Brad Johnson appears on the McFiles with host Christopher McDonald. Enjoy a lively discussion about COVID-19, the election, and CIA issues.
Retired after 25 years as a Senior CIA Operative and Station Chief, Brad now devotes his time to his non-profit, Americans for Intelligence Reform.
Please like, support and spread the word about our work.
Visit AIR at:
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[Music]
00:09
it is necessary to investigate
00:11
before legislating but the line between
00:14
investigating
00:15
and persecuting is a very fine one now a
00:17
man is seen
00:18
walking towards the officer’s suv where
00:20
the deputy’s suv investigators tell us
00:22
it seems the suspect was going to pass
00:24
them
00:24
then turned and fired multiple shots
00:26
while the two were parked
00:30
[Music]
00:39
one of multiple locations that have been
00:41
burning in kenosha wisconsin madam
00:44
speaker
00:45
my colleagues my fellow americans
00:48
i rise to support the impeachment of
00:50
president donald j
00:51
trump
00:57
as far as the allegations of cia hacking
01:00
the senate computers
01:12
[Music]
01:20
pain could be volatile and i’m about to
01:23
talk to him about
01:25
allegations that he was involved with
01:26
prostitutes in moscow
01:28
that the russians taped it and have
01:30
leverage over him
01:32
[Music]
01:38
and now here’s cd media’s host of
01:40
information operation
01:42
l todd wood and george eliason
01:45
welcome to the information operation
01:47
while we where we try to tell the
01:48
american people really what’s happening
01:50
uh with this
01:51
massive military-grade psyop that’s
01:53
going on
01:54
against the population today we have
01:56
rich higgins who has a
01:57
multi-decade career as an army officer
02:01
in the pentagon and then a defense
02:02
contractor and then finally with the
02:04
national security council where he was
02:06
an adviser to president trump
02:08
he was fired uh a few years into that uh
02:10
for writing a memo where he outlined the
02:12
sedition and
02:13
the coup that was going on against the
02:15
president here’s the book by the way the
02:17
memo
02:17
we’ll get into that a lot welcome rich
02:20
thanks for coming on the show
02:22
hey thank you for having me i appreciate
02:24
it no worries
02:25
so i you know i i found your book
02:29
you know as a somewhat similar
02:31
background very concise and it’s it kind
02:33
of really told in a
02:34
in a quick read what we all have been
02:36
feeling for a long time what’s been
02:38
happening
02:39
inside and outside of of government the
02:41
media
02:42
you know education etc i i feel like
02:44
it’s all coordinated and
02:46
and really an infinite information
02:48
operation is why we
02:49
started this show but if you could give
02:51
us kind of an overview of your career
02:53
and
02:53
and what you what got you to this point
02:55
and you do a good job of it in the book
02:57
but
02:58
maybe it’ll entice our readers to to go
03:00
pick it up
03:01
uh yeah look um i really appreciate you
03:04
bringing me here today
03:05
and uh you know the this is my first
03:07
time ever writing a book
03:08
you know i i’m i’m probably like
03:10
yourself you know it’s
03:11
there’s kind of an adjustment period of
03:13
becoming kind of more public
03:14
with our experiences right it’s it’s
03:16
true i’m i’m still getting used to that
03:18
so if i i’m if i’m reluctant in some
03:21
areas you understand why
03:22
but uh yeah in a nutshell uh i was an
03:25
army eod officer
03:27
actually a non-commissioned officer when
03:29
i first first
03:30
served ended up leaving the army in 2000
03:33
went to work for the justice department
03:35
all this is laid out inside the book
03:37
uh ended up responding to the 9 11
03:40
attacks
03:41
in new york city the day after wanted to
03:44
get back into the fight
03:45
ended up in the defense department
03:46
working inside the counterterrorism
03:48
tech black ops world for about 10 years
03:52
and uh you know the the thing i i’m
03:54
trying to tell in the book is
03:56
uh you know and i titled it the memo
03:58
because you know having supported
04:00
trump in the 2016 campaign uh
04:03
i wanted to uh i wanted to give people
04:06
um a picture how somebody who kind of
04:08
comes from the national security
04:10
community
04:11
uh of the deep state if you will yeah
04:13
how does somebody
04:14
how does somebody that comes from that
04:15
community come to support a donald trump
04:18
right and uh what was it about donald
04:20
trump that
04:21
that spoke to something that i’d seen
04:23
that i’d experienced and candidly uh you
04:25
know
04:26
you get down into the ranks of the
04:27
military there’s a lot of people that
04:29
support the man
04:30
and i i was trying to i was trying to
04:32
give voice to some of that
04:33
um and so you know and
04:37
when you’re reading the book i think
04:38
what i want people to to take away from
04:40
it isn’t
04:40
it isn’t a look what i did book at all
04:44
uh the book was really a labor of love
04:46
because i think
04:47
i wanted to use my story to tell all of
04:50
our story
04:50
