Speaker 4 (00:00.238)
All things know, all things know We sold our clothes to the state I don't mind, I don't mind I made a lot of mistakes in my mind In my mind You came to take

you

Speaker 4 (00:24.404)
All things go, all things go, to recreate us All things go, all things go, we have our minds set All things go, all things go, you have to find out All things go, all things go I drove to New York

then

In a... With my friend, we slept in parking lots. I don't mind, I don't mind, I was in love with the place. In my mind, in my mind, I made a lot of mistakes. In my mind, in my mind, you came to tell me...

Thanks.

you

Speaker 4 (01:26.286)
things go, all things go, to recreate us. All things go, all things go, we have our minds set. All things go, all things go, you have to find them. All things go, all things go,

Speaker 4 (02:23.432)
If I was crying In the van With my friend It was for freedom From myself and From the land I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot of mistakes I made a lot

of mistakes.

You came to take us all home, home to create us all this growth in our mindset all this snow, all this fire

things grow, all things grow, we have

All things, all things, no. You had to find them. All things go, all things go. You came to take us. All things go, all things go. To recreate us.

Speaker 2 (03:33.944)
there.

you

Speaker 2 (04:02.83)
you

Speaker 4 (05:48.024)
There's no praise in death, things kinda move that way. Good Lord above, now he don't have to fuss, it's not no good to people. Born with a weary eye, playing to see my mind.

Go!

Speaker 4 (06:12.886)
Crazy ideas don't last long, but they come and they go in America.

you

you

You

Speaker 4 (06:45.41)
There's another boy and man With hair I don't understand This is just about as long as my wife Marlene Don't it all kind of keep you wondering

Staring at the stars above, wondering what we've made of When some folks say that they know right away, send love on a cloud for a brother like me This is my world, so my own middle line of view

you

Speaker 4 (07:31.79)
Hey

you

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,

you

Speaker 2 (07:49.742)
Hey!

Speaker 2 (08:02.891)
you

Speaker 4 (08:07.426)
There's no busted dream Staring me right in the face Good one knows why we don't give a try to leave, run from this place Staring at the stars above Wondering what are we made of

You

Speaker 2 (08:23.454)
Speaker 2 (08:31.435)
you

Some folks say you think you're right, but some people are proud for them.

Yeah

You

Speaker 4 (08:55.096)
you

you

Speaker 2 (09:05.612)
Hey

you

you

Speaker 4 (09:47.406)
you

Speaker 2 (10:55.874)
You know your problem?

you

angry then I have to be here to testify about the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ.

The is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice. It's eating damage.

admitting

Speaker 1 (11:08.11)
There was a deep rot within the FBI. said that the FBI suspended me in order to financially devastate us and leave us stranded in a new city without any support. What ultimately kind of was the final straw for me was I got poisoned twice.

and the FBI, they don't get promoted by not charging you. They don't get promoted by not ruining your life.

Look everyone, we're getting more January 6 subjects. At this point, if the worst of the worst haven't been arrested, what are you doing? With FBI agents being taken off child sex trafficking cases to swat people's houses.

think we all love James Covey, but you're a great storyteller because you made up the entire story.

entire story about.

Speaker 1 (11:54.316)
As far as the allegations of CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that. They were f***ing with on destroying me. It didn't take very long, maybe four months before the FBI ended up raiding my home. It began a couple of years worth of retaliatory harassment.

several FBI whistleblowers that call themselves the Suspendables.

It was this.

as if my name was toxic.

A lot of them are having trouble making ends meet and taking care of their families. And that's one reason, of course, why the FBI and the Department of Justice are punishing them. Just set an example.

Speaker 1 (12:30.734)
I will have.

by communist-like totalitarianism.

particularly working for the Central Intelligence Agency to protect the Constitutional rights. Instead, it helps to defend and protect the bureaucracy first and foremost.

I'm supposed to defend them.

Speaker 4 (12:45.258)
If any of you are thinking of blowing the whistles, look at these boys. They can't feed their families anymore. So think twice and you better fall in line.

Speaker 3 (12:57.774)
I'm going to do my best to keep my cool today. Hi. my goodness. That right there is the documentary Deep State Gangsters. And I want to talk to you about that today, along with three men of integrity who are a part of that film, Deep State Gangsters. And we will introduce them to you in just a moment. I've got many questions for these guys.

whistleblowers for the FBI and the CIA. And there's a lot to discuss today. And I appreciate you joining me here on the Thursday deep dive. Wes, hey, he has not been feeling well this week, y'all. Hero Wes, who runs at themikeshow.com. He puts the show on YouTube, Rumble, Spotify, I Heart, all the places you can find it. Does all the artwork. The man's been struggling this week with some health issues. So please keep Wes.

and your thoughts and prayers.

He might be back at work tomorrow. We'll see. But be thinking about Wes. Also, Gabby, thank you so much. All the fun stuff that you do over there on Instagram. Please follow along over there at the Mike Show. She was so kind yesterday. My grandmother turned 100 years old. Nana turned 100. We had a huge party. Oh my goodness. Tom Brady did not show up. I would like to point out. He did not RSVP. He did not show up. That would have made it even more special. But.

I reached out to the Fox Sports PR department, but no dice. But she had a great birthday party, and Gabby put some nice pictures up over there on the Instagram page. So go check those out. Tomorrow, Brad's going to be here for the Friday live stream. I'm going to introduce you to someone that has not been on the Friday live stream yet, Delahl Bruckman, a friend of mine. I don't know what it is about always having someone joining me from Europe, but normally, like I think.

Speaker 3 (14:56.578)
Let's see, Zay's been in Turkey and somewhere else, I forget, before. You know, Rebecca's always in Norway, and now we're going to Switzerland to connect with Delal tomorrow at this time, 3 p.m. Eastern here on X. I hope you will join us there. Okay, last week's Deep Dive, we talked about what the CIA's really been up to over the last 75 years with Operation Gladio. was part two of that discussion with the Colonel. If you haven't checked that out, please do so. So much information there. Okay.

This is unusual. I have three guests that I want to introduce you to today. mentioned Pedro Orta. I mentioned his documentary, Deep State Gangsters. That's what led me to doing this show because one of there are look, there are a few issues that I just will never let go of and protecting defending the honor and integrity of our whistleblowers against a tyrannical government is one of them. And so when I saw this documentary,

I said, this guy, this guy, this guy, I want them all. And then when I reached out to Pedro, the executive producer of the documentary, Deep State Gangsters, I had no idea that I was asking for them to come on the show on the week of National Whistleblowers Day, which was yesterday. be that, that's pretty cool, I think. So I reached out and...

and these three gentlemen join me, Pedro Orta. He is a former CIA operations officer, analyst, 18 years of service. He's been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, other places in the Middle East. And he's a whistleblower because he reported some problems there at the CIA. And we will talk to him about his story coming up. Also, Nate Kane, another guest of mine today.

He is a nationally recognized expert in cyber security, election integrity and national security, military veteran, over 27 years of experience in cyber security. And of course, as an FBI whistleblower, he's been exposing corruption within the federal government as well. He hosts the Raising Kane Show, where they discuss a lot of issues similar to what we talk about here. So check him out. The Raising Kane Show.com, Nate Kane.

Speaker 3 (17:15.608)
coming up here. And then the third gentleman that will be joining us here is John Kirikou. I really hope I'm pronouncing that right, John. Former CIA counterterrorism officer. He served for what, 1990 to 2004, I think it was. He was involved in operations, including the capture of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah back in 2002. And he has an interesting story as well about how he became a whistleblower in 2007. He's an author, numerous books.

He writes a column for Reader-SupportedNews.org and he co-hosts the show Political Misfits. Boom, boom, boom. There they are. Did I even pronounce that right? It's Kirikou, right? Did I get that right?

Very very close. It's Kuriaku.

Please.

Do I exist in the syllable in there?

Speaker 2 (18:04.76)
That's okay, because literally nobody gets it right. So that's feelings.

Good for me.

Okay, guys, I'm so grateful for you. It just I tell you, I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated as hell. And I'm not even living the lives that you guys are living. I'm just frustrated and angry as an American for what you have been through and what you continue to go through. I tell you, if we don't

protect our whistleblowers. If we don't defend this system that is in place to root out government corruption and misdeeds, then what's the point of all of this, quite honestly? Because I don't say this lightly. Y'all are the best among us. We ask you to hold these government positions with integrity and to defend liberty. And then when you call out

egregious oversteps. Yeah. All hell, all the fury of the federal government comes down on you. So I, I'm so sorry. And I want to get to all of your stories. and I think what I want to do is I kind of want to just kind of go around here in a circle and, just, you know, question by question and just let you guys, answer it here. I want to, first of all, I want to start with you, Pedro.

Speaker 3 (19:32.854)
It was your film that introduced me to all of you here and Deep State Gangsters. Go back to when you were in the CIA and what was it that you were attempting to expose?

It's a long story because there were three iterations and I don't want to hog up the time and I really want to make sure these gentlemen know their stories as well. By the time I got to Afghanistan for the second time in 2014, I had already had 14 plus years of CIA work, two years Iraq, one year Afghanistan, two years in another semi-quasi war zone, seven-month deployment to the Middle East.

You know, I had eight exceptional performance awards. had a lot of accolades, teamwork, this and that, lots of training. You know, by the time you become a deputy chief of base, they don't give those jobs out unless they truly believe you're qualified to do that job. I get out there and it's like, what have I walked into here? I literally walked into a situation where it was a DEI nightmare. The nice lady.

She was qualified for other places, but Afghanistan made a heck of a mess in this space. You know, we had a subordinate being harassed. Our lives were being endangered with recluse moves for yoga classes out of all things. you know, if I'm getting into the nitty gritty of the details, eventually the situation will blow up. But you know, I brought it up to the regional psychological officer. He tells me you're going to have to speak it up and tell your supervisors about this.

That's more.

Speaker 2 (21:11.128)
So I followed the chain of command. You know, I told them what they needed to hear. They didn't want to hear it. Finally, the situation blows up between some subordinates of ours and, know, the chief of base was lying about the situation. And I would have had to been basically, I would have had to penalize a subordinate and have a subordinate potentially sent home for nothing he did wrong. So essentially they made.

a mountain out of a mohiel because then I'm the one who was sent home short of tour to face a bureaucracy back at CIA headquarters that was hell bent on destroying me. And this is where I begin to uncover basically a grand conspiracy of the inspector general, the equal employment opportunity office, human resources, the grievance officer. They were basically trying to get me to quit and leave the CIA as in just resign. You know, every

thing I try to do to correct or just find a resolution, I gave them a low bar, just give me another job. I'll be happy to move on. They refused to give me a job. So I literally get chased out and I end up at the office of the inspector general for the intelligence community. And while I'm there, the CIA IG now reportedly is interested in investigating the reprisals I had claimed. But in this capacity, I end up working on an evaluation.

where we inspected, evaluated CIA, not FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, NGA, ODNI, their implementation. Yeah, the implementation of our privacy protections. And what we found is that it's just income paper. They didn't know what standards to use. They wouldn't use the timelines. They were doing nothing to protect whistleblowers. So the IG was going through some changes. They kicked me out, sent me back to CIA.

acronyms in our government.

Speaker 2 (23:10.592)
I go back to CIA for what I call round two, round three with the devils because the same exact thing that I went through before I took the joint duty assignment, I go through it again. Now I begin to basically blow the whistle on the broken whistle because what's going on here is the entire process is just broken. You cannot count on anyone or anyone or anything to look into a claim of reprisal of any matter.

