03-19-25 Interview - David Strom - There is Some Stuff in the JFK Files

THERE IS SOME STUFF IN THE JFK FILES And David Strom at Hotair.com is covering it from every angle. Read his latest columns on it here and here. Some of it is very interesting and perhaps shows us how long the CIA has been doing its own thing.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
We got an eighty thousand page document dump unredacted about
the jfk assassination, and I said yesterday on the show,
I was like, you know, I'm kind of prepared to
be disappointed in this. I just don't think that there's
gonna be I just want the memo that says LBJ
did it, and then then we can go from there.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
That's not what's happening.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
But my friend David Strom from hot air dot com
has been pouring over.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
The people who have been pouring over.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
The documents, and there actually is some kind of interesting
stuff in this document dump. So I thought i'd say, David, what's.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Going on now?

Speaker 3 (00:38):
David?

Speaker 2 (00:38):
First of all, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
Oh, I love being on the show.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Yay.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
I'm glad because I like having you on as well.
How are you following this story? Because you've been on
this I think since yesterday. What are you doing to
stay on top of what's coming out?

Speaker 5 (00:58):
Well, I'm cheating, is what I'm doing doing there. Basically,
people are crowdsourcing by having a lot of very smart
people combing through. I mean it's eighty thousand pages.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
Yeah, and so.

Speaker 5 (01:15):
The intelligent way to do this is to crowdsource the information,
and then I'm being a leak and taking taking what
they found and tried to synthesize it so that I
can give it to my readers and get unearned credit
for what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
We love unearned credit. On the Mandy Connell Show, So
what have you discovered so far that is noteworthy? Because
I don't think did you really think anything interesting we
were going to find out anything new because I saw
some comments by you that were, like, eh, I thought
this might be a nothing burger, but here we are.

Speaker 5 (01:53):
Well, in fact, I did think it was going to
be a nothing burger because I figured, you know, now,
where what are we Sixty two years since it happened.
That's a long time to dispose of embarrassing documents, and
so I've been pleasantly surprised that there's actually quite a

(02:14):
bit of interest. We've only seen the tip of the iceberg,
and two things so far have really struck me. Number One,
we don't have definitive proof of this, and there is
countervailing our evidence from after the fall of the Soviet Union.

(02:36):
But the documents that we have very much point to
the idea that this was at least tangentially a KGB operation,
which is a big deal. And it explains why no
one wanted these documents out because, of course you had

(02:57):
the threat of the American public wanting to retain alliate
and therefore, you know the potential for worldwide destruction in
a nuclear war. Now, to be fair, I'll give you
the pro evidence and the Khan evidence. The pro evidence
in the documents is that the CIA had been warned

(03:17):
multiple times that Oswald was not just a Russian agent,
but a Russian assassin. And you had Polish diplomats saying this,
You had other sources warning about this. The CIA had

(03:38):
been very carefully monitoring them for the two months before this,
uh and so they had a lot of information saying
this is a very dangerous guy with very bad intent.
And there was also information out there that the Soviets
wanted to kill Kennedy that was not tied to Oswalt.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
I'm gonna ask a question about this.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
So if they got a tip that Lee Harvey Oswald,
this guy who was a nobody, right, I mean, he
wasn't He was nobody until he killed John F.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Kennedy Junior.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
So did they follow up or do we not know
if there was any kind of follow or did they
just look at it and go, who's this guy and
why is he going to kill the president?

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Why should we even be concerned?

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Because if one of the if it is that they
just dismissed it out of hand. They had to have
known that Lee Harvey Oswald had traveled to the Soviet Union, right,
I mean, they knew this, So it just seems really
irresponsible to the go ahead.

Speaker 5 (04:40):
He had not only traveled, but he had defected and
then came back and he was there. That's how he
met his wife. He was living there and he was
sort of kind of kicked out, although now it looks
like it wasn't out that maybe they sent him here.

