Best of The Program | Guests: Avi Yemini, Mike Pompeo, & Rudy Atallah | 9/27/21

38m
Rebel News Journalist Avi Yemini joins to discuss the latest protests in Australia and the horrific police actions against the protests. Rudy Atallah, COO of the Nazarene Fund, joins to discuss the rescue operations in Afghanistan in the wake of the return of the Taliban. Rudy also refutes a negative claim made in a Politico article. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joins to discuss redistricting ahead of the 2022 midterm elections
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Transcript

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Hello, you sick twisted freak.

It's Monday.

Great program for you.

We go to Australia to talk just a wee little bit about the police beatings that seem to be happening on the street in Australia now.

We also have some really important news about banking

and

what you should be concerned about, what you should be doing.

A very personal message tucked in on the show today.

We give you an update on the Nazarene fund from the guy who is actually doing all the overseas work on it.

We tell you a little bit about the FBI.

We also tell you about the president's lawsuit.

I mean, the former president, not this president.

Lawsuit,

I'm wearing my lawsuit right now.

We have his attorney on to talk about his lawsuit against big tech and Mike Pompeo all on today's podcast.

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I don't know about you, but I've been trying to follow what's going on in Australia, and I can't get any of the news stories to match the video.

The news stories say that it was a bunch of neo-Nazis dressed as construction workers

and the police did no wrong, et cetera, et cetera.

And that may be the story.

However, the video I'm seeing, I am seeing a video of construction workers, you know, throwing bottles and everything else.

But then I'm also seeing other videos where the police are just taking people off the streets and just beating them, you you know, Birmingham style.

I don't know what the truth is.

Avi Yemini is the Australia Bureau Chief for the Rebel News, a journalist in Australia that has been following this.

Avi, welcome to the program.

What the heck is happening?

I know it can sound very confusing.

I think it's also confusing for Aussies that are here.

But I, for Rebel News, was in amongst it from the beginning.

And I can tell you right now, there's no Nazis there.

It was, the media really wants you to believe that, and the unions want you to believe that.

That's a narrative that makes it easy for them to avoid taking any responsibility.

But essentially what happened in short is last week

there was a mandate.

There's a mandate to be introduced for the construction industry.

And as you can imagine, there's a lot of union members which feel like it's their unions job to represent and fight for their rights that's essentially the one thing they pay membership for so they decided to go outside the union headquarters the construction so the construction union headquarters and to speak to the union boss now it was a it was about nine hours outside that office

and

they kept pushing off the boss kept pushing off when he's going to come down and speak to his members until they gave an hour deadline.

He'd said he was going to come down to talk to them.

And suddenly

news hits this crowd, which ends up being by that point about 2,000 members strong.

Mostly 99%

of them are construction workers union labor voters, labor voters which are like Democrats.

So certainly not far-right Nazis.

And

suddenly the news hits the crowd that the boss is actually on the radio

telling the audience, telling the state that it's just crazy far-right

extremist anti-vaxes outside and he doesn't know what they want from him.

So obviously that didn't go down too well with the crowd.

And that's where the violence actually started.

Now the videos you're seeing the next day and the following day

was an escalation by certainly by the police and you had once the rest of the members had seen that so the next day you had probably ten times that number roaming the streets

there was certainly violence on both sides but having said that

you know that the police escalated to a point where they essentially turned their counterterrorism capabilities on the civilian population, on these construction workers.

In short, in summary, I think the government

overstepped it and picked on an industry that

until now, they haven't done an industry that would fight back and did fight back immediately and is continuing to fight back until for the previous 18 months it's been

70-year-old grandmas that being paper spraying in the face.

And now

it's certainly a part of the population that won't take it lying down.

And we can see how that is working.

Those videos you're seeing is just capturing those moments and so police are certainly coming in very hard to anyone.

I want to show the video while we continue to have our conversation.

There was some video that I saw last night of some people that were just pulled off the streets.

They were walking down the street one side and the police

come from across the street and just push this guy.

Another one wings him down to the ground and they just start beating on him.

Oh my god, oh my god.

This is a different one, but

here's police

beating on this guy.

Play the other clip, please.

Can you play the other clip?

Hopefully.

So there's stopping anyone that obviously looks like a construction worker.

By myself going for a walk, trying to get back to work.

So you're here for a

lawful reason?

Lawful reasons always.

The cops with the guns, one of them looks at me, just sprints across the road, and they just drop me, all like five on top of me, just smashing me.

