Transcript of Kash Patel on Shawn Ryan Show Podcast

You almost don’t want to have that leadership there because they’re too tied into the everyday operations.

And then what they do is they micromanage everything. You need to have someone who is familiar and has operated with it, but also at the same time who’s managed a big ship and can understand the most important thing that Trump taught me was execute the mission and then get the hell out of the way for the people who signed up to do the job. And so that’s the thing I learned. So if I go back and he wants me back and wherever he wants me, you know, I’ll tell your viewers as soon as he makes that decision, if he does.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. When do people generally find out if they’re going to be in the cabinet or on the staff?

KASH PATEL: You know, the funny thing about my career is I’m not even, I guess I’m in politics, but like I never was. Right. And then I got out and people are like, you’re in politics. I’m like, well, I’ve never run for office. I’m never going to run for office. I’m not in the RNC, the DNC or whatever party, this, that, or the other things, apparatus. But I guess just because of the close positions I’ve held with the president and continuing to serve, I’ve learned that whatever or however it was done is not Donald Trump’s way. So I think that’s what’s appealing to him, to the American public about him.

And so I don’t know when he’s going to stack it. Even though I know him as well as I do, and I talk to him all the time, he probably has his cabinet laid out in his mind. He’s just not going to tell people and he’s going to do what he does, which is continue to ask probably everyone he sees about their opinions and he might change his decision on it. So it’s very, the vice president’s probably the best example. That came down to the last second, you know, the last day, last wire, you know, there’s a couple of folks in convention, but he made the decision, you know, after hearing everything from everyone.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding. So, I mean, I’m just curious, how do you feel about that? I mean, there’s no time to switch gears in your head. Right. So you just, “Hey, we’re going to have you for X, Y, and Z, and we’re starting yesterday.” So, or is there, or is there somewhat of a, “Hey, we’re looking at you, you know, to fill this slot and start getting your mind.”

KASH PATEL: Yeah. There’s some leeway for everybody. So what the campaign does, and that’s whatever they manage over there is they send out vetting packages to, I think it was like eight people for presidents, President Trump’s vice president candidate. So they knew they were being looked at. They had to submit this massive amount of information, the campaign leadership that the president looks at it, and then they make a decision. So the guys and gals are on, they’re on notice for at least a month that this could be your deal. And I don’t know the inner workings on the VP thing. That’s probably just like anything else. People are lobbying for you. You may be lobbying directly, you may be doing media, you may be on the road with the president. I mean, a lot of these folks were at President Trump’s rallies. A lot of them were doing surrogate work for him.

So I guess in my opinion, I think he did it the best way possible. He auditioned them in front of the American public. There was no sleeper candidate. It’s not like anyone in the top three or four or five was someone people hadn’t heard of. They were all over the country, President Trump. They were doing TV interviews. They were very vocal and very public. And so I think the president was able to say, I have a wide range of opinions coming at me for these folks. And he was able to use that info.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. Interesting. Next question is from Paul. I think this is something on everybody’s mind. How likely is it that illegal immigrants will become undocumented voters?

KASH PATEL: It’s probably already happening. I mean, whatever you think the number is, it’s at least 10 million, if not 15 million. And you’ve seen liberal states go out and say, we’re going to house illegal immigrants. We’re going to give them IDs. And we’re going to help finance whatever needs they might have for their families and themselves. And so you got to ask yourself, what’s the point of all this? What do you bring in all these people here for, putting aside the fact that some of them commit the most atrocious crimes we’ve seen in modern history? What is the point of that from the Democrats?

And it’s because this is a weapon I think they’re going to use. They’ve studied this for a while. They know President Trump, in my opinion, has the best policy, the best agenda. And he’s literally a president of people, from Hulk Hogan to Dana White to rock stars, to movie stars, to everyday Americans, the military, and to people that serve in government. They just love his style of leadership. And so I think the Democrats are smart enough to say, well, we got to figure out a new way to rig the election. They caught us on 51-Intel, they caught us on Russiagate. So now I think what you’ll see is some of these swing states come in, and that’s what people don’t realize. It’s not the federal government that controls federal elections, it’s the state government.

Every state applies its own laws. In my home state of Nevada, there’s no voter ID. I went to vote and I broke out my ID and they go, we don’t need that. I’m like, how do you know? It’s me. Also, not to mention the fact that you sent me two mail-in ballots. And so I could vote three times. And the system is not secure. And say you have 5% of the illegals, and say, let’s use a conservative number of 10 million, right? 500,000 people. The last two elections were decided by 54,000 votes in four states. You don’t need a lot. And that’s the scary part.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow. So, I mean, at this point, this may be a stupid question, but if you get two mail-in ballots and nobody’s checking your ID, I mean, is it even illegal to vote more than once these days?

KASH PATEL: It’s supposed to be, but there has never been a process to question, you know, the state by state electioneering methods and rules and laws. You know, we had the, what was that famous Bush v. Gore, the paper ballot, I forget what you call it, issue. And then it went to the Supreme Court. But that was one state in one election. And so, honestly, I don’t know how you get people to enforce those rules, because it’s up to the state — secretary of state and the state attorney general. Are we going to look at it or are we not going to look at it? Well, they’re not going to look at it in Michigan or Minnesota. They’re not going to look at it in Pennsylvania. They’re not going to look at it in Georgia. Georgia has been very public saying we’re not going to look at any of this.

Two-Tiered Justice System and Election Integrity

And so if your elected officials aren’t going to look at it, what’s your alternative?

SHAWN RYAN: So there’s legitimately nothing stopping somebody in Nevada from just voting and going to the back of the line and voting and going to the back of the line and voting and going to the back of the line, is there?

KASH PATEL: So the one last measure that people have is bringing private suits, civil suits in the states. So, for instance, in Nevada, we are bringing multiple lawsuits to purge the voting rolls. Right. So people think I’m not the election expert. I can’t talk to you about machines or about whatever, you know, it’s not my wheelhouse. But before all of that are ballots. And before all of that is who gets a ballot? Who gets one mailed to you from Carson City for us, right from Reno? Everybody that’s on the voting rolls. OK, well, let’s take all the dead people off. Let’s make sure all the illegals aren’t on.

So if you eliminate the problem before it even starts by going to federal court, excuse me, state court and federal court and cleansing the ballot rolls, then they don’t get a ballot to get in line and do it over and over again. So that’s what we’re doing there. And there’s a couple other states doing that. I know they’re doing that in Arizona, Wisconsin and probably one or two other states.

And there’s really five states at play at the end of the day for this thing. Five states are going to make this election.

SHAWN RYAN: What five states?

KASH PATEL: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe Georgia. But that’s it.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow.

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SHAWN RYAN: So is there any headway in Nevada?