So I blow the whistle to Mike Pompeo, the DNI, Daniel Coates. Eventually some disclosures may have made it to Congress in this process. I'm making intelligence community whistleblower protection act disclosures. They're not processing them. They refuse to do anything. All they're trying to do is basically get me to quit the CIA. They wouldn't give me any jobs. I probably was passed over for like easily like 25 jobs. So I ended up having to take.

a really, a job that was not career enhancing that I shouldn't have taken. So in this process, I continued to escalate, blow the whistle. So now what they're doing is they're trying to make things even more difficult for me. They launched a counter investigation against me, the IGs claiming that I had interfered in the evaluation that I worked on. At the same time, the CIA office of general counsel was refusing my efforts to retain a new attorney.

It became just a lot of obstructions and stone walls. So as I continued to blow the whistle They basically send in the Office of Security To basically threaten me you're gonna shut up or we're gonna take your clearance away from you and fire you and when I blew the whistle on that because that was definitely a reprisal a Reprisal is defined as a personnel action or a threat of a personnel action

So after I report that they basically allow the CIA Office of Security to come in as a big bad bully and chase me out, put me through the personal evaluation board, which is a kangaroo court because the PEP, personal evaluation board, that it's the deputy director of security that makes a decision, not the actual board. And your first level appeal is the director of security who basically will either go against his deputy

Speaker 2 (25:37.542)
or go along with his deputy. And eventually you can do a second appeal that goes up to the number three officer. basically they put me through a run around, nobody helped, they chased me out, they fire me. And in this process, principals were notified, they did nothing, Congress knew about it, they did nothing. And ultimately this will continue to escalate even after I was fired because

It was reported to Horowitz, the Inspector General for the Department of Justice was the chair of SIGI. So SIGI received a lot of information from me on serious issues with the CIA IG and for that matter, other IGs. It turns out that there were some serious issues that other whistleblowers had come forward to report and SIGI was covering it up, wasn't doing anything about it.

So it would escalate in 2019.

Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you. What was the window here? What was the time frame we're talking about here?

2015, the entire year basically was the first iteration.

Speaker 3 (26:50.478)
Okay, and now we're in 2019. So this has been going on for multiple years over, my gosh, multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican. All right, so take us, what's in 2019 now?

In 2019, what happened is the Ukraine whistleblower case came up. I had tried using the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act process back in 2017, where they did nothing about my disclosures. When I followed up in 2017, they failed to respond. In 2018, when I again filed them, they refused to do anything with them.

except tell me you need to refile them again. So when I finally refiled them for a third time, they come back immediately back to me and tell me you've been fired. You can't use this process. Sayonara. You know, take a hike. So at that point in time, when the Ukraine whistleblower case came up, mysteriously, all of a sudden now finally out of nowhere, the C.I. ICIG

had requested that the Department of Energy IG do a review of my case. While this is going on, I publicly put out a Twitter thread where I showed the public that they had changed the processes, the procedures on how to.

The government loves that when you call them out publicly like that.

Speaker 2 (28:18.796)
Yeah. So that caused a firestorm in which even Trump responded saying, you know, end the witch hunt now. But, know, the department of energy, IG refused to engage with me. They didn't talk to me. They wouldn't respond to my emails, to my phone calls. So they basically just rubber stamped what they, what they claimed to be was legitimate CIA IG reprisal investigation for round one. But on that note, I have evidence that that round one was a shoddy investigation.

And more importantly, what is known as round two, what happened in 2017 to 2018 was never investigated. So I stand here today without truthfully and honestly having had no legitimate reprisal investigation for round one, or for that matter, no investigation at all for rounds two. And honestly, from what I know, what I witnessed and also having worked as an inspector general,

The inspector general system is completely broken. can't count on it. So this idea that we can count on these institutions to do their due diligence to investigate whether a reprisal took place or not, it's never going to happen.

Okay, well, all right, yeah. I tell ya, I'm so frustrated for y'all because this isn't some like just standalone moment in time where you call out something and then the fallout ensues. This is something that drags out over a period of years in your case, Pedro. You're at 10 years now and this is completely unresolved. Nate, what were you trying to alert your supervisors on in your case?

So my case was a bit different. I initially ran into an issue where I overheard a conversation in the office. This was down at the FBI's information assurance division. It's in Washington, DC at a non-disclosed location. But I was working there in the SCIF and overheard a conversation that honestly I wish I had never heard.

Speaker 3 (30:20.278)
Right. What year is this again?

This was in 2017. Okay. Was when when I overheard the conversation. Actually, I take that back. See, it might have been 2016, but it took a while for me to go through the process because it started off that basically the gist of it, to put it simply, there was a we have internal communications within the FBI. They utilize, you know, a, you know, like a zoom like system.

right? You know, but it's on their classified network. Okay. Or, you know, interdepartmental conference calls and that sort of thing. Everything that happens in there gets transcribed and those transcriptions get dropped into a bucket. That all came about after the church commission. have extremely strict rules for records management at the FBI, probably on steroids compared to anything else I've ever seen, which makes me very suspicious when I hear that, you know, evidence and stuff like that goes missing because

How does that happen when you've got a records management system that supposed to be dialed in like that? But nonetheless, somebody had seen transcripts of a conversation on the seventh floor. It's just call me and you know, and all of his underlings at the top level. The discussion that my supervisor shared with me that he had heard about was that it was about the investigations into Hillary Clinton. And by the way,

I had been there for over a year and I'd never heard a rumor about anything, not any case, not anything, because they were very, very tight-lipped about things, very compartmentalized. They keep everything, you know, separated for a reason. They don't want things leaking out of cases. But in this case, somebody had seen these transcripts, thought that it was odd and had mentioned it to my supervisor who, you know, basically under his breath was talking with my colleague. And I walked in, I'm like, Hey, what's going on? He shared it with me. But.

Speaker 1 (32:19.16)
They were talking about the investigations into Hillary Clinton. And I say investigations because there was more than one. It was more than the email server. They were investigating her for money laundering, for public corruption, for securities and exchange fraud, and for terrorism financing. And this is what was being looked into. And things like the word treason were being thrown around. One of the things that was being determined was that we're going to shut down all of these investigations into her because she was a candidate.

and they believed that she was going to be the next president. And the consensus was they were afraid that she would basically go after them after she got in there. And mind you, everything that I am saying now and have said all along has all been backed up by John Durham's report on page 78. He details exactly what I'm telling you, because he went and reviewed all of this stuff and found that that is exactly what happened. The other thing that occurred was

There was a statement that was made that there was something so big that it could bring down the entire government. Now, I don't know what that was. It certainly wasn't the evidence that I brought forward, which definitely was damaging to Hillary Clinton, maybe damaging to the Democrat party, but it wasn't something that could bring down the entire government. So I don't know what else was talked about in there. But I had a duty as somebody who's sworn the oath. I've taken the oath three times and that doesn't

away just because you are no longer in the military or just because you're no longer a federal employee. You know, and that that oath is about supporting defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So I went and I investigated and I didn't violate any rules or any laws. I had access. I just simply did a search within the database. I didn't you know, I didn't go into any areas where I didn't have access to. But I just wanted to see if there was any truth to what was being said.

I didn't find those transcripts by then they had already been compartmentalized. But what I did see was all of this evidence files on Hillary Clinton. And these were suspicious activity reports, financial records that showed from point A to point B to point C to all the way in the chain of where money was moving, what accounts it was moving. It had the names of the individuals involved. It had the governments that were involved. It had the corporations and the shell corporations involved, all of that.

Speaker 1 (34:41.818)
and so I saw this and initially I thought, the rumor about a coverup, it's just a rumor because every single one of these, were over 458 pages of documents and all of these documents had case numbers. They had, they were serialized. They had already been reviewed by, FBI analysts. They had already made a determination of high credibility and of those crimes that I had mentioned, they were, you know, these were basically things being set up.

So I just said, well, okay, I'm not going to worry about this. just going to let them do what they got to do and let it play out. And I sat on it for a long time and didn't do anything. a whole year goes by and you'll remember that FBI Director Comey, in regards to the email server, he held a press conference at the FBI headquarters, J. Hoover building, where he

basically gives a rundown on everything that they discovered on the email server. And the email server, he mentions multiple, like thousands of classified documents that were found on this email server. And this is mind you, they had already violated the law by violating a subpoena by destroying evidence that was on that server. She had her lawyers go and scrub it from, you know, supposedly wedding photos and, and, uh, you know, work out recipes and non-stuff like,

whatever. I have been in the government for almost 30 years now. And in that time, I have had multiple subpoenas sent to me for evidence that they wanted to look into my emails because of usually because of spillage, you know, of classified information, they wanted to verify, you know, anybody who may have received an email of whether or not they received this classified document. When that happens, you don't do anything. You certainly don't delete anything because you're going to jail if you do.

And so when I heard that, that first of all, that they had issued a subpoena and that, emails that her lawyers were allowed to delete things that shocked me. but then the other thing that, that happened was he mentioned there were thousands of classified emails. Most of them, I think confidential, but there were some secret as well. some secret, no foreign. and then he says something else that caught my attention. And I don't think most people listening to the news probably even understood what he was saying.

Speaker 1 (37:05.25)
He said that there were seven email chains with special access, a special compartment, no, sorry, special access program, SAPs. What a SAP is, is something you have to get read onto. And he was going up the chain. So I have to assume he's talking about top secret, you know, basically above top secret compartmentalized information. If you have a need to know, and if you're not read onto it you haven't signed a non-disclosure agreement for the rest of your life, then you don't have any right to even know about this stuff.

I have been read onto some programs like that in my career. And I can tell you, you can't just walk out of a skiff with that. Like when I was read on to these intelligence authorities, when I was working for NSA, I ended up basically having to go and check this out from a security manager. They had to verify that my name was on the list that I had been read on. I had to have a polygraph, all of that kind of stuff. Then they lead me into a room and that's the only place I'm allowed to look at this stuff. Mind you.

I'm in a room, a skiff already that has a man trap and that already has everybody in there has a top secret clearance, but not everybody in there was allowed to see these documents that I'm looking at. So the fact that that was found on a private email server in her bathroom, basement bathroom, you know, in her home, that is serious. That is a serious scandal. So if that's not bad enough, he then goes on to say that they had ascertained that foreign adversaries had

had access that server. And so I'm thinking from somebody who my job is a cyber protection, I was on a cyber protection team, a DCI hunt team, basically going after hackers, hacking our national critical infrastructure. And what I saw, you know, from everything that I'm seeing is that it sounds like a drop box to me. Like, you you put something there and anybody that, you know, is paying you to get access to it. And mind you, I'm seeing also,

all these money trails and everything else that's going on. So I'm putting two and two together and it seems pretty obvious to me. So I'm thinking the next words out of his mouth are going to be. And so we decided to indict Hillary Clinton, but no, instead what happens is he says, but no reasonable prosecutor would burn a case against somebody for this. at the time they had a young man in the Navy who was a submarine, a submariner who had taken a picture of his

Speaker 1 (39:29.934)
hot rack, is basically your bunk. There's nothing classified there, but the notion of taking a picture at all on a submarine is a violation. He was thrown in prison for several months for that. And Hillary Clinton walks free and she's got top secret special access program stuff that likely got leaked to our enemies. So at that moment, I'm sitting here under this and I'm just like, holy crap.

they are gonna cover this up. And then it gets confirmed to me when I'm hearing my, basically our section chief is cussing and swearing, yelling at the TV in his office. And I had a good relationship with him. So I walk over and I'm like, hey Chuck, what's going on? And Comey's up there giving this speech at the time. And Chuck looks at me and he goes, we're the FBI. We don't make determinations of...

indictments. That is the DOJ. We only investigate. I was still at this point, it's still in some level of disbelief and still, I guess, naive. And I said, well, do you think maybe they're not bringing charges for her for this because they've got something bigger coming? And I'm trying not to give away the fact that I've been looking at some things. But he goes, no, they're going to cover this up. And I walked out of my office.

that down on my desk and at that moment I realized I had a choice. I could turn a blind eye, keep my head down and keep my job where I was making more money than I'd ever made before. Or I could decide to blow the whistle. And I went home that night and I'm sitting in bed, you know, laying in bed with my wife and she's, you know, I hadn't talked since I got home and she's like, what's up with you? What's going on? And I just sat up and I said, I think I got to blow the whistle on the FBI. And she sat up and she goes, what?

