[00:00] Hi everybody. I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome back to the briefing room. As always, I want to thank you, thank you, thank you for all of the the likes and the shares and the subscribes and all that stuff. We are growing by absolute leaps and bounds and it's because of you. So, thank you for that and please continue telling your friends and liking and subscribing and all that stuff. And as always, if you've got a question, email us the question. It's uh jKBr admin@gmail.com.
[00:31] And we're going to try to get to as many questions as we possibly can in uh in a third weekly uh segment where we just do the Q&As. So, [snorts] listen, there's a lot of uh there's a lot of news today. Um there are some videos that were just released that the US government frankly didn't want you to see. It's because they reveal so plainly in the clearest possible terms how much we have completely screwed up the Middle East. And I want to go back for a minute
[01:03] and say that over the weekend a newspaper in Kentucky ran an obituary of Senator Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell's alive. But they ran this obituary on purpose. And the reason they did was because last week when Senator Lindsey Graham died there was this immediate response like, "Oh, wow, Lindsey Graham was a real war hawk and wanted to get us into different wars and then over the next few days
[01:34] after that they were like, 'Oh, no, wait a minute, he was this great statesman and we love him and everybody should love him and he loved America and No. Let's not whitewash who these people are. They're the very definition of war criminals. And they think that they can demand constant war and there will be no fallout. So, there's new footage that was just released of one of the main characters
[02:04] from our show, Lindsey Graham, may he rest in peace, and [clears throat] his decades-long idiotic criminal quixotic quest to drag the United States into a war with Iran. But, here's the short version. Lindsey Graham was probably the biggest cheerleader for war with Iran in Washington. Whether it was on the legislative side or even the among the executives, he had extraordinary access to Benjamin Netanyahu, his brother.
[02:36] By many accounts, speaking with him more than he spoke with some senior US officials. And his death has revealed secrets about our strategy worse than even I expected. Let's start with this video clip. Take a look at a video of him celebrating the day bombing started. >> Do you have it on speaker, Ryan? >> Yep, we're good. >> Okay. All right, connecting you now. >> Yeah, hello. >> Hey, baby Lindsey.
[03:06] >> Hey, Lindsey. How are you? >> Uh couldn't I'm just so impressed. Glad to be your friend. >> I'm glad you are my friend. >> I'm going to meet with the president this weekend. I'm going down to Doral. I'm going to try to get him to join with y'all in Lebanon to maybe fly some with you. Would you like that? >> Yeah, I I I I get that. I think I think you're on the right point, but uh I've been thinking about the other side of it for a second. >> Mhm. >> We're concentrating right now on the
[03:37] Iran. If we tell Hezbollah that we're going all the way, we threaten them. But, if we do it, >> Okay. >> then they have no reason not to go all the way against us. And right now, that's in our interest. >> Okay. >> We can do it later. >> Well, I'll Okay, well, that's that's actually good counsel. I'll I'll put it out there as an idea. We can always go back to it. >> What he's saying here, this is Remember, this is the day that the bombing started
[04:08] in Iran. And what he's saying to BB, his friend, so proud to be his friend, he's saying, "Hey, listen, um do you want us to bomb Lebanon? Cuz if you want us to bomb Lebanon, we'd like to to fly with you." Well, newsflash, the United States isn't at war with Lebanon. So, what he's offering up is just for Americans to just begin murdering random
[04:39] people, you know, just because the Israelis might want us to, which in this case they actually don't. But, he's offering up the US Air Force to bomb a country with which we are not at war. So, this footage was captured by documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who had been granted extensive access to Lindsey Graham ever since 2023. He was a fly on the wall, Alex Holder was, for the last 3 years of Lindsey Graham's
[05:09] life. I'm going to be honest, probably a pretty boring documentary. I actually wouldn't want to watch it. Under normal circumstances, you could not have paid me enough money to watch hour after hour of Lindsey Graham on the phone with his friends. That's probably why Lindsey Graham thought, "Ah, screw it." And he gave a documentary film team access to every facet of his, well, almost every facet of his life. Including phone calls that probably should have been probably were actually classified.
