I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones.
We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
This is mission implausible. Well, today's guest is Will Summer. Will is a senior reporter at the Pullwark Or. He writes the False Flag newsletter about right wing media and the MAGA fringe. He's also worked previously for The Daily Beast and The Washington Post. He's the author of Trust the Plan, The Rise of QAnon, and The Conspiracy The
Unhinged America. So Will, let's talk a little bit about someone You've written about, someone who's actually quite important in our nation security space now that I never thought would be Dan Bongino. He's the FBI deputy director who was a right wing radical and conspiracy theorist with his own podcast.
I'm telling you there could be some national security problems here. Because ladies and gentlemen, nobody knows how much material people have on Jeffrey Epstein, who was videoed where those videos are.
I was told by.
Someone a long time ago, a very knowledgeable reporter, and so my information, I'm not hiding me.
Oh you're hiding up for some foreign government you're protecting I'm not protecting anyone.
I'm only telling you what I was told that some governments around the world may have some material that's related to the Epstein thing.
Bill Clinton was knee deep in this. Man. I have a very very good source.
He was on the plane with Bill Clinton and Epstein on one of Epstein's planes when Bill Clinton was on the plane with some women who, according to my source, looked under age, like I killed himself, and now nobody's gonna know.
My buddy was on the plane.
He didn't see anything directly, but there was like apparently some area in the back of the plane where everybody went to go whatever, do their thing. I've told this story a thousand times, and it's amazing how because it's the Dan Bongino Show, where we've been right about just about everything, everyone in the media ignores it.
Even though this source is still out there.
But he seems to be having a hard time squaring his new work overseeing the FBI workforce with his previous fan base who he told he was going to destroy the FBI.
You know, just the age that were in Deputy director FBI Director Dan Bongino doesn't seem that crazy, but then you think about it, you go, wow, that's really crazy. I mean, I you know, being in DC, I used to hear him on like he would call in the local talk radio. He was this ex Secret Service agent. You talk about how awful it was working in the Obama administrator. And so I thought, all right, I'll never hear of this guy again. I guess I was wrong.
So this is a guy now obviously he's working under Cash Btel. He's his podcaster. Famously, he couldn't take over the FBI until his podcast ad sponsorships run out. I mean, so a real serious situation here, and now he has this he just has all this pressure on him because, like Cash Battel, he was saying, you know, the FBI is a bunch of crooks, the Democratic deep state is run amuck. All these people should be indicted. And now
that he's in charge, he hasn't indicted anybody. I mean, some of these conspiracy theorist thought they were going to get fifty thousand indictments and now no one's been busted. So the heat is kind of on for Dan Vongino.
Well, Dan Vongina's problem is he trusted the plan right from cue and I so, but trust the planet. I'll be I got to pay them their due. Some of the stuff came true insofar as Trump's back, right, I mean, we haven't seen the Adrina chrome or people are not getting older because they're like killing babies and things like that, but they haven't been arrested for that either. So for me just to what was the plan and if they're trusting it, where should we be with the plan now?
So, I mean, you know, in the QAnon case, they love the phrase trust the Plan, and then sort of more broadly in Trump is you know, there's maybe like a slightly more watered down version of that, but basically it's the idea that these democrats, this cabal of people in Hollywood and banking and finance, Yeah, they're running the world and they're drinking children's blood and all this stuff, and that ultimately, you know, if only we could get
in office. If only Trump could control the FBI and the Justice Department, then all the secrets would be unveiled. And what we're seeing is we don't have the mythical Epstein client list. The JFK files haven't revealed much of anything. All this stuff, and in Dan Bongino's case, they thought he was gonna You know, this is the guy who's saying the FBI's out of control. We got to root and vine perform it. And now he's just tweeting all the time. I'm working really hard. You can't quite see
what I'm working on. But just again, as you said, trust the plan is basically what he's asking people to keep doing forever.
