Look, there are fifty former national intelligence folks who said that what this he's accusing me of is a Russian plan. Nobody believes it except them his and his good friend Rudijiolli.
You mean the laptop is now another Russia Russia Russia hopes.
Hey you that's exactly what this is? Why exactly what is this? Where he's going?
Here we go again with the Russia.
I'm John Ceipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. 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.
We'll break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible. So in this episode, we are going to continue our discussion with Adam Davidson about the Biden laptop.
But keep in mind we recorded this before progosion. The head of the Wagner group mysteriously died in a plane crash.
Jerry, I'm not sure it's that mysterious.
Not everything is a conspiracy, right.
So guys, you're not just watching this, you're actually a little bit part of this story.
We are the most junior, least important cocks in this machinery. I'll tell you that right now.
Believe me, I would much rather talk to anyone else involved.
You can't fight it. You should fight people who are more important than us. Yeah, we're part of the Dirty fifty one, if you will.
Okay, So what are the dirty fifty one?
Well, that's what the New York Post calls The former intelligence officers just signed a letter in the lead up to the twenty twenty election. So, as we talked about earlier, this story of a laptop shows up right a few weeks before the election and is tied to Rudy Giuliani, and it's tied to Hunter Biden and Ukraine a number of other issues. And as Jerry mentioned before, it sort of looked as if this was meant to be some sort of October surprise, similar to what the Russians got
up to before the twenty sixteen election. So a group of former intelligence professionals wrote a public letter that said, essentially, be careful here because we saw what the Russians did before the previous election, and there are earmarks of what's happening here that could be part of a disinformation campaign. In other words, there's stuff that we don't know what's
happening here. It involves Rudy Giuliani, who's been involved with Russian intelligence officers in Ukraine, and so therefore be careful. This letter was signed by both Jerry and I, but also by people far more senior and general James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence from NSA and CIA Director Mike Hayden, CIA Director and Secretary Defense Liane Panetta, former CIA director John Brennan, Michael Morel and John mcgloffin,
who both were former DCI or deputies of the CIA. Essentially, even to this day, if you read the letter, it's not really saying anything that anybody can really argue with. This is essentially just a public warning, and it probably
have fallen away. But what happened is in the presidential debate, which happened a few days later, Donald Trump brought up Hunter Biden and talked about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in response, said that this fifty one former senior intelligence officer signed a letter saying that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Now that's not exactly what the letter said, not exol
what it says, not at all what it said. However, when Biden ended up winning the election, disgruntled Republicans and others tried to use this to say, hey, these people must have been in cahoots with the Biden administration and therefore used their former positions to try to influence an election. And so now they are hearings supposedly to look into this.
The hearings are about the mischaracterizations of the letter. So the actual letter simply says caveat emptor we don't actually say it's disinformation, which implies that we know it's like made up and wrong. We're talking about malign influence in information. That's where it could be true but was put out at a certain time. It could be mostly true, but
cherry picked or curated. And we're basically saying we don't know what this is, nor do we advocate for Donald Trump or for Joe Biden, but we're simply saying, don't take this at face value, have a look at it, and let's get the facts first.
I fully understand what you saw as the risk, and you seem to still think is a risk. There's a few different scenarios that pop into my head. One scenario is there was an explicit effort by Russian intelligence to swear our election by taking accurate information from a laptop and spreading it. Another is taking information from a laptop, manipulating it to make it look more incriminating, or selectively releasing it out of context. Another thing is maybe they
made the whole thing up. Until you answer some of these questions about the provedance the history of this thing, you just can't answer any of that. It is something like as a journalist that we've really struggled with, because the instinct of a journalist is if someone gives you information and it's at all good and checkable, you go with it. But what do you do if the even if it's accurate, but the person who gave it to you gave it to you with malign intent. It's complicated.
And what's kind of striking is it's now more than two years later and we still can't answer a lot of those questions.
Well, Adam, I want to admit here and now that I too have a laptop, and I use that laptop to look up the letter, which I haven't looked at
for quite a long time now. Yeah, and I just want to point to one part of the letter here, which says, quote, we want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post 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 all Americans voting this will and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.
