The Truth with Lisa Boothe: Money Laundering or Humanitarian Aid? The Real Story of USAID

In this episode, Lisa interviews J. Michael Waller, a former CIA operative and author of "Big Intel." They discuss Mike's experiences in Central America during the Cold War and the evolution of USAID. Mike critiques the shift in perception of the CIA and FBI from Cold War heroes to "deep state villains," highlighting issues of foreign intervention, regime change, and U.S. foreign aid policies. They explore the potential corruption within USAID and the need for reform in intelligence agencies. The Truth with Lisa Boothe is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Thursday. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From battling the red threat to bankrolling bizarre vengures. That
is the wildwide that USAAD has taken in history. It
was established by JFK in nineteen sixty one to counter communism,
but it's now dishing out nearly eight hundred million to
fund global censorship and radical gender ideologies. Not to mention
twenty million for an Iraqi Sesame Street, because that's the

(00:23):
best use of our taxpayer dollars. But it gets worse
than that because there have been numerous reports of the
money ending up in the hands of terrorists. So when
did this mission drift into chaos begin to unravel at all?
We're joined by J. Michael Waller. He's a former CIA
operative from the Cold War era, so we'll dig deep

(00:44):
into how USAD lost its way and discuss why. According
to Waller's book, Big Intel, how the CIA and the
FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains.
Why politicians are so scared to probe the CIA. So
get ready for a no holds barred conversation about government
agencies that started with noble intentions but grew into these

(01:07):
behemoths of corruption. Stay tuned for J. Michael Waller Well Mike,
it's your first time on this show. I appreciate you
taking the time. I'd reached out to a group of
friends trying to figure out the right person to have
this conversation with, and you were recommended. So I appreciate

(01:27):
you making the time today.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Well, it's good to be on your show, Lisa.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
So you recently authored a book called Big Intel, How
the CIA and the FBI went from the Cold War
heroes to deep state villains. I want to dig into
that a little bit deeper in a minute, but let's
talk about So you were a CIA operative. You spent
time in Central America. Tell me about that experience. You know,
what was it like? When did you get into the CIA?

(01:51):
Kind of give us a little bit of your background
and that.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Well, it was a really neat experience. I was only
twenty one. I was still an undergraduate in college, and
I got in in a very unorthodox way. I was.
I was active in college Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom.
And this was President Reagan's first term and his one
of his best friends, Bill Casey, who had fought the
Nazis in the OSS during World War Two, was CIA

(02:15):
director and he was dissatisfied at the time with how
the CIA had declined, and so what he was doing
was going around finding younger amateurs who really didn't know
what they were doing, and like in the OSS in
World War two. And so I was brought in that
way and went down to Central America with the Nicaraguin contrast,

(02:36):
which was a gorilla army fighting the communist Sandinista government.
So that's all I got my start, But never as
a CIA employee or you know, I never got trained
at the farm or anything. It was simply as a
as an asset down in Central America to collect intelligence.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
So you had said that when you so when you
got in, the CIA was in decline at that moment.
I guess what do you think led to that decline?
And are there parallels to where we are today with
the CIA.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Well, this was nineteen eighty three and eighty four when
it began, and so the CIA had been torn apart
in the late seventies, just four or five years earlier
by President Carter, and the LT just been gutted and
the whole mission to fight communism had been gutted. So
Reagan was really shocked at what he inherited. From the

(03:23):
CIA in case he was. So they were trying to
rebuild capacity, and they did it through hiring new employees,
but really a college undergrad just can't join the agency.
So that I was found out and I was recruited
and as a volunteer, so I got some walking around
money and just went down and did my thing. And

(03:44):
I guess the asset to that was you didn't know
what you were doing, so you didn't know what you
were not allowed to do, so you could accomplish more
that way, and you were completely off the books. And
I learned thirty years later that the pocket money that
I was given came from Bill Casey's pocket and he
was using that to get around certain congressional restrictions and

(04:07):
to be helping President Reagan get the Communies out of
Central America.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
You know, you look at the CIA obviously had a
lot of activity in Central America, particularly you know, in
the context of the Cold War as well. You talked
about the Contras and supporting that rebel group. We were
involved in overthrowing or the CIA was involved in a
coup in Guatemala in the nineteen fifty four to overthrow

(04:34):
the government. At that point involvement in El Salvador. You know,
the list goes on as well, kind of like in
hindsight with a lot of the conversations we've had recently,
particularly post Afghanistan, with sort of nation building and you know,
when to get involved, when not to get involved, you know,
with hindsight looking back, like were those the right decisions

(04:57):
with the CIA's involvement throughout Central America and then also
sort of what's your opinion now on sort of regime
building and you know, or meddling so to speak, in
various areas of the world.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yes, those were the right decisions. Most people won't say that,
but looking back, this was our southern border, and we
could either invade militarily or we could just let the
Soviets and their proxies take over on our southern border.
There's another alternative, and that's covert operations to influence the politics,

(05:33):
to influence even to help one faction defeat or overthrow
another faction. This is all in the American national interest
to do so. I think it was a great thing
that President Eisenhower did in nineteen fifty four to use
the CIA to overthrow a pro Soviet. Remember this is
Stalin had just died, So this guy would have you know,

(05:54):
he was aligning himself with all the Stalinists to build
a regime right on our order, and so it was
vital for President Eisenhower to be decisive and get rid
of that regime.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
I guess, how involved currently do you think the CIA
is in, you know, involving itself in sort of regime
change throughout the world, or you know, I guess sort
of what's the CIA's role currently and those sorts of engagements.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Well, we knew what it was when we had military
forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's understandable that
we would have all our instruments of power working together,
and it was a war against the terrorists who attacked us.
So they were just wars. They were just messed up
the way they were carried out, because what you had
was this nation building exercise that got us nowhere, however

(06:44):
in nonviolent places. You know, we won't know what's happening
with the CIA until the future when it's declassified. But
the CIA has been it was never a right wing
organization the way it's been trade. The whole strategy in
the Cold War was to peel away the left, peel

(07:05):
away elements of the left and support the center left
and sometimes the far left that was sort of on
the borderline. Are they going to side with the Soviets
or the Chinese or can we peel them away? So
the CIA had invested a lot in that and in
other countries in the center right, but seldom the far right,
anti communists. It was always the you know, fairly moderate

(07:26):
to left. And this is one of the misconceptions of
CIA covert operations because I think people will be surprised
to find how much of the left around the world
the CIA actually funded and controlled.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Dig into that a little bit, do you mind kind
of building that out?

