Title: #278 — MK Ultra, USAID, Overthrowing Governments
Show: Julian Dorey Podcast
Date: 2025-02-25
URL: https://youtu.be/_CFWmuIgQIE
Duration: 137:00

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[00:00] [Music] excellent John it's great to have you back sir good to be back thanks for the invitation of course of course the last time we sat down at the end of October we got a lot of your story probably not the full thing that's not really possible even in six and a half hours or whatever the we did but you know I talked with you obviously I've enjoyed your podcast with Danny over the years where you're breaking down the

[00:31] geopolitics of things and I hope to see you do that with Dalton as well moving forward but you know there's a lot going on right now there's a lot and I'm I'm like a little bit I'm a little bit at fault here because last time when we were about five hours in you started telling this story and you're like I'll give you an example Afghanistan 2009 poppy everywhere everywhere and I'm just sitting there like wow okay little did I know you were blowing the whistle on the whole USA thing before this was like

[01:01] cool to do that I guess I guess I was congratulations on that so for for everyone out there who's hearing about USA they've seen Mike mercedesbenz on all these podcasts and stuff talking about it he's been blowing the whistle on it obviously elon's working on it we'll get to that you know what what what was it to you when you were in the CIA how did you view USA and what kinds of things were they doing back then and then we'll work to today to tell you the truth when I was in the CIA still I paid very very little attention to uh to USA

[01:33] ID I didn't have any U interaction with them every once in a while you'd bump into them in you know an embassy that you happen to be working in or most of the big embassies have a bar you can go to after work and you'd see them having drinks over there but I you know I never had to interact with them so with that said I I was aware that usaid um was giving money to the National Endowment for democracy and there were accusations that that was a CIA front organization it wasn't a

[02:03] legitimate Think Tank and you know there's a lot of what you and I might call L money money laundering going on uh others would say you know were were private uh Public Partnerships uh but now it's all coming out in Afghanistan in ' 09 I wasn't working for the CI anymore I was working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and I was under the staken belief that I was uh I was free to investigate what I want what I wanted

[02:35] and to you know make that information public and in retrospect I wasn't would you just for people out there who didn't see episode 250 that was the second one we did you told that story maybe a couple hours in can you just run through what you found there and then how it was shut down just to review it sure um I was keenly aware that Afghanistan at the time was producing 93% % of the world's so as recently as the 1970s Afghanistan was a net food exporter there's not very

[03:07] much land there that's arable there's not very much water but the the arable land that they have they made very good use of and they could feed themselves and Export rice to Pakistan and Iran so that's that's pretty good yeah for a country that's you know 90% mountains yep well um after the Taliban were overthrown they converted all their food production to Opium poppy because it's profitable right and

[03:39] as a result by 2009 after eight years of you know American control or occupation or whatever your politics want you to want you to call it uh they accounted for 93% of the world's heroin so I wanted to go to Afghanistan and I wanted to investigate this I was the senior investigator on the Senate Relations Committee working for John krey at the time your favorite guy yeah my favorite guy we can we yeah there's a lot to say about John krey so I'm so grossly disappointed in

[04:11] John Carrey yeah so um so I I got the um concurrence uh of the American Embassy in Cabell I flew out to Afghanistan and I went to B Bas and I had trouble immediately I said that I wanted to go to kahar Province and Helman province in the South that was the center of of poppy cultivation and um and they didn't want to fly me and I did something that I never ever

[04:43] do I pulled Rank and I said listen I'm a senior staffer of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee I have the rank of brigadier general I'm not asking you to fly me I'm telling you we're going to fly down there what was the reaction somebody start up the chopper I've I had never done that before in fact once I went to Afghanistan and we were on a 16 seat uh military plane U going to Dubai to catch

[05:14] a commercial flight back to DC um and it was a whole bunch of generals and a handful of us staffers and uh 16 seats on the plane there were 17 of us and so this this General says oh I'll I'll stay behind another day I go absolutely not I'm not going to be responsible for a general not making it home after finishing his his tour in Afghanistan he said no no you outrank me I said absolutely not and so I stayed another day in in Cabell so he could go home to

[05:46] his family but anyway that that took me off the subject so I I go to to kahar we meet with a handful of people there and then we fly to lashara which is a a village in the center of Helman province there was something called a PRT there uh that was a state department um provisional reconstruction team is what it stood for a state department organization it also had military and had usaid and a couple of other uh organizations that were represented there but they were doing things like

[06:16] trying to build a a a um an electrical Grid or digging water wells stuff like that so positive things yeah yeah yeah legit things so um we got off the helicopter and the state department people greet us and and I said I want to I want to just drive out into the poppy fields now when you're coming in to lashara as far as the eye can see it's just poppy MH and I mean for miles and miles and you can see these Rivers

[06:48] running through the province and they're diverting water from the rivers just to cultivate the poppy who is doing that well see that's that's an important question for the most part it's just itinerant Farmers dirt farmers um and they're being in some cases told what to grow and that became an issue for me so I said listen we're going to drive out into the poppy fields the military escort that I had said absolutely not

[07:19] and I said no we absolutely are going to drive into the poppy fields because I have questions to ask right I'm not doing this for vacation yeah you know I didn't want to go to Afghanistan this was because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members had a legitimate interest in you have a job to do I had a job to do so we get in this Jeep two Jeeps uh security was in one Jeep and it was me and a driver and a state department guy translator uh in the other Jeep we go out to the into the fields we find a poppy farmer so I asked

[07:49] him this very naive question and I said why do you grow poppy when instead you could be growing things with two growing Seasons like Tomatoes or onions or pomegranates he he was very frustrated he goes H the Americans told me in 2001 if I told them where the Arabs were I could grow all the poppy I wanted and I said what Americans told you you could grow poppy as soon as I said it the military

[08:22] guys were like meeting over and they pull me back into the Jeep we're under threat there was nobody out there but we go back to the base so I I fly back a couple of days later and I I called one of my contacts at DEA and I said I got to write this paper but I want to talk to you first because I saw some stuff that that's just not right yeah so they've got this secret facility out in the sticks in Virginia I drive out there

[08:52] and I I told them everything I had seen and um and the one guy says to me you're never going to get this paper published and I said why not it's all first person it's I saw it with my own eyes plus I interviewed you know DEA and a whole bunch of different people that that could be quoted so he said you don't get it yeah it's 93% of the world's poppy but it all goes to Russia and Iran and

[09:24] we want them to be addicted to it weakens their societies it weakens their cultures we want them to be addicted to drugs can I ask a really really difficult question here that sucks to ask sure I think that's horrible it's awful it's awful yeah trying to play Devil's Advocate with the emphasis on Devils it's being done to us like crazy with fentel absolutely so could you not

[09:55] to excuse it or Say in any way they should do it but could you see where the reactionary human emotion comes from in the decision makers where it's not just necess not just necessarily like let's be evil they're more like them they're doing it t we're going to do it to them without a doubt and that's why this Lefty supports Donald Trump's decision to send troops to the border and to crack down on China yeah yeah because they do it to us yep MH so that's the better way yeah to deal with this stuff

[10:27] is to use your resources to stop stop it and not have to do it to someone else cuz you're also spending you're funneling taxpayer money through poppy fields yeah poppy fields and you know the funny thing too is you you look at these charts that are produced by DEA and it's it's the amount of poppy produced in Afghanistan over the last like 40 years the years that the Taliban were in charge they produced almost no Poppy and then in 200

[10:59] one they didn't produce any poppy at all they were terrible businessmen that's the problem it's just it's a business thing John we're good at that here we bring New York City out there we bring our public companies we know how to spend money they don't know how to do that I'll tell you another thing that they're not very good at uh when I was out there uh one of the one of the military guys that I was working with showed me a satellite photo of Afghanistan of Southern Afghanistan taken at night okay so so it was it was

[11:32] measuring heat heat production and there were these little pin Pricks of light all over Southern Afghanistan I said what is that they can't be Villages they're too small and he said um they're processors MH yeah that's what it is every little house every little mud hut or Shack that's out there in the fields at night you're not going to farm at night so at night you cook the

[12:05] poppy how strongly connected is this Sinister Bond it's obviously strongly connected but let me paint a picture for you to tell you how I'm thinking about it I'm just thinking Hollywood right now MH okay you know in the movies when there's like the evil warehouse and Productions happening you see all these people and let's even make it stereotypical here they're speaking some foreign language and they're making drugs and give people whatever it might be and the camera's panning cross you're meeting all the characters in there the manager talks to this guy whatever eventually he goes to his office when he gets into his office there's a shadowy figure sitting in a

[12:36] chair with a M envelope that's yay thick and they hand it to him speaking you know yeah The King's English if you will the president's English I should say in American and they say keep it going is it literally like that or is it more we're going to let this happen yeah the latter okay yeah it's not so sophisticated yeah yeah there were other issues too that I I really struggled with I I don't remember if we talked about the dash Deele Massacre last time I was here I believe it came up fil me

[13:08] in on what it was again this was something that was actually pretty important to me during my time at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 30th and December 1st 2001 mhm 2,000 Taliban soldiers yes gave up on Moss we did talk about yeah in the northern L please please review this yeah well there there was no were to put 2,000 people all at once there's no prison in Afghanistan that can hold 2,000 people so we told the Northern Alliance which at the time was led by

[13:38] General abdar rashed doam one of the most genocidal violators of human rights in the last century um he was in charge of the Northern Alliance we these guys gave themselves up to the Northern Alliance and he called us and said what do I do with them and we said take them out to the desert and hold them there until we can divide them up into smaller groups and then send them to jails and prisons around the country to hold them so they loaded these guys I don't remember if it was four containers or

[14:09] six containers whatever it was 2,000 guys they pack them into shipping containers and put them on trucks on 18 wheelers and truck them out into the desert but the thing is there were no air holes and there was no water and there was no food and of the 2016 survived yeah and one of the Survivor said when they arrived in the desert and they opened up the trucks the bodies fell out like sardines from a can so in the in the 2008 election Barack Obama

[14:42] said that he was aware of this dhele massacre and it had never been appropriately studied and he was going to get to the bottom of it that if he were to win the presidency he was going to task the National Security Council with doing a study and figuring out who was responsible for this okay great that's exactly what I wanted to hear so I told Carrie I said look you know Obama made this uh statement and I want to I want to take a look at it I'm going to fly out to Afghanistan and and um and investigate before I did that

[15:14] though I got a call from a human rights activist and not one of these you know Looney ones you know like a serious human rights activist from a serious important Human Rights group and so um he said that he needed to tell me something but it was too sensitive for him to come up to Capitol Hill could I meet him um I ended up meeting him in a in a darkened classroom at John's Hopkins University so he said look I have a I have a witness to the dashy L

[15:45] Massacre who just came forward and um this kid was 12 at the time of the massacre now he was you know what 21 MH and what was new that he wanted to tell us was that when they were opening up the trucks he was hiding behind a rock and he saw the bodies falling out of the trucks but there were two men there wearing blue jeans and black t-shirts and speaking English yeah the CIA always

[16:16] denied that there was any CIA presence there well who in the world is going to be in Dashi L Afghanistan on December the 2nd 2001 but the the CIA yeah nobody no other Westerner from anywhere in the world is going to be at that spot on December the 2nd so um I wrote a letter to the CIA and we got Carri to sign it and I asked for clarification I said we've developed

[16:47] this information it appears to be new were these CIA officers onsite at the uh we called it the Box up so six weeks passed and um a colleague of mine comes into the office and he said hey the agency sent a a response to your letter and I said I didn't see any response I just checked my mail an hour ago and he said oh they classified it top secret it's it's down in the vault well I only had a secret clearance at the time so I said well

[17:18] what did it say and he says it said go yourself yeah and I said okay that's how they want to play it all right so I went to Carrie and I told him and he's like yeah you're not publishing this thing they've already called you're not publishing I feel like this is the Trap we run into all the time and it's the thing I wrestle with the most about any of these powerful agencies that are under the Spy designation you will have people there who work on tasks that are vital to National Security and it's not

