Joe Kent Reveals All in First Interview Since Resigning as Trump’s Counterterrorism Director

28:37The one way to throw that all out the window, and this isn't just Joe Kent's opinion, many, many scholars and I think a lot of intelligence assessments have been written about this too, I know for a fact they have, is that if we struck the regime, it would only strengthen it. And that's not, I think that's just basic common sense. I mean, I think of myself, and probably you're in this camp as well. We didn't like Joe Biden, we didn't like Barack Obama. But if an outside force were to come in here and try and topple them while they were the president, I would 100 % rally around the flag. That's just common sense.

29:07So if we wanted to strengthen the Ayatollah. Well, you actually did. You joined the military under Bill Clinton, whom I assume you didn't vote for. Right. Right. You joined in 1998. You've gone the whole cycle of the war on terror, I noticed. um and served out as an nco i think your your entire nco and warrant officer and warrant officer 20 years um and i should just say i hate ever to refer to a man's resume as like a data point because your ideas exist separately because but in this specific case meaning you you spend most of your time fighting iranian proxies yeah a good deal of it yeah yeah so uh you're aware of the threat from Iran.

29:48You have personally used violence against that threat. I have. Yep. A lot of it, I think. And you supported the president's policy up until fairly recently. Right. And you've said that a lot in public. In fact, you went to work for him. He hired you. Yeah. Right. But here's the, from what I can tell, is the central question. Imminent threat. Now, the president has said many times to many people, including the public, look, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. I'm sure he must have said that to you. You don't have to say it, but he said it to everybody. Is that fair? That's fair. Yeah. They can't have a nuke.

30:23Whenever I asked, we say, let's just start here. They can't have a nuke. Okay. Got it. Everyone agreed with that conceptually. Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon? No, they weren't, you know, three weeks ago when this started, and they weren't in June either. I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling, a fatwa, against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That's been in place since 2004. That's available in the public sphere. But then also we had no intelligence to indicate that that Fatwa was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted. The Iranian strategy, it's actually pretty pragmatic.

30:59The Iranians are obviously aware of what's taking place in their region. And their strategy was to not completely abandon their nuclear program because they saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. When he said, hey, I've got no more nukes. I'll do what you say. I'll give up my nukes. And we gave him the Nobel Peace Prize? Yeah. Regime changed him and he was executed by his own people in the most horrific way. Oh, sodomized by a bayonet. Right. Okay. So that's the lesson, I think, that the entire region took from that when Hillary Clinton had killed. Unfortunately, that is what the neocon, neoliberal warmongers, that's the lesson that they showed everyone in the region.

31:35And then conversely, the Iranians also knew that if they came out and said, OK, we've got a nuke, whether they were bluffing or not, Saddam Hussein, Iraq right next door. So they kind of had this – And he hung, I think. He was hung by his own people after a bloody war that's still essentially going on inside of Iraq. So the Iranians' position when viewed from the lens of the region was actually fairly pragmatic. They were preventing themselves from developing a bomb, but they still wanted the ability. They wanted the ability to enrich. They wanted the ability to have some components so that they weren't completely stripped of it.

32:11And we always assess that they were either several months or a year, two years away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon. And that's not because the Iranians are stupid people. I think we can tell right now that the Iranians are anything but stupid. They had the ability, I think, that the brainpower to actually develop one. Or they could have simply traded a ton of oil with Pakistan or with someone else to actually get a nuclear weapon. they were not doing that we had no indicate no intelligence to indicate that they were then why was the president was he told that they were on the brink of it why at the beginning of every conversation about iran would the president say i don't want iran to have a nuclear weapon why was that the central question when and you would know since you were the director of the national counterterrorism center why would he say that if there was no intelligence or evidence that they were actually developing a nuke?

33:05So a couple things. This is what I talk about in the letter about this ecosystem of information that's laundered through a lot of prominent neoconservative types that are very sympathetic to the Israeli cause. And then also Israeli government officials who give us things in semi-official channels. What they did was they created basically a shifting red line or a new red line. So if the president's red line was Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, We've actually got a lot of trade space in there for a deal to be made because of what I just described with the Iranian policy. Essentially, the Iranian saying, OK, well, we don't want a nuclear weapon.

33:41Well, that means we basically are at a point where we can start negotiating and we can come up with a deal. And the president is a fantastic dealmaker. So if your goal is to move us away from any kind of deal and your goal is to move us into a conflict, you have to shift that red line. And that's where a lot of this, I would say, what became a de facto U.S. policy of Iran can have no nuclear enrichment. It was laundered through a lot of the different talking heads, Mark Levin, Mark Dubowitz. You've got the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. You name it. Washington, D.C. has plenty of pro-Israeli lobbyists who will come and say those things, who will publish think pieces on it, who will go on the media, who will run op-eds in the Wall Street Journal to talk about this, why they can't have any enrichment whatsoever.

34:24And then we have a high degree of engagement with Israeli government officials who will come in and say, well, they're enriching and they could enrich or they could enrich more and that will get them closer to a nuclear weapon. So then enrichment basically became the new U.S. policy. And the only official I've heard, and folks are welcome to look for this, that said this in the first Trump administration was Mike Pompeo. He said it. The president didn't say it. The president has been very consistent. He said they can't have a nuclear weapon. But again, like I said, that puts us at a place where we actually could have negotiations.

34:58And only President Trump, I think, could successfully have negotiations with Iran because he actually punched them in the face. And the Iranians had been walking all over us. They had been killing our soldiers. All of that is true. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Iranians, what their proxies were doing. President Trump level set that when he killed Qasem Soleimani and he killed Abumati Mohandas. The folks who wanted to push an actual regime change war in Iran knew this and they knew there was a potential to get a deal or there was a potential for President Trump just to continue the policy of maximum pressure sanctions.

35:29And if you come after us, we will hit you hard. And that got the protesters out on the street in Iran. And that's actually what the regime feared the most. I don't think the Ayatollah feared dying, not because he, you know, is some crazy lunatic. I'm sure some degree of the Shia martyrdom culture played a factor in that. However, I think he knew that if he was killed, the regime would survive because the people would rally around the regime. Well, there's been a lot of noise in the news lately, but none of it matters if you can't hear it. And there's no shame in that. It happens to millions of people every year.

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36:43It's essential healthcare hearing and it's now accessible and affordable. That's the system should have done all along. I believe you predicted this, you know, some years ago. I think we're watching. I mean, it's hard to know exactly what we're watching, but it seems consistent with what we are watching. So I'm just focused on this question of imminent threat. Because that's really the only justification I think most Americans would accept for a preemptive war. Otherwise, just like a war of choice done because Bibi told you to. And no one wants to get behind that because it's obviously illegitimate.

37:21So imminent threat. You're saying that there was no intelligence that you saw with the highest level clearance, obviously involved in this conversation, that showed an imminent threat from Iran to the United States. No, unless we took certain actions, unless we came after them in a way that they thought threatened the regime. Then we basically knew what they were going to do. Well, OK. Right. Of course. But like any country. So if you attack any country, we know that they're going to have a reaction. We face an imminent threat once we attack you. Yeah, exactly. But there was no intelligence that said, hey, on whatever day it was, March 1st, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack.

37:58They're going to do some kind of a 9-11 Pearl Harbor, et cetera. They're going to attack one of our bases. There was none of that intelligence. Again, back to what we know about the Iranians, they're very, very deliberate with the escalation ladder. And again, they're only deliberate under President Trump's leadership because they knew and they took President Trump very, very seriously. So, I mean, it's just I just think it's a remarkable thing to nail down because you're not some guy on Twitter. You're a senior as of yesterday. You were a senior U.S. intelligence official who's not hostile to President Trump, who's not going to hear to write a tell-all book or launch a media career.

38:34So I think you're a sober voice on this. And just to be clear, there was no intelligence that showed imminent threat. There was no intelligence that showed they were on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon. There was no intelligence, indeed, that showed they were trying to build a nuclear weapon. And nobody you know said, I've seen it, but you haven't. It exists, but you just haven't seen it. Did you ever hear anybody say there is intel that shows this? I did not, no. But I know how this works. I know the Israeli officials, some in intelligence, some in government, will come to U.S. government officials and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn't true.

39:12And they'll say, hey, I'm giving you a preview. It's not an intelligence channel yet, but here's what's going to happen. And that doesn't usually come to a solution. Wait, wait a second. I mean, I thought that U.S. policymakers made their decisions on the basis of intelligence collected and or vetted by our intelligence. That's why we have intelligence agencies that soak up hundreds of billions a year. But you're saying that Israeli officials short-circuited the entire U.S. government and just went right to American policymakers and said, it doesn't matter what your country says. Here's what we know.

39:45Is that what you're saying? I mean, usually they're pretty slick. Oh, of course. And they'll say, hey, this isn't in intelligence channels yet because it's going to take some time to get there. And here they're on the cusp of building a bomb. You know, they're going to – I don't know. You pick your topic. A lot of times they'll sample different things until they find what sticks. But in general, the narrative about, you know, they're going to do a preemptive attack or really just they're going to build a nuclear weapon. And if we don't stop them now, they're going to build a nuclear weapon. And enrichment is the pathway to that.

