Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Chris Piehota - Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Chris Piehota, a former FBI Special Agent who served as one of the bureau's top career executives, discusses the dramatic changes he witnessed in the FBI during his 25-year career. Author of Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew, Chris reveals the internal challenges that have led to the FBI's current crisis of trust, including leadership failures, cultural erosion, and operational missteps. He provides a firsthand account of how the FBI transformed after September 11, 2001, and how those shifts have led to the agency's diminished reputation. From claims of political polarization to public calls for disbandment, Piehota shares why the FBI is struggling to regain the credibility it once had and what it will take to restore public faith in this vital institution. Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew - https://a.co/d/blXwtj9  

Good morning, everybody. Welcome back. If you have a video, you can tell I have a beanie on, because it's beanie season here in Montana. Yeah, it turned for winter. About in the last 24 hours, rain became snow and hopefully it's game on. Two things to talk about before we get in today's episode. One of them is obviously going to be the Black Rifle Coffee advertisement read. Before that, though, let's talk a little bit about intellectual property. Intellectual property rights are the backbone of American innovation, economic growth, and national security. By defending these rights, we secure our place as a global leader in technology, safeguard our economy, and protect American ingenuity from foreign adversaries like China. And if you're like me, I don't think a lot about intellectual property because I don't feel like I have any. But China's IP theft costs the U.S. economy about $600 billion annually. And China is now leading the U.S. in 37 of 44 critical technologies that will define the future, including AI, space exploration, and advanced manufacturing.

There's also an increased dependence on foreign producers. Weak IP protections only make it harder to maintain our technological leadership. So what can be done? What can we do to strengthen our position? Well, there are some pro-innovation policies. Congress could pass legislation like the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, Pera, and the Prevail Act to strengthen IP protections. We can work to bolster agencies like the Small Business Administration, SBA,

and the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the NIST. And more than anything, your average person on the street, like me and you, we can just think a little bit more about where we are sourcing things from, whether that's product or data and start protecting our critical intellectual property. Now, let's get into who makes this episode possible and the podcast for that matter. That's right. It's black rifle coffee. This shouldn't shock you. Right now, there is a Black Rifle Friday. I was about to say Black Rifle Coffee. It's Black Rifle Friday.

Largest product drop of the year. Okay, shop now. Let's just click on that and go down the rabbit hole here. Trash Panda sticker wearing a pair of bino nods. I like that very much. Ooh, give me coffee or give me death mug. I'm digging that. All right. So, and for those of you with video, hopefully you can just see, I'm just scrolling down here. They have, oh, what is this? Electric Kettles? Damn. New t-shirts, new mugs, new stickers, new patches. Ooh, a little spirit of 76. Loyal Spirit Coffee blend. Okay. They have a lot of stuff on the website right now that is a new release and like they say right there, the largest

drop of the year. Black Rifle Friday is probably going to be active right now or at the very least four days after this episode comes out on Monday. So if you want to support the podcast, the best thing you can do is help me support my friends that make this podcast possible over at Black Rifle Coffee. That's it. That's all the business stuff up front. Let's get into my guest for today. He is a repeat guest. His name is Chris Piotta. He served for 25 years in the FBI and under a variety of directors all the way up to being one of the six, my words not necessarily his department heads of the FBI. They're trunched off into six categories. He was over in the science and technology side of the house. You want to talk about somebody who understands how the FBI operates and has operated. He just wrote a book

called Wanted, the FBI I Once Knew. And we had a pretty interesting conversation about the FBI that he started working in and what the FBI has become. I'm going to give you some wavops of things that we covered. He reached out and I made sure that we covered each of these, but everything from the FBI handling of the Hunter Bider laptop case, crossfire hurricane investigation and possible Russian collusion. The revision of the FBI is 2020 crime data reports, FBI retaliation against whistleblowers, DOJ FBI payouts for sexual discrimination. Yeah.

Questioned FBI intelligence and surveillance focus and the FBI use of the Trump questionnaire by its headquarters security division. Among other things, fantastic episode. I love sitting now with people like Chris who can talk about the agency from soup to nuts, from walking in to being almost up at the apex,

the upper asterons of the FBI. So let's get into it. Hope you enjoy the episode with Chris Piot. I'm looking at danger. close now. I'm all right. Wait a minute. And I was looking at saying that's that's not FBI protocol. That, you know, you don't show up looking like bums.

I mean, I'm going to be honest. There were some seal protocol that I adhered to sparingly. Yeah. But one of the things for us was, like when you showed up to put people at rest, you showed him your credentials, you say, hey, we're from the local FBI office. Whoever, this is my partner, whoever. You're dressed in suits generally. And then people are like, okay, okay.

You know, it's like now you get these two guys who look like they rolled out of a bowling alley. That's actually how problems can start as well. You get somebody who's a little bit, not necessarily anti-authoritarian, but maybe they're a little bit apprehensive. This guy was waiting for him. He was loaded for bear, man. Oh, that's a horrible, horrible idea. So instead of, it was just, he owned these two guys. Okay.

Michael, have you been able to find this? I found something. I don't know if it's the right one. I mean, Chris will be able to tell us. Yeah. Yeah, you got nice. This is a bigger place, huh? This one? No.

No. Do you know where it was? I saw it on X, but I'm sure it was everywhere. I'm just trying to think a lot of times, so if you went on YouTube, what would you put on there? Look up FBI visits home for social media posts. Oh, yeah. It's going to give you a lot of, well, it wouldn't be the FBI, but that's going to net you a lot of European traction recently. Dude, but they're throwing people in jail for fucking social media posts? are out of control. I know.

There they are. There's this one? Okay. I can bring it up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think it was these two comedians here. Before we get into that, though, we got a good start. Oh, yeah.

We have a good start. So Chris was talking about how he listened to the episode with my dad, which you were in the room for. Oh, yeah. And did I chastise my dad for, like, the inappropriate conversations he has with Connor sometimes? Like, stop talking about music. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay.

So apparently on Monday, the day that the episode came out, which is two days ago. Two days ago. Jesus, it's been one of those weeks. Yeah. He goes down to the coffee shop downstairs, which I've told him many times the customer side of the shop is upstairs. But he follows no rules. This man will not be told what to do. Goes down there and says to her, when did we ever have a talk about being naked?

And then Connor starts laughing and Gala asks, what were you guys doing about talking about talking about being naked. What he does? Well, oh, I went fishing one time. Then he immediately laterals into he just left the gym. And apparently said, I'll use relatively polite language. Oh, there was this woman in there that was so well endowed. I would have paid money to see her getting up off the floor.

So clearly nothing is listened to by this man. He is out of, he's out of fucking control. But you know what? It's beautiful. He's at that point in his life where none of that matters and he doesn't care. I have to deal with this shit. Everybody thinks he's like Calispell Santa Claus. I'm like, I have to fucking deal with this guy.

Yeah, but you're the cleanup crew at this point, right? Here's the cleanup crew. All right. Here we go. What do we got here? You're part of a regime. Oh, yeah, we're good to go. Okay.

You're part of a regime. FBI visits citizens home. Okay. So before we even watch this, is there anything in the FBI's charter other than a direct threat? Like if you were to make a threat, hey, I'm going to kill so and so that the FBI would ever want to or be authorized to come to you. your house. That's a difficult situation because what you're looking at is is the FBI does interact with the public, right? Yeah. We do go out and talk with folks and we do make sure that our dialogue with them is friendly. We don't just show up at the end of a law enforcement action. So sometimes if there's

a potential threat, if there's a potential for any kind of violence or negative outcome, sometimes the FBI will come out and say, we have a duty to warn you. Or, hey, can you tell us about this post because it was received poorly somewhere as maybe maybe. Because you said you were going to kill everybody in Philadelphia. Right. It wasn't very graceful and people were scared by it, especially in today's society. So it can happen, but I would say that the rule in my FBI that when I was there was it was probably the exception, not the rule. Okay.

And if you were going to do so, we were talking about this slightly before we went live, you're probably going to be in a suit. You're going to identify yourself credentials. That's kind of the protocol you're going to follow. Generally, you'll see FBI folks will show up. They'll be dressed in business attire, which for the FBI is, you know, the uniform is a suit. Yeah. You'll, and they'll introduce themselves, and they'll show their credentials. And they'll start telling you why they're there and ask if, you know, you have time to talk.

And it's a very cordial thing with the FBI. It used to be. So I'm not sure about these gentlemen. Let's take a look at it, Michael. You guys making six figures? Factor in 50% expenses. overhead, maybe 100% expenses.

Talking about burning a couple hundred dollars an hour just here, let alone all the time you guys are spending to invest in a time you know is not against the law, right? Like you're familiar with... So then why would you come? No, you're coming because you're part

of a regime that does this kind of thing when you know laws aren't being broken. And that's an embarrassment, man. Didn't you guys read the Constitution? Do you not believe in America? Fuck. Everything about that. that sucks. It was, it was disappointing to watch those two people, the supposed

agents, they weren't prepared to talk to this gentleman. He obviously was waiting for him. Well, and he also has a camera in his hand, which I don't think should change behavior, but it puts those guys on their heels instead of on their toes. Well, I'll tell you one thing. Honestly, back in when I was still working street agents, cameras were kryptonite for federal agents. When someone started back in those days, though, there really weren't the smartphones and everything, people would actually just start taking pictures of cameras and all this kind of thing. And it was kryptonite. You know, you didn't want to be there. You didn't want to be recognized. You didn't want to be identified by image. Yeah. Because of certain things you were trying to do elsewhere.

And now you were identified as a federal agent. You really couldn't, your effectiveness in certain capacities was reduced. For sure. When he was asking about wanting to see the last name, what are the actual legal requirements for an officer or an agent, in this case, an FBI agents to identify themselves? It's not a legal requirement. It's a policy thing. Okay. So for police officers, all the only identification they generally have is a badge. Yeah. I had a badge and a set of credentials with my name and my picture and, you know, it says that I was there. It's a ID card. Essentially. You know, officer of the government. So it's not a, it's not a legal requirement, but it is a policy that, you know, you're interacting with the public. You're a public servant. And you're a

you would identify yourself. So it should never be combative. The only time it happened that I would see that it got combative was when someone said, can I hold your credentials? Can I hold your badge? That's a little weird. It is.

And the problem that it was, why it was so, it was a problem because what happens if they ran back in their house with your credentials? I mean, I bet you can get another one. Yeah, you could, but you'd also have to explain

back in the office, why that happened. Now someone has a set of federal credentials, and they're yours. Also with your badge or any other identification, and then you have someone in their home, they won't come out. It turns into a really negative situation. I will also tell you there was a policy that you don't allow people. They'll say, can I take a picture of your credentials? No.

Because that can be replicated. Now you can have contraband or fictitious federal credentials. Yeah. I can understand why they wouldn't want to give first and last name. Oh, no, we never had a problem given first and last name. You know, that whole, if I came to your home and you said, hey, who am I talking with? And I would say, I'm a federal agent. Okay, we're off to a good start.

Yeah. Right? If I was building any rapport, if I expected you to be helpful or receptive on any level, that my stock just fell. No, because, I mean, if I'm being totally honest, my response would probably be, like, what, Department of Sanitation? Right. Like, department and go, fuck yourself. Like, what are we talking about? Yeah.

Yeah. The relationship starts off. poorly. So by being, you know, hey, my name is Chris Pajota. I'm a federal officer with the local FBI. It just, you know, I mean, it's at kind of first, first interaction. So it was more policy-based. Did you ever figure out or have you heard how that engagement actually ended? Because obviously, it's edited. It ended well. That guy, the homeowner, kind of tongue lashed them a little bit more. And they just turned around and walk back to their car. Ooh, that's a victory for the YouTube crowd.

Oh, yeah, yeah. When it was on X and all the other social media platforms, you know, Homeowner 1, FBI, Zero. Now, does the FBI take something like that? And will they put that into a training protocol where they can show younger agents, hey, potentially be prepared for something like this? Or this is the type of, especially as technology is increasing, right? And we can all be live or whatever it may be, you know, reporting or recording. I mean, I would hope that the agency is evolving their agents for situations like that because that to me seems like it's going to be more normal than abnormal in the future.

They probably have some level of training. I would say, though, just from my previous experience, it's probably not widespread. It's not standardized. It's probably more training agent mentor based. It's probably not a bureau-wide protocol of training. Now, when I used to always tell people, before I left the organization,

always assume you're being listened to and recorded. Yeah. I mean, always assume it because that's the world we started living in. Everybody was carrying around pretty much professional grade electronics. Settings on this thing are ridiculous. They're better than broadcast cameras. Seriously. They're incredible.

So I always told people, assume that you're being recorded, assume that there's a phone that is listening in somebody's pocket, whatever the situation might have warranted. But the training might not be, as standardized and available as I would like to see. Yeah. What was the backstory and what they were there for? What type of social media post was it?

I never heard that on some of the clips that I saw. I just know that they were there over some kind of a social media interaction. Michael, would you do a little peripheral dive? What did you find here? So I think that's it right below. Oh, anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero. Oh, man. The First Amendment is it's not about.

about what people are able to say. It's about what you can tolerate other people saying, in my opinion. It is, it's, it's the person saying something that boils your blood and makes you want to throw up in your mouth and you recognizing that's the right. I mean, he's not necessarily calling for, and again, I'm not a fucking expert on what is calling for violence or reason. That's a, it's a douchebag saying to say about anybody, but that's a fucking protected right. And that's the point. We live in a time now where there's such a risk of. to anything happening and the FBI and other federal or law enforcement protective agencies,

they don't want to be left holding the bag saying you had this information, you didn't follow up, you didn't do a duty to warn, you didn't go and check on this. And that's led to many problems for the federal law enforcement profession because people would then say, well, you knew there was a problem, you didn't do anything if there was a, if there was an actual shooting. And one of the problems in our society, though, is that we've moved away from the most reasonable person standard to the most sensitive person standard. I would agree with that for sure. And that has made things much more difficult because now you're not looking at what

is the majority of reasonable people think? Well, that's internet nonsense. Yeah. But the most sensitive people are saying, this person is pushing violence. Where are the authorities? So a hard, tightrope for them to walk in some instances. I feel like the beer was having a slow day that day. How would say, and without, I mean, I don't obviously tell me anything or anybody else, something you're not supposed to you.

How would a tweet, or what is that even on? Is that X? It looks like it is on, who knows. How would that rise to landing at an agent's desk anyway? The, it could have been a tip. Somebody could have called it into the FBI's tip line. They have a 1-800-call FBI, right? But, I mean, wouldn't they have to determine the actual identity of the agency?

individual on X, their address, all of these things. So somebody's doing a little bit of background. Yeah, and that individual may have been very easily identifiable by himself. I mean, my name is in my bios. That'd be a real tough one. And take a real sleuth to put that together. Right. FBI could probably handle that one. I think a sixth grader could handle that one. Right. But, you know, a lot of times, they'll just call to the, you know, whoever's hosting the platform and say, hey, there was a potential issue of violence. And sometimes they'll give you the information on those grounds. Yeah.

Or sometimes they'll say, hey, can you give us legal process? We'll give it to you, depending on what it is. All right. And then these two guys drew this short straw that day. I mean, you can tell neither of them are incredibly stoked to be there. The guy on the left is less stoked than the guy on the right. Yeah, that didn't seem like a high priority part of the day. But again, you know, they're going out and doing due diligence.

