Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - In the Crosshairs of National Security - with Chris Piehota

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

This episode is all about the world of national security and covert operations with retired FBI Agent, Chris Piehota. With a career spanning nearly a quarter of a century, at one point serving as one of six people who oversaw strategic and select daily operations for the entire FBI organization, Chris has a wealth of insights to share from his time spent safeguarding our nation. Chris is in a unique position to analyze where things have been, where things currently stand, and where things could be going with today's FBI. From leading complex national security investigations to steering cutting-edge technology platforms, Piehota's contribution to the realm of security and risk mitigation is immeasurable. Having been recognized as a Senior Intelligence Officer by the Director of National Intelligence and honored with a 2017 Presidential Rank Award, his expertise in national security matters is second to none. We discuss his experiences overseeing high-stakes intelligence collection programs, his innovative approaches to leadership and organizational development, and his impactful strategies for process improvement and change management. We'll also take a peek into his time as the Chief Executive for FBI Science and Technology Programs, and the Director of the United States Government's global Terrorist Screening Center. Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Well, good morning, everybody. You know the deal. Let's talk about the sponsor of today's episode. It's Black Rifle Coffee. We're going straight to blackriflecoffee.com. We're going to talk about what we see. The rotating banner is at the very top. Actually, it's not like the very top.

The website address is, if you know what I mean. But at the top of their page is the banner. And today I'm looking at multiple subscriptions. You can get a coffee subscription, a T-shirt subscription, a sticker subscription. Actually, I don't think you can get that, but you can order stickers if you want to. So basically anything that you would want delivered to your house on the frequency that you would want to. Looks like they did a collaboration with Tim Kennedy. Looks like a war hippo, accurate in many reasons and for many reasons.

And next is the Liberty Roast. It's back. This is a good roast. I like this one. I actually like this for a pourover. It tastes quite well if you're into that. And it's only back for a limited time. And then the last page on this rotating banner is this damn.

Bass Cat Boat Giveaway. Can somebody please go enter and win that thing? Because I don't know what it is and I'm tired of looking at it. Now beyond that, what can you find at black rifle coffee.com? Apparel, gear, coffee bundles, coffee samplers. They list their bestsellers. It's pretty wild. Anything you could possibly want if you're a coffee, a fictionalto or a coffee head. And that's it. Head over there and support an amazing organization founded by amazing people. My guest today, is Chris Piotta. And I'm really happy with the timing of this episode. We recorded it over a month ago.

I had some in the queue. But the FBI has consistently been making it into the headlines for reasons that I don't think they actually want to be in the headlines for. So Chris spent nearly 25 years at the FBI. And he was in his career as an agent, worked his way to one of six people who oversaw strategic and select daily operations for the entire FBI. organization. He served under directors Free, Pickard, who is acting, Mueller, Comey, McCabe, acting, and Ray saw the FBI itself fundamentally change as an organization from when he came into what the organization is today. And like I said, super timely episode because of what the FBI is hitting the headlines for today. I'm going to shut up, let Chris speak for himself and his

experiences. Episode 2.94 with Chris Piotta. Enjoy it. Chris, what would you like to begin? Anywhere you want to, depending on your interests or what you think your audience would like to hear about the most. Man, where do we start? Unpack your professional background a little bit, and then I can bring the questions from there. Okay, great. So, names Chris Pajota, and I served nearly 25 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And at the time of my retirement in 2020, I was one of the, I would say, eight most senior people in the entire organization. So I had the privilege of leading large enterprise functions for the FBI as well as being part and party to certain very sensitive conversations, interesting conversations. I watched the entire

Durham report circumstances unfold. I knew all those people personally. The Durham report is the one that just came out, correct? That's correct. the Durham report is reporting on the Mueller report. There's a lot of fucking reports that the FBI does. Let's be honest. Lots of reports. What happened after the 2016 election cycle and the claims of the candidate Trump and then President elect Trump was that he had certain ties to the Russian government or Russian organizations.

Yeah. So the Mueller investigation was to see whether or not there were any activities that the president was involved with either leading up to or, you know, in conjunction with the election cycle. So they were looking for any criminal activities and they found none. Yeah. And then after that, the attorney general at the time decided that we as a government should take a look at the whole election cycle. And he appointed Mr. Durham to be that special counsel to look into the entire way it was done,

the investigations, the work of the FBI and how things evolved over time. time. Correct me if I'm wrong. And the Durham report is, I wouldn't say it's breaking news at this point where a few weeks, I think, passed when it came out. But it essentially said that the FBI went about that investigation in a manner that could be considered, I'm going to use the term inappropriate. I will let you describe what term you would, you know, what would you describe it as? I would say it was a combination of several factors. One was the fact that there was no opposing view among the leadership team at the FBI that was overseeing it. They departed from time-tested and time-honored practices and protocols for investigations,

especially one of that type of magnitude. And what you had was a group of folks who at first had certain common thought processes and political leanings that then led into certain, as the Dormerport pointed out, confirmation biases. And they didn't do what the FBI normally does and there was a lack of due diligence and there was a lack of divergent thought. And they all sat

in the room and created their own puddle of excellence and moved forward from there with the investigative work. There was a lot of activity that folks are looking back on now and even some folks at the time and they were concerned about how the FBI was departing from its own

processes. Correct me if I'm wrong. The FBI as an organization is supposed to be apolitical. That's correct. And what you're basically describing is, and to think that individuals don't have political beliefs in an apolitical environment, like you're living in fairy tale land, right? If you think that people can truly leave, we'll take off the individual hat and leave it at the door and not have any of that stuff biased. But if it were to work seamlessly, it would be it would be blind from a lot of people. political perspective, correct?

It should be objective. That's a better term. I don't want the FBI to be blind. Blindness may not be a good trait, but it should be objective. It shouldn't lean one way or the other, and it should be based on the, again, the processes, protocols, and practices that lead us to investigative outcomes. There should be no issue or leaning toward any one side or another. What happened in my view and when I saw and I know these people,

is that they lost their emotional professionalism. What triggered that? And I mean, did it, was it really the contentiousness of the 2020 election? Did it begin before this? Did the FBI start drifting to becoming more of a political weapon, if you will, before that? The FBI over time, from what I saw, and I was around since 95, so I worked under many different directors, acting directors. The culture of the organization started changing. When?

Significantly, there was a violence shift after the 9-11 incident. The FBI at that time was very, it was rocked back on its heels. We failed. I was working counterterrorism matters in the Newark, New Jersey office. I saw the first plane strike out my office window across the Hudson River because we were right across from the New York office. No shit. So we saw the first plane strike. I looked out, said, wow, you know, what happened.

And you won't believe this, but the FBI at the time, not very technically advanced. So somebody said, I heard this on the radio. And then a guy came running down the hall. Then we had North Tower, South Tower, and, of course, Pentagon and Shanksville. There was a violent shift. The FBI leading up to that time was a reactive, criminal, investigative agency. We were very good at catching bad guys, bank robbers, kidnapped. and other kinds of, you know, people who would break the law and elicit a response from us.

Yeah. And that wasn't good enough. And what people asked me and I used to go out and give a lot of presentations on these things, quite frankly, being that responsive cops and robbers organization, the terrorist organizations, they were better than we were. They planned better. They had better intelligence. They executed.

And they were willing to die for their objectives. I don't know if I would describe it in those terms. You don't think so? Well, I've never worked, well, I have worked for the federal government. Yes. You were working under, you know, the, well, I guess more in the modern era, you're under, I would say the FBI is certainly interfacing with the intelligence network. They may not fall necessarily underneath that. But I don't know, I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say even pre-9-11, there might have been a little bit of bureaucracy at the FBI.

I think you're being kind. Yeah, so. Well, bureaucracy is the middle name of the organization, the federal bureau of investigation. So there's no way that an organization of that size is going to be able to outmaneuver an organization the size that Al Qaeda was at that time. Planning in remote areas, a very disaggregate approach. There's no way that an organization that has that much bureaucracy is going to stay ahead of them, especially when there was no history of those times. type of attacks. Right.

So everybody was kind of, like, I can appreciate you saying, hey, the FBI failed. The list of organizations that failed is robust. We were in good company. Yeah. Right. There was enough failure and lack of initiative to go around. I only speak on behalf of the organization I used to work for, but yeah, there was enough of failure to go around.

Part of the problem we saw was that national security manners were very low priority for the FBI at the time. Because buildings weren't fucking blowing up. Well, we had the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yeah. They were still trying to figure that out, right? Was this a criminal activity? They were trying to use old legal structures and prosecution structures to deal with that issue.

And it was something that the FBI really didn't know how to move forward with. When 9-11 actually occurred, the FBI had a very violent culture and organizational. shift. Over what time period? Are you talking quick? It was quick. It was harsh. It was probably over, I'd say, starting in about 2002 to 2003 through about 2004 or five. It was a violent shift where the FBI was in danger of being split into two organizations. Really? Yes. There was talk about moving it into a domestic law enforcement and intelligence organization splitting it in half. Because the FBI, has a foot in each world. It's a law enforcement organization.

It's also part of the intelligence community. Yeah. And they were going to split the FBI. And what's interesting about that was that all of our international partners wish they had our model because the intelligence organizations didn't have any power to do anything. They had to depend on the national police forces or, you know, their counterpart law enforcement. But they had a violent shift. We went from being that cops and robbers, you know, the untouchables and all that good stuff.

We went from that to being more leaning toward the intelligence. community, national security, being more predictive, preventative. Like I said, we had our tails kicked. Right. And because of that, you know, people lost their family members, lives, loved ones. Yeah. And the organization really took a hard look at itself. And again, we all decided we weren't good enough.

We had a bureaucratic mindset. We did things in a checklist fashion. The terrorists knew how to avoid us. Yeah. It's not hard. If you're going up against a massive bureaucracy, they knew. Put together a small team and operate in the seams.

Like, it's not that fucking hard. That's exactly what they did. Yeah. And we were operating in those very, as you say, would be broad, I would say, very macro tactical ways we would do business. Well, of course, you need a policy paper before you put one front of the other.

Right. So, you know, but that was us, right? I mean, that's the way we did it. And it wasn't just you. I think every entity inside of the national defense apparatus was largely operating in that way. And what I'll add to that is, you weren't really talking to each other that much either.

Actually, there was a large level of dislike for each other. So, you know, when you look back in those days, you were actually told, do not share this with these people. Let me ask you this, because the pre-9-11 seal teams, absent an enemy, we fight ourselves. Well, you've got to fight somebody, right? Well, you're fighting for relevance and budget. If you really distill it down at the end of the day.

When I first got into the teams, the number associated to the team actually meant something. So I get to Team 5. It's like a Southeast Asia. We're going to be super cold. We're going to focus on Korea. And like right next door is Team 3. They're doing the desert stuff. We didn't tell them shit.

They didn't tell us shit. And if I could, I would sabotage everything that they were doing. At the end of the day, though, all we were trying to do is maintain our relevance. And by that and by extension, our budget. You guys, I feel like we're probably in the same boat. All the intelligence app. Oh, absolutely. If we tell them this, then holy shit, we're going to be less valuable.

So that means we're going to get less money. So everybody keeps their mouth shut. And if you can let the air to the tires at the FBI sedan, you should definitely do that. Well, we would fight among ourselves, right? Because right across the river, we had the New York field office, which was the FBI's largest field office. Yeah. We were number six largest at the time in Newark, New Jersey. And, yeah, we were always treated as that red-haired stepchild, so to speak, in New York.

So, you know, everybody was doing their own thing. There wasn't a lot of sharing. And that was internally. and that's not counting among the other intelligence partners. And if you flip that equation, if you tasked me with putting together a small team that wanted to wreak havoc and said you get to mold your opponent, that's the model that I would actually mold

because there's no fucking way. They're not going to see anything. Yeah, we just couldn't see that far down into the threat environment. Or even if you could, are you going to tell anyone? Depends, right? You might tell somebody, are they going to tell the right person? Is it going to knock through the internal? walls of bureaucracy and the information going to get to where it needs to go.

And that's hard to tell. Yeah. Right. So that culture changed very violently. The director Mueller came on board shortly, and then he had 9-11 to contend with. He was trying to keep the FBI from being split into two entities, which he was successful in. And then he made the FBI into more of an intelligence, what he called intelligence-led

organization, which was to the chagrin of all the old G-man type of guys and ladies who were used to putting handcuffs on everybody and arresting people and taking them to jail. So over time, the culture changed to a more predictive, proactive, and plus everybody was just scared to death of Director Mueller because, you know, former Marine officer and prosecutor and very stern man, very hard. So the organization made a whole entire shift. I think everybody was terrified of a repeat of 9-11 as well. Oh, yeah.