(05:02):
And you know, just days before the assassination, he went
down to Mexico City and visited the Cuban embassy to
see the Soviet attashe The CIA knew that because they
were watching him for sixty days beforehand, because he had
been named. He was a known you know, kinding a

(05:25):
sympathizer who had defected to the Soviet Union and come back.
He had a Russian wife who barely spoke English, and
which really brings me to the I mean First of all,
there's no question that there was a cover up some kind.
You know, there are plenty of documents that they have

(05:47):
kept out of the public sphere, and one can only
speculate as to why. But my particular speculation is it's
just like COVID, where the bureaucrats, the government officials really
messed up. In the case of COVID, we funded the

(06:10):
creation of a virus that killed twenty five million people,
and so everybody involved wanted to point their fingers somewhere else.

Speaker 4 (06:19):
The easiest thing was the wet.

Speaker 5 (06:21):
Market, and so you know, and now it's almost incontroverted
that they covered it up, that they had that it
came out of a lab, that it was engineered. I
mean the CIA, the German intelligence you know, I mean
Boris Johnson and Angelo Murkel had been briefed on this

(06:42):
in twenty twenty, and they just hit it all. It's
the same thing happened here, And I believe the reason
is pretty much for this, it's the same as as
with COVID, which is they really really, really met stop
and they didn't want anyone to know.

Speaker 4 (07:02):
They had been warned.

Speaker 5 (07:04):
They knew he had been labeled an assassin of Russian assassin.
They knew he had ties to the KGB, they knew
that he had ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union,
they knew that he had gone down just days before
to Mexico City to go to the Russian embassy. And
then they let JFK get killed. Nobody wants to have

(07:28):
that on their record.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, so to say the very least, but one would
think if the President of the United States is in
Dallas and then all of a sudden, Lee Harvey Oswald
is also in Dallas, perhaps they should have put somebody.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
On him a little bit closer, you know.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
I mean, at what point do you have to be
told this guy is going to try and kill the president. Oh,
by the way, he's in Dallas right now. Oh you
know who else is in Dallas?

Speaker 2 (07:53):
JFK.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that you
really begin to wonder what happened here with the CIA?
What happened because the CIA did not love John F.
Kennedy Junior. There was no love loss.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
We already know that.

Speaker 5 (08:09):
No. In fact, my second piece that I wrote about
this is he had aides who basically called the CIA
the deep state or an alternate state, a state upon
within itself and wanted it broken up. You know, there
are multiple interpretations. You know, if you're not feeling charitable

(08:34):
towards the CIA, and I can understand why people wouldn't
feel charitable, you'd say, well, they let it happen, right,
and that is not an unreasonable thing to suspect if
you're being charitable, they did not connect the dots, and

(08:55):
now they're trying to hide that fact. You know, kind
of like nine to eleven. You know, the CIA, as
a state within the state, as Arthur Schlessinger called it,
held their cards very close to their vests, both.

Speaker 4 (09:10):
When they had good intentions and bad.

Speaker 5 (09:13):
We know from long experience that intelligence agencies do not
share information with each other, which is why we have
the Department of Homeland Security and a Director of National Intelligence.
Because of all the failures around nine to eleven. I mean,
they had every reason to know, they had every reason
to know who they all, all the dots were there

(09:37):
that were not connected, right. So the charitable explanation is
they were two secretive, you know, a bureaucratic, they were
protecting their turf and they screwed up.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
The uncharitable one is they'd let it happen.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
Well, you know, I've always thought LBJ had something going
on here. I've always suspected that LBJ knew something that
everybody else didn't know.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
I've always thought that.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
I just think LBJ was just the kind of personality
that was more favorable to the CIA and their arguments
than John F. Kennedy's junior was. So perhaps the CIA
maybe took a more lackadaisical approach. But isn't it interesting
that we're now having the discussion of my favorite game show,
malfeasance or incompetence?

Speaker 2 (10:23):
You know, you get to choose one. Neither of them
are very thought. You know, it's like, was it evil
or was it just incompetence? But but I refuse honestly, David.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
I have a hard time with the incompetence angle, right,
I really because I believe that the people working at
these agencies, especially at a high level, are there because
they're super smart about this stuff. You don't get to
be a high level in the CIA by being an idiot,
by assuming that nothing bad is going to happen, right,

(10:53):
And that was the assumption that would have had to
be made by an agency whose job it is to
create operations that disrupt other nations. That's what they were doing,
and yet they think no one's gonna do it here.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
That just does not hold water with me.

Speaker 5 (11:09):
And and they were very big into assassinations back then too,
you know. I mean, there's the whole assassination attempts against
feed al Castro. One of the things that really angered
Kennedy very early on in his term was the assassination

(11:30):
of DM in.

