The Tucker Carlson Show - Joe Kent Reveals All in First Interview Since Resigning as Trump’s Counterterrorism Director

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

Joe Kent on why we actually went to war with Iran. Paid partnerships with: Ethos: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/TUCKER Audien Hearing: Learn more about how Audien can help you or someone you love hear better. Call 1-800-453-2916 or visit https://HearTucker.com Dutch: Get $50 a year for vet care with Tucker50 at https://dutch.com/tucker Joi + Blokes: Use code TUCKER for 50% off your labs and 20% off all supplements at https://joiandblokes.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We want to start tonight with a clip from January of 2024. This is from this show, and this is Joe Kent, who later went on to become until yesterday, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Here it is. What do you think the immediate and then longer term effects of a war with Iran would be on the United States? Immediately it would be very bloody. I have no doubt that we could probably defeat some of their air defense and go in there

and have another shock and awe campaign. But again, like, we saw how the shock and awe campaign. in Iraq really didn't actually work in the long run. So I have no doubt that we'd have some immediate results that people would cheer about here in the United States. But Iran, Persia, has always been an empire. It's been around longer than any of the other players in the modern Middle East right now. And they are not going anywhere. If we get deeply involved and deeply entangled with Iran, we are playing right into China's hands because China would like nothing more than for us to be committing our military industrial base to a war in Eastern Europe.

in Ukraine and then to be committing our conventional military power, our blood and our treasure, back in the Middle East. That will make the Pacific, our actual border, extremely vulnerable to Chinese aggression. Or China will simply just watch us bleed out economically as we bleed out on the battlefield on these couple different theaters. It's absolute insanity. It's opening up Pandora's box. And again, for what gained to the American people. So the very first thing you notice about that clip, which was shot almost exactly a year before the current president was inaugurated, is that it was right. It was prescient. He called it. He called the general outline. Not that it was hard to call, but Joe Kent knows what he's talking about. He spent a lot of

his life in that region. And he said a year before this current presidency began, this is a big, serious country. It's the oldest civilization in the region. And if it was a, you know, it's the oldest civilization in the region. and if we went to war with Iran, there would be a momentary sugar high. Americans would support it because they support their own country and they certainly support their military and people would approve of it. But very quickly, you could see a process by which we got caught there, trapped there, bear trap. Hard to extricate yourself from that.

And sitting on the sidelines would be our chief global competitor, China, who would be silently nodding along with a slowly spreading green. in knowing that they were the main beneficiary of what they were seeing, of our waste of American lives and treasure, as Joe Kent said. So we haven't reached that stage, thankfully. We're moving toward it, and everyone who's watching carefully knows that. And if you're honest, you know that. So this is a very serious moment we're in, and we're watching not just a war in Iran, but potentially a total realignment of the world and the loss in some sense of what, the United States has globally. This could be the beginning of the end of our influence in a lot of

the world, and that's just the beginning. So again, that's a big deal. It's starting to dawn on people, and that leaves Joe Kent as one of the relatively few people connected to this administration who said it in public. Is that good or bad? Well, it may seem good. Of course, you want to be around people who have clarity about what's going to happen next. but in practical terms, it's bad. In fact, it's always bad. Whenever you have somebody who stands up and says, don't do this, here's what could happen, and then you do it anyway, and it turns out that person was right, your first instinct is not to apologize and correct your behavior. Your first instinct is to crush the person who called it correctly. And that's your instinct because,

and it's the lowest of all instincts, but it's a human instinct. That's your instinct because his correct prediction is an indictment of you. Of course. And it's a way to deflect attacks on you and your own culpability by blaming the guy who told you it was going to happen before you did it. And this is a longstanding fact of human life. And in the last 60 years in this country, it has been the iron law of foreign policy, which is to say when things go wrong, the only people who get punished,

are the people who criticized the adventure in the first place. You can imagine General Westmoreland attacking Walter Cronkite of CBS News and everything of Walter Cronkite, in my case not much. But fundamentally, it was Walter Cronkite sitting very much on the sideline saying, hey, this war's not going well. And there was General Westmoreland prosecuting the war. But General Westmoreland argued till the end of his life, in some way successfully, that he lost the war because Walter Cronkite criticized the war. Hmm, Is that really true? How many troops did Walter Cronkite command? Was he in charge of strategy?

Don't think so. He was a newsreader in New York. But you can see why Westmoreland did that. Why a lot of people believed it, agreed with Westmoreland. You saw the same thing happen in the days after the tragic and incredibly stupid Afghan withdrawal under Joe Biden. That didn't help the United States. Of course, we had to get out of Afghanistan. But the way we did it, who would argue that was a good thing?

It was a terrible thing and resulted in the deaths of a lot of Americans. So who was punished for that? As far as we can tell, and we've checked, only one person. And that would be Colonel Stu Scheller of the United States Marine Corps. What was his crime? Planning the withdrawal from Afghanistan? Oh, no. No.

Stu Scheller's crime was saying out loud, boy, that didn't work very well. And why did we do this? And for that, he went to jail. The people who actually did it, who gave the orders, or who carried them out without asking questions about them, which was everybody else, they're fine. You don't even know their names, and they certainly haven't been penalized. So there is a long history because this is a standing feature the way people are that you criticize those who told the truth and who were right, who called it ahead of time. Now, in a functioning society, you get a hold of yourself,

and you understand that people are like this, but if you want to be successful as a society, you have to restrain that impulse because it's low and it's counterproductive. And if you you silence people who tell the truth, you end up making the same mistakes again and again and again. And maybe that's why we're here at this pivotal point in our war with Iran. So that's the first thing you notice. Joe Kent was right. Therefore, Joe Kent must be destroyed. And there's, of course, this ongoing effort to do that to dismiss Joe Kent as a tool of the Islamist or a leaker or say he's married to someone who works for Hezbollah or lie after lie after lie. But they're all aimed at Joe Kent the man at his motives, at his character, his personality, and his wife.

And that's by design, because none of them touch on his reason for resigning as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, because if you focused on that, you'd have to answer his questions. You'd have to answer, is this true? Is what Joe Kent, who possessed highest-level intelligence clearances, who was really barred from knowing no secret in the U.S. governments, as he was one of our top intelligence officials until yesterday. Seems like a pretty informed guy is what he's saying true?

That's the last conversation anyone in Washington wants to have. So just attack him. And you're going to see a lot more of that. The people who said this war was a bad idea will be punished. And the more it turns out they were right, which is to say the worst this project goes, the more it becomes obviously kind of productive to American interests, the more vigorously they will be punished unto and including jails.

Stu Scheller went to jail. Probably not the only one who will going forward. So you should just know that and understand what you're seeing in those terms. The second thing that comes immediately to mind when you watch Joe Kent from January of 2024 talk about what would happen if we went to war with Iran, is that what he said that day a year before Donald Trump's inauguration could have been said by Donald Trump. Maybe with a different style. he was making Donald Trump's case. The case that Donald Trump has made for a very long time.

Donald Trump, as everybody knows, became the Republican nominee in 2016, 10 years ago, in part because he was the only Republican running for president that year out of a field of nearly 20 people who was willing to say what everyone else knew but was afraid to say, which is the Iraq war, didn't help us. It hurt us. It was a dumb idea. And it went on way too long. And it became the quagmire that people like Donald Trump predicted it would be. And the American public so relieved to hear the truth about something they already knew made him the Republican nominee despite maybe some concerns. But they did it because, hey, he was right.

And he's the only one brave enough to say so. And Donald Trump made varieties of that case for the next 10 years. And in many cases, specifically about Iran, because Trump has seen long before most people in Washington, for almost anyone in Washington, the big picture, the outline, which is this is a contest. between the United States and the West and China in the East, a rising power that matches or maybe exceeds our economic power globally, and we have to figure out how to apportion power. And we don't want to get sidetracked with engagements like, I don't know, another endless Middle Eastern war, because in the end, the only winner of that conflict is China. It's China in this specific case.

Whoever in the end settles this conflict, whether it's the United States or some, other power, whoever comes in at whatever the end of it is and says, enough. This is hurting the world. Each side has made its point, but the global economy has a critical interest in the Persian Gulf. That's energy. And we're going to stop this now. Whoever that person is will become more powerful than ever, and everyone else will become less powerful. The person who settles disputes is in charge. Not the person who starts them, not the person who wins them, the person who stops them. When dad comes home and stops the fighting between brother and sister, who's in charge, dad, because he stopped the conflict. All of which is to say, if at the end of

this conflict, it's China that comes in, China which has a vested interest in what happens in the region since they're a major consumer of Gulf Energy. If it's China that comes in, and restores the energy flows out of the Persian Gulf and restores some version of peace gets the fighting to stop, then China is in charge of the Persian Gulf. That's just a fact of nature. And so a lot is at stake as Joe Kent knew, as Donald Trump knew. And so the question is, how did Donald Trump, after 10 years of saying one thing, do in the pivotal act of his presidency exactly the opposite?

That's not just an academic question. It's not the beginning of a conspiracy theory about some shadowy lobby. It's the most important question we face because this is not the first time the United States has entered into this kind of war against the wishes of its own population and in clear contravention of its own interests against its interests. This isn't good for us. No one has made the case that it's good for us. And increasingly as the days pass, it becomes obvious to everyone why it's not good for us. And if you don't believe that, then check the prices of food and fuel and everything you buy, because everything you buy is dependent on the price of energy and the production of fertilizer,

both of which are affected almost immediately by the closure of the Straits of our moose. So we did this again. It's not exactly clear how or why we did this, but we need to find out. There is great resistance to finding out. And you've noticed that in the last 36 hours since Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Terrorism Center, one of our top intel officials, because the attacks on him have prevented an honest conversation about what he's actually saying. And what he's saying is, and he says it clearly, and we're going to ask him about it directly in just a moment, Israel got us into this war. It's lobby in the United States, pressured the president, and its prime minister in Israel told the president, we're going without you. Join us, because if you don't, your troops in the region, an interest in the region, your citizens in the region will all be at risk.

You have no choice. They led the way. That's Joe Kent's position. And rather than push back against that and say, no, actually, he's wrong. They're telling you to shut up. And why are they doing that? well, there's only one reason people ever become hysterical and slanderous, start screaming at you rather than answering you.

It's because they're lying. And the truth is, this is not the first time you've watched people in charge lie. This has been going on a long time. And lies give way to a whole bunch of bad things. More lies. Once you tell lie, you bolster it with further lying. Hysteria, the fear of being caught lying. The rage and slander.

if the person catches me lying, he wins in the zero-sum game of lying, I die. You go in the attack to cover your lies and bad judgment. You can't make wise decisions on the basis of lies because they're not true. They're not based in reality that didn't actually happen or in this case it did happen but you're pretending it didn't. So a country based on lies like a family based on lies, like an individual life based on lies, cannot succeed. In fact, it's hellish, as all of us have experienced in our lying.

And so the only way out of this is to stop lying, is to tell the truth now, probably 63 years after we should have started telling the truth, but it's never too late, to tell the truth now about everything. because it's never as painful as you think it will be. It's actually an act of liberation. In fact, it's the only real act of liberation.

