American Thought Leaders - Kash Patel on the Israel–Hamas War, the Defense–Industrial Complex, and Strategies to Curb the Deep State

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

“I don't think it's a coincidence that a month ago, 6 billion goes to Iran. And now their number one ally against the United States of America, writ large, Hamas, is doing a coordinated strike to America's number one ally, Israel.”Kash Patel has previously served as Department of Defense chief of staff and is also a former terrorism prosecutor. We discuss his take on the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel as well as his new book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”In this deep dive, Mr. Patel explains his realizations about “the deep state,” how it functions, and possible strategies to deal with it."The Defense–Industrial Complex, as President Eisenhower warned us 60 years ago, is the biggest behemoth in and around the swamp. I think it's worse than every lobbyist group combined,” Mr. Patel said.Views expressed in this audio are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

I don't think it's a coincidence that a month ago, $6 billion goes to Iran, and now their number one ally against the United States of America writ large, Hamas, is doing a coordinated strike to America's number one ally, Israel. In this episode, I sit down with former DOD Chief of Staff and terrorism prosecutor Kash Patel. We discuss his take on the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, as well as his new book, Government Gangsters, The Deep State, The Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. I have to file a federal lawsuit against the Biden administration

and the nine agencies and departments they sent my manuscript for review. In this deep dive, Kash explains his realizations about the deep state, how it functions, and strategies to deal with it. The defense industrial complex, as President Eisenhower warned us 60 years ago, is the biggest behemoth in and around the swamp. I think it's worse than every lobbyist group combined. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Ash Patel, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Ash Patel, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. This is awesome. I'm so thrilled to be back, and I'm reminded of our

fun times in Cash's Corner, so I'm looking forward to this. No, absolutely. And, you know, of course, we're going to talk about your new book, which, you know, I read a while ago now, and you sent me an early copy. A lot of interesting information there. But what I want to get into first is what's happening in Israel right now. We didn't expect this overnight as we're filming. Israel is saying it's at war. Essentially, it was the invasion by sea, by air, by you know essentially all all parts there's and there's towns which were basically taken over by hamas or occupied by him i mean speaking from like a military standpoint

planning preparation what we call operational preparation of the environment an attack like this isn't a one-off it's not a a splinter group saying, ah, we're going to fire a couple of rockets from this location and, you know, do some damage and, you know, we'll get some headlines. Like you said, air, land, and sea through various vectors originating in Hamas and Hamas-funded groups into what I believe is a coordinated strike plan into Israeli territories. And that doesn't happen in a week. That is a lot of planning. But more importantly, that takes a ton of money. And Hamas, you know, I think it's worth going into, they are a foreign terrorist organization under the United States law. What does that mean? They are fully foreign terrorist organization under the United States law.

What does that mean? They are fully sanctioned. That means they can't bank with the U.S. industry and companies. They can't bank with U.S. partners. They can't do business with U.S. allies. And their access to money is sharply cut off throughout the rest of the world, kind of like we do with Iran, right? Because Iran's the largest, kind of like we do with Iran, right? Because Iran's

the largest state-sponsored terror, the Iranian Quds Force, the IRGC, all FTOs, foreign terrorist organizations. And a lot of other countries have sought the same recognition of Hamas. So you got to ask yourself, where do they get this money? You're not talking like a million dollars. You're talking hundreds of millions of dollars to mobilize this kind of effort. Well, and you were very critical, if I recall, you know, a couple of weeks back of this decision to basically, I guess, release about six billion dollars worth of money towards Iran. It was probably personal in the fact that that was involved in hostage affairs, which I led up for President Trump. And, you know, I always lead with this.

Bringing home Americans is a great thing. And every time you bring one home, it is good. Who was detained or held unlawfully or hostage overseas, especially by America's enemies or terrorist organization. And then you have to step back, and I learned this doing the work, on the bigger picture. There's more hostages out there, and there's going to be future hostages out there. And the question you have to ask is, did you harm America's ability to get those folks back for a headline? Did you harm future hostage-taking matters by going to our number one enemy on planet Earth? I know there's, you know, in terms of like economics and others, we talk Russia and

China, but when you just talk sheer terrorism, it's Iran. And they, like Hamas, are cut off from the world funding line. They are literally funded by flying in cash, pallets of cash, to continue to operate their economy and keep their currency afloat. And what happened here that I thoroughly disagree with the Biden administration is they gave Iran $6 billion and we got some hostages back. And they then lied. They, the Biden administration, lied to the world. They said, we are going to dictate how that money is spent. And we've told them it's going to be on humanitarian affairs. Don't listen to me.

Don't listen to Cash Patel on that, you know, countering that headline. The president of Iran, who works for the Ayatollah, the next day after after the money transfer, said, we, Iran, will spend this money however we please. But what is your expectation of its use? We're told that it's for humanitarian purposes, food and medicine. Do you believe you have the right to use that money

in any way that you see fit? This money belongs to the Islamic Republic of Iran and naturally we will decide, the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide to spend it wherever we need it. So if I hear you clearly that it will be used for more than humanitarian purposes in your view. Humanitarian means whatever the Iranian people need. So this money will be budgeted for those needs. And the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government. And they're right. There's no mechanism for the United States.

So this $6 billion specifically came from Korean banking institutions. It was frozen for a long, long, long time under all these sanctions stuff. They released that money to the Middle East. And then the Middle East And what are we going to go police the use of that money in Iran where we're not allowed, where we have no access to the intelligence infrastructure, banking infrastructure or anything, the SWIFT system. And so, of course, they were going to spend it as they saw it. And I don't think it's a coincidence that a month ago, six billion goes to Iran and now their number one ally against the United States of America writ large, Hamas, is doing a coordinated strike to America's number one ally, Israel. I talk about it in the book. There's just no coincidences in government.

And at this level, there definitely is not. And I'll always stick by that. So I'm not going to, I don't think we should spend too, too much time here with this. by that. I don't think we should spend too much time here with this, but one thing you did mention is that this declaration of war, I had seen it was the defense minister who said it. Why does that change the equation in your mind? Well, as you know, in America, to declare war is an act of Congress, right? The president can't go out and declare war. It's not the same exactly over in Israel, but the authorities that arise when you declare war

give the premier vast expansion of executive authority to conduct that war. That's his job. And so that's why I think it's just like it would be here. If we, America, formally declared war, the authorities given to the commander in chief as the head of our union are massive. And the options he has become exponential, not just with money, but with equipment, with manning, with human beings and human lives and how we operate with our allies. So what I think Israel is doing is saying we're at war and they're probably going to look west next and say, Europe, are you with us? Our allies, America, are you with us? And if so, how are you with us? And this is going to be where, in my opinion, it gets really, it gets really, I don't even know what the right word is for the Biden administration.

This is probably going to be their most difficult national security issue they've dealt with to date. Because what are they going to say? Besides publicly, we, of course, support Israel. And the Israelis have a large hangover from how the previous Trump administration treated them as a very public, very global partnership with Israel. And also, let's not forget the Mideast Peace Accords, right? You know, those have been completely lit on fire by this one strike, this one act of war alone. You know, the Iranians and Hamas are already talking to the Saudis and saying, what are you going to do? Right?

