The Team House - From 101st Airborne to Chasing HVT's in the FBI | Michelle Taylor | Ep. 213

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Michelle Carron Taylor spent 14 years as a Special Agent in the FBI, investigating cyber, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and corruption matters. As a Special Agent, she also worked with federal, state, and local law enforcement partners to provide security assessments and real-time threat monitoring of large scale sporting events, such as NASCAR races and the Preakness Stakes, a premier thoroughbred horse race. While in the FBI, she also served as Director for Legislative Affairs for the White House National Security Council and on the staff of the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, where she was responsible for homeland threat and cryptocurrency issues. In 2017, she was selected to join the U.S. Department of Justice Special Counsel’s Office investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, where she held a leadership role on the obstruction of justice investigation. After leaving government, Michelle held a senior position at a research consultancy and advised global technology companies on policy challenges and brand communications strategies. Michelle is a veteran of the U.S. Army, where she served as a military intelligence officer in domestic and overseas assignments, to include combat deployment. https://trenchcoatadvisors.com/ Today's Sponsors:⬇️ SLNT (Silent) Faraday Bags https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d SLNT® sleeves, bags, cases and wallets are all exquisitely designed to ensure your devices become invisible, untrackable and silent. Get 10% off your order by using this link or using the promo code "teamhouse" at checkout! https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #fbi #101stairborne #militaryintelligenceBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Teamhouse know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream as well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review,

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, The Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, Scott and David Park. You can get him out of. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 213 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park.

And our guest on the show is Michelle Taylor. She is a former Army intelligence officer, served 14 years in the FBI, served on the Robert Mueller special counsel obstruction case, spent some time in the Middle East, in Iraq, Yemen, other interesting things that we will definitely get into. this interview. So Michelle, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, absolutely. So the thing we like to start off with, because you are a superhero,

and we like to know how you got your powers. Like, what's your origin story? So first of all, my first superpower is that I don't need a lot of sleep. This is genetic. It is a gift. Everyone should have this. As a mother, it has been a gift to me. So that was handed down from my parents. So that's my number one superpower. I don't need to sleep. origin story so I was an army brat my dad was in the army for 30 years so I was born on an army base to a drill sergeant I don't think it gets any more quintessentially military than that we moved around my whole life I went to three high schools I'm still mad about it ask my parents I'm

still not over it we talk about it to this day I'm 43 years old I'm still mad about it So don't do that to your kids if you can. And then, even after all of that, I went to college and thought I should probably give ROTC a shot. And in some ways, it was very comforting for me. It was the only thing I knew was the military. My dad actually did not want me to be in the Army. I think he was in the Army of the 70s and 80s. I think he had sort of a different experience watching women in the military, and he didn't work with many of them in his particular line of work, and so he was very worried about what would happen to me in the military, but I did it anyway.

And he became, you know, basically became a feminist because he suddenly had a daughter in the army to think about. So he actually came to airborne. So I went to airborne school. You guys have been to airborne school. it's the best three weeks of your life at Fort Benning. So he came to airborne school when I was there and they let him jump with me. Oh, wow. Yeah, so because he was still in and he was still on jump status.

But the great thing is, so my dad was enlisted. All these other kids were legacy kids, but their dads were officers. So for whatever reason, maybe it was fair or not fair. Those guys had to go in the test airplane. They were the wind dummies. but they let my dad actually jump with us. So he was on the plane with me. He was the number one jumper.

I was a number two jumper. So it was super cool. And then we ended up, we had gotten rained out of one of our jumps. So we had like a battlefield graduation or drop zone graduation. And he had jumped in, he had pinned his airborne wings to his uniform

and jumped them in and then gave them to me. Oh, that's great. I know. So that's my, that's my how I came into the Army story. So then I went to, And then I graduated.

And I graduated in May of 2001. So I was at Fort Wachuka waiting for a change of command when 9-11 happened. So you had just gotten to Wachucah. I had just gotten to Wachuca. Why did you decide to branch military intelligence? How did you end up with Wachuk in the first place?

Well, this was 2001. So no combat arms. Right. We're open to women. And honestly, not sure. I really wanted to be an infantry officer. It would have been nice to have been asked. But so I thought out, my dad was an engineer, so I thought about, you know, branching engineer,

but nothing else seemed interesting to me. So military intelligence seemed like the closest way to be part of the action without, or the closest way I could get, you know, because you can be an intelligence officer in lots of different types of units, even if you are not allowed to be in those units. And so yeah, it seemed like the most interesting. I have a sort of analytical mindset. I like data. I like things.

I like puzzles. And so I branched M.I. It's really weird to be a senior in college doing an SF86 for a security clearance because you're sort of like, oh, should have thought about this. I really should have got a party last week. When I was in, someone just told me when I was like coming in that I was going to have to fill out this paperwork and I was a senior. Luckily, I was too scared to do anything truly terrible. So it was a pretty easy process.

But yeah, that was MI. And then so my class, we were the last commissioned class to come into a peacetime army. So we came in. There was Kosovo, maybe, Bosnia. Still sort of people were deploying, but those deployments were different. And then everything changed when we were at OBC. In fact, at MI school. You learn you learn the threat.

And the threat we were still learning in 2001 was ironically enough today, Russian threat. So we were still learning sort of Cold War threat. And we, they quickly, after I left, of course, because it was too fast to change. But they did quickly pivot. Right. So what was that like then? So you were doing a change in Japan. But were you just starting what Chuka when 9-11 happened?

So I got there in May. So I went right after school. So we were props in somebody else's change of command, basically. It was one of these big spider marks, actually, was either coming in or going out. I don't know if you know him, relatively well-known intel officer. And so we're all on the parade field waiting to go on, and we're waiting, and we're waiting, and we're waiting, and we're waiting, and we're waiting. And somebody was, I think one of my friends who was chronically late to everything, she came and she told everyone, like a plane hit the World Trade Center. And they were going to do this huge, like UAV flyover.

They canceled everything. They did a very quick and dirty change of command. They sent us all back. And we just, I think we, I mean, we weren't even really in the army. Like, there was no arms room to go to. But we were like guarding things, you know. But yeah, everything, everything changed. Was Wachucaan open base at that time?

It was not. Okay. Because Wachuka has a lot of interesting, like, random stuff. Yeah. So it was not open. It was one of the few that was closed. But it did get a lot harder to get on and off post. Yeah.

So what was your, what unit did you get assigned to after you finished? I was in the 102nd MI Battalion and the second infantry division in Korea. So we supported 2 ID. So classic platoon leader, you show up 21 years old. They give you 30 people to be. be in charge of. So my platoon was interrogators, interpreters, and then all source analysts. So it was kind of cool. So my company didn't have an organic brigade and 2ID to support. So we supported TDII entities that were coming into Korea for training, and we supported a rock

army unit. So we got to do really cool stuff up on closer to the board. And my soldiers were all so brilliant. I mean, some of them were really upset that they were in Korea because Korea can be a little bit of a drag, but they were Korean linguists. So I'm not sure where they thought they were going to end up. Right. But once they got over that part. There's only one other country you might be going to and you don't want to go there. Yeah.

Yeah. So, but it was tough because it was right after 9-11. So we were locked down even in Korea. So we weren't allowed. So we were up north. We weren't allowed to go down to the fund base at Yongsan and party. So we just, we hung out on our battalion compound just us all the time. It's a little grim.

Did you guys at all, because Korea, you know, I'm sure there was prior to 9-11, there was quite a bit of focus there, you know. But after 9-11, did you guys feel like forgotten at all? No. And that would probably be a good question for someone who was there in like 0-4, 05. because I was there, I showed up in October of 2001. Nobody knew what was going on anywhere in October of 2001. So actually it was a little bit more, it felt just as intense, right?

The opt tempo in two ideas already pretty fast. You go to the field every month. People are always coming in for training. So that didn't really feel any different, I guess, to me, because I didn't really know any better. Yeah. And so you did your year in Korea? Yep.

And then went back stateside? Yep. I went to the 101st. It was sort of an open secret that we were going to go to Iraq and that the 101st was going to go. And I wanted to go because, you know, back then no one had ever... This is for the invasion. Yeah. But again, today, everybody has been to war.

Every veteran, you know, has been to war. has been to war, but back then nobody had done anything. And nobody joins the military to sit at home. So when you hear someone's going to go to Iraq, you're like, well, I'm going to go. So I got to the 1001st, and I became the S2, the intelligence officer for a Blackcock battalion. So the people carrying the soldiers for the air assaults, which was the coolest job ever. And I deployed to Iraq with them. So I got to ask like a little bit about like what's the difference between being an MI officer for like an infantry unit like in in Korea versus being a MI officer for a, you know, I mean I understand 100 first is infantry also but for now black clocks. Yeah. So I mean in

Korea I was still in an MI unit supporting infantry. Blackcock unit still supporting infantry. So in some ways you're always supporting the guy on the ground or gal on the ground now. So in some ways it wasn't that different. My customer was a little bit different though, right? My customers were pilots who wanted to know the best way to get somewhere, what they were going to encounter on the ground, what the radar situation was, you know, what they were, what the celebratory fire situation was or was not. There's a lot of that that nobody was used to when we went into the country. So it was different, but pilots are, I'm sure you've spent time with pilots. They're a completely different animal, and I really, I sort of enjoyed my time in that battalion.

It's hard to be not a pilot around a bunch of pilots, but they were generally very kind to me, nonetheless. So tell us about, like, you know, you said it was an open secret that this unit's going to Iraq. Tell us a little bit about, like, how the 101st and from your point of view, how the invasion was planned, the movement to Kuwait, sort of like how all of that started to unfold. Yeah, so first of all, the way that, again, I don't know how they do it now, but the 101st was one of these quickly deployable units. So they could be anywhere in the world within a certain period of time. And so in order to do that, brigades took turns being the ready brigade.

And so when you were the ready, you were the ready brigade, you were the training, you know, it was black cycle, white cycle, gold cycle, something like that. And so we were on Black Circle, which means that our helicopters were shrink-wrapped and ready to go in case we needed to go somewhere and that we were prepped and we weren't allowed to be more than two hours away from, you know, to be recallable within two hours. Luckily, Nashville is not that far away from Fort Campbell, which is where we all spent our free time. Um, we ended up staying on Black Circle because it was close enough. We didn't sort of realize it at the time, but basically they knew we were going and it didn't make sense for us to get unready and someone else to get ready when we were already ready. So when we stayed on Black Cycle, I think we knew we were going to end up going and we were going to end up going first, even though we weren't supposed to go first. So, you know, I moved out of my apartment and got rid of, you know, had my dad come and get my car. And at work every day, we were getting maps of Iraq.

And first I had maps for this part of the country. And then I had maps for that part of the country. And then I had maps for that part of the country. And then I was looking at this river. And then I was looking at that river because it changed all the time. Like it was never really clear exactly what we were going to do, unbeknownst to me, because I was a 23-year-old lieutenant, you know, the United States is negotiating with pick a country on whether or not we can stage there and move in, you know, and I'm just thinking, my God,

can someone get it together, you know? Right. So it's a lot of hurry up and wait. But again, no one had done it in a long time, so it still felt a little bit exciting. And at times tedious, you know, you have to do all the boarding bureaucracy. But then we went. So we went in February, yeah, February of 03. And we went to Kuwait and we waited.

