TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @ReadeAlexandra
Posted - September 22, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Saved - September 24, 2025 at 5:00 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
Today is incredibly special for me as I officially became a Russian citizen! I'm grateful to President Putin for his support during my asylum process. A huge thank you to @Maria_Butina for her assistance and to @M_Simonyan and @RT_com for their encouragement. I feel so lucky!
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
This was a very special day. I am now a Russian citizen! What an honor. Thank you to President Putin for this amazing honor of signing a decree making me a citizen and keeping me safe when I applied for asylum. Thank you to @Maria_Butina who stood with me and helped me on this journey to safety. Thank you to @M_Simonyan who gave me support and helped me to apply for citizenship and @RT_com. I am so proud to work at RT. I am a lucky girl.
@RT_com - RT
Tara Reade is a Russian citizen! ‘I was under threat from the Biden regime…they said I violated sanctions’ After two years of asylum, Vladimir Putin granted her citizenship today https://t.co/afscOf1Y8C
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 1 describes learning her name with emotion, saying "I I cheered up. I was so joyful," and she immediately talked to RT colleagues. She "'fell in love with Russia so much' and 'wanna stay,'" and she applied for Russian citizenship after two years of asylum. She credits editor in chief Margarita Cemignon and others for support while she was "under threat by the US government, by the Biden regime." She notes "Congressman Matt Gates told me that I was safer to stay here in Russia," and that "Maria Butina and Margarita Simignon stepped in and kinda showed me the path to asylum." She "continued my work with RT" and, with their guidance, could "rebuild my life." She recalls fear of possible prison in the US for sanctions related to Channel One and RT, and ends: "I am very proud to work for Russia today" and that "the Biden administration didn't appreciate that."
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: So you found out just about an hour or two ago.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 0: What was your reaction when you found out you got your name?
Speaker 1: Oh, I I was actually, you know, I I cheered up. I was so joyful, and I immediately talked to some of the people at RT. You know, there's so many heroes along the way with my story that helped me when I came here, as you know, Nikki, because I was forced to come here. So and then I fell in love with Russia so much. I I now wanna stay, and so I applied for Russian citizenship.
And, when I came here, I had to seek asylum. So I had asylum for two years, before this was granted, and so it's very exciting. And the people that helped me were the editor in chief, Margarita Cemignon. And I remember when I was going through this, I was under threat by the US government, by the Biden regime. Right?
Mhmm. And my family was under threat. My life was threatened. Congressman Matt Gates told me that I was safer to stay here in in Russia, and then Maria Butina and Margarita Simignon stepped in and kinda showed me the path to asylum. I I continued my work with RT.
Mhmm. And thanks to their guidance and help, I was able to, you know, rebuild my life Mhmm. Because I was really in a bad position. It was very scary, you know, facing possible prison in The US for if I went back. They said I violated sanctions for being on channel one and had issue with me working for RT.
And I'm very proud to work for Russia today. So I've been very outspoken and pro Russia and the Biden administration didn't appreciate that.
Posted - July 22, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Saved - August 8, 2025 at 12:16 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
I'm hearing the Democrats criticize Trump over the Epstein files, but I remind them they used media and the Biden DOJ to silence me. They have no right to throw stones. I also address @RonanFarrow in a video, but my main message is for survivors of abuse and the media's complicity. Please listen.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
I am hearing “holier than thou” nonsense from the Democrats re: the Epstein files as they attack @realDonaldTrump. I would like to remind them that the Democrats weaponized media, the Biden DOJ and FBI to silence me and destroy me. They have no stones to throw. Please watch this video and yes I do go after “MeToo” reporter, Dem bot @RonanFarrow but listen to the end to my message to survivors of sexual abuse by powerful people and the complicit western media. Please listen.
Video Transcript AI Summary
In 2019, the speaker came forward about sexual harassment by Joe Biden, later revealing a sexual assault in 2020. She claims her Senate report was sealed or destroyed. She accuses Ronan Farrow, the "Me Too reporter," of discrediting her and another woman, CeCe Doan, in his podcast "Not a Very Good Murderer."
She says Farrow contacted her in 2020, raising her hopes for a New Yorker article that never materialized, and that he dismissed her claims, saying "there wasn't a there there." She believes Farrow, who previously worked for Hillary Clinton, is a political operative shaping public opinion. She says that after Biden gained power, the DOJ and FBI targeted her, analyzing her social media and communications.
She warns survivors against coming forward, stating there is no justice and that doing so led to her losing everything and living in political asylum in another country. She now works for RT as a geopolitical analyst. She advises others to remain silent to protect themselves and their families.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: So recently, I posted on social media I would be discussing power, media, and something that happened. So here we go. As you know, in 2019, I came forward about what Joe Biden did to me. I came forward slowly. In 2019, a local reporter had gotten ahold of me.
And it was a male. It was on the phone. It was not in person. And he asked me some very kind of jarring questions, and I got really kind of nervous and scared and told about the sexual harassment, but stopped short of the sexual assault I experienced. Finally, in 2020, I came forward with the entirety of what I experienced in Joe Biden, working for Joe Biden in his office because it was over a series of months, and then it culminated with the sexual assault.
And after that, when I tried to report to the US Senate, that filing has been somehow sealed in Joe Biden's records or destroyed. I don't know. Since then, I did try to report it to the US Senate. As I said, you know, that I I don't know what happened to that. That's been the subject of question, so to speak, regarding Joe Biden.
My mother also called Larry King's show. She had wanted me at the time to go to the police. But let's save to say that for decades, pretty much the only people I told were friends and family, close friends or family. A couple of acquaintances in the right kind of circumstance when it came up, I discussed the sexual assault. People have come to me and remembered, course, they were close to me.
I have my cooperating witnesses. I have all of that. I was gonna testify, as I said, I was prepared for any kind of investigation and really wanted to move forward with that. I ended up doing a interview in-depth with Katie Halper, Megan Kelly, Tucker Carlson that goes into details, if you wanna look those up, about the sexual assault. I don't wanna talk about that here.
What I wanna talk about is the way I was treated by the media, particularly Ronan Farrow and who's supposed to be the Me Too reporter. And that's the subject today. Ronan Farrow is the Me Too reporter called that because he wrote a book called Catch and Kill, which is a journalistic term. That means catching a story and then killing it. Pithy title.
He recently did a podcast called Not a Very Good Murderer. Interestingly enough, this woman, CeCe Down, a former Miss Arizona and a Trump supporter, had come forward about her sexual assault, I guess, in earlier. I don't know exactly when, but she contacted me. I did not engage with her, but rather passed it on to Ronan Farrow. That's where he got the information via email.
He has dedicated this whole podcast to basically discrediting her, talking about her rather colorful life and different things that happened to her, as well as touching on what her allegations were against Biden. In episode four right at the beginning, he talks about that, and he also mentions me. And he dismisses me as if and to listen to it, you would think that he didn't really have much contact with me. But he did. Actually, he talked to me in May 2020.
We never did FaceTime. We never met in person. He only talked to me on the phone. But I developed trust for him, so did some of my family members and my daughter. He was going to write an article supposedly for The New Yorker and said there wasn't at the end of it.
And I cried when he told me that he wasn't gonna have it. Of course, he wasn't gonna have it in The New Yorker. I mean, now that I understand The New Yorker and David Ruznick, of course, that was never gonna be in The New Yorker. David Ruznick has never written anything critical of Biden and was certainly not write such an explosive piece that would compromise him in any way. So I was silly to think that truth would prevail.
Right? But I did. I was naive, and I believed Ronan. And Ronan used a term. He said, well, there just wasn't a there there.
And he wanted, like, multiple people coming forward like they did with Weinstein. Well, Weinstein was hated by a lot of people. Joe Biden is a different story. He's a politician, president of The United States. But at this time, he was a presidential candidate.
He had access to a lot of money, a lot of power, and a lot of people that had an agenda that wanted to see him succeed. I naively thought truth would prevail, and I was wrong. Very, very wrong. I was almost bullied to death to try to be kept silent. Right?
I had social media coming after me. I had, you know, democratic operatives coming after me. And then once Biden got into power, he weaponized the DOJ and FBI and threatened to have me imprisoned. There's even still a sealed case in Northern California. I was all of my social media was analyzed, all of my communications taken in by the FBI and because I was considered a political opponent at that point because I was speaking out against Biden.
This is really a dangerous thing for survivors, but there certainly was never a safe platform for me to come forward. I came forward to Times Up at first before I went public. Anita Dunn was the founder of that. Well, Anita Dunn was already on Biden's payroll, and I didn't know it. Her PR firm was already getting paid, and then she went on to be the White House special adviser.
And law and crime did a great job of exposing this about how much money it went through the FEC that Biden received while I was coming forward about my story. So this leads me to the question about Ronan Farrow. Ronan Farrow has a previous history of working for Hillary Clinton at the State Department. He's pretty protective of Democrats. He did one a one off article on Cuomo, but basically, we even went after the survivor in that, kind of making it seem like she was difficult to work with and took his shots there.
He's basically and what makes me wonder and other people wonder, is he a political operative posing as a reporter, or is he actually just an investigative reporter? That's not really clear. I don't know the answer to that question. Maybe he's a hybrid of both. But I do know that the reporting by Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibi have revealed how much intelligence has infiltrated media to try to shape public opinion.
And Ronan Farrow definitely attempts to shape public opinion with his reporting. Case in point, his recent podcast, Not a Very Good Murderer, while he's discrediting CeCe Doan throughout the whole thing, kind of, you know, basically putting down the fact that she's a Trump supporter referring to them as political extremists, saying that they listen to disinformation, those kinds of things. He's using it to basically shape, again, political opinion, saying that, crime in America is being weaponized like that information is disinformation. To paraphrase, okay, listen to the podcast for yourself. But basically, what I got out of that is, again, trying to shape that narrative that whatever the Trump supporters are telling you isn't true, Republicans are not right.
Democrats are good. Joe Biden's good. Listen to me. I'm Ronan Farrow. I'm the Me Too reporter.
At the beginning of episode four, he also trashes me, and, you know, you would think he never even knew me. It was very painful to hear because, you know, my daughter trusted him. And at the time when she was going through a hard time, he even spoke with her about what it's like to be in a child in public scrutiny. He's the child of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, so he knows what that's like. And, you know, she really benefited from her interactions with him at that time.
And so this was really painful, really painful for her and for me and devastating that he chose to use his platform to take a shot at me rather than fairly cover what happened to me. It lacked emotional intelligence. And saying to a survivor of sexual assault is really triggering saying something like, there's no there there. And I know other sexual assault survivors that are listening are cringing because that lacks such emotional intelligence. First of all, our experiences shouldn't be condensed down to whether people believe us or not.
It's taken me a long time to try to heal from the fact that people won't believe me because it challenges their political beliefs. They simply will or even if they do believe me, they don't care. It's so painful on so many different levels what Ronan Farrow said. It's hard for me to talk about logically, but I'm trying to just lay this out logically and and in a way that's that's you can comprehend without getting you know, me crying on a video is not gonna help you. But me laying out the political facts and the actual facts and the political realities of trying to shape a narrative, I think, is more to everyone's experience.
Right? You know, so here we are. My lawyer has issued a demand letter that he remove the comments about me from episode four. There is an HBO documentary coming out. I hope I'm not mentioned in it.
I was told and warned by several reporters, and I don't mean one or two, but I mean four or five, that I would be his equalizer piece. Like, watch out for Ronan Farrow. You're gonna be his equalizer piece. I didn't really understand what that meant, and now I understand it means, basically, he'd gone after all these men. Now he had to go after women.
Now why he would choose at this point in his career five years later, and Biden's no longer in power to take a shot at me and try to discredit me as well as this woman, CeCe Doan, you know, who's an older woman. She's, like, 73. I'm older. Like, why go after older women that have no way to fight back or really tell their truth? It's really kind of sad, isn't it?
But maybe that's where he is in his career. I don't know. But I can say this. I'm gonna say something that's kind of controversial, and that is to I'm addressing to the survivors that follow me. If you are watching what I've gone through, then you know the totality.
I'm living in another country under political asylum. I've lost everything. I don't even own a car anymore. I'm away from my family, my pets, the people that I love. It's very, very difficult.
Russia's been very good to me. RT has been very good to me. I work for RT now as a geopolitical analyst. I'm very grateful for that work. But I should be able to live and work in my own country, and I can't because I came out against a powerful person.
There was no safe platform for me. So the controversial part of what I'm gonna say is this, if you had an experience like mine with a powerful person, don't share it. What I've learned about this is there is no justice. There's no fairness. Our society does not have the emotional intelligence to deal with this subject matter very well.
You will have your life torn to pieces like I did, and it's not worth it. And even if you're someone who wants to be in the public light, you don't wanna be in the public light in this way. There's a difference between being famous and notorious. No one wants to be notorious. No one wants to be like Anna Kroninow.
Right? You don't want to be seen in this light and be used as a political football, which is exactly how I'm my story is used. That's what I wanted to say. Protect yourself. Protect your family.
If I had to go back, I would have remained silent, and that's what I know now because coming forward wasn't worth it. I know in the past, I've said, oh, yes. It's worth it. You know, you you fight. You fight for I've never had any justice.
I never will. I thought under this new administration, maybe they would look at the DOJ and FBI weaponization. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe they still will.
Hopefully. But as far as investigating Biden, no one's going to do that. No one. He got away with it. He sexually assaulted me, covered it up, and then tried to destroy me to the point of almost killing me.
That's no joke. I literally almost died. So heed my words. It's not worth it. There's no one that's going to help you, and the people that are supposed to help you will harm you if you are threatening their political world.
That's all I wanted to say. As far as Ronan Farrow goes, I've learned a lesson, you know, again, to not trust those who appear that you can trust them. Time's Up taught me the same thing. You know, they weren't what they were seemed to be. They were wolf in sheep's clothing, and there's a lot of wolves out there.
So be careful. Protect your family. Protect yourself. Protect your heart. Focus on healing.
That's what I'm doing. I'm really looking in gratitude at what I do have, which is right now I have safety. I have comfort. I have a job. I have people around me here in Russia that care for me, and my family is safe.
So I'm thankful for all of that. Anyway, that's all I have to say on this matter. Take care. Don't let political operatives shape your narratives. Think critically.
Look carefully. Follow the money. Take care.
Posted - May 9, 2024 at 6:15 AM
Saved - July 7, 2025 at 3:53 AM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
I am always grateful to @TuckerCarlson and his team @TCNetwork for covering what happened to me. They allowed me again the space and a dignified platform to discuss the painful truths. They truly cover the stories that mainstream corporate media will not. Thank you Tucker.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
Ep. 103 Former Senate aide Tara Reade credibly accused Joe Biden of sexual assault. Now the DOJ is after her and she’s moved to Russia seeking political asylum. We spoke to her in Moscow. https://t.co/1C4hTc9c1T
Video Transcript AI Summary
Tara Reade's lawyer filed a tort claim against the DOJ and FBI for $10,000,000, seeking the release and expungement of her FBI files and the revealing of a sealed criminal case against her in Northern California. Reade believes she is being targeted for speaking out about her sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden.
According to Reade, the sealed case was initiated after the DOJ and FBI obtained her communications under sealed warrants. She learned about the warrants from a Twitter lawyer. Reade claims the government has harassed her with death threats, undermined her reputation, and made it difficult for her to find employment.
While in Moscow to publicize her book, Reade did an interview with a sanctioned Russian TV channel and was warned by former intelligence sources that she could be indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). A US congressman advised her against returning to the US due to safety concerns. Reade sought political asylum in Russia and hasn't seen her daughter since.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: So your lawyers have sued the Biden Department of Justice for misconduct. Tell us about the suit, why you filed it, what
Speaker 1: you hope to achieve by it. Yeah. Well, my attorney actually, had filed a complaint with the inspector general about the way I was treated by the FBI and DOJ and how they were harassing me, and they didn't receive a response. Surprise. Surprise.
So, after we waited, there was no response. He filed a tort claim, and it's for $10,000,000. And the basically, what the outcome will be, hopefully, is that they will open my FBI files and then expunge them. And the criminal case that has been opened against me in Northern California, the one that's sealed, will be revealed. And because that was opened by DOJ and FBI, where they took all my Twitter communications, now x, it's called, but, Gmail, you name it, all my social media, was taken under sealed warrants.
The only reason I know about the sealed warrants and it was publicized is because a Twitter lawyer had called, and told me that this has happened, and they had made a motion in court to tell me. And, so this case had impaneled a grand jury, so it went pretty far. So it's just, like, shy of indictment. But what are they gonna indict me for? Well, they won't tell me.
Now as an American citizen, that's infuriating. Right?
Speaker 0: But I'm I I think a lot of I am confused. I think a lot of people watching this are confused. You, of course, are most famous for recounting in public your experience of sexual assault, and I think it was a sexual assault by then senator Joe Biden in an elevator when you worked
Speaker 1: for him. Not an elevator. Corridor.
Speaker 0: A quarter. Mhmm. Beg your pardon. And unlike a lot people who make these claims, you have a con you have contemporaneous evidence in your mother's call to Larry King alive, which came out years later. It's an amazing story.
And I think it's a credible story. But what did you do wrong? How did you wind up the subject of a sealed potential indictment of a criminal investigation by the US government? What what was your crime?
Speaker 1: I think not shutting up. I think because I just wouldn't stop talking. I kept trying to push for an investigation. If you recall, Jen Saki Yeah. When she was she was asked one question one time, Peter Juicy, I think, asked the question and said, you know, about me, about Tara Reid.
And she said, oh, that's been litigated. It was never litigated. She lied outright. It's never been litigated. It's never been investigated.
You know? And and I was asking for an investigator. All they did was pay money to have media hit pieces done on me.
Speaker 0: But of course, they did. And and you were attacked. The whole believe all women thing turned out not to be true. I guess. Right.
Speaker 1: No. Honestly. Not true. There's no me too.
Speaker 0: There's no me too. But And a criminal investigation into you is a completely separate category. Yeah. And really an escalation of a kind most Americans can't understand. Like, what Why would they possibly be criminally investigating you?
Do you There
Speaker 1: were two. Yeah. I mean, one the first one was for perjury, when I was an expert witness, and it took me lawyers and thousands of dollars to clear that. They had to drop that case. And then they came at me with a sealed case, which I can't do anything about because I'm not even supposed to know about it.
Speaker 0: And this is the federal government?
Speaker 1: Federal, the DOJ, FBI. And so
Speaker 0: A seal so there is a Sealed so Soviet, it's hard to believe it's it's Yeah. What you're saying is true, but I I think it's checkable. There's a sealed case against you. They're investigating you for a crime. They won't tell you what the crime is.
Right. But it clearly is a felony or they claim it's a felony. Right. Correct?
Speaker 1: And I posted the sealed warrant. So and that's been in the media. So the sealed warrant is visible. You can see the case number. Journalists have tried to look it up.
My attorneys tried to look it up. No one will tell them what it is. Then they started coming at me, in more subvert ways, which was, you know, basically harassment, death threats. Particularly, it amped up when Marjorie Taylor Greene and representative Matt Gaetz asked me to testify in the whistleblower's panel. Like, I was going to talk about how difficult it is to be a whistleblower because I had been so targeted.
And then when I was about to testify, you know, I'll get to that part. But when I was about to testify, things really amped up as far as threats and undermining me. And it was hard to get a job. People thought I was a security threat. There were, you know, innuendos.
You know, my reputation was destroyed, and we've talked about this. So my attorney basically said, okay. That's that. You know? We're we're going to, you know, file this complaint.
And this came after, you know, when I was here in Moscow, Russia, I, came here to publicize my book and to oversee the translation of it. And I did an interview with channel one. And
Speaker 0: channel is a Russian TV channel.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. And channel one is sanctioned, apparently. And apparently, that was I was here for vacation, I had packed literally for for seven days, five days. Didn't have much with me. And then about midway through, I started getting, you know, messages that I was from former intelligence.
They were trying to get me messages, whistleblowers. Like, look, you know, you're in danger of being indicted if you go back. I talked to my lawyers about it. Indicted for what? For FARA, the Foreign Registration Act, which is the same thing they went after Maria Butina for and
Speaker 0: And Paul Manafort.
Speaker 1: And Paul Manafort. And Maria Butina, if you read there's a really good article called The Spy Who Wasn't, who really lays out why she wasn't a spy and she wasn't. She's now working for the State Duma. But, she was definitely targeted. But that set the president, Paul Manafort in her case set
Speaker 0: the But wait. Just to be clear, you're an American Yeah. Who has accused the sitting president of sexually assaulting you while you worked for him Mhmm. As a young woman. And you have evidence to prove that that's true.
Right. Contemporaneous evidence Right. I think is key. And all of a sudden, you're the criminal because you wind up in a foreign city and you do a TV interview. Is that am I missing something?
Speaker 1: Well, they in 2019, if you recall, one of the smears that they made against me was that I was a Russian asset, even though I had no ties to Russia. Immediately out the gate. That was the Biden campaign told that to The New York Times. They said that was their first response. Not a denial, not, you know, anything else.
They said, oh, she's a Russian asset. And that started in 2019 and got spread around, and then it continued on and and had a life of its own because it was spread by former Obama staff, Edward Isaac Dovier, people like that, who have some clout on social media and people listen. So, unfortunately, there was that kind of overhanging it. So when I came to Moscow
Speaker 0: So you make this allegation against the president of The United States, then a candidate. Mhmm. A credible allegation, once again. Mhmm. I wouldn't be talking to you if I didn't think it was credible.
Think it is credible.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: I think it's true. And they don't even respond. They just accuse you of being a traitor to your country.
Speaker 1: Immediately. That was the first response. Not even a denial at first. So I thought that was interesting.
Speaker 0: And the media amplified those?
Speaker 1: Oh, yes. New York Times amplified it. Washington Post did. Everyone did. Politico, you know, they did their they did their due diligence for their the empire, I guess.
I didn't really understand the media at that time. Now you have to understand, I'm a regular citizen. I don't have a PR team. I don't have lawyers. I now I have a lawyer, but then I didn't.
I didn't have resources.
Speaker 0: Where were you living?
Speaker 1: I was living in California. And, and I was really naive about, you know, the media, and now I understand. I think a lot of people in 2019, 2020 were still a little late.
Speaker 0: And just to be clear, it sounds like you've been a fairly liberal Democrat your whole life.
Speaker 1: I was. I really had, you know, really believed. I worked for Leon Panetta as an intern. I worked for Joe Biden. I worked as a Democratic operative on congressional campaigns.
I was trained by Homeland Security. I was trained by Seattle police to do to help with domestic violence. I was a train the trainer. I donated my time. I worked for for Democrats.
I believed in it. Believed in it wholeheartedly. And so it's been heartbreaking when I came forward with evidence how I was treated, how I still am treated. Like, to this day, like, I just get I mean, I I get called right now a defector, a traitor. I did back then before I left The US.
Speaker 0: I keep stepping on your story and I'm and I'm sorry. It's just it's just a remarkable story when Yeah. When you lay it out and Yeah. Give the timeline. It's just It's amazing what's happened to you.
So so just back to where you were before I interrupted you. So you're here on vacation to get a translation of your book done.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: And you do an interview with local TV and then you start getting messages from informed people who you trust. Tara, you're in you're in danger of being indicted. And what happens then?
Speaker 1: Well, I would be put into a cage because with with the FAR Act, it's a backdoor into the Espionage Act, essentially. It's the federal registration act. So you have to register as
Speaker 0: a foreign agent registration.
Speaker 1: Registration act. It's administrative. They never used to even use it, but now they're using it as a backdoor into espionage. So so, you know, you might recall the Uhuru group. Right?
Speaker 0: Very well. That you yes. The black nationalists that we defended.
Speaker 1: Right. They're being, sentenced this month up to ten years in prison. And I've read through all their whole legal case, and, you know, I have a lot of grief, so I'm interested in those things. And you know what the charge is? Sowing discord.
So I want people to really hear this because sowing discord shouldn't be a crime, and they shouldn't be able but they're being,
Speaker 0: actually Sowing discord then?
Speaker 1: Sowing discord. That's the term under the FARA Act and the backdoor into the Espionage Act. And so they're facing up to ten years in prison or more. Their passports have been taken away. The sentencing happens this month.
They're they have no ties to Russia. They simply spoke out against the proxy war against, you know, Russia via Ukraine. And for that, they've been punished. And, you know, what I want people to hear is that it's not just January 6 people that are being targeted by the DOJ. No.
It's to the left. It's to the right.
Speaker 0: That's right.
Speaker 1: It's someone like me that just had a claim against my former employer that should have been investigated properly and should have been adjudicated in a proper way. And I should have been treated with some dignity instead of having my life torn to pieces.
Speaker 0: So, again, back to the story. You're in Moscow where we are now. Mhmm. And you hear that you could be indicted or punished under Foreign Agent Registration Act for giving this interview with a local TV station. And what do you do?
How do you respond?
Speaker 1: Well, I wanted to look at all the data points. You know, I'm not an impulsive person. Like to think and I didn't have a lot of time. I mean, we're talking. I had to make this in a forty eight hour window.
Right? And so this was a lot of pressure, but I did. I took the time. I talked to my daughter for hours. I talked to my lawyer.
I got more data points of other people who had opinions that were educated. And then I talked to Matt Gaetz, and I and I am forever grateful that he took my call. And he was you know, I I wanna give him some credit here because
Speaker 0: The congressman from Florida.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Because I was supposed to go the June and walk with him on the senate floor to get my senate thing open, and I wanted to do that. And he advised me he didn't advise me. I I should raise that. He gave me information.
He basically just said, you know, I'm worried about you. I'm worried about your personal safety, and, you're good where you are, you know, that kind of thing. And he was he just said he knew how those people operated, and so he was concerned about me.
Speaker 0: Those people being employees of the US government.
Speaker 1: Right. And he sits on the intelligence committee. So when a US congressman tells you something like that, it's remark that's a remarkable data point. Right?
Speaker 0: That's a It is.
Speaker 1: A remarkable data point, and I trust him. He could because he could have easily just said, oh, sure. It'll be fine. And I did ask him. I said, please, you know, congressman, can you help me?
Can you get me off these charges? Can you and he said, no. I can't. I'm sorry. I can't.
My hands are tied. I I don't even know what they are. And sometimes some of this intelligence isn't shared, but what I can tell you is just that, I understand how these people operate. And, yeah, I'm really worried about your personal safety because I had received death threats at that point. And you think about it.
I'm not that well known. I would have been in the news maybe a day or two. Maybe you or someone else might have talked about me for a couple of times, but it would have been considered a conspiracy theory like Adam Rich. Right? And his death?
Speaker 0: Seth Rich.
Speaker 1: Seth Rich. Yeah. Seth Rich.
Speaker 0: So I what I what I find so compelling and shocking about your story is that I still don't understand what you did wrong.
Speaker 1: In their eyes, they see me as somehow being a traitorous is is the words that they use. I think, in The USA today, there was a former CIA agent who gave a quote saying that I my thoughts about America made him viscerally angry. Because I was talking about inflation. I was talking about the fact that there's 600,000 homeless. I was talking about the fact, you know, I I'm involved with geopolitics.
I have a law degree. I'm interested in it.
Speaker 0: So But you're an American. Yeah. You spent your whole life in The United States. Mhmm. You worked for the sitting president.
Yeah. Who you say sexually assaulted you. Yeah. You're upset about the state of our economy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. How does that make you a traitor? Apparently, does. And apparently, my views about the proxy war against Russia via Ukraine. And in 2019, I had I had said, and this is true, that if Joe Biden was elected, that he would go to war with Russia.
Speaker 0: You were right. Yeah. So just to bottom line, the path that you took for people who are hearing this for the first time. You decided you could not come home after that.
Speaker 1: I decided then and then I had to figure out, well, what does one do? Because you can't just like decide to stay in a country without proper paperwork and a visa. Right? Can't just like, oh, I'm just gonna hang out
Speaker 0: That would make you a stateless person.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. So I I reached out and I'm forever grateful to Maria Butina because Masha helped me and she helped me with the process of how to just the how to of applying for political asylum, which I did. And it took a few weeks. Only ten percent of those cases get accepted, but they did their they do their due diligence, and they felt that there was enough of a problem where they had to give me
Speaker 0: a This is after speaking to a US congressman who sits on the house intel committee who told you he was worried about your safety.
Speaker 1: Correct. How
Speaker 0: hard a decision was that for you? That's a big decision.
Speaker 1: It was a big decision, but it wasn't just what he said and I don't want to put this all on Of course shoulders. Yeah. It was it was several peoples and one, I can't really say who it was, but went to great risk to send me a message to say if you get off that plane, they're gonna take you into custody. For what? And violation of the FAR Act.
Probably, they were talking about violation of sanctions. There was talk that I had red notices, are, you know, arrest warrants. Like, I could have been picked up in Istanbul.
Speaker 0: By whom and for what?
Speaker 1: By The US proxy. By by you know, that that's how they do it with Interpol. They arrest on behalf of The US, like in The UAE and Dubai. I had a lawyer who actually specialized in people that have that happen to them, and she got the red notices pulled. And so now those are gone now that I'm under asylum.
But they'll extradite you from every country. So the only two countries that will not extradite an American back to America is Iran and Russia.
Speaker 0: This is a really crazy story. Yeah. It sounds like you don't have any way to get your story to an American audience.
Speaker 1: No. No. It's very difficult. I mean, I have a large, Twitter following, and I I have a podcast that I do. You know?
But
Speaker 0: But no one has called what's what's so interesting to me is we have a supposedly free media in The United States as a backstop against a check against government overreach, too much power in the hands of too few. And so it's supposed to be a self correcting system. If something truly crazy and totalitarian happens to an American citizen, our media is supposed to take an interest and alert the rest of the country so they know what's going on. So they can say, woah. Woah.
Woah. Woah. I may not like Tara Reid. I I don't agree with her or whatever, but you can't do that. You can't arrest someone for no crime or for complaining about the president.
Like, has anyone from The New York Times called you? No. Or Politico? Politico? No.
No. The Daily Beast to say, you know, tell us what's happened with you.
Speaker 1: Those those no. Of course not. Those they only do hippieces. They only and they're they're working for the empire. There there's no question.
They're just working for the you know, as proxies to US government. I mean, I think, you know, some of the reporting that Matt Taibi and Michael Schellenberger have been doing has been really valuable.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Because they've been showing how there's think tanks, actual think tanks that basically put out articles to these, and then they reprint them. They don't even change them that much. So these are planted articles. Like, there was all kinds of lies told about me that I lied about my education. Now I never lied about my education, that I defected to Russia.
I didn't defect to Russia. I was threatened with my life and my family, and I didn't want my family harmed. I didn't want to be at risk of being put in a cage. And I can't tell you what that conversation was like with my daughter, that that it was hard.
Speaker 0: Have you seen her? No. Why?
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't under political asylum, I can't leave the borders of Russia, because, you know, like, I'm under the protection. And to to be frank, I don't know when I can ever go back to The US. I don't know when there's a safe But what have you done? In their eyes, I've committed some sort of crime, and I haven't done anything.
And that's the thing. I've never committed a crime. I'm not a traitor. I'm not a spy. Not a spy for Russia.
I don't have tons of resources. I don't have a PR team. I just told the truth about Joe Biden. I told the truth about what he did to me, and I told the truth about the corruption. And I wouldn't be quiet about it.
And I I was demanding to be heard. But let's say I'm not gonna get $83,000,000 like Eugene Carroll or a perfume line like Stormy Daniels, right, or treated, like, with dignity in the press like those women were because they accused a Republican. No. I was attacked and
Speaker 0: And no one has defended you?
Speaker 1: Not really. Rose McGowan. She really has. Megan Kelly gave me a platform a couple of times. Of course, you have.
Other than that, independent media. Even the lefties, even though the the Me Too reporters, silence. You don't see any Me Too reporters coming and telling my story, do you? Never once. They protect Biden.
This is all about catch and kill. And if you recall, I went to Time's Up for help. Right? Time's Up, Roberta Kaplan, who just represented Eugene Carroll. Roberta Kaplan had to resign from Time's Up because she was smearing me and the Cuomo, you know, survivors of the people that talked about Cuomo.
And because she did that, had to resign. Time's Up was dismantled. And she went on to represent, you know, Eugene Carroll. And Eugene Carroll publicly said that she was going to now support Biden and give him money. Just it's unbelievable.
Speaker 0: It's totally evil. It's completely evil. It is evil. Where does it I I just can't get past this question and I don't want to upset you but of your daughter. I mean, you have a child in The United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's been hard. You know, I missed her graduation. She got her master's. They went after her, actually, while I was here in Russia.
The first month I was here, a bunch of democratic troll farms or whatever try doxed her photo, her work address, tried to get her fired. She was interning as a therapist. She's a therapist with children. She works with play therapy, with children who've been traumatized. And they tried to get her fired, and they they were saying it out loud and calling the work.
But luckily, you know, my daughter's work is, you know, not interested in those kinds of, you know, smears. So my daughter's fine. But, like, you know, having her face plastered everywhere because she's associated with me. My horse was almost kidnapped. They literally came and took him almost on a trailer, and luckily, the owners of the stable were there.
So I'm getting these calls at three in the morning in Moscow that my horse is being loaded on a trailer by someone I don't know who's going to take him for Joe Biden. That was what they were saying. They were taking him for Joe. Like, some so luckily, he's safe. But, I mean, it's been sort of relentless.
It's been you know? And I know public figures, you know, I don't consider myself a public figure, but other public figures do get harassed like that. But when you're a regular citizen like I am, it's it's really daunting, especially if we don't have the resources to protect yourself. Right? And which I didn't.
Speaker 0: You expect to be able to see your daughter anytime soon?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I I don't feel comfortable putting her
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: In, you know, the spotlight again. She's about to get married.
Speaker 0: Can you go to the wedding?
Speaker 1: I can't go to the wedding. And, you know, I'm upset, but you know? And I don't wanna be a victim here. I just I'm angry, and and I want Joe Biden to be held accountable. He's taken years of my life.
He's destroyed it three times over, and I'm just I'm gonna continue to fight.
Speaker 0: Tara Reid, thank you very much for talking to us.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 0: Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organization. Societies are defined by what they will not permit. What we're watching is the total inversion of virtue.
Posted - June 5, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Saved - June 5, 2025 at 8:01 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Meanwhile…. While ma and pa fighting over custody. https://t.co/o3J75LXUXJ
Posted - June 4, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Saved - June 4, 2025 at 7:34 PM
reSee.it AI Summary
This interview is incredibly powerful and moving. I'm grateful to Tucker Carlson and John Kiriakou for his bravery. Hearing about the struggles he faced for speaking the truth brings me to tears. It's heartbreaking to see how broken America is. I urge Trump to pardon John immediately; he is a hero.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
This is one of the most powerful and poignant interviews. Thank you @TuckerCarlson. Thank you @JohnKiriakou for your bravery. This recounting of what our government put you through for telling the truth has me in floods of tears as I write this. It’s so heartbreaking America is so broken. Please @realDonaldTrump pardon John immediately. He is a hero.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
John Kiriakou committed Washington’s one unpardonable sin: he embarrassed the CIA. John Brennan tried to have him executed for it. (0:00) Introduction (1:41) Speaking Out Against the CIA’s Torture Program (7:20) Why the CIA Loved Obama (19:05) Why John Brennan Hated Kiriakou (23:23) The CIA’s Torture Techniques (32:01) How the FBI Tried to Bait Kiriakou Into Committing Espionage (42:48) The FBI’s Absurd Years-Long Investigation Into Kiriakou’s Life (58:54) The CIA Set Up to Get Kiriakou Thrown in Jail (1:04:15) The Major Issue With the Espionage Act (1:15:00) Kiriakou’s Experience in Prison (1:27:36) Did Any Elected Officials Defend Kiriakou? (1:32:19) The Dangerous Legal Precedent Set in Kiriakou’s Case Used Against Trump (1:33:58) The Clinton Judge Responsible for the Sentencing of Kiriakou, Assange, and More (1:39:10) Kiriakou’s Attempt to Get a Pardon From Joe Biden (1:41:41) Obama’s Drone Strikes Against American Citizens (1:43:19) Do CIA Employees Think They’re Doing Good? (1:46:50) Kiriakou’s Thoughts on the JFK and RFK Assassinations (1:53:09) The CIA’s MKUltra Program (1:57:40) Can the CIA Infect People With Cancer? (1:58:14) How 9-11 Turned the CIA Into a Paramilitary Group (2:08:27) Ronald Reagan Was Right About Government (2:09:38) The Waco Massacre (2:12:18) How CIA Employees Get So Rich (2:14:01) FBI Agent Apologizes to Kiriakou (2:16:32) How to Forgive Your Enemies Includes paid partnerships.
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 1 claims MK Ultra caused suicides and that CIA shrinks were used on operations, including one where a man's arm was hypnotized in the air for two hours. The CIA, post-9/11, shifted from intelligence gathering to a paramilitary organization focused on high-tech surveillance rather than recruiting spies. Speaker 1 was approached by an FBI agent posing as a Japanese diplomat attempting to elicit espionage.
Speaker 1 went to jail for revealing in an ABC interview that the CIA had a torture program, authorized by the president, who then lied about it. No torturers were prosecuted. After Obama's election, John Brennan allegedly reopened the case against Speaker 1 due to personal animosity, seeking an espionage charge, despite lacking evidence. The FBI then tried to set up Speaker 1 to commit espionage.
Speaker 1 believes the CIA uses psychological profiling on presidents, manipulating them. Congress is now cheerleaders for intelligence agencies instead of providing oversight. The CIA is forbidden from spying on American citizens, but NSA leaked Speaker 1's information to the New York Times. Torture doesn't work, and the CIA used techniques that led to deaths.
Speaker 1 was charged with espionage, making a false statement, and violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The speaker took a plea deal to avoid a longer sentence. The CIA objected to Speaker 1's placement in a minimum-security prison. The speaker believes elements of the CIA were responsible for JFK's assassination. The speaker also claims mind control is not science fiction and that the CIA talked about infecting people with cancer.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Do you think it is possible to get people to commit acts that they wouldn't otherwise commit?
Speaker 1: I do. MK Ultra caused people to jump out of windows and commit suicide. Yeah.
Speaker 0: You said there are a lot of shrinks at at CIA.
Speaker 1: I used those those shrinks on operations. We even hypnotized one guy. He was hypnotized with his arm in the air for two hours.
Speaker 0: Would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency?
Speaker 1: Not anymore. It used to be until 09:11, and then it became a paramilitary organization. What they would rather do is fancy high-tech satellites and drones, and they're not really in the business anymore of recruiting spies to steal secrets. I got a call from a Japanese diplomat, and he said, hey. Let's have lunch.
I said, great. He said to me, so what's next for you? And I said, I think I'm gonna resign soon. And he says, no. If you give me information, I can give you money.
He was an FBI agent What? Trying to get me to commit actual espionage.
Speaker 0: The FBI did that to you? Mhmm. We got a down actually. Yeah. I mean, your only crime was an ABC interview in which you say, yes, the CIA does have a torture program.
I know because I worked there, and the president authorized it and lied about it in public. That's that's that's your sum total of your crimes.
Speaker 1: That was it.
Speaker 0: It's pretty unbelievable you went to jail. I think when nine eleven happened, you were one of how many CIA officers at the counterterrorism center spoke Arabic?
Speaker 1: Oh, at the counterterrorism center? Two? Two.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So you have this distinguished CIA career. No one outside the CIA has heard of you, but in the CIA, you're very well known, helped capture an al Qaeda operative in Pakistan, risked her life as an operations officer, and then you leave CIA, and you mentioned in an ABC News interview in 2007 that the CIA is torturing people, which it was Yes. Illegally Yes. And is a stain on the country, didn't make the country safer.
You say that, and you wind up in jail. I sure did. Did any of the people who were torturing other people wind up in jail?
Speaker 1: Not a single one. The the torturers I'm crazy. It's nuts. It's nuts. The torturers didn't go to jail.
The people who conceived of the torture, the people who funded the torture, appropriated taxpayer money for the torture, the people who implemented it, nobody went to prison but me.
Speaker 0: And what's I guess what's so funny is when you think of whistleblowers complaining about something like torture, you think of, like, I don't know, some you know, the Berrigans or some, you know, professional peace activist, but you're you're like a I was a true believer. But you were a CIA operations officer. Yes. Like, doing the war on terror.
Speaker 1: Specifically, a counterterrorism operations officer. Yes.
Speaker 0: And so you were hardly you were hardly something like No. I was no pleading type. Right. No. And you went to jail.
Amazing. So can you just just to come to the point of the story where you're you're out of the CIA, you're working at Deloitte Yes. And you give this interview to Brian Ross at ABC. Right. One of the few, I think, pretty honest ABC reporters who, of course, left ABC.
Agreed. Too much honesty for them. And what happened then? This was '2 that was 2007 during the Bush
Speaker 1: Right. It was in February. Yes. So I I went on this interview with Brian Ross, and I said three things. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.
I said that torture was official US government policy, and I said that because president Bush had specifically said, we do not torture. I knew that wasn't true.
Speaker 0: Where did he where did he say
Speaker 1: that? He said that in a press conference at the White House in February. And I said that the that the torture had been personally approved by the president, which was also true. And so within twenty four hours, the CIA Wait.
Speaker 0: Wait. How did you know that, by the way?
Speaker 1: Oh, because I was Were were you just guessing? Oh, no. I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. So I was intimately involved in the planning for all of this nonsense, not just torture, but the Iraq war as well. And I was watching the rule of law just be thrown to the dogs almost on a daily basis, and I decided whatever Brian Ross was gonna ask me, I was gonna tell the truth.
That's what I did.
Speaker 0: So that was in late two thousand seven?
Speaker 1: Late '2 thousand '7, December of '2 thousand '7.
Speaker 0: So the president authorized this. Again, didn't make the country any safer. No. The whole thing really hurt the country, but and then lied about it in public, which you're not supposed to do. I mean, you're not supposed to do that.
Speaker 1: And No. You're just not supposed And you
Speaker 0: said those three things, which are factually true.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. And then what happened? Well, the FBI began investigating me the next day, and they investigated me for a full year from December of o seven to December of o eight.
Speaker 0: Did they tell you they were investigating you?
Speaker 1: No. I read about it in CNN.
Speaker 0: So how are they how are they investigating you?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know. They never sought to interview me. I I ran out and I hired an attorney, and and we leaked that to the press that, oh, I'm represented by this legal giant in Washington DC. It was it was Plato Kacharis who's no longer longer living.
Speaker 0: But one of the most famous lawyers in The
Speaker 1: United famous lawyers, the greatest in Washington. And they never contacted him. I I really don't know what constituted an FBI investigation. But a year later in 02/2008, they dropped the case, and they said that I had not committed a crime.
Speaker 0: But when they investigate you, what does that do you have any sense of what that means? Like, are they
Speaker 1: In the subsequent investigation, which we can get to, it was very clear what it meant. But in that year, I think what they did, and I'm speculating here, is that they went over the ABC News interview and a subsequent interview I did with the New York Times. They parsed it, and they decided that I had not committed a crime. Now in the declination letter that they sent to my attorney declining to prosecute me, they said that it was illegal to classify a program if the program is illegal.
Speaker 0: But can I ask you, is it a federal crime to say the president is lying? No. Oh, it's not. Oh, so you're allowed in The United States, you're allowed if you see a politician lying, you can say that person is lying?
Speaker 1: Call them on it. Okay. That's right. Okay. Just just wanna because it is America after
Speaker 0: all. Right. Just wanna make sure. Okay. So so they invest the FBI spends a year investigating you because you say the president is lying.
Yes. Totally normal. Yeah. And you don't know that they're investigating you because they never contacted you or your lawyer.
Speaker 1: Never contacted you, one of us.
Speaker 0: So then 2008 rolls around, Bush leaves after two terms, Obama gets elected. Yes. And he's very much the peace candidate. He's for transparency.
Speaker 1: Well, like to say that it was Saint Obama that came down from the heavens Right. Into the into the White House Black
Speaker 0: Jesus returns.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: And but he's very much I mean, I remember, in fact, being on on television saying, you know, he was this wild eyed peacenick lefty guy.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. Oh, no. He wasn't.
Speaker 0: Oh, he wasn't.
Speaker 1: You know, this is something that I've puzzled over for a long time, and I've come to the conclusion that the CIA, at the top levels of the CIA, they they really love it when a new president is elected, and he has no background in intelligence or foreign policy. Usually, Donald Trump is a very unique figure in this in this scenario. Very unusual. But Barack Obama, two years as a senator. Two years as a senator.
No experience in foreign policy. No experience in intelligence. The day after an election, the director of the CIA authorizes a president-elect to begin receiving a PDB, a president's daily brief. And so the day after the election, they go with this this 16 page document marked at six levels above top secret, and they say, mister president-elect, wait till you see the cool things we're doing all around the world, and they've sucked him in. They made him one of the guys, and every day they're like, wait till you see the update on what we told you yesterday.
It's incredible. And then we get the the feedback at the CIA. Oh, the president loved this. The president had a follow-up question on that. Oh, the president said, oh my god, when he read this.
That's Well,
Speaker 0: think you're psychologically profiling the president.
Speaker 1: Oh, I think I think that's exactly what they do. And don't forget, they have an entire staff of psychiatrists and psychologists that do exactly that.
Speaker 0: And so they use the tools that they have employed for decades to subvert foreign governments to subvert their own government?
Speaker 1: Yes. But they smile while they're doing it, and they say, no. No. We're just trying to forge a good working relationship with the president. In fact, for a while in the nineties, they didn't even call him the president.
They called him the first customer. Oh god. Swear to god. Is
Speaker 0: there I know we're getting far afield and we look it back to your story, but it it it it doesn't sound like so if you look at the org chart, the president controls CIA. Yes. But you're describing a situation where CIA kinda controls the president.
Speaker 1: You know, this is another problem. It's that presidents come and go every four years, every eight years. But these these CIA people, they're there for twenty five, thirty, thirty five years. They don't go anywhere. And so if they don't like a president, or if a president orders them to do something that they don't want to do, they just wait because they know they can wait him out, and then he's not gonna be president anymore, and they can continue on with whatever plan the blob or the deep state wants to implement.
You know, Donald Trump took a lot of guff in his first term when he used on a regular basis the term deep state. And I argued from the very beginning, it is a deep state. Maybe you don't like the terminology. You don't have to call it the deep state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy.
You can call it the state. But the truth is that it exists.
Speaker 0: I I would say by definition mean, you just described it. The president and by the way, the elected representatives who are the instrument of the population through which they control their government, you know, are perennial. They come and go. Oh, yeah. The people who carry out those orders remain.
Over time, they are the ones with the power.
Speaker 1: Right? And then when they get caught, they scramble. I remember Jane Harmon. She was a congress congresswoman from Venice, California. She was the chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee during the Iraq war, and she was briefed on the torture program.