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Sure? And this started in Europe where the real resistance. Okay,
think of containment. So we just defeated the Nazis and
the fascists in Europe, and now what's happening. The Soviets
are using their subversive networks because they were the only
ones with organized resistance movements that we had to hijack
or ourselves to to fight the Nazis in the underground

(08:02):
in France and Greece and elsewhere. Stalin was using those
to seize control of those countries after we had defeated
the enemy, so his view of the war by nineteen
forty three had decided he was going to conquer all
of Europe. He would do what he could militarily, and

(08:23):
then he would subvert the rest under British and French
and American domination. So we were up against do we
surrender all our gains and surrender Europe to Stalin? Or
do we run covert operations to prevent that from happening.
And the real miracle came in the Italian elections of
nineteen forty seven, where the CIA man on the ground

(08:44):
there James Angleton, sort of on a whim. He was
one of these amateurs that had been recruited into the OSS.
He was a really superb individual at the time, and
he got funding from the USA and from wealthy Italians
as a CIA man to fund the Christian Democrat Party

(09:06):
that was the center right Catholic party in Italy because
there was no real political cohesive movement against the communist parties.
So he prevented Italy from going communists in nineteen forty seven.
Can you imagine if Italy had fallen to Stalin?

Speaker 1 (09:26):
No way, I mean, I guess, I guess what I
think about often is sort of just like the broader
context about you know, when we talk about like democracy,
if we're intervening in other countries democracy, like can we
I don't know, It's just I sort of I go
back and forth in my mind about some of these
broader like can you preach democracy if we're you know,

(09:48):
staging coups and overthrowing governments and democratically like you know
what I mean? And I'm not saying like and look,
you know, we've got to do what's in the best
interests of the country, So I'm not saying I'm against it.
It's just sort of this broader question that I think
of and ask myself.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Sure, well, it's a great question, and it's a really
fair one because you know, if we're meddling around in
other countries democracies, how can we preach democracy. On the
other hand, we wouldn't have our own constitutional republic that's
a democracy, had it not been for the French Secret
Service and the French military helping us during the Revolutionary War.

(10:25):
So in this case, if you have now, when you
have totalitarian movements like communism infiltrating democratic societies to subvert
them from within and recruiting mainstream politicians who are covert
enemy agents, and they're using the democratic system of their
countries as a device to seize power for good. Then

(10:47):
you're really defending democracy by subverting what the communists are
trying to do and helping the good guys be a
center right or center left. I think that's fine, and
that is fine from our point of view. I wouldn't
like other kind doing it to us, but we're not
other countries, you know. So the problem comes when the
CIA intervenes covertly in American politics or in the American

(11:12):
media to influence how the American public, you know, sees
the world and understands things and how they vote. That's
where the danger comes.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
I guess let's get into USAID for a moment. So
it was created in the context of the Cold War,
established by Kennedy. I guess talk about how it was
used then and what's changed since then. Well, I mean,
obviously a lot has changed since then, but in the
way that USAID operates and is it still a force

(11:42):
for good or was it ever?

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Well, it has quite an interesting history and I think
overall it really benefited US a lot as well as
arguably billions of people around the world. But the US
started using foreign aid right after World War Two with
the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and similar programs to
rebuild Japan and other parts of Asia. And that was

(12:06):
to help us to win the peace and to keep
Stalin and then Mao, who was backed by Stalin and
a lot of them at the time, from conquering those
areas around them and helping them to rebuild and join
a Western alliance or a series of Western alliances that
were being built. And then also to prevent Japan and
Germany from rising to become militaristic, aggressive powers again. And

(12:32):
it worked really, really well. Then there was a whole
system of banking and finance to fund these recoveries and
to get these economies back on their feet and to
rebuild industries in these countries. And he ended up making
our two worst enemies, Imperial Japan and Germany, two of
our closest allies and most important allies for more than

(12:54):
half a century. So it was a wonderful success. So
this idea begun under Truman, continue to under Eisenhower, spread
out to other forms of aid to provide grain, agricultural
assistance to other countries in need to avoid famine and
to build goodwill, to show that we meant goodwill in
these countries, and also to subsidize the American farm industry

(13:16):
and to expand the farming industry. That worked well. So
what President Kennedy did when he took power in nineteen
sixty one, first and he inherited a CIA coverd operation
that he didn't even know about until after he became president,
which was Eisenhower's plan to use the CIA to arm
and equip a Cuban exile guerrilla army to invade their country,

(13:40):
which Castro had just taken over a year and a
half or two before, and to overthrow Castro and to
get rid of the Communist regime there. And that failed
at the Bay of Pigs with the invasion. So Kennedy
was really stung by this whole Bay of Pigs invasion,
in which he knew about by that time, but he
hadn't prepared for it. This is early sixty one, and

(14:00):
he thought there's got to be other ways. He gave
a speech to an association of news editors and he said,
there's this relentless communist subversion in every corner of the world.
We have to fight it somehow, we have to develop
new means to fight it. And sometimes it's going to
look great, and sometimes it's going to look terrible, but
we're going to have to do that. And through that

(14:22):
was the speech that helped shape what became the US
Agency for International Development USAID, which was one of these
tools with US Information Agency for broadcasting to countries that
well friendly and hostile countries so that people could get
the voice of America right, which had been set up
during World War II, So a US Information Agency had up,

(14:45):
So we had all these different agencies for soft power,
and USAID became one of those agencies for soft power.
And it was never a giveaway program for charity's sake.
It was an instrument of statecraft to make sure that
our inter were advanced in every corner of the world
that mattered to us.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
But are they in terms of I mean, do we
do we do you see that return on investment? Then
in terms of you know, getting other countries to sort of,
you know, do what we want in return.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yes, we've seen it. We've seen it over the decades.
So this has been what sixty four years, and we've
seen it happen time and again over the decades. We've
seen it backfire on us as well. But here's a
case where you have the propaganda that was being incessantly
pushed on the whole developing world now in the nineteen
fifties and sixties with decolonization, was America is a capitalist,

(15:41):
imperial power, a racist power that wants to repress the
poor people of the world. And it was a very
appealing propaganda campaign because America had sided with the British
and French and Belgium and other Portuguese and other colonists'
colonial powers. So we ended up getting the blame for
what those colonial powers had done. So to fight that,

(16:04):
we built a lot of good will in these countries.
We helped a lot of friendly leaders in those countries
to show that they could provide for their people, which
they couldn't before, and they couldn't without our support. So
we were able to help them, work with them, boost them,
and then also use this aid as leverage to affect
their behavior to make sure they kept Soviet troops out,

(16:27):
or they didn't allow a Soviet embassy in there, or
they cracked down on Soviet communist parties and subversive groups
that were backed by the Soviets to overthrow those governments
one day. So in those senses, yes, it really helped
us out. A lot. Where it got a black eye
reputation wise, was in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, because

(16:49):
USAID he was running a whole lot of humanitarian programs
in South Vietnam as part of our war effort. But
that's where the national consensus about fighting the Cold War
really broke down because of the unfair way that the
draft was to fight the war, and then the fact
that there was no real victory plan and President Johnson

(17:12):
was trying to fight the war without much publicity so
that he could push his big social great society programs
here at home. So it worked out really really poorly
for US in Vietnam. And then then came Watergate and
the fall of Vietnam and Watergate and these other scandals
and the Church Committee hearings to expose what the CIA
had done. This is all in the mid seventies, and

(17:34):
then President Carter coming in saying we've got to tear
this stuff apart and reassess what we're doing. A lot
of the Cold warriors left USAID, and then a lot
of well meaning people and do gooders I would call them,
came in and so the whole nature of the agency
changed and it developed mission cree. So it was no
longer going to become an instrument in the US foreign policy.

