#291 Joe Kent - His Message to President Trump on Ending the War With Iran

- Welcome back, man. - Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

- It's an honor to have you.

So, what you were born, you were resigned last week. - I did, I did. - How's that going?

“- But as good as resigning to the president can go, I think.”

(laughing) - It's definitely created a lot of buzz. I just want to commend you, then. I mean, I know that took a lot of courage that took some serious balls to do that,

especially what the statement you made. Wow. And, you know, internally, but just me myself. I haven't been happy about really much of anything that's been going on.

I feel like it's been a 180 bait and switch from what we were told and just about every aspect. And I've been wondering,

'cause I know there's people frustrated out there

and I've been wondering, what are you still doing in the position if you're not doing the fucking job that you were supposed to do? Why are you still there? Is it power?

Is it, 'cause it's not power. They might think it's power, but if you're not able to do the fucking job

“that you're there to do, then you're power less, right?”

- That's the conclusion that I came to. I mean, after a year of really trying as hard as we could, to advance what we believe the agenda was, in particular, keeping us out of endless wars, and preventing, you know, more bloodshed ever sees.

And then potentially more blowback terrorism here. You know, I just felt like we weren't being a factored. I wasn't being effective anymore. And so for me, it's like, I don't wanna stay just because I have a title, some degree of,

I don't know, prestige, whatever. I don't wanna stay for that. I wanna stay for the mission, but then also just seeing, and I'm sure we'll get into it,

this thing's I mentioned in the resignation letter, seeing the way we're being slow-walked, and then rapidly entering this war, I had to say something about it. I couldn't number one, I couldn't be a part of it,

once the coffin started coming back from Dover, from overseas to Dover. I just couldn't be a part of it just based on all the experiences I had had previously, 'cause I'd, you know, had said to myself,

years ago, if I was ever gonna position to prevent us from getting involved in a quagmire, I wouldn't be quiet about it, I would say something about it, and so that, that weighed heavily on me.

“But then I truly believe, like I said in the letter,”

that the way that the president was influenced by the media, but then also by Israeli government officials, and the way that decision making was, took place in the compartmentalized environment, compartmentalized in the sense that the president

didn't have a bunch of, didn't have much in terms of people giving him alternative key points that our country was in a bad spot, and the most effective thing that I could do was resign resigned publicly.

- You get a ton of hate, and you're being attacked. The FBI's coming after you, you've been accused of leaking, you've been accused of all kinds of stuff, it's ridiculous in my mind.

But, you know, I think the one thing that you've been accused of, the most is people are pissed that you called Israel out, they're really, really upset, and they make it sound like there's zero justification for that.

But, you know, I have a couple of things right here that I want to read off. I mean, you're saying that the administration, president himself was influenced to strike our ran for Israel's benefit.

I mean, Rubio said that we hit them

because Israel was gonna hit them first.

Then the Wall Street Journal had an article out, I think it was last week, maybe the week before. And this is quoted. To help make the case on Iran, Lindsey Graham traveled several times

to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence agency. This is in quotation. They tell me things are own government won't tell me. He said, he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said. I mean, this is, it's breuders about an hour ago. Today, breuders, less than 48 hours before the US

Israeli strike on Iran began. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone to President Donald Trump about the reasons for launching the kind of complex far off the, far off war the American leader once had campaigned against.

I mean, it's, it's not absurd that you're saying

at all, all the publications are talking about this. Everyone's talking about this. Senator Lindsey Graham is actually bragging about this. Ted Cruz was on the flight. Yep.

“So what, how was this like some kind of fucked up conspiracy?”

Like all the signs? Yeah, they're trying to shut people up by saying your conspiracy theorist, your anti-Semitic, et cetera, but yet they will come out and they will say, we had to attack Iran because Israel was going to attack Iran.

I mean, Secretary of State Rubius said that the president said that many others have as well. So it's, it's right there up in our face. And so again, for me, it was just something that I, I couldn't, I felt like it couldn't influence anymore

from the inside and I couldn't no longer be a part of. But it's insane.

I mean, even if, you know, Israel spent 6.4 billion

on this war since March. You know how much the US has spent? 18 approximately 18 to 25 billion with another request for another 200 billion from Congress. Now, why the fuck are we the ones pay a float in the bill for this?

Because that's the way it is every time. I mean, the Israelis will have their objectives.

“They will convince senior American officials”

that this is also their objectives. And if the Americans don't agree, then the Israelis will set off a series of actions that make us react. And then, actually, you know, we're having to contribute our blood in our treasure.

And that same playbook is playing out now. And I referenced the Iraq war. I referenced what happened in Syria as well in my letter because this is the same playbook we've seen it over and over again. And, you know, you and I saw that at the tactical level,

we're deployed in the war on terror. And then now I saw it at that pretty senior levels take place over the course of the last year. We're going to get into all this. I want to start by reading President Trump's statement today

on truth. I am pleased to report that the United States of America in the country of Iran have had over the last two days very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostile of our hostilities

in the Middle East. Based on the tenure and tone in these of these in-depth detailed and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War

to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period. Subject to this success of the ongoing meetings and discussions. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President Donald J. Trump.

Do you know what our Rans responses to this? - I've seen some of that. - I've seen some of that. - Immediately respond. And, you know, I would love to believe our President and our administration,

but just like we talked about at the very beginning, everything that has come out has been a bait and switch and complete 180 fucking lie. This is what Iran says. The Iranian foreign ministry in state broadcast

or IRIB stated, "No conversation has taken place between Iran and the US and Trump's claim about having these talks as false. They described it as psychological warfare intended to manipulate energy prices,

markets and buy him time. And, a senior Iranian security official quoted, Tehran is not in talks with Trump and that he backed down from attacking energy infrastructure after Iran's credible military threats

and market pressure. There has been and is not any negotiation underway. IRGC linked outlets and Iran's parliament speaker called reports of negotiations in quotes, Trump's own words, fake news.

- We're in a bad situation. I mean, I pray that this five day somewhat true,

I hope it lasts, the problem is the Israelis have said

they won't stop striking throughout the entire period. - They came out and said, they don't care. - Right, so this is the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that we right now are not capable of restraining the Israelis.

“I think if President Trump focuses on it,”

I think he has the power to restraining the Israelis, but that's the key first step in any formula towards peace. He's got to restrain the Israelis before he can even get the Iranians to negotiate a table. - Now, there's a lot of speculation

that maybe the President made that statement to jet launch the stock market today. Here's a post. Just minutes before Trump's announcement of talks with Iran, massive traders hit the market.

In one move, 1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures were purchased.

This trade was so large, it sent the entire index, 0.3% higher that exact minute.

These orders were for to six time larger than anything else at that time,

whoever made those trades made $60 billion.

I wonder if that was Congress. I wonder if that was insider trading Congress, the administration of the Senate. - Yeah, I hope people look into that. - I hope they look into it too.

- I hope they look into it 'cause it's definitely, it definitely should be researched. - Well, a lot of people are looking into it 'cause it's going viral on X right now. And, you know, it's the problem.

- That's a good point. - Even if it was, you know, worst case scenario and this would be very bad a way to make money at the end of the day, the five days expire were still in the exact same spot that we're in

where there's going to be a stranglehold from the Straits of Hormos. There's gonna be continued escalation, energy prices,

even if they stabilize for this five days,

what's gonna happen when day five arrives? We have a problem that we have to solve.

“Again, look, I believe that President Trump can solve it.”

Restrain these railways, work with the GCC countries. That's the way to get out of this. - Well, Joe, let me give you a quick, just a quick introduction 'cause I think a lot of people have forgotten just exactly who the fuck you are

and what you've done for this country. So, Joe Kent, former director of National Counterterrorism Center, retired Green Bra, former member of a classified special mission unit, former CIA paramilitary officer, gold star spouse with 11 combat deployments,

six broad stars, author of Send Me, the true story of a mother at war, a tribute to Shannon's courage and a testament to what real service looks like. Trusted by President Trump as his foreign policy advisor

and leader, and the leader who most recently served as head of counterterrorism for the United States of America, now being investigated by the FBI for leaking classified information. I wonder how many of the pedophiles

that were in the Epstein files, I wonder how many of those pedophiles are having active FBI investigations on 'em, probably fucking zero, probably fucking zero. As of this recording, Pauli Markett says there is a 13% chance

that U.S. forces will enter Iran by March 31st in a 19% chance of a U.S. Iran ceasefire by March 31st. What do you think about those odds? A ceasefire, I'm skeptical. Again, until the Israelis are restrained,

there won't be a ceasefire. Butch in the ground, as you know, when you have combat resources in theater and you've got active combat going on, saying that you can control any of these factors

is more of a wish than a plan. So my fear is that we could rapidly escalate. - Let's talk about your rug's resignation and what was it, I mean,

“how long have you been frustrated with what's going on?”

- Basically since the lead up to the first iteration

of our conflict with Iran in June, I was very frustrated that we had kind of backed ourselves and do a corner artificially. I was in a big supporter of President Trump's overall thesis of foreign policy, of peace through Sri Lanka,

of stopping us from getting involved in costly wars. In particular with Iran, I think President Trump was uniquely posture to cut a great deal with Iran. He had, in the first Trump administration, he had killed Kossim Solmani in the tear mastermind.

Once he left office, the Iranians went right back up to their old tricks. They funded their proxies. They were attacking our troops in the region. October 7th happened.

America generally was not respected by the Iranians. When Trump came back into office, the Iranians automatically said, "Okay, wait a sec. This is a whole different administration. We might be able to cut a deal with this guy

but also if we don't, he will use force like he did against Kossim Solmani." So they stopped their proxies from attacking us. The last time I was on your show, we were talking about how there had been over,

“I think, 152 hundred attacks against our forces in Iraq and Syria.”

That stopped when Trump came into office because the Iranians knew who was back. They also knew that President Trump was willing to make a deal and actively seeking a deal. President Trump deployed, I think,

a very, very competent diplomat, Steve Whitkoff, to go get a deal going with the Iranians. Now, this was a major threat to the Israelis. Because the Israelis viewed this as the prime time and Trump is the prime vehicle to use for regime change

in Iraq. Now, President Trump stated policy had been, and he says this all the time, that Iran can't have a nuclear bomb. Now, the Iranians actually agreed with President Trump

and they had a prohibition of fought to a religious decree on actually producing a nuclear weapon that had held since 2004. Now, what the Iranians did say was like, hey, we're not gonna make a nuclear bomb,

but we want the ability to enrich uranium because they had seen what had taken place in Libya

and say, here's all of our nuclear-making material,

then they're sitting duck.

“Then they can be invaded and regime changed at any given time.”

They saw the Saddam route, if they actually pursued a weapon or even like kind of bs that they had a weapon, that same thing, there would be immediately invaded. So they kind of had this, this ability to say, hey, we have a prohibition on an nuclear weapon,

but we have some ability to enrich. This was a major threat to the Israelis goal. So what I watched the Israelis do over the course of the last year was use their government officials engaging with our government officials,

but then also their surrogates in the media, Markle Ben, who will talk to you tonight, mainstream media, think tanks, foundation for defensive democracies, a lot of talking heads on Fox News, to move the red line. So Trump had said, my red line is no nuclear weapons.

Diatolic had great, I don't want nuclear weapons either. Let's talk. So they move the red line by saying enrichment. Iran can have no enrichment and enrichment equals a nuclear weapon which is just fundamentally not true.