And our goal was to continue that full-on Saudi-Israeli Mideast peace negotiation, which was still developing. In my opinion, I think that's over now, at least for as long as this war goes on. So the amount of, we're going to be talking about this for a long time, the amount of moving pieces that are now on the board and have yet to even get onto the board, this is going to be months and months and months, in my opinion. I don't see a quick resolution unless one decides to just unilaterally surrender.

And last question, you know, of course, I mean, these are, again, everything developing as we speak. I've heard that, you know, Iran might be very close to actually having a ba-bomb. And I don't know if you've been following that at all. Well, that's a great point, because once the $6 billion was transferred to Iran, the police officers for the nuclear arsenal in Iran are the UN-sanctioned cops, for lack of a better word, that are allowed into Tehran and around the country to their various nuclear sites because Iran is publicly saying we're only making fissile material nuclear weapons grade material to power our country I've always thought that was a total pretext sham but let's put that aside the Americans weren't allowed in there so we relied on the UN inspectors to go in and check what's the percentage, what's the weapons grade,

how far along are you, are your reactors on, are they cooling, all these indicators of how much stuff is being made where. And if you're doing it for energy, you need like this much. If you're doing it for bombs, you need like this much, right? Iran kicked all the inspectors out of the country the day after the $6 billion and the hostage exchange occurred. So I don't think we were getting the full story when we had the UN inspectors in country. Now we have nobody. So it's going to be almost impossible for us to figure out how far along they've come. In my opinion, and I've been away from the intelligence of this for a while since I've been out of government, but I've always thought that was their plan.

And I've always believed they are inching closer to that material necessary for weapons. And that is very scary. That's an issue that doesn't get talked about a lot. Maybe it will be now. But this administration, in my opinion, while also permitting the funding of this war, proxy war by Hamas into Israel, also just gave a huge cash injection for their nuclear program. And we know they lie to the world. This is Iran. They do it all the time. So even if they stand up and say, no, it's only for energy, we have no way of knowing, proving to the world otherwise, because we don't have anyone in there anymore. A final thought on this, and let's dive into the book. I mean, these are dark times. It is.

Yeah, the final thought is we talked about who Israel is going to look for in terms of public allies. Well, who's Hamas going to get? What are the Middle East countries going to do? What are the signatories to the Abraham Accords going to do? What's Turkey going to do? I mean, we know what Iran's going to do, but Iran's going to go around and try to, in my opinion, galvanize a group of countries to back Iran, to back Hamas because of their joint, quote unquote, hatred for Israel or actions taken by the Israeli government. What is Jordan going to do? What are all these, Egypt, right? Massive implications for Egypt. We

don't have time to get into any of that, all things involved. But remember, the Muslim Brotherhood, the presidency in Egypt, the fall there, Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization. What are we doing with all that? So, I mean, the international implications are almost never-ending. Well, let's talk about government gangsters. Yeah, let's do it. I can't wait to dive in. We should tell our audience, I haven't been told what you're going to ask me about, so this could get interesting. No, well, you know, there's some very, very basic questions, right? And of course, you

go out, as you're introducing the book, you say, I didn't know there was a deep state until somewhat recently. You keep hearing this terminology. You hear it, conspiracy. Some people equate it with the administrative state. Is it the same thing? What's the deep state? Yeah, I think that definition will change when you ask, depending on who you ask. For me, having written the book and looking at it historically, I think we got signals about the deep state before President Eisenhower became President Eisenhower. When he warned the world about the defense industrial complex, the behemoth that we see today.

He saw it coming. He said government needs to be aware of this. Government cannot be run by private sector organizations who continue to pay in a cyclical fashion, people that go in and out of government. And we'll circle back on the defense industrial complex stuff. But I think that was like, maybe the beginning of it. And it's not like we got a deep state overnight. That was the point. This is years of degradation, in my opinion, by people in leadership service positions, and failing to do the job that they signed up to do. When you couple that with my personal experience being the lead prosecutor at Main Justice for Benghazi, being the guy that found Hillary Clinton's emails in the discovery

process, not being able to run with that and not being able to prosecute that Benghazi prosecution the way I wanted to and get all of the terrorists who killed four Americans. And I saw it become a political thing in the Obama administration. And I was in the room when Holder was making these decisions. And so I was like, maybe that's a one-off of a really massive event. But then fast forward, and I leave the Trump Justice Department and I go to Capitol Hill and I run Russiagate. And I think that's when it kind of solidified it for me. I saw the FBI and DOJ that I worked with, and we all know what happened afterwards, as the chief investigator, kind of exposing it all. And I just, I was just like, you know, I even went to Devin Nunes, the then chairman who had hired me to run the investigation.

I said, I don't even believe this. I think I think I'm lying. You know, I remember a day specifically, I think I put in the book, but I walked into Devin's office to give him my like weekly brief on Russiagate, you know, and I think this was one of the big ones on the FISA and how it was unlawful, in my opinion. And then we were putting out the facts about it, withholding evidence of innocence and all the biases and all that stuff. And he turns to me and he goes, if you're going to start drinking this early in the morning, get out of my office. Because it was so, it was crazy, right?

Like, you know, the whole story of Russiagate that we now know fully today almost is unbelievable. It's science fiction. But to me, it's not a Republican and Democrat thing. And that's kind of one of the hitting points of my book. I said, I don't care about R's and D's. I probably name more Republican government gangsters in the book than Democrats. I learned through that that they were an entrenched class together, whether it's FBI, DOJ, DOD, CIA, NSA, what have you. Coupled with, I think, the biggest conspirator they have, the media, that's the deep state and while it was operating in a somewhat surreptitious fashion in the initial stages of the Trump presidency I think in the four years of the Trump presidency

fast forwarding now two and a half years into the Biden administration it might need a new name it's no longer the deep state they're just out there doing it in public because there's no accountability. And I think that's what ticks off Americans the most. It's the question I get asked the most. Where's the accountability? Not for everyday Americans that commit crimes, but for these folks that we know who held senior positions in the DOJ, in the FBI and elsewhere that commit crimes. And they are rewarded for that action with a continuing entrenched DC swamp bureaucracy. And the media is almost their glorifying ego padding machine. And I don't know that I have a full answer as to where that accountability is going to come from. I remember reading in the book, you had this very succinct explanation of Russiagate. So I want to get you to try to recreate that, you know, right?