(17:57):
It became more of a giveaway program in a sort
of a patronizing way for us to just share the
wealth around the world bile getting nothing in return.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
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O t G. One question a lot of people have

(19:16):
is is the getting in return? You know, has it
USA D has it become sort of like a money
laundering scheme, does a certain degree where you know, you've
got uh, like the Biden administration, for instance, gives all
these moneys to all this money to like ng os
and you know, democrat connected groups, and then those people
end up being the don't you know, and it just

(19:36):
kind of like the circular you know, where people sort
of use it to sort of enrich themselves and their
friends to a certain degree, right.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Right, And this is this is where the whole thing
started falling apart, because first of all, you had us
ai D employees, you know, people in the civil service
equivalent running these programs, and as us say i'd be expanded,
you know, to to scale up your capabilities, you need
to hire outside contractors. Well, the outside contractors get paid,

(20:09):
but they get paid more than the civil service people
get paid. And then the if you own an AID company,
you can pay yourself a nice salary, but then you
can take ten percent profit off the gross size of
the of the grant or the contract, so you can
become a millionaire, a multimillionaire very quickly. As the USAID employee.

(20:29):
If you think, Okay, I'm going to plan to quit
in two years, and I'm going to promote these people
to take my place, and then they're going to issue
contracts to me, and then and and so, then it
just becomes a money grabbing enterprise with with a do
gooder kind of mentality or even worse, a politicized mentality
like we're going to we're just not going to help

(20:49):
people get fed and have better roads and sanitation. We're
going to change the world and become a social revolutionary force,
you like.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
For instant oh sorry, no goal. For instance, you know
you look at some of even these like Catholic NGOs,
you know they've been sued by the state of Texas
for you know, alleged role in human trafficking or you
know what I mean. So you look at a lot
of these things, sometimes under the guise of helping, and
you know, I think most people would make the argument

(21:18):
that that's against American interests to be bringing a legal
aliens into the United States and to be assisted by that,
particularly assisted by taxpayer dollars. So I guess what should
become of US A I D. I mean, the Trumpet
administration is not the first administration to think about and
entertain the idea of merging it with the State Department.
The Clinton Clinton administration had entertained that idea as well.

(21:42):
So I guess, like, what should we do with U
S A I D. And are they working in our
interest or you know, against her interests?

Speaker 2 (21:50):
Well, they started working against our interests when they when
they began supporting our enemies funding Marxist groups, funding pro
Chinese groups, funding pro Hamas and Hesbelah and Jahadis groups
all around the world, in the Americas, in Africa, in
the Middle East. You know, when you see Hesbela and
Hamas with USAID tents and food and all these other things,

(22:15):
you obviously the agency lost complete control of its mission
gave up its mission, and it had become a sovereign
entity within the US government. So even though it's legally
under the State Department and supposed to be under the
direction of the Secretary of State, it never was that.

(22:35):
After the after Vietnam, it had become this state within
a state, and then as we're learning now, it became
this huge slush fund for a domestic political machine here
at home. That's a crime under the law. This is
under section fifty of federal law, which is for foreign aid.

(22:57):
It is not for or any activity of a political
nature in the United States. Yet that's what it's done.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
I guess, you know, Okay, so let's talk a little
bit about you know, your your book and wanting to
reign in the CIA and the FBI. I guess how
how corruptive, how corrupted have they become? And you know,
when do you think that happened? Why do you think
that happened? And is it even possible at this point

(23:33):
to reform it in a way where either or a
force for good.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Well, they were both a force for good FBI and CIA.
And I tracked this in Big Intel, which, by the way,
it said out only to what happened to CIA, FBI,
and how did they get so woke to become self
destructive and damaging to the country. And I was just
looking at Obama, Trump and Biden, and then I started
tracing this red threadback, Well, who is in charge of this? Well,

(24:02):
how did they get motivated to do this and why?
And you go back through the genealogy of this, and
you could trace it back to a Soviet meeting in
Moscow five years after the Bolshevik Revolution in nineteen twenty two,
when a representative of Lenin, when the head of what
became the KGB and the heads of the communist parties

(24:23):
of Europe got together to meet where they decided, we
can't replicate a Bolshevik revolution in the Western countries because
the conditions are not there for that. We're going to
have to find another way. So they decided to set
up a subversive movement to not just infiltrate societies, but
to fight Marxism in the cultural manner, not in the

(24:44):
economic pore against the economically wealthy, but as a social
movement to destroy all the beliefs that Western civilization has had,
whether it was their patriotism, whether it was their religion,
whether it was faith in God at all on which
civilization was built, whether it was on the law, whether

(25:06):
it was on the family unit. All of these things
had to be destroyed in the minds of the public
in order for large numbers of people to question everything
and to feel that their societies are evil and they're
the source of evil, and therefore they must be destroyed
down to the family level. So that was the cultural

(25:29):
side of Marxism, which is called critical theory, and that's
where we get critical race theory, critical law theory dei.
It all stems from that, and it's all very subversive
and corrosive of the societies. So J. Edgar Hoover, who
was the longest serving leader of the FBI, but back
as early as nineteen twenty, before he even went into

(25:50):
the bureau, he was warning about this. He said, they
are foreign born agitators here who came here as anarchists
and radical socialists and communists, and they are trying to
infiltrate every element of our society and destroy what we
have as a country. We have to do something to
round them up, get them out, and then watch those

(26:11):
who remain, because they're destroying it. So that's how Hoover
got started in the FBI, and the FBI's own function,
by statute, is to defend the country against foreign propaganda
and covert operations. It stopped doing that at about the

(26:31):
same time USAID began collapsing after Watergate and Vietnam and
the Carter administration. It didn't become woke until the Obama administration,
so it was sort of the last bastion to fall.
But the CIA had already gone that way earlier. Now,
CIA was supposed to be collecting intelligence and having an
institutional memory to know how did we get here to

(26:55):
the situation where we are today, so that we can
combat it abroad and collect intelligence on it abroad to
advise our president or presidents and his designees on what's happening.
And CIA dropped the ball on that completely in the
late nineteen seventies.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
But I mean people like Ron Paul warning back in
the nineteen eighties that it seemed like the FBI's sole
job was to spy on Americans who disagreed with the
government on policy. Did it surprise you to find out
how the FBI spied on you know, then candidate Donald Trump?