And the first words out of her mouth is, why does it have to be you? You're just a contractor. Why can't one these FBI, you know, uh, career guys do that? And I told her, said, who's going to do that? I said, what if, what, and, and, and so, you know, sometimes people ask me the question, you know, would I ever do this again? And the answer is yes. Because the reason, what motivated me to do this was the fact that I know that someday I got to stand before my God.

Speaker 1 (41:52.046)
And I got to answer for the things that I did in this world, not just the bad things, but also the good things that I chose not to do because of fear or cowardice or whatever. So I told her, I said, no, I have to do this. And so she of course said, look, this is going to change everything. This is going to, you know, it's going to, it's going to impact our family. It's going to impact our kids. It's going to impact your career. And she said, you know, and she was honestly fearful. She said, look, these people might kill you for this. And she wasn't wrong about that.

And so I knew that, but I had to make that decision. And so at that point, I started researching because the problem I had was everyone in my chain of command at the higher level. That would be Comey. would be the deputy. It would be even the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and also

who was the intelligence community inspector general. So as a contractor, I really only had one option and that was going through the intelligence community whistleblower protection act because the standard whistleblower protection act doesn't apply to contractors. So I really only had one option that was as a, a, intelligent community member, I could go through the ICWPA, but the problem was, is that the head of the ICWPA was Michael Atkinson and his name.

was all over these documents because he was the head of the FBI's public corruption unit that uranium won. Well, actually, was not uranium.

Hang in there, Nate. Hang on. You're breaking up a little bit. Let me shoot. That's your I want to finish. I want you to finish that story for us. Let me let you get reestablished there with Internet because I kind of want you to refresh everybody's memory on what uranium one is. But I mean, you talked about the name right there in the files. I it's like the killer is in the house. And and that's I just it's it's

Speaker 3 (43:59.958)
every one of these stories is shocking in its own way. And I'm going to pull you down there, Nate, and I'll keep an eye out for your connection to reestablish. John, let's go to your story. What were you attempting to expose? And I know that much like Pedro and much like Nate, there's a lot of layers to your story as well. the floor is yours, sir.

Well, I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, which I believed was illegal, immoral, unethical. But just like these other stories that we're going over, it was a very complicated situation. And I wanted to reiterate something that Nate said a minute ago. There actually is a legal definition of whistleblowing in federal law. It is bringing to light any evidence of waste

broad abuse, illegality or threats to the public health or public safety. Now there is a whistleblower protection law in this country, but national security whistleblowers are not covered by it. Yesterday on Capitol Hill, there was this big event for National Whistleblower Day and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon went up and gave fiery speeches that we've got to stand up and protect our whistleblowers. Yeah, we do. Great.

But why is it that year after year after year, you are the only two guys that come here and say that. Where are the other, you know, 536. So I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9 11 and never worked so hard in my life as I did to capture as many Al Qaeda fighters and Al Qaeda leaders as we could possibly pack into the Raul Pindi jail.

One of those was Abu Zubaydah, Zain al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, known as Abu Zubaydah. We believed at the time that he was the number three in Al Qaeda. He was not the number three. He actually was never even a member of Al Qaeda. Our intelligence was faulty. We caught him. They gave me six weeks. They said, find him, track him, and grab him. And that's what we did. We found him, we tracked him, and we grabbed him.

Speaker 4 (46:09.87)
Bye.

Speaker 2 (46:22.592)
in an al Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan in late March of 2002. He was put on a plane. Well, I put him on a plane, a CIA jet, and he was flown to a secret location. That was March of 02. On August the 2nd of 02, the CIA began to torture him. I was asked at CIA headquarters if I wanted to be trained in the torture techniques.

ashamed to tell you that of the 14 people who were asked, I was the only one who said no. I said, you guys, and I knew all these guys, right? We were friends, our wives were friends, our kids played together. I had no idea that these guys had it in them to be monsters, to be murderers, torturers, but they gladly did it because after all, we're the good guys, right? So everything we do is good. It's all right.

Yeah.

So.

So,

Speaker 2 (47:24.302)
So they began torturing him and not just him, but they began torturing anybody that they felt like torturing. Pedro said something that I wanna echo as well. All my life I have been a self-described leftist, but I do not believe that the ideological spectrum is a straight line from left to right. I believe that it's a circle and it meets at a certain point.

And I'll tell you the last two weeks I've been all about Marjorie Taylor green, my new hero, right? That's a whole different, we can have another podcast about that later. And I'm proud to call Tucker Carlson, not just a friend, but a long time friend. Those two sides meet at a certain point. So

The reason I said that is because in, in 2008, after I blew the whistle, I was approached by Jerry Falwell Jr. The son of Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty university. And he asked me if I wanted to teach a course there. I ended up teaching six courses there on intelligence studies. And I said, with all due respect, you and I probably disagree on 99 % of the issues. Why would you want me?

of all people to teach at Liberty. And without missing a beat, he said, because torture is not Christian. And I said, you know what? I'll take it. So I took it and I loved every minute of it. One of the professors asked me one time if I would take a look at his final exam. And this is coming back to Pedro's point. That simple exam has stuck with me all these years. He had a class of about 15 sophomores.

in an introduction to intelligence studies class. There were four questions on the final. The first question said, there's a bomb that's ready to go off in a major US city. It's a dirty bomb. Maybe it has a little bit of nuke material in it. Maybe it's BW or CW, but it's going to go off. You caught the leader of the Al-Qaeda cell that planted it. You know that this thing's going to go off. So

Speaker 2 (49:46.68)
Do you torture him to get the information? Yes, no, and explain your answer. The next page, he didn't give you anything, but you have his wife in custody and you think that she may have the information or even if she doesn't, if you torture her in front of him, maybe it'll loosen up his lips and he'll give you the information. So do you torture the wife? Yes, no, explain your actions.

The third question, she's a true believer and she didn't give you anything, but you have their kids in custody. Do you beat the kids? Do you torture the kids in front of the parents to make them tell you where this bomb is so you can defuse it? Yes, no, explain your answer. The final question was, you've died and you're standing at the gates of heaven and Jesus Christ tells you to explain your actions. What do you tell him?

And that's where left and right meet. Because some things we know in our guts, in our hearts are wrong. One of the things about CIA culture is that the agency, the agency brings us up in a system where everything in life is a shade of gray. And that's just simply not true. Some things are right or wrong. They're, they're black and white.

But you have to go into this job after you put your hand in the air and you swear to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. You can't be the only one in the room who meant it that day. And so you have to be able to stand up to people much more powerful than you, much more important than you and say, you're wrong and I'm right. And I'm not going to let you do this because it's illegal.

It's immoral, it's unethical, and the American people have a right to know what you are doing in their name. And so I decided when not only we started torturing Abu Zubaydah, but we started torturing everybody that we caught from Al-Qaeda or even that, you know, that may possibly have been in Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that we did not have justice department.

Speaker 2 (52:16.758)
or White House authorization to do it at that lower level. And in at least four cases that I know of, we actually murdered the prisoner and then just dug a hole outside the interrogation building and just put him in the hole. Well, that's not what I signed up for. And that's not what the law says we should do. And so I decided to say something.

And then that's when the real fun really began.

Yeah, the government fell on my head. What can I say? mean, that's really Pedro, you can you can attest to that the weight of the government falls on your head. And then what do do? You really get to see who your friends are.

Turn your own.

Right. And John, I want to talk to you about the fallout after you came forward, which was in a 2007 ABC News interview, I believe, Brian Ross. Correct. And so your story continues well beyond that. And so I want to get back to that as we discuss the fallout from sticking your neck out. Pedro, let's go to you and ask you what was the fallout after you went through your disclosures.

Speaker 2 (53:31.798)
It's a long list as far as fallout. I mean, career shot, done, finished. But more importantly is, you know, I had a wife at the time who was from a country where I had worked, became a US citizen. She came to the US, you know, we had a daughter. So the fallout family wise was the difficulties brought upon my family were just extremely severe.

Yeah

Speaker 2 (53:59.49)
where it really just unfortunately caused my ex-wife to go back to her native country. So that basically separated our daughter, my daughter and I at age seven. So there's been some serious fallout family-wise. I mean, other matters are, know, I mean, if you work for the government and you work in the Washington DC area, it is one of the most expensive areas to live. The cost of living is significant high. So the way people survive is they go overseas.

I could not go overseas. Made things really difficult on my wife and I at the time. More importantly, I mean, is you are constantly being beaten and bullied where it has impacts on your health, your emotional wellbeing. You're constantly being subjected to gaslighting, false accusations. You're having to fight every single office.

And I'm having to basically deal with the IG deal with EEO deal with HR, everybody coming at me from a negative way, then add the office of medical service into that, then add the office of security. I'm literally being sandwiched. know, imagine if you're being basically like a rat being hounded by a dozen cats with no escape. I mean, having to go through that for a few years.

And the worst thing about this is what happens when you end up blowing the whistle and you get blackballed, you get blacklisted. Now there are repercussions outside of the CIA, not just inside, but given the job as a CIA officer, while you're working at the CIA, if you're undercover, it's even more difficult because you got to live your cover. So your circle of influence, circle of friends becomes very limited outside of the CIA, but becoming a whistleblower,

you basically are getting blacklisted on the inside. And if you get forced out, like I get forced out, now your entire circle of people that you knew is just cut off from you. So you're literally trying to reinvent yourself from zero on the outside. But because you were affiliated with the CIA and you were a whistleblower that were fired, you'll find out that probably 900 out of 99 people want nothing to do with you out of the 1000 you come in contact with.

Speaker 2 (56:20.948)
I can't tell you time after time after time that, you know, somebody finds out who I am. It's like literally nice to see you and off they go. So, I mean, this has been a very difficult process to reinvent myself. I'm going on eight years of not working actually. Yeah, actually eight years. Yeah. I've tried to get some jobs. I've even tried to consider like a PhD. Whenever I reach out to a university for a PhD to find out who I am. Not interested. Yeah.

So, I mean, you literally become a pariah in society. Politically, you also become a pariah. You'll find that Congress is totally useless. I can't tell you the number of Congress persons. The right and left, both sides, the political aisle, literally want nothing to do with me. I mean, I've had some prominent senators as soon as I approached them, when they had the ability to help.

basically just wash their hands like Pontius Pilate and say, you solve your own problems with the CIA. And to this day, I'm in the same state.

Hey!

Yeah, and that's the thing before I move on because you just reminded me of a quote that there's another whistleblower out there who Texted me a quote. were going back and forth leading up to this conversation today and He says it helped because we he was talking about the frustrations with the Trump administration Specifically, but to your point his quote was it feels like we helped Castro overthrow Batista

Speaker 3 (57:55.518)
I mean, that is exactly, think, sums it up nicely. It's so frustrating because you guys, like I said earlier, it's not just a blip in time. All right, I blew the whistle, nothing ever came of it, and on with my life I go. That's not the case. This has become your story, not a chapter in your story, your entire story, really, at least professionally speak. Well, no, hell, personally too.

