National Security and the Deep State: VDH Interviews Adam Lovinger

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Speaker 2 Hello, this is Victor Hanson for the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and I'm here alone today.

Speaker 2 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 Levinger.

Speaker 2 And he's got this book that came out from Encounter Press, another one of Roger Kimpo's brilliant edited and selected books, How the Deep State Undermines America

Speaker 2 from Within, and that's the subtitle, and the main one is The Insider Threat.

Speaker 2 I read this in November and have read it since. It's a fascinating book from Mr.
Lovinger's experience within the security apparatus of the United States.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And Adam, why don't you go ahead, introduce yourself to us, and then give us a brief synopsis.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 thank you for the opportunity, Victor. So I served for over a dozen years in the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And the office had emerged out of the Vietnam War in the recognition that America really didn't have an understanding of the strategic context of that war. You know, what

Speaker 3 were we fighting for?

Speaker 3 How did the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese see America?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so the Office of Net Assessment emerged out of that to ensure that we never really entered wars in the future without an understanding of the strategic context. And

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 was in the office for eight years of the Obama administration. And what I saw during that time, there were two attempts to shut the office down by the Obama Pentagon.

Speaker 3 And then when the office, you know, 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 described in the book as more of like a policy, a strategy of U.S.

Speaker 3 diminishment.

Speaker 3 So I wrote this book to answer your question because

Speaker 3 when I was detailed over to the National Security Council in the Trump administration, General Michael Flynn made it very clear to me that this office had gone off the rails.

Speaker 3 It was no longer producing net assessments.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And my job was to put this office back on track, but from the National Security Council. And

Speaker 3 that's when I experienced what I call the deep state attacking me. Something

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy from 2002 and 3, and I went, I think it was every two months to Office of Net Assessment when Andy Marshall ran it.
Right.

Speaker 2 And he was quite unique in that the time everybody... was worried about the lead-up to the Iraq war.
But most of his interest was on China even then.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I really liked him. But

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He was brought over by Henry Kissinger from the Rand Corporation in 1971 to the National Security Council.

Speaker 3 And 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

Speaker 3 real discipline to have been created in a federal bureaucracy. There may be others, but this is the only one I know.

Speaker 2 One of the questions I had about your book is that you not only suggest that in

Speaker 2 the Obama years in particular,

Speaker 2 that there was a naivete or even sort of

Speaker 2 a nihilism about the threat of China, Russia, and Iran, but there were even people

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Why don't you elaborate on that a little bit?

Speaker 2 Yeah, 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

Speaker 2 their loyalties were.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I've been shocked with the degree of anti-Americanism that is exhibited in these protests. And

Speaker 3 I did not write my book anticipating these protests. However,

Speaker 3 this view that America is a imperialist oppressor, or as Barack Obama has called America, a racist country,

Speaker 3 this self-flagellation, this view that America is too preeminent, is too powerful, is imperialist, is subjugating other non-Western countries.

Speaker 3 As this view

Speaker 3 percolates throughout institutions, it's inevitable that it ends up

Speaker 3 being held by government officials in high office in the national security bureaucracy.

Speaker 3 And if you assume, if you take the position that America is a bad country, the next sort of logical thing to do when you're a policymaker is to hurt America, to knock it down a bit.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 euphemism at the time was we needed more of a balance of power in the world. And the balance of power, this is a very old concept.
You know, Kissinger talks a lot about this historically,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 it's a preposterous notion as a policy objective when America's position, you know, particularly after the Cold War and

Speaker 3 I would say even up to this day, but were 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 like it's really cutting America

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We all like balance. But

Speaker 3 if you permit America's adversaries, strategic adversaries, namely the Chinese, Iranians, or Russians, to shape the global security environment,

Speaker 3 that's a pretty bad situation for freedom-loving democracies.

Speaker 2 Let me break down

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So you're in the Office of Net Assessment.

Speaker 2 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 of 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.

Speaker 2 That's a euphemism.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 tilted toward them

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 or and they had really Iranian sympathies to the detriment of our own country.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Is that pretty much a synopsis of your argument?

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, I think you really outline it well, Victor.

