MTracey podcast - Interview with Joe Kent: Iran ceasefire, Trump's craziness, Israeli influence, Tulsi, Epstein

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Today I did an interview with Joe Kent, the former Director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, who you might recall made a big splash when he resigned from the Trump Administration on March 17, in opposition to the Iran War. While I thought Kent displayed unusual integrity by resigning, I also found the substance of his accompanying letter a bit questionable, especially insofar as it seemed to displace all decision-making agency away from Trump and onto Israel. Which is an argumentative move lots of right-leaning critics of the war have been trying to make for the past six weeks. To me, this gives woefully short shrift to Trump’s clearly-expressed Second Term ideology of global conquest and resource extraction.Anyway, following his resignation, Joe Kent jumped immediately onto the Podcast Circuit. Which is rife with epistemic problems, as we’ve often discussed. So I wanted to get into some things with him that maybe he has not addressed yet, or at least hadn’t addressed from the angle that I wanted to approach from.Matt Taibbi was supposed to co-pilot the interview, but his hotel Wifi crapped out and he had to abort. Don’t fret though, because Joe Kent has graciously agreed to join the two of us on a forthcoming expeditionary mission to Greenland.Let me know what you think. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

All right, so welcome to today's news, and I guess we should end the suspense about the worst podcaster in America because it's me. We had technical difficulties for an interview we were both looking forward to. Michael's still conducted, but because I'm not home, the Wi-Fi situation was bad. I had to duck out of an interview with former National Director of the National Counterintelligence Center, Joe Kent. Counterterrorism Center, Matt. You really are the worst podcaster. National Counterterrorism Center, NCTC. Michael, what did happen in the interview?

What did he say? Well, though we, Joe and I both warned your absence, we soldiered on. And, you know, first off, because this podcast is definitely not named Private Petro Party, but rather today's news, we thought that we should start with the developments over the past 24 hours or so, where Trump yesterday morning decided to post on the old truth social machine that he was gearing up to annihilate all of Iranian civilization, which obviously, you know, got people's attention. And if his ultimatum deadline of 8 p.m. Eastern time was not met for some kind of deal or resolution. An entire civilization is going to die.

Yeah, yeah. That's what he said. So, you know, you and I thought maybe we should ask Joe, like, or did he get, this might seem to indicate like a little bit of a volatility on Trump's part that's perhaps getting more pronounced as he nears 80 years old. We should have a birthday edition when the day finally comes in June. But, you know, then Trump, he, you know, about an hour and a half before the putative deadline, he says, look, there's a ceasefire deal that's been reached. The parameters of it are very unclear still. It seems at this point that it just entails the United States for a time anyway, ceasing to bomb Iran. But, you know, there's been big mutual strikes already in the past couple hours between Iran and the Gulf Arab states and Israel and Lebanon.

forth. So who the hell knows what's happening with that. But, you know, just wanted to get his initial take on it. And then we got some broader themes. And I wanted to make sure that I didn't just rehash the stuff that he's been on a million podcasts already talking about at nauseam. And hopefully I achieved that. So I wanted to get a little bit more of a window into his perception of the Jeffrey Epstein situation because he had been on, you know, breaking points and he was asked about it. He seemed to intimate that it's possible that although Trump might not be incriminated in anything, that there's some Epstein network floating out there that might have, might be intimidating Trump or pressuring him, something like this. And oh, by the way,

how is it that Joe Kent had said before that his understanding of Epstein has been informed, really only by him reading stuff, the same stuff on the internet that everybody else is reading. And he had just had a high level security clearance. So he presumably maybe could have gotten some access to more information. But, you know, I, I probed him a bit, and it was, you know, a good spirit, good nature, I think. He seemed to appreciate, you know, delving into some stuff that maybe he hadn't covered before at great length around, like my, my reservations around this theory that he introduced when he resigned and he put in his resignation letter that he feels Trump was deceived. That's the word he used by Israel into launching the war

with Iran. To me, that's a bit of a, of a pivot that a lot of people have been. making to sort of avoid grappling with how you know Trump's ideology and his personal sort of conduct of U.S. foreign policy kind of has given rise into a large extent these

adventures around the world where he's wanting to seize the oil and you know declare himself ruler and whatnot so I try to challenge it on that and I think you know it was pretty fruitful pretty constructive and there's a bunch of other stuff too so I think that's a decent summary but Matt was unfortunately absent because I don't know.

I guess, you know, they haven't, they haven't, the hotels of Florida still haven't found a way to get. Yeah, they haven't mastered the art of Wi-Fi. But the one thing I did hear, I heard him reference the New York Times story when he was talking about Israel's influence. And I thought that was odd because one of the big quotes in that story was that the president had effectively made up his mind, weeks earlier, and this was before a meeting with Netanyahu.

And then there was another quote that he gave to Tucker Carlson saying, talking about security failures. And he says he sees what happened in Butler and the other assassination attempts. When he sees what happens with Charlie, I think it's reasonable to believe that somewhere in his head, he thinks that, like, maybe I don't have a choice. maybe they could harm me or they could harm my family. Did you get into any of that at all? Because I'm a little confused as to whether he's extrapolating things that he got from the news

or whether that's informed by something from his job. You know, I did not bring up Charlie Kirk because I feel like he's been asked about that so many times. I felt like the Epstein questioning was sort of a, like a window into that line of thinking, meaning like there could be some threat or some pressure that's being placed on Trump. And he's being basically forced it to doing things against his will

by some Israel-connected network or something like this, right? So we got into that a bit. Did he offer any indication as to where he's getting that from? No. I didn't, but I didn't really press them on that. I guess I should have, which is why that would have been your job if you were there.

I should have gotten more into it. We had a whole good, top, bad cop thing worked out. Yeah, yeah. We didn't really need it, though. I mean, he's a good sport to be fair to him. Like, he didn't get offended at all. I pulled up a tweet from him from when he was running for Congress in 2024 as a Republican in Washington State. You know, Trump endorsed him at the time.

I went back and watched, like, he did like a row, like a telephone town hall, they call it, with, uh, with Joe Kent back, but right before the election 2024 and said that Trump is, Trump said that Joe Kent is great because he looks like he's right out of central casting, right? So I said, you know, Ben, you know, Joe Kent said like, you know, Trump's kind of mad at me now, but I said, well, I mean, you still look like like you're straight out of central casting. So maybe you can repair the relationship. So that kind of laugh. All right. Well, that's very interesting. Look, it's we're, we're trying to be reactive. to the news and Joe Kent is somebody who has played an interesting role in the last couple of weeks just because he's come out and he's made a lot of statements. It's not

100% clear to me that they're informed by his work as opposed to things that he's read in the news. But sometimes people who are in government positions, they're prohibited from talking about things that they know about. So that's another thing, right? Like, if he knew something to the contrary, he wouldn't be able to say it.

So it's an interesting interview. I'm sure it's a very interesting interview. We're going to, on Rack, it will publish it with a transcript. It'll be up on your side as well. Thanks to everybody for tuning in. And we'll be back in touch with you soon. and listening to this interview that was conducted almost entirely by Michael Tracy. Mr. Kent, thanks for coming on.

Great, guys. Thanks for having me. So we just had a ceasefire allegedly. And in the space of about a day, we had Donald Trump, President Trump, go from saying, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. And today we get a cheery tweet saying we'll be loading up with supplies of all kinds and just hanging around in order to make sure that everything goes well. So this is really a two-part question. Number one, what do you think of the ceasefire?