Telling the truth sets you free because the truth itself sets you free. That is always and everywhere a fact. And the longer you delay doing that, the more horrible the consequences of your lies. So let's hope that tonight with this conversation with Jo Ken is the beginning of the long overdue truth-telling, which is the only thing that will save this country. And one final note about Joe Kent, who I spent the last 24 hours with. Joe Kent's resume hardly needs explanation because everyone is aware this is a man who deployed on 11 combat missions to the global war on terror. This is sort of the perfect representation of the G-WAT generation. This is one of those guys we often celebrate, but too rarely hear from, who we sent out to fight

the so-called War on Terror that began on 9-11. And it's an entire generation of men, men who look and sound, for the most part, very much like Joe Kent. So the implication, of course, he doesn't care about security or he's soft on Iran. Joe Kent spent, well, the moment. majority of his 20s and 30s fighting Iranian proxies. I'm watching his friends get killed by them. So this is someone who's actually earned the right to speak about Iran and the war on terror. And of course, he was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. So he's thought a lot

about terrorism in this country and the blowback from events like this. And we're going to ask about that as well. But the other thing to notice about Joe Kent, and it maybe his defining factor, is that he doesn't slander anyone. His resignation letter was not an attack on Donald It wasn't a promised way to tell all memoir about what he saw on the insider to aggrandize himself or to get a job on a TV show or sell something. I asked him at dinner last night. What are your plans? None. He did this purely because he believes, as he'll explain in a second, this is the only way to save the United States from certain disaster.

Tell the truth. Air the secrets. Be honest for once in decades about what is actually happening. that everybody who lives here suspects are happening in some cases we're probably wrong we've come to the wrong conclusions that's okay tell us what actually happened tell us why you did this and let's reorient this country where it should be which is around its own citizens make the decisions that you make based on one criterion is this good for my people or not in the way that a father would lead his family or an officer would lead his troops it's not complicated

Everybody wants that. That's not a partisan question. That's a human question. And that's the question Joe Kent is posing. Why can't we do this? Why can't we say this? It's not attacking anybody. Joe Kent himself does not attack anybody.

But this is a last ditch attempt, not simply to save the country from disaster in Iran, but to save the country, period. And as you listen to him speak, ask yourself, is this a man who's working for Hezbollah or is an egomaniac or a leaker? Or is this a man who says very little when he has nothing to say, who speaks straightforwardly and with honesty, self-evident honesty, is this a man of dignity and decency? Is this a man that America once had a lot of? Is this a man who was once in effect the American archetype, the guy you looked up to, the guy you wanted your son to be? Whether you agree with him or not. maybe you're reaching completely different conclusions. But as you listen to him speak, ask yourself, is this the kind of person who makes me proud to be a fellow American?

Because it's really a referendum on us. If we can't see that Joe Kent, whatever you think of his opinions, is the kind of man this country should be producing and should be elevating and should be proud of. If we can't see that, then we've failed the test and we've lost. but judge it yourself. Here's Joe Kent. Joe, thanks a lot for joining us. So I appreciate this. So I want to go through the letter that you sent yesterday

as you resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center and basically through the big points and give you a chance to explain them. You've been spoken for quite a bit over the last 24 hours. So I think it would be really helpful to all of us if you would speak for yourself and flesh out some of these points. I'm just going to read the first one. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.

Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. How did you reach that conclusion? I think this is key. I mean, this would be more challenging to explain had the Secretary of State, the President, and the Speaker of House, the House not come out and said

that we conducted this attack at this time because the Israelis were about to do so. So that takes away the argument that there was an imminent threat, as in Iran was planning to attack us immediately. That just simply did not exist. May I ask you to pause? And so I've heard people say that, and this just happened, but history has a way of getting rewritten in real time,

and then you look back 10 or 15, 20, 25 years later, and no one seems to understand the things that you saw because they've been eliminated. So it's important to stop and say, here's what we actually know. So I'd like now, if we could, just to play one of the statements that you alluded to, and that's from Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and this was shortly after this war commenced, and he was explaining, as is his habit, in a thoughtful, precise way. Why? Here's Secretary State Marco Rubio.

And so the President made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't happen. Okay, so that is his almost contemporaneous explanation, and it's not offhand. He reasons it out. He explains there's a logic chain there, and he says, we knew not that Iran was going to attack.

He did not say that. He said we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran, and in retaliation for those attacks by Israel against Iran, Iran might attack American forces. So the imminent threat that the Secretary of the State is describing is not from Iran, it's from Israel. Exactly. And I think this speaks to the broader issue. Who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East? Who is in charge of when we decide to go to war or not?

In this case, with what the Secretary described and later on the president, later on the Speaker of the House, and the way the events played out, the Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off. a series of events, meaning the Iranians would retaliate. Now, I think there's a potential there where we could have done several different things. We could have simply said to the Israelis, no, you will not. And if you do, then we will take something away from you. I think that it's fine that we offer defense to Israel. But when we're providing the means for their defense, we get to dictate the terms of when they go on the offensive. Otherwise, they stand to lose that relationship.

And the Israelis felt in bolden that. no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, that they could go ahead and take this action and we would just have to react. And so that speaks to that relationship. But also, it just shows that there was a lobby pushing for us to go to war. I know we'll get into that later on in the statement, but we had a real potential, I think, knowing what we know of the Iranians and how they react, and in particular how they react to President Trump's leadership. The Iranians under President Trump's leadership, especially in his second term, they have shown that they take a very calculated approach to the escalation ladder. For instance, in the

lead up to the 12-day war before Midnight Hammer, the Iranians didn't attack us. They were engaged in negotiations with us. When President Trump came back into office, they stopped their proxies who were attacking us under the Biden administration because they knew Biden was weak. They stopped their proxies from attacking us as well. So they knew President Trump was someone who wanted to negotiate, but more importantly, they knew that President Trump was not someone to mess with because he killed Qasem Soleimani. He killed Abu Mahandis. He had defeated ISIS. They knew that President Trump was a man of action. He was militarily strong. And so they said, before we take an action, we need to make sure that it's calculated. So I think in this scenario, even if the Israelis

told us, we're going to strike on this date at this time and we didn't, you know, try to negotiate with the Israelis and say, hey, we'll take something away from them, I think we still could have back channeled to the Iranians and said, hey, if something happens here in the next couple days, it's not us. We're still serious about negotiations, and we don't want to escalate this, because it's well known what the Iranians' plans were. We knew that they were going to hit potentially our, potentially our bases in the region, potentially our allies. We knew about the Straits of Hormuz. All of these things, I think were fairly well known. And the Houthi's ability to close the Red Sea, which is not yet done, but which would be catastrophic

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And one of the consistent themes is, well, I mean, of course, there's a lot of slander, which we can talk about. But the substantive attack on you, and it is an attack or refutation of your letter, is that, well, actually, Joe Kent was totally for using military action. He supported the Soleimani killing, for example. He seemed fine with the 12-day war, for example.

So he doesn't have a problem, on principle, with an engagement with Iran. You're saying what to that? What's your response? Well, I have no, uh, function about really fighting anybody who threatens our country and the Iranians have posed a threat in the past and the Iranians have a way of threatening America. They have the capability. And we always talk in the intelligence circles about capability and intent, what your enemy is

capable of doing and what they actually want to do. And again, back to the data that we have on the Iranians, they used the escalation ladder. We saw that deliberately during the 12-day war. When they struck back after midnight hammer, it was very deliberate. They fired an equal amount of missiles as we dropped bombs on the nuclear facilities, and they basically hit a part of a base in Qatar that they knew we didn't have any troops on. Yes. They didn't want to escalate any further than we were willing to go. But also, the Iranians, when they pose a threat to us, they usually do it with their proxies. And if their proxies stick their heads up and their proxies come after us, this is basically the Trump doctrine. We hammer them and we hammer their high-profile

leaders. Kassim Solemani was highly effective and highly revered in Iran, because the previous presidents, prior to President Trump, Obama, and Bush, let Qasem Soleimani run around, raise proxy armies, kill Americans, and no one ever did anything to him. President Trump rightfully killed Qasem Soleimani. We got his deputy, Abamani Mahandis, who had American blood in his hands, took them off the battlefield. But then President Trump stopped. He took those two key players off the battlefield, and he said, I'm not going to further escalate with Iran unless you escalate with us, knowing that if we struck Iran,

and we truly struck the regime, that would only strengthen the regime. So then President Trump did something that's incredibly smart. Use that decisive military action, but then he coupled it with an economic package of sanctions, maximum pressure sanctions. And we can debate whether or not we should be using sanctions as the Prime Reserve currency holder or whatever, but he pressured the Iranians economically. After punching them in the mouth and showing, hey, I won't take this, I'm not Obama, I'm not Bush.

If you cross a line, I will come after you. But then he really put the pressure on them economically. And if you look at the effect of the economic sanctions, that's what got the Iranian people on the streets actually protesting against the Ayatollah's government, which is ostensibly what we would like. We would like to see a bottom-up regime change where we get rid of the Ayatollah, but it's the will of the people and they have a new successful government that's stable that we can deal with. The one way to throw that all out the window, and this isn't just Joaquin's opinion, many scholars and I think a lot of intelligence assessments have been written about this too, I know for a fact that. have is that if we struck the regime, it would only strengthen it. And that's not, I think that's just basic common sense. I mean, I think of myself, and probably you're in this camp as well, we didn't like Joe Biden. We didn't like Barack Obama. But if an outside force were to come in

here and try and topple them while they were the president, I would 100% rally around the flag. That's just common sense. So if we wanted to strengthen the I atollah. Well, you actually did. You joined the military under Bill Clinton, whom I assume you didn't vote for. Right. Right, you joined in 1998. You've gone the whole cycle of the war on terror, I noticed, and served out as an NCO, I think, your entire. NCO and a warrant officer, 20 years. And I should just say, I hate ever to refer to a man's resume as like a data point because your ideas exist separately. But in this specific case, meaning you, you spend most of your time fighting Iranian proxies.

Yeah, a good deal of it, yeah. Yeah. So you're aware of the threat from Iran. You have personally used violence against that threat. I have. Yeah. A lot of it, I think. And you supported the president's policy up until fairly recently. Right. And you've said that a lot in public. In fact, you went to work for him. He hired you. Yeah. Right. But here's the, from what I can tell is the central question. Imminent threat. Now, the president has said many times to many people. including the public, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. I'm sure he must have said that to you. You don't have to say it. But he said it to everybody.

Is that fair? That's fair. Yeah. They can't have a nuke. Whenever I asked, we say, let's just start here. They can't have a nuke. Okay. Got it.

Everyone agreed with that conceptually. Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon? No. They weren't three weeks ago when this started, and they weren't in June either. I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling of fatwa against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That's been in place since 2004. That's available in the public sphere.

But then also we had no intelligence to indicate that that fought to what was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted. The Iranian strategy, it's actually pretty pragmatic. The Iranians are obviously aware of what's taking place in their region and their strategy was to not completely abandon their nuclear program because they saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya when he said, hey, I've got no more nukes. I'll do what you say. I'll give up my nukes.

And we gave him the Nobel Peace Prize? Yeah, we, we, regime changed him and he was, you know, executed by his own people in the most horrific way. Oh, sodomized by a bayonet. Right. Okay. So that's what, that's the lesson, I think, that the entire region took from that when Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, that's what the neocon neoliberal warmongers. That's the lesson that they showed everyone in the region.

And then conversely, he, the Iranians also knew that if they came out and said, okay, we've got a nuke, whether they were bluffing or not. Saddam Hussein, Iraq right next door. So they kind of had this. And he hung, I think. He was hung by his own people, you know, after a bloody, you know, war that's still essentially going on inside of Iraq. So the Iranians' position when viewed from the lens of the region was actually fairly pragmatic.

They were preventing, you know, themselves from DeVuyl Obama, but they still wanted the ability. They wanted the ability to enrich. They wanted the ability to have some components so that they weren't completely stripped of it. And we always assessed that they were either several months or a year, two years away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon. And that's not because the Iranians are stupid people. I think we can tell right now that the Iranians are anything but stupid. They had the ability, I think, that the brain power to actually develop one.