you know why would a veteran who’s a
04:52
maga guy yeah um
04:55
back this donald trump this businessman
04:57
from queens right
04:58
right and uh i think that yeah the blue
05:01
collar billionaire and you see the
05:03
you know i could have written a really
05:04
technical book about
05:06
you know special operations and black
05:08
ops it’s not that
05:10
i wrote it purposely in a way that i
05:12
hope is accessible not just the veterans
05:14
although
05:15
veterans and police officers i’m sure
05:16
will enjoy it it’s written for the
05:18
general public
05:19
and for people who are trying to
05:20
understand what is going on in our
05:21
country today
05:24
yeah as i said it’s i
05:27
i know i have and a lot of my friends
05:29
have had just this feeling for some time
05:32
that something is happening and it’s
05:34
really only come
05:35
i guess to fruition in the last six
05:37
months to a year where you really see
05:38
all the pieces
05:39
put together where you where you have
05:41
you know what’s been happening in the
05:43
fbi
05:43
the our intelligence agencies uh the
05:46
media education in government the state
05:48
department you know we’ve done a lot in
05:50
ukraine and what’s been going on in
05:51
there
05:52
with the state department as far as
05:53
supporting soros and elsewhere and that
05:55
agenda
05:56
is just fascinating and frightening but
05:58
um
05:59
so can you tell us what happened to
06:03
you in the white house um you know you
06:05
started
06:06
seeing what was going on i know you
06:07
write in the book that you felt that
06:09
some people needed to be
06:10
to be removed were you successful at
06:13
that at all and
06:15
you know how did that process play out
06:17
well i was successful at getting myself
06:19
removed so
06:21
i think i think you have uh i think yeah
06:23
you take the wins where you can get them
06:25
uh i think you’ll see that the
06:28
i think the best way to explain what
06:30
happened to the white house the white
06:31
house was kind of the culmination
06:32
you know the book begins with this story
06:34
right and it kind of cycles back to it
06:36
right but i think um having supported
06:39
the president through the campaign
06:40
um and you know i was one of his
06:42
counterterrorism advisors i was one of
06:44
his surrogates at the republican
06:45
national convention
06:46
a lot of politics and drama involved
06:48
there where i thought things really
06:50
started to come off the rails i mean we
06:51
you know we saw the rush hack the
06:52
election the hillary nonsense throughout
06:54
the campaign
06:55
but where it became alarming was right
06:57
after uh the election you know november
06:59
9th if you will
07:00
sure um you would expect in normal times
07:03
those sort of campaign
07:05
shenanigans to recede right and to go
07:08
away
07:08
yeah where this time we saw it
07:10
escalating
07:12
so the transition period is really where
07:14
i think i
07:15
kind of queued on something is wrong
07:17
here a lot of that was
07:18
planned obviously the women’s march and
07:20
all that stuff that happened
07:21
right so it’s it’s what we saw was this
07:24
coordinated
07:25
massive and you know you’re pretty sure
07:27
it’s perfectly named an information
07:29
operation a counterintelligence
07:31
information operation that instead of uh
07:34
receding and kind of backing off
07:35
you know accelerated and and magnified
07:39
you know as the as the preparations
07:41
began for him to assume office in
07:42
january and so
07:44
you know i was throwing red star
07:46
clusters up where i could
07:47
uh and warning you know various people
07:50
around the campaign but i think there
07:51
was no context for them to understand
07:53
this this just wasn’t the way things
07:55
were done
07:55
i remember a very specific conversation
07:57
i had with jeff sessions about this
07:59
and i said to him sir you know the fbi
08:01
is up to some stuff
08:03
you know we’ve got these concerns these
08:04
people have gone inside the transition
08:06
he said oh rich don’t worry about that
08:07
i’m sure the fbi is all over it
08:09
and you know looking back
08:15
so january 20th comes around and uh he
08:18
takes office
08:19
and you remember in the first couple of
08:21
weeks there you saw you know the
08:22
telephone call with the mexican
08:24
president
08:24
the telephone call with the australian
08:26
president and you’re saying yourself
08:28
what is going on here and
08:29
you know i’m harkening back to 2002 2003
08:32
this is the stuff we would do to saddam
08:34
hussein right right we would make
08:36
telephone calls from his generals
08:37
showing they were plotting to overthrow
08:39
him whether it was true or not i mean
08:40
this is just you know classic deception
08:42
type stuff right
08:43
right and so we we sat there
08:46
and and um you have to get past that
08:49
initial
08:50
shock of what’s going on around you and
08:54
uh finally once we kind of got past that
08:57
initial shock you know by
08:58
by mid-february general flynn’s gone uh
09:02
you know ezra cohen as you’ll see in the
09:03
the new movie that’s out ezra cohen