For example, one of the guys that they had made into a boogeyman that they're going to go after is this FBI agent named Stephen Jensen, who was appointed to lead the Washington Field office recently under Bongino and Patel, and he oversaw the investigations of January sixth. So to Bungino's Maga faithful, he's a demon who went after the Proud Boys and all these other kind of things. He's trying to tweet it away, but do you see this causing a real problem for him?
I do. I mean, as you said, this Stephen Jensen guy is agent who in the broader world I had never heard of him. But if you're a January sixth person or like, really follow that, cause this was a key FBI guy in terms of the January sixth response, which I think for normal people would say, oh, good for you, But in this case they see him as sort of like a devil figure. And the idea that he's been promoted now to run the Washington Field office
is crazy. There's this whole universe of like ex FBI whistleblowers such as it is, people who were talking how much they hate Naga inside the FBI, and that now these people have podcasts and they do media appearances, and they say Longino and Cash Mattel are throwing us under the bus. They're not really gonna in this case expose the truth about J six and how we were all innocent.
So Margo's going to destroy Maga. Naga is not Maga enough.
You can never get like too far. If Dan Dongino in his I'll use the word ilk.
I love that word.
It's like, I'm not sure what an ilk is but Damigino in his ILK who were saying that they had the inside scoop. If they become establishment, are they leaving the space open from QAnon guys coming and say, oh, they've been they've been turned, or they've been you know, sort of recruited by the deep state.
I gave up everything for this. I mean, you know, my wife is struggling everything.
And I'm not a victim.
I'm not Jim Coleman.
It's fine.
I did this, and I'm proud I did it. But I think we're there for tea and crumpets. Well, I mean, Cash is there all day. We share our offices are linked. He turns on the faucet.
I hear it.
He's there at he gets into like six o'clock in the morning. He doesn't leave till seven at night. You know, I'm in there at seven thirty in the morning. You know.
He uses the gym.
I work out in my apartment, but I stare at these four walls all day in DC. You know, by myself divorce from my wife, not divorce, but I mean separated divorce. And it's hard. I mean, you know, we love each other and it's hard to be a part. People ask me all the time, you know, do you like it? I say no, I don't, but I didn't the President asked me to do this to like it. You know, you nobody likes going into an organization like that and having to change things and make big, bold changes.
But you know, I was at one of our facilities yesterday down in Winchester, and a woman who worked there, very nice, said, you know, I used to watch your show.
I miss you.
I said, you know, I miss me too. You know, part of you, part of you dies a little bit when you see all this stuff from behind the scenes.
And does that leave room on the far right for like a new version of Q and one point two or now that they're in, you know, they can control their own crazies and it's not going to happen.
There's no nothing gets to the right of them. So what's your sense on that.
Is there going to be a new sense of conspiracy theories with these guys now at the center of it?
Or no, once they're in, it's over.
Yeah. I mean, I do think people like Dan Bongino and Cash Reteller are at risk of being outflanked on the right with people saying you've gone Washington, you're going to these Georgetown cocktail parties already. In the case of Pam Bondi, for example, she tried to win over these right wing influencers with her Epstein Binder. Then it turned out to all the old information people started saying, maybe
Bondi is part of the cover up. You look at someone like RFK, maybe like the ultimate hero to anti vaxers, and he even grudgingly has to say, well, I guess two kids are dead, Maybe you should vaccinate your kids for measles, and suddenly they're flipping out at him. So there's really no satisfying these people on the right because I think a lot of it is decades of right wing media. They've been told like you can kind of
make your own reality. We saw in the Fox News lawsuit the emails saying, oh my gosh, if we admit the election wasn't stolen, we're going to lose all our audience. So I think Bongino as like a hybrid right wing media guy and politician. He has to. He's very conscious of this, and I think that's why he keeps tweeting about it.
