[00:00] Hi everybody, I'm John Kuryaku and welcome back to the briefing room. As the Iran war shows no signs of a diplomatic resolution, President Trump has sent his two lead negotiators to try and make progress in a different conflict. That's the Russia Ukraine war. Steve Witoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Moscow this week for direct talks with Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials. This comes just a few days after CIA director John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow likely to lay the
[00:30] groundwork for these talks. Statements to the press have tried to sound optimistic. A White House official said that Witco Kushner and Putin quote discussed a number of substantive plans that would be announced in the coming weeks. Whatever that means. Details have not been revealed. I don't expect that they will be. Wickoff and Kushner are now heading to Kiev for corresponding talks with Ukrainian President Wimir Zalinski.
[01:01] You can see leaders smiling in photos from the talks. But here's how the talks are probably going behind closed doors. The White House has absolutely no new leverage over Moscow. This is where the US political system is at its weakest on this issue. The president is very unpopular at home and he knows that he needs a win, really a win before the midterms and Moscow is more than happy to receive WhitF and Kushner because their country is about to get rich if a
[01:34] deal is made and sanctions are lifted. That's likely why you see Putin showing a big smile, which he normally doesn't do when shaking hands with with Coffin Kushner, the head of sanctions for the US. He directs something called the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control or OFAC. Also traveled to Russia with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessant. What will probably come out of this is that the White House may receive an on paper victory in exchange
[02:06] for easing Russian sanctions. Russia, on the other hand, has more leverage than it had before. Importantly, it can continue sharing technology with Iran because we can't stop them. A new report from the Financial Times newspaper confirms that Russia has helped Iran developed supersonic missile capabilities, a technology that it has been seeking for years. The project came organized by Roso Boron Export. That's
[02:37] Russia's state arms exporter. and it also involved a rocket design company that is under US sanctions. The development program is reportedly focused on what's called ramjet propulsion systems that would allow a cruise missile to fly at multiple times the speed of sound. Remember the speed of sound is about 665 miles an hour. Well, multiply that by 2 3 4. Military experts assess that the
[03:10] weapon would most likely be used to hit ships, some land targets, but mostly ships because ships can't defend themselves from a missile that's traveling that fast. Some of Russia's top experts in the field were involved in the Iranian program. According to the Financial Times, and its engineers analyzed data from an Iranian ramjet engine system, this relationship has gone both ways. In January 2025, Russia and Iran signed a strategic partnership agreement to further improve
[03:41] cooperation, including military and defense partnerships. Prior to that, Iran had already been providing Russia with its homemade Shahed attack drones that have been widely deployed against Ukraine. These are the suicide drones that you just strap a an explosive to it and fly it into the target. And Russia now manufactures its own version of that Iranian drone in Russia. Washington knows that supersonic missile technology is only the tip of the
[04:12] iceberg for what Moscow could share with Iran. Last year, the Financial Times reported that Iranian scientists made a secret trip to Russia where they met with military experts to potentially advance nuclear weapons work. Keep in mind too that Iran is very close to China and to India and to Pakistan. There's nothing now that Iran is under attack to stop the Iranians from actively pursuing nuclear cooperation
[04:43] with North Korea. I think that what we're going to see come out of this Moscow thing is concessions from Ukraine. That's really what the bottom line is. Do you remember during the uh the 2024 election, Donald Trump said that he could end the Russia Ukraine war in 24 hours? He genuinely believed that he could because he believed that he could speak frankly with Putin. He could get the Ukrainians to back down by threatening them, which he did. You
