[00:00] Hello everybody and welcome to briefing room. August is usually the slowest month of the year news-wise. Not so this year. In any normal August, most everybody is on vacation including the president, whomever it happens to be. Congress is in recess and the rest of America is spending time at the beach, in the mountains, or visiting family and friends, but apparently not this year. To the surprise of much of official Washington, CIA Director John Ratcliffe was reported yesterday to be on a secret
[00:31] trip to Moscow. Secret? It's on the front page of the Washington Post and New York Times, so it's not really a secret anymore. Actually, he's still there right now. Why though is the question? Well, that really is the question. To tell you the truth, it's not unusual or at least it's not as unusual as it seems. So, let's break it down. Relations between the United States and Russia are terrible right now. There is no US Ambassador in Moscow and there is
[07:16] his name, Mengistu. So, President Jimmy Carter called General Walters in and said, "Vernon, I want you to go to Addis Ababa and get the CIA man out of the country." So, General Walters flies to Addis Ababa. He lands. He goes right to the palace to meet with General Mengistu. And he says, "I want you to release the CIA man to me right now." And Mengistu told him go screw yourself.
[07:47] And General Walter said, he just simply wasn't prepared for a response like that. And so he said he blurted out, "If you don't release him to my custody in 2 hours, we're going to drop nuclear bombs on you." And everybody in in our group, we started laughing because nobody's authorized to say something. You can't just blurt out that you're going to drop nuclear bombs on somebody. He said 1 hour later they were loading the CIA guy onto his plane in a gurney.
[08:19] The guy was practically dead, but General Walter saved his life. Anyway, this is a long way of saying when [snorts] very, very sensitive diplomacy needs to be done, something that you can't risk leaking out like a secret trip to Moscow, you ask the CIA director to do it. So, getting back to the issue at hand, what is John Ratcliffe doing in Moscow? Honestly, it's impossible to say, but
[08:50] I'll venture a guess. He's likely asking the Russians to ease up on attacking Ukrainian civilian positions. He's probably telling the Russians that he's going to ask the Ukrainians to ease up on attacking Russian civilian positions. He's probably offering to carry a message back to the White House or to the Ukrainians. And he's asking what the Russians bottom line is on how to end this conflict in Ukraine. Listen, Donald Trump really needs a
[09:22] political win right now. Things are not going well. And uh what would be better than being able to put an end to the Russia-Ukraine war when when nobody expects it? In all seriousness, don't hold your breath that anything will come of this. But still, talking, diplomacy, it's always a good thing. At least we're not talking about nuking each other, right? What if the way money
[09:53] works is about to change? Not someday, not hypothetically, but right now. Well, China and the United States are both making moves that suggest we could be headed toward 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 side, the government is sitting on more
[10:25] than 8,000 tons of gold. And it's still valued at $42 an ounce on the books. Legislation to fix that is currently pending in Congress. If both superpowers start anchoring their currencies to gold, what happens to the price? And more importantly, what happens to every dollar in your retirement that isn't backed by anything at all? That's the question a free report from American Alternative Assets answers. It's called The Day Money Changes Forever. And if you have an IRA or a
[10:56] 401k, you need to read it right now. Get your free copy at johnlovesgold.com. That's johnlovesgold.com or call 888-GOLD-053. Before I get into our next um what we call blocks here, I wanted to give you a quick update on something that we talked about a couple of days ago. We talked about Darleen Graham, Lindsey Graham's sister.
[11:29] She was running in the primary election to win a full 6-year term uh in the US Senate. And the reason we talked about her a couple of days ago, you may recall, is that she participated in the debate with um with a congressman that was her her primary uh opponent. And um she didn't know what the South China Sea was. She didn't know why it was important. And she says, "I'll be honest with you. I'm not really a national security
[12:00] person." Well, you're a United States Senator. You got to become a national security person. Anyway, the primary election was yesterday. Day before yesterday, Donald Trump flew down to South Carolina. He had already endorsed her, but he took the very unusual step of campaigning for her in a Republican primary against a sitting congressman who is also a MAGA Republican and pro-Trump.
[12:31] Well, yesterday, Darlene Graham won 52 to 48. It was funny to me to see in outlets like Politico and The Hill and um and even CNN that somehow people are optimistic that, "Well, the Republicans are split almost 50/50. That means the Democrats can win this seat for the first time since 19 whatever, 90
[13:01] or 92." Uh-uh. South Carolina is ruby red. And whether the the primary voters were for Darlene Graham or they were for Congressman Norman, they are ruby red voters. They're going to coalesce behind Graham. No Democrat is going to win a Senate seat in South Carolina. Number one. Number two, we told you about the very
[13:31] strange uh race for the US Senate seat from Alaska. And we said that there was Senator Dan Sullivan running against another Dan Sullivan, who was a former Forest Service employee and elementary school teacher. >> [snorts] >> Um Congresswoman Mary Peltola uh the the former Democratic congresswoman and the first Inuit ever to be elected to Congress uh was running, too. Now,
[14:02] remember, Alaska has this odd free-for-all primary, where it doesn't matter what party you're in. Everybody just runs in runs in one giant race. And then the top four people go to the general election. And it's it's um ranked voting. Right? So, you pick who you like first, who you like second, who you like third. Well, it took a week to count the ballots cuz Alaska, frankly, is a big place and it's really isolated. And um Mary Peltola came in first with 46%.
[14:33] That is remarkable for a Democrat in the state of Alaska. But both Dan Sullivans also made it to the final ballot. The third person, I don't even know his name. He got 1%. Uh but everybody else got less than 1%. So, so Mr. 1% is going to be on the ballot. He's not going to be a factor. It's going to be Mary Peltola versus Dan Sullivan and Dan Sullivan. Keep your eye on Alaska. Yesterday, the Cook Political Report moved the Alaska
[15:06] Senate race from leans Republican to toss-up. And the Democrats, if they have any hopes of taking the Senate, they really need to win Alaska. Keep your eye on it. And Dolly Parton died. I've always loved Dolly Parton. Poor thing. What a role model. What a humanitarian. I was really broken up about it. Anyway, mail-in voting is becoming [clears throat] the preeminent issue in
[15:37] the lead-up to the midterm elections in November. Yes, polls show that voters are most concerned with affordability, inflation, the Iran war, Gaza, data centers. We talked about data centers a couple of days ago. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is the actual modus operandi of voting. When I was in college in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s, I was registered to vote in my hometown of Newcastle, Pennsylvania. So, I voted by mail. When I served overseas for the CIA, I was
[16:08] registered to vote in Arlington, Virginia. So, again, I voted by mail. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump voted in the Florida primary by mail. But, he doesn't want you to be able to vote by mail. And the Supreme Court ruling on Monday is giving him more leeway to block your ability to vote by mail. In the 2024 election, more than 1/3 of Americans voted by mail. During the COVID pandemic, that number was more than 42%.
[16:41] And in which states is voting by mail most common? Get this. Of the 24 states with the highest numbers of ballots cast by mail, and you've probably guessed it, 19 are blue states. And to make matters worse for Americans who want to vote by mail, the U.S. Postal Service announced last week that it would not process many mail-in ballots. Why? Because the president told them not to.
[17:12] So, here's the state of play. In [snorts] March, the president signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create something called a state citizenship list based on data from citizenship and naturalization records and other federal databases. The feds then are supposed to send the list to state election officials. And Trump has ordered the Attorney General carte blanche to prosecute any state election
[17:42] official who provides any federal ballot to any ineligible voter. This executive order also forbids the Postal Service from delivering any ballot to any person not on this gigantic federal list. Well, are you on the federal list? Am I? We have no idea. Because the list doesn't exist yet.
[18:13] There are several important issues here. Number one is that Trump's executive order is patently illegal. It is obviously and clearly unconstitutional. It's just illegal. Newsflash for the president, there is no such thing as a national election in the United States. Instead, the Constitution is crystal clear. It provides for 51 state elections.
[18:44] The 50 states and the District of Columbia. Every election, whether it is a presidential election or a congressional election or just local offices, every election is run individually by the states. Period. And Trump's legislation or executive order, um well, besides the executive order, he has this legislation that's pending in Congress to try to change it to make one giant national election, that's bogged down in
[19:15] Congress because Republican senators refuse to allow it to come to the floor for a vote. Democrats, meanwhile, have filed a federal lawsuit, which is, you know, what else they going to do? I mentioned that that the Supreme Court has also thrown a wrench into the Democratic position here. What it did on Monday was to was to lift several hurdles, legal hurdles, for the White House as it continues plans to limit voting by mail. With that said, the Supreme Court
[19:47] decision was temporary and it was limited. A temporary ban on Trump's executive order that was imposed by the lowest-level federal court, the federal district court, still stands. So, the president signed this executive order, nobody can do anything about it. I mean, on the president's side. It's frozen because a federal judge said it was. So, now you have both sides suing each other. There's also some immediacy to this.
[20:19] Ballots have to be sent out in the next four weeks in order to give voters enough time to get them back before election day. So, stay tuned. This one's going to go down to the wire and it's going to be ugly. One aside, and I I found this to be very interesting. I write a lot of op-eds about um prison reform, sentencing reform, things like that. And one of my go-to sources is the Brennan Center for Justice, which
[20:50] is a bipartisan think tank founded by the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. Well, it published an exhaustive investigative study following the 2016 presidential election, in which it found that voter fraud nationwide accounted for between three and 25 10,000ths of 1% of all votes cast.
