Tulsi Gabbard on Russiagate Hoax Evidence and How She’s Reforming Politicized Intelligence Agencies

From Democratic congresswoman to staunch Trump supporter, both loved and heavily criticized for her independent thinking.

She won't be bought, she won't be bullied.

The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

Aloha, it's just BS.

I've always been a very fiercely independent-minded person.

I know exactly what I need to do here and how deep the rot is within the intelligence community that has to be rooted rooted out.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tulsi Gabbard.

Hello.

This is you, Tulsi.

Thanks for coming.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Aloha, everybody.

Aloha.

We were all clamoring to kind of frame this, and then Sach said, I really just need to do the kickoff because he really wanted to tee this up.

So I'm going to cede my responsibility in introducing you because everybody knows who you are.

But David, there's just too much red meat.

David's been frothing.

Tulsi doesn't need a big introduction, but everyone knows she's a director of national intelligence.

And in the words of President Trump, he is the hottest member of the administration.

I think he means in the sense of having released the biggest news story of the year.

And specifically, files, you declassified and released a series of files related to the whole Russiagate hoax, and many of the documents are just stunning.

I'll let you speak to it.

But I think there's still maybe a few holdouts out there in the world, not that many, who still don't understand.

Who are you looking at right now?

Who are you trying to do?

No one in particular, but who don't seem to understand what this Russiagate hoax was about.

Can you just, maybe this is the place to start and then we can drill into some of the details, but just at a very high level, what exactly happened?

I mean, I think we saw for years there were all these accusations that somehow that Trump was an agent of Putin of Russia.

Was that all just made up and who made it up?

How did that happen?

Yeah, I think just setting the baseline of like, why should you care?

Why should people at home care about this?

And this really speaks to the power of the intelligence community and the power of quote-unquote

intelligence.

Is that as

these headlines were turning out about Trump is a Putin puppet or he is colluding with Putin in order to get elected, we're going back to the 2016 election here.

If you're just watching the headlines from home, you got to believe that there's some credibility here, that there's some intelligence that's actually driving this.

And that really is the significance of the documents that we uncovered, declassified, and released that shows how intelligence and information can be actually manipulated intentionally so that it shows something that is not reflective of the truth at all, and how it can be done in a deeply impactful way.

politicizing it and what we essentially saw throughout President Trump's candidacy in 2016 and throughout his four years in office, the documents we uncovered really served as the foundation for the weapon that was used to undermine his presidency, to try to undermine the outcome of that 2016 election and really

usurp the will and the voices of the people who elected Donald Trump.

So I'll try to run through this timeline in the top lines.

Just to paint the picture of, as you asked, David, like where and how did this start?

When we go back to that 2016 campaign, President Trump went through what was a very crowded primary at the time.

Almost no one thought that he could win.

He became the Republican nominee, going up against Hillary Clinton.

And during that time, Hillary Clinton kind of seeded the

allegation that there was some collusion happening between Trump and Putin and Russia, that Putin was somehow trying to get Trump elected.

What we saw then play out is now known as the Republican.

So what does it mean she seeded?

What does that mean?

There were a lot of different ways that that occurred.

If you go and look at some of the documents that the FBI declassified,

that Durham uncovered is now known as the Durham Annex.

There were a lot of different ways that it happened, but we saw early signs of the weaponization of this when the FBI under Comey

basically got illegal, they got warrants through the FISA court to illegally surveil Americans, Carter Page, in Crossfair Hurricane, and others around President Trump and his campaign at that time.

November 2016, President Trump shocks the world and wins the election.

The intelligence community and the assessments and all these documents we've made public already throughout this period of time during the campaign leading up to the general election, the intelligence community almost uniformly assessed that

Putin did not have either the intent or the capability to hack the outcome of the U.S.

election.

So there were different assessments that said this, but this trend was there.

President Trump wins the election.

Members of the intelligence community then go and brief members of Congress post-election, and their briefing was consistent with the intelligence reports that basically said

there's no evidence that

Russia or Putin had any kind of impact on the outcome of the U.S.

election.