It was in forefront of everybody's mind. Well, we had a spectacular, you know, failure in an incident from the whole government perspective. And what happened then is after the organization had been kind of dragged through this transformation, it was fatigued. And by the time Mueller left as the director because he was extended for several years by President Obama at the time because they're only supposed to be direct for 10 years. He stayed for an extra, I think, two or three. and then Jim Comey came in and Jim Comey was the opposite of director Mueller where Jim Comey was a smiling, happy, affable, likable guy

Mueller always had that look on his face and scowling people were just always sweating bullets around him It's called a resting bitch face I'm sure you're familiar with the tour. I'm familiar with it, I lived with it for many years and but Comey came in and he was very relaxed and he was very approachable.

And what they started doing was they started looking at the FBI trying to change, okay, we've been like this since 9-11. We've done well. There have been no further attacks. We were able to interdict many activities. And he started relaxing things. And the organization became a little more at ease, so to speak. And then him and some of the other senior leaders decided that the FBI should keep up with the time.

So they started sending teams out to Google and Amazon and all these places to see how do these people operate their organizations? They have multi-billion dollar international organizations, which so is the FBI. Well, what happened that I saw was that there was a change in some of the cultural practices and values that made the FBI special at one time. We're starting to be deprioritized, if not eliminated, altogether. And everything became negotiable inside the organization. People would email the director personally to complain about things. Really? And they introduced climate surveys.

Those are super useful. Oh, yeah, it was awesome. Yeah, they really get shit done. And here's what happened. As soon as they introduced the climate surveys, all the leadership, they tied them to your promotion, of course, capability. Yeah, why not? That sounds like a great idea.

And everybody became very timid. and scared and it became more about being liked than being operationally effective. Now, I'm not saying you have to kick people in the teeth all the time, you know, but there are times when you have to, you know, make a few public executions maybe and get people to do what they're supposed to do, and then that would show up in your climate survey.

And the organization just started changing, and it became much more, I don't know, just like Jim Comey said he was a good guy and I liked working for him from the short time that I did but he was way too out in the public he was way too out in the public eye before him you rarely ever saw Mueller on TV ever comie was out there all the time was he trying to get out there did he enjoy that spotlight I think he wanted the FBI to be more visible which is not our thing right yeah take care of the business we deliver results and go move on and that's where when you talk about the politics and the apolitical side of things, he was drawn into the political

circus in D.C., where Mueller and those guys used to stay away from it. And I think that's where things started really shifting for the FBI, is that we weren't able to effectively navigate the political environment as well as we used to. We were then, we succumbed to it. And I was in that meeting the day where he said, either way I'd go. I'm screwed. If he does the Hillary laptop thing and the Hillary server thing and the Hillary, he's going to have half the people mad at him in the Democrat side. If he doesn't do it, half the Republicans are going to be upset with him.

He said either way he goes, he's done. I have a theory on that. Just do your fucking job. And let people be mad at you. Well, that was part of the problem is that he tried to walk that line. Yeah. That's not the line of the FBI, though. Exactly.

And that's where I think we got into some trouble. We were trying to manage that rather than coming out and saying, hey, we conducted an investigation. These are the results. Department of Justice, Attorney General, you do your thing. Yeah. I mean, let me ask you this. What's the actual charter of the FBI? Do you mean the mission of the FBI?

Yeah. Like what is the founding principles? Why did it come into existence in, let's say, in a modern era, like when you have somebody come on board the first day across the FBI hallway, The CIA has got a great hallway. Your guys, I don't know if you have anything that's as cool as that. It doesn't make the movies. That's why don't tell you that much. It's because it's not near as awesome.

That's what I'm saying. As the agency's entryway. I feel like the agency lets far too many productions film on that floor. But whatever, that's a totally different topic. Why was the FBI created? It was actually people, it was created out of some, they took some agents from what was then the Secret Service. Yep. And they created a force of agents to look into things like prohibition.

and we started getting this newfangled threat vector called the automobile. And back then, there wasn't this moving over state lines where jurisdictional issues became a problem. So they had a form of a federal police force that could move across jurisdictional lines. And that evolved into the FBI. I think it was about 1908 when they formalized all that, right? But the initial bunch of folks came to grab a couple guys from what was in the Secret Service. The FBI then became that federal answer to all of these new types of crime problems. National Security really wasn't a thing at the very beginning, but it was more crime, interstate crime problems.

So let me ask it. I'll ask it in the other way, in the negative. Is there anywhere in the FBI charter where it says you have to sail the political wins? No, but it's being a Washington entity, it has to be done. If you look at today's FBI, the mission. statement, I was there when we redid the mission statement, the vision statement and all those wonderful things that are part of, you know, corporate life. The vision statement was to remain ahead of the threat. Yeah. The mission statement is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. I like it. All right. That, we changed all of that because before

Comey came in, there was this really long mission statement and you go around the room and ask all the senior leaders, hey, do you know the mission statement? And nobody knew it. That's actually not a very good sign. Yeah, I know. It was kind of strategically, yeah. And nobody could, nobody could say it. But with this one, with the updated version is, hey, we uphold the Constitution, we protect the American people. Yeah. Right. And that's the mission of the FBI in its current form. And whether we do that through defeating crime problems or whether we do it through defeating national security threats, you know, depends on what the threat environment is. So through that same lens,

when they're, you know, the head of the FBI is sitting in there saying, either way I'm screwed. And I can look at the laptop or, you know, or emails or servers or whatever it may be. Or the Trump investigation shouldn't it not matter whether or not that individual is screwed? I mean, I understand that I'm like pie in the sky here, but this is this is what I want as a citizen from my federal organizations. I want them, it's okay for them to understand that they might be going into a moment. minefield, but if it's your job to clear a minefield, get the fuck out there. Right. And that's kind of where, like I said, the culture of the FBI kind of shifted over

time, where that became more important than coming out and saying the FBI conducted an investigation, and this was what was found, and the chips fall where they fall. Yeah, you can provide an investigation absent editorial information. This is the raw data that we came across. And I'm assuming that there's another entity of the U.S. government that would handle that anyway, right? Isn't it going to go over to the- the Justice Department or if they're, you know? Right, it would go over to the Attorney General. The Attorney General being the nation's number one chief law enforcement officer would then

determine how to move that forward. He would probably consult with other people in his circles and then they would determine how to do that. We would just bring the investigative results, prosecution or any other follow-up action would come from Department of Justice. Yeah. So. That's a worrisome state of affairs when, you know, an individual in that leadership position

who's swinging a big hammer is worried a little bit more. Again, my word's not necessarily his. I wasn't in the head, but worried more about the political outcome or whether or not one party is going to like or dislike versus getting to the baseline foundation of what your job is. Well, I think what happened, and this is, again, my opinion, as you would say, leading up to the election, people were hedging their bets on what the successful party or successful outcome would be.

Yeah. And then when that didn't happen, and we had the other side one where, you know, Trump became president, then the whole thought process is shifted where, okay, we're no longer trying to, as you saw in some of the reports, some people who were working on this investigation actually took it upon themselves to become the protectors of the American people. Yeah. Via their own lens of morality. Exactly. And that's where I said they lost their emotional professionalism. and they became where they were, now they had their own mission to,

as you saw, we're not going to let this happen. And then the investigation departed from certain protocols and it was run up through the deputy director of the FBI, who's the senior most operational chief. You know, the director's a political appointee. The deputy is a career agent, senior executive service. And that pipeline left in no room for dissenting opinions, dissenting thoughts.

In your former life, when you would gin up a mission and you had a couple guys say, wait a minute, this doesn't look so good. Let's talk about this. And you say, okay, what am I missing here? That kind of went away in that group. And they all sat around in this conversation. And they all had common political views, common thought processes. And it didn't take long for that, as the Durham reports said, that confirmation bias to set in.

And then they were all looking at, like, they just, just chose not to interview certain people. The Durham reports said, we cannot figure out why they didn't do this, or why did they skip these steps? And I think they were trying to accelerate the investigation. They were running on adrenaline, and they ran on a lack of what I consider to be critical thought, and that's where they got in trouble. And there was none of that, there was none of that opposing view in the room, even if somebody was appointed to be that official pain in the ass, right, to sit there. Make, and here's my thing, when I used to worked with certain operations, I would say there's a continuum. On one side, you have, I know I'm right,

and on the other side you have, how do I know I'm right? And they never got to the how do I know I'm right. They just stayed over on the side of I know I'm right. Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one. You know, why did they choose not to do those things? Because they didn't want to. They were backwards planning from the assumption that they, you know, the end state that they knew they were going to arrive at, they were just going the other direction. They had an objective that they set. And that's kind of what happened. And, you know, when I look at the people involved,

everybody has a lot of negative things to say about everybody because the outcome was so bad. But all of these people, I've known Andy McCabe for many years. I know Pete Strach, Elisa Page. I know all of them, the Bill Prestap, all those people who were involved. They were all good people. Yeah.

They got together in this high, mind situation. Echo chamber. Yeah. And then they came out with these outcomes. And then certain people, I think that would have provided some of that, what I consider to be, operational resistance. They were just pushed off to the side.

And in the Durham report, it even says that a lot of folks in the counterintelligence division who would have been the Russia experts, they weren't engaged, they weren't consulted, and they themselves had no real intelligence that would have supported. what we were moving toward. Yeah. The problem is, is it undermines both the political arena and the legitimacy of the FBI to a degree. Like, there's no winner in that one, especially when you look backwards. And there's an additional report looking back at the previous report.

It's like, hey, we probably shouldn't have gotten this far or done it the way that we did. How do we make sure it doesn't happen again? How does the FBI course correct? Well, I think you've got to go back to, again, leadership environment and culture. The culture of the FBI used to be more self-policing. I think the leadership environment changed where now it was more, you know, you always have your careerists. That's always going to be there in any organization. But there were more people who were willing to say, stop, what are you doing?

This isn't right. We shouldn't be doing this. And now a lot more people are willing to just nod their head and say, hey, you know, whatever. Right. That is a dangerous, dangerous, slippery slope. It is. But you know as well as I do, when you become that squeaky wheel, you tend to get replaced. So you have to be careful how you fight your battles.

And if you're that person who's always contrary, you'll be disinvited from meetings and other things moving forward. So you have to pick your battles. And I think that if you go back to the leadership culture, the FBI, I'll tell you what, I was at a meeting with some. some very senior Microsoft executives one day. And they asked me about, hey, what's going on in D.C.? Because they're out in Redmond, Washington. And they hear about this. And I said, look, I'm going to tell you something right now.

The FBI is the same FBI that has protected you, your parents, and your grandparents. And it's the same FBI that will protect you, your children, and their children. The people of the FBI won't fail. There are remarkable people who work in that organization. I mean, they will bleed their own blood to make sure that things are proper. It's the leadership environment that we find fluctuates more than anything. And when the leadership has a certain perspective or leaning, there will always be a group of people who will curry favor with the leadership. And there will always be that other group of people who say, yeah, I think this is ridiculous.

but you know what, I'm here to do a job, and I'm just going to shut my mouth and we're going to get the job done. And the FBI has to change its leadership environment and the incentives that it puts out, and the FBI has to go back and look at its culture. The FBI is not Google. It's not Netflix and it's not Amazon. There's a certain special set of values and beliefs that the FBI maintains that have to be reprioritized. They have to be put in place to say, this is how we do things. And if you can't get right with this, then we'll help you do something. else. We'd love you to stay, but you can't stay. They have to get people back on that track where we're not overly concerned with DEI initiatives and diversity things, which I understand are important parts of an organization's dynamics, but they can't take precedence over the operational mission of the FBI, which is to be exceptional at conducting operations and

investigations and I think that has drifted into a now of course everybody will say that's not true but I watched it happen it drifted into a secondary role it'd be the same in your previous life if you're you and your teammates all of a sudden started prioritizing other activities besides the tactical skills that you had need to do your job and then you all wonder like hey why did that go well well because none of us can shoot anymore because we were doing all this other stuff those two things have to happen first. You have to have a change of culture and leadership and you have to be able to go back to the FBI being a trustworthy organization like I told those people at Microsoft. And I told them flat out. Don't worry about the FBI. Those people, they'll sacrifice themselves to make sure that things go

right. It's the leadership environment that changed over time that created some of these, I would say, distractions. So you've been out since 2020? That's correct. So three years away from the machine, if you will, are you hopeful or are you seeing things that are making you feel like they are making those changes? Like if you had to call the wind on this one, is it continuing status quo? Is it getting worse or is it getting better? I think from what I see as part of the public now, the FBI does itself no favors. They are, I mean, they do themselves no favors.