09:05
finds out about all these unmasking
09:07
abuses that had transpired it really we
09:08
really at that point dug in
09:10
we knew we were in a real fight that the
09:12
presidency itself was at risk
09:14
and uh i didn’t feel like the political
09:16
leadership in the national security
09:18
council could be trusted particularly
09:19
h.r mcmaster i thought he was a terrible
09:21
choice as the national security adviser
09:23
he represented everything that the
09:24
president ran against um
09:27
and i think uh you know we knew we
09:29
couldn’t go to him with this
09:30
so what i what i had done and the reason
09:32
the book is titled the memos i wrote
09:34
this
09:34
uh memorable warning the president about
09:36
the you know the
09:38
i’ll call them the forces arrayed
09:39
against them and the structure
09:41
of of of um they’ll call it the order of
09:44
battle of what those forces were trying
09:46
to accomplish who was behind it why they
09:48
were behind it
09:49
and i tried to do it in a short and
09:50
concise way as possible
09:52
um you know general mcmaster got a hold
09:54
of that memo
09:55
at some point and i was you know i tell
09:57
people all the time my feet didn’t hit
09:59
the ground you know i was
10:00
i was swooshed off that finally happened
10:03
in july when they figured out it was me
10:05
um yeah but but part of the battle that
10:08
went on inside the national security
10:10
council was one where
10:11
we had uh you know in normal times i
10:14
think you would see this
10:15
you would have a kind of a peaceful
10:17
transition within the national security
10:18
community itself but foreign policy had
10:20
been at the absolute forefront
10:22
of of the president’s campaign in 2016
10:25
where
10:26
you know we were going into year 15 in
10:28
afghanistan you know where
10:30
you know these endless war against isis
10:32
that just goes on and on and on in syria
10:35
um you know a uh uh
10:38
ostrich strategy of dealing with the the
10:40
chinese in terms of their informational
10:42
warfare and
10:43
uh their non-kinetic warfare right yeah
10:46
and so
10:46
the president was he was battling these
10:49
institutional norms
10:51
and what i saw happening and this isn’t
10:54
necessarily uh uh
10:55
you know i’m not trying to knock on h.r
10:57
mcmaster and the same is true for uh
10:59
john bolton
11:00
they thought their job was to tell the
11:03
president what these institutions
11:05
would do all right we see that now with
11:07
general milley
11:09
and my understanding of the national
11:11
security council and general keith
11:13
kellogg said this often remember you
11:14
staff the president
11:16
he is your boss right right and your job
11:20
exactly he is he is there our job is to
11:24
tell the institutions
11:25
what he wants to do exactly not the
11:28
other way around
11:29
so the communications pathway had been
11:31
inverted through this quote-unquote
11:33
interagency process uh and everybody
11:36
talks about the process you know talk
11:38
about a statist
11:39
term right the process it sounds like
11:41
something right out of 1984 moscow
11:43
you will follow the process comrade
11:45
right and so here here
11:47
here we are um you know with um overt
11:51
uh subversion taking place uh files
11:54
going missing meetings being
11:56
subverted uh documents missing telephone
11:59
calls leaking
12:00
clearly uh we had you know we had
12:02
crossed the rubicon
12:04
yeah definitely so you you talk in the
12:06
book about how mcmaster was really
12:08
pushing this islamic
12:10
is a religion of peace issue um can you
12:14
talk about that a little bit it wasn’t
12:15
just him obviously but it’s
12:16
it’s permeated the whole the military i
12:18
know for sure in the state department as
12:20
well
12:21
yeah i’m gonna i’m gonna say if i’ll
12:24
tell you flat out this
12:25
this and this really bothers me okay and
12:27
it’s it goes to the immaturity
12:29
um there’s an immaturity that that comes
12:32
with these leftist multiculturalist
12:34
ideas
12:35
right i have a lot of muslim friends i
12:37
have a lot of muslim friends in iraq and
12:39
afghanistan and other places
12:41
and one of the things they like about me
12:43
is that i actually take the time to
12:44
learn the rules
12:46
right because once you know the rules in
12:47
their world view they can speak more
12:49
candidly to you
12:51
what are they supposed to be saying not
12:52
saying when are they breaking their
12:53
rules when are they not breaking the
12:54
rules right when
12:55
are you gonna are you gonna uh betray
12:57
their confidences
12:59
right and so our ignorance of islam
13:02
uh it shows i mean there are there are
13:04
1400 years of islamic history to study
13:07
okay much of it in conflict with the
13:09
west and western civilization
13:11
my point was always inside the community
13:13
just don’t go blindly into this
13:16
right and you know you look back and and
13:18
the colonial countries
13:20
especially france uh which had uh you
13:23
know a tremendous amount of experience
13:24
in dealing with the middle east right
13:25
with the ottomans dealing with north
