct that energy towards an adversary or even towards a crowd, and you make their body heat, you make the tinnitus, you make them feel uncomfortable, they just want to get out of the way, you can do that with different kinds of directed energy.

The challenge historically, in terms of an engineering perspective, with these weapons, is they have to have a lot, a lot of power to drive that energy, to create that energy, to make it consistent. So over the years, it's been one of these ideas of like, maybe someday we can do this, but the size of the energy, We're talking about like a truck or in some cases, depending on the weapon and what you're trying to fire around. We need to be the size of a small building. So the concern of some folks out there who are like, I was in this, my car, I was in a house,

you would have to have a really, really big energy supply to really hurt someone inside of that building or that car. And so I think from an engineering perspective, that's why there was a bias initially, I think towards people saying that this kind of directed energy weapon is highly unlikely. It's not to say, per the CIA report, that these people, people aren't suffering from things, but that a directed energy weapon probably isn't it. And one of the earliest victims came from Havana and Cuba. So that's why they call it Havana syndrome.

Now, whether that was the Cubans doing it, or the Russians or Chinese or others, we didn't really know, but that's the underlying issue or concern. So then about four years ago, three years ago, from my understanding, there was an offer on the black market of some Russian affiliated people who said that we can give you, we can sell you a weapon that is basically a backpack-like weapon, that's a directed energy weapon.

And we bought it. There's an element within the US government who does that, and they bought it, and they've been testing it because it was a really surprise that that could be miniaturized and then utilized in that way. It's been reverse engineered, and my understanding is that it's legitimate. And so that would suggest that the Russians have had this weapon

for some period of time that they had a technological leap in a way that we didn't appreciate. And that some of these people, I don't know what number of percentage, But a certain number of these people at the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, have been injured by these directed energy weapons. And it's probably the Russians. It could also be a Russian, you know, gun for hire who is, you know, being paid under the table by Russian intel or, you know, an ex-wife or who knows. But, you know, they're going on the dark web and they're organizing these things. So the bigger point that now that thing Trump has called one of the weapons allegedly, the discombobulator using it in, uh,

in Venezuela during the raid in Taken Maduro, that we've been able to reverse engineer that and then use that as our own weapon, not from a lethal perspective, but it has caused when we landed, it caused when people started bleeding from their nostrils and terrible headaches and all the rest of it. It didn't kill them, but it disabled them

for a short period of time. You know, that's a potential good use, as it were, of a directed energy weapon. But I think that technology is a little bit new, and if it goes sideways, you can really hurt people and damage them. And so I think the clip that you put at the CIA officer is probably reflective of somebody who got hit by that.

I believe he was in Moscow at the time when he got hit by it. And he was a guinea pig by the Russians to see if this could work. And if it did, they were very angry at the Biden administration for what they were doing in Ukraine, which is we were providing intel to kill the Russians. Our CIA was working with special forces in Ukraine to kill Russian generals and Russian soldiers. So all is fair in love and war.

From their perspective, taking out some of our CIA guys or Pentagon guys with a direct-to-energy weapon to make them suffer. They don't care. I mean, you got to remember early on the war in Ukraine, we brought down a plane that had over 100 men, all over 100 Russian men on it, and a fair number of generals. So this war has been very costly from Russia's perspective, and they're more than happy to get back at us. So I think that that's the broader context of this directed energy weapon concern issue. It's real. It's been under engineering sort of the radar for many, many years. It looks like the Russians beat us to it. Looks like we're reverse engineering it. And I think that that

requires probably the Trump administration to declassify what we know so that we can help these people who've been impacted by it. People who are still with us, my friend is not. You know, how much of her death was caused by it. I don't still know to this day, but it's real. And I think Kavana syndrome, I've gone from a bit more of a skeptic around the underlying engineering for it to with this discovery, I'm a lot more keen to say, we need to declassify what we know and be honest with our people who have been hurt. That's exactly what I was going to ask. next because here you have the CBS News report that is post-Majaro raid where these reports from Cuban soldiers, I believe it was the Cuban report that was going absolutely viral at the time

explaining or explaining the experience of what sounded exactly like others reports of Havana syndrome. And so why would the CIA continue to not just come clean when CBS News is saying, hey, we're running a big 60 minutes package on this. It's based on our Reporting going back years and years. Help us understand reading between the lines from the outside here, Brian, why the CIA doesn't want people to know it has this capability, or at least not in a news report. It doesn't want to confirm it.

Well, I think you start getting back to this issue of at what point was that weapon secured by this Russian black or gray arms dealer? What are those intel networks that we use to get in front of those people? And what degree are we going to burn those networks? that are quite important in other operations, that might be a part of it. I think that you then have to weigh, like what are the pros and the cons of revealing that network

to letting everybody know that there actually is this kind of weapon? And then the fact that we've reverse engineered and we're using it in the discombobulator, at least in one case or one example, like that starts to get into some classified capabilities too, that if we were to go to war with, let's say, China, we wouldn't necessarily want them to know that we have that weapon.

