Anna Paulina Luna Wants Everything Disclosed

20:56And there's been other members as well. But the point was, is that why did it take me having to do that?

21:01Ross Douthat:Well, and did it only work because there was a Republican and a Democrat at the same time? because some of this, as you just suggested, right, is that under highly polarized, highly partisan conditions. They protect party. Right. Well, no one, Republicans have a very narrow majority. Neither side wants to have a sudden special election or have to deal with any kind of fallout, right? I think it was so bad that people did not want to be associated. So I think in this instance, if push came to shove and I called it up, they would have voted for it. but I will say it's been very frustrating because there have been other instances, for example, the Congressional Slush Fund for sexual harassment or misconduct.

21:41Ross Douthat:What are those funds? Those are funds that are paid for out of the House of Representatives. And so, for example, if I'm working for you and you do something you shouldn't, I can then bring a lawsuit against your office and then your office will pay out. And then usually there's an MBA. And that is paid for by? That's taxpayer funds. I see. And so, first of all, that shouldn't be the case. So you can just see that the institution will protect itself. People, it's very hard for people, I think, to be confrontational to people that they are serving with because then it's, well, are they your colleagues, friends?

22:10There's kind of this, and you can be friends with people, but like you don't have to cover up for their misconduct. And the point is, is that, you know, when we go up there to serve, if you tolerate this behavior, it's a poor reflection on everyone. And then also too, How could you then expect people to trust the institution, trust you, have faith in federal government, which gets into the whole aspect of why I'm so big on disclosure, declassification, really kind of this open source model of doing government is because really trust in the institution, trust in government's at all time low with the American people.

22:45And I think rightfully so because stuff like this.

22:57Ross Douthat:I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now. And The Athletic's World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament. There's 48 countries taking part, from the tiny island of Curacao to the five-time champions Brazil. Even if you don't know your offside from your onside, if you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Maybe you're the kind of person who's already up early every weekend waking the neighbours when your favourite club scores.

23:32We'll make sure you get equipped with more information, more insight than anyone you know. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground covering the ins and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention

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23:55Ross Douthat:So we'll get to the larger disclosure push in a minute. Just to stay on this issue, how much of this is about sort of government secret keeping versus how much is it a kind of Me Too style story about male misbehavior in particular being protected? and do you see yourself, Congresswoman Mace, others as sort of doing a kind of me too push against entrenched male bad behavior? I don't think, so I think that's two parts to this question, right? I think in general, yeah, in general, I think that the aspect of what I'm trying to do is follow through on the transparency aspect that I think the federal government desperately needs.

24:40That's why I head up the task force that I do, which is the declassification of federal secrets, which by the way, a lot of people thought it was like some like kooky task force. And now you're seeing that the task force has actually done some wildly cool stuff. And we'll get to that in a minute, whether it's Jeff Payton. I never thought it was kooky.

24:56Ross Douthat:But that's what they try to discredit, right? They see me kind of young. People will automatically sometimes assume or try to discredit me because of, I think, my background, my age. But you know, it's crazy what happens when you read books. You're going to learn a lot in regards to how the whole entire institution functions. And I'm one of the few members that actually knows how that works. And so I can operate in a different way and I'm effective in that way. But as far as what we're doing, no, because there's females that do this as well. It's not as prevalent because there's smaller races, I think, of female to men in this institution.

25:32But in general, I'd have to say that I just don't think that this should be hidden from the American people because there's this aspect of transparency. if you are serving in Congress, you want to, or if you're asking for someone to vote for you, there's a different threshold and standard of which you're supposed to conduct and maintain yourself, right? This goes into, I think, you know, and I've been pretty good on this issue, even as far as disclosing, for example, the congressional stock trading. I stood up with Governor DeSantis in the state of Florida, and he actually changed the qualifying candidate forms to actually disclose if you're going to trade stocks while you're in Congress, which is great because at the federal level, we're supposed to actually have a vote on banning insider trading, which, by the way, happened because myself and Representative Burchett and many, a few actually came together and said, this is so wrong on both sides.

26:26And we are working against our own parties to actually get this to the floor. This is, I think, in line with my push for transparency on Right.

26:33Ross Douthat:Okay. I'm curious about listening to your critique of how Congress works and, you know, stock trading and people covering up sexual harassment and all of these things. It seems like versions of that critique could apply to the president himself and the White House and his administration, right? Like in ways that range from the history of allegations of sexual harassment and assault against the president to the various ways in which the Trump family seems to be enriching itself in this administration. Isn't there some kind of tension between saying, I'm here to clean up Congress, but meanwhile, I am in an alliance with a president who seems to be manifesting the same kind of vices?

27:19So going back to when you have evidence, it's one thing, but when you have accusations, it's totally separate. And what's been interesting is I, when no one else wanted to touch it, was leading the charge on the Jeffrey Epstein declassification of files. And when we brought all the victims in with their attorney, it was both Democrats and Republicans and Mike Johnson. And the first question that a Democrat asked was, was President Trump, I think it was a long time, was President Trump involved? Do you have any information that implicates the president in any of this? And the victim said no. We then, later on, when I took the deposition for Bill and Hillary Clinton, which is so wild, and I was in the room and I was sitting across from President Clinton, and he actually exonerated President Trump.

28:03And regardless of where you're at. So to answer your question.

28:06Ross Douthat:I wasn't suggesting that there was strong evidence that President Trump was involved there. I think there is ample evidence that people close to the president have enriched themselves substantially in this presidency. The president himself has made a number of stock trades that have increased his net worth, right? I'm just saying there's a range of things outside of the Epstein case, where he and people close to him seem to fall into the same category of people you're criticizing in Congress. So I've looked extensively into this. And if Congress had the same laws in place that the administration has specifically with stock trading, you would not see the insider trading that you see now.

