Title: CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou On JFK Files, Nathan Tan
Show: Katie Halper
Date: 2025-02-19
URL: https://youtu.be/7iJ_1LNBBZA
Duration: 1:29:00

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[00:01] okay Cal down you got nervous man you got nervous man hello and welcome to the Katy helper show everyone thank you so much for joining thank you so much for your patience we are so excited to be here and we have a great show for you tonight and it's a really cool pairing if you will uh during the second half of the show we're going to be talking to John

[00:31] kiraku John kiraku is the only person to ever go to jail over the CIA torture program which he blew the whistle on and he is a former CIA analyst but before we speak to John we're going to be doing a really interesting kind of Deep dive into what the hell is going on with Elon Musk and the person guiding us through that will be Nathan tenus now before we start the show and bring on Nathan tenis everyone please do give this show a thumbs up it's a great way to just express your support of the show help the algorithm um also please do

[01:02] subscribe thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed we have passed the 250,000 Subs Mark which we're so happy about we could not have done that without you obviously also if you can become patreon supporters please do that at patreon.com thee Katy helpers show again that's patreon.com theey helper show and that is a way that you can support the show again we really couldn't literally could not do the show without your patreon support and if you can do the $5 a month level uh we really appreciate that and you get in return

[01:32] you get access to all sorts of bonus content extended interviews Early Access interviews so if you are a patreon you have access right now to the entire over one hour long interview with Walla Sean you'll have early access to a great live show we did in Ireland early access to a an interview that we did with David Cross and tonight there'll be some patreon only uh content also for people who aren't watching live uh if you're watching live you're in luck but if you're watching later want to see the full interview with John Kaku you'll be

[02:02] able to do that at patreon.com thee Katy halber show so now I'm going to bring on our first guest guest um Nathan tankis is the publisher of notes on the crises and research director of the modern Money Network he has written for the financial times political Rolling Stone and more and he's currently working on a book under contract with Viking press of penguin so welcome Nathan thank you very much for having me Katie of course and right on time you come in and didn't know you in New York City you got the sirens so welcome to

[02:34] your debut of the Katy Halper show on the Katy Halper show historic moment um so you've been covering in your in your um what do you call your website what do I call it your newsletter I say newsletter generally yeah yeah your newsletter uh notes on the crises you've been covering um various crises so what is the crisis as you see it or what are the interconnecting crises as you see it uh if you could just break it down for us yeah so I think there is um there's

[03:04] the big picture globally what is happening right now with the federal government as a whole and with Trump the Trump Administration and uh Elon musk's Doge uh so-called Department of government efficiency and then there is the specific crisis uh crisis that I've been focusing on in my newsletter for the past two weeks and maybe I'm going to be branching out to a second one soon um which is specifically about the treasury Department and specifically about a specific subpart of the Treasury

[03:37] Department called The Bureau of the fiscal service so to start on the big picture the big picture is that the Trump Administration and Elon Musk Doge are rolling through the federal government and basically firing whoever they can getting access to all the information technology systems of various parts of the federal government with no regard to privacy laws or any other sort of restrictions of accessing very sensitive data and so they're

[04:09] essentially trying to grab all the sensitive data that they can fire whoever they can stop spending on C on whatever they don't want to uh uh thing don't whatever they don't want to be spent on despite the fact that Congress has ordered the spending in what are called Appropriations and so this is a multi-layered crisis one part of it is just stealing all of our information and using it against us for their own

[04:41] private purposes in terms of profit making potentially or using it to just persecute people and doing this under the cover of you know essentially an anti-woke War um anti- Dei anti- wokeness anti-gender ideology which are literally you know in the title like the the gender one is literally you know gender you know against gender ideology and for biological truth and also uh you

[05:16] know what they call the green New Deal which of course there no green New Deal has passed but what they mean is like the inflation reduction act and anything being done on climate change and but these are these are culture War framings that are just justifications for gutting the parts of the federal government and really the whole federal government and laying off people like you know they have found they felt that these uh uh that these executive orders give them the authority to for example fire tens of thousands of people in the

[05:49] agency that looks uh that that oversees the nuclear stockpile and then going oh crap we didn't realize the agency where we were firing everyone literally looks over the nuclear stockpile let's try to find these people and hire them but all their government emails are deactivated so it's actually hard to contact them like this level of kind of just running rough shot of through everything um and notably you know there's some sort of ringing in the back of your head about the Constitution or the basic you know

[06:20] what is called the separation of powers is Congress passes bills and the go the the president that quote unquote executive branch is supposed to execute those laws so the president just sort of claiming or the executive branch is claiming the authority that they get a kind of second bite at the Apple and get to decide well we don't care if Congress passed you know legislation we get to decide spending is a fundamental constitutional crisis and you don't

[06:52] necessarily have to care about whether something's constitutional or unconstitutional in this case it is really bad because what they is is the concentration of power in Donald Trump apparently also Elon Musk and away from even the courts pot and potentially and maybe going much further but also Congress and thus the rest of us we can say all sorts of problems with Congress but it's a much worse situation when you know we kind of have this full imperial

[07:23] presidency where the president and in this case Trump gets to sort of decide what is is happening in the federal government or not and that is TR tremendously tremendously concerning and they're trying to do this in all sorts of ways and the the my specific crisis which I've been focused on which I was extremely alarmed about as soon as the first murmurs of it emerg was specifically wanting access to very

[07:54] sensitive systems in what's called The Bureau of the fiscal service and that matters because what the Bureau of the fiscal service does is process government payments like all government payments 88% of payments in the last fiscal year run through the Bureau of the fiscal service and so if you can get control like operational control quote unquote of the Bureau of the fiscal service you don't actually have to kind of do the hard work of taking control and installing installing your funkies

[08:25] in every single government agency and worrying about court Ord and injunctions you can just get in there and just literally say hey don't process payment files from that agency which is what they did US ID and they didn't say like you know love USA ID or whatever but that kind of power is extraordinarily dangerous and they seem to be building the while still seemingly respecting the court injunctions as far as we can tell building an apparatus so that they can just kind of get to the point of kind of

[08:57] clicking buttons and hey I don't like any anything being spent any any money being given to like this group that I don't like and so I'm going to click a button and say no to that right it seems like there's a real um misunderstanding on the part of a lot of people I would say where somehow like there's corruption in government and there's uh overreach committed by the government and there's uh Power grabs committed by the government but not by really smart dudes like Elon Musk uh it's like all the nefarious motives that are sometimes

[09:29] fairly sometimes unfairly uh ascribed to government are never uh apply to individuals or corporations but uh that's obviously not true and you know we're gonna I I wanted to to jump off with an article that you did uh which is pretty fascinating uh you your this piece in your newsletter is called um I ask former Bureau of the fiscal service employees to interpret an Elon Musk tweet here's what they told me so let's take a look look at this tweet

[10:00] and then we're going to uh discuss the larger implications of it and what it it it reveals to us and uh let's take a look at this tweet and sorry to put everyone through it I I'll read it out loud okay I don't I you this is just one tweet I know it's so crazy okay to be to be do we have to call them X's now or something now that it's X I will never it's their tweets yeah to be clear what the Doge and I heard you say Nathan an interview it's apparently not even Doge

[10:31] it's douge that is I've been told this multiple times and I've decided to just execrate this in my brain you know if someone's gonna correct me on it Go mus calls it Doge I've heard M call it in interviews Doge if he's gonna call it Doge we're just gonna call it Doge right oh wow we're we're submitting to musk okay to be clear to be clear what the Doge team and US Treasury have jointly agreed Mak sense is the following require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code which is necess in order to pass Financial audits this is frequently left