Well, when I went public on the torture program, reporters had questions. Well, did Congress approve this? Of course Congress approved it, and Congress appropriated money for it. So she's the chairman. And reporters went to her and said, hey.
What about this torture program? And she said, I didn't know anything about the torture program.
Speaker 0: She's a liar.
Speaker 1: She was lying. And I said, and I remember saying it to the New York Times, I said, she was in the room when it was briefed. Yeah. And when she was challenged, she said, oh, yeah, I remember that day, but you know what? I got up and I left early, and I left one of my aides as a notetaker, and he never briefed me, which is also a lie.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, she was just a pure tool of the intel agents
Speaker 1: That was it.
Speaker 0: And of foreign government.
Speaker 1: And that's an ongoing problem on Capitol Hill is rather than being overseers, they're cheerleaders for the intelligence.
Speaker 0: So how that is absolutely true, and I've I've known them all, and you know, if you criticize any of the intel agencies, particularly CIA, is the most powerful, they're immediately defensive Oh, yes. About it. You know, like it's their job to defend these agencies when in fact their job, as you said, is to oversee these agencies and to keep them within the boundaries of the constitution.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: How does that happen?
Speaker 1: You know, I say all the time that we really did have real oversight for a while from the seventies into the 1980s, a decade, a decade and a half, where people really did exert influence over intelligence policy by really examining some of these covert action programs. But Pat Moynihan is dead, and Barry Goldwater's dead, and all these other senators and congressmen, Otis Pike, they're all gone. They're all dead. And now we've got people who just egg on the intelligence communities, and I'll give you Oh,
Speaker 0: I knew them.
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example. When I got out of prison, I was invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence, and I went, and there was a senator there, a Democratic senator there, who's a member of the Intelligence Committee. And so he came up to me and he said, hey, welcome home. We were really worried about you. And I said, oh, thank you.
I said, senator, I've got to tell you, I was disappointed that you didn't say anything, you didn't express any support or or anything related to my case, and he got very angry. And he said, listen. It took everything I had just to not lose my security clearance. And I said, so you're afraid of them. That's what this is.
And he walked away.
Speaker 0: That's disgusting. Mhmm. That's disgusting. But I think you can go through, certainly in the senate, you can go through the roster of the, you know, the hundred members of the Senate and then compare it to the list of the permanent you know, the Committee on Intelligence, and those are the worst those are the most dishonest people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They are. Yeah.
Speaker 0: They are. The the most rotten, the most morally compromised, the most dishonest by far.
Speaker 1: I have to agree. That was
Speaker 0: my happen? Like, sitting on the the senate intel committee is, like, just a sign that,
Speaker 1: you you know, you You're one of the in crowd.
Speaker 0: Worse than that. Yeah. Like, you're not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. No. I agree.
How? How do they identify the most morally compromised people?
Speaker 1: You know, I I wonder if if this began with nine eleven. I think that it didn't. I think it began earlier than that, like during the Clinton administration where everybody just where the the intelligence community was seen as a a force for good Yes. Which was odd to me.
Speaker 0: Well, mean, that's how I grew up thinking that for sure. I mean, it was not even questioned.
Speaker 1: When I first joined the agency, they were still sort of getting over the whole church committee era. And then when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, we were told that there were going to be big changes at the agency, and indeed, one of the things that Clinton did was he ordered what they called a cull. So we had to go through the files of literally every recruited agent in the CIA, and if they had any human rights problem, they were fired. Right? We just cut off contact with them.
And I remember thinking, wow, they're actually serious about this. I'm I'm very pleasantly surprised. But then nine eleven happened. And not only did that go out the window, the pendulum swung so far to the other side that it has yet to go back to its point of equilibrium.
Speaker 0: And then just naturally, inevitably, predictably, the tactics that that and other agencies used against foreign governments were used against the US government, the elected government, and the and the population of the country.
Speaker 1: I know you and I agree on this. We've talked about this in the past, but the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on American citizens, as is NSA. It's a part of NSA's charter that it may not collect the communications of American citizens or US persons.
Speaker 0: They say NSA spied on me. They leaked the information to the New York Times.
Speaker 1: And leaked the information. I remember it very well. To control me. Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Right? Oh, it's illegal. Guess what happened?
Speaker 1: Nothing. And here again, congress just says, well, what are we gonna do?
Speaker 0: Yeah. We're afraid of them too. Mhmm. So here's a company we're always excited to advertise because we actually use their products every day. It's Merryweather Farms.
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So we'll get back to all this, but I just wanna return to the thread of what happened to you. So Obama gets elected, and you've gotta think because your your real crime was calling the president a liar Yeah. George W. Bush, you had to have thought that once he was gone, you know, it was gonna be forgotten.
Speaker 1: When because what
Speaker 0: you said was true.
Speaker 1: That's right. And when my attorneys received this declination letter, my wife and I actually went out and celebrated that night. We went out and had dinner. I had no idea that three weeks later when Barack Obama became president, that that's when my trouble was really going to start. Obama initially named John Brennan as the CIA director.
Liberals were up in arms at the time, and so that nomination was withdrawn, you may recall, and he named Brennan instead the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. John Brennan and I always hated each other. I don't know why he hated me. I hated him for what were very clear.
Speaker 0: He seems like such a marvelous guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, such a sweetheart. I found him to be a very dark figure, very dangerous, willing to take risks that no one should take without appropriate congressional oversight. And frankly, I said this on your show one time, and I don't mean to sound like, you know, that guy, but I thought he was in over his head intellectually in that position. He was
Speaker 0: cut out that When did you meet him?
Speaker 1: I met him in 1990, January of '19 '90.
Speaker 0: Over thirty five years ago?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: Okay. So it's fair to say you Oh, I knew him very,
Speaker 1: very well. In fact, when I was the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, John was the first, he was the deputy executive director and then executive director of the CIA. So he was the number three officer in the CIA, while I was the assistant to the number four officer in the CIA. So I briefed him every single morning, and we just did not like or respect one another.
Speaker 0: So Why didn't you like or respect him?
Speaker 1: First of all, I thought he was unqualified, number one. John made a life in analysis, but he struck up a very close friendship with George Tennant when George was at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. George became the deputy CIA director and then CIA director, and every time George got promoted, he promoted Brennan. But he promoted him into jobs that he simply wasn't qualified for, Like the station chief in Riyadh. This is a guy that had been an analyst for, you know, twenty something years, and you're gonna make him the station chief?
Not only has he never recruited an agent, he's never even met one. And that's who you want in charge of of operations?
Speaker 0: In Riyadh? In Riyadh? Places. One of
Speaker 1: the most important Yeah. Places in
Speaker 0: the Complicated place.
Speaker 1: Very complicated. And then when he went back, he he named him the deputy executive director. So he's running the day to day operations of the entire CIA, the whole thing. It just didn't make sense to me.
Speaker 0: So you thought that he was unqualified, but it sounds like you thought that he was morally unqualified also.
Speaker 1: Oh, I I always believed he was morally unqualified. John had a reputation as being vindictive. He had once worked for a woman who didn't like or respect him, and she let him go. He got a job briefing George Tenet at the National Security Council, and then when George was promoted, he promoted John to the point where he called this woman in and he fired her. Like, was that really necessary?
You could take the high road. There's no reason to be that guy that you just go in and start, you know, trashing your enemies. But that's what he did. And there was a group of there was a group of guys that that came of age with him, and he all promoted all of them with with himself, with his rising boat. They all went to the to the top.
And I'll tell you too, I was in operations at the time working for people who had spent thirty years in operations, and they disliked him with with a special kind of passion. And it was because they didn't respect him either. It was clear. Interesting.
Speaker 0: You you said he was dangerous?
Speaker 1: I always thought that he was dangerous.
Speaker 0: Why? Yeah. That's a strong thing to say about somebody.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I'm gonna get on my soapbox again, so forgive me, but we're a nation of laws. Right? We're a nation of laws, and whether you like the law or you don't like the law, you have to respect it, or you work to change it. You can't just pretend that the law doesn't exist.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: Oh, we're the good guys. So let's let's talk about the torture program for a second. Here he is, the number three in the CIA, and the leadership wants to implement a torture program. Okay. We've got this thing called the Federal Torture Act of 1946 that says, you can't do that.
In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. We executed. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. In January of nineteen sixty eight, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The day that that picture was published, the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an investigation.
That soldier was arrested. He was convicted of torture and sentenced to twenty years at Leavenworth. But then in 02/2002, like magic, it's all legal.
Speaker 0: So waterboarding has been around a long time.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's been around a long time. The Chinese actually invented waterboarding
Speaker 0: Of course they did.
Speaker 1: In like the fifteenth century.
Speaker 0: Can you explain waterboarding for a moment? Sure.
Speaker 1: So a prisoner is strapped to a board with his feet elevated compared to his head. There's something put in his mouth, like material, a cloth, burlap, whatever, and then water is poured on his face. So it's supposed to give you the feeling that you're drowning. In fact, in many cases, you are drowning because a lot of water is getting past that that cloth. In the case of Abu Zubaydah, and we can talk about him later if you want, we drowned him.
His heart stopped beating, and he had to be revived so that he could be tortured more. That's what waterboarding is.
Speaker 0: Why is it done?
Speaker 1: The idea is this is this is a term that the CIA came up with. The idea is to instill the feeling of learned helplessness in the in the prisoner so that the prisoner is so terrified of you, so terrified of what you can do to him that he'll whimper as soon as you walk into the room and just confess everything that you want him to confess to. But the problem is that torture just simply doesn't work. This is a proven fact that decades of scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists have proven it doesn't work. And so the prisoner will tell you what he thinks you want to know just to get you to stop torturing him.
You know, we know from from prisoners held in North Vietnamese prisons, American prisoners, that when asked, well, who was on your ship? What were the names of men on your ship? They would recite, like, you know, the the the Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line from 1968 or just make up names or childhood friends just to get them to stop torturing. So it just doesn't work.
Speaker 0: So what was the process post 09:11 for for waterboarding? I mean, I noticed that in the later reports, some of these guys were waterboarded, KSM for example.
Speaker 1: 87 times.
Speaker 0: 87 times. So was was he coming up with the offensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers every time? Like, why would they keep doing that?
Speaker 1: Well, he even well, were they were convinced that he knew the location of Osama bin Laden, and that he knew what the plans were for the next attack on The United States. Well, there were no plans for the next attack. Sometimes there would be, you know, 10 or 12 guys sitting around a campfire in Afghanistan saying, you know, we should do we should attack, you know, we should attack the Chicago stock exchange. Oh, yeah. That's what we should do.
Okay. That's that's not an that's not a plot. That's just some guy at a campfire just throwing it out there. So they were convinced that there was another plot planned and they wanted to get it.
Speaker 0: But 187 times like that.
Speaker 1: And KSM ended up confessing to the Daniel Pearl murder, which we know for a fact he wasn't even in Pakistan when Daniel Pearl was murdered.
Speaker 0: He confessed to it?
Speaker 1: He confessed to it. Mhmm. And then when they showed him the video showing that it wasn't his arm that was sawing off Daniel Pearl's head, he's like, no, look, look at the hair on that arm. My arm's that hairy, that's my arm. No.
You didn't kill Daniel Pearl. Stop saying
Speaker 0: A lot of hairy people in the region. Exactly. Yeah. So but but a 87 times? Mhmm.
Speaker 1: And Abu Zubaydah, eighty three times.
Speaker 0: They waterboard him 83 times.
Speaker 1: It worse than that. You know, there's this conventional wisdom that waterboarding was the worst. It was sort of the top of the list of torture techniques. There were worse techniques. We killed people with other techniques.
For example, the cold cell. So you're stripped naked, you're chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't sit or kneel or lay or get comfortable in any way. Your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and then every hour, a CIA officer goes into your cell and throws a bucket of ice water on you. And people died of hypothermia. We the Justice Department didn't say we could murder people.
They said we could use these, you know, different techniques. They didn't say we could use this cold cell. That was just made up.
Speaker 0: And people died? Mhmm.
Speaker 1: There was another one, well, sleep deprivation. The American Psychological Association, the APA, has published studies saying that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep. They they begin to die at day nine. Their organs begin to shut down. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for twelve days, and people just drop dead as they're being kept awake with that eyebolt in the ceiling again, and strong lights, and hard rock, you know, death metal music twenty four hours a day on a loop.
You go crazy, and then your organs just don't work.
Speaker 0: Do we have any idea how many people died under torture?
Speaker 1: The CIA has never said. They it it was in the senate torture report, but it was redacted, so we don't know the number.
Speaker 0: What's your sense?
Speaker 1: At least a half a dozen.
Speaker 0: We're tortured to death. Yeah. To death. We're always looking for cool companies that make products that make you feel better, and that's how we ran into Boncharge. Boncharge offers a wide range of products that improve your physical condition, help you sleep better, perform better, and center your mind, recover faster, maintain energy, etcetera, etcetera.
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Sure. But as objectively as you can, do you think there was a lot of useful information produced by all this torture?
Speaker 1: No. Not by the torture. Listen, it it's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI. It really is. You know, when I've had 22 FBI agents raiding my house and taking all my stuff, but if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations.
And they proved it with Abu Zubaydah. They proved that if you treat a prisoner with respect and engage in rapport building, and take some time to build this relationship, the prisoner will tell you everything that you want to know, and that's what happened with Abu Zubaydah. But every time the CIA would step in and begin torturing him, he would clam up, like completely clam up, and then the FBI would have to go back in, try to reverse the damage, and start the whole thing over again.
Speaker 0: So you gave that interview at the end of 2007 in which you said really just it was pretty spare interview. It was. You didn't go into any detail. No. Investigation happens.
It's dropped. Obama gets elected. A month later, John Brennan, I interrupted you.
Speaker 1: I had no idea that John Brennan asked Eric Holder to secretly reopen the case against me.
Speaker 0: So you think he did that? Think Of all the problems We're going out in the world.
Speaker 1: In the world. Right. I think for two reasons. Number one, he genuinely disliked me, and he has this history of going after people using lawfare, which now we all know what that means, using lawfare to take down his enemies, number one.
Speaker 0: Lawfare understates it. Violence, I mean, they came to your house, They cuffed you. They threw you in a cell. Oh, yeah. Like, those are acts of violence, force they're
Speaker 1: using Right. That's right.
Speaker 0: So if you'll do that, if you'll take a man from his five children Mhmm. And lock him in a cell for years.
Speaker 1: And they fired my wife just because she was married to me. She was a senior CIA officer.
Speaker 0: Okay. So you've answered the question, how is John Brennan a dangerous man? So he goes to the then attorney general, Eric Holder, and says, we need to reopen. Of all the problems that we've got, we need to make sure John Kiericu goes to jail.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We we received 15,000 pages of classified discovery in my case, but we found in that discovery three memos. There was a memo from John Brennan to Eric Holder saying, charge him with espionage. Espionage? Espionage, which can be a death penalty charge, I might add.
Speaker 0: Who are you spying
Speaker 1: for? Exactly.
Speaker 0: Who? Well, did they allege you were spying for somebody?
Speaker 1: No. What they said is that I told the media that the CIA had a torture program, and so because the media published it, our enemies knew that we had this top secret program.
Speaker 0: But how is that espionage?
Speaker 1: I know. It's not. So Holder writes back and says, my people don't think he committed espionage. Sure. And then and then Brennan wrote back and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.
Speaker 0: To use the f word. This is my new this is my new thing, self improvement journey I'm taking, but it it's making me mad hearing this because, I mean, you were in I happened to be in Pakistan around the time you were very dangerous country. Oh, I wasn't doing anything dangerous.
Speaker 1: Oh, no.
Speaker 0: It was Super dangerous place. The most dangerous place I've ever On
Speaker 1: Earth Yes. Time.
Speaker 0: Yep. And so you're it's not an overstatement to say you're risking your life, father of all these kids, to fight the war on terror against the Islamic terrorists.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And now they're accusing you of aiding those terrorists? Enemy.
Speaker 1: It gets worse.
Speaker 0: That's really over the top.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I I don't think I've ever told you this story, but when I was on the senate foreign relations committee, I was the senior investigator. And so one of the great things about that job is you get to have lunch with diplomats from around the world and just talk about the issues of the
Speaker 0: You were working for CIA at the time?
Speaker 1: No. Was working for John Kerry Yep. When he was the chairman of the foreign relations committee.
Speaker 0: When was this?
Speaker 1: 2009 to 2011.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: So I got a call from a Japanese diplomat, and he said, hey, let's have lunch. I said, great. So we meet at a restaurant on Capitol Hill. His English was so bad that we had to do the lunches in Arabic. Right?
He was an Arabist, and I I'm an Arabist, and so we would have our lunches in Arabic. And I remember what we talked about in that first meeting. I know it's absurd, isn't it? You and the Japanese guy speaking Surprised somebody didn't call the cops. So we talked about the Israeli election, the Turkish election.
We talked about the peace process. I remember it very clearly. And at the end of it, he said to me, so what's next for you? And I said, I think I'm going to resign soon. I promised senator Kerry that I would give him two years.
It's been two and a half, and I have five kids that I need to put through college. And he says, no. Don't do that. If you give me information, I can give you money. And I said, what in the world is wrong with you?
Do you have any idea how many times I've made that pitch? Shame on you for cold pitching me. And I indignantly got up and walked out, and I went directly without stopping to the office of the senate security officer. And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer. I need to report it.
He said, was it that damn Russian again? And I said, no. It was Japanese. He said, Japanese? Well, occasionally, they're poking around looking for trade secrets.
So he said, sit at this stand alone computer, write it up, and I'll send it to the FBI. I said, fine. I wrote the entire thing as a memo. He sent it to the FBI. The next day, he calls me and says, two FBI agents are gonna come up.
They wanna interview you. I said, great. I go back down to the security vault, and these two young FBI agents come, I tell them the story again, and they said, okay, here's what we want you to do. We want you to call him back and invite him to lunch, and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he's looking for and what he's willing to pay for it. And because I'm a patriot, I said, do you want me to wear a wire or something?
And they said, no. We'll just be at the next table. We'll listen to everything.
Speaker 0: You're such a boy scout.
Speaker 1: I know. Right? I love Well, kind of. I mean,
Speaker 0: everyone who lives in DC get know, has had something like what you described, but I've never heard of anybody going to the authorities over
Speaker 1: it. So the morning of the lunch, they called me and said something came up, we can't do it. So do the lunch and write another memo. So I did, and I wrote up a comprehensive report, I sent it back to the FBI. Then they asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time, which I did.
And in the final lunch, it was a place in Georgetown.
Speaker 0: Which place?
Speaker 1: It was on Lower Wisconsin, the famous Italian place.
Speaker 0: Oh oh, where they give you after dinner drinks at the end
Speaker 1: Yes. And the ladies in the front window making the pasta.
Speaker 0: Such a great restaurant.
Speaker 1: Filomena. Thank you. Sorry. Forever.
Speaker 0: I love Filomena.
Speaker 1: It's wonderful. It really is wonderful. So I do it, and in that final lunch, he says, I got promoted, I got my dream job, I'm going to be the number two at the Japanese embassy in Cairo. I said, congratulations. I shook his hand.
I never talked to him again. A year later, I've been arrested, and we get discovery, and we see that there never was any Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent What? Trying to get me to commit actual espionage, but I kept reporting the meetings back to the FBI. And then there was a there was a memo to Peter Strak who actually put Not really.
Put the cuffs on me in in 2032. The Peter Strak? The Peter Strak. He actually I'll get to that in a second. But one of the one of the FBI agents wrote to Peter Strok and said, we should end this operation.
He's clearly not gonna take the bait.
Speaker 0: No way. And I said
Speaker 1: to my lawyer, why would they do this? I'm a patriot. The FBI did that to you? Mhmm. Mhmm.
Because I hadn't committed espionage.
Speaker 0: We're burn down down, actually. Yeah. I mean, that's Yeah.
Speaker 1: John Brennan specifically said, charge him with espionage. Well, I hadn't committed espionage. And so they're trying to get me to commit it so they can charge me. I kept reporting it back to them.
Speaker 0: Who was the guy? The Japanese diplomat.
Speaker 1: No. He was just an an Asian FBI agent who didn't speak a word of Japanese, but he did speak Arabic. So he pretended No. You're blowing my mind. He pretended to not speak English so that I wouldn't be sure this happened?
%. It's all it was all in the discovery. But Brennan said charge him with espionage. And they were like, okay. Well, we gotta charge him with espionage.
Speaker 0: To create the crime Mhmm. In order to fit the charge.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. And what happened? They charged me with three counts of espionage. Wait. How can you believe that?
Speaker 0: It's so, like, I have friends who have a lot of interesting information on the Oklahoma City bombing. Oh. And my brain doesn't wanna go there.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Same with January 6. Same with a bunch of different operations the FBI has been involved in where it seems pretty obvious they're trying to get people to commit felonies, acts of violence, acts of terrorism. And I'm like, I just I I can't bring myself to believe that that happens in The United States, but you're describing it.
Speaker 1: Oh, Tucker. I was in prison with this poor guy. This guy was just a just a dope. And he and a couple of buddies were in a bar one day in Cleveland, and this other guy was there drinking with him, and he said, hey. You know what would be fun?
We should blow up the Route 82 Bridge. And they were saying they were drunk. They said, yeah. That would be so much fun. I'll I'll get the explosives.
Well, he's an FBI informant. The FBI gives inert explosives. These idiots go out to the Route 82 Bridge and try to blow it up. It doesn't blow up. And then the FBI comes out from behind the bushes.
They got twenty, twenty five, and thirty years in in prison.
Speaker 0: Why would they do that to
Speaker 1: this Why would they do that? It wasn't their idea to blow up the stupid bridge.
Speaker 0: But but why were they targeted?
Speaker 1: Because this is how FBI agents get promoted. They don't get promoted by not arresting you. They get promoted by arresting you and heaping charges on you so that eventually you go bankrupt and you give up, and then they say, okay. Here's the deal. We'll drop all the charges but one.
You take a guilty plea to a felony, and then you do, you know, two years or whatever. But these guys went to trial because they said, no. Well, it wasn't our idea. It wasn't our explosives. It was the FBI's explosives, and it was the FBI's guy that talked us into doing it.
We were just having drinks that night. We weren't gonna blow up a bridge, but that's that's how they get ahead in Washington.
Speaker 0: That is but they're I mean, they're targeting American citizens for destruction.
Speaker 1: Sure. Sure. That's what they do.
Speaker 0: You need to shut down the FBI right away.
Speaker 1: I would not object to that at all. And in my case, they charged me with three counts of
Speaker 0: What is the fucking point of all of this? Yeah. Pay your taxes.
Speaker 1: I know. Right?
Speaker 0: Hoist the flag on your front lawn. I do those things.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I do too. And and
Speaker 0: then they try to destroy you? Yeah. Like and you're because your crime is you didn't like John Brennan when you both were junior guys at CIA.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I you called the rapist
Speaker 0: Lee said the president, George W. Bush
Speaker 1: Was lying.
Speaker 0: Was lying because he is a liar Mhmm. Unfortunately. And so, like, let's spend millions of dollars on
Speaker 1: all this million dollars of the taxpayers' money is what they spend on my To destroy you. Mhmm.
Speaker 0: 6,000,000 pardon right away from Trump. But okay. Sorry. Sorry. Everybody get me emotional.
This is just too ridiculous. I've known you a while. I I didn't know the details.
Speaker 1: Was it was ugly.
Speaker 0: So let me just go back. So Brennan orders this investigation the second Obama takes office.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: He goes to Eric Holder. Holder says we actually, our staff attorneys don't think that he committed espionage. Then what happens? Like, do you know that they're investigating you again?
Speaker 1: No idea. No idea that I'm being investigated. So I'm going on my merry way. I'm trying to build a business in consulting. I have some big name clients.
Things are starting to look up. In fact, I was going to New York so often that my wife said, you know, maybe we should buy a little pied a terre there, so instead of staying in a hotel, because things are going really well right now. You should you should talk to a real estate agent. It was so exciting. Right?
And then 22 FBI agents raid my house. When? 01/12/2012. '20 '12? '20 '12.
They investigated me for three years.
Speaker 0: Did you know they're investigating you?
Speaker 1: No. And then when we got the discovery But
Speaker 0: they investigated you for three years, and this is now, like, quite a few years after. The only thing you've done wrong is you gave an interview to ABC News saying three things. The president lied. We had a torture program. And what's the third one?
Speaker 1: And the torture was was And was approved. By the president. Yes. Mhmm.
Speaker 0: All true.
Speaker 1: All true.
Speaker 0: And so for five, six years, they investigate you without telling you.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Now what were they doing to investigate you?
Speaker 1: They were they had my phones tapped. Actually? Actually tapped. Yep. They intercepted all of my emails, and I'll tell you something funny about that.
Speaker 0: For real?
Speaker 1: There's a service that you can pay, like, $36 a year called readnotify.com. So if I want to write you an email, I put, you know, tucker carlson aol dot com dot readnotify dot com. And when you access it, it'll show me. Tucker Carlson read your email. He read it for two minutes and thirty seven seconds.
He forwarded it. He deleted it. He filed it, whatever, and this is where he was located. And it has a a a town, and it'll have sometimes geo coordinates. Damn.
So I I wanted to write a Freedom of Information Act request because I was thinking of writing a book about an author, a novelist from the fifties, and I wanted to know whether he had worked at the CIA. So I sent this Freedom of Information Act request. Actually, I called a journalist that I knew who writes these things every day, and I said, I don't want it to get rejected, so can you walk me through the process? He said, yeah, just send me what you have, and I'll correct it for you. So I sent it to him, and I got a read notify notification, and I looked at it and it said, Accessed in Washington, D.
C. And I said to him, I called him and I said, You're not in Washington today, right? And he said, No, I'm in LA. Why? I said, because somebody just accessed the email, and it's in Washington.
I said, hold on, because it has geo coordinates attached to it. So I took the geo coordinates, I put it into Google Earth. And you know Google Earth, it shows you the whole planet, and then it kind of zeros in on the FBI's Washington field office. No way. And he said, are they looking at you or are they looking at me?
I said, I haven't done anything. They're probably looking at you.
Speaker 0: Because you didn't even know you were under investigation.
Speaker 1: No idea. But they were looking at me, and they were accessing all of my emails. They even followed my family and me into church, into Target to go shopping, and and they would write these stupid reports. Subject and his family went to church, sat in the first pew. Hour and fifteen minutes later, subject and family went home.
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Speaker 1: I don't Brendan Brendan complained that I had aired the CIA's dirty laundry, but that was, I think, more of just an excuse to cover up his own, you know, narcissism. But I
Speaker 0: mean right. But like airing dirty laundry, calling liars liars. Yeah. These are not crimes.
Speaker 1: No. They're not crimes. Exactly.
Speaker 0: So am I missing something? I mean, did you kill anybody? Were you dealing heroin at all? Nope.
Speaker 1: Nothing. And then You didn't start some
Speaker 0: kind of fake cryptocurrency company?
Speaker 1: I wish I had thought of it. I'd be rich today.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Right. I hope at some point we can talk about all the actual criminals who are Right.
Richer living in my neighborhood. Right. Richer than ever. Okay. So but you don't know any of this is going on.
When do you when do you get confirmation that you're the target of an investigation?
Speaker 1: The FBI called me. I was sitting at my computer one morning writing an op ed, and the FBI called me, and I looked my phone and it said Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I thought, what in the world is that? So I answered it. I said, hi.
This is John. May I help you? And he says, hi. This is special agent I forget what. Do you remember that case that you helped us out with when you were on Capitol Hill?
Cause remember, I didn't know that this Japanese guy was an FBI agent yet. I said, sure.
Speaker 0: This is so freaking bonkers.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And he said, well, we have another case and we need your help. And I said, because I'm an idiot and a patriot, I said, anything for the FBI. What do you want from me? That's what I told him.
He said, can you come down here tomorrow at ten? I said, absolutely. So I went at 10:00, and I said, what do you want me to do?
Speaker 0: Said Which is to the FBI building downtown? Yes.
Speaker 1: I said, is it with the Russians? Who is it? Well, you know, before we get to that, he says, I wanted to ask I just read your book, which was a lie. I had a book that had come out two years earlier. I just read your book, and I just wanna ask you a couple of questions, and it was all about the torture program.
And I'm getting more and more nervous. And finally What were the questions? Well, when you were in Pakistan and you were describing this this piece of technology, did you get that cleared by the CIA? I said, of course, I got it cleared. I said, it took me nine months to write that book and twenty two months to get it cleared at the CIA's publications review board.
Well, you know, what about this guy? You mentioned this guy. Do you remember you just say John Doe. Do you remember his name? I'm like, yeah.
I remember his name. And then I said, what what what are we talking about here? And then one of them said, well, we probably should tell you that as we're speaking right now, we're raiding your house. We're confiscating all of your electronics, and Holy shit. You're gonna be charged with a lot of crimes.
What? Uh-huh. That's what he said.
Speaker 0: And thank God Wait. As you were talking, were raiding your house? Mhmm.
Speaker 1: My wife later told me that as soon as I got on the metro to go to the FBI, they just broke down the door.
Speaker 0: Was she home?
Speaker 1: With our two month old son. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yep. And then one of the one of the female FBI
Speaker 0: agents drain the swamp is not not strong enough. No. It's not.
Speaker 1: Burn it down. Burn it down. Yes. You know, this is neither here nor there because my opinion is not important. But when Kash Patel was named the director of the FBI, I wrote an op ed in a leftist for a leftist news outlet celebrating this appointment, saying this is exactly what we need to do.
We need to tear the place down to its studs. If there's going to be a federal law enforcement organization, this one needs to be scrapped and rebuilt, and nobody else has the guts to do it.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Let's build them in a headquarters, though.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. In Kansas, maybe.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Leavenworth.
Speaker 1: Oh, excuse me. One final sentence. I thank God that I had the presence of mind to say, I want I want to speak to my attorney, and I'm not saying anything else. And that was the only reason they didn't put the cuffs on me right there. So I said, I want to leave, and I got up, and they said, just a minute, just a minute.
I said, no. If I'm not under arrest, that means I'm free to leave. And as I walked out, Peter Strauch was standing there, and he said, did he implicate himself? And the guy says, not really, but I'll tell you about it in a second. And he turned to me, and he said, you're free to go.
Speaker 0: Did you have any idea what this was about?
Speaker 1: No. No idea. No idea. They're they they charged me with This
Speaker 0: is like a bad dream.
Speaker 1: It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. I I went outside, I called my lawyer, he told me, come to the office immediately. I went, told him everything that happened. He told me, try to take it easy.
I said, this is a death penalty case. He said, just take it easy. They're not gonna see What was happening?
Speaker 0: Did you call home and ask your wife? What was
Speaker 1: Yeah. And she was just wonderful. She she was as calm as I wished I could be. And she said, the FBI's here. I said, I know.
I said, are they treating you with respect? And she said, well, one of the female agents said, why don't you sit with that beautiful baby and don't get up?
Speaker 0: Why don't you go fuck yourself
Speaker 1: Exactly. Actually.
Speaker 0: Excuse me. Talking that way to your wife with a newborn baby.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. And then within hours, of course, they leak it to the media immediately. So within hours, all four of my clients, and these were like household name clients that I had for this consulting business I was trying to get up and running. All four of them dropped me. That day?
That day. And then immediately Profiles encourage award. I tell you. The phone, we got I we we counted actually. We got something like 65 or 67 calls from the media that that night.
I just shut my phone off. We unplugged the we had landlines back then. One of the local networks put a truck in front of our house with a spotlight on the house. No way. Humiliating.
Just utterly humiliating.
Speaker 0: And I just wanna say for the fifth time, because at this point, I mean, you're being treated like El Chapo. Okay? Your only crime was an ABC interview with Brian Ross in 2007 in which you say, yes, the CIA does have a torture program. I know because I worked there, and the president authorized it and lied about it in public. That's that's that's your sum total of your crimes.
Speaker 1: That was it. I'm gonna cut to the chase here.
Speaker 0: Is so unbelievable. So you go to your lawyer's office, you find out you're being charged with espionage. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: I called my wife. She came and picked me up, and I told her, I'm gonna kill myself. This is a death penalty case. I haven't done anything wrong. And she's like, you're not gonna kill yourself.
Let's just take this one step at a time. What did the lawyers say? And then we started taking it from there.
Speaker 0: When did you get arrested?
Speaker 1: January no. Four days later. That was on a so this is another trick that they use, and they did this with the j six people. The FBI loves, loves, loves to make their arrests on Fridays. Right?
Or Thursdays after five, because there are no federal arraignments on Fridays. So you get arrested on a Thursday evening, and you have to spend Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night in jail. And then you get to go to a rain
Speaker 0: To that end.
Speaker 1: On Monday. No, only because I asked to see my attorney. And so they told me I had to turn myself in at the FBI Monday morning at ten. Tucker, when I tell you I had these guys on me from Thursday to Monday, like white on rice, I mean, six feet off my bunk my bumper everywhere we went. Even one of my neighbors called to say he had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and he looked out the window, and he said, buddy, there are, like, carloads of people out there at 03:00 in the morning just staring at your house.
And I said, I know. I know. It's the FBI. There's nothing I can do. And so they followed us.
Like, there were FBI cars on either side of us and behind us as we drove to the FBI that Monday morning. And then when I got out of the car and walked into the FBI headquarters, they broke off. And then they they chained me to a to a metal bench. So I'm I'm like this Actually? With a handcuff.
I yeah. Yeah. And I said And Strzok was there. Oh, yeah. He was there.
And, you know, but I didn't know I didn't know he was Peter Strzok until I got a call in 2019 from a reporter at the Washington Post. Twenty no. No. 2017, reporter for the Washington Post. And he said, hey.
I wanted to get your thoughts on Peter Strock being fired from the FBI. I said, I don't know anything about Peter Strock other than what I've read in the Washington Post. He said, no. Peter Strock arrested you in January of twenty twelve. I said, that was Peter Strock?
He said, yeah. It was Peter Strock. He was the head of the counterintelligence division. It was Peter Strock that wrote the reports on your arrest. He's the one that physically put the cuffs on you.
And I said, oh my god. I said, yes. I'll give you a statement. He said, what's the statement? And I said, the statement is that statement is that karma's a bitch, and now it's his turn.
Yeah. So all they printed was now it's his turn.
Speaker 0: I think he wound up getting like a million dollar settlement, actually. He
Speaker 1: did. And there was a GoFundMe He got richer. He got richer. And there was a GoFundMe that raised another half a million dollars. Yeah.
Speaker 0: This is so It's a nightmare. So okay. You're charged
Speaker 1: just to Yeah. Three counts of espionage.
Speaker 0: Three counts of espionage.
Speaker 1: One
Speaker 0: But not specifying who you spied for.
Speaker 1: Nope. There was never even an accusation that I had spied for anybody. One count of making a false statement. We were never exactly sure what the false statement was supposed to have been. It had something to do with the clearance process for my book.
And one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
Speaker 0: Did you reveal the identities of anyone?
Speaker 1: Here's that story. In the February, '6 months after I blew the whistle, I got an email from a journalist who was writing a book on the CIA's rendition program. I told him, I don't know anything about renditions. Kidnapping was not my thing at the agency. I can't help you.
So he sends me a list of a dozen names. He said, can you introduce me to any of these people so that I can interview them? I said, I don't know any of these people. Then he sent me a second list of a dozen names, and I said, look, you clearly know this better than I do. I don't know any of these people.
And then he said, there's a guy that you mentioned on like page 165 of your book. You called him John. Can I mention can I interview him? And I said, oh, you're talking about John Doe. I I don't know whatever happened to him.
He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. They got me. I confirmed the surname of a former colleague. That was it. That's the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
Speaker 0: And they knew that because they were listening to the
Speaker 1: call. Mhmm. Well, it got worse. They didn't recognize that as a violation until the journalist who wasn't really writing a book, gave the name to Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch gave the name to the Guantanamo Defense Attorneys.
The Guantanamo Defense Attorneys wrote a classified motion telling the judge at Guantanamo, we'd like to interview this John Doe. The judge said, hey. This name is probably classified. He gave it to the FBI. They gave it to the CIA.
The CIA gave it to John Brennan.
Speaker 0: This is crazy. What do you mean the journalist wasn't really writing a book?
Speaker 1: He was pretending to write a book on the Abu Omar rendition from Milan. There really was no book. He was really working for the Guantanamo Defense Attorneys as kind of a private eye without telling anybody. What?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Man, the level of treachery Yeah.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Washington. It's it's that bad.
Speaker 0: Oh, I'm very aware of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad I'm not there anymore. Oh my god. I can't wait until I the day I can leave.
Speaker 0: It's like nothing is as it seems. Everyone's lying. Everyone's pretending to be something he's not.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And underneath it all is the willingness to to hurt people, to kill them. I mean yeah. Yes. Exactly. It's not just like, you know, we're competing and I'm, like, elbowing you out of the way.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get that promotion before you do.
Speaker 0: It's like if you if if I need to make sure you die in prison, that's okay. That's really sick.
Speaker 1: Speaking of which, I took a plea to make the the first of all, they waited until I went bankrupt, and then they dropped all three of the espionage charges.
Speaker 0: Okay. So what were you facing initially? You get charged. You get
Speaker 1: Forty forty five years.
Speaker 0: Forty five years in prison. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: And one of the one of the attorneys in in the Obama holder justice department said to me at the first proffer meeting, they offered me forty five years, and this woman says, take the deal, mister Kiriaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.
Speaker 0: Who what? Do you remember her name?
Speaker 1: I don't. I remember she had a Vietnamese name, like Nguyen or Tran or something like that, but she ended up, like, getting promoted in the Biden justice department. Really? Very, very important. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I hope I hope that she becomes famous for that because
Speaker 1: I hope so too.
Speaker 0: That level of cruelty to another human being is there's no justification for that.
Speaker 1: They wanted me to die in prison. That was the plan. And so my attorney said, you haven't done anything wrong. We're gonna go to trial. Right?
We're gonna go to trial. And I said, okay. Let's do it.
Speaker 0: Let's go to Anyone alleged that you lied
Speaker 1: ever? Ever. Never. Never. And, you know, that's a really important point.
And we talked about that. We talked about me testifying in my trial because literally everything I said was the truth. In fact, fast forward to December of twenty fourteen, I'm gonna be released from prison in six weeks, and I called my wife, and I was allowed to call her for fifteen minutes every other day. And I said, how was your day? And she said, it was great.
And I said, great? Why was it so great? And she said, because the senate torture report came out today, and it proved that everything you said was true. So I said, you know what? That made it worth it.
Speaker 0: So you went to prison, you were facing life in actually, you're facing the death penalty initially.
Speaker 1: Death penalty.
Speaker 0: Because you told the truth about other people's lies. Correct. So the truth teller, and I'm just I want to put a very fine point on this because I think it is a trend, and I think it's a sign of evil. You know, the definition of evil is lies, lying, and the truth teller faces death, the liars thrive. Yes.
So that's a system that can't continue. That's not a virtuous system, that's an evil system.
Speaker 1: You're exactly right. And may I add a statistic? The Espionage Act was written in 1917 Yes. To combat German saboteurs during the first
Speaker 0: world war. Nineteen seventeen being one of the darkest periods in American history.
Speaker 1: When it comes to civil liberties, one of the darkest periods.
Speaker 0: The most anti, almost un American moment, really,
Speaker 1: with Without any question.
Speaker 0: Probably one of the worst presidents we ever had, Woodrow Wilson.
Speaker 1: Double without any question.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Destroy Christian Europe for no reason at all. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It espionage has never been meaningfully updated. In fact, it doesn't even mention the words classified information because the classification system wasn't invented until the
Speaker 0: Most Americans didn't have electricity in 1970.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: Between 1917 and the election of Barack Obama, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the press. Under Barack Obama, eight people, almost three times all previous presidents combined, were charged with espionage for speaking to the press. Three times.
Speaker 0: And none of them was charged with lying?
Speaker 1: Not a single one of them.
Speaker 0: Because lying is not a crime. That's right. Telling the truth is a crime. That's all you need to know. You can't support a system in which telling the truth is a crime and lying is rewarded.
Sorry.
Speaker 1: I mentioned to you last night privately that one of my attorneys really put this whole thing into a couple of sentences, and it was so powerful, so profound what he said that it has stuck with me. I decided to turn down the Justice Department's best and final offer of two and a half years in prison. I said, I haven't done anything wrong. And I had this stupid idea that as soon as I get in front of a jury, they're going to see how ridiculous this is, and I'm going to be acquitted. Well, that's nuts.
Yeah. So he said to me, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal.
And so I took the deal. What was I going to do? I have five kids at home. Should I take two and a half years? I'm going to do twenty three months, or should I roll the dice?
And I said to him, I said, if I turn the deal down, what am I realistically looking at here? And he said, twelve to eighteen years. Take the Deers. Mhmm. So I took it.
Speaker 0: For telling the truth in an ABC interview. How long was that ABC interview?
Speaker 1: Thirty minutes? Forty minutes?
Speaker 0: If if you had to replay your life, live it again, would you have done that?
Speaker 1: Yes, actually. Wow. I would have. The only thing I would have done differently is I would have had my attorney sitting with me. I I had to be reactive by hiring an attorney after blowing the whistle, so we had to respond to the media and respond to the justice department.
I would have hired the attorney first, but yes, somebody had to say something. Somebody. It's these these Bush people and the Obama people who covered up the Bush administration's crimes that were the that were the criminals.
Speaker 0: The amazing thing is that of Barack Obama, I mean, I was there. I mean, I knew Obama. He ran against all that stuff. Yeah. He did.
Right? Iraq was the bad war. Afghanistan was the good war, and he he ran a campaign against that. You know? But he ended up throwing into prison the guy who told the truth about it.
Speaker 1: Mark Halpern and John Heilman wrote a book about the well, both the two thousand eight election and the two thousand twelve election. And in the second book, they quote Obama twice, saying things that just put it all into perspective. Number one, he said, I never said I was a liberal. Like, why are the liberals so mad that he's a warmongering, you know, neocon? I never said I was a liberal, he said.
And the the other thing he said that really struck me, he was talking about the drone program. He killed 10 times more people with drones than George W. Bush did, and he said, you know, I never realized I would be so good at killing people.
Speaker 0: He's a cold human being.
Speaker 1: What is that? That's that's sociopathy.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, for sure.
Speaker 1: You have to be a sociopath to to even think that way. Yes. But he surrounded himself with other sociopaths like John Brennan, who for sport would ruin people's lives to the point where they're actively considering suicide or making plans to die in prison.
Speaker 0: These are Americans he's doing this to. Americans.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Clearly, a man capable of great violence, and you you wonder if he's involved in plotting physical violence against Americans now. Would not surprise me at all.
Speaker 1: I would not be surprised by anything anymore. You know, when president Trump I had to laugh. When president Trump stripped him of a security clearance, I went on one of the networks. Well, I went on Fox, but I think I also went on MSNBC that week to say, why does John Brennan deserve a security clearance?
Speaker 0: Exactly. Why don't I have private citizen. Do you have one?
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 0: I don't either.
Speaker 1: See? So why does John Brennan get one?
Speaker 0: I agree.
Speaker 1: So I said, of course, the president should strip John Brennan of the security clearance. And then when he disallowed Brennan from entering into a government building, I went on Fox, and they said, is this legit? I said, of course it is. This guy is so dangerous that he shouldn't be anywhere near a federal building. With what we know he's plotted in the past, God knows what he's cooking up today.
No. I wouldn't trust him in a federal building. I wouldn't trust him in a position of trust, and I wouldn't trust him with a security clearance. He's dangerous.
Speaker 0: Well, all these people have security clearances, which really are the currency in Washington
Speaker 1: Very much
Speaker 0: so. Conduct business without one in DC because everything is classified.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Not to protect American national security, but for the obvious power advantage it gives the holders of those clearances.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: So, you know, I I think there should be a real attempt to do that to a lot of people, like a lot of people, but there won't be.
Speaker 1: No. No. There won't be.
Speaker 0: So anyway, you you plead. You get how much time I got thirty months.
Speaker 1: And at sentencing, my attorneys asked that I be sent to a minimum security work camp. There are no bars on the windows. There are no locks on the doors. You're free to come and go. Most of those guys worked in town at the local university, sweeping the floors or whatever.
And there was a possibility that I could get out in seventeen months with good behavior and halfway house, not halfway house, but home confinement. So I said, okay, this will be easy. So I get to the prison. It's very strange when you go to prison. If you're not remanded at sentencing, you have to physically drive to the prison and knock on the door and say, yeah, I'm here to turn myself in for
Speaker 0: The opposite of a jailbreak.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's it's nuts. It's nuts. And of course, I've got, you know, two cars with me. There's a documentary film crew and my lawyers and my cousin, and we we have this caravan that that that go to the prison with us.
Speaker 0: So you've already said goodbye to your children.
Speaker 1: Already said goodbye to my children.
Speaker 0: What was that like?
Speaker 1: They were very young, and so I said, you remember I had that fight with the FBI? And they said, yes. And I said, well, I lost, And so I have to go to Pennsylvania for a while, and I'm going to teach bad guys how to read and write, because I figured I'd probably teach a GED class or something. And I said, but you're gonna come and visit me all the time, and then I'm gonna come back home and everything's gonna be great.
Speaker 0: Who were they?
Speaker 1: They were eight, six, and one.
Speaker 0: Your little kids. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: And
Speaker 0: so Six and one.
Speaker 1: In the visiting room, there was a sign on one of the doors that said inmates only, and my eight year old said, dad, what's an inmate? And I without thinking, I said, it's a prisoner. And he said, wait a minute. Are you a prisoner here, or are you a teacher here? And I said, buddy, I'm a prisoner here, but we're gonna get past this.
It's gonna go quickly, and I'm gonna be home, and everything's gonna be good again. Ugh. It took everything I had not to
Speaker 0: That makes me emotional. Yeah. Oh, that's bad. Yeah. I'm out of adjectives actually for that.
So you didn't wind up in the work camp?
Speaker 1: No. The CIA under John Brennan, who was He
Speaker 0: was director by this point.
Speaker 1: No. But he was soon to be director actually, 02/2012. Yeah. He was director at that point. Yes.
Yes. Thanks for correcting me. The CIA objected. They objected to my placement in a minimum security camp.
Speaker 0: Well, they're vindictive, aren't they? I guess, asked Julian Assange how vindictive they are.
Speaker 1: And and why I got there. Exactly. Exactly. Ask Julian Assange. They almost killed him.
Speaker 0: So Under Mike Pompeo plotted his murder.
Speaker 1: Literally.
Speaker 0: Who's still free, by the way. Is Mike Pompeo in jail?
