CIA Officials Go Public With Warning About Trump

0:00Ben Meiselas:Current and former CIA officers are issuing major warnings about Donald Trump's war failures in Iran, Donald Trump's escalation and the potential for war in Cuba, Donald Trump's integration of the United States military with Israel technology, with the Netanyahu regime, Donald Trump's behavior at home. Also, Donald Trump's utter incompetence is a major topic that current and former CIA officers are talking about as well. I want to dig into it with you. The Financial Times just released a very important piece titled, Donald Trump is Dismantling U.S. Guardrails, warn former security officials. And it cites an organization comprised of former top CIA officers, some who are willing to put their names out there, others who wish to remain anonymous.

1:01Ben Meiselas:And the organization is called the Steady State. And this organization is warning about Donald Trump's behavior, his authoritarian behavior, and how ultimately it is imbued with this characteristic of authoritarian regimes, incompetence, stupidity. And they say it is that behavior that often results in the toppling of authoritarian regimes. And that is what we're seeing with Donald Trump. I'll get to that in a moment. And I want to talk about what the current CIA officers are warning about. Let's start with Cuba. One of the things that we've seen reported over this weekend, And of course, we know the escalation by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, who's been tasked with the escalation of the threats against Cuba beyond simply the embargo that the United States has against Cuba.

1:56Ben Meiselas:One of the things that we're learning as well through various leaks is that China is supplying Cuba with a lot of alternative energy supplies in addition to the crude, in addition to the oil, but providing alternative energy supplies in order to keep Cuba powered throughout the blockade. So we're learning about that. But we also learned about the CIA top secret Cuba task force as Donald Trump tries to pressure Havana. Now, these leaks coming from the top level of the CIA talking about the CIA's secret Cuba task force gives away some of the red flags that the CIA agents feel about Donald Trump's plan regarding Cuba.

2:45Ben Meiselas:But one of the things that the CIA leakers are saying, you know, Donald Trump hates those leakers, is that what you have in Cuba is a similar assessment that the CIA made that was in Iran, that this ain't going to be Venezuela, Donald. If you think you're just going to waltz into Cuba and do a partnership there with the authoritarian leader, whether it's Delce Rodriguez, like you did in Venezuela, that ain't what's going to happen in Cuba. You need to realize and learn the history of Cuba, its history of resistance, its history of international involvement. And the CIA warning is you're going to get yourself into another Iran, except this time, Donald, 90 miles from the border of the United States.

3:39If you escalate there, you know, though, this is part of the warning.

3:44Ben Meiselas:You know what you are seeing in the Middle East as Iran is able to strike Bahrain and Kuwait and Jordan and Al-Udid and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and UAE. Well, Cuba's pretty close to the United States. And the assessment is, look, Cuba is not going to, on its own, invade the United States or use any of its weapons against the United States. It's not going to pick a fight with the United States. It's not stupid. But in the event that recognizes the United States is a, you know, even under Donald Trump, that the United States still has a large military, despite the fact that the United States is now out of interceptors, out of attackums, out of critical weapons.

4:28Ben Meiselas:But Cuba would respond if the United States invades it. And if you invade Cuba, you should be prepared for resistance and that the regime is just not going to roll over. They don't want to work with you. And so the same warning that the CIA tried to give you before invading Iran, which you didn't listen to, the CIA is making clear that we are giving you that same warning again. This is the headline from a New York Times article, News Nation. CIA secretly formed Cuba task force. The CIA has secretly formed a Cuba task force to intensify pressure on the country's government, the New York Times reports.

5:07Ben Meiselas:The paper said the task force will be able to direct more financial, human, and technical resources to efforts to push for political and economic change in Cuba. The task force is reportedly comprised of case officers, intelligence analysts, cyber specialists, and others focused on covert operations. But what they've told Donald Trump and they've warned him is that let us handle this. And I think the CIA wants to kind of slow walk this. Let us handle it. You should have listened to us in Iran. We were trying to warn you. We're warning you again in Cuba. You're not going to be able just to topple this regime.

5:44Ben Meiselas:It's going to take a very long time if you're going to do this. And let us try to deal with it and let us handle it and not you. But you're not going to be able to topple the Cuban regime. And the ramifications on the United States could be very dire. So that's one warning. Don't invade Cuba right now. It would be a very bad thing for the United States. Also, we saw some of the leaks this weekend about how Trump issued an ultimatum to defense contractors saying to all of our defense contractors, you have 21 days come up with a plan to replenish America's weapons that Donald Trump squandered in the catastrophic war in Iran, despite having a$1 trillion budget for the United States military.

6:34Ben Meiselas:Trump, as you know, has run out of the interceptors, the THADs and the Patriots. We run out of ATACAMs. Our Navy destroyer anti-ballistics are gone. And so Donald Trump's now telling the defense industry, rush, rush and do it, which is ultimately going to be more expensive because that's not the way you're supposed to develop weapons in a 21-day period. So we have that being leaked out as well. You also have the CIA issuing this warning and leaking out to a number of new sites, including Capital and Empire, which is covering this. The CIA is warning that what Israel's strategy right now under Netanyahu is, and we've seen this, of course, in some of the spending bills that are pending in Congress, to integrate the technology of Mossad and Israel's defense forces with the United States such that the U.S.

7:30Ben Meiselas:will never be able to disentangle. and it'll be permanently locked in with Israeli intelligence, Israeli military equipment within the United States military itself. And apparently there are people within the CIA currently warning that this would be very harmful and detrimental to the United States, especially what do we see developing in the past 48 hours? You have Netanyahu rejecting any plan from the so-called Board of Peace to do a peace deal in Gaza, right? Donald Trump in the past week and a half announced yet again, didn't he announce this last October, but he announced yet again that the Board of Peace entered into a deal between the Netanyahu regime and Hamas, that they are agreeing to this historic peace deal.

8:21Ben Meiselas:Donald Trump said, I got it done. My 15th war, I would say, what is his ninth, his 10th war that he claims he's ended, right? When he's actually making things worse. We all know that the ceasefire claimed in Gaza was a fabrication. Over a thousand people were killed in Gaza by Netanyahu since the so-called ceasefire was entered into, which was not a ceasefire. All of them, of course, you have all of the killings by the Netanyahu regime in Lebanon. But now Netanyahu is saying, nope, we don't agree to the board of peace, whatever they said. We're not doing a deal. As long as I remain in charge, there will be no Palestinian state, to which the CIA's warning you see.

9:00Ben Meiselas:This is what we're warning about. If their equipment is integrated into the United States, then let's say the U.S. wants to help Ukraine. This is actually part of what the CIA's warning was about as well. Because when the U.S. wanted to try to, earlier on, give certain weapons to Ukraine, Israel basically had a veto over it because part of its defense relationships were some of its weapons. And it said, nope, you can't give those weapons to Ukraine. So the CIA is warning, you can't handicap our military by having Netanyahu do the plan that he wants, where Netanyahu says, we don't want any more aid from the United States.

9:38Ben Meiselas:But what Netanyahu wants is something more than aid. He wants full integration to basically make it one in the same military, essentially, so that there's never a way to not or to pull out of supporting the genocide or to pull out of the heinous conduct there. So you've got that warning. Then you have this article from the Financial Times. Donald Trump is dismantling the U.S. guardrails, warns former security officials. So it says, Donald Trump, this is what top former CIA officials are saying. Donald Trump has followed the autocrat's playbook, Donald Trump's attack on the so-called deep state, is what you're used to.

10:20Ben Meiselas:Autocrats have relatively common playbooks in terms of how they capture and wield power, said Paul Colby, a former Soviet CIA station chief who served across the former Soviet Union in the Balkans. These are all things that rhyme right now for me that we see happening in the United States. Colby's among more than 400 former U.S. intelligence and national security officials in the steady state, a network formed in 2016 in response to members alarmed at the rising authoritarianism, but this membership has swelled during Trump's second term. Many remain anonymous who are part of this organization, led by a guy named Stephen Cash, but this organization right now is filled with many, many, many CIA and anonymous CIA giving information as part of the so-called steady state.

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12:46Ben Meiselas:One of the things that Gail Helt, another former CIA agency analyst focused on China and Taiwan, says, Trump wants his face on our passports. He wants our face on our money. Even Mao didn't put his face on money, she said, referring to the former chair of the Chinese Communist Party. There's a lot of good reason not to say anything, said Julia Curley, a former CIA analyst. who's a member of the group. The problem is if everybody says nothing, then we're in the situation we're in right now. She said, people did not grasp the degree to which these institutions, which are so important, have been allowed to weaken.

13:25Ben Meiselas:We want to look at what exactly we think the risks are or aren't. Said Ed Bogan, a former CIA station chief who founded this institute, another institute called the Institute for the Study of States of Exception right there. You know, when you look at Stalin, Slobodan Milosevic, you look at Saddam Hussein, you look at these authoritarians, and there's a profile. And these former top CIA analysts, who obviously have the contacts inside the CIA as well, they're out there speaking out. So I want to share with you what Stephen Cash, former spy, CIA operations, worked in the main CIA facility in Langley.

14:11Ben Meiselas:And he's out there right now talking and he's leading this organization. And he had some profound observations as well that I want to share with you. First, he gives a little bit of his background. Let me share this with you over here. Don't get me wrong. We are all very much aware of the imperfections in the history of the organizations we come from. I'll bet some people in this room have some strong feelings about, for instance, my home agency, the CIA, or the Department of Homeland Security. We know that. And you're not wrong to have concerns. And you may be right on the specifics. but we have decided that we share, I hope we share with you, a fundamental view that while we could disagree on lots of policies and what and how America and its government does things and what it does, we all agree that the best way to decide that is through open democratic processes and free elections in a rule of law society under our constitution.

15:15and that is what we think is in danger. So let me tell you why you should listen to us. Well, we've spent our professional careers in one way or another looking at, analyzing, spying on, sometimes working alongside dictators and autocrats overseas. That's what we've done most of our lives. We're very familiar with how they work, what they do, how they get to be autocrats, how they stay autocrats, and when they fall, how they fall. And that's a perspective we can bring back here and talk about it with Americans. And one of the great things about being an American with all the problems we've had is we haven't lived through all of that.

15:59We don't have that kind of experience. Most of us don't. Many of our immigrants do, and that's why they came here. But certain segments of our society have that experience. If you were an African-American in the civil rights movement, you did understand about autocratic violent governments. But I certainly didn't growing up in a suburb of New York City, you know, upper middle class in a nice high school. So we have that perspective. And here's the bad news. What we are seeing here in the United States, and this is for us, at first, we are taking the skills we have, not the spying, we're not doing any spooky stuff, but the analytic skills we have, the understanding of how government systems interact with populations, particularly under stress, we're turning that attention here.

16:49Ben Meiselas:And then notably, what he talks about with Donald Trump is that if you study these authoritarians, ultimately their undoing is that they're malignant narcissists. And because they don't follow experts, because they don't study, because they think that they know everything, Ultimately, what you see is Trump doing exactly that. And that's why we have all of these massive failures. And so the CIA has, and these former CIA officers, they've created the same way actually Iran did, and actually all intelligence agencies across the world are doing, a psychological profile of Donald Trump, his downfall, how he's a loser.

17:32Ben Meiselas:And when you study his psychological behavior, you see how problematic he is. And the bad news is, is that he's sadly the guy in the Oval Office now. Perhaps the good news, I guess, is that the CIA analysis is that we're seeing the downfall. We're seeing the authoritarian downfall that we're used to because he's supplanted expert stuff for his own machinations. Here, play this clip of what he has to say over here. Dictators are really bad at running governments. They're bad at fighting wars. They're bad at running economies. They're just generally bad at it. It's not just that we think democracies are somehow morally better because they respect the individual person and their autonomy.

18:27me, they are demonstrably more effective at actually running a country, which is not surprising, which is larger groups of smart people with various interconnecting skills and talents with systems of both guardrails to keep them within what they're doing, a way to vet them, like voting for them or not, and a way to punish them when they go outside the rules, are actually really good at doing all the things, whether it's running health care, building highways, winning wars. We won the wars we have won, in large part, because we're a democracy, not in spite of being a democracy. So what I'm saying is, And now it's sort of demonstrated the ability of Donald Trump without the participation of the entities and the institutions that normally would would be part of decisions like, should I have tariffs or should we raise interest rates?

19:37It's just him. And the smartest individual, the most knowledgeable, the most good faith individual, if alone, would do a pretty crappy job of running a country and an economy as complicated as the United States. And he's not the smartest guy. He doesn't have good faith and he doesn't know what he's talking about. So it's equally damaging. So the story now should be, oh, the economy's most important to you? Well, you had a partial dictator running the economy, and he's running it into the ground because he increased taxes on you through tariffs, and he has alienated all our allies. And he started a war and apparently didn't know there was a narrow waterway that oil had to go through before he bombed the hell out of him.

20:24That's the kind of thing a dictator does. That, by the way, is why Stalin wouldn't believe, because he was sure that the Germans would never, ever break the pact and invade him. Well, they did, and they lost a couple of million Russians in the ensuing devastating war. The answer is, if you care about the economy, you don't want an autocrat deciding what your bank account looks like. So I think we're in a better place than we were in 2020 for this. And I think we should reorient ourselves away from thinking that it is a, you know, you could either have dictators or a good economy.

21:03Ben Meiselas:Yeah, I found that profoundly fascinating. And remember, the CIA did warn Trump, you ain't going to be able to bring down the Iranian regime. Trump rejected that. They're saying you ain't going to be able to bring down the Cuban regime. See what Donald Trump does there. They're saying we're out of weapons. They're leaking all this information. By the way, where do we think a lot of the leaks came from in Greenland? You know the story in Greenland, right? Where Trump's putting a MAGA company that's trying to do this drilling and Greenland's like, we didn't give you permission to do it. And now we know that Trump wants to try to force himself on Greenland and do this drilling of their natural resources.

21:43Ben Meiselas:And Greenland's like, no, get the hell out of here right there. So this is going to be a development I want you to pay attention to what's happening within in the CIA, how they're giving these warnings, how they're speaking from within, and that these former CIA agents are doing it as well. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Thanks for watching.

22:20Thank you.