Fast forward to December 8th,

one of the organizations, one of the elements that's under my oversight in the intelligence community creates this product for the president every day called the President's Daily Brief.

The numbers of people who, within the cabinet even, who are able to access this brief is a pretty small number.

This is built for the president, and

it is a product of contributions from across the intelligence community.

This December 8th President's Daily Brief was consistent with all of the other assessments, essentially saying there was no interference in the outcome of the election by Russia.

That brief was pulled.

It was never published.

It was pulled back from publishing hours before it would have hit then-President Obama's desk.

The next day, December 9th, the Obama administration calls a National Security Council meeting.

All the senior leaders within the Obama administration, the topic of discussion was Russia.

The tasks that came from that meeting that were delivered to then Obama's DNI James Clapper, and we have the emails that we declassified around this, said this is a POTUS tasking on Russia meddling with the election.

And what you'll see in those documents was not President Obama asking,

look into the intelligence and see if Russia meddled the election.

It was, provide me with an assessment saying how Russia meddled in the election.

John Brennan, James Clapper, Comey, and the FBI, they all got their folks together then to start building this document that was an intelligence community assessment.

And so, just to be clear, was this in the sort of that lame duck window between the election and then President Trump taking office?

That like two or three month period?

Right, post-November 2016, President Obama's last day, January 20th of 2017.

So, this document was being created by a very, very small group of people within these three agencies.

They got the NSA involved.

And ultimately, that document would state what President Obama wanted it to say, which was that Russia and Putin aspired to help President Trump win the election and did so through cyber means.

And the briefing doc, you mentioned

the President's Daily Briefing Doc, you can see that there was a draft written that then got pulled back.

Yes.

And that still sits somewhere.

So we know that that's what was written.

And someone said, pull that back.

We don't want to have evidence of this

going into the open.

Exactly.

And these were some of the documents that we released.

It's all on odni.gov, where we have the draft finalized president's daily brief from December 8th, and then the email saying, pull this back.

And it was never published until we

pull it back?

Yes.

So So they're also stupid.

Would you like to apologize now?

No, no, no.

I mean, no, there's a few more pieces here.

No, no, no.

I mean,

I'll have the receipts.

We'll go to those in a moment.

This January 2017 assessment was published on January 6th.

It was very quickly leaked out

to different members of the media, Washington Post, New York Times, et cetera.

Then it was briefed to Congress.

But the key thing here is that the most classified and compartmentalized pieces of intelligence they used as the basis for this total 180

intelligence assessment that was basically contradicting what the intelligence community had assessed leading up to the election.

They hid those sources even from the vast majority of members of Congress

because

based on intelligence community tradecraft standards, they were deemed even at the time to be not acceptable.

We had senior officials in the CIA who were tasked to work on this who objected to then CIA Director John Brennan using these as sources because they were not credible.

One of them was the Steele dossier.

It's a manufactured political document that was filled with falsehoods.

So then you see after that,

this assessment, again, leaked to the media, briefed to Congress.

This was the document that then led to everything that happened in the four years that President Trump was in office.

What we declassified and released provided further reinforcement of how politicized this document was.

It showed a few things, for example, that in those sources that were hidden, that Putin didn't believe Trump would win the election in 2016.

He thought Hillary Clinton was going going to win.

He thought that, hey, we know who she is.

We know how she operates.

We can try to figure out a way to deal with the Hillary Clinton presidency.

Russia and Putin claimed that they had extremely derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, her health, her state of mind,

allegedly illegal bribery,

illegal activities going on.

If Putin and Russia were trying to help Trump win the election, they would have done so at a critical time in October of 2016 in order to try to push him over the top.

They didn't believe he could win.

There is so much evidence that disproves this manufactured, politicized intelligence assessment ordered by President Obama that was very conveniently hid by John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey.

So again, why does this matter?

We have seen a trend in some of the biggest intelligence failures around politicized intelligence.

And I'll just give this one example because it goes back to the creation of this organization that I lead, ODNI.

James Clapper was an intelligence community leader during the time

before our country went to war with Iraq.

James Clapper wrote in his book about how Dick Cheney was telling the intelligence community, I need you to come up with intelligence basically that will just create the narrative for us to go to war with Iraq, that will give Colin Powell what he needed to go to bring to the UN as evidence of weapons of mass destruction, of evidence that Saddam Hussein is colluding with al-Qaeda.

And in James Clapper's own words, he said that he and his colleagues were so eager to do what Dick Cheney told them to do that, quote, we created something that wasn't there.

This is

as someone who served in the Iraq War, along with so many of my brothers and sisters in uniform, you can see the devastating consequences of politicized intelligence, the difference between war and peace,

the difference between, in this case of President Trump with his first administration,

this threatens the integrity of our republic and the voices of the people.

being shown through an election.

Chelsea, your position

absolutely enraged.

Absolutely.

Because we were lied to then, we were lied to in 2016 and 2017.

And over and over again, you see how people in these positions of power act with impunity, putting themselves, their political interests, their ambition ahead of the Constitution of the United States and the responsibility

and trust that they have to the American people.

It's the ambition, this sensation that they are puppet bastards, that they can sort of control and shape outcomes, yet they're sort of in the shadows and they're not accountable?

Like, what is it?

The lack of accountability, I think, is what drives

them believing that they can get away with anything.

Because if you control information, you control intelligence,

then you can control an outcome.

Yeah, what was the incentive or the objective to Chamat's question about doing this after the election?

Because it seems so destabilizing.

I think that was

paper paper evidence of it, but one could surmise that the intention was they all thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.

President Trump won the election.

That was

President Obama.

You can imagine the feeling amongst the Democrats.

I remember I was a Democrat in Congress at the time.

Absolute devastation.

What's the reaction to that?

Let's see how we can completely them,

how could they completely undermine and

destabilize and

in their minds disarm a President Trump while he's in office.

And this is some of the twisted thinking that I witnessed when I was in Congress at that time.

And also that they believed,

many of these Democrat leaders really believed that they were doing the right thing for our country by trying to protect the American people from the guy that they actually voted for to be President of the United States.

Right, I mean, I think part of it was to undermine Trump, and then part of it was sort of

exculpatory towards the fact that they had supported Hillary, and Hillary turned out to be a bad candidate and they lost.

And they wanted to find a reason why she lost that didn't blame the Democrat Party for choosing the wrong nominee.

I think that was like part of the motivation as well.

But just to be clear, in this national intelligence assessment that you found in the documents,

the career staff

said there's nothing to support this theory of Trump somehow being an asset or agent of Russia.

So they did their jobs.

Some of them did.

Some of them did.

But it was the leadership, the political appointees who are obviously hyper-partisan because they're appointed by the president.

So they're the ones who overruled their own career staff.

Okay, just to be clear.

That's right.

And just, sorry, last point.

Just to put a bow on this,

we discovered some emails that were printed out literally in the back of a safe.

I think they had been sitting there since 2017

that showed an email exchange between then Obama's DNI James Clapper and then the head of the National Security Agency Mike Rogers.

And

the DNI Clapper, he really wanted to get the NSA to sign off on this manufactured intelligence document.

And Mike Rogers at that point in his email saying, hey, you're giving us too short of a deadline.

We don't have enough time to vet what is in this intelligence assessment in order to add our name to this.

And if you don't want to give us more time, then we just won't be a part of it.

And the response that James Clapper sent, and you can find this again online, was he essentially said, Mike, this is a team sport.

This is the time where you just have to say yes and sign off on this.

Didn't he say we're going to stand behind this report in the best spirit of, quote, this is our story.

This is our story and we're sticking to it.

Exactly.

So, Tulsi,

while I don't believe Trump was a Russian asset, is your position that the Russians did not try to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections?

Because the FBI

and

Trump himself, they all conceded that they did try to interfere.

The intelligence documents, and again, this is what we released, was their intent was to try to sow chaos.

Got it.

In the elections.

And that was throughout the assessments.

So just to parse this,

there was a group of people who believed he was an asset.

