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.
Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
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 3 (00:30):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
This episode of Mission Implausible was recorded previously before the
government shut down, before the prosecution of Latisia Jams and
James Comey for.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
A lot of stuff, all right.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
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. The probably more important, he
was a standout football star for the Williams College FS
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 a great job there. However,
(01:20):
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 (01:41):
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
(02:01):
of money actually fomenting conspiracy theories about in particularly the FBI.
Now they're running the place, and what's been interesting 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
(02:23):
weird theory about the who planted the pipe bombs outside
the RNC and DNC to come to fruition, and 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 Bartomo on Fox News where they
said flatly that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. Dan Bongenius said,
I've seen the file. He committed suicide. Cash Ptel said
(02:44):
the same thing.
Speaker 5 (02:45):
You said, Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
People don't believe it.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
They killed themselves.
Speaker 5 (03:09):
Again, you want me to I've seen the whole file.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
He killed himself.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
They got huge blowe 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 Brett Bear on 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 in front
of them, right they But for other things, they've tried
(03:37):
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 in Spector General in this which gave
chapter and verse on what was true and what was
(03:58):
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, Daily Mail, Fox. So
that's been really interesting to watch that dynamic.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
So for Stop the Steal the conspiracy theory, there were
sixty two court 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 that 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
(04:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Now?
Speaker 4 (04:51):
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 might have taken. Why they
(05:13):
brought so many cases is there was a demand. Trump
kept saying find the evidence, and people at Ruvig 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
(05:34):
the Justice Department to tell the country that there was fraud,
and he asked his senior he demanded really his senior
Justice Department officials 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 they had sent out a letter because
what Trump wanted to do, saying we found fraud, we
(05:56):
need to investigate this. That would change 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.
Speaker 6 (06:06):
Now.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
There are people who I think would do whatever he wanted,
would say yes to that request now, and that's pretty.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
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 down? What are you learning about that?
Speaker 4 (06:32):
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
(06:52):
turns out he didn't need to do that because he
was willing to fire people in what many experts say
are is 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. I are a lawyer and
go to the Meritism's Protection Board and then you're still
(07:13):
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
(07:33):
worked for the Special Counsel Jack Smith case. These were
career prosecutors who had done Yeoman'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
(07:53):
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
to replenish. It's not just going to be like, oh,
a new president in four years, we can hire all
(08:13):
these people back. They're gone. The Civil Rights Division of
the Justice Department, more than half the lawyers, more than
have 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
(08:34):
to fire a mass amount of people who had worked
on January six. It was interesting the people that they
brought in to be 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
(08:54):
assistant directors. 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. You know. The first term, we saw bureaucracies
acting more normally and resisting things that they thought were illegal,
(09:16):
and it was a different group of people. Anyway, the
political appointees were 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 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. This Trump
(09:38):
administration very different from the first.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
One 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,
(10:02):
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 (10:18):
And 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
(10:39):
is by 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 to 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,
(11:00):
but that system has come under real strain in this administration.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
So Ken, I think one of the things that is
really different and is also scared 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
wall between them, and there 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
(11:27):
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
(11:48):
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 one where we are now
and where you see us going.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
Maybe you're putting your finger on another unprecedented keep. 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 to Apartment 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
(12:18):
and 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, but she says openly she's a
friend and ally of the president. She's there to carry
out the president policies. In the last administration, Marrik 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
(12:39):
House and 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
(13:01):
it's hard 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 investigation. In a review, probably the lawyers use that
word of Chris Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity Agency,
(13:24):
and 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 2 (13:35):
And yeah, he was appointed by Trump the first time.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
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 is expensive.
(14:00):
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 leave a 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 about going after
(14:23):
its enemies using whatever power can removing security clearances. We
can talk about what's been happening with the law firms.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Your media 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, 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 it turns out
(14:52):
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, you know,
On Musk and others, they amplify this and they create
this fake story completely out of whole clock that oh
(15:13):
my god, maybe the gold's not safe, which of course
is silly. He's a president of the United States, get it.
He could get the answer in five minutes. And in fact,
you don't. Those of us who work in the company,
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 this.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
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 2 (15:42):
We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure
the gold is there. He'll be totally surprised.
Speaker 6 (15:46):
We opened the door.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
We'll say it is nothing here. They stole this too.
