Dangers of the Deep State From the Inside Looking Out

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Hello, I'm going solo today.

This is Victor Hansen, and Jack Fowler and Sammy Wink are not with me because I'm doing one of our one-on-one interviews.

And today it's with Cash Patel.

You've heard of him, of course.

He is an American attorney.

He's an author of children's books.

He's an author of analytic books about his government service and really the war of the deep state against us all.

He served on the National Security Council.

He might be best known or he emerged into the national scene when he was the primary,

I guess, a chief of staff or counsel to Devin Nunes when Devin was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at that critical time when we were trying to figure out, we the public, what was going on with Russian collusion and the war against Donald Trump.

Cash is a lawyer.

He's been a public defender.

He's been a federal attorney.

He's been on the National Security Council.

You knew him at the closing months of the

Trump administration when he was chief of staff to the Defense Department.

He's now a podcaster.

He's an analyst.

He's an author.

And he's a very close advisor to the Trump campaign.

And he's been in the news a lot.

He's forthright.

He's candid.

And we're delighted to have him.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back.

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And we're back with Cash Patel.

Cash, thanks you for coming to the Victor Hanson podcast.

Hey, Victor, thanks so much for having me on this show.

I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Well, thank you.

And, you know, I think before we get into anything, today in the news, Iran was supposedly designated as a terrorist organization.

There's somewhat, there's a lot of reports that this is sort of a phony label.

Iran is responsible for the Houthis attacks, the Hamas attacks, the Hezbollah attacks, seems to be immune from serious consequences from us.

Maybe you could just tell us, first of all, what was this sudden, I don't even know if it's an about-face on the part of the Biden administration to designate them some sort of terrorist organization.

Explain from your legal expertise what that means, and then what Iran is doing and what we should be doing about it.

Yeah, this is a great starting point for national security.

Look, this is worse than an about-face.

An about-face would have meant that Joe Biden and his administration admitted they got it wrong out of the gate.

And what I mean by that is when I was running President Trump's counterterrorism programs at the White House, we immediately listed the Houthis, an Iranian mercenary proxy force, as a foreign terrorist organization.

And what that allowed us to do is mandate congressional notifications for economic and diplomatic sanctions across the board.

Furthermore, it stifled Iran and the Houthis' ability to do trade and business with any American ally or banking system.

And from my standpoint, it allowed us to kinetically operate, target, and collect against a hard target that was killing and striking Americans and American allies.

When President Biden came into office, the first month, he delisted the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, taking away all of those capabilities to defend our nation against Iran's proxy force, Iran, the largest state sponsor of terror.

And now we fast forward and see the disaster that's going on in Israel and the Red Sea.

We see American ships getting attacked.

We tragically saw two U.S.

Navy special warfare operators get killed in an operation that Biden and Austin launched recently.

All done by the Houthis.

And now today, the mainstream media media is puppeting Joe Biden's national security quote unquote achievements by saying he's listing the Houthis as a terrorist organization.

Well, he hasn't done that.

He has labeled them a specially designated global terrorist, what we call an SDGT.

That is a stark distinction from labeling them an FTO, a foreign terrorist organization like we did under Donald Trump.

The former, the SDD designation, is simply what we call an OFAC listing.

OFAC is the Office of Foreign Asset Control in the Treasury Department.

All that means is the Treasury Department is now on notice to look at financial transactions that the Houthis participate in because they might be suspicious.

You mean to look at them, but not to sanction in any punitive manner.

Right.

The SDDT designation does not afford any mandated sanctions diplomatically or economically across the board at all.

It notifies Congress of nothing because there are no sanctions in place.

Furthermore, Joe Biden, as president under the SDGT designation, can waive any relief he wants over the Houthis under this quote-unquote designation.

So it's basically a paper tiger, and the media is now saying, oh, Joe Biden fixed his errors, but he hasn't.

He's only doubled down on them, and he's allowing the Houthis to operate as a terrorist organization and not treating them as such.

I ask you a question because the common denominator is obviously the theocratic government in Tehran, and

it's supplied the Hezbollah with over 100,000-plus rockets or missiles guided, very sophisticated now that have basically made it impossible to live along the northern border in Israel.

They were the ones that I think it's pretty clear, despite this administration's denial, that they knew in advance or helped plan the attack.

On October 7th, they're supplying the Houthis.

They have a new, I guess, quasi-alliance.

They're supplying drones to Russia, but alliance with Russia, China.

They're friendlier with Turkey than they've ever been, North Korea.

So, and yet there's an inert response, and it has to be one of three things or all of them.

And I'll just lay them out there, and then I'll just turn it over to you, and maybe you can comment.

Is it a general leftist idea that the more

in foreign affairs that you appease aggression, that magnanimity will be reciprocated by your niceness rather than be considered weakness to be exploited?