28:46And I actually even suggested, well, why don't we just, instead of doing a standalone, why don't we try to essentially reflect it with the executive branch? And they still didn't want to do it. In fact, I had a bipartisan, very tough bill on insider trading. And Hakeem Jeffries told Democrats to not support it. So I have, I'm like, I'm a hawk on this, right? Like I've looked extensively into this, but I do think the aspect of -

29:08Ross Douthat:And you think the president's stock trades are fine? Above the board? I haven't seen what his stock trades are, but I don't have reason to believe that what he is doing is on the level of what Congress is doing, because I know that the disclosures for the executive branch are way more strict and harsh than the disclosures for this branch. And of course, too, then we get in the same aspect of I was also on the Hunter Biden and Joe Biden basically task force that Congress had set up. I don't want to call it task force, but we investigated that extensively. And so then the critique could then one could say, well, why aren't we then talking about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden that we're getting all this money from Ukraine and China?

29:47Ross Douthat:Because he's not president. But at the time, but at the time, though, the thing is, is that the media is not with the arguments. If we're going to talk about Trump and this. Well, we have known reports from Treasury. Do you see what I'm saying? I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that it was inadequate coverage of something associated with Joe Biden. I just also think that Donald Trump is president right now and you're on an anti-corruption crusade. I don't think so. How about this? Why do you think that the president was so reluctant to release the Epstein files? Well, I talked with him extensively on this.

30:27And what did he say? So I was on this to put it in timeline for people that aren't tracking. In November of the year prior, I wanted the flight logs. And I remember Marshall Blackburn had made a motion to release those flight logs in the Senate. And it was a Democrat senator that blocked them. And then come time to President Trump taking the administration over, the new attorney general in January, I got the task force for declassification of federal secrets. And so the purview of the task force was UAP, JFK, MLK, RFK, Epstein, and 9-11. That was kind of like the initial start of it. And I remember writing the DOJ and just not hearing a response from them.

31:05And so I was vocally calling for the release of the files from Bondi, and then the rest of it kind of transpired. But I actually remember calling over and saying, Hey, I think you guys should just release these, give the files to oversight. And they said, okay, the problem is, is that the timeline and the second order of documents, that order came out of a judge from New York. So you had the DOJ that allocated, I think it was like 500 attorneys at once trying to go through and redact victim information. That in itself wasn't ideal. However, why did it take so long?

31:39Ross Douthat:But also why during this time, the president was out giving public comments saying, you no, this is now a Democrat hoax and so on. Like, it wasn't simply a matter of there was a slow process to release the files. It was also clear that he himself had some objections to the kind of release that you were pushing for. I think when he said Democrat hoax, and I think that Caroline Levitt clarified this in that when you have someone that's accusing you of trafficking people and saying that you are a rapist, that you are going to get upset and you're going to call it... Like if I was being accused of that, I would probably say the same thing.

32:19However, I want to be clear in that my conversations with him were not personal nasty. And I was the biggest proponent on releasing these things. At a certain point, so in February, I had a whistleblower that came forward. I actually wrote a bill. I talked to media on it. And I said, hey, I think that we're only dealing with a partial deck here. in that we had someone that said that there was destruction of files and evidence specifically pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein. And then you have this other aspect of, was Jeffrey Epstein a member of the intelligence community? I think so. We had the attorney that represented the victim.

32:59Ross Douthat:So you think basically that the sort of harder core Epstein conspiracy theories are still true, are likely to be true. Well, there's a lot. There's a lot of there. Not the hardest. Well, tell me what they are. Well, so I mean, I looked at the material that was released. And I'm not going to tell you that I read every single document. That's almost impossible. But I was sort of a, you know, I was very interested in the Epstein story for a long time. And I thought that there was clearly things there that were hidden or mysterious. And I wanted to know what was going on. And to me, the upshot of the huge data dump was that there was maybe less than I thought.

33:44Ross Douthat:It seemed like maybe he had connections to Israeli intelligence or some foreign intelligence, but was not actually working for them in the sense that I didn't see evidence that he had, you know, sort of carried out any kind of blackmail. Maybe that was a possibility, but there wasn't evidence there. The exposure reduced my sense that there was, you know, a truly profound and dark secret here and made me more likely to think the guy was a sexual predator who had a lot of rich and powerful friends and they helped cover up for him. And it's still an interesting story, but it's not the most interesting story.

34:25So I discovered a document in going through some of the records unredacted over at the DOJ, and he did have an alias. It was a passport, and his address was located, I think, in Saudi Arabia. I believe it was an Austrian passport. And that was in his safe that he had with a bunch of other cash, diamonds, etc. etc. Most people don't have a completely fake name in a safe with that type of information. That was my first kind of, all right, he definitely had intel connections. I think the guy dealt an intelligence and exchange of information. The thing that will always be a question for me, and I don't think that we're ever going to get the answer on this, is that what happened with the alleged evidence that was destroyed, and also to this type of operation could not have existed without the intelligence agencies knowing about it.

35:17So what exactly was he doing?

35:19Ross Douthat:What kind of... Well, him just moving the amount of money that he was, interacting with the people that he was aware of. I mean, the aliens, passports, the travel, all of that, that doesn't just happen unless you have friends that are helping you. So the verdict out on that is that, yes, Obviously, he was known to be a sexual predator. But the other thing that I don't think that the media fully focused on, and this was something that I read in an unredacted FBI report on co-conspirators, is that the only co-conspirator sitting in jail right now is Galene Maxwell. There were other women that were listed as co-conspirators and they were able to walk.

35:59those women could have easily given names of, were they helping to assist in the purchase and transaction for minors? And this goes to show that this just doesn't go back to this administration. This goes all the way back to, I think, Bush 2.0. And why is it that it stayed kind of hidden for so long? And then why was it, like the really responsible reporting would be, yeah, both sides messed up. They should have handled this early on. This entire thing was a complete botch of the entire judicial process. And then in addition to that, what you have is people, victims, that have their entire lives destroyed because there was no due process for them.