Or they could have simply traded a ton of oil with Pakistan or with someone else to actually get a nuclear weapon. They were not doing that. We had no intelligence to indicate that they were. then why was the president was he told that they were on the brink of it why at the beginning of every conversation about Iran would the president say I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon

why was that the central question when and you would know since you were the director of the National Counterterrorism Center why would he say that if there was no intelligence or evidence that they were actually developing a nuke so a couple things this is what I talk about in the the letter about this ecosystem of information that's laundered through a lot of prominent

neoconservative types that are very sympathetic to the Israeli cause and then also Israeli government officials who give us things in semi-official channels. What they did was they created basically a shifting red line or a new red line. So if the president's red line was Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, we've actually got a lot of trade space in there for a deal to be made because of what I just described with the Iranian policy, essentially the Iranian saying, okay, well, we don't want a nuclear weapon. Well, that means we basically are at a point where we can start negotiating and we can come up with a deal. And the president is a fantastic dealmaker. So if your goal is to move us away from any kind of deal and your goal is to move us into a conflict, you have to shift that red line. And that's

where a lot of this, I would say, what became a de facto U.S. policy of Iran can have no nuclear enrichment, it was laundered through a lot of the different talking heads, Mark Levin, Mark Dubowitz, you've got the foundation for the defense of democracies, you name it. Washington, D.C. has plenty of pro-Israeli lobbyists who will come and say those things, who will publish think pieces on it, who will go on the media, who will run, you know, op-eds in the Wall Street Journal to talk about this, why they can't have any enrichment whatsoever. And then we have a high degree of engagement with Israeli government officials who will come in and say, well, they're enriching and they could enrich, or they could enrich more, and that will get them closer to a nuclear weapon.

So then enrichment basically became the new U.S. policy. And the only official I've heard, and folks are welcome to look for this, that actually said this in the first Trump administration was Mike Pompeo. He said it. The president didn't say it. The president has been very consistent. He said they can't have a nuclear weapon. But again, like I said, that puts us at a place where we actually could have negotiations. And only President Trump, I think, could successfully have negotiations with Iran because he's,

he actually punched them in the face. And the Iranians had been walking all over us. They had been killing our soldiers. All of that is true. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Iranians, what their proxies were doing. President Trump level set that when he killed Qasem Soleimani and he killed Abadamanae. The folks who wanted to push an actual regime change war in Iran knew this. And they knew there was a potential to get a deal.

Or there was a potential for President Trump just to continue the policy of maximum pressure sanctions. And if you come after us, we will hit you hard. And that got the protesters out on the street in Iran. And that's actually what the regime feared the most. I don't think the Ayatollah feared dying, not because he is some crazy lunatic. I'm sure some degree of the Shia martyrdom culture played a factor in that. However, I think he knew that if he was killed, the regime would survive because the people would rally around the regime. Well, there's been a lot of noise in the news lately, but none of it matters if you can't hear it.

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No more squinting and struggling to hear as people try to talk to you. Audion helps you reconnect to the world and more important to other people who are the key to life. Visit heartucker.com, that's here, h-e-a-r-r-tucker.com, or call 1-800-453-2916 to learn more about how Audion can help you or someone you love hear better. It's essential healthcare hearing and it's now accessible and affordable. That's the system should have done all along. I believe you predicted this, you know, some years ago, I think we're watching. I mean, it's hard to know exactly what we're watching, but it seems consistent with what we are watching. So I'm just focused on this question of imminent threat

because that's really the only justification I think most Americans would accept for a preemptive war. Certainly. Otherwise, just like a war of choice done because BB told you to and no one wants to get behind that because it's obviously illegitimate. So imminent threat, you're saying that there was no intelligence that you saw with the highest level clearance,

obviously involved in this conversation that showed an imminent threat from Iran to the United States. No, unless we took certain actions, unless we came after them in a way that they thought threatened the regime, then we basically knew what they were going to do. Well, okay.

Right, of course. Right, but like any country. So if you attack any country, we know that they're going to have a reaction. We faced an imminent threat once we attack you. Yeah, exactly. But there was no intelligence that said, hey, on whatever day it was,

March 1st, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack. They're going to do some kind of a 9-11 at Pearl Harbor, et cetera. They're going to attack one of our bases. There was none of that intelligence. Again, back to what we know about the Iranians. They're very, very deliberate with the escalation ladder. And again, they're only deliberate under President Trump's leadership because they knew and they took President Trump very, very seriously.

So, I mean, it's just, I just think it's a remarkable thing to nail down because you're not some guy on Twitter. You're a senior, as of yesterday, you were a senior U.S. intelligence. official who's not hostile to President Trump, who's not going to hear to write a tele-a-book or launch a media career. So I think you're a sober voice on this. And just to be clear, there was no intelligence that showed an imminent threat. There was no intelligence that showed there on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon.

There was no intelligence indeed that showed they were trying to build a nuclear weapon. And nobody you know said, I've seen it, but you haven't. It exists, but you just haven't seen it. Did you ever hear anybody say there is intel that shows this? I did not know, but I know how this works. I know the Israeli officials, some in intelligence, some in government, will come to U.S. government officials. And they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn't true. And they'll say, hey, I'm giving you a preview. It's not an intelligence channel yet, but here's what's going to happen. And that doesn't usually come to... Wait, wait a second. I mean, I thought that U.S. policymakers made their decisions on the basis of intelligence collected and vetted by our intelligence. That's why we have intelligence agencies that soak up hundreds of billions a year.

But you're saying that Israeli officials short-circuited the entire U.S. government and just went right to American policymakers and said, it doesn't matter what your country says, here's what we know. Don't you say? Usually they're pretty slick.

Oh, of course. And they'll say, hey, this isn't an intelligence channel yet because it's going to take some time to get there. And here, they're on the cusp of building a bomb. You know, they're going to, I don't know, you pick your topic. A lot of times they'll sample different things until they find what sticks. But in general, the narrative about, you know, they're going to do a preemptive attack or really just they're going to build a nuclear weapon.

And if we don't stop them now, they're going to build a nuclear weapon. And enrichment is the pathway to that. They're going to continue enriching at whatever percent. Enrichment became the narrative. And so that hung up and that short-circuited and really sabotaged the entire negotiations because the Iranians basically. said, like, we're not going to negotiate if the whole starting point is no enrichment. And again, that had nothing to do with a nuclear weapon. And the Iranians essentially agreed to that. So the Israelis came in. They moved that red line. And they would do a lot to say,

like, oh, they're enriching. And you know what that means? That means in X amount of time, they could have a nuclear bomb. You have to ask now. And then the way the ecosystem would work is that the talking heads on TV, you know, your Mark Levins, Sean Hannity, et cetera, they would say basically the exact same thing that night on TV. Or there would be a piece written in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, that would say something very, very similar. Yet, if you looked in classified intelligence, we didn't see any of that. I mean, that must have been such a weird experience for you.

Bizarre. Since you have access to the biggest and most powerful and presumably the best intelligences in the world, and you're seeing people say things as fact when you know that they're not facts. Right. what was that like? Infuriating. And I think that's why in general, in the lead up to this last iteration,

a good deal of key decision makers were not allowed to come express their opinion to the president. Not allowed by whom? I think it's important for me right now just to stay on the facts. I don't want to point names. I don't want this become a name calling or this guy did this on this day. But any leader has gatekeeper. And so you're saying that you were prevented from bringing this information directly to the president by gatekeepers. Well, there wasn't a robust debate.

So in general, because our assessment really hadn't changed, you know, we would send those up through intelligence channels. Everybody was kind of reading the same intelligence, but then what actually gets briefed to the president can be very, very different depending on who and how it's delivered. And without a level set from the intelligence community, someone like D&I Gabbard coming in and saying, Mr. President, like here's the full scope of the intelligence. and what it means, you're kind of lacking that sanity check of where we're at, or at least a good sampling, you know, to gauge how accurate what the Israelis are saying is. And that process, in my view, was largely stifled in this second iteration. There was robust debate and robust discussions leading up to the 12-day war into Midnight Hammer. But this second round, to me, and I'm sure others will refute this and disagree with me, but what was conducted by just a handful of

small of advisors around the president. That is true. I believe what you're saying is true. My sense, though, and you would know more than I, is there weren't a lot of people directly around the president who work there, who work at the White House, the principals, who are making an aggressive case for this war. Do you think there was, I mean, was there a majority of, like, his top ten advisors who were saying we must do this now?

I think the circle that was that he, that was around him was very, very tight and very small. And I think they were all in the same sheet of music. And I think a lot of them were getting their information from the ecosystem that I described. And I think we'd be in a different place if we would have talked about the actual, what the intelligence picture is and what our, what our interest is. So Israeli government talking points laundered through Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Is that the ecosystem you're talking about? Yeah.

And then the Israeli officials coming in and basically either ahead of, of time or after the fact saying the same thing like the enrichment is going to get them a nuclear bomb and set amount of time do you believe that you and the d n i for whom you worked until yesterday had as much face time with the president as israeli officials did i don't know i don't know that for sure because i don't know exactly how frequently the Israelis were were engaging directly with the president, it did seem like Benjamin at Yahoo was, you know, obviously that was all public, that he was in the White House. Seven times.

Quite a bit. Yeah. Quite a bit. And then his other officials as well, Dermar, et cetera, those guys were in. They were making phone calls. Just a lot of engagement from them. And again, when we would hear or you'd hear what they were saying, it didn't reflect in intelligence channels, even intelligence that we shared with the Israelis that the Israelis

were giving us in many cases. So there was a clear, you know, gap between, you know, the intelligence and then the information that the president was given and the decisions that the president was making. I don't want to put you in a comfortable position. Obviously, you're not going to divulge anything that's classified. I don't think you would. You definitely shouldn't because there are people who hurt you for that. And you shouldn't. So without encouraging you to do that, it's, yeah, I think it's a commonplace that's understood in Washington.

I've heard for many people who work in your business that a substantial portion of our information touches Israel at some point. Either it's collected by them, it is shaped by them. It's not purely American. Is that a fair? Do you think it's fair? Especially in the Middle East, I would say, I mean, look, the Israelis are tactically very proficient. They have a very competent intelligence service. And there's a lot that we can learn from them in the craft of intelligence.

Yes. So they're very proficient. They're very good. However, whenever we get information from a liaison service, I think it's incredibly important to realize that it could be given to us to influence us as well as to inform us. And the way that I would see Israeli information, in particular coming from senior officials directly to our senior officials, that caveat just wasn't given frequently enough. And there's a lot of times, some of this is just because of, you know, bureaucratic practice, but a lot of it, I think, is just we feel very comfortable with the Israelis. A lot of them are dual citizens.

They sound like us. They don't feel foreign. We kind of go into a more complacent mode where we trust a lot of what they have to say, not keeping in the back of our mind, that they have their own agenda and we have our own agenda at the end of the day. Now, I'd say a lot of times we have the same agenda. You know, it's very, very tactically, you know, the same. comes to fighting Hezbollah, when it comes to fighting terrorism, sure, but when it comes to what's our strategic goal in a war that's going to have ramifications for our nation, for the

region, for global energy supplies, I think most folks right now at the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, they would say us and the Israelis actually have a different objective here. I don't believe that our objective has been clearly defined because we're shying away from regime change. The Israelis are not shying away from regime change. They want to knock out lock, stock, and barrel the current government. They don't seem to have a plan for what comes next.

Well, that was my next question. I think you would have heard tell of such a plan. So if you're going to take out a government, I think it's fair to ask what replaces it. And I have asked a bunch of people, many people, this question, never gotten any answer whatsoever other than there's no plan. The Israelis don't have a plan because they don't care. Do you think that's fair?