Because, you know, it is incredible when you lay out really, really the broadest strokes in just a few sentences. Yeah, okay. You're putting me on the spot here. All right. It's going to be a fail or pass situation. So what I tell folks the following, they have to realize it took me two years to get there. So would you believe in the 21st century America a political party would go overseas and buy fake intelligence from an overseas asset then use campaign dollars to purchase that information, funnel it back to the FBI and DOJ here in the United States of America, appear before a federal secret court and a federal judge, and knowingly present information they knew to be false

and withhold information they knew would exonerate the posed targets, all to get a surveillance warrant on their political opponent. That's Russiagate. And again, when you hear that, you're like, this guy's crazy. But a few years later, multiple congressional investigations, the Durham report later, that and many other things happen that have degraded America's faith in the justice system and causes two-tier system of justice, as I often reference in the book. One of the things that I've been charting, and we didn't really understand what was happening

post-2016 and so forth, but it's this development of what some have dubbed the disinformation industrial complex. It's this combination, as you were saying earlier, of agencies working with some sort of quasi-civil society organizations, working with some legacy media. And it's unclear exactly where the lines are between some of these organizations and this pressure being exerted. There's threats, but there's some sort of ideological alignment altogether. But in the end, you have suppression of all sorts of information and elevation of other information

even to the level where it seems like everybody agrees on something that really very few do. I think the best way for me to sort of digest that and put it back out is I try to, what I was talking about, the cyclical nature of DC and that it being, if you're in a leadership position in government, you go out only to come back in to help the people that are helping you along the way, knowing where you're going to land. So what do I mean by that? Let me give you an example that I raised in the book. Brennan and Clapper were the heads of the intelligence community

under Obama, the CIA director and the director of national intelligence, the top two dogs. They knew going in to the election cycle, they briefed then President Obama about this Hillary Clinton, Russiagate scandal. They knew and the president knew it was coming and he allowed it to occur. And they didn't warn the incoming presidency of any of it. In fact, they got the FBI, James Comey and company to withhold that information from the incoming commander in chief. Now, why do I highlight Clapper and Brennan? Well, if you fast forward to just today to literally bring this thing up to basically a week or so ago, Brennan and Clapper, who, by the way, were caught lying to Congress, right, under oath.

Brennan specifically lied to Congress about the CIA spying on Senate staffers. And Clapper specifically lied to Congress under oath about utilizing the FISA surveillance process to secretly surveil Americans. That happened. They both admitted it later. They both lied right across the street under oath in front of the world. What was their reward? They've been glorified with contracts in the media. Let's put that aside. And whatever your feelings are on the border, just to bring this thing full circle, the Department of Homeland Security just rewarded Brennan and Clapper with two senior level board positions at the Department of Homeland Security to adjudicate the border crisis. So two cabinet secretaries who committed felonies by lying to

Congress under oath, who thwarted an incoming presidential administration with an investigation they knew was bogus and didn't tell anyone and who allowed the media to run that disinformation campaign roughshod over half of America so they would vote one way. That's the deep state out in the open. And that's what I mean when I say they're in it for themselves. And you asked an interesting point. Well, what is their unifier? What makes them come together? And in my opinion, and what I talk about in the book is it's their get Trump attitude.

I wish there was another answer. But every time we go down the road of why do these bad actors do this, of course, they won't publicly admit it. But that's where every road leads. In some way, shape or form, their personal dislike and their desire to unify and quote unquote, be the ones that get Trump continues the deep state juggernaut. And I don't know that it's going to stop anytime soon. You know, my sense is that a number of these people deeply believe, have a deep conviction that President Trump

is an existential threat to America. And that is part of their action. Or, I have that sense, or is it just purely transactional? It's just business and there's no belief involved. How do you see it? This is one of my questions, actually. Yeah, no one's asked me that. What I think is occurring is that they, the deep state operators, are not doing it in service, in mission. They are doing it with that as a pretext. What do I mean by that? They'll say we are upholding the institutions of justice and FBI and Intel and DOD and intelligence and all roads just happen to lead to Donald Trump.

But these are known liars. These are people who knowingly broke the law. And I'm not just talking about Brendan Clapper. I'm talking about James Comey and Andy McCabe and Gina Haspel and 17 other people that got fired or relieved of duty as a result of just our little congressional investigation. They go out and the media hires them on to say, look at the deputy director of the FBI, look at what he has to say now. It's, you know, they get six, seven figure

contracts and they'll proceed their disinformation narrative with, you know, we believe in the full commitment to the Constitution and accountability, and that's why I think Donald Trump is a threat. And so they've blended this narrative together with facts that don't exist, and the media wants that narrative to proceed in advance just as bad as they do. So now the counterargument is like, oh, look at you, Kash Patel, you're attacking these brave Americans. You know, one of the things that I became aware of that I really didn't grasp at all over the last few years, especially around, you know, there was a lot of information sort of seeded into the system, you know, around COVID, around how you're supposed to use masks. You're supposed to, you know, these vaccines will be perfectly safe and effective. A great number of people seem to be unable to accept new information that changes those statements.

My view is they were propagandized into believing something that wasn't true. Maybe people wanted to believe it was true. Turned out not to be true, but are now unable to change their mind or seemingly unable to change their mind. It's a scary reality. COVID wasn't the first sort of blanket blast of information. Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing. There's people that deeply believe things that seem to not comport with reality, specifically with respect to Trump.

Even if you start with it being propaganda and you know it, a whole bunch of people will even start believing it. This is the ecosystem that we're in here. We talked about Russiagate. We now know what you just said happened in that one fashion and half of America thought Donald Trump was a Russian asset, literally. I mean, they were writing that. That was the headline over and over again. That was the justification to launch an investigation into a sitting president of the United States. That was a justification for the

people that were fired who led that operation to go to the media and say, well, we did it because we thought Donald Trump was a Russian asset. We now know unequivocally from John Durham and before our investigation that there was never a lawful basis to launch any investigation into Trump or any of his surrogates. Do you know how powerful that statement is for a prosecutor to lay out there? They're saying you couldn't have done any surveillance, any investigation, made any phone call, sent out any subpoenas. It was totally unlawful. So that means he wasn't a Russian asset. He wasn't even close. And neither were anyone, any people in his universe. Advance that to

the 51 Intel letter. Okay. It was a similar type of operation. Three CIA directors, an NSA director, a secretary of defense and senior level other intelligence officers signed a letter knowing that a week before the election, the Biden campaign and Tony Blinken wanted the CIA to get in front of this and say Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation. And half of America believed it. And if you go out there and talk to many Americans like you and I do, they base their vote on that presidential election on that piece of disinformation. And so now you have two major events that we're talking about that literally led to the rigging of presidential elections, in my opinion. And the commonality is, yes, it's the get Trump thing, but the commonality is the characters that are involved.