And I can't imagine the financial devastation. Like for example, I know John, they're holding your pension from you, three quarters of a million dollars. Yes. It's maddening because on so many levels it's maddening. And again, I'm not even living the hell that you guys have gone through and continue to go through. But from my perspective, it's okay kids, I'm gonna teach you a lesson today.

This is what you get if you do the right thing. And then in addition to that, this is the country that we love. And this is the government that we support with our tax dollars. And for what? It's just so maddening that you guys have gone through and continue to go through your experience. Like John, I know that when you spoke out against the torture program in 2007,

I know it was frustrating to you that President Bush at the time lied and said, we don't have a torture program. I know that that administration investigated you for over a year, decided that they weren't going to press charges. But then lo and behold, another administration comes in and then what happened to you?

Yeah. Yeah. So the day after I gave the interview to, to ABC news, the CIA filed what's called a crimes report against me. And they, asked the FBI to investigate me saying that I had revealed top secret information. The FBI investigated me from December of 07 to December of 08. And in December of 08, they determined that I had not committed a crime. They sent my attorneys a declination letter declining to prosecute.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14.872)
Case closed, done. My wife and I went out to dinner that night to celebrate. we did. Three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president. And within days, John Brennan, an old nemesis of mine, asked Eric Holder, the attorney general, to secretly reopen the case against me. The Justice Department investigated me from then January of 09 to January of 2012.

And they ended up charging me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, which can be a death penalty charge. Yes. Yes. But what we found in Discovery, 15,000 pages of classified Discovery, we found a letter from Brennan to Holder saying, charge him with espionage. And then Holder wrote back and said, my people don't think he committed espionage. And then Eric.

See you.

Speaker 3 (01:01:12.354)
Holder was the voice of reason in that

of all people. then Brennan wrote back and said, charge him any way and make him defend himself. And that's what they did.

I swear. Okay, yes. And then your wife, right? She was fired. And fall out.

My wife, she was fired on the, my wife is a senior CIA officer and she was fired on the day of my arrest only because she was married to me.

Your family's been followed. Your emails have been read. Your door's been broken down with your wife and your two-month-old son. Twice? Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44.22)
yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54.318)
I still have the evidence sticker on the back of this computer that I'm talking to. I can't get it off.

group.

no! Actually that's a badge of honor now, man. Probably bugged. Yeah, probably, but you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so this happens. I guess, so do you want to tell us then, like what happened after that? He says a three-year investigation courtesy of John Brennan. Yeah. And we're really just getting started with your story.

Yeah, we just got started. I'm going to keep it short, but, but, the justice department, asked for a proper meeting. And so I go with my attorneys. had the best attorneys money could buy. So I go with my attorneys to the justice department and there was this evil bitch assistant us attorney.

And she says, the offer on the table is 45 years. And I laughed. And she says, take the deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you may live to meet your grandchildren. And I said, lady, I'm not gonna do 45 minutes. And so we just got up and walked out. And the offer stayed at 45 years for the next 10 months. And then finally, again, to make a very long story short,

Speaker 2 (01:03:25.164)
They came back and they said 10 years. And I said, I'm, I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not taking 10 years. And then they said eight, and then they said five and my senior most attorney, Plato, Kacharis legendary figure, the Washington post called him a legal Titan. When we announced that he was representing me. he said to me, you know, I've been an attorney in this town for 52 years and I've never seen them come down in time.

Usually if they offer you 10 and you say no, the next offers 15 and then the next offers 20. And I said, why are they coming down? And he said, because they have a shit case and they know it's shit and we're going to go to trial. I believed we were going to trial because I believed in my heart. I didn't do anything wrong. So, we get to October and the government comes back and they said,

Best and final offer two and a half years. do 23 months. My wife and I stayed up all night long that last night to talk about what to do. I was only the second American that had ever been charged with violating the intelligence identities protection act that the, the, the espionage charges were thrown out. hadn't committed espionage and they knew it.

I actually had

Speaker 3 (01:04:54.274)
Yeah, you'd have to be a sp-

Exactly. So we decided I'm not taking the deal. I'm going to trial. As soon as I get in front of a jury, they're going to see how ridiculous this is and they're going to see that it's politically motivated. So I email my lawyers at six o'clock in the morning. I said, we've been up all night. We decided I'm not taking the deal. Let's go to trial. One of the attorneys writes back to me and he says, put a pot of coffee on will be over in an hour.

So sure enough at seven o'clock, four of them showed up at my house. had 11 lawyers. So four of them show up at the house. Plato was first. Plato was a mean old man. I was glad that he was on my side. And he barges in the door. gets right up in my face and he says, you stupid son of a bitch, take the deal. I said, you're the one who told me not to take the deal. You told me we were going to go to trial. And he goes,

I just said that to keep your spirits high.

Cheers.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57.262)
So the second lawyer, Bob Trout, Bob says, Bob was a very sweet man, very elegant. And he said, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal. And then the lawyer that I actually liked and respected the most, Mark McDougall, he was the head of white collar defense at Aiken, Gumpens, Strauss, one of the biggest law firms on the planet.

He pulled me aside and said what you saw in the opening clip. He said, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And I said, Mark, if I don't take the deal and I'm convicted, what am I realistically looking at? And he said, you are realistically looking at 12 to 18 years.

And he said, this can be a blip in your life or it can be the defining event of your life. Make it the blip. And so I took the deal. You know, there's this old joke that everybody in prison's innocent. I'll tell you what, a whole lot of people that I encountered in prison were innocent.

I believe you 100%.

You have to mitigate the damage.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22.158)
So I don't even want to ask you, but I'm going to anyway. And you don't have to share this. But I can't even imagine how much this cost you in legal fees.

I can tell you $1,150,000, which of course I couldn't pay. I mean, I hear here I am 13 years later and I'm still paying on it.

I don't doubt it. And that's why you hope to get your pension release just so you can pay this bill.

Yeah, but see, that's part of the strategy too. The strategy is to ruin you. And I remember Mark McDougall telling me one time, he said, I don't think you understand how much bigger this case is than just you. This case isn't about you. This case is about frightening every other person in government who is thinking about going public and blowing the whistle. He said, you, they'll come down in time and they'll give you some short sentence. The next guy.

they're going to screw. And it was Ed Snowden and Chelsea Manning and reality winner and Jeffrey Sterling. And you can go on and on and on. And they all got longer sentences than I did.

Speaker 3 (01:08:34.348)
Yep. Yeah. Okay. and, by the way, we skipped over the part of the FBI trying to set you up with those, those lunches with this guy who's acting. Okay. I mean, it just, it's like, they don't stop. That's the one thing the government, it doesn't stop. They just do not stop. That's right. How many whistleblowers have you, talked with, like for the documentaries and, because this is a story, I mean, John's,

definitely is unique, but the story of our government, again, the government that we pay taxes to, the government that we ask you guys to stand up if you see something, and then of course, this is the fallout that ends up affecting you for the rest of your lives. It will, it just will, for doing the right thing in the face of tyranny. But how many people have you talked to, Pedro, in the course of your research?

Ugh.

half a dozen at least, dozen maybe. But I mean, there's a reason why it's The Broken Whistle, the book, and there's a reason why it's Deep State Gangsters, the name of the film, because the principal issue here is, as John pointed out, they don't want people speaking out. We just found out from these documents dumped from Tulsi Gabbard that apparently there was a whistleblower who tried to speak up

And, Senator Warner didn't want to hear about it. The IG didn't want to do anything about it. Nobody wanted to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the supervisors were trying to convince them to, you know, change their stance on this ICA. And, you know, if you look at the documents, you find that this individual got threatened with personnel actions, you know, we're not going to promote you. If you, you know, you, you got to tow the line to be able to get promoted.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34.456)
But you also notice in the documents, this person ended up taking a joint duty assignment. So this person was literally forced out of the ODNI to go to another government agency to get out of this hostile work environment to protect themselves. This is a case of just the ICA. But there's another whistleblower out there, John Reedy, if I pronounce his name correctly. He goes back to about 2007, 2009.

His case is extremely significant. He blew the whistle on some technical programs, which I can't technically discuss, but I can tell you what I've read in the press since a lot of it has come out. So he blew the whistle and nobody wanted to fix the problem, except immediately they basically took reprisals against him and they took his clearance away. So...

You know, he's on the outside and it's like, take the clearance away from somebody, you're taking their livelihood away. So he had a right to stand up and try to get justice. So he tried to have the CIA IG investigate. Well, because he was a contractor, the CIA IG declined to investigate Reprisal saying he has no protections. So he's still forced to try to figure this game out.

So he goes to the inspector general, the intelligence community, inspector general for the intelligence community, you know, said, you know, you, you have a valid claim here. You know, we'll, get with CIA, the CIA declined to investigate. So he goes to Congress, Congress tells the CIIG, need to investigate the reprisals. The CIIG tells Congress he has no protections. We're not investigating.

So I mean, look at the runaround he's getting. We're now a couple of years in. you know, he goes back to the ICIG. Now, because somebody at the ICIG decides to step in and push for it, the CIIG is forced to begin an investigation. A few years go by, the CIIG submits a report. When the ICIG gets it, it's incomplete.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51.384)
The ICIG says you have failed to investigate appropriately. Go back and correct this and investigate. Well, know, the CIIG decides to give it a new case number. So there's no record now of the first case or the first case, basically what's done with. So now they open a new case and you know, eventually what happens here is they claim to have done an investigation and ultimately, you know, nothing comes out of it.

In the meantime, you Congress does nothing about it. You had a few senators had some interest, but you know, when you have this situation where the entire whistleblower process is broken, or a whistleblower has no one they can report to, and for that matter, no one who can correctly investigate, you're never going to have the ability to report wrongdoing, whether it's as serious as torture and rendition, or for that matter, threats to life as John Reedy, lives were lost.

countless lives. Now they estimate dozens of lives were lost from just the breach of security that involved this program or for that matter even 9-11 or fast forward now to 2016-2020 the ICA.

Speaker 3 (01:14:07.09)
you know, I just made some notes here because as you guys are talking, I'm just I'm I'm remembering more and more of your stories and getting angrier and angrier trying to figure out how to work. But like I just like, for example, for you, John, I know that you you had four big name clients. You you lost them because of what you were going through. Just like that.

They didn't wait around to find out the full story.

All in the same day. Same day. My entire livelihood down the toilet in a matter of three hours.

And beyond the business aspects and the employment aspects that Pedro, you were discussing earlier, eight years of trying to find employment. that right there is that is a refrain that I hear from so many whistleblowers that they can't find employment. They've got this stain on their record and their persona non grata, even in the private sector. It's maddening for you all. you go ahead.

Sorry, that's why I'm speaking to you from my dining room. mean, Pedro and I have had essentially the same experience here. No one will ever hire me again. Like Pedro, look how Pedro's dressed. Who wouldn't want to hire somebody that would come so dapper, so well taken care of. I would love to have somebody like that working for my company. And somebody would say, well, look at this Pedro Orta character. He's very, very honest.

Speaker 2 (01:15:48.908)
And you know what the executive says? Yeah, he's too damn honest. We don't want him. So, you know, I had to make a determination. got out of prison over 10 years ago, but I had to make a determination that the only jobs I was ever going to get were for 300 bucks for writing an op-ed for somebody. That was it. And so I was going to have to work for myself and like Pedro, now you have to put something together. I teach a grad school class. have two syndicated newspaper columns. I have.

two podcasts, I'm working on my ninth book right now. I give speeches at colleges and universities. And then if you put all of that together, maybe by the end of the year, you've actually patched together a living. Yeah, maybe.

And that's just the business aspects. That's not the personal relationships like Pedro talking about his marriage. Yeah, right. So Pedro loses a marriage separated from his daughter. You lose a marriage and time with your kids, 23 months in prison, time you will never get back.