I think that's completely fair. I think as Americans, rightfully, we want a clear stated objective and in-state for war. I think that's something that was very important. that's something that was born out of the GWAT, was born out of the Vietnam era. Americans want to know why we're going to war, what the in-state is, and they can get on board in general, if that's clearly articulated. That's not the case with Iran. The Israelis are different. I think a lot of times, again, because a lot of them speak English, they culturally feel the

same, but the Israelis have a much different tolerance for how and why they're going to war and for their endurance for war. The Israelis are completely fine with Iran slipping into chaos. That means that the Ayatollah and the IRGC can't really threaten them anymore. Hezbollah's money might be cut off in their head. And so complete chaos in Iran, it's not necessarily a bad thing for the Israelis. For us, for global energy, Straits of Hormuz, our partners in the GCC, mass migration problems in Europe, this is a major problem. It's a catastrophe for the world. For the world, yeah. Hey, to brag, but we're pretty confident this show is the most vehemently pro-dog podcast you're ever going to see.

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I think this is the case by all data that we have with the son, the next Ayatollah that you get is going to be more radical because he has to show the people that he's going to push back. And there's always a tension inside of Iran between the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the clerics who run the country. They have a healthy, I think, tension between the two a rivalry. IRC's leadership, these are Qasem Soleimani's troops. These are the guys that Soleimani trained. These guys, most of them cut their teeth in the Iraq-Iran war. A lot of them cut their teeth fighting us in Iraq. They cut their teeth fighting ISIS and Iraq and Syria.

They created Hezbollah. They trained and armed Hezbollah. So these guys are actually pretty serious and pretty hard line. And they're willing to fight and they want to fight. And so by killing the Ayatollah, we've given them more power because now internally, they can go and they can say, hey, all you guys who thought that we could negotiate with the Americans, you're chumps. We have to fight them. So I think the longer this goes on, the more negotiators, the more moderates that are killed off. Like we just killed, you know, Ali Laranjani, who was a negotiator, who was eager to get us a deal.

Again, look, I've got no love for the IRGC. I've got no love for the Iranians. But you've got to realize if you want it's in. In case you're cheating, no, you fought their proxies. I fought their proxies. I mean, I put countless of them in flex cuffs are much worse. I've gone after the Iranians. I was in specialized outfits that went after the Iranians and their proxies.

These are very serious people. They're not supermen by any means. They're humans. But they're serious. And if you give the IRGC a reason to take more control and they get support from the people. Because again, you know, you kill off the Ayatola. They can say, hey, the last guy was too moderate. Look at what it got us.

Like give us more control. I get it. And the Iranian people are going to be like, well, actually, yeah, I don't like being bombed by the Americans and the Israelis. Maybe we do need to listen to the IRGC. So a lot of these, the points that you're making, I think are insightful, but they're also pretty obvious if you kind of game it out for 10 seconds.

So it seems like you've got two different goals. You've described Israel's goal as just regime change, permanent chaos, take Iran off the map as a coherent nation state, just tie them up with internal chaos, whatever the effects of that are on the rest of the world, all of them disastrous. Then on the American side, you have the president's state a goal, which is we can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon, which they didn't have and weren't trying to build in any imminent way. Right.

Okay. So if you join those two together in a common mission in a war, like that's our partner in this war, then you create all kinds of very bad incentives. And now, Larzani, I think, was killed by the Israelis. You saw the Israelis blow up Qatari natural gas facilities today in the Qatari natural gas field, which feeds the rest of the world, LNG. Those seem like very obvious steps not to minimize the threat from Iran, but to lock down the United States in permal war. We can't get out after we do that. You kill the negotiator. You attack our closest ally in the region, is probably Qatar.

you attack Qatar apparently like no one thought this might happen and there's no there's no reins on the Israelis unfortunately I mean we continue to refer to them like as our partners are equal to the best partners we've ever had but at the end of the day the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us and so we have to be acting against our interests

in a in a very obvious and very serious way and again it's obvious if we've stated that our goal is just to take away their ability to to ever even enrich and to take away their ballistics and to take away their Navy, all these kind of tactical objectives. If we say that that's our objective and that's when we can come to a place where we can just exit, it's in the Israelis' interest to get us more and more entrenched in this. And that's exactly what they're doing right now.

You know, when the Israelis killed Leonard Johnny, I think I may have misspoken. We didn't kill him. The Israelis struck him. But I do believe in Iran at this point of the war, they view it as whether we like it or not. I think they view it as we, us and the Israelis kind of as the same thing. We've described it that way. Because the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us. And that's where the relationship is just way off kilter.

If they have different objectives than us, then what are we doing letting them drive the war? So you just said something that's been disputed many times by the mark, well, I'm not going to name anybody, but by advocates for Israel, it's a PR department here in the United States, which is huge. and you said they couldn't do any of this without us. You often hear its promoters, its lobbyists say, Israel just wants to fight its own wars, back off and let us do it. Is that not? I'd love us to run the experiment we try that. What would happen?

You know, the Israelis, again, they have great, they have the ability to go out and collect great intelligence. They have a very capable military, but they're a very small country. I think Israel would be able to. to defend itself. I think it could conduct, you know, limited strikes on its borders. I think it could continue carrying out pretty impressive targeted assassinations. Yes. Against its adversaries. And so I think you would see it relatively contained. What it couldn't do is go topple entire governments. It couldn't do something like the Iran War, the Iraq War. It couldn't aggressively, you know,

destabilize Syria. These big, heavy lifts of regime change that America has been engaged in, Israel could not do on their own, which is where you get back to the Israeli lobby being just so potent and so powerful and so aggressive. So that, and I want to ask about that because that's the line that you're being attacked for. And so I want to go through and have you explain more fully if you would why you said what you did and read it. But before I do that, one last question. Was any of this debated that you know of before this war commenced three weeks ago? Did anyone say, well, wait a second. if we do this and kill the Ayatollah,

because that was like the first order, I think. What are the effects after? And like, what's the goal? Did these debates ever emerge? I know they happened heavily before the 12-day war. I think that when the Israelis came back around and said they wanted to do this, I just don't think there was any debate. I think just based on the ecosystem and the amount of influence that was exerted.

Because in some ways this is a little. humiliating since we were told I was told the whole country was told that after the 12-day war there was no Iranian nuclear threat we got rid of it I'm not imagining that it just happened last summer yeah do you recall those statements yeah I mean Operation Minnet Hammer yes destroyed their nuclear capability so so how was it that we wound up six months later getting another lecture about their nuclear capability and it's imminent threat to the United States and nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles aimed at Miami and the whole thing.

And nobody, first of all, there was no organized protest against this, like in a normal country. You'd think people would rise up and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You just told us six months ago the exact opposite. Did internally in the intel world, people say, what the hell is going on? I just think that the planning for this was so compartmentalized that there was no debate, as in it was a foregone conclusion. Maybe the exact timing they didn't, they weren't exactly aware of, or,

that had to be debated, when do we do it? But it seemed to be a foregone conclusion. And I'm sure others will say, no, that's not the case at all. But there was no robust debate like there was going into the 12-day war. Because the big question that a lot of us had that were skeptical of Operation Minnet Hammer was, okay, so we do this. We know the Israelis' whole goal is regime change. What makes us think they'll stop? And if they do stop for a period of time, why won't we just be back in the same place in six months where they're saying that we have? have to go back in. And that's essentially exactly what happened. So this was raised. This was raised to my knowledge in June. This was like, hey, what happens next? So you take out the

the ability for them to enrich and to potentially develop a nuclear weapon. That's done. We know the Israelis have a completely different goal. Part of that strike, Midnight Hammer, was also to get the Israelis to wrap up the 12-day war. But we knew because of what the Israelis told us that they wanted, this is the time to take down the regime. And they don't want the Ayatollah to be in power. They want a regime change. They want to do government there. So we said, okay, knowing that, we know that this strike, this limited strike that we're going to do, isn't going to be enough. At some point, the Israelis are to come back to us and say, hey, we have to go again. And with that knowledge, and I think because so many of us had pointed

that out, and because the Israelis had said it, there wasn't a big debate this last time. you know, they, I think they, they had that discussion, you know, behind closed doors, and there wasn't a chance for any dissenting voices to come in. But you would think, well, I've seen it before. You know, when a question like this arises, the people making a decision go immediately to their own intel agencies, and in your case, the agency that, you know, has jurisdiction over those agencies and say, you know, all available intel on the question of the Iranian nuclear program, all available intel on the question of ICBMs or its ballistic missile program,

all available intel on what might happen if we topple the regime in place. Like this has all been gamed out for a long time. There's a constant process of gathering intel on it, correct? Yeah. And that's what we did in the lead up to the 12-day war. But this time, no. But this time, no. Not to my knowledge.

And I'm sure the administration will come out and say, no, you just weren't invited. But I've got a pretty good idea how those meetings look. And even if I wasn't invited, I at least would have known that they took place. Again, it just seemed to be a foregone conclusion that, like, this was happening. So most people don't wake up in the morning and decide to feel horrible, exhausted, foggy, disconnected from themselves. But it does happen and it happens slowly. You're working hard, you're showing up, and your energy disappears by midday. Your focus is dull.

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Join blokes. Get your edge back. So I almost don't want to bring this up because it's so distressing, but I have to ask a question about blowback. The effects, the downstream effects of military action, terrorism in the United States. And I have the feeling we're going to see some of it. but I want to ask you.

But since you are an acknowledged expert on that question, and since you spent your adult life fighting Iranian proxies, and because we're always hearing some of them in the United States, did anyone go to you and say, if we do this, what are the odds that we will have terror attacks in the homeland here in the U.S.?

That was a piece or an intelligence product that we worked up on our own? I bet. And coordinated throughout the intelligence community. basically we talked about the Iranian's ability to conduct sleeper cell like attacks, which is actually pretty limited. The whole idea of sleeper cells or a cell operating is challenging in today's environment because cells have to communicate with each other and we're pretty good at picking up on that.

The real threat and most major terrorist organizations have kind of moved to this model is the lone actors. It's inspiring people that are already in place by using the media. there was already a ton of blowback, you know, because the Gaza war, Hamas used propaganda very, very effectively to, I think, curry a lot of favor with younger people here in the United States and abroad. And there was multiple terrorist attacks in America in the last year where Gaza was cited because they consumed some of the propaganda coming out of Gaza. And these people weren't, you know, infiltrated Iranian agents. They were here, folks that were homegrown.

And so we said, hey, the biggest threat right now is, isn't that the Iranians are going to like sneak some guys over and they've been waiting here for years and their goods force operatives. That's that's always possible. Again, the Iranians are very competent as well. And they have tried something like that before in the past back under the Obama administration where they tried to kill the Saudi ambassador in Georgetown. So we were worried about that. But what we were more worried about was the fact that Biden had the border open for four plus years. And I testified publicly in Congress laying out the 18,000 known suspected terrorists that potentially could be in the country. Since then, we've discovered potentially more. The problem is the bookkeeping under the Biden administration was kind of like the border. It was wide open. And so we don't know how many folks are actually in the country that shouldn't be here. It's millions.

How many of them have ties to countries that are adjacent to Iran or that are Iranian were still. As I left, we were still working on some of those numbers. But we've seen several terrorist attacks since these operations began in America. And they all fit that lone actor-inspired model. So the blowback is longer this goes on, and the more than that, the propaganda inevitably gets weaponized, we are going to see more than likely more people here that are radicalized. Now, frankly, I think that none of the, and this is another great thing about President

Trump, none of these people should be in the country. We should have tight immigration policies. We should be focused right now. Our focus should be on finding everyone who shouldn't be in our country right now and getting them out as soon as possible, not in another foreign adventure. I wonder, I mean, so you've already seen in the wake of a recent terror attack, neocons use that attack as a way to try and censor, shut down, maybe even in prison, critics of the decision to go to war in Iran.