[11:02] blank making audits almost impossible all payments must also include a rationale do you want me to go through this piece by piece and we respond or should I just read it all and you respond in one thing let's read it all and then we'll just we'll just pain to draw it out less okay um all payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field which is currently left blank importantly we are not yet applying any judgment to this rationale but simply requiring that some attempt be made to explain the payment more than nothing the do not pay list of

[11:33] entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional Appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored also it can currently take up to a year to get on this list Which is far too long this list should be updated at least weekly if not daily the above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing longtime career government employees not anyone from Doge it is ridiculous that these changes didn't exist already yesterday I was told that there are currently over

[12:04] 100 billion per year of entitlements payments to individuals with no social security number or even a temporary ID number if accurate this is extremely suspicious when I asked if anyone the treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud the consensus in the room was about half so $50 billion per year or $1 billion per week this is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately medely okay so what is your response to this and what are the what

[12:34] were the responses of your sources and explain to us who your S I mean not don't tell us who your sources were but explain to the extent that you can who they were yeah so I mean the first thing I want to start is like there was a lot of detail in there and I I want to emphasize that just before you even get to the substance the fact that he's tweeting about these topics is fundamentally insane like that's fundamentally insane like Circa three weeks ago the amount of people who knew

[13:06] or like with with anything like knew a factoid about the Bureau of the fiscal service or what it did in even a one- sentence description of its job was a small small minority of people and the amount of people who are actually like have anything approaching expertise in what these systems are are first of all like 98 % of them are literally they formally worked at the Bureau of the fiscal Service uh or currently work

[13:37] there like to give you context like I have talked to Deputy treasury secretaries people who've worked on like tax policy or debt management or whatever and you know major parts of the government and they've gotten into some pretty minute details and they had only the broadest conception of what the Bureau of the fiscal service did because it was so Technical and so outside of their purview and so the idea that like Elon Musk is getting into tweeting about specific systems and what they do in

[14:10] their details about the Bureau of the fiscal service is fundamentally an insane concept it's it's it's unbelievable I mean like before any of this started breaking almost no one had any idea about any of this and like the fact that like I knew some stuff about it and I knew how to get quickly caught up in even more detail is like what made me like a personality that all all all sorts of people wanted to have me on to talk about it or you know touch base with me and ask me about what I was

[14:41] getting into like it's because this is such an obscure minute area and so for him to be tweeting trying to in his own inco way intervene into like a quote unquote debate about what's going on about this system is just crazy and so like I want before we get like lost in sort of or get into the details which can be hard to follow I do want to say that sort of just upfront it is just fundamentally crazy for him to be commenting about any of this at all like this is normally

[15:12] stuff that like would be over the heads or not subject to conversation of like almost anyone in the treasury besides literally the treasury secretary and the person who's running the Bureau of fiscal service it's crazy um and so you know then but then to get into the guts of what he of what is's commenting the so the big context is he he's a doge team and specifically a certain person Marco lez 25-year-old

[15:44] former employee of space act had been sent to the Bureau of the fiscal service to essentially you know Commander it in the way that all sorts of different branches of government have been commandeered by Doge teams with very to say the least very unclear legal Authority and specifically he got what was called re supposedly got what it was called quote unquote readon access which means he can look at the source code look at the specific code of how this system

[16:15] operates he can look at anyone's information that are in these systems which is social security number of anyone who's ever received a government payment from a tax refund to Social Security from you know snap you know the works it is you know we're talking so we're talking already about like hundred something million Social Security numbers so uh you know sensitive bank account information like all sorts of very personally anything that you would want to steal someone's identity they

[16:47] were letting some like 25y old Nazi gper rummage around in um and so the kind of like they need representation of Nazi gers yeah yeah I mean yeah diversity and equity and conclusion for Nazis like that is the Doge program and so it's or it's already crazy for him to have that kind of what's quote unquote readon access but what wir came uh came across from

[17:19] sources and then also I came across from sources fell asleep naan I know you fell asleep they beat you by a couple of hours yes yes you know be I I I woke up at 3:30 got it out by 7:30 they beat me by 6 and a half hours um was that Marco alz in fact had read right access and this went so rapidly that I even got to the point of being able to report on the effect of wired and myself reporting

[17:50] and his access supposedly getting revoked and then the details of that um of of of the of the like their sort of like oh oh crap reaction and what and then ultimately after a court injunction about his involvement in these systems that Thursday morning um got he resigned supposedly over racist tweets again the Trump musk Administration has diversity Equity inclusion for Nazis it's not very

[18:21] believable that he would Fire's tweets this was reinforced even further by you know first musk then Vance then Trump agreeing with Vance that he should be rehired but him getting rehired back to Joe didn't necessarily mean at the Bureau of the fiscal service so we had gotten you know the Nazi out and now there's a big injunction based on 19 uh attorney general 19 State Attorney General suing keeping you know keeping

[18:52] him out of out of the system um and so you know the reason that this was so concerning and why I put aside everything in my uh in my life to go right out piece after piece that piece out of that is that I was fundamentally terrified that he they were going to rumage around in the system and break it and if they break it that means no Social Security checks no no Social Security payments no Medicare no Medicaid and like the sort of just the wheels fall off on our society pretty

[19:22] rapidly when they just don't know how to get government payments to the entities that that need payments because there's quite a complicated system that that connects what specific entities or people are supposed to get what payment in what bank account or to what address and if you break that system because we have starved government for decades and we haven't paid for you know it modernization and we we we or been

[19:54] reluctant to pay the full amounts that have been needed our systems have been like Legacy systems but not because like government bureaucrats have been lazy about this they've done their best kind of duct taping things and holding things together and making sure people still get their Social Security checks on time but this has just been not funded and so because it's not funded it it is a system that's very hard to change quickly it's was not a systems that we've you know invested in building

[20:25] redundancies into and so they could they really could do something fundamentally that breaks everything and now that Marco alz is out at least for now and they haven't sent anyone else back in I've kind of stepped back and you know focused on some of the bigger picture but the reporting has since has come out like I mentioned the usaid thing that they're keeping very close focus on using using the Bureau of the fiscal service to do impoundment and that's why

[20:56] I focused in on this tweet is he is doing a bunch of justifications which sound to the uninitiated about like they are about efficiency and government efficiency and auditing but what they actually are are about being able to do empowerment so you know he's he's he what he wants for example what he calls a payment categorization code which is not a term there's a specific technical term that um the Bureau of the fiscal service uses

[21:27] called or the treasury uses called a treasury account symbol where you can tie a specific payment to a specific kind of line item of Appropriations um and the reason that he wants like he he wants to have like this system fully nailed down is and and and is like harping on it is because he wants to just be able to like take the treasury account symbols that he doesn't like and just kill the spending and so

[21:58] one of the things that have already come out is they killed some Refugee settlement money coming out of Health and Human Services based on its treasury account symbol and so this is just them going like this is a type of thing that the government spends money on and I don't like it so I'll just kill it and you know you might not care about you know administr you know covering the administ cost of you know Refugee resettlement of women and children or maybe that's involve D in some larger

[22:29] kind of more nefarious activities of of the federal government in terms of backing ethnic cleansing for example in other places but the must Trump you know vision of what they want to do with these codes is to just delete spending of you know delete any spending that could that has any sort of quote unquote lib coding or you know left wi or Marxist coding or whatever and that means fundamentally trying to harm people and this is also where this idea of a rationale comes in you know it

