Bulwark Takes - Kash Patel Is Dismantling FBI Counterintelligence (w/ Derek Owen & R.M Schneiderman)

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

Ben Parker is joined by Derek Owen and R.M Schneiderman to discuss their deeply reported investigation into how the FBI rebuilt its counterintelligence capabilities after decades of failure—and how ...Trump-world politics, Kash Patel, and shifting priorities could put America at risk. Read more from Owen and Schneiderman here: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/fbi-spent-generation-relearning-catch-spies-kash-patel-counter-intelligence-espionage-tulsi-gabbard-china

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show. Only at BetMGM. Access to the Price is right fortune pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,
Starting point is 00:00:21 please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hi, everybody. Ben Parker from The Bullwork. You may have seen this enormous, deeply reported, really interesting piece we posted, an article we posted on the Bullwork.com, all about how the FBI spent a generation re-learning how to catch spies, one of their primary jobs in the United States, and then came Cash Patel. And I'm so excited that Derek Owen and Ross Schneiderman are here. They are the people who dug deep in this story, talked to the people involved, wrote the whole history, wrote the whole history, found out what's going on, why we should all be pretty alarmed about it, and they're here to walk us through it. So, guys, we're going to do a deep dive. It's going to be real spy stuff and spy hunting stuff. So to start out, let's just set the basics. Like, top level, the FBI spent 20 years, according to the story you guys tell on this piece, doing what? A lot of this comes right after 9-11, in the aftermath of 9-11, where there was obviously, you know, I think there's been a lot of reporting, a lot of ink spilled about the changes in counterterrorism and, you know, all of that.
Starting point is 00:01:37 What's kind of less reported is about what's happening in counterintelligence, which is, you know, just as important. And there was a lot of stuff happening there. And it was coming out of the Louis Free years where there have been a lot of issues, a lot of dysfunction, they've been trying to solve. and moving essentially kind of big picture the Bureau was really trying to move from a sort of reactive stance to espionage so finding spies that are already there and figuring out what they're doing and arresting them
Starting point is 00:02:09 to a more proactive of okay we've got all these spies coming in we need to find out what they're looking for we need to set up trip wires we need to set up these proactive means to deter them to disrupt them before they even get going as much as possible And this is a response.
Starting point is 00:02:25 And this is where you guys really start out, which is like the Cold War ends, the Berlin Wall comes down. We're not doing like the cat and mass game with the Soviet Union anymore. And you talk about the years with Louis Free, you said it was director of the FBI. He says, we've got to get back to chasing criminals, putting guys behind bars. And you talk about more, you know, the more aggressive spies that are coming in. And a lot of the ones you focus on in the piece are from China. And there are all these scandals about Chinese spies stealing all sorts of things, but especially American nuclear technology as a nuclear weapons technology. So Derek, yeah, if you could talk a little bit more about
Starting point is 00:02:58 that. What were some of the big scandals that happened in the 90s about solar nuclear tech? Well, I think, you know, the one that everybody springs to mind and is very familiar to most people who at least lived at that time is all of the controversy around Wenho Lee. But what was, I think, the most interesting to us in talking to the people who lived through that and, you know, what the, you know, the concerns in Congress, what they were trying to do to address it is that was actually a small piece of a larger puzzle So Wenho Lee was the was the guy who worked at the Los Alamos Labs
Starting point is 00:03:30 he was deeply involved in researching nuclear technology and he was a tiny, Taiwanese born American is that right? And he got accused of espionage and then what happened? Well, there was, you know, they had some indication,
Starting point is 00:03:44 some intelligence that the Chinese might have gotten some key information about the W88, which is the most sophisticated U.S. warhead. It's the one that they, The significant thing out of it is really small. So you can put it on a trident missile and go in a submarine. And so this is like one of the critical legs of nuclear deterrence.