So it's almost like you control both sides. Like you advocate for a war which inevitably stokes religious hatred because you advocate for the killing of a religious leader. Okay. So you're helping to create religious war, permanent generational religious war. And then when you're a country or the country you happen to be living in that you don't really care about. feels the effects. When Americans are killed as a result of that, you use their deaths to justify the silencing of people who criticized you. Does that make sense?

No, exactly. Yeah. So how much are you concerned we're going to see more of that? I'm very concerned. I pray we won't, but the odds are not in our favor, just considering how open our borders have been. Obviously, this type of propaganda radicalizes people. Again, we've already seen attacks. We saw attacks inspired by the conflict in Gaza. So I think we're going to see more of this and then just, you know, made the mistake of opening up Twitter a couple times today. There's people calling for, you know, dissenting voices to be charged, to be locked up. Of course. And so, you know, it's the erosion of civil rights. I think during a time of conflict is nothing new. Unfortunately, we've seen it before. It's the rule.

But I wonder, though, is like people talk through or maybe they didn't talk it through, but did anybody in the lead up to this, I just want to ask it again to make sure I understand the answer, in the lead up to this war, which is now a regional war, potentially a global war, big war, biggest war of our lives. Did anyone come to you and say, what's your projection for like what the effects

on the United States will be? Like how many Americans could die at the shopping mall because of this or at school? We proactively wrote an assessment. Yeah, but do you? Which is what we tend to do anyways. But again, there just wasn't a huge process

in a debate about this last this last iteration. But you're worried about it. I'm very concerned about it. I am too. Yeah, I am too. Yeah, I'm too. Okay, so let me read you

the most controversial, and you've addressed this to some extent, but I'd like you to flesh it out a little more, if you don't mind. You say to support the values, the foreign policies that you campaigned on during three campaigns and that you enacted, you understood up until June of 2025 that the wars of the Middle East were a trap

that robbed America of the precious lives who are patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation. Early in this administration, this is the change. High-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First Platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that you should strike now. There was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.

that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again. So I think you've explained how the echo chamber and the lobbying campaign worked. It wasn't just on Fox and the Wall Street Journal. It was by telephone and text message. It was in person. And it was relentless. And there was no countervailing campaign.

There was almost nobody who went to the president and said, well, actually, here's the American view. which is frustrating. But then you allude at the end of that to the Iraq war. And I think you told me at dinner last night. I think you spent five years total. I don't know. You're 11 combat deployments.

You spent about, you think, five years. Yeah. I mean, nine of those deployments were to Iraq for six to eight months. So, yeah. Okay. So you've had some time to think about the Iraq war. Yeah. Yeah.

More time than it's healthy. Yeah. Can I just say because it makes me. So here you go. You join them. army at 18 18 18 yeah you spend your whole young life there go to all these wars 11 deployments you spend five years in Iraq over seven deployments and you reach a serious conclusions fighting and being shot at by iran proxies and now you say i don't think this war is good for

america and you're being slandered as a bad unpatriotic quitter who secretly sympathizes with the iatola I just have to ask you how that feels. I mean, they love you when you're just saluting and moving out, but then the second you say, I don't think we should be doing this, and I have an opinion now, then all the attacks come at you. But I truly believe that God put me where I am right now, really putting me through everything I've been through in my life, to bring me to this point.

I don't believe that God said, hey, you're here now in this moment to just sit back and be a good soldier for this iteration. I've had lots of friends who have said, hey, I think you would have been more value staying in the administration with your experiences. And I understand that, and I'm flattered by it. But considering all that I've seen, the conclusions that I've reached, I feel like I'm here for a reason. And something I think, you know, probably on my third or fourth deployment, as I was realizing that we were lied to to get us into Iraq and that we had a whole mess that we now had to clean up and how much it mirrored and echoed Vietnam. I remember as, you know, being in my mid to late 20s, being very frustrated with a lot of the Vietnam veterans who did not speak up against. I know some some did, but especially Vietnam veterans who stayed in service, as I had intended to do, who stayed in service and who advocated for the Iraq war.

Colin Powell is someone who I have a lot of respect for, for the way he fought in Vietnam, his leadership in Desert Storm. but then the way that he was part of lying to get us into the Iraq war and then staying on and continuing those lies, knowing full will having all the experiences of being a guy on the ground in a feudal war that was, you know, basically we were deployed to under false pretenses. He had all that knowledge and because he wanted to be loyal to, I think, the president and I think he wanted to be loyal to what he felt was the government that would eventually get it right. he didn't step out and say we shouldn't be doing this. And I just remember reflecting on that. I said to myself at the time, and this might seem silly and idealistic, but said to myself at the time, if it's ever my turn, if it's ever my generation's turn,

I'm going to do everything that I can to make sure this doesn't happen to the next generation. So a real breaking point for me, I did the best I could for a couple weeks as this war started from the inside to try and find off ramps to try and provide information to see what I could do from the inside. But watching the casualties roll in, and I don't want to use anyone's loss as a political talking point. But for me personally, watching more casualties come in, I just couldn't stand by as both a veteran and then, you know, as a gold star husband and say, like, I'm just going to continue to soldier on in this. It's time to try something different. I know this path that we're on.

It doesn't work. I've seen enough data. It's time to do something different. How hard a decision was it? It became really clear to me. you know, over the weekend, this past weekend, that our message just wasn't getting through. And I was like, I know what's, I know what happens if I stay. If I, if I stay and I go along with this, I'm going to be, you know, knee deep in it,

trying to just chip away and make a difference. But my ability to have, you know, my voice heard to present data that runs contrary to the trajectory and the agenda that the administration's on, that's going to be squashed before it even really reaches the White House. And so I knew I had kind of hit my limit of effectiveness in that capacity. So really, it should have been a hard decision, but for me it was crystal clear. It was like, number one, I can't be a part of this in good conscience. And I need to do everything I can to actually speak out about it and speak out in a way that I hope resonates with the president and with some of my former colleagues.

I understand they might be mad at me. They're getting hard questions from the media. but I really want them as we descend even further into this war. I really hope that they take the time to reflect and to realize that we still have time to get us out of this. And then also for the 77 million people who voted for President Trump, who voted for no new wars, who voted for the foreign policy that President Trump enacted in his first administration,

the foreign policy that I described. I mean, President Trump's first foreign policy, the one that he ran on, the one that he destroyed the Republican neocon establishment on, was incredibly pragmatic. We're not saying, you know, you have to be some kind of a, you know, a pacifist. We are saying, though, that you have to be very, very deliberate and judicious in how you use force. And you also have to use the full scope of the American toolbox. You use diplomacy, use our economic leverage.

And again, this isn't something that I came up with. President Trump came up with this. President Trump enacted this. And this is why 77 million people voted for him. It's probably not the only reason. but the no new wars put America first don't let us bleed out in the Middle East that's what people voted for and that's what I think

you campaign for and I think that's something he could get us back to if he just takes a look and assesses how we got to where we are right now I want to get to that in a minute your solution and you know that

I just want to be transparent about my motives not in this to attack anybody I'm concerned to the point of agitation about where this is going and its effects on the United States, I think, I hope I'm wrong, but I believe it. And I think you do too. I think this is the most serious thing that's happened in my lifetime. So I want to fix it. And I don't want to happen again. Exactly. And I don't want history to be written in real time by liars in such a way that no one

understands what we're going through. And then we make the same mistakes. And this is a principle that any parent applies to his own children. No, say out what you did, and you're less likely to do it again. So, but before I say anything, I just want to pause just on your personal experience. I know you hate talking about this. I'm not going to make you uncomfortable

by pushing too much, but you just, you feel it, I feel, as an observer, such sadness for the men who've been used, including you. And I wonder how given everything you've done and everything you've just, said how you don't feel bitter at the response that you've gotten from people, some people. How do you keep the bitterness out?

I think faith, I've got a great wife. God's blessed me twice with my late wife Shannon, my wife Heather. Our two boys, Colton Josh, who I think are watching this, hopefully. So faith and staying grounded on what's important. Yes. But then also, look, the people who are coming after me, I believe that the Internet is like 25% real. I think there's a lot of bots. There's a lot of people who got delivered a talking point and they're going to get a paycheck for it. Or they just, you know, they want the adoration. So I just don't

take most of it seriously. And again, look, I know there's some of my former colleagues people who I do like who have had to come after me. And I understand that too. Like, I get it. Like they're still there. They've got to discredit everything I'm saying right now. They're watching taking notes. So I'm not bitter about that. I literally just want to focus on the task at hand. And the task at hand is stopping us from getting deeper into this quagmire. Because again, like just looking back on my experiences in Iraq, I don't feel like this happened. There wasn't the ability to. There wasn't this platform.

There wasn't, you know, the free independent media that existed in a real way that could reach people. That's right. And so to me, we have this opportunity. So I'll be better and angry later when, you know, I read Twitter and somebody who I used to like says that Joe Kentz a traitor and we're going to fire him tomorrow anyways. You know, I don't, we don't have time. that. Like, as you pointed out, major things are happening right now in this war. And the president is facing some very, very challenging decisions. So I personally just hope that he and his closest advisors listen and think. And that's the main priority. So I strongly agree. And we can't allow

hatred of us to inspire hatred in ourselves. You can't become a hater. It'll destroy you. It's what they want. So I just, I salute you for avoiding that. And it's absolutely real. all the time with you and you're not a hater at all. You don't even seem that bothered. So that's incredible given where you are. It's amazing. It's an active faith. And I love it. End of the history portion of the segment, but I just think it's important to establish why you said, first the war in Iraq, second, the conflict in Syria, which took the life of your wife, why both of those were driven by Israel. Well, the war in Syria never would happen about the war in Iraq. I mean, so had we not gone in and invaded Iraq, we wouldn't have had the conflict

in Syria. But Syria was always a major problem under Assad for the Israelis, both under his father and under the Bashir al-Assad, Hafussan Bashir. Because of their support, the relationship with the Iranians, their support for Hezbollah. Makes sense. And so they wanted to get rid of Assad as well. They saw Iraq as a vehicle for not just taking down Saddam Hussein, who posed a threat to them as well, but also as a way, a lily pad, if you will, to get rid of Syria. And basically... So Assad must go, which was a slogan that all of a sudden emerged out of nowhere. That was not like an organic American desire.

It wasn't like Americans woke up and more like, you know, the problem really is this ophthalmologist from Syria, he must go. It was, that reflected the priorities of Israel. And then I think he had the echo chamber as well, because you had all the usual. back. She had FDD and you had all these different other organizations that were out there saying that like now is the time to, you know, break off. Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss, break off the shackles. The next thing you know, like, although we'll be a Syria and Thomas Jefferson that'll take over and instead, we got the former leader of Al Qaeda. But a big reason that Syria became next after Iraq. In Iraq, we screwed the whole thing up so badly that we toppled Saddam, destabilized, fought a bitter

insurgency, the Sunnis eventually aligned with al-Qaeda, but then we beat them down so heavily because the Shias are the majority of the country. The Shias took over Shias largely, the Shias that we installed in Iraq, the Dawa Party, Bader, Skiri, et cetera, you know, heavily aligned with Iran. And so at the end of the Iraq war under Obama, you know, there was this whole, like, oh, crap, we just handed basically the keys to Baghdad to the Iranians, who, again, hostile to us. Qasem Soleimani is running all over the place, funding proxies. It's a great deal. It helps Iran circumvent sanctions, their relationship with Iraq, and we just spent

trillions, lost nearly 5,000 Americans there. And now we have this Shia super state. And so then there was a ton of pressure coming from not just the Israelis, but I think also a lot of the Gulf to say, hey, we've got to get rid of Assad as well. Because now you have this Iranian land bridge that goes basically from Damascus. all the way to Tehran, and then you can hook that down into the Lebanese area where Hezbollah is.