[23:03] might sound like it makes sense why shouldn't we just have a rationale on every payment but the thing is is that the rationale that of these payments is that Congress appropriated the funds like there was a budgetary process there was you know administrative our agency process of determining the internal controls like him saying you should put a rationale on every single payment going out is basically the equivalent of anytime you swipe your credit card you should have to write a rationale to your

[23:35] credit card company and then they can decide that some of that is bad spending and so you know want to put it in like cultural War side the other way if you had to put a rationale every time you swiped your credit card then that means that the you the government can come in and go well they're swiping their credit card to buy some meat and we think people like are consuming too much meat so no you can't you know you you already bought chicken this week so you can't buy chicken a second time or a third

[24:05] time or whatever it is and you fundamentally the Bureau of the fiscal service is kind of just serving what I call like a payment intermediary they're making payments on behalf of government agencies who have a budget determined by Congress and they're just you know payments are supposed to go one way out the other and they do do checks for fraud and other things their for that they have What's called the payment Integrity unit but fundamentally like the agencies are supposed to be the ones

[24:36] who check about whether you need whether you qualify for a certain type of spending not at the payments level um you know one of the one of my sources and so this article you know as the title says is based on former employees in the Bureau of the fiscal service and one of them put I think put it quite well when when they said you know fiscal service is never going to know whether someone needs a wheelchair or not like fundamentally Health and Human Services has to check about whether you need a wheelchair not at the payment code level

[25:08] but if you're Elon Musk and you want a way to just sort of arbitrarily capriciously hit a button and kill payments and and in fact not only do you do you not find it satisfactory that there's an administrative agency process to check whether people deserve deserve the spending or not or or you know that it's consistent with what Congress has ordered up that's actually a negative thing because that's decisions that are not in your Direct Control like the

[25:41] agent it's not just that they are like don't feel like the agency controls or checks are adequate they're against it because that means someone else can say decide to continue following the law by you know by following a court injunction and are not under the person control of Elon Musk and that is very negative and so you we this is about him being able to pick and choose who deserves what spending and you know making sure maybe

[26:11] you know SpaceX gets five billion more dollars um pretending just to be calling balls and Strikes right like that's that's he's just a technocrat he has no ideology he's he has no skin in the game I thought uh I came across an interesting tweet uh because I really do have a pet peeve people uh believe people's claims about this just being about efficiency and um not any anything else not no ideology so let's take a look at this tweet so this is a tweet that was um screen grabbed and we'll

[26:42] look at the comment after it was screen grabbed by DEA Hazara and so here's the tweet that DEA uh screen grabs and it's Richard hanania who's what like a antie woke rightwing uh kind of cool yeah he writes do reportedly considering cutting Dei programs which could save an estimated 125 billion a year this is the easiest no-brainer of anything in the federal government I'd be surprised if they didn't do it and then Elon Musk treats no-brainer um and then you take a

[27:13] look at what this really is and let me just read the the actual tweet uh so here is that visible yeah uh the do stuff is so unserious the no-brainer 125 billion savings includes $120 $120 billion dollar that are simply a goal of how much of its spending the government wants to contract to quote socially economically disadvantaged unquote small business sure get rid of that if you want but it saves zero dollars yeah yeah so just like one

[27:45] example of how this is nonsense dressed up as as intelligence yeah I me not even nonsense it's more nefarious than nonsense it's it there's an agenda yeah there's an agenda but ALS Al there is also just a stupidity to this because like musk isn't a particularly smart person to say the least and he certainly has no expertise in how government works and sure there are you know things that we can talk about as leftists that we have problems in various specific areas you

[28:16] know that you could go after you know for example notably there's the Department of Defense which they have basically left alone so far and has the manifold actual account in problems that aren't happening or happening to a much lesser degree with other agencies which they're not touching um but fundamentally musk just knows so little that he doesn't even know the basics of what to get rid of or not I mean like this recent thing where

[28:47] they're firing at all probationary employees and they think that that means they're firing all new employees but it also means they're firing anyone who's been recently promoted to aob uh to a higher position and could return to a lower position if they don't succeed at that like it's because they literally just like controlled f for probationary and don't realize what they're doing and that they're actually firing a lot of highlevel important people who are like say keeping the planes in the air or

[29:17] something they like they just fundamentally know so little about this that it's a mixture of an aggressive agenda that you know aggressive agenda that is unconstitutionally centralizing power in musk and Trump's hand but also doing a whole set of extremely stupid things that are so stupid that they're dangerous and it's it is like there's a quite actually like difficult race between how much of the damage is their

[29:48] agenda and how much of the damage is their stupidity and one starts edging out the other at any given time and then the other like makes it come from behind you know acceler ation to get back in the lead at least it's exciting um sure is excuse me today Nathan you announced the start of a deeper investigation into uh doa's attempts at uh accessing taxpayer information at the IRS so can you explain to us um more about this and it's possible in you're only at the

[30:18] beginning but yeah yeah this is the early stages I didn't write about this in the piece but we know the guy who they're going after or the the guy who is the the musk person being sent to this uh I'm blinking on the name offand because I don't have I I I don't have it in front of me and I hadn't included in the piece but um among other things this person uh according to like a now deleted uh substack a paid substack

[30:50] premium substack post um they were radicalized by an article in the UNS review which among other things is a was is a is a publication put out by this guy who's a far-right holocaust denier um type so and the this this kid's Manifesto who's going to be rolling around in IRS data U or seems to be as at this moment gonna be rolling around in IRS data um is of that is of a

[31:22] piece with that and I I've had it in my mind in the back of my mind that they were also going to get IRS um as I say in my piece there was this little tidbit that had stuck in my head in the first reporting that got me on to what I've been calling the treasury payments crisis um where they said that they the same inquiries for quote unquote source code information or wanting you know direct access to the systems that they wanted for the Bureau of the fiscal service they had also been wanting for

[31:53] the IRS and so I was so overwhelmed with the payment stuff that I was just like I hope that doesn't happen anytime soon and I can like wait to focus on it but it ever since then I've been expecting for them to come for the IRS and a couple days ago um Jeff Stein um and Jacob bagage broke the story in the Washington Post that yes indeed they're going after the IRS systems there seems to be a draft memor random of understanding giving this kid you know

[32:25] free reign um to to one very important system and it has a lot of the same shape of what's been going of what happened uh at um at the Bureau of the fiscal Service uh there's also a similar thing going on at Social Security and actually the head of the social of social security or the Social Security commissioner who was Trump's um acting commissioner that he selected when he came in similar to the Bureau of the fiscal service has resigned in protest

[32:56] for the accessing of of sensitive data and the same thing is now happening at the IRS so my I put out like a little kind of just few five paragraph six paragraph description of the situation um and but for the purpose of trying to get um former and current IRS employee uh sources and get a get a greater understanding you know some of these things are similar like I know a lot about Mission critical or it's called Mission critical because they're

[33:26] very important and can't ever go down for even a small period of time Legacy it systems and this computer programming language known as kall um so I have some of the overlapping expertise to understand it but I I know much less about the details of the tax system as I do about payments taxes you know seem like from what I've just already can glean are much more complicated systems than the payment systems which are already complicated because you know

[33:58] there's this you know there's this phrase en coding called business logic and what is the idea is that there's there's a programming language but then there is business logic meaning specific kind of logical statements you use with the code that direct a specific thing to happen so for example like um this type of payment you know which is a Social Security payment and this goes to this type of recipient and these are for households or whatever it is that kind of logic is not something inherent to

