We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emi Lajashinskiek,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to the
premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. Today I'm
excited to be joined by Brian Dean Wright. Brian is XCIA and he also
has a new podcast called The Right Report. Brian, thanks for joining us.
Such a treat this is great. Now. I started up by saying
your podcast is new? Is it new? How new is it? You've
been doing it for a little bit, well for the last year to a
lot of folks out there might be new. We kicked off last April and
have been going strong ever since. We're just shy it one year, so
yeah, relatively speaking, it's new. Well, congrats then on the one
year mark. That's a huge mark. I feel like a lot of people
start podcasts and they go for six months or something or three months and it
just sort of peters out. But that's just such a great mark of success.
And can you tell us, Brian a little bit about where people can
find your podcasts and what they can expect to hear on your podcast, you
bet, five days a week, available no later than seven am Eastern.
I bring folks around America around the news, and we talk about around the
world. Rather, we talk about news that's happening that might not get on
everybody's radar at first. But I use my background as an intel guy will
take you to strange places and help you understand why we should care about you
know, Van and Watu or Uaga Dogu and like where are those places?
Well, I'll tell you. So. It's a lot of fun. We
have a great time seven am Eastern on all major podcast platforms, and we
do a lot of domestic news as well, a lot of great political stuff
and even the fun stuff again you don't usually hear elsewhere, like agriculture.
Well, you know, there's also some good overlap between agriculture and intelligence,
especially these days, and maybe we can't get to that in just a second,
Yeah, do it right? Could you tell us about your career history,
your experience with the CIA, a little bit about what brought you up
to this point. You know, I grew up in a farming and egg
family back in Oregon, graduating from college back in the day at gonte Goes
Eggs, and I went into the intelligence community as a pretty young guy on
twenty four years of age. Went into the what's called the Clandestine Service,
So there different kinds of jobs. My job was to go out and recruit
spies, steal secrets, and give those two the folks back at headquarters who
would take out down to the White House and talk about what's happening in the
world. So that was my career. And then I taught a fair amount
also with the military, and did that for gosh, lots and lots of
years until the last three or so, and that's when I started doing a
little bit more writing, a little more TV stuff, and this podcast.
So this has been a great transition spending time for years avoiding cameras and Mike's
and now I sit in front of them and talking to them as a no
longer clandestine officer. So it's a lot of fun. You know. There's
also interesting kind of reporting in that. I mean, it's just been over
the course of years and years about how if you are XCIA that the agency
still has to exert some control or influence over what you say. And Brian,
I don't know to what extent you're able to answer that question say about
your experience with the CIA, that is is that, how true is that?
How might that influence the way you go about all of this work,
I imagine has to be sometimes kind of tough to balance all of that.
It's an awesome question. So if there are topics that I know that I
have got inside information on and I want to talk about that, I have
to reach out to the agency. There's a review board, and they're actually
pretty good about taking the information and processing it sometimes same day, but otherwise
I just really really far away from the stuff that I know to be true,
from the clandestine world and my clandestine secrets. That has to remain in
my head for the rest of my life. But I will tip my hat
to the agency for on occasion when I have to reach out to clarify.
They're pretty good at getting back to me. But I know the line.
I don't want to be in prison, So I'm very motivated to write and
speak carefully bold, bold choice to stay out of prison. Bright to set
the stage a little bit. You know, there's this great piece that you
wrote for the Washington Examiner recently, actually like March twenty first, I think
is when it came out. The headline was the US intelligence community is a
propaganda machine. And again this kind of sets the table because I hope our
listeners know at this point that we're not just throwing you know, hacked spooks
up on Federal austradio hour. This is you know, serious territory for self
reflection as you engage in every single day about what's happening to the intel community
in the US and how it's evolved over the course of various years. You
start with this thing that Dan Crenshaw said. You say, last Friday,
Representative Dan Crenshaw told a lie about US spies. He was asked if he
was worried about intel agencies spreading propaganda within the US, thereby manipulating our minds
about domestic or foreign affairs. Crenshaw, laughably, from my perspective, says,
I know that they're not. Do you have some evidence otherwise that you'd
like to share? Now, again, this is a helpful kind of table
setter. Brian, Could you talk to us a little bit about why that
smug insistence from Dan Crenshaw isn't in fact a lie and why the reality behind
that lie is so important? Right now? Yeah, so let's start with
this. I think most of us know intuitively that probably the CIA and FBI
are leaking to the press. I will tell you from personal experience that I
know that the agency tended to leak to the Washington Post. When I was
inside of the building, they would talk about this. This was the joke
that our seventh floor or our CIA director or senior folks, they would leak
to the Washington Post. The FBI would leak to the New York Times,
their senior folks. So we all kind of knew culturally that that's what happened,
right so, which in and of itself is awful and wrong and bad.
