February 6, 2025 • 29 mins
Newt talks with former CIA operative, J. Michael Waller about his new book, "Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains." Waller explains how the FBI and CIA have shifted from their original missions to becoming tools of political correctness and propaganda. He highlights the politicization and bureaucratization of these agencies, particularly under the Obama administration, and the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Waller also critiques the intelligence community's failure to adapt to modern threats and suggests a fundamental redesign of the CIA and FBI, including splitting the CIA into separate entities for intelligence gathering and covert operations, and decentralizing the FBI's power. Their discussion also covers the need for a strategic overhaul to restore the effectiveness and integrity of America's intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of newts World. In the beginning, the
FBI and CIA fought America's enemies at home and abroad.
Now there are tools of a growing police state attacking
the left's political enemies and spying on ordinary American citizens?
How did we get here? In his new book, Big Intel,
(00:26):
How the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes
to deep state villains. Former CIA operative J. Michael Waller
shows how normal intelligence functions have given way to political
correctness and never ending pride propaganda trapping agents in the diversity,
equity and inclusion House of Merits. I'm really pleased to
(00:49):
welcome my guest, J. Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy
at the Center for Security Policy. His areas of expertise
include foreign propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. He
holds a PhD International Security Affairs from the Boston University. Michael,
(01:24):
welcome and thank you for joining me on Newtrum.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
It's great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
You mentioned that I have been what forty three years
since you guys were hanging out in my office.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
At the top of the Cannon House office building.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
It's amazing how much time flies when you're having fun.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Isn't it? It really is walk me for.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
A seconds your own life. What happened from College Republicans
to today?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Well, I ended up getting involved with friends of yours
with Herber Rohmerstein and Faith Whittlesey and Morton Blackwell and
others at the White House through College Republicans, and was
the White House youth person for promoting Reagan's policy to
roll back the Soviet Union. And they got me down
with the conference in Central America, and I did some
work for Bill Casey and then went on to become
a professor and teaching a lot of what I learned.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
That's great. Let's start with the nominations of Cash Patel
as FBI Director and Tlsey Gabbert as Director of National Intelliviance.
First of all, why do you think President Trump was
trying to achieve when he nominated them.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
President Trump wanted some really tough people who simply don't
care about being popular in Washington and playing the revolving
door game to land some big contractor law firm partnership
after heading their agencies. And so he picked a very
tenacious person like Cash Patel with experience in the area
to run the bureau, and that shocked a whole lot
(02:44):
of people. But really, there's no better person for the job.
He picked someone like Tulsea Gabbert with a Democrat background,
who got burned badly by the security apparatus. She was
labeled a suspected terrorist. She and her husband were labeled
threats to aviation even while she was a member of Congress,
and she came around in a lot of her points
of view as a result of that. So she, being
(03:06):
personally stung, really has a good motivation to do the
right thing.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I've known Tulsa Gabbert a long time. I really like her.
I think she's very smart. Why would the intelligence community
have done that?
Speaker 3 (03:18):
She was a rogue Democrat, She was a critic of
the system, so she was a threat. I don't see
any other reason beyond that. People point to certain points
of view she has, but they're simply points of view.
But she was viewed as a public enemy.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
In a sense, they've created their own monster. Yeah, this
is one of those classic cases where if you strike,
you had better win, because otherwise the person who attack
gets bigger and stronger.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You on An article recently was fascinating entitled why some
senators are so afraid of confirming Cash Pattel and Tulsa Gabbert,
who's in the blaze on February thirty. Why do you
think they're that afraid.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
They're afraid because Congress for forty nine years has never
held real oversight investigations or even hearings of the FBI
or the CIA. There have been cursory ones, but no
real hard skeptical oversight in any systemic way. I mean,
you have even somebody like Chuck Schumer, who was elected
(04:21):
in nineteen eighty, so he's been on the House and
Senate Judiciary committees for a total of forty five years.
He never once tried to hold the FBI into account
on anything. So you have these rogue apparatuses, which were
more rogue than they were in the nineteen seventies, and
Congress hasn't looked. And it's natural human nature. If nobody's
watching what you're doing, you're going to do what you
feel like doing, whether it's the right thing or the
(04:43):
wrong thing. So these institutions have gotten out of control
and become politicized to the point where they will go
after anyone who opposes them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Because it's very obvious that President Trump is shaking things
up in Washington. The latest the example is the way
which they've closed the doors of the US Agency for
International Development, literally in fact, locking employees out. Now, you've
had first hand experience with AID, and you worked as
a subcontractor for them in the nineteen nineties, can you
(05:13):
walk us through your experience with AID?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Early on, I did some work in Latin America and
some work in Russia. And in Latin America, they were
just doing their job for development, for helping train civil
society type things that were pretty legitimate, and they were
consistent with US foreign policy. It was always an instrument
of US foreign policy. But then after the Cold War,
under the Clinton administration, these agencies were wondering what to do,
(05:38):
and policymakers were wondering what are their purpose? And the
Clint administration flat out set at the time, you want
to join the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House or
Foreign Relations in the Senate to bring money back to
your districts using foreign policy to bring money back home.
That means contracting money. That means money for your friends
and cronies. That means money for the causes that the
(05:59):
political causes that you want to produce, meaning using our
foreign policy apparatus as a domestic liberal left political machine.
