Piers Morgan Uncensored - “He Would NOT Make A Good Asset” Ex Spy Doubts CIA Link To Ryan Routh

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Just when it seemed the 2024 US Election couldn’t get any more dramatic, former President Donald Trump has suffered through a second assassination attempt. While Trump was unharmed, and reports are now coming out that the gunman did not himself manage to fire off a shot, his intentions were crystal clear. The would-be assassin, now identified as Ryan Routh, fled the scene of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach after being spotted and shot at by Secret Service agents; leaving a rifle and other supplies in his wake. Ex-CIA agent Andrew Bustamente, speaks to Piers Morgan about how the harrowing scene unfolded, and what the currently available intel would suggest. According to Andrew, it’s unlikely that Routh is working for the CIA, citing his clear instability as a disqualifying factor, but does agree that the rhetoric of Trump’s opponents may have radicalised him into believing Trump’s murder would save American democracy. Andrew also believes that the most logical reason for the Secret Service’s inability to stop these threats from reoccurring, is not conspiracy, but plain old incompetence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've never been in a CIA. I've never been in my Secret Service. I'm just a television guy. But I would know immediately that those two places are highly likely to be places a would-be assassin would choose to be. Without a doubt, there are facts, there are details that the American public is not being exposed to. What people aren't willing to talk about yet is how dangerous a game the Biden and Harris camp have been playing since the beginning of this. threats that Trump has received from Iran in particular. Obviously, he took out General Soleimani,

he also took out the head of ISIS. The people that followed them may want to exact revenge. Absolutely, that is well within the realm of possibility. We've seen the likes of Alex Jones and Laura Luma. They believe Ryan Ruth, the second shooter, may have been a CIA asset. What would you say to that? Andrew Bustamante is a former CIA intelligence officer

and a US Air Force combat veteran, After serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, he spent seven years handling top-secret classified operations for the CIA's clandestine service. He brought his unique insight to bear in unpacking conspiracies that Trump's first assassination attempt could have been staged. As America grapples from a shocking fallout of a second plot to kill Trump, building salacious narratives and wild theories emerging from all sides, I'm pretty relieved actually to say that Andrew Mr. Mente joins me now to try and put some clarity on this. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me.

Absolutely, Pierce. Thanks for having me. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I absolutely understand why conspiracy theories are running riot in America right now, given two attempted assassinations on Donald Trump in seven weeks.

Both of them really inexplicable in terms of how they were allowed to happen. One is a young kid who gets on a roof that's unprotected, 150 yards from stage where Trump's appearing. And the other one just waits in the bush for 12 hours by a golf course hole that Trump's going to play because that's what he does every weekend. We'll come to the Secret Service part of this in a moment. But what's your brain telling you?

You're a CIA guy to your bootstraps. What does your brain tell you is happening here? Yeah, you know, it's a great question because what you're seeing not just in terms of the the cadence or the frequency of these assault attempts, but also you're seeing an evolution in the quality or the premeditated intent of that shooting. So when you look at what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, you had an individual shooter who was essentially planning for the shooting during the event, right? He actually had a scope during the event. He was walking around the crowds. He climbed up on a roof with no escape or no evacuation plan. He essentially either climbed up on that roof with the intent to shoot and then be killed, or he never once thought that he might be shot

at upon his escape. So you can see the lack of intentionality, the lack of training, the lack of planning that went into that attempt. Whereas we saw a very different setting in Florida. You saw a shooter show up who had pre-staged himself. He actually had backpacks with ceramic tiles. You don't ever hear people talking about that detail. But to me, when I hear that somebody shows up with ceramic tiles and multiple backpacks, it's because they are trying to create a barrier, an armor, a shield against incoming fire. Well, why would he want that? Because he knew he would be shot at, he would have returning fire. He already had his evacuation route planned. He had himself pre-staged. He had a scope and a site. He knew that the president was going to be, or the former

president was going to be going through a certain order of holes during his golfing day. And he even had his evacuation with his vehicle nearby and staged. And that's how he was able to flee the scene. So you can see an evolution in the intentionality of it, along with the evolution in some of the activity that you've seen in the campaign circuit as well. But here's the rub on this. I reckon if I said to you, Trump's doing a rally at the location where he was shot.

