DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou: “Finally, the Epstein Files”

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou cue up the long-awaited Epstein files vote; a Trump Administration investigation of UC Berkeley over a skirmish at a Turning Point protest; the torture of 252 Venezuelans in El Salvador at the behest of the US; JNIM's fuel blockade highlights the rise of Al Qaeda in the Sahel in the wake of French withdrawals. DOJ Investigates UC Berkeley Protest Incident: The Justice Department announces an investigation into UC Berkeley after protesters confront Turning Point USA event attendees, with civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon labeling demonstrators as Antifa operating with impunity. Protests outside Zellerbach Hall feature chants against Trump, a brief scatter from fireworks mistaken for gunshots, and four arrests including one violent off-campus incident. The probe may fold into ongoing UC system scrutiny over antisemitism and diversity practices, while the university condemns violence and cooperates with FBI. Will the White House babysit Turning Point everywhere they go?Epstein Files Discharge Petition Reaches 218 Signatures: Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva affixes the final signature to the bipartisan discharge petition led by Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna immediately after her swearing-in last night, triggering a seven-legislative-day countdown for the bill forcing full DOJ Epstein files release to hit the House floor. Senior aides estimate a contentious December vote, despite Speaker Mike Johnson's pivot to opposing it and Trump downplaying the matter as a hoax. Three GOP women—Boebert, Greene, and Mace—remain supportive amid White House pressure, with Massie predicting passage and potential Johnson allowing vulnerable members to vote yes.Venezuelans Tortured in El Salvador Gulag: A Human Rights Watch and Cristosal report reveals over 252 Venezuelans deported under Trump's policy endure systematic torture, sexual assault, beatings, and inhumane conditions at CECOT mega-prison. Detainees face prolonged incommunicado detention, inadequate food, and abuses after visits by officials like Kristi Noem, with the US paying $4.7 million to El Salvador despite known abuse. Groups demand independent DOJ investigation and halt to third-country deportations, comparing it to Abu Ghraib and accusing Trump administration complicity.JNIM Blockade Paralyzes Bamako, Mali: Al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM seals highways since September, imposing fuel blockade on Mali's capital, causing soaring prices, power cuts, school closures, and resident desperation. Ambushs burn tankers, abandon vehicles clog streets, and Western nations evacuate staff as JNIM leverages discontent to pressure military government toward negotiations. Analysts see growing JNIM hold aiming for regime change in Mali and Burkina Faso, with local deals in regions allowing siege lifts for taxes and non-cooperation with forces.

Okay, let's see. We are supposedly live. Let's see if we are live. Okay, I think we are figuring this out. Hold on. Rumble Studio. Okay, I think we're live now. I'm putting it in.

All right, everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Okay, all right. I recognize my switcher. All right, let's start this from scratch, everybody, all right? We are really sorry. This is, by the way, why we need our producer Robbie West back. Exactly.

Because I'm not, they threw me out of engineering school for a variety of reasons. And this is one of them, okay? I'm not qualified to run the board. So I don't know what happened. Yesterday there was a glitch, and I think this was a residual glitch, but I'm not going to get into all that crap. Anyway, you're watching Deep Program. with Ted Raul and John Kiriaku.

We basically talked to ourselves for the last seven minutes. It's instructive to me, by the way, that you guys didn't seem to care. And we're having a great conversation with each other in the live chat for seven minutes. And that's great. We've created a community. We love you guys. We are here Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. We're going to go very quickly through it.

We are talking about the report that says that the Venezuelans, that we've sent to El Salvador have been tortured, including sexual abuse, including sodomy and forced oral rape. The French withdrawal from Molly and Burkina Faso has led to a power vacuum being filled by an affiliate of Al-Qaeda called J-N-I-M. Epstein filed a discharge petition is now at 218, so we are looking at a showdown in the House of Representatives over the Epstein files. And finally, the Department of Justice is investigating sort of a turning point USA appearance at UC Berkeley that kind of didn't go as well as one might have hoped.

So, okay, I think now, let's see, is anyone saying in the live chat whether we're actually here? It looks like we're here because I'm wearing today's sweater. Okay, that's good. Let's see. Let's see what people see. Okay. Yes is it. Okay, we, people said they thought they were going mad for a minute.