A lot of times those leaks were actually directed by the White House.
Sometimes our senior folks just did it on their own, kind of let James
comy. But the point is, so anecdotally I can tell you that's true.
But the real challenge is how do we demonstrate this? How do we
factually prove that it is true? Because what I know from when I entered
in two thousand and one to the CIA, and what it is today wildly
different. I don't trust the agency or the intel community. So how do
I prove this allegation that they are spreading propaganda inside of this country and that
it is highly unethical, if not illegal. Well, what I show in
that piece that you brought up is the fact that we can go back to
December of twenty twenty two, a woman named Amirl Haynes, who is the
director of the Office of National Director of National Intelligence. She was sitting down
on BBC Radio four with a guy last named Fleming, with a British GHQ,
which is kind of their segent or signals intelligence, their spies that listened
to emails or phone calls and read emails and such. And they were talking
about the war in Ukraine, and they were talking about how they were declassifying
information to try to what they said, prebunk or debunk Russian disinformation. And
the goal was to try to put this stuff inside of Moscow, inside of
Russia, changed the hearts and minds of the Russian people, and then if
not, try to change the hearts on the minds of all of Russia's allies
all around the world. So those are the two goals, and what they
set on BBC radio, these two leading spies of these two countries hours in
the brits Is they said, well, the propaganda operation where we declassify disinformation,
it was unsuccessful, unmitigated disaster inside of Russia. It did nothing.
Also did absolutely nothing all of these countries all around the world, who are
Russia's allies. So you might one think, gosh, here they are admitting
that their propaganda operation did not work. Okay, well, then they added
both AMERL. Haynes and this mister Fleming added, but this information that we
put out into the public sphere, the propaganda, it really changed the needle
and hearts and minds in Europe and the United States, and that is just
disastrous. But they celebrated it. Now you might be able to argue,
well, okay, if they were declassifying really good information, maybe that is
good for us to know. Well, we unfortunately know that they were publicizing
information that was in some cases just half true, the unvetted rumor or they
published stuff that they knew to be false. So it wasn't like they were
really declassifying this top shelf stuff that we all really needed to know. It
was just garbage, and they were celebrating that, and so I documented that
in this piece to say, look, Crenshaw knows better or he should,
that this information, at least on the issue of Ukraine, is being put
out into the public sphere. It is changing hearts and minds on this issue,
which, oh, by the way, Biden and a lot of folks
on Congress want us to give us give Ukraine another sixty billion plus dollars on
top of the one hundred or so we've already given. So we should probably
say this spreading propaganda in this country, and I would imagine in the UK
might not be good, especially with that propaganda is false. So that's the
point that I make. The Intel community is absolutely out of its mind.
When I was involved in various operations, the lawyers were always asking the question,
what is the potential blowback here when we do the propaganda stuff. Do
we need to be worried about this coming back into the US because we don't
want that. That was happening into twenty fifteen and sixteen when I was there,
and now they actually celebrate that it is coming into the United States,
that our own propaganda is influencing American hearts and minds. That is wrong.
It should be and we should be talking about it. Hello, thank you
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for sponsoring this episode and our good times. You know, this was so
central to the creation of these Intel agencies that it would not they would not
operate within the boundaries of the United States. That was held sort of sacred
as a founding principle of these Intel agencies, at least publicly. That's not
to say there wasn't a funny business going on. We know, for example,
with Chadgar Hoover. You know, there's all kinds of stuff going on.
FBI is differently the CIA, obviously, but with the CIA, I
mean, there are various different things I'm sure people will point to, but
that was held sacred. That was really a line that publicly at least was
not crossable. And then we have had so much reporting since on former Intel
guys collaborating on the Hunter Biden laptop propaganda letter. We know that people were
using CIA email addresses to help in the organizing of signatures for that letter and
censoring the Hunter Biden laptop on the guys that it was potential Russian propaganda.
I guess I just want to ask Brian, you know you mentioned that you
started in two thousand and one, so just the watershed moment in the history
of American Intel, global Intel obviously nine to eleven, along with the influx
of online technology and all these different tools. It was, you know,
such a such a crucial hinge point in history. What went wrong? Where
did all of this start to change and why? If you ask those of
us who started right after or right during nine to eleven, such as me,
I think a lot of us started to see the change. And around
twenty ten or so, first of all, we just stopped, I think,
having that passion for the mission. I think there were a lot of
folks who were there more for themselves to feed their egos. The culture started
to change a bit. I think all of us saw that, because again
we came on you know, days or weeks after or before the nine to
eleven attacks, so we were motivated by mission, by country and love for
our country. That changed, and I would say around twenty ten, give
or take. I also think that the culture started to change because of who
we were hiring, and they were all under the Obama administration. There were
a lot of folks who came on board where it was all about the me
show, it wasn't about mission, and I started to see some of that.