Or is it there's something about Iran that we saw in the the Obama administration that's continued by the Biden administration?

They have some bankrupt idea that a Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, Gaza, Nexus somehow creates, I guess you'd say, tension in the Middle East and

balances the Arab moderate or Gulf regimes, Israel, against this new axis, and that allows us to manipulate it or to keep out of it.

Or

is it just that this is an election year, Cash, and they feel that people are starting to remark, even independents and Democrats, that things were pretty calm when you guys were in there.

And now the entire world is blown up from Afghanistan to Ukraine to the Middle East.

And

they want to manage this conflict so that it doesn't break out into a multi-nation regional war right before the election.

Is it all of them or what is it?

Because I can't figure out quite why they're so reluctant to act in a way that might stop this aggression.

Well, when you broke it down in that fashion, I almost hadn't thought of it in that way.

And I think it's all of them.

I think it's a confluence of these events in a hot political election cycle to avert catastrophe.

But unfortunately, I think we're too late to averting catastrophe.

We're already there.

And what I mean by that is...

Donald Trump's national security policy during his administration was pretty simple when it came to Iran.

Do not let them get a nuclear weapon.

That was the backstop of the entire policy against the largest state sponsor of terror.

Now, there was two different approaches, as you well know, with the JCPOA and the Obama administration, which gave them money, waived sanctions, and allowed them to build up nuclear material.

And we just had to believe that Iran wasn't going to use it for any nefarious purposes.

Donald Trump took the opposite approach, withdrew out of the JCPOA and said, absolutely not.

And we're going to go in there and visit the sites ourselves through UN inspectors and make sure you're not doing what you say you're not doing but with the with the excuse me biden administration i think they have come in there and said well donald trump was such a strong force against iran and even though he was successful politically we have to take another route We have to go back to the Obama days and say, we're going to be nice.

We're going to hope it works.

And then we're going to have the mainstream media go out there and puppet some sort of successes that we're having over in Iran, which they're not having.

But since they have a disinformation campaign machine at the ready, I think they're able to, unfortunately, engineer a narrative that's false that says we are countermanding Iran's threat presence.

But when you look at what's happened, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthis, all Iranian proxy forces, all flush with cash because Joe Biden unfroze $6 billion of Iranian money, allows all those forces, as you highlighted, to go out and purchase weapons and delivery systems and munitions and arms from the the CCP and Russia, all to be utilized against America and American allies like Israel over there, and to thwart Red Sea traffic and operations.

So, the calamity, in my opinion, is upon us.

And I think Joe Biden is trying to mask that calamity and paint over that disastrous national security policy by saying, oh, look what we did.

We listed the Houthis.

We're on our way to success.

Or look what we did.

We're trafficking the Red Sea.

But what actually happened is an operation by U.S.

special forces that would never have been authorized under any Trump administration because the landscape was too threatening to the security posture.

And now we have two dead soldiers and the media is not even talking about that.

I mean, I just want to highlight that.

Maybe I'm biased because of my background as a civilian in DOD or in the Intel community.

We lost two U.S.

soldiers in the theater of war because our president and our secretary of defense are essentially mailing it in from the bedside table.

And that's just not how you conduct national security.

Let me ask you, and given that deterrence is much harder to restore after it's been wasted or it's eroded,

it's very, it takes a long time to accrue and it can be lost very easily.

And then it's almost impossible to get back.

If you were Cash Patel's National Security Advisor, DOD, Secretary, whatever, and Donald Trump was present at this late date and given the idea that it would be much harder to restore equilibrium to the Middle East than it would be, given that you guys did it over four years and you left a pretty calm Middle East.

So much that Jake Selwyn, as everybody remembers, said he didn't even have to worry about his Middle East portfolio.

It was so calm.

What would you guys do right now?

How would you restore it?

Maybe you could.

I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but what kind of things you think that Iran would listen to?

Because as you point out, they're the nexus of all of it.

No, you're right.

That's a great question.

And it's what Americans should be listening for.

I think we would do what we did in the Trump administration.

Remember, it's a multifaceted approach.

There's multiple lines of effort.

It's not just DOD and Intel.

What you have to do.

Ultimately, the role of the Department of Defense and your uniformed military is to create space for diplomacy on the international stage to take charge.

But if you need to get to that end point or to get to that end point, you need the ability to have soft power.

You need the ability to have WASTA on the international stage and have global world leaders take the phone calls of the president of the United States.

So what we would do, or I believe what President Trump did correctly, was one,

crippling economic sanctions against the regime and the Aitollas in Tehran.

Now, they can manipulate their currency all they want, but when you zero it out and make it worthless, not only is it worthless, they can't trade for anything.

Then you call up our European allies and the SWIFT banking system folks, and you say, Iran cannot conduct any business with any international banking system and or ally of the United States of America.