[05:15] remember the the explosive meeting between uh Trump and JD Vance on the one side and Zalinsky on the other side in the Oval Office where where both Trump and Vance humiliated him, but our NATO allies didn't back down and Zalinski was tougher than we expected him to be. Now, for all intents and purposes, the Ukrainians can't win this war. They just can't. Russia's a nuclear power. It it's it's got an endless supply of North
[05:48] Korean soldiers that it can put on the ground. It's got all these Russian drones and Iranian drones and Chinese drones and North Korean drones and, you know, there's just nothing to stop them. They occupy a a pretty fair slice of eastern uh Ukraine as well as Crimea. And I think that the Ukrainians, if they want peace, are going to have to negotiate a deal whereby Ukraine is fasttracked for European Union membership. And the United States
[06:18] declares Ukraine a major non-NATO ally. The same status enjoyed by Japan, Australia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates. You get the idea. I think that's what it's going to look like in the end. High prices are here to stay. Gas, groceries, insurance. If you're a homeowner, you've probably thought, "Should I refinance to pay off this credit card debt?" Then you
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[07:53] my partners here at the show and I u a few days ago did a Q&A session and I've said in the past how much I love doing these Q&As's. I just love them. The questions are always so good and so insightful. Well, one of the questions that I get with regularity is about Hollywood and about CIA activity in Hollywood. Um I'm actually very proud of my IMDb page. I've done a lot of stuff. Um, most importantly, I've been a script adviser on a half a dozen movies and uh
[08:27] and TV series, something that I really enjoy doing. And I'll tell you a story about that in a little. But that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about here is the CIA doing something that the FBI has been doing since the very early 1950s. The FBI and the CIA both now give special access to Hollywood writers, directors, and producers, even access to classified briefings,
[09:00] just so that when the movie finally comes out, it shows the CIA and the FBI in a positive light. There are no movies where the FBI agents are the bad guys. There are almost no movies where the CIA officers are the bad guys. Well, that's not an accident. The CIA 25 years ago established a branch within the Office of Public Affairs. That's the unclassified area of the CIA, the public facing part
[09:30] of the CIA whose specific role it is to cooperate and lies with Hollywood Studios. That's it. That's all they do all day long. an entire staff of people just work with Hollywood studios making pro-CIA movies. I would call that propaganda, but that's just me. In any event, the most egregious example is a a an absolutely awful awful film called Zero Dark 30. Zero Dark 30 came out in
[10:03] 2012 and it won several Academy Awards, I'm sorry to say. Uh, it was written by Mark Bull, an Academy Award-winning writer, and it was directed and produced by Katherine Bigalow, an Academy Award-winning director. The reason why I say it was awful is that the sole purpose of this film was to perpetuate the lie that the CIA's torture program led to Osama bin Laden's location. It did not. That is a lie.
[10:34] And both the CIA and Katherine Bowl and and Katherine Bigalow and Mark B want you to believe that that's what it was. I'll tell you what led to the location of Osama bin Laden. It was really great analysis. That's how Bin Laden was found. But anyway, Bigalow and Bull were invited to CIA headquarters when they were writing this movie, and they were given classified
[11:05] briefings by CIA analysts in violation of the Espionage Act. They were given access to a classified mockup of the Osama bin Laden compound in violation of the Espionage Act. and they were then invited to a classified awards ceremony where the director of the CIA at the time um revealed the names of the SEAL team six members who had killed Osama bin Laden which is a violation of the
[11:37] Espionage Act. So, be very wary when you watch these Hollywood uh films and they make the CIA look like, you know, the guys who saved the nation while supporting the Constitution and respecting human rights. It's all BS and it's propaganda. Back in 2007, I was working for a big four professional services firm called
[12:09] Deote. At the time, it was called Deote and Touch. I was the deputy director of the competitive intelligence program there. It was it was the most boring job I ever had in my life. Lovely, wonderful group of people, tons of money, the most boring job I ever had in my life. And in the summer of 2007, I was really bored. Well, my former boss at the CIA called me one day and he said, "Listen, you're going to get a call from Paramount