Speaker 3 And I'm glad you mentioned this, this sort of the Shia crescent, the Iran, Damascus, Alwhite, you know, Hezbollah crescent, and then, of course, that influence, you know, going into Hamas, which is not Shia, but has looked to Iran at least in the past decade, decade and a half for support.

Speaker 3 This policy was really an anti-Israel policy.

Speaker 3 That's what was very clear to me from inside the Pentagon, was that Obama really,

Speaker 3 Israel, he had this irrational,

Speaker 3 unbalanced view of Israel, that it was somehow the embodiment of Western imperialism

Speaker 3 or something else. But his fixation, a monomaniacal fixation on Israel, was really governing so much of Obama's Middle East policy.
And

Speaker 3 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 sets over the horizon,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 sort of

Speaker 3 sloughed off as not being so important by the Obama administration. But those were really critical.
And it was clear that he wanted to

Speaker 3 normalize Iran and undermine

Speaker 3 Israel's primacy, frankly, in that region of the world.

Speaker 2 Yes, we're talking today with Adam Lovinger, and he's got this new book.

Speaker 2 I urge you all to read it, The Insider Threat, about his experience in the Office of Net Assessment and elsewhere in Washington in general.

Speaker 2 And we're going to take a brief break and we'll be right back.

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Speaker 2 And we're back with The Insider Threat. It's authored by Adam Lovinger.
And Adam, let me just turn for a moment. So

Speaker 2 Donald Trump is elected in 2016.

Speaker 2 He's a newcomer.

Speaker 2 He's

Speaker 2 sort of overwhelmed with the UNI party. 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.

Speaker 2 You're at this point in Office of Net Assessment.

Speaker 2 Mike Flynn, who had been relieved,

Speaker 2 I think he posed a threat to the Obama administration, now as an outsider and he's inside.

Speaker 2 He understands what your worries are. And he is reaching from as his

Speaker 2 designated national security advisor during the transition. He's interested.
And then he's

Speaker 2 in the first few days of the Trump administration,

Speaker 2 he's on your side, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 And then all hell breaks loose, as we know, and Comey and the whole FBI and Andrew McCabe and the frame-up.

Speaker 2 And then he's taken out, so to speak. At that point, did things radically change for you?

Speaker 2 when Flynn was gone or from or would it have made any difference?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I really don't think it would have made much difference.

Speaker 3 So Mike Flynn and I, we had been collaborating

Speaker 3 somewhat informally for about a decade before

Speaker 3 the Trump administration. And in our ongoing dialogue, Victor, one of the things that both of us observed, Flynn in battlefield intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan,

Speaker 3 and myself in this high-level strategy office, we really saw a similar pathology.

Speaker 3 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 bureaucratic empires that would allow various military officers, but also civilian bureaucrats to aggrandize

Speaker 3 their careers. And

Speaker 3 this was something that troubled us both deeply

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 Flynn, of course, he had many

Speaker 3 soldiers and military personnel under his command who were being killed. And he would see that firsthand.
And this is a horrible thing.

Speaker 3 But then myself, 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.

Speaker 3 And the very pathology that the office was created to stop,

Speaker 3 this pathology was running rampant. And there was nothing this office is really doing.

Speaker 3 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, you know, back on track into

Speaker 3 ensuring that we were not blind going into these wars and competitions.

Speaker 3 I I had had a spotless career, Victor, for a dozen years in the Pentagon, no

Speaker 3 high performance ratings, no security issues whatsoever. Within a couple of months, I had five investigations against me,

Speaker 3 two administrative, three criminal.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I think Flynn was really, he was the existential threat to

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 And at this point, the Office of Nest Assessment being in the Department of Defense, you were subject to the deputy

Speaker 2 ultimately, could 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 too, it's somebody else's concern?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, one of the things that

Speaker 3 showed me just how

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And, you know, so it's a real subversion of federal process and weaponization of the federal investigative process. Bob Work was behind this.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 really hobbled us in so many of our wars. And that for some reason, Bob Work saw this as a real threat.

Speaker 2 This was similar.

Speaker 2 We had on our podcast Mark Moyer, who had, you know, he was in USAID

Speaker 2 and he was... He had fought all of the same thing.
And

Speaker 2 what was striking about your two books, and I don't want to get get in the merits of Mark's, but

Speaker 2 is that there's these unelected people who have high positions of power in the federal government, and they claim they're bipartisan

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 someone is not on the same team, or someone, I'll put it this way from rereading your book again: if someone

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 they have a conflict of interest. In the case of Marx,

Speaker 2 he wrote a book and he didn't clear it enough with it.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 and for whatever reasons they're against this, then

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, on that particular issue,

Speaker 3 they do try to divide and conquer.

Speaker 3 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 Loveringer was just taken out based upon all these apparently bogus investigations.

Speaker 3 Why didn't you help him? And this official came back to me and said, Everyone was so afraid that if they stuck their neck out to help you, what happened to you would happen to them.

Speaker 3 And this is a, I think it's a big problem because

Speaker 3 it's not that

Speaker 3 the laws and the facts are what matter. It's that this unaccountable

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 this is a real problem because

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Did you have to seek legal counsel?

Speaker 3 Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 So the idea is that we're going to go after someone, and we have all the resources of the federal government at our disposal.

Speaker 2 But if we draw this out in Washington at $1,000 an hour or whatever it is, we can force this person to concede because of the sheer expense in the legal world.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Well, my legal counsel, Victor, after fighting my case for three years, he actually shut his legal practice.

Speaker 3 And he said, Adam, I can't represent federal whistleblowers anymore because I'm a lawyer. And as a lawyer,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so just like, you know, a surgeon needs a scalpel to do his trade, a lawyer needs the law to do his trade. And if the law could be ignored,

Speaker 3 it's just all for naught. And it's a very sad commentary because this should not happen in America.

Speaker 2 How long have you been out of government, Adam?

Speaker 3 I've been out half a decade. I was removed

Speaker 3 in 2018.

Speaker 2 So let me ask you a question. So

Speaker 2 we had this election. The Trump administration is back in power.

Speaker 2 This time, allegedly, they are not relying on the recommendations of the administrative state people.

Speaker 2 So, this is what we're told, although it's very hard not to. And they're bringing in people to government,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If you're interested in what the abuses of the FBI have been by careerists, then you get Cash Patel, who's a maverick with

Speaker 2 an unorthodox resume, very competent, but he's been targeted. If you want some, Tulsi Gabbert was put on a

Speaker 2 basically a watch list. She's now, same thing with Pete Hexeth for a very critical.

Speaker 2 Have people in this transition reached out to you to see if you would be willing to come back into government?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I have, and I would be honored to serve in this government. You know, nothing is

Speaker 3 set in stone, but there have been some discussions, and I'll really have to leave it at that.

Speaker 3 I think there's a lot of wisdom in bringing in people who have seen the dark underbelly of our administrative state, just because it has gotten so corrupt.

Speaker 3 It's gotten so compromised by America's adversaries.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And a lot of these divisions, as we know,

Speaker 3 this has been what

Speaker 3 the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians as well have been trying to sow in our country for so many years. And I think that they have made inroads into our national security bureaucracy.

Speaker 3 I do lay some of that out in my book.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 it's a real problem. And I think that Trump

Speaker 3 rightly recognizes that this time time around, he can't rely upon normal processes, long-standing policies. He has to

Speaker 3 make his own judgment as to

Speaker 3 who has

Speaker 3 the competence and the knowledge and

Speaker 3 who's been through

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 fought these fights with the Administrative State. And to recognize that

Speaker 3 a lot of this long-standing policy and these processes are corrupt and just don't work. And so

Speaker 2 I think that's true. And I think some of the people that I've seen that are have, it's still very preliminary and many of the positions or most have been unfilled.

Speaker 2 But some of the people who have been mentioned or who have accepted jobs with national security areas,

Speaker 2 it's funny,

Speaker 2 people call me about them for,

Speaker 2 but.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Almost with the implicit idea that given that you've worked for government before,

Speaker 2 we have to have, you have to prove to us that you are willing to go in there and change things.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But it does seem that they're deliberately trying to get people

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 And I'm seeing a healthy balance. On one hand, I mean, Trump is bringing in

Speaker 3 genuine outsiders who have a fresh perspective, who have not worked in the administrative state before. But he's mixing that and he's leavening it with

Speaker 3 been in there. So you have the benefit of both the freshness, the new ideas, the fresh way of looking at things,

Speaker 3 which

Speaker 3 paid great dividends in the first Trump administration. For example,

Speaker 3 leading to the Abraham Accords. This was a very fresh approach.
It was not the work of insiders.

Speaker 3 It was

Speaker 3 doing things from the outside. But yeah, I mean, I believe that Trump does recognize you also need insiders.

Speaker 2 There must be a whole cadre, and

Speaker 2 I've had Cash Patel on,

Speaker 2 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, McKay,

Speaker 2 Ray, and have that expertise to help outsiders make changes. And the same thing is true in the National Security Council and their people.

Speaker 2 So I hope that people can consult you about that, because that's what we need. We need

Speaker 2 outsiders who don't have anything to lose, but they have to have the expertise to understand what

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 brief break. I'm with Adam Lovinger, and this book is The Insider Threat.
It's published by Encounter Books. You can,

Speaker 2 Amazon, Adam, where do you, where do you?

Speaker 3 You can get it on Amazon. You can get it on the Encounter Books website, Barnes ⁇ Noble, really, really all of the major platforms.

Speaker 2 Do you you have a website you're associated with?

Speaker 3 I work at a think tank called the Gold Institute for International Strategy. And so I, you know, my some of my work is on that website.

Speaker 3 And, you know, certainly viewers can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 3 But I keep kind of a low social media profile just because I was advised early on by some national security people to do that. So

Speaker 3 I just do that.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back after a minute from our sponsors.

Speaker 2 And we're back with Adam Lovinger again.

Speaker 2 Let me ask you right now,

Speaker 2 and I don't want to put,

Speaker 2 it seems like

Speaker 2 it came up in the news just to apply your expertise. So we have a new administration,

Speaker 2 and Israel is in this existential fight. It's taken out in brilliant fashion, some of the most of the hierarchy of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It has this brief period, a brief window of opportunity, if it will, because the Assad government is gone. Syria is in turmoil, one of the conduits of Iranian weaponry.

Speaker 2 Hamas, as I said, the Houthis to a lesser extent, but somewhat have tried it. Same with Hezbollah.

Speaker 2 Internal dissension in Iran, and then, of course, a new administration comes in. Do you,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Nonetheless, we have to restore deterrence because we've lost it during the Biden administration. And last time he did it by taking out Solemni, Baghdadi, ISIS.

Speaker 2 being really tough. Do you think that this administration, with all the things I outlined, will more or less say to Israel,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 we're not going to go preempt Iran. It's under a lot of tension.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 be

Speaker 2 strategic cover

Speaker 2 or

Speaker 2 munitions support, we're here to help you. Is that sort of characterizing where you think the Trump administration is going?

Speaker 3 Yes, I do, Victor. You said it.
You and I have a mind meld.

Speaker 3 I think that that is where the Trump administration is going.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of interest, and I think that, you know, with America as

Speaker 3 the only superpower in the world, and

Speaker 3 that our attention really should be focused more on China and East Asia.

Speaker 3 And that the Israelis, one of the great lessons I think that the American people have come away with from the past four years is that here you have the Biden administration consistently telling the Israelis what to do.

Speaker 3 And the Israelis, rightly, have not followed this very poor advice.

Speaker 3 And they've achieved great strategic ends and i think that there's a lot of respect frankly uh of the israelis of the of israel's leadership by by the trump uh by trump himself and by uh 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 and is actually you know 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

Speaker 3 fight for

Speaker 3 ensuring its peace and stability. And

Speaker 3 as you say, to keep the Chinese and the Russians at bay. And

Speaker 3 those are the bigger strategic issues.

Speaker 3 But now it's very clear that

Speaker 3 the no daylight policy, which is meaning that the United States and Israel are are very closely aligned, history shows that this is the best policy.

Speaker 3 That as soon as you start twisting Israel's arm,

Speaker 3 Secretary of State Blinken himself just admitted that by twisting Israel's arm,

Speaker 3 this actually emboldened Hamas to hold on to the hostages, including American citizens, longer. And

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 that's really the best hope for peace. So I think that you nailed it, Victor.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think I'm a little worried, Adam,

Speaker 2 as this administration leaves.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But some of the negotiations by by the Biden administration,

Speaker 2 I think Brett McGurk

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I was reading news accounts today that they are pressuring the Israelis to let out hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners. And then

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 and then there would be iterations of release of hostages, of which Hamas refuses to tell us how many are still alive.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 whether if this process is in

Speaker 2 the middle of things to go in there and really pressure the Israeli government to

Speaker 2 declare an end to the war, get out, and at any cost get the hostage no matter how many terrorists they have to release.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I don't know as far as the actual

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 I don't either.

Speaker 2 I'm just kind of worried that

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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 follow him and have troops in Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 I guess he thinks the best way to end a war is to lose it.

Speaker 2 It was incredible that. And then he took credit for

Speaker 2 the diminishment of Hezbollah and the overthrowing of Assad and Hamas. It was pretty much

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, it is amazing. It seems that

Speaker 3 Biden's foreign policy legacy

Speaker 3 is a legacy of spin and really putting lipstick on a pig. And

Speaker 3 it's one of these things that

Speaker 3 I've been really just disappointed in that a lot of mainstream media has been trying to

Speaker 3 really going out of its way to try to find some silver lining to these great foreign policy failures of the Bay Tradition.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's dishonest. I think ordinary Americans see through it.

Speaker 3 The ignominious retreat from Afghanistan with

Speaker 3 those Marines being killed. And

Speaker 3 it was just a disaster. You don't have to be a foreign policy expert to recognize that.

Speaker 3 It's humiliating. A great power like the United States should never be in a situation like that and

Speaker 3 have the Taliban

Speaker 3 be able to do what they did under our watch. And

Speaker 3 it's a shame. And mainstream media will continue to have its market share eroded

Speaker 3 by

Speaker 3 dishonestly reporting it as something that it isn't. So it's.

Speaker 2 it was a humiliating loss. One of the things I wanted to ask you, because your title is Insider

Speaker 2 Threat, and if you all buy the book, and I hope you will, you'll see that a lot of the chapters deal with

Speaker 2 people within the United States or people within the administrative states that have enabled some of our adversaries.

Speaker 2 But what do you make of Christopher Wray, that the director of the FBI, with this kind of Parthian shot, as he leaves office, He now tells us that there are

Speaker 2 people from the Chinese that have affiliations with the Chinese government, enclaves within the United States, he said.

Speaker 2 And that brought up the question of

Speaker 2 the Chinese balloons trajectory,

Speaker 2 whether people were communicating it from the ground, why are they buying up

Speaker 2 strategic acreage near military facilities or bases? What's the role of maybe 1% of these 300,000-plus Chinese students as far as Espino?

Speaker 2 What do you make of what Ray was trying to talk about, the internal threat that China poses?

Speaker 3 I think it's perhaps one of the most serious threats we face, frankly. And

Speaker 3 stepping back a little bit,

Speaker 3 I believe our adversaries learned a long time ago that taking America on head-on is not a very smart thing to do.

Speaker 3 Just because

Speaker 3 you really awaken the dragon and fill it with furious rage. And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They learned this from the Russians, from the Soviets,

Speaker 3 who were very successful in infiltrating a lot of American institutions, including our national security bureaucracy, our intelligence agencies, recruiting assets. And

Speaker 3 this is a real problem. What I try to do in my book is to show

Speaker 3 really sort of the collaboration that's been emerging over time. And that

Speaker 3 if you have this world view that, for example, what I call the Obama doctrine, that America is bad, and really trying to balance America with strengthening our adversaries.

Speaker 3 Where this sort of leads to in a natural competitive political environment is those parties that

Speaker 3 are

Speaker 3 that see America as bad allying themselves,

Speaker 3 really teaming up with America's foreign adversaries, the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, teaming up with

Speaker 3 our foreign adversaries against their domestic political rivals. And this is something that we are seeing increasingly.

Speaker 3 We know, for example, that the steel dossier that Hillary Clinton and the DNC commissioned, that this is something that was filled with Russian disinformation.

Speaker 3 I have in my book some collaboration between the Office of Net Assessment, led by James H. Baker,

Speaker 3 really

Speaker 3 tearing down one of our allies, the Japanese government, colluding with a suspected Chinese agent and sharing classificated information with that individual.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 you know, anti-Americanism, you know, how far are we prepared? Are we willing to let this take us?

Speaker 3 Are we really going to be so self-hating as a nation that we will allow our enemies to come in and destroy us?

Speaker 3 And it seems that there are 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 an advantage in the here and now against their political adversaries.

Speaker 3 Or, like the Biden family, as

Speaker 3 three U.S. House of Representatives committees have determined, that

Speaker 3 they took in tens of millions of dollars from the Chinese, just enriching themselves. And

Speaker 3 one of the troubling things is

Speaker 3 as this becomes more normalized,

Speaker 3 I kind of fear that Americans will just

Speaker 3 accept this this as as something that this is just the way things are uh and we will disintegrate uh as a country but it's but it's an outrageous state of affairs and um i i don't know how we can bring more outrage and concern about this sort of internal corruption or you know ally it's hard to know i mean

Speaker 2 we had joe biden When you put your son, who's had these

Speaker 2 problems on Air Force 2 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.

Speaker 2 You don't know to which, to what degree that's an insidious thing, that he's subconsciously trying to think, you know,

Speaker 2 this is Hunter knew this person and this person, and I did this person, and I, and in our case, they were friendly or whatever.

Speaker 2 And we had Robert Maui, 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I don't know whether Congress will

Speaker 2 say there's areas around military bases that foreign entities cannot own, or

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 in the last four years, 20,000 single unaccompanied males from China came in. I don't know why they would.

Speaker 2 Maybe some of them are

Speaker 2 legitimate dissidents, but it seems that the last four years, it's everything goes, no one's, no one, and the sheer effort and money and time and media abuse that's going to be necessary to correct it is going to be amazing.

Speaker 2 It's going to be formidable, I think, because we've got inured to this kind of

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It seems to me, this correction and thinking.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, I agree. And I really do try to highlight that in the book is that there is genuine collaboration between our national security state and America's adversaries.
And

Speaker 3 this is something I think that more people people need to talk about.

Speaker 3 It's not just business as usual, politics as usual.

Speaker 3 Do we really want our leaders, like as you say, Joe Biden taking all these millions of dollars from the Chinese? Do we really want our leaders

Speaker 3 doing business relations using their official office to enrich themselves with our enemies?

Speaker 3 It's a horrible state of affairs. And it's inevitable.
that

Speaker 3 and we know this from the writings of the both the Russians and the Chinese that they are genuinely seeking to achieve policy decisions, policy outcomes by this corruption.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 it's important that

Speaker 3 more Americans see it as

Speaker 3 not just politics as usual, but a general national security threat.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Where have you encountered either informal criticism or formal criticism? Or

Speaker 2 who doesn't like your book? Or who's afraid of your book?

Speaker 2 is it too soon yet to be digested?

Speaker 3 Well, I do have some pretty explosive things in the book, including, for example,

Speaker 2 covering

Speaker 3 a murder that's been covered up to date as a suicide.

Speaker 2 Pretty serious thing.

Speaker 3 But it's really been a lot of silence, Victor, which has sort of surprised me, frankly. I have not received

Speaker 3 too much

Speaker 3 head-on criticism.

Speaker 3 uh so it's it's i was expecting more because i i do name names in this book which is something that um you know when i'm working so carefully with encounter you know that we we we really made sure that every single thing i said that was attributed to an individual you know there was a a government evidence basis for this claim and so uh we went through it you know very um

Speaker 3 you know, through in a very detailed process

Speaker 3 to make sure that

Speaker 3 all these claims that I'm making are truthful and that there's evidentiary record for it.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 the decision to name names is that we do need accountability.

Speaker 3 And the American people are just craving accountability that malfeasers inside the national security bureaucracy will actually be held to account for, frankly, crimes, knowingly and willfully doing things that they know are illegal and

Speaker 3 doing it with impunity. And this state of affairs is it's reached a boiling point.
Polling shows that Americans are just

Speaker 3 really fed up with it and are craving politicians to actually

Speaker 3 hold individuals to account. And that's something that I'm...

Speaker 3 It seems like the incoming Trump administration will do that, and I hope and pray that's true.

Speaker 2 Well, I hope everybody reads Adam Lovinger's book. It's the insider threat.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's not generalities.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So thank you for coming, Adam, and I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Victor.