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Hi, welcome. Welcome to the Thursday deep dive. Appreciate you making time for this edition of At the Mic. I am your host, Keith Malinak. And I don't know, it might be a cap day. What are we doing up here? Yeah, I think it's a cap day. my goodness. I hope you're well. We got so much to talk about. We got so much to cover here.

Thank you to Hero West for always making sure the show shows up at atthemikeshow.com. We can get the YouTube link, the Rumble link tomorrow morning. It'll be available on Spotify, iTunes, all over the place. What else do need to tell you? I don't know. Just shout out to Wes. Follow him, of course. His handle is really only the best graphics here. At that guy at PGU.

So PGU standing for Pat Gray Unleashed, I produced that show. That's my day job over at the Blaze. And of course, out to Gabby, who keeps the Instagram hopping. I mean, my goodness. At Jeffy, apologies on X is her handle. Thank you, Gabby, for all you do at the Mike show on Instagram. Okay, now my next guest is no stranger to the Thursday deep dive. I love him dearly. He is former FBI agent Steve Friend. You can follow him at real Steve Friend on X.

He hosts his own show and it is the American Radicals podcast. And I'm going to bring him in here. Steve, where's the best place to check out your show, Well, you can find it on rumble.com slash am rad pod, or you can just check it out on iTunes, Spotify, I heart because we stream the audio there as well. I like that. So you got a nickname for your show, the am rad. I like it. The American Radicals and a cool, it's probably the coolest logo in all of podcasting.

You know, it's the, it's the, gosh, the Hamilton thing. Credit to my co-host, Garrett Aboil, who was actually a fan of that musical, and he put an AR-15 in Alexander Hamilton's hand instead, so we didn't get banged with a copyright violation. Hang on a second, hang on a second. You say that like Hamilton's not a good play. I don't like, and I'm just assuming, I picked up on a little sarcasm or something there, but I...

Speaker 1 (09:03.374)
I am not big on Broadway shows and I haven't seen it on Broadway. I've just seen it streaming. I thought it was awesome. Did you not have that same opinion or did I pick up the wrong vibe? Look, I'm not gonna cast aspersions on anybody. I didn't actually watch it. Okay, okay. I'm not a fan of the theater. The only thing that I like to do for fans of the theater is say that my favorite play is Wicked because I know that makes people who are elitists very uncomfortable. That's awesome.

Okay, so you and I, my goodness, have we got quite a bit to chat about today. I took notes. I really actually prepared for this deep dive, if you can believe that. it's all about, so okay, let me back up. You and I were going to talk on last week's deep dive here Thursdays, 3 p.m. Eastern on X.

And last week, were going to chat about the cash Patel in Dan Bongino interview with Maria Bartiromo over on Fox Business. Is that where that originally airs? I don't know. So we were going to go through that. we had a scheduling conflict. And we made it forward today. We were going to go through that. We had some other FBI-themed topics to talk about.

you are the answer man when it comes to all things FBI for me. Well lo and behold we had this rescheduled for the last you know week or so and last night Cash Patel shows up with Brett Baer this morning. Dan Bongino shows up on the curvy couch for Fox and Friends. I want to say at the onset of this conversation I absolutely love both of those guys. I love them.

got to know Cash through various podcast interviews over the years. That's where I primarily knew him. Bon Gino, I've talked to him personally in the halls at the Blaze. Super awesome guy. A really good friend of mine was a part of Dan's show when he did that before he took the public service, public sector job. And I have nothing bad to say about these two guys. I love them dearly. And I was rooting for them and I wanted them to be

Speaker 1 (11:21.342)
in the FBI at the exact post that they hold today.

But we're four months in to this administration. I don't think I'm alone in saying that I have questions that have yet to be answered, or at least answered satisfactorily. And who better to talk to than Steve Friend, former FBI whistleblower. You, sir, you know your stuff. And you look at these interviews and these actions by the FBI through a completely different prism than I would.

And so where something may look one way to me or I might have questions, you see things completely different and you have answers. So I guess let's start with, let's go chronologically. What do you say? let's, I thought, look, I don't know how, how much of this we're going to be doing, start stopping here. I thought we would do the old rush Limbaugh trick where you press play on stuff and you stop and you analyze along the way. we could try. There's only one rush Limbaugh, obviously.

but we can at least give it a shot and see if we can.

Get some answers here. at least have you, maybe, I don't know, you might be able to, I don't know, explain in more FBI parlance, I guess. I'm trying to find which, because I've got two clips of, or two different parts of the interview with Brent Bear. So yeah, that's part one. Okay, cool. So let's start at the beginning. It's about 20 minutes with Cash and about 15 minutes with Dan.

Speaker 1 (13:03.61)
If I have a question along the way, is that cool if I just stop it and ask you, Steve, to interrupt? And then same thing with you. If there's some place that you want to stop this, by all means holler. I will warn the audience that there will be moments during these interviews going to be annoying as hell when the YouTube ad pops up and interrupts the flow. But here we go. All right. So anything you want to say at the onset here, Mr. Fred? I'm just happy to be the Tim Walls guy who can code talk this to you, Keith.

How do you look in a camouflage hat? Okay, so here we go. This is Brett Baer last night with FBI director Kash Patel.

What do mean, we're joined by FBI Director Cash for

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not going to stop at every one second. I promise. But I have to address why are they sitting in chairs that have their feet dangling two feet off the ground? That is the most absurd look. I'm sorry. In the gymnasium or you do defensive tactics, which is super old. Oh, no. OK. Well, they get a new building, you know. Yeah, excited, excited to find that out. But I don't think the Academy is going to the new building. They might be moving that down. There's a lot. OK.

The Quantico training facility for new agents is going to remain. The Huntsville, Alabama facility is going to be for in-service training for agents who have already matriculated. So they're not getting rid of Quantico anytime soon. And Britt Bayer fawning, I guess, at a later point over Hogan's Alley is a problem. But we'll get to that. OK, we'll get to that. All right. So I just wanted to point out, I don't know if they didn't have chairs. They're just normal chairs. I mean, this looks.

Speaker 2 (14:38.862)
Thanks so much for the time. Welcome to Quantico, Brett. This hasn't been on TV, this kind of behind the scenes. This is where an FBI agent or analyst starts their journey, right? Absolutely. The first grade facilities that we are trying to dedicate to the men and women who want to join the FBI need some upgrading, as well as the standards that we need them to meet the violent crime. And all of that is engineered right here in Quantico, Virginia. And we're thrilled.

applications to be an FBI agent.

Hold on, on, hold no, here we go. It's already starting. Okay, so what was your comment there? You have no training on investigating violent crime at Quantico. I mean, it's a police academy. I mean, they teach you driving and shooting and defensive tactics, but the actual investigative stuff that you do does not involve violent crime. Okay, so do we want to talk about the applications here, the FBI?

Recruiting numbers here. Did you want to touch on that at all? I do because this is a been a bee in my bonnet since Christopher Ray used it. no. For the same purposes, he testified multiple times. know Matt Gates, Eli Crane, they both sort of went at Chris Ray during the hearings and both times he was prepared to throw back at them the number of candidates from Florida and Arizona. He was prepared for that. And I can think of no better analogy than

a restaurant owner who was approached by customers saying, I get food poisoning whenever I eat at your restaurant. And the restaurant owner then says, well, I have a record number of applicants to become waiters busboys. So I'm not going to take your complaint seriously. Meanwhile, I pay my waiters and busboys three times with all the other restaurants in the area pay them. So it's just not a good retort, but it sounds good because unless you know, you know. Okay.

Speaker 1 (16:36.938)
We're off to a good start. Let me get the closed captioning off there. Because if you tuned in last week, you learned on the Friday live stream, my doctor told me I'm a good candidate for hearing aids, which would explain why I leave the closed caption on everything. The family loves it. OK, so here we

Back in March, it was about 5,600. The last time the Bureau saw monthly figures like this was back in April 2016. But you're seeing big numbers. We're seeing huge numbers, and I think that's in large part to the administration's response on which way the FBI wants to go. Last year alone, the average for per-month application was about 2,500 applicants per month. The first two full months of applicants we've had since I've been in the seat, we're at 5,700 applicants a month. So that shows me there's an excitement.

for the American citizen to join the Bureau. All right, so let's talk about some of the things that you're doing. You're doing a lot of things all at once. One of the operations is on fentanyl, Operation Raptor. It's really across four continents, not only the fentanyl, but also the precursors to fentanyl from China. almost no one's talking about it. Fentanyl is a synthesized...

Hold on, nevermind. I'm not Nick, but I'm not going to nitpick. Everybody's talking about it, right? OK, I'm sorry. Sorry, I'm sorry. Sorry. Let me put.

as a manufactured drug. You don't clip it from a tree. And if you want to choke off the amount of fentanyl that's pouring into America, that's killing an American citizen almost every seven minutes, you got to go to the source. So one of the first things I did when I became the director of the FBI, said, we're going to mainland China. We're hitting up the fentanyl precursor laboratories and the banks that are moving the money and the transshipment routes. We started that over almost 90 days ago. We are going to suffocate the snake. We're going to cut off its head.

Speaker 2 (18:24.494)
We're going to use our inner agency partners at Treasury for sanctions, at State Department for diplomatic negotiations. But the simple fact is the Chinese and the CCP have gotten smart. They said, OK, we're going to stop sending fentanyl precursors directly to Mexico because you've done such a good job at suffocating the southern border. We're going to send them elsewhere through other agencies, through other countries. And we are attacking those points to choke off the fentanyl precursor distribution. No one has done that before.

Okay, so let me ask you this, Steve. What you just heard there, do you have any problem with that? No, I have no problem with the federal government trying to address this threat. I mean, it's a weapon of mass destruction. It sure is. I just don't know that the FBI should be the lead on that. You and I are having the same thought on this. I don't have a problem with us stopping it. It feels like China is turning the tables on the opium wars and it feels like that's exactly what's happening here. But I'm with you because I love...

I have to mention this every time you're on because if the FBI is an investigative arm of the government, then they should be investigating. They shouldn't be, we should have, they should be unarmed, right? I love that plan of just letting them be the investigators and turning it over to local authorities when it comes to the actual use of force, right? And when you have the priority set,

we're going to investigate the fentanyl dealers or the, the people who are manufacturing it. What will inevitably happen is there will be hundreds of hours between investigators and prosecutors, and there will be a triumphant press release two years from now where they have indicted multiple people from the people's Republic of China for fentanyl manufacturing distribution. And they will no way ever

face American justice because China's not going to extradite them. Okay, so that isn't important. That's something you've mentioned in the past. Why is it that we constantly hear about the, we get these press releases from the FBI that say exactly what you just said. Let's say they go and serve a warrant for someone in China. That is a waste of manpower. I don't know why we're involved internationally, especially when there's nothing you can do about this.

Speaker 1 (20:45.838)
So yes, it's almost like a for show press release that this is setting up for so who would be The lead arm I guess and again I don't want to get hung up because I know we have so much to tackle here But I don't know who would take the lead on that any thoughts I'm you probably have to do something with Interpol but really ultimately China's is its own standalone existence and you have to just fortify here at home and keep it from coming in across the border

To date, this year, we have seized 1,000 kilograms of fentanyl in the United States of America. That's 480 million lethal doses. That's enough to kill everyone in America and Canada combined. And that's just in these three months. You you coming in before you got this job were obviously a critic of the FBI, how it was being operated. Now, after being on the job for as long as you...

I saw the pink salt recipe in a 30 right, over and yes. Hold on, want to pay attention. I was the same woman. Today I'm here to teach.

job. What about the FBI? Did you get wrong before becoming director? Like, did you have some pre

question. What was your view of the FBI before you got this job compared to what it is now? I think that's a good start. And the setup for it is, will you demonstrate humility and say that you might have been wrong about something? It's an opportunity. mean, he's not going to say, okay, I was right about everything. It's worse than what did you get wrong? Well, right. It's far worse than I even imagined. Like that would be the response I would probably give him. All right, let's see what cash says. Shall we? Okay, I still I

Speaker 1 (22:25.846)
I should have written down that Oprah thing and revisit it later. Look, really, I want to be a different woman.

you think the conclusion that turned out to be wrong about the Bureau? I think what I was a critic of was the leadership, people who sat in this seat before me and people who were the deputies and the very senior portions of the Bureau who manipulated and weaponized the Bureau. I was a fierce critic of it because I led the Russiagate investigation and I proved that my predecessors went to a federal court and lied to them just to weaponize the FBI and the D.J.

who lie were not just in leadership. it again. The people who lied to the FISA court were not just the director and the deputy director. It was not limited to just the people at the top. He's correct that people lied, but there were some rank and file, as they like to say, the BRIC agents who were involved in those investigations, they weren't in leadership. So I think he's actually minimizing who was responsible for that. Right. I mean, I could just...