Okay, we are hopefully fixed. Someone saying that it's a little bit glitchy. You know, I don't know what to say about that. But all right, John, nobody heard anything we had to say. Just by the way, the seven minutes that you guys missed were absolutely brilliant. And you'll never get that time back. So, John, you were saying about the Venezuelans. let's go with let's go let's go let's go back to the venezuelans yeah if you can repeat what you were saying

we so the venezuelans that that we deported and sent to the mega prison in el salvador we were talking about that this is clearly a crime against humanity we even have a law in this country called the federal prison rape prevention act which is supposed to protect prisoners from this kind of assault but the the The government here just doesn't care what happens to people like this. They're just, you know, deportees, as Woody Guthrie once saying. So I don't think anything is going to come of this, certainly. It's good that it's out there.

It's awful that people are being raped and sodomized in prison. In a prison they were put in by the United States, there's no recourse. It's just, it's horrible. Then you mentioned that it's a violation of the Geneva Convention. It most definitely is a violation of the Geneva Convention. But I think the administration would argue that to be protected by the Geneva Convention, you have to be a lawful combatant. Right.

This is the argument that goes back to, of course, your period of the agency during the global war on terror where this new term enemy combatant was coined by the Bush administration and by the late non-lamented Dick Cheney to basically deny people their rights. And there's no such term under the law, U.S. or international. the law. But now, you know, that's the thing. It's like you do some, that's the thing with politics, right? You do something to cut a corner one time. And that's it. It becomes a precedent that will, can and will be used forever. That's it. And then there's nothing that the next guy can do to stop it. And I wanted to bring up something else. This was a story

broken by the Washington Post this morning on the front page saying that beginning in 2004 and ending in 2024, the CIA dropped billions and billions of poppy seeds on the poppy farms of Afghanistan because these seeds, the CIA developed to be less potent than regular poppy seeds and they would presumably make the heroin less potent and ruin the Afghan heroin crop. And I have several issues here. First of all, first of all, this was a program. This is confirmed by 14 former CIA officers. This is biological warfare.

Biological warfare. They used British planes, so they were working with the British. But this was an operation carried out by a little-known agency entity called the Crime and Narcotics Center. That was a graveyard. for dumb dums who couldn't cut it anywhere else in the agency oh boy and they used to brag drugs and thugs and thugs now you sound stupid when you say that stop saying i used to work for this guy anyway drugs and dugs man it's like well then why don't you just join d ea if you want to do drugs and thugs they're the ones with the money and the operational approval anyway um but at the same time it was the

CIA that was protecting the poppy fields remember what that poppy farmer told me that the cia told him he could grow as much poppy as he wanted so long as he told the americans where the arabs were hiding so it's another one of those situations where you've got the cia operations directorate literally at war with the cia's intelligence directorate and then the conclusion of this epic groundbreaking piece is that the seeds didn't work anyway. Nothing happened. That's always the case with a lot of these kind of schemes, right? But it could have really fucked things up in other ways, right? I mean, the law of unintended consequences, there could have been other crops that would have failed as a result. The last thing that the Afghans need is anything

that fucks with agriculture. I mean, it's a very agrarian society. Their economy is highly dependent upon it. And I don't understand. I mean, the United States always has to relearn every lesson. We learned how to cult, I mean, no force has been more effective at curtailing a poppy seed, poppy production in Afghanistan than the Taliban. The Taliban banned it very effectively back in 1999 and 2000. And the U.S. had this weird program where we paid some of the Taliban officials' salaries in order to, as a bribe to the Taliban on 1.0 government to, you know, to basically proceed with this. And the farmers were compensated and paid to grow other stuff. And it worked, right? I mean, opium production fell

off a cliff. There was zero opium produced in Afghanistan in 2000. It's amazing. I mean, like it's instant, well, I mean, you know, when you're threatened with death, you know, it tends to get your full attention. And, and so it's kind of like, I mean, and it came back. just as fast, right? Like in 2001, it was amazing to me, right? The U.S., the bomb started falling, I believe it was October 4th in 2001, and I arrived in Afghanistan November 15th. There was already, I don't even know how this is possible, but there was already opium paste turning up in bazaars by December 4th when, and I remember even just thinking like, wow, that'd be a lot of opium paste. The purest, you know, even my biggest druggy friends would drop dead if they,

if they even looked at that shit. It's so, it's so potent. But, oh, and the porn started showing up in the bizarre, like on November, yeah, we talked yesterday about, you know, the Bollywood influence. My favorite was all these, all these weird Indian porn things with weird English titles like Founders Boobes. Oh, my God. I prefer my boobs thunderous to thundrous. And I think thighs should be thunderous, not really boobs. I don't even know what thunderous boobs would look like.

But anyway, yeah. So that's actually terrifying, right? I mean, if that's, I mean, if it's, there should be an international convention banning the dissemination of biological entities over a foreign. country without their express permission i i had a conversation once with the british ambassador to afghanistan it was at bagram air base and um i was there with the senate foreign relations committee uh not not with the uh the agency and we were talking about spraying right like we like we tried to do in mexico back in the 70s and the 80s and he said can you imagine if we sprayed like Roundup, for example, on the poppy fields.

