Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/12/26 Joe Kent on Why He’s Not Optimistic About Trump’s Iran Deal

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

Joe Kent returns to the show to discuss the latest developments with the Iran war. Kent explains why he is pessimistic that a lasting deal can be achieved in the near future. He and Scott also talk about Israel’s spying on the US government, Tulsi Gabbard, the Charlie Kirk assassination, the new regime in Syria and more. Discussed on the show: “U.S. and Iran Zero In on Four Nuclear Issues in Talks” (New York Times) The Trump Assassination Plots: What the Investigations Missed and Why it Matters by Ken Silva Joe Kent is a retired Army Special Forces soldier who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in Trump’s second term until he resigned in 2026 over the war with Iran. Follow him on Twitter @joekent16jan19  Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country? Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott. Scott Porton. All right, you guys, introducing Joe Kent. Again, a former special operator and CIA Special Activities Division guy from Iraq and Syria. Did you fight in Afghanistan too? Despite spending six months in Pashti language school, I did not go to Afghanistan.

Did some time in Yemen, Northern Africa as well. Okay. And then famously was the director of counterterrorism. in the Trump to administration, but resigned over the Iran war. And you might remember I got the second interview after Tucker, but still. Anyway, so it's been a little while.

I thought it was time that we catch up. Now, I hate to say, but this is almost an evergreen headline. Trump is threatening to bomb Iran off the face of the earth, and he's also saying that actually that's not going to happen at all because he has a deal in hand. And so in this era of Doublethink, I guess both things are true.

Day in, day out, I think, you know, the latest count is this is the 39th or 40th time that he said he's had a deal. The Iranians are saying that's not true. I guess I'll go ahead and throw in that David Sanger had a report in the New York Times, which, you know, he's their Iran Beak guy for a couple decades now. And that report at least indicated that I don't think they even had Iranian sources. I don't know. But at least that there are talks going on.

and that they are quite substantive and they had all these proposals on the table for what might be the solution, although I'm not so sure how achievable those potential compromises are. But anyway, I just wonder what's your take on this? I guess first, to simplify it,

is there a deal on the table that's achievable here? Or is this all just bluster? What is going on? I don't think, I used to be skeptical. I used to be more optimistic on a deal, but I'm less optimistic now for a wide variety of reasons. But basically, I mean, number one, the Iranians think they're winning. And I think they have every reason to believe that they're winning. Like they can exert some degree of control over the Straits of Hormuz.

They can strike our foolishly placed bases in the region whenever they want. The Israelis also are not on board with us getting a deal because us and the Israelis, regardless of what we tell ourselves, we just have fundamentally different strategic objectives here in this whole thing. So I think Trump is actually like he's caught in this suspended state, this quagmire stalemate, if you will, where basically he's either going to have to accept a deal that is going to end up being, you know, worse, according to political rhetoric, worse than the Obama deal, or he's going to be forced to stay in a shooting war that's going to end up being worse than Bush's wars. So I am truly hoping that he just rejects the false binary choice

and just walks away from this whole thing and says that he won and then kind of piecemeal, kind of a la carte negotiates deals on the side once the military tensions have been taken down. But I'm very skeptical of a deal. Yeah, I mean, this is the problem, right? Is your solution, as you've proposed, which I agree with, of course, is just to walk away from the whole thing. That's just the whole burden back onto it, right?

on to figure out how to get along with the rest of Eurasia now. And so, and we need to come home anyway and it accomplishes a lot of things. But the thing is that solution is too good and it's too simple. And so we're stuck between the easy but politically impossible solution versus negotiations that don't go anywhere because both sides are way too high up on their ladder still as far as their demands from the other side and what they're willing to relinquish. and then a shooting war that can't go anywhere. Where, as you say, they have, you know, it's a Mexican standoff.

Everybody's got a gun to each other's head. And we're the superpower here, but not really there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, if there was a military solution, Trump just would have done it. But there is no real military solution. I'm grateful that President Trump at least hasn't listened to the more insane people from FDD or even within the administration who want him. to deploy paratroopers onto one of the islands

or to try and do some sort of a special operation in to grab the nuclear dust, as he calls it. I think we got really lucky, even if that pilot recovery was something different. Thankfully, we didn't lose anybody, but we got close enough that we kind of got knocked back down a couple pegs into reality, saying that we can't just swoop into countries

and do exactly whatever we want to. Venezuela gave us that false confidence for a while there. So look, there's no military. solution. I think the president knows that at a very instinctual level. And then again, like, the Israelis were diabolically genius at the beginning of the war by getting us on board with killing the Supreme Leader and then basically suffering no consequences whatsoever when the Israelis went and killed a bunch of the other moderates. So now we're left to negotiate with the guys who never wanted to negotiate with us in the first place. I know Arachi and a few of the other guys are

still out there, but the guys that are really calling the shots inside Iran, these are the guys, I think, coup for decades now have been saying, like, you can't negotiate with the Americans and the Israelis. Like, we just need to fight them. And so now we're, he's either going to have to accept a deal. If he accepts anything that resembles this 14-point proposal, I mean, I would be for it if it would end the conflict, but he's going to get eaten alive politically. And then that's going to give the Israelis the justification for basically knowing out that. And we still haven't shown the fortitude to take away support from the Israelis. So we wouldn't be able to restrain the Israelis and the deal would end up blowing up anyways. So again, we're, we're just,

stuck. That's why he should walk, but I agree with you, he probably won't do it. Yeah. Well, there's so many different things I want to ask you about all that. I guess let's stick with the theme of Israel's veto power over Donald Trump's decisions here. I mean, I got to tell you, I'm a little bit dubious about all of this. I mean, it's very easy to speculate that these two guys are on the phone going, okay, man, you tell them this and I'm going to do that, right? It makes perfect political sense for Trump to create some distance between him and Netanyahu on Lebanon, for example. And I did an interview yesterday with the American conservative guys. And Andrew Day was pointing out that this makes sense from a diplomatic point of view, too, as far as Trump's