So next thing you know, well, if you want to get rid of the guy Assad, who's in Aweet, well, we get a country full of like really angry Sunnis, and what are those guys going to turn into? And so next thing you know, we're now on the side of ISIS and al-Qaeda. ISIS gets out of control, and we have to deploy back to Iraq, back to Syria, to put out essentially the brushfire that we created. And so that's why I can,

I put all of those together. Because again, without Israel's influence, would all of this have happened? Would the Iraq war have happened? Maybe. But they heavily lobbied for it. I mean,

Benjamin Net and Yahoo, you can pull up tapes on YouTube. Like the guy was lobbying heavily back in 2002 for us to do regime change in Iraq. And he has stayed in power ever since. Ariel Sharon, who initially was the PM in the lead up to the Iraq war, initially was against it.

because he wanted us to focus on Iran, but then towards the end, he got on board as well. But the Lakud Party that's in power and has been driving Israeli politics now for most of my adult life, they were heavily in favor of the regime change war in Iraq, which again led to Shia domination, led to the rise of ISIS, led to the rise of al-Qaeda, and then heavily fueled the Syrian civil war. So again, this country, Israel, who they can be a good partner in some regards. I'm not anti-Israeli. I've worked with the Israelis. Again, very competent intelligence service, very wonderful people, but they have different objectives than we do.

So to put them in the driver's seat of our foreign policy and to let them dictate our foreign policy is a disservice to the American people. Well, I think, you know, I think you're understating the effect. Disservice suggests like an inconvenience. Dangerous, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we're looking at bankruptcy and death and collapse. of the dollar and like lots in i'm not blaming israel by the way i'm not believing israel for any of it i'm blaming supine american leadership that takes this right don't understand it at all um and that that kind of leads the most uncomfortable question of all and i don't know if you can

answer it i don't think i can answer it but since all of these dynamics are very well known to everyone in washington everyone who pretends this is not real the tom cottons of the world lindsay grams or whatever you know the liars everybody knows everybody knows pros are people people know, anti-Israel people know that what you're saying is true. I don't think there's any debate about any of it. So since it was clear that we were being pushed by the Netanyahu government into this war that they were choosing the timing. They chose the timing. Right? I mean, Yeah. I'll take Marco Rubio's word for it. I'll take Marco Rubio's word for it. Was it ever discussed the option that you mentioned at the beginning? Like, how about no?

not that I know of okay so then you have to ask I'm just following the logic train here how could what kind of pressure does it require to get a president who campaigned against exactly this thing for 10 years to do

exactly this thing what does it take to do that I wish I knew definitively I think there's two potentials there's two schools of thought I mean one is the media echo chamber the donors the way the Israelis come in and kind of laundering the information like I described previously.

And then the other option is much darker. I mean, we still don't know what happened in Butler. We don't know what happened with Charlie Kirk. And by no means am I saying like, you know, the Israelis did this or any of that. But I'm saying there's a lot of unanswered questions there. And there is enough data to at least say that there's a good chance that President Trump feels like he is under threat.

We're not allowed to ask basically, was there any linkage between what took place with Asif Mershant, who was recruited by the Iranians, to come to America, to recruit proxies, to kill President Trump. The FBI put a confidence human source at him. All this is public now. This is all out there in the open. And he's arrested. And then two days later, a sniper takes a shot at President Trump.

We think Mershant and the CHS was talking about the human source that the FBI put at Mershant. they were talking about, hey, we could kill the president potentially with a sniper rifle. But then they arrest him. Two days later, Butler happens. And Crooks, according to the official narrative anyways, is an enigma. We don't know anything about him. We can't get into his devices. If we did get into his devices, maybe there's nothing there.

No more questions are allowed to be asked about Thomas Crooks. The DHS IG is currently being blocked from investigating Butler as well. That's out in the media. That's all well known. your investigative journalist found that Crooks did indeed have an online persona. Quite an extensive one. And he was talking to people. So it's like, why aren't we investigating this?

You know, I mean, if... An attempted murder of a presidential candidate? Intended murder of a presidential candidate. And then there's another assassination attempt. There's been multiple public breaches of President Trump security over the last year. And then, you know, Charlie Kirk has killed publicly in a very horrific way. And we're not really even allowed to. look into that at all. And Charlie Kirk was one of President Trump's closest advisors, and he also

advocated heavily against a war with Iran. He was in the Oval Office, in the lead up to the 12-day war. I wasn't particularly close with Charlie. He was very gracious to me when I was running for Congress, very, very supportive. So we knew each other. And the last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June in the West Wing, in the stairway, and I said hi to him, and he looked me in the eye. And he said very loudly, and it's a small, you've been in the West Wing. It's small. It's a tight space. And he said, Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.

Very loudly. He was single-minded. And he walked off. And he went, I believe, into the Oval. So when one of President Trump's closest advisors who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink at least our relationship with the Israelis. And then he's suddenly publicly assassinated. and we're not allowed to ask any questions about that. It's a data point.

It's a data point that we need to look into. What do you mean when you say we're not allowed to ask any questions about that? We've been told that this individual, Robinson is a lone gunman, and maybe he is. But the investigation that I was a part of, the National Counterterrorism Center, was a part of, we were stopped from continuing to investigate. And the FBI will say that they stopped that because they want to do. to turn everything over to the Utah State Authorities, everything's going to trial, it's very, very sensitive.

But there are still a lot for us to look into that I can't really get into, but there was still linkage for us to investigate that we needed to run down. I'm not making any conclusions. I'm not saying, No, I don't think you are. Because of this, this happened. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying there's unanswered questions.

We know the pressure, because of the text messages that have been made public, that Charlie was under a lot of pressure from a lot of pro-Israel. Donors and again we know Charlie was advocating to President Trump against this war with Iran and we knew at the end of the 12-day war at the end of Midnight Hammer that the Israelis were to come back and ask us to go back to war again Right So we have a lot of data points between Butler the assassination attempts against President Trump the breaches of his security what happened to Charlie Kirk Can I just ask you to pause on the Charlie Kirk just yeah because it it upsets me to hear what you're saying to be reminded that he was murdered but also to hear you confirm what was reported in the media several months ago that your office had been blocked from investigating his murder.

That does not make sense to me. I don't understand why you would ever turn down help in an investigation from a U.S. agency with a lot of experience in gathering intelligence on things. That's your job. The FBI will say and the DOJ will say that because it's an ongoing case, It's a Utah state case that back off. They've got it. They've got a smoking case.

They've got the fingerprints on the gun. And they've got the case. But the FBI was involved in the case. The FBI was involved. The FBI basically said that they're deferring to Utah because it's now a state case. They've established a precedent for federal investigation of this crime. Yeah. And the National Counterterrorism Center's mandate is to investigate any foreign ties to see if there's potentially any foreign ties.

If we don't find any foreign ties, we back off. what I'm saying about getting into too much detail is there was more for us to investigate. There was, you believe there was reason to investigate foreign ties to Charlie Kirk's murder and were told by the FBI, DOJ? FBI and DOJ, yeah. No, you're not allowed to investigate that. Stop. It's done. They basically cut off our access to be able to get into that information. And look, I didn't even say necessarily that I believe there's 100% foreign ties. There were data points that we needed to investigate. I mean, I think anybody who's even,

you know, looked at any kind of police investigation, you get 100 leads, you run them down, and 99 don't mean anything. We still had a lot more leads to run down that pertained to some kind of a foreign nexus that we were stopped from investigating. And, you know, that just strikes me as inconceivable that that could happen. And again, I was aware of it from reading about it, but not really to the extent that you've just described. So I would love to hear the justification for that. And can you flesh that out a little bit more? What were you told was the reason to prevent you as a federal intelligence official running the National Counterterrorism Center from looking into the murder when you had reason to look into it.

Well, the way the bureaucracy works is they can just kill things in process. So initially we were cut off pretty early on from being able to access like the files and to being able to send people out there. We sent people out initially to work in the task force. after the crisis period the first week or so, that dispersed. And we basically were told that, hey, we'll get back to you if we find any kind of foreign ties, etc., that we want you guys to look into. Meanwhile, we had already dug up a decent amount of leads. Again, I'm not saying that we had anything concrete, but we found more work that we needed to do to say that we had done our due diligence.

We were then told that, hey, you guys need to stop. You can't work on this anymore. had a bureaucratic dispute about it. Eventually, we were allowed to continue to investigate. But then in very short order, all the requests that we would make that normally different parts of the interagency with the FBI being on point would facilitate data sharing. Data sharing is a big thing that NCTC does. Those requests were just never met. Or, in my opinion, not an honest effort was given to fulfill those requests, just basic information that all.

that any competent police service, which I believe Utah has and the FBI, that they would have access to, to help us run down the leads to either confirm or deny some kind of foreign activity. So we were cut off from that. They didn't ever officially come back and say, you can't look at this anymore. All of their requests just continued to die on the vine with the various agencies that we needed to actually fulfill those requests. I just can't imagine a legitimate justification for that. I mean, maybe I'm missing something, but from a non-specialist perspective,

perspective, something horrible has happened. The U.S. government is its core function as to investigate crime, particularly murder. Here you have an agency whose job it is to run down the rabbit trails you've described, and you're stopped from doing that. We don't want the information. Right. Why would any person engaged in a legitimate pursuit say, I don't want more information? I mean, especially considering there's people posting online prior knowledge of what was about to happen. So a lot of the justification for stopping us from investigating hung on, hey, we've got the guy, his fingerprints are on the gun.

We've got a video of him jumping off the roof. Like, this is a slam dunk case. Okay, even if it is a slam dunk case that he took the shot, what about all the people who had prior knowledge? You know, all this is the basic investigative questions. How do you get there? You map it out. You know, nothing.

This isn't rocket science. I mean, this is anything that anyone of common. sense would know to ask, but basically once they caught him, once he turned himself in, and his fingerprints were on the gun, it was basically pencils down, Utah has the rest of it, there's nothing else to see here. And, you know, I'm over there thinking I'm in crazy town saying like, no, we have all these different leads that we need to run down. Just from my perspective, now the people who had prior knowledge, I think I believe most of them were American citizens, so that would be on the FBI to go run down. But again, not without saying anything specific,

There was more work for us to do on the potential of a foreign nexus. Again, not saying there is one, but we had more work to do, and we were blocked from doing that. I can't. My heart is pounding. Listen to this. I just want people listening to this to assess two things. One, are you over your skis? Are you making claims you can't prove?

No. Two, is there any conceivable motive, dark motive that you would have for wanting to know more about this murder, to wanting to investigate it? And I don't think any rational person could construct a bad motive for wanting to know. It's your job. It's the government's job. And so I think the onus is on people who are preventing the collection of information to describe why they're doing that. That's the question for them. Why wouldn't you want to know?