Starting point is 00:04:01 So this was a big deal. And that was developed at the LaSalle, almost national laboratory. And really that investigation took a long time to get going. And one of the reasons that it took a long time is there wasn't this whole idea of national priorities and sort of a FBI that was driven, at least for national security matters, from a kind of centralized, you know, command and control from headquarters. So, you know, well, hey, we might be losing our nukes here. Like, that's a big deal.
Starting point is 00:04:31 Like, from a national level, at the Albuquerque Alphas, counterintelligence was number four in the priority list. So they'd send reinforcements in, and these agents would be, you know, having to chase crimes on tribal lands and that sort of thing. So it was really slow to get going. And if you, and if things are slow to get going, you can miss things, you know,
Starting point is 00:04:50 eventually they zeroed in on when he'll lead like we mentioned but there might have been other stuff going on and and that's really the kind of the key thing is we just don't know they they lost the opportunity to find out and we don't know what happened and when ho lee was eventually uh i think he pled guilty to like a misdemeanor or something and he wasn't really convicted of espionage uh and uh you know we we promised we talk a little bit about cash patel we got this is what we're setting the groundwork so ross you know Derek talked about this a little bit but um this wasn't an issue with espionage, was an issue with how the FBI was thinking about its role. And that's a lot of what you get into in the piece. So it wasn't just the Wenho Li issue. It was a whole bunch
Starting point is 00:05:30 of Chinese nuclear espionage and other embarrassments for the FBI. So what happened inside the FBI where they looked at this problem and said, we've got to fix something. The biggest thing to understand is, you know, we're coming out of the Cold War. So at the time, it was all about, you know, Russian spies, Soviet spies, these one-on-one spy games. China was not seen as the type of sophisticated adversary that they are today. And so in this exact time period in which the FBI is decentralized kind of behind the curve in terms of their approach to counterintelligence, China is rising. China is figuring out they're getting a lot more sophisticated. They're figuring out how to steal what they want, both in terms of like these nuclear secrets that Derek was
Starting point is 00:06:14 talking about, but also in terms of economic espionage. So it was sort of the worst possible time for the U.S. to be stuck in this Cold War mindset. And you could see that in the, not only the Wenho Lee case, but the broader investigation into the, what had been stolen out of the, out of the lab. And so, you know, Wenholy was a, that investigation was a very small piece of a larger puzzle. And the FBI completely botched that as well.
Starting point is 00:06:43 And, you know, Wenholy ultimately, he ultimately was, it was, it was, convicted of like a misdemeanor. He accused the Bureau of racially profiling him. And he actually ended up suing various publications and the FBI and received, you know, a giant sum of money as a result saying that, you know, the FBI had leaked his name and conducted the investigation improperly. So there was this whole embryo in this, which was just an absolute disaster. And then we start getting into 9-11, basically. Yeah. So we get 9-11. And part of that is, you know, as as Derek said, it's a little bit of a more well-known story that, you know, Robert Mueller is less than a month
Starting point is 00:07:22 into his 10 years, FBI director, and all of a sudden, the world changes, right? It's not about going after the mob. It's not about the white-collar criminals. It's about national security, and national security first. And it's not about just investigating and punishing crimes. It's about proactively protecting the country from these threats. And, you know, the story you guys tell is one of people like Zadie, like Bigweeney, like others, whose names aren't really well-known, These are the people who transformed the way the FBI protects America from foreign spies. So how did that internal process in the FBI get started, Ross? Because that's a lot of what's in the piece of you guys reported.