So a few things happened that push this letter into the spotlight. First, during the second Biden Trump debate, Biden said something, even though he mischaracterized our letter a bit, it sounded something like.
This, I want to stay on the issue of race. We're talking about from Hill President Trump.
We're talking about.
Race right now, and I do want to stay on the issue of race, President Trump, you have to respond to that. Please, look, very are fifty former national intelligence folks who said that what this he's accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the four five former heads of the CIA, both parties say what he's saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except them his and his good friend Rudy Gilli.
You mean the laptop is now another Russia Russia Russia hoax.
You that's exactly what. Exactly what is is where he's going is Russia. I want to stay on the you have here.
We go again with the Russia.
So, John, the first thing it strikes me and listening to this is it's two bald guys fighting over a comb. Neither one of them has got it right right, they don't. It's not what the letters said.
Well, politics is about simplifying things for the people who want to hear what you have to say. And so yeah, it's frustrating for people like us who tried to carefully look at this and provide some context and background.
So I'm gonna a little bit push back on the both sides. I think one of the guys, is really bald. The other does have a few whisky hairs on this subject, A few strands.
All, all right, I'll grant you that. Yeah, But in this case, what but Biden did though, is he mischaracterized it, which gave Trump actually a decent end to pit back.
So I want to get at White. You guys had this suspicion. Can you talk a bit about Russian active measures, Russian information campaigns, disinformation campaigns.
Odd's the expert, So let me jump in first. Pregosion has said recently that he was involved. He's saying this publicly. He was involved in trying to manipulate our elections in twenty sixteen. He was involved in trying to manipulate our elections in twenty twenty, and he will continue to do so. So the Russians have admitted that they were doing so on behalf of Donald Trump. So turn it over to the expert though, that's John.
Although this goes back before twenty sixteen, right, this was not some new tactic that showed up.
Well, let me go back to the nineteenth century. If we remember the names Lev Bronstein used up, Druw gosh Vili and Vladimir Ulyanov will know where we're coming from here. Well, I'm joking, but those names are actually those are the real names for Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. And it's a good reminder because the Soviet Union was founded by people who operated as terrorists, as underground as people trying to destroy the Artist regime and we're in and out of prisons.
And so when they took over and created this new Soviet Union, first thing they did is create a security service, and coming from the roots of being essentially underground operatives and terrorists, their Security Service started out almost as a terrorist organization which would tried to weaken their enemies from within, and they used deception and subversion and disinformation because they couldn't take their enemies on head on. You know, even Churchill at the time said, you know, we need to
strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle. They knew that they couldn't take on the European powers at the time, and so they created this, you know, very strong security service which kept internal opposition at bay and tried to weaken their external enemies from inside. Why that's relevant is because essentially the subsequent security services, the KGB and others have all followed that same playbook. It's been the same
thing that's gone on. And Vladimir Putin is a career KGB officer, has been involved in years and years and decades and decades of this same kind of subversion and disinformation and deception and agitation and all of these things
which they've been doing to us for years. Before social media could spread fake stories, the Russians created fake stories like that the United States and the Pentagon created the AIDS virus, and they spread that around the world and made its way into major media markets when it was a completely invented story. And this happened to us again
in twenty sixteen. By twenty sixteen, the US intelligence services and others have been so focused on terrorism that I think we didn't put the resources into looking at what the Russians are up to. And I think we're sort of caught by surprise when we find out that the Russians were using heavy efforts in social media that pushed in information. In fact, several different Russian security services hacked into the Democratic National Committee to steal all of their
emails and others and then publicize them. Of course, there was a number of groups you know the Muller Report, this Senate Intelligence Committee and others who looked into it and have said definitively that the Russians tried to influence our elections. They tried to do that on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign because Donald Trump was the chaos candidate, and chaos benefits the Russians. Anything that weakens the United States or keeps US inwardly focused benefits them, so they
can mess around in Europe and in their neighborhood. And we've seen what the outcome of that is in Ukraine.
And for similar reasons to the early Bolsheviks, we see if Russia can't be as successful in Ukraine as they had hoped militarily, they clearly couldn't take us on in a head to head fight. But this is a way to use their oil well.