KASH PATEL: Yeah, we’re doing, it’s actually going really well. We’re finding people who shouldn’t be on the rolls and the courts have to say, okay, get these guys off. And so the issue for, again, all these states have different rules. And I think two states have early voting that starts 60 to 75 days ahead of November 5th. Right? So you got to get in on the action before then. Some states have 30 and 60 day early voting, meaning ballots start going out that early. So you have to clean the rolls by then. So hopefully some of these initiatives pay off by then. It’s paying off in Nevada. And the work that Nevada GOP is doing is pretty incredible on it.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s good to hear. You know, I want to move in, because of all your time and intelligence, I definitely want to talk about some of the external threats from the U.S. or of the U.S. But since we’re talking about courts and legal jargon, and that definitely is your wheelhouse.

KASH PATEL: It used to be, man, I’m a retired lawyer. I never want to do it again.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, what I want to talk about is the two-tiered justice system. Everybody talks about it. And I think everybody knows something’s going on. But I’d love to hear you describe what the two-tiered justice system is and go into some detail about it.

The Two-Tiered Justice System

KASH PATEL: In short, the two-tiered system of justice is the deep state’s weapon of choice. And I don’t mean just in court. I mean in the administrative state, too, in all three branches of the federal government and in applications at the state level. So I used to be, before I started doing everything, I was a public defender for years. I defended the worst humanity had to offer, including terrorists. And the one thing I learned in that job was, you know, our due process and our Constitution applies to everyone, or it doesn’t work. That’s exactly what our founding fathers wanted.

So I actually went in there and I was like, give me the worst of the worst. It’s funny and ironic because all these liberals became public defenders. I became a public defender because I thought going to court was fun and litigating and investigating was cool. And these people would come in and my colleagues would be like, I don’t want that case. I don’t want that case. I don’t want this case. I was like, we don’t have a choice. You took this job because you’re supposed to defend everybody.

So the irony for me started there, but it wouldn’t piece together until years later. And so meeting out that singular system of justice for everyone became a big part of my job. And then when I went forward through my career and when I got to D.C. and main justice and JSOC and all that, I would start seeing people in government like places like the FBI and senior leadership positions and DOJ making prosecutorial decisions based on a political election. You know, my first big instance of that was Benghazi. I was the main justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

KASH PATEL: And I remember this meeting with then AG Holder and we had a deck of like 19 guys who wanted to prosecute, you know, JSOC had them rolled up and we wanted to get them all. They killed four Americans, you know, it’s a legit terrorist attack. And the basic general response from the FBI and DOJ leadership was, well, it’s only politically convenient to get one guy. And they went and got basically the wrong guy. And then we prosecuted that wrong guy. Not that he wasn’t a part of it. He just wasn’t like the top tier of guys I would have gone after. And they screwed up the prosecution because they didn’t listen to us and they didn’t want to use the right evidence. And it was all political decisions.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean they didn’t want to use the right evidence?

KASH PATEL: They wanted to, you know, because half of that stuff was classified and they wanted to. I didn’t piece this together then because we didn’t have the whole fallout from Benghazi, the hearings and the congressional review that would take time to come in. But they wouldn’t let us prosecute, I think, 16 of the 19 that I wanted. They didn’t want half this evidence declassified. And I was like —

SHAWN RYAN: Who is they?

KASH PATEL: Well, the leadership at DOJ, FBI and the intel community obviously played a role in that. And so, you know, we were just like, all right, we’ll do the best we can. And for example, Katala, Greenbrier River, the guy that’s getting that first got prosecuted, he is getting out for his participation in Benghazi where he killed four Americans. He’ll be out of prison before the next presidential election is done.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

KASH PATEL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Why? Why would we? Why? Why?

KASH PATEL: I don’t mean to laugh at it because it’s just — it’s so atrocious because they charge them with the wrong crimes. Nobody at the FBI or DOJ wanted to listen to how to turn intel into evidence, into public display in a court of law. You know, everybody working on the case thought they were the best at everything. And the decision from the top down is we’re only doing this guy. And if you get the prosecution wrong.

SHAWN RYAN: What are we doing, man?

KASH PATEL: I don’t know, bro.

SHAWN RYAN: What are we doing? Why are we even in? What are we doing?

KASH PATEL: It was my first kind of foray into it in terms of the two tier system of justice. And it wasn’t happening outside. Right. My first experience with that was public defender land. Now it’s internal. It’s the administrative application at the executive branch level in Washington, D.C. And you know, then you have Russiagate and then you have all these other things we’ll talk about. But. The best. I guess definition of the two tier system of justice I can come up with for your audience is the classified documents case.

SHAWN RYAN: Which one?

KASH PATEL: Which one? So let’s use the two presidents, right? President Trump gets his home raided on a bogus WhatsApp warrant, which the FBI leaks to the media. Do you know whose name is in the FBI’s WhatsApp warrant for President Trump? That was 65% redacted. Trump’s name and my name. Then they redacted everything else after my name, which once it finally came out, it was completely meaningless B.S. Then they go in there and they stage that photo display and everybody’s like, oh, my God, look at all this classified materials. What they don’t explain to the American public is he’s a president, former president, Presidential Records Act. Bill Clinton did the same thing. Every president performs on the same thing. They can take what they want. That’s the law. That so you can’t be prosecuted for possessing classified documents.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, can I and I don’t know what was in the document, but I mean, if you take and I can’t remember who I had this discussion with, it may have been Tim Parlatore. But if you take I mean, when people say classified documents – taking classified documents wherever to Mar-a-Lago or or Joe Biden’s garage or wherever the wherever it was. I mean, a lot of those documents, people that make it sound like it’s the nuclear codes or. But what it actually is, at least what it sounds like to me or what I’ve been told is a lot of it is just the daily. Just the daily schedule. Yeah.

Today, you’re giving a press conference here, you’re doing this here, you’ve got lunch with so-and-so, you got a couple of meetings and then that day’s over and that is no longer classified because it’s already happened. But obviously, you can’t get the president’s schedule out before it happens, because. Am I correct in saying I mean, some of these documents that they’re saying are classified or are that type of — ?

KASH PATEL: You’re correct. My point is, under the law, it doesn’t matter if you have the nuclear codes, OK, the Presidential Records Act and Bill Clinton took literally recordings of a classified conversation and took him when he left the presidency and he put him in a sock drawer. It’s called the Clinton sock drawer case. No bullshit. They went to federal court, the government and the federal court adjudicated that President Clinton, as a president, has the Presidential Records Act. He can take what he wants. The court never even found out what was on the recording. It’s that strong. And that’s the law.

