The Daily Beast Podcast - How Gerald Ford’s Big Mouth Helped Uncover Insane CIA Abuses

Episode Date: May 28, 2023

James Risen, author of The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy, joins this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast to talk about Senator Frank Church, who led what is known as the Church Committee, a group that held Senate hearings in order to hold the intelligence community accountable for its expansive abuses. He shares one particular story with co-host Andy Levy that explains how a few whip-smart journalists, and President Gerald Ford opening his big mouth, finally exposed the CIA and set the hearings against them in motion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of The New Abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with legendary journalist James Risen of The Intercept. And today he's going to talk to us all about his new book, The Last Honest Man, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia and the Kennedys, and one senator's fight to save democracy. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips? Clips. All right.

So as we discussed in the last episode, Mr. Trump had a hell of a lot of reactions to Ron DeSantis getting in the race. I really felt like this video he filmed. It was some of the better comedic genius he's ever done. Let's take a listen. Rob DeSanctimonious and his poll numbers are dropping like a rock. I would almost be inclined to say these are record falls. The question is Rob just young.

and experienced and naive or more troubling, is he a fool who is no idea what the hell he's doing? We already have one of those in office. We don't need another one. We need MAGA. Make America great again. That's what we want. He called him Rob again?

I'm sorry. That is fucking hilarious. Him just repeating Rob like casually over and over is amazing. The lack of respect is just like you got to give it to the guy. Wow. I think the desantimonious part is stupid and he should come up with something else, but I guess he's stuck with that now. But the Rob, just calling him Rob is so good. It's so good.

Really, honestly. Oh, my God. I'm shocked that he hasn't gone Weird Ron because Weird Ron is really the Trump nickname for him or Weird Rob. Weird Rob. I mean, it's the laugh. I really would have liked him to close that out with Rob's laugh because I think that would have like. Laughing Rob. Yeah, Laughing Rob.

You know what I kept thinking about is like of all the traits to go forward with to present first of Ronda Sannis, his voice and his laugh first and foremost. Like giving no visual appeal in anything. It'd be like, no, we should just let his voice lead the campaign kick off. It's like the political malpractice of the decade. Yeah. Yeah. Know your audience. I don't know though, because he makes weird faces and like it's almost like,

They had to go with, you know, it was the lesser of six evils. I don't even know what the others are, but there's got to be more than two. Yeah, his face, his height being too. Yeah. That is true. They did get to cover up the high heels for that. Yeah. So, oh, yeah, the height.

Yeah, that's the other thing. So it's, you know. God, I can't wait to see him standing next to Trump on stage. It's going to be amazing because, like, Trump is, not only is he taller than him. he's also wider than him. So he's just going to beat this. He's literally going to be in Trump's shadow. I was going to say he's going to walk over and stand next to him.

Yep. Sure is. He absolutely is going to do that just for that reason. What's to also be honest, though? He's only wider than him because Ron's been on the Oseptic ever since he heard about meatball Ron. So that's true. He was getting pretty up there for quite a while.

Rob. Well, while we're on the subject of Rob, previously we played him saying woke seven times in 20 seconds. Today, we have his big media hit after his disastrous presidential launch on Twitter. He went, I got to do a big media hit. So where does he go? Fox News to talk to Trey Gowdy, a king of charisma. I got to say, not ready for primetime doing this in the primetime hours. Really, really, really put a bow on it. Well, first of all, the woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism. At the end of the day, it's an attack on the truth. And because it's a war on truth, I think we have no choice but to wage a war on woke. So how does that work for a president?