To weaken your enemies from the inside if you can't take them on head out. And that's why I brought up the term terrorism and why the early sort of Bolsheviks were terrorists. That's how terrorists operated. They look for your weaknesses and try to exploit them.
Let's take a breather and back in a moment. Glad to have everybody back let's go back down.
The rabbit hole.
We've done it too, right. We did it in Honduras in the fifties. We did it in Iran where we spread I mean Honduras, we kind of spread this fake war. But don't other nations, including US use disinformation sometimes.
This is often the pushback that we get from people who don't follow these things, and I think in some ways it's certainly true. There's two points I'd like to make.
One is after World War Two, when we had not had a national intelligence service prior to that, we created one, and the fear of massive Soviet troops taking over Europe Stalin with the bomb our new intelligence services thought we had to fight fire with fire, and we had to play the Russian game, and so we did get into the game of disinformation and trying to subvert countries that we didn't like. Now we found over time that that actually one number one, we weren't very good at it.
And number two, it isn't really the strength of our country. The strength of our country is sort of art. We're a vision for others that we have our open democracy and open diplomacy, such that by the early nineteen seventies there were significant reforms in the intelligence community. There was of investigations, There was a big change in the intelligence community,
and they created congressional oversight. They changed some of the laws about the United States can't get involved in assassination, It can't get involved in some of these things, so much so that nowadays the US is really not in that game. And you know, you can argue that in some ways it's worse if we're trying to overthrow other countries. We do it overtly, we go into a rocker Afghanistan or what have you, with our military as opposed to
trying to subvert from the inside. That's another discussion for another time. But our intelligence services largely don't play the game in the same way that the Russians do.
I think it's important it's illegal for US intelligence agencies, for example, to use journalists as cover or to use journalists in the English speaking world. The Russians know that, and that's one reason I think since Donilov was arrested the journalists in nineteen eighty six, journalists have been left alone, the English speaking journalists in Russia up until the Wall Street Journal journals was arrested. Where we did get involved
in information operations. Radio Free Europe was started out as a CIA operation was so successful that CIA withdrew from it as it self finance. That actually was one of the most powerful weapons during the Cold War, and that broadcast truth inside to the you know, real journalism, real truth inside, and that was very effective. And I think that is something that we've learned from inside of the intelligence agencies. Truth has been more powerful than lies in the long run.
All right, So what's happening with you guys? Are you like under investigation by Congress by Jim Jordan? What is happening right now?
Well, let me take a quick step back. So what's happened is with the twenty twenty two elections and the Republicans taking over the House Representatives, a number of committees were put together by Republicans like Jim Jordan and others, and one of them is called the Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. And what they are trying to do is make the case publicly that somehow Democrats have used agencies like the CIA, the FBI, Justice Department
to go after conservatives. There's a number of things that
they're doing here. We're one small piece of it. So one small piece of Jim Jordan's committee is to look at the Hunter Biden letter, the letter that the fifty one Ormer intelligence officers signed in the lead up to the twenty twenty election, And as part of that process, all of us received a letter from Jim Jordan's committee saying that we had to share whatever internal correspondence we have in terms of what we did to sign the letter and who we talked to, and then separately be
available to be questioned by the committee. Even if you're taking on facebat that they're looking at the federal government and using its power inappropriate ways. Not a single person who signed that letter was working in the federal government. All of us had been retired for some of us for many years and some of us for a few years. So you know, we were prior citizens with no access to secret information.
Not only were we private citizens, we were also people men and women who had devoted our lives to protecting the constitution. Right. I never saw Jim Jordan in Afghanistan, did you, I never saw Paul Gosar in Iraq. I never saw any of these people and all the you know, some of the rough, dangerous places that we volunteered to serve and to serve our country, to protect the Constitution,
which is what we pledged to do. And yet these people who've never done any of this, they're the ones to call us up and try to intimidate us for expressing our First Amendment rights. And I think it's a really dangerous step in the wrong direction.
None of us were partisans. None of us ever talked about Democrat versus Republican party politics. Why we served in the agency. We worked for the United States government, and we were professionals, and so that doesn't mean that we don't have a right to express opinions after you retire. They're finding that there isn't much there, and I think they're finding it's already being a failure before they've even come to our issue.