[12:39] Studios. They called me and they asked me to do something." He said, "And I said, it's not for me. I'm too old, but John Kuryaku would do it." I said, "Okay." I said, "You want to tell me what it is?" He said, "I'm going to let them explain it, but they're going to call you." I said, "Okay." Couple of hours later, I get a call from the vice president and general counsel at Paramount Studios, and she said that they had just finished filming a movie called The Kiterunner, based on the uh
[13:10] Khal Husseini number one bestselling smash hit uh of the same name, The Kiterunner. And um they needed my help. I said, "Okay, what kind of help do you need?" They said, 'Well, can we fly you out to out to LA and we want you to watch the movie first and then we want to talk to you in detail about what we want you to do, but it's going to be private. I said, "Okay." So, um, I flew out to Hollywood. They showed me a rough cut of the movie, so
[13:41] no like music and, you know, multiple takes, that kind of thing. It was a work of art, this movie. It was so great. It was just like the book. Once I saw the movie, I knew exactly what they wanted. There were two scenes in this film that were highly, highly objectionable to Muslim culture. One was a scene where a 15-year-old boy essays a 12-year-old boy and the 12-year-old limps away while
[14:11] he's bleeding. Awful. The second was when a teenage boy was forced to do a homoerotic dance in front of a group of members of the Taliban. The movie, even though it hadn't even been fully edited yet, had leaked and bootleg versions of it were being made in India and were being shipped on DVD to Afghanistan. Now, many Afghans are
[14:42] simple people and when they watch this movie, they couldn't tell the difference between a Hollywood movie and real life. And so, they had begun threatening the lives of the children who had acted in the film. And I said to the general counsel, "You want me to go to Afghanistan and get these kids out of the country?" and she said, "That's exactly what we want you to do." So I said, "Okay, I got to come up with
[15:13] a plan." So I asked my boss for two weeks vacation. He granted it. Have fun. He didn't ask me where I was going and I didn't offer. And so I flew to Afghanistan. In advance, I hired a [laughter] a group of British mercenaries to protect me. So, armed security, armored car, and a translator and a driver. Really good guys. And um the studio gave me an Inmarat satellite
[15:45] phone in case, you know, all hell broke loose and I had to take to the mountains to save myself. And so, uh I flew to Kbble. These guys picked me up at the airport. I stayed in a small flea bag hotel. And and I'm glad I did because while I was there, the Intercontinental Hotel was was killed and more or killed was attacked and more than a dozen people were killed. And so um I found the kids at school and I went to see the principal and I spoke to him. I said, "I
[16:16] I need to speak to the parents of these children." So the principal who saw a little bakshish in his future uh took me to the parents house. I said, "The studio sent me. I'm here to rescue you. Well, it's not a question of just rescuing, you know, mom, dad, and the kids. It's, you know, Uncle Muhammad and Aunt Miriam and cousin Abdullah. And to make a long story short, I had to get 27 people out of the country.
[16:46] So, the studio had given me a ton of cash. I bribed everybody that needed to be bribed. And um I went to the foreign ministry. I had a meeting with the deputy foreign minister. I I should add too, I went to the American embassy. The CIA uh rep refused to meet with me. I had uh I had not blown the whistle yet at that point, but I'm a private citizen. And even for old time sake, and this is what I told him. I said, "Buddy, you've known me for 27 years.
[17:19] For old time's sake." He's like, "Can't do it, buddy. Can't do So, I met with the State Department. I said, "Look, I'm here to rescue these kids." They said, "Let us know what you need." I said, "I need a meeting with the deputy foreign minister. They're the ones who got me the meeting with the deputy foreign minister." I went in. I bribed him. I said, "I need 27 Afghan passports and 27 exit visas." And he gave them to me. I had to rent a bus. We put everybody in the bus with all their suitcases. We go to the airport in Kbble. The airport in Kbble is very tiny. It's got like four
[17:51] gates. So, I just go to the to the desk there and I said, "I need 28 one-way tickets on the first flight to Dubai." And the guy kind of looks at me funny. I said, "Seriously, like right now, whatever the first flight to Dubai is, I need 28 one-way tickets." And so, he said, "Well, there's a flight that's leaving in like whatever it was, an hour and a half on Cam Air, Kam." I said, 'What is that?' He said, 'Cam.