What do you think it means? And number two, do you agree with the people like Representative DeGed or Ed Markey who think that there's something about Donald Trump's mental stability? that needs to be investigated. You're coming in a little choppy, but I'll do my best here. So if I miss something, just correct me, and I'll go back and try to address it. Number one, the ceasefire is good news. Obviously, this time, yesterday we were embracing ourselves for something much more drastic,

which I think would have been catastrophic. So if President Trump was using that as a negotiating tool, it appears that he, but he was. I'm glad that he opted for the pathway of negotiations. big question is will this hold? I think the real question there is going to be, can we withhold the Israelis? Because the Israelis stated goal, their strategic objective is to take down the Iranian regime, regardless of how long it takes, regardless of how chaotic things are. Up to this point in the war, we have had a very hard time saying no to the Israelis, basically as the New York Times even reported on just, I think two days ago,

just talking about how BB was the driving influence behind President Trump and the President that Assad gave him how easy this would be. That's what took us into this war. That was my experience as well and a big reason why I had to leave. So if we can hold back the Israelis and separate ourselves from them and treat them like the junior partner that they truly are, that's going to give President Trump the negotiating space that I think he needs to come up with a sustainable deal with the Iranians. Now, what exactly that deal is going to look like? I think that remains to be seen. I think his main goal at this point is to get the straight of Hormuz reopened for energy commerce and just for the free flow of commerce as well. So that's that's kind of where we're

at right now. I think the last part of your question was about like President Trump's mental status. In my, you know, given the, given the volatility of yesterday morning saying we're going to destroy the entire Iranian civilization and then this morning saying, you know, we're going to have a beautiful joint venture with Iran or it should be hanging out, you know, it seems to swing back and forth pretty wildly. It does, but it kind of always has. So I think because this tactic has worked out for him before in the past, I think this is basically just kind of classic Donald Trump. It concerns me when you start talking about, you know, the total annihilation of a civilization and the Iranians weren't backing down either. So the stakes are high. That negotiating tool that

President Trump is very fond of, I would not use in this circumstance. And also I think there's an element two where that negotiating tool loses its effect over time because we're already engaged in a hot war with Iran. The application of force and the military options haven't been successful up to this point. So I'm hoping he leans more into diplomacy and commerce as opposed to the military stick because there's only so much that you can actually threaten with the military stick. If anything, I think this last iteration of conflict with Iran has shown that warfare has just changed and we can't solve everything through sheer military might. And once you've threatened to obliterate all of Iranian or Persian civilization, what threat can you go up to next? Right? That seems

like you've probably exhausted the threat options. Yeah. And even without even addressing the morality, obviously that'd be immoral to use any kind of, you know, WMD or a nuke or whatever. But in order to annihilate or whatever, what did he say, like completely wipe out a civilization, you'd have to do that. But even if you did do that, putting the morals aside, the way that we would be viewed by the rest of the world would be counterproductive for anything else that we wanted to accomplish. At that point,

we would basically have to be willing to go to nuclear war with pretty much everybody to force our agenda because I think the rest of the world at that point would isolate us and we wouldn't be able to negotiate really with anybody. So at some point, it's just like, okay, I understand he uses bombastic language frequently and sometimes it works out. I don't think he's losing it. I don't think he's of, you know, poor mental sanity

or anything like that. I just think we got very lucky here with this one, so we should be working as hard as we can to make sure this ceasefire holds. And we can get the streets open again. We can cut a deal if I ran. And we can hopefully learn from our mistakes and move on. Yeah. I mean, it is true that he's always used this bombastic language as a negotiating tactic. We're all encouraged to read the art of the deals to learn the nature of his negotiating sort of philosophy.

I actually have read it. It's almost like our new holy text. So I've made sure to read it and I have a copy. but at the same time, I mean, it's never gotten quite this extreme where I do think we have to dwell for a moment on the scale of that threat that was leveled, right? Because it's one thing to use some kind of coercive language. It's another to say that your entire ancient civilization is going to die tonight. And you've talked about how, in your experience, the policymaking process around Trump has shrunk to an insular circle compared to Midnight Hammer last June. your perception was that it was really confined to a small group of people,

maybe, you know, Pegstaff, Rubio, Ratcliffe, Cain, Susie Wiles, that seems like probably around it and maybe Wickeff, Kushner. So by and large, it's not as though we can consult some larger policymaking process to understand what the trajectory of the policy is. We have to, for better or worse, listen to Trump's statements and words, right? And if those are the words coming out of his mouth, I don't know. I mean, he is approaching 80 years old. he does sometimes seem to contradict himself a little bit more frequently,

so often like within the span of the same paragraph. So like, was there any indicia of that that maybe gave you pause while you were still in government? Or did you just kind of chalk everything up to his, you know, standard Donald Trump? A problem with the circle of advisors being shrunk down so, so tightly. Not only did you have basically an echo chamber that I've described before where you had a lot of folks that were already leaning to be very pro-Israel. Israelis had, I think, really good access to those decision makers. And then you had the pro-Israel media wing of Fox News, the think tanks, FD, etc., coming in and saying the same thing, kind of in the private sector or on the media to Trump that created an echo chamber around him. But another big problem that we have is basically the way that the Israelis laid out this scenario that pushed us into the war.

And they kept getting Trump basically to say, hey, you're going to get this catastrophic effect on Iran. They're going to, the regime is going to crumble. it's going to be very easy for you, but in order for it to be successful, the regime actually has to crumble. They have to totally surrender. They got him very comfortable with using language like total surrender. And how do you actually get a total surrender? You either have to go in on the ground. Unconditional surrender is what he said. Yeah, unconditional surrender. Anytime we've gotten an unconditional surrender in the past, it's like World War II. We either dropped the nuclear weapon or we came in and we fought a prolonged ground campaign and we forced our will upon the Iranians or whoever,

we're fighting with boots on the ground, the more you play out the scenario in Iran, it's huge. And even if we could commit the full U.S. military and let's say the nation's all in and we go, we do a conventional land war there, we simply just can't control and quell the population of Iran. So basically by getting Trump conditioned to say like total complete surrender, the regime has to totally and completely fall, which again, that was never our stated strategic objective in this, but that was the Israelis. The Israelis, because of the echo chamber and their access to President Trump, they made it essentially share their strategic objective with them. They basically make this equation that in order for this to be a successful operation, you have to have a complete

collapse in Iran and it's total regime change and we have total control that can't be done with boots on the ground. So you do come back at this point where it's like, well, then maybe we do have to use a nuclear weapon. And luckily, I think President Trump kind of saw through this in the last couple days or, you know, maybe even a week or so, where he saw like, look, I can't drop a nuclear weapon of these people. I can't subdue them. This is not going well. You can't change geography. The Iranians are going to be able to apply very little force and still mess with shipping on the Straits of Hermuz. That's going to have an effect here back in America. Let's go ahead and come up with the negotiation. And now everything we're seeing is this, you know, Trumpian bravado of, hey, we made

this great deal. So, again, I'm hoping that that holds and we can make, we can hold back the Israelis, because if the Israelis continue to have the amount of influence on President Trump, as they did prior to this war, they're going to go back to him and they're going to say, Mr. President, this isn't good enough. This is a failure. We thought that you were going to be the guy that could bring down the regime, that could open the Straits of Hermuz. The Iranians are now making money off the Straits of Hamoos.

They're mocking you, et cetera. So I'm hoping he can put them in a box and tell them they're the junior partner. And we've reached a deal here, and it's going to stick. So, and shows, this kind of gets back to what you said in your initial resignation letter on March. 17th, which caused such an uproar. And I thought to myself when I read this, okay, he's actually somebody who's got some integrity because what's going on now is contradicting his seemingly sincerely felt beliefs, and he feels like it's no longer tenable for him to remain in government for a variety of reasons. At the same time, I felt that there were some things in there that

may be a bit substantively off, and that you were pinning almost exclusive or near-exclusive responsibility on Israel for, quote, deceiving Trump. That's what, that's the verb you use, deceiving Trump. And it seems like that gives short shrift to Trump's actual worldview, especially in the second term, where it's not like he's been bashful about talking about how he's, you know, doing the Venezuela operation to take the oil. He's saying he likewise would love to take the oil with Iran, seizing Greenland, declaring himself the ruler of Venezuela, declaring himself the ruler of Gaza, talking about

taking over the Panama Canal. He says, once we're done with Iran, we're going to be taking Cuba. So this is a pretty well articulated, a consistent sort of paradigm now that he's been espousing, that it seems like the Iran thing fits pretty neatly into with or without the influence of Israel. Of course, Israel has influence, and Netanyahu in particular is very well-schooled at making a case to American presidents, given his background living in the United States, being very well-versed in American politics and so forth. But why can't we view Israel almost like as an adjunct to American hegemony in the region? and Trump has his own spin on how to maintain and expand American hegemony.

The Iran thing fits comfortably into that. And, you know, in that context, Netanyahu can make a case that is persuasive to Trump that gels with his own sort of preexisting ideology. I mean, you see what I'm saying there? Like, is that something that maybe hasn't been emphasized enough or with the over-emphasis, at least from my perspective on Israel, not to discount its influence entirely, but with over-emphasizing it, we kind of fail to appreciate this ideological sort of paradigm that Trump himself is very frequently and vehemently declaring.