And that's what happened to the USAID. But I would
argue AID went even further, and it became a state
within a state, running its own foreign intelligence operations, as
operations to overthrow governments, regardless of what the president's policy was,
(06:22):
and then to recruit and to assess and to finance
and therefore control political operatives of other countries all around
the world. Not as an instrument to foreign policy, but
as an instrument to itself and to this big current
political machine that it became.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
At the time when we took USAID out of state,
it's because we distrusted state. But then USAID evolved on
its own into a system that I think is in
many ways anti American and certainly anti Israeli. I was
surprised in the last couple of days as they began
to release this information with how much of the money
(06:59):
was going into the US through these nonprofits to finance
left wing operations, I mean political apparently is being funded
by usidea. Apparently Bill Crystal was getting money.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
New York Times got millions, twenty.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Five percent of usida's funding eight billion dollars was allocated
to public international organizations rather than being spent directly by
the United States. And it's pretty clear that in some
places they were funding terrorist groups, they were funding people
who are actively anti American. As recently as October of
twenty four, Senator Tom Cotton was raising questions because we've
(07:37):
spent over a billion dollars in humanitarian aid DEGAZA, and
all it did was may comas stronger.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah, USAD has been funding this civilian support infrastructures for
insurgencies and for terrorist groups. Long ago, it was funding
civilian support infrastructure for our friends and allies, but it's
been doing it for Hamas. It's been doing it for
a lot of extremist groups around the world, and it's
also been used to wage cultural Marxist revolution in countries
(08:08):
with traditional values. Look at what they've done in Guatemala,
funding Marxist attorneys to become judges and then putting pressure
on the Guatemalan government to force it to appoint them
as justices to the high courts because Guatemalans won't elect
to Marxist president. It's a conservative country. Look at what
they're doing in Nigeria promoting this LGBTQ whatever else nonsense
(08:30):
that goes against the values of practically every last Nigerian,
but it's being shoved down their throats, and it's creating
anti Americanism among the populations at large, and then trying
to build hostile systems that want to tear down Western values.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Do you think in that sense on balance, that usid
IS programming has not advanced America's interests.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
It hasn't since the collapse of the Cold War. I'll
give you a good example. I saw it in the
nineteen nineties when I was working in Russia on the
USAID Rule of Law Project, working with the Russian Park
Parliament to build Frank Church style oversight committees of the
former KGB to make sure it could never rise again
and to expose and break apart the gangster state. It
was a KGB gangster state that was developing in the
(09:11):
nineties before this Lieutenant colonel named Ladimir Putin ever went
to Moscow, and so really USAID had a big role
in helping, inadvertently or otherwise, to build what became the
Russian gangster state, because it eviscerated the power of the
Russian Parliament to have oversight and have those oversight skills
and knowledge that they needed.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
In your book, begin tell how the CIA and FBI
went from Cold War heroes to deep state funds. You
paint a pretty stark picture of the CIA and fbis
of all, from the Cold War heroes to what you
call deep state villains. What were the key moments in
history that marked this transformation.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Well, if you discount the human frailties that any human
institution is going to have, and you look at the
big picture of the purpose, the CIA and the FBI
served their purposes by going after our foreign enemies abroad,
FBI against domestic spies and subversives at home, and law
enforcement here at home. But they were never in a
position to abuse the American population at large, let alone,
(10:31):
as Chuck Schumer warned several years ago, to have six
ways from Sunday to go after you as a senior
elected official of the US government.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
It wasn't that way.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Even Jay Edgar Hoover didn't have the powers that today's
FBI has, And as bad as he was in those
certain areas, he did a lot of good. Also, he
was never in a position to abuse power the way
the FBI since James Comey has done and Chris Ray.
So the real shift came in the Obama administration, in
the Bush forty three administration, when there was this mass
(11:03):
hiring of people who were poorly screened and often poorly
qualified for their jobs at CIA, and they brought a
lot of those West Coast Silicon Valley San Francisco values
with them. But the real shifts came when Barack Obama
mandated it with James Clapper as Director of National Intelligence,
lifetime radical, just a lunatic radical when he was an
Air Force general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency
(11:25):
and a counter intelligence problem by the way, and then
John Brennan as Obama's next CIA director, who was an
unrepentant voter for the Communist Party candidate Gus Hall back
three years before he was recruited into the CIA.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
And he laughs at it.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
He never uses as a teaching moment, say you can
do stupid things as a kid, but this is how
the enemy, our foreign enemies like the Soviets, are running
operatives in the United States to recruit us and to
subvert our system. He never once used that as a lesson.
These people ran the intelligence community and then you had
Valerie Jarrett and others in the White House writing the
Bama executive orders to impose critical theory cultural Marxism their
(12:05):
manifestation under DEI throughout the whole intelligence community, and this
corrupted the system.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Do you portray, particularly in the intelligence side, a really
remarkable imposition, if he will, of leaders who are sort
of knowingly not pro American.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Yeah, they think America is a bad country.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I remember one point Bremen arguing that there were really
moderates in Hesbelah. I think he had converted Islam. It
was thinking to myself, why would you have an intelligence
chief who has this fantasy, because there aren't any moderates
in Hesbelah. Hes Bela is dedicated to the destruction of
(12:48):
Israel and pretty cheerful about killing Americans, and yet you
had this guy preaching somehow We're going to reach out
and find the moderates. Was that because Obama was being duped,
because in fact, that's the world Obama wanted to create.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
As the world Obama wanted to create if you look
at his whole political formation, since he was a boy
living in Hawaii who his grandfather had guide him in
his teens, long time Communist Party agut operative Frank Marshall Davis,
and then he goes to college and then he meets
up in Chicago. If you look at the Democratic machine
(13:22):
in Chicago and the faction that he attached himself to,
it was the old Communist Party faction of the Chicago
Democratic Party. That's what raised him. That's where he met
Valerie Jarrett, whose parents were party That's where he met
Michelle through Valerie Jarrett. And then the state senator who
stepped down to run for Congress and anointed him to
replace her was also part of that party, Apparatta. So
(13:44):
this is Obama's America. When he said he wanted to
fundamentally transform America, this is what he was dreaming about.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
I understand that with the intelligence community. Well what about
the FBI, which had historically been very conservative and we
were characteristic with where in a suit and following the rules, etc.
How did that decay?