This is before it takes place. Where do you reckon the most obvious places that a shooter could want to get to to shoot it? You'd say that roof. Secondly, if I said to you, Trump plays golf every weekend that he's in Florida at the Trump International at Palm Beach. And he plays the holes in exactly the same order.

And there are three in a cluster in a corner, which is where the media tend to put themselves to get a clean shot with a camera of him playing golf because it's the best place to get a clean shot. If I said to you those two things, you would immediately demand in advance proper protection to stop people going to those two places. I would.

I've never been in a CIA. I've never been in a Secret Service. I'm just a television guy. But I would know immediately that those two places are highly likely to be places a would-be assassin would choose to be. So if I'm aware of that, and you would definitely be aware of that,

why weren't the Secret Service? And it beggars belief that they, just didn't think of this. So when I hear conspiracy theories go, well, they must have known, they wanted this to happen as well, obviously, I think that's ridiculous. Every part of me says, no, of course they don't.

But I don't have any logical explanation for why they didn't properly protect Trump. Yeah, you know, at CIA, we follow rules of analysis, right? Rules that help us understand how to make sense of all of the different intelligence that comes in, because you have intelligence that oftentimes is disparate or doesn't agree with each other.

And we have a saying, we have a razor or a rule that we follow that says never subscribe to conspiracy, that which can be explained through incompetence. And I think what we have seen time and time again now with the Secret Service is the second half of that rule. We can't say that they are actively engaged in some sort of secret conspiracy as easily or as logically as we can conclude that they're simply making mistakes. Now, what is the purpose? What is the foundation of those mistakes? It's unlikely that it's that they don't care about the president. It's more likely that it's a lack of resources. It's a lack of support. It's a lack of pre-planning.

And imagine being Donald Trump's Secret Service. I mean, that man chooses his own agenda day to day in a way that's very different from what a sitting president gets to do. I mean, even the day that Trump chose to go golfing, he just spontaneously made that decision. That does not give a pass to the Secret Service for leaving open certain vulnerabilities or corridors of attack, but it does help to get an idea of why they are perpetually challenged

with their purpose and mission of protecting the former president. The former first lady, maybe the next first lady again, Melania Trump has got a new book coming out and to promote it. She released a video saying there's more to that first attack. This was released before the second than the public had been told. Let's take a look. The attempt to end my husband's life was a horrible, distressing experience. Now, the silence around it feels heavy.

I can't help but wonder why didn't law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech? There is definitely more to this story and we need to uncover the truth. What is bizarre, Andrews, we seem to know more about the second shooter within 24 hours

than we still know about the first one seven weeks later. So just on that first one, do you think the first lady has a point? Do you think there's just stuff we just don't know about this? Without a doubt, there are facts, there are details that the American public is not being exposed to. That is just par for the course. That is how secrets and that's how the world of intelligence works.

Because in order for the federal government to share all that they know with the American people, they would have to also accept that they're sharing all that they know with foreign adversaries, with anybody who could translate English into a local language. So that's part of the game of secrets that makes it. so difficult. However, I will also say that what people aren't identifying, or what people aren't willing to talk about yet is how dangerous a game the Biden and Harris camp have been playing since the beginning of this, because they are essentially engaging in what the government very well knows is a influence campaign. They are not just running a presidential election campaign.