We're actually going to Fort Knox to see if the
gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold, tons
of gold.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
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 Krassley, a Republican senator Trump ally, I remember,
said right away, I was in Fort Knox a few
years ago. I saw the goal 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
(16:19):
what 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 have now
shown that LBJ was pretty corrupt, he had the TV stations.
(16:39):
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.
(17:02):
As you mentioned the dinner where people paid millions of
dollars to essentially dine with Trump. The deals that his
son and in law are making the crypto, the meme
coin not just it's unbelievable that he's able to they
the family, are able to enrich themselves this way as
they're deregulating crypto and taking actions that fuel crypto boom.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
And well, in the tariffs, you this whole thing, I'm
going to put these big tariffs on. But if you
come to me personally, 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 Jerry and I saw
overseas for many years.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
It seems that way, and even as this is going
on on, Trump and his aides to dismantled 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 presidence immune prostitution.
(17:59):
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 the stuff
we know about and then there's the stuff we don't
know about it.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
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
were enemies of was like Russia, North Korea, Iran, And
now you're the current White House calling members of the
of the of the media enemies of the state. So
how we got around, you know, we found people who
(18:50):
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 that the information got to where it
was the truth. So now is sort of an enemy
of the state, said tongue in cheek, And I think
you're a present of democracy. A What is your relationship
(19:12):
to the Justice Department, folks, And are you still able
to get people to talk to you offline and tell
you the truth because 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 (19:34):
The great question, Jerry, And the answer is absolutely yes.
In an atmosphere like this, people want to talk more
than ever. People who had never talked before are talking now.
My relationship with the Justice Department, frankly, is a 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. If there's a
(19:55):
critical story, I give them a chance to come 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
(20:17):
know that. They're telling us what's happening, 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
I did about Dan Bongino having a large security detail,
and has started leak hunts, leak investigations, and they've been
(20:39):
polygraphing people inside the FBI, and you guys know what that.
You guys know the implications of that, and so.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
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 2 (20:50):
And if you want loyalty, if you start polygraphing people,
there goes that exactly.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Right, Exactly you would 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 perfectly happy with cracking down on immigration
(21:18):
or whatever, but they see a corrosion of the rule
of law, particularly the way the FBI and the DOJ
have been treated, and they're acting accordingly.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Obviously, the Jake Tapper book that came out, and he's
making the rounds about the Biden health story, what's your
take on that?
Speaker 4 (21:32):
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
(21:54):
with this story was when Rob Herr issued the Special
Council report and talked about well meaning a literly 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?
(22:16):
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
put they pushed back. They just wanted to win the day,
(22:38):
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 you had good days and bad days,
and people around him really believed he was effective to function.
(22:59):
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 2 (23:19):
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 were helping the
average worker, and in red states and these other places,
they did a really poor job of communicating to the
(23:41):
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,
(24:02):
and you and the media have to do that too,
even though you get attacked from both sides.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
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, but that signal was certainly there.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
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
(24:44):
the Venezuelan government of these criminal gangs and 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 (25:03):
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.
They got fired, that's true, and so what will happen
the next time? That's a fair point. But the analysts
who produced the underlying work presumably didn't get fired. You
(25:24):
can't fire them all. I don't know. Again, I'm not
covering 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. In d and I,
We'll see. It's just very it's very scary.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
But was this a conspiray? I mean, did Joe Kent?
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.
(26:02):
How much of a conspiracy is this or do they
just know?
Speaker 4 (26:05):
I just remember, in the first term, it was well
known that you don't bring up Russia or things related
to Russia and 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
the smart thing to do. So it would not surprise
me at all if it was just like him or
(26:26):
someone else taking the initiative and saying, let's take another
look at that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
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 Bide administration
(26:50):
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 illegal immigration?