negotiations with the Iranians, where he can kind of say, ah, geez, Israel's this loose cannon here. They're doing these things that I don't approve of. But once we get to a final deal, I'll make knock it off then, you know, kind of thing, but still giving Israel their space. And then he can, I mean, come on, they call up the guy from Axios. And they go, you know what I mean? So it's so easy to believe that right before that, they go, well, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. You bomb this, but then I'm going to call the guy from Axios, and I'm going to tell him

that I'm real mad at you, though. And you know what I mean? Like, it seems kind of the theater to me. But then again, well, I don't know, because if you take it at face value, there have been times where Trump said, now listen, I'm negotiating here and I need you to stop bombing Lebanon and publicly so prohibited in all capital letters. And then the Israelis just keep going anyway. And it seems like they really are sabotaging his diplomacy there, just the same as killing Lara Johnny and the other guys who might have been able to sit down at a table or might have been

more amenable to compromise there. So what's your real take on that, especially somebody who was inside the government for a little while there at that level? during this. Yeah, until we actually see the United States remove some of the support that we give the Israelis, even if it's very minimal, I just don't think anything that we say is very serious. I mean, whether or not, you know, B, B.B. and Trump are secretly, like, wargaming out this, like, pro wrestling thing. I don't know. They both kind of run hot and they both understand politics. So I don't even know if they would even need to collude that much on it. But the Israelis, under this administration, especially, have never had any real ramifications. They've,

gotten some strongly worded posts. They haven't gotten to do like, you know, an offensive exactly when they wanted to do it. But they still have our unconditional support. They're still getting the money. We will still come and bail them out. So until we actually pull some of that support back, I just don't expect the Israelis to behave any differently whatsoever, regardless of what we say, and even if we have the intention of being like, no, BB, this time I mean it, don't go on the offensive in Bomb Beirut while we're having the negotiations. If we don't actually pull support, then we're just not serious. And this is a debate that we had. ahead of the 12-day war

where there was several of us who said, if we're worried about the Israelis going on the offensive, let's take away some of their capabilities that prevents them from going on the offensive. Now, that's harder in Lebanon because they're closer. They don't need as much from us. And we were talking about Iran at the time where they actually did need us.

But again, until we see that, us actually taking things away from them, I just don't think we're serious about restraining Israel. Well, yeah. And then that's everything, right? It's the hugest ask in the world is for Trump to say, now you listen to me, Netanyahu, I'm tired of this and I'm taking your guns away, whatever.

But without that, nothing happens, right? Or without that at least he leaves open, this permanent Israeli veto. And now, see, this is important too, is apparently, I mean, I hadn't read like Iranian press and know if they're talking this way or what, evidently feeling their new increase. power and authority in the region, the Iranians hit Israel over Israeli strikes in Lebanon the other day, which is a first, right? Now they're not just supporting their friends in Hezbollah, but now they're actively defending them, jumping into a fight on their side the way, for example,

the Houthis had done and all that and hitting Israel directly on behalf of a third power there. So, you know, that's their objection to Israel's constant breaking of the ceasefire, two different ceasefires, right? They're supposed to already have a ceasefire with Hezbollah. Anyway, people just forget that because it's so meaningless. It's so one-sided. But anyway, I don't know. Well, I mean, this is kind of stupid, but I might as well ask you.

Like, what do you think that it would take for America to actually win a war against Iran where they come like in Trump's daydreams and, you know, on their knees with a bloody nose and sign whatever document we say, like the Japanese, after, you know, we finished nuke in them and threatened them with Stalin and all of that back in 1945. Yeah, I mean, this is a dark question because when you play out the formula long enough, it kind of leads to one place,

and that's like the Japan scenario. Because even if we had the national will, and even if we had like a coalition of the willing, to go and do boots on the ground, a ground invasion in Iran, even if we could topple the regime, the insurgency that would undoubtedly follow, we would not be able to quell, even if we were unconstrained

and we had lots of, the country's just, the geography just doesn't make sense. We just couldn't do it in any meaningful way. It would be another scenario, you know, where we replaced the IRGC with the IRGC after 20 years of blood and treasure, just like we did in Afghanistan. So I think when you play out the scenario fully

and you're like, we need a total surrender from the regime, it goes to that dark place where it's like, oh, well, actually you do have to probably drop a nuclear bomb or something like that. As crazy as that sounds, that's why, like, even saying we demand total surrender from them is actually crazy too because there's only one real way to get there. Yeah. I mean, this is, it's so obvious Trump's frustration here. He's the ruler of the world empire. Right. And he's fighting against a second tier state, maybe third tier state.

Yeah. He lost. But he didn't lose. Like America's still here and everything, right? Just the same way we lost Afghanistan just means we have to leave. Right. Right. But same thing, though.

Right. But then that is bad politics for him to like have to back down in a way. I mean, this is the thing of it, right? Is never even mind Donald Trump, okay? Let's say it's Vice President Pence in there. And now Trump, it's, you know, the past is the past. There's nothing we can do about the fact that Trump just kicked Iran up another couple of pegs in the region, maybe three or four. In turn of their enhanced authority over the Gulf there.