You see the same folks coming up and their protégés coming up again. What do I mean by that? For example, the two individuals that are the number two and three at the Justice Department today, Lisa Monaco and John Carlin, were the heads of Homeland Security and the National Security Division where I worked at the DOJ, and they were the ones that launched Russiagate. Now they're in charge of DOJ. And like you said, the point that you hit on that I think is of such consequential importance is America doesn't find out until like two years later. You know, America didn't catch on until Russiagate, until like 2018. They didn't catch on about Hunter Biden's laptop until a year and a half, two years after that intel letter. They didn't catch on about the COVID originations, which Epoch has been reporting, truthfully,

I think, in one of the only places that has been doing so. They thought it was another Donald Trump conspiracy. It couldn't have come from China or this lab. The intelligence community had no information to that effect. So whatever your belief is or thoughts are on the former president or the current president, this pattern of conduct and the people and the revolving door that people walk through in government gangsters is a reality that can only be created by this machine that is the deep state. You know, Cash, this topic of how our information ecosystem affects us is one that I could go on and on and on about. It's just what I've become kind of obsessed with because I really think that there's a whole bunch of people out there who deeply

believe that doing some of these, what you and I would see as unethical things, is actually the right thing to do. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that. But I'm not going to keep harping on this for now. Okay. I want to talk a little bit more about some of the things. I mean, your formative years in the book. You took this trip to Tajikistan. You had to get back very quickly because a judge demanded it. Tell me the story. I find that to be one of the most, one of the most enjoyable moments in the book. I'll give you the quick, quick and skinny version. So I was a national security prosecutor.

We had just charged a terrorist in the state of Texas with a terrorist offense, actually a couple of terrorist offenses. Namely, they were going to figure out a way to blow up a shopping mall in Texas. Once we had finally indicted that guy after a multi-year investigation, you sort of take that case and put it on the side and, you know, get back to what else is still out there. We were chasing down at the time the emir for special operations for ISIS, and that led us

to Tajikistan. So we were building on a prosecution on him. And I thought, OK, we've got a little bit of time here. Let's go over there, you know, and do the work. Got over there, did the work. And I get a phone call from DOJ. The judge on his own has issued a hearing in chambers, so not in public, to talk about classified information and all this stuff and how we're going to handle it. That wasn't supposed to happen now. And the attorneys in Texas don't know how to do that. So get back. So I don, I don't know, I'm like 22 hours away. I get back. I'm in this type of outfit because I don't have a full suit on. So I have a jacket, a shirt and pants. And I go straight into the judge's chambers. And, you know, the first thing is I apologize immediately. I said, I just come from the airport, just from overseas,

just for this hearing. I would normally have a suit. I'm sorry, Your Honor. And whatever, he didn't like that and proceeded with the hearing. And I kind of knew at the start what that was about then. We had been told this judge in Houston doesn't like DOJ attorneys for some reason or doesn't like Washington or whatever the larger issue was. And in the past, he had actually had some issues with Indian American lawyers that appeared before him. But I don't ever care about that stuff. I just didn't want this hearing to get messed up and the prosecution of this terrorist to get messed up. He ends up demanding to see my airport boarding pass, my passport, and launches into a barrage at me mind you

with the defense attorney there and my two guys are supposed to my colleagues from from the Justice Department's Texas office they're just sitting there because they're just loving it and I could have blown a gasket but what I did was keep my cool because the mission mattered more. And fast forward, the guy eventually gets convicted. No classified information leaked. That was the win, along with the conviction. And we maintained the integrity of that conviction. That was a win. So it couldn't be reversed on appeal. But what I did see was the cowardice of big DOJ. I came back here and they were like, oh, heads are going to roll.

And I even specifically discussed this matter with then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. They did nothing. You would think when a lawyer who does the job for them gets attacked by an Article 3 judge, they would do something. No one wanted to take that on. The ironic thing is, my colleagues tell me that because we were in chambers, there's a transcript of the entire hearing, and it's public now, I think. They use that transcript to train future lawyers on how to act in the most difficult of situations with the harshest of judges, even when you know that you are right in the fact in the law.

I was pretty peeved when I got on the plane after that hearing, but it was a learning experience for me. I just thought the one group of people, it wasn't a political thing, you know, it wasn't even, this was before Trump. This was just a, hey, aren't you gonna have the back of the federal prosecutor who's doing the work you, the attorney general and the DAG sent me out to do?

And they all failed. They all shied away from it. And I called them out for it. And then more fake news stories about me appeared. So what was interesting in that story, actually, if I recall, is that there was some sort of activity internally. The problem that you outlined was that there was no action externally. Right. No, that's a great distinction. And what I told the leadership at the DOJ at the time is, look, I don't care that this guy yelled at me. You're talking about an Indian American who grew up in Queens in the 80s and 90s. I've been called a lot of things. I've been called a lot of nasty things by much better people than that judge. And I wasn't like, this isn't personal. But, you know, when you just send around a few internal

emails and, you know, say, oh, this is horrible and this should never happen. The point is, if a judge overreaches like he did here, it's to protect our future prosecutors and to protect the integrity of the court system. Because as we are now fastly learning, judges have become activists. When they put on the robe, they're supposed to take off the R&D or whatever label they have politically

and mete out justice. And that taught me that, wow, maybe even they will inject politics or convictions that shouldn't be there to steer a case or investigation one way or the other. And I just thought DOJ's, and my main point was, this is gonna come up over and over again as I go on in my career. There's going to, this story was written by national media outlets. And they said, you know, they literally said I was incompetent because the judge said I was incompetent.

Which he did in that hearing, but they didn't bother to read it. And it comes up time and time again. And I don't care what people think about me. But if he did it to me, who else has he done it to? And who's he going to do it to next time? And what other judges are going to be like, I can get away with this. But in the end, you actually secured the conviction, which would suggest competence. Yeah, not if you ask the team down there in Houston, but that's all that matters. That's why in my book you see over and over the mission-first approach.

Whether it's at DOJ, DOD, or the IC, or where have you, that's what you did. You signed up to serve the mission. So I wasn't going to get into a political, personal argument with this judge and jeopardize not just the conviction, but classified information which we were using to prosecute other ongoing active terrorism cases. And yeah, we didn't let that happen. What was it that made you think, do you think then Congressman Devin Nunes want to bring you on for Russiagate specifically before you even knew what it was? I mean, I'm embarrassed to say, I tell this to Devin all the time now, I didn't even know who he was.

You know, I was an executive branch prosecutor guy, had gone over to the military as a civilian, sports forces stuff, like, you know, I was just working on national security stuff. I didn't pay attention to the Hill or really any of that, except maybe a headline story here or there. And I met Devin because a mutual friend of ours wanted to help getting a job in the Trump administration, not even me. And it was just random. We were sitting in his office and I

tell the story in the book in greater detail. But long story short, he was like, what do you do? You know, he's just being polite. I was like, well, I'm a terrorism prosecutor. I was over at JSOC for a while doing intel, blah, blah, blah. He's like, oh, no way. You know, and this was before Russiagate was a thing. But they had known that they were going to get charged with that investigation on House Intel. And so on the spot, his team and he asked me, you know, would you be willing to leave DOJ and come over and do this job? And I said, absolutely not.