Page and struck come off the top of my head, right? All right

I think one of the things that surprised me the most and pleasantly so was that the amount of men and women at the FBI that hated that they did that to the Bureau. And that when I got in the seat, when Dan Bongino got in the seat, they said, we want to fix this place. We want to work with you. We've been trying to do it for years. We've been trying to increase training. We weren't able to. We've been trying to take the technological advancements around the world and import them into the FBI. That hasn't been done.

Speaker 2 (23:54.572)
And so we've just seen a void in terms of long range planning at the FBI that all the men and women at the FBI wanted to do and their leadership wouldn't let them.

Okay Steve So let me restate this another way that doesn't sound so flowery, okay, there were people when I came in who Said that they had had problems with prior leadership with the bad things they went on with the FBI where they completely destroyed the reputation of the agency that they work for and they just Kept their heads down and just followed orders. But now that you're here boss

They want to be your friend. Now, I know one of two things about these people. Either they're gutless and they don't deserve to work there or they're snakes and they are just playing the next boss and they don't deserve to work there. I'm still waiting for the person that stepped up and said, this is wrong and I'm willing to put it all on the line. Those people aren't there. The guys like, that was you. That was you and Garrett and a few others. Exactly. my gosh. Here we go.

You know, you were on with Maria.

All right, so now we're gonna go and revisit and Brett's gonna play a clip from the interview that aired originally Sunday. So this is the one that we originally gonna chat about here.

Speaker 2 (25:16.642)
weeks ago and you said this. we can do now is continue to put out the documents and the information that these people withheld from the American public. You're about to see a wave of transparency. What do mean? Just give us about a week or two. All right, we're almost at two weeks. This is about Crossfire Hurricane. You just talked about that. All that you've been learning.

Alright, yeah!

Speaker 1 (25:38.158)
Do you want to give a quick thumbnail sketch of Crossfire Hurricane for those that forgot? Crossfire Hurricane is the investigation into Russia, Russia, Russia. The fact that they somehow, the allegation was that Donald Trump was a stooge, an asset of the Russian government, which was a derivative of an opera. it was opera research from the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was then laundered over to the FBI.

And the FBI took that, leaked it to the media. And then when the media reported on it, the FBI then took the media reports and said, see, now it's been confirmed to the media. Then went to the FISA courts and lied to the FISA courts in order to obtain wiretaps on the Donald Trump campaign, all for fake allegations that were never substantiated, that essentially hamstrung his campaign and in the first two years of his presidency. OK. So I'm going to write myself a note here. I'm going to ask you a question. want you to be, you may already have the answer, OK?

But here's the question. Well, first of all, can we agree, you and I, Steve, that the FBI was absolutely dirty to the core during things like Crossfire Hurricane? Yes? Yes. OK. Dirty? OK. So here's a question that I want you to be thinking of. And again, if you have the answer, save it for later. Because after we go through these two interviews with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino from the last 20 hours or so,

I want to revisit that question and I want to ask you kind of like an optometrist would. I want you to tell us is the FBI better than it was? Is it worse than it was or is it about the same? And so that'll be our question later on. Okay, so let me get back to video here.

Can you give us a little of that wave of transparency? Absolutely. So just quickly on Crossfire Hurricane, that is a continuing production. We have found material, and I'm the Crossfire Hurricane guy, that I didn't even know existed in FBI holdings. So there's been held someplace else or? That's been stashed away in locations that people thought we wouldn't find it because we wouldn't know to look for it there. And as promised with my congressional partners, I'm working with Congress on constitutional oversight because that's what the American people deserve.

Speaker 2 (27:47.724)
And those documentations have been flowing to Congress nonstop on a rolling basis since...

Now Bongino gets into this more specifically in the interview this morning that we'll talk about later on about where some of these documents were according to Patel and Bongino.

Very interesting. But more importantly, people have had questions about January 6 and whether or not there were FBI sources, not agents, sources on the ground during January 6. And I told you I would get you the definitive answer to that. And we have. And we are in the process again of working with our partners to divulge that information. And it is coming. And I will tell you this. The answer to that question will surprise and shock people because of what past FBI leaders have said about it.

Okay, anything you want to say at this point Steve or should I keep rolling? Well, we got an inspector general report last year about that where it said that there were 26 informants there and I think that's underselling it because I know that there were emails circulated in the lead up to January 6th where they were asking people if they had sources who were available to come for it and then it also sort of underplays the number of sources there were there on behalf of the federal government. It wasn't just limited to the FBI but

him handing it over to Congress. Again, January 6th is fully pardoned at this point. There's no ongoing investigation. From my perspective, it should just be turned over to the American people and Congress. Why not?

Speaker 2 (29:14.52)
Former FBI Director Chris Wray eventually admitted to Congress there were 26 FBI confidential human sources in around the Capitol on January 6, but not actual agents.

What are you paying for my insurance is going up man? I'm It's true. You know what? It's on my to-do list. As a matter of fact, I have to have a conversation with my insurance company because I just noticed the renewal period and then it went up a couple hundred bucks for the whole family. I'm like, what ain't got no Rex knock on wood and it's an older car. It make any sense. Thank you by inflation.

That's.

Speaker 2 (29:51.182)
Are there more than that? What you're learning from that? I can say that that is definitely a piece of the truth. Why it took

a ton of time and questioning in Congress for the director to get that point is what I'm trying to eliminate from the FBI. If Congress asks you a question under oath, whether or not there were sources in around January 6th at the Capitol, you as the director of the FBI need to know that and not deflect and give a DC answer. You have to be prepared for that. And that's the answer we're giving. That's the answer Chris Ray should have given.

I'm hearing chuckling from the other end. gave the DC answer and said that I'm working with oversight and not turning things over. as he was answering that, was thinking, I bet Steve asks me to stop it here. But in his defense, he does say there that the partial truth, which is worth going into briefly, because in that inspector general report about having agents at January 6th.

The FBI was very lawyerly and specific in its answer. And I presume that the Inspector General knows that because the Inspector General's office exists to protect the FBI, not to actually investigate it. It's a government investigating the government and turning the government to do anything wrong. But the question was, there undercover agents at January 6th? And the FBI very specifically said there were no undercover employees at January 6th. Now, you wouldn't know.

that the FBI has an actual designation of UCE undercover employee. They're agents, mostly agents, but they can be task force officers. They're people who work for the FBI who go through a selection, a tryout and specific training, and then they become a UCE. And they're available to be an official UCE for any case around the country. If you say, need an undercover employee to help me, that will be provided for you. Now the lay person like the Keats out there, when you hear undercover agent,

Speaker 1 (31:48.94)
You just think, well, it's an agent who's just standing there in plain clothes, maybe with a MAGA hat on, who's trying to find out what's going on. They didn't answer that question. They said there were no UCEs there. They never addressed whether or not there were agents there who were dressed in plain clothes. Okay. Partial truth. Yeah. And Cash called it out.

Everybody's going to know the whole picture. Yeah, because the American people deserve that. And look, no one's more frustrated than me. Remember, I was chief of staff of the Department of Defense on January 6th. We said that we were ready, and the president had previously authorized the National Guard to be there days in advance. I spent two years, a small fortune, grand juries, to testify to the truth. And what happens now, years later, we were right. Bowser and Pelosi rejected that offer.

And instead of figuring out how to prevent security lapses like that ever again, the American public spent tens of millions of dollars and countless hours on TV listening to conspiracy theories because those in positions of leadership failed to tell the American public the truth. But there is a lot of conspiracy theories out there. There are. The Epstein thing, you dealt with Maria, you said...

Here we go, buckle up. What'd you say, Cash, about Epstein?

far as you know, he killed himself. I'm telling you, he killed himself.

Speaker 1 (33:09.464)
Okay, okay. If I'm reading too much into this, stop me. But correct me if I'm wrong. You have sat in on, you've interviewed suspects before, right? You get them in a room, right? Okay. right. So I assume you're a body language expert. I will say I am not. Yes. I mean, is that part of your training to know?

When people maybe I would say that's on the job training, but yeah, you can get a little bit on the read interview skills. Yeah. Am I looking too much into the way he is? Whatever, man, I don't want to do this. I don't want to be that guy that nitpicks. But since I have you here and I know you have experience in questioning people that maybe you don't exactly believe everything that they're saying, I'm just asking, is there anything in the body language here in this?

There's a lot of conspiracy theories out there. are. The Epstein thing, you dealt with Maria, you said, as far as you know, he killed himself. I'm telling you, he killed himself. The other thing on the internet,

anything there Steve or am I just being where he takes his lips and purses them together. Oh, I wasn't even this question. wasn't even holding. Is that a thing? I was doing the really long close your eyes thing. Now granted, you're talking to a guy who gets minimal sleep. So I'm sure if I watched me on TV, it would look like I'm always lying no matter what I'm talking about. What you have for breakfast this morning? Uh, edible cereal. I'm proud. So I don't know.

I get I'm just asking you because I have the opportunity to have somebody who is in these situations questioning people's different. I didn't even know the lip thing. that a thing?

Speaker 2 (34:42.872)
The Epstein thing, you dealt with Maria, you said... I'm telling you, he killed himself. The other thing on Nina...

He's got more

Speaker 1 (34:50.702)
Oh, shit! I'm telling you, he killed himself after he was threatened. I didn't even catch the lips going. Like, I'm telling you, he killed himself. I could tell you more, but I'm to close my mouth now. Again, it's not inaccurate. It's not untruthful if, just speculating that he killed himself after being

Speaker 2 (35:23.726)
That is the Epstein files What's the answer to that? The answer to that is the same as everything else. I'm not going to Withhold information from the American public ever But I'm also not going to rush to get it out there in a format in which they can't rely on it So on the Epstein matter or any other matters we are diligently working on that and it takes time to

Okay, real quick. I don't disagree with that. It takes time. I cannot imagine the amount of data that they have to go through the files, assuming it hasn't all been destroyed. Set that aside for a moment. But I think what helps us to feel so burned by this administration on that front thus far is this big production of Pam Bondi having the

the influencers show up for an empty binder of stuff that we already knew. And I don't know, I don't know how much cash was involved in that whole production. But when you have spent what the last four years over promising or promising on day one that you're gonna have the files and then you have the influencers come up there at this point.

It's it's really a bad look if it instead they had just said one time look when we get that we will share it The end they painted themselves into a corner. They painted themselves into a corner Thank you for being much more coherent than I am. They they promised it It's pan bonnie said it's on my desk. Yes, and this is something that it's very important to american people and they haven't come through on it and I mean it could easily have been hey, we

are investigating 200, 300 individuals and we don't want to compromise those investigations, but we've stood up a task force with this many people and this many assets. And then you would have gotten a lot more pom poms waving off of that. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point there. Rachael Darwin in the chat day one turned to one day. Yes, it did. Yes, did. And, and I don't want it because I, you and I can disagree on

Speaker 1 (37:37.186)
the importance of the Epstein files and all that stuff. And that's not the issue. It could be fill in the blank files, right? It's not, well, let me back up. It actually, for me, I do wanna know the pedophiles in government. I do wanna know which policies were supported because of whoever had blackmailed and had this stuff hanging over the heads of our decision makers.

But it's also important to know that I mean, prioritizing which cases that people want to know about and what would be transparent about most. Arguably, the cases that have no statute of limitations issues are the Epstein pedophiles, because those statutes never run out if you're committing those offenses. Whereas the explanation of, well, we can't do anything about crossfire hurricane because the statutes are already up on.

one or that there's the the dobs leak out of the Supreme Court where there's actually no crime that's been violated there isn't a statute because there isn't a crime and this one they don't have the ability to hang in on their hat well hey look they got away with it statute of limitations sorry nope nope it's forever it's forever so so two things I just want to finish the point on the Epstein files it could be any topic but it's a credibility issue at this point with the promising

with the whole gathering at the White House and all this stuff, it just becomes a credibility issue and it makes it difficult to trust anything after that. And now I get to introduce my credibility Ponzi scheme terminology. Well, before you do that, before you do that, can you please educate me? You said that there's no statute of limitations, what, on pedophilia? What are the crimes that you can come back to at any time? Murder? Murder.

sexual assault of a child. Okay. So that's definitive. Typically in the federal system, it's five years for most crimes. Okay. Okay. That's the concern when it comes to even like deprivation of rights charges you could possibly bring against government actors with the crossfire hurricane. I mean, that happened in 2015, 2016, 2017. I mean, we're well beyond the statute at this point. Now still want to expose those people. so there can be some modicum of accountability, but they're not going to go to jail for

Speaker 1 (39:56.578)
But as far as sexually assaulting a kid, no statute that we can have to worry about. They can go to jail whenever it is that we can put the bracelets on. OK. I've lost my, I have like seven little whiteboards in this room. But to illustrate, no pun intended, how disorganized I am, none of them are within sight of me right now. So I have a handy pad here. Am I going to need to?

