The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House by Chris Whipple From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers comes a revelatory, news-making look at how President Joe Biden and his seasoned team have battled to achieve their agenda—based on the author’s extraordinary access to the White House during two years of crises at home and abroad. In January of 2021, the Biden administration inherited the most daunting array of challenges since FDR’s presidency: a lethal pandemic, a plummeting economy, an unresolved twenty-year war, and the aftermath of an attack on the Capitol that polarized the country. Waves of crises followed, including the fallout from a divisive Supreme Court, raging inflation, and Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Now, in The Fight of His Life, prizewinning journalist Chris Whipple takes us inside the Oval Office as the critical decisions of Biden’s presidency are being made. With remarkable access to both President Biden and his inner circle—including Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns—Whipple pulls back the curtain on the internal power struggles and back-room compromises. Featuring shocking new details about how renegade Trump officials enabled the transfer of power, which key staffers really make the White House run (it’s probably not who you think), why Joe Biden no longer speaks freely around his security detail, and what he really thinks of Vice President Kamala Harris, the press, and living in the White House, The Fight of His Life delivers a stunning portrait of politics on the edge.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, friends.

We certainly appreciate you being part of the Chris Foss Show family. The family loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law. Anyway, guys, welcome to the Big Show. We have a returning guest, Chris Whipple, who will be on the show with us today. We'll be talking about the Joe Biden, President Joe Biden, I should say, White House and everything that's going on with it over the last two years. He's gotten some unprecedented access to it. So we'll be dealing with that.

In the meantime, for the sugar, family, friends, relatives, go to goodreads.com for chest, Chris Foss, go to youtube.com for chest,

Chris Foss, LinkedIn group, LinkedIn newsletter, all that stuff we do over there. We certainly appreciate it. He is the author of the latest and newest hottest book to hit the shelves this year in 2023, January 17th, 2023. It just barely came out. The fight of his life inside Joe Biden's White House by Chris Whipple is with us today to talk about in depth all of the cool stuff that went in there.

Chris Whipple is an author, documentary filmmaker, and speaker. He has been called an indispensable observer of American power. A former producer for 60 Minutes CBS News, he is the author of the upcoming highly anticipated book that we just mentioned before. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, The Gatekeepers, How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency and the Spymasters. He was on our show for How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future. Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent of the New York Times,

calls him a premier journalist and historian of the White House as well as the intelligence community. Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you? I'm great. How are you? I am awesome. That is quite the amazing resume you've got there. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to find you on those interwebages in the sky. So chriswipple.net, that's chriswipple.net is the place to go if you want to find a link to buy the book. By the way, no longer upcoming, actually out. It's been out since January 17th. There you go.

At chriswhipple.net, you can find that. You can find reviews. You can find an excerpt, as well as most of my television appearances. I've got to update it, but you'll find a lot of stuff there. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Well, you know, how could I not want to tell the story of this presidency? You know, if you, when you consider that Joe Biden came into office facing the most daunting array of challenges since FDR's day, with a once in acentury pandemic, a crippled economy,

the aftermath of a bloody attempted resurrection, insurrection, rather. You know, how could anybody with a political or storytelling bone in his body not want to tell that story, especially if you could get access to his inner circle, which fortunately I was able to do. And I see it as a political thriller in three acts. I mean, the first act is this unbelievable transition that came much closer to not happening than anybody realizes. And I have untold stories about that. The second act is the first year of the Biden presidency, which was really dominated by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the slide in Biden's approval rating.

And then the third year, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and Biden rose to met that moment and rallied NATO to face down Putin. Then it was followed by a lot of legislative successes. And then, of course, the midterms when he and the Democrats defied the odds. And so, look, I think it's a political thriller with no ending yet. That's true. That's true. That's true. And it sounds like you've got enough content to pack into the book.