Yeah, no, I see what you mean. In the case of Iran, just because we had been so anti-regime change war in the campaign, and I believe in Trump's previous administration, I mean, he was pressured consistently to invade Iran. He killed Qasem Soleimani. I thought that was the right call at the time, but then he didn't take the bait of getting sucked into a regime-change war. I just think considering the driving force of the foreign influence coming from the Israeli lobby to get us into this war, it was very, very significant to me.

And I felt like had he had more advisors around him that could have pointed this out, or at least pointed to how the Israelis were using their access really to senior government officials, their longstanding relationship with our intelligence services, that we were basically doing this operation against Iran, which on a strategic scale is more significant than anything else he was planning on doing because of the implications of the Straits of Hormuz, the GCC, the PetroDolar, etc. That I think we could have probably talked him out of it. However, just the apparatus that the Israelis have built around the U.S. government, around media, the amount of support they have here in the States, it was almost impenetrable that was built around Trump. And obviously, President Trump, like, has agency. He shouldn't have let that happen.

In the past, he had called out that, you know, the Adelson's were going to support Marker Rubie. in, you know, whatever it was, 2016. That was the famous tweet. He's aware of this, but he did let them in. I think, well, Rubio is now his Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. So clearly there's been an evolution, right? And so once he let them in, I do think he was just swept up by all of it. And he was deceived.

I think something that had he been an outsider, he would have been like, well, those guys are getting ran by the Israeli lobby. I've seen this before. And I think, you know, Donald Trump of 2015 would have called that out like he did. but once he was on the inside, I think his perspective changed. I think the Israelis and the Israeli lobby did a really good job of kind of getting into President Trump's psyche. The confidence that he built up in the Venezuela operation, I think that combined with the protesters on the street in January, it made it easy for the pro-Israel lobby to basically

sell to President Trump. Like, look how easy this is going to be. You've got the best military ever. They can just zip in there and take out some targets. And then the protesters are already in the streets. And the whole thing is going to fall, not letting any of the dissenting voices, come in and really kind of bypassing his own intelligence community where I was sitting, because that was not the assessment whatsoever coming from the USIC, but we basically didn't even

have a voice at the table in the discussions. So Joe, I mean, just to, you know, I don't know if this was really in your purview at all in the position that you had, but like just taking the stuff that's gone on the Western Hemisphere, right, it's, we hard to make a case that the pro-Israel lobby or Netanyahu had much to do with, for example, this gambit to seize Greenland, right? or Venezuela. I know you could say that, you know, Venezuela oil exports have gone maybe to Israel or something, you know, an indirect connection there,

or the Panama Canal or, you know, Cuba. Like, that's not really in the ballywick of Israel. So there's something ideological that's going on that flows from Trump himself that is informing his conduct of foreign policy, right? So then when that gets grafted onto the Middle East, obviously Israel is a more outsized role. But I'm just so, but apart from the Middle East stuff,

like how would you characterize, like, what his worldview is now, with respect to these other initiatives that are going on that don't have really much of a direct role on Israel that may, you know, whatever those predilections are, they may intersect with Israel when we come to the Middle East, but they kind of like exist on their own at the same time, right? I think in the Western hemisphere, um, there's a school of thought that most these governments that, that are adversarial to us, the, the populations, um, are not hostile to us in a, in a way that they are in the Middle East, because we're so,

culturally similar, and that the Western Hemisphere, Monroe Doctrine, that we should completely control it. So it's basically securing our own borders to reach down and take out some of these these more hostile governments. Now, I think a lot of that probably could have been done with soft power. I think we could have cut just as pragmatic of a deal. I mean, Maduro is not like a, you know, there's no ideology there driving Maduro. Like, he liked money and he like power. But at the end of the day, I think that there was, and I don't have any insider knowledge on this one, because it wasn't really in our wheelhouse. But obviously, we did some really good intelligence prep work.

There's members of his government within Maduro's inner circle that basically kind of carved a pathway for us. Our soft and our military went in there and just were able to grab him quickly. That could have gone sideways, though. I mean, pretty easily. We're lucky that that went as well as it did. It remains to be seen in the long run, like how beneficial that actually was, was the risk actually worth the reward. So I don't know exactly how that chess match is going to end. up playing out. Again, I think Venezuela

with the amount of oil they had, I think we kind of could have just cut them a regular private. But take the oil has been a longstanding sort of conviction of Trump's, right? Even going back, you know, so I mean, if take the oil resource extraction applies from his perspective to both Venezuela and Iran, there's like something going on there independently

of the pro-Israel lobby that may have informed why it is that he's chosen to undertake these endeavors. Yes, sir. I mean, he likes the idea, I think, of like we got it. We get the better deal. We we take the oil, we take the resource for the benefit of America. Again, if I were advising him, I would just say, hey, you can probably cut just as good of a deal that will be beneficial for us. And the amount of, like, blood and treasure you'll have to spend or just the capital of our

reputation on the world. Again, Venezuela, like, there's no ideology there. They probably just wanted to cut a good deal with us. Chevron had already gone down there and built a lot of the infrastructure. So I'm not sure how much we needed to go, like, smack them around or anything. Now, the Middle East and just how far away it is in terms of oil. Again, is the juice worth the squeeze? I think if Trump had had more, like, pragmatic business people in his ear on that one, I don't know if he would have been talked into it. And I think, again, the Israeli lobby came in, and they basically told him that every

other president for the last 47 years has been two week to do this year. The only one that's strong enough to do it. They really played to his ego. They made it seem like it was going to be easy even as well. It was a confidence-building exercise. And that's how we got into this mess. So you mentioned that you had supported the Soleimani assassination. And I saw you mention that on Tucker in the first appearance that you went on after you resigned.

And I found it a little curious because I was covering Tulsa Gabri very closely at that time during the Solis Mani assassination. And you know, knew her decently well. And she was vehement in her denunciation of that Solomani assassination for reasons that seemed to me have proven rather prescient. Meaning she says that Trump has instigated like a new phase of kinetic warfare with Iran that was leading intellectually toward a regime change. war with Iran. And, you know, she was pretty harsh about Trump himself. Like she said, you know, he doesn't know what the hell he's doing. I even, you know, just to refresh my memory, I pulled up a quote from her because I was with her at the time. And she was saying that, look, this is, this is going to lead to a war if we allow Trump to just continue on this path. That's going to be

quote, that's going to come with a quote, cost that will not be confined to within the boundaries of Iran. This will be a regional war that will take American lives. Sure enough, the Trump policy trajectory led in that direction. Like, I know your argument is that in assassinating Soleimani, Trump, you know, punched Iran in the phase. I think that's how you put it on Tucker, and that gave leverage to him to potentially broker some kind of

diplomatic accord with Iran. But there's been no diplomatic accord brokered, right? And, you know, and Tulsi coupled that with a critique of him even withdrawing from the JCPOA, which she said she had some misgivings about, but in withdrawing from it, Trump was pursuing a military solution rather than a diplomatic

solution. So, look, I mean, I know Tulsi's in a different position now, but when I go back and look at what her analysis was at the time, you know, when she was like operating under some different incentives, she was on the mark, you know. So I'm just like sort of wondering maybe how you, how you reconcile that given what's come to pass in terms of Trump's Iran policy and like, could you ever see yourself reconsidering maybe why it is that you supported those past iterations of the policy, at least pre-February 28th? So I support the Solmani strike or limited CT operations, targeted CT operations. When you have a guy, a terrorist, in Solmani's case, he was the hybrid between, you know, a proxy master and an Iranian general who is directing attacks against our forces, killing our troops.

I fully support us finding him as soon as we can and killing him. Qasem Soleimani basically had ran proxy armies against the U.S. and Iraq and Syria since under Bush and under Obama. and he really wasn't touched because we thought there'd be massive political implications. He killed an American under Trump's watch and Trump immediately struck back, killed him and his deputy, Abelmani Mahandas, who actually had been at war, who had been targeting Americans since that. When they were on a diplomatic mission to Iraq, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So killing him.

Kind of gives some insight into what we prefer, right? Diplomacy or a military solution, because the military solution was taken to thwart a diplomatic mission. Right. I mean, they both were like operating under the auspices that they were Iranian diplomats. or something like that. We knew exactly what they were doing. So killing them showed Iran like, hey, I'm not Obama. I'm not Bush.

We're not going to let you guys walk all over us. And that's a good use of targeted counterterrorism operations because that's basically the only language that a lot of folks in that region respect. Now, at the same time, President Trump stopped and he didn't get sucked into a regime-change war, even though he had Bolton and the rest of the neocons and probably the pro-Israeli lobby,

in his ear saying, now's the time, take down the mullahs, he already took down Soleimani, let's go in there. Because by going in in a conventional war, we give the advantage back to the country that we're trying to take over. regime change just never works. And it also has the reverse effect of what we want. There's always a rally around the flag effect.