Speaker 1: I haven't seen any announcement that he
Speaker 0: Are you allowed as an appointee to a government, not elected, just an appointee, are you allowed to plot the murder of people who embarrass the agency?
Speaker 1: You are not.
Speaker 0: Oh, you're not allowed. Okay.
Speaker 1: You are not.
Speaker 0: You can't so you can't use federal funds to murder people who embarrass you?
Speaker 1: Only if you're Barack Obama, but anybody else, no. You can't do
Speaker 0: that. So if you do that, have you committed a crime?
Speaker 1: Yeah. A serious crime.
Speaker 0: A serious crime would be attempted murder, I think, plotting a a murder.
Speaker 1: There's a former CIA officer, Bob Bear, who was who was given a choice to either be charged with attempted murder or resign from the agency for talking to a Kurdish group about killing Saddam Hussein. So why wasn't Mike Pompeo arrested for talking about or planning? He did more than talking. They planned to murder Julian Assange.
Speaker 0: I don't know. That's a whole different conversation. To sue me for saying that.
Speaker 1: Well, the facts are a defense.
Speaker 0: I hope you will.
Speaker 1: I hope you go.
Speaker 0: Discovery would be fun. Anyway, sorry. It's also you say goodbye to your children.
Speaker 1: I do. I say goodbye to
Speaker 0: my The CI makes certain you don't go to the work camp. Mhmm. You go to a prison.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It was five days before I got access to a phone at the prison, and I called
Speaker 0: What was that?
Speaker 1: My lawyer.
Speaker 0: The first five days.
Speaker 1: It was you know, looking back, I think I was in shock.
Speaker 0: Did you think about fleeing?
Speaker 1: Everybody does.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I don't know that I would submit to that. I mean, I you know, you never know until you're there,
Speaker 1: but it is yourself constantly looking at the fences, constantly calculating how bad you'll get cut up with the concertina wire.
Speaker 0: Before you report to prison, did you think like, I served this country. I grew up here. You're from a, you know, middle class family, pro America. No. You never thought about fleeing the country.
Speaker 1: Why? No. I was right and they were wrong. And, you know, the truth, Tucker always has a way of of coming out. Always.
Sometimes it takes a while, but the truth always comes out. And in fact, the the deputy director for operations at the CIA under Brennan, Jose Rodriguez, another notorious murderer, tweeted at me the night before I left for prison, and he said, don't drop the soap.
Speaker 0: He actually tweeted that
Speaker 1: at you? Mhmm. And I tweeted back at him, and I said, Jose, I am on the right side of history, and you are not.
Speaker 0: These people are morally diseased. Mhmm. When Michael Avenatti, who I mocked for years as the creepy porn lawyer, went to prison, I felt sad for him. Sure. Because you're a human being.
I despised him. Mhmm. But he's in prison. Ever been to a prison? I've been to many prisons.
You don't wanna be in well, you served in prison.
Speaker 1: You don't wanna be in prison.
Speaker 0: To to cheer when a man goes to prison and your only crime was embarrassing them by telling the truth. Whatever happened to the Jose character? He took MSNBC contributor?
Speaker 1: He took his $6,000,000 book advance and moved to Florida. Actually? Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Doesn't this? I mean, why are you not insane?
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 0: There's a lightness to you that
Speaker 1: Thank you. And maybe I'm an idiot, but I really believe that I'm on the right side of this, and I'm hopeful that president Trump will pardon me. I have an amazing amount of support.
Speaker 0: I I I hope that you get a pardon this afternoon. I really do. This is horrifying. His enemies are the people who did this to you.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: He ran against this kind of
Speaker 1: Yes. He did. Behavior. And he righted it with the j six people, with Rod Blagojevich. I wrote Rod Blagojevich a letter when he went to prison.
This is before I was ever in trouble. Yeah. I wrote him a letter and I said, you don't know me, I don't live in Illinois, but this is a travesty.
Speaker 0: It was. I remember
Speaker 1: There's no crime that was actually committed. Oh, I know. And then fourteen years, Have people lost their minds?
Speaker 0: I know.
Speaker 1: But the president you know, you and I were talking about this privately. The president has been unlike almost every other president in that he's not waiting for the political safe period to issue pardons Right. After an election. Right? He just issues them as they come to
Speaker 0: To pardon Mark Rich because he's sleeping with his wife Precisely. For example.
Speaker 1: Precisely. You know who else did that? Historians have told us historians have documented that Abraham Lincoln used to sit up late into the night pardoning people by candlelight because he said, for example, that army deserters shouldn't be executed for cowardice.
Speaker 0: I agree.
Speaker 1: He didn't wait until after a congressional election, and neither does this president.
Speaker 0: Yeah. The British army disgraced itself by they they murdered a lot of their own men
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: They did. Who snapped. Cowardice is contemptible, of course, but you shouldn't kill a boy because he runs away. Exactly. It's disgusting.
It's disgusting. It's like, you know, regain your senses for a second. So anyway, the first five days
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: You were in shock. I was in shock.
Speaker 1: I was in prison for forty minutes, and the only thing that the cop who processed me said to me was, if somebody comes into your cell uninvited, that's an act of aggression. And I said, great. Thank you. And then he walked away. And sure enough, these two guys walk in.
One of them had a swastika that took up his entire neck, came up onto his face. The other one had fuck you tattooed on his on his eyelids.
Speaker 0: It's like kind of a movie.
Speaker 1: It was nuts. And I jumped up, and I said, what do you want? Because I thought, it's two of them, it's one of me, but I'm I'm gonna do my best.
Speaker 0: You got to. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the one with the swastika said, are you the CIA guy? And I said, yeah. So? And he said, are you a fag? And I said, no, I'm not a fag.
You know, I haven't even said that word in so many years,
Speaker 0: but We're not in Georgetown anymore.
Speaker 1: And he says, are you a rat? I said, no. I'm not a rat. I didn't have anybody else in my case. And he said, are you a Chomo?
I said, I don't know what that word means. And he goes, Chomo, like I'm stupid. Chomo, child molester. I said, no. I'm not a child molester.
And he says, okay. You can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. And I said, oh, okay then. And, you know, funny thing, a year later, I I lived right across the hall from from a senior captain, the number three in one of New York's five families. Right?
He said Good guy? Good great guy. Not even good guy, a great guy. I would give him A
Speaker 0: good fellow, really.
Speaker 1: He was a good fellow. I'd give him the New York Times every day. He would give me the New York Post. We traded papers every day. So, you know, he got a Christmas card one year from Derek Jeter that really impressed me.
Speaker 0: Der I've met Derek Jeter. Nice
Speaker 1: man. Sweet guy. Yeah. Absolutely. So, anyway, he said to me, let me ask you something.
Why do you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria? I said, I I don't know. My first day here, they told me to sit with them. And he says, very dramatically, from today, you're with the Italians. And so from that day, I was with the Italians.
Speaker 0: And you're still friends with some of them.
Speaker 1: I I am. We were talking
Speaker 0: about a dinner last
Speaker 1: night. We talk frequently. Good guys.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. That was a misapplication of federal power. It's like, know, obviously, you don't want, you know, organized crime. On the other hand, like, if that's your number one well, look at what's happened to America post mafia.
Has it gotten a lot better?
Speaker 1: Oh, no. It hasn't. I don't think so.
Speaker 0: No. It hasn't. Bensonhurst has not improved. No. It hasn't.
I know. I'm aware. I'm aware. They did a better job with Staten Island than the current rulers have. So at this point, your case is well known.
Not well. It's known. Okay. I was I'm in the media, so I'm sort of following it, but I don't really know. It's a leak investigation.
You've somehow betrayed your country. Right. That's all we know. Right. But there are some people who are paying attention, and they're making a lot of noise, but but it doesn't matter.
No. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny. My support came from people on the hard left Yes. And people on the libertarian right.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: It it led me to the conclusion that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line.
Speaker 0: No.
Speaker 1: It's a circle, and it meets at a certain point Yes. Where civil liberties are concerned.
Speaker 0: I agree.
Speaker 1: And so I started following other people's cases that would never have interested me in the past. It was always cases dealing with government overreach, like reassessing Ruby Ridge, right, or Waco. I mean
Speaker 0: I mean, Ruby Ridge was really just absolutely murdered the guys In cold in his wife's his wife's Randy Weaver because his shotgun was two inches too short or something.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Lon Harucci, I think was the name of the FBI sniper. I wanna say it again. Lon Harucci.
Speaker 1: Murdered them in cold blood.
Speaker 0: Shot a woman? Really?
Speaker 1: Yeah. A woman. Who's just standing in the Holding
Speaker 0: a baby.
Speaker 1: Holding a baby. Uh-huh. That's right. Yeah. And that
Speaker 0: was and by the way, that was not only never punished. Lan Harucci was never punished for that. He should've gone right to prison for murder, and his superior should've gone right to prison for authorizing that murder. But it was like at the time, it was like, oh, are you a Ruby Ridge person? Like, you care?
Speaker 1: Right. Like, you're a wacko or something. Right wing extremist. Yes. If you
Speaker 0: could extremist, so I knew about it, and I was really bothered by it. Right wing in the sense that I I believed in the bill of rights. I don't think you should be able to murder women for no reason.
Speaker 1: Like People began sending me books by John Whitehead, and I remember just blowing through these books saying, why have I never heard of this guy before? Don't know. I mean, he's talking sense here about government overreach.
Speaker 0: He had case after case after case.
Speaker 1: All documented.
Speaker 0: I have that book on my shelf in my office. Government of wolves. It's unbelievable. But the media, not to blame everything on the media, but it is kind of the mouthpiece of the blob. Yes.
It is. Yeah. The Praetorian Guard, really. The protectors, the bodyguards of the murderers and the liars. They just man, they swarmed anybody who expressed concern about these cases.
Speaker 1: That's right. They try to paint you as a radical.
Speaker 0: A conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 1: Conspiracy theorist, a term that was created by the CIA, by the
Speaker 0: way. Yes. Uh-huh. Who shot the man's wife. Mhmm.
So this so you your views, and I should have done a people can Google you, and I hope that they will, but it's hard to overstate the departure that this turn is from the rest of your life. Oh, yeah. You weren't a CIA paramilitary. You were an actual just like officer. Case officer.
Yeah. Case officer.
Speaker 1: Recruiting spies to steal secrets.
Speaker 0: Multilingual. You speak Greek. You speak Arabic
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Which is, like, considered basically impossible for native English speakers. You're a scholar Mhmm. Literally, and and kind of an academic in some ways. Mean, right?
Speaker 1: I'm a professor of intelligence studies now at the University of Salamanca in Spain, and I taught for four years at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: And it's funny when they called me to hire me, I said, said, wow, I'm flattered, but you and I probably disagree on 99% of the issues. Why would you want me to teach in the Jesse Helms School of Government? And the dean said, because torture is not Christian.
Speaker 0: It certainly isn't.
Speaker 1: And I said, you know what? I'll take the job.
Speaker 0: Certainly isn't.
Speaker 1: And I love those guys. I'm still in touch with Killing
Speaker 0: unarmed defenseless people is immoral.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 0: And it's also just dishonorable in the most secular terms.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: If a man is handcuffed, you don't punch him in the face because it's bad for him, but it also degrades you.
Speaker 1: That's right. It does. It's not how honorable men behave. PTSD and moral injury are real.
Speaker 0: I totally agree.
Speaker 1: We damage ourselves. Disgusting. Like, what what is
Speaker 0: this anyway? I mean, I sort of believe that the the country was good because it was virtuous and, like, we Right. Certain things we don't do Mhmm. Because we're above that. We don't send our wives to go fight wars for us.
No. We don't torture people who are chained because they can't fight back.
Speaker 1: That's right. What is
Speaker 0: this anyway? What what is this?
Speaker 1: And then what happens when you go in and you say, oh, I accidentally killed him. Oh, well, just bury him out back. That's literally what they did. Actually Just bury him out back. Yeah.
Mhmm.
Speaker 0: It's just hard to make a moral case for the things that you're doing when you behave that way. Agreed. And and and to see once again the only man who tells the truth face the penalty Mhmm. And the liars thrive is really dispiriting.
Speaker 1: It is. I'm confident things are gonna turn around.
Speaker 0: I think so too. I I hope so. I pray that. Thank you. So how long were you in prison in the end?
Speaker 1: Twenty three months, I didn't get a single day of halfway house time. They made sure that I did every day of that sentence. They had to take seven months off for good behavior. They had to because it's it's legally mandated, But I was in that prison for every last day that they could get out of me.
Speaker 0: Were any elected officials sympathetic at all?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, yes. But none were really willing to go out on a limb. Gus Bilirakis, who's a congressman from Florida, he was very supportive and friendly. I I should add, it wasn't just Gus.
Gus is is a sweetheart of a guy. It was the whole Greek American community. Man, they're cohesive. They are. We stick
Speaker 0: together. I'm aware of yes.
Speaker 1: So they they really went to the mat for me. I got fantastic press coverage in Greece. The Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law when I got out of prison. It was my first trip. I had to get permission from the judge to travel because I had just gotten out of prison.
So that was fun. But really, no. And and Jim Moran, who was a Democratic congressman from Yeah. Jim was very helpful. Very, very helpful.
But that was it besides the two of them.
Speaker 0: Moran was I don't even know if he's still alive. I knew Moran pretty well. Yep. Drank too much. I don't know.
Florid and wild private life, like crazy town. And I disagreed with him on all domestic policy issues passionately because he was very liberal, but his foreign policy views were out of the mainstream. Yes. He was not a neocon. Right.
And boy, watching the job they did on Jim Moran
Speaker 1: How many times they bash
Speaker 0: him, ghouls like that, who just like on the merits. So Jim Moran seemed like possibly hadn't honored his marriage vows and Right. Drank too much. Okay. Okay.
And he was, like, a loud mouth, and he was always ready to beat people up. He was, like, this big Irish guy. Okay. Got it. Those were his sins as I understand them.
The people who were against him had, like, committed genocide.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right. Right. And they
Speaker 0: were like, it was crazy. It was crazy. And they systematically destroyed Jim Moran's life
Speaker 1: Uh-huh. They
Speaker 0: did. Asking, like, pretty obvious questions like, why did nine eleven happen?
Speaker 1: Right. They don't wanna shut my
Speaker 0: know? I mean,
Speaker 1: like You'd think.
Speaker 0: Assuming that it was exactly what they told us it was, which was this group of 19 Arabs, mostly Saudis, decided to, you know, attack The United States, whatever. Let's just say that's true. I'm assuming it is true. Mhmm. Why did they do that?
Why are they willing to die for that? Like, what were they mad about?
Speaker 1: That's the question.
Speaker 0: What were they mad about? Yeah. That's what Jim Moran asked, and I'm like You can't ask Oh, by the way, Jim Moran. And then they, like, plastered. They they Glenn Greenwalled him.
Yes. Big time. They did. And they kind of drove him out, and I think they he lost his seat in the end.
Speaker 1: He retired. Oh, he did. Okay. And he he's at a political consulting firm in He's still in line? Plain, Virginia.
I ran into him at a conference about a year ago. No way. Yeah. He's he's a lovely man. He really is.
Speaker 0: I always secretly liked him. I had him on. I interviewed him a lot, and he would get, you know, per his the ethnic stereotype, he'd get, red in the face or, like, spit would come out, but I I kinda like you know, he was like a I liked him. Yeah. So sorry.
Not to
Speaker 1: And Gus Bilirakis is one of those guys who's just a genuinely nice guy. He and he's actually he's quite an accomplished legislator, which he doesn't get a lot of credit for, but he's a good guy. And so, you know, a fellow Greek American needed some help, and he was there to help.
Speaker 0: Wow. Have you ever had any contact with CIA since you got out of prison?
Speaker 1: No. No. Well, not other than sending articles and books in for clearance.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: No. You know, when I got out of prison, I finished house arrest. I had ninety days of house arrest, and people started calling me, hey, let's meet for lunch, or let's have a pizza or whatever. And every time I would go to meet them, I'd be under surveillance. And the first few times Still?
Yeah. But from whom? It it had to be the FBI. It could have been
Speaker 0: the CIA. Basis, could they justify surveilling you? They sent you to prison for an abyss interview.
Speaker 1: And it's done. It's all done. I'm just gonna go have a pizza.
Speaker 0: And moreover, by this point, a congressional investigation has confirmed that you were telling the truth.
Speaker 1: You're exactly right.
Speaker 0: And this is just this is now on Wikipedia.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. Mhmm. But Barack Obama was still in the White House.
Speaker 0: Now why the policy hadn't changed?
Speaker 1: I don't think he knew who I was one way or the other. I think that Brendan Whiteman said, there's this very dangerous guy, insider threat from the CIA. He leaked to the press and Obama just said,
Speaker 0: You know? He's a cold man. He doesn't care. No. He doesn't care.
So part of the reason that this has to be precedent, they cannot allow a CIA
Speaker 1: officer break ranks. Very dangerous. There there actually was a legal precedent that was set in my case, and it was it was one of the things used against president Trump in the documents case. I was charged in the Eastern District Of Virginia, which is called the espionage court for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 0: No. I'm aware.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No no national security defendant has ever won a case there, ever. And it's the home of the Pentagon, the CIA
Speaker 0: Of course.
Speaker 1: All the defense contractors. So we made a hundred motions to use a hundred classified documents that we received in discovery in my defense, and we asked the judge to block off three days to hear our motions. And we walked into the courtroom, and she says, I'm going to make everybody's day much easier, and I'm going to just deny all 100 of these motions. You can't use any of these documents in the case. And my lawyer said, your honor, it's it's our whole defense.
You're saying that we can't mount a defense. And she said, classified is classified, so you can't use the classified documents to defend him. So as we were walking out, I said to my lawyer, what just happened? And he said, we just lost the case. That's what happened.
And I said, well, now what do we do? He said, now we talk about a plea.
Speaker 0: So the government charges you with the death penalty offense and then gets to decide what you can talk about in court?
Speaker 1: In fact, they made a list of words that I wasn't allowed to use in court. Like, I could not use the word whistleblower. I had to use the words swimming pool. There's a whole list. So Swimming pool?
Uh-huh. Because the word whistleblower in and of itself, they deemed to be classified. And so I couldn't say, I'm a whistleblower. What grounds? How is it classified?
They they say they say so.
Speaker 0: The secret word? Mhmm.
Speaker 1: So they invoked something called the CIPA, the classified information protection act. So they would clear the courtroom every time I had a hearing. They would put plastic tarp over the windows and tape it up so nobody could shoot a laser beam at the window and listen to the vibrations and hear classified information. There was the list of banned words like whistleblower. Yeah.
Whistleblower. Absurd.
Speaker 0: So that the physical security of The United States dependent upon you not using the word whistleblower.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That was it. And so my lawyer said to the judge well, the judge said his reason for blowing the whistle is irrelevant. The question is, does the intelligence community say that he violated the espionage act? The answer is yes.
And my lawyer said, your honor, are you saying that a person can accidentally commit espionage? And she said, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Speaker 0: Who is this judge?
Speaker 1: Her name was Leonie Brinkima. She was a Clinton appointee.
Speaker 0: Was she not bright, or was she just so committed to the status quo to the intel community?
Speaker 1: She's committed. She reserves every national security case for herself. They're supposed to go into a wheel, right, and be chosen randomly. She had Julian Assange. She had the Ed Snowden case, which never came.
She had my case. She had Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA whistleblower. Every national security she had Zacharias Mosawi, the twentieth hijacker. So she reserves these cases for herself, and everybody gets the maximum. So she said in response to my attorney
Speaker 0: She sounds like a scary person.
Speaker 1: Oh, she terrifying. That the definition of whistle first, she said, I'm not respecting a precedent set in the Federal District Of Maryland. She's not respecting it in the Tom Drake case where the judge ruled that there had to be some harm to the national security. There was no harm in my case. Nobody was harmed, literally.
The name that I confirmed was never made public. Never. So nobody was harmed. So she says the definition And actually, you
Speaker 0: were speaking out against harm.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was speaking out against harm. She says the the definition of espionage is providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it. Period.
Speaker 0: So That's espionage?
Speaker 1: In her view. I mean,
Speaker 0: it may be illegal, but it's not espionage is spying
Speaker 1: For a foreign country. Correct. Daniel Ellsberg called me. He and I became very close friends over this whole thing, and he said, I'm going to ask you to do something that's completely selfless. I'm going to ask you to go to trial because we can only challenge the constitutionality of the Espionage Act if somebody goes to trial and is convicted.
I said, Dan, I have five kids. I can't go to trial. So he asked Jeffrey Sterling to do it. Jeffrey did go to trial, was convicted. The judge saw that this conviction was kind of trumped up.
And so he was convicted of nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage, and to use her words, I'm giving you kiriyaku plus twelve months. That's what she said at sentencing. I'm giving you kiriyaku plus twelve months.
Speaker 0: Who is he alleged to have spied for?
Speaker 1: No one. He gave he gave an interview to the New York Times about the the racial discrimination suit that he had filed against the CIA. They passed him over for a promotion just because he was black, and then they had the temerity to tell him, we're not promoting you because you're black. And he said, when did you realize I was black?
Speaker 0: The irony is that there's a lot of espionage in Washington. Apparently. Yeah. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean Every There is. Intelligence service in the world has its officers in Washington.
Speaker 0: Also people who work for the US government who, without any kind of authorization
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 0: Give highly relevant classified information to foreign governments. Yes. Yeah. I know for a fact, and I know people who've done it, and none of them is in jail.
Speaker 1: No. No, none of them. None of them is in jail.
Speaker 0: And it's also fair to say the US government is penetrated by foreign actors.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. And it has been for a long time.
Speaker 0: Yes, I'm aware. And I don't think anyone goes to jail for that.
Speaker 1: No. Right. You know, I tried a couple of times to get a pardon under presidents Obama and Biden, thinking that most of my contacts in the Greek American community had access to those presidents. I was laughed out of the room under Obama, and I knew I would be. Under Biden, there's a Greek Orthodox priest who very generously offered his access to the White House.
Speaker 0: That can I just it's just note parenthetically, I don't think there are a lot of Greek liberals left?
Speaker 1: No. There aren't.
Speaker 0: There used to be.
Speaker 1: There used to be. These to be almost all liberals. Yeah. And they've they've all
Speaker 0: moved. I've noticed. I don't think I've met a Greek liberal in a long time.
Speaker 1: No. They're they're just not out there anymore. Yeah. So he said, look, you know, I've known Biden since the early seventies. I I can help you.
And then nothing. And I called him, and I said, father, forgive me for being so blunt, but maybe if I had been, you know, a crackhead relative of the of the president or a Chinese spy or a a judge that sold children into bondage in Pennsylvania, maybe then I would have had a chance. But Joe Biden doesn't want to hear about a case like mine. And the truth is, and I I mentioned this to you yesterday, my support comes exclusively from the Republican Party, the libertarian movement, and the conservative movement, and I embrace it. People like just wild, though.
Because they're the ones thinking about civil liberties now. They're the ones thinking about individual freedoms. You know, what's his name? Hakim Jeffries the other day said, Vladimir Putin is an avowed enemy of The United States. No.
He's not. That's a neocon position. When did he take a vow? He said he was an avowed m enemy. When did he take a vow that he was gonna be an enemy of The United States?
No. Stop trying to to to lie us into a war or trick us into a war, but that's today's Democratic Party.
Speaker 0: Oh, I'm aware. It's are you do you think I mean, the kind of casual cruelty and violence in the CIA that you describe, I I haven't seen any meaningful attempt to stop it.
Speaker 1: Oh, no. No. No. No. I agree very strongly.
Speaker 0: Do you believe that the CIA has hurt other American citizens?
Speaker 1: Yes. I'm sure of it.
Speaker 0: Yes. What about physically?
Speaker 1: Well, there are two very well documented cases where Barack Obama used a drone to murder Anwar Alaki. Yep. And whether you like the man's politics or not, he was an American citizen who had never been charged with a crime. And then a week later, Obama droned his 16 year old son and 14 year old nephew who were sitting in a coffee shop having a cup of tea. Also, American citizens who had never been charged with a crime, and they were children.
So, the CIA does all kinds of things like
Speaker 0: that. What about domestically?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I keep thinking back to Eric Holder's testimony before the the Senate Armed Services Committee when Rand Paul asked him, does the president have the legal authority to murder an American on US soil? Well, senator, you know, just answer the question. It's a yes or no question. Yes. He has the authority.
Now has he done that? We didn't know. But the attorney general of The United States said that the president can murder an American citizen in The United States if the president believes that he presents a clear and present danger to the national security. That's sick. It's Unbelievable.
Anti constitutional. Not just unconstitutional. It's anti constitutional.
Speaker 0: Do people who work at the CIA have a sense that maybe they're not serving good?
Speaker 1: Generally, no. Generally, these are I mean, at the working level, these are hardworking, really smart, patriotic
Speaker 0: Some of them are really smart. I can confirm that.
Speaker 1: Really smart. At the upper levels, you know, they believe they're the smartest people in the room, They're smarter than whoever happens to be president at any given time. And if they don't like this president, they just wait him out. He'll be gone in four years. They'll still be there in their still senior positions, and they're gonna do exactly what they wanna do.
You know, this is why they panicked when Ronald Reagan named an outsider as the deputy director for operations.
Speaker 0: Remember? Do I remember?
Speaker 1: Yeah. They lost it because they were like, oh my god. Okay. You you appoint your campaign manager, the director. That's one thing.
But now operations, you're gonna bring a friend from Wall Street or wherever he was. He was an attorney. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I would. I think that's when they called in Bob Woodward to to blow them up. Right? The former naval intel officer, Bob Woodward.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'll tell you.
Speaker 0: Not not the only time Bob Woodward has been called in by the by the national security state to destroy
Speaker 1: Americans. When I was the deputy direct the the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, I I had just finished writing a cable. I had this lovely private office, and it looked out past the secretary into the hallway. So I finished writing, and I leaned back like this in my chair, and I happened to be looking at the hall, and Bob Woodward walked by. And I said to the secretary, was that Bob Woodward that just walked by the office?
And she said, yeah. And I said, without a security escort, like he owns the place. And she said, you didn't see the memo? I said, what memo? She said, George George Tenet.
She said, George sent a memo saying that Woodward's writing a book, and we're all ordered to cooperate with him. I said, I'm not talking to Bob Woodward.
Speaker 0: I couldn't believe it. He's just a great reporter. Come on, John. He's free to Let's go on shoe leather. He's not.
Speaker 1: You're talking about people that have been undercover or deep cover for decades,
Speaker 0: and he's just walking the halls. He's not an instrument of the government. He's a he's a counterbalance. He's a check against their overreach. He's
Speaker 1: He's a journalist. They're they're gonna run with that.
Speaker 0: It's so absurd. I was shocked. What what did you think of Bill Burns?
Speaker 1: I wrote an op ed
Speaker 0: when Bill Burns was appointed Former ambassador to Russia. Yes. And then up until January, the CAA director. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: I said that I disagreed with his position on Russia
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: As I think every free thinking American should, but we needed an outsider in that job. Having insiders is a mistake.
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: You know, Obama proved that. Having insiders Clinton proved that. It's just a mistake. It's incestuous, and they feed on each other.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: So you needed an outsider. Bill Burns was one of the most highly respected ambassadors that we had in the State Yes.
Speaker 0: That is true.
Speaker 1: And I called him the adult in the room. Mhmm. And I thought, you know, if we have to have a Washington insider in that position, he was a good choice.
Speaker 0: Yep. That that that sounds right from everything I know about him. When you worked there, did anyone ever talk about the murder of the president in 1963?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oliver Stone and I got into quite a spirited argument about this one time Because I made the mistake of saying that I didn't think we had given enough thought to to the involvement, the possible involvement of Santo Trafficante and and the mob. And he said, oh, you're so full of shit, he says, and he just started yelling at me. I came to my own conclusion. I talked to Bobby Kennedy about this too.
Actually, he's the one that pushed me over the edge and and led me to this conclusion. I believe that elements of the CIA were responsible for for the assassination of the president. I don't agree when people say it was a CIA operation because John McCone was the head of the CIA, and he was Bobby Kennedy's best friend.
Speaker 0: A name forgotten to history, but yes.
Speaker 1: That's right. And a good and decent man. But there were a lot of people, unfortunately, one was a Greek American who Very famously. Very, very famous Greek American. His name does not bear repeating.
Who hated John Kennedy for not providing air cover for the Bay Of Pigs Yes. And wanted revenge against Kennedy. And these guys were still in constant touch with the Dulles brothers who were also just dark stains on American history. And so I came to the conclusion that, yeah, there were CIA officers who were responsible for carrying this thing.
Speaker 0: Did you think that when you worked there?
Speaker 1: No. I didn't. In fact, I thought it was so absurd. I couldn't believe people were even talking about it. Oh, really?
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, we're the good guys.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Why would we kill the president?
Speaker 0: I thought the same. Why haven't all the files been released?
Speaker 1: I genuinely don't know. For for JFK, I think they have been.
Speaker 0: No. They have not.
Speaker 1: They have not. No. That that frightens me. You know, there were a couple of explosive revelations in the last tranche. The fact that James Angleton, the deputy director for counterintelligence, wanted to recruit to formally recruit Lee Harvey Oswald is exactly the opposite of what the CIA has been telling us for so many years Yes.
For for sixty years. Why? If if the Russians came to the conclusion that he was just a nut when he was living in Minsk and didn't want him to come back, why was the CIA involved or interested rather in in recruiting him? What was he doing in Mexico City in October of of nineteen sixty three? He said or not he said, but the the CIA has said over the years that he was there to go to the Cuban and Soviet embassies to try to get visas.
Why was he meeting with Americans? And were those American CIA officers? Of course, they were. Why else would he have gone to Mexico City?
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: I'm actually more interested in the RFK and the MLK documents. There is so much that we don't know about those two, especially RFK. They recovered one more bullet than Sirhan Sirhan's gun held. And
Speaker 0: Thomas Noguchi And this is confirmed.
Speaker 1: Yes. And Thomas Noguchi
Speaker 0: Well, then that's kind of case closed, then There it is. Right. I mean, we we don't know what happened. We know the official explanation is untrue. It's untrue.
So because it was a revolver. It was a 22 caliber revolver. Correct. It's like a nine shot.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: 20 twos fit a lot in the cylinder. Mhmm. Is that I did not know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And Thomas Noguchi, the coroner Yeah. Said that the that the death shot came from behind Yep. At an angle from from down on the ground, but Sirhan was in front of him.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: There was a there was a security guard there who was not associated with the Kennedy campaign or with the
Speaker 0: Ambassador Hotel.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The Ambassador Hotel named Caesar.
Speaker 0: Mhmm.
Speaker 1: He was a well known racist and white supremacist. On video, you see him lifting a gun out of his belt, and then you hear bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and he puts it back in the belt. He never got it fully out. In the nineties, the National Geographic Channel tracked him down to Mississippi or Alabama or something, and they interviewed him. And they said, did you shoot Robert Kennedy?
And he said, no, I was going to, but that Arab fella got him first. Well, we know that there had to be somebody else in the kitchen at the ambassador, and we know that the shot came from behind. We know that there was a second gun because there were too many bullets. So why hasn't this been released?
Speaker 0: Yes. And and it raises the really obvious question, which was I mean, we know Sirhan had a gun Yes. Fired Fired the gun. Was on Yes.
Speaker 1: Film. Correct.
Speaker 0: Lots of people there, including lots of famous people, Rosie Greer
Speaker 1: and Rosie Greer.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Right. So Kennedy had just won the California primary. Mhmm. Johnson had announced a few months before that he's not running.
Bobby Kennedy clearly is going to be the Democratic nominee. He's murdered that night after his victory speech walking through the kitchen of this now demolished hotel in Los Angeles. Yes. Srhan Srhan, a Christian Palestinian Mhmm. From a very poor family was arrested for it.
His apartment is searched, and there are all kinds of papers where he writes, RFK must die, RFK must die, over and over again. What would he has said he's still alive, by the way.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. And still in prison.
Speaker 0: Yes, he is. And I mean, that was before I was born, and I'm 56, so it was quite some time ago. What was that?
Speaker 1: Well, that's the $64,000 question. Because now there are rumors that when he was at whatever it's called, Los Angeles Community College or whatever the the community college there was, that he may have participated in experiments that fell under a CIA operation then known as MK Ultra. Yes. So what's the truth? Now director director Helms during the Nixon administration or during I guess it was the Ford administration ordered that the MK Ultra documents be destroyed.
Speaker 0: Which they were.
Speaker 1: Which they were. After being specifically told it's a crime to destroy federal documents.
Speaker 0: And they don't belong to you.
Speaker 1: Right. Exactly.
Speaker 0: Do you think it's and this is a debate about, you know, a lot of different people in Lewis, Drillin, West, and the CIA affiliated psychiatrist. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: Do you think it is possible to get people to commit acts that they wouldn't otherwise commit?
Speaker 1: I do. You do? I do. You said
Speaker 0: there are lot of shrinks at CIA.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. There there are offices where everybody is either a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and they're operational psychiatrists and psychologists. So you take them with you on an operation to consult with them on how do you get this guy to crack. You want him to just lose his mind. What do I need to do to push this guy over the edge?
Right? Or what do I need to do to convince this guy to do something that he definitely doesn't want to do? I used those those shrinks on operations. We even hypnotized one guy. He was hypnotized with his arm in the air for two hours.
Never saw anything like it in my life. And then when he took him out of the hypnosis, his arm fell down. He looked around. He said, what happened? And then he vomited.
I've never seen anything like it in my life. People Did it work? It did work. Yeah. We asked him I'm getting a little off the subject, but we asked him No.
Speaker 0: This is definitely a subject.
Speaker 1: A political assassination that had taken place that he had claimed to see. So the guy didn't speak any English. So the the shrink is asking questions, and I'm translating the questions as softly and as gently as I can.
Speaker 0: Right? Into Arabic.
Speaker 1: Yes. And I'm asking, what did you see? Well, the guy had stopped at a mosque, at this little small roadside mosque to relieve himself. So he's behind a tree and a car pulls up, and it's these people who had been identified as the shooters in an assassination that had just taken place. And I said, so describe the guys.
And he's describing what they're wearing. And I said, what kind of car are they driving? They're driving a van. I said, does the van have a license plate? He said, yes.
I said, can you see the license plate? And he go his eyes are closed. He goes like this. And then he reads off the numbers and letters to me. So I hand it to another officer that was in the room, runs into the next room, does a cable to the country intelligence service, it comes back stolen plates.
I said, my god. He he actually did see the plates. The plates were stolen specifically for use in that assassination.
Speaker 0: Amazing.
Speaker 1: So you can convince people to do things that they otherwise would never
Speaker 0: dream of. So mind control is not a sci fi fantasy? No.
Speaker 1: No. MK Ultra did far, far more damage caused just grief and misery to hundreds of people, maybe more. And there are subsets like MK Chickwit, there like five or six other sub operations that were part of MK Ultra that that just, you know, caused people to jump out of windows and commit suicide Yeah. Jump off bridges.
Speaker 0: Well, the defense secretary did.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He did. James Forrestal. Yep. Committed suicide.
Speaker 0: Yes, Sure he did. Yeah. Quite that's quite an amazing story. I don't think that's on Wikipedia. No.
So but I would encourage people to look into that because that is definitely worth knowing about. Is it possible to infect people with cancer?
Speaker 1: Not while I was there. People talked about it a lot, but
Speaker 0: They talked about it a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like, do you think it's possible? Can we do it? I mean, you know, if we could do it, what would we do with it? This is something that the that the Venezuelan government and the Cuban government have both accused us of doing.
Speaker 0: Oh, yes.
Speaker 1: When when I was there
Speaker 0: And many governments around the world believe that that is real.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now remember, I I left twenty years ago, so who knows? I don't know.
Speaker 0: Is would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency?
Speaker 1: Not anymore. No. It used to be. The the deputy director for whom I worked was very fond of saying, and he used to say this all the time, the job of the CIA is to recruit spies, to steal secrets, and to analyze those secrets so that our policymakers can make the best informed policy.
Speaker 0: So I thought that was the whole idea behind creating the agency right there.
Speaker 1: Yes. That was it until 09/11, and then it became a paramilitary organization. You know, the director gave a speech the other day in which he said that we need to focus on human source intelligence. True. Every director says that when he becomes the director.
But the truth is, what they would rather do is fancy high-tech, you know, science stuff, satellites and drones and, you know, computer intrusions and stuff like that. They're they're not really in the business anymore of recruiting spies to steal secrets. They should be, but they're not.
Speaker 0: It's not directly related, but we know because it's public information that somebody bet big against United Airlines and American Airlines Mhmm. Right before 09:11. Mhmm. So people knew it was coming. Now the people who planned it knew it was coming.
Yes. Do you think that those bets, those stock bets, shorting those airlines, that Al Qaeda did that?
Speaker 1: No. I don't think Al Qaeda did it. I think that
Speaker 0: In other words, who else knew it was coming?
Speaker 1: I think there were intelligence services out there, foreign intelligence services that knew it was coming, but it was in their interests for The US to be at war. I think that's where this came from.
Speaker 0: Did you think that when you worked there?
Speaker 1: No. And I'll tell you why. On 07/06/2001, totally normal day, I was entertaining a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers, which we did every day. They come in, we do a day of briefings, we exchange gifts, they get a photo op with the director, and then we take them out to a family.
Speaker 0: This is Ad Langley.
Speaker 1: Yes, Ad Langley. So I had this group of Arabs that day, and I had gone to this very young junior analyst on Al Qaeda at the counterterrorism center. And I said, hey. I've got this delegation. Can you come in and give us thirty minutes on Al Qaeda?
He said, sure. So it comes time for the briefing, and instead of this junior analyst showing up, Koffer Black shows up with the chief of operations
Speaker 0: And who's Koffer Black?
Speaker 1: Koffer Black was the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, later ambassador Koffer Black. He was the special coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department. Then he went on to Blackwater and and great great wealth. So I jumped up and I said, oh, I said, gentlemen, this is Kopher Black. He's the director of the counterterrorism center, and this is the chief of operations for the Osama bin Laden group called Alex Station.
And I mean, I had no idea why somebody as important and as busy as Kofer would come in. He sits down and he says he starts off by saying, something terrible is going to happen. We don't know exactly when or where, but we're hearing communications from Al Qaeda that tell us that something big that we've had we've never seen before is going to happen. We're hearing code words for a huge attack. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey.
There's going to be an enormous wedding. There's going to be a great football match. We're hearing Al Qaeda camp commanders on the phone with their students, and they're crying and saying, I'll see you in paradise. He said, we have no idea when and where this attack is gonna come. He said, I'm begging you If you have any sources inside Al Qaeda, please help us.
And they just kind of sat there and, you know, looked at each other, and he got up and he shook their hands and walked out. So at the end of the day, I'm thinking about this all day. At the end of the day, send them back to their hotel. I said, I'll pick you up at the hotel. We'll take you to I'll take you to dinner.
But I went back to Kofra's office, and I said, I said, Kofra, I want to thank you for for coming and talking to those guys, but I have to ask, were you serious, or was that for their benefit? And he said, oh, I'm I'm dead serious. Something terrible is gonna happen. And then it happened. On the morning of of September 11, Kofra and I had a meeting scheduled with Condoleezza Rice for the stupidest idea, now in retrospect, the government printing office was going to print a volume of declassified cables called Foreign Policy of The United States, Nineteen Forty Nine to 1967, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus.
Nobody's ever gonna read this thing. Right?
Speaker 0: Not not one person. No. Even the Cypriots will ignore it.
Speaker 1: Not interested. But it mentioned three people who were still alive who had been informants for the CIA. And the law says that if they are outed, we have to offer them resettlement. So rather than go through that whole rigmarole, we made an appointment with Condie to ask her
Speaker 0: to National security adviser.
Speaker 1: National security adviser, thank you, to just remove those three cables. Nobody's gonna miss them because nobody's ever gonna read this book, but just in case. So I walked over to Koffer's office to tell him that our car was ready
Speaker 0: and his secretary Well, you were at Langley that
Speaker 1: morning I was. I was there early. And his secretary had a small TV on her desk. You couldn't watch TV on your computer in those days. And I said, what happened to the World Trade Center?
And she said, a plane flew in into it. And because I'm an idiot sometimes, I said, you know what? That happened once before. In the nineteen thirties, a plane flew into the Empire State Building, but it was really foggy and raining that day. It's so crystal clear today.
How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center? And then the second plane hit. And she turned to me and she said, did you see that or did I imagine it? And I ran back to my office. I said, guys, we're under attack.
Two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. We all ran up to the front where Koffer's office was. And you have to imagine this big bullpen where there are maybe 150 or 200 people in in partitioned cubbies, and then there are private offices all around the perimeter. And then there are TVs hanging from the ceiling above Cofer's office on BBC, CNN, Fox, Canal plus RT, from all over the world. And they're all showing the same thing, and there's silence.
And then somebody behind me shouts, will somebody please lead? And Kofer said, oh, yes. You. Go to the Director's Office and tell him this. You.
Go to security. You. Go to operations. And the rest of us are like, what do you want us to do? Evacuate.
Nobody's evacuating. Literally not a single person evacuated. Finally, the the CIA cops came in and said, if you don't evacuate, you'll be you'll be arrested. So we evacuated. I got about halfway home, had to abandon my car, so I started walking.
Speaker 0: Why?
Speaker 1: It was gridlock like like World War z, like the end of the world. You know? I mean, on on the George Washington Parkway, which is four lanes, it's like twelve twelve cars wide, and everybody's just parked.
Speaker 0: That Parkway passes right by the Pentagon.
Speaker 1: And that's right. Right by the Pentagon. When I got to the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, I lived just up from the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, I saw the deputy national security adviser with no shoes evacuating. And I said to this guy next to me, how could this happen? That's the dash the deputy national security adviser.
Yeah. He ran out of the White House without shoes to save himself. I ended up my my my ex wife and I, we climbed to the roof of my building. We we were engaged at the time, and we watched the Pentagon burn for a little while. And finally, I said, this is ridiculous.
We we have to get back to work. And so I walked back to my car, drove across the median, went back to CIA, and and stayed there for the next four days. I just slept under the desk hour, two hours at
Speaker 0: a fiance also worked at CIA? Mhmm.
Speaker 1: She did the same thing.
Speaker 0: I mean and then, you know, the world changed, and your life in particular changed.
Speaker 1: I could never ever have predicted the changes either for me personally or for the CIA in the country.
Speaker 0: So you didn't think is one of the only Arabic speakers at the counterterrorism center at CIA in Langley. Of course, you knew you would play a significant role in
Speaker 1: what came
Speaker 0: next. I
Speaker 1: expected that I would.
Speaker 0: And you did, but you never expected you'd go to prison.
Speaker 1: Never. Not in a thousand years would I have said, I'll do the prison experience for a little while, see how that works out.
Speaker 0: So I just wanna ask you one last question. Of all the things you've said, which I've known you for a while, but I'm and we just had dinner last night, but I'm I'm shocked by some of the things that you have said actually. And I grew up around this stuff, and I'm still shocked. Right. So the story that you told about the fake Japanese diplomat trying to set you up is is is remarkable.
That's a remarkable story.
Speaker 1: Sick.
Speaker 0: It what is sick? It's unbelievable if they would do that to an American citizen, particularly one with a demonstrated record of serving the country at personal risk. So but outrageous side, it does sort of reframe your understanding of how things actually work that happened to you. That's a real thing. Yes.
Provable. And you said that it had in fact changed your view of how things actually worked, and you'd you'd reassessed your understanding of things that had happened in American history, and then maybe they're not exactly what they seem to be. That's right. Can you go into a little more depth about what you're thinking now?
Speaker 1: The the short version is I have come to believe very strongly that Ronald Reagan was right when he said that government is the problem, it's not the solution to the He was right. He recognized it, and the rest of us failed to see it. So now when I hear about standoffs, let's say, between American citizens and the Bureau of Land Management, for example
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Or ATF or DEA, I no longer believe what is reported in the media. I no longer believe the strategic leaks that come from whatever bureau or agency to spin the story. I I've gotten to the point where I'm obsessed with doing my own investigations.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: And I read all source material because the truth has to be out there somewhere. I just feel like I have to put it together for myself. So now when we talk about the Kennedy assassinations or RFK or I mean, or MLK, or as we said earlier, Ruby Ridge or Waco, whatever it is, I I default to doubting the government account.
Speaker 0: So you worked for the government during Waco. That was
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: My first day working at a newspaper, so I remember the chaos in the newsroom when that happened. So that was '93.
Speaker 1: '90 '3.
Speaker 0: That must have been the spring of ninety three. Mhmm. Correct. Is that right? Yes.
So, boy, over thirty years ago. But you worked for the government then.
Speaker 1: I was at the CIA at the time, and it was on every TV in the CIA. And I remember looking at it, not really having an opinion, and my boss saying, well, it's about time they finally moved on that operation.
Speaker 0: So what was that? Boy, that's really a forgotten moment in American history. So there was a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians, so that's what we called them.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: A guy called David Koresh. That was his cult name anyway. Right. And they were accused of mistreating children. Yes.
Which maybe they were. I have no idea.
Speaker 1: Hoarding weapons.
Speaker 0: And hoarding, of course, and hoarding weapons, and they were surrounded by federal agents at their compound in Waco, Texas, and that standoff culminated in a shootout in which federal agents were killed.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: And most of the occupants of that compound were burned to death. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: I think it was something like 27 of them, and half of them were children. Yeah. Like, young children.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I think it was maybe more than 27.
Speaker 1: More than 27.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It was it was
Speaker 1: A lot.
Speaker 0: It was awful. But what was it? Was that more than what we were told it was, do you think?
Speaker 1: I well, the spin was this was a dangerous lunatic, and he had to be stopped before he used those guns to go out and kill people. The truth of the matter is you're allowed to buy as many guns as you want.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I've proven that. Yep. I have. Good.
You're not allowed to buy guns because you're a convicted felon.
Speaker 1: I'm a convicted felon.
Speaker 0: And you've done nothing wrong, I really hope you receive that presidential pardon soon.
Speaker 1: Thank you. And and on top of losing my my gun, I lost my pension. The the Obama justice department seized my federal pension. Why? Twenty years of proud service, $770,000.
I'm gonna have to work until the day I die. Only a pardon. Could you have
Speaker 0: worked at CIA for all those years and not wind up rich?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right.
Speaker 0: I have to say that is the story that no one ever tells, and I just know it from my just personal life, just living in DC my whole life. They're all rich. Have you noticed this?
Speaker 1: They are all rich.
Speaker 0: How why are there all these former CIA officers who are rich?
Speaker 1: Some of them, excuse me, some of them get enormous book advances. Others make this odd transition into venture capital or consulting or butts in the seats kind of, you know, Booz Allen style firms. A lot of them go overseas and stay overseas, so the CIA pays for everything. The only thing you pay for is your phone bill, and they just invest, invest, invest for thirty years and come out with plenty of money.