I enjoyed what I was doing. I just didn't envision myself ever on Capitol Hill. That's how it started. But what was the job that they wanted you to do? They said since you had handled FISA, since you had used the FISA process to go after terrorists and been before the FISC and did the applications. And since you had an intelligence background with your time at JSOC, you know, this is what Russiagate was. We were talking about DOJ, FBI, Intel coming together. And they knew

more than I did at the time because I wasn't really paying attention to much more than what's in the media. And that's why they needed someone to lead the investigation who had done that work so they, Congress, knew what to ask for during their constitutional oversight hearings. And the rest is history. So how is it that you ended up either wanting to work in the Trump administration or how is it that you came, that whole thing, that all came about? The only job I ever wanted, Jan, was to run counterterrorism. You know, I was a counterterrorism CT guy by background. That's what I did. We manhunted terrorists. We figured out what to do with them, prosecute them, kinetic strike, give them to a host nation, try them in some arena of justice, whatever. And I thought that was the greatest job.

And I wanted to learn how to do it at the operational level and then build a bigger policy picture, you know, from the central government perspective to say, I think this is what we should be doing with Al Qaeda, with ISIS, with AQI, whatever, right? Hostage affairs and all that stuff. And, you know, Devin, I went over there to Devin and I had never met Trump, didn't know him, literally. And I told him, I'll make you a deal. Whatever we find in the investigation, we put out. And he goes, done. And he said also, you know, he's like, I will do everything I can to get you that job that you want as head of CT in the White House. And after we completed the investigation and after some stalling by Bolton at the National Security Council, I went over there

and shortly thereafter became head of CT. And I was like, and it was, it was the greatest job. I loved it. It was awesome. Had the greatest team. We changed the landscape of how we got after terrorists. And for me, that was it. I thought I was good. I was like, I can just stay here and do this job. There was no plans. There was no, what am I going to do next? I got there and I was like, this is great. One of the things that you talk about in the book quite a bit is reforms. Yeah. Right. And I know those are, these are very important to you.

This is stuff that was just kind of has been percolating up over years. We've talked about some of them on Cassius Corner before, but you talk about this thing called the justice manual. Right. And, you know, I'd never heard of that until I read your book, but, you know, ostensibly there's a lot of policy in there that has to be followed. And you're saying you were saying that very small changes to that manual could actually have very profound implications for, I don't know, like, I guess, getting away from what you would call this two-tier system of justice which has developed. Yeah, the central core of the, I mean, anybody can highlight the problems. The purpose of the book was to not just tick people off with what had happened, but how do we fix it?

And that is the mission of Government Gangsters. You can fix all the problems that we've discussed here and more. And accountability is at the core of that mission set. And so how do you execute that mission at justice, right? Because we've seen the fracture in the system of justice. And whether you believe that or not, let's put that aside and let's look at the United States Attorney's Manual, the USAM, the DOJ policy book that you're talking about. It's been in place for decades. I think the last major change to it was Ashcroft. And in it, it talks about things like that so many people, so many attorneys generals, AGs and DAGs have referred to as, you've heard this on TV, this is Justice Department

principle. This is Justice Department policy. And I always thought that was ironic to hear from the head law enforcement officer, shouldn't you be saying this is Justice Department law? And then I looked into why they weren't saying that, because they were basing that off the USAM, the DOJ policy book. And specifically, just to bring this thing all the way up to speed, A.G. Garland gave a recent interview on national TV where he said, you know, where he's pressed on, oh, DOJ's longstanding policy has been not to interfere in presidential elections, not to investigate people, not to publicly announce investigations. And we've seen how they've handled that with Trump and Biden.

And then all of a sudden I heard him for the first time say, well, we won't do it if it's near in time to the election. But if you go back to the attorneys generals before him, they would say one to two years beforehand. Where is this? Where is this written? Where is this timeline? I've been looking for it. And are you allowed to? And yes, the attorney general is the only one that can change the timeline. Excuse me, the United States Attorney's Manual. He can do it with a stroke of a pen. So was it changed? And I'll give you another great example. Jurisdiction. Everybody asks me, why are all these, whether it's Jan 6 or whatnot, cases being brought in Washington, D.C.? And again, I think it's another legal fiction. In the United States Attorney's Manual,

it specifically says we should bring these types of cases in Washington, D.C. Not that we shall, because the Constitution obliterates that. Jurisdiction lies when any component of the crime took place. So if we're talking about a USB stick that was bought in a store in Arkansas and used in Washington, D.C., prosecution lies in Arkansas. It's just that this DOJ, again, whether it's Republican or Democrat, has metastasized its policy to become tantamount to law, but it's not law. And it hasn't been challenged, and it hasn't been talked about. And the power that those little tweaks wield, as you talked about, is monumental. And that same policy

says when it comes to special counsels, that's a whole other conversation, but when it comes to special counsels, you shall appoint one from without the Department of Justice, outside of DOJ. How is it the last three special counsels have all been current DOJ employees? The DOJ is literally violating its own policy that it says is the law. And we're not supposed to ask questions about it because Garland goes out there and says oh Weiss is a Trump appointee and Durham was a you know bar appointee that is a total deflection if our institution of justice and its leader can go out there and lie about the law or manipulate it and have no consequences. That's why a core point is that manual needs to be put out.

It's not classified. Anyone can go get it. And we need a uniform structure of law that governs, not DOJ principle and years-long policy and this is how we've done things. You've always heard people go to Congress and testify about it. It ticks me off to no end when you hear an AG or DAG go up there and say, this is how we've done things. You've always heard people go to Congress and testify about it. It ticks me off to no end when you hear an AG or dad go up there and they say, this is how we've done things. And not one member of Congress has said, what's the basis in law for that? That to me is the deep state. Well, so something that you just alluded to is the increase in administrative power in America, right?

And concentration of administrative power are almost, not almost, actually a lot of decisions that typically would be left with the legislative branch being made by agencies, people that have been bureaucrats for a long time and there's even you know legal precedents, Chevron deference, I've covered that on the show before that kind of leads to this and many things. So one of the things you talk about is Schedule F. Yeah. Right and I've actually had you know I think the guy who figured it out on the show originally. But I want to remind people what the Schedule F was talk about. But I also bring it up in my book because another myth that's out there from decades-long government bureaucrats saying it over and over and over and over again is you can't terminate government employees. And I was like, where does it say that?

