Title: Former CIA Agent John Kiriakou Turned Whistleblower Talk
Show: LA Progressive
Date: 2021-10-17
URL: https://youtu.be/NiAb3oiaZ58
Duration: 50:00

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[00:02] so hi john uh we're dick price and sharon kyle from la progressive we've produced la progressive social justice magazine for 13 years and we're so glad that you're uh willing to sit still for for an interview my way to do it thanks for the invitation great so by way of introduction for people who aren't totally familiar with your story for 14 years you served as a cia analyst and case officer which included

[00:33] leading the team that captured al-qaeda's abu zadata in pakistan in 2002 but then in 2007 three years after you resigned you became the first cia officer to publicly acknowledge that as ci that the cia used torture and its use was official official policy under the george w bush administration five years later in 2012 the obama administration filed espionage's charges against you you eventually pled guilty to violating

[01:04] the intelligence identities protection act by confirming the name of an officer involved in the infamous cia rendition program sentenced to 30 months in prison you were released in 2015 after serving almost two years and you've written several books about your various experiences all with great titles the reluctant spy my secret life in the cia's war on terror the convenient terrorists abu zubaydah and the weird wonderland of america's secret wars

[01:35] and doing time like a spy how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison and then sharon a little bit later wants to drill into your prison experiences you also wrote a series of letters uh entitled letters from loretto written from the prison in pennsylvania so uh as a first question given that we're we're working on uh the assange issues what parallels can you draw from your your treatment by the

[02:07] us government and its current treatment of uh julian assange i think that the u.s government specifically the justice department has learned lessons uh from a string of whistleblowers and they're not good lessons you know one of the very first whistleblowers post dan ellsberg that the cia and the justice department went after was tom drake from nsa and they charged tom with nine felonies including seven counts of

[02:37] espionage that case completely fell apart and they had to drop every one of those those felony charges they began charging um other whistleblowers in fact just during the obama administration there were eight of us that were charged under the espionage act and each one of those cases got a little stronger because the justice department learned from its previous mistakes and it learned a lot from the drake case so when it got for example

[03:07] to reality winner who uh was an nsa whistleblower and who was accused of of leaking one page of paper uh a classified analysis on russian involvement with the trump campaign she got five and a quarter years for leaking that one page of paper uh terry albury an fbi agent in minneapolis minnesota leaked a barely classified memo saying that there was systemic

[03:39] racism in the fbi's hiring and promotion process and got three and a half years in prison for that now this law the the uh espionage act was written in 1917 to combat german saboteurs during the first world war it's never been meaningfully updated and it was meant to go after uh uh spies real spies spies who steal secrets for foreign countries it was never meant to be an iron fist against

[04:09] journalists and against whistleblowers and that's where julian comes in this is the first time uh at least in the last 75 years that the us government has gone after a journalist a decorated journalist in this case using the espionage but not just the espionage act they've enlisted the help of of allies like the uk and ecuador and we learned recently spain uh

[04:41] to spy on him to keep him in what was essentially a solitary confinement in a in a situation that niels melser the u.n special rapporteur on torture calls torture and so what the justice department did to us whistleblowers they've done in spades to julian assange and they've coupled that with especially harsh treatment so what do you think the consequences for the public's right to know in

[05:11] journalism is this throwing a wet blanket or uh i mean it seems to be intended to scare the bejesus out of potential whistleblowers and and in the case of james and journalists who might talk to them yeah a cia officer told scott shane of the new york times after my uh my incarceration that the point wasn't to convict me of a crime it wasn't even to incarcerate me it was to scare the

[05:42] daylights out of anybody else who was considering blowing the whistle on waste fraud abuse or illegality and scott shane said that on the day of my arrest literally all of the new york times national security sources went silent and stayed silent for more than six months so that really is the point the point is to frighten people now in the case of julian it's more than that it's worse than that because this is a journalist doing his job as a journalist he's being prosecuted for journalism so if julian

[06:15] is found guilty under the espionage act then what's to keep this administration or the next one from finding a pulitzer prize-winning reporter from the new york times the washington post guilty of espionage for reporting on national security this is a very slippery slope and i i don't think i'm overstating it by saying that the constitution is in danger here at least the first amendment is so so given that threat to the first amendment amendment and to journalists in general why do you think the

[06:46] mainstream journalists and mainstream media are generally so quiet about your case jeffrey sterling's case julian assange i mean there are there are good articles i read a good article in the new yorker about you but i mean they're few and far between and and it's a direct threat to the first amendment and the journalism why are they quiet i actually asked a night ritter journalist why uh he was quiet and he said because julian assange is an

[07:16] activist not a journalist and i said maybe he's an activist but at the very least he's a publisher and wikileaks has never had to issue a correction uh or or apologize for saying something or publishing something that was incorrect and certainly the new york times and the washington post and others um have have landed huge scoops based on the information that julian assange has published uh you know i think that there's a root cause to all this though and that is uh

[07:47] the demise of investigative journalism in the united states these big outlets by and large don't have budgets anymore for real investigative journalism and so instead of developing sources inside the cia or nsa or the fbi they just go to the office of public affairs and i know some journalists who have told me to my face that they don't have the time or the money to develop these journalists they go to the office of public affairs and the office of public affairs has threatened them

[08:17] that if they publish anything that the cia doesn't like that they will be cut off forever and they won't have access to any information anymore and they just don't want to risk that at this stage of their careers they're willing just to do as they're told you know there's another thing too ken delanian who used to be a pretty prominent front page reporter for the los angeles times he's since moved on to uh nbc and msnbc he was caught a few years ago sending his articles to the cia for clearance

[08:51] before sending them to his own editor we know that thanks to jason leopold of buzzfeed who filed a freedom of information act request and caught ken delaney in red-handed that's not journalism uh that's that's fascism uh to tell you the truth it's authoritarianism it's bad for our democracy so uh it's reported that you still support the cia mission generally but you had a crisis in uh conscious oh that's not true okay so

[09:22] i've written extensively on on the fact that i i don't think that there ought to be a cia i've said as recently as a week ago that the the state department's bureau of intelligence and research does analysis that is at least as good as the cias nsa has far superiority over the cia in technical collection the pentagon's defense human services bureau uh runs human source

[09:53] intelligence and so the cia is redundant there's no reason to have a cia and then when it with a track record dating back to 1947 of of overthrowing governments and murdering world leaders and interfering in elections and abusing human rights i just don't see what good the organization is there's no reason for it to be around so when you um retire retired or when you left and was it 2004

[10:24] yes was it for these reasons [Music] in part uh you know when i got back from from pakistan in 2002 uh within days of my arrival back at headquarters i was asked if i wanted to be trained in the use of what they called enhanced interrogation techniques i had never heard that term before and i asked what it meant and the the cia officer who had pitched me explained what it was and i said man that sounds

[10:54] like a torture program that can't possibly be legal and very excitedly he said we're going to get rough with these guys and he claimed that it was legal it had been approved by the justice department and by the national security adviser and signed by the president all of which was true well i had a moral and ethical problem with it besides being pretty dark uncertain that this was illegal i don't care what the justice department said this is illegal and i can get into details why i believe

[11:25] that and i turned it down well that caused me to have uh to gain a nickname the human rights guy and i kind of chuckled the first time i heard it and my boss pulled me aside he said buddy that's not a compliment and then i got passed over for a promotion and i had just captured the number three in al qaeda with with these hands and i was passed over for promotion and i went and complained and and was

[11:57] told look and these were the exact words that the head of the cia's counterterrorism center used that i displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counter terrorism because i wouldn't torture up as a beta now i like to think i'm a student of history right i have a deep interest in it i read constantly and i knew that in 1946 we executed japanese soldiers who had waterboarded american prisoners of war we executed them that was a death

[12:28] penalty offense in january of 1968 the washington post ran a front-page photograph of an american soldier waterboarding a north vietnamese prisoner the day that that picture ran in the post robert mcnamara the infamous secretary of defense um ordered an investigation the soldier was arrested he was convicted of torture and sentenced to 20 years at leavenworth well the law never changed

[13:00] we changed so why was this a death penalty offense in 1946 and were there of worthy of 20 years in prison in 1968 but then in 2002 no i'd say it's perfectly fine you can do whatever you want well that's not the way the government works we're supposed to be a nation ruled by law a nation governed by the rule of law and so if you want to torture people then you're going to have to pass the law saying that it's okay to torture

[13:31] people because as things stand now torture is illegal and indeed if someone at the justice department wanted to pursue it you can be sentenced to death for it that was my objection one point and then alternatively so interestingly uh yesterday we saw a play called our man in santiago of a delightful play but it's about the assassination of salvador allende so sharon has some questions you bet yeah i want i my questions are going to