Trump asked on stage during the election, Russia, if you're listening, please hack Hillary's email and send them to us and release it.

Donald Trump Jr.

then met with the Russians at Trump Tower, hoping to get that information.

The FBI proved and a DC court indicted Russians for interfering in the election.

So interference occurred.

The Trump family engaged with the Russians, but Trump himself was not a plant, we all agree.

He's not a Manchurian candidate.

But the Russians have been absolutely, you agree, trying to interfere in our elections, correct?

That has not been disputed

at all.

I just wanted to get clear here on the level of the.

Well, all of the other stuff you said, I mean, about what happened,

that stuff has all been litigated.

And unfortunately, the the reality is when we say, oh, the FBI said this,

we were dealing with a very highly politicized FBI at the time that was so politicized they were willing to use what they knew was false information to obtain illegal surveillance warrants from the FISA court to spy on members of the Trump administration.

When you actually look through it, there was nothing actually there.

Okay.

Now, if you put yourself in the FBI's shoes, Donald Trump Jr.

says, I hope, I can't wait to get what you have.

I hope it's what you're saying it is.

And Trump literally asks Putin to release Hillary's email.

Would the FBI not actually take a look into that?

Would you want them to?

Hold on, I'm talking to Tulsi.

You had your chance.

You think that's a good question?

You can be quiet for one moment, Saxon.

Let me finish.

Tulsi, would it not be the FBI's absolute duty to look into that?

Yes or no?

An honest FBI?

Yes.

This was a dishonest FBI.

All of the FBI's

FBI.

All of the FBI's.

You have to look at things within within the bigger context.

Anyone who watches Donald Trump, he makes jokes every single day.

Should the FBI look into serious issues?

Yeah, of course they should.

But again, we're dealing with an FBI that has been proven time and time again during that period of time to break the law.

They are supposed to enforce the law.

They broke the law because of their efforts to try to undermine President Trump's candidacy.

So they already had an objective clearly in mind.

So tell us a little bit about what you learned about Paul Manafort and his conviction, subsequent pardon, and what his role was as the campaign manager for Trump the first time and his giving information to foreign

I'm not familiar with the Manafort case.

Oh, okay.

What I have laid out is the truth of what has been uncovered through the declassification efforts.

Let me ask then the generalized question.

The question is about President Trump

and the question is about the intelligence community.

Russians to do something.

I would urge everyone who actually believes that to go back and watch the video of the rally.

It's a joke.

The context was that Hillary Clinton was being investigated because she had used a private email server and was supposed to be turning over thousands of emails, but she didn't because they destroyed the hard drive and they broke it with hammers, they bleached it and all the rest of it.

And he made a joke about if the Russians are listening, I hope you can find the emails.

Yeah, I just think that's...

Everybody laughed, and you have to be, I don't know, kind of dumb or super partisan or hate Donald Trump to think that him telling a joke on stage was the basis for a grand conspiracy with Russia.

Yeah, okay, let me ask this question.

No, I would think that the FBI

investigating the Russians and us convicting them in court by

30,000 people.

He's going to say, hey, Vladimir, can you do the following?

That's not how conspiracies work.

I'm sorry to break it to you.

Let me ask the question.

What are you doing tomorrow?

But Chelsea, what are you doing to clean it up?

She just told you she released the files and the current statement.

If I want to look on a go-forward basis, well, the first step really is, and this is an essential thing, is about transparency and accountability.

So

we have referred all of the documents that we've uncovered to the Department of Justice because the two have to go together in order for there to be

real change.

Let me build on Jason's question.

12 years from now, there could be a Democrat.

Maybe it's AOC.

You know, four more years of Trump and then eight years of JD.

But

I'm getting to the point.

And some people may not like the AOC candidate, but that doesn't mean, as you said, that some nameless, faceless person can subvert the will of the American people.

So what needs to happen so that there's checks and balances here?

How do we make sure that people can't just not like somebody and then decide to try to basically destroy them?

How do we make sure that that doesn't happen?

It's a good and important question.

And ultimately, the ultimate accountability has to come from the American people and who we choose to vote for.

who we have in these positions of leadership actually matters.

And so for the United States Senate, for example, have the responsibility of confirming people to serve in the position that I hold, and the CIA director, the FBI director, and so on.

We have to be very clear-eyed about the tools and the tactics that are used that ultimately fundamentally are undermining our founding documents and the Constitution, the integrity of our republic, and ultimately our ability as we, the people, to determine who we want to serve

in our government.

You know,

the weaponization, politicization, unfortunately,

it continues.

There is a lot of

there is still rot within our intelligence community and those, again, who believe that they know better for the American people

than we do for ourselves.

And that's really a dangerous thing.

This is not something that's easily solved.

It's not one institutional change that can occur.

We have to remain vigilant on all fronts in order to protect ourselves and to protect our democratic republic from these kinds of abuses.

How do you lead that change, Tulsi?

You're going into work and you don't know who to trust.

You don't know who is part of the institution that you were up against when you came in to take this role.

How do you grapple with that?

And how do you think about prioritizing and kind of filtering the workforce, the people that report to you?

The information.

The information.

By being vigilant.

You know,

I've made some pretty big changes within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself,

finding those pockets and those places that have been weaponized and politicized,

and really ultimately bringing a mission focus to the organization, trimming down and slimming down our manning and personnel count so that we have the right people in the right positions who focus on the mission itself.

Ultimately, every day it's just about doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do and setting that culture of leadership that focuses on our responsibility, the American people, to the Constitution and

holding people accountable when they are not fulfilling that responsibility that they have been entrusted with.

When you were a Congresswoman,

you must have had a different mandate, you were a different political party.

When you go back home, what's the conversation like about the transition?

I don't know if you've talked about this publicly much, but what's it like in talking about your evolution, changing parties, and having this role today with the people that you used to represent?

You know, Hawaii has

been a strong democratic state for a very, very long time, but it's not,

it's a unique state with a very unique culture.

People tend to be, honestly, a little bit more just aloha, live and let live.

I just want to live my life and you know, raise my family.

And

it's, you know, mixed bag for me when I go home.

But I've been pleasantly surprised at times.

I was waiting in line one day at like a FedEx to go ship something, and there's an older Japanese-American man who was the manager, and he came out and he pulled me aside, and he just said, I really, really love everything you're doing.

Keep speaking the truth.

You know, there are others who

definitely have Trump derangement syndrome and can't wrap their heads around how, you know, I represented Hawaii for eight years in Congress as a Democrat and now I'm President Trump's director of national intelligence.

But it also

warp people's brains.

It is

maybe on its surface, but the thing is, and look, I mean, I've listened to your guys' podcast for a long time, and I think there's a lot of folks who are having probably not like the cerebral kinds of conversations you have but the conversations around how the Democratic Party has drastically changed drastically changed.

I hear you talk about it as well.

I mean, for me, I was

21 when I made a decision to join the Democratic Party in Hawaii.

I was running for the state house and had to choose a party.

And for me, at that time, the Democratic Party still represented

the values values of fighting for the little guy fighting for working people protecting the environment and you know standing up for free speech even if you didn't like that speech and to fast forward from then uh to to now it's um you know the party is is unrecognizable in just about every way and

I ended up writing a book about why I left the Democratic Party because fundamentally, and it's not about, well, what do you believe about health care?

Should we take this approach or that approach?

It really is foundational how the Democratic Party has

completely gone away from the party of JFK and Martin Luther King.

And the good news is you get to work for somebody who's a former Democrat himself.

Exactly.

President Trump.

There are a number of us power

and

Shama.

It's all Democrats.

That's when Trump won his second term, was he rallied all those moderate Democrats like yourself to become his candidate.

It was really hard to do that.

I'm saying that in jest, but I think there's some truth to it.

And it was, you know, Bobby Kennedy and I,

for the last few months of President Trump's campaign, we went and traveled all across the country together.

And the final event that we did

together was in Wisconsin, I don't know, a couple weeks before the election.

And it was really incredible because it was in a district that normally votes pretty solidly Democrat.

We were in this big, beautiful barn, and there were probably at least a thousand people there, maybe more.

And

at a certain point, I asked the crowd, I said, you know, raise your hand

if you're a Republican.

Whole bunch of hands went up.

Raise your hand if you're an Independent or a Libertarian.

You know, a few hands went up.

Raise your hand if you're a Democrat.

And the reaction was so fascinating because first there was like one or two hands that went up very timidly, and they're kind of looking around, and then more hands went up, and then more hands went up.

And then the whole crowd got on their feet and just started cheering and looking at each other.

And folks came up to me after and just said, like, I felt like I was getting a hug from everyone that was there, and that we, there was no separation or difference between us.

Thank you for your service.

And you spent a lot of time serving the country.

You had reservations about bombing Iran,

and we did it anyway.

How do you reconcile that today?

And did we do the right thing?

I served in a medical unit in Iraq back, and I was there for all of 2005 and was in a position where every day was confronted with the high cost of war.

And ultimately, that's

what drove me to eventually run for Congress, to be in a position where I could help to influence and impact those

decisions.

And ultimately, one of the things that I found

to be true and very detrimental to our country and our own national interests is very rarely

did leaders in our country ask the fundamental question of what is our objective?

What is our objective?

What are we actually trying to accomplish?

If we're discussing a potential military operation or an act of war,

or any policy for that matter, what is our objective?

Is it achievable?

Does it serve the best interests of the United States?

And if it's a military operation,

how do you define winning?

What's our exit strategy?

And so

those are things that I've brought to every foreign policy question and every aspect of my professional life and personal

kind of considerations of these different policies.

And this is where

I appreciate President Trump's leadership in his approach to Iran.

My position has always been that Iran Iran cannot have a nuclear weapons capability, period.

President Trump was very clear.

But the reports were you were not in favor of it.

Reports, there were a lot of bullshit reports out there.

My job is to provide the President with intelligence so that he can make the best informed decision.

Ultimately, what we saw in that operation, Midnight Hammer, was a president who made a decision and executed a very precise military operation with a very clear objective that was accomplished in the best possible way and a very clear exit.

Seems to have turned out okay, but

it was

also.

By the way, Sachs also was against bombing Iran.

He was absolutely did not want Nikki Haley to become president because his fear was, and he talked about it on the podcast, that he didn't want to start up with Iran.

Just use the precise words.

I didn't want a war with Iran.

I still don't want to over the war.

But what is the condition that you can share with us, the public,

on the strength, the fortitude in Iran today with that government?

What is the state on the ground that you can share?

And what do you think the paths ahead are?

Well, I mean, you know, their nuclear capability was destroyed, much of their infrastructure destroyed, much of their military capability destroyed.

When you look at Israel's actions throughout that 12-day war, their economy is tanking,

their

energy sector is tanking.

So

Iran is facing a very challenging

position.

What we saw is that the Iranian people

at least then and at this point have not risen up against their own government.

But you can imagine, and this is openly talked about by a lot of experts, is

if you're facing a failing economy, lack of basic necessities, water,

basic infrastructure,

there is legitimate concern about how people will ultimately react and how they will react to their own government.

Sorry, do you have a point of view on where that takes us?

What steps into the void there?

There are a lot of different factors.

Such instability in the Middle East historically has not gone as we thought it would or hoped it would be.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Which is why it's so important to look at this from

taking the

regime change in Iran, kind of history lessons learned into account,

but really recognize that these things, we cannot be simplistic as we look at this challenge as well as any of the others that we face because there are always complexities

and so many different elements that are involved that could turn things one way.

I certainly encourage you all to see that.

I was in favor of that strike if it was strategic, because I do not think they should be allowed to have a bomb.

I was in favor of it.

Great questions, guys.

I want to talk about the southern border for a second.

Very early into the administration, you guys declared cartels as terrorist organizations.

Can you walk us through the logic of making that transition and what it enables America to do and why we did it, what the goal of that is.

President Trump saw, as you heard, anybody who attended even a single one of his rallies during the election,

he saw very clearly the devastating effect that MS-13 and Trende Aragua and these other cartels were having in our communities and on our streets in this country, making the American people less safe and exacting a kind of violence and

criminal activity that was getting worse.

And this was the main thing that drove his decision to designate the worst of the worst of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations because of their activities here within our own country.

So this then opens up the door for

the ability to use different authorities to be able to protect the safety and security of the American people.

You look at the, you know, obviously the trafficking of fentanyl is a huge thing.

So within my organization,

we have the National Counterterrorism Center, who's, you know, for the last 20 plus years has been focused on Islamist terrorism, ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, and others who may be plotting against America and our people and our interests.

Now that has been expanded to look at, you know, the counter-narcotics effort, the counter-cartels effort.

And what it's doing is actually bringing in and focusing on: hey, how are we engaging with,

yes, it's the customs and border protection folks, it's the DEA, but it's also your local police and your sheriffs who are on the ground there working in these border states and dealing with the very real effects of these cartels.

I remember I was in Texas visiting one of these border communities with the vice president a few months back, and the local ranchers there came in and talked to us.

Secretary Hegseth was there as well and they were talking about how these cartels are using such sophisticated weaponry the kind of stuff that yes we experience some of IEDs for example there was an IED that was planted on on one of the roads on this guy's ranch and one or two of in Texas and one or two of his ranch hands were were killed because of this We're seeing that these cartels intelligence collection capability, their counterintelligence capability, their use of drones for both surveillance as well as using armed drones to go after those who are threatening their operations.

It's a serious adversary that is highly adaptable and ultimately

will do what they feel is necessary in order to continue their illegal activities at harm of the American people.

We lost 3,000 people on 9-11, tragically, from Al-Qaeda.

We're losing 100,000 Americans to Fentanyl.

If they're not a terrorist organization, please tell me what one is.

I mean, I am 100% in favor of you crossing the border and fucking killing them immediately with prejudice.

I applaud the administration for doing that.

It's far too many.

And when we talked about this issue with Rick Caruso of the people who are on the street over here, they're on the street because of fentanyl, not because they can't get home.

I applaud you guys for doing that.

It takes true courage to do it.

The historical context of this is, you know, if you look back at what happened with Britain and China in the 1800s, there was a period where, you know, Britain wanted to desperately weaken the Chinese, and what they did was they started the opium wars.

And

it's incredibly analogous to this moment where you see all of these foreign actors that are trying to weaken the United States from within.

And so this is why I think the cartel thing is not talked about enough.

Closing the southern border was critical.

But designating these organizations as the organizations that they are allows, exactly as you said, a really 360-degree view of what is going on because they are sophisticated, they have incredible capability, they have an unlimited balance sheet, it turns out.

Bad intent.

Do you think this is a strategic

issue in China?

Are they making this decision to support fentanyl supply chains because it's destabilizing to the United States?

I'm reviewing in my mind what I can say and what I can't say with regard to classified intelligence.

This is a point

so I have not seen intelligence that reflects the statement that you just made.

The precursor issue coming out of China with regards to fentanyl continues to obviously be a point of negotiation in the President's ongoing negotiations with China.

Ultimately,

you know, getting after, and China's not the only one that's providing precursors, but what we're seeing is a downstream

or maybe like a down tick in fentanyl coming across our borders, as well as the cartels in Mexico struggling to create fentanyl because they're not able to access these precursors as easily as they have been over the last several years.

So, when you look at that, President Trump going after the precursor issue, as well as

actually securing our borders, I mean, the significance and the impact of that really cannot be overstated in how it's positively affecting, again, the ability for people to live here in our own country

more safely.

Folks, on that, I just want to thank Telsey Gabbard.

Amazing.

Thanks, Telsey.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you, bro.

Thank you.

You got a lot of Tulsi fans out there.

You got the standing up.

Standing up.

Thank you.

Standing up.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Appreciate you.

That was awesome.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.

Woo!

Absolutely incredible.