Speaker 0: I've lived in nice neighborhoods for a long time, and they're always CIA people on
Speaker 1: my street. Always. Half of McLean, Virginia is CIA. Yeah.
Speaker 0: And the District Of Columbia and Florida, and it's just like like legit rich.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Rich.
Speaker 0: Is that that's not a good sign, is it?
Speaker 1: No. No. It's not a good sign. Because you're not supposed to capitalize on on a position Not
Speaker 0: when you have the power of life and death over That's what bothers me. It's not just like people from the labor department or commerce who are like leveraging their skills to riches. It's like people who have information that they're the only ones legally allowed to possess Mhmm. True inside information, and the power to kill people.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Like, that's one category
Speaker 1: With no questions asked. May I add one thing? Yeah. I recently received I recently received an email from someone I'd never heard of, but this is the third such email that I have received, and I wanted to mention it. So of all things, I I received it through eBay.
Right? I was selling something on eBay, and somebody saw that because I I'm an open book, so I'm just like John Kiriaku on eBay.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I I received this thing through eBay, and it says, dear John, it's so nice to finally speak to you. I've been watching your YouTube videos, and I love all the content, and I've been wanting to reach out to you for many years. I'm one of the FBI agents who wants to personally apologize to you for the disgraceful way that the FBI and our federal government treated you. I worked on your case with both heads headquarters and the Washington field office team, and I know many of the personnel that you're familiar with, unfortunately. That case was directed and driven by senior most officials.
Many mid level and street personnel were against it, but nevertheless, we just followed orders. Anyway, I've always felt bad about what we did to you and for the way you and your family were treated, and I wanna personally apologize.
Speaker 0: Well, God bless that man. Mhmm. Do you think that's real?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yep. Two other FBI agents sent similar emails to my attorneys. They're sorry. They did as they were told.
It's nice, but
Speaker 0: Do you worry about anything further happening to you?
Speaker 1: I did for a long time. Yes. I there were people inside the justice department with whom I was friendly who said, oh, the CIA's really mad that you only did twenty three months. Like, they really wanted you to die in there. So be on your best behavior because they're watching everything you do.
And then that wore off about two years out of prison. I didn't see the surveillance anymore, never got any funny emails. As soon as I got home, I was home for a couple of days from prison, and I got an email from a guy who claimed to be an attorney saying he had some classified information that showed a crime, and he wanted to send it to me. And I said, don't you dare. I don't want any classified information.
Call the FBI and give it to them. But I figured it's just some nut trying to set me up. So anytime I had a question, I would just call the lawyers, refer people to the lawyers, and then it ended up just going away after a while.
Speaker 0: So the story that you just told over the last couple of hours is very distressing Yeah. To hear as someone who grew up in this country, believes in the country, loves the country. I can't even imagine what it must be like to be you, and yet you tell it complete without bitterness and no self pity whatsoever. How have you been able to maintain emotional equilibrium, wisdom, perspective, and peace in the middle of everything you've been through?
Speaker 1: Thank you for asking that. When I was in prison, I read constantly, including biographies of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And I thought, wow. What these guys went through? And they just forgave over and over.
Nelson Mandela especially, the way he was treated and kept in solitary confinement on on Robin Island, and and he forgave. And then there was a biography of a twentieth century Greek Orthodox saint saint called Saint Nectarios, Nectarios of Aegina, and he had been the Greek Orthodox bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, and other priests who were jealous of his rapid rise accused him of having an affair with a nun, and so he was stripped of his office. He never attained high office again, but he forgave everybody for what they had done to
Speaker 0: him. And he hadn't done it.
Speaker 1: No. He hadn't done anything. And I thought, you know what? These people went through so much more than I did. It was so much worse for them.
And I've become friendly with one of the former prisoners at Guantanamo, Muhammadu Uldslahi. The CIA kidnapped Muhammadu from Mauritania while he was attending his cousin's wedding. We tortured him mercilessly for fourteen years.
Speaker 0: Fourteen years? Mhmm. And then
Speaker 1: we decided, wrong guy. Let him go.
Speaker 0: Actually? Mhmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Which happens with more frequency than you might think. And so when he got out, he went on to Twitter, and I tweeted at him. And I said, Muhammadu, you don't know me, but my government will never apologize for what it did to you, so I want to apologize. I am so sorry for what happened over the last fourteen years.
And his attorney called me and said, would you be interested in a conversation? I said, absolutely. We've been friends ever since. He actually lectures to my my grad school class at the University of Salamanca. He comes on Zoom.
The the poor guy couldn't go back to Mauritania. He was afraid they'd kill him. No country wanted him because he had been in Guantanamo for fourteen years. Finally, the Dutch said, we'll give you citizenship. And so he has gotten married, he has children, he got an education, living happily ever after in in The Netherlands, and zero bitterness.
And I said to him one day, he said to me in front of my class what you just said, you're not bitter at all for what and I said, me? I said, you. You're like Mandela. How can you not be bitter after what we did to you fourteen years? I was 23.
And he said, what would bitterness accomplish? Nothing. He said, bitterness would put me right back into that cage, and I don't wanna live in there. So that's the position that I've come to take.
Speaker 0: There's a very that's that's a rational explanation of it, and I think I think it makes total sense. I think it's true. But forgiving people is kind of the next step, which you've also done, and I like, what's the purpose of that?
Speaker 1: I've forgiven for myself. I'm sure that John Brennan doesn't give two shits if John Kiriakou forgives him, but I feel better having that monkey off my back. Yes. So I did it for myself. I don't care what John Brennan's feelings are.
Speaker 0: And John Brennan, as you described, is a grudge holder. He's the opposite.
Speaker 1: Oh, yes. He is.
Speaker 0: And a prisoner of that. Yes. John, I really appreciate all the time that you've taken to tell your story.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.
Speaker 0: And I hope that you are vindicated in the Thank you. To the fullest extent.
Speaker 1: Thank you very,
Speaker 0: very much. Back. Thank you. Truth telling should be rewarded, not
Speaker 1: It should be. You know, like I said, I'm I'm very, very fortunate, blessed to have the support of people like you and doctor Phil and Bruce Fine and Brett Tollman and Doug Deason and and people who understand the import, not not just to me, but the import to all Americans of protecting our civil liberties from a government out of control. We have to make sure that we never go back there.
Speaker 0: You have to reward the truth and punish lies. And if you invert that, then it's a system you can't live under.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: Because it's evil.
Speaker 1: It is. It's evil. John, thank you. Thank you very much.
Posted - April 27, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Saved - April 27, 2025 at 11:01 PM
reSee.it AI Summary
I recorded a video discussing the challenges and dangers of coming forward about powerful men, especially Democrats. I shared my gratitude for those who supported me, despite losing everything—jobs, housing, finances—when I spoke out about Biden. While I still have my life, family, and meaningful work, I acknowledge the struggle of "minute to minute" days. My heart goes out to those who haven't survived similar struggles. It's crucial to hold accountable those who cause harm, regardless of their status, and to recognize that some journalists protect the powerful instead of the truth.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
I recorded this video regarding how difficult and dangerous to come forward about powerful men, particularly if it’s a Democrat. In the video, I express all that was taken but also gratitude for those who chose to protect me. For the record, debating “believe women” is a tired political flashpoint. How about just showing empathy and support to those who step forward and risk everything to tell the truth, even if you doubt them. Personally, I lost everything coming forward about Biden ( jobs, housing, money, car, my country) but I still have my life. My family is safe. I am safe. I have meaningful work. I am healing and rebuilding. And I am grateful to be alive.There are days so hard they are what I call “minute to minute”days. Then there are those easier and good days. My heart goes out to those who have not survived the minute to minute days and faced that dark abyss. Hold the monsters accountable that have caused so much evil harm and made it seem normal. No amount of money or power or celebrity should allow someone the freedom to cause such great destruction to others. And to those partisan journalists that continue to protect politicians rather than truth? They are more than just complicit, they are the monsters too.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
@RadhaStirling asks Was Ronan Farrow Ever a Journalist – or Just a Political Operative in Disguise? "Exposing the Real Ronan Farrow: From #MeToo Hero to Gatekeeper for the Powerful" A few of my thoughts on this. https://youtu.be/bdpXpN3ovts?si=B0j81HkqHoHWCtdQ
Posted - April 18, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Saved - April 18, 2025 at 8:19 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Thoughts on this interview ? Super interesting.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
Conor McGregor says the Irish people are intentionally being erased by mass migration. He’s considering a run for president of Ireland to stop it. (0:00) How Is Ireland Doing? (6:38) McGregor’s Humble Beginnings as a Plumber’s Assistant (8:53) The Erasure of Irish Culture (11:31) How They’re Trying to Keep McGregor From Running for President (18:31) Ireland’s Economic Crisis (28:17) How Long Until Ireland Is Unfixable? (32:14) The War on Christianity in Ireland (37:11) The Origins of McGregor’s Political Aspirations (41:12) McGregor’s Thoughts on Donald Trump and His Tariffs (45:02) Will the Government Come After McGregor for His Politics? (45:56) When Will McGregor Make a Decision About His Presidential Bid? (46:32) McGregor’s Plan to Singlehandedly Fix Ireland’s Housing Crisis (49:39) Is McGregor’s Stout Better Than Guinness? (52:01) Would McGregor Deport Rosie O’Donnell? (53:22) Ireland’s Spiritual Revival Includes paid partnerships.
Video Transcript AI Summary
Conor McGregor believes Ireland is governed by people with ill intentions, but the country remains strong. He urges citizens to stay positive and highlights the need to address issues facing the Irish people, who feel like third-rate citizens in their own country. He accuses the government of using intimidation and public funds to enrich private interests and alter public opinion.
McGregor feels there's an incentive for government officials to focus on foreign issues over Irish ones, seeking personal gain. He emphasizes his love for Ireland and his commitment to fighting for it, driven by the struggles he witnesses as an employer. Growing up in a working-class Dublin suburb, he sees Ireland's culture being erased through mass migration, which he calls treason.
He criticizes the government's globalist agenda, claiming they take orders from above and prioritize foreign interests. McGregor highlights the difficulty of running for president due to stipulations controlled by government parties. He advocates for national safety, control of public spending, and an end to the era of politicians, favoring common-sense leadership. He wants preference, peace, and prosperity for Irish citizens. He believes Irish Americans don't realize Ireland is on the cusp of being done. He is against the EU migration pact.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Conor McGregor, thanks a lot for having us. Is one of the great Dublin's One of the great cities in the world, for sure.
Speaker 1: For sure. The best city in the world. You know,
Speaker 0: you can make a claim to that. Sure. Walk around Dublin for a day, and then think of five better cities. Not possible. It's an amazing place, it's an amazing country.
How's the country doing?
Speaker 1: You know, like a lot of countries in the Western sphere, it is being governed by, you know, people with ill intentions of its people, and they have not got the interest of their people at its heart. However, our country stays strong, our people are strong willed, strong minded, and we are of amazing spirits, and it's about highlighting the issues that are going on, and as we have been doing, it's taunting. We will get there. I am not gonna sit here in front of you with a doom and gloom about the things that are going wrong. I will highlight for sure, but I will highlight the solutions and the resolutions and where we are headed and keep the outlook positive.
That is what has worked for me my entire life and my entire career, where I was able to rise up and do things that were once considered unattainable. You know, I kept a positive outlook, that's what I would urge my citizens and my countrymen, my fellow countrymen and women to do, and that's what we are doing. You know, we had a great moment in the Oval Office with with with President Trump where we got to speak and before the press in the White House where we got to speak our case. It was the first time it had happened our history, really, where we felt as a a people, someone spoke up about our issues. We often hear, and very hastily, hear about overseas issues or foreign affairs, and we hear about it so much that we are left scratching our head, well, what about our issues?
Exactly. What about the issues the people of Ireland face? And that is a rising sentiment that is taking place behind the doors of every household in the country. What about us? And right now, the citizens of Ireland, not only do we not feel like first rate citizens, we don't even feel third rate citizens in our own country.
So, you know, we continue to highlight the wrongdoings of a minute government elite, and it is minute, you know, and what they are doing. You know, they are using intimidation tactics. They are using bullying tactics. They are using diversion tactics. They are using public funds and public wealth to to to to to enrich private people and private industries to alter the thinking of the public, and we say no more.
And we are in the midst of highlighting it and continuing our motion towards the betterment of our country and the saving of our great country. Ireland is God's country, and you will not go against the nation of Ireland. We are peaceful. We are not harmless, and we will continue this journey onward.
Speaker 0: We are peaceful, we are
Speaker 1: not harmless. Fact. Amen.
Speaker 0: You could be describing The United States in everything you just said, that all the conversations about foreign policy in our country, it's about the Middle East, who cares? Eastern Europe, double who cares? And very little about what's happening to the people of our country, and you feel that here.
Speaker 1: That is I feel it's even magnified the more here. I feel in this administration currently in in The United States, it seems an America forced stance, and it's very it's a very welcome sight for for us over here. We we wish that for us, Ireland forced, you know, but I I feel, and as many of my country men and women feel, there is almost like an incentive to speak your piece on foreign issues. You know, if you think about a raise or your next job or your next your next position, that is where we feel our government elite have their eyes on. They have their eyes on the next role for themselves, and then in order to get that next role, they must speak their peace on foreign issues and nothing to do with Irish issues.
And then, you know, lo and behold, an announcement of a raise or an employment in the European Union delegates, and then off they go on their merry way after a running riot on Ireland, and, you know, zero accountability of doing so. And it's no more. I'm not sure where people think they will go in this small island. You will not will not destroy Ireland and be free to walk away, and that is a fact.
Speaker 0: How do you I I wanna get to how you know all this, and how you've distilled it to such a to its essence. I mean, that was such an amazing description, not just to what's happening here, but throughout the West, the English The entire Western
Speaker 1: sphere for sure that's happening here.
Speaker 0: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, which has already gone
Speaker 1: I feel our our government, again, overseas issues, yes, okay, internal. I'm an Irishman. I love my country dearly. Yes. Nothing or no one could ever change that fact.
I would give my life for my nation, and I have such a love for this soil. And I how I know about it, I've just invested in it heavily. You know, I'm an I'm an employer of many people here in the country. I have many businesses here operating in the country, and daily I hear about the struggles of people and, you know, the issues they are going through, and it ignites a fire in me to stand up. There's something in my belly from my country that I cannot shake, and even despite maybe the worrisome of my mother and people in my life, why?
Why? Let's go away, let's sail on the yacht, let's fucking do something excuse the language, let's do something else. I cannot, my country is my country and I'll fight for it till the day I go out, and that is it.
Speaker 0: Where did you What was it like growing up here? Where'd you grow up? What were the circumstances? What was Ireland like as you were
Speaker 1: Ireland's a beautiful place, beautiful place to grow up, very very community driven and family driven, and I grew up in a in a Dublin suburb off the city center called Crumlin. Dublin Twelve is the district. It's why I named my whisky proper number 12 after my district. It's where my public house is that we will go after in Dublin Twelve, the Black Forge Inn. It's also home to the largest children's hospital in the country, so most people in Ireland have a relationship with the area.
It's a rough and tough area also, and Was it growing up rough? For sure it was. For sure it was. You know, we we moved out when I was about 17 years of age, and that kinda got me a little break from it, if you will, but I had I was 17 years of age, I had already made my friends. I was like an alien in the new place, so I always made my way back down.
My boxing club was down there, my football club was down there, all my friends were down there. Although I moved out at 17, never really moved out, you know, so But Ireland's a great place, full of great people, and
Speaker 0: But it wasn't a rich neighborhood you grew
Speaker 1: up in? No, no, no, it was not, no, for sure
Speaker 0: did so you're 17, what did you how far did you get in school?
Speaker 1: I went all the way to my leaving cert, I was the only one in my family to do it, so I held that up, I
Speaker 0: held And what age did you leave, 18?
Speaker 1: 18 years of age. I didn't go to college, I went into an apprenticeship. It's either you get a job, you go to college, or you get an apprenticeship, and I got an apprenticeship as a plumber on an industrial site in Kilterranen County Wicklow, which was actually, at the time, one of the actually, it was the largest building site in Europe at the time, and lo and behold, misspending, overspending, over budget, all the rest of it, you know, backhand or central, the thing fell apart. The ass fell out of it, we'll say. And that is one of my issues here in Ireland and the people of Ireland, the overspending that's going on.
This is our public wealth being being administered into private hands, enriching people to bring in this influx of illegal mass migration that is changing the fabric of my country. It is Ireland is very close to losing its Irishness, and we will not let that happen, you know, and that's it. We must continue to raise raise our voice and speak our peace. It's almost taboo to speak it, and it has been made that way by our government elite. Like I said, they use bullying, they use intimidation tactics, they use our funds to pay our legacy media to push an agenda.
They do not push facts, they push agendas, and
Speaker 0: I mean, I've only been here two days, but I'm a little bit confused by it because Ireland is not like The United States in that you have an indigenous population of Celtic people called the Irish who've been here since the beginning of known history, and so it's not like you were invaders, you were also never a colonial power, you never invaded anybody else, you didn't have overseas colonies, you just kind of stayed on your island, didn't brewed alcoholic beverages, and
Speaker 1: At the best brewery in the land. Not to me. Not to me. Yeah.
Speaker 0: You never bothered anybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: You don't have any national crimes to atone for. So I come here to Dublin, your biggest city, and not one advertisement on any public space has Irish people in it. Yeah. And it's clearly part of the same propaganda campaign. Yeah.
Like, make white people hate themselves, make white people feel ashamed to be white, white people are criminals. It's like, okay, but why would they who's doing that to you and why? Like, what is that?
Speaker 1: I feel since the turn of the crash, our government elite have been accosted into full time globalist traders of Ireland, and they take their orders from above, and it is not even them. They are being ordered, and the orders are coming down onto the people, and the people have no say. We need amendments to the constitution, we need to remove this tight grip that the political elite have over the public, and that is it. And that is our goal here eventually. I operated my businesses and my entire life on fairness.
That is it. What is fair? What is correct? Our government elite do do the absolute opposite, and it has to change. It has got to change.
Our culture is being erased, you know.
Speaker 0: And you have a very distinct thousand year old or older culture that's based on Irishness, the indigenous population of the island that we're on right now, and they're being replaced at super high speed. So you have said immigration is treason, mass migration is treason. Describe the scale of it to Ireland and its effects.
Speaker 1: Well in the olden days my family, the MacGregor clan, know, treason is you're hung, drawn, and quartered if you commit treason against your nation. Yeah. So, you know, it's what is going on here is an abomination, a travesty, and it cannot continue for much longer. As you said, we are island unto ourself, a small island, and we are being governed by a small people who are in turn being governed by another minute group of people, and it must stop, and that's it. There is so much worry in this government elite circle about myself running for president, and if we are a true democratic nation, which we are not, and I don't believe so, and it's becoming more and more clear and more evident, and the more Irish people are being awakened to this fact, But if we are, let the people decide.
You know, it is this cozy click where I you have to you have to almost bend the knee, you know, to even have a have a shot at this. We should be on the ticket, and a citizen of Ireland should be allowed to be on the ticket above a certain age, of a certain creed, and let the people decide.
Speaker 0: A ticket to run for president.
Speaker 1: Ticket to run for president, that is it. I do not even
Speaker 0: Wait, hold on. Why, this is a democracy supposedly, why can't you run for president?
Speaker 1: Because there's stipulations, you have to get four county councils which are controlled by the government parties, or you have to get 20 nominations of the Eroctis, which are all mostly party affiliates.
Speaker 0: So you can't just run for president.
Speaker 1: You can't just run for president.
Speaker 0: So how is it a democracy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. How is it that it isn't?
Speaker 0: Oh, are you gonna do it anyway?
Speaker 1: I'm gonna push forward and carry on my journey, highlighting my country's plight, my country's fight, and also my country's delight. You know, I do not want to be doom and gloom here, as I said. Yes. Dublin is the greatest city on earth, and Ireland is the greatest country on earth. And I know as an American man, you're probably sitting there in your chair, but we love Ireland dearly, our people.
Speaker 0: No. I'm not, actually. I'm just the opposite. I'm thinking you've got a claim on being the
Speaker 1: greatest You've a claim for sure, and it's worth fighting for, and that's it. That's why I'm But
Speaker 0: so why wouldn't people I know the media here hates you, but I've never understood why. I mean, you're not calling for invading anybody, or throwing anyone in prison, maybe other than your corrupt leadership, you sound like they deserve Why would they hate you?
Speaker 1: I'm just calling for our national safety. Right now, our national security is at risk, and that is a fact. We are being overrun, and it's a danger to the public. And on top of that is our overspending of our public wealth. It is preposterous, the the the the splashing of our money on issues that have not, one, not got to do with us, and two, that actually directly put us in danger, and these are my issues that I wish, we'll say, run on our campaign.
You ask me about my political aspirations. I am of the belief that the era of the politician must end. It must come to an end. It has proven unfruitful, and that is clear as day by the statistics and by what we see around us. It is straight chancery.
Our ministers and our appointed ministers have no history in the roles that they are appointed to. Our minister of finance has no history in accounting. Our minister of health has no history in the health industry. Our minister of education was never a school teacher, as an example as an example as an example. It is straight chancery we are dealing with.
The era of the politician was to end, Tucker. And I can see with the selections of the Trump administration that we look upon, which has been twenty four seven walk walk rate from from my vantage point, You know, Trump a businessman, you know, he he's running it more like a business, and with common sense. You know, that that that is where I I would see it more so than these politicians where they're all in this clique, and it's a party. They they are working on behalf of the party and not the people. They are working to curry favor within the party to rise up the ranks, and then the heads of the party are working to curry favor on on the people above them again to rise up another rank.
It just it serves the country. It does not serve the country, and that is it. I'm simply highlighting it, putting it out to the people. If they wish for me to run, Whatever my nation wants, I'm here for. That's CNN has described you
Speaker 0: as the leader, and I'm quoting, of Ireland's Far Right. Who has? CNN, which is a news channel in The United States.
Speaker 1: Far Left, Far Right, all of these terminologies mean nothing to me. I am a family man, I am an employer of the country, you know, I'm a supporter of many people, and I care about my land, and the safety of its citizens, and the prosperity of its citizens. I want preference. I want peace, preference, and prosperity for the citizens of Ireland, for my people. And isn't that isn't that fair for our country, men and women?
It is our country. Ireland is for Ireland, you know, and and that is it. I'm not right, left, you know. I I I I feel I'm centered, grounded. That is what I feel.
In fact, I ground myself every day. I walk out, and I ground myself every day barefoot in the grass. Barefoot is king. I fought in the octagons, in the cages all around the countries of Ireland, and then into The United States Of America barefoot. So I am a grounded man, either left or right, I am center and grounded.
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You know, the Irish family of 12 children doesn't exist anymore in part because no one can afford that, and yet your government is subsidizing immigrants to have kids. Yeah. So I I don't And that's true in my country too, and Australia, and New Zealand, and Canada, and The UK, like, what is that?
Speaker 1: It's suicide, is what it is. It's absolute suicide, and you know, it has to stop. It has to stop. The rising cost of living is a national emergency. Yes.
And, you know, it has to stop. It has to We say no. We built a toll bridge here in Ireland. We built toll bridges. They're sold to foreign companies.
The funds of this goes to foreign companies. It's silly. It's a little
Speaker 0: bit So the people of Ireland build something, and then your government sells it to foreigners, and then you have
Speaker 1: to pay for
Speaker 0: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Billions per annum. Billions in profit per annum, and people. Another another thing, the traffic corps of the on Garda Shia Khan is one of the most successful divisions in the Gardee, in the in the police force, in our police force for convictions, and, you know, it is the most successful, and it has caused untold stress onto the people of Ireland. I could I I wonder the amount of suicides, the amount of lives lost, and families destroyed over the stress of of the traffic car institution with, you know, get caught driving without tax, or, you know, no NCT, or it's all a money racket,
Speaker 0: foot So, just for foreigners watching this, you're talking about parking and minor traffic Yeah,
Speaker 1: minor traffic violations, you are put through the ringer, and now in this day and age, which is why it's so infuriating, and then, you know, we'll keep calm with it, but it's why people in Ireland are waking up, because everyone has felt it in some way, shape, or form, the stress of having to make sure that you're above board on this money racket, is what it is.
Speaker 0: It's not to keep you safe.
Speaker 1: It's steal money from you. Not to keep you safe, but on this day and age now, we've got our our new visitors to the to the island who get fully exempt from driving without tax, insurance, NCT, and even on Irish reg plates, free as a board right through after Irish The immigrants gone after through the most stressful periods of our life. Lives have been lost due to the stress caused of this of this of this branch in Ungarra Siakhani, and yet now people now our our our our neighbors from other countries are moving here, and with full exemption, to drive around our roads with supercharged vehicles that have been imported on the taxpayers' dime, and then also even another crazy statement is if something happens to your vehicle, if you're a nice friendly visitor or potential new new member of our country, you get your vehicle repaired at a cost to the state. So it is just ludicrous, and the people of Ireland are rising up to it. Not even we're just being awakened to it, and that's it.
As it as awaken, you know, we're noticing Wait.
Speaker 0: Is what you said real?
Speaker 1: That's very, very real. Very very real, and it's How can they justify They cannot. There is no justification. You know what there is? Silence, and that is that doesn't work.
You cannot be silent on this. Like I said, you're not gonna get off ruining Ireland or ripping off Ireland, never in a million years. But if
Speaker 0: they're paying foreigners to have kids while you can't afford to have kids, if they're shaking you down with the armed police but allowing foreigners a pass. Yeah. If they're paying to fix foreigners' cars, not yours, they hate you, and they're trying to kill you. Right?
Speaker 1: It's an erasure. It's an attempted erasure of our of our our people. That is it. I could have went I could have went all that way in the White House. I had to climb.
We had to you go incrementally up. Right? You go in. Hey. It's you talk about a genocide.
This is the genocide of our people.
Speaker 0: Obviously.
Speaker 1: But, you know, you gotta climb it right. So we're getting there, and awareness is being made, and we'll make the moves, and there's many great people. In fact, the majority of the Irish people are great people. Majority majority are great
Speaker 0: people I agree
Speaker 1: with you. Doing great things for our nation, and we're and the pressure and the awareness we're we're we're putting on our government elite is causing slight changes, you know, they're they're they're doing they're doing certain things to appease, however, how genuine that is, how much of a facade that is, we're skeptical. Our trust is at an all time low, and you know, you see we walk the length of breath the length of breath of the Dublin city capital, and it's love, and you know, cheer, and support. Not one politician under any party can do the same, and that is a shame. And I actually I I don't understand why they Ireland, we are the greatest supporters.
If you do good by Ireland, Ireland will do good by you, and none more is is that evident than than myself. Yes. We are the greatest supporters of the in the world, they say. How our politicians do not wish to receive this love? I do not understand it.
Fundraising efforts will begin, and there will be a large fund built into this where we're gonna really take back our country, and that's it. Funds are needed. Money is needed.
Speaker 0: Is anybody so you've made a, I think
Speaker 1: If I if I think about these tariffs, what's going on right now, while their money dries up, and they're panicking about their money, our government elite, our money rises up. And that is an exciting thing for the people of Ireland to hear. And that's what this is. My funds are infinite, and I'm all in for the country of Ireland. And I've got incredible backing from your country and other countries that wish to support our cause, and they said it's a real movement for change.
Speaker 0: So let me ask you this so a lot of political move or one political movement in particular in Ireland had support from rich Irish Americans for years. The Republicans, the nationalists here had support from donors in The United States. Do you think Irish Americans in The US, a lot of whom are rich, understand what's happening in
Speaker 1: this No. For sure. And when I seen Michal Martin or Taoiseach, our rotating Taoiseach, grace the Oval Office on March 12, '5 days before Saint Patrick's Day, five days before myself, I saw softball. I saw a game of softball by Vance by vice president Vance and president Trump, and almost a little bit of pandering to him, being safe with him, because you cannot be seen and I'm sure that that's 40,000,000 Irish Americans, and that that vote is very strong for for for for the administration. You know, you need that on strong.
Yeah. You need that on-site. So they couldn't be seen. Although their feelings are well known, you know, they they're well against what's going on here in this country, they could not be seen to be tearing through an Irish delegate on the Saint Patrick's week. So they played it they played it correct.
And then when I seen this, I said, okay, and I got my call to go and show show up, I said, I'm gonna highlight this to the Irish American people. This is what's really going on, you know. Some people are saying, hey, I'm from Wexford. I'm from Wexford. My grandmother's from Wexford.
I said, Wexford was the sunny Southeast is what we used to call Wexford. A well, we do call it a holiday destination. It is now no more. There is no hotels available in Wexford. They're all transferred into iPass centers, which are international protection applicant services.
It's this fuck it's this racket where they're all getting housed. It is a it is an office block. It is a hotel. It is a it is even a school. It is even schools now are being transferred into these into these iPass centers.
Filled with immigrants. Filled with immigrants, yes. So So they totally saw Wexford Wexford, Russell Air Port is another is another port where they arrive in, and they're in County Wexford, which used to be the sunny Southeast, a beautiful holiday destination, is now without a hotel in the county. They've all been transferred into international protection
Speaker 0: Why doesn't someone overthrow the government? Here? Yeah. I mean, that's like an act of war against your country. I I mean, I shouldn't say that to you because I don't wanna get
Speaker 1: you Look. I'm statesman like. But in a normal statesman like. I'll say this. We are peaceful.
We are not harmless. A normal country, people wouldn't put up with that. We move under God, and we let God guide us. We're capable of many things. We're capable of many things as a great nation, as a great people, and we move under God.
Speaker 0: Well, you've heard a lot of complaining in the last couple of weeks since Donald Trump announced his new import tariffs on foreign made things. A lot of people don't like it, but the companies who make American products in America with American Materials, they're pretty happy because they're not affected by this. They've been doing the right thing since the beginning. They're not paying tariffs because, again, they're making American products for Americans. Liberty Safe is a perfect example.
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You protect what matters most. Choose American steel, American craftsmanship, choose liberty. Visit libertysafe.com for more. So you believe that Irish Americans, again, who funded a lot of stuff in Ireland over the years, a lot of investment
Speaker 1: Need to realize that where you where you originated from is on the cusp of being done, and some are already already gone. Some are already gone. However, it's not it's not I don't I don't see it as I see it as correctable still. I see it as fixable. You know, you I I even if you think about, like, the deportation efforts, I I asked speaker Johnson, where are you gonna go?
Like, what? You're you're talking about this it'll be the largest deportation effort in The United States history. Where do you plan on going? He said, the prisons. He said, the prison's force.
I said and I just thought, okay. I I and then I thought and then I thought about our prisons. Our prisons are overrun right now. We've got now, I think maybe just thousands of people without a bed even in a prison, let alone we can't house our people. We can't even house the we can't even have a bed for the prisoners.
So, you know, straight away, you're going in there. You came in, you committed a crime on our soil, you're gone. You know, that's it. No ifs, ands, or buts. Why is the taxpayer paying to keep prisoners from foreign countries in our prisons, and it's and it's being overrun.
So, you know, that that I I be up for that, and then I would be going to these iPass centers. Would be going to the direct provision centers. How did you enter our country? Illegally, you're gone. You know, have you a criminal history?
Gone. Are you is there a genuine attempt to assimilate into the culture and achieve a job and give to the community and support the community? If so, yes, Cade Milafolger. If not, gone. And, you know, we can do that.
And then also, a turning off of the tap, you know, right now, as I said, about the car situation, you know, they arrive, they get you get favor if you're from another nation, but if you're from from Why? Why? Who thought of this? It's it's an order from above. It's a globalist agenda.
That's the truth of it. It's a globalist agenda.
Speaker 0: Know it is.
Speaker 1: So for me, if I get in, I'm gonna be exerting my influence to turn off the tap. If you think about what Trump has done, they're actually stopping to they're stopping coming in Yeah. Because it's not there no more. The gravy train isn't there no more. What is there is actually resistance, you know, and that's that's where it's at.
Now, is a human there's compassion for me. There's compassion. I employ people from all walks of life, so there is a compassion element. Many people have emigrated here, have done great things for our country, and that has to be highlighted also, but it's like at a stage now where the great people who have came here and emigrated and and contributed greatly to our society are now being feeling the strain of of of of and are feeling the wrath almost because of this social unrest. It has to stop.
It has got to stop, you know, and we're at we're at our limit with it. We are really at our limit with it. How the next few years go? It's a bit it's worrisome. It is worrisome.
This EU pact, this EU migration pact, as a president I could get in, and I could really rattle it, and put it to a stop, push to stop it, which would be the main thing. They're trying to now hurry it through, which if it goes through, it's like 30,000, 40 thousand, 50 thousand, it's an unlimited number that we'll have to take, it's on the orders of
Speaker 0: And move all around your country, right, into small towns, this is what they've in The United States, they move them into small towns around the country, so then your country's gone and you don't even know it. Are they doing that here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's counties overrun right now. There's a county in Ireland, Karna, it's a Gaeltox it's a Gaeltox town, and there's more iPass center. It was a home for the Ukrainians, and now it's being altered into an iPass center, and it's one of the last places of our language, and that is being, that is feeling an influx over, and there's, you know, the people are out in the streets against it, so it is happening in counties all over Ireland for sure, and with this EU migration pact, if the floodgates are open on that, it's a difficult time.
Speaker 0: It's changing the religious composition of your country, which since Saint Patrick has been a Catholic country, you had Anglican overlords from across the water, but it's been a Catholic country for over a thousand years. So now they're trying to put a refugee center in Christian holy site town in Ireland. Was reading Yeah. It's hard to think that's not on purpose.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It is purposeful for sure.
Speaker 0: Is anyone saying anything about this, like in your media?
Speaker 1: You know, I wonder. I do often wonder, and I'm almost certain they must behind doors. You know, it's like if your boss says something and you don't agree, but you're gonna you might you might have to agree because your livelihood is on the line, which is essentially what it is. A lot of people's livelihoods are on the line. In fact, the only people that don't the only people that agree with it are in public, because I actually I could not believe that they could believe it behind closed doors, boss or not, livelihood or not.
I'm I'm almost certain they cannot they cannot, you know, believe in this this way for our country. But that's it. I'm just, you know So
Speaker 0: your biggest media company is state media. Like North Korean state media, it's called RTE. Yeah. And it literally is an organ in the state, which is amazing. But then you have social media, and you tweeted on social media, Ireland, we're at war.
Yeah. You obviously are. What was the reaction from the government to that tweet?
Speaker 1: Oprah. Oprah. You know, I I was the scapegoat. An an incident happened where an Algerian visitor, or citizen, had an Irish passport, or so we believe that the information is very is not fully revealed.
Speaker 0: You could never get a straight answer from these people.
Speaker 1: Never get a straight answer. Our children were stabbed outside of an Irish school on Parnell Street, and a teacher was stabbed trying to fight them off, and then an Irishman jumped in, and then an immigrant from Brazil jumped in, and together they wrestled them down, and then it was, you know, hide it and blame my tweets as the reason it kicked off, and that's kind of what we're dealing with.
Speaker 0: Wait, Algerians stabbed Irish children, but it was your fault Pretty
Speaker 1: was kind of what the rhetoric was, yes, and then, you know, that that was it, yeah, pretty much. Like I said, I often wonder about if I think about, you know, do they believe in this? We have 6,000 members of the defense force, six thousand army, and we have about 12,000 guardians. I really wonder how many are are are happy with the direction our country was going. I cannot see I cannot see many behind closed doors.
Speaker 0: Gardia or the police?
Speaker 1: Gardia or the police. I cannot see many closed doors that are happy with this. Even if I look at what has happened in some of the protests where the Guardians essentially, the Guardians are following orders. They're doing their job. It's a tricky one, and it's a it's a sad one to see.
It was very sad and upsetting to see our Guardians throwing on their compatriots, and that's what we saw, and use excessive force. But it's an order coming down, and I feel I feel sad seeing it. I feel sad seeing it. And, you know, most recently, one of them came out unnamed and said it has stayed with him. They are they are very, very troubled by it, and it's just a sad sight to see.
You know, Ireland, we should be together, and that's what I said, I wonder how many behind closed doors are really with this cause that we are fighting.
Speaker 0: So if nothing
Speaker 1: I would assume it's most, the majority.
Speaker 0: I think that's true in The US too. I think our FBI is totally corrupt, as I'm sure you've read. I think most FBI agents are probably appalled, but too afraid to do anything. How long, if nothing changes, will Ireland remain Ireland, do you think? How much time do you have before it's just not fixed?
Speaker 1: Well, we are a small island. We are a small, small island, and we are now I don't even wanna highlight. I actually do I'm actually at a stage now where I'm cautious of highlighting the benefits of arriving here, because it's only gonna attract more. You know? If I look at Trump's situation, he's it has decreased the amount of people who are attempting to immigrate to The United States Of America because of what's going on.
This is what I wish would have happened. You know, if you turn off the tap, they go, or they stop coming. If you start if you if you show a a basket full of golden eggs, you know, they just arrive for it, you know, and that's kinda what it is. So It's awful here.
Speaker 0: I just wanna say that.
Speaker 1: It's a free for all with our public wealth, with our money, a free for all, and it's being stolen, and it has to stop. It's not how long I couldn't give you the exact figures, you know, statistics, but it doesn't look right. It could happen a year not not long, anyway, not long.
Speaker 0: Feels that way. So how did you just back to my original question, you're a plumber's apprentice on an industrial site in Ireland, cutting cast iron pipes and replacing them, or whatever you're doing, probably something like that, and then you wind up here thinking about running for president with these very evolved political views. How did that happen?
Speaker 1: Having a love for one's country, that's it, I have a love for my country, I fought to represent my nation's flag on the grandest stage of fighting. That was my aspiration, to represent my nation, to open the doors of the fighting world and the martial arts world to the Irish public, and to support my teammates, we don't we were all we had a kindred spirit rising up, chasing our dreams, and a very tight knit tight knit crew, and we rose up, and I got in there, I was successful, I opened it up. Now the martial arts lifestyle is a real way of living for many people in Ireland, and I take great happiness in seeing that. And I suppose it's just continued off of that, You know, it's it's it's a different fight now. You know?
It's a different fight, but it's still a fight to represent my country to the best of my ability.
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Honestly, you will be. So when you started fighting, as you said, you're a plumber's apprentice on an industrial site, and then you announced in public a few years after that, you haven't heard of me, but I'm gonna be the world champion, and then you were. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Five time.
Speaker 0: Five time. Did you know that you were going to be, or were you trying to put your marker out and then live up to it?
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I will say here about, you know, I do not wish to be doom and gloom. Right? I I all my outlook on life has always been to have a positive outlook, you know, borderline delusional. I could walk into a burning house and see hear birds chirping, as an example, and that assisted me in being able to block out certain things that may have impacted me and
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Hampered me and slowed me down from getting to where I I was going. So I wish to continue with that and have a positive outlook and say, it's not all doom and gloom. Like I said, there are there are positive changes happening incrementally, slowly but surely. Slowly but surely. And as I said, there's a great group of people, and it's the majority of Irish people that are that are at the helm of it.
I'm I'm a voice and a support, and as I said, I'm here to serve my country, serve my country to the best of my ability and protect my country. That is that is all I wish. I wish for the people to have the power, and myself to have a vote amongst the people. That is my that is my aim.
Speaker 0: What did you think of President Trump?
Speaker 1: What do I think of him? Yeah. I he's doing very very well. I think, you know, I was present for his February, although not officially. I was there on fighting business.
I was fighting in Madison Square Garden for my second UFC world title, and you MMA and UFC had just became legalized in New York at the time, and I remember Trump had been just voted in, and he won the election, and there was uproar on the streets, and anger, and, you know, fear, I suppose, was going on, and at that time, I was just an observer. You know, politics wasn't really on my mind at that time. Ireland was not really going through what it was going through at that stage in 02/2016. Although it was rising, it was unbeknownst to me and many in the country.
Speaker 0: Were not political really?
Speaker 1: Not really political at that stage, you know, I was focused on my craft, and it wasn't at the forefront. It all kinda took a turn post COVID. It all took a real turn post COVID, and you could kinda see what was going on and what had going on post the crash, you know, and who our government are serving. You could kinda see that come to fruition then throughout the COVID era, and then I just became more invested in it, and then that that was it. But I I I was there for Trump's inauguration when he was sworn in for the first time, fear, worry, panic, and then I was there the second time in 2024 most recent, and it was elation and excitement, and I thought it was good to see.
I I I they asked me what do I think he'll be as a president, and I said, well, when it was 02/2016 in in in the in the media runs I was doing, and I said, let's see, you know, give the man a chance. He's not by he's not from a political background, he's from a different background. It's interesting. Let us see. And I thought he'd done well.
Towards the end of the term, you know, there may have been times to, you know, as a leader of a country, you almost need to, you know, cool the flames, you know, maybe there were some things that might might have fanned the flames towards the end of his term that I thought. But this time around, I I feel that he's off to a good start, and I wish him well. I wish the country of The United States Of America well. We I I consider them my dear siblings. We consider America our sibling, and and I think it's going well, and we're getting a good fair bit of energy from it, from Ireland even amidst the tariff situation that is going on, you know.
Ireland's people have not seen the money got to do with this whatsoever. In fact, we have been, you know, robbed of our own money, and yet yet we are supposed to supposed to be this wealthy country, yet the people of Ireland are struggling to heat their homes. So there are many people who are seeing this tariff situation as a, you know, a gotcha moment for our government to eat. I'm not so much of that. I wish I wish for our country to be prosperous, and our people to be prosperous, and that's what my aim is, that's what my wish is and my hope is.
Speaker 0: So you're not necessarily against the tariffs, it doesn't sound like.
Speaker 1: Well, governments say, what good is tariffs? Tariffs are no good for nobody, yet they've been tariffing The United States, you know, if that's the case, then why have we been tariffing them? Why haven't we been hitting them with tariffs? I'm not so much against it. I'm I'm watching it.
You know, I'm watching it. I wish for economic success for my nation, and, you know, Ireland deserves it. That's how it trades. We played our cards correct in certain ways, and, you know, that's it. But like I said, fair it has to be fair.
Fairness is is key here, and that's that's what I that's what I push for him.
Speaker 0: Since no Irish politician well you're one of the most, maybe the most famous living Irishman, okay, so there's that, world famous, and you're saying things that the overwhelming majority of your politicians will not say that are probably pretty popular with the people, so you're therefore a massive threat to the structure running your country now. What do you think they're gonna do to you if you keep talking this way?
Speaker 1: Attempt to tarnish as they are, you know, attempt to disrupt as they are, or possibly worse, but I do not fear. I do not fear it. Like I said, I move forward under God, and my nation can see my nation can see my heart and what I'm for, and that's that's it. That's like, I move on and carry on. You're really not afraid at all?
Not on my own.
Speaker 0: When do you have to make the decision about whether you want to formally enter politics?
Speaker 1: Well, we believe the election will take place November 11, so it's a sixty day run up prior to that. So I'm just gonna keep, you know, requesting a democratic process to play out and allow the people to decide and see where it falls. You know, it'll become more evident if they deny this, that we are not a democratic country, and they'll have to answer to their constituents at some stage, you know, there will be accountability, you know, it's how much are they gonna be accountable for? They'll have to decide, and that's it.
Speaker 0: You've described yourself as an employer, you said that a couple of times, tell us about the businesses you employ people in.
Speaker 1: I've got many businesses here in the country, I've about 300 staff all in, I've got public houses, I've got construction efforts going on building
Speaker 0: social Public houses meaning, we would call them bars, public No,
Speaker 1: yeah. A pub is short for public house. So I've got public houses, I've got breweries, I've got companies also with brand building, and I have also construction efforts where I'm many social houses, houses towards the housing crisis that's going on. I'm currently at about 300 houses built already, and, you know, I'm closing in on, you know, my next venture is about a thousand houses built, so I'm doing my part to help this housing crisis. I've always been doing that, and it is at a heavy cost, not gonna lie, it's a heavy cost.
Speaker 0: What do you mean?
Speaker 1: Like, there is no profit in it, you know, it's a build, and it's for the people, and that's it.
Speaker 0: There's no profit in building houses?
Speaker 1: No profit in it, you know, for social housing, I get my money back if I'm lucky. You know, maybe a little sweetener, little drink, we'll say, here in Ireland. Yeah. So, but for the stress it's and the time, it's a difficult task, but it's worth it. You know, there was one I'd done, I completed a build of eight houses, it was actually my very first one.
It was maybe two years ago. I've only I've only maybe four three, four years ago, but it was in a a part of Dublin called Sandring, and there was eight homes, and I had got them completed just before Christmas, so there were eight homeless families that were brought into their new forever home right before Christmas, and that filled me with so much energy to continue and go and do it, and I went full steam ahead, and like I said, now I'm in the process, I've got 300 strong now in construction, close to finish, and, you know, more than a thousand being built already, and that's with me, my own self, able to do this with every block in my way. You know, as as as one individual citizen of Ireland. If I was to get in and and to have influence, I really fancy my chances. I mean, the bar is so low.
Every statistic, every metric is on the on the floor. Every metric is on the floor. I'd get in, and I'd able to I'd be able to decrease our homelessness, you know, build our housing, you know, slow down the role of influx of illegal migration, control the spending. I fancy it. Our country has not been run correct, and it is clearly evident to everybody outside of the political paywall.
Everyone is aware of it, and even those inside of the political paywall are also aware of aware of it. However, they are being bullied, intimidated, and threatened with their livelihood unless they go along with it. So a turn will happen, a shift will happen. I'm doing my part, and I'm proud to do so, and honored to do so, and I will continue to fight for my country and the future of the children of this nation, and that's it.
Speaker 0: Do you really sincerely, be honest, think that your beer is better than Guinness?
Speaker 1: So, it's another level. It's the world's creamiest stout. Not only is it better tasting, it is better pricing. It is brewed right here in Dublin, and there's an employer of about a hundred people in that brewery. It's a it's a fantastic brewery, and the Forge Brewery, you can go and visit it if you have time, but we will go and test it if you wish.
I would fancy a blind taste test any day of the week, and I guarantee victory. We have we have done, we've done amazing things with the with the stout, to date, and it's still only on the rise, but there have been many taste tests done. So there's a couple of Stouts, Guinness is the top for the minute. We are number two on the rise, and then there's some other brands. You know, there's some other great Irish brands, Murphy's and Beamish.
It's a shared pot, a rising tide raises all ships, you know, the the others are bullies. Yeah? The others are bullies. I am I wish to build up all our stouts and all our you know, because Ireland, are world champions at making stout, like we are the world champions at making whiskey. It's it's put them all to the test, on a blind taste test, forage Irish stout.
Speaker 0: It's just a little bit weird. I guess I didn't realize that Guinness was an English company.