For no reason.

So why that boy, huh?

Oh, just

for being here, basically, yeah.

Are you within your 10Ks?

Yeah, I live in South Melbourne.

I just walked here.

My watch is still going.

4.2Ks.

Stop for a second.

That's the guy who was beaten down to the ground.

You remember talking to him, Avi?

The guy with the orange hat by any chance?

Of course, he's a construction worker.

And that's the story we're hearing from all these construction workers is that they're being targeted because essentially the government, when that escalated outside the headquarters, the government shut down the entire construction industry for what they said was going to be a snap two-week lockdown for that industry.

And so basically anyone walking around looking like a construction worker was fair game for the police.

And there's been zero accountability.

We've seen throughout this pandemic.

The police

think they are above the law at the moment with their new emergency powers.

So if you look like a suspect, they will beat you and ask questions later.

How are the people in Australia reacting to this?

Are they buying into the Nazi thing?

I think for the first 24 hours, yes, the the government, the media, the union certainly

had the narrative down pat.

People believed it.

But to be fair,

when people saw the Rebel News story where we actually interviewed, you know,

everybody in that crowd we were walking around just interviewing and it became quite clear that they were union members.

And the very next day, they changed the way they spoke about the crowd.

And suddenly they were talking about, you know, elements that were far-right and far-right provocateurs.

I think that that was probably their way to blame me for this,

for their issues.

But the fact of the matter is

it very much was an organic

explosion of outrage that they brought onto themselves and they have no one but themselves to blame.

I think that the government misjudged it.

It was, you know, they got away with it for 18 months in Melbourne.

We've been in lockdown.

We are the most locked down city in the world, most locked down with the harshest restriction.

And people have complied.

But now they've taken on an industry which, you know, these are people that live paycheck to paycheck.

Take away that paycheck.

You've given them no other choice but to stand up and fight for it.

So

what is coming towards Australia?

Common sense and

a reversal of these things or

chaos?

It's a tough question.

You know what?

The last week certainly indicates chaos is coming.

And I'm hoping at the end of it, whether it's chaos or...

or it settles straight away, I'm hoping common sense is what does prevail.

I saw the video of the police running into the city park, firing into the backs of people, you know, rubber bullets, but they were still firing rubber bullets into the backs of people as they were running away from the police.

I don't think I've ever seen that.

Listen,

I've been in war zones and some of the stuff I'm seeing here in Melbourne,

I just cannot believe my eyes.

I was covering a peaceful march of those construction workers, and they were literally walking, you know, probably a thousand strong walking

peacefully marching, you know, chanting.

And out of nowhere, these armoured, you know,

vehicles that you see at the front lines of a battlefield suddenly confront them and counterterrorism police.

run out of the vehicle and start firing indiscriminately into the crowd and firing tear gas, throwing tear gas canisters.

It's just, it's incredible.

And to think that, you know, all these tools that they've been given over the last few years in the name of, you know, counterterrorism is now being used on the people,

the people that funded it to protect themselves through their taxes.

It's scary and it makes you think all the things that they're passing now

under the guise of public health, what is it going to be used for next?

Just like

they're misusing and abusing counter-terrorism things.

It's an eye-opener, and people need to wake up.

From Rebel News in Australia, Avi Yemeni.

Avi, thank you so much.

Please stay in touch with us because

we can't make heads or tails from it here.

Anytime, mate.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You bet.

Rebel News.

You can follow Rebel News, rebelnews.com.au for Australia.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

The guy who is running the operations for the Nazarene Fund oversees this particular

rescue operation over in Afghanistan, I think, is the Oscar Schindler of this moment.

His name is Rudy Atala,

and

he's working 22 hours a day, every day.

I don't know how he's keeping up with everything.

And every time you try to talk to him, he's got 14 different

crises that he's trying to work through.

Thank you for spending a couple of minutes with us, Rudy.

I know you're busy.

God bless.

God bless.

Thank you, Glenn.

Much appreciated.

So

I wanted to see if you could give us any kind of update on

what is happening overseas and what we're able to do or if there's anything.

Yeah, well,

rescue operations are still ongoing.

Things are not moving at the same pace as before.

The Taliban is

is taking control and trying on one side to show that it is a legitimate government.

And then on the other side, of course, it continues to do all the things that

we know the Taliban does, lopping off of hands and hanging people, killing people, raiding people.