40:15They're going to continue enriching at whatever percent. Enrichment became the narrative. And so that hung up and that short-circuited and really sabotaged the entire negotiations because the Iranians basically said like we're not going to negotiate if the whole starting point is no enrichment. And again, that had nothing to do with a nuclear weapon and the Iranians essentially agreed to that. So the Israelis came in. They moved that red line and they would do a lot to say like, oh, they're enriching. And you know what that means. That means in X amount of time, they could have a nuclear bomb.

40:45You have to ask now. And then the way the ecosystem would work is that the talking heads on TV, you know, your Mark Levens, Sean Hannity's, et cetera, they would say basically the exact same thing that night on TV. Or there would be a piece written in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times that would say something very, very similar. Yet if you looked in classified intelligence, we didn't see any of that. I mean that must have been such a weird experience for you. Bizarre. And since you have access to the biggest and most powerful and presumably the best intel agencies in the world, and you're seeing people say things as fact when you know that they're not facts, what was that like?

41:28infuriating um and and i think that's why in general in the lead-up to this last iteration um a good deal of key decision makers were not allowed to to come express their opinion to the president um not allowed by whom uh i think i think it's important for for me right now just to stay on on the facts i don't want to point names i don't want this become a name calling or a you know this guy did this on this day but any leader has gatekeepers And so you're saying that you were prevented from bringing this information directly to the president by gatekeepers. Well, there wasn't a robust debate. So in general, because our assessment really hadn't changed, you know, we would send those up through intelligence channels.

42:08Everybody's kind of reading the same intelligence. But then what actually gets briefed to the president can be very, very different depending on who and how it's delivered. And without a level set from the intelligence community, someone like D &I Gabbard coming in and saying, Mr. President, like here's the full scope of the intelligence and what it means, you're kind of lacking that sanity check of where we're at or at least a good sampling to gauge how accurate what the Israelis are saying is. is. And that process, in my view, was largely stifled in the second iteration. There was robust debate and robust discussions leading up to the 12-day war into Midnight Hammer.

42:49But this second round, to me, and I'm sure others will refute this and disagree with me, but was conducted by just a handful of small advisors around the president. That is true. I believe what you're saying is true. um my sense though and you would know more than i is there weren't a lot of people directly around the president who work there who work at the white house his you know the principles who are making an aggressive case for this war do you think there was i mean was there a majority of like his top 10 advisors who were saying we must do this now i think the i think the circle that was that he that was around him was very very tight and very small and i think they were all in the same sheet of music.

43:33And I think a lot of them were getting their information from the ecosystem that I described. And I think we'd be in a different place if we would have talked about the actual, what the intelligence picture is and what our interest is. So Israeli government talking points laundered through Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Is that the ecosystem you're talking about? Yeah. And then the Israeli officials coming in and basically either ahead of time or after the fact saying the same thing, like the enrichment is going to get them a nuclear bomb in set amount of time. Do you believe that you and the DNI, for whom you worked until yesterday, had as much face time with the president as Israeli officials did?

44:10I don't know. I don't know that for sure because I don't know exactly how frequently the Israelis were engaging directly with the president. It did seem like Benjamin Yahoo was, you know, obviously that was all public that he was in the White House. Seven times. Quite a bit, yeah. Quite a bit. And then his other officials as well, Dermar, et cetera, those guys were in. They were making phone calls. Just a lot of engagement from them. And again, when we would hear or you'd hear what they were saying, it didn't reflect in intelligence channels. Even intelligence that we shared with the Israelis, that the Israelis were giving us in many cases.

44:47So there was a clear gap between the intelligence and then the information that the president was given and the decisions that the president was making. I don't want to put you in a comfortable position. Obviously, you're not going to divulge anything that's classified. I don't think you would. You definitely shouldn't because there are people who hurt you for that, and you shouldn't. So without encouraging you to do that, it's – yeah, I think it's a commonplace. It's understood in Washington. I've heard from many people who work in your business that a substantial portion of our information touches Israel at some point.

45:22Either it's collected by them, it is shaped by them. It's not purely American. Is that a fair – do you think it's fair? Especially in the Middle East, I would say – I mean, look, the Israelis are tactically very proficient. They have a very competent intelligence service. And there's a lot that we can learn from them in the craft of intelligence. Yes. So they're very proficient. They're very good. However, whenever we get information from a liaison service, I think it's incredibly important to realize that it could be given to us to influence us as well as to inform us. And the way that I would see Israeli information in particular coming from senior officials directly to our senior officials, that caveat just wasn't given frequently enough.

46:08And there's a lot of times – some of this is just because of bureaucratic practice, but a lot of it I think is just we feel very comfortable with the Israelis. A lot of them are dual citizens. They sound like us. They don't feel foreign. We kind of go into a more complacent mode where we trust a lot of what they have to say, not keeping in the back of our mind that they have their own agenda and we have our own agenda at the end of the day. Now, I'd say a lot of times we have the same agenda. You know, it's very, very tactically the same when it comes to fighting Hezbollah, when it comes to fighting terrorism.

46:41Sure. But when it comes to what's our strategic goal in a war that's going to have ramifications for our nation, for the region, for global energy supplies, I think most folks right now at the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, they would say us and the Israelis actually have a different objective here. I don't believe that our objective has been clearly defined because we're shying away from regime change. The Israelis are not shying away from regime change. They want to knock out lock, stock and barrel the current government. They don't seem to have a plan for what comes next. Well, that was my next question.

47:12I think you would have heard tell of such a plan. So if you're going to take out a government, I think it's fair to ask what replaces it. And I have asked a bunch of people, many people, this question. Never gotten any answer whatsoever other than there's no plan. The Israelis don't have a plan because they don't care. Do you think that's fair? I think that's completely fair. I think as Americans, rightfully, we want a clear stated objective and end state for war. I think that's something that was born out of the GWAT, was born out of the Vietnam era. Americans want to know why we're going to war, what the end state is, and they can get on board in general if that's clearly articulated.

47:49That's not the case with Iran. The Israelis are different. I think a lot of times, again, because a lot of them speak English, they culturally feel the same. But the Israelis have a much different tolerance for how and why they're going to war and for their endurance for war. The Israelis are completely fine with Iran slipping into chaos. That means that the Ayatollah and the IRGC can't really threaten them anymore. Hezbollah's money might be cut off in their head. And so complete chaos in Iran, it's not necessarily a bad thing for the Israelis. For us, for global energy, Straits of Hormuz, our partners in the GCC, mass migration problems in Europe, this is a major problem.

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49:48It sounds amazing like it couldn't be real, but it actually is real. Visit dutch.com slash Tucker to learn more. Use the code Tucker for 50 bucks off your veterinary care per year. Your dogs, your cats, and your wallet will thank you. Right, and it's a little galling that I was treated to lectures for a couple of weeks about the valiant people of Iran and how we needed to save them. And then a lot of the exile communities here in the united states of of iranians a lot of really nice people they jumped on board we got to save our people but by your telling and by the facts by the way this is not really an opinion there's no plan for what happens after regime change like the people pushing that line would just would be happy to see a permanent civil war there which is insanity so if you if you if we do want a real regime change and we want the people to rise up and want it to happen fairly organically going aggressively after the ayatollah was the last thing that we ever should have done again like i'm no fan of the former supreme leader you know like aminai however um he was moderating their nuclear program he was preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon if you take him out if you kill him aggressively people are going to rally around that regime and the next ayatollah that you get and i think this is the case by all data that we have with the sun the next ayatollah that you get is going to be more radical because he has to show the people that he's going to push back.

51:11And there's always a tension inside of Iran between the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the clerics who run the country. They have a healthy, I think, tension between the two, a rivalry. IRGC's leadership, these are Qasem Soleimani's troops. These are the guys that Soleimani trained. These guys, most of them cut their teeth in the Iraq-Oran war. A lot of them cut their teeth fighting us in Iraq. They cut their teeth fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. They created Hezbollah. They trained and armed Hezbollah. So these guys are actually pretty serious and pretty hard line, and they're willing to fight and they want to fight.

51:48And so by killing the Ayatollah, we've given them more power because now internally, they can go and they can say, hey, all you guys who thought that we could negotiate with the Americans, you're chumps, we have to fight them. So I think the longer this goes on, the more negotiators, the more moderates that are killed off, like we just killed, you know, Ali Laronjani, who was a negotiator, who was eager to get us a deal. Again, look, I've got no love for the IRGC. I've got no love for the for the Iranians. But you've got to realize, to be clear, in case you're shooting or now you fought their proxies, I've got their proxies.

52:24I mean, I put countless of them in flex cuffs are much worse. Uh, I've gone after the Iranians. I was in, you know, specialized outfits that went after the Iranians and their proxies. Um, these are very serious people. Uh, they're not, you know, supermen by any means they're, they're humans. Um, but they're serious. And if you give the IRGC a reason to take more control and they get support from the people, because again, you know, you kill off the Ayatollah, they can say, Hey, the last guy was too moderate. Look at what it got us. Like give us more, more control. I get it. And the Iranian people are going to be like, well, actually, yeah, I don't like getting bombed by the Americans and the Israelis.

53:00Maybe we do need to listen to the IRGC. So a lot of these, the points that you're making, I think are insightful, but they're also pretty obvious if you kind of game it out for 10 seconds. So it seems like you've got two different goals. You've described Israel's goal as just regime change, permanent chaos, take Iran off the map as a coherent nation state, just tie them up with internal chaos, Whatever the effects of that are on the rest of the world, all of them disastrous. Then on the American side, you have the president's stated goal, which is we can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon, which they didn't have and weren't trying to build in any imminent way.