And we waited. And we waited. And then eventually we made our way into Iraq. And the 101st followed third ID, the heavy unit and the Marines, a very light, very messy unit, up north. So we sort of slowly made our way. We stopped at Baghdad, the airport. We stayed there for a few days. And from there, we moved pretty quickly up north.

So the 101st was in Mosul. One brigade was in Mosul. One brigade was in Talafar. That's where I was supporting the Rakhisans. Yep, my brigade supported. I spent quite a bit of time there. Oh, did you? Yeah.

It was probably nicer when you were there. Actually, though, it could only get so nice. Like, there's not much room for improvement. The first time was going in and out in 2005 when it was really bad. Yeah. Then the second time, 2009, it was very nice. It was very, it was pacified. Yeah, it's very, I mean, it's a lovely, it is, no kidding, a lovely part of the country.

So that's, that's where I was. The Racassans were there, so we were supporting them. And then there was another brigade south of us. I can't remember the name of the town. We called it Q West. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what was it like when you were there? So it was, so from like a life standpoint, you know,

I always say, like, I went to war when it was still hard. There was no internet. There were no phones. There was not great food. You know, we slept, I slept in a GP medium with six other women with a wooden floor that we built ourselves, you know. So, but also celebratory fire was a thing that pilots often felt like they were being shot at when they weren't. But they were justifiably sort of concerned because it doesn't matter the reason that they're shooting those, those AKs in the air. if they hit your rotor, something bad's going to happen. So we had to learn the rhythm of the

country. We had to figure out what was going on, how the people were. I had to figure out how to work with the infantry brigade Intel shop because they were hearing things about what was going on the ground that I needed to be able to tell pilots about. So there was a lot of, just a lot of dialogue, a lot of figuring out, a lot of coordination, but it was. It worked really well. Like I got along well with my counterparts at brigade and, you know, there was, there were no issues. There were, um, the IED game was strong back then. Uh, the, already that early.

Yeah. Um, the car bomb, the, um, the car bomb game was very strong. One of our battalions actually had a car drive through with some insane number of pounds of PE4 in the trunk, blow it up. totally coincidentally magical timing that brigade commander had just went on a tirade about sandbags and they had sandbagged their and their their compound in a way that everyone actually thought was a little bit overkill nope saved all of them I mean they they all had a couple scratches but but no no casualties from that so so yeah it was a little bit of the Wild West it got worse actually after we

left once the arrest same we were figuring them out they were figuring us out right so it got a little bit worse 05 was very bad then it got better then I got worse again so and at that time I mean obviously the invasion but I mean was just sort of like hold and occupy this area so the so we were there so general Petraeus was our commanding generals, the 1001st commanding general. And so things, he was, I think if I remember correctly, he was sort of the author of the winning the hearts and minds part of the Iraq campaign.

And so, again, I was in the aviation unit, so my comrades were not on the ground, but I would, you know, you talk to people. And, you know, they went from court on in search to, you know, knock and talk. You know, that definitely happened when I was there. There was a lot more sort of recognizing that we were going to need to sort of dial it back in some ways and sort of communicate with people in a different way in order to achieve some of our objectives, objectives that changed on the regular. But at the same time, there was an attempt to take the temperature down.

Yeah. So in that part of the country, we had, you know, Syria and all, the they called them the rat lines you know the supply lines coming in and then and then Kurdistan right there so it's just it's a it was a busy busy corner of the country and you were there for how long a year just a year so we did the standard one year deployment although nobody knew when we were leaving so this was the beginning right so we were like well in the last time we last time we invaded here we weren't here for that long you know so like maybe we'll be home by 4th of July.

And I was like, maybe we'll be home by Labor Day. Maybe we'll be home by Halloween. You know, like, pick a date, pick a federal holiday. And we were like, maybe we'll be home by then. We were not home by any of those. So we ended up going back in March of 2004. So just a calendar year later. Yeah.

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Get us to $100,000. We want a really nice little YouTube plaque for $100,000. Leave us your friendly comments. If you have mean comments, I'll give you Dave's email. You can send those directly to him. You don't need to leave those comments. So you said you made it, there was a, like a year gap, and then the unit redeployed back to Iraq?

I didn't deploy with them. Okay. So I came back and I had been in the unit for whatever my term was. And the infantry brigade commander that we had supported I don't remember how exactly this happened, but I know he had to hand it. Anyway, I ended up going to the infantry brigade to be the assistant S-2,

so the assistant Intel officer. And so this was 2003, 2004, and this was a very big deal for me because women were not in, so I couldn't go into, I couldn't be in an infantry battalion, even as the Intel officer. I think they would probably tell you

that there was no bathroom for me to use or something silly like, that. But I, and not very many women were at the brigade level either, but I, I, um, had worked with, with, with his brigade commander and he must have thought I was okay. So I ended up going there as the assistant S2. So, um, so that's very, you know, you go from Iraq with the helicopters to staff in an infantry brigade and you're, you think it's going to be actually pretty exciting. It's not that exciting. It is, it's very much a staff job at that point. So, you know, I was the brigade key control officer. So I literally made sure that everyone knew where the keys

to the arms rooms and the motor pools and everything else were. But I still, I'm still glad I had the job. We went to the field, we did tactical things and I supported the brigade with my soldiers doing sort of strategic intel for the brigade, working with the battalion level S2s who were all men. But yeah, so this is a great job. So I, um, I, um, I did have, I was telling you before we started, I did have this boss, though, that he had come from the Ranger Battalion, and then he was in Tent Mountain Division. He had never worked with women before, and he shows up, and he's this giant, hulking ex-football player kind of a guy with one of those handshakes. It's like sort of designed to make all your bones crush. And he shows up, and he's like, who's this person?

And so someone was like, well, sir, she works for you. And so we had a little bit of a bumpy road there at times while we figured each other out. But, you know, he got used to it eventually. So the 1001st was transitioning then from pure infantry brigades to brigade combat teams, where they, by design, had different units to support them sort of organically. So, again, times were changing, and he had to get on board. It was like the concept at the time was like sort of like what cab units were, right? That they were, everything was organic to that one brigade and you could just kind of push it out the door as it is.

Yes. And it's really smart if you think about it, right? Because you used to have the different battalions and each company would support a different, you know, entity and they would sort of move things around. But they all, they all had their own boss. This way, everybody knows who they're supporting. Everybody knows what they're doing. And you're training together more often. Right. So those units are, they're with you.

So you're sort of fighting with the people that you've trained with. Right. As everybody knows, whether it's sports or war or anything, you just, you fight better when you've trained together. Right. So you didn't go on the second deployment after serving as the assistant S2 officer. Was it this bad vibe with the commander? What was it that started getting this idea in your head that you wanted to, you know, get out of the military at that point? It was a hard decision, I will say.

And actually, sometimes I wish I'd stayed in the Army. I was like sort of good at it. I like order. Right angles are kind of my thing. It was, so from my career perspective, being an MI officer, you're tactical or you're strategic. I was more tactical. The different jobs that would be available to me

would have been harder to get and a little bit more jockeying to get the ones I wanted. There were fewer of them. So I also saw the writing on the wall. I didn't necessarily want to go to Iraq or Afghanistan every other year for the next, you know, I probably said 10 years, but it was 20. Right. And so I tried to figure out what I should do. And I really wasn't sure, but I couldn't think of a sort of civilian job that made sense for me. I had a degree in biology. I was in the Army as an MI officer, and I had just spent, you know, the last four years in the Army, one of them in Iraq, I didn't know what to do. And so I applied to the FBI because

it's, you know, it's another way to serve without wearing uniform. You know, it's still very, very much public service. It's an interesting public service. It's domestic public service, which is what I thought I wanted. And so I applied to the FBI in the beginning of 05, and I was at the FBI Academy by November of that year. Wow, that's fast. Yes. That's very fast. It is. So back then, they were running a class of 50 every two weeks. Okay. But the thing that they did was, they didn't actually give you a date really far in advance. You couldn't really plan. So I got in, but I couldn't just stay in the Army and wait because I had to get out of the Army at a certain time.

I couldn't get another job because I didn't know when I was going to go to the Academy because they literally, they call you, they're like, hey, can you be here in a month? Like, I guess so. So I got out of the Army. I moved home because where else would I do? 25. And I actually did a contract job for Northrop Grumman for a few months

just to get out of the house a little bit and then ended up at Quantico. Now, having, you know, Having come from an MI background, did you ever consider like the DIA or the CIA or was it just kind of the FBI for you? Never the DIA. And again, I would no reason other than I think I just lacked imagination. I don't know that I had a complete awareness of what the DIA did. CIA considered, but I don't speak a second language.

And back then, it was pretty hard to get into the agency without a second language. And I also, I mean, maybe I was wrong about this and it wasn't this way, but. You know, I don't have, I didn't then have sort of a deep and abiding love of like foreign policy. It wasn't the thing that I read about in my free time. And all of the CIA case officers I know were just incredibly smart, geopolitical thinkers who have another language and are interesting in that way. I was not interesting in that way. And so I thought, sure, I could get into the CIA. So didn't, didn't pursue that.

Yeah. And so FBI. Yep, FBI. And what did you think when you got there? Like what percentage of your class was former military and what percentage were civilians? So there were 50 of us. In my class, there probably were not that many.

There are more now, but back then, there maybe four people in my class that were military. Because think about it, you know, we were just, I was just able to get out of the Army in 2005, having served my four-year obligation. So there weren't as many sort of people in the pipeline. Right. So my class was lawyers and classical pianists and web designers and accountants

and former police officers and, you know, a Navy reservist and just truly, truly interesting, fascinating people with a huge variety of. So you don't really consider the Navy Reservist former military? I'm picking up what you're putting down. I mean, he was in Navy reservists before there was anywhere for him to go. I mean, so I'm like, he was at the beach a lot. Come on. So that probably wasn't kind.

He's not watching. So, yeah, so not that many, actually. I think there were more after me who came in. So it was a little bit more of a novelty. Yeah. And what did, like, what did you think of Flutzer or that? Quantico? Yeah.

Quantica, yeah. So for me, I was pretty young, so I was 26, and I had just come out of the Army. So I thought some of the intensity was a little silly at times, but I didn't have any problem with it. You know, they said, don't wear jewelry. I didn't wear jewelry. They said, don't do this. I didn't do the thing. They said, stencil your shirt in a certain way.

I stentle my shirt in a certain way. I think there were people older than me who had full, grown-up. careers before who get to Quantico and get treated like children who just who really struggled and so I watched them and I was just sort of like well at least I'm used to this you've been institutional yes I had been institutionalized a little bit so you know there were parts of it that were that were easy and there were parts of it that were that were hard I think the legal instruction I got at Quantico is to date some of the best instruction I've ever received in my life. Including like college and high school and all the things.

Just phenomenal, phenomenal legal instruction. A lot of shooting, of course. I'm left-handed. Every firearms instructor in the world, you guys are making that face. You know, everybody hates a left-handed shooter. We have to change out your mag release. Either left-handed or cross-eyed dominant. I'm both.