Some of the leadership is distracted. They're sleeping at the wheel, and they allow the organization to be repeatedly kicked in the nuts in the public eye. And part of the problem is the FBI used to be that iconic organization that when everything was messed up and you needed a straight answer, they would call the FBI. Hey, get the bureau in here, but they don't cover this. We don't care.

We just want them here because what we had, when I retired, I sat with the FBI director before I left. I used to meet with them every day, But when I left, this is my final meeting with him. And I told him, I said, look, there are two things, there are two primary currencies that the FBI deals in. One is credibility and the other is competence. I said, our credibility used to be on, beyond reproach.

If the FBI said it was that way, then it was that way because they knew that we were highly credible and there was the honor of the Bureau. And the other was the competence. When we showed up places, people knew that we were either the best at something, or we were pretty good. Even if someone else was the best, we were pretty good.

So we had those two factors, and that's what gave us our professionalism. And I think that they've squandered some of that. That has to be brought back so the American people can have what they deserve is an impartial, objective, high-performing FBI. And I guarantee you, if they were given the proper leadership environment, the organization would snap to very quickly. It's just been let to atrophy. Yeah.

It sucks too because we are a heartbeat away from the 2024 election cycle, which I am not a T-reader, but if it's anything like the 2020 election election, and you want to talk about splitting the country down the middle, you know, neighbors yelling at each other. I mean, I don't know how many videos I have watched of people like putting. batteries on the back of like campaign signs so they could zap their neighbor. Don't get me wrong. I'm deeply appreciate those videos for their entertainment value. Yes, they are entertaining. It's deeply concerning to me, though, that people have come to the place or went to the place, and I'm afraid they're going to go back where they view their enemy as their neighbor because they have a fucking sign that says something different. Yeah, take your pick, whatever your flavor is.

Whatever it is, it's like, hey, when shit hits the fan, I wish we could all put all that stuff behind us. and rely upon it, but instead it's like, let's just point our guns at each other and forget that we're all Americans here. Yeah, and I'm a concerned about that too. And having a position. How is that culture going to, how is that environment going to affect the current leadership of the FBI in your opinion? I think they're still playing the margins. They're still trying to figure out how to. I don't want the FBI playing the margins, Chris. That's what it looks like. What the fuck?

But it's what it looks like. And I tell you, I know these guys. And I tell my wife a lot of times, I can hear the meeting. I can hear what they're talking about. I know what they should be doing, but what are they doing? And I say that not to be condescending to any of my former colleagues, but it's like, when you get into that mode of, again, I talk about continuums, on one end, you resist and justify your position. On the other end, you accept the external perspective and you assess yourself and say,

wow, are we really doing it that way? And even if we're not, it looks that way, we better figure this out. And we need to get that trust back from the public. Right now, the FBI, the trust is the lowest it's ever been in the FBI. I don't know if you've watched some of the whistleblower proceedings. Now, I didn't know any of those folks. But some of that stuff sounds terrible. It, from an outside perspective, who somebody pays, I pay enough attention to it to understand at a very broad odd level what's going on i try god i try not to do super deep dives on one individual thing because i want i think you can lose your objectivity two it's an

endless rabbit hole of information three the rest of life is still going on around you like i could spend all of my time trying to figure out what's going on with the whistleblowers in washington i still need to like figure out how to make the coffee shop serve coffee right you get dragged down that sewer pipe but but from a outsider's perspective it seems like federal agencies, not just the FBI, maybe the IRS to a degree too, to use two common examples of what I think would be many, have become weapons of political parties, which is terrifying. Well, I don't know if the agencies have become weapons any more than they ever could have been,

but I do think that there is- Somebody's aiming them in a direction that serves a very limited few, as opposed to the great many. Yeah, the organizations are. not resisting that type of request like they used to. Those requests have been around forever, I'm sure. And the leadership was strong enough to stand up and say, we're not going to do that. That's outside of our charter. That's illegal, whatever their justification was. I think the organizations have become more amenable, is what it appears, to doing certain things that have a political tilt than they ever have before. And that's where I think we're running into the dangers

zone. How do you draw that back to where you have anybody who trusts these organizations ever again to do what they're supposed to do, what we depend on them for, and to behave in a manner that when they show up at my door, I'm actually relieved to see them. I'm not scared to death to see them. Well, that's because you probably would know the person. Anybody else's the rest of us would be like, oh, shit, there's an FBI guy at my house. Michael would pee his pants. Well, I'll tell you what, if the FBI's ever coming for you, make sure you're just not home at 5 o'clock in the morning. That's when they come for everybody.

Why do they pick that time? I don't know. It must be some scientific study at some point. They're reading Jocko's book or something? Like, up before the enemy. Yeah, you're at the gym. Fuck. Yeah, but that's tend to be this.

So make sure you're not home early if they're coming for you. But that's another thing. You know, I look at what goes on, the culture of the Bureau. The Bureau used to pride itself on being very low-key and very professional on how everything was done. And generally, when they went out and did arrests, unless it was a known violent fugitive that you knew you were going to have a problem with

or that it was in a very dangerous environment, the FBI would just pick you up. Low-key, a couple guys or ladies and suits, hey, come with us, no problem. Or for a lot of folks, we would just call them, say, hey, look, here's a situation. Would you like to come in tomorrow or would you like the guys to come and get you?

And they would show up the next day. That's what I'm talking about. That's efficiency. Right. Hey, I actually am at my office now and I know where you are. Right. So how about you do me a favor by bringing your ass to me? Well, you do yourself a favor too because now I don't have to come to your house and embarrass

you in front of your family and scare your kids. And I don't have to come to your place of work and embarrass you in front of your colleagues. And most people would say, okay, right? And they would show up with their attorney and we would do our thing. It seems now that the culture has changed to where every time you see them on TV, they're in bulletproof vests. They're wearing web gear. They have APC, or APCs, but they have the MRAPs out, and they all have M-4s.

And where did that change? I would watch this on TV and say, that was some of the most ham-handed stuff I've ever seen. Why would you go to pick up a 70-year-old man with a bunch of guys in bulletproof vests in M-4s? When you could have just called them. Well, hold on a second. Who is this 70-year-old man? Is it John Rambo? Does he have an M-60?

No. It was not. Yeah, like proper escalation of force, you know, it's the same thing as interactions with people on the street were avoiding violent confrontations. Right. You can avoid 99.999% by either controlling yourself, keeping your mouth shut, walking away, running away. Like, it doesn't have to escalate. And if it does, you know, you could talk first, then you could raise your voice. And then if you had to, you know what I mean?

You have this continuum of escalation. Well, but that was one of the problems I saw when the FBI changed. And when I was a special agent in charge up in Buffalo, New York, I got there. The first week I was there, again, the culture started shifting, right? And I walk in and I have to sign off on all arrest plans. So I'm reading this arrest plan, and I said, wait a minute, you're going to do what? And what they wanted to do was go into City Hall, which was across the street from our office, with raid jackets on and pull somebody out of there for a public corruption issue.

You're talking like the sweet FBI ones? You know, the blue shitty-looking glazer. Yeah. Yeah, 1960s design. Yeah. Very retro, though, in modern era. Yeah, also very uncomfortable and hot. It was like a trash bag.

Yeah, it was a glad trash bag with FBI stenciled on it. But they were going to wear those to go into the building during work hours and create a scene. And I said, well, hang on a second. This is some clerk was taking some money for some things. Yeah. I said, have you told the police commissioner? Well, no. Have you told the mayor?

Well, no. we think they're corrupt. All right. You're not doing anything like that. I called the commissioner. I explained him what was going on, what we were thinking of, and how could he help us if he could?

He goes, all right, hold on. He calls the mayor. Mayor says, whatever you need, we'll do for you. Keep it low-key. I told them no raid jackets. They're just going to call her up to the office and we'll walk her out from there.

And after that, the commissioner was my best partner. Yeah. And the mayor thanked us profusely for not making a scene. But they wanted to go in and make a scene, which I told them is not our way. Yeah. Put somebody in a suit and tie.

Like you said, schedule a meeting, walk in there. Oh, I bet. By the way, this meeting happens to be about you. Right. And you take them out. But here's the problem. Like we were talking about how you avoid these confrontations. It treats people with some dignity and respect.

And that's what we were the best at. Another quick story for you. When I was in Newark, we went to an outlaw motorcycle clubhouse. I think we have one of their clubs up here. I've seen jackets. Yeah, these were the outlaws that we were dealing with this time. So we are SWAT guys going first, and they clear it a place. So we start bringing all these guys out.

And there was a menagerie of guys like usual. You get all the old fat guys, and then you had some one percenters, and then you had all these other folks. And so we bring them out, and we say, okay, come on. We give them the quick run, you know, quick frisk and everything. We sat them down the curb. We started talking to them. And one guy, the older guy says, oh, no, no, we knew you was the feds. He goes, because you weren't assholes.

You don't treat us bad. And again, that's how we were known to show up with professionalism. We were courteous. I mean, of course, there was a SWAT team there. But as soon as they cleared the place, they backed out, got in their little SWAT truck and left. Yeah. Right. But that's how we used to do things.

And it's changed now where I'm watching. When they went to the former president's house to do that collection of classified material. Yeah. They went there heavy. And I was telling somebody, I don't know what they expected to run into because he has a Secret Service protective detail. When you say they went there heavy, are you talking like tack-eared up? They look a little more tactical maybe than they could have.

It was in Florida, right? Yes. I mean, I feel like the appropriate attire for that is cargo shorts, because I'm assuming you guys have shit you need in pockets in a polo shirt. Well, the FBI is a little more tight-ass than that, so they would have had long... Obviously, these would have been undercover agents. They would have been long-pant, long cargo pants. Perfect.

And 5-11s for sure. Yes, sir. Because what says FBI agent more than fucking 5-11 tax-cal. Casual. Yeah, tactical casual. But they were rolling in. They were going to roll up on a Secret Service protective detail. What did they expect to find?

I mean, it was more of an administrative search at that point anyway, right? It's not like it was a tactical problem. They were literally searching for documentation. And they could have went in there with a bit more of a respectful, in my opinion. Yeah. Respectful, lower-key fashion than they did. You're dealing with a former president. What's your take on the...

possession of classified documents. Because, I mean, obviously they went and found shit at Biden's house, too. Yeah. A lot of the senior folks talk about security, but they don't practice it very well. Yeah. And you've worked in that environment where you have certain documents and certain materials that have to be protected in certain fashions. A lot of the folks don't, they don't put a lot of weight on that.

But I'll tell you this much, though, in their defense, a lot of the very senior government officials have skiff spaces built into their homes. Yeah. And when they leave office, they come in and they remove the SCIF structure and the SCIF comps equipment. But they don't look around their house and see what boxes of other stuff they have. So I think there's a certain lack of priority on it. And I think they take stuff home to work on it in the evenings and maybe on the weekends. But it's not controlled as well as, I would say, the rank and file are very protective.

The senior folks kind of maybe a little more loose than they should be. varying degrees of sensitivity with the documents, right? It's obviously there's, you know, TSSCI, there's White House clearances, secret. What the hell is the C? Confidential. Yeah. And, you know, I've been read into a few programs in my time. Me too. And if you know the right search term on Google, I could point anybody to any of those programs.

None of them are as high speed as possible. none of them netted me at meeting fucking Jason Bourne, you know. You weren't read into the right programs, hey. Well, I mean, I'm telling, like, there was some pretty high-speed shit. Yeah. And then years later, I'm like, I'm going to fuck around on the internet here just a little bit. And search for things that are peripheral to this program. You're like, son of a bitch.

There it is. It's right there. It's consumer-facing. They just don't know what to look for. Well, again, that's another culture change, right? Yeah. Not just for the Bureau, but for the government itself. during the Cold War, those types of information were very well protected and kept in, much more so than now, I'll say.

Yeah. And as the Cold War ended and everybody says, oh, that's old Cold War behavior. We don't, yeah. And plus, there was, after 9-11, there was another shift of sharing became the norm versus not sharing. So you were given information. Inter-agency or intra-agency. And even between the federal and state authorities. Yeah. So the control over some of those materials and information became much more, I would say, lax isn't a great word, but I would say it wasn't as intense as it once was.

Well, the more hands it passes through, the harder it becomes for sure. Oh, agreed. Well, here's a good example of when we would run terrorism task forces. And we would bring in state and local partners to run on the task forces with us. Not only did it augment our manpower, they were deputized as federal agents, and then we could use the integration of authorities between us and the locals. And then it also gave their sheriffs and chiefs and commissioners a better view of what the threat environment was in their own AORs. Yeah. Before they had no idea, because they didn't have clearances. Yeah. And once we did that, we brought people in, but we gave them limited access to our systems.