13:27
africa
13:28
um you know shirai isharak was warning
13:31
us back in 2003. you’re going to go
13:32
there and turn it into a democracy you
13:34
do realize it’s an islamic country right
13:36
and we just you know we made fun of them
13:38
and we said freedom fries and
13:40
you know some of our great fingers all
13:42
that stuff yeah exactly
13:43
and then so then you had like great
13:45
american scholars from places like
13:47
harvard samuel huntington
13:49
i mean this guy was a you know a genius
13:51
in many respects
13:53
he was immediately dismissed and taken
13:54
off the board because he didn’t comport
13:56
with the politically correct narrative
13:58
now h.r mcmaster just fell right into
14:01
that same old
14:02
rubric right yeah for whatever reason i
14:04
don’t want to assess his motives but
14:05
when you are
14:07
when you are willing to strategically
14:08
blind yourself like that
14:11
um you deserve what happens well it’s
14:13
kind of an intellectual dishonesty i
14:15
mean that’s the way i put it
14:16
when i talk to people on the left i mean
14:18
it’s will willful
14:20
of course um but tell me about sessions
14:23
i mean what what do you think his
14:24
motivations were you were close to him
14:26
at that point
14:27
a lot of people think he was a bad actor
14:30
others think he was just
14:31
you know not smart enough i mean where
14:33
do you put him in that whole
14:35
that whole charade as far as i think he
14:38
was a great
14:38
yeah go ahead oh i think i think i’m a
14:42
little bit more um
14:44
i’m a little bit more defensive of him
14:46
only in so far as he was one of the
14:48
first people that brought me into the
14:49
campaign
14:50
and his staff and um
14:54
my read on him is that he wasn’t a bad
14:56
guy he was a good senator
14:58
he he invaded omaha beach
15:02
with a lawn chair and a cooler okay he
15:05
had no
15:06
idea what he was going into um in normal
15:10
times he
15:11
in in normal times he would have had a
15:13
difficult time
15:14
bringing the bureaucracy bearing the
15:16
bureaucracy to heal he just
15:17
had no experience managing a you know a
15:20
bureaucracy with tens of thousands of
15:22
people
15:23
and massive institutional interests and
15:25
tremendous power
15:26
right yeah um so he in normal times
15:29
would have had a hard time in this
15:31
you know he he had his bud light and his
15:34
lawn chair and his umbrella
15:36
walking up omaha breech beach into an
15:38
mg-42 nest right and then
15:40
i mean yeah it’s just abs absolutely and
15:44
yeah i think all and candidly in his
15:46
defense
15:47
and uh general flynn i think as well and
15:49
in all of us
15:50
we were all in over our head yeah none
15:52
of us anticipated what we walked into
15:54
it took a while for everybody to figure
15:56
it out i think candidly i told i told
15:58
the president this and i’ll tell you
16:00
this
16:00
um his decision to fire comey was
16:02
decisive it’s the only thing that saved
16:05
his presidency in my opinion
16:06
and people will say oh no that’s how the
16:08
special the special counsel would have
16:10
the special console was a contingency
16:12
operation for them right
16:13
they never wanted to have to do it it
16:14
forced their hand
16:16
and they all got in the boat because
16:18
they still thought they were going to
16:19
pull it out
16:19
which is why weissman was really running
16:21
the show i think
16:22
um history is going to be really unkind
16:25
to these people
16:26
uh i i think these these cousters i like
16:28
to call them the koosters but you know
16:30
team coup
16:31
if you will uh history is going to turn
16:33
them to stone
16:34
for what they did i think you’re right
16:38
and i agreed with another thing in your
16:39
book where you said that
16:41
trump’s hiring process was his one
16:43
achilles hill that really
16:45
hurt him for the first three four years
16:46
of the first
16:49
i term you see that changing now as we
16:52
absolutely has changed
16:53
you know absolutely it’s changed johnny
16:55
mackenzie is uh
16:57
people people ding on him because he’s
16:59
young but he’s a hundred percent maga
17:02
he understands the issues of the past
17:04
he’s still learning kind of some of the
17:06
institutional nuances
17:08
but he has uh he has figured out i think
17:11
the vetting process by which you can
17:13
assess someone’s
17:15
not not necessarily fidelity to the
17:18
president
17:18
okay fidelity to the constitution the
17:21
rule of law
17:22
doing the right thing getting the
17:23
mission right i i think the the media
17:25
the media likes to
17:27
to castigate manga people as sort of
17:29
trump sycophants or something
17:31
but that’s not actually the case most of
17:33
us just want to do the right thing do
17:34
the mission get the job done
17:36
you know self-reliance independence all
17:38
those american kind of principles
17:39
believe in the agenda
17:41
yeah johnny reflects that what i thought
17:43
what i think happened initially is
17:45
you know the president’s a businessman a
17:46
real estate guy from queens
17:48
okay he is um he is
17:52
walking into an organization i mean what