Are you telling me that if a government employee violates his oath of office, breaks his ethical duties, breaks the law, breaks the chain of command, you can't fire them? Are they allowed to do that at the DOD? A Justice Department lawyer can just say, I've got this job, I'm here for 20 years. Doesn't matter what I do. And I highlight in my book over and over again the people that did break their oath of office

or the law or policy or ethics or the chain of command and were rewarded for it, which is a whole nother problem. But when I was deputy director under the Trump administration of national intelligence, we were actually able to go to the DNI, the office director of national intelligence and eliminate hundreds of billets, seats, positions, as we call them, because you can. But nobody wanted to be the guy or gal in the media saying, you took away seats from the national security mission, which was the disinformation twist to what we were doing. We were reducing duplicative efforts, I outline in the book. If the CIA is doing one thing and they're doing it really well, I don't need 50 people doing the same thing again in another building only to jam up the process

so it takes us longer to get a question answered that our chain of command put forward to us. I think that is an empirically disastrous position to put the national security apparatus in. And so if you have a government structure, a commander in chief and executive branch that are willing to have your back, you can do a lot of the work that leads us to Schedule F. Schedule F was created because they got so tired of trying to remove the folks that had committed essentially crimes. And you're talking about the likes of McCabe, Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, James Baker, you know, all these bad actors, right? And, you know, it ticks me off a little

bit that we even needed to create a whole new Schedule F. But if that's the solution, that's why I push it forward, because it goes after the same endpoint that we're trying to get to, government accountability. I understand that people want everyone prosecuted if they broke the law at the government, and that should be their desire. But in the very least we can do is eliminate them from the roles of government, Take their security clearance. It's another thing I talk about in the book, right? We can reclassify all these positions if a president wanted to, or the majority of them as scheduled left. And essentially you are hired and fired at will. And that's what's scaring a lot of the public that President Trump has put this policy forward saying we're going to do this.

And now you're hearing again that policy swamp decision of saying you can't remove government employees. It's a complete fiction. So whether it's Schedule F or a combination of the two, I'm obviously all for it because we need to hold government more accountable than we do the everyday citizen. And the other way that this ties into the whole administrative, like the deep state isn't just in the executive branch. It's in the judiciary. It's in the legislative branch. And what we did was we teamed up with Congress too because they have the power of the purse.

They pay for these billets, these positions. And if you get Congress to zero out those positions and billets that are unnecessary, that are wasting taxpayer unnecessary, that are wasting taxpayer dollars, that are slowing down the national security mission, then you've also eliminated that position. So there's a combined way to get to that goal. And I don't want to be the guy out there that removes a parent's ability to take care of their family. But you signed up to serve. We're not forcing you to serve. And if you fail the American people in the mission, you shouldn't be here.

Through your time in government, in the administration, working in a number of agencies as it played out, I guess how much waste or how many excess positions were there in your mind in these agencies? At least a third. If you take every agency, combine them and do the law of averages, right? And that's a lot. That terrifies people. But the other thing I learned, whether it was at DOJ or DOD or CIA or NSA or ODNI or become part of the budgeting process and you see that agencies and departments actually had money left over, and they would literally say, if we don't spend this, we're going to get less from Congress next time. Somebody go spend it. It was insane to me.

What do you mean we can't give taxpayer dollars back because we did a good job and did it for, you know, less than we thought we were going to do it for? And so this, again, this problem metastasizes in the deep state. And they get out there and say, well, if I get, I need a thousand more billets because I need a thousand more FBI agents on the streets chasing down criminals. Well, if that were the case and that was its purpose, great, if there was a justifiable need for it. But when you expand that, and again, this goes back to the point that this degradation of government isn't like a year too old. Decades. So you're adding and adding and adding. And then what you get is this thing called mission creep. Why are they creeping into their mission set? If CIA is doing it, what's ODNI doing with it? If NSA is running point on it, and each one of those agencies and departments has critical missions they do best. That's why they exist.

But this mission creep, this expansion of billets allows people to say, Oh, we're going to bring this guy over here, and he's going to be great. We're going to do this fusion cell, and we're going to give a fancy name like the hostage rescue fusion cell, and it's going to be great. We're going to do this fusion cell. And we're going to give a fancy name like the hostage rescue fusion cell. And it's going to be great. And sadly, what they're mostly doing is printing headlines for the media that don't accomplish the very objective they set out to. It becomes political. And that's another thing I get into in government gangsters. I'm like, well, what did this fusion cell solve?

Who did you bring home? And what's your justification for a thousand new DOD positions here or there? I'm not the guy that's ever going to argue against the national security of America, but I am going to be the first guy that says there is government waste, fraud, and abuse across the board. And a lot of positions just don't need to exist. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, people are going to probably hate that I talk about that in my book. And I say we need to eliminate 50% of the billets of the Joint Chiefs. What is that? Those are the general officers,

the flag officers, the four-star officers that you see in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. It's too much of a fraternity. There's just too much glad-handing going on. How am I going to get my next star? You got to give me this position. If I, you know, kiss up to you, then I'll do it. And people are put in command of large nodes of the United States military and have no experience to do it. And specifically for my seat as a chief of staff at DOD, we've talked about this before, the Joint Chiefs have zero role in the command and control structure of the Department of Defense, the chain of command. That's not because I said it. That's because Congress said it in 1951. And it's been the law ever since. The Joint

Chairman, the Chief of the Joint Chiefs, and everyone below him is there to advise the President upon request. And we've seen that mission creep there spread. If you don't do this, the new Air Force aren't getting the new planes. If you don't do this, the new Army aren't getting your new, you want 10,000 new people registered next year to be in the Army. You're not getting the funding for it. I've seen that game play out behind closed doors. And I just didn't see a need for a lot of it. I saw a need for some of it. But when you have, and this is kind of like the way to sum it up, when you have these billets and positions added over years and years and years and years and years,

every year they're looking to justify their existence. And every year that's another cog in the process to me that either slows it down or gets you to know instead of getting you to yes. And a big problem of that, which we won't get into today, is the Office of General Counsel's at all these agencies and departments. As a former lawyer, I'm telling you that the biggest problem we have in some of these agencies and departments is the massive size of lawyers that exist. It's mind boggling. And then you have FBI lawyers pretending to be prosecutors and you have prosecutors pretending to be the lawyers for the FBI agents. What are we doing here? And then they're fighting, you're fighting each other. And that's DC and it needs

to change if we're going to help secure the national security mission, the law enforcement mission, the judiciary, and oversight in Congress. But look, it's not an overnight fix, just like it wasn't an overnight problem. It's going to take a massive lift. I'm just reminded that your boss at DOD, Chris Miller, when I had him on the show, he mentioned that he believes that to make the U.S. military stronger, I mean, in not so many words, we need to reduce its funding. Yeah. Which is very counterintuitive to anything that you hear. So it sounds like you agree with this. So, yeah, people, the media will immediately take this clip and say, Kash Patel is all for slashing the Department of Defense budget. Yes. The defense industrial

complex, as President Eisenhower warned us 60 years ago, is the biggest behemoth in and around the swamp. I think it's worse than every lobbyist group combined. And I'll be the first one to tell you, they do great work. The Raytheons, the Lockheeds, the Boeings, the Northrop Grumman's, the Submakers and all that, all those guys. But I've literally seen billions of dollars set ablaze in the sky due to incompetence. And then we give them another $10 billion contract. Why? If we eliminated some of this wasteful spending, and the reason, and then I go into, this is excessive detail in the book about the DOD, the Defense Industrial Complex, because we have these general officers, we have these secretaries

of defense who get these positions that they were in the Defense Industrial Complex. They go into the senior level undersecretary positions or secretary positions. And then when they leave, they go right back to that company for a 10 figure payday. And we have to break that wheel. And too many military uniformed officers are just setting up their next job. Oh, remember that big plane contract I got Company X? Well, I'm gonna go work for Company X. And there's nothing stopping that. And the response in the media is,

who's gonna cut the Department of Defense's budget? We've gotta keep growing and growing and growing and growing. And now they're gonna say, why are you giving so much money to Ukraine? We need a bigger budget. This stuff isn't really academic. Right now we have this war in Israel. We have no idea where that's going to go. You suggested that the U.S. may get involved. That's a real possibility. There's, of course, a huge commitment to supporting the Russia-Ukraine war on the