Should you do that, we, America, will cut you off from our monetary policy and trading structure.

Those two forces are very powerful and don't require any DOD or Intel community lift.

Then what you do is you turn your Intel community on.

And remember, Donald Trump prioritized as a tier one intelligence target, terrorist and the Ainatols in Tehran.

We killed Soleimani.

We killed Baghdadi.

We killed IQ senior leadership.

We did that because they were a threat to our way of life and safety in the Middle East.

Joe Biden's number one priorities are climate change, DEI, and white rage.

You know, and I say some of that in jest, but they're literally rolling that out as we speak.

So you'd have to recalibrate the entire national security apparatus to prioritize hard target collections against terrorists that want to do you harm.

And it couldn't happen overnight.

You're right, Victor.

It's not a one-year fix, maybe even, but it is a fix that can be implemented immediately.

And I think that's what Donald Trump's sort of been running on here and campaigning about, especially when it comes to national security threat.

That is Iran.

And you don't necessarily even then have to deal with the Ayatollahs in Iran because you've cut them off from the rest of the world.

But Joe Biden has basically flushed them with $6 billion in cash, opened up the ports, opened up the trade, and opened up their economy.

And now they're going to be able to carry out these style attacks for years to come, unless there is a force to counterman that.

I think what everybody's listening, Cash,

what you just said kind of reminds us of what Winston Churchill said

to Neville Chamberlain and, of course, to Stanley Baldwin.

He said, you had a choice between dishonor and war.

You took dishonor, you chose dishonor, and you ensured war.

And they had a choice between being

deterrent and they would have had peace,

and yet they appeased, and now

I think they're going to give us a war.

I don't know.

Iran is not stupid.

Of all of our adversaries, they're the most cunning, I think.

And they realize that we're in election year and that Joe Biden has lost control of foreign affairs.

I imagine they're going to be even more risk-taking than they have in the past.

And if what you said, and everybody has listened to it,

what you've said is that these sanctions, these terrorist labels, are not even effective.

And the fact that they're not effective and they know that we know they're not effective and they know that we chose a name-only terrorist designation without real teeth, it's going to,

don't you think it'll just further embolden them and think, wow, they're so worried about us that they came up with this phony designation, but it won't stop our operations to any degree.

So they must be even weaker than we thought.

You raise a great point.

I don't think Iran's going to stop.

And look, it's no coincidence that the Iranians, along with the CCP and other terrorist organizations, are using our southern border, which is open, to seed in their operatives into the United States of America.

And you don't have to take my word for it or any conservative media outlets' word for it.

Chris Ray and Alexander Mayorkis testified 35 days ago that they are aware of at least two dozen known foreign terrorists who illegally entered our southern border, and now the DHS and FBI do not know where they are.

Now, they're telling me to believe it's only 24 out of 10 million.

I think the number is higher.

But what Iran has done, this goes to your point, is they have taken advantage of the landscape of the diminished law enforcement capability and the deprioritization by Joe Biden of removing criminals and foreign terrorists from the United States of America and said, we're going to go all in.

Not only are we going to strike, just think about this, the Iranians have conducted 135 missile strikes on U.S.

military installations in the last 90 days alone.

And we've lost U.S.

service members.

And they have $6 billion in cash.

And they can trade with the CCP and Russia.

Those guys are combining efforts against us at our southern border.

Because they know they are going to run a two-front operation against us domestically and internationally overseas.

And you're right, Victor.

Iran is not stupid.

Saying Iran and the eye tollers are dumb is extremely dismissive and and a poor national security approach.

And they are taking advantage of us.

They are taking advantage of our quote-unquote former allies.

And they're also aligning with our enemies because they have one goal in mind.

How do we defeat America?

And they're doing that successfully, unfortunately, with Joe Biden at the helm.

They are.

I think they came in.

I think the Bidens came in with the Obama Tootley omnipresent in the sense that they felt that

Iran had been mistreated by the, and John Kerry was a primary player here, by the Trump administration.

They were going to reach out for them.

And then this, as I said, this magnum be reciprocated.

And then they would maybe give us some evidence they were slowing down on nuclear proliferation, something.

And then they, and then they, at the same time, you remember, they tried to ostracize the Saudis, even when they went later obsequiously and begged them to pump more oil.

But they were talking about all of the terrible things they did, the murder in the Saudi embassy, all of that stuff.

And they really alienated the Saudis.

And now we've got this mess.

But I have a larger question.

You've accompanied Donald Trump overseas.

I think you were one of only two people in India when he had his famous India visit.

So what

the official narrative is that Donald Trump is crazy, he's disruptive, and we don't want him back.

That's what we're here out of Davos this today, yesterday.

We've heard it in Europe.

But obviously, the world was much more peaceful.

It was actually peaceful when he was there.

So is there a subtext?

Is there something that we're not hearing in the public that when you talk to foreign leaders at any level, not just heads of states, but their ancillaries, do they tell you or do you grasp that

for all the rhetoric that Donald Trump is unpredictable, maybe deterrent, you better not screw with the United States?

Now,

is there a disconnect there from what we're told in the media until the way things actually operate on the diplomatic

world global level?

I think there's a drastic disconnect.

And when you juxtaposition what's going on in Davos at the World Economic Forum with things like what Jamie Dimon just said this week about the successes of a Donald Trump administration and the peace that the world was at, when you have leaders of the European Union and the European Central Bank and other, you know, quote-unquote figureheads of the First World Order saying that they are, you know uh scared if donald trump comes back to power what exactly are they scared of all they are advancing is the globalist ideology in the media and they're ignoring the reality that donald trump ended three of the forever wars that we ran an intel-based security-based withdrawal out of afghanistan that joe biden lit on fire and cost the murder of 13 american service members and we do you know i do still speak to folks overseas of course you have these relationships you establish when you're privileged to serve in high levels of government.

And, you know, without identifying who they are, every single one of them has told me unequivocally they look forward to the day where President Trump is back in office so they can engage with him as commander-in-chief and safeguard, most importantly, their citizenry and ours.

That's a message I hear resoundingly from the world.

But of course, you're not going to hear it out of the halls of Davos,

where John Kerry is too busy trying to fix the climate in his private jet.

And

people are starting to pick up on this.

I mean, when you have the CEO of the world's largest bank come out and tell the world that Democrats are essentially being stupid to label MAGA supporters and disparage them when there's at least 80 million of them, and after the Iowa caucuses that just happened, and you saw the resounding reception that Donald Trump received, alienating that fan base, alienating that voting base with disinformation campaigns and disparaging statements.

Again, a tactic of the left.

They say we're doing it, but they're the ones doing it, like Joey Reed, who comes on TV and says Iowa is an example of like white national privilege.

I don't see that at all.

Most Americans don't either.

And I think the world leaders analyze American politics through the same lens.

They don't have the ability right now.

to engage with Joe Biden because they don't want to.

The Saudis don't even take his phone calls.

And you raise Saudi Arabia real quick.

Saudi Arabia's number one enemy used to be the Houthis in Yemen.

And now the Saudis are calling on America to stop attacking the Houthis in Yemen.

That's how upside down the situation has gone.

We're with Cash Patel, everybody.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back.

And we're back with Cash Patel.

We're talking about Iran

and what has happened since since he left his various offices in the Trump administration and Donald Trump stepped down from the presidency.

And I would call it the Biden catastrophe.

But I had a couple of other

comments or questions for you because there are people who come into the Hoover Institution from foreign countries.

I try to do maybe two or three

interviews with foreign journalists, and

they often speak in podcasts like this.

They speak off the record during breaks, they write you.

And

I guess if I aggregate all that, one of the message is something to the effect, well, we'd like to be on the United States side, whether you're in the territory of China or you're in the territory of Iran or the territory of Russia.

But these people come to us and say, you may not like us, but your patron doesn't exist anymore.

And we're willing to incorporate you or to, for certain concessions on your part, not to bother you.

Because if you think that the United States is going to react in its former fashion and protect you or you're under some nuclear or some mythical umbrella of deterrence that's provided, you're sorely mistaken.

And that's what really worries me that a lot of our neutrals and even some of our allies may have to hedge their bets or feel that it's very dangerous to be a friend to the United States.

Is that what you feel too or you've gathered?

Yeah, not only is it dangerous,

our allies

who were well positioned along our side in the Trump administration to defend with us against our khanamenomy now realize that America has chosen a different path with Joe Biden.

When you fund a war in the Ukraine to the tune of $135 billion,

America, as massive and amazing as our DOD is and our infrastructure is, we don't have the ability to do that war and stand by our ally sides around the world and man, equip, and train them.

And I'll give you one example.

Surface-to-air missile systems are costly expenditure and they are complicated machinery.

When Zelensky came calling and the Biden administration gave them a blank check, we depleted seven years worth of our surface-to-air missile defense systems.

That means if we printed them from now, 365, it would take us seven years to get back to zero.

And I bring up this point because when our allies come calling now, even if they did call Joe Biden, which I don't think they would for reasons you outlined, we don't have the ability to send anyone anywhere.

And we are now on the verge of a three-front war, Ukraine, Israel, and everything going on in the Middle East and the Red Sea.

And we are continuing to print billions of dollars.

And our allies have wisened up and said, wait a second, even if we got on the phone phone with the United States of America and said we need X, Y, or Z, how are they going to supply that?

Where are they going to get that from?

What Congress is going to issue a mandate to provide more weaponry of war in another location?

And I think our allies or our former allies and friends are well versed in that

U.S.

position that has been weakened by the Biden administration.

We're talking to Cash Battelle.

He's the author of Government Gangsters, a book that came out last fall about the abuses and the overreach of the deep state, overreaches of euphemism, of course.

And he drew on his experience in the Trump administration, especially when he was the prime investigator for Devin Nunes.

And probably,

I think it's pretty clear that you were the draftsman, or at least the first draft, of Devin's

view of the intelligence community about, and broke the story about Christopher Steele, et cetera, et cetera.

But I wanted to get in, Cash, you mentioned DOD.

You were,

I think you were chief of staff to the last secretary of the DOD.

That's correct.

And you were in the National Security Council.

So everybody, when I give lectures, often I have one person in the audience, even if the topic is not about the military, who says something to the effect, and I've mentioned it before, I have a son.

or I have a daughter.

They want to go into the military.

Their father fought in the First War.

Their grandfather fought in the Vietnam, but I don't want them to go.

And then I say, well, why not?

And then they give me a list of things.

And if I could just aggregate or collect these and get and pass them by you, see if you would agree.

One of the things they say is the DEI is so out of control that people in the military are not being promoted or retained or even.

hired on the basis of meritocracy and therefore their particular child will not have a fair shake of the military.

And or they'll say things like,

I don't want to put my kid in harm's way given the debacle that I saw in Afghanistan.

Or they'll say in a larger text, we have these optional forever wars that we don't win.

We start, but we don't finish them effectively.

Or they'll say, some people will even say, well, we had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, calling a Chinese counterpart to really

contradict or even weaken the position of his own commander-in-chief.

We've had members, well, I've had a people, and I've written about it, but we have a lot of four-star generals who seem to violate Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice when they disparage the commander-in-chief and call, as they did in the summer of 2020, and even before Donald Trump is Mussolini, a liar, Nazi-like, architect of Auschwitz-like cages on the border.

These are all coming from Forsyth.

You add it all up and

you say to yourself,

we're short thousands of soldiers, maybe 30 or 40,000s in the various branches of the military.

And we have announced, I guess, Admiral

Gilgad and so did Millie and so did Austin in front of the Congress in 2021 that they were hunting out domestic terrorism, white privilege, white rage, white supremacy.

And then with a little meow, they announced in December that after that multi-year investigation, they found no evidence of what they accused this group who died at whether we like it.

They keep data on every single ethnic group, but whether we like it or not, when you look at the figures of the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, you see that 72 to 75% were white males, even though they only make up maybe 33 or 34%.

So what I'm getting at is why would you go out and offend the demographic that you count on, mostly from the rural middle classes or southern middle classes, to go over in these places and die and fight in combat?

Or why would you target people, again, this rubric in a disproportionate fashion, that may have had COVID once or twice and they didn't want to get the mRNA vaccination?

And you lose 8,400 of some of your best people in the military you force out.

And you put all of this together.

What's happening in the military?

Well, look, this is an extraordinarily important question and one that's very personal to me.

And I think what's happening in the most simplistic fashion is that Donald Trump put forward such a monstrously successful national security policy that when Joe Biden came into power and we transitioned and Donald Trump ordered us to transition to the Biden administration and we led the largest Department of Defense transition in U.S.

history.

We handed them over everything, the intelligence.

We said, call it whatever you want.

The Afghan withdrawal is too important.

Winding out of Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, too important.

Making sure our preparedness and readiness posture is up and continuing to rise.

It's too important.

And the Biden administration's decision was to, one, ignore us.

And two, their national security policy was simply this.

What did Donald Trump do?

We're going to do the opposite.

Donald Trump methodically withdrew out of Afghanistan.

promised to keep Bagram, did so on an intelligence-based directive.

We're going to pick an arbitrary 9-11, have a suicide bomber that Joe Biden let out of Bagram Air Force custody, blow up 13 American soldiers, and watch Afghani civilians plummet to their death.

And if that weren't enough, we're going to have Mark Milley authorize a drone strike of Afghani children and thump his chest for two weeks and claim victory that they got the suicide bomber that killed our soldiers, only to find out they drone struck seven children and innocent Afghanis.

And the mainstream media will cover up for them because they want to laud Joe Biden and hate on Donald Trump because that's been their position for the better part of a decade.

And when you go deeper into it, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, go ahead, but everything you said is true, but do you, and I want you to go on, but I was just going to interject that when I have mentioned this to officers, some of very high rank, just to take one example about the recruitment shortfall, they will tell me people are too fat.

They're gang members.

We're competing with private sector in a record low

unemployment rate.

People are taking drugs too much.

So we don't have the same pool.

And yet, you guys had the same pool that they did.

And you didn't have this problem, at least, and you went through COVID.

This thing is reaching crisis proportions, and it seems like it's going to affect the efficacy of the military.

It doesn't seem like they're worried about it.