Well, of course, that created a whole big storm because everybody said, well, the FBI still isn't sharing completely. So we had to give them more and more and more access. Well, then people could just look in our files, except for certain files that were protected. Public corruption, counterintelligence files were protected. But all the other ones, I mean, they could look in the files,

and then they could have access to a lot of information that used to be inaccessible to anyone outside of FBI programs. So it was a big shift after 9-11 on how all that was done. Let me ask you this, because the sharing of information brings up an interesting topic for me. You're a civilian now, right? You worked for, what was it, 25 years at the bureau? Almost, yeah. How much information do you want the government to have on you?

How much do I want them to have is very little, but how much do they have? Probably more than they should. Oh, we fucking both know they have more than they should. More than they should. I'll say that. But here's the problem. And this is where, again, the FBI at one point, we lost track of how to manage social norms and social behaviors. Do you remember when we had that, the FBI, I say we, they, now, they had that spat with Apple.

A bunch of years ago, we went to Apple with a subpoena. We wanted information and access. Was it a particular phone? There were a couple of instances where we wanted them to unlock phones because. I do remember that. And I believe they said no. They did say no. Yeah.

Good for them. Okay. You know why? Fuck the FBI in my phone. Stay the fuck out of my phone. But here was a challenge. But here was a challenge, right? We had issues where we had incidents and we didn't know if there were anyone else involved as far as co-conspirators

or anybody else who was going to be part of a mass shooting event. There was a kidnapping somewhere. A woman was killed right at her doorstep. We couldn't get in her phone. Now, we eventually defeated the security systems. and any passwording, but it took us months. Yeah, I think you guys brought in a hacker. You had a lot of different things we tried.

A professional electronic toolsmith is the one. Yeah, there were many friends that we have out in those communities. But it wasn't Apple. What I will say is Apple seems like they held their ground. Here's my issue with Apple. But they did. Let me finish this one thought. And this was us.

And I gave this at a, I did a presentation at some private dinner one day with a bunch of people from California. But they asked me about this, and I said, well, here was the challenge. We didn't read the room properly. And we didn't have a relationship with Apple like we should have as a large, one of the bellwether tech companies. We went to them with a subpoena. We did the FBI thing. We stood there with our hands on our hips, handed them a subpoena, did the Joe Friday type of thing. And when they said no, I mean, you know, it was like being throat punched, right?

Now, what do you mean? No. Well, they have enough money and resources and law. lawyers that they could stand up and say no. So what did we do is we went back, huddled, and then we went back at him even harder and said, all right, that didn't work the first time, let's try it again, but harder. The old full back dive. You're right. And what Apple did, and they were masterful, is that they turned it around very quickly. So now that they were the protector of privacy against government overreach. That is exactly how they swam.

They murdered us on that one. Okay. And we stood there, shaking, scratch at our heads saying, wait, wait, wait, how did we become the bad guys? We're trying to find out if there were other people involved. Were there going to be more mass shootings? Were they going to be, how do I find this woman's killer at her front door? Yeah. And we became the bad guys. And that's what I'm saying is that we didn't read the room.

We didn't look at the social impact of the norms and values of the communities. Should the FBI have a relationship with Apple at all? We have to, right? A long time ago. At what level, though? At what point do we start bumping up against privacy? Right. And here's the, and this is one of the things when I used to go have to go sit in front of the

Senate committees and the House and the Congress people. And I used to tell them, look, you've charged to me with an imperfect balance of security and privacy. Any day they're out of balance because when there's no incident, I'm trampling all over on everyone's rights. When there's an incident, I didn't do near enough and I didn't exercise our authorities and I couldn't get things done, right? And I told them, you're the same people that'll staple me to the wall.

Yeah. And they would sit there and, yeah, you're right. Well, it's because most people are idiots though. And because what you just described is actually an unbalanced equation. There's no way that you can win in that situation. And that's the world and the environment that we worked in many times. most times. And we had to sit there and try to balance those two issues. And then when people say, well, the FBI was slow to do this, because we have civil liberties and privacy concerns,

the FBI actually, believe it or not, agonizes over some of these things. Yeah. And the FBI, and you talk about relationships with some of the private sector companies, a long time ago, the government used to own all of the data. The government owned all of the access to all of the telecom companies. That changed in the 90s through the 2000s, where now these large tech companies started emerging, and there was no legal framework for them to, they weren't compelled to help law enforcement where Verizon and AT&T, they're all compelled by law to do this. These other folks became pseudo-telecom companies, and now they owned all the data, where the government used to be the manager of all this stuff. Now, the private sector was. So to have a relationship with them to say, look, we, for these reasons, under these laws of our nation, require access to these data sets from time to time. Exceptional access based upon legal orders from a court.

How do we do that together to make sure, again, we protect your privacy as the citizens, we protect the partner in the private sector from being sued, and we also are able to then protect the community. from harm, theft, or compromise, how do we do that together? Right? That's the equation. That sounds good. But that's the ideal state. It's the ideal state. Yes.

If only the U.S. government had not been caught many times in the past, let's say as an example, directly tapping into the transcontinental cables that go both from the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, getting raw data from every telecommunications. company, using our allies overseas to collect on U.S. because we can't collect on our own citizens. So you know what we're going to do? We're going to have another country collect on it and then give us the data. That's the problem. There's always more than one way to skin a cap, right?

There is. But the problem is when the U.S. government right now has unfettered access to almost anything we say, anything we type, emails, and they may not be collecting it themselves. We just have our fucking allies do it. Well, you used a great word there is access. It is accessible to certain government agencies where it maybe didn't used to be at one point. And I don't think it ever should have been. Well, the Patriot Act might need to be renamed.

Well, the Patriot Act. Well, it'd be more specific. But you remember, the Patriot Act was done right after 9-11, and it was done where there was an environment of fear and the fact that, there were these new things called email. Yeah, well, fortunately, nobody would ever use an environment of fear to create legislation that would benefit them and empower them via information over the people they're supposed to be serving. Right. And we just had our tails kicked, and they wanted the authorities to go out and start looking at things in these new environments once we found out how some of the calms were happening.

Yeah. What's the quote, Michael, can you look this up? Somebody who's willing to sacrifice security for freedom. I think it was Ben Franklin. Yeah. It's fucking true. People have no idea how the world changed with the Patriot Act. Well, they say it's a pendulum that swings back and forth, and it's really not a pendulum.

Yeah. Now, once it goes to that direction, it's hard to get it to even move back the other way. You may get a little bit of a backtrack, but you'll never get back to zero. Yeah. What's the quote, Michael? Those who would give up a central liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. Yeah.

That's a very good quote. And it is, but we used to talk about it too, is where security and privacy and civil liberties are inverse functions. As you want more security because you're scared, you will more than likely be asked to give up some of your civil liberties and privacy. Problem is they never come back. Well, the scales never rebalance. Yeah.

Because, and I saw this once, and I thought it was a great quote, if you allow the government to break the law during an emergency, there will always be an emergency. That's like a good face tattoo, right? Right on the forehead. And the problem, but Andy, the problem you have is, you know, organizations like the FBI,

there are people who are objectors to this. Like they're saying, we can't do this, we shouldn't do this. This is, you know, wrong, right? This is not what we're here for. We're here to protect, not to surveil our own people. But here's the fear from the inside of that community, the intelligence community is our adversaries are, they're pretty smart on some levels. And what they started doing was they started recruiting U.S. citizens because they saw that, hey, as I contacted whoever, they ended up having a predator hellfire missile in their vicinity, which. These cell phones are deadly.

Yeah, yeah. I got a call and fucking everybody I'm talking to vaporizes. Yeah, sent this email. And they're not around anymore, right? So they figure it out real quick because it's self-preservation. And then we have to figure out, all right, how do we stay ahead of them? They're not dummies. They figure out different ways to get, they were doing expedition.

We called it expeditionary cybercoms. They would actually travel to different places. So when we were looking at things, we would pick up IP and we would triangulate and it would be some internet cafe and some shitrag country that they're not there anymore. But when you're looking at the. the ability to protect the communities. And I think we've overstepped in some areas, for sure, of course, with good intention, which paves the way to hell.

Yeah. But where do we stop being able to protect the communities when we know that, hey, they've changed tactics? Like, they're recruiting U.S. persons now to do some of their things. And they know that we don't monitor U.S. person communications. But we do. Well, that we do with court order, right? Yeah, but we do. We do with court order.

Yeah, sometimes without. And that's where the whole... Just because the FBI may need a corridor. It doesn't mean there are not other intelligence organizations that are... I don't know. I don't think they monitor it in real time, but I know damn sure that everything is recorded. And it can be sniffed and gone through retroactively. They can go back and do reverse analysis on certain things.

They are vacuuming up a lot of comms. And that's where the 702 coverage debate is coming in because it's coming up for renewal where the FBI and the intelligence community can target foreign nationals while they're overseas, which doesn't sound like that's a bad idea, right? But what happens is, is U.S. persons get caught up in those comms nets. And then what do you do? Now you've had a warrantless surveillance of a U.S. person, right? Yeah.

So that's where policy and practice come in and say, it's just like during a Title III criminal where you sit on a wire, so to speak. When they start talking about things that are not pertinent, you have a dump button. You hit the dump button. It kills what you can hear and record for 30 seconds. And then you listen again.

And then you dump. And then you listen again, you dump. That was the best way they could figure out how to monitor, like we would go after the old organized crime families. Yeah. It's the same thing. It's policy and practice.

And that's what they have to figure out how to refine that to get to a point where the American people are going to say, look, I want you guys watching this stuff. I just don't want you watching me all the time. Do you think it's possible to reduce the risk to zero? No. I agree with you on that.

And so then it becomes a matter of how much privacy are we willing to give up. That's the key right there. What is tolerable to the American public? Because the answer is never going to be, hey, gumdrops are falling from the sky. It's a rainbow over every horizon. That's just not the world that we live in. And I just, it concerns me. I honestly feel like some people are like stumbling and tripping and falling, racing to hand over their privacy without understanding what is being given up.

Well, here's a quick example where I was giving a presentation one time and there was some ladies in the front row of the audience. And I said, ma'am, this is a very pro-law enforcement organization. I said, ma'am, would you be willing to tell me where you had dinner last night, who you had, dinner with, would you be willing to tell me what you had for dinner? Would you? No, absolutely not. I said, but you're more than willing to put it on Facebook, where you're a G. Which is basically a skiff, though.

Which you're, yeah, basically. Well, these days it might be. No. But the point is, Andy, was the attitude of, no, I'm not giving that to you, you're the FBI, but there were the willing to put it on Facebook where Facebook will then take and monetize all that data. I mean, I'm going to go back to my theory that many people out there. there are dumb-dums.

Well, I think they're uninformed, right? Because who wants to read that 80 pages of microscopic font as you're signing up for one of these social media platforms? And then you hit at the end and you get that, I agree, because you want to use it. Who's willing to read all that? And then it's in all that lawyer gibberish. I'm sure that's all accidental, though, too. Like, I'm sure the length and the huge and just voluminous nature of that, I'm sure that it's

completely accidental, that they really want people to dig through that. the fine tooth and comb. Right. Nobody has time. Yeah. So you allow this to happen, but people, but the government sits back and now the government doesn't understand. Like, well, you won't give it to us, but you'll give it to these people.

And these people are owned by the Chinese government. Well, I think there's a difference, though, too. Like, we'll use Instagram as an example. Like, my understanding of Instagram is largely supposed to be sharing pictures, not like policy and like deep life thoughts, even though many people use it for that. Yeah. There is a difference, though, between putting that information out into the wild and having a government entity that can basically read in almost real-time emails that you're riding, have access to your computer, banking account, telephone records, credit card. Like, there's the difference between those two.

I agree, but I'll tell you this much. The government has a lot of rules on what it can look at versus what it can retain. Yeah, but how about our allies who are looking at that stuff overseas? Now they have different rules. and under different sharing arrangements, that information can be shared, right? Like, I get what you're saying. It's very in line with policy, but, I mean,

I've also navigated a little bit in the intelligence community, and I know exactly how the government gets around this shit. Well, like I said, there's always a way to skin a cat, right? There are different ways. Yeah, but the cat, unfortunately, is still skinned at the end of that. And the cat that we're talking about here is the American public. And their privacy. Right.