We would want that to be our secret weapon that we would bring to a war and knock them out that they could otherwise be prepared for if we be classified it now and started talking about it now. So I think that there could be some reasonable explanations for why they're not talking about it. But if you're going to believe that and think that's possible, you've got to believe that your leadership of the CIA or the ODNI or the White House are really going to do the right thing. And they're going to keep stuff classified for the right reasons. And I think what this country has seen up for the past 10 years is a lot of us don't trust the CIA anymore. We don't trust the ODNI. We don't trust the NSA. We don't trust the FBI.

And for a good reason, crossfire hurricane started with no predicate. The CIA involved in some of the stuff, the most horrible tax on this country. And you're going to tell me, we should, circular predicate. Yeah, you know, we're not, we should now trust the CIA because Rackcliffe's in charge. That's a really tough sell. I mean, I'm a former CIA guy, and I can admit that. That's a really hard sell, I think, for reasonable people to say, let's just get the benefit of the doubt the CIA. Now, it's not like that anymore. I think good people can ask really tough questions and say, yeah, we just don't trust you. So until I think there's different kind of leadership and more time of CIA reestablishing trust, you're going to have to probably declassified a lot more

stuff. That makes me think, I know we can put this up on the screen of this big Matt Taibi report over at Rackett. He has all of his reporters working on this seemingly. They appear to have a cache of FBI, no pun intended, a cache of FBI documents that they're going through. They say in this headline exclusive, the FBI secret stash finally uncovered. And actually in this big article where Taibi is talking about how we are likely to get more disclosures from what Cash Patel, FBI director, has discovered at the FBI in terms of secret files that were intentionally kept away, that he has confirmed the FBI. has confirmed to Taibi and the racket team are in existence.

Matt asked Seymour Hirsch for his take on this. And Hirsch obviously led to the church committee and the great disclosures of the CIA. I mean, the epic disclosures of the CIA that are literally hundreds of pages long, read in some cases like they're Le Carre because they literally were. These guys were all writing spy novels. It's an amazing thing that CIA guys do when they get out of the age. Reast our podcast, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Or they write like really, like, thinly veiled versions of their memoirs through fiction. Yeah. Incredible. But on that note, it feels like we're entering a period of disclosure. I mean, the fact that Tulsi Gabbard's at OD&I, the fact that Cash Patel, people who are piecing together crossfire hurricane, skeptically, are now in the government and confirming, you know, big stashes. like apparently what the FBI has of secret files that rival the crown jewels that Hirsch reported on that led to the church committee that led to us starting to understand M.K. Ultra and ever another secret things. I wonder, I mean, there are a lot of different directions. Maybe I just,

I want to get your reaction to what apparently is this big stash of FBI files, Brian, but I'm kind of thinking about it to this lens of, is it getting much, much harder in the age of partisanship and new technology to keep things secret. Because remember when BuzzFeed just published the whole dossier that Christopher Steele was shopping around? Like, it just, it seems as though we're coming towards something very different than the era the CIA and the FBI grew up in. Now, look, there was a guy that worked, it was a CIA ops officer, and he worked for the

Soviets. He was a treasonous spy and he worked for the Soviets. He was caught. The FBI later investigated him and caught him. and his name was Aldrich Ames. He recently died back in January after spending many, many years from prison. When he was caught, though, back in the 90s,

they asked him, why'd you do it, Aldrich? Why'd you work for the Russians, the Soviets at the time? And he responded by saying, because I know what is best for America's national security, and I'm going to act on it. I want to do what I want. So there's a great example of what motivates somebody to decide to leak secrets or work against U.S. interests.

And I think that we've seen that for the past 10 years or so, in a different way, in a partisan way. You've got a lot of these guys like John Brennan or others without the FBI, James Comey, who they think they know what's best for the United States and for national security, and they're going to act on that. They're going to use their powers,

they're going to use their information to cook the books on Intel and to leak that information, as they did to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others, and they're going to create this propaganda campaign to destroy President Trump in 2016 and 2017 and then throughout his entire first term.

That's exactly what they did with a crossfire hurricane, this document called the ICA, which assessed the degree to which the Russians were helping Trump and all that. So we have this evidence. It's not even a question now. It's not a conspiracy. We know what Comey and Brennan and Clapper and other guys did. And it's a partisanship that is now taken over the CIA and FBI.

And it's not just the leadership because we have new leaders now. But we hired a lot of people during that era. We hired a lot of partisans. And those are within the Bureau. And the DOJ too, by the way, as well as the agency and others. You might remember that infamous CIA recruitment ad under the Biden era. that had a gal who said that she was, you know, I think it was, what was it, not bipolar, it was some mental issue. She also said she was intersectional and all these things that weren't focused on the mission.