Yeah. And, you know, they can go back and say, We made contact and this person, you know, didn't, you know, they'd give you the usual, didn't appear to be an immediate threat. It was non-cooperative, to say the least. Yeah. You know, I can only imagine the volume. Let's assume that that rises to a threshold where an agent or an agency of some kind

is going to take a look at that state or federal. Right. The internet, as you know, is the Wild Wild West. And you could just be firing away all day long on stuff like that. I don't, there's probably more people riding things in that vein on both sides of the aisle because I've certainly seen the inverse of that as well. Of course. And I feel like there's more people writing that stuff than agents, even possible to go out and investigate those things.

Right. And also you have not just the FBI, but if it threats against the, you know, sitting vice president, sitting president, now you have Secret Service has interest. And so other people have interest as well. I used to go out with my partner on the Joint Terrorism Task Force was a Secret Service guy. So I used to go out with him on some of these, what they would call kind of just an interview. But somebody wrote that they wanted to do harm to whoever the sitting president was. Secret Service says, okay, we got to go out and see if they have means, motive, such and so.

Is this a real threat or is this somebody just kind of barking into a keyboard? And how do you determine if it's a real threat? And I'm looking at this through the lens of the assassination attempt on Trump. Right. What was that kid 20 years old? So let's say you're as an agent, you roll up and you see a mentally disturbed 20 year old kid. But does that mean he's got access to a rifle? Does that mean that dude is actually going to go get on a roof somewhere?

That is such a tenuous, how do you determine one over the other? Yeah. And in today's world, you have to err on the side of possibly not taking him into custody, but maybe being in his company. for a while. Yeah. Right. And you have to talk with them. You've got to figure out what's going on. And the penalty for being wrong was Butler, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Right. That was insane. So when you have a situation like that and you're saying, hey, he's a 20-year-old, he did nothing wrong, he has no potential threat indicators or, you know, whatever your... Probably no criminal history up to that point either. Yeah. Whatever your criteria is for assessing threat, then you walk away and then you go,

and he grabs his gym bag with his weapon and he does what he does, right? Yeah. So then law enforcement is left with the zero tolerance perspective of the public and our national leaders of saying, well, you should have known, you could have, would have, should have. So it's a lose, lose all the way around because if you stay there with him and you are heavier handed and you maybe detain him and nothing does come of it, now you got a lawsuit coming your way. Yeah.

So I think at this point in our life, in our society, you've got to figure out how bad you want to lose, not what's the best decision. And that's a terrible position to be in. Did you track the after action at all from Butler? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I talked to some guys that were out there. Yeah, I have two. What are your thoughts on it? I think it was a disaster.

It was a complete failure of leadership, tactical awareness. I can go down a list of initiative. awful. I mean, just all the way around 360 degree absolute failure. And the sad part of it is, is that, you know, we dodged a bullet, so to speak. Yeah, literally in metaphor, but except for the guys in the crowd, unfortunately. Unfortunately, there were collateral and damage and, you know, casualty. But then the organization didn't even try to take responsibility at first. That one doesn't make sense to me. Where you heard all the nonsense about the pitch of the roof and all the other, you know, just silliness, right?

So that's where the internet becomes undefeated when they started talking about the pitch of the roof before the actual findings came out. Right. And so, of course, memes, God, they're amazing sometimes. People posting, you know, Secret Service, you know, what was the exact verbage? I can't even remember, but, you know, Secret Service will never defeat this roof. And it's like a two-degree angle. And there's a lady up there sweeping leaves off.

I saw one where they actually saw a cow. had gotten up onto a shed. It was terrible. Yeah. But that was just a complete and total leadership failure, tactical failure, operational failure on all levels. So the Secret Service has some real soul searching to do. And I knew guys who were with the service back when it was really a professional organization. And I don't know where they're going to go with this now.

I think with the new administration coming in, I'm sure you'll see some adjustments within the Secret Service at the leadership level, maybe at their protocol level. It's such a hard job. I mean, you never hear about the successes that they have. Of course not. Because it's behind the radar. But if you think about the last time that agency really got pressed, like game time pressed, it was Reagan walk into the limo. That we know of.

Well, where a guy got some rounds off. I think we would know about it. Yeah, that somebody actually, yeah. And Reagan did get shot on that. If my memory serves me correctly, didn't a round clip the door and then hit him in the side. I don't recall what the actual... He took some lead, though. But I know he took, he took some rounds.

But that was in the 80s. Right. That's a long time of trip after trip after trip, of detail after detail after detail and not getting pressed. And I know how easy it is, not living in that job, but same thing overseas. The first 30 days you're there, super heightened and alert because you're kind of getting the pace of what's going on. And the last 60 you're there or whatever, 200 days that you're there. The tail end of that is actually really dangerous because you're like, fuck it. It hasn't happened yet.

It's probably not going to happen. That complacency will absolutely eat your lunch. Well, complacency kills. We've all heard that statement. And I think over time, you become robotic. You settle into routines. Routines are killers. And they kill initiative and they kill awareness.

And the Secret Service in this instance, obviously, I also heard that the event was supposed to be held out on the runway. It was at a municipal airport. And there was some local, I would just say, coordination. Or lack thereof. Yes. And it was pushed over into the area where it was held. It was supposed to be out on the runway where it was flat and everything was, I guess,

better for security purposes. Yeah, you could have pushed at least an elevated threat farther out. I mean, that report for people who haven't read it, it's an interesting review. I mean, the fact that they weren't communicating on a singular net, and there were breaks in communication. I mean... But that's been a problem for decades, right? Where the Secret Service maintains their own command post.

They like to have their own communication. Which is cool, but you need to have other people nested in there so you can communicate. But when you have multiple law enforcement agencies there, you may have multiple different types of radios. You may have multiple different protocols for comms. You may have... And then they can't talk to the Secret Service. So you have people who are running back and forth trying to do, you know, kind of shoe leather, express to convey threat.

And so it becomes a problem. And we saw that after 9-11, too. And when I was in Newark after the towers fell, well, before the towers actually fell, we couldn't make any phone calls because all the systems were just overloaded. There was no system for anybody to talk to each other among all the responders. And then when the towers fell, all of the antenna arrays that were on the towers, of course, we're no longer transmitting. so everything kind of went into the dirt.

So yeah, I saw that. I saw that happen firsthand. I had heard that the FBI was deeply involved in planting the explosives in the Twin Towers. You know what? I've heard a lot of conspiracy theories. Here's what I tell you. The inside job, the explosives. Here's what I tell people.

Oh, I've heard that one. And, you know, I hear folks talk about that. You're giving the government way too much credit. That's how I answer the question, too. Like, you have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, there's no way. One of those towers would have fell before the other on a different. different day. It would have never happened because it was a government operation. Or

none of the tower, everybody would have been standing around waiting for something and it would have never happen. Not to make light of the situation, but the conspiracy theories on the trade centers and the destruction around the areas by all the folks on the internet, I mean, nobody's really been in a demolition zone of that magnitude. They really can't know what the effects are on the side buildings and everything. So I think there's a lot of, conspiracy that gets people likes and clicks and good stuff on the internet. But I, you know, I think things happened kind of like they happened. When I was at the, when I was the director of the terrorist screening center, we had artifacts from the trade centers. And one of them was the

point of entry where the aircraft hit the further North Tower. No way. They could tell by where all the girders are numbered. Everything was numbered. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So when they built this thing, it was like a big erector set. basically, right? So they're all numbered and serialized. So they knew where the plane made entry, they could tell it. And right where you can see where the girders were pushed a certain way that they could say, okay, this is where in a plane made entry. So, and there, of course, people were saying, well, where was the rest of the wreckage and everything?

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if there's ever been any extensive studies done of an airplane traveling fully loaded at near max velocity, hitting a static object like that. I mean. Full of jet fuel. Yeah, as I'm saying, fully loaded, gassed up because they were going to be cross-country flights, which is, I don't want to use the term smart, but a smart choice for the people who are trying to inflict maximum damage. I mean, they did their research for sure. Oh, yeah, they've been planning that for a long time.

Yeah. So that was one of the things that I, you know, I wrote about was we had an adversary that was better than we were. They had good planning. They had good vision while we were bureaucratically and administratively trying to combat terrorism or prevent terrorism. and we didn't see the operational horizon. Yeah. We couldn't see it. How choked out is the FBI from a bureaucratic perspective?

Pretty bad. I mean, it's organization's middle name, right? Yeah. Federal Bureau. But I will tell you that in the law enforcement profession, many things have to be done by protocol, strict adherence to practice protocol and policy because you have to go to court

and you have to present evidence and you have to, you know, you're looking to take someone's, rights away based upon your investigative work and potentially put them in prison or whatever the penalty is. So everything has to be done in a certain way so that it meets legal standards and legal requirements. So a lot of that policy and protocol driven thought process is important to that line of work. Yeah, that makes sense. I want to get into your new book first, but just to help people make this stand alone, first off, what have been up to you for the last

year since I've seen you, but then also just kind of unpack your experience as well so the listener can just kind of join along with us as we go into the next book. Sure, sure. Well, it was great. You and I connected again. Thanks for let me come on to the show and visit with you in your audience and Michael. And for the last year or so, I've been writing, wrote a book. And our conversation was one of the impetus points for me to put my thoughts on paper and kind of coalesce my, you know, almost 25 years of time with the FBI where I watched it change shortly before 9-11 to 9-11 and then through 2020 when I retired. So I was working on that.

I did some other work with some companies on some technical work that they were involved with, you know, great companies. One of them I was working with a super group. So I'm working with them and they said, yeah, we want to try some things. I'm okay. And then they started showing me some of the things they're doing there. I mean, they're working on anything from cyber weaponry to directed energy weapons to to, I mean.

Star Trek shit. Yeah. Awesome. Right. So I said, all right. So worked with them for a while and then, you know, tried to get some other business initiatives going for them. And just been doing some consulting work,

trying to, like we talked last time, I'm trying to start easing into not being FBI, you know, and working on that. And that's been about it. Yeah. Talk me through just kind of the roles you held in the FBI. Sure. The listener's some context on your background.

Sure. I started out as a special agent. Investigator did a lot of casework before 9-11 in the terrorism programs, weapons of mass destruction, things of that sort. Worked at headquarters, FBI headquarters after 9-11. It was in the Newark, New Jersey field office during 9-11. So, again, as we talked about, I saw the first plane strike out of my office window and said, which is wild.

What's going on here? Because we were right across the river from the trade centers. You could see them from everywhere. Do you think it was an accident, though, the first one? That's what I thought when I first turned the TV on. It seemed like the world thought that. Well, one of our analysts came walking up the hall and said, hey, an aircraft just hit the trade centers.

So we all said, whoa. And we thought it might have been an accident. Some private pilot is in a big trouble. Yeah. Somebody's day is really bad inside the building and inside the aircraft. And then the second one hit. And there was no doubt. Right. And then it was just go time from there.

So I was there during that. And I can tell you other stories about that day. but, I mean, we were rounding people up for interviews in Giant Stadium. Wow. Yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy. So went to headquarters, worked in a counterterrorism programs there, and also did some counterintelligence work, which was awesome.

And worked with all the three-letter crowd. Alphabet soup crowd. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was great stuff. It was like the stuff you really see on TV. And I thought, wow, you know, this is like the real FBI here. This isn't the, you know. worked in terrorism most of my career, actually, because after 9-11, it was the Bureau's number

one priority. And all the resources and priority went to counterterrorism because we couldn't have another attack. We couldn't, and the FBI politically couldn't survive it. Right. So everything went to that. I think a lot of the alphabet soup, you know, CIA, NIA, NSA, I think a lot of people rightly or wrongly felt the same way about those organizations, internal and external. Like, we cannot let this happen again. The agencies will not survive. But also, how do they put such an extreme focus on terrorism and not lose all the other tentacles that they're supposed to be focusing on at the same time? Well, we did. We jettisoned certain programs, certain other, like, all the FBI's drug programs went away. That sucks because we were winning the war on drugs right up

until that point. I don't know. I don't know about winning. We were engaged in it. Yes. We were playing, but I don't know about winning. Fuck. But, you know, all the drug programs went away. We stopped doing bank robbery responses. We stopped doing certain violent crime things that just, we just didn't do it anymore. We pushed it off to the locals, moved all the drug stuff to DEA. And we got out of that business completely because we had our span.

That's one of the Bureau's challenges we'll get to later, I'm sure. But their span of mission became too wide. And the Bureau in its earlier incarnations was primarily a law enforcement organization, cops and robbers, and we were the best at it. And then they made us into a domestic security agency after 9-11. We changed, the culture changed, the mandated change, the survival of the Bureau meant that we had to become that national security element and also maintain certain law enforcement abilities and authorities. So after I went to headquarters, I did, and I worked out in the field. I was in charge of field offices and, you know, managed all the operations in. We were talking about Buffalo, New York.

And then I was the director of the terrorist screening center, which was the government's 24-hour global threat interdiction, watchlisting screening. And that's what we were talking about your friend Mike Glover last time you were asking me about whether he should be on the list or not. You think he should. I report him once a week, to the domestic terrorist hotline. Yeah. No one takes me seriously. But I was the guy who adjudicated those things. I decided who went on the list and who didn't for the U.S. government.

And so we were... So here's an interesting segue into modern day. Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know what list exactly she's on. Mike, could you pull this one up? But she has as a... I believe she's a lieutenant colonel now in the National Guard. I think she's holding a commanding officer post wherever she's at,

showed up on a list. And it's not like, do not fly a list. It was basically, it was an observe, watch and observe list, something like that. It was one of TSA's internal programs. It wasn't the terrorist watch list. Yeah. There is only one consolidated terrorist watch list for the U.S. government, which she was on, however she got on, was one of TSA's internal lists that they maintain for potential security concerns.

So how would she end up on a list? like that. It could have been directed. It could have been a report of her, maybe she was possibly being surveilled or she was being in danger of some sort. It could have been, they can put you on a select D list is what it's called for additional love and attention at the airports based upon a lot of factors. They could even do it based upon the fact that, you know, they think you were, you could be sick and coughing your brains out at the airport and they can pull you outside and they can, you know, have me the oversight of this list. Right.

So, but TSA can do that on their own. That's their own, they own the airports. And they can do that if they feel as though there's a security related issue. And that's the kind of list she was on. It was an internal TSA list. You know, one of the, it happened when she was running for president. And it just, it's, it's the ground swell is happening again. as she was nominated for, what, DIAH, she had a Russian asset.

Yeah, that, that's a story that keeps coming back around. She is the worst fucking Russian asset ever if she is. It's a terrible story. Actually, she might be the best, right? Well, I guess she's so consumer facing. I mean, what are you talking about? Yeah, I think that story, well, I think they're running out of stories at this point. They're recycling some of the previous stories that were, that had a little bit of traction.

You know, and Tulsi Gabbard, you know, appears to be a great American. But when she was running for president, she could have been on those security lists as well so that they knew she was on aircraft. Okay. That they knew she was in transit. They knew where she was because she was a higher visibility, higher, you know, higher, I can say, consequence passenger. Yeah. Right.