My marriage ended too.

Speaker 3 (01:17:03.968)
you have how many kids is the five kids man five kids and they were all young when when you went to prison i think ages eight and under

Fuck it.

the kind of stuff guys that you can't quantify, but just it pisses me off. I can't reiterate this enough, but I'm not even living this horror show that you guys have been through and go through still. Yeah. awful. Bless you. mean, just, I'm so grateful for you guys standing up and doing the right thing. I am however,

equally angry on your behalf. want to ask you, were you excited when you saw the change of leadership? Obviously, you guys were CIA. But from the FBI perspective, people like me stupidly, stupidly thought because I wanted Cash Patel. I'm Dan Bongino. That's great.

yeah. I celebrate. even wrote our op-eds. Listen, again, from the left, I wrote op-eds saying what inspired choices Cash Patel and Dan Bongino were, because whether or not you like their personal politics, in my mind is irrelevant. These were the only guys with the guts to tear the place down to the bare studs and rebuild it the way that it should have been in the first place.

Speaker 3 (01:18:35.534)
So I agree completely, but I've also, and I had the same 100%, same what you just said is how I felt. I have completely lost hope that that's ever going to So yeah, right. So here's my question now. Do either of you gentlemen think that the bureaucracy, these three letter agencies like the CIA, like the FBI, do you think that there is any hope for them at all or?

going to change.

Speaker 3 (01:19:04.92)
Do we just need to dismantle every three-letter agency and start them all over from the ground up?

Go ahead, Pedro. Well, in Colombia, South America, the equivalent to the FBI back in the late 2000 was caught weaponizing its powers to go after political dissent, political opponents. They shut that agency down. They put people in jail and they started from scratch. If foreign countries can do it, certainly the U.S. should consider it. As far as can we, are these agencies salvageable?

CIA, I believe it's only three presidentially appointed Senate confirmed individuals. The director, inspector general, the office of general counsel. The DNI has basically the DNI, the chief of the counterterrorism center, the counterintelligence and security center, the, I think maybe civil liberties. I'm not sure about that one, but definitely the office of general counsel. FBI only one, the director. My point is simple. Bureaucrats.

who have been in there for, in some cases, decades, run these organizations and they know how to manipulate and manage upward, making it very difficult for the Caches, the Patels, and so forth to manage downward and try to make changes. Now, thankfully, I consider Tulsi a rock star. mean, but she has an axe to grind against the Democrats, that's number one for what they did to her. Number two, she's got basically no political capital to lose at all.

by trying to placate and, please these bureaucracies. So kudos to her for what she's doing and I pray that she continues to do so. but I mean, sadly, the reality is that it's going to be extremely difficult for Radcliffe Patel to completely reform the CIA, the FBI. And at some point in time, what's going to happen here is if these institutions not change,

Speaker 2 (01:21:08.48)
Lord forbid that we get another Biden in there or a Democrat hell bent on a retribution tour and basically start weaponizing these government agencies once against their political adversaries.

Yeah. So, John, I can't let the conversation end without asking you why you need, even though you've served time, I don't want to say your time because screw that. You shouldn't have served a minute like you said. But you've served the sentence that was handed to you. But explain why it's still important for you to get a presidential pardon.

sure.

You know, it's, it's a, it's a falsehood to think that once a person has finished a prison sentence, finished probation, if he had probation paid his debt to society in air quotes, that it's over. It's not over. It's never over because you lose your, your right to vote. I had to apply for reinstatement. can get into that in a second.

You lose your rights to own a weapon for the rest of your life. For the rest of your life. And in my case, the Justice Department confiscated my federal pension. 20 years of proud federal service at the CIA and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where I was the chief investigator. And so I'll tell you what happened. This was a really very pleasant surprise. I got home in

Speaker 2 (01:22:50.008)
February of 2015 and I wanted to vote. So I went on the governor's website and there was a little tab for, know, felons who want to vote and you have to ask the governor's permission. It's different in every single state, but in Virginia, you have to ask the governor's permission and they do an investigation. And then if you're, you know, if you're a Dick, then you can't vote. And if you're not a Dick, then I mean, that's really what it comes down to.

So I filled out the form. I didn't really put much detail because there wasn't anywhere to put detail. And I sent it in. And then I didn't hear anything for like a month or month and a half. So finally, I called this toll free number that's answered in Richmond, Virginia. And this guy whispers to me on the phone. He said, yes, Mr. Kiriakou, we received your application.

And, just want you to know that we're processing right now and, the governor is very supportive of reinstating your rights. said, great. Okay. So about two weeks after that, my doorbell rings one morning, seven o'clock in the morning, I was already up making the kids breakfast. was like, who in the world would be at the house at seven o'clock in the morning? I go to the door and it's a courier and he's got this big. Like cardboard envelope.

And he hands it to me. It's from the office of the governor. And I open it up and it's a pardon. It's got this big gold seal on it and it's signed by the governor. I hadn't applied for a pardon. So there's a letter saying that all my civil rights have been reinstated by order of the governor. can, I can, vote and I can own a handgun, but don't forget.

that under federal lies still can't own a handgun. Seriously, this is it said. So I take my big pardon down to the courthouse and, you know, to re-register to vote because you're disenfranchised automatically when you're convicted. And it says, have you ever been convicted of a felony? I checked. Yes. Have you had your civil rights restored? I checked. Yes. And they actually take me around the corner into this private booth so as not to embarrass me.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17.718)
It was amazing. Wow. And I showed the woman my pardon. She says, congratulations. I sent a thank you note to the governor and I said, I hope you run for president.

Yeah.

Which governor was this?

was Tim McCullough. Huh. Yeah. Terry McCullough. Really? Yeah. I hadn't even applied for a pardon and he pardoned me.

Wait, Terry McC-

Speaker 3 (01:25:41.036)
That's shocking. Yeah, that is shocking and in a pleasant way.

I was shocked by it. like I say, you know, and here's what mealy-mouthed congressmen we have. 20-something years ago, Congress passed a law saying that if you are a convicted felon, but your felony did not involve violence, weapons, or drugs, that you can have your gun rights reinstated. But then they put

an amendment onto that very same bill saying that they will not appropriate any money to allow ATF to do the investigations necessary to reinstate the gun rights. Can you imagine this? In perpetuity. So just a week ago, Donald Trump announced that this is nonsense and that the office of the attorney general

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:43.202)
was going to be the one who decided who gets their gun back and who doesn't get their gun back, they're gonna cut out ATF. So it's like, finally somebody's thinking about this.

Well maybe, but if it's on the AG's desk.

I know that's the thing. And they keep saying, they keep saying, just hang on for the announcement. The announcement's coming. Okay. I've been hanging on for quite some time now. I'm waiting for the announcement.

Alright.

But I'm going to run to Cabela's. I'm going to run to Cabela's with my credit card.

Speaker 1 (01:27:19.361)
Exactly

Speaker 1 (01:27:35.438)
Yeah, had a flash flood that hit us like so just to clarify that was not the FBI cutting me off.

Speaker 1 (01:27:45.166)
Yeah, no, no, we knew there was one coming and thankfully I pulled my boat out of the water today But man, I've never seen anything like that. I mean it was lightning hitting all around our house and I'm pretty sure We must have had a strike close because I had to reboot the satellite everything so yeah, I mean it was like down

It could be this show actually, Nate, because last week the Colonel, that's when the Starlink went down. Remember that?

I was going to say that, you know, unless the government can control the weather, neither confirm nor deny.

That was about an episode about six months ago. Okay, so let's get back to your story because you were talking about Hillary Clinton. You were really rattling off some very important names there, some players that... And I guess what my question was going to be is, I want you to, for those that may have forgotten, can you please explain the Uranium One ordeal scandal?

that never amounted to justice for Hillary Clinton. And then go through that for us.

Speaker 1 (01:28:52.344)
So there was a company called Rossatom, or Ross Adam. I don't know how it's pronounced, but it's a Russian energy company. And they wanted to purchase a company called Uranium One, which is a Canadian mining company. that Canadian mining company processes, I think at the time, 20 % of our uranium. And this was obviously a big red flag, right? You don't want a foreign adversary having control.

over a company that manages 20 % of our uranium supply chain. that in and of itself, right? How in the heck the CFIUS committee, which is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, anything like that that's of a national security matter has to go before them. Some examples would be like if an American company wants to sell missile technology.

to rocket technology for putting stuff in outer space to another country. There's a problem if that country is an adversary because then we're possibly giving them the means for intercontinental ballistic missiles, which that actually happened. That's how China got those from us by Clinton basically moving some things around into another committee to make that decision.

And the comment is right from the.

That's right. So this is a, it's an important duty of the Secretary of State's office who the Secretary of State at the time was Hillary Clinton. She's the chair of that committee. And the committee did in fact give permission for Rosatom to purchase the uranium one. Now there were several things that were said. One was that, the uranium will never leave the U.S. or it'll never leave Canada. All of that

Speaker 1 (01:30:44.878)
has rung to be untrue. It did leave and did end up going to Russia. And now we can't get that uranium back unless we pay for it. But the other thing that was probably more nefarious than even that whole ordeal, which was bad in and of itself, was that this company, Rosatom, had already been investigated by the FBI. And by the way, the FBI director has a non-voting seat on that committee.

so that he can notify them of any national security matters concerning a deal that's going down. And it just so happens that Robert Mueller was the FBI director at the time. Comey was the deputy director at the time that that deal went down. Or I should say that the deal went down and they had an investigation, I think it was 2008 or 2009, where they had been investigating Rosatom.

And they had an intelligence report that showed that Rosatom had basically agents of the Russian government that were involved in a bribery and kickback scheme in order to infiltrate our uranium supply chain with a company called 10X, where they were trying to basically bribe people to get these trucking contracts to transport yellowcake uranium.

and, with this company 10 X. And so it gets very convoluted and everything. And, but to suffice to say, they knew better than to allow this to happen. Comey knew better. you had Rod Rosenstein, who was the, he was the, okay. At the time that I blew the whistle, he was the deputy attorney general. Okay. working for Jeff sessions turns out during the 10 X investigation, he was the, the, AUSA for that.

So he was the one leading the investigation into that. And of course, never brought an indictment until after my whistleblowing story blew up. And then he knew, uh-oh, now this is all going to come out and they're going to find out that since basically for 10 years, we haven't done a damn thing about this company that was involved in these kickbacks and bribery. anyways, everybody was involved from Comey to...

Speaker 1 (01:33:06.904)
to Mueller, to Rod Rosenstein, to Michael Atkinson, who was the head of the FBI's public corruption sector at the time. So it basically left me in a position where I had no way to go about this through the normal legal whistleblowing channels. So I ended up doing a bunch of research. That's why it took me so long to go through this

Speaker 1 (01:33:30.818)
process because I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to end up in jail. so I did find number one, I had a courier card. I was allowed in and authorized to carry top secret information outside of the FBI. But there's very strict rules and all of that involved in that. so I knew that. So I knew I could take these documents to somebody, but I needed to know who I could take them to that would be legal. And I found that in the federal law, it stated that the senior staffer to either of the

intelligence committees, which would be the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that any senior staffer to those committees could take classified information from anybody without question. So that became my method. So I ended up reaching out to a reporter. He was a YouTuber, but he had a newspaper before. But the reason I reached out to him and it was guy by the name of Bill Still,

We had a show called the Still Report. believe it's still, you he's still running it. But he had interviewed other whistleblowers, in particular Bill Binney, who was an NSA whistleblower that had had a pretty extensive case in which he actually won against the federal government.

I think they busted into his house while he was taking a shower.