Is that because of when you were in the Pentagon, were people terrified to speak out against DEI or

the protocols that were discouraging people from joining or

rejoining the military?

I think that the men and women that serve at the everyday level during the Donald Trump administration, we saw an explosion in people wanting to serve for a military because they saw a commander-in-chief who had their backs and didn't want to end up in wasteless wars and who wanted to use the American military prowess to defend this nation in a smart fashion.

The leadership structure, and this is one of my main points in government gangsters, is that this sort of government gangster deep state cadre of individuals like Chairman Mark Milley or Mark Esper or the new chairman and the new SECDF and other individuals across the intelligence community and law enforcement hijack these institutions to service a political narrative.

When Mark Milley is out there as the number one uniformed military officer in the land, calling China our number one enemy during the Trump administration, selling them, I will warn you if we attack you, that is an action by a military officer that is unlawful and violates the chain of command.

But he was rewarded for it because it was done against, quote unquote, all things Trump.

And that's just one example.

And the reason that there's been a deterioration, and I want to give you this hard data point, in one of our service branches alone, in the United States Army, since Joe Biden took office, there has been a drop by 35,000 recruits.

35,000 less Americans have signed up for Joe Biden's Army than they did under the Donald Trump administration.

That's just one service branch.

We cannot be be a prepared and ready force at the tier one level or any other level if we cannot recruit at the basic level.

And we cannot combat the threats that are coming our way because we go to Congress and our leadership and our SECDF says they're more important things such as white rage and DEI.

And while I think most in the military and most in the intelligence community

put that aside and can combat that, what they can't combat is a leadership cadre that comes in with over-the-top, heavy-handed maneuvering and says, this is the direction of the Department of Defense.

And I'll give you the best example I can think of.

We have these things called conops, concepts of operations.

It's how we move the DOD, the big machine that is the 3 million people and $800 billion budget.

And what we do is we get our generals and leaders to implement these concepts of operations for the Middle East, for Indo-Paycom, for terrorism, for hostages, for the border, for cartels.

Joe Biden's first concept of operation from Lloyd Austin's Department of Defense was on climate change.

I'm not making that up.

They put together a comprehensive plan that prioritized climate change as the number one priority for our Department of Defense.

And when you do that, it doesn't matter how great the men and women are in the rank and file.

Your leadership, cadre, has destroyed the ability of the United States military to act as it should.

And I think people are seeing that.

And I think people are trying and now wanting to go back to Donald Trump.

We're speaking with Cash Patel.

He's the author most recently of Government Gangsters about the deep state and its overreach.

We're going to come right back and continue with this discussion about the Pentagon and our armed forces.

And we're back with Cash Patel.

Everything you outlined is so disturbing.

So just give us a scenario.

Donald Trump,

let's say, gets the nomination, he's re-elected, he beats Joe Biden, he's coming into power, and he's confronted with these crises.

Are they fixable?

Can you be rectified in a single four years?

Or are they so fundamental and existential that

we can't really, they've done so much damage is what I'm trying to get at.

How do you restore the recruitment or the morale or the deterrence of the U.S.

military?

I think it's absolutely fixable.

And it's what I outlined chapter and verse, agency by agency, in my book, Government Gangsters.

And I think it's the reason Joe Biden spent 10 months blocking the release of my manuscript and made me go to federal court to get it out there, because the answers do exist.

And I think they're in the following fashions.

When you have a commander-in-chief like Donald Trump go back to the White House, I think you're going to see an instantaneous resurgence in recruitment because people have responded to that type of leadership before.

You saw when he went overseas how engaged our military men and women were on the ground, how excited they were just to meet this man because they knew he had their backs.

And I think that will happen instantaneously.

I think there are other things that will take longer time and duration.

And what you have to do is replace personnel across the board.

This sort of two-tier system of justice, this weaponization of defense, intelligence, and law enforcement is happening not just in the agencies and departments, but in the administrative state.

So you can't just appoint a Secretary of Defense and hope everything goes well.

You got to go 20 and 30 rungs below that and implement America First cadre that are going to execute your national security, law enforcement, and defense mission.

And the good thing is those people exist.

And the better thing is now that the Haleys and DeSantises and Christie's and whoever else of the world announced their presidencies, all these other people that were and are a part of the deep state, which is a reality, have publicly identified themselves.

So those folks will never work in a Donald Trump administration because they don't want to work for Donald Trump and they've made that publicly known.

In the first administration, we were not only combating the mainstream media and disinformation campaigns, Russia Gate, Jan 6, 51 Intel at Hunter Biden, et cetera, we were also competing against glorified government gangsters like Bill Barr and Pat Cipollone and Mark Hesper and Gina Haspel and Paul Nacassoni and Mark Milley and so many others at so many various agencies that we were essentially kneecapped at 50%.

So if we could lay out a landscape where we have a government, where President Trump is commander-in-chief and he's able to implement a personnel change of tectonic proportions and then put in his, and look, he's made no secrets about his policy.

He's told the world what his policy is going to be from the border to Iran to Russia to China to drugs to the cartels to human trafficking and everything else.

Once you implement that, I think we can get a pretty rapid uptake.

But you're right, it's going to take a little bit of time to unwind the disasters of Joe Biden.

But I think the pieces are there.

The personnel is there.

And I think Donald Trump's laid out the policy more brilliantly than anyone anyone running for president.

Let me ask you a controversial question because I have been reading lately that you've been quoted a lot.

I think it was from an interview, and you know where this is going with Steve Bannon.

And you mentioned that given the Russian collusion farce or the laptop disinformation caper,

the alpha bank ping, the FISA abuses, we have all of these things that have gone on.

And they have been, I guess, fabricated, echoed, amplified by the media.

And you said in the course, supposedly, and I haven't listened to it, so I'm very careful, but you said that they're going to pay or they're going to have to be, you're going to go after.

And did you mean people in the media that were spreading it or the people in the deep state?

Or what was going?

What did you say that made the mainstream media so hysterical?

This is a perfect example of the disinformation campaigns they're willing to put out.

What I said was the things you highlighted, RussiaGate, FISA corruption, FBI agents lying to to a federal court unlawful surveillance of the presidential campaign funneling in illegally tens of millions of campaign dollars to the united states government only to go buy foreign dirt and try to rig a presidential election all of those incidences occurred with the assistance of people in the mainstream media.

And what I said on Steve Bannon's war room was that we will use the Constitution and the courts of justice in this country to prosecute anyone that broke the law, criminally or civilly, to include some members of the media.

Because without those members of the media, there would have been no Steele dossier.

There would have been no reporting from the likes of David Corn and Company, quote-unquote, augmenting the credibility of Christopher Steele.

There would have been no surveillance warrant.

There wouldn't have been no James Comey and Andy McKay.

And that disinformation narrative has continued.

And to me, the mainstream media is one of the most wicked tools of the radical left-wing agenda that wants to go out and besiege people.

I agree, but I think I agree entirely.

but what when you say

so there's a are they just evil mean spirited reckless dangerous full of venom existential hatred prejudicial or are they systematically violating statutes and when you say go out what give us an idea of what sort of statute might be actionable by a Trump DOJ for things that were clearly violations of the law.

Well, when you are in the mainstream media and you receive classified information and then you publicize it for a false narrative,

you have done so at the behest of a government agent who has come to you with information to go out and advance a political narrative by breaking the law.

You are participating in that scheme.

Any individual who participated in that process would be prosecuted by a singular system of justice.

They shouldn't receive duck and cover because quote unquote, they are the media.

And again, what I said on Steve Bannon was whether it's criminally or civilly, meaning we call out the media and take them to court for defaming people and for leading out disinformation campaigns.

We must be able to correct that narrative because what they're doing is adding to the pollution of our election cycle by helping rig it with false narratives.

And I think there needs to be consequences for these individuals who are glorified with international awards for knowingly putting out out false information, for receiving sensitive classified information where they had the truth, and yet putting out further lies, all in the name to get Donald Trump.

So I think there are ways to do it.

And I think these people, if they didn't exist, then no one at the FBI, Strzog, Page, Comey McCabe, or others, would have had anyone to go to.

There would have been no stories written.

There would have been no disinformation campaign.

And so there must be a way to hold those folks accountable.

And that's why I said criminally or civilly.

And I think there's ways to do both.

Let me give you an example, and then we'll just move on real quickly.

So you have the FBI that we're told

that subcontracts out the old Twitter

and works hand in glove with Twitter censors, FBI people.

And by the way, the counsel, I think James Baker ends up leaving his FBI counsel.

chief counsel position, probably paid a couple hundred, $150, and he goes over to Twitter and he makes reported $7 million a year.

But you have this effort of the government to hire people within this media conglomerate to suppress

news about the Hunter laptop

disinformation hoax.

In other words, we know now that even the people in the Hunter Biden legal team and even people in the government now admit what everybody knew that was listening, that Hunter Biden's laptop was authentic.

And yet the government

used FBI agents, as I understand it, to work alongside media counterparts to officially go out and try to suppress what they knew was the truth?

Is that anything there actionable on the part of the government or the media?

Yeah, I think, but look, as a former national security prosecutor, I think, first of all, there's this thing called the 371 dry conspiracy.

They're actually using it in current prosecutions against, guess who?

Donald Trump.

And when you have an underlying illegality committed by a government agent, anyone that participated in that illegality can and should be charged with this 371 felony, which is a five-year felony in federal court.

That's the purpose of that statute.

And so much of the conduct you described would encapsulate that.