So even people who might not like the Iranian regime, they're going to rally around the Iranian regime when we attack them. So I think that got the Iranians to the negotiating table. Now, obviously, the election happened after that. Biden came in. the Iranians clearly did not respect Biden because after October 7th, we had over 200 attacks against our forces by the proxies. The second that Trump came back in, the Iranians stopped the

attacks from the proxies. They immediately got to the negotiating table. And so I think they would not have done that had Trump not killed Soleimani. So that got into the negotiating table. That basically got us almost a full year of negotiations with the Iranians, even after the 12-day war and after midnight hammer. The Iranians didn't have their proxies attack us. They didn't really meaningfully attack us. They fired like the same amount of bombs that we dropped on the nuclear facilities. They fired that same amount of missiles at an empty quadrant on our base in Qatar. And then they basically said, let's get back to the negotiating table. And we went back to negotiating from June until this war kicked off. So I think the use of limited counterterrorism strikes, I think is always

appropriate if our forces are in danger or have been attacked. It's almost the same thing with like Afghanistan. Like we should have gone into Afghanistan after 9-11, killed al-Qaeda guys, Chase bin Laden into Pakistan, but we shouldn't have stayed and gotten bogged down in like some regime-changed government-building exercise. Like us taking the bait in these regime-change wars, it has never worked out for us. Well, I guess Tulsi's argument at the time was that this was taking the bait and sort of accelerating a policy that was fundamentally geared toward ultimately attempting some sort of full-fledged regime-change war. She called it another tit-for-tat escalation

that's going to lead to this cataclysmic outcome. And she was right. But she also coupled that with her critique of at time the sanctions regiment, which I know you also supported, because she felt that this was siege warfare. It was destabilizing the government in a way that, again, was going to culminate

in some sort of regime change confrontation. So, again, do you think there's anything to credit about her critique at the time in terms of, Like even if the Soleimani assassination didn't itself instantly lead to or a full-fledged regime change war, it was like part of the same, it was part of a trajectory that led to that point, right? Oh, I mean, I agree, unfortunately. I think had Trump had better advisors around him, they could have said, hey, there's a time to use force. You've already proven that you're going to use force.

So all the pro-Israel people coming in right now and all the neocons coming in right now saying like, you're the only guy that's tough enough to do this and like we can just go kick their ass. It's like, you already proved you can do that. you know you destroyed the ISIS caliphate you killed Solemani your tough guy card is punched like these people take you very very seriously now it's the time to show your strength through negotiation to show that you can be a stabilizing force and i think president trump would have understood that but those voices were cut out instead you just had the hawks come in and do what tolsey predicted and she was right i mean she basically said like if we kill this guy it's going to lead to the next

thing lead to the next thing she was correct i think there is a way to balance that sanctions in general I think in terms of Iran, we had the Iranian people to the point where they were frustrated with the economic conditions in their country. They were frustrated with their own leadership. So if our goal was to get rid of that leadership and have it be somewhat organic. By emiserating the civilian population as best we could. Yeah, it's not perfect, man. But in some cases, we should do something. Which, also, it used to have a very vehement moral objection to.

If we're going to be, if we're going to be the world's reserve currency holder, the idea of us doing sanctions kind of shoots ourselves in the foot to a certain extent because we, we, we, we. We should want the whole world to use the dollar. So you have like a limited amount that you can actually use the sanctions as we saw when we went after Russia and we were like, we're going to throw Russia off the Swift system. Like, you know, way to shoot ourselves in our own foot there. Like, I get it. Like there are some moral implications of, you know, targeting that in a way is targeting the civilian population. But it is better than what we're seeing right now, which is a full on regime change war.

But again, like, look, I think the combination of killing Soleimani, maximum pressure sanctions, that had the Iranians to the point where they were. willing to go to the negotiations table with us. They even, you know, withstood one iteration of war and we're still willing to go to the negotiating table with us. Unfortunately, I think we squandered some of those opportunities. I think, you know, just through the sheer will and force of President Trump's personality, we have, we're at another juncture where maybe we can cut another deal. It's not going to be, it's probably not going to be as good of a deal as we could have gotten before because now the Iranians are realizing

their full, their power with the way they can throttle the Straits of Hormuz. Yeah. But at what point? point does this all this does whatever problem exist as you see it stem not from a lack of suitable advisors but trump himself i mean trump's the one who picks his advisors right after he won the twenty twenty four election he had maximum political capital especially in the republican party they would have confirmed fred flintstone for him if they if he had nominated him to be some uh cabinet official and he chose like marco rubio a long-standing interventionist quote-unquote hawk on iran and all manner of other issues he chose uh he you know to be this not just separate

of state, but now this hybrid national security advisor, Secretary of State role, where he's like Kissinger Redux, probably even more influential. He chose Hegsef, he was on the record as somebody who was very gungho about military action in Iran and all kinds of other places and with like this sort of religious inflection that he invokes. He chose Mike Waltz, his initial national security advisor, who's now UN ambassador, also a very committed, long-term interventionist.

So, I mean, look, I mean, this is who Trump thinks best reflects his foreign policy agenda, right? So it's not a matter of just trying to like sneak some different advisors in there at this point. Right. I mean, we're like 11 years into Trump being the most dominant political figure in the country. So like at what point is it about him on some level? Yeah. And he probably should have realized in the 24 campaign season that if you're going to take hundreds of millions of dollars from the pro-Israel lobby,

they're going to come back and demand a couple seats at the table. And then those advisors are going to lead you down a certain path. So, you know, I'm with you. I think he got some bad advice. I think he still has the capability to pull it off. I still, as much as he might not like me right now, I still believe it overall in his message and some of the policies he campaigned on.

But yeah, obviously at the end of the day, the buck does stop with the commander-in-chief. I know he once said that he liked you because you look as though you came straight out of central casting. And that hasn't changed. So maybe you can salvage the relationship. So you're saying there's still a chance, yeah. I mean, you have a much better drawline than me, I'll admit that.

I can get. Going back to 2024 for a second, so you were running for Congress, right, at the time, and you had in 2022 as well. And, you know, I remember, and I've been aware of you for years. I forget exactly how. It was something to do with Tulsi.

But, you know, I kept an eye on that campaign, did your messaging and so forth. It was against Marie Gleus and comp. Is that her name? Yeah, Perez. Yeah. And not long before that district had been represented by a Republican, right? It was, what's her face?

The woman, I forget her name now. Greer, Butler. She was one of the impeachment voters. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So she was not long for this world in terms of being in rep, Congress, as a Republican. But anyway, so this is what you said.

I just pulled, you know, not to do a gotcha. Sure. It's not really what it's meant. I'm just genuinely curious if, like, you see any cause to maybe introspect about some of this. And like, see, maybe if your analysis might need a little bit of updating a revision. This is what you said at September 24th, 2004, right? You said, Iran's leaders in our national security blob want a war with Iran. war focuses money and power on the ruling class.

It unites the people around the regime. Okay, fair enough. But then you say, our blob and Iran fear Trump avoiding war and using diplomacy and economic leverage. Trump is good for American people and the people in the region. So basically you're saying that like what stands in the way between the United States and war with Iran or the national security blob getting what they want is Donald Trump.

Like he's the impediment. And it's just like, I mean, come on. You got to like now maybe do a little bit of a rethink on that, don't you? You got me. Yeah, I mean, you can, you can pair that, I guess, my resignation letter, unfortunately. I hate to say it. And I still, in my heart, I believe that Trump wanted to be that guy. Unfortunately, just political reality of, you know, who he took money from on the campaign trail, who got an insider track on being key advisors.

You know, we're at where we're at. Again, I think he can still walk it back. All that could still end up being true because he's still going to get pressured by the national security blob, the pro-Israel lobby, which I wasn't as aware of until I was in the position I was in, to go back and to do something against Iran that's even bigger, whether that's a ground incursion or what he was talking about just the other night. So I still think he can be the Trump that all of us voted for and campaigned for. I mean, he started taking money from the, uh,

Sheldon Adelson, it was then in 2016. And then again in 2020. And then again, 2024. And it like increased each cycle. So like, it's nothing new. I mean, like, I appreciate that maybe. if you became a little bit more aware of it as time went on or given the perspective that you had in the government, you know, that's that's all fair and good. I just think they, you know,

I was a little flustered, especially in 2024 when I saw this like image being presented of Trump as something that like the record didn't really seem to support, meaning somebody that was like deep down looking to thwart Israel when he was like going around saying, I'm the most pro-Israel president of all time. Adelson's are great. Like, you know, on Gaza, his problem was that Biden hadn't sent enough heavy munitions. and even though Biden sent the most munitions to Israel of any president ever. So there was a huge wealth of evidence suggesting that this is what Trump's disposition was on Israel. It's like, it's some mystery.