He has no legs. He's lost both of his legs from the knee down. He was in a in a shower chair in the shower and they pulled him out of the shower naked with no legs and cuffed him.

Speaker 1 (01:35:09.294)
I

just the rage in me right now.

So

So I'm a hero, a bona fide hero.

Absolute hero and and he was and I knew because bill had a relationship with him I figured he might know people that I could trust and that I could reach out to so I reached out to bill Through a encrypted email and said hey, I'll only talk to you through encrypted email But I'm a whistleblower and I need help and he reached back we started talking And I the problem that I had was that I had I was thinking about how do I get this information? I knew because of like I said my my job working at

Speaker 1 (01:35:44.104)
at NSA, I was detached to NSA from Marfor Cyber, part of a cyber protection team where we go after hackers hacking our national critical infrastructure. I had been read on to all of our surveillance authorities, all of our intelligence, signals intelligence to our FISA, all of that stuff. So I know how well they can surveil, you know, stuff. know, look, I know what the law is and they're not supposed to, but I know that

the capability is there and I just didn't trust anybody. So I didn't want to walk in. I didn't want to make a phone call. I didn't want to go talk to somebody. I was extremely nervous and I knew that if this information came out before I had a chance to get it to the right people, then they would likely either make me disappear or end up, you know, getting, you know, not disappearing could be, you know, as simple as have me put in jail or something, you know? And so I ended up basically at that point,

having to devise a plan. And so I talked to Bill and used him as a means of reaching out through another intermediary of somebody who had a good relationship with Devin Nunes. And so we made contact and we set a date for a handoff. So I carried this information out. And I mean, there's so many miracles that took place that I have no doubt at all that God was involved in all of this because number one, how do you get something

How do get a bunch of classified files onto a thumb drive when they've got systems that basically block you from being able to plug in a thumb drive without it being detected? Just so happens, the week before I'm supposed to carry all this stuff out, I'm either going to have to print it all, which it's going to get logged in, and it's going to cause a red flag, and I'm going to end up in trouble. And I didn't want to violate the law in any of this. That was the main thing that I was concerned about, because I knew that any little tidbit of anything

they could get me on, they were going to try to come after me for. So I didn't hide any of my looking around. I didn't delete any records, none of that. But I didn't want to print it out because I knew those logs get looked at quite frequently. it just so happens I prayed about it. I said, God, I need a way out here. And literally the next day, my boss tells me, hey, I want you to take this desk of a former colleague who had left. said, I want you to take his desk and his computer.

Speaker 1 (01:38:05.858)
Well, just so happens he was on the, the pen testing team and his computer didn't have all of the security apparatus on it that everybody else's does. And they hadn't changed. hadn't re-imaged the box. So it basically, I was able to plug in a thumb drive and pull those files off onto a thumb drive. Now I followed all the rules. I wrapped it, double wrapped it, all that kind of stuff. Had my car with me, carried it out only after I had confirmation that the senior staffer would meet with me.

That senior staffer I've revealed since, you know, of this year was George Pappas. And I ended up, so Devin Nunez had two senior staffers at the time, George Pappas and Cash Patel. So I'm pretty sure Cash has probably seen all these documents. So I carry them out. I go over to the, the botanical gardens while I waited and I wanted a witness there. So Bill came up, he drove up from, I think South Carolina.

picked me up, then we went and we picked up George Pappas. I tried to show George Pappas my ID because I thought, you this guy's gonna want to know that I'm a legit person and he immediately says, I don't want to see your ID. It's probably better. I don't know who you are. And I'm like, that's kind of weird. Okay. That's good. So I, so I sat down. I, you know, we drove around the Capitol, I briefed him for about three hours on everything that was on there. Like I said, 458 pages and

He, you there was a lot of stuff. It was, you know, about all of the coverup of Hillary Clinton's crimes, but it was also, like I said, there was a couple of other documents. One was this intelligence assessment that the Russians had not hacked the 2016 election. And I brought that out because Comey had just done a, you know, it basically just sat in front of Congress and lied to them and said, you know, yeah, the Russians hacked our elections and all this. And I'm like, wait a minute, I got this assessment right here. says bullshit. So.

I wanted them to see that. also, the other thing that I brought out was there was a over-reliance on third party intelligence, you know, or not even intelligence. I don't even know what the hell they call it, but basically they were, if you remember, there was all of this talk about, you know, white supremacy is the biggest threat to America right now and all this nonsense. Well, where that came from was,

Speaker 1 (01:40:30.124)
The FBI was contracting out to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is an extremely far left organization. And they have something called a hate map, which they basically put different organizations on there. Some of those organizations, sure, maybe meet the criteria of a hate group. But some of the groups were like they had a Catholic organization which does counseling for homosexuals that want to stop.

you know, having homosexual relations. And they call it conversion therapy. They basically had them on the hate list for that. And that information was in the FBI's database as basically a hate group. And I'm like, this is bullcrap. They're targeting Christians. They're targeting people that have nothing to do with any kind of violence. And this was all for their database that had to do with homegrown violent extremism.

And so I was like, something is wrong here. And so I carried out that document and a whole bunch of others, but the majority of them were related to the, the, uh, uh, Hillary Clinton investigations. So he asked me, he said, do you have anything more? at the time they were investigating the uranium one scandal. And he asked me how much of it was related to that. And I said, I said, there's a couple of, uh, acting several, uh, TSARs that are related to that. And, and I said, but you know, it's, it's mostly, you know, these,

suspicious activity reports that lay out all the money, you know, that and how it was being moved around. So he asked me, he said, we have information that there is a intelligence report that would confirm what the FBI knew and when they knew it. He said, would you be willing to go in and get it? And I only had a week left at the FBI. And I'm just like thinking to myself, are you kidding me? It took me everything.

to build up the courage just to walk out with this and now I gotta go back in there and worry about, you know, trying to get out a second time without getting stopped by the guard and having my bag searched and all of that and then trying to explain why. yeah, you know, how do you explain that? So I reluctantly said yes. And he set me up with a means of encrypted chat. Cause when I asked him, said, how do you want me to contact you? You want me to call you? And he said, absolutely not.

Speaker 1 (01:42:48.416)
And this surprised me what he said next. He we have reason to believe, and this is the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, we have reason to believe that we are being spied on by the FBI. And I said, whoa. And I mean, which is what I suspected, but I didn't want to say it. That's why I wouldn't go directly to them. I wanted to go through somebody else and have secret meetings because I didn't trust these guys. Turns out about

about a few months after I blow the whistle and finish going through the whole process, Chuck Grassley releases a document that took him four years to get declassified and should never have been, you know, shouldn't have taken that long. But it showed that the intelligence community was spying on the Intel committees in order to identify whistleblowers. Doc, you can go onto the judiciary's website. It's probably still up there. But yeah, so I end up

going in, getting this document. gave me an encrypted chat that he me download and gave me his PIN number so I could communicate with him. We tested it, it worked. I find the document they're looking for and it clearly shows. And it's got dangerous stuff in it, right? I don't want this stuff anywhere near me. It's got Russian agents names and pictures. And this is a typical Intel package on what was going on with this company, Rosatom and 10X and

and Micrum and all these other guys, right? So I'm like, well, all right, I'm to bring this out. But I decided to put that along with everything I'd given him before all on the same thumb drive and know, a different one, but I grabbed another thumb drive and I brought it out. So I try contacting him and I get left twisting in the wind with a classified thumb drive. Now I've turned in my badge. have, you know, I still have my courier card, but I didn't have my badge to get back into the FBI. I can't destroy this. This is evidence.

So I have no way of contacting these guys other than this means that I'm not getting responded to. So I had to take it home, put it in my safe and call a lawyer at that point because I was pretty much screwed. So I ended up contacting a lawyer, actually reached out back out to Bill Still and told him, said, look, man, they're not responding to me. I'm not getting any call back. I said, something is up. I don't know what's going on, but they've left me

Speaker 1 (01:45:14.946)
you hanging. And I said, you know, I think I've been burned. so, so he says, he tells me he goes, something is up because he had contacted his intermediary and wasn't getting any response back either. And so he said, look, I don't tell you, I said, well, I need you to find me a lawyer. And so he did find a attorney for me. And guy by the name of Michael, I met with him.

And he basically said, yeah, you're basically in the same situation Snowden was in. yeah. And he says, he says, you know, he says, are you independently wealthy? And I said, no. He said, do have any rich relatives? And I said, no. I said, why are you asking? says, cause I'm very expensive. And then I asked him, said, well, you can't do this pro mono. he laughs and goes, are you kidding me? You're going up against the FBI. You're going up against the intelligence community. You're going up against Hillary Clinton and

Russian intelligence agents. He goes, my partner would throw me out of the office if I brought a case like this pro bono, it's way too much liability. I got to be paid for this. And so I, know, and he told me, and I said, so I said, how much are you? And he's 750 bucks an hour. And I'm like, can't afford that. Yep. So I went home and I cried. I got with my wife. thought my life was over. And we prayed and prayed and prayed. And, um,

You know, and I went to bed that night and literally thinking, you know, my life's over. And two days later, I get a call from my lawyer and he says, you know, something strange happened. He goes, I went down to go talk to a lady who he had done some work for for free and she was always wanting to repay him. And she's a wealthy woman, older woman. So he went and told her my story and asked if she was be willing to kind of put up like a $10,000 donation, you know, into an escrow account to start a.

you know, a legal fund. And while he told her what happened, she says, how much is you think this is going to end up costing this kid? And he said, probably a couple hundred thousand dollars. And she pulled out her checkbook and wrote a check for two hundred thousand dollars that went into an escrow. the end, with my whistleblowing attorney, my defense attorney, all the co-counsel that I had to reach out to and talk with, it ended up coming to one hundred ninety eight thousand dollars total. I mean, that's a God thing right there.

Speaker 1 (01:47:39.582)
And in the end, we decided… we went down and we met with… this was the other kind of miraculous thing that occurred, and I think that's an important part of the story because it just goes to show that if you do the right thing and you are, you know, and you're seeking God and asking for help, He will help, but it ain't easy. You know, there's nobody… none of this has been easy, and it's never going to be a cakewalk. But I…

I got in the car with Michael, and we were heading down to go meet with Joe DeGenova and Victoria Towson. Victoria Towson was representing the other uranium-1 whistleblower guy, but I think his last name is Campbell. I can't remember if it was William or Joseph, but he was actually an FBI informant, the one, by the way, who I believe who a lot of that intelligence information in that intelligence report had been gathered by.

And so he had been basically left twisting in the wind with a bunch of classified drives. And so they were trying to bring this stuff public. And so Victoria Towson was representing him. So we go down there and I'm sitting in Michael's car and and I was just I was so nervous. I thought, you know, I'm to get killed. These these people are going to have me put to death. You know, I'm going to end up or getting thrown in jail or or, you know, the Russians are going to find out and they're going to kill me. Something's going to happen. And I was feeling, you know, extremely vulnerable.

I had left the FBI by this time. I'm working at the VA, but working from home doing a cybersecurity job. So I end up asking Michael, I just said, can we pray? And he said, absolutely. And he grabbed me by the hand and prayed. And I was immediately had a flashback of something that had happened 10 years prior. We were at our church and there was a, they were doing this like, you thing where, know, we're supposed to learn how to hear God and all that.

And so we were supposed to pray and fast and then, and then write down what we hear in our head. And so I wrote down what I heard, which said, go to Sicaris. That's 10 years earlier. Now I'm looking, you this is how old it was. I was looking on MapQuest, trying to find this place called Sicaris and I'm looking all over. No place exists. My wife even remembered the conversation because she was a Spanish major. And so she's like, well, maybe you heard wrong. Maybe it was Socorro cause there is a Socorro New Mexico. And I'm like, no, no, that's not the case.