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Well, the FBI was the last to fall, and that
also took place at the end of the Robert Muller
twelve year reign over the FBI, when he completely reorganized
the FBI from a bottom up organization, which is the
way JEdgar Hoover designed it to be bottom up. He
was a very powerful director, but you'd open your cases
(14:25):
from the field offices and each of the fifty six
field office directors from around the country could call him
when they needed to. Now, the head of a field office,
the special Agent in charge, needs to go through fifteen
different steps in order to communicate directly with the number
one person at the FBI. So it cut that off,
and it created a huge bureaucratized, centralized from the top
(14:47):
apparatus where careerism meant everything. So rather than agents who
would spend a lot of time, maybe years of their
life on certain cases, if you're not promoted in eighteen months.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
You're out.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
This attracted a lot of very avaricious and politicized people
to join. So if you look at the national security
part of the FBI and the public corruption part of
the FBI, they're the most politicized of all. So what
really tipped the scale was when Obama loved Muller's job
so much that he asked Congress to allow him to
stay beyond his ten year term and kept him on
(15:20):
for two years to impose what then James Comey put
in as all the dei politicization of a bureau. Imagine
that on top of a bureau that had gone from
an investigative and law enforcement agency till after nine to eleven,
it was converted into a law enforcement agency and a
domestic intelligence service, which we've never had before.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Shouldn't that have been separated. I always argue that when
you're fighting crime, you're innocent until proven guilty. When you're
fighting terrorism, you're sort of guilty until proven innocent. If
you mix the two into the same institution, you're going
to corrupt it.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Right, And then you're using in intelligence for law enforcement.
There are different standards. There's evidence for law enforcement, and
you're required to prove that it was obtained legally and
with warrants and so forth, and then to be submitted
before a court and a trial. With intelligence, none of
that is needed. You get the information however you can,
from wherever you can, and then you're using that to
(16:19):
drive law enforcement investigations. No, but no place west of
East Germany does that.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I didn't realize until looking at your book that for
five years, starting twenty eleven, the Obama administration's Office of
the Director of National Intelligence held pride summits but they
were sort of secret. I mean, what was going on.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
This is the indoctrination of our intelligence community. These were
command performances where officials had to attend these Pride summits.
And even in the FBI, if you were not actively
what they call an ally, then you were marked. So
if you're just simply a professional saying, look, I don't
like what's going on around me, but that's what the
(17:00):
President and the Attorney General want, I'm just going to
just keep my head down and be quiet and do
my job, that's a mark against you. So the FBI said, literally,
you must embrace LGBTQ, whatever pride. You must be a
quote ally of the Pride movement. So they're turning a
national police into a political police.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
I mean there's a serious effort there to coerce the
American people in to change, whether they want it.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Or not, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
And when it's done in secret, with no deliberation, with
no congressional authorization, with no oversight, and really no recourse,
then you are indeed developing a political police system across
the country.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
National security community had his last fundamental redesign in the
late nineteen forties, and it's based on the National Security
Act of nineteen forty seven in the early Cold War.
Do you think we need a fundamental redesign of the
system and if so, how would you do it.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, well, we need another George Kennon to assess what
our foreign adversaries are all about and how.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
To deal with them.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
You need the bipartisanship that you had with Harry Truman
and Harry Truman in the Eisenhower period. They had plenty
of fights, but they had a general consensus on who
our adversaries were abroad, how they were infiltrating us domestically,
and how we needed to have a posture around the
world to fight that. But the world has changed so
much that we're still on that late nineteen forties structure
(18:51):
and even mentality. So even our defense priorities are designed
for that period. Commerce keeps throwing more money at defense.
That's such a huge waste because our whole grand strategy
is obsolete, and therefore our defense structure and spending is obsolete.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
I've written that we really have to have a profound rethinking,
and it's going to be very difficult. I mean, Hegseeth,
for example, has an enormous job trying to get the
Pentagon under control, and then trying to get it modernized
because it's a very bureaucratic, largely obsolete system. Now, now
you suggested that the CIA currently should be dissolved into
(19:29):
two different entities, one for intelligence gathering and analysis and
one for covert operations. Would you like break up the
CIA and create these two freestanding, separate systems.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yes, I would divide them in two parts, so it's
not abolish the CIA and have no intelligence service. We
need intelligence services, but break it into two functional parts,
so you have the ones that go out and they
collect intelligence, and then others when then that analyze that intelligence,
and they write their estimates and assessments and so forth,
and provide that inform with their assessments to the president
(20:02):
so that he can know what's going on in the
world and can decide how to make policy. That's what
the CIA was for. Then you'd have a separate, very
small covert action service to run covert operations abroad as
necessary under presidential control and never never on its own.
And then I'd shrink both of them, because if you
look at the CIA, it's a huge bureaucracy with an
(20:24):
even larger unknown number of contractors, and a lot of
it's waste. You don't need secret intelligence to spy on
the climate or gender or these other things. We also
need things that we don't have, like an ability for
our people, our agents abroad, to live in those societies
and integrate in those societies for the long term, like
(20:45):
the old British services did. People know their Americans and
so forth, and people might even know their CIA. But
they can just be there, be our eyes and ears
on the ground, and we won't have to rely on
the secret services of the local countries to tell us
what's going on, which is why happen. And then a
lot of the analysis is just unnecessary because there's so
much public information, and a lot of the human work
(21:06):
is unnecessary because so much is automated and digitized. You
don't need so many people. And then a lot of
the positions are just obsolete or even worthless. And so
you take the best elements of that and you hire
other people to come in. We can have a first
rate intelligence service again with first rate information. But you
see president after president since Reagan saying the president's daily
(21:28):
brief is pretty much useless. It's not informative. It's not
guiding on anything. And so if Democrats and Republican presidents
agree on that over decades, then something's fundamentally wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
It has to be fixed.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Do you happen to know? How do the Israelis divide
up intelligence?