She never actually talked about working for the American people, but she was part of the CIA's recruitment ad. And you should come to the agency bringing your whole self. Well, I don't want to see your whole self. I just want you to come to do the work. Yeah, I don't want your partisanship. I don't want to know what intersectional is. That sounds like a sofa. Like whatever.

I don't care. Just like, come do the work. And so I think that that's the really fair reaction that a lot of people have in this new era over the past 10 years, and that is the CIA is not what I thought it was. It's not the nonpartisan agency that it needs to be. And that's what good leadership needs to bring to the agency again, into the intelligence community, because the president really does need high confidence, good quality intelligence to make good smart decisions.

But it's really hard to do that and trust that. if you think that the whole place is full, a bunch of these partisans than we've seen over the past 10 years, and that's a great danger that the U.S. makes bad decisions because we don't trust the intel guys anymore. Like, that's a bad deal.

Is it possible to disrupt the machine? I mean, that's one of the things I think when I look at, listen, I'm still very skeptical about the story we're getting told on the January 6 pipe bombs. I'm still skeptical of what the FBI has said about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, meaning, were there other,

is there information that they're slow walking for a reason? Or is there information about, for example, the people who seem to telegraph, they knew something on social media in the kind of internet community of trans identifying people. I don't even know the particulars because we haven't gotten enough public information about it yet. But there did seem to be potentially some online knowledge in the Tyler Robinson friend group. And that's not to open up this kind of worms. It's just to ask, you know, I think some people look at a cash petal or they look at a John Ratcliffe or Tulsi Gabbard and they say, this is, we were promised significant reforms.

And I wonder if the machine is just ultimately too powerful to prevent. Because I mean, even we're talking about Crossfire Hurricane. Well, the freaking FISA courts were part of the church committee reforms. Like we were supposed to have those as a protection against the abuses that the church committee uncovered and they're still being abused. Klein smith lied on the visa application to continue surveillance. Right. Yeah, no, I'm with you.

So look, here's the thing. If I were a king for a day there, and I could go back, I would say over the past 15 years, I want to look at everybody that we've hired in what's called the Director of Analysis and the Director of Operations. And I want a team dedicated to look at every single one of those employees. And I want to understand, are they there for the right reasons? Are they there for the mission? And you can look at the hiring individuals involved, what's called the HRS, which is the HR components. and you can look at some of those careers

and you can see who's been promoted. You can go through and I'm sure the opposition would call that, you know, a witch hunt, but what we're really looking for are people who are there for the wrong reasons. And I think you can find that this is a great audit trail of all this. One of the things the agency does well is document everything

and computers, you know, save everything for decades. So it's all there why these people were hired, you know, whether they were there because of DEI or the rest of it. And I think that you can smoke out a lot of those people. And I think that I think you can clean up a lot of it. But I would say to you that I think that a generation of Americans who saw the crossfire

hurricane stuff were really paying attention are still going to be skeptical. And it's going to take a series of leaders over the years doing good things on behalf of the American people and just keeping quiet, not getting involved in the world of politics, and really addressing this statement that was made by Schumer, if you remember, in January 2017, when he said to Trump that he's an idiot for going up against his television. community because they have six weeks of Sunday to get back at them. That remains to me one of the most outrageous things that has been said over the past 10 years, and that is a Senate majority leader saying that the CIA and Intel community have six to ways to Sunday to control America's leaders.

Oh, I mean, that kind of seems like a big deal. Why are we not talking about that? Like, you know, so if that's real and Schumer was real, I were honest, and I think he was, like, yeah, we've got to love to clean up. It's going to take years. And until then, I think criticism is appropriate. Let's talk about New York City because on the Upper East Side, outside of Gracie Mansion, there was a wild, wild scene. Actually, we have video of this. There was a, just for a little bit of background here. I think this was Saturday, Sunday over the weekend. There was a, yeah, it was Saturday.

There was a right-wing fringe type demonstration, and then there were counter-protesters. But let's take a look at S-8 here. video of a suspect throwing a bomb over a protesterner named Walter Masterson. We were pulling in race in New York, and we want everyone here to stay in New York. You don't get to come from outside and then tell everyone else. There you go. All right, now we also have this video. I hope the indigenous drum there. Isn't that great?

Right? It's a soundtrack. It's a soundtrack. You didn't know you needed. Here we have this VO we can roll. This is the suspect dropping the bomb at the feet of officers. So it's exactly what it sounds like if you're listening to this, literally from Matt Van Swole on X. It's exactly what I just described.