So that wouldn't be paraded from officials in the Israeli government and then also on the news. - I'd be, let's backtrack. - Yeah, I don't think, not one of our 18 intelligence agencies had mentioned that Iran was enriching uranium, correct?

- They were doing enrichment to some degree. So there was enrichment-- - We're no nuclear weapons. - But no nuclear weapons. - And we knew all 18 intelligence agencies agreed

that the Fathwa against actually making a nuclear weapon was holding and the Iranians were not making a nuclear weapon. So that Tulsi gathered testified to that last year, she just testified to it again this year that the Iranians, under the previous Supreme Leader,

who was just killed. Now the Iranians more than likely are going to change their strategic outlook. That's my guess. My guess is like, hey, a lot of their hardliners are now saying,

hey, do you see what this moderation got us? And now they're going to attempt to buy one or spread. That's just my guess. But for the last year prior to this last conflict kicking off, we did not assess that they're trying

to make a nuclear weapon.

“So that's why they had to move the red line”

and say enrichment.

And so finally, through official engagement and the media

continuing to echo this, they basically got the U.S. talking point to change that Iran could not have any kind of nuclear enrichment. And that was a non-starter for the Iranians. And that's how we basically got into the 12-day war

operation in that hammer. Again, 12-day war launched by the Israelis. We said, hey, we're going to come in. We're going to do a series of limited strikes to take away any nuclear capability that Iran may have.

And then we're done. Now, at the time, we had seen myself and others had seen how aggressive the Iranian Israelis were about wanting regime change inside Iran. And so when midnight hammer and the lead up to it,

we assess that, hey, even if we did these strikes, the Israelis were going to come right back to us after a couple months and say, no, now is the time for us to do regime change. And that's exactly what happened.

The difference is we had robust debates and lead up to midnight hammer. After midnight hammer, President Trump's decision-making circle was very, very tight. And that's his prerogative, he can do that.

However, he had all pro-Israel Hawks, like really in his ear, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz. And then on the outside, again, the media echo chamber and knowing that President Trump was watching Fox News, knowing what media he was consuming.

And they're all saying the same thing. Iran can't have any enrichment,

which basically put us on this collision course

towards a conflict. I think the Israelis, once again, got nervous about a month ago, because they knew that Wittkov and Kushner and others in the administration were actively engaging with the Iranians to get a deal.

And that's why the Israelis launched their attack, knowing they could force our hands.

“And that's why I think you saw Mark and Ruby”

on others come out immediately and say, well, yeah, there was an imminent attack. And the imminent attack was the Israelis attacking the Iranians. And then we knew that they would retellate back against us.

Why would they retellate against us? Why would the Iranians retellate against us? If they know that the Israelis or the ones that hit them, why would they retellate against us? Because they know that basically we fund the Israelis.

That Israel would not have the offensive capability without us. The Israelis are very competent at conducting, I'd say, like, smaller and more clandestine intelligence type of assassinations.

Very good at doing that. They don't need our help to do that. They don't need our help gathering very much intelligence. But for big military lifts that involve deploying strike packages, several thousand miles.

They need our help for us and troops. And also, they want us to die for them. In order for them to commit that air power to go strike around, they're leaving some of their air space vulnerable. So they need us to back them up in that regard as well.

So without us providing the defense and the offensive capability Israel can't do it. Now Iran in the lead up to the 12 day war. During the 12 day war and after midnight hammer, they observe the escalatory ladder very, very carefully.

They didn't have their proxies attack us. And they also didn't attack us until midnight hammer. So they let the Israeli strike them throughout the entire 12 day war. And they didn't target any of our bases in the region.

they shot back and equal amount of missiles that like the empty sector of one of the bases on Qatar as we dropped bombs inside of Iran.

“So I think this next iteration, they said,”

we're not going to be the escalatory ladder. If you guys come after us this time, because they knew that the Israelis were going for regime change, they were going to try to take out the supreme leader. And that's what led them to say,

if you guys are going to do this, then we are going to retaliate for the full force because they didn't want to get pushed around again. - And where did the intelligence come from? But didn't come from us.

- The intelligence about them having-- - About enriching uranium. - It wasn't even intelligence. It was literally just talking points. I mean, I don't even think it was portrayed as intelligence

because this is what the Israelis, they're very good at fucking serious. - These Israelis are very good at doing this. The Israelis will come and they will have engagements with our intelligence services, with our diplomats,

and they will give them information. And they will say something like, well, this isn't an intelligence channels yet, because as you know, we formally share intelligence with the Israelis, but that makes this way through our own checks,

and it's not a perfect system, but it's at least a system. And they'll say, hey, this isn't an intelligence channels yet. And then we'll go back and we'll check it to see if it's actually an intelligence channels. And a lot of times it's not.

And that's the way this enrichment talking point was really, really, really spun, because they just basically said,

no, no, America's policy has always been no enrichment.

And I went back and I looked and people can fact check me. The only American official who ever said America's policy is zero enrichment was Mike Pompeo in the first Trump administration. So the Israelis in this Trump administration came

and they're basically like, here's President Trump's policy, from his last administration. And he contained Iran, this is it, this is the policy. And they equated over and over and over again, whereas all President Trump had said was no nuclear weapon.

And so the short circuit, the agreement, essentially, that the Supreme Leader and Trump had that Gotham and negotiating table the Israelis moved the red line by basically having their official government interactions,

but then also the media echo that. It's a very clever, pretty sophisticated plan, but they got it done through repetition. Shh. You got a lot of flag for something that you said

on my show the last time you were here.

“Oh, I think I think he said that we'll roll the clip right now,”

but I believe he said that Iran's they've attacked us over 150 times, he's in proxies. And people are calling you a flip flopper. What do you have to say to that? - If they look at the totality of everything I've ever said,

I am neither an isolationist nor am I a hawk. On Iran, if their proxies attack us, we should hammer them. I am, I will debate anybody on the utility of killing costume, soul money, President Trump was justified, and he was correct and he was bold for killing

costume, soul money and his deputy Abamani Mahandas. He was really bold in the fact that he took them off the battlefield, but then he didn't get suckered into what we're in right now, which is a regime change war in a massive country like Iran.

So I've always been against us doing a prolonged

kinetic strikes inside of Iran. When I ran shot ballistic missiles at our troops, I thought we would have been justified to basically counter-battery and take out some of those ballistics. Now right after the Iranian shot the ballistic missiles

in retaliation for so many at our troops at our side, they accidentally shot down that Ukrainian airliner and that basically ended the conflict right there. But I have never been in favor of a regime change war inside of Iran. If their proxies attack us, if they attack us, we hammer them back.

But again, going back to the Iranian esclatory ladder, if you look at how Iran has behaved since President Trump basically killed soul monies and then since he came back into office, they were very, very deliberate about what they weren't going, what they were and what they were not going to do.

They didn't hit us until we hit them. And then again, again, just for the director, I'm not a fan of the Iranians, I'm not a fan of the Kurds force. Like I thought them, you fought them, they've killed friends of ours. But at some point we do have to find a way

that we can de-escalate these situations and move on.

The default answer can't always be,

well, we're going to do another regime change war and get sucked into this place for twenty-plus years. That's my belief, I mean, the way I look at it is, you got in there, you have access to a lot more information and you changed your mind.

And yeah, you're right, you know, they were, I think they were in charge. They were the ones that developed the EFP bomb, too. Correct, they killed a shit out of our friends.

“But I think we both agree we shouldn't have been in the Iraq war.”

We shouldn't. And then also just in terms of being effective. If our goal is to stop the Iranians from doing things like that, I argued, I've argued this for quite a while, we would only strengthen the hardliners in Iran, we would only strengthen the goods force, the IRGC,

and the hardliners I told us if we go in there and try and take them out. It's the basic rally around the flag effect. And I think we've done that. I mean, the Supreme Leader Ali Kamini that we killed,

not a great guy, probably a bad guy, but by killing him, we basically said the next guy who's in charge, he's going to say we're not going to have a prohibition on developing nuclear weapons.

and we end up killing some of the other folks that are more moderate,

“they're not going to be replaced by like a many Thomas Jefferson.”

They're going to be replaced by more and more hardliners.

There's always been a tension in the Iran between the clerics

and between the IRGC and the IRGC. There's full of pipetteers, man. I mean, it's the guys who fought the Iraq around more. They fought us on Iraq. They fought against the Israelis in Lebanon with Hezbollah.

So if we give these guys the ability to basically say, hey, don't listen to the moderates. Our job is to fight the Americans. It's to fight the Israelis. Then this is going to get harder and harder.

There's going to be more terrorism. It's going to be more blood. And then basically the only recipe for getting out of this is going to be

more and more continued war.

Problem is, though, you've got the Straits of Hormuz. As a choke point for major world energy. So this is going to become, it already has become a major geostrategic issue and a major issue on the world economy. That's like 20 to 25% of the world's oil comes out of there.

Everybody's pissed out of us. Back to the Iranian proxies and them killing U.S. Service members in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. That's not why we're there, though. And so I see everybody in there, they're talking about the hostages back in the day.

They're talking about how they're clipping you on my show. But that's not why we're there. You can scrounge around and find all funds of justifications on why we would be starting a war with Iran. But none of that relevant stuff is the reason that we're there.

And it hasn't been stated either by anybody but just fucking internet trolls. If we wanted to clean the deck on Iranian proxies that were outside of Iran, or even inside of Iran, fine, do it. Do limited strikes. That's fine.

The Israelis are very competent. I mean, they've killed many, they've killed at least one Hamas leader inside of Turan. They've killed how many members of Hezbollah decaptated them with the pages. Operations like that are pragmatic. They make sense.

They're limited in their scope. And they target exactly where we need to target.

Again, back to the policy of the first Trump administration.

President Trump would use force where required. But then, like, go with the president of the obscene, he would apply other leverages that only America has in terms of economic power and in terms of diplomacy. So after he killed so many Mahantas, he goes and he slaps maximum pressure sanctions on Iran that makes the economic life and Iran very, very challenging.

That results in waves and waves of protest that we were saying. Back in January, just not that long ago, we saw Iranians out in the streets protesting against the current regime because of the cost of living. Now, the Iranian regime knows that their own people could overthrow them if they're not happy, especially with just how expensive it is and challenging it is to live.

That organic protest movement was already happening, but it was happening in large part because of the economic pressure that President Trump had put on them.

“Now, if you want to ruin all that, you go as an outsider with these rallies and you strike them”

because then everyone is going to rally around the flag. That's why we're not seeing any protests. That's why even the Kurds have said, "Hey, we don't want to be part of any kind of regime change right now." Yeah, I've heard rumors that we wanted the Kurds to back us in this.

My answer that is, why the fuck would the Kurds back us in this? We abandoned them in Iraq, they got fucking slaughtered when we did that. We just abandoned them about a month ago in Syria. I got buddies over a fifth group that were complaining about it, and they fought with them. Yeah, and we fucking abandoned them again, and now they're getting slaughtered in fucking Syria.

And then we ask them, the U.S. has a, I mean, we have a pattern, and that's what the pattern is. We come in, we pretend like you're a, we're your friend, we get what we need, and then we fucking abandoned you, and they slaughtered your ass, and we do nothing. Happened in Afghanistan, happened to the Kurds twice in my, in Iraq and in Syria. One, just a couple of months ago, the Syrian one, just a couple of months ago.

Now we're already back asking them, like, of course they're going to fucking say fuck you.