Oh, my God. The bane of a firing. I know. So I'm left-handed with a handgun. I'm right-handed because I'm right-eyed dominant with a long gun, so with an M-4. You know what, though? I'm a great shooting partner. Like, I'm on the other side of the shield.

I'm not going to shoot your hand off. Like, I am not a bad person to partner with. Right. I'm a lefty. So I will say at the time the Bureau was not super technologically advanced. And we get this training module on our database system, and it's, you know, black, computer screen with like the green, you know, DOS-based text. And I was like, is this, like a training?

This is training, right? This isn't real. No, no, no. That is really what it was when I came in the bureau. It was like, would you like to play a game? Yes, it really was. I mean, when I got to my office in Wilmington, Delaware, my first office, we didn't have an unclassified computer.

I think I sent my first affidavit by email to an AUSA on my Yahoo account. Like we didn't have Bureau email. We didn't have, we had one computer that we fought over eventually. I mean, it was pretty, we got there quickly, but when I first came in, and I was like, it's 2006. Like, this is ridiculous. Right. It's better now. It's way better now.

But at the time, you know, we had these like, those Nextel phones and that you basically used like a pager. Yeah. So I was like, oh, this is different. But I still, I thought it was great. I loved it. I loved being. I hated Delaware, but I loved being a new agent. There's like a whole bunch of things that still seem exciting when you're brand new.

So what were those things when you got to your field station in Delaware? So I was on the JTTF, so the Joint Terrorism Task Force. So there was a JTTF and a criminal squad. And so the Bureau was really still, was like fully into counterterrorism, But still sort of working out a few of the bumps, you know, it's, again, it's only 2005 when we're kind of figuring a lot of this out. So I was on that squad, but the office was so small that everybody did all of the things. So if one person had a search warrant, the whole office, you know, went out. And so being in a small office like that, you end up getting a lot of experience, doing a lot of different things.

And so white collar arrests, child pornography arrests, guns and drugs, and, you know, sort of, surveillance and I just got to do all of the things as they say because we were we were so small and I mean every FBI agent has you know some crazy search warrant story because they're kind of crazy my favorite one might be the one where we went and our subject had a house full of mannequins like so we're we're clearing the house And everywhere you look, there are naked mannequins. And so you're going quickly and you're like, could be a person, could be a mannequin, probably, you know,

so everyone's sort of making these decisions. And I still remember, like, someone opened a closet and all these mannequins fell out. And I was like, you know what? It is a testament to our training that nobody shot one of those mannequins. Because, like, something came out of that closet that looked like a person. Yeah. And nobody shot it because it was just so many mannequins. It's kind of some buffalo bills.

What was this dude's deal? Yeah. It was a child pornography. Yeah. Yeah. And this particular guy had a number of other proclivities, and one of them was a love of mannequins. And, yeah, I can't even, I can't, I still laugh about it.

I'm laughing about it now. I'm thinking about those mannequins. It's making me laugh. So they weren't all that exciting. But I did get to do a lot of that type of thing. And again, I would tell you that I hated Wilmington, but I've got to do more things there than a lot of people do who are in big offices because I had a different relationship with my AUSAs, my assistant United States attorneys, my lawyers, because there were so few of us and so few of them. Right. And so, I mean, I learned how to write an affidavit from great senior agents and great AUSAs.

Yeah. And that's just, you know, pretty, pretty valuable. So they were able to, like, throw you on, like, a terrorism case, a child pornography case, a bank robbery, these different types of things. Yeah, because, so I was on the JTTF, and my complaint at the time with terrorism was the cases were, they were a lot of desk work. There's a lot of, at the time, the Bureau required a lot of sort of database checks and sort of, there was a lot, you had to do a lot of things. things in order to close a case, basically. You had to sort of prove that you'd boil the ocean a little bit to prove because the stakes are pretty high if you close it before. But the reality of that is that you're basically proving a negative if someone's not a terrorist. And it's really hard

to affirmatively prove a negative. So you're just sitting on surveillance forever. Yes. And so the problem is if you're a brand new agent and your work in counterintelligence or you're working counterterrorism, you don't get to learn how to be a criminal agent. You're not writing an affidavit. You're not writing, you know, you're not doing search warrants, you're not hanging out with AUSAs, you're doing national security letters and potentially dealing with FISA's and things of that nature. So subpoenas, like all of the criminal tools, you're losing out on it. And so I was kind of a brat about it, and I made a fuss about being on the JTTF and how I wasn't learning and being provided ample opportunity to be a well-rounded FBI agent. And they got tired of

listening to me, and they let me do some things on the criminal squad so that I could write those affidavits and run those search warrants and deal with those AUSAs. And so you got to work both like some internationally and domestic terrorism cases around this time frame, right? Yeah, yeah. So this was in, you know, in 2008, 9, 10, a lot of folks were being radicalized on the internet and where Al-Laki was at the time like a very very popular very well-spoken compelling internet radicalizer and a lot of a lot of people wanted to join up and be part of his cause

so we had a large actually Yemeni population in Wilmington I can't actually remember the reason why but there's actually an occupational reason that a lot of Yemenis were in Wilmington it's also sometimes where immigration decides to set down people But there was like, there was some, I can't remember, but there was some, it was like one family had come and gotten jobs in like this particular thing. And like their friends came and then their friends came. And so there was a large, you many population. And so this was at a time when a lot of people were calling in tips about their neighbors. And so we ended up talking to a lot of Middle Eastern people because their neighbors wanted us to when I was there.

Sometimes it turns out to be like a real terrorism case where you, you know, there's a lot of work to do to figure it out and sometimes there wasn't. So I did have an opportunity to go to Yemen while I was there. I'd had a subject who traveled to Yemen, wanted to meet Enraalaki and be part of his cause. and at the same time, so I was dealing with the legal attache office in Sana'a. The FBI has legal attache offices all over the world in embassies, and he, the Leagat, needed a TDI-Y-A-Lat, assistant legal attaché. Technically, there's a pool of people that you pull from for those jobs, but I had been sort of frustrated with my ability or inability to work my own case. And so he called me up and he was

basically like, hey, I need an acting alat. You've got a guy over here. Why don't you, like, I'll get your SAC to agree. Like, why don't you come to Yemen, be my acting alat, get some eyes on, figure out, you know, get the lay of the land, experience the place that you keep reading about. And then maybe you can do a little bit with your guy while you're here. So I of course said yes. Who says no to a garden spot like Sinai Yemen in 2010? Right. And I went. What was the political situation in Yemen at that point? I mean, things had not, well, things had not totally fallen apart.

No, they hadn't fallen apart. Things were, things were. Dicey. Sort of fine-ish. I mean, so the climate on the ground was scary, you know. Few hostage. I don't know about hostages, but like you weren't allowed to stay in the Sheraton. Usually you can always stay in a Sheraton.

You could not stay in the Sheraton. I ended up having to stay in a house with, like, other government people. One day, actually, I was alone in the office, and the British ambassador down the street had been attacked by a suicide bomber. He was fine because he had one of those, like, really cool level seven SUVs. But, you know, that happened, and we convened, you know, an emergency action committee, and I was the only one there. So I was like, well, guess I'll be the league at today. So that was, you know, sort of, that was normal. Like nobody really was just like a thing that happened, which not to me.

To me, it was a little bit alarming, but to other people is just a thing that happened. But the government was okay, I think. The Houthis were not going crazy. Yeah, it hadn't turned into a civil war. the president, I think. Because this is early, it was like another four years, I think. Yeah, I think it really fell apart in 15. Yeah.

Yeah. What, how, what was that like for you, like when you were in Delaware, when you're working these cases? Because, like you said, the legal talks that you got at the FBI Academy, you know, were great. And you are a cop, right? You're a police officer. You're a federal agent. But you're basically enforcing the laws of land.

And in America, it's not breaking the law. Is it to have a desire for something or want to travel somewhere or want to meet somebody as long as you are not like committing, like blowing something up? Like how hard was that? Like how much gray area was there? So international terrorism is easier than domestic tariffs. Okay. Because international terrorism is about a foreign power. Okay.

So is this person an agent of a foreign power? Are they, you know, we had designated al-Qaeda as, you know, an enemy. And therefore, if you are trying to join al-Qaeda and you are trying to be part of them, then you are a valid counter-terrorism subject. But that's why we use national security tools, not criminal tools. Right. So no subpoenas. as we did national security letters. You know, you don't do Title IIIs.

You do FISA's, you know, things of that nature. So international terrorism was actually relatively easy if you had, and you needed it to open it, but if you had a nexus to terrorism. Now, were those due to existing laws in the United States prior to the Patriot Act, or were those because of the Patriot Act? So FISA was before the Patriot Act, but the other ones are, Patriot Act. Okay.

If I'm if I'm remembering correctly. Okay. Yeah. I mean, they were all there by the time I came in the Bureau. So to me, they were sort of all I knew. Right. But my understanding is that they were Patriot Act. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, I was just wondering how difficult that was because is it a crime to want to go meet somebody? Right. No, it is a crime to want to go meet somebody who's objective it is. is to kill Americans. Right. So once somebody's designated, once a foreign entity is designated a terrorist organization,

that's where you can sort of put the hammer down on it. Okay. So international terrorism, easy. Domestic terrorism, way harder. So when I left Wilmington, I went to headquarters and I did domestic terrorism from a program level. And I still think domestic terrorism is one of the most difficult things

that the FBI does because the First Amendment is so, powerful. It is not a crime to hate people. Right. It is not a crime to believe things. It is not a crime to want things to be different. It is a crime to use violence to achieve a social or political goal. Right. Right. So, but you also can't sit and do surveillance forever and wait for someone to cross the line from ideology to action. So it's very, very difficult. Right. a violation to work. Yeah. Tell us about your case,

about your Yemeni that you followed, you know, from the United States to Yemen. I mean, in my mind, two things come up. First, you want to bust this guy if he's involved in international terrorism, but also is he potentially a lead to get you to Hulakai himself? Well, that's how we, that's how the FBI thought about all of those guys. I mean, everybody that wanted to go to Yemen to meet Alaki, we, you hope that they're going to lead you to him.

because this is when we were hunting him, right? I wasn't, but, you know, the government was. So my guy was, he was an American from New Jersey. He was not Muslim. He was African American. He was a late-in-life finder of religion. And went all in, pretty fast. and he managed to get himself over to Yemen.

He had linked up online with another guy from Charlotte who had sort of successfully linked up with Alaki and, yeah, managed to get himself over there with his wife and his kids. Wow. How were these people at this point in time, like were they meeting Facebook chat rooms? Yes, I think all of the above.

Because again, this is 2009, 2010. There's not as much as there is now, so it was Facebook. Some like maybe news groups or something, those weren't as easy. But you found them because usually somebody told you about them. You know, somebody said, this guy's talking about doing this, maybe you should look into it. And again, this is where sometimes you feel sort of bad because this person has done nothing wrong except potentially be the wrong color, but other times it's not.

So you have to follow every lead. And it's incumbent, I think, on FBI agents who are following these leads to be as civilized and polite and to sort of assume the best of everyone. Because nine times out of ten, that is what's happening here. but to also be thorough and diligent and careful. It's tricky. Yeah. And was he a little bit older than, you said that he was an older guy.