[05:40] Then comes one of the most revealing moments of all. This is how Graham replied to a question about how long the war would go on. Listen to this. >> Well, to be honest with you, I think about 3 to 4 weeks we should have them in a spot where they start losing control of some cities. And what we're trying to do is just get a few cities to fall in the next month. Get the Arabs more openly involved
[06:10] tomorrow or by the end of the week and just have almost irreversible momentum. >> That's important and there are several hidden messages here. Number one, he's on the phone with Jake Sullivan. You might remember that Jake Sullivan was Joe Biden's National Security Advisor. Jake Sullivan is rumored to be the top choice for pretty much everybody in the Democratic Party to be Secretary of State in the next Democratic administration.
[06:41] This is not a partisan issue. Attacking Iran, attacking Lebanon, supporting the Israelis, this is a bipartisan issue. The Democrats are in with both feet just like the Republicans are. So, number one, he's talking to Jake Sullivan. Number two, Lindsey Graham fancied himself as an expert on the Middle East. He apparently actually believed that once the Israelis and the Americans began attacking Iran that the whole country would just collapse like a house
[07:13] of cards. That was Benjamin Netanyahu's line. Oh, it's just going to fall apart. We're going to step in. The Shah's son is going to return. It's going to be the land of milk and honey. They're going to be waving little American and Israeli flags. This was a fantasy. Anybody who knows anything about the Middle East could have told him that he was just plain wrong. So, let me repeat that. Lindsey Graham believed that after just three or four weeks of bombing
[07:44] Iran would lose control of its own cities. Arab governments would then pile into the war and the momentum which would would cause regime change and would become in Lindsey Graham's words irreversible. All from just dropping some bombs. We've always known that many of the architects of this war believed that the Iranian government was that house of cards, but now we have the tapes that show just how idiotically confident they
[08:17] were. What we've done with this war against Iran is we've driven Iranians together. And now the Iranians are united against us, against Israel, and against our Arab allies. Imagine if years after the invasion of Iraq, we discovered footage of Dick Cheney casually telling his friends that Saddam would be gone in a couple of weeks and the entire Middle East would just fall into place. Well, just like Dick Cheney, Lindsey
[08:48] Graham's funeral, which was yesterday and I think will be soon forgotten. 10 years from now, nobody's going to remember who Lindsey Graham was. And those who do will see him as an embarrassment to our country. He'll be given as an example for generations to come to military school students as someone that you should never let get within 10 ft of a president of the United States. Keep Lindsey Graham's predictions in the back of your mind every time you hear
[09:20] the administration talk about how this war is going and how it's going to be over shortly because it's not. Look, I spent my career at the CIA and I know exactly how easy it is to find someone when you have their name and a little patience. And here's what should scare you. These days, you don't need to be a spy in order to do it. Your name, your home address, your home phone number, details about your family, it's all sitting out there online, compiled by data brokers, and then sold to anyone with a credit card.
[09:51] I've made my share of enemies over the years. And since going public on the CIA's torture program, I've gotten a lot more the number of strangers who know who I am. So, safety and security aren't abstractions to me. They're daily concerns. All that personal data floating around the internet has real-world consequences. And honestly, most people have no idea how exposed they are. That's why I personally use DeleteMe. DeleteMe is a subscription service that removes your personal information from hundreds of data broker websites.
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[16:40] coming out in a few months, right? I mean, I'm not going to be able I said earlier I didn't want to watch it. Now I'm going to force myself to watch it. Because I'm going to end up shouting at the screen. You know, just as an aside one of the very few little bits of joy that I had in Pakistan after 9/11 we were working 7 days a week, 14 hours a day. It was ridiculous. But on Wednesday nights
[17:11] the ambassador would host movie night in the embassy's little mini theater. Well, we watched whatever we could get our hands on. And it became like a joke. We would shout at the screen. We'd throw popcorn at the screen. There was one movie called How Sha- How Shante Got Her Man Back. That's what it was. How Shante Got Her Man Back. And we were screaming at the screen, "Don't take him back, Shante. He's no good."