Speaker 1 (01:50:00.49)
I said, no, was Sikaris, but I just chalked it up till I didn't hear right. And I wrote it, you know, I wrote it down, but I forgot about it. So 10 years later, I'm sitting in the car with Michael and I remember this. And all of sudden I realized his last name is Sikaris. Exactly how I had heard 10 years ago to Sikaris. So at that moment, I knew that everything in my life had led me up to this point. had nothing to fear. God had me on the right track. Yes, it was scary. Yes, there were worse things that were going to come, but

I knew I had him, you know, watching my back. so that, that overwhelming, like out of control terror was gone. I still had moments of pure fullness. There's no doubt about it, but, it wasn't that anxiety, crippling anxiety, like I was having. So we met with them. Um, we, were, it was recommended that, you know, we had two options. We could either try to make a deal with the AUSA or we could go to the only other.

IG that I could go to, which would be Michael Horowitz. And Michael Horowitz was the DOJ IG. And so we were going to do something that never been done before. We were going to utilize the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act with the DOJ IG, which had never been done. So he contacted him. They agreed to some extreme measures. didn't want them knowing who I was. I wanted total anonymity.

I didn't want them getting my fingerprints. I didn't want them getting my voice. I didn't want them getting pictures. So we staged a very elaborate, what my lawyer calls an exchange of prisoners. We met at the St. John's Episcopal Church across from the White House. I disguised myself with a hoodie and sunglasses. We got there early. I had printed out everything according to, and this is the other thing, so the

The IG had said that I could maintain the thumb drive in case either of these committees did nothing. I could take it to, you know, the judiciary or something like that. But so he wanted it printed out because we asked you want the thumb drive and he said, no, I want it printed out and you maintain that. So I had a packet, you know, about this thick sitting next to me on the bench of the pew, you the front row of the church. And we had arranged for my lawyer went outside, contacted the IG.

Speaker 1 (01:52:25.186)
His senior staff member came and he escorted him in, stopped him right behind me, tapped me on the left shoulder, and I handed the package over my left shoulder, and never saying a word or anything. And then he escorted him back out. Then Michael came back in and we both said, you know, let's pray before we leave. And I thought I was done at that point. There's a process though when you submit paperwork, it's supposed to go through this process. Number one, it's got to get

It's got to get looked at by the AG and they have to give it a credibility rating. So the AG at the time was Jeff Sessions. And so it was supposed to be done, I think, like within 21 days. Here, you know, we're moving beyond 30 days and we hadn't gotten any response back. So my lawyer reached out. The IG said he'll look into it and he gets back to us the next day and says, you know, it's kind of unprecedented, but it's sitting in Jeff's

Sessions office and he refuses to look at it because he had recused himself from all things Russia and Hillary Clinton. So now we got a dilemma because the law says this is the way it's supposed to happen, but he won't do his job. So the IG actually offered and said, would it be acceptable if I gave it a credibility rating? Because he has the ability to go and look into the database and check the serial numbers and verify that everything matches and all of that.

So we said, absolutely. So he went, gave it a credibility rating. He asked us for an extra additional couple of weeks, which we gave him. He comes back and says, you know, that he had determined that it was a national security matter of urgent concern and it was rated as credible information. So at that point, we've been given permission to reach out to both the House and Senate Intel committees. So my lawyer reached out to the House Intel committee to the liaison at the time whose name was Corden Hall.

And he reached out, talked to him, said, hey, you we got a whistleblower that wants to bring some information. We've given been given permission by the IG. And he says, is he willing to testify? To which my lawyer asked me and I said, well, you're my lawyer. You know, what do you think? And he goes, I wouldn't trust them. And I said, yeah, they'll leak my name out of committee. And next thing you know, I'll be found dead somewhere. I said, no, I don't think so. You know, this already been.

Speaker 1 (01:54:49.078)
It's already been given credibility. I don't need to testify. The evidence speaks for itself. So I said no. And then they came back and said, well, then we're not going to take the information from you. And so at that point, I had, you know, we went back to IG and said, hey, look, they're refusing to take the information because I won't testify. know, he was just kind of beside himself and he goes, well, ask him if they will take it if I deliver it. So we went back.

said, hey, if the IG delivers it, will you take it? And they said, absolutely. So they received it. We confirmed that it was valuable to their investigation, extremely important. And then we didn't really check with the Senate Intel Committee because to be honest with you, there had already been some leaks that had come out of there and I didn't really trust them at all. turns out we find out like a year later that it went to the Senate and whoever the

person was that received it, shoved it in a drawer, never even delivered it to the committee there. that pretty much was the end of it. And at that point, like I said, I thought I was done, although I was waiting to see if there was going to be any action. And I already knew that I was being spied on. About a week before I got raided, I started having what I'll just call signals showing up on my phone.

on my devices. And look, I did this for a living. I know what to look for. And I found evidence that I had processes that were being taken over and things like that, certain things happening in my conversations, clicks and other things. Well, so I was very leery of saying anything over the phone. But my lawyer calls me and being a lawyer who probably believes that

that there's something called attorney-client privilege and that the government shouldn't be able to invade that, gets on the call. And every call, he always starts the conversation. This is an attorney-client privilege call. Anybody listening, you have to drop blah, blah, blah and all this stuff. So he does that. And then he goes on to say, hey, I think we need to get that thumb drive out of your house and somewhere safe. And I just immediately was like, shit.

Speaker 1 (01:57:09.748)
And sure enough, the next day they raided my home.

the

Yeah, and they, you the raid was, it was a, I call it the, got Mara Lago'd. I did not get Roger Stone. They didn't kick in my door. You know, look, they didn't want this making the news. All right. They came at 9 a.m., politely knocked on the door. I met them at the door. I asked to see their credentials. I told them right at the door. said, just so you know, I know what you're here for. I'm a protected whistleblower under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. And I thought maybe that would cause them

to call their superiors and say, what are we doing at this whistleblower's house? But no, they're like, well, can we come in? We'd like to talk to you. So I did. And I didn't I didn't do anything illegal. So I thought, you know, I don't have anything to hide. Right. And much to my lawyer's chagrin, I told them everything, including the password for the thumb drive that they found. And and they they, you know, but they basically were talking to for a while. And then they pull out the search warrant.

And they separate me from, you know, from, I couldn't see what they were doing. made me, you know, they detained me in my living room while they searched my house. know, funny thing is they went through my wife's panty drawers, you know? So I guess that must be standard practice, I guess. I don't know. But, know, they never gave me what's called the Schedule B. And because I had never been served a search warrant ever in my life, I didn't even know what a Schedule B was or even what a search warrant is supposed to look like. So I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:58:43.308)
So he gives me the first page of the search warrant and the schedule A, which tells them where they're allowed to search, but it did not include the schedule B, which tells them what they're allowed to take. And I had to actually have my defense attorney threaten them to get a copy of the schedule B. And when I got it, turns out they took a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't on the list, including excerpts. took like four pages out of my wife's journals, personal, private diary, like

What possibly could they get from that? They had all of my electronics. They took my government equipment and the the the agent in charge. I don't blame the other agents that were in my house. They were just doing their job. But the agent in charge, that guy was a scumbag. He ended up calling me the next day after I had already given him my lawyer's number and said, please do not contact me. Please contact me through my lawyer respectfully, because that's what my lawyer told me to tell them after I finally did, you know, call him.

And he said, don't say anything more to him. Tell them that you have a lawyer and that they need to reach out to you for anything through him. So the agent in charge calls me the next day and start playing Mr. Good Cop. Oh, hey, if you give me your password, I'll make sure that all of this equipment gets back to you. We can just clone it and we can get it back to you right away. And so I'm like, oh, that's great.

But then he asks me for the password to my government computer. And I told him, said, look, I don't feel comfortable giving you that password, but here's the phone number of the security manager over at the VA. It's not my equipment. I don't own it. I only do work on it. It is their equipment. And I've signed something saying that I will not have access to anybody. So you can contact him. And I'm thinking, you know.

How hard is it for them to get a warrant? They can get a warrant and get that equipment. And then they can get access. I'm a systems engineer. know how hard it is. It's not that hard. If you have administrative rights, you can give access to those files and stuff like that that are on that computer. So he starts basically threatening me and telling me that I can give him that password. I'm like, excuse me, sir, but I've signed a

Speaker 1 (02:01:05.824)
in agreement saying that I would not do that. And so I'm giving you the next best thing, which is the name and phone number of the guy where you can go and you can request that access from the VA. So he starts, like I said, starts threatening me. And at some point I just said, you know what? I asked you not to call me directly. I asked you to call my lawyer and you're violating that. And I have nothing more to say to you. And so, you know, I hung up and then he calls me right back and I pick up the phone and I said, why are you calling me back? And I already told you.

not to call me. And so he starts threatening me again. And so I finally hung up again. And then he called me back and I just didn't answer the third time. And so I think that's one of the things that's important for Americans. They need to understand and know their rights. And this guy violated them. So I ended up at first, you know, I thought, okay, no big deal. He's just overeager FBI agent. But then this guy went on a basically on a witch hunt.

really no other way to say it. Going to all of my neighbors, my friends, my coworkers, people that I know asking very, you know, asking the standard questions and then asking other questions that had nothing to do with anything, but are just purely designed to create doubt and suspicion. Things like, have you ever seen Mr. Kane be inappropriate with his daughter? Like, who asks that? And so, so this kind of crap is what was going on.

to ruin your life.

Speaker 1 (02:02:32.098)
Fortunately, some of these people know me really well and they called me and told me said, Hey, the FBI came here. And I'm like, when you say the FBI, do you have a name? I'm like, yeah, this one guy. And I'm like, was there two agents there? No, it was just the one, which that's also a violation of the department. Witness for themselves. This guy was going around by himself and he was doing, you know, this kind of interrogation everywhere. And, it just, so finally I got sick of it.

the

Speaker 1 (02:03:01.89)
And then they leaked my name. I can only assume it was them that leaked it because who else would have known? But my lawyer gets a call from a reporter from the Daily Caller News Foundation who tells him he's got a spy inside New York Times and they're getting ready to write a hit piece on me saying that I stole government property and you know, and they've got a copy of the search warrant and all this other stuff. they're like, so my so the guy says,

Look, I would like to get your, you know, get a scoop on your story. And if you'll, if you'll give me an interview, I will get your story out before they get theirs out. And so my lawyer reluctantly agreed on my behalf to give an interview to the daily caller, news foundation. And so like, that's the main story that broke is, the daily caller and it has my full name, Dennis Nathan Kane, but

He gave that story and the next day it broke and it went international for a few days. It was all over the place and my life has never been the same. mean, you got to understand before this, I didn't have social media except for I had an account that I think my mother and my wife followed me. And the only reason I even had it was so that I could see what Trump was saying on Twitter that was pissing off people. I just thought it was hilarious.

And I really didn't use it for anything. And I had like a Facebook page, but only my family members had it. And that was just for pictures, you know, when we were traveling abroad and sure, we had our family and so our, you so the grandpa and stuff, because you're the kid. That's it. I didn't, I didn't do anything on social media because I had a top secret clearance, you know, for 20 something, 20 something years. And so I went from immediately being somebody that nobody knows to all of a sudden now the whole world knows and, and

And I didn't want to do that, but they left me no choice because they leaked my name and they were gonna like I said The New York Times was gonna write hit pieces on me. So I ended up you know, I ended up basically becoming very vocal because I like that was the safest thing for me to do and I ended up eventually I did get poisoned twice. I had somebody loosen the lug nuts on my vehicle right before we went on a long trip and

Speaker 1 (02:05:26.978)
My son's sitting there in the car with me. on the highway doing it. it's like, I'm hearing a weird noise. We pulled over and we pull over and there's a, you know, we get out and I walk around and every lug nut is all the way to the end except for one that was holding that wheel on the passenger front wheel. If that wheel had come off, you know, we would have been severely injured or killed.

