October 19, 2025 • 38 mins
MSNBC & NBC justice and inteligence correspondence Ken Dilanian predicts how the Dept. of Justice will continue to be used under Trump, and reports on the experiences of the people still working there.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. We have over
sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA,
serving in high risk areas all around the world, and part.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of
you may not have heard.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
This episode of Mission Implausible was recorded previously before the
government shut down, before the.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Prosecution of Latisia j mc james, comey before.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
A lot of stuff, all right.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Today's guest is Kendelanian. He's the Justice and Intelligence correspondent
for NBC News. He's also worked at the Los Angeles Times,
US Today and other outlets, but probably more important, he
was a standout football star for the Williams College SS
and so Ken, I've known you for a while, and
i've known you as a reporter on the intelligence community,
and I think you did it great job there. However,
(01:01):
your timing on taking over the justice role is either
really really good or really really bad. I think we're
seeing some of the biggest changes we've seen in decades
of the Justice Department. If ever, we have actual conspiracy
theorists at top roles at the FBI, Justice and in
the intelligence community. So just to start off, what's your
take on that on your new beat?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
First of all, John, I'm sure your listeners know that
you were much more of a lacrosse star than I
was a football star, So clear that up right away.
But yeah, the theme that you mentioned, the fact two
conspiracy theorists or prior conspiracy theorists running the FBI, is
a fascinating one and has been part of my daily
life and covering these guys because they made a lot
of money actually fomenting conspiracy theories about in particularly the FBI.
(01:47):
Now they're running the place, and what's been interesting to
me is to see how they've navigated that how because
they've got a following out there that's expecting people to
be frog marchs out of the FBI and handcuffs, and
that's expecting answers on Jeffrey Epstein, and that's expecting Dan
Bongino's weird theory about the who planted the pipe bombs
outside the RNC and DNC to come to fruition, and
(02:09):
of course none of that can happen, so they've tried
to straddle it. For example, I'm sure you saw they
gave an interview to Maria Bartroomo on Fox News where
they said flatly that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. Dan Bongeni said,
I've seen the file. He committed suicide. Cash Pttel said
the same.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
Thing, you said, Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
People don't believe it.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
Well, I mean, listen, they have a right to their opinion.
But as someone who has worked as a public defender,
as a prosecutor, who's been in that prison system, who's
been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who's been in segregated housing,
you know a suicide when you see one, and that's
what that was. They killed himself again, you want me
to I've seen the whole file.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
He killed himself. They got huge blow for that from
a there's probably millions of Americans just do not believe that,
and now have turned against them, and they repeated it
again yesterday an interview with Bear around Fox. But for
other things, so they're trying to they can't. What can
they say about the Epstein case, like the evidence is
(03:15):
in front of them, right they But for other things
they've tried to play into their previous conspiracy theories like
cash Bettel said promised in this latest Fox interview that
he is going to show the public the real story
of what FBI assets were doing in the January sixth
attack on the Capitol. There's already been a thorough report
by the Department of Justice Inspector General on this which
(03:37):
gave chapter and verse on what was true and what
was false about that conspiracy theory. So I'm not sure
what else is left to be revealed, but you know,
he left the impression the public is going to know
the real story, and conservative media plays right into that,
plays it up The New York Post, the Daily Mail, Fox.
So that's been really interesting to watch that dynamic.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
So for Stop the Steal, the conspiracy theory, there were
sixty two cases, they lost sixty of them. Most of
them were just thrown out because there was no evidence,
it was without merit, and the two where they prevailed
were under minor conditions. It really made no sense. And
I wanted to ask you, just knowing the judiciary and
the system and the very fact that you would bring
(04:18):
sixty two cases and have sixty losses and two. Really
that don't really mean anything. Is that part of the
conspiracy to bring those cases? Or is that just like
trying hard? Where's the line there?
Speaker 4 (04:32):
That's a great question. I mean, look, and what's also
interesting is you don't hear much about that anymore. Right,
Like they have power now. So there was some talk
about we're going to re examine the twenty twenty election,
and there is a Weaponization Task Force, let's not forget
that is supposedly looking at a lot of different things.
But you don't hear much about that because there isn't
the evidence out there. It My take on why they
(04:53):
brought so many cases is there was a demand. Trump
kept saying find the evidence, and people at Rudig Giuliani
were trying to satisfy him, and so they just went
into court with whatever they had and it wasn't much.
And the other interesting thing about that whole episode was
that one of the main parts of the effort of
Trump to baselessly say there was fraud was he wanted
(05:15):
the Justice Department to tell the country that there was fraud,
and he asked his senior he demanded, really of his
senior Justice Department of fishers to do that, and they all
said no, and they threatened to resign. These were his
political appointees, and they were essentially they were unsung heroes
at the moment because they had they had sent out
a letters what Trump wanted to do, saying we found fraud,
(05:37):
we need to investigate this. That would have changed the
whole equation, and they didn't. And none of those people
are working in the Trump Justice Department in the second term.
There aren't people like that there now. There are people
who I think would do whatever he wanted, would say
yes to that request now, and that's pretty.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
It is scary. So Jerry and I have been out
of government service for a while now, and I'm always
careful to not try to talk to people who are
inside and find out what's happening. But that's your job.
What's it like inside these places the extent that you're
getting reporting on that, are people leaving? Are people just
keeping their heads done? What are you learning about that?
Speaker 4 (06:13):
John? Yet? People are leaving and this is it's been
a real earthquake. It's hard to convey how unprecedented that work.
It's use all the time, how different this is than
any other administration in modern history, and how we didn't
really see this coming. Remember, people used to talk about
Schedule F. Donald Trump was going to implement Schedule F
to get rid of the senior the civil servants. It
(06:33):
turns out he didn't need to do that because he
was willing to fire people in what many experts say
are legally questionable ways. He's willing to reassign civil servants
in ways that they probably could challenge. But it turns
out it's pretty expensive to hire a lawyer and go
to the merit system's protection board, and then you're still
(06:53):
out of a job anyway, and you don't have income
for two years. So people aren't doing that. So what
he's found is that he what they have found is
that they've been able to remove most of the top
officials at the Justice Department, many of the top officials
at the FBI, and targeted ways like they also they
fired all the prosecutors for most of the prosecutors who
(07:14):
worked for the special counsel Jack Smith case. These were
career prosecutors who had done Yeomen's work for the governments.
Many of the national security experts they've removed For example,
many of the top officials in the National Security Division
of the Justice Department a lot of the institutional memory,
and they did it by transferring them to things that
had nothing to do with their legal expertise, like the
(07:34):
Sanctuary City Task Force or some program to train judges overseas.
And after a while, these people said, you know, I
can go earn a good living in the private sector.
I'm not putting up with this anymore. And that expertise,
by the way, that's not easily rebuilt. You guys know
this because you work in government. That's going to take
a decade to replenish. It's not just going to be like, oh,
a new president in four years, we can hire all
(07:54):
these people back. They're gone. The Civil Rights Division of
the Justice Department, more than half the lawyers, more than that,
maybe sixty seventy percent have left because it's being run
by a person who's just turned civil rights enforcement on
its head. And you know, in the FBI, initially there
was a plan, we think there was a plan to
(08:15):
fire a mass amount of people who had worked on
jener six. It was interesting the people that they brought
in to beat the acting director, a man named Brian
Driscoll and a guy named Rob Cassane. They stood up
and they said no to that, and they I think
they were successful and they staved that off. But nonetheless
they removed basically all the top layer of management assistant directors.
(08:36):
There have been firings and removals of several special agents
in charge. Some we know about, others we don't know.
I'm trying to confirm and what the message that that
is sent is you toe the line or you're out.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
You know.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
In the first term, we saw bureaucracies acting more normally
and resisting things that they thought were illegal, and it
was a different group of people. Anyway, the political appointees
were not We're not asking them to do these kinds
of extreme things. Now we're seeing political appointees turning agencies
the missions on their head, and civil servants feeling compelled
(09:10):
to go along or they know they're going to lose
their job. And you guys know that this is not
normal for government. This just doesn't happen. Did This Trump
administration very different from the first one.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And just to add to that is the FBI and
the CIA in the State Department. In many ways, they're
like what people probably know better as the military. Like,
you don't become an army general or a Marine general
or an admiral by just signing up and when you're
in your mid twenties they make it. It takes years
and years of experience. It takes a long time to
create that expertise, that knowledge, that wide ability to lead,
(09:43):
that knowledge of these complicated and complex systems. It takes years.