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Again, this is I'm not the expert on this. 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,
(27:23):
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
(27:47):
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 the Trump administration said in April they had
removed one hundred and forty thousand. That's a drop in
(28:09):
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 convictions. 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
arm people to go out, especially the day, and that's
why they've ordered the FBI to spend like thirty percent
(28:31):
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 vacuuting people up, and that
(28:51):
would cause a lot of problems for the economy, It
would cause maybe the general public would not be appreciative
of that.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
So we've got this court now, and surprisingly Cony Baird
and Kevinaugh are surprising a lot of people. And this
is the last pastion and case after k 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, if anything, that's the last barrier right, and
(29:21):
what happens if and when it comes to Trump defying
the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
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
claw cleaned on everything from Harvard to the law firms
(29:46):
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
Rais's questions about at what point will they try to
defy 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 on constitution, and
(30:10):
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 a smart bet.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Let me go back to something I do know. You
did a lot of work out. 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 (30:36):
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 Moroblis and you Jerry. I mean, just like the
intelligence comunity is full of quiet heroes, and I've been
(30:59):
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
(31:21):
about when 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 was no 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
(31:42):
great place, 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
(32:02):
your take on how are millennials Because you know, I
haven't really come to the 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 3 (32:15):
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 and which is Nael 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
(32:36):
can't do 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
(32:59):
age of 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.
So 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 and I.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
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 running management overseas,
(33:41):
is like to get people to go out and do
the work overseas. It's 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 (33:50):
Like, tell us send an email.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
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 can be earning two or
three times as much to serve in Bagdad and take
(34:13):
huge risks and be away from their family. And I
got to say, I think every generation of CIOs, 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
(34:35):
force for good. And I think that's still the same today.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
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 gonna be the first administration to prosecute a journalist
under the Espionage Act, Because as you guys know, that's
always been out there 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
(35:15):
doing this. That's a worry, And so that's something new
that you don't even worry about that in previous administrations.
There's guidelines, for example, about subpoenaing journalist records, and Merrik
Garland basically said we're not doing that, and they just
you know, Pambodi repealed those guidelines. Those are the things
I worry.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
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 3 (35:45):
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, But
what's a journalist? Now?
Speaker 4 (35:59):
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 can 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 (36:19):
Look?
Speaker 4 (36:19):
All I can say is like the journalism and 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
(36:40):
gave it a little help. President of NBC 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 3 (36:54):
We don't do it on this podcast either, because we
just say whatever the hell we want.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
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 at it? What's the reporting process?
Speaker 3 (37:15):
So every administration can be some of 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. Was like, how do
you get Trump to change a light bulb? Tell them?
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Joe Biden put it in.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
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. I
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 (37:49):
It's been my privilege. John and Jerry, thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
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 a Bobble
Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
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 3 (00:30):
Of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
This episode of Mission Implausible was recorded previously before the
government shut down, before the prosecution of Latisia Jams and
James Comey for.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
A lot of stuff, all right.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
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. The probably more important, he
was a standout football star for the Williams College FS
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 a great job there. However,
(01:20):
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 (01:41):
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
(02:01):
of money actually fomenting conspiracy theories about in particularly the FBI.
Now they're running the place, and what's been interesting 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
(02:23):
weird theory about the who planted the pipe bombs outside
the RNC and DNC to come to fruition, and 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 Bartomo on Fox News where they
said flatly that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. Dan Bongenius said,
I've seen the file. He committed suicide. Cash Ptel said
(02:44):
the same thing.
Speaker 5 (02:45):
You said, Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
People don't believe it.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
They killed themselves.
Speaker 5 (03:09):
Again, you want me to I've seen the whole file.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
He killed himself.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
They got huge blowe 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 Brett Bear on 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 in front
of them, right they But for other things, they've tried
(03:37):
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 in Spector General in this which gave
chapter and verse on what was true and what was
(03:58):
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, Daily Mail, Fox. So
that's been really interesting to watch that dynamic.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
So for Stop the Steal the conspiracy theory, there were
sixty two court 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 that 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
(04:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Now?
Speaker 4 (04:51):
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 might have taken. Why they
(05:13):
brought so many cases is there was a demand. Trump
kept saying find the evidence, and people at Ruvig 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
(05:34):
the Justice Department to tell the country that there was fraud,
and he asked his senior he demanded really his senior
Justice Department officials 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 they had sent out a letter because
what Trump wanted to do, saying we found fraud, we
(05:56):
need to investigate this. That would change 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.
Speaker 6 (06:06):
Now.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
There are people who I think would do whatever he wanted,
would say yes to that request now, and that's pretty.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
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 down? What are you learning about that?