So we've been operating in this environment, trying to be extremely careful.

But we

continue to find Americans.

We continue to find people that need our help.

And then in that process, we haven't stopped getting people out of the country.

It's just gotten a little bit slower than before.

And it's not like we're going around looking for them.

There's many still in safe houses?

Or can you say that?

Correct.

Yes,

they're scattered in safe houses in various regions and areas.

We talk to them directly.

And then

when we get names, we're very careful at taking names and getting solid information.

We do our own vetting process on the backside of these individuals.

We make sure that

they're tied to other individuals, people that we know of or have heard of.

So we do our due diligence.

And then once we get, because the Taliban is trying to infiltrate many

chat groups, many organizations that

are doing similar things.

So I'm extremely careful with my guys on how and who we rescue, just making sure that what we're doing is proper.

And did you see the politico article that came out this weekend, Rudy?

I did.

I did.

It was saying that the FBI is going around, and if this is true, and I just don't know what to believe because of the Justice Department today, but I agree with what they say their mission is, and that is to go into all of these groups and make sure that nobody's ripping people off, that nobody's, you know, human smuggling, etc., etc.

100%.

And I think it's necessary to do so.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of groups and organizations that jump into these things out of the goodness of their heart trying to do the right thing.

But there are a lot of steps that need to be taken.

The first thing I did is when we started this

whole rescue operation is I reached out to our legal team that specializes in working with the Office of Foreign Asset Control, or OFAC.

And I sat on the phone with three lawyers and I said, please advise OFAC

what we're doing and how we're doing it.

So we went through multiple iterations of that.

And we are covered by OFAC.

I made sure that OFAC knew exactly what we were doing, who we were dealing with, how we were moving money.

The official answer for me from our lawyers basically said that OFAC officials have indicated that

they would take a non-enforcement posture with respect to anybody dealing with evacuations currently out of Afghanistan, but we have to be careful where the money goes to and who it goes to.

So that's another end where I work closely with our finance team to make sure that every single dollar that we move is going to an entity that's well known,

that there's nothing nefarious going on there, and everything is reported.

So we are above board, but we're one of the few organizations that has done that.

I've done this in Syria when we operated there.

I've done this in other countries.

And I'm very particular about this area and just making sure that all our T's are crossed and all our I's are dotted for every reason.

I mean the last thing we want is DOJ breathing down our throats for doing something stupid.

You were in charge of the Somalia evac for the government, weren't you?

I was not not the person in charge, but I did work the Somalia evacuations in 92, 93, correct?

Yes.

And what other ones have you worked?

I've worked Liberia.

I've worked Ivory Coast.

I've worked on

Sudan.

So you've seen these many times up close and personal.

How does this one compare to ones that you've seen before?

I would say

compared to what I've seen, this one was an utter disaster.

I mean,

it's on a scale never seen before because normally when you do a non-combatant evacuation or a NEO, it's fairly well,

again, organized because the delegation goes to the Department of Defense essentially to take in the right measures because you're basically a country goes into almost a chaotic stage in our combat zone.

And the Department of Defense steps in and has very specific measures and what they do and how they do it.

And they work closely with the State Department.

In this case, everything was flipped upside down.

It was the State Department and the driver's seat and the Department of Defense had already pulled out.

It was backwards.

And this is why we got into

the mess that we're in today.

And now we're still picking up the pieces.

And I unfortunately feel like we're going to be picking up the pieces for many years to

This political article says, one person familiar with the call said the FBI doesn't want groups offering bribes or paying the Taliban to evacuate people from Afghanistan, as those practices raise human trafficking concerns.

Further, this congressional person said one of the groups that received a call was Glenn Beck's Nazarene Fund.

Beck has brought attention to his organization's activity, praising Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on Twitter for acting on his willingness to assist.

Nazarene Fund didn't respond for a comment.

What are they saying here?

They're mixing two things.

So we never, ever, ever get into any bribes or paying anybody.

Again,

every single penny that we spend or pay somebody, we make sure that our OFAC lawyers know and that we're above board.

The Imran Khan piece

was necessary.

When we looked regionally for people that can influence the Taliban without money, the only regional actor that was able to do that is Pakistan.

Essentially, if you go to like

you have different Gulf countries and other countries that are dumping money on the Taliban, we stepped away from those countries.

The only country the only country that did not offer or does not offer any bribes or money is Pakistan, and they carry a big stake.

Now a lot of people feel uncomfortable with Pakistan because

of its past, but unfortunately, the way things have unfolded, there's no other real big actor in the region.

The State Department and our government did not leave us any choices of, you know, they're not helping us in any way move people.

So what we did is we simply asked

you know, through channels, proper channels, for Imran Khan to see if he can weigh in and allow the Taliban to allow our people to go.

But there was no money exchange.

There was nothing.

It was simply a letter-to-letter, verbal, you addressed it on air, and that was it.

And they made a few phone calls and certain things happened.

And then we were able to get people out.

And

in our case, you know, we've been able to get very high-at-risk people.

We've already gotten the leaders of the underground church out of Afghanistan.

We've gotten

American.

That's an announcement.

I knew that.

Can you make that?

Can you clarify what that was?

This is a big deal.

Yes.

I mean,

there are leaders of the underground church, Christian church, that were stuck in Afghanistan.

And we,

you know,

through proper channels, we were able to get them out without them being whisked away.

And, you know, all the promises that the Taliban wanted to catch these people and burn them and their families alive publicly.

Thank God they're out of harm's way and we worked hard to do that.

But again,

we had to use diplomatic channels to pull these people out.

I mean there are Americans we pulled out.

We promised to Britain.

We got Americans out.

We've gotten at-risk women out.

It took a lot of effort and there are things that we could not talk about at the time that it was happening because it was extremely sensitive.

Everything we've done has been above board and we've never, you know, there's nothing hidden.

There's nothing

in terms of, you know, back payments or whatever.

None of that happens.

Yeah.

You know,

as a member of the board, I know that we have been very, very clear, nothing, even the appearance.

of anything that is that is not right.

We want to stay a million miles away from any of that

and just trust in God that he'll make things happen.

One more thing, Rudy.

I heard this weekend, and this is going to embarrass you, but it shouldn't.

I've heard that you are unwilling to take any salary for what you're doing.

Is that true?

Yes, sir, it is true.

That is,

first of all, you got married, what, I think, six days into it.

You haven't, you've barely even seen your, literally barely even seen your wife,

and you just got married,

and now you won't take it.

Salary, why?

Well, it's the proper thing to do.

First of all, I'm blessed that I have a wife that's very understanding.

She said, just go do what you need to do.

And when the dust settles, then we'll just go out on a honeymoon.

And she's been awesome and very supportive.

I'm not taking a salary because

I feel like if I was in people's shoes on the other side, I would want somebody to reach out to me.

And

I grew up

as a Christian in Lebanon.

I was a persecuted Christian.

I know what it's like to be on the other side of the fence.

And for me, it's personal.

I want to make sure that

the people that we help.

are people

that

we're helping desperate people.

I always cling to Proverbs 24, 11.

You know, the Bible is very clear about helping those who are stumbling to death or to the slaughter.

And, you know, from my heart, all I want to do is just

rescue as many people as I can.

And, you know, given the fact that you and I are tied together and your listeners are so generous, we were able to do some great, great work.

And I think we still have a lot of great work to do.

And I'm willing to put everything on the line for it.

You're a good man, Rudy.

You're a very, very good man.

We're blessed to have you working with us.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you for everything.

God bless.

I would ask that you would keep that man in your prayers.

And if you would like to donate, we could still use your financial help.

Nazarenefund, the Nazarenefund.org or MercuryOne.org.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Former CIA director, former U.S.

Secretary of State, and chairman of CAVPAC,

and also the co-chair of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, Mike Pompeo is with us.

Mike, you really need to get a resume.

Good morning, Blake.

Great to be with you.

Good to be with you, sir.

Thank you for coming on.

I want to talk to you about redistricting, but I have to ask you a question on a story that broke yesterday

from Michael Issakoff, so take it for what it's worth, that says that

the gist of the article, you were so obsessed with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that you and the president were looking at really aggressive methods, including kidnapping or an assassination.

One scenario included a possible shootout with Russian agents who you believed were going to try to get Assange for themselves.

Glenn, I've seen the piece.

I knew they were writing on this thing.

I'd say three things.

First of all, it's a cough.

We've seen you as a big Russia hoax perpetrator.

Yep, he was.

Yeah, so

take that for what it's worth.

Second, there are many stories out there now about how the president and I were engaged in things that were crazy, right?

There's this talk about that there was an effort to drop a nuclear weapon on China in the last weeks of the administration.

This story is of that same ilk, right?

Just I couldn't tell you who they have as their sources, but those sources didn't know what we were doing.