Speaker 4 (11:33):
South Vietnam.

Speaker 5 (11:34):
I mean, he was furious both because he thought it
was counterproductive, but also he had personal ties to DM
because they were both Catholics, and so I.

Speaker 4 (11:47):
Mean, wait a minute, long, it was moral?

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Wait wait wait, so he was president, but the CIA
took out DM without the president's knowledge. Okay, that that
certainly does add to my sense that the CIA was
running its own country, running its own operations.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
And therefore the the thought that they're.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Just incompetent, that doesn't pass the smell test for me, David,
It just doesn't.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well.

Speaker 5 (12:16):
And I certainly understand that I'm hesitant to make accusations
without of something that serious, without you know, really solid evidence,
but all the circumstantial evidence, uh certainly suggests. I mean,
it's like with the Trump assassination attempt in Butler. Uh

(12:38):
you know again, it's incompetence or malfeasans because uh, you know,
amateurs like you and me could have looked at their
security plan and said, well that's bad.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yep.

Speaker 5 (12:50):
Uh, you know, amateurs like you and me think, well,
you had three minutes warning people screaming there's a gunman
up there. Yea, the local police are responding. I mean literally,
you have these videos of tens of local police swarming
where the gunman is, and so the only people not

(13:13):
in the know are the Secret Service. Yeah, I mean
it's possible, I mean up, but that's implausible.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
That's even almost more concerning to me that incompetence would
be allowed to go on at that high level when
we when we rely on these people to do such
an important job. I do keep saying JFK Junior. It's
just because I have RFK Junior stuck in my head.
So sorry, it is JFK. We're talking about right now,
And somebody started a poll to see how many times

(13:42):
I'm gonna say JFK Junior.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
So there's one more for your pool.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
You know, David, when we look at this stuff, one
of the things I saw, did I see that? It
was sort of like baked in that Lee Harvey Oswald
was going to kill.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
I mean, wait a minute, the Jack Ruby.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
Was going to kill Lee Harvey Oswald after he killed
the president, like that was the plan the whole time.

Speaker 5 (14:07):
Well, again, it looks that way, and a lot of people,
you know, the old Jack Ruby theory was he did
it because the mob had ties to the kendidate, right,
the new theory that one could have again, I mean,
what we have is circumstantial evidence. There are documents that
indicate indicate this. But the Soviet Union also had ties

(14:31):
to the mob. They would pay the mob to do
certain things because of course, the Mob and the unions
were very tight, and the Soviet Union had a lot
of people in the unions. The Union movement right, and
the mob likes money.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Right, So let me let me ask.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
I'm trying to figure out how I want to wrap
my head around this. This is a question that actually
clarifies it. Mandy, I don't think the CIA is allowed
to operate on US soil. Won'n't this be the FBI's responsibility.
I'm assuming the CIA got the tip on Lee Harvey
Oswald because he was a Russian asset and they were
spying on Russia during that time. This is the side
of the Cold War, so that would make sense. But

(15:15):
why not loop in the FBI to the potential and
the Secret Service.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Do we have any.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Evidence that the Secret Service was looped in to this
threat that the CIA got about Lee Harvey Oswald?

Speaker 5 (15:29):
Not to my knowledge, although there are eighty thousand pages
of documents, so it might come out. But again, this
goes back to if you're charitable, it goes back to
the homeland security problem, which was what other reasons why
they didn't connect all the dots around nine to eleven
is all the different intelligence agencies had different views of

(15:55):
what was going on. They know, one group had one piece,
another group had another pe, and there was no coordination to.

Speaker 4 (16:03):
Put together the whole picture.

Speaker 5 (16:05):
You know. It's kind of like if you look at
how satellite imagery is done. You know, we see the
final product, which is everything stitched together. But satellite imagery
is usually you know, one hundred or two hundred miles wide.
You get these strips and then it all gets put together,

(16:26):
you know, in posts by a computer. But if all
the strips are going to different people, you only see
a tiny little part of a much bigger picture. And
the CIA did not talk to anyone. The FBI and
the CIA don't like each other. They probably all look
down on the Secret Service, you know, as you know,

(16:50):
sort of these knuckle draggers and you know, bureaucratic arrogance.
It might be that they withheld the information because they
didn't want others to know, But it's just as plausible
that they withheld the information because they're bureaucrats, and bureaucrats

(17:11):
do not.