“Yeah, I think that was, I think that was the, is really trying to, like, basically, use a media campaign to”

will that end to existence? I don't know if that was a very, very real thing. But again, if our goal is to get rid of the, the, the, I told it is to get rid of that, that government, the last thing that we should have ever done was strike them, because now, I mean, the Persians have their pride. I mean, I, it's not that hard to imagine to put ourselves in their shoes, like none of us, most people probably watching this, the show or, or me or you, we didn't like Joe Biden,

but if a foreigner would have attacked America, like I'm going to saddle up and I'm going to defend my country. Yeah. I, I don't think they're that much different than we are. And we're seeing that right now, there's a massive rally around the, the flag factor happening inside of our hand. And again, we're only going to get more and more hardliners now. Let's talk about the strategy. Yeah. What is the strategy? What are we doing?

we have a drastically different strategic goal than the Israelis do. So we will say that Israel is our ally and this. They're basically our co-equalness. People like me will say, actually, we're not really even co-equals. They're leading because we're having to react to them. But either way, we're basically

joining at the hip with the Israelis. Now, the problem is they have a much different strategic goal.

And a much, I'd say, higher threshold and tolerance for chaos and bloodshed than we do. Now, we have stated that our strategic goal, you'll hear Secretary Hegsev who rattled his office morning briefings that he gives to the media. It's to destroy the the Iranian Navy, to destroy the IRGC, to destroy the ballistic missile capability, to destroy all their enrichment. So we, we kind of have a checklist of like things that we want to bomb essentially to take off the battlefield. That's about

“as far as we've gone with stating what our strategic goal is, which I think is a big problem that we have”

with the GWAT is we never really said what our strategic goal was. Obviously, there was get been loud and then make sure the homeland is in the tact. But I just remember being in Iraq being like, what is the puts the goal here? Like we're building a government. So same thing, we didn't really

learn that lesson. We even stated our strategic goal. The Israelis, as critical as I am of our

relationship with the Israelis, the Israelis have a very clear strategic goal. And that is to take out this regime, watch stock in barrel. That's the hit rate of the eye of toll is that the clerical class that rules over. And then also the IRGC, which is a huge lip. It's a big country. Those institutions are massive. They've got a lot of support. But that's the Israelis goal. Now, the Israelis don't really care necessarily. If that happens in Iran, then slips into chaos.

And the straight support moves remains inflamed. And there's a migration crisis. There's an ongoing one. You just really don't care about that. They care that the IRGC and the Iatoulas can no longer fund their proxies or cause them problems inside of Israel. So again, you've got us footing the bill, doing the majority of the combat, doing the dying, doing the fighting. We have a very, very murky strategic objective, whereas the Israelis are driving this. They're driving essentially

our commitment of combat power. They're driving us having people lose their lives. They have a very clear strategic objective. And this is why I say the number one thing we have to do in order to get out of this is to restrain the Israelis and get our relationship with Israel straight. Otherwise, it's all going to be for not. And we're going to continue to get sucked in further and further.

“I mean, if we're attached, have to hook with them, I mean, it's got to be the same goal, right?”

You would think, but it's not. Is it just not articulated or is it really not? I feel like it's truly not. And the Israelis don't have a hard time articulating what their goal is. Oh, I mean, us articulating. Yeah. So we just list off the tactical punch list of things we want to bomb to take out. So the Iranians don't have any more. And to me, that's not a real strategic goal. You know, you had to, we want to bring out this up. You had a really good article in the

Washington Post. I think it released today. But you were talking about some strategy here. And then made me think the potential deployment of U.S. ground troops makes me very nervous. Yeah. Siding recent reporting that the president is considering season car Island, Iran's main hub for oil experts. This is you quoted. I just think that would be a disaster. Can't set of deploying U.S. troops there. It would essentially be giving Iran a bunch of hostages on an island that they could

barrage with drones and missiles. Are you the only fucking person out there that's that's they can straight because that's exactly what would happen. You're putting U.S. service members in a fucking in a fishbowl for Iran to kill because they are fucking stranded on a fucking island.

“Yeah. I mean, this is ours. This is our strategy. Yeah. Who came up with this fucking strategy?”

It sounds like a Trump. It sounds like Lindsey Graham. I mean, Lindsey Graham was on the Sunday shows yesterday talking about how great it would be. It'd be just like you, a jima. I mean, just insanity. I mean, I don't think the people who are pragmatic in our expressing their concerns. I don't believe they're being listened to. Obviously, the administration will push back and say, no, no, we're doing robust planning. We're hearing all voices, etc. But when I see ideas like that

floated and there's much worse ones out there as well. I could basically most of the formulas

for putting boots in the ground inside of Iran are problematic. I guess it's too late of the way to put it. They're bad plans. They've already stated they want us to do it. They're ready for it. 100%. I mean, that would be handing Iran basically a strategic victory. Because once they get our troops on the ground there, they're going to be able to kill some of them. They're going to take the losses. And then we fall back into that cycle. Once we take losses somewhere, we say,

no, no, no, now we can't leave. We have to stay to avenge our fallen. We can't be all for

Every single time we talked about any kind of withdrawal in Iraq, Afghanistan,

it was the same argument. We've lost too much here. There's still more that we could do. So, I mean, in terms of the the Crock Island, that makes me nervous because I have heard so many people like Lindsey Graham and others that are not military people that are not in the Pentagon, that are not reading intelligence every day, talk about it very flippantly. Like, oh, we'll just take that island. We'll just take their oil. I'm going to tell you guys, like, it's not 2003 anymore.

You can't just put guys there and they'll occupy it. Like, there's ballistics, there's drones. They would be sitting ducks in that area. And as a matter of fact, like you said, the Iranians would probably be like, please take the island. We, you know, we'll roll out the red carpet for you guys. I mean, do I need to read your bio again? Why is he taking advice from Lindsey

Graham and Ted Cruz and whoever else that's just career bureaucrats?

This is the problem. I then you got a guy like you in there with tons of experience in war and intelligence. Yeah. And there's others too. There's plenty of us in there that can give him much better advice. I just hope the president reflects and he, I know he's mad at me. I hope he reflects and I hope he looks at the advisor. She has around him currently that got him to the state that we're in right now because we're not in a good state. He knows that. And he needs to

start listening to people that are going to give him better advice that can give us a clear pathway out of this. Who are some people that would give him better advice better than yourself?

“Vice president, DNI gathered in their teams. I think are absolutely key.”

The vice president and the DNI. And, and the DNI. Yeah. Yep. And there's, there's, there's good people that put me on that can give you off. So he's not taking advice from his own vice president. I, that I don't know. I wasn't at the vice president's level. I think they have a good relationship. I just based on what I've seen and based on what we've seen in the, in the public sphere. He has been taking more advice, obviously, from, from Lindsey Graham, from Ted Cruz,

from Mark Levin on TV. Then he, then he has been from, from people who may say he's more live than on TV. That's who's a good in advice from fucking. In terms of how easy and great of an idea this will be. I mean, so the media ecosystem, they're not giving him tactical military advice, but they were, I believe, in my opinion, a big part of echoing the Israeli talking points about no enrichment. You have to strike now. If you strike now, you'll be a hero.

There was also this false narrative, basically, that said, like, hey, because the people were

on the streets in January, if you take a couple strikes right now and you really hammer them, the rest is going to be easy. It's going to be a cakewalk. The people are going to rise up. They're going to overthrow the regime. They're going to love you. They're going to cut a deal.

“It's going to be quick and easy. Like, if then as well it was. I think Venezuela did a lot to give”

us some false confidence in, and, and how quick and easy a regime change regime modification, whatever you want to call it, can be. People like Levin, people on, you know, Fox, New York Post, New York Times, etc. A lot of those talking heads, you know, coincidentally, not so coincidentally, a lot of them were the same people who talked us into the Iraq War, convinced them how quick and easy this would be. But I mean, to your point, I think if he, he took some more advice from Vice

President from Vina Gabbard and their teams, I think we'd be in a much better spot, and I think we'd be able to carve our way out of this mess. Wow. How many troops do we have over there right now? Waiting? I just 25. Honestly, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I see what you see on the news. I'm, I'm disconnect from all this. How many is Israel's son? Far less than us. Most of their military operations are taking place in Levinond. They're doing a lot of

air, air support and power projection via air, which is heavily funded by us. Are they talking about sending ground force? If they could have been tiny, they just don't have, I mean, Israel's so will do it. So we would have to do it. Yeah. I mean, they might do it for them. They could do a commando raid or something, you know, that'd be about it. But in terms of any kind of meaningful, hold ground, even for a limited amount of time, that would have to be American boots.

Oh, okay. That's kind of what I thought, but, you know, I'm getting angry, Joe. I can tell I'm angry. I'm angry. I'm fucking angry. But, um, man, it's just, no new wars, no new wars. It just echoes in my head all day long. And here we are, here we are, right back in war. Completely avoidable, completely avoidable. And I pray again, he listens to some of the, the voices that they can get them out of this. I think they're still time. But,

this is, this is very bad and this could, this could get worse. And I think platforms are

“yours are important because people like you, big, big podcasts. I think you guys brought a lot of”

people out to vote for President Trump. And I think it's really important that all the people that are watching this, this show and all the other podcasts, call their senators, call their representatives, make their voice heard because there, there is, again, that media ecosystem that kind of exists

during the campaign. And I think they'll listen again if people take this as a call to action.

I mean, so we're talking about war strategy a little bit here. What, what is, what is, what is the rest of the world's pulse on us? Is anybody other than Israel encouraging us to hit Iran? I doubt it. I strongly doubt it. I mean, China gets like, out the China's our front, China's out our front. They get like 75% of their fucking oil from the strait or her moves. There's still getting it. The only differences are selling the transactions and you want. And so I think China

made like this because obviously we've taken our eyes off the Pacific for people who care about Taiwan. The Pacific is truly our border, we're a Pacific power. I think a lot of that is kind of gone by the way. So I actually had to move as much combat power into into St.com. So I'm sure China's happy with it. Russia, too. We've taken our eyes off of getting a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine because there is scarcity now and we've created scarcity while it's

taking place in the straits of her moves with the energy sector. Russian oil, Russian gas, all that is going to be worth more on the market now to kind of defund their war. So I think our major competitors, Russian and China, I would say they're probably pretty happy about this. But all of our regional allies, I think are probably pretty furious about it. And China's becoming more aggressive towards Taiwan since we started this. Right. Right. And then two in terms of like now that's a real

fucking threat. That's a real threat. And then take those chip plants. That's a real fucking threat.

They will win the AI race like that. It is. Yeah. And it was always the beta we're going after fake

nuclear weapons. It was always the beta we could defend it before. But now with all the combat power pushed into St.com. That's a huge issue. Another major issue is the strength of the dollar. The dollar has already been weakened so much because of our deficit spending. We can deficit spend because of where the world's reserve currency holder. And a lot of that strength comes from the Petro dollar that any money that gets bought from the GCC or any oil gets bought from GCC. You

got to sell the transaction in dollars. China's already kind of short-served. And then they reinvested

“it in our stock market. Right. But so if you want to keep that system going, which I'm not sure”

if it's the best system, but we should at least deliberately move away from it if we're going to do it. It shouldn't disappear over the course of a month because of a war because the straits being choked off. Iran knows this. They know that if they choked off the straits and they only let you know, Chinese ships, etc, come through and they settle the transaction in another currency that they're eroding away at the Petro dollar. And we also need the GCCC to be on board all

that the Gulf Cooperation countries in the region, they've got to be on board with the Petro dollar too. The reason why they went with the Petro dollars is because we provided their security guarantees. Well, how are their security guarantees now? We can't defend them against what's taking place. We can't defend them from our any-emblistics, our any-end drones. They know full well that the war was launched by Israel and now they're suffering the consequence. So we're

all of a sudden we're not the best ally. So how long do we expect them to continue to settle their

“transactions in the dollar? So the ramifications of this conflict, I think are massive. What about Europe?”