53:37Okay. So if you join those two together in a common mission in a war, like that's our partner in this war, then you create all kinds of very bad incentives. And now Larjani, I think, was killed by the Israelis. You saw the Israelis blow up Qatari natural gas facilities today in the Qatari natural gas field, which feeds the rest of the world, LNG. those seem like very obvious steps not to minimize the threat from iran but to lock down the united states in perma war we can't get out after we do that you kill the negotiator you attack our closest ally in the region is probably qatar you attack qatar apparently like no one thought this might happen and there's no there's no reins on the israelis unfortunately.

54:33I mean, we continue to refer to them like as our partners are equal to the best partners we've ever had. But at the end of the day, the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us. And so we have to be acting against our interests in a very obvious and very serious way. And again, it's obvious if we've stated that our goal is just to take away their ability to ever even enrich and to take away their ballistics and to take away their Navy, all these kind of tactical objectives. If we say that that's our objective, and that's when we can come to a place where we can just exit. It's in the Israelis' interest to get us more and more entrenched in this.

55:09And that's exactly what they're doing right now. When the Israelis killed Lerner and Johnny, I think I may have misspoke and said, we didn't kill him, the Israelis. The Israelis struck him. But I do believe in Iran at this point in the war. They view it as, whether we like it or not, I think they view it as we, us and the Israelis, kind of as the same thing. We've described it that way. Because the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us. And then that's where the relationship is just way off kilter. If they have different objectives than us, then what are we doing letting them drive the war?

55:40So you just said something that's been disputed many times by the Mark. Well, I'm not going to name anybody, but by Advocates for Israel. It's a PR department here in the United States, which is huge. And you said they couldn't do any of this without us. you often hear its promoters, its lobbyists say, Israel just wants to fight its own wars. Back off and let us do it. Is that not? I'd love just to run the experiment where we try that. What would happen? You know, the Israelis, again, they have the ability to go out and collect great intelligence. They have a very capable military, but they're a very small country.

56:19I think Israel would be able to defend itself. I think it could conduct limited strikes on its borders. I think it could continue carrying out pretty impressive targeted assassinations against its adversaries. And so I think you would see it relatively contained. What it couldn't do is go topple entire governments. It couldn't do something like the Iran War, the Iraq War. It couldn't aggressively destabilize Syria. these big heavy lifts of regime change that America has been engaged in, Israel could not do on their own, which is where you get back to the Israeli lobby being just so potent and so powerful and so aggressive.

56:59And I want to ask you about that because that's the line that you're being attacked for. And so I want to go through and have you explain more fully, if you would, why you said what you did and read it. But before I do that, one last question. Was any of this debated that you know of before this war commenced three weeks ago? Did anyone say, well, wait a second, if we do this and kill the Ayatollah, because that was like the first order, I think, what are the effects after? And like, what's the goal? Did these debates ever? I know they happened heavily before the 12-day war. I think that when the Israelis came back around and said they wanted to do this, I just don't think there was any debate.

57:41I think just based on the ecosystem and the amount of influence that was exerted. Because in some ways, this is a little humiliating, since we were told, I was told, the whole country was told, that after the 12-day war, there was no Iranian nuclear threat. We got rid of it. I'm not imagining that. It just happened last summer. Yeah. Do you recall those statements? Yeah. I mean, Operation Midnight Hammer. Yes. Destroyed their nuclear capability. So how was it that we wound up six months later getting another lecture about their nuclear capability and it's imminent threat to the United States and nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles aimed at Miami and the whole thing.

58:22and nobody, first of all, there was no organized protest against this. Like in a normal country, you'd think people would rise up and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You just told us six months ago the exact opposite. Did internally in the intel world people say, what the hell is going on? I just think that the planning for this was so compartmentalized that there was no debate, as in it was a foregone conclusion. Maybe the exact timing they weren't exactly aware of or that had to be debated, when do we do it? But it seemed to be a foregone conclusion and I'm sure others will say, no, that's not the case at all.

58:56But there was no robust debate like there was going into the 12-day war because a big question that a lot of us had that were skeptical of Operation Midnight Hammer was, OK, so we do this. We know the Israelis' whole goal is regime change. What makes us think they'll stop? And if they do stop for a period of time, why won't we just be back in the same place in six months where they're saying that we have to go back in? And that's essentially exactly what happened. So this was raised. This was raised to my knowledge in June. This was like, hey, what happens next? So you take out the ability for them to enrich and to potentially develop a nuclear weapon.

59:35That's done. We know the Israelis have a completely different goal. Part of that strike, midnight hammer, was also to get the Israelis to wrap up the 12-day war. But we knew because the Israelis told us that they wanted – this is the time to take down the regime. And they don't want the Ayatollah to be in power. They want a regime change. They want a new government there. So we said, OK, knowing that, we know that this strike, this limited strike that we're going to do isn't going to be enough. At some point, the Israelis are going to come back to us and say, hey, we have to go again. And with that knowledge, and I think because so many of us had pointed that out and because the Israelis had said it, there wasn't a big debate this last time.

1:00:16You know, I think they had that discussion, you know, behind closed doors, and there wasn't a chance for any dissenting voices to come in. But you would think, well, I've seen it before. You know, when a question like this arises, the people making the decision go immediately to their own intel agencies, and in your case, the agency that has jurisdiction over those agencies, and say, all available intel on the question of the Iranian nuclear program, all available intel on the question of ICBMs or its ballistic missile program, all available intel on what might happen if we topple the regime in place.

1:00:48Like, this has all been gamed out for a long time. there's a constant process of gathering intel on it, correct? Yeah. And that's what we did in the lead-up to the 12-day war. But this time, no. But this time, no. Not to my knowledge. And I'm sure the administration will come out and say, no, you just weren't invited. But I've got a pretty good idea of how those meetings look. And even if I wasn't invited, I at least would have known that they took place. Again, it just seemed to be a foregone conclusion that this was happening. So most people don't wake up in the morning and decide to feel horrible, exhausted, foggy, disconnected from themselves.

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1:01:54And that starts with comprehensive lab work and a one-on-one consultation with a licensed clinician. An actual human being explains what's happening inside you and builds a personalized plan, which includes hormone optimization, peptide therapy, targeted supplements. So don't settle. Go to joyandblokes.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 50 % off your lab work and 20 % off all supplements. That's joyandblokes.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker. 50 % off labs, 20 % off supplements. Join blokes. Get your edge back. So I almost don't want to bring this up because it's so distressing, but I have to ask a question about blowback.

1:02:34The effects, the downstream effects of military action, terrorism in the United States. And I have the feeling we're going to see some of it, but I want to ask you. But since you are an acknowledged expert on that question since you spent your adult life fighting Iranian proxies, and because we're always hearing some of them are in the United States, did anyone go to you and say, if we do this, what are the odds that we will have terror attacks in the homeland here in the U.S.? That was a piece or an intelligence product that we worked up on our own. I bet. And coordinated throughout the intelligence community.

1:03:13Basically, we talked about the Iranians' ability to conduct sleeper cell-like attacks, which is actually pretty limited. The whole idea of sleeper cells or a cell operating is challenging in today's environment because cells have to communicate with each other, and we're pretty good at picking up on that. The real threat, and most major terrorist organizations have kind of moved to this model, is the lone actors. It's inspiring people that are already in place by using the media. There was already a ton of blowback because of the Gaza war. Hamas used propaganda very, very effectively to, I think, curry a lot of favor with younger people here in the United States and abroad.

1:03:54And there was multiple terrorist attacks in America in the last year where Gaza was cited because they consumed some of the propaganda coming out of Gaza. And these people weren't infiltrated Iranian agents. They were here folks that were homegrown. And so we said, hey, the biggest threat right now isn't that the Iranians are going to like sneak some guys over and they've been waiting here for years and they're Quds Force operatives. That's always possible. Again, the Iranians are very competent as well. And they have tried something like that before in the past back under the Obama administration when they tried to kill the Saudi ambassador in Georgetown.

1:04:27So we were worried about that. But what we were more worried about was the fact that Biden had the border open for four plus years. And I testified publicly in Congress laying out the 18 ,000 known suspected terrorists that potentially could be in the country. Since then, we've discovered potentially more. The problem is the bookkeeping under the Biden administration was kind of like the border. It was wide open. And so we don't know how many folks are actually in the country that shouldn't be here. It's millions. How many of them have ties to countries that are adjacent to Iran or that are Iranian?

1:04:57We're still – as I left, we were still working on some of those numbers. But we've seen several terrorist attacks since these operations began in America, and they all fit that lone actor inspired model. So the blowback is the longer this goes on and the more the propaganda inevitably gets weaponized, we are going to see more than likely more people here that are radicalized. Now, frankly, I think that none of the – and this is another great thing about President Trump. None of these people should be in the country. We should have tighter immigration policies. We should be focused right now. our focus should be on finding everyone who shouldn't be in our country right now and getting them out as soon as possible not on another foreign adventure i wonder i mean so you've already seen in the wake of a recent terror attack neocons use that attack as a way to try and censor shut down maybe even in prison critics of the decision to go to war in iran so it's almost like you control both sides like you advocate for a war which inevitably stokes religious hatred because you advocate for the killing of a religious leader okay so you're helping to create religious war permanent generational religious war and then when your country or the country you happen to be living in that you don't really care about feels the effects when americans are killed as a result of that you use their deaths to justify the silencing of people who criticized you does that make sense no exactly yeah so how much are Are you concerned we're going to see more of that?