Ukraine side. Well, I'll tell you just real quick on the Israel-Hamas situation. You know who's already involved? The defense industrial complex. The lobbyist industry and the DOD industrial complex are already ramping it up. And we'll see it in the news soon that we've got to send this and that over to Israel. And we've got to provide them with equipment and manning and training. And we thought we only needed 500 million widgets. We need 5 billion widgets. Well, except that that might actually even be a good policy decision, right? Agreed. Agreed. But where our shortfall is, if we bring Ukraine into this, we have depleted seven years worth of, this is just one example, seven years of our surface-to-air

missiles. What does that mean? If we, the United States of America, built at the rate we do now, seven years worth of surface-to-air missile defense systems, then we'd be back to whole. And that's not the only place it happened. So what are we going to give them? It's not like we can make this stuff overnight. We're pretty good at it, but these weapons are complicated. These systems are complex. The training and upkeep and maintenance takes years to educate our allies overseas.

So you're going to see, I think, a knee-jerk reaction. And what I talk about in the book a lot of times is an overcorrection in government. They're going to come in so big and fast and sell it to the media and say, oh, we're going to donate X amount of billions. And then you're going to be like, okay, what are you spending it on? Well, you're spending it on multi-year contracts at the DOD and Defense Industrial System. And they're going to get paid no matter what. And who's going to oversee that what. And who's going to oversee that money? And who's going to be the police of that money next year and the year after

that and the year after that? And by the time we catch up to it, we've got another Afghanistan, two trillion, not to mention the blood loss there. And we have no oversight into where majority of that money is going. Just like in the Ukraine, we have no oversight or ability to see where that money is going. And to me, that's just a wrecking ball when it comes to accountability. But I think some in this complex prefer it that way because that's how they get the money. This feels like a difficult thing to unwind, especially when there's a lot of commitments that are made, some of which are maybe very important. I mean, of course, there's a lot of commitments that are made some of which are maybe very important I

mean there's of course there's tons of discussion but what the correct policy is right yeah but you know when you're you know in the midst of you know being committed how do you make these changes over time I mean you got to go in with a multi-year plan to implement these changes and a multi, not just agency, but branch plan. You need to get with Congress and you need to get rid of the lobbyists and the defense industrial complex noise for a little while. And you need to sit down and figure out what we actually need in this country in every single line of effort and then figure out how to fund it. Rather than, and this is a conversation for another day, but this is why so many people,

I mean, we're being topical, so obviously the Speaker of the House just got ousted for the first time in US history, first time in 235 years that we've had a Speaker. And I'm not getting into the rights and wrongs of it. But what you have is a group of people who are supremely ticked off at continuing resolutions. Continuing resolutions are technically illegal by Congress's own law. But Washington has been governing in the CR fashion for 25 years because we don't have single issue spending bills that they're

supposed to appropriate and legislate and vote on one at a time. And I think in my opinion, that has led to a fury amongst a lot of, I'm just talking about the American public, not the congressmen and women. And that to me combines with what you're seeing in the Ukraine and what you might see in Israel and Hamas and all these other places. And you just have to say, well, why can't we just have a working Congress and executive branch? And I mean, imagine if we were actually passing budgets the way we're supposed to be passing budgets, you would be able, I believe, to firmly reduce the number of waste in agencies and departments because you took it on head-on

and you had not kicked the debt ceiling can down the road yet again and not had another cr and omnibus omnibus is just fancy for here's a thousand pages of law you have one hour to vote on it i mean that's literally what an omnibus is and it covers every three-dollar agency you can imagine. How is that good governance? Now I'm not saying again it was right what happened on capital. That's not what I'm saying but these are the issues that have led to what we are now seeing and they're all colliding together. So I also think this is our rare moment in our history to course correct. And that's what I talk about in the book.

Film Courage Well, so maybe since we're talking about what happened in Congress, this unprecedented upheaval, let's call it in Congress right now, why don't we talk about where the silver lining of that is in a little more detail for you. Yeah. So I think people have now learned that a lot, there's a good chunk of this country that doesn't want to see this type of waste, financial waste.

And that's what we've been talking about. And a good amount of people have now learned how do we prevent that? How do we make it so Congress doesn't do this? It's not a Republican and Democratic thing. And so I think it's been a major civics education. So I think that's always good. The more Americans you can educate on how government works and how it could work and how it should work, I think is a massive win. But the flip side is also true. What if the Republicans install a speaker that is underperforms? You know, you've taken out a majority position.

And now what are we doing with just running government? Right. Is it going to stall for long? Maybe they get a better one. I don't know the answer to that. But that unknown. And from a political standpoint, I was talking to a lot of my friends who are elected officials,

a lot of their concern was the Republicans have a very small majority from their perspective. And what Kevin McCarthy was able to do, and I know this just from being around folks, is raise a prolific amount of money. And that's what it takes to win elections. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I'm just saying the reality is a lot of the seats that gave the Republicans the majority was because they went out there and hit the fundraising hard. And they were out there and able to travel and go through their districts and get with people and message and advertise. And that's what elections take. So their message to me back was, we're in jeopardy of losing the majority.

And that's the balance, right? That's, you know, what I keep telling people is, you can't have 100% of 100%. Our founding fathers never wanted this country governed in that fashion. And I try to tell people we shouldn't vote based on that fashion because you're never going to find another American who's 100% on 100%. And, you know, compromise is a big part of it. But what we're seeing in government these last few decades, that's not compromise. That's people being bought. That's outside influence coming in. That's Congress stalling everything from budget to constitutional oversight.

And you're just seeing a mechanical failure of the legislative, judicial, and executive branch. And I think it's come to a head. So I do tell people I think it's going to be a rough year. I think it's going to a head. So I do tell people, I think it's going to be a rough year. I think, you know, it's going to be a really rough year and I don't know what's going to happen in the next election cycle. But a lot's at stake and a lot, the reality of when things are so bad, you can find the solutions, but you just have to be in a position to implement them and we'll see how that goes. So I can't help but remember that the number one reform, overall reform that you mentioned

in your book is aggressive congressional oversight. I think that might be exactly what you said, right? So you know you've of course argued many times on Cash's Corner with me that that isn't happening. Yeah. Yeah, it's one I learned firsthand, you know, from my time running the Russiagate investigation. And then it's one I learned, again, from looking back into what Congress has been doing. When it came to the Democrats when they had the majority with the Jan 6 committee and it came to Republicans now bringing

it up to speed when they've had the majority and oversight investigations of DOJ and FBI. I've seen two different ways in which constitutional congressional oversight has been conducted and to me the Republicans have failed to meet the mark on a lot of factors. And again, the two-tier system of justice, this sort of deep state, is not just in the halls of justice and courtrooms. It's here in Congress, in our constitutional oversight. When you have individuals who are subpoenaed, who are holding senior positions in government, and they violate those subpoenas by not producing the documents constitutionally they owe to Congress under threat of subpoena,

not threat of subpoena, under the authority of the subpoena, and they violate them continuously, you're eroding the Constitution. You're setting it on fire. I mean, Congress has all but ceded its constitutional oversight authority to the executive branch that's supposed to report to them. These folks like Garland and Wray have come in and made it almost beneath them to go over there and testify. And then it takes a literal act of Congress to get one document from one subpoena, and it's 60% redacted. So the question is, why is Congress allowing this to occur? They've done some great work. There's been some brave whistleblowers.