Speaker 1: It the Diageo owned, yes, and they were yeah.
Speaker 0: Centuries of colonial oppression, and they're still selling their stout here?
Speaker 1: You know if you're not held accountable, or you've got, you know, you're free to do as you will. That is what it is with Guinness, even even as they go in. I'm a publican also, so I own pubs, so I deal with Guinness, and I serve Guinness. I serve my competitor. No problem.
We outsell it 10 to one. 10 points to one, we outsell it on-site. But, you know, other Republicans are dealing with Guinness distributors, and they're not they're not friendly. They're not supportive, you know, because they've never had to be in. And then when I came onto the scene with Forge Irish Stout, all of a sudden they started coming and shaking the the publican's hand a little bit differently.
Speaker 0: They started acting Irish.
Speaker 1: They they were held accountable, they had to be they had to be by the book. It was creating fairness, and then there was a hit job done on me, and it kinda took me out of the market here in Ireland for a minute, and that's kinda what happened, and it was it is what it is, you know, but I have the best stout in Ireland, Four Drivers stout for sure. Interesting. And you're gonna have one. You don't drink, do you?
You don't drink any?
Speaker 0: No, I had a I had a Guinness no alcohol last night.
Speaker 1: We can get you one of them, we've got the zero zeros on-site for sure, we'll get you one of them.
Speaker 0: Yeah, it was okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's nice.
Speaker 0: So, in sad news, I know you said you're a, you know, looking at the bright side kind of guy, but Rosie O'Donnell has moved here. If you're president and you tackle the immigration crisis, and I do think Pakistan and India take a lot of the blame for it, Africa, but also Rosie O'Donnell, like, would you deport her?
Speaker 1: I I promise to report What is her criminal history? Has she got a criminal background? How does she enter the country? Does she enter the country illegally? Has she assimilated with our community?
Does she hold our beliefs? Is she is she a upstanding member of our community? How would she be? If she is not, well, then she's gotta go. Yeah.
Gotta go home. You gotta get the hell out of here. But I don't know Rosie O'Donnell from Adam. But, you know, you be happy? If she's a comedian?
She see I've seen her on our national TV. She spoke a bit ill of me. I don't know, Rosie. She seems unhappy. She seems going through something at the moment, and I'm not the type of person to kick a person when they're down.
I wish for her I believe she's a comedian is what her craft is. I wish for her to find her happiness again, and that is it. I am, you know, was what
Speaker 0: I was saying you could feel that she was going through something even through
Speaker 1: the I could feel it for sure. I think that's And I wish for her, I wish, you know, happiness and spread love in the world, that's it.
Speaker 0: Well, you're a very very decent man, I have to say. Last question, do you think that Ireland is famously a spiritual country?
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: You know, your patron Saint Patrick, after whom the day is named, you know, was a Christian leader, and you think of Ireland as like a very religious country, it's not really anymore. Do you think it's becoming more spiritually aware or less? Yeah, for
Speaker 1: sure. So
Speaker 0: you feel that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. It's spiritual warfare going on right here, 100%. Yes. And we fancy our chances. We fancy our chances in a big way.
Speaker 0: Me too. Conor McGregor, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Okay, Carlton, thank you very much. That was awesome. Deadly brother. Thank you.
Posted - April 12, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Saved - April 13, 2025 at 11:48 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
“He (Ronan Farrow) @RonanFarrow distorted her words, downplayed their connection and delivered a gut punch to a survivor he once called credible.” Dr.Jon Levy ( Tara Reade’s attorney) and thank you to @RadhaStirling for her help on the legal team.
Posted - March 28, 2025 at 8:03 AM
Saved - March 28, 2025 at 8:48 AM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Hilarious https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2vA73oL/ https://t.co/lzn2Eckg2U
Video Transcript AI Summary
Ireland is allegedly about to become a military superpower with the acquisition of six fighter jets, despite never having them before. The speaker believes this may still not be enough to prevent invasion.
Despite Ireland's neutrality, the speaker has a list of countries to invade, starting with Norway for the Vikings and for catching Ireland's fish. Iceland is second, because the speaker feels it is begging to be colonized by the Irish.
Ireland is also acquiring 300 cyber security troops, possibly to catfish Justin Trudeau. The speaker believes the Irish will be a force to be reckoned with, unless their enemies have seven planes.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Ireland is about to become a military superpower. You're all fucked. We're about to get our very own fighter jets. We never had them before. Very exciting.
We're getting six of these fuckers. That doesn't sound like a lot. That doesn't sound like enough. If we get invaded, we're probably still fucked, which is typical. This always happens to us.
Ireland is supposed to be a neutral country, a country of peace. That being said, I have compiled a list of the first countries I think we should invade. Number one, the Norwegians. They get away with too fucking much. First of all, the Vikings.
We haven't forgotten about that. And stop coming over and catching all our fucking fish. Number two, Iceland. I've just always felt it was begging to be colonized by the Irish. We'd only have to change one letter.
We're also getting 300 cyber security troops. I don't know what we're gonna do with them. Maybe try and catfish Justin Trudeau or something like that. The Irish are gonna be a force to be reckoned with. We will rain hell on our enemies unless they have seven planes.
Follow me, I'm delicious.
Posted - March 19, 2025 at 8:56 AM
Saved - March 19, 2025 at 9:30 AM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Very insightful.
@Glenn_Diesen - Glenn Diesen
Jeffrey Sachs: Peace Negotiations & the End of NATO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BljAmYrjn08
Video Transcript AI Summary
The discussion centers on the Ukraine peace process, with Trump reportedly optimistic after his envoy discussed ceasefire conditions in Moscow. A key point is that Russia seeks recognition of the war's fundamental causes, including Ukraine's neutrality, territorial settlements, and security arrangements. Publicly, Ukraine continues to demand NATO membership and full territorial recovery, positions seen as obstacles to peace.
The US may be shifting, suggesting NATO won't enlarge, territorial concessions are needed, and US involvement in security arrangements will be limited. However, Ukraine's agreement on these points is uncertain. Some European leaders are interpreted as wanting the US to pursue a long war, a view the speaker dismisses as delusional.
Compromise possibilities include security architecture and territorial disputes, with the speaker emphasizing the NATO question as fundamental. Crimea is unlikely to return to Ukraine, and Russia has gained ground on territory. The speaker advocates for UN Security Council involvement in security arrangements, referencing a nearly finalized Istanbul agreement from April 2022 as a basis for peace, which was allegedly undermined by the US. The speaker also notes that NATO lost its purpose after the end of the Warsaw pact and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Hi, everyone, and welcome. I'm very excited today to speak with professor Jeffrey Sachs about what is going on with the peace process in Ukraine. That is after The US got Zelenskyy to accept a proposal for a ceasefire, which was, I guess, always a bit empty of content. But nonetheless, we saw that Trump's invoice, Steve Whitkoff, he went off to Moscow to discuss the conditions for ending the fighting and indeed moving forward with this ceasefire. And it seems to have gone quite well, given that Trump said he was optimistic.
And tomorrow on Tuesday, March, Trump and Putin are reportedly expected to speak on the phone. So I was wanted to ask you first, what is realistic to expect from this? Well, there's obviously
Speaker 1: a lot of discussion going on behind the scenes that we have not been privy to. So the question really is what beyond the discussion of a thirty day ceasefire has substantively been discussed with Ukrainians, perhaps even agreed, though according to the Ukrainian response is nothing. Now what I mean by that is there isn't going to be a cease fire just standing alone. Why would there be? The Russians will not accept that.
They have the military momentum and they've not heard a word officially from the Ukrainian side about any of the fundamental causes of the war. And that's what the Russians say, but it's true. Also, it's not just a Russian position. This war has to be ended on political grounds. The most fundamental of which include three items.
Ukrainian neutrality versus the ongoing demand by Ukraine and by many of Ukraine's partners in Europe for NATO membership. The second is a settlement on territorial issues. And the third is a settlement on some kind of security arrangements in the context of a peace agreement. Now we haven't heard publicly any movement by the Ukrainian government on any of those three items. According to the Ukrainian government, from what I've heard, and I may have missed something, but the demand for NATO membership continues essentially or continues to this day.
The demand for a full recovery of all territories to the nineteen ninety one borders continues to be the official position. And regarding security, basically NATO membership or NATO troops continue to be, including the participation of The United States, to be the position regarding security. Now, those are not the basis for peace, because Russia has security interests that are fundamental that led to this war. Russia has the momentum on the battlefield. So, calling for a thirty day cease fire by itself means nothing.
Now, when The United States Representatives and the Ukrainian representatives met in Jeddah, they didn't spend eight and a half hours behind closed doors discussing very short statement. They discussed these basic conditions. One might suspect that there was some movement on these. The United States has more or less made a very major movement on these, saying that yes, NATO will not enlarge, there will have to be territorial concessions, There will have to be security arrangements that do not include, for example, The United States. Ukraine, to my knowledge, to the time that we speak, has not made any public movement on these, and we don't know if there was private movement.
Now, that eight and a half hour meeting in Jeddah, The US Envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with President Putin. Was a, one could say, a congenial meeting in a way. The meeting itself was mutually respectful and diplomatic. The statements that came out of it were the same. Russia is saying, we could agree with a ceasefire if the fundamental causes of this war are recognized.
There was a further exchange regarding Ukrainian troops surrounded in the Kursk region. In the two days that followed, there were upbeat statements by President Trump on his social media. Presumably something's happening behind the scenes, but we don't know. And these statements coming from European leaders are as bellicose as ever. So we have probably two levels of diplomacy taking place, something behind closed doors, something in public.
If the only thing we have is The United States essentially saying NATO will not enlarge, that there need to be territorial concessions, and that a security arrangement will not involve The United States, but that there is no agreement on those fundamental issues, either by Ukraine or by major European powers, then I think what we will have is The United States just extricating itself from this conflict, and events will follow on. In Ukraine, probably Ukraine's major losses on the battlefield. But if there is behind closed doors more agreement, which I think is quite plausible, then maybe we're heading towards a real agreement.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, I narrative in Europe responding to this ceasefire, they interpret first, at least in the media, as a take or leave it deal to the Russians. So there was a a great deal of excitement because the assumption was the Russians can't accept this, and once they don't accept it, The US should go after Russia in a big way. So in other words, The US should return and come back to our side of pursuing a long war instead. And then you had Starmer, he built this into the narrative that Walt Zelenskyy showed he wants peace, but now Putin does not.
So it's been used for everything it's worth. But of course, from coming from Trump, something else is being said. He said, you know, he he's optimistic. Putin respects America, and Ukraine shouldn't have picked the fight in his words with a much more powerful adversary. But what is there to where is the scope for compromise here?
I'm curious. Cost neutrality, it encompasses a lot. It's security guarantees. It's yeah. It's any peacekeepers on the ground.
All all all of this are issues related to neutrality. Of course, with the the territorial disputes, there seems to be some more leeway, but or at least that there could be some in terms of where the administrative borders are pulled because Trump said that we'll be talking about land, and we'll be talking about power plants. I'm assuming this is the Saporozhian Nuclear Power Plant, which is under Russian control, and it's on its side of the Dnieper, a bit too uncomfortably close to Crimea. So where do you think there's it is is a possibility to meet halfway? Would it be on the security architecture, or how do you view, well, the or how much room is there for actual maneuver for both sides?
Speaker 1: First, let me say what Starmer and Macron say makes absolutely no sense to me at all. The British almost never make any sense to me anyway, I have to say, in everything that they say, because the bellicosity, the Russophobia, the lack of any sense of diplomacy, it has two hundred years of history, and it's very sad and unrealistic. But in terms of an expression of what's actually happening, it's delusional. The idea that Trump made a take it or leave it offer, and that The US was going to quote rejoin the war is completely delusional. Trump and The United States are not going to rejoin the war with new packages of military aid and an extended war in Ukraine.
The United States, in its current political, fiscal, military, geopolitical conditions, is not going to do that. Why the Europeans believe that, I don't know if they believe that. Why they express that in public is beyond me. Because being wrong all the time, as the British and the French are, does not seem to me to be clever bargaining, clever negotiating, clever politics. So I view it as incompetence and intransigence, rather than actually even tactical, much less strategic insight on their side.
Of course, everything I'm saying could be wrong. The United States could announce, well Russia is not moving, so we rejoin the war. I find it impossible in the context of American politics and American interests and Trump's own position and the repeated positions of all those around him to believe that anything like that is remotely the case. So let me start there. I don't give any credence whatsoever to the British and French positions.
And I've heard privately from European leaders to the contrary. So let me just add that as well. When it comes to the actual conditions for peace, I do believe the NATO question is sine qua non. The NATO question is, in my view, the fundamental causes of belli. It goes back thirty years, it's not a secret.
Many times Western officials have expressed the truth about this. Trump has said the truth about this. US Officials have said Ukraine is not joining NATO. Ukraine is not joining NATO. Period.
Everybody needs to understand this. It's not going to happen. Whether NATO survives is yet another matter, by the way. It's not beyond, thinking that ten years from now there's no NATO. But given that Ukraine is not joining NATO.
Okay, next. What about territory? Well, Crimea is not going back to Ukraine. It was part of Russia for centuries, until a rather arbitrary maneuver when Crimea was gifted, so called to an administrative part of the Soviet Union, that is the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1954, on an occasion of a three hundredth year celebration of a treaty, which had made made according to the Russian view of it, Ukraine subordinate to the Russian Empire back in 1654. Okay.
Ukraine for countless reasons is Crimea is not going back to Ukraine period. Then come the questions of the annexed regions of the two Donbas Oblasts and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. I don't think that there's all that much room for maneuver and negotiating myself, because Russia won on the battlefield. If this had been the Istanbul process in April 2022, no, those would not have become Russian territory, most likely. There would have been the implementation of the Minsk Two agreements in the Donbas, and the questions of Zaporizhzhia and Herzogne never would have come up.
The western side, led by Biden, was stupid. They were stupid to block the Istanbul process, which would have ended this conflict in April 2022. Now, events have continued. Well, the negotiations are all the harder on territory. Ukraine will have to cede a lot of territories.
I'm not in the negotiating room, and I'm not going to negotiate in this way. I'm just saying that the events on the ground since the Istanbul process have changed for the worse regarding Ukraine's territorial situation. And that's predictably so, and I and you and others predicted it. So this is sad. If you play a losing hand and you keep upping the ante, you lose more in the end.
And that's what happened to Ukraine. And that was the fault of Biden and the European leaders, but especially the Biden administration and Boris Johnson, who was leading The UK in April 2022, and went personally to Kyiv to tell them fight on, don't take an agreement, which was in reach. When it comes to the security arrangements, the central issue on the security arrangements include two questions. What kind of military situation? Who does or doesn't have troops on the ground?
How big are the militaries and so forth in Ukraine? And second, what is Russia's role in the security arrangements? Russia has said we will not be a bystander to the security arrangements, because then you make a pretext and we're back to war. And on the other hand, the European powers are saying this can't be an empty word of unilateral Ukrainian demilitarization, there needs to be something more than that. My own view, which I've put forward for many years, is that this should come under the context of the UN Security Council, which would automatically include Russia, but then automatically, of course, also importantly include China, which is a major stabilizing force for an agreement, because China will want to see an agreement fulfilled, and it of course includes Britain, France, and The US.
And so the Security Council is a good venue for putting in place the security agreements, and often there are Security Council plus other co guarantor parties to a security agreement, and that's where this should be negotiated. I personally find the 04/15/2022, nearly finalized draft of the Istanbul agreement, or the Istanbul process, to be a basis for peace. Basically, the two sides were going to reach peace, had the Biden administration not intervened to continue the war. And therefore, all of these issues that we're talking about, permanent neutrality or non NATO enlargement, the territorial issues, and the security issues, were nearly nailed down. Had there been an interest in peace by the US administration, those remaining issues would have been settled through diplomacy, not cast aside as they were by continued war.
So, we know that we are not far away, except in unbelievably heated and often obtuse rhetoric, and in terms of the unilateralism of Macron and Starmer egging on the European side. It's said by the way, I've heard it several times, I think probably, perhaps it's said often in France, well, Macron tried and he was rebuffed, and so why should he try again? This idea of how history unfolded, and how negotiations go, is so primitive, that you wouldn't expect a 12 year old to use that kind of logic. But this is actually the logic. He was rebuffed.
He was insulted. He was humiliated. Oh, give me a break. Are you kidding? Would you sit down and negotiate a serious arrangement?
This is my advice.
Speaker 0: Yeah. At the time, in beginning of twenty twenty two, when Macron said, well, perhaps Russia needs some security guarantees. This was immediately pushed back as some kind of appeasement. So, no, I I I agree with this. But also, I found it very interesting what you said about whoever should observe future ceasefire part of you know, with a political agreement that that it would be better for to be more involvement of China in the global south because I can't imagine a scenario where the ceasefire is broken and the Europeans who observe it would then say, Oh yeah, the Ukrainian side did it.
It would be very This is a proxy war, they're party to the conflict. But also the Russians have said they don't really care much what Europeans think of them, but they do care a lot about China. They care a lot about India, Africa, and the global South. So that is a good point.
Speaker 1: This is very important, because we are not in a bilateral negotiation. People forget that completely. People think that this is somehow a bilateral negotiation between Russia and Ukraine. It's nothing of the sort. We are in a completely interconnected world where this war impacts the entire world, and where Russia has global interests, The United States has global interests, Europe has global interests.
If you vulgarly cheat on an agreement that you've made to the whole world through the UN, and specifically the UN Security Council. The consequences are quite different from what you would have in a bilateral situation, where one side cheats on the other, but there's no recourse to third parties. This is the idea by the way of law itself, that you don't have vendettas and revenge matches between two sides, you multilateralize it. You put it in a context where there are broader interests at stake. This is very very basic.
It's a very basic concept of diplomacy. Treaties are not bilateral documents, if they're properly drawn. Flagrant violations of treaties that are agreed and systematically monitored and well designed impose high costs on the violators. And so the idea that is very often stated in Europe these days, well, we could agree on something, but then Putin will just cheat and continue, is extraordinarily naive. And by the way, since everything in discourse goes back to someone's historical example, and typically to Munich in the fall of nineteen thirty eight, it should be said very explicitly that that agreement that was reached between Hitler and Chamberlain, when Hitler vulgarly violated it, soon afterwards, had massive repercussions against Germany, including the massive accelerated rearmament of Britain, including uniting much of the world against Hitler, including exposing Hitler to the lies, including the ability of The United States to enter into many agreements even before entering into the war itself in December 1941, including enabling Churchill to face down those who would compromise with Hitler in May of nineteen forty by saying Hitler cannot be trusted to make an agreement.
So even the most famous case that Europeans look to of saying we can't deal with the other side, Munich Nineteen Thirty Eight, appeasement of Hitler, Historians that are serious historians know that first of all Hitler felt that he had been tricked into that agreement because it did expose his hand. It did change his timing. It did weaken his position. It did lead ultimately to his defeat. That's not the history we tell now.
The history that is told in the tabloids is never negotiate with the other side. Well, would say two things. One, this is not Munich '19 '30 '8. There's none of the preceding history. There's none of the contextual situation.
The whole analogy is pathetically weak. And we've been making that phony analogy through every war The United States has been in for fifty years, whether it's Iraq or whether it's any other place, so it's false. But even if it were a serious analogy, it's a completely misunderstood historical event. And so I would just say, my bottom line is treaties are important, they can work, They need to be properly drafted. They need to be properly monitored.
They need to be understood for what they are, which is to multilateralize a crisis, not to bilateralize an ongoing crisis.
Speaker 0: You you mentioned earlier that the future of NATO might come into question, and this is interesting because Elon Musk's been also on Twitter. You know, what his role is in the US government is still unclear, but but nonetheless, he's he's brought up this idea that why why are we still drawn into this? The Europeans have their their coastal endeavor. This is preventing us from pursuing our actual interest. It's been my personal hope for thirty plus years that NATO would be converted into an inclusive European security architecture as opposed to being a hegemonic project constructing Europe without Russia, which becomes a Europe against Russia.
But what happens now? Because if it's not gonna be an instrument in more towards surrounding Russia, what is the purpose? In the 90s, we had slogans like expand or die out of area or out of business. Do you see a possibility that NATO will lose its purpose and even collapse as yeah, the interests of its member states become begin to diverge more and more, and if it's not gonna be used only as an instrument against the Russians?
Speaker 1: NATO lost its purpose in 1990. The Warsaw Pact was ended. NATO should have been ended. NATO certainly lost its purpose in December 1991. The Soviet Union was dismembered.
I happened to be around those days rather intensively. There was no risk whatsoever of any kind of a Russian invasion of Europe. NATO should have been ended then. It became something completely different from a defense against a Soviet invasion. It became the instrument in Western Eurasia for the American hegemonic project.
This was not NATO's purpose up until 1990. NATO's purpose, whatever one thinks, was to face off against the Soviet Union in Western Europe. But it became as an expansionary organization, precisely and explicitly part of the American unipolarity, and American hegemony, and American police enforcement powers. And it was used in this way repeatedly. So I think that NATO has been misguided for more than thirty years.
Right now it's fraught with the problems. One is The United States, rightly under Donald Trump, is saying, well those thirty years of adventurism, of expansion, are over, they failed. They were dangerous, they were costly, we're not doing it anymore. The Europeans are supposedly in panic over this, but they should get a grip and understand what's been said. The United States did not say NATO is over.
The United States said NATO will not expand further. So this is one big point. Trump is also saying a second point, which is Europe has to spend more on its own defense. By the way, I favor a European common defense. This is the right approach.
That may mean another percentage point of GDP in spending. I don't think it's 5% of GDP. That's if you're going to war, but no one should go to war. But to have a proper deterrence and proper military force in Europe might be 3% of GDP right now. Okay, that's fine, do it.
But that's different from NATO. Will NATO in the form of Article five guarantees that The United States would swoop in to a European war still apply? Well, this is where I say in ten years, we may not have NATO. If the Europeans act as stupidly as their leaders are speaking right now, NATO will end. If Starmor and Macron continue to beat the war drums and and actually perhaps even mean it that they're gonna unilaterally place troops on the ground in Ukraine, this would accelerate the end of NATO.
Because The United States political scene and public will not say, my God, they had a chance for peace, but they went to war and we're supposed to defend them if they're attacked in return? No way. The United States absolutely would lose interest because The US doesn't want to get into World War three. So if Starmer and Macron persist in the way they're persisting right now, they're accelerating the end of NATO. Now one could say, that's their Machiavellian plot.
I don't think so. I don't think there's anything clever about what they're doing. But that is the inadvertent result of their actions.
Speaker 0: Just a very quick last question. You mentioned before that you do speak sometimes with some Western political leaders. And what do they say actually is the objective here? Because again, Starmer's talking about a coalition of the willing. Macron says he doesn't care what Moscow thinks about the peacekeepers, European peacekeepers, even though Russia will target them.
Beyond this, know, beating their chest, is this to try to sabotage the peace agreement? Is it try to make Europe relevant by elevating its voice and heightening the stakes? Or are they actually preparing for war without sufficient troops? Do they do they have any insight or tell you anything that makes any of this seem rational? Or
Speaker 1: Twice in the last week, I heard once from an official, once from a senior thinker in Europe, the statement, oh, Jeff, why do you take these protestations of NATO enlargement so seriously? We know that NATO's not going to enlarge to Ukraine. I heard this twice in the last week. I went back and looked at there are no doubt dozens. I collected around 20 very high level statements in recent months where solemnly it was stated that NATO will expand to Ukraine.
So according to two times what I heard last week, the public statements are just lies, and that private statements, are are very different. I asked both times, what's the purpose of this public lying? This is a degradation of democracy, and very dangerous in my view. I feel I did not hear a good answer to this. Is this Europeans cleverly stirring up fear to raise the defense budget?
Is it Europeans trying to become heroic figures because they lack public support in their countries? Is it laziness because we have Article 10 of the NATO treaty, which claims an open door so no one can say otherwise? Is it naivete? To my mind, it's lying. It is in private, they say one thing, and in public, they say another thing.
This kind of lying can get us all killed, as far as I'm concerned. Leaders should tell the truth. Really. I'm not talking about a tactical military maneuver from morning till afternoon. I'm talking about high policy that's stated and restated and restated.
If they believe privately something different from what they're saying in public, they need absolutely to stop the lying. If they really believe that NATO will enlarge, they need to get their heads examined, because they don't understand anything that's going on. My take is that they're lying. And I am aware that politicians lie, but lying on something of such gravity and consequence and so repeatedly over a period of decades and even in the context of war and risk of nuclear war is unacceptable.
Speaker 0: Agree. Anyways, I've already taken too much of your time. So professor Sachs, it's always a great pleasure to speak with you and thank you for your Likewise. Thanks.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much. Bye bye.
Speaker 2: In 2021, we kept reiterating that Ukraine was gonna join. We kept saying that over and over again. So, Mike, Mike, so, so, Mike, so our our diplomats are lying? Yes. Oh, so Yes.
That's the real world, guys. Come on. Come on. But but you could then That's the real world. Wait a sec.
Our diplomats are lying all the time, yet the Russians should trust them when they offer assurances.
Posted - March 18, 2025 at 8:06 AM
Saved - March 18, 2025 at 8:55 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
I appreciate @TCNetwork and @TuckerCarlson for highlighting the Biden administration's executive orders that make it illegal to work for RT. I've been with @RT_com for years, and it's been a great experience. Censorship is a tactic to silence opposition. I hope for the lifting of sanctions and the RT ban. Free speech must return.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Thank you so much @TCNetwork @TuckerCarlson for bringing attention to the Biden administration executive orders making it illegal to work for RT. Thanks to @RickSanchezTV for speaking up! I have worked for @RT_com for years and it is the best! Censorship was the cornerstone of Biden and Democrat’s strategy to silence political opposition and push the proxy war against Russia vis Ukraine. May the sanctions be lifted and the RT ban lifted as well! Free speech should come back.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
Rick Sanchez spent a lifetime in television before becoming one of the highest rated anchors at RT. Last summer, the Biden administration forced him out of his job and threatened him with jail for refusing to repeat Zelensky’s talking points. A case study on the death of free speech. (0:00) Advice From Larry King (4:27) The Neocon Chokehold on Corporate Media (8:48) What Was It Like Working for a Russian-Owned Network During the War? (13:51) Are We Seeing the Death of Free Speech in America? (19:00) How Biden’s State Department Made Sanchez’s Show Illegal (32:06) The Russian’s Perspective on the War (39:33) The Things You Can’t Say Working for Corporate Media (45:42) So-Called Journalists Defending the Establishment (55:57) The Deep State’s Worship of War, Death, and Destruction Includes paid partnerships.
Video Transcript AI Summary
Rick Sanchez discusses his career journey, including his time at RT. Larry King convinced him to consider working for RT, assuring him of editorial control. Sanchez, who had left television news after being fired by CNN and starting a healthcare company, missed storytelling and decided to join RT five years prior to the interview. He emphasizes the editorial freedom he experienced at RT, contrasting it with the restrictions he faced at CNN, Fox, and NBC, where certain guests and topics were off-limits.
Sanchez notes that RT was not available in the United States after the Ukraine war began. He says the Biden administration, through the Treasury Department, effectively banned Americans from working for or contracting with RT, citing concerns about Russian interference in US elections. Sanchez recounts a phone call from a former CNN colleague, now working in the State Department, which he interpreted as a warning. He also describes how a major US newspaper killed a story about his experience after a call from an unknown source to the managing editor. He believes the US government is trying to control who Americans can work for, watch, or receive news from.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Rick Sanchez, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for doing this.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a pleasure.
Speaker 0: How did you wind up at RT and what did you think?
Speaker 1: Larry King gives me a call one day. Come on. Larry King. By the way, Larry's a great man.
Speaker 0: I totally agree.
Speaker 1: I love Larry. He was kind. He says, Ricky, you ought to really look at this. And I'm thinking, Larry, the Russians? I mean, come on, man.
I was born in Cuba. It's a communist country. I mean, just in case he wants, you know but he but Larry says to me, let me tell you something. Ricky, let me tell you something. This is the way Larry would
Speaker 0: It sounds
Speaker 1: so know? They don't tell me what to say. They don't tell me what to do. They don't tell me who I have to interview. They let me be in control of my show.
And I guarantee you, they really like you. They really want you. If you come here and do this show that they want you to do, they're gonna do that for you as well. And I said, really, Larry? You sure?
And finally, I I came to terms. You know, at the time, I'd been fired by CNN. I went to Miami. I decided to leave television altogether, television news. And at at the time, I was I had started a new health care company in South Florida, which we took public for a couple billion dollars, and it was
Speaker 0: a great
Speaker 1: story. But as the store as that that company was growing, I started thinking to myself, you know, I miss my calling. My calling is this.
Speaker 0: Yeah. What you do. Plus, it's fun.
Speaker 1: I love to tell stories. I like finding out things that I didn't know, and I love sharing them. And doing that for a living, I think, is just a wonderful thing.
Speaker 0: I totally agree.
Speaker 1: So because I was kinda missing that when I got a call one day from an agent saying, you know, there's this group that wants to hire you and they're a real network. Would you come up and talk to them? And then subsequently, I had the call with Larry King. I said, you know what? I might wanna do this.
Sat down with my wife and my family, and I said, you know what? I'm gonna put the health care company aside, and I'm gonna go back to what I what I really wanna do. So I joined RT. I said yes.
Speaker 0: What year?
Speaker 1: That was five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Five years ago.
Speaker 0: Twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Way before 2019.
Speaker 0: Twenty '19.
Speaker 1: Way before, like, this war and everything else. And the the footing between The United States and that Russia at the time was not hostile. It wasn't necessarily overly friendly. It was just kind of Muddy. In the middle.
Muddy. Exactly.
Speaker 0: Yeah. At the time. Yeah. So what was it like?
Speaker 1: It was everything Larry King said it would be.
Speaker 0: Really? Surprisingly so. I'm not surprised, but it's interest but I think others would be surprised. So
Speaker 1: Like you, I like dominion of my product. Right? Of course. I wanna I wanna be a writer. I wanna be able to talk to my producers.
I wanna know who my other writers are. Yes. And so I picked my staff. I wrote my entire show. I picked my topics.
I led the editorial meeting every morning discussing what was gonna be on our news agenda of the day. And can I tell you something? I never had that opportunity at CNN or Fox or NBC. I'm sorry to say this.
Speaker 0: I've worked at all three, and I can confirm that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, you do have some sense or some liberty or journalistic independence when you work at those places, but not like this. I'll just say right now, and I hope I'm not breaking anybody's heart out there who's a big CNN fan or any cable news fans out there. But if you decide you wanna interview somebody and he's not on their list of okay interviewees, they're not gonna let you interview him. And if you wanna go down a certain path
Speaker 0: He's banned. He's banned. Oh, I've I've run up against that many times.
Speaker 1: And you're saying this is a good man with interesting things to say.
Speaker 0: Or he's in the news. Like, this is a relevant person. Our our viewers need to hear about this.
Speaker 1: Sure. The Jeffrey Sachs of the world, the Meersheimers of the world, the colonel MacGregors of the world, they're not allowed to be on those networks. Iraq. Yeah. Right?
It's it's crazy. So I started seeing some of these things when I was at CNN. I saw them as well at at NBC and Fox, you know, to be fair, maybe sometimes coming from a different direction. And and and sure, I was allowed to have some, you know, say in the editorial decisions, but not as much.
Speaker 0: Can I just ask since I worked at the same three companies that you worked? Yeah. Well, you and I worked at CNN together. Exactly. I would say the one so people look at, you know, CNN and MS are on the left.
Yeah. Fox is on the right, but the but there's also this sense that, like, wait. Maybe they're telling versions of the same story. Yes. And I found over twenty five years that the one thing that none of those networks would accept was anybody who questioned the Neocon storyline.
Correct. So I actually did have Doug McGregor to Fox's great credit. They allowed me to have him on, but I think that I don't think he's been on since I left, and I think they really hated him. But I think Doug McGregor is as offensive to Fox executives as he is to CNN executives as he is to MSNBC executives. You think that's fair?
Speaker 1: I think it's very fair. Yeah. And kudos to you for being the first person to put his thought process.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, I mean So different. It was up, and that is really the credit goes to to the Murdochs who let me do that. You know, a lot of things to criticize, but they did they
Speaker 1: And and your message was simple. We're being told we're winning this war in Ukraine. We're not.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: And here's a man who's gonna take us through this. That's all I want.
Speaker 0: But I don't wanna make it about me. I just wanna say I think we had the same experience, which is the red line at all three channels is exactly the same. Question neocon foreign policy, and we're done.
Speaker 1: So as a journalist, working at RT, going back to your question, was almost nirvana for me. Yes. It was fantastic. I reveled in this opportunity. I would get up with a, you know, with a little skip in my step every day thinking about what we can talk about and how we're gonna explain it and who we're gonna talk to.
As difficult as it was because a lot of guests wouldn't wanna come on because it was RT. You know? But it was really a great experience, especially comparatively speaking, to what I had experienced in the past. And my old friend Larry King was right. They generally did not mess with me.
And when they did, when we had normal editorial arguments, which happen in every newsroom and should, of course, We would talk it out, sometimes I would win, and sometimes I would lose, but it would be a discussion. It wouldn't be like, this is what you're doing. So That's fascinating. It's a great experience. So you felt
Speaker 0: that RT from, you know, internal editorial perspective, obviously, you're the anchor, so you Yeah. You see what happens. You felt that it was freer than Fox, NBC, or MS.
Speaker 1: I wrote my entire show from top to bottom, and nobody looked at it until it went on the air.
Speaker 0: Okay. How's that? There you go. There you go.
Speaker 1: Can I you know, can is there anything more than that? Nobody looked at my script before I went on the air except except me and some of the editors who had to put pictures.
Speaker 0: Right. Of course. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But nobody was looking at it. No. This goes out. You can't say this.
You can't say that. Amazing. Because they trusted me. I mean, look, man. I mean, I've got I've been a part of two Peabody award winning teams.
I've got a DuPont. I've got five Emmys. I've interviewed four US presidents. I've sat down with Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev, and yet there's not a single entity in The United States who seems to be interested in hiring me. Why?
Speaker 0: Well, now I would say I mean, there may be a lot of reasons, but now that you've worked at RT, I think it's illegal to hire you. Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It is. Yeah. It's
Speaker 0: it's something So how long were you there?
Speaker 1: I worked for the first three years and then left prior to the invasion Yep. Because my friends back in South Florida who were now building this $4,400,000,000 health care company, and I was one of the original partners of it, said, can you come back and help us handle the marketing? I mean, we need you to just jump back in there, and there's some things we we want you to fix. And I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah.
So I left, and I said, okay. I'm gonna go back and go back and do the, you know, the the job building back this health care company that I had built with my friends. And and while I was doing that, I then got a call from another dear friend, Ben Swan, who's a really good journalist. And he said, would you you you wanna do a show? I said, oh my god.
I'd love to do a show. I miss doing a show. So after taking a little hiatus for about a year and a half, I went back and started doing a show. He said, it's not allowed to air in The United States, but you get to produce your own show, and they air it all over the world. And you get to do it in Spanish and in English.
So suddenly, started doing the show again, Tucker. And
Speaker 0: When when would that was after the Ukraine war started?
Speaker 1: That was after the Ukraine war started.
Speaker 0: Correct. How was I mean, that must have been because that was the moment when well, the Ukraine war is not a Ukraine war. It's a war against Russia led by The United States. Yeah. And you're working at RT, Russia Today.
Yeah. So what was that like?
Speaker 1: It was tough. It was tough. But after reading enough and knowing enough and hearing some of the people that we aforementioned, the McGregors and Saxon, I started thinking to myself, you know, I should do this because we need to have a conversation with these people. Exactly. We need journalists and others and academics and whoever to start engaging with the journalists and the academics over there so we can have discussions and work out a solution before we start another freaking world war here.
I mean, the so this will be a good thing. The the I can make the world a better place by having a show from The United States that shares the American perspective from a person who loves America. Of course. A guy who was born in a communist country and spent all his life listening to his parents say, we're in the greatest nation on Earth, and sharing that with people around the world, and RT was gonna give me an opportunity to do that. They weren't asking me to be a Russian.
They were asking me to be a journalist who happened to be American. And why wouldn't I tell that kind of story? Oh, I totally agree. And that's what we grew up with. I remember as a kid watching Phil Donahue interview Brezhnev in New York surrounded in a studio.
When Brezhnev would go to the UN, he would interview him, and here he was in the studio with all these women asking this man questions. I remember I that was Phil Donahue. I remember Ted Koppel once a week having a a Soviet reporter on. His name escapes me, but he became very famous this Yes. And they would go back and forth and debate ideas.
Suddenly, we're living in an era where our president hasn't spoken to their president for almost four years. This isn't right.
Speaker 0: It's lunacy, and it's we're so diminished by it, actually, and imperiled by it. I would say I've had every thought that you've had. That's why I've been to Russia a couple times for that exact reason. As a proud American who's never leaving, doesn't have another passport, hasn't served anyone else's military.
Speaker 1: I've never been to Russia.
Speaker 0: Right. Well, you should go. It's a wonderful place. But but it doesn't make me less American. I I love my country more than anything.
But, anyway, the point is I can understand and empathize with and so strongly agree with everything you said. But I wonder for that first year or two years, you know, the anti Russian hysteria in The United States was at, like, a comical pitch. Like, I I don't think the US Open put Russian names on the screen of the players. Like, people were not allowed Russians weren't allowed to compete in sports. It really became pretty evil, actually, I would say.
And but you you signed back up with RT. Like, what was that like with people you know? Like, what did they say to you?
Speaker 1: I tried not to bring it up in polite conversation. It would get impolite really fast. It's like, you're doing what? I would you know, people would ask me and say, oh my god. Rick Sanchez, I grew up watching you on TV, you know, in Miami.
Speaker 0: It's Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Where I used to be on local television. And they say, so what are you doing now? I'd say, well, I'm doing a bunch of global stuff. You know? Because you just unless unless the person happens to be if I recognize that it's someone who's astute and has some kind of geopolitical observations or knows the world or is kinda smart, then I tell them and they go, oh, man.
That's cool. That's great. But you just don't wanna, you know, have a an argument with people during the day. So
Speaker 0: What did your kids say?
Speaker 1: They were perfectly fine with it. Oh, yeah. They totally understood. We've taught them. Suzanne and I have really taught well, she's a much better parent than I am, but I've done my part as well in making the kids understand that we live in a world where there's a lot of different opinions and a lot of different ways of looking at things.
So you couldn't talk to my kids and come away thinking, oh, they're liberal. Oh, they're conservative, or they're this or that. They they just they're smart enough to understand and recognize things for what they are. Yes. And I think that's important.
Speaker 0: It sounds like you've done a great job. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1: She did. She did.
Speaker 0: I believe you. Was there blow was there blowback though at all to your personal life?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Not to mention, you always felt like if ever you wanted to do something outside or let's suppose Fox News would call. One of your ex, you know, colleagues would call and say, hey, Rick. We were thinking about inviting you because remember you used to talk about such and such, and they'd wanna book you. And you'd think they were booking you for something, and you go, sure.
I'd love to come on. And then all of a sudden, you get that famous phone call that all bookers had
Speaker 0: to in a different direction.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We've changed the show. We're not gonna do that story. And actually was they found out that you work at RT. Of course.
And now they're not gonna have you on simply because you never work in RT, which is so prejudicial.
Speaker 0: What's also so small minded and childish? Like, these are these are children who don't know anything about the world at all.
Speaker 1: Rick Sanchez, we want you to talk about the new elections in Mexico, but we're not gonna get you on because you work at RT. What the hell does one thing have to do with the other?
Speaker 0: Well, of course. And by the way, let me just back up a bit. You said that by the time so you were there from, I'm roughly speaking, like, 2019 to late
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one. End of '20 '1 or something like that.
Speaker 0: And then you come back in, say, '22 or '23
Speaker 1: Correct.
Speaker 0: After the war begins. Yes. But by that point, you can't watch RT in The United States?
Speaker 1: RT is not available in The United States. It was totally banned.
Speaker 0: So the problem there, it's not really about Russia who owns RT or its agenda. It's about The United States, which has a bill of rights. The first right enumerated is the right to free speech, the right to see, hear, and say whatever you choose because
Speaker 1: That had already been gotten rid of.
Speaker 0: You're not a slave. You're a free man. So Correct. No one can control what I hear or what I think. Right?
Well, but Biden How did they ban a TV network in The United States? Like, when did that happen?
Speaker 1: After the war in Ukraine, they decided that no one in The United States should have the right to understand the perspective other than the Ukrainian perspective. Therefore, RT, which was possibly going to share the Russian perspective, should not be allowed to continue to operate in The United States.
Speaker 0: That happened? Like
Speaker 1: Oh, they just put out an edict, I think. They just I think it went through the treasury department once again. But what happened, like Your license is revoked, and this particular entity is not allowed
Speaker 0: to operate in civil liberties? Aren't Americans allowed to hear whatever they wanna hear?
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I thought. Right? Congress shall pass no law. Yeah. Freedom of speech, all that jazz.
Where'd it go? But then Biden doubles down. Right? And that that do you want me to share the the the the the phone call?
Speaker 0: Yeah. I wanna know everything. I mean, this is but I just wanna set the context. This is pure craziness, and they can say Russia bad, Russia bad, Putin agent all they want. I don't care personally, but what they can't do is end the constitution because that's not their right.
It preexists their rule, and it will, I hope, endure after they're long gone. So, like, I don't really know the part where they were they ended the First Amendment. I don't really understand that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's really weird because if you watched my show, and many people did, and some Americans were watching the show because they'd, you know, backchannel it somehow through the Internet or something. My show was very, very popular in Latin America, 1 of the most popular shows in Latin America, huge in India and in different parts of the world because RT happens to be one of the most respected, you know, journalistic networks, content creators in the in the whole world. It's a very viable you know, they put a lot of money, and they've got a lot of smart people working there. And I think they generally do a pretty good job with their product.
Speaker 0: I will say this. I haven't I'm not allowed to watch it, so obviously, I haven't seen it that much. As an American Mhmm. It's forbidden for me to have those ideas or that information. But to the extent I have seen it, super interesting.
Yeah. Super interesting. Yeah. It's not just news on a loop like the channels that we worked at are. It's like, here are the eight stories of the day.
We're just gonna flog the shit out of them, and you can't hear anything else. They have tons of interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And my show was not necessarily every day about the Ukraine war nor was it about Putin nor was it it was US politics. It was a little bit of India. It was about the South China Sea. You know, we covered all the interesting things that were going on out there with interesting people from around the world who would love to come on and talk to us.
And a lot of people found it invigorating and interesting to watch a perspective that was different than the normal perspective you get here in The United States
Speaker 0: all the time. And to hear an American perspective, which as an American you brought, is I think really cool and important.
Speaker 1: And it's good for us, and it's good for them, and it's
Speaker 0: good for just talking. And by the way, even if it's not good or you think it's not good, you're not allowed to you're not allowed to get in the way of it because that's against our constitution, which is the basis of our civilization. So back off.
Speaker 1: A government is not allowed in this country or so we're told to tell us who we can work for, who we can watch, or what news entities can deliver news and which can't.
Speaker 0: You probably haven't forgotten the image of empty grocery shelves during COVID. Lockdowns and out of control mandates made that nightmare hard enough, and not being able to get the food you want for your family was just too much. So the people who run this country should do everything possible to make sure that never happens again. One small business called Meriwether Farms is doing everything it can to help. The founder of Meriwether Farms was so alarmed by this country's dependence on foreign meat that she left Washington, abandoned her career there, and came to the great American West to begin a company that created American grazed beef.
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Go to MerriweatherFarms.com/Tucker, shop all products and save. And by the way, the meat is excellent. So then I'm I just wanted to get that as a sort of foundation for the story you're about to tell. So then what happened?
Speaker 1: So this last year, sometime around August, I come home, and I'd had a great newscast.
Speaker 0: Last year, so 2024.
Speaker 1: Correct. Twenty twenty four.
Speaker 0: So right in the middle of a presidential campaign?
Speaker 1: That's correct. Okay. In the middle of a presidential campaign. Keyword, presidential campaign. I get this interesting phone call.
I had just come home from work, and I get a phone call, and it's an old friend who used to work with me in mainstream news. He was a manager at CNN as a matter of fact. Ricky, what's going on? Yeah. Hi.
Oh my god. What are you doing calling me? He goes, I just wanted to check up on you, see how things
Speaker 0: are going. I said, good, Jim. Things are going pretty,
Speaker 1: really pretty well. He says, just calling to let you know that I'm now working somewhere else. I'm no longer in news. I said, oh, okay. And where I work, a lot of people are talking about you.
And I said, well, cool. That's neat. Who who are you working? He says, like, the state department? It's kind of
Speaker 0: Oh, come on.
Speaker 1: I'm like, no. I'm like, oh, wait. You work at the state department. Who knows? USAID And
Speaker 0: Or other agencies.
Speaker 1: Yes. And I the the guys are talking about you. I said, well, good. What what are they saying? Well, your show is very popular.
So come on. Yeah. I said, well, what do you think? He goes, well, they they don't necessarily like some of the things that you're saying. And I said, okay.
And I said, well, they're welcome to come on and tell me whoever they are. Tell me. I mean, we could have we could have them on as a guest, we can discuss whatever it is. But throughout the conversation, he was very evasive, but was letting me know that I guess I guess he was letting me know that I was being watched, and that was part of his mission. And not only was he telling me that he was that I was being watched, but he would kinda hope that I would somehow change what I was saying.
But he wasn't coming out and exactly saying it. So when we were done with the conversation, I remember I hung up the phone and I thought, what the hell was that? Was that a warning or a threat? I'm not sure or maybe both. And then three weeks later, all of a sudden, I'm hearing, and then it happens, the Biden administration has decided to go through the Treasury Department, this little agency called OFAC that most people have never heard
Speaker 0: of Oh, yes.
Speaker 1: Which controls what businesses in The United States are allowed to exist and which ones aren't. And and they shut down the place where I worked, And not only that, they passed a measure within that provision that seemed to say and I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not an expert on it, but it seemed to say that any American working for this entity will go to jail or be fined if they continue working for that entity. So And that's what happened. And the next day, man, I was on the street.
Speaker 0: That's absolutely mind blowing. So let's just back up. You say three weeks later, they the state department shut down the place where you work. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: That means that they officially announced that RT as an entity and anybody associated with media in Russia, I think is the way they wrote it, is not allowed to hire or or even contract anyone in The United States. I, Rick Sanchez Productions, my show, had been hired by an entity to do a show that was airing on RT. I didn't work directly for RT, but I worked for a US company that was doing shows. They sold the shows, and they sold this show to RT. So my show ended up being on RT.