You see it happening in real time. And this is, again, outside of Gracie Mansion, obviously the current mayor of New York, Zaraamamadani, is Muslim. And there was a rush immediately to pin this. seemingly, I shouldn't even say seemingly, because Brad Lander, former comptroller, former city council member, he already apologized for rushing to blame Islamophobia for this, but we have two New York Times headlines. We can put side by side. This is F6. The original headline, smoking jars of metal infuses thrown at protest near mayor's house. The sub headline was six people were arrested after anti-Islamic protesters led by the right-wing activist Jake Lang, clashed with counter-protesters near Gracie Mansion. The revised headline, homemade bomb thrown at protest near NYC mayor's house, police say the kind of protester accused of throwing the bomb was one of six people arrested after a clash with anti-Muslim protesters led by the right-wing activist Jake Lang. Now, these two suspects were arraigned today in court. This is from Bill Malugian of Fox News, who says, according to the just-released federal criminal complaint after NYC terror suspect, Amir Balat was arrested for throwing an IED loaded with nuts, bolts, and TAT, he pledged allegiance to ISIS while in NYPD custody saying,

all praises due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, etc., etc. The comments were caught on NYPD body cameras, which makes sense because we also learned today from the police that a lot of the information they're now claiming about these suspects' allegiance to ISIS and the motivation for the attack was actually told to officers, meaning they likely have tape of all of this. F8, we can put on the screen, the suspect's statement

that was, again, captured on body camera. Right afterwards, we can throw up the picture F9 from the New York Post of the ISIS salute being flashed by one of the suspects in this case. Zoroamam Dani first comes out and points towards white supremacist. This Jake Lang guy, he says such hate has new place in New York City. My administration, he goes on to say he's closely monitoring the situation. And then as more and more information came out, it became obvious that there was something deeper happening here. Mom Dani had been going on and on about white supremacy,

and then as of this afternoon, he posts, Amir Balat and Ibrahim Kiyyami have been charged with committing a heinous act of terrorism and proclaiming their allegiance to ISIS. They should be held fully accountable for their actions. We will continue to keep New Yorkers safe. We will not tolerate terrorism or violence. in our city. Brian, this comes after last week's attack at a bar in Austin, Texas, which could potentially, I mean, it looks to me likeliest case scenario. That's a lone wolf. This is obviously not alone

with. We have two people. They have suspicious travel history from what I understand already. That seems crazy. And it's a counter protest. They've apparently said they were partly inspired by the war in Iran. They said they wanted to do something allegedly worse than the Boston Marathon bombing. How volatile is the situation in cities like New York, Austin, probably Dallas, Miami, places like that right now, where potentially, I mean, do you see links in this case to something more organized with just the little information we have in the first 48 hours? Yeah, look, absolutely. There was also another attack at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway. And what do you know about that one is that the Iranian gangs there will pay young Muslim boys or young migrant boys as young as ages 12 or 10 to kill U.S. diplomats, Israelis, Jews, except Western targets. So you combine that with what happened in New York, these radicalized Muslims from not just a big town, by the way.

There are communities in Pennsylvania from where they hail originally. They live in communities less than 3,000 people. So these are not necessarily communities that you're just talking about Miami's and New York, it's everywhere. And that I think is the real big alarm that I've been trying to ring for a fair number of years. You know, my podcast, I think others are too. If you go back right after the October 7 terror attacks into Israel, there was a poll released by an outfit called Signal, one of the top-rated pollsters in this country, and they asked American Muslims, do you support what Hamas did? 60% said no.

But 40% of American Muslims said that either Hamas was fully or partially justified in doing what they did on October 7th. So they would find a way to justify a terror attack. Well, that's pretty alarming when you think about that there are millions and millions of Muslims in this country, and that 40% of them would justify a terror attack. That's a lot of folks. So we do have a problem here. We have a radical Islam problem. There is a crisis within Islam.

It is not a religion of peace. It's a religion in crisis. And it's important to be honest about that. And I think that we've had some really wonderful leadership actually in the Middle East and from the Middle East. Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates has that very brilliant quote from about 7,8 years ago, saying, look, and to paraphrase, you in the West, with your political correctness, you were going to allow this radical Islam to rise and it is going to be there in the West and Europe and the United States, who is going to have a radical Islam problem? We in the Middle East won't because we're cracking down on it. And we know that it's real. But you in the West, just bury your heads. And I think that that's what we saw with that first reaction by the New York Times and Zohoramandani

and folks on the left, that Democrat Party. You know, just continuing with this ridiculous suggestion that, you know, Islam is a religion of peace and that actually is just Islamophobia if you point out the fact that 40% of them would justify a terror attack. No, we're just being honest. And we're being honest with facts and we're being honest with reason and logic. And it's not homophobic or Islamophobic or whatever, transphobic, whatever phobic, to say that that's true because it is. It's definitely not transphobic.

You know what could be? Who knows anymore? Everything is something phobic. I don't know. So, look, it's really important, I think, to start being honest about this threat. And then you think about the southern border. Seven to 12 million people came over the border,

either unveted because they were godaways or poorly vetted. You know, imagine all these individuals from around the world, let's say, from predominantly Islamic nations, to be able to vet them from just a criminal perspective, our databases had to be tied into, say, the Mauritans or the Nigerians or the whomevers.