Some of it may be the bully pulpit, being willing to tell the truth and not being diluted by ideology, which we see in many aspects of our society. I'm sorry, I fell asleep. Like the woke mind virus and his war on truth, really? Everything that they project, right, is just a lie. Because the fact is, is that they are so afraid of the truth that they need to remove books. They're so afraid of the truth that they need to distort curriculum. They're so afraid of the truth that, like, they need to hide everyone that doesn't fit their mold so that they can feel comfort. it's laughable that they think that what they're doing is preserving truth when they are literally

trying to hide everyone's eyes and ears from reality. Yeah, somebody should check his, I don't know. It's not the woke mind virus. I don't know what it is. Yeah, we talked about this on Friday. I unfortunately get why a lot of Americans like Trump. He taps into like the darkest, basest impulses, et cetera. I really don't think that this is what the American people, the offline American people who aren't watching Fox News 24-7, who aren't on Twitter or truth social or whatever. I don't think they want a guy who talks like this. Maybe I'm wrong. And maybe they've got polls that show otherwise. But I just think, I just don't see it. Like, again, it's not that I think, you know, I'm not sitting here.

with some rosy-eyed picture of America, where Americans won't stand for that. It's not that. I get why Trump appeals to so many Americans. I don't think this appeals to those same people, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Just saying woke over and over again. But it's like, listen to that clip and you're just like, what did he just say? Right.

Right. Like literally, did he say anything of merit? And I think that most people are going to look around and they're going to be like, yeah, he's passed all of these policies in Florida. My life is not any better. Right. Like just making it so that other people's lives are worse than yours doesn't mean that yours is better.

If Democrats can tap into that reality and be like, no, seriously, think about it. Is your life actually better under Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump does the same thing? He has no standing. Right. Exactly. That whole thing, like what it really like sounded to me like was lack of virtue signaling, instead of the virtue signaling these idiots talk about. It's just like...

Yeah. Yeah, it's vice signaling. Yeah. And I think like the other funny thing is, I never heard him say woke mind virus until he got around Elon Musk. Never heard Bill Maher say it. Now he says it all the time until he got around. Oh, yeah.

Sounds like a mind virus to me. But also it just reinforces what a beta he is, you know, in their terms. They've already got Trump for all the alpha shit. They don't need a beta. version, like the beta version is supposed to come before the alpha version. This doesn't make sense. All right. Well, speaking of really, really absent brain things, fortunately, Margie's here to make

her appearance for this week. She's trying to impeach everyone. And I really do have bad news because I think that the stupid has really even grown since last week. And it's like an invasive species in her brain. Here we go. Merritt Garland must be impeached. What I want to tell the House of Representatives today is a Rasmussen poll was released just last week

that 53% of voters in America, Republicans, independents, and Democrats, support the impeachment of Joe Biden for high crimes and misdemeanors. I introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden last week because of the national security crisis at our border. I also introduced articles of impeachment against Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for failing to do his duties to secure America's border. But he's only doing the bidding of his boss, Joe Biden. At 5 p.m. yesterday, I released a survey simply on my social media asking, do you support impeachment? 8,600 people responded, and that was just from 5 p.m. last night. 77% said yes, they support impeachment. Only 23% opposed.

And if anyone's read the comments on my Twitter account, you know for sure it's not just Republicans that follow me. Honestly, I don't know what's less trustworthy, a Twitter poll or a Rasmussen poll. Oh,000%. You need some better sources, honey. Really, seriously. It's not just Republicans that are following her. Is it the Martians from out of space?

Because there ain't no Democrats following you. She's right. You know, some of us in the journalism thing, I unfortunately have to follow her. I have to find things that are stupid and send them to you guys. So, you know. I see her tweets,

but not because I follow her, but because people retweet her, like, can you believe this shit? I have to follow her to know when she's going to have another feral hog hunt raffle to come with her and hunt the feral hogs.

I just want to know what the people, like her constituents are gaining. Has Marchy and Taylor Green offered up any policy, like that actually affects the people in her district. Like everything that she does, she's like just a stunt. Everything she does is a fucking stunt. It's amazing.

It's amazing that these people send her to Congress. Her and DeSantis. Yeah. I mean, she's in a, you know, she's in a hardcore MAGA district that was, I think, you know, gerrymandered to be like as safe as can possibly be. There are a lot of people who do want nothing more than owning the libs. and I guess there's enough in her district that that's all they care about. Sad.

They're sad. It's really sad. No, it is. It is. It really is sad. James Risen won two Pulitzer Prizes while with the New York Times and currently serves as the Intercept Senior National Security Correspondent. He's also the author of five books, including his latest co-written with Thomas Risen,

a compelling portrait of Senator Frank Church, best known for heading the church committee, which, in Risen's words, brought the intelligence community under the rule. of law and imposed congressional oversight for the first time. The book is called The Last Honest Man, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys, and one senator's fight to save democracy. He joins me now to talk about it in the first of a two-part interview. James, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for happening. I know I said this to you off air, but I want to say it on air as well. This, I think, is the best nonfiction book I've read this year, if not in a longer period of time. and I had a question that I wanted to ask you that I wanted to talk to you about for almost like every page of the book it felt like there was something just that fascinating.

So I'll start with Church's upbringing. I won't spend too long on that because I had written a lot more questions, but obviously once I got into his political career, the questions were just flowing out of me. But there were a couple of things in his upbringing that stood out for me. And they involved his political development. You wrote about him doing research so he could argue against his Republican father. And also you wrote about the effect his army service during World War II had on him. Tell us about those. Frank Church grew up in Boise in the, he was born in 1924.

And Boise at that time was a sleepy backwater. I think the population was only about 20,000. But he was a very unique and odd character in a mountain west remote area where he was an urban kid, a city kid really, from day one. and he read, he loved to debate, and he began to debate with his father almost, you know, as a child. And he would go to the library in Boise and read up on politics when he was just a little kid. He developed this love of current events and politics and history that was very unique. And he began to debate his father, who was kind of an old curmudgeon Republican traditional conservative who hated Franklin Roosevelt. and the New Deal. As church grew and began to debate his father, he began to realize how much he

liked the New Deal and how much he respected Franklin Roosevelt. And so he later said that that time period was very formative for his political thinking, and it led him to become a Democrat. And then in World War II, he served as an Army intelligence officer in China, where the United States Army was supporting the Chinese nationalist army of Shankai Sheck. And he became very cynical and disgusted by the corruption of the Shankajek regime and of the Chinese nationalist army. And it really had a major impact on his thinking in the post-war period and his belief later. It affected the way he looked at Vietnam and the war in Vietnam, which he thought that the South Vietnamese regime reminded him of the corruption of Shanghai Shik's regime in China. And so I think those two events really help shape his thinking and his political outlook.

That was illustrated very well in the book. So just, you know, I need to jump ahead. So let's jump ahead to 1956 now. He's obviously out of the army. And sort of out of nowhere, he decides to run for the Senate from Idaho. And he defeats his opponent, Republican and McCarthyite, Herman Welker. So he gets to Washington and he immediately gets himself in trouble with the Senate majority leader who was a man named Lyndon Baines Johnson. He had survived cancer in the late 1940s and decided that because he wasn't sure how long he was going to live, that he would take big risks in his life. And as a result, he decided to run for Senate when he was still very young and defeated Welker, who was Joseph McCarthy's biggest ally in the Senate. He was so close to McCarthy that he was nicknamed Little Joe from Idaho. Church defeated him in 1956, and he was only 32 when he entered the Senate.

And Lyndon Johnson was then the Senate Majority Leader and was trying to pass what later became known as the Civil Rights Act of 1957. And it was going through very weird, convoluted machinations and the Senate in order to navigate through the Deep South segregationists and get the law passed. and Church at first didn't understand the strategy that Johnson had, and he voted against him and some procedural moves at first. And that led him to be on the outs with Johnson for the first several months of his career in the Senate. And finally, he realized that in order to get back in the good graces of Johnson, he had to figure out a way to play a bigger role in the civil rights legislation. And so he came up with his first major legislative victory in the Senate, which was to alter and amend the civil rights legislation in

1957 in a way that helped it get passed through the Senate. And Johnson became so enamored of church as a result that he began to shower him with rewards after making him persona non grata for the first few months. Yeah, just an amazing political story. And talk about that civil rights legislation because, as you say in the book, this really prepared him for what will come later with the church committee, and that is under the church committee's purview, the investigation of the FBI's racist record and harassment of Martin Luther King. Right. You know, church coming from Idaho, there were, I think, when he was elected, there were only

a few hundred blacks in all of Idaho. It was probably the whitest state in the country. And so he didn't have very much experience with the issues of civil rights or, you know, segregation. But he quickly learned as the civil rights bill went through Congress and began to understand the significance and the historic legacy. And one of the things that was tripping up the bill was whether or not there would be people who were in the South, who were opposed, who fought and violated the Civil Rights Act, would be allowed to have a jury trial rather than just a trial by a judge in a federal court. And this was such a huge issue because everybody knew if a jury

in the South was impaneled in a civil rights case, the jury would be all white and would acquit. And so northern liberals opposed a civil rights bill that wouldn't require only federal judges to rule in the cases of civil rights violations. But in the mountain west where church came from, There had been a long history of liberal support for jury trials because miners and union workers had always been oppressed by non-jury trials where the management of mining companies would try to get them persecuted by favorable judges. And so Church spent a lot of time on this issue of the jury trial provision in the Civil Rights Act. And he came up with an amendment in which the federal juries, would have to be desegregated, and even in the South. And so that meant that you could have a jury trial,

but it would have to include blacks, which was a kind of breakthrough amendment that led to the final passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1957. And that did, as you say, that was his first real experience of the issue. And later, the Church Committee, one of the hallmarks of the Church Committee was it provided the first investigation of the FBI's harassment of Martin Luther King. Yeah, and we'll get into that in-depth later. But I want to ask you something now. There seems to be a bit of a theme that church, he really loved strong women, didn't he? Yes. You know, there was his wife, and then there was his top aide Verda Barnes, and you refer to them as the twin guardians of his political career. Yes. First, Betheen Church, his wife, they met in high school. She was the daughter of

the governor of Idaho, Democratic governor of Idaho. She kind of fell in with Church's circle of friends, and they became really just platonic friends for a long time. And then over the years, they began to date. But they had a very on and again, off again relationship. And it was much more of an intellectual relationship at first, revolving around politics. During World War II, when he was in China, she got engaged to another man. And then when he came back, from the war, he, you know, they reconnected and very dramatically. He took her out driving outside Boise and demanded that she marry him and dump the other guy. But she became much more than just his wife. She was a political figure in her own right. Her family, the Clark family,

was probably the most powerful Democratic family in Idaho. And some of their critics said that they ran Democratic politics. They called it the Clark. machine. She brought not only herself to the marriage, but her father and the rest of her extended family. She was always looking out for church and the impact of his votes in the Senate on his political standing in Idaho. Verda Barnes was a fascinating character who I don't think very many people have ever heard of. She was a Mormon from eastern Idaho who married this guy who said that his name was Barnes when she was very young and when she was in the hospital with their first child, he disappeared and left her with a mountain of debts. And she had to make her away in the 1920s and

30s on her own and became a leading political figure in Idaho politics during the Depression. And later became a leader of the Progressive Party in Idaho and was working for the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948. also for one of Church's political rivals, the guy named Glenn Taylor. She knew Idaho politics better than anyone, and she eventually became churches. They called then the administrative assistant, which was really chief of staff. She helped him survive Idaho politics, which was becoming increasingly conservative as he was in the Senate. And so even as he became a much more liberal senator throughout the 1960s and 70s, he had Betheen and

Verda Barnes there to help protect him in Idaho. I left your book hoping that someone will write a book about her, about Verda Barnes. Just a fascinating story of her own. Okay, so before we get to 1975 and what is well known now as the Church Committee, I think we have to talk about Church's 1973 hearing into ITs. the CIA and Chile. By now, Church has been a senator for 17 odd years. He's established himself as a leading voice against the Vietnam War and American imperialism. And he's become both more radical and, as you point out, also more famous and publicity seeking. Yeah. And he gets this hearing

with absolutely blockbust revelations. You've got CIA director, Richard Helms, blatantly lying to the committee. This whole section of the book was an absolutely thrilling read and really felt like it set the stage for what happened in 1975? French Church throughout the 1960s became really disillusioned with American foreign policy because of Vietnam. And Vietnam really radicalized him. And he came by the early 1970s. He believed that the United States was becoming a militaristic empire. And he thought Vietnam was a symptom rather than a cause of that. And he really felt that one of the ways in which the United States was becoming this imperial power was through the growth of multinational

corporations. And so he was beginning to look for ways to conduct investigations of multinational companies when stories began to appear about ITT and its role in Chile and working with the CIA. And he got the ability and authority to create a subcommittee of the Senate of Foreign Relations Committee to investigate multinational corporations with a focus on ITT's role in Chile and its work with the CIA to overthrow Salvador Allende. And one of the first things that he did was to seek the testimony of Richard Helms, who had been CIA director until just before the hearings. And Helms lied to the Church Committee, to the Church's multinational committee,

and he lied to the main Center Foreign Relations Committee about the CIA's role in Chile. And that led to Helms' prosecution by the Justice Department for perjury and lying to Congress. And that was going on throughout 1973 just as the Watergate scandal was blowing up. And so Church's investigation of Chile and ITT became kind of part of the whole Watergate era scandal. It provided a real entree for him into the larger CI investigation of the church committee. Yeah, and of course, Helms eventually gets off with basically a slap on the wrist, but it still showed that these people were not untouchable anymore. It was remarkable because it was the first time that Helms had ever been held to account for anything. And he had gotten away throughout the 1960s during Vietnam when he was CIA director.

He had developed this M.O. where he would whisper in the ears of a handful of leading senators and leading members of the House about little tidbits about Vietnam, and they loved him. And he did the same thing with the press in Washington. And so he had developed this very protective guard around him, both in Congress, the White House, and in the Washington Press Corps. And so no one wanted to go after Richard Holmes until Frank. church. Everyone was shocked that someone would try to go after Helms because he was so widely revered and protected by the Washington establishment. So this, as I said, or as you say in the book, this really sets the stage for 1975, which is the year of the church committee. Tell me about the family jewels. And as our listeners will soon understand, this is not an inappropriate question. Right. During Watergate, Helms had to testify. before the Senate of Watergate Committee, and he claimed that the CIA had resisted

the Nixon administration's efforts to help in the Watergate cover-up, and he claimed that the CIA had nothing to do with Watergate. But James Schlesinger, who succeeded him at the CIA, began to hear that there was evidence that that was not true, that the CIA had played a role in Watergate, at least by providing logistical support for the White House plumbers, especially during their break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in

Los Angeles and in other instances. And so, Flesinger began to get very concerned that he had taken this new job as CIA director, and he was going to be left holding the bag for all of the abuses that the CIA had been involved with. And so he ordered everyone at the CIA to write down and send him memos about everything they knew that the CIA had ever done that was illegal or illicit or might lead to scandals. All of these memos that came in were put together in one big giant memo that was nicknamed the family jewels because it included every bad thing the CIA had ever done, or most of them.

And then Schlesinger left the CIA after just a few months. And William Colby, who was his successor, came in and suddenly had. had this giant thing on his desk, the family jewels, which was like a ticking time bomb. And along came an investigative reporter named Cy Hirsch, who began to hear about the family jewels and who began to investigate the CIA after he had been spending most of his time on Watergate trying to help the New York Times compete with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But he moved off Watergate and began to investigate the CIA. CIA's domestic abuses. And in December, 1974, he broke a massive story about the CIA's domestic spying,

both on anti-war leaders and other dissidents. And his exclusive story led directly to the creation of the church committee. Yeah. And this is where, in addition to the domestic abuses, this is when the country really first learns about various CIA assassination plots, including the ones against Fidel Castro that we're all very familiar with now. And as you recount, this sort of all came about because of a verbal slip by President Gerald Ford when he was meeting with New York Times executives. Yeah, Hershey's story came out right before Christmas in December 1974, and it immediately led to calls for congressional investigations. The Senate and the House both began to talk about congressional investigations. And Jerry Ford, it was the new president,

wanted to try to stop that. He wanted to try and figure out how to tamp down this growing scandal. And so he called in the executive editor of the New York Times, Abe Rosenpaw, and a few other editors from the New York Times who had just broken this story. And he sits down with them and tells them, oh, there's a lot of things that should stay secret. You know, there's a lot of things that, oh, if you only knew about all these other things, we got to keep them secret. And Abe Rosenpaw said, like what? And Ford sitting in the Oval Office says, well, like assassinations. And then he goes, but that's off the record. And all these New York Times editors are sitting there dumbfounded and they go back to the New York Times and they say, well, he said it was off the record so I guess we can't print it.

And Tom Whitker, who was a columnist and editor who had been in the meeting, said, this is ridiculous. We can't sit on this. And so he goes to see Cy Hirsch in the Washington. Bureau, who was not in the meeting. And he tells them that Ford has just talked about how the CIA was involved in assassinations of foreign leaders, but that Rosenthal's agreed to keep it off the record, so they can't run it. And so Cy Hirsch makes a few phone calls, finds out that it's true. And then he goes to see his neighbor, who's Daniel Shore of CBS News in Washington, and basically leaks the story to CBS. And then CBS runs the story. And when that story came out, that became the focus of the church committee because it was such a huge story that nobody knew anything about.

And at the time, the church was looking for how to focus his new investigation. And that became the focus. Yeah, it is wild timing because the committee, again, their purview was originally to look at CIA domestic abuses. and then all of a sudden, like almost literally on the eve of this committee, this bombshell drops. And as you write, you know, you say even decades later, most of what is known about the CIA's plot to assassinate foreign leaders was first disclosed to the church committee. And we're talking about plots that took place over the course of four presidencies, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, in various corners of the world, places like Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Congo. Right. Yeah.

I mean, you got to remember, and this is really hard for people in our age to remember that there was no congressional oversight of the CIA or the FBI or the NSA prior to this. And so there was 30 years of CIA history that Frank Church suddenly realized I'm in charge of investigating for the very first time. And so where do I start? What do I start with? And then this bombshell drops. And he says, oh yeah, let's start with that. And that became the central focus for the next few months. And it was such a rich story that went in so many different directions.

And one of the thing that really the church dug into the most was the CIA's alliance with the mafia to kill Fidel Castro in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And that became the central story of the church. Church Committee in its investigation of the CIA. And it's such a fascinating story because it has so many side plots. Well, including suspicious deaths. Yeah, one of the, the amazing thing is that three of the Church Committee's witnesses were murdered, including two who were involved with the CIA's alliance with the mafia. Sam Jancana, who had been the mob boss of Chicago, and Johnny Raselli, who was a Los Angeles and Las Vegas mobster who worked with the CIA.

CIA to try to kill Castro. Those two murders have never been solved. I think the evidence of whether they were murdered to try to silence them from providing evidence to the Church Committee is still up in the air. You know, as we've said, in addition to the assassination investigations, there was a lot of work done by the committee on the CIA-run domestic programs, including the infamous M.K. Ultra or experiments, and of at least equal importance, the church committee was the first public exposure of what, at the time, was this unbelievably secretive and little-known organization called the NSA. Right. There was a staffer on the church committee named Britt Snyder, who years later became the top official at the CIA. But at the time, he was a young staff who had just gotten back

from Vietnam a few years earlier. And he began to hear things. There were little hints of NSA programs of domestic spying. And so he started to go out to the NSA at Fort Meade, and he was the first congressional staffer who had ever tried to investigate anything that the NSA did. And the NSA kept stonewalling him and refusing to tell him anything. And then at the end of one meeting he had

with this lone NSA person who would meet with him, the NSA guy got frustrated and say, oh, go talk to Dr. Tordella. And Ritz Snyder had no idea who that was or what that meant. But he found out that there was a guy in Tordella who had been the deputy director of the NSA forever.

Had basically been running the NSA on his own. Nobody had ever heard of him, but he had just retired. So he was living very quietly in his house in Bethesda, Maryland, just enjoying retirement. And Snyder went to see him, and they began this long-running,

discussions between just the two of them sitting on his back porch about all of the NSA's incredible domestic spine programs that nobody knew about. Yeah, absolutely amazing. Make sure to check out the next episode of The New Abnormal for part two of my interview with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Ryzen, where we'll explore more of what the Church Committee uncovered and talk about the intelligence reforms it led to. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday.

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