[34:29] just the programming language in general it's a kind of logic that you build in with code and it's already pretty complicated with payments but imagine the the the the the size and complexity of the tax code and that you have to have systems that are able to like connect all these different thing elements and do checks and make sure that people are having their taxes uh calculated correctly or checking what

[35:01] theyel you know what you what you're filing and make sure that they're accurate that and there's all sorts of different types of taxes and you know the tax I mean it's it's not a news thing that the tax code is extremely extremely complicated but when you're thinking about it as like Code system uh it systems that are even less modernized than the Bureau of the fiscal service um we're talking about quite complicated systems some systems that still literally kind of have some of the same

[35:33] code even if like somewhat modernized or on new machines literally from like 1959 um because again they've the IRS has been starved of budget and hasn't been able to do it modernization these systems are very very very complicated and it's hard for me to get a sense of how much of the complexity is lack of modernization how much of the complexx is just the tax cod's way more complicated and so this is something I'm still at the early stages of getting my

[36:04] hands on and Nathan you uh your reporting on this has earned you a lot of media coverage and it's even earned you praise from people like Robert Reich and um I'm not gonna hold this against you but from Paul krogman it's okay this is a safe space but I bring up Paul krogman because it's it's important I think to note that you are not a a lib or resistance lib uh you you obviously are critical of trump but you're not uh uncritical to say the least of the Democrats so I want to ask you how did the Democrats enable um or facilitate

[36:34] Trump kind of generally but also what we're now seeing with Trump and and musk and Doge yeah so I think there's two elements and of course the topic of how the Democrats enabled the current kind of fascist takeover there's manifold but in terms of my area of expertise or what I'm focusing on now I think there's two crucial elements one is and and musk has even started tweeting about this in his own way of why is everyone getting all

[37:06] you know all up in a tizzy about the department of government efficiency we're just doing what um Clinton did in the 90s with Reinventing government and they cut the government Workforce by a lot and this is both kind of a Savvy rhetorical move also kind of an obstinate one because you know they passed legislation to do that but fundamentally the kind of well they pass legislation to do that isn't a good response because what that says is oh

[37:37] this isn't a fundamental problem this is just a technical detail and they I don't know haven't filled out the right paper work and if they're doing the right thing anyway then why do we care if they're doing it this way or not now there's answers I could come up with that on that about centralization of power and blah blah blah blah but you know at the end of the day it's not a very good answer the fundamental answer is that was bad then too like they pretended like they were saving the US Society money or you know making our

[38:09] society more efficient what we just did had was a less capable government like we we government and government employment has nowhere near kept up with the size and the complexity and of government and of the of the economy and all the sort of manifold things that are going on society and a less capable government is less capable of doing various different things including keeping corporate interests accountable like why are they interested in gutting the IRS well one of the positive things

[38:41] I will say that the bid Administration did but this is kind of like was a little like too little too late was increasing funding to the IRS and why were they increasing funding to the IRS so they could go after Rich tax cheats because if you have no money then if you have no budget then the tax cheats you go after are just Penny any poor people tax uh tax cheats or Ordinary People or you know a small micro business you know sole proprietor you need a big budget if you're going to go after the biggest

[39:12] corporations or Society or billionaires for cheating taxes well if you're Elon Musk if you're the richest man in the world and connected up with all these other ghouls well you want to fire 5,000 people from the IRS so they can never go after after Rich tax cheats ever again like that's a positive thing in government that they don't want to exist and that's what they're gutting but you know it's not like the Clinton Administration Or democrats during the bush era were like pushing hard at like

[39:44] increased funding for the IRS to go after Rich tax cheats they were all going in the other direction you know government starvation to make government more inefficient and more and less capable but if you're the Democratic Leadership now who are all the same people because they're all like just still there and they 80 or something you know Chuck Schumer and the rest then you have no real like effective like thing that you can really say that can like put all of this together that connect the corporate

[40:16] issues and and the centralization of power and give a real narrative to push forward the second thing oh sorry no no uh keep I'll ask you after the the second thing that I think is important is um all the apparatuses that the federal government has can now be easily accessed by the Trump Administration and Elon Musk to go after their enemies and these are all apparatuses that not only did the Democratic party not resist but

[40:48] they actively encouraged themselves well things that are called say anti-money laundering or know your customer laws or countering the financing of terrorist laws these are systems where we deputize the banking system money transmitters so on to go after people to surveil their customers on behalf of government and do all sorts of capricious things arbitrarily closing people's bank accounts and so on without any due process and creating lists you know like what's called you know the ofac list

[41:20] which is the you know it's basically an office for foreign assets control yeah office of foreign assets control control and but that's not just foreigners oh you can put Americans on this list without any due process and now you're on that list and now you are financially blacklisted and or you can't be say a legitimate nonprofit and so you know this this is something I was tweeting about in October about um seadon one of these um important n uh important

[41:51] Palestinian nonprofits supporting uh Palestinian prisoners you know you know political prisoners essentially who are just arbitrarily detained uh or you know uh convicted in kangaroo Israeli courts th um that those you know this was something that the Biden Administration was doing you know in October you know right as we were gearing up for the gearing up for the election that ultimately Trump won and all of this sort of surveillance

[42:21] apparatus the ability to Blacklist people um is there and that's you know one of the really concerning things about that Elon must tweet it's so long it's got so many things in it is him talking about how the quote unquote do not pay list is not updated quickly enough and no one I talked to could figure out what he was talking about because it doesn't make any sense you know but one of the things that goes through do not pay is the ofac list and so when I read that tweet what I think

[42:51] he is talking about being able to add any enemy he wants any person he wants any entity to the ofac list and to just financially disappear them essentially because uh because and they can never receive a government payment but the ofac list is also a list that goes to the entire banking system so it means just like if mus doesn't like someone you can be blacklisted from the banking system and as we're seeing there's no checks or controls on any of that except

[43:22] kind of incoit public outrage and the Democratic party willingly handed over this system built the system so that it could be taken over and notably did nothing during the lame duck period from Trump being president-elect to being president to stop this you know I was happened to be in a room in November with a B that among other things had a bunch of Democratic party operatives and I was like if you guys really believed that Trump was a fascist you would destroy all the surveillance you know

[43:52] comput data you that's something you would do and of course the Democrats they never do that in a m ion billion years but they've handed over a full system that can be used against anyone because it was useful for them it was useful to go after Palestinian activists and leftwing activists and all sorts of other people and you know genuine National Security threats quote unquote whatever you want to say with very little due process and now we'll see where this goes right well you know that

[44:22] I actually want to ask you about this because Nathan you've been a very outspoken um presence when it comes to the I would say maybe uh no not maybe I would say the weaponization of the Holocaust to justify genocide could you share a little bit about your own family's history and um how you see what is happening now with the legacy of the Holocaust yeah so I mean obviously there's a lot a lot to say there um and I've have I have a lot of to PR a lot of

[44:54] half-written things that I've been waning to put out there but I just haven't quite well we can actually show we have some really great tweets of yours if you want to use those as jump off point yeah sure um this is so this is one and and if you could read this and then we can use this as a prompt yeah yeah so th this is related to the sadun um point and I was tweeting it related to that day um so I have a very simple principle I'm against any law imple implementation of a law or interpretation of a law which if applied

[45:26] in a logically consistent way would have harmed Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany in occupied Poland or Justified the murder of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust and so this one let's let's take a look at the other one because I think you know dve yeah absolutely okay ah yes this was what I uh tweeted October October 8th um 2023 yeah the day after yeah um yeah let me