Was he a little bit older than? No, he was young. Oh, he was young. Yeah, he was young. He was not raised religious. He came to religion later in life. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying.

He was in his 20s. Okay. Yeah. Because generally, like for me, like when I think of radicalized people for whatever, I generally think of more, like, younger people who sort of has such sort of existential angst and are looking for something. Yes. Yes.

He was, he was existentially angsty. So what became of this individual? So as far as I know, he's still over there. Wow. And again, he's been over there through the, the upheaval. So, I mean, I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if anyone knows he's alive. So he wasn't indicted as far as you know.

No, he wasn't indicted because we didn't, we didn't indict him. So he ended up actually getting picked up by the Yemenis. And so he was in their custody when the country went to Helen Handbasket. And he remains there as far as I know. Holy shit. Wow. Yeah. I look him up sometimes just to see if there's anything about him.

but I'm pretty sure he's not back. So I assume the worst. He probably wished he would have been arrested by you guys. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been a rough patch. We've had a rough go of it over there in Yemen. So, yeah, that's what happened to him.

He's still there as far as I know. Anything else interesting happened while you were over there on the Yemeni trip? Let's see. I don't think so. The suicide bomber was kind of a big. deal. The FBI director came to visit, so I got to see sort of how the, how the director's detail gets really amped up about a visit like that in a country like that. So, um, do you remember the SF guys getting into trouble over there? I don't remember them getting

into trouble because I never saw them get into any trouble. But they did, I mean, they did, they did have a good time. Um, but I, they always seem to be, you know, properly, uh, properly behaved as far as I know. So I ask, I'll tell you off air a specific story about some guys I knew. Okay. So they, they, so we had both the Army and the Navy there, doing various things. And they, you know, in the way, in the way that the world is small and tiny and that the army is even smaller and tinier, you know, I said my dad was in the Army.

I was, you know, had come back from a run and some random guy comes up to me and says, hey, are you sons and son's daughter? And I said, yeah, why? Or how do you know that? And he's like, oh, your picture's all over your dad's office. And so from that day forward, everybody knew who I was. But they made them all very nice to me. So it was helpful.

Yeah. And then I promptly told my father that he should probably take my picture down. And he's like, but I'm very proud of you. So, but I mean, there are no secrets from that man. I mean, there was an Embassy 5K and like I won in my age group and my gender group. To be fair, I might have been the only one in my age and gender group, but I did win. And my dad was like, I heard you won the Embassy 5K. I'm like, seriously?

Like, you live in North Carolina. I'm in like, Sena Yemen. He's like, yeah, have good sources. So they were all like, like I said, pretty well behaved as far as I know. But now I really want to know that story. they um uh it's it's been it's been a while no names no names involved but uh there was a team i was actually going to go over there with at one point and um my understanding was that they had a couple of the guys left their equipment in a vehicle locked it up and went to the market and while

they did that someone broke in and got radios rifles the whole nine yards and yeah team sergeant got sent home. That's a bad story. Yeah, I don't remember that happening. Must have been not while I was there. Yeah, yeah. Um, go ahead, Dave. No, no. So, uh, so, uh, so did you go back to Delaware after Sana'a or? Yep. So I went back to, it was just a TDI. So I went back to Delaware and worked my terrorism cases. And then later that year, I actually went to headquarters and went to do the domestic terrorism stuff. And so how did that happen in, and what was it like when you first got there. So interesting way it happened. So the Bureau has mostly supervisors at headquarters, GS-14s. And they're certain, you know, you have to be in for a certain amount of time and you

have to apply to be a supervisor. And I technically had enough time in to be a supervisor, but I didn't feel ready to be a supervisor. Probably was, but didn't feel ready to be. But it had this weird program where you could go to headquarters as a GS-13 and do GS-14 work. So this is why it's dumb. I mean, I basically did a job, a level up for a lower pay. But it doesn't matter. I needed to get out of Delaware. So I go to the domestic terrorism unit, which is part of the counterterrorism division as a GS-13. And I do what, you know, they call it program management. So they, you get a number of offices and you sort of take a look at all of their white supremacy cases and their anarchist cases and their animal rights extremist cases and, you know, all of that. And so the idea is like

from the headquarters level, you're sort of strategically looking at these cases and you have analysts who are sort of looking and putting together patterns and saying, this is happening in Newark. I'm not sure the guys in New York know this. They're really geographically close. Let's sort of make sure that they're talking to one another and that the programs are in sync. It's also a lot of compliance work. Right. You know, like there are a lot of rules,

and so the headquarters people are overseeing and sort of making sure that all of the boxes are being checked and all of the authorities are being used properly and so forth and so on. So for, like, the definition of, like, domestic terrorism, is it only considered, like, homegrown, like, people who are born race and aren't, like, talking to foreign sources? Yeah, so there's no, there's no foreign power, right? So it's, again, it's people who's, who are willing to use, you know,

sort of political or actual violence to achieve their goals. Okay. So I'm willing to, like, it's okay to think that animal, testing is bad. Right. It's okay to protest outside of an animal testing facility, right? That's an ideology. Right. Ideologies are fine. Right. It is not okay to use violence, light something in fire, hurt somebody in order to make a statement about your lack of affinity for the animal testing. Right. Right. So when you go from idea to action, it's okay, unfortunately, to like people that don't look like you in this country is not okay to set a bomb up at a Martin Luther King Unity parade and the

folks that black people will get blown right that happened in Spokane right so so it wouldn't so if there were let's say that if there were a homegrown like a Q element but they weren't talking does that like that that's what I'm curious about that does it fall within that domestic system or is it still? I would look at like San Bernardino for instance. Yeah. That you had a self-radicalizing couple that had an affinity for ISIS. But as far as I know, they were not talking to anyone overseas.

So I think, again, I mean, I will say the Bureau has probably changed a lot of this, especially in the wake of January 6th. So I'm, you know, take it all with a grain of salt. A lot of times, at least during my time, things like San Bernardino, they were domestic terrorism before they were not. So we would sort of automatically assume that they were domestic terrorism. Because, again, there's a little bit more protection of subjects, of people, of Americans, when we're using domestic terrorism rules because we don't get to use any of those national security tools.

So like when Boston, the Boston Marathon bombing, it was domestic terrorism before it was not domestic terrorism. And when Gabby Giffords was shot, it was domestic terrorism before it was anything else. The Boston bombers were never connected anything overseas. No, but again, normally when something blows up, everyone thinks it's international terrorism. Right. But just from a program perspective, like it's a lot of times back then anyway, when things blew up, they started a domestic terrorism. If you found a nexus to a foreign power or foreign financing or something else, it would move to international terrorism. So tell us about your next assignment.

You moved up to congressional affairs. and, I mean, got some interesting positions, Hill staff or National Security Council. Yep. I mean, what is congressional affairs at FBI? Why don't we start there? Yep. So the FBI, so all departments and agencies have an office of congressional affairs, and these are the people that deal with that entities, authorizers, and appropriators.

So the people that authorizes to do the things we do and give us the money we need to do it with. And so FBI congressional affairs works with the committees. have oversight of the FBI and liaises with them basically sort of answers their questions, gets them the things they need. When they want briefings, you're sort of helping to coordinate it. But it's sort of the pathway from Congress into the FBI. It is, and probably in every department and agency, not, you know, the most warm relationship because the Hill likes to ask for things and agencies like to say we've got it covered,

don't ask us any questions. and that's not really how oversight works. So I did go to Congressional Affairs as a supervisor and worked predominantly with the Intel committees. So they often are entitled to more information than some of the other committees on the things that we're doing or that the FBI is doing. And so facilitating that relationship,

getting them the briefings they needed. I was there for a few months when there was opportunity to go to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on a detail. So you go spend a year, year in change on a committee, basically functioning as a staffer. So I was not there as an FBI agent. I was not there as an investigator. I was not there doing any FBI things. I was there doing policy work. So looking at the FBI from the vantage point of a committee that had oversight of the FBI, which is sort of a, you know, surreal. Surreal and interesting. valuable. You don't, you know, when you're in the FBI, you put your arms around it and you say,

we've got it covered, don't ask us any questions, we know what we're doing. And then when you go up to the Hill and you sit in a Hill staff office, you look at the FBI and you think, oh, I see why they're asking that question now. And so it's really helpful, I think, both for the committee to sit with me and for me to sit with the committee and then for me to go back to the FBI and sort of say, you know, here's a little bit of a different take on this. Have you ever have a moment where I believe it was a colleague of yours who said something to the effect of, you know, when he was working at this level, you know, sitting down and wondering like, where are the rational adults? There were, you know, so there are a lot of, I did learn, so there are a lot of people in the world of policy who have a lot of really, really great ideas and thoughts on how things should go. but a lot of them have never worked in the field that they have, that they are overseeing or creating rules for.

And so, you know, there were times where I would say, well, we could do that. But the downstream effect of that rule would be so many layers of bureaucracy and so many people changing the way they operate that you're not actually going to achieve the thing you think you're achieving. And that's a hard and painful and sort of uncomfortable lesson for a lot of people. And there's a lot of kingdom building, you know, both on the hill and in the agencies. And so it's tough. But I am sort of a big kind of nerd about that stuff. I mean, I watch C-SPAN for fun sometimes. So I kind of liked it.

That's pretty high on the spectrum. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's not okay probably. But I still do it. But yeah, so I did that for a while. And it was great because in addition to the FBI stuff, I got to do regular committee stuff. So my committee had a nominee that we were trying to push through. So I learned a lot about the, you know, the nominations process.

For director? For, it was for the deputy director of DHS, because that was the committee that had oversight of them. Bitcoin, this was 2013. Bitcoin was just emerging technology. And so me and another guy and another detailee spent seven months sort of researching Bitcoin and thinking about... I hope you bought some back then. I did. I did.

I bought half of a Bitcoin for $25 or $50 or something like that. Now, if there are any ethics people listening, I bought it with my own money. I bought it out my own direction. And I really just bought it because I was talking about it so much. I needed to see how it would work. And you could spend it on overstock at the time. You could go on overstock.com and buy something. So I bought, you know, and I bought this like crappy.

phone holder for my car that at the time was, you know, like a quarter of a Bitcoin. And I think about now that I had, you know, a $5,000 phone holder that I have since thrown away. So yeah, I, but the one of the, it's funny because one of the things that we were trying to do was sort of figure out how to regulate it or if you could regulate it and how to tax it and how it should be treated. And clearly I should have stayed there longer to help with this because I cannot cash my Bitcoin now because, the long-term capital gains tax would just kill me. Yeah. Because I made so much money at it.

So now I just stare at it in my Coinbase account for fun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the government is still trying to. I mean, look at the SECs, you know, suit with Ripple right now. Like, they're still trying to figure out how to do it. Yeah. Uncle Sam figured out how to put the Kaibosh on that.