What sort of access do you get to be able to delve into all this? So I spent two years talking to almost every member of Joe Biden's inner circle. it wasn't easy because this is the most battened down, disciplined, leak-proof White Houses in modern times. I mean, the bar was pretty low with Trump's White House. It was breaking loose all the time. Was there anything that didn't leak in that White House? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But this White House is a very different story, which makes it all the more satisfying to have been able to get in there, talk to all these guys and women, and to find out that there was a lot more drama going on behind closed doors than anybody realized from, again, from the transition, which is a wild story, really untold until now, and to the present day. Do you feel like he was the man for the moment,

and maybe voters saw that? They're like, we've really strayed far from, you know. I used to enjoy the days where I didn't have to think about what my president was doing. Like, you know, Obama and other presidents, you know, you weren't really concerned. But like with Trump, you would wake up in the morning, I think most people in the nation would, especially journalists, and go, holy, you know, what bottom, new bottom have we hit? What new crisis is this? And it's just, I was joking, I can't remember who I was joking with, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist won't come to me, but I was joking with her on

Facebook. I said, you know, the problem with the Joe Biden administration is I'm not getting enough authors on the show that write books about all the corruption. There's not any corruption or enough corruption going on. With Trump, there was plenty and we had so many authors on the show writing books it was wonderful for the show and i go we we need to have politicians on more corruption just for my show but that's a joke um but yeah biden was look uh biden might not have been the man for any other moment yeah let's face it, he ran two presidential campaigns and never got close. In 1988, he had to bail out over that.

You remember that he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by a British politician. And then he got whooped by Barack Obama. And so his moment arrived. And, yeah, it arrived in the form of this guy who was trying to overthrow a free and fair election and who had driven us all completely mad for four years. And there was Joe. So he was the man for that moment hi folks here with a little station break hope you're enjoying the show so far we'll resume here in

a second uh i'd like to invite you to come to my coaching speaking and training courses website you can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com over there you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for

your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show and be sure to check out ChrisVossLeadershipInstitute.com. Now back to the show. It almost kind of seemed like voters and everybody else had been just ground down after four years of madness. And we're just like, we just want to go back to normal. We want the guy who doesn't, isn't

broadcasting his crap all the time, who isn't a drama queen. We just, we just would like a FDR again or something like that. And it seemed like, you know, there was a lot of great people that were on the dais for running for president, but it just seemed like we just, we're just like, we really just there was a lot of great people that were on the dais for running for president. But it just seemed like we just were just like we really just need like an old school politician again.

Yeah. But, you know, now we're getting a little bit of drama. Yeah. You know, in the form of the classified documents. But remember that rewind to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. There are a lot of dramatic stories in this book that, you know, you may look at this presidency and think, OK, it's, you know, it's a duck gliding across a pond. Looks pretty smooth on the outside. Underneath, there's furious paddling going on and competition. And that was certainly the case during the transition.

One of the stories I tell is how we all think we've read that story when we know it, right? The oceans of ink have been spilled about it and yet I found this unbelievable story about an obscure Trump staffer in the West Wing who carried out this Sub Rosa operation under Trump's nose and without his knowledge. Wow. He kept the wheels of the transition turning. And he had a, you know, he was one of the few sane people in the White House at that point. Somebody described it was like the eye of Sauron. As long

as you stayed out of the Oval Office, and Trump didn't see you doing it, you could get away with it. And he did. I mean, his name was Chris Liddell. He's a guy who was born in New Zealand, came over here, became successful in business, wound up in the Trump White House. And he was there making sure that the peaceful transfer of power took place. Wow. So, I mean, and there are a lot of great stories like that. And this is a tease out in the first act part of the book that you talked about? That's right. Yeah. So I was talking about how it's a three-act drama. That's the first act.

There you go. I mean, it was kind of extraordinary watching it. You know, I had the same feeling, you know, I've been saying for four years he wasn't going to leave the White House. And saw most of the movements as that Trump was making as a way to stay and seize power. And, you know, you saw him resistance to the transition. You saw him, you know, doing everything he could to spread the lie and everything else. And, you know, General Tilley was a General Milley. I mean, at the inauguration, he said, he said that we landed the plane.