[45:57] be crystal clear clear as a Jewish grandchild of Holocaust Survivors I am always s of the side of the people imprisoned in ghettos and not on the incredibly armed in modern AR not with the incredibly armed in modern Army who served as their jailers you're not going to be able to bully me into another opinion uh I don't want anyone to die but I also won't participate in contextless Haring of military strategy launched from AO whether it's uh Jewish partisans during World War II or yes even Hamas whether or not I a Jewish

[46:27] writer living in New York criticize Hamas as irrelevant um and then you know kind of go on from there about you know the question is just about whether you support cutting off military aid or not um obviously you can imagine tweeting something like that especially with the kind of traditional following that I have largely around Finance or Economic Policy uh that was a that was an interesting couple weeks after you know having tweeted that October 8th um and then obviously continuing to tweet about what was going on um but yeah uh

[47:01] I you know any oh sorry I was just gonna ask like people not people I think don't don't realize that there's a whole Legacy and you and I full disclosure have shared institution Camp Kinderland from which we both graduated but um your family uh it was not like historically was not a Zionist family uh a lot of people don't know that that there's a whole Jewish tradition culture and Heritage and history that was either not Zionist or anti-zionist so I wanted to know if you could share a little bit

[47:32] yeah so yeah I I come from you know the back the the the background that speaks to me the most is um you know my uh my father's mother my bubby uh her father uh were bundis you know the Jewish labor Bund um my Bubby was born in vilna now nness which was kind of the center of Jewish life uh in in in the inter War Europe known as kind of the

[48:05] the Jer the Jerusalem of Eastern Europe or the Jerusalem of Lithuania however you want to put it and you know grew up grew up with fundamental like bundist um bundist commitments which meant you know fighting where you were fighting for Socialism or revolutionary socialism but not necessarily A bolik socialism um and fighting for you know the you know cultural Freedom the

[48:35] ability to pursue the culture that you want to kind of have a tra have a Jewish Education a yish education um my my great-grandfather uh it's a longer story of all the things that my great-grandfather was involved in but among other things he was a principal in the network of schools of in the network of schools that was backed by the Jewish labor buns uh shio schools he was head of the network of villainous schools

[49:07] from 1930 to 1934 until kind of capricious government uh polish authorities kind of forced two schools together and he became the principal of this much larger School in VNA and then in Spring 1939 he ran for and ran and won under a ticket for the city council uh in DNA and um his best friend from from teacher Seminary was this guy named levius I'll

[49:37] have more to say about him than uh in writing and in other places but was very well known um Bund at the time kind of left-wing bundist who uh has a lot of very uh fresh writing about Zionism uh after the Holocaust and you know 1946 1947 and so um yeah I come from that that tradition um you know time moves on and political institutions Decay so there is a sort of there are some

[50:09] circles in which there's a like kind of a cultural love for the BN you know I love Yiddish I love the culture I love this I love that but the politics and especially certain elements of the politics like anti-zionism hasn't um held up as much but for me it was something that I connected with um from my teenage teenage years and you know became some of my first adult political opinions and uh let's just say the last 15 years have done have have

[50:41] have have been quite a time period to be constantly reinforced in those political commitments and find them more deeper and more fundamental rather than uh rather than lose them which say some people in earlier Generations did yeah well thank you and uh I guess the last thing I wanted to ask you was uh if you had any advice on how we fight what is happening now fight against it yeah range musk the do stuff to um the you

[51:11] know attack on the welfare state to uh Gaza yeah I mean I think right yeah I think I think it's I think it's a tricky thing that is going to involve a lot of thinking because you know the people first and foremost who are focusing on these issues are resistance liberals and there is good reason for why leftists are very skeptical to the say the least to what resistance Liberals are taking as important um I would say in this case forthrightly I think this stuff is really important and I don't think that

[51:42] it should be left to resistance liberals I think and I think there is an opening here there's a unique opening here where there's a lot of very disenchanted resistance liberals who are finally kind of maybe momentarily only momentarily disenchanted with what the Democratic part is offering up because they're looking for a fight they're looking for people who are going to confront Trump and musk and are not seeing it you know there are some of these people who normally would You' be eye rolling about

[52:14] how pro-democrat they are are the kind of people who at rallies are yelling at Chuck Schumer and so I think that there's an opening and opportunity to enter these spaces to go into sort of physical protests in person at government buildings obviously especially in DC but there's other kind of strategies you can pursue and at the same time like educate well like the Democratic party has contributed Building Systems that now Trump and musk are using so it's you know getting people to take privacy seriously

[52:46] flipping them from their like pro- National Security like I'm going to look to the FBI to fix things to look they're taking over these apparatuses pretty EAS easily and there's no checks and balances so that means there wasn't ever really any checks and balances so you should except for norms and you should have a problem with that and I would say I think I've generally speaking have positive response from people who were following me kind of more from the resistance liberal angle two things I have to say about you know o ofac or

[53:20] anti-money laundering know your customer laws like they're they're more open than they've ever been before to these criticisms and so I think but it's it's difficult it is really difficult there's a big tension there and there's a lot of people who certainly are not going to be that willing to listen to you on Palestine or Gaza who are mobilized on this so I think it's really it's it's a tricky question that I don't really have anywhere near a full answer to I would just say I think this stuff is very important I don't think we can say larger complex things about what Trump's

[53:52] election has meant for Palestine in general but I don't think the spe specific taking over these agencies and their more and more capricious use is going to be good for anyone and so I think it is worth challenging It's just tough in it's tough with what we were left with from you know Biden and more than a year of Democratic party backing genocide and so on so it's you know it's tough It's the there's really is no good answer we kind of just have to try stuff and figure it out yeah you can work with

[54:25] people uh that you would want to have over for dinner that's definitely true yeah well Nathan thank you so much for joining yeah L your uh work in the description yeah thank you so much thanks Nathan bye all right everyone uh that was a great discussion and we are moving right along to our next guest everyone if you haven't already liked the stream please give it a thumbs up again a really great way to support the show also help the algorithm and speaking of

[54:55] thumbs up what wow what a thumbs up we're going to give our next guest uh and I know that because he's been on the show a bunch of times and everyone loves him uh John kiraku is the only person to go to jail over the CIA torture program which he blew the whistle on he is a former CIA analyst and case officer a pen USA Award winner and best-selling author he's the host of political Misfits and rights at John kiraku Dos subs.com so welcome John hey thank you good to be back of course thanks for coming um so much to talk about with you let's see where to start um why don't we

[55:28] start with your thoughts on what Elon Musk is doing and I guess wanted to know specifically about the connection between the Deep State and the brol Archy and in fact there's a we could maybe start with a clip uh there's a clip of Alex karp from um how do you say it pal paner is that how you paler paler paler yeah I paler um not to be confused with Palante which is the slogan of the young Lords which is

[55:59] why I always struggle with it um and here he is talking about Elon Musk let's take a listen and then I'd love to have your reaction I what I don't like about what's going on is I just view this as well let's watch the Democratic party commits suicide and like I've been a Democrat most of my life I would still I kind of f myself as outside it but I don't like watching the Democrats just commit suicide and what I see is most of the country doesn't really at this point given the fraud waste and abuse we know

[56:29] is there 90% of the countryes like get rid of that fraud waste and abuse and I I just view this as yet another example of the progressive left boxing themselves in into a suicide Dance Now if you what what the progressive left should be doing is saying okay Elon you're clearly the most qualified person in the world to do something like this we want to dialogue with you about how you're doing or what are you doing I don't believe that's actually what happened and again I I probably I like

