National Security and the Deep State: VDH Interviews Adam Lovinger

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Hello, this is Victor Hansen for the Victor Davis Hansen Show. And I'm here alone today.
Jack's not with us, nor is Sammy. But we're doing one of our often scheduled interviews with authors.
And today we're going to talk to Adam Lovinger. And he's got this book that came out from Encounter Press, another one of Roger Kimball's brilliant edited and selected books, How the Deep State Undermines America from Within.
And that's the subtitle. And the main one is The Insider Threat.
And I read this in November, and I've read it since. It's a fascinating book from Mr.
Lovinger's experience within the security apparatus of the United States, and we're going to have him just for, oh, five minutes give us some idea of what made him write the book and what he saw when he was working for government. And Adam, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to us and then give us a brief synopsis? Yeah.
Thank you for the opportunity, Victor. So I served for over a dozen years in the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon.
And the Office of Net Assessment, it's really, I would call it,

the highest level strategy office in the U.S. Department of Defense.

And the office that emerged out of the Vietnam War

and the recognition that America really didn't have an understanding

of the strategic context of that war.

You know, what were we fighting for? How did the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, see America? How did we see them? How did it fit into the greater Cold War? There's now quite a recognition that we didn't really understand what we were doing in that war. And so the Office of Net-A-Sesson merged out of that to ensure that we never really entered wars in the future without an understanding of the strategic context.
And the real purpose of this office is to ensure American preeminence. The whole idea is to keep America in a position where we can shape the long-term strategic competition with our adversaries.
And what happened, what I saw, Victor, particularly during the Obama years, I was a civil servant in this office. So I saw the office change hands.
I was appointed during the Bush administration. I was in the office for eight years in the Obama administration.
And what I saw during that time, there were two attempts to shut the office down

by the Obama Pentagon.

And then when the office,

when there was so much resistance

to shutting the office down,

there was an attempt to sort of decapitate

the leadership and put in place

someone who was more in line with the Obama doctrine,

which is something I describe in the book as more of like a policy, a strategy of U.S. diminishment.
So I wrote this book, to answer your question, because when I was detailed over to the National Security Council and the Trump administration, General Michael Flynn made it very clear to me that this office had gone off the rails.