Speaker 4 (17:13):
Help each other.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
That's that's like that to me is almost worse than
if it was some big, concerted, you know, conspiracy. Just
to think it is just incompetence is more distressing for me.
Now I've rope David Strom from hot air dot com
my guest into playing the most exciting game show ever
because it goes like this, And now it's time for

(17:35):
the most exciting segment.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
On the radio of its kind, Word of the day.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
All right, David, it works like this. First, Aron's gonna
tell us a dad joke. All you have to do
is react, not react, laugh, don't laugh.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
Whatever you want to do here, bugs Bunny won't ex
laughed at everything. Okay, you better, you better. Bugs Bunny
won't accept files through Google apps, He'll only accept them
through What's app doc?

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Can you yeah?

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, you're still happening right now. Yeah, there you go.
What is our word of the day?

Speaker 3 (18:15):
Please? It is an adjective adjective rife, r I f E. Oh.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
It means full of something, it's it's rife. Is there's
a yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Rife It means there's a lot of it and it's
all in there.

Speaker 3 (18:30):
Describes things that are very common and often, though not
always bad or unpleasant.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
Oh, I did not know that. Read that again.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
Rife usually describes things that are very common and often
though not always bad or unpleasant.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Like rife with controversy or something like that.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, maybe life With.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
Today's trivia question, what is someone with the track of
phobia afraid of? But track of phobia be a t
R A c h O phobia? What are they afraid of?
But track I'm gonna say coughing. They're afraid of coughing.
Let's say, I guess, David, you gotta guess.

Speaker 4 (19:11):
Have a clue.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
Amphibians Huh, here's another animal related fear for you. A
leerphobia is fear of cats, aliens nor I know. I
see him walking back and forth. It's like, okay, now, David,
now we're gonna play jeopardy. You have to shout out.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Your name, David.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
You do not have to wait until the end of
the question if you know the answer. Okay, I have
to wait until the end of the question because you're
on a slight delay, and.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
That's only fair.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
So uh, then you we call on you when you
answer in the form of a question, just like normal jeopardy.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
We all know how to do it. Okay, what's our category?

Speaker 3 (19:49):
Vice presidents? Vice presidents? This vice president who later succeeded
to the presidency was born on May eighth, eight teen
eighty four, in Lamar, Missouri.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
H Manny who is Lyndon Dames Johnson?

Speaker 4 (20:06):
Wrong?

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Dangit wrong?

Speaker 5 (20:09):
David, David who is I'm sorry, succeeded on what date?

Speaker 3 (20:17):
Succeeded to the presidency. He was born in eighteen eighty four,
So it doesn't give you some surrey.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, that's the key. He did become president. I just
don't know who that is.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Who is Harry Truman?

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (20:32):
Danit? Secondly? Oh, when we took the oath of office
on January twentieth, nineteen fifty three, at age forty, he
became Yeah, he became the second youngest vice president, David David.

Speaker 4 (20:50):
It would be Richard M.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Nixon, correct, Domando third, John Nance Garner. This president's first
vice president served from nineteen teen thirty three to nineteen
forty one.

Speaker 4 (21:05):
Who David? That would be Franklin del What.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Is David's killing me?

Speaker 3 (21:16):
In the Minnesotans have served as vice president Hubert Humphrey
and this man Jimmy Carter's.

Speaker 2 (21:24):
Veet Mandy who was Walter Monday?

Speaker 3 (21:27):
That is correct? Tex No, I'm zero, You're zero.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Finest one. He's got to I now have zero. He's
killing me.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
You were sworn in as vice president March fourth, eighteen
forty one, and as president April sixth, eighteen forty one.
That was ever heard of?

Speaker 1 (21:44):
This guy Lincoln's vice president and I don't know, no,
eighteen forty one.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
That's well before Lincoln.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
That was William Harry Harrison's vice president.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
And who who was that is?

Speaker 5 (21:54):
That?

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Never heard this name in my life?

Speaker 2 (21:57):
When's the answer

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Is John Tyler of course orders Tippie Canoe and Tyler
Shoe dang