[21:20] Indeed, in the most egregious cases seven people were arrested for voter fraud. In all of America seven people were arrested for voter fraud with all seven having voted multiple times for Donald Trump. One said in her court defense that she did so, quote, "to offset the libs." Whatever the heck that means. Now, there were also at least two cases where
[21:50] where foreign nationals voted because they claimed they didn't realize they couldn't vote. But still, we're talking about 3 10,000ths of 1% to 25 10,000ths of 1%. There is no voter fraud. And folks, while all of this is happening we find ourselves again in a tariff war with Canada. Here's another news flash for the
[22:21] president. Presidents cannot impose tariffs. The Constitution is crystal clear on this. Only Congress can impose tariffs. The president has done this repeatedly. He announces sweeping punitive tariffs against a country. They're put into place. Congress and the individual countries being affected fi- file lawsuits.
[22:52] They win the lawsuits and the tariffs are lifted. In the most recent cases, the US government had to return the money collected from the tariffs to the affected countries. This happened 2 weeks ago. But the American consumer always comes out as the loser. Well, now President Trump has thrown us into a full-fledged trade war with Canada, announcing that he is imposing across-the-board tariffs of 25, 30, and 50% on Canadian goods entering the
[23:23] United States. The truth is that the US imports far, far fewer Canadian goods than the Canadians import from the United States. Tariffs are going to be levied on things like lumber, maritime buoys, and auto parts. The Canadians, in turn, matched Trump's tariffs with 50% tariffs on 700 different US goods. Besides that, Canadians, on principle,
[23:54] because they so dislike Donald Trump, have been boycotting American wines and whiskeys since 2016, severely damaging well-known companies like Jack Daniels, for example, and virtually shutting down the Napa and Sonoma valleys in California. The industries on the US side of the border that will be hardest hit are cars and car parts, steel and aluminum, machinery, dairy, grains, and
[24:25] agricultural goods, furniture, wood, and paper. This is going to sting. Interestingly, most of the manufactured and farm goods are produced in states that voted for Donald Trump. And frankly, I'm just not clear as to what the president's strategy here is. If there is a strategy, he's not sharing it with the American people. What it looks like is that he's winging it and hoping for the best. For their part, the Canadians are not
[24:56] being friendly in their reaction. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, kind of the governor of Ontario, uh called on the president to kiss his rear end, and he said it in a very undiplomatic way. Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada could inflict far more pain on the United States than the United States can inflict on Canada. And so, the fight goes on. But differences over tariffs haven't
[25:28] stopped, get this, the Canadians from bombing Iran just because we asked them to. Nobody ever said, I guess, that foreign affairs and diplomacy were easy, but you would expect it at least to make some basic sense. And it doesn't. So, folks, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of um a Briefing Room. Uh I'd like to thank our producers, John Ball and Victoria Von
[25:58] Pertz. Please keep your comments coming. We read all of them. Please continue to like, share, subscribe, review, uh tell your friends, tell your family. Thank you for that. We're up over 260,000 subscribers. It's because of you. And we're only able to keep this going because of you. Folks, we're going to do another Q&A next week. We're going to record it on um on the 1st or the 2nd. It'll come out later in the week. If you've got questions, please send them to jkbr_admin@gmail.com.
[26:33] That is jkbr_admin@gmail.com. And if you're not sick of me yet, uh you can find more content on John Kiriakou's Dead Drop. That's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, uh where I tell stories. Uh and I'm also on uh, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Cameo. So, stay tuned. I'm John Kiriakou. We'll see you next time.
[27:03] I'm John Kiriakou. [music] In season 1 of Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick, I told you what makes this spy tick, me, [music] and why I blew the whistle on the CIA's covert torture program. In season [music] 2, Doing Time Like a Spy, I told you how my training as a spy served me extremely well while I served 23 months at Loretto Federal Prison among drug dealers, mobsters, [music] murderers, and child molesters. In season 3, well, it's back to spying.
[27:33] I had to reclaim my life and get it into some kind of working order, which included finding work. Since spying was what I knew best, I decided that spying, in one way or another, was going to be my way back. Meanwhile, the thing that put me in prison after I blew the whistle on it, torture, was finally getting its day in court, and more importantly, in the court of public opinion. And the public did not like what it was hearing about what the CIA had done. If there's anything worse than torture, it's covering up torture and lying about the fact that [music] you
[28:04] tortured and then covered it up. There's a lot more story left to tell, lots more whistleblowing, and a lot [music] more spying. That's season 3 of Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. Find out wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costartedtouchdown.com.