So then why does this DOJ come in and say, well, it doesn’t kind of apply to Trump. And then you interview Joe Biden and he was never president. He had four different locations of 20 years of classified information, Delaware, his offices in Washington, D.C., and two other locations as Beach House and somewhere else.

The Two-Tiered Justice System (Continued)

KASH PATEL: But their excuse to not prosecute Joe Biden was, well, basically, he’s too inept. He’s too feeble minded. So we’re not going to prosecute that. I’ve never heard that.

SHAWN RYAN: So that’s legitimately why they didn’t.

KASH PATEL: That’s what the special counsel appointed the investigation, told Attorney General Garland. And Garland came out and literally said, well, we can’t really — we don’t think Joe Biden meant to do it. And I was like, what? I was like, we’re back to the Clinton case, the Clinton server case. Right. It’s like when Hillary, when Comey created this new legal fiction, no reasonable prosecutor. First of all, it’s not the FBI’s job to ever make a prosecutorial decision, but no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case. I was in the National Security Division at the time. I was doing the discovery for Benghazi where we found her freaking email. And then they took that investigation away from us. And then it became the Clinton investigation. Right. That everybody now knows about. I was like, who is this guy talking about? And then I didn’t think it would happen, but it did.

Came back full circle with the Biden administration, the Biden prosecution, classified docs. And they let the guy off the hook. And he said, it doesn’t matter. So we’ll prosecute a guy who has a legal justification to have those documents because we don’t care. It’s Trump. And we won’t prosecute the sitting president because you’ve made up a new legal standard that applies to exonerate him and to not even charge him. That is the two tier system of justice on steroids. And now you’re talking about the two guys who are running against, now they’re not, but two guys who were then running against each other for the presidency of the United States.

SHAWN RYAN: Where else is this happening?

KASH PATEL: Man, everywhere, unfortunately. So we saw it every day on people who are indigent and charged with serious offenses, who were treated differently than folks who were high level private sector individuals. I mean, if you go to the fraud cases out of Wall Street or whatever, these guys get to go to club fed for a couple of years, a couple of 10 years, whatever. But the poor guy down at the end of the ladder, he’s going away for 40. You don’t need to be a legal expert to have seen this over the years. And the classified documents case, that’s just, you can apply what they did there out to what they’re doing to certain Jan Six defendants.

And I always say this about Jan Six. Some people committed some pretty violent stuff. They need to go away. But when you’re bringing in a 65 year old grandmother who doesn’t have any priors and she’s held without bond for years to force pleas so that you can weaponize and politicize the two tier system of justice even further, so that Christopher Wray, the FBI director can go to Congress and lie and say, domestic terrorism prosecutions are on the rise because they classified everything in Jan Six as domestic terrorism. And so that he can say, him and Merrick Garland can say, oh, we’ve got a thousand people under investigation for this insurrection, this insurrection that nobody was ever charged for.

SHAWN RYAN: But it’s a political narrative and it’s tough to defeat. It sounds pretty lethal, you know, storming of this, hijacking of that insurrection. But when you look at some of the people involved, their lives have been destroyed by the justice department because of a political vendetta they want to enact through the justice system to take out Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: How long has this been going on?

KASH PATEL: Decades. But it started slowly. I think Eisenhower was the first to say it in the 50s and he started it with the defense industrial complex. He basically said, paraphrasing, if you don’t control this animal, it is going to take over Washington D.C. and is going to take over the purposes of the government’s departments and agencies. And to me, there’s probably no better example than the defense industrial complex. But once you layer that in and you combine that in with what people in these leadership positions for so long have done, which is use Washington as a revolving door, I don’t see it as a Republican or Democratic thing. I see it as a swamp thing.

I see it as a who’s running these agencies and departments, where do they go afterwards and how do they get back in? And all of these people have connections, direct lines of employments from the private sector to Washington and back to the same firms, the same lobbyists, the same defense contractor, big agency. And it’s been going on for decades.

I think when Trump hit the escalator, these guys got on steroids because they didn’t care that he was a Republican and the Republicans were going to back him. They just didn’t want him there to expose the corruption of the swamp, to expose the deep state. And you saw more Republicans in Trump’s administration. For example, his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, agreed to wear wire because then deputy director of the FBI, Andy McCabe, supposedly another Republican, went to the number two cop in the country and said, I need you to wear wire so we can get information to use the 25th amendment against President Trump. It’s kind of ironic now that we’ve seen Joe Biden and what the 25th is supposed to be used for and what these guys wanted to do to exact a political vendetta.

Remember, Trump exposed, we exposed during Russiagate, Andy McCabe’s criminal activity while running the FBI. We exposed Rod Rosenstein’s criminal activity while signing an illegal FISA, burying evidence of innocence and lying to a federal court just to surveil a sitting president of the United States. We caught him. And they will go to, they will stop at no length to get him.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s go back. You said the 25th amendment. What is the 25th amendment?

KASH PATEL: So a long time ago, basically Congress and the cabinet secretaries got together and said, what if something happens to a sitting president? Not an assassination, but just some, he has a stroke, he’s completely in a coma, you know, the worst of the worst, right? Then how do you, how do you govern? Because technically he’s not dead, so there’s no mechanism to kick in the vice president to president. So the 25th amendment basically says the vice president combined with the cabinet goes to the Congress and says, the president’s incapacitated. Here’s what happened. The VP then becomes the president.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. Okay. So, well, I guess we’re bypassing the Oconus for the time being, but hey, we’re on a roll here. So, so let’s get into the deep state because it sounds like that’s what you’re talking about. Yeah. What is it?

The Deep State

KASH PATEL: It is an apolitical entity that operates in government to service itself instead of the American people. And what I mean by that is it’s, it’s leadership positions across government, whether it’s DOJ, FBI, DOD, CIA, whatever, combined with underlying positions that are pretty senior up who work with mainstream media entities to perpetuate frauds on the American people to commit government corruption and to stay in power and to lie to the American people and to rob them of the truth. That is the singular purpose of the deep state because they think once the truth gets out, their corruption is going to be exposed. They might get prosecuted for breaking the law. And once that happens, you have an explosion in DC.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I want to, I want to dig in a little bit more on who, who exactly is it? I mean, I think Vivek gives a great explanation of what it is, but I’m always curious to hear what everybody else thinks. And, but it just seems, it seems so well organized to me. It is. So who’s at the end of it? Is it a country? Is it US politicians? Is it the World Economic Forum? Like where it’s so well orchestrated, there has to be an organizer. And so who is the organizer?