They are running a influence campaign. And influence campaigns use very specific words, very specific alarmist rhetoric. When you hear people talk about rhetoric, what they're talking about is alarmist rhetoric. They're using terminology. And if you watch the Democratic National Convention, you'll actually see how mass psychosis was leveraged throughout that entire event to create chants that were dark and almost verging on violence, right? Trump is a scab and some of these other terrible things that came out as chance, as rallying cries during what was supposed to be a professional convention. That is further evidence of what we in intelligence call an influence campaign. Traditionally, the most politically embedded candidate has always leveraged these influence campaign

tactics. Donald Trump, being a returning candidate, does not have that same network, does not have that same connection that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have been essentially cultivating for the last four years. I mean, interestingly, the second shooter, Ruth, was using towards the end of social media that was found by the media before most of it got shut down, was using direct sentences, which had come out of Carmelah Harris' mouth about Trump being a threat to democracy and so on. Conversely, Trump, every single day, he's just done it now on X, will say that Biden and Harris have destroyed the country and only he can save it. I mean, there's a very kind of apocalyptic language being used on both sides, isn't that? Yeah, you're right. They are both speaking.

in generalities that are dark and apocalyptic, to use your term. But I think the big difference that we're seeing here is that Donald Trump's rhetoric is still very much, you know, Donald Trump's improv, his off-the-cuff exploration and trying to come up with, you know, sound bites that sound interesting or relevance. Whereas what we're seeing from the Harris and Biden camp, and I call them the Harrison Biden camp because that is what they are. Let us not forget. They are now a combination of sitting president, yes, sitting president and prospective president, something that has not happened before in history where a sitting president eligible for reelection simply chose to nominate their vice president. Either way, what you're seeing from that camp are very well-tailored, crafted attacks that are repeated over and over again. Anybody in business, anybody in marketing, even you peers in media, you understand the value

of saying the same phrase, the same way over and over. again. Yeah. Right? And that is exactly what is happening from the current sitting administration. No, I think there'll be a very dangerous game because it sets of presidents. Yeah, there are lots of people out there. I think you repeatedly hear from the left that Trump represents an existential

threat to democracy. Like if he wins, if he wins, democracy dies and they double up by calling him the new Hitler as if there's any comparison between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis who murdered 12 million people. I've had a problem with that for a long time.

What do you think about these reports from various people trying to link threats that Trump has received from Iran in particular? Obviously, he took out General Soleimani, he also took out the head of ISIS. Very, very, very dangerous, bad people, but who,

you would imagine that the people that follow them may want to exact revenge. There is a theory that's been put out that the fact that the first shooter seems so clean in terms of no motive, no reason coming out, no social media really, that he could have been put there by somebody like a state like Iran or whatever. What do you think of that with your CIA ad on? Is that even remotely possible? Absolutely. That is well within the realm of possibility. The thing to understand about Iran is that, and really about Donald Trump and his relationship with Iran, because of the activities that he carried out when he was the sitting president, he has created

a very clear target on his head because he fought and demonstrated the power of American intent in executing foreign policy that's in the best interest of democracy. That is why Iran still to this day has death threats on his head. They still invest in sending out teams to try to attack Donald Trump. He has a very active Secret Service team now, specifically because even though he hasn't been sitting president for four years, he is still a known hot target for the Iranian administration. That is exactly what it means to be a president, right?

You execute on things that put you at risk, you carry out activities that you know will make enemies of you because you're doing the right thing for the people that you're trying to protect. that is part of the hard lessons of leadership. And under Barack Obama and under Joe Biden and under the prospective promises of Kamala Harris, they're trying to do the opposite. They're trying to make America friends with everybody.