[17:42] That's how I feel about Lindsey Graham. I'm going to shout at the screen, "We don't want you, Lindsey Graham. We don't care that you died. Just just go and let us be." Now his sister is the senator. Can you imagine this? His sister is the senator. Filling in for the remainder of his term, and she announced that she's running for a full term in the United States Senate. Her only qualification is that she was related to Lindsey Graham. That's it. It says a lot about the current state of American politics, doesn't it? What if
[18:14] the way money works is about to change? Not someday. Not hypothetically, but right now. China and the United States are both making moves that suggest we could be heading towards something the world hasn't seen in more than 50 years. A return to gold-backed money or something very close to it. China is shutting down paper gold trading at four of its biggest banks. All on the same day. And they're building a new system that settles in physical gold instead. On our
[18:45] side, the government is sitting on more than 8,000 tons of gold still valued at $42 an ounce on the books. Legislation to fix that is already in Congress. If both superpowers start anchoring their currencies to gold, what happens to the price? And more importantly, what happens to everyday dollars in your retirement? Dollars that aren't backed by anything at all. That's the question our free report from American Alternative Assets answers. It's called the day money changes
[19:16] forever. And if you have an IRA or a 401K, you need to read it right now. So, get your free copy at johnlovesgold.com. That's johnlovesgold.com or call 1-888-G-O-L-D-0-5-3. Leak investigations, you know, leak investigations are conducted under the Espionage Act, the the auspices of the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act was written in 1917
[19:48] to combat German saboteurs during World War I. It has never been meaningfully updated. It was slightly updated in 1950 after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying for the Soviet Union. Ethel Rosenberg, as it turns out, was innocent. But, the Espionage Act doesn't even mention the words classified information because the classification system wasn't invented until the 1950s.
[20:21] It just says national defense information and then it never explains what national defense information actually is. My own case set a legal precedent uh for espionage cases. The judge in my case, Judge Leonie Brinkema, a hanging judge, appointed by Bill Clinton, um she defined espionage as this, providing national defense information
[20:52] to any person not entitled to receive it. That's it. Well, Lindsey Graham was talking classified defense strategy in his phone call with his buddy Bibi. And there were uncleared documentary filmmakers in the room. That's espionage. Lindsey Graham committed espionage on camera. So, you know, where do we go from here? The whole system is broken.
[21:25] To me this feels like the start of the Iraq war. When when we launched the first missile on Iran, I warned people there's no exit strategy. It's easy to bomb a country. It's easy to overthrow a government if you want to put troops on the ground. It's almost impossible to get out. And we never learn our lesson and here we are again engaged in an undeclared war. Congress
[21:55] never declared war on Iran. It's an undeclared illegal war. We did it at the behest of a foreign government, Israel, and we can't get out. There has been a kerfuffle at the Democratic National Committee. I criticized Republicans like Mike Johnson in our last episode. In fact, that my exact words were Mike Johnson's an idiot and I stand by that. I think that you'll find half of the Republican contingent in the House of Representatives thinks that Mike Mike
[22:27] Johnson's an idiot. Well, the Democrats have some serious problems on their hands for the midterms as well. You would think that after months of public anger, even fury, over Donald Trump, over soaring gas prices, and a deeply unpopular war with the Iran, that the Democratic Party would be swimming in cash. And it's not. It's practically broke. According to the New York Times, the Republican National Committee is sitting on 130 million dollars in cash.
[22:59] The Democratic Party has $2 million in debt. in debt. They don't have any cash. The Democratic Party is so short on cash that leaders at its headquarters have undertaken a new gambit to mask the severity of the problems, asking vendors to not send bills until after the elections are over. And they even used their own building, the headquarters of the Democratic
[23:31] National Committee, as collateral for a loan. And then there's the leadership. Earlier this month, the the chairman of the Democratic National Committee uh threw his telephone at a junior staff member's desk during a heated confrontation, prompting a formal complaint to the DNC's Human Resources Department. In early June, he threw his phone while yelling at this junior aide. The
[24:03] phone-tossing incident ended up resulting in a formal complaint, and now it's being investigated. According to the New York Times, that phone-throwing incident was witnessed by half a dozen people, and he's now paralyzed by the idea of leaks. And the leaks keep coming. If I know one thing about leak control, intimidating your staff as a result of paranoia is not a good way to do it. I was standing in the hall one time
[24:33] >> [clears throat] >> in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. I worked there at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I was one of the senior staff members. And I saw a Democratic senator, a little teeny tiny Democratic senator, a woman, throw a stapler at a staff member in the hallway and call him a idiot. You idiot! She threw the thing, and then she immediately looked around to see, "Oh my god, what I what have I done? How many people have seen me? And is anybody going to run to the media?"
[25:05] And that happens all the time. Because these members of Congress think they are so special. They're so much smarter than you are. They're so much smarter than I am. And we have to jump at their every whim. And God forbid you should say something that makes them feel like they're not smarter than you are. Then you get a stapler thrown at you.
[25:35] You're called a idiot or a phone thrown at your desk. And then you have to go to HR. Like is that how really how you want to run your political party when you're $2 million in debt? Last week we talked on this show about prospects for the Democrats taking the House of Representatives. The consensus is that the Democrats are going to win, and they're going to have a majority of between five and 11 seats. Well, two and a half weeks ago, the predictions were that the Democrats would have a majority
[26:06] of 22 to 25 seats. Why is that falling apart? You can't blame everything on redistricting. You have to also blame it on bad leadership. Like really bad leadership. The Republicans may be on to something. Not that this is truthful or intellectually honest, but they're on to something when they're calling attention to the fact that Democratic socialists are winning primaries against Democratic incumbents. I'm actually glad that they are.
[26:37] Because we need to be talking about poverty and affordability and and health care. More people go bankrupt because of of health care than for any other reason in America. It's documented fact. Congress has to do something. Well, this Democratic Party isn't doing anything. The Republican Party isn't doing anything. And these Democratic Socialists really are the Democrats' version of the Tea Party. When you've got a center that just can't get the job done,
[27:09] other people are going to come in from the fringes and they're going to try. There's another issue, too. It's about how political parties choose their leaders. Political parties are always intentionally weak. Right? Nobody knows who the head of the Republican Party is, who the head of the Democratic Party is. It doesn't matter. They come and go. But they come and go because the real power is on Capitol Hill or it sits in the White House. It's not in the RNC or the DNC.
[27:40] Really, the job of the Republican and Democratic National Committees are are supposed to be to raise money. The Republicans are very successful in doing that. The Democrats are not, and they never have been. There was a fascinating piece in Politico over the weekend about Senator John Fetterman, the Democrat maybe, at least temporarily, the Democrat from uh from Pennsylvania, who has been voting pretty consistently Republican and might as well join the Knesset in the next election.
[28:10] And um he took in something like $645,000 in this quarter 4 years ago when he was running for the Senate in donations that were under $100. I will admit that I sent him 50 bucks because he was pro-labor. And you know how much he's taken in in this quarter, this year? $12,000. Nobody wants him. The Democrats just aren't willing
[28:42] to donate money. And why should they be if they don't believe in their leadership. So, I think that these races that are supposed to be, you know, watersheds and to give the Democrats this new majority in in both houses of Congress, they may not come to pass. The Democrats are going to win the house. I think that's an easy one. But, the Democrats coulda shoulda won the Senate, and I think that they're going to lose. Look for a 50/50 split or
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[30:52] The New York Post reported something way back on March 16th that I think bears repeating today. This is what the New York Post said, quote, "President Trump was stunned to learn last week that US intelligence indicates new Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei may be gay. And that his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, feared his suitability to rule the Islamic Republic for that reason, the Post can now reveal."
[31:23] Trump couldn't contain his surprise and laughed aloud when he was briefed on the intel, according to sources. Others in the room also found it, quote, "hilarious," unquote, and joined in the president's reaction. While one senior intelligence official, quote, "has not stopped laughing about it for days," unquote, said one person familiar with the briefing. The shocking claim was described to the Post by two intelligence community officials and a third person close to
[31:55] the White House. All three sources say the implausible sounding allegation is viewed as viewed as credible by US spy agencies, rather than false information intended to undermine Khamenei, age 56, who was selected to replace his dead father as the supreme leader on March 8th. Two of the sources said the intelligence indicated that Mojtaba, who earned the nickname the power behind the robes while serving as his aging dad's gatekeeper, has had a long-term sexual
[32:26] relationship with his childhood tutor. First of all, who gives a Even if it were true. You know, you hear all the time it it I I'm constantly scrolling through through Tik Tok looking at shorts. And one of the things that's always funny to me is when conservatives approach people who are gay or trans or queer or whatever, I don't know what.