17:54
are there three and a half million
17:55
employees of the federal government
17:57
worldwide i mean it’s just mind-boggling
17:59
yeah and the scale of it he was really
18:02
dependent upon finding help but the guy
18:04
i mean
18:04
and um the guy i think who nailed it
18:07
right off the bat was
18:08
uh steve bannon uh yeah it’s pack in
18:10
2017 where he said
18:12
the stat you know the staffing and the
18:14
decision to rely on the republican
18:16
national committee
18:17
to help staff the administration was the
18:19
original sin
18:20
of the administration it affected
18:22
everything else
18:24
and i think um he has learned that
18:26
lesson
18:27
uh but politics is what it is i mean
18:29
it’s it’s contact sport you know
18:31
here he is a businessman he thinks okay
18:33
i’m the president now i can go be the
18:34
president
18:35
look you’re the president you get to
18:36
celebrate your reelection for about 10
18:38
minutes
18:39
your election for 10 minutes and then
18:41
you’re right back into the political
18:42
fight
18:43
right i don’t think he fully
18:45
comprehended just how hard of a contact
18:47
sport it really is
18:49
but you think he’s there now oh
18:52
absolutely he’s there now
18:53
yeah okay you know both of us were
18:57
former military officers
18:59
i take offense to what i see happening
19:02
in the u.s military you know you still
19:04
have a lot of this
19:05
critical race theory being taught you
19:08
have a lot of the generals
19:10
during the obama administration were
19:12
actually purged
19:14
you know uh general ham in africa after
19:17
the benghazi incident was one example
19:20
and now you see secretary of defense
19:23
esper and general
19:24
milley the joint chief jon chairman
19:26
openly defined the president
19:28
just recently multiple times in a row uh
19:32
what are your thoughts about that it’s
19:34
shocking to me and offensive
19:38
uh i think that we’ve reached a point
19:41
you know
19:41
where um
19:44
much like we have to ask ourselves you
19:47
know when the fbi was spying on the
19:49
president-elect and then the president
19:51
you know trying to remove
19:52
him from office on whose behalf were
19:54
they working
19:55
right um this is where i’m at with esper
19:58
and millie
19:58
right whose behalf are they actually
20:00
working right yeah i mean the american
20:02
people put this president in office for
20:04
a reason
20:05
one of them was to get us out of
20:06
afghanistan pretty clearly was one of
20:09
them
20:09
and yet here we are uh four years into
20:12
his administration
20:13
and uh he’s still struggling to get that
20:15
done and and
20:16
in the world you and i occupied the
20:18
commander-in-chief said it happened
20:20
it happened period instantly right
20:23
yeah and uh it’s a it’s just i think it
20:26
goes to
20:27
um the very deep state culture i hate
20:30
that term by the way it’s so
20:31
conspiratorial right just sounds
20:33
conspirate the deep state it’s just
20:35
but it really is just it’s the
20:38
bureaucracy
20:39
operating without a rudder i mean that’s
20:41
that’s what you’re trying just does what
20:42
it wants it floats around
20:44
this potion of self-interest right and
20:46
and so
20:47
my my question is who is millie going to
20:50
general millie
20:51
general millie how is he how and who is
20:54
he going to be going to work for
20:55
when he resigns okay and the same thing
20:58
for esper
20:59
i mean what what is the post service
21:02
motivation that drives these individuals
21:05
and i think if you look there you’ll
21:06
find out what’s really
21:08
what’s really feeding this beast
21:10
interesting i think trump’s made it
21:11
clear
21:12
esper doesn’t have long to go i haven’t
21:14
heard him really
21:15
discuss millie specifically but i just
21:18
find it shocking but i think he hit it
21:20
right on the point there
21:22
who is there anyone else that you think
21:24
in the administration you may not want
21:25
to say it that needs to
21:27
be gone if you will does anyone else
21:30
obviously i can
21:33
i can avoid the political uh landmine by
21:35
just saying i think they need to do a
21:37
complete institutional reset
21:39
yeah i would ask for everybody’s
21:41
resignation
21:42
uh this is i mean this is not uncommon
21:44
right it’s just a courtesy
21:46
we want a courtesy resignation from
21:47
everybody and then we’re going to
21:49
reassess
21:50
right i would really like to see the
21:52
president take
21:53
um you know i’ll call it institutional
21:56
restoration
21:57
and make that one of his flagship
22:00
efforts for a second term
22:02
um there are some institutions that
22:04
probably need to be
22:05
either completely reset or just to go
22:07
away and be rebuilt
22:09
and then there are other institutions
22:11
that i think are easily salvageable
22:12
provided to correct change in leadership
22:14
i put the defense department in that
22:16
category
22:17
uh it needs to be reincentivized the
22:18
good thing about the defense department
22:20
is
22:20
you fire a couple guys for the you know
22:22
for for a reason everybody else gets the