And sure enough, that's like what's come to fruition in the second term. So I don't know. I'm venting to you about my frustrations at the time because, you know, I like to try to dispassionally analyze like each nominee as best they can. And I didn't see a lot of good dispassionate analysis of Trump in 2024. for. Yeah, I mean, I think the money is, is an interesting point that a lot of people who aren't deeply involved in politics don't understand. And it's like this weird feature of the, the American political system where you need money and whoever can pour the most money into a campaign,

they're going to have a lot of power. And then as a candidate, and I know this from being a candidate who is outspent, you kind of end up with this, I guess, like the prisoner's bargain. Like, if I don't take the money, then my opponent's going to take the money. So what do I need to do to do to get the money? And I think APAC and other special interests have really done. Did you raise money from those, from pro-Israel groups or individuals when you were running for Congress? So I think if you look at A-PAC tracker, I think I got like a couple individual donations where people donated a couple hundred or $1,000 like in the name of A-PAC. But, you know, I went to a couple of different breakfasts and like fundraising stuff they had and said, hi, I'm Joe, here's what I believe in. And I guess they just didn't like me.

So I never got a ton of money from them. Yeah. So it's challenging. So I understand where Trump and other candidates are like, no, I had to take this money. But I think the way that's coming out now, I think this younger generation, so I'm like 46, the people that are younger than me, I think they actually are acutely aware of this. And so I think in short order, it's going to become pretty toxic to actually have taken some of that money. So it's actually to be a net negative, which I think is overall a good thing.

It's informing people. And I think this is going to be a big wake-up call for the coalition that President Trump built, that we need to start rewarding candidates who aren't taking money from all these different special interest groups, especially from special interest groups that represent foreign countries. Well, you even have mainline, you know, prospective Democratic presidential candidates like a Gavin Newsom are people saying

that they won't take A-PAC money. So that's at least an indicator in the Democratic Party. It's a little bit more slow going in the Republican Party, obviously, within the younger cohort. Maybe that's something that they would like to see happen. But we shall see. I mean, just to drill down a little bit more

on the origins of the war, because I think, you know, it's important for the historical record to, like, understand that as best we can. you know, just like, you know, people are going to be debating for years or decades like, you know, why did Putin invade Ukraine on February 24th, 2022? You know, why did Hitler invade Poland on September 1st, 1939? I'm not likening, you know, Trump attacking Iran necessarily on the substance to those conflicts. Just like, you know, something that's going to come up, you know, as people

study history. And I'm just not quite following how it is that Israel could have, you know, so decisively deceived Trump to, for instance, amassed the largest U.S. force presence. in the Middle East since 2003. Like that's not something that Beebe could have, like, engineered somehow. Yeah, he could have made his case to Trump. But, like, Trump did that on his own volition, like maybe in concert with Heggseth, whomever it was with Israel and, like,

these pro-Israel people in the media, you know, whispering his ear, sure. But it almost kind of, like, when you so emphasize Israel, it almost creates the impression that Trump's being puppeteered by them rather than acting on his, with his own agency, first and foremost, which is my view, because I like to take Trump. Trump seriously when he's like introducing this expansionism thing that he's on in the second term that, you know,

spans the world, you know, Cuba's next, I guess, right? So, and he previewed this in his inaugural address, right? So, like, and then, like, in terms of the Rubio statement, right when the war was launched, a lot of people pointed to where, like, Israel was about to attack, so we had to attack preemptively to thwart any reprisals against American forces. Okay, but at the same time, like, why were the forces there in the first place because Trump sent them right to a mass against Iran and like in this pressure campaign thing, right? And that wasn't Israel doing per se in terms of like what the cause of it was. And also like there was, you know, in that New York Times report, they say, you know, Trump made its decision weeks in advance, right? It was just a matter of timing. And the timing came

when like the intel was presented to Trump about the Ayatoll having this meeting or the Supreme leader having this meeting in, you know, in daylight or something like this. And you can even see reporting like in the preceding week where like sources are telling Politico, look, we were like U.S. officials think it might be more politically palatable if Israel strikes first, right? So it just seems like there's like this pretty obvious coordination that's going on between Trump and Israel, where it's not just a matter of him being pressured or deceived, it's that Trump, for better or worse, views his interests or America's interest as aligned with Israel, right? So maybe that's wrong, but it's not a matter of him being snookered or swindled.

Well, I think a lot of it initially when Trump came in in January of 25, he was putting on a full court press to get a deal with Iran. He dispatched Steve Witkoff, and I think Whitkoff was on the cusp of getting a deal pre-midnight Hammer, and potentially even after Midnight Hammer, but definitely before Midnight Hammer, I think Whitkoff was on the cusp. Now, what the Israelis did that was very, very clever, and they used the echo chamber to do this was they moved the red line. So President Trump had said, like, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.

He still says it all the time. He had said it before. So that was basically the U.S. policy, no nuclear weapon for Iran. the Iranians basically had no nuclear weapon policy under the previous Ayatollah fatwa going back to like 03. I've even seen this walk through in great detail to the president why they don't have a nuclear weapon yet. He and I even had a discussion about this. You know, why don't they have a nuclear weapon? Couldn't they develop one? Couldn't they build one?

And we explained to them that like, yeah, they have a prohibition on building a nuclear weapon. And this is a pragmatic strategy because they saw what happened. Or we're just prohibition. Yeah, prohibition. So they saw, but they still want to be able to enrich because they saw what happened to Gaddafi, who said, I'm going to give up all my nuclear capabilities. Well, he got regime changed. They saw what happened with Saddam right next door when Saddam was like, maybe I do, maybe I don't. And he tried to play coy with it. Well, he got regime changed. So the Iranians

basically had what I called the Goldilocks formula of like, we've got some enrichment. We could build a bomb, but we're not going to. And we actually have a prohibition on it and you guys can come monitor it. And it was a deterrent from their perspective. Deterrence, totally. Yeah. And so what the the trading space was then at that point was like how much enrichment, how can it be monitored? These aren't things that are going to take a country off the war. There's lots of time to discuss that, et cetera. But what the Israelis did was they came in and they took a statement that Mike Pompeo had said back in 2018 where he said no enrichment. The U.S. policy is zero enrichment. And they used their access to our advisors. And they said they kept saying,

this is the U.S. So when is like what month is this? This is in the, you know, probably between February and June of 25. So this is when. So Wickhoff came out, comes out in May. I just think they recall this, because it seems like to me very important, where he comes out and makes a statement on some Sunday TV show saying, our red line is zero enrichment. So how is that, so that's Wittkoff declaring it. Wittkoff's the personal representative of Trump in this diplomacy along with Jared Kushner. And it seems like Wittoff himself is like he's already pre-existingly very pro-Israel, as is Jared Kushner, right?

So there wasn't a whole lot of subterfuge maybe that would. have to be done to get the Israeli Whitkoff position aligned, and then Trump also supports it. And then, you know, Trump and Rubio had also been saying, like, around this time starting, like, when those, that 60-day negotiation window was launched. So Trump, declared an ultimatum,

60 days, also there will be bombing, he said. Like, there will be blood, the movie. And, like, and Trump and Rubio said that their conditions were that Iran would have to basically accept the U.S. coming in and blowing up or supervising the blow-up of their dual-hler facilities. And Iran was never going to capitulate to that. There'll be a national humiliation.

So that's that goes, that's U.S. policy, as articulated by the president, the Secretary of State, his top advisor, etc. So that's not really coming from Israel, per se, unless you're just like talking about Israel kind of always being in the ether in Washington, which is true enough. But like, that's not the position of the Biden administration. Well, in the Trump administration, the zero enrichment talking points all came from the from Israeli government representatives engaging directly with our representatives, obviously Rubio and other officials, but then echoed in the media by Levin, by FDD, by all these different talking heads,

and all them engaging personally with President Trump too. So they were able to move that, which was, it wasn't his red line. They were able to move that red line, and then once it was said publicly enough times, and then we're in this trap where you can't go backwards on that, otherwise you look weak. And so they did a very effective job of playing the president, Trump's, you know, his psyche. But it was never President Trump's that I'm aware of. It was never

his, they can have zero enrichment because him and Wiccoff were talking about, you know, enrichment. Whitkoff was having discussions with like how enrichment can be monitored, to what percent, et cetera. And then kind of out of nowhere after there was lots of different engagements from senior Israeli officials of our officials and then a concerted campaign on the media that they know that President Trump consumed, that's when it came out that like our red line is no enrichment, knowing, like you said, that the Iranians were like, well, no, that that negates our entire strategy. That's actually our red line.