That's sort of what we would now call DEI stuff, the diversity,
equity inclusion world. We started to see that creeping in in around twenty ten
twelve. So I put part of it to that, But at the end
of the day, it's about terrible leadership, both at the White House and
whoever they choose to run the CIA. If you are not mission only,
and you are mission sometimes but politics other times, which is what we currently
have, then you are going to get a very very horrific situation where you've
got a deep state, or you've got what Chuck Schumer said said back in
twenty seventeen, which is an intel community that could have six ways of Sunday
to get after politicians who are duly elected by you, all by us the
voters. That's what we have right now, and that not only came from
Chuck Schumer, but we've got, as you allude to, a couple of
Special Council reports, We've got Inspector General report to talk about the lack of
strict fidelity to the law by the FBI. Yeah, that's another word for
lawlessness by our bureau. That's awful. So we've seen, i think,
over the past ten years, a real profound assault on the country. It
is an attack on this nation by folks in the intel community, which really
is the definition of the deep state. Yeah, that's so interesting. Maybe
just I'm also interested in what it was like to be at the CIA around
two thousand and one and maybe throughout the kind of early heady days of the
War on Terror, just being there and being around, you know, so
many genuinely very brave people, so many genuinely very well intentioned people, but
also in the midst of this real and justified panic. What was it like
just to be someone spending every day, you know, in that environment at
the time, you know, the word incredible comes to mind. You know,
it really was the best of times because we had a lot of men
and women who showed up because they wanted to deserve the country. They wanted
to defend the country, and that was their motivation. So you were surrounded
by these incredible men and women who were diverse, but not because that was
the goal. We had folks who are Christian and Muslim, and gay and
straight and black and white, didn't matter. We all came to work every
day focus on trying to protect the country, figure out who al Katta was
and where their threats were coming from inside and outside of the country. It
was incredible. It really was amazing. And you know, I had so
many amazing and wonderful memories of a lot of these folks who sacrificed so much,
and to include their lives, I will never forget some of my first
early colleagues who I went through training with, who didn't come home, and
their memories I will always live in my heart and mind. You don't forget
those folks. So it was an intense time when you know, you would
go out and have a lunch and you look up on the sky after the
weeks after nine eleven, and you would see that when the planes were allowed
to fly again, you would see them and think, well, this won't
come unto me or not, and there was a degree of concern. I
think a lot of us every day were like, well, maybe this is
the day that the agency gets hit. I don't know, but we got
to keep going. We've got too much work to do, We've got too
many threats to address. And it really was incredible, and it did intends
that I miss that era where people walked in and they didn't care about their
personal politics. They weren't there for a snuggle session about you know, I'm
whatever. Was at an infamous CIA recruitment ad that came out about three years
ago where the gal said that she was intersectional, which I think is a
kind of couch. I don't know. The point is she was like talking
about all these things that were relevant. Right, I've latina, I'm anxiety
disorder, Like what did get hero divergent? Right? Right? What do
these words even mean? I think somebody just made them up. They're not
even real English words. The point is it's absurd they're hiring these people who
Now was it? I think two weeks ago there was a document that was
put out by the Office of Director of National Intelligence that talked about how this
person was a cross dresser and it made him a better Intel officer. And
this person wasn't even claiming to be transgender. They just were cross dresser.
Wait, what, why why are we doing this? Why are we putting
this out? And it was true. It's incredible. The Peace was talking
about how the guy was a much better Intel officer because he wore ladies clothes.