This may be better for Iran than even Iraq War II, which is kind of hard to fathom. But yeah, I mean, considering especially how the government in Baghdad never does very much for Iran other than stay out of things, you know what I mean? So, but how is America, the empire, not the country, supposed to be able to ever live with this? I mean, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is where almost as frustrated at Trump as I am and many Trump supporters are,

this is where Trump's superpowers really could kick in. Because if anybody could sell just leaving and then also like reorienting to like the Persians, it's Trump. Trump could easily just say like, this whole thing was stupid. We got into it, you know, because of the Israelis. The only reason we had bases there is because, you know, Bush got us into this thing with Gulf War I and we stayed. It was dumb.

We're pulling those bases out anyways. And you know what? These Persians are actually pretty strong. And, you know, I hear they've always had a great empire. If you just look at how big the country is, we're going to end up dealing with him anyways. And then he ends up dealing with him, you know, and that's much easier to deal with them. We're dealing with the al-Qaeda headchoper who gets to go to the White House.

So I think Trump could do it. but the problem is the Israelis get to veto. There's a lot of people that are whispering in his ear right now, how much he'll be humiliated, which I really don't, I don't think he would be. I think he could basically trump his way out of it. That's my hope anyways, because I think just accepting the fact that, like,

look, Persia's always been a big thing. It was contained for a little while, but it probably costs us more to contain it than it would just to deal with it. So, well, let's just accept the world as it is. Yeah. Hey, you guys, me here for tax lawyer, Matt Surveller, Sersely. And he is at agoristtaxadvice.com. He is a libertarian, one of us. And he's here in case you run a small to medium size business or you make a lot of money at your high-powered salary job. And you're looking to

protect your wealth from the IRS who wishes to take it. No gimmicks here. You have to obey the law, but he knows the law and he will make sure that you do not pay one penny more than you have to. Talk to your new lawyer, Matt Sersely, at agoristaxadvice.com. I mean, I always said he should get on a plane and just go to Iran. Call him on the radio, say, we're requesting a runway at Tehran International Airport. Don't you shoot the president down. We're landing and we want to talk to the Ayatollah right now. And then, you know, I learned this for my guest, Chos Freeman, or maybe I already knew this,

but I did talk with Chos Freeman about it, and he was there. Nixon went and shook hands with Mao Zaytung, the bloodiest killer in the history of all of statehood ever. And went and said, put it there, pal, and said, let's make friends now. And then I'll have my people call your people and we'll work out the details later. Taiwan, the Soviet Union, like every bit, Korea, Japan, whatever. We'll take care of all those details later. But first, let's just settle this. you and I are bros now, screw them Soviets, right?

And then start on there. And so that's the kind of thing that, and I agree with you, that of his many kind of detriments and failures, this is Trump's greatest political talent, is just pretending that yesterday never happened and that I meant to do that and everything is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen. And this is just what I want to do. And now I got him right where I want them. So now let's make a deal on their terms.

And we'll call it a victory. Like whatever, man. He doesn't care what the truth is at all. all. It's whatever serves him that day so we can do the right thing and sort of ignore all the stupid stuff that he wished he hadn't done kind of thing like you're saying there. I think he could do that. Maybe better than any other president could, but like you say, the lobby's got a veto. Yeah. And this is why the Israelis, again, we're diabolically genius in getting him on board with the killing of the Ayatollah. Because now if he tried to go in there, I think he could still probably

accomplish it, but it's much more complicated for him to go now directly to the Iranians. Had we not killed off the Ayatollah initially, I think that scenario would be very, I mean, I think Trump could have landed Trump Force One there, you know, within hours of the conflict even beginning, or even before that, for that matter. But now it is much more complicated. You've got a lot of hardliners who I think they might just be like,

hey, we're winning this thing, and we've been humiliated for 47 years. And like, uh-uh, well, we're going to rub their nose in it. Right. Yeah. And they are. Because now they're in a much better position. to do so than ever before.

I mean, it's amazing the status quo, anti, you know what I mean, the way things were before the anniversary of a Waco raid day there when they launched this war. Okay, I got other things to ask you about, though. So how about, let's talk about the news here. I want to ask you about Tulsi in a minute, but here's some important things that we need to discuss, namely this story in NBC News, Pentagon Rae. threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say. And here's another one from the New York Times.

Pentagon sees growing espionage threat from Israel. And I'm here to testify to you that the New York Times doesn't usually cover that. There was a time when there's really only one reporter in America. I don't know if he's still working. I think he must be. Jeff Stein from Spy Talk at Newsweek was the only guy who would cover this. And then he became a crazy Russian gate. truth or and God knows what.

But he used to do a really good job on this. He had been an intelligence analyst in the Vietnam War and, you know, was a real hard-nosed intelligence beat guy for a long time. And he would cover this how the CIA, there'd always be a secret CIA report. In fact, I believe it was kind of mandated by Congress and then they suspended that mandate because I didn't want to hear the truth anymore. But it was the report was the three nations that spy on us the most are Russia, China, and Israel.

and they are a real security threat because they'll pass our supersonic sea-skimming missile blueprints off to the Chinese for a few hundred bucks or whatever it is. And so it is a real security threat. In this case, I guess they're talking about mostly eavesdropping on conversations regarding a deal, a potential deal with Iran.

People might remember the Larry Franklin scandal where the spy in the Pentagon was passing secrets about Bush's decision making on Iran policy. policy back then. So I just wonder what you make of this and even what you know about it. I know that you're in the counterterrorism department, not just all counterintelligence, but, and obviously I don't want you to reveal anything he ain't supposed to, but I know you wouldn't anyway. But so what can you tell us about this? Yeah, I mean, that report, if it's true, came out after I was gone. But if it, if it actually was published, I think it's very significant

because it was always known within the intelligence community, regardless of where I was, that the Israelis aggressively spy on us. It was always verbally briefed, but I never saw it put in writing. And so if they actually put this in writing in a formal report that put Israel on par with what we consider to be very hostile actors, China and Russia, it's very significant. Because within the community, anybody who had worked in the Middle East

for any length of time, like they had a moment where they were kind of brought into the fold, if they were going to go work with the Israelis, where you got told by the old hands, like, hey, man, these guys are going to spy on you. They're going to try and recruit you, maybe even try and get some dirt on you, whatever. Like that was always known, but I just, I never saw it written down.