That's why all the admirals and generals are in their fifties.
It's not just the and so you lose those people.
It isn't as if you just can turn the keys
over or when you leave, if new people come in,
you're losing that expertise.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
I know most of your listeners know this. You guys
know this, But just to explain and make it very clear,
these we're talking about people who are not political appointees.
They are civil servants. They've served Republicans, they've served Democrats.
They were in the first Trump administration. They didn't like
everything they were asked to do, but they did it.
Some of them were appointed in the first Trump administration.
The head of the Public Integrity Unit, which is by
(10:21):
the way, has been disbanded. We could talk about that
at the Justice Department was a Republican Trump appointee. But
yet those people, anybody who is deemed who have done
things that the Trump folks didn't like in the Biden administration,
they're out. And again they're supposed to be protected by
civil service rules. The idea behind civil service is that
you're insulated from politics and from political demands, but that
(10:41):
system has come under real strain in this administration.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
So Ken, I think one of the things that is
really different and is also scary and touches on conspiracy,
is now the relationship between the DOJ and the White House.
It was there was always a there was always a
all between them, and they're needed to be because the
DOJ and the FBI needed to be a political and
that's not really the case anymore. So what are your
(11:08):
concerns about the White House just telling and the Justice
Department being okay with investigating and bringing cases against political
opponents for political reasons and b what happens when they
start to go to court or people are pressured to
plead guilty and you won't have to go through the
process is often the most painful thing. Right, you got
(11:29):
to get lawyers, you could lose, But if you plead guilty,
which is what they really what they want. And so
what's your sort of sense on where we are now
and where you see us going?
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Maybe you're putting your finger on another unprecedented I hate
to use that word. It's an earthquake of a development. Really,
for the first time in the post Watergate era, we
have a Justice Department that has thrown out the idea
of being independent and of not having contacts with the
White House on individual criminal cases. And we have and
(11:59):
said they're completely in lockstep with the White House and
the president. You've got an Attorney general, we've all seen
her on Fox. She says openly she's a friend and
ally of the president. She's there to carry out the
president's policies. In the last administration, Mark Garland, by the end,
he didn't even want to be in the same room
with Joe Biden. He was investigating his son. You know,
there was no love loss between that White House and
(12:21):
that Justice Department, and Garland took pains to be independent.
It is completely the opposite here. For decades, there's been
a White House contacts policy that restricts who with the
White House can talk to certain people. That Justice armored
about criminal investigations. We don't know exactly what happened with
that policy, but we don't believe that it's being followed.
And again we don't have the details because it's hard
(12:42):
to penetrate the Trump inner workings about who exactly is
Stephen Miller talking to the Attorney general, which levers are
being pulled, But we know very clearly that, for example,
Donald Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office,
essentially ordering They called it a review, not an investigtion
in or review. Probably the lawyers use that word of
Chris Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity Agency, and
(13:05):
then lo and behold, a few weeks later we reported
that he's under criminal investigation. And that is chilling. That
is the idea that a president can essentially direct a
criminal investigation of a political opponent.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
And yeah, he was appointed by Trump the first.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Time exactly, and why Trump doesn't like the fact that
he said the twenty twenty election was free and fair
and free from fraud. But to your point earlier, Jerry,
what are the consequences of this, because there still is
a court system, and you still need a jury verdict
to convict somebody, So that is really hard to do.
But as you mentioned, just being under federal criminal investigation
(13:40):
is expensive. It causes anguish, it causes problems for people.
It's something that nobody wants to do. I mean, Chris
Krebs had to leave his company, and despite him leaving
the company, they still that company. Members of that company
still lost their security clearances. They're in the cybersecurity business,
they need those. So these are the kind of things
that are happening. This White House has shown no compunction
(14:02):
about going after its enemies, using whatever power it can,
removing security clearances. We can talk about what's been happening
with the law firms.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
You MEETIA are the ones that are supposed to protect us.
So keep doing what you can there. But to go
to a little bit a conspiracy thing recently, I don't
know if you saw this report about Fort Knox. So
Fort Knox supposedly where the gold is. The government controls it.
There's like any government for so, there's regular reviews, there's
people there, there's security. Donald Trump has kept up this
thing that, oh, maybe the gold is not there. Then
(14:32):
it turns out his son runs a company that benefits
by this. He's spread the word that maybe the gold
is not safe, and maybe it's not there, which raises
the price of gold, which helps his son specifically with
his gold company, and these type of things. And then
people around him, on Musk and others, they amplify this
and they create this fake story completely out of whole
(14:53):
clock that oh my god, maybe the gold's not safe,
which of course is silly. He's the president of the
United States. He could get it. He could get the
answer in five minutes. And in fact, you don't, those
of us who work in the COUMP, you don't need
to even try to get the answer, because of course
it's safe. That's what There's a whole institution behind us.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
Fort Knox is synonymous with security. It's the place where
America's gold reserves are stored. But are those legendary vaults
actually empty? President Trump and Elon Musk want to see
for themselves.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
We're gonna go into Fort Knox to make sure the
gold is there.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Don't be totally surprised.
Speaker 6 (15:27):
We opened the door, we'll say there's nothing here. They
stole this too.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
We're actually going to Fort Knox to see if the
gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Tons of gold.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
The idea that millions of people believe this stuff is
disturbing in and of itself, right, like this thing that's
self evident to you and me, of course, the goal
and even Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator Trump ally, I remember,
said right away, I was in Fort Knox a few
years ago. I saw the gold that's there, But that
didn't stop people from believing it. So that's that. But
in terms of the corruption, look, I this is not
(16:00):
I report on a daily basis, but I've been watching
it and I read a great piece by Peter Baker
in the New York Times that really laid out how
this we again, this is a thing that we have
never seen before in the modern history of the presidency.
I mean, look, we all you know, historians now shown
that LBJ was pretty corrupt, he had the TV stations.
(16:20):
Nixon did what Nixon did. But this is massive. And
first of all, Donald Trump was the first in the
first term. He was the first president in the modern
era who didn't put his holdings in a blind trust
and disassociate himself from his businesses. But it was the
things that we were worried about in the first term,
like which foreign governments were buying hotel. Rooms at the
Trump hotel are quaint in comparison with what we're seeing now.
(16:43):
As you mentioned the dinner where people paid millions of
dollars to essentially dine with Trump. The deals that his
son and son in law are making, the crypto, the
meme coin, and that just it's unbelievable that he's able
to they the family, are able to enrich themselves this
way as their deregulator crypto and taking actions that fuel
crypto boom.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And well, in the tariffs, you this whole thing, I'm
gonna put these big tariffs on. But if you come
to me personally, if you're Apple and you come to
me personally and say, okay, I'll give you, I'll give
you a break, but you've got to do things for me,
it's just old fashioned corruption, like Joey and I saw
overseas for many years.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
It seems that way, And even as this is going on,
Don Trump and his aide to dismantle all the mechanisms
that would check that corruption, whether it's firing the inspector
generals or doing away with the public Integrity section of
the Justice Department. By the way, I'm not sure that
any of those entities could have dealt with a president
who is doing these things in the wake of a
Supreme Court decision that said the presidences immune for prosecution.
(17:40):
So I don't know if any of this would have helped,
but at least it might have exposed more some of
this stuff you might have had. If you had an
independent FBI, then they saw this, they might investigate, you know,
and at least start an investigation. But we have none
of that. And so you know, there's there's this stuff
we know about, and then there's the stuff we don't
know about.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Boom so Ken, John and I and you we all
have something in common. We are all enemies of the state. Now,
went back when we were in Cia, the state we
(18:19):
were enemies of was like Russia, North Korea, Iran, And
now you're the current right House calling members of the
media enemies of the state. So how we got around,
you know, we found people who were in those states
who couldn't stand as agents. Often right, they would volunteer
and then we would handle them securely to make sure
(18:40):
that the information got to where it was the truth.
So now as sort of an enemy of the state,
said tongue in cheek. I think you're a represent of
democracy A What is your relationship to the Justice Department, folks,
And are you still able to get people to talk
to you off flyne and tell you the truth because
(19:01):
there's a lot of fear about being hunted down and fired.