Speaker 3 (21:43):
The Israelis have two main services. They've got the Mosad,
which is their international foreign intelligence service, and then they
have Shinbet, which is their domestic security service, and they
have others. But if you look at what happened to
the Israelis, they're as woke as our.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Intelligence services are.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
And we saw that on October seventh, where they didn't
anticipate any of this. Now that's horrible intelligence collection, horrible
internal security.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Well, and they had talked themselves into a fantasy world
in which they were paying Hamas enough to keep Hamas quiet.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Right, So you get into this mentality that your mortal
enemy really isn't a moral enemy. He can just be
bought off. So that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the moral enemy.
And I think a lot of liberal and left wing Israelis,
including in the secret services, feel about Israel that maybe
they really are an occupying power, maybe they're not a
(22:36):
legitimate state. Likely you see with a lot of Americans,
we're a force of evil in the world.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Maybe we're not legitimate.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Imagine having intelligence officers sworn to defend us who don't
believe in our founding principles and think that we are oppressors.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Here at home domestically. Would you split the FBI into
a crime fighting organization and an internal security organization.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Yes, And it's not a question of being anti FBI
have always been supportive of the FBI and its missions
until you see what's happened to it over the years,
and you see not just the corruption within it, but
the obsolescence of it. It's still the FBI that Jayeggar
Hoover built. We have counterintelligence as a major function to
fight foreign espionage against US, but it's really fly swatting.
(23:20):
So as good as so many of our counterintelligence officers are,
they're just getting the low hanging fruit and they're not
allowed to stay on cases for a long time. But
we have no strategic counterintelligence, like Michelle Van Cleeve has
recommended for so many years, to actively go out and
penetrate adversaries intelligence services, to disrupt them from the inside
(23:41):
and to deceive them so that they can't operate effectively
against us. We have no capabilities like that at all.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
When you think about all that, it seems to me
that you're talking about both a profound reshaping of the
CIA and a profound reshaping of the FBI. The second one,
I assume is going to be but Tell's.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Job right, and he has the temperament for it. You
need a real wolverine who just doesn't care what people
think about him. You can't have some polite lawyer from
the Beltway. So he's the right guy to do it.
He has his own ideas. I only know what he
said in public about them. But the fact is that
he's inheriting an obsolete organization. He's inheriting one that's full
(24:21):
of waste. It's been reorganized to the point that careerism
motivates everything, so you have the worst people going to
the top instead of the best people. And then you
have it where it's not doing the job that most
people in public would expect it to do. So if
it's good at investigating and fighting certain kinds of federal crimes, great,
why don't we take that section out of the bureau
(24:41):
with the best people, move it over to the US Marshals,
which is relatively a scandal free law enforcement agency and
has been around since the Founding Fathers.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
It's the only one.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
So move that there, and move the training FBI Academy
a Quantico over to the Marshall Service. Create a standalone
strategic counter intelligence service that has nothing to do with
law enforcement. Take other services.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
We don't need.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Two agencies FBI and ATF doing firearms and explosive work,
So get those people out. We don't need two drug
enforcement administrations. But you've get FBI does count in narcotics
as well as DEA, So move them out to DEA
and so forth down the line. And then by that
time all you have left at the FBI is HR.
So just take it and grind it down. I don't
(25:26):
think this requires an Act of Congress to do, because
the FBI has no statutory existence. It was founded by
an Attorney General memorandum and it doesn't have a legal charter.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
So it's created back what the nineteen twenties, nineteen oh eight,
nineteen oh eight, Wow, that's even pre j Agar Hoover.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, it was Teddy Roosevelt and he wanted to have
a federal law enforcement agency and Congress didn't want one,
so he went around it by having the Attorney General
write a memorandum detailing agents from the Secret Service, which
was under Treasury, to do work for the Justice Department.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And that was the root of the FBI. It was
a run around.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I did not know that story.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, that's a great story.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Attorney General Bonaparte, he was Napoleon's grand nephew.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Is that right? It all gets more and more interesting. Now,
would you go back to the bottom up system and
reallocate power back out of Washington to the special agents
in charge?
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Absolutely, from the FBI level, but even go further because
there are so many functions that the FBI does that
usurp the power of localities and states, state police or sheriffs.
They will often have a tendency when the FBI takes
over a case without real need to, they'll just surrender
their authority over to the FBI, and they'll even deputize
(26:44):
FBI agents to enforce state and local laws. And then
you see the FBI come in and then they say, well,
we need more of a budget. Look at all the
great things we're doing to fight crime. What this does
is it centralizes all the more law enforcement and instruments
of coercion from the states and counties and localities. So
I would push a lot of those functions back down
(27:05):
and then have special agents in charge of the field
offices be the originating offices of the cases and not Washington, DC.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So if Cash Hotel called you and said, Okay, I'm
about to be confirmed, what should I do on my
first day? What would you tell him?
Speaker 3 (27:21):
I would advise him to lockdown the FBI, and it's
electronic access, the same way USAID was locked down. There
are so many malicious actors within the FBI that you
have to get a hold on things before you can
actually run things and start to change them. So it's
not like we're going to shut things down and there'll
be more crime or anything else. It's just to pause
(27:42):
and to get an idea of what's happening, put the
right people in, find the professionals that are inside there,
and just make it work.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It's great. Listen, Michael, we've covered a lot of ground.
I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book,
Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI went from Cold
War heroes to Deep State Villains, is available now on
Amazon and in bookstores. Everywhere. We're going to feature a
link to buy it on our show page, and I
want to let our listeners know they can follow your
(28:10):
recent work by visiting the Center for Security Policy website
at Center for Security Policy dot org and by following
you on x at Jmichael Waller.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Thank you very much, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Thank you. To my guest Jaymichael Waller. You can get
a link to buy his book Big In Tell How
the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes to
Deep State villains on our show page at newtsworld dot com.