Do any doodling here on the Ponzi scheme thing that you're about to explain or what would No, I think it's just, what is a Ponzi scheme? It's a Bernie Madoff style where you recruit people and give them the false conception that you're gonna enrich them, right? You give me a little bit of money and I turn around and invest it and I give you a nice return. Now there's really no product or service actually there. All they're really doing is continuing to recruit more people into the scheme to pay off the earlier investors.

Eventually it runs out. It will collapse in on itself because you just run out of people to recruit, right? That's the concept of Ponzi scheme. So you make a promise Epstein lists is your credibility is on the line right now. And now people are upset. So in order to stave off the collapse of the scheme, because you're not ever going to turn over the list, you make more promises, more big promises to be transparent. And then

when the time runs up on those promises, you make more promises. Eventually, you're just going to run out of promises or people are just going to stop extending you the grace, patience and the credibility and the scheme will collapse in on itself. You're going to have to deliver on something. it seems to me that every time that they're up against that, like a statute of limitations, whenever the deadline's here, it's just another promise on another big thing. Okay. But I want to reiterate that I love cash and I love Dan.

So you're not necessarily saying that they're they went into this to be nefarious or to deceive your and I'm screaming if I'm wrong you're going back to the they painted themselves into a corner right and they have to give us something is that what you're saying here I think they're going out there and they're they had genuinely wanted to turn this over and they're saying well, I'm the director

Speaker 1 (42:11.852)
I'm the deputy director. I can make that happen." And then they go back to the office. The people that say, I really want to be on your team right now are saying, hey, boss, we can't do that. And then their faith is in those people. It's in the wrong people who don't have their best interest and are not letting them actually execute the duties and responsibilities of their job where they have the power to actually do that. So are you of the opinion, and this is probably a question that a good host would ask later in the conversation, but

From your perspective, do you think that at this point that Cash and Dan are...

Have they been absorbed by the swamp? Have they just realized the swamp is undefeated? Are they being threatened? Are they being compromised? Like what, is your gut telling you at this point of this journey? want to think the best way is to go back to the Maria Barbaromo interview that Dan Bongino made a comment to her. And he said, every day at seven 30 in the morning when we show up to work, are 100 level 10 things on our desk.

Okay, I think the reasonable question then is who's putting them on your desk? Because you are being captured by the people that are putting them on your desk because you might not necessarily understand what it is the job of the deputy director, the director of the FBI, because they're both outsiders. They haven't matriculated through the agency itself. And from my experience, the director casts the vision.

and the strategies and he maneuvers and moves resources around and prioritizes things. The director is not involved in investigating cases. Neither is the deputy director. So when Dan Margino says he has a hundred level 10 things, it's not administrative things. These are high profile cases. He even remarked that, you want something to explode in Washington, D.C. or New York City? And we have to address those.

Speaker 1 (44:17.23)
Well, no, you don't. You have to trust the investigators to do their job. That's not your job. You're being fed that by the people around you saying, hey, you need to be briefed in on these high profile cases every single day all the time to distract you. like, look, just for perspective, brick agent, me, work in a case. Let's say I'm even working a high profile case. I report to a squad supervisor who- Okay, that's what I'm going to ask you. I was just starting to do this here.

Do you want to work our way down or do you want to work your way up? Let's our way up and you're going to need multiple pads. hell. That's the government for you right there. So hold on a second. That's an interesting thought that I haven't even considered. You think that the reason that we may not be getting what we want from Cash and Dan at this point is because someone on the inside, maybe with bad intentions, is just intentionally overwhelming.

Yes, they're overwhelming them and giving them the impression that it is their responsibility and it is vital for them to have knowledge, intricate knowledge of cases. they don't need to have, right? my God. So, okay. So, you want to start at the bottom here? Let's start with Steve. Steve reports to a squad supervisor who is his initials are SSA, Supervisory Special Agent. So, that's who you, okay. So, you're the SSA guy, okay?

who reports to an assistant special agent in charge. Hang me get cash off the screen here. I'm sorry. We'll come back to you, Cash. We gotta make sure we can see this hierarchy, the federal government here at work. Okay, so there we go. Steve Friend, agent, right? Agent. Is that right? Agent Friend. Agent Friend. SSA, whatever that stands for. And who's above SSA? ASAC, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, who reports to a SAC, the Special Agent in Charge. Hang on a second.

special agent in charge. uh uh sorry. Wait, another sack but not an A sack? No, just you got a lot of sacks. Don't call them. Don't call them a sack. Oh no. They don't like that. foul. don't like that. Alright, what's above the sack? Well, careful answering. Above the sack is is an ADIC. Oh **** Are you for real? How do you ADIC? ADIC. Oh good.

Speaker 2 (46:30.926)
you

Speaker 1 (46:36.876)
This was on purpose. What year did this? When did our perverse society come up with these acronyms, bro? Come on. So that is in the field. Now you have a hierarchy at headquarters. we've gone. So we have five levels out in the field. All right. It kind of looks like this. You go from an agent to a special agent, right? To a supervisory special agent. Supervisory special agent to a... Assistant special agent in charge.

a sack to a special agent to charge a sack who reports to an a dick. OK, this if I didn't know you better, I think I'd be getting punked right now on my program. OK, so there we let me. All right. So that's just out in the field. All right. So now you're going what behind the walls of the Hoover building for you. Now got to go to Hoover building because we got to get up to the director. So sweet Lord. The introductory into management is the program manager program.

manager. Not, not any acronym for him. Uh, PM, but program managers kind of accepted vernacular. Yeah. right. There we go. Get the program manager. What's up now? What's above reports to an assistant unit chief, uh, assistant unit chief. There's lots of units and edicts in the FBI. I almost let that one go, but thank you for bringing that in. Cause I appreciate that somebody needed to. Okay. So then we went from the program manager. We're inside the Hoover building.

Assistant unit chief. Who's above this? Isn't unit chief the unit chief. okay. You're a chief. All right. I got that one. All right. So remember it was five levels out in the field five degrees of Kevin or Kevin bacon there. So now we're okay. So who's above the unit chief inside the Hoover building assistant section chief. right. This is this is bureaucracy at its best assistant. Would you say assistant section chief section section?

You know before I do these programs. I really got to find an actual sharpie This is a dry. This is like a knockoff sharpie or dry erase. I Right, I couldn't even order I got the Amazon basics and that'll That'll hold on say let's see here maiden. I bet you're right. You don't see it Okay, so we went we're up to the fourth level. What's after the assistant section chief section chief? yeah, okay that I mean come on Keith get with it

Speaker 1 (49:03.298)
Section chief. Okay. What's above the, the section chief. Deputy assistant director dad. Okay. So, all right. All right. We're getting closer. Dad, deputy assistant director. Okay. And then who's above that assistant director. Okay. So now we're up to Dan Bagino, right? No, no, he's a deputy director. my gosh. I thought I was going to cheat. I thought I'd already gotten that paper ready here. Okay. So I'm sorry. Who's above dad. the, AD assistant director.

Why do I keep asking the stupid questions, man? Alright, who's above the assistant, dad? The executive assistant director. Shut the hell up.

Come on, This is a joke. All right, who's above that guy? The associate deputy director. I don't like this game.

Holy crap, we're already six, nine? We're nine levels up on the, inside the Hoover building. This is asinine, bro. my word. Okay. All right. All right. What's next? it's the deputy director. Okay. All right. So we got there. We got there. Deputy director, that's Dan Bongino. And then right above him, the only one above him is Cash Boteau, the director of...

the FBI. All right, ladies and gentlemen, did you catch that? So here we are. When we're out in the field, we've got five levels. We've got the agent, agent Steve Friend, who reports to the SSA, who reports to the ASAC. The ASAC reports to just the simple sack, and the sack reports to the A-Dick. Did I leave something off there? Am I missing something? You got it. OK, so that's... fluent, fluent FBI acronym at this point. I mean, if you get promoted or reassigned,

Speaker 1 (50:55.33)
from the field into the headquarters, you miss out. You lose the benefit of all the fun acronyms. Well, and let me throw one more wrinkle in here, because you can't really promote straight at headquarters. You have to ping pong back and forth to the field. So you would go from agent to program manager at headquarters, and then you'd pop out of headquarters and be an SSA. And then you'd go back to headquarters to be a unit OK, but this kind of

This, especially if you talk about two who I still believe are honorable gentlemen between Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, this would lend credence to the they don't have experience in there and which is good, which I think is still a benefit as a plus. But look at these levels of bureaucracy that they're having to battle through, man, like Daniel Boone trying to carve out a trail in Kentucky, man. So, OK.

We got five levels out in the field. And then I counted 11 here inside, right? Program manager, assistant unit chief, unit chief, assistant section chief, section chief. What was the dad thing? was deputy assistant director, deputy assistant director, assistant deputy assistant director, executive assistant director. What was that one? Associate deputy director.

Then we get to Dan Bongino, a deputy director, and then Cash Patel, director of the FBI. Holy crap. If you want to know what the problem is, it's summed up right there in that illustration as far as Every single one of those people in the headquarters building is making in excess of $150,000. OK, hold on. Hold on. Let me back up here. Is there just one of these individuals? There's one director.

one deputy director one associate deputy director it's a very straight line but then once you go to executive assistant director the six

Speaker 1 (52:53.4)
like this game. Hang on. Hang on. on. Hang Hang on. So there's one director, one deputy director, one associate deputy director, one executive assistant director, one assistant dad. No, there's six executives. I'm sorry. That's where we pick up six. How many assistant dads are there? I no idea. No idea. It just starts branching out. So more than six. yeah. Yeah, there's more than one in each branch. So, yes. wait a minute.

You're how many how many FBI buildings are there around the nation? So is this is this replicated in all of them? No, no, no. So this is the Hoover building. This is the headquarter building. Then once you go out into the field, there are 55 field offices and there's about 250 resident agencies, which are basically satellite offices for those field offices. There's over 300 standalone buildings for the FBI. Now, almost every one of them has

at least an SSA, a squad supervisor. Some of them don't. I didn't actually have one when I was working in Iowa. My squad supervisor was working in Des Moines and he was responsible for our building and his building, but that's pretty rare. Normally you have at least one level of management in the office.

Speaker 1 (54:15.278)
How many people are employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation? 38,000.

Speaker 1 (54:26.526)
And what is the average salary? Do you have any idea? just throwing that It would depend on if you're an agent or not. But if you're an agent where there's about roughly 14,000 agents, so a minority of employees in the FBI are actually special agents. Once you hit the GS 13, which is you're a tenured special agent, you get there at the five year point. And there's adjustments for where you regionally, the locality adjustment. just in general. OK.

In general, you're making about $130,000.

Speaker 1 (55:01.416)
And most people don't know this, because it's public information. You can go to the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, and you can look at the GS pay scale, and it will tell you that a GS 13 makes a certain amount of money, and that's true. But if you're an FBI agent, you're federal law enforcement officer. And as a result of that, you were entitled to what's called law enforcement availability pay, LEAP, which means that whatever that chart says you make, you...

say times 125 percent. You get to boost your pay by 25 percent. And that's not listed publicly.

So if you're—it's just a brick agent out in the field, been there for 6, 7 years, you're pulling down around $135,000 a year. You have 39 days off between leave and sick leave. You have 11 federal holidays. Now we're up to 50 paid days off a year. You get 3 hours a week to work on your mental health and your physical health on the clock. And then I used to have this joke with another agent. He said, you know, you have AL, which is annual leave. That's vacation time. You have SL.

which is sick leave. And then you have JL. He what's JL? He goes, it means just leave. Because that's what happens every Friday. And on Friday, everybody's out of the office by two, three o'clock in the afternoon. See, part of me is okay with federal employees not paying attention. Sort of a two minds there. Yeah, right? Yeah. But there's so many of them that somebody's always in there. Okay, let's see. Where am I going now? I got to get back to this.