[17:49] just a tagline it actually is real and they do an ni shop maybe they stop a terrorist attack things like that right you then also have some people who either through evil or through very very radicalized group think get carried away which are things that you were trying to point out that you discovered while you were still there and we know that whole story but you'll have those people and they'll do things that are very bad very bad just like you're talking about right now the argument that always gives them

[18:20] cover to keep doing it is also the argument that gives them cover to not release it which is if you bring it to the public the public is going to say you look at this in this case I'll just say it like this maybe this anecdotal thing we know there's more problems than that sure but they're going to say that's anecdotal you're right you're right it added to the body of evidence but it was anecdotal but they're going to then say shut it all down that's right and now you have a problem because then the good things that may also happen here which a lot of people don't want to hear and you know when you hear

[18:52] about MK Ultra and stuff like that it's it's kind of hard to say that but there are some good things that happen it's like then that baby goes out with the bath water how do we fix that you're exactly right you know really the only way to fix it is through is through transparency real transparency and true Congressional oversight which we have not had in decades in decades you mentioned MK Ultra a moment ago MK Ultra was a real thing most of the documents

[19:22] were destroyed that's right by uh director Helms in violation of the law right um but even with all the documents destroyed we still have a pretty darn good idea of what Mk Ultra was and pretty much every facet of it was illegal yeah it was it was extensive experimentation on American citizens without their knowledge and without their consent to the point where um under something called MK chick Wht which was a a subset of MK Ultra the CIA

[19:53] actually weaponized a virus that they that they blew into the San Francisco fog just to see if people would get sick and this was in the late 1950s and 11 people came down with this rare urinary tract infection the doctors had never seen before and so that was a success that made them success oh yeah we can weaponize this and you know maybe we we blow this in Shanghai Harbor or in

[20:26] Moscow in the summertime uh another thing that they did also part of MK Ultra is they recruited prostitutes in San Francisco yes to go out and find Jon's and bring them back to what was really a CIA safe house it was made to look like a cat house a CIA Safe House drug them Y and then try to get them to tell their innermost secrets so they dosed them with LSD and with a couple of other there were like six different medications this was like

[20:56] Sydney got Le's experiment right exactly yeah it came from Sydney got's experiment and uh you know is it's it was supposed to be some sort of truth serum right but with LSD as a base does it work well who cares if it works these guys never consented to be drugged by you guys to tell their innermost secrets and then you just dump them on the street somewhere in San Francisco yeah but that kind of thing was happening a lot until 1975 Church commission the

[21:26] church committee and the pike committee and the house and they were appalled by that and it it the church committee and the pike committee morphed into the Senate select committee on intelligence and the house permanent select committee on intelligence great and they had real true legit oversight until about 1982 um Bill Casey was Ronald Reagan's CIA director case great guy oh lovely lovely man yeah he's a real looker too and a he

[21:57] must have done well with the see he was years ahead with the giant lips thing that he had going on so he was he's a former OSS officer office of strategic Services which was the cia's predecessor organization and just a True Believer and he did his darnest to cut Congress out of everything and then that ended up giving us you know Iran Contra and all kinds of different terrible scandals he ended up dying of a of a way at a stroke

[22:28] in the he had an aneurysm a brain aneurism um so died just before the end of his term um but by then the oversight committees really didn't have any idea what the CIA was doing and so they went so far as to have a vote in 1986 it was a no confidence vote in Casey as the DCI and the way they ended up getting it passed in a negotiation with the Republicans was

[22:59] was it's it sounds so stupid now in retrospect but they they voted to say that William Casey is not unqualified to continue as director meaning I see what they're doing so they're basically just trying to like put a little in there but politic it to say but he still can yeah we're not asking that he resign yeah but we're saying that he's he's not doing great yeah he's not doing great that's right that's right uh but ever since then I mean there's not been any real oversight

[23:30] when the Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee did the Senate torture report uh what a decade a little bit more than a decade ago that report as it was published was Democratic staff only there were no Republicans involved no Republican staff and no Republican members it was a democratic uh product excuse me and then the Republicans came out with with a the counter to it that they published and

[24:01] what was that oh we love torture and it wasn't torture it was it literally said that yeah it worked it was it was moral it was right it's like okay if that's what you're going with you know don't let me stop you yeah so the the other problem though if when you look at the history of you bring up the the church committee that guy Frank Church who it's named after yep I believe the committee commen in 74 or 75 correct something like that yep so he won his senate

[24:32] election in 74 he he won he won re-election in 74 because Richard Nixon had just um had just resigned and it was the worst most devastating that's right kill job in the 20th century that's right yeah point being though his next election was six years later and he got crushed and he got crushed yeah and it's cuz there's some weird money that went into the race against him we know where that's coming from are exactly right you know Frank church was one of those

[25:02] giants of the 20th century I can I can honestly tell you such Senators don't exist anymore maybe though there will be some someday but giants like who had a place in American history we had a half a dozen of them back then from both parties but anymore they're just a bunch of they're bought bunch of bozos yeah yeah but this guy tries to make that committee so that there can be oversight or whatever and then the very people that they're investigating I mean it hearkens back to the old New York Times

[25:33] headline where it's like the CIA investigated itself on whether or not it sold crack in the hoods and it found no wrongdoing exactly that's what they're doing here when the people who are supposed to be pushing for the oversight they can then use surreptitious ways right to get them out of office and then poof you never really hear about it again because to your point there hasn't been there have been arguments over like the torture time or whatever but there hasn't been some sort of like hand hands on major oversight commission since then yeah I was a

[26:04] little kid when that was happening and I remember my dad voting for Frank church for president in the 1976 primaries my mom had voted for Birch by from Indiana I remember that I don't know why she did but um my dad voted for for church and my mom said really church and I remember my dad saying that guy earned it if anybody's ear earned it it was him mhm A young John kirak that went in one year not the other apparently so joined up joined up with the dark side right the dark

[26:34] side well the context of all this and what we're talking about and I appreciate you running through some of that again just so people can hear it because you saw this hands on but the context has to do with an organization like USA and how it may be used for terms of soft power now we pulled up a link right here just for people to review I know you and I were talking about this a little earlier before we got on camera lesie can you scroll down a little bit these are are just some highlights if you will y of different things that have been uncovered since they started investigating this so you

[27:05] have 14 million in cash vouchers for migrants at the southern border through the state department you have $20,600 for a drag show in Ecuador through the state department you have $7,777 the money on this sheet to you and me it's a lot of money to what the actual budget is it's a very small percentage of it but like when I see things the

[27:36] carelessness of like $10,000 to pressure Lithuanian corporations to promote Dei values through the state department John do you know what $10,000 buys you yeah nothing I can get like an editor in Venezuela for that that's it all right like that's I think you said it you you put it best you're like that could buy you two Facebook ads yeah that's it and that and they characterize it as pressure now to you and me $10,000 very small part of the budget here but that's a lot of money to me it's like if they're this careless with that $10,000 how many other things are they this careless with and what does any of

[28:07] the stuff you're seeing here which frankly a lot of the highlights that they've decided to pick out because it is and I'll be fair like it is a republican who's pointing these things out they're picking out the LGBT stuff and the Dei stuff because that's like the you know soup theour right now but like when you add up probably all the things that are in that type of Lane like something that seems totally unnecessary it probably adds up to a lot and is something where we've lost the oversight completely in the organization MH you're exactly right you know two years ago I was I was one of

[28:38] six um independent journalists who were invited to have lunch with the Russian ambassador to the United States and we we went to the to the residents it was this big formal deal so it was the Ambassador the deputy Ambassador and like three of his staff members and six of us journalists and he had read um articles that all of us had written he actually quoted them which really struck me and the reason for the lunch was for the most part he wanted our

[29:09] ideas on how the US and Russia could cooperate in a time of war and I gave my standard thing counterterrorism counter proliferation counternarcotics um but the thing that made him angriest was how the state department pushes lgbtq on countries where it is culturally unacceptable and he said you know we don't even mind being adversaries on some of these issues our interests are

[29:39] different sometimes from American interests he said you're right we can cooperate on counter terrorism we can cooperate on on counter proliferation that's a great idea no problem but don't force us to accept trans people in our government Don't Force us to to accept lgbtq people in positions of authority in the Orthodox church we will not do it you don't respect our culture and he said that's a bigger problem than not respecting our policies why do they do it because like

[30:12] I I like living in a country where people are are are free to be themselves and do what they want to do that's a beautiful part of America Agreed 100% it's different when you're pushing like I would in In fairness like my gay friends like this is not this is push like some sort of business commissioned ideology on places to make them probably pay more attention to it in a negative light than they would have in the first place if you didn't do it exactly exactly so why do they do it people some of the people who might be impacted by

[30:44] like8 $8,000 to promote Dei among lgbtq groups in Cyprus well everybody in Cyprus is Greek Orthodox right the Orthodox Church of Cyprus there is no such thing as lgbtq in a in a culture like that it's a conservative culture it's offensive I I recognize that it's only $8,000 and I'm glad 8000 that we that we have it here I'm glad I welcome it I celebrate it

[31:15] truly but we we shouldn't be imposing our own values our own cultural values on countries that don't want it yeah I don't I it just it's seems so especially when you look at like I was saying the amounts it's not doing anything no so when you look at like the The Devil's Advocate to like us Aid and we can talk about this because I think you'll probably have a lot of thoughts here is that it has to do with this idea of soft

[31:47] power and we already mentioned the extreme example of like pushing drugs into other countries earlier but where there are countries like I don't know China Russia ran who are running around and maybe building roads in places to Curry favor oh I'm so glad you brought that up or give debt you know basically create debts and say don't worry about it but now we get to do this with you I understand why the United States would want to have things like that I just don't want to see it have stupid [ __ ]

[32:18] like this and I don't want to see it not have oversight does that make sense you're right and then that leads to the question of why is it that the Chinese are building ports and Roads and hospitals and airports all over the world and we're doing that right what do we have to show for that we have nothing nothing it's like democracy in Afghanistan this has long been a big deal for me why in blazes did we force Afghanistan into a western style democracy when in the 3,000 years of

[32:49] that country's history they never had a western style democracy they had this system called the Loya jurga which worked a it's a consultative council of tribal Chieftains and so if you and I are in a dispute I I say that my land ends here and you say no it ends here and we have a conflict with one another we go to the lawyer jurga and they we each give our side and they settle the dispute or um I want to be the village you know tax

[33:21] collector let's say we go to the loyal jurga I make my pitch the other guy makes his pitch the loyal jur of votes H they choose you know this guy oligarchs instead of Kings yeah right right so we said no no we we recognize you guys have been doing that for thousands of years but we don't like that instead we're going to have uh an election and we got this guy Hamed carai and his brother's got a nice restaurant in Baltimore you can you can have lunch at his Afghan restaurant Baltimore is very popular and so that

[33:53] real uhhuh it really did uhhuh in Baltimore yeah there's like six good blocks in Baltimore I know that's about it and and they still call it Greek Town yeah and uh and they're like we don't uh we don't want that kind of system and we said yeah we're we're not asking you we're telling you but then you know we're not pushing democracy on Saudi Arabia or on Kuwait or bahin or or even Egypt which actually had a democracy for

[34:25] a minute but when the wrong guy got elected then we said no a coup would be okay just about now why why did we CH Saudi Arabia I think is more self-explanatory yeah but like Egypt why do we decide that's okay there but not in Afghanistan because the Egyptian populace um has an intense dislike of Israel which is in opposition to our foreign policy and there are so many poor people we're afraid of a broad

[34:57] uprising there they'll throw us out you know it's it's going to be chaos what's different about Afghanistan though cuz there's a lot of poor people there as well is it the geography more than anything they thought they could get away with it in part it's geography and in part it's population there aren't that many people in Afghanistan we thought we can we can push these people around and uh we can supply them with whatever they need we have bases in usbekistan Tajikistan we had the Drone base in uh in in Pakistan that nobody knew about until until a a really smart thinking

[35:30] reporter filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all drone fuel deliveries in Pakistan and they're like oh sure here you go all the someone got fired for that like what's the Harmon asking where all the fuel is coming from or where where the fuel's going it's going right here to this base oh wait a minute that's a secret base oh sorry oh man yeah but we just pushed them around yeah and it didn't work I I say often too that that the Taliban did not descend

[36:02] from the Moon right and just they didn't softly land in Afghanistan and take over these are the the husbands the fathers the brothers of Afghan women they they Afghan families this is who they chose to be led by they had 20 years of American leadership they didn't like it and so they chose the Taliban well we didn't lead that's the other problem we put in figureheads we tried to push as you just laid out beautifully democracy on a on a country where that wasn't necessarily what they wanted or what

[36:32] their history wanted and then we also got oh I don't know Tangled Up in a [ __ ] war in Iraq so we pulled resources that's right and there was all kinds of [ __ ] that that went on that led to that steep Decline and it's not even like the whole population supports the Taliban but the Taliban was able to say hey we're not as bad as this that's right and enough people were like all right [ __ ] it yep that's exactly right you know there was another thing too I remember being there in like 20 7 maybe 2007 and we had come up with

[37:06] this just terrible idea uh to combat corruption right corruption is endemic it's just a part of the culture so we decided that the police chief in each province would have to come from another Province right so the police chief in a pashun area was a Hazara for example and the police chief in uh beluch area was

[37:36] from you know the the border with Tajikistan and they said well that way you know there's no connection between the police chief and the populace they don't have anything in common so it's going to make bribery go away and it's going to make everybody honest no they just started killing all the police Chiefs they're like I'm not going to where's this guy from he's got Asian eyes he's not a poshu right and then they put a bullet in his head it's like that's a that was a dumb idea who's who

[38:06] thought of that there a lot of people who play fantasy football with government sitting in offices in DC and got right langly and stuff doesn't mean they're dumb it means that they're not thinking no and they just have no cultural understanding and no understanding of History I will say that for the most part the working level Foreign Service officers at the state department do have that understanding of history and they tend

[38:37] to focus on specific Geographic areas so if you're an arabist you speak Arabic you're going to spend probably the entirety of your career in the Middle East until you become an ambassador and then you'll probably spend most of it in the Middle East even after you've become an ambassador and you know elsewhere in government USA ID CIA Pentagon forget it I never met anybody to Pentagon spoke Arabic they live in their own worlds what is where where's the state

[39:08] department and all this that's actually good you bring that up because there the state department and you've done a great job explaining this in the past I know bu de mon talked about this in the past and Jim Lawler and those guys like they will house a lot of people who maybe work for the agency or even sometimes the Pentagon like undercover and then they're also there to be the diplomats and have the embassy and you know shake hands and kiss babies but for things like USI a idea to happen you have the

[39:38] intelligence agencies potentially using it as like a moneya laundering operation to get see that's the dangerous part but does the state department know that's happening or can they just not do anything about it yes and yes okay yeah there there's a formal written agreement between the CIA and the state department um on that addresses cover issues you know sometimes for for for most of my career actually for the entirety of my career now that I'm thinking about it um

[40:09] I was under what was called nominal cover like oh where do you work ah State Department right there was nothing to back that up you couldn't call the state department and say can I speak to John and then you know they route the call to me that just didn't exist oh you didn't even have a cover back no no no no no no I was declared to so many intelligence Services it wouldn't have made it a difference anyway so um so there's this formal agreement between the state department and the CIA like there is between the the CIA and other governmental bodies USA Aid is an

[40:41] unusual situation though I never ever encountered a CIA officer who was embedded in usaid I don't think that that happens um it it wouldn't make sense anyway because really yeah because when you're when you're embedded you have to do that cover job for eight hours and then you go out and do your CIA job for eight hours that's right so if if you're going to be given some kind of official cover you don't want it to be USA ID where you actually have to

[41:13] do the work you know you want to be I got to be very careful here um but you want to be in a position where you can sort of blend the two H yeah why do you have to be careful here because um the details are classified okay yeah yeah let's not have another trial no no no more trials for me thank you so you got to blend the two leave that there now the reason I said that this is a a problem is that to use to use a phrase

[41:45] that I heard this week on the news um usaid was was a beach head for the C in the state department that's that's not what USA ID is supposed to do usaid is supposed to be you know digging water wells and training doctors and you know building sewage treatment plants and electrical grids and helping people develop it's the agency for International Development which was like John F Kennedy's that was the plan it

[42:15] yeah usaid the Peace Corps and Vista were all created at the same time by John Kennedy you know was a great idea yeah but the CIA the CIA moved right in as soon as Kennedy was killed by 1964 the CIA was running covert operations out of usaid this has all been Declassified it's all available this is Declassified this is Declassified it's available at the um at the National Security archives at George

[42:46] Washington University okay so for this example since it's Declassified can you explain what that one look like because now I'm a bit confused cuz you're saying you wouldn't go undercover there but there's a they did not have they did not have people undercover uh at usaid what they did is they ran covert op operations through usaid English uh okay in 1972 Ted Kennedy wrote a letter to the CIA and he said this is also available

[43:18] Declassified online so he said I heard that the CIA was paying Lo oan Mercenaries through USA ID just cutting okay payroll checks yeah um is that true and so he got a letter back from from Henry Kissinger who was the Secretary of State at the time real straight shooter too oh yeah yeah he's never going to op gate phenomenal guy he got an identical letter from the CIA like identical to

[43:49] the word um saying yeah we're using usaid essentially to launder money and pay these Lo ocean mercenaries to fight Communists and Kennedy's letter said did you pay these people in 1969 and he said yeah we paid him in 69 and 70 and 71 and 72 like what are you going to do about it Kendy well that was just one of many many operations that that was paid for

[44:19] through usaid here's another thing and and this might be a better explanation I love when John starts cooking that's great really Chef curry with the shot keep going there used to be a a senator Democratic senator from Wisconsin by the name of William proxmire proxmire was famous for a couple of reasons first he won the seat that uh Joseph McCarthy vacated when he drank himself to death okay right yeah so he was a liberal Democrat there he is Bill proxmire and he was famous also for

[44:52] never spending a single dollar to get reelected he he said the people of Wisconsin know my voting record they either like it or they don't like it and he got elected Time After Time After Time yeah he finally retired like in the 70s like 76 or 78 something like that I've never heard of that before at any point when did he retire it looks like Senator 89 okay so he was around for a long time from 57 to 89 so he hated

[45:25] government waste more than anything in the world and he decided to bestow an award kind of a gag award called the Golden Fleece award for the fleecing of the American taxpayer and he would do it every month every month he would call a press conference I like to issue the Golden Fleece award the problem was a lot of what he identified as government waste was actually secret CIA programming so he couldn't say it no he said it anyway oh he did and he didn't

[45:56] get arrested this CIA was apoplectic all bet because he would say you know $5 million to Dollars to study you know gay monkeys in gaban and he's like what the [ __ ] is this this is a waste of the taxpayers money well of course there was no $5 million to study gay monkeys and gaban that's just what they called it yeah so that the CIA because you can't like go on to Google and look for the CIA budget it's you can't but do they have to create like a shell company on the other side meaning like a company

[46:27] called like research for gay monkey studies are there's really mercenaries behind it who are like thank you for the money there are at least hundreds of those right okay maybe thousands so they got to try they got to try got it yes yeah but the thing is the cia's budget is hidden all around the rest of the federal budget yeah okay it's not just in the state department not just in the defense department or the Commerce Department it's everywhere and so they'll say $5 million for gay monkeys

[46:57] and gaban and they'll put that at USA ID or they'll put it in you know the whatever some fund for the National Geographic Society or whatever they're not really going to spend that money on that they're going to spend it to you know buy weapons for lotion mercenaries or you know bring drugs to Los Angeles or whatever okay so let me ask a direct question then on this that you may not know the answer to but in theory you could did we really spend $50 million on

[47:28] condoms in mosm Beek or did that fund some sort of like Rebel Army there you know if that were $50,000 I'd say yeah we we did that if it's $50 million I'd say that's nuts and it's probably something else okay that's making sense now yeah so this is a tail as old as time and they as you said there's Declassified things involved in like Henry Kissinger where they admit oh yeah they're doing this and they went beyond that I mean let's go into the into the early 2000s please uh in

[47:58] 2003 we didn't do anything wrong in 2003 stop stop right there I don't know where people found the time to get all these was a great year there everything was right slam dunk slam dunk it was a slam dunk wasn't it in 2003 we created a Facebook alternative called zun zuno and it just appeared in Cuba like oh look this this this this Facebook copy it it just appeared on the Cuban uh

[48:32] internet one day yeah and uh I didn't know they had that yeah zun zuno and so it was supposed to um encourage Cubans to initiate uh the equivalent of the Arab Spring and overthrow the castros and nobody signed up for zun zuno nobody no they couldn't get anyone to sign up no people were like no we're not they didn't like drop some flyers with like prizes no no low effort yeah weren't interested that's how I like my overthrows though John softly you do it

[49:04] online you piss them off everyone gets their TIY torches they have a nice little meeting and then poof new leader yep nothing wrong with that that's exactly right um in in 2013 they um they infiltrated the Bolivian uh media to try to overthrow Evo Morales how' they do this uh they just started buying uh journalists you say hey how much do you make $500 a month okay here's $5,000 WR

[49:34] this article saying that Ava Morales was caught with a six-year-old girl yeah they're like okay I can do that how often does stuff like that still happen oh every single day right yeah all over the world all over the world meaning it's not just concentrated in one two places of interest this stuff is happening all the time all over the world and you know with the with the advance of technology too it just makes it easier and easier although it diffuses it because you know it's not just ABC CBS NBC The New York Times The

[50:06] Washington Post The Wall Street Journal the LA Times now there are millions I mean we're all journalists any any blogger anybody any slob who rolls out of bed in the morning and makes a YouTube video can be a I feel a t a journalist I'm sorry I didn't mean to it's okay you saw my bed before we got started no that's okay you're a pirates hat and that's that's all that matters hat John but keep falling behind but yes as you were saying it happens every day yeah

[50:37] so if we had to steal man something like that would you say that doing cuz that doesn't sit right with me that you're you are infecting what's supposed to be sources of News That's supposed to in theory be unbiased so it just feels dirty in every way I know what happens to us it's same argument as earlier I know what happens to us all the time do you think if you had to choose poison pill it's better to do that than it is to actually hire Rebels to go in and kill the people in charge that we don't like

[51:07] yes now it it'ss hard it's like what do we do and what do we not do hard and and your chances of success are low yeah I mean look at look at what the Russians were accused of doing in 2016 and what they actually did in 2016 the Democratic narrative is that the Russians essentially bought the 2016 election for Donald Trump right that's all been all been proven false yep yep so what did the Russians actually do they spent

[51:38] $50,000 on YouTube ads okay none of the YouTube ads were political 25,000 half of it was spent after the election was over so you have $25,000 left and they're all like memes of kitten and puppies and flowers almost all of that money was spent in states that were already solidly red or solidly blue MH that's

[52:09] not stealing the election that's somebody some idiot wasted $50,000 like we were looking at up here mhm yeah so we do it the Russians do it the Chinese do it the Cubans the Iranians the Israelis the French the British everybody does it so why did they cuz we can look at that now because so much of this has been disproven you know it was always crazy to me there were so many things like just in general that if you wanted to attack Trump on you could attack him but they had to come up with stuff yeah why attack him on the fake stuff that's what I'm saying

[52:40] like stuff and and they made it sound very bad I'll say that so I see why it could make a story but they attacked him on things that now hindsight being in 2020 it's like it was always going to come out that this isn't real the evidence is all there you know when you assemble this blue ribbon panel of the the greatest Minds in government to look at the evidence they're going to find the truth unless they're the warrant commission but unless they're the warrant commission or maybe the 911 Commission well I don't I don't want to

[53:11] talk about that okay and uh no just kidding pin put in that we're coming back and um yeah I mean if they're if they're legitimately doing their job they're going to find look we we have no evidence the Russians didn't steal the election for Donald Trump that's just the way it is there was so M there were so many people though because you're making me think with the media thing there were so many people in the media who were now we can say it creating evidence oh my

[53:41] Godel an example yeah I on my show one day we played a clip of Rachel mattow saying Russia Moscow or Putin 90 times in the first hour of her show the night before it was ridiculous and she was ripping Mitt Romney for saying it four years before that M remember that he got like laughed off the stage oh yeah Obama's like cold war call wants their policy back and and everyone's like H he

[54:12] said Russia and then it was like the main keyword yeah it sure was do do you think that well let's get to the bigger question here do you think that like powers that be in the bureau Ry I mean this is what the internet says but do you think there is any legitimacy to people in the bureaucracy besides like those two idiots at the FBI who really were actually working to attribute things to other places when in fact it was quite literally them doing it to stop Donald

[54:44] Trump from getting into Power boy that's a good question yeah you know how looks yeah regardless of politics yous yeah you know honestly I have to say probably yes yeah yeah probably and and that's a surprise to me because when I when I worked at the CIA we generally had no idea what our colleagues politics were genuinely I sat next to this one guy for six years I

[55:14] didn't have the foggiest idea if he was a Democrat a Republican or an independent no idea there was a woman I worked with this is in like 96 and she got in trouble like written up because she put a Bob Dole for president bumper sticker in her cubicle oh wow and they're like that has to come down and you're getting written up and you have to go to HR and you know we work for the for the country we don't choose sides that's how it used to be at the FBI as well and that really seemed

[55:46] to change dramatically around 2016 what do you think it was do well let me even ask a hypothetical one there because I always wonder this I'm like obviously I know Trump says a lot of [ __ ] and like you know he's an outsider and all this but like do you think that there's some sort of intelligence I don't know what it would be that they know about him that they think is just so dangerous that they're willing to completely lift the veil on

[56:18] their not caring about these elections and no and saying like [ __ ] it get him out of there somebody would have leaked it you know going back to um to the um Christopher steel report you know I worked with Chris steel wait this is the guy who had the piss memo right right yeah he he was an MI uh six uh officer you worked with him yeah we did an operation together in in London in the 90s and the funny thing about it is he was like the guy at MI6 that all the

[56:50] other MI6 guys wanted to be like that's how highly respected he was I I enjoy Christopher steel golden showers yeah okay please continue so I have I have a theory he went from the James Bond kind of officer that that every MI6 guy wanted to be to this caricature because when you're collecting

[57:22] intelligence when you're an operations officer collecting intelligence no matter how outrageous the intelligence might be you send it back to your headquarters and the analysts go over it and the analysts say this is [ __ ] this is great this is a possibility this is a probability you just turn over the analysts so if he had been at MI6 and A source told him that Donald Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on Barack Obama's Hotel bed um the analysts would say this is stupid and it wouldn't get published

[57:54] because there's no other information to corroborate this mhm but in private practice there is no team of analysts to go over the the intelligence cuz he was out by then he was out by then and he was paid by the Clinton campaign although there were reports that he was initially hired by the Ted Cruz campaign and then Cruz walked away from it liying Ted uhhuh and then Hillary said we'll take it so there was no team of analysts to

[58:25] vet the information and to tell the Clinton campaign this is nonsense this is true this is maybe this is I don't know we have to ask other questions find other sources there was nobody to do that and so he did what he always did at MI6 he just write it up and sent it in and then let the next group figure out if it's true or not you think it's just literally because he may not have endorsed it he just had what he found and he didn't have government analysts on the other side so he said they'll take care of that yeah I think that's exactly what happened now how all right back up a second how were you working

[58:56] with this guy was this was this the Greek stuff yeah oh [ __ ] okay can you talk about this at all in generalities that's good enough I became the master of the old files on Greek terrorism I I took this issue so seriously it actually cost me my first marriage I was obsessed with Greek terrorism yep and then they tried to kill me in Athens you told that story

[59:27] so I would go through these files these files some of them were 25 years old just looking for a lead a lead that maybe had been overlooked 10 20 25 years ago and I found a lead it was a connection between the Greeks and Carlos The Jackal and nobody had ever talked to this guy so I'm like where is this guy we don't have any idea where this guy is so which guy oh the connection got it got it yeah

[59:58] so I wrote a cable to headquarters and I said I've identified this guy that I think is the middleman between the Greeks and Carlos The Jackal um do we have any idea where he is I think he's probably in Lebanon I said I get a cable back and they said no he's he's living in London I said how in the heck is he living in London they said he converted to Christianity married some English woman and he's living in London and I said I got I got to see him

[1:00:31] a Carlos De Jackal plug living openly in London MH can you tell people who Carlos De Jackal was by the way who caros the Jackal was the most infamous and deadliest independent terrorist of the 1970s there there was a movie based on on his exploits called uh The Day of the Jackal it's a classic 70s film and the reason why I say independent um terrorist is he did this

[1:01:01] for ideology he was a communist but like an Ardent yes hardcore Bolshevik kind of communist believer he was Venezuelan by birth his name was um ilich Ramirez Sanchez um his n deare was Carlos The Jackal and he was just impossible to find but he did some of the most outrageous terrorist attacks he and his men just simultaneously opened fire on the airports in Rome and Vienna killed I forget what a dozen two dozen people

[1:01:33] whatever it was the most outrageous operation that he carried out was there was an OPEC oil ministers meeting in Vienna Austria okay so all the me all the Ministers of oil he loves those guys yeah loves those guys all the Ministers of oil from all of the opet countries and he kidnapped all of them at the same time he was a gangster I'm not going to lie I mean this dude was different my God and the OPEC countries are like okay how many hundreds of millions do you want to

[1:02:04] give us our people back yeah and they paid we've talked about his capture it's it's actually quite exciting that was Billy wall Billy W yeah in cartoon but anyway um I wrote a cable to um headquarters and they wrote a cable to the Brits and they said hey we've got a guy in Athens you know this is what he's working on this is what he wants can he come and uh and talk to this this guy and they said sure but you know as per

[1:02:37] protocol we're going to have a guy from MI5 and a guy from MI6 go with him and I said cool so they set up this meeting of all freaking places it was at the Hardrock Cafe in London with you know through the whole meeting I couldn't I couldn't even hear myself but he did that on purpose cuz he he genuinely believed I was going to shoot him in the meeting MH he was scared to death shaking mouth all dry and I kept

[1:03:09] saying I don't mean you any harm I understand that you've straightened out your life he said I found God I became a Greek Orthodox Christian I married this beautiful woman he was living in some housing project outside it was bad so I so he's living poor yeah he was poor and I said I don't care about anything but Carlos I want to know about Carlos and the weapons that went to the Greeks

[1:03:39] well he ended up being less valuable than I had hoped we met I don't know four or five times but um but chisle sat in on every single meeting and we kind of struck up a professional friendship I had a great deal of respect for the guy and then fast forward what 15 years yeah and they're talking about the steel dossier and I I was like that can't be the Chris steel

[1:04:09] from MI6 now he's Christopher steel right yeah and it was I recognized him on TV I was like you've got to be kidding me how could somebody so highly respected so professional get stuck in this political quicksand up to his neck and the conclusion that I finally came to was he did exactly what he used to do at MI6 yeah just thinking well there's this whole team you know there has to be this whole team in Washington to analyze the information just like I had this

[1:04:40] whole team in London to analyze the information they paid me to collect it they didn't pay me to analyze it so here it is Hillary Clinton knew it was [ __ ] he had to but he has his head in the sand with that thinking that you know they're going to run with anything just to be like oh look he's a Russian asset I'll tell you what as a as an intelligence collector if I had one source say something that was utterly outrageous that no other source corroborated I would never have included

[1:05:11] it in the report you know I I asked an officer one time in the Middle East I was doing a paper and there was a a foreign woman's name who came up repeatedly and so I didn't know anything about her and we didn't have anything in the files so I send what's called a a um no I won't say what it's called anyway I sent a cable saying I'm working on this study for the for the National Security Council and This Woman's name keeps popping up I don't know who she is

[1:05:41] there's nothing in the files can you collect on her and one of the officers responded Yes I can collect I was like great and I I put the paper on hold waiting for him to trigger a meeting with his with his source so he can ask the source course tell me all about this woman yeah I get the report back the entire report was about how much she loved hot dogs that she would put them with mustard and sometimes with onions and sometimes with relish and then every time she goes to the states she has hot

[1:06:12] dogs and she asked the some airline to ship in Hot Dogs I'm like are you [ __ ] kidding me I waited for two weeks for this report I can't send this to the president yeah oh and by the way this woman who we think may be procuring weapons for this terrorist group she really really loves hot dogs I was Furious but sometimes the collectors just aren't thinking about the end result they're like oh you want to know about the woman here she loves these hot dogs Chris steel oh you want to know about uh uh Obama and Trump yeah Trump

[1:06:45] hired hookers to piss on Obama's bed isn't that hilarious it's like no do you have any idea what you just did to our election yeah have you tried to reach out to him you know I talked about it with a friend uh back in 2016 and then I thought nah I'm going to leave well enough alone and I've been back to London I don't know six eight times since then but I I haven't you don't stay with him no no it's too much too much trouble intelligence agencies though like

[1:07:15] because it always comes back to us when I talk with you guys obviously they have these names for certain alliances in air quotes you got the five eyes all the English countries and they're friends yeah right yeah we are leg they are but is anyone really friends are you really friends with someone if the minute they walk out the door you [ __ ] attached a microphone to their ass so you can hear them fart oh no in in the case of five eyes it's you know I didn't believe this when they first announced the creation of the five eyes but we were instructed

[1:07:47] to open the books and give them literally everything to the point where there are five eyes officers sitting at NSA FBI CIA sitting there with you they have a desk all the books all the books not just the books that sit in the main part of the library and then there's a hatch that takes you downstairs really no they're going to be compartmented operations but it's not just they can't see it because they're five eyes they're foreign Nationals they can't see it

[1:08:17] because nobody else can see it but maybe six people you know what I mean which is a lot yeah it's compartmentalized like you said but it's a lot there's a lot of things like that yeah yeah do you think they have the same policy for us oh yeah really MH that surprises me it surprised me when it was first announced you know we had very poor relations with New Zealand for example for many years Ronald Reagan um withdrew the CIA station Chief from New Zealand and closed the station there in

[1:08:48] 1982 in a fit of peak for what why because they would not allow a nuclear powerered submarine into port yeah you know what [ __ ] them how dare they yeah that's we're gonna Park our nuke where we want it that's what Reagan said don't shoot the Lord of the Rings there and then and then in 1990 91 it's like six weeks before we we attacked uh Iraq to push them out of Kuwait I was instructed to brief the prime minister of New Zealand and I was

[1:09:20] like New Zealand I thought they were on the [ __ ] list and they're like yeah well it's war time we're going to we're going to try to rehabilitate them oh you know [ __ ] it I even got invited to the ambassador's house for dinner afterwards it was so much fun of course you did you didn't plant a bug there no you sure positive you can tell me and the food was great in New Zealand it was delicious at the ambassador's residence the New Zealand Wasington no it was a lot of fruits I remember that fruit yeah that's cool it was nice so they're

[1:09:51] really friend I'm I'm surprised to hear that yeah five eyes is the real deal all right I'm going to put a pin in one thing because I want to come back to that whole friendship thing with someone else but I don't want to lose the last important part of this USA conversation which is how it's being uncovered right so I wish we lived in a world where Optics didn't matter but they do how things look unfortunately are often more important than how they actually are and you just had an election where certainly

[1:10:22] like a lot of people voted for Trump and and voted for going in and fixing some of the swamp and whatever and he's trying to follow through on some of that and I respect that MH as someone who is a fan of Elon Musk I always say this I'm not a fan boy I don't sit here and gargle the balls of every [ __ ] thing he does he's a genius I love his companies I think there's so much exciting [ __ ] I think he's a funny guy I think he's entertaining I think he has some pretty good ideas I disagree with

[1:10:54] some of the ways he public L goes about things I also know he as he stated like he has autism so there you know there's a certain there can be an edge to him right there can be an edge to him the Optics though of the richest guy not named Vladimir Putin or some long sality last name in the world having full access to all of these programs including I think even some stuff in the treasury or whatever and the IRS right now he's not technically elected though a lot of people did elect Donald Trump

[1:11:24] with him being attached to it I will defend him on that the Optics though of of him being in charge of that is not the best to me cuz I I almost wonder if it defeats the purpose of what I like him doing here which is this minus like it just being him doing it does that make sense I'm glad you said the I I'm glad you use the word Optics because it's important in this in this uh case a friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day something about you know it was illegal for Trump to appoint m

[1:11:56] and I was like no it wasn't yeah it wasn't no it's not at all illegal his title is adviser to the President right okay anybody can be appointed adviser to the president and when you're appointed adviser to the president you're given you're given the Necessities to carry out the task so he's got you know all the clearances that he needs he has you know a small staff um I think his staff is uh a problem it's like Five Guys in their early 20s who don't really know

[1:12:26] what they're doing that was probably not the best choice but he's perfectly within his rights to be doing what he's doing I would prefer like you that he not muck around with my personal information that's at the IRS or the department of the treasury or whatever but with that said his task from the president is to take a machete to the federal budget and I have to say and I can't believe I'm saying it but I have a lot of respect for that yeah I was reserving judgment until just

[1:12:59] a few days ago when the president announced much to the shock of every Lefty in America that he's ordered musk to cut the Pentagon budget by 8% a year for five consecutive years that has never been done in American history ever it's incredible to me yes a letter went out to all CIA employees the other day saying we're not immune layoffs are coming there hasn't been a layoff at this CIA since 1977 so this is serious they mean

[1:13:30] business and I think that's a good thing I do too is it problematic though that one guy's kind of spearheading it and just like this isn't his fault but he is the richest guy in this country yeah it's a bad look I I will I will admit to you it's a bad look you know I mentioned offline and you told me to wait actually met him one time yeah John's got it like every time it really does happen off camera people every time we bring up anything he's like let me give you an example I know that guy and

[1:14:01] you're like wait how do you know Abraham Lincoln I was there April 14th what a night every [ __ ] time I got a Lincoln story too I'll tell you in a minute godamn um no you'll get a kick out of it so are you Ser as a as a hobby most people don't know this most people who know me don't know this but as a hobby I like to write television Pilots right just for fun and I have an agent and a manager and an entertainment lawyer and I have sold eight of them over the years and one of them actually made it to Pilot

[1:14:32] right under your name yeah uhuh I have an IMDb page it's like this long yeah let's get it so um I had an idea for a news show and I mentioned it to a buddy of mine who's in the industry and he said oh wait a minute he says before you pitch it my best friend from high school just became the president of NBC uh Ben I don't remember his last name he was the he was the producer of the uh of the office he said let's pitch it to Ben

[1:15:04] uh and uh yeah see I did all kinds of I did all kinds of stuff there true and self I've got like 60 something True Lies yeah true lies I was the script uh script coordinator come on yeah fun wait you were on Kill the Messenger the movie yeah oh you were an advisor for that right advis about whatever Gary web yeah yeah whacked him I did Bruno I did From Paris With Love with John Travolta oh my God yeah you've talked about Bruno before yeah yeah yeah it's

[1:15:36] fun I do all kinds of stuff all right so you were saying your friend the NBC he said yeah I got this friend Ben he was my best friend from high school he just became the president of NBC let me call him we could pitch the show to him I said great so he calls him and Ben says hey I'm going to be at dinner at the white house uh Obama had just got elected and he had this big fundraiser um for wealthy Jewish Democrats and so he said the dinner ends at 9: let's meet at the bar at the hey Adams hey Adams

[1:16:06] hotel across the street from the White House at uh at 9: we said great so 9:00 comes he's running a little late he calls my buddy and says um hey I'm running late I'll be there at 9:15 do you mind if I bring a friend we said no the more than marrier so uh they come at 9:15 and um my friend Rich and Ben are like hugging each other oh my God it's been so long you look great oh you've had such success you're the producer of the office and now you're NBC it's amazing

[1:16:38] blah blah blah and then they sit down and and Ben says uh this is my friend Elon and I said hi Elon nice to meet you I shake his hand I said uh and Rich says this is John I said hi Ben nice to meet you this is like 08 09 oh yeah very very beginning of 09 so um we're sitting there and Rich and Ben are like hey you remember this girl we both banged in high school and hey remember this teacher we both hated remember so and so had this party and and Elan and I are

[1:17:10] just sitting there looking at these guys like I this conversation means nothing to me so finally I go so Elon what do you do for a living as soon as the words came out of my mouth he goes like this he goes oh oh I have this passion for technology and I created this company called PayPal and then I sold it for like a billion dollars and then I used the money and I bought another company called Tesla and then I I have another company called SpaceX and we're going to go to Mars and

[1:17:41] we're going to colonize Mars and we're going to put a big dome and it's going to have oxygen in it and people are going to go up there and they're going to colonize Mars some are going to die but they're going to be heroes they're going to be heroes we're going to colonize Mars and I'm I'm looking at them and I go wait a minute wait a minute are you Elon Musk and he goes yeah oh my God and I go like the Thomas Edison of our time he goes I don't know I guess so but anyway

[1:18:11] we're going to go to Mars and there's going to be this giant Dome and we're going to build buildings in there and we're going to be able to farm and we're going to have oxygen I never pitched the show I never spoke about the show the whole rest of the two hours was him tell talking about colonizing Mars and this is you said this at the very beginning of 2009 shortly after January of 2009 okay so literally days after Obama yeah days he had been president for days you know what's you know what's crazy about this there is a very famous story about Elon Musk and please correct me in the comments if I have the date wrong but

[1:18:41] I'm pretty sure I got it right Christmas Eve 2008 weeks before this yeah very famous story Elon was up to the brims because of the financial crisis he had Tesla and he had SpaceX and he was told by all of his advisers you know they they had money due they had been trying to get raises in couldn't get it in the companies were going to put they said you have to pick one if you pick one there's like a 90% chance or something that it will survive if you pick both

[1:19:12] they'll both die oh my God and he said I can't let one go I guess we're just GNA have to die oh my God and he picked it and then money came in like five days later they were able to so he's talking with you in this hotel tell weeks after like nothing's going on when he just made the most insane decision of his career and for years afterwards I just assumed he was Jewish because he had been at this fundraiser well because it was a Jewish fundraiser you know Jewish democ you say where's your yamaka no I just and in fact somebody corrected me

[1:19:43] years later and they said musk isn't Jewish I said are you sure because he he was at this fundraiser for Jewish Democrats he's like no he just went just to go you know I that you call him too Elon I was like yeah so Elan what do you do for a living oh my God I didn't know he looks like Vaguely Familiar to me but I didn't know who the heck he was that's crazy when you met him is crazy to me yeah like a long time ago but that's on brand like he's so like ah [ __ ] it let's

[1:20:15] go so he could just whatever that guy does to be able to compartmentalize in every aspect of his life except when someone pisses him off with a meme is incredible like true it's unbelievable cuz I guess it just takes a different kind of well it definitely takes a different kind of marine to be a guy like that without a doubt you know Forbes came out with a uh she'll reach out to him for the pardon by the way you know I wish I could get to him I don't know how to get to him we'll get to him stick with me okay let's let's work on that I'll tell you something offline that's very important

[1:20:45] about that um Abraham Lincoln here we go I am a Lincoln collector um over like the car or the guy no the guy over many years I have bought things associated with Abraham Lincoln at auction I have uh I have a blood soaked piece of the pillowcase that he died on come on yeah I do framed uh yeah framed I I bought it at Saab it still got his blood on it soaked with blood um I have an 11 and a half inch

[1:21:17] strip of the wallpaper from the room that he died in at the Peterson guest house I have a Swatch of Mrs Lincoln's uh dress that she wore to his funeral what's a Swatch a just a scrap oh of her black dress I have a a piece of the wood that made the Gallows that the conspirators were were hung from That's a crazy story by the way I I buy all this stuff at at auction like serious auctions and it's all about provenance you know provenance provenance is you

[1:21:47] have to be able to to document from Lincoln himself how it got to you M so the the blood soaked pillowcase piece um Mr Peterson who owned the house that he died in took the pillowcase and cut it into pieces with the scissors and he gave the Doctor Who fished the bullet out of Lincoln's brain the piece he gave it to his daughter who married the governor of Indiana and then it passed

[1:22:19] down through their family until they sold it at sopes and I bought it right whoa so that's provenance so you can prove that it is what it says it is so summer of 2009 I have my boys for the summer I I had two sons at the time well I had I had more than just I had three sons and a daughter but my two from my oldest from my first second marriage my second marriage at that point so we went to

[1:22:51] Baltimore the whole family went to Baltimore because they had this thing called the sideshow Museum and it was a museum of circus freak shows from the 1800s like stuff that had been in these circus s shows they had like some N9 foot tall woman she's mummified the the Amazon they called her they had a Jackalope you know stuff like most of it's funny just silly stuff but they have this shadow box hanging on the wall and there's a dried out turd in it and it says it's Abraham Lincoln's final

[1:23:22] turd come on so it says on the card it said when he arrived at Ford's Theater he had to drop a deuce and so before he got seated he went to the men's room and he dropped a deuce in the chamber pot and then he went back to watch the play and he got shot and someone fished it out somebody had the presence of mind to fish it out and they saved the presence of mine or the sickness well there are a lot of Lincoln collectors out there it's very competitive so technically the last [ __ ] he takes is in the bed after he dies well technically you're right

[1:23:54] technically yes you're right so unless he got it all out the first time all right so uh thank you so this place was run down and it was dirty and the owner had a cat the place smelled of cat and I see an article in the Washington post about six months later saying it's going out of business and they're going to auction everything off so I told my wife I'm buying that turd she's like oh no you're not I said oh yes I am I'm buying in that turd John

[1:24:25] what do what does 144 year old turd look like it was all dried out and there was a kernel of rice sticking out of it and he how do you preserve that he had chicken and rice for his last meal that was his last meal I could plant the rice in there if I wanted to how how do you preserve that it was just air dried they just stuck it in a shadow box it was pinned to the shadow box I heard that but that's all they did yeah it dries out it doesn't like go moldy or anything

[1:24:58] so my wife and I actually had a strong disagreement about this I wonder why she's like there's no provenance right just because it was in the sideshow Museum that's not provenance you have to be able to and I said I know what provenance is so I go to the auction and I I top out at 1,200 bucks I'm just I can't go over 1,200 for this thing it ends up going for five grand oh my God so the Washington Post reporter is

[1:25:30] there and he's like there was this turd and it went for $5,000 spirited bidding they said so the guy that ended up buying it sends it to some company for a DNA sample and what they found was it had like microscopic bits of Necco wafer in it you know what a Neco wafer is do I look like I know what Necco wafer is John it's the most disgusting candy that's ever been created it's from Pittsburgh wow that sounds about right and they're all pastel colors they're

[1:26:01] disgusting they're little Wafers little round circles they look like buttons but Necco Wafers weren't invented until 1880 it wasn't his [ __ ] it wasn't his it was just some guys some random guy's turd that somebody paid $5,000 for I thanked my lucky stars that I didn't get it that's called Darwinism to whoever spent $5,000 on anyone's [ __ ] right but that's you imagine like the Washington

[1:26:31] Post reporters like Joby works so yeah so why'd you buy this [ __ ] oh my God I would have called him like Joby Joby we can't be bid against each other oh my God how far back do you go with Joby uh 07 was he calling you about that he was one of the first guys to interview me wow yeah yeah I think he mentioned it last time he was in here he's a good guy yeah I like Jo he's a good solid solid reporter yes mhm he's he's so unafraid to be the sober voice in the room and

[1:27:02] tell people [ __ ] they don't want to hear that's right and also sometimes like he speaks openly about like look you're still working with sources that have they got their motives right and so sometimes you're going to get backed information that turns out to give exactly what they want to get out there that's exactly a lot of journalists cuz it it's just a reality of that profession it's a reality of even what I do here I don't know every [ __ ] person that comes in here and what they're trying to do and this is one of the reasons why I respect Joby War so much um he's not the kind of of

[1:27:32] journalist who's going to just take a CIA press release and gist it he has sources yeah human sources that he can use to to either confirm or or deny information yeah I I I love talk when I was a fan of him before I ever brought him in here because I read his books his books are incredible his books are fantastic the the the host bombing oh man yeah you got to call him and ask him what he's working on right now I'm not allowed to tell you okay but I think we were talking off camera earlier about

[1:28:04] something else and I think it'd be something you would be very interesting oh excellent yeah it's it's really cool stuff small world yeah but so you're how did you get into being a Lincoln collector like were you just obsessed with the guy when you were a kid yeah yeah the greatest president in American history as far as I'm concerned he's definitely top three the kind of person that we should want to be like the only thing I ever got out bid on that I really kick myself over there was a gigantic uh Lincoln auction at Heritage auctions in Dallas back in 2009 and I

[1:28:35] was outbid on the original key to his tomb I couldn't get that that went for big bucks what what kind of bucks we talking uh went for close to 10 10 grand I think I went up to like 3600 3,800 and my wife is like it's a freaking key yeah it's just a key yeah you could buy like a lot of gon with that yeah something yeah so do you have like a Lincoln room no I just I have it framed and then I put it up on the wall I've got a I've

[1:29:06] got a ballot from Ohio from the 1860 election that has Lincoln on the on the ballot that's a lot higher on my list than [ __ ] but you know God damn it John this did you ever see that documentary it just makes when you were saying provenance it makes me think about it because I've never asked anyone about that I just watched it but you ever see the documentary The Lost Leonardo yes and I don't think that's a Leonardo okay I think Muhammad bin Salman got ripped off I think he might have too $500 million just for context

[1:29:39] for people there was a piece down in a New Orleans auction this is I don't know maybe a decade ago something like that yeah what's that it's it's Salvador Mundi yeah yeah the Salvador Mundi and actually lesie can you pull it up Salvatore Mundi m u n d and you'll be able to see the picture and so there there's apparently these guys like this is a real job that exists where there it is they just go to auctions we have it up on the screen right now they just go to auctions all over the world wherever it is and they

[1:30:10] try to find slips cracks right where something slipped through the crack oh my God I would love to do that it's such a cool job and so these guys out of New York I forget their name they they two of them they went down to the show in New Orleans and they see this picture and they didn't go like oh that's a Leonardo they just went something about this is crazy because we see it on the screen if we can pull it up one more time or less this is it remastered I'll explain the context as how that happened but when they found it it was like torn apart you kind of yeah you kind of had

[1:30:41] to like like sift through it to see what was there and apparently there's all kinds of ways things can be restored so wow that's perfect Le we got it so oh I see down in the bottom left it's all messed up yes yeah see that ex actually yeah see the example on the far left up up one ORS right there so people can see that this is what I believe what it initially looked like but you can see there from an art perspective you look at that and you go there is something there that looks interesting it was selling for like I don't know [ __ ] $

[1:31:11] thousand dollar or maybe less and these guys are like all right yeah you can get an old Master painting uh 17th century 16th century for 1,500 bucks especially if they don't know who painted it exactly right School of or circle of you know so and so yeah so this was really fascinating for me to learn about but they bring it back to New York and there's a whole underground you know system of experts who can determine down to the paint stroke yes with high accuracy if something's attributable to

[1:31:43] someone so they take it to this woman who I forget her name but her husband he he had passed away he was like the most famous art something or other I'll [ __ ] up what what the official title was but he was an expert on this stuff and she was an expert on it because of him so she starts looking through it and I forget what her logic was but suddenly it like Came Upon her she's like holy [ __ ] this is Leonardo so they commission her to retouch it up so it goes from the old one to the new one that we showed like a few minutes ago and actually

[1:32:15] looks real and they started marketing it as a Leonardo and very quickly there was a famous reporter I forget his name from The New York Times who was instantly like no [ __ ] this that's not a Leonardo and people started fighting over it but long story short skipping all the middle parts along the way it ends up going to a soues auction in New York City where there is the auctioneers up there a whole crowd and then there's a silent like crew of dudes on the phone yes who are all like American New York attorneys or something they're taking the bids by

[1:32:46] uh proxy and you don't know who it is and suddenly the bid goes up to like 450 million or something and they're like winner so it's the most expensive piece ever sold and it floats up later that it is most likely MBS who bought it and now they're like certain that he bought it yeah and there are many people who are still like yo that's not a Leonardo could maybe they were saying maybe it could have been a student of his which isn't worth nearly as much right but the Lou wanted to put the painting on

[1:33:17] display in the Leonardo exhibit because there's like 15 or 16 known leonardos yes and there was supposedly this they weren't admitting it was NBS they were talking with but there was this underground conversation oh we're going to get it we're going to get it we're going to get it and then eventually he they didn't because NBS wanted it put next to the Mona Lisa so that symbolically people would assume it had the same level of like importance as the monis yeah yeah so it's like this whole thing but the provenance is what they didn't have they didn't know who it passed from and all that so how heck

[1:33:47] does it get to New Orleans you know there was just a a two-part HBO series uh not a series a two-part HBO documentary on Leonardo um that goes through his entire life and he traveled a decent bit for you know the late 16th century um but when I say travel I mean between Rome Milan Venice you know Florence yeah Naples that was pretty

[1:34:20] much it and pretty much all of his work stayed there and in France and that's it how in the heck did that end up in New Orleans I mean it's been a lot of years things can happen the world has certainly changed I could see it it just it gets really weird and that one I tend to believe it's not a Leonardo I it's just some of the I understand where that lady was coming from because part of it could be a little bit of confirmation bias because she's looked at so much crazy art or whole career and you know finding a Leonardo is like finding a [ __ ]

[1:34:50] golden Charizard like you're not fing that thing yeah it's what everybody fantasizes about in that uh in that line yeah he was something else though you you ever read isaacson's biography of him no so good really oh he was he was he was a God I mean he could just he was a true polymath who just yeah he was who's a rebel but he could do everything did you know that he only wrote backwards yes I did not know that until I saw this documentary yeah I fre actually I haven't read the biography in

[1:35:22] a while he was obsessed with the idea of people stealing his Communications yes and so he only wrote backwards yeah they had that in The Da Vinci Code where they part of the code that they're uncovering Dan Brown wrote that in the book where it's like you had to hold it up to a mirror to see yeah [ __ ] crazy like bro it's like it's like it's like James Madison James Madison could write Greek with his right hand and Latin with his left hand at the same time what is that I know what is

[1:35:52] that it's it's some kind of glitch in your brain do you think that because you've been around some crazy people in your life you think some people are literally just born physically different and we just can't see it yeah I do I do yeah yeah crazy I think that's the only way you explain like an Elon Musk right is it oh that's what I was going to say so in Forbes last week they said he's worth $446 billion now he's not just the richest man in the world he's the richest man in the world by 100% outside

[1:36:25] of Saudi Arabia and Vladimir Putin yeah cuz we don't really know we don't have any idea they're laughing over there for like 440 that's cute yeah that's right that is right so optically not the best that maybe he's the kind of guy in charged with it but the idea of what they're doing I think is a good is music to both of our ears right now do you think that could go I mean I love the idea of slashing the waste right me too do you think it could do you think that there are things

[1:36:57] that he won't get access to from maybe an intelligence perspective or something like that that could lead to him accidentally slashing some things that we actually do need probably not because I think if that were to be the case people like John Ratcliffe and Tulsa gabard would go to the president and say listen just between us there's this operation there's this you know program it needs to be protected and they would be okay well

[1:37:29] that's the other question that I was going to ask you you just siphon right into it someone like Tulsi gabard I like Tulsi from what what I've heard so you're a fan too I am a fan I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago what why do you like her she's got guts first of all she's qualified which is which is wonderful yeah and she's got the guts to stand up to people she stood up to the DNC she stood up to the Democratic leadership in congress she's a lieutenant colonel in

[1:37:59] the Army I guess now it's the Army Reserve um but oh I mean that all of that is good what I what I was also thinking is that she's a supporter of transparency she supported uh uh Ed Snowden she's been supportive of Julian Assange she said a couple nice things about me I don't know her well enough to actually you know ask her for a favor or anything but i' I've met once or twice we can work on that I hope so I've tried I've reached out a number of times we'll get working thank

[1:38:30] God now I won't say it on the air but anyway we protect our friends in New Jersey we got you don't worry thank you so I'm I'm optimistic I love that so many important Democrats accuse her of being a Russian St f a Syrian stoe why did they say this because she bucks the official DNC line yeah you know she went to she went to Syria and met with Bashar al-assad

[1:39:01] good he's a leader yeah he's a leader I want people to be meeting with I mean back then when he was still in Syria I wanted them to meet with Bashar al-assad and also when the United States said when Barack Obama said Bashar alassad gassed his own people we gave him this red line we said don't cross then he gassed his own people well there were 12 uh United Nations whistleblowers that say that that gas attack did not come from the Syrian government it came and these were the inspectors who were on the ground they said it came from

[1:39:31] Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda uh fired that Al-Qaeda uhhuh but remember we're friends with al-Qaeda in Syria we just sent a whole delegation from the state department to meet with the new leader of Syria who's Al-Qaeda and and the co-founder of Isis by the way and we lifted the $10 million Bounty that we had on his head so it interfered with our with our plans all right we got to take this Rabbit Hole real quick we'll come back to Tulsi because you just took a Middle

[1:40:03] Road and what I mean by that is when this Syria conversation comes up we've done a lot of podcasts where it gets discuss in one way or the other Joby Warick wrote a great book on it that has more of the you know Assad did it point and he lays out a lot of good evidence for that people cook him for it all the time and try to say it's [ __ ] but like he's going with what he knows the two arguments though are that Assad did it or then the saers argument of like oh no the CIA did it which I I've never seen good evidence for that but you're say you just took a Middle Road and you

[1:40:34] said another Rogue element yeah may have done this and you know I got to tell you may maybe I'm glassing glossing over it in my memory but I don't remember reading about at any point whistleblowers yeah these opcw whistle came out yeah and they all ended up getting fired but they're the ones that said that it was Al-Qaeda it was the nusra front that did it yeah what was what was their evidence of that they were on the ground testing and they said that there was no evidence that a missile had been launched from the Syrian side from the Syrian government

[1:41:04] side so this is after it gets done obviously they're going through the residue and and what what reason would Assad have to to to turn to chemical weapons especially after he had specifically been told by the United States that this was a red line which turned out to be [ __ ] anyway we didn't do anything that's right like better not cross this line okay you crossed it well then you better not cross this new line come on Barack Obama yeah Obama we've talked about that a bunch Obama I've mixed emotions on

[1:41:37] that one because first of all that was a really stupid thing to say MH secondly afterwards he had to try to like clean that up politically after it was all said and done at home and that was messy how he did that however you know what it's like when your pride gets hit oh yeah you know he said something stupid he should have never [ __ ] said that's right and his pride was like [ __ ] you we're gonna bomb him yeah which would have started a new war and there was because the Russians were already based there yeah exactly I I wasn't even going to go there but that's just another layer to it and he apparently

[1:42:09] the way I understand it is that he did there was a work around here where he didn't have to go to Congress to get pass to take certain action that would have started a war he could have effectively like said I'm I said red line I'm protect my pride and at the last minute now he thought Congress was going to agree with him he was very wrong about that but he said [ __ ] it let's do it right let's put it through Congress they voted like 400 to 100 against it or something whatever it was something like that against it and he couldn't do it and I at least respect the fact that once he had the L he

[1:42:42] didn't he moved on double the L that's right that's right I agree would have been bad to get involved in something there but we kind of you know if it wasn't Syria we still did with what ended up happening with Isis because of what was born in a lot of there too MH have you ever been to Syria no uh oh wasn't on my list of vacation spots it's one of the most fabulous places I've ever that's what I hear but not in my life abely amazing no no it's too dangerous it's probably going to remain too dangerous for a long

[1:43:13] time friendliest people best food incredible history I mean you know you go to Greece you see the you see the Parthenon you go to Rome you see the Coliseum you go to Syria you go to Damascus and the stuff that you're looking at is mentioned in the bible yes that's how old it is so much hisory W I loved it loved every minute of it what do you think's going to happen there um in the near term nothing good okay in the longer term I could

[1:43:45] see slow development they've been racked by War for so long I don't think anybody wants more war at this at this point um the the unknown is that the Iranians and the Russians were humiliated by what happened with Assad it happened so quickly you know I remember I remember um it was exactly one week seven days before Assad was overthrown he and his family got on a

[1:44:17] plane and went to Moscow and people started saying oh my God he's running away he's running to Moscow but then he returned the next day to Damascus but he left his family in Moscow and then that same plane made three more trips to Moscow over the course of the week presumably to take out money and artwork and personal effects and Furniture whatever and then at the end of that week he went back to Moscow and stayed so this was a humiliation for the

[1:44:47] Russians because they had military bases there including a major Naval base and remember the day he was overthrown the Russians made this announcement that they hoped that the new government of Syria would respect Russian bases in Syria ah they just ran right over the bases yeah and took them more importantly than than you know Russian embarrassment is this was the Iranian pipeline to Hezbollah and then by extend by extension to to Hamas so the Iranian

[1:45:22] weapons and and cash and all the stuff that the Iranians were sending went across Northern Iraq uh and across Syria and then from Syria to Lebanon and then you know there's through a more informal pipeline from Syria to Jordan to Hamas or Syria to Lebanon to Hamas and it's gone now like like that just like that it's gone and at the same time the Israelis essentially decapitated hez balah they killed Hassan nalah three days later

[1:45:54] they killed the guy who replaced tassan Masa and now there's a guy nobody ever heard of and half of his uh his Fighters have been killed or wounded so for a while there's going to be pretty much no Hezbollah not meaningfully and Syria's Syria's economy though that's a wreck it's been a wreck because essentially I I was talking to this guy on the phone that we trying to get in for a podcast who met with a in like 2012 he's a Syrian wow and told

[1:46:26] him what was going to happen here you know if he didn't change his ways or whatever the [ __ ] you told him yeah so we're working on getting him in here he has to get like approval to do it so we'll see if that Happ that would be exciting yeah it would be really cool he's he's very very smart but you know what he's saying is that yeah the whole economy is run on I always forget the name of the [ __ ] drug what's it called again alessie captagon it's run on that captagon drug oh you haven't heard heard about this so Capon is like this meth like club drug or something

[1:46:59] and Assad transferred basically the Syrian economy into a captagon trafficking economy wow that pushes it you know all over Europe and stuff like that where it's used and Joby when he was at the border of Syria like last fall they were they were watching all the trucks come across with with with the Capon so what this guy I talked to on the phone from Syria was saying is he's like that's absolutely correct the issue is that it's kind of a

[1:47:30] self-fulfilling prophecy because the US put so many sanctions on Syria as a result of something allegedly very bad you know with the with the chemical weapons that it cut them off from so much of the world that this is how they have to stay afloat MH sure sanctions are going to come back to bite us yeah you know I think that American San stions are what led to the creation of bricks I was in I was can you expain yeah um the bricks countries Brazil um

[1:48:01] uh Russia India China South Africa and then they've added a couple they've added Iran and South Korea and a couple of others um when I was in China last year uh I was there for a week for a conference and I was struck by how few places took uh MasterCard and Visa that doesn't surprise me well they took this card called Panda card and everybody had these panda cards so I

[1:48:32] asked one of the shopkeepers what is this Panda card and his explanation was so like right on he said with visa and MasterCard because they're American companies all transactions are rooted through New York right and so even if the transaction Only Hits New York for a tenth the second it's still considered to be a us transaction so if the US government imposes sanctions we can't make that transaction but what we did is we

[1:49:03] created Panda card where all the transactions go through Shanghai which is their banking center and so if the Americans put sanctions on us he said we don't care we don't need visa and MasterCard we have Panda card wow uhhuh well now not only are the bricks countries um merging their their economies they're talking about a unified um uh currency like the Euro well if they have a EUR unified currency American sanctions going to be

[1:49:35] worthless and what do you think that is a real threat to overtake the dollar I do yeah last year for the very first time China bought a shipment of oil from Kuwait and paid for it in Yuan instead of dollars never happened before and we went back to the quades and we raised all kinds of hell and they're like look what are we going to do they're a major Global power this is how they wanted to pay for it yeah and it's because we sanction everybody I remember

[1:50:07] still being at the agency and and the treasury Department had announced new sanctions on Iran and I remember saying to a colleague how many more sanctions could there possibly be yeah like haven't we sanctioned them in in every facet of their economy self-fulfilling prophecy man yeah that's exactly it I'm not saying the intentions are always evil or something like that it's just people get it's the eye for an eye people get carried away with it and it's like you're going to make the problem worse and we should see that now we're

[1:50:37] going to talk about the Russia Ukraine thing a little later I I I don't want to jump to that because I I do want to keep my promise and come back to to the gabard thing because there's there's there's an important Point here that I keep thinking about in my head cuz I like her too and I don't [ __ ] know her I hope she's cool but you know she's qualified as you said she understands how this world works all that's true and let's say it's also true that she's a great person has great intentions she is still just like the president by the way which should say something about the problem with the

[1:51:08] system she is still technically at the mercy as a dni or D is it DCI or dni dni dni right she is still technically at the mercy of the people who read her in on things yeah she's not out there in the field you're if they're in offices at these different agencies and they're like we're not telling this [ __ ] this stuff and I'll go one further than that oh please um there are what 18 19 U intelligence uh agencies in the US government I forget what the the latest

[1:51:38] the latest numbers that we know of almost all of them are um are DOD agencies right Army intelligence Air Force Navy Marine Corps Dia DARPA NSA they're all components of the defense department M so she doesn't have jurisdiction over them Secretary of Defense she has no jurisdiction zero the only thing she controls is the budget she controls two important things the the intelligence Community budget and the president's

[1:52:09] Daily Brief which was just in the last couple of years transferred from the CIA to the odni that's it but again it's what they feed her in that too yeah you're right you're right and it would be easy to cut her out because then they could say if called on it well the secretary's briefed we report the Secretary of Defense so he's briefed we don't need to brief her now she has a little bit more sway at the CIA but not really I mean there was a listen in in

[1:52:40] the Obama Administration there was this huge fight because Obama announced that he was going to start making NSA officials and Dia officials station Chiefs overseas okay and John Brennan said I will resign if you do that that would have been nice it would have been nice would have been good for me yeah um and Obama backed off so it's just CIA officers that are station Chiefs

[1:53:10] overseas most most places around the world don't have anybody from NSA or Dia or anywhere else it's just CIA but he was trying to make it a truly intelligence community position right it's supposed to be but it's not never has been um with Tuli that's going to be her bureaucratic fight is remaining relevant at the CIA because if you look at the at the wiring diagram she's technically above the CIA director but

[1:53:42] in practice that's right it's more of a dotted line and they're on the same line yeah that's what I worry about because it's like I I'm with you I worry about it too it might not be her fault that she ends up completely ineffective and it's it's a waste you know and like I that's another double-sided double coin problem right here you point out with the Brennan argument to Obama I can't believe I'm going to steal man John Brennon but like I understand why he would want it to stay his people just

[1:54:14] because I've heard all the stories from you and everyone else and we can read our history books about the inter agency High School drama that happens God but at the same time given the CIA all the power to make these decisions and say well we saw what we saw don't worry about it right and these other agencies then get rendered less effective at their job too we used to laugh at these other agencies we used to laugh that the joke was the only reason that NSA and Dia existed was as a pipeline for for people uh to apply to the CIA or as

[1:54:45] somewhere to go when you couldn't get hired by the CIA I just had a guy in here who Matt hedger who did four years at NSA and then they pulled him to be a knock at CIA I have deep respect for the Knox that's hard work I do too that is hard work he really he's different and he's psychologically different too and he explain like they look for different things in that kind of job than they do to hire you or L Deon right but he can there were a lot of people are like oh

[1:55:16] this is the fakest [ __ ] ever bro he was brought to me by Shaunie Delaney and backed by Jim Lawler and he and he was also I like Jim Lawler a lot Jim's a Jim's a good guy Sol guy probably still in the CIA but you know Julian I'm not in the CIA I'm like the [ __ ] you are Jim but you know this guy the other thing we I don't think we said this on the first podcast with Matt because he has to come back we got cut off he had a flight but he got doxed on the dark web by a foreign Intel service that's the only

[1:55:46] reason he can talk cuz he was he was known publicly they had to pull him out like he's actually one guy who was like yo I'm not still at CIA and I'm like think I believe you you know I worked for a former knock and he had been outed by Al James yeah yeah Ames outed a whole bunch of people and they had to all be brought in crazy because these guys that I I'm glad there's someone that can do that I couldn't do I couldn't do it oh my God the things that he said he saw couldn't

[1:56:17] do it I'm I'm told that that's what amiris fox Kennedy did she was a knock really yeah she was a uh an international art consultant makes sense uhhuh a lot of money in that a lot of money a lot of hidden money in that a lot of money laundering in that yes that's what's fascinating about that Leonardo one because I'm like all these rich people they got their own little world you know a a friend of mine who uh works for the uh Treasury Department told me that systems are pretty good right now to the point where there are

[1:56:47] only three ways to really launder money and really get away with it he said Fine Art real estate and race horses that's it yeah makes sense we had when I when I worked at Merill in in my initial career on Wall Street you know we work with these ultra high net worth people right and it was funny because there was one situation where you know whenever we needed access to anything we had people for that right and we were like the quarterbacks and we bring them in and there was one situation I'll just say it involved cuz

[1:57:19] you know it's privacy kind of things it involved art and so it was Big Art and I didn't know [ __ ] about [ __ ] with this and so you know I'm just following along this was my boss running this one and I'm just kind of watching and we brought in the main art guy and I put two and two together later I'm pretty sure it's the dude who was the main expert in that lost Leonardo documentary because he was the head of Bank of America's trust department for Fine Art and I couldn't remember the guy's name cuz I never met with him but like I remember those conversations with

[1:57:49] my boss where I'm just asking him questions not even about case we were working on but like what people do with this she's like dude wow even I like look at this with like it has 10 heads because people they you just declare a value on something yeah yeah it's so nobody knows you don't know it's worth what somebody's willing to pay you for it yeah and then you can it it you the downstream effects of that on how you Sosh around money I mean anyone out there you don't have to like get in the in the weeds with that it's exactly what

[1:58:20] it looks like right so this lady was a knock doing consulting for all like the richest people and I wonder what that she could find with that yeah she was supposed to be the deputy CIA director and um two weeks ago and Tom Cotton uh that that clown act from he's a statist yeah he's a big time statist neocon from Arkansas he said absolutely not why he just doesn't like her how why does he know her like that

[1:58:53] he wanted to be the CIA director Tom Cotton did yeah and he wanted to be CIA director in Trump's first term and got passed over for Pompeo so um I think there's a little bit of bitterness there and he's a young guy he's only what in his early 40s maybe yeah something like that and um and here's this this upstart woman who you know happens to be married to Bobby Kennedy's son and she was the campaign manager and why did she get to be the deputy CIA director something should have gone to me right so he um he sent

[1:59:27] word to the White House that he would filibuster her appointment and so the president did something that was just so smart he named her Deputy National Security adviser which is a way more important job because the CIA director reports to the National Security adviser right so now her title is Deputy National Security adviser I think for counter no it's not for counterterrorism because that's Seb Gorka who I have serious

[1:59:57] problems with would you care to elaborate oh my God does anyone not have a problem with that guy I have a personal problem and I have a professional problem well I'm your psychiatrist shoot John well the professional problem is that he wears his father's Nazi party lapel pin I've seen that it's he's not a Neo-Nazi he's an actual Nazi from Nazi Hungary hard to deny that when you're wearing that also

[2:00:28] um the children of Hungarian Nazis use the letter L as a middle initial they they have two middle initials they're given middle initial and they put the letter L and when he signs documents he adds the L which is [ __ ] up that's crazy so are you a Nazi or are you an American right it bothers me very much we shouldn't have in fact he he was only on the National Security Council for 30 days in the in the first term because

[2:01:00] the FBI is like the guy's a Nazi we can't give him a security clearance and you can't have us you can't have the job of you know what was a deputy National Security adviser or senior senior director for counterterrorism and not have a security clearance so they got rid of him well now he's back and and Trump has ordered that the FBI give him his security clearance okay number one number two I was trying to get a pardon from Trump in the first term and I hired a republican lobbyist to help me she calls

[2:01:31] me one day and she says Seb Gorka is coming out with a book and there is a party at the Trump Hotel and we're going to have dinner at his house afterwards so she says I want you to come and I said but why why would I ask Sebastian Gorka to help me yeah like what what reach does he have and she said he's the only non-trump family member that Trump follows on Twitter at time yeah you told me keep going you told me the story good

[2:02:03] so I said okay she says we want him to tweet at the president pardon John kiraku and then she says bring your checkbook and I said oh it's going to be one of those nights and she said yeah he's going to ask you for $2,000 and I said all right I said I I've been in Washington long enough I'll that yeah I know how the game is played I'll give him to,000 to tweet cheap date so I go to Trump and um and he's you know handing out his book whatever it was I don't even remember and everybody like every

[2:02:34] elected Republican in Washington is there it was kind of a big deal and so she takes me up to him she says she says Seb this is John kyaku I told you about him and he says with that British accent I want to smack right out of his face so you're the chap who wants me to tweet and I said if you're so inclined and he says well you're coming to dinner tonight and I said yes we'll see at your house we'll go to the house afterwards and uh he pulls me aside and

[2:03:05] he says so you want me to tweet what pardon John kyaku and I said yes and he says give me $5,000 I said $5,000 for a tweet and he said yeah give me $5,000 I said you know I've been in Washington for 40 years and I'm not a babe in the woods I know how it's played but I'm not going to be shaken down by you or by anybody else and I walked out good for you I like those stories I don't have any respect for the guy at

[2:03:36] all and I honestly I have no idea what Trump sees in him I I also like when I hear stuff like that it get it so confuses me because the guy wears the Nazi lapel type pin you're telling me he signs his name with like I'm I'm unaware of that symbolism but I believe you and he loves Trump who's like buddies with Israel yeah very confusing we've never in our history had a more pro-israel president and then just a couple of weeks ago maybe it was more than a

[2:04:07] couple maybe it was a month ago just before the inauguration he made this big announcement that I am a Zionist he said it's accepted yeah but you're wearing a Nazi party lapel pin people are confused these days John they don't know what a gender is anymore well that's true too he's he's he's political fluid yeah that's right there will be a lot of that yeah there's going to be a lot of that but the the thing that we're looking at with some of these people that Trump's putting in is like the the transparency angle which we're laying out some of the issues that could happen there with

[2:04:37] someone like gabard but then there's also these pop culture and also National Security related type things that people are concerned about there's two things I want to hit on here because I am cynical about both of them and if you can correct that I would love that first one is the J k thing yeah so they're saying Trump so far is keeping his promise on that and he's saying he's ordering the release yes he said last time and I've seen Pompeo talked about this he said Mike Pompeo is the one who stopped it because like names and addresses or something like that but I actually

[2:05:09] cynically unfortunately agree with the people like Andy boo Deonte who say even if they were involved those documents would have been destroyed right after it happened or never created and so we're not really going to find out most likely is that what that's what you think I think I think Andy's correct um we're talking about well let's let's back up Congress passed a law in 1992 mandating the release of documents having to do with the JFK assassination

[2:05:39] the RFK assassination and the Martin Luther King assassination 1992 and every year the CIA Whispers in the president's ear and says sources and methods Security National Security 911 you can't release it and president after president after president um blocks the release so many of us were very hopeful in Trump's first term that it would finally come out now it's going to come out he's

[2:06:12] serious this time he made the final decision it's coming out and I think it's like they have 30 days to release the JFK and 60 days for the RFK and the MLK um I was talking to a guy at the National Security archive which is at George Washington University and they're the ones that usually take um custody of these Declassified documents it it's a hub for people working on phds or for journalists working on um stories where they need access to original CIA documents sure so I said to him the

[2:06:42] other day tell me if I'm wrong but I'm going to make an educated guess and I'm going to guess that these documents are going to be either documents that have already been released but were more heavily redacted in the past they're going to be less redacted this time and they're probably going to be about CIA surveillance activities in Mexico City in October and November of 1963 and he said I think that's exactly what it's going to be it's not going to be a Smoking Gun it's not going to tell

[2:07:13] tell us who killed Kennedy it may be moderately interesting to a handful of phds who have followed this stuff for years but we're not going to learn anything new from these documents I'm a little bit more hopeful about RFK and MLK why well because there are more clear-cut questions that have never been answered in those killings um RFK to me is the is the most interesting and I don't mean to sound like a you know tin tin foil hat person I'm not you you know

[2:07:45] on your head yeah you know me I'm I'm a straight shooter but um sirun sir was was convicted of of killing Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles he did have a great name I have to give him that s s yeah it's a good name I'm ashamed that he's Greek Orthodox yeah it's a great name it's long been a source of pain for many of us in the Greek Orthodox I know so um he had a revolver that that held seven uh rounds and eight bullets were

[2:08:17] recovered and in addition to that a forensic investigation an auditory investigation conducted in 1993 found that there were between 10 and 13 shots that were fired Thomas naguchi who was the um coroner the Los Angeles County Coroner at the time and famous famous nationally yes um determined that the kill shot came at the back of the head at the top of the neck um from a distance of 1 to three

[2:08:47] inches but Sirhan was in front of Kennedy so how did the kill shot come from behind Magic Bullet Magic Bullet just like JFK yeah at the same time there was a security guard by the name of uh Cesar who was a uh white supremacist his name was Cesar I know and he was a white supremacist pretty dog on ironic confusing yeah so he hated Bobby Kennedy and he told a reporter afterwards that the reason he hated Kennedy was that if elected that Kennedy

[2:09:18] was going to bring all of the and the into government like his brother did sorry no no you're good I we got to mark that um there was a video that the National Geographic Channel uh found in the 90s where you see Cesar in the very back of the kitchen and he reaches into his waistband and he pulls out a gun and then you hear bang bang bang bang bang bang bang and he puts the gun back in his belt so the reporter asked him did

[2:09:48] you did you shoot Robbie uh Bobby Kennedy and he said no I was going to mhm so that one too sorry oh yeah yeah you're good sorry I got to do that you it's yeah YouTube It's brutal so um how many shooters were there uh that's one question how many shooters were there and who were they so he ended up being polygraphed by the FBI and he passed the polygraph he did

[2:10:20] not shoot Kennedy he wanted to he intended to but he didn't which isn't a crime MH that's right that was number one number two was Siran Siran has been utterly inconsistent about that night when first arrested he said he did it he was proud that he did it and that he did it with 20 years of malice of forethought his words because of Kennedy's support for Israel and he's

[2:10:52] Palestinian then he said but he's Greek Orthodox yeah a lot of Palestinians are Christians and most of them are Greek Orthodox some are Catholic right yeah so he later said I didn't do it and then still later he said I may have done it I just don't remember and then later yet he said I suppose I could have done it but I don't have any memory of it well we also learned 20 years after the fact fact that he may have participated when

[2:11:25] he was in college in um a medical experiment that turned out to be a component of MK Ultra and so we don't really know the answers to these questions I'm hopeful that there will be some answers now the FBI said two weeks ago oh my goodness we just found another 1,800 pages of documents related to the RFK

[2:11:55] assassination that we didn't know existed they were in this guy's desk since 1968 seriously can you imagine working in a place like that the CIA at least will admit well we destroyed all the doents the old school way yeah the old school way that's what we did in the old days yeah like when they told Gina haspel don't destroy the torture tapes and she goes back and puts them in a grind yeah so maybe we get more on RFK I hope

[2:12:28] so and then what about MLK because that's FBI that's FBI I know they're your favorite agency yeah and and RFK is FBI as well for the most part except MK Ultra yeah yeah I heard MK Ultra I'm not thinking FBI would you say that MK uh FBI Visa V two or more Shooters okay MLK is fascinating to me um I always believed that James RL Reay killed Martin Luther King and then I decided if if I'm going to have an opinion it needs to be an educated

[2:12:59] opinion so I'm going to read everything I can get my hands on about Martin Luther King's killing and I think that if James R Reay killed him he was to use Lee Harvey Oswald's word he was a py yeah cuz look at it this way here's a guy who was drunk all the time time all the time he just had a well documented lifelong drinking problem and he decided he's going to

[2:13:29] kill Martin Luther King and so he goes to a boarding house that is a full block away from the hotel where Martin Luther King was the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was staying this boarding house was a Rundown Flea bag place the rooms didn't have bathrooms there was one bathroom at the end of the hall and the bathroom at the end of the hall had a window in the shower one of these long narrow windows

[2:14:01] that had a view of the Lorraine so we're supposed to believe that this drunk guy with a 40-year-old rifle sat in a public bathroom all day long nobody ever noticed him and then he hits the perfect shot from a block away come on seriously now couple that

[2:14:32] with what we know for 100% fact that the FBI tried to get Martin Luther King to commit suicide two years earlier they sent him a a letter an anonymous letter that purported to be from uh an anti-king African-American man saying you're a disgrace to the black people you should do the only honorable thing you know and by all accounts he laughed he was like J that was never going to work yeah like come on we know that we

[2:15:03] have people who say that about us I know right you know how many death threats I've gotten oh my god um but uh they said we're going to tell your wife that you cheat on her it's like go ahead knows I cheat on common knowledge my friend yeah so he just dismissed it but the hatred of King at the FBI was was enough in the' 60s that make people think perhaps they did it perhaps they set him up perhaps they worked with with

[2:15:34] James Earl Reay we don't know and we don't really have any idea what these documents might be and why they've been classified if this is a if this is a criminal act nothing should be classified yeah right he didn't have you know an elected office he didn't have a security clearance he didn't have access to classified information he's just you know he he's a a preacher and a civil rights leader so why would that case be classified in the first place so I'm kind of excited about what that release

[2:16:05] is going to be and you think we could really get something there I think there's a chance that some of these big questions might get answered and you don't think James R re could have floated around in a bathroom for a lot of hours you did believe like an hour ago that maybe someone had fished the [ __ ] of Abraham Lincoln out of a toilet after he got shot so you know it was thinking I admit it it was wishful thinking you know I remember I was a little kid and James R Reay escaped from prison and I remember watching the news

[2:16:37] with my folks and being shocked at the people being interviewed who were saying well I hope he comes to my house cuz I'll hide him I'll hide him he's a hero oh my God and my parents just being like appalled that people in America that's wild yeah it's crazy that's I think I must have been like eight or nine years old still like you would think at that point people would move on with life yeah move on seriously crazy wow what

[2:17:09] about the other one though you know what one I'm going to ask about which one the files the ones that were just magically shut from everyone at the end of 2021 at the end of Gan Max trial oh that you know I almost forgot about that talk about literally no reason to be classified thank you guys for watching the episode before you leave please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video it's a huge help and also if you're over on Instagram be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my

[2:17:41] personal page at Julian D Dory both links are in the description below finally if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes use the Julian Dory podcast playlist Link in the description below thank you