Right, And I think it's important to note people should read the letter to actually see what if they're interested. But the letter doesn't advocate for Joe Biden to become president. It doesn't advocate for or against Trump, for or against Biden. It's simply questions whether or not the Hunter Biden laptop issue, what the facts are, and the facts were and continued to be disputed.
Well, what we come to is we are worried about foreign interference in the United States, Russian active measures, and frankly, the Chinese are up to the game pretty heavily now. And so I think as Americans and as American national security professionals, that's what we care about. You know, if Americans elect one president or one candidate over another, that's the way the system should work. But if a foreign adversary is putting their finger on the scale, that's something
I think we should try to call out. And what's unfortunate now is there are people who are seeing a benefit to having a foreign interference because it may benefit their party over the other party. And frankly, that's as skeazy as anything you find on the Biden laptop.
That's on America. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. So there is Paul Manifort, who was Donald Trump's campaign manager. He himself has admitted publicly that he was providing to a Russian intelligence officer, secretly providing him inside information on the Trump campaign that the Russians could use to assist the campaign. He was providing polling.
To a Russian intelligence officer, and he's provided that afforation to a Russian intelligence officer saying, does this information help defer my eighteen million dollar debt to an oligarch?
Right, then you've got Michael Flynn, who was for a little while that they as a security advisor to the president who before that, So Hunter Biden received fifty thousand dollars from Barissima per month. I don't think he earned it. I think it was clearly because of his last name. But Michael Flynn received twenty five thousand dollars to go to a dinner in Moscow to sit next to Vladimir Putin. That disturbs me as well, right.
And did not report it to the Defense Intelligence Agency by regulation he was supposed to report as a recently retired former military general.
And he was taking money from the Turkish government, which he later admitted, and was actually discussing kidnapping a US person, not a citizen, a Turkish citizen living in the United States, actually discussing kidnapping this individual and bringing him back to Turkey. So these are people around Trump who are being manipulated by Russian forces just.
To get into the foreign interference thing here. As I mentioned earlier, for example, years ago, the Russians would create a false story and then promote that false story, for example, the notion that the Pentagon created the AIDS virus and used it in places like Africa and others. But frankly, you know how easy it is now. So you know,
we're focused on the Hunter Biden laptop or whatever. But what the Russians want to do, and the Chinese want to do, when the Iranians want to do, when the North Koreans want to do, is create chaos inside the United States, because the more Americans attack each other, they're not focused externally. The more Americans attack each other, the weaker we are as a polity. Nowadays, you don't even need to create the false story. What you do is you watch the things that we're saying to each other,
and you amplify and exploit that. So the Hunter Biden laptop story now is probably being used even more now by the Russians and others than it would have been even in the lead up the election, because they see that people in the Republican Party and in the House representatives are trying to use it as a weapon against others, and so they say, oh, my goodness, what a free weapon you're handing us. You hand us the bat will
gladly beat you with it. So they can see bad actors on Twitter and Reddit and all these kind of places, and they can promote them and pump them up, and they can essentially just exploit the things that we're doing to ourselves. They don't have to create it anymore. You know, it's a shame more essentially hurting ourselves in the process.
All right. Well, Rudy Giuliani, of course, is deeply associated with the laptop. He talked about it a fair bet.
Hunter, this degenerate drug addict made that way, probably by his father, because his father didn't take care of him, put him in business with some of the biggest criminals in the world.
Was a bag man for his father. He explains it right into our drive.
He says, I've had to pay all the expenses of the family for thirty years, he tells his door to this, and I've had to give fifty percent of my income to Pop Well because the income.
Was really Pops. He started cheap a little slimy.
Center from Delaware, and then he became an international criminal.
Missus MC allow me to jump in here just for saying, because I want to get to some of the things that we learned today. I don't know if you read this or not, but Hunter Biden's lawyers they're threatening a lawsuit against Fox and Tucker Carlson about some payments that he made. Now he did put something on his taxes that he actually did make the payments for this house. Can you can you maybe clear some of this up for us?
Yeah?
Sure, I mean, first of all, they sent a letter to the to Daddy's Justice Department and to Daddy's the Delaware Attorney General asking that myself, Steve Bannon, Bob Castello, and mister John mac Isaacs be investigated for stealing his laptop. Of course, that's absurd because I got the documents right here.
He signed a contract with John.
Mac Isaacs had said if he didn't come and get it in ninety days, he abandoned it and it became mac Isaac's property.
Here's the contract, and here's the notice right here of the fact that it reverted to John mac Isaac.
Well, I think that's the first time that somebody asked Rudy Juliana to clear something up.
I gotta say I've used the move on the radio a bunch of times. If I have the documents right here. It's a very effective performance because of course they aren't going to look at the documents. It's just a prop.
Senator McCarthy did it famously. You remember, I have here in my hand a list.
Of fifty seven, and I remember I read a book that said fifty seven just came into his head because of fifty seven varieties of Heinz.
But a lot of it is, even what you hear there, is just for political purposes. It's a smear of information that sounds awful but doesn't really have anything to do with the issue at hand. I mean, sure, Hunter Biden's laptop may have ugly stuff on it, Sure he might have had been a drug addict and done really bad
and ugly things. But some of the assertions that somehow his father was involved in illicit activity, as far as I know, none of that stuff has ever in any way not only just not been proven, but other than people just making assertions, they haven't even tried to give any follow up information that would make those assertions even sound plausible.
So that's where my mind goes with this, is creating a conspiracy theory around Hunter Biden's laptop. They've been very bad at it. They've missed some real easy best practices of creating a conspiracy by getting these really specific and easily falsifiable factoids, by over selling at every stage, they've left it where as I understand it. Yes, there is a kind of Trump cultist belief that I was watching a YouTube video the other day and a big Trump
supporter was screaming Hunter Fiden's laptop is true. But it was like, what does that even mean? Like my iPhone is true? Like it's there's no thing that could be true or could not be true.
Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute or two, and we're back.
Like, if you were hired to spread this particular conspiracy, I feel like I would recommend, like keep it, Like ben Ghazi was awesome.
Because it was sort of nebulous.
It was nebulous. It wasn't clear. Whitewater, like what was white? I don't know, I don't remember what whitewater was, but it's that and the Clintons are bad, and I feel like they messed that up. I mean, they've done a great job of motivating the people who were already fully motivated, but they've done a terrible job of getting converts because
they oversold it. There are too many details, and the thing is by sticking to vague but truthful statements, they really box the Hillary side in in that there wasn't a simple no. That's not true. And what I've learned as a journalist is you don't want to give a list of things because if I say, John Ceipher is the most incomfident CIA agent ever, he destroyed the CIA's
abilities to investigate Russia. He's a coward. In fact, he lives in Mexico and he like I just throw in one thing, you get to turn the whole thing into I do not live in That is a lie. I do not. So I feel like Rudy, it's just bad conspiracy fearmongering. Like with Hillary, it was like her emails and then it was some were more confidential and yes they could say well no they were more confidential later and it wasn't top you know, but she didn't have a clean no. That's not true.
But to be fair, Rudy Juliani's not just bad at conspiracy theories.
Bad a lot of things, but one thing he has known for is his lifelong commitment to combating substance abuse.
There's one thing that we can all agree on that none of us are going to vote for Hunter Biden for president.
I don't think I would.
So let's play back an interview we had with a different, better looking, and more charming ad him Adam Kinsinger, until recently a congressman from Illinois. He was one of only ten Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after January sixth, and was the only other Republican on the January sixth committee along with Liz Cheney. We have a full episode with Adam Kinsinger. Here's an excerpt talking about the fifty.
One Adam, with the Hunter Biden laptop thing has become a big political issue. Can you talk a little bit about how you think the Republicans see that, how they're going to use it, and if possible, what do you think they really believe about that issue?
First off, the thing I haven't become clear on is was it legally obtained? At any point? If you have evidence that seized illegally, I think it's thrown out a court typically, right. I'll leave that to the legal experts on it. What we don't know, and maybe forensic people have gone through it, we don't know was any file or anything inserted into it later, was it tampered with after the fact. What's happened though, is that's a whole issue.