Look, whatever you want to do in your private time, knock yourself
out, don't care, but come on. So here we are twenty years
twenty five years later. It is an Intel agency and an Intel community that
is unrecognizable. It is now yet one more extension of these absolutely crazy leftist
ideas that are turning the Intel community into something that it wasn't designed to be
or do. And by the way, I say that as a guy who
was for twenty years of Democrats, so I feel like I have a little
bit of cred on this and I left that crazy party. But at any
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zapmdebt dot com, zapmidebt dot com. That's kind of exactly what I was
going to ask you about next, because interestingly, Michael Waller has a new
book out sort of going through the history of the evolution of these h sies,
and Mike talks about how there's a real ideological strain of basically cultural Marxism
that's running through the CEI CIA for example. And you know, he looks
at people like Clapper and Brennan and says, these are actual ideological leftists and
they have brought this this ideology into the bureau, or not the Bureau,
into the CIA and into the intel world. And that, to a lot
of people, especially my friends on the left, is going to sound absolutely
laughable. I mean, when you watch the CIA recruitment video that you just
referenced, it becomes a lot less laughable. But I wonder, Brian,
from your perspective, do you see this as kind of a haphazard battle between
the young millennial employees who are just woke in ways that they don't really even
understand and want a virtue signal and you know, believe in gay rights and
women's rights and all of that. Or is it this deeper ideological struggle that
really is rooted in you know, maybe some of the things that like Chris
Rufo talks about with cultural Marxism. Where do you kind of fall on assessing
how deep this is? Well, I actually think that it's both. So
I think that you've got a lot of young people who have been brought up
in this cultural Marxist stop over the past twenty or thirty years, and they
now believe that they might not necessarily understand that the Marxist underpinnings or the goals
of some of the more Marxist leadership, but they are living in the world
that these folks have created, so they come into work with all the wokism
which really is centered in this Marxist cultural revolution. So what I have seen
and I know for sure, I'll give you just one example. There was
someone at the agency who believes themselves to be transgendered. They came in and
they were going to file an appeal or a demand that some people be fired
because they saw on the person bumper sticker it said Trump for President. And
this obviously was a number of years ago, and so the person believed themselves
to be so important, that their beliefs and values were more important than anybody
else's that they could file this claim and get that person fired because their cultural
or political beliefs didn't cohere to each other. So, look, I think
that there's that group of people who have just been brought up in this radical
leftist stuff and they're living in the world that they might not understand have been
created for them, but it certainly is true, because yes, John Brennan
and some of those guys absolutely swing way left and they're bringing that Marxist stuff
along with him. And then of course you've just got the guys who are
the true old school deep staters. Let me give you an example, aldrich
Ames. He was a former CIA operations officer. He worked secretly for the
Soviet Union. When he was caught by the FBI. He was asked why
to do it, and he said, because I know what's best for America's
national security and I'm going to act on that. This is the James Comy
or aldrich Ames deep state, where they're just going to do what they want
because they think they're smarter and better than the rest of us. So you've
got that kind of leadership, you've got the John Brennan radical leptist, communist,
socialist, Marxist stuff, and then you've got a lot of younger people
from that trans person I mentioned to others who they just want to be the
intersectional neuro divergent person because they think that's normal and it's not. So we've
got this really awful mix of a lot of different kinds of people, different
motivations. But the end of the day, what did I not mention and
all that of why people are there? The mission the country, defending the
nation, that is why everybody should be there, and that is what is
being sacrificed, and instead you've got a bunch of people with a lot of
power using it for very terrible means. I'm kind of scared to ask this
question, but from the inside, how frightened are you about the apparent lack
of competence and preparation sort of on full display. A lot of people see
this more broadly with the Pentagon, Afghanistan and Mark Millie and there have been
all kinds of connections drawn there. But you know, again, just you
have such helpful perspective on this, you have experience from the inside. Are
there kind of everyday ways that scare you? If the or as the CIA
in particular, has embraced this ideology not just for these kind of ideological concerns,
but for these concerns of just like basic preparations, our ability to defend
the country. The border is a really good example, not that that's the
CIA's fault. But just you know, we have all kinds of different people
from the terrorists watch list coming in the border, you know, every few
days basically, and we have to depend on the FBI, for example,
to be able to defend us from that. Are you scared just about our
ability to protect ourselves? Amen? Yes I am. So let's talk about
what we all know just CIA aside, and that is when you start hiring
people or you surround yourself with people not because of merit. So you're trying
to build a business, and it's not because they are good at whatever job
you're hiring them to do, but rather they check a box that you need
because the federal government or otherwise tells you, oh, we need a certain
number of gay folks or women or what have you. When everything that you
base your HR procedures and processes on and you will hire people not on merit.
Can you do the job? Can you spy or recruit recruit spies and
steel secrets abroad? If you're not asking that, then you're in big trouble
because not only do you have problems in terms of collecting the intel, but
then analyzing it. What does all of that mean? Well, if you're
not hiring smart people who you're hiring because they're smart, but because of a
skin color or sexual orientation, then you are immediately and automatically inherently degrading the
process of both the collection and the analysis of that intel. I mean,
just intuitively obviously, right. So yes, I am deeply afraid of the
folks that are being hired right now. Are they really competent because they're not
hired on merit and large So yes, I'm very concerned about that. Thank
God. I will tell you there are some good people still left there and
they are doing God's work. There aren't a lot of them, there are
some, but I think that they from what I understand what I continue to
be told is they feel like they are being overrun by people who shouldn't be
there, who are qualified to be there, and that is affecting operational planning
and execution because it is incredibly incredibly tough to go out there and recruit those
spies and steal those secrets, get high quality intel that then goes to the
president. That is a problem with your collectors aren't really competent. So yeah,
I'm worried. And how much was any of this, I don't know.
I don't mean this spee leading question, but how much was this influenced
by or induced by morale concerns throughout the sort of broader war on terror in
which the CIA, you know, whether it was torture, which I think
we forget, how front and center it was to these news cycles throughout the
Bush administration into the Obama administration, you know, different intelligence failures that led
up to nine to eleven in the War on terror? Was there a crisis
of morale that maybe made it easier for these ideological failures to or these these
failed ideologies I should say to Waltz in the door and kind of take over
the CIA? Is there any is there any connection between those two things?
You know, I think that there could play a role. I don't think
it played a major role. I think that whatever morale issues occurred, it
was because of the folks who did engage in whatever you know, advanced interrogation
techniques people called torture. Whatever you know, your view on that is fine.
There were some people who got hung out to drive because of that.
They were following orders and they got in serious trouble. But the lives were
ruined and people were tossed out of that out of work. But I really
don't think that that created a culture where then it allowed kind of a weakness
then this other more radical leftist stuff to kind of seep in. I think
instead, if I could use an analogy, I just read a piece this
morning that was talking about a study of British female athletes and the ask these
gals, are you worried at all and concerned about any advantage that so called
to trans women have obviously men competing as women. And this survey was anonymous,
and it said seventy percent seven zero percent were worried, and they were
a similar percentage were worried about speaking out. They felt that they might ruin
their careers, that they might be in trouble in some way. And so
I think what happens is you start to get these small numbers of people who
come into the place like a CIA, where you've got leadership. He says,
hey, to these small numbers of people, actually, your cross dressing
is totally normal, and everybody should accept your cross dressing and if they don't,
they're a bigot. Well wait a minute. If course everybody's like wait,
what, that's crazy, But if it's set enough and if enough people
sort of now there doesn't go along with it. Suddenly the majority, the
seventy percent in the UK today or the majority of folks at the CIA,
are like, oh, well, I don't want to not get promoted.
I don't want to get the job that I really want. So I'm just
going to keep my head down and I'm not going to say that that is
actually crazy that we should be not you know what I mean. So I
think that that is probably helps explain when Obama and others came into the White
House, they chose their CIA leadership. They were not focused on mission.
They were focused on this social engineering stuff, mostly radical leftist stuff that changed
then the culture, and so the people who were there for a mission shut
up and kept their heads down continue to do the job, thank god.
But then they brought in a whole bunch of other people who are not interested
in doing the job because they were intersectional and neurodivergent and the rest of it.
And now it seems like they're the normal ones, but they're not.
So you want to change that, we can talk about how to do that,
but it needs to be changed. Hello, thank you for listening to
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episode and our good times. You know the There's a line towards the end
of Howard Hunt's memoir that's always stuck with me. It was written, I
want to say, two thousand and seven, and obviously Howard Hunt is famously
longtime CIA operative, involved in Bay of Pigs and Watergate and Guatemala and all
of that. But the former too, I believe. But he wrote,
if we're right, he really blamed the Church Committee and the reforms that came
out of the Church Committee and some of the crisis of confidence that came out
of the Church Committee. As he was looking at the Iraq War, he
thought, you know, if we had a stronger, unhampered CIA, what
we could have done was something more covert and precise in the Middle East,
in Iraq, and we wouldn't have had to have this sort of massive boots
on the ground operation. And again this is what he's writing around two thousand
and seven, he didn't have the benefit that we do now of hindsight.
But I'm wondering, Brian, what your take is on that, because you
know, it could be extrapolated to just about every conflict that the United States
finds itself in brilden around the world. So it's a very broad and open
ended question, but just sort of in general. You know, I'm coming
from this someone from a perspective who looks at breach of you know, Foyer
Foya standards over the course of the administration and says, my goodness, you
know, the CIA should have less power or you know, these intel agencies
should have less power in general. But at the same time, there's something
that seems so real to that that there is a legitimate argument we could save
lives, you know, save American lives and have a totally different operation if
you know, this was more Cold War pre Watergate. So two things.
One, I think we can talk about the theoretical and what could be if
America were different, and then we can talk about, well, what is
the best way forward giving the America that we have so the America that we
have over the past five years, since twenty sixteen, I went from a
guy that really supported the Intel community and really embraced my former colleagues. I
did not. I knew that there were problems internally in some of this cultural
stuff, but I didn't think that it would get as bad as it did,
as we found in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Trump. When I saw
that, what became very very clear. Plus a lot of those Special Council
reports, we've got Chuck Schumer saying that CIA and the NSA and the rest
of situated and someday getting back at people are politicians. At that point,
I said, you know, okay, this is too far gone. It
doesn't matter what the importance of the mission is of the CIA or the FBI
if they are engaged in such lawlessness, if they are attacking the nation hypothetically,
you know, we could go back to even an earlier era where we
got the untouchables. Right, there're such bad corruption and we have the eliot
messes of the country rise up and start to take on the dark powers of
the nation that I think there is a way to be inspired by that about
fixing things or looking at guys, this is how it could be. I
would only offer in terms of going back some of the era of the nineteen
seventies and before you know, the agency and the covert action operations, those
are simply tools of the president, so the resident can order one thing or
the other. So the CIA comes up with lots of different operations or options,
and then the present chooses. I would only gently offer to the legend
that you mentioned the oss incredible officer, that we came into the nineteen forties
and fifties thinking that were really really good, and we were, and then
into the sixties and seventies we got a little bit overconfident in some of our
abilities in terms of we could do all this whiz bang stuff covertly, and
we really learned some bad lessons. For instance, in Guatemala, we did
a terrible job and the covert action operation down there there was nothing covered about
that. That was an overt operation. And we thought that we had learned
some interesting things and we tried to apply that to Iran, and some of
the Shaws and all that back in the day screw that up as well.