It was no longer producing net assessments. It was no longer doing what America needed to ensure that we were the preeminent power in the world so we could shape the strategic competition with our adversaries.
And my job was to put this office back on track, but from the National Security Council. And that's when I experienced what I called the deep state attacking me, something I didn't like the word at the time.
And I didn't even think that something as lawless as the deep state could exist, but I encountered it. And I was a visiting professor at the U.S.
Naval Academy from 2002 and 2003. And I went, I think it was every two months to Office of Net Assessment when Andy Marshall ran it.
Right. And he was quite unique in that at the time, everybody was worried about the lead up to the Iraq War.
But most of his interest was on China, even then. And a lot of people thought that was kind of eccentric, but it was actually prescient.
And when he would visit the Hoover Institution on occasion, I really liked him. But did you come in in the post-Andy Marshall era, or were you there when he was still in the last years of his tenure? Yeah, so for a decade, Andy Marshall was my mentor, and I worked directly under him in the Office of Net Assessment.
Andy Marshall is a legendary figure. He was brought over by Henry Kissinger from the Rand Corporation in 1971 to the National Security Council.
Then when his friend Jim Schlesinger became the Secretary of Defense in 1973, he brought Marshall over to set up the Office of Net Assessment and really create the discipline of net assessment, which, to my knowledge, is the only real discipline to have been created in a federal bureaucracy. There may be others, but this is the only one I know.
One of the questions I had about your book is that you not only suggest that in the Obama years in particular, that there was a naivete or even sort of a nihilism about the threat of China, Russia, and Iran, but there were even people that within the apparatus of government that either were sympathetic to these particular adversaries of the United States, or they might have had business concessions with them. Why don't you elaborate on that a little bit? That it wasn't just the external threat, it was people within this administrative state that were either too naive to understand it, or they knew it very well, but they were ambiguous about what their loyalties were.
Yeah. So a lot of Americans, I mean, have been watching with some surprise and I think even horror at a lot of these protests that have been taking place on Ivy League University campuses, up at Columbia, for example, other schools, and have been shocked with the degree of anti-Americanism that is exhibited in these protests.
And I did not write my book anticipating these protests. However, this view that America is a imperialist oppressor, or as Barack Obama has called America, a racist country, this self-flagellation, this view that America is too preeminent, is too powerful, is imperialist, is subjugating other non-Western countries.
You know, as thisates throughout institutions, it's inevitable that it ends up being held by government officials in high office in the national security bureaucracy. And if you assume, if you take the position that America is a bad country, the next sort of, you know, logical thing to do when you're a policymaker is to hurt America, to knock it down a bit.
And so what I saw, Victor, during the Obama administration was this adoption of a view that America needed to be restrained and it needed to have its wings clipped. And the sort of the prevailing, you know, euphemism at the time was we needed more of a balance of power in the world.
And, you know, the balance of power, this is a very old concept. You know, Kissinger talks a lot about this historically, but it's a preposterous notion as a policy objective when America's position, particularly after the Cold War, and I would say even up to this day, but we're more contested by China, when the power differential is so large between America and our adversaries, if you adopt the balance of power view, it's really cutting America's power down and raising that of our adversaries.
And that's something that is very dangerous. It might sound good to various people that, oh, there's balance.
Balance is a wonderful word. We all like balance.
But, you know, if you permit America's adversaries, strategic adversaries, namely the Chinese, Iranians or Russians, to shape the global security environment, That's a pretty bad situation for freedom-loving democracies. Let me break down in a synopsis of some of your chapters.
So how that breaks down is, and maybe we could take maybe the most notorious attempt at balancing power in the Middle East vis-a-vis Iran. So you're in the Office of Net Assessment.
This new administration comes in with sort of a vague, it's not very explicit of what its real intentions are for the first couple months, but it becomes clear to you and others that they feel in the Middle East, the United States has been maybe a bully or one-sided, and that we need sort of strategic tension.

That's a euphemism.

So we're going to almost favor Shia theocratic Iran on the principle that, and I'm just outlining from your book and what I think was covered in the media pretty well, that the Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, West Bank, Hamas, Houthi, Axis, was kind of the underdogs in a community organizer's mindset of Obama, that they were the minority of Muslims and Persia rather than Arab. And maybe, just maybe, if you tilted toward them and against democratic Israel and maybe the moderate Arabs, then you would have a balance of power in the Middle East.

And during that process, people became aware of it.

And in the various government agencies, they were now overt or they flocked to these agencies because they themselves, while they weren't strategic

thinkers in the sense of an abstract balance of power, they were pro-Iranian, and they had really

Iranian sympathies to the detriment of our own country, and they were empowered by this kind of

idiotic Obama creative tension in the Middle East, of which we're still dealing with the results today.

That's what I got from your chapter. Is that pretty much a synopsis of your argument? Yeah, no, I think you really outlined it well, Victor, and I'm glad you mentioned this sort of the Shia crescent, the Iran, Damascus, Alawite, you know, Hezbollah crescent.
And then, of, you know, going into Hamas, which is not Shia, but has looked to Iran, at least, you know, in the past, you know, decade, decade and a half for support. This policy was really an anti-Israel policy.
That's what was very clear to me from inside the Pentagon, was that Obama really, Israel, he had this irrational, unbalanced view of Israel that it was somehow the embodiment of Western imperialism or something else. But his fixation, a monomaniacal fixation on Israel, was really governing so much of Obama's Middle East policy.
And it's clear to me that the Iran deal was genuinely about balancing a nuclear Israel with a nuclear Iran. That Iran deal had these sunset clauses that, you know, just like the sun, you know, sets over the horizon.
Once these clauses expired, Iran would have a real clear pathway to developing nuclear weapons. And this would be internationally sanctioned.
And these sunset clauses were downplayed and sort of sloughed off as not being so important by the Obama administration.