But they have tried to turn this into a way to blunt and throw more spaghetti on the wall of confusion to what about in blunt the very reality that Donald Trump profited on his name, his family profited on his name, but he launched an insurrection against the government, which has never happened. He launched an insurrection. This has not happened since the eighteen hundreds in the Civil War.
And so they're trying to create any what about ism, and they've created this Torrent I mean, the fifty one of you guys are getting pulled into some conspiracy when you never said, as far as I know, you never said the laptop is fake. You said what we were all saying, which is, we need to be very careful because not just in twenty sixteen, before that, in twenty sixteen, and certainly in twenty twenty, the Russians, the Chinese, the
Iranians are going to try to influence the selection. So don't just take something that all of a sudden pops up at face value. Understand and be cautious about it. There's nothing wrong with saying that you guys did what you should have is as former professional intelligence officials. But that doesn't mean they're not going to drag you in. And you'll tell the truth in front of them even if they do. But they'll collect snippets. You know, Matt
Gates will get his time. And it's garbage. And I got to tell you, if anybody is listening to this, who's a Republican and you have some sympathy to this, fine, all of this needs to be handled in a court of law. But what is happening in Congress is it is a fundraising slash attempt to take away blame from Donald Trump. That is all it is. So take that with a grain of s and then come to your
own conclusions. And I think that's a real thing. I'm not saying most people on the right believe that, but I think there are certainly people that have truly understood that the only way to stay in power, as whether it's white, whether it's right, or whatever, is visa v force and visa v anti democratic methods, and I think they want to do that.
So Jerry and I fond ourselves playing a small role in the counter Biden conspiracy because we were two of the Dirty fifty one who signed a letter in the lead up to the twenty twenty election that's been spun into somehow we were part of a deep state who purposely are trying to impact the election.
Well, we're in a club because people somehow think I was part of the Steele dossier, because David Kramer, who's a friend of mine, had the dossier early. He with McCain took it to the government. But I got a copy of it probably about five hours, maybe a day before it hit Politico or whoever it hit first. And so now I'm actually the guy that pushed around the Steele dossier. Yeah, here's another of my favorite here's another of my favorite ones. You can find this on Twitter,
Google or whatever. They have a picture of me with Arabs and John McCain with Arabs and they're all, of course bag daddy of ISIS, because I guess they all look the same to some of these people. And so it's me and John McCain invented ISIS. We worked for the CIA to do it, and that's where you and I all got to meet each other. We were on the build isis because it's good for America operation for some reason.
Yeah, you shouldn't have done that. One of the things you're suggesting is leaders and people elected officials should push back even if it's hard. What do you do because you can't do that all day long. Each individual you'd say no to isn't going to necessarily change. So what are some of the answers of how we can sort of slowly pull ourselves out of this.
I mean, if I had that answer, you know, I'd certainly be implementing it. The thing I try to do is a occasionally, for instance, I always see this thing pop up on Twitter about me and John McCain. Occasionally I'll retweet it and just say, just so everybody knows there are people that really believe this it's insane, because I do think there.
Is.
It's like, I got to be careful in how we put it out there, but there is some benefit in ridicule on some of this. Right to show the rest of the world like what's going on, I think is important Sometimes like I'll and I shouldn't do it as much, probably, but I'll retweet somebody that don't have that many followers. That's going after me again because I want my followers to see the reality of what people are thinking out there. Because you have to be on the guard for this.
You have to do that now. Our old friend of the show, Rudy Giuliani, also had some things to say about Adam Kinsinger.
So, mister mayor, Kinsinger's claiming that either mc isaac or you know whoever stole this, now you care to respond.
He's a complete He's not crying, right, I mean, here's that that idiot wouldn't bother to read well because he's a liar. The document says clearly equipment left with the mac shop after ninety days of notification of completed service will be treated as abandoned property, and you agree to hold a max store harmless against any py damage for the loss of your property.