[56:59] Elon I know I I I think he's the he's obviously the most important builder in the world and I I just think if you want to say my former side I I I don't believe that they're actually engaging I I I I I think this is it's like another dance where I'm supposed to say of course like whatever it's like there's this one issue where I might and then you get boxed into you cannot solve the problem and then I would say what is the biggest problem in this Society biggest problem in this Society from my P perspective is legitimacy of our

[57:30] institutions why aren't they legitimate they're not legitimate because okay does do any of you really believe that uh 99% of your taxpayer dollars are being spent but last and not least and probably arguably most importantly there's two revolutions happening one is transparency and one is AI okay so why is it that we do not know where every penny of our money goes like how do you explain that to people and got and by way slightly more technically what large language models do is they

[58:00] mean you can go into the contracts and see exactly what happened so in the past we couldn't do this now we can the right response is we want this to happen we want to happen we want to be involved in the dialogue the real response is it feels like the people criticizing Elon don't want it to happen and this is going to destroy those people okay a lot to unpack there wow let's say I know a lot of incoherence to to SI a lot of incoherence my first thought is if he died as Herod dark brown he could pass for Rachel mattow

[58:31] because it sounded like I was listening to Rachel mattow make apologies for the Democratic National Committee that's what that sounded like yeah someone should do a mash up this this has nothing to do with the progressive left you and I are on the Progressive left and we're not Democrats right you know Democrats who consider themselves to be on the Progressive NE left are are not Progressive or left you know when when the DNC celebrates the fact that the Democratic candidate for for president had just received the endorsement of

[59:04] Dick Cheney that's not a brag and that's not Progressive and it's not leftist you know there's a there's a an issue here too Katie where where we trick ourselves into thinking that we get to choose one of two choices either you Cho you choose Elon Musk and Donald Trump tearing the whole place down or you choose the status quo well that's that's not the case there's

[59:34] a third choice and the the third choice is to fix it right Republicans well Republicans and Democrats alike have conveniently forgotten that year after year after year they appropriate more money than the Pentagon has even asked for they make excuses year after year after after year for the fact that there has never been a successful audit of the defense department budget so fix it you

[1:00:04] know when when he says that um we there's no transparency to the point where we can't see what the federal budget is of course we can it's all online it's long and it's complicated and you can't really see what the what the intelligence Community budget is because it's all you know hidden here and there and everywhere William pxm could have told us all about that but um people just don't go to the trouble so there is a third way it's to fix it not to either you know burn it down like a

[1:00:35] California wildfire or just to pretend that there is no problem uh in government right did you know I I just my sister just texted me that the Kennedy Library abruptly shut down today at two o'clock because of a presidential executive order uh Donald Trump fired everybody right and uh and so they they just can't remain open it's a Presidential Library For Heaven's Sake how does that save us money how does laying off everybody at FEMA save us

[1:01:06] money just wait until the next flood or tornado or hurricane or wildfire and then we're screwed so I'm just not getting it there's also all this hypocrisy I mean so Adam Johnson who tweeted out that clip of karp uh tweets paler was seated by the cia's investment arm in qel in 2003 it's received 2.5 billion in federal contracts these guys are total sponges on taxpayer dollars yeah yet play the part of Rebel Outsiders because they want to remove oversight and all the government contracts for themselves

[1:01:39] yeah which is which is I think something we see frequently it's this idea people who claim to be anti-government they just want the government funding them not programs that they don't like exactly in the immediate aftermath of the 911 attacks uh the CIA got Congressional approval to create a venture capital fund unprecedented because no governmental entity is supposed to have the kind of power that that creation and and exploitation of a

[1:02:10] venture capital fund would entail but Congress gave it to them and the first thing they did was to set up this fund which is quasi governmental it's called inel I in-q-tel it's the word Intel with the the slang for intelligence with a letter Q in the middle as kind of a a wink wink nod to Q from the James Bond movies very cute and um and so it went out there and it started investing in

[1:02:40] companies that could invent really cool really complicated things that the CIA was interested in and one of the things that it invested in was uh was paler uh paler was a failing tech company until the CIA put um put money in it and then all of a sudden it succeeded and it succeeded because as soon as that money was invested paler essentially began working for the CIA this was in 2003 by 2013 paler was the biggest provider of

[1:03:14] classified software in the entire intelligence community and not just the intelligence Community but the Pentagon as well it was in 2013 that pal finally developed software that allowed the CIA and FBI computer systems to be um interconnected can you imagine it took 12 years after the 911 attacks so that the CIA and the FBI could exchange

[1:03:45] classified messages ridiculous and now everybody got rich they got rich with taxpayer money right wow well you know uh John one of the things I wanted to talk to about uh is your own case because uh people know that you're a whistleblower um but people may not know that there's been a kind of bipartisan uh refusal to Pardon you for whistleblowing and I it's disgusting you blew the whistle on on the cia's torture program um you and then your your

[1:04:17] punishment for that your prize for being honest and exposing something like that is being uh thrown into jail thrown into prison losing your pension yeah that's the big part yeah and I mean well I I assume as someone who hasn't been um subjected to either of those Horrors I assume they most must both be extremely traumatic and and traumatizing and the idea that the only person to pay a price is the person not who engaged in the torture but blew the whistle on it can you shed a little bit of light onto how that happened then I want to ask you uh

[1:04:48] about the pardon process because you actually wrote a an article uh on the defunct pardon process uh in which you call for and you explain uh what needs to happen so can can you unpack all of that that I just I threw a lot at youor no that's okay so I uh I gave a nationally televised interview to ABC News in December of 2007 in which I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners that torture was official US government policy and that the policy had been personally approved by the president

[1:05:20] this is when it goes into the Twilight Zone the very next day the CIA filed what's called a Times report against me with the FBI saying that I had um I had uh revealed classified information top secret information in this interview um the FBI investigated me for a year from December of 07 to December of 08 and they uh finally sent my attorneys what's called a declination letter declining to prosecute me they said that uh it was illegal to classify

[1:05:52] a criminal act torture was a criminal act and so I had not committed a crime by revealing it great I'm home free three weeks later Barack Obama becomes president and he names John Brennan as the deputy National Security adviser for counterterrorism John and I always hated each other and one of the dirty little secrets was that John Brennan was one of the fathers of the cia's torture program he pretended to be you know a progressive Democrat he never was he was

[1:06:23] a pro torture um independent so I had no idea that as soon as he was uh given this position of Deputy National Security adviser he asked the justice department to secretly reopen the case against me um in Discovery later on we we found three memos there was a memo from Brennan to Eric Holder the Attorney General saying charge him with Espionage and holder wrote back and said my people don't think he committed Espionage and then Brennan wrote back

[1:06:55] and said charge him anyway and make him defend himself and so they charged me with three counts of Espionage mind you Espionage can carry the death penalty right and um and then when I went bankrupt they dropped the charges so I ended up taking a plea to a a lesser charge but I I was looking at my phone a minute ago so I could pull this up um I received this email anonymously a month ago and it says Dear John it's finally

[1:07:28] nice it's I'm sorry it's nice to finally write to you I've been watching your YouTube videos and I love all the content and I've been wanting to reach out to you for many years I'm one of the FBI agents who wants to personally apologize to you for the disgraceful way that the FBI and our government treated you I worked with both headquarters and the Washington field office team on your case and I know many of the Personnel that you're familiar with that case was directed and driven by senior most officials many mid-level and Street Personnel were against it but nevertheless we just followed orders