Starting point is 00:08:01 Well, I'll let Derek take that part. But there's one aspect I wanted to make is that if you read all the great histories about this time period, you know, Tim Weiner's Enemies, which is a fantastic book. You also have another one by Ronald Kessler called Secrets at the FBI. this period is basically omitted, like counterintelligence is sort of an afterthought, which is somewhat telling in terms of, in some ways, in terms of how much counterterrorism dominated the landscape. But as we found out, these two sort of aspects of what the FBI does and the reform,
Starting point is 00:08:37 that the reforms that were made were completely intertwined and interconnected. And so we tried to tell the counterintelligence side of the story. And just a little backstory for, for viewers, how we got the story. Derek and I wrote a piece for Politico magazine about the mystery of the fourth man, which is sort of America's greatest espionage mystery. We didn't solve it, so no spoilers there. But it was basically about whether there was a high-level CIA spy or a high-level Soviet spy or spies inside the CIA at this time period. And one of the people that we talked to about that investigation was the assistant director for counterintelligence at the time, David's 80.
Starting point is 00:09:19 And in that conversation that Derek had with him, he started talking about these reforms. And we were like, huh, what reforms? Tell us more, please. And so, Derek, I'll let you take it for beer. Yeah, no, I'll just, I'll pivot back into your question then. But it was really interesting because, yeah, we, you know, it took quite a long time to work through a bunch of sources in the Bureau even to get. to Zadie and get enough sort of kind of trust to talk to him. But in the middle of that, he, he basically, this is very Zadie. He took pictures of this brochure, this internal document from 2005 about the program
Starting point is 00:09:54 on his phone and emailed those to me and said, hey, this will be, this will be helpful for our next discussion. And I'm like, this is interesting. This is outside of what we're doing. So wait a minute. This guy, you were asking him questions about FBI counterintelligence, this is pretty closely guarded stuff and he goes here let me take out my phone camera take pictures of this FBI internal document from 20 years ago right but not classified not classified so well like here let me just
Starting point is 00:10:22 pull this off the shelf right and it's from 20 years ago and like here's what we said 20 years ago about counterintelligence yes and I was like holy cow this is interesting this guy's got a story to tell and whatever that is we're going to dig into it right and so one of the and so I went out to Montana. I met with Zadie. I talked to him. I interviewed him, you know, a little bit about the other story, but mainly about this. And he gave me a name. He's like, you've got to talk to this guy, Tom McQueenie. I mean, I've never heard of this person. I want to pause on Zadie just a little bit. Because one of the things that you guys hint at, he's such a character. It sounds like and one of the things you guys hint at in the piece is that like we're talking about a lot
Starting point is 00:11:01 of the things that Trump administration is doing. And a lot of the things that are happening in the FBI because of the mass deportations and a lot of the internal battles between the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence between Cash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, right? All these sort of Trump world people. But a lot of people you talk to, they're Trump fans. They're Trump voters, right? Some of these FBI people. Tell us more about that. Well, yeah, I mean, Zadie is a, you know, big proponent of Trump. He likes them. You know, he likes a lot of the stuff that he's doing. I think in a way, I mean, Zadie's such an iconoclast, you know, he's such a unique individual. he probably kind of there's a little bit of kind of sees a little bit of that you know it's somebody who cuts against the grain um but i think the thing that you know is of concern
Starting point is 00:11:44 i mean when you get to some of these matters things that really matter for national security right you know we're not talking about some of these like loopy things that patel might be doing or whether they matter or don't matter i mean this is like you know life and death you know war winning war stopping stuff we're not talking about pull-ups here you know right Right. So, yeah, they care a lot about it. They want to spotlight on it. And like, you know, with this question of priorities, which was such an issue in terms of the dysfunction in the 90s, you know, do we have the same priorities down? You know, is counterintelligence still a top priority for the Bureau? Because it was, you know, forever, counterterrorism number one, counterintelligence number two. Are we returning to the years, you know, the pre-9-11 years where, you know, as Frank Montoya, one of our sources told us, counterintelligence was considered the rubber gun squad you know that was the place they were great obviously counterintelligence agents but it was kind of seen as less sexy was a place where you sent the new guys or the guys you didn't know what to do with um and that was the reputation that had to
Starting point is 00:12:47 be transformed and reverting back to that era would be a disaster for the fbi so when when derrick was talking about this story with me it was kind of it was kind of a difficult story because it's a process story and process and reform and honestly they can be kind of boring sometimes but they're really important. And you guys made it exciting. Yeah, you guys made it exciting. Like, you have this great story. So Zady and a bunch of the other guys, you could read about it in this piece on the bulwark. You can go into all the details. They sell the director of the FBI in their plan. We're going to re-centralize. We're going to create a hub in headquarters in Washington, D.C., to coordinate these spy cases. So as these people are moving from state to state,
Starting point is 00:13:25 from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, we can cooperate with the whole government. We can cooperate between field offices. That's their whole plan. And they have to sell it to the people who actually implement it, right? Which is the heads of the 56 FBI field offices around the country. So this is such a great quote that you guys highlight in there. They call in not their biggest allies in the bureau, but the people they expect to be their biggest opponents, right? And Zadis up there and he's making his pitch. And what is their biggest opponent, and a special agent named Matthews, what does he say? Because I just love this moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Zadis, he's got the pitch. He's whining up.