It's interesting to me to see that Telca Gavard and Radcliffe and Bongino, and they continue to tweet and have this sort of public face, which is really unusual. We've never seen previous CIA or d and I directors or FBI people constantly out there trying to have a public face as well as do the work. So it's really interesting. And you follow right wing media, and so I think a lot of us are just learning about how big it is and how much of it's based on podcasts
and all these alternative media. And I see now that some Democrats are going on these kind of like gro podcasts and stuff. What is your sense of that and where that's going the right wing media and how to best engage with it.
Yeah, I think it's a real challenge for Democrats. The idea that you know, I thought such a useful dample during the election was that these podcasts like Joe Rogan or Theo Vaughn were reaching people who did not really actively seek out you know, let me load up the New York Times or sit down and watch CNN, but who brushed up against media, brushed up against the news
or politics. And so they're listening to Joe Rogan because they like comedy or UFC or whatever and then he'll casually say, you know, well, I think Democrats did this conspiracy theory or something, and they go, okay, I guess so and so. In that way, I think Democrats have really struggled. And you know, even the sort of progressive YouTubers or people on Twitch or whatever, their content is often also about how much they hate the Democratic Party.
And so I talked to this guy who's kind of like a hip hop YouTuber named Adam twenty two, who's very successful, very like normy Democrat, but this is also a guy who films adult films with his wife and posts them and all this other kind of unsavory stuff. I mean, I think several of his co hosts just caught Rico charges and this is the He's desperate to become like the liberal Joe Rogan. But at the same time,
for Democrats, that's going to mean making some compromises. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe it's a bad one, but that's kind of a I think when people say we need the liberal Joe Rogan, that's often what that's going to look like.
We're going to continue in just a moment, we'll be right back.
So I'm ashamed to say, I watched an entire episode of Tucker Carlson recently.
And the reason I did that is there was a former colleague of John and I a CIA officer, who was on it, and I wanted to see sort of
like what was going to say it. One of the things I thought was really interesting coming out of this is squaring the circle as to how it is that former right wing guys who claimed they knew about QAnon who are now establishment figures who aren't coming down in the One of the things be forward by Tucker Carlson is that he claims he knows senior politicians in the US and Congress and in the Senate who supported Trump and supported some of these right wing conspiracy theories, and
when they go into a skiff, which is one of the rooms that protected from eavesdropping, they go into the skiff with some CIA officers alone, and when they come out, they're different, and.
So he's he's basically Tucker Carlson was saying that basically we're brainwashing people inside of these skiffs, and it's an interesting way of squaring the circle so that the conspiracy he's now spun is that these aren't bad guys, but these are guys who were actually been captured by the d state.
We need to free them.
It was interesting to wat Check, the CIA officer, who knows what goesana this is in methods.
We should change the name from skiff to truth rooms. They went into a room and they were different.
I guess I'm just utterly gobsmicked by the inventiveness of the right, and I was wondering if you could go into like, you know, do you think there are any limits on.
Where they can't go?
I would have thought it was like Nazis or JFK Junior coming back, but it's I can't seem to see it.
Across long time.
I know, I know, I know, but you're you're an expert with q andon, So what's your sense of that are there any limits? Because I worry about authoritarianism and losing our democracy, so.
Of course, yeah, no, I mean, I to be frank, I don't think there are like really any obvious limits that people are bumping up against. I think the there is kind of this challenge now that Trump people are in office that we've underlined with Bongino and many others, where there is like a baseline level of reality that these appointees realize they need to operate in in an rfk's case, because Okay, we can't just keep having more kids die, so I'm going to have to reel it
back in a little. And then that's causing people to flip out. But at the same time, you know, you mentioned the Hitler kind of revisionism, and this kind of goes into the whole world of like bro podcasts too. The idea that Tucker is from to this guy, this guy who gets martyr made, guy who gets out there and says, I'm working on a podcast about World War Two and my big discovery is that Churchill is the
main villain of World War Two. And you listen to it and it's like, well, you know, I wouldn't even put him at you know, top five, top ten, you know, I mean, even in the most kind of crazy idea. But there is kind of this whole sale kind of on the right, this attempt to sort of like reimagine history and and and you know, and and in that way kind of our shared reality. So I think up until I think the when we see this with the tariffs too, it's such a wide ranging thing where this, oh,
we're going to restructure the whole economy. I mean, so there is kind of a sense to I think, make America, and a lot of that involves, you know, remaking what we understand to be the world and our country.
And frankly, that's not unusual what Jerry and I lived in places overseas, former communist countries, or we're author darian governs. Crafting a false history or crafting a false narrative for people to believe is something you do to keep power and to control your people. So that's not that unusual, at least with a more simple question, how did you come up with a name for your newsletter the false Flag?
The false flag? Yeah, well, you know, it's funny. I mean, I was brainstorming about what I wanted the newsletter be about. I mean, it's about writing media, the fringe, conspiracy theories and often you know these days, how that stuff plays out in the world we live in and the government, and so in that way, I mean, false flag obviously is a big kind of byword on the right or by phrase, because they think everything that happens in the world is a false flag event, or that there's a
shadowy force behind it. Things are not as they seem and so given that that's the world we're living in now and that kind of thinking is informing what happens, I figure I go with it, you know, And it's kind of it's evocative, kind of hopefully catchy, a little punchy.
So where we go? One we go?
All?
I think that was a really you know, it's a little long for a bumper sticker, but it's still pretty cool. But are they going?
All?
Do you see any fracturing with looking back?
Historically way you have extreme political movements, they often begin to fracture into different people try to take control of it. So are you seeing fracturing on the right now that they're facing reality? And or as long as we have the figure of Trump as the central figure, that the messiah like figure, they can all sort of rarely around that that's not happening or not happening yet.
So what's your sense of that?
You know? And this is maybe a bit of good news that I see so much fracturing and factionalization, all this stuff that I mean, I could fill a newsletter twice a week with examples of backfighting or backfighting and all this scheming. Yeah, I mean, I do think it's easy to be a united movement when you're out of power, whether it's business Wall Street types who want lower taxes versus like religious zealots or anti vaccine people, you can
all kind of unite together. But then when you're in office, you actually have these policies, let's say in the case of tariffs, that are going to infuriate business people, but you know, perhaps these work where blue collar people want it. I mean, all this stuff is you know, we're seeing people splitting. It's just a couple off the top of
my head. I mean, now that even Republican appointed judges are starting to restrain Trump on immigration, I'm seeing a lot of attacks on the Federalist society, who, of course
were very involved in stocking the judiciary with Republicans. So a lot of people on the writer are saying, you know, I think the federal society, you know, there are a bunch of deep staters and stuff, which for people, you know, perhaps liberals, I mean great, you know, if you want to go after the Federalist society who handed them the judiciary, that sounds like a great idea. Or attacks on Amy Cody Barrett, all this kind of stuff. So I do
think there is like a huge amount of fracturing. I think we're seeing a lot of people who maybe got into trump Ism because they were sick of wokeism or pronouns in bio, these things that I think in retrospect they're coming to realize we're minor annoyances that suddenly they're realizing like, wait, who have I thrown in with? Who are these nuts who are now running the country.
Yeah, the term that Jerry used there was a QAnon term just for people who don't realize it. And one person who famously said it publicly was Michael Flynn, a former army general, three star general, who Jerry and I know very well.
He was selling merch with that.
There was so much So where is he now and why hasn't he been brought in? And how is he responding to the new people in the Trumpet mission? Is he even supportive of is he staying away from it? Is he just trying to make money?
What's what's he up to?
Well, you guys are gonna love this one. So Michael Flynn is he was a hero in the q and On community. But all these things, you know, they eat their own and so really, just in the past week, or two. Michael Flynn has really been targeted by QAnon and conspiracy theorists who say he is a deep stater.
They're looking at his brother, who I believe was in the military still was yes and was like somehow involved in the military response to January sixth, and they're saying, maybe he allowed Jerry six to happen to make Trump people look bad. So Michael Flynn has been, you know, spending the past couple of weeks basically taking shots from these right wingers who were saying, you're in the deep state too, and and so they're really you know, once I went to this q no On convention and he
was kind of holding up quilt. You got to tell us that, oh my god, I got kicked out. And so they folding up Qan on quilts and selling him for thousands of dollars. And so he was their hero, and now they're really turning on him.
Let's pause for a second. We'll be right back. So q and on Ink is there still money to be made in this?
I think there is. You know, it's in some ways we don't see the cues anymore. We don't hear people saying where we go on we go all. In part that's because Q after the election said after twenty twenty said the brand has become tarnished. People have figured out that we're nuts. So stop saying Q and on specific stuff. Let's keep talking about Democrats eating kids, keep talking about
the stolen election. Just don't say QAnon because that makes people of normally people have figured out that that's that's for lunatics. And so but I think, you know, this kind of thinking like we're talking about, it became a lot broader and now it's you know, an article of faith in the GOP that you need to be skeptical of vaccines, or that the twenty twenty election was stolen, or that Ukraine is part of this kind of like
international cabal. And so I think in that way, I think there's like a huge amount of money to be made and you can still sell pills and sell nutritional supplements or there's a whole lot of money still out there for them.
As you look at that group out there, one of the things it's clear and politicians have done this forever, but it seems to be very prevalent amongst this right wing MAGA group is they use fear to push things how does it work. On one hand, that they were willing to push this kind of fear. For example, there was outside of Dallas they were building this mosque and they're using it in Texas politically, Oh my gosh, Sharia City. Oh my god, Muslims are coming. They're going to kill
us against this bro tough guy culture. So part of the MAGA thing in charge is we don't care. We're tough, you know, we listen to these pro podcasts and stuff. On the other hand, oh no, a mosque is being built. Heaven's to Betsy, Like, how does that work together?
Yeah, I mean that's a great point. I mean, you know, similarly, you have these situations where it's like I go into the city, I got to keep my head on a swivel, you know, and we all managed to survive, you know, going into the city the otherwise. But yeah, I mean, in this case, you're talking about this thing called Epic City, which is shaping up to be a very typical Dallas ex serb. Except it's being organized by Muslims who are
affiliated with this mosque. And it looks like, you know, it hasn't even broken ground, So I can't even say it looks like this, but it seems to be I'm from Texas. It looks like one of a million sort of suburban housing developments. But Republicans have absolutely lost their minds over it, including John Corn and the Senator, Ken Paxton, the Attorney General, and Greg Abbott the governor, are basically competing with each other to violate these people's First Amendment rights.
And say, I think there's something like ten investigations now into this operation. I asked Greg Abbat's people, I said, can you just what is the crime here that's being alleged? What is the basis of the investigation? And it's, oh, well, maybe they raised money to build buildings, but they hadn't built the building yet, so that might be securities fraud. I mean, this kind of like Penny Anti stuff. But it's I think it's very clear that they just do
not want a Muslim community happening in Texas. And this has become like a realistic on Fox News talk radio. It's become a cause to let on the right.
And so I get that people are suspicious and don't like foreigners getting involved, their foreign cultures getting involved in our politics, But explain to me, at least from their point of view, why it is that it's okay if Russians.
Do this, right?
I mean, so we have as former CIA officers, we dealt a lot with conspiracy theories and conspiracies, and this is a real conspiracy, right. I mean, the Russian government was subsidizing through a cutout right wing podcasters, you know, and you know Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and that's okay. But I guess George Soros, who's an American citizen, if he supports something that's not okay, on is one is.
Nefarious and one is the other one isn't.
So at least could you explain to me from their perspective why it's okay?
Or do you just explain it away by Russia? Russia Russia hoax? But so what is the rationale or how did they view that?
Yeah, I'm so glad you guys brought that up. You know, obviously john has the experience with Russia, And when you brought that up, I said, oh, man, I would love to talk about tenet media. This case square Timpoole and Benny Johnson and Dave Rue money. They're taking huge amounts of money. In Tim Poole's case, I believe it was one hundred thousand dollars per video. Just imagine if we finished this video and then you got to check clear for one hundred thousand dollars.
It's crazy. You do exactly Maybe you know well, but you.
Know, it's so funny. There is this aspect. I think even some liberals they say, oh my gosh, we went so overboard with the Russia stuff. Sometimes Russia really did do stuff, you know, and continues to And as someone who tries to live in reality as much as I can, you also have to acknowledge that. Like, I think it became a kind of a knee jerk thing among Democrats to say, oh, you know that Russian stuff was made
up too, but it wasn't a lot of it. I don't know, I'm not an expert, but like, but you look at it, and so I mean, in the case of this Tempoole situation, this was personally for me very satisfying because I had been watching this YouTube channel Tenet Media, and I was saying, I don't quite understand why this exists.
It's these popular right wing YouTubers and they kind of made a collective on YouTube, but it's very not successful and are getting hundreds of views per video, and then the FBI came out and said, hey, we have this indictment. This is all upfront for our tea. And so for me it explained a lot of things. And it's also I mean, these people are, you know, in the case of Timpoole, Benny Johnson, these people are successful right wing
figures without Russia. But the idea that perhaps they were doubling, maybe tripling their incomes because of these payments, it was very interesting to me. In Tim Poole's case, he has some compounds out in western Maryland and West Virginia, and he had already a skater and so he had started taking he buying local skate parks and this kind of
stuff really kind of like impresario type things. And then suddenly the Russian money gets turned off, maybe related, maybe not, and somebody's saying, oh, I have to pull back on all my businesses.
You know.
And so for me it's just interesting seeing the dynamics of this. And you are often left wondering, really when someone makes a move that seems odd to be like very pro Russia or on kind of a specific Russian issue that has no kind of valence in the United States. You wonder, like what's going on here.
Like like with Ed Martin, right, district attorney for at least potentially for Washington, DC, just slipped his mind. You mentioned RTE slipped his mind that he had been on RT Russian television over one hundred and fifty times and forgot to mention it to the Senate. And it's still not clear how much he got paid.
Right, Yeah, I mean that's a great example. And now he's one of the top law enforcement figures in the country and then as a DC resident, and it's truly bizarre seeing him tweet. You know, it's, Oh, this guy's selling pro Palestine merchant Georgetown. Oh I'm looking into this. I mean, that's not a crime. You know, all these examples, I mean, this is a we have a legitimate crime problem in DC, and that Trump people were more than
happy to talk about up until the election. And now it's it's all these culture work things.
What is the right way to look at sort of the maga's view of Jews. They're attacking universities claiming they're anti Semitic, but they also seem to promote a lot of nasty Nazi stuff.
Yeah, they do yeah, and you know, this is an interesting case. I think there's a lot unfortunately, particularly among like younger skewing right wing media right now, I think the energy is really much more towards anti Semitism than towards you know, supporting Jews or not or Israel. You know. I think we can look at Ben Shapiro, for example, in the Daily Wire, which are obviously very pro Israel and yet have really been going through a lot of
business struggles. In the case, he had this person named Candice Owens, who is like a very successful host, and then she started making all these anti Semitic remarks. She came up with wackaduke because she you know, Macrone in France his wife is secretly trans and all this stuff, and she's been hugely popular with that, and ultimately they fired her roughly a year ago, and she's continued to be very popular while the Daily Wire has all these
business issues. Or you know, I'll tune into like Stephen Crowder, a guy who is very much kind of like, you know, not making waves of his own. He'll kind of go whichever direction the right wing is going. I just tuned in one random day and he was doing this like insane anti semitic skit where a Jewish guy won't hire a guy once he finds out he's Jewish. I mean he was was like what and this is like Daily
Stormer type stuff. But now these days on the right, and I think particularly in kind of like the Manisphere world, it's becoming very common.
We're gonna stop here today and will we turn next week with more of our conversation with will Summer here on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterr. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.