And so the fact that, that allegedly, if the leak is true, the DIA actually put this into writing. And then in order to make sure it kind of got out there in the bloodstream, because they probably knew was going to be killed, they went ahead and leaked it. It's very significant. And then the targeting specifically of, certain named individuals, Bridge Colby, Mike Domingo. I mean, anybody can Google Domingo and they can

Google Bridge and just see that these guys are from the more restrained, restrainer category. You can look at who didn't want them to get those positions at the beginning of the administration. The Israeli lobby came heavily after Mike Domingo, who's a former CIA analyst, who's gone up against the IRGC, who is by no means, you know, a dove on Iran policy, but he had been critical of the wars before. And so to see the Israeli specifically targeting those individuals and that make its way out into the press, I think that shows there is a shifting tide, probably due to just a frustration with how we've been had this war forced upon us. Yeah. And was it in the NBC article that said that they were also targeting Steve Whitkoff?

Yeah. And to me that makes sense because like at the beginning, before the 12th Day of War, Wiccoff, I believe, was on the cusp of getting a deal. And that's really before Wiccoff got the memo that zero enrichment was our policy. This is kind of what I described in my resignation letter. The red line was moved by a combination of Israeli officials, you know, donors, and then the pro-Israel media apprass all working in coordination to convince the president that his policy was zero enrichment.

Because when Wiccoff was close to getting a deal, they were discussing, you know, like what level of enrichment, like how it would be monitored, et cetera. And that was a major threat to the Israelis. That's why the Israelis spent so much capital on getting the red line moved and then accelerating the 12-day war and trying to get us into this whole, this whole debacle as quickly as they possibly could, because Wiccoff was on the cusp of getting us a deal. Just to clarify, you're talking about a year ago before the war last June. Before the war, yeah, which Israel started and then Donald Trump came and finished up. But then isn't that, the same thing that happened before this war, too, where the Omani negotiator, I forgot his exact

title, said that actually we were on the cusp of a deal on 27th of February as well. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, after the midnight hammer, a good deal of us in the administration said, okay, we need to make sure that we're done with this. We need to restrain the Israelis because the Israelis were always very clear with us that they wanted regime changed. And so we knew they were going to continue to lobby heavily for this. But the Iranians, after they shot back, you know, an equal number of missiles as we dropped bombs on their nuclear facility is at an empty quadrant of our base in Qatar, they messaged right away. They wanted to get back to the negotiating table. And we watched them throughout this entire time, basically from 1 January 25, or 20 January of 2025,

when Trump came back into office, restrained the Iranian proxies who had been attacking us under Biden. They restrained them. And then they said they wanted to get back to the negotiating table. And so I have every reason to believe that Whitkoff and the president's team were close once again to getting the deal. And that's why, again, the Israelis, probably from like the holidays, the Christmas time frame, December on to February, they went back into full court press mode. And they said, look, the protesters are on the streets. They really leaned heavily into the Venezuela saying that, hey, what you did in Venezuela, that can be replicated here. And they were really messaging hard that, hey, Iran's a paper tiger. look, all this talk of their proxies and their ballistics and the drone capabilities,

that was all nonsense. They didn't attack you during the 12-day war. They didn't attack you after midnight hammer. And so I think that sales pitch really went in heavily to get the president on board. But the reason why the Israelis were pouring on so heavily is because another deal was within sight. Yeah. All right. Now, obviously, I'm not asking you to break any confidences or anything,

but please tell us what you know and what you think about the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Is it like she said in her letter, just, you know, she needed to spend more time with her family or ailing husband or was she pushed out of there for political reasons? Was she fighting the good fight? You know, people would ask me, why did you quit and she stayed? And I said, I had no special knowledge of this, but I've heard it from a lot of bureaucrats a lot of times that like, man, if it wasn't,

me, it'd be worse. You can't imagine the bad stuff I was holding back and or, you know, especially from soldiers. I can't have my guys going back out there without me. You know what I mean? It's the same species of the same thing, right? So I don't really know that, but I've met her before. She seems like a decent person. I know she knows better. She said she knows better than the fake cost us belly for this war that Iran was making nuclear weapons. Like she's the authoritative source on. They still were not either. But so what do you know and what do you think about her resignation now? I mean, first off, like her, as I was leaving the administration, her husband had just gotten the diagnosis. It wasn't, it wasn't public. It got the diagnosis. Then about a week later,

they came back with more to say how aggressive the cancer was. So that's very real. And she made the, the hard decision to step away to take care of her husband. But at the same time, look, Tulsi stayed because she was, you know, one rung up for me. She was primary cabinet. I had reached a point where I was like, I'm not even being, we're not being heard here at the deputies level, at the NSC level. We're kind of just talking to each other. Tulsi had a little more access than me. And I think in her mind, there's my cat, her, in her mind,

she believed that she would be more value add towards trying to steer us away from the cliff by being in the situation room, being in the oval. As you can tell at the beginning of the war, there was a lot of boxing out that took place, like the first night when they released the photos, and there was like the Secretary Rubio and Ratcliffe and the president and Hegseth down at his golf course. And then there was, you know, the vice president and Tulsi in the situation room. There definitely was some siloing there.