She was a VIP of sorts. Exactly. So it could have been something like that. like that as well. I mean, I'm guessing. I'm guessing. I can see that. I'd give that. But they never took her off. 15% odds. I think the 85% odds, and I hate to say this, is that these systems are weaponized. Not that the system isn't valuable, but individual. And this is a thing I hear often and people want to throw the FBI, fuck the FBI, it needs to be redone. It's like, well, maybe the organization could be more efficient, but I feel like there is a substantial amount of

really good people working inside of it. It's the same thing as the FBI. agency or the federal government, like, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe let's drain some of the bath water and see we can get the baby a little bit more clean. Well, as you've said it, and I've said it too, where we become a very binary society. It's either one, zero, on off, left, right. And in order to fix, so to speak, some of these government agencies, we have to take a serious look at their mission, their mission scope, what their authorities are, what their authorities have drifted into. And you really have to take a look at some of that because, you know,

somebody at TSA may have put all of those candidates on. Yeah. An internal, hey, again, high consequence traveler. She was never taken off. It could have been, like she said, she was put on a list as more of a kind of a poke in the eye. Don't know, right? Well, we'll never be able to, we'll never know. Is there any way for somebody to determine whether or not they are on one of those lists? Does the organization have any obligation to declare who is on there and then why they were put on there in the first place? Well, what you do is you send what's called a redress request to DHS. DHS would then take that redress request and we used to adjudicate them because we were the, we own the list. And what people can do is say, hey, I've been, you know, given all this

special love and attention at the airport for I don't know what reason. Am I on one of these lists? and you send your name, your bio data, and then they'll check. And sometimes people are on those lists and they get those additional screenings, and it's not intentional. And I used to use the example of the name Mohammed Khan. Do you know how many Muhammad Kahn's there are in the world? Probably John Smith of the USA. Right.

Yeah. And sometimes people would get screened because they had a similar name. They were from the similar part of the world. their birthday was close enough that the algorithms would say, hey, you know what, this is within reasonable, you know, could be, right? So that used to happen. And then people would come in with a redress request and DHS would send it to us. We'd do it right up on it and say, this is not that person.

We have definitively, it is not them. Here's their redress number or redress case. And then DHS would say, go back. Anytime you put this number in so that they know it's not. you. Right? So there was a mechanism for that. Yeah.

And, you know, it worked fairly well when people would take the time to just make the redress request as opposed to just screaming and yelling about being at the airport. And, you know, being at the airport sucks anyway. And getting all those special screening activities just makes it a little more painful. The reality is, too, even with TSA, and I'm not going to give anybody any ideas. But security is a fucking illusion. You know, it's interesting that you say that, Annie. I'll tell you what.

I used to go out and talk to people, right? And I would say, what is security? To me, and this is the way I used to explain it. Because you have all everybody talking about security. I'd say, look, what security is is a man-made concept. It makes us feel better. And basically what security is, is it's a layering of inconvenience, consequence, and economics. That's it.

So inconvenience, you put up a fence. You shut a door. Whatever it might be, put cameras up. That's inconvenience. And then there's consequence. It's the barking dog. It's, I'm going to call the police. You know, those type of things are consequences.

I'm going to go to jail. And then you have the economics on the last part of it. What can I afford to do to secure my stuff? And I'm sure you've heard this when you've watched police shows and they'll say, why didn't you do that house? not worth it too much trouble. Yeah. Right?

Yeah, they're looking for easy targets and hard targets. So that's all it is. It's just that layering of those three big factors. It just depends on how you do it. And again, I'm not going to give anybody any ideas. All I'll say is I've flown a lot public, but I was a charter pilot for a while. And let's just say... I think it's a little softer there.

I mean, that's a generous term. There are just our vulnerabilities around. airports, if people think that the TSA is the wall that is holding something bad back from happening, they might be for the idiots. Anybody who takes a cursory or an educated look at this, well, I think as the world becomes more dangerous, we have to take a look at those very high consequence assets like airports and things like that. Because you're right. I mean, for the day-to-day knucklehead, defense is going to stop them. Right.

Yeah. You have a trained... For a nuanced person who wants to do real damage, there are ways to completely circumvent airport security. You have trained people who know how to defeat those protocols and they know how to defeat those infrastructures. They can do it. So, yeah. As far as Tulsi Gabbard goes, I mean, yeah, it could have been a little bit of a poke in the eye. I don't know.

I don't have a problem with those lists. I have a problem with them being weaponized. Well, they're misused. Yeah. And I'll give you another philosophical thing. I said tell the folks, we have to be careful when we have authority and you do things and you get an add-a-boy. Because here's the, here's the dangerous part of it. Some is good.

Well, then more must be better. And then too much must be just right. Okay. And that's where you find most of the government creep on things because people are incentivized. well, if we caught a few, there must be more. So we'll tighten things up even more. We'll get more authority. And then next thing you know, you're way out in the, you know, just a lunatic fringe, basically.

Because again, you know, the whole, you know, some is good, more is better, and too much is just right. It's incentivized. It's also been pounded into people over time because we don't tolerate any shortfalls at all anymore, ever. So all I ever hear now on TV and other discussions is somebody makes a mistake or something happens in their agency. Well, they should resign. Okay. So everybody who makes a mistake in their day-to-day life should quit their job. On some instances, yeah, maybe they should.

Yeah. But not as much as I hear it. Yeah. Yeah, some level of infrastructure has to remain if you're going to improve upon the organization. Well, and that's one of the problems. and you know, and you talked like, when I wrote, I wrote my book about the FBI, I tried to say, this is where things started going wrong when I was there, and I saw things drifting in a certain direction. And I knew, looking back, that's where we started having a cultural erosion.

That's where the leadership approach started to change. That's where our operational practices started to change. And when you have a convergence of those three factors alone, the organization starts, that battleship starts to drift. Where do you put that pin in the ground for the FBI? Where'd you first notice it? It was after 9-11 because the FBI was operating in survival mode, right? The FBI was blamed primarily and took probably 90% of all the blame. Really?

Yeah, the FBI took... I heard a lot of shade thrown at a lot of three-letter agencies. And they all sculpt back into the shadows. They all stepped back into the shadows. The FBI was left out there front and center, just getting throat punched on this thing. And we deserved it. I mean, we didn't do a good job, right? We didn't harden the environment.

We weren't looking for threats. We were reacting to things just like we would for a bank robbery or any other reactive law enforcement function. Well, looking back in the mirror now, so it's 20-20? You know. Looking back, though, I mean, for my understanding, and I wasn't interfacing deeply at that time with the intelligence apparatus,

but it seems like one agency would pick up some chatter. And another one would pick up chatter and maybe not necessarily directly correlate and also not communicate. But looking back now, did the agency's, not just the FBI, but in your opinion, the larger intelligence infrastructure, did they have enough pieces to know exactly what was going on or was there just chatter? They had fragmentary information that looking at it and like we would look at it now? Yeah, you can, yeah, 20 some years in the back. Someone would say, hang on a second. Yeah. What is this?

What's going on here? But that's assuming you have all of the data to look at, not parsed out. Exactly. And back then, it was actually discouraged to send things to the agency for everybody, right? So, you know, it was cutthroat and they wouldn't send us thing. They looked at us as if we were court jesters at the FBI. We looked at them as this bunch of strange people, especially at Fort Meade, because that is kind of a bunch of strange people. But we would look at them as like, yeah, these are weirdos over here.

Chris, we wouldn't share information with the SEAL team literally directly next door with us because we were battling for relevancy and budget. And not only that, but you just had this animosity. Yeah. Right. Between the agencies. It just. Because we were the best. And they fucking sucked.

Yeah. Absolutely. Right. So, you know, we, but, you know, we were cops. They were the spies. Yeah. Right. So there just wasn't a cultural interaction between the agencies that.

We could put that stuff together fast enough. But had they, looking back now, do you think it would have painted a clear enough picture that it could have been stopped? I think we could have interdicted certain parts of it. I think certain parts of it would have still been unknown to us because, again, they operated in a fashion that eluded all of our static surveillance, all of our infrastructure for security at the time. That was passive. They eluded all of it. Don't know how. We didn't pick them up anywhere.

Now, what I did do when I was at the Terra Screening Center, we did an analysis. If the TSC existed at the time, we picked out maybe half a dozen to maybe between six and ten items where they would hit our screening apparatus that we have now. We would have seen them time and time again. And we would have possibly been able to hit a few of them, change their behavior. Yeah, make contact at least, yeah. Push them off plants, harden the environment, make them. it non-permissive. We had a very permissive environment. So they operated with zero drag or opposition. Yeah. So we could have done that. I'm not saying we could have prevented 9-11,

but maybe we could have pushed it. We could have made it to where it wasn't as impacting. Who knows? But I don't think the organization, my organization, we weren't looking for that. We weren't looking for that. That was so big and that was so outside of what normal, like normal terrorism was. And they take some hostages, they fly an airplane, they want ransom, they do these things, they make demands. These people did none of those things. Yeah. So, you know, their protocol changed significantly with that event.

So, but that's what I was, you know, my time at this terrorist screening center, but I mean, that was my best, best assignment at the Bureau, you know, doing global counterterrorism. terrorism. It was great. In the modern having the TSC now, of all the behaviors that the hijackers exhibited, which one would have hit the radar as the brightest flash? It would have been a series of interactions with our credentialing systems. We would have seen these people several times. We would have seen, we could have made relationships between them. Interesting. Because they were, they had interactions with law enforcement, but it was, Nobody knew who they were.

So we could have started seeing these things, these relationships with our, with the current analytical approach that we have. But again, I can't go back to, you know, 2001. We weren't as sophisticated. We weren't looking for something like that. The FBI had still other issues that it was dealing with. It was still more of a cops and robbers organization. No blame to anybody.

That's just what it was. And, you know, we had our tails kicked. It's also wild to think about commercial travel pre 9-11. Oh. Where they're just fly on the plane with the cockpit door open. Come on up and bring your kid into the cockpit mid-flight. It's astounding, right? But think about the level.

What kind of a high trust society were we at that point? Well, maybe trust isn't the right word. Ignorant, perhaps. Maybe a bit of that too, just a naivity. Yeah, that's probably the best word. for it. Naivity. Right?

We just thought no one's going to crash this airplane. They don't want to die. Yeah. Right? And, you know, you have a couple of guys who take over an airplane and, you know, and whatever their political position is and whatever they were. And it always terminated in a hostage and ransom and nothing had happened like 9-11. Right.

And, you know, someone broke bad. Remember the Egyptian one? Yeah. That didn't go well. Didn't go great. But they didn't fly it into a building. No. Yeah.

And they didn't have all the resultant, you know, collateral damage. But they weren't that spectacular. Right, and it wasn't that impacting. My last time, my last assignment with the FBI, I was one of the six people who ran the FBI day to day, right? There were six of us who the FBI's cut up into six branches. And I ran the science and technology branch, which we did all of the technical work. We offered those technical solutions because we live in a very technical world now. And all of James Bond stuff we did, we did all the crime scene stuff.

We did all of the national databasing of criminal information, terrorist explosive device defeat around the world with our partners. Those were all in my areas. And at the time, when I retired, I looked at this. I was running the largest FBI branch. I had more people than the entire ATF that worked with me. And I had a bigger operating budget than ATF. So you can see the scope of the Bureau's size. I mean, for an entire agency, my one branch was bigger than the entire ATF.

Man. So, you know, a lot of impact, a lot of great work. But then I, you know, I got to a point where I was like, all right, the organization, I think, has kind of taken this turn. I can no longer align myself with where it's going. So it's time for me to go instead of staying and trying to continue to swim upstream. The organization started shifting in ways that I saw that I didn't believe were productive or sustainable. but I had not earned the authority or position to negate those changes. I mean, dude, you were top six.

Well, there are three above me. So those three above me were the ones that were drifting in a certain direction. How fast was the drift? Are we talking slow? Are we talking about jumping into Class 5 rapids? Well, the drift started after 9-11, and it was hard and fast. And it was like, we were doing it. change management, big initiatives with external consultants.

It was painful. It was a basically it was just a disaster, right? But what happened in that whole change management, culture change, was that the FBI was pushed out of its law enforcement capacity. No more cops and robbers. No more G-men. We were made into that domestic security organization. the FBI agent was dethroned as the primary or top tier role in the organization. They kind of flattened it out and made intelligence analysts and other professional support,

professional staff members had similar, if not higher levels of authority than FBI agents. It just sent shock waves through the organization, right? And when I was watching all of this, I would talk to people, and, you know, there was a lot of rancor. Folks were not really happy about it, but the Bureau was trying to survive. Because I think I told you last time I was here that there was talk on the Hill. They wanted to split the Bureau in half. One side, one organization to do criminal work, one organization to be domestic security. And the director Mueller at the time fought as hard as he could to keep the Bureau united.

The reason being is if you go overseas and you talk to our partners, the Brits, Australia, you know, whoever, they all want our model because they have zero authority. Their intelligence services don't have any authorities. They have to go to the national police. They have to go to their law enforcement counterparts to get anything done. So they liked our model because I'm working in the intelligence community. I'm a member, you know, as a designated intelligence officer, right? but I also had law enforcement arrest powers because I was a special agent with the FBI.

Yeah, that makes sense. So we had immense power that they would look at us and just be jealous and long for. So, you know, at the time, after Director Mueller ended his time with the FBI, he was extended by Obama for a couple years. as the FBI director's 10 years, 10 years because they didn't want another Hoover

where he was there like 40 years or something Probably not a good call. So too much consolidation of power. For sure. 10 years. So Mueller stayed till, like, about, you know, I think it was 2013 or so. Do you think 10 years is too much?

I don't think 10 years is too much, but I do think that the first year the director is there. probably just getting up speed. He's just trying to figure out what's going on. Yeah. Fire hose. He's got three or four fire hoses in all parts of his orifices of his body, right?

That sounds exciting. Tell me more. Awesome. Right? He's got fire hoses everywhere you can imagine. That's how some people like to party. I'm not going to do you. Yeah.

I don't know if he would call it a party. Some might. You're true. You're right. But here's the thing, though, is that the FBI director comes in and he's taking over a very monitoring. analytic and storied organization. Are there any requirements for an FBI director?

Do they have to be previous law enforcement? Do they have to be a previous agent? We've seen all different types, right? The last agent law, the last director that had an agent background was Louis Free. Okay. He was the last. When was that? I don't even recognize that.

Louis was there from early 90s through 95, 90s. Okay. You know, he was there through like the mid mid-90s. Well received? He was well liked by a lot of the folks, because he, He understood everything. Yeah, he knew to make the sausage. And he knew what agent life was like.

And he was, you know, he was one of those guys. He kicked everybody out of headquarters. He kicked everybody out of the laboratory. All the agents that had homesteaded there. Kicked everybody out, pushed them out to the fields and go work cases. Yeah. All right. So he understood a lot of that.

And he was pretty well liked as a director. But you've seen other directors. We've had judges. We've had lawyers. We've had prosecutors. We've had, you know, so it varies. But I think the thought process over since Louis Free. was that they want people who have a law background, which I disagree with because lawyers aren't

necessarily investigators. They're not necessarily intelligence people and they're not necessarily folks who work in those capacities, right? You can say more often than not, they're not. Right. So some people, you know, start out as cops. They go to law school. They become lawyers, right? But that, I think, is a smaller population. But what you find, though, with the directors is there's a political appointee of the organization. We're the real. We're the real power is is what the deputy director. He's the most senior career FBI agent, senior executive service. He's the guy. He'd be the top of those six that you were talking about. No, he was my boss.

Okay. Right? But there was a deputy director and then there's an associate deputy director. The deputy is the boss of everybody. Gotcha. Right. The director, of course, is the head of the agency, but he's doing a lot of other stuff. Deputy runs the place. The associate deputy runs the business side of the Bureau effectively. Right? He runs all the administrative things, the logistical things. And then there were the six of us. Okay.