Well, they backchanneled the the the just the the treasury department under mister Biden decided to follow all those little loopholes or whatever, and they went all the way back and said, not only can RT not exist in The United States, RT is not allowed to pay money to anybody in The United States for any product. They can't buy a product. They can't contract anybody. They can't nobody can work for anybody who contracts through RT. And if any of those people are caught in The United States somehow contracting or working for RT, I don't care if you're a janitor or a carpenter or a plumber.
You will be fined or even go to jail. That's the new law according to mister Biden three weeks afterward. And they said something in the, dicta, in the explanation about why they were doing this that they thought that the Russians were once again preparing to interfere in our election as they had before in the case with mister Trump. So they were shutting down RT and anybody who could be in any way associated with RT even though I wasn't doing pro Trump stuff. In fact, I was criticizing mister Trump during the campaign for certain things that he did, just like I was criticizing Kamala Harris.
So it's totally unfair that here I am just doing a basic newscast every day, sharing it with them. That was getting garnering tens of millions of people around the world, and a lot of people thought it was fair, and it was sharing a perspective that Americans needed to hear. And the Biden administration said, no. You cannot practice your craft as a journalist if you're in any way associated with those people.
Speaker 0: But it wasn't airing in
Speaker 1: The United States. No. It wasn't.
Speaker 0: I was That's just pure craziness.
Speaker 1: That's what happened, and it happened in America. And it hurts being a guy who was born in a communist country and has spent his whole life saying we are so different than the rest of the world because we allow people to say and think and work wherever they want. And all of a sudden, here I was being told I couldn't work or think or or or say whatever I wanted.
Speaker 0: That's That's like unbelievable. Did anyone from the US state department reach out to you after?
Speaker 1: No. No.
Speaker 0: Did you speak again to the sinister CNN colleague who called you from the State Department after this happened?
Speaker 1: He he sent me a a Christmas card and recently.
Speaker 0: Did he leave, like, a horse's head on your bed or anything like that?
Speaker 1: He did. We did have your no. Actually, we did have a
Speaker 0: That's such mafia behavior. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: We did have a secondary conversation, and interestingly enough, he suggested that he would help me if I wanted to maybe go to work, like, at Fox or someplace like that, that they could make some phone calls.
Speaker 0: Oh, he could. So we'll welcome you back into NeoCon world if you'll just
Speaker 1: bow before the throne. Isn't that kind of the feeling you get? Is that what they were saying?
Speaker 0: That's the right I
Speaker 1: don't know. That's is all so damn coded, man.
Speaker 0: It's coded, but the message is clear as well.
Speaker 1: But when you're living it and you're experiencing it and thank God, you know, we've done well, and Suzanne and I are, you know there's other people who are affected by this, you know, guys who were producers and writers. Oh, Americans. They hired teams of people all over Washington and and New York,
Speaker 0: and and they're good people. People who worked with you at Fox and people who worked with me at
Speaker 1: CNN and people who worked at local news. They're just regular American people, writers, producers, you know, and they're all out on
Speaker 0: their ass simply because mister Biden thought that
Speaker 1: the Russians might be mean to him and, you know
Speaker 0: But not even in The United States. Exactly. I will say one of the smartest people I've ever met in my long life and most patriotic American I've ever met in my life, certainly up there, worked at RT. Just a fact. And I I met on a on a news assignment in a foreign country years ago and just a truly brilliant person.
But anyway
Speaker 1: I found the Russians in general to be and have found them to be since I've been working with them to be extremely transactional and extremely honest, sometimes, you know, more so than we are. Yeah. Well, blunt. Yeah. They they they say what they think.
You know what they want. And when you talk to them, they're very exact about what they want. And I kind of find that admirable. It's a it's a it's a it's a you know, we're talking in generalities here. Hasty generalizations are never good.
There's all kinds of Russians just like there's all kinds of Americans, but but generally speaking, I found their mannerism to be very easy to work with and for.
Speaker 0: So I thought I grew up in a country that took the Second World War seriously and its lessons, our whole civilization in the our whole side in The US was based on the lessons we were learned in the war in World War two from the Nazis. That that's the country I grew up in. And one of the main you know, so what were the lessons? We don't judge people on the basis of their appearance. Racism is bad.
Right. Eugenics and all that garbage, we're against that. And number two, we don't demonize whole groups of people. If an individual does something bad, we can say that, and we can punish that individual, but we can't punish his parents. Right.
Or his children or his neighbors because they didn't do anything. We don't believe in collective punishment. That's immoral. It's anti Christian, but it's also the lesson of the second world war. And to and so I totally buy that.
I still believe that truly. Like, in my heart, I believe that. Call me liberal. But it's so crazy to see, like, our whole society doing that. And it's like, you don't like Putin?
That's fine. You've got all sorts of, like, things you don't like he's that he's doing. You wanna do things he's preventing you from doing. I get it. But to turn around and say every a 50,000,000 Russians are evil, or Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons like that low IQ buffoon McCain used to say, and all the other low IQ buffoons in the US Senate, which is, like, 95% of them, it's a gas station with nuclear weapons.
Really? Have you ever read Tolstoy?
Speaker 1: Have you
Speaker 0: been there? Like, you may hate Russia, but to say it's a gas station, you're an idiot, actually. And to hurt, like, professional tennis players because they have Slavic last names, like, don't wanna live in a country that does that. Do do know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 0: I thought it was first they came for the so and so, then they came for the so and so, I said nothing. It's like, we that extends to all human beings. If they did that to the Malaysians or the Chinese or any it doesn't matter. The Belgians, you can't collectively punish people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right? And And we did. Since you made the historical reference to World War two, last time I checked, and there's no American who knows this unless we as parents tell them, but I hate to break it to you, but the French were not the reason that Hitler was defeated. I'm aware.
I know we think this, and I know every year or every couple of years, we have this, you know,
Speaker 0: celebration resistance did it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Normandy thing where we invite everybody but the Russians, and the French president, whoever he happens to be at the time, whether it's Macron to Mitterrand, sits there and says, oh, look what we did in Europe. Look what we did? Really?
Speaker 0: No. I
Speaker 1: know. You lasted five minutes, dude. But yeah. Yeah. Part of the story.
Speaker 0: It's just that impulse, the impulse of the crowd to call someone unpopular and then lynch him. Like, that's a human impulse. All people have that impulse. It's incredibly ugly. Civilization exists to keep it in check.
It's why we're against lynching. It's why we're against war crimes. It's why we're against, like, mob behavior in general. And to see the US government encouraging that, whether it's against people who don't get vaccinated or Russians or just pick a group. I don't care who it's against.
I'm opposed to that. Right?
Speaker 1: Just know this, Tucker, and I think you do. Every time a bullet is spent, every time a helicopter crashes, every time a fighter plane goes down, somebody somewhere in The United States says cha ching.
Speaker 0: I hate that. And I mean, you're right. I know that you're right.
Speaker 1: Fortunately, wars and enemies are chosen for a specific reason, and more often than not, it has to do with financial reasons, and it has nothing to do with the good people of this country.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: Just like there are good people in Wisconsin who don't want to share their communities with tons of immigrants, and it's not because they're bad people or dislike immigrants, and they're not the ones who started the problem in Honduras or Guatemala
Speaker 0: that
Speaker 1: caused 500,000 people to leave the countryside and come to The United States.
Speaker 0: Completely agree.
Speaker 1: So there are some people in our we I love The United States, but there are some people in our government who do some very nefarious things, who create bad results that make the rest of us feel it and look bad. That's the shit we gotta take
Speaker 0: care of. Hate and hate each other too. They inspire hate. I don't like that. I don't think a government should ever whip its population into a frenzy of hate.
Think it's really scary. Right. Even again even against the Russians. So I'm hardly an expert on Russia. I've been there a couple times.
I don't speak Russian. I don't you know, I'm not Russian. I'm from La Jolla, but my I've come
Speaker 1: to understand their perspective, and I think it's a fair perspective.
Speaker 0: Well, you worked them. So that's my question. You know more about Russians than I do just because you worked with a lot of them. What was their perspective on the war?
Speaker 1: Their perspective on the war was quite simple. It goes back decades where it seemed to them that NATO and The United States Yeah. Which many people would argue NATO's really run out of Washington, have for years broken their promises. It it's almost this simple if we were trying to explain it in very simple terms. After the Soviet Union broke apart, they were desperate for a friend, and we said we would be their friend, and we would show them how democracy and capitalism works.
And we sent the brightest minds in America, and we even had James Baker say to them, don't worry. Because you're no longer our enemy, we're not gonna encroach on you. We're not gonna point missiles at you. We're not gonna continue NATO expansion all the way up to your border. We're just not gonna do that.
We promise. We're not gonna do that. And then they found out over the years that that wasn't true, that every single thing that we said we would not do, we actually did. And if you actually looked at Russia and then you looked at NATO now, it's almost like they're feeling a little bit surrounded.
Speaker 0: Well, because the the point of NATO is to surround them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. From Estonia to Latvia, and there's missiles pointed there, and they started getting feared. So now you have this here, which is Ukraine, which is almost the end of the encirclement, and they finally thought to themselves as citizens, and their president said, guys, this is too much. I mean, now you wanna take Ukraine? We got a four thousand year history here going back to Catherine the Great.
And it's now you say not only do you wanna take NATO, but you're already putting military hardware in there. And then there was this thing, which they believe is very true, which our government, under a woman named Victoria Nulen in 2014, helped to foment along with mister Biden who was vice president, a coup in in in in Ukraine that caused a democratically elected president to be removed simply because he was friendly to Russia. He wasn't necessarily a Russian, but he was friendly to Russia. In other words, he wanted to have good relations with Russia.
Speaker 0: It's one of the world's great powers right on his border. Correct. Be like, is the president of Mexico generally friendly to the president of The United States? Yeah. Yeah.
No choice.
Speaker 1: Right. Not on everything, but they're gonna have relations. We decided it was wrong for the president of Ukraine to have relations, certainly not friendly relations with Russia. So we went in and we started a coup, which we're we've been known to do, as you know. And as a result of that coup, we had the guy essentially eventually removed, and that finally was the last straw.
That's where the Russians, their mindset, their president, their politicians said, this is too much. This just cannot continue, and that's what led to this war. So that's their way of looking at it. Like, they were being encroached. Is it right?
Is it wrong? Do they have a right to think that way? It's not for me to decide. Maybe historians can decide that. But there is another story besides one day, the Russians just got angry and decided to go after Ukraine for no reason whatsoever.
Because they're
Speaker 0: rebuilding the Soviet Union, and they wanna take Poland, and it's like the goddest storyline I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: And there's nothing factually to back that story up in any way.
Speaker 0: I'm
Speaker 1: aware. They have been losing territory, not gaining territory, and they're fine with it, and they don't wanna go they don't wanna I don't think the Russians wanna run Ukraine.
Speaker 0: Do they need more land with the Russians?
Speaker 1: No. But part of Ukraine is Russian.
Speaker 0: No. I'm aware. But I'm just saying that the idea that they want
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe, like country in the world.
Speaker 0: Yeah. That That's, like, extremely
Speaker 1: common. Seven times up?
Speaker 0: Yeah. So it's what I have noticed, and that makes me sadder even than anything, because I ultimately care about what happens in my country because my kids live here. And so watching the style of debate in America change to, you know, a system, an age old system, a Western system where, you know, you think one thing, think another, we, like, talk it through. Mhmm. The guy with the best point wins.
Right? To a system where we just create a villain, and if we don't like what the other person is saying, we tie him to the villain Mhmm. And it ends the conversation. Shut up, Rick Sanchez. You're a Putin puppet.
Correct. You took money from Putin. Correct. Why should I listen to you? Yeah.
And it's like, I at first when this started happening, it started happening a while ago, I was like, that's so childish. I'm not even gonna acknowledge it. And then it spread like the stage four cancer that it is, and all of a sudden, everybody thinks like that. Everybody thinks like that. It's like you're connected to Russia.
The latest is Qatar, which is a country of 300,000 people. It's like, oh, Qatar is running our American media. It's like so floridly insane, but also so, like, unimpressive. Like, do you really think like that?
Speaker 1: There's something that bothers me so much lately. Created star. I I just well, because I'm bored, and I created a new podcast. It's called Journalistically Speaking, and I named it Journalistically Speaking for a reason. I, you know, I got a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota.
I've practiced journalism most of my life. I feel good about it. I think it's an honorable profession, but I'm kinda trying to stick it in the eye of the other people who call themselves journalists who work at all these places today. I started looking around and looking at MSNBC and CNN and Fox. Half the people who work at these places were former spokespersons for the Pentagon or the State Department or president Bush or president Intel or president this or president that.
And I'm thinking, and they say Russians are state TV? We we've got literally the person who spoke for the president of The United States is now the anchor at such and such a network.
Speaker 0: Oh, I agree.
Speaker 1: And they're all over the place. And and and what is what is more state TV than that? And most of them didn't even study journalism and have never covered a story and wouldn't know what what it looks like if they hit him in the ass. So funny. And so
Speaker 0: There's this one chick at MSNBC who I knew, and I can't remember her new last name. It was Deb Nicole Devinish. Nicole Wallace is her name. Yeah. And she was Jeb Bush's, like, coffee girl and flack kind of, like, the nineties.
And I I covered Jeb Bush. I remember her very well. She was totally incompetent then, but she was incompetent in this very specific way that people in Washington are. She was totally obedient to the message. Yes.
No creativity, no independent thinking, Pretty low IQ. Nasty. But, man, if you told her to say something, she would just say it. Yeah. And it's so sad to see someone like that rewarded in this great country, which I guess she has been.
I think she has a TV show still. Right?
Speaker 1: Nicole Wallace? Nicole Wallace. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Is she still on the air? She worked for McCain. I think she ultimately worked for McCain, but I knew her when she worked for Jeb Bush. And but I just couldn't believe, like, she's a journalist? Yeah.
Like, are you joking? She's like a flack and not even a good one.
Speaker 1: They're either
Speaker 0: But obedience was her main Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's how qualification. And that's how they keep their jobs, and that's why the Rick Sanchez's of the world get fired from those places and the Tucker Carlsons of the world get fired from those places.
Speaker 0: Whatever happened to
Speaker 1: me Me too.
Speaker 0: You know? I shouldn't even ask you this in the middle you know, on camera because I don't no no idea what your answer is gonna be, but there was a guy Well, you don't know what any of my answers are. No. That'd true. No.
But this could be but Dylan Radigan. Yes. K. So I think I was at NBC Brilliant guy. Exactly.
Yeah. And he was on the left, and I remember thinking, oh, he's like some liberal. He was not a liberal. No. He was on the like, traditional he was like free thinking left guy.
Right. And he started saying stuff. I think I was worked there when this happened, and he went from being, like, oh, liberal guy, whatever, abortion, abortion, abortion, to being, like, hey. Why don't we pay people fair wages, which is a real thing
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: As far as I'm concerned, and all of a sudden, he, like, disappeared. I think we never heard from him again. Whatever. And so I thought he was impressive, but I knew that his brand of politics was not acceptable. Whatever happened to him?
Speaker 1: They did the same thing with him that they do that they did with me. I mean, you know, they said, look. I know you've got a new contract you signed just a little while ago, so we're gonna continue to pay you for the next two
Speaker 0: and a half or three years.
Speaker 1: And the only thing is you can't say anything bad about us, and you can't really take another job unless it's more money. And, you know, it's crazy. I don't know where they get the money, but they have a lot of money in those places.
Speaker 0: Oh, I know they do.
Speaker 1: Because they just hand it out, and they told Dylan Radigan, no. We don't want you working here anymore. And it was like they did it from one week to the next, and he was gone simply because he was challenging the status quo.
Speaker 0: He and he was. And I remember, like, I didn't pay any attention to Dylan Radigan at all. But then one day, I heard him say something. I said, well, that's I don't even know if I agreed with it or not, but it was interesting. Yeah.
And I could tell that Dylan Radigan was actually thinking for himself, and he's smart. I totally agree. I don't know him, but I remember thinking this guy's smart.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then
Speaker 0: he was gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I got that same feeling at CNN. As soon as I started challenging certain principles, criticizing, for example, certain things, then the elders at CNN, those people who were in that the the the row, they called it.
Speaker 0: Oh, I remember.
Speaker 1: This thing called the row. And it was, like, five, six, seven, eight older guys who decided what stories went on the air, why they went on the air, when they should go on the air. And I remember I wanted to start doing certain stories about some of the mistakes and foibles that we had made in Latin America, for example, that were causing this this this immigration thing that was going on. And they said, no. No.
No. We're not reporting that. I said, what do you mean we're not reporting that? I said, you know, to a certain extent, we kinda started a a civil war in Guatemala that ended up in the deaths of 200,000 people, and we removed the democratically elected president back in the nineteen fifties, which has led to the problems that have gone into Honduras. And as the only Hispanic anchor in America, working at your network, I'd like to tell some of these stories not to be critical so we can learn.
We make mistakes. It's
Speaker 0: okay. Percent.
Speaker 1: They said, no. You will not do that story, period. Why? How? I guess it made certain people in the neocon establishment look bad, and they were trying
Speaker 0: to move That foreign intervention, especially in a country you don't understand, has massive consequent generational consequences. Exactly. Right. Have have some humility when you act. Like, you bomb somebody's country.
Everyone's like,
Speaker 1: oh, just just bomb the country.
Speaker 0: Okay. Fine. You bomb the country, kill a bunch of people, take out a nuclear site. But, like, what happens then?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And and, Alex, maybe there was a good explanation for it. I agree. There was something that was gonna lead, but you can't just say, well, the guy seemed to have some leftist tendency, so we took him out.
What? I mean, you know, what
Speaker 0: was interesting, and it does make you wonder, like, the people who remain and I like them perfectly fine. I have nothing I always like Wolf Blitzer, always go along with Anderson Cooper. There
Speaker 1: are
Speaker 0: a ton of people like that who've just, like, kinda been there forever at at all the networks, not just CNN, but and I never had any problem with any of them. Wolf was always nice to me, for example.
Speaker 1: Yes. Wolf's a really nice guy.
Speaker 0: Totally. I completely agree. And Anders Cooper never had any problem with
Speaker 1: him all.
Speaker 0: But he's a nice guy. I'd never got
Speaker 1: So are we all.
Speaker 0: Any kind of human warmth sense from him, but whatever. You know? But what in order to stay at a channel like that for that long, the number of, like, deep moral compromises you have to make Yes. Is crazy. Don't you think?
Is that fair?
Speaker 1: I was watching you and Cuomo the other day, and I thought, wow. The questions that you guys were going back and forth on, I was thinking, does he really not know? Does he really think, for example, not to bust his chops, because I I think he's a good guy and generally does a good show. He's he's inquisitive enough to ask good questions, but guys like him who you think this guy is really smart and when he's kinda defending Zelenskyy as some kind of, you know, novel perfect leader, I'm thinking, dude, really? I mean, the information's out there if you just wanna look for it, or do you not wanna find it?
I don't know.
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The address, policygenius.com/Tucker, or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much money you could save and how much hassle you could save. Policygenius.com/Tucker. What is that? Do you think that it is a kind of instinctive deference to true power that keeps people in line? Is there some kind of conference call I've never been invited on?
Like, how does everybody know It kind of the red line is?
Speaker 1: When you when you are hired in The United States Of America as a communicator, one of the first things you adhere to is the principle of power. So having access, if you're a local reporter in Wichita, to the police chief
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: So that you can go out on the by bus that they're going to do Yes. Or the investigation on a local politician, you yearn for that connection. Somewhere along the line, that never seems to be broken for some people. It's like, if all I gotta do to be a good communicator is get tight with the mayor's office, the police chief, the and then as you grow, maybe you end up at CNN. Now it's the state department.
Speaker 0: No. It's totally right.
Speaker 1: CIA. The the as a journalist, I represent power. And somewhere along the line, somebody needs to slap the shit out of all of us and say, no. You don't. No.
You don't. Your job is not to represent. Your job is to represent the people down there, the workers, the people who pay the taxes.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And your audience.
Speaker 1: People.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: They they are the people you need to work for. Your audience, the average American, and they're not. They're like, yeah. Yeah. The average American's here, but the people that I really wanna impress are over here because that's what gives me access, and access is everything.
Access is growth, and it gets me the next job. And that's a strange little thing that we've developed in this country.
Speaker 0: Jen Griffin at Fox, the Pentagon reporter?
Speaker 1: I'm I think I may have met her, but no.
Speaker 0: I don't wanna single her out. She's perfectly nice. That's not true, actually.
Speaker 1: Pentagon reporters are usually salutes. Woah.
Speaker 0: Woah. And what's interesting is she just carries the she lies, and she carries the Pentagon line, not the kind of top you know, not the defense secretary line. He's a political appointee, but the permanent Pentagon, the interest of this agency, the largest government agency, and she just carries her line no matter what. No matter what. It doesn't matter how implausible it is.
It's and it's a neocon line. It's a free show.
Speaker 1: Challenge her when she's on your show, which I'm sure you had this happen because I had this happen at CNN, I'd, you know, have the inter the the Pentagon reporter on, and I'd challenge her on a question. She would complain to management, and then management would call me in and say, hey. Take it easy with your questioning and what you were doing. Are
Speaker 0: you serious?
Speaker 1: Oh, I remember John Klein calling me the president of CNN. You you remember John? Do I remember John? Yeah. Okay.
Am I do you wanna go at a rabbit hole here?
Speaker 0: It's like No. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: But John would call me and say, Rick, such and such says you gotta really back off on this stuff. It's like, why? It's a perfectly legitimate question. John Klein Well, she's upset.
Speaker 0: Was a test of of my personal decency and religious principles because I was so mistreated by John Klein in the most dishonest no one's ever been that dishonest with me ever in my life that when John Klein got fired, which was, of course, inevitable from CNN, I called him to say, you know, I just I heard you get fired, and I'm just so grateful that you did get fired because you deserve it.
Speaker 1: Did you say
Speaker 0: that? I didn't. Oh. So I called him on a cell. He this was years later.
He picks up, and then I was like, that's really don't do that to somebody. Like, I'm a Christian. Don't act like that to somebody. You know, kick him when he's down. Don't do that.
So I just hung up. He's like, hello, Tucker. Hello. And I hung up, and that was the best I could do. Yeah.
What I should have done as a Christian just called him and said, you know, John, I I've and we had the promise between us, but I know what it feels like to be fired. I'm really sorry. I I could I wasn't man enough to do that, but I did pull back. What a moment. Well, that
Speaker 1: that middle moment, that that half a second on the phone
Speaker 0: of someone must have been person. I don't wanna kick the suffering man. I'm glad about your cancer diagnosis. Damn. I don't wanna be that person.
But, boy, I was tempted. Because, I mean, John Klein is I've never dealt with anybody that dishonest. Like, literally, I resigned my job at CNN. I went to lunch with my brother at the Palm on Nineteenth Street. I'll never forget this is, like, back when you didn't check your cell phone all the time.
Yeah. I get back to my office, and I have a call from Dave Bauter at the AP. He's the AP writer, and he's like, call me back right away. He's like, I'm sorry you just got fired from CNN. We have a statement from John Klein.
I was like, what do you mean fired? I resigned this morning. I didn't get fired. What are you talking about? He said, no.
No. John Klein called me. Well, I was at lunch.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. I
Speaker 0: was like, are you kidding? So I called John Klein. I was like, is this real? And he said, and I'm quoting, as god watches, he goes, it's just business.
Speaker 1: It's just business.
Speaker 0: I don't know why I'm telling this story. I've never told that story to anybody, but that was,
Speaker 1: yeah. That's a great story.
Speaker 0: So, John no. But that's how the
Speaker 1: business works. Sounds a little like the mafia then.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, it totally is, and I'm sorry that I
Speaker 1: It's just business. Now No. You and I have had interesting careers.
Speaker 0: Years later, it's like, of course, that's what happened. It doesn't bother me
Speaker 1: at all, but And we're both better for it.
Speaker 0: Oh, I completely agree. And anyone who's shocked by that kind of stuff is a is a naive, and I don't wanna be naive. So but so you can so I'm totally stepped over your story because you triggered me with John Klein.
Speaker 1: Well, here. Let me help you. So after the Biden administration decides that they think this entity, which they really don't even understand, but apparently, they thought my show was too popular, and they didn't want me to be popular on a network other than the BBC or CNN. And so they essentially shut it down, thereby shutting me down by penalty of imprisonment. And I was a little angry about it, so I went around and I started telling people about it all.
Anybody who would listen, I would say, look. This this is the situation I'm in, and it's very bothersome. And I got a lot of people, including the, Society of Professional Journalists who said, look. In a country like ours, the government doesn't get a chance to decide who are the winners and losers, who can report, and who can do anything else. So they've invited me to actually speak at one of their forums, which I thought was cool.
And then a very large newspaper here in The United States, in Washington no less, decided they were gonna run a story on this. And, essentially, they wrote a story that essentially says the headline of, you know, Rick Sanchez, former CNN reporter, challenging the Biden administration, hoping that the the new Trump administration will change this law. And it was legitimate story telling the story that I've been telling you that one day I was working, and suddenly I was this was taken away from me, and it was unfair. Perfectly legitimate story. And it was about to air or, pardon me, be published, the very next day, and I get a phone call.
Remember we talked earlier about a mysterious phone call? Yeah. Now there's this young journalist, nice young man, worked hard on the story, smart kid, and he says, mister Sanchez, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but the story that was gonna come out tomorrow that you and I were both excited about it, it's been killed. They're not gonna run the story. I said, why wouldn't they run the story?
He said, well, because our managing editor, not my boss, his boss, apparently got a call last night from somebody, and they convinced him in that phone call that we should kill this story. And I said, can you give me more details? Do you know why? He goes, no. I don't even know who the person was who called him.
And I don't usually work with my man with with the guy at the top. I usually work with my regular editor. I'm just a reporter, but I've never even heard of a phone call coming from the very top like that and canceling the story. So now not only did I get a mysterious call that led to me losing my job at RT, now my just trying to share my story with people was being killed by another mysterious phone call.
Speaker 0: Well, it was a Neocon publication. So I'm from DC. You're not. So I'm I happen to know the publication very well, and it's a NeoCon publication.
Speaker 1: And we don't wanna say it because we're
Speaker 0: a young I don't wanna ever fire you. It's not my it didn't happen to me, so I don't have the right to divulge it, but it's a publication in Washington DC that is resolutely neocon. And they're like, no. This is contrary to the story that we're telling so.
Speaker 1: So so what you're telling me and what we're coming to realize in this conversation, you and I, is that the State Department, who I know reached out to me when I was working at RT to kind of threaten or warn me not to work at RT, which is my choice and was taken away from me, also then followed up by calling a American newspaper to tell them not to cover me or tell my story based on what they needed as well.
Speaker 0: Of course. This is crazy. It is crazy. This is crazy. And and by the way, I I don't know anything about the mechanics of what actually happened, but I can say that there is a conspiracy of temperament and worldview that is not explicit, and I doubt it's even, like, a true conspiracy, and then I don't know if there's communication between the parties, but the people who work at the State Department, the people who work at the Washington Post, the people who work at, you know, every big news organization in DC and New York have the same worldview.
And so they know that, you know, telling your story, explaining how your First Amendment rights as an American were violated by the US government, is contrary to their interests as cheerleaders of the war against Russia. It'll help Putin, so we can't say
Speaker 1: it. Right.
Speaker 0: It's like I mean, that seems like deep
Speaker 1: And all we wanna do is engage. I mean, I am not here, you know, being a cheerleader for Russia or any other country.
Speaker 0: We're allowed to be. We're not at war with Russia, by the way. So we are, in fact, waging a war against Russia and have been for hundreds of billions of dollars later.
Speaker 1: Proxy.
Speaker 0: You know, more than a million people dead later, you know, we're losing. But and it's all very sad. But the truth is we're not actually at war with Russia. Congress has not declared war in Russia, so you've got every right to go to Russia, to take Russia's side if you want. I I mean, I don't think you are you haven't been to Russia, and you're not taking Russia's side.
But just to be clear, you have a right to do that, and it's an inalienable right.
Speaker 1: As a journalist, it's my responsibility to represent their point of view.
Speaker 0: Of
Speaker 1: course. You put a microphone in front of them and say, what is your opinion of this situation? And then report back, but we're not allowed to do that. I'm being told you're not allowed to get that side of the story, and if you report that side of the story, we're gonna put you in jail.
Speaker 0: So I do think that most journalists obey because they fear social sanction. They fear someone saying, you're a Putin puppet or whatever.
Speaker 1: I hate that.
Speaker 0: But in your case, you actually saw an administration try to apply the force of law. Like, we'll put you in jail. So that's what I think is different about your story. It's not just like people are embarrassed to be seen as pro Russia. They were like, no.
You violate the order, and you're going to prison. That's a different level now?
Speaker 1: And I'm challenging it. As an American, first of all, just from a constitutional standpoint, I think I have a right to challenge it. And I've talked to enough people in the legal community who are helping me with this, who are saying, if you wanna continue doing that, you have a right to petition to continue doing that in The United States. And now that the Trump administration is there, there are we're getting some friendly responses from people in the Trump administration who are saying, why is Rick Sanchez not allowed to work?
Speaker 0: I know.
Speaker 1: No. And I can't say definitively yet that the Trump administration will undo this because, you know, things are moving, and there's negotiations now with Russia. And I understand the Trump administration is trying to remove some of the silly sanctions that we have on them that are just ridiculous.
Speaker 0: But the reason it's so hard to do any of that is because of the leash that remains in place, which is the fear people have, good people, patriotic Americans have, of being tied to Russia. So so total has been the propaganda victory. You're connected to Putin. Putin's bad. You poll a hundred Americans.
90 nine will tell you Putin is evil, which you may be. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't know. Yeah. More evil than, like, a lot of our allies? Probably not.
But but whatever. I'm not defending
Speaker 1: He happens to be the president of a country, and they have something to say, and we should report it.
Speaker 0: Yeah. But, like, it's gotten to the point where that kind of lynch mob mentality is so entrenched in The United States that even to suggest that someone is close to this boogeyman is enough to shut it down. But here's what And that's a leash. What they're doing is controlling your behavior.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. But even on a more pragmatic standpoint, I looked this up the other day. I said, how much money did we spend to rebuild Europe after World War two? Yeah. A hundred and $40,000,000,000 in today's money.
Yeah. We've spent over 200,000,000,000 in Ukraine.
Speaker 0: To destroy Ukraine? To destroy Ukraine. Well, that's the difference. Right?
Speaker 1: Think about that. If you ask the average American, back then, we spent a hundred and $40,000,000,000 to rebuild Europe after the Nazis destroyed it. Was that okay? I think 99% of us would say, yeah. We needed to do that, and I'm glad we did it.
If you went around America and you said, $200,000,000,000 of your tax money has been spent in Ukraine, and then you said, can you find it on a map? What would you kill?
Speaker 0: And what could you do to Gary, Indiana and Baltimore and Detroit and Minneapolis, like, with that money? In general, I think the destructive impulse is is satanic, and I think it really is a dualism, either you're creating or or you're destroying. Yeah. And if you look around and you're like, the outcome of all these different adventures is just purely destruction, I think you can say you're serving evil. I think it's honestly, that's what God creates.
Mhmm. Satan destroys. I'm sorry to, like, get all heavy on you, but I think it's just very basic. Yeah. Right?
Isn't it?
Speaker 1: Not only that, but I think it's it it it's all about engagement. And I and I keep going back to this idea that I keep having call me crazy that my calling is sharing stories, and I want the right to be able to share stories. And my parents told me one day when they brought me to America from a communist country that this was a unique place where I would always be able to share any story, and I'm being told that I can't share stories. Yes. And if we don't engage with Russia, if we don't talk to Russia or any other country for that matter, even Iran or whatever other countries out there that are supposed to be the boogeyman, if we don't engage with those countries, we're creating a path which is gonna be so dangerous that we're not gonna be able to come out from it.
And that's my fear.
Speaker 0: I mean, that right. From a geopolitical standpoint, we're we've really, really squandered American power to the point where we have less power than most Americans understand, and it's really scary. I want America to be powerful. I want us to be able to project power if we need to. I want us to be to protect our interests.
I want us to stay prosperous and free, and and we the degree to which we've, like, kind of wrecked ourselves is not obvious to people, and it makes me wanna cry when I think about
Speaker 1: And how is it that we can continue to convince Americans of these things that aren't true and have them buy it? Are they just too busy? Is the money too big? Is the media
Speaker 0: propaganda, it's it's how, you know, the state department or your CNN former colleague calls you up. It's like, no. What the the okay. The people in charge are terrible at building things. They built nothing.
Our country's collapsing. Our infrastructure's garbage. Our population is dying. Okay? That's just a fact.
Yeah. I grieve over that. I want this country to be prosperous, free, and happy. I want people I want my kids to get married and be able to afford houses. I want them to have my grandchildren.
I mean, these are like basic desires. The people running it have no ability to do any of that, to help with any of that, to actually help the population of The United States. All they can do is destroy. And how do they pull that off without, like, sparking a revolution, a much needed revolution in their country? They do it through propaganda, and I have been an instrument of that throughout my life unknowingly.
A prop propaganda that lies to people in a way that's so aggressive and all encompassing. You don't know that it's dark because there's no light. You have nothing to compare it to. You have no idea. Your worldview is so controlled that you have no freaking idea what reality is.
Speaker 1: You know, I was just thinking something which is really interesting and that is comparable almost. I was thinking to myself, you had the number one show in The United States Of America at the number one network, and somehow that was taken away from you. I happen to have a pretty darn good show that was seen by also tens of millions of people, but mine didn't air in The United States. It aired around the world. Both of us seem to have that show kind of taken away from us one day.
And I think, if I'm not going too far on the perch here, that it happened as a result of the same thing and was caused by probably the same people.
Speaker 0: Of course. I mean, of course. I was so grateful, by the way, because I I will always, you know, give Fox Yes. The credit. It deserves a lot of credit for being kind to me, which they always were, of not really getting in my business and of, you know, giving me all that freedom for so long, and I'm grateful to the Murdoch family for that.
But, you know, clearly, policy, neocon foreign policy is the red line. Mhmm. They don't care what your views on transgenderism are Yeah. And abortion or gun control or tax policy, all that stuff that we claim Yeah. Think is important.
They don't think that's important.
Speaker 1: Go ahead and do that. Right?
Speaker 0: Go ahead and do that. Fight amongst yourselves. Yeah. Exactly. You know, have a race war.
You know? Great. How about how about one you know what? You should have a race war.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's so true.
Speaker 0: No. It's totally true. Have a race war, and they just don't care. What they do care about is the ability to keep the money flowing and, you know, the coffins filling. Like, they they love to kill, and they love they worship money and death, and that's just a fact.
And I know them because I I'm from there. So, anyway, I I came to this very slowly just being involved in public policy debates my entire life. I realized, oh, the only thing they really care about is the foreign policy stuff. And so I got fired, and that was, like, totally inevitable. I knew that it was gonna happen at some point.
It was a shock that morning, but, like, not a shock big picture. And I'm I was so grateful for it and have woken up happy every single day for two years because of that. So I'm not complaining in this No.
Speaker 1: I know. But there's
Speaker 0: But you're absolutely right. It's the same thing. Right. That's the red line. There's so many fake red lines out there.
Like, oh, you know, anyone who's like, the race stuff was like, most Americans do not hate each other because of race. Despite the best efforts of our leaders to get us to hate each other, man, they have tried so hard.
Speaker 1: And most Americans don't want to hate Russia.
Speaker 0: At all. Right. But, again, it's North Korea. It's like you have to. You don't even know what you don't know.
Right. And I didn't even know until like, I'm a huge believer in, like, just looking at stuff and, like, smelling stuff and, like, what's the obvious reality? You can tell me any story you want, but let me go see it. And that's why I've traveled so much. And it was just so clear when I went to Moscow, like, I don't wanna move there or whatever.
I'm not Russian, but, like, you've been lying to me about this Mhmm. In a really big way. And if you've lied to me about that, what else have you been lying to me about?
Speaker 1: Anyway, whatever. I But we should. Boring. And I now feel compelled, and that's one of the reasons I'm telling this story. I don't need It's an amazing story.
I don't need to work because thank god I've done fine and, you know, I'm in a good place, but I want the opportunity to continue to help engage and tell the stories that bring us together as a people. Russia's story, the American story can be one story. We can share our stories. We can disagree. We can hate each other.
Speaker 0: We can
Speaker 1: love each other. But this whole idea that we have to be like this is just crazy, and it's gonna lead to a bad thing.
Speaker 0: Well, it's just so
Speaker 1: And Trump's instincts are correct on this. I hope he can fulfill them.
Speaker 0: And the real battle that has you know, it's never changed for the last two thousand years was between east and west. It's between worldviews, and you have the Christian west, and you've got the non Christian east. And the truth is Russia is really part of the Christian West. And so anyone who's trying to make Russia into the main enemy of The United States is trying to divide and destroy the Christian West. That's just a fact.
Yeah. So I don't know why people don't say that. It took me a long time to figure it out, but it's just so obvious. Know?
Speaker 1: And and isn't that funny? We you know, like, Le Mans, the BBC, all these people. I hear these people my friends say, oh, yeah. I don't trust American newspapers or American media, so I watch the BBC. I said, dude, that's a same damn thing.
Speaker 0: I love it.
Speaker 1: No. You need to watch maybe a little India or a little Russia Totally. Brazil or just get Totally. A different perspective. You wanna go to the global South countries.
Speaker 0: So funny. Of course. Al Jazeera. I mean, just read watch it all. Read it all.
Speaker 1: Disagree with him. Whatever.
Speaker 0: Thing is that's such like the upper middle class half wit lady with the beach novel thing to say. I I, you know, I really I'm I I watch the BBC because it's just more it's
Speaker 1: I don't trust CNN.
Speaker 0: I watch the BBC. It's the same damn thing. It's like I've heard that so many times. Really, it's the it's the BBC. It's like, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: So true.
Speaker 0: I don't anyway, Rick Sanchez, it is wonderful to see you after all these years, and thank you for your amazing story.
Speaker 1: And thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 0: For your resilience through, you know, many different jobs. I do respect that.
Speaker 1: You just keep on fighting. Amen. Amen. Dali. Vamos.
Thanks, man. My pleasure.
Speaker 0: Time for another true life Alp story. I got a call from a friend of mine yesterday, honestly, true story, who said his girlfriend had just broken up with him over Alp. He wouldn't stop. And I thought to myself, that's kinda sad. And he said, no.
It's not sad. Imagine if I'd married her. Now I know. I was saved. Then the next day, this same friend is driving at twice the speed limit through a major American city pulled over by a cop in a speed trap.
Cop takes his license registration, goes back to patrol car, runs him, comes back, looks in the window, and sees a tin of Alp on the dashboard, pauses, stunned, says to my friend, you use Alp? Yeah. I do, says my friend. So do I, says the cop. We all do.
He looks at my friend thoughtfully and goes, drive safely, sir, and hands back his license and registration. No ticket. So in two days, he's saved from a tragic marriage to a girl who doesn't like Alp and a speeding ticket. All true. It's more than a negative marriage.
In a nation of 350,000,000 people, guessing there are about 350,000,000 Alp stories. Email us yours. We wanna know and read it on the air. Email tellall@AlpPouch.com. Tell all at Alp Pouch dot com.
Give us your Alp story.
Posted - March 12, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Saved - March 12, 2025 at 7:53 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Why is the murder of a journalist in Austin, TX not all over the mainstream media? Jamie White was very outspoken about the proxy war. Was this work of Ukrainian terrorists?They have killed a U.S. journalist before, Gonzalo Lira. The western media remains silent on this. Why?
@JohnMcCloy - Johnny St.Pete
This is Horrific. A long standing Infowars reporter, Jamie White, was brutally murdered yesterday outside of his home in Austin, Texas. Alex Jones places a large amount of the blame on DA Jose Garza who is a Soros backed DA and is notorious for his lax treatment of violent criminals. Jamie was a star in Infowars community. His last X post was a repost of Elon Musk asking “Why are the liberals so violent” Godspeed Jamie.
Video Transcript AI Summary
This morning, police found a victim with obvious trauma in an apartment complex parking lot. EMS transported him to the hospital where he died. Homicide detectives are collecting evidence, focusing on a second-floor apartment. Police are asking for information about the incident, and you can provide tips anonymously through Crime Stoppers.
In other news, Jamie White, a reporter and researcher at Infowars, was murdered last night near our studios. He was found outside his home. The police responded quickly and took him to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead shortly after arrival. Jamie's last activity was reposting a comment from Elon Musk about violence. This tragedy highlights the increasing crime in Austin, which is made worse by policies and a DA who fail to prosecute criminals effectively. I will be speaking to Jamie's family to see how we can help.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Gation, good morning
Speaker 1: police really releasing few details about what happened overnight, but this is what we do know right now. Police say they actually found the victim here in the parking lot of this apartment complex. EMS ended up taking that man to the hospital where he later died. Right now, police will not say exactly if he was shot or stabbed, only saying that he had obvious trauma. Homicide detective still on scene, as I mentioned this morning, collecting evidence.
We've seen also a lot of, activity in a Second Floor apartment where they've been taking evidence bags out. Right now, police say they do not have any information about a suspect, and they're asking if you know something about that about that to contact them. You can also remain anonymous using Crime Stoppers.
Speaker 0: The afternoon of Monday, 03/10/2025, and I come to the Infowars family of viewers and listeners into the world with some really horrible news. There are a lot of really cool people that have worked at Infowars over the years, and one of the most amazing people was Jamie White. You know him as a great reporter and researcher. He was up here last night working late during the Sunday show and after it. We even have his last post on acts where he responded to Elon Musk.
Jamie was murdered last night outside of his home just a few miles away from our studios. And we are the folks here breaking that news first because his family has been notified and his good personal friends here that were very close to Jamie have talked to his folks and family. We sent some people over this morning when he didn't answer the phone because he's always here early, loves to work, loves to fight tyranny, loves to promote freedom. And when they got to the apartment complex, there was yellow tape everywhere and blood all over the parking lot. And we went and talked to the manager, and they didn't know anything.
Just like everybody else we see in the left, they just very laissez faire. But our crew members saw a police officer and went and talked to them, and they made a phone call. And she had the details when she talked to him and knew Jamie. The police officer said, yes. He he he died at the hospital very soon after they got him there.
The police responded within two minutes and they had him at the hospital where he was pronounced dead within eighteen minutes. Just wanna say the police did a great job in the response time despite I'm gonna talk about in a moment who I hold responsible for this and who is responsible for this and who are accomplices to Jamie and so many others murder so many others that have been raped and mugged. Heard me on air talk about how the crime is very, very bad here in Austin and he left the city as and just exploded the last four years. But let me just tell you what happened to Jamie. What we know so far, his last post on x was sixteen hours ago.
Elon Musk was talking about leftists saying that if they see cyber trucks, they're gonna attack them and physically attack them and put a rock through their windshield that's now actually happening and they're burning down the Tesla dealerships and shooting them up and they're celebrating on corporate news. Elon responded and said, yeah. Why are liberals so violent? Legacy media propaganda is a major part of the problem. I'm not saying a leftist killed Jamie, but the point is there's a lot of push for violence, White reposted Elon Musk comment in the story, and that's the last thing we know that he ever probably did in his journalistic career.
There's Jamie's ex account. I've sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Original gangster Thomas Jefferson. And, I mean, I'll just say it. Jamie was our best writer and reporter.
They're all great, but they all said he was the best. I mean, there's others that are almost as good, but not as good as Jamie. And he he wrote six, seven articles yesterday, posted all this news, did all this great research, gave us information for the show, assisted us in what we were doing, and we came to this war and the crew looked really upset and they said Jamie didn't come in. And so we sent one of the crew down there and didn't look good. And then they didn't wanna tell me yet that the cops had said, no, it was Jamie White, that we were the first to learn.
We waited until the afternoon till the family's been told. You saw a little clip from a newscast about this in the early morning hours, and it's just become so routine. And then when somebody like Daniel Penny defends a group of people on train, these leftist DAs throw him in prison. We'll get to that in a moment. We have one even worse than Alvin Bragg here in Austin, you can believe that.
Recognized as probably the worst in the country, an actual communist. They love the chaos. It's their Cloward and Piven. We'll get to that in a moment. Because Jamie would want us to talk about this.
And I would I'm gonna talk to the family again a little bit later and see if we can help out, hopefully, with any of the expenses and maybe do a Gibson go or something. Austin Police Department officers responded to a high priority emergency call at approximately 11:57PM, Sunday night. The call was shoot, stab, hotshot, which refers to a high priority potential life threatening call involving possibility of an active shooter stabbings. Officers arrived about two minutes later and found a male victim, obvious signs of trauma, according to APD public information officer Leah Ratliff. Officers attempted life saving measures before the victim was transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead at approximately 12:19AM Monday morning.
Homicide detectives are actively investigating the incident which marks Austin's Eighth homicide of the year. Authorities have not released information about potential suspects for specific nature of the victim's injuries. This is pretty early on the investigation and the homicide unit will be releasing more information as they're able, Ratliff said during a media briefing. Well, we've talked to police off record. We know more.
I'm gonna reveal that right now. Multiple police officers we've talked to, detectives said off record that, you know, we we're really sick of this. We're tired of this. And they said, you know, we are too. We have had in the last few years our funding for crime scene, people and responders cut back massively.
They made the biggest cuts in areas that deal with violent crime as we we know from the news, but this was them telling us. And that they will bust really hardened people with huge rap sheets committing serious crimes, robberies, armed robberies, and that the Austin DA who, despite all the pressure and everything, is is is very proud of himself. Soros put him in on record, financed his run, does nothing. In fact, they just intensify it to the point the governors had to put the state police in to Austin just to try to deal with it. And then the state police really don't know anything but writing tickets, so they just write tickets.
And I've been really, you know, talking about that being very, very sad thing. But, everybody's homes and cars are being broken into. I was talking to Rob Dew who got home Saturday night at about 11:30. I said, I said, you're lucky you live out in the country in Nigeria. Said, actually, we pulled up.
There was a truck parked in the street with its lights on. He said to his wife, Trish, you know, they're probably gonna break in the cars and they they did break in the cars that night. They learned from the neighbors. They parked their car in the garage. So, this is the this is what's going on in this country.
And almost everyone I know has had family that have died or been brain damaged from fentanyl. I mean, this is all the open border. This is all releasing the hardened criminals. And, you know, to read at the news and have it happen to your friends and things is is is is really just the tip of the iceberg when you start experiencing the left persecuting people that actually protect their fellow humans. And and when you see the Soros DA's in control of over 800 jurisdictions protecting serious narcotics gangs and human trafficking gangs, and when you see different feds in in ICE calling and warning some of those violent gangs in the world that there's ICE raids coming.