Those databases weren't synced. We weren't connected. So we didn't have the ability to vet any of those individuals on the border, even though the Biden administration was lying and saying they were. And then that you apply on top of that the cultural question, which is, do we want some of these people from these societies, believe? Like, all right, they're Muslim. But what do they believe really? Oh, they believe that, like, women are not really fully human and we can push gays off of buildings and we don't believe in art. like, you know, sciences, coffee or whatever.

Like, oh, okay, well, let's vet for that. What we do at embassies and consulates when we process visas, but we don't have the southern border. And now we have 7 to 12 million of these people into this country in addition to the legal migrants who we didn't ask these questions about cultural fit. So we have quite literally tens of millions of people in this country who certainly we can argue don't have a cultural fit in terms of Judeo Christian values. Like the Charlie Heddo type.

Like that's a good... Right. Right. I mean, this whole idea, Trump got a lot of heat for saying, you know, in Springfield, Missouri of like, the dogs and the cats, they're eating the dogs and the cats. Well, you know, look in Haiti, they do. They practice witchcraft and they do animal sacrifice. So, you know, there was tens of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, you would assume some percentage of them practiced their faith from back home witchcraft. Yeah, they're going to eat them.

So this isn't crazy. Like, this isn't illogical. And unfortunately, there have been a lot of people who have turned this into Islamophobic or whatever phobic. And it's not. It's about security. It's about cultural fit. And it's about being really honest about that and being brave and saying it. Because, you know, I don't know about everybody else, but I'm tired of being shouted down by just bringing up a truth.

And that is I want an American family that's a melting pot. That when you get here from wherever, burn your ship. You ain't going home. There is no dual whatever. You're American. Welcome to the family. I'm like, give you a big hug. And you're going to be part of the family.

And that's it. But you're not going to maintain these foreign connections and ties to whether it be religion or whatever. You're in. And I think that that's what is happening in New York. So many of us are concerned about these kids and people and adults. Now take it over the city at Islamist. Sohoram Mandani's record as an Islamist is clear, and his reaction speaks to that.

And then these two terrorists out of Pennsylvania, growing up in very wealthy families and communities of 2,000, 3,000 people, it just underlines the point that we have done an abysmal job as in terms of leadership for our American elite, what they've done here. It's unforgivable. Well, and this, so one of the things that worries me me a bit is I look at the record during the Bush administration of going, we had situations that almost looked like, and this would be FBI, but like Whitmer kidnapping plots with

random kids at mosques. And there were some cases where I look back in like, well, the left was right about this. And Mamdani is one of the people who grew up watching that. He talks about how he grew up watching that. And whether or not he's, you know, whether or not we agree with. him on the proliferation of it or anything, he saw that. And I look at what he's pledged to do in terms of like, sounds to me letting off the gas of it when it comes to investigating after we just had however many people pour in through a southern border over a three-year surge period

in the Biden administration, plus like the 10 years before that when it was relatively porous. And I'm sympathetic to the idea of respecting civil liberties and being enthusiastic and vigilant about respecting civil liberties. The other hand, I wonder if Bush era failures are giving way to a New York City that is ultimately going to be less safe because there's this intentional politically correct turning away from some very obvious situations where you could have people whose political philosophy is based on undermining, harming the United States of America, took advantage of an obvious situation that you could take advantage of.

I mean, I was down at the border when the Biden surge was happening. You watched it. You just walk right across and disappear into the interior of the country. So it's like a perfect storm of horrible things happening for the security and the safety of the American people. How do you think about those two things? Like, is the Mamdani backlash? Does it worry you that the backlash? to what happened during the Bush era from people like Zoroamam Dani

makes New York City less safe? How are you thinking about that? Look, there are a lot of us who grew up in the United States of America assuming a lot of things about us as a country and a people. And one of those things was we believe in the Constitution, we're a constitutional republic that we have our various First Amendment, right, second, all the rest of them, and those are very important to being an American

and embracing people from abroad. And those same laws and rules are now being used against us to destroy from within. And what we have seen over the past, well, good number of the Biden administration, we saw a pipeline into this country. First of all they would lie on their asylum applications. We have migrant activists on the left, helping them to lie on their asylum applications. Eventually 80% of them will be turned down, but in the meantime, they get to come in the country,

go into a sanctuary city or state, and they never leave. So we have this pipeline into the country. Now we've got this abolished ice, which isn't just abolishing the organization. But what Democrats have said over and over again is they want to abolish the country. is they want to abolish the ability to deport anyone for any reason. So now what we're doing is we're importing people who hate this country, who want to throw out the Republican and throw out the Constitution, and they're being protected by the rule of law.

And I will tell you, having worked abroad what I have seen in countries where that happens, is the rule of law is no longer meant to protect people or to protect the innocent, but to ensure corruption continues and to ensure that seditious behavior continues. It's a weapon to destroy, not to protect. And that's where I think that we're at right now as a country, is that the rule of law is being used by judges, by attorneys, and by people who really want to destroy the nation to use it against the rest of us.