KASH PATEL: I don’t think that there’s one specific organizer. I think there is a group of organizations that have participated in it for a while. The World Economic Forum is a piece of it. Certain politicians are a piece of it. Certain people who become AGs, directors of the FBI, directors of the CIA, et cetera, are a piece of it. And of course the mainstream media is a big component of it. All of those entities partner up together to take over Washington, DC. And instead of doing the job for the American people, they come out and instead come up with government boondoggles that pay them, sells billions and billions of dollars or their friends billions and billions of dollars, which is our dollars. And they want to make sure that that keeps going over and over and over again.

I’ll give you a perfect example. Who cares if you’ve ever followed Russiagate or any of this other stuff about the deep state? Chris Wray, the director of the FBI, and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general and of the DOJ, were tasked with helping us at Congress, where I ran the Russiagate investigation, to expose Russiagate. We went to them and said, look, you guys didn’t do this. Help us expose it. And they both doubled down. You know what they did? They launched an investigation against me, the senior congressional investigator for Russiagate on the House Intelligence Committee and six other staffers.

They used grand jury subpoenas to get my personal information, my banking information, my emails, my cell phone information, everything else. I didn’t find out until five years later when Google called me and said, hey, our five-year notification has lapsed. We can now tell you the DOJ surveilled you. And we had to turn over documents. So that became that. We exploded that into a federal lawsuit that’s still ongoing in the DOJ and FBI. But those two guys.

SHAWN RYAN: Hold on. What? So Google informed you that you’re being surveilled five years after the investigation started?

KASH PATEL: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: What, I mean, what more did they tell you?

KASH PATEL: They’re not allowed to say anything but that you can be informed now since it’s five years later. So as a former national security prosecutor, I know you don’t just go to Google. You go to every provider. You go to all the telecoms. You go to the bank. You go to everybody. If you’re going to run an investigation, that’s what you do. But these two guys who were running the FBI and DOJ sat in a room with the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and lied to our faces. They threatened to investigate us, which was bad enough, right? They actually did it. And then these two guys would get exposed, Rod Rosenstein specifically, for signing a FISA that was totally bogus. And we’ve caught Chris Wray lying time and time again as the director of the FBI.

Put these guys over here for a second. Gina Haspel, who was the director of the CIA, was London’s station chief in England when Russiagate kicked off. Under the rule of law in America, if you want the Federal Bureau of Investigation to launch an investigation overseas, you have to get permission from the head intel rep. In England, it’s the DCI, excuse me, the station chief. So she allowed Russiagate to occur on British soil where there was a barroom operation to try to record some nub into spilling the beans on Donald Trump. And they would use that to launch the whole Russiagate offensive. Gina Haspel would later become Trump’s CIA director. And then when these guys got out of the administration, do you know where Gina Haspel and Rod Rosenstein work today?

SHAWN RYAN: Where?

KASH PATEL: At Christopher Wray’s old law firm at Senior Named Partners, making seven and eight figures.

SHAWN RYAN: How is this going to get broken up? They seem so deep. You just mentioned they’re embedded in politics, they’re embedded in mainstream media, they’re embedded in intelligence agencies. They are former top leadership of the military that’s now embedded within the military industrial complex companies. I mean, it’s how many people are involved in this?

KASH PATEL: Thousands. Thousands.

SHAWN RYAN: How would you even begin to dismantle it?

KASH PATEL: Well, I think the first Trump administration was the beachhead, right? People were just like, you guys are full of it. And we continue to put out the truth. And years later, people are catching up to a lot of that truth saying, wait a second, you guys weren’t lying back then. People being the American public, that’s the weapon we need.

The Deep State and Media Influence (Continued)

KASH PATEL: And you guys weren’t lying about impeachment. They literally made up a piece of a phone call to launch a presidential impeachment and then put me in the middle of it by making up a meeting that never occurred. But it sounded dirty at the time. And then when we finally released the transcript, everybody was like, oh, yeah, there was no quid pro quo. Nothing illegal happened here. But the narrative had been out there. Now you have President Trump as a president who was impeached for the first time in however many years. And so they get their narratives, right?

They don’t necessarily care about the conclusory portion of their mission. They use the mainstream media to say Trump’s a Russian asset. He’s been impeached. Kash Patel is under DOJ surveillance for whatever investigation when he was never done. I’ve had more mainstream media hits on me than I can count. But they want the title narrative to carry the day. Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation. They don’t care about the actual truth.

And so once you start stacking these together and you show the American public you were lied to, you based your vote at the polls on information that the government purposely withheld from you so that you would vote a particular way. Once you show enough Americans that, then I think you have the movement that you need behind the leadership that we have in Donald Trump, in my position, to take a wrecking ball to the deep state.

SHAWN RYAN: How so?

KASH PATEL: You go to D.C. and you remove all these positions, right? And you start enacting measures, not of retribution, but of legal consequence. Y’all acted one way. For instance, the people that signed the 51 Intel letter, right, permanently suspend their security clearances forever. Every one of those guys lied. Every one of those guys got caught lying. You’re talking about two former CIA directors, a former NSA director and a former Secretary of Defense, all intentionally to this day continue to lie and won’t take back their letter. OK, you can stop making money from your security clearance. There’s a start.

Then you go in and you get the Eric Charmels of the world, who have been publicly outed as utilizing Intel to inject a political narrative across mainstream America. And you remove these people from government. You have to go in there. The same thing we’re talking about with voting, the same thing here. You got to cleanse the scrolls. Government service is a service. We’re not making you do it. And if you break the rules and regulations, you’re out.

So that’s a big part of it, right? Then you bring in the new bench, the new team. Then you’re going to have to keep fighting the media. And I think we’re slowly over the years have started to win that fight because the more and more of the one thing I learned when I started Russiagate, my name was outed for the first time that the media is attacking you. The more you’re over the target.

SHAWN RYAN: Who is it that — who is at the head of it?

KASH PATEL: I don’t think there’s one person or one group. I think it’s people who know they’re going to benefit from each other if they sign up for the program, let’s call it. And so again, not a Republican or Democrat thing. In the glossary of this book, in alphabetical order, I think there’s like 65 people I named by title and name just to show people how expansive the Deep State is. And so there is no like one chain of command they report to. Instead, what I believe they do is they bring in people that they can control. The Obamas still have heavy sway in that entire operation. And so do people that have been around for 10, 20, 30 years in Washington.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I think it’s already out there for them. I mean, how corrupt it is. I mean, that’s why I think that’s why podcasts are doing so well right now. And I mean, somebody just came in here in media and said that CNN’s viewership is only about 50,000 at any particular point in time during the day. That’s pretty bad.

KASH PATEL: It’s pretty bad. It’s atrocious. And I’ll give you an example from sort of the other end of the spectrum. When Tucker was on Fox, and this is not an attack on the reporting, it’s just the way the pendulum has swung away from mainstream media in general. When Tucker was on Fox, and he was at the peak of his show’s viewership, he was still one third less than Bill O’Reilly when Bill O’Reilly was on Fox in terms of viewership. So it had already started. And it’s again, not because of the reporting. I think it’s because other people started to say, I don’t want to watch mainstream media anymore, anywhere. And the shows, the podcasts, the radios, the series started becoming more and more and more and more popular.