Yeah. Yeah. But I do my tax as a turbo tax. And it always says, did you buy or sell anything with virtual currencies? And I'm like, no, because I don't want to pay the insane tax that I will have to pay on it. Yeah. I mean, I'll do it eventually. And then you got a position with the National Security Council? Yep. I went back to Congressional Affairs at the FBI and I was working, um, I was working a kidnapping case by which I mean a young man had been kidnapped and his senator was very

invested in sort of helping the family and making sure that the government was doing everything they could, doing his job basically. Overseas or? Yeah. And so Syria, I think. Maybe not Syria. I can't remember. But so I was at the FBI dealing with this hostage case. And I was working with the interagency and the National Security Council. And the woman that I was working with at the National Security Council called me up one day. And she said, I'm leaving. And they told me how to find my own replacement. Do you want my job? And I said, I mean, maybe. So what do you do? So, you know, lots of paperwork was done and I ended up being a director of congressional affairs at the National Security Council. So I did that for all of 2015 and a little bit of 2016. And what did your duties entail? Like, what was your job? So congressional affairs, one of the more interesting jobs in the National Security Council, in my opinion, because you get screwed a little bit of everything.

So we split the National Security Council up four ways. So there were four directors. And so I covered the AFPAC, counterterrorism, intel programs, covert action programs, defense, maybe something else. Obviously not important. I can't remember. And what that meant was I was working within, you know, my counterparts within those directorates on the things that they were doing that required either congressional briefing, congressional notification. anytime something happened that the Hill needed to know about and NSC principles were going to be involved in, we were preparing them to engage.

And then, you know, again, you're sort of trying to advance the administration's policies. And so when the administration was doing any number of things that require, again, that require the Hill either from a notification or otherwise standpoint, we would be involved in that. So, for example, one big thing I did is I worked on PPD 30, which was the Obama administration presidential policy directive on hostage operations, basically. How the government deals with families and because of Syria. Because there was so much. We called them the Beatles, the British guys that were kidnapping all the folks. Jihad John.

Yes, they were hot and heavy and the Bureau and others in the government were really taken a lot of heat for How they were dealing with families. You know, there were stories anecdotal about agents telling families that it was a crime to pay ransoms for these like kidnappings for ransom in Mexico or It was a crime to do this or not providing them information or telling them that it was classified now I don't know that all of those stories are true because I wasn't there But I do think these are very emotional families dealing with probably the worst thing that could ever happen to them. And they probably did need a little bit more compassion than your average FBI agent who just want some facts and is doing their job is sort of ready to deliver. So this really sort of shifted a little bit how the government deals with families.

So I worked on that because lots of people in Congress were trying to legislate it. and we, you know, wanted them to know that we were doing things that maybe that legislation wasn't necessary, or they had constituents who had been kidnapped and they wanted to make sure that we were taking care of their families. So what were, yeah. I was going to say, well, were something like the legislative, like, measures that people wanted to come on. So there weren't, so there were, there were some draft legislation that never went anywhere out of, I think, one of the foreign relations committees, I can't remember if it was the House or the Senate, but they ended up not doing anything with it.

So they, you know, Congress tried to do, mandate any number of things depending on where they sat. You know, some of them said you should be able to pay ransoms and some of them said you should absolutely not. Some of them wanted to mandate how the government dealt with families or wanted to say you don't, it's not a crime to pay the ransom if your loved one is kidnapped in Mexico, you know, which is where a lot of kidnapping for ransoms were happening at the time. So as far as I know, none of those measures made it into any laws. There was just a lot of noise about it. But the PPD had a lot of information and sort of structural change and how the government handled it. And they ended up having, there's a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs now.

That came out of PPD 30. So there's a big shift in how that happened. He's a former Special Forces officer. I'm trying to remember his name at the top of my head. Yeah, I don't remember because it's been a constant. There have been a couple cycles. People speak highly of them, though. Yeah.

I mean, it's a tough job. Yeah. I mean, it's a really, really tough job. And, you know, you can change how you do with the families all day long. There's still only so much you can do as a government to, you know, release hostages. So it's such a delicate problem to solve. Right. And again, I don't think there's a perfect way to do it, but there are certainly,

a lot of people tried really hard to do the right thing. And when it comes to that, like what determines whether, especially if it's enough for, let's say Mexico, for example, because we're talking about non-governmental actors, right, or cartels or whomever, or whoever it is. You know, we have counter-terrorist forces in our country, right? That's their bread and butter. And obviously, there are probably. politicians and families who go, look, we have these people, we have these assets, why don't

we launch them if we can find these people? And then we also have people like, it's a sovereign country. Like, we can't conduct. Like, how do you find that balance? I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with who we think has taken them, our relationship with the country, and whether or not we can get cooperation with that country to do anything. So we actually have a great relationship with Mexico, for example. And so I don't know all the stories because I've never, you know, I was never there in Mexico, but my understanding

is, you know, the State Department, the FBI, DIA, whoever, DEA, have a very strong and robust presence and relationship in Mexico and they do work with the Mexican government. Right. When it's appropriate to do things. Now, if someone is being held

in Syria and we don't have any diplomatic relations with the Syrian government, that's a little bit more difficult. That's a military question. You know, Brittany Griner is a political question. You know, the Beatles and all those that they were kidnapping was a military question. Right. So I think it depends on what we know about where they are and who has them, where they are,

what the conditions are, whether it's safe to go rescue them, you know, because we're putting military lives on the law. Sure. And sometimes that's what you do and sometimes you can't. Right. So. It must be frustrating, you know, at every level, from the family all the way up to policymakers.

I think so. I mean, again, think, like, I can't even conceive of one of my children being kidnapped in a foreign country and being held by someone that I knew had a propensity to cut people's heads off. Like, I don't really begrudge any of their emotions, you know. But, but also the government has a way. a job to do in a way to do it. And so finding the, finding the way to do that is hard. Yeah. And each of them is like its own separate instance that has to be approached differently,

whether Mexico, we had one in Nigeria recently, we've had Somalia, we've had Syria, we've had Iran, you know, all these different cases. So it's hard. Yeah. I don't envy that special presidential envoy. Were there any other big food fights up at that level during your time there? Big food fight. So 2015, cyber security, cyber legislation, cyber policy was something that we were talking about a lot. There was a lot of jockeying between departments and agencies in terms of who should have responsibility. The FBI, of course, wanted it. And I'm clearly biased, but I thought we should have it. DHS also wanted it. There was a little bit of a policy difference of opinion on how the government should do. cyber and what authorities and powers the government should have. So this was when the FBI and Apple were at it all of the time because the FBI wanted to be able to get into Apple products. Right. Apple called it a back door and, you know, Director Comey would say, I'm not asking for a back

door. I'm asking for a front door. You know, it's not a secret. I want, you know, I'm telling you that I want this thing. So there was a lot of that. I actually think about that now. So, think about 2015, 2016. We were all terrified of the government and how much the government knew about us and what they could do to our phones and our internet and what they were going to do with our information.

It's funny to me because now I am not worried about the government and what they do with my data. I'm worried about what Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. We didn't care about the public sector monetizing or the private sector monetizing our data.

We just gave them all over. And we probably should have been worried a little bit more about it. But that is my personal opinion. You mentioned a DHS. And I'm curious what the FBI's relationship was because the DHS has agents. Right. And so this thing was created after 9-11, right? That all of a sudden, where do these DHS agents fall in?

that the FBI, you know, or the DEA or whomever, like, you know, or state intel agencies, like, where does the DHS fall into all that? And was there a competition? Great question. And competition, I don't think, is the right word. I think there was some question about whose mission was whose. You know, so the FBI is Title 18. So those are Title 18 in United States Code. those are the violations that we worked.

DEA is Title 21. You know, they are Title 21, we're Title 18. DHS has ICE, so they have a separate set of violations that they work. But like DHS agents, and I'm actually just suddenly, oh, Homeland Security agents, sorry, I forgot what they were called. They ended up having sort of a hybrid set of authorities that, yeah, I think people sort of wondered what exactly it was that they were doing because they work this type of case, but we also work that kind of case.

They work this kind of case, but we also work this kind of case. Now, reasonable people could say that there's plenty of crime to go around and perhaps we shouldn't argue as long as bad guys are going to jail. But that doesn't actually work. So I'm probably not answering your question a while. No, you are because, you know, one of the things I, when the drug war was the big war, like that's where all the money went. Then when it was the war on terror, that's where all the money went.

And I'm wondering that, you know, with a new sort of federal law enforcement agency on top of the FBI and all the state efforts that do, like, do we need to find more crime in order to justify our existence? Are you asking me if Homeland Security agents should exist? I mean, maybe. I'm not. I can't answer that. I can't answer that. Some Homeland Security agent out there is probably yelling at their computer. It's a tough question, right? A lot of people struggle with sort of where the line is between this agency and this agency. I think Homeland Security ends up doing a lot more maybe border-related work.

They do a lot of exploitation of children, so a lot of child pornography comes across borders. And so, you know, the few Homeland Security agents I know do a little bit more of that type of work. I mean, even though the FBI does that also. But they do it. I'm all for, like, taking down child exploitation in whatever form. But is that Homeland Security? Like, should it be called something else where their mission focused on child exploitation? Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, that's not the only thing they do. I'm just, that's the example. But I'm thinking, because it's coming into the border, right? So they're protecting the homeland from that type of thing. I don't know. I mean, Homeland Security is the. It's a, it's a, it's a baby agency. Right.

Baby department. When you, when you think about it, it's young. It was, I mean, literally. After October of 2001. Yeah. Right. Right. And at first it was, wasn't it just like a coordinating agency?

It was and it's grown, right? So now they have Secret Service. Secret Service used to be part of Treasury. Now it's part of Homeland Security. Well, interesting. Yeah. So that changed. Ask a Secret Service agent what they think about it.

I'm sure they love it. what else is in Homeland Security is I mean obviously immigration so ICE I don't know what other 1811s have they have their own Intel component they have an intelligence and analysis

Border Patrol Border Patrol is part of Homeland Security and that that squarely fits I think right so I mean I don't know fair enough yeah yeah

You said you also got involved in some public corruption cases that that came up. Yep. So when I left the White House, I went to the Washington Field Office of the FBI, and I worked on the public corruption squad there. So there are a couple of different public corruption squads in D.C. This one focused on local public corruption, so D.C. corruption, which utterly fascinating. There's, you know, D.C. is a very interesting town because it's, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a federally, you know, it's, it's a federally run entity. So everything's a federal crime there, which is why the FBI did the public corruption there, whereas in a, in another city, the, the DA's office would have done it. Um, so I did that for a little bit, worked some pretty garden variety public corruption cases, you know, corrupt officials, bribes. You learn a ton about how a city works. You learn a ton about how a city work. and how they make their money when you work corruption because you sort of figure out how much it costs to be a business owner and why it's worth your worth why they decide it's worth it's worth it to grease the skids or even like building permits you know building permit if you've ever renovated a home and it takes forever I know why it takes forever now you know and so you get these these um public officials who will get your get your permit on the top of the stack for you know a relatively small amount of money but that is in fact

definition like textbook public corruption. Right. Well, if you look at how much it costs to build a skyscraper versus how much they're greasing the skids, it is. It's nothing. It's nothing. But, you know, it's why, and you're sort of like, was this really worth your job? Like, did you make enough money to make this worth? But, you know,

that's... How is that, though? Because it seems to me that... And maybe they are, and it's just not promoted, but it seems to me that officials would be getting arrested all the time. Like, all the time. Well, they're not.