So it wasn't like that there was a perfect era in the CIA's history,
it's going to be imperfect. The operation is going to be imperfect because you
have humans and yet presidents and they have different priorities about which tools are going
to use and why. So at the end of the day, could we
create read a CIA that maybe gets back to the elliot ness like characters,
We hire those kinds of people who really just love the country and want to
do right and follow the rules and the laws. And then, oh,
by the way, because there's so much power there, we've got to have
good Senate and House oversight to make sure that there isn't abuse going on at
the CIA or FBI. Yeah, all the systems are like we know them,
They just they've broken profoundly completely. And so unless I knew that there
was somebody in the White House who truly earnestly loved this country, was not
caught up in foreign entanglements like the Biden family is, and we had different
kind of leadership of the CIA, and we started firing I'm going to guess
about sixty to seventy percent of people there who are not mission critical but in
politics aciet they're just not needed. Then maybe you start to recreate and most
importantly, I just want to emphasize this. There has got to be a
re establishment of trust with the American people because right now that trust has been
destroyed, absolutely destroyed by guy who's like James Comy and Clapper, John Brennan
and even the current guy, Christopher Ray. One of the incredible things from
one of the Special Counsel reports, I believe it was John Durham's, he
called the FBI's lawlessness missteps missteps what no wawlessness that the FBI is on a
misstep? A misstep is you know when you come home and you call your
wife by the ex girlfriend's name. That's a misstep and you're gonna be sleeping
on the couch. The point is a misstep. It's far far more serious.
Uh. The way what happened to the FBI, that that lawlessness,
it has to be made right and it has to be honored and acknowledged that
it was, it happened, and then you get new leadership and you restore
trust amongst the American people, and that's the way you move forward in my
view. Right you know, RF Kid Junior has a plan on this.
Obviously, he has a lot invested in the reform of the CIA given his
family three. Donald Trump and people that might staff at Trump administration have talked
about reforms and I know Brian that you have some ideas about this. A
lot of them have focused on separating the collection in the intel agencies and kind
of bifurcating the operations. What do you think would help from a policy perspective,
Well, the president and let's hope in this case, if I may,
that it is Trump versus Biden, because I have no belief that Biden's
can to fix things. He and his team are part of the problem.
So if it is Trump or if it is mister Kennedy, whoever it is,
has to understand that things are broken, because obviously you're not going to
fix a problem if you don't think one exists. So there's a problem,
we need to fix it. Let's talk about the CIA. You've got to
have different leadership there who comes in and looks at who's hired over the past
ten or fifteen years. You look at those HR records, especially in what's
called the Director of Analysis or Intelligence, plus the director of Operations, and
those are your spies who are out there. My old job, and then
I would hand things off to the analyst. Look at those folks and really
look at their You can look at their internal unications. You can look at
their cables that they're sending them from the field, you can look at their
analysis. You can talk to some of the folks that they work with.
Who's there formasion and who is there because there's some ideological belief. That's what
you got to focus on. You got to root out a lot of those
people. Honestly, I think it is sixty seventy percent of the people need
to just go thing and downsize and you focus on the mission at hand,
which is to protect the country and nothing more, nothing less. So it
really comes down a good leadership and then's smoking out all the people who were
hired that weren't there or shouldn't be there. It just takes new leadership.
Yeah, that's really interesting. Do you have a read on this is a
big question I was going to say on the recent horrible tragedy in Russia which
Putin now seems to be pointing fingers at the US. We know that the
CIA has been active in Ukraine. There's plenty of reporting on that. In
fact, Washington Post twice fifteen bases. Yeah, right, right, yes,
exactly, and putting's pointing the finger at the US. So a lot
of people say, well, they were heading towards the Ukraine border. That
might mean that there was some Ukraine US involvement. We still don't really have
any clear understanding of what happened with the nord Stream pipeline, although there's good
reporting in that space, some conflicting reporting in that space. But do you
have an assessment just from what we're able to know from the perspective of the
public, on how Intel is generally handling what's happening in Ukraine and Russia.