And then they finally ran into what you talked about, the CNN’s, MNM, MSNBC’s of the world, Washington Post and what have you, and people just said, I’ve had enough. But the problem is, there’s still a lot of people that subscribe to it out of sheer hatred for the other side. And they’ll keep pumping out disinformation. And so our job, my job is not to go, and this is what I learned from one of my former bosses and now my friend, Devin Nunes. One day I figured out who paid for this field dossier, right? I got the subpoenas, I got the bank records, I figured it out. And before we could tell the world, I figured out it was Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

And I went to Devin, and I told him that in the morning, he goes, “Dude, if you’re going to start drinking at 9am, get out of my office,” because it was, I mean, just think about that back then. It was an insane thing to conceive that a political party would be responsible for financing Russiagate, let alone having the deep state in government execute it.

And so once I figured that out, I thought, okay, we’re good, investigation over, everybody can move on. And Devin goes, “Dude, now we got to spend the next four years telling the American public this happened and fighting the media, because they’re going to come up with narratives to attack you, me, the investigation, Trump, and anything else.” And he was right. And I go, okay, so how do we convince, how do we convince the other 45% of Americans? He goes, “No, you’re missing it. You need to convince the other 7%. You convince the other 7%, you win every election there ever will be.” And it was what he was talking about, I don’t have the political experience he had. He was talking about sheer politics, numbers, how you win elections, and the numbers you need, because you’re never going to get that opposing 40%. It’s never going to come over to your way.

The Future of Mainstream Media

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t understand how whoever owns the news organizations, they have to see their business crumbling. They are. And so I’ve not, I’ve yet to see any changes. I’ve yet to see anybody try to restore their trust in the viewers. It just seems to be, I mean, are they just going to ride this thing until the wheels fall off? Or what’s the plan here?

KASH PATEL: Maybe. I mean, you’ve seen some sea changes at the New York Times. And when they did that, there was like an internal revolt, and the sea change just kind of stopped. So the people I think in charge, they’re not stupid. They see it. They notice it. You can’t make up money not being there. You can’t make up viewers who stopped buying your paper. CNN did the same thing. Remember, they fired like, between a year ago and today, they fired every reporter that was on their mainstream networks, daytime, primetime shows, everyone. Then they fired their CEO. And there was another revolt, and kind of paused again. You know, so I think people see it, they see that there needs to be a course correction. But they’re so…

SHAWN RYAN: They can’t do it, though. They can’t do it. I mean, just two weeks ago, with the Trump assassination attempt, what was CNN’s headline? It was, “Secret Service rushes Trump off the stage.”

KASH PATEL: Yeah. I actually took a clip of that headline, so I never lost it, and it says, “Trump falls.” Yeah. That’s what the CNN headline was, when the guy got shot in the head.

SHAWN RYAN: So I mean, I don’t see any attempts to rectify the distrust.

KASH PATEL: No, I think you’re ultimately right. I think my point was just, some people see it internally, and when they try to rejigger it, they just get steamrolled.

SHAWN RYAN: So is this like a CEO being steamrolled by his employees?

KASH PATEL: Essentially. I mean, look at what happens over on MSNBC. They take Mika and Joe Scarborough off the air after the Trump assassination attempt, because they don’t, even they, don’t want that program to say the false file disinformation that would have said had they had them on the very next day, right? But what happens the day after that? There’s a revolt at MSNBC, and they come out swinging the next day. They’re like, “Oh, we’re sorry. We didn’t let them on. They should have been on.” Then they go out and say all the false, terrible things that they were going to say, because they hate Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: So is it the head of the news organizations that are part of the Deep State, or is it the actual reporters?

KASH PATEL: I think the heads, in an ironic way, I think the heads of the news organizations report to their big shows, because those big shows carry their networks, and they have so much wasta built up that they can, it’s one of the only places I’ve ever seen where you can be like, “Oh, your CEO said X, I don’t care. I’m doing what I want.”

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

KASH PATEL: And for the most part, for the people that participate in disinformation campaigns over at CNN, over at MSNBC and wherever, ABC, CBS.

SHAWN RYAN: Pretty much everywhere.

KASH PATEL: Pretty much everywhere. That’s why, well, there’s more reasons than that, but that’s one of the reasons why your show is so popular. You don’t care about anything but the truth. It’s the only thing I’ve really ever cared about, and I just think it would be so hard in America to relay it.

SHAWN RYAN: Where do you see this ending with the media? You think they’re going to go out?

KASH PATEL: They’re not going out laying down.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think they’ll be subsidized by the government?

KASH PATEL: Well, NPR already is, right? And that’s probably what they want to have happen next. It’s probably what the CNNs of the world want since they aren’t making any money, since their viewership is cratering. And once, as you know, get a government subsidy like that, you can say whatever you want and be sponsored by the government. You know, NPR should be completely retooled, if not shut down until it’s fixed, because we’re paying for it.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I feel like I’ve thought this for a long time, that they were going to crash and burn on purpose. I’ve actually never vocalized this, because what we’ve seen in 2008, all the banks got bailed out.

KASH PATEL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Airlines all got bailed out. Media organizations are all failing. They’re all going to get bailed out. I don’t see why they wouldn’t. They employ a metric ton of people. That seems to be why they bail people out. They don’t want the job losses. And then once they get bailed out by the government, then guess what? You are 100%. I mean, not that they aren’t already, you know, but…

KASH PATEL: I think there’s one more layer to it. You’re right about the money, the employment, the employees, and the attention they get. The one more layer of it is, how does that all benefit the people in Washington, D.C.? Insider trading.

I mean, just look at Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading deals.

Insider Trading and Media Influence

KASH PATEL: It is insider trading. And she keeps making up hundreds of millions of dollars. So do dozens of other congressmen and women. So they know what’s going to happen. They’re writing the legislation. They’re doing the funding. And it’s the same thing for the media circuit. These people, not all of them, but for the most part, live and breathe to get on these TV shows. I could care less if I ever do media again. In fact, I’d probably be a much happier guy. These guys are begging to get on your show for three minutes here and four minutes there. They’re begging for relevance.

And they’re looking for any way they can get it. So if the government and those folks were to bail them out, well, they’d be on those programs on a daily basis. And they’d be on your TV, and they’d be a national figure. They wouldn’t do anything. They’d come up with the next corrupt plan to rob us of the truth and implement a system where we bend the knee to them.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think it shouldn’t have any government officials on?