But in her mind, I think that she, she believed, just like we did the whole time I was in the military and her too, like, hey, if someone's going to go into the breach, like, I'm going to go. And so she felt that she was more value at there. I don't think anyone in the minute, I don't know if they specifically pushed her out. I can't speak to that. I don't know. hopefully she'll come out and talk about it at some point. I don't think very many people within like the president's inner circle were sad to see her go. Because two things, she was against the Iran war.

They knew that she was going to tell the truth if asked by Congress, which she did when it came to the development of the nuclear weapon, even though that really pissed the president off. But then also the DNI's primary role, not just being the final word from the intelligence community, but also overseeing the intelligence community. Tulsi is probably the first DNI to hold that position that actually tried to follow the statute and oversee what the CIA and the NSA were actually doing and that pissed off a lot of people.

Yeah, I can imagine. And so, well, what more can you tell us about the good fight that she was fighting in there? Because she would come out publicly and say some pretty bad things justifying what Trump was doing, which I understand that's the job, as you say. And I also understand,

I've read enough books by people like this that I understand that, as you say, when you have access to talk to the president at all, you don't want to burn that bridge. It was a huge deal when Tucker came out with his Easter special that was basically saying, like, go ahead and block my number, Mr. President, you know what I mean, kind of thing where he literally could talk to the man himself and now he can't ever again, but like, okay, you know what I mean? It was worth it at that time, but that's a hell of a decision to make. So I understand, you know, the way people rationalize those kind of things. But then so tell me, though, that she was telling the people,

President, Mr. President, these are lies. Can't start a war based on things that aren't true. They aren't making nukes. I know they're not. And now you know they're not. And like, don't tell me she was just Condi Rice to W. Bush here going along with this. Otherwise, what's the good of her staying? But then if she warned him that these things are not true, then that raises a whole other level

of criminality to Trump's unconstitutional, illegal aggressive war here. If he knows for a fact that is based on a lie. Yeah, I mean, Tulsi definitely was doing everything she could from what I saw to speak truth to power and to say, hey, Mr. President, you have 18 intelligence agencies. They actually all agree there's no nuclear weapon. We're not tracking an imminent threat. Here's the Israelis perspective. Make, you know, here's where your decision space should be. Understand the Israelis are trying to force you towards a decision. I know that she was doing all that. Now the question is, was she being listened to? And so unfortunately, like you mentioned Russian Gate earlier, the intelligence community didn't do itself any favors by doing the whole Russian Gate hoax to the president

and the first administration. Because now when you would say, sir, the entire national intelligence security apparatus, the intelligence community, they all agree Iran's not building a nuclear bomb. The president would just, you know, not every time, but a lot of times he would just be like, okay, like these are the same guys who just consistently lie and get things wrong. He believed they tell him that Iran was trying to kill him,

Joe, which by the way, you had a job during that. So why don't you tell me about the, the merchant and the, I forgot the other guy's name, these Iranian stories, which by the way, you know, people are always asking, what is it with Trump? Like, fine, he's a Zionist, he likes Netanyahu, who he always has, whatever. But is it the blackmail, or is it bribery,

or what is this level of control over Trump that would get him to stick his neck out this far? And then the often overlooked answer, including by me, is because he believes this hoax, put on by the same guys who did the Russia Gate hoax to him, are telling him that Iran tried to kill him. And at the start of the war, when he bombed the Ayatollah, he told, I forgot the news source,

but he said, I got him before he got me. And which is total nonsense, but he clearly believes it. And there's your answer to the riddle of why he would go this bar, is he thought that he was in a death match with the Ayatollah. because it wasn't just the Israelis telling them that. It was the FBI telling that, right? Right. Yeah.

So, I mean, a couple things. Like, I don't know if Trump necessarily believe that because the evidence was always like pretty spotty, but he does believe certain people. And he he didn't like a lot of things that, you know, myself and Tulsi and others were saying, but he did like, you know, the way that Ratcliffe and Rubio were deferential to him. And then also the donor. backing from the Edelson's that come with them. So he was susceptible to what those folks were saying, obviously.

Like there's more consequences for him not listening to them than kicking myself and Tulsi, you know, out of the room. And so I think a convenient narrative that he really didn't look into deeply was, oh, Iran's, you know, trying to kill me. Because there was definitely a lot of threats out there. But we never were really able to kind of pull back the thread on a lot of them. And in the Mershont case, a lot of that has been. And, like, Libertarian Institute, Ken Silva did that great book, was just on Tucker.

I mean, when you look into that case, it was pretty freaking flimsy. Yeah, you got it right there. I just read it. It's fantastic. Isn't it great? Yeah, I know. Institute, every libertarian institute. org slash books for Ken Silva's great work there.

Yeah. He did a great job with that. But something that I've talked about before and I don't have a complete answer for, for President Trump to get involved in this war, it just goes against a lot of his just gut instincts. It goes against the things he ran on. I don't think the guy completely suckered us because, you know, although things didn't go perfect in the first administration, he did keep us out of more. He resisted the Iran war at the beginning. So I do think there is a underlying bit of coercion. I don't think it's blackmail because I think it was blackmail that would have come out a

long time ago. But the fact that President Trump had multiple assassination attempts against him, he has had multiple breaches of his security, one of the most, you know, one of his biggest supporters and political organizers who was against the Iran war was publicly executed, all of these present a set of data that is going to influence the president in some way, shape, or form. Now, whether that's directly and someone's going up to him and being like, you know, here's what really happened. I don't think that's the case.

But the president's, one of his superpowers, is being able to take in large sets of data and figure out where his risk is, where his leverage is, et cetera. And so I do think it all factors in. I think it can't be overlooked, the assassination attempts, the breaches the security, what happened of Charlie Kirk. I just think all that could weigh into the president's decision making because I think if none of that existed, I do feel like there's a much better chance that the president would just walk away. He would just restrain the Israelis and he would just leave.