Every time a child is born with a birth defect or mental retardation or any problem at all, they're going to blame Her Majesty's government, he said. And I said, yeah, that's exactly right. And rightly so. The solution is not to spray them. The solution is earlier on in the process where you convince them not to plant the things in the first place. You pay them.

You pay them. Because there's no other way for them to make any fucking money. That's right. I mean, especially now, I mean, like the Afghan economy is collapsing due to these horrific sanctions, which also are, you know, just heinous. Houdini's asking, wouldn't the CIA want the heroin to be as potent as possible since it's mostly going to Russia? Yeah, they would.

See, this is that dichotomy again. the director of operations yeah they want afghanistan to produce as much heroin as it can but then the directorate of intelligence where most of the more sane people are are saying this doesn't make any kind of sense there shouldn't be any any american supported uh heroin in the first place and so you're stuck with with the cia fighting itself that's crazy um another Another comment here. It looks like super chat's not working. I'm going to fix that.

I'm pretty sure I can fix that. I think you might be in the wrong chat, so I'll fix that. Star Runner, did you see where senators slipped in $500,000 payments to the senators whose phone records were surveilled by the FBI currently being debated right now in the House of Representatives? I miss this story, John. Can you pull me in while I do a little troubleshooting here? Yeah, in the budget bill that. that the Senate passed a couple nights ago,

they included a line, a light item to give themselves $500,000 each if the FBI had examined their cell phone records related to January 6th. So this would be as kind of a settlement payment. So if your cell phone, like Josh Hawley, remember Josh Hawley running with his fist, up in the air and then he and then he you know ran for his life an hour later from the january six people well the fbi i sought josh holly's cell phone records to see was he talking to anybody that was involved in the in the um demonstration so josh holly gets 500 grand cash as a settlement now any senator of course they're all republicans any senator

that had his his cell phone records examined gets half a mill it's nice to be the boss it's just like it's amazing yeah I do not understand by the way it looks like super chats are working over in the rumble feed by the way there's this new feature

I just saw over in YouTube where you can set a goal and we promise to do something I don't know maybe we can promise to rub our stomachs and bark like a dog at the same time or something if we get a certain number of super chats. I don't know. Sounds like the kind of thing that would be more annoying than anything

else. But as far as I know, everything is up and running despite my previous screw up. By the way, just thanks, everybody. We did achieve our goal on Robbie Aid last week. And we are set for the month of November. But if you are so moved, you can donate to Robbie anyway, just as a tip. he's at give send go.com slash west glacier gaming that's gibson go.com slash west glacier gaming and we also have some ads john should I go ahead and read one I think I will go ahead I will go ahead and read one okay Brooke Burke Burke a fixture in the entertainment and wellness industries for decades known for her roles in dancing with the stars and wild on is not one to show away from the spotlight, but shortly after she turned 50, despite her expertise, the fitness icon

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that I've been in my whole life. She's sharing this with the world to both women and so Ben, so everyone can learn about this revolutionary protein. Click the link in the chat or and the QR code on the screen to watch. All right. Back back to our regularly scheduled program here. We are, all right, so should we, what do we, should we talk about? Oh, we should talk about Epstein, right? I mean, yeah, we have to go about Epstein.

Okay. So, so anyway, House is back in session. So it looks like Tom, Tom, Thomas Massey has 218, and there's some thought that there's someone resigning who's one of his 218, but he says that even if they go down to 217, they'll be back at 218. Discharge petition will happen. There should be a battle on the floor of the house. John, how does this work? I mean, is there anything that the leadership that doesn't want to release the Epstein files can do to prevent it at the stage? No. No, there's nothing that they can do. This is what's

called a discharge petition. We talked about it one time months ago, but this is that inside baseball stuff that I just love about Capitol Hill. So there's a history of very strong speakers of the House, present speaker accepted, in that it's the speaker who single-handedly decides what goes to the floor of the House for a vote and what doesn't, what gets killed in committee and what doesn't. Well, if there's something that a majority of the House wants that the speaker won't permit to come to a vote, any member of Congress can file what's called a discharge petition. This is a petition to discharge whatever the issue is from the committee where it happens to be stuck. Usually that's the Rules Committee. Usually something will get out of, you know,

whatever committee it's assigned to, goes to the Rules Committee, which decides whether it is legal and then whether it should go to the floor for a house but of course only with the signature of the speaker so in this case let me back up i was working on capital hill in 1986 when there was a discharge petition related to um tax cuts right the the speaker didn't want tax cuts the members wanted tax cuts they issued a discharge petition it got 218 votes it went to the floor of the house for a vote not to say it'll become law because there is no such thing as a discharge petition in the Senate, but that's a different story. So what we have here is Thomas Massey and a handful of other Republicans, a very small

handful of Republicans, plus all of the Democrats, literally every single one of them, including Representative Grijalva, who was just sworn in today, they want to send to the floor an order to release all of the Epstein documents. Mike Johnson said, no, they're not releasing any documents. And Massey doesn't really care about what happens to his career. He stands on principal. And so he filed the discharge petition. He's been trying to whip votes.

It now appears that he has the votes. And so the petition will be voted on on the floor. If it gets 218 votes and it looks like it's going to be 218 to 217, or 218 to 216, then the, the, the Justice Department has to release everything it has on Jeffrey Epstein. And that's it. I was, just before we went on air, or I should say more accurately, just before I thought we were about to go on air, I saw breaking a newsflash about how Democrats released a letter, emails

from Epstein, in which he talked about Trump, and apparently said that Trump, in which Epstein's claims that, of course, he's not here to verify this, that Trump spent hours at my home with one of the accused victims. This is a new email that was just released by the House Democrats. So what do you make of this? Why are the Democrats doing this now and not before? Well, a couple answers come to mind. One, that the accusation is not true. Two, that there are going to be lots of Democrats in these files and on these tapes as well also having sex with underage girls and so it's one of those I think it's one of those situations Ted where everybody's guilty it's a Washington thing better to cover it up than to let the

truth get out but now it's but now the truth is going to come out so it will it be one of those like, you know, what aboutism on steroids where everybody is just like, well, you did it and, you know, never mind what I did. I know what I am, but what are you? Yeah. And in addition, there's this situation between Melania Trump and Michael Wolf. He's a journalist. And it's funny, Michael Wolf reported, I don't know, weeks ago, months ago that Donald Trump and Melania met on Jeffrey Epstein's plane. We have no idea if that's true. Melania, Trump says it's not true, that they had sex on the plane and that um and that donald trump was cavorting with underage uh girls so he published this in a book and milania's attorneys sent him a cease and desist letter tried to get

the book canceled um he says you you can't cancel the truth he went went forward with the book. Now he's suing Melania for a billion dollars for defamation. And then we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're waiting for the suit from Melania against Wolf.

God. Yeah, it's. It's like, holy shit. That's the perfect word. I will say she's very litigious. You remember during the first. administration. There was a reporter, and I don't remember who it was, who said that she was a very high-priced prostitute, and that's how he met her. He had actually purchased her services.

Yeah. She said that wasn't true. She sued, and she won. Good for her. Yeah. She's absolutely right. I mean, I would have told her to do the same. Yeah. What a shit heel to say something like that. Crazy. Washington's been crazy. Spectrum 30. Thank you very much for the five euros.

John, congrats on the book release. Happy for you. Would you consider doing an audio book version and recording it yourself or is it too much effort? Oh, no, no. It's not too much effort. In fact, I've begged them

for each one of my books to let me do the audiobook and they're like, no, no, no. We have professionals who do that. We have professionals. So do you have an audio book coming out, I guess, on the new one? You know, I would have said no, but now that it's Simon and Schuster that's publishing the book, I'm going to say probably yes. So I'm going to ask again, but my ask this time is different because the first time,

Random House hired some unknown Broadway actor to read the book. And he pronounced all the names incorrectly. Oh, God. Yeah, the Greek ones, the Arab ones, the Afghan ones, they were all pronounced incorrectly. So it was embarrassing for me. Well, now I am a card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild. Yes, you are. And I can do voiceover work.

So I'm going to say, I want to record the audio of my own book. I'm going to tell them again. Well, you know, John, I hate to piss on your parade, but I would advise you not to. I looked into this about my most recent book, which I was like, oh, I could do my own recording. It's extremely hard and very time-consuming. I mean, it could take, like, you know, reading your book,

you might, you think, oh, it'll take like three hours or four hours. No, it could be 40 or 60 or 80 hours of intense studio work. You have to do a reset. You can do only like do like an hour at a time. Otherwise, your voice starts to get scratchy and fucked up and inconsistent. You know, you have to go back and do edits and corrections. It's a huge pain in the ass.

I had no idea. It's like I always thought, oh, it would be fun. I can read my own book. I mean, I read all of the Harry Potter books to my kid. You know, all of them, you know, there's thousands of pages. But, you know, it's not good enough for audio quality recording. And you have to go to a studio to do it. You have to go to a studio.

And, of course, the studio would be in New York. And then what would I do there? Well, you'd hang out with me. Yeah, that's great. So that part's good. Yeah, it's like, not like it's so funny. I actually had a friend of a friend literally in all seriousness say, like, oh, I don't want to come to New York. There's nothing to do there.

I was like, what? What? I mean, of all the briefs against New York City, that's really not one of them. Question for you, John, fluidic Polly on Rumble is asking, does the media censor or suppress news of domestic terrorism for fear of copycats. There were quite a few of them, but I never hear of them. This is a good question.

Go ahead. The answer is yes. And what they do is if something happens, and in the course of the investigation, a journalist finds information that the government deems to be critical to the investigation. They don't want the public to know.

the administration will go at a high level. I've seen it, when I was at the CIA, I've seen it as high as the president himself calling a newspaper publisher and saying, listen, for the good of the country, for the safety of the country, please don't publish this. And I'd say probably 50% of the time they don't publish it.

And the other 50% of the time, they conclude that the American people have a right to know the information and they go ahead and do it. But yeah, it's not unusual at all for the White House or for the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Homeland Security, whomever, to call a publisher directly and ask him to kill the story.

Well, the feed is full of people still calling for, still requesting you to do your audiobook. So, although people always request and then like, you guys, if John does this and puts himself through the hell, that would be involved. You guys had better fucking buy it. Okay, Peruse 1, a quick feedback. for the Pete Seeger episode of the podcast, John.

Oh, thank you. Glad you. What do we think about Bob Dylan and his music? Did you see a complete unknown? I did. And it made me love Pete even more than I already loved him. First of all, thank you. What we're talking about here is I have a third podcast called Dead Drop with John

Kirooku, What Makes a Spy Tick. And we do these little mini episodes. too. We release an hour-long episode every two weeks, and then we release on the alternate two-week schedule a mini episode that's between 12 and 15 minutes. This one is about Pete Seeger, the folk singer, an activist, and how important he was to me. Hey, I'm going to blow my own horn, too. Apple Podcasts sent me an email two or three days ago saying that this podcast is in the top 5% of all podcasts worldwide. This podcast?

No, no, my podcast. Oh, congrats, congrats. Thank you. So anyway, I did see a complete unknown. I saw it on a plane. And my sister-in-law had raved about it. So I thought, okay, I've got to check it out. I didn't realize it was going to be as much Pete Seeger as it was Timothy

Chalomey as Bob Dylan. I've always loved Bob Dylan. I've always loved Bob Dylan's music, I'll say that. And I've seen him in concert three times. He's absolutely dreadful in concert, absolutely, positively awful. It's don't waste your time or your money. On purpose, he'll play songs nobody's ever heard of on purpose. And then as the encore, he'll do one of his classic ones from the 60s.

And that's it. that's all you get take it or leave it when the first time I went he was with willie nelson and john Mellencamp and people walked out whoa yeah they were rocking the melon camp and really was so you do you think he's just inconsistent i mean i've never seen dylan in concert um but i mean like Elvis Costello was incredibly inconsistent i mean he's either brilliant or horrific last time i saw him stuck ass i saw crosbie stills nash three times too. And sometimes they're great and sometimes they're embarrassing. I saw them once when David Crosby was so fat that he couldn't bend over to pick up his guitar. A road he had to come

on stage and place the guitar around his neck, the strap around his neck. That's how fat he was. Speaking of, since we're going to talk about obesity, did you hear that the Trump administration is banning fat people from visiting the United States as tourists? Yes. So I don't, first of all, the part that I find, like, really sad is all the fat people from around the world who wanted to go to the country with the fattest people so that they could feel comfortable now can't come home. Yeah. Also, has Donald Trump, does he own a mirror? I know, right?

This is a serious thing. He doesn't want any fat people to come to the United States. And so he's ordering. Is it Ohio or Michigan, dude? Seriously. He's ordering State Department consular officers to deny visa applications if the person applying for the visa appears to be fat. So there will be literally no Saudi royal family members permitted to come to the United

States. That's crazy. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, by the way, I'm not, I was kind of silent on the, on the, on the Dillon thing. Because he never really spoke to me. I mean, like, it's one of, you know, there's certain things that musically, I love music, that I absolutely want to love. Bob Dylan's just not one of them. I always feel like that says something more about me than it does about him.

Like, you know, maybe I'm not sophisticated enough or intelligent enough. Like, I'm not really into jazz for that reason. And it's like, I'm like, maybe I'm, I'm like not smart enough or whatever to be, to get jazz. That's how I feel about, about Bruce Springsteen. man, every one of my friends has practically gotten on his knees and worship the ground that Bruce Springsteen. Me too. And I just, I've never gotten it.