They're not trying to show our power and our might and our ability to unify through power. They're trying to say that we're just part of a larger community. I don't want to be part of a community with Iran that makes terrorism and sponsors terrorism around the world. I don't want to be part of a community with China. that takes advantage of childhood labor and tries to force laws that force women to procreate

to make more children. I don't want to be part of a global community that's led equally by crazy countries that don't understand true democracy or true leadership. I would rather be part of the strong arm of the United States that ensures that we have a very clear, strong, powerful leadership role in the world. We've seen the likes of Alex Jones and Laura Luma,

two people who I would not associate with the most reliable the most reliable of information about pretty much anything, right down to what the weather's like. However, they are putting out today that they believe Ryan Ruth, the second shooter, may have been a CIA asset. What would you say to that? Everything I've read about the second shooter shows that he would not make a good asset. When the CIA vets an individual to be an asset, they look for very specific things and very specific traits. And one of those traits is mental stability. They also look for people who are predictable and consistent over time

because unlike the movies would have you believe, true CIA officers and true CIA assets are so effective because they are secret. They're never discovered. They're never found, right? True CIA officers get in, get the information and get out without anyone ever knowing they were there. It's not like James Bond, right?

So when I saw the second shooter and I see his history of inconsistency and his travel to and from Ukraine and the fact that he can't he literally just seems to parrot the party line of whatever's happening right now in the Democratic Party it shows that that is not a person of mental stability of consistency of reliability that it would take to carry the kind of pressure and responsibility of being an asset and i would not anticipate that CIA would come within 10 miles of an individual like that because they know that when he is compromised when he does something stupid tries to shoot a president or former president on a golf course that have Eventually, that would come back to them.

It's a term we call blowback. And the blowback on an asset like that would be so great. It simply doesn't make sense that CIA would spend any time or effort investing in him. There's a clip from Leon Panetta who spoke up with DNC, which I want to play and get your reaction to it. Our warriors need a tough, cool-headed commander-in-chief to defend our democracy from tyrants and terrorists. We need Kamala Harris behind the resolute desk. Do we, Andrew? Or is Donald Trump, in his very uniquely kind of blunt, bombastic,

put his arm around the dictators, but also warned them style, which led to America not going to war with anyone in the four years that he ran the country, which was against all expectations? You know, I've often thought with Trump that he had a kind of weird, but quite effective strategy on the foreign stage, whether it be Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin or President Xi or whatever it was

or taking on NATO and making them pay their dues, the NATO countries. His kind of blunt style and the bromant style was oddly effective. So when you hear the former boss of the CIA, Leon Panetta, say that it has to be Kamala Harris because she's cool, calm and collected, do you agree with that?

I do not agree with Leon Panetta, and I'll tell you one very important thing to understand about the former boss of CIA. The head of CIA is an appointed position by the president. So when Panetta was the president or was the head of CIA, you have to look at who was the president who appointed him, right? They were very much part of a political umbrella that has to foster and grow them up. Plus, Leon Panetta is now buying for a position in the cabinet under a Harris administration, right? So you have to take all of that as a completely biased point of view, sitting on a biased stage, preaching to a biased audience, a message that was pre-canned, pre-approved, and pre-written specifically to get a reaction from the voting base of the Democratic Party. So I see all of that as absolute bathwater that should be thrown out the window because it's useless, it's worthless, it doesn't actually advance the message forward. In contrast to that, and to your point, Pierce, Donald Trump was a oddly effective president.

which is why people are so upset with him, because nobody can explain why he was effective. We don't know why. It didn't fit any of what we've seen effective, it didn't fit any of the model that we've seen developed over the last 50 years. But remember that the United States rose to preeminence after World War II,

and we rose to preeminence because we had a very cold, pragmatic, practical, business-like approach to how we ran geopolitics. Ever since we've had this back and forth of, families of elected candidates, right? The Bush family, the Clinton family, et cetera, et cetera. And we've seen this passing on of professional politicians. We've actually gotten away from practicality

and we've gotten more into the world of ideology, which is exactly what drove that second shooter to camp out on the golf course and try to shoot President Trump, former President Trump. It was an ideology. He believed in this good and evil garbage that's being preached from the stage by our current sitting president

and by our candidate to be, or our Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris. When you pull on people's ideology, it's like playing with children, right? You can ruin adults by teaching children the wrong ideology, and that's what is happening to our country overall. We are investing in these ideologies

that are very dangerous instead of sticking to the pragmatic, cold-blooded facts that make us such an economic powerhouse. Any CEO out there understands the cold, harsh truth of business. Why is it that we have gotten away from the cold, harsh truth of politics

in place of these ideological quips. Yeah, I completely agree. You were an undercover spy for seven years. You don't look like the conventional James Bond type spy that we Brits in particular have grown used to. I don't know how many spies I've met because you're never quite sure, are you? But you certainly wouldn't fit the archetypal mold.