But those were really critical.

And it was clear that he wanted to normalize Iran and undermine Israel's primacy, frankly, in that region of the world. Yes, we're talking today with Adam Lovenger, and he's got this new book.
I urge you all to read it, The Insider Threat, about his experience in the Office of NetX Assessment and elsewhere in Washington in general. And we're going to take a brief break and we'll be right back.
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And we're back with The Insider Threat. It's authored by Adam Lovinger.
And Adam, let me just turn for a moment. So Donald Trump was elected in 2016.
He's a newcomer. He's sort of overwhelmed with the Uniparty.
Everybody is his friend. He's getting people from all across the spectrum that are both sincere and insincere about their devotion to the MAGA.
You're, at this point, in Office of Net Assessment. Mike Flynn, who had been relieved, I think he posed a threat to the Obama administration, now as an outsider, and he's inside, he understands what your worries are, and he is reaching from, as his designated national security advisor during the transition, he's interested.
And then he's, in the first few days of the Trump administration, he's on your side, is what I'm saying. And then all hell breaks loose, as we know, and Comey and the whole FBI and Andrew McCabe and the frame up.
And then he's taken out, so to speak. At that point, did things radically change for you when Flynn was gone or would it have made any difference? Yeah, I really don't think it would have made much difference.
So Mike Flynn and I, we had been

collaborating, you know, somewhat informally for about a decade before the Trump administration. And, you know, in our ongoing dialogue, Victor, one of the things that both of us observed, Flynn and battlefield intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and myself in this high-level strategy office, we really saw

a similar pathology. And that was that there didn't seem to be much effort in actually winning

our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but more to really keep the wars going, to keep the money

flowing, to keep the defense contractors happy, and to build these sort of these bureaucratic empires that would allow various military officers, but also civilian bureaucrats to aggrandize, you know, their careers. And this was something that troubled us both deeply, because, you know, Flynn, of course, you know, he had many, many soldiers and military personnel under his command who were being killed.

And, you know, he would see that firsthand. And this is a horrible thing.

But then myself, you know, here I am in an office that was created out of the ashes of the Vietnam War to ensure that we were never directionless when it came to fighting wars and to engaging in strategic competition. And the very pathology that the office was created to stop, this pathology was running rampant.
And there was nothing this office was really doing. And so the election of Donald Trump and Flynn becoming the national Security Advisor, this we both saw as a great opportunity to put America's strategic prowess, you know, back on track and to ensuring that we were not blind going into these wars and competitions.
I'd had a spotless career victor for a dozen years in the Pentagon and no, you know, high performance ratings, you know, no security issues whatsoever.

Within a couple of months, I had five investigations against me, two administrative, three criminal. They attacked me pretty much as soon as Flynn called over to the Office of Net Assessment and requested me to be detailed to the National Security Council.
I think Flynn was really, he was the existential threat to this bureaucratic cronyism and corruption. And I think that anyone that he brought in to address this issue with him was going to suffer a similar fate as him.
And at this point of Ness Assessant, being in the Department of Defense, you were subject to the deputy, ultimately, the deputy secretary of defense or the secretary of defense, were they aware of this or did they want to, or they were just, it's somebody else's concern? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that, you know, showed me just how concerned these Obama holdovers were about me going to work for Mike Flynn was that Bob Work, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense, this is Obama's Deputy Secretary of Defense.
For some reason, I don't understand to this day, he was held over during the Trump administration, at least for several months.

And the very first investigation that was launched against me was an entirely illegal investigation because it had no legal predicate under law.

And this was actually run by Bob Work. And, you know, so it's a real subversion of federal process and weaponization of the federal investigative process.
Bob Work was behind this. I didn't really know him very well.
But my sense is that I was one of these people that Flynn had confidence in and that was serious about

trying to clean up this corruption that had, you know, really hobbled us in so many of our wars,

and that for some reason, Bob Work saw this as a real threat.