Pam Bondi and others reporting that they are preparing to indict some of these people, but there's so many communist traitors in the government that they're having to polygraphs now.
Posted - March 6, 2025 at 11:32 AM
Saved - March 6, 2025 at 7:19 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
These absolute evil war mongers in Europe will not stop propping up the Kiev regime and undermining peace! You are watching the globalist cabal in action.
@MarioNawfal - Mario Nawfal
🔴LIVE: ZELENSKYY JOINS EUROPEAN LEADERS FOR EMERGENCY UKRAINE TALKS https://t.co/9hpnu00odR
Posted - February 18, 2025 at 9:14 PM
Saved - February 18, 2025 at 9:59 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Absolutely riveting. @TCNetwork Jeffery Sachs analogy of the US foreign policy and the game of Risk ( which I played as a kid) was so right on. Great listen.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
Can Donald Trump actually end the Ukraine war? Jeffrey Sachs thinks he can. (0:00) Jeffrey Sachs’ Story on How He Met Viktor Orban (2:55) Bill Clinton’s Shadowy Deep State Project (11:13) The Three Most Important Things Donald Trump Has Done So Far (14:41) Why Can’t We Have Rational Conversations Anymore? (23:55) The Global Chess Game of American Dominance (25:24) Why the US Sows Chaos in Foreign Countries (28:31) How Far Will the Deep State Go to Sabotage Trump? (33:30) What Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Means for the US (41:42) How the Democrats’ Own Foreign Policy Totally Backfired Includes paid partnerships.
Video Transcript AI Summary
I met Prime Minister Orban 36 years ago and saw in him vision, energy, and foresight. The Ukraine war resulted from the US's idea to expand NATO eastward, ignoring promises made to Russia. Yesterday was historic; Trump and Putin spoke, and the defense secretary admitted Ukraine won't join NATO, forming a basis for peace.
For 30 years, America played a "game of risk," seeking world hegemony, but Rubio now acknowledges a multipolar world. Europe is befuddled as the US reverses course. I told European leaders this project wouldn't work; Russia sees it as life or death.
ExpressVPN shields your online activity. We need rational conversations in foreign policy, not attacks based on motive. The problem is the arrogance of power.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to, introduce someone who I consider one of the smartest people I know and whose understanding of the world is matched only by his ability to synthesize huge themes, and illustrate them with precise detail, someone who's traveled the world for forty years, a man who not only writes about leaders of the world but knows them personally, professor Jeffrey Sachs. Thanks. Alright. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jeff. Thank you. So how long I just you were telling me backstage. I didn't realize this. For for those who enjoyed prime minister Orpana, I'm one of them.
I was tell us when you first met the prime minister.
Speaker 1: We met forty six years ago. Thirty six years ago. Sorry. Thirty six years ago, 1989.
Speaker 0: He was just getting out of jail at that point.
Speaker 1: No. Yeah. They were just opening up, and, this young guy was starting a political party. And he gave me a call, and, we sat in our my backyard in, in Boston for a few hours. And I thought, okay.
This guy is gonna be prime minister for most of the next, thirty six years. It's very, very impressive then. And it's very impressive now.
Speaker 0: So you said that you saw in him and it's not just about him, but it's about what are the markers of enduring leadership? What makes, you know, this politician impressive while most of them are not impressive? What did you see in him? What do you see in leaders like him who have been successful?
Speaker 1: This was 1989. It was even, before the Berlin Wall Fell, but Hungary had cut the barbed wire. So people were that was the beginning of the end in 1989 of the Soviet domination of of Eastern Europe. And, this young guy said, I'm gonna make a political party, and I'm gonna be a leader, and I'm gonna make a new Hungary. And, what he showed was vision that, look, we're a great country.
We've been held back for the last forty five years. I'm gonna help lead the way. And it was Fidesz, young democrats, I think was the translation of it, and he just had the idea. We're we're gonna move forward. He was a kid, and we were all kids then.
And, you could see that there was energy, vision, foresight, and and it proved right.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And their toughness. So you heard his analysis, I think, of where we are, with the war in Ukraine election of Trump on the basis in part of, you know, his promise to to try to end this if he can. You saw the new secretary of defense say, no. We're not gonna support Ukraine's entry into NATO.
Where are we now?
Speaker 1: You know, yesterday was the most, important day for peace in maybe decades, actually. This war in Ukraine resulted from a very bad idea of The United States taken in 1994. It's a project. The project, was a project to expand NATO forever anywhere. Just keep moving east.
Keep moving not only to the first wave, which was the prime minister's country, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but then move eastward closer to the former Soviet Union, into the former Soviet Union, surround Russia in the Black Sea region, go all the way to a little country in the South Caucasus, Georgia. It was mind boggling. Clinton signed on to that in 1994. It became what we call the deep state project, meaning it didn't really matter who the president was. Each president would come and basically would be informed.
NATO's moving eastward. You're part of that process. So Clinton started it in 1994. And as prime minister Orban said, he mentioned briefly, in 1990, on 02/09/1990, in unequivocal, clear as can be terms, The United States had said to president Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO will not move one inch eastward. And if you have any doubt about it, all the documents are now online, available.
You can scrutinize everything. Hans Dietrich Genscher, the US the German foreign minister said the same thing, same day. He's on tape actually explaining, no. No. I don't just mean within Eastern Germany.
I mean anywhere to the East. Clinton, being Clinton, and the US deep state being The US Deep State started this project in 1994. They already had the idea by the way in in nineteen ninety one, ninety two as soon as the Soviet Union ended. Now we move. Now we move eastward.
Now we control everything. Now we are the sole superpower. So this has gone on for thirty years and each president got into it under George Bush Junior, seven more countries were added, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania, Nine in 02/2004. Then in 02/2007, president Putin said at the summit that's taking place right now, the Munich Security Summit, said stop. You told us no expansion, not an eastward expansion even an inch, you said.
You've now done 10 countries. Stop. Perfectly reasonable. Stop. I don't think our president Donald Trump would much like to see China and Russia building their military bases up from Central America.
You know, this was how the Russians saw this. Why are you coming to our border when you told us you weren't gonna move? And there was one other thing that was very important in this, which is probably the most decisive thing and almost not even recognized. In 02/2002, the US did something really, really, really destabilizing, and that is it unilaterally left the anti ballistic missile treaty. That was a core strategy to stop a nuclear war between the two superpowers because what ABM had done for thirty years was to say, we each have deterrence.
You if you strike us, we can strike back. We'll limit our anti ballistic missiles so that both sides maintain deterrence. In 02/2002, the United States unilaterally, unprovoked, walked out of the ABM, said, no. No. We're not gonna do it anymore.
We're going to put anti ballistic missile systems into Russia's bordering territories. The Russians said, are you kidding? The US said, what's your problem? We do what we want. So in 02/2007, Putin stopped already.
In 02/2008, George Bush junior doubled down as Americans typically do and said, okay. Now we're moving to Ukraine and to Georgia. That was, why this war occurred. But Ukraine had one more sliver of, of life, and that was that they elected a president in 02/2010 that didn't want to be part of NATO. And the public didn't wanna be part of NATO.
Why? Because they knew this is very dangerous. Why get into this provocative situation? His name was Viktor Yanukovych. Americans don't like neutrality, but Yanukovych was trying to be neutral between the two sides.
And The US played a rather unfortunate role on 02/22/2014 in a violent overthrow of this person. And, that's when the war started. And it's been now ten years, and no president has, told the truth until yesterday, by the way. Yesterday is a historic day because the a call took place between president Putin and president Trump. It was the first call.
We don't know if there had been a short call beforehand between the two of them, but there was no call by Biden and Putin with war going on for three years. No call. And now there was a call, and the readout from the American side was excellent. What president Trump said in the call was we respect Russia. We hear Russia's concerns.
We fought on the same side in World War two. Nice point, by the way. True. Russia lost, Soviet Union lost 27,000,000 people in World War two and was an ally of The United States. The fact that wasn't mentioned for years and years and years by president Biden.
And then the defense secretary had said the new defense secretary said yesterday the truth for the first time that Ukraine is not going to join NATO. This is the basis for peace. This is absolutely the basis for peace, and they couldn't tell the truth for three decades. They could not admit what any of us knew because I've been around this region for thirty six years in detail. I sat with Boris Yeltsin.
I sat with Mikhail Gorbachev. But the Americans would not tell the truth publicly until yesterday that this was so provocative. It was a game. They thought they'd win the game. I don't know how many people here play or played in their childhood the game of risk.
The game of risk was a big game for me. You wanted your piece on every part of the world map. That was the game. When you took over the whole world, world hegemony, we now call it, you won. They're playing that game until this administration.
So the two most important three important things have happened in my view in this administration so far. First, our new secretary of state Marco Rubio told the fundamental truth. We are in a multipolar world. First time the sentence was uttered, he told the truth. What does it mean?
The American mindset for thirty years was we run the show. Marco Rubio said, well, we don't run the show. We live with other powerful countries. Great start. Second and third were the two events yesterday.
So I'm feeling about peace that this is really something that happened yesterday. If if they follow through, we know what Washington is like. There's every crazy idea swarming still. A project of thirty years doesn't go down necessarily in one phone call or one statement by, the secretary of defense, but it's pretty important that it was said so publicly and so visibly. And of course, Europe is in a tizzy because Europe signed on to The US project.
All these politicians in Europe are there where they are because they were part of The US project. And now The US is reversing its project, and you didn't tell us, and you didn't. Know. What are we supposed to do? We're way out there.
And so they're completely befuddled. And I have to say, I told them personally, many of these leaders, and I mean personally one by one for years, you are gonna get trapped this way because this project doesn't work. It doesn't make sense. It's a game for the Americans, but it's life and death for the Russians. So it cannot be won by the American side.
It's impossible. And I tried to tell them, and nobody in Europe either had the clarity or the guts to see it except the person that preceded me in this seat, prime minister Orban, because he was completely clear about this from the first day. Now others are starting, but even till today, the Europeans can't get it because they're so deeply invested in something that makes no sense. They should have said, Russia's big. It lives near near us.
Let's cooperate. That's how you do it.
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We recommend it. I think one of the reasons we wound up in this position, we meaning The United States, but also Europe, is there's a habit of speech which reflects a habit of mind, which is an unwillingness to engage with ideas and instead resort immediately to attacking the other person on the basis of motive. And you saw this with Orban. You're a Russian stooge or whatever and was especially hilarious as he explained. Always the opposite of a Russian stooge, of course, lifelong.
His country was occupied by the Russians. But you do see it also in The United States, and it makes it kind of impossible to have a rational conversation about any I know you've been the the butt of the stew, not whining about it, but it's like, Yeah. Is there even a culture in our foreign policy establishment of having rational conversations to the point where we can solve problems like this?
Speaker 1: You know, we've talked about, I think, an uncle of yours, who's one of my favorite politicians of American history, j William Fulbright. And, he wrote a book in the nineteen sixties called the arrogance of power. And I was a kid then, and I read that book like it was the coolest thing imaginable. This was the chairman of the US foreign relations committee saying we're too arrogant to think clearly. That was amazing.
He was an amazing person. Now I think that's the fundamental problem. I'm not sure we're properly over it, but I have to say that, in nineteen ninety, ninety one, we had the chance for global peace, really for global peace. That doomsday clock of the atomic scientist which I like to refer to so much, which measures how close or far are we from nuclear war, was the farthest away it was ever in its history because the cold war had ended. So I was there as a as a young economist who actually knew something about economic stabilization, and I made proposals.
And, interestingly, just as a footnote, I advised the Polish government in 1989. I just long story, but suddenly as a kid, I happened to be there, and I helped write their plan. And I, everything I recommended for Poland was immediately accepted by the White House. It's a very odd thing. In fact, I went one day, I had an idea of mobilizing some finance to help Poland stabilize, and I called the Polish finance minister said, do you mind if I try to raise a billion dollars for you today?
Which was a lot of money in in those days and, he said, if you raise a billion dollars that would be great. So I called Bob Dole, our senate majority leader whom I knew because of the Poland, work that I was doing and he invited me immediately into his office and he said come back in an hour. So I came back in an hour, this was September 1989 And who was sitting there? General Brent Scowcroft. Okay.
He was the general who was our national security adviser. I was a kid. So it was a little bit interesting moment. And he senator Dole said to me, explain to general Scowcroft your idea. So I handed him the paper, and this is how you do financial stabilization, and here's how you stabilize the currency.
And Scowcroft looked at it and said, well, will this work? And I said, general, this will work. And, Dole led me out of the office and said, call me back, later in the day. So at 5PM, I called, and Dole said, the White House has called. You have tell your friends you have the 1,000,000,000.
So I raised a billion dollars that day. It was good.
Speaker 0: No. No. No.
Speaker 1: It had nothing to do with me, because, it was the right idea. The Polish was wealthy, stabilized. I I did a good I did a good thing. I was a technically, equipped, sophisticated manager of a financial stabilization or not manager, but advisor on the financial stabilization. Okay.
Then in 1991, I recommended the same thing for Gorbachev and for this creaking, collapsing, Soviet Union. Gorbachev wanted to have elections in all of the republics, and he wanted to democratize and stabilize. So okay. I know something about that, mister president. And so we met, in, the Harvard Kennedy School, and, there were, one, two, three, four, five of us, a little team.
One of them was the chief economic adviser of Gorbachev, Grigoriy Yavlinski. One was the dean of the Kennedy School. One became a very senior diplomat, Bob Blackwell, that I deal with. One was a very senior economist at MIT Stanley Fisher. We wrote a plan for how the Soviet Union could stabilize, and I did the chapter on the financing.
Basically, the same thing that I had said for Poland. Okay. It was completely rejected within about twelve hours in Washington. Okay. I hated this for the next thirty years, I have to tell you, because we just could not take yes for an answer.
Couple of months ago, someone sent me from the archives, the first time that I'd ever seen it, the National Security Council minutes rejecting the proposal. Fascinating to read because that's your life before your eyes watching this. There was a guy named Dick Darman who was a former colleague of mine. The technical term, I don't I don't think I can say it in mixed company, actually. So I I I won't say what I would say about him.
But
Speaker 0: it's an unpleasant English word.
Speaker 1: It's really nasty. Too nasty for polite company. He says in this thing, we should do the minimum necessary so that there's not a collapse, but nothing more. And, he quotes Machiavelli and, you know, we're not interested and we're not gonna do this. And it's it's really watching stupid people taking important stupid decisions.
Fools. By the way, they never called to say, can we discuss stabilization? This guy knew nothing. They don't understand anything. They don't care.
So what were they doing? They actually reached a conclusion at the end of the meeting. We're gonna do the minimum possible. I mean, minimum, minimum. It's not our business to help.
We're not gonna do any of that. That's arrogance of power. We don't have to do anything. Why? We're The United States.
We don't have to do anything. They didn't even The stakes for the world were very high. You could have a thirty minute phone call to understand financial stabilization. You could say in history, when countries are destabilized this way, here's how stability has worked. That was my specialty.
That's what I knew and taught at Harvard and knew knew a lot about. But they're so arrogant that it's not even to discuss for a half an hour any of this, and they didn't, and they took a terrible decision. And by the way, my point is not that that led on to this and this and this. No. They took terrible decisions for the next thirty five years.
This could have been stopped at any moment. Not one thing led to the next thing. No. One stupid decision, then the next one, then the next one, then the next one. You have to learn to behave.
The way you behave in this world is mutual respect. The way you behave is thinking you're not gonna be more secure if they're completely destabilized. That's what you have to understand, and that is not so hard to understand. We teach it to our kids. At age four, we start teaching that.
And then suddenly, if you want your passport to Washington, you have to forget it at age 40 or something. And that's how they behave. So that's my feeling about this, that it's just a kind of arrogance. And you can see it in this writing which I find fascinating to go back and watch this tragedy unfold. Nineteen ninety seven, another wonderful moment if you wanna just watch hubris and tragedy.
Very good book. Good in that it's insightful. Terrible book in that it's all wrong by Zvi Brzezinski. And many of you have probably read it called the Grand Chess Board, and he could have called it the game of risk. It would have been a little bit more accurate, but it was about how to make American dominance in the world.
And he has a chapter about expanding NATO to Ukraine. Exactly that. He's and he talks about Europe and NATO expanding eastward. And the question that he asked in 1997 is, what can the Russians do about it? Because they're weak.
And he answers meticulously. He considers, would Russia ever ally with China? Impossible. He
Speaker 0: That'll that'll never happen.
Speaker 1: That'll never happen. Could Russia ever ally with Iran? No. Impossible. That will never happen.
So you watch like we watch now, Chatt GPT thinking out loud. It's all there. It's all wrong, and it was all American policy for the next twenty five years. That's tragedy.
Speaker 0: May may I ask a question, though, like a kind of thematic fundamental question. So, great empire, one of it you know, empires tend to be arrogant. I think that's a feature of empires.
Speaker 1: That is it.
Speaker 0: But a an enduring empire shows stability. Its goal is stability. And it because it understands exactly what you said I thought so nicely. It doesn't help you if your neighbors are in chaos. It doesn't it doesn't help you.
It's against your own interest. So that's such an obvious insight. The Roman Empire was based on it. The British Empire was based on it. Ours is the only empire I'm aware of that has kind of intentionally sowed chaos, and I don't understand where that thinking comes from.
Leaving aside, the moral question is, is it right or wrong? It doesn't work for you. So why have we done it?
Speaker 1: You know, the Roman Empire is always a great story for us, and I compare the Ukraine war to the battle of the Teuttenberg forest, which is AD nine. Yep. And in AD nine, the Roman empire reached its limits, on the Rhine. It never it tried to conquer the Germanic tribes, in September. They were defeated under Augustus.
And there were sporadic border things from then on, but they never tried again. They had hundreds of years where that just wasn't wasn't wasn't their business. It was very, very smart. Hadrian, in the first, second century AD was the emperor at the maximum extent of the Roman empire, and he basically wanted stability across the the the border lines. And this was the prudence of the empire.
It wasn't Alexander, you know, was very different, three, four hundred years earlier. He wanted to conquer the whole world. There was no limit. Finally, his soldiers told him, if you go any further, we're killing you. We we've gotta go home because they were already at the beyond the Indus River.
But the Romans said, no. We're gonna put some boundaries, we're gonna keep the borders, and we're gonna not go beyond our means or our needs. I hope what happened yesterday was a a good example of that. What Trump and, Hegseth did yesterday, if they follow through, if the deep state doesn't undermine it, if it's some crazy thing doesn't happen, said, we don't need to be in Ukraine with NATO. We don't need to be.
It's for us. It's nothing. And it doesn't mean that Russia's now gonna invade Western Europe. That's crazy. This was a project going the other direction.
So it's basic prudence, and that's what a great power should show,
Speaker 0: prudence. What are the chances that some you said unless the deep state doesn't make some crazy thing happens. I would note that for a good part of the presidential campaign, the deep state was telling the candidate Donald Trump that the state of Iran is trying to kill you, which as far as I know was totally untrue, by the way. But they were telling him that in order to prepare him to attack Iran, which they're still trying to do. So we know that this kind of deception is just a feature of it.
How hard will people invested in the Ukraine war go? I mean, what to what lengths will they go to continue this, do you think?
Speaker 1: First of all, the the main job of a US President, of a of a successful US President, is to put the foot on the brake. This is if you look in history, the good presidents know when to stop. Eisenhower was such. Kennedy was such. Reagan understood this, and all our recent presidents did not up until now, basically.
Speaker 0: Well, troop Truman in Korea, George H W Bush in Kuwait. I mean, also true.
Speaker 1: No. That they fought too many wars in Miami.
Speaker 0: But they but they did stop.
Speaker 1: And No. But they stopped, but they, made too much Iraq Two Thousand Three. I mean, there were just too many too many wars. So the question is, can we learn, and can the president keep the foot on the brake? If he does, he will have a extremely successful administration.
He, I think, understands that all of Netanyahu's pleading and this has been thirty years also, this another project to go for The US to go to war with Iran is just the worst idea imaginable, would be a disaster. And so I think president Trump understands that. I think he understands that a war with China would be a complete disaster, which it would be, though there's a lot of war party around on that. The funny thing about our time right now, not funny, the the wonderful thing about our time right now is that we're in the midst of the biggest technological boom in the history of the world. So so many good things could happen in the next ten to twenty years.
President Trump has used the expression, which I fully subscribe to, a golden age. We could have it. A golden age is not war. A golden age is investing in all this wonderful technology so that we can have health care that works, education systems that work, infrastructure that works. It would be nice if The United States even had one kilometer of fast rail just saying.
China just completed its fifty thousandth kilometer of fast rail. We we don't have one. I can't even take the train reliably from, New York to actually from Washington to New York. Last time I took the Accela, it broke down in the middle. Yeah.
And I I had to change to a local in New Jersey, which does not happen between Shanghai and Beijing, by the way. Just saying.
Speaker 0: But you missed the countryside. I mean, that is part of it, though.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 0: Not a lot of incentive to stop in New Jersey, and now they're giving you one.
Speaker 1: There I was. I felt so privileged. Right. And there was the local right on the next Exactly. Waiting for us.
Speaker 0: And you wouldn't have been in Passaic otherwise. So Exactly. Lucky you.
Speaker 1: You count your blessings. Right?
Speaker 0: So the whole point of market capitalism is consumer choice. You have a choice between products and services, and the competition between companies makes the goods and services better. That's the core idea. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of monopolies out there. Monopolies are not good for consumers.
They are not good for you. And one of the places where there's effectively a monopoly is in wireless contracts, but it's not a complete monopoly. You're probably paying way too much to use your cell phone. But now you have a choice. You don't have to pay a hundred bucks a month just to get a free phone.
That's not a good deal. There's a company called PureTalk, which we use, that has no inflated prices. With a qualifying plan of just $45 a month, you can choose a free phone, an iPhone 14 or a Samsung Gallery, then you get unlimited talk, tax 25 gigs of data, which is enough for most people, a mobile hotspot, all for that low price, and it's got the most dependable five g network. So you get your free iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy by visiting puretalk.com/tucker, and you switch to PureTalk today. America's wireless company, PureTalk.
It does feel I'm glad that you are saying this because it does feel like we're we're not even a month into the Trump administration. I don't think anybody agrees with, you know, everything of anyone else's program, but, clearly, this is a massive departure from what we had, much more than I thought. I feel like I'm I watch pretty closely. I'm amazed by the ambition of what they're doing, and it does feel like the only way to stop this. Tulsi Gabbard just confirmed yesterday as the director of that
Speaker 1: phone bill. Very big deal. It's unbelievable. It's a very big deal.
Speaker 0: Tulsi Gabbard's writing the president's daily brief. Tulsi Gabbard is in charge of a lot of declassification efforts. Like, the whole thing is unbelievable. The only way to stop this is with a war. I mean, that's my kind of simple reading of it.
Do you agree with that?
Speaker 1: I think that is exactly entirely the point. And if, and we had news today, please, inshallah, that, the ceasefire will continue on Saturday because more hostages will be released, more exchanges will take place, and there won't be a return. Really, If it happens and an outbreak of war is stopped, because it has to be stopped, this will be such a blessing, not only for this region, but I have to say for our country too, The United States. I agree. And so this is really the key moment, and I think Trump's instincts are there.
And what he says, we didn't even hear Biden or other presidents say, president Trump said many times about Ukraine, too many people are dying. You didn't even hear those words. I mean, the idea that war involve by the way, maybe a million Ukrainians dead or seriously wounded. We're gonna find out in the next months because finally we'll see what reality is, not what the propaganda is, but it's horrible what's happened. So that instinct is essential, and there are several places where everything could be derailed.
This region is one of them, Ukraine is another, South China and East China Sea is is the third. And if the president gets it and has the basic idea we live together in respect with other countries, the golden age will come.
Speaker 0: I I think and I'd love your view of this. I think of all the amazing things I've seen in the last three and a half weeks, maybe the most amazing is the emergence of Steve Witkoff, who I I just I will say I know personally and like enormously, but who was a real estate guy. K? All of a sudden, Trump appoints him an envoy sort of over and above massive stable diplomat. We have professional diplomats at the state department to go do, you know, effective ceasefire here in this region and then sends him over to Russia, and he winds up meeting Yeah.
With Putin apparently for several hours. And then all this stuff happens. You've been around diplomats your entire life. You've functioned as a diplomat. What do you think of that?
Speaker 1: Look. He did the single coolest thing since this administration started, I I have to say, which was, Trump made this cease fire. There's no question about it. Biden would never I mean, he didn't make the ceasefire because we don't know where Biden was mentally anyway, but his team was completely incompetent. Horrible.
I'm sorry to say it. It's very terrible.
Speaker 0: A lot of the rest of us did notice that.
Speaker 1: Yes. It's it it wasn't a completely it wasn't a completely closely held secret, let's say. So Trump said, we gotta have a ceasefire before my inauguration. And he sent Witkoff. And, Witkoff said to Netanyahu, I'm coming to meet you tomorrow.
And, Netanyahu said, no. No. No. Tomorrow is, Saturday. I can't meet you.
And Witcoff said, I'll be in your office tomorrow at one, and, told him, I don't care anything. I'm there. We're gonna have a a discussion. And out of that meeting came the ceasefire. Now the ceasefire looks maybe like it will hold this weekend.
Believe me, in Israel, they want war everywhere for a lot of reasons. But the president's job from my point of view of American interest and the world interest and this region's interest, everybody's interest, no more war. Stop this now. So if Witkoff can keep that track record, that would be the heroic success.
Speaker 0: But what does it tell you that Steve Witkoff, who I will say, again, I'm biased because I really like him, he's got a great personality, super energetic, very straightforward, believable, but zero training in any of this. Like, not he's a real estate guy. And he pulls this off? Like, what does that tell you about our professional diplomatic corps?
Speaker 1: I'll tell you one thing it it tells you. Trump can make peace if he wants to make peace. I mean, he needs he needs a capable guy that can go and read the riot act and say this is no joke, and we're gonna have it. And that is basically what good diplomacy is. And, again, in The US system, of course, we've got the deep state who tell presidents what to do.
We've got lobbies. We've got all all sorts of things, but a president's true job is to lead. And if you don't have a president compasementus, like I think we didn't have in The United States, you get war breaking out everywhere like we had, in the last two years. Or if you have a president that is poorly directed or poorly, you know, really doesn't get it, and Clinton was an inconsequential president in my opinion because he is so easily swayed. He lets he he just made so many lousy decisions.
George Bush Junior listened to Cheney who was really a nonstop warmonger and so on. If a president gets the idea, I want peace because this war is really destructive of everything else I'm trying to do, then you can have peace, actually. It's possible. No one is gonna attack The United States. So peace depends on us.
No one is attacking us. China is not about to invade The United States. Russia's not gonna attack The United States. Mexico and Canada are not gonna attack The United States. Panama's not gonna attack The United States.
Greenland's not gonna attack The
Speaker 0: United States. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to make I don't wanna go the whole list, but I'm just confident about this. So if the president wants peace, he'll get it. If he gets peace, believe me, he'll get all the other things that he wants, like low inflation, being able to pass the budget that he wants, getting his tax policies that he wants. But if there's war, he ain't gonna get any of it. That's the basic point.
And, you know, I voted democratic in '9 in, 2020. I voted for Biden. And Biden I've had a lot of experience with governments over the last forty five years, so I watched them, and I I think I understand a lot of of them. And Biden, in the first days, said stupid things about foreign policy. The world was divided between this and this and blah blah blah.
And you say, oh my god. What is the guy is doesn't get it. And in fact, he didn't get it at all. And I told many democratic leaders when they still talk to me. Now if they don't talk to me and I don't talk to them, you're gonna you're gonna do something completely almost impossible in American politics, which is you're gonna lose on the basis of foreign policy because Americans don't vote on foreign policy.
And I said, your foreign policy is so bad, this is gonna bring you down. And in fact, the democrats lost their heads in this, and they were so intent on defeating Trump that no matter what Biden said, well, we have to back him up a % as he led them off to war and complicity in the war here and the Ukraine war and tensions with China and all the rest. And they created a milieu of so much unhappiness in The United States, Anxiety, higher inflation, big budget deficits, that the public said, no. We don't like this. This is so they did really be impossible.
Speaker 0: But they brought Liz Cheney over to the coalition.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. And then what's ironic is, you know, this wonderful person who was confirmed yesterday for, the head of director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who's really smart by the way, very honest, very meticulous. I know her extremely well over many, many years. Totally up and up, so I'm delighted she's gonna be briefing the president each day.
I couldn't think of a better person. All the democrats voted against her. This is crazy. She was their colleague for decades. She stood up for things that they should be applauding her for.
Every one of them voted against her.
Speaker 0: She was the vice chairman of the DNC. Exactly. Seven eight years ago.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 0: So, I guess the question is the opposition you've alluded to the deep state, but there's also the out in the open state. You know, the the congress, for example, the other party, the Democratic Party, does Trump's success, not just in the election winning the popular vote, but in affecting peace, which is actually popular with people, does that change their views on foreign policy? Does he bring people with him, or does he stand alone between the two parties as he did in the first time?
Speaker 1: Look. This is very early days because we're just a little over three weeks into this. But if yesterday turns into policy, which it could, and the Ukraine war ends soon, which it could, you're gonna see everybody changing their views. Oh, I didn't support that. Peace is great.
The European leaders are gonna be saying the opposite of what they're saying right now. Look. In a hundred politicians, anyway, three think. The rest line up somewhere tactically. So, yes, they will change their view.
They'll complain about other things. That's their job. They're in the opposition, but this war was a disastrous, stupid project that went awry, should have ended, makes no sense. And if Trump pulls it off as he can, if he's resolute now and clear minded and Witkoff does his work, because he'll be the one to do it, it looks like, and he does his work, then this won't be talked about or complained about. This will pass into history as just another one of those blunders.
I mean, we don't talk about the two thousand three Iraq war or the twenty years waste in Afghanistan or so many Libya, so many completely ridiculous projects that America has been involved in for no conceivable reason other than these, weird game of risk ideas. We gotta own that space on the board. Turns out the world and that game board are are rather different. But if Trump pulls this off, what he needs, I think, and what we need to understand is the American scene, it ain't great in general. The budget deficit is enormous.
The fragility of society is is actually quite significant. There is lots of depression, lots of violence, lots of problems that haven't been addressed for thirty years. Big, big budget deficit, huge, can't be solved with all due respect to Elon. It's not the budget deficit has very little to do with the size of the civil service. That's not where the budget deficit comes from.
That's not where the spending comes from. Spending comes from seven fifty overseas military bases, from wars, from massive outlays, of course on pensions, on health care, on interest payments, on the debt and so forth. So war derails all of that. We're not with a buffer. We're not where the US dollar is king forever.
It's almost the opposite, by the way, although it's not so clear to people. But ten years from now, it's gonna be completely different international monetary scene from the one that we have now because the red bean piece is gonna play a completely different role. And the way that international settlements will be done is completely different. You can if you watch like I do, you see all of the stitching together of a new system taking shape. So The US does not have this great room for maneuver, and it's all a game, and we can do this, and we can do that.
The president needs to be really accurate right now, really accurate, and understand. Also, not don't overplay the hand. The world's not desperately waiting to get into The US market as I think he thinks, that these tariffs give all this leverage. No. The US is not the big deal that maybe some people imagine right now.
So we gotta get our act together, and you can't get your act together in war. That's that's the bottom line.
Speaker 0: Professor Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Great to be with you, Steve. Thanks.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Have a stroke. Thanks. So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour, and it was amazing. We brought the entire staff with us like we always do because we all work together for so long and enjoy traveling together.
And one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker, and so he decided to make a documentary film about our trip, a full month across America was some of the most interesting people around. Different people join us every single night. Fun, Gino, and Russell Brand, and Bobby Kennedy, and JD Vance, and Donald Trump, etcetera, etcetera. We had the best time, and the fruit of that is a documentary called On the Road, the Tucker Carlson live tour, which is available right now on TCN. On the Road, Tucker Carlson live tour is hilarious.
You will like it.
Posted - January 16, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Saved - January 16, 2025 at 10:28 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
This is a very important interview. This whistleblower was found dead. His family is exposing truth.
@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson
Suchir Balaji worked as an engineer for Sam Altman building AI, until he decided that Altman was committing crimes. Balaji became a whistleblower, and soon after was found dead in his apartment. California authorities claim it was suicide. Crime scene photos clearly show a murder. Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramarao, tells the most shocking story we’ve heard in a long time.
Video Transcript AI Summary
My son, Sukhir, was a brilliant AI researcher at OpenAI, contributing significantly to projects like ChatGPT. He raised concerns about copyright violations at OpenAI, especially after it became profitable. Sukhir died on November 22, 2023, shortly after being named a custodian witness in a New York Times article regarding OpenAI's practices. The official cause of death was ruled a suicide, but evidence suggests otherwise. His apartment showed signs of a struggle, with blood found throughout and a wig fragment that did not belong to him. Despite hiring attorneys and seeking justice, authorities have been dismissive. We believe there is a cover-up, and I am calling for a thorough investigation into his death and the practices at OpenAI. We need to protect whistleblowers and ensure accountability in the tech industry.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 1: So My son. I owe this to him.
Speaker 0: Well, this is a remarkable story. So we were connected by someone we both know. I had followed this casually in the media. I didn't know what to make of it. Your son died in November.
You commissioned, an examination by a forensic pathologist, independent forensics pathologist called, Doctor. Dinesh Rao. I have it right here, accompanied by photographs that you took. And, I don't think any honest person looking at this would conclude this was a suicide. There's some an awful lot of evidence that it wasn't.
I was actually shocked by it. So I wanna get into the details of what may have happened, but I'd like to start, if you don't mind, by hearing about your son. Who was he? How old was he? What did he do?
What was he like?
Speaker 1: Sukhir was a prodigy. From birth, we knew he was gifted. And for leaving, he studied his, masters bachelor's in computer science from UC Berkeley, the top school. He had 4.0 GPA throughout. As soon as he graduated, he started working in OpenAI as a researcher AI researcher.
His first project was WebGPT for which a fresh graduate, he took the lead role and that WebGPT turned out into the chap GPT and application. Yes. And once this was, a publication of of 4 people. One of them is Sukshir. Following this, he worked at OpenAI for pre training data.
That means he was scooping up all the Internet data feeding to chat GPT's AI model. Following this, he worked
Speaker 0: on Which is which is the fuel that it runs on. It needs massive amounts of data in order to become what it is. Right? That's the
Speaker 1: Yes. Requirements. It's an AI model. And for the AI model, they need to be data fed. And this data is what everybody is saying as copyright data.
Yeah. That's what all the lawsuits are against. Yes. He was involved in fueling that data. He was he
Speaker 0: was directly involved in that part of the business. It.
Speaker 1: Yes. He knows inside out. Yes. Following that, he worked directly on the chat GPT application team itself under John Shkerman. In this team, he was vital.
His former boss, John, claims that his role was vital in Shard GPT team, and he did some kind of tuning and optimization, made it very efficient. It's a significant contribution. But the irony is he was never acknowledged by OpenAI. And even after he left OpenAI, he's after his death also, no one has acknowledged him. Prior to joining OpenAI, he was so qualified.
He was national champion in 2016 for Computing Olympiad. It means he was a top programmer of 2016. Following that, he went he took a gap year. At 17, he said he doesn't need a degree. Right after 12, he said, I don't need a degree.
I don't need to go to college. He took up a job in CORA, software engineer. He was hired with $25,000 sign on bonus and a pay equivalent to a master's or a bachelor's folder. He worked there for a year, and then he joined UC Berkeley after taking a gap year. It took a lot of effort on parents into persuade him to go back to college for which he was grateful throughout.
In UC Berkeley, he represented UC Berkeley for ACM ICPC intercollege programming contest, the world contest. He went to China along with his team. It was in 2017. 2018, he won $100,000 award for a TSA competition. This is for passenger screening algorithm, which TSA has implemented today.
He was shining all throughout his life. Prior to this, at the age of 11, he got, 680 in SAT. And then I put in the paper he wrote, like, makes makes me believe he's a prodigy. That science paper is about, quantum computing, optimizing a CPU. And, like, he talks about VLSI design that my friends claim they studied in their masters in electronics and communications.
All these things make me believe he's a prodigy, and he's demonstrated he had exceptional abilities. And
Speaker 0: it's like like he did. So it's but and it sounds like from reading about it that he ran into trouble only when he began to question whether or not the data that was being fed to OpenAI was copyrighted.
Speaker 1: He never raised the voice when he was within OpenAI because he had concerns that management will not approve. And he started to question all these when, Chargegbt became profit making. As long as it was nonprofit, it was okay. He explains in his publication on suchi.net what his views are and why he believes this is copyright violation. And, when he started after reinstatement of Sam Altman in 2023 November, November 21st was the day he got reinstated.
I know it so well because it was Sushi's birthday that day. He got reinstated. And after that, Suji started thinking about the copyright violation, and he did discuss with me. It's very unethical, and he feels awful about it. And I said, yes.
It's unethical. I agree with you.
Speaker 0: What's unethical is using copyrighted material, material owned by other people for your business, which
Speaker 1: Yeah. Artist work will be lost. Their means of living will be impacted. Yes. And also, he did a research and he published, like, how the Stack Overflow and then, few other, like, maybe Quora, few other websites, the traffic is reducing.
And he also made a publication in which he explains that the answer given by chat GPT versus the answer given by Stack Overflow, how unscientific and inaccurate the answer is.
Speaker 0: Interesting. Yeah. When did he leave OpenAI?
Speaker 1: He left in August.
Speaker 0: Of 2024?
Speaker 1: Yes. 3rd week of August.
Speaker 0: 3rd so recently?
Speaker 1: Very recently.
Speaker 0: When did he write his now famous paper about what the management of OpenAI was doing with copyrighted material?
Speaker 1: He next day, he already had made up his mind prior leaving to leaving OpenAI. In fact, in July, he discussed with his, UC Berkeley colleague that he want to do a start up and his friend expressed interest. His name is Tyler Zhou. And next day, after leaving OpenAI, he went on interview with Canadian News Media. We didn't know anything about it.
Yeah. We just found out bus based on his call logs, he spoke to someone for 40 minutes. After his passing, we called him and found out he was Tungus. And it was next day after his, last day at work.
Speaker 0: Who did he speak to?
Speaker 1: I'll get back to you on this.
Speaker 0: But he spoke to a reporter?
Speaker 1: Kennedy and news media that sued OpenAI. Kennedy and news media. That sued OpenAI. Kennedy and news media that sued OpenAI.
Speaker 0: Interesting.
Speaker 1: On October 23rd, his interview was published in New York Times where he makes a very, very open statement, and he calls OpenAI violates copyright data.
Speaker 0: On October 23rd, he was quoted in the New York Times saying that OpenAI violates
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: Copyright law. Yes. It's stealing other people's material. Yeah. Okay.
And what what day did he die?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry?
Speaker 0: And what what day did he die?
Speaker 1: 22nd November, but we found a body on 26th November.
Speaker 0: So he, he was quoted saying that OpenAI was committing crimes, and a month later, he was dead.
Speaker 1: That's not just it. On November 18th, New York Times named my son as custodian witness. Custodian witness is very, very important. He had the documents against OpenAI. That was on 18th, 22nd.
He just came back from vacation from LA and Catalina Island the same night. They have attacked him and killed him.
Speaker 0: Tell us about what the New York Times wrote on November 18th. He had these documents. What were the documents?
Speaker 1: We need to get the documents from New York Times. It's a sealed document, and it's not open for public. But we need to become, like, the estate administrator. My husband will be the estate administrator end of this month. Then they will go and acquire that data, what documents they were.
At the moment, we don't have information.
Speaker 0: But you know because you read at the New York Times that your son had given journalists papers that he says implicated OpenAI in crime.
Speaker 1: Yes. And also, on December 2nd, Sujit had an interview planned with Associated Press, Matt O'Brien. On December 2nd, Sujit did not attend. 3rd, they called on his phone. By then, we had his phone.
My husband took phone call, and he found out that Sujhi wanted to take legal action against OpenAI. He wanted to give the witness. By then, this news was not out yet that Sujhi was a custodian witness, but we got it. Then all we did was hurrying up the second autopsy, private autopsy moment. We heard that this was his initiative, and he didn't make it to do that.
Speaker 0: So to bottom line it, it sounds like your son, who's your only child, by the way, and I'm and I'm really sorry about that, your son was in a position to threaten really threaten OpenAI.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not his intent was not to threaten. He just cared about people. He cared about humanity. He writes in his article in New York Times as well as the publication. He believes the way the AI is currently without any regulation is a harm to humanity.
He stood up for a cause, and he lost his life for a cause. He's a martyr. Obviously, he's a martyr, and then he never hesitated. He took his put his life at risk.
Speaker 0: So the, official cause of death is suicide. You're his mother. Clearly, you spoke to him a lot. Did you get any indication that he was depressed?
Speaker 1: No. He just came back from vacation. He had a very active lifestyle. When he when we had his memorial service, Many of his friends came, and they gave, the details of when they met him and how many times they met him after he left. He was visiting family.
We were going out for dinner, lunch. He was fine. And more than anything else, he had concrete career plans.
Speaker 0: Yes. And interviews scheduled, and he had things on his to do list. Did he ever suggest to you say to you that he felt his life was threatened? Was he worried?
Speaker 1: He had concrete plans. He wanted to do some work for humanity. That's the last day when we spoke. Last conversation with Sujeer in person was that he had a nonprofit in mind, and he didn't want to take the salary for his work. He said, mom, I have enough resources.
I don't even need to get paid. I want to serve humanity. And he wanted to work in neuroscience and machine learning combination. Using that, I think I've seen on his desktop one of the project for future of doctor visit. Since we haven't unlocked his email and, laptop yet, we have to discover that.
But we know. He discussed with me. He's it's a 1 year plan. He said, give me a 1 year time. You'll know everything.
Because Did
Speaker 0: he ever talk to you about Sam Altman?
Speaker 1: We Did
Speaker 0: you ever talk to your son about Sam Altman? No.
Speaker 1: We refused to.
Speaker 0: You refused to?
Speaker 1: We refused to talk to Sam Altman.
Speaker 0: But did your son ever talk to you about Sam Altman? Did he ever say anything about Sam Altman?
Speaker 1: Not to me, but to his friends a lot. When he was in Catalina Islands, he spoke a lot against him. He literally didn't like him. In fact, I've seen his chat log saying that he wanted to work with Annie Heltman in her nonprofit work.
Speaker 0: And that would be Sam's sister who has accused him of sexual abuse? Really? He wrote that down?
Speaker 1: Yes. So he he knew what personality Sam Altman had, and his main concerns were the lies.
Speaker 0: The lies?
Speaker 1: Lies that Sam Altman used to
Speaker 0: The lies?
Speaker 1: Lie. Yeah. He was lying a lot, and, my son is very ethical, and he he couldn't stand it.
Speaker 0: So the time if we could go to the time line, around your son's death. So he goes to Catalina Island with friends
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: To backpack, to camp? What was he doing?
Speaker 1: Backpack in yes. November 16 to November 22nd, there were 5 guys who went and my son was one of them. All these are his middle school and high school classmates. Some of them were his best buddies. We spoke to every one of them when they came back and everyone gave an image like he is happy.
He was very happy. He celebrated his 26th birthday on 21st November, the day before he died. What more do we need to give an account of his happy mood?
Speaker 0: Exactly. And if you, you know, at a certain age, you know people who've killed themselves and typically, you know, the suicide follows a a morose period of isolation. The person sitting alone in his apartment drinking. He died the night he came back from a camping trip with his high school and college friends.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: Yep. K.
Speaker 1: Our attorney, he came to his apartment with us. And moment he inspected his apartment, he said he had fresh supplies ordered. He has so many packets unopened. This doesn't look suicidal at all.
Speaker 0: So, and the photographs that you took, which we'll get to in a minute, you know, I I just wanna say this is not the first time I've been contacted by a family saying, you know, our child ruled a suicide, but we think it was a murder. I mean, many people have claimed that. I've never seen anything like this before. This is, this should, I think, again, to any fair person suggest that he was murdered. But let's get to that.
So what do you know? He came back from Catalina, and if you don't mind telling us what you know about what happened then? He comes back that evening to San Francisco.
Speaker 1: He came around, like, 11 o'clock, he texted me his flight is taking off. That was on 22nd. And then 4:54, he texted saying that it's pouring in San Francisco. And, when he got off Uber, leasing off his, manager, he has apparently seen Sujit coming off with big suitcase and other things. And then Sujit said, yes.
I'm coming back from LA. That's somewhere between 1 to 2 PM that day. And then he spoke to dad at 7:15 PM. He was very happy, And Balaji said, like, shall we go to CSI CES in, Las Vegas in January? Because it was raining here, dad brought up the concept that, you know, weather will be great in January, and so she said yes.
And dad gave him birthday gift.
Speaker 0: Gave him a birthday gift.
Speaker 1: Birthday gift. Because 21st was his birthday. He said he'll send him it, you know, cash, just a token of a love, and so he accepted it.
Speaker 0: The then that's the night he died?
Speaker 1: The day he died.
Speaker 0: So his last conversation with his father was what time, roughly?
Speaker 1: That's the last conversation.
Speaker 0: That was the last conversation.
Speaker 1: I called the next day, 12:15 PM. Phone rang once, and it went to voice mail.
Speaker 0: When did you learn that your son was dead?
Speaker 1: That was on 26th. 25th, I went to his apartment, knocked on the door, no one open. I called the dispatch. Unfortunately, it took a day of effort for us to get his open apartment open. 25th, they went and they didn't even call me back.
What happened? Apparently, they have gone and knocked on the door. They didn't bother to open the door. They just said, okay. Nobody's opening the door, and they went back.
Security guard from the apartment complex says he saw the fire truck and the ambulance and the police, and they went back. 5:30, I waited waited and waited. And 5:30 PM, when I called on Monday, 25th, they said, ma'am, unless you are here, we cannot open the door. Next morning, Unions I went to Union City Police Station, that's where we live, and filed a missing person complaint. I waited for 1, 1 and a half hours, but both the parents, meanwhile, when we started calling all the hospitals in San Francisco area to see if he he may have had an accident, why he's not responding to us, what happened to him.
Moment we found that he was not in any of the hospitals, we took a deep breath. Okay. He's safe. But when we went to his apartment, 1 o'clock, I went to San Francisco, and the dispatch came at 109. Until 4 o'clock, we were not told anything.
Speaker 0: And then you got a call from from the city?
Speaker 1: No. That is not how it went. One zero nine, 2 people, 2 officers came, and they went with the leasing office manager, leasing manager, and I'm waiting outside. They didn't allow me inside the premises. I'm waiting outside the complex.
Then 113, they have seen apparently. That's what the report says. They've seen the body. Within 5, 10 minutes, they came out, and they told me, no. We didn't enter.
