I just can't escape the thought that you've spent voluntarily decades of your life fighting some of the most hate filled violent groups on the face of the earth, ISIS and al Qaeda, and yet you're getting death threats from supposedly patriotic Americans. It just boggles the fucking mind.
Okay, want to be patriots that are driven by wanna be dictators.
I'm John Ceipher and I'm Jerry o'she I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
Will break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible. Hunter Biden was found guilty by Delaware jury for gun charges lately, and we've done a couple episodes on Hunter Biden's laptop, and I was hoping perhaps we could get away from the issue, but the
verdict and the news has spun up again. The issue related to Jerry and I and a bunch of former intelligence friends who signed a letter in the lead up the twenty twenty election warning about the laptop issue coming out right before the election might have been in October surprise involving Russian intelligence, and so of course is now
back in the news. The New York Post has written about it, and Stevid Miller and a number of others are Fox News are commenting saying the Hunter Biden gun charges are quote a giant misdirection, a fig leaf to cover up the real climbs of Joe Biden, and a New York Post has written another story about us, saying that x Intel officers stand by their smear even after the FBI has confirmed the device's authenticity, of course, which had nothing to do with what we said in a letter.
I'm trying to imagine the meeting where they're like, all right, guys, we've got a big problem. The president's obviously the leader of a massive criminal enterprise. We don't want people to know about that. I got an idea, Let's get his son convicted of a crime. And have a massive spotlight on his sun and his crimes, because that's the best way to hide bigger crimes, Like just how would that possibly be the conclusion to that meeting. But then there's the U News, which we care about a lot.
Well, I don't even care that much about that, to be honest with you, either, because it's just a deflection scam game for partisan purposes, and they use our names because it helps them make their case.
Because we've talked about this on the show before. But just remind us, like you were two of fifty one former intelligence officers who wrote a letter right before the twenty twenty election. Suddenly it was out that there was this laptop, and.
The misdirection comes from what we said and then what they claim we said in the letter. The letter simply says be careful. We know that Russian intelligence officers are involved, named who they are. We named Andre Derkos who was involved. We talked to Lef Parnas, he was involved in going
after information on Hunter Biden and on the laptop. And we know that Giuliani had it a year earlier, he had in April nineteen, but he waited just before the election to put this out with all these grand, wild accusations and claims, none of which have been proven to be true yet, and so all we did is just be careful. This is what the Russians do, and Giuliani was working with Russians, and we've seen the FBI has arrested this guy Smirnov, who was also involved in this
whole hunter Biden and Broglio. So the issue isn't really whether it the laptop, and there's several of them, but which is authentic. It's just whether it's part of a malign influence campaign. That's really the issue, and to be careful.
In the New York Post article, Leon Panetta, the former Secretary of Defense, said, I signed that letter for one reason, which was to make the American people aware that the Russians deliberately were engaged in this information campaign in the United States and trying to impact on our ability to have free and fair election.
We happen to know that leon Panetta, like that was the case study where they took They did take real emails from leon panetto But if you actually read Mollor report and Molor indictments, we know the names and the units of the Russian military that did these actions, and so as I read your letter, you're simply saying this is not neutral information.
We strongly suspect a foreign government is trying to manipulate with this, and somebody who's the word disinformation that we're disinformation never shows up in the letter. I mean disinformation means people are telling you things that are simply are not true. And there's also just malign influence where they're telling you things that have been curated, things that have been slightly altered, things taken out of context. They can
still be like authentic or true, but not correct. A good way of putting this across is if you write to somebody I'd kill for a beer right now, and what they put out is you say I kill, And so did I say I kill? And the answer is yes.
But that's part of the game, right. They know what they're doing. This is all deflection, Like they're claiming that this somehow impacted on the election, but well, lots of stuff impact on the election, and those people who complain that we impact on election, we're trying to impact on the election for their own purposes. And here's exactly what
the letter said. One part of it, we want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Posts by President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani are genuine or not, and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement, just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.
And we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.
And do you stand by that assessment today?