And And then the third point, I guess, Glenn, is

we were very worried about the fact that we had bad actors who were stealing really, really sensitive material from the United States.

And I make no apologies for the fact that we and the administration were working diligently to make sure that we were able to protect this important sensitive information from whether it was cyber actors in Russia or the Chinese military.

or anyone who was trying to take this information away from us.

Not just commercial stuff like intellectual property theft, but real national security secrets.

And so we were working hard to go after those bad actors who were trying to do that.

So was Assange and Wikileaks,

are they journalists and a media outlet

or a hostile intelligence entity?

So I came to believe that they were, in fact, one of the first non-state hostile intelligence entities.

They weren't engaged in even crappy reporting like Issakov does.

They were engaged in

active efforts to steal secrets themselves and pay others to do the same in a way that violated both the central understandings that I think the American people get and second violated U.S.

law as well.

We were always careful.

I'm all about a big, bold, strong First Amendment, but these folks were acting in ways that were deeply inconsistent with that.

Okay, they're redistricting now,

and these last for 10 years.

As they draw the district lines in 2021 and 2022, they'll be in place for 10 years, and that's how we elect officials.

And it's embarrassing the way they snake through

districts, quite honestly.

You are coordinating the national redistricting strategy for the Republicans.

Tell me what you're doing and why it's so important.

So, Glenn, the last time we did this now, coming on 10 years ago, the Republican Party went full hibernation mode.

We just played victim.

We screamed at the Democrats for behaving badly and then suffered the consequences of this where they drew maps that just couldn't get conservatives and Republicans to win.

So my view is enough.

I want to crush them.

I want to make sure we get fair maps every place we go.

Look, we've seen what happens when Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in charge with Democrat president of the White House these last eight months.

We have to make sure these maps are right and fair.

And I want state-elected officials who, in the end, get to make these decisions, Republican state-elected officials to say, no, we're going to be serious about this.

This is a decade-long decision we're making.

And if the Democrats threaten to sue, bring it on.

We're going to make sure we have fair maps.

And we're going to provide the resources and intellectual firepower to help those state-elected officials litigate against these Democrats.

It's a program on the other side run by Barack Obama and Eric Holder.

Nothing said.

They're really the one running the show, aren't they?

In Barack Obama and his people really running everything now.

On this redistricting effort, it's very clear.

President Obama has gone out and fought for maps that if you showed them to the average American, regardless of their party, they'd say that's crazy.

They're deeply unfair.

They don't reflect what Glenn, you, and I know, right?

One person, one vote, right?

They're just fundamentally indecent.

And so what we can't do is complain and whine and do nothing.

We have to articulate our vision and then go out and fight and crush and never give an inch and fight these battles and win them and get fair maps for us so that we can get conservatives elected.

You know, I don't know if you know this, but

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, towards the end end of their lives,

they were corresponding with one another.

And they said, you know, this is going to fail.

And they said, yes.

The other one, yes, but the people will see what we were trying to do.

And the other one said, we should have put more Leviticus in it.

And apparently

what they were talking about was the idea of stakes, that districts should just be blocks of, you know, 500 or 1,000 people, and they should just be blocks.

And those blocks just just keep breaking up as the population gets more and more dense.

That would stop all of this, wouldn't it?

It would.

I'm familiar with that debate.

They went at it hammer and tong for sure.

They got a Senate that was represented by states and then

the deal to allow equal representation for the population in the House of Representatives.

There were big fights about this.

Here's what we know today.

Today, not only Democrats and progressives, but even the courts have permitted these districts to be drawn in ways that are partisan and that reflect the worst of factions that those very founders were trying to stop.

We shouldn't do that.

We should go back to a more traditional set of understandings.

They create the Democrats, create these commissions that have this veneer of nonpartisanship.

They'll put five Democrats and two Republicans on the commission.

We get rolled.

We just can't let that happen.

We cannot let them draw districts.

Not just, by the way, not just at the federal level, but county commission districts, state legislative districts.

These things all matter for a decade.

I'm convinced, convinced, Glenn, that with Fair Maps, the conservative voices will be heard and we'll have good things happen all across America.

This is why we have people like Nancy Pelosi in, because the districts are so crazy that they don't represent

the truth.

They represent

a line, really, that snakes around to try to capture the people they want to capture.

And so the districts become more and more more extreme, even if that district is not extreme.

Do I have that right?

Absolutely.