I had, like I said, I mentioned getting poisoned twice. One, I walk into my office and by this time I'm working for the Navy as a Navy contractor. And our office was in Washington, DC, across from the Naval shipyard. But I walk in there one day and my office door is locked and I never locked my door. I always left it open because I want the cleaning crew that comes in through the main door to go in and clean that room.

But I go in one day, it's closed. So I had to go get the key and open it and I get in there and there's this powder on my, like this dust on my desk. So I start sweeping off thinking it's just some dust that came down from the ceiling. And I start having like an arrhythmia, you know, and start having like crushing weight on my chest and feeling like I'm losing myself and end up in the emergency room for that. And they did a bunch of tests, didn't find anything. Then about

Two months later, I'm in the office and I go down to my car after I have finished work and I go down to the basement where my car's parked in the parking garage. And there's no cameras down there. I anybody could have walked in off the street, but I reach under my door handle and there's like an oily substance under my door handle. Now at the time, I didn't think anything, either of those times, I didn't think it was poison. just thought, the heart thing I thought maybe it's just stress.

you know, from all of the whistle blowing stuff. And with the other thing, I'm looking up and there's like pipes and stuff. I'm thinking maybe it's just some sewage or something. So I thought, oh gross. And I wiped my hand off, get in my car. I'm driving down the road and about halfway up the road to my home, I start feeling this really bad pain, like right at the base of my skull. And I reach back there and I've got this lump like swole up, you know, at the base of my skull. So.

Speaker 1 (02:07:47.214)
I called my chiropractor. I'm like, Hey, can you guys squeeze me in? thought my neck was out. So I go down there. The guy looks at me because you need to go to the doctor. This isn't a vertebrae. This is like a gland or something. Oh, I go to the doctor's office and they, uh, by the time I get there and they squeezed me in, they're like, you know, doing the eye test and I got one eye that's following the other one. By now I'm starting to droop on one side of my body. I'm starting to have slurred speech. I can't walk in a straight line.

symptoms of a stroke. So they rushed me to emergency room. They did an MRI and I think an MRI and an EKG. They didn't see anything. And so they follow up with – and I was having problems. This is the other thing that was weird. I was having problems swallowing. I couldn't swallow. And the thing is when they stuck me on my back to go into the MRI, I can't swallow, so I'm choking on my spit. And so they had to sedate me to put me in there.

But I got to, after that they didn't find anything. So they had me follow up with a specialist. So I follow up with a specialist who'd been a neurologist for 50 years. This older guy, six weeks I had symptoms for six weeks. He did an MRI with and without contrast. He did a carotid artery ultrasound. He did an EEG where they stick that neuro net on your head and they're looking at how your brain is functioning. All of that.

nothing, everything comes back. They don't see anything. And the guy after six weeks is like scratching his head and he goes, you know, he goes, I've been doing this a long time. And he says, the good news is, he says, all of your arteries are completely pristine, your brain arteries, there's no plaque, nothing. He goes, so this doesn't really make any sense. He goes, I've only had one patient, you know, in all my years, they had the same kind of charts as you.

with nothing basically showing up, but the same symptoms. And he goes, but that guy's job made sense. Yours doesn't. And I go, what do you mean? What kind of job did that guy do? said, well, he worked at an industrial chemical plant, and he touched some chemicals with his bare hands. And that's when it dawned on me. And I realized, crap, these guys tried to poison me. And so I reached out to the Carlson Institute, who does all the poison testing for the FBI, sent over my charts to one of the labs there, to Lab Tech.

Speaker 4 (02:10:12.756)
Uh-oh.

Wait a minute, I want to know what the lab results were. Come on now.

Can you me? All right. So he comes back and says, look, he says, look, I can do a test and it's going to basically look at your hair follicle. And we can tell back like 90 days, I think, or I think was 90 days or something like that, that they can see. Because the problem is, he says, here's a list of 14 chemicals that are colorless, odorless, that if you touch with your bare hands, it's going to cause all those same symptoms.

Yeah, now we can.

Speaker 1 (02:10:49.0)
you're not going to see anything on the charts. And then he says he says, and that test is like $6,000. And then he goes, he goes, we can do another test, which will look at it the molecular level because he says the likelihood – he says if this was nation-state, and he says, and based on your whistle blowing, says it could be. And he says if this is nation-state, he says, then it's just going to come back as inconclusive.

And says, and then we have another test that we do. like 12 grand, and that's going to look at it at the molecular level. And at that point, I'm just like, dude, look, I just lost my job. I'm like trying to get my life back. I got no money for this. So I never had it confirmed, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

I mean, this is, you had dirt on the Clintons. And you were very nearly on multiple occasions, it sounds like, nearly added to the list.

And I've said this before and I'll say it again, I do not have any evidence at all. When the FBI raided me, they got everything. So there's no reason for anybody to come after me and try to kill me. But I think for a long time, there were people wondering if I still had like a backup copy or I wouldn't be stupid enough to keep any of that. When they asked me stick the thumb drive and I'm like, yeah, please take it. I didn't want it. That thing was like, you know, the kryptonite.

Sure. Nate, I'm glad that you survived and I just hope that you're out of the woods as far as danger to yourself and your family. God bless you and God bless you as well, Pedro and John. I'm so grateful for you. I know that this audience is and every American that hears your story, they will be as well because this cannot continue.

Speaker 3 (02:12:40.226)
There must be protection and there must be action and there must be reform and this stuff, it's got to stop. It's out of control. Nate, how can people support you,

You the best thing they can do right now, honestly, is pray for me. You know, I have, I've had to completely reinvent myself. The final straw, guess, you know, Obama on his, or sorry, Biden on his way out the door. That was a Freudian slip there. He, he ensured that, they ensured that my clearance got basically axed.

was my problem.

Speaker 1 (02:13:19.798)
Now, I didn't lose my clearance for any justifiable reason. In fact, there was no derogatory at all. And it was a quote unquote administrative error that took them eight months to basically not be able to figure out. But I ended up the that administrative error caused them to basically restart a new investigation. And I was removed from my job at the DEA because of it.

And so I had to start over and it happened right around Christmas time, right? Actually, December 8th. And so we were struggling and I had to basically go into the private sector. And so I'm doing that now. I'm in the private sector and thank God that, you know, things are going well. know, but it was it completely destroyed my career. the sad part is I wish I could say this is over, but I requested a through my congressman.

um, a congressional investigation into these clearance matters. And what came out of it was a really, really good, um, very fine, uh, DCSA investigator met with me. I interviewed with her for 10 hours. I told her everything from start to finish, all the stuff that happened. They took 10 hours long. And by the time that I finished it, she informed me and told me that

And basically let me know that at the FBI, when they had gone to the FBI and had inquired of certain people there about me, that these were certain things that were said. And I mean, I'm not talking like exaggerations or this is somebody's opinion. They flat out maliciously lied. I mean, they made up stuff there's absolutely no evidence of. in fact, I had quarterly reviews when I was there.

And every one of them was exemplary. And they didn't even know I was a whistleblower for a whole year after I left. That's how well I did in kind of covering and protecting my identity. But once the story broke, it was out. And so they went and interviewed them and they were all, know, he was not, you know, he had a drinking problem, which was a lie. They're like, oh, you know, he was violent in the workplace. Total lie. Never have been that way ever in my professional career. Not once. And

Speaker 1 (02:15:47.022)
You know, and it just unbelievable. And some of the things were so outlandish and ridiculous that even the, the, the, the special agent was like, this is crazy. You know, after spending 10 hours with me, she had a good beat on my character and who I am. So, so there's, you know, so, so the FBI apparently can lie to a special agent and get away with it. Now I did that. I would be in jail and I asked the, and I asked the special agent, said,

Correct.

Speaker 1 (02:16:17.006)
You know, when they made these claims, did you, you know, did, cause it wasn't her that went down and invested with somebody else. said, did they go and ask for any evidence? You know, um, like did the counseling statement, any kind of, you know, evidence at all. So when, know, like Pedro talks about the reprisals, the reprisals, you know, it's real and they, they, they get you in every way they can, whether it is reputationally.

Whether it is like what they did with John and in just trying to destroy his life and put him in prison or whether it's like what they did with Pedro and with me where they basically tried to destroy my reputation and my clearance and everything else and in my career. So I have no love at all. For these people. Now, I will say there are good FBI agents, there are good CIA agents, there are people that love their country and that that's why they're doing the job. And there's a lot of people that I don't blame them.

I understand.

Speaker 1 (02:17:12.584)
not having the courage to be honest with you to stand up and be with the lawyers because they look at us and they go, I don't want to be like that. I don't want to lose my 20 years pension. don't want to have be, mean, think about like the some of these guys like the suspendables. I think of some of these guys that they've been FBI agents their whole life. What are you going to do when you can't be an FBI agent? You're to go be a beat cop? don't think

And that's if you can get hired at all.

Exactly. And I've talked to several of them and they're, you know, they can't even get a job at a grocery store. I know.

I know. The Raising Cane Show, correct? Dot com. The Raising Cane Show dot com. Please go and support Nate over there. John, what is the book that you just wrote?

I decided to do something completely different after seven books about the CIA or about my career at the CIA or about being a CIA officer in prison. I decided to write one called Remains of the Day, the definitive guide to Washington DC's historic cemeteries.

Speaker 2 (02:18:20.152)
was I was researching it and I realized nobody had ever written a book about DC's cemeteries and the people buried in them. Everybody writes about Arlington cemetery and it turned out that the it's supposed to come out in next couple of weeks, but it turned out that the publisher liked it so much he commissioned for more commissioned the Mafia graves of New York City. The historic cemeteries of Chicago the country Western graves of Nashville and.

the graves of America's most notorious serial killers. So it's gonna be busy.

It's gonna be a series. How cool. I am seriously gonna read the DC one for sure. Yeah, it sounds like you're be busy and traveling and all sorts of stuff. Where can people go to get your books, man?

It's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (02:19:09.338)
they're all on Amazon or the ones that are still in print are all on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the usual places. And I've got a podcast now called deep focus that I'm very proud of. It's only been around for two and a half months, but we've got 50,000 subscribers already, and it seems to be growing quickly. And we talk about all these same issues and, you know, yell and scream and complain and seems to work.

Deep focus. Okay, very cool. Yes, sir. Yeah, I got a lot going on here. I got to check out a couple of guys shows down there. see. And Pedro, you have the film, Deep State Gangsters. And then there's also the the book, The Broken Whistle, right? What's the is that the book back there? What is that? Okay. And where can people go to get that man?

there. Cool.

Yes, it's back there.

Best place is Amazon. Amazon is outstanding for self-published authors. So you can find it either paperback, hardback, audible, or Kindle.

Speaker 3 (02:20:13.154)
I was going to say that's where I found your documentary that introduced me to all of you gentlemen was through Amazon Prime. And it was the Deep State Gangsters documentary. It's well worth your time, y'all. Please watch this and understand what these men of integrity and good men and women like them are up against. And it is shocking. It's surprising, but yet it's shocking at the same time that our government

is what it is and does what it does to good people. And it's shameful. It needs to stop. And these individuals need to be made whole as much as possible. And I'm just grateful for all of you. And I thank you for your time today, guys.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you guys. All right. Please be safe out there. Please keep me updated if there's anything new that we need to report in your stories. And I hope things do get better for you on behalf of all Americans. Thank you gentlemen so much.

Thank you. Thank you.