Starting point is 00:14:00 He's talking about terrorism. That'll kill you in a second to like a heart attack, but there's this other cancer. And, you know, he's a, you know, people like Favreau's associate says that, he says like, I've seen him give that pitch, you know, a thousand times, and he slays every time, you know. That was kind of part of Zadis thing, is he could really communicate this stuff, right?
Starting point is 00:14:19 And so at the end of it, he's starting to say, okay, this is the stuff we're going to do. And Matthews is like, and everybody's like, oh boy, here's this crusty old guy who, thinks counterintelligence is just a bunch of eggheads and losers and never gets anything done and we don't even need it. What's it for? And he says, you know, hey, Dave, if all this bullshit you're talking about is true, why the fuck aren't you in there pounding on Mueller's desk asking for more resources? And Zadie's like, you're right. I should be. That's a good point. And then,
Starting point is 00:14:50 and then he did. And he got it. And, and, you know, it's like the old, you know, cliche, you get what you pay for right uh and yeah um i think what's important about watching this process and the sausage being made is like so often we look at the institutions in our government and we're at this point where you know you people are like clamoring for this radical change both you know on the right what you're seeing with trump is is is very radical and then you have some people on the far left who are looking for a radical change in different ways and i think a lot of people are like folks of the bulwark are kind of stuck being the institutionalists. And it's like, how do you argue for things to be better while being like,
Starting point is 00:15:35 but we're not saying this, everything to say exactly the same. Like, that's not what we're saying. We're saying, like, let's not throw out every good thing about the American government as we try to make these changes. And this story to us was like a perfect bulwark story because it's a window into that, into those changes and into that process and like how to create important changes while like not throwing out all the things that are already worked. working. And we're at this inflection point right now with what's happening in the FBI.
Starting point is 00:16:02 Like, it's almost like all our sources were like, it's like Groundhog Day all over again. Because what Zaney had to go up against after he was able to sell this plan to the FBI is they had to go and sell it to Congress at a time where counterintelligence was not really trusted in Washington and was also seen as like, you know, not the brightest bulbs, so to speak. at the FBI. And similar things are going on today right now with how Congress, particularly Representative Crawford, is championing a bill to basically strip the FBI of its counterintelligence function, which is the exact same thing that happened in this time period that we're talking about. So the parallels are very clear. Yeah, so let's talk about this. There are basically two patterns you get to in the piece about sort of problems from the past coming back. And one of them we talked about is that the FBI just isn't focused on this mission. It's not focused on
Starting point is 00:17:02 counterintelligence anymore. We know none of the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Cubans, and even some of our allies, are spying in America as feverishly and intensely as they ever have before. Instead, for the first time ever, you have FBI agents out on the streets enforcing immigration law, which is not something the FBI has ever done. You have these guys who are highly trained experts and how Chinese spies operate, how Russian spies operate, and they're off, like, on the streets rounding people up. The other issue
Starting point is 00:17:33 you guys bring up is that the FBI has always been America's premier counterintelligence agency, right? The rest of the intelligence community, all the other agencies have the sort of internal counterintelligence shops, but the FBI's are the ones who actually put the handcuffs on the bad guy.