So whenever there was something going on and they needed operations for something, whether it was national security for anything, science, technology, you know, human resources, whatever, that's when they would come to us and say, hey, we need this or we have to have this. So we would deal with it. Is that a pointee, which a lot of people are up in arms right now about Trump's appointee, who, Michael, can you pull up that guy's picture? it is an amazing photo of Trump's appointee for director of the FBI.

You talk about Cash Battal? Fuck, he's got crazy eyes. And the pictures that they're... Don't know the man at all. I'm just saying I deeply appreciate the picture that they selected for him. It's like he's looking into the future and burrowing through him out at the same time. I would bet you that came from a left-leaning media outlet. What are you saying?

Are you saying that they would not pick the best image? I would say they may not have picked the most flattering image of that gentleman. I don't, I mean, if you were going to use a picture that might instill fear in people, yes, there it is. Yeah. Wait, wait. Where did it go? My God. This thing goes crazy.

Oh, enhance. Enhance. I'm trying. There is left. Cash Patel, yep. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what was going on in that picture. He looks a bit intense.

I love it. I love it. I've never met him. He worked over at Justice. He was a main justice. He was an attorney there. From what I understand, he was a line attorney. May have moved off into some other.

TDII assignments at, you know, the National Security Council and some other places, served as an assistant to somebody important. I don't remember the name. How much can they change the organization? I mean, if the deputy holds a lot of the keys to the kingdom because he has ascended through those ranks and knows how to make the saucers, and they have the associate director, the desk above them, that appointee, how much can they really steer the ship? Well, let me put it this way. I'll put it back in your previous world, in the military. You're at a command and a new. new admiral rolls in.

How much do they change things? It depends. It depends. And they might have, they might have the idea to change the community. And they might want to do it overnight. And it's about execution. Well, it's like an aircraft carrier, not a rowboat.

They can spin the, and I know people, you know, it'll steer aircraft carriers with a wheel. Like, I get it. But for this metaphor, you're spinning it and spinning it, spinning and spinning and spinning, and eventually it moves one degree. Whereas a rowboat, right, you paddle in the other. direction and it turns. And also, if there are people, and let's just be honest, just because somebody has four stars on their shoulders, doesn't mean that the people that work for them

agree with their ideology. Right. They can passively provide friction. They'll provide what I would consider be administrative inertia. Yeah. In the wrong direction. Yeah. So the breaks, the silent breaks, if you will. Exactly. Things will crawl. Things won't work. You'll, you'll see initiatives will fail. they'll die on the vine, right? And that's what happens. So the director can come in and make some very strategic shifts on how the organization's going to go. But if the other leaders from the director down to maybe the, I guess in your previous life, it would be like the 06 level. Yeah.

Well, there's the admiral who's in charge of the group. And then there's the teams, but you have COs, which then there's the exo. There's the operational structure. Then there's the tactical structure where there's task unit commanders, but then there's OICs. That guidance has to trickle its way all the way down. And it has to be accepted. Yeah. And it has to be acted upon.

Only publicly. Right. Hypothetically. So you see what I'm getting at. So it depends on what he's looking to change and what the impetus is for. What is the cause for it, right? So when Director Mueller came in after 9-11, man, it was brutal. He made some hard changes and he was not a congenial man.

He came in and he was hardcore. Former Marine officer, Vietnam, prosecutor, just heavy duty, right? He made a lot of changes in the organization. A lot of people hated him. But he made a lot of changes. I think that where the new director is going to come in, and this is me. If they came to me and said, hey, would you come back and be the FBI director? First of all, my wife would probably say she'd kill me. But I'd probably say, sure, on certain conditions. But first thing you have to look at, leadership environment that exists right now. Yeah. What are you going to battle with? Right. The culture of the organization, where do we stand on things? And then what are our operational practices? Practices are the key, it's a key word.

Because they'll say, well, here are all of our policies. We don't follow any of them. Yeah. But they're all on paper. This is what we are saying we're doing. And that's where the accountability dies. I always told people, accountability is one of those disgusting, terrible words that everybody hold people accountable, be accountable. And I would ask people,

what does that mean to you? And I get the blank stairs and everything. I said, look, accountability is, are you doing what you're supposed to do? And are you doing what you say you're doing? Yeah. That's, that's basic as it gets. He's got to make sure that those things are happening. He's got to make sure that when the director comes in and everybody's kind of doing the hocus pocus and he's getting all the happy talk and everything's, say, okay, good to go boss. He's not going to know. And I I would go in first and say, I know. I know where the skeletons are. Yeah.

Okay. And if he doesn't have that, you know, he doesn't know where the skeletons are, you don't know where to look. I had, I was going to call them friends, but they weren't because they were much higher ranking than myself. They were acquaintances that achieved the flag level. And my understanding, my word's not necessarily doctrine inside of the military, but we're talking. You throw a star up on your shoulder. And one, two, three, four stars, four stars. I think he can do five stars.

Didn't Eisenhower do that for a bit? Yeah, but that was during. During war, he was like the supreme ally. Yeah. You know. Even at the one star level, I had a guy, I had a guy, I had an admiral telling me once, fucking, some, I think I was an E5 at the time. Why he was talking to me is still beyond me. But I was asking him essentially, I mean, what's life?

What is your life like when you are a flag officer? He's like, Andy, you're never going to have a bed that's uncomfortable. You're never going to have a shitty meal again. That's not true. But, okay. You know, you're overlying. You're going to get catered to in both those. Your travel is going to be better than everybody else's,

and nobody's ever going to tell you the truth again. That's like, fuck. That's about right. And so if that's at the one star, by the time you get to a four star, you are political in nature, and you're at the apex of an organization where people may not be directly fighting you

underneath you, but maybe they're just not telling you the whole truth. And they're putting in that bureaucratic friction that is putting the brakes on the change you want to make. Right. See, the position I held at the Bureau, we were told that they were in the senior executive service ranks. If you're looking at equivalent military,

we were four-star equivalent. Okay. Okay. Yeah, you're up to the apex. So when we would go places, you know, we had a certain parity with those type of military officers. But I think what happens is you allow yourself to become isolated. You allow yourself to be based upon the more strategic nature

of things you're dealing with. you can't be really involved with what's going on on a boat crew or me on an investigative squad. I can't. You know, and plus there's about a hundred people between me and them. So do you think Patel will even know where to, assuming he let the nomination thing play itself out, I'll use his name because he's currently nominated, will he even know where to look? I think he has people that he will consult, right? When he worked over at Justice, I'm sure he knows people who are with the Bureau.

and there are many people out there who will consult. They'll just tell them, here are some programs you should look at, here are some things you should look at. And he'll have a general idea. The problem is that the current leadership at the Bureau, the director's going to leave or he'll be asked to leave. Yeah. Either where the door is coming.

Right. The number two guy, he may leave or he may stay until the administration comes in and then they'll ask him to leave. Why would they ask both of them to leave? Are they just not philosophically aligned with the incoming administration? Yeah. Think about this. The incoming administration, they want to see a different atmosphere at the Bureau.

They want to see a different more apolitical or objective bureau because the Bureau has been pretty much painted as being pushed a little bit to the left of the line. Has it been, in your opinion? I think the Bureau has taken on a much more liberal perspective and a little bit. a lot of its dealings than it traditionally has had. How do you think that happened? Time. I'll go back to, I'll circle back around to the 9-11 evolution. After 9-11, we started hiring people like crazy for an analyst cadre.

We didn't have a real, as the intelligence community would call it, analyst cadre. We had analysts, but they weren't at the level of what the intelligence community considered to be analysts. So we started hiring people. and the director Mueller at the time also said, we need more intellectual people here. We need people who are cyber savvy. Reasonable.

You got a bunch of people in there that, you know, computers are like, this will pass. Like my dad. Yeah. Fuck. Just younger. Yeah. You know, the whole computer thing.

Yeah, this will pass. We'll be fine. I think they were wrong demonstrably, but. But here's the thing, though, is like, and nobody could see this at the time because you just can't. But they start hiring people. Where were they hiring people from the colleges, right? Because the FBI, you had to have a four-year degree.

Required. Now, some of the agencies didn't have that requirement. They all do now, I think. But so we're hiring these younger folks. They're coming out of some of these schools that have that more left-leaning liberal position. Now we have whole organizations inside the FBI that are comprised of people who came from left-leaning liberal organizations. the climate of the Bureau started changing. The culture started changing.

And the Bureau at the time was worried about keeping people happy in retention. They were worried about retention. Filling slots. They didn't want to have empty positions because they were getting murdered on the hill. The Hill gave the Bureau money and all these positions are empty. We can't manufacture people to put in them. But that didn't matter. So the Bureau starts capitulating to some of the generational shift.

the multi-generational workplace culture shift younger folks had different ethics work ideas I wrote about it a little bit about the change in some of the I saw I saw some cracks in the armor of what it once meant to be an FBI employee you were expected to behave a certain way do certain things mission came first the bureau came first and that started fading away And after 9-11, I mean, it was just a brutal work environment for a while. And people just, they couldn't, you know, people just couldn't stand up under the intensity. So the Bureau decided to change its leadership approach to be a little more kinder, gentler. You know, not the old hardcore G-men in charge anymore who really weren't worried about your feelings so much.

Yeah. You know, your feelings were your problem, pretty much. So everything started shifting. Nobody could see it. Because if you're standing in the middle of the storm, you can't... Yeah, it's like an iceberg movie. Yeah. And so over time, the Bureau became a little bit more liberal in its approaches and what it would tolerate.

Before certain things were just intolerable, you would be, you would suffer if you acted certain ways. And then it started becoming, well, you know, it's all right. Well, you don't want to be so hard on people. We're really... And that was kind of moving toward the end of Mueller's time. where it really started accelerating was when Jim Comey came in. Jim Comey came in when Mueller left. He came back from private sector work.

He was working for one of the, I think, Lockheed or one of the big ones. But Jim Comey, much, he was the direct opposite of Mueller. Mueller was, like, you saw this man, you walked the other way. He was stern, he was hard, and he was tough. Comey, on the other hand, despite his height, he was 6'8. Was he really? Yeah, he's a big, he's a tall man. affable.

Always had a smile in his face. Friendly. Put you at ease. Laugh in a room. I mean, you know, joking. Completely 180. So everybody kind of did a big exhale

when Mueller left. And to Comey's credit, I mean, he ran into some problems a little bit later, but to his credit, he knew the organization was exhausted. The organization was completely fatigued from all of those years after 9-11.

And he and the other senior leaders decided, we got to figure out what we're going to do here. This organization, we're not going to make it. We're running out of gas. People were really just exhausted. The programs were tired, you know. So he started allowing certain things to be more acceptable. You know, just the chains of command became a little more fluid.

You know, people were willing, they were willing to talk. I think I told you last time, you know, people would email him directly if they had an issue in the, building, you know. It's really just flattening the chain of command. Well, flattening it, no, but disregarding it. Yeah. Kind of the same thing. Well, you know, if it's in the military, I would see people do this. You know, flattening, meaning they would just flatten the world and go direct as opposed to going through the elevation that they needed to. But the problem is, is all those layers are still there. Yeah. So when they would call upstairs or they would email

upstairs, next thing, you know, a rocket would come down from the, you know, director's office saying, hey, what are you doing about this? And the fact that the guy at the top would tolerate that is reinforcing that fucking behavior. He invited it. He actually promoted it. That is a rough, rough environment. It is. And it's rough for the chain of command then,

because now you have this new kind of chaos. Yeah. It's like, do you have a chain of command, or is there a shadow chain of command? Yeah, there is. It's a chain of command when the bad stuff's rolling downhill. Yeah. Right?

Or when there's a problem and somebody, you know, is calling the deputies calling asking you, hey, what's going? We're hearing this is a problem. From whom? Right? So it caused a different kind of chaos. And again, and it's not that Comey would accept mediocrity.

I mean, he expected good performance from the people. But it wasn't that you were walking into a meeting with Mueller and you were just, I mean, you could see the fierce sweat running down people's face. I mean, they were just horrified. With Comey, it wasn't like that. And then, of course, we started losing our edge. We started drifting, drifting, drifting. And not only that, but then they decided, what are we going to do with the FBI?

How are we going to make the FBI more livable, sustainable? They started going out and benchmarking management and leadership approaches in Silicon Valley, with banks, with, you know, places that I wrote in my book, the FBI at its soul cannot be compared to a bank or a Silicon Valley software development firm were not Netflix. Right. No more than we could take your former profession and say, well, let's look at a bunch of people who, who, I don't think of a good analogy here, but like crossing guards and Navy SEALs.

Yeah. Right? Both have a protective mission. You could draw parallels, but not the same. So then they started implementing certain practices in the organization. And everybody, all of us guys are kind of looking around saying, you know, what's this? What kind of practices is you talking about?

Well, just the, it was an onset of corporate death by metrics, risk scores, PowerPoint slides, which you said you have a very high level of competence for. An unbelievable amount of competence and PowerPoint. So PowerPoint slide decks begin to rule the day, balance scorecards everywhere. And it was, everybody was looking around saying, hmm, okay, well, how is this? And my question was, all right, these are all great things to measure activity and look around the organization in a diagnostic sense, right? You want to kind of take inventory. But how are these things, do we have any measurable improvement in how we combat national security threats or crime problems?

Yes or no? So, you know, I mean, it was more corporatizing the Bureau versus, you know, I mean. Are we a law enforcement and intelligence function that we're out there ready to put foot to tail, protecting our communities and people while upholding the Constitution? Or am I now having to build an internal cottage industry of people who know how to make PowerPoint slides and count shit? And that's where we started drifting. So let's say it's drafted a few notches to the left. A guy like Patel rolls in.

Is it even possible to even just call it just drift it back more towards center? Because I feel like there would be resistance. Well, but that's where you have to look at if he enters the organization and he's going to have some marching orders. Oh, yeah. Right. Especially if the Attorney General selection that the incoming president is looking for comes true, he's going to have some marching orders. Whoever the director is, he's going to have firm marching orders. he's going to have to rip the top of the organization off to make it happen

the way the incoming administration wants it to happen. He's going to have to decapitate the organization. Is he authorized to do so? I think that if the chief executive tells you that all these people got to go, because once you get to that certain level of, I can say, you know, in the SES ranks, you serve the pleasure. Yeah. Now, they may not fire you.

That's beyond the G.S system, right? The SES is above G. G.S. Right. Yeah, the GS system goes up to a GS-15, then you have the S-E-S system above that. Still a government employee, though. I'm just curious about the mechanism of getting rid of one. And you have some protections, but not as many as the GS folks have.

Really? Well, you elect to go into the SES. Okay, so it's just slightly different terms for life a better word. Right. You elect to go into the SES. You actually compete, promote into. Okay. Where in the GS scales, that you have a lot more protection based upon the type of work it is.

Especially after that one year mark. Yeah, got a lot of protection. Yeah. But what I'm getting at is the, for the organization to make some hard shifts back toward the middle of things, I don't think they're that far away from the middle right now, but the organization used to lean more conservative because of what it was, very procedurally driven, status quo, you know, certain beliefs and values that, you know,

more, sit a little bit more on the, on the, conservative side of things if you're looking at that spectrum. I think it's drifted off a little bit, especially when you hear things like, well, the FBI now has its own DEI programs and now they're not enforcing. Now, this is anecdotal. I haven't seen it personally, but that they're not enforcing or administering policies as they once did with a certain maybe enthusiasm or strictness. and it's causing a decline in the quality of agents that are coming in.

Yeah, that checks out. And they're not holding to the standards. Right. The standard you had is a slip. Yeah. So, and again, I haven't witnessed this, but it's been talked about. And it's been, it's anecdotal, but a lot of people say it's happening. Of course, the FBI says it's not.