36:41Ross Douthat:So that just the last question on Epstein, then one of the striking things is that we have had all of this information, all of these things released, all of this public debate and controversy. and the only person who has seemingly been taken down is Prince Andrew. Potentially, allegedly. I want to, like, he was not tried and convicted, but that... You have the BBC calling you here in a minute. But do you think that before this story is done, we will actually get the names of other powerful guys who were part of his essentially trafficking work? I think to answer your question, I'll just have to, I guess, follow up with, we asked specifically the victims for names of people.

37:30And I remember the attorney saying, since we've been up here, I've been getting phone calls from people that are basically, from what we gathered, involved in a lawsuit. And I think part of, unfortunately, the thing surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is that the victims, if they do sue civilly, then they sign NDAs and then it goes away. And then they're not going to talk and there is a settlement. And then maybe the people that were guilty of this get off.

38:07Ross Douthat:let's go from from epstein to other areas so just first tell me about the committee that you're running and how you ended up in this role yeah so the last congress that i served in the 118th Both Representative Birchett, myself, and Matt Gaetz responded to a whistleblower report from pilots at Eglin Air Force Base saying that the Air Force was covering up UAP activity, or UFO activity, if you will. We went up to investigate. We get people that say things all the time. And when we were there, we were stonewalled. We were shut down. They tried to cancel the briefing initially. We got it back on.

38:47We get there. They're showing us stuff about Chinese spy balloons, which is equally important. However, that's not what we were there to see. And in the middle of the meeting, the general that was running the base gets up and leaves and goes to Georgia, which in my time in the service, I never saw that happen, especially when you have three members of Congress there on a delegation. And they ended up eventually, after we got into a fight with them, pulling in pilots. And we got the most insane briefing from the pilots that we've pretty much ever heard saying, hey, these things are real.

39:15Ross Douthat:Where is Eglin Air Force Base, just so people know? Eglin Air Force Base is in the pinhandle of Florida. Okay, and so it was yourself and Matt Gaetz, who was then a Florida congressman. And it was Tim Burchett, a congressman from Tennessee, who received this whistleblower report. Correct. Briefing. Briefing. And then we go up to Eglon to follow up on it. And that's when kind of stuff hit the fan. But why did you receive the briefing in the first place? Well, these whistleblowers came forward to Representative Gates's office and said the Air Force was covering up UAP activity. Okay. So clearly when you get something like that, you're like, all right, you hear a cover up, it kind of piques interest.

39:46Ross Douthat:Had you had any contact with or interest in the world of UFO stuff before this? I had had a pilot when I was stationed at Portland Air National Guard tell me about an airspace incursion that had happened, and he was kind of spooked and talking about it. But I wasn't necessarily focused on it, right? This piqued my interest because you have Eglin Air Force Base. I was stationed at Hurlburt Field. I know the area. The pilots were very well-equipped, so they're not making it up. and after we got up there, remember, we're just kind of following up on our to-do due diligence. You have a member of House Armed Services that oversees the military and funding and two members of Congressional Oversight, which do the investigations.

40:28And when we got up there, that's when stuff hit the fan and that's when we basically realized that the Air Force was indeed not being so transparent about what was actually happening. So that happened in the 118th Congress and then at the start of the 119th Congress, we realized President Trump had talked about releasing the MLK, RFK, and JFK files. We had this stuff outstanding with UAP activity. And so we ended up actually wanting to be the follow-through mechanism arm for the president. And so Chairman Comer decided to set up the task force. And initially, people were a little spooked about taking the position because of everything that it involved.

41:06And there was a stigma, even when we had our first UAP hearing of people saying, you know, if you do this, People are going to think you're crazy and they try to, it's a taboo topic, right?

41:15Ross Douthat:Well, I haven't really asked about your relationship to the congressional leadership, but do you think that this was something that you were given in part because it was like, let's, you know, keep her busy and also it might make her look a little crazy? I think, I think maybe they anticipated that, but I also knew - But you had already held a hearing. Yeah. Well, there's already a hearing on oversight and there's a lot of interest for it. So I said, look, these are some really interesting topics. I think everyone kind of wants to know, right? This is in part curiosity. We're not trying to be the cat.

41:46So we're trying to, you know, stay safe while we're doing it. But this aspect of just wanting to find out more, kind of answer questions. And if we don't know, we'll tell you. But no one, no one thought that we would get the UAP files declassified. Not one person. Except for when President Trump started saying, okay, we're going to declassify it. And I think that's when things really started changing. I actually had a member of Congress find me on the floor and Chairman Comer, I was talking to him the other day. He goes, well, Luna, you did some great things with that task force. Because it's not just that, it's also this aspect of the JFK files and the declassification there.

42:23We have a good team in general with the actual task force. We also have kind of an unofficial body of the task force that are members on other committees that kind of do drive-bys for the hearings, if you will, and come in and are curious and inquisitive. But I mean, I've worked with some great people. And at least as Congress is concerned, we're putting out an official congressional report on all the new findings with the declassified files pertaining to JFK. And the stuff on JFK has been interesting too. And I think that this kind of is happening at a very serendipitous time.

42:55Ross Douthat:On the JFK stuff, just to pause before we go further with the UFOs. So I've seen, there's been stuff that's been released about the CIA's sort of connections to Lee Harvey Oswald, right? And George Joan E.D.'s a big one. None of that, as with the Epstein stuff, right? I found that very interesting. It did not change my view that Lee Harvey Oswald probably killed JFK and probably acted alone. Do you think that there is actual material out there that would change that view? I don't think that you're ever going to find a list, per se, of people that were implicated in the plot to assassinate the president.

43:39But what I will tell you is that we had a doctor come in that was in the operating room that Kennedy was brought to in Dallas after he was shot and testified under oath to Mr. Kennedy being shot, or President Kennedy being shot from both the front and the back, which means you had to have more than one shooter. We then also found in some of the follow-up documents that Mr. Morley had been trying to look for for like 20-something years. Right. Jefferson Morley, who runs a substack JFK Facts, I would consider him a subject matter expert on all this stuff that the CIA then delivered on. Kudos to Director Radcliffe on the task force working with us.

44:13but that had implicated the CIA in knowingly obstructing Congress's initial investigation and follow-up investigations. George Jonidis was an operative for the CIA, had dual identities, was installed as the CIA liaison. And we have a CIA historian that is now a professor that has come forward and said that he knows There's a document that specifically talks about how the CIA intended to undermine and prevent Congress from finding out the truth on Kennedy.

44:47Ross Douthat:But that could mean that the CIA was trying to undermine Congress's attempt to figure out things that might be embarrassing for the CIA. Like that they had had these connections with Oswald that they didn't want anyone to know about. But that doesn't mean that someone else killed Kennedy, right? I mean, this seems to me part of what you might find when you dig in is things that are embarrassing for institutions that they don't want to reveal that do not then in the end prove that the most conspiratorial perspective was true, right? Well, I think that might be a theory. But when you look at all the pieces to this puzzle and you see the mosaic that's kind of formed, when you have—so you have to think about it, too, from a historical context in that Kennedy, after he was assassinated, we go right into Vietnam.

45:37I mean, the war machine really does pick up. And the CIA, based on their internal communications about Kennedy, really did look at him like a radical. And they had this aspect of— All right, all right. So you think the CIA—wait.

45:49Ross Douthat:So you think the CIA killed Kennedy? I don't think that the CIA gave the authorization. I think that there was radical factions within the agency that were working with other networks that assassinated Kennedy. And I think it stood to benefit many people to include the military industrial complex and to include people that thought that Kennedy was too much of a radical thought leader in the sense that he wanted peace. Because remember, at this point in time, it's also been interesting. This is the Oliver Stone and JFK narrative, right? That narrative about Kennedy was for a long time a left-wing narrative.

46:23Ross Douthat:It was a narrative I grew up with that was present among people I knew who were political radicals on the left who sort of took it for granted that nefarious factions had killed Kennedy so that we wouldn't get into Vietnam. I think Kennedy would have done much the same thing as Vietnam as LBJ. But setting that aside, now we don't have to argue that out. There's a separate conversation on LBJ. But now it's just really striking that now this is a Republican conservative making this argument, right? It's just really interesting that that would switch. I think the more important question would be, why is it that the federal government tried so hard to discredit, prevent, and stop information from coming out and wouldn't even answer questions for people that had that theory?

47:13Because the thing is, is that that theory, from everything that we have seen, the CIA did lie to Congress. Right.

47:19Ross Douthat:But what we've seen is that they lied to Congress about things that might have been embarrassing for the CIA that were different from a radical faction CIA killed Kennedy. Well, not necessarily because you have this aspect of people that were surrounding Oswald, observing Oswald, knew about him. Really, you can say that was it intentional negligence? Isn't that insane? Right. But, I mean, that's insane embarrassment. Well, it's embarrassment or is it intentional nefariousness? And I think that's the question. And so what's been so interesting is that, you know, the investigator that I'm working with on this, Mr.

47:56Morley, when we had the CIA in my office, he goes, I've been waiting so long for this. But he's a Democrat. He's a Bernie Sanders Democrat. Yes.

48:04Ross Douthat:Now I've been reading him for many years. Yeah, Mr. Stubbs. Okay, so he's great. And so he's actually the one that we brought in to the oversight task force, and he's actually going to be writing the report on it. And what is also very interesting about this is for so long, if you said what you said right there, people would say that that's a conspiracy theory. But what we're finding out is that maybe it wasn't so far off. And these are with the facts. And so I will encourage everyone, and we'll do, you know, we'll try to do a one-pager on it. But when you hear Mr. Morley talk about all the facts and really get into the key details on who was who and where was, I mean, it's actually really sad what happened to Kennedy.

48:43And it's really sad what happened.

48:44Ross Douthat:Well, that's, yeah. When you see the distrust in federal government, you can pinpoint it to what happened with the assassination and the fallout from that. And I will also end by saying this. In the 90s, Congress tried to obtain the actual investigations from the KGB into the assassination on Kennedy. And what we found with a declassification of files from the Russian government, they were actually verified and now they are on the archives as not being, you know, propaganda, but like legitimate documentation, is that they had separately concluded similar findings and what we found in the documents that were released from the archives.

49:24And they had provided those before a lot of these came out. That was in the fall of last year.

49:29Ross Douthat:Right. I guess I have some skepticism about how much clarity the KGB had into the actual assassination. But let's follow then two threads on UAPs. There basically are sort of two areas of interest around UFOs and UAPs. And I'm going to try and divide them up and maybe you'll put them back together. Area one is basically a combination of reports from U.S. military pilots about things that they have seen, combined with video evidence of things that the U.S. military can't identify. The New York Times reported on some of this back in 2017. They did a great job on it in 2017. Good job, Times. It's a wonderful newspaper.

50:15Ross Douthat:The second area is the claim by people who have held posts inside the U.S. government with some access to classified material, And they have claimed that the U.S. government has concrete evidence of what gets called non-human intelligence, including possibly non-human craft or technology. So those are two separate categories. The second category is obviously much wilder, right? It's much wilder to say the U.S. government knows about non-human intelligence than to say there's a bunch of things that we have on video or see in the sky that we don't understand. Understand, right? So just sticking with the first one, what you have done on your committee is push for what the Trump administration is now doing, which is the release of what we take to be video evidence that is— Of UAPs.

51:06Ross Douthat:Of UAPs. There have been two sets of videos, and not just videos, material, some pilot testimony— Investigations. Investigations and so on, right? Astronauts. Right. Right. But some of which, though, had been in the public domain already. But what what do you make of what's been released and how does it compare to what you've seen in classified settings? I can talk about the stuff that's been publicly released that, for example, there's a an illustration that came from an investigation that the FBI was conducting. and a lot of people don't realize that the FBI had an office that was dedicated to this and that these things, the anomalies do exist and they're real.