Yes, and evidence has shown that it actually was happening. Rudy Giuliani was running around Ukraine talking to Russian malign actors. They know that the smear is out there, and there's a lot of people who they just want to believe somehow the deep state was involved. In fact, today, as we're talking, Andy Biggs, a Republican representative from Arizona, put a bill in Congress to revoke the security clearances of
the fifty one who signed the letter. Jerry and I don't even have security because all the fifty one, all of them were retired. This is sort of a silly game, but it's trying to keep it in the public consciousness.
So this is this is where you know, the hyperpartisan journalism. It's not even really journalism. John and I somebody from Fox News reached out and said, do you now want to apologize now that the laptop is shown to be authentic. The answer is complicated, but there is no the laptop.
The FBI apparently, when you know, in the court case where Hunter Biden was just found guilty and they didn't take the laptop that Juliani had, that hard drive had been shared and altered and changed, and we don't really understand where it's been. What the FBI used was a different version of it that it got initially, so they didn't actually need his hard drive. Plus you don't really need the hard drive anyway. He wrote in his book, I was high and I applied for a gun.
So I mean, when you go back to the laptop issue, we did an episode with Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman who worked for the January sixth Committee who now works for Hunter Biden, and he is the only one who has seen all the versions of these various hard drives and laptops and gone through all of it. And he talked about it on our podcast saying essentially, yes, the stuff has been manipulated. It's been in so many
hands it's impossible to know where things are. That doesn't mean that there's not a lot of actual things in there that make Hunter Biden look like a scumbag. And of course that has nothing to do with what our letter was about.
And our Love Parnis episodes really just lay it out. I mean, Love Partners was central to this whole actual conspiracy, and.
He was with Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine as they talked about this issue.
I did want to touch on prosecutetorial discretion. I mean, I think Hunter Biden is guilty these charges. It's pretty clear to me was. But the question is, really would he have been how many other people would he have been prosecuted were he not Hunter Biden? And you could ask the same would Trump have been prosecuted on all these various things were he not Donald Trump? And prosecutorial discussion,
I think is a whole different kettle of fish. But it makes a big difference whether you're like a nobody, I mean, who gives a shit about Hunter Biden?
Right?
I mean, nobody's voting for him or whether you're the president former president the United States, and you're being charged with manipulating the information around whether or not you should be president and hiding it illegally. There was a Supreme Court case that I actually know about, Wait versus the
United States. There was a guy who refused to register for the draft and Adam and John I graduated high school in seventy five, so we didn't have to register for the draft, but everybody else after us did.
I was seventy nine. I did have to register.
Yeah, so they've prosecuted apparently just a couple of dozen people, despite the fact that millions of people have not registered for the draft, and the Supreme Court ruled that if you broke the law, it doesn't really matter whether they didn't go after other people. So, I mean, Hunter Biden really can't argue that, well, lots of other people have done this and you didn't come after me and nort can Donald Trump.
Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
And we're back.
So you know, we do this show about conspiracies. We're always talking about conspiracies, and there are a group of people who are actively trying to place you two at the center of a conspiracy, because what they're saying is that there's this deep state, whatever that is.
I was there's money involved this d thing.
To be clear, when I signed the letter, I had no idea that this is going to like this whole kerfuffle would take off. And I don't really mind so much if people are willing to talk about it in a factual way what we actually said in sparking a contract. But what I do mind are the death threats and sort of the violence.
Have you had death threats?
We've had. There's been death threats, yeah.
More against some of the other guys.
So, according to Philip Bump, who is a Washington Post columnist has looked at us pretty closely, the FBI case really didn't revolve around whether or not the version that the FBI has of the Hunter Biden laptops. There were three of them. It came out of his iCloud account.
It came out of his book, and apparently the FBI had got an early version of the hard drive from the store, and then later the guy that the repair man handed it to Rudy Giuliani, and then it passed through numerous numerous hands until it ended up in the Washington Post, so that one can't be used simply because of chain of custody. Nobody really understands what it is. So the FBI did not use the hard drive that the New York Post and Fox News is talking about, using a different hard drive.