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yes, And this is where it became a real, real danger.
Today's FBI is far more dangerous and far more abusive
than Jaygar Hoover ever was. Hoover was powerful as a person,
and he built the FBI as a powerful institution, but
he didn't have the technology. He didn't have the legal

(27:53):
leeway even though he violated the law in many cases.
He didn't have the legal leeway that the current FBI has.
A powerful an FBI director as he was, he had
a decentralized bureau where he couldn't just open up a
case on somebody in some state somewhere and say investigate
them or raid them. That was all done by the
local field officers who made those decisions, fifty six of

(28:14):
them around the country, and they reported up to him.
So he didn't even have a swat team. He didn't
even have tactical units. So he had nothing at the
FBI has today, let alone the technology that the bureau has.
So we're in a much more dangerous situation today than
when Hoover was at his worst.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
Is it a top down problem that we have now
or is it an everyone problem?

Speaker 2 (28:40):
It's both. So you had people being recruited into the
FBI or the CIA for that matter, anywhere in government.
They're coming out of university, what are they trained in?
What are so many of them indoctrinated in? You know,
with every law school almost in the country now preaching
teaching critical law theory, which is which is the legal

(29:00):
form of critical race theory, the legal equivalent to use
American law as a weapon to achieve a defined political
and social objective. It's no longer about justice. So that's
really dangerous. And even though a lot of people in
the bureau, most of them don't necessarily subscribe to that,
the attitudes have change. And when you have people in

(29:23):
the Bureau who don't even know what founding principles are anymore,
and there's a resentment against America as a racist society
that was founded by racists, founded by a corrupt, rich
patrimony of slave owners who wanted to oppress everybody else,
and they really view that we have to correct this,

(29:44):
we have to make good on this, we have to
be critical of all of this to make change. And
then the FBI becomes a change agent, which is illegal
for it to do. But that's the mentality of so
much of the management within the bureau, and those types
of individuals have been had been promoted over the years
and then artificially elevated in the Obama administration at a

(30:06):
time when the reorganization of the FBI post nine to
eleven was to create a giant management system at the
top over sixty three senior executive service positions and now
the field office, the special agents in charge of the
field offices around the country no longer had direct access

(30:27):
to the director. They had to go through as many
as fifteen steps just to speak to the director. And
this empowered a huge new bureaucracy at the top that
could dictate downward. And that's where the real danger expanded.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
What should President Trump and his administration do about it?
You know, I guess what can you get done in
four years in terms of reform with some of our
intelligence agencies.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Well, Trump has gotten a whole lot done in three weeks. Think, yeah,
I'm the whole world.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
I think he just like had a notepad and every day,
like throughout the day for the past you know, for
years he's been out of office, past four years, he's
just like written lists every single day of all things
he wanted to do when he got back in a power.
And then now we're saying that come to fruition.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
And he had some really excellent and very experienced and
cohesive policy teams in whatever part of the government that
he was most interested in addressing, as well as legal teams.
And they didn't exist as teams before in his first
term because he didn't even think he was going to win,
So he just threw teams together of people who didn't
even know each other. Now you have people who'd known

(31:37):
each other for years, they trust each other, they work together,
and that's why he had so many really well written
executive orders coming out, you know, every hour every day
practically since he's been inaugurated. With the FBI, the FBI
was founded not by law. It doesn't exist under any
Act of Congress. It was founded by a one page

(32:01):
memorandum from an Attorney general in nineteen oh eight, and
that's what the Bureau says was it's founding document. And
there was never a legal statute establishing the FBI the
way there was with say the CIA. So I argue
and beg intel that the President should simply rescind that

(32:22):
Attorney General memorandum of nineteen oh eight and dissolve the FBI.
That doesn't mean get rid of all its people and
its functions and everything, because we need most of them.
So if you take the Criminal Division of the FBI
that investigates crime and arrests criminals, and you move it
to the US Marshals Service, which is a very underappreciated

(32:44):
federal law enforcement agency that dates all the way back
to the founding fathers and still has a good reputation.
You take the FBI training, the FBI Academy. You'll also
hand that over to the US Marshals, because the Marshals
are sort of the least woke of the federal lawf
hoorsement agencies. And then you take the FBI national security

(33:04):
side of it, you know, fighting against spies, counter terrorism,
and you divide that into a couple of different units,
but create a good standalone counter intelligence service and the
Public Corruption Unit. You would make an entity of the
of the Criminal Division that would be moved over to
the Marshals as well, and pretty soon you'll find that
you you know, the FBI doesn't need to be doing

(33:25):
the work of ATF on firearms and explosive crimes. So
take all those FBI personnel working there, move them to
ATF and then we'll deal with atf later and the
same thing with that. You don't need a counter narcotics
unit in the FBI when we already have a drug
enforcement administration. So you move that unit from the FBI

(33:46):
over to the DEA. And now you don't really have
much left of the FBI, so you can just dissolve
it and it's split up, so it can't you won't
have a central law enforcement apparatus anymore to harass and
abuse the public. Another thing what happened after nine to
eleven is we're the only democracy in the world of
any size that has combined domestic law enforcement with domestic intelligence.

(34:11):
So it's an internal spy agency as well as an
internal law enforcement agency. Those two functions cannot co exist
under the same roof.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
Well, and we've seen, you know, as a result of that,
things with the Patriot Act and you know, abuse from
our intelligence agencies and spying on Americans and using it
as an excuse to spy on us. We've got to
take a quick commercial break more with Mike Waller on
the other side. The things that you laid out that
you would like to see the Trump administration do, and

(34:40):
some that they have already done, how much of they can.
Can they do that unilaterally versus you know, do they
need Congress to be involved in that or you know,
how much can they do on their own?

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Well, most of what I explained in terms of the
FBI doesn't need Congress except where it would affect certain
budgets where something was appropriated out of a certain budget,
and then they would need congressional approval for that. But
you can, as we've seen with usaid the president can
unilaterally chop it down ninety five percent if he wants to.