I mean, when the facility in Qatar got hit, I mean, they're now having to renegotiate all their contracts with China, Italy. There was a handful of European countries that did get the majority there are oil from there. Now they have to renegotiate because they're going to default on the contract. Yeah. There's only one country that gains in this and that's Israel. That's just the bottom line. Is there anything that we gain? Do we gain anything at all by doing this? I don't believe so.

I mean, my critics would say, "No, we're finally once and for all taking out the Iranian regime." Again, for all the reasons I previously outlined it, I just disagree with that. And again, we don't seem to have a strategy. It's working in that direction. Might as the punchless of things that we're bombing. Well, Joe, I want to take a very care of real quick. But before we do, I saw Trump's speech this morning about you two, he's poking fun that you lost. That you lost your

congressional run. So I pulled some stats. So I'm poking fun at you this morning about losing and Washington, losing your Congress race. Trump actually lost there in the last presidential

election by set by a 17 percent margin himself. You only lost by a 3.8 percent margin. Who's the

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Tarras, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime, not everything is urgent, but this show

will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. All right, Joe, I know we were going to move on about strategy from the Epstein war. I mean, the Iran war, but I got a couple more questions for you. So one, what does Rubio do in all this? I'm not sure. I mean, I think he's doing the best he can to give the president options. He came out right away, and I think was pretty honest, when he said we had to attack otherwise he was really going to. What are the other options

that he's given, are you aware of those? I'm not. No, I don't know. Is he for this? That I don't know, honestly. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of strategy, there's a lot of of stuff floating around about strategy attacking their infrastructure, taking away the fertilizer for their food, creating famines, hitting their water supply,

“starving them of water. I mean, hitting their energy grid, is there any validity to that?”

I'm sure it was looked at because we look at everything, but that I don't know. The only, the most interesting people, the only strategy I've seen is the punch list of military targets. And I don't, I still believe the U.S. military would not deliberately target civilian infrastructure in that way. You don't think we would do that. I don't think we would. I just based on my experience in the military, I don't think that we would.

Now, will the Israelis? This is the problem. This is the problem that we have being partnered with someone who has different values than we do. Look, the Israelis believe this is existential. The Israelis, we've seen what the Israelis, but what they did in Gaza. They have a different 20,000 kids. They have a whole different way of fighting wars than we do. They fight total war, they fight very, very biblical wars. We do not. I mean, in all honesty, they fight of war,

“how you should fight a fucking war. Precisely. So you want to win. Like, we, that's not, that's not”

a win. That's not an art interest because at the end of the day, like, if you're going to do that, then you're going to occupy the land. You're going to fully take the land. We're not going to do that.

We've never been a very good occupying army. America has not been a good occupying army. I don't

think Americans have the colonial mentality. I don't think we have the total warm mentality. I'm glad that we don't. However, if we're going to be, again, it goes back to are we going to be partnered with the Israelis and attempt to pretend that we can have a different strategic goal, but then also a different appetite for how war is conducted. Like, at some point, we should just say, there are certain things we can partner with the Israelis on, like limited strike counterterrorism

operations. Absolutely. But when it comes to fighting and to trying to take over and quell and dominate an entire population, we cannot be joining the hip with the Israelis. Just do the different strategic goals, but then also just a different value system. Is there any way at all to differentiate that, to have our goal and their goal and be on this together? I don't seem to be. I don't believe so, but we're paying for the Israelis. We're paying for everything that they're doing.

And so we are the dominant one in this relationship. We need to assert ourselves as such. I honestly, and I know I've gotten a lot of crap and people said, oh, you're into something like whatever, I've got to know issue with the Israelis. They're pursuing their objectives. I have an issue with our reaction to the Israelis. Like, our government should not be, our action should not be directed by the foreign government. That's my biggest issue.

You have your upset because we are under their influence. Yes. Exactly. And in your

their influence, too. And I want to ask you, how are we under their influence in Syria?

“So I think the war in Syria wouldn't have happened if the Iraq War wouldn't have happened.”

So the Iraq War was driven obviously by the New York Conservative movement here in America, military and industrial complex, but a big part of that was also the Israeli lobby. Benjamin Netanyahu at the time, who had just gotten done being the Israeli Prime Minister. I think he was still in government. He was like the finance minister. He came and he aggressively lobbied and testified in the house and in the Senate that Saddam was developing weapons

in mass destruction. So he helped Launder that narrative that Saddam was developing weapons of that destruction in conjunction with the military and industrial complex and the other conservatives to say that we had to go in and we had to take away the nuclear weapons. You also had others in the think tank realm, the same thing, the menu echo chamber who was saying that Saddam was linked to Al-Qaeda and to 9/11 potentially. So they laundered those talking

points as well. Now Benjamin Netanyahu and the Lakhud party really wanted us to go in and take

out Saddam so that they could have basically a launching pad for operations into Iraq and then

also into Syria. They wanted us to do the heavy lifting so they could eventually get their goal of taking out Assad who was supporting Hezbollah and Hamas and then also taking out Iran.

“So that's why they supported the war in Iraq. The Prime Minister at the time,”

Ariel Sharone initially said, "No, I don't support this. I want America to focus on taking out Iran first," but then eventually he got on board. So you basically had both major political parties inside of Israel pushing for the war in Iraq. The Israelis also wanted access to Iraq's oil supply so that they could get a pipeline of oil coming out of Iraq and directly into Israel circumventing Syria because they didn't want to go through Syria because Assad was supporting

the Iranians and supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. So once we got into Iraq and got into that

quagmire, we the U.S. government screwed things up so badly that we basically handed over Iraq

as you know to Iranian back she is that we're there. So by the time we were done in Iraq, Iran pretty much controlled Iraq through their proxies, health and circumvent sanctions, made Iran even stronger. So then you had the Shea crescent. You basically had a unification of Iran, Baghdad and Damascus forming that crescent. That land bridge of Iranian supplies going right into Israel's backyard. So the Israelis at the end of the Iraq war were like no, this is not going to work at all.

We have to break this up. We have to go to war in Syria. We have to take down a side.

“Arab Spring happened. There was some energy from the people. I think there was somewhat”

organic but then in short order we came in and we said we're going to work with the Israelis but we're also going to have to work heavily with the Sunni population on the ground in Syria to create an uprising and that's where ISIS came from. We worked directly with Al-Qaeda, Hillary Clinton's emails confirm this. The operations that we were doing to support the so-called free Syrian army and there were some moderates there but the most effective guys initially were

Al-Qaeda and then eventually ISIS. Now obviously ISIS got out of control and they started plotting attacks in Europe. They started plotting attacks in America. They took over large swaths of Iraq. So we then had to go back and put out once again the brush fire that we had started and we didn't go after ISIS and that's where I lost my late wife but Israel was the driving factor in that. We took down Saddam who was a strong man against Israel. We then had to go in and take

out a side who was a strong man against Israel as well and now this is the third phase. We're going

now into Iran to take out that strong government for Israel. And who do we put in charge of Syria? Oh we handed that whole, well again we screwed the whole thing up so much. We handed it to a leader of fucking Al-Qaeda. He was in ISIS initially. He was in Al-Qaeda initially. In Iraq, fighting against us, we had him in jail, joined ISIS broke off from ISIS. Han selected by Ben Laden's right-hand man. I'm in Zawahiri to lead Nusra and then they rebranded and this is like the number one

way to fool Americans as a geodas is just put on a suit and get a good PR company and then apparently we'll just believe whatever you say. There's videos of this guy holding people's heads that he cut off. Yeah, he's, I mean he's the thought he's shaken. He's a brutal person in Trump's hand. Yeah, horrible advice. And so what the fuck are we doing? What are we doing? Exactly. The President Trump at the beginning, again this is where Trump

disguised in fighting a fucking terrorist into our house. In the first Trump administration, he had Syria right. He said we're going to go in, we're going to take out the caliphate because it posed the threat to us and then we're going to get out. And this is why I support a President Trump even after losing Shannon because he was trying to get our troops out the military was fighting him. And then when Assad fell in December, right before President Trump even

even took office, when Assad fell in jellani, whatever HTS took over Syria, President Trump put

our business. I always said it was a bad idea. I don't want to be involved in Syria. And that was actually

the right approach because it was too late for us to go back in and fight the new government, et cetera. Best thing that we could have done is back off, let the Turks, let the Israelis let our regional partners kind of take lead there. But instead we went all in with the Shara government, and we embraced them and now we're pretending they're part of the D.I.S.' coalition and it's just it's entire mess. Like look, the Middle East basically, and President, again, President Trump

used to understand this. The Middle East is a place where you can just get involved in these never-ending quagmires and you start one fire to put out another and you never fully extricate yourself. And at the end of the equation, there's never a clear benefit for the American people. And that's gotten us to a state, this state that we're in right now and we have to stop that. What about the I.A.E.A. inspections? We were going in there and inspecting all these facilities

and I ran, correct? And then Trump cut that. Oh yeah, it's part of the, and it's first administering.

Right, it's part of getting around the J.C.P.O.A. Why would we do that? I think the idea with the J.C.P.O.A. was it gave our ran access and I partially agree with this. It gave our ran access to more capital with sanctions circumvention. That was the whole famous.

“Initially Obama unfrosed a bunch of the assets that we had frozen and that's why we flew over”

the pallets of cash that everyone talks about so frequently. And then as part of throwing out the J.C.P.O.A., we got rid of the inspections and we did, and there was, because when they got, when they put in the inspectors, there were some sanctions relief that came there. By getting rid of the J.C. P.O.A., and slapping the sanctions back on them, that made it more challenging for the inspectors to get back into the Iranian sites. Again, though, like Trump had used his leverage, he killed

so many, we were in a really good place. At the beginning of this administration, President Trump was in a great spot with Iran. Him and the Supreme Leader both agreed, no nukes. We need to have a discussion about enrichment. We need to have a discussion about how that's going to be supervised and checked, but this was a discussion that could have been worked out by diplomats sitting at a table as opposed to a massive military conflict. And Iran, and again, I'm no fan of the Iran, they

were restraining their proxies. They even restrained their proxies throughout the first iteration of

the 12-day war. So again, I go back to why are we doing what we're doing right now. Look at the ramifications, look at how little we're gaining from this. And again, all roads go back to Israel is the benefactor in all of this. And we've got to get that relationship to a place where it actually benefits us and not just them. As far as these proxies, I mean, you know, Sarah Adams correct. I mean, she's been talking about the sleeper cells in the US for probably two years now,

maybe longer. Yeah. You know, so there's thousands, thousands of terrorist and sleeper cells all around

“the country. Now, how are we going to know if Iran is the one that activated them? Right?”