Can I just once again say, I think Giuliani's really bad at this. There's another lesson I feel like I've learned in my journalistic career. There may be audience that's fully with you, like I love you, Rudy. Anything you say. If you call someone a liar, I believe they're a liar. But by going all the way to there, like for the for the audience. It's like genuinely like, I don't know, I don't pay that much attention. Maybe Adam Kinzinger has
a point. When you go all the way to he's a liar, he's an idiot, it's putting a huge burden on the viewer, on the listener.
To take on this like big weighty choice.
Like what I think would have been much more effective is to say, ah, you know that bugs me when politicians talk about stuff without really looking at the information. You know, I can understand why you might think that. But let me show you. I have this letter, and it makes it really clear that Adam Kinziger is mistaken. I think Juliani is bad at spreading conspiracies.
Rudy, if you're out there and you're listening, you can contact Adam directly. He can give you some tip.
Let me offer another suggestion. Perhaps, in fact, he understands his audience better than we think he does. I think his audience is an audience of one. I think when he speaks on Fox News, he is trying to appeal to Donald Trump.
That's a good point.
Well, I'm excited to bring together two of my favorite people. Aaron Hayes is one of the best comedic actresses working today, and George Santo's from the great State of New York is one of our best comedic congressman working today. I should note we're recording this when he is almost certainly going to not be a congressman by the time this airs.
George Santos felt that the call from several people, including John and Jerry, to actually investigate facts before you tell the world about them was an outrage, and he wrote this bill to strip them of their security clearances.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. This act may be cited as the Drain the Intelligence Community
Swamp Act of twenty twenty three. In general, not later than twenty four hours after the date of enactment of this Act, the security clearance of any individual listed in Subsection C signatories of the statement titled Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails dated October nineteenth, twenty twenty are hereby revoked, and no security clearance may be granted or
renewed for any such individual. The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General shall investigate such individual, Jules and their role in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and level of engagement with the Biden presidential campaign.
I think it's quite ironic that George Santos is the one that brings this up. The one person who certainly could not get a security clearance, who could certainly not go through an inspection or a polygraph and get themselves into a position of authority in any feshion is the one who's saying we should be held accountable and we shouldn't have our security claimss. Like I'd almost it's almost makes it, like you said, Adam comical.
Right, I want Jared Kushner himself would say God, that guy should knock down. Can I ask, like, what's it like being at the middle of some political theater?
The death threats are a bummer?
Did you get death threats?
We've gotten death threats.
Yeah.
It's strange because you spent the greatest part of your adult life, you know, working in secret where nobody knows who you are. There's no public face to what you do, and for the most part you are given pray for your work in defense of the American people and defense in ne security, and then all of a sudden, once you put out an opinion in public in some ways. You know, the attacks are weird and scary to see and it's really sort of unhealthy, but it doesn't affect
my day to day life. And in fact that the fact that he's offering to take away our security clearances is really sort of a canard. Most of us are retired and no longer working as contractors with the intelligent community and don't need security clearances, and those who do, who are doing really important work, probably can find a way around that.
I did some other questions. So when you join the CIA, is that when you become part of the deep state? Or is there like a selection process from people in CIA?
But let's this is this succumbs a shock to you, But there is some hypocrisy in Washington. I spent time like up in northern Afghanistan and like on a horse tracking bin laden. After nine to eleven, I was in Iraq and the bad days with ices outside, and we briefed Congress about this, and I sat across from some of these same congressmen who then talking about how, you know,
colleagues risked their lives to protect this country. And they were all happy and supportive and thankful and thank you for your sacrifice, and when when it came to politics, they were ready to cut our throats without a second thought. So I mean a lot of these guys who in Congress who were attacking us are the same guys who were thanking us what we risked our lives earlier on.
I can remember coming back for a Chief of Station conference. We would go down to the Hill to speak to centers and congress people and their staff and actually being hugged. You know, thank you for what you guys are doing. It's so wonderful. And that night seeing in them on TV tearing into the CIA is dishonest. Whatever He's like, geez, it could have waited a day or two.
Thank you guys. I gotta say, it's kind of exciting to have a couple of deep state stooges on to talk about the conspiracy, about the very sane deep state stooges who are hosting this show.
Thanks guys, Oh you're very welcome.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producers are Rachel Harner and David Sollinger. This has been a production of honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeartMedia