Julian Dorey Podcast - “I am the DEEP STATE, Pal!” - CIA Whistleblower Removes the Mask | James Erdman

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) MARS MEN: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life plus Free Shipping AND 3 Free Gifts at MenGoToMars.com for 50% Off AND 3 Free Gifts when you checkout. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT NEWSLETTER: https://juliandoreypodcast.beehiiv.com/get-julians-top-10-books (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ James Erdman III is a senior operations officer and 20-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He gained widespread public attention when he testified as a whistleblower before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. JIM'S LINKS: - IG: https://www.instagram.com/feds4freedomusa - X: https://x.com/Jerdman2005?lang=en - WEBSITE: https://www.fedsforfreedom.org/ - SUBSTACK: https://fedsforfreedom.substack.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Meet The Whistleblower 9:46 - Sticky Notes & Silence 20:26 - 1,100 Agents Revolt 30:59 - Stopping The Mandate 41:46 - From Michigan To The Rangers 50:24 - Demoted For Doing Right 01:00:40 - Election Anomalies 01:10:33 - Did The Middle East Like Trump? 01:19:57 - A "Tactical Error" 01:30:34 - Tulsi, DIG & The Deep State 01:41:43 - Why You Shouldn't Believe Him 01:52:36 - The Subpoena 02:05:25 - Honorable Vs. Subversive 02:15:42 - Rethinking Edward Snowden 02:26:10 - Color Outside The Lines 02:35:30 - Infiltrating The Press? 02:45:29 - We Need Another Church Committee 02:54:45 - Shrink The Government 03:04:55 - Solving It Without Violence 03:16:08 - The Epstein Problem CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 486 - Jim Erdman Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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like it but i am peak male form and he he comes into the skate park and does like a flip does some crazy shit and he looks like me and he comes on and he's like you may not like it but I am peak male form and you may not like it but I am the face of the deep state and that's

there you go yeah this is it right here that's right there I told you he's fast as fuck with it yeah I've seen that one okay yeah so that's you but deep state yeah so roller blades yeah gotcha so it's and it's you know I

I When we first started chatting, I looked up, I actually listened to a bunch of what you've put out. And I think you've got, you've got a big chunk of this right. I just think that it's worse than what you think. Okay. Worse than what I think. I do. I do. Do you know what we talk about on here? I do. I, you know, I, I went through probably, um, at least, there was at least 14

episodes I pulled right off the bat to, to, to, to, I try to do my homework. Yeah. That's a lot of homework. Thanks. That's what the deep state does. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to blink twice if I need help, everybody. Keep that in mind.

So, you know, I was listening to what you had to say, and you have quite a bit right about, you know, there being a big problem with bureaucratic intransigence, with just the things that are going wrong that you don't have a good explanation for. And the only thing you can say is, like, somebody's doing this. Right. So the $60 million question is like, who's doing it? Unfortunately, I can't answer that question for you. It's not because I don't want to. It's just it's worse than you think because the deep state isn't a conspiracy requires members. Okay.

So you've got to have people part of the conspiracy. And you can get rid of members if they're not really on board with the conspiracy. But if you have a bunch of people who over time have been part of the conspiracy. have been part of an organization and all of their decisions are defendable. Like small decisions over time where they're like, I need to do this because this is how we're doing it. And this is after a while you accumulate this dead weight of bureaucratic bullshit, right? Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review.

They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. and you justify it to yourself. You don't even know you're part of the deep state. And that's it. So like you're making decisions because this is how it was done before me. And you continue on making those decisions. So it's not a conspiracy which you can eventually identify.

It's that it's a culture. And you can't indict a culture and you certainly can't vote it out. So I think it's actually probably. a little worse than, you know, you've got these multiple conspiracies, which in my opinion probably do exist that there are people that have done things they shouldn't be doing. And all of this has occurred and it's still occurring in an administration that has said, we're going to reform, we're going to get transparency. So, well, they dream the swan to a lake or something like that.

that right right and you know part of the part of the the the big issue with with with all of this is um i was looking at what you've done uh did you say it was like seven years you've been doing this six and a half six and a half okay um you have provided a hugely invaluable benefit to people like me so you people like you yes oh yeah And I don't mean to the deep state. I mean to people who are waking up. Okay. Or are in the process of questioning things.

And so you have put people on your platform, like John Kiriaku, these other people who, you look at them, you go, okay, this is a guy who, and I don't know the full details about what happened and or didn't happen to him. What I do know is he passed a test of his humanity. Okay? He said, you know, last I checked, enhanced interrogation is probably just torture. Okay. Do you agree? Yeah, I do. I do.

Now, part of the reason I'm part of the deep state is he passed a test to humanity. I didn't. Okay. You didn't hear me complaining about it. You didn't hear me getting jailed over complaints about it. So you have to take ownership. And part of that process of waking up is taking ownership for the decisions you did and didn't make over time. So like I came forward because the promises from this administration, the importance of transparency and reform, you know, I'm fully on board.

But it wasn't like my transformation is not something that, you know, people should. lion eyes because that was the guy was like well the Middle East is a burning dumpster fire but good thing we're here for democracy okay so you know it takes time to realize that maybe some of the things that you thought before and wrong and there's some people who are on the front end who recognize it early some people aren't but for me you know I started noticing that the institution we had individuals more interested in protecting the institution than protecting the Constitution. And I foolishly assumed that if I started like telling people in the organization, hey, this might be the wrong way to go, I was under the impression that I would be rewarded. for that behavior. Okay? So, you know, I mean, you know, I thought like, listen, I'm amongst friends

here. We're all part of the organization. We care about it. But there's, there's some things that have happened. And the sad part is, you know, I didn't really fully come forward until I was attacked personally. And so, you know, you want to do the right thing. And I, I'm, I have no regrets about coming forward in front of Senator Paul's committee on May 13th of this year. I have no regrets in March when I went in for a transcribed interview. No regrets on any of that. But it's a process for people. And it got me thinking when I saw what your platform is similar to maybe a handful of

others where you've brought people out and let them speak the truth, let them say, this is what's happening behind the curtain. We get to see we benefit. And when I say we, I'm talking about the organization on Morgan Foreign. now, which is all federal government employees. I know it's hard to believe, but there's federal government employees who actually think there should be transparency, reform, accountability, a small government. It's a huge, huge organization. I have no doubt there's people who want the right things there. The question is, what are they able to do about it when we have so many examples of

the people who did try to do something get stonwold? Good point. And that leads right into what I wanted to say about folks like, again, Kariaku. Right. We get to see the guy, man, he was raked through the coals. He was. Dude's life was destroyed over this. And this is just one example. But you put him up there and you said, tell us what happened.

And he's out there screaming it at the top of his lungs. For someone like me on the inside, all of a sudden you realize, hey, wait a minute. I know it's going to be, there's going to be some pain involved. But maybe we can do the right thing now inside the system, use the system to try and make changes. And from the outside, you look in there and you're like, well, everybody keeps losing that battle from the inside. They're plucked out. They're sent out. I retired in my own accord.

You know, I was not pushed out. There was nothing. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have given me anything of substance to do. Maybe they would have. Maybe not. Because of you speaking up. Yeah, there's a whole series of this. You know, we have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of these other people who come forward.

You don't come forward on your own. It's not like somebody says, you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to come forward and do the right thing. They got to see, they got to see that somehow, somewhere, somebody got through it. They may have experienced a great deal of pain along the way. but what your platform does is tell people in the federal government, people are listening and they want you to do the right thing. You're not going to do it unless you see it. Again, it's not great for these people, but I wouldn't have come forward if I wasn't seeing other people who have managed to, it's not great, but managed to get through it.

And, you know, part of the reason I'm still, so I co-founded feds for freedom during COVID. Feds for Freedom. Well, it was Feds for Medical Freedom, which at the beginning, because we said, enough is enough. We're not going to take your jab. We had lots of reasons. We had lots of reasons why we didn't. Like reasons you knew that the public doesn't? No, no, I'm not saying it like that.

But I will say, I guess in some way, maybe. maybe and here's here's what I mean by that um I worked for an organization whose whole sole purpose was to collect information and then pull it together and finished intelligence and then send it off to policymakers to make wise decisions I couldn't understand why we had this cognitive block with say COVID origins okay like no one wanted to hear the possibility of lab leak nobody. I remember Brett Weinstein, who was just on the pod. He did a famous podcast with Joe Rogan in June 2020 where he's an evolutionary biologist. Yeah. Great guy. Laid out the entire thing, bar for bar, word for word. He got so much shit for it. They tried to cancel him. He was 100%

right. He was. And that's, that is what I said. I can't remember if it was a written statement or the public statement during the testimony. Who got it right during COVID? Well, it's the amateur internet sluice that everyone wanted a bad mouth about doing your own research. groups like drastic, Richard Ebright, Brett Weinstein. All of these people had it right. And we were looking from the inside, most of us, we were mad about what was going on with the COVID protocols and mitigation measures that didn't work. But we're also looking at and going, yeah, this is a clue.

I mean, we're intelligence officers. We're supposed to be able to look at something and say omission of facts is also a clue. So, yeah, a little bit, you know, when you are privy to secrets and you decide you're not going to take those secrets and use them to the fullest effect you can. And I got to see even more when I was working for Director Gabbard and director's initiatives group running the COVID-19 origins investigation for. When my dad hit his 50s, he started noticing his energy fall through the floor. Everything felt harder. The same workouts didn't hit the same way, the recovery wasn't there, felt energy crashes midday all the time, and even

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tell them I sent you. But you saw that. And at the time during COVID, we had scientific reasons. We had a bunch of people with religious reasons. And I don't want to spend a ton of time. Like, how did I end up from there to here unless you really want to? But in May of 2021 is when I started really asking questions in the agency. And it's- What led you to actually at that time be like, you know what? This is it.

Now, we got to look at this. Well, I had been looking into COVID origins. I had offered some assistance. And I don't want to go too far down that road with that. But the questions in May had to do with, the questions in May had to do with, there was some very clear safety signals that were already showing up in bears. And we had a group of people, it was just me and like six other people, seven other people who would show up in my office. We'd take our stupid masks off. We'd sit down, close the door and be like, listen, we're not crazy.

We're not crazy. This whole, the mitigation isn't working. All the people are vaccinated, to keep getting sick. We're the only ones running the office, and we're the ones who are unvaccinated. And so those questions started piling up, and so I said, well, tell you what, I'm going to send an email to our office of medical services. And I pulled together,

and, you know, there was a bunch of organizations out there pulling the data together. So I pulled the data together. I sent them a bunch of questions that, if you were to bucket them, it was, what are you going to do about myocarditis and paracarditis? Thromosis and autoimmune disorders and some of these neurodegenerative disorders. I said, if you want me to take this thing that you're pushing, and they were pushing it,

oh, they were pushing it, can you answer those questions? Now, I sort of knew they weren't going to give me a good answer, but I wanted at the time to put it on the record that I was asking these questions. And I want to come back to that putting your name on the record. It's essential. it's essential it started there and then um when i couldn't get any answers we had problems with the whole like they were keeping excel spreadsheets of the unvaccinated they were putting them on sticky notes in their office i mean sticky notes oh sticky notes that's not a fake story this is i collected more more little vignettes just like who's unvaccinated in the office on sticky notes

In the highest agency of spying that we know of in the land. Yes. That's nice. Very reassuring. Yeah, it should be. Sleep tight America. Yeah. So, and again, like, I, you know, we were looking at her like, this is, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

And last I checked, we worked for the CIA. Like, we are intelligence officers in an organization that is, yeah, it's got a rep. And so, um, you. Then I went to the Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties. I put my name on that complaint. And I said, this looks like a violation of privacy, medical privacy. And we had a bunch of other people who had actually gotten vaccinated, but they just were like, I shouldn't have to tell you my vaccination status.

And so they were getting sideways. They were following the rules and still getting sideways. So I ended up going to our office of general counsel, our office of Inspector General, the EEO office, which, by the way, I had never made a complaint in any of my jobs ever in my adult life. Yeah, you don't seem like that guy. No, no, like, just go about your business. Yeah, just leave me the fuck alone. Right.

Sorry. Leave me alone. Let me. New Jersey. You can say it's okay. Okay. Leave me alone. Let me do my job because all I really want to do is steal secrets and recruit spies.

Okay? So let's just do that. And so I started sending me. and I finally got in in August late July late July late July of 2021 I got an exasperated email from the office of general counsel and they said hey Jim we know you have a problem with the COVID policy but you have exhausted all of your administrative means for employee employer dispute mechanisms if you have a problem with policy you have to take it up with the person responsible for policy So I was like, well, giddy up, motherfuckers. Okay, who's responsible for this so I can send them an email to? And they said, well, it's the number three in the agency. It's the chief operating officer.

I'm like, okay. And I didn't want to be accused of wasting government time. So I came in on a Sunday. Sunday, was it August 8th, I think, 2021. So before the military mandates, which was August 24. This is right at Afghanistan. Right. Right.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly Afghanistan around that time. So I send this long email and I cite scientific studies. I talk about the impact to the workforce because what they were asking us to do was inculcate a lie into our everyday work. And you're going to say, uh, Jim. CIA lies right I mean I you do my work for me yeah I mean yeah I get it you're right

it's a little bit what I'll say about this is it's a little different when it's something meant to like heard their own on something that has nothing to do with the work you guys do if that makes sense it does and here's this was one of my problems with it with inculcating a lie so we are given a lot of authority to operate on her own as a you know an operations officer you are expected to make decisions on the fly because you can never predict you're never going to be able to predict every situation the longer you spend in the agency the better you're at at predicting these things and so you know you you're given a lot of leeway and you're given a lot of trust and well you're polygraphed so there's that

too so that helps with the whole trust thing i feel like you know how to pass some of those Uh, I, I, listen, no comments. All I'm saying is there's lots of polygraphs. And there's lots of ways. I mean, they get access to your banking. Um, you know, you give up a lot to, to, to get the, and I mean this sincerely, uh, that I always felt blessed that I actually got in and got to work at the CIA. I still do. Everything good in my life has been touched by service there.

It doesn't mean you can't change your opinion on what needs to happen to fix the place. But so when you are given all that authority, there's a lot of things you can do with that authority. Talk to 40 million and gold bars guy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that was the guy, the CIA spy that like took the gold bars off the balance sheet or something. I don't know exactly what happened with that, obviously, but it's a matter for DOJ to work out. You know that guy?

I met him once a long, long time ago, and it was like in passing. So, um, the chance encounter. Got it. Um, I don't, I don't know anything. You don't have any bars. I have no connection with him whatsoever. Let me say that. Go check his house.

I don't need any more ass pain. Um, pause. So, uh, you get a lot of authority. And so what happens is, um, there were a ton of fake vaccine cards, a lot of. of them in CIA too. Oh, fuck yeah. And they were just getting away. God, that was such a bad system. Everyone got away with that. So, so like there were fake vaccine cards. People just loaded them up. Okay. And I am not judging them, frankly. But here's what happens. One lie. That's all it takes. Okay. If you can justify why you need to make this just, just this one lie,

what you're doing is setting the stage for more lies to the organization you're not supposed to lie to. because you've been blessed by a job in the agency. Okay. And I mean it. It's so much fun. Just as a quick editorial here, by the way, we're going to get to Jim's full story, everybody. I just want them to stay with this because you're laying out like a key critical moment

to where you suddenly are kind of stepping out of it after a lot of years in this and realizing what happened. We'll get to the full background so you guys can understand that too. But please continue. Sure, sure, sure. Sorry. And I sort of just jumped into it. No, it's great.

I like that. But so I sent this email on August 8th. And it's me and my seven friends in my office with their masks off. I, you know, they come in Monday. I said, hey, I came in Sunday. I sent the email. I cited these studies. I'm sure they'll listen now.

So they didn't listen. They didn't listen. And in fact, I started getting hit up by people I didn't know in the agency. Out of the blue. They're like, Jim, I saw your email. And yeah, I agree with everything you're saying. What are we going to do? Because it looks like we're going to have a vaccine mandate.

Are they just texting you this? Yeah, they're contacting me through agency systems. And so my first question was like, how did you, how did you know I sent that email? It was sent to the Coos office, which, by the way, that was like my bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses. So checking on my TPS reports. Right. And so, you know, I'm like, how did you know? I mean, it turns out that like instead of like taking anything I said seriously, you know, the email was forwarded probably in a, they were probably laughing at me, like some kook, whatever, don't care.

But what happened was by the end of the week instead of seven people in my office in August of 2021, there was 50 of us. And so they're all asked me, Jim, what are we doing? I'm like, I don't fucking know. I just send emails. Are you allowed to say where are the office? office was at this time you keep referring to or is that yeah yeah i guess let me to i i handled financial intelligence okay so were you based domestically at this i was domestic so i was i was not overseas at the time i was domestically i came came home in 2019 from africa so when you are saying 50 people

in my office are you referring to the entire likely complex sorry no no no i'm talking about so first it was seven people in my office where i worked me and seven people like your death You're that area. Yes. My office. After that first email, it was 50 people from across the agency. Okay. So they're all asking me, like, what are we going to do about this?

I'm like, shit, I don't know. I mean, I, okay. I guess I'll send another email. I was like, you know, they didn't answer my questions, but it worked so well. I'm just going to send the coup another email and ask them to answer my questions and give them a few more studies. So I came in the next Sunday. I wrote another email. I sent it off and I mean I was sort of like I didn't I was taking it seriously because it was bothering the I didn't want definitely wasn't going to take a vaccine I knew it at that point and so I sent it off and to sort of shorten this story by the time vaccine mandates hit on September 9th of 2021 I had spoken to 1100 officers in the agency give or take that did not want to get get the shot that's a significant

number. But that's a huge number. Yeah. A huge number. And so I knew I wasn't wrong. One of the problems up to this point was we were all sort of separated. There was never, there was never this connection where you could like look over and go, I wonder if that person, other than the fact that like there was a period of time that only the people who weren't vaccinated had to wear a mask so you could identify them pretty quick. And this was across a whole federal government. So when all of this started 2021, honestly that is not exactly when I woke up I woke up before that but um that was sort of the the last straw um that this whole period because and again it's it's not flattering to me but it really didn't wake up until I experienced the pain point and I whatever giddy up we're

going to we're going to just take it what happened on September 9th when the mandates went in just I understand this. What happened because you didn't do it? Was it just you were just wearing the mask or? Well, here's what happened. We got emails saying we're going to be fired if we didn't get the shot by a certain date. Okay. And, you know, when you're thinking to yourself, you have spent millions of dollars training me and, well, multiply that by 1,100.

And lots of time, money. I mean, they trained me in Arabic and Chinese, free gifts from the age of. and um you're fluent in both of those my arabics gotten pretty bad but mandarin i'm still you're nice with the mandarin it's yeah it's good enough they will use him for the movie dief yeah i need that it's mama hoo-ho um okay so him and mom dani mom dadi's mom dani's in the movie yo mom dani kind of spits it i'm not going to lie it wasn't a i i see him speaking chinese yeah i did i did it's like vaguely impressive to a person who doesn't understand chinese yeah yeah yeah In any case, you know, they, that was what happened.

You know, that was a turning point. And when they said you're going to get fired, I had all these people who were talking me like, Jim, what do we do? And I'm like, again, I'm just sending emails, man. I'm like, but when it happened, I went out and started calling lawyers. And you would think, I thought for sure lawyers were just all blood sucking. They wanted money. They didn't care whether you had a case or not.

They'll take your case. No one wanted in D.C. no one wanted to take a COVID case. I wonder why. Yeah. And again, I had never, I'd stayed away from legal issues as much as humanly possible because, you know, you're, you don't need that, that hassle when you're working at the agency. So I started calling, and I finally got a hold of lawyers at Federal Practice Group. And I get a hold on, they said, hey, Jim, you know, it's going to cost you this much for each plaintiff and I'm like, and they said, you know, you're also,

I forget what they quoted. It was like an initial, each person would have to dump in five grand and, you know, I'm talking to government employees, you know, it's a lot of, that's a lot of money for anybody. And so, they said to me,

but there's somebody else over at State Department who's doing the same thing as you are. You guys should, one, call each other, talk, figure this out. And two, you can't really just sue individual agency. on this one. If you're going to go after this, you have to sue the federal government because there's, I'm like, what? Like, are you trying to steal money from me? Like, why are we doing it this way? Like, I just, all I care about is the agency and the handful of NSA and DIA people that were

part of a group. But I called up Marcus Thornton, a state department employee. He had lined up a bunch of people from State Department and Customs and Border Patrol. And so I had like 200 people that were willing to go to court or because of various reasons, just provide money for the lawsuit so it could go forward and they just sort of hope and pray that we got it through. I talked to Marcus and he had a whole bunch more at State and CBP. And so we decided that day on September 9th, we needed to form a 501C3.

I don't know if we picked the name at that point because to be honest, I wasn't really into the name to begin with. I'm like, we sound like a bunch of glowies. But whatever. It's sort of true. Yeah, yeah. Going on vacation? We're here for it.

With kids who turned the backseat into a courtroom drama over whose table is louder, whose charger is faster, and while watching the same cartoon for the hundredth time as a human right? Yep, we totally have vehicles to handle that. Because whether it's a road trip or a business trip, where your flight's delayed, your phones at 2% And your dinner is whatever is open? Yeah.

Here for that, too. Enterprise. We're here for it. Yeah, you said that out there. I went, ooh. Yeah. We're for your free. We're here for your freedom.

Yeah. But we are. We got a good group of people. Uh-huh. And so, um, anyhow, we started suing. And, um, I did, I've got, it's not, it's not a fully formed philosophy. But over the last five years, there's a, I'll call it more like tradecraft on how you oppose

government overreach from the inside. And the crass way of saying is, don't be a pussy. The more, I don't know if there's a more elegant way to say it, but you have to put your name on everything and you have to use the system and you have to own everything. Because if there is any daylight between what you see, state explicitly you're doing and why you're doing it. And what you're actually doing, they're going to destroy you. Okay, they being the deep state, or even just the organizations you work for. So like when I was sending those emails between May and September, my name was on it.

I was telling them explicitly what I was doing. I didn't know I was developing sort of a tradecraft behind it. And this goes back to our discussion on Kariaku. We're the one organization, Feds for Freedom now, was Feds for Medical Freedom, that has learned how to use some of the levers on the inside to actually make change. And we can talk about some of the changes that have actually occurred as a result. And it's part of the reason, like, I left government service. There's lots of other things I could do, but I'm giving Feds for,

Freedom a little more time because what I see here is this we're standing on the shoulders of giants in the sense that other people have gone through this mess and gone through it. What if you don't have to? What if you got an organization? We've had a ton of whistleblowers show up at Fed's for Freedom. We handle it quietly. And there's some examples of what we've done with part of the reason I'm out talking now is people have to know that we exist and that we are going to help you and we'll be in your

corner. What I'll say about all that is we'll be in your corner, but it's all on you. I'm not, this is not a recruitment video where I'm like, you should come to Feds for freedom and do the right thing. If you want to do the right thing, come on by. We'll help you. We know the system is broken. We know because we've lived it.

For five years, we've been living inside the system going to, you know, know, Intel oversight committees, going to oversight committees, working through the administrative procedures internal to the organizations. We know it's broken because we've lived it. And the people at Feds for Freedom, they weren't recruited into the organization. They were brought in by a test. Okay. We're not just picking anybody at this point. The people who showed up in the beginning, they didn't want to lose their job. Somewhere between 23 and 24, the people who now are sticking around, they're sticking around because they're like, we like being on the right side of history and we really, really want our government to function like it's supposed to. So we're going to

stick around and we're going to put our name on everything. We're going to file complaints. We're going to, and it's not like a resistance like, you know, one of the arguments is, well, what makes you different from some other group of people out there going, we don't like what the president is saying and we're going to, we're going to fight. We're going to. We're going to fight. We're going to subversively undermine. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is an organization that is using their authority in their jobs to ensure that the people above understand the decisions they're making and that people have stated explicitly, like, here's the implications of what you're doing. And you need to know that because this is

this is the facts. And so Feds for Freedom fought the vaccine mandates. We got a nationwide injunction that stopped the vaccine mandate for all staff, federal employees throughout the entire Biden administration and up until January. Yeah. Yeah. So we got a settlement at the end of the day, which really just covered some legal fees, but good enough.

And that didn't make you persona non-gras? Oh, yeah, 100%. Okay. So it's a great question. Great segue, too. Yeah, you, when I say you're going to experience pain, you're going to experience pain. You're like, for a while I entertained this, this idea, okay, I'm going to go back to just do what I was doing before eventually. It's still not perfect.

And I'm not like, honestly, I'm not complaining about what happened because I'm, whatever. You know, if you're going to get in a ring and get in a fight, you better expect to get punt. That's right. And if you're going to get in a ring and get in a fight and then you get done with it and you start bitching and moan and I got in a fight and I got punched, that's dumb and that isn't going to convince anybody that you're doing the right thing. Put your name on everything. Do it by the book.

Don't have daylight with what you're doing and what you're saying you're doing because the fastest way to lose any kind of credibility. Any kind of credibility is to do that. And also, you'll just get destroyed anyway, just quietly, not loudly. And you lose anyhow. Yeah. Unfortunately, I think, and this exists far beyond just even deep government bureaucracies and everything. Sometimes if people are looking at the chessboard, they want to make that move just right at the king to say, look what I did, check. Yep. But it's not checkmate. You know what I mean? You have to play things longer. And sometimes that means you have to do the things that feel like you're not speaking up in order to get your way slower to the end result. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not even, I'm saying what I'm saying is we've got a group of people

that have decided that they will speak up. They're not going to avoid the hard conversations. They're not going to hedge what they're saying. And the hard part is you had, what's her name, Shawnee Delaney on, okay? She was on. a panel that I saw before I even knew that I heard about, I guess, before I even knew that she had been on your program. And she was on a panel with, with another officer from the agency, really, really good officer, about what insider threat looks like. Okay, the changing face of insider threat. Was this with Jim Lawler? No, no, no, but I know Jim Lawler, too. He's a, he's a, he is a fantastic old school case officer interesting guy very interesting guy had him on the show a few years

ago did you really yeah okay okay yeah uh i didn't catch that one i wish i had yeah 129 back in the day but very very fascinating guy scared me a little bit he's writing books now you know his nickname was mad dog i'm well aware oh okay okay um he's like julian when i look at you our eyes they meet and suddenly I have you in a trance and you're going to do whatever. I'm like, okay, is this really like happening right now? Like, are you doing it to me? But he's, he knows what he's doing when it comes to being a case officer. But you were saying Shawnee was on the panel.

Yeah. So the problem with what I'm describing here, government insiders saying, you know what? We're going to do. We're going to, we are going to complain about things that need to be complained about. We're going to put things on the record. That is what some people might call an insider threat. And so we've had five years to work this out now. And I mean, across all, we had 34 government agencies and departments as part of Feds for Med Freedom when we started, Feds for Freedom.

And when COVID hit, we started getting information from every single one of these agencies and departments. Not classified. We don't accept classified information for the record. You know, they don't, they're better not send it to us. Like I said, we don't need any more ass pain. If you do, just let me know off camera. Okay. So we got a window into what was happening in all these different agencies and departments.

And we started seeing all these patterns emerged. It was all the similar BS. And it's part of, we can talk more about it later, but, you know, one of the last things that we did was sue the CIA before the day I retired. Just in June, this year. This year. Okay. Because these patterns emerge where people were put on insider threat list because of asking for religious accommodation, being involved in protected activities, which, by the way, lawsuits are a protected activity. And so, and if you want, we can jump straight into the lawsuit.

But these things happened. And we saw that these people were being identified. And, I mean, you don't have to be a genius. It looks like a purge. It looks like a purge. Yes. Okay. And if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a damn duck. Yeah. Now you were, you're highlighting a thing that was a real hit point for you because you literally ended up starting an organization out of this and it had to do with the Vax mandates and you not wanting to do that. And obviously that was the biggest story in the world there for a couple years and we were all dealing with a lot of bullshit. That said, you've had a long career there. You had a long career before you were in CIA where you were. were in State Department, I think, and Army Rangers as well.

You've seen a lot of different things around the world. You've run some missions that you can talk about, some that you can't. And you, in a nutshell, ended up having access to a lot of different things in there within the agency that are, let's say, major questions the public has that still are unanswered, some of which I guess you can talk about. Others, maybe you're still trying to figure out yourself. But maybe we could take a step back right here. my point so that people can understand how you got to this point and how, you know,

you're someone who's been able to see all these things and do all these things. Where, where did you begin? Did you, did you want to be a spy when you were growing up? Is that ever a thought? No. No. In fact, there was probably a time when I was 18 and living in Livonia, Michigan, if somebody said, hey, do you want to travel the world? Why would I leave Detroit? I love this place. You know, that was not on the bingo card. You like Detroit. I did. You know, I moved to Detroit when I was 16. I think it gets a bad rap. There's some awesome. Like you've got good food. You've got a good music scene. People don't realize the music scene is pretty awesome. And if you get tired of Detroit, you can just cross the bridge

up to Windsor and drink at 19 and it's cleaner and the people are nicer. So I love Detroit. I of Cleveland, you know, and, yeah, no, I did not dream of it. I had no other plans. I was, I was at Michigan State for a while. I dropped out to join the Army, joined Second Ranger of a time. Why did you drop out to join the Army? Was that out of nowhere? I sort of, I sort of just, I got tired of, it felt boring. Like, you know, I had some friends who were joining. And, and And one of them said, hey, there's this Ranger thing. And, you know, a lot of people like to say, well, I joined because of patriotism. Well, at that point, it was not patriotism.

They said that I could jump out of planes and kill people for a living. And I said, that sounds like Ranger Battalion. It sounds like it would be cool. That was my immature young Jim thoughts. Like, hey, this would be cool. There's patriotism involved in there somewhere. Like, I love my country. I was at Michigan State during the first Gulf War.

I remember seeing the protesters, and I've always been a conservative, conservative my entire life. And I saw it, and I was like, yeah, I sort of want to join the Army. And they told me that there was this thing, Rangers. I had a friend to join. His name was James. And so I did. And, you know, I watched all the, all the Army movies and Marine movies before I left, getting all psyched up. And then I got there and I was like, holy shit, I may have made a terrible mistake.

Like, what the hell? Yeah, training's hard. Yeah, parents were paying for everything. And I was, you know, I didn't realize I was spoiled. I was spoiled. So I got there. But I was like, I got so lucky. I had this, he's still, all those guys that were at range of Italian with me,

privates with me, my squad leader, they have shown up all the time. entire life they're my closest friends they are the inner circle uh if i have a problem they're going to show up with hatchets shovels plastic bags and they will take plastic bags yeah yeah they can't full meal deal that's right uh you know uh my my squad leader was a guy everything i learned about leadership um i learned at range of battalion and um because i was not i think probably if someone had known, even most of my life actually. I'm not somebody who bucks the system for the most part. I didn't, you know, my mom would put my ninth place finish up on the, on the fridge and say, good job, Jimmy, you're the best. You know, so, you know, it's not, it's not like I was, uh, I'd never been with a

group of people that, uh, challenged you all the time. These were a hyper competitive group of people and just constantly. And so when I got there, I was meeting standard for sure. You know, I was a little more physically fit than most. I was a little smarter than most. I was never the smartest. I was never the most physically fit. And when I got to Ranger Battalion, I realized this is not the exact fit for me. I'm really glad I'm doing this because these people are making me better. And yeah, what made them teach you so much about leadership? I guess a better way to ask that question is what do you think are the key tenants that make great leaders? He's not agreeable on anything.

And I'm, believe it or not, I'm actually fairly agreeable. At least I was, not anymore. But I had never experienced somebody who was willing to respectfully, ethically, morally, challenge people's, people who were in a position of authority. Just asking questions, if you will. Yeah, just asking questions, if you will, exactly. He was also a man of faith. And at the time, and my faith has changed, definitely has changed. It started with the birth of my son.

But before that, before that, when I met my wife, she said, here's the rule. I'm Catholic. You will be Catholic. And I believed, but it wasn't like it wasn't anything that was, part of my life. I was raised Episcopalian, which is almost not religion at this point. But whatever it is, it's not, it's not what I, the God I sign up for. And so, yeah, I took her seriously. She said, you have to convert. And I still haven't, but I definitely don't miss church anymore. And I definitely have a difference in opinion. And it was after my son was born. When I

was born, you start doing this thing and maybe other people don't, but I started saying, make sure you're being a good boy, be a good boy. And that's maybe where the transformation started, because I started asking myself, have I been a good boy? Have I really been a good boy? I really like not, I mean, I won't lie, I like not being a good boy. It's fun. And you start saying it over and over and you're like, I should probably be a good boy too. And, you know, it sounds dopey. No. No, that makes sense. It doesn't. I don't. That started it down the road. So I have a difference in faith now. And it's not because I've had any kind of, man, I wish I had one of those experiences people talk about where they're like, I know because this happened. I don't.

It was slow. It chipped away. Slow. And I think my wife did it too. She slipped it in everywhere she could but uh right but so you were saying the the the squad leader yeah the fact that he would ask questions respectfully of authority when things didn't clock to him and that he had strong faith those were things that wanted to be in a great leader yeah and um he didn't equivocate on anything he never hedged his bets he never said well if i say this right i'll navigate this and so you know there are guys that I served with at Range Battalion are, they're so freaking hardcore. And they've gone

on, they went on to be, most of them are all retired now because, you know, we're men of a certain age. And you know, hardcore dudes. And I remember thinking, I am cosplaying here. I've got the uniform on. I feel pretty good. I can meet standard.

And I'm keeping up with all of them. I'm doing everything a Ranger's supposed to do. But if someone said, Jim, do you think this is going to be the rest of your life career, I'd be like, no. I didn't, I didn't quite fit in. I fit in well enough and they made me a better person. And part of that making me a better person was my leadership that I had there, but also the, the team I was with, they were all good, like genuinely good people, rough, but good. They could be both. Yeah. Yeah. And they're my friends to this day. And this is in the 90s.

Yeah. Yeah. It was 93 to 97. I was in active duty. Okay. So the war is not hot, obviously. It's all pre-9-11. The 90s were until the end when you had the Balkan stuff, like, it was largely a pretty decent time. So are you on the base this whole time, or did you get to go places too? There was a lot of training. Went to Panama. We were deployed for Haiti, and that was probably the closest we ever got. We were ducks in a row at Guantanamo Bay. before Guantanamo Bay was a thing. Ducks in a row? We were on the airfield, ducks in a row, battled up, geared up, ready to go into Haiti.

And the mission was, what was it, restored democracy and then it turned into a poll democracy. And we're, well, why is it always about something with democracy? Oh, because you've got to have the, you know, the big patriotism, you know, and spreading the wealth, right? Because voting will fix it, right? Voting will fix it. Right. So we're ducks in a row waiting to get on these helicopters. helicopters to go in and the mission was pretty much just kill everybody but us. We're going to go into

the airfield and the presidential palace and fix things that went wrong. While that was going on, it was Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, and there was another guy there doing negotiations. And he was saying to the folks there, hey, listen, 82nd Airborne is in the air right now. Third Ranger battalion is in the air right now. And I've got first and second range of battalion on an airfield in Guantanamo Bay and they're coming. So you have a choice. Adher to Democratic elections

or, you know, we can't guarantee that anything will be good for you at least. So that, you know, restored democracy turned into uphold democracy. And we thought we thought, okay, well, that's it for us because Rangers aren't peacekeepers. But we were left in Gitmo for

I forget how long. But then a special forces guy got shot in the chest in a village called, man, Lechai, Lecai. In Haiti. In Haiti. And they had a special forces compound there. And they had like a Psiops team that was running around town saying, turn in your weapons at the weapons turn in point.

It was actually called a Psiop's team? Yeah, there was a Psiop team out there. I believe it was called. I mean, that's what we called it. And I was some dumb private that, Rojo. We got our war. I was that guy. Man, when are we going to war?

Yeah. So we got sent in as a show force. So we flew into Lecai and we were rotating in. And I was on what they called the C-SAR team as well. So combat search and recovery. So when VIPs were going and out, we were up in the air making sure that nothing happened to them. And if they did, we'd fly in and that was our job.

So we were there. for a few days putting up blocking positions we raided a hotel you raided a hotel yeah we pulled out i'm trying to think it was like 50 guys in the hotel and there was some and i don't remember all the details but um we got this is after lody is show and everything we got in five ton trucks went out to the hotel um no shots were fired which by the way is a feat for a range of battalion they went in they being us and i was on the uh recovery team or the uh search team for the folks that they pulled out. So we're pulling stuff out of them. And they had a team went in, pulled everybody out. And then we brought them back to the police station where we had

hold up and you got to see grown men bawling their eyes out when they saw where we were taking them because that was the police station where people just disappeared. And we didn't know that. I don't think we knew that when we took that as our sort of it worked. SF interrogators came and did their thing. But that's the closest I ever came. And it was it was an interesting time and it was a different time because you didn't have the global war on terror right totally it's it's like night and day yeah and ranger battalion is night and day the ranger battalion i grew up in was very difficult it was obviously harder when i went through but they always got to say yeah uh but it's a totally different animal now and so i'm just grateful

that i i got to serve with all these guys and they taught me leadership that leadership in the way they taught leadership too they taught you how to follow first and people don't go down that road far enough everybody wants to be in charge um they teach you how to be a good follower too like how to like part of being a good leader is actually learning that first step how do you support the leader respectfully ethically morally how do you make sure that that person is successful and everybody comes home and um so you learn to be a follower first You learn the job that is two jobs above you. You always learn the job that's two jobs above you because you never know what's going to happen.

And I always carried that with me from then on. And you don't realize what shapes you when you're a young man until you got to pull it out of your back pocket and say. And leadership in the agency is totally different. It's not this hierarchical chain of command. Like everybody goes around everybody else. and, you know, there's a, it's flat. Yeah, I was going to say, spies talking behind each other's back, that would never happen. No.

They don't do that. Right, right. They follow chains of command. But it taught me everything. I needed to know to have a strong foundation. And I'm, I'm grateful for all of them. Yeah, I also feel like that gives you a wildly different perspective than a lot of the people who end up in case officer jobs and CIA. And I've talked with guys in the military before.

have had to work with those types of people as well. And, you know, sometimes they work with them well and they get it. And then other times a major source of the frustration is they're like, you know, this person was sitting at Dartmouth four years ago. And, you know, I just did fucking 12 tours of duty and lost 12 of my guys along the way. And they're trying to tell me how it works in a place that they've never fucking been. But you understand having been in the guys who are, even if you weren't in there for the world for the war on terror and everything like you've been out there you understand how it works you

see how the military things you see how the tip of the spear works so that you can work with them well later and the the human factor too you know that just there there are people who are disconnected and um sort of an aside but related you know i got uh administratively demoted out of my job at the CIA because of my heretical views on COVID, right? So I got a two-year letter of reprimand, career killing, letter of reprimand. A two-year letter of reprimand? What was I mean? So for two years, I was not allowed to get promoted, couldn't PCS overseas, couldn't

TDIY, temporary duty in other locations. So couldn't go to training, couldn't do any of those things. I was also suspended without pay for a week over Christmas in 2021. And even though I had the year prior received four leadership awards, it was because I was a bad leader. Not because of COVID, not because they were fully aware I was organizing litigation. No, not that kind of leadership. No, no. Right.

No, the other kind. They sit down and shut up kind. So I got administratively demoted. and this is going to sound crazy too and it's sort of an aside we're sort of all over the place here but I'll bring you back but every person

should be demoted once in their life I agree completely everybody should be demoted like did I deserve to be demoted no fuck them but I did and I got put in a entry level

position and I was a senior manager running two full branches and yeah division yeah anyhow uh i was demoted and i'm not saying this to to wine i'm telling you that i got put in a branch and the branch manager was junior to me and he's like what the fuck do i do with you what are i going to do with you and um i said well just tell me to do what i'm supposed to do like your job is to tell me what to do give me my tasks i'm here to work and that's

part of my it's not a philosophy it's it's trade crap that's a humbling thing though to have to say that it well i told him just listen you're you're you're in charge right like i like i'll be glad to give you advice if you want it but you're in charge and my job is to make sure that i do my job and the people around me do it and so he did and it was great and the thing was i realized i had sort of drifted over time and some of the things i was saying to my staff when i was a manager I was like, holy shit, I had totally lost the beat on what it takes to be, what it takes to be a line officer, a junior officer sitting in those branches and you got some dipshit showing up going, why is this not done yet? Like what's what is what is up? And then you realize, oh, I know what's a giant bullshit bureaucracy that gets in the way of everything.

That's right. And so, you know, just as short aside, good leadership is getting demoted just once. Yeah. And I said, right when you said that, I completely agree. because I think it can mean more to that as well. More than that as well. It depends on the context. Like if you run your own business or something,

you technically can't really get demoted within your business. But you can have things happen to you. And I know everyone out there runs a business will be able to relate to this. You can have things happen to you that you objectively in no way deserve. You did everything to avoid. And it's just the universe fucking you a little bit. But then it creates an opportunity for you to kind of, you know, rise Phoenix from the ashes a little bit. And I think a big part of it is the point you're making

where you get down maybe to the bare bones of stuff that you didn't previously have time to do or you ended up delegating it off for a while and then you lost control of how it developed over time and maybe it's a certain details need to be done a new way. And now you get to see that from the inside out. I think that's huge. Yeah. And it also like every once in a while maybe just go straight back to basics. And like, I developed a skill set over a long period of time. And the skills I developed as a junior officer when I was grinding. I mean, I was grinding because I wanted to be, I did not want to be a bad officer. I wanted to be a really good case officer. Right. So you grind for those years. And then you start moving into positions where you're running programs,

you're running personnel, you're interacting with more senior people. So you're learning that skill set. it's easy to forget or conveniently forget some of those very basic trade craft, very basic skills that you should have known. The best thing that could have happened is one demotion just once, even if it's undeserved, even if it's the universe laughing at you. If you treat it with the right attitude, it's an incredibly valuable experience. That's the key. You have to have the right attitude with things.

It doesn't mean you're not human. happens you can't take a minute and be like what the fuck but then you got to get that out of your system say you know what i can't control this anymore so how do i make the best out of situation a minute it sounds like you did that pretty quickly yeah and you know the people i was working with over there i think they appreciated having somebody who actually had done the work in the field for years and having them sits shoulder to shoulder saying hey you know this might might be how you want to handle this this is how you write up this cable this is how you whatever So I was grateful for that too, you know, and I think that's if you are going to fight a system, you better learn to, you're going to have to learn to appreciate the things however small they are.

Give a little gratitude for the things that come your way. Yeah. So I learned leadership from the Rangers. I knew it was four years in there, 93 to 9. 93 to 97. It was a little less than four years. And then I stayed in the National Guard after I got out. Quick question, because you had said when you went into the Rangers and were in training, you're like, yeah, I'm not going to do this for the rest of my life or anything like that.

You knew that. But then as you went along in it, was there ever a point where you're thinking I'm going to stay longer? There was. For a very short period of time, I thought maybe I might reenlist because I was interested in the Special Forces medic career trial. Okay. You know, I always had a love of science. I thought, okay, well, this is a, this is something for a hot minute. But that, that changed. It passed. It passed.

You know, I started, I was like, listen, part of the problem with the military for me was if there was somebody who'd been in longer and that person had been in longer, they will always be in charge of you. And you have to be okay with that if you're going to stay in the military for a long time. time. My battalion commander was, um, at the time, I think he was lieutenant colonel McChrystal. Mm. And, um, you know, before he was general McChrystal. Yeah, like the Stanley McChrystal. Yeah. He's he's another part of that leadership piece there. When he showed up at second range battalion, people hated them. And you know why? He said, uh, we're going back to basics. I know all you guys want to do is do the special operations missions, the airfield seizures, the, the CQB, the clean

but we're going to do some patrolling and you're going to be in the field you're going to do raids ambushes recons you're going to go do those things and we we're like come on you know we want to do the fun cool stuff and um you know you instituted uh different physical standards um what was it a 10 mile ruck march every week wow 12 mile ruck march every month a 25 mile ruck march every three months and a 30-mile ruck march every four months. And you're still doing that schedule today, right? Right, right. Can you tell?

Well, I remember we all couldn't stand him because he was like, you're going to do this. And the thing was there was an incident with a bunch of privates who may or may not have been setting a fire on the back of a range somewhere at Fort Lewis. Nice. You know, may or may not have been cooking steaks up on a Friday night. And it's before midnight. And McChrystal shows up.

And he's doing his 10-mile Ruckmarsh because he's got to get it done before Friday, before the end of the week. He's doing all of these standards. When he instituted the first 30-mile road march, it was like, I forget the order, but headquarters element went first and Alpha, Bravo, Charlie.

He did the 30-miler with every single one. Fuck, yeah. Every week. That's cool. And so, like, I may disagree with McChrystal now on politics or other things, but, I mean, that's leadership. Yeah, that's, I completely agree.

You never want to do something that you wouldn't, you never want to ask someone to do something that you have not done yourself or wouldn't do yourself. I think that's just like a key tenet of anything. Yeah. And he did it. I mean, hard as nails. So that's where you learn leadership. It was a different kind of leadership at the agency.

You had to navigate a more complex hierarchy. That's the kindest way I can say it. But touch that later, I'm sure. We can. We can. And so when all this mess happened and I said, yeah, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to equivocate on, you know, be nice so that we can just get along and get past this. At that point, it for me was the most obvious example of this was a purge going on.

This was not motivated by government efficiency, which is what they claim. They said this is about government efficiency. Really? That was the final straw. There were other things. I mean, I haven't, I don't generally talk about all the time, but as far as I can tell, the 2020 election was stolen. And that's my opinion.

Based on what? Okay. So in my career at State Department and the agency, we've monitored elections overseas, right? Right. By monitored, you mean metal? No, no, I really do. Hold on. Hold on. I really do mean monitor. Thank you for that clarification. But we've monitored elections overseas, right? And I think they were monitoring the election in Guatemala in 1962, right? Yeah, there's Italy and 48. Yeah, before my time. A lot of monitoring going on. There's monitoring going on. But if the number of anomalies that had occurred in the U.S. election had occurred in one of these countries that we monitor, elections for, we would have demarched them. There would have been a nasty, sorry,

State Department would have sent a strongly worded letter remonstrating them for their poor behavior. That's called a demarch? DeMarch. We've been like, what are you doing here? These aren't free and fair elections. Is that a word? Or is that like a French guy? That's a word we use. That's a word. That's a real word. Okay. And we would have said, what are you doing? I mean, I know it. I mean, all of those anomalies. Did you know this at the time when you were looking at it in 2020? Yeah.

Yeah, I was looking at it was going, this is insane. What was insane specifically? Okay. Well, so I did have some cognitive dissonance surrounding it. So what was insane to me was especially after the election. After the election, everybody saw that curve. You know, the curve with a jump. And you're looking at you're going, that doesn't happen.

That's not possible. Statistically, what happened wasn't possible. There was those Bellwether, what is it, Bellwether counties, Bellwether counties, I think, where almost always it predicts who's going to win and that was wrong. And you're looking at all of it and I'm like, the election was stolen.

Now this is again, before I have been involved in any kind of litigation whatsoever, ever. I have no idea how that process works. Now I'm a full-fledged jailhouse lawyer. But at the time, I didn't know how it works. So my cognitive dissonance with the whole thing was everything I saw pointed towards a stolen election, but every time something went to the court system,

it never went anywhere. So I'm, you know, part of me was like, I know something feels wrong, but it's not sticking in court. And if there was something wrong, it would definitely stick in our courts. And so my cognitive dissonance at the time was, well, maybe there was some Black Swan event, maybe.

And I was going back and forth on it, but it sure felt like a stolen election. Were there people in CIA quietly having the same conversation as you? Yeah, of course. Of course. Interesting. I mean, people are people. And if you're having that conversation out on the street, you're having that conversation

with people you trust in the agency. Now, you better not be vocally pro-Trump because they will shout you down and they'll complain about politicization. Never mind that they'll talk about everything else on the other side of the aisle. How many people in, let's go back to 2020, 2019, 2018, 2018, 2020. 20, if you had to guesstimate a percentage of CIA that was anti-Trump and a percentage that was pro-Trump, what would you say? They are mostly anti-Trump. I couldn't, I don't think I could estimate a percentage.

Okay. But they are mostly anti-Trump, for the most part. And there are more anti-Trump in certain parts of the agency. And, you know, what parts? The parts that handle our relationship with Europe, for sure. Okay. that actually makes sense does it does doesn't it it's funny too

you'd spend time in the middle east and i did and you talk to middle easterners and they're like yeah we sort of like trump and um it was like it's like he didn't he ban a bunch of your countries from people coming in like how does this work they're like america needs a strong man and so i mean i'd actually had these conversations with them like yeah america needs a strong man and at the time you know i'm like okay you know giddy up you do

you do you think you know if you're looking at the different factions of anti-trump maybe that exist and again i'm very specifically asking about trump term one here because these are very different worlds to me completely different but you know people in cia like everywhere else they have politics maybe they're a little more jaded by it because they know what happens underneath the scenes for sure i think that's fair to say but they still you know they'll have a belief here and there they also know though like Joe Rogan used to have that famous line that I think is very accurate where he's like these people in places like that when a president comes in or a senator or whoever maybe not a senator because they seem to last all fucking their lives now but when a president

comes in good old Mitch McConnell exactly we just had him here a few weeks ago he wasn't doing too well but you know when a president comes in the people in the bureaucracy like the CIA they're like we were here before they got here we're going to be here after they leave so they kind of control the process. But among the people that were anti-Trump, I would imagine it also included people who were maybe conservative-minded or something like that. So what do you think outside of something like guys who were stationed in Europe, not like and that he didn't like NATO or something like that? What do you think drove so many people who maybe thought that way to be like, yeah, but not like this, you know? Let me break it into groups. Okay. And there's some people who are

conservative who have never liked Trump. The never Trump ruse that's what they call them. But some of them those are can be broken down even further some of them it's it's it's I'm not saying it's superficial in the sense like there's nothing to it but there's a superficial piece to it he's crass he's he's not likable like they may even in some cases agree and I've had these conversations with some of the things he was saying hey we need a wall like we got to have borders and they're like yeah we agree with it but he's so mean about it and you're like CIA that was their complaint And that's some of them, some of them. Wow.

Some of them are, are, are, were never Trumpers. And this one, this is one of the things during the first term that, that, that I remember when he was running, I didn't get my absentee ballot in time. So I couldn't vote for him. And, um, I didn't do the paperwork in time. I was overseas. And I was glad he got elected though. And it was funny. I had a conversation with a very close friend.

And, um, I had just done a trip, road trip in the U.S. And there were Trump signs. everywhere, everywhere across the Rust Belt, because I was going through the Rust Belt. And, you know, when I was talking about, they're like, who do you think's going to win? I think Trump's going to win. And they're like, what are you talking about? I said, I'm telling you, I'm from Ohio and Michigan. And I've, you know, I got family in Pennsylvania.

I just drove through this area and they all love Trump. I think he's going to win. They're like, you're crazy. Hey, blind squirrel. every once in a while. And so they, some of them don't like Trump because they didn't like his economic policy, which I, I, during the first term, he was talking about tariffs during the first term. Right.

And so I'll never be labeled a libertarian, but I actually appreciate libertarian philosophy, particularly on the economic side. It's a consistent, whatever you want to call it. And for me, tariffs was a way to put the weight of additional cost on the poorest part of the United States. And I didn't think it would work. And then it did. And maybe it's because our economic system is so fouled up. It's not really capitalism anymore.

It was a low bar. It's a low bar. Yeah. Okay. So it didn't, it wasn't enough tariffs to cause it. But it didn't actually hurt the economy. In fact, it helped a bunch of people. So one of my complaints that I had about Trump during the first term was I didn't like his economic policy, which we can talk about that a little bit more too.

But so they've got they've got those complaints. And I had a bunch of people are like, this economic policy is dumb. Like it's not going to work. And then it did. Or at least it didn't not work if that makes sense. It wasn't the worst thing you ever saw. Yeah. Certainly his foreign policy was not what a lot.

of people wanted to hear about NATO and paying their fair share and and um with that part they didn't want to hear I could totally see like the part where he's like we're going to leave it and stuff like that and they don't want to hear that but like the whole all right we're paying I'm making up numbers 40% of this when you know there's fucking 40 other countries in and we should be paying 20% it's about control. I mean maybe some of them weren't quite as maybe I'm mischaracterizing some of them But I did have this conversation. Like, if you're paying for it, you own it. Allegedly.

Well, I mean, we paid for the who, and we didn't own that. There's that. So there was a lot of different reasons. And it felt for a while, it felt like you had to, if you were conservative, you had to come up with some reason why you didn't want to support Trump. But deep down, some of them, they voted for them. They voted for them anyway. They just said the things that they had to say because they felt like it because there was this group think, pure group think peer pressure.

Yeah. Do you remember like a week into his first administration in 2017 he went to CIA by the gold star wall and did or by the star wall and did like an impromptu press conference there was streamed on every network? I don't actually. I was going to ask you if you were there. I know. I was overseas. Because you couldn't see any of the CIA people, obviously, they were keeping them off camera. They just had Trump. But it was interesting because you could tell there was a crowd there. And it was like kind of a mixed crowd.

And I was curious if you knew people who were there and what that might have been like. I do vaguely remember this occurring, but I was overseas at the time. Okay. And on that, so we had a very senior DNI official show up in a post that I was at while during Trump's first term. and we had a whole meeting with all the people that were there and this was a big big group of people we had like 50 people standing around talking to this person and um she was um she was a career person and she was speaking to the group from a very senior position and um she was entertaining questions so of course what if the junior officers uh pipes up with their

question. And this is on the economy sides. And before I, it's an interesting anecdote. Says, what's it like working for the Trump admin? And I'm trying to think this must have been 2018, I believe. 28. Yes, it was 2018. And I'm like, oh, why are you doing this? Like, we don't need to like, let's just, but she gave a really, really good answer. She goes, I have, I have, never seen an administration that looks at every question through an economic lens. This is the first one like this. So that hit me. I'm like, okay, well, not only is that a good answer, that's a fair answer.

Like she's not, and she was no fan of President Trump. And so I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm going to ask a question too then. I said, well, that's strange. If he's viewing everything through an economic lens, why? have I not seen a sea change in the requirements for me as a collector on what I need to be collecting? Because if every single thing he's looking at needs that economic angle, I should be seeing stuff coming from Washington saying, hey, folks, this is what the president wants. The president wants to know the economic situation. What are the levers? How do we make the most for America?

And for me, I'd be happy to see that. I would have been thrilled to see, even if it's not our priority collection requirement, seeing the agency actually respond to a new administration that has a completely different idea of what we should be doing. Never saw it. And I got this non-answer, just like, oh, you know, it takes a long time to steer a ship and blah, blah, blah. and that's the problem with the bureaucracy. Maybe it's true. Maybe it is,

just takes a long time. Or maybe there's sticks in the mud that are like, well, that's sort of dumb. We're not going to, right. So there was a lot of reasons why people didn't like Trump. Some were superficial.

Some were based, at least on the surface, it looked like they were based on honest questions about how Trump wanted to handle policy issues. But a majority of the, agency did not like him in my opinion from what I where I sat because you had people who they weren't allowed to talk about their love of Trump right yeah right see and it seems like in talking with you before camera and on camera now like going over this stuff one thing about you

is your I mean this is a compliment like you're a real observer of trying to be yeah we're sort of paid to do that yeah you are but you know how it is people can get really locked in their own world of just observing in their little zone what their job is, even if they're looking at every fucking detail on that, they're not opening up the scope off the blinders. You know what I mean? It seems like you're kind of looking at a lot of different places all the time. I try to. Thank you. I try to. And I think it makes you a better operations officer. I mean, your job is to sort of consider 90% of your job is risk mitigation. So risk mitigation means you have to consider all of the possibilities that are out there.

And that's, that was the whole mess in COVID too. Like when you bring it back around, like what finally was the nail in a coffin for me on like, yeah, I'm done playing these silly games. There was no consideration of the other, the other possibilities.

There was just shutting conversation off. And that was it. That was it. And, the friends I had prior to COVID, most of them were gone. All the friends I have now are from different parts of the administration that is currently here, different parts of the federal government.

And they were all people who were tested during COVID and made it through on the other side. What do you make of the fact that there were people that you had long-term relationships with in doing what you did for a lot of years in some of the most high-stakes environments who, based on one thing now won't talk to you anymore and you don't have a relationship with them? I'm radioactive. So I'm going to give them this. You know, like some people I deeply respect, they're like, I got to get the shot. Okay. I've got to.

I've got a kid in college. I've got. So some of these people, some of these people made an honest decision. They didn't want it. And they took it for reasons that are theirs and theirs alone. And the folks that took it. that took it that stopped talking to me, but we're talking to me. Some of them, I think they're just they don't want to have to deal with that decision. They want to put that behind. The people who

have always been against it, I mean, and that I used to have a relationship with that have since left me, I personally think, it's my personal opinion. It's hard for them to have to deal with the fact that actually let me break it into two there's two halves to this there is moral harm for everybody involved in this so you've got these managers who may have deep down thought it was a terrible idea and at the time most of my friends were all senior managers or higher and so they were forced to push things on people they didn't they didn't want to so if i'm trying to give as much grace as possible. Some of them probably feel pretty bad right now. And I do think some of this stuff is finally getting out to people inside the bureaucracy. So if I'm giving them grace, some of them,

they're hurt too. You know, they were hurt by the process too. They did what they thought would get them through it. They hedged their bets. They navigated things. And now they're not feeling good about it. And why would they want to talk to me about that? It doesn't, it's not going to fix anything. It's that they don't owe me anything. I don't owe them anything. The other folks, I think they wanted us out. I think they wanted to purchase. You know, people who have faith, they were being purged out. And this, this was, they were almost success. They were almost successful. Do you want to know why they didn't succeed? This is my working opinion now. Why? They didn't succeed because they're cruel. And imagine this. So whether you like Trump or

dislike Trump, what did you do this administration? He came in and said, we want to reduce the size of government because government efficiency actually gets better with a smaller government. So let's make Doge. Let's do these things. He offered very beneficial. He offered packages for retirement to get Now, just take this. Hey, you are a valued employee of the federal government. You have done everything right. Tell you what, here is this package where you will get paid for, I think the first package, like seven months of severance pay, basically, and then you'll get full retirement as long as you meet these standards. You're fantastic. We loved what you did. You're a wonderful employee. and you can go now and you can go now with a with a runway imagine if the Biden administration had done that

during COVID okay I said listen there's a pandemic we firmly believe that this is a very dangerous virus if you have religious beliefs we understand you do but it's not going to work for us so here's what we're going to do we're going to give you a seven month runway we're going to give you a very generous package we're going to help you get out the door and then you can go fight a job in a company with less than 100 people, because that's what was happening, with the OSHA mandate, they didn't do that.

They said, we're going to pursue you until you actually just leave. We're going to make it as miserable as possible every step of the way. If they had done it the other way, nobody would have started a lawsuit. There would be no legally defined harm.

So the cruelty with which they implemented this stupid policy, which had nothing to do with public health, forced all of us together. And Brett Weinstein, you said you just had them on. Yeah. He, and I don't know where he said it or when, but I remember there was a conversation he had,

and he said it was a tactical error. Because what happened was all these people from very different fields. Yes. All God drove together. All these people who had a moral backbone, who even if they weren't religious, they had discernment in terms of whether it was science.

You had like Ed Dowd, I've mentioned him before. Ed Dowd is like this guy who was, what was he, BlackRock? And then he's now a financial analyst and he's doing all this work. Steve Kirsch, who's punching, you know, punching his calculator when getting the numbers going, all these different fields. And he drove all of us together. And, you know, that's what happened within the federal government for the folks who fought the vaccine mandates.

We got a group of people from, at the time, was 34 different agencies and departments that all came to get. We never, I would have never met somebody from weights and measures. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like, I've got friends from Social Security Administration. I didn't want to know about Social Security. Like, I could give a shit. But there's good people there too, surprise, surprise, who do important work, who face the public every day and make sure that these old fellas who have not.

else actually, you know, get their, their payments so that they're not as much a drain on the economy. Like, these are good people. They drove us all together. So there's always a silver lining. You try and find it as best you can. And, you know, the sad thing is I actually want to get past the COVID discussion. I don't think we should forget it.

But I do want to get to the point where that is something that is documented. We know what went wrong. and we can talk about the real issues because COVID was just a symptom of some really big problems. Yeah, I think COVID because it was something the entire public dealt with, which meant there was a push pool also as it relates to the government with the public, that parts of it were also to divide people for sure. And there were lies and mistakes made everywhere. Yes, it was all these things, could not agree more.

It changed the world because it also broke a lot of people on. how they look at things and I don't mean that as a bad thing. It's like suddenly things that I'll speak for myself too that I took for granted in the past like yeah it's just how things are done or whatever. Now I'm like, wait a minute. You know what? Who told me that? Why did I believe that? Why did I say that? That makes no sense. And so that's all, it was all like a portal to a lot of other things that includes many things that happen behind closed doors, which I think is part of what you're alluding to here to where it's like there were accepted ways of how things were done or how we thought things may have gone down with stuff and therefore that's how we're doing things moving

forward that now you know if there's someone intelligent like you who's seen the facade come down in such a huge way during the pandemic you're going to suddenly maybe not suddenly but you're going to be much more apt to say wait a minute i was told this is how everything was was if it was like this for the pandemic, why should I think it was like that for all these things? 100%. Absolutely 100%. And if you just described my transformation, and there were key things along the way. There was more than COVID.

There was the election. There was the birth of my son. There was things you can't explain internal to the agency where you're like, I don't understand why we're not pressing China on. issues, for example. Okay? So I saw that firsthand where like, no, no, no, no, this is a, this is definitely a China issue. And you could say that about COVID too. I mean, it's a U.S. issue as well, but it's a China issue. So you see all these things. But for me, the exclamation point at the very end was when I was lucky enough to get selected to work for Director Gabbard over at the

dig. And so the director's initiatives group was brought in because director gabard former director gabard understood that the system was broken okay and a lot of us did too we had been through the system for five years at this point so she wanted to find the guys like you

who had been trying to say hey yeah yeah i mean she she picked people who knew where the bodies were buried and um we came in and um i will say we fully i fully believed i won't speak for other people I fully believed this administration was going to reform, radical transparency. The full meal deal that was promised, no new foreign wars.

Last I checked that almost all those promises have been broken. Okay. So, you know, the election of President Trump was a false summit. It was not the panacea. And, you know, I'm with an organization that's a 501C3, and I can tell you, we are not partisan in any way. We will, if the administration isn't getting it done, we're going to tell them they're not getting it done

and they're not getting it done. They either lied or just have been so incompetent. Well, I mean, the no new foreign laws was pretty clear. They lied. And so when you're at the dig and you're running, like we were brought in because there was weaponization that occurred and we wanted to get to the bottom of it. We wanted, you know, there's a ton of EOs that came out, anti-Christian bias, eradicating that.

And so we were given tasks. And at every step of the way, we had, and I'm going to call it the deep state, there's blob, whatever you want to call it. Okay. There's, the agency in particular did not want, did not want the results that they were getting. And I'll give you a good story on this. Trump, Russia collusion. and it's somewhat related to the ICIG, but let's talk in general. So like I've described to you a group of people that,

Feds for Freedom, that wants to go fight from the inside and fix things, and there's a process you need to do. You need to stick to the rules and say what you're going to do and then do what you're going to say. You're going to pay for it. You will pay for it. But that's the process so you don't make it worse.

Okay. And I firmly believe that. that is the only way we can fix some of these things that are, you have to have people on the inside who know that folks like you've platformed come out on the other side and still have a life. Not all of them. They've been destroyed. So we get in the dig and we're doing the,

all these things are getting divvied up. And, you know, Trump rush occlusion stuff. I'm going to tell you a story. And I got permission from Bill to tell this story. Bill. Just Bill. Okay. Okay.

Bill was a CIA officer. He's retired. He worked at CIA and he worked at HIPSEE. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the congressional oversight. Sorry. If I start using everything... I could see that you were going to do it. You're doing a good job with that.

Every time today you've started to say something and I'm like, clarify, you usually... I do this all the time. So please just jump in and see... Usually I have to jump in, but I can see you're on it with that. So Trump-Russia collusion. We cared about. about it. We believe that there was this whole bullshit story that director Gabbard got out the door. And that was on July 25th of 2025. Is that when that came out from Gabbard? I think so.

I'm trying to remember because she did things when she was outgoing this year after her husband got cancer. Yeah, yeah. Which I'm very grateful and we can talk about that too. Right. She did the Russia collusion stuff. I think you're, I don't remember. It was in July. But it was July of 2025. So here's what happens. The Diggs communications, they were being monitored by the CIA. Okay. And you're going to ask me, well, how do you know that they were being monitored?

I know because there were phone intrusions that were traced back to the CIA. When you say a phone intrusion? We were, we have secure phone lines and we were having conversations with whistleblowers. And there was phone intrusions. There were people on that line that weren't supposed to be on there. And you, how could you tell that? I totally believe you. I'm just curious.

Because they didn't do it very well. Their tradecraft was poor. So you heard that. Sort of, yeah. Come on, guys. At least don't give us the B team if you're going to do this. Give us the A team. Yeah.

Make it a challenge. So there was that. How do I know we were being monitored? The day after a whistleblower shows up, CIA whistleblower, he gets fired. then other people who showed up to talk to us they got communications from managers over at the agency about what they should do if they ever talk to the people at the day so we'll set that aside just go with me on this for now we know they're monitoring our communications and it's insane why they would do that because this is our administration this is the people who are coming in

to de-weaponize why on god's green earth would they need to do that so Trump-Russia collusion. There's a series of documents that are really important. And Bill, Bill had written one, a rebuttal to this whole Trump-Russia collusion thing a long time ago during the first Trump admin. And there were three copies of this report. Two were with Director Radcliffe during the first Trump administration. And one was in a safe at CIA headquarters.

But not when Radcliffe was the director. Because he wasn't the director. When he was the director of national intelligence. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. When he was the CIA. Got it.

And so, you know, we at the dig wanted to get our hands on that document and start looking at declassification because we knew it was a powerful document well sourced. Well, the stuff that we put out in the end of July, that's the stuff. Okay. Okay. How many people are working at the dig roughly? I can't say. Can't say that.

I can't say that. But it grew and there was divided tasks. People had different responsibilities. But so we're looking at it. The agency knows we're looking at it. Okay. So what happens is Michael Ellis, the deputy director, asks Bill to come in and help them do their declassification effort on Trump-Russia

occlusion. So Bill wants to get out largely what Director Gabbard put out. that is what he wanted to get out through the agency. He was working on it and he ran into bureaucratic obstacles. There was problems. He was trying to get it done. He leaves on a short vacation. And then in early July, that ICA that came out, that CIA put out first, it's a whitewash.

Okay. It's a whitewash. It's a, it's bullshit. It's not bullshit in the sense of what they said. They said, hey, listen, there's this list of anomalies. too much emphasis on one report. They didn't give access to all the information, to all the agencies that were involved, like all of these series of things that amount to terrible analytical tradecraft.

But at the very end of that ICA that came out, I think it was July 2nd, 2025. So before anything else came out, it says, but the premise was sound. why would they put this whole paper out that lists the analytical anomalies with at the very insane but the premise of this was sound

I can tell you why you're in a race against time okay and again this is this administration there's a couple reasons why one if Brennan is actually

going to have to go to court and defend himself. Well, you can take that thing and say, listen, there was some problems. But look, even this administration says the premise was fine. It's another reason. And this is my supposition, but Director Radcliffe had these documents during the first Trump administration. Why didn't he just release him then when he was DNI? Why didn't he just go through the process of getting those things released during the first Trump admin?

I don't know. I don't have the answer to that, but I think it's a really good question. That's a great question. Okay. And why would you need to do it? Why would you monitor the communications at the dig and try and get it out earlier? Well, because now anything that comes out after that is a refutation of whatever came out first. Okay. And when Bill saw what came out, when he came back and he said, what are you guys doing?

He had no idea the agency was doing this other ICA effort in addition to him being called in to run this declassification. on these documents that were a parallel process was going on over at under director gabbert. That is the definition of deep state. That is the definition of I'm going to protect our institution as opposed to protecting the Constitution, protecting truth, which again, I know people laugh. But if you're a CIA officer, your job is truth. Your job is to pull out from all of these lies. one little bit of truth you can present to policymakers so they can make good decisions.

You see how that's not truth, though? I do. I do. So we're going to pull out from all these lies. Let's give them the 1% little, you know, dog bone to chew on. I do understand. I really do. If you're dealing with misinformation and disinformation and underlying motives that you, it's always a guessing.

game if you're dealing with human beings and you you're trying to figure out whether or not their motives are pure or unpure or whether they're trying to influence as well as inform but your job is to take your best guess at all the information out there because even liars good liars have a nugget of truth at the center oh hell yeah so and you know CIA trains good liars so we should be good at picking that out it's called look at the shiny object over here is the definition of a limited hangout. Yep. Yep. And, you know, that, that to me encapsulates what has happened to this administration. I don't know if there was some direction from the top to make that happen, or if all the underlings

that are still there who were part of the reason we got to this point. Like all the people running the agency, the seniors, they were part of the person. problem. And what I find insane is, okay, so we got to a point where the agency is not doing what we need them to do, whatever you want to define that, however deep you want to go on that. But we kept the same people who got us in that position, and they're the ones going, I'm going to help you reform. Right. It's not going to change a thing. And this ICA is a perfect example. And it's a perfect example why you have to have people who, as much as it sucks, and as much as you know that you are Don Quixote swinging at windmills.

You got to have some folks stay inside the administration morally, ethically, lawfully, present truthful information and put their name on it and just own it. And you're going to get the shit kicked out of you. But there are still people out there doing that. And why are you able to? Because you did this privately in the sense that you did it internally for a long time when you had your issues. And then I guess some of it went public when you started the organization back then while you were still in. And now you've come out in June, I guess, retiring and you're talking about all this.

You know, these are these are some of the most powerful people and institutions in the world. Why don't they just put a bullet in your head? well i you know i didn't realize i was doing it at the time and like i said it's not a philosophy it's more like a tradecraft philosophy uh implies that there's some deep thinking involved and you know the closest philosophy i can say is stoicism but i'm not a stoic i bitch and moan i've sent angry emails and laughed as i sent it off uh you know and told people to fuck off to fuck off a stand and um So, you know, I'm not a stoic by any stretch of the imagination.

Ask the guy who went through Rangers, my Ranger buddy at Ranger School. That's not it. So again, I'm going back to this tradecraft thing. The reason they didn't just totally get rid of me is because my stated actions were exactly, exactly what I was doing in the agency. So when I was suing the agency, suing the federal government, I was sending group emails to a couple hundred people. and you don't normally, like you could get really sideways for using government information systems. Sure. Yeah.

But I said, hey, guys, this is how you legally go through the administrative process to get straight. So I know it's hard to believe, but if you're in the CIA and you want to sue the CIA, the CIA makes you have to go through an administrative process to approve your lawyer, approve what you're doing. And you have to tell, like if you're going to write an affidavit, you have to give them the affidavit first so that they can make sure there's no classified in it. That's what Linda Langley does. She just sits back there in the office and right.

So I said, okay, if we're going to do this, I'm going to be as transparent as a CIA officer can be. And I am going to send the group emails to the people are interested. And I'm going to give them a step by step to the point where I even took screenshots of the administrative things you had to fill in and say, listen, guys, first things first. We work for the CIA. It's a blessing to work here. We need to stay focused on our mission. But I'm sending this to you because if you do not believe that your religious accommodation or whatever is being properly processed, here are the steps you need to take.

And I just did it out in the open. I put my name on it because that is the only, like they're going to beat you up for it one way or another. I was not, again, they weren't giving me a two-year letter of reprimand because I was suing the government. It was because I was a bad leader, right? Okay. So that happens. You got to be willing to put your name on it. So you're asking, why did they let it keep going? Yes. They let it keep going because there was a legal basis for what we were saying. And there was actual, like, I don't think they thought our organization was going to get an actual injunction. Now, I had already been administratively demoted when that happened. I had already been suspended for a week without pay.

but I was doing exactly what I said and you know you have to have the right reason and I was watch I was trying to watch my P's and Q's I was trying to do everything by the book complete the tasks I was given has that ever mattered before um John did it by the book when he was in there and they still fucked them later yeah and this is where I come back to what your platform is done for people we know that you get fucked anyhow I mean take a look at John. Okay. It wasn't even, he didn't even get fucked by the same administration. He got screwed over by another administration that came later, right? That, well, the only thing I'd say to that is it was through the holdovers in about one guy I can say publicly because he's explained this is like John Brennan.

Yeah. He's the dude who caused the whole thing. He's the one, they have the emails. He's a due to cause a whole lot. Yeah. And like even Holder, who obviously was a pretty fucking corrupt guy. I can't name the last time. We had a good fucking attorney general ever. But like, Holder obviously did a lot of bad shit, but Holder on these emails goes back to John Brennan and says, no, we already investigated this, nothing to do there. And John Brennan, very Joe Stalin like, goes, find it. You know, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's the same levers. It's just they're under a different mass. It is, but the answer is they did it alone. They did it completely alone. I was not alone. I just happened to be the one sending the emails. But when you have 200 people on an

email and I say, hey, listen, this has just happened. You should file a fraud waste and abuse complaints if you don't like this. Here's my fraud waste and abuse complaint. You can copy and paste if you want because I do believe this to be wrong. And so there's there's a difference. All of these people you described, they're like truly brave people because they did it on their own. I was able to see that, hey, these people, at the time I wasn't thinking through it like this. I've had time to sort of contemplate. But I think we got through because there was a huge number of people. It was not just Jim saying this is wrong.

It was Jim writing the email that says, we say it's wrong. Got it. At the same time, though, Jim, Jack Kennedy had people behind him too. But the logic is you cut off the head of the dog that's barking a little too much for your taste. And that's why I wonder. You know, I have to ask these questions too. You're absolutely right to. And it's a good question.

I think part of it too is, and it goes back to, I don't know what you want. It's not stoicism. It's don't be a pussy. Okay, don't be a pussy. Okay, put your name on it. The problem is the other side, you've got maybe some people who are actually part of conspiracy. So people saying, yeah, we're not going to let this happen. We're not going to let this happen.

But a majority of the people, it's the culture and they're pussies. Okay. When push comes to shove, if they have a bunch of people saying, hey, this might be a, illegal they're going to be like uh you know and i'm talking about covid right now but it's applicable it's applicable okay and so don't be a pussy uh don't be don't don't vacillate if if you believe it put your name to it own it get in the ring and fight don't bitch about it when it's done because that's not going to help it nobody's going to want to join your cause if you want to call it activism it's not activism you want to join the cause of hey how about constitutional governance where like you can actually

get answers from the government that'd be nice um did i answer your question i think so i think so and i appreciate you understanding why i'm asking it because you know that that's something i've had to look at over the years too like this starts with nothing and my parents have and just kind of slowly build it up. And eventually you're getting a lot of different people to come in here. And then eventually you get some guys who literally, it's on their resume. They were in CIA or something like that. And I've had to learn along the way, like, all right, why is some of this happening? Who are some of these people? How many of these people still work with them and things like that? And these are legitimate questions. You have to ask because media, no matter what medium it's in, is certainly manipulable. Yeah. So for me, this is just how I've always looked at. I've talked about this a bunch. But you know, I much, I much prefer to talk to guys like you where it's open on the resume. We stick you on the camera. Everyone else out there can hear what you have to say and sniff through it or agree with it or somewhere in between and I'll let people be the judge of that. I get more concerned admittedly when I have someone random in here about some random story that has nothing to do with geopolitics or something and there's something that feels off later. where I'm like, wait, why was that person here? Did they just sneak something in there in the middle of that fucking whatever and they really

work for someone else? And you should. Unfortunately, I have a good reason to be suspicious about that. What that doesn't mean, though, is that when I'm talking to a guy like you, everyone on the spectrum from like Bustamante to Kiriaku, you know, from someone who's like died in the wall CIA to someone who claims to really dislike it. I always have to ask as best I can and I'm not a fucking mind reader. why is this person talking with me? Why are they saying the things they're saying? Why are they

maybe coming out and blowing the whistle on something like that? So for people at home right now who might be like, all right, wait a minute, this guy spent a lot of time, I guess since 2013 in CIA. And before that, you're in the Army Rangers. We still haven't even gotten to some of the stuff you were probably doing between then. So we'll get to that at some point, people. But, you know, suddenly he's coming out and he's saying all these things referring to you. that, you know, are not advantageous for seemingly on the surface for the government. Is there some greater reason for that? Are you someone that's kind of sent out to just make a lot of noise about stuff and distract from other things?

Do you understand why people have these questions? It's totally fair too. They shouldn't believe me. I mean this sincerely. You should not believe me. And I'm not saying it because I want people not to believe me. I do. But the government has lied so many times.

times now repeatedly and has been caught. You like even like I want you to believe that I'm telling you the truth and I'm giving you an honest story. And I've got somewhat of a record over the last five years now because I've been involved in suing the government. Right. So, you know, maybe there's a little bit of credibility with that, but like let's just take COVID origins. I went in front of Senator Paul's committee and I said things and I gave a written statement. Most people don't know. the agency called me the night before and told me I was not supposed to go and I went anyhow. And this is in March you did that? That was in May.

In May. In May. You know, they called the night before. I came in with the subpoena on the Monday of that week. I had received it the week prior. It's a longer story, but a pipe broke in my new condo and it was like $22,000 in damage. And so I'm, you know, taking care of that. I get the subpoena.

I bring it in on Monday morning. Sorry, and I want to make sure I stay. I sometimes go and. Yeah, that's all right. I'll pull you back. Pull me back. So I get it. I give it to a Monday morning.

And I'm like, here's my address. I moved, by the way, and the roof caved in because it flooded. Here's my phone number. You already have it. You already know my email. You can call me anytime. Here's the subpoena. I intend to go.

Boop. Send it. I send it to my supervisor, my new supervisor, because I had left the DNI. I was on loan on a joint duty assignment, came back. And I said, can you please make sure it gets to the office of general counsel? And again, this is my whole philosophy. Put your name on it. Own it.

And so I did. And I didn't hear anything all Monday. And I'm like, I for sure expected screeching and pulling of hair and nothing. All day, Tuesday. And again, Wednesday is the hearing. And it's Tuesday. I leave. I guess I'm going to the hearing, and I pick up my lawyer from the airport, who I, at this rate,

will keep her employed forever. And so we're talking about things, and I'm going to drop her off at her hotel. I've got my phone up on the car window. And the phone rings. It's 7.30 at night. It's like less than 15 hours away from the hearing. And it's the Office of General Counsel at CIA, and they say, hey, Jim, yeah, we're calling because we're going to have to direct you not to appear tomorrow.

And I said, yeah, well, I'm going to have to direct you to my lawyer, but you're in luck. She's in the car with me. So I give the phone to Carol. Carol says, so I love Carol. We got to get you Bluetooth. Shit. Yeah. I give the phone to Carol.

Carol's like, so can you explain how Jim is supposed to ignore a Senate subpoena, you know, because that's sort of a requirement. Yeah, you've got to go. They probably laughed at that. Oh, it was uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. What's that? Senate subpoena.

Yeah, and we can have talks about oversight, too, if you want. But so she's like, well, tell you what, why don't you get your stuff? They said, well, you know, we can't. We can't. There's case law and there's regulation, I think is how they said it. She's like, great. Just send an email with the regulation that affords you the right to stop someone from appearing at a Senate subpoena.

And they're like, well, tell you what, call me back. I'm going to my hotel. I'll call me back. And she calls me up later from her hotel. And she says, Jim, they don't want you going. They won't send the regulation because they say it's classified. And then they said that you have to get your stuff cleared. And I was like, Carol, you know this is bullshit because they had all day Monday to hit me up.

They had all day Tuesday. And now they're doing it after hours, 7.30 at night. the night before. Now it's 9 o'clock at night. And I don't want to go until there's some people who helped me out. I called some friends about getting things cleared in time and it didn't get cleared in time. And I went anyhow. They said I broke my NDA when I did it.

Because you were still with CIA. Yeah. Yeah, I'm still employed. That was in May. And I'm like, I told Carol, listen, your job is to make sure that when I leave the hearing, I'm not leaving in handcuffs. That's it. That's the only, I'm going.

I'm going to this hearing because this whole lie about COVID origins, how we can't, even with the full weight of Gabbard at that point, pushing, pushing, we couldn't get anything out. I mean, I saw this whole hope of reform and this hope that we would have radical transparency. It just shit the bed, okay? And this was, it felt like the last chance to actually like do the right. thing. Let's do the right thing. Congress voted unanimously. COVID Act of 2023 release it all. Okay. You have people saying in this administration, we're going to get to the bottom of this stuff. And despite Gabbard being in charge of the DNI, she's still fighting every day to

try and get this out. And unbeknownst to most people, her husband was very, very sick. And the people who want to call it some political machinations, they can shut the fuck up. So I believe that. I do too. A hundred percent and I'm not like in her inner circle, no that. Anyhow. So I went anyhow and I want them to believe me, but they shouldn't. Anybody can say anything at this point that no one gives a shit if you lie to Congress.

Nobody cares. So like. Yeah, we have a new water gate every fucking day. Yeah. Like, and it's like no one does anything about it. So I want you to believe me, but you shouldn't. What you should believe are documents. And this is why I'm very grateful for Director Gabbard's work because right up to the very last day she fought to get stuff out the door.

The transparency we were promised, even if other people aren't going to keep the promise, she did her best. On the last day, a bunch of COVID stuff got out. It doesn't provide support for everything I said in there. but I think it's enough that people can look at it and they can compare. These are the documents. So don't believe me, believe documents. And that's my watchword for everyone. Like, I want you to believe me, but.

I will give her this too, because she also released the Ukraine Bio Lab stuff as well. It's something. And she was really, you know, we hit her hard during some of the stuff that happened post-Iran because she stayed in there. the one thing I did say while I was doing it is she was really stuck between a shit and a fart because she had basically

said we're going to be against all this stuff and then the minute it happens and they'd clearly locked her out of the room I do believe that she either says well this isn't what I signed up for and quits and gets blame for like leaving when the going gets tough or she stays

in there and toes the line publicly which to people they don't give a shit what's happened privately they only hear what happens publicly and she looks like a cuck yeah you know is a very in in hindsight i will say is a very hard place to be i don't and this is a good this is a good segue to talk about joe kent and i i want to talk about joe kent because he's super important to this story let's do it um i was mad at gabbert too i was like you're in charge here why can't we get this done now i was hired because i execute things you know, my job, my entire career.

Yes, things. Execute projects to their completion. So. I don't know if that's a code word or not. And I got to watch that in here. It's good. I'm glad you're, hey, push, push, discern. Yeah.

So, you know, the, the, you know, I was mad too. I was like, listen, you hired us to help get this done and we're not getting it done. Like you gave us a task. We want to get the task done. Joe Kent, in my opinion, did one of the most honorable things you can do when your position is a senior executive like that. It used to be a normal thing. What's his name? Secretary of State for Carter.

Cyrus Vance. Cyrus Vance. Okay. That guy, he didn't want to do the Iran. rescue mission. And so he resigned in protest publicly, respectfully. Wait, the Iran rescue mission that the Reagan administration negotiated underground secretly with Iran to delay until after the election so they could win the election then look strong? I think. You know, I'm again, like I'm remembering. And this guy didn't want to do that rescue

mission? I think Cyrus Vance went on record, as I recall and said, no, I don't want to do this. I'm, again, I'm a science major, not a history major, but there were other people in the past who have resigned in protest. That's an interesting thing to protest, but okay. Okay. Yeah, no, I got you. You've got, you've got a belief. Got a belief and you do it, you do it publicly. Joe Kent is in a position to do that, and he should do that because that is the honorable thing to do.

It's not dishonorable and it's not subversive. what would be subversive is saying I disagree with what President Trump is doing and but I bet you if I just stick around longer I can I can maybe move things around and you know affect this yeah this thing okay so I think some people thought that that was what Gabbard was doing okay I don't think so I don't and there's a difference here and I also want to talk about it from those people are in different positions. They are people who pull levers, whereas people like me, I'm a gear. I'm in the machinery. If I all of a sudden up and say, screw you, I'm out, you know, I could do that. Is it honorable, maybe? But our job is to make sure that we push up information to people, put our name on it and say, this is what we think. This is our honest opinion. This is not politicized. This is not, if you just up and leave, first of all, it looks like you politicized it because you're not in a position to like, who gives a shit? I remember there's a guy early in my career kept saying, I'm so mad, I'm going to quit.

I'm going to quit. And finally a bunch of us just said, fucking quit. No one cares. No one cares. You're part of the machinery. Right. If you're going to quit, you've got to be somebody who has the gravitas. And when they do that, it comes downhill to the folks like me, the machinery.

and we may have been harboring silent questions. We're like, oh, gosh, it seems bad. Well, then you validate it for us. And it steals our resolve to do the right thing, not be subversive. It's not, I'm not talking about the resistance with the blue hair running around going, ah, you know, it's illegal to, you know, not let us have our trans bathrooms, whatever. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about we're hired to be professionals.

So all of a sudden it's like, listen, the professional thing to do is make sure they understand. The person who makes the decision understands all of the facts. It would not be honorable for me to like, well, I resign in protest. Yeah, no one cares. No one cares if Jim resigns. They care of, they care of Tulsi Gabbard resigns. Because they're public fit. You can see who they are.

Yeah. Now, with regard to Tulsi Gabbard, she's also a miller. military leader and she you can't separate and so I mean so is Joe Kent obviously yeah you know there there's a certain amount of like listen unless it's 100% um a violation of the constitution in law there's wriggle room to make a decision on what you do and and we all didn't know as well that there was personal stuff going on for director gabard sure we would have never known so maybe she just did the couch and said listen I've i'll finish up the last few things and and then when it's time to help my husband.

I don't know. This is all speculation. It's possible. I do remember the day after Joe resign, I think it was exactly the day after he resigned. She had to go in front of Congress for like the hearing on the Iran war. And, ooh. She has no friends.

You could see it in her eyes because she's like, I am so fucked right now. Like, because I can't just say like I resign right here. Joe just did that yesterday. No fault to him. Yeah. But it was just a awful spot to be. I would never want, like, I can't imagine a time where I'd be like, you know what I really want to do?

I want to be at that job. Right. You know, maybe there's a time. But right now, she had a no-win situation. And I, much to my discredit, I judged her very harshly during the process because I was like, why aren't we getting this done? You hired us to get this done. We want to get it done. She had, she was working behind enemy lines.

She had no friends, no friends. Yeah, can I ask a question on that, actually, on the on the role itself, DNI? Yeah. So the way we're told to understand it in the public is that that position oversees all the intelligence agencies. Correct. Effectively. So this might be an oversimplification, but if you look at the organization chart, therefore, a guy like John Ratcliffe who runs CIA reports to Tulsi Gabbard. That's okay.

Yeah, this is exactly why I'm asking you. Yeah, let me, so after 9-11, after the failures of 9-11, which I'll know their story, but, you know, they created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And the point was to integrate intelligence, all-source intelligence into products that would be provided to the executive branch and the legislative branch that combines all of it so we don't miss anything. And those statutes have been read in different ways. There were a couple other people along the line that wanted to do what Director Gabbert did, which was exercise all of their statutory authorities to the absolute limit. Press the limit on what the lawyers believe that statute means. So what happens when a new log is put into place,

or they decide that they're going to create a new office like this? All the lawyers get together beforehand and afterhand. Beforehand, they say, here's a statute. This is what we think we can do. Afterwards, after it's passed, they're like, here's a statute. Here's what we think we can do. And here's your authorities. There is always, like the statutes are always written with just enough, particularly with

the intelligence community, with just enough wriggle room that it leaves it up to the lawyers to interpret. This goes back to Snowden as well. Take Clapper. Clapper lied to Congress. 100%. Lied to Congress. Why do you think, other than the fact he's part of the club, why do you think he wasn't prosecuted?

Well, it's because lawyers got together when the Patriot Act was passed and said, here's what we think, here's what we think this all means. This is the statute. This is what our authorities. This is what we can do. And the lawyers from the agencies went to the oversight and said, this is what we think we can do. We think we can collect all that metadata. We think we can collect all this information. We think that gives us the authority to do all that.

The reason Clapper's not in trouble is because the legislative branch was in on it. Right? So, you know, it's all a big club and we're not part of it. Is that an answer, I guess? Yeah, because what I was getting at is even if it's hypothetically on paper, you know, all these agencies are going to report to her. If someone that they don't like comes in there, Yeah, they're going to treat it like a mushroom. Feed it shit, keep it in the dark. Yeah. And how what's Tulsi Gabbar going to go to every single compartmentalized station of all these different agencies and be like, so what are you guys working on? You can't do that. So this is where I was cynical coming in on to the new administration with when when Trump two was coming in. I was a little cynical on the Tulsi Gabbard position because I'm like, how why would the bureaucracy give her any?

They know that she's in there to like reform them. They won't. And you're right to be cynical. And I'll give you another example. So why'd you join up? I joined up because it was one solid chance. And so far the CIA had. CIA in my appearance, my experience had failed on all those fronts.

And Gabbard, Gabbard's unique. So Gabbard is a unique animal being brought into the administration. Sort of like Joe Kent. She was not part of the government during the whole COVID. debacle. Okay. So she doesn't have any of that baggage. So she comes in clean on that. Also, she wasn't part of the government during the whole January 6th bullshit. Okay. So she doesn't have any of that baggage. She is quite literally not carrying any of the stuff that makes you question all these other knuckleheads that are part of the government who made decisions. Like she's, it's not the right

or but clean on that front. I don't have to agree with everything that she's ever said, and I don't. But I saw Gabbard as somebody who, and I still do, somebody who wants to do the right thing and does not have all the baggage that some of these other losers have. So I guess, you know, you have high expectations for folks and I had high expectations for director gabbert but i didn't put myself in her shoes when i was upset uh that we weren't getting everything done by high expectations though based on the beginning if your answer though could that be like hey we're going to move the ball 1% here and that's way better than the 0% that's been

moved for a long time i was hoping for more than 1% okay but you understand what i'm saying i do you weren't sitting there going we're going to change half the game no no not at all but uh we had been given authority authority to pursue and make sure that president trump's EOs were actually being executed. Okay. And so that, that authority allowed us to get access to the information we knew. It allowed the Trump-Russia collusion stuff to get out. And I think that was a wake-up call.

Because when Director Gabbard, this is just my personal opinion, I don't think the IC was ready for Gabbard when she showed up. They were still a little scared of her because there is statutory authority and there is a gray area on how you interpret it. And when we first started, I think she did have a, have the agency a little bit on their back heels. But then they got their footing and they remembered, oh, that's right.

We've got all the deep state people. We can make this happen. We can stop this. We'll send you the report we want to send you and the ones we don't, we won't send you. Yeah. And so by statutory authority, depending on how you read it, she has control of all the IT

systems in the intelligence community. That she knows of. That she knows. Very good point. That she knows of. because there's not like some super user at the agency who has access to every single compartment. Yeah, she doesn't know the guy at NSA that invented Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah.

See, that's good job. You slipped that one in. I didn't, that was not an agreement. So, no, she doesn't know that guy. You trying to get me in trouble? That's what I'm trying to do. It's what I'm here for. All right.

It makes me like you more. Um, so the, she doesn't, she was in a losing position, but she fought to the very end. And I don't view what she did any less honorably than what Joe Kent did. Okay. And, um, but if, if they had stayed for some of the reason other than, like, they're like, I'll stick around and I'm, I'm going to make some stuff happen, even if Trump doesn't like, I'm going to, well, that's subversive. And the same thing on my side.

I was saying that a group of us, like folks from Feds for Freedom in general, the folks that I'm now surround myself with, they were very pleased. Even if they didn't agree with Joe Kent, nobody said, well, that guy clearly is just hates Trump. Nobody read that statement, at least the people around me. There's a brilliant statement he put out. Nobody read that and said, boy, that guy's a subversive asshole. No, no. And in fact, the response that came from the administration was so bad, even though. Even though. the folks who I know that are in favor of the Iran war. And I know people who are. I'm not. I was told no more foreign wars. Sort of what I voted for. We're not voting herself out of this problem. They saw that response and they're like, what is he doing? Why on God's green earth would he attack this man, meaning Trump? Why would he attack Joe Kent? And that response is, It's the dumbest thing you could do. It was so dumb also because Joe Ken is a real Marcus Aurelius.

He's a better man than me. He knew it would be coming and he said that. And every step of the way, no matter what the attack has been, he's never gotten angry. He responds to everything. He will, I mean, he'll go respond to every tweet if he has to, but he does it in the most bit by bit, case by case way. Hey, I see why you're saying that. This is why I think. And like it, I will say this when.

I knew it was coming, but when Trump, like, hit hit him over his wife, like a week or two later, his deceased wife. It's disgusting. I saw red when I saw that and I don't know how Joe, like, good for him, man. Yeah, no, I'm the guy who would send the angry email and tell him to go fuck off. Yeah. So good on him. He's a bigger gentleman than I would be.

And to really, I really want to hammer this home. We need Joe Kent's. We need people who act on whether you agree or disagree. We need people to do what he did because deep down in the recesses of the deep state, the bureaucratic governance, there are people who agree with him. But they don't know what to do and they don't know what right looks like. That's right. And so for me, I was like, holy shit, that is what right looks like. And I know for a fact that that act resulted in people within the federal bureaucracy saying,

you know what, I'm going to make sure that all the facts are being pushed up as far up as possible. And I'm talking about, like, Fence for Freedom has people at Department of State, Department of War, CIA, NSA, NGA. They saw it and they said, we are not going to sit idly by and not provide information. that is truthful. And it's guys like Joe Kent that catalyze that. And it's only folks like that thing. Like I can't catalyze that kind of action. No one's going to be like, oh, Jim, just complaining again.

Let's do the right thing. Right. You know, this has been in the back of my mind throughout this conversation. Then you even said something maybe 10, 15 minutes ago where you were referencing it a little bit or on the outside of it. But let me start by asking it this way. What was your opinion of Edward Snowden in 2013? I thought he was a traitor.

Okay. That's the truth. I don't, the stories I've heard about Edward Snowden inside the building and I, they're all second third hand. And they're all from people who, uh, who are normies. Let's just call them normies. Okay. They have those, huh?

Yeah, we got tons of normies. I used to be one. I used to be so happy when I was a normie. Whitting normies or unwitting normies? I was an unwitting normie for a long time. Okay. Thank God we're here for democracy. So I was an unwitting normie, a slow learner.

Let me talk about it this way. Let's do a thought experiment. Let's imagine. So I'm talking about using systems that are in place, administrative systems in place to express your discontent with something. Your employee, employer disputes or whether or not you think something illegal is happening, fraud, waste, abuse. I think it's hugely important we use those systems. And I don't know Edward Snowden's full story. I don't know if he used any of those systems, some of those systems, but let's do a thought experiment.

Let's say he did. He used every available administrative dispute complaint available to him. And he did it by the book. He went all the way through the process and he even got to the point where he goes to the inspector community or sorry, the ICIG. So the inspector general for the whole community. He lodges a complaint. He says, I think this is credible and urgent and I want to report it to the Senate Select Committee. and I want to report it to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

He does all that. Now, during the process, this is a long process, by the way. So you're probably, first of all, you're probably filing some complaint with OGC where you're like, hey, listen, this doesn't look good. I'd like to talk to you about this. Then you start maybe with Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties, since it's a metadata issue and collection on Americans. You start filing these complaints.

It goes to the process. months and if you're lucky months and months and months and he's like this is wrong let's fix this he gets to the point where he's like i'm going i want to report it to congress and senate we just talked about this why didn't clapper why didn't clap or get arrested or whatever for lying to congress and the guy who asked the question by the way i forget who the congressman was but he was on that committee where he had been briefed on this before that hearing and knew that the answer was a lie while it was a lie and didn't stop him. Right. So Edward Snowden would have been doing it all alone and he would have, um, he would have experienced a shit ton of ass pain through the whole

process. And then he would have been like, but I, I know it's right. So I'm going to report it to Senate and Congress and would have gone there and done nothing, done nothing. So he would have never been rewarded with some kind of justice at the end of the day. That's right. Okay. So he does all that. He's not rewarded with justice, but he's doing the right thing and he's using the process. Again, the process is broken.

I've said it, and this is not going to make it easy for me to justify why we need to use the process. But I would want him to use the process. That said, knowing what we know now, and knowing. only what I know about Edward Snowden's second third hand. He would have been fucked either way. Okay. He would have been fucked either way.

So, you know, it really comes down to details. I don't have access to like the whole file on Edward Snowden and what he did or didn't do. But the truth is he probably would have been fucked either way, whether you use the system or not. You have watched my show. I've said that phrase. So many goddamn times. Okay, no, I've watched a, I didn't catch the Snowden stuff, but I've got the 14 or so episodes. You nailed it. Yeah. So, okay, well, now, now you're going to ask me.

When did it change? When did it change? And why would you advocate using a system that would have fucked you either way? 100%. Fair questions. When did it change with Edward Snowden? I'm not sure, like, at the time, I started actually going through the system myself. working the system and seeing how the process works. I was able to view Edward Snowden as not just somebody who all my normie friends said was a traitor. I viewed it as, okay, I don't know what he did or didn't do behind closed doors. I don't know his full file. But I do know he would have been fucked if he had used the whole system. And so it changed about the time.

And again, this is the sad part. it only changes when somebody experiences their own pain point and also like like it or not i hope that helps i hope it helps like i'm telling you it's not flattering to me to say hey i didn't really learn until somebody kicked me in the nuts no but it's human and i and i'll and i'll defend this because it's just something anyone can fall trap to regardless of what they do but there's a phrase i use a lot that i'm very self-aware of and it's one of my favorite things that's one of my favorite things I say because God damn is it true. It is really, really dangerous to fall down the slippery slope of saying, if I were blank, then I would definitely blank when this situation is a very

serious situation. You don't fucking know till you're in it. And that doesn't mean you write away, write off things when someone really does something where it's like, man, I really think that was the wrong decision and say, well, you just don't know. I'm not saying like it needs to be an extreme, but there always has to be that doorway of like, hmm, at least the understanding that that's a really tough spot to be in. And I can't say for sure how I would have handled that. So am I going to take this big rock and throw it as hard as I can at another glass house from my own glass house? Yeah. You know? Yeah. You know, it's funny. I expected you to ask me that question about Snowden. Not because I caught it on one of the other episodes. Because I had never been

asked about Snowden until 2023. I went to Freedom Fest in 2023. Longer story, but I met what's his name, Winston Marshall, banjo player. Oh yeah, the dude from fucking Mumford and sons. Yeah, I met him. First thing he asked me, because I was already like, you know, I had a resume out there. I was looking for work. I didn't know what I was going to do. looking for work I can move some band shit like uh

yeah no one never no one ever uh describe me as a musician um and so the first thing you ask me was like oh what do you think Edward Snowden and you know I remember

laughing about it because like we're we're hired because we're supposed to be able to think on our feet quickly come up with decisions quickly and I've I just completely fro you can't talk about Snowden It was 2023. I'd already been, had the shit beat out of me from the agency.

And I was still like that visceral. Are you going to talk snow kittens? Why are you asking me that? You just start short-circuiting. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like some things, it takes a while to de-institutionalize yourself. Ain't that interesting?

It does. It does. And now that you're outside of it for the first time technically ever. Yeah. For not a long period, right? It's been three months. It's got to be strange to think back to the things that you just. were like locked into right it's such a high place we should be able to talk about edward snowden and

what the implications are we should be able to talk about um you know whistleblowers who've come forward whether whether they did it right or wrong okay whether they use the system or not um my point is a lot of these people came before us the people you've put on the program they did it all by themselves they had no support right um the only reason i'm not just moving on after all of this is because we've had a ton of whistleblowers hit us up. And they're asking for help. And I'm not going to give names. I'm not going to talk about it because they, please, if you're, if anyone hears this and wants to do not send us classified at all, you're going to get us in trouble. But we've had a bunch of people. In fact, whistleblowers that are out there now,

they were part of Feds for Freedom from the very beginning. Guys like Kyle Serafin, FBI, Stephen Friend, FBI, Garrett O'Boyle, FBI. I sort of count myself lucky to have these surly refusenics showing up at her doorstep saying, hey, we agree with you. We believe that we believe that what happened was wrong. And I think one of the things that I've had the pleasure of working on, and again, when we started Feds for Freedom, it's just, it's all volunteer. Like the whole thing was volunteer.

So we'd take in these whistleblowers. We'd link them up with, most of them are not successful. For the most part, all of them are not successful. But we link them up with legal services. If they need us to quietly carry unclassified information to legislative offices, we've done that. We've done it because it's the right thing to do. They come to us for help. And I'm not done helping yet.

I'm like, when I made the competitive. In comparison to Don Quixote, sometimes you've just got to swing at windmills, even if you know it may not be successful. What I think is valuable is like we've seen now individuals make it through and now we've got a group of people. And they're in every part of the federal government. And we're all cross talking. When a problem comes up, we've got check. We're crossed on. We're like, how are we going to deal with this?

What is the mechanism we can use to stop this from happening? because it's not because we're trying to be subversive, because we want the federal government to represent the American people. Is there any way to actually accomplish that, though, without color and outside the lines at some point? And maybe in answering that question, just to be clear, so people understand, do you now not view Edward Snowden as a traitor and understand what he did? I understand what he did. I don't know. It's full file.

So if there was some traitorous act, I have no idea about it. But from what I know, I can't. Assuming there wasn't. No. He would have been fucked either way. Okay. And I know that's a qualified statement. But I found that I have to be very precise.

I found I've experienced now through trial and error when you're fighting to get truth to policymakers, truth up the chain of command, say the things you want to say. If you're not very precise, they're going to destroy you. Right. for no reason other than they just they hate what you have to say. So on your own stuff, though, you know, could you understand why some people out there might be thinking, you might reach a point or maybe you're already at it

where you do need to color outside the lines, meaning like, and again, I'm not trying to get people in trouble right now. Yeah, I know, I know. And personally telling them to send classified information or whatever, but I'm saying like, it might take something like that for you to actually get some of the hurdles jump that you want to jump. No, I hear you. So the whistleblowers who come forward, we're learning quite a bit about how to handle these things.

And the alternative outlets to get things done, you know, we've had people come forward and say, I want to go to the press. And that's happened. And I have told people, this is my honest opinion, if you want to be a whistleblower and you want to report wrong. doing, don't do it. And I'm being serious. My first advice to them when they come forward is like, don't do it. Like, unless you are ready for this, do not do this because we, we can be in your corner. Unlike, you know, the government has all these, these mechanisms in place. That's a good sell. They have all these mechanisms in place to help you out. Well, it's not helping you out. It's helping the, the system out. If you come to us, we will help you. We will be the co-

in your corner. You can get in the ring. We're going to, you know, patch your head, make sure you got water. And if you're getting beat up between rounds, we're going to, you know, do whatever you got to do to fix you up. But you have to take the punches. So if you want to do it, this is on you and you need to know that up front. And I'll give you a bunch of examples of people we know firsthand that have got the shit kicked out of them. So if you want to do it, my first advice is don't. Don't. Come back in a couple days and talk to me again. If they come back in a couple days and they say, yeah, we want to do it. I want to go to the press. First of all, that's dumb. Not because the press can't fix things. Ashley, and we can talk about the press. Oh, you know all about that. I do. Yeah, you know I use press to fix it.

You could, the press is a way to do it. But the problem is, and I've said this before, it's Russian roulette. Because the press is controlled. Okay. There's not a free press. Like that, last like you've got all these systems in place the last final you know if you want to do the right thing some people say okay well let's go to the press and i'm going to tell all okay if you go to the wrong person from the press they might call your agency back 100% okay and i tell them that too like hey listen i am not going to stop you that's what you want to do i don't i don't advise it um and it's not because, hold on, and it's not because I'm scared and it's not because I think that, you know, how it's wrong to do that. It's because you would definitely be destroyed. And if you want to do it,

you can do it, but you're going to pay a price. It's going to be bigger than if you tried using the system first. So my advice is try and use the system first. Because at the end of the day, if you go to the press or if you decide, like in my case, and by the way, I went to our oversight In my case, Rand Paul is not oversight for the intelligence community. It's part of the reason the CIA went apoplectic. You want to use another outlet like his gag, the House Security Government Affairs Committee. I encourage people to ex-and, before they make that decision, which, by the way, is against the law, you better try and exhaust everything else out.

But people have come to us and said, I'm just going to go to the press. I'm like, you're sure. you sure it's also a great psychological cell on your part too because they come to you and you say don't do it that's a challenge that makes me want to do it oh that is not like i'm gonna don't don't come do not i'm gonna come you know what i mean if you ever seen that meme i have i have yes i have no you're right there is there is a cell with that it's not intentional i'm i'm doing it sincerely because people have been destroyed yeah and i've seen it firsthand i've seen it firsthand i've seen it firsthand Take take a look at Stephen Friend.

Stephen Friend. FBI whistleblower almost got a job back. He did go on a podcast and say some things, but the FBI whistleblower. Garrett O'Boyle. What happened to Stephen? Did he go to jail? No, no, no. He didn't.

He's been financially ruined by this. Now, he still gets to go to sleep at night knowing he did the right thing. Yeah, that's huge. You got to be able to look yourself in the mirror. Well, and that's the thing like it's also addictive when you start doing the right thing. you realize, hey, wait a minute, I'm doing the right thing. This is, this is a good thing. Your soul is cleansed.

It feels good. And it gets easy. Like at first, this whole, not a philosophy that I have about not being a wuss. It was hard at first because it was like, oh, yeah, do I send this email? Do I really send an email to, you know, the coup, the number three in the agency? Every time you do it, it gets a little easy. It gets a little easier. And every time you see other people do the real.

right thing, it gets a little easier. Again, going back to Joe Kent. So you're right. You know, bring it back to like, do you go to reporters, one of these whistleblowers? I would never encourage anybody to go to this path because there is a cost. I don't think if you'd go this path, you should whine about the cost. And it's particularly if you're with the CIA. Because if you're with the game. Well, particularly because what is the benefit of you going, I was hurt by, It's like saying, um, I joined a gang and the gang treated me like a gang member and I'm mad. Shut the fuck up.

Okay. If you're going to do it, just do it. And, you know, you know what's coming. You got to know what's coming. And we've got a bunch of people now who have worked this system. And I'm sticking around with, I still don't really like the name. That's for Freedom. But it is the name.

It sounds like glories. But we've got a bunch of people who are doing it. the right thing. Real quick. Can we just take a quick bathroom break? Yeah, for sure. That's an important point. All right, before we get into this point about the media, I do want to say we're a little

over two and a half hours in right now. Normally, this would be, I'd be delaying your train and we'd be sitting here for six and a half hours a day and doing two. I got my monthly allergy shots this morning, though, so I'm like a little bit slower today and bang up. So if you're cool with it, what I'd like to do is bring you back in a month or two to go through a lot of the open loops that. I know people are thinking out there that we got off today or didn't go into.

Is that right with you? Yeah. And sorry. I tend to do that. So if I were more organized, maybe you'd have a look good. That's what a well-trained spy does. They change the loop and trains the narrative sometimes in a conversation. Chad, Kathy, you just pull the string.

That's right. That's right. But we'll get you back in here to be able to go through a lot of things and details that you got access to that we are not going to get to today. But we were on this point about the media. and one of the things you said is that the free press is not free. That was like a direct quote, which is news to none of us out there. But I think about this. I think it is news to a lot of people.

I think there is a lot of people out there that turn on Fox News. The boomers? Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, they don't count. But everyone else I'm saying, we love our boomers to watch this show because they actually understand what's going on. But to a lot of people, like that's not news to us.

That said, I get. I think that there is a real infallibility complex that exists within independent media, which includes podcasting and everything, to where they think this won't happen to us or something like that. This is something I think about all the fucking time. I'm worried if I already see it happening all over the place. Is that a reasonable fear that places like CIA and other agencies, obviously, around the world or within this country, are going to look towards things like independent media and say we're going to make that our new mainstream? I think I want to make sure I understand your your your your your point here. The real concern is that the CIA is going to infiltrate

this independent media phenomenon that's occurred over the last maybe 10 years could we say it started building strike zone of flight yeah and that somehow that independent piece that we finally got maybe with podcasters maybe with whatever else is out there, it's going to disappear. Am I? Yes. Okay. Yeah, I think that's a fair, that's a fair concern. And again, if you had asked me this, you know, 10 years ago, I would be like, what are you talking about? We don't, we don't play games with the media, like US media. We don't do those sort of things. That's illegal. Why would we do that? You would have really said that? I probably would have. I probably would have.

And it's because the, like, we, when we do risk mitigation, we do the Washington Post test. So the Washington Post test is what happens if this operation ends up in the Washington Post, like, okay, what's going to go down? Now, in originally, when that got, that got termed the Washington Post test, it was about sources and methods. So like, we can't have sources. sources and method. Like, what if our sources get killed? I think over time, just like everything else, it got less about sources and methods and more about embarrassment. Okay, so you've got this risk mitigation measure. Well, now you don't worry about the mainstream media. You're worrying about all of these independent outlets that are out there that, what if they find out about some big screw-up,

or, you know, 40 million in gold bars or whatever it was, 30 million. And in my experience, particularly of late, there are, there are media outlets that seem to be mouthpieces for the intelligence community and the government. Okay? And you can't, like, even if you don't have inside knowledge, once you start seeing the pattern over and over again, you're like, yeah, we'll take even my hearing. And this is not me, like, please don't take this as me tooting my own horn. But like, when have you ever heard of an operations officer? Okay, somebody who runs operations going out and sitting in front of Senate and saying those things.

I don't know if it's ever happened before where they've come out and said, you need to know this. Nobody in the mainstream media covered that at all. Okay. Nobody. There was no mainstream media that covered it aside from Fox News. Okay. And yeah, Fox News, not great either.

No. And so how does that happen that there can be media blackouts? How can that happen? Unless somebody's telling them you can't cover that. We don't want you to cover that. And so, okay, you don't have to have inside knowledge. You don't have to know for sure that there's some relationship going on. I sat with Tucker Carlson.

And he said, I know for a fact it occurs. I mean, he didn't tell me how he knows. And it's none of my business if he's got people telling him that. But I can watch a pattern. And the pattern is, right? now, if something negative is about Department of War, Department of State, CIA, is not going to show up in these outlets. You know, the only outlet, I think it was the Wall Street Journal covered my head and had an editorial about it, I think, and don't quote me on that. So if you can have blackouts, well, the blackout doesn't just happen.

It's not like they don't want news. They don't want to sell newspapers or sell sound bites. Am I answering your question? You are. And I'm thinking of another layer to add to this. Sure. The people that are consuming CNN and Fox News from left to right, the average age four years ago, five years ago was like 68. So now it's like 72, 73.

It's phasing out is my point over time. The people that consume independent media of any kinds, from Tommy G. making documentaries to me doing a podcast, that audience is growing. And the new audience that comes in when they go to college and stuff like that, they're replenishing, if you will, right? Meaning it's getting way bigger. So when you go out and you do that thing, there is a media blackout on the mainstream side. You're right. Yeah. But you walk out and then you talk to talk.

Tucker and then you're talking to me and you're going to talk to other people as well. And I'm just using you as an example because you're sitting here. But like that's going to get a lot of places. People will clip this up. They already clipped up Tucker's for sure and it goes on short form all over the place. So yes, you're getting blacked out in the old school metrics with the lost cause, the boomers, if you will. But everyone else that's movable and shapeable, you're not blacked out on. So I, you know, and I'm playing this. I'm not doing this to put on a tinful. I have to think like this. I have thought like this for a long time now because I've had a chance to come up higher and higher to 30,000 feet in the air and look at how my career is played out and

seen the steps along the way and people who showed up that I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. Now it wasn't interesting then. Now it's interesting now. And I'm looking at this live and I'm saying, guys like you, when you're walking out of these agencies or whatever, what better way than to say, I play for your team than say, look, they're blacking me out in the mainstream media. that you don't trust so we can now poison the well of independent media. Yeah. That's a fair. That's a fair concern.

Okay. So let's play this out a little. I'm not a good actor. I'm coming on to programs to, you know, color views and you should be asking that question. And so how do you, how do you protect against that?

There's no good answer. one of the protection is the decentralized nature of podcasting. Okay. You know, over time, I do think there's a wisdom of the masses as well. Like over time, if they start seeing that the person who's coming out and wants to cause problems for this community, this, this new thing, this is more decentralized. So it's a lot harder to poison the well. Like you had ABC, CBS, you know, Fox News, CNN, you had this limited group of outlets.

I think it's harder. I think different people are going to ask different hard questions in different outlets. And if you show up at one podcast and you're a bad actor, they're going to ask you some questions and maybe you'll fumble it. You know, and after a while, you're going to fumble on the same places. It's not a great answer, I guess. it means that everybody has more personal responsibility to actually be just not just the audience but the folks the podcasters like yourself that have built something special um man it's going to be harder as time goes on because it probably will happen and you probably will need to be very discerning

on who you come on and be willing to continually reassess as more information comes out hey was that person who showed up two years ago was that person here to to create a problem i i don't know am i answering your question yeah you are and i'll i'll give you i'll give you a direct example of one i think about with this because it you know there's things that are clear now but nick shirley you know who that is i do the minnesota guy right yes yeah so nick's a nice enough kid he's young he's green I don't know, like, I have to be honest, I don't know a ton about it. I do know I was happy to see that fraud, waste, and abuse was being exposed to Minnesota. It also got astro-turfs, though.

So let me give full context here. Sure. I was the first podcast Nick ever did when no one knew who he was. Really? And let me tell you how innocent that was and how it came up. My buddy Brandon Buckingham has been on my show. He's on episode 200. He called me up.

He's a YouTube documentarian, does amazing work. He called me up. Memorial Day weekend, 2024, and said, hey, I did a video in D.C. did a little collab work with this young kid, Nick. He's really nice. I just met him. We did a video. He's a really hard worker, which is entirely true. And, you know, I think you should have him on because he's going to be big. I said, okay. And Brandon, to be clear, is like the most independent guy there is. Just to be very clear about that. So I said, okay. So bring him on. And nice enough. kid. But right away, I could see this kid at the time he came on June 2024 and I'm like, this kid is green as fuck. And my guy's old attested this was when he left. This was my opinion. It's not talking behind his back. I'm obviously saying it publicly now and I'm like, this is a really manipulable kid for sure. I was retarded when I was 22. In fact, I was retarded when I was 27. He's 22 at the time. And so,

So hard worker goes around. He starts blowing up and everything. And then, you know, I had concerns with, as an example, he calls himself a journalist. But then he posts excited videos where he's going in and briefing the president. Journalists don't brief a politician. Journalist question a politician. You know this well. And so privately, I had no problem when people would ask me.

This is exactly what I would say. I'd say, Nick's a really nice kid. He does some good work. He's young. And he thinks he's a journalist. I do take issue with him calling himself a journalist. He's a commentator. He has a point of view.

When the fraud story happened, which was based on some truth for sure, it got astroturfed. I have never seen a story. It was impressive what he found, but that was retweeted by the entire right-wing machine. It's now come out publicly that people with the administration were using this as an opportunity to get it into the out there's fear and everything. And he got used. And I do believe that. There's people who call him whitting and say he's like an agent and stuff. To be clear, I don't really talk with Nick, but I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I don't think he is. When people look at that though now and they see that Trump announces the Greenland thing.

And within two minutes of his true social going up, Nick Shirley's releasing a video of him doing an ice bath in Greenland with a bunch of his fellow Americans. Do you understand why people look at this and say, fuck, the game is up? How is this different than, you know, the guys on the payroll doing COVID death counts on CNN in 2020? Yeah. Yeah, I do see exactly what you're saying. And I don't know if I have a good answer for you on it. I guess for me, you, You got to take each individual who's coming on individually. And again, it's putting it all back on you. It's putting it on your audience to make a decision for themselves.

You know, when people come on, you know, I look at what is the cost for that person. And I always tend to believe folks, maybe this is wrong too, where it looks like there's probably going to be a cost. associated with speaking to independent outlets. I hope I'm answering your question. I'm, I think I am, but there's no good answer. And the answer is discernment and, and. Right. But do you think it's more, let me make it more, a little more binary here. Yeah. Is it more common, whether you're talking about mainstream media, any form of media and manipulation that occurs? Is it more common? Is it more common? common for the agency to utilize the the agency the powers that be to utilize the useful idiot scale

or the winning participant scale and so let me just and i'm just using this as an example because i just gave the nick example and i'm not going to put my opinion on it or anything but do you think nick is more likely literally working for the team and he is fully aware of that or is he just a very useful idiot at this point um so what's the cost useful idiot? cost less. Okay? You know, like, and you're going to go for, I don't mean low cost and like financial, but what's the cost of risk? Useful idiots are much better than on team whatever. Because on team whatever, that means that they know something, some secrets that are meant to be kept. And the more people that are in that secret, the harder it is to keep it. So useful idiots are very, they're called

useful idiots because they're useful. And so I think that if you're going to, if you're going to go about this, the more useful idiots you have, the better. You get more done. And it's low cost. Because like when somebody comes and says, oh, I think that guy's working for the government. And be like, no, he's not. Like, why would you think that?

And just from my experience inside the bureaucracy, I think we had sort of mentioned this already, you know, it's worse than you think because it's not a conspiracy if it's culture. You can't vote out culture. And if the culture is the institution has said, we're going to do this and I'm going to justify it because I've had years of justifications that have led up to this. Those are useful idiots too. So if you're already using that model internal to the bureaucracy, why not just use it outside? How do you possibly, if it's that deep rooted though, on the inside and then the levers that are used on the outside, remove the outside because they have no, whether you're witting or a useful idiot, they have no effect on how things can be handled internally.

Let me stop you right there on that. Actually, you do. So every time you bring somebody out and you highlight whether it's useful idiots doing things. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm sorry. I should have said that better. Yes.

But I'm saying like we can move public opinion. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it's not the public who gets to hit the red button in there, right? Right. Right. So for people out there thinking, based on hearing guys like you talk and other people talk, holy shit, he's saying it's even worse. It's not just a conspiracy. It's the fucking culture.

And they go, just hit the red button and get rid of it. do you understand why they say that oh yeah yeah i mean the easiest thing to do if you don't like something is just make it go away like just get rid of what cleared off the table okay but here's the problem and this is maybe this is my own sort of institutional blinders maybe it's my own uh philosophical blinders i always worry about like what's going to replace it i'm a conservative okay i've i've always been a conservative with a you know i've voted for Rossboro because I thought $4 trillion in debt was stupid. Jokes on me, it's $40 trillion.

But, you know, okay, let's just wipe it off the table. First of all, how are you going to do that? Won't ever happen. But hit the red button, get rid of all of it. What replaces it? And I'm not, I'm not just like, for example, four wins sort of thing. Like, hey, should we just get rid of the CIA? Let's use that as an example.

Okay. if you had asked me that a long time ago, I'd be like, what are you talking about? Now I'm like, I'm not saying we should get rid of it yet, but I am saying we should strip it down to its bolts and we should examine every single piece of it. We need another church committee. We need to go bolt by bolt through that thing and decide what is worth keeping. And part of it probably is my own just my own beliefs. I'm a conservative and conservatives believe institutions. are important and they don't want to destroy institutions. Okay?

People can judge me on that. That's just, I worry about a place without some structure, right or wrong. But I'm at the point now where I'm like, yeah, I'll strip things down to the bones. I'll strip everything down and we can take a, hell, we'll pull the paint off. We'll do everything. Look what happened at church, though. Yeah. I'm not, church committee is not.

No, but I'm saying he was literally. spent out of office by dark money in his next election cycle because he did that yeah i mean Thomas massy um there you go so like don't me wrong i'm on team massy too and we can talk about epstein if you want but oh we're going to do that next time okay uh you know your question is like why not just hit the red button i think a lot of people are getting there and is dangerous to me to hit the red button And that means you've decided that there is nothing else you can do. Whoa. It's, it, it leans into that.

There's some people out there, and I've heard them say, well, this is leading towards violence. And, you know, history has proven that violence does solve things. Okay. And I'm, I see what you're saying. I'm sorry, I'm drawing a parallel here, and I shouldn't. You know, you start going down a road. You're like, get rid of everything. it's probably my own hangups i guess i worry about what what replaces it and if that makes me a bad

person i guess i'm a bad person but i am of the mindset that boy it's so deep right now it's culture it's culture and there's solutions but it's not like a red button solution the solution is like there's a brownstone institute have you heard a brownstone institute sounds familiar formed during covid uh i read them their products religiously and one of them talk about um you talk a lot about institutional capture okay they've coined a term and boy i hope i don't screw that epistemological whatever yeah epistemic yeah capture where it's not just like the institution is like the whole education system and the the mode of thought that goes into it. I think that's probably pretty accurate.

And so you're like, well, if it's that bad, why not just hit the red button? Well, it doesn't, it won't fix it. It won't make it better for us. It won't. And again, I know I sound like some, you know, naive polyana on this. No, no. I understand why you're saying what you're saying. Because realistically, I may have an intense hatred for a lot of.

of what these places have become and to be clear I do. But if like let's say you did the fun option, you just burn it all down in one night, you know, and suddenly the next day we didn't have every three-letter agency there is, it might be, if you did it that way, you would never get around to the other side to actually survive through this period because you might just be dead overnight. You know what I mean? It's a shitty place to be. So I am in agreement that no government agency deserves any trust whatsoever right now.

100% on board with that. Like when they come out and say, hey, you're not a horse. Don't take Ivermectin. Or they come out and say, or I come out and say, hey, there's a problem with the whole gain of function research that's going on in the ties with the ICI come out and say that publicly. You shouldn't believe us. we haven't earned trust in fact we've just continually lost trust but i'm not at the point where i'm ready to say red button option for every agency department that's you know part of this mess um and maybe it's fear maybe i maybe you ask me this in two years maybe i'll have a completely different

view on it but as of right now i think we should strip things down to the bones i think the only way to hold the government accountable is to make the government much, much smaller. And I mean firing a lot of people. A lot of people. How does that, so just in theory for people to understand what that would do, when you say fire a lot of people, ideally you're talking about identify two different types of things. I'm putting words in your mouth. So correct me if I'm wrong. People that are redundant in jobs that don't matter and on one end and then also people that have gotten into positions that are extremely corruptible and they've become corrupted yeah okay both of that is true but i think we've actually tested this out already during covid um at any given time there's only 50

percent of the people in the office at any given time if they had to go into the office Okay. So we were running on all cylinders with 50% of the people. By that math, we could probably lose 50% of the people, you know, in certain agencies and departments. That's how it was running. We did get a window into how all these agencies were doing. They moved to, you know, moved out of the building and did work from home with a lot of agencies and departments. And, you know, productivity for the, you know, there's questions about productivity for people working from home or not working from home. I don't know the answers to that. What I do know is they found new efficiencies to help get things done with fewer people who were out because they've been quarantined. They've been, so we've already proven we can get by with a whole lot less government workers. And I'm organized with a bunch of government workers who actually agree that, like, yeah, you know, if you want accountability, you can't have this. Byzantine labyrinth of bureaucracies.

And I call it, I've been calling it a gain of function government. Because we have, we have tweaked this stupid thing over and over. Like the Constitution is contract law. If it's not in the contract, you don't get to do it. That's how contract law works. Okay. But over time, we've tweaked it. We've messed with it.

Because we think, oh, if we do this one fix, this one, this will make it all better. This, I'll tell you what, Department of Labor will be perfect after this. Well, we tweaked it so far that we've got this manipulated mess that doesn't respond to any kind of cajoling from the legislature, from the executive branch. Even litigation doesn't work. So I'm not saying we should burn it down, but I'm certainly not advertising for keeping it. I hope I answered your question. You did. You did on that one.

Are you optimistic about America 50 years from now? No one has ever asked me that. I'm generally an optimist, but no. Boy, no, I'm not. I, you know, part of the reason I've been fighting so vociferously with this group of other government employees who are nobody's like me. I mean, we're just part of the machinery is because I look at my son and I actually could view a day where his life is worse than mine was. Not that mine was bad. Mine was a good life.

But the whole point of having kids and propagating is you hope to God, God with a big G, that their life is going to be better. And I'm looking around at one point, there was a, we might have to show our papers to eat at a cafe or get groceries. If that could happen in the United States, that tells me that we are, we're spiraling, we're circling the toilet, and that's not good. And I take a look at, like, broken promises from this administration. Like, I won't lie. I was excited that Trump got elected, and I had differences with what he wanted policy-wise.

I didn't care because he was the greatest disruptor we've ever seen, ever. The problem is he's not a finisher. Okay. So I want the greatest finisher we've ever seen and we're not getting it. We're not getting it. He lied. He either lied or he just, I don't know. We're going to really get into this next time you're here for sure. So we'll have a chance to fully litigate that. But it is interesting. Even if you really disliked his first term and didn't agree with his policies and shit like that, pre-COVID, because I've always said this not to excuse how things were handled there, But, like, I truly believe that shit show would have happened to any president. And it's like, it kind of is what it is. But if you just look like January 2017 until March 2020 and think about that time, it wasn't the worst thing you've ever seen.

Like, just objectively. Right. Regardless of what your politics are. Yeah, he was chaotic. Yeah, he tweeted way too much. Yeah, you know, there's, I have policy differences with him and everything. But, like, I could point to way worse times, like, with, with, with, how. how things were going administratively down to the people and what the economy was and this,

that, and the third. This time, you know, I've likened it this way. The Biden administration was drunk and asleep at the wheel. And it was four years that it just, it seemed like every time they could say something wrong, they chose to say something wrong. But it was almost like imagine just leaving the water on, letting the water run and leaving your house for three weeks. Yeah.

Okay. Exactly. This administration is like breaking the pipe and leaving your house for three weeks. It's two different sides of the same fucking problem. Yeah. And like if you suspected there was a uniparty before this, there is no way anyone with two eyes and ears. And, you know, there's no way you can, you cannot escape the fact that we, we don't have some two party system that you're going to vote for this side or vote for that side. And again, I don't want to be like somebody who says, don't vote.

I actually don't. I want you to vote. The problem is we aren't going to vote our way out of this problem. It requires a lot of personal responsibility at this point. And when I mentioned before that I've heard people talk about violence, I'm like, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Okay. I've been to some third world locations. I was in Liberia for a while.

You know, they had a civil war. Oh, shit. Yeah, I was there during the Ebola crisis. a while back. In 2014? Yeah. Yeah. And the government buildings and the buildings in the city of Monrovia are riddled with bullet holes from a war that occurred like a decade prior.

Okay. That was still there. People have no idea what they're talking about when they say prepare for violence. And we're too soft as a society right now to really understand what that means. Completely agree. And so please, let's, and again, I get it. History has proven time and time again that violence solves problems all the time. When you, I almost stopped you earlier when you said that.

Are you making a distinction though when you say that? Yes. Meaning violence solves problems through war, but maybe not necessarily through well-intentioned people's revolutions? I'm not advocating for it. What I'm saying is when you choose violence, you will solve a problem. Like some side's going to win at the end of the day. And for now.

Okay. The cost of that is just stupid. And we need to do the one thing. And I said this once before, but we need to do the one thing that's never been done in history. We are spiraling right now. And when you ask me, I wish you hadn't asked me that, but I'm glad you did, I guess. I am not optimistic about 50 years from now. And I'm not optimistic because I have people legit.

legitimately people I like and respect who say there's a possibility of violence. If they're saying it out loud, if they're instantiating that, there's a possibility of violence. And we cannot. We need to do the one thing that's never been done in history and solve something without violence for once. Like let's try and make this work, please, because you've got things so vicious on either side of this fake. divide. Okay, this fake divide between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals. Up down. Yeah. That's all bullshit. And people, other people have made us hate the other side. I have conversations with people. I'll tell you a little anecdote. I had a friend. I'm not going to call him a friend because he was never actually a close friend, but he was somebody I knew from high school.

and I was trying to center myself. You know, this has been a discombobulating half decade for me. Like, you know, everything I thought I was, I wasn't anymore. And so I was like, what can I do to sort of re-center myself? And there was a guy I knew who was a musician. A musician when I was a kid. He's been tiring. He's been toiling away.

He's my age, give her to take. a little bit older, doing the rock and roll thing. Playing music, love his music, absolutely adore it. If you were to ask me whether we agreed on anything whatsoever, no. Like he is on the complete opposite side of everything I believe in philosophically. But we grew up in the same suburb in Cleveland. you know no one ever described me as musical but i mean i was in a musical with him

i was baby john and west side story there you go there you go you know and like he was he was one of the main i mean he's he's a he's a real artist a musician and uh i gave i wanted to reconnect with something that would center me um that would bring me back to the thing like Like it or not, the place where you grew up, the people you grew up with, you might grow distant from them, but there's like a shared bond. And like if you can reconnect with some of them, sometimes it is a healthy thing. Hell yeah. Sometimes.

Not always. Maybe not on Facebook. But I mean like in a real sense. Yeah, in a real way. So I took the time out of a, I gave him the most valuable thing I had at the time, which was my time. He's in another state far away. and I made the time to try and catch his shows. Now, again, we're not talking about a rock star.

We're talking about a guy who is a real artist because he's a struggling artist. And I have a feeling that, you know, years from now when he's long dead, people might go back and listen to what he created and be like, this is something special. He stopped talking to me as soon as he found out where I was working and what I was doing right now

for this administration. or I was dumbfounded that I had made real effort. Like, how many adults, how many 50-something-year-old adults say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make effort to do something different and just connect with somebody that I know we disagree on, like, everything. But he's somebody I knew as a kid and like there was no, like I didn't talk about politics or anything. I didn't like, I gave them. Yeah. And that's where we're at right now.

That's where we're at right now. And it, like, I hate to admit it, it actually hurt my feelings. And I'm a grown man. Listen, there's, and I'm sorry that happened to you. There's still shit that happens like that. And, you know, you have to have at the same time the courage to be able to give opinions, regardless of where they land politically. Sometimes they're not even political.

and not worry about some of the fallout from people who don't want to hear them. Yeah. And it's just a reality of human nature. And I hope that guys like, you know, your friend there can wake up to the things we do agree on. Because unfortunately, we've set the bar so low at this point that there is some, and I don't mean it this way, low hanging fruit. I don't know, rape, genocide, mass surveillance. that everybody who's normal can agree on and those are the things we need to coalesce around. You had Yigley on here.

Mike Yeagerie. Yeah. Okay. We could talk about that too. Like we have a surveillance problem and the tools that the that empowered us after 9-11, smarter people than me were saying, hey, we're going to watch out. These tools will be turned against us and, you know. Yeah, where were they?

Some of them did say it. I was not one of them. I was like, good thing we got this because we got some retribution to take care of. Okay? Like, I know, like, I'm sorry, this is. I appreciate your confession. You know, like, I was like, hey, we got, we got it. We got some comeuppance to dish up.

Am I supposed to cleanse you your sins now or something? No, no, I'm talking to a priest about that. All right. But, you know, we got some comeuppance to take care of. And that was, that was how I felt back then. And, you know, everybody learns fast. Some people learn faster than others. But, you know, the surveillance state thing, it's all based on tools and the techniques that were supposed to be employed against foreign terrorists who want to harm us.

And then, you know, smart people said, I don't know if we should be doing this. It's the best cover for the terrorists at home. Yeah. Yeah. Domestic terrorists you're talking about? No. No, to people who would never be labeled that. who think that they're the good guy, but they're not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Boy, there's a, there's a lot to unpack with that. But, you know, the, some of the stuff, I believe that Director Gabbard released had to do with this whole labeling people domestic care. Sure. Yeah, yeah. That's a separate issue too. Yeah. Yeah. I meant that more symbolically. But all right, let's let's have you back in a month or two. And we can really dig into it. I'm not wasting your time. Am I like? Not at all. No, this is, this is very, very fascinating. shotgun blast right now but take a look at what we've said we can cover the things that I have and hell yeah yeah there's a lot on the bone there's a lot on the bone that we didn't talk about like you said you even brought up the Epstein thing and that's certainly something to talk about

I definitely want to talk about Epstein okay and I know if we're off no we're still on you're still on yeah we're talking yeah yeah I definitely want to talk about Epstein because that I've already heard journalists out there saying hey it's not as big a thing as you think and you're like What? It's the most, it is, what's his name? And I love Matt Taibi, but he replaced Walter Kern with a guy named Michael Story. Michael Tracy. Michael Tracy. Michael Tracy, sorry, sorry. And I tried really hard because I love Matt Taibi. He reminds me of like. I don't know what happened to him on this. I don't know either, but he's always reminded me of that older brother who like, take you and go, listen, I'm going to teach you out. of smoker bowl. I'm going to teach you the etiquette on smuggling ball. It's puff, puff, pass. No more.

Two puffs pass. Okay. Because if you do more than that, it's impolite. Everybody gets a turn. And so, like, and then he brings that guy on. I'm like, this is the most important story that has ever hit in recorded history. Just stop. Stop with this. Okay. He sure looks like an intelligence asset to me. Okay. We need to talk about states involved. We need to talk about, um, what the implications are. Why haven't we seen any action, uh, FBI, DOJ, CIA? Because there is a foreign nexus, an intel foreign nexus, okay? And, uh, I don't want to go into sources and methods, obviously, because I don't want to get in trouble, but I guarantee you, I could in a matter of months pulled together an investigation at the CIA that is completely foreign focused

that would get at some key questions. And the real issue, too, is it goes back to my problem with this culture thing and guardrails and, you know, the deep state. For sure, you look at Epstein's clients list because it's a client list, okay, this bullshit that they're talking about where no i don't know not clients you know just visitors i don't know what the fuck they're calling them a lot of visitors a lot of visitors people live right next door too um and so you you start looking at that and you take a look at this these visitors i guarantee you these foreigners i'm talking about foreigners i'm talking about the americans the foreigners

either they showed up at some point in intelligence collection and someone ignored it or they didn't. Both are bad answers. If they didn't, bad intelligence. Then you suck at your job, okay? Because you look at the list of people that are foreigners and if they've got any kind of connections to key government targets or key, like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can cross that one off. We'll look at the other one for sure. Yeah.

All right. That was a great little, we're going to leave people on that because we're going to, the next conversation, we will get deep into that. And like I said, today I just kind of wanted to let you state your case, like who you are, let people get to know you, put it out there. I think you do a really good job with that. And now, next time we can dig through the details and some of the stuff you got to look at that, you know, in some cases you've already talked about publicly, which I think is. If that's for all the right intentions, that's very brave of you, because these are, these are some serious, serious, serious times and serious, serious topics. Yeah, I appreciate it. All right.

Well, thank you for doing it, Jim. We'll do it again soon. Okay. Sounds good. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.

Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. She's got a break away. She's all alone. She's going. She's going.

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