1:06:25I'm very concerned. I think we – I pray we won't, but the odds are not in our favor just considering how open our borders have been. Obviously, this type of propaganda radicalizes people. Again, we've already seen attacks. We saw attacks inspired by the conflict in Gaza. So I think we're going to see more of this and then just – I made the mistake of opening up Twitter a couple times today. There's people calling for dissenting voices to be charged, to be locked up. Of course. Et cetera. And so – And they may be. The erosion of civil rights, I think, during a time of conflict is nothing new. Unfortunately, we've seen it before.

1:06:58It's the rule. But I wonder, though, is like people talk through or maybe they didn't talk it through, but did anybody in the lead up to this – I just want to ask it again to make sure I understand the answer. in the lead up to this war, which is now a regional war, potentially a global war, big war, biggest war of our lives. Did anyone come to you and say, what's your projection for like what the effects on the United States will be? Like how many Americans could die at the shopping mall because of this or at school? We proactively wrote an assessment, which is what we tend to do anyways. but again there just wasn't a huge process in a debate about this last this last iteration but you're worried about it i'm you know i'm very concerned about i am too i am too yeah i'm too um okay so let me read you the most controversial and you've addressed this to some extent but i'd like you to flesh it out a little more if you don't mind um you you say to support the values the foreign policies that you campaigned on during three campaigns and that you enacted you understood up until June of 2025 that the wars of the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.

1:08:08Early in this administration, this is the change, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that you should strike now. There was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.

1:08:42We cannot make this mistake again. So I think you've explained how the echo chamber and the lobbying campaign worked. It wasn't just on Fox and the Wall Street Journal. It was by telephone and text message. It was in person, and it was relentless. And there was no countervailing campaign. There was almost nobody who went to the president and said, well, actually, here's the American view, which is frustrating. But then you allude at the end of that to the Iraq War. And I think you told me at dinner last night, I think you spent five years total in Iraq. You had 11 combat deployments. You spent about, you think, five years in the country.

1:09:23Yeah, I mean, nine of those deployments were to Iraq for six to eight months. So, yeah. Okay, so you've had some time to think about the Iraq War. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More time than is healthy, yeah. Can I just say, because it makes me... So here you go, you join the army at 18. 18? 18, yeah. You spend your whole young life there. Go to all these wars, 11 deployments. You spend five years in Iraq, over seven deployments, and you reach a series of conclusions, fighting and being shot at by Iranian proxies. And now you say, I don't think this war is good for America. And you're being slandered as a bad, unpatriotic quitter who secretly sympathizes with the Ayatollah.

1:10:08I just have to ask you how that feels. I mean, they love you when you're just saluting and moving out. But then the second you say, I don't think we should be doing this, and I have an opinion now, then all the attacks come at you. But I truly believe that God put me where I am right now, really putting me through everything I've been through in my life to bring me to this point. I don't believe that God said, hey, you're here now in this moment to just sit back and be a good soldier for this iteration. I've had lots of friends who have said, hey, I think you would have been more value staying in the administration with your experiences.

1:10:42And I understand that and I'm flattered by it. But considering all that I've seen, the conclusions that I've reached, I feel like I'm here for a reason. And something I think, you know, probably on my third or fourth deployment, as I was realizing that we were lied to to get us into Iraq and that we had a whole mess that we now had to had to clean up and how much it mirrored and echoed Vietnam. I remember as being in my mid to late 20s, being very frustrated with a lot of the Vietnam veterans who did not speak up against. I know some did, but especially Vietnam veterans who stayed in service, as I had intended to do, who stayed in service and who advocated for the Iraq war.

1:11:24Colin Powell is someone who I have a lot of respect for, for the way he fought in Vietnam, his leadership in Desert Storm. but then the way that he was part of lying to get us into the Iraq war and then staying on and continuing those lies, knowing full will, having all the experiences of being a guy on the ground in a feudal war that was basically we were deployed to under false pretenses. He had all that knowledge and because he wanted to be loyal to, I think, the president and I think he wanted to be loyal to what he felt was the government that would eventually get it right, he didn't step out and say we shouldn't be doing this and i just remember reflecting on that and you know said to myself at the time and this might seem you know silly and idealistic but said to myself at the time if it's ever my turn if it's ever my generation's turn i'm going to do everything that i can to make sure this doesn't happen to the next generation so a real breaking point for me i you know did the best i could for a couple weeks as this war started from the inside to try and find you know off ramps to try and provide information to see what i could do from the inside.

1:12:30But watching the casualties roll in, and I don't want to use anyone's loss as a political talking point, but for me personally, watching more casualties come in, I just couldn't stand by as both a veteran and then as a gold star husband and say, I'm just going to continue to soldier on in this. It's time to try something different. I know this path that we're on. It doesn't work. I've seen enough data. It's time to do something different. How hard a decision was it? it became really clear to me over the weekend, this past weekend, that our message just wasn't getting through. And I was like, I know what happens if I stay.

1:13:12If I stay and I go along with this, I'm going to be knee deep in it, trying to just chip away and make a difference. But my ability to have my voice heard to present data that runs contrary to the trajectory and the agenda that the administration's on, that's going to be squashed before it even really reaches the White House. And so I knew I had kind of hit my limit of effectiveness in that capacity. So really, it should have been a hard decision. But for me, it was crystal clear. It was like, number one, I can't be a part of this in good conscience. And I need to do everything I can to actually speak out about it and speak out in a way that I hope resonates with the president and with some of my former colleagues.

1:13:55I understand they might be mad at me. They're getting hard questions from the media. But I really want them as we descend even further into this war, I really hope that they take the time to reflect and to realize that we still have time to get us out of this. And then also for the 77 million people who voted for President Trump, who voted for no new wars, who voted for the foreign policy that President Trump enacted in his first administration, the foreign policy that I described. I mean, President Trump's first foreign policy, the one that he ran on, the one that he destroyed the Republican neocon establishment on was incredibly pragmatic.

1:14:27We're not saying, you know, you have to be some kind of a, you know, a pacifist. We are saying, though, that you have to be very, very deliberate and judicious in how you use force. And you also have to use the full scope of the American toolbox. You use diplomacy, you use our economic leverage. And again, this isn't something that I came up with. President Trump came up with this. President Trump enacted this. And this is why 77 million people voted for him. It's probably not the only reason, but the no new wars put America first. Don't let us bleed out in the Middle East. That's what people voted for.

1:15:00And that's, that's what I think, uh, you know, you campaigned for. And I think that's something he could get us back to, um, if he just takes a look and assesses how we got to where we are right now. I want to get to that in a minute, your solution. And, you know, that I just want to be transparent about my motives um not in this to attack anybody right i'm concerned to the point of agitation about where this is going and its effects on the united states uh i think i hope i'm wrong but i believe it and i think you do too i think this is the most serious thing that's happened in my lifetime so i want to fix it and i don't want to happen again exactly i don't want history to be written in real time by liars in such a way that no one understands what we're going through and then we make the same mistakes and this is a principle that any parent applies to his own children no say out loud what you did and you're less likely to do it again so before i say that i just want to pause just on on your personal experience i'm i know you hate talking about this i'm not going to make you uncomfortable by pushing too much but you just you feel it i I feel as an observer, such sadness for the men who've been used, including you.

1:16:17And I wonder how, given everything you've done and everything you've just said, how you don't feel bitter at the response that you've gotten from people, some people. How do you keep the bitterness out? I think faith. I've got a great wife. God's blessed me twice with my late wife, Shannon. my wife Heather, our two boys, Colton and Josh, who I think are watching this hopefully. So faith and staying grounded on what's important. But then also, look, the people who are coming after me, I believe that the internet is like 25 % real. I think there's a lot of bots. There's a lot of people who got delivered a talking point and they're going to get a paycheck for it.

1:16:57I've noticed. Or they just, you know, they want the adoration. So I just don't take most of it seriously. And again, look, I know there's some of my former colleagues, people who I do like, who have had to come after me. And I understand that too. Like I get it. Like they're still there. They've got to discredit everything I'm saying right now. They're watching, taking notes. Um, so I'm not bitter about that. I literally just want to focus on the task at hand and the task at hand is stopping us from getting deeper into this, this quagmire. Um, because again, like just looking back on my experiences in Iraq, I don't feel like this happened.

1:17:31Um, I, there wasn't the ability to, there wasn't this platform. There wasn't, you know, the, the free independent media that existed in a real way that could reach people. That's right. And so to me, we have this opportunity. So I'll be bitter and angry later when I read Twitter and somebody who I used to like says that Joe Kahn's a traitor and we're going to fire him tomorrow anyways. We don't have time for that. As you pointed out, major things are happening right now in this war, and the president is facing some very, very challenging decisions. So I personally just hope that he and his closest advisors listen and think and that's the main priority.

1:18:08I strongly agree and we can't allow hatred of us to inspire hatred in ourselves. You can't become a hater. It'll destroy you. It's what they want. So I salute you for avoiding that and it's absolutely real. I spent a lot of time with you and you're not a hater at all. You don't even seem that bothered. So that's incredible given where you are. It's amazing. It's an act of faith and I love it. End of the history portion of the segment but I just think it's important to establish why you said first the war in Iraq, second the conflict in Syria, which took the life of your wife, why both of those were driven by Israel?