But it's just. I believe the people, it's the same thing when I hear stuff about the SEAL teams. I can go listen to what the public affairs officer is saying, or I can go listen to to my buddies who are still in and they can give me the actual pulse. And they're telling you. I wait the pulse of those that are still in and active a little bit more than the public spokesperson. And that's what I try to get the ground truth, right?

These are people that are still close to the organization. I'm not. I stepped away from the organization. That was one of the things I wrote in my book was I know that there are people who still are connected to the organization personally or professionally or economically. They make a living by working for the contractors that support. the Bureau. Professionally, they may still be there, or they may be closely connected, or just personally, there are those people who are die-hard FBI people who the FBI can do no wrong,

which is part of one of its challenges, right? They don't self-assess well. But, you know, I just don't know what he's going to be able to do. I know what he has to do. He'd have to trim the top off. He's got to. And then, because if he just say, well, let's bump the other folks up, well, who do you think those people hired as their number two and three? All people of like mind. Yeah. Right. So I don't know how far down he would be authorized to go.

And I don't know what you do with these people. Do you fire them? Hey, if you're eligible retire, you get a tap on the shoulder. You know, we're going to reassign you. Okay. I used to be like an assistant director, which is like a three star level equivalent. Now what are you going to do with them? You bumped them out of their position.

Now, where do they go in the organization? So these create all these logistical problems. And then who do you put in? You promote people that are not even close to, you know, that level of... Yeah, do you bring in people outside of the organization because of the argument that maybe what they need is somebody whose nose isn't six inches from the problem, but then they may not understand the organization? Well, that happened also after 9-11. They brought over a bunch of people from around the intelligence community.

And they put them in these... Every position ranging from line supervisor up through, I mean, very high ranking like three and four star level people in the SCS. And they brought them in from the intelligence community. And these people had no idea how the FBI worked, didn't care. They were going to come in and fix the bureau, and they brought all their whatever from their home agency. And how do you think that went? Not well. Yeah.

It didn't go well. Probably like gears trying to mesh that are not designed to mesh in a very high speed. Yeah. Yeah. You know how that works out, right? You shear off a lot of teeth. I worked for somebody who was from the agency for a short period of time. And my first meeting with this woman, she was a career analyst at the FBI.

I mean, at the CIA, I'm sorry. My first meeting with her, I walk in, I sit down, introduce myself. You know, I just hadn't gotten promoted into a position. And she goes, okay, you know, hello and everything else, starts to talk bad about the FBI. and then she looks at me and says, I hope you don't think you're any better than the analyst because you're an agent. This is a strong opening.

Yeah, it was awesome, right? Yeah. But she just didn't understand that. No, that's not how we do business here, right? But she had this preconceived idea. And that's how a lot of them came in. Not all of them. Some of them came in and said,

hey, I don't know what I'm doing here. You guys got to help me, right? I can work with that person. And they were successful because they came in and said, I don't understand this. What are you guys doing here? Right? So when you tell them, they say, oh, okay, I get it.

And then you move on, right? But some of them came in, they didn't care. So bringing people in from around the community may not be the answer. You might get a couple of people who could be helpful, depending on what their thought process is and what their background is. But I don't know if you can bring somebody in who's never worked in that investigative environment and start giving direction to people who do. And I walk a tight rope.

on this. And I'll go back to your previous life. Do you think in a Navy SEAL platoon, whatever level, that you can bring somebody in from, say, an Army Ranger outfit and say, hey, take over that platoon, make it better? That would be setting them up for failure with a task given it, giving them that task in that way, that directive would be setting them up for failure. Absolutely. There's 100% that we have something to learn from everybody.

But that level, like that direct type of tasking with that level is that's going to set it up for failure. Look, you have a difference between putting them over there and having them in charge and making change versus bringing them over to exchange ideas. Yeah. There's a difference. 100%. So I don't know what his ability is going to be to get people who can come in, act as trust. advisors and trusted leaders that will execute his wishes and execute his vision.

I figure he'll be lucky. Let's say he gets in and he at the end of Trump's four years. I feel like he would be lucky to start the shift back in the other direction. It's not something that would be overnight. You'd see a lot of superficial changes at first. Yeah. Right? But how do you reorient the entire organization that has now had X number of years of drift to

correct. You need a couple more years. I think I read one place, 90% of culture change operations or initiatives fail because no one's around long enough to make sure the culture sticks because everybody wants to drift right back to where they were. Yeah, especially if they're resistant to it to begin with. Exactly. And you know what they're going to sit there and say, I'm going to wait this guy out. Yeah. Right. So he has a big job ahead of him, whoever it might be. I use him. It could be a her at some point. Yeah, I'm just using his name because that's currently on the docket. He's the guy whose name's being thrown around. They're also thrown around to Mike Rogers. I'm not familiar to Mike Rogers. He was a, I think he was a former congressman. And he was an FBI agent for,

I don't know, I don't know, six, seven, eight years. And then he left the bureau and then he went into politics. I don't know if he was a lawyer, maybe went into some law and stuff. But he left the bureau. He's been up on the hill and his name was thrown around too. So I just don't know what the objectives are. Because, again, if it was me, I know I'd have a plan to go in and do certain things immediately. And then there would be a couple of second or third order effects so that you could see a change in approach now.

And then it would be, all right, do we have the right people in the right roles for this organization to push it in whatever direction we're going? So, I mean, I wish whoever it is the best of luck, I'd be happy to help them just with some ideas. Because here's another thing. Are you looking for a career or are you looking to actually help the organization? Hopefully the latter.

Yeah, because a lot of folks roll in and they want to make a career out of these things. Or you have the consulting firms want to come in and just, you know, jump on the government dime. Yeah. Or do you have a bunch of folks who say, look, I'll come for two years. I'll come for three years. I'll come for six months just to help you get started here and tell you where you might. be not getting complete candor, right? Yeah.

So some of those things are going to be interesting to see. You know, I put out a list. I have a, I don't know if I told you this last time I said, I don't know if I did or not, but before I left the bureau, I used to have a large whiteboard in my office. And we used to use it for communications and I used to write stuff up there. And I started putting things up there. I called them the rules to live by. and the first one I put up there was tough shit

because I started hearing a lot of people complain about things being difficult so I said welcome to the fucking real world I said well we're the FBI and we do hard things we do the heavy lifting that other people can't or won't do and if things were easy someone else would have already handled it so if something breaks down and something happens tough shit figure it out right second rule was if it doesn't suck we don't do it.

Right? That's the second rule. Because I told them, if it was easy again, and if it wasn't hard and if it wasn't difficult, somebody else would already handle it. I said, we, the FBI,

seek out things that suck so we can sharpen our skills and we can get better. And people, when they're scared, when they're tired, when they're in trouble, and they need help

and things really suck, they should know that the FBI's our best, bad. So that's the second rule. The third one was, and these came over time, but I didn't sit there one afternoon and just write this stuff down. But the third one was, assumption causes bad things, especially in our line of work, right? I told test for outcomes whenever you can, do not assume, try to get, because assumption is just one of those things. You know, they say it makes an ass of you and me, right? But in our line of work, assumption could mean people get hurt. Yeah.

on the easy side of that scale, you have what, mission incomplete, you know, job doesn't get done on time, you know, whatever, my embarrassment. On the hard end of that scale, I would tell them you could have loss of life, injury, property damage. So, you know, don't assume when you test things, make sure things are right. And then the last one I said is never be a liability. Everywhere we go, we should be an asset. and if we're in charge, we pull and we are considerate of who else is doing things. When we are supporting, we push

and we make sure that we're always an asset. Those are good rules. And I told them, if we can do those four things, I think we'll be okay. Other things will kind of sort themselves out. But I only did that with my own people. And the director came in one day and he looked at those rules.

And I used to call them Melissa's rules to live by who's my chief of staff. She's a proper southern lady. And he comes in, he goes, who's Melissa? I said, oh, I said she would be horrified if she knew the director was standing there, reading these things. And it was her name as attached to it, you know. But I told them that they were all mine. I just did that to tease with her.

But, you know, four things. That's all you need in the organization to get it back on track. Toughen up a little bit, people. Stop complaining. Do things that are hard. I learned that early in my career. One of the things I wrote is a guy pulls me aside one day. And there's an older agent.

He's given some training to a newer person. Guy pulls me aside. He goes, hey, you see that guy? Yeah. He was one of the more tenured agents. He goes, he's got almost 20 years experience. You know what the problem is? He's got 20 times one year's experience.

He said, learn to do hard things. Learn to do the things that are tough. if you really want to help. He goes, you can't have everybody just kind of hanging around with one year's worth of experience repeated 20 times. Yeah.

And I thought, wow. Yeah, it's a shallow organization if that's your manpower. Yeah, I mean, think about it. When you have a crisis, man, you're an inch deep. So, and the Bureau can't be an inch deep. The mission's too important.

We do too many things for too many people to be an inch deep. And it's just too many people depend on the FBI. And that was one of the, One of my things was, you know, people look to us for stability. They trust. They used to.

You know, stability, trust. Hey, if something is really messed up, call them. They'll come and help. And the word of the FBI used to be inviolable. When the FBI said something, they was like, oh, okay, got it. Now. It's up for grabs. Yeah.

And that's a shame. Yeah. Because the FBI used to be one of those institutions that, I mean, do you remember that situation? And it was a very unfortunate thing where there was an Air Force PJ that was left somewhere. And your former organizations were part of this discussion about Navy SEALs, this, that, and the other. And they brought it to us. Oh, really?

You're talking about Roberts Ridge. Yeah. Yeah. They brought it to us. I said, read this, tell us what you think we want your opinion. Wait a minute. This isn't our bag. Yeah.

They said, no, we don't care. We just want to know what you guys think. Yeah, neutral third party with a respected opinion. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the kind of stuff people used to trust us with. And now it's kind of, well, I think it can be recovered, but it's going to take a shift. And it's going to take exhibited behavior that is showing people the opposite of what they have currently been receiving.

Action over words. Yeah. That's it. I mean, it's going to take, show me, don't tell me. Yeah. Then you can show me and tell me. But where we are. now is there's a lot of talk. There's a lot of happy talk, I used to call it, a lot of happy talk.

But what are you doing? What are you doing to get people's trust back? How do you push the FBI back into the FBI that I used to be a part of? Because over, and the downfall, well, I call it a downfall, but the change of the FBI really accelerated when we were at the beginning of COVID. But, you know, everything kind of went to sleep. Everybody was kind of doing things. The organization really shifted. A lot of people were, you know, caught up in the whole, I don't want the shot thing. And, you know, there was a lot of issues inside the organization.

They sent everybody home. And, you know, I don't know how you do all that stuff that we used to do from home. But, you know, it caused a lot of shifting in the organization. And then it had a hard time reeling it back in. As soon as I saw them do it, I thought, oh, no, it's going to be hard. Yeah, it's going to be tough to put the cows back in the cart on that. that one. Exactly. So all of these things kind of ran up on the organization, Andy, and it was just, I think the organization is not what the American people want or need right now. You know, the FBI is that protector of the, I used to say, you know, the FBI used to be, when I was a kid or when I was growing up, they were dragon slayers, man. When the bureau rolled in, you knew you had called down the lightning, right? I don't know if that's still the case.

It might be. I just, I'm not as confident in it. I don't think the American people feel that way anymore. I think it is recoverable, but it is going to take time. Well, how do you get out there and start kicking tail again and making sure that no matter what the outcome is of an investigation, people know that, hey, I don't have to like it, but I know they did it right. Yeah. I don't have to like the outcome. but these guys are always, always right.

They're on point. There's no personal agenda here. There's no political haggling here. There's no, you know, even perceived push for one side or the other, left, right, conservative, liberal. It doesn't matter. It's the investigation of a situation objectively and skillfully. That's what they have to consider. And they drifted away from those things and became distracted or hypnotized by all these peripheral issues.

And I don't know how you get an important organization like the FBI or even like look at DOD. Right now, DOD is got to do some soul searching too. Yeah. You know, and those are the most two most trusted organizations, what they used to be, the two most trusted organizations that we had, the institutions of our uniformed military and FBI. Right? And I think I told you that my conversation with Director Ray, my last conversation with them, which at the end of my book, I said, you know, I don't think you heard a word I said at the end. I could tell the media was over, but I told them, I said, when people are in trouble and they're in danger or they need help, the two most trusted organizations are the uniform military or the FBI. When people see those uniforms show up, they're like, oh, my God, thank you. When they used to see those uniforms, you know, those piece of crap windbreakers show up. Oh, my God, I'm glad they're here. Why didn't they get you guys better windbreakers?

Nobody can see it on camera, but he gave me a FBI windbreaker, which I'm definitely going to use to stop crime in. Yeah. That thing is about as thick as a piece of paper. Right. I think they were more visual aids. Yeah. Well, it's certainly not a technical fabric.

Yeah. I think they were more visual aids so we could identify each other. That's fair. When you were out places, right? Yeah. But can you imagine wearing that in the summertime or, you know. Oh, God, no. That'd be like a trash bag.

It is basically a trash bag with arms attached to it. So, but now they give out, and this is one of the other things that was a beef I had about the change of the bureau. It was the militarization, the image of it. You saw on TV where they would be out, you know, bulletproof vests. The one that I had was a white and blue piece of crap. I don't think it would have stopped much of anything. But it was just a white and blue piece of crap. You know, you put it on and you hope for the best.

Now you have like level three, four. tactical gear, web gear, all kinds of stuff. And that's what they wear now. You don't like that stuff? It's not that I don't like it. I just don't think it's always appropriate. Or time and place. It's not helpful.

Yeah, time and place. Because think about this. When you show up at a doctor's office to arrest some guy for embezzling some Medicare funds, you really don't need, generally, the tactical gear. You don't need M4s. That's not true at all. You need to gas him. Yeah.

Maybe. I mean, that's how I would go. This is why I can't be an FBI agent. Based upon your background, that might be a proper approach. No, you should probably send somebody in. Well, I mean, I would want somebody to go in discreetly have a conversation, walk the guy out to the car, and take care of it. Yeah.

And not only that, but if you're looking to develop any kind of informants, you want a non-confrontational interaction. Why don't you go and say, hey, man, we got you. Now here's how you can help yourself at us. Yeah. As opposed to waving M-4s around and, you know, you're at his house and his kids are screaming. and the wife's having a heart attack. Yeah.

Not everything is the global war on terror. Right. But that's what the Bureau kind of started leaning that way on things. And I, look, I agree it's important to have protection because we had a couple of agents that were killed. They rolled up on a place where a guy was involved with child pornography or something. Shot them to the door. Yeah. Right?

They weren't wearing protective gear. So, again, you're going to hear all those arguments for and against. I just don't think it's the image we need all the time. That has actually trickled down to state and local law enforcement as well. I mean, the cops here have an MRAP, which they use for SWAT callouts and stuff like that. And they have a lot of the same gear as a lot of the federal agents do that we used to wear. There's a time and place for it. But yet, it shouldn't necessarily be your default.

I agree. But that's what they're issuing now. Everybody has the vest with the web gear and everything on them. The technology is great. It is. You're going to go to a middle school and do a nonviolent offender. You know, maybe don't scare the shit of the kids. Maybe, maybe not, right?

Yeah. You know, and that's where, you know, I saw and, you know, talked about the agents kneeling for the BLM people. We talked about that a little bit last time I was on it. I was thinking, they're all wearing that type of web gear and everything. And they're out there kneeling before. You know, what happened, right? So that's where I, that's when I decided to. right. Where'd you start when you were writing the book? What was the first chapter you wrote?

The first thing I wrote was an introduction to say, this is what the book is. Yeah. And this is what it's not. The list that you sent me in the email, was this, well, was this chapters that you wrote? No, no. Those were examples of the outcomes of the cultural erosion, the leadership, decline, and the operational practices. Those are the symptoms. Yeah. That's where you see that list. If you want to hit, yeah, you want to hit a few of those? I mean, let's hit the FBI handling of the Hunter Biden laptop. Yeah, that was, that was interesting.

Again, oh, how the narrative has shifted on that. Well, of course it has, right? But the problem was at the time, they came into possession, they validated it, and then sat on it. They were scared. Who makes the choice to sit on it when they validate? I'm going to make an educated guess because I was not involved with that. My people would have been the ones to generally do the forensics. Because you were the science and technology.

Right. Chris, did you sit on this fucking thing? I didn't. Okay. Just check. But somehow communications were made and they said, keep it to yourself. We'll work it in a separate channel. And that was one of the bad parts of the Bureau too, was that those kind of tunnels were being dug in some places.

And we would have been the guys to extract, validate. My programs would have done, not necessarily my people at hand. headquarters, but we had people worked out in the field that did the same programs. But they validated that laptop and sat on it because they were scared. And what they didn't understand, I don't think at the time, and now looking back on it, you know, 2020, you know, be in good hindsight. By not making a decision, you influence the election. By making a decision, you influence the election. Yeah. Okay. So for me, you take it to the Attorney General and you say, look, this is what? we found. What are we doing? He's the cabinet level official. He's the guy who's going to make

that call. Is he essentially the head lawyer in the United States? He is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Now, not to say the fact that he's a law enforcement officer, but he is the chief legal law enforcement official. Lawyers have no law enforcement power. Zero. They're officers of the court. A lawyer can't go out and arrest somebody. I used to be able to run. the mechanism of arguing inside of the courtroom. That's it. Yeah. That's the only, and they could write very strongly worded letters, right?

And send them out to people and then, you know, and then scare you or annoy you with letters. Those can be fun. Right. I've been on the receiving of some of those. But that's what they do, right? They write letters. Yeah. And they, you know, they document things.

But they don't have any real authority. The AG, though, by virtue of being, the attorney general, by being in his role, that role has a lot of power. because we report to him, the marshals report to him, DEA, ATF. All those parts of the executive branch report to the attorney general. How long did they sit on it? I think they came into possession around 2019, sat on it through 2020. And the whole time it was this Russian disinformation. That's when they were.

And then they asked the, now again, this is all, you know, in the public eye. But then they reportedly asked the social media company, to disavow. Oh, there's direct. Right? Yeah. I believe it's called in black and white. Yes.

Disavow that this laptop is real. Which, and it... I'm not an expert in the FBI, but I feel like that is outside of the jurisdiction and wheelhouse of the FBI to do. Well, they were running it as a potential in their world. Yeah. If this was a Russian operation.

But they had validated it. That was... Remember, that that's when they started the whole... Remember that Crossfire Hurricane disaster was going on. Crossfire hurricane, which one's that one? That was in here, too. Yeah, that was the one with Peter Strach. And that's when they were investigating Trump as being part of the,

as being having a relationship with the Russians. Wasn't the number thrown out there like 51 intelligence? Oh, that was a whole different. That was a whole different debacle of 51, I guess, was the number. The Russian dossier, whatever it was. Well, that was a whole different one too. But the 51 intelligence officers wrote a letter saying that this has all the earmarks of a Russian misinformation campaign. The Steele dossier was something that was paid for by the other candidate at the time.

And that Steele went out and used questionable subsources to get information that was never vetted or validated about Trump. That's a real proper shith shell. It was a convergence of multiple levels of ridiculousness, nonsense, and piss poor performance by the FBI. In the perfect world, or if it had played out in an FBI that is agnostic to political class, what would they have done with the laptop? Reported that they had it and that it was in fact authentic and then left it to be what it was. That's what they should have done. Yeah, okay.

They should have took it over to justice and said, All right. We are bringing it to you. Tag, you're it. Yeah, we've done our due diligence. This is authenticated. This is yours. This is what we found. Yeah. And here are the results.

Mr. Attorney General, what would you like to do? How would you like to proceed? And the AG would have said, don't say another word. Let me go to the White House. I feel like that would have been a rough cup of coffee. I'm sure. I am sure that would have been a difficult conversation. God.

to be a fly on the wall of that particular room. But that's what the Bureau gets paid for. That's why it exists to make those tough calls, right? Well, the call you got. I'm talking about going to the AG and presenting the case. That's what the Bureau exists for. It's the AG's choice what they want to do with it from there because if the FBI does their job agnostically, certifies it and hands it over, to a degree, to a degree, what do you want from us? It's not our job to prosecute.

Now you guys took it to the White House and then all of a sudden the trajectory changed. Perhaps we should look at that connection. Well, yeah. I mean, that could be a different issue. You've got to have the AG at that point. It has to make some decisions. Yeah. Right.

But that's where that whole thing came about. And, you know, the FBI, they have their terminology is the FBI stands for fidelity, bravery, and integrity. And I've been seeing some inconsistencies in all three with that list that I sent to you. And this one here, where was the bravery? there. People were afraid. They were scared. They were scared because they saw what happened. Well, they saw what happened during 2016. They saw what happened to Jim Comey and they saw what happened to Andy McCabe and they saw what happened to other people. And they just didn't want to be next in the crosshairs? Nope. Yeah. Absolutely not. So that one there was a duck in cover. It really was. Right? And it hurt the,

it hurt the brand of the FBI and it hurt the reputation and the trustworthiness with the folks. What is the unexplained revisions of the FBI's 2022 crime data reports? Oh, that's a good one. The FBI is the keeper of all of the crime data, and it publishes an annual report every year of crime trends in the United States, violent crime, you know, sexual assault, whatever, you know, take your paper. They're the repository for all the data. We collected all it. That was one of my programs. And that program requires a complete and 100% overhaul, but that's a side point.

I just left before we can get it done. But the administration was claiming that crime was down as part of their talking points. And the FBI came out and said, yeah, violent crimes down 1.7% from previous years. Yeah. And, of course, the administration was crowing. Is this incredibly recently when this was? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And the administration was, you know, kind of used that as their talking points. And then somehow the FBI quietly updated their statistics and didn't really make a note of it. And it went from being down 1.7% to up 4.5%, which is what, a 6.2% swing. Yeah, that doesn't really align with the narrative either. Okay. So that's why they took a lot of heat on that one and saying, wait a minute, are these statistics worth anything at this point? Because you people, are you gaming this?

What are you doing? So that's another thing. It hurt, again, the image, the reputation, the trustworthiness. Timing was horrible. Oh, of course. It was awful. But here's the thing. Those statistics are used around the whole country. Very important decisions are made based upon those statistics. And now people are questioning them. As they should, because they're shifting it very convenient or inconvenient times depending on the lens. I'll tell you what. I was going to ask you, what would you change? You're saying that the system. That whole system has to be updated. It has to be upgraded, professionalized. Technology is bad. The thought, processes are ancient. I'll give you real quick without killing you with this. The FBI used to have what was called the Uniform Crime Report. It was started in the 1930s, right? And it was called a hierarchical

system, which meant only the top tier crimes were reported in an event. We tried to switch over to a new system called the National Incident-Based Response System, where it was now a line-item system. And here's where the killer is. And the cops don't like this. So, say, in the old days, if there was a bank robbery and the guy stole a car and violated a bunch of traffic laws and stopped to maybe commit a rape, the only thing that really gets reported is the bank robbery. Because it's at the top of that tier. Under the other system, the new system, every line item offense gets reported. So what do you think the law enforcement community said?

No, thank you. Because now they're going to see these giant spikes in unreported crimes that weren't being reported before. Even though they were happening. They were happening, not recorded. The new system will show them all. Now community is going to say, well, wait a minute. where are we getting all these, you know, assaults and where are we getting all these things?

Like, well, that was an accounting error. And the communities deserve that data. Well, but, you know, and I asked somebody this recently, I said, what do you think the number one objective of the chief or sheriff is in their community? Getting reelected. Absolutely. Remaining the chief and sheriff. Those numbers coming out like that?

That's not good. It's not. You need that shift to happen in the, yeah, before you. so you can run against him. Exactly. That's going to be your platform. And then your other platform better be reducing those line items. Exactly.

But yeah, you don't want that shit to happen. Just like Harris' campaign, you don't want the data to shift mid-campaign. Right. That's a real tough cookie to explain. Yeah. Hard. So, but that's why that program is, it's a national program that we make very important decisions based on those statistics. How would you update it?

What would you change it to? Well, technology and it's way out. Okay. And just like a lot of government things. The protocols are bad. And it's not required. Reporting is not required. There are approximately 18,000 criminal justice related organizations that could participate

in the crime survey. We usually used to get about maybe 15, between 15 or 16,000 responses, maybe something, you know, depending on the years and what was going on. But it's not required by law. It was a policy thing. president himself said, hey, we'd really like it if you guys did this, which means if you don't do it, you're not going to get any federal money, basically. This current administration, the outgoing administration, reportedly told the law enforcement community, you're not required

to do this. So then- There's only one fucking reason to tell them that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not serving the people in the communities. It's not. And that's where you have the big cities, some of them didn't report this past year. That's insane. Okay. So, So the numbers could be even more out of skew than you think. Because if the big cities don't report, where do you think most of that crime is? It's in the big cities. It's not out here in the hinterlands, right? I mean, we've got some cow theft.

Yeah. Potentially a little horse thievery going on sometimes. Maybe. Maybe. A couple of catalytic converters here and there, right? Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. But you're not getting the crime that, you know, a city like Detroit has. Yeah, or the inner city violence of Chicago. Yeah. Exactly. So, and it's not required. Because I was looking at the program, Andy, and I was looking at, I was talking to people saying, this is ridiculous. It takes you guys eight months to make this report. Why not? We did a thing where I made them,

and the assistant director at that program at the time, he was, I picked him, he was new, he came in, he goes, yeah, this is not good. So we did it to where, look, people report, some people report their crime stats throughout the year. Some people report them quarterly. Some people report them semi-annually. Some people wait till the end of the year. because there's no real protocol. And I asked why not? Well, we just take whatever we can get because it's not required. We can't force them to do anything.

Man, you can't catch trends though. It gives you incorrect trends. It gives you bad information, right? And so we made this thing called the Crime Data Explorer. And State did a nice job on where you can do self-serve crime reporting. You can go on to this site and you can do all your own searching and it gives you search tools and you can do your own research. But what it gives you is this is what we know as of this date. So say in a week from now, Chicago PD comes in and it dumps a bunch of stuff in there,

right? It's a cross-section in time. But it was more, before they had to wait until we put out some, you know, glossy covered report, which is, you know, it just wasn't as helpful. But they got to get it to where it's real-time reporting, as much as possible, which they have now. And I saw one of the things they wrote about it was that we're going to start doing real-time reporting. You have that. So I'm not sure what exactly they're going to change at this point. But that program is too important to be handled in a kind of a, you know. I just feel like you could actually track realistic trends and get a pulse of where it is actually at. Well, how about the deployment of resources? How about the deployment of grant money? How about when you have places that have a real

crime problem, but it's underreported? They don't get as much as other places. What about the demographic reviews? What about places that, you know, especially now that we're going to have all of this, you know, these migrant operations that are going to be coming up? How do you think that's going to go? I think it's going to be a debacle. I think it's going to be terrible. Yeah. I think it's going to be painful to watch.

What agency do you feel like that's going to fall under? Ice. Okay. Because I've heard people. Oh, we need to engage the military. I was like, well, I don't know if you've ever heard of this thing called Pasicomatatus, which kind of exists. Well, that's an inconvenience. Yeah.

Right. Well, they're also not trained for it, though. Exactly. Well, here's the problem. And I had a conversation with somebody like about this, using the military. Or even just say if you taken and you seconded a bunch of FBI people. Well, the FBI has a certain amount of training on its use of lethal force or use of force. So does ICE.

So do other departments. They're not all the same. And you bring the military into it now. What are their rules of engagement? Because here's what I see happening. the opponents of that activity are already marshalling. Loudly. Forces.

Yeah, loudly. They are going to make sure that everywhere this operation is happening, there are people with their cell phone cameras or news crews. And you will probably largely see only women and children being filmed. They're not going to take the 80% of these people who are military age males being kind of taken into custody and moved on. you're going to see women and children screaming and yelling. And you're going to see ugly separation of families, all this stuff. It's going to be terrible.

And you're also then going to see where are they going to put these people while they're going to process them out. What do you do with the people who come from a country of origin that we can't return them to? They won't receive them back. Venezuela is a good example. A lot of people say, oh, super dangerous. These people are coming from Venezuela. I'm like, yeah, you can't send them fucking back. Well, they won't take them.

Yeah. So this is going to be just a national debacle. and I think the administration is going to take a lot of battle damage on the imagery and the optics. Especially since they largely ran on it. Yeah. So they got to do something. Yeah. But you take, and how many ice agents are there?

I'm not sure. I don't know, Michael, can you look that up? But I'll tell you right now, there are only between, I'd say, between 13 and 14,000 FBI agents in the country. And FBI has got to be bigger than ice, right? Probably. Is it a departmental size? Let's say that they're equal. That's 13,000 cut that across 50 states.

I mean, about 20,000 ice. That's the total of the, how many agents are there? ICE agents. Because the FBI says it has 35,000 people, but only between 13 and 14 of the agents. Yeah, the actual agents themselves, yeah. 7100. All right.

Okay. So 7,100 plus 14,000. We'll give them that. 21,000. And this is if you take every available man and woman who has law enforcement credentials to go, on do that between ICE and the FBI. Marshalls is a small service.

ATFs is a small service. Yeah. I mean, how are you getting this done? So that's what I'm saying. It's going to be, it's going to be ugly, and then you bring the National Guard in, and everybody's so risk-averse, everybody's so afraid of cries of racism and, you know, all the other usual. Is it's going to be a disaster. But he's got to do something.

Yeah, and he's going into it as a lame duck, right? He's not going to have another opportunity to run. Right. But he can't crater the runway for the guy coming behind him. Yeah, that's true. Because that's what's going to happen. He can go out there and be a wrecking ball. He doesn't care.

He's not running again. And he's rich. So he's going to go play golf for the rest of his life. He's got kind of a nice place to live down in Florida. He's got nice places all over the place. But he can't crater the runway for the guy coming behind him. Unless he doesn't care. which I'm not sure.

I don't know the guy. I don't know. I'll tell you what, I would hope not. Because what we can't do is have four years of whatever this is going to be. And then swing back toward the other side again. And I'll tell you, when my wife and I were watching the election stuff. And I said, okay. So the American people decided.

decided as we were racing toward the cliff. We need to make a change. That they just hit the brakes. Yeah. Okay. I'm not saying we turned away from the cliff. The cliff's still right in front of us. Yeah, we just slowed down.

We just stopped. So what happens in four years? If he doesn't prepare the battlefields, you know, speaking of battlefields. Yeah. If he doesn't prep the battlefield for the person to come behind him to take another four years to get things back in some level of good condition, We're going to swing right back and we're going to be running headlong off that cliff into socialism, communism, in my opinion. I had not thought about that optic, which I agree with you, for people who using, again, these amazing devices that you can be a first line reporter if you want.

And they're going to be all over. They're going to be all over it. And by selectively using emotionally engaging imagery like that, they're going to be fighting an uphill battle from the moment that. that begins for sure. And all of the mainstream media outlets are going to, they're just waiting to get that footage. I think they're cooked. Well, they're going to be waiting. I think mainstream media is fucking circling the bull.

I think they're in trouble right now, but they're going to hold on until these operations start. And this is going to bring, this is going to bring some, it's going to reinvigorate the left. And they won't. That would have a hard time arguing. Because they saw some of their other issues, didn't. have the traction they had hoped. I tell you whose fucking job, I think, is over. Polsters.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the pollsters. Can we disagree to like fuck off and let's just see what the results are? I mean, it was always, it was always a, I don't know how to put it. It was, I hate to call it a pseudoscience, but it was kind of a pseudo-searched, right? But when you had actual people who would answer in an honest fashion and you had pure statistical analysis, they were pretty good.

Yeah. But that went away. I was going to say, the days of that should are gone. That went away. Yeah. So what else you got on your list? What do we see here? Not through it here.

FBI retaliation against whistleblowers. Reported use of administrative sanctions and clearance adjudication process in punitive ways for supposed conservatives. Fuck me. Yeah, there were a couple of guys this past year were whistleblowers against the FBI. They were saying there were things going on aside the organization that they were, they felt were either immoral or, you know, illegal or whatever, they disagreed with. And they were actually up on the hill.

They testified in front of one of the committees. I think it might have been the weaponization committee. And one of the guys, they gave him a promotion. He was, you know, an objector to certain things. They gave him a promotion. He was out west. they have him move to D.C. with his family, all of his stuff's in storage.

He gets to D.C. And they tell him on the day he gets there. Yeah, you're on suspension. Because of this security matter. They withdrew his clearance. And then they wouldn't give him his household goods. No way. Yeah.

And then they wouldn't let him work. Because FBI agents are not allowed. to have external employment. And you have to have, I'm assuming you guys, most of you guys are wrong with TSSs at a minimum. They pulled his clearance. They suspended it. Yeah, which is hard shut down

from almost any job that guy would want to get. Yeah. Yeah. But he can't work externally. He can't support his family. He doesn't have his household goods. Punity. Yeah.

And whatever his issue was, and I used to tell people this, you can't hate them. You deal with the issue. You deal with the issue. with the behavior, whatever it is, you can't hate the people. Because then when you get into that, that's when that's, and people were saying, well, you know, maybe that was an isolated incident.

I said, if that happened where somebody's clearance is being pulled and they just promoted him into a position at FBI headquarters, the chain of command knows that it's going on and they allowed it to happen. Yeah, that doesn't happen in a silo. Absolutely not. There was another guy. He was against certain things going on. They suspended his clearance.

Under investigation for, I don't know, 18 months, maybe longer, wouldn't let him get outside employment. He was broke. Finally, he went and he testified again. The IG, the inspector general, come out and said, this is BS. What are you doing? So they gave him back pay,

and they were going to re-hire, you know, put him back in the service. I'm sure he was super excited to go back to that. He told them. He told them. Fuck. No. Because he actually on his last, he said, this is my, he was testifying in front of one of the committees again before he goes, this is my last day of government service.

He goes, these people. He goes, and if I was, he was actually kind of funny. He goes, and if I were all the American people here, I would arm yourselves. And he was staying in the city. Okay, that's going to inflame a certain portion. Yeah. But they did that to him. another guy that was testifying, he was on a SWAT team and they wanted to use SWAT to go out

and arrest somebody had to do it January 6th. And he goes, why are we doing that? We need a SWAT team for it. I'll just go on and pick them, you know, and did the same thing to him, found out that he, you know, they were saying that he, he unauthorized took materials out of the office and they suspended his clearance. That's their thing. As soon as they suspend your clearance, it's kind of a, yeah, you can't come to work.

So they're using those type of things. And to me, what that is is that is a cancer. That is a leadership cancer in the organization when, okay, say the top two or three guys didn't know. Everybody else did. And they either looked the other way. And the fact that people thought that was even an acceptable course of action is unacceptable. How about when the top two or three guys do find out? What do they do about it?

Well, if it was me, if I was still in my role, I would have said, you give them this stuff today. Yeah. Right, today. and I want a full report on this, what is going on. Let's look into this real quick here. Let's see how this clearance was actually pulled. But by tomorrow morning at 08, you're going to be standing in front of me and telling me what's going on here. Yeah.

Right? That would be my response. As they break out in a fucking cold sweat. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You'll outline this for me and tell me what the justification is for this behavior. So, but that's what I'm saying.

But that's, if that's the kind of stuff that's going on, even if they did something wrong, Andy, why are you treating your people? like that. And how can the American people feel that the FBI will treat them with an honest, even even even treat their own people? They won't even treat their internal people. Yeah. So, you know, but it's just that that's what I, that's why, you know, I'm thinking that that is a leadership cancer. All right. This is a long one here. DOJ FBI payouts for sexual discrimination at the FBI Academy, 22 million. Olympic athletes abuse case, 139 million. And the Parkland, Florida, shooting tragedy at Majorie Stomond High School, $130 million. Peter Strock and Lisa Page.

And Lisa Page. That's the $2 million. So a sum of $2.993 million paid out for programmatic shortfalls. And that's 2021 through 2024. I have not heard about the sexual discrimination. And what's this Olympic athletes abuse? I wrote about that in my book. Okay.

It's one of the examples I use as a perfect storm of FBI cultural decline. operational decline, mediocrity, and just it was a debacle. Okay. So there was a guy's last name was Nasser. He was a doctor. And he used to be the team doctor. He was the team.

Fuck, I want to get my hands on this dude. For the female. Gymnastic team. Gymnastic team. Yep. And he abused these girls over an extended period of time. Yeah. They called the FBI for help.

and the FBI did nothing. The FBI did not follow up. The FBI did not notify any other partners. The FBI did nothing for months. They didn't interview all the people. It was just, it was a disaster. So I outlined it in my book as an example of, like, what were these people thinking?

This is an, I was embarrassed when I read about this. As I'm a career FBI agent, I'm thinking, where were the FBI Dragon Slayers on this? These young ladies called the FBI for help. Multiple times. Okay. And they did nothing. And then they, and this is the IG report.

Everything I did, I referenced Inspector General reports in my book because they couldn't strike it because they would have struck it on the pre-publication review. Oh yeah, because if it's in the IG report, that's open source. It's public knowledge. Yep. And the IG is the IG. So the IG came out and said, are you kidding me? The FBI didn't even follow its own protocols. The FBI did an incomplete investigation.

They went through this litany of things. And basically these young ladies called for help. The FBI did nothing. There was a culture of mediocrity. And then they actually, the IG said that some of these people tried to lie and, you know, they were not truthful. And they said the guy in charge was trying to get a job with the Olympic Committee. So it was.

It was just, I mean, I'm reading this and I'm disgusted beyond belief. So, you know, I'm looking at this and I'm thinking leadership failure, operational failure, practice failure, cultural failure. Where would these, I mean, this should have had the best available case agents on it to say, we've got to remove this person from a position of trust immediately. I mean, I would have been in the year of the Olympic Committee saying, you guys really don't want us to start talking. about this out in the public, do you? So you better move them now. But while we do this and get him away from those girls, they didn't do anything.

And the FBI could be influential when it wants to be. Did you ever watch the documentary about this? I've seen several shows. I don't know which one you're talking about. It's on Netflix, I believe it's called Athlete A. And I believe it does reference the agent who was potentially looking at getting the job with you. I knew that guy. And it makes your skin crawl.

I knew that guy. And when I read that, I was stunned by it. So the FBI paid out $139 million? DOJ. DOJ did. And then what happened at the Parkland, Florida? Why did the DOJ pay out $1309?

This is another sad story, but before the shooter at Parkland did what he did, one of his family members contacted the FBI. We had that tip line. Yeah, I think I know where this is going. The folks who answered the call dismissed it. Fuck. No follow up. And now, and it was one of my programs under me, right?

So we're all having a leadership meeting. A couple of guys walk in pale. They were in charge of the division that this program was in. And they said, hey, you guys step outside. Okay. And they said, hey, there was shooting. This was on Valentine's Day. It was shooting, school, kids, all that good stuff.

Okay. I said, oh, no. And then we started that march into looking into what happened. And basically again. How far, or how, what's the right of the phrases? How far before the event did the call come in? Days week. Okay.

So plenty of time. We could have interdicted. Okay. What I saw was, and I wrote about this a little bit, and I really coined this phrase recently. I'm sure I didn't make it up, but I coined it in my own mind. Bureaucratic indifference.

Not that they meant anything bad by it. Because the first thing I, when this happened, I said, all right, I got to tell the director. I got to tell the deputy. Director was new in his role. They were already calling for, he wasn't in his role a couple of months. They were calling for his resignation.

Yeah. Deputy gets called to the hill and gets raped over to Coles. I said, all right, we got to look into this, see what happened. Well, one of the calls, call takers under the old protocols, looks at it, says, yep, can't figure this out, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever. She went through his checklist. Takes it to a supervisor.

A supervisor looks at it and says, yeah, yeah. So they killed it. And then that event happened. And then they went back and saw, oh. And I said, well, you know, tell me what happened. How do we get there? Well, we followed our policies. I said, oh, okay.

obviously our policies are not adequate. And what I found was, is there was a combination, Andy, of a lack of leadership, again, lack of culture, lack of training. The policies were a pile, I kid you not, maybe 18 inches high of incoherent documents, emails, you know, fall on the fly protocols of this. And, you know, I don't think we could have prevented it. But we could have tried harder. Right. And those people, the call takers were being told at the time, do not spend more than this much time on a call.

What volume of calls are they getting? They could get hundreds. Like per day? Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. And then what happened was, is the argument was, well, if we don't take these calls quick and sort out the nuts,

because we get a lot of calls from people who are just lonely. I mean, they're nuts. And then you have people who hang up because they're on hold for a minute or two or two. You know, that's a long time to just sit there and listen to crappy elevator music. So you have people select out. And then an event happens and you say, well, I tried to call them. I was on hold for five minutes.

So what's the worst of two evils? They try to plow through the calls quickly where you stay on with somebody. You extract every bit of information out of that call only at the end to say, yeah, this person's kind of goofy. Yeah, there's certainly no perfect answer to that. Damn, that sucks. So, yeah. And again, in hindsight, looking back after the event, you focus so much on that event and not the other thousand calls that came in that didn't terminate in the event.

I get it. That's what I'm saying. It is that zero tolerance. I mean, the FBI was brought to its knees on this thing, right? So as we looked into it, both my own office and our inspection division, we found a lot of, I would just say, outdated protocol. Yeah. And a lot of, again, leadership shortfall.

Right. So, you know, I just think we could have tried harder. We might have been able to get. The local law enforcement was aware of this kid. They had run-ins with them already. So. That often seems to be the case a little bit. But the problem is, Andy, they don't do anything wrong.

They're just bad. They're just hard kids to deal with. They're troubled, right? And this kid went out and bought the weapons legally. Yeah. Bought. Yeah. No problem.

So I don't know what. do about that one other than that was one of those just awful situations where we had four knowledge and she actually, the family member actually said, I think he might go shoot up a school. Yeah. So. It's like the guy who shot at Trump when they showed up and knocked on the parents' door. The dad's first response was it was my son, wasn't it? Yeah.

Fuck. It's like, I don't know what you do. So, you know, but our society has zero forgiveness, zero tolerance. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have done more. we couldn't have done more. I just don't know what that could have been at the time. And nobody wants to live in a minority report world either, where they're fucking reading your future thoughts

and incriminating you for shit that hasn't happened. That's part of the problem. When you go to the courts and all that, we can't take action against people based upon what we think they're going to do. Yeah. And that's where the civil liberties and security imbalance occurs.

What was the sexual discrimination at the FBI Academy? What do you guys got going on? I'll tell you, they had a bad run of some folks down there. And from what I understand, there were some females at the academy that were subjected to some off-color comments and maybe some, you know, grab ass and, you know, people are people, right? But it happened systematically enough or systemically enough that a bunch of them got together and said, well, wait a way. a minute. Some of us were thrown out of here. Some of us were not passed. We didn't get this. We didn't get that. Other ones were just harassed. So they all got together and put together a lawsuit. Class action probably. Yeah. And I guess based upon the IG's report and other people's, you know, whatever they,

investigation they did. They said, okay, we, whenever the department pays out, they know they have culpability. And Andy, those are the ones that we know of. Those are the public ones. Yeah. Yeah, that's an important point to bring up, actually. That's the ones that are consumer facing. And here's why I look at those and I say, is that the declining FBI culture? What kind of people are we putting in positions of authority? What kind of people are we putting in positions of trust? When you have people at the FBI Academy, you're there not only to train people, but you're there to mentor.

You're there to take care of them too, right? They're in your charge. What are we doing? I mean, are we... So that's why I looked at that one as a just, is that an indicator of a declining culture? Where's the leadership on that? You can't tell me that none of them complained to a manager at some point, at least one. I would find it highly improbable if they didn't.

Right. Especially if certain things were, you know, physical in nature. Yeah, for sure. Right. Questioned FBI intelligence and surveillance focus. Examples of the Catholic Church, school board meetings and the five. As a 702 coverage. Okay.

Catholic Church. There was a memo that was leaked out of one of the field offices. I believe it was Richmond Field Office, where they wrote about people who were traditional Catholics being extremists. And that was the gist of the report. If mass was being given in Latin, these people may be religious extremists. That is a normal practice in Catholicism. They do masses in Latin.

because it's traditional. So, but they wrote this report and it got late. And people were just beside themselves about, no, wait a minute. Now, you're attacking the church. Not only that, but you're attacking Christians. Where if that was a report about Muslims, given their services in Arabic, yeah, people would have gone absolutely preserved. So there was that, there was that appearance of like, and who's in.

incentivizing that type of reporting. Who approved that? Who's asking for it? That didn't get approved at the line analyst level. There are supervisors who okayed that thing. Now, Director Ray saw it, and he was horrified by it. He said, yeah, we've withdrawn that. That was withdrawn from all of our records, everything.

But it made it out to the public. Yeah. What's the FISA 702? 702 coverage is part of the FISA authorities. And 702 is what I believe you were talking with that gentleman who was on about the human trafficking. Okay.

Oh, recently, Jared? Yeah. Okay. And you guys were talking about how the government can perform unwarranted surveillance on its people. More like it's a stamped turnkey stamp warrant. So I'll tell you a little bit just real quick about that. The FISA court, I think FISA was put in place

by Reagan. President Reagan. It was executive order 1-2-3-33-3 started all of the authorities. Well, FISA was put in place because it was kind of the Wild West on wiretapping back in the day. And they said, all right, hang on a second. You guys are getting a little out of control here. I mean, they're only just listening to the other campaign and what they were thinking

about, things of that. Well, somebody developed a conscience or somebody developed a vulnerability. Or somebody got caught. Whatever, right? But they put that in place. And FISA now is the authority set that we use for that foreign intelligence collection against foreign nationals, you know, terrorism, counterintelligence, espionage, things of that sort. What they did after 9-11 and what they figured out at some point moving up toward, you know, current time is that technology was changing faster than our legal constructs would allow us to do collection. because things didn't exist

when certain legal authorities were written. For sure. Yeah. Technologies didn't exist yet, right? I remember when we were doing some FISA stuff and they were saying, okay, we were looking to do surveillance on a certain target. We don't have any language for that.