Essentially, what Philip Bump says in his article in others is there's a lot of stuff in the laptop hard drives whatever that smears Hunter Biden, and we're fine with that. But there's nothing that associates with so far that we're aware of with President Biden. And that's what they're trying. That's what these guys are trying to get. They're trying to get something that hurts the president and the lead up to the election they've been trying to push for
the last several years. Biden crime family, Biden crime family, the worst crimes ever. Are going to impeach him. Like Biden has been in the Senate for like fifty years. He's been thought of as like a radically boring guy who just took the train to work all the time and didn't have enough money, you know, like make money like a lot of other senators did. And somehow they decided Okay, well, we're gonna get him on his massive crime He's a massive crime boss. Like, come on, you guys
could have come up with something better than that. You could have gone through the stuff he's done for the last fifty years laws he passed and attack those. But instead they just it's almost like they made it up. Let's just say he's a big crime b and then we'll just keep putting it out there until somebody believes it and there's nothing that shows up. I mean, you think they would have found it by now.
Jared Kushner's father was a convicted felon, and I don't think it's fair to like throw that in Kushner's face.
I do think I may be the world's leading expert outside of actual participants in the Trump Azerbaijan deal, which you know, I wrote an article about it in Time, Yes in Quneiform, even though Azerbaijan is far outside of the Mesopotamia region where kine form was popular. But it's a highly corrupt I mean, it's not even I don't even think I have to say allegedly because Trump's own
lawyer said everything I wrote was true. It was a money laundering operation for Iranian Revolutionary Guard and in that case, Ivanka Trump was the lead executive on the deal within the Trump organization, So in that case she happens to be his daughter, but it is appropriate to convey the fact that Ivanka was an active participant in an actual
international criminal operation. We also know that the Manhattan DA this is years ago before Trump went down the Golden staircase and declared his run for presidency, that everyone in the Manhattan Day's Office below the DA Cyrus fance was all convinced that they had a case against Ivanka and Don Junior for a criminal operation. But for reasons that are highly controversial, the DA Cyrus fans chose not to
prosecute them at the last minute. So I do think sometimes there are actual crime families, and you know they are crime families because you see them doing things like committing crimes and doing it in conjunction with each other, and there's like evidence and even dare I say prooved, So just to point out what crime families actually look like, So.
Let's bring in our colleague and unindicted co conspirator, Doug Wise, who also signed the famous Hunter Biden laptop letter.
Today's guest Doug Wise is a former colleague and good friend of both Jerry and I. Doug had a career in Army special operations, to include time in Vietnam after graduating from West Point and then joining the CIA in nineteen eighty seven, and in fact, his last job in the federal government was he was a deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Doug was a senior officer in CIA, worked on lots of war zones, and so it's great to have him on.
Doug sort of smoke up you. So you're sort of a hero of mine. You saved my ass in Afghanistan when I first showed up in the Hindu cush up in the side of bad and I didn't know which way was up, and you sort of took me by the lapels and off we went into the mountains together for a while. And I want to talk maybe a little bit about why you were unable to catch Bin Latten.
Yeah.
Well, one of the reason why I didn't catch him is he wasn't where I was. It wasn't for lack of trying, you know, as anybody in the ciact business will tell you. While we all sat there and said, what an ex straordinary accomplishment by our targeting and operational colleagues, both at headquarters and in the field, and certainly the courage of our Navy seals. We also have to sit and give some credit to the President of the United States,
who you know, his central focus was domestic policy. But I think the intelligence case for beIN laden being Abadabad was not exactly one hundred percent. So you know that was a courageous decision because you can imagine what the impact would have been if it had failed. There'd have been no been laden, if there'd have been dead Navy seals, captured Navy seals, dead Pakistani citizens, innocent lives lost. But anyway,
Jerry's right. I mean he and I were out there in the middle of nowhere trying to figure out there's been laden there. He could have walked twelve kilometers from Jalalabad into Pakistan as opposed to being up Hindu kush were there eighteen thousand foot mountains, no oxygen, a lot of sheep, and sharing a cave with a grimy ole shepherd.
I think being in a villa in Pakistan south of Tora Bora was probably the more likely thing, But anyway, we didn't know and so guys like Jerry and I and others were all over Afghanistan really trying to look.