This was similar. We had on our podcast, Mark Moyer, who had, you know, he was in USAID,

and he was, he had fought all of the same thing. And what was striking about your two books, and I don't want to get in the merits of Marx, but is that there's these unelected people who have high positions of power in the federal government, and they claim they're bipartisan, and they have expertise in their narrow areas of concern, so they're almost immune from the change in government.
They're a kingdom under their own. And once they decide that someone is not on the same team, or someone, I'll put it this way from rereading your book again, if someone might bring controversy from the current administration that is in power, although they tend to be more left than conservative, then they have all of these contacts they've developed over a lifetime of GS service that they can bring to bear in things like they have a conflict of interest.
In the case of Marx. He wrote a book and he didn't clear it enough with it.
But they can find things to use against the person, and then that creates a deterrent effect so that, in your case, when you're trying to make changes or you're trying to work with Flynn, and for whatever reasons they're against this, then by going after you with the facilities of the administrative state, they can also deter other people from speaking out on your behalf, it seemed to me.

Yeah, well, on that particular issue, they do try to divide and conquer. And a senior Trump administration official went around to a bunch of people that I was working with at the time and asking, well, Adam Leveringer was just taken out based upon all these apparently bogus investigations.
Why did you help him? And this official came back and said, everyone was so afraid that if they stuck their neck out to help you, what happened to you would happen to them. And, you know, this is a, I think it's a, it's a big problem because it's not that, that, that the laws and the facts are what matter.
It's that this unaccountable, you know, deep state, for lack of a better word, really can go after and destroy the careers of people in entirely lawless processes and do it with impunity. And this is a real problem because, you know, once these facts and laws don't matter and the federal investigative process can be weaponized this way, you just get the rot just spreads.
Did you have to seek legal counsel? Oh, yes. So the idea is that we're going to go after someone and we have all the resources, the federal government at our disposal.
But if we draw this out in Washington at a thousand dollars an hour or whatever it is, we can force this person to concede because of the sheer expense in the legal world.

Yeah.

Well, my legal counsel, Victor, after fighting my case for three years, he actually shut

his legal practice.

And he said, Adam, I can't represent federal whistleblowers anymore because I'm a lawyer

and as a lawyer, my tools are the facts and the law. But in your case, neither the facts, the facts didn't matter and the law was ignored.
And so just like, you know, a surgeon needs a scalpel to do his trade, a lawyer needs the law to do his trade. If the law could be ignored, it's just, you know, all for naught.
And It's a very sad commentary.

This should not happen in America. How long have you been out of government, Adam? I've been out half a decade.
I was removed in 2018. So let me ask you a question.
So we had this election. The Trump administration is back in power.
This time, allegedly, they are not relying on the recommendations of the administrative state people. So this is what we're told, although it's very hard not to.
And they're bringing in people to government, sort of like your experience, in that if you're really worried about what you're talking about being evident in the National Institute of Health, then you get somebody like my colleague Jay Bacharia, who was targeted by the NIH. If you're interested in what the abuses of the FBI have been by Kariris, then you get Kash Patel, who's a maverick with an unorthodox resume, very competent, but he's been targeted.
If you want something, Tulsi Gabbard was put on a, basically a watch list. She's now, same thing with Pete Hexeth, but a very critical.
Do you, have you been, have people in this transition reached out to you to see if you would be willing to come back into government? Yeah, I have. And I would be honored to serve in this government.
You know, nothing is is set in stone, but there have been some discussions and I'll really have to leave it at that. I think there's a lot of wisdom in in bringing in people who have seen the dark underbelly of our administrative state, just because it has gotten so corrupt.
It's gotten so compromised by America's adversaries. You know, you wrote a great piece last month, Victor, Are the Years of Madness Ending? This was an American greatness.
And you talk about really all these divisions in America. And a lot of these divisions, as we know, So, you know, this is this has been what, you know, the the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians as well have been trying to to sow in our country for so many years.
And I think that, you know, they have made inroads into our national security bureaucracy. I do lay some of that out in my book.
But it's a it's a it's a real problem. And I think that Trump, you know, rightly recognizes this time around.
He can't rely upon, you know, normal processes, longstanding policies. You know, he has to, you know, make his own judgment as to, you know, who has the, you know, who has the competence and the knowledge and who's been through, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the fought these fights with the administrative state and to recognize that, you know, a lot of this longstanding policy and these, you know, processes are corrupt and just don't work.
And so I think that's true. And I think some of the people that I've seen that are, it's still very preliminary and many of the positions or most have been unfilled, but the, some of the people who've been mentioned or who have accepted jobs with national security areas, it's funny.
People call me about them for, but they're not, I mean, one of the first questions they're asked is, are you committed to changing? And are you on the agenda? Almost with the implicit idea that given that you've worked for government before, we have to have, you have to prove to us that you are willing to go in there and change things. Whereas before it was, well, he's recommended and he's done this and he's done this and both, you know, John Bolton really likes him or this kind of stuff.
But it does seem that they're deliberately trying to get people to the extent anybody can against the grain or who have suffered from the administrative state or who are unorthodox. That's my impression.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that would be... And I'm seeing a healthy balance.
On one hand, I mean, Trump is bringing in, you know, genuine outsiders who have a fresh perspective, who have not worked in the administrative state before. But he's mixing that and he He's leavening it with insight.
I think so. It's been in there.
So you have the benefit of both the freshness, the new ideas, the fresh way of looking at things, which paid great dividends in the first Trump administration, for example, leading to the Abraham Accords. This was a very fresh approach.
It was not the work of insiders. It was doing things from the outside.
But yeah, I mean, I believe that Trump does recognize you also need insiders. There must be a whole cadre, and I've had Cash Patel on, I've known him, but there must be a whole cadre of mid-50s or early 60s FBI people who left in disgust or were forced out by the Comey, McCabe, Ray, and have that expertise to help outsiders make changes.
And the same thing is true in the National Security Council and their people. So I hope that people can consult you about that, because that's what we need.
We need outsiders who don't have anything to lose, but they have to have the expertise to understand what these agencies, how they work and what they're capable of doing to people if they're abused, it seems to me. And that came across, I think, as well in your book.
We're going to take a brief break. I'm with Adam Lovinger and this book is the insider threat it's published by encounter books you can amazon adam where do you where do you you can get it on amazon you can get on the encounter books website barnes and noble really really all all of the major platforms do you have a website you're associated with i i'm a i work at a think tank called the Gold Institute for International Strategy.
And so some of my work is on that website. And certainly viewers can reach out to me on LinkedIn.
But I have a low social media profile just because I was advised early on by some national security people to do that. So I just do that.
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And we're back with Adam Lovinger again. Let me ask you right now, and I don't want to put, it seems like it came up in the news just to apply your expertise.
So we have a new administration, and Israel's in this existential fight. It's taken out in brilliant fashion most of the hierarchy of Hamas and Hezbollah.
It's in a series of exchanges. It suffered 500 projectiles launched, but very few got in.
And it pretty much devastated the Iranian air defenses. It has this brief period, a brief window of opportunity, if it will, because the Assad government is gone.
There's Syria's in turmoil, one of the conduits of Iranian weaponry. Hamas, as I said, the Houthis to a lesser extent, but somewhat have tried it.
Same with Hezbollah. Internal dissension in Iran, and then, of course, a new administration comes in.
I don't want to ask you what you would do, but do you see things developing? There's going to be an attitude by the United States quite different than the Biden. Maybe it would be something along the lines that while we have a MAGA agenda that we don't get involved, we don't go look to slay dragons abroad or we don't get in ground wars in the Middle East like Afghanistan, Iraq, or we don't have these forever wars.
Nonetheless, we have to restore deterrence because we've lost it during the Biden administration. And last time he did it by taking out Soleimani, Baghdadi, ISIS, being really tough.
Do you think that this administration, with all the things I outlined, will more or less say to Israel, well, we're not going to go preempt Iran. It's under a lot of tension.
The government is on, but we will prevent the China-Russia axis, North Korea, from strategically interfering with your range of choices. And we will put sanctions on the maximum pressure campaign of the past, which brought really Iran almost to its knees.
And whatever you need to do, what you think is necessary for your existential survival, whether it's being strategic cover or munition support, we're here to help you. Is that sort of characterizing where you think the Trump administration is going? Yes, I do, Victor.
You said it, you and I have a mind meld. I think that that is where the Trump administration is going.
There's a lot of interest. And I think that, you know, with America as, you know, the only superpower in the world, and that our attention really should be focused more on China and East Asia.
Yeah. And that the Israelis, one of the great lessons I think that, you know, the American people have come away with from the past four years is that here you have the Biden administration consistently, you know, telling the Israelis what to do.
And the Israelis rightly have not followed this very core advice and they've achieved great strategic ends.

And I think that there's a lot of respect, frankly, of the Israelis, of Israel's leadership by Trump himself and by the leadership in the new administration that Israel knows what it's doing.

Israel has more to lose and to gain from whatever new dynamics emerged from the Middle East. And it has a very it has a proven track record.
So so why why break something? Why meddle with something that that isn't broken is actually on the right path. And so what I see is I see Trump doing what he said he would do, which was to continue to support Israel's fight for ensuring its peace and stability.
And and as you say, to keep the Chinese and the Russians at bay. And those are the those are the bigger strategic issues.
And, you know, but but but now it's very clear that this the no daylight policy, which is meaning that, you know, the United States and Israel are very closely aligned. History shows that this is the best policy, that as soon as you start twisting Israel's arm, you know, Secretary of State Blinken himself just admitted that by twisting Israel's arm, this actually emboldened Hamas, pulled on to the hostages, including American citizens, longer.
And, you know, this was a mistake. And so the no daylight policy between Israel and the United States sends the message of deterrence that they can't divide and conquer us.

And that, you know, that's really the best hope for peace. So I think that you nailed it, Victor.
Yeah, I think I'm a little worried, Adam, as this administration leaves. Everybody wants the hostages no more than any of us home, and there are a lot of them, to the shame of the Biden administration, were neglected as American citizens.
But some of the negotiations by the Biden administration, I think Brett McGurk is also counseling the special envoy from the Trump administration that doesn't have legal authority yet, but probably de facto a lot of influence. I was reading news accounts today that they are pressuring the Israelis to let out hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners.
And then Israel felt that it unwisely had not gone into all of the territory in Gaza where the remnants of Hamas are. But to end the war and then have a pullout, and then there would be iterations of release of hostages, of which Hamas refuses to tell us how many are still alive.
But it just seems to me that given what the Biden administration has done and given what Blinken has admitted to, it might be really unwise for Trump to start out, whether if this process is in the middle of things, to go in there and really pressure the Israeli government to declare an end to the war, get out, and at any cost get the hostage, no matter how many terrorists they have to release? Yeah, I don't know, you know, as far as the actual, you know, the, you know, the tactics of the hostage negotiations as to what the right approach is, just because so much of the variables are just not really known to the public. So, you know, what capabilities the Israelis have, where the hostages are, you know, whether they can rescue them, you know, without negotiations.
These are things that I just don't have clear sense of. I don't either.
I'm just kind of worried that as this administration is leaving, I know it'd be a great thing. Trump would be very proud to come in with all the American hostages, indeed all the hostages exchanged.
But from what I've seen of this administration, Joe Biden, for example, gave a speech, I think it was yesterday, in which he said that under his tenure that Iran had been weakened, that no president will ever have to come following him and have troops in Afghanistan. I guess he thinks the best way to end a war is to lose it.
But it was incredible. And then he took credit for the diminishment of Hezbollah and the overthrowing of Assad and Hamas.
It was pretty much the subtext of the whole speech was, I'm glad that Israel didn't listen to what I tried to do because they accomplished some amazing things for which I'm going to take credit for now. Yeah, no, it is amazing.
It seems that, you know, Biden's foreign policy legacy is a legacy of spin and really putting lipstick on a pig. And it's one of these things that I've been, you know, really disappointed in that a lot of mainstream media has been trying to, you know, really going out of its way to try to find, you know, some silver lining to these great foreign policy failures of the Biden administration.
And, you know, it's dishonest. I think ordinary Americans see through it.
You know, the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan with, you know, those Marines being killed. And, you know, it was just a disaster.
You don't have to be a foreign policy expert to recognize that. It's humiliating.
A great power like the United States should never be in a situation like that. They have the Taliban be able to do what they did under our watch.
And it's a shame. And mainstream media will continue to have its market share eroded by dishonestly reporting it as something that it isn't.