Man, we got off on the side street there. Sorry, thanks for indulging me. Okay, back to cash. Here we go.

Speaker 2 (56:38.584)
go through years of investigations, years of political maneuvering, and years of cover-up to get the American people what they deserve. And that's what I'm going to give them on everything. Yeah. And if somebody says, how long is that going to take? We always see investigations in Washington that end up in blue ribbon commissions, and it doesn't seem like anything comes from it. Do you think?

In other news, a 2025 DOGE inspired initiative causing a stir with the Now hold on a second. Hold on, kudos though. Kudos that you made it look like a news segment, right? Mm-hmm. She said DOGE, which is... Right! And it says, look at the bottom there. I don't know if you can see there. It says USA6 News channel instead of Fox News channel. How crafty. She's not blonde though, so it's definitely not Fox. Oh, I have a...

have a theory on these coins. Like if you buy them like on eBay, I don't know if it's this one in particular. No, it was just a regular Trump one. It was, and this was like before the tariff stuff, but it was like $2 for a coin. And I thought, come on now, that's ridiculous. And then I got to thinking, wait a minute, it's on a boat. Cause you know how like you track your purchases and then it's like all in Chinese and you're like,

It's on a boat. It's literally on a slow boat from China. I think all of those things This is this is this is tin foil territory if they're coming from China. They know they're going to a Trump supporter What's inside those devices?

Actual prosecutions will come from some of this stuff. I think from some of this stuff, when we go back and look at things like the pipe bomber case, the cocaine in the White House, January 6th and Crossfire Hurricane, the prosecutorial decisions will lay at the Department of Justice. But we are rigorously investigating them. And I think we've developed some great leads. And I also think we're not going to wait for any blue ribbon commissions. That's up to Congress. If they want to do that, that's totally fine. They're a coordinate branch of government. But we've got answers coming on all these matters.

Speaker 1 (58:45.518)
Do you want to say anything, Steve? No, I think he's assigned responsibility, I guess, to the DOJ properly. I don't know why they're investigating cocaine in the White House, though. That just seems like a waste of time and resources. Should anyone investigate that? Maybe the Secret Service? Anybody? They already did and didn't do a good job. The DOJ shut down. That's true. That's true. This is just asking for your gut opinion. How do you think the relationship is between

Cash Patel and Pam Bondi at this point. He told me that he's very close with her. Recently? When he got named to be the FBI director. Okay. Well, I wonder, was that before or after the empty binder? Yeah, I don't know, but I'm having to keep it up with the policy entry. Yeah. Okay. Just, just curious. All right. Here we

You promise? I do.

Your. Wait, what did he just promise again? The other investigations and stuff. Rigorous investigations. You promise.

He said this.

Speaker 1 (59:48.526)
All right, so this is January 12th, Dan Bongino's show. Here we go.

Yeah, I know is the identity of this pipe bomber on January 6, four years ago and just doesn't want to tell us because it was an inside job. Why didn't they find the? You know, they know who the pipe bomber is. The FBI knows who it is. Does the FBI know who it is? The FBI, under me and Dan Bongino's leadership, has reestablished that investigations of great public importance that almost blew up the DNC and RNC in Washington, D.C., an area in which then Vice President Harris was in the vicinity of.

The pipe bomber.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21.142)
is something that needs to be answered.

So far, what are you thinking of this answer? He didn't answer the question or he's going a long way of saying we don't know who the pipe bomber is. But in light of the revelations that the crossfire hurricane cases were being buried one way or another, who's to say that they don't know who it is and they just haven't let the director know? Right.

And we learned that FBI leadership in the prior administration slow rolled and basically shut that investigation off. So we turned it on and we have some great leads. And Dan is actually going to talk about that when he does Fox and Friends tomorrow. Okay. You don't want to give us a little something.

bret's like look ponzi scheme don't promote the next show promote this one that's what he's saying okay yeah podsy scale okay what was it the posse scheme of accountability credibility credibility credibility vodka start

can't get ahead of everybody. All right. All right. What did you make of your predecessors walk on the beach with the shells 8647?

Speaker 1 (01:01:18.424)
Can we just agree upfront that James Comey is a piece of garbage? Can we establish that? We can establish that. And look, I'll make you laugh. James Comey is six foot eight. So any crowd of people he stands in, he looks like a giant middle finger.

There is not one person that's been associated with the FBI that I've had a conversation with where James Comey comes up that's had anything good to say about this man. The people that loved him that he brought on that surrounded him throughout leadership were referred to by insiders in the FBI. We called them the College of Cardinals. nice. I love

You know, the FBI is bigger than any leader it's ever had or ever will have. And James Comey's a private citizen, and he can walk around the beach and talk about seashells and crayola crayons, where I like to hear about, and talk about how we're the conspiracy theorists. But I just remind the American people.

Anyway, that's the cash that I was so excited that was a part of the Trump administration. Anyway.

of one thing. When that man was a leader of the FBI, he perpetrated the largest criminal conspiracy, packaged political information from overseas, took it to a federal FISA court, and illegally surveilled a political opponent. So I won't be lectured on how to run this FBI from that man. Well, James Comey was just on talking about all of that, the seashells and everything, and he also talked about you

Speaker 1 (01:02:42.542)
Obviously you start with the fact that the guy has literally nothing in his entire adult life that prepares him for this role. And so that's deeply concerning to start with. In a way, I'm a little bit sorry for the guy. He's barked at the FBI nonsense for years, and now he not only caught the car, he's got to drive the car. And so that is a daunting task for him. I hope he lets the career people do their jobs, but they've already forced out a bunch of good career people and sent a chill through the organization. Okay, hold on, hold on. Let me ask you.

former FBI agent Steve Friend. Would it bother you? And take cash out of it. If someone came in without any experience with the FBI whatsoever and then was suddenly leading it, do you have a thought on that? I'm trying to remove yourself from it being cash and Dan. I think historically the FBI director has not come from the inside.

Okay, the only ones that were in recent were Louis Free had been an agent for a few years, but he had left and gone on to become federal prosecutor. Interesting. That was under Clinton, right? Yes. Yeah. Wow. Okay. All right. So here we go. But boy, could you be more condescending? Look, I'll be condescending and pedantic. It's just like same way to James Comey because he said that literally, Cash Patel doesn't have anything as background. Yeah, it's not written in literature.

You're saying that as an author, as a romance novels? I think if you want to do anything that's been part of literature, guess, Cash Mattel wrote a book called Government Gangsters in which he talked about investigating people like James Comey. So I guess he does literally have something in his background that would justify him being the FBI director. James Comey, I mean, he's such a man child. It's pathetic. He's an action figure for Biden Harris.

That's James Comey.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39.726)
Again, have to point this out. He just went toe to toe with James Comey. And then what do they do? They do the wide shot where his feet are dangling two feet off the ground again. I don't like it. I hate it. The end.

as a result of that beachside venture from the former director. Is that right? Do you know how many agents I've had to take offline from chasing down child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, terrorists, because everywhere across this country, people are popping up on social media and think that a threat to the life of the president of the United States is a joke and they can do it because he did it? That's what I'm having to deal with every day.

would to know that. He said, do you want to know how many I've had? And he was sort of this rhetorical flourish. I would like to know the actual number. OK, but yeah, I'm with you 100%. But also, to accentuate a point that you made earlier, when we were going through that crazy ass hierarchy, should it be reaching Cash Patel's desk at this point?

No, no, look, it is a unless it's I mean if it's a credible threat against the president United States, it's incredible threat but also this is a it would be a sensitive investigative matter because he's a high profile individual political figure so that would necessitate core some cooperation between FBI and DOJ and there would be briefings on up the chain of command to a certain extent but no the director himself would not be reassigning people from working fentanyl cases to

go and talk to James Comey about his First Amendment protected activity. wait. Okay. So, so you don't even see James Comey's post as how big, how big of an issue is that to you? Because I look at that as almost, I think it's, I think it's a threat to, it at least warrants a visit with the secret service and spend a day down there. Are you, are you saying that maybe it's no?

Speaker 1 (01:06:41.674)
Not worth that? Because there's a well-founded doctrine of First Amendment protected activity. The FBI is on point of saying that they do not investigate people for First Amendment protected expression and speech in any way. And posting a picture of 8647, as much as you might find it abhorrent, does not run afoul of First Amendment protection. I mean, there's Supreme Court doctrine on this. You go back to an individual. was a decision that came out. It was a

opposed the Vietnam War. He said, if you draft me and give me an M16, the first thing I'm going to do is turn around and point it at LBJ. And the Supreme Court said that is First Amendment protected activity because it was not specific. There was not a time. It was not a direct call for violence. It was heated rhetoric and heated language. And that's the way that political speech is supposed to be in the country. I don't like James Comey either. I think this is probably a pretty good test of my principles on this matter. I'm a free speech absolutist and the FBI should not be doing that.

Now, there are ways he go after James Comey that are actually illegal, and there are ongoing criminal conspiracies in which he's been a part of that he should probably be sitting in solitary confinement over. I would like to see resources devoted towards that, particularly not just limited to Russiagate. I would say that the off the books honeypot scheme that he ran during the Trump campaign in 2016, where he took agents

And they had them infiltrate Trump's campaign, make themselves appear sexually available to dig up dirt and ran that off the books. And there's been multiple whistleblowers that have come forward on that. That's an ongoing conspiracy because he promoted those two agents. They're still in the FBI, still in the federal government benefiting from having participated in that. I would argue that that's an ongoing conspiracy. So there is no statute of limitations because it's still ongoing. OK, I've got three questions and I'm going to forget two of them here.

The Supreme Court case back in the 60s. I'm not gonna ask you to litigate that here from memory But how is that not a specific threat? Like if I am drafted I'm going to kill the president His direct quote he was speaking at an event and he said if I ever got an m16 in my hands The first thing I would do is pointed at LBJ So there were qualifiers of if and would

Speaker 1 (01:08:56.078)
And he didn't have the means. He didn't actually have the M16 in his hand. Okay, hold on a second. Here's a follow-up. This is my second question. So far, so good. Did that guy get drafted, do we know? Because that almost seems like, okay, you're protected from having to be drafted. That's a pretty good counter technique. That's great. Right, right. Interesting. Okay. So then my next question to you, going back to the seashells. just, mean, this is where we are in America.

Let's talk about seashells. What if in the beach, Comey had taken a picture that said,

The president should be killed. Right. Like what if that's what it said in English? The president should be assassinated. And that picture was posted. Should anything happen to come? Or that is that also a free speech issue? That's very speech protected. Should should. It's an expression of opinion. We actually had the example of that. yeah, sure. OK. Yeah. Yeah. The libertarian in New Hampshire, where the agents came to his house, he had said something to that effect online.

and he recorded it was pretty viral last year and that that's I mean look the FBI law enforcement in general they're not the jerk police you have the ability to be a jerk and say nasty things as long as there isn't a direct call for violence the FBI should not be involved okay so I'm one more hypothetical here as far as messaging in the sand goes if if it had said

Speaker 1 (01:10:34.414)
If it had said something like, I want someone to go to the White House right now and murder Donald Trump.

Right that's getting close, but it even is I want yeah element to it right and that's interesting You need a level of specificity to actually in the alleged land of the free to charge somebody for their speech Well besides it is not that many seashells to spell all that I think that's our problem there. You to give great that's

having to pull my agents and analysts off because he thought it was funny to go out there and make a political statement.

think this goes back to your hierarchy point. Why is he making determinations of the minutiae of which agents are doing what, Exactly. He could have a... sacks and dicks to do that, right? He could have it easily reported up to him. Hey, how many people did we wind up devoting this because that's a personnel issue. I need to know that. Right. It's high profile. I think that would be valuable information, but he should not be saying move Bob from financial crimes over to talking to James Gove. Because if you take the...

What was it five inside five steps inside the building about 11 outside I mean we're 16 steps that's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54.924)
then said that he believed it was an assassination message. On assassination attempts, I did ask the president on the Middle East trip about this. Is there frustration on your part?