51:50Ross Douthat:That was the, you mean that was the conclusion of the FBI? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so what's interesting is, and I'm very careful because I don't think that you should, I don't think anyone should just blindly take what the federal government is telling you to be true is like, don't verify for yourself So I don't tell people what to believe. I say, go look at the evidence for yourself and formulate your own opinion. But what I am really concerned about from a national security perspective, but then also from a transparency perspective, in that if you have aspects of the federal government or bureaucrats that are stonewalling oversight from elected members of Congress that are supposed to be stewards of the financial resources that are funding programs, etc., And you have this aspect of retribution being faced by whistleblowers, whether it is in a number of times we've heard that people are in fear of their lives or they don't even want to testify because they're afraid of getting killed from what we've heard from some people, which is also wild to say out loud.

52:55But that's the truth.

52:56Ross Douthat:Well, that's what they've told you. That's what they've told us. Stay with the videos with me. Right. You have had access before these videos were released. In what context have you seen these videos before they were released? So I went into the SCIF and saw all the videos. What is a SCIF? A SCIF is basically a box with lead paint around it. Not lead paint, but no signals can come in and out. So you can have conversations on things that are considered top secret, classified, all of that. I went and actually observed and saw all the videos before they were released to go through numerically to make sure that those were the ones that correlated to the ones that we had actually put out in the request.

53:34So those have all now been declassified.

53:35Ross Douthat:All of the ones. But how did you get the list of videos in the request? We had a group that came forward. It was bipartisan, former whistleblowers from the intelligence community that had access to— I would compare it to something like YouTube that exists within the intelligence community. And they came up with the files, and they said, you need to get access to these files and have them released. And so before the order came out from the president, we had come up with this list. We had been getting pushback. and then after he gave the green light for it, it was declassified. And those are now up and enabled to view at the Department of War.

54:10Ross Douthat:Okay, and what do you think they show? Well, there's some interesting stuff. I think that they show UAPs. There has been one of the videos that has since been debunked to be actually the infrared that was picking up aircraft that was farther in distance, but the optics are kind of an illusion in that sense. So there's been one that's been debunked, but there are ones that they cannot explain. They've tried to cross-reference it with other data. and the way that these things are maneuvering are pretty wild. And so, again, I think that they show UAPs in some instances. Right. And you think that one reason to take this stuff seriously is that they correlate with direct pilot testimony of the kind that you've heard, right?

54:50Ross Douthat:So it's not like I'm just imagine the completely skeptical listener or viewer, of which there are reasonably many, who says, okay, you have some number of videos. We don't know what they are, but if one of them turns out to be, you know, sort of some prosaic explanation, we can assume a lot of them will be. So what else makes you think? Yeah, and the specific incident of Eglin Air Force Base, which is where we had the pilot testimony and we were able to see some images, these things were frying the equipment on the aircraft. Some of our most state-of-the-art technology was getting completely fried.

55:28So there's this aspect of—

55:29Ross Douthat:And this is something that pilots told you had happened to them. Yep. Now, the other issue, sometimes pilots won't report because they don't want to be taken off flight status. So there's removing the stigma of if you're supposed to have safe flying, you want to also track national security issues. You have to be able to document this stuff. But when you have this type of stuff impacting military training, impacting flight operations, impacting our technology, it's a problem. The other aspect is, you know, we should follow up on it and say, okay, well, is this technology that potentially could be advanced tech from adversary nations?

56:06I don't necessarily think that's the case because if that was true, we wouldn't be number one currently. Some of this stuff that we're seeing is pretty wild. You saw the New York Times report and just how it's defying physics, if you will. But then the other aspect of what can we as Congress do next? We can declassify. I don't think, you know, this aspect that people say it's not enough. It's not.

56:29Ross Douthat:Well, is there, but is there, are there things that you've seen in a skiff or not in a skiff that are wilder than this that would like make the front page of the New York Times as, you know, no one can be skeptical anymore? No, I think the aspect of do I have, you know, a location where there's a little green man on a slide. Wait, wait, we're going to get to that. No, just stick with the videos. Is there anything else out there that is like a holy shit moment? Well, I think that there's probably going to be some more release of other videos as well, other testimony. They're still coming. But as far as a lot of the meat and potatoes that we've been able to see and gotten briefings on, it's for the most part been put out.

57:17However, there needs to be a call to action. And the problem that we're having in Congress is that the UAP Disclosure Act and Whistleblower Protections, whenever we bring this up to try to make it easier for people to report or to actually give immunity for people to come forward and not risk violating the Espionage Act if they do have information on this. And right now within the chambers, whenever this happens, I call them legislation goblins because they just pop up. They'll never put it on the NDA. They'll never put it on the FAA. Something as simple as whistleblower protections. Why would you not want to pass that?

57:50So I actually called the White House and suggested that we actually do that through an executive order because they don't want to do it in the chamber.

57:57Ross Douthat:So in the chamber, one of the things that has made me take this issue seriously is the fact that among the people who have pushed for the inclusion of UIP provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act are Chuck Schumer. Right, exactly. Chuck Schumer. Hillary Clinton made a mention of it, too. And right, it is a range of very high profile senators who are not known for being interested in wild goose hunts. What are you trying to say? I'm saying let's just say it's a number of people who would probably disagree with you about with you about the JFK assassination. Maybe I don't know. Maybe not.

58:42Ross Douthat:Right. So one of them is on the Republican side, on the Republican side, Mike Rounds. Right. He's a Republican senator from South Dakota. I would say that there is no more sort of stolid, vanilla Republican senator than Mike Rounds. Mike Rounds has been partnering with Chuck Schumer on this issue in the Senate. Have you talked to those guys? Have you talked to Schumer and Rounds? Not personally. So there aren't secret—why do you think that they're interested in this? Well, this is the most bicameral bipartisan issue in Congress currently, which is funny because I'm letting it out in part. But there's interest because there's something there because it's real.

59:23It's not just made up. It's not just like some crazy, wacky thing. It's real.