I mean, they're not getting arrested all the time. But, I mean, I don't think there are that many corrupt people. I think that you need intent, right? So sometimes people just are dumb and they make mistakes. And that's not public corruption. So it's public corruption when someone is, you know, taking a bribe, willfully looking the other way in order to gain something for themselves. You know, so that doesn't happen as often.

and if it does happen a lot, it's happening on such a small scale that the FBI isn't learning about it, right? Because you learn about it when it's happening enough or so often that someone tells you about it or it trips something in a system that someone in an oversight of capacity sees it. So. Can you give us any dirt even if you don't give us a specifics in terms of it?

If it's been prosecuted, it's probably. Well, no, I'm actually asking, were there people who were just so connected that like things got like waved off or stomped on from some outside higher source? Not in any of the cases I worked. You know, I did, I had a case once where there was an allegation against someone who was in a very high position of authority. And I got it and I had to investigate it, which meant I had to follow some leads, I had to do some

interviews. I had to, you know, I had to do my job. And I was allowed to do my job, but I did have a few more people to check with along the way than I would normally have had. And yet, did I chafe at that? I absolutely did because I was, you know, everybody's the same. We don't, nobody gets special treatment. This is how it works. You know, in hindsight, especially because it ended up not being an unfounded or it ended up being an unfounded allegation. I'm sort of glad that we tiptoed. Right. Because I think had that been handled poorly or loudly, you know, it could really have been

very damaging for that person. Sure. For no reason. Sure. So. Yeah, just being investigated for something is with social media the way it is and, you know, just being investigated for something is sort of a. Right.

The court of public opinion is pretty strong. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, no, I don't think I ever was. I was never told to sort of stand down from anything I truly believed in. Yeah. Because somebody was in a position of power. That's just not the cases I had.

So at this point, I believe it's around this point, your career takes this interesting term where special counsel Robert Mueller is appointed to investigate what is the term, or malign influence in the 2016 election. Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Tell us about how that special counsel was brought together and how you got brought into it. Yeah, so Director Comey was fired, you know, on a Tuesday. I'm not sure.

And I don't know, a week, not even a week later, I think. They had named a special counsel, the former director of the FBI Bob Mueller. And they were assembling their team. and my understanding is they sort of had their team because the special counsel was brought in to investigate Russian interference in the election and there were some squads and offices in the FBI

already doing some of that. So a lot of those folded in on the special counsel. So they had a lot of their team, but there was a small group looking at obstruction of justice. Basically, did the president obstruct justice in firing Comey or anything else? And this council was appointed by DOJ. DOJ, yeah, DOJ. And so I wasn't a part of this, but I get a call from my ASAC, so my boss's boss, and he says,

hey, would you be interested in doing a short TDI with the special counsel's office? I can't remember enough if it's two weeks or two months, it all blurs together. but it was supposed to be short. He says, this team's going to do a whole bunch of interviews. There's only a couple of agents on this particular thing. Can you, you know, I've seen you work. You used to work at the White House.

I know you can work in a pressure cooker. Come and do these interviews. And then you'll be done. And I was like, okay, seems cool. I like to do the things that are timely and in the news, and there was nothing more timely in the news in May of 2017 than all of this. Right. So I say yes, and I go.

and I did not leave for two years. So, yes, I went in May of 2017, and I left in April of 2019. And so in the beginning, we were all at the Hoover Building, and they were still hiring different attorneys from bringing in AUSAs from different parts of the country, bringing in a couple of attorneys from the private sector who had formerly been in government that Director Mueller knew and wanted to work with. assessing sort of the cases that they had, the agents that they had on them, just putting it together. Now, I'm making it sound like it was really smooth.

It was actually sort of chaotic at first because we didn't have anywhere to work. We didn't know who we were working with. Nobody had access to everything. So there's a lot of kind of churn. But pretty quickly, at least for the government, we were in office space where we were all together, one big, happy family. And we split the office. up in teams. So there were people working this part. There were people, you know, there was a

Manafort team, there was sort of a Russia team, there was an obstruction team, Flynn team. So that's how that shook out. And it was, you know, there were some growing pains. FBI agents are not used to working elbow to elbow with attorneys. Attorneys are not used to working elbow to elbow with agents. Like they have their office, we have our office, and we visit each other, but we do not sit together. So that, you know, is tough, but we were really fast and efficient because we were sitting next to each other.

And so it was definitely not always, you know, puppies and unicorns and roses, but it did work ultimately. And as a model, I think it's probably one that people will follow. So you're on the obstruction team looking at that. So explain the scope of your investigation, what like investigatory powers that you had, power to interview people. Can you subpoena people? If you could tell us a little bit about how that investigation took shape. So we had all of the authorities that the FBI has because we're still, you know, this is an FBI investigation.

So you can subpoena people. You can interview people. You could use the grand jury. you know, the office, even though I said we were in teams, like the office was sort of one entity when it came to a lot of that stuff. You could get search warrants, you could do all of that stuff.

And so the, we did a lot more interviewing than anything else. We were, it's a very people-based investigation, so there were a lot of interviews that we did looking at who knew what, when they knew it, how they knew it, what people were saying around the things that they were doing because we were trying to establish intent.

So was there corrupt influence into a government investigation? So the elements are, you know, again, corrupt influence into an investigation. There was an investigation. Was this action, that action, that action, a crime? But only, but you guys were only only. looking at from the obstruction point of view, was as in was Trump

or any of the people associated with him, were they obstructing the investigation? The investigation. Right. Which is tricky. If you are a, you know, need to find something to read

at night, you could go read the Mueller report. Volume two is all of the obstruction and it's just as long as volume one. There are a lot of very complicated legal issues for our lawyers to untangle in there. But my job was fact-finding. So I read emails, I read notes, I put together timelines, I looked at, I did all, I did regular FBI stuff. Right. I just did it with people that you happen to see in the news more often than any of my

other cases. Right. But the interview, you know, I did an interview and I wrote it up. I, you know, served a subpoena and I wrote it up. I reviewed documents and I made timelines. I've read you know that it's the same work even no matter who who you're dealing with. You're just doing it at that time in a little bit of a a little bit of a pressure cooker because if you remember 2017 2018 I mean this is all- Every reporter in the country wanted to know what was going on in your office. And we didn't leak. We did not leak. I mean people say we did but we didn't leak. Like CNN was camped out yeah in front of our office every single day and they would park

there and they would get a parking ticket, but they just paid the tickets because they wanted to be parked out there. I mean, it's just, it's what they did. And, you know, so we, we went to work in our skiff and we did everything we needed to do and then, and then we left. But that's, you knew that everyone was watching you. Everyone was watching everything you did. You know, I mean, the FBI has, like, there have been political views of the FBI before, like, you know, during, you know, like the Red Scare or McCarthyism, or what's his name, the first, or not the first, but who's the, remember the feud? Who's the very first director that I'm thinking of?

Hoover. So, you know, people talking about who. Yeah. Hoover, you know, Ruby Ridge, Waco. Like, they've been political, but generally, the FBI. FBI is just sort of thought as as this nonpartisan law enforcement agency. But at this point in time, obviously, it was very politicized, you know, with people think both ways. But like, how did that affect you personally?

Like, because obviously you were, you weren't ignorant of the news. You saw what people were saying on both sides. And like, how did that feel for you? Well, first of all, I would also point out that people had problems with the FBI before this because of Hillary Clinton. Right. Because we didn't prosecute, but we did talk about it publicly right before the election. Right. And I say we, I mean, Director of Congress.

Right. And also there was the rewording of the statement about the emails too. Yes. The matter versus the investigation or whatever. Right. Right. So. True. It was hard for me personally in a lot of ways, right? It was hard for me because I had friends who were sort of, who objected to the existence

of the investigation and who couldn't figure out why I was doing it. The president of the United States was tweeting regularly about how we were, you know, radical crazies who were out to get him. Right. CNN was outside the office every day waiting for all of us so they could take our picture getting our lattes or whatever we were doing. And it was hard. And I would just say, I'm not ashamed of anything I did in that investigation.

You know, I followed the facts. Right. And we were so, I mean, we thought a lot, a lot and talked a lot, and talked a lot about some of the things that we did and why we thought the things that we did and whether or not we had enough to make this statement or that statement or that statement. And sometimes we didn't have it. And if you didn't have it, we didn't pretend that we had it. We were, we were not telling you, we were not trying to create a narrative. We did not have a narrative that we were trying to prove. We were trying to find what the narrative was. Right. And I just, that's kind of

what I told myself. Like I am, I am sort of, this is, this is a job I've been asked to do. I'm pretty apolitical. I'm still a political. And I know that what I did was the job that an FBI agent was asked to do and I did it to the best of my ability. Right. And I would say

at most everybody I worked with at the time, I would say the same thing about them. Right. I think people had personal opinions about things we were doing. Right. Sometimes that bubbles up. But it bubbles up in a conference room. Right.

It doesn't bubble up in an affidavit. Right. You know? So people are able to say to put that aside. But like did it, did it affect you guys or you personally? Like did it, like when you find out about like the FISA issues, right? The like, did that kind of take the window? Because even though you were.

You like the Carter Page FISA? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you think I wish that hadn't happened. Right. But a careful reader of that IG report still says. that the justification of the case was legit. So did they mess up?

Yes. Like, were there administrative issues? Absolutely. Should they have done things differently? I think everyone agrees, yes. It doesn't mean that the investigation that we did didn't matter or wasn't justified. So, I mean, yeah, I wish it hadn't happened in the same way that, you know, as a, you know, sometimes when you're like the only one in the room that looks like you and somebody

else that looks like you makes a mistake, you're like, man, I wish that hadn't happened because you're making us all look bad. Yeah. That's what I wish. I wish that it hadn't happened that way because it made us all look bad. Right. But still don't think that it like undermined the job I did. Right.

And that's what I, that's kind of what I was asking is because like there are all these things that are being said about the FBI and then things come out where, you know, Yeah, nobody's perfect, right? And yeah, so it's like does, why you say somebody like makes that mistake. Right. I mean, I think it's hard to be in the FBI right now. I mean, I'm not, I'm not in the FBI, but I know plenty of people in. And I think the beer is like it's hard.

It's hard to be under attack all the time by the court of public opinion. Right. And, you know, many, many people are doubting the purity of people's motives. And I think it's kind of hard when people think that way about you. and the only thing you really can do is just do the right thing and hope that history is going to judge you well. Right. That's probably all any of us can do.

Yeah. Now, did you read the Durham report? Like, what were your opinions on that? I did read the Durham report. But the... I thought the Mueller report was better written and better sourced than the Durham report. If I'm picking favorite reports...

Sure, sure. I think the... I think they wrote it a little bit differently. We sort of approached ours with a lot of fact and very little suggestion. And I think there's a little bit more of a narrative in the Durham report that they wanted to get out. Just a difference of style between Bob Mueller and John Durham. Maybe leave it at that.

Going forward for the FBI, whether the director leans left, right, whatever. Do you feel that it hurts like agents at the ground level if the director sort of like, obviously they're appointed, right?

The director is appointed. But if they make political statements, do does that hurt like the agents at the bottom or the agents below them? Yes and no. I mean, there are so many, there are so many FBI agents in so many parts of the world that have no idea what's happening in the Hoover Building and they love it that way. Right. And that's kind of the beauty of the FBI is that the guy on the drug squad in Houston does not care what the assistant director of the FBI thinks about anything. Right.

Doesn't even know the assistant director, you know, doesn't even know the assistant director's name half the time. And that's okay. I mean, I think it hurts, again, it hurts when the FBI director says something publicly that then the media or somebody pounces on. And then you're part of this organization and you feel somehow like you need to either defend that position or have an opinion on it because everyone's asking you to have an opinion on it. I think that's hard. Yeah. I think some people probably take it harder than others. You know, the FBI is very big. There are a lot of FBI agents, and so it's kind of hard to say FBI agents, it's hard for me to make sort of a bold statement about FBI agents because they're so different. It's the same way with the military, right? People on the outside look at it as a monolithic sort of, you know, this thing.

Yeah, like you were in the Army, you know. Right. Or you were in the Army, do you know this guy? Right, right. No, I don't. Right. So tell us about, like, as you're doing these interviews, you're going through these emails, you're sifting through all this evidence. Was there a picture that began to emerge for you?

Yeah, I mean, and we put this in our report. I mean, I think the picture was, it was very clear that the president was not pleased with our investigation and, you know, was taking steps to influence it. Now, again, we did not come to a conclusion in our report one way or the other. We did not say that we have exonerated him. We did not say that we think he's committed a crime because that was a decision for the Department of Justice to make. So, you know, there was certainly a picture that was emerging of a tumultuous administration. There were, as the public well knows, a number of chiefs of staff and national security. advisory advisors, there were people in and out of the administration.

There was a lot of churn. There was a lot of people trying to do the right thing and sort of feeling like they couldn't do the right thing or that the right thing was elusive. And so again, untangling that and figuring out what was sort of just the way people were operating versus a true desire to influence the investigation is what we were doing. Was there a criminal conspiracy? Was there criminal case? At the end.

Right. And you made that, or not you personally or you alone, but the decision was made that you were not going to recommend pushing for criminal charges. Correct. The position that we took was that we laid out the facts and we presented them to the Attorney General for the Attorney General to make a final decision on. Because we couldn't, because the Department of Justice has a memo that says you can't indict a sitting president. and so that was not the only, but that's sort of, you know, something that a lot of people are thinking about. And we had to both lay out the facts that we had discovered and our assessment. And again, also sort of say it's not our position at this point to make this call.

And so how did, I mean, you talked about it a little bit, but I mean, how did this special counsel, how this investigation kind of wind down and then you're eventually after your your temporary short-term stint there yes you were eventually released from it yes so the so director miller's one of his sort of guiding um positions here was that we weren't going to take forever you know we weren't going to be we weren't going to drag on and on and on and find new things to investigate and so we got to the point where we had done um you know the bulk of investigation, we had some cases that were going to go to trial. And so we closed down what we could, and then instead of keeping the office running to take to trial, we transferred those cases to the

D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office. So we closed down, we wrote our report, we closed down, you know, the office, and, you know, Roger Stone, for example, went to the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office for prosecution, and they did his trial. And that was, you were. So when I went with that, so I went with the case to the DCU as attorney's office and was the government's witness against Roderstone in that case, I actually got out of the FBI before the trial. So I, but I stayed on as the government witness in my civilian capacity.

Yeah, and I learned how the other half lives. Like I had to go through the metal detectors. I had to get a visitor pet. to do trial prep. I was like, wait a minute. I didn't have to do any of this before. Even like getting into the courthouse, I was like, oh, wait, I used to be special and now I have to stand in line. So how did your obstruction investigation intersect with Roger Stone? So it didn't really. The office was, you know, like I said, we were in teams and we were kind of, we had done a lot of the work on the obstruction portion. And I had been at Washington

field office. I was a criminal agent. I was familiar with criminal cases and the U.S. Attorney's Office and how things worked in D.C. And I had gone to help that team with a number of interviews and Roger Stone's arrest and some of the investigation they had done just sort of as an extra set of hands because I had more criminal experience in some agents who were more counterintelligence focused. So I basically just sort of got attached to them separately. It wasn't really an overlap. So what did the feds pinch Roger Stone for and what did uh start? Well, we can start. So yeah. So he, um, he, uh, so first of all, he was convicted on all seven counts. And I actually, now I can't remember what they all were, but obstruction of

justice, uh, witness intimidation, false statements. Um, can't remember how many of each. My AUSAs are probably rolling their eyes if they're watching this because they could quote it for you. So Roger, again, he was indicted and arrested in January. We shut the office down in April. He went to trial in November. November. Yeah, I think that's right. Of 2019. So this is all 2019. So that case, I mean, it's part of the public narrative. So there's a lot out there, so I won't bore you with all of the details. But, yeah, he lied to Congress. He lied to the House Intelligence Committee in some testimony that he provided to them.

And we were able to uncover that. And he also intimidated a witness into not providing, you know, accurate statements to the government in the course of that investigation. And so it was kind of a fun trial. There's a lot of... Roger Stone's a fun guy. He's a fun guy. There's a lot of fun text messages to read. My daughter came to watch me testify, and she was like,

Mommy, you said some bad words. I was reading text messages. I was reading, you know, I didn't say the bad words. I was just reading them. So there was, you know, very memorable. There's a scene. the godfather, the godfather too, where Michael Corleone

tells someone to do their Frank Pantan, or tells Frank Pentangeli to sort of lie and for congressional testimony. And so Roger Stone says to his friend, like, do your Frank Pantanjali, you know, basically you can't remember anything. But he doesn't, you know, he doesn't say lie. He says, do your Frank Pantanjali.

And so, you know, I had to testify about what it meant to do your Frank Pantangelo and I'm like, I'm not, you know how dudes, like, you watch a movie one time and you can just, like, you can spit it out immediately? I don't have that. So I'm, like, watching this movie over and over and over, like making sure that I have this scene down. Because I have to narrate this on the stand. And, again, not.

They can't just wheel in the VCR and play the scene? The judge wouldn't let us. Really? Too prejudicial because it's a mobster movie. Oh, interesting. So we couldn't show the movie. So we tried. We tried.

I mean, they tried real hard. But that's rude because it was a specific. reference, you should be allowed to, like, play the reference. That was what we said, but the judge didn't say. So I ended up having to sort of narrate this scene from the... Did you do the accent? I did not do.

I did not do the accent. I think I did all right. But, I mean, I remember... Can you do the scene for us with the accident? No. First time live. I'm never doing it. I'm never doing it with an accent. But I remember the prosecutor knew I had watched

the night before because I had told him. And we are great, we're great friends. There's a special relationship between a prosecutor and the agent they put on the stand. Anyway, so he says to me, well, I'm up there, you know, and how do you know this? And like, well, I've watched the movie, and I read the screenplay.

You know, I did all my due diligence. And he says, you've watched it recently? And I sort of laughed, actually, and said, yes, I have watched it recently. And some reporter actually, like, picked that up. And so I mentioned that I was laughing about it. But I did watch that scene from the Godfather a lot. And now, Frankie, Frank.

Frank Pentangeli is part of my lexicon. Nice. So Roger Stone goes down for some federal time. He doesn't do his federal time. The president pardons him before. The president pardons him. So he is convicted on all seven counts. He's pardoned, commuted and then pardoned, or maybe just pardoned.

I don't remember. A lot of strong views on that. A lot of people ask me how I feel about it. it. You haven't asked me, but I'm going to tell you anyway. How do you feel about that? Thank you. Thank you for asking. That's a great question. Obviously, disappointed. But I had been worried that he would get pardoned before the trial, which could have happened, right? So to me... That's very irregular, though. I mean, a lot of things were irregular.

Well, okay. I mean, come on. I will grant you that. Low bar. If it had to happen, I am at least happy that it happened after a jury trial where we laid out our facts, improved our case, and he was convicted by a jury of his peers. Reasonable people can, you know, lots of people will make noise about whether or not those were his peers. But that was a very smart, insane jury. And, like, they were very thoughtful and, you know, they were not crazy one way or the other. So if he had to get pardoned, at least. we were able to put out the facts that we had uncovered and the narrative that we believed and a jury was able to vote on that and unanimously agreed that he was guilty.

So happy about it? No. If you asked me to find a bright side, there it is. Because my one and only shot at being Pollyanna. So but now you're on Sivie Street. Now I'm on Sivie Street. You know, we had talked about a little bit about the show why you left the EPA. Can you kind of recap that for this? Yeah. So I got out of the Bureau right before I was 40. Like, literally started a new job on my 40th birthday.

I don't recommend that. In the Bureau to get promoted, you have to, you know, check some boxes and jump through some hoops. And the idea is they want you to have a certain number and type of experience. so that you can then supervise people. It's logical in its own way. But some of those things change over time and the requirements change over time. And oddly enough,

given all the things I had done, none of the things I had done sort of checked any of those boxes. And so for me, I'm like, okay, I can't retire for 10 more years because I couldn't get out until I was 50. And in order to promote, I'm going to have to spend the next 10 years

just grinding it out, doing this job and that job, that job checking those boxes and one I didn't want to do that and two having been led by people that were checking boxes it's not the right way to do it right no good supervisor is just there waiting for the next job right we can't expect good agents to come from supervisors that are just looking for the next thing so it's just not my style so one I was like well I can't I can't check all these boxes I don't want to spend the next 10 years doing that.

And I also didn't want to spend the next 10 years just sitting on my squad. There are a number of really cool things you can do in the FBI, but none of them really felt like something I wanted to do. And so I thought, well, I'm old enough to sort of get a non-entry-level associate job in the real world, but young enough that I can learn a new skill. And I have a whole, you know, 25 years

before I can collect Social Security. You know, so, you know, I'm like young enough to learn something new. And so I thought, well, this might be the right time. And I made the leap. And what was that first leap for you? I went to go work for a market research firm doing sort of policy-related, quantitative and qualitative research. So think surveys, focus groups, interviews, a lot of the same stuff I did in the FBI

with a different client. So in this case, the client was private sector companies who were facing a number of tricky, thorny policy issues, potential regulatory issues, potential legislative fixes, who wanted to sort of figure out the best way to message why some of those fixes weren't actually that good. So if you watch Hulu right now, like every ad is like a TikTok ad

like why TikTok is the greatest thing ever sometimes you watch these things about how like Facebook is actually the safest thing ever so the type of research that finds the language for those types of ads. So it's great I did it for

a little bit it was a kind of a grind like a lot of a lot of work. Super interesting but just really kind of burning me out. What would you're like typical if you had a typical day, but like what would that entail? I mean, some weeks I would run, you know, 10 or 12 focus groups.

Okay. A week. You know, 90-minute focus groups. So me, a bunch of strangers and me sort of taking them through a series of questions to sort of figure out what's working, what's not working, why it's not working, what sort of emotions it's listening in them. So those are tough. And then writing, basically turning around and writing a memo,

about it for the client in the next 24 hours. So just a constant churn of research results, research results. And so survey data is the same. We'd pump a survey out into the field, we'd get the data back and we would just be grinding through the numbers with my obscenely smart math kids, doing all the things that they do,

sort of figuring out what the insights are. And we were fast and good. You know, you can't, and expensive actually. Yeah. So people come to you, somebody would come to you, a company like Hulu, for instance, would come to you with a question of like,

how effective is this or what's the message you should? Yeah, so they would say, so, okay, the, we think the Hill wants to introduce legislation that's going to block Hulu from merging with Netflix. I'm making this up, right? Right.