Newsworld is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
(28:47):
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
Special thanks to the team at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three free weekly columns at gingishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
(29:11):
I'm Newt Gingriish. This is nutsworld.
On this episode of newts World. In the beginning, the
FBI and CIA fought America's enemies at home and abroad.
Now there are tools of a growing police state attacking
the left's political enemies and spying on ordinary American citizens?
How did we get here? In his new book, Big Intel,
(00:26):
How the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes
to deep state villains. Former CIA operative J. Michael Waller
shows how normal intelligence functions have given way to political
correctness and never ending pride propaganda trapping agents in the diversity,
equity and inclusion House of Merits. I'm really pleased to
(00:49):
welcome my guest, J. Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy
at the Center for Security Policy. His areas of expertise
include foreign propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. He
holds a PhD International Security Affairs from the Boston University. Michael,
(01:24):
welcome and thank you for joining me on Newtrum.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
It's great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
You mentioned that I have been what forty three years
since you guys were hanging out in my office.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
At the top of the Cannon House office building.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
It's amazing how much time flies when you're having fun.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Isn't it? It really is walk me for.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
A seconds your own life. What happened from College Republicans
to today?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Well, I ended up getting involved with friends of yours
with Herber Rohmerstein and Faith Whittlesey and Morton Blackwell and
others at the White House through College Republicans, and was
the White House youth person for promoting Reagan's policy to
roll back the Soviet Union. And they got me down
with the conference in Central America, and I did some
work for Bill Casey and then went on to become
a professor and teaching a lot of what I learned.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
That's great. Let's start with the nominations of Cash Patel
as FBI Director and Tlsey Gabbert as Director of National Intelliviance.
First of all, why do you think President Trump was
trying to achieve when he nominated them.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
President Trump wanted some really tough people who simply don't
care about being popular in Washington and playing the revolving
door game to land some big contractor law firm partnership
after heading their agencies. And so he picked a very
tenacious person like Cash Patel with experience in the area
to run the bureau, and that shocked a whole lot
(02:44):
of people. But really, there's no better person for the job.
He picked someone like Tulsea Gabbert with a Democrat background,
who got burned badly by the security apparatus. She was
labeled a suspected terrorist. She and her husband were labeled
threats to aviation even while she was a member of Congress,
and she came around in a lot of her points
of view as a result of that. So she, being
(03:06):
personally stung, really has a good motivation to do the
right thing.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I've known Tulsa Gabbert a long time. I really like her.
I think she's very smart. Why would the intelligence community
have done that?
Speaker 3 (03:18):
She was a rogue Democrat, She was a critic of
the system, so she was a threat. I don't see
any other reason beyond that. People point to certain points
of view she has, but they're simply points of view.
But she was viewed as a public enemy.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
In a sense, they've created their own monster. Yeah, this
is one of those classic cases where if you strike,
you had better win, because otherwise the person who attack
gets bigger and stronger.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You on An article recently was fascinating entitled why some
senators are so afraid of confirming Cash Pattel and Tulsa Gabbert,
who's in the blaze on February thirty. Why do you
think they're that afraid.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
They're afraid because Congress for forty nine years has never
held real oversight investigations or even hearings of the FBI
or the CIA. There have been cursory ones, but no
real hard skeptical oversight in any systemic way. I mean,
you have even somebody like Chuck Schumer, who was elected
(04:21):
in nineteen eighty, so he's been on the House and
Senate Judiciary committees for a total of forty five years.
He never once tried to hold the FBI into account
on anything. So you have these rogue apparatuses, which were
more rogue than they were in the nineteen seventies, and
Congress hasn't looked. And it's natural human nature. If nobody's
watching what you're doing, you're going to do what you
feel like doing, whether it's the right thing or the
(04:43):
wrong thing. So these institutions have gotten out of control
and become politicized to the point where they will go
after anyone who opposes them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Because it's very obvious that President Trump is shaking things
up in Washington. The latest the example is the way
which they've closed the doors of the US Agency for
International Development, literally in fact, locking employees out. Now, you've
had first hand experience with AID, and you worked as
a subcontractor for them in the nineteen nineties, can you
(05:13):
walk us through your experience with AID?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Early on, I did some work in Latin America and
some work in Russia. And in Latin America, they were
just doing their job for development, for helping train civil
society type things that were pretty legitimate, and they were
consistent with US foreign policy. It was always an instrument
of US foreign policy. But then after the Cold War,
under the Clinton administration, these agencies were wondering what to do,
(05:38):
and policymakers were wondering what are their purpose? And the
Clint administration flat out set at the time, you want
to join the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House or
Foreign Relations in the Senate to bring money back to
your districts using foreign policy to bring money back home.
That means contracting money. That means money for your friends
and cronies. That means money for the causes that the
(05:59):
political causes that you want to produce, meaning using our
foreign policy apparatus as a domestic liberal left political machine.