We're like, hey, you know, I might not necessarily agree with everybody or whatever, but welcome to the country, we hope you enjoy it, be part of the American family. So they're taking advantage of the goodness that a lot of us have. And by the time that we wake up to that, wake up to the attacks, effectively, to the Trojan horse that has arrived, inside of the castle, I think it's going to be too late. And that's what really, really worries me about the current state of our reunion. Right. Mass migration is a pretext, like, as Kier Starmor was pitching for visual ID, is a great, like, this is a pretext for surveillance. You create a horrifying

situation as the Biden administration did, and then you could crack down because people want security and safety because you've just created an unsafe situation, which is just a wonderful way to go about it. Before you run, Brian, I did want to get your take on the transition period. We seem to be entering from Christy Knoem to Senator Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma. You're border guy, Brian. You pay attention to this. You talk about it on your podcast all the time. The internal battle clearly was a tug of war. I've heard this from people. I think it's fairly obvious at this point between Team Nome, Lewandowski, Stephen Miller, and Team Holman. And Team Holman, Hulman, of course, comes from the Obama administration, an institutional veteran,

he wanted to do worst first. And that's what a lot of the American people would agree with. Nome, Lewandowski, Stephen Miller, came in and said, this is basically a generational mandate to do mass deportations. And a lot of people, I know, are kind of bummed in Washington, not bummed, blackpilled is probably the better answer. and think now this was a big victory for the Holman wing. Although I'm skeptical of that, I think Mark Wayne Mullen is probably politically similar to Christy Noem,

and maybe we'll prove to be a better leader, less messy leader, we'll see. But from a security standpoint, worst first is criminals. Criminals might not necessarily be spies, espionage, tools. There may not even be doing espionage or spying, but they might not even be doing espionage or spying, but they might be tools of a foreign government, whether it's China, whether it's a cartel, whether it's Russia. When I was on the border, I literally met Russians in 2021. And they had a sob story.

So maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn't. But they were on their way into the country. I'll tell you that. So what is the difference? I mean, how important is it? Or maybe I'm wrong. But is it important to do more than just the worst?

Give us your thoughts. So what's the worst of the worst? Like, let's define that. So one of the things that we know in a lot of states is that they don't write down or they don't document somebody's documented status. Right. So if you get arrested,

they don't ask if you're a migrant or otherwise, unlawful or otherwise, so it's not documented. So how do we even determine the worst of the worst if your police officers or your sheriffs or whatever aren't even documenting that up front? We don't have the data to say, oh, this person's the worst

because they don't have no criminal record. And even if they are processed, oftentimes prosecutors will let these people, especially the Soros, DAs, and others, they will let these people off with lower-level charges, even though they should be charged higher. We have the Department of Justice is now investigating that in Washington, D.C., and other cities,

where the police chief of the mayor are downgrading crimes. So these people are actually the worst of the worst, but it's not documented up front, or the police department's downgrading crimes, the DA isn't prosecuting, letting people out of the streets. So this whole debate around worst of the worst, it's impossible to really determine who's the worst of the worst. You know, we can have some data that can help us along that process,

but that's the fundamental issue. We don't know who's bad and who's not. And then, you know, we, of course, got all the people across the border, that only adds additional elements to it. So as much as I would like, you know, personally, to just grab as many people as we can, understanding, appreciating that we'd like to do the surgical, careful approach, but because of what I just laid out,

we gotta use the chainsaw. And that's uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable. It's sad. There are a thousand sob stories. And I think that that's what I'm seeing in a lot of the polling, which is they, the American people want a lot of the unlawful migrants or illegal aliens out of the country, but it makes them sad, you know, when they see the sad videos and the people hurting.

And so it's like they want the meal, but they don't want to watch the cap be raised and slaughtered and cut up. Like, don't show me how the sausage is made. I just want to eat it. Well, I think that that's important politically to then understand that, you know, from Holman's perspective, let's focus on the worst of the worst. I guess this is just a branding exercise. and then we bring up and try to educate people like, well, what is the worst of the worst? If we're not even writing down people's immigration status when arresting them, or we downgrade crimes,

or we prosecutors release them, we've got to re-educate people on what even worse the worst means. So the ones that they start seeing these sad videos, they're like, well, I don't know about that guy. He says that he's got a family here, but does he really just have a family? He's not really just a snake of the grass. That's the conversation that needs to happen.

Because if you don't, and you leave in, you know, five million of the ten let's say we deport half of what came under Biden, the Democrats going to get in and they're going to open up the border again, and you're going to have another 10 million to come out of this country. So at that point, the country is over. You're done as a nation. You're cooked. So you've got to get as many people out as fast as you can.