All right, this is where I am more pissed off about anything that's been going on with the FBI is we need more information about Butler in Florida and I get the standard line about the Florida assassination attempt. It's still going through the courts blah blah blah. But there's a lot of questions that have come up around Butler, Pennsylvania and what the private investigator came up with.

suggesting that it was a larger scheme. still haven't had a satisfactory answer of the cell phone pings near the FBI building for Thomas Crooks. let's see this here.

get transparency, where we know the bottom line story? It's very interesting because we have great people. I think Pam is incredible. I think Cash is incredible. I'm relying on my people to tell me what it is. You know, we have deep-seated craziness in this country. And I'm relying on my people. And so far, — and they're good. But so far, they and in this case, it's Secret Service — they tell me it's fine.

That's as close as Donald Trump is gonna get to saying, I don't trust the opinion of the people that work for me. Would you agree with that? mean, Yeah. And he shouldn't. shouldn't. This, this. Right? I'm with you, Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26.926)
It's a little hard to believe.

Be honest with you, okay? It's a little bit hard to believe as I get that throbbing feeling. It sounds like he wants more about at least the butler guy that we don't know a lot about. Will we know a lot more about him? Is there more to know? I don't know that there's more to know.

Yup.

Speaker 1 (01:13:47.31)
Okay, I'm gonna do my best to not interrupt as much as my brain is telling me to interrupt this answer. But this is gonna be, I would tell you right now, there's gonna be at least one more stoppage in rewind. But right there, I don't know that there's more to know.

but you're going to know everything we know.

Do you believe that Steve? you think we will ever know what the FBI knows about Thomas Crooks? You will not know what the FBI knows. You might wind up knowing what Cash Patel knows because they have a total. Oh, okay. we're okay. All right.

That's the other thing we did. We take assassination attempts, especially the president of the United States, extremely seriously. And we don't feel that the American people have been given the information they need on that. And we're digging through the files and we're getting them a more robust picture of what happened and whether or not there were any connections. And I get all that. And I also understand investigations underway and there's potential prosecutions for people who are living, but he's dead. And we knew a lot more about a lot of different people than we know about that guy.

you know there's people that circulate all kinds of stuff that it was an inside job or there was foreign influence

Speaker 1 (01:14:57.688)
Okay, and I'm asking sincerely, Steve, since you're the one on the line with me here, am I being too sensitive when Brett Baer suggests, hey, some people think it might've been an inside job, and then the immediate reaction from Cash Patel is very dismissive. I did not appreciate that. Am I being too sensitive at reacting to that? Let me play one more time, and then I want you to answer that.

a lot of different people than we know about that guy. And there's people that circulate all kinds of stuff, that it was an inside job or there was foreign influence.

Don't do that. It is a little patronizing because I think that the circumstances around Butler entirely could lead to a reasonable person to come to that conclusion. Okay. Thank you. All right.

or whatever. Can we say that it's not that? And that's a great example of people looking for things where things don't exist.

this. You weren't as definitive as that 60 seconds ago. He should have been more assertive originally and said that everything's done, but there is no expectation of privacy. There's no ongoing prosecution. Crooks is dead, so they should all be out in the open at this point. I think I've told you before, my strong speculation is that Crooks fit the bill.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27.358)
of the typical person that the FBI goes after and entrapped into a terrorism plot. And I think the hubris of the FBI, which has been on display at length for years with all of their terrorism entrapments, is that they always assume that the person they have targeted will follow all the bread crumbs until they can spring the trap. And they never, even for a moment, consider that even though the person's not within arm's reach of them, that they might just take a detour. I think Crooks fits that bill.

up until the point where he might have just taken a detour and gone and perpetrated a successful assassination attempt. Donald Trump didn't die, but he got the shot. He hit him in the head. He killed a man. And to me, the ultimate concern after it all was over was that the deputy director of the FBI at the time, Paula Bate, told Congress that this was being investigated as potential domestic terrorism because they'd learned their lesson after the Capitol baseball shooting.

because at the capital baseball shooting, the FBI concluded that the Bernie Sanders supporter who asked were other Republicans and went and tried to shoot all the Republicans, that wasn't an assassination attempt, that was suicide by cop. Our bad. So we're going to investigate this as domestic terrorism, which I think might have been cover for the fact that there already was a domestic terrorism investigation up on crooks and would have justified having the case open and they would have made it classified and not able to talk. Okay. All right.

I hope I make sense here in my request. So just so that there's no ambiguity here, you're suggesting, correct me if I'm wrong, that inside the FBI, there was contact with crooks, that there was this plan in place that they were gonna grab him at that last minute or what have you, correct? I think I'm speculating. think it fits the bill, but not the assassination.

I think they had a plan for him to do something else. Okay. So here's my question for you. Okay. Well, then that might change my question a little bit here. Do you think then if that, if there, if there was, if there was contact between the FBI and Matthew Crooks, do you think that they were telling Crooks that we want you to assassinate Donald Trump? Or are you saying that

Speaker 1 (01:18:47.942)
They had him groomed for something completely different and crooks said, yeah, I'll show them. I'll go and shoot him instead. I think the latter is more likely that they were setting him up to perpetrate some sort of an attack. Okay, okay. Because when they set up the attack, what you have to understand is they don't arm the person. They don't give them a functional weapon. They might give them a weapon that's had the firing pin manipulated in some way. So it is impossible for them to take a shot or they'll give them a fake bomb that

is impossible to explode. lacks the necessary ingredients. This guy got a legitimate shot off because he took his dad's deer rifle. you and I have discussed on previous shows in the archives. Everything's pinned to the top here of my profile. If you want to go check out all the time, Steve Friend has been on. But one of the things we've talked about is this the way the FBI goes about setting up. What was

I love the stat. I try to bring it up every time you're on 99 % or 96 % of all domestic terrorist cases investigations are all connected to the FBI, you know, being the catalyst for the plot. Is that kind of? Yeah, Project Salam said that it's in excess of 90%. I think it's around 92%. The individual who gets arrested was not predisposed or capable of actually perpetrating an attack. Yeah, the FBI found them and was able to groom them and and

do the whole thing. So here's my question. You don't have to necessarily... Well, I mean, if you want to... Let's just say that that is what was happening with crooks. And let's just say that it wasn't the end game wasn't to assassinate Trump. It was just to... For the FBI to justify their existence, make this kid out to be the bad guy. Here's my question for you. In something like that, can you direct us to how high up the chain would a plot like that go? Would it only be in the local situation?

Or would it go inside the Hoover building like like where are we on the hierarchy of? FBI should I get out of the local office and go to the Hoover if this is a high profile within the within the office itself you're working on a domestic terrorism case the demand for those is pretty high

Speaker 1 (01:21:02.87)
So it would be briefed to your special, your supervisory special agent. They would know about your big case that you're working because likely you're involving informants and undercovers all the way up to the assistant special agent in charge, perhaps even the special agent in charge. so the local stuff. Yes, it would all be within the field office. Now, at headquarters, program manager, maybe within the, within the chief, up to the unit chief would be aware.

But that would probably be about it. the program manager in the Hoover building talks to the Dix. The program manager mostly liaises with the supervisory special agent and the assistant special agent in charge and the agents themselves, because the program manager is basically the funding. They say, I need some money for this thing I'm doing. do we have the resources for it? And that's how they manage the program. Okay. Our government is so big.

And so unnecessarily big. It's just, it's, makes me ill. All right, here we go.

In that specific case, since that individual is dead, we are able to say a lot more, unlike the merchant case in New York, which is ongoing, and whether or not there are any connections. We have definitively given that information over.

okay. They had to take a break. and then Sean Hannity has to get his plug in there. Okay, so that was the majority of it. There's another. Anything you want to address before we play the last few minutes of this interview? No, let's keep it on rolling. All right, let's go here. Cash Patel, Bret Baer, part two.

Speaker 2 (01:22:42.552)
Welcome back to the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. us again, welcome back to the FBI

my bad. Sorry, I was trying to zoom in here.

Joining us again, FBI Director Cash Patel. You were recently up on Capitol Hill answering questions. When should we expect this FY 25 spend plan for the FBI? Have you seen it? Have you reviewed it? When will we get it? I'll get you an answer, ma'am. I don't have a timeline on that.

Okay, hang on, let me zoom in here. Okay, he doesn't have a timeline. Boy, Patty Murray just loves the Trump appointees.

It was due last week by law. I understand. And your answer is you just understand you're not going to follow the law? My answer is that I am following the law and I'm working with my interagency partners to do this. It is budget season. And should you have a laid out a budget by then to Congress? Because everybody is looking to how much you're going to spend and how much they're going to take from perhaps you to make this all work. Do I have a budget at the FBI? Sure. Of course I do.

Speaker 2 (01:23:42.306)
But the Office of Management Budget at the White House sets the budget for the United States government. And so if they have a budget which we agree with, they need to roll that out. And they're doing so on their own timeline and working with Congress on that. What I'm telling the American people is that we will be stewards of the taxpayer dollars no matter what budget we are given and focus on these priorities, crushing violent crime, defending the homeland and fierce organizational accountability. And we'll make it happen. We're not the guys running around on private jets and

Somebody maybe in Congress should ask for how many flights on a private jet Director Comey took or my predecessor Director Wray took and how many personal trips they took. I know they want to take pot shots at me, but I've been working nonstop on this job, including pretty much every single weekend. And somebody should ask the tens of millions of dollars that were wasted on personal junkets by prior FBI directors before lecturing me on a budget for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But you have a good sense.

from the White House what it looks like and are you going to be able to operate in that parameter? I am. We are in a very good position. When do you want everyone out of Hoover Building?

Did you want to comment on that? Well, he's asking for 500 million more dollars. So I don't know how comfortable he feels about operating with a restricted budget. And, you know, he's been pictured at multiple UFC events. and with Al, Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals and shaking hands with the FIFA director and hanging out with Wayne Gretzky and visiting his girlfriend in Nashville. Yeah. You know what? If I hung out with Wayne Gretzky, I would say, you know what?

How much input did you have? Because this is so good, bro. This is really good. Okay, sorry, hang on a second. By the way, go Oilers.

Speaker 2 (01:25:25.922)
You say you want to move out of that building. Where would the new headquarters be? I can tell you that we are in the process of moving out. We've just worked out the.

Let me ask you this, is there anything that you know of Steve regarding the Hoover building? it as decrepit as, well, I think he's about to explain.

final logistics of to begin that process and we are actually in line with keeping the American taxpayer dollars on mission, shuttering about six different offices the FBI has in the DC area. And we're moving to our new location within the DC area. And that process has already started.

I thought we were supposed to leave the swamp. So we're going to have again the partial truth where he said that he was going to shut down the Hoover building and turn it into a museum to the deep state. I mean, that's a little bit of hyperbole. He's going to shut down the Hoover building and move all of the same people who have been there to a brand new shiny building. Which is what Trump said on the campaign trail a couple of years ago. I remember when he said it, I was like, what? No.

No! A state-of-the-art building for the FBI. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34.28)
Which is where? Maryland? We're staying in Washington, D.C., right next to our partners at the Department of Justice, and we're getting out of the Hoover Building. I have cargo nets holding up the cement structures of the exterior of the Hoover Building because it catches falling cement and prevents it from hitting someone in the head.

That seems like a problem. I don't want my federal employees dodging chunks of cement. That's why the cargo nets are there.

I'm not making that up. Why no one in the past decided to address that standard or lack of standard and make that building unsafe is beyond me. But we're addressing it. you're going to leave that building and then go to another building next to Homeland Security? Next to the Department of Justice. Justice. Got it. Because we have to, that's, this is a great point that I think people overlook. We are a component of the Department of Justice, moving us an hour and a half outside of town.

Every morning, you know what me and the deputy do? We walk across the street to brief the attorney general.

wish he hadn't said that out loud. have a problem. Oh, okay. Sorry. I was just going to comment. Please don't talk about your daily routine cash. But anyway, go ahead. What are you saying? It's back to responsibilities. I mean, what is he briefing the attorney general on? On cases? Because again, not his responsibility. And he's talking about moving the FBI headquarters across the street from the Department of Justice because the FBI has to work with the DOJ to prosecute cases.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04.008)
No cases are investigated in the FBI headquarters building.

It is management. There's a Washington field office that's in Washington DC that investigates crime and national security matters in Washington DC. It's relatively close to the Hoover building where the agents that investigate cases go to work at, and it's called WFO, Washington Field Office. They would go to the US Attorney's Office, Department of Justice. Why do we have to conflate DOJ and FBI management?

And I think maybe the counter to that, I didn't say this is the right answer, but the counter to that might be, you know what, are we doing anything in the federal government at that level the right way, the way it's supposed to be done anymore on any level? You could say this about any department, doesn't make it right. And you want to see everything steer back constitutionally the way it's set up to be. But man, it just seems like more of the same, right? Okay.

the deputy attorney general and the paydeck are the most pressing matters of the day. If we leave, how are we going to do that on a daily basis? What's the thing that keeps you up at night?

The CCP, for a whole host of reasons we haven't even talked about, their cyber espionage campaign, what they're doing undersea, what Russia's doing overhead in terms of space, and their cyber intrusion capabilities like salt typhoon, they have made wildly successful penetrations into our telecommunications infrastructure. And what they do is they suck up our information threat, and this is what keeps me up at night. They're playing the long game, the fentanyl production by the CCP, I firmly believe.

Speaker 2 (01:29:49.621)
is their way.

terrible edit. I think they're gonna just talk here about fentanyl again. But real quick, Steve, do you have any insight as to? Okay, let me ask you this. He just talked about the data that China has. Do you think, and it's completely unfair question, do think China has more information about Americans over the FBI? I know that.

The Chinese have my information because they hacked into OPM when I was an FBI employee and stole like millions of employees information, our SF86, which is basically everything about me in order to get employed. And in response to that, the FBI gave me LifeLock for a year.

Speaker 1 (01:30:37.536)
Okay, the threat is real. You know when you take your garbage cans out to the curb.

How far down the road are you looking, bro? you know, and who are you more concerned about the Chinese who have all your information or your government who turned their back on you forever? the ladder. They number one threat to Americans is by far weaponized government. Number two is so far back in the rear view mirror. It's over the horizon. mean, checks every night.

of killing tens of thousands of military age men and women in the United States of America. They are wiping out generations of Americans that could come here and be an FBI agent. All right, so let's just talk to the future here. How do you see this? The job, is it different than you thought it was coming in? How do you look at a big picture? Look, there's two ways I look at it. One, you're talking to a first generation Indian kid whose parents fled genocide and their son's now the director of the FBI.

Only in America, literally only in America. So I wanted to inspire people to come to places like this and train with us and serve this country. The other thing that I want people to take away from that is there is no job on God's green earth that prepares you to lead an agency or department. There is it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is flat out lying or being politically preposterous. And I learn every single day. I learn from the leadership team. I have

folks in there around my table every morning who come from so many different walks of life, people I disagree with on a daily basis. And I'm so glad that they're in that room because they are the ones helping me make these decisions. What we won't stand for is people turning around on social media and attacking folks who are doing the job. We will.

Speaker 1 (01:32:32.174)
Okay, should I let that answer play out?

up for them. will also out anyone who violates their oath of office at the FBI.

Cool, Steve. Four months in, I don't know, maybe three for cash after confirmation, so on.

Give me a letter grade for Cash Patel as director of the FBI at this point. Are you prepared to do that? That's a tough one. No, actually, it's not F. complete fail. Wow. I go back to Maria Bartiromo. That was the acknowledgement. This is this effort to retake the FBI was a complete failure. Wow. I was on your team and wanted this to work with.

Director Patel, the deputy director, Bongino. But the effort is lost and we need to have a tactical withdrawal. And then we need to dissolve the entire agency. That is the only answer at this point. He's sitting at the table with his leadership meetings with people who are by his own definition, they disagree with him on so many things. And that's great. Then it's not a functional management structure at all.

Speaker 1 (01:33:56.73)
And you could tell that the one thing he doesn't really want to deal with at this point, by his own words, were people on social media having, expressing their opinions about bad performance by the FBI. So the Twitter timeline, the FBI director is directly impacting what his actions are on a day to day. It's not effective.

The FBI is still operating the exact same way that you and I have talked about for multiple episodes of these deep dives. These things are all still going on. We've put a fresh coat of paint and we're saying that it's a brand new bureau and it's just not true. And the opportunity was there and they just didn't want to take it. And at this point, the overhaul that was necessary hasn't happened. The people that had already boxed up their things and were ready for the hammer to drop.

have unboxed their things, they know it's not gonna happen. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. That's exactly what I said this morning on Pat Gray Unleashed over at the Blaze. I don't want that to be true. I was the guy who was, you know, hashtag defund the FBI and then Cash Patel comes along, I'm like, wait, maybe we can steer the ship back around. And then when I asked you for a letter grade, my grade was, let's give him a.

see and then check in with me in a couple months and see if I'm still at that middle of the road area. But you're saying a full out fail, huh? Okay, so let me ask you this. I wasn't going to ask you this next question until we got done with the Bon Gino thing, which I still want to go through with you. Is that cool? Do you have time to go through Bon Gino with us? Okay, cool. But let me go ahead and ask you this. We agreed early on in the conversation that the FBI was absolutely dirty before Trump was in there.

as have been institutional rot hell since Hoover. So at this point in time, the FBI as of right now, compared to let's just go back six months, just get us into the Biden administration. Better, worse or the same FBI? Operationally the same, but overall worse because they have the pom-pom waivers on line and in media.

Speaker 1 (01:36:16.174)
who are saying it's ours now, everything is great and we're going to overlook the things that are bad because it's ours now. Or they're trying to make cases that are patently ridiculous like you Julie Kelly's out there who are saying that the Epstein list doesn't matter and it should matter, you just need to move on. It's our toy, it's our plaything now. So we're not going to be critical of it. I have been from the beginning, balls and strikes. There's nothing that I say on social media that I wouldn't tell Dan Bongino or Kesha Mattel.

to the face. Yeah, no, I would tell them, director, your people are claiming credit for work they're not doing. That's a problem. Yeah, that's not there's no emotion to it at all. But now there's an emotion to it. And there's an actual effort on foot to mobilize support online as opposed to just doing the job that you got were appointed to do. And that was to course correct in a major fashion very quickly or turn it into a museum for the deep state.

It's almost like Obamacare. It's like, well, if we control it, then it's okay that it sucks. that that's kind of what it felt like when you just said, well, now it's our toy. my gosh. Okay. So let's go to this morning on the curvy couch. We've got Fox and friends, interviewing Dan Bongino, number two in charge of the FBI. So let's now go through that here and get your take on what he had to say this morning.

The FBI is now re-examining high interest cases that went unsolved in the Biden era. That includes the 2021 DC pipe bombings, the 2022 leak of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, and the cocaine that was found in the White House in 2023.

Anything you want to say on set here? The leak is not illegal. OK, the leak is not illegal. All right, here we go.

Speaker 2 (01:38:04.408)
You discuss this and more is FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. great to see you. Welcome back. Absolutely. So many good memories. Great to see all of you. First off, before we get into specifics, what did you think the job was going to be like? What is it like? You know, the biggest lifestyle change for me has been family wise. I we already went through this with my time in the Secret Service. But, you know, when the president called and asked if I would take the job.

See you in

Speaker 2 (01:38:31.278)
You know, can't tell your audience for years, go out and do stuff. Talk is cheap. And then when the opportunity comes to do stuff, I didn't mean me. You know, I meant you. It's kind of a you're a fraud. I mean, you don't sound like a fraud. You are one. So it was a lot. It's been tough on the family. People ask me all the time, you know, do you like it? I say, no, I don't. But I didn't. The president asked me to do this to like it. You know, nobody likes going into an organization like that.

and having to change things and make big bold changes. But you know, I was at one of our facilities yesterday down in Winchester and a woman who worked there very nice said, you know, I used to watch your show. I miss you. I said, you know, I miss me too. So, know, part of you, part of you dies a little bit when you see all this stuff from behind the scenes. You're doing this for country. So we appreciate that. And we thank you.

Anything yet? that was a reassuring little pat there from Brian, think. Coming up. don't know. No. OK. Just very morning, Joey. Yeah. And I can't imagine being in his shoes. Dan Boncino. You talk about a lifestyle change from just hanging out and speaking your mind with your audience to, crap, now I'm a mouthpiece. I want to say mouthpiece. And now I'm representing the government. OK, cool.

you and we're excited to find out to roll back the curtain and find out what's deep in the FBI. We have so many questions about those three cases we just mentioned. Y'all are doing a deep dive into this. What's the latest on those investigations? So the moment cash and I swore in, we realized that the first thing we had to do is rebuild public trust. This is your FBI.

Okay, so far, what are we great in that? No, I wanna revisit something I called you yesterday, whenever I talked to you on the phone, Steve, and this media blitz. You don't think it was just Fox calling the FBI and saying, hey, we'd love to have you on our shows. You guys care to join us? You think there's something deeper going on behind the scenes as far as what prompted this little media blitz last couple of weeks?

Speaker 1 (01:40:38.838)
I think there's been a lot of criticism, particularly, I mean, I think the original Bartiromo interview was scheduled and planned because they needed to get out there and sort of represent the brand, but it did not come off well enough, particularly when they said that Epstein killed himself. I think they lost a lot of people who were outspoken big names. And now they're kind of having to do some mop up duty as a result of that.

someone encouraged this media blitz here? That or maybe they just knew that the big boss likes to watch Fox and Friends. That's what I was getting at. So are you of the opinion that Donald Trump himself? Yeah, I am. And I think that the Epstein list is the one, I'm sorry, the Epstein killed himself is the thing that they have gotten people so upset about that they have to do clean up duty.

their adamant also to just take their lumps on it. Because people will, so many people will just move on and forget about the other things, the things that they're promising and they ultimately don't deliver on them. But he killed himself, they lost so much support for it. But I think that they've made a calculated decision that we'll take our lumps, we're gonna stick to this, and then hopefully just sort of flood the zone with promises about other things, about SCOTUS leak and coronavirus and crossfire hurricane, so that maybe at the end of the day we have enough

blacken our ledger to overcome the red. It's impossible to get into somebody's mind and I'm gonna still ask you to do that. If you're President Trump and you're watching these interviews, how much faith do think he has in Cash Patel and Dan Bongino at this point? Any idea at all or do you not want to speculate? I think he's got a lot of confidence in them because he's just allowing the sword operate. We haven't really heard the President weigh in.

on the FBI and he's certainly never had the hesitancy to criticize his own people. true. That's probably a great answer. That's probably the best indication that he is absolutely

Speaker 1 (01:42:48.43)
understanding of the whole process that they're going through. But it's still interesting though, your other theory is interesting too, that, we're getting killed on this, get out there, you know, talk to. And do you think, okay, do you think it's a coincidence they went to Fox News for these interviews? All three of these now, all three of them. I don't know if Jen Psaki would go as well or as friendly. I think Brett Baer in particular, he was the last sit down one on one

interview with an FBI director that was Christopher Wray, that was Brett Baer from Fox. Bartiromo sitting down with the two of them was sort of a different dynamic. And then Bongino going on the morning show, think. I mean, it sounds a little cold, but Bongino's personal profile is much larger than Director Patel's, right? I mean, he's famous. He's a podcaster, right?

he can't get the prime town sit down. He's going to outshine the boss within the agency. So that's got to go to the director. And if anything, this may be like kind of makes Bon Juno like look a little bit softer. Cause he's on the curvy couch. He's on the curvy couch. Talking about weak people and slamming his face. could never do a show on a set like that. I'm way, I got so much shit strewn all over the place. I'm too messy. My co would not go well.

It's not mine. I tell the employees every day you don't own it. You don't own it I don't own it. It's like being the center fielder for the Yankees that'll live with you forever But you don't own the Yankees. It's a proud franchise The place has taken a reputational hit there is zero question about if there were a lot of bad actors One of them still out there causing us all kinds of trouble So we had to fix it and rebuild public trust one of the ways to do it is these cases of significant public interest that matter

You know, we had two pipe bombs planted on January 6th. I mean, we were told by partisan actors out there, this was the insurrection. The world was going to fall apart and no one seemed to show any interest in this case. The second we got in, I put a team on it and I said, I want answers on this. And I'm pretty confident that we're closing in on some suspects. The reason, by the way, I use social media with these cases. I'm trying to communicate on social media is nothing's by accident, guys. I do nothing by accident.

Speaker 2 (01:45:06.272)
Every time I put a tweet on it, we get tips. We got a fascinating tip.

The viral 30. boo. Pink salt. Hold on. Y'all pay attention. Grab a pen and paper. I'll wait. We got a fascinating tip coming up with baking soda and, and sea salt. Melts fat was actually featured on the today show. for those who missed. Okay. So real quick, he's talking about, cause you earlier when you were talking about cash Patel's mentioning of social media. And I agreed with you that, that he's.

on one of these cases.