1:18:43Well, the war in Syria never would have happened about the war in Iraq. I mean, so had we not gone in and invaded Iraq, we wouldn't have had the conflict in Syria. But Syria was always a major problem under Assad for the Israelis, both under his father and under Bashir al-Assad, Hafez al-Bashir, because of their support, the relationship with the Iranians, their support for Hezbollah. Right. Makes sense. Yeah. And so they wanted to get rid of Assad as well. They saw Iraq as a vehicle for not just taking down Saddam Hussein, who posed a threat to them as well, but also as a way, a lily pad, if you will, to get rid of Syria.

1:19:22And basically – So Assad must go, which is a slogan that all of a sudden emerged out of nowhere. that was not like an organic American desire. It wasn't like Americans woke up and were like, you know, the problem really is this ophthalmologist from Syria, he must go. That reflected the priorities of Israel. Israel, and then I think you had the echo chamber as well because you had all the usual suspects. You had FDD and you had all these different other organizations that were out there saying that like now is the time to break off. Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss, break off the shackles. True expert on Syria.

1:19:56The next thing you know, like there will be a Syrian Thomas Jefferson that will take over and instead we got the former leader of al-Qaeda. But a big reason that Syria became next after Iraq – in Iraq, we screwed the whole thing up so badly that we toppled Saddam, destabilized, fought a bitter insurgency. The Sunnis eventually aligned with al-Qaeda, but then we beat them down so heavily because the Shias are the majority of the country. The Shias took over. The Shias largely – the Shias that we installed in Iraq, the Dawa Party, Badr, Skiri, et cetera, heavily aligned with Iran. And so at the end of the Iraq war under Obama, there was this whole like, oh, crap.

1:20:36We just handed basically the keys to Baghdad to the Iranians who, again, hostile to us. Qasem Soleimani is running all over the place, funding proxies. It's a great deal. It helps Iran circumvent sanctions, their relationship with Iraq. And we just spent trillions, lost nearly 5 ,000 Americans there. And now we have this Shia super state. And so then there was a ton of pressure coming from not just the Israelis, but I think also a lot of the Gulf to say, hey, we've got to get rid of Assad as well. Because now you have this Iranian land bridge that goes basically from Damascus all the way to Tehran.

1:21:15And then you can hook that down into the Lebanese area where Hezbollah is. So next thing you know, well, if you want to get rid of the guy Assad who's an Awaite, well, we've got a country full of like really angry Sunnis. And what are those guys going to turn into? And so next thing you know, we're now on the side of ISIS and Al-Qaeda. ISIS gets out of control and we have to deploy back to Iraq, back to Syria to put out essentially the brush fire that we created. And so that's why I put all of those together because, again, without Israel's influence, would all of this have happened with the Iraq War have happened?

1:21:53Maybe. But they heavily lobbied for it. I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu, you can pull up tapes on YouTube. Like the guy was lobbying heavily back in 2002 for us to do regime change in Iraq, and he has stayed in power ever since. Ariel Sharon, who initially was the PM in the lead up to the Iraq war, initially was against it because he wanted us to focus on Iran. But then towards the end, he got on board as well. But the Likud party that's in power and has been driving Israeli politics now for most of my adult life, they were heavily in favor of the regime change war in Iraq, which again led to Shia domination, led to the rise of ISIS, led to the rise of Al-Qaeda, and then heavily fueled the Syrian civil war.

1:22:34So again, this country, Israel, whom they can be a good partner in some regards. I'm not anti-Israeli. I've worked with the Israelis. Again, very competent intelligence service, very wonderful people. But they have different objectives than we do. So to put them in the driver's seat of our foreign policy and to let them dictate our foreign policy is a disservice to the American people. well i think and you know i think you're under you're understating the effect to disservice suggests like an inconvenience dangerous yeah yeah yeah um now we're looking at bankruptcy and death and yeah collapse of the dollar and like lots and i'm not blaming israel by the way i'm not blaming israel for any of it i'm blaming supine american leadership that takes this right don't understand it at all um and that that kind of leads the most uncomfortable question of all and I don't know if you can answer it.

1:23:28I don't think I can answer it. But since all of these dynamics are very well known to everyone in Washington and everyone who pretends this is not real, the Tom Cottons of the world, Lindsey Graham's or whatever, you know, the liars, everybody knows. Everybody knows. Pro-Israel people know, anti-Israel people know that what you're saying is true. I don't think there's any debate about any of it. So since it was clear that we were being pushed by the Netanyahu government into this war, that they were choosing the timing. They chose the timing, right? I mean. Yeah, I'll take Marco Rubio's word for it.

1:24:00I'll take Marco Rubio's word for it. Was it ever discussed the option that you mentioned at the beginning? Like, how about no? Not that I know of. Okay, so then you have to ask, I'm just following the logic train here. How could, what kind of pressure does it require to get a president who campaigned against exactly this thing for 10 years to do exactly this thing. What does it take to do that? I wish I knew definitively. I think there's two potentials. There's two schools of thought. I mean, one is the media echo chamber, the donors, the way the Israelis come in and kind of launder the information like I described previously.

1:24:43And then the other option is much darker. I mean, we still don't know what happened in Butler. We don't know what happened with Charlie Kirk. And by no means am I saying like the Israelis did this or any of that. But I'm saying there's a lot of unanswered questions there. And there is enough data to at least say that there's a good chance that President Trump feels like he is under threat. We're not allowed to ask basically was there any linkage between what took place with Asif Mershant who was recruited by the Iranians to come to America to recruit proxies to kill President Trump. The FBI put a confidential human source at him.

1:25:22All this is public now. This is all out there in the open. And he's arrested. And then two days later, a sniper takes a shot at President Trump. We think Mershant and the CHS was talking about the human source that the FBI put at Mershant. They were talking about, hey, we could kill the president potentially with a sniper rifle. But then they arrest him. Two days later, Butler happens. and Crooks, according to the official narrative anyways, is an enigma. We don't know anything about him. We can't get into his devices. If we did get into his devices, maybe there's nothing there. No more questions are allowed to be asked about Thomas Crooks.

1:26:00The DHS IG is currently being blocked from investigating Butler as well. That's out in the media. That's all well known. Your investigative journalist found that Crooks did indeed have an online persona, an online footprint, and he was talking to people. So it's like, why aren't we investigating this? You know, I mean, if an attempted murder of a presidential, a murder of a presidential candidate, and then there's another assassination attempt. There's been multiple public breaches of President Trump's security over the last year. And then, you know, Charlie Kirk is killed publicly in a very horrific way.

1:26:34And we're not really even allowed to look into that at all. And Charlie Kirk was one of President Trump's closest advisors. and he also advocated heavily against a war with Iran. He was in the Oval Office in the lead up to the 12-day war. I wasn't particularly close with Charlie. He was very gracious to me when I was running for Congress, very, very supportive. So we knew each other. And the last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June in the West Wing, in the stairway. And I said hi to him and he looked me in the eye and he said very loudly, and it's a small, you've been in the West Wing, it's small, it's a tight space.

1:27:10and he said, Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran. Very loudly. He was single-minded. And he walked off and he went, I believe, into the Oval. So when one of President Trump's closest advisors who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink at least our relationship with the Israelis and then he's suddenly publicly assassinated and we're not allowed to ask any questions about that, it's a data point. It's a data point that we need to look into. What do you mean when you say we're not allowed to ask any questions about that? We've been told that this individual, Robinson, is a lone gunman, and maybe he is.

1:27:54But the investigation that I was a part of, the National Counterterrorism Center was a part of, we were stopped from continuing to investigate. And the FBI will say that they stopped that because they wanted to turn everything over to the Utah state authorities. Everything's going to trial. It's very, very sensitive. but there was still a lot for us to look into that I can't really get into, but there was still linkage for us to investigate that we needed to run down. I'm not making any conclusions. I'm not saying, no, I don't think you are because, you know, because of this, this happened. I'm not, I'm not saying that at all.

1:28:24I'm just saying there's unanswered questions. We know the pressure because of the text messages, the text messages that have been made public, that Charlie was under a lot of pressure from a lot of pro Israel donors. And again, And we know Charlie was advocating to President Trump against this war with Iran. And we knew at the end of the 12-day war, at the end of Midnight Hammer, that the Israelis were going to come back and ask us to go back to war again. Right. So we have a lot of data points between Butler, the assassination attempts against President Trump, the breaches of his security, what happened to Charlie Kirk.

1:28:54Can I just ask you to pause on the Charlie Kirk just because it upsets me to hear what you're saying, to be reminded that he was murdered. but also to hear you confirm what was reported in the media several months ago that your office had been blocked from investigating his murder that does not make sense to me i don't understand why you would ever turn down help in an investigation from a u.s agency with a lot of experience in gathering intelligence on things that's your job the fbi will say and the doj will say that Because it's an ongoing case, it's a Utah State case, that back off, they've got it.

1:29:35They've got a smoking case. They've got the fingerprints on the gun, and they've got the case. But the FBI was involved in the case. The FBI was involved. The FBI basically said that they're deferring to Utah because it's now a state case. But they've established a precedent for federal investigation of this crime. Yeah. And the National Counterterrorism Center's mandate is to investigate any foreign ties to see if there's potentially any foreign ties. If we don't find any foreign ties, we back off. What I'm saying about getting into too much detail is there was more for us to investigate. There was – you believe there was reason to investigate foreign ties to Charlie Kirk's murder and were told by the FBI, DOJ?

1:30:12FBI and DOJ, yeah. No, you're not allowed to investigate that. Stop. It's done. They basically cut off our access to be able to get into that information. And look, I didn't even say necessarily that I believe there's 100 percent foreign ties. there were data points that we needed to investigate. I mean, I think anybody who's even, you know, looked at any kind of police investigation, you get 100 leads, you run them down, and 99 don't mean anything. We still had a lot more leads to run down that pertain to some kind of a foreign nexus that we were stopped from investigating. And, you know... That just strikes me as inconceivable that that could happen.

1:30:49And again, I was aware of it from reading about it, but not really to the extent that you've just described. So I would love to hear the justification for that. And can you flesh that out a little bit more? What were you told was the reason to prevent you as a federal intelligence official running the National Counterterrorism Center from looking into the murder when you had reason to look into it? Well, the way the bureaucracy works is they can just kill things in process. So initially we were cut off pretty early on from being able to access the files and being able to send people out there.

1:31:23We sent people out initially to work in the task force. After the crisis period, the first week or so, that dispersed. And we basically were told that, hey, we'll get back to you if we find any kind of foreign ties, et cetera, that we want you guys to look into. Meanwhile, we had already dug up a decent amount of leads. Again, I'm not saying that we had anything concrete. But we found more work that we needed to do to say that we had done our due diligence. We were then told that, hey, you guys need to stop. You can't work on this anymore. Had a bureaucratic dispute about it. Eventually, we were allowed to continue to investigate.

1:32:00But then in very short order, all the requests that we would make that normally different parts of the interagency with the FBI being on point would facilitate data share. Data sharing is a big thing that NCTC does. Those requests were just never met or, in my opinion, not an honest effort was given to fulfill those requests. It's just basic information that any competent police service, which I believe Utah has, and the FBI, that they would have access to to help us run down the leads to either confirm or deny some kind of foreign activity. So we were cut off from that. They didn't ever officially come back and say, you can't look at this anymore.

1:32:39All of the requests just continued to die on the vine with the various agencies that we needed to actually fulfill those requests. I just can't imagine a legitimate justification for that. I mean, maybe I'm missing something. But from a non-specialist perspective, something horrible has happened. The U.S. government, its core function is to investigate crime, particularly murder. Here you have an agency whose job it is to run down the rabbit trails you've described, and you're stopped from doing that. We don't want the information. Why would any person engaged in a legitimate pursuit say, I don't want more information?

1:33:16I mean, especially considering there's people posting online prior knowledge of what was about to happen. So a lot of the justification for stopping us from investigating hung on. Hey, we've got the guy, his fingerprints are on the gun. We've got a video of him jumping off the roof. Like this is a slam dunk case. Okay, even if it is a slam dunk case that he took the shot, what about all the people who had prior knowledge? You know, all just the basic investigative questions. How did he get there? You map it out. You know, this isn't rocket science. I mean, this is anything that anyone with common sense would know to ask.

1:33:52But basically, once they caught him, once he turned himself in and his fingerprints were on the gun, it was basically pencils down. Utah has the rest of it. There's nothing else to see here. And, you know, I'm over there thinking I'm in crazy town saying like, no, we have all these different leads that we need to run down. Just from my perspective. Now, the people who had prior knowledge, I think I believe most of them were American citizens. So that would be on the FBI to go run down. But again, without saying anything specific, there was more work for us to do on the potential of a foreign nexus.

1:34:21Again, not saying there is one, but we had more work to do and we were blocked from doing that. I can't – my heart is pounding listening to this. I mean I just would want people listening to this to assess two things. One, are you over your skis? Are you making claims you can't prove? No. Two, is there any conceivable motive, dark motive that you would have for wanting to know more about this murder? to wanting to investigate it. And I don't think any rational person could construct a bad motive for wanting to know. It's your job. It's the government's job. And so I think the onus is on people who are preventing the collection of information to describe why they're doing that.

1:35:02That's the question for them. Why wouldn't you want to know? Specifically, you may not know the answer, of the people who demonstrated prior knowledge of Charlie Kirk's murder online, and there were a number of them. Are you satisfied that all of them were interviewed by the FBI in person? I have no idea. I don't know. I just think considering they knew the guy, they knew Charlie was going to be assassinated. And there was enough of them that it wasn't just some rando who maybe he tags every TPUSA post with that. There was enough of them that there's something there. I don't know what that something is.

1:35:37Well, by definition. But we haven't seen any arrests. so to me there's more work to be done and because that could have been posted from anywhere that would be in the purview of the fbi or nctc or if they're overseas um and to me i i personally did not see any effort being taken to continue to run that down now i'm sure they will say hey we're we're open to anything we'll continue to investigate but you know we're we're coming up on several months now um why hasn't this been done are you bothered by it i'm very bothered by it. I'm very bothered by it. Like I, I personally did not know Charlie well.

1:36:13Um, but Charlie Kirk is a generational figure. I mean, he led a movement. He was speaking to millions of young Americans who came out and who voted for president Trump. Um, and he was just a genuine great man, husband, father. Um, I mean, how can you not like Charlie Kirk, but also the fact that he was murdered so publicly and yes, there's, there's, there's been a lot of, uh, sympathy and his movement has grown, et cetera, but actual curiosity about getting to justice, to figuring out what happened. That makes me furious that we're being blocked from that and that we're not allowed to ask the question anymore.

1:36:52We're just not allowed to talk about it anymore. And I think that's absolute insanity. And what does that mean? What does that mean that there are people and there's entities out there that don't want us looking into this? And I'm sure they're preparing the response right now and they're saying, that's because we don't want to screw up the Robinson trial. Like, OK, if the Robinson trial is so slam dunk, then don't worry about it. You know, he's got his fingerprints on the rifle, et cetera. But there was people publicly posting. They had prior knowledge of this. And I'm here telling you, as someone who's involved in the investigation, there was more stones for us to overturn.

1:37:21And every time we asked, we were blocked. And then they leaked the New York Times. We had a blow up and we had to throw them out of the room because they're crazy, et cetera. So it's incredibly frustrating that there's not more, especially considering how pivotal Charlie was to the MAGA movement and to President Trump, that there hasn't been a more concerted effort to find the truth and to find justice. Do you think there will be? I pray there is. I hope this helps. I know you and I will probably take some flack for it. I don't know why. And I doubt I'll be – yeah. Yeah, at a certain point, I've really tried not to say anything about it because I don't know the answers.

1:38:01But I want them to be found because I believe in justice and because I love Charlie. But I think everything you have said may be dismissed as crazy or evil, but tell me how. With reference to the words you've just spoken, I don't see how someone could level a legitimate attack on you. It won't stop them. you mentioned the breaches of the president's security that have been reported one that was reported and i can't say whether it's true i'm only asking to see if you've if you know that it is true but it's been reported that um prime minister netanyahu's security tail was caught twice by secret service attaching some kind of device to the president's emergency secret service emergency response vehicle i don't know if that's true have you heard that i've read it in the media.

1:38:50I don't know if that's true. I think the president and the vice president and several members of the cabinet going out to dinner in D.C. and the Code Pink protesters having a heads up about that to rent the table. That's hard to do. They had to figure out where. They'd rent the table. They had to kind of get the restaurant on board to a certain extent. To me, that's kind of almost like counting coup. It's a soft flex. It's a I can touch you whenever I want. It was Code Pink. They're just going to be kind of crazy and annoying. However, what does that mean? It means you've got real problems with your security detail.

1:39:26And then a few weeks later, you have an armed police officer who's off duty, who's not part of the president's detail. Come right up and shake the president's hand. And the guy is probably patriotic American, whatever. He probably just wanted to shake the president's hand legitimately. But that got a lot of publicity. And what does that mean? And the president, again, President Trump is very smart. I think President Trump has a gift for interpreting large sets of data and making very, very key strategic decisions. And so when the president sees that he's got issues with his own security detail, when he sees what happened in Butler with the other assassination attempts, when he sees what happened with Charlie, I think it's reasonable to believe that somewhere in his head he thinks that like maybe I don't have a choice.

1:40:13Maybe they could harm me or they could harm my family. And if they can't keep me safe, I believe the president deeply cares. I believe he's very courageous. I think if it was just a matter of he worried about his own physical safety, I don't think he cares. We saw that in Butler. But he does love his family and he's got a big family. And so somewhere in his head, if they can't keep me safe, what about my family? So, look, maybe the president was just simply deceived by the echo chamber we described. And that's how we got to this place. But it's also there's a potential that there's an element of coercion, intimidation, whatever words you want to use there that is also influencing his decision making.

1:40:53If you were assessing a similar situation in another country, a country not your own, and you as an expert on these questions, which obviously you are, I gave you the same data set you've just presented to me. And I said, would you say that's just crazy even to bring that up as a possibility? Not at all. I mean, when you map out those data points, I would just say this moves from being a possibility to potentially, depending on how you look at it and interpret it, this could be a likelihood. It would be something that I'm sure that we would debate rigorously, but nobody would dismiss it altogether.

1:41:27With all this data, it's not nothing. It's something that has to be looked into. Is it being looked into? Again, I don't think it is. I think that you're with Butler your investigative journalist found more about crooks than the entire government and the response I received from the FBI was so hostile that it confused me and it still does confuse me a lot it confuses me a lot since I didn't approach the question with anything like that in mind. I mean, we put this documentary out. We got information, the information you described. We got a lot of his online activity, which we've been told didn't exist.

1:42:08And this was not an attack on the FBI. This was, of course, during the last administration with a different director. So this was hardly a partisan hit job. This is the president of the United States who I campaigned for and voted for and like and have liked for many years. So, like, it's not an attack. And the response that I got was hysterical. yep that's not an overstatement yep and it confuses me yeah do you have you had experiences like that there was a level of you know just hostility coming from really the fbi um and some of it i think is just like rivalry like why are you looking over your shoulder like i got this yeah yeah very familiar with that i mean yeah we're the same way in the military so i'm sure that's totally i totally get that they were treated like you were in the air force kind of Yeah, exactly.

1:42:55Like, hey, what do you know? Like, we're the FBI. Like, gotcha. But, you know, we had a role to play. And the way that we were aggressively blocked from that, I found the hostility to be above and beyond what you would what you would think that you'd find with just typical, you know, rivalry, bureaucratic rivalry, turf wars, those types of things. some of that was at play but the the level of like you cannot look at this and then for them to to escalate it to attempt to get us kicked out of the case that to me was very surprising same thing with butler when we first started asking questions about butler i thought because especially that happened under the biden administration that hey we would come in and we would get the truth because you know the previous administration really screwed this thing up uh and there just wasn't curiosity there uh there wasn't curiosity and there wasn't a tolerance whatsoever for us going after just the key questions of like, hey, did the informant that you had that was interacting with this guy, Merchant, was he in communication with anybody in Butler?

1:43:53I mean, basic questions to ask. Again, this is nothing that's going to blow any investigator's socks off. Just those basic questions. Like, no, no, the two aren't related. Like, you can't talk about it. You can't ask any of those questions. Even when we found data that needed to be looked in. Yeah, I mean, they would say at the time, like, well, the Merchant case is ongoing, etc. Like we can't interfere if that case is over. So, I mean, at this point. I don't understand. I think this is like a new rule. Yeah. Which is to say a fake rule that you're not allowed to gather information about anything that might potentially intersect with an ongoing case that's not directly related.

1:44:30Like who made that up? I think that's just made up. I don't. Because then how do you ever investigate anything? What law school did you go to? And I asked this question and I was like, yeah, cases have been overturned on this basis. And it's like, well, cases have been overturned on many bases, but how is that, is this like the new standard? Because you would not be able to investigate anything. Right, exactly. And we want to get to the truth. So what is that for those of us following along at home who don't have a high level of familiarity with the process? What could that possibly be? The current president was the subject of a near successful assassination attempt like recently.

1:45:07Yeah. And we're just not going to look into very obvious leads or divulge information that everyone knows they have. For example, the surveillance tape from the shooting range at which Thomas Crooks trained because it would answer the question, was he training with somebody? And if so, who? They have that footage and they won't release it. What could possibly be the explanation for that? I know what the result is. The result is people come to their own conclusions and this is where like crazy conspiracy theories come from. And then those conspiracy theories usually are easy to debunk or make the people saying them sound crazy.

1:45:40So then the actual question never gets answered. I'm sorry. Can you say that for people who haven't lived in Washington? Okay. I try to explain this to people all the time because this has been ongoing since at least the Kennedy assassination. But this is a very serious and reoccurring thing. It's a tactic. And you just explained it better than anyone ever heard. Can you just do that again if you can recall it from memory? Yeah. I mean, so basically you give no information whatsoever on something that's obvious that there should be information. Like you outlined, like there's potentially footage of crooks at the shooting range.

1:46:14Again, police 101, go get the tapes. Let's figure it out. If you don't want to address that question, then you just – you go silent on it and you say you can't ask that question, which then creates people who come out of kind of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions. Right. Knowing the way the internet works, I mean, half of them, if not more, are probably going to be so far off in left field and made by legitimate kooks or bots that then you can just be like, oh, these people asking these questions about that tape at the video range. It's space aliens. They're all crazy conspiracy theorists.

1:46:44They say it's a UAP or whatever. And so then you've just, you know, diverted all attention away from the thing that you're trying to conceal. And now everyone's focused on the crazies. Man. And then the second someone asks a legitimate question, they're crazy. I hope everyone watching will just clip that tape and keep it on your phone and replay it every day because that is one of the primary ways that the intel agencies and federal law enforcement influence public opinion, influence elections. That's the way they influence the perception of what's going on. But more than anything, it's the way that they hide their own behavior from the public.

1:47:18Yeah. so at the beginning of the administration i think it was uh october rather it was january 23rd was like right after the inauguration the president issued an executive order calling for the total declassification release of all documents relevant to the assassination of president john f kennedy in november of 1963 all of them and also documents relevant to the assassination investigation into Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general. I don't think all the Kennedy documents have been released, have they? They were supposed to be. I mean, that was the president's order.

1:48:00That's what was in the executive order. It's the law. The president said it, and it's in the executive order. Maybe you can't go there because of— So, yeah. Yeah. so i just want to say again uh and not from you i have been told conclusively that that has not happened so without divulging anything that's classified like anything from 1963 should be classified the whole thing is insane and an insult to citizens i'm a middle-aged man i wasn't even born then it was six years before i was born and they're telling me i can't see it okay it's infuriating and it's the end of democracy but what could possibly be the justification for keeping classified a document that the that must under law be released yeah and that was produced generations ago yeah i i think more of this goes to the the deep state the system the machine whatever you want to call it they they're not hiding something in the kennedy files in my opinion, because, you know, it's not like they, the assassins wrote down on this day, we're going to kill JFK and they put in a file at CIA or FBI, like that didn't happen.

1:49:07So I don't really think there's anything that's in particularly, you know, would be earth shattering inside the files themselves. The system doesn't want to get us used to things being rapidly declassified. They don't want a president to be able to come in and say, here's an executive order. And I said, declassify it because the people demand it. And it happens like that as fast as it could happen. They don't want that to happen. They want to condition us that like, OK, the president of the American people elected, he may have come in and lawfully given us an order. But there's a process here.

1:49:39There's an interagency process. Everyone gets to check to make sure there's nothing still classified or still ongoing, even if it was from 1963 or even further back. Because, again, they don't want us conditioned to we can just have access to this information. And I think there's probably times where that would be appropriate, like declassifying something that happened. last week, for instance. Yeah, there's going to be equities there. And I think the American people would understand that. I agree. But a lot of this, I think, is power. And so the bureaucracy, when the president says declassify this, regardless of what it is, from decades ago, they can't just let them have it.

1:50:16They all want to have their cuts on it. They want to be able to control it. And this is the way the bureaucracy and the career bureaucrats roll. And they just tell the new political appointees, like, hey, we just, you know, we really can't do that. But we'll get us to a place that mostly will get you what you want eventually. And then it all just gets killed off in process and there's literally no transparency at the end of the day or limited transparency. But that's where I think the game is here. They don't want to condition us that you can elect a president and he can automatically change the bureaucracy.

1:50:49I mean, this fact, the fact that the government doesn't have to tell you what it's doing, even though you pay for it, just invalidates the whole concept of consent to the governed. Like, how can you give consent to something you know nothing about? But more than that, it creates a moral poison at the center of the society. Lying is a sin. it's the core sin and lies beget lies and they like cancer destroy the body in which they live and if you care about the body this country if you're from here and you hope to live here and have grandchildren here you have to fix that and I really think that telling the truth radically telling the truth is the only thing that gets you there and the pain that that entails and it does entail pain there's no doubt about it and humiliation is much smaller a price to pay than the price that we will pay inevitably and maybe soon if we don't do it.

1:51:49I don't think this is sustainable, this level of lying in any society. No. And if people don't think that their vote matters, that they can actually elect someone and change can be enacted. I think things go to a very, very dark place. Of course. And people lose faith in our system. And our system is based on that faith that, you know, we get to have these elections in theory, hopefully you'd hope the elections are free and fair. We've got a lot of issues there as well. But when you finally get your person in office, that they're going to be able to control the government that the people pay for, that are supposed to be ran by the folks that they voted for, that they'll actually get their will implemented, or at least what's in the best interest for them implemented.

1:52:30That's right. And that's just not the case right now. No, it's not. So I want to end with a hopeful note. So we've been talking about this for 24 hours because i think that without even getting into it um anyone who's followed it carefully and is thinking clearly can see that the war with iran is potentially like the end of a lot for the united states yeah i mean i don't think we could overstate the consequences of this and i don't think i'm being hysterical i've had three weeks to think about it i've actually had 10 years to think about it because that's how long they've been pushing for it. So at this point, it feels like there's no way out.

1:53:08But you were saying to me this morning in a really thoughtful way that gave me hope that you think there is a way out. And so I'm going to stand back and let you explain how you think that the United States can exit with a lot of its interests intact and its honor intact and the president's administration intact, because the political cost of this is shocking. I mean, it's not the most important thing, but right now it's all very broken. Okay, what's the answer? It's going to take drastic action. And the good news is I believe that this is something that President Trump is uniquely qualified to fix on his own through his sheer willpower.

1:53:50President Trump has an amazing ability. It's almost his superpower, I think, to be able to kind of breathe life into ideas and again to capture large data sets and to find leverage. And right now it's clear that this conflict will just continue the way it is and get exponentially worse, especially if we go down the path of demanding a total surrender with boots on the ground or maybe even something far worse. And that is the path we're on. I mean inevitably. If we say it's total surrender, what does total surrender mean? Now again, this is where President Trump is uniquely suited. President Trump can define his own total surrender.