And that's what happened to the USAID. But I would
argue AID went even further, and it became a state
within a state, running its own foreign intelligence operations, as
operations to overthrow governments, regardless of what the president's policy was,
(06:22):
and then to recruit and to assess and to finance
and therefore control political operatives of other countries all around
the world. Not as an instrument to foreign policy, but
as an instrument to itself and to this big current
political machine that it became.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
At the time when we took USAID out of state,
it's because we distrusted state. But then USAID evolved on
its own into a system that I think is in
many ways anti American and certainly anti Israeli. I was
surprised in the last couple of days as they began
to release this information with how much of the money
(06:59):
was going into the US through these nonprofits to finance
left wing operations, I mean political apparently is being funded
by usidea. Apparently Bill Crystal was getting money.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
New York Times got millions, twenty.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Five percent of usida's funding eight billion dollars was allocated
to public international organizations rather than being spent directly by
the United States. And it's pretty clear that in some
places they were funding terrorist groups, they were funding people
who are actively anti American. As recently as October of
twenty four, Senator Tom Cotton was raising questions because we've
(07:37):
spent over a billion dollars in humanitarian aid DEGAZA, and
all it did was may comas stronger.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah, USAD has been funding this civilian support infrastructures for
insurgencies and for terrorist groups. Long ago, it was funding
civilian support infrastructure for our friends and allies, but it's
been doing it for Hamas. It's been doing it for
a lot of extremist groups around the world, and it's
also been used to wage cultural Marxist revolution in countries
(08:08):
with traditional values. Look at what they've done in Guatemala,
funding Marxist attorneys to become judges and then putting pressure
on the Guatemalan government to force it to appoint them
as justices to the high courts because Guatemalans won't elect
to Marxist president. It's a conservative country. Look at what
they're doing in Nigeria promoting this LGBTQ whatever else nonsense
(08:30):
that goes against the values of practically every last Nigerian,
but it's being shoved down their throats, and it's creating
anti Americanism among the populations at large, and then trying
to build hostile systems that want to tear down Western values.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Do you think in that sense on balance, that usid
IS programming has not advanced America's interests.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
It hasn't since the collapse of the Cold War. I'll
give you a good example. I saw it in the
nineteen nineties when I was working in Russia on the
USAID Rule of Law Project, working with the Russian Park
Parliament to build Frank Church style oversight committees of the
former KGB to make sure it could never rise again
and to expose and break apart the gangster state. It
was a KGB gangster state that was developing in the
(09:11):
nineties before this Lieutenant colonel named Ladimir Putin ever went
to Moscow, and so really USAID had a big role
in helping, inadvertently or otherwise, to build what became the
Russian gangster state, because it eviscerated the power of the
Russian Parliament to have oversight and have those oversight skills
and knowledge that they needed.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
In your book, begin tell how the CIA and FBI
went from Cold War heroes to deep state funds. You
paint a pretty stark picture of the CIA and fbis
of all, from the Cold War heroes to what you
call deep state villains. What were the key moments in
history that marked this transformation.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Well, if you discount the human frailties that any human
institution is going to have, and you look at the
big picture of the purpose, the CIA and the FBI
served their purposes by going after our foreign enemies abroad,
FBI against domestic spies and subversives at home, and law
enforcement here at home. But they were never in a
position to abuse the American population at large, let alone,
(10:31):
as Chuck Schumer warned several years ago, to have six
ways from Sunday to go after you as a senior
elected official of the US government.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
It wasn't that way.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Even Jay Edgar Hoover didn't have the powers that today's
FBI has, And as bad as he was in those
certain areas, he did a lot of good. Also, he
was never in a position to abuse power the way
the FBI since James Comey has done and Chris Ray.
So the real shift came in the Obama administration, in
the Bush forty three administration, when there was this mass
(11:03):
hiring of people who were poorly screened and often poorly
qualified for their jobs at CIA, and they brought a
lot of those West Coast Silicon Valley San Francisco values
with them. But the real shifts came when Barack Obama
mandated it with James Clapper as Director of National Intelligence,
lifetime radical, just a lunatic radical when he was an
Air Force general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency
(11:25):
and a counter intelligence problem by the way, and then
John Brennan as Obama's next CIA director, who was an
unrepentant voter for the Communist Party candidate Gus Hall back
three years before he was recruited into the CIA.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
And he laughs at it.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
He never uses as a teaching moment, say you can
do stupid things as a kid, but this is how
the enemy, our foreign enemies like the Soviets, are running
operatives in the United States to recruit us and to
subvert our system. He never once used that as a lesson.
These people ran the intelligence community and then you had
Valerie Jarrett and others in the White House writing the
Bama executive orders to impose critical theory cultural Marxism their
(12:05):
manifestation under DEI throughout the whole intelligence community, and this
corrupted the system.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Do you portray, particularly in the intelligence side, a really
remarkable imposition, if he will, of leaders who are sort
of knowingly not pro American.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Yeah, they think America is a bad country.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I remember one point Bremen arguing that there were really
moderates in Hesbelah. I think he had converted Islam. It
was thinking to myself, why would you have an intelligence
chief who has this fantasy, because there aren't any moderates
in Hesbelah. Hes Bela is dedicated to the destruction of
(12:48):
Israel and pretty cheerful about killing Americans, and yet you
had this guy preaching somehow We're going to reach out
and find the moderates. Was that because Obama was being duped,
because in fact, that's the world Obama wanted to create.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
As the world Obama wanted to create if you look
at his whole political formation, since he was a boy
living in Hawaii who his grandfather had guide him in
his teens, long time Communist Party agut operative Frank Marshall Davis,
and then he goes to college and then he meets
up in Chicago. If you look at the Democratic machine
(13:22):
in Chicago and the faction that he attached himself to,
it was the old Communist Party faction of the Chicago
Democratic Party. That's what raised him. That's where he met
Valerie Jarrett, whose parents were party That's where he met
Michelle through Valerie Jarrett. And then the state senator who
stepped down to run for Congress and anointed him to
replace her was also part of that party, Apparatta. So
(13:44):
this is Obama's America. When he said he wanted to
fundamentally transform America, this is what he was dreaming about.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
I understand that with the intelligence community. Well what about
the FBI, which had historically been very conservative and we
were characteristic with where in a suit and following the rules, etc.
How did that decay?
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Well, the FBI was the last to fall, and that
also took place at the end of the Robert Muller
twelve year reign over the FBI, when he completely reorganized
the FBI from a bottom up organization, which is the
way JEdgar Hoover designed it to be bottom up. He
was a very powerful director, but you'd open your cases
(14:25):
from the field offices and each of the fifty six
field office directors from around the country could call him
when they needed to. Now, the head of a field office,
the special Agent in charge, needs to go through fifteen
different steps in order to communicate directly with the number
one person at the FBI. So it cut that off,
and it created a huge bureaucratized, centralized from the top
(14:47):
apparatus where careerism meant everything. So rather than agents who
would spend a lot of time, maybe years of their
life on certain cases, if you're not promoted in eighteen months.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
You're out.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
This attracted a lot of very avaricious and politicized people
to join. So if you look at the national security
part of the FBI and the public corruption part of
the FBI, they're the most politicized of all. So what
really tipped the scale was when Obama loved Muller's job
so much that he asked Congress to allow him to
stay beyond his ten year term and kept him on
(15:20):
for two years to impose what then James Comey put
in as all the dei politicization of a bureau. Imagine
that on top of a bureau that had gone from
an investigative and law enforcement agency till after nine to eleven,
it was converted into a law enforcement agency and a
domestic intelligence service, which we've never had before.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Shouldn't that have been separated. I always argue that when
you're fighting crime, you're innocent until proven guilty. When you're
fighting terrorism, you're sort of guilty until proven innocent. If
you mix the two into the same institution, you're going
to corrupt it.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Right, And then you're using in intelligence for law enforcement.
There are different standards. There's evidence for law enforcement, and
you're required to prove that it was obtained legally and
with warrants and so forth, and then to be submitted
before a court and a trial. With intelligence, none of
that is needed. You get the information however you can,
from wherever you can, and then you're using that to
(16:19):
drive law enforcement investigations. No, but no place west of
East Germany does that.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I didn't realize until looking at your book that for
five years, starting twenty eleven, the Obama administration's Office of
the Director of National Intelligence held pride summits but they
were sort of secret. I mean, what was going on.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
This is the indoctrination of our intelligence community. These were
command performances where officials had to attend these Pride summits.
And even in the FBI, if you were not actively
what they call an ally, then you were marked. So
if you're just simply a professional saying, look, I don't
like what's going on around me, but that's what the
(17:00):
President and the Attorney General want, I'm just going to
just keep my head down and be quiet and do
my job, that's a mark against you. So the FBI said, literally,
you must embrace LGBTQ, whatever pride. You must be a
quote ally of the Pride movement. So they're turning a
national police into a political police.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
I mean there's a serious effort there to coerce the
American people in to change, whether they want it.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Or not, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
And when it's done in secret, with no deliberation, with
no congressional authorization, with no oversight, and really no recourse,
then you are indeed developing a political police system across
the country.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
National security community had his last fundamental redesign in the
late nineteen forties, and it's based on the National Security
Act of nineteen forty seven in the early Cold War.
Do you think we need a fundamental redesign of the
system and if so, how would you do it.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, well, we need another George Kennon to assess what
our foreign adversaries are all about and how.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
To deal with them.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
You need the bipartisanship that you had with Harry Truman
and Harry Truman in the Eisenhower period. They had plenty
of fights, but they had a general consensus on who
our adversaries were abroad, how they were infiltrating us domestically,
and how we needed to have a posture around the
world to fight that. But the world has changed so
much that we're still on that late nineteen forties structure
(18:51):
and even mentality. So even our defense priorities are designed
for that period. Commerce keeps throwing more money at defense.
That's such a huge waste because our whole grand strategy
is obsolete, and therefore our defense structure and spending is obsolete.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
I've written that we really have to have a profound rethinking,
and it's going to be very difficult. I mean, Hegseeth,
for example, has an enormous job trying to get the
Pentagon under control, and then trying to get it modernized
because it's a very bureaucratic, largely obsolete system. Now, now
you suggested that the CIA currently should be dissolved into
(19:29):
two different entities, one for intelligence gathering and analysis and
one for covert operations. Would you like break up the
CIA and create these two freestanding, separate systems.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yes, I would divide them in two parts, so it's
not abolish the CIA and have no intelligence service. We
need intelligence services, but break it into two functional parts,
so you have the ones that go out and they
collect intelligence, and then others when then that analyze that intelligence,
and they write their estimates and assessments and so forth,
and provide that inform with their assessments to the president
(20:02):
so that he can know what's going on in the
world and can decide how to make policy. That's what
the CIA was for. Then you'd have a separate, very
small covert action service to run covert operations abroad as
necessary under presidential control and never never on its own.
And then I'd shrink both of them, because if you
look at the CIA, it's a huge bureaucracy with an
(20:24):
even larger unknown number of contractors, and a lot of
it's waste. You don't need secret intelligence to spy on
the climate or gender or these other things. We also
need things that we don't have, like an ability for
our people, our agents abroad, to live in those societies
and integrate in those societies for the long term, like
(20:45):
the old British services did. People know their Americans and
so forth, and people might even know their CIA. But
they can just be there, be our eyes and ears
on the ground, and we won't have to rely on
the secret services of the local countries to tell us
what's going on, which is why happen. And then a
lot of the analysis is just unnecessary because there's so
much public information, and a lot of the human work
(21:06):
is unnecessary because so much is automated and digitized. You
don't need so many people. And then a lot of
the positions are just obsolete or even worthless. And so
you take the best elements of that and you hire
other people to come in. We can have a first
rate intelligence service again with first rate information. But you
see president after president since Reagan saying the president's daily
(21:28):
brief is pretty much useless. It's not informative. It's not
guiding on anything. And so if Democrats and Republican presidents
agree on that over decades, then something's fundamentally wrong.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
It has to be fixed.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Do you happen to know? How do the Israelis divide
up intelligence?