[1:07:59] anyway I've always felt bad about what we did to you and for you and for the way you were treated and I wanted to personally apologize sincerely Joe wow that's the third one of those I've gotten the third one so you know when you embarrass the CIA and you air the dirty laundry there's going to be a very heavy price to pay um it cost me literally everything my my marriage my career my freedom uh my children it cost

[1:08:31] everything which is the the plan right right one of my attorneys said to me well in the midst of all this they said you know this case isn't isn't just about John kiraku this case is about frightening anybody else in the intelligence Community who might be thinking about coming forward to report on criminal activity inside the organization and that's true you know Ed Snowden said that said that um Tom Drake and I inspired him to go public with his

[1:09:02] uh with his Revelations and that meant the world to me and knowing that there are other whistleblowers out there who who you know if they don't go to the media they go to the oversight committees or they go to an attorney or whatever that makes it all worthwhile now the the pardon process I applied for a pardon with Barack Obama I was ignored I knew I would be then I applied for a pardon from Donald Trump in Trump's first term and I was I was close and it made the papers a couple

[1:09:33] times once because Rudy Giuliani tried to shake me down for $2 million and I ratted him out to the New York Times and it made the front page I don't think I know this story oh this was a big one so I have a friend who is close to Giuliani and people kept saying oh you're close but if Giuliani gives you the thumbs up from going to give it to you I said okay how do I get to Giuliani well I know this guy and he works for Giuliani so I called him and he said okay let's meet up at the Trump Hotel um you and your

[1:10:05] lawyer Giuliani and me I said great so we go to the Trump Hotel juliani's there and um we're sitting there and and Giuliani says uh so you know the Mets are looking good this year and I'm like yeah great uh are you a football fan I said yeah I I'm a Steelers fan I understand you're a Giants fan yeah I love the Giants I'm like what the [ __ ] is going on finally I said so Mr Mayor I appreciate you taking the time to see me but I wanted to talk about this pardon

[1:10:36] and he says like this anybody know where the pisser is and he gets up and he walks away I said to the guy what just happened and he said you never talked to Rudy about a pardon you talked to me about a pardon and I talk to Rudy I'm like okay whatever like these guys watch too many episodes of The Sopranos so um he says Rudy's going to want two million and I laughed and I said I said look I don't have two million I'll never have

[1:11:07] two million but why would I spend $2 million to recover a $700,000 pension that doesn't make any sense I said look I don't want to waste your time I appreciate you uh seeing me and I got up my lawyer and we walked away so that night a friend of mine had a book launch party and I went to the party and there was another whistleblower there that I'm friendly with and he said to me innocently he said so how was your day I said oh how was my day listen to this I said Rudy Giuliani tried to shake me down for two

[1:11:39] million bucks and I told him and he said did you call the FBI and I said I don't talk to those those rats at the FBI I'm I'm not a snitch right I didn't call the FBI couple days later I happened to be standing in my attorney's office we were chatting and my phone rang and it was Mike Schmidt from The New York Times and he said that a little birdie had told him that Rudy Giuliani tried to shake me down for $2 million was that true so I

[1:12:10] said hold on a second I said to my lawyer should I talk to the New York Times he said yeah tell him the truth so I said yeah I'll talk to you he said will you go in the record I said sure use my name I told him the whole story and um he said actually you're the fourth person that he he approached and tried to take $2 million from for a pardon and it's because he was getting a divorce he was a member of 16 country clubs he spent $10,000 a month on cigars and he needed this money to continue you

[1:12:42] know the lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed so um no wonder he has that terrible hair dye he couldn't afford a good hair dri his face exactly he does you know just for men or whatever the spray is so um so he denied and denied and denied he he said that he had never met me that he hadn't been in Washington that day so I sent the New York Times a picture of the four of us together that we took in the lobby and they wrote The New York Times has seen documentary evidence that the meeting took place well when um Noel I

[1:13:17] forget her last name his assistant went public about her sexual harassment case she said said that he told her the day of the New York Times article that that son of a [ __ ] CIA guy ratted me out to the times and I said yep I did so a long way of saying Giuliani didn't help me but I got that close because Tucker Carlson helped me right I had been on Tucker

[1:13:49] show a dozen times he loves when I criticize the agency we we became friends and he went to Trump for me and he said he's going to do it then on the last day of the Trump presidency Tucker called me and said that Mitch McConnell had called him and killed it because Mitch McConnell said that if Trump pardoned and this was the original idea Trump was gonna pardon Julian Assange Ed Snowden and me that and and McConnell didn't know me but he said if Trump uh pardoned Assange and Snowden that he

[1:14:21] couldn't control the Republican caucus in the Senate and that they would probably vote to convict him on the impeachment charges so he dropped our pardons then I go to Biden and I'm friendly with a Greek Orthodox priest who's very very close to Joe Biden he said I can help you so I'm getting you know this guy to write a letter and that guy to write a letter and Senator soand so and Congressman what's his name and I got I

[1:14:51] got Annette Benning and and I got Susan sandon and Mike Ferell and I got a whole Hollywood contingent um and then he passed me over and I said to the priest because the priest was like nobody's as close to him as I am I'm I'm Hunter's Godfather you know blah blah blah and I said well if I had been a crackhead or a Chinese spy or a judge that sold children into bondage maybe I would have I would have gotten so [ __ ]

[1:15:23] Joe Biden excuse my language and one of those kids killed himself by the way one of the kid one of cash for kids you are exactly correct he killed himself he was like 16 years old yeah and um so I'm trying with Trump again and without even trying um Alan dtz called me and said hey are you gonna are you gonna apply for a pardon I said yeah I'd like to I said I'm I'm kind of disillusioned now and he said no he said I'll write a letter and then we can circulate it and

[1:15:54] maybe get some some other people to sign so I got I got Alan dtz I got Tucker Carlson I got judge napalitano and um and two two high ranking friends of trump that nobody's ever heard of in in this venue um and so we're going to go again and I'm gonna I'm gonna try my best we'll see what happens but you know I I like to think that I'm going to get a fair shake from the Republicans on this because it was Barack Obama and John Brennan and Eric Holder that put me

[1:16:27] in prison and covered up war crimes and crimes against humanity it was not Donald Trump we there are a lot of things we can criticize Donald Trump over sure but this is not one of them why did Obama pardon Manning and not the rest of you guys he didn't he gave Manning a uh commutation okay com right yeah so Manning's Manning's still a convicted Fon right but so he uh clemency in commutation is that yeah clemency you know and I'll tell you

[1:16:59] another story that that answers that question I have very very strong support in the Greek American Community for a for a pardon and I mean like the Archbishop the the bishop of Pittsburgh uh these two Greek American billionaires the former lieutenant governor of New York Alexi janulus the the Secretary of State of of um Illinois great great support and um two these two billionaires

[1:17:29] um one of them called me and I went up to New York to meet with the two of them and they said look we know Joe Biden very well and we can get to him directly do you want to meet with him and I said yes so I said listen I have a letter signed by 70 former CIA officers asking that I be pardoned I have a letter written by the man who wrote the law that I was convicted of violating said saying I should never have been charged in the first place I have a floor statement from John McCain saying I should be pardoned from my liberal Democratic Congressman saying I should

[1:18:00] be pardoned but maybe most importantly right I have an oped from the Christian Science monitor from Senator Joe Biden saying that the law that I was convicted of violating was unconstitutional and should never have been passed so we go to uh Wilmington to meet with Biden this is like four or five days before Trump became president so we go to Biden I make my pitch and we all get on the train not not Biden the the two Greeks