59:28Ross Douthat:Okay, so one thing that's real that we can establish is that we have a range of testimony from aviators about inexplicable events in the air and a range of videos that seem to correspond with at least some of that. Okay, let's go then into what you could call like the stronger dose of strangeness, which is the claim that there is a secret program inside the U.S. government that knows a lot about this or knows more about this. You've had people testify to that effect before your own committee. Do you think that there is a secret program inside the federal government? I think that there's a lot of money in the Pentagon that goes unaccounted for.

1:00:12And part of the reason why we initially wanted to investigate is, again, being stewards of the pocketbook. Where's our money going? If you have people testifying to this and they're saying that they're afraid of losing their lives over it, is there a there there to that? What's been interesting is the amount of pushback that we've gotten. So do we know that money is missing out of the Pentagon's budget that we can't account for? Yes. Do we know that people are making these testimonies under oath and risking prosecution for lying under oath? Yes. Do we also know that there are things that we can't explain?

1:00:44And we have now the new director of Arrow who concurs with us on this instead of attacking our witnesses. What is Arrow? Arrow is the all-domain anomaly office that was set up to essentially investigate these things. Which, by the way, the former director was, in my opinion, stonewalling our investigations and efforts. You have a new director that's come in and basically push for the release and now we have the documentation. All that to say that I have seen enough weird stuff to definitely make me be skeptical of the aspect of everything's fine and dandy and look the other way.

1:01:16Ross Douthat:Okay, so everything, all right, everything isn't fine and dandy. Correct. But you, but just to stick with the most prominent example, David Grush, who's a former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official, made very concrete claims and he's made them on many, many podcasts and he made a version of them under oath to you that there is, again, a sort of secret program studying non-human intelligence that has been in place going back decades that multiple presidents have known about. Or have been somewhat read into. Have been somewhat read into. Do you think that he's telling the truth? I think that he is going off of information that he's been shown.

1:02:02So I don't have a reason to believe that he's lying. But what I will say is that there are programs that exist that are top secret and clearance or read-in programs for advanced weapons technologies that we're studying, not necessarily these things. So I think, and part of what we're doing with the investigations that hasn't been publicized, and Representative Burleson's been very good on this, is sending certain letters to different corporations, manufacturers, tech, to see if there's any hard evidence that we can get with that.

1:02:31Ross Douthat:Right, because one of his claims, and others have made this claim, is that contractors in the style of Lockheed Martin have been themselves sort of brought into this program. Correct. Now, I do want to, though, put out, though, that I have personally come across with some of our other congressional investigators, people that have inserted themselves as subject matter experts in this that have been pushing disinformation campaigns of false information that I know for a fact to be false. So we are very careful about certain things that we say and also certain people that we have as witness testimony specifically on this topic because I think that there's a certain level of grift and then a certain aspect of disinformation happening.

1:03:16And so we're careful about that. But what I will say about Grush specifically is for his testimony, first of all, he's been one of our better witnesses, been able to also help kind of point us to where we should be looking. and he is not incorrect in saying that one of the big issues that we are having right now, remember I was talking earlier about special interests, corporate kind of power within the chamber, et cetera, is that I don't necessarily think that people are lying when they say, well, the U.S. military might not have it because we've farmed out so much of our tech and research to corporations that aren't held to the same privacy and oversight laws as a government agency or contracts would typically have if it was under our purview in the Department of War.

1:04:04And so that's the problem that we're facing right now. But what I will say is that if there was nothing there, then why go through so much pain and heartache and heartburn and really preventing us from being able to see the bare minimums? Why fight us so hard at the release of some of these classified videos that we just got released? Why push so hard to get our briefings canceled only to find out something completely separate when there's a change of administration. If this wasn't true, why are so many members of Congress, both in the Senate, Democrat and Republican, and literally on polar opposites of every other issue, why is it that we're so adamant about actually pushing this forward?

1:04:42If it weren't for this administration, I would say we would have never seen those videos.

1:04:45Ross Douthat:Right, but if, again, allowing that the videos and the pilot testimony are evidence of something, and we don't know what, if there were this kind of program, why would Chuck Schumer, Anna Paulina Luna, a range of people with serious power in the U.S. government not be able to access information about it? And I mean this both in sort of the direct sense of like you are lawmakers who have a certain set of powers, but also in the sense that, you know, if someone has this information, why wouldn't they want to go into Chuck Schumer, give it to Chuck Schumer, and then the next day be on the front page of the New York Times as the person who blew the story wide open?

1:05:33Ross Douthat:This is what keeps me skeptical. Yeah. So the question of why isn't someone coming forward is I think you have the aspect of power and money. So we've been told that we don't have, up until recently, we were told we don't have clearances to see certain information, that that was housed within certain aspects of the intelligence community. And it was not until President Trump gave the order that the Department of War would actually release the footage. Which, by the way, this is the other issue of like overclassification. But this goes back into even going back all the way to Kennedy is you have factions of the government within the intelligence communities that are so compartmentalized, so bureaucratic and entrenched that you would think that we would be able to go and do this and we can't.

1:06:17And this goes back into why is it that the intelligence community, the CIA, tried so hard to prevent certain things from coming out. I mean, even Mike Pompeo tried to prevent the release of the classification of the JFK files during the first Trump administration. And it wasn't until Radcliffe came in. And I had a conversation with Radcliffe. He goes, I'm not going to cover or try to hide the mistakes and the sins of agencies past. That was from the CIA director.

1:06:45Ross Douthat:Okay, so Radcliffe. So Radcliffe, so he's in charge of the CIA. Yes. Does he have access? To specifically this? Well, to, yeah, to the, like, who in the structure of the U.S. government, if you had a secret program or a set of secret programs, and they had been farmed out to defense contractors, let's say, or they'd been put inside the Department of Energy rather than the Defense Department, who knows, right? Hypothetically. You're into UAPs since you brought that up. I am aware of, let's call it the mythology around the subject. But who in the government would have the capacity to figure this out?

1:07:25To answer your question, all of the actual data and specifics surrounding this were housed from what we have found under the Department of War. But specifically to how contracts work, is there's pots of money that are set up, and then different agencies have access to those pots of money and then they will allocate the contracts. And once that money goes to a contractor, then our ability for oversight and disclosure goes away. And that's the problem.

1:07:52Ross Douthat:Okay, but so you just said what we have been able to tell. What have you been able to tell? That there is a set of secret programs and you don't know what they are? Well, there's unaccounted funding. I've heard rumors of certain programs, but then the issue is that you don't have reading clearances. Okay, but so what you have concretely, you think, is unaccounted money that could be for secret weapons programs. Well, we do for a fact that the U.S. government has secret weapons programs. That's a fact. That is a fact. Absolutely, yeah. The question is, are these things being given to contractors, and is there any validity to these statements made by witnesses that we've had countless that have come forward risking perjury that are saying that there's evidence of back engineering programs?

1:08:35That's what we're still following up on and trying to find hard evidence of. That's an ongoing congressional investigation.

1:08:40Ross Douthat:If you have the witnesses, like if you have David Grash saying, he can tell you who he heard these things from. And you can go talk to those people, right? Yes. And have you talked to those people? So the question is, will the witnesses come forward in the event that they would potentially be hit with espionage after the administration is out? And that's why we want the whistleblower protections. We've sent letters to different contractors. And this is why the push for the whistleblower protections is so important. You are maybe not saying, but strongly implying that there is a set of people that you yourself have talked to that have information about this?

1:09:13Yes, we have talked to—

1:09:14Ross Douthat:Who are unwilling to come forward under current protections. Correct. That are afraid to. We've actually had multiple witnesses that refused to come forward because they specifically said that they did not want to lose their clearances or they're afraid of retribution after the fact. And in David Grush's case, we saw specifically that after he testified, his records were released. At the same time, though, David Grush is on every podcast in America. He's walking around, seems fit and healthy, as far as I can tell. The same applies to a number of other people who have spoken publicly and made pretty wild claims about this.

1:09:49Ross Douthat:So we have a lot of evidence that you can be a UAP whistleblower and become at least a Joe Rogan-level celebrity, not end up in jail, not be murdered, right? Well, it doesn't necessarily mean that. So there is weird stuff that happened with Grush. And you can ask him about this, but he was coming in to talk with us in a skiff and on his way and someone pulled a gun on him while he's driving down the highway. I'm sorry. This just seems like a very ineffective way to cover up a multi-decade conspiracy theory. Sorry, see, there. A multi-decade conspiracy, right? Like if I were running, if I were the cigarette smoking man from the X-Files and I was running this conspiracy, I wouldn't have someone randomly pulling a gun on David Grush.

1:10:34Ross Douthat:I'd have somebody, you know, slipping him the reverse engineered UFO. Or disappearing him. Well, right. Weird, weird, you know, deaths of scientists, maybe. I mean, I've just, there's a lot there. Right, but you yourself are sitting here having this conversation with me, right? And implying that you've talked to people who have more information. Yeah, we've heard a lot. But the question is, are we able to produce that as evidence? So I'm not going to come up and tell you what I've heard without being able to actually confirm it for myself. Right. Why can't the president solve this dilemma? Surely the president has the capacity.

1:11:13So the president did authorize the release of the files. He authorized the release of the videos. The president, note the files, because there's testimony. The testimony and, you know, accounts are not video evidence. So you authorize the files. And there's a rollout on the files that's ongoing. The next thing that he should do and that I've suggested is whistleblower protections that would give basically a period where people would not be subject to violation of the Espionage Act if they were able to provide concrete evidence on these alleged programs that exist.

1:11:47Ross Douthat:Do you think the president has been read in to these alleged programs? I'm not going to speculate on rumors that we hear, and I'm not going to also call the president and say, Mr. President, can you please? You know, so I think that the question that we have with people—

1:12:26Ross Douthat:rules and so on. Well, I think people can argue different points on this. I've heard all sides. People say it's not a big deal. People say it's a very big deal. For your perspective, it's a big deal. I think it's a big deal. I think that, I mean, I could be underestimating it. I guess it's one thing. Yes, I think that a U.S. government cover-up of a program that had concrete evidence of non-human intelligence communicating with human beings, flying craft around whatever else. I think that that would be a pretty big headline in the New York Times. Yes. Yes, I do. And I think that people, this is a frustration.

1:13:00Ross Douthat:You can tell that I'm frustrated. Yeah. This is a recurring frustration that I have. There are a lot of people and they are people who I trust and take seriously on in who seem to who are in high levels of government, who seem to take this issue seriously, ranging from yourself to Chuck Schumer to the vice president of the United States, who's made a lot of public comments about this. All of these people, it seems to me, should have the collective power to resolve this issue. Except for the fact that we can go back to the fundamentals and that there is and there has been proof of an overclassification and aspect of the intelligence community that has largely been entrenched in calling the shots.

1:13:39And we have personally been denied clearances as members of Congress that have top secret clearances, access to these different things. So my job is not to tell you what to play. I'm not going to be, I don't know that I'll be able Now I need you to tell me what to believe. I don't think I'll ever be able to roll a little green man in on a silver platter for anyone. But what I can do is I can present you with evidence that we have seen. And I can also tell you what we've been up against. And what I will tell you is on the conversations with the president, he has been very clear about wanting transparency on this issue.

1:14:10And he understands that it's important. And I have had those conversations. The reason why I'm not going to call him and say, Mr. President, Have you been given access to a read-in program on you? It's because at the end of the day, there's a certain aspect of, do I really want to press the president on something that if he was comfortable with telling me that, he would tell me directly because I feel that I have a very good relationship with him. But also this aspect of, even if he had that, he might not be able to tell me because we're being told that we don't have the correct clearances. So at the end of the day, what can we do?

1:14:41Ross Douthat:But he could tell you. He could tell me. He's allowed to tell people. Yes, and he can also direct agencies to give us full blanket access and clearance. Because the other thing that we are coming up with within the intelligence community is they said, well, you have to go to this division of government to get the clearance or have to get it from House Intelligence, etc. When in actuality, he's the overarching authority. And just like he gave Director Gabbard all the read-in authorities and access to different things pertaining to JFK, MLK, and RFK, he can give us similar clearances. Right now, the White House has been doing a good job on the rollout and we have not been getting pushback.