How intentional was the strategic abuse of American border policies during Biden from hostile foreign actors, maybe not even hostile foreign actors, maybe places that just found an easier route to bring people into the United States, United States and do espionage. Like is, is, was that a fairly vast operation worldwide during the Biden administration? Were other foreign intelligence agencies looking at the United States and laughing at us because of our open border? Well, two things were they laughing at us. You bet they were. Second, where they take advantage of it? Mm-hmm. Yes. For sure. I can tell you foreign intelligence agencies sent inoperative, sabotage and others into this country be the southern border, for sure.

The other thing to keep in mind with the Chinese is that even if a Chinese person has a sob story, and they don't want to cooperate with a regime. President Xi and his goons can still go to a Chinese person and say, look, her Chinese law and or because we have your family back home, you will do what we tell you to. You're an employee with a utility company or the water company

or whatever. You're going to set up this bomb. You're going to fry this system. Because if you don't, we're killing all of your friends back home and your family members back home. And that's how the Chinese operating. That's what they will do, even with these Chinese people who you might hear people in the media or otherwise say like, oh, you know, they don't want to go home,

doesn't she's bad and mean? Yep, he sure is. And he will use his relationships or these people's relationships back home to get what he wants. So we've got a mess across the board in terms of terrorism, in terms of saboteurs, in terms of even people who might otherwise be good, but they can be turned to be bad.

And as we are seen in places like Oslo over the weekend, the attack there, we've seen this other places in the world, where poor people are struggling, they will take cash to do terrible things. So you don't have to be incent in this country to do terrible things. when you've got examples and also we've examples of Hesbola doing this down in Argentina, paying a wedding photographer paid him cash to target Jewish interests in Argentina.

So poor people will do lots of terrible things for cash, and that's not because they're poor, it's because they start to become desperate and they do really dumb things. So we've got to send a lot of people back home. We've got to vet them once they're back at an embassy or consulate abroad. Then we can talk about why we need them back here. Really, that's about labor. Do we need labor? I don't know, we've got the AI revolution. The robots are coming for everybody. So do we really need labor? I don't know about that.

But that's the thoughtful conversation that we need to have in our immigration as well. Well, we'll see where Mark Wynne-Mollin takes it. We'll be following the Senate confirmation. Brian Dean Wright, host of the Wright report. It was so good to have you in the middle of this new cycle. Thank you for, you've been very generous with your time. Thank you for taking so much time to explain this to us.

You're amazing. And congratulations when you're showing. I look forward to coming back whenever. Oh, we would love that. Thanks so much, Brian. Awesome. Be welcome. All right.

going to take another quick break and then talk about Stephen A. Smith on the other side, everybody, everybody is talking about weight loss injections because the results are so dramatic. It's a ward show season. We've seen that on full display. These medicines work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. So what if you're looking to lose weight, but not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those intense side effects? That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called lean, and the results are remarkable. The studied ingredients in lean have been showed to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it in energy, and then curb your appetite and cravings so that you're not as hungry.

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Sometimes clips just pop whenever because people are posting their podcast clips, literally whenever. And Sean Hannity has a new podcast. He's got Stephen A, he's a radio guy, by the way. So just an interesting state of affairs. Tells a little bit about media right off the bat. But Stephen A. Smith is his guest on tomorrow's edition of the show. And Hannity asked Stephen A. Smith how serious he is about running for president.

Here's the clip that we just got that just popped on social media before we went to air. Here's my big question. Yeah. 2028's come pretty quick. Yeah. If you had to pick, a suit. I think it's all bullshit. I don't think you're running.

Am I right? I don't think I'm running either because I got to give up my money. You don't, yeah, you want to. I ain't given my money. You want a plane. Sean, I ain't given my money. I got it. I can tell you right now, let me put that presidential aspirations to bed from if I have to give up my money, it's not happening.

All right, so is he totally joking? I don't think so. That sounded pretty serious to me, but someone should let him know that you can actually create a family company. put your children in charge of it. He can even put his name on it and he could have a meme coin and he wouldn't really have to give up his money. But that's kind of interesting, right, that he would have to give up his money because

a lot of people right now are saying it's a bridge that we've crossed. That was maybe some people say that as a cheap shot at Trump, but I do think it's one of the things that we still haven't figured out. I mean, with Hunter Biden, for example, when Joe Biden was vice president, that family sure is how it didn't give up. their money, right? There was intense lobbying efforts afoot that were used then to support Joe Biden after he left the White House and didn't have a ton of money and was, you know, obviously engaged in selling influence, selling his status as a former vice president, potential future president. And that was good business for the entire Biden family. With Stephen A. Smith, he's saying, I don't want to give up my money, period, period. Don't want to do it. But to me that's it serious. And I think this is interesting for Democrats because I don't know. I mean, some of this depends on the giant unknown we won't really have an answer to because of world events in the

future for a long time, which is who's the Republican nominee? Some of this depends on, you know, a black swan event like Butler, Pennsylvania, God forbid, happening again. And let's hope that doesn't happen. But you can see how that would dramatically change the landscape in ways that we can't quite anticipate and change through the Republican nominee is in ways that we can't quite anticipate. But if everything stayed the same, Stephen A. Smith would run as a Democrat. He's indicated as much before. And what you get with him is the combination of this anti-establishment, anti-machine sensibility with media know-how. And Trump kind of had both of those things.