22:24
message real quick
22:24
very quickly and i think that we you
22:27
know
22:28
we can start there and build out but the
22:30
idea and one of the things that scares
22:31
me more than anything else that we see
22:32
going on right now is there’s this
22:34
institutional
22:36
um i’ll call it indifference uh it may
22:38
be more
22:39
devious than that or hostile than that
22:42
but i’ll call an institutional
22:43
indifference to the fact
22:44
that you have these marxist ideologies
22:47
just yes
22:48
just seeping their way into these
22:50
institutions and they have been for 25
22:52
30 years in many respects but those
22:54
things are now come to a head and
22:56
uh they’ve been they’ve been just so uh
22:58
deleterious to our
23:00
overall capability what you see is what
23:02
i would call the citadels of western
23:04
civilization the citadels of the
23:06
republic the cia
23:08
the fbi the defense department i mean if
23:11
these
23:12
institutions aren’t safe none of us
23:15
are yeah yeah i mean it’s really crazy
23:20
so uh you know i i have been in the
23:23
of the opinion over the last year that
23:25
it was very obvious
23:27
uh you know late last year after
23:29
impeachment you had a roaring economy
23:31
the president was
23:33
on his way to re-election unemployment
23:35
for you know minorities was at record
23:37
lows
23:38
incomes were rising uh people were very
23:41
optimistic
23:42
and then we had this uh pandemic i don’t
23:45
believe in coincidences and i just feel
23:47
that that was
23:48
too big of a coincidence and then we
23:50
have yesterday two virus
23:53
manufacturers halt their you know their
23:55
trials
23:56
three weeks before the election on the
23:58
same day i i find all this fascinating
24:00
and
24:01
and to me i just don’t buy it i mean
24:02
what are your thoughts i think china was
24:04
involved i think they released it on
24:05
purpose
24:08
i’ll talk a little bit about china i
24:09
think
24:12
in may many people don’t know this in
24:14
may of 2019
24:16
china declared people’s war against the
24:19
united states
24:20
and um most of our you know most of our
24:23
strategists because they don’t underst
24:25
you know
24:26
we all in the west learn clap sweats
24:29
right
24:30
klaus which is like you know for
24:31
anybody’s ever been in the military they
24:32
can quote clause what’s left and right
24:33
we’ve all read on war
24:35
um but we don’t read mao
24:38
in the same way um and
24:42
mao is ten times the strategist klaus
24:44
which was i mean
24:45
the guy unified china okay but
24:48
he understands warfare is the continuum
24:50
of politics
24:52
but he has actually done it all right
24:54
and
24:55
i think when when i look at china um
24:58
what i saw happening in the bush years
25:00
and the obama years was this kind of
25:02
collective indifference to the potential
25:03
threat that they represented right
25:05
napoleon used to
25:06
say when china awakens the world will
25:08
tremble
25:09
and beginning in 2001 with the you know
25:12
the
25:12
reintegration of china into the global
25:14
economy you’re giving them five nation
25:16
status
25:17
we saw the chinese took advantage of
25:19
that and they authored several plans
25:20
china 2025
25:22
china 2049 and then most importantly the
25:25
one belt one road
25:26
effort and this one belt one road effort
25:29
is
25:29
um you know it’s the it’s the uh the
25:32
sync went on it’s the raison d’etre it
25:34
so it explains so much of what we see
25:36
going on in the world today because the
25:38
international bankers the central
25:40
bankers have decided that the
25:41
unification of the eurasian land mass is
25:44
central to their emergent markets
25:46
right and we saw this in the trump in
25:48
the trent the uh excuse me in the obama
25:50
years
25:51
they would talk about this concept of
25:53
managed decline right it was the managed
25:55
decline it was the age of china was
25:57
coming
25:58
well trump was elected to stop that
26:01
right
26:01
and so manage decline came off the table
26:05
and what took its place how about just
26:07
decline
26:08
so once they stopped being able to make
26:10
money off of us because the president
26:12
was implementing
26:13
smarter trade policies they became
26:15
overtly hostile
26:17
and what scares me is that the chinese
26:19
communist ideology
26:21
is aligned it has aligned itself with
26:23
the islamist ideology because they
26:25
recognize that we are
26:27
a blind b the democratic party has
26:29
embraced both of those hostile
26:31
ideologies
26:32
and see the money is behind them
26:35
right the money is backing their side we
26:37
we can’t even have the republican
26:39
congress uh or the the republican senate
26:43
uh you know put forward a referendum
26:44
condemning antifa and tifa still doesn’t
26:47
even designate a terrorist
26:51
must be behind the organization to
26:52
prevent that from happening not to
26:54
mention the fact that many of these
26:55
democrat politicians children
26:57
are members of antifa to include tim
26:58
kaine okay i mean that’s where we’re at
27:01
um and so when i think about china that
27:04
may 2019 declaration you had the
27:06
impeachment beginning we know that
27:08
they allowed travel out of wuhan
27:10
intentionally
27:12
one of the other things that’s always
27:13
kind of come to mind and i’ve questioned
27:14
openly on twitter in the past is
27:17
if you are going to do a bio this is the
27:19
problem for the chinese red is to
27:21
explain this away if you were going to
27:22
do a bio-weapon attack against the
27:24
united states
27:25
our policy of a bio-weapon attack
27:27
retaliation was nuclear
27:28
that was our deterrence policy so you’d
27:31
have to make it look like an accident
27:33
wmd sure right you’d have to make it
27:36
look like an accident in order to
27:37
release it
27:38
yeah so this is the great conundrum that
27:39
the chinese really ought to open their
27:41
books on right i mean this
27:42
this is the the danger of that sort of a
27:44
deterrence policy in the first place and
27:46
then you know we all know that and
27:47
for those of you who are interested in
27:49
the national security side you can go
27:50
and do some research on this
27:51
lieberman the guy who was doing the
27:53
research at harvard uh that was working
27:55
with the chinese and the two chinese
27:57
who were arrested at boston’s logan
27:58
airport they were looking at
28:00
the development of nano payloads for
28:02
embedding inside of coronaviruses
28:04
as a tailored weapon system uh or as a
28:07
delivery system for payloads that could
28:09
be
28:09
virally distributed inside the body
28:11
perhaps even targeting individual organs
28:14
this is the stuff of nightmares okay and
28:17
um our national security community has
28:20
really kind of played
28:21
you know again kind of short shift on
28:22
that stuff we we need to reinvigorate
28:26
uh that particular part of our defense
28:28
portfolio to you know because the you
28:30
know a threat
28:30
of the threat has changed they’re
28:32
willing to and
28:34
absolutely and i’m not saying that this
28:37
was for sure a bio weapon attack i’m
28:39
saying the possibility even today
28:41
remains
28:41
yeah and so um going forward i think
28:45
you know when you think about when you
28:47
think about these ideological threats
28:49
confronting us
28:50
i’m a big believer in the you know and
28:51
you’re a military guy i’m a big believer
28:53
in the strategic defensive
28:55
sure i think we need to focus on our own
28:57
house
28:58
and getting it in order and um
29:02
failing to do that right a failing to do
29:04
that everything else
29:05
doesn’t really matter yeah um and i’d
29:08
really like to see the president and
29:10
his because he is going to be re-elected
29:13
his new administration uh really focus
29:16
on the
29:17
getting the domestic part right and
29:18
beginning to to rest the country away
29:21
from these
29:22
you know these communist uh idiots
29:24
who’ve you know taken over the
29:25
democratic
29:26
party and they’re infecting our you know
29:28
our children
29:29
well they have to be confronted i i
29:31
happen to think that uh
29:32
their economy is not as strong as they
29:34
think it is you know i was
29:36
an on trader for a couple decades and
29:38
and i feel that
29:40
their debt is massive and that’s one
29:42
reason they were
29:43
incentivized to do something like this
29:45
to because they knew if trump was
29:47
re-elected
29:48
you know and the tariffs would continue
29:50
that they’re in real trouble they can’t
29:51
build cities fast enough to keep their
29:53
people working i mean it’s just
29:55
it’s it’s a house of cards uh so
29:58
speaking of the election and the reason
30:01
i started this show is
30:02
is there is obviously some type of
30:04
coordinated information operation
30:06
as we’ve talked about
30:10
how does the right go after this machine
30:12
this cabal this
30:15
uh people have to go to jail obviously i
30:16
think your point of uh consequences for
30:19
behavior
30:20
needs to happen and what’s coming out of
30:21
doj is not real
30:23
you know it doesn’t give you warm and
30:25
fuzzies on on that happening actually
30:28
yeah look i i think i’m i’m not a uh
30:32
i’m not a bar durham naysayer uh i just
30:35
you know i as somebody who’s worked
30:37
inside the community for a long time
30:38
you know mainly on the counter-terrorism
30:40
side i recognize these things are slow
30:42
yeah like just brutally slow like doing
30:44
good indictments takes time
30:46
and the scale of what durham has been
30:48
asked to investigate
30:49
is massive the reason i still believe it
30:52
is yeah
30:53
right right the but the scale of it is
30:55
is i mean it touches all the
30:56
intelligence agencies it touches the
30:58
defense department
30:59
it touches political politicians i mean
31:01
it’s just big
31:03
um if there were ever a case for a
31:05
special counsel this was probably one of
31:07
them
31:07
but we’ve had you know we had special
31:09
counsel fatigue by this point
31:10
right right and uh i think what you’re
31:13
going to see is
31:14
we won’t get everything we want you know
31:17
we’re
31:18
we’re not going to see everything that
31:19