[32:57] And and these people on the left are pro-Palestine. And they say, "Well, if you went there, they'd throw you off the roof of a building." No. >> [clears throat] >> No, they wouldn't actually. ISIS was doing that. And ISIS was opposed by everybody. Right? That's why ISIS pretty much no longer exists because all of the region's countries pulled together, all the Muslim countries pulled together and destroyed ISIS along with the United
[33:27] States and Turkey. We all destroyed ISIS. That's where people were getting thrown off roofs. In Iran, you're not going to get thrown off the roof if you're gay. I actually know several gay Iranians with two, not several. I know two gay Iranians who live in Iran. And there's no problem for them. Cuz nobody cares. Number one. Number two, this has poorly planned Israeli psyop written all
[33:57] over it. Like, "Okay, the Iranians are weak. We just murdered everybody in their leadership. How can we really screw them? I got an idea. Let's say that the new Ayatollah's gay. Hardy har har. That'll That'll make people rise up in the streets and overthrow him." No, it won't cuz nobody gives a even if he were gay, which he's not. So, why bother? We actually have a clip I want to show
[34:29] you. Can we show this clip from the White House Correspondents Dinner? >> here in one place. I have to say that we're having an amazing load of accomplishments that the media never talks about. For example, under my administration, a once feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they're now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions, but
[35:00] I for one wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News. She's a wonderful woman. >> It's a really terrible joke. But on the Iran part, like literally none of it's true. It's true of Bari Weiss at CBS News, but that's a whole 'nother conversation we can have. Anyway, keep your eye on Iran cuz things are not going to get better for us over there.
[35:31] There were a couple of other stories in the news that uh that probably bear um some conversation. Um the new Air Force One, the new Boeing 747 jumbo jet that was gifted to the United States by by uh the Qatari government, it's got all kinds of problems. Uh it was delivered to the president while he was overseas. He ended up not using it to fly back because it turned out that it hadn't been retrofitted with
[36:01] with um protective devices, missiles, radar jamming equipment, whatever. I don't know why we would have assumed that the Qataris would have loaded that stuff on the plane. Like, what in the world were we thinking? But anyway, the jet's not in use. It's not going to be in use for quite some time. Um Israel is still very upset with the International Criminal Court over the fact that uh that there are these charges pending against Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, Israel and the United States are not
[36:32] signatories to the Rome Statute, and so the United States is not is not bound to arrest Netanyahu and send him to The Hague for trial. In fact, Netanyahu is coming to the United States today again to meet with the president. I'll give you two guesses as to what they're going to talk about. It's not too hard. And and I wanted to say that I I was in New York last week for most of the week, and I had a chance to meet with
[37:03] with some fans of the show on the street. It was a lot of fun. Um >> [laughter] >> At one point, I was walking down Fifth Avenue and a bus pulled up and the door opened and this I don't know, 13-year-old kid shouted in Italian, "Madre mio! John Kiryakou!" And 65 Italian middle schoolers ran off the bus, and it took me half an hour before I finished
[37:35] the selfies. But anyway, even people at that age are watching the show. And I want to say how much we all appreciate it here. As I said in the beginning, it's only because of you and people just like you that we're able to do it and that we're not living in the backseat of our cars at the Walmart parking lot. Yeah, I say that as a joke, but not really, you know? It's because of you. And I want to thank you very, very much. So folks, I wanted to say thank you again. Also, please find me on Spotify and Apple
[38:06] Podcasts. I also have a second podcast called John Kiryakou's Dead Drop. I'm also on Cameo and Facebook and X and Instagram and every place else. So looking forward to seeing you again in a couple of days. All the best.