What was it like being a spy? You know, some of the best years in my life serving the United States, being undercover, being ambiguously brown, which appears you find a very nice way of saying that I'm just ambiguously brown. I appreciate that. Actually, it was more your hair, actually. It was more, I haven't seen many spies with your hair. Fair point. But the thing that's nice is that, you know, when you're working undercover around the world, the goal is to blend in and be forgotten and be overlooked. And brown people, especially brown people of a smaller stature like me, we can blend in and be forgotten very easily.

It's much more difficult for a handsome, you know, Pierce Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan, yeah, that's his name, or other, you know, James Bond, or, yeah, or Pierce Morgan, exactly. It's harder for a handsome Caucasian male to blend in around the world. And honestly, I don't know how often you've met MI6 officers yourself, Pierce, but, you know, MI6 has done a fantastic job of diversifying what their officer corps looks like so that they can play off of the embedded racism that is true. present all over the world outside of Western societies. We like to make a big deal and say that we are racist in the United States.

We have a racial history in the United States, but there is truly active racism everywhere else in the world outside of Western democracies. Yeah, just to be clear, I wasn't actually talking about your ethnicity at all. I was talking about your hair because, you know, we have a thing of like Daniel Craig or Sean Connery or whatever. You're obviously not that kind of guy. But I completely said.

I would imagine that the CIA MI6 must be incredibly diverse in who they choose because the whole point is they want you to disappear into the regular world. If you do stand out as all six-foot-three-inch, you know, Sean Connery look-alikes, it's going to be a bit obvious. It's absolutely true. And what's funny is when you do get to meet some of the leading officers of other intelligence services, the Pakistani ISI, the Mossad with the Israelis, the Chinese MSS, oftentimes what they're looking for is your stereotypical,

non-threatening American-looking person, right? So they're trying to find the most Caucasian people in their country to send to the United States so that they will blend in, understanding that a very Pakistani-looking Pakistani is going to stick out on the streets of Washington, D.C. How long would it take you to kill me with your bare hands? I would never kill your peers, but I would show you some tricks that could kill somebody.

But if you really needed to, if you discovered I was a terrorist and you had to kill me, how long would it take you? Oh, man, if I discovered that you were a terrorist, I wouldn't want to kill you. What I want to do is incapacitate you. That would take about 70 seconds. And then take you somewhere where we could quietly debrief you to get all of your secrets before we just made you disappear. You said that your time in the CIA was a whirlwind chasing bad guys and shutting down terrorist plots. Is that the reality then? It really is everything we assume it is. It's so much better than what you think it is, to be honest. What media and what Hollywood have done with,

espionage is they've watered it down to make it flashbang and fancy. In reality, undercover officers, they go operation to operation, executing two to three operations a week. It's always on the cutting edge of what is needed to keep America safe because CIA is known as an agency of last resort, which means every other federal agency has tried and failed, and that's the only reason CIA gets called in. So when you are that agency of last resort and there's so much work for you to do, you really do you end up jumping plane to hotel to terrorists to plane to hotel to human trafficker plane to hotel to weapon smuggler plane to hotel to guerrilla war lord it's incredible the amount of diversity and excitement that you get to have and it's very real unlike it is in the movies where you're never