But a lot of ways they're uninformed. They don't know how to protect themselves, whether it's from the U.S. government or anyone else, and they think that if they're in that electronic environment or digital environment, that there are certain ethics or rules that protect them and there aren't. I mean, for clarity, Michael, you, me and Chris, we're all getting fucking audited this year,

just so you know, based on this conversation, like, you're a proper fucked, I apologize. Yeah, sorry, man. A hundred percent chance we're getting audited for the next three out of five years. I wouldn't doubt it. But it comes back to that culture, though. Like I keep saying it's a culture.

culture thing. And when you, in your mind, when you look in that, say if you're thinking about, when FBI shows up to your house, what are you expecting? What do you see in your mind's eye? Me? I'd be like, hey, guys, what's up? But what do you see? Like, what do you expect? I want you in that glad trash bag with the FBI on front. For some reason, there's like five of you. I'm not sure why. Nice spread on diversity. Everybody's represented. Yep. Nice. And it's like, knock, knock, knock at a reasonable hour, like 830. I'm like, oh, hey, what's up? You guys want some coffee? Come on in. Right. Well, that may be today's FBI. Yeah.

But I look at it. I'm also not a fucking criminal though. So it's like when I see cops or like anybody who works in law enforcement, my response, I'm just like, hey, what's going on? You know? Yeah, but you've had a special relationship with a lot of people in certain areas where that's nothing to you. Well, I also don't break the fucking law. Well, that's true. You have nothing to worry about, right? There are people who are nervous because they have a problem and they're worried if you're there for a certain problem.

But for me, it was, it's more of a what do you expect when you see the FBI? a couple of folks in suits. They're kind of zipped up tight. They're professional. They're there to offer you a conversation on something there. Whatever it is, but you expect that certain FBI image, certain FBI behavior. Yeah. Right.

And even before I got here today, my wife, I had a different shirt on. And my wife says, stop it. You look like a tight-ass FBI agent. She made me change before I came off. Your wife did you a solid. It'll take you a little bit, but you're going to let it go. I haven't been able to scrape it off my shoes yet. You'll be in flip-flops.

in cargo shorts before you know it. I haven't been able to do it yet. But she made me change before I came over. But the point is, do you remember a while back during the BLM marches and there was an incident where the FBI? Is that what we're calling them? Yeah, we'll call it that for today's conversation. There certainly were people marching.

And it led to things that were anything but a march. Yeah, they were mostly peaceful. Yeah. Excellent selection of English words there. But do you remember that incident where, again, the culture to be? Bureau changed. There were some FBI agents who were out at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and they actually kneeled. They took a knee. I don't remember seeing that now. Yeah, there was some pictures that came out, and they took a knee in front of the BLM marchers, FBI agents with FBI paraphernalia.

Regalia, if you will. And I saw that, and my heart broke, and I thought, what are we doing? And who was in charge there? And why would the FBI take a knee showing solidarity with that group? As opposed to the leadership, I'll use that term loosely, walking out to them and saying, hey, folks, we're here to make sure you can exercise your constitutional rights in a safe and respectful manner. We're right here at the FBI if you need anything and keep moving. The FBI, although is also comprised of people, and I'm sure, I bet you not all the agents there. In fact, probably did take a knee. the people that chose to do so were probably,

they're still human. I would say it was the majority of them. I have pictures that were just part-breaking. I don't doubt it, but again, I bet you they were making a decision based from an individual perspective as opposed to an organizational perspective. I'm not saying that's right or wrong,

but I suspect that's probably what was happening. But if the organization's culture was such that we don't take a side, we don't take a knee. Yeah. Right. Well, if you would, it literally was as clear cut as that, is like, we're not here to be on the left

or right of this. or right or wrong to this. We're here to do our job. That actually separates a lot of the confusion. Right. And I saw a picture of someone from your former organization standing out in front of us, one of the statues of, it was a seal statue, a gentleman in UDT shorts. And, you know.

He was wearing UDT shorts on the statue. The statue was going to say, holy shit. Anybody in the modern era wearing those is balzy. But he was standing there in front of the statue, you know, he had his, he had his operator, a uniform on a baseball hat and the flannel shirt and all that, and an M4. I saw that picture, too. I know who you're talking about. And my personal thoughts on that is, that's fucking stupid.

That's almost inviting to a degree. It's antagonistic. You're looking for conflict, but it shows also a different thought process. You're not going to desecrate our statues, right? Maybe a little bit on the extreme side. Yep. But same thing, right? And that's where I'm saying is that I want to get back to the time when the FBI was that

organization where if they walked up to FBI and they said, hey, you guys with the bureau, yeah, hey, cool, you know, yeah, we're here to make sure that you guys are good to go and everybody's safe and happy and you guys march and do your thing. Right. And we've lost that. And that's where I'm kind of disappointed and sad. And you asked me earlier, can we get it back? And I said, I think we can because there are many, like I said, extraordinary people who work in the bureau. I was blessed to work around many of them. And I think that they, if given the proper environment, I'm telling you, I think they would snap it back around. It would be several months and you'd see a difference. I feel like we need to do that now, though. That's why I brought up the election cycle. I don't think

anything great is going to happen during that time period, with that 16, 18 months that will be just bombarded with that shit. I think the FBI is going to take more battle damage because the political cat fighting is going to start. And I think a lot of them are absent a plan of action, they're going to put their heads in the dirt and say, let's try not to have any more issues here. Even that action in and of itself, though, will lead to more issues. Inaction is also going to lead to issues.

Well, inaction is also a choice at times. And I think that in this instance, they're flailing looking for an answer and then you have some of the senior leadership. I don't know if you saw the other day there was a lady who was up on the hill testifying and they asked her a question if she read the Durham report. She was number two in charge

at the Counterintelligence Division. She said, no, I don't have time. And the guy said, I am amazed that you said that. I am floored that you didn't do that. And that's the, is that antagonism? or is it ineptitude for the woman who didn't want to read the report or chose not to? Or the fact that the organization allowed someone to go to the hill and didn't prepare them properly to say, if you are asked about the Durham report, this is going to be how you can respond within these parameters.

Or if she chose to ignore that and didn't want to read it. Or again, should she be in charge in that type of a senior position? Yeah. And that's where I tell people when I talk to them, I get a lot of that, hey, what's going on with your organization? Yeah. And I'll say, look, you have to separate evil from ineptitude. Because I don't think there's, it's not one or the other. You could have a little bit of evil.

You could have a little bit of ineptitude or you could have a whole lot of one or the other. I don't think there are people there who are, I would say, knowingly bad, at least at this point. But I do think there are folks maybe who are in their roles and maybe they're miscast a little bit in some of those roles in the name of whatever, you know. There's a difference between being malicious and incompetent. Right. And as I said, evil or ineptitude? Which one is it? And when you can't sit back and say, you know what, we made a mistake.

We didn't do this well. Here's how we're going to fix this versus we're going to fix this by adding 50 training classes and another 1,000-page manual of policies, which we already have one of those in the bureau. That's a thousand-page minefield for these people who have to. conduct investigations. It's a thousand pages of stuff that they have to look through to do their job. And it's a minefield for them. I remember when I would get a call from our headquarters and they would say,

hey, you haven't reported any non-compliance issues this month. And I used to tell them, hey, we're good. We're good. We would deal with that stuff in-house. My chief legal counsel in-house would say, hey, man, this isn't good. And here's what we're doing. Well, then teach them how to do it right.

Reporting them to headquarters isn't going to help us out any here. Yeah, the fact that they're overly concerned by not reporting noncompliance issues, meaning that maybe perhaps you're doing a great job as a leader is fucking problematic. But that's the thought process, right? How come you haven't had any issues? Because we're training our people, we're taking care of it. These aren't egregious issues. We're good.

But the thought process and the incentivization is different. When they talked in the Durham report, they said they rushed through the Bureau's investment. investigative steps, and I won't bore you with the details, but you can either do an assessment as the, just, hey, what's going on here? You can do a preliminary inquiry, which is the next step up in the force continuum, so to speak, and then the full investigation, which is, all right, the barn door is open. All right, we're going to do everything. They skipped right from getting the information, right to full investigation, right to intrusive and invasive technical coverage. They went right to that instead of taking that measured approach, as we talked about earlier. It'd be the same with, you know, in your former life, you don't, there are certain things you do before you start having a tactical solution.

You do certain things first, usually. Well, they didn't do that. Yeah. Yeah, they got the cart a little bit in front of the horse, if you will. I don't even know if there was a horse. They were just, they just shoved that cart down the hill, and that was that. And then they just, they lacked critical thinking, and they lacked that opposing view. And so what happened to those people?

Pete Strach was fired. Andy McCabe was fired. Jim Comey was fired. Lisa Page, the attorney, who was the chief counsel to McCabe, I think she resigned. And there's a bunch of other folks. One of our general counsel attorneys was arrested, found guilty of he actually changed some wording in a communication that changed principally. He changed like, holy shit. So he basically changed an intel source?

He changed the content of the predication for technical coverage to make it sound a little more. Get some. Yeah, yeah. Well, he got caught. I mean, he got caught. And so he was arrested and he found guilty. They took a, they disbarred him and did a bunch of stuff. Although I think he's back practicing law now, which I don't know who hired him.

So all of those consequences, for lack of a better term, what impact would that have on other people in the FBI seeing that happen. Does that correct behavior in and of itself? You know, I think it will correct behavior only in the effect that we don't want to get caught doing any kind of stuff like that. Yeah, we don't want to be those people. Right. It's not going to correct behavior as in, hey, we're going to go up and tell the director that we can't do this. Here's why. We don't know these things. These subsources are no good. This information's never been corroborated. We can't predicate this action based upon what we know right now. That's not going to correct that.

I think what you're going to have is a bunch of folks that is say, okay, we saw a couple of public executions. Yeah, let's avoid the missteps that they took. Exactly. That's about it. You know what I mean? And that's where when I first... It doesn't solve the problem.

Well, let me tell you. When I first joined the organization, I'm sure this happened to you too when you joined your former organization. A couple of the old-timers took us in a room. these guys were worked under Hoover. And they said, okay, all you new guys have a seat. We're going to tell you how it works. And they proceeded to tell us a bunch of, you know, we were knuckleheads.

And they said, look, here's how it works. You don't ever mess with the uncle's money, Uncle Sam's money. You watch what you do with your car. You be careful with boyfriends or girlfriends in the office. The SAC, the special agent in charge, is the only guy who speaks to the media. If you think you have something to say, think again and shut your mouth. right and they said like the rules i have for michael right and they're good rules right don't mess with the boss's money right and here's the last rule that they told us and this one

supersedes all rules they said no matter what you're doing no matter where you are where you are or who you're with never ever embarrass the FBI yeah that was it they said any questions of course we're all you know we're all sitting there shell shock no no no we're not have any questions at all But the fact is, is those rules serve me well over my years with the organization. And you'll see, you've seen a bunch of silliness where the, I'm sure you've seen the FBI agent doing backflips in the bar, loses his, loses his firearm from his lack of retention holster in the back of his pants. First off, the six o'clock carry is super tactical. It's great for when you're sitting down in like a restaurant or driving a vehicle. It's like at least a sub 15 second draw to get that fucker out.

Yeah, awesome. What was that guy doing? What the fuck? I don't know what his thought process was when he did the flip, but the flip was actually, he did a pretty good job on the flip. I'm not going to, oh, fuck, yes. Oh, we're going to, okay. All right. Yes. Gun accidentally fires. Well, there's a lot of accidental things that happened. All right, watch this, and this is some bad trade craft here. God. All right, here you go.

Hold on, though. Those moves are legit. What? Boom. Loses his gun, picks there, and there's the AD. All right. Who the. fuck carries a gun. And then he puts his hands on, tells everybody it's okay. So hold on, when did he AD it? You actually almost can't even see it.

All right. Watch when he goes to pick the gun up. He picks it up. He picks it up by sticking his hand in the trigger guard, sticking his finger in a trigger guard. I mean, that is one way to pick up a gun. And you saw that it is also an effective way to shoot somebody in the crowd. All right. So is that... He was terminated, by the way.

Is that particular... I mean, look at his moves, though. He's got just limber joints, backflip. Do they teach that to you guys at the academy, the backflip like that? No, you know what, that might be new? I didn't learn that in any defensive tactics class or anything or at the range. At what point in time in this, do you think, like, is it right here when he fell the pistol? Does he realize his career's over at that point?

Like, at what point in time in that? I think he tried to recover by doing a quick pickup until he shot the guy in the crowd. Then you've got to be like, I'm basically on an egg timer until I'm out of here. Yeah, his shoulder. life was very short after that. But the fact is, is when did you ever, ever hear of FBI agents doing that type of stuff? It just didn't happen. And if it did, they covered it up really well. Yeah. They recovered, right? In my fantasy world, that shit's been happening forever. Maybe not the, to be honest with you, the most disturbing thing in that video to me still is the

6 o'clock carry. Yeah. I don't get it. I don't get it. I mean, not for nightclub use. I mean, you know, and doing back flips. Not for any type of use. But, you know, what my thing was is when I saw that and I thought, well, that could have all been resolved by two things. One, not being there. Two, how about a retention holster? Yeah, or, you know, look at where you're going to be going.