But there's something that's drawing him to stay into this. And maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe it really is just his ego. But I think these are things that we have to really, really look into. just to get a complete answer. And now look, I know there's a lot of departments and all of that. I don't know exactly like what your role was in terms of working with the FBI counterintelligence division and counterterrorism divisions and all that.

But as Ken shows in the book, this guy, Marchant, was allowed into the country from Iran under this special thing that is set up for informants to bring in in the first place. Then he miraculously meets a guy who decides to become a walk-up. informant against him and somehow gets the idea from that guy that that guy knows where to hire some hitmen and hire some FBI informant hitman for him. So what the hell's going on here, man? And did you know about any of this as it was happening? So as it was happening, it was happening under the Biden administration.

Yeah. So Mershont comes into the country and then they basically throw the informants at him. He's under FBI surveillance the whole time, allegedly. I'm sorry, he was arrested in July of 24. Yeah, I mean, he's arrested two days before Butler, basically. And the whole reason the counter-sniper teams were deployed to Butler is because of Mershant having this little incident where he's basically, him and the informer are working out that like the best way to target Trump would be with a sniper.

And so there is a sniper threat against the president. That's why they deploy the counter-sniper team. Ken does a great job of documenting how that wasn't communicated. that really wasn't even known necessarily to even the counter-sniper's. But that's why that took place. So my question, when we came back into the administration, obviously, like, the Trump administration has a lot of questions about Butler. And so from the IC perspective, when I was still waiting to be confirmed,

I was Tulsi's chief of staff, we started looking into all of the intelligence that came from the intelligence community proper around Butler and then around the Iranian plots. And so I pulled all that intel and I, this is before it was publicly disclosed that there was, there was confidential human sources from the FBI around Mershant. And I looked into it and I'm, you know, I'm reading the report and it says that Mershant's talking with, you know, a source, basically one of his sources that says like, hey, I'm potentially can do some sniper stuff to take out the president. And so my question, I was like, well, where's this, the sniper? And they're

like, the FBI comes back and says, well, that's one of our CHS is. This has all been publicly disclosed now at this point. And so my next question as a guy who, has ran sources before, I was like, look, when you are dealing with the source you directly have control over, things can get pretty goofy. However, when you start adding the sources, sources, source, like your three levels removed, things get really crazy fast. Are we sure, and this is always my question, and it's still my question, are we sure that everybody that Merchant was interacting with wasn't associated with Butler? Like, are there any of the people that were interacting with Merchant that have any connection whatsoever to Thomas Crooks, that have any

connection whatsoever to anybody who was in vicinity of that Trump rally. And we never got answers to that. It was just, it was quickly said, you know, behind closed doors that there was no linkage between the Mershant case and Butler. However, someone told the president, or at least there was a lot of innuendo. I mean, even Mike Walts at some point said like, you know, that was an Iranian assassination attempt against him, implying that Butler and Crook or Butler and Mershant were linked. And then anytime we tried to actually do our due diligence, because there's tools we could use to determine if there actually was any linkage.

And I didn't see those tools actually being used to determine if there was any linkage. I was told to stay out of it. So again, this is where I say, like these things all do factor in. There's a lot of questions, as Ken outlined in his book, too, about the West Palm Beach assassination attempt with Rolf on the golf course there. And then, you know, just the same story, brilliant with Charlie Kirk. Same story of a lot of the different breaches in the security.

And so that's why I say, like, we have to kind of look beyond the typical policy disputes or policy angles and then, you know, Trump's ego to say, like, is there something else that could be affecting the president's decision making? Yeah. Hey, you guys, don't forget to check out my substack, Scott Horton Show.com. And if you're a paying subscriber there, you get the shows first and with no commercials. And also you get the audio book of Provoked, which I'm serializing there. the first two chapters are out

and the more are coming soon. So that's Scott Horton's show.com. Now look, you know, I don't want to accuse you of being coy or anything, but, you know, it's been brought up numerous times in connection with Charlie Kirk

and then now here that like, as someone who's not just a guy out here in the world, but I was the director of the counterterrorism division up there. That when you, you say like, look, the FBI didn't want to let us look at possible foreign connections. You seem to be implying, and many people, including me, are inferring that what you mean to say

is that you saw some avenues of investigation to go down there, not just like, hey, I'm just asking questions as to whether anyone else in the world could have had something to do with this, but that you had indications that somebody else in the world had something to do with this, that you were not allowed to pursue and that apparently have not been pursued by the FBI since then. So particularly on Charlie Kirk, can you tell us exactly what it is that you're talking about that makes you think that there's something more to it

than what we've been told so far, which I don't know when the kid's ever going to go on trial, I sure would like to see them cross-examinations. But do you have a real indication that somebody else was behind that or involved in some way? I know that there was leads that still needed to be ran down explored because they were very real leads. Now, would those leads pan out to be anything? That I don't know. That's the way the investigations work. Usually you get 100 leads and 99 of more.

What's that? Can you describe these leads at all? Yeah. So the first ones that the most obvious is there was people posting online that Charlie Kirk was going to be assassinated that day. And so there were people with prior knowledge, obviously. And that's, you know, that's been widely reported. That's in the open press. And to my knowledge, that hasn't been ran down. And now were those international? I don't know. Most of that was probably domestic, so we didn't look into that. However, we did have leads that indicated there was foreign nexus.