discovered you're never caught and you get to make decisions that literally change the fate of history what was the closest you came to death it's uh it's actually the topic of a book i'm trying to get approved by cia right now it's been about a three-year process but i was serving in East Asia against a preeminent geopolitical threat that we have out there, and they discovered that I was present, they discovered that I was in their country, and they sent a team to find me, and I had to escape using the skills that CIA taught me. It's such a sensitive and current story that CIA has consistently rejected to let me tell it, but I am fighting them. In fact, I'm actually due in Langley next week to sit with their review council, their review board, to try to get formal permission

to share that story. And I'm happy to come share it with you. as soon as I get that permission. I would love that. Fascinatingly, and this probably goes to your people's skills, you managed to carry out a lot of this undercover work with your wife in a tandem operative scenario. Your wife, G.E., how did that happen? Yeah, that's actually, you're exactly right.

Part of it's because my wife is smarter than me. She is more likable than me. She is an amazing human being with an anxiety disorder, which also helped her because it made her now paranoid about all the threats around us. But my wife and I met at CIA. We ended up getting married at CIA after dating for about a year. We tried very hard not to fall in love because it's very inconvenient to fall in love with another operative. But ultimately we got married. CIA saw that we had complementary skills and that we were both of a brown, you know, an ambiguous

ethnicity, which made us very powerful as an operational couple because we could essentially be sent into the forward field and with very little support, just supporting each other in a true like marriage that did not have to be fabricated or falsified, right? It was a genuine legal marriage. So it was a fantastic time, but at the same time, any husband who's ever worked with their wife, you know what that's like.

And doing, working with your wife undercover is no different than working with your wife anywhere else. It's a mix of good and bad. And you still have to sleep together at night. So more often than not, her decision wins. Why did you leave in the end? Because it sounds like you had a fantastic time in the CIA. We had a fantastic time.

My wife and I both had fantastic careers. And ultimately we left because in 2012, when we came back from one of our most important assignments, we decided to build a family. And by the time that we had actually successfully had our first child and that child was old enough to be going to daycare and whatnot, we found that there was a very,

an unspoken code at CIA where you had to put the organization above your family. And that's not something that, you know, they don't teach you that on your first day. They don't teach you that on any of the slide shows about, about, you know, health insurance or retirement planning. And when the time came that we felt that we had to choose between family and career, my wife and I were of a generation that chose family first.

So we chose to raise our son. We chose to have a daughter. We chose to build a life of contributing American, you know, you know, citizens, rather than just dedicate ourselves to the mission of CIA. And frankly speaking, after seeing how CIA reacted under the presidency of Donald Trump in his first term as president, I was very happy that we left when we left, because it gave us a chance to be independent voices, independent business people, independent adults that did not have to follow the party line of what CIA was saying at the time about our sitting president.

Finally, Andrew, I mean, you know better than most the answer to this question. What is the biggest threat that we in the West face, do you think, right now? Without a doubt, our biggest threat is China. Just there is no place where China isn't actively investing, evolving, and growing. That isn't the threat to the United States, militarily, economically, technologically. When it comes to their global reach through the Belt and Road initiative, China is replicating what the United States did at the end of World War II. They are giving poor countries alternate.

options for technology, communication, and infrastructure, just like we did in Europe post-World War II. And as a result of that, you're seeing the rise of China and the rise of the access of resistance as it partners with Iran and Russia and North Korea. And you're seeing how it compares to the traditional form of democratic alliance like we see in NATO, which is predominantly run by the United States, not equal parties. So you're seeing this competition between pragmatism in the east and ideological, in the West. And the question is, which one will win out in the long term? That's one of the reasons that Donald Trump is such a powerful candidate for the United States, not because he sounds

silly, not because, you know, he's a famous business person, but because people look at Donald Trump and know he makes pragmatic decisions. Selfish, yes, but pragmatic. And pragmatism is the thing that's going to keep us safe in the future, not a promise of ideology. Andrew, Mr. Minow, what a fascinating conversation. Let's do it again. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Pierce. Thanks for having me. Thank you.