But the Iranians still stayed at the negotiating table. They were like, okay, maybe this is just, you know, bluster and maybe we can get through this. Even after 12-day war, even after mid-day hammer, they basically accepted Trump's framework where Trump said, like, okay, if we can't agree on enrichment, we're just going to bomb all of it and we're going to take all of it off the negotiating table. The Israelis, the Iranians basically at the end of that said, like, okay, cool, that works. That works for us, too.

It's gone. Which is amazing. I mean, I still don't quite understand. their whole posture here because, like, there were mountains of evidence that, like, this is where the train was heading, like the train left this nation, but they still, at least were signaling their openness to diplomat, so what happened after Midnight Hammer, though? You know, at Rubio's urging, the snapback sanctions get placed back on, right?

So that's not, meaning these UN sanctions that, you know, have been suspended as a result of the JCPOA, but the European countries had not yet acceded to reinstating them. And so that's another punitive measure against Iran, right? And then, you know, when the 60-day window back, you know, in February, you know, I think it was in March of 25, was declared by Trump in concert, in conjunction with Netanyahu, it was like one of on is like 12, you know, third or fourth trip to the White House already at that point. They say, they characterize it as what Iran has to accede to is the Libyan model. You mentioned the Libyan, you know, sort of precedent here where Gaddafi ends up getting regime change and also like sadomized to death in the streets. and Trump himself says, yeah, they have to blow up their nuclear facilities. I'm sorry, like, that's not a premise for a negotiation with Iran that's ever going to lead to a nonviolent outcome.

Maybe because one wasn't sought, right? Like, maybe Trump did want to take military action against Iran. Like, it's, they thought he was led to believe or he came to believe that they were attempting to assassinate him, right? I mean, so maybe that's just like what his conviction was. I just feel like there's a lot of people who don't want to accept that and do a lot of mental gymnastics to reach any conclusion of than that. Maybe I'm one of those people. But look, I think had he had a more robust discussion and different advisors around him and then really unpacked the intelligence, I don't think that this would have happened. But unfortunately, the Israeli influence network, the senior government

officials and the media apparatus, they were able to basically bypass the intelligence community. There wasn't a lot of robust debates. Leading up to Minnet Hammer, we had lots of robust debates. There was deputy committee meetings. There was national security council meetings. This was debated you know, hotly whether or not they were developing a nuclear weapon. What would happen? I mean, we played out all the scenarios as the U.S. government has been doing now for decades. What happens if we go to like a total war with Iran? So like all of this was known and all of it pointed to like we want to stay at the negotiating table with the Iranians. Like there actually isn't a good kinetic military solution. And that's why I believe in my opinion, after midnight hammer,

there was no more discussions. It was a very, very tight echo chamber around President Trump. And then to your point, they kept doing all, taking all these different actions that further provoked Iran. And again, when people come back and say, well, Iran's like ran by crazy Shia jihadis, it's like, well, if you look at the escalation ladder they used from the time Trump came into office, even post-midnight hammer, it took us actually attacking them first, knowing that the Israelis, and the Israelis were so frustrated with the negotiating process at the beginning of this war, because they knew that Trump was still at the negotiating table, or at least we were still attempting to get a negotiation, that they just said, you know what,

the conditions are right, we're going to go ahead and attack. Because like you said, they had already gotten basically Trump to move forces into the region. He was already enamored with the military from Venezuela, et cetera. But there was still obviously a potential for us to get some form of a negotiation. That's why the Israelis said, hey, we're going. You guys can't stop us. We're going to go. And so we...

Well, speaking of antagonistic behavior, Trump even just a bit it a few days ago, for the first time that I'm aware of, that the U.S. had sent guns or firearms or its weaponry of some kind to the protesters, quote, unquote, in like late December, early January. I mean, were you aware of that? I wasn't aware of that. That was probably closely, closely held. But I'm sure the Iranians were aware of it, too. And they still didn't.

I mean, again, observing the escalation ladder, they didn't want this conflict. So, yeah, it's very unfortunate. And again, I hope that the ceasefire that we have right now holds and we can get pragmatic Trump back. Okay. So I want to go to a slightly different topic. I watched you on breaking points shortly after you

you resigned. And Soger, as he's wanted to do, couldn't resist bringing up Jeffrey Epstein, our favorite subject. And basically he was trying to get you to expound on whether you saw Epstein to have been an intelligence asset. I thought it was a little bit odd, frankly, that you did think he was an intelligence asset of some kind, but you said it was based on, like, the same stuff on the internet that you were reading that everybody else was reading. There was nothing you could have leaned to that effect with a very high-level security clearance. Um, not with it. Do you see why I might find that peculiar?

Like if, if you do have that view, like shouldn't there be some information available or would there be some information available to you that can substantiate that idea beyond just like reading the standard stuff on the internet that, you know, every, uh, every like schmuck in their mom's basement can read? I mean, the only thing is different with, with me is my, my background in the CIA and special operations. So it, to me, it looks like an intelligence operation. We at, at NCTC and OD and I, we didn't have access to.

any of the Epstein file, all of that was under DOJ, lock and key. So we had no ability. All of it was sealed up. We weren't involved in any of the declassification or any investigation. So to me... What would it be lock and key? Like, you couldn't do an interagency request for something if you really thought that it was needed? No.

I mean, we would have to prove like what our investigatory nexus was. And because most of it involved American citizens and most of it was, you know, there's other people that there was legal implications for all that would be DOJ's purview. Did it ever occur to you that maybe like if you could that might be something you might want to? Oh, I would love to. If I if I am the you know, whatever at some position in the government ever again, I would love to look in there and see what we can come up with. However, like the way that these intelligence operations run, especially something like this that's going to deal of so much illegal activity, the the record keeping on it, it's not really going to exist. It's going to be ran through multiple layers of cutouts. I'm amazed that there was so much documentation. in the files. And I think a lot of that is because it involved Americans who eventually ended up getting caught up in the court system and arrested like Epstein did. But in general, these types of operations that intelligence services engage in, like there's not files at Langley or in Jerusalem

or any other capital. Like a lot of this is done through multiple layers of cutout. So I'm a little skeptical sometimes when they're like, oh, we have files here about, you know, this horrible thing this intelligence agency was engaged in. But couldn't get that cut against the idea that he was intelligence asset, at least in a traditional sense or in a way that most people would conceive of that consisting of. Just in that, like, I don't know any, like, intelligence assets, really, who have, like, millions of millions of emails and photos of themselves and are constantly sending, like, unencrypted texts and emails and, you know, aren't really bashful about, like, being out there, don't seem to have any obsec whatsoever. I don't know, like, isn't that, like, an

alternate theory that, like, although he might have had some engagements with some intelligence agencies just by way of, if only if him having this, you know, relationship with the former Prime Minister of Israel and Barack, you know, but he also had relations in some way or another with, you know, the members of the French government or former officials, British government, U.S. government, obviously, even, you know, Saudi, you know, Mohammed bin Salman and, you know, a million others. So, I don't know, like, isn't there, like sort of, like, potentially plausible contrary view of that, given his, like, total blasé attitude toward his, like, personal, you know, texts and calls and everything else?

Maybe he just thought he was protected. It seems to me like he just, he just, just thought he was untouchable. I don't know where the money come from, etc. I don't really know. To me, it looked like, even if it was completely independent and organic, with the amount of influential people that he was interacting with, I find it hard to believe that like multiple intelligence agencies weren't in some way, shape, or form linked with him. But again, that's, that's off of me, you know, using my background and reading the same thing that you're reading on the news. You seem to intimate a bit, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you at least found it plausible that when you have a network like the Epstein network,

whatever that consists of exactly. I'm not sure it's like a particularly well-defined network. But whatever that was, that it's possible that Trump, just given he did have an association with Epstein, not saying that he's incriminated any kind of child sex crime or anything like that, but he did have an association with Epstein that's well documented. It was a pretty close one, actually, in a long-term one. That therefore, just by virtue of that association,

maybe there's some, like, pressure that can be brought to bear on Trump to somehow influence his conduct of foreign policy or what he's doing as president? Like, is that a theory that you think is credible? If we don't want people to believe that, then we should have been way more transparent with the way the Epstein files rolled out for one. I think if there was anything-

Or maybe not declare it a hoax, right? Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. If there was anything incriminating on Trump in the Epstein files, I just think it would have come out like a long, long time ago. However, like you said, there was a lot of powerful people in the Epstein files. So there's a potential that there's something greater there about structures of power that people that are in power are incentivized to keep suppressed.