KASH PATEL: No, I think they should just have people who care about questioning them neutrally. Again, not a Republican or Democrat thing. Like if someone goes out there and specifically lies about Russiagate, about impeachment, about insurrection, about the 51-Intel letter, call them out on it. But they keep having them on over and over and over and over again. Remember, illegal immigration. It was not a national security crisis for the first year of the Biden administration, for the second year of the Biden administration, for the third year of the Biden administration.

Now in the election year of the Biden administration, it’s a national security crisis, finally, where Donald Trump was a Nazi for dealing with it as a national security crisis. And that allowed us to implement assets and tools from DOD and the intel community specifically go after that crisis. But the media manufactured this disinformation campaign that nothing wrong at the border, nothing to see here. And now everyone knows that was a total hoax, a complete scam.

And people in Congress went on their shows to double down on that narrative to say, what a great job Joe Biden and the border czar Kamala Harris are doing. And now we have more fentanyl on the street, killing more kids than ever before in the US. We’ve got more rapists in our streets. We’ve got more murderers. We’ve got more heroin. We’ve got more cocaine. And we have more violent crimes. And what does Joe Biden go up and tell the world the other day from the Oval Office after he decided not to run for president? Border crossings are the lowest they’ve ever been in my presidency than ever before during Trump. And the media printed it.

SHAWN RYAN: I saw that. I did see that. But I mean, when I read that stuff, I like to think everybody knows that’s a lie. But I know, I know that there is — I know there’s a good portion of this country that will read whatever that print is and take it as gospel.

KASH PATEL: But that’s the power of your program. That’s the power of your show. You don’t have just the goobers in D.C. watch it, right? You’re so expansive from military to sports to entertainment to Hollywood to everyday Americans that are so fed up with that garbage that they’re actually getting educated. You know, that’s why you have the guests you have. And I think that’s part of the transformation process. And people always ask how you defeat the deep state. And I think you were asking earlier, I’m like, dude, it ain’t happening overnight. Even if Trump wins, it ain’t happening during his four years fully. They spent decades doing this. It’s going to take a few terms to clean up.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how do you get them out of government? How do you get the deep state out of government?

Strategies for Combating the Deep State

KASH PATEL: You deprive them of the opportunity to continue running the deep state, removing their security clearances. The other thing I recommended in my book and I recommend President Trump, too, was you need a 24-7 declassification office, whatever you want to call it, transparency, truth, whatever. I don’t care. Sits in the White House, reports directly to you, and you take incoming from the United States of America. I want JFK. I want the 9-11 files. I want this. I want that. All the FBI, and this is a tool, this is something we didn’t cover, what the deep state uses the most to cover up their corruption is an illegal application of the classification system.

Remember the lovebirds text from, this is a beauty, the lovebirds text from FBI, DOJ land, Russiagate, Strzok and Page were texting each other. They were running the Russiagate investigation against Trump. They were the head of the counterintelligence unit at the FBI, and they’re having an extramarital affair together. Can’t make this stuff up. They’re sending each other texts about how much they hate Trump and are going to create an insurance policy to stop Trump. Then we finally find those text messages, you know what the FBI and DOJ do for like a year? Redact them to congressional investigators and congressional men and women running the oversight of their agency. That’s just one example, but it gets even better.

Here’s the deep state full circle. Just last week, do you know what Strzok and Page received from the Department of Justice? A $1.5 million payout to settle a lawsuit that Strzok and Page brought for the improper disclosure of their personal text messages on FBI phones, and the DOJ just rewarded them. They broke the law. They broke the chain of command. They broke every regulation there is in the FBI. They weaponized the system of justice against the political target they hated. We found those text messages and we got them declassified finally in full when I became Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and the world has now seen them and they can read them.

That’s the best form of transparency. That’s why I want this 24-7 declassification office. Don’t have me regurgitate it to you. Read it. Get the documents, get the files, get the memos. But the deep state came full circle and gave these guys a payday for rigging a presidential election and breaking the law. So now you know what happens. That’s step one. Step two, get America the truth. And that’s what that office would be for.

SHAWN RYAN: If Trump gets in there, do you think anybody’s going to be held accountable?

KASH PATEL: Yeah. And here’s where-

SHAWN RYAN: I think the only way, I think the only way that the government ever gets confidence in the people again, and I don’t think they even give a shit, by the way, but is to hold somebody accountable, hold people accountable for what we’ve been seeing go on.

KASH PATEL: You’re totally right. The people that are running the deep state don’t give a shit because they’re so arrogant. They’re like, we’re never going to get caught. And if we get caught, we’re going to get rewarded like these guys. Like Andy McCabe, who the DOJ rewarded him with his pension after we caught him lying to the FBI investigators while he was the Deputy Director, leaking to the media improperly. He goes out, we fire him. He gets out of government, he brings a lawsuit, and the DOJ under Joe Biden reinstated his pension in full.

So how do you have accountability for stuff like that? Or a Comey or a Clapper or Brennan, we haven’t even talked about the intel side of stuff. My version of accountability is a little different than maybe what most people would think. I don’t have a hit list. I don’t have a revenge march I’m on. I want the-

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t have a hit list? I’ll give you one.

KASH PATEL: I’ll take it. I simply want the Constitution to be applied to everybody, singularly, in government and outside of government. That’s it.

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Accountability and Reform in Government

KASH PATEL: I want the judges to stop being political jackals on the bench and participate. We didn’t even talk about it, and participate in the deep state prosecutions that have weaponized justice. And what I want in terms of full accountability is I want the American people to have enough ammunition of the truth that they are the ones that enact the accountability in Washington, D.C. That is how you see a sea change. I know the people that, guys like me, may take self-fulfillment in seeing that guy or that girl go to prison for breaking the law, but that is not going to fix Washington, D.C.

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t think so. You don’t think that’s an important piece of the puzzle here is to hold these people accountable, prosecute them, imprison them, maybe more. It’s an example to everybody that’s coming after them. If you do this, we’re coming for you, and this is what’s going to happen.

KASH PATEL: I agree in full that it’s a big piece of it, but it won’t fix the next man up behind them unless you can combine that piece with educating America that this is going on writ large. Because you’re not going to get everybody, right? But if you get enough Americans in there to get Congress to do what they should be doing, like prosecuting Merrick Garland for breaking a congressional subpoena and violating the law, he can send Steve Bannon Pina Navarro to prison for violating a congressional subpoena, but he can do it on his own, right?

What I want is for people to get Congress to execute the authority they have on instances like this and have him held accountable there. And then I want the DOJ and FBI to be run by the Constitution. I want the intel communities to focus on our overseas threats and our border. I want all of these people that join the ranks of government to respond to the needs of the American people. It might sound pie in the sky, but if you want to fix the, if you want to fix it, fix it, I give you 50 things to do in here. But if the American people aren’t behind you, then you won’t have the accountability you really want.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, are any of the stuff that we’re seeing right now, the word treason is thrown out quite often. Is it actual treason?