So it's.

It was a it was a humiliating loss. One of the things I wanted to ask you, because your title is insider threat.
And if you all buy the book, and I hope you will, you'll see that a lot of the chapters deal with people within the United States or people within the administrative states that have enabled some of our adversaries. But what do you make of Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, with this kind of Parthian shot as he leaves office, he now tells us that there are people that have affiliations with the Chinese government, enclaves within the United States, he said.
And that brought up the question of the Chinese balloon's trajectory, whether people were communicating it from the ground, why are they buying up strategic acreage near military facilities or bases? What's the role of maybe 1% of these 300,000 plus Chinese students as far as espionage? What do you make of what Ray was trying to talk about, the internal threat that China poses? I think it's perhaps one of the most serious threats we face, frankly. And, you know, stepping back a little bit, I believe our adversaries learned a long time ago that taking America on head on is not a very smart thing to do, just because, you know, you really awaken the dragon and fill it with furious rage.
And the smarter thing to do is to really infiltrate American institutions because we're a very open country. And the Chinese have been excellent at this.
They've learned this from the Russians, from the Soviets, who were very successful in infiltrating a lot of American institutions, including our national security bureaucracy, our intelligence agencies, recruiting assets.

And, you know, this is this is a real this is a real problem.

And what I try to do in my book is to show, you know, really sort of the collaboration that's been emerging over time. And that if you if you have this worldview that, for example, what I call the Obama doctrine,

that America's bad and really trying to balance America with strengthening our adversaries, where this sort of leads to in a natural competitive political environment is those parties that

see America

as bad

allying themselves

really those parties that see America as bad allying themselves, really teaming up with America's foreign adversaries, the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, teaming up with our foreign adversaries against their domestic political rivals. And this is something that we are seeing increasingly.
We know, for example, that the Steele dossier that Hillary Clinton and the DNC commissioned, that this is something that was, you know, filled with Russian disinformation. I have in my book some collaboration between the Office of Net Assessment, led by James H.
Baker, you know, really, you know, tearing down one of our allies, the Japanese government, you know, colluding with a suspected Chinese agent and sharing classified information with that individual.