Or were they just inspired by events that are over there? So I testified publicly in December that we at NCTC had identified 18,000 known suspected terrorists who had access to America. The more we dug into the data of the last four years, the more I realized we have no idea who's in our country. Just because there was no border of the CBP one app and the ability for people to come into the country, undetected, but then later apply for a benefit knowing

they'd get a parole status, which gives them a legal status in America, which we're still caught up in the courts and fighting the courts with. We just simply don't know. At the beginning of this war, we were looking at other data sets of people who could have come from either Iran or Lebanon or Iraq countries that have large sea of populations. And again, the data was, to me, it was as, it was as murky as the numbers of who came into the border. Like it just, the one consistent

factor I kept coming away with, or one take away I kept coming away with was that we have no idea

“who is in our country right now. And that has incredibly dangerous. So again, I think we should be”

focusing the majority of our efforts on securing our homeland and making sure that people who came into our country in the last four years are located and we get them out. Now, sleeper cells, I think a lot of people when they hear sleeper cells, they'll think like it's a handful of guys who are specifically trained and infiltrated to conduct an attack at a certain time. There could, that could be taking place. I don't think that's the main threat. I think the main

threat is people that have come here legally and illegally being inspired by media, they consume, or by seeing social media clips and then saying, "Now I'm going to conduct an attack as a loan actor." Because that's even harder for us to pick up on like cells when they infiltrate. They have to communicate with each other. The U.S. intelligence community and law enforcement were pretty good at infiltrating those cells and detecting them. It's not 100%. It could still

happen. But when it's a loan actor and someone who's just inspired to take action, based on the fact that they shouldn't even be in our country in the first place and they see

it's too late. And at the beginning of this conflict, we've already seen several attacks. It was a guy down in Texas who went into the barn and shot up several, I think killed three people, shot several more, he had an Iran t-shirt on. He said, "O.D.U. to hold down in your example." Exactly. Right there, too. And then, how do you know that they, so how do you know they need to communicate and that we would pick that up? Because it's been reported by Sarah

and her counterparts that they are only communicating back to HQ and Afghanistan through couriers

“and that they have, they're totally isolated, they don't know each other. So the only way they have”

to communicate is through couriers, which we would not pick that up. They're stealing possible, too. Yeah. That's certainly possible. Yeah. I wouldn't roll it out. Again, it goes back to like the board was opened for four years. So it's kind of like, if you and I wanted to attack our adversaries and they left their board open for four years, how creative could we get? And that's the opportunity that we gave all of our enemies. So when people would say, "Well, how many bad guys do you think

around the country?" Like seriously, what's the number? I'm like, "I don't know. I'll tell you

the truth. I'll tell you the truth is that the more we dig through the data, the more we realize

we really truly don't know." And then people would say, "Well, do you think it's sleeper cells? Do you think it's this or the other thing?" And it's like, "Well, honestly, again, we kind of go back to the only thing we created for the last four years in the previous administration was a massive opportunity for terrorists to exploit our country and to kill people here." If they were to attack with a proxy, would you be 100% confident that it was them?

If I ran, I mean, at this point what we've seen more of is we've seen younger people, some of whom were born here, conduct these attacks and they were just inspired by something that they saw. And then a lot of them too, I know Sarah has her theory of the case. I think the bigger threat based on what we saw last year, the terrorist attacks we saw here in America, most of those people were inspired by media content they had consumed coming out of Gaza, the Gaza conflict, and they

cited Gaza as being a driver pushing them towards violence. So, yeah, obviously, if we intercepted a cell of Iranians that we could prove they had ties back to Iran, then absolutely we'd have to hold them accountable for that. I mean, there are other motivations for this as well. To get us all riled up. Oh, for sure. 100%. Do you think that's a possibility?

I think I think we're always prisons and opportunity for people to exploit to further their objectives.

“So, if you want to sell more of surveillance state, more infringements upon our civil liberties,”

now is the time to do it. Because, like I just described, it's a very scary and security environment. You can legitimately say, hey, we don't know who's in our borders, terrorist attacks, because what's taking place in the Middle East, there's been a massive decline in law in order in general in our cities. So, therefore, we need to take your pick. What kind of intrusions on our civil liberties? It becomes easier. I mean, the more people are scared of what's

happening, the easier that is to sell. So, I definitely think there's going to be elements of the government, big tech, that will exploit this chaos. You're being accused of leaking classified information. Yeah. What classified information did you leak? It's a good question. I didn't leak any. I didn't leak any classified information. I had my full security clearance until last week when I walked out the door. I'd full access to everything.

So, my security clearance was never suspended, never pulled. I think most of the most of these

leak allegations are just immediate narrative to take away from the conversation that you and I are having. The first leak accusation surface right as I was going live with Tucker. So, they were just trying to take the wind out of our out of my sails. I think a little bit by saying, no need. I know

“less of this guy's leaker. I mean, that's what I think. Yeah. It seems very reactionary to me.”

When did the investigation start? Are you aware? I don't think there is an investigation. There isn't. No one, no one has come to me and said you're being investigated. The only proof there of being an investigation is someone in the government leaking to the media saying that can't send her investigation per being a leaker. So, they had to leak that I'm a leaker. Another leaker. Right, exactly. That's why, I mean, I take it seriously. The FBI has ruined innocent

people's lives like general Flynn with an accusation before. So, I take it seriously. I'm confident I didn't leak any classified information. But at the same time, we kind of know what the game is here. And if they really were going to investigate me, they would come to me and say, hey, you're being investigated or we're going to ask you some questions, etc. If they really were going to investigate

in their advantage at all. So, I think it's just immediate if they do you were leaking, why wouldn't they have fired you and then continued on with the investigation? I guess they were just going to wait for your resignation. Right. They at least would have pulled my clearance going to resign soon, don't fire him. He's like, well, we know he's leaking classified information, but just he's going to be gone. So, exactly. Yeah, it doesn't make me sense.

“What's going on with the Butler assassination attempt?”

So, are we looking into them?

Yeah, I think there's basically two schools of thought as to what's taking place right now

and how we got in the situation with Iran that Trump should know better. And I think he does know better. I just gave you that more than likely, I think he just got a lot of bad information. There's a much smaller chance, but I think it can't be ignored the fact that there was several assassination attempts against President Trump that really haven't fully been explained. One of which, the Butler itself, no one is saying is linked to the FBI, but two days before the

Butler assassination attempt, we arrested a guy named Osif Mershont. He was just, you know, prosecuted and I think going to jail, we arrested him for being recruited by Iran to come here and attempt to assassinate President Trump to avenge the death of two of them. Then he's killing him, got some soul money. Mershont had a FBI informant that was working with him. Mershont didn't know he was an FBI informant, obviously, and they basically set up a scheme to conduct an

assassination against President Trump using a sniper. They arrest Mershont, and in two days later, a sniper tries to kill Trump at Butler. I wanted to look for potential linkage between those events was completely shut off and blocked from that. You were, though with NCT, the National Counterterrorism Center. Why would they cut you off? That seems like definitely possible terror as a, especially considering the first one was supposedly set by Iran. Certainly. Yeah, exactly.

I don't know. Again, we were told that the Mershont trial is ongoing, so you can't look into any information. You can look at a little bit of the information, but we can't, we can't really do much

there, but my question was always, is there any linkage between anyone that Mershont talked to

and the people who were there at Butler and Crooks? Because we can say all day long, they're not links, but are we sure that we had everything that Mershont was doing out of control? Is there any linkage between those two events? Under from my vantage point, I didn't see that investigation

“being done very thoroughly. I think this matter was conducting that investigation. That was all they”

had the FBI. Oh, the FBI. Yeah. I think this matters in the terms what we're talking about because you had Butler, you had the other assassination attempt at West Palm Beach, and then you had once Trump came into office, you had several breaches of his security perimeter. You had the famous stoppage of the escalator at the UN. You had when he went out to dinner, there was the table of code-pink protesters who sat down next to them, and then you had the police officer who,

I think, is probably a good patriotic American, but he was armed. He wasn't part of the president's

detail, come up and shake President Trump's hand, like so basically circumventing the secret

service, and then you had the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, and Charlie was one of the most vocal advocates against a regime change war inside of Iran, and he was advocating heavily that we change our stance in regards to our relationship with with Israel. He was in the White House, lobbying President Trump to not attack Iran in the lead up to the 12-day war. So Charlie would have been very, very much against what was going on, what's going on right now. He's then killed in

“September. And so I think it's irresponsible for us not to look at all of these things on a broader”

timeline and see where they fit into what's taking place right now. Are you saying that you don't think that the kid that's been propped up to have killed Charlie is the guy? I'm not saying that at all. I mean that that that that kid, his fingerprints are on the gun. That case is going to be made. What I do know is that in CTC was investigating the foreign any foreign linkage, not necessarily just to the suspect, to Robinson, but any foreign linkage that could have taken place regarding that case.

And again, we were stopped really early on from from thoroughly investigating and all that I can say is that we had more foreign connections. I'm not saying a foreign government, but I'm saying foreign connections to look into to thoroughly do our due diligence from an investatory standpoint that that in my opinion was not done. Now the FBI will tell you, we got our guy, he turned himself in, his fingerprints are on the gun. There's been some debate over whether or not he confessed. I

guess we'll see when he goes to court. But now that the whole the case is being handled 100% by Utah. And again, considering how prominent Charlie Kirk was, I think it's important that we continue

And from what I saw that did not happen. So this is going to wind up just like JFK.

I hope not. I hope not. I think we have the ability to really look into every aspect of it

“no matter what the truth is. No matter where that leads us. And again, like, look, people are saying,”

why are you speaking cryptically? I can't speculate. I can only tell you what I know. And the only thing I know for sure is that our due diligence was not done on looking at the foreign links. The rest of the case can be rock solid if they've got Tyler Robinson. There's foreign connections we didn't look into. What are those connections? That I can't get into because that's going to that's all tied up inside of classified channels essentially. But there was more work we needed to do.

And now I'm not saying like, you know how an investigation works. You chased down 99 leads and

the 100 leads and 99 of them are BS and you get one good one. So even the things that I know of that

I don't want to speculate about half of them could be half 75% 90% of them could be trash leads. But there's stuff that we need to look down. Charlie was a very influential figure. He traveled the world. He traveled the nation. There was a lot of people from all over the place looking and watching Charlie Kirk speak there. There was people speculating about what was going to happen to Charlie Kirk online ahead of time. So there's more work that we needed to do in regards to foreign

linkage to the current assassination. And I just don't understand why you wouldn't want to know why you wouldn't conduct a full investigation on who tried to kill you if you're the president of

“the United States. I just that does not compute in my brain. Why would you not want to know?”

Especially after we were told for quite some time that Thomas Crook was in the Nigma. We didn't know who he was. He's just this crazy kid. He had no online footprint. You know, we were told for a while that they couldn't get into his devices that they were locked. He couldn't get into his

devices. And then when they said they finally got into the FBI, finally said they got into his

devices. They're like, "No, there's nothing there." Well, fast word a couple months and Tucker Carlson's investigative journalist finds a full online persona of this kid. He's communicating if other people he's commenting on YouTube videos. He's interacting with people that are overseas. So there's more work there to be done clearly. And there was a big rush to say like, "Well, we shot the sniper. He's kind of in a Nigma. We don't know anything about him." But case closed. You know,

cremate the body techniques later. Of course, the one that came up with all that. Tucker's investigative journalist that he that works on Tucker's team found Crook's online persona. Yeah. In the FBI didn't. The FBI didn't report it. I don't know what the case is. We're just totally standing all those stuff. She's obviously going to tough spots. So I don't want to say anything else. It's going to put her in a tougher spot than she's already in. She's doing the best that she

can. How many people up there are against what we're doing? It's hard to put a number on it. Look, I mean, you know how the government is. Maybe a percentage. Yeah. Most people that serve in the government, I found they want to make their boss happy and they don't want any friction at work.