Like, and I say this is somebody who carries often and almost anywhere. There are times and places where I choose not to because I know the environment I'm going into or what I'm going to be choosing to do in that environment, which by that I mean generally drinking. Like backflips? I don't do backflips. Michael does Judo and he tries to make me do front flips over the top of him and I barely, like my body, I feel like I'm like a glass vase. And when it's just like, so if I shorted that, nothing would ever be put back together again.

Yeah, I mean, I carry all the time too, right? And I'm the same way where there are the times I just don't take a weapon in certain environments because it's just not it's not responsible. Productive. Yeah, it's not responsible. I mean, that was one thing they always told us too, the old guys. be careful with your gun. Don't show people your gun. Your gun is not...

That's a generally good principle, yeah. I mean, they taught us this. But here's the problem my scientists. While they took that, they took that upon themselves. Nobody told them to do that. There's a bunch of older guys. They just came in and said, okay, dummies, come over this way. That went away.

That went away. So you didn't have these older guys anymore telling you how things worked. And what you had was you had younger folks. And during the post-9-11 time, like when I was, had the culture changed. The director Mueller at the time, he deprioritized the hiring of former law enforcement and military. And he wanted more people.

What was the reasoning behind that? Because he wanted more people that were cyber savvy and he wanted more people with political science degrees and other types of more intellectual things. And they changed the prioritization of hiring across the Bureau. So then you've got a bunch of folks who, and I don't know about you, but generally people who are very cyber savvy are not very people savvy. It's rare to find somebody that spans both worlds. Right. It's hard. There's the exception.

Yeah. And then all the folks of political science degrees, yeah, okay. You know, they do their thing, but they don't have command presence. They're not going to go out and take charge of a scene. They're not going to show up as a younger agent with a bunch of old gray-haired cops and hold your own, right? When they deprioritized those hiring practices, we lost the ability to show up and have that command presence. We lost the ability to show. show up and measure up where everybody would always say where's the FBI and there'd be like two very young people right here and I'm not saying young folks aren't capable but people again you have that impression of what is the FBI going to look like because I know I went out we were going out to a bomb threat one time and two of us were going to go and the squad supervisor says wait a minute you guys are going sir take such and get see if such as I can go with you and he was an older dude with gray hair and he made him come with us which I was glad because we didn't know what the

to. You know, and we're losing, we've lost that where now the folks who are there, they're not taking anybody aside and telling them how things work. They're just not doing it. And you have a training agent, and that's just somebody who tells you how to do paperwork. There might be a group of people pulling people aside and telling them how it works, but I'd be worried about what they're telling them. Yeah, not for the better. Well, who knows what the content of that brief may be. It may be all based in the things that actually at the end of the day are going to, in the long term, erode the effectiveness of the FBI. My experience, getting my first team, was, I'm going to say, it's less structured

than perhaps what happened to you. We definitely had a talking to, and then we're hazed profusely, which I look back on and I understand the intent of why they did it. And actually, if they had not done that, if I had been left out of that, I would have felt like I had done something wrong or wasn't accepted as part of the organization. But we certainly, you know, one thing that you said it was the last bullet point. Like under no circumstances, will you fucking embarrass the SEAL community? Which I'm going to be very clear with.

About six weeks later, I did. But that's just because I'm an idiot. But yeah, it was kind of the same thing. And it was the older guys. The ones that were just beyond reproach because they just exuded that confidence, the experience, they were just fucking walking legends. Yeah.

And you had those people who built the reputation and you had the people who then lived off the reputation. Right. and that's these guys were the ones who built it. And they didn't want to see us as a bunch of new guys come in and pretty much walk all over it and not do the organization any credit. And the Bureau, like the SEAL teams,

it's a special community. It's a small community. The Bureau, a lot of people think the Bureau is some national police force. I mean, right now, I think they have between 10 and 11,000 agents. That's it. NYPD has 30,000 police officers, just in the five boroughs.

There's a couple agents up here, I think, I think there's one of the remote offices. Like Wednesday, Tuesdays, though. They do, I think they have an office in billing. There's a lot of meth out there. Yeah. That's how you spell Billings, M-E-T-H. Yeah.

Well, it's everywhere in the Midwest, and it's a big problem. I think it's kind of everywhere, everywhere. Yeah, especially in the rural areas. It's really big. It was one of the problems that we were looking at before I left. But, yeah, but that's leaving, Andy. And there's nobody there to restore that culture. I read an article one time, and it was a great article where it said,

our army is breaking. And it said there are no more sergeants. And it was that same thing where the sergeants were the ones who doled out, disciplined, order. They made sure the folks knew how to behave for the most part, you know, and all that. And that's what's happened. And I don't know how to, I don't know how you change that unless you, you bring some people back who were part of that and still believe in that and help them, help the organization kind of rebalance itself.

Well, it takes time. For the shift you described in the organization, it will probably take an equal amount of time to shift it back the other direction. Yeah. But you have to commit to staying the course. At a minimum, right? But the problem is, is the FBI lives its life in 90-day increments. Really? How come?

When you do case reports and you do file reviews of open investigations, they're done every 90 days. So you live in 90-day increments as to what you do, how you're going to do, you get your semi-annual performance review, you get your – yearly, and those are the major milestones, right? So they live in 90-day increments, and it's hard to make a strategic change looking at 90-day increments. Yeah. And I think they're going to have to figure out

how to get the organization back to where it believes these things back from when the organization was that more storied, trusted institution versus now where it's pretty much, you know, I think I saw a recent poll, 40% of people polled trust the FBI right now, 40%. Damn. Right. And used to be the FBI was one of the highest, always at the very top.

And this is the thing I told the director when I was leaving. I said, there are two institutions in this government that the American public depend on. One is the FBI. They always feel better when they see those guys and the, you know, those goofy. raid jackets and everything. I said the other is our Department of Defense. There's nothing that soothes the American people when you're in trouble more than seeing uniform

U.S. military personnel. I said those are the two organizations that bring calm, stability. People trust them implicitly. And we've kind of slipped on that. And when I was on with Greg the other day, he said, hey, would you go back and help? I said, absolutely. I love that.

I would go back and do it all again, Andy, if they let me. But I'm too old and broken now. Why did you decide to get out? Or not get out? Well, I retired. I retired. I departed on my own terms. A lot of people don't know this, but when you're a gun carrier in the FBI, your code is 1811 job family, you have a shelf life.

You have to retire 57 mandatory. Really? Yeah, they give you an eviction letter. Unless the director signs a waiver of some sort, you have to leave. There has to be some pretty extenuating circumstance. is for you to stay. And I had gotten to a point where I was disagreeing with the leadership a lot more than I really should have been. By that, do you mean publicly? There were times I really had a hard time biting my tongue. Yeah. Right. And I always tried to be a good citizen. Because here I

was. I was, the FBI's cut into six pieces. And they're run by people who are called executive assistant directors. What are those six pieces? You have the science and technology. You have the science and technology branch, which I was in charge of. You have the Human Resources Branch. You have the National Security Branch. You have what's called the Cyber Criminal Response Services Branch.

Let's see, that's fine. What was the other one? I'm having an attack of the dumbass right now. Oh, the intelligence branch. So that was the way the FBI was strategically divided, and there were six of us that headed up each one of those components. So I was one of the most senior people in the organization. I think we were equivalent to four-star, you know.

You guys, G.S. Pay grade? I was the S-E-S. Okay. And we were the guys who ran the Bureau effectively. And I found myself a lot of times I'm standing on the outside of things. I'm looking at them saying, what are we doing here? Why are we doing that? And then I felt maybe it's time for me to go. If I can't realign myself properly to support the organization,

the leadership on which way they're going, maybe I should step away. And that's where I made that decision and when I left in January of 2020 right before the whole COVID mess. So that's why I left. It was, I just felt like I wasn't lined up with the way that the senior leadership

between the director and the deputy and the associate deputy, they were taking the organization in a certain direction. I found myself kind of stepping on the outside of that a little bit more than I was comfortable with. What led you to the,

FBI in the first place. Real quick story, I was in the Air Force for six years, not the real military, according to the law. Yeah, we're not going to hold it against you while you're here. But I substituted the Air Force for college. So I had to learn something that was transferable to the, I wasn't ever going to make it a career. Where are you from originally? What led you to the Air Force, too?

I grew up in Pennsylvania, and we grew up in the anthracite coal region where, of course, coal mining was the big thing, which nobody did anymore. I wasn't going to go to college. It wasn't really an option for me. so I decided, well, I have to do something. I'm not working in one of these lousy industrial parks making plastic shoes. So I went to the military.

A lot of my friends went to the Marine Corps, and I said, yeah, you know what? Being a door gunner is not a great skill to learn for civilian use. So, you know, some of them became, you know, these other combat arms thing. And so I went to the Air Force recruiter, and he said, hey, I got this great job for you. He goes, it's metrology.

And I said, all right, what is that? And it was the science of quantification and measurement, very technical field. I can't actually think of something I would want to do less. You know what? I got to that point. That's what led me to the bureau.

But at first, it was awesome because I didn't know Jack Shit. I was a kid out of high school and they sent me to this military school where the Air Force was the only place you can go to the school. It was an inter-service school run by the Air Force. You have never even heard of this M-OS.

Yeah, and the civilian companies used to pay to send their people to this military school. Because what you do is you, You test and you validate quantities and accuracy and measurement, and you look at precision of certain measurements. Like when I was at, and it will happen, I spent my six years, I got out, I worked at the Kennedy Space Center

and the Space Shuttle program. While you were in the Air Force? No, after I got out, after I separated. I worked down to Kennedy Space Center. The space shuttle program had kind of reached its peak. Yeah. And it was on its way down, but I got there, you know, when I got there.

But every time it took off, we were scared shitless because we were afraid we're going to have another space shuttle incident. And every time it landed, it would reenter the atmosphere and you'd hear two sonic explosions. And we would stand on the roof and look and watch it come. And they say it flew. It never, it didn't fly. It fell from the sky in a controlled manner. It was like playing Frisbee with a manhole cover.

It would come down. It would swoop down and it would come down and land. Yeah, they got one shot at that. Yeah, that's not a touch and go thing. You're, you're just going to hit it. But at the end of those, as I was coming up on that five year, I told my wife, who my wife is just phenomenal. She's been a super partner and everything.

I've got to give her credit because she's put up all of my BS over the years. I said, I don't want to do this anymore. I said, like you said, I would rather hang myself than continue to do this type of work, even though it was awesome because I was doing helium, helium leak rate analysis, platinum resistance thermometer. I was doing microwave power, optical power, all this awesome stuff, right? And I would rather shoot myself than do it anymore. And I said, I want to go back in the military.

My wife gives me the stink eye at first, and then she says, okay. So I'm going to Officer Candidate School for the Army National Guard, and I was accepted to go to helicopter pilot school. Where did you pick up your degree along the way? Just nights and weekends. Okay. Yeah, just going to school, nights and weekends. I did my bachelor's degree, master's, and doctorate all the same.

Doctorate? Yeah. What are you doctorate? I have a PhD. It's an education and organizational management perspective. It's called Human Performance Improvement. organizational development, problem-solving systems analysis. It helps you intervene into organizational problems and provide solutions.

Took me a long time to get my doctorate. Good. It's in sarcasm. Yeah. So Michael can tell you about it. He's very proficient. Well, I've seen your show, so I've seen your past performance. It's very impressive.

Yeah, I'm not a doctor of shit. But I got my bachelor's degree when I worked at Kennedy Space Center. I got to get out of here. And where it brings me into, I'm going to the Florida National Guard, Officer Candidate School. They gave me the thing I can go and be a helicopter pilot, which I thought, which would have been pretty sweet. Yeah, awesome. But I had applied to the FBI previously. They were on a three-year hiring freeze at the time.

So I'm working at the Kennedy Space Center. I'm going to this officer candidate school, and I get a call on a Monday. Hi, this is such and so from the Tampa Field Office, which is where I. processed in, are you still interested? And I said, well, yes, I am. And they said, great, can you be here this Sunday? And I said, yes, I can. So I quit my job on Wednesday, drove to Quantico, Virginia on Saturday, and started the FBI Academy on the 9th of July, 1995. Damn. What got you to apply to the FBI in the first place. It sounds like the path you were on wasn't really kind of in the law enforcement realm. I also applied to other law enforcement entities as well. I told my wife, I wouldn't mind

work for state police or something along those lines. The military thing, I just, I like the military. And the bureau came back just happenstance and said, hey, are you interested? And then I actually got my formal acceptance letter three weeks later when I was already at the bureau for three weeks. But I went to Quantico, did the agent training thing, which is, I tell people, they always ask how hard it was. And I said, it's kind of like community college with mandatory gym class and firearms. I saw a point break. You guys are rolling around out there in the rain, chewing gum. 100% Utah. Yeah. Just blasting away paper targets with shotguns that are just like vaporizing them, which I wish happened in real life. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to get some of those rounds

at some point. Did you ever pick up bricks off the bottom of a pool while you were blindfolded? No. Michael, you don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about, do you? What? Was it point break? You said? Yeah, it was. Yeah. Can you believe that shit? They don't even understand. Like if I were to say to him, give me to Utah, he wouldn't even know what the fuck I'm talking talk. You know what, though? They just did a remake, didn't they?