So this these sorts of things are sort of the inevitable byproduct. And we really have to ask ourselves as Americans, you know, if we're adopting this worldview that you see on Ivy League campuses of, you know, anti-Americanism, you know, how far are we prepared? Are we willing to let this take us? Are we really going to be so self-hating as a nation that we will allow our enemies to come in and destroy us? And it seems that there are, you know, quite a few individuals now who are very willing to do that, even if it's for their own sort of short political gains, short term political gains, because they can somehow get advantage in the here and now against their political adversaries.
Or like the Biden family, as three U.S. House of Representatives committees have determined, they took in tens of millions of dollars from the Chinese, just enriching themselves.
And one of the troubling things is, you know, as this becomes more normalized, I kind of, you know, fear that Americans will just, you know, accept this as something that this is just the way things are. And we will disintegrate as a country.
But it's an outrageous state of affairs. And I don't know how we can bring more outrage and concern about this sort of internal corruption.
It's hard to know. I mean, we had Joe Biden, when you put your son, who's had these problems on Air Force Two when he was vice president, and then this money comes in, and then he says things while as president that China is not really a rival of the United States.
You don't know to what degree that's an insidious, that he's subconsciously trying to think, you know, Hunter knew this person and this person and I did this person. And in our case, they were friendly or whatever.
And we had Robert Malley, the former journalist who was a freelancer that was pretty much overtly pro-Iranian and very critical in his writings when he was out of office of the United States. We had a high Pentagon official who was pretty much an Iranian expatriate that is the same.
And I don't know what we do about it. I don't know whether Congress will say there's areas around military bases that foreign entities cannot own, or we're going to have to cut back on the number of foreign students, or we have to have them admitted under different auspices, or we have to close the border.
20,000 in the last four years, 20,000 single unaccompanied males from China came in. I don't know why they would.
Maybe some of them are legitimate dissidents, but it seems that the last four years, it's everything goes. The sheer effort and money and time and media abuse that's going to be necessary to correct it is going to be amazing.
It's going to be formidable, I think, because we've got inured to this kind of, how dare you suggest this person's working for China, or how dare you say you should deport someone. It's going to be very difficult, but it has to be done, it seems to me, this correction in thinking.
Yeah, no, I agree. And I really do try to highlight that in the book is that there's genuine collaboration between our national security state and America's adversaries.
And and this is something I think that more people need to talk about. It's not just business as usual, politics as usual.
You know, this is do we really want our leaders like, as you say, Joe Biden taking all these millions of dollars from the Chinese? We really want our leaders doing business relations, using their official office to enrich themselves with our enemies. It's a horrible state of affairs, and it's inevitable that, and we know this from the writings of both the Russians and the Chinese, that they are genuinely seeking to achieve policy decisions, policy outcomes by this corruption.
The whole reason why they're trying to generate this blackmail material on the Bidens and get cozy with American officials is that this creates blackmail material. And that blackmail can be used to coerce policies that are favorable to America's enemies.
And it's a horrendous state of affairs. And I think it's important that more Americans see it as not just politics as usual, but a general national security threat.
Let me ask you, we're almost out of time, Adam. Let me ask you a final question.
So the book has been out, say, 60 days, two months. Where have you encountered either informal criticism or formal criticism? Or who doesn't like your book? Or who's afraid of your book? Or is it too soon yet to be digested? Well, I do have some pretty explosive things in the book, including, for example, covering a murder that's been covered up to date as a suicide.
You know, pretty serious thing. But it's really been a lot of silence, Victor, which has sort of surprise me, frankly.
I have not received, you know, too much, you know,

head-on criticism. I was expecting more, because I do name names in this book, which is something that, when I'm working so carefully with Encounter, we really made sure that every single thing I said that was attributed to an individual, there was a government evidence basis for this claim.
And so we went through it in a very detailed process to make sure that all these claims that I'm making are truthful and that there's evidentiary record for it. But the decision to name names is that we do need accountability.
And the American people are just craving accountability that malfeasers inside the national security bureaucracy will actually be held to account for, for frankly, crimes, knowingly and willfully doing things that they know are illegal and doing it with impunity. And this state of affairs, it's reached a boiling point.
Polling shows that Americans are just really fed up with it and are craving politicians to actually hold individuals to account. And that's something that I'm, it seems like the incoming Trump administration will do that, and I hope and pray that's true.
Well, I hope everybody reads Adam Lovinger's book. It's the insider threat.
I hope people who are listening from the Trump administration transition take heart as well, because Adam has a lot of talent that would be vital, especially at this time. And I really appreciate you coming on, and I'll try to do my best to let people know of your work.
We didn't get into the specifics of names, but believe me, everybody, the book is explicit. It's not generalities, and that's what's scary about it.
It talks about case studies where people were culpable. People knew they were culpable, and yet it's very hard to bring them to account.
So thank you for coming, Adam, and I really appreciate it. Thank you, Victor.
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