I guess what I want to hear is I want
you to assure us and listeners that, yeah, you can
keep people safe and they can find ways to talk
to you to talk about the truth of what's going on.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
The great question, Jerry, and the answer is absolutely yes.
In an atmosphere like this, people want to talk more
than ever. People who would never talked before are talking now.
My relationship with the Justice Department, frankly, is cordial. With
the Public Affairs Department that Pam Bondi appointees. They're perfectly
nice people and we have a working relationship, and I
of course give them a chance there's a critical story,
(19:37):
I give them a chance to commem and I tell
them what we're about to report, and I take their
point of view into account. But thankfully there are people
inside both the FBI and the dj and other places
that are willing to take risks and to tell us
things that they're not telling us classified things. By the way,
they're not going to violate the law to do this,
but that's okay. We don't need to know that. They're
(19:58):
telling us what's happening, and what moves are being made
policy wise, what personnel who's getting fired, just the basic
workings of these organizations. And frankly, the FBI leadership has
been very annoyed by some stories, including one idea about
Dan Bongino having a large security detail and has started
leak hunts, leak investigations, and they've been polygraphing people inside
(20:22):
the FBI, and you guys know what. You guys know
the implications of that, and.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So they don't really work, all right. They only tell
whether you're nervous. They can't tell whether you're lying or not.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
And if you want loyalty, if you start polygraphing people,
there goes that exactly right.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
Exactly if you were trying to recruit people at a
foreign government agency, you would just be thrilled to hear
that the bosses are polygraphing people and dealing them with suspicion.
So yeah, but the answer is yes, you know, the
vast majority of people inside these institutions are not happy
with things that are happening. It's not that they're against
everything Donald Trump wants to do. They may, for example, be
(20:56):
perfectly happy with cracking down on immigration or whatever, but
they see a corrosion of the rule of law, particularly
the way the FBI and the DOJ have been treated
and their acting accordingly.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Obviously, the Jake Tepper book that came out, and he's
making the rounds about the Biden health story, what's your
take on that?
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Look, I think Jake Tapper has said and others have
said that, Look, the media has some answering to do
about that, about why we missed what was obviously evidence
of cognitive decline, and why we allowed or didn't make
a bigger fuss about the fact that the President wasn't
doing interviews. I mean, we of course reported on that
and took note of it. And then my personal experience
(21:35):
with this story was when Rob Herr issued the Special
Counsel report and talked about well meaning a lily man
with a poor memory. I reported on that, and the
pushback from the White House was intense. And then when
I actually was the first to write the story that
remember when Joe Biden right after that complained that Rob
her brought up his dead son, and how I dare he?
(21:57):
What is this guy doing bring up my dead son?
And I immediately was able to figure out that's not
what happened. Actually, Joe Biden brought up his dead son,
and even though they knew the transcript eventually would be out,
White House officials just simply lied about that. And I
use that word not it's not an insignificant word to use.
And they just were not on the level, and they
(22:17):
pushed back. They just wanted to win the day, win
the news cycle, even knowing that they would be exposed later.
And then recently when the audio of that interview came out,
it was even worse. So yeah, there was a I
don't know if different authors have had different takes on this.
Chris Whipple wrote a book and his conclusion was it
wasn't a cover up, it was wilful blindness. People. He
had good days and bad days, and people around him
(22:38):
really believed he was effective to function. I think Jake
Tapper's book leans more into some people covered some stuff up.
I don't know what the ultimate answer is there, but
it clearly now people are coming to grips with the
fact that had Biden gotten out and he served one
term as he said he was going to do at
one point, and there was a normal primary, maybe the
world would be much different today.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Those of us who've taken history and political science courses
in the lead up to our president jobs understand that
one of the key jobs, maybe the key job of
a president, is to communicate, to explain to the people
what he's doing, why they're doing it. And as we
led up to this election, if the economy was doing well,
and if he did have policies who are helping the
average worker, and in red states and these other places,
they did a really poor job of communicating to the
(23:22):
public what was going on. So I really hold them
responsible for their failure or his failure to communicate effectively,
and the people around him to get him to communicate effectively,
and if he couldn't so, then perhaps call it out.
I still think he's a million times better than Trump.
But nonetheless, if we're going to be honest brokers here,
we have to explain where we think people are going wrong,
(23:43):
and you and the media have to do that too,
even though you get attacked from both sides.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
I agree and the polls show that the public was
way ahead of us. The media or whoever, the elites
they thought he was too old from jump seventy percent
at one point, and so I don't know why more
people didn't listen to that. That signal was certainly there.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
You have a long history of watching, of following national security.
Now have you seen since WMD in Rock have you
seen anything at all what happened with the assessment over
Venezuela where the intelligence community comes out and says that
there is no or almost no evidence of control by
(24:25):
the Venezuelan government of these criminal gangs and they're it's
not an invasion. And then you've got the number two
with the DNI saying basically, change this. The president doesn't
like this. This is politicization we haven't seen since the
Iraq War, and of course that didn't go real well
for us when we got politicized. So what's your sense
on that?
Speaker 4 (24:44):
I agree with you one hundred percent, and I think
but I think it speaks really it was comforting, and
it speaks well for the intelligence community that they didn't
change a thing, like, they didn't buckle under that pressure.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
They got fired.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
That's true, and so what will have up in the
next time. That's a fair point. But the analysts who
produced the underlying work presumably didn't get fired. You can't
fire them all. I don't know. Again, I'm not calling
the intelligence community as intensely right now, but I'm told
that there's been less of that, the kind of purges
that we're seeing at FBI and DJ. It's harder to
do that at the CIA and D and I. We'll see.
(25:19):
It's just very it's very scary.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
But was this a conspiracy? I mean, did Joe ket
just is it it like they just know the White
House wouldn't like it? Or are they not writing anything down?
Are they getting on a phone call and saying, is
it you know somebody Steven Miller saying, you know, kill this.
This is a conspiracy. I want you to do this.
And Joe Kent was just the one caught writing the note.
(25:42):
How much of a conspiracy is this or do they
just know?
Speaker 4 (25:45):
I just remember in the first term, it was well
known that you don't bring up Russia or things related
to Russia in intel briefings because then the boss would
go in a bad direction. And so it's there are
a lot of things around Trump that people around him
just know that this is what he wants. This is
a smart thing to do. So it would not surprise
me at all if it was just like him or
(26:06):
someone else taking the initiative and saying, let's take another
look at that.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
So one thing you are having to work on a
lot now is you look at justice point is the
issue of immigration. What are you learning now? I do
think it's true at the beginning of the Biden administration
he did send signals that brought a lot of immigrants
to our shores, or legal immigrants. But I also see
these stories that in the last year there's probably more
illegal immigrants that were pushed out by the Biden administration
(26:31):
than there have been by the Trump administration. Despite all
the stories and the sort of cruelty, we see, what's
the truth there? What are you learning about the whole
issue of border protection and immigration and the legal immigration?
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Again, this is I'm not the expert on this. Was
someone else covers this for us, but I watch it closely,
and I think the story of the Biden administration was,
as you said, wide open doors in the beginning. Then
they realized this is a problem. They started slowly closing
the doors, and by the end there was very little movement.
But they didn't tell that story effectively, again going back
to communication, in part because some of their base, you know,
(27:04):
it was not a good story that for some of
their race, and they didn't agree with that policy, but
they certainly didn't weren't able to communicate to the public
that hey, by the way, we've shut the door. This
is not the first two years. But Trump has done things.
Trump has taken it much further, obviously, and border crossings
are almost non existent now. But it was interesting. I
actually did some I had to do some live shots
today on this immigration issue because they've there were some
(27:27):
people removed from their jobs inside of because the White
House is frustrated with the pace of deportations, and it
turns out it's hard to deport people. Like the promise
of mass deportations, that's really hard to do. So, like
if there are ten million undocumented immigrants in this country,
I think that Trump administration said in April they had
removed one hundred and forty thousand. That's a drop in
(27:50):
the bucket. Right last fall, there were documents that showed
there were four hundred thousand undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions,
including twenty nine thousand felony conviction. Most of those people
are still here because they're hard to find. It's manpower intensive.