[24:40] have started a Twitter page, uh, Federman Staffers, and they're going to post all this stuff. But seriously though, come on. This is a guy who just doesn't feel like doing any work. He has by far the worst attendance record in the Senate. The only times he's shown up for work is to take selfies with Benjamin Netanyahu. The only time he's worn a suit, I mean this quite literally, the only time he has
[25:11] bothered to put on a suit was to attend Benjamin Netanyahu's address to a joint session of Congress. I'll say what the me mainstream media can't, but it's clear if you've been following this guy at all, John Federman suffered a near fatal stroke in 2022 during the campaign. He still uses a closed caption transcription technology to comprehend what people are saying to him because his brain just can't process it. The man is not of sound mind. And
[25:44] Americans, especially Pennians, have to suffer the consequences. Here's why the disgruntled staffer thing doesn't doesn't ring true with Federman. Listen, I worked on Capitol Hill a long time, both on the House side and on the Senate side. what you just saw on MSNBC or MS Now is true. There are a lot of people who don't like their bosses and when they leave the job on Capitol Hill, they'll whisper about it and then you'll [clears throat] hear sort of through the grape vine that so and so is not a nice
[26:14] person to work for. But 12 and it didn't say 12 staffers. It said 12 staffers and lawmakers would talk to the Wall Street Journal and show them original text messages. If these people were staffers who could barely hold down a job on Capitol Hill, which is what Federman said, and weren't used to narcissistic bosses with big egos, okay, sure, maybe you can take the complaints with a grain of salt. But that's not the case, and that's not how
[26:44] staffing, especially on the Senate side, works. These are some of the best, some of the brightest people that Washington has to offer. Federman was a frontline candidate in 2022. He attracted big names to his campaign. His staffers were the best people on the Democratic side of the aisle. They now run the show for everyone from Zoron Mumdani to Bernie Sanders. They likely have much better things that they could be doing
[27:14] than leaking texts by John Federman. Or at least they don't need to smear John Federman's reputation to explain a gap in their resume. And just as an aside, I spoke over the weekend with a senior official in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. He told me that two sitting congressmen, Chris Delusio of the northern Pittsburgh suburbs, uh, uh, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, and Brendan Bole from Eastern Pennsylvania, as well as
[27:45] moderate former Pittsburgh area Congressman Connor Lamb, whom Federman defeated in the 2022 Democratic primary are all considering running against Federman in the primary. With all that said, this official told me that he doesn't think Fetterman's going to even bother to seek re-election. His health is terrible. His wife and kids don't even live in Washington. Some reports say that his marriage is hanging on by a thread. And then by all accounts, the guy just
[28:17] hates his job. He just hates being a senator. He doesn't even like Pennians. Couple that with the fact that Pennians don't like him, and well, that ought to be all she wrote. There was a poll that was released this past week in Pennsylvania showing that among Democrats, 30% like the guy and 70% don't. He can't win a Democratic
[28:49] primary. Why bother running in a Democratic primary if you hate the job? So, I think that he is going to just walk away. I've got a friend at Politico, the political news website, and he's kind of a a doomsday guy, and I was talking to him over the weekend, too, and he said, "How about this?" He said the Democrats need to win um uh four seats to take
[29:20] over the Senate. He said three seats makes it 50/50. Vice President Vance has the tiebreaking vote, but with uh with Mitch McConnell, uh MIA, it's, you know, going to be close. It could be 50 Democrats and 49 Republicans. We have to wait and see. But then he said Fedterman would switch parties and then it would be 50/50 again or 5049 or whatever and the vice president still has the vote. Or even if the Democrats do win
[29:51] 51 seats, Federman could still switch parties and it would be 50/50 and then the vice president blah blah blah. I'm like, let's just take one thing at a time. I'll tell you, I I wish I wish I had two more years I would run for this seat. I love Pennsylvania. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania. I go to Pennsylvania all the time. I could easily reestablish residency there. Two more years. I'm looking at you,
[30:22] Federman, and I want my 50 bucks back. Crook. Every American with an IRA or a 401k should hear this next part. There's a number Wall Street won't talk about, and it puts gold at roughly eight times today's price. And it's not a guess. It's basic math using China's own published data. Here's why that matters right now. China just hit an all-time record in gold reserves. 21 straight months of buying. Each month bigger than
[30:53] the last. At the same time, they are dumping US Treasury bonds. Run the math. China's trade surplus divided by the gold they're importing and that number is $38,000. That's what gold would need to be worth if China settles trade in metal instead of dollars. And everything they're building says that's exactly where this is headed. Meanwhile, the national debt crossed $40 trillion. Annual interest payments on this debt now exceed the entire annual military budget. If your
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[31:57] That's johnlovesgold.com or call 888 G O L D053. Okay. There was another story that I wanted to uh to touch on and that was a report in the Washington Post. Correction. That was a report in the New York Times that in a major leak hunt, the Pentagon is now polygraphing members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[32:29] Can you imagine that? Time was when only the CIA, the FBI, and NSA polygraphed employees. In the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president, there was an idea that came out of the White House to polygraph everybody in the State Department because there were leaks taking place and Reagan was convinced that these leaks were coming from the State Department. They weren't. They were coming from the Pentagon.