And normally a DOJ would go out there and prosecute that, especially if the government partners up with select few in the media to lie to the American public to achieve a political goal and break the law in doing so.

And so I think that's just one example you could do it.

I also think there should be some clawback mechanisms for the monumental amounts of money that these institutions have made by printing lies.

And I think that's also a DOJ civil sort of forfeiture analysis.

And that's not my forte, but I know from having served in DOJ, they do it all the time to private companies.

They do it to big pharma.

They do it to large institutions and corporations.

They do it to the banks.

Why shouldn't they do it to the media if they break the law?

Thank you very much.

We've got five more minutes.

We're going to take a quick break.

We're with Cash Patel, authors of Government Gangsters, sort of an expose, not sort of, but a damning expose of the deep state and the abuses that we've seen recently and during the Trump administration, especially.

And we'll be right back.

Cash, we've got five minutes

left.

And I wanted to ask you,

so are you confident

about the campaign?

I mean,

Donald Trump is going to be 78.

He's now, I think, going to lock up the nomination.

We're already starting to see

re, I guess we're going to see the recreation of the hatred and the money that we saw in 2016 start to be used.

Will Donald Trump be able to withstand this?

Are they better?

Do you feel confident that the Trump campaign is older, wiser than 2016, 2020, and understands the depth of the hatred and the resources that are going to be arrayed against them in a way that maybe

I'm not saying they were naive, but nobody in their right mind would have ever imagined what, say, Molly Bell outlined in that time essay.

Are you guys, you, I'm not saying you're part of the campaign, but you are a close associate to people in the campaign.

You'll be in the Trump administration if there is one in 2025.

Do you think that the people you talk to or what you observe empirically, they're much wiser and much readier than they were in the past?

Yeah, I think the campaign under Susie Wiles has done a fantastic job putting forth a ground game and taking no chances.

And we saw the results of that in Iowa.

And I think we're going to see it in New Hampshire.

And then we're going to come back to my home state of Nevada in a couple of weeks where we have our caucuses before South Carolina.

And we're going to see the results there.

I think they have a tremendous team around them on the campaign at every level, and they're not taking any chances.

And they also have, of course, the best weapon, Donald Trump.

And, you know, while I'm not a part of the campaign, I am President Trump's, you know, one of his senior advisors for national security.

And we chat all the time.

And I'm, you know, I go around the country and I do a lot of speaking engagements and I do a lot of media.

And what I see is what people saw on the ground in iowa a response to the desire to have donald trump's policies on the border on ccp fentanyl on the cartels on iran on russia on china on ending the forever wars on the economy um i see a desire by americans to want those back in place and i think when you combine that ability of Donald Trump to relay that message to the American people with the campaign team that they've put together and the ground game that they've established.

I think, you know, eight years down the road, as you pointed out from 2016, it is a far different animal and they are well versed.

And I think they're not going to take any chances.

Certainly Donald Trump isn't taking any chances.

He's already been back to New Hampshire and everywhere else in between in just two straight days.

And he's going to hit it hard.

And I think from an anecdotal point, when I go out there and I see people, more and more people aren't drawn out because I'm out there speaking.

They're drawn out because they want a desire to hear about Donald Trump's successes from the first administration that were drowned out, especially in national security.

And they're hearing it for the first time.

And the difference now is that they don't have to take a gamble.

He, Donald Trump, did it before, and he, Donald Trump, can do it again.

And I think that's the singular piece of uniqueness to Donald Trump's campaign that no one else possesses.

Thank you very much.

We're going to conclude.

We've been talking to Cash Patel.

I just wanted to conclude with a little editorialization of my part.

I think people sometimes fail to understand in those dark days of 2017, the first year, maybe the first two years of the Donald Trump administration, there were all these rumors that Donald Trump had collided with a Russian, that Christopher Steele was a seasoned British agent, a specialty was on Russia, that there were all of these things, lurid tales of sex and

worse, that Donald Trump had engaged in.

And yet there was was nobody, everybody even on the Republican side was quiet.

But one person was Devin Nunes, and he was head of the House Intelligence Committee, and Cash Patel was his chief investigator and advisor.

And I think it's fair to say that you two people were responsible for telling us that no, Christopher Steele had no recent experience in Russia.

Yes, it's illegal for a foreign national, a British subject in this case, to work on a foreign campaign.

Yes, he was being paid by Hillary Clinton through the DNC, Fusion GPS, Perkins Co., paywalls.

And yes, the FBI actually did employ.

And nobody had believed any of that at the time, did they?

When you guys were trying to warn the country.

You did, I think, early on, and we appreciated you for that.

Yeah, but

it was quite an achievement.

And with that,

we've been speaking to Cash Patel.

We'll hope to see you later this week, everybody, with Jack Fowler.

And this is Victor Hansen for the Victor Hansen Show with Cash Patel signing out.