And Hulu and Netflix were like, there's no reason why, there's no antitrust case there. This is a totally legit thing to do. This legislation is bad. Like, how can we, but obviously no one's going to listen to us if we say that. So how can we talk about it in a way that sort of explains. What's the value proposition of Hulu and Netflix being together? How do you make policymakers think that this isn't really the problem that they think it is? Is it focusing on the negative?

Is it focusing on the positive? is it, you know, so it's like digging into people's perceptions and ideas about these things so you can craft a message that makes people think the way you want them to think. Right. It's marketing. Yeah. But it's policy marketing. Right.

So. It's very fascinating. It is very, very fascinating. Yeah. I did love it. But it was kind of burning me out. Did it ever amaze you, like, how out of touch, like, a company, like, their branding people or their CEOs or whatever, how out of touch they were with what the actual message should be?

Yes. And, you know, these companies hire research firms like ours, and then they also have ad agencies. And so we would look at sometimes, like I'm thinking of one client in particular, like their ad agency would come in with these like crazy, edgy, like in your face ads. And you're like, you do know that we're in the middle of a global pandemic and you're trying to sell this to these people that are going nowhere with this ad. This is bad. And so, you know, and your job is to sort of do everything you can to fix it. Yeah. So it's fascinating. It is really, really interesting. So tell us about how you ended up working with another previous guest on the show, Holden and Triplett. How did you come into that orbit? Yeah.

So Holden and Bill started trench code advisors two years ago now, two years in April. And I think they were getting pretty busy. and so they were looking for someone to bring on board. And I didn't actually know Bill. I knew people who knew Bill. And so he asked me if I wanted to come to lunch. I said, sure. And he was basically like, would you come,

would you be interested in working here? And it was a long courtship there. I was not sure startups are scary, right? And you really have to believe in what they're doing and believe in their success to make a leap like that. You know, I mean, I left my pension on the table when I left the FBI and need the money. So you need them to succeed. But eventually I said yes.

And so I went to work for them. And, you know, just like the market research firm, you're basically leveraging all the skills that we had in the FBI. So people bring a problem. We bring a solution. Now, a lot of it is like risk management. like we have a problem with, or we think we have a problem with this, or we think we have a vulnerability here, and we're not sure how to attack it.

So insider risk, for example, we're doing a lot of insider risk work. Holden and Bill have big counterintelligence backgrounds. I have more of an investigative background, but public corruption is in some ways an insider risk problem, right? And so companies don't have great programs, and they come to us and they say, what should we do? How should we do it? What should it look like?

how do we protect ourselves? And it's sad easy. So that's mostly what you guys are doing is insider threat stuff. Or like if I want to open a diamond mine and see our own, can I get, can I give them a call? You know, we, you know, we are a startup, so we don't say no to much. Right. Right. So, we're doing us.

So we've got, we've got some insider risk. But really, there are so many vulnerabilities out there where the solutions are generally the same. with a slightly different angle that we are able to say yes to a lot because at the root of all of these things there are human beings doing things to and around other human beings right so we are very good at understanding human beings right and what's motivating them and what's driving them and you know how they work so cyber crime you know everyone it's cyber cyber is a crime but computers are static there are people right at keyboard perpetuating crimes and there are people on the other side clicking on links that they shouldn't or allowing people access to something

they shouldn't because they don't have proper risk management protocols or insider risk training and so that's what we try to sort of come in and fill the gap on yeah no it's fascinating and yeah the and the insider threat like a lot of companies don't understand the insider threat isn't is not always malicious you know it I mean it could it can just be bad computer practice. It's insider risk, right? It's insider risk versus insider threat. So like

insider risk is like bad hygiene, insider threat is bad intent. Right, right. But a good program sort of takes into account all of that. Right. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, that's me man. They send me emails to my work email. What's Kim Kardashian doing now? Click. Download this. That was a joke, by the way. I hope that was a joke. You can laugh. It's not a joke.

I mean, I'll just, I'll tell you what I tell everyone. You can't win a lottery you didn't enter. Right. So you just keep that in mind. The UN wants to give me a quarter million dollars. Yes. If the deposed Prince of Nigeria says he needs some money to get some money out of an account, say no. Look, Amazon is not running a special or iBuds or air buds for 99 cents. So don't sign up for them. No company will ever ask you to change your password with a link in an email. But again, these are things people don't think about. And it's tough. And I was just talking about. And I was just talking to a buddy mine yesterday, you know, because we were talking about our parents who are both, you know, 80, 90, and it's like, and my dad's like, ah, you know, I don't even have McCaffey,

and they just told me that my subscription ran out, so I emailed them to told them, you know, and it's like, Dad, everything you read in your email is fake. Do not respond to anything. But it's not even, it's not just like the elderly, it's people. I mean, they, they, The people who run these, like, we make fun of the Nigerian princes, you know, but they're so much more savvy than that now. Yeah. You know, when they are able to conduct those like man in the middle attacks and, you know, take over, you know, the email accounts and telling you that your AC, their ACH has changed and people are sending this money out. It's like, people are just so unaware. Yeah.

And it's unfortunate. It is. And in a business context, I think what happens is we're a very fast-paced society. And we work hard and we work quickly and we're sort of deadline aware. And so when you sort of get in the way of somebody's ability to do their job quickly, they make rash decisions about what they should click. So when they're getting, you know, when they're being told to click on this link and they keep clicking on it and it won't go away. and they just keep clicking on it

and they're actually letting somebody have access to their system. They know better. Right. But they're worried about the deadline or the boss or the person. And they, we haven't, companies haven't made it easy

to figure out how to pause and who to talk to when you pause. Right. If you ask most people, what do you do when you get this email? Most people can tell you I probably shouldn't open it. A lot of people can't tell you

what to do after that. Right. Do you send it to your CISO? Well, what's a CISO? Right. So we have to sort of get the mindset of people to sort of think about all the different ways that they're vulnerable. And so that's what we help companies do. No, that's fantastic.

I want to get to some questions for Michelle. And I also just want to thank the... We know you've got a bit of a drive-in-hade. I met somebody at a Special Forces Association event over the weekend. And it turned out he's a big listener of the show. And he gifted us this bottle of a 16-year liver. Roy so thank you out there. Like he's 6.5?

He'll probably be watching this. So really appreciate it, man. Thank you. So, oh, first off, Isaac, let me see here. He has four questions. I'm just going to, I'm 30 years old, my third year of university majoring on cybersecurity, and I'm a janitor.

But I want to join the intelligence community and all things cyber. I'm afraid that I'll never make it in the agency before I turn 36, what can I do to increase my chances of getting accepted into the FBI, DIA, D-E-A, DHS, C-I-A, or NSAe. So he's in school now. Third year. Third year.

Great question. I'm not sure that I have a perfect answer. I mean, generally, when people are in school, what I tell them is to get out and pursue the job that you want and do it. sort of well and thoroughly as if you're never going to be in the FBI, the DIA, or wherever. It's wonderful to have that as a goal, but you should do every job with sort of the passion that you would if you weren't looking for your next job, because when you apply to DHS or the FBI or the agency and they call back to figure out who you are, you want them to say, who's the best cybersecurity analyst I had.

Right, right. But he was an okay cybersecurity analyst, but all he ever really talked about was being in the FBI. So sort of a don't put all your eggs in one basket. Like get out, get the job, get the experience, do the work, and then use that leverage to get into another job. Do you think that there is, if, you know, if an FBI recruiter or a government recruiter is sitting at a table with somebody and they have a highly romanticized view, of the job like oh this is all I've ever wanted to do you know I'm going to be you know is that I could turn off yeah no okay plenty of people I mean half my FBI class probably wanted to be an FBI agent since you know some very formative age people people become lawyers so that they can be

lawyers that join the FBI people become CPAs so they can be CPAs that join the FBI but again the best ones I know did their job really well before they came into the FBI because it's that experience you have to bring that experience with you not the the the agencies are gonna they're only gonna they're gonna they're gonna train you but but you do need to bring some sort of baseline skills and so you have to develop those outside of the FBI a lot of times are you saying be all that you can be yeah so isaic okay we got we got one of your questions j C Thanks for the donation with the umbrella.

Cat Chaser, thanks for the donation with the cat emoji or GIF or whatever it is. Sticker. Oster Roberto, thank you. Do your Frank, do your Frank. My friend, Patangeli. Not doing Frank. Patangeli is an all-time euphemism, euphemism. Very FBI to watch the scene over and over and read the screenplay.

I wanted to be accurate. And we'll do. Isaac, I keep hearing this talk that the FBI has been weaponized, but how is that true? It just seems like this accusation started when

Trump was caught with classified documents. I think the accusation started prior to that, but they are being pushed for doing their jobs. Like there wasn't this kind of talk when the Bureau investigated Hillary for the emails. So why all the accusations? I mean, I think the answer is political.

I mean, it's politics. I can't, you know, I don't think the Bureau has changed the way they're operating, or I know the Attorney General's guidelines haven't changed, like the same rules apply now that apply before. I think that we have become a very, like, highly politicized, partisan society, and it's easy to blame the FBI for a lot of things. And the FBI makes mistakes. And it's like you said, there were accusations of the FBI being political with the Hillary email stuff.

There's been accusation since its inception. Sure. And I mean, it's, and so it's sort of incumbent on the director and the rest of the leadership of the FBI to just sort of continue to say that we're doing the job that we're doing and using the authorities that we have. And understanding and not commenting sometimes when people make accusations from the Hill that, are inaccurate. And that is it for the question, I believe. So Michelle, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for having me.

And doing the show and providing this really unique insight. I think it's really valuable, really cool to hear. And for everyone out there watching, thank you for joining us tonight. And on Friday, we're going to have Mike Taylor here. No relation. Mike Taylor served in special forces. I had a number of interesting assignments there, worked from Blackwater after that, repatriated kidnapped children from overseas,

and he's really the most famous because he allegedly smuggled Carlos Gohn out of Japan, and he was extradited to Japan and served, I think, almost two years in prison. And now he's released, he's back home. He'll be here in studio speaking out, breaking his silence for the first time this Friday. So I've spoken to Mike for years now, you know, right up until he got extradited and sent to Japan. So I'm excited to have him here and talk about his life, the life in times of Mike Taylor. Michelle, thank you so much. We deeply appreciate it.

Everybody check out trench code advisers.com for all your small, medium and large business needs for all things cyber. Let them come in and square you away. don't be a statistic we've had holding on now michel and bill in in uh july right yep we love these guys getting the whole team it's awesome well thanks for having me it was it was fun good yeah thanks for joining us we love to do it again sometimes she didn't drink but we're gonna pound some shots now after we don't like scotch we we have makers mark is that okay uh and and and tonto we love chris brantto we've got some tonto vodka Tonto vodka.

We always want to drink, but then we're like, oh, but we love Tonto. We want to keep it. Shaka, bra. All right, guys. So we'll see you on Friday. Again, thank you, Michelle. Take care, everyone.