So talking about conspiracy theories. So there was a form President of the United States. He did retweet a conspiracy theory that Bin Laden was captured and that the Navy seals who were involved in this were killed. First of all, why would a conspiracy theory like that resonate? And that's spin that out? What would that actually take for people who don't understand how the US government works? What would it actually take. What sort of craziness would have to
be involved to actually make something like that work. I mean, people have to disassociate their critical thinking skills to even believe that sort of shit.
And it plays into the overall psychoses in America all the way from the time of our founding, which is being skeptical of central government. So I think the unnamed individual didn't really believe it. I would he possibly could, given a state of his mental health. But the reality is he had another purpose. He was talking to a very specific audience. But the problem is that this is emotional. Not that everybody who believes conspiracy theories is mentally ill,
but there is a psychosis that is at play. There is a disassociation from reality, there is a chaos in their lives, and conspiracy theories allows them to provide an explanation, a rationalization.
So there's a difference between the people who believe the conspiracy theories and the people who use them for personal gain.
Yeah, I mean a cynical exploitation to those people who believe and are not violently disposed. It's clear that there are those that exploit those community, those good people who actually believe in those conspiracies, and they're either one in the way that you described, or two they want to exploit money out of them. They want to use this for financial game.
So the tweet that I talked about the core is that a group of Navy seals was murdered by the government and all their families are now clowed into not talking, and now we have a tax on like the Joe Chiefs and used to be. You know, a third rail is that you couldn't attack institutions like the military. These are people who risk their lives to keep us all safe and free, and yet that seems to be going
for the first time I can ever remember. By by the wayside, why do you think that is doug, that it's now okay to attack the US military.
I just think it's just as it plays well. Right the government, you can't trust them, right. It's a very easy message to disseminate. It's readily consumed by a broad number of people, and so it is now turned into a political tool. You know, you hate the government, the government scrun you vote for me.
Which takes us into Hunter Biden's laptop. Many of the people who's who signed on to that letter and people criticizing haven't really read it. But these are people who risked their lives over and over again to keep our democracy safe. And the subtle text to that was really that these people have sold out.
But I got death threats, like many people did who were signatory to the Hunter Biden laptop letter. Kind of a funny story is that I'm getting them through dms on Twitter, and as soon as they would come in, I would delete them just so my wife didn't see them. And the one thing that I found unusual was I never got one on email. But what happened was one of them squeaked through and my wife said, hey, did
you see that? Horrible because all these death threats aren't. Hey, I disagree with you, right, and we agree to disagree. These are exactly what they're going to do to you and what they're going to do to your family and all that stuff. I mean, all these pusilanimous fucks out there on the far right sending these threats anonymously. So what happened is Sindy came to me and said, oh,
did you see that death threat? That was horror? And I go, yeah, baby, I've been calling all of those out of all of our communications channels so you wouldn't see them. But it's weird we didn't get me an email. She goes, I've been calling them out.
Of the easy.
Because I didn't want you to see them. But I think it's all rooted in the cynicism toward federal government, which Trump exploited very well by calling us all members of the deep state. Deep state. I mean that just plays into that psychosis, that the deep rooted psychological belief that government is untrustworthy and dangerous.
So you've risked your life many times in exchange you get nothing right, You get the feel that you've the sense that you've served your country, that you've served a higher mission, you've helped democracy, and yet at the end of this at the end of thirty five years, supposedly this letter implies that you took what money or influence. It's like none of us are rich, and yet we have a billionaire talent everybody else that we somehow are deficient in our patriotism and our willingness to serve.