Speaker 4 (06:32):
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
(06:52):
turns out he didn't need to do that because he
was willing to fire people in what many experts say
are is 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. I are a lawyer and
go to the Meritism's Protection Board and then you're still
(07:13):
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
(07:33):
worked for the Special Counsel Jack Smith case. These were
career prosecutors who had done Yeoman'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
(07:53):
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
to replenish. It's not just going to be like, oh,
a new president in four years, we can hire all
(08:13):
these people back. They're gone. The Civil Rights Division of
the Justice Department, more than half the lawyers, more than
have 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
(08:34):
to fire a mass amount of people who had worked
on January six. It was interesting the people that they
brought in to be 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
(08:54):
assistant directors. 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. You know. The first term, we saw bureaucracies
acting more normally and resisting things that they thought were illegal,
(09:16):
and it was a different group of people. Anyway, the
political appointees were 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 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. This Trump
(09:38):
administration very different from the first.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
One 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,
(10:02):
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 (10:18):
And 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
(10:39):
is by 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 to 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,
(11:00):
but that system has come under real strain in this administration.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
So Ken, I think one of the things that is
really different and is also scared 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
wall between them, and there 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
(11:27):
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
(11:48):
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 one where we are now
and where you see us going.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
Maybe you're putting your finger on another unprecedented keep. 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 to Apartment 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
(12:18):
and 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, but she says openly she's a
friend and ally of the president. She's there to carry
out the president policies. In the last administration, Marrik 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
(12:39):
House and 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
(13:01):
it's hard 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 investigation. In a review, probably the lawyers use that
word of Chris Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity Agency,
(13:24):
and 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 2 (13:35):
And yeah, he was appointed by Trump the first time.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
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 is expensive.
(14:00):
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 leave a 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 about going after
(14:23):
its enemies using whatever power can removing security clearances. We
can talk about what's been happening with the law firms.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Your media 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, 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 it turns out
(14:52):
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, you know,
On Musk and others, they amplify this and they create
this fake story completely out of whole clock that oh
(15:13):
my god, maybe the gold's not safe, which of course
is silly. He's a president of the United States, get it.
He could get the answer in five minutes. And in fact,
you don't. Those of us who work in the company,
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 this.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
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 2 (15:42):
We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure
the gold is there. He'll be totally surprised.
Speaker 6 (15:46):
We opened the door.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
We'll say it is nothing here. They stole this too.
We're actually going to Fort Knox to see if the
gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold, tons
of gold.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
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 Krassley, a Republican senator Trump ally, I remember,
said right away, I was in Fort Knox a few
years ago. I saw the goal 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
(16:19):
what 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 have now
shown that LBJ was pretty corrupt, he had the TV stations.
(16:39):
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.
(17:02):
As you mentioned the dinner where people paid millions of
dollars to essentially dine with Trump. The deals that his
son and in law are making the crypto, the meme
coin not just it's unbelievable that he's able to they
the family, are able to enrich themselves this way as
they're deregulating crypto and taking actions that fuel crypto boom.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
And well, in the tariffs, you this whole thing, I'm
going to put these big tariffs on. But if you
come to me personally, 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 Jerry and I saw
overseas for many years.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
It seems that way, and even as this is going
on on, Trump and his aides to dismantled 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 presidence immune prostitution.
(17:59):
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 the stuff
we know about and then there's the stuff we don't
know about it.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
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
were enemies of was like Russia, North Korea, Iran, And
now you're the current White House calling members of the
of the of the media enemies of the state. So
how we got around, you know, we found people who
(18:50):
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 that the information got to where it
was the truth. So now is sort of an enemy
of the state, said tongue in cheek, And I think
you're a present of democracy. A What is your relationship
(19:12):
to the Justice Department, folks, And are you still able
to get people to talk to you offline and tell
you the truth because 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 (19:34):
The great question, Jerry, And the answer is absolutely yes.
In an atmosphere like this, people want to talk more
than ever. People who had never talked before are talking now.
My relationship with the Justice Department, frankly, is a 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. If there's a
(19:55):
critical story, I give them a chance to come 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
(20:17):
know that. They're telling us what's happening, 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
I did about Dan Bongino having a large security detail,
and has started leak hunts, leak investigations, and they've been
(20:39):
polygraphing people inside the FBI, and you guys know what that.
You guys know the implications of that, and so.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
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 2 (20:50):
And if you want loyalty, if you start polygraphing people,
there goes that exactly.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Right, Exactly you would 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 perfectly happy with cracking down on immigration
(21:18):
or whatever, but they see a corrosion of the rule
of law, particularly the way the FBI and the DOJ
have been treated, and they're acting accordingly.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Obviously, the Jake Tapper book that came out, and he's
making the rounds about the Biden health story, what's your
take on that?
Speaker 4 (21:32):
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
(21:54):
with this story was when Rob Herr issued the Special
Council report and talked about well meaning a literly 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?
(22:16):
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
put they pushed back. They just wanted to win the day,
(22:38):
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 you had good days and bad days,
and people around him really believed he was effective to function.
(22:59):
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 2 (23:19):
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 were helping the
average worker, and in red states and these other places,
they did a really poor job of communicating to the
(23:41):
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,
(24:02):
and you and the media have to do that too,
even though you get attacked from both sides.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
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, but that signal was certainly there.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
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
(24:44):
the Venezuelan government of these criminal gangs and 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 (25:03):
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.
They got fired, that's true, and so what will happen
the next time? That's a fair point. But the analysts
who produced the underlying work presumably didn't get fired. You
(25:24):
can't fire them all. I don't know. Again, I'm not
covering 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. In d and I,
We'll see. It's just very it's very scary.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
But was this a conspiray? I mean, did Joe Kent?
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.
(26:02):
How much of a conspiracy is this or do they
just know?
Speaker 4 (26:05):
I just remember, in the first term, it was well
known that you don't bring up Russia or things related
to Russia and 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
the smart thing to do. So it would not surprise
me at all if it was just like him or
(26:26):
someone else taking the initiative and saying, let's take another
look at that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
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 Bide administration
(26:50):
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 illegal immigration?
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Again, this is I'm not the expert on this. 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,
(27:23):
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
(27:47):
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 the Trump administration said in April they had
removed one hundred and forty thousand. That's a drop in
(28:09):
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 convictions. 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
arm people to go out, especially the day, and that's
why they've ordered the FBI to spend like thirty percent
(28:31):
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 vacuuting people up, and that
(28:51):
would cause a lot of problems for the economy, It
would cause maybe the general public would not be appreciative
of that.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
So we've got this court now, and surprisingly Cony Baird
and Kevinaugh are surprising a lot of people. And this
is the last pastion and case after k 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, if anything, that's the last barrier right, and
(29:21):
what happens if and when it comes to Trump defying
the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
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
claw cleaned on everything from Harvard to the law firms
(29:46):
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
Rais's questions about at what point will they try to
defy 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 on constitution, and
(30:10):
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 a smart bet.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Let me go back to something I do know. You
did a lot of work out. 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 (30:36):
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 Moroblis and you Jerry. I mean, just like the
intelligence comunity is full of quiet heroes, and I've been
(30:59):
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
(31:21):
about when 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 was no 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
(31:42):
great place, 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
(32:02):
your take on how are millennials Because you know, I
haven't really come to the 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 3 (32:15):
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 and which is Nael 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
(32:36):
can't do 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
(32:59):
age of 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.
So 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 and I.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
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 running management overseas,
(33:41):
is like to get people to go out and do
the work overseas. It's 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 (33:50):
Like, tell us send an email.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
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 can be earning two or
three times as much to serve in Bagdad and take
(34:13):
huge risks and be away from their family. And I
got to say, I think every generation of CIOs, 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
(34:35):
force for good. And I think that's still the same today.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
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 gonna be the first administration to prosecute a journalist
under the Espionage Act, Because as you guys know, that's
always been out there 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
(35:15):
doing this. That's a worry, And so that's something new
that you don't even worry about that in previous administrations.
There's guidelines, for example, about subpoenaing journalist records, and Merrik
Garland basically said we're not doing that, and they just
you know, Pambodi repealed those guidelines. Those are the things
I worry.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
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 3 (35:45):
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, But
what's a journalist? Now?
Speaker 4 (35:59):
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 can 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 (36:19):
Look?
Speaker 4 (36:19):
All I can say is like the journalism and 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
(36:40):
gave it a little help. President of NBC 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 3 (36:54):
We don't do it on this podcast either, because we
just say whatever the hell we want.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
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 at it? What's the reporting process?
Speaker 3 (37:15):
So every administration can be some of 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. Was like, how do
you get Trump to change a light bulb? Tell them?
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Joe Biden put it in.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
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. I
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 (37:49):
It's been my privilege. John and Jerry, thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
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 a Bobble
Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.