Frankly, yeah, So I cover this a lot on the podcast. On
Monday, on my podcast, we discussed this, and here's the upshot.
These guys who were the attackers with isis K, they were tachiks and some
of them were laborers there unlawfully somewhere there lawfully, but they were very poor
and they basically got an offer online or via a mosque that said, hey,
participate in this and we're going to be a bunch of money, and
then we got this escape plan. So that's what they did. They did
the attack and they had the escape plan going into Ukraine. So the question
is did the organizers reach out to obviously somebody in Ukraine and they had this
open window where they could sneak through the border, okay, the border guards
or the whoever was the Ukrainians on that side of the border. Did they
get some sort of official permission to do this by President Zelensky or his intel
or his military folks. I would be surprised if that were true, But
then again, the last two or three years have surprised me a lot things
that I didn't think would probably happened have happened. Nordstream, I think is
a notable one where the probably the Ukrainians they did that on their own,
or they were nudged into doing it by some folks at the agency or Biden.
But the point is, I don't know if Zelensky opened up the border
to help these guys because of the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort
of deal, or if this is just yet another case of Ukrainian corruption,
because we know Ukraine is massively corrupt. General Zulushni, who is the former
a chief general of the Ukraine forces, He's talked a lot about this.
Look Helen Keller could see how terribly corrupt Ukraine is. So maybe they just
paid off some border guards and they were going to sneak in and this has
nothing to do with the Ukrainian government and just some good old fashioned Ukrainian corruption.
That's what I expect this probably is. But who knows that little land
over there is full of all kinds of hijinks right now. M Absolutely,
you know, there's been another coup in Niger recently, and that's kind of
an interesting entry point to a question I wanted to ask about general US Russia
intel battles, not just US obviously, also I six and you know,
kind of generally the West, but especially the US, Russia has made a
very concerted effort to basically have these relationships in Africa that are much closer than
I think a lot of people in the US realize, and much more valuable
to them than I think a lot of people in the US realize. And
you know way more about this than I do. Obviously, China is in
the mix with Mountain Road in Africa and in South America, where also you
know, you have Iran basically with land that has been gifted to it.
In places like Venezuela, there's there's this kind of stuffs happening all over the
place, But there does also seem to be this, you know, where,
why do we still have troops in New Chair, Why are we still
you know, doing all of the operations that we're doing in places in in
Africa and in like just the most random countries that people can think of,
and a lot of it seems to me that there's still this hardened Cold War
mentality. And that's not to say that Russia isn't a threat. Russia is
absolutely a threat. But can you speak to that? Do you see that
kind of mindset as being too you inflexible and problematic, or is it,
you know, actually that we underestimate the ongoing threat from Russia. So before
we dig into this, first of all, I love this part of the
world. It's so weird. It's like a star scene out of Star Wars,
you know, when they're at the bar and it's all these weird characters,
Like, that's this part of Africa. This hell, it's awesome.
I love it. Before people are like, now this is kind of boring
Africa. I'm going to tell you this story is going to become a big
deal. It already is if you don't know it. But it's going to
become even bigger because what Moscow is doing is taking all the migrants that are
from this region in the Sahel and he's starting to push them into Libya then
onwards into Europe to push that migrant crisis even from bad to worse. And
they're doing it too into Guinea and Mauritania, which is on the west coast
of Africa, and they're pushing those people to our southern border. So yes,
boodin in this area, it's a big deal. It's super important for
us to know and understand because a lot of those migrants coming over that border
are coming from this area. Yeah, and it is on purpose, So
let's just start with that. We should definitely care about this part of the
world. Is Russia a threat? Absolutely? Can we manage that threat or
that relationship? Of course we can. I would submit to you that Beijing
is far more difficult to manage. That is a threat that is virtually impossible
to deal with in many ways, certainly as compared to the Russians. So
if you ask me like who keeps me up a night, it's not Putin.
It's not the Russians, It's the Chinese, hands down. So let's
start with that. Or second third, this area of Sahel region desperately poor,
filled with Islamic raticals, particularly the more north you get, and that
could be Isis or a strain of Isis or al Katta, and they don't
get along, so they fight each other. Plus they fight these regional governments.