So that's a potential as well. I mean, Trump came out. I mean, I guess he said before, like, you know, there's nothing there, et cetera. So I don't know. I just think if we should have maximum transparency considering the implications so that if we're afraid of conspiracies, conspiracy theories like this spreading, the best way to combat it is transparency. in this exactly the opposite way that it was handled. I agree with that. I've been always

saying, I've been always calling for maximum. If we're going to get the Epstein files, right, let's have a maximum disclosure without all these ridiculous redactions that are mostly about, you know, purportly concealing information that relates to the identifying information of victims. So it's not like about perpetrators or, you know, alleged victims anyway. So I think there's some misconceptions around, like,

why it is that the redaction process has been so shambolic. But I'm just curious, like, you've been seeing that the messaging coming out of the Iranian government, right, where they're constantly talking about Epstein. Like this Larziani guy who was the head of the National Security Council or what it was. It was a very learned guy, actually. I mean, he wrote treatises on the philosophy of Kant and so forth

two or three days before he was killed. He was putting out tweets like taunting Hexteth saying, whereas our top Iranian officials are, you know, boldly striding around the streets of Iran and like being with the people, you Pete Hegsef and Trump, I guess, are hunker down in some kind of bunker on Epstein's Island, right? And you see like, you know, press TV, which is

like the state media organ. They're putting out Epstein stuff constantly. They're like surrogates. They're mentioned, like, they call the U.S. the Epstein regime or the Epstein Coalition, stuff like this. They're putting out these crazy AI videos where they're like singing Legos or singing

raps about Epstein and like, you know, implicating the U.S. I don't know. What do you make of that? Like in terms of like how how this has been embraced by Iran and also Russia, by the way. They put out the same stuff. What's your assessment of that? I think the Iranians, I think most of our enemies actually, because U.S. media is so prevalent.

I think that they do a very good job. And they take studying our media and our culture very, very seriously to see where the divides are. So I think this just shows a lot of their savvy. So they've probably got a good team of young people that are social media savvy. They're like, hey, this is a hot button. This is a place where we can really curry some favor. with an American audience and also just kind of like rub some salt in the wound. So I think it's mostly them being savvy. But at the end of the day, too, I mean, like, look, if you just look at

who Epstein was dealing with, it was basically the elite throughout the entire world, right, for the, for the most part. And so it does speak to the potential that there is, you know, a class of people that exists kind of above government that can make governments do things like, you know, wars, etc. So I think it does speak to just the constant struggle that we have between the people and the elite. Have you gone through, have you read any Epstein files since you've been out of government? Have you done like any independent, uh, investigation any further? No, not a ton. I just would, I haven't spent a time. I'd like to. I haven't spent a ton of time on it. Okay. I can, I'll give you a tutorial at some point. Okay. That might be amusing. Um, so I guess looking forward, right, so that we

have this apparent ceasefire. And yet, you know, just as you were, you put a video out, I think I saw last night where you're saying, you know, you has just to make sure that Israel's rained in here. I don't know. Why would we assume that Israel launching the biggest bombing rate or bombing spree on Lebanon of the entire conflict so far, you know, six or eight hours after the ceasefire was declared? Which obviously would seem to imperil the ceasefire because, you know, it's unclear, but it was at least suggested by the Iranian side that the ceasefire was supposed to include Lebanon as of last night. And now who knows? I mean, maybe it's subject to change, but hard to say. But why should we assume, given what's in the record net right now, in terms of, like, Trump and Israel being hand in glove or Trump and Net and Yahoo being handing glove, that Israel launching the bombing raid in Lebanon, the biggest of the conflict, was done like in contravention of the United States?

Like, doesn't the body of evidence now suggest that that would probably have been in tandem with the United States, or am I crazy? No, this is why I said, in order for any of this to last and for us to get out of this mess that we're in, step one is restraining the Israelis. And it has to be more than just like, oh, we're going to. going to call BB or we're going to call Dermer and say, like, don't do this anymore. It's got to be us actually withholding key pieces of military aid because the Israelis have actually, like, never been checked before.

Even in the lead up to the 12-day war when we were talking about how to make sure the Israelis don't force our hand, whenever the handful of us would say, like, hey, we should take away some of their offensive capabilities so they can only play a defense. We were basically like people didn't want to talk to us anymore when we said that. It was a hot button issue. And as things that played out, it's like if we don't actually actually. restrain these guys beyond like a phone call or a smack on the wrist, like they're not going to take us seriously. So I think Trump's got to get that under control. I'm hoping he's frustrated

enough right now with how badly this is gone that now that he actually has a ceasefire and the Iranians are so much corroborated. But the glorious victory we're told. Hexath gave this triumphant's press conference this morning. Did you see it? We did a total victory. It was incredible. What did you make of that? I noticed he was bragging that the U.S. sent boots on the ground last weekend. Like he's saying, look, we sent boots on the ground and they did this like thunder strike or something in the heart of Iran and how it was all great. So I guess he's trying to say, like, look, you naysayers

who were telling us how bad it would be if we sent boots on the ground, you know, suck on this because it was awesome. Like, is that how you interpreted that? Yeah, I mean, look, I was in the Army for over 20 years. I mean, it's always impressive when the military does things

because our military does do very impressive things. And so if you hear us describe these impressive things, you can get very enamored by them. Does that mean those things like strategically did anything good for our country? No, probably not. I mean, I can talk.

all day about all the cool things that we did when I was in special forces in Iraq. And at the end of the day, the Iraq war is a complete and total disaster. So, I mean, whenever you get a Pentagon press conference, like, they're going to come out there and run the highlight real of all the cool stuff that we did militarily. So I... Hakeseth in particular seems to, like, be really, really into it. Like, you know, I don't know. There's like, you could tell, I mean, maybe it wasn't a coincidence that they decided to, quote unquote, rename the department, the department of war. Like, maybe that spoke to something about their intentionality. I mean, he's a great height man and front man for the DOW.

As a leader, though, you've just got to know where that belongs. That's one tool in the toolbox. And it can't be the only tool in the toolbox. So I hope now we put some diplomats in the lead. All right. Just to close up here, Ukraine. I don't know that I've heard you really speak much about that. I'm wondering to what degree that fell under your purview at all when you were in the government?

because or like what what is your assessment of the current status of that because i you know i seem to recall correct me if i'm wrong that that thing was supposed to be solved in 24 hours so how many hours are we up to yeah i mean and uh Tulsi's chief of staff at the beginning of before i was confirmed we we dealt obviously with with ukraine a big problem that i think president trump had when he came in to the administration is that Putin was already winning the thing in a very russian sense in an american sense we're like this is a bloodbath oh my god this is horrible you guys are losing the soldiers. Putin is just like, attritional. The Russians are just like, we'll grind this out

and we don't care if we lose thousands to take back one kilometer. So when that's like the mindset, it's really hard to convince them. Now, the problem that we have, it's with Zelensky and the Ukrainians. And I understand the Ukrainians are under fire. I get that. They're defending their homeland. I get it. I respect it.