Speaker 1 (01:45:39.89)
seems to be responding to what he's seeing out on social media. Well, here's maybe the flip side of that. This is social media, I guess, as the side of the milk carton, modern version of that. Do you have any problem with the way Dan Bongino is using social media to generate tips for the effort? I don't think that.

I think it's a good explanation. There's the real reason and the right reason. And the right reason is, yes, we get lots of tips. The real reason is that they're trying to engage with social media because they're concerned about coming off really bad. is there anybody out there who's like scrolling around on Twitter right now who's like, you know, I know who the pipe bomber is and I wasn't going to say anything. And then I, I saw something from the deputy director of the FBI. that's fair.

Damn you, Steve! Little disingenuous.

One of the three. I want to say which one, but I'm

Okay, so he doesn't, we're about to have, this is fascinating. We're about to have some serious reveal coming up real soon, it sounds like, of one of those three. Well, I don't know which door it's behind. I can't say it right now, but he's about to give away one of them that it isn't.

Speaker 2 (01:46:53.624)
pretty confident that we're going to close out one of them, hopefully shortly and in the cocaine in the white.

So now I'm going to talk to you about the cocaine in White House. So now you know that the thing that we're about to reveal isn't the cocaine in the White House because we're talking about that separately. Which means they're about to close out one quickly, which means it's either the pipe bomb. Right. Right. Or the SCOTUS leak. Yeah. Yeah. And you know it's going to be the SCOTUS leak, right? Because it's not a veto. doesn't matter. Yeah.

I saw someone on social media, which is fine. Everybody's entitled to an opinion. We work for you. I don't care about the case. Yeah, I do. I was a Secret Service agent. A potentially hazardous material made its way into the White House. Nobody seems to know how it got there. And nobody seemed to investigate it fully. What planet do we live on where that's not of public interest?

You're faced with this interesting thing. I've known you since I was a kid. And I know your instinct is to swing back. But you promised that you weren't going to do that. You promised that you were going to get rid of the partisanship. And you were going to go back to being a law enforcement officer. You went in there, and there were some cases that were closed or still open that a lot of the public felt a little sketchy about. The first assassination attempt against President Donald Trump. It's like, is he really the guy?

What happened with Epstein? Can you say with confidence as a lot of people used to be their guy when it comes to podcasts appearing on Fox News, but now as a law enforcement officer, can you say we have all the information?

Speaker 2 (01:48:21.986)
Well, I'm never going to say we have all of it and people.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that's not what your boss just said? Am I wrong? Did he not just say that?

me all the time are these

Go ahead, Steve. Whatever they know, you're going to know. That's That's what I think. I couldn't remember the exact verbiage. It's vodka. Sorry. Bad host.

cases closed and whether they're closed administratively is irrelevant. If new tips come in, we're absolutely going to follow them. And that's why I always put out, you have additional information, please let us know. Those two cases obviously are of significant public interest. I'm just telling you what we see in the file. I am, I just want to be crystal clear.

Speaker 1 (01:48:57.358)
Hang on a second. Hold on. He's going to talk about the Epstein file. But remind me, I've got to ask you a question, a point that you made previously.

I am not asking anyone to believe me. I'm telling you what's there and what isn't. There is nothing in the file at this point on the Epstein case. And there's going to be a disclosure on this coming shortly. We are working through some, there is video. That is something the public does. No, no, not, not the actual act, but there, the entire MCC Bay, was only one camera. were other, there's video.

The video of him killing him.

Speaker 2 (01:49:36.29)
that when you look at the video and we will release, that's what's taken a while on this, we are working on cleaning it up to make sure you have an enhanced, and we're gonna give the original so you don't think there were any shenanigans. You're gonna see there's no one there but him. There's just nobody there. So I say to people, if you have a tip, let us know. But there's no DNA, there's no audio, there's no fingerprints, there's no suspects, there's no accomplices, there's no tips, there is nothing. If you have it, I'm happy to see it. There's video clear as day, he's the only person in there.

and the only person coming out, you can see it.

All right. Oh, hang on. OK, yeah. All right. So any thoughts on that, Steve, before I ask you my two questions? I thought that there was no video because the cameras went out.

That I thought as well, but he just said he made it sound like the way I interpret it, taking that information you just said and pairing it with what he just said is it sounds like the camera that was on his cell was out, but he's trying to say that, no, we have other cameras in the building. You're just going to to accept those. Going in and going out sort of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, there's no audio.

And no deal in there to point to that it wasn't him by he look he might have died by his own hand. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily a suicide. They have yet to address that very simple thing that a lot of people have righteously brought up. This is a guy that from what we understand worked in influence and coercion. Who's to say that the people that he was doing that to didn't just turn around and say it ain't no fun when the rabbits got the gun.

Speaker 1 (01:51:14.386)
And there's people that are important to you. unless you die by your own hands, something negative will happen to them. And you could see how that would happen. You made a remark to me. Again, I think this was off air. I can't recall. I'm sorry. You might say this publicly. I hate to put you on the spot like this, but how big do you think this file that Dan Bongino keeps referring to is? There's no way that it's thousands of documents. I mean, he, in he's.

certainly put that forward like he's been in there. And look, it's small but again, unless you know, you don't know. He's never used the vernacular for the FBI. So if, if you, if I got a case, right, that wasn't mine and I was looking through it and I came at you and you were my SSA, Keith. I'd be like, hey boss. hold on. I gotta look. Hang on. So I'm, above you. I'm not a dick though, right? Well, I mean, that's debatable. I'm not a satan again.

Okay, but I'm above you as far as the hierarchy goes. Okay, go ahead. And you asked for a status update or summarize this case. I would say boss. I read through every serial in the case file. The word is serial. That's the FBI term, which to me is just more evidence. These guys are outsiders. They're not in the know on these things. You could see how the viper's nest that's around them is distracting them. And just the fact that they don't have the terminology down is just very

to me that they're uncomfortable with where they're at and they could easily be manipulated.

Speaker 2 (01:52:49.182)
the two DC by pipe bombings the Supreme Court leak on the Dabz decision and the cocaine in the White House you say one of them within a day or two we're gonna have a major break well we got the we've got a good tip this morning we're gonna run it out we're not gonna be able to make that public obviously

Hang on a second. You got a tip on Twitter? That's the breaking news? Oh, I'm not a misunderstood. What? Here's where it doesn't make any sense. They're going to open up the White House cocaine case after the White House has basically had a turnover 100 % in staff. Are you going to locate all of the old people? I hate Washington, DC, man.

right away because we have to make sure

Speaker 2 (01:53:30.19)
And we have to go all the proper steps. What I don't want to do ever, and I've said this before, it's not an excuse. I can't say to the public enough. I put it in my tweets all the time. I'm not asking you to trust me. Nothing drives me crazy. And people go, they're asking us to trust the plan. I am absolutely not. Read my tweets. I don't want you to trust me. I don't. I'd be nice. You have evidence. All I care about is results. So let's talk about what the president wants. He clearly wants a result when he told Bret Baier on the assassin.

Okay, hang on a second. Hang on. I'm so confused now because I thought earlier in the conversation, I didn't catch this earlier today when I watched this, he said that we're going to be releasing some information, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then on the, on the, which case wasn't the, the, cocaine in the white house. So we knew it was going to be either, J six pipe bomber or, Dobbs leak. Okay.

So now he's is he saying now that we got a good tip on the White House cocaine? He's saying that it's one of the cases that they're going to reveal that we're presuming is either Dobbs or cocaine. OK, hang on a second. So so we're supposed to believe for four months now that these things take time. And again, if I miss hearing this and that is quite that's definitely in the realm of possibilities. But if.

If we're told for four months, be patient. We've got to cross our T's and dot our I's and make sure that names aren't revealed. It shouldn't be blah, blah. Is he at the same time telling us that we got a tip this morning that we're going to reveal in the next couple of days? I don't understand the showmanship aspect to this. Why are we doing the reveal with cliffhangers? Just give us the information.

assassination and he's got questions on the first one.

Speaker 1 (01:55:27.82)
A trick of ice, water, salt, and lemon has gone wrong. Steve Harvey's the president? User report lost. That's crazy time loss.

What on?

Speaker 2 (01:55:35.98)
that we still don't know about that shooter in Butler. And we don't know about his communications. Will we get transparency? I thought it was strange. You know, the one guy had 18 cell phones. OK. Right. have a lot of cell phones, but I have like two. You know, I call that a lot. And I think I probably make more calls than him. They live outside of Butler in a little place. Where do they get this lawyer that would represent IBM and would represent Exxon Mobil? You're the president. Can you find out? Secret service.

They tell me it's fine.

my gosh, even more so than earlier when we played this clip. Look, we've come to know a lot about his reactions over a lifetime of him. I'm sorry. When he said, tell me it's fine.

He doesn't, I don't, I'm not gonna. That's the word, thank you. I just feel like he does not believe that at all. They tell me it's fine.

I would represent ExxonMobil. You're the president. Can you find out? Secret Service. They tell me it's fine.

Speaker 1 (01:56:48.876)
He never looks like that. He stares at Brett. Again, I know how ridiculous I'm being with these over-analyzing all these moments on these clips. But they tell me it's fine. And then he stares a whole through Brett as if that's what they tell me, Brett. Stare, stare, and then he looks down. my gosh.

They tell me it's fine. But it's a little hard to believe, to be honest with you. It's a little bit hard to believe as I get that throbbing feeling.

So then the question is that a lot of people have wondered is did this kid have help? He could not have pulled it off by himself. Was there a foreign actor? Did someone provide him with the weapons? there a chatter online?

Well, let's be clear. There are two separate parallel tracks here. Foreign actors targeting people in the United States, and it's not just the president, it's others. That is a very real track. The question is, do they intersect? The case file now, which by the way, we are going to make another public release on this coming up. We're just kind of finishing up the product now to make sure it's tight and put together. You're going to see a lot of what you've heard about online does not exist in the case file.

I'm not telling you information may not surface later. We do the PDB, the President's Daily Brief, we get the same brief, me and Cash every morning. We have worn people out, telling them if there's something there we wanna find. They have shaken every tree on this. You mean you talk to his classmates, you talk to his family, you've talked to everyone, because they burn the body, cremated, and they clean the whole house out. Yeah, and here's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:58:23.99)
There are, like with the Epstein case, for example, we have a number of significantly odd abnormalities that would make a normal person go, what? If Lawrence is near his bank at four o'clock and the bank gets robbed, but we know Lawrence reported to work afterwards and has an alibi, the fact that the bank was robbed, it's a fact that Lawrence was there, but it's not evidence that Lawrence committed the crime.

Things really, really bad things happened in this case, but when you see the report we're gonna release, you'll see that not everything you've been told is true. But the president is not wrong at all. mean, he's entirely, hey, who's shot in the head? He shot in head, got up and screaming fight, fight. Of course he's gonna lie. That's Answers, but that's our responsibility. And nothing's ever closed though. If new evidence services, we'll be sure to get it There were just things that were strange. The slope roof thing, you know, the guy was on his bicycle roaming around, never caught, never seen.

Let's talk about something that's been in the news.

Any thoughts there, Steve? No, I think we'll probably have to react to the report that they put out there. But again, it's always, they going to disprove certain things and these questions? I think Bound Geno is spot on. Circumstantial evidence is not evidence of a crime. However, back to the Epstein list, you can die by your own hand and it's not suicide. Right. So we'll see what they put out and hopefully they do it in an expeditious fashion here.

You're gonna have to pull that one out for me there a little bit. You can die by your own hand. It feels like a riddle that I'm not getting. You can die by your own hand, but that doesn't make it suicide. Okay. Like maybe he accidentally killed himself. Accident would be one thing, or you actually killed yourself, but it's not suicide if you did it under the threat of... Oh.

Speaker 1 (02:00:08.606)
If I coerced you, if I said I was going to harm your family unless you did something. Let's say I kidnap your child, Keith, and I say rob the bank, or I'm going to hurt your child. You would not be charged for bank robbery. Let me ask you this, and I don't know. A simple, quick Google, I guess, could solve this. Did Epstein have kids? I don't even, did he have I don't know his. I just wondered who you would threaten for him. We're going to take a.