You have to have a strike force, you have to
have arm people to go out, especially the day, and
that's why they've ordered the FBI to spend like thirty
(28:11):
percent of their time working on immigration matters, which is
very frustrating for a lot of FBI people I talked to,
and it's probably taking resources away from counter terrorism and
counter espionage because they can't deliver on their promise to
deport all these people unless they The only way really
they could do it is to start having mass workplace rates,
really just showing up and vacuuming people up, and that
(28:32):
would cause a lot of problems for the economy. It
would cause maybe people the general public would not be
appreciative of that.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
So we've got this court now, and surprisingly Cony Bairrett
and Kevin R. Are surprising a lot of people. And
this is the last Bastion and gues case after case
ends up in the Supreme Court. What's your sense on
the court's makeup and where its limits are and how
it can be pressured anything that's the last barrier, right,
(29:02):
and what happens if and when it comes to Trump
defying the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4 (29:06):
I probably can give you the conventional wisdom on this,
which is, as you said, it's pretty clear that Cony,
Barrett and Kavanaugh on a lot of these issues are
not sympathetic to what the Trump administration is trying to do,
and so a lot of people think it'll be a
lot of seven to cases. What we're seeing in the
lower courts is that the Trump administration is getting it's
colack cleaned on everything from Harvard to the law firms
(29:27):
to immigration cases. It's starting the losses are really starting
out up at The Administration's answer to that is this
is a judicial coup. These horrible judges are standing in
the way of democracy, which is really scary rhetoric and
raises questions about at what point will they try to
defy a court order the main bulwark against a lot
of the things that the Trump administration has tried to
do that many people think is illegal and unconstitutional, And
(29:51):
it remains to be seen how many of these are
going to win in the Supreme Court. But what we've
seen so far is that again seven to two seems
like a smart us.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Bet let me go back to something I do know.
You did a lot of work on You spend a
number of years reporting on the intelligence community and CIA
of just you know your experience from that. What do
you take away from what you learned about the intelligence community?
And you can give us some good stuff and some
bad stuff, or if you don't have any good stuff,
just the bad stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:17):
No, it's both, of course, it's both. Like what I learned,
it was fascinating, and the CIA used to come into
this fresh having read all the books and watched the movies,
and there's a mystique about the CIA, and the CIA
did incredible things, and particularly after nine to eleven, So
that was fascinating to meet people like you John and Mark,
Polly Morobliss and you Jerry. I mean, just like the
intelligence comunity is full of quiet heroes, and I've been
(30:40):
really fast and privileged to meet people and hear their stories.
And then on the other side you realize in some
ways the CIA is also another government bureaucracy, like the
Agriculture Department, and you have people who complain about the
pace of things and write books about how they they
weren't able to do the intelligent collection that they wanted
to do when they were a knock in Europe or whatever.
Or for example, I did a story many years ago
(31:02):
about what I actually under their Freedom of Information Act.
I got a bunch of Inspector General reports that talked
about the management culture of the CIA being bad and
there wasn't training for managers and people were elevated who
had no business being managers. And then you know, a
survey actually that showed that a lot of people were
leaving because of bad management. And I heard that story
over and over again, people saying, this is a great place,
(31:23):
but like, I can't advance here. I feel that my
manager is terrible, so I'm leaving. And then of course
there was the post nine to eleven debate about the
interrogation issues and the black sites and stuff, and I
was so interesting to cover the evolution of that, which
is amazing that it's still being litigated in the Guantanamo cases.
Well let me ask you this, though, what's your take
(31:43):
on how are millennials, because you know, I haven't really
covered CIA closely for a number of years now, how
are the younger generation getting integrating themselves into that bureaucratic structure.
Are they thriving? Are they changing the place?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Sort of? I think two things. One is, when we
went in, I think you saw it as a calling, right,
it was like it's like you're a policeman or a priest.
It's like it's something you do your whole life. And
I think younger people, which is Naela like I'll come
in and do this for two or three years and
then get out. And I don't think we thought they were.
But to be a good case officer, you can't do
(32:17):
it in three years. I mean it takes ten to
twelve years sometimes until you really understand enough to be
able to run a small station or something like that.
And the other thing is, whereas John and I came
from the Stone Age, I mean we actually entered the
agency before they had computers. They were just phasing out
electric typewriters. But today separating anybody under the age of
(32:41):
thirty from their telephone is almost impossible. And yet it's
a death threat for us because it records where you are,
what you do, who you talked with, and how you
socialize and how you interact with the world. Without one
of those devices is really difficult for people under thirty,
but pretty easy for John.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And I can remember talking to sort of older guys,
you know, when we were still in and they left.
They were like, oh, it's not the same as it was,
and I'm like, my god, we're doing amazing things. So
I always said to myself when I leave, I'm not
going to be that way talking about how bad it
is now and how they don't do it. And so
I'm sure there's still, you know, incredible work being done here.
But the one bitch I do here when I talk
to people who are still in sort of senior people
(33:21):
running management overseas, is like to get people to go
out and do the work overseas as hard Like they
all want to be on the computer. It's like you
need to go out and actually meet physical people, and they're.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
Like, can I send an email?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
So I was in Iraq, for example, and I got
to tell the young people who were there they were committed, idealistic. Often,
if not the majority of them were giving up jobs.
They came out of great schools with great prospects. They
gave up jobs where they could be earning two or
three times as much to serve and bagdad and take
(33:54):
huge risks and be away from their family. And I
got to say, I think every generation of cias, not all,
but probably the majority, really go in because they want
to serve, and they believe in what they're doing, and
they understand the agency has issues warts and all, but
at the end of the day, they really want to
be part of something that they hope is mostly a
(34:16):
force for good.
Speaker 7 (34:17):
And I think that's still the same today.
Speaker 4 (34:34):
I've noticed in the Trump era is just a greater
concern from our lawyers about, for example, the idea of
are the are these going to be the first? Is
this going to be the first administration to prosecute a
journalist under the Espionage Act? Because as you guys know,
that's always been out there. It's a threat the laws
written as it's illegal to publish classified information. And the
Bush administration they considered it and they said, we're not
(34:56):
doing this. That's a worry, and so that's something new
that even worry about that in previous administrations, there's guidelines,
for example, about subpoenaing journalist records, and Mark Garland basically
said we're not doing that, and they just PAMBODI repealed
those guidelines. Those are the things I worry.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I think that's a real threat. I think they're I
think they believe that a lot of the public doesn't
follow understand these things, and if they're told that the
media is doing something wrong, and large enough portion of
the population will believe that.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
What's a journalist these days? Is a podcast journalist? Is
Tim Poole a journalist? Is arguably snowed and right he
goes online? Is he a journalist? You obviously are. What's
a journalist?
Speaker 4 (35:39):
Now, that's an old question, This dilemma has been with
us for a long time, but it's really You're right,
it's really pronounced and more exacerbated in the age of
the podcast and sub stack. And look, my kids. I
don't think my kids could answer what a journalist is.
They're constantly they're getting bombarded with information they don't know
the source of it. The videos on TikTok, who made that?
Is that person credible?
Speaker 6 (36:00):
Look?
Speaker 4 (36:00):
All I can say is, like the journalism I practice,
before we say something, before we report something, it goes
through layers of vetting, not just editors and senior executives,
but then we have a standards department. Because back in
nineteen ninety six, there was a scandal where Dateline put
a bomb on a gas tank because they were trying
to show that the gas tank blew up and they
(36:20):
gave it a little help. President MBC lost their job.
So ever since, it's been a very robust standards operation.
Lawyers look at it, and that's true of most mainstream
news organizations, and it's not true of Joe Rogan, right,
it's not true of some people on Substack.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
We don't do it on this podcast either to because
we just say whatever the hell we want.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
But you could your self censor because you're not going
to slander someone, like you know, there's certain things you
wouldn't say that. But that's not really a satisfactory answer.
But that is one way to separate what is a
traditional journalist from this new kind of thing is like
how is the information vetted? What's the reporting process?
Speaker 2 (36:56):
So every administration can be its character can be judged
by like the jokes they tell about it. So I
don't know if you've heard any Trump two point zero
jokes or anything, but I've been looking at I haven't
seen any good ones. But it was like, how do
you get Trump to change a light bulb? Tell them
Joe Biden put it in.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Well, I can I apologize for Jerry's stupid joke. I
do want to thank you. I don't want to keep
you too long. You have important work to do and
you want to thank you for what you're doing. We
hope you keep it up. It's a tough time to
be a journalist, and I thank so much for spending
time with us.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
It's been my privilege. John and Jerry, thanks so much.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry, O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. We have over
sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA,
serving in high risk areas all around the world, and part.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of
you may not have heard.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
This episode of Mission Implausible was recorded previously before the
government shut down, before the.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Prosecution of Latisia j mc james, comey before.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
A lot of stuff, all right.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Today's guest is Kendelanian. He's the Justice and Intelligence correspondent
for NBC News. He's also worked at the Los Angeles Times,
US Today and other outlets, but probably more important, he
was a standout football star for the Williams College SS
and so Ken, I've known you for a while, and
i've known you as a reporter on the intelligence community,
and I think you did it great job there. However,
(01:01):
your timing on taking over the justice role is either
really really good or really really bad. I think we're
seeing some of the biggest changes we've seen in decades
of the Justice Department. If ever, we have actual conspiracy
theorists at top roles at the FBI, Justice and in
the intelligence community. So just to start off, what's your
take on that on your new beat?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
First of all, John, I'm sure your listeners know that
you were much more of a lacrosse star than I
was a football star, So clear that up right away.
But yeah, the theme that you mentioned, the fact two
conspiracy theorists or prior conspiracy theorists running the FBI, is
a fascinating one and has been part of my daily
life and covering these guys because they made a lot
of money actually fomenting conspiracy theories about in particularly the FBI.
(01:47):
Now they're running the place, and what's been interesting to
me is to see how they've navigated that how because
they've got a following out there that's expecting people to
be frog marchs out of the FBI and handcuffs, and
that's expecting answers on Jeffrey Epstein, and that's expecting Dan
Bongino's weird theory about the who planted the pipe bombs
outside the RNC and DNC to come to fruition, and
(02:09):
of course none of that can happen, so they've tried
to straddle it. For example, I'm sure you saw they
gave an interview to Maria Bartroomo on Fox News where
they said flatly that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. Dan Bongeni said,
I've seen the file. He committed suicide. Cash Pttel said
the same.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
Thing, you said, Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
People don't believe it.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
Well, I mean, listen, they have a right to their opinion.
But as someone who has worked as a public defender,
as a prosecutor, who's been in that prison system, who's
been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who's been in segregated housing,
you know a suicide when you see one, and that's
what that was. They killed himself again, you want me
to I've seen the whole file.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
He killed himself. They got huge blow for that from
a there's probably millions of Americans just do not believe that,
and now have turned against them, and they repeated it
again yesterday an interview with Bear around Fox. But for
other things, so they're trying to they can't. What can
they say about the Epstein case, like the evidence is
(03:15):
in front of them, right they But for other things
they've tried to play into their previous conspiracy theories like
cash Bettel said promised in this latest Fox interview that
he is going to show the public the real story
of what FBI assets were doing in the January sixth
attack on the Capitol. There's already been a thorough report
by the Department of Justice Inspector General on this which
(03:37):
gave chapter and verse on what was true and what
was false about that conspiracy theory. So I'm not sure
what else is left to be revealed, but you know,
he left the impression the public is going to know
the real story, and conservative media plays right into that,
plays it up The New York Post, the Daily Mail, Fox.
So that's been really interesting to watch that dynamic.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
So for Stop the Steal, the conspiracy theory, there were
sixty two cases, they lost sixty of them. Most of
them were just thrown out because there was no evidence,
it was without merit, and the two where they prevailed
were under minor conditions. It really made no sense. And
I wanted to ask you, just knowing the judiciary and
the system and the very fact that you would bring
(04:18):
sixty two cases and have sixty losses and two. Really
that don't really mean anything. Is that part of the
conspiracy to bring those cases? Or is that just like
trying hard? Where's the line there?
Speaker 4 (04:32):
That's a great question. I mean, look, and what's also
interesting is you don't hear much about that anymore. Right,
Like they have power now. So there was some talk
about we're going to re examine the twenty twenty election,
and there is a Weaponization Task Force, let's not forget
that is supposedly looking at a lot of different things.
But you don't hear much about that because there isn't
the evidence out there. It My take on why they
(04:53):
brought so many cases is there was a demand. Trump
kept saying find the evidence, and people at Rudig Giuliani
were trying to satisfy him, and so they just went
into court with whatever they had and it wasn't much.
And the other interesting thing about that whole episode was
that one of the main parts of the effort of
Trump to baselessly say there was fraud was he wanted
(05:15):
the Justice Department to tell the country that there was fraud,
and he asked his senior he demanded, really of his
senior Justice Department of fishers to do that, and they all
said no, and they threatened to resign. These were his
political appointees, and they were essentially they were unsung heroes
at the moment because they had they had sent out
a letters what Trump wanted to do, saying we found fraud,
(05:37):
we need to investigate this. That would have changed the
whole equation, and they didn't. And none of those people
are working in the Trump Justice Department in the second term.
There aren't people like that there now. There are people
who I think would do whatever he wanted, would say
yes to that request now, and that's pretty.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
It is scary. So Jerry and I have been out
of government service for a while now, and I'm always
careful to not try to talk to people who are
inside and find out what's happening. But that's your job.
What's it like inside these places the extent that you're
getting reporting on that, are people leaving? Are people just
keeping their heads done? What are you learning about that?
Speaker 4 (06:13):
John? Yet? People are leaving and this is it's been
a real earthquake. It's hard to convey how unprecedented that work.
It's use all the time, how different this is than
any other administration in modern history, and how we didn't
really see this coming. Remember, people used to talk about
Schedule F. Donald Trump was going to implement Schedule F
to get rid of the senior the civil servants. It
(06:33):
turns out he didn't need to do that because he
was willing to fire people in what many experts say
are legally questionable ways. He's willing to reassign civil servants
in ways that they probably could challenge. But it turns
out it's pretty expensive to hire a lawyer and go
to the merit system's protection board, and then you're still
(06:53):
out of a job anyway, and you don't have income
for two years. So people aren't doing that. So what
he's found is that he what they have found is
that they've been able to remove most of the top
officials at the Justice Department, many of the top officials
at the FBI, and targeted ways like they also they
fired all the prosecutors for most of the prosecutors who
(07:14):
worked for the special counsel Jack Smith case. These were
career prosecutors who had done Yeomen's work for the governments.
Many of the national security experts they've removed For example,
many of the top officials in the National Security Division
of the Justice Department a lot of the institutional memory,
and they did it by transferring them to things that
had nothing to do with their legal expertise, like the
(07:34):
Sanctuary City Task Force or some program to train judges overseas.
And after a while, these people said, you know, I
can go earn a good living in the private sector.
I'm not putting up with this anymore. And that expertise,
by the way, that's not easily rebuilt. You guys know
this because you work in government. That's going to take
a decade to replenish. It's not just going to be like, oh,
a new president in four years, we can hire all
(07:54):
these people back. They're gone. The Civil Rights Division of
the Justice Department, more than half the lawyers, more than that,
maybe sixty seventy percent have left because it's being run
by a person who's just turned civil rights enforcement on
its head. And you know, in the FBI, initially there
was a plan, we think there was a plan to
(08:15):
fire a mass amount of people who had worked on
jener six. It was interesting the people that they brought
in to beat the acting director, a man named Brian
Driscoll and a guy named Rob Cassane. They stood up
and they said no to that, and they I think
they were successful and they staved that off. But nonetheless
they removed basically all the top layer of management assistant directors.
(08:36):
There have been firings and removals of several special agents
in charge. Some we know about, others we don't know.
I'm trying to confirm and what the message that that
is sent is you toe the line or you're out.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
You know.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
In the first term, we saw bureaucracies acting more normally
and resisting things that they thought were illegal, and it
was a different group of people. Anyway, the political appointees
were not We're not asking them to do these kinds
of extreme things. Now we're seeing political appointees turning agencies
the missions on their head, and civil servants feeling compelled
(09:10):
to go along or they know they're going to lose
their job. And you guys know that this is not
normal for government. This just doesn't happen. Did This Trump
administration very different from the first one.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And just to add to that is the FBI and
the CIA in the State Department. In many ways, they're
like what people probably know better as the military. Like,
you don't become an army general or a Marine general
or an admiral by just signing up and when you're
in your mid twenties they make it. It takes years
and years of experience. It takes a long time to
create that expertise, that knowledge, that wide ability to lead,
(09:43):
that knowledge of these complicated and complex systems. It takes years.