“And they want to sleut and they want to move out. You know, I think that's where everybody's lost it.”

100% my group. Fucking job is to protect and serve the people of the United States. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And look, there's a lot of good patriots that are still there who think that they're doing the right thing. And this is a dilemma that I had. I was like, well, do I stay here and do I soldier on a me a good soldier? And do I show up every day and you know, do my darness? And then if the big strategic picture gets messed up, well, that's not

really on me. You know, I did that for 20 plus years in the military and the agency and kind of see where that got us, right? When we knew better, see where that got us. And so like I said, you know, 20 plus years ago, I've been a problem with myself if I ever had the ability to speak out and do and try to get us on a better path I would do. So if my late wife hadn't gotten killed, if I hadn't been through the experiences I had been through, I wouldn't, I don't think

have the clarity and the courage to do what I'm doing now. So I am sympathetic to people who are inside who are still like, hey, I'm just a, you know, I'm just a guy. I'm not that important. I'm trying to do my job. I'll do what I'm told. However, the people who came in, you know, with President Trump in key leadership positions that are a part of this movement and leading this movement, I think they've got to reflect on what we ran on because this is not what we ran on. And

they have to live with it. And so they can either make a decision to try and influence the situation from inside. But once they realize they can't influence that situation inside, then they have a choice to make. Do they stay and be complicit with it or do they leave

I'll be more in it now with Iran. Yeah. We're in it. How does this end? How do we get out of this? What are the options? If we don't deal with the Israelis, then this thing will just keep going. There might be fits and starts, like maybe this five day ceasefire will work on a little skeptical I'm hopeful. But unless we restrain the Israelis and tell them like you're done, and if you continue to attack and you continue to do things without telling us and asking us,

without asking us first, we're paying for it. You're going to ask us first. Then we are going to

negate our other part of the deal and our part of the deal says that we defend Israel. And we provide their iron dome system. We provide their air defense. We provide a lot of their defense. We provide their iron dome. We provide -- We provide a lot of the funding for the iron dome, for sure, for sure. So I would say to the Israelis very bluntly, you're done going on the offense. We will tell you what operations you can conduct if you disobey us and you don't run

your operations by us that we're paying for. Then we're going to start taking away features of your defense system. To the point where all you can do with your military basically stay on the defense.

“That's the only way to restrain the Israelis in my opinion. I think we're past the point of being able”

to have like hey nice conversations like hey could you guys please not? Because every time we say could you please not, the Israelis say yeah sure that sounds good and they turn around and they

conduct strikes that basically negate any kind of negotiation that we're trying to pursue.

I mean, did Nanyah who'd literally just say that? Yeah, I get this with what the statement I just said. Again, as frustrating as people -- as I get with the Israelis sometimes, they're not very subtle. Like these Israelis are not doing a lot of like lying and BSing to us. They're pretty up front with what they're doing and what they plan to do. So I would take them at their word and I would just say no you're not because we're paying for all of this and we have to restrain them and I know

a lot of people are going to be very, very frustrated what I say that because there are people who really like Israel and all that's saying like you cut off Israel, you know you whatever I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying you take away their the resources that they have right now to go on the offense.

Make it so Israel can only defend themselves. That's fine. But they can't go on the offense anymore.

Once we do that and once we restrain the Israelis, then I think we have a place where we can use our allies in the Gulf. We can use the Omanes, the Qataris, etc. To get the Iranians to come to this table and come up with a way that we can reopen the streets of Formus. I think we're going to need to say to the Iranians, okay, we need to lift sanctions on some of their -- what we have to give them something. So I think lifting the sanctions and letting them get a lot of oil introduced back into the

world market. I think that's actually a pretty good carrot to get them to the table. And that's also going to help lower the price at the pump and lower the -- and get more oil and petrochemicals flowing for the further lighters and everything else the world needs in terms of energy.

“But again, step one is restraining the Israelis. That's the only way I can see out of this.”

And look, we're going to have to make some concessions. We're going to have to say, hey, we'll work with whoever there is there in Iran. We're going to have to give them red lines that might need to be enforced every now and again, like your proxies will not attack us. You will stop attacking the Gulf countries. Otherwise, this will continue. But at this point, they know we're pretty serious about using force. I think we have to show them now that we're serious about using

diplomacy and getting into the table. What are the chances you think that'll happen? Every day that goes by, less and less. Right now, again, look, I know -- I know you're frustrated with President Trump. I know I'll probably a lot of your viewers are frustrated with President Trump. I think if President Trump sits and thinks about where we are and how we got here, I think you'll understand that we're in a bad spot and we need to get out of it. And in order

to get out of it, he needs to take drastic action. Now, that's where the good news is -- and this is what gives me some hope -- President Trump is good at taking drastic action. He is decisive. He is unpredictable. But in terms of doing big things, that's the story of President Trump's life. He can do it. So I think other presidents in this situation, they wouldn't be able to rapidly extricate us from this. I think Trump can. He needs to listen to his core beliefs and he needs

to listen to different advisors and he needs to have the courage to restrain the Israelis. Then I think he can do it. It gets harder and harder every day that goes on, though. If he's got this five-day window that he's created for himself, he needs to use it and he's able to pursue it aggressively. At the end of that five-day window, I think it's going to be exponentially more difficult. I mean, what do you think? I mean, our brands literally saying, "There are

“no negotiations going on." Right. This thing. I think there are, or do you think there are not?”

I'm sure we're trying. I'm sure we're trying. We have some people that I know are probably aggressively reaching out. Now, are they getting responses? I don't know. I just think that the

and then us, you know, basically saying after the 12-day war that we use, the negotiations as a

“ruse, I don't think that helps. Because I think, before again, there was a tension inside of”

Iran where you had the clerics and you got some of the moderates that were saying, like, "Okay, we won't make a nuclear bomb. We are interested in some engagement with the Americans. We would like to deal." But then you had the hardliners. You had the students have cost them so money who were like, "Uh-uh, absolutely not. Let's go on the offensive. Let's use our proxies to kill these guys. Let's believe them out of the Middle East." So right now, who's winning that

argument inside Iran? I fear the hardliners winning that argument inside of Iran. Because every Iranian leader that they target and they kill, I mean Trump even said it today when he was at the plain side, when he was playing side, he was asked, "Who are you talking with inside of Iran?" And he said, "I don't want to name them because then they might get killed." Well, they might get killed by the Israelis. Because the Israelis don't want us to have negotiation. This is fucking crazy.

It's insane. No, no, it's insane. This is fucking crazy. It's insane. So the Iranians in that he's not saying that because if he, if he names a name, the Israelis will kill them. I didn't say anything. You're saying that we can't, I just don't understand how essentially you're saying, we just need to

“tell them no. We have to do it. And not just tell them no, you have to take things away from them.”

You can't just say, because we've said no to them before. How forcefully? I don't know. I think it's pretty debatable. But right now, they're having their cake and their eating it, too. I mean, we are doing all the heavy lifting in this war for them, but we're also continuing to provide them so much military assistance. We're providing their defense package for them. So we have to go to them and we have to say not just no, but you're going to run any strikes by us. And also,

you're not going on the offense anymore. You're done being on the offensive. You're attacked. We'll back you up. If you guys want to do military operations on your own border, that's your country fine. What takes place now when I ran, that affects us, that affects the GCC, that affects states of Hormuz and World Energy. You're done. We have to say that, too. And we have to take away things that make it so that they can only do their own defense. They can't go on the offense.

Until we do that, I don't think the Iranians actually will take us very seriously. We don't have a problem doing that to any other country in the world. Pretty crazy. Why do we have reluctance to do it to Israel? I mean, there's obviously the Israeli lobby factor, APAC, and all the other surrogates that spend so much money on our elections. There's major donors,

Miriam Adelson gave, I mean, someone can look to some hundreds, like, I think $100 million dollars to

the Trump's campaign. And she's not the only she's in dollars. I think someone can look it up. I'm not sure exactly. I thought my head significant. And there's other really prominent donors that are very pro Israel, many of whom are dual citizens. Oh, yeah, I mean, the owner only fan is he just died today. Right. He was the biggest donor to APAC. Right. Did you know that? I just learned that today actually. I had to check that myself because I wasn't aware of that until

he was posted there now. Yeah. Yeah. So we've got a pen for funds APAC so that we can go away. Yeah, make it make sense. But I think he is really lobbyist part of it. But I also think that there is a massive outpouring of support from, like, the Evangelical Community in America, Evangelical Christians. And also I think a lot of people, especially the baby boomer generation, have just been led to believe that Israel's a democracy, the Israelis, the other speaking, they sound like us.

There, I've dealt with the Israelis quite a bit. They're pretty pleasant to deal with. They're easy to deal with. I mean, because a lot of them are educated in America. You can, it's easy to get complacent around the Israelis because, like, they don't have that foreign feel. And so they do a good job of selling, hey, we have the same interest here, man. We're just this more the same same. So a lot of it is financial. You have a spiritual component to it. And then you also have

the Israelis basically by providing us a lot of intelligence and potential access, even though I think a lot of that is to inform us. It is to influence us rather than inform. Yeah, you had already mentioned that a lot of that stuff is in the intel pipeline. Right. Exactly. It is the intel pipeline. What is it? What is the flow of intel from the field to the top? Well, I mean, it depends on what manner of intelligence it is. But stuff that we get, and you know this from your past life,

when we get information, especially from, like, a foreign liaison service. Like, it always says

that caveat, like, could be used to influence and informs. Everybody knows what they're reading. If you want to lean heavily on the inform side and you're a partner of ours that has access to senior decision makers, you bypass the intel guys because they're going to check your stuff. They're going to put it through a vetting process. They're going to put it through analytical

“tradecraft. If you want to short-circuit that, then you go directly to key decision makers.”

And you say, "Hey, I've got some intel for you. It hasn't gone through the intel channels." And a lot of those decision makers, although they have access to 18 intelligence agencies and

vetting process that needs to take place. Or things are happening so quick. They don't have time to think about it. So these railways with their access. And again, a lot of that access comes from the media. It comes from the donors. It comes from just a certain familiarity and comfort that we have with the Israelis. They're able to push that in there. We get intel, as you know, it's not 100%

it's not always accurate. But when we get intelligence from the field, whether it's from a human

source signal or early ason, there's a vetting process that has to take place there before it goes and finished intel. And then usually it's explained how we got the intel. Again, the Israelis have done a really good job of putting an end run on that system to circumvent it. Yeah, you know, the reason I'm asking, I'm just wondering if the, which pretty much already described it, if the intelligence that Iran had nuclear weapons went through the proper channels.

“It didn't, we know it didn't. Yeah, it just didn't. Who's the gate? Who's the gate?”

It's keeping real intel from getting a Trump. It's a good question. I mean, he, in theory, has control over who he has around him. He's the president. He's the commander and chief. Somebody stop and real information to get from getting to them. Yeah, clearly. Or maybe he just doesn't want to hear. I don't know what the case is. I think he might not want to hear it. I think you got sold like a pretty clean equation. They were like, hey, the protesters are protesting.