Speaker 3 (21:43):
The Israelis have two main services. They've got the Mosad,
which is their international foreign intelligence service, and then they
have Shinbet, which is their domestic security service, and they
have others. But if you look at what happened to
the Israelis, they're as woke as our.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Intelligence services are.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
And we saw that on October seventh, where they didn't
anticipate any of this. Now that's horrible intelligence collection, horrible
internal security.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Well, and they had talked themselves into a fantasy world
in which they were paying Hamas enough to keep Hamas quiet.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Right, So you get into this mentality that your mortal
enemy really isn't a moral enemy. He can just be
bought off. So that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the moral enemy.
And I think a lot of liberal and left wing Israelis,
including in the secret services, feel about Israel that maybe
they really are an occupying power, maybe they're not a
(22:36):
legitimate state. Likely you see with a lot of Americans,
we're a force of evil in the world.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Maybe we're not legitimate.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Imagine having intelligence officers sworn to defend us who don't
believe in our founding principles and think that we are oppressors.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Here at home domestically. Would you split the FBI into
a crime fighting organization and an internal security organization.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Yes, And it's not a question of being anti FBI
have always been supportive of the FBI and its missions
until you see what's happened to it over the years,
and you see not just the corruption within it, but
the obsolescence of it. It's still the FBI that Jayeggar
Hoover built. We have counterintelligence as a major function to
fight foreign espionage against US, but it's really fly swatting.
(23:20):
So as good as so many of our counterintelligence officers are,
they're just getting the low hanging fruit and they're not
allowed to stay on cases for a long time. But
we have no strategic counterintelligence, like Michelle Van Cleeve has
recommended for so many years, to actively go out and
penetrate adversaries intelligence services, to disrupt them from the inside
(23:41):
and to deceive them so that they can't operate effectively
against us. We have no capabilities like that at all.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
When you think about all that, it seems to me
that you're talking about both a profound reshaping of the
CIA and a profound reshaping of the FBI. The second one,
I assume is going to be but Tell's.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Job right, and he has the temperament for it. You
need a real wolverine who just doesn't care what people
think about him. You can't have some polite lawyer from
the Beltway. So he's the right guy to do it.
He has his own ideas. I only know what he
said in public about them. But the fact is that
he's inheriting an obsolete organization. He's inheriting one that's full
(24:21):
of waste. It's been reorganized to the point that careerism
motivates everything, so you have the worst people going to
the top instead of the best people. And then you
have it where it's not doing the job that most
people in public would expect it to do. So if
it's good at investigating and fighting certain kinds of federal crimes, great,
why don't we take that section out of the bureau
(24:41):
with the best people, move it over to the US Marshals,
which is relatively a scandal free law enforcement agency and
has been around since the Founding Fathers.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
It's the only one.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
So move that there, and move the training FBI Academy
a Quantico over to the Marshall Service. Create a standalone
strategic counter intelligence service that has nothing to do with
law enforcement. Take other services.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
We don't need.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Two agencies FBI and ATF doing firearms and explosive work,
So get those people out. We don't need two drug
enforcement administrations. But you've get FBI does count in narcotics
as well as DEA, So move them out to DEA
and so forth down the line. And then by that
time all you have left at the FBI is HR.
So just take it and grind it down. I don't
(25:26):
think this requires an Act of Congress to do, because
the FBI has no statutory existence. It was founded by
an Attorney General memorandum and it doesn't have a legal charter.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
So it's created back what the nineteen twenties, nineteen oh eight,
nineteen oh eight, Wow, that's even pre j Agar Hoover.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, it was Teddy Roosevelt and he wanted to have
a federal law enforcement agency and Congress didn't want one,
so he went around it by having the Attorney General
write a memorandum detailing agents from the Secret Service, which
was under Treasury, to do work for the Justice Department.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And that was the root of the FBI. It was
a run around.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I did not know that story.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, that's a great story.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Attorney General Bonaparte, he was Napoleon's grand nephew.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Is that right? It all gets more and more interesting. Now,
would you go back to the bottom up system and
reallocate power back out of Washington to the special agents
in charge?
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Absolutely, from the FBI level, but even go further because
there are so many functions that the FBI does that
usurp the power of localities and states, state police or sheriffs.
They will often have a tendency when the FBI takes
over a case without real need to, they'll just surrender
their authority over to the FBI, and they'll even deputize
(26:44):
FBI agents to enforce state and local laws. And then
you see the FBI come in and then they say, well,
we need more of a budget. Look at all the
great things we're doing to fight crime. What this does
is it centralizes all the more law enforcement and instruments
of coercion from the states and counties and localities. So
I would push a lot of those functions back down
(27:05):
and then have special agents in charge of the field
offices be the originating offices of the cases and not Washington, DC.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So if Cash Hotel called you and said, Okay, I'm
about to be confirmed, what should I do on my
first day? What would you tell him?
Speaker 3 (27:21):
I would advise him to lockdown the FBI, and it's
electronic access, the same way USAID was locked down. There
are so many malicious actors within the FBI that you
have to get a hold on things before you can
actually run things and start to change them. So it's
not like we're going to shut things down and there'll
be more crime or anything else. It's just to pause
(27:42):
and to get an idea of what's happening, put the
right people in, find the professionals that are inside there,
and just make it work.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It's great. Listen, Michael, we've covered a lot of ground.
I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book,
Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI went from Cold
War heroes to Deep State Villains, is available now on
Amazon and in bookstores. Everywhere. We're going to feature a
link to buy it on our show page, and I
want to let our listeners know they can follow your
(28:10):
recent work by visiting the Center for Security Policy website
at Center for Security Policy dot org and by following
you on x at Jmichael Waller.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Thank you very much, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Thank you. To my guest Jaymichael Waller. You can get
a link to buy his book Big In Tell How
the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes to
Deep State villains on our show page at newtsworld dot com.
Newsworld is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
(28:47):
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
Special thanks to the team at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three free weekly columns at gingishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
(29:11):
I'm Newt Gingriish. This is nutsworld.
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