By the way, you know, there's that whole thing with Springsteen right now about the recording of the Nebraska album. I don't know how you felt about this. But I always thought, you know, he left me cold. And I, you know, I always thought the bombast was like ridiculous. And I just don't, didn't appeal. Nebraska was the first album where I was literally like, oh this is pretty good and like and now i'm reading that apparently all of springsteen's fans

like what the fuck is this yeah they hate it yeah and i wonder if midwesterners like we're kind of like oh here's one for us finally i think it's funny that you say that because i had the same experience with him when he came out with a series of recordings called the seeger sessions in which he performed pete seger music and then i was like oh okay this like could listen to and people like, music from the 50s? No. I love music from the 50s. So do I, especially when it's like, you know, leftist anthems or songs commemorating the Spanish Civil War or, you know, I love that stuff. It's like a history lesson in the song. By the way, John, you know, we have to do some Rumble premiums. And I don't know, you never responded

in the chat, but we got to do one about music. We got to do one about movies. We're going to be doing that in the next week or so. So another reminder, if you subscribe to Rumble Premium, you get for $5, for $10 a month, you can watch all Rumble premium content. For $5 a month, you could just watch ours. So up to you what you want to do. But highly recommended to do that. Yeah, I'm with Phil Chats. I could never handle Dylan's nasal twang.

That's exactly it. Well, there's kind of a famous story. And it was hinted at in the movie. But they didn't really get into it. There's a famous story that when Dylan first arrived in New York from Hibbing, Minnesota, he found where he found the nursing home in northern New Jersey where Woody Guthrie was being, was living. He had Huntington's disease and there's no cured. It's a terrible, horrible death and he was just dying slowly.

Pete was there every day all day, playing songs for him and talking to him and reading him in letters that people were sending him. So in the movie, Dylan comes in. He's 18 or 19 years old. Woody Guthrie is his hero. And he asks if he can play a song for Woody that he had written. And Pete nods and smiles. and Dylan plays the song.

Well, the part they cut out in the movie was after Dylan left, Woody said to Pete, he's not much of a songwriter, but that voice, it's the voice of an angel. What? That's awesome.

I love that story. That's so great. That is fun. That's fantastic. Oh, my God. Yeah, so you know, it's like one of those things. Someone said, someone's mentioning Hendricks. Yeah, yeah, give me Hendricks anytime over Pete Seeger.

You know, I could put that on any time. Over Seeger? No, no, no, over, over, over, Hendrix over, over, over Dylan. Over Dylan, right. Yeah. Yeah, for Singer-songwriter shit, which I do, I am partial to. I got to go Nick Lowe. I love Nick Lowe, yes.

Very underrated. Very. Nobody talks about him, but he's fantastic. And he's had such an incredible range that that guy has. That's the voice of an angel. Yeah. He can go lower than I can go. He can go way higher than I can go.

Yeah, he's amazing. And politically, I mean, also Paul Kelly from Australia, fantastic. Um, Nick Lowe, um, uh, what's his name that created the Sopranos, not David Gray. Oh, uh, Chase. Yeah, David Chase. David Chase so loved Nick Lowe that he got Nick Lowe to sing a song called The Beast in Me that was the closing credits of episode number one. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. The Beast in Me. So good. Oh, so good. What a song. Yeah. And by the way, he's.

always great in concert, whether he's backed by Los Strait jackets or whether he's, you know, just him and a guitar. It's always, always great. Here we go. Breaking news, John. House Democrats, this is it. Release. Oh, this is just more things about the Epstein email. This is not the files themselves. Sorry. Okay. So, yeah, we'll see. Would, I don't know. I got to. I got. I don't know what Donald Trump did or didn't do sexually with these girls, but to me it doesn't quite pass the smell test that he did anything sexual with these women. It just doesn't, girls, I should say. You know, we'll see. We will see. Let's talk about Al-Qaeda. So Al-Qaeda, there's this Al-Qaeda affiliate called J-N-I-M that are based.

in West Africa, West Central Africa. You know, starting about a year ago, six months ago, the French started withdrawing from their military bases in their traditional colonial former colonies in the Sahel, including Burkina Faso and Mali, of course. And there's always been, obviously, an Islamist problem in Mali, and to say the least. And now it looks like it's getting pretty serious with the French withdrawal,

there's a fuel blockade on the capital city of Bamako. Is that the right way of Parano? I think it's Bamako. Bamako. And so Timbuktu is still under government control. But basically, J&M has blockaded all the highways in and out of Bamako since September. So it's been a couple of months fuel blockade and basically, you know, situation is getting pretty miserable in terms of power cuts. food prices going up, and Western nations are advising all of their nationals to evacuate Mali.

You know, it's a desperately poor country. And, you know, basically, J&I.M is sort of following the Taliban kind of playbook, basically establishing sort of a form of governance in the areas that they control. They impose taxation on the locals. they are you know they've set up Sharia courts and so on this is a major problem who's gonna who's gonna handle this

the French are they going to go back in is the US going to have to do it is the UN or is it just going to rot you for the most part the US policy position is that this is a French problem and the French just walked away six months ago and they told us

two years ago they were going to walk away Donald Trump has made these odd comments about sending troops to Nigeria which is generally in the area northern Nigeria especially but we're talking about something that would have to be a major troop commitment. This group

the JNIM I looked it up I didn't know what it stood for it's the Janath Nasar al-Islam al-Muslimin which means the gathering the revolutionary gathering of Islam and Muslims. And it was created by the merger of three groups, Ansardin, Al-Murabatun, and the Saharan branch of Al-Qaeda. Interestingly enough, when they merged a couple of years ago,

they pledged allegiance to Aymina Zawahiri, the number two in Al-Qaeda, who we killed. by firing an unarmed missile right through the middle of his body. I still think it's brilliant. He was in a house full of women and children. He was in a house full of women and children. And the CIA didn't want to kill the women and children. And so they just fired an unarmed missile.

It was a missile with no warhead on it. And he was out on the balcony drinking a cup of coffee. And the missile went right through him. Jesus, the precision. Yeah. Uh-huh. Crazy. So anyway, this group, this group is all over the place.

It's, it's in, as you said, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Cameroon, Northern Nigeria. And we're talking about desert and jungle. There are a lot of them. We already know how bad we are at fighting guerrilla wars, going house to house or tree to tree. It's not as easy as you might think it is. And so I don't think there's any desire in government here or any insistence on the part of the American people to get involved fighting some nebulous terrorist group in West Africa.

It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, no one even knows about it enough to give a shit about it. And if they knew about it, they wouldn't give a shit about it. I mean, Molly, as far as anyone knows, there's no natural resources. right they haven't attacked us so there's no cost us belly no that's for sure i mean i guess yeah i mean traditionally it had been until maybe 10 15 years ago uh sort of the norm for the former colonial power to be considered to be in charge by the west of going in and and and cracking heads in a situation like this this does sound like a job for the foreign legion right i mean

Going door to door and counterinsurgency is a French foreign legion specialty. Absolutely. And what about, and don't call me crazy, what about the Wagner group? Right? I mean, they're already there. What about the Chinese? They're taking over Africa anyway. They would be able to protect their own investments.

But they don't want to be involved militarily. They don't, but why should we be involved militarily to protect China's investments in the Sahel? Well, so, I mean, Emmanuel Macron has his hands full with the French. Is he going to have the appetite to go back in? I mean, I have to say, I imagine French public opinion would probably require him to send a force, a few thousand, you know, foreign legionaires to go and save that city and lift the blockade. I mean, because it's just like it's a French, it's white man's burden, right? It's a French obligation. It's like you guys, you owned it, you broke it, you left it.

Now you've got to like put out the fires every now and then. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think it's a matter of French national pride, but I don't think Macron wants to do it. And then, of course, there's a situation for Quina Faso, too, which is, it's now spreading over there, too. Yes. And what would the French, what would French public opinion be? Do the French people want to commit to a war? where you don't have any idea what victory looks like?

No, they did that with Algeria, and they didn't like it. And, you know, that's the last time the French did that. They've been out of the endless war business for, you know, the better part of half a century. You know, the French, people forget this, but the Rwandan genocide ended in large part because of French foreign legionnaires, you know, being sent in at the end to crack heads,

along with the Belgians, right? I think that that's that's the French the French public opinion view is like go in limited force go in and get out and the thing is that the French government has going for them is they have done this before they don't suffer from mission creep as much as we do yeah I think that's right I think that's right they don't and this is one of the situations Ted when we're still so early in the process we can just say no we're not interested in this one Thanks for the 999, M over on YouTube in the Super Chat. Love the show, guys. John, I know you were on Julian Dory the other day. Please tell me you go in on Andrew Bustamante. You know, just between us and this little closed meeting we're having right here. I'm careful with Julian because Julian and Andrew Bustamante are very, very close friends.

So I keep most of my criticisms to myself. When I do criticize, it's constructive, but the truth is that Andrew Bustamante is living a lie. And if Julian were to ask me in my opinion, I would give him an honest opinion. I think he's living a lie. He was never a case officer. He never did these operations. He's just making it up. And, you know, other people have told me that Andrew tells other people's stories and claims them as his own,

which also bothers me to know. much stolen valor kind of um it's it's uh yeah you know i think a lot of it the psychology of it is people figure the CIA is secret no one can verify or invalidate what you said and exactly he reminds me of the two cups of tea guy in afghanistan who turned out to be a fraud and it's kind of like nobody knows what you know it's like well i was in rural you know remote afghanistan where there's no phones so you know who fucking knows what i was up to godgarn it pierce morgan wants me to go on at one o'clock i don't think i can do that um you know let me tell you something else too my sister one o'clock actually i can't um my sister

and her husband and two friends of theirs are opening a laundromat in manchester new hampshire they're just about ready to go it's gorgeous there's a gourmet coffee bar in a kid's play area it's gorgeous so they've been they've been interviewing for help and for example a few days ago they had eight interviews scheduled over eight hours five of the people never bothered to show up never bothered to call one woman came my sister said she came in pajamas and a t-shirt that had a tear in it no bra and you could see her nipple through the tear in the t-shirt That's how she came to a job interview. Anyway, there was one guy who came.

My sister said he was fantastic. He came well-dressed. He was well-spoken. She's like, we've got to hire this guy right away. So he claimed to be a retired Navy captain. And I said, Navy captain, that's the equivalent of a full bird colonel, why in the world would he want a part-time $15 an hour job at a laundromat? And then he complained to her the other day that he really needed to pin this job down because since the government was closed, he wasn't getting his pension.

And she said, that's not right. My husband's retired military. And the military are exempt from the government shutdowns. They continue to get their pension checks. And he said, well, I was in this special part of the Navy. Oh, here we go. of her, yeah, special operations. We're different.

So even our fault, if you're a captain, you're not. So I, she called me to ask me, and I said, it's all bullshit. It's stolen, Valerie's making the whole thing up. So she, she had him fill out this application for background investigation. It turned out he just made up the social security number, like off the top of his head, he just made it up. Wow. She, this is very much my sister, she did a deep dive on this guy.

And she found out that he has three felony warrants open, federal warrants in Alaska, all for gun crimes. He's on the run. So she called the FBI. They were like, yeah, we don't, we don't care. She called the local police. They didn't give a shit. So I said, you know what? I know a guy from Homeland Security.

And he's a real ass kicker. He's kind of a fan of mine. So I put them in touch and he's like, oh, we'll scoop them up. we'll scoop them up and we'll send him right back to Alaska. He's looking at another 15 or 20 years with these three open warrants. Oh, man. I almost feel sorry for him. Yeah.

John, we have a question. Yeah. This might be our last question for today. Phil Chats is asking, is this the first time we're hearing about this group, J&I.M seems like a new terror organization daily, hard to keep up. It's the first time I'd heard of them. Yeah. I hadn't heard of this group until I was forced to look it up when this news broke. But we should take it seriously because it's got arms.

And so long as they're sweeping into villages and just shooting everybody or going into schools and kidnapping all the children, which they do, we should keep an eye on it. Not to say we should commit troops to it. I don't believe that we should. They have not attacked us. I think this is French business it's not American business but I do think I mean you know look Molly deserves better it is I mean it was a cradle of civilization and then it you know

look at it now and it's just it's fucking sad and life is hard enough there without these kind of shit heels running around you know making people's lives even more miserable very quickly turning point USA they had a protest and they had an appearance at Berkeley. Justice Department is investigating UC Berkeley. Obviously, it looks to me like there's just, you know, as usual, like riding hard on, you know, trying to own the, own the libs. That's what this seems like. I mean, I just, I mean, turning point USA founder gets killed, flags are half-mast. I mean, is this really federal government business? No. No, it's not. It's not.

It's not at all federal government business. I don't even know why we're doing it. But, you know. It's just politics. Yeah, Donald Trump understands how to shore up his base and to do it at no cost to himself. And so there it is. Yeah. All right.

Well, thanks, John, for being here as always. Looking forward to talking to you again tomorrow. We're here Monday through Friday. We will be back at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning, live, really truly live, unlike this morning when I hit the wrong button. My apologies for that. We will have Robbie back next week. Please stay tuned to the TMI show with me, Ted Raul, and Manila Chan, coming right up.

If you're in the Rumble feed, you'll be spirited away, just like in a Miyazaki, Miyazaki movie. And we will see you tomorrow, and thanks, and bye-bye. Bye, Jan. Bye-bye.