Now, whether that's truly a foreign government or foreign individuals, I really can't get into. I hope at some point we can. I hope it comes out in the trial or maybe through another venue. But I know that there was still work that we had to do that was of a foreign nature that when we were removed from looking into, it by the FBI because the FBI basically said like we've got all the evidence that we need this is all going to be on Utah from here going forward everybody stop what you're doing um that's that's kind of where it ended for us but there were still foreign nexus for us to to run down um there's a lot of innuendo out there um about what some of those foreign nexus are um but i don't believe the vast majority of them

we're we didn't do our due diligence on them as probably the best way to say that and then Now, with Ryan Ruth, the guy that tried to take the shot down at the country club there, it seems a lot easier to explain him away as Alon Kuk, very self-motivated to stop Trump from making a deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. Now, whether somebody over in Ukraine or somebody in American intelligence was prodding him along, I guess there's always sort of, you know, infinite room to try to wedge those, you know, possibilities in there. We don't seem to have any indication of that.

However, I'm much more suspicious about Thomas Crooks up there in Pennsylvania. It seems like, you know, the FBI was just lying to say that this kid had no online presence. Tucker Carlson had a source that went and found his online presence, you know, and showed a lot of it. And as Ken shows in the book, you know, there's a lot of reason to believe that he was, talking with people online about very provocative things like who to murder and things like that, where then it seems like maybe they went off into a private chat somewhere else, but that this looks like a real avenue, you know, where he was making these very explicit threats in the YouTube comment section.

Like that's virtually guaranteed to catch the FBI's attention in the first place, right? Or somebody else's spyware's attention, that here's somebody who can be poked and prodded to actually go ahead and do something. And even, you know, Ken brings up the possibility that you have these children. chat rooms of these Satanists and nihilists and weirdos who, like, they don't represent any state power or any institutional power. They just want to, you know, see the rocks come tumbling down. So like, um, the walls or whatever. So, um, but it seems like there's a very explicit and kind of deliberate cover up by the FBI where they don't want to know where all this goes. I think Ken even

says it. Perhaps Trump even said himself that, yeah, he ordered the FBI to stop looking into it. He didn't want to know anymore. And so maybe he was already convinced that we already knew everything we need to know. I thought one hypothesis was maybe he was afraid of inspiring copycast by keeping it in the headlines all the time, you know, like that makes sense. I might want to play it down and someone took a shot at me, you know what I mean? But then again, like, geez, I don't know. Seems like we should have the whole story here.

And because the guy's dead, we're not going to have a trial. We don't, right? So like, by what avenue do we get to find out what was really going on behind that? Yeah, I mean, when we first came in the administration, when I was looking into Butler and Mershant, we were told that, number one, crooks, we couldn't get into his devices, which I, having come from the intelligence community, I said, okay, well, if the FBI can't get into devices,

we've got a whole bunch of people in the intelligence community that should take a crack at it, because one of these organizations is going to be able to get in this guy's devices. Was then shortly thereafter told, Oh, no, no, it's actually, we got into his devices and there's just nothing there. And I was like, okay, well, if there's just nothing there, then why don't you show that to the rest of the community and let everybody kind of do their due diligence? That's the way these things work. There's no Fourth Amendment issue because the guy's dead.

And that never materialized either. And then Tucker came out with the whole online persona. He was in communication with an organization that Norwegian Front or whatever it's called, that is a designated terrorist organization. So a lot of this probably was, I find it hard to believe that there wasn't some degree of monitoring going on there. So, yeah, this is where things do get pretty dark. And when the president became aware that the FBI, you know, had confidential human sources involved with the Merchant case, I'm not sure if he specifically, if he made the decision to shut down the investigation, that's basically what Tucker and others have said. Or I don't want to put words in Tucker's mouth, but I know, I think. People have said that, Bud Gino said that.

He didn't say that to me, but that's basically the time that we were told, like, stop looking into this altogether, period. And so we still have no answers. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to bust your chops here a little bit here, but it's your fault for being a government employee. So you've got it coming.

A former government employee, at least. You mentioned earlier, I forgot the exact words, but something like head shopper, bin Laden night cooks that run Syria now. And I get it that this was your job, but I have this thing, this tweet from when you met with all these guys in the anti-ISIS coalition thing here. My buddy David Camp sent me this today. And he pointed out that one of the guys in this meeting was this guy, Assad al-Shabani, Sir's new former foreign minister. And he is actually one of the founders of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria. known as Jabhat al-Nusra and is now, of course, assistant to the chief head shopper,

Abu Mohammed al-Jalani, or as they call them now, Al-Shara. So I get it that there's these narratives that Al-Nusra is like, I don't know, half a click, less worse than ISIS. But I also know that you know better, too, because you were in that war over there, and you know good and well who these guys are. And I wonder, like, how credible is it for the U.S. government to team up with the bin Ladenite government in Damascus against their former and sometimes allies in ISIS. And I'd bring up something that happened, which I know you know the full story from your position there about this insider attack last December where these two guardsmen and an interpreter. Imagine guardsmen over there in Syria.

but anyway, they and their interpreter were killed by a guy that they said, oh, he was ISIS. That's why he did it. But he was an al-Qaeda guy, a member of the government. And then they go, oh, well, but geez, he converted to the other side, even though it's the same damn thing. So, I mean, obviously it was a lot of other people who put these cooks in power. And that was in December of 24, right, on the eve of Trump's inauguration into his second term here.

but whatever. I'm not like accusing you of providing material support for terrorism. You were meeting with a so-called foreign minister of a pseudo-official state now. I get it. But give us like a real survey of who these guys are and what America's relationship is now with the bin Ladenite government in Syria. And if you want, as opposed to the ISIS fighters still locked up there, or how many of them are or what?

Yeah, I mean, at the beginning of the Trump administration, I think Trump had the right take before he was actually inaugurated. When Damascus fell, Trump released a pretty long truth post that said, like, Syria is always a mess and it's none of our business. And I just kind of wish everybody well, which I thought was the right approach. Like, we have the ability in the government to clandestinely engage with people if we need to. Like, if there's a country that's being ran by people that we don't want to do overt business with, this is what you pay a CIA for. And so my recommendation at the beginning of the administration, and this was, you know, Tulsi and I's recommendation to the boss was there's no, like, we don't need to go in there and try and regime change this guy.

Like, really, this is a regional issue. If we need to engage with Syria, we just do it clandestinely. We use our CIA for that. That's what we pay these guys for. However, we lost that fight, and we decided for reasons, I really, I truly can't explain. And this was the first time I kind of had a gut check when I was like, do I leave now? Because I am against the bin Ladenite head choppers for a wide variety of reasons. also my late wife was killed in Syria by ISIS

or do I stay and try and make a difference and I still felt that we had real counterterrorism equities there in Syria. I wanted to ensure that we got all of our troops out of Syria because I thought they should have been out long, long ago. So we were in this state where for some reason we decided that we were going to fully embrace

Sharra, he was going to come to the White House, all that. Again, I think that was unnecessary. I still don't know if it's necessarily the best play. But here we are. And so we're having to deal with these guys. I don't trust them. I know that they have a lot of affiliations with ISIS. They have like a little, you know, I say it's more of a power struggle and a tactical

disagreement with core ISIS on how to go about it. It's interesting that we've like designated the Muslim Brotherhood now as a terrorist organization when Nusra and this version of Al Qaeda, they're actually following the Muslim Brotherhood model like to a T. They go from being terrorists to infiltrating all the different political organizations. and now they have political power. And then also I was against kind of the decision that we made with regard to the Kurds. I don't think we should have stayed in Syria and propped up the Kurds, but I also don't think we should have made the Kurds surrender to the Jalani government

and become part and kind of force them into this arrangement. But again, here we are. And I just, I accept the world kind of as it is. If we have to deal with these guys, we should deal with them. Yeah, that's where we're at. I'm not optimistic about it. I do think at some point in the near future, considering how the Hezbollah fight against Israel is intensifying, I do think that Shara is going to be under some coercion slash pressure from the Israelis to use his forces against Hezbollah,

which actually has been a big reason why Hezbollah kind of resurged in popularity in Lebanon was because the Lebanese Shia watched us install the bin Ladenite selfie jihadi. as the leader. And they're like, well, who defended us the last time the jihadi head choppers came across the border? Oh, it was Hezbollah. It was the same thing in Iraq, too. We were trying to get the Iraqis to disarm a lot of the Shia militias over there. But at the same time, we installed Shara.

And, you know, I was just like, okay, well, you can't expect these guys to disarm. And really, it's kind of weird for us to ask them to disarm because the last time we had to come in here and fight, yes, it was the Kurds, but the other part of that equation was the Shia militias. And then the Shia militias, some of them that were more loyal to Iran. turned on us. But again, it's the whole concept of like, how many different brush fires do we have to start in the Middle East before we just kind of get out of the business of starting brushfires. Yeah. And it really is just like back in the Clinton years where they're already attacking us

the whole 1990s long, but Bill Clinton's still backing them anyway in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya. And hey, as long as they're killing Serbs and Russians, who cares? And then as I show and provoke, 11 of the 19 hijackers had fought in Bosnia or Chechnya on America's side or America fighting on their side in those wars before they hit us. And so, you know, I don't hear anyone talking like this really anymore except that Sarah Adams lady and I don't really know what's up with her, but I'm terrified of the bin Ladenites. And I'm not saying like they're going to hit me out in the suburbs, but I'm just saying I think that it's just too easy for them to get into this country. It's too easy for them to be motivated, especially by Israel's actions, but also

America's over there. And Zawahari's advice to them, which is you got to keep fighting the Americans till they finally go all the way broke and go home still stands. And really, he proved Baghdadi wrong, really Biden and, pardon me, Obama and Trump approved Zwhaerri right, really, when Obama built the caliphate for them, but then destroyed it again. And then Trump destroyed it again. It just proved that you can build your caliphate until America's gone. So their original 90s doctrine of keep attacking America until America engages in a big enough war over there that the dollar and the army just finally break and we have no choice but to come limping all

the way home like the Soviet Union now we can afford a lot more war than the Soviets ever could but that doctrine still seems operative although apparently Zawahri's dead I guess they did get him in that strike in Kabul haven't heard it podcast from him late um Zahua here he's the guy who he in selected Jalani slash Shara to run Nusra so it's yeah you that killed Zawahari in Afghanistan wouldn't me no but we wait wait wait we We got him, the U.S. government did. That was under the Biden. I was out of the government at that point.

I know we had been hunting him for a long time. Early Trump, too. That was under Biden. He was under Biden. Yeah, because he came back into when the Americans left, this is the interesting thing. A lot of times these high intense operations like we're doing in Iran right now, like they make the really bad guys go to ground.

And so for decades, we couldn't find Zawahiri. The second we pulled out of Afghanistan, he waltzed right back into Kabul. because he thought that we weren't looking at them and we were looking at them and we were able to do a surgical strike and we took them out. And so like there is definitely

I think a strong case to be made for these massive combat operations that we do. Number one, they create more terrorists with blowback terrorism. And number two, they actually inhibit our ability to do targeted, deliberate counterterrorism operations

against the bad guys who are really a threat to America. Yeah. All right. I'm running late. I'm sure you are too. Thank you so much for your time again on the show. I appreciate.

Absolutely. Thanks, Scott. Go Ken, everybody. This Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerge, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote. at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media,

audio mastering by Podsworth Media. See all next time.