1:54:26He's in charge. I ended my letter with, you know, you hold the cards because President Trump truly does hold the cards. He's a very powerful, very respected leader. And what I think President Trump must do is, number one, he has to address the main issue. The main issue is what the Israelis are doing. And he needs to very forcefully and probably with a new team of diplomats go to the Israelis and say, you're done. We will defend you. We will make sure that, you know, ballistic missiles aren't rained down upon you. However, you are done going on the offense because this is our war. We're paying for it.

1:55:01We're bleeding for it. This is not your war. If you choose to continue this offensive operation, we're out. And as a matter of fact, if you choose to continue, we will start withdrawing features of your defense system so that you will be on your own. We have to say that to them. And we have to be very blunt. And we have to be very forceful. And I know a lot of people who like the Israelis are going to say, we can't do that. That's wrong. They're under fire, et cetera. But if we don't do that, if we don't address our relationship with the Israelis, even if we come up with a temporary ceasefire, we'll be right back in the same situation in very short order.

1:55:35So that's the first thing that President Trump must do, address the main issue. The main issue is how the Israelis are out of control and they are driving this entire war. Address that aggressively, get the Israelis to stop. How realistically, just having lived through this whole thing, how hard will that be? It will be hard, but again, President Trump can do it. President Trump can call the prime minister of Israel and get him to the table. President Trump can force it. I believe that. I truly believe that he can. So I think it's doable. It's only doable with President Trump. And then from there, once we get the Israelis to stop, we still for now have strong allies in the Gulf.

1:56:18We have the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Saudis, the Bahrainis, all these actors, the Omanis. They may not always agree with each other, but they're all pretty good partners with us. I think we need to use them. And again, I think we probably need to bring in some new diplomats and we need to aggressively engage with the Iranians while we can to get to a ceasefire and to come up with a way that we can stop the killing. We can stop the destruction of not just these countries, not just the loss of more life, but basically the collapse of the energy system that we have right now so that we can open the Straits of Hormuz back up again and so that we can make sure the petrodollar is being used.

1:56:57Because right now we didn't stop the flow of oil going to the Chinese. The Chinese are still getting their oil out and they're settling those transactions in yuan, not the petrodollar. So we have to – once we get the Israelis to stop, we have to aggressively pursue our economic interests. And I think the only good thing in here is that our economic interests are in line with not just the GCC countries but also with the Iranians. Because the Iranians want this war to stop. They want to be able to rebuild their energy sector. They want to be able to revitalize their energy sector. and on this mutual cooperation to open up the Straits of Hormuz and to build back the energy sector, I think we could come up with a piece.

1:57:38It's going to be seamless. We'd have to lift some sanctions. We'd have to lift some sanctions, yeah. And why wouldn't we? We've had sanctions for decades, and according to the neocons, they had no effect on the nuclear program, which posed an imminent threat. So what is the argument? We've had sanctions for decades, And I don't see how we benefited from that at all. We didn't. I mean, we just lifted sanctions on Syria because the regime changed there. But we lifted sanctions on a guy who used to be the former leader of al-Qaeda. Right, because he's pro-Israel. So I'm pretty sure we can go ahead and lift some sanctions.

1:58:09It would be in our benefit to lift the sanctions. Not only would it help us in the war, but also a condition of lifting the sanctions would be you will settle all transactions that you're going to get from your new oil industry that will be reintroduced to the world economy. You'll settle that in the dollar. and we need the dollar to survive if we want our country in its current state to survive as well. So the lifting of sanctions in this case very much works out in our national interest. That to me, and I'm sure there's lots of different variations we could have of this plan, but President Trump aggressively enacting this and addressing the Israelis first and foremost.

1:58:46Otherwise, any kind of negotiation we try to have with the Iranians or pretty much anybody else, If we don't address the Israeli factor, they're simply not going to take us seriously. Why would they? Precisely. Why would they? And every day that this goes on, again, the more – I have no love for anybody in power in Iran right now. But the more of the people that we – more of the leaders we kill in Iran, you're not getting a Thomas Jefferson next. It's not like if we kill 15 or 20 of them, the 16th or the 21st guy is Thomas Jefferson or he's a moderate. Absolutely not. It's very obvious to me that some of these strikes, not all, but some were conducted with the intent of making a negotiated settlement impossible.

1:59:30And that leads me to the saddest thing, you know, whole cluster of sad things. But the saddest thing is the bombing of the girl school attached to the Iranian naval base. And the U.S. has admitted we did it. But I'm wondering about the targeting coordinates and where those came from. Is it possible that those came from Israel? That I don't know. Are you aware of, has it been publicly reported or in previous conflicts? Can you say anything that you're not constrained by? Is it possible that that could have happened? I mean, have there been strikes, American strikes on targets in the past that you're aware of that have used coordinates supplied by Israel?

2:00:13Yeah, and we share so much intelligence with Israel. Right, of course. So it's entirely possible, but no one has said anything about it, but it's entirely possible that the coordinates were given to us by Israel. And why wouldn't they be? Because once you start doing things like that, it's intentionally or not, it's very hard to get out of it. And obviously from the way the Israelis have conducted themselves in the Gaza War and other places, they have a much different way of fighting than we do. I mean, America definitely makes mistakes and we do everything that we can. I can tell you as a guy who fought on the ground, Americans almost to a fault sometimes.

2:00:51We do everything that we can to prevent the loss of civilian life. I mean, almost the point where sometimes we risk our own lives deliberately to not kill Americans, to not kill innocent civilians. So, again, this is where being in partnership with a, air quotes, partner that has very different, a very different agenda than you and a stated outcome, but then also just a different standard for how they fight. It's very dangerous. It's very dangerous for us. to be in partnership with a country that has different goals and different standards of behavior on the battlefield in different ways and means yeah they just have a whole different way so how how would you describe the israeli attitude toward the killing of innocents look the israelis are in a hard spot and as somebody who fought for most my life i think i can get into their heads pretty easily um if i was an israeli i i think i would have have the same view.

2:01:49I think I would say like, well, we're going to fight them at some point anyways. If there's civilians in that area, that's militarily important to us, whatever, like I have a job to do. I understand that, but it's also important for us to understand our air quotes partners. If we're going to be in a partnership with them, we have to be clear-eyed about that just because they speak English. And a lot of them went to school over here and we have dual citizens doesn't mean that they're going to target the same way that we do. We have to be clear-eyed about it. And that's what I think is missing. If we're going to do joint operations with the Israelis, they are going to, look, we saw what happened in Gaza.

2:02:25And you can say that's a horrible thing. You can say that's just the way it is, but that is the way the Israelis fight. And so we have to go into that clear, with clear eyes and understand that's how they're going to fight. And now we're going to be viewed as being not just complicit, but we're going to be viewed as being partners in that. And again, that's a very dangerous place for us to be because our At least our tactical objectives have been pretty clear that we want to take down the ballistic missiles, the nuclear program, the Navy, the Army, et cetera. And those are military targets. But we're in partnership right now with the Israelis who they're going after some military targets, but they're going after a heck of a lot more that are not military targets.

2:03:03It's a very generous assessment of their motives. And I mean as a compliment, I strongly disagree with you, but then I didn't spend my life fighting wars. and you're making every attempt to get into their perspective, even if you disagree with it, which I assume you do. And I think that is the way to assess things. It's like, what's the other guy's perspective, even if I hate it? Yeah. Look, in the Middle East, you're going to do business with some unsavory characters. In the world, you're going to do business with some unsavory characters. So if you're going to be doing business there, just get comfortable with the fact that some of these guys are unsavory.

2:03:39I mean, the classic, I think, President Trump line really early on when he was asked if he thought Putin was a killer. And he's like, well, yeah. I mean, we're killers too. You know what I mean? He's right. He was just very logical about that and very clear-eyed about that. Again, this is why President Trump is uniquely qualified to solve this problem because I think he has the ability to understand things from multiple perspectives at the same time and then find our leverage and then find out what's best for our objectives, for America's objectives. Yes. With clear eyes. And that's the way we have to be.

2:04:12Do you anticipate you'll be speaking to the president again? I would welcome it. I mean, I spoke with him before I departed the administration. How did that go? It went great. I mean, not the best conversation ever. You know, I told him why I was leaving. He heard me out. He was very respectful. He was? Yeah, very respectful. He was very kind. He always is. And I think we departed personally on good terms. Again, I'm an adult. I understand the way I left and writing the letter that there's parts of his administration that are gonna have to come after me and try and discredit me. I understand that.

2:04:48But I think the president is someone who listens. And so I think he's listening, not necessarily just to me and to you, but I think he is listening to a lot of different people, because I think he knows at a core level, this is not going well. And he needs to find a way for us to get out of this. Well, you're definitely an adult, and I wish there were more of them, and I appreciate all the time you spent here. Thank you. Thank you, Tucker. I really appreciate it. Joe Ken. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next Wednesday. Thanks for watching the Wednesday edition of the show. We stream live every week, Wednesday, 6 p.m.

2:05:25Eastern, on tuckercarlson.com. Members can watch the show live, join the members-only chat, and take part in the conversation in real time we're grateful to be doing it and grateful that you watch it thank you