The Iranians at the negotiating table have said they still want to enrich because they, again, they moved them moving that red line. The Israelis and their allies moving that red line and

making Trump basically think that the U.S. policy is new in Richmond. It was very effective. And so they

made it seem like the negotiations had stalled out. When, in fact, I don't think they had. I

“think Steve Wickoff got a gotten us to deal back in June. I think they just sold them a very simple”

rushed, rushed equation to get us into this conflict. A big, a big part of getting a quick action like this is rushing the president and telling him, hey, the protesters were just out there in June. We don't have time in July. I'm sorry, in January. We don't have time for a long deliberation. We need to conduct these strikes now. And so I think they took away a lot of his decision-making space in time and only put a handful of advisors around him. And maybe there's the people that he requested,

but because he thought that he was under the gun for a time crunch, I don't think he had enough time to really fully assess that. A lot of people are saying that your resignation and change of heart is because of influence from your wife. Is there any validity to that? No, no, no, no. I mean, we share very similar views at one of the reasons we've probably got married, but right on. Yeah. I got to address it. It's out there. Sure. Sure. But, all right, Joe,

I want to take a break when we come back. I just want to talk about how what this means for the midterms, what this means for the next election, what this means for the Republican Party, what this means for maga. Yeah, absolutely. Most gear looks good until you actually start using it. Then you find out pretty quickly,

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site-wide at checkout. That's ROKA.com and use code SRS. What more from the Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guest interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content like our extra Intel

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Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now. Support the mission and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story. All right, Joe, we're back from the break. Midterms are coming up. Yeah. Next election's coming up. Yeah. Magus split. Yep. CNN just put a what, a poll

“out that's at 100% of maga. What does it say, 100% of maga supports the Iran War?”

I don't think they're wrong. I just think a lot of people have left maga. Oh, a lot of people have left maga. Well, that and I think our our political opponents would love us to believe that this very unpopular thing we're doing is popular to convince us to keep doing it. Yeah. I just I'd be very wary. Obviously, I don't know why we're listening to CNN. It's insane. I'm not that that came from somebody on the staff here. No, but I saw that too, yes.

So yeah, but I don't I don't actually don't watch any mainstream media and not far. Scott, I must have done any of it. It's all fucking garbage. It is. But what does this mean? I mean, what do you see in? So I think the conventional wisdom would tell you and I think the president was told this. I think the president was told that

wartime presidents are always popular. Like if you look at Bush's approval rating after both

“Afghan, the launch and Afghanistan in Iraq, it was as high as his highest ratings yet.”

So that's the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom also says that most Americans, they don't really care about foreign policy. But what they do care about is they care about the press the pump and look at what this conflict has already done, the press the pump. What what's already done to cost living? We already had an inflation crisis and Trump was working on getting us out of it. But look at the effect that the war, especially what's happening in the

straits is going to have on all these everyday issues that your average really hardworking person, who's you know, busing their butt to stay above water, they might not say like that's because of the Iran war and dig deeply into the policy. But they're going to be like, oh, the party that's in power right now screwed this up. I'm going to vote for the other guy. And then you have the mag issue. It's not even just this country. Yeah. We're talking about a global economic depression here.

Yeah. Serious. A lot of global economic depression. Yeah. Potential famine because the fertilized. I mean, it's just the magnitude of the famine. I don't know. America. I don't think we will. But the amount of fertilizer that needs those petrochemicals that come out of the come out of the Gulf that that rely on the straits are moves flowing freely. I mean,

that's a major problem. It's going to be a major problem. I think first for Europe, I think for

Africa, for Asia, I think America, we can we can insulate ourselves to a certain extent. We're definitely going to feel in terms of the inflation. We're already feeling it. The gas prices are back up like we're back in the in the Biden era again, unfortunately. So I think that's that's going to factor heavily on on voters. And then the mag issue and the people that like were hardcore who don't who were small dollar donors to President Trump and and to candidates like me when

I was running with his endorsement, them not coming out of them being disenfranchised or then being he endorsed me in this war. He endorsed me twice. Trump endorsed you. Yeah, twice. On a speech day, made it sound like he just felt sorry for you because your wife died in combat. Yep. And he just like hated you a job, which which honestly I was listening to that. I'm like,

“if that's how you hand jobs out to your fucking administration, no wonder we're in the fucking place.”

We're at. Yeah, you just handed out pity jobs. Here you go. Yeah, I mean, maybe look at their background. And so you know, this is how we wind up with people like fucking Sebastian Gorka. I think Trump just got into a they put him into a position where he needed to say something about anything. I think he's frustrated because I'm doing these. I'm doing these media appearances. So he's going to fire back like I just for me. I don't take it personally. I want him to just

focus on what we're talking about and focus on getting us out of this crisis. And then also like like you said for the midterms. I mean, you're going to need a lot of hardcore mag of people to come out to knock on doors to do that hardcore work because working elections. It's not easy. It's not fun. It's on glamorous. The mag of bass trumps bass. They're hardworking people. And they got him across the finish line. In 26, a lot of them now it's debatable. How much? But a good

chunk of them are going to have a really hard time doing that because of the way this last year is gone. Don't come banging on my fucking door. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear more of this fucking lies. I hear that from a lot of people. I hear it from a lot of people. It's everything, Joe. It's everything. You see the glyphosate stuff? I did. I did the Make America healthy again, movement. Right. Immunity. Immunity. Yep. Because of what? A national security issue. Do you

You know where the highest concentration of glyphosate is? It's in Iowa. You know where the highest

concentration of cancer is? It's in Iowa. Yeah. They need you to give them immunity. Yeah. This is called the fentanyl crisis of national security concern. That's a hundred thousand people. Cancer is 618,000 fucking people in one year. Yeah. And he just gave a immunity.

“Yeah. Yeah. I think your frustration, your anger is felt by a lot of people who voted who can't”

paint the Epstein files? I believe the Epstein files. Yeah. The book is that. Right. Are you serious right now? We're just going to let people that are raping and killing and exploiting kids? Yeah. It's actually just run free. But we're going to put

we're going to set the FBI on Joe Kent. It's insanity. And it's going to have ramification. I

know he's probably not being told this at the White House, but it's going to have ramification on the elections. It just, it just will. I mean, the coalition that we had was something I think very, very, very special. In the sense that you had a lot of people who probably didn't don't consistently vote who we got mobilized with our message. President Trump's economic populism, his, his, his desire at at least stated desire to go out for the deep state,

no new wars to make America healthy again movement. All of all of those coalescing into what

“became the mega movement in 2024, giving them the electoral college and the popular vote. I think”

over the course of the last year, that coalition has been very, very fractured. And people will say, I'm fractured in the coalition right now. I'm not fractured in the coalition. The coalition is very fractured because of our actions. I want to preserve the coalition. I want the coalition to last because I think that formula, I think what President Trump and Vice President Man's ran on in 2024 is the right message. It is the right formula for America and for our country. But we've

got to be serious. If we promised as a liver and we didn't deliver, we've got to be serious about that and we've got to show people that we're going to correct that. I don't think there's any coalition left. I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with you. The formula that made in 2024, those shows that it can be done. And we go and after the deep state, we haven't seen one indictment, we haven't seen anything. Nothing. We've seen, look the other way. We're still talking about Jeffrey

“Epstein. That's what we see. The CIA, the FBI, all these powerful institutions are still very much in”

tech and they're still very much going in the shots. And that's a huge problem for the freedom and security of our country. So there's a lot of things in this administration. I think needs to get serious about if we're going to fix things. Obviously, this war being the most pressing. But I think this last year of us attempting to govern is going to have a major ramification in the midterms and then definitely in 28. If we don't get serious about turning it around for sure,

what are your aspirations now? What's next for you? The next week or two, I really want to push as hard as I can to attempt to reach the president. And I know that puts me in the line of fire and the new cycle and people sniping at me online. But that's the only plan I truly have leaving this. The way I look at it is I already kind of got to do my childhood dream in our old line of work. I got to do that and everything else is kind of kind of grave. I want to be able to serve my country.

I cared deeply about the future of this country. I cared deeply about the future that we leave for our kids. So, whatever capacity I end up working or serving at, as long as I feel like I can influence to make sure I'm using my life experiences and what I've been through to affect a better outcome for our country. And I think national security is probably the best place that I can do that. That I'm happy. I didn't take resigning lightly, but once I made the decision,

I felt clarity that I don't think I've felt ever in my life that this is the right thing to do. So, you're the first of many that make a statement like that. Are you worried for your safety? No, I'm not. I'm worried for my family. But as a father, you know, you're always worried. You're always worried for your family. I have a strong family, strong extended family, strong friend network. Like we were just talking about at the break and when I got here, the outpouring

of support from veterans, from people I served with, from people that are part of the, whatever

movement this is, it's been amazing. So, obviously, the security worries are always there in the back

of my head. But, you know, I think God's on our side and I think it will be okay.

Not in midterm. I got, I got the running for, for Congress out of my system. I'm living in Virginia right now. And I don't think there's much of a prayer where I live for a, for a Republican of my politics to get elected. So, no, definitely not in the midterms. I don't really have a desire to run for office. Again, it was a good experience. I'm glad I did it. I'm also glad it didn't work out because I've kind of had to interact enough now with Congress and my, my last job that man that does not look

enjoyable at all. But I want to serve in this capacity. If we're able to get someone

into the White House who wants to put this country first, they're going to need people that

understand the national security apparatus and how to tackle it and reorient it towards American priorities. So, I'd be happy to serve in that capacity. What about 20, 28? Same thing. I think I get help craft good policies and come up with attack plans. I made about a run. I have no plans to run for president in 20, 28. Running for Congress is challenging enough. I can't imagine doing it in 28. A problem with our, with our politics in general is the amount of fundraising that

“you need to do. And I hated doing that and I really have zero desire for again to go ask people to”

cut me a check. But you have to, like you, you've got to be a relentless fundraiser to make it in politics today. And it's tough because there's so much money out there. And this is like literally how our politicians end up getting bought. Like if they don't take the check, then the other guy, their competitor is going to take the check. And so that's what a lot of it comes down to. And I'd much rather stay in the national security realm where I think I can contribute more anyway,

and then ever after go back down as from money ever again. I don't know. Stoy on a lead it. Safe. Medviso Stoyer. How do we solve the APAC problem? I think we need we need heavy legislation and regulation on the ability for foreign governments to come in and even using cutouts because APAC will say no, no, no, this isn't, this isn't affiliate with Israel.

“These are Americans who support Israel. And that I think by and large is true.”

But they're advocating for policies that just support a foreign government. So there's got to be some regulation on foreign agents. There's got to be some regulation on having political fundraising packs and mechanisms that just support the agenda of a foreign country. What that is, I don't exactly know. I mean, what is that, what is that change if they register as a foreign agent? Because the Saudis got a huge, huge lobbying for it. Yeah. So what does that change?

I think it changed much. I think you just are aware. It's more of a upfront, to my knowledge, someone can fact check me on this. I'm not a foreign agent registry expert by any means. But I think once someone is registered in a foreign, they can't get a government contract. I think they can resign from the position they're in where they had to register and for underfarer. And then I think they can slide back into, it's not like a forever thing by any means.

The problem with the money side is that the Supreme Court basically ruled that money is speech.

And just like they can't tell you what you can't, you can't say the government can't tell you

“you can spend your money. So if you want to put your money into a super pack, you can put an”

unlimited amount in there. And I think that's basically been the death of our political system ever and said that makes it very possible for elections to be bought. Because money is fun to buy. I think it's hard to actually create a firewall around that. All right, Joe. We're wrapping up the interview here. Got a hot question for you. Totally different to change a pacer. So trying to lighten it up a little bit.

Joe, the last time you were on the show, we aired a club called Inside the Military's Most Secret of Unit. That thing did 2.8 million views on YouTube. This time around we actually had Claude, the AI, scrape the data on your YouTube performance, dig through sources across the internet and help us build this question. Oh, man. It what came back was very interesting. When you were

operating in that secret of unit, doing those missions, most people never hear about what was your

go-to combat loadout and why. Oh, it's a great question. So it depends on obviously where I where I was working. I would say a consistent factor for me because I was predominantly in the Middle East and dangerous places was either a clock 19 or a clock 43 or a clock 43 or a clock 43.

It depends on what I was wearing and where I was. There's the else was that the 26 as well,

“the 26. I think it's the little fatter double stack version. But usually a clock 19. I like”

the clock 19 because it's a good, you can see it, but it's still a full size pistol. You know, you got the 15 plus one cameras heavily as well just for the type of work that we did. It's a matter of cameras. Small digital camera, like a small, you know, like pocket-sized. Some of our guys would use bigger ones depending on what mission they would do. But then I did a lot of human intelligence. So a huge part of my EDC was a pen in the paper and probably about $1,000

cash not on me because no pen, no paper, no intel. And if you don't pay on, then I'll come back. Yeah, you carry a bolt bag or anything. Like a go bag? Yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah, I had a little beat up North Face career bag, but I still have somewhere that I got like an 05 and it was like almost a superstition that I had to take down an average point with me. And that would be like my

little bug out of the vehicle bag. Never a long gun. No, definitely a long gun. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

We're long gun, for sure. So we had four or six teams for a little bit and then just standard, you know, AR. No MP7. You know, I rolled for MP7 a couple times, but it's just just a little thing. The bullet, I was always a little skeptical on. I never, I know some guys, I had heard people say they shot folks with it and it was fine. I did the job. I always just seemed really little to me. There's pictures of me with it with an oozy, an oozy for a trip. It was like a lap gun and a car.

Use the oozy. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, because I had the super, I mean, I had a great suppressor on it. At the time, we didn't have, we didn't pee fives, but we didn't have suppressed ones. And the suppressor on the oozy was sweet. So I use that kind of my lap gun in the car. Big fan of the UNP45s too. I thought that was shit. I like to have those. We had those. Yeah, and it run around Baghdad. I thought that was great because everything was so close,

quarters, and Baghdad, and you just needed the stopping power, especially working in a car. Yeah. And why got you a present? You want to see it? Absolutely. It's a long gun. It's long gun. Are you serious? I'm serious. I thought it was going to be gummy bears. You're in love. My kids will be happy. This is what they care about. Okay, do another one. Have you seen the, yeah, dude? You know, with the FBI investigation.

I don't know if you're going to get clear for this thing, but, but, yeah, this is, uh, this is a SIG, the SIG spear chambered in six point eight brand new optic. And then, um, so SIG wouldn't have made a give this to you. Wow, that's incredibly mad. Thank you so much.

“And then silence or shop jumped in, too. So they put this suppressor on here. I think”

a good thing about silence or shop is once you sign up with them and you get everything done, that makes the process go a lot smoother. A lot easier getting suppressors. The class three items stopped. So anyways, this is incredible mad thing. So much. Say, what a beautiful gun. You want to rip a couple off out back? Yeah, of course. Yeah, definitely. Man, this is beautiful. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, man. Why'd you happen to have some six point eight out there?

So yeah, we wrapped this up. We'll go. You definitely. This is amazing. We'll blow some shit up.

I really like that thing. That's nice. Yeah. I've never, I haven't shot this before.

It feels really good. Yeah. I think you're going to like it. I think so too. There's a follow on question. You're going to go back into combat tomorrow. What would you? If they institute the draft, they'll have to go back to Iran. Or the Middle East. It'd be like jokes on you, smart asses. What would your load out look like today? With all the new tech and weapon systems, the military has developed since you were on the ground last.

I would need to get spun up on the drones and the counter drones. That's what I was going to say. I mean, I can, you know, talk about long guns, it pistols all day long, but the fight nowadays, man, with those FPV drones and that technology, I would, I would get hot on that as fast as I possibly could. And then how did it defend?

“I think how did it, how do you defend any kind of like small formation that you have?”

Like what system can you carry around? At least have a fighting chance against those things. That'd be my, my first, uh, my first task. I think I'd get really good at 3D printing.

Yeah, that exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So that, the technology coming off the battlefield in the Ukraine is just incredible.

questions as we were doing the interview. So let's crank through some of these. This is from Eva Evans. Thank you so much, Mr. Kent, for your bravery and honesty. What is your advice to the younger generations who may have to drive to severe, to, excuse me, to serve humanity in the midst of this chaos, but also do not agree with the objective in a agenda of this current administration. To serve humanity. Yeah, I think she's saying, you know, join the military.

“Oh, to join the military with Iran. Yeah. That's what she's alluding to.”

Look, I hope we can be effective and, and walk this back and get us out of it. I think it keep part of that, and especially for the people that are, you have a huge audience. I think for people who feel like they can't do anything, I think they're calling their senators, calling their congressmen. Going to the president's websites and social media isn't just saying quite late that they are against this. I think that's probably one of the most effective things we can

we can have to do to get out of this. I think for people that find themselves in the military,

or have to be in the military, I think your first obligation really is to the man and woman

on your left and right, like make sure they come home, you get a job to do. That's what we're trying to sort out the policy from, from, from, from our end. But before you join, I mean, take a good hard look at what's going on right now. And only you can make the decision if this is something that you're willing to support with your, with your life. And don't rush that decision. Again, my goal is to make it so that we can send people back into the military, knowing their leaders

will only deploy them against a vital national security interest. But yeah, right now, we need to have all all voices need to be heard right now to say that we, we are against what's taking place. Let our elected leaders know that. Well, said, man, well said, this is from Lila Restival. What criteria should be met before deploying US troops into conflict? How can we ensure accountability

“from leadership when wars do not have clear objectives or protection or protection of outcomes?”

It's a great question. And they basically give the answer in there. I think our leaders need to

say before they deploy people into harm's way, this is the objective. This is why I'm sending you to this country. I'm sending you to this country to accomplish this military objective. And then quickly be able to articulate why that objective is in our vital national security interest. And America's vital national security interest, why if we don't take out this threat, it's going to harm Americans. That has to be very, very clear upfront. And that has to come from the commander and chief.

I understand there's like the war powers act and there's certain things that Congress should be able to do. But as fast as things move, this largely rests at the executive branch, unfortunately, unless the Congress is willing, unless we elect enough people in Congress that are willing to withhold funding from the military, unless for more for operations, unless there's actually a war powers declaration. Roger that. This is from Zach. Since you know all that we can do,

“which changes, would you like to see at NCTC that would be most beneficial to citizens that we protect?”

Hmm, that's a tough one. I think in terms of, yeah, that's a very good question. I think in terms of screening and vetting, it's a big part of what NCTC does to make sure when people come into the country, they're not attached to a terrorist organization. There's a lot of different agencies that touch screening and vetting in America. In the U.S. government,

it's a very complicated bureaucracy. I think there basically needs to be one central clearing

house for screening and vetting to decide if someone has ties to a terrorist organization or not, and whether or not they should be allowed in. Problem is there's a bunch of different ways, and there's a bunch of people who have equities and are able to say whether or not folks are led in. I think there needs to be one agency for that. That should be NCTC. It's from Dicklin. Iran is known to harbor many terrorists who are actively training and planning

to attack the U.S. home front through sleeper cells, former CIA target or Sarah Adams has proved this through open intelligence channels. All this considered, why is Iran not a threat to the United States? So the question was, is Iran an imminent threat? And based on what Secretary Rubio said, we've talked about here today, the only imminent threat was Israel attacking Iran. Is Iran a threat to America? Iran has been a threat to America. And there's other countries that are threats to America,

as well. The question is, how do you deal with those threats? Might my issue is us being part of the Israelis agenda, but then also using a massive conventional attack on Iran as the way of dealing with the threat that Iran poses, I think, is wrong. I think we'd be much better off doing targeted CT operations against Iranian proxies or Iranian leaders, not doing a massive regime change that results in the United States or a moves being closed, and then also around the flag that reinforces

If they do that, then the war is going to fail really quickly, because I just don't think the American

people are willing to saddle up their sons and daughters or the draft.

“If they could get away with it, I think they'd be tempted to do it, because they'd be like,”

"Oh, I mean, all options on the table, right?" Like if they say, like, if we get so far sucked into this thing, kind of like we did in the Iraq war, where it's like we can only win by applying a massive amount of ground troops, Iran is so big we can't do it with the standing military that we have right now as big as it is. We would have to do a draft. Now, I think a negative to the downside of the all volunteer force we've had is that it's been very easy to deploy us and most

Americans not really know our care that we've been deployed because we volunteered for where we have professional soldiers. I think a draft is actually a good check on that. I think compulsory service. I think if there was more people right now who they had to go do two years in the military, and they were like, "Oh crap, my two years are going to involve this Iran deployment. I think a lot more people in America." And that was felt by the entire American population that every able-bodied

man and woman was eligible for a two-year period to go serve. War is like this wouldn't happen to my opinion. That is a very interesting point of view that I have not thought about. Yeah. As much as I don't like the idea of conscripting people or having mandatory service, because I liked the professional warrior class that we were a part of, I like serving the volunteers. From a volunteer's, we'll just keep going back and you'll create a professional warrior class,

and then we'll like I did, we'll enter Mary, and we'll live in our tight communities, everybody I know is of that trend. And so we have an insular community, and we're the only ones that experience the war, experience the loss, and we keep going back over and over again, whereas if you spread out that burden to the entire country, it makes it almost impossible to keep us at war for a prolonged period. The only reason to Vietnam war ended is because there was

popular that the people basically revolted against it because of the draft. And that's a big reason why

“I think after Vietnam they were like, "We can't draft people anymore. Let's create a professional”

military." Damn. I have not thought about the like that. It makes a lot of sense. This is from Donnie. If I ram was not an immediate threat, then what threats are there that we should be the most concerned about? The ram was not an immediate threat. If a ram was not an immediate threat, he wants to know, "What are the threats that we should be most concerned about?" I think we should be worried about the fact that we had open borders in this country for four

plus years, like we talked about. And the sheer volume of potential known suspected terrorists, known suspected terrorists, that our here are main focus should be getting our homeland straight

first and foremost. There's other threats from Al Qaeda in Yemen, Al Qaeda in Syria. There's a lot

that we don't know that's taking place in Afghanistan that Sarah's talked about at Nazim on your show. So there still is CT threats out there. There's still our people that we do need to hunt down

“in kill because they seek to do us harm. Again, that's why this is another reason why this conflict”

in Iran concerns me so much because all of our resources are going to be sucked up there and Al Qaeda in ISIS and all of our adversaries are going to take this time to rebuild and probably attack in China. China, man. They're breaking in the cash right now. I mean, this is working out in their favor for people who are very, very worried about Russia, the same thing. I mean, their their their energy is, their energy surplus is going to be reintroduced to the market at a greater value.

Man. Well, Joe, that pretty much concludes the interview. But once again, man, I'm serious. Thank you. Thank you. What you did, I know that was a tough decision. And like I said, I know that took a lot of courage, but one an example, you are, man. Thanks for their appreciate it. Thank you. What it means to be an American. Thank you. I just appreciate you. Fucking awesome. What you're doing. So God bless you.

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