And we have just this policy where we don't like to work with people
who aren't to firm democracies whatever that is anymore. And so that's why we
no longer time to the military government in Nigier. We went over there here
about a week ago. We wagged our finger that represented it from the State
Department and Pentagon all. It turns out the Nigerian leadership didn't like that,
so they're like, get out of here, take your eight hundred troops or
so, get a gone from what's called the air base two oh one,
then a city called Agadez. And yeah, we've been operating drone base or
a drone based there, firing on killing all of these Islamic radicals that,
if properly organized, could not only destabilize the central part of Africa, but
now they can do all kinds of crazy things, to include go to places
like Mauritania or Guinea and fly all the way to our southern border. So
we know that Isis is doing this, and they're doing this with the Ta
jeeks by the way, So back to your question, is Russia threat,
Yes, are the biggest threat? I don't think so. I think China
is a far bigger threat. This Sahel region. It's a big, big
issue and a big problem for the migration crisis. It's going to make it
bad in Europe. It's going to make it bad here. We haven't even
seen the beginnings of it yet because Putin is finally stard to kind of get
his claws back into this region. If you look at a map all the
way from Sudan in the far east all the way to places like Burkina,
Fosso and others in the west, and then if you toss in the Chinese,
they've got Guinea lockdown and Mauritania too. So this area, by the
way, has a lot of very important things that we need, like box
site and uranium, especially in these air We need that to fire up our
nuclear power plants and sort of folks like the French and others. So this
area is really important from the migrant perspective from some of their minerals and some
of the things that we need for our economy. But it is kind of
an area that is so strange and so weird that it's hard to even know
where it's out on the map for a lot of folks. But that's one
of the great things that I love doing on my podcast is taking people these
crazy places and helping them to understand why we should care. Awesome. Well,
my last question is about TikTok, because I have some really smart friends
who to the point you made in your wonderful Washington Examiner piece about Damn Creunch,
see the internal operation, you know, whether it's former CIA people collaborating
on a collaborating on a letter saying that this piece of journalism is propaganda even
though it's you know, by all but by all measures at that point was
true, it had been verified. But in your post over a full editorial
process, whether it's that you know, you have these intentions from our own
intel agencies that want to use places like Facebook, like Twitter, which we
know Twitter was Jack later said it was a mistake, but they did block
the sharing based on that letter of the Hunter Biden laptop story. At the
time. So people say, you know, TikTok Twitter or TikTok Facebook,
Meta is all the same thing. You know, these guys are basically defense
contractors at this point, so you know you're concerned about TikTok. This is
what they would say to me is basically it should be extended to all social
media. My counter to that is, you know, the sort of latent
threat of TikTok, as I've said on the show many times, is so
high because there's potential for a hot conflict like immediately with China, and that
puts American lives in danger. But again, you know way more about this
than I do. Brian, what's your take on the kind of great TikTok
debate? Should we be as worried about meta as we are about TikTok?
Is Meta maybe worse than TikTok because it is a domestic company and is censoring.
Where do you come down on this? So I'm kind of an all
the involved guy, but I will start with what I think is the greatest
threat, and that is the one from China. Anything that is owned by
China and has influence over this country, that could be land, that could
be a business, that could be a social media company whatever it is,
if they have access into this nation, I am I am concerned about that
and I don't want it. So with this TikTok business, if it could
be sold to a US based company by the American run company that is obligated
to respond to law, it doesn't mean that it is going to be responsive
all the time or in the best ways, as we have seen through Meta
and others over the past four or five years. You are correctly bringing up
the absolute scandal which was burying the Hunter Biden laptop story, not just the
skin. There was an attack on the country, but they did really they
stole people's votes and they changed the election. So it is not to say
that an American based company is not going to be a potential threat as well.
That is I suppose true. Is old is the country right? We've
had this threat of companies and corporations becoming too powerful for a long time.
The Gilded Agent the late eighteen hundreds, I think was probably one of the
worst in this nation. So let's solve the China problem. Let's get Beijing
out of this nation in all possible ways, including TikTok, and yes,
we can do the other thing at the same time, which is we've got
to do a much much better job at this social media censorship generally the direction
of the government by deep staters, administrative staters who decide that they want to
figure out what the truth is and decide what everybody should think. Both of
those things are threats. I think the most immediate one. Per your point,
Yeah, we got to fix the TikTok one. That is a bad
one and probably a little bit of a greater concern on a media basis.
And then yes, the rest has got to be done too. We got
a lot of work. It's overwhelming, but Brian, we are lucky to
have honest reflection from folks like yourself. Again. Brian's podcast is called The
Right Report. It's available on every major podcast platform. Brian, thank you
so much for sharing your perspective on the show today. It's been such a
treat and pleasure. And just to remind folks, my last name is right
like wor ighd so it is The Right Report like my last name. I
would be honored to join me every morning at seven am Eastern, and I
got to come back. This is such a treat. Thank you for having
me on what a great one. I definitely we definitely have to do it
again. Thanks so much, Brian, it was a blast. You've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour, Emily Tashinski, your editor
here at The Federalist. We will be back soon with more. Until then,
be lovers of freedom and anxious for the Fray.