(35:15):
And then you have lawsuits coming in and you have
all kinds of other challenges. But the way he's handling
it with us and he's shocked the public enough to
help them understand what many already felt, and that is
the central government is too out of control. It's wasting
our money and is spending our money on things that
are harmful to us as a country. And the people

(35:39):
who are defending it, the president's political opponents, say nothing
about fixing the problems or cutting the waste or cutting
the abuse. They just want the thing as it already was.
So I think the president has a lot of leeway
right now to do what he needs to downsize the
FBI because it's too bloated, it's too big, taken away

(36:00):
powers from the states and the local sheriffs, even though
it works with them a lot. It takes credit for
the work they do, and then they get more money
to expand their staff and authority even further. So the
president can chop it down, handle a lot of power
back to the states and won't need Congress for that,
especially if now, if you've got to omb chief and

(36:23):
there Russ Boat, who understands this problem very well. He
doesn't have to ask Congress for a budget for these
things anymore. He can ask for zero if he wishes,
so he'll have a lot of the budgetary authority, and
then if Congress does appropriate money, the president can decide
not to spend it.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
No, you're right, I mean, I think the broader problem
with all of this, and like this entire conversation with
the FBI and the CIA and USAAD is just government's
gone too big and then it gets out of hand
and then starts, you know, doing things like you'd talked
about with USAD, working against American interest, and you know,
we sort of lose track about what each of these

(37:05):
agencies and various aspects of our government are doing. It
sort of becomes its own beast. Is there anything in
this conversation that you'd like to get across that we
haven't had a chance to do so yet.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
Well, first of all, it's really easy to get upset
about this stuff and get demoralized about it and think
it's all hopeless. But what we're seeing before in our
eyes right now is there's a lot of hope. This
is a great time to be alive and a great
time to witness what's happening and even participate in what's
happening where you can even have Now look at you've

(37:41):
got the DOGE team pulling out information on waste, fraud
and abuse and corruption and in its raw form and
then putting it out there for the public to look at.
And there's going to be more crowdsourcing of this, and
the encouragement and the aority of whistleblowers and the restitution
of previous whistle blows whose careers were destroyed because they

(38:02):
came forward through legal means just to tell the truth.
So I think we're going to have a lot more
public ability to scrutinize what's happening in our government agencies
and how that money is being spent, and a greater
political pressure on all politicians to do something about it. So,

(38:24):
despite the very narrow margins Trump has in the House
and the Senate, I think things are going to get
to the point where you'll have some sort of bipartisan
majorities pushing through a lot of reforms that will be
enshrined in law, not yet the presidential executive order that
another president can resind, you know.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
And I think right now he's got obviously a lot
of juice coming off of, you know, the first popular
vote for Republican in twenty years. He's got approval rate
and majority of Americans are approving of what he's doing,
you know. So right now he's got a lot of
momentum behind him to try to make some of these reforms.
And I think like he's going to end up rebuilding

(39:03):
Americans faith in government because I think for the longest time,
we've been told or you know, a lot of people
have operated with the mentality of secrecy and not telling Americans, oh,
this is in your interests, you know, this is dangerous
if we put this information out there, if we declassify this,
and in reality, I think transparency brings trust and transparency

(39:24):
is what is going to rebuild faith in government. Transparency
is going to what is going to be what leads
to a more unified country. So, you know, I've had
this conversation with someone earlier today about just how much
what a transformational figure he has been for the country,
and like every aspect from just reshaping the Republican Party

(39:44):
to reshaping government, to reshaping media, to reshaping the way
Americans even think about their government. I mean most I mean,
you probably knew because you worked in the CIA, but
you know, he's brought a lot of it to light
about just the depths of the corruption of our government
that you know, I think we you know, obviously we
saw glimpses of it during the Obama illustration, and you know,
the targeting of Tea Party with the Irs, and you know,

(40:06):
the list goes on. But I don't think a lot
of us knew just how corrupt or government is and
how a bad it's gone.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
Right, And a lot of people inside the government don't
even think what they're doing is corrupt or wrong because
that's how they were hired, that's how they were trained,
that's the attitude they have, And so not everybody in
the government is a completely lost soul. There are some
very capable people, very very good people, very devoted people

(40:35):
to whatever service they're providing in the government, so we
have something to work with once the big personnel changes
are made and the big personnel reductions are done. So
it's not like we're going to lose a lot of
good people or like we don't have good people in
there with the experience that the newer people will need

(40:57):
to get things done the right way. So it's very
exciting to see. I've been talking to people in some
of the three letter agencies and have been really encouraged
at the level of support among a small number of
highly capable, well placed people who they didn't They're not say,
they're not maga people, they're just professionals, but they really

(41:19):
see that the president is articulating what they've known had
to be done for most of their careers, and they're
there to help undo this mess.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
No. I mean you're right in the sense of, you know,
to some degree, people are living in their own universe,
Like you know, Pete Bojo just has been tweeting out
about the threats of democracy and how Trump's dangerous, and
I'm like you guys just try to throw them in jail.
You know, it's like a different right, you know. But
I really do think that he thinks Trump is a
threat to democracy, and like somehow what he was doing

(41:51):
and trying, you know, in the desire to throw Trump
in jail, like they were doing the right thing. And
that's in the interesting you know. So it's like, you know,
how do you Yeah, you know, it's almost just two wins, right,
because you're never going to change someone like that's mind,
and they live in their own universe. Fortunately there's more
of us than there are of them. But you know,
I think he really does think Trump is a threat

(42:11):
to democracy and somehow throwing your political opponent in jail
is justified.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, But if this was done in another country, those
same people would throw sanctions on him, saying, you're destroying
democracy by jailing your opponents and then by hounding everybody
else through prosecutions and lawsuits and everything. You're subverting the
democracy of your own countries by doing this. But they
don't look inward. And somebody like Buddha Jegs. He was
raised by a father who was a Marxist, who was

(42:39):
a scholar of one of the founders of what became
critical theory, Antonio Gramsci Gramscy pioneered the communist tactics of
infiltrating very very very slowly over generations through institutions, taking
them over, starting with universities and then elementary schools through
high school and then professional schools, and getting people into

(43:02):
the profession who had been pretty much brainwashed to view
the world in a certain way. That's so you get
all this this this this receptivity toward the wokeness that
Obama imposed from the top was the Gramsey type of
people had been working for a century now since Gramsey
first articulated this to march through these institutions and take

(43:23):
them over. And nobody knows this better than Pete Botagest
because that's the way his dad raised him well.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
And Kamal Harris his dad was a Marxist as well.
So I guess you you know that solves that problem.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah. And Valerie Jarret's parents were Companist party. You know,
she was the you know, she lived in the White House.
She's so close to the Obama She introduced them when
she was working for the Chicago uh, you know the
city of Chicago, and Obama himself was mentored from age
nine by a man named Frank Marshall Davis, who was

(43:59):
an old Stalinist and Communist Party member, and he raised
he helped shape Obama's worldview as a young person. In
his first autobiography, Obama mentioned somebody named Frank, but didn't
say his last name who was so important in him
because he was trying to hide the fact that it
was Frank Marshall Davis, who you can find out was
a hardcore Balonist and Communist Party person throughout his life.