[1:18:32] and I got on the train we came to um uh Washington I went home they went to the White House for a dinner that they were invited to I waited up late into the night finally at at midnight they called me and they said you would have been so proud of Joe Biden tonight he went to the mat for you but halfway through his pitch OB put up his hands and said guys I'm just not going to do this it's either him or it's Manning and Manning got 30 years and I said why are we

[1:19:04] mutually exclusive right what does it cost Barack Obama to do the right thing but he didn't do it and then Honestly by the time Biden was able to do it he was so demented that I mean I don't I don't have any idea who made that decision I don't think it was Biden wow I don't know wow yeah sucks well um at least you know that a lot of people support you and you know believe in you and and support your work and tune in

[1:19:34] great yeah great pride in that thank you great pride and and you know what if I could interrupt you for one second I would do the whole dog on thing over again really I would I mean my wife and I split up um I lost my my pension I lost my security clearance I lost my job and I don't care because it was the right thing to do and torture is outlawed in this country now and I'm proud to have played a role in that you

[1:20:04] know you you you come to some issues where you know that you're right and they're wrong and eventually everybody else is going to see that so I don't care you know and this is one of the things when you apply for a pardon when you make a formal application we could talk about the process whenever you want um you have to show proof that you showed Contrition and I'm not contrite oh yeah they're like are you sorry for the crime you committed and I said no

[1:20:35] I'm not no I would do it again yeah it's interesting uh did you ever have regrets were you ever like God why did I do the principal thing would have been so much easier not to oh yeah moments of it yeah yeah when the justice department offered me 45 years in prison and told me that was the best deal I was going to get I I intended to commit suicide that night and my wife and I were up watching TV and she said let's go to bed and I said no I'm gonna stay

[1:21:05] up late I'm gonna I'm gonna just watch TV I wasn't gonna watch TV I was going to go down to the garage and just you know put a pipe in my mouth and um and I think she sensed it and she said no we should go to bed and she kind of talked me out of it so um wow yeah so yeah there were times when I I thought oh my god what have I done what have I done and then yeah the more I thought about it the more I thought no somebody had to do it we're led by a

[1:21:37] cabal of criminals and somebody had to say something you know yeah so there it is the pardon process if if I may yeah of course the pardon process is supposed to be very simple and very direct you go to www j. justice.gov Parton and you fill out apply for clemency and it's supposed to be that easy but what they do is they take your application and they send it to the FBI

[1:22:07] to do a background investigation on you and they want to know are you sorry for what you did have you said so in public have you committed another crime are you an [ __ ] to people you know all kinds of different things and then they send that whole package to your prosecutors and they say to the prosecutors uh John here wants a uh wants a pardon what do you guys think

[1:22:38] about that well this is what they think this is what they think about just about everybody then they send it to your sentencing judge and they ask the judge who's 99% of the time a former prosecutor and they say um you want to you want to give this guy a pardon and the judge usually says no no pardon for him and then it goes to the deputy attorney general the deputy attorney general says no no pardon for him then it goes to the uh white house chief of staff and the white house chief of staff

[1:23:10] um makes a recommendation to the president that is unless you have money or influence um these these pardons that Donald Trump has been giving nobody applied for those pardons he just gave him you remember this uh this Green Beret war criminal um that was pardoned at the very very end of Trump's first term he didn't apply for a pardon Fox News talked about his case every single night for a month and a half and then he got a

[1:23:41] pardon um another one was uh this crooked judge the the kids for cash judge right he hadn't applied for a pardon and even even the the governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro said whoa oh wait a minute where' this pardon come from literally a guy who ruins the lives of children for money a judge right he literally sold children into bondage yes so disgusting so if you've got you know you don't get no and then I didn't get a

[1:24:11] Parton so if you if you've got or commutation I think is what that he got right that guy did he get a Parton or commutation I think a commutation maybe I don't know whatever maybe yeah but if you if got money or you have daily access to to Fox News and you can get in the president's face every night or you have you know a very important and very well-placed friend who can just walk into the Oval Office and say hey do me a solid and pardon this guy otherwise you know your chances

[1:24:42] are nil and I I point out in this piece that I wrote um actually now that I mentioned it I didn't even realize that it had run did it run today you saw it I think yesterday here yest okay now so I I point out that um that the number of Pardons that have been given by the last you know four or five presidents are are dwarfed by the number of Pardons that used to be given I mean even Richard Nixon pardoned 22% of the

[1:25:14] people who applied well now we're down to more like 2% 2% yeah what happened to forgiveness you know when I got home from prison um I went to the courthouse in um Arlington Virginia to register to vote and um they said uh did you get a um did you get an approval from the the governor and I said oh I didn't realize that I had to get an approval from the

[1:25:45] governor they said only in Virginia and Florida you have to get the approval of the governor I'm like okay so I go on go on to the governor's website it was uh Terry mcalli at the time and I I said you know I'm a convicted felon I I was convicted of violating the intelligence identities protection act of 1981 and um I I would like the right to vote I paid my debt to society right like two weeks later my doorbell

[1:26:15] rings at 7 o'clock in the morning and it's a courier and he's got this big envelope like this big but it's like a hard stiff cardboard envelope and I pull it out and it's this gubinatorial declaration with a big seal the big gold seal on it and it's signed by the governor and it's a pardon it's a gubinatorial pardon which was a really sweet it was a really sweet thing to do I hadn't been convicted of committing a

[1:26:46] State Crime but what it did was it was symbolic and it allowed me to register to vote that's nice so I I went to register to vote again when I got the big certificate and there's a box have you ever been convicted of a felony and I saides have you been pardoned by the governor so I checked yes and they said that the guy who handles your kind of cases and the woman Winks at me he's on vacation today and I said oh but today's the last day to register so that I can vote in the election she said don't worry about it you can vote in the

[1:27:17] election on the following Monday this guy from the courthouse comes to my house and gives me my voter registration card and he said we know what you did I wanted to make this as easy as possible so people have been awesome it's these presidents who have been dicks and Mitch McConnell I'd like to smack in his in his Turtle face too but that's just me that would be the final his final moments I think he's like yeah I think so he's pretty well he's pretty well dead as it is you know when I was

[1:27:48] working on the hill we used to make fun of him because he lives in this townhouse that's literally four doors down from the uh from the heart Senate Office Building so he lives like literally 150 feet from his office and he used to take a limo every morning the 150 feet and we would boo him as he as he drove by like what a loser well John you're you're s you're such a I I ran into you at the peace ball and I told my friend I was like he is the best Storyteller ever you really

[1:28:18] are you should have like a daily p i mean you should just tell stories all the time but what are your thoughts on uh Elon Musk and also on USA because one of the reasons that I I think you're such a great guest is because you're and someone to talk to is you don't have like a particular political kind of like uh no I don't know uh uh formula right so you're critical of Elon Musk you're also critical of USA tell us about the connection between USA and the CIA this was a great show and we have uh I hope

[1:28:50] you guys liked it I mean I hope you guys gave likes I'm going have to uh harass you guys more about this but um we are going to make some of this patreon because it was a great show and because patreon is how we uh make this show happen and uh to see the the full show and uh where we see people like where we talk about uh who killed RFK who killed JFK what else do we talk about in the patreon only section uh Snowden um Ukraine the CIA uh we have a little

[1:29:22] fight between John and and of the people in the comments to do that of course go to patreon.com theat helpers show again that's patreon.com theey helpers show and I think that's it right anything else I have to say no thank you guys so much and again see you next week bye everyone C down