[14:03] be centered around um your prison experience and but first i want to ask you so your parents immigrated here uh from greece my grandparents did grandpa yep okay and so and you were raised in sharon pennsylvania uh yeah in nearby i was born in sharon and raised in nearby newcastle pennsylvania so i'm wondering um with being second generation america american and coming from the area of the country that you came from did you has your sense of america and

[14:35] our various systems changed in the past [Laughter] wow yes capital y capital e capital s uh you know western pennsylvania is it's blue dog country um everybody's registered democrat and they're all very conservative pro-labor pro-life pro-gun uh it was very heavily amish country so i grew up out in the styx and um

[15:05] my my grandparents were so grateful to be in this country and instilled in us such a sense of gratefulness that i only considered public service i didn't even think i didn't even consider going into you know business or banking or whatever i don't even know what i would do um outside of public service and then when this position at the cia present itself you know the cia pitched me i i didn't apply to the cia um

[15:36] i i saw it as a way to serve my country and a way to see the world which i really really wanted to do and i sought out a friend of a friend um i had a a friend in grad school whose boyfriend worked for the cia and um she's she set up a dinner for us because i had questions about human rights to tell you the truth and so um we had dinner in dc one night and he assured me that um things had changed with the church

[16:08] commission those changes had stuck uh those battle days were behind us blah blah blah you're gonna have a great experience there and i thought okay and i was naive i was what 23 years old and and so i accepted the job and then bill clinton became president and sure enough the agency initiated something called a cull where they went through the files of

[16:39] literally every source who had been recruited and if any source had a problem with human rights in his or her background they were um they were fired uh we used the word terminated but people are gonna make too much of that they were just fired and told that we just can't work with them anymore fully one-third of the cia's recruited assets were fired in that call and i remember saying to a colleague wow bill clinton is serious about human

[17:09] rights i got to tell you how happy i am about this i think i really made the right decision here and that held until september 11 2001 and things not just changed but changed to the point where we crossed a rubicon and there's no going back not until some point when members of the congressional oversight committees decide that their job really does

[17:40] include oversight you know frank church is dead otis pike is dead ted kennedy is dead and no one really took their places ideologically and so instead of oversteers on capitol hill we have committees that are made up of little more than cheerleaders i confronted ron wyden the democratic senator from oregon when i got home from prison and um i said you know senator i i frankly expected a little bit more support from you and he got very angry

[18:13] and he said look it takes all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance and i thought wow so that's what it's about they even control ron wyden all they have to do is threaten him say something we don't like and we're going to take your security clearance and how in the world are you going to serve on the oversight committee without a security clearance so my position right now is that there's no hope of reform at the cia it can't be

[18:43] reformed because it has so protected itself bureaucratically that no one from the outside can change it interesting interesting so your time in prison clearly based on my readings of your letters i gave you a deeper understanding of the so-called uh u.s correctional system right um for those who haven't read any of your letters do you want to talk about well for example your last letter where you you list 19 different things

[19:13] that you won't miss about prison and i thought it was somewhat striking that of those 19 it seemed to me that every single one of them had to do with staff with the exception of the pedophiles um yeah yeah i don't miss the pedophiles yeah uh one of the things that i that i learned very very quickly was the problem in prison and the danger in prison is from staff

[19:44] look the truth is and this is an ugly truth but the bureau of prisons is really nothing more than an employment agency for otherwise unemployable under educated uh [Music] yes these prisons are in the place where the nearest town is this is oftentimes the only employer in town and if you're

[20:16] somebody who has gotten out of the military and got thrown out of the police academy or just couldn't cut it in the police academy where else are you going to work where else are you going to work where the only qualifications are a ged and no felony convictions that's literally the only qualifications to be a prison guard in the federal bureau of prisons seriously a ged and no felony convictions and then you know you give people a badge and a stick and you've created a

[20:48] monster a monster that that was one thing that i learned very very quickly another thing you know everybody knows this joke that you know everybody's in everybody in prison is innocent right i was shocked at the number of people that i would have concluded were innocent or people who were guilty of some minor crime and then drew sentences you know for example

[21:19] um i had been in prison about a year and a new prisoner showed up um in the visitor room and the only reason i noticed him was that he was covered in tattoos from his neck to his toes his hands even the palms of his hands completely totally covered in tattoos he turned out to be a very nice guy and he was from right there in the area he he was born and raised within 20 miles of the prison and every single weekend his wife would

[21:51] come with their four daughters little girls like between 5 and 12. and they loved their dad and they would take turns sitting on his lap and he he was so kind to them and sweet to them so finally one day i went up to him and introduced myself and um in the course of conversation i asked him do you mind if i ask you what you're in for and he said yeah i got caught i got caught uh taking a car load of weed from

[22:22] pennsylvania to ohio he he ran a a heating and air conditioning business that he had built himself it wasn't doing well most of the houses in pennsylvania don't have air conditioning it's not hot enough and so um he thought he'd make some extra money by taking a little bit of weed across the state line well that's a federal crime and it's and it's uh transportation they gave him 20 years in prison 20 years so not only

[22:56] does he have the obvious cost of not watching his girls grow up they're all going to be married and gone by the time he gets out of prison but the government's actions put a dozen people out of work he employed a dozen people and i had to ask rhetorically is society better off with him locked up in a cage are we safer as a country with him in a cage it just doesn't make any sense to me now the pedophiles i understand the

[23:27] pedophiles are dangerous right and i i met you know a serial killer i met a contract killer there are a lot of bad dangerous people who need to be in prison but but people in on drug sentences i mean i know it would be a mammoth undertaking but honestly i feel like every single person in america who is in prison on a drug charge should have a sentence review because this is ridiculous you know i'll fall back on these very

[23:58] well-known statistics that the washington post published we have five percent of the world's population here in the united states and we have 25 percent of the world's prison population and there is no justification for that whatsoever i i did my own little study for a piece that i wrote a couple of years ago and i found that congress creates 50 new crimes every year not laws they don't pass 50 new laws they create 50 new felonies every single year they've done this for

[24:29] the last 20 years where a year ago there was some action that was perfectly legal that this year is a felony that is a thousand new felonies in the last 20 years this is an excuse we can't continue living like this it's not absolutely wow so um the letters that you wrote were so open and honest did you i mean based on knowing thank

[25:01] you that your your your letters were read you know by the staff did you fear retribution i mean they didn't die thank you you know it all started as an accident um one of my attorneys jessalyn radak uh the day that i left uh for prison she said to me look when you get on your feet and you feel comfortable send me a letter and i'll circulate it among there were like 600 people that

[25:32] had signed up for a mailing list that just wanted to know how i was doing so i said okay so about six weeks later i felt all right i feel like i know what i'm doing here i'm gonna write a letter and just tell everybody i'm doing fine and tell them what some of the experiences are like so i wrote that first what i called letter from loretto and i did to honor martin luther king and his uh letter from birmingham

[26:02] jail so um so i wrote this thing and i gave two i told two stories i gave two examples of staff malfeasance not thinking that people don't do that right you don't call out staff so i called them out and um and i sent it to jessalyn and she put it on the mailing list but i didn't know that jessalyn was friends with ariana huffington and so she sent it to ariana who put it

[26:33] like this banner headline on the huffington post and it went completely crazy i got two million hits that first week i ended up giving interviews to jake tapper came um came to the prison to interview me and i gave an interview to playboy and npr and the atlantic monthly and oh my god i can't even remember but it it went everywhere all the three broadcasts the four broadcast networks and cnn fox and msnbc it just went

[27:05] everywhere and i could tell one day like people are looking at me and you know giving me the thumbs up and i'm like yeah okay but that thought that was weird and then finally one of the guards the female guard pulled me aside and she said have i ever been rude to you and i said no i i don't think we've ever had any interaction so you're not talking about me in that thing i said what thing and she said that letter you wrote i

[27:36] said the letter from loretto she said yes i said how have you seen that and she says everybody in america has seen it i said what are you talking about and so she allowed me into the guard booth and showed me on the internet and i thought oh my god but and of course i get called to the warden's office and he wants to know the names of the of the guards and i said what you want me to do your job for you now too i said i'm not a rat

[28:06] i said you know let me have my my to speak my piece but i'm not ratting anybody out i never used any names never and so um the more i thought about it the more that i realized that if i could remain that public it would protect me from them because they knew that i had access to the media you know it's funny one of the things that i did after i had been there about six months

[28:38] um sorry i'm just checking the gate i keep getting these texts saying that we're boarding and we're not boarding so i don't go no no one of the things that i did after i'd been there about six months was to file a freedom of information act request on myself with the bureau of prisons just out of curiosity and i got back about uh 200 pages and 90 of it was garbage it was just my visitors list and my health records and stuff like that but then there were about six pages that were

[29:09] clearly marked at the top and the bottom of each page foia exempt do not release to inmate so either they're so stupid in the freedom of information act office that they can't read or somebody took pity on me and decided that i had a right to see this stuff so what it was was it was it was memos from the warden to the staff before i got there warning them that i had access to the media and one of them was just it was

[29:39] one sheet and in these huge block letters it said warning inmate has access to the media and so uh yeah and so i realized that that they were far more afraid of me than i was of them um they did try to shut me down a couple of times they tried to rip my desk off the wall but i had heard a rumor that they were going to do it so i paid a guy a bag of tuna fish to strip the the screws and sure enough two hours later

[30:11] they came and tried to yank it off and they just couldn't get their drill to to uh get the screws out and um there were a couple that i had to smuggle i had to smuggle out which was a little bit difficult that drove them crazy but you know most of those letters all i did was i just put them in an envelope and sent them that was it um i would send one to my lawyer in legal mail which they're not allowed to search they're not allowed to search anything you send to a journalist

[30:42] so i would send one to uh jane hampshire at uh shadow proof it used to be called firedoglake.com one to my lawyer one to my wife um one to my publisher because i wanted to turn it into a book later and so they just couldn't figure out how i was getting them out and i allowed them to think that i had this sophisticated smuggling operation going in fact i was just put an envelope and put a stamp on it and sent it

[31:12] wow so it's sort of ironic it appears that the systems of of corruption within the prison system almost paralleled what was going on at the cia in terms of not wanting the media you know not wanting to put light on what's oh yeah the the parallels were striking they really were i mean at a jv kind of level but um

[31:43] but yeah you know we've got the uh commissary right the commissary has an across-the-board 30 markup and that 30 is supposed to be used to buy athletic equipment books for the library things like that well instead and i know this because i filed a freedom of information act request instead they took the thirty percent um we didn't get any athletic equipment or books for the library and instead it bought them workout equipment and a large screen tv

[32:14] for the for the guards lounge well you know what that's illegal you can't do that uh but that kind of petty corruption is is a way of life there one one guard got caught that they fired him he deserved it he got caught um he just backed up his pickup truck to the commissary and loaded a thousand dollars worth of groceries into the back of his pickup truck and just drove home you you can't do that you know that's grand theft

[32:46] so so early in this interview you talked about how the cia is um it's redundant and it shouldn't exist how do you feel about the prison abolition movement uh i support a lot of what the prison abolition movement um stands for i i do not support the complete abolition of prisons i i learned that there are some very very dangerous people in prison

[33:16] there are people with severe untreatable mental illness psychosis anti-social personality disorders there are a lot of sociopaths and psychopaths people who are genuinely dangerous but you know why does no other country have the same kind of car cereal problems that we do why does no other country have the kind of recidivism that we do you know look if you take a guy

[33:47] out of some terrible neighborhood and you charge him with a drug crime and you put him in prison for 10 years or 15 or 20 years you provide him no programming you don't teach him to be a plumber or a mechanic or an electrician and then you let him out what do you think he's gonna do he's gonna go back and do the only thing that he knows how to do because you didn't teach him anything else

[34:17] so that's why we have the recidivism rates that we have because we do these people wrong by not helping them to improve their lives what better opportunity you have literally a captive audience what better opportunity to give someone a marketable skill and help them turn their lives around and the prison system doesn't do that uh i i really have come to believe that i mean i was never a supporter of the so-called war on drugs but but now i

[34:49] feel like i have a a rich understanding of just how wrong and dangerous this this awful policy has been yeah it's it's it's so it's paralyzing crippling to our society you know when one out of every four black men is on parole probation or in prison you've got a problem and the problem's not crime the problem is a policy problem but nobody wants to talk about that

[35:20] right because those people have been labeled um disregardable what's happened to you exactly and what happened to you when you were given the label of a but the human rights person first you're labeled yeah it's okay to just do whatever to you yep isn't that the truth there was a guy that i was there with um i i was warned about him in advance he was he was very dangerous and he was a serial killer

[35:52] um the story was that he had killed 14 women he was a long long-distance truck driver and he was killing prostitutes at truck stops along his route this was in the 1970s before the use of dna and so he picked up a 16 year old prostitute and raped her and strangled her and threw her into a ditch on the side of the road thinking that she was dead but she wasn't and she recovered and she identified him the police knew that he was the serial

[36:22] killer but they just couldn't prove it so they got him on the rape charge and um and he got 20 years um he got out after doing the 20 years at a state facility in colorado and the cops and the prosecutors were afraid that he was going to start killing people again so they sort of set him up they harassed him at home with with unannounced visits and inspections of his house

[36:52] until finally he got so angry that he punched his parole officer well they found a gun in his house there's a mandatory minimum sentence of eight years for being a felon with a gun uh they got him for assault on a federal officer he ended up with another 20 years so um even though he was never convicted of of any of the murders 40 years in prison is enough to make people feel safer uh

[37:23] he ended up going to a higher security prison because well it was because i set him up to tell you the truth i was a little bit afraid of this guy everybody was afraid of him for whatever reason that i never understood he actively sought my approval um he would say you know hey john i saved you a seat in the tv room to watch the game today okay thanks truck um hey john there's a new classic rock station at uh 16 10 a.m appreciate it truck well one day

[37:54] there was a guy that had been giving me problems uh he was a contract killer and um and was doing 20 to life for murdering a businessman in pittsburgh and so uh so this guy wanted to move into my into my room and i i said i was in i was uncomfortable with his crime i said i don't want any pedophiles in my room and i don't want any contract killers so tash so you know the guards would at least

[38:24] let us have a vote if somebody wanted to move into our into our cell so we voted no and he was furious well one day i got a i got called to the lieutenant's office because npr had requested an interview and i had to go down and sign a waiver allowing the interview and i'm sitting next to truck in the tv room and this contract killer he's standing like three feet away from me i'm right behind him and he just didn't see me he's standing at the email

[38:56] computers and he says to the guy next to him hey did you hear kiriakou got got called down to the lieutenant's office and the guy said yeah and the contract killer says that guy's a rat he went down there to rat us out well if you call somebody a rat blood's gonna be spilled so i'm sitting there like this in the chair and truck says to me did you hear that that guy just called you a rat like what are you gonna do about it and

[39:28] i said to truck an hour ago i heard him call you a pedophile [Laughter] totally untrue without saying a single word he got up and he beat that guy into a coma yeah into a coma and so truck got another five years onto his 40. and was shipped to a medium security

[39:58] prison they upgraded him and this contract killer he was in the hospital for several weeks and then he was in solitary confinement for a few weeks after that finally he came back and a couple guys told him what i had done and so he walked up to me and he still had like visible injuries and he says very meekly i want to apologize for calling you a rat i should never have done that and i'm sorry it won't happen again and i said to him very quietly this is what

[40:30] i learned in prison i said if i ever hear my name cross your lips ever again you're dead do you understand and he just said yes like this and you know what i never had to lift a finger and i let truck do my dirty work and everybody saw what happened and so nobody messed with me they already saw that the guards didn't

[41:01] mess with me and now they didn't mess with me either so so julian assange is still um his extradition is still pending largely because of the state of our here in the united states yes yes and you know the european court of human rights has has twice ruled against the extradition of other prisoners that the u.s was seeking one on drug

[41:33] charges and one on an international fraud charge but our prison system is so well known for its decrepit state and for our weaponized use of solitary confinement that the european uh court of human rights won't extradite people that's why i can't imagine even though even though we've already gone through brexit i can't imagine that a court of appeals would extradite julian especially now in light of two things number one is the reporting from um mike isikoff at

[42:05] newsweek that the cia had made plans to kill julian or to snatch him and two uh because the fbi's sole source is a convicted pedophile and fraudster who has admitted to making up half of what he told the fbi i mean no judge in his right mind would agree to extradite somebody based on that i i can't even believe and this is one of the real disappointments for me with the bide administration i can't

[42:37] believe biden just hasn't walked away from this what you you want another humiliating defeat just walk away from this it's all over yeah it's it's just it's so strange that he's even pursuing it especially since obama the obama administration didn't exactly right so about the issagoff yahoo piece uh based on your experience was that surprising to you or is that uh running the mills it's not surprising

[43:08] no that that's what they do there there's a very very clear um um way to conceptualize and have approved a covert action program somebody comes up with an idea uh there's there's a staff that handles this kind of thing and what they do is they put it all in the right format put it in the right memo and then they send it to the justice department's office of legal counsel olc that's where john you and jay bybee were

[49:58] oh