(44:21):
He broke with Stalin after Stalin's death. But imagine if
you're raised from this as a as a child, if
you're raised in this type of ideology, and it becomes
normal for you, so when you go into college, you
become an activist. When you get out of college, a
guy like Obama could have made a fortune and finance,
but he chose to become a community organizers being mentored

(44:43):
by the weather underground.

Speaker 1 (44:46):
I guess you know when you had mentioned on you
know Peep, you to judge, and you know us trying
to throw or not us them trying to throw Trump
in jail, and then it makes it hard to then
you know, pre each other. I guess that's kind of
like my thought us in sort of the broader conversation
of you know, when we meddle in other countries, if
we're not, you know, can we really push democracy, particularly

(45:07):
if we're not practicing it at home. And like, I
guess my thought process and Trump has changed this a
lot in the sense of, like, I think the first
the most important thing we can do as a country
is just get our own house in order, right, because
it's like if you're on a street and your house
is falling apart and the grass hasn't been cut, and
your shutters are falling off, and like your paint looks

(45:29):
like crap, and like your house is just totally disheveled
and you know, a complete mess. You can't tell like
your neighbors and the other people in the neighborhood to
get it together and you know, to cut through up right.
It's like we have to, you know, if we're going
to push things on other nations, like we have to
practice what we preach. Otherwise it's just hypocrisy. And I

(45:50):
just think, you know, there's a lot of examples throughout
our history when we aren't doing so, and so I
think the best thing we can do for our country
is like get strong, you know, defend our borders, you know,
clean up our own intelligence agencies, make sure that we
are practicing democracy. Well, I mean, we're constitutional republic, but
you know, make sure that we are living out like
what our constitution states, and you know, the kind of

(46:13):
country that our forefathers sought us to be, and you know,
and to like return to being that beacon of light
in the rest of the world. Otherwise it's just hypocrisy.
And you know, we're we're we're no longer America.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
That's really important. At the same time, you know, people
throughout history, that's what the Bible is all about, right,
People screw up all the time. So you have to
help each other to stop screwing up so that you
can perfect yourselves and help the next generation do an
even better job. So we have to recognize our own
faults and recognize that that that republican former government a

(46:52):
democratic process. They're messy and they're going to be abused,
and it's just a question of how do you try
to perfect the situations you have and respective countries. I
don't think it makes sense for the United States to
be this big democracy crusader everywhere in the world. But
I do think it's important for us to promote, you know,

(47:13):
promote what's right in places of importance to us and
in places where our largest military adversaries, our most dangerous ones,
are the jihadists, or the Chinese communists, or Russia in
certain places where they are competing and say, destroying the
democratic system right right in our own hemisphere, like Venezuela,

(47:34):
the way the Russians and the Chinese and the Cuban
regime have done, and the problems that all that has
caused for us, it's our duty to intervene in those
countries and help beef up, if not the democratic processes themselves,
at least the political forces that are important to us,
and to help them to destroy the political forces that

(47:55):
are going to to make life very hard for us.
It's our national obligation to do that. And it's not
an interventionist strategy. It doesn't it's not some neocon thing,
it's not some forever war thing because it doesn't involve
the deployment of American troops.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
It's right because who are we to decide what's in
the interests of another nation? You know what I mean,
I guess that's kind of like where I you know,
it's like, who are we to decide? I guess we
should I don't know. I think maybe we should just
be more honest about it and say we're doing what's
in our interest, even if that's meddling in other countries
or staging coups or doing whatever it is, Like the

(48:32):
bottom line is because it's good for America. It's like,
I don't, like, who are we to tell other countries
who they should vote for, what their government should look like?
That doesn't always work out either, you know, we've seen
where nation building doesn't work out. So yeah, so it's like,
I guess, my, you know, who are we to tell
other countries?

Speaker 2 (48:49):
How?

Speaker 1 (48:50):
And then also like if our government is meddling in
other elections and staging coups and overthrowing governments and whatnot,
then how much of that have we been doing in house?
Like how much?

Speaker 2 (49:00):
How?

Speaker 1 (49:00):
What have what has the CIA done you know, throughout
the course of history, you know, or throughout its course
in our history in our own elections es, you know,
particularly after what we saw with Donald Trump and the
spying on him and what you know, and a lot
of that was brought to light because he called them
out and he was the one that brought attention to it.
So like, how much of this has been going on?

Speaker 2 (49:20):
Right? And then?

Speaker 1 (49:21):
And then if that's the case, are we truly you know,
how democratic are we? You know how much of a
democracy are we if our own government is meddling in
our own elections or you know. So it's like, I
don't know, it's like I.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
Just sink situation to be right. All your questions are
really great questions, and we're always going to be debating them.
But really, if we believe in American exceptionalism, which the
critical theory types and the DEI types do not believe
in American exceptionalism, They view us as a force of evil.

(49:54):
But if we believe in American exceptionalism, and we believe
in making America and keeping him on top of the
world with no pure rival, then it's our duty to
defend our interests however we have to. I don't think
it's moral at all. I think it's grotesquely immoral to
have such a decrepit state of our soft power and

(50:16):
our covert capabilities and to solve problems or try to
solve them by bombing people, including innocent people abroad, and
then sending our own people out to be killed just
because our own leadership can't figure out how to work
in the gray area where we don't have to use
military force. That's disgusting and it's immoral. And then that's

(50:37):
how you get into these forever wars like Iraq and Afghanistan,
where you don't have a lightning strikes against the bad
elements and then call it a day. We start sending
in what contractors and USAID and multi billion dollar budgets
and the tens of billions of dollars a year to
do nation building, and what do you need for nation

(50:59):
But we need more troops to guard and protect the
USAID programs. You need forces like Blackwater to be hired
to go out. You're paying these guys, these security guys,
a quarter million dollars a year to be out in
the field providing security for USAID workers. Meanwhile, these USAID
companies in the in the Washington Beltway are making fortunes

(51:21):
and not providing value back to the taxpayer. So you
have these forever wars that become very profitable. Now one
can look at it from a very cynical way that
these happen because people are greedy, or I just look
at it in a more human way where our policy
makers are just shortsighted and foolish.

Speaker 1 (51:39):
I think it's probably both, you know, Like, for instance,
there's like a Daily Signal article out recently about how
USAID has worked with like the Soros Foundation and his
various groups, and you know, obviously he's a big Democrat,
don't right, It's like, I don't know, I think it's
probably a combination of, you know, the two that I
think that power corrupts. You know, you look at the
Biden fan and how he's leveraged his positions of power

(52:03):
not only to get the prosecutor General fired who was
investigating Breeze and the wholdings, but also just to enrich
his entire family, you know, and then holding on classified
documents since like the nineteen seventies when he was in
the Senate, so he probably had to remove them from
a skiff. So you know, what were those documents? Why
did he have those? And like why were some of
them being held at the pen Biden center that received
Chinese money? Like what were they were they buying access?