Specifically, you may not know the answer. Of the people who demonstrated prior knowledge of Charlie Kirk's murder online and there a number of them. Are you satisfied that all of them were interviewed by the FBI in person? I have no idea. I don't know. I just think considering they knew the guy, they knew Charlie was going to be assassinated. And there was enough of them that it wasn't just some rando who maybe he tags every TPP USA post with that. There was enough of them that there's something there. I don't know what that something is. Well, by definition. But we haven't seen any arrests. So to me, there's more work to be done. And because that could have been posted.

from anywhere that would be in the purview of the FBI or in CTC or if they're overseas. And to me, I personally did not see any effort being taken to continue to run that down. Now, I'm sure they will say, hey, we're open to anything. We'll continue to investigate. But, you know, we're coming up on several months now. Why hasn't this been done? Are you bothered by it? I'm very bothered by it.

I'm very bothered by it. I personally did not know Charlie well. but Charlie Kirk is a generational figure. I mean, he led a movement. He was speaking to millions of young Americans who came out and who voted for President Trump. And he was just a genuine great man, husband, father. I mean, how can you not like Charlie Kirk?

But also the fact that he was murdered so publicly. And yes, there's been a lot of sympathy and his movement has grown, et cetera, but actual curiosity about getting to justice, to feel. figuring out what happened, that makes me furious, that we're being blocked from that and that we're not, we're not allowed to ask the question anymore. We're just not allowed to talk about it anymore. And I think that's absolute insanity. And what does that mean? What does that mean that there's there are people and there's entities out there that don't want us looking into this? And I'm sure they're preparing the response right now. And they're saying, that's because we don't want to screw up the

Robinson trial. Like, okay, if the Robinson trial is so slam dunk, then don't worry about it. You know, he's got his fingerprints on the rifle, et cetera. But there's going to, but there's going to There was people publicly posting. They had prior knowledge of this. And I'm here telling you as someone who's involved in the investigation, there was more stones for us to overturn. And every time we asked, we were blocked. And then they, you know, leaked to New York Times. We had to blow up and we had to throw them out of the room because they're crazy, et cetera.

So it's incredibly frustrating that there's not more, especially considering how pivotal Charlie was to the MAGA movement and to President Trump, that there hasn't been a more concerted effort to find the truth. to find justice. Do you think there will be? I pray there is. I hope this helps. I know, you and I will probably take some black for it. I don't know why, and I doubt I'll be, no, I, yeah, at a certain point, I've really tried to not to say anything about it because I don't know the answers.

But I want them to be found because I believe in justice and because I love Charlie. But I think everything you have said, you know, may be dismissed as crazy or evil, but tell me how. With reference to the words you've just spoken, I don't see how someone could level a legitimate attack on you and won't stop them. You mentioned the breaches of the president's security that have been reported, one that was reported, and I can't say whether it's true.

I'm only asking to see if you know that it is true. But it's been reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu's security tale was caught twice by Secret Service attaching some kind of device to the president's, It's Secret Service Emergency Response Vehicle. I don't know if that's true. Have you heard that? I've read it in the media.

I don't know if that's true. Okay. I think the president and the vice president and several members of the cabinet going out to dinner in D.C. And the Code Pink protesters having a heads up about that to rent the table. And that's hard to do. They had to figure out where they'd rent the table. They had to kind of get the restaurant on board to a certain extent.

To me, that's kind of an almost like counting coup. It's a soft flex. It's a, I can touch you whenever I want. It was good, pink. They weren't going to do anything. We know they're just going to be kind of crazy and annoying. However, what does that mean? That means you've got real problems with your security detail.

And then, you know, a few weeks later, you have an armed police officer who's off duty, who's not part of the president's detail. Come right up and shake the president's hand. You know? And the guy's probably patriotic American, whatever. He probably just wanted to shake the president's hand legitimately. But that got a lot of public. publicity, and what does that mean?

You know, and the president, again, President Trump is very smart. I think President Trump has a gift for interpreting large sets of data. Yes. And making very, very key strategic decisions. And so when the president sees that he's got issues with his own security detail, when he sees what happened in Butler with the other assassination attempts, when he sees what happened with Charlie, I think it's reasonable to believe that somewhere in his head he thinks that, like,

maybe I don't have a choice. Maybe they could harm me or they could harm my family. And if they can't keep me safe, I believe the president deeply cares. I believe he's very courageous. I think if it was just a matter of he worried about his own physical safety. I don't think he cares. We saw that in Butler. But he does love his family and he's got a big family.

And so somewhere in his head, if they can't keep me safe, what about my family? So look, maybe the president was just simply deceived by the echo chamber we described. and that's how we got to this place. But it's also, there's a potential that there's an element of coercion, intimidation, whatever words you want to use there that is also influencing his decision making. If you were assessing a similar situation in another country,

a country not your own, and you as an expert on these questions, which obviously you are, I gave you the same data set you've just presented to me. And I said, would you say, that's just crazy even to bring that up as a possibility. Not at all. I mean, when you map out those data points, I would just say this is this,

this moves from being a possibility to potentially, depending on how you look at it and interpret it, this could be a likelihood. It would be something that I'm sure that we would debate rigorously, but nobody would dismiss it altogether. With all this data, it's not nothing. It's something that has to be looked into. Is it being looked into? Again, I don't think it is. I think that you're, with Butler, your investigative journalist found more about crooks than the entire government. The response I received from the FBI was so hostile that it confused me, and it still does confuse me a lot.

It confuses me a lot since I didn't approach the question with anything like that in mind. I mean, we put this documentary out. We got information the information described. We got a lot of his online activity, which we've been told didn't exist. And this was not an attack on the FBI. This was, of course, during the last administration with a different director. So this was hardly a partisan hit job. This is the President of the United States who I campaigned for and voted for and like and have liked for many years.

So, like, it's not an attack. And the response that I got was hysterical. Yep. That's not an overstatement. Yep. And it confuses me. Yeah. Have you had experiences like that?

There was a level of, you know, just hostility coming from, really the FBI. And some of it I think is just like a rivalry. Like, why are you looking over the shoulder? I got this. I'm very familiar with that. I mean, you know,

we're the same way in the military. So I'm sure that's right. Totally get that. They were treated like you were in the Air Force kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Like, what do you know? Like,

we're the FBI. Like, got you. But, you know, we had a role to play. And the way that we were aggressively blocked from that, I found the hostility to be above and beyond what you would,

what you would think that you'd find with just typical, you know, rivalry, bureaucratic rivalry, turf wars, those types of things. Some of that was at play, but the level of like you cannot look at this. And then for them to escalate it, to attempt to get us kicked out of the case, that to me was very surprising. Same thing with Butler, when we first started asking questions about Butler, I thought because especially that happened under the Biden administration, that, hey, we would come in and we would get the truth because, you know,

the previous administration really screwed this thing up. and there just wasn't curiosity there. There wasn't curiosity and there wasn't a tolerance whatsoever for us going after just the key questions of like, hey, did the informant that you had that was interacting with this guy, Mershant, was he in communication of anybody in Butler? I mean, basic questions to ask. Again, this is nothing that's going to blow any investigator socks off.

Just those basic questions. Like, no, no. The two aren't related. Like, you can't talk about it. You can't ask any of those questions. even when we found data actually needed to be looked in yeah I mean they would say at the time

like well the merchant case is ongoing etc like we can't we can't interfere if that case is over so I mean at this point I don't understand I think this is like a new rule which is to say a fake rule that you're not allowed to gather information about anything that might potentially

intersect with an ongoing case that's not directly related like what that who made that up I think that's just made up I don't I don't because then how do you ever investigate anything. What law school did you go to? And I asked this question and was like, yeah, cases have been overturned on this basis. And it's like, well, cases have been overturned on many bases.

But how is that, is this like the new standard? Because you would not be able to investigate anything. Right, exactly. And we want to get to the truth. So what is that for those of us falling along at home who don't have a high level of familiarity with the process? What could that possibly be? The current president was the subject of a near successful assessment.

assassination attempt like recently. And we're just not going to look into very obviously or divulge information that everyone knows they have. For example, the surveillance tape from the shooting range at which Thomas Crooks trained because it would answer the question, was he training with somebody? And if so, who? They have that footage and they won't release it. What could possibly be the explanation for that?

I know what the result is. The result is people come to their own conclusions. And this is where like crazy conspiracy theories come from. And then those conspiracy theories usually are easy to debunk or make the people saying them sound crazy. So then the actual question never gets answered. I'm sorry. Can you say that for people who haven't lived in Washington? Okay.

I try to explain this to people all the time because this has been ongoing since at least the Kennedy assassination. But this is a very serious and reoccurring thing. It's a tactic. And you just explain it better than anyone ever heard. Can you just do that again if you can recall it from memory? Yeah. I mean, so basically you give no information. whatsoever on something that's obvious that there should be information.

Right. You outlined, like there's potentially footage of crooks at the shooting range. Again, police 101, go get the tapes. Let's figure it out. If you don't want to address that question, then you just, you go silent and you say, you can't ask that question, which then creates people who come out of a kind of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions. Right.

Knowing the way the internet works, I mean, half of them, if not more, are probably going to be so far off and left field and made. by legitimate cooks or bots, that then you can just be like, oh, these people asking these questions about that tape at the video range. It's space aliens. They're all crazy conspiracy theorists.

They say it's a UAP or whatever. And so then you've just, you know, diverted all attention away from the thing that you're trying to conceal, and now everyone's focused on the crazies. And then the second someone asks a legitimate question, they're crazy. I hope everyone watching will just clip that tape

and keep it on your phone and replay it every day because that is one of the primary ways that the intel agencies and federal law enforcement influence public opinion, influence elections. That's the way they influence the perception of what's going on, but more than anything, it's the way that they hide their own behavior from the public. Yeah. So at the beginning of the administration, I think it was October, rather, it was January 23rd, it was like right after the inauguration, the president issued an executive order calling for

the total declassification, released. of all documents relevant to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963, all of them, and also documents relevant to the assassination investigation into Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General. I don't think all the Kennedy documents have been released, have they? They were supposed to be. I mean, that was the president's order. That's what was in the executive order. It's the law. The president said it and the executive order. Maybe you can't go there because of...

So, yeah. So I just want to say again, and not from you, I have been told conclusively that that has not happened. So without divulging anything that's classified, like anything from 1963 should be classified. The whole thing is insane

and an insult to citizens. I'm a middle-aged man. I wasn't even born then. It was six years before I was born, and they're telling me I can't see it. Okay. It's infuriating and it's the end of democracy. but what could possibly be the justification for keeping classified a document that the must under law be released

and that was produced generations ago. I think more of this goes to the deep state, the system, the machine, whatever you want to call it. They're not hiding something in the Kennedy files, in my opinion, because it's not like the assassins wrote down on this. day we're going to kill JFKK and they put it in a file at CIA or FBI. That didn't happen. So I don't really think there's anything that's in particularly, you know, would be earth shattering inside the files themselves. The system doesn't want to get us used to things being rapidly declassified. They don't want a president to be able to come in and say, here's an executive order and I said declassify it because the people demand it and it happens like that as fast as it could happen.

They don't want that to happen. They want to condition us that like, okay, the president, the American people elected, he may have, you know, come in and lawfully given us an order, but there's a process here. There's an interagency process. Everyone gets to check to make sure there's nothing still classified or still ongoing, even if it was from, you know, 1963 or even further back, because again, they don't want us conditioned to we can just have access to this information. And I think there's probably times where that would be appropriate, like something, declassifying something that happened last week, for instance. Yeah, there's going to be equities there and I think the American people would understand that.

I agree. But a lot of this I think is power. And so the bureaucracy, when the president says, do you classify this, regardless of what it is, from decades ago, they can't just let them have it. They all want to have their cuts on it. They want to be able to control it.

And this is the way, like, the bureaucracy and the career bureaucrats roll. And they just tell the new political appointees, like, hey, we just, you know, we really can't do that. But we'll get us to a place that mostly will get you what you want eventually. And then it all just gets killed off in process.

And there's literally no transparency at the end of the day. Or limited transparency. But that's what I think the game is here. They don't want to condition us that you can elect a president and he can automatically change the bureaucracy. I mean, this fact, the fact that the government doesn't have to tell you what it's doing, even though you pay for it, just invalidates the whole concept of consent to the government. Like, how can you give consent to something you know nothing about?

Yeah. Right. But more than that, it creates a moral poison at the center of the society. Lying is a sin. It's the core sin. And lies, baguette lies, and they, like cancer, destroy the body in which they live. Yeah. And if you care about the body, this country, if you're from here and you hope to live here and have grandchildren here, you have to fix that.

And I really think that telling the truth, radically telling the truth, is the only thing that gets you there. And the pain that that entails, and it does entail pain, there's no doubt about it in humiliation, is much smaller a price to pay than the price that we will pay inevitably and maybe soon if we don't do it. I don't think this is sustainable, this level of lying in any society. No. And if people don't think that their vote matters, that they can actually elect someone in change can be enacted. I think things go to a very, very dark place. Of course. And people lose faith in our system. And our system is based on that faith, that, you know, we get to have these elections.

In theory, hopefully, you'd hope the elections are free and fair. We've got a lot of issues there as well. But when you finally get your person in office that they're going to be able to control the government that the people pay for, that are supposed to be ran by the folks that they voted for, that they'll actually get their will implemented, or at least what's in the best interest for them implement. That's right. And that's just not the case right now. No, it's not.

So I want to end with a hopeful note. So we've been talking about this for 24 hours because I think that without even getting into it, anyone who's followed it carefully and is thinking clearly can see that the war with Iran is potentially like the end of a lot for the United States. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we could overstate the consequences of this. And I don't think I'm being hysterical. I've had three weeks to think about it. I've actually had 10 years to think about it,

because that's how long they've been pushing for it. So at this point, it feels like there's no way out. But you were saying to me this morning, in a really thoughtful way that gave me hope that you think there is a way out. And so I'm going to stand back and let you explain how you think that the United States can exit with a lot of its interests intact,

and it's honor intact, and the president's administration intact, because the political cost of this is shocking. I mean, it's not the most important thing, but like right now it's all very broken. Okay. What's the answer? It's going to take drastic action. And the good news is I believe that this is something that President Trump is uniquely qualified to fix on his own through his sheer willpower. President Trump has an amazing ability. It's almost his superpower, I think to be able to kind of breathe life into ideas and again to capture large data sets and to find leverage.

And right now it's clear that this conflict will just continue the way it is and get exponentially worse, especially if we go down the path of demanding a total surrender with boots on the ground or maybe even something far, far worse. And that is the path wrong. I mean, inevitably, if we say it's total surrender, what does total surrender mean? Now again, this is where President Trump is uniquely suited. President Trump can define his own total surrender. He's in charge. I ended my letter with, you know, you hold the cards because President Trump truly does hold the cards.

He's a very powerful, very respected leader. And what I think President Trump must do is, number one, he has to address the main issue. The main issue is what the Israelis are doing. And he needs to very forcefully, and probably with a new team of diplomats, go to the Israelis and say, you're done. We will defend you. We will make sure that ballistic missiles aren't rained down upon you. However, you are done going on the offense because this is our war. We're paying for it.

We're bleeding for it. This is not your war. If you choose to continue this offensive operation, we're out. And as a matter of fact, if you choose to continue, we will start withdrawing features of your defense system so that you will be on your own. We have to say that to them. And we have to be very blunt and we have to be very forceful. And I know a lot of people who like the Israelis are going to say, we can't. can't do that. That's wrong. They're under fire, et cetera. But if we don't do that, if we don't

address our relationship with the Israelis, even if we come up with the temporary ceasefire, we'll be right back in the same situation in very short order. So that's the first thing that President Trump must do. Address the main issue. The main issue is how the Israelis are out of control and they are driving this entire war. Address that aggressively get the Israelis to stop. How realistically, just having lived through this whole thing, how hard will that be? It will be hard, but again, President Trump can do it. President Trump can call the Prime Minister of Israel and get him to the table. President Trump can force it.

I believe that. I truly believe that he can. So I think it's doable. It's only doable for President Trump. And then from there, once we get the Israelis to stop, we still, for now, have strong allies in the Gulf. We have the Emirates, the Qataris, the Saudis, the Bahrainis. all these actors, the Umanis, they may not always agree with each other, but they're all pretty good partners with us. I think we need to use them. And again, I think we probably need to bring in

some new diplomats and we need to aggressively engage with the Iranians while we can to get to a ceasefire and to come up with a way that we can stop the killing. We can stop the destruction of not just these countries, not just the loss of more life, but basically the collapse of the energy system that we have right now so that we can open the Straits of Hormuz back up again and so that we can make sure the petro dollar is being used because right now we didn't stop the flow of oil going to the, you know, the Chinese, the Chinese are still getting their oil out and they're settling those transactions in Yuan, not the petro dollar. So we have to, once we get the Israelis to stop, we have to aggressively pursue our economic interests. And I think the only good thing in here

is that our economic interests are in line with not just the GCC countries, but also with the Iranians. Because the Iranians want this war to stop. They want to be able to rebuild their energy sector. They want to be able to revitalize their energy sector. And on this mutual cooperation to open up the Straits of Hormuz and to build back the energy sector, I think we could come up with a piece. We'd have to lift some sanctions. We have to lift some sanctions. Why wouldn't we?

We've had sanctions for decades. and according to the neocons, they had no effect on the nuclear program which posed an imminent threat. So like what is the argument we've had sanctions for decades? And I don't see how we benefited from that at all. We didn't. I mean, we just lifted sanctions on Syria because the regime changed there, but we lifted sanctions on a guy used to be the former leader of al-Qaeda. Right. Because he's pro-Israel.

So I'm pretty sure we can go ahead and lift some sanctions. It would be in our benefit to lift the sanctions. Not only would it help us in the war, but, Also, a condition of lifting the sanctions would be you will settle all transactions that you're going to get from your new oil industry that will be reintroduced to the world economy. You'll settle that in the dollar. And we need the dollar to survive if we want our country in its current state to survive as well. So the lifting of sanctions in this case very much works out in our national interest.

That to me, and I'm sure there's lots of different variations we could have of this plan, but President Trump aggressively enacting this and addressing the Israelis first and foremost. Otherwise, any kind of negotiation we try to have with the Iranians or pretty much anybody else, if we don't address the Israeli factor, they're simply not going to take us seriously. Why would they?

Precisely. Why would they? And every day that this goes on, again, the more, I have no love for anybody in power in Iran right now, but the more of the people that we, more of the leaders we kill in Iran, you're not getting to Thomas Jefferson.

It's not like if we kill, you know, 15 or 20 of them, the 16th or the 21st guy is Thomas Jefferson or he's a moderate. Absolutely not. It's very obvious to me that some of these strikes not all, but some were conducted with the intent of making a negotiated settlement impossible. And that leads me to the saddest thing, you know, a whole cluster of sad things, but the saddest thing is the bombing of the girls' school attached to the Iranian naval base. The U.S. has admitted we did it, but I'm wondering about the targeting coordinates and where those came from. Is it possible that those came from Israel? That I don't know. Are you aware of, has it been publicly reported or in previous conflicts, can you say anything that you're not constrained by?

Is it possible that could have happened? I mean, have there been strikes, American strikes, on targets in the past that you're aware of that, have used coordinates supplied by Israel. Yeah, and we share so much intelligence with Israel. So, right, of course. So it's entirely possible, but no one has said anything about it, but it's entirely possible that the coordinates were given to us by Israel. And why wouldn't they be?

Because once you start doing things like that, it's intentionally or not, it's very hard to get out of it. And obviously from the way the Israelis have conducted themselves in the Gaza war and other places, they have a much different way of fighting than we do. I mean, America definitely makes mistakes, and we, you know, we do everything that we can. I can tell you as a guy who fought on the ground, Americans almost to a fault sometimes, we do everything that we can to prevent the loss of civilian life. I mean, almost to the point where sometimes we risk our own lives deliberately to not kill

Americans, to not kill innocent civilians. So, again, this is where being in partnership, with a, or quote's partner that has very different, a very different agenda than you and a stated outcome, but then also just a different standard for how they fight. It's very dangerous. It's very dangerous for us. To be in partnership with a country that has different goals

and different standards of behavior on the battlefield. In different ways and means, yeah. They just have a whole different way of looking. So how would you describe the Israeli attitude toward the killing of innocence? Look, the Israelis are in a hard spot. And as somebody who fought, for most of my life, I think I can get into their heads pretty easily. If I was an Israeli, I think I would have the same view. I think I would say, like, well, we're going to fight them

at some point anyways. If there's civilians in that area that's militarily important to us, whatever. Like, I have a job to do. I understand that. But it's also important for us to understand our, air quotes, partners. If we're going to be in a partnership with them, we have to be clear-eyed about that. Just because they speak English and a lot of them went to school over here and we have dual citizens doesn't mean that they're going to target the same way that we do. We have to be clear-eyed about it. And that's what I think is missing. If we're going to do joint operations with the Israelis, they are going to, look, we saw what happened in Gaza. And you can say that's a horrible thing. You can say that's just the way it is, but that is the way the Israelis

fight. And so we have to go into that clear, with clear eyes and understand that's how they're going to fight and now we're going to be viewed as being not just complicit but we're to be viewed as being partners in that and again that's a very dangerous place for us to be because our object at least our tactical objectives have been pretty clear that we want to take down the ballistic missiles the nuclear program the navy and the army etc and those are military targets but we're in partnership right now with the Israelis who they're going after some military targets but they're going after a heck of a lot more that are not military targets it's a very generous of their motives.

And I mean, that's a compliment. I strongly disagree with you, but then I didn't spend my life fighting worse. And you're making every attempt to get into their perspective, even if you disagree with it,

which I assume you do. And I think that is the way to assess things. It's like, what's the other guy's perspective, even if I hate it? Yeah, and look, in the Middle East,

you're going to do business with some unsavory characters. In the world, you're going to do business with some unsavory characters. So if you're going to be doing business there, just get comfortable with the fact that some of these guys are unsavory.

I mean, the classic, I think, President Trump line really early on when he was asked if he thought Putin was a killer. And he's like, well, yeah, I mean, we're killers too. You know what I mean? He was just very logical about that and very clear-eyed about that. Again, this is why President Trump is uniquely qualified to solve this problem. Because I think he has the ability to understand things from multiple perspectives at the same time and then find our leverage and then find out what's best for for our objectives for america's

objectives yes with clear eyes and that's the way we have to be do you anticipate you'll be speaking to the president again i would welcome it i mean i spoke with him before i departed the administration how did that go it went it went great i mean not the best conversation ever you know i told him why i was leaving he heard me out he was he was very respectful he was very respectful he was very kind uh he always is And I think we departed personally on good terms. Again, I'm an adult. I understand the way I left and writing the letter that there's parts of his administration that are going to have to come after me and try and discredit me.

I understand that. But I think the president is someone who listens. And so I think he's listening not necessarily just to me and to you, but I think he is listening to a lot of different people because I think he knows at a core level this is not going well and he needs to find a way for us to get out of this. You're definitely an adult

and I wish there are more of them and I appreciate all the time you spent here. Thank you. Thank you, Tucker. I appreciate it. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next Wednesday. Thanks for watching the Wednesday edition of the show. We stream live every week.

Wednesday 6 p.m. Eastern on Tucker Carlson.com. Members can watch the show live, join the members-only chat and take part in the conversation in real time. We're grateful to be doing it and grateful that you watch it. Thank you.