I share your feelings of betrayal. You know, after all that all of us on this oh yeah, done, and now to be treated like we're being treated. I suppose I look at it and say, the individuals who are actioning their hatred perhaps maybe don't know any better, and they're being egged on and manipulated by Trump and by the ultra right wing of the Republican Party. Maybe that's my way of rationalizing that these thousand plus people out there that threaten my life and my wife's life, and
they just don't know what they're doing. They're just being cynically manipulated. Some of the conspiraciy actually are bringing up Italy Gate was from a CIA officer Doug also worked for knows. Another person who's in the same boat is Mike Flynn. So it's not just nutjobs. Well, they may be nut jobs. It's just those people came from inside the US government and worked in serious and hard places and nonetheless are spouting these type of things. Is because
you know, both these people done. Is there anything that you saw as you worked with these people that would have suggested to you that they might go down this road? Well,
one no, and the other yes. I suspect that one of the officers who was our CIA collegue, probably within the limitations and the constructs and the behavioral norms that existed inside CIA, I think that individual probably conformed to those kind of norms, and to a degree, I think the second guy, the retired three star, did as well. I think the individual that we see today is the
individual that always existed. But I think the professional bounds of norm and expectations and regulatory guided behavior can constrain that individual. And so, you know, back to Jerry's point, arrived at this time in American history where one can't without existential damage politically, economically, personally, socially reach across the aisle.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back and Rebecca, So, in any demographic, there's always going to be a scoundrel or two, right, you know, an a sociopath, and that's certainly the same for agency officers. But for both these people that we're discussing, they've been on the inside. So the agency officer in question, he understands we don't do stuff and couldn't do stuff like hijack nonexistent Italian satellites to steal off the internet, you know, voting talies from machines that aren't connected to
the internet. Right, this is so wild and why we would do this. So he knows that's not true.
So for our colleague, is he a believer or is he an exploiter?
Good question?
In the worst case, all the above, Right, He's unlike the unnamed tweeter who clearly is cynically exploiting, knowingly exploiting, and is not a believer.
You know. One of the accusations made by the unknown tweeter that we're talking about here is that we cynically and with mail us a forethought intended to impact on the election, which of course was farthest find in my mind, except impact on the election in a positive way that people should like have the facts before they vote.
Yeah, I mean to to start to me, I think all fifty one have probably different motivations, but anyway, the context for me was the disinformation campaign by Progosions internet research agency, which he admits to clearly confirmed, clearly identified as having an impact on the election. That was my context for taking a look at Rudy Giuliani's possession of this alleged laptop contents people, whether they pay attention to this issue or not, and so everything we knew about
the Hunter Bye laptop came from Rudy Giuliani. So when Michael Morrell reached out to me and said, would you be willing to sign this letter? I like you, Jerry. I looked at it very carefully. I wouldn't want to sign up to something that was declarative at all. My objective in signing the letter was to add in my credibility to a message that said, let's not rush to judgment, Let's take a deep breath, let's wait for the facts.
I mean, this letter was written by a highly experienced senior analyst, former presidential daily briefer, Michael Morrell wrote an excellent letter, and so for me it was a cautionary letter. It was to caution anyone who paid attention that there may be more given the context of Russian meddling in our election in twenty and fifty in twenty sixteen, none of us had ever seen the contents of the laptop, and so for me it was not to sit and say,
all of this laptop is bs. None of it's true, The entire laptop is a creation of the Russian Internet Research Agency or some element of the Russian government. It was to just say, take a deep breath, and let's just let the facts come out, which they ultimately did. So. Ultimately, I think we all had to agree with the forensic analysis that the contents of the laptop turned out to
be reasonably true. I wasn't worried at all with the letter and the fact that the laptop turned out to be forensically true, because at that point I said, now the Russians have a treasure trove of data and information that's been validated allegedly by the forensic analysts, and they could exploit that to our disadvantage and to the advantage of Russian foreign policy goals.
The Russians used things as benign as Colin Kaepernick, an NFL football player, kneeling for the national anthem, or using vaccines against US, anything that creates some sort of tension or tribalism or anger in our system can be used against us. And so whether the laptop contents were true or not, it's something that the Russians could take advantage of and would.
Say that the laptop is true or isn't true. That's sort of like, what are you talking about? What parts of it are true? I think it's also clear that parts of it were manipulated, which doesn't mean it was changed. I mean, we do know that before Julia Giuliani had it, different files were made on the inside, that parts of it were moved around, and who had access to it. But the letter made it very clear that we didn't talk about disinformation. I don't think anybody was even claiming it.