(52:25):
What were they buying? Right? So like, I don't know,
I mean it's I think it's probably like a combination of,
you know, some of these people just being dunces, and
then also, you know, the power corrupts and everyone wants
to get rich and they don't care about doing it
off of our backs as long as they're getting rich,
and so are their families.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Sure, and there's no accountability. So there has never since
USAD was founded in nineteen sixty one, there's never been
a serious congressional oversight investigation of USAID or how it
was run. Yeah, there was a day long hearing here
and there, but nothing serious. So USCID became a state

(53:03):
within the state, spending the money the way it wanted to,
lying and misleading about how it was being spent, and
then becoming a political slush fund for domestic political and
media activities here at home. That's completely illegal. You've had
the CIA. There has never been a single serious congressional
investigation of the CIA in forty nine years. Imagine that

(53:27):
that's two career cycles for CIA professionals, not a single
one since the Church Committee hearings of nineteen seventy six.
So they've gone off and done so much that we
don't know and we might never know. And there was
never an oversight hearing before nineteen seventy six.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Why has there not been one since the Church Committee?
And you know, why do you think that is?

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Well, I've talked to some senators about this and congressmen,
and some of them honestly feel they don't have any
right to be asking these questions about the CIA. They
don't have any right to know certain information. And well,
they have.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Every right too, because they were away the public office
to vote to appropriate our tax dollars and then approve
the use of those tax dollars to fund these agencies.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
So they should be demanding this. But think of it.
Politicians spend literally half their time fundraising for their next campaigns,
so they don't have time, and they have to spend
other time at home, and so they're really in Washington
three days a week while they're in session. And then

(54:36):
congressional salaries aren't that good. They can't compete with the
private sector, so so many congressional staff aspire to become
lobbyists and then double or triple their salary right away.
So you don't have the real dedicated groups of people.
You do have some right now, but you don't have
the number that you need. I mean, when you think
of how Jim Jordan, Congressman Jim Jordan of the House

(54:58):
Judiciary Committee chairman, came out and said he was going
to set up a Weaponization Subcommittee that was going to
be just like the Church Committee of nineteen seventy six.
He did set up the Weaponization Subcommittee, But whereas the
Church Committee had one hundred and thirty odd lawyers and
investigators and subject matter experts coming in and a cooperative

(55:20):
CIA director who was bringing these secrets out to expose
what the CIA a wrongdoing, one hundred and thirty, the
Weaponization sub Committee had five.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
Are they afraid? Because I remember Chuck Schumer said after
President Trump was elected, I think it was like twenty
sixteen or twenty seventeen, he said it. I want to
say it was on MSNBC if I remember batting that out, Yes,
And he said that what was it? Six ways from
Sunday they.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Had, Yeah, they were both talking about Trump blaming the
CIA for the Russia accusations and so forth. And he
said in a very intense way, he said, and he
wasn't he wasn't really denouncing Trump for this. He was

(56:15):
just saying it. As a matter of fact. He said,
if you go after the intelligence community, they have six
ways from Sunday of getting back at you. Now, think
of what that means. Where you have the most powerful
man in the Senate at the time, who had been
in the Senate or been in Congress since nineteen eighty one.

(56:39):
So during his time in the House and his time
in the Senate for that forty four year period, he
sat on a judiciary committee with oversight of the FBI
that was part of the committee's responsibility, and he never
once sought to challenge the FBI in those forty four

(57:00):
years he has sat on those committees. He's afraid of them.
Others are afraid of them. And some lawmakers have told
me off the record are not for attribution, that they're
afraid to challenge the system because they don't know what
the intelligence services might have or not have on them,
and they don't want to They don't want to go there,
and they remember how j Edgar Hoover blackmailed politicians and

(57:23):
spied on politicians, and they're afraid. So when you have it,
where where our democratically elected leaders are afraid to challenge
the security apparatus of the country. Then we've lost our
constitutional republic, and that's what you know.

Speaker 1 (57:38):
I mean, look, I love America. I wouldn't want to
be anywhere else. I think we're the best country in
the world. But I you know, I just I guess
I just believe in like realism, and you know, there
are many aspects of it that have become corrupted. A
large part of that is because it's too broad, it's
too centralized, which is what or for our founding fathers
were worried about. And then we've kind of become like

(58:00):
the antithesis of what we were supposed to be as
a nation, like this decentralized government that was in the
hands of the American people versus you know, those in power.
And then even our government has gotten so big where
even the people in power area of like the government
and what it's become, as you pointed out with Chuck Schumer,
you know, and then it's like we want to preach

(58:20):
democracy abroad, but then we don't abide by those same
principles here, which so like, you know, I just there's
just like we need to be truthful and then figure
out how we can fix it. As we've had in
this conversation, and then also just be honest that like
a lot of the things we do abroad, it's not
because it's moral or it's not because it's necessarily even
the right thing to do, because that could be subjective

(58:41):
depending on which country you are, even if you are
in the country where the meddling is involved. It's just like,
we're just doing what's in America's interest. Because that's also
how you stay to be the biggest superpower in the world,
is because you're doing what's in your interest. You know.
It's like instead of putting it under the guise of
being do gooders or whatever, it's just because no, we
want to be strong and mighty, and so like we

(59:03):
might have to overthrow this government over there in order
to stay powerful or to you know, for whatever strategic interest.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
If there's sort of a bipartisan consensus that we need
to invade trouble making countries if they harm us, or
we need to squash their economies by sanctioning them. But
there's sort of this this weird idea that you can't
influence their political systems. It's not like other countries aren't
influencing our political systems, you know, look at you. Look

(59:32):
at Senator Menendez who's spending eleven years in prison now
because he was on the take from all these foreign governments,
and he was chairman of the Senate for Relations Committee,
or Hunter Biden in the pocket of the communist Chinese
and the whole Biden family. So you can see what
the Russians were doing with the Clintons. You know they
they when they when when Hillary Clinton, when she was

(59:53):
Secretary of State, she was approving the sale of uranium Ie,
the uranium producing company, to let the Russian Ministry of
Atomic Energy take a controlling stake in uranium one. This
is the Russian agency that manufactures nuclear warheads that are
aimed at us. She approved that sale and in exchange,

(01:00:17):
the Clinton family foundation got one hundred and forty five
million dollars in cash from uranium IE interests, and somehow
that was okay. So you have this criminalization of our
political system with foreign entities paying huge amounts of money.
Look what cutter that your hardest regime that was backing