If I had to describe that remake in technical terms, it would be a baby diaper that's full of shit that's on fire. So it wasn't good. I haven't seen it. I, first off, I've never been an actor, so I have no ability to rate acting, and it was horrible. It was fucking horrible. Some of those classics are better left alone. They are. Yeah.

But that's how I came to the FBI. is that I was looking to get back into one of the service type of oriented careers. Honorable type of thing, you know, the just cause. And military law enforcement, I never went to the fire department side. I stayed with military law enforcement. Bureau called first. I was able to move through the process. At the time, the Bureau was having like almost a 94% attrition rate.

When you started the process at the very beginning, when you went in and took the test first, to the very end, when you stepped in the door and you stepped out as a special agent, they were losing about 94% of candidates. What was hanging people up the most? That's an ungodly attrition rate. Yeah. What was killing people the most was the time it took. Because life moves on, and you get to a point where it's like,

I just had a kid. I can't be gone for 20 weeks. No, I'm not moving to Anchorage, Alaska, to be up there in that field office. Things like that. And people, they got other careers and they moved on. And people always ask me, what kind of college degree should I get?

to get in the bureau. I said, the best kind of college degree to get is when you are interested in. Because if it doesn't work out for you and you have now a degree that you have no interest or utility with and the bureau shifted its hiring processes or say your life changed, now you have this degree that's of no use to you. Yeah. Right. So that's how I got to the bureau. And I had a and I'm telling you, I would go back and do it again in a heartbeat. I had a remarkable career. Well, I mean, we opened with you, you know, you were one of, you were in charge of one of those six slices of the FBI. I mean, there's such a gap in between. Fill me in on how your career went from, you know, post-academy. Fill us in, doctor. That's all I'm going to call you from here

on out. All right. Dr. Agent. Yes. That is a good, good moniker. All right. So I leave the academy, right, around the 13th or so week, they give, they have a night of, it's fun and games for the instructors, but that's where you get your orders and what office you're going to. I feel like that's already been removed from current training. No, no, they moved it to the, second or third week because now they give you a chance to find a place to live. I just feel like the instructors can't have nearly as much fun in games. Well, I'll tell you another story. But so they call your name, you go up and they hand you your things and you have to read it to the class.

And of course, me like an idiot, I put down my number one choice was Tampa, Florida. Makes sense? Yeah. Well, you can't get to Tampa, Florida. That's one of the most desired offices in the entire bureau. So I read my opening my letter and I said, Newark, New Jersey. And everybody's kind of, you know. At the time, Newark was the carjacking capital, the AIDS capital, and the murder capital of the Northeast.

I told my wife, she started crying. My wife's from Florida. Are you kidding me? Went up there, and it was probably one of the best experiences I've had because everything shitty in the world starts in New Jersey. It passes through New Jersey. or it ends up in New Jersey. Why is that the case?

I have no idea, but it's just the way it is. Fair enough? I got to do some remarkable, remarkable work as a new guy. I mean, I got to work with like foreign liaison services and stuff and stuff that you never get to do as a new guy. So a crazy amount of exposure right out of the gate. Oh, yeah. And Newark was a great city.

Everything, something was on fire at all times of the day. There was sirens going off. And it was just an awesome place to be. And it was dangerous and shitty. But it was a great, they would take us to. We used to go to the projects to pick people up and, you know, everybody wanted to do that type of work, right? You wanted to go in the, you know, pick up warrant squad pickups and stuff. And it was just, it was a phenomenal place.

I didn't get to do that full time. We used to go out the real agents, you know, and then I was there for several years, got to do some remarkable things. And then 9-11 happened. And that changed my whole perspective on things where I thought, wow, this, you know, we lost. We lost. Like, this sucks. And from then on, for me, good enough was never good enough again. And I didn't become a fanatic, but I just always thought, I freely took this oath to help protect people, and we're not good enough.

We can't do it. Not the way we were. So I went to headquarters shortly after 9-11, did some program management work, picked up an intelligence chief program that we were building them after 9-11, because everybody says, you guys can't share information. And they were right. We were exceptional at gathering information, but we couldn't share it.

We couldn't exploit it either. We didn't know how to exploit our own data. So I went off from that assignment. I went to the Washington field office, FBI's second largest field office after New York. DC, I'm assuming right? Yes, I'm sorry. Yes, Washington, D.C.

And I went to this program that was a counterintelligence program. One of the best jobs I had in the bureau. We were doing some serious, like, dark side. secret squirrel stuff with the guys at Fort Meade. Covert operation, covert. Oh, yeah. Everything. And phenomenal.

And then I said, oh, man, this is a real FBI here. This is not this nonsense I was doing before. Great, great, great job. And then I got promoted into an assistant special agent in charge position. I was the head of security for the office then. And I was the landlord at one of our other buildings and made sure everything was okay. And then I became the deputy for operations at the terrorist screening center. Terrorist screening centers are a really unique place in the Bureau.

It's an interagency function that puts out the terrorist watch lists, the no-fly list, the watch list, and all that type of stuff, all the screening at the borders, maritime, everything else. So I was the deputy for operations there. I worked for a man who, he's one of the most intense guys I've ever worked for it, but I learned a lot from him and there. And we did 24-hour terrorist screening around the world. interdiction we used to work with DOD and all a bunch of other folks let people hey this guy's here this guy's here we used to facilitate certain movements for certain outcomes and things like that it was

awesome and that's when I entered the senior executive service and then I went to Buffalo as a special agent in charge of that office so I was a 98% autonomous I was the senior FBI guy and all of western New York another fantastic tour of duty I was in charge of all of the criminal investigative and national security operations. I was the politician, the head investigative person, everything. It was just remarkable. So I get a call one day from Sean Joyce, and he was a deputy director at the time, former HRT guy. I don't know if you've ever run across him at any point. And I knew Sean for a long time, and he calls me up and he was, hey, Cress, yes, what can I do for you, Sean? He goes, pack your shit. And what I found was the former director of the terrorist screening center

had retired. So they brought me back as the full-time director of the Terror Screening Center for the whole U.S. government. Remarkable operation working with all the Intel law enforcement folks, 24-hour, again, interdiction coverage, screening at the borders. I was the single adjudicating authority for the no-fly list for the country. If I were to give you the name of one of my friends that I want to fuck with, do you think you could get his name on that list still? Not anymore. I used to. I could have. Do you know the right person? His name is Michael. Glover. He is a domestic terrorist and I don't want him to be able to fly. I will say Mike's name might already be on that. From what I've seen on other shows, Mike may already be on that list.

Fuck. But that was... What volume of information were you guys processing on the daily there? At that time, probably about 10 terabytes a day. Holy shit. Per day. That wasn't what we held. That's what we churned. Right? And I remember having to go up and sit with people. people up at the congressional members because they didn't understand it at the time. And I had to explain to Tulsi Gabbard one day about one of her constituents. Guy tried to fly out of Hawaii, took a Dina airbase. He's married to a military person. And I told her, this is, we never confirmed or denied certain things because, you know.

But I had to explain to her why he was left there. And she said, okay, I get it. I had to do the same with Chuck Schumer and other people. They just didn't understand. I had a room full of them one time, a whole room full of them. And it was an informal thing, which that varies. But they asked me, do you track people who are members of the NRA? And I said, I can tell you definitively, no.

And they said, well, how do you know that? And I said, because I'm a member of the NRA. And they all started laughing because a bunch of them were too. But the fact is, is that they looked at us, we were that first line of defense, whether it was overseas, we would stop people from getting visas and ability to travel here, we'd stop them at the ports of entry with CBP and other folks from actually passing into the country. And if they were here,

we would actually investigate them with our Joint Terrorism Task Forces and our other federal law and local law enforcement services. So I have a question for you, because I travel a bunch internationally and they take my passport and they screen it. How quickly are you able to interdict somebody who is there with a passport in hand? When they run that check,

Yeah. They'll get a flag back that says, yeah, no-go. And then you're just off to secondary tertiary. And then they'll say, Mr. Stump, can you please come this way? It's happened to me once or twice. Yeah, yeah, they get a no-go. Yeah. It depends on the classification code.

But if you're pre-loaded in that system. Well, we feed the entire government. There was a central, we were at a central point of data for integration, packaging, and then redistribution for the entire government. So everybody uses, that was one of the criticisms after 9-11. there was about 50,000 lists that everybody maintained separately in their own separate systems that nobody could query. And that's how the terrorist screening center was born

as that central government entity. So, you know, you were that, we were that entity who then provided all of that information to, you name it, State Department, DHS, everybody else, the intel community. I thought my wife was going to, we were coming back from Costa Rica. I thought she was going to fucking pass out because I was fucking with the border. Well, we were fucking with each other.

my middle son was with me and the guy goes, is this your son? I'm like, no, I'm just trafficking him. You know what? I was like,

you can't say that. I'm like, well, clearly I'm joking and I have his passport. But you know what's great now is that some of them actually have a sense of humor now?

He totally did. He was just like, okay. Hey, like, I'm telling you a while back. No sense of humor. Well, he had looked at the camera

and read the biometrics and they were off a good. Yeah, they would have just set in a room for a while. She wasn't ready for that. No, no. Yeah.

He's like, slightly different than other people out there. So I did that for a while, and I thought I was going to retire out of that job. Right, and I loved that job because I used to travel around the world on behalf of the U.S. government negotiating security arrangements with other countries around the world. It was phenomenal. And then one day I'm sitting in my office and one of the ladies who had answered some of the incoming calls says, hey, the director's on the phone for you.

I said, all right, cut it out. Oh, no, really? I said, oh, okay. So I pick up the phone. Hey, sir, what can I do for you? goes, hey, I'm going to change your world. And I thought, hmm, this could be really good or really bad. He may have been giving me the call. Hey, it's time to go, get out. Yeah, your new station is in Djibouti. Or your new station is in retirement. Yeah. Because he and I had had several conversations

over time. And this was Jim Comey. And he goes, I'd like you to be my new executive assistant director for science and technology. Because he and I talked about certain things and he liked the way that I could explain things in a very simple manner because he goes, hey, I'm an attorney. I'm not a scientist. And I worked in that very highly technical field so I could explain things to him. And you're a fucking doctor.

Well, that didn't hurt, but it was, right? So he goes, I'd like he'd be mine. And what was I going to say? Let me think about it. I just said, yes, sir, glad to serve, you know, that type of thing. And then moved back to Maine FBI headquarters out of the wonderful standalone facility I was in Vienna, Virginia.

And then I took over that. It's the largest branch in the entire FBI. I had about 5,500 people in there, a couple billion dollars worth of budget to formulate. But we were an enterprise service provider of all technical services. We had very quickly without, I had three main components. One was the operational technology division. That's where we did all the James Bond type of stuff that you see that happens on TV and stuff. Those were, that was those guys.

I also had the FBI Laboratory, which was the head renowned crime laboratory in the world. CSI for the FBI, I used to tell people. And then the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which we were a national asset program that ran all criminal data checks, all criminal histories, biometrics, repositories. We were the guys who did all the gun checks for people who wanted to buy guns when you had to fill out the 4473 form for ATF. We did all the background check. So very massive criminal information screening. And that was a great tour. And that's where I ended my career in January of 2020.

So what are you going to do now? You know what? I'm still trying to figure that out, Andy. What have you done for the last three years? Let's start there. Well, I worked for a risk management firm for a while and then COVID came. And at some point I saw I looked around and I saw, wow, of all the senior executives here, I'm the only one that doesn't have the same last name as the boss.

Yeah. So they were just, they had a shrink down. They said, hey, man, you know, we love you, but we can't keep, you know, people because their business was hurting. So I said, hey, no problem. So I started doing consulting work and I started doing some other types of work for security related things and all the, you know, secret squirrel tech stuff. And, you know, people are very interested in that. And also, we knew how to violate people's privacy better than anybody. So I could.

Fucking right, you did. Yeah. So. Sons of bitches. sniffing around in my email folders. Hey, you'd be surprised. How well, how well we could do that. If there was an agent tasked directly to me,

it would be the most bored out of their mind agent on the fucking planet. However, people will use that as like, well, why should I care because I'm so boring? That's beyond the point. No, it's the creep, as you said, right? Yeah. It's that mission creep. So I did some of that for a while. And then I was on some boards, some advisory boards.