we want i think we’re going to see
31:20
enough to know that you know people will
31:22
have paid
31:23
you know at some degree for what they
31:25
did they’re already paying in the public
31:27
sphere
31:28
certainly right oh and and i think i
31:31
think you know
31:32
i’m a i’m i’m i’m a believer
31:35
i think that history though is going to
31:37
really judge these characters right
31:39
um they’re going to be they’re going to
31:42
be fro you know andrew mccabe will be
31:44
frozen in history right there along
31:46
benedict arnold right right there next
31:47
to benedict arnold i mean it’s that it’s
31:49
that level of betrayal
31:51
and what’s amazing to me is they’re so
31:54
tone deaf um as to their own
31:58
malfeasance and corruption that that
32:00
they still are in this act of uh
32:02
disgusting self-justification that makes
32:04
it hard to watch them
32:05
right you know yeah
32:09
it’s it’s amazing to see true i mean i
32:11
agree
32:12
yeah it’s
32:15
so to wrap up um
32:18
i have one more point i i’m really
32:20
concerned also about our service
32:22
academies and i i keep telling myself
32:24
the term we can try to deal with this
32:26
but still today this
32:28
critical race theory social justice
32:30
cultural marxism
32:32
destroying the institutions you know
32:34
reducing the level of hardship
32:36
so that you don’t produce really you
32:38
know people who can
32:39
get through tough times i’m hopeful that
32:42
in the second term
32:43
that trump has the bandwidth to deal
32:45
with that or someone in dod
32:48
i mean do you feel that’s something that
32:49
can be addressed
32:51
or it’s it’s a little bit tough because
32:54
it’s education but
32:57
i think it’s imperative that it get
32:59
addressed um it’s not
33:00
unique to the service academies it’s
33:02
throughout the joint professional
33:03
military education environment
33:05
um you know i mean we remember a couple
33:06
years ago where you had the guy at west
33:08
point
33:09
caught you know he was wearing the chase
33:10
shirt right he wasn’t the only one
33:13
yeah and the professors knew and the
33:15
senior officers knew
33:17
and again it go the military is probably
33:19
the easiest to fix because the cultural
33:22
accountability model there is very quick
33:24
acting right you fire a couple leaders
33:26
for doing the wrong thing everybody else
33:27
gets the message real quick
33:29
and um you know this administration’s
33:31
moved to kind of address the threat of
33:33
communism we’re gonna
33:34
we have a massive educational mission to
33:36
kind of you know get people familiar
33:38
with the precepts again i was very lucky
33:40
i came into the military right about the
33:42
time that the cold war guys were
33:43
retiring
33:44
and i took the time to just sit and
33:46
listen to them
33:47
uh read the books they passed me read
33:49
the token archives read the sword and
33:50
the shield you know read read the books
33:52
about the cold war to understand it
33:54
and to get into the ideology not that
33:56
i’m an expert on it but i know
33:58
i know when i hear truth and um
34:02
that’s really what it requires i think
34:03
as far as the service academies go
34:05
you know we i think the na i think the
34:07
naval academy west point
34:09
i know you’re an air force academy grad
34:10
i think you know one of the things that
34:12
the maybe the president
34:14
needs to tell his post espersek def
34:17
is i want you to make a concerted effort
34:19
to give me an officer corps that’s
34:21
worthy of the republic
34:22
yeah and and that starts with
34:24
understanding this two things
34:25
number one is they need to understand
34:27
that the constitution
34:30
is simply the legal means but the actual
34:33
strategic idea the idea we’re defending
34:35
ism
34:36
is embodied in that declaration and you
34:39
need to understand the strategic nature
34:41
of your oath
34:42
and that is something so many of our
34:44
officers have lost sight of
34:46
well put rich thank you so again this is
34:49
the memo
34:50
uh rich where’s the best place to get
34:52
the book uh can they get signed
34:54
you can get it you can get it at rich
34:56
higgins
34:57
you can get it rich against the memo.com
34:59
if you want to sign copy just throw in a
35:00
request there i’m happy to do it
35:02
uh if uh you’re partial to spending
35:04
money with jeff bezos you can get it on
35:06
amazon barnes and noble the usual
35:07
suspects
35:08
please follow me on twitter at rich
35:11
higgins underscore dc
35:13
at rich higgins underscore dc uh you
35:16
know i’m
35:17
pretty active on there lately sometimes
35:19
more than others but
35:20
uh going into this election cycle and
35:23
everything we’re expecting to see i’m
35:24
gonna be out there throwing some
35:25
insights
35:26
from a political warfare special warfare
35:28
prism
35:29
and i hope people can pick something up
35:30
there what can we expect to
35:32
see of you in the future uh
35:36
wait god knows
35:40
all right rich uh thanks for joining us
35:41
on information operation and maybe we
35:43
can have you back on down the road
35:45
thanks for ha
[/expander_maker]