(01:00:39):
the terrorists who are killing our people, yet bought us
off by giving us, giving us use of their Aludade
military base and a big CIA base. So the terrorists
won't hurt Cutter, the Iranians won't hurt Cutter, and the
Americans won't hurt Cutter because we all have different opposing interests,
so they've been able to buy that. Think of the

(01:01:01):
colossal amounts of money that that regime has poured into
universities and law firms and lobbyists here and you just
sort of name the country and they've got some type
of influence operation going on to influence how we think
and sometimes how we vote.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Well also to make you know, money through foreign interests
like you mentioned the Clinton Foundation, or the way the
Biden family has enriched themselves, or even with the Penn
Biden Center. It's always like under the guise of you know,
some sort of like diplomatic, you know, foreign relations type thing, you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Can give any amount of money to a school or
a five oh one C three charity and not have
to register under the Foreign Agent's Registration Act because it's
considered charity and education. That's the way the law was written.

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
Quick breaks, stay with us. Should we audit the money
that we have sent to Ukraine? Because you know, obviously
the Biden family had and have made a bunch of
money off of leash barisma in Ukraine. You know, we've
already seen reports about you know, not really knowing where

(01:02:09):
the money is exactly going. And you know Ukraine has
a history of corruption as well as a country and
with its politicians, So like, should we do an audit
and you know what do you think we would find
out about that?

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Absolutely, for a few reasons. First, it's our money. We
have to make sure that at least most of it
is being used the right way, meaning the right way
as our leadership intended for it to be. Whether or
not we agree with the policy, the fact that our
leaders implemented the policy with our money, we have a
right to know. That's the first thing. The second thing

(01:02:44):
is those who want Ukraine to win. I want Ukraine
to win. I support their just fights, but I just
don't support it forever war where we're going to be
just pouring money into it with no plan of any kind.
If you want to fight, you have to make sure
that there's minimal fraud in corruption because you're going to lose.

(01:03:06):
So a great example of this is Senator Harry Truman
in nineteen forty ran a committee in the Senate before
we got into the war. But while we were supplying
our own naval vessels and shipbuilding capabilities and other weapons
capabilities to the British and to others. He was looking

(01:03:28):
to see where's the where's the fraud, where's the abuse,
where's the corruption. So this was the Truman Committee and
it operated up until the time he became vice president
in nineteen forty five, when he was elected in forty
four under Roosevelt. And they came up with all kinds
of corruption, to cheap quality steel, to a poor ship design,

(01:03:50):
to things that would have gotten our own sailors and
airmen and soldiers killed. And plus it was just wasting
a lot of war money that could not be used
against Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo. So the Truman Committee
literally helped us win World War two, and it even

(01:04:11):
shortened the war by several years based on the quality
control that that Senate Committee was having. There's been no
call for a Truman Committee equivalent for Ukraine or for
anything else for that matter.

Speaker 1 (01:04:23):
I guess I just questioned their ability to win. And
so you know, it's like how much money do we
continue to spend and how many people continue to die
if they end up back in you know, some sort
of scenario where like Russia is probably getting in control
like the Dawnbass region and obviously they already took Crimea

(01:04:46):
and you know what I mean, Like it's so at
the end of it, do we lose all this loss
of life, give them hundreds of billions of dollars and
like the plead o own you know, military or arsenal
in the process to like end up where we really
could have ended up basically at the beginning of oh
this and so it's like, you know, me, and if

(01:05:07):
they're not going to win, you know, can we just
reach that conclusion sooner? Where like you know, Russia obviously
has to give you know, they're not going to get
everything they want, and Ukraine's not going to get everything
they want. But that's basically the best we're going to get.
Otherwise it's just going to be you know, how many
years is this thing going to go on for? How
many people are going to die? And uh, you know

(01:05:29):
how much poor will we become as a country in
the process.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Sure, and those are the policy decisions on what do
we do with things now? What kind of decisions should
be made, But the question we were just looking at
is being done what we have since already.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Yeah, that's fair. Well, I could honestly talk to you
forever because every time you say something, I'll just keep
asking a question. Very curious person.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
I'm really joyed this and you got me thinking about
questions that took me away off what I was so
this was fun. Well, I had my.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
List of questions, and then we started talking about other things,
and then that led to other questions. At some point
we just had to call this thing or I'm just
going to keep asking you questions and then we'll talk
about if you crank and win and I'll just you
know so, and I'm sure you have things to do.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
You know, if you think how much has foreign corruption
of our own political system gotten us into other people's
wars and conflicts, We've never looked at that before.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
That's a great point. I guess. I'm just glad that
the message that has been sent from the Trump administration
that like nothing is off the table, right Like they
will look at everything. They will look at every you know,
line item part of the budget, Like every dollar we're
sending out a country is going to be examined. And

(01:07:02):
nothing sacred. There's no sacred cows and everything will be
audited and looked at, and I think that setting that
will Obviously everyone's freaking out as a result of it,
but that's a good response, So you know, I think
that's a positive and uh, you know, at the end
of the next four years, I think Americans are going
to trust their government a lot more, will be in

(01:07:22):
a lot healthier place, and hopefully, you know, we've at
least taken you know, a sledgehammer a little bit to
government as much as we can.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
Well, I hope Americans never trust the government too much.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Well that's true. No, yeah, no, I've never really trusted really,
I don't know. I'm a Santa Truther, So I was
like in kindergarten, so I've always distrusted it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
But good healthy upbringing. So if we just you know,
part of part of good governance, if there is such
a thing, is making the bureaucrats fear the consequences of
their action. But if they don't live in that state
of fear, they're going to do whatever they want and
then things will become as inept and corrupt as they do.

(01:08:10):
Think what any of us right, If there are no
rules and nobody's looking and there are no consequences, and
we have an unlimited money supply, We're all going to
do messed up things. That's just human nature. Imagine when
they get together in packs, giant packs called bureaucracies, what
they're going to do with that endless money supply and
no oversight from the outside. So what President Trump is

(01:08:33):
doing right now is really a great thing for the country,
and it's going to put real fear into all bureaucrats.
But it's also going to give a lot of courage
for other people on the inside to speak out about
the wrongdoing and then to start policing one another.

Speaker 1 (01:08:47):
I'm true why I appreciate your time. Thank you so
much for being so generous with a very interesting conversation,
and I learned a lot, So Mike wallerbly appreciate your time.
Thank you for taking it with us. That was j
Michael Waller. Appreciate him for taking the time. Appreciate you
guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday now,
but of course you can listen throughout the week. I

(01:09:07):
also want to thank John Cassio, my producer, for putting
the show together. Until next time,