1:15:14If it turned out that there was no secret program, what would be the explanation for that?

1:15:23Ross Douthat:That it was all disinformation? Is it possible that there has been a multi-decade disinformation campaign to make people believe in UFOs? We've heard that theory. However, it's a little bit hard to, I think, continuing to parrot that theory when you have so many people, witnesses, and now video evidence that is saying otherwise. Right. I guess you could say the video evidence could show a phenomenon that the government doesn't understand. And the whistleblowers could reflect a inside the Pentagon, like, hazing ritual meets disinformation operation. And those could be separate. And there's this other aspect of I think people don't want to talk about it because it freaks them out.

1:16:02And they don't want to be looked at as kooky. Because remember, up until recently, I think it's really Gen X and beyond. If you talk about this, you can have a conversation. But if you talk to older people about it, they're kind of weirded out by it.

1:16:14Ross Douthat:So I think this aspect of how people are understandably weirded out by it because it's very weird in the sense that they don't even want to have a conversation on it. They just don't want to deal with it at all. But not Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer is an older American. And yet he seems very open minded. And Hillary Clinton on this topic. All right. So just to end, though, I do need you to speculate. What do you think that these things are? The one thing that we got in a briefing from the FBI, and the one thing that the whistleblowers have said, scientists that we've talked to, is that they don't believe whether it— Which scientists?

1:16:56Some of the scientists that have come in to SCIFs to brief us.

1:17:00Ross Douthat:Okay. Who worked for the government? Had worked, had worked or were contractors. is that these things, whatever the phenomena exist, that they don't believe that they operate in the realm that we can understand currently. So the term that they use is interdimensional. And this is used repeatedly? This is used repeatedly by the witnesses. Now, have I seen something pop out of a portal? No. I've never personally witnessed one of these things. You tell me. I've never personally witnessed one of these things. So it's been interesting in collecting all this information and then sorting out who's lying, who's telling the truth, and what evidence we have that can kind of better put together this picture.

1:17:42What I will say is that concretely, the phenomena exists. You have too much evidence that says otherwise. and what I'm currently focusing on right now is whether or not we can put in place to find out in regards to the funding aspect and mechanism and oversight. We can get protections for these whistleblowers to see if there's validity to that. I'll be the first person to say if we had someone that came forward and it was not accurate, I'd say that it was not accurate. But to date, we have people that will chicken out coming to the hearings because they're afraid. I don't want to say chicken, but they're very concerned.

1:18:19and...

1:18:20Ross Douthat:Do you think you have people who chicken out because they're grifters and they don't want to be put under oath? Oh, I definitely think. Yeah. I definitely think that there have been instances of people getting SCIF flu. And that's always... I'm like, I have a SCIF. You say you have all this classified information. I have now permissions and you guys aren't coming in. So those people you think are... Yes. A hundred percent. I also think that there are people that have been... that are just straight up nuts. Like some of them are just crazy. But then they're the ones that are illegitimate. And I think that this is such an interesting topic that when you don't shine the light and when you can't have the conversation, it doesn't matter if it's this, JFK, MLK, RFK, Epstein, whatever it is, then you give a reason for this to be exploited by foreign intelligence agencies, and then it can just kind of take on a life of its own.

1:19:05So I'm willing to at least have the conversation and see what evidence we have. So it's been an interesting -

1:19:12Ross Douthat:had the evidence of a secret program and you had it, it couldn't be revealed, you would find a way to reveal it. Eric Burleson also in my committee hearing, this is your fellow congressman. Yeah, I allowed him to play a piece of footage that was refusing to be released. Okay, so you have ways, you have ways of achieving catastrophic disclosure. Well, well, not catastrophic. We have ways of trying to find workarounds, yes, on the information that we're given. But remember, we're still operating with one hand tied behind our back because of the fact that you still don't have whistleblower protections in place.

1:19:46You still don't have the UAP Disclosure Act that's been passed. You still have people working within the chambers preventing us to be able to do it. And the reason why we can't fully, I think, operate in the level that we need to is because there's nothing that's been put in writing. Like there's not like an executive order that's been signed by the president like there was on MLK, JFK, and RFK.

1:20:06Ross Douthat:By the end of Donald Trump's second term, do you think that you or anyone else would be able to come on this podcast and give me a definitive answer about whether the kind of secret program, wild and crazy scenario is true? I would hope. I would hope that we get enough movement on this, but I want to point to something specifically that Obama said and that President Trump said, and then just that'll help kind of answer your question. Are aliens real? They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in, what is it? Area 51. Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.

1:20:50When President Obama came out on that podcast and said stuff about UAPs and then President Trump responded on Air Force One, he goes, I think he maybe said something classified. Well, he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that. So aliens are real? Well, I don't know if they're real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that. And then President Obama kind of backtracked. And then President Trump confirmed what Obama basically said and saying, I'm just going to release this. That shows you the internal struggle happening right now within the entire, I think, intelligence community and government on this specific topic from all sides.

1:21:27so we are still up against whether or not just like when president biden signed the executive order or pushed for more release of the jfk files and not a lot of stuff came out just like president trump tried in 2016 with jfk and not a lot of stuff came out it's because there's still an entrenched perspective and bureaucracy of people that don't want this information to be released and so we have to rely on other people essentially helping to push the release of this information This is a kind of, do you believe that we should know this or not? And I think that those are the two perspectives that we're facing right now in the government.

1:22:02But it has been a while, you know, on Obama, you have Obama, Schumer, me, Hillary Clinton, President Trump, and everyone in between that's kind of like talking on these issues.

1:22:11Ross Douthat:I just want to get, ultimately, I just want to get you and Chuck Schumer together in a room off the record. I just feel, you probably could on this topic. We'll see. All right. Ana, Paulina Luna, thanks for joining me.

1:22:25Thank you.