And Smith has dabbled. I mean, even the way he responded to Hannity, it sounded like he's had serious conversations about it. I don't know why he wouldn't have had serious conversations about it. But we have record low levels of institutional trust across the board. So if Democrats don't think that Stephen A. Smith would be, competitive against, and I'm not joking, Republicans might blanch at this, a Rubio or J.D. Vance. We haven't seen Stephen A. Smith really campaign, but what we can tell is that people like

hearing him talk, they like hearing him talk about politics. And he has takes that surprise people. He's extremely entertaining. And, you know, there's always a lot of talk about Michelle Obama and Oprah and how they could just wipe the floor with any Republican. I don't know if that's true. They're such creatures of old media. And Stephen A. Smith is a creature of old media, but has adapted for the new media ecosystem. He knows how to go viral. He's very in touch with the new media audience. He knows that people expect and appreciate takes that are, let's just say, use the worst word in the English language,

heterodox. Sometimes it's the only word that works. And he understands that. He's surprising. He's unexpected. And I think Democratic voters would like him, despite the fact that he's neither a cookie-cutter populist or a cookie-cutter establishmentarian. That's what would make everybody uncomfortable. And it was true with Donald Trump, right?

Like, this is a guy that loves business, but is super protectionist. This is a guy who detests foreign wars, but talks about how he's always been hawkish on Iran, as we've. mentioned on last week's show. So, and he talked about, you know, no more dumb wars, kicking the heck out of different countries. So he's like, sort of a similar figure. It was on primetime forever. And Stephen H. Smith is maybe more of a niche figure, right? Like he is, he didn't have the apprentice, right? But he's a very familiar face. And he gives very surprising takes. generally people believe that he believes what he's saying, which I continue to think is one of the more important characteristics of anybody running in a new media environment. Plus he doesn't have the stench of a political institution around him.

So this isn't me making the case in substance for Stephen A. Smith. It's me making the case for the political power viability of Stephen A. Smith as a candidate. There are a lot of people are like, oh, well, maybe this pop cultural figure, this random person could be a candidate. And it's just not that easy. He, though, happens to be someone who actually has experiences that come together in a way, almost a perfect storm of characteristics that come together in a way that I think would make him a potent threat to other Democrats and potentially to a Republican nominee. One of the things that helped with Trump is people saw him as a very, very successful businessman. Stephen Smith doesn't have a real estate empire, at least that I'm aware of. Maybe he does behind him. But he's talking about how much money he's got now. So maybe he could convince

people that he has some prowess in business and media that requires, you know, with Trump. He was able to pitch his kind of international relations, right? Like he was able to pitch himself as someone who made deals with other countries and knows how to work with the elites of different countries. I think that's going to be, would be, probably not going to be, sounds like he's not going to run. That would be a much, much deeper climb for a Stephen A. Smith. But, but people get annoyed when I do this, but I talk about how Neil Postman had the television-based epistemology in the Reagan era. Before that, the print-based epistemology. We're in the TikTok-based epistemology. The algorithmic social media-based epistemology. Our narratives are set, not by television,

not by print, they are downstream of TikTok. It doesn't mean television of print aren't important, but it means that they're downstream now of a more powerful, wide-reaching technology. And if Democrats think they could be someone who's a master of that craft with AOC, do I think AOC is good at it? Yes. But Stephen A. Smith is a media native.

AOC is good with social media. in the same way that, like, in 2016, you could say, like, Rand Paul was good with social media. But there's a difference between being, like, clever as a politician and being a native. And Trump was a television native. He was a Twitter native. The Cinco de Mayo tweet alone.

So Stepheny Smith is a native of that medium, and that medium is driving the conversation. it is driving the discussion with voters and the like. So I think that's something they think very, very serious about if you're an establishment Democrat or a populist Democrat. Is there someone that you can, and I'm not trying to give anyone ideas, but that you can attach an agenda to

where it would be believable, authentic, and powerful in that medium, that would just blow everybody else out of the water. So some food for thought as the midterm cycle gears up and people start looking ahead to 2028. All right, that's going to do it for me this evening alive from the Harvard campus. Where else would I be on Monday night in March? Happy birthday to my dad. Thanks to everybody for watching.

Appreciate it. You can email me at Emily at devil make care media.com. I will go ahead and check those out for the happy hour episode. We will record on Thursday to pop Friday. Get your questions in early and often, as they say. Thanks so much to everyone. Have a great night. Subscribe and we'll see you back here on Wednesday live at 9 p.m.