[32:59] The thing is the intelligence community, the foreign policy community, the defense community leak like a civ every day. But those leaks are authorized. They make the administration, no matter who happens to be president, look good. What we're talking about are unauthorized leaks that may embarrass a president. So, very quietly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been
[33:30] polygraphing about 50 staff members. And we're talking about generals, colonels, and lieutenant colonels. This is because somebody is talking to the media and they're saying things like, "We're not winning the Iran war. We're running out of missiles because we gave them all to Ukraine. We do not control the Strait of Hormuz." Well, that's driving the White House
[34:01] crazy. The investigators are asking these senior military officers and a handful of civilian employees on the joint chiefs if they disclosed classified information to members of the press and about whether they provided information about diminished US munitions stocks. One of the reasons why that's so important is because the questions would only be asked if the allegations were true. It's only classified if it's true.
[34:32] That's it. And what makes what makes the administration think that these leaks aren't coming from Capitol Hill, which also leaks like a civ? The polygraph tests were conducted in August after a flurry of news reports detailing these these diminished stocks of uh crucial munitions, including long-range missiles, Patriot interceptors. The show of force appeared aimed at not just fariting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others who might be
[35:03] thinking of speaking with the media. And that's according to people with inside knowledge of what's happening. We still have a couple of minutes. I wanted to talk to about um well, you know what? Let's roll this clip and we'll talk about it. Take a look.
[35:50] Mayor >> [music] >> That's a lie. We know it's a lie. He thinks people don't pay attention or
[36:21] people don't have memories. We know that's a lie for a couple of reasons. First, he said in previous interviews that he was awakened on the night of October 7th. He just decided to go back to bed. So to say that, okay, October 7th was happening and he was asleep and his aids never woke him up. Oh, but only if he had been awakened, he could have saved so many lives. That's just a lie. They did wake him up and he went back to
[36:51] sleep. So, there's another thing, too. It's been well documented that for two weeks before Hamas attacked the music festival on October 7th, there were signals intelligence indicators that the attack was coming. Also, Hamas was floating balloons over the border into Israel proper to see wind directions, weather conditions. Everybody knew an attack was
[37:22] coming. But Idomar Bengavir, that extreme right-wing convicted hate crime felon who is Israel's Minister of National Security, told Shinbet, "No, the attack is coming in the West Bank. I want all eyes on the West Bank. Forgive me if I believe, and I say this, and I'm going to repeat what I've said in previous podcasts, I am the least conspiratorial person I know, but
[37:52] forgive me if I can only conclude that this was a conspiracy to allow the October 7th attack to go forward to give the Israelis a fig leaf for them to launch what essentially is a genocide in Gaza. And now that Gaza is almost completely pacified, now they're looking at the West Bank and allowing settlers to just have their way
[38:24] with Palestinians, be they Muslim or Christian. Folks, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Briefing Room. I want to thank our producers, John Ball and Victoria von Pertz. Please keep your comments coming. We read all of them. It's jkbadmingmail.com. Uh, please continue to like, share, subscribe, review, and tell your friends and family about us. We can only keep growing because of you. So, thank you
[38:57] very much. And if you're not sick of me yet, you can find more content on John Kiryaku's Deadrop. That's on Apple Podcast and Spotify. And you can find more of me on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Cameo, and soon Tik Tok. Until next time, I'm John Kuryaku. Thanks for joining us.