What do you mean you don't have a language? Well, it didn't exist. So they just started calling things facilities. Okay. But it's not a facility. Okay, yeah, don't worry about it. Right? Because they can't rewrite.

the whole. Yeah, they had to shoehorn it into the infrastructure they had. Exactly. So when they moved up into the FISA 702 issue, 702 coverage, and I wrote about this just briefly, 702 coverage was provided so that we could do surveillance overseas on non-U.S. persons. The FISA authority that we go to court to get allows us to target those people overseas, right? Because they're not U.S. persons. They're not covered by our rights. and our protections and everything else. The court, the foreign intelligence surveillance court, is a rotating group of senior judges in the D.C. area, right? They get together and they review these packages.

When you're talking about rubber stamping, the problem with the FISA process is that it's opaque. You can't see what goes on inside of it unless you're part of it, which I was part of it. That review goes through, I'm not kidding you, maybe a dozen, maybe more now, people who review and approve from line supervisors to executives to lawyers, general counsel, then it goes to DOJ. And then the DOJ lawyers take a whack at it.

And then it goes to the lawyers in the FISA court. So there's a million people in the middle of that process before it gets to that judge who can say no. And everybody says, well, every one of them gets approved. It has like a 98% approval rate. Probably because of the 12 people that went through on the way. Because it gets shit canned up and down the chain several times. You get all these edits back from DOJ. You get all this stuff, right?

So it's an opaque process. It'd be like me saying, look, Andy, you know, when you had to do your ops orders and you had to get approval for missions, it was a rubber stamp. Do you know how many PowerPoints I had to do to get that approval? Yeah. Nobody sees that. And it's a very...

And they get bounced back all the time. I had a slide-down come back one time because the helicopters on my PowerPoints, slide were oriented in the opposite direction of the arrow of flight. Which could have created an operational disaster. I guess. Not that I wanted them to fly there in reverse. I feel like the pilots understood the intent of where we wanted to land.

I shit you not. They kicked it back because the fucking helicopter tail rotor was towards the pointy end of the arrow. And we inverted them and then we got approved. Yeah. But what happens too with that process, again, being an opaque process, right? You don't see it unless you're part of it because of the classification. of the information and what you're looking to do

the surveillance techniques and everything else. So it's classified. Secret minimum. Top secret a lot of times because of sources, methods, all that good stuff. So when you're talking about

a rubber stamp, it gets a high level of approval because before it gets to that judge, these are all like district court judge level. They're all federal judges. When it gets to that level, this thing is tight. No tail rotors in the wrong direction

because it's already been scrubbed through by ad nauseum. Yeah. by an army of lawyers and agents and analysts and everybody else. So I'm not saying the process is that it's not a consistent approval. It's just that before it even gets to that judge to look at, and we used to get them back from the judges even. The judges would say, I don't understand this, restate this,

and you'd come back with sticky notes on it. It's like, God, you know, are you kidding me? But that never gets counted in the process. Yeah. So I just wanted to clarify that. No, that's good. I'm glad. Okay, because it's not just me.

I don't just write this stuff up and, hey, here you go, Judge. That doesn't happen. Yeah. It's a very rigorous, painful process. That I'm glad to hear. Well, I hated it. It was awful. That means it's working well.

Yeah, it was painful. So, but the 702 coverage, when we look at conducting surveillance overseas or doing what they call upstream type of, you know, comms analysis, the problem is when they talk about the unwarranted collection with U.S. persons is that U.S. persons are in contact with people overseas. They get caught in those surveillance networks. And then we collect. And then when it comes back and it's translated, maybe in its foreign language, then they say, oh, we got a U.S. person. Incidental contact. Now we have to decide, was it incidental contact, or do we now open an investigation on this person so that we could predicate a look into what their relationship

is with this other person overseas, right? The FBI is great at collecting information. The FBI was not as good at managing the information. They put it in these databases, and then people could just go romping through the databases doing checks. Yeah. Well, that was the problem. So when people are in there looking up, you know, Congressman such and so in this 702,

that made them very uncomfortable or any other U.S. person. They could look me up in them. Yeah. Right? and then when you start getting hits because these people have communications in certain places or you start drawing analysis of comms, they're saying,

okay, you didn't have a warrant to collect my comms. Yeah, but you were in contact with this investigative target. So where do you balance that? The FBI has its own internal systems. Now they're saying you have to get a warrant to look at your own internal systems. No shit.

That's what they're talking about. So now the FBI is going to be handcuffed from looking at its own internal collection. So when the next 9-11 is being planned, and I don't get a warrant to look in my own databases and something blows up. Fuck. Do you see, again, they're handed this conundrum.

Yeah, because you don't want them to be able to, you know, and Snowden actually disclosed a lot of this stuff. Right. Like, keyword searches and the ability to cross that. And, like, you don't want that in the hands of the wrong person or an entity that is weaponizing that against the populace, but you also don't want another 9-11 to happen inside of a vacuum. Exactly.

And that's the problem. That's the conundrum they're given. Yeah. The whole intelligence community, do we listen or do we not listen? If we don't listen, we should have been. And if we do listen and there's no incident, then we're going to get yelled at for listening. So that's the problem. I'm not saying that it's right.

I'm just saying, what's the alternative to preventing loss of life or injury to people? Or do we just not listen and keep our fingers crossed? Or the worst scenario is, I have it in my database. Plain as day. which the NSA does, and they can retroactively go back and look. But I didn't look and I'm the FBI. And I didn't get a warrant to look in my own database or I didn't get whatever authorization to look in my own databases

and we had an incident. Yeah, that's a rough optic. Again, I don't know what the right answer is. I think you have to pick between the two evils. So, you know, like I told people when I used to go up on the hill, you've charged me with an imperfect balance between civil liberties and privacy and security and safety. And it's a sliding scale every day. Yeah.

So it's a tough one. But the 702 coverage, people are upset about it. But how do our protectors then get the information and intelligence they need without trampling on the rights of people? But the – I think the bigger argument is integrity of the organization. That's what it comes back to. And that's the killer. And that brings us full circle back to the trust in the FBI has declined.

Yeah. And until that's reinstalled or instilled, there is no good answer. Well, did you ever read, there's a book called Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey? It's actually a pretty good book. But he boils it down. Trust, he made it a little bit of a math problem. Trust equals character plus results. Okay, I could agree with that premise.

Very simple. Now you can add all other kind of mathematical functions. Yeah, true. As a baseline premise, that's not bad. But he said, when you build trust, you exhibit character and deliver results. Very simple. To me, the character of the FBI was always its competence and its credibility. That made the trust.

What they said was, again, inviolable. We know it was right because they don't take shortcuts. They don't do this. They don't do that. And I don't know if we've moved away from that. And that's where I think the organization is struggling. People forget, too, that, you know, you move away from trust. A, if you take it to bankrupt, you may never be able to build it back.

But it's almost, you could almost use the example of trying to lose body weight. You can gain it faster than you can lose it and get back to where you want to be. It's almost 2x as long. So there's going to need to be a history, a robust history of people seeing things that are trustworthy for it to get back to that. Yeah. You can damage it in a minute and it takes a lifetime to build it. FBI use of the Trump questionnaire by its headquarters security division. What is this? This is a lovely thing I heard about. Somebody in the security division of the FBI, which the FBI has its own internal security function to look after its systems, its protocols,

its practices. They're the ones who adjudicate clearances and, you know, they do their insider threat investigations, all that type of stuff, facilities and, you know, information security. it came to light, again, through a whistleblower, that there was a survey being given to people, whether or not they supported Trump. Oh, boy. What were their ideas on the COVID vaccine? Looking for their political conservatism. Asking people this. And I'm thinking, to what end?

Yeah. Why do you need that information? Right. And then once it got leaked, everybody was playing hot potato, right? Everybody's pointing fingers. Nobody knows what's going on. I'm thinking, first of all, they said it was a comment. contractor who made that survey.

And I said, well, a contractor would not make that survey unless they were given a set of requirements and they were paid to make that survey. Somebody asked for it. Somebody okayed it. Somebody was using it. Where does that tell you where the leadership needle points? When somebody commissioned that and they were using it to interview people inside the FBI. Yeah, that's not good.

You know, it really gives you a bad image of what kind of leader. environment exists in that organization that they're asking you if you're a Trump supporter. What if I am? Yeah. And besides that, we're supposed to be apolitical, so it shouldn't matter. Yeah, it should be kept out of that. Exactly. I feel like the FBI is not going to like your book.

You know what? I'll tell you what. I tried to be fair and I tried to be objective and honest. Yeah. And I've gotten a lot of great feedback on it. And I even wrote in the book, I said there will be people who will attack me. They will denigrate my career. and, you know, there will be people who disagree, which is fine.

I welcome all perspectives. But I also think there are going to be people who silently nod and they will murmur their approval. Did it have any issues going through the clearance process? No, they sat on it for five months. Yeah, which actually is shockingly slow. The DOD approval process, 18 months minimum, I've heard from people. Yeah. Well, five months for me was, I don't know if it was that they just didn't get to.

to it or whatever, not one edit. Interesting. Not one edit. They didn't strike anything. Now, granted, I knew I had some inside baseball, right? I knew what they would be sensitive to. Yeah. So I omitted writing about certain things, or I alluded to things without.

Yeah, you can write around it. Yeah. So I was able to do that, and I used IG reports. So. Not a whole lot they can say about stuff to start in public. Exactly. They may not have liked it. Yeah.

But they couldn't strike it based upon their own policies and our own rules. So, you know, when I wrote it, again, it was written in a manner that I'm not trying to smash the organization. I love the FBI. I spent a quarter of a century there. I love that organization. I'm just concerned where it is right now. And it's not what the American people want and need as the world becomes more dangerous. We're moving into different social environments in this country. And I don't think our FBI is right now well positioned to provide that protection to be those dragon slayers, to give us that shield against foreign hostile adversaries. One of the things I read in a book called The Naked Truth, it was about the movement

of communism in the United States. One of their primary objectives that they said they could not be successful unless they were to disable or destroy the FBI. And this book was written in the 1950s, Andy. You know, I think it's okay that you feel that way. And I actually think it's okay that our public institutions at times take an actual pulse and are honest about where they are because then you can make change. It's about when that's happening and it's being denied and you're being told one thing, but you see another.

That's where I think we get into some really tenuous water. I'm sure the agency doesn't want to hear that. And they may not like it, but change it. But it starts with being honest, though. Well, that's the problem. They operate solely based upon the trust and confidence that the American people give them. That's it. Yeah.

If the American people don't trust them anymore, they will become irrelevant. They won't survive. And we cannot do without that protective agency. They can't start behaving in a way that people are comparing the FBI to the KJ. They're preparing the FBI to the Stasi of East Germany. And even though that's kind of hyperbolic, the fact that people are even saying it is it should be a concern to the senior leadership. The FBI director is the protector of the FBI brand. And this is where we are.

Do you think it's fixable? I do. I think it's fixable. I still think there are a lot of people in the FBI that are just holding their breath, keeping their head down. They're doing the work. I think if you give them a chance to pick their heads back up and say, okay, this is where we're heading. Are you willing to go?

Let's go. We got to get this right. I think there are a lot of people who would snap right back in and say, okay, we're with you. I think there are people who their values and beliefs have to, they may have to find somewhere else to work. That's okay. And I think there are some people who should be excused from the organization. Also, okay. Right?

So I think that's, I mean, on very broad brush strokes, that's where that is. I still think that there are people in that organization. I mean, I grew up during the Cold War. I mean, I was in, you know, we're both, well, I wasn't in the real military. I was in the Air Force, but. That's still the real military. No. Space forces, I'm not sure as the real military.

Well, you're being kind today. But, you know, I did serve in the armed forces during the Cold War. You know, everything was, you know, the Soviets. and, you know, we were, I mean, it was serious. Yeah. And that went away and things changed. And I don't think we have that same sense of protection of what we have here. Take it for granted.

And I think the folks now, they don't understand that there's danger out there. And there are people who are willing to come and take what we have, destroy what we have, and get rid of the way of life that we've made. many people have, you know, paid the ultimate sacrifice to give us. Yeah, I agree. Hey, we've been out for two and a half hours. All right. That's probably enough for everybody. Well, first off.

Okay. We've got to talk about the book. All right. Where can they find it? All right. The book title is Wanted the FBI I Once New. Amazon, probably the best place? It's live on Amazon for ebook and hard copy.

And it's live on Barnes & Noble for HardCopy. copy only. Okay. I'll throw it in the show notes as well. So yeah, I'll send you a link to it or I'll tell you I'll send you the, you put a little like a little thumbnail of the book cover. That'd be great. Um, do you social media at all? Do you have people reach out to you? Yeah, I do. I have X. Okay. That's, that's, I have X too and I still, Michael, we were talking about this. Is it a tweet? No, it's a, it's an X now, right? That's a, that's, technically it's an X, but I still. Hey, did you see that X I sent? That sounds like dog shit. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't roll off the tongue. There's no.

Well, there's no, yeah. Yeah. What I do is when people say, if my wife will say something, I said, I'll say, I made an ex-posting or an ex-post is what I say. I actually responded to one of years today. Did you? Yeah. What was I talking about?

I just get on the, the phone of all. The fact that they. Oh, the fucking landmines? Yeah, they gave the missiles in the mines. Forty-eight hours. What are we doing? I wrote back and said, this was an irresponsible act by an outgoing administration that is not going to be here to deal with the consequences.

There's a part of me that thinks that that's exactly why they're doing it. And I hate to say it, but I don't know. there was a bit of ill intent in there. Yeah. But I did right back to you today because I was sitting in a hotel room. Yeah. You know, trying to take care of the fucking wild, wild west. It is.

I'm currently arguing with drag queens about whether or not it's good to do public. Don't laugh at me, Michael. I'm fucking fighting the good fight. Hey. And you know, I'm serious. I'm arguing with them about whether or not they should do fucking school circles and read books to kids. Hey, this is like, I don't know why they want to is my question.

That is a multiple front battle. Because if you fight with them, then you're going to get attacked by other people that you're... Fucking bring it. You know, that you're whatever. Transphobic. Yeah. Which I'm not at all.

Why? Why do they want to do that around kids? I don't understand. Actually, I'm not afraid of them at all. I just don't like them. That's a fair... So, I mean, you know, I just don't care for that lifestyle and I don't want it around the little ones.

Yeah. Well, we're definitely going to get fucking banned on YouTube now, and maybe we'll just have to upload this, the X. Well, we'll tweet it on our ex, Michael, or whatever. We'll exit. Yeah. So, yeah, but hey, listen, I just want to tell you before we close, Thanks again for having me on.

It's a pleasure to see you again. Michael, thank you very much for being here today for the show. I hope some folks, if they do choose to read the book, that they get a picture of what the FBI was when I was coming up. As I was being taught and trained by what I called in the book, these were the old breed, right? And they wouldn't accept anything less than excellence. And they told us how we were supposed to behave

and what the FBI should and would be under their watch. and I think we got to look back on some of those times and maybe see if we can go back to a better day. Not everything we used to do was amazing, but not everything that we used to do is bad either. And that's the problem. Everything, I think we discard things before we look at the value of them. And I think there was still a lot that was good about the Bureau,

even though the 9-11 tragedy happened. But a lot of it was discarded or deprioritized. before you go, am I going to get arrested wearing that fucking code around town? Are you allowed, am I going to be like a ticket for impersonating an agent? Possibly. I love it. I'm doing it then. All right.

Thanks again. Thank you, Chris.