Don't get me wrong. And a lot of these people are people I used to work with. But the amount they've left on the field, in my opinion, has left constitutional oversight and tatters in Congress. And, you know, maybe that's one thing the new speaker can perform better on. I just remember being a target of the Jan 6 committee and the first guy subpoenaed by it. And I have no problem with that. They could have just asked me to come in and I would have come in and told the truth. That's your job. But how they went after people who didn't show up for subpoenas or didn't cooperate or who didn't produce documents was

drastically different than what we've seen these last 10 months. And so that's why I just think, I thought in the last check was the judiciary, but that's a different conversation. Different in that, you know, they were very serious about doing it or? Well, they were, I think they were overly aggressive. I think, I think those committees abused their constitutional oversight authority to personalize and politicize and sort of mete out a weaponized system of justice from Congress. But they also showed you what the actual authorities are if you were to use them appropriately. And I haven't seen a lot of those authorities utilized here. And I talk about one in particular, fencing, taking pockets of money from agencies and departments that are not

doing the mission that are not serving congress's subpoenas that they've lawfully ordered and not providing the witnesses that congress wants to talk to and a lot of it always keeps coming back to the central note of you know how is that going to reflect in a current election cycle? And that's not the role of the executive branch to make that decision. So, you know, I really, I've told numbers of Congresses, I said, you need, you're doing some great work, but you really got to go all in and get aggressive because a lot of America has realized over these years that you are responsible for keeping these agencies and departments in check. And when you don't, the system fails. And a lot of the media

is okay with that because it advances a certain political narrative. And I think that's completely destructive to our constitutional republic. You know, this fencing of money, we've discussed it a number of times. I keep thinking about it, frankly, ever since, you know, frankly, ever since you applied it. This was before we met, right? And while you're still working for House Intel. But it just, I think, I mean, I can't, was it applied once? Were there other instances? I can't even remember. It really isn't something that's been used, but it seemed to be very effective. Yeah, and whether it's fencing, that's just a congressional terminology, or another mechanical maneuver in Congress to take pockets of money, you know, you need the Speaker's permission, and we only got it once, but we saw thousands of documents come in the next day. So it worked.

But this Congress, you know, when they issue these new CRs, these new budgets, they haven't trimmed any of the fancy government funded private jet rides or any of this. And I'm not talking about defunding the police or the FBI or the DOJ. I'm the guy that tells you you can't do that. But I'm the guy that tells you there's waste, fraud and abuse there. And why is this guy flying away on vacation on a G5 we pay for? You can't take that line item out of the budget and ground the jet until he at least complies with all the subpoenas that are out there. You can't say, no, you FBI are not going to get a new headquarters department that's twice the size of the Pentagon in Maryland until you reform this FBI? I mean,

this is simple stuff. And it begs the question, why hasn't Congress acted? They have the power of the purse. And I don't think they've used it to maximize constitutional oversight. It's another thing I talk about in the book. So what's your theory? On where it goes? to maximize constitutional oversight. It's another thing I talk about in the book. So what's your theory? On where it goes? No, your theory on why. I think a lot of it revolves around the lobbyist industry and the defense industrial complex.

A lot of it is, look, fundraising for campaigns. You know, what PACs are getting money from who and what companies and companies and you know are the Amazons and Googles and Facebook's and Twitter's of the world and every small company on down underneath them they're spending money to make sure laws go in place that help them increase their bottom dollar and that's part of the American process but I think it's overtaken the powers that members of Congress should be executing because they're beholden to these companies for that financing, for that funding to be reelected. And I think it's just gotten completely out of control.

Well, so the book is out. I have to say I really enjoyed it. I hadn't realized how important your adventure, our adventure at Cassius Corner was to helping kind of set up the broad swaths and themes and so forth. So it was great. It was a pleasure and an honor to see that. So I guess we talked a bit about it. It took a long time. You were done a lot earlier and we thought it would be published a lot earlier. Yeah. So you're right. Cassius Corner was critical. Epoch and the team here was, that was the fun part. Talking about every week, sitting down, what I did, what we can do better and how we go forward.

And we were able to stitch the book together in relatively short order. I think we wrote it in about three to four months. Finally, you know, wire to wire to the manuscript, final manuscript. And what really, this goes back to a central point of the book, the deep state, the administrative state is in just random places of government. So there's a book review process if you have a security clearance, which I'm all for. If you leave government, you submit the manuscript back and it takes two to three months. They want to make sure no private information is slipped or classified information. I got that. I used to be on that side doing it. It's totally fine. 10 months later, I mean, this is what happens. Your manuscript is frozen,

by the way. So when you submit it, and I submitted it now, the book is out in October of this year. I had finished my manuscript in October of last year. Just think about that for a second. Couldn't change it. But they wouldn't let me release it up until now. I have to file a federal lawsuit against the Biden administration and the nine agencies and departments they sent my manuscript for review. That's unheard of. It goes to the last station of service. For me, it would have been DOD. They sent it to eight more. When we pressed them on it, oh, there's a lot of classified stuff. We got to review this. You're talking about this operation and Baghdadi and Soleimani and hostages. And OK, well, you know, with my background, I think I was competent enough to make sure I didn't put in classified information. But if I did, just tell me what it is, block it

out or delete it and we'll move on. So after we finally filed the lawsuit, it was shocking to see how fast they worked then, they submitted it. And I think the math count on it is less than 0.05% of my book is redacted. And the words that are redacted, and I'll be able to tell you someday, me and my attorney literally were laughing out loud, which means to us, we knew the whole thing was a setup, a delay tactic, because what they redacted is completely meaningless. And so we just said, we'll accept these. And I actually, for the first time, I don't think anyone's ever done this in the history of government review. I took DOD's letter and I pasted it right into the front of the book so the American public can see what they tell you needs to be done and how they delayed the book. And I'm just glad it's out.

I don't know that I'll do it again, Jan. But I'm very thankful to the team at EPOC for making that a reality because it's hard to sum up 16 years. Well, Kash Patel, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks for having me back, my friend. This has been a delight for me. Thank you all for joining Kash Patel and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. Thank you.