You absolutely have it right.

Take a look at what's going on in California, where they control the state legislature and the governorship.

They're going to draw out a couple of members of Congress, or at least they're contemplating it, who won in close races last year.

They'll make it nearly impossible for them to continue to serve.

And frankly, to reflect the values of the people that they've been tasked to represent, they'll make these liberal districts.

They'll make them 55, 45, Democrat, and

they will try, as they might, to hang on to this little bit of power.

Because in the end, Glenn, it's all about power for the progressives.

And we have to make sure that these fair maps prevent that from happening for another decade.

How much does the census play a role in this?

It's a big deal.

It obviously drives the data set that gets used in litigation and for state legislators to make their decisions.

So, you know, the fact that there were questionable outcomes from this past census certainly concerns me.

Can you go into that?

Because I don't think most people paid attention.

That happened when everybody was talking about the election.

Well, there are two things.

One, there was a big court case.

Secretary Ross had filed a court case.

There's a lot of argument that says that the Constitution only intended citizens to be counted as part of the census.

We were unsuccessful at that.

So now you have census decisions.

That is how many members of Congress one state gets decided on how many people are there, even if they're here illegally.

And then the second thing,

the timing of the release of the census and the contents of the census were all, in the end, controlled by the Democrats.

And this will make it easier for Democrats, and that's why the work that we're engaged in is even so much more important.

So,

what do you need from people?

Anything?

No, just we need them to encourage their state elected officials, their state assemblymen, their state delegates, their state representatives, their state senators, get a backbone.

Be tough.

Don't give in.

Don't just say, oh, goodness, this won't happen.

This won't affect me.

It affects every family all across America.

Make sure that we're watching what's going on in this redistricting.

If they see it coming off the rails in their state, to raise the flag, and we will come to provide the support they need to get fair maps so they can actually make sure their vote matters.

Mike, can I ask you two questions to jobs you used to have?

One,

I don't know if I trust,

I don't know what to trust anymore.

I don't trust our Justice Department.

I don't trust our intelligence community anymore.

Can you talk me off the ledge or should I be on this ledge?

So

here's my best.

And I'll speak for the organization I ran.

I saw what happened at the FBI.

It became deeply politicized.

I also saw that there was risk that happening at the other intelligence organizations, including the one that I ran at CIA.

My predecessor was a fellow named John Brennan.

He brought real politics into how they did analysis of the data that was collected.

My second observation is most of the folks who work at the CIA are good people, a lot of ex-military folks, significant piece of them.

These are people who are trying to do their jobs, execute on behalf of America, make sure we have good info for our decision makers.

But if the political leadership is corrupted, if the people who are appointed and the people who are confirmed decide to drive politics down into whether it's the Justice Department or the FBI or any intelligence agency, this is where it comes unhinged.

We saw that at the FBI.

We've seen it in the Department of Education Civil Rights Division.

We've seen it.

We want good people with sound values leading those, and it's why these elections ultimately matter, because the people presidents put around them drive into those systems and processes.

And people ask me, because we were involved over in Afghanistan, people have asked me, Glenn, is the State Department, why would they intentionally thwart all of these things?

And I answer the same way, that I believe there are good people in the State Department.

In fact, I know there are because there are some people that are helping,

but they're at the lower levels.

On the other,

I can't give you an answer other than, you know, if it was incompetence, occasionally things would break in America's favor.

And they don't seem to.

No, this is policy.

These are decisions that President Biden and his senior team made in Afghanistan.

And I'll pause there for a second to say, bless you for the work you're doing, helping folks get out, helping Americans get out, helping those who we made promise to get out.

It is critical work.

Don't give up.

Thank you.

There are a handful of groups doing it.

I know you know this.

There's a handful of other groups doing it too.

We should all figure out how to work together

to get folks out as quickly and as capably as that.

So bless you and stay in that fight.

Thank you.

But

you've run to it senior State Department levels where they just need a clearance to fly or they just need a single piece of paper well within the full capacity of the State Department to deliver.

And there is a down-on from high decision not to do that.

I can't explain it.

I also can't articulate why they made the set of decisions they did around closing programs, pulling the military out before the civilians.

These are unexplainable, and I think they drive to a deeper misunderstanding of who we are as Americans.

Mike, thank you very much.

We'd love to have you on again.

We really, I'm a big fan, and I really appreciate everything you've done.

God bless you.

Thank you.

Mike Pompeo.

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