Starting point is 00:17:50 And now the proposal is to take that responsibility and place it under the Director of National Intelligence. So, Derek, if you could talk a little bit about why people think that's a good idea and why people think that's a bad idea. What are the arguments for and against that? Yeah, I mean, you kind of broke it down. I think there's a little bit nuanced to, like, a lot of these things, right? You know, even in terms of like the immigration thing, it's like,
Starting point is 00:18:13 well, you know, as far as what the actual man hours or resources or how that breaks up, like, we don't know, but certainly if some of this data from Warner's office or if some of these things that we've heard talking to people who recently left the bureau or if people have contact with people in the bureau are true, well, it is really important that we ask the questions, right? I mean, that's, you know, as far as the, the DNI piece, I probably couldn't speak too well to the argument for it, but I think the argument is against it is like, you're taking something. So counterintelligence domestically is the FBI's purview, foreign is the CIA, but domestically, if we're talking about moving
Starting point is 00:18:55 that authority, you're adding an extra layer of bureaucracy, and you're removing the actual decision-making from the people that are on the ground that are doing it. And the point from these guys are making is you want to have that there in the Bureau, in the agency that does it, because you want to be able to be tactical, strategic, you need to be agile. And if you're adding that extra thing or like removing the authority or, you know, in any way sort of diminishing that capacity, you're making what is already a very, very difficult, difficult job that much harder. And I think the counter argument that Crawford's office would make is that, you know, you have all these different intelligence agencies and the DNI is already sort of like,
Starting point is 00:19:42 I don't know, Derek, could you describe them as like the project manager of the intelligence agencies? You know, they're mostly doing like coordination. They're not actually like hunting spies, but they're working with all the, the military and the CIA and others. So the idea would be not that they, they're suddenly out there necessarily making arrests, but like they would set the strategy for the FBI. They would be in charge of that sort of strategic and sort of implementation function of it. The FBI's kind of argument would be like, well, that could be a slippery slope. That adds another layer of bureaucracy.
Starting point is 00:20:20 And do we want this intelligence agency that, you know, isn't really tied to the Justice Department at all and the, you know, the restrictions laid out by the Constitution, you know, more involved in our intelligence agencies. Like there's a, you know, a long history of the FBI, you know, violating people's civil liberties, doing all these things. We, you know, remember the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, from 191919, you know, into the 1920s where, you know, leftist radicals were rounded up without evidence, you know, you, there's co-intel pro in the 1960s. in which anti-war protesters and civil rights leaders were basically spied on and manipulated by the FBI. And that's a pretty ugly history. And I think it's a history that people in the Bureau today take very seriously. And they don't want a return to that. And so anything that feels like it could be maybe even headed remotely in that direction, people are very wary of. And I don't think that's the direction that Crawford's office or the DNI would want to go in. I just want to make that clear, but people are concerned about those civil liberties matters.
Starting point is 00:21:26 Yeah, you guys broke a little bit of news in this story, which is mostly history, but there had been reporting over the last couple months that the office of the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard's office, was sort of pushing this reform and saying, like, hey, we should really be in charge of counterintelligence. It shouldn't be located in the FBI. We should be overseeing it. And when you guys contacted her and said, hey, look, what do you think of this bill that does exactly that?
Starting point is 00:21:49 just passed the committee in the House, they said, oh, no, we don't, we don't support that. We're actually, we're actually not in favor of this at all. So we'll see if that ends up going anywhere. I don't know if that's breaking news so much as like being gaslit. It's unclear to me. We'll have to see. But, yeah, we were very, we were very surprised by that response. And when I asked Gabbard's spokesperson to point me to examples in the media in which they said,
Starting point is 00:22:15 have said from the beginning that we are against this, you know, because the Trump administration is apparently against this. I did not receive a response. So I think that's also very telling. This article you guys wrote is super long and super detailed. You know, I just, I want to mention that there's another great spy story that we don't even have time to get into here, which is Chi Mack. And you guys tell the story of this Chinese spy who was selling secrets. That's selling. He was sending secrets back to Beijing and, and how the FBI sneaked into his house in the middle of the night and found little slips of paper where he had been writing down secrets and, um, and nailed them. I mean, they convicted it. It was great. Um, but I also know there's a ton of stuff
Starting point is 00:22:57 that did not make it into the piece that got lost in the cutting room floor. So, uh, if you guys could each just share one thing you learn, one thing you heard, uh, that didn't make it, um, you know, what, what are the little tidbits that you wish had made it into the piece for Ross, we can start with you. Oh, man. Well, you know, it's funny. I think I got really obsessed with the sort of 90s area technological buggles that the FBI made. I mean, Derek had to keep cutting this out every time I tried to keep adding it in before we even filed. But, you know, Tim Weiner has all these great anecdotes in his book about, like, how many different steps that you needed to send an email when you were at the FBI pre-9-11. It was like something like to said, like you couldn't get like external internet.
Starting point is 00:23:43 Like people were buying their own computers and using them in the office. It was just, it was, it was the most hilarious stuff if it wasn't so, you know, fucking serious considering, you know, the importance of technology at the time. So we kind of cut a lot of that and consolidated it, just kind of noting that at the time that technology and digital technology was becoming so important when, when Louis Free was the head of the FBI, the FBI was not moving ahead the way it should have been. It was sort of ant, it was sort of like, you know, a bunch of Luddites, basically. So that's one thing that I found kind of fascinating, hilarious, alarming, that didn't quite get the detailed treatment. But if you want to read more about it, Tim Wander's book is a great place to start. It's called Enemies. Yeah, I hope it's a lot better now.
Starting point is 00:24:30 I hope they can send emails. Geez. Derek, what about you? If you'll do it all, I got two things. Yeah, sure. Let's hear. The first one is, Sadie talked about this poster that he had. I think this goes to the whole kind of like a lot of the rhetoric about like, you know, the FBI, like, oh, you know, let's go be cops and we need to, you know, focus on crime.
Starting point is 00:24:51 And he had this poster and it basically said, you know, burglaries affects individuals, bank robberies effects communities, counterintelligence affects the world. And it's like a mushroom cloud, right? This is like this speaks to the stakes. And so when we were, you know, kind of trying to visualize that, that's kind of how we started working with this opening and this whole. layered attack and all the stuff. There's a guy named Paul Joel, who's done a lot of work in terms of drones. He's very involved in the Ukraine thing.
Starting point is 00:25:21 There's a link to one of his 22, 2022 article about the weaponization of commercial drones. So that, it was, you know, that whole thing and then kind of some of the stuff from the Rand report was, hey, what does this kind of like worst case scenario
Starting point is 00:25:37 look like? What are we talking about? What are the stakes? I mean, I think, I wish we had a chance to include that poster because it's just so great, but we wanted to do the updated version for 2025. The other thing, which is, you know, was always interesting to me was how, you know, a lot of it talked about this intelligence reform, you know, in 2004 in the wake of the 9-11 Commission, and there was a lot of emphasis on, you know, we need the FBI to do better, better intelligence there, we need them to become a member of the intelligence community, they
Starting point is 00:26:11 They need to become essentially an intelligence agency. And what Zadian company, and even before that, McQueenie and Bryant, and it's, you know, what's all putting into place were kind of the, some of the groundwork for that was already being laid. And one of the things that Favro talks about is like, this is like a big battleship and it takes a while to turn it. But certainly, I think one of the things that was, you know, the FBI set up an intelligence directorate when they started getting, like, after the IRTPA came out. Favro was named the head of that, and what was interesting is he didn't, in his view, he wasn't really a guy that would have been considered to be an assistant director, but because he had been so involved in this domain idea that Mueller picked him, because that was the key stuff. Everything that they were doing in domain flowed right into them, the intelligence director. These are some of the missing pieces of history that, you know, I think we're just beginning to kind of like peel apart here.
Starting point is 00:27:09 Wait, but Derek, are you going to tell the Halloween story or what? I mean, you got to tell the Halloween story. Someone's going to tell the Halloween story. So, so, so, yeah, the Halloween story. This is, this was in the, when I was out in Montana, Zaddi told me the story and always stuck with me because, you know, one of the things I got to do with this domain program is, you know, it's all about sources and getting, you know, knowing the mind of the enemy. But a lot of that is we have to, we have to build awareness in our institutions and, you know, the DOD and contractors and academic institutions, right? Because, you know, this is where a lot of the technology
Starting point is 00:27:48 that goes into our military comes from. So Dave, I guess he thinks it was about 2004. I mean, he's on the road a lot, you know, talking about this sort of stuff. So he's at UC Berkeley, happens to be Halloween. He's coming from this talk that he was given to the School of Journalism just because he's just trying to get everybody's awareness up on the subject. And he's walking across, you know, campus and it's, you know, FBI kind of off the rack suit.
Starting point is 00:28:13 All the kids are like, you know, probably high on like whatever it is, they're dosing or smoking or whatever, all dressed up in their Halloween. You know, it's UC Berkeley and all these kind of crazy liberal kids. And they're like, hey, what's, what's your costume supposed to be? And he's like, well, I'm dressed as an FBI agent, you know, it's just kind of. It's an easy, it's an easy costume. It's an easy costume. Didn't take a lot of work, you know. So that was a lot of the stuff that we sort of left on the cutting room floor.
Starting point is 00:28:45 And I think what it really speaks to is like, if you listen to Cash Patel before he gets, before he becomes FBI director, one of the things he says is like he wants to take FBI agents, send him out over the country, get them out of Washington, go be cops. Forget about all this intelligence nonsense. sense. So essentially what he's saying is all those reforms that, like, the Bureau did for like 20 years, again, not saying that they're perfect, not saying that they shouldn't be changed. In fact, they need to be updated for the modern AI era. Let's get those out of here. And that's... Or at least the rhetoric is we're not focused on them. Right. Right. Fair. Fair. You know, I mean, as to what's actually going on, I think... Yeah. They are still doing counterintelligence. It's just a question of how much time, how much focus are they spending? on it and what are their priorities you know like ben if i are to tell you that every two weeks you were uh instead of you know editing 9000 word stories for the bulwark you're going to just go and deliver amazon packages for a whole day i think that's going to affect your job in a serious way um so you know uh in in our case it just means somebody doesn't get a hot take in the case of the bureau it might mean that you're not catching a spy or stopping America's enemies from stealing our secrets.
Starting point is 00:30:08 Yeah, it is definitely a, you know, warning lights or blinking red kind of piece. Again, it's on the bulwark.com. The FBI spent a generation relearning how to catch spies, then came Cash Patel by Derek Owen and Raus Schneiderman. Guys, thank you so much for writing the piece. Thanks for talking to me about it. And we are only able to bring you these deeply reported, really interesting. deep dives because of the support of our Bullwark Plus members.
Starting point is 00:30:35 So if you're watching this and it's not your first Bullwork video or you're going to watch a bunch of other Bullwork videos that you like the Bullwork, consider going to Bullworkplus, bulwark.com becoming a Bullwork Plus member. Also like the video, subscribe to the channel, all that good stuff. Derek, Ross, thanks so much for chatting me. Thanks, Ben.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.