And this one company, the venture capital firm, recruited me to be an advisor for one of their stable companies that they picked up, dark web investigative work and all this kind of stuff. So, okay. And then eventually they just said, hey, why don't you just come work for us? And I said, all right, make the terms right, and we'll do it. So I did that with them for a couple years,

and then we parted ways this past December. So now I'm just kind of figuring out, I'm doing consulting work in that, and I'm just trying to figure out, like, what do I want to do? where do I want to put my energy? How do I want to spend time? Do I want to help people be successful working for other people?

Or do I want to work for myself and help people be successful? And I'm still trying to work some of that stuff out. So I'm looking at the consulting gig. You know, when I get people to call me and say, hey, how can we get a leg up here? We're doing product development. Yeah. How does this work? How does the government procurement process work, which is a very Byzantine?

Slowly and ineffectively? Yeah, and it's just people don't understand it. So, you know, you help them navigate some of that stuff as well, relationship maintenance on certain things. So what do you like to do with your off time? You know, I never used to have off time. Yeah. So for a long time, I used to do martial arts.

I really very enjoyed. Well, in the beginning, there was only one kind. And that was- Karate? Yes. So you said martial arts, though, so which one did you practice? Because that's bullshit, too. All right.

So I went. How many months did it take you to get your black belt. I never got my black. I'm joking. Yeah. I never, never got one. But I did. So you're definitely not a deep practitioner because I could take you downstairs here and there's seven-year-olds with black belts. Yeah. I'm not sure about that by the way. I'm just completely talking. But I am not on that level of the seven-year-olds. Okay. I can't, I can't kick anymore because I had to get a knee replacement when I was 50. That'll do it. Yeah, the pivoting on the knee doesn't work anymore. But what my, my favorite was, I did a lot of moitai kickboxing.

Now we're talking. Yeah, which is a very high intensity. That's probably why I needed a knee replacement. But I also did some Filipino stick and knife stuff, which is good stuff. Yeah. And I did some Aikido, which people shit all over regularly. Rightfully so. And what I tell people about Aikido is it's a great martial art if you don't really have to fight somebody.

Yeah. Just remember who the head of Aikido is in the world. I don't know that. Stephen Sagan. Oh, yeah, that's right. He is the head of Akedo. Aikido. Yeah. I remember I saw your episode when you guys were talking. Fuck that guy. Who was that guy you had on who was working for him? Remember a guy

worked for him? I do, yeah. I think he briefly worked, did shooting with him for a day and that was enough. Yeah, he said he goes, and the guy wanted him to fill up, put gas in his car, and he said, I'm not putting gas in your car. Yeah. But, but, you know, we're not going to use this show to defend Aikido. Well, I'll tell you this at all. All right. Fair enough. But I will say, The Aikido, again, great exercise, coordination, just for folks who want to learn. Oh, I'm totally talking shit. Like, I want people to do whatever they want to do. No, but if you're going to get in a real fight, though, you don't want to go out and try to grab somebody's wrist and you don't want to try to do Aikido because it's not made for that.

Or don't get in a fight. There's your better option. Yeah. But if you find yourself in a situation where you cannot avoid a physical altercation, I think the practice of martial arts. not the martial art itself, help you deal with adversarial... It's the exposure to that environment. Adversarial situations, conflict. Hey, you've been hit before.

Most people have never been hit in their whole lives. And they think if they do get hit, you're going to go. But no. No, you're going to go all right, right to the ground. And you're going to be in a fetal position. When I was at the FBI Academy, they were teaching people just enough, what they call defensive tactics, so that you go out and get your head caved in. If you were going to latch on to somebody who really didn't want to go with you, you were going to get hurt, especially the female agents.

They were teaching them certain like these wrists come alongs and stuff. Just grab these two fingers. Right. As this guy is just caving your nose in. Yeah, totally. And that's where I think, you know, they could do a little bit better on that. I don't know what the answer is because you have so many different people of different capabilities and sizes and strengths. But, you know, I know you're a jiu-jitsu proponent.

I think the answer is Taze everybody. And then to put costs on them when they're unconscious. I'm not sure that's legal, though. I think if you can articulate the circumstances. But yeah, so I did martial arts for many years. And like I said, I had to give some of the more hardcore stuff up when I had to get my knee fixed. It's the way it goes. So, yeah, I just don't have a lot of free time other than right now.

You ever been into outdoor stuff, like water sports, winter sports? No, I've kind of, like I said, 25 years. years at the bureau, all hobbies kind of went away except for when I could squeeze in some martial arts stuff. And I used to work some long hours. I mean, you know, a 10 to 12-hour day was regular. And that's if there was nothing going on. Yeah. So didn't leave a lot of time for hobbies. So a lot of people ask me, what do you hobbies you have? And they say, how's your quality of work? I don't know what's that, work-life balance? Yeah. What is that? What is that? Well, now you're in control of it a little bit more. But I got to learn to do it.

Yeah. You got time, though? I wouldn't waste too much of it. No, but that's what I'm at right now is just figuring out, like, what do I want to do? What do I find meaningful? What's that next just cause? Isn't it nice to be able to make those decisions for yourself, though? It is.

It is. And again, being part of the, like, a SEAL community or me for the FBI, a lot of that was made for you, right? If not all of it. I mean, you had, like, a little bit of, like, career path trajectory, but as far as the steps that the organization was taken. Yeah. I wasn't in charge of the left or right foot. No, you were there to execute certain things, right?

So that's kind of where I came from, and I've just got to learn not to do that. And as my wife told me, I'm still a, you know, uptight, tight-ass FBI guy. It's going to take you a while to unwind from some of that. Right, and I'm trying. But, you know, I just don't know when that will actually happen one day. You're probably going to have to make it. You're going to have to force it.

Well, she's trying to force it on me, and she's doing a great job. What's trying to get you to do. ballroom dancing no no no i'll tell you what my wife uh over the years i always used to tell her be a good national security wife as i'm talking to people the fuck does that mean well just pretty much don't get mad because i'm on the phone all the time or i have to be at work or there's shit going on the weekend one time i'm at her parents house right yeah with her and i said and i get a call i said all hang on a second they're all sitting there we're all watching tv together i said i got to take this call so i walk in the next room and here there's a call there's a flight coming in to the u.s has

a guy on the terrorist watch list in, they don't know how he snuck through, they want to know what to do. So I had to divert the flight into Puerto Rico with NORAD and push it down there so they had to get it. Couldn't they just arrest him at the border or the coming through? They didn't even want the plane landing here. Jesus, what was this guy? Was he like Jason Bourne but for Al-Qaeda? You know, I don't remember what his background was, but the fact that whatever it was at the time, they said, we prefer that he not even... Damn!

Yeah. So we pushed the flight. But that's the kind of shit that used to happen. I always always tell her to be a good national security wife. It's a special type of woman that's going to tolerate you talking to her like that. And you know what? She is. She is a special type of lady.

But yeah, she's trying to get me to decompress, and it's still hard. It's going to take time. Yeah, it's so hard. How long did it take you to kind of? Still working on it. Been out for 10 years. Yeah, and it's hard. Because I'll tell you, every time I see something on TV,

before I retired, I used to have to send people to every mass shooting that happened in the country. And I used to watch video footage from every mass shooting inside the buildings, you know, count on their own videos, everything. We used to see it all. And it's like, when that happens again, I know what should be happening. And I feel like I should be doing something. What are your thoughts on the increase of that type of shooting? I think that there's a certain pressure that's built up in society.

I think that people are looking for attention. They're looking for some sort of release of that pressure. And I think people have lost the ability to cope with their own emotions on a very large scale. Why else would you take a firearm, enter a school, and shoot children? And, you know, you put that together. There's no logic to it. Well, they could say they're mentally ill. Yeah.

Okay. However, we have to look and see why is this pressure building in society and what has changed when I was in Buffalo and I would talk to my agent managers and I would tell them, you can no longer wait for SWAT to show up. That's not a solution. If need be, you must confront any shooter. I hate to say it, if it's a sacrificial engagement, you got to draw a fire. That's kind of the deal. Right? And it's what we do.

Yeah. But all of that had to change over time. And I don't know where we get people to, and everybody, you know, I don't know, gun control and everything else. But there's a pressure in society right now. I don't know how you relieve it that people find that to be that this is my option. Yeah. It's my only option. There's a lot of weight and burden associated with watching all that video that doesn't make the fucking national news.

It's a lot. Well, I tell you, when we were looking at certain video from like the, I won't use that one because they're still litigant. But there are certain other shootings that happen where we watched the shooter go up and down Isle just shooting into bodies and just, you know, what do you do with that? I don't know. What do you do with that? I mean, you know, it's just the societal pressure, I think, has grown to a point where and people feel powerless.

I think that's a lot of it too. When we would look at some of these incidents. Yeah. And, you know, people, I would have to send people out. They would either have to do victim recovery, evidence recovery. I mean, they used to have to collect the remains of people's bodies off of walls and ceilings and just awful work. And these are the people that I told you at the beginning of our talk today. They will never fail.

I used to have to talk to my managers down there and say, are these people okay? We've sent them on four mass shooting incidents. Are they okay? And, you know, nobody really ever thought to ask them. You've got to see this all the time. And there's only so many people who are qualified to do that type of scene processing. It's rough. Yeah.

Yeah. So, but that's, again, I would go back in a second if they let me do it again. You know, but I do think the organization is not what the American people deserve right now. They're not doing. Is it salvageable? I think it is, Andy. I tell you, I think it's salvageable if the right leadership environment is put in place. and the people who, and this is one of my speeches,

I told people, look, we love you. And this is the direction the organization's going. If you find that you can't do it, you can't stay here and be a problem. We'll help you get somewhere else, but you've got to go. And that they're going to have to have that same kind of conversation with the Bureau and say, look, if you can't stay and you can't exercise that emotional professionalism,

if you can't go back to a bit more of a stoic, investigative position on things, you can't stay. And until they get the courage to do that, it's going to be a problem. But I think it can be done with the right leadership team. I think if you get the right leadership environment and you get the right culture back. And I know those are very amorphous terms, but I think if you start there, the FBI is not broken from a procedural perspective. They know what to do.

Yeah. I used to talk to my guys all the time, and they would come in and say, They, all right, what are you doing? What are we doing about this? Here's the outcome that we're looking for. How are you guys going to make this happen? They come back and say, hey, this is what we're going to do. All right, go.

They know how to do it. It's just a matter of, are they being allowed to do it in a way that will restore that trust and confidence in the public? Well, I don't want your wife, who is being a good national security spouse right now to beat the shit out of me when we leave here. So I'm going to let you close it out with. What do you want to close it out? Well, thoughts by the doctor agent. All right. I will just say this.

Don't lose faith in the organization. The FBI has some soul searching that it has to do as an organization. And, you know, the agents and the professional staff folks on the working level will never fail if they're allowed to do what they have to do. I like it. Where can people get a hold of you? I feel like you're huge on social media. I am just digging it. Yeah, yeah.

No. Not really. I have a LinkedIn account because I have to. I have zero social media. God bless you. Anywhere else. Well, back in when I was with the government. Yeah, not going to allow it, yeah.

That really wasn't. It was frowned upon. Yeah. It was frowned upon. It still should be. I wish we had that type of assessment tool called LinkedIn when we were looking up other people and everybody has their, I have a T. Yeah.

I wish we had that kind of assessment tool when we were doing the type of work. But yeah, just an email address. C-P-P-I-H-O-T-A-3 at g-mail.com. You want to talk at any time? And one of the things I appreciate you letting me come on the show to spend some time with you and your audience is to dispel some of the conjecture and BS out there that's going on right now. I think you have a lot of these Internet warriors and a lot of the social media warriors. Tactical typists. Yes, yes.

It's my new favorite term. Yeah. I mean, they are. I call them the keyboard warriors. They speak in snippets and factoids. Yeah. And they're normally wrong. And that's why when I was reading the Durham report, I thought people are going to criticize this report because it isn't what they thought it was.

This is not a 360-degree 100% solution report. He was closing up shop. He summarized his findings, and he presented it to close up his operation. Yeah. And a lot of folks are mad because no one was a restaurant. arrested. Well, they didn't do anything illegal, unethical maybe, incompetent maybe, or, you know, take your pick. But no one else besides that one attorney who doctored the language, this was set up for jail. So I would just say that keep the faith. I hope the FBI comes through

this. I hope they will take a good look at themselves and come back to what the American people deserves and needs from them. I hope so too. Thank you for your time, Chris. No, thank you. Thank you, sir. Yeah, awesome. Appreciate it.