KASH PATEL: For who? For…

SHAWN RYAN: Fill in the, fill in the, anything, any of the stuff that’s going on.

KASH PATEL: I mean, I think what so many of these guys did, whether it’s Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Barr, Haspel, Esper, what have you, I think there’s a lot of rule and lawbreaking. And I don’t know that it ever gets the level of treason singularly with any of them, but what you have is a buildup of so many actions by the deep state that it becomes borderline treasonous to allow those people and their activities in a collective fashion to ever be applied to the United States.

SHAWN RYAN: What is the definition of treason?

KASH PATEL: Man, it’s going to stump me here on the law of it, but it’s basically committing an overt act to overthrow your government is treason. So they’re not committing overt acts to overthrow our government. What they’re doing collectively is committing acts to rig our government and to stock it with people that they want in there, themselves and their acolytes.

SHAWN RYAN: What would be the harshest punishment you could see happening to some of these people?

KASH PATEL: Some of them being prosecuted. I mean, there’s nothing harsher than that, right? Your civil liberties are taken away from you and you’re sent to prison. It’s about as harsh as it gets. We can do the financials. I think we need to do parallel track civil suits and prosecutions for monetary purposes against some of the bigwigs in Wall Street and all that stuff that happens up in the financial racket.

Insider trading stuff. There needs to be a multitude of things done, but I think the biggest punishment…

SHAWN RYAN: What about stuff like the, what was it, 51 intelligence?

KASH PATEL: Yeah. Strip their security clearances forever. Remember, every one of these people in the private sector, and you know this, they use that to get seven and eight figure paydays, to get big government contracts, to go for big defense contracting and intelligence firms, right? Who owns their security clearance? The U.S. government. Who pays for it? The U.S. government. So the DNI can come in there on day one and said, X, X, X, X, all the way down the line. And they’re not the only ones.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that will happen if Trump gets in? That seems like a very easy task. Pull these clearances now. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen at a lower level within the agency. Pull that guy’s clearance.

KASH PATEL: Here’s the one. Look, Trump speaks for Trump. I’ve recommended that to him. I can tell you that publicly into your audience. I want him to do that because it’s justified. It’s not an act of vengeance. Because they have had the opportunity to recant, and all 51 of them have doubled down and tripled down. So pull him. I think he will. But it will be up to him and his DNI.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it is legitimately that simple, correct?

KASH PATEL: Yeah, not the amount of money we’ll save. And they’re not – they’re just one example of the 51, right? There’s everybody that participated at the FBI in Russiagate. Everybody that participated in FBI – excuse me, at DOJ in Russiagate. All these people have clearances. They all still have clearances. Gone. Same thing at CIA. Same thing at DOD. Same thing at NSA. I mean, the list will be massive. The 51 is just a very public-facing version of it.

SHAWN RYAN: What are some of the other ways we could get rid of them in your book?

KASH PATEL: I should know the short form of the book better. I’m failing on my chance to sell it. I think we’ve talked about, like, the bulk of the ones I want to – personnel. It’s the one thing we haven’t really discussed. Restocking. I don’t consider it restocking. Everybody keeps talking about who’s got the black books. You’ve got to go in and fill 4,000 jobs. Why? Who the hell said you have to have 4,000 people come in with you? Why can’t it be 1,000? No one’s ever given me a good answer for that, except that’s the way we do things. That’s the way we do transitions. That’s the way the deep state works. Okay, well, that’s not really a good answer.

And then if you decrease the amount of people in the cog, you preempt the wheel, the whole, like, wheel of government. Instead of having 67 people that can say no and don’t want to follow your lawful command, you just have a chain of command that goes from point to point. Right? So I think you need way less people. You don’t need this massive number. I think that is a fiction of the deep state. Not to mention, again, you save money.

Then you need to do a whole bunch of things with personnel. For, like, instance, at FBI, you need to stock it with a director, deputy director, and the heads of the separate divisions. Same thing at CIA and DOD that are going to support. And the media, again, is distorting it already. Trump’s going to install loyalists. Kash Patel is the Trump loyalist. What does that even mean? Like, if the guy gives me a lawful chain of command authority, you want me to not execute it? That’s unlawful if I violate it. He was the president. If he’s the president again, the same thing should apply.

So then we need to decrease what I call government creep with personnel. The FBI’s footprint has gotten so freaking big, and the biggest problem the FBI has had — has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it. I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here? Looking for the next government promotion. Looking for the next fancy government title. Looking for their parachute out of government.

So while you’re bringing in the right people, you also have to shrink government.

SHAWN RYAN: So massive government reform.

KASH PATEL: Yeah. And you’ve got to work with Congress to eliminate the billets. This is one of the things we did when I was deputy DNI. We got to DNI, and I was like, okay, what do all these people do? Well, we’ve got the CIA, so why do I have analysts doing the CIA’s job here? Why do I have a floor of them? Like, give me a good answer. I don’t know everything. I don’t know a lot. But if you can give me an answer that satisfies their existence, I’m all in. Well, we just have our own people.

Government Reform and FISA

KASH PATEL: Okay. Well, now we don’t. And we went to Congress and zeroed out a bunch of billets. And they hated us for it.

SHAWN RYAN: Why? Why would Congress hate you for that?

KASH PATEL: Not Congress, the public. Congress is like, great, you saved us money. You’re the only agency that returned money this year because we didn’t spend our entire budget. We were literally funding seats with no humans in them for years. And what the government creep that I was talking about is these agencies go to Congress every year. And, again, that’s why it’s a thing of decades. I need five more seats here. I need ten more seats here. Okay, you keep doing that. How’s that going? Oh, we’ll fill that seat next year.

We’re in the process of, you know, interviewing people for that section. And that keeps – no one returns money. It’s the biggest fiction in government that you can’t return money. Every agency and department that I’ve ever worked for, when it comes to the fiscal end of the year, they’re like, go on trips. Go spend money. What? Just give it back to Congress. We can’t do that.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s talk about FISA.

KASH PATEL: Oh, boy. I might have to go to the bar.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, it’s just a short distance from the chair. So, if you need that, let me know.

SHAWN RYAN: Can you go – what is FISA, for those that don’t know? Just super simple, right?

KASH PATEL: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA. And the FISA court, the fifth, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s funny because the first word that comes into my mind is domestic.