The whole thing was completely made up. My line influence it was, yeah, it was about whether it was being used to influence us unnecessarily.
You know, the chain of evidence was quite loosey goosey, to say the least. As recently as just a few days ago, we had several members of Congress that are objecting to a body of very experienced advisors for the Department of Homeland Security and demanding that they be terminated from that advisory role at literally at the cabinet level.
Why because they signed this letter. And you know that, all of a sudden, the irony here is not lost on me that the intent of the Russian malign influence is now being attributed to our colleagues.
So we're still fighting over the whether this is true or not and what our role was and how it plays in politics. And what we should have done is we should have jumped in and said absolutely, I influenced the election I wanted for the Democrats. And now I am a political pundit and you need to come to me if you want to win elections in the future, and I will throw elections for whoever wants to win if you pay me large sums of money.
And you can imagine that the dudes in Moscow are sitting there going, Jesus, I can't believe these guys are beating us.
I certain visit a barrel be the face right, yeah.
And now all of a sudden you have nations that are emergent democratic states, you know, looking at maybe America, isn't that perfect ideal? And then you have mature democracies sitting there going if America can't do this. Maybe it's too hard to do this, and Putin's right there to sit and say, yeah, you're right.
But the alternative don't trust your government even though you elected them. The alternative to that is an authoritarian government that you have no control over. There is a growing force on the far right, and not even always on the far right, red Caesarism that the United States, in order to save itself, needs to have less of a monarch, but more than a tyrant right. We need a strong man to commit and reassert all those values. A red Caesar is what we need. And that's just more government.
That's like bigger government. If you're distrustful a government. It just seems to me logically and foolishly that you should push for more democracy, right, more people voting, not less.
Yeah, absolutely, I agree.
So, Doug, what's been the fallout from you personally for signing that letter.
Well, the fallout for me personally was quite direct. One thousand plus death threats of various kinds from various corners, all anonymous. Of course, you know, even if the name sounds legitimate, it turns out it's not. But still these are death threats, these aren't I don't agree with you. Threats based on your belief set me you deserve to die and your family deserves to die. That's just not right in America today, but it is very common in
America today. And I laid the origins of that literally at the feet of Donald J. Trump and the Trump Inner Circle in the cynical manipulation of American people that are ripe for this kind of messaging, and he gives them the comfort to action. He hates what they hate, and he gives them permission to action that hatred, where in years past, you know, wouldn't be able to do it.
I would love to see some of these people actually come after you, someone who's been in combat, who's actually been wounded in combat.
Yeah, Yeah, was in a state where I'd like to show up in my driveway.
That would be interesting, I thought. I just can't escape the thought that you've spent voluntarily decades of your life, decades of your life fighting some of the most hate filled violent groups on the face of the earth ISIS and al Qaeda, and yet you're getting death threats from supposedly patriotic Americans. It just boggles the fucking mind.
Yeah, want to be patriots that are driven by want to be dictators.
But Mike Flynn's in the same boat. He was on that side of the aisle, and now he's pushing these kind of violent things.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So, Doug, knowing what you know now, in a similar situation, would you sign the letter again?
Yeah, I mean I would, because the letter is just as valid as it was in twenty twenty. Let's wait for the facts, let's not rush to judgment, let's not overreact when we can react, which is what used to be a core value in America, which appears is no longer a core value. But the reality is I would sign that letter again.
Mark Milly said, paraphrasing him, but I mean I thought it was really powerful. He said that, you know, that loyalty to that pledge to the Constitution that we had against all enemies foreign and domestic, that opposed the ideals in the Constitution, that doesn't end when you retire.
Yeah, it is. It's true for all of us on this podcast to public service.
Doug, thank you very much, it's been great having It's an honor, good friend, and thanks for coming on.
Well, it's a singular honor for me. It's good to see all you guys.
Well, let's hope to god we never have to talk about Hunter Biden's laptop again. But if more information comes out or it's used in the upcoming election, which is likely, we may have to come back to this issue again. But for the time being, thank you and tune in next time for Mission Implausible.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterner.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeartMedia.