Julian Dorey Podcast - #278 - CIA Spy on MK Ultra, Sinister USAID Mission & Overthrowing Governments | John Kiriakou

Starting point is 00:00:00 John it's great to have you back sir good to be back thanks for the invitation of course of course the last time we sat down at the end of October we got a lot of your story probably not the full thing that's not really possible even in six and a half hours or whatever the fuck we did but you know I talked with you. Obviously, I've enjoyed your podcast with Danny over the years where you're breaking down the geopolitics of things. And I hope to see you do that with Dalton as well moving forward. Me too. But, you know, there's a lot going on right now.

Starting point is 00:00:37 There's a lot. And I'm like a little bit – I'm a little bit at fault here because last time when we were about five hours in, you started telling this story and you're like, I'll give you an example. Afghanistan, 2009, poppy everywhere. Everywhere. And I'm just sitting there like, wow, okay, little did I know you were blowing the whistle on the whole USAID thing before this was like cool to do that. I guess I was. Congratulations on that. So for everyone out there who's hearing about USAID,

Starting point is 00:01:08 they've seen Mike Mercedes-Benz on all these podcasts and stuff talking about it. He's been blowing the whistle on it. Obviously, Elon's working on it. We'll get to that. You know, what was it to you when you were in the CIA? How did you view USAID and what kinds of things were they doing back then and then we'll work to today? To tell you the truth, when I was in the CIA still, I paid very little attention to USAID. I didn't have any interaction with them. Every once in a while, you'd bump into them in an embassy that you happen to be working in or most of the big

Starting point is 00:01:42 embassies have a bar you can go to after work and you'd see them having drinks over there but i you know i never had to interact with them so with that said i i was aware that usa id um was giving money to the national endowment for democracy and there were accusations that that was a CIA front organization. It wasn't a legitimate think tank. And, you know, there's a lot of what you and I might call money laundering going on. Others would say, you know, we're private public partnerships. But now it's all coming out. In Afghanistan in 2009, I wasn't working for the CIA anymore. I was working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and I was under the mistaken belief that I was the second one we did. You told that story maybe a couple hours in.

Starting point is 00:02:46 Can you just run through what you found there and then how it was shut down just to review it? Sure. I was keenly aware that Afghanistan at the time was producing 93 percent of the world's heroin. So as recently as the 1970s, Afghanistan was a net food exporter. There's not very much land there that's arable. There's not very much water, but the arable land that they have, they made very good use of and they could feed themselves and export rice to Pakistan and Iran. So that's pretty good for a country that's 90% mountains. Well, after the Taliban were overthrown, they converted all their food production to opium poppy

Starting point is 00:03:34 because it's profitable. And as a result, by 2009, after eight years of American control or occupation or whatever your politics want you to call it, they accounted for 93 percent of the world's heroin. So I wanted to go to Afghanistan and I wanted to investigate this. I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee working for John Kerry at the time. Your favorite guy. Yeah, my favorite guy. Yeah. There's a lot to say about John Kerry at the time. Your favorite guy. Yeah, my favorite guy. Yeah, there's a lot to say about John Kerry. So I'm so grossly disappointed in John Kerry. Yeah. So I got the concurrence of the American embassy in Kabul. I flew out to Afghanistan, and I went to Bagram Air Base. and I had trouble immediately. I said that

Starting point is 00:04:27 I wanted to go to Kandahar province and Helmand province in the South. That was the center of, of poppy cultivation. And, um, and they didn't want to fly me. And I did something that I never, ever do. I pulled rank. And I said, listen, I'm a senior staffer of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I have the rank of brigadier general. I'm not asking you to fly me. I'm telling you we're going to fly down there. What was the reaction? Somebody start up the chopper.

Starting point is 00:05:36 I had never done that before. In fact, once I went to Afghanistan and we were on a 16-seat military plane going to Dubai to catch a commercial flight back to DC, and it was a whole bunch of generals and a handful of us staffers. And 16 seats on the plane, there were 17 of us. And so this general says, oh, I'll stay behind another day. I go, absolutely not. I'm not going to be responsible for a general not making it home after finishing his tour in Afghanistan. He said, no, no, you outrank me. I said, absolutely not. And so I stayed another day in Kabul so he could go home to his family. But anyway, that took me off the subject. So I go to Kandahar. We meet with a handful of people there. And then we fly to Lashkar Gah, which is a village in the center of Helmand province.

Starting point is 00:06:14 There was something called a PRT there. That was a State Department, a Provisional Reconstruction Team is what it stood for. The State Department organization. It also had military and had USAID and a couple of other organizations that were represented there. But they were doing things like trying to build an electrical grid or digging water wells, stuff like that. Net positive things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:42 Legit things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Legit things. So we got off the helicopter and the State Department people greet us and I said, I want to just drive out into the poppy fields. Now, when you're coming in to Lashkar Gah, as far as the eye can see, it's just poppy. And I mean for miles and miles. And you can see these rivers running through the province and they're diverting water from the rivers just to cultivate the poppy. Who is doing that? Well, see, that's, that's an important question for the most part. It's just itinerant farmers, dirt farmers. And they're being in some, told what to grow. And that became an issue for me.

Starting point is 00:07:28 So I said, listen, we're going to drive out into the poppy fields. The military escort that I had said, absolutely not. And I said, no, we absolutely are going to drive into the poppy fields because I have questions to ask, right? I'm not doing this for vacation. I didn't want to go to Afghanistan. This was because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members had a legitimate interest. You have a job to do.

Starting point is 00:07:51 I had a job to do. So we get in this Jeep, two Jeeps. Security was in one Jeep and it was me and a driver and a State Department guy, translator in the other Jeep. We go out to the into the fields, we find a poppy farmer. So I asked him this very naive question. And I said, why do you grow poppy when instead you could be growing things with two growing seasons like tomatoes or onions or pomegranates? He was very frustrated. He goes, oh, the Americans told me in 2001 if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted. And I said, what Americans told you you could grow poppy? As soon as I said it, the military guys were like, meeting over. And they pull me back into the Jeep.

Starting point is 00:08:42 We're under threat. There's nobody out there but us. We go back to the base. So I fly back a couple of days later. And I called one of my contacts at DEA. And I said, I got to write this paper. But I want to talk to you first. Because I saw some stuff that's just not right.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Yeah. So they've got this secret facility out in the sticks in Virginia. I drive out there and I told them everything I had seen. And the one guy says to me, you're never going to get this paper published. And I said, why not? It's all first person. I saw it with my own eyes. Plus I interviewed DEA and a whole bunch of different people that could be quoted.

Starting point is 00:09:29 So he said, you don't get it. Yeah, it's 93% of the world's poppy, but it all goes to Russia and Iran, and we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies. It weakens their cultures. We want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies. It weakens their cultures. We want them to be addicted to drugs. Can I ask a really, really difficult question here that sucks to ask? Sure. I think that's horrible. It's awful.

Starting point is 00:09:58 It's awful. Yeah. Trying to play devil's advocate with the emphasis on devils. It's being done to us like crazy with fentanyl absolutely so could you not to excuse it or say in any way they should do it but could you see where the reactionary human emotion comes from in the decision makers where it's not just necessary not just necessarily like let's be evil they're more like fuck them they're doing it to us we're going to do it to them without a doubt and that's why this lefty supports donald trump's decision to send troops to the border and to crack down on china yeah yeah because they do

Starting point is 00:10:37 it to us yep so that's the better way yeah to deal with this stuff is to use your resources to stop it and not have to do it to someone else because you're also spending – you're funneling taxpayer money through poppy fields. Yeah, poppy fields. And the funny thing too is you look at these charts that are produced by DEA and it's the amount of poppy produced in Afghanistan over the last like 40 years. The years that the Taliban were in charge, they produced almost no poppy. And then in 2001, they didn't produce any poppy at all. They were terrible businessmen. That's the problem. It's just – it's a business thing, John.

Starting point is 00:11:22 We're good at that here. We bring New York City out there. We bring our public companies. We know how to spend money. They don't know how to do that. I'll tell you another thing that they're not very good at. When I was out there, one of the military guys that I was working with showed me a satellite photo of Afghanistan, of southern Afghanistan taken at night. OK? Afghanistan, taken at night. Okay. So it was measuring heat, heat production. And there were

Starting point is 00:11:51 these little pinpricks of light all over Southern Afghanistan. I said, what is that? They can't be villages. They're too small. And he said, they're heroin processors yeah that's what it is every little house every little mud hut or shack that's out there in the fields at night you're not gonna farm at night so at night you cook the poppy how strongly connected is this sinister bond? It's obviously strongly connected, but let me paint a picture for you to tell you how I'm thinking about it. I'm just thinking Hollywood right now. Okay, you know in the movies when there's like the evil warehouse and production is happening and you see all these people. And let's even make it stereotypical here.

Starting point is 00:12:37 They're speaking some foreign language and they're making drugs and trafficking people, whatever it might be. And the camera's panning across. You're meeting all the characters in there. manager talks to this guy whatever eventually he goes to his office when he gets into his office there's a shadowy figure sitting in the chair with a envelope that's yay thick and they hand it to him speaking you know yeah the king's english right if you will the president's english i should say an american and they say keep going is it literally like that or is it more we we're going to let this happen? Yeah, the latter.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Okay. Yeah, it's not so sophisticated. Yeah. Yeah, there were other issues too that I really struggled with. I don't remember if we talked about the Dashti-Laley massacre last time I was here. I believe it came up. Fill me in on what it was again. Yeah, this was something that was actually pretty important

Starting point is 00:13:26 to me during my time at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On November 30th and December 1st 2001, 2,000 Taliban soldiers gave up en masse. Please review this.

Starting point is 00:13:42 Well, there was nowhere to put 2 000 people all at once there's no prison in afghanistan that can hold 2 000 people so we told the northern alliance which at the time was led by general abdur rashid dostum one of the most genocidal violators of human rights in the last century um he was in charge of the Northern Alliance. These guys gave themselves up to the Northern Alliance and he called us and said, what do I do with them? And we said, take them out to the desert and hold them there until we can divide them up

Starting point is 00:14:15 into smaller groups and then send them to jails and prisons around the country to hold them. So they loaded these guys. I don't remember if it was four containers or six containers, whatever it was. 2,000 guys, they pack them into shipping containers and put them on trucks, on 18-wheelers, and truck them out into the desert. But the thing is there were no air holes, and there was no water, and there was no food. And of the 2,000, 16 survived.

Starting point is 00:14:42 Yeah. And one of the survivors said when they arrived in the desert and they opened up the trucks, the bodies fell out like sardines from a can. So in the 2008 election, Barack Obama said that he was aware of this Dostoevsky-Laley massacre and it had never been appropriately studied and he was going to get to the bottom of it. That if he were to win the presidency, he was going to task the National Security Council with doing a study and figuring out who was responsible for this. Okay, great. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. So I told Kerry, I said, look, Obama made this statement and I want to take a look at it. I'm going to fly out to Afghanistan and investigate. Before I did that though, I got a call from a human rights activist. Not one of these loony ones, a serious human rights activist from a serious important human rights group.

Starting point is 00:15:39 And so he said that he needed to tell me something, but it was too sensitive for him to come up to Capitol Hill. Could I meet him? I ended up meeting him in a darkened classroom at Johns Hopkins University. So he said, look, I have a witness to the Dashti Laley massacre who just came forward. And this kid was 12 at the time of the massacre. Now he was, you know, what, 21. And what was new that he wanted to tell us was that when they were opening up the trucks, he was hiding behind a rock and he saw the bodies falling out of the trucks. but there were two men there

Starting point is 00:16:25 wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and speaking English. The CIA always denied that there was any CIA presence there. Well, who in the world is going to be in Dasht-e-Layli, Afghanistan on December the 2nd, 2001. But the CIA. Yeah. Nobody, no other Westerner from anywhere in the world is going to be at that spot on December the 2nd. So I wrote a letter to the CIA and we got Kerry to sign it. And I asked for clarification. I said, we've developed this information. It appears to be new. Were these CIA officers on site at the, we called it the box up. So six weeks passed and a colleague of mine comes into the office and he said, Hey, the agency sent a response to your letter. And I said, I didn't see any response. i just checked my mail an hour ago and he said oh they classified it top secret it's it's down in the vault well i only had a secret clearance at the time so i said well what did it say and he says it said go fuck yourself yeah

Starting point is 00:17:37 and i said okay that's how they want to play it all right so i went to carrie and i told him and he's like yeah you're not publishing this thing. They've already called. You're not publishing. I feel like this is the trap we run into all the time. And it's the thing I wrestle with the most about any of these powerful agencies that are under the spy designation. You will have people there who work on tasks that are vital to national security. And it's not just a tagline. It actually is real, and they do a nice job.

Starting point is 00:18:08 Maybe they stop a terrorist attack, things like that. You then also have some people who either through evil or through very, very radicalized groupthink get carried away, which are things that you were trying to point out that you discovered while you were still there. We know that whole story. But you'll have those people, and they'll do things that are very bad. Very bad. Just like you're talking about right now. The argument that always gives them cover to keep doing it is also the argument that gives them cover to not release it,

Starting point is 00:18:40 which is if you bring it to the public, the public's going to say, fuck you you look at this in this case i'll just say it like this maybe this anecdotal thing we know there's more problems than that sure but they're gonna say it was anecdotal you're right right you're right but it added to the body of evidence but it was anecdotal but they're going to then say shut it all down that's right and now you have a problem because then the good things that may also happen here which a lot of people don't want to hear. And, you know, when you hear about MKUltra and stuff like that, it's kind of hard to say that.

Starting point is 00:19:10 But there are some good things that happen. It's like then that baby goes out with the bathwater. How do we fix that? You're exactly right. You know, really, the only way to fix it is through transparency, real transparency and true congressional oversight, which we have not had in decades. In decades. You mentioned MKUltra a moment ago. MKUltra was a real thing. Most of the documents were destroyed by Director Helms in violation of the law. Right.

Starting point is 00:19:42 But even with all the documents destroyed, we still have a pretty darn good idea of what MKUltra was. And pretty much every facet of it was illegal. Yeah. It was extensive experimentation on American citizens without their knowledge and without their consent to the point where under something called MKChickwit,

Starting point is 00:20:04 which was a subset of MK Ultra, the CIA actually weaponized a virus that they blew into the San Francisco fog just to see if people would get sick. and this was in the late 1950s and 11 people came down with this rare urinary tract infection that doctors had never seen before and so that was a success that made them think oh yeah we can weaponize this and you know maybe we we blow this in shanghai harbor or in moscow in the summertime another thing that they did also also part of MKUltra, is they recruited prostitutes in San Francisco to go out and find Johns and bring them back to what was really a CIA safe house. It was made to look like a cat house. A CIA safe house, drug them, and then try to get them to tell their innermost secrets so they dosed them with lsd and with a couple of other there were like six different medications this was like

Starting point is 00:21:11 sydney gottlieb's experiment exactly yeah it came from sydney gottlieb's experiment and uh you know is it's it was supposed to be some sort of uh truth serum right? But with LSD as a base, it doesn't work. Well, who cares if it works? These guys never consented to be drugged by you guys to tell their innermost secrets. And then you just dump them on the street somewhere in San Francisco. But that kind of thing was happening a lot until 1975. Church commission. The church committee and the Pike committee in the house. And they were appalled by that. And the Church Committee and the Pike Committee morphed into the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Great.

Starting point is 00:21:54 And they had real, true, legit oversight until about 1982. Bill Casey was Ronald Reagan's CIA director. Great guy. Oh, yeah. Lovely, lovely man. He was a real looker too. And a looker. He must have done well with the ladies.

Starting point is 00:22:14 See, he was years ahead with the giant lips thing that he had going on. So he's a former OSS officer, Office of Strategic Services, which was the CIA's predecessor organization, and just a true believer. And he did his darndest to cut Congress out of everything. And then that ended up giving us Iran-Contra and all kinds of different terrible scandals. He ended up dying of a – well, he had the end and he had an aneurysm, a brain aneurysm. So died just before the end of his term. But by then the oversight committees really didn't have any idea what the CIA was doing. And so they went so far as to have a vote in 1986, it was a no confidence vote in Casey as the DCI. And the way they ended up getting it passed in a negotiation with the Republicans was, it sounds so stupid now in

Starting point is 00:23:17 retrospect, but they voted to say that William Casey is not unqualified to continue as director. Meaning – I see what they're doing. Yeah. So they're basically just trying to like put a little in there but call a ticket to say – but he still can. Yeah. We're not asking that he resign. Yeah. But we're saying that he's – He's not doing great.

Starting point is 00:23:38 Yeah, he's not doing great. That's right. That's right. But ever since then, I mean, there's not been any real oversight when the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee did the Senate torture report. What a decade, a little bit more than a decade ago. That report, as it was published, was Democratic staff only. There were no Republicans involved, no Republican staff, and no Republican members. It was a Democratic product. Excuse me.

Starting point is 00:24:10 And then the Republicans came out with a counter to it that they published. And what was that? Oh, we love torture. And it wasn't torture. It literally said that? Yeah. It worked. It was moral.

Starting point is 00:24:24 It was right. It's like, okay. If that's what you're going with, don't let me stop you. Yeah. So the other problem, though, when you look at the history of – you bring up the church committee. That guy, Frank Church, who it's named after. Yep. I believe the committee commenced in 74 or 75. Correct.

Starting point is 00:24:44 Something like that. Yep. So he won committee commenced in 74 75 correct like that yep so he won his senate election in 74 he won he won re-election in 74 because richard nixon had just um had just resigned and it was the worst most devastating that's right kill job in the 20th century that's right yeah point being though his next election was six years later. And he got crushed. And he got crushed. Yeah. And it's because there's some weird money that went into the race against him. You're exactly right. We know where that's coming from. You are exactly right. You know, Frank Church was one of those giants of the 20th century. I can honestly tell you such senators don't exist anymore. Maybe there will be some someday.

Starting point is 00:25:27 But giants like who had a place in American history, we had a half a dozen of them back then from both parties. But anymore, they're just a bunch of – they're bought. A bunch of bozos. Yeah. But this guy tries to make that committee so that there can be oversight or whatever. That's right. And then the very people that they're investigating – I mean it harkens back to the old New York Times headline where it's like the CIA investigated itself on whether or not it sold crack in the hoods and it found no wrongdoing. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:25:56 That's what they're doing here when the people who are supposed to be pushing for the oversight, they can then use surreptitious ways to get them out of office. And then poof, you never really hear about it again. Because to your point, there hasn't been, there've been arguments over like the torture time or whatever, but there hasn't been some sort of like hands-on major oversight commission since then. Yeah. I was a little kid when that was happening. And I remember my dad voting for Frank Church for president in the 1976 primaries. My mom had voted for Birch Bayh from Indiana. I remember that. I don't know why she did, but my dad voted for Church. And my mom said, really, Church? And I remember my dad saying, that guy earned it. If anybody's earned it, it was him.

Starting point is 00:26:38 Mm-hmm. A young John Kiriakou that went in one ear out the other, apparently. So he joined up with the dark side. Right, the dark side. Well, the context of all this and what we're talking about, and I appreciate you running through some of that again just so people can hear it because you saw this hands-on. But the context has to do with an organization like USAID and how it may be used for terms of soft power. Now, we pulled up a link right here just for people to review. I know you and I were talking about this a little earlier before we got on camera. Alessi, can you scroll down a little bit? These are just some highlights,

Starting point is 00:27:14 if you will, of different things that have been uncovered since they started investigating this. So yeah, $14 million in cash vouchers for migrants of the southern border through the State Department. You have $20,600 for a drag show in Ecuador through the State Department. You have $7,071 for a BIOPC speaker series in Canada through the State Department. pretty much now the fact of the matter is when you add up the money on this sheet to you and me it's a lot of money yeah to what the actual budget is it's a very small percentage of it but like when i see things the carelessness of like ten thousand dollars to pressure lithuanian corporations to promote dei values through the state department john do you know what ten thousand dollars buys you yeah nothing i can get like an editor in venezuela for that that's it all right like that's i think you said it you put it best You're like that could buy you two Facebook ads. Yeah, that's it. And they characterize it as pressure. Now to you and me, $10,000, very small part of the budget here. But that's a lot of money to me. It's like if they're this careless with that $10,000, how many other things are they this careless with? And what does any of the stuff you're seeing here, which frankly, a lot of the highlights that they've decided to pick out because it is in i'll be fair like it is a republican who's

Starting point is 00:28:28 pointing these things out they're picking out the lgbt stuff and the dei stuff because that's like the you know soup du jour right now right but like when you add up probably all the things that are in that type of lane like something that seems totally unnecessary it probably adds up to a lot and is something where we've lost the oversight completely in the organization. You're exactly right. You know, two years ago, I was one of six independent journalists who were invited to have lunch with the Russian ambassador to the United States. And we went to the residence. It was this big formal formal deal so it was the ambassador the deputy ambassador and like three of his staff members and six of us journalists and he had read

Starting point is 00:29:13 articles that all of us had written he actually quoted them which really struck me and the reason for the lunch was for the most part he wanted our ideas on how the u.s and russia could cooperate in a time of war and i gave my standard thing counterterrorism counterproliferation counter narcotics um but the thing that made him angriest was how the state department pushes LGBTQ on countries where it is culturally unacceptable. And he said, you know, we don't even mind being adversaries on some of these issues. Our interests are different sometimes from American interests. He said, you're right, we can cooperate on counterterrorism. We can cooperate on counterproliferation. That's a great idea. No problem. But don't force us to accept trans people in our government. Don't force us to accept LGBTQ people in positions of

Starting point is 00:30:15 authority in the Orthodox Church. We will not do it. You don't respect our culture. And he said, that's a bigger problem than not respecting our policies. Why do they do it? Because like, I like living in a country where people are free to be themselves and do what they want to do. That's a beautiful part of America. Agreed. 100%. It's different when you're pushing, like I would, in fairness, like my gay friends, like this is not, this is pushing like some sort of business commissioned ideology on places to make them probably pay more attention to it in a negative light than they would have in the first place if you didn't do it exactly exactly so why do they do it people some of the

Starting point is 00:30:56 people who might be impacted by like eight eight thousand dollars to promote DEI among LGBTQ groups in Cyprus. Well, everybody in Cyprus is Greek Orthodox, right? The Orthodox Church of Cyprus. There is no such thing as LGBTQ in a culture like that. It's a conservative culture. It's offensive. I recognize that it's only $8,000. And I'm glad that we have it here. I'm glad. I welcome it. I celebrate it, truly. But we shouldn't be imposing our own values, our own cultural values on countries that don't I it just it seems so especially when you look at like I was saying the amounts it's not doing anything no so when you look at it's not like the the devil's advocate to like USAID and we can talk about this because I think you'll probably have a lot of thoughts here is that it has to do with this idea of soft power. And we already mentioned the extreme example of like pushing drugs into other countries earlier. But where there are countries like, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:32:11 China, Russia, Iran, who are running around and maybe building roads in places to curry favor. Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up. Or give debt, you know, basically create debts and say, don't worry about it. But now we get to do this with you. I understand why the United States would want to have things like that. I just don't want to see it have stupid shit like this.

Starting point is 00:32:33 And I don't want to see it not have oversight. Does that make sense? You're right. And then that leads to the question of why is it that the Chinese are building ports and roads and hospitals and airports all over the world. And we're doing that. Right. What do we have to show for that? We have nothing, nothing. It's like democracy in Afghanistan. This has long been a big deal for me. Why in blazes did we force Afghanistan into a Western style democracy when 3,000 years of that country's history, they never had a Western-style democracy. They had this system called the loya jerga, which worked. What was the loya jerga? I say that my land ends here and you say, no, it ends here. And we have a conflict with one another.

Starting point is 00:33:25 We go to the lawyer, Jerga, and they, we each give our side and they settle the dispute or I want to be the village, you know, tax collector. Let's say we go to the lawyer, Jerga. I make my pitch. The other guy makes his pitch. The lawyer, Jerga votes. They choose, you know, this guy. Oligarchs instead his pitch. The lawyer jerga votes. They choose this guy.

Starting point is 00:33:45 Oligarchs instead of kings. Yeah, right, right. So we said, no, no. We recognize you guys have been doing that for thousands of years, but we don't like that. Instead, we're going to have an election. And we got this guy, Hamid Karzai. And his brother's got a nice restaurant in Baltimore. You can have lunch at his Afghan restaurant.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Baltimore is very popular. Is that real? It really did? In Baltimore? Yeah. There's like six good blocks in Baltimore. I know. That's about it.

Starting point is 00:34:13 And they still call it Greektown. Yeah. And they're like, we don't want that kind of system. And we said, yeah, we're not asking you. We're telling you. But then we're not pushing democracy on Saudi Arabia or on Kuwait or Bahrain or even Egypt, which actually had a democracy for a minute. But when the wrong guy got elected, then we said, no, a coup would be okay just about now. Why? Why did we choose Saudi Arabia? I think is more self-explanatory. But like Egypt, why do

Starting point is 00:34:53 we decide that's okay there, but not in Afghanistan? Because the Egyptian populace has an intense dislike of Israel, which is in opposition to our foreign policy. And there are so many poor people. We're afraid of a broad uprising there. They'll throw us out. You know, it's going to be chaos. What's different about Afghanistan, though? Because there's a lot of poor people there, as well as the geography more than anything they thought they could get away with in part its geography and in part its population there aren't that many people in afghanistan we thought we can we can push these people around and uh we can supply them with whatever they need we have bases in uzbekistan tajikistan we had the drone base in uh in in pakistan that nobody knew about until until a really smart thinking reporter filed a freedom of information act

Starting point is 00:35:47 request for all drone fuel deliveries in pakistan and they're like oh sure here you go all the drone got fired for that like what's the harm in asking where all the fuel is coming from or where the fuel is going it's going right here to this base. Oh, wait a minute. That's a secret base? Oh, sorry. Oh, man. Yeah. But we just pushed them around. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:11 And it didn't work. I say often, too, that the Taliban did not descend from the moon, right, and just softly land in Afghanistan and take over. These are the husbands, the fathers, the of afghan women they're they're afghan families this is who they chose to be led by they had 20 years of american leadership they didn't like it and so they chose the taliban well we didn't lead that's the other problem we put in figureheads we tried to push as you just laid out beautifully, democracy on a country where that wasn't necessarily what they wanted or what their history wanted. And then we also got, oh, I don't know, tangled up in a fucking war in Iraq. So we pulled resources.

Starting point is 00:36:54 That's right. And there was all kinds of shit that went on that led to that steep decline. And it's not even like the whole population supports the Taliban, but the Taliban was able to say, hey, we're not as bad as this. That's right. And enough people were like, all right, fuck it. Yep. That's exactly right.

Starting point is 00:37:09 You know, there was another thing, too. I remember being there in like 2007, maybe 2007. And we had come up with this just terrible idea to combat corruption, right? Corruption is endemic. It's just a part of the culture. So we decided that the police chief in each province would have to come from another province, right? So the police chief in a Pashtun area was a hazara for example and the police chief in baluch area was from you know the the border with tajikistan and they said well that

Starting point is 00:37:57 way you know there's no connection between the police chief and the populace they don't have anything in common so it's going to make bribery go away and it's going to make everybody honest. No. They just started killing all the police chiefs. They're like, I'm not going to, where's this guy from? He's got Asian eyes. He's not a Pashto.

Starting point is 00:38:16 Right. And then they put a bullet in his head. It's like, that was a dumb idea. Who thought of that? There's a lot of people who play fantasy football with government sitting in offices in D.C. and maybe even Langley and stuff. It doesn't mean they're dumb. It means that they're not thinking.

Starting point is 00:38:33 No. And they just have no cultural understanding and no understanding of history. that for the most part, the working level foreign service officers at the State Department do have that understanding of history. And they tend to focus on specific geographic areas. So if you're an Arabist, you speak Arabic, you're going to spend probably the entirety of your career in the Middle East until you become an ambassador. And then you'll probably spend most of it in the Middle East even after you become an ambassador. And elsewhere in government, USAID, CIA, Pentagon, forget it. I never met anybody at the Pentagon who spoke Arabic.

Starting point is 00:39:20 They live in their own worlds. Where's the State Department in all this? That's actually good you bring that up because they're the state department and you've done a great job explaining this in the past i know bustamante's talked about this in the past and jim waller and those guys like they will house a lot of people who maybe work for the agency or even sometimes the pentagon like undercover and then they're also there to be the diplomats and have the embassy and, you know, shake hands and kiss babies. But for things like USAID to happen, you have the intelligence agencies potentially using it as like a money laundering operation.

Starting point is 00:39:58 Yeah, see, that's the dangerous part. But does the State Department know that's happening? Or can they just not do anything about it? Yes and yes. OK. Yeah. There's a formal written agreement between the CIA and the State Department that addresses cover issues. Sometimes – for most of my career, actually for the entirety of my career now that I'm thinking about it, I was under what was called nominal cover.

Starting point is 00:40:26 Like, oh, where do you work? State Department. Right. But there was nothing to back that up. You couldn't call the State Department and say, can I speak to John? And then they route the call to me. That just didn't exist. Oh, you didn't even have a cover?

Starting point is 00:40:36 No, no, no, no. Oh. No, no. I was declared to so many intelligence services. It wouldn't have made a difference anyway. So there's this formal agreement between the State Department and the CIA, like there is between the CIA and other governmental bodies. USAID is an unusual situation, though. I never, ever encountered a CIA officer who was embedded in USAID. I don't think that that happens.

Starting point is 00:41:07 It wouldn't make sense anyway, because really, yeah, because when you're, when you're embedded, you have to do that cover job for eight hours and then you go out and do your CIA job for eight hours. That's right. So if, if you're going to be given some kind of official cover, you don't want it to be USAID where you actually have to do the work. You want to be – I got to be very careful here. But you want to be in a position where you can sort of blend the two. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:40 Why do you have to be careful here? Because the details are classified. OK. Yeah. Yeah, let's you have to be careful here? Because the details are classified. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, let's not have another trial. No, no more trials for me. Thank you. So you got to blend the two.

Starting point is 00:41:52 Yeah. Leave that there. Now, the reason I said that this is a problem is that to use a phrase that I heard this week on the news, USAID was a beachhead for the CIA in the State Department. That's not what USAID is supposed to do. USAID is supposed to be, you know, digging water wells and training doctors and, you know, building sewage treatment plants and electrical grids and helping people develop.

Starting point is 00:42:24 It's the Agency for International Development. Which was like John F. Kennedy's dream. That was the plan. USAID, the Peace Corps, and VISTA were all created at the same time by John Kennedy. It was a great idea. Yeah. But the CIA moved right in as soon as Kennedy was killed. By 1964, the CIA was running covert operations out of USAID.

Starting point is 00:42:52 This has all been declassified. It's all available. Okay, this is declassified. This is declassified. It's available at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. Okay, so for this example, since it's declassified, can you explain what that one looked like? Yeah. Because now I'm a bit confused because you're saying you wouldn't go undercover there, but

Starting point is 00:43:11 there's a blend of the two. They did not have people undercover at USAID. What they did is they ran covert operations through USAID. Okay. In 1972, Ted Kennedy wrote a letter to the CIA, and he said, this is also available declassified online. So he said, I heard that the CIA was paying Laotian mercenaries through USAID. Just cutting payroll checks. Is that true?

Starting point is 00:43:56 And so he got a letter back from Henry Kissinger, who was the Secretary of State at the time. Real straight shooter, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's never going to obfuscate. Phenomenal guy. He got an identical letter from the CIA, like identical to the word, saying, yeah, we're using USAID essentially to launder money and pay these low ocean mercenaries to fight communists. And Kennedy's letter said, did you pay these people in 1969? And he said, yeah, we paid them in 69 and 70 and 71 and 72. Like, what are you going to do about it, Kendi? Well, that was just one of many, many operations that was paid for

Starting point is 00:44:34 through USAID. Here's another thing. And this might be a better explanation. I love when John starts cooking. Chef Curry with the shot. Keep going. There used to be a senator, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin by the name of William Proxmire. Proxmire was famous for a couple of reasons. First, he won the seat that Joseph McCarthy vacated when he drank himself to death. Okay. Right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:01 So he was a liberal Democrat. There he is, Bill Proxmire. And he was famous also for never spending a single dollar to get reelected. He said, the people of Wisconsin know my voting record. They either like it or they don't like it. And he got elected? Time after time after time. Whoa.

Starting point is 00:45:21 Yeah. He finally retired like in the 70s, like 76 or 78, something like that. I've never heard of that before at any point. When did he retire? It looks like 1989. Oh, no, Senator, 89. Okay, so he was around for a long time. Yeah. From 57 to 89.

Starting point is 00:45:36 So he hated government waste more than anything in the world. And he decided to bestow an award, kind of a gag award, called the Golden Fleece Award for the fleecing of the American taxpayer. And he would do it every month. Every month he would call a press conference to issue the Golden Fleece Award. The problem was a lot of what he identified as government waste was actually secret cia programming so he couldn't say it no he said it anyway oh he did uh-huh and he didn't get arrested the cia was apoplectic i'll bet because he would say you know five million dollar to dollars to study you know gay monkeys in gabon and he's like what the fuck is this this is a waste of the taxpayers money well of course there was no five million dollars to study gay monkeys in gabon that's just what they call the

Starting point is 00:46:31 word yeah so that the cia because you can't like go on to google and look for the cia budget it's you can't but do they have to create like a shell company on the other side meaning like a company called like research for gay monkey studies there are probably really mercenaries behind it who are like thank you for the money there are at least hundreds of those right okay maybe thousands so they gotta try they gotta try got it yes yeah but the thing is the cia's budget is hidden all around the rest of the federal budget yeah okay it's not just in the State Department, not just in the Defense Department

Starting point is 00:47:07 or the Commerce Department. It's everywhere. And so they'll say $5 million for gay monkeys in Gabon and they'll put that at USAID or they'll put it in, you know, the whatever, some fund for the National Geographic Society or whatever. They're not really going to spend that money on that. They're going to spend it to buy weapons for low-issue mercenaries or bring drugs to Los Angeles or whatever.

Starting point is 00:47:35 Okay. So let me ask a direct question then on this that you may not know the answer to, but in theory you could. Did we really spend $50 million on condoms in mozambique or did that fund some sort of like rebel army there you know if that were 50 000 i'd say yeah we did that if it's 50 million dollars i'd say that's nuts and it's probably something else okay that's making sense now yeah so this is a tale as old as time and they as you said there's declassified things involving like henry kissinger where they where they admit they're doing this. And they went beyond that. I mean let's go into the early 2000s.

Starting point is 00:48:10 Please. In 2003 – We didn't do anything wrong in 2003. No. Stop right there. I don't know where people found the time to get all these things done. 2003 was a great year. Oof.

Starting point is 00:48:21 Everything was right. Slam dunk. Slam dunk. It was a slam dunk, wasn't it? In 2003, we created a Facebook alternative called Zunzunio. And it just appeared in Cuba. Like, oh, look, this Facebook copy. It just appeared.

Starting point is 00:48:46 Cuba Libre. The Cuban internet one day. Yeah. And – I didn't know they had that. Yeah. Zunzunio. And so it was supposed to encourage Cubans to initiate the equivalent of the Arab Spring and overthrow the Castros. And nobody signed up for Zunzunio.

Starting point is 00:49:04 Nobody. They couldn't get anyone to sign up? No. like yeah we're not they didn't like drop some flyers with like prizes no no just low effort yeah weren't interested that's how i like my overthrows though john softly you do it online you piss them off everyone gets their tiki torches they have a nice little meeting and then poof, new leader. Yep. Nothing wrong with that. That's exactly right.

Starting point is 00:49:29 In 2013, they infiltrated the Bolivian media to try to overthrow Evo Morales. How did they do this? They just started buying journalists. Just say, hey, how much do you make? $500 a month? Okay. Here's $5,000. Write this article saying that Evo Morales was caught with a six-year-old girl.

Starting point is 00:49:53 Yeah. They're like, okay. I can do that. How often does stuff like that still happen? Oh, every single day. Right. Yeah. All over the world.

Starting point is 00:50:03 All over the world. Meaning it's not just concentrated in one, two places of interest. This stuff is All over the world. All over the world. Meaning it's not just concentrated in one, two places of interest. This stuff is happening all the time. All over the world. And, you know, with the advance of technology too, it just makes it easier and easier. Although it diffuses it because, you know, it's not just ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times. Now there are millions – I mean we're all journalists. Any blogger, anybody, any slob who rolls out of bed in the morning and makes a YouTube video can be a journalist.

Starting point is 00:50:33 I feel attacked, John. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. It's OK. You saw my bed before we got started. No, that's OK. You're wearing a pirate's hat and that's all that matters to me. It's a Philly's hat, John, but keep falling behind. But yes, as you were saying. It happens every day. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:51 So if we had to steel man something like that, would you say that doing – because that doesn't sit right with me that you are infecting what's supposed to be sources of news that's supposed to in theory be unbiased so it just feels dirty in every way right i know what happens to us it's the same argument as earlier i know it happens to us all the time do you think if you had to choose poison pill it's better to do that than it is to actually hire rebels to go in and kill the people in charge that we don't like yes now it gets hard i do it's hard what do we do and what do we not do and and your chances of success are low yeah i mean look at look at what the russians were accused of doing in 2016 and what they actually did in 2016 the democratic narrative is that the russians essentially bought the 2016 election for Donald Trump, right?

Starting point is 00:51:46 That's all been proven false. Yep, yep. So what did the Russians actually do? They spent $50,000 on YouTube ads, okay? None of the YouTube ads were political. $25,000, half of it was spent after the election was over. So you have $25,000 left, and they're all like memes of kittens and puppies and flowers. Almost all of that money was spent in states that were already solidly red or solidly blue that's not stealing the election that's somebody some idiot wasted

Starting point is 00:52:28 fifty thousand dollars like we were looking at up here yeah so we do what the russians do what the chinese do with the cubans the iranians the israelis the french the british everybody does it so why did they because we can look at that now because so much of this has been disproven you know it was always crazy to me. There were so many things like just in general that if you wanted to attack Trump on, you could attack him. But they had to come up with stuff. Yeah, why attack him on the fake stuff? That's what I'm saying.

Starting point is 00:52:56 Like stuff – and they made it sound very bad. I'll say that so I see why it could make a story. But they attacked him on things that now hindsight be in 2020 it's like it was always going to come out that this isn't real the evidence is all there you know when you assemble this blue ribbon panel of the the greatest minds in government to look at the evidence they're going to find the truth unless they're the warren commission unless they're the one commission or maybe the 9-11 Commission. Maybe. I don't want to talk about that.

Starting point is 00:53:27 Okay. No, just kidding. Pin put in there. We're coming back. Yeah. I mean, if they're legitimately doing their job, they're going to find – look, we have no evidence. The Russians didn't steal the election for Donald Trump. That's just the way it is. There were so many people though, because you're making

Starting point is 00:53:48 me think with the media thing, there were so many people in the media who were, now we can say it, creating evidence. Oh my God, Rachel Maddow is an example. Yeah. On my show one day we played a clip of rachel maddow saying russia moscow or putin 90 times in the first hour of her show the night before it was ridiculous and she was ripping mitt romney for saying it four years before that remember that he got like laughed off the stage oh yeah obama was like cold war call wants their policy back and everyone's like hi he said r, yeah. Obama was like, Cold War call. Once they're policy bad. And everyone's like, ha, he said Russia. And then it was like the main keyword. Yeah, it sure was.

Starting point is 00:54:36 Do you think that, well, let's get to the bigger question here. Do you think that like powers that be in the bureaucracy, I mean, this is what the internet says, but do you think there is any legitimacy to people in the bureaucracy besides like those two idiots at the FBI who really were actually working to attribute things to other places when in fact it was quite literally them doing it to stop Donald Trump from getting into power? Boy, that's a good question. Yeah. You know how it looks. Yeah. Regardless of politics, you know how it looks. Yeah. You know, honestly, I have to say probably yes. Yeah. Yeah, probably. And that's a surprise to me because when I worked at the CIA, we generally had no idea what our colleagues politics were genuinely i sat next to this one guy for six years i didn't have the foggiest idea if he was a democrat a republican or an independent

Starting point is 00:55:34 no idea there was a woman i worked with this is in like 96 and she got in trouble like written up because she put a bob dole for President bumper sticker in her cubicle. Oh, wow. And they're like, that has to come down, and you're getting written up, and you have to go to HR. We work for the country. We don't choose sides. That's how it used to be at the FBI as well. And that really seemed to change dramatically around 2016.

Starting point is 00:56:03 What do you think it was? Well, let me even ask a hypothetical in there because I always wonder this. I'm like obviously I know Trump says a lot of shit and like he's an outsider and all this. of intelligence i don't know what it would be that they know about him that they think is just so dangerous that they're willing to completely lift the veil on their not caring about these elections and no and saying like fuck it get him out of there somebody would have leaked it you know going back to um to the um christ report, you know, I worked with Chris Steele. Wait, this is the guy who had the piss memo, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:56:50 Yeah. He was an MI6 officer. You worked with him? Yeah, we did an operation together in London in the 90s. And the funny thing about it is he was like the guy at MI6 that all the other MI6 guys wanted to be like. That's how highly respected he was. I enjoyed – Christopher Steele, Golden Showers.

Starting point is 00:57:13 Yeah. OK. Please continue. He went from the James Bond kind of officer that every MI6 guy wanted to be to this caricature because when you're collecting intelligence, when you're an operations officer collecting intelligence, no matter how outrageous the intelligence might be, you send it back to your headquarters and the analysts go over it. And the analysts say, this is bullshit. This is great. This is a possibility. This is a probability. You just turn over the analysts. So if he had been at MI6 and a source told him that Donald Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's hotel bed, the analysts would say, this is stupid, and it wouldn't get published. Because there's no other information to corroborate this. But in private practice, there is no team of analysts to go over the intelligence. Because he was out by then.

Starting point is 00:58:19 He was out by the clinton campaign although there were reports that he was initially hired by the ted cruz campaign and then cruz walked away from it i intend uh-huh and then hillary said we'll take it so there was no team of analysts to vet the information and to tell the clinton campaign this is nonsense. This is true. This is maybe, this is, I don't know. We have to ask other questions, find other sources. There was nobody to do that. And so he did what he always did at MI6. He just write it up and send it in and then let the next group figure out if it's true or not. You think it's just literally because he may not have endorsed it. He just had what he found and

Starting point is 00:59:03 he didn't have government analysts on the other side. So said they'll take care of that yeah i think that's exactly what happened now all right back up a second how were you working with this guy was this was this the greek stuff yeah oh shit okay can you talk about this at all in generalities that's good enough i became the master of the old files on greek terrorism i i took this issue so seriously it actually cost me my first marriage i was obsessed with greek terrorism yep and then they tried to kill me in athens you told that story so it won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka. Soda.

Starting point is 00:59:51 Natural flavors. So. What should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. I would go through these files. These files, some of them were 25 years old, just looking for a lead,

Starting point is 01:00:19 a lead that maybe had been overlooked 10, 20, 25 years ago. And I found a lead. it was a connection between the greeks and carlos the jackal and nobody had ever talked to this guy so i'm like where is this guy we don't have any idea where this guy is so which guy oh the the connection got it got it yeah so i wrote a cable to headquarters and i said i've identified this guy that I think is the middleman between the Greeks and Carlos the Jackal. Do we have any idea where he is? I think he's probably in Lebanon. I said, I get a cable back and they said, no, he's he's living in London.

Starting point is 01:01:05 I said, how the heck is he living in London? They said he converted to Christianity, married some English woman, and he's living in London. What? And I said, I got to see him. A Carlos de Jackal plug living openly in London. Can you tell people who Carlos de Jackal was, by the way? Carlos the Jackal was the most infamous and deadliest independent terrorist of the 1970s. There was a movie based on his exploits called The Day of the Jackal. It's a classic 70s film.

Starting point is 01:01:39 And the reason why I say independent terrorist is he did this for ideology. He was a communist, but like an ardent, hardcore Bolshevik kind of communist. Believer. He was Venezuelan by birth. His name was Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez. His nom de guerre was Carlos the Jackal. And he was just impossible to find. But he did some of the most outrageous terrorist attacks.

Starting point is 01:02:09 He and his men just simultaneously opened fire on the airports in Rome and Vienna, killed, I forget what, a dozen, two dozen people, whatever it was. The most outrageous operation that he carried out was there was an opec oil ministers meeting in vienna austria okay so all the all the ministers of oil he loves those guys yeah he loves those guys all the ministers of oil from all of the opec countries and he kidnapped all of them at the same time he was a gangster i'm not gonna lie i mean this I mean, this dude was – Oh, my God. He was different. And the OPEC countries are like, okay, how many hundreds of millions do you want to give us our people back? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:51 And they paid. We've talked about his capture. It's actually quite exciting. That was Billy Wah. Billy Wah. Yeah. In Khartoum. But anyway, I wrote a cable to the headquarters and they wrote a cable to the

Starting point is 01:03:08 Brits and they said, hey, we've got a guy in Athens. This is what he's working on. This is what he wants. Can he come and talk to this guy? And they said, sure. But as per protocol, we're going to have a guy from MI5 and a guy from MI6 go with him. And I said, cool. So they set up this meeting of all freaking places. It was at the Hard Rock Cafe in London with – through the whole meeting. I couldn't even hear myself. But he did that on purpose because he genuinely believed I was going to shoot him in the meeting.

Starting point is 01:03:46 He was scared to death, shaking, mouth all dry. And I kept saying, I don't mean you any harm. I understand that you've straightened out your life. He said, I found God. I became a Greek Orthodox Christian. I married this beautiful woman. He was living in some housing project outside. It was bad.

Starting point is 01:04:10 So I said – So he was living poor. Yeah, he was poor. And I said, I don't care about anything but Carlos. I want to know about Carlos and the weapons that went to the Greeks. Well, he ended up being less valuable than I had hoped. We met, I don't know, four or five times. But Chris Steele sat in on every single meeting and we kind of struck up a professional friendship.

Starting point is 01:04:40 I had a great deal of respect for the guy. And then fast forward, what, 15 years? Yeah. And they're talking about the Steele dossier. And I was like, that can't be the Chris Steele from MI6. Now he's Christopher Steele, right? Yeah. And it was. I recognized him on TV. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. How could somebody so highly respected,

Starting point is 01:05:05 so professional get stuck in this political quicksand up to his neck? And the conclusion that I finally came to was he did exactly what he used to do at MI6. Just thinking, well, there's this whole team. There has to be this whole team in Washington to analyze the information, just like I had this whole team in London to analyze the information. They paid me to collect it. They didn't pay me to analyze it. So here it is. Hillary Clinton knew it was bullshit.

Starting point is 01:05:34 She had to. But he has his head in the sand with that thinking that, you know, they're going to run with anything just to be like, oh,'s a russian asset i'll tell you what as a as an intelligence collector if i had one source say something that was utterly outrageous that no other source corroborated i would never have included it in the report you know i i asked an officer one time in the middle east i was doing a paper and there was a foreign woman's name who came up repeatedly and so i didn't know anything about her and we didn't have anything in the files so i sent what's called a a um no i won't say what it's called anyway i sent a cable saying i'm working on this study for the for the national security council and this woman's name

Starting point is 01:06:24 keeps popping up. I don't know who she is. There's nothing in the files. Can you collect on her? And one of the officers responded, yes, I can collect. I was like, great. And I put the paper on hold waiting for him to trigger a meeting with his source so he can ask the source, tell me all about this woman. I get the report back. The entire report was about how much she loved hot dogs.

Starting point is 01:06:48 That she would put them with mustard and sometimes with onions and sometimes with relish. And then every time she goes to the States, she has hot dogs and she asked some airline to ship in hot dogs. I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? I waited for two weeks for this report i can't send this to the president yeah oh and by the way this woman who we think may be

Starting point is 01:07:11 procuring weapons for this terrorist group she really really loves hot dogs i was furious but sometimes the collectors just aren't thinking about the end result yeah they're like oh you want to know about the woman here she loves these hot're like, oh, you want to know about the woman? Here, she loves these hot dogs. Chris Steele, oh, you want to know about Obama and Trump? Yeah, Trump hired hookers to piss on Obama's bed. Isn't that hilarious? It's like, no, do you have any idea what you just did to our election?

Starting point is 01:07:37 Yeah. Have you tried to reach out to him? You know, I talked about it with a friend back back in 2016 and then i thought nah i'm gonna leave well enough alone and i've been back to london i don't know six eight times since then but i i haven't you don't stay with him no no it's too much too much trouble intelligence agencies though like because it always comes back to this when I talk with you guys. Obviously, they have these names for certain alliances in air quotes. You got the Five Eyes, all the English countries. And they're friends.

Starting point is 01:08:11 Yeah. Right? Yeah, we are. They are. But is anyone really friends? Are you really friends with someone if the minute they walk out the door, you fucking attached a microphone to their ass so you can hear them fart? Oh, no. In the case of the Five Eyes, it's, you know, I didn't believe this when they first announced the creation of the Five Eyes.

Starting point is 01:08:30 But we were instructed to open the books and give them literally everything to the point where there are Five Eyes officers sitting at NSA, FBI, CIA, sitting there with you. They have a desk. All the books. All the books. Not just the books that sit in the main part of the library and then there's a hatch that takes you downstairs. No. Well, they're going to be compartmented operations, but it's not just they can't see it because they're five eyes. They're foreign nationals. They can't see it because nobody else can see it, but maybe six people.

Starting point is 01:09:05 You know what I mean? Which is a lot – yeah, it's compartmentalized like you said, but it's a lot – there's a lot of things like that. Yeah. Do you think they have the same policy for us? Oh, yeah. Really? That surprises me. It surprised me when it was first announced.

Starting point is 01:09:21 We had very poor relations with New Zealand, for example, for many years. Ronald Reagan withdrew the CIA station chief from New Zealand and closed the station there in 1982 in a fit of pique. For what? Why? Because they would not allow a nuclear-powered submarine into port. Yeah, you know what? Fuck them. How dare they? We're going to park our nuke where we want it that's what reagan said we won't shoot the lord of the rings there and then and then in 1990 91

Starting point is 01:09:53 i was like six weeks before we we attacked iraq to push them out of kuwait i was instructed to brief the prime minister of new zealand And I was like, New Zealand? I thought they were on the shit list. And they're like, yeah, well, it's wartime. We're going to try to rehabilitate them. Oh, you know, fuck it. I even got invited to the ambassador's house for dinner afterwards. It was so much fun.

Starting point is 01:10:19 Of course you did. You didn't plant a bug there? No. You sure? Positive. You can tell me. And the food was great in new zealand it was delicious at the ambassador's residence the new zealand

Starting point is 01:10:30 now there's a lot of fruits i remember that fruit yeah that's cool it was nice so they're really friend i'm surprised to hear that yeah five eyes is the real deal all right i'm gonna put a pin in one thing because i want to come back to that whole friendship thing with someone else but i don't want to lose the last important part of this usaid conversation which is how it's being uncovered right so i wish we lived in a world where optics didn't matter but they do how things look unfortunately are often more important than how they actually are and you just had an election where certainly like a lot of people voted for trump and and voted for going in and fixing some of the swamp and whatever and he's trying to follow through on some of that and i respect that as someone who is a fan of elon musk i always say this i'm not a fan boy right i don't sit here and gargle the balls

Starting point is 01:11:27 of every fucking thing he does yes he's a genius i love his companies i think there's so much exciting shit i think he's a funny guy i think he's entertaining i think he has some pretty good ideas i disagree with some of the ways he publicly goes about things i also know he as he stated like he has autism so there you know there's a certain there can be an edge to him right there can be an edge to him the optics though of the richest guy not named vladimir putin or some long saudi last name in the world having full access to all of these programs including i think even some stuff in the treasury or whatever. And the IRS. Right. Now, he's not technically elected, though. A lot of people did elect Donald Trump with him being attached to it. I would defend him on that. The optics, though, of him being in charge of that

Starting point is 01:12:15 is not the best to me because I almost wonder if it defeats the purpose of what I like him doing here, which is this minus like it just being him doing it does that make sense i'm glad you said that i'm glad you used the word optics because it's important in this in this uh case a friend of mine posted on facebook the other day something about you know it was illegal for trump to appoint musk and i was like no it wasn't yeah no it's not at all illegal his title is advisor to the president right okay anybody can be appointed advisor to the president and when you're appointed advisor to the president you're given you're given the necessities to carry out the task so he's got you know all the clearances that he needs he has know, a small staff. I think his staff is a problem. It's like five

Starting point is 01:13:08 guys in their early 20s who don't really know what they're doing. That was probably not the best choice. But he's perfectly within his rights to be doing what he's doing. I would prefer, like you, that he not muck around with my personal information that's at the IRS or the Department of the Treasury or whatever. But with that said, his task from the president is to take a machete to the federal budget. And I have to say, and I can't believe I'm saying it, but I have a lot of respect for that. I was reserving judgment until just a few days ago when the president announced, much to the shock of every lefty in America, that he's ordered Musk to cut the Pentagon budget by 8% a year for five consecutive years. That has never been done in American history ever. It's incredible to me.

Starting point is 01:14:02 A letter went out to all CIA employees the other day saying, we're not immune. Layoffs are coming. There hasn't been a layoff at the CIA since 1977. So this is serious. They mean business. And I think that's a good thing. I do too. Is it problematic though that one guy's kind of spearheading it and just like, this isn't his fault, but he is the richest guy in this country yeah it's a bad look i i will i will admit to you it's a bad look you know i mentioned offline and you told me to wait oh yeah i actually met him one time yeah john's got it like every time it really does happen off camera people every time we bring up anything he's like let me give you an example i know that guy and you're like wait how do you know abraham lincoln i was there

Starting point is 01:14:49 april 14th what a night every fucking time i got a lincoln story too i'll tell you no you'll get a kick out of it so as a hobby most people don't know this most people who know me don't know this but as a hobby i like don't know this. But as a hobby, I like to write television pilots, right? Just for fun. And I have an agent and a manager and an entertainment lawyer. And I have sold eight of them over the years. And one of them actually made it to pilot, right? Under your name?

Starting point is 01:15:18 Yeah. I have an IMDB page that's like this long. Yeah, let's get it. So I had an idea for a news show and i mentioned it to a buddy of mine who's in the industry and he said oh wait a minute he says before you pitch it my best friend from high school just became the president of nbc uh ben i don't remember his last name he was the he was the producer of the uh of the office he said let's pitch it to ben uh and uh yes we got your page i did all kinds of i did all kinds of stuff there true and self i've got like 60 something true lies yeah true lies i

Starting point is 01:16:00 was the script uh script coordinator come on. Wait, you were on Kill the Messenger, the movie? Yeah. Oh, you were an advisor for that, right? I was an advisor. That's about Gary, whatever. Gary Webb. Yeah. I whacked him. I did Bruno. I did From Paris with Love with John Travolta. Oh my god. Yeah. You've talked about Bruno before. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:20 Yeah, it's fun. I do all kinds of stuff. Alright, so you were saying your friend, the embassy. So he said, yeah, I got this friend, Ben. He was my best all kinds of stuff. All right. So you were saying your friend. So he said, yeah, I got this friend, Ben. He was my best friend from high school. He just became the president of NBC. Let me call him. We could pitch the show to him. I said, great. So he calls him and Ben says, hey, I'm going to be at dinner at the White House. Obama had just gotten elected and he had this big fundraiser for wealthy Jewish Democrats. And so he said, the dinner ends at nine. Let's meet at the bar at the Hay-Adams Hotel across the street from the White House at nine. We said, great. So nine o'clock comes, he's running a little late. He calls my buddy and says, hey, I'm running late. I'll be there at 9.15. Do you mind if I bring a friend? We said, no, the more the merrier.

Starting point is 01:17:07 So they come at 9.15, and my friend Rich and Ben are like hugging each other. Oh, my God, it's been so long. You look great. Oh, you've had such success. You're the producer of The Office, and now you're NBC. It's amazing, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 01:17:24 And then they sit down. And Ben says, this is my friend elon and i said hi elon nice to meet you i shake his hand i said uh and rich says this is john i said hi ben nice to meet you this is like 0809 oh yeah the very very beginning of 09 so um we're sitting there and Rich and Ben are like, Hey, remember this girl we both banged in high school? And Hey, remember this teacher we both hated? Remember so-and-so had this party. And Ilan and I are just sitting there looking at these guys. This conversation means nothing to me. So finally I go, so Ilan, what do you do for a a living as soon as the words came out of my mouth he goes like this he goes oh oh I have this passion for technology and I created this company called PayPal and then I sold it for like a billion dollars and then I used the money and

Starting point is 01:18:20 I bought another company called Tesla and then I have another company called SpaceX and we're going to go to Mars and we're going to colon SpaceX. And we're going to go to Mars. And we're going to colonize Mars. And we're going to put a big dome. And it's going to have oxygen in it. And people are going to go up there. And they're going to colonize Mars. Some are going to die.

Starting point is 01:18:33 But they're going to be heroes. They're going to be heroes. We're going to colonize Mars. And I'm looking at him. And I go, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you Elon Musk? And he goes, yeah.

Starting point is 01:18:49 Oh, my God. And I go, like the Thomas Edison of our time. He goes, I don't know. I guess so. But anyway, we're going to go to Mars, and there's going to be this giant dome, and we're going to build buildings in there, and we're going to be able to farm, and we're going to have oxygen. I never pitched the show. I never spoke about the show. The whole rest of the two hours was him talking about colonizing Mars.

Starting point is 01:19:11 And this is – you said this is the very beginning of 2009, shortly after. January of 2009. Okay, so literally days after Obama. Yeah, days. He had been president for days. You know what's crazy about this? There is a very famous story about Elon Musk. And please correct me in the comments if I have the date wrong but i'm pretty sure i got it right christmas eve

Starting point is 01:19:29 2008 weeks before this yeah very famous story elon was up to the brims because of the financial crisis he had tesla and he had spacex and he was told by all of his advisors, you know, they, they had money due. They had been trying to get raises in, couldn't get it in. The companies were going kaput. They said, you have to pick one. If you pick one, there's like a 90% chance or something that it will survive. If you pick both, they'll both die. Oh my God. And he said, I can't let one go. I guess we're just going to have to die. Oh my God. And he picked it. And then money came in like five days later they were able to so he's talking with you in this hotel weeks after

Starting point is 01:20:10 like nothing's going on when he just made the most insane decision of his career and for years afterwards I just assumed he was Jewish because he had been at this fundraiser well because it was a Jewish fundraiser you know Jewish would you say where What did you say? Where's your yarmulke? No, I just – in fact, somebody corrected me years later, and they said, Musk isn't Jewish. I said, are you sure? Because he was at this fundraiser for Jewish Democrats. He was like, no, he just went just to go. I love that you call him Elan too. Elan.

Starting point is 01:20:41 I was like, yeah. So Elan, what do you do for a living? Oh my god. i didn't know he looked like vaguely familiar to me but i didn't know who the heck he was that's crazy when you met him is crazy to me yeah like it was a long time ago but that's on brand like he's so like ah fuck it let's go so he could just whatever that guy does to be able to compartmentalize in every aspect of his life except when someone pisses him off with a meme is incredible yeah like it's true it's

Starting point is 01:21:11 unbelievable because i guess it just takes a different kind of well it definitely takes a different kind of brain to be a guy without a doubt you know forbes came out with a uh should reach out to him for the pardon by the way you know i wish i could get to him i don't know how to get to him. We'll get to him. Stick with me. Okay. Okay.

Starting point is 01:21:27 Let's work on that. I'll tell you something offline that's very important about that. Abraham Lincoln. Here we go. I am a Lincoln collector. Like the car or the guy? No, the guy. Over many years, I have bought things associated with Abraham Lincoln at auction.

Starting point is 01:21:46 I have a blood-soaked piece of the pillowcase that he died on. Come on. Yeah, I do. Framed? Yeah, framed. I bought it at Sotheby's. It's still got his blood on it. It's soaked with blood.

Starting point is 01:22:00 I have an 11.5-inch strip of the wallpaper from the room that he died in at the Peterson guest house. I have a swatch of Mrs. Lincoln's dress that she wore to his funeral. What's a swatch? Just a scrap of her black dress. I have a piece of the wood that made the gallows that the conspirators were hung from. That's a crazy story, by the way. I buy all this stuff at auction, like serious auctions. And it's all about provenance.

Starting point is 01:22:30 Provenance? Provenance is you have to be able to document from Lincoln himself how it got to you. So the blood-soaked pillowcase piece. Mr. Peterson, who owned the house that he died in, took the pillowcase and cut it into pieces with his scissors. And he gave the doctor who fished the bullet out of Lincoln's brain the piece. He gave it to his daughter, who married the governor of Indiana. And then it passed down through their family until they sold it at Sotheby's and I bought it. Right? Whoa. So that's provenance. So you can prove that it is what it says it is. So summer of 2009, I have my boys for the summer. I had two sons at the time.

Starting point is 01:23:26 Well, I had more than just – I had three sons and a daughter, but my two from my oldest – from my first marriage. You're on your second marriage right now. Yeah, I'm on my second marriage at that point. So we went to Baltimore. The whole family went to Baltimore because they had this thing called the Sideshow Museum. And it was a museum of circus freak shows from the 1800s. Like stuff that had been in these circus sideshows. They had like some nine foot tall woman.

Starting point is 01:23:53 She's mummified. The Amazon, they called her. They had a jackalope, you know, stuff like, most of it's funny, just silly stuff. But they have the shadow box hanging on the wall and there's a dried out turd in it. And it says it's Abraham Lincoln's final turd. Come on.

Starting point is 01:24:09 So it says on the card, it said when he arrived at Ford's Theater, he had to drop a deuce. And so before he got seated, he went to the men's room and he dropped a deuce in the chamber pot. And then he went back to watch the play and he got shot. And someone fished it out? Somebody had the presence of mind to fish it out, and they saved it. The presence of mind or the sickness? Well, there are a lot of Lincoln collectors out there.

Starting point is 01:24:33 It's very competitive. Technically, the last shit he takes is in the bed after he dies. Well, technically, you're right. Technically, yes, you're right. Unless he got it all out the first time. All right, thank you so this place was run down and it was dirty and the owner had a cat the place smelled of cat and i see an article

Starting point is 01:24:57 in the washington post about six months later saying it's going out of business and they're going to auction everything off so i told my my wife, I'm buying that turd. She's like, oh no, you're not. I said, oh yes, I am. I'm buying that turd. John, what is, what is 144 year old turd look like? It was all dried out and there was a kernel of rice sticking out of it. And how do you preserve that?

Starting point is 01:25:24 He had chicken and rice for his last meal. That was his last meal. I could plant the rice in there if I wanted to. How do you preserve that? It was just air dried. They just stuck it in a shadow box. It was pinned to the shadow box. I heard that, but that's all they did?

Starting point is 01:25:38 Yeah, it dries out. It doesn't go moldy or anything. So my wife and I actually had a strong disagreement about this i wonder why she's like there's no provenance right just because it was in the sideshow museum that's not provenance you have to be able to and i said i know what provenance is so i go to the auction and i i top out at 1200 bucks i just – I can't go over $1,200 for this thing. It ends up going for $5,000. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:26:12 So the Washington Post reporter is there and he's like, there was this turd and it went for $5,000. Spirited bidding, they said. So the guy that ended up buying it sends it to some company for a dna sample and what they found was it had like microscopic bits of necco wafer in it you know what a necco wafer is do i look like i know what necco wafer is john it's the most disgusting candy that's ever been created it's from pittsburgh well that sounds about right and they're all pastel colors yeah they're disgusting they're all pastel colors. They're disgusting. They're little wafers,

Starting point is 01:26:47 little round circles. They look like buttons. But Neko wafers weren't invented until 1880. It wasn't his shit. It was just some random guy's turd that somebody paid $5,000 for. I thanked my lucky stars that I didn't

Starting point is 01:27:04 get it. That's called Darwinism to whoever spent $5,000 on anyone's shit. Right. But that's... Can you imagine the Washington Post reporters like Joby work? So yeah, so why'd you buy this shit? Oh my God. I would have called him.

Starting point is 01:27:21 Joby. Joby. We can't be bidding against each other. Oh my God. How far back do you go with Joby, Joby, we can't be bidding against each other. Oh, my God. How far back do you go with Joby? 07. Was he calling you about that? He was one of the first guys to interview me. Wow.

Starting point is 01:27:35 Yeah. Yeah, I think he mentioned it last time he was in here. He's a good guy. Yeah, I like Joby. He's a good guy. Solid, solid reporter. Yes. He's so unafraid to be the sober voice in the room and tell people shit.

Starting point is 01:27:48 They don't want to hear. That's right. And also sometimes like he speaks openly about like, look, you're still working with sources that have, they got their motives. Right. And so sometimes you're going to get back to information that turns out to

Starting point is 01:28:00 give exactly what they want to get out there. That's exactly a lot of journalists. Cause it's just a reality of that profession. It's a reality of even what I do here. I don't know every fucking person that comes in give exactly what they want to get out there. That's exactly right. And a lot of journalists – because it's just a reality of that profession. It's a reality of even what I do here. I don't know every fucking person that comes in here and what they're trying to do. See, and this is one of the reasons why I respect Joby Warwick so much. He's not the kind of journalist who's going to just take a CIA press release and gist it he has sources yeah human sources that he can use to to either confirm or or deny information yeah i i love talking with him i was a fan of him before i ever brought him

Starting point is 01:28:34 in here because i read his books his books are incredible books are fantastic the the the host bombing oh man yeah you got to call him and ask him what he's working on right now i'm not allowed to tell you okay but i think we were talking off camera earlier about something else and i think it'd be something you would be very interested in excellent yeah it's really cool stuff small world yeah but so you're how did you get into being a lincoln collective like were you just obsessed with the guy when you were a kid yeah yeah the greatest president in american history as far as i'm concerned he's definitely top three the kind of person that we should want to be like the only thing i ever got outbid on that i really kick myself over there was a gigantic uh lincoln auction at heritage auctions in dallas back in 2009 and i was outbid on the original key to his

Starting point is 01:29:22 tomb i couldn't get that. That went for big bucks. What kind of bucks are we talking? It went for close to $10,000. I think I went up to like $3,600, $3,800. And my wife is like, it's a freaking key. Yeah. It's just a key.

Starting point is 01:29:40 Yeah, you could buy like a lot of Givenchy with that. Yeah. Something. Yeah, so do you have like a Lincoln room no I just I have it framed and then I put it up on the wall I've got a ballot from Ohio from the

Starting point is 01:29:54 1860 election that has Lincoln on the ballot that's a lot higher on my list than shit but you know god damn it John did you ever see that documentary it just makes when you were saying prominence it makes me think about it because i've never asked anyone about this i just watched it but you ever see the documentary the lost leonardo oh yes and i don't think that's a leonardo

Starting point is 01:30:16 okay i think muhammad bin salman got ripped off i think he might have too. Five million dollars. Just for context for people, there was a piece down in a New Orleans auction. This is, I don't know, maybe a decade ago, something like that. Yeah. What's that? It's Salvatore Mundi. Yeah, yeah, the Salvatore Mundi. Actually, Alessi, can you pull it up? Salvatore Mundi, M-U-N-D-I, and you'll be able to see the picture.

Starting point is 01:30:43 And so there's apparently these guys, like this is a real job that exists, where they just go to auctions. We have it up on the screen right now. They just go to auctions all over the world, wherever it is, and they try to find slips, cracks, right? Where something slips through the cracks. Fascinating. Oh, my God. I would love to do that. It's such a cool job.

Starting point is 01:31:02 And so these guys out of New York, I forget their name, two of them, they went down to this show in New Orleans and they see this picture and they didn't go like, oh, that's a Leonardo. They just went something about this is crazy because we see it on the screen. If we could pull it up one more time, unless this is it remastered, I'll explain the context as to how that happened. But when they found it, it was like torn apart. Yeah. mastered. I'll explain the context as to how that happened. But when they found it, it was like torn apart. You kind of had, yeah, you kind of had to like, like sift through it to see what was there.

Starting point is 01:31:29 And apparently there's all kinds of ways things can be restored. So that's perfectly less. We got it. So I see down in the bottom left, it's all messed up. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. See that? Actually, yeah. See the example on the far left up one or less yeah right there so people can see that this is what i believe what it initially looked like but you can see there from an art perspective you look at that and you go there is something there yeah that looks interesting it was selling for like i don't know a thousand dollars or maybe less and these guys are like all right you can get an old master painting uh 17th century, 16th century for $1,500. Especially if they don't know who painted it.

Starting point is 01:32:08 Exactly. Right. School of or circle of so-and-so. Yeah. So this was really fascinating for me to learn about. But they bring it back to New York and there's a whole underground system of experts who can determine down to the paint stroke. Yes. With high accuracy

Starting point is 01:32:26 if something's attributable to someone. So they take it to this woman who, I forget her name, but her husband, he had passed away. He was like the most famous art something or other. I'll fuck up what the official title was, but he was an expert on this stuff and she was an expert on it because of him. So she starts looking through it and i forget what her logic was but suddenly it like came upon her she's like holy shit this is leonardo so they commissioned her to retouch it up so it goes from the old one to the new one that we showed like a few minutes ago and actually looks real and they started marketing it as a leonardo and very quickly there was a famous reporter i forget his name from the new york times who was instantly like no fuck this that's not a

Starting point is 01:33:11 leonardo and people started fighting over it but long story short skipping all the middle parts along the way it ends up going to a sotheby's auction in new york city where there is the auctioneers up there a whole. And then there's a silent like crew of dudes on the phone who are all like American New York attorneys or something. They're taking the bids by proxy. And you don't know who it is. And suddenly the bid goes up to like 450 million or something. And they're like winner. So it's the most expensive piece ever sold, and it floats up later that it is most likely MBS who bought it. Now they're like certain that he bought it.

Starting point is 01:33:50 Oh, yeah. And there are many people who are still like, yo, that's not a Leonardo. Could it – maybe they were saying maybe it could have been a student of his, which isn't worth nearly as much. Right. But the Louvre wanted to put the painting on display in the Leonardo exhibit because Cause there's like 15 or 16 known Leonardo's. Yes. And there was supposedly this, they weren't admitting it was MBS they were talking with,

Starting point is 01:34:10 but there was this underground conversation. Oh, we're going to get it. We're going to get it. We're going to get it. And then eventually they didn't because MBS wanted it put next to the Mona Lisa. So that symbolically people would assume it had the same level of like

Starting point is 01:34:23 importance as the Mona Lisa. He was thinking. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like this whole thing, as the Mona Lisa. He was thinking. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like this whole thing. But the provenance is what they didn't have. They didn't know who it passed from and all that. Now, how the heck does it get to New Orleans?

Starting point is 01:34:35 You know, there was just a two part HBO series. Not a series, two part HBO documentary on Leonardo that goes through his entire life. And he traveled a decent bit for the late 16th century. But when I say travel, I mean between Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples. That was pretty much it and pretty much all of his work stayed there and in france and that's it how the heck did that end up in new orleans i mean it's been a lot of years things can happen the world has certainly changed i could see it it just it gets really

Starting point is 01:35:21 weird and that one i tend to believe it's not a Leonardo. I think it's not. I understand where that lady was coming from because part of it could be a little bit of confirmation bias because she's looked at so much crazy art her whole career. And finding a Leonardo is like finding a fucking golden Charizard. You're not finding that thing. Yeah, it's what everybody fantasizes about in that line. He was something else, you ever you ever read isaacson's biography of him no so good really oh he was he was he was a god i mean he could just he was a true polymath who just yeah he was a rebel but he could do everything did you know

Starting point is 01:35:59 that he only wrote backwards yes i did not know that until i saw this documentary yeah i freak actually i haven't read the biography in a while he was obsessed with the idea of people stealing his communications yes and so he only wrote backwards yeah they had that in the da vinci code where they write part of the code that they're uncovering dan brown wrote that in the book where it's like you had to hold it up to a mirror right to see. That's fucking crazy. Like, bro. It's like James Madison. James Madison could write Greek with his right hand and Latin with his left hand at the same time. What is that?

Starting point is 01:36:37 I know. What is that? It's some kind of glitch in your brain. Do you think that, because you've been around some crazy people in your life, you think some people are literally just born physically different and we just can't see it? Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:52 Yeah. Crazy. I think that's the only way you explain like an Elon Musk. Oh, that's what I was going to say. So in Forbes last week, they said he's worth $446 billion now. He's not just the richest man in the world. He's the richest man in the world by 100%. Outside of Saudi Arabia and Vladimir Putin. Yeah, because we don't really know.

Starting point is 01:37:13 We don't have any idea. They're laughing over there. They're like $440 billion. That's cute. Yeah, that's right. That is right. So optically, not the best that maybe he's the kind of guy in charge with it. But the idea of what they're doing, I think, is music to both of our ears.

Starting point is 01:37:29 Yeah. Right. Now, do you think that could go? I mean, I love the idea of slashing the waist. Right. Me too. Do you think it could? Do you think that there are things that he won't get access to from maybe an intelligence perspective or something like that that could lead to him accidentally slashing some things that we actually do need?

Starting point is 01:37:52 Probably not because I think if that were to be the case, people like John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard would go to the president and say, listen, just between us, there's this operation, there's this, you know, program. It needs to be protected. And they would be okay. Well, that's the other question that I was going to ask you. Just siphon right into it. Someone like Tulsi Gabbard. I like Tulsi.

Starting point is 01:38:22 Me too. From what I've heard. So you're a fan too. I am a fan. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. Why do you like her? She's got guts. First of all, she's qualified, which is wonderful. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:34 And she's got the guts to stand up to people. She stood up to the DNC. She stood up to the Democratic leadership in Congress. She's a lieutenant colonel in the army i guess now it's the army reserve um but oh i mean that all of that is good what i what i was also thinking is that she's a supporter of transparency she supported uh uh ed snowden she's been supportive of julian assange she said a couple nice things about me i don't know her well enough to actually you know ask her for a favor or anything but i've met her once or twice we can work on that i hope so i've tried i've reached out a number of times we'll get working thank god now i won't say it on the air but anyway we protect our friends in new jersey we got you

Starting point is 01:39:20 don't thank you so i'm i'm optimistic i love that so many important democrats accuse her of being a russian oh it's so funny a syrian stooge why did they say this because she bucks the official dnc line yeah you know she went to she went to syria and met with Bashar al-Assad. Good. He's a leader, yeah. own people we gave him this red line we said don't cross it and he gassed his own people well there were 12 uh united nations whistleblowers that say that that gas attack did not come from the syrian government it came and these were the inspectors who were on the ground they said it came from al-qaeda al-qaeda uh fired al-qaeda but remember we're friends with al-qaeda in syria we just sent a whole delegation from the state department to meet with the new leader of syria who's al-qaeda right and the co-founder of isis by the way right and we lifted the 10 million dollar bounty that we had on his

Starting point is 01:40:39 head so it interfered with our with our plans all right we got to take this rabbit hole real quick we'll come back to tulsi because you just took a middle road and what i mean by that is when this syria conversation comes up we've done a lot of podcasts where it gets discussed in one way or the other joe b warwick wrote a great book on it that has more of the you know asad did it point and he lays out a lot of good evidence for that people cook him for it all the time and try to say it's bullshit but like he's going with what he knows the two arguments though are that assad did it or then the cy hirsch argument of like oh no the cia did it which i i've never seen good evidence for that but you're saying you just took a middle road and you said another rogue element yeah may have done this and you know i gotta tell you maybe i'm glassing glossing over

Starting point is 01:41:25 it in my memory but i don't remember reading about at any point whistleblowers yeah these opcw whistleblowers came out yeah and they all ended up getting fired but they're the ones that said that it was al-qaeda it was the nusra front that did it yeah what was what was their evidence of that they were on the ground testing and they said that there was no evidence that a missile had been launched from the syrian side from the syrian government side so this is after it gets done obviously they're going through the residue and and what what reason would assad have to to turn to chemical weapons especially after he had specifically been told by the united States that this

Starting point is 01:42:05 was a red line, which turned out to be bullshit. Anyway, we didn't do anything. That's right. Like talked about, better not cross this line. Okay.

Starting point is 01:42:11 You crossed it. Well, then you better not cross this new line. Come on, Barack Obama. Yeah. Obama. We've talked about that a bunch.

Starting point is 01:42:19 Obama. I've mixed emotions on that one because first of all, that was a really stupid thing to say. It was. Secondly, afterwards, he had to try to like clean that up politically after it was all said and done at home. And that was messy how he did that. However, you know what it's like when your pride gets it. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:37 You know, he said something stupid he should have never fucking said. That's right. And his pride was like, fuck you. We're going to bomb him. Yeah. Which would have started a new war. Because the the russians were already based there yeah exactly i wasn't even gonna go there but that's just another layer to it and he apparently the way i understand it is that he did there was a work around here where he didn't have to go to congress

Starting point is 01:43:00 to get passed to take certain action that would have started a war he could have effectively like said i'm i said red line and protect my pride and at the last minute now he thought congress was going to agree with him he was very wrong about that but he said fuck it let's do it right let's put it through congress they voted like 400 to 100 against it or something whatever it was something like that against it and he couldn't do it. And I at least respect the fact that once he had the L, he didn't double the L. That's right. That's right. I agree.

Starting point is 01:43:32 Would have been bad to get involved in something there. But we kind of, you know, if it wasn't Syria, we still did with what ended up happening with ISIS because of what was born in a lot of there too. Have you ever been to Syria? No. Uh-oh. It wasn't in a lot of there too. Have you ever been to Syria? No. No. It wasn't on my list of vacation spots. It's one of the most fabulous places I've ever been. That's what I hear, but not in my lifetime.

Starting point is 01:43:52 Absolutely amazing. No. No, it's too dangerous. It's probably going to remain too dangerous for a long time. Friendliest people, best food, incredible. History. I mean, you go to Greece, you see the Parthenon, you go to greece you see the you see the parthenon you go to rome you see the coliseum you go to syria you go to damascus and the stuff that

Starting point is 01:44:11 you're looking at is mentioned in the bible yes that's how old it is so much history well i loved it loved every minute of it what do you think's going to happen there um in the near term nothing good okay in the longer term i could see slow development they've been racked by war for so long i don't think anybody wants more war at this at this point um the the unknown is that the iran and the Russians were humiliated by what happened with Assad. It happened so quickly. You know, I remember it was exactly one week, seven days before Assad was overthrown. He and his family got on a plane and went to Moscow. And people started saying, oh my God, he's running away. He's running to Moscow. But then he returned the next day to Damascus, but he left his family in Moscow.

Starting point is 01:45:14 And then that same plane made three more trips to Moscow over the course of the week, presumably to take out money and artwork and personal effects and furniture whatever and then at the end of that week he went back to moscow and stayed so this was a humiliation for the russians because they had military bases there including a major naval base and remember the day he was overthrown the russians made this announcement that they hoped that the new government of syria would respect russian bases in syria yeah they just ran right over the bases yeah and took them more importantly than than you know russian embarrassment is this was the iranian pipeline to hezbollah and then by extent, by extension to, to Hamas. So the Iranian weapons and, and cash and all the stuff that the Iranians were sending went across Northern Iraq and across Syria and then from Syria to Lebanon.

Starting point is 01:46:18 And then, you know, there's through a more informal pipeline from Syria to Jordan to Hamas or Syria to Lebanon to Hamas. And it's gone now. Like that. Just like that. It's gone. And at the same time, the Israelis essentially decapitated Hezbollah. They killed Hassan Nasrallah.

Starting point is 01:46:38 Three days later, they killed the guy who replaced Hassan Nasrallah. And now there's a guy nobody ever heard of. And half of his fighters have been killed or wounded. So for a while, there's going to be pretty much no Hezbollah, not meaningfully. And Syria's economy, though. That's a wreck. It's been a wreck because essentially, I was talking to this guy on the phone that we're trying to get in for a podcast who met with Assad in like 2012. He's a Syrian.

Starting point is 01:47:10 Wow. And told him what was going to happen here if he didn't change his ways or whatever the fuck he told him. So we're working on getting him in here. He has to get approval to do it. So we'll see if that happens. That would be exciting. Yeah, it would be really cool. He's very very very smart but you know what he's saying is that yeah the whole economy is run on i always forget

Starting point is 01:47:32 the name of the fucking drug what's it called again lse captagon it's run on that captagon drug oh you haven't heard about this so captagon is like this meth-like club drug or something, and Assad transferred basically the Syrian economy into a Captagon trafficking economy that pushes it all over Europe and stuff like that where it's used. And Joby, when he was at the border of Syria like last fall, they were watching all the trucks come across with with with the captagon so what this guy i talked to on the phone from syria was saying is he's like that's absolutely correct the issue is that it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because the u.s put so many sanctions on syria as a result of something allegedly very bad, you know, with the, with the chemical weapons that it cut them off from so much of the world that this is how they have to stay afloat. Sure. Sanctions are going to come back to bite us. You know, I think that American sanctions

Starting point is 01:48:37 are what led to the creation of BRICS. I was in, I was in, yeah. Um, the BRICS countries, Brazil, um, uh, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and then they've added a couple, they've added Iran and South Korea and a couple of others. Um, when I was in China last year, uh, I was there for a week for a conference and I was struck by how few places took MasterCard and Visa. That doesn't surprise me. Well, they took this card called PandaCard and everybody had these PandaCards. So I asked one of the shopkeepers, what is this PandaCard?

Starting point is 01:49:20 And his explanation was so like right on. He said, with Visa and MasterCard, because they're American companies, all transactions are rooted through New York, right? And so even if the transaction only hits New York for a tenth of a second, it's still considered to be a US transaction. So if the US government imposesoses sanctions we can't make that transaction but what we did is we created panda card where all the transactions go through shanghai which is their banking center and so if the americans put sanctions on us he said we don't

Starting point is 01:49:57 care we don't need visa and mastercard we have panda card wow uh-huh well now not only are the BRICS countries um merging their their economies they're talking about a unified um uh currency like the euro well if they have a year of unified currency American sanctions are going to be worthless and what do you think that is a real threat to overtake the dollar i do yeah last year for the very first time china bought a shipment of oil from kuwait and paid for it in yuan instead of dollars never happened before and we went back to the kuwaitis and we raised all kinds of hell and they're like look what are we going to do? They're a major global power. This is how they wanted to pay for it.

Starting point is 01:50:48 And it's because we sanction everybody. I remember still being at the agency and the Treasury Department had announced new sanctions on Iran. And I remember saying to a colleague, how many more sanctions could there possibly be? Like haven't we sanctioned them in every facet of their economy? Self-fulfilling prophecy, man. That's exactly it.

Starting point is 01:51:10 I'm not saying the intentions are always evil or something like that. It's just people get, it's the eye for an eye. People get carried away with it. And it's like, you're going to make the problem worse. And we should see that now. We're going to talk about the Russia-Ukraine thing a little later. I don't want to jump to that because i i do want to keep my promise and come back to to the gabbert thing because there's there's there's an important point here that i keep thinking about in my head because i like her too and i don't fucking know her i hope she's cool but you know she's qualified as you said she understands how this world works all that's true and let's say it's also true that she's a great person and has great intentions.

Starting point is 01:51:49 She is still, just like the president, by the way, which would say something about the problem with the system. She is still technically at the mercy as a DNI. Or is it DCI or DNI? DNI. DNI, right. She's still technically at the mercy of the people who read her in on things yeah she's not out there in the field you're absolutely right they're in offices at these different agencies and they're like we're not telling this bitch this and i'll go one farther than that oh please um

Starting point is 01:52:14 there are what 18 19 uh intelligence uh agencies in the u. government. I forget what the latest number is. That we know of. Almost all of them are DOD agencies, right? Army, intelligence, air force, navy, marine corps, DIA, DARPA, NSA. They're all components of the defense department. So she doesn't have jurisdiction over them. Secretary of defense has zero. Oh, she has no jurisdiction. The only thing she controls is the budget. She controls two important things, the intelligence community budget and the president's daily brief, which was just in the last couple of years transferred from the CIA to the ODNI. That's it. But again, it's what they feed

Starting point is 01:53:02 her in that too. Yeah, you're right. You're right. And it would be easy to cut her out because then they could say if called on it, well, the secretary's briefed. We report to the secretary of defense. So he's briefed. We don't need to brief her. Now she has a little bit more sway at the CIA, but not really. I mean, there was a – listen, in the Obama administration, there was this huge fight because Obama announced that he was going to start making NSA officials and DIA officials, station chiefs, overseas. Okay. And John Brennan said, I will resign if you do that that would have been nice it would have been nice would have been good for me yeah um and obama backed off so it's just cia officers that are station chiefs overseas most most places around the world don't have anybody from nsa or dia

Starting point is 01:54:00 or anywhere else it's just cia but he was trying to make it a truly intelligence community position. It's supposed to be, but it's not. Never has been. With Tulsi, that's going to be her bureaucratic fight, is remaining relevant at the CIA. Because if you look at the wiring diagram, she's technically above the CIA director. But in practice, it's more of a dotted line and they're on the same line.

Starting point is 01:54:32 Yeah. That's what I worry about. Yeah. I'm with you. I worry about it too. It might not be her fault that she ends up completely ineffective and it's a waste. Yes. That's another double-sided, double-coin problem right here you point out with the brendan argument to obama i can't

Starting point is 01:54:52 believe i'm gonna steal man john brennan but like i understand why he would want it to stay his people just because i've heard all the stories from you and everyone else and we can read our history books about the interagency high school drama that happens. But at the same time, you're given the CIA all the power to make these decisions and say, well, we saw what we saw. Don't worry about it. And these other agencies then get rendered less effective at their job. We used to laugh at these other agencies. We used to laugh that the joke was the only reason that NSA and DIA existed was as a pipeline for people to apply to the CIA or as somewhere to go when you couldn't get hired by the CIA. I just had a guy in here who – Matt Hedger who did four years in NSA and then they pulled him to be a NOC. Oh.

Starting point is 01:55:42 That's CIA. I have deep respect for the knocks that's hard work i do too that is hard work really he's different and he's psychologically different too and he explained like they look for different things in that kind of job than they do to hire you or yeah right but he can there were a lot of people were like oh this is the fakest shit ever bro he was brought to me by shawny delaney and backed by Jim Lawler. Oh, well, there it is. And he was also –

Starting point is 01:56:09 I like Jim Lawler a lot. Jim's a good guy. Yeah, solid guy. Probably still in the CIA. But, you know, Julian, I'm not in the CIA. I'm like, the fuck you are, Jim. But, you know, this guy – the other thing – I don't think we said this on the first podcast with Matt because he has to come back. We got cut off.

Starting point is 01:56:26 He had a flight. But he got doxxed on the dark web by a foreign intel service. That's the only reason he can talk because he was known publicly. They had to pull him out. Like he's actually one guy who's like, yo, I'm not still at CIA. And I'm like, I think I believe you. I worked for a former NOC, and he had been outed by Aldrich Ames. Yeah, yeah. believe you you know i worked for a former knock and he had been outed by aldrich ames yeah yeah ames outed a whole bunch of people and they had to all be brought in crazy because these guys that i

Starting point is 01:56:54 i'm glad there's someone that can do that i couldn't do i couldn't do it oh my god the things that he said he saw couldn't do it i'm i'm told that that's what emeralds fox kennedy did she was a knock really yeah she was a uh an international art consultant makes sense a lot of money in that a lot of money a lot of hidden money in that a lot of money laundering in that yes that's what's fascinating about that leonardo one because i'm like all these rich people they got their own little world you know a friend of mine who works for the Treasury Department told me that systems are pretty good right now to the point where there are only three ways to really launder money and really get away with it. He said fine art, real estate, and racehorses. That's it.

Starting point is 01:57:41 Yeah, it makes sense we had when i when i worked at merrill in in my initial career on wall street you know we worked with these ultra high net worth right people right and it was funny because there was one situation where you know whenever we needed access to anything we had people for that right and we were like the quarterbacks and we bring them in and there was one situation i'll just say it involved because you know it's privacy kind of things it involved art and so it was big art and i didn't know shit about fuck with this and so you know i'm just following along this was my boss running this one i'm just kind of watching and we brought in the main art guy and i put two and two together later i'm pretty sure it's the dude who was the main expert in that lost leonardo

Starting point is 01:58:24 documentary because he was the head of bank of America's trust department for fine art. And I couldn't remember the guy's name because I never met with him. But like, I remember those conversations with my boss where I'm just asking him questions, not even about the case we were working on, but like what people do with this.

Starting point is 01:58:39 He's like, dude, even I like, look at this with like, it has 10 heads because people they you just declare a value on something yeah yeah it's nobody knows you don't know it's worth what somebody's willing to pay you for it yeah and then you can it you the downstream effects of that on how you slosh around money i mean anyone out there you don't have to like get in the in the weeds with that it's exactly what it looks like right so this lady was a knock doing consulting for all

Starting point is 01:59:10 like the richest people and i wonder what that she could find with that yeah she was supposed to be the deputy cia director and um two weeks ago and tom cotton Cotton, that clown act from – He's a statist. Yeah, he's a big-time statist, a neocon from Arkansas. He said absolutely not. Why? He just doesn't like her. Why does he know her like that?

Starting point is 01:59:37 He wanted to be the CIA director. Tom Cotton did? Yeah, and he wanted to be CIA director in Trump's first term and got passed over for Pompeo. So I think there's a little bit of bitterness there. And he's a young guy. He's only, what, in his early 40s maybe? Yeah, something like that. And here's this upstart woman who happens to be married to Bobby Kennedy's son and she was the campaign manager.

Starting point is 02:00:04 And why does she get to be the deputy CIA director?edy's son and she was the campaign manager and why does she get to be the deputy cia director something should have gone to me right so he um he sent word to the white house that he would filibuster her appointment and so the president did something that was just so smart he named her deputy national security advisor which is a way more important job because the CIA director reports to the national security advisor. So now her title is deputy national security advisor, I think for counter, no, it's not for counterterrorism because that's Seb Gorka, who I have serious problems with. Would you care to elaborate oh my god does anyone not have a problem with that guy i have a personal problem and i have a professional problem well i'm your psychiatrist

Starting point is 02:00:55 shoot john well the professional problem is that he wears his father's nazi party lapel pin i've seen that it's he's not a neo-nazi he's an actual nazi from nazi hungary hard to deny that when you're wearing that also um the children of hungarian nazis use the letter l as a middle initial they have two middle initials they're given middle initial and they put the letter l and when he signs documents he adds the l which is up that's crazy so are you a nazi or are you an american right it bothers me very much we shouldn't have in fact he he was only on the national security council for 30 days in the first term because the FBI is like, the guy's a Nazi. We can't give him a security clearance and you can't have the job of – what was it? Deputy National Security Advisor or Senior Director for Counterterrorism and not have a security clearance. So they got rid of him.

Starting point is 02:02:00 Well, now he's back and Trump has ordered that the FBI give him his security clearance. Okay. Number one. Number two, I was trying to get a pardon from Trump in the first term. And I hired a Republican lobbyist to help me. She calls me one day and she says, Seb Gorka is coming out with a book and there is a party at the Trump Hotel and we're going to have dinner at his house afterwards. So she says, I want you to come. And I said, but why would I ask Sebastian Gorka to help me? Like what reach does he have? And she said, he's the only non-Trump family member that Trump follows on Twitter at the time. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:02:45 You told me. Keep going. You told me the story. Okay. So I said, okay. She says, we want him to tweet at the president, pardon John Kiriakou. And then she says, bring your checkbook. And I said, oh, it's going to be one of those nights.

Starting point is 02:02:57 And she said, yeah, he's going to ask you for $2,000. And I said, all right. I said, I've been in Washington long enough. I'll pay that. Yeah. I know how the game is played. I'll give him $2,000 to tweet. Cheap date. and i said all right i said i've been in washington long i'll pay that yeah i know how the game is played yeah i'll give him two thousand dollars to tweet cheap date so i go to trump and um and he's you know handing out his book whatever it was i don't even remember

Starting point is 02:03:16 and everybody like every elected republican in washington is there was kind of a big deal and so she takes me up to him. She says, Seb, this is John Kiriakou. I told you about him. And he says with that British accent, I want to smack right out of his face. So you're the chap who wants me to tweet. And I said, if you're so inclined.

Starting point is 02:03:41 And he says, well, you're coming to dinner tonight. And I said, yes, we'll see you at your house. We'll go to the house afterwards. And, uh, he pulls me aside and he says, so you want me to tweet what? Pardon John Kiriakou. And I said, yes. And he says, give me $5,000. I said, $5,000 for a tweet. And he said, yeah, give me $5,000. I said, you know, I've been in Washington for 40 years and I'm not a babe in the woods. I know how it's played, but I'm not going to be shaken down by you or by anybody else.

Starting point is 02:04:15 And I walked out. Good for you. I like those stories. I don't have any respect for the guy at all. And I honestly, I have no idea what Trump sees in him. I also like when I hear stuff like that, I don't have any respect for the guy at all. Honestly, I have no idea what Trump sees in him. I also like when I hear stuff like that, it so confuses me because the guy wears the Nazi lapel type pin. You're telling me he signs his name with like – I'm unaware of that symbolism, but I believe you.

Starting point is 02:04:44 And he loves Trump who's like buddies with Israel. Yeah. Very confusing. We've never in our history had a more pro-Israel president. And then just a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was more than a couple, maybe it was a month ago just before the inauguration, he made this big announcement that I am a Zionist, he said. Seb did? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:05:00 But you're wearing a Nazi party lapel pin. People are confused these days, John. I don't understand this at all. They don't know what a gender is anymore. Well, that's true too. He's political fluid. Yeah, that's right. There will be a lot of that.

Starting point is 02:05:12 Yeah, there's going to be a lot of that. But the thing that we're looking at with some of these people that Trump's putting in is like the transparency angle, which we're laying out some of the issues that could happen there with someone like Gabbard. But then there's also these pop culture and also national security related type things that people are concerned about. There's two things I want to hit on here because I am cynical about both of them. And if you can correct that, I would love that. First one is the JFK thing. Yeah. So they're saying Trump so far is keeping his promise on that. And he's saying he's ordering the release. Yes. He said last time, and I've saying he's ordering the release yes he said last time and i've seen pompeo talked about this he said mike pompeo is the one who stopped it because

Starting point is 02:05:49 like names and addresses or something like that but i actually cynically unfortunately agree with the people like andy bustamante who say even if they were involved those documents would have been destroyed right after it happened or never created. And so we're not really going to find out anything. Most likely. Is that what you think? I think Andy's correct. We're talking about – well, let's back up.

Starting point is 02:06:15 Congress passed a law in 1992 mandating the release of documents having to do with the JFK assassination, the RFK assassination, and the Martin Luther King assassination. That's right. 1992. And every year, the CIA whispers in the president's ear and says, sources and methods. National security. National security. 9-11. You can't release it.

Starting point is 02:06:41 And president after president after president blocks the release. So many of us were very hopeful in Trump's first term that it would finally come out. Now it's going to come out. He's serious this time. He made the final decisions coming out. And I think it's like they have 30 days to release the JFK and 60 days for the RFK and the MLK. I was talking to a guy at the National Security Archive, which is at George Washington University, and they're the ones that usually take custody of these declassified documents.

Starting point is 02:07:16 It's a hub for people working on PhDs or for journalists working on stories where they need access to original CIA documents. So I said to him the other day, tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to make an educated guess. And I'm going to guess that these documents are going to be either documents that have already been released, but were more heavily redacted in the past. They're going to be less redacted this time. And they're probably going to be about CIA surveillance activities in Mexico city in October and November of 1963. And he said, I think that's exactly what it's going to be. It's not going to be a smoking gun. It's not going to tell us who killed Kennedy. It may be moderately interesting to a handful of PhDs who have followed this stuff for years, but we're not going to learn anything new from these documents.

Starting point is 02:08:09 I'm a little bit more hopeful about RFK and MLK. Why? Well, because there are more clear-cut questions that have never been answered in those killings. RFK, to me, is the most interesting. And I don't mean to sound like a you know tin foil hat person I'm not

Starting point is 02:08:29 you know me I'm a straight shooter but Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of killing Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles he did have a great name Sirhan Sirhan

Starting point is 02:08:44 I'm ashamed that he's Greek Orthodox of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He did have a great name. I have to give him that. Sirhan, Sirhan. Yeah, it's a good name. I'm ashamed that he's Greek Orthodox. Yeah. It's a great name. It's long been a source of pain for many of us in the Greek Orthodox community. I know. I know. So, um... he had a revolver that held seven rounds.

Starting point is 02:08:59 And eight bullets were recovered. And in addition to that, a forensic investigation, an auditory investigation conducted in 1993 found that there were between 10 and 13 shots that were fired. Thomas Noguchi, who was the coroner, the Los Angeles County coroner at the time and famous, famous nationally. Yes. Determined that the kill shot came at the back of the head, at the top of the neck, from a distance of one to three inches. But Sirhan was in front of Kennedy. So how did the kill shot come from behind? Magic bullet. Magic bullet.

Starting point is 02:09:40 Just like JFK. Yeah. At the same time, there was a security guard by the name of Cesar, who was a white supremacist. His name was Cesar? I know. And he was a white supremacist. Pretty doggone ironic. Confusing. Yeah. So he hated Bobby Kennedy. And he told a reporter afterwards that the reason he hated Kennedy was that if elected, that Kennedy was going to bring all of the commies and the coloreds into government like his brother did. Sorry. No, no, you're good. We got to mark that.

Starting point is 02:10:13 There was a video that the National Geographic channel found in the 90s where you see Cesar in the very back of the kitchen and he reaches into his waistband and he pulls out a gun. And then you hear bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And he puts the gun back in his belt. So the reporter asked him, did you, did you shoot Bobby, Bobby Kennedy? And he said, no, I was going to, but that ARAB fella hit him first. So that one too. Oh yeah. you're good sorry i gotta do that yeah no it's yeah you too brutal so um how many shooters were there

Starting point is 02:10:54 uh that's one question how many shooters were there and who were they so he ended up being polygraphed by the fbi and he passed the polygraph he did not shoot kennedy he wanted to he intended to but he didn't which isn't a crime that's right that was number one number two was sir hun sir hun has been utterly inconsistent about that night. When first arrested, he said he did it. He was proud that he did it and that he did it with 20 years of malice aforethought, his words, because of Kennedy's support for Israel. And he's Palestinian. Then he said... But he's Greek Orthodox? Yeah. A lot of Palestinians christians and most of them are greek orthodox some are catholic right yeah so he later said i didn't do it and then still later

Starting point is 02:11:54 he said i may have done it i just don't remember and then later yet he said i suppose I could have done it, but I don't have any memory of it. Well, we also learned 20 years after the fact that he may have participated when he was in college in a medical experiment that turned out to be a component of MKUltra. And so we don't really know the answers to these questions. I'm hopeful that there will be some answers. Now, the FBI said two weeks ago, oh my goodness, we just found another 1,800 pages of documents related to the RFK assassination that we didn't know existed. They were in this guy's desk since 1968. Seriously. Can you imagine working in a place like that?

Starting point is 02:12:54 The CIA at least will admit, well, we destroyed all the documents. The old school. Yeah. The old school way. We did in the old days. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:13:03 Like when they told Gina Haspel, don't destroy the torture tapes. I'm going to do it. And she goes back and puts them in a grinder. Yeah. So maybe we get more on RFK. I hope so. And then what about MLK?

Starting point is 02:13:17 Because that's FBI. That's FBI. I know they're your favorite agency. Yeah, and RFK is FBI as well, for the most part, except for MKUltra. Yeah. Yeah, I heard MKUltra. I'm not thinking FBI when you say that.

Starting point is 02:13:30 FBI vis-a-vis two or more shooters. OK. MLK is fascinating to me. I always believed that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. And then I decided if I'm going to have an opinion, it needs to be an educated opinion. So I'm going to read everything I can get my hands on about Martin Luther King's killing.

Starting point is 02:13:53 And I think that if James Earl Ray killed him, he was, to use Lee Harvey Oswald's word, he was a patsy. Yeah. Because look at it this way. Here's a guy who was drunk all the time. All the time. He just had a well-documented, lifelong drinking problem.

Starting point is 02:14:15 And he decided he's going hotel where Martin Luther King was, the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was staying. This boarding house was a run-down fleabag place. The rooms didn't have bathrooms. There was one bathroom at the end of the hall. And the bathroom at the end of the hall had a window in the shower, one of these long, narrow windows that had a view of the Lorraine. So we're supposed to believe that this drunk guy with a 40-year-old rifle sat in a public bathroom all day long. Nobody ever noticed him. And then he hits the perfect shot from a block away. Come on. Seriously? Now, couple that with what we know for 100% fact that thebi tried to get martin luther king to commit suicide two years earlier they sent him a letter an anonymous letter that purported to be from

Starting point is 02:15:34 an anti-king african-american man saying you're a disgrace to the black people you should do the only honorable thing you know and by all accounts he laughed he was like yeah that was never gonna work yeah like come on we know that we have people who say that about us i know right you know how many death threats i've gotten oh my god um but uh they said we're gonna tell your wife that you cheat on her it's like go ahead as i cheat on common knowledge my friend yeah so he just dismissed it but the hatred of king at the fbi was was enough in the 60s that make people think perhaps they did it perhaps they set him up perhaps they worked with with james earl ray we don't know and we don't really have any idea what

Starting point is 02:16:27 these documents might be and why they've been classified if this is a if this is a criminal act nothing should be classified yeah right he didn't have you know an elected office he didn't have a security clearance he didn't have access to classified information. He's just – he's a preacher and a civil rights leader. So why would that case be classified in the first place? So I'm kind of excited about what that release is going to be. And you think we could really get something there? I think there's a chance that some of these big questions might get answered. And you don't think James Earl Ray could have floated around in a bathroom for a lot of

Starting point is 02:17:05 hours you did believe like an hour ago that maybe someone had fished the shit of abraham lincoln out of a toilet after he got shot so you know it was wishful thinking i admit it it was wishful thinking you know i remember i was a little kid and james earl Ray escaped from prison. And I remember watching the news with my folks and being shocked at the people being interviewed who were saying, well, I hope he comes to my house because I'll hide him. I'll hide him. He's a hero. Oh, my God. And my parents just being like appalled that people in America.

Starting point is 02:17:43 That's wild. Yeah. It's crazy. That's wild. I think I must have been like eight or nine years old still yeah like you would think at that point people would move on with life yeah move on but that's crazy wow what about the other one though you know what i'm gonna ask about which one the files the ones that were just magically shut from everyone at the end of 2021, at the end of Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. Oh, that. The Epstein files. You know, I almost forgot about that.

Starting point is 02:18:13 Talk about literally no reason to be classified. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast, or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory Podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

Julian Dorey Podcast - #278 - CIA Spy on MK Ultra, Sinister USAID Mission & Overthrowing Governments | John Kiriakou

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

Your Ad Here

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

Julian Dorey Podcast - #278 - CIA Spy on MK Ultra, Sinister USAID Mission & Overthrowing Governments | John Kiriakou

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