That's why all the admirals and generals are in their fifties.
It's not just the and so you lose those people.
It isn't as if you just can turn the keys
over or when you leave, if new people come in,
you're losing that expertise.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
I know most of your listeners know this. You guys
know this, But just to explain and make it very clear,
these we're talking about people who are not political appointees.
They are civil servants. They've served Republicans, they've served Democrats.
They were in the first Trump administration. They didn't like
everything they were asked to do, but they did it.
Some of them were appointed in the first Trump administration.
The head of the Public Integrity Unit, which is by
(10:21):
the way, has been disbanded. We could talk about that
at the Justice Department was a Republican Trump appointee. But
yet those people, anybody who is deemed who have done
things that the Trump folks didn't like in the Biden administration,
they're out. And again they're supposed to be protected by
civil service rules. The idea behind civil service is that
you're insulated from politics and from political demands, but that
(10:41):
system has come under real strain in this administration.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
So Ken, I think one of the things that is
really different and is also scary and touches on conspiracy,
is now the relationship between the DOJ and the White House.
It was there was always a there was always a
all between them, and they're needed to be because the
DOJ and the FBI needed to be a political and
that's not really the case anymore. So what are your
(11:08):
concerns about the White House just telling and the Justice
Department being okay with investigating and bringing cases against political
opponents for political reasons and b what happens when they
start to go to court or people are pressured to
plead guilty and you won't have to go through the
process is often the most painful thing. Right, you got
(11:29):
to get lawyers, you could lose, But if you plead guilty,
which is what they really what they want. And so
what's your sort of sense on where we are now
and where you see us going?
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Maybe you're putting your finger on another unprecedented I hate
to use that word. It's an earthquake of a development. Really,
for the first time in the post Watergate era, we
have a Justice Department that has thrown out the idea
of being independent and of not having contacts with the
White House on individual criminal cases. And we have and
(11:59):
said they're completely in lockstep with the White House and
the president. You've got an Attorney general, we've all seen
her on Fox. She says openly she's a friend and
ally of the president. She's there to carry out the
president's policies. In the last administration, Mark Garland, by the end,
he didn't even want to be in the same room
with Joe Biden. He was investigating his son. You know,
there was no love loss between that White House and
(12:21):
that Justice Department, and Garland took pains to be independent.
It is completely the opposite here. For decades, there's been
a White House contacts policy that restricts who with the
White House can talk to certain people. That Justice armored
about criminal investigations. We don't know exactly what happened with
that policy, but we don't believe that it's being followed.
And again we don't have the details because it's hard
(12:42):
to penetrate the Trump inner workings about who exactly is
Stephen Miller talking to the Attorney general, which levers are
being pulled, But we know very clearly that, for example,
Donald Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office,
essentially ordering They called it a review, not an investigtion
in or review. Probably the lawyers use that word of
Chris Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity Agency, and
(13:05):
then lo and behold, a few weeks later we reported
that he's under criminal investigation. And that is chilling. That
is the idea that a president can essentially direct a
criminal investigation of a political opponent.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
And yeah, he was appointed by Trump the first.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Time exactly, and why Trump doesn't like the fact that
he said the twenty twenty election was free and fair
and free from fraud. But to your point earlier, Jerry,
what are the consequences of this, because there still is
a court system, and you still need a jury verdict
to convict somebody, So that is really hard to do.
But as you mentioned, just being under federal criminal investigation
(13:40):
is expensive. It causes anguish, it causes problems for people.
It's something that nobody wants to do. I mean, Chris
Krebs had to leave his company, and despite him leaving
the company, they still that company. Members of that company
still lost their security clearances. They're in the cybersecurity business,
they need those. So these are the kind of things
that are happening. This White House has shown no compunction
(14:02):
about going after its enemies, using whatever power it can,
removing security clearances. We can talk about what's been happening
with the law firms.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
You MEETIA are the ones that are supposed to protect us.
So keep doing what you can there. But to go
to a little bit a conspiracy thing recently, I don't
know if you saw this report about Fort Knox. So
Fort Knox supposedly where the gold is. The government controls it.
There's like any government for so, there's regular reviews, there's
people there, there's security. Donald Trump has kept up this
thing that, oh, maybe the gold is not there. Then
(14:32):
it turns out his son runs a company that benefits
by this. He's spread the word that maybe the gold
is not safe, and maybe it's not there, which raises
the price of gold, which helps his son specifically with
his gold company, and these type of things. And then
people around him, on Musk and others, they amplify this
and they create this fake story completely out of whole
(14:53):
clock that oh my god, maybe the gold's not safe,
which of course is silly. He's the president of the
United States. He could get it. He could get the
answer in five minutes. And in fact, you don't, those
of us who work in the COUMP, you don't need
to even try to get the answer, because of course
it's safe. That's what There's a whole institution behind us.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
Fort Knox is synonymous with security. It's the place where
America's gold reserves are stored. But are those legendary vaults
actually empty? President Trump and Elon Musk want to see
for themselves.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
We're gonna go into Fort Knox to make sure the
gold is there.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Don't be totally surprised.
Speaker 6 (15:27):
We opened the door, we'll say there's nothing here. They
stole this too.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
We're actually going to Fort Knox to see if the
gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Tons of gold.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
The idea that millions of people believe this stuff is
disturbing in and of itself, right, like this thing that's
self evident to you and me, of course, the goal
and even Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator Trump ally, I remember,
said right away, I was in Fort Knox a few
years ago. I saw the gold that's there, But that
didn't stop people from believing it. So that's that. But
in terms of the corruption, look, I this is not
(16:00):
I report on a daily basis, but I've been watching
it and I read a great piece by Peter Baker
in the New York Times that really laid out how
this we again, this is a thing that we have
never seen before in the modern history of the presidency.
I mean, look, we all you know, historians now shown
that LBJ was pretty corrupt, he had the TV stations.
(16:20):
Nixon did what Nixon did. But this is massive. And
first of all, Donald Trump was the first in the
first term. He was the first president in the modern
era who didn't put his holdings in a blind trust
and disassociate himself from his businesses. But it was the
things that we were worried about in the first term,
like which foreign governments were buying hotel. Rooms at the
Trump hotel are quaint in comparison with what we're seeing now.
(16:43):
As you mentioned the dinner where people paid millions of
dollars to essentially dine with Trump. The deals that his
son and son in law are making, the crypto, the
meme coin, and that just it's unbelievable that he's able
to they the family, are able to enrich themselves this
way as their deregulator crypto and taking actions that fuel
crypto boom.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And well, in the tariffs, you this whole thing, I'm
gonna put these big tariffs on. But if you come
to me personally, if you're Apple and you come to
me personally and say, okay, I'll give you, I'll give
you a break, but you've got to do things for me,
it's just old fashioned corruption, like Joey and I saw
overseas for many years.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
It seems that way, And even as this is going on,
Don Trump and his aide to dismantle all the mechanisms
that would check that corruption, whether it's firing the inspector
generals or doing away with the public Integrity section of
the Justice Department. By the way, I'm not sure that
any of those entities could have dealt with a president
who is doing these things in the wake of a
Supreme Court decision that said the presidences immune for prosecution.
(17:40):
So I don't know if any of this would have helped,
but at least it might have exposed more some of
this stuff you might have had. If you had an
independent FBI, then they saw this, they might investigate, you know,
and at least start an investigation. But we have none
of that. And so you know, there's there's this stuff
we know about, and then there's the stuff we don't
know about.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Boom so Ken, John and I and you we all
have something in common. We are all enemies of the state. Now,
went back when we were in Cia, the state we
(18:19):
were enemies of was like Russia, North Korea, Iran, And
now you're the current right House calling members of the
media enemies of the state. So how we got around,
you know, we found people who were in those states
who couldn't stand as agents. Often right, they would volunteer
and then we would handle them securely to make sure
(18:40):
that the information got to where it was the truth.
So now as sort of an enemy of the state,
said tongue in cheek. I think you're a represent of
democracy A What is your relationship to the Justice Department, folks,
And are you still able to get people to talk
to you off flyne and tell you the truth because
(19:01):
there's a lot of fear about being hunted down and fired.
I guess what I want to hear is I want
you to assure us and listeners that, yeah, you can
keep people safe and they can find ways to talk
to you to talk about the truth of what's going on.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
The great question, Jerry, and the answer is absolutely yes.
In an atmosphere like this, people want to talk more
than ever. People who would never talked before are talking now.
My relationship with the Justice Department, frankly, is cordial. With
the Public Affairs Department that Pam Bondi appointees. They're perfectly
nice people and we have a working relationship, and I
of course give them a chance there's a critical story,
(19:37):
I give them a chance to commem and I tell
them what we're about to report, and I take their
point of view into account. But thankfully there are people
inside both the FBI and the dj and other places
that are willing to take risks and to tell us
things that they're not telling us classified things. By the way,
they're not going to violate the law to do this,
but that's okay. We don't need to know that. They're
(19:58):
telling us what's happening, and what moves are being made
policy wise, what personnel who's getting fired, just the basic
workings of these organizations. And frankly, the FBI leadership has
been very annoyed by some stories, including one idea about
Dan Bongino having a large security detail and has started
leak hunts, leak investigations, and they've been polygraphing people inside
(20:22):
the FBI, and you guys know what. You guys know
the implications of that, and.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So they don't really work, all right. They only tell
whether you're nervous. They can't tell whether you're lying or not.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
And if you want loyalty, if you start polygraphing people,
there goes that exactly right.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
Exactly if you were trying to recruit people at a
foreign government agency, you would just be thrilled to hear
that the bosses are polygraphing people and dealing them with suspicion.
So yeah, but the answer is yes, you know, the
vast majority of people inside these institutions are not happy
with things that are happening. It's not that they're against
everything Donald Trump wants to do. They may, for example, be
(20:56):
perfectly happy with cracking down on immigration or whatever, but
they see a corrosion of the rule of law, particularly
the way the FBI and the DOJ have been treated
and their acting accordingly.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Obviously, the Jake Tepper book that came out, and he's
making the rounds about the Biden health story, what's your
take on that?
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Look, I think Jake Tapper has said and others have
said that, Look, the media has some answering to do
about that, about why we missed what was obviously evidence
of cognitive decline, and why we allowed or didn't make
a bigger fuss about the fact that the President wasn't
doing interviews. I mean, we of course reported on that
and took note of it. And then my personal experience
(21:35):
with this story was when Rob Herr issued the Special
Counsel report and talked about well meaning a lily man
with a poor memory. I reported on that, and the
pushback from the White House was intense. And then when
I actually was the first to write the story that
remember when Joe Biden right after that complained that Rob
her brought up his dead son, and how I dare he?
(21:57):
What is this guy doing bring up my dead son?
And I immediately was able to figure out that's not
what happened. Actually, Joe Biden brought up his dead son,
and even though they knew the transcript eventually would be out,
White House officials just simply lied about that. And I
use that word not it's not an insignificant word to use.
And they just were not on the level, and they
(22:17):
pushed back. They just wanted to win the day, win
the news cycle, even knowing that they would be exposed later.
And then recently when the audio of that interview came out,
it was even worse. So yeah, there was a I
don't know if different authors have had different takes on this.
Chris Whipple wrote a book and his conclusion was it
wasn't a cover up, it was wilful blindness. People. He
had good days and bad days, and people around him
(22:38):
really believed he was effective to function. I think Jake
Tapper's book leans more into some people covered some stuff up.
I don't know what the ultimate answer is there, but
it clearly now people are coming to grips with the
fact that had Biden gotten out and he served one
term as he said he was going to do at
one point, and there was a normal primary, maybe the
world would be much different today.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Those of us who've taken history and political science courses
in the lead up to our president jobs understand that
one of the key jobs, maybe the key job of
a president, is to communicate, to explain to the people
what he's doing, why they're doing it. And as we
led up to this election, if the economy was doing well,
and if he did have policies who are helping the
average worker, and in red states and these other places,
they did a really poor job of communicating to the
(23:22):
public what was going on. So I really hold them
responsible for their failure or his failure to communicate effectively,
and the people around him to get him to communicate effectively,
and if he couldn't so, then perhaps call it out.
I still think he's a million times better than Trump.
But nonetheless, if we're going to be honest brokers here,
we have to explain where we think people are going wrong,
(23:43):
and you and the media have to do that too,
even though you get attacked from both sides.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
I agree and the polls show that the public was
way ahead of us. The media or whoever, the elites
they thought he was too old from jump seventy percent
at one point, and so I don't know why more
people didn't listen to that. That signal was certainly there.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
You have a long history of watching, of following national security.
Now have you seen since WMD in Rock have you
seen anything at all what happened with the assessment over
Venezuela where the intelligence community comes out and says that
there is no or almost no evidence of control by
(24:25):
the Venezuelan government of these criminal gangs and they're it's
not an invasion. And then you've got the number two
with the DNI saying basically, change this. The president doesn't
like this. This is politicization we haven't seen since the
Iraq War, and of course that didn't go real well
for us when we got politicized. So what's your sense
on that?
Speaker 4 (24:44):
I agree with you one hundred percent, and I think
but I think it speaks really it was comforting, and
it speaks well for the intelligence community that they didn't
change a thing, like, they didn't buckle under that pressure.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
They got fired.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
That's true, and so what will have up in the
next time. That's a fair point. But the analysts who
produced the underlying work presumably didn't get fired. You can't
fire them all. I don't know. Again, I'm not calling
the intelligence community as intensely right now, but I'm told
that there's been less of that, the kind of purges
that we're seeing at FBI and DJ. It's harder to
do that at the CIA and D and I. We'll see.
(25:19):
It's just very it's very scary.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
But was this a conspiracy? I mean, did Joe ket
just is it it like they just know the White
House wouldn't like it? Or are they not writing anything down?
Are they getting on a phone call and saying, is
it you know somebody Steven Miller saying, you know, kill this.
This is a conspiracy. I want you to do this.
And Joe Kent was just the one caught writing the note.
(25:42):
How much of a conspiracy is this or do they
just know?
Speaker 4 (25:45):
I just remember in the first term, it was well
known that you don't bring up Russia or things related
to Russia in intel briefings because then the boss would
go in a bad direction. And so it's there are
a lot of things around Trump that people around him
just know that this is what he wants. This is
a smart thing to do. So it would not surprise
me at all if it was just like him or
(26:06):
someone else taking the initiative and saying, let's take another
look at that.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
So one thing you are having to work on a
lot now is you look at justice point is the
issue of immigration. What are you learning now? I do
think it's true at the beginning of the Biden administration
he did send signals that brought a lot of immigrants
to our shores, or legal immigrants. But I also see
these stories that in the last year there's probably more
illegal immigrants that were pushed out by the Biden administration
(26:31):
than there have been by the Trump administration. Despite all
the stories and the sort of cruelty, we see, what's
the truth there? What are you learning about the whole
issue of border protection and immigration and the legal immigration?
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Again, this is I'm not the expert on this. Was
someone else covers this for us, but I watch it closely,
and I think the story of the Biden administration was,
as you said, wide open doors in the beginning. Then
they realized this is a problem. They started slowly closing
the doors, and by the end there was very little movement.
But they didn't tell that story effectively, again going back
to communication, in part because some of their base, you know,
(27:04):
it was not a good story that for some of
their race, and they didn't agree with that policy, but
they certainly didn't weren't able to communicate to the public
that hey, by the way, we've shut the door. This
is not the first two years. But Trump has done things.
Trump has taken it much further, obviously, and border crossings
are almost non existent now. But it was interesting. I
actually did some I had to do some live shots
today on this immigration issue because they've there were some
(27:27):
people removed from their jobs inside of because the White
House is frustrated with the pace of deportations, and it
turns out it's hard to deport people. Like the promise
of mass deportations, that's really hard to do. So, like
if there are ten million undocumented immigrants in this country,
I think that Trump administration said in April they had
removed one hundred and forty thousand. That's a drop in
(27:50):
the bucket. Right last fall, there were documents that showed
there were four hundred thousand undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions,
including twenty nine thousand felony conviction. Most of those people
are still here because they're hard to find. It's manpower intensive.
You have to have a strike force, you have to
have arm people to go out, especially the day, and
that's why they've ordered the FBI to spend like thirty
(28:11):
percent of their time working on immigration matters, which is
very frustrating for a lot of FBI people I talked to,
and it's probably taking resources away from counter terrorism and
counter espionage because they can't deliver on their promise to
deport all these people unless they The only way really
they could do it is to start having mass workplace rates,
really just showing up and vacuuming people up, and that
(28:32):
would cause a lot of problems for the economy. It
would cause maybe people the general public would not be
appreciative of that.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
So we've got this court now, and surprisingly Cony Bairrett
and Kevin R. Are surprising a lot of people. And
this is the last Bastion and gues case after case
ends up in the Supreme Court. What's your sense on
the court's makeup and where its limits are and how
it can be pressured anything that's the last barrier, right,
(29:02):
and what happens if and when it comes to Trump
defying the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4 (29:06):
I probably can give you the conventional wisdom on this,
which is, as you said, it's pretty clear that Cony,
Barrett and Kavanaugh on a lot of these issues are
not sympathetic to what the Trump administration is trying to do,
and so a lot of people think it'll be a
lot of seven to cases. What we're seeing in the
lower courts is that the Trump administration is getting it's
colack cleaned on everything from Harvard to the law firms
(29:27):
to immigration cases. It's starting the losses are really starting
out up at The Administration's answer to that is this
is a judicial coup. These horrible judges are standing in
the way of democracy, which is really scary rhetoric and
raises questions about at what point will they try to
defy a court order the main bulwark against a lot
of the things that the Trump administration has tried to
do that many people think is illegal and unconstitutional, And
(29:51):
it remains to be seen how many of these are
going to win in the Supreme Court. But what we've
seen so far is that again seven to two seems
like a smart us.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Bet let me go back to something I do know.
You did a lot of work on You spend a
number of years reporting on the intelligence community and CIA
of just you know your experience from that. What do
you take away from what you learned about the intelligence community?
And you can give us some good stuff and some
bad stuff, or if you don't have any good stuff,
just the bad stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:17):
No, it's both, of course, it's both. Like what I learned,
it was fascinating, and the CIA used to come into
this fresh having read all the books and watched the movies,
and there's a mystique about the CIA, and the CIA
did incredible things, and particularly after nine to eleven, So
that was fascinating to meet people like you John and Mark,
Polly Morobliss and you Jerry. I mean, just like the
intelligence comunity is full of quiet heroes, and I've been
(30:40):
really fast and privileged to meet people and hear their stories.
And then on the other side you realize in some
ways the CIA is also another government bureaucracy, like the
Agriculture Department, and you have people who complain about the
pace of things and write books about how they they
weren't able to do the intelligent collection that they wanted
to do when they were a knock in Europe or whatever.
Or for example, I did a story many years ago
(31:02):
about what I actually under their Freedom of Information Act.
I got a bunch of Inspector General reports that talked
about the management culture of the CIA being bad and
there wasn't training for managers and people were elevated who
had no business being managers. And then you know, a
survey actually that showed that a lot of people were
leaving because of bad management. And I heard that story
over and over again, people saying, this is a great place,
(31:23):
but like, I can't advance here. I feel that my
manager is terrible, so I'm leaving. And then of course
there was the post nine to eleven debate about the
interrogation issues and the black sites and stuff, and I
was so interesting to cover the evolution of that, which
is amazing that it's still being litigated in the Guantanamo cases.
Well let me ask you this, though, what's your take
(31:43):
on how are millennials, because you know, I haven't really
covered CIA closely for a number of years now, how
are the younger generation getting integrating themselves into that bureaucratic structure.
Are they thriving? Are they changing the place?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Sort of? I think two things. One is, when we
went in, I think you saw it as a calling, right,
it was like it's like you're a policeman or a priest.
It's like it's something you do your whole life. And
I think younger people, which is Naela like I'll come
in and do this for two or three years and
then get out. And I don't think we thought they were.
But to be a good case officer, you can't do
(32:17):
it in three years. I mean it takes ten to
twelve years sometimes until you really understand enough to be
able to run a small station or something like that.
And the other thing is, whereas John and I came
from the Stone Age, I mean we actually entered the
agency before they had computers. They were just phasing out
electric typewriters. But today separating anybody under the age of
(32:41):
thirty from their telephone is almost impossible. And yet it's
a death threat for us because it records where you are,
what you do, who you talked with, and how you
socialize and how you interact with the world. Without one
of those devices is really difficult for people under thirty,
but pretty easy for John.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And I can remember talking to sort of older guys,
you know, when we were still in and they left.
They were like, oh, it's not the same as it was,
and I'm like, my god, we're doing amazing things. So
I always said to myself when I leave, I'm not
going to be that way talking about how bad it
is now and how they don't do it. And so
I'm sure there's still, you know, incredible work being done here.
But the one bitch I do here when I talk
to people who are still in sort of senior people
(33:21):
running management overseas, is like to get people to go
out and do the work overseas as hard Like they
all want to be on the computer. It's like you
need to go out and actually meet physical people, and they're.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
Like, can I send an email?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
So I was in Iraq, for example, and I got
to tell the young people who were there they were committed, idealistic. Often,
if not the majority of them were giving up jobs.
They came out of great schools with great prospects. They
gave up jobs where they could be earning two or
three times as much to serve and bagdad and take
(33:54):
huge risks and be away from their family. And I
got to say, I think every generation of cias, not all,
but probably the majority, really go in because they want
to serve, and they believe in what they're doing, and
they understand the agency has issues warts and all, but
at the end of the day, they really want to
be part of something that they hope is mostly a
(34:16):
force for good.
Speaker 7 (34:17):
And I think that's still the same today.
Speaker 4 (34:34):
I've noticed in the Trump era is just a greater
concern from our lawyers about, for example, the idea of
are the are these going to be the first? Is
this going to be the first administration to prosecute a
journalist under the Espionage Act? Because as you guys know,
that's always been out there. It's a threat the laws
written as it's illegal to publish classified information. And the
Bush administration they considered it and they said, we're not
(34:56):
doing this. That's a worry, and so that's something new
that even worry about that in previous administrations, there's guidelines,
for example, about subpoenaing journalist records, and Mark Garland basically
said we're not doing that, and they just PAMBODI repealed
those guidelines. Those are the things I worry.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I think that's a real threat. I think they're I
think they believe that a lot of the public doesn't
follow understand these things, and if they're told that the
media is doing something wrong, and large enough portion of
the population will believe that.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
What's a journalist these days? Is a podcast journalist? Is
Tim Poole a journalist? Is arguably snowed and right he
goes online? Is he a journalist? You obviously are. What's
a journalist?
Speaker 4 (35:39):
Now, that's an old question, This dilemma has been with
us for a long time, but it's really You're right,
it's really pronounced and more exacerbated in the age of
the podcast and sub stack. And look, my kids. I
don't think my kids could answer what a journalist is.
They're constantly they're getting bombarded with information they don't know
the source of it. The videos on TikTok, who made that?
Is that person credible?
Speaker 6 (36:00):
Look?
Speaker 4 (36:00):
All I can say is, like the journalism I practice,
before we say something, before we report something, it goes
through layers of vetting, not just editors and senior executives,
but then we have a standards department. Because back in
nineteen ninety six, there was a scandal where Dateline put
a bomb on a gas tank because they were trying
to show that the gas tank blew up and they
(36:20):
gave it a little help. President MBC lost their job.
So ever since, it's been a very robust standards operation.
Lawyers look at it, and that's true of most mainstream
news organizations, and it's not true of Joe Rogan, right,
it's not true of some people on Substack.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
We don't do it on this podcast either to because
we just say whatever the hell we want.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
But you could your self censor because you're not going
to slander someone, like you know, there's certain things you
wouldn't say that. But that's not really a satisfactory answer.
But that is one way to separate what is a
traditional journalist from this new kind of thing is like
how is the information vetted? What's the reporting process?
Speaker 2 (36:56):
So every administration can be its character can be judged
by like the jokes they tell about it. So I
don't know if you've heard any Trump two point zero
jokes or anything, but I've been looking at I haven't
seen any good ones. But it was like, how do
you get Trump to change a light bulb? Tell them
Joe Biden put it in.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Well, I can I apologize for Jerry's stupid joke. I
do want to thank you. I don't want to keep
you too long. You have important work to do and
you want to thank you for what you're doing. We
hope you keep it up. It's a tough time to
be a journalist, and I thank so much for spending
time with us.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
It's been my privilege. John and Jerry, thanks so much.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry, O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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