What's her name? mean, it was just saying we could make it look we can make it worse. Right? Yeah, yeah.

this morning and that is cash Patel talking about how when James come was on the beach and posted that social media doing the 47 he claims that he just happened to walk up along the beach and they saw the shells he and his wife and he put on social media says he thought it was innocent. He was the director of the FBI but thought it was innocent, he knows what 86 means then cash Patel said now we have all these copycats and now you're having to pull resources from all the serious crimes terrorists.

the beach again.

Speaker 2 (02:01:12.802)
gang-related individuals, drug traffickers, and people who are abusing children. You're pulling them off to go research these copycats because we can't afford another assassination attempt. I got to tell you of all the things that have surprised me in the close to now three months I've been here is the depravity of Jim Comey. This man is a disgrace to the badge, the FBI, and the country. What he's doing right now...

But one going out and taking shots at cash cash isn't belong to cash was the chief of staff at the Department of cash is is a is a a patriot cash is served in numerous high level roles taking personal shots while you're on the beach implying a threat towards the president blaming your wife about it. And let me just add about James.

Just just a quick aside both cash and Dan the most The thing that they're most passionate about is this James Comey thing Just just just an observation

me you know Saint comey walks around the moralizing to everyone how wonderful the human being is what you said is absolutely accurate we have wasted countless man hours now running out. The tips to our tip line about people putting 8647 because of Jim comey because he cannot control himself and his emotions he is a child he is a big child and let me tell you more. Jim comey want you to Jim comey taken a shot.

at the president. look at me. I'm such a victim. The president's going after me. He's making a ton of money on this book. The only person that got prosecuted was the president. Jim Comey. We're finding stuff even now. Wait till you read this stuff that's coming out.

Speaker 1 (02:02:52.302)
But does he still have loyalists in the building? Because when I hear the FBI director saying, you guys are finding boxes that are hidden. OK, how does that happen in the bureau?

Well, we were there a couple of weeks and luckily there were a lot of people up there.

Now hang on a second. Hang on. We just went through the cash Patel thing. Did cash say boxes? No, no. on. Hang on a second. This may be a case of the Dan say something off air to the curvy couch team about cash found boxes or something. And then Lawrence maybe is bringing it to air again.

maybe hey, it seems like a dramatization. There's not just boxes around with case files. I'm just what I'm getting at is Lawrence is saying is referencing cash Patel talked about boxes. If I heard him correctly, I haven't heard cash mentioned boxes and I feel like I feel I just I feel like this is an off air thing something off air. I could be reading into this.

But let's see here. And now he's putting Dan almost on the spot. Yeah, because Dan's like, there was a thing a couple of weeks ago. Now that you bring it up, that's what it feels like.

Speaker 2 (02:04:05.102)
look at me. such a victim. The president's going after me. He's making a ton of money on this book. The only person that got prosecuted was the president, Jim Comey. We're finding stuff even now. Wait till you read the stuff that's coming out.

But does he still have a loyalist in the building because when I hear the FBI director saying you guys are finding boxes that are hidden Oh, that was during the Bartiromo wasn't it happen in the bureau. I think he said that you're in Bartiromo my bad

Well, we were there a couple of weeks and luckily there were a lot of people up there who grabbed us by the arm the minute we came in and said, thank you for being here. You know, we need to talk. There are people there who are really horrified at what happened. And there was a room and we found.

Are you driving way less than you used to? No, Do you have a clean driving record? Are you over 25? Yes, I feel it.

A lot of stuff. hidden room. I wouldn't call it hidden, but hidden from us at least and not mentioned to us. And then we found stuff in there.

Speaker 1 (02:05:06.382)
I gotta go back to that Barna Romo interview because it's, Lawrence is referencing things that I just don't remember, you know?

and a lot of it's from the Comey era and we are working our damn this right now to declassify. And just so you know, cause I get the public, totally understand people saying, do it now. The process is not all the information is ours to declassify. Some is other intelligence agencies. It's not, we literally can't do it. Once that gets done and that gets out there and you read some of the stuff we found that by the way was not processed through the normal procedure, digitizing it, putting in FBI records. We found it in bags hiding.

under Jim call and you're going to be still shells on the beach can you not talk to social media.

my gosh, Ansley,

down. you see anyone posting this, take it down. It's a threat to the president's life. Second thing, can

Speaker 1 (02:05:56.452)
she wants social. We've been here with social media policing speech. Ainsley, stop it.

You arrest people that post these like like coming. We we make arrest decisions based on an interaction with the Department of Justice with FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation, not prosecution. The problem is a lot of these cases haven't been a Secret Service agent is you're going to prove intent and here's what you don't want. You say you arrest them and he goes.

there's not a magistrate that's going to end and guy walks out of court and doing a victory. to the right case. have to build a case. You need to build probable cause. I don't want to do what the left did, which is jump the gun. I mean, then you have a situation like the prior dep.

I mean, that's a fair point too, right, Steve? I mean, we got to exercise some caution or else you're going to blow the whole case before you get in front of a judge. Well, I don't know what case they have. Yeah. Okay. They're they're in the FBI. They do investigations of crimes. Those aren't crimes. Okay. Well, I don't know if he's talking about specifically, he's not still on Comey, is he? know Ainsley wants him to be. That is just click bait. It's like conservative.

to be Andrew McCabe who goes back, know, files a lawsuit. You know, this guy was engaged in one of the biggest scandals in American history. He got $200,000, I believe, and his pension. You have to do this the right way.

Speaker 1 (02:07:12.11)
my gosh Ainsley's like what about social media stop! mckay got seven hundred thousand dollars plus a gifts a GoFundMe account that raised over half a million then Peter Struck and Lisa Page each got over a million

Speaker 1 (02:07:33.678)
There are no words, There are no words.

also got a network contract, so he's an expert commenting on you. What is that like? Well, listen, as Lauren said before, it's difficult for me to not be able to respond like I used to, but there'll be a day. There'll be a day. I'll be back one day, and I'm going to be sure to answer all that stuff. But that's not my job now. My job now is to put aside my partisan interests and to...

responsibly handle the deputy director of the FBI. You got to remember, Brian, nothing that gets to our desk, mere cash is a five or a six problem. Everything's a 10. If it's a nine, someone else fix that.

We need change something. Say that again. Everything. It's back to what's at my desk. Is it a five or six problem? Is it? It's a 10 problem. First of there's no level problems. This is just his own sort of way of expressing it. But who is bringing it to your desk? And you said when you showed up, people were thanking you and they're pulling you aside and they really want to be on your team now. What's their background?

What do we know about them? Well, what we do know about them is they were very unhappy with what was going on and were just ashamed by it and they saw what would happen and yet they kept their heads.

Speaker 1 (02:08:49.246)
And then as soon as they walked in, they distracted cash and Dan. see.

that the FBI held on to know to make sure it wasn't a factor in the election. Well, there's been that's another thing I wanted to address. You know, we can't can't publicly talk about HR matters. We just can't you. You know, illegal. Yeah, it's it's it's you can't do it. But anyone out there who thinks we have not taken.

I think we're about due for an Ainsley social media question.

appropriate action against political actors. They're just making that up. We can't go out and advertise this stuff. But if you think we're allowing partisanship to infiltrate the FBI and just let all that bad stuff happen, you're really just making, I don't know why you're doing it. Maybe you're trying to break up, know, divorce us from the people and breed mistrust. But that is not what's happening. I don't know what people think me and Cash are doing all day. I I gave up everything for this. mean, you know,

My wife is struggling. I'm not a victim. I'm not Jim Comey.

Speaker 1 (02:09:48.172)
I hate to hear that, but I don't doubt it, man.

fine. I did this and I'm proud I did it. But if you think we're there for tea and crumpets, mean, cash is there all day. We share our offices are linked. He turns on the faucet. I hear it. He's there at the gates in like six o'clock in the morning. He doesn't leave till seven at night. You know, I'm in there at seven thirty in the morning. I you know, he uses the gym. I work out my apartment. But I stare at these four walls all day in D.C. You know, by myself, divorced from my wife, not divorced, but I mean, separated divorce. And it's hard. mean,

Wait, what was that breaking news? Is that a Freudian slip? Seriously, I, I. What? OK, I don't know, man. I'm sure social media is having a fun time with this.

You we love each other and it's hard to be apart. But you're doing some great work. You're straightening out at the FBI, you're moving buildings, there's a lot of change. I just, one more thing, I'm not asking anyone to trust me. Trust is for fools. Just wait for the results. Just, that's all I'm asking. Don't trust me. Too many actors in government have asked you to trust them and screwed you in the past. We're not doing that. You don't need speed in this, need to do it Smooth is fast.

Yeah, and before we go though, can you please address the seashells one more time? Sorry. Don't trust me, but what I need you to do is be patient and trust me. Yeah. That's it's just not a good approach. It's just not and a lot of it's not his own fault. I mean, they painted themselves in a corner with some of the big stuff and now they feel obligated to have to double down on some more stuff. And I think that

Speaker 1 (02:11:25.538)
The way that they could have got in differently was to have the shock and awe factor and had significant changes. And then they wouldn't be having to lean on what is salacious and what's going to play well on Twitter. You know, it's going to, they shouldn't be on Twitter. Right. I mean, as much as they say, I'm a big boy. I don't care what they say about me. They very clearly do. Right. I mean, the best thing you could do is get insulted by James. me and just go, I got nothing. Yup.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. He's got time to do that. I got to work on my job here. You know his job that he used to have and I'm from yeah, I'm just googling here. The Epstein files were released by Pan body in February 27th Dan Bongino didn't become a part of the FBI until March 17th He of course inherited that fun thing there Let me let me just check real quick here cash, but tell first day February 20th, I believe. Okay, let's see here

must be yeah sworn in February 21st. Yeah, so there you go. that release was already well in the works before these two gentlemen were able to do anything with it. Okay, Mr. Steve friend, it has been an absolute pleasure. Anything else that you wanted to discuss as we covered those two interviews there? I think we did a deep dive. Hey, look at that and match the show title. Okay, so

Steve, tell everybody again where your podcast is the American Radicals podcast where they can find it and all sorts of good stuff. American Radicals podcast. We like to call it colloquially AMRAD. AMRAD. Yes. Hold on. I wrote this down. Hang on a second. Y'all write this down. Episode 214. that was where you broke down the the new term that we have.

as those of us that didn't buy the narrative hook line and sinker during the Biden years of if you question the COVID shot, if you question the vaccine, the masks, if you questioned how we were operating with the schools, if you have questions of the government, you were termed a...

Speaker 1 (02:13:40.332)
domestic violent extremists agave It's 214. It's called the powder keg It actually brought the the next term that you're gonna start seeing a lot more often which is nihilistic violent extremist Relating that to terrorism which is interesting because the basic foundations of a nihilistic violent extremist is they have no ideology and Terrorism is based on having an ideology, but right now government never lets that get in the way of entrapping the next level of people

That's the American radicals podcast episode two one four. Go and check that out. I look forward to having you again on in the near future. I'm sure there'll be something for us to talk about and I wouldn't be interested. Text me if you ever change your grade on on the Patel bungeanoo. You know FBI as it were F I think you said earlier. Yeah, that's what can they get? Can they get extra credit?

Can they bring that up? They say for summer school. no. no. Probably going to have to address the social media according to Ainsley. Okay, so at themikeshow.com if you want to check out this episode and all the previous ones we've done. Of course, everything is pinned to the top here of the X page. Tomorrow we just hang out and and I don't know. Maybe I'll have some animal videos.

There's some, we're gonna have some fun. We're gonna have a Brad Staggs and then we're gonna have my buddy Steve Baker from The Blaze is going to be in as well. And then next week, and let me look over here. yeah, so next week we're gonna talk with Ashton Forbes because he was, if I'm being honest, the first conversation I ever had was about MH370 with Ashton Forbes, which gave me the thought, you know what, let me do a deep dive thing every week. Anyhow, he was on with Pat Gray, my day job over at The Blaze last week.

giving us an update on MH370 and all the orbs and everything. And he said something there that kind of, I perked my ears up. I want to talk to him next week, next Thursday at this time, 3 p.m. Eastern. I want to talk to him about who are the gatekeepers of this technology that could revolutionize the world forever. So we're going to get a little deep dive into that. So I hope you'll join us then. But Steve Friend, the American Radicals podcast, awesome man, as always, I appreciate your time. And I'm so grateful for all of you.

Speaker 1 (02:15:59.798)
for being a part. Shout out to Hero West and to Gabby over at the Instagram page. I appreciate all y'all do as well. I will see y'all tomorrow, 3 p.m. Eastern, right here on X. Thanks so much.