However, for us to continue to string them along and tell them to keep fighting and giving them these limited capabilities, then they never get to the negotiating table. And I think a lot of the more hawkish, like big NATO supporters and neocons in Trump's orbit convinced him that like, hey, you can still get both sides of negotiating table. You'll be able to get peace, but you kind of got to keep supplying the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians would go and do something offensive and the

Russians would come back and hammer them. And so it's just like, I don't think the Russians ever really took us seriously that we wanted any kind of meaningful peace because we never really took anything away from the Ukrainians. And in fact, Trump removed a restriction on long range, uh, Ukrainian missile strikes into Russian territory that even Biden had been resistant to remove. That was like last November, wasn't it? Yeah. Yep. And this is another one where it's like, I mean, he already got handed such a mess that the best thing that we could do is just say, hey, we're done funding it. And like, you guys are going to sort this out because at the end of day, who controls the Dombas really isn't that important to America and like let the Europeans

and everybody else kind of yell at us about it. But I think even the Europeans weren't saddling up, you know, to commit resources to it either. So it's like, we just let our get captured in like the passion of combat and then also thinking that like we Americans can solve everything. And I think a lot of times and just inertia, right? I mean like when you have a military engagement or I don't know how you would classify the U.S. mission to whatever extent there is one in Ukraine, I've always called it like a joint operation because you have like joint intel going on like targeting Starlink, you know, you have the weapons provision obviously. You have lots of troops in European command that are sort of playing the supporting role.

there's a bureaucratic inertia that that that takes hold right where it's difficult to steer the leviathan you know and that's you know process through to different administrations even if maybe like there's some indication that a new course might want to be taken um so i mean do you see that no yeah i see anything that reflected that dynamic i think that's spot on i mean like the president has a hundred things that he has to deal with on any given day and so unless he is very specific and he as people below him that are very specific to says go turn off all these different things that the last administration was doing for Ukraine in order to get us to the negotiating table and get a ceasefire. He can kind of say, I want a ceasefire all day long, but unless he deliberately

turns off all those instruments of bureaucratic inertia, as you put it, which I think is accurate, then like it all just kind of runs in the background. And this is a problem, I think, with a lot of our intelligence and a lot of the stuff that the DOW does, a lot of it just kind of runs on autopilot and even if the policy has changed or we're like, hey, that didn't even work, like, it just kind of keeps going because the machine is so big. And everyone that's a part of it is incentivized to keep it going because, you know, it's jobs, it's power, its contracts, etc. Isn't another part of this, though, that like Russia has also gotten more maximalist and radicalized? Like, I know personally, I would have been inclined to maybe be a little bit

skeptical of people who want to focus on that at the beginning of the war. I was more focused on U.S. foreign policy or the U.S. role, you know, Ukraine's the one who's the one receiving weaponry and so forth from the U.S. That's what would have been what I would focus on, what I focused on, and it was. But then in late 2020, I went to Moscow. Like this Russian group organized,

you know, maybe I shouldn't say this is out loud, but, you know, I've talked about it before. This Russian group organized, like, you know, they called them like social media influencers. Like, most of them were just these dopes who were just like basically Russian, like aspiring Russian apparatchiks, which I guess they mistakenly thought I was as well.

But I went and, you know, I was very strong. by how adamant and vehement and like ideologically sort of like radicalized they were around the Ukraine war, meaning, you know, we got to take Novo Russia. We have to like, you know, we have to draw on these grandiose historical theories that Putin was talking about in his essay infamously, you know, in July of 2021 before, you know, six or eight months before the war. And we're like now going to do actually some territorial conquest, which wasn't the case initially, the four oblasts that Putin declared our eternal part to the Russian Federation. So that's an aspect here too, because if you're saying, oh, maybe we could work harder if we had some bureaucratic sort of strategy to rein in some of the stuff that's been going on for four years. Maybe we can get Putin to agree to a ceasefire. Well, I don't know, he gave a speech that, you know, his position, he declared to his Russian National Security Council in June of 2024. Last I checked, that is still the policy where there's no ceasefire that he's ever going to accept without underlying resolution of all the political grievances. So he's a he was expressly against a ceasefire. And that's what Trump 2.0 came in. with a unified position with Ukraine eventually, saying, freeze the conflict, ceasefire. That's like directly counter to what Putin, very plainly, said he was never going to count.

Obviously, you know, can positions move over the course of negotiation? Sure. But I don't know. It seems like, you know, that's another factor here that maybe it's at least worth being mindful of. No? I mean, I agree. Because when you just look at the how Russia is pursuing this war, like they think they're

winning, they're willing to continue to lose for it. And like you said, like, obviously it's not just about like, oh, we kind of want to secure these couple of lobe loss. I mean, they have a historical view that they're very passionate about. So like, again, they're so passionate. They're willing to lose thousands of Russians, probably even a million by the time the whole thing said and done, to get their territorial gain. So again, I think Trump, as on the campaign trail, I think he really thought that he could get a deal. But the further this thing went along, the more entrenched and the more hardcore the Russians got. So I think even by the time he got in

the White House, even if he would have been able to go and rip out all the bureaucratic inertia supporting Ukraine, it's still a long shot that Russia would have even taken them seriously. I think Putin still would like give them the meeting or whatever, but I think they were just... There's probably bond, right? There might be some like improved sort of like, you know, diplomatic overtures maybe. Yeah. In terms of the underlying policy, it's pretty much the Biden's status quo at this point, except with this weapons provision program where supposedly we're being paid for the weapons, right, through like NATO as a conduit. I still don't understand how that's supposedly working. Like, is the U.S. really getting, paid for them? They won't, they won't respond to

my FOIA. So I have no idea. I just think the whole thing, it's like, we're not going to solve this. Like we're not from that region. It's not our backyard. It doesn't really matter to us. This is a place where I think we should just kind of wash our hands the whole thing and walk and say, hey, we hope you guys can come to a ceasefire and, you know, live in harmony and we can trade with both you. Yeah. All right. Just to a final question, are you sick of doing media interviews at this point? Do you feel like overexposed or like, because like I tried to mix things up a little bit. Tell me if I did an okay job. I didn't want to just get you to rehash the same salt stuff, right? Yeah. But are you sick of, are you sick of this yet for like the past?

What is it? Three weeks? Yeah, I mean, a little bit, but I do think the more that we can discuss these issues, I think it's, I think it's important. I think it's going to be important in elections going ahead. I really hope President Trump corrects course, but also I think going forward with whatever remains of the MAGA coalition and whatever it's forming on the left, too, I'm not as familiar with because that's not my political home. But I do see a lot of folks, like some of the messages that Rokano was putting out. I think, like, Americans being sick and tired of these endless wars, being sick and tired of foreign influence in our government, I think these are big things to talk about. And I think there's something here where we could form a new political

alliance, maybe even just for the presidency, because I think really at the end of the day, the president controls foreign policy and all the other stuff that we argue about, like, in a presidential election, it kind of ends up, like, not mattering. Abortion, trans. Yeah, yeah. Trump did one, Trump had one domestic piece of legislation, basically that he was focused on the big beautiful bill. And then beyond that, it's been all foreign policy. Exactly. Trump is very much sort of counterintuitively focused on foreign policy because that's what

the president has most unfettered control over. So it kind of makes sense. It was similar with Biden, actually. So that's what I agree with you. That's what I've always focused on in terms of presidential power rather than, I don't know, economy, okay, fine. But like, look, the president makes a call and then the military does it. Like, that's like, that's the unique area of his remit.

And so if there's agreement on the left and the right of like, we should stop doing the foreign wars and stop doing the bidding of foreign countries, I do think there's a potential if we can educate enough people that like, hey, you can vote for a president that just guarantees to keep us out of that, select his cabinet accordingly. And then all these other issues we disagree on, taxes, trannies, whatever, health care. Like, that's what you vote down ballot for. That's what you vote at the state level for. So, I mean, I think those are important discussions for us to have going forward in the next election cycle. That was kind of the premise of Tulsi Gabbard's 2020 Democratic primary campaign. Yes, it was. Which again, you know, day and day out.

She was probably too early for it, but I think maybe now, now I think there might be an appetite for that. Can you spill the beans on like anything that's going on with her at this point or are your lips sealed? Like, what's your, I mean, I know that, okay, like when she testified at the annual threat assessment meeting, her statement was, you know, this is that right after you resigned, right? Her statement was, look, the president gets to decide what constitutes an imminent threat. I mean, she had no problem in a different capacity, disagree. with how, you know, Biden, Trump 1.0, and Obama determined what an imminent threat was or what a threat was in any respect.

I appreciate that she's in a different role now, but, like, she very conspicuously did not, she made a point to say that she was not giving her own personal view. So I guess at least this is speculation about what her personal view is at this point. Yeah, I don't want to get Tulsi in any more trouble than I already have. I got you. Yeah, okay.

I believe it there. All. Last, last question. Do you want to come with Matt, Taleb and I on an expedition to Greenland. Are we going to take the oil? Yeah. Yes.

We'll take the oil. We'll take the salmon. We'll take the raw earth minerals. We'll take anything that we can get our grubby hands on. How about that? It's up for the taking. Let's do it. All right, Joe Kent.

Thank you. Sorry, Matt had to be in some hotel today and with a terrible internet, but hopefully I did my duty as best I could. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yep. Bye-bye.