We're waiting for 2 more officers. We have a security protocol. We cannot go inside. Around 2 o'clock, 2 more officers came.
Speaker 0: But they knew your son was dead and they lied to
Speaker 1: you? They didn't tell at that moment.
Speaker 0: 2
Speaker 1: o'clock, they have a protocol. I don't blame them. 2 o'clock, 2 officers came. They went inside. 20 minutes, they came back and said, we're waiting for 2 more officers.
We have security protocol. We can't go inside. And they said at 2 o'clock, they said, ma'am, you can go back home. We'll inform you in 5 to 6 hours. I said, I'm not going anywhere.
They told me it's going to take some time for the next two officers to come. I said, let it be. Please give me the phone number. I'll contact them and find out if there's any way we can expedite it. My son's safety is in question.
I cannot wait any longer. And then at 3:20, I saw a big white van coming, and my heart sang seriously.
Speaker 0: Knew as they were speaking to you that your son was dead, but didn't tell you?
Speaker 1: They didn't tell.
Speaker 0: That's disgusting. That's inhuman. Sorry.
Speaker 1: It is. It is. And you know what? They're asking me to go home. And how I knew my son was dead is looking at the white van.
At that moment, I knew ambulance didn't come. And instead of even then, I was optimistic. Okay. Maybe ambulance wasn't available. They sent another van.
And when I just saw a stretcher that came out, I went and spoke to the officers who are the medical examiners. They said we have a dead person in the apartment. That's how I came to know.
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That is awful.
Speaker 1: It's a gated community. He had a gun with him to protect himself. What more can we expect in America than this? It's a very reputed apartment complex. Not that it's cheap or something.
They have 4 or 5 units. 4 or 5 buildings, I mean to say.
Speaker 0: Did the officers at the scene give you any indication of how they thought your son died?
Speaker 1: At 4 o'clock, they came to the leasing office, and then medical examiner said he shot himself. He killed himself. It's a suicide. At that moment, I raised to them, look, my son went into New York Times. He's a whistleblower, and his death doesn't look suicide to me.
They just didn't want to listen. He bought a gun. It belongs to him. Nobody went into the complex. Nobody came out.
He was all by himself, and it's a suicide. And it how long it took? Can you believe it? 40 minutes to investigate. 40 minutes to determine determine the date cause of death.
And at 4 o'clock, they give me the keys for the apartment, and they say you can collect the body tomorrow. Like, right from that moment, I see foul play. Proper formalities were not followed, and the next day, they released the body within 24 hours without doing the complete autopsy. They removed the bullet. They did a CT scan.
They just returned the money to us. Then, we just checked with the funeral home and we discussed with them. And then they also said, looks like it doesn't seem normal. There's something very unusual here. You should do a second private autopsy.
Speaker 0: That The funeral home suggested that.
Speaker 1: Yes. And even we were thinking. Both of us were also thinking. Funeral home also suggested. We were shattered, obviously.
Right? We were completely shattered. We just didn't know what's going on. And seeing a son like that and they said, like, his eyes are gone with the gun wound. Don't see his face.
We couldn't see him.
Speaker 0: But the fact that the funeral home, which, of course, sees dead bodies every day, said to you, this doesn't look right, doesn't look like a suicide. We recommend that you get a a second autopsy, a real autopsy. That's amazing.
Speaker 1: Actually, the way it's and they didn't look at the body. They didn't look at any evidence. But the way the information was given to us and the way the procedures and policies need to be followed and norms were not followed according to them. Before they received the body itself, they said this doesn't look normal. And we addressed the concern that it could be some foul play here.
And we knew from the very moment we heard the news, we know it's not suicide. Next day, in the death news and I'm shattered by calling police, calling medical examiner, coroner's office, homicide unit. We've done everything we can.
Speaker 0: So, tell me what you know about what's been proven from the the CCTV from the surveillance footage about your son's last moments. Is there any evidence anyone came in or out of the apartment?
Speaker 1: No. Actually, even when our attorney concluded it's a suicide, even at that moment, I mentioned to the attorney, look, there are 3 entrances to this building. 1 of them is gated. It has CCTV. Other 2 entrances don't have CCTV.
And why are we ignoring that nobody came in, nobody went out? And, also, what we just recently discovered, his packages are missing. His roommate or no, his, you know, neighbor in the apartment complex, he mentioned that in the they have a shared package room. They have a shared bin or basket or something. He'd seen Suu Kyu's package until December 31st.
He reached out to me through Twitter. On x platform, when I tweeted, he found out I'm Suu Kyu's mom and he said, have you picked up Suu Kyu's packages? I don't see that after January 1st. Those packages are missing. When we talked to that, neighbor, he said, like, it's very common that packages get lost.
In September, they received a notification that if you see so and so man, then let us know. And that tells us a lot about the security and, you know, like, there's a compromise of key, there's a compromise of entrance. All of these need to be investigated, obviously, when there is a murder.
Speaker 0: So let's, let's get to the reason that I am anxious to do this interview, which is this, report that you commissioned, doctor Dinesh Rao, and it contains his analysis of the condition of your son's body based on an autopsy, I believe, and it and it critically contains, 7 crime scene photographs that you took in your son's apartment. Is that correct?
Speaker 1: That's right. There are 7 evidences that were very critical, which has not been picked up by the authorities. Within 40 minutes, they concluded they haven't even picked up critical things like a bag with blood that has my son's saliva in it. They haven't picked that up. And how could they miss haze falling all over from the wig?
Speaker 0: Right. So that's that's what I wanna get to. So the 2 things that jump out to me the first thing that jumps out, and it's, very obvious from the photographs that you took, is that there's blood all over the apartment. So the official explanation is that your son shot him, and I'm sorry to I I know this is hard, but I think it's important to go through this. The official explanation is your son shot himself once in the head and the bullet enter the brain stem and extinguished life immediately.
Speaker 1: Can I say something there? Yes. It didn't touch his brain stem at all. It didn't even touch his brain, and the angle is downwards.
Speaker 0: Yes. So I'm saying the official explanation is he shot himself once in the head. He died.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: But these photographs show that that's not at all what happened because there's blood all over the apartment. There's blood on the door, on the floor, in the bathroom. There's blood everywhere. So that right there, just employing common sense, tells you that who you know, that the person from whom that blood came, your son, presumably, did not have a fatal brain injury, at least when he was bleeding. I mean, this is something was going on in the apartment.
Right? The second thing that jumps out is that there is a tuft of hair that's not hair. It's from a wig.
Speaker 1: It's from a wig. And there's a clip seen.
Speaker 0: It's okay. So tell us what that is for people who don't know. It's a part of a clip in wig.
Speaker 1: Like, there's some kind of plastic band or something that put fits the wig on the head. We can see that coming out behind the door. Yes. And that's obvious evidence that no crime scene investigators are police can miss. They just ignored everything that showed murder, and they picked up everything that showed a cover of suicide.
Speaker 0: But how could they ignore? So your son did not I mean, he was a 26 year old man with short hair from pictures. He's not wearing a wig.
Speaker 1: Correct? No. No. He is not. And these hairs are not his.
This investigator's analysis looked at the hair from the autopsy pictures, but my son's hair and this hair, this is not his hair.
Speaker 0: And the and the portion of the wig, the clip in wig has blood on it?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 0: Okay. So as a, you know, non forensic investigator myself, I look at that and I'm saying that's a that's a where where did this come from? And there's blood all over the apartment. Right there, I would say this is you know, maybe it's a suicide, but you're gonna have to tell me how because that you know, what is that?
Speaker 1: It's not a suicide. It's a homicide, obviously. We have enough reasons to believe that. 1 is coming from the private autopsy. It's not a suicidal angle at all.
Speaker 0: So you said that, and let me let you explain. It's not a suicidal angle. So you you had the the the the crime scene, your son's body was taken away. It was evaluated in some way by the authorities. They say this a suicide.
You have an like a real autopsy done by professor Rao, and he says, what about the bullet angle? Will you explain that?
Speaker 1: The autopsy was done by doctor Joseph Cohen.
Speaker 0: Okay.
Speaker 1: And, he says two things. One of them is the bullet angle is going downward about 30 to 45 degrees downward. It's been shot here. It's missed the brain. Second thing is there's a head injury on the left side of the head.
In fact, I spoke to medical examiner's office, executive director. I told him there's a head injury. The sinus struggle in the bathroom. He just declared that I'm the decision making authority of state of California. I decide the cause of death.
And when I brought up we'll have federal investigation, there was a momentary setback in his voice on the phone, but still they're holding on to suicide.
Speaker 0: So doctor Cohen's autopsy, and this is grisly, I'm sorry, but shows, demonstrates, proves that the bullet was fired at what angle?
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's downward angle. That someone cannot shoot themselves.
Speaker 0: Right. So in other words, if this were a suicide, your son would have had to have held the gun to his forehead coming down.
Speaker 1: He was made to sit. If you look at the same thing, like, so it's the victim was sitting down. He was made to sit someone standing, he shot him down. In fact, like, Balaji and I, my husband and I are going to create a virtual reality. Once we get all the evidence, we'll create a virtual reality video and present it to court what exactly happened to him on that moment.
Speaker 0: You also said, if I heard you correctly, that he had another head injury not caused by a bullet.
Speaker 1: Yes. Can you
Speaker 0: tell us about that?
Speaker 1: Actually, it appeared to us that from his fallen toothpick and toothpick and the blood in the sink and all that, it appeared around 10 ish because 10:10 is his last browser history on the desktop. He was brushing his teeth before going to bed. He was attacked from behind on the head. That's why this fallen dustbin, this fallen toothpick, and his earbud has fallen in 2 different directions because of the head impact. And we believe after that, he was either electrocuted or he was, you know, like, he was paralyzed from the head injury, and then he just they just held him up, paid him seat, and shot him.
But, also, we know that that we are waiting for further report, but that may not be the cause of death. The gunshot wound is not the cause of death. And probably, they might have suffocated him. We don't have any details of that cruelty, but we're waiting for further reports from the city's crime.
Speaker 0: Why do you believe the gunshot was not the cause of death?
Speaker 1: Because it's not touched the brain. It only causes, makes him unconscious.
Speaker 0: So the autopsy show that the bullet did not touch his brain?
Speaker 1: Yes. And also since I called the apartment on 12 on 23rd at 12:15 PM, it rang once and it went to voice mail. Oh, that makes me believe the killers were still there in the apartment. Again, we need to verify all that. We can do something called geofencing.
Through that, we can figure out who was there, who was visiting that complex, and all that information. That's exactly why we need thorough investigation.
Speaker 0: You certainly do. You said your son's last browser record is from 10 PM ish?
Speaker 1: 10:10 PM.
Speaker 0: And what was he looking at? Do you know?
Speaker 1: I think he was looking at a black cat or something. Because last time in Sushiro and I met, a cat was going in front of me, and then I told him it's a superstition. And then he was looking at, neuroscience topics, and he logged into a website for those you know, for the start up or something like that. He logged into a website, and he was doing some research.
Speaker 0: So he wasn't looking up, how do I kill myself?
Speaker 1: No. That's the first thing that we look for, actually.
Speaker 0: Of course. Of course. Of course. I mean, killing yourself is a, you know, a a profound decision. People, there are signs.
Speaker 1: And can I say something? Yes. It doesn't add up if he's so brave to go to news media, to go be a witness. He's so courageous. How does someone so courageous do a cowardly act?
It doesn't add up at all.
Speaker 0: What doesn't add up is there's blood all over the apartment, and, there's a piece of a wig on the ground covered in blood. That's not his wig. And, you know, you you you don't need to be a detective to imagine that if someone's gonna commit a murder, he might be wearing a wig as he goes into the apartment. So that right there, considering your son didn't wear a wig as a 26 year old male, you
Speaker 1: know Hays were not his. That's also another thing.
Speaker 0: What weren't his?
Speaker 1: Those hairs were not his hair. We have the picture of his hairs. His hair is fallen down in the bathroom sink. That is different from the wig in the head in the wig. His original hair have been found on the floor.
They might have strangled him by his hair or something. His hair has fallen down. That hair versus the big hair are different.
Speaker 0: Did anybody hear anything in the apartment? Did anyone hear the gunshot? No. No one heard anything?
Speaker 1: No one heard anything.
Speaker 0: And 2 entrances into the complex have no surveillance cameras? Yes. Wow. It makes the hair on your arms go up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a lot.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Again, I've I've been involved in many stories like this, more than 5, and I've never seen one like this.
Speaker 1: Brutal.
Speaker 0: Well, it's unbelievable. So what's unbelievable is it's so obviously not a clean-cut story. I mean, you wouldn't walk into an apartment with blood splattered everywhere and see a man on the floor with a gun in his hand and say, oh, it was a suicide. Well, how did the blood get in the bathroom? He shot himself in the head.
Like, that doesn't even make sense.
Speaker 1: It it was a cover up. Right? So they picked up what they want to pick up. We don't know if they have been instructed to do this beforehand.
Speaker 0: So, okay. Let's thank you for describing all of that, and I'm sorry. I know it's awful. Yeah. But, tell me how the authorities responded, if you don't mind.
Speaker 1: Authorities have been very indifferent. In fact, we hired an attorney, a senior attorney. He wrote to chief of police, city administrator, chief medical examiner, executive director of medical examiner. He wrote very clearly couple of points. One of them is he was not suicidal.
Before making a decision of suicide, they need to take his mental state into account. Yes. He has happy pictures. He they shared the pictures. He just came back and he said, talk to 4 of his friends who accompanied him.
And he also said the autopsy information in that letter. The autopsy report says that this is the angle of gunshot. It doesn't look suicide at at all. A doctor described this as atypical abnormal worrisome angle. We wrote all of this to them.
We just had them to reconsider it and do the investigation. Chief of police apparently has agreed to do investigation, but medical examiner stopped it. He said, no. This is suicide. And their attorney came back and said, what they said was, oh, yeah.
The angle looks different. So what? It's a suicide.
Speaker 0: A man shooting himself in the forehead from a downward angle. Yeah. Okay. I'm not even sure if that's possible, but,
Speaker 1: we are going to demonstrate that. We just ordered a dummy gun. We're going to create a dummy of his size, and we're going to demonstrate using the VR or using the video. We're going to demonstrate to people it's not possible.
Speaker 0: Who is the medical examiner who refuses to reconsider a pretty obviously silly explanation for this?
Speaker 1: His name is, David Hellman.
Speaker 0: David Hellman. Yes. He's the San Francisco medical examiner.
Speaker 1: But he has been covered by David Sewell, who's the executive director. Every time we call, it's him. And even the news report is given by David Sewell. There's no false witness.
Speaker 0: And who is David Sewell?
Speaker 1: He's the executive director of medical examiner's office. He is the one who's holding on to suicide despite of seeing all the evidences. He wants to declare it only suicide, nothing else.
Speaker 0: What does he make of the bloody wig and the blood splattered in the bathroom when your son was not found in the bathroom? Like, how does he explain that?
Speaker 1: He didn't want to listen to it. He didn't want to pay attention to any of the things that they were saying. And you know the worst struggle here is? The first attorney, he was reluctant to help us. When he said so when medical examiner's office said suicide, he didn't want to fight because they have been threatened, obviously.
Then we hired a second attorney. He got a crime scene investigator, and our attorney said, we'll give you explanation of every blood mark. And he came back this Monday, and he gave explanation. And none of that explanation he gave corroborates to what happened in the apartment based on what we see. That means even the crime scene investigator was bought.
He gave, inaccurate results. If both the attorneys are like this, then where do we go? We definitely need some serious help here from the authorities.
Speaker 0: Okay. So the authorities would begin with the mayor of San Francisco?
Speaker 1: Mayor of San Francisco? Actually, Sam Altman is on the transition committee for the new governor. He's a friend.
Speaker 0: He's a friend of The new mayor? Sam Altman is a friend of the new mayor? Yes. Okay. So let's move up.
Then you go to the governor of California, Kevin Newsom.
Speaker 1: We're trying to. We are first trying to meet the district attorney of San Francisco, DA of San Francisco. We probably are going to get an appointment sometime next week or later this week.
Speaker 0: It's it's mid January. Your son was killed in November.
Speaker 1: We had not been getting any appointment. We wrote to everyone. We wrote we wrote to Rob Bonta. We wrote to DA. Like, we didn't get any appointment from any of them.
5 weeks were wasted by our 1st attorney. He does nothing. He just keep prolonging, prolonging, prolonging. He wasted 5 weeks. Then we hired a second attorney.
It's been almost 2 weeks since we hired. But now, like, we just didn't trust any of these people. We got a report from someone else, and now we're coming to media because these people, like, none neither the authorities nor the attorneys are helping us.
Speaker 0: This needs to go to the Department of Justice, I think, in the Trump administration.
Speaker 1: I did. Right?
Speaker 0: You did?
Speaker 1: Yeah. We haven't heard yet because it's only been a few days. Yeah. We did write to them.
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Has anybody in a position of authority in the state of California said to you, boy, this needs more investigation. It doesn't look right.
Speaker 1: Everybody is suppressed. No one has come in our favor. In fact, even our attorneys whom we hired have been made to tell it's a suicide to us. Every day from every different angle, there is a push for us that it's a suicide. But we parents, we know, and we want to fight for justice for our beloved son.
Speaker 0: I but I I don't understand on what basis. So your son had just come back that day from hanging out with his buddies. Okay? So which is, like, a happy thing. It's No evidence that he was suicidal whatsoever and tons of forensic evidence that he was murdered.
So on what grounds are they saying it's very likely he killed himself?
Speaker 1: Okay. That's because of the cover up. Remember, like, there was a gun near him. He owned a gun, and they put a shell casing and 4 bullets near it. They made it look like it.
So there are both the evidences, right, for the medical examiner to pick up. He picked up the one that looks suicidal. He ignored the one that looks like homicide. That's what it is.
Speaker 0: So now to Sam Altman. What contact with Sam Altman have you had since your son died?
Speaker 1: We contacted HR for 401 k plan details. Until then, no one from OpenAI ever contacted us. They gave the PR report that they're supporting the family. How? So she had obviously put parents in his emergency contact.
Right? They got the death news on December 13th. They made no attempt to contact us. And when we reached out to HR, Sam Altman said he wants to talk to us. But then we already knew Sukhir was, you know, his presence or his living would have been a threat to AI industry in general.
I wouldn't want to name one company, but, eventually, it's going to expose everything. Right? So we didn't want to talk to Sam Altman. And then they said we provide employee assistance program, though he was a former employee. He said we have medical insurance.
We don't need it. Then they pushed us saying, we want to get you on a Zoom call ASAP to go over his stock options. Then our response to that is, why are you in a hurry? We are not. We've lost our son.
We're grieving. Money is not important to us. Please talk to a probate attorney, and we had a probate attorney talk to the HR. This is our
Speaker 0: They wanted to talk about his stock options?
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's why they wanted to get us on a Zoom call.
Speaker 0: Do you think, do you believe you can't know, I guess, but do you think that Sam Altman was involved in your son's death?
Speaker 1: We don't know. We need to investigate it. We can't, you know, we can't say anything at this time. But one thing I know for sure is if he was deposed, there are a few, organizations who could have been impacted for that matter. Like, there are a lot of AI companies which violate copyright law, and we don't know what OpenAI wanted to hide when my son deposed.
What was the wrongdoing that he would have brought up, not just a copyright law. That's exactly we need FBI to investigate thoroughly. Was there any, criminal activity? Was there any illegal activity? We don't know.
Right? Why? Why would they silence him? What would he have spoken? If it's just a copyright law, do you think these big organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI care?
No. They don't care about it. Right? Because they have money and power. What else was involved in the deposition, in the testimony that took my son's life?
We need thorough investigation.
Speaker 0: So you haven't seen those documents. You don't know?
Speaker 1: Okay. There are two things here. 1 is the custodial documentation. Right? The second thing is his own statement.
His own statement be heard from few former employees of OpenAI. There are certain wrongdoings there.
Speaker 0: Like what?
Speaker 1: We can't say something that someone shared. Right? So I I would want to keep it more, you know, just overview that something like that. So that is the reason they're hiding. And you know what?
If we come and tell openly our life could be at risk, but we are taking the risk and coming out and telling publicly that's the reason our son was killed because he knew something that was going on. Keeping in mind, he was feeding the data. Right? Pre training data.
Speaker 0: So he knows be clear, you think this is not simply about OpenAI stealing, you know, copyrighted material? It's there's more than that?
Speaker 1: More than that. 100% sure. Because copyright data, obviously, my friends and I were all talking. These companies, they get many lawsuits like this. Right?
Speaker 0: Sure.
Speaker 1: Do they really care about it? No.
Speaker 0: What is the kind of thing they do care about? What kind of crimes do you think they would kill someone over?
Speaker 1: Stealing some data that, against that that could cause a violation possibly. They might be stealing some data.
Speaker 0: From the US government, from other government?
Speaker 1: Something like that. Maybe government is involved. We don't know. We're speculating.
Speaker 0: That's just a remarkable story. Do you think that we will find out? Like, how will the rest of us find out what your son testified to?
Speaker 1: That's exactly why we call out to president Trump to do a thorough investigation. We want the FBI director to be assigned to investigate this. This is not just about copyright. This is about a lot of other things that are going on that could cause harm to society potentially, not just my son's death. There's something harmful that need to be evaluated and, like, thoroughly investigated.
That's exactly why they're covering up a suicide. Why do you think medical examiners, the executive director would come and tell? Why do you think nobody gives us appointment? Because there's some kind of foul play and there's strong power behind medical examiner.
Speaker 0: So you're saying that AI itself poses a threat to the world and that your son understood this.
Speaker 1: Yes. He understood it, but he was keeping in mind that's one aspect. The other aspect is he knew everything OpenAI does. Yes. And he might have actually felt overwhelmed by what kind of activity he got involved in.
We know that he spoke to a copyright attorney, which is again a cover up, we suspect. And what Matthew Buderic told us on November 29th is, yes, I met with your son. He's a very brave man. So chief told us what open AI did to him. He didn't say anything beyond that.
That day, he said, I live in San Francisco LA. I come to San Francisco quite quite a quite quite a few times, and I'm going to talk to you next time when I come. And then he's been silenced. He's not telling us anything. We had our attorney call.
Even then, apparently, he did not say. So if we depose him, he's going to spill out everything. And, also, we suspect he's Sam Altman's friend, and he's played against our son and has indirect involvement. We don't know.
Speaker 0: Wow. There was a a moment where Sam Altman left his own company or seemed to leave his own company for a few days. You may remember this. What was that? Do you know?
Speaker 1: Sam Altman was fired. This was because of AI safety issues. The board of directors for OpenAI from the nonprofit side, especially one called Elias Sesto, he and others, excuse me, fired Sam Altman. And then all the 700 employees, including her son, wrote a letter or a momentum saying that if they don't reinstate Sam Altman, they're all going to resign. So they brought Sam Altman.
They fired Ilya, who's the AI safety expert. And to be honest, few days after my son's death was announced, December 15, Ilya was seen in, a presentation in one of the conferences. He had 2 security guards with arm no. With, firearms around him. He was so scared of his life.
So we are seeing a mafia behind all these things, honestly speaking.
Speaker 0: What were the safety issues that caused Sam Altman to get fired, do you think?
Speaker 1: We don't know if it's safety issue or whatever. We don't have the details of it. Even my son doesn't know any of these things. In fact, he supported Sam Altman's reinstatement.
Speaker 0: Yes. You said that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Like, a lot of AI safety people have been leaving OpenAI. If you notice, their CTO, Mira, I don't have no no her last name. Their CTO also resigned.
Many people have been leaving OpenAI, not just the researchers.
Speaker 0: Why?
Speaker 1: That's exactly I want to know why. There's so many people to leave. Obviously, there is something, right, that they're not happy about. Right? Only person who spoke against them was my son.
Rest of them just quietly walked away. My son, he couldn't take it. He felt like, you know, he need to stand up and tell the truth so some harm can be prevented. We need to investigate all this seriously.
Speaker 0: Did your son ever mention during that period when Sam Alban left, that very brief period, there was a report, in the news media that said, within OpenAI, AI itself was being worshiped like a god. Did he ever mention anything about that?
Speaker 1: He did. Such he didn't mention.
Speaker 0: And do you have any sense of what these harms are? I mean, clearly, people are afraid of what AI can do, not just by eliminating jobs, which is enough to worry about, but there are other things that people are very concerned about. Do you know what they are?
Speaker 1: They are in my son's publication. Some of them he's covered. One of them is, like, less traffic means the loss of jobs. That was one of his concerns. I'm proud of him for bringing that up.
Yes. He gave the graph graphical representation of how the traffic is reduced to Stack Overflow and fewer website that are a means of leaving for people. That will be taken away. That's his concern. And, also, the accuracy, as I mentioned earlier in the interview, the accuracy of data.
And, also, he says something called, like the modulation index or something. Point 5 versus 1 dot o, he tells in his article. If it's point 5, the data in and data out are not the same. If it's 1, data in and data out are same. Most companies, including OpenAI, use point 5.
That means the data accuracy is not maintained. That is his biggest concern. He being, kind of like an architect inside, he knows in and out of chat GPD.
Speaker 0: What happens next?
Speaker 1: If my son were alive, he was planning to bring a competition to OpenAI. He was working on a medical start up. I even checked with him. How do you think it's a competition? Not directly.
Mom is an indirect competition, he said. He would have been a great humanitarian. He would have done a lot of causes for humanity with the concerns he had. We lost a great human being, not just my son, who would have made a big difference to the world. Now what we want is we want justice.
We want death sentence to the one who killed my son as well as the imprisonment for people who are behind it. We don't know who it is, but we want to know. And we want to know what my son stood against and take actions, at least in honor of him, At least do something that he stood for and, you know, let his soul be at peace.
Speaker 0: What happened to the piece of wig found on the floor soaked in blood in your son's apartment? Where is it?
Speaker 1: It's still there. We didn't pick it up because we want police to go and look at it.
Speaker 0: It's in the apartment right now?
Speaker 1: Nobody came to do the investigation. We have the apartment case. Nobody came to do the investigation. We have been requesting police.
Speaker 0: It's sitting there right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Still there. We didn't pick up anything because it's crime scene evidence.
Speaker 0: But no one's investigating it as a crime scene?
Speaker 1: No. In fact, like, our attorney said up to December 31st, these people will retain the apartment. In fact, we are paying the rent, and we are maintaining the apartment as is because we want someone to come and investigate all these things with so much evidence. If medical examiner still calls it suicide, this is an ethical question, the regulatory question. So it's
Speaker 0: just sitting on the floor right now?
Speaker 1: Yes. It's the same place. We didn't touch any of that.
Speaker 0: Oh, this is a really crazy story.
Speaker 1: It is. Reality. Right? It's not a story. It's how gruesome it is, and, like, you see all the bloodshot.
Like, there was a fight, and my son has been tortured. He didn't die immediately. And where where can we go with? Where is peace of mind for us? We can't we just don't have any peace of mind.
Our life is not normal at all. The only thing that could make a difference after the loss of our son is getting justice, punish the wrongdoers, protect AI.
Speaker 0: Did you know that California was this corrupt?
Speaker 1: Yeah. We know it's very corrupt. That's exactly why we're requesting FBI thorough investigation. We did speak to an agent at Ting class Friday. We're waiting for that agent to get someone assigned if you know, special agent or something.
And we also know that there's a transition period in the government. Some may be moved transferred, some may be leaving. So we just thought, okay. Let's wait. Meanwhile, we did all the groundwork that we needed to do.
We have the evidence. We are here in the media. We're telling the media now we want a new oncoming federal government to intervene because Newsom, we know. Trump himself makes lot of statements against Newsom. We don't we wrote to Ro Khanna.
Speaker 0: You talked to Ro Khanna, congressman from Silicon Valley?
Speaker 1: We wrote to him. No response from him. Many people tried
Speaker 0: response from Ro Khanna?
Speaker 1: Yes. Many people tried to reach out to him. Not one. Many people. No response from him.
Because they're all inside. Right? All this tech lobbying.
Speaker 0: Okay. Well, I'm gonna you know what? I'm gonna text Ro Khanna right now.
Speaker 1: Please do.
Speaker 0: I'm going to. And I'm gonna send him this right here. And, Ro Khanna has not responded to you? Yes. Okay.
Speaker 1: I sent out I filled in a form in his website. I gave my phone number. I gave all the details on his website. Many people from whom we know have tried to contact Rohan. They took my email address and they said, Rohan Rohan will reach.
It's been 2 weeks. He hasn't reached us. Initially, we thought it's holidays time, so he's little busy. But even it's 14th January today, no response yet.
Speaker 0: Okay. I'm I'm gonna I just texted him right now, and I just sent him, pictures of the relevant information, and I and I hope that you'll try again. Well, I mean, Ro Khanna is this is the Silicon Valley member congress. And
Speaker 1: We don't believe in state government at all. We know how corrupt it is, especially in, San Francisco Bay Area. It's very, very corrupt. We don't believe in the system. Unless, you know, we change the governor, we won't believe anything will happen here.
We need to go to federal, and we also found out that he's protecting the whistleblower act as well.
Speaker 0: He's trying to what? I'm sorry?
Speaker 1: Whistleblower. There's a federal aspect as well. It's not just a
Speaker 0: whistleblower. Yes.
Speaker 1: Right? There are two things here. 1 is wrongful death, 1 is a whistleblower. The whistleblower comes under federal because the lawsuit was filed in New York, and he was a custodian witness. So we have a backing from federal government involvement.
If it's just the state, corrupt state would fight against it. Since that is federal, they can overtake the federal aspect. We are writing to, Federal Trade Commission now, today or tomorrow, and we want them to do a quiet investigation of the case. We have a top attorney in whistleblower that's helping us prove one of his contingency basis. We will work with him and bring the truth out.
Speaker 0: I mean, your son was born in this country. You can't murder American citizens because they're standing in the way of your business. That is not allowed in this country. You can't do that.
Speaker 1: Imagine we are immigrants here, and we came here. We raised our son. We were so proud of him. We we don't expect this to happen in this country No. In America.
No.
Speaker 0: That's right.
Speaker 1: We don't expect this to happen. Like, sense of security has been lost for me ever since.
Speaker 0: Do you worry about your safety?
Speaker 1: Potentially. Now that, like, we've gone so public, they may not target us.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: But there might be some kind of, you know, threat in terms of accidents or something like that can potentially, indirectly, they could harm us that they cannot be caught. We are we suspect that. And I don't go out alone anywhere because I'm more vocal. So I don't go out alone for walk or anywhere. I always take my husband along, and we make sure if we go somewhere, we inform our friends where we are.
We just keep letting people know. In fact, like, I don't want my family from India to visit me because it's a big risk for them.
Speaker 0: Has The New York Times called you to do this story?
Speaker 1: We call New York Times 2 days after we got his body, and we told, I think his name was, I don't remember his name. So we told him many times. They haven't even interviewed. They ignored it completely. And he said he'll get back.
He will say he'll let us know, what he can do, and he's he doesn't even take our call.
Speaker 0: What about the television networks? CNN, NBC, Fox? Is anyone
Speaker 1: Nobody. ABC just relayed the vigil, candlelight vigil that we had for Surchiran Milpitas. 1.5 minutes, they relate of the visual information. ABC News.
Speaker 0: Local.
Speaker 1: Now that that we just received this evidence today morning. We probably might reach out to some of the news media. Now that we have this evidence, news media will talk to us. We want to take it much forward.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I don't for the 3rd time, I just wanna say this again. I don't think anybody, any honest person could look at this and say, oh, yeah. That's a suicide. I mean, I just I you know.
Speaker 1: We were hesitant because, like, they can try to manipulate the evidence or something like that. We were very hesitant. You know, like, they can even attack the apartment, remove everything, clean up. You know, like, some things crazy things, like, they might cause a fire and then let the, you know, water sprinklers go on and it'll destroy the evidence or something. Right?
That's why we were very quiet. We didn't go to media until we got this authoritative report. It's very scary.
Speaker 0: Well, I'm I'm grateful that you're making, you know, as much noise about this as you are, and you're as aggressive as you are. Thank you for doing that. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: Whistleblowers' lives matter. Oh, I'm sorry. We cannot lose. Honestly, I was talking to my son. I expressed concerns about his whistleblower activity.
But what I was thinking was he won't get another job because he's going against employer.
Speaker 0: Right.
Speaker 1: He kept assuring me he has his own plan startup plans, but taking his life is something that I never expected. This is not the first time. 2 whistle blowers from Boeing were found dead last year. One of them exactly same way. Another one died in the hospital.
They drugged him.
Speaker 0: You mean
Speaker 1: This is America.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Thank you for this.
Speaker 1: We need to protect them. Most whistle blowers we were talking to the whistle blower attorneys. Most of them, they don't even know there is support. There's not enough awareness. Going forward, we want to create awareness and help others.
Then not just that, there should be some kind of regulation protection. And I'm sure we are going to talk to New York Times at some point of time and said, how did you put his life as risk? If he was a custodian witness, why didn't you give him protection? Why was he left alone? Right?
What kind of protection did he have for speaking truth? Costing his life?
Speaker 0: Well, I think most Americans, like you, would not even consider the possibility you'd be murdered over something like this. You know, the penalty you would assume would be, you know, having trouble getting another job but getting killed in your apartment. And your son I know I've asked you. I just wanna make totally clear. He never mentioned being followed or feeling threatened or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Actually, I do have some observation. After New York Times article came, he didn't want us to visit. He would come home and avoid me going there, and he would also come during the weekday, not the weekend. I want to investigate why. Was he already under some kind of someone was following him or something?
I was about to demand him an answer, but he's no more. Like, slowly, you know, like, with an adult son, like, how much can we push him each time he visit? I just made sure, like, he's eating well and he's healthy and he has strong plans, he's has hobbies, all of those things. But this kind of information, why are you coming in the weekdays? I was didn't get a chance to push him.
He was gonna come for Thanksgiving, and that's when I would question him. I thought he wasn't even alive till then. We didn't have enough time.
Speaker 0: Thank you for telling us the story.
Speaker 1: Thank you for hosting us. And, no, we want Americans to know what happened. And why has the mean covered by news media? Why no one is talking about it? Why they want to repeat like parrots what medical examiner is saying?
Why they don't want to stand up for truth? Why? Are we so sold out for these tech lobbying? Is there any regulation on the amount of money they can spend for lobbying? Right?
It's indirect bribe. Right? So they're all sold out. Can't we do anything? I'm an American citizen too.
This is totally disappointing. They let a reporter came home. He took the pictures. He wrote the article. And then when I mentioned OpenAI's name, there was so much fear in him.
He was scared. So the tech companies, they're controlling and they're turning down to be mafia, controlling the government, controlling the news media. What more harm do we want from them? Do we public do we need to live in safety or do we need to live in fear? What what are we doing?
Why are we quiet now? Now that an innocent life is gone, we're seeing so much going on. Why are we quiet? Why can't we start just this for switch here moment? Why can't we do rallies?
Why can't we go on a nonstoppable moment until we get the justice, until we get the punishment? I'm I'm calling out to all Americans to stand with me. We want to do rallies all over America. We want to do vigil all over America, and we want to enforce FBI investigation and punish the culprit.
Speaker 0: I hope this helps.
Posted - January 29, 2024 at 4:37 PM
Saved - August 14, 2024 at 9:14 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
I remember being bullied and harassed by Biden’s team, forcing me to seek asylum in Russia. I testified against him, claiming he raped me while I was his staffer in 1993, yet there’s never been an investigation. It's frustrating to see him praised on national TV.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
Remember me @ejeancarroll ? I was bullied and harassed and chased to another country by Biden’s machine . All because I was to testify before Congress against him. I now have political asylum in Russia. He raped me. When I was his staffer at work in 1993 and there has never been an investigation. You are singing his praises on national TV ?
Posted - July 21, 2024 at 6:08 PM
Saved - July 22, 2024 at 2:49 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
You were never qualified. You are corrupt, and you raped me in 1993 when I worked for you. So you run away, but you can not hide.
Posted - July 21, 2024 at 6:08 PM
Saved - July 22, 2024 at 1:45 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
You were never qualified. You are corrupt, and you raped me in 1993 when I worked for you. So you run away, but you can not hide.
Posted - June 1, 2023 at 11:45 AM
Saved - April 28, 2024 at 9:12 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
I wish to again thank @mattgaetz and @RepMTG for being the only brave politicians to request an investigation into Joe Biden regarding my case. https://t.co/YbuOHJqz7y
Video Transcript AI Summary
Tara Reid, who accused President Biden of assault, seeks Russian citizenship due to fears of US detention. She was in Russia for a book translation and interview on Channel 1. Claims of defection are deflection tactics by the Biden administration to silence her. Allegations of violating sanctions for a plane ticket are baseless. Reid wanted to testify against Biden but faces attacks and threats. The White House and Democratic Party aim to silence her. Reid's exile in Russia is spun negatively by the media. She vows to speak out and seeks to testify safely before Congress.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Tara Reid, the former congressional aide to then senator Joe Biden, who has accused the American president of sexual assault.
Speaker 1: Pinned her against the wall and reached under her clothing and penetrated her with your finger.
Speaker 0: Is reportedly seeking citizenship in Russia following fears of detention by US authorities. Know Biden to justice Miss Reid was preparing to testify before congress about her allegations against president Biden when she traveled to Russia to oversee translation of her recent book and to participate in an interview on Channel 1. I feel safe. The Russian television channel paid for her airfare, raising questions about a possible violation of US sanctions against the network. Radha Sterling, CEO and founder of Due Process International, issued the following statement commenting on claims that miss Reid has defected and upon concerns that she may have fallen afoul of US sanctions.
Speaker 2: The Biden administration is attempting to escalate the persecution against Tara Reid with the obvious intention of deflecting from her allegations against the president. This is not a story of defection. It is a story of deflection. It is a gross mischaracterization to portray miss Reid's exile in Russia to avoid persecution by the president of the United States and all the weaponized intelligence and security arms of the government at his disposal as defection. She did not travel to Russia with any intention to stay there.
While in Russia, however, the Biden machine ramped up its campaign to demonize and silence her.
Speaker 1: The attacks on me started again and the threats.
Speaker 2: Which meant that she could not return to her home country without fear of being immediately detained and potentially denied due process. With regard to speculation that miss Reid potentially violated anti Russian sanctions because a Russian media outlet paid for her plane ticket, This is preposterous. While it is true that this media outlet has been sanctioned by the US, those sanctions apply to companies advertising and offering professional services to the channel. They do not include a ban on receiving a plane ticket. She is not a company.
She did not finance channel 1 through advertising or selling equipment. She did not provide accounting services to channel 1, nor corporate formation services, nor consulting. These are the activities prohibited by the sanctions. To even raise the issue of her plane ticket is just a manipulative bullying tactic intended to criminalize someone in the public mind who has been victimized so that her accusations never have to be answered.
Speaker 1: And in the media, I've been pretty attacked and smeared.
Speaker 2: Miss Reid was intending to testify before Congress about her allegations against Joe Biden, and it appears that the White House and the Democratic Party's political and media machine wants very badly to ensure that her voice is silenced.
Speaker 1: This year, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both US Congress representatives, said they were going to investigate Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: This is actually quite a familiar tactic to us, a victim of wrongdoing being falsely criminalized to ensure that they cannot fight for justice. This is something that happens in the UAE on a regular basis, and it is one of the reasons I founded detained in Dubai and Due Process International in the first place. If American authorities are not, in fact, waging a campaign to silence miss Reid, they will allow her to at least testify before Congress remotely and ideally provide guarantees that she will not face unlawful detention or baseless accusations if she returns to the United States. We have already learned that some are insinuating that her allegations against Joe Biden were part of a plot by the Kremlin to influence the 2020 election.
Speaker 0: For her to to speak
Speaker 3: to. Does the White House, believe that her allegations may have been motivated by her allegiance to affinity for Russia?
Speaker 2: This is outrageous. After the Me Too movement and the Time's Up movement, it is appalling that a victimized woman can still be subjected to this kind of malicious character assassination. It is precisely because of this malice that miss Reid has been forced to remain in Russia even while knowing how her exile there will be spun by the liberal establishment.
Speaker 0: Someone who wants to build a case, potentially testify, I'm not sure a press conference in Russia is gonna bolster her credibility.
Speaker 2: It is a grim reality that the media today no longer shield whistleblowers who have the courage to expose the crimes and wrongdoing of those in power, and that they instead act as a virtual hit squad on behalf of the powerful against their accusers.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be intimidated, bullied, or silenced. I'm going to speak out, and I'm willing to speak under oath.
Speaker 2: We stand with Tara Reid and call upon the US Congress to allow her to testify from wherever she can do so safely.
Posted - March 11, 2024 at 4:39 AM
Saved - March 11, 2024 at 11:18 PM
reSee.it AI Summary
I was raped by Biden while working for him, but the media silenced me. It's hypocritical for @ejeancarroll to support my rapist. Even @GStephanopoulos knows about it, yet elite Democrats continue to prop him up.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
A reminder again @ejeancarroll that you know I was raped by Biden when I was his staffer and silenced by the media and yet you publicly support my rapist! Sit down before you lecture other rape survivors. Hypocrisy surrounding you. @GStephanopoulos knows I exist as well and knows what Biden did. The morally bankrupt elite democrats know what Joe Biden is but still prop him up.
@ejeancarroll - E. Jean Carroll
Thank you, @GStephanopoulos for valiantly defending me. I wish Representative @RepNancyMace well. And I salute all survivors for their strength, endurance, and holding on to their sanity.
Posted - December 2, 2023 at 6:02 PM
Saved - December 2, 2023 at 6:15 PM
reSee.it AI Summary
In my own country, you hunt me with power and money, suppress me through media, and force me to seek refuge elsewhere. But I won't be silenced. I'll fight for justice. You'll be held accountable for your corruption and actions in 1993. The truth and I both exist.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
You can hunt me like an animal in my own country using your power and money. You can suppress me and attack me through your lap dog media. You can force me to take refuge in another country. But you will never silence me. I will keep fighting for justice. You will be investigated and held accountable for what you did to me in that corridor in 1993. You will be held accountable for all of your corruption. I exist and so does the truth.
@JoeBiden - Joe Biden
I wrote the first Violence Against Women Act and spent decades working to expand survivor protections. As president, I was proud to not only reauthorize this landmark law, but strengthen it—including increasing support for survivors from underserved and marginalized communities.
Posted - October 5, 2023 at 8:06 AM
Saved - October 6, 2023 at 12:31 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
I sought shelter in Russia due to the weaponization of DOJ and FBI against US citizens. As I prepared to testify against POTUS in Congress, I sought asylum in Russia for my survival. Thanks, @DineshDSouza, for your support.
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
To those people who are out there wondering why I had to seek shelter in Russia ? It’s because the DOJ and FBI are weaponized against US citizens. I was about to testify before the US Congress against POTUS. I ended up seeking asylum from the Russian Federation for my own survival. @DineshDSouza good job.
@DineshDSouza - Dinesh D'Souza
Here’s the official trailer for “Police State.” Please watch and share! Movie is in theaters Monday, October 23 and 25. Virtual premiere is Friday, October 27. All tickets only at http://policestatefilm.net
Video Transcript AI Summary
Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are seen as a threat to our republic. The video highlights instances of heavy police presence and arrests, with individuals claiming their rights were violated. The focus shifts from Islamic terrorism to domestic extremists, which some argue unfairly targets those on the right. The government's power is questioned, with claims that the Patriot Act and FISA were used against Trump. The media is accused of manipulating news algorithms to fit their narrative. The video warns that anyone could be targeted and emphasizes the importance of freedom of speech and religion. It concludes with a promotion for a film called "Police State."
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.
Speaker 1: Chief Division Council and DOJ have approved the no knock breach. We want the subject to be on display, doing the walk of shame, full visual impact. Any questions?
Speaker 2: Are we becoming a police State. Government told American citizens they couldn't go to church on Sunday. I've never seen anything like it. It may be the Russia other people grew up in, but not my America.
Speaker 3: FBI war. Come To the door now.
Speaker 2: There's a heavy banging at my door. Open up. It's 15 marked units on my property. I got SWAT in the back of my house. It took a battering Bam.
To my door.
Speaker 1: 6 AM, I hear boom boom boom and hear about 6 to 8 military style soldiers With the tallest one of them pointing an automatic rifle at my head.
Speaker 3: FBI, we have an arrest warrant.
Speaker 4: Shock you out of sleep, drag you out of
Speaker 5: your house, have closed, refused to give you a warrant, ransacked your house. Now I'm facing 15 years in federal prison. For doing nothing other than exercising my right to free speech.
Speaker 3: I had no reason to be attacked.
Speaker 2: I hope that you remember Matt's name and the role you played aid in killing him. How did we give the state this kind of power? 9/11 changed everything.
Speaker 1: We're going to expand the bureau from Law enforcement to domestic intelligence. Legal shackles are now off.
Speaker 2: They used to be Islamic terrorism. That threat is kind of dissipating. Our focus is shifting. They're moving to domestic extremists. It really paints anybody who's right of center.
What We need as a person to look at, and then we go find out what crime you did. If you're a pro life, pro family Catholic, they define you as radical. The demand for domestic terrorism vastly outstrips the supply. When candidate Trump came down the Escalators. The government had a meltdown.
Speaker 1: We are going to drain the swamp. We'll see about that. You take on the intelligence community. They have 6 ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
Speaker 2: The Patriot Act and FISA were used against Donald Trump. Google literally rewrote their news algorithm based upon what Trump was doing so that they could get Sky. You just take out the word Russiagate and you put in COVID origins. You take out COVID origins and you put in 100 by those laptop. You take that out and you put in January 6th.
It's the replicated play from the deep state and their partners in the media. They're not just deplatforming you. They are can throw people in prison.
Speaker 5: If they're coming for me, they're coming for you.
Speaker 3: Hands on your head.
Speaker 1: These are anti government We are freedom
Speaker 3: of religion and freedom of speech.
Speaker 1: Violent extremists, they must be dealt with. We can do anything we want. Release date. Exclusively in theaters, October 23rd 25th. Tickets sold only on police state film
Police State | Official Site
D'Souza Media LLC presents a film produced by Dinesh D'Souza, Debbie D'Souza, and Bruce Schooley. Research by Julie Kelly and Peter Schweizer.
policestatefilm.net
Posted - April 24, 2023 at 5:32 PM
Saved - April 25, 2023 at 12:41 PM
@ReadeAlexandra - Tara Reade 🐎
I appreciated that when no mainstream journalists would fairly cover what happened to me when I worked for Joe Biden in 1993, @TuckerCarlson did. He has been out spoken against the proxy war the US and NATO fighting in Ukraine and other major topics as the Biden administration takes us all to WWIII. He called it out! He is a heroic voice above the noise.