You know, it's a miracle, kind of half a miracle or something. I don't have his exact quote there, right? But he knew how dangerous it was. And some of the conversation reporting we had, that came out from people. So talk to us about that. It's so they, this guy is keeping their transition moving because they,

they were kind of stalwarting everything and going, you know, we're not really, you know, we're unless they accept the transition happening, then they're accepting that the votes were fine. Right? Yeah.

Well, remember, so if you think back to this period, this was that time when there was this Star Wars bar casting characters in the Oval Office, from Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Trump. And they're telling him that Hugo Chavez engineered this rigged deal to elect Biden, with Chavez having been dead for a few years.

Anyway, the people who actually were sane, and there were a few of them, including this guy, Chris Liddell, were trying to figure out how to land this plane, as you put it, as a number of people put it, including Liddell. And it was wild because, and in fact, Mark Meadows, who was the chief of staff, Trump's last chief of staff, who I called in the Washington Post at one point, I anointed him the worst chief of staff in history because he was up to his eyeballs. And even before the attempted coup, he was the worst chief. But he clinched the title when he became the co-conspirator with Trump.

Anyway, Meadows was not so much a white-ass chief as he was a kind of glad-handing maitre d'. I mean, he would do anything Trump asked him to do, and he was a yes man to everyone else, too. Wow. So anyway, he said to his deputy, Liddell, look, yeah, you go ahead and do that. You know, you make sure the transition happens, but just don't tell the boss. Wow. So this was just complete madness. It was just a wild thing going on.

And Liddell almost quit a number of times when Trump did something outrageous. And his friends, including Josh Bolton, who was a former George W. chief of staff and a guy who just wanted to see the plane land. Anyway, this group would get on the phone with Liddell and talk him off the ledge and say, hey, no, no, no, listen, you can't resign because democracy has to survive here. We got to have a transition.

And Liddell stayed. Anyway, it's a great story. It's crazy to think that we saved this democracy, this republic experiment, with a handful of people that were kind of at the helm. Two people at justice that told that attorney that, no, we're not going to send your letter out. No, we're not going to pursue this craziness. People in Georgia, you know, that stood up and said, no, we're not going to accept the intimidation phone calls. The Arizona legislature, he testified at the commission.

It's interesting to me how just a handful of people, it seems, were the bulwark against losing everything. Yeah, it's really true. This all comes down to just it all sort of depends on a few people of goodwill, you know. Yeah. So it really kind of hangs by a thread. But as I say, that's just Act 1 of this book. And Act 2 and 3 are a hell of a ride, too.

And we can talk about that. Let's do that. One thing I wanted to touch on, I don't know what your thoughts are, but I remember watching the Biden, when Biden started acting presidential and doing presidential stuff and kind of not, I don't even know if he was using the seal, but he was, there was, you know how he started doing that staging out in, I think where he's at in Delaware, where they started having a stage and he started showing meetings

and preparation meetings. Yeah. And one of the one of the uh people who do media journalists like yourself i remember i don't know what show it was but he made the comment he goes what he's doing is he's getting the people prepared that if this thing goes sideways we're gonna have almost like a dual presidency vision but he's he's getting them to to kind of force the transition and saying you you know, here I am, I'm starting to be presidential, and we have a transition.

We're basically laying the foundation for that, which I thought was really interesting because I'm like, this is really scary because they know that this thing may go sideways, and there's a reason they're doing this whole setup, and he's doing the meeting. You know, they were preparing for almost anything. Among the people I talked to was Bob Bauer, who is now the president's personal lawyer. He's handling the classified documents mess.

But at the time, he was the senior counsel on the transition. He had a bunch of lawyers, more than 100 lawyers lawyers working this thing, looking at every eventuality. And they stopped counting at like number 70. And, you know, one of them, one of the unthinkable eventualities was Trump declaring martial law and sending troops into the streets. And they spent a lot of time thinking about that, trying to plan for that, deal with that. It didn't happen, but it could have. Yeah.

And then later we come to find out that SCOTUS could have been compromised if SCOTUS had been called in to decide the election because some things are going on there. Let's tease out the second act. Let's dig into that a little bit. Yeah, I think, you know, the second act was, again, the first year of the Biden presidency. There are a lot of great stories I tell, including day one when Joe Biden walks into the Oval Office for the first time on that afternoon. And he's got a small group of staffers, Ron Klain, Jen Psaki, a couple of others there with him.

Klain's got a stack full of executive orders for him to sign. And one of them says, but Mr. President, first, there's a letter. And Biden goes, oh? And he walks around, he opens the desk drawer, and he pulls out a letter from Donald Trump, and it's two full pages in small handwriting, and he sits there and he reads it while they look at him. Nobody else had read it.

They hadn't even touched it. They saw it in the Resolute Test. Biden reads it, and he looks up, and he says, that was gracious. He said, shockingly gracious. And they said, do you want to put out a statement, sir? And he goes, nah. He goes, this is between him and me. Now, don't you want to know what's in that letter?

I mean, my thought is, so I called up Jared Kushner. I got him on the phone. I said, Jared, tell me about this letter. And he said, well, he said, look, all I can tell you is he's got a lot of levels. And I heard him chuckle when he said that. And then I said, well, what about it? He said, well, he spent three days writing it. Wow.

Now, one question I have is, did Trump in this letter, if it was so gracious, did he acknowledge that Biden was president? I mean, do you leave a letter for somebody in the Resolute Desk who is not president? That's true. Who you don't think won the election i mean that goes to his mindset and i would think the january 6th committee and and justice of my others might want to read that letter yeah yeah it'd be interesting to have a public and he's never published it right he's never let it out no no it's it's b Biden has it and you know, it goes into the archives and someday we'll read it.

Yeah. The, the, the, the Trump presidency, I remember Rachel Maddow used to keep track. You remember she used to keep that wall. It became a wall of all the people that were being, you know, either kicked out of the Trump presidency or quitting. And remember how it got so big she had to change the studio? And it was just like every day, it was just a clown car of people exiting. And I think with the Biden presidency, correct me if I'm wrong, we're just barely seeing

one of the first major change-ups. I mean, Jen Psaki left the White House to go to MSNBC, but the Chief of Staff is now leaving just barely. Yeah. And Ron Klain is a major character in my book. Joe Biden is the principal character, but Klain comes in a close second. He's a really fascinating guy, absolutely whip smart. I talk to him regularly for the last two years, so you can really see this presidency unfolding from the inside.

Not from Clayne's point of view, the book's my point of view, and I'm clear-eyed and no holds barred on failures as well as successes, but I had this ringside seat with Ron Klain, and one of the more dramatic moments was late October 2021 when I went to see him at the White House. Biden was in Europe. It was one of the really low points of his presidency. He'd gone, you know, he was trying to pass Build Back Better and bipartisan infrastructure, and there was all this ugly sausage making going on, and nothing was passing. Biden went off to Europe empty-handed. He went to Glasgow to the climate summit without anything to show for, you know, his first whatever, six months or more.

I went to see Klain and I said, look, is this the week that makes or breaks the Biden presidency? Because Biden had just said that his presidency, the fate of his presidency depended on passing these two bills that had not passed. And and and Klain at that point was bone tired. He was frustrated and he was thinking about quitting. Wow. And we all know how that turned out. He decided to stay. He and he decided to primarily because he wanted to see biden through the midterms and uh that turned out to be a pretty good decision right definitely definitely i mean

it's interesting how the whole thing's panned out i you know i voted for biden full disclosure um and uh you know he he it kind of looked to me like in the first year or two, I've lost track now, but I was really like, oh my God, you know, inflation is going to kill him. He's going to destroy his presidency. Uh, he's in this, you know, worst time coming from the COVID and, and the, uh, you know, processing of goods at the ports and everything. And, and here he is, you know, trying to to do his best the build back better fails um you know lots of finger pointing within the democratic party and the thing of maybe the progressives

screwed it up and you know we reached too far and then it all kind of comes together which is kind of interesting and then all of a sudden he starts smacking balls out of the park yeah so but again remember during that first year, it was rough because we had the Afghanistan debacle, which triggered a slow decline in his, actually pretty quick decline in his

approval rating. Then he gets smacked by, well, Jake Sullivan's favorite expression, the National Security Advisor, he stole from Mike Tyson, which is everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And they got punched right in the mouth by the Delta variant and then inflation and supply chain problems. All of this stuff was going on. And as you point out, they managed to pretty much

turn things around. And I personally feel, this brings us to Act III, that the turning point of the Biden presidency was February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and Biden rose to meet that moment. We had the intelligence that the U.S. had on that invasion was like the CIA's, one of the CIA's finest moments. It had plenty of low moments, but this was probably the finest moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. They had Putin absolutely dead to rights. They knew exactly what he was going to do. Biden tried to persuade, you know, the NATO leaders and nobody was buying it. And I have this great story about Kamala Harris meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky on the eve of the

invasion at the Munich Security Conference. She privately meets with Zelensky, and she says, not only are the Russians coming for Ukraine, they're coming for you personally, and your wife, and your family. Hit squads are coming. And Zelensky was still dubious and skeptical that the Russians were going to invade. He leaves. She turns to an aide and says, I wonder if that's the last time I see him alive. Chilling. That is chilling. Wow. So much to have in this presidency.

Let me see if we can squeeze a few more things in. You talk in the book about what he thinks about Kamala Harris and their relationship. Do you want to tease out anything? Are we going to see her as another vice president if he runs again? Well, you know, it's, yeah, I mean, if you, so one of the things I, my favorite, I don't think this book is necessarily just for political junkies. I think that it's a really human story as well. And my favorite moments in the book

are the kind of private, unguarded moments with Biden where you find out what he really thinks of Kamala Harris, his fraught relationship with the Secret Service detail, what he really thinks about the press and about the Ivy Leaguers in his White House who kind of looked down on him. Anyway, the Kamala relationship is fascinating and complicated because, as I just suggested, he gave her some very important national security assignments.

He really had a good rapport with her. Early on, they were in meetings together all the time, partly because of COVID, partly because Biden wanted her there. I say COVID because they weren't traveling at that point. Anyway, things got more complicated. And maybe I'll leave it there and not do a spoiler. You got to read the book. You got to order it up. Find out. I'm digging a spoiler. You got to read the book. You got to order it up. Find out.

I'm digging now. I'm going to order the book. No, it's interesting. You know, I've heard some rumblings from that camp. You probably heard more as a journalist than I have. But, you know, there was some reporting that, you know, she's had staffing problems, issues with her staff, and some conflict there. And so it's kind of been one of those things where you're like, I wonder where this goes. And of course, you know, the Biden presidency, we really need to return to normal.

To me, that's what it speaks to in his election and also in the midterms here, where people are just like, you know, we're enough of the circus crap. We just want stuff to go back to normal. Go run the damn country. Leave us the fuck alone. Let us watch our TV. It's that network thing. Let me just watch TV with my radial tires and just stay out of

the thing. And we also need a politician to return the order, return some semblance of the message of democracy in order to the world that the world could go, okay, cool, America's back, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, you know, I agree with that. But I also think that Biden was and is trying to do two things that are contradictory.

On the one hand, he wants to unify the country. And on the other hand, he has to call out MAGA and the lasting power of Trumpism. And the one thing that surprised him more than anything else in his presidency was the staying power of MAGA. He thought it would be in the rear view mirror by now. He thought, hey, you know, I won by 7 million votes. It's a mandate for the normalcy you were just talking about. But it wasn't going away. And so for a long

time, he just talked about when he referred to Trump, he would say the former guy. Remember that? Yeah, the former guy. By the way, I have some great stories about him taking a friend around the White House residence and pointing out some of the stuff that Trump left behind and saying, can you believe this blanking, you know what?

Anyway, so Biden, after a while, felt compelled to call out Trumpism. He gave a hell of a speech on the anniversary of January 6th. I don't know if people remember that. It was a hell of a speech. He said, I'm going to stand in this breach. You know, this is not going to happen again. And so and of course, the key to success in the midterms, when all of those crazy Republicans ran, many of them endorsed by Trump and the Democrats defied the odds. talking not about inflation that all the pundits said he should be talking about, which is obviously a really serious problem he's got to deal with. But the key to the midterms was to talk about women's reproductive rights because they were pissed off at the Supreme Court and about Trumpism.

So he did, and he had pretty good results. Yeah, it was really interesting to me. In fact, I was watching the approaching midterms and I was thinking, my God, we're going to lose this wholesale. And then the leak happened with SCOTUS about the abortion versus way being turned over. And I said, just friends I was talking to at the time, I said, you know what? I almost think we're just going to get killed in midterms as Democrats

if maybe that's what needs to happen. They need to overturn Roe versus Wade, and that'll get everyone fired because no one wanted to vote. People are just totally like, we just burn out on politics. We don't care anymore. And then it happened. And it's almost like one of those fateful stroke of whatever things. You have to wonder what the midterms would have been in the next two years of his presidency.

It would have been without the SCOTUS overturning it. Yeah, Joe Biden likes to say that he's a great believer in fate. And so maybe this was fate, you know, playing a role. Nobody saw that coming, but it fired up the Democratic base and more fired up, you know, independents and women. And then, you know, the clown car of Republican crazies that ran for, you know, people said, I mean, Mike Barnicle said on Morning Joe, you know, normal beat crazy. I like that analogy. That's what happened.

Normal beat crazy. Yeah, and I think we all wanted that. I think even many Republicans that crossed over, they're like, we just really would like to get back to normal. So you document all these things in the book. You talk about Afghanistan. You get Afghanistan. That was quite the kerfuffle. Quite the kerfuffle.

That's kind of a misappropriate word to put towards it. But that was quite the crisis to have him endure. Yeah, it really was. And, you know, Biden really felt let down by his briefers and by the intelligence. Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, told me that in no uncertain terms, look, everything we did was based on this flawed intelligence that said the Afghan government would last for 18 months. So I went over and visited Bill Burns, the CIA director. I was lucky enough to have access to him as well. You know, he liked my book, The Spymasters, about the CIA directors.

Sat down with him. This was news to him. He said, no, wait a minute. He said, we were clear-eyed about the fragility of the Afghan government and armed forces. And we said that if you pulled out two legs of the stool, the U.S. military and the American contractors who kept the Afghan armed forces' planes in the air and trucks on the road, that the whole thing could collapse really quickly. At the end of the day, what happened, and I lay this all out in the book, I mean, I call it a whole of government failure because everybody got almost everything wrong, including the U.S. military just not, you know, putting way too much faith in their Afghan counterparts. But I think that what happened really was a result of they thought they had more time than they did

to get everybody out safely. It was based on BS. That was just wrong. And so they, Milley, General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Lloyd Austin, basically tried to pull it off with a cap of 700 American troops. It wasn't enough. And the result we all saw on our television screens. But there was drama behind closed doors over all of this as you can imagine i'm sure do you document anything uh or did you get any data on what the i know the cia went over there the director went over there and met with them i think shortly after or during which was extraordinary i'm like yeah wait we're meeting

with a taliban he was over there you know bill Burns is a great character in the book. This is a guy who, you know, is maybe the most influential, accomplished diplomat of the late 20th century, 21st century. And he's a guy who does not only runs the CIA, but he's Biden's go-to guy when he's got a really big problem and sends him out to negotiate. So he went to see the Taliban. And I tell a story that never reported before that there was a big problem, big fight between the CIA and the Department of Defense in the midst of the evacuation.

A DOD is the Defense Department is, you know, filling these planes with and trying to get people out at this extraordinary pace. And they noticed that every time they filled a plane, there were like 100 more people that shouldn't have been there on the tarmac ready to go. Turns out the CIA, without telling Department of Defense, were bringing people from their secret base and dumping them on the tarmac, and they were climbing into the planes too. And Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, was furious, went over to the White House and yelling about this. Anyway, so it's a great behind-the-scenes

CIA Defense Department dust-up. Would you compare it to the Bay of Pigs deception that John F. Kennedy felt because he'd been deceived about everything? Well, one of the stories I tell is that, you know, while this was

happening, I was talking to Leon Panetta. I know Leon as a result of my previous books. He was White House Chief of Staff. He was CIA Director. I've got to know him over the years. I was on the phone with Leon, and he said, look, watching that evacuation, he said it was just like watching January 6th. Like, what's going on? And Panetta went on CNN, and he called it Joe Biden's Bay of Pigs.

Wow. Well, this didn't sit too well with Joe Biden or Ron Klain, the chief of staff, Biden's chief of staff. So the next time I was with Klain, I asked him about Panetta, and he said, look, Joe Biden didn't spend $2 trillion training these guys to defend their country. Joe Biden wasn't for the war. Leon Panetta was for the war. If this was Joe Biden's Bay of Pigs, it was Leon's army that lost the battle. So anyway, you get so much of what you hear from the White House scripted. I think in my book you get to know what they're actually thinking.

I love it. You get the deep inside stuff. Let me ask you this. President Biden gets a lot of crap for being old and sometimes he's not sharp on his communication either. I'm 55, so he's doing better than I am. He can fall off a bike

and I can't even ride a bike, I don't think. And survive, actually. He has the lisp that's a part of his whole life. So there's a little bit of that. And he's a careful politician. He's a very seasoned politician. And so some people see when he talks.

Wait a minute. Did you just call Joe Biden careful? Is he careful? Well, that's true. He's made a lot of gaps, hasn't he? He's famous for going off the hook. It seems like he's gotten better in the presidency. Am I wrong? Oh, yes, he has.

It seems like he's gotten a little bit better. In the old days, he was like Mr. Jokester. I was watching the other day, and I've got a couple of friends that get in my ear, and they're like, you know, he's an old guy. He's losing it. And I'm like, did you see the guy prior that you voted for? But it almost seems to me like Joe is way more smarter in private than he is when he's doing those things. Yeah, he may have a couple gaffes and he may say things wrong. And sometimes I almost see like he's almost, it feels like he's working a little bit hard to get it right and not make gaffes and maybe not just come across as the prior guy. It almost seems like he's crazy like a fox almost.

I don't know. What do you think about that idea of mine? Well, yeah, I think one of the really fascinating things, I think, in the book is this. Ron Klain did a Zoom call with all the former White House chiefs, 19 of them, the living chiefs, former chiefs, got on the phone with Ron before he took office. Excuse me. And they came to give Ron advice. And believe it or not, LBJ's last White House chief was on this call, 82 years old. His name is Jim Jones.

I don't know about you, you're too young to remember LBJ, but I was a kid and I remember thinking that LBJ was about 90 years old. He was 60. He was 60 when he left the White House. Anyway, LBJ's chief says to Klain, look, you've got to take care of this guy and make sure he gets some rest. I look at him and he looks like me. I trip every time I go up the stairs. You know, I'm 82. I recognize this. I can see when he when he can't find a word and when he's struggling and all that. So make sure he gets his naps and all this stuff. I think Biden, look, he's an 80-year-old guy. He walks like a zombie, like an 80-year-old guy.

But by all accounts, he's fine mentally. He's sharp. And he's got plenty of energy Bruce Reed his deputy chief of staff told me a story about how they were in Europe and they've gone through four summits back to back to back to back exhausted they dragged themselves on Air Force One slumped into their their seats, and tried to go to sleep. Everybody was wiped out except the boss. The boss comes into the senior aide's cabin, and he sits down, and he starts telling stories.

And six hours later, as they land in D.C., he's still telling stories, and they're prying their eyelids open trying to be polite. But he had plenty. He had energy to spare. Yeah, I mean, people give off the presence that when he's not in front of cameras, he's sitting in a back room of the White House and they're feeding him pudding or something. He's drilling down the side of his mouth.

I mean, this is some of the Republican stuff that I get from my Republican friends. I was watching a couple weeks ago and I'm like, this guy's way smarter behind the scenes. Like this guy, he's a seasoned politician, and he's sharp as a tack, I'm sure, behind the scenes. And I started going, you know, he really is crazy like a fox. You know, you see times where,

what was the time where he said something really rude or he swore about, I think it was Trump or something. He called somebody, or it was the reporter from fox news and he goes you know what a stupid president's on a hot mic and he knew it like people were like oh he's doing dumb gaffes i'm like i don't know i think he knew that dart i think he threw that darn on purpose yeah how about his line in warsaw when he gave that speech about Putin and he said, for God's sake, this man cannot remain in power, right? That was ad-libbed.

That was not in the speech. I was talking to Ron Klain 15 minutes after that speech, and he goes, Chris, the president ad-libbed it. Yeah, but he knew, Chris, the president ad-libbed it. It was totally – yeah, but he knew what he was doing. And that line is – the White House ran around with its hair on fire trying to say, well, no, that's not what he meant. That's exactly what he meant. And he came out and said it too.

No, I meant it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's going to go down with Ronald Reagan's Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It was a moment of authenticity by Biden, but he planned it and he delivered it. I've got a hard out for you here in about two and a half minutes. Just really quickly, what do you think the next two years are going to be like? Is it going to be a circus show or is it going to be... I don't know. What are your thoughts?

It's going to be a really wild ride, I think. I don't think Donald Trump is... He's weakened, but he's still there. And I think anybody who thinks that he is a

fading guy who's going to shuffle off into the twilight is kidding themselves. This is a guy who will do anything to DeSantis, tries to go for the nomination. I think Trump will do whatever he has to do to take him down. Biden and his team are planning to run against Trump. They think democracy is still on the ballot in 2024. Anything could happen to Biden at his team are planning to run against Trump. They think democracy is still on the ballot in 2024. Anything could happen to Biden at his age. You've got the documents thing out there. You've got just a lot of big, big challenges, including avoiding a recession and keeping NATO unified.

It's going to be a wild fourth act and, uh, I'll be out there talking about it and, uh, trying to sell a few bucks. There you go. And you'll probably have an expert going with the classified documents and all the stuff that's not coming out.

Sure. So that's going to be interesting how that all comes together. Well, Chris, it's been always wonderful to have you on the show. You bring such wonderful insight and into politics and everything you, uh, have the access to, uh, give us your.com. So if you can find you on the show. You bring such wonderful insight into politics and everything you have access to. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. So the place to find it is at chriswipple.net.

Again, that's chriswipple.net. You can find a lot of information about the book, a couple of early reviews. We've had even better reviews since uh you can find uh uh links and uh and some of my television stuff and uh i hope people will check it out i hope they will too i will be checking out because i i've i've been interested in what's going on with this uh white house i've been you know because it's been it's been pretty quiet i mean it's been they kept the they kept lit on i'm kind of a little disappointed, though, because, you know, we got a lot more great books and authors that came on the show during Trump's presidency.

In fact, it never seemed like it was going to end, all the books that were written about it. Anyway, thank you very much, Chris, for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. There you go. Thanks, Miles, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, and our big LinkedIn groups. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see

you guys next time.