KASH PATEL: Right. And that’s a whole other deal with it. So, there was a passage of legislation that its original purpose was there’s a lot of bad actors overseas, namely terrorists, who want to do Americans harm. We need a better way to find out who they are. And electronic surveillance, ELSER as we call it, is a great way of doing it through people’s phones, through people’s computers, through people’s laptops, through people’s internet cafes, signals, whatever, right? But the American government didn’t have an ability to just go and, like, plug in here and get all that. So, we created a law that allows us to go to a special court to say if you, the target of the FISA, is one of two things, an agent of a foreign power or acting at the behest of an agent of a foreign power, you can be targeted under FISA.

And the probable cause standard is the exact same as it was if we were trying to get a warrant on a bank robber. It’s the same standard in terms of the level of evidence. But you go before this court, and you’re supposed to show all this information to say, look at the operation they’re running, and if they’re an American citizen, like Carter Page was during the Russiagate FISA, you’re supposed to do more to justify that surveillance because it’s so intrusive on an American citizen. But once you get a FISA – and I use this all the time to manhunt terrorists around the world – once you get a FISA, you basically just hoover in all this intel, all this data.

And on paper, and in theory, it sounds like a good idea. I mean we use the FISA process to stop bombings in America. You would think that’s a good thing. The problem is the people, given the FISA authorities in the deep state at the leadership levels, they’re the ones that abused it. They’re the ones that broke the law and corrupted it, and they’re the reason we have such a revolt in this country against FISA.

You talk about domestic terrorism or domestic surveillance. These guys took that process during Russiagate and targeted an American citizen to get into a president’s campaign of all American citizens. Not only that, there’s another application of FISA called 702. It doesn’t matter all the logistics of it. It’s just another vector into how we collect certain data on emails and email hops and phones of overseas people. We’re not supposed to use it here in the United States of America. Chris Wray was caught last year illegally using 702 collection methods against Americans 274,000 times. 274,000 times. It’s not my number. It’s in the report that they wrote. The FISA court wrote it.

And then the FISA court, and there was this big fight about 702 reauthorization. I know it might not be appealing to your audience, but it was a big fight this year to say, we want FISA reform. And FISA did need reform. We exposed it, and we gave you a bunch of reforms during Russiagate, and it never got implemented. So because the budget of FISA was up this cycle, we demanded Congress fix it. And do you know what the majority in the House, where the Republicans did? And they bent the knee. They re-offed it.

SHAWN RYAN: Why? Why?

KASH PATEL: I don’t know. Ask them. And they said, oh, no, we’re just doing it for another year. We’re just going to kick the can down the road. I’m like, okay, so the other year you’re doing it for is an election year. We showed you how they abused FISA once already. And then now you know about Chris Wray and all these other FISA abuses. But you trust the director of the FBI, this guy Chris Wray, who went before you and said, no, no, don’t worry. We fixed everything. We’re good. And they gave him more spy powers? I can’t answer that one. And I couldn’t get on board with that legislative fix.

SHAWN RYAN: Did they use that to surveil you?

KASH PATEL: They used, as far as I know, remember, we’re still in the process of suing them. I don’t know that they used the FISA against me, but they used all the other grand jury and federal investigatory subpoenas to surveil me.

SHAWN RYAN: And so how does that work? Do they just tap your phone? Do they talk to Google and Facebook?

KASH PATEL: Yeah, the mechanics of it. Right. That’s a great question. So the mechanics of it, the government doesn’t own the private sector. They don’t own Apple. They don’t own Google. They don’t own Verizon. They don’t own Sprint. Right. So they got to get cooperation from these agencies and from these, excuse me, private companies. Look, it’s just like if you were, we call it a T3, a Title III warrant. It’s a wiretap. If you were in the mafia and you were a federal prosecutor hunting down the mob, you would go to a federal judge and say, I need to tap this guy’s phone line. But that guy’s phone line is owned by Verizon or Bell Pacific or whatever, right?

So once you get the warrant, then you go to the company and the company complies with a federal court order to give you the information. And then what the government does most of the time is they go to the company and say, you’re not allowed to tell the target of the investigation that you’re giving us this information. Hence the Google thing with me. Google was ordered not to tell them about me. But five years later, they could.

[Section about phone gift removed]

SHAWN RYAN: That’s the sad part, right?

KASH PATEL: Yeah. I love… Eric’s his friend. One of the most creative minds I know. That he has to do that. As an American. Yeah. That I have to write a book called Government Gangsters. That Steve Bannon has to make into a movie. Just to explain to America that the mob in government is worse than the mob that Whitey Bulger ran. That we have to explain there’s a deep state. That we have to do that instead of having you, me, and all our friends go do the jobs they signed up for. In 2024 America. That’s the problem.

SHAWN RYAN: Did FISA come through through the Patriot Act?

KASH PATEL: It came before the Patriot Act. It’s been around since, like, the 70s. And the Patriot Act gave FISA a bunch more… Bolted on a bunch more tools. Because technology advanced, cell phones advanced, computers advanced, Wi-Fi advanced. So they have to add that stuff in.

SHAWN RYAN: Would you like to see that go away?

KASH PATEL: No. See, I’m in the minority here. No.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s got to be tough, right? I mean, the border’s been wide open for who knows how long. Who knows? I mean, who knows how many terrorists have run through, cartel members have run through?

KASH PATEL: Well, if we believe the FBI director, only 24.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Right. The FBI director. The FBI in general.

KASH PATEL: DHS, same thing. 24.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re literally saying only 24.

KASH PATEL: So the Mayorkas and Ray testified late last year or early this year. I can’t remember, Congress, for an update. And they said, 24 known foreign terrorists have come into America and we lost them. And I was like, wait a second, there’s multiple problems with this statement. Just 24? And you lost them? Like, where are they? Yeah. Which, why weren’t you using the FISA process on these guys? Everybody’s wired up these days, okay?

That’s, I mean, you know this better than anyone. Al Qaeda, ISIS, all these guys, they monopolized the cell phone empire and figured out how to use it. So why don’t you set your intelligence apparatus to prioritize this instead of DEI and white rakes? This is why this stuff’s happening. But just think of what you guys, you know this. The terrorists are going to wait. They’re not going to do it tomorrow or next week. They’ll wait like five years. Whenever they want the opportune time. But it’s happening now. And as bad as that is, I still think we need FISA to manhunt those people down. We just need people using it lawfully. And it needs major, major reform.

SHAWN RYAN: And I don’t, I don’t, I hate to say it, but I don’t disagree with you. I mean, especially with all the, with all the terrorism that’s come through the border. I mean, it’s, we won’t know. And we’re having this conversation, you know, breakfast about when they might hit. And I think we maybe have a difference of opinion on that stuff or, or different strategies, which I’d love to go into. But, but how do you get rid of it with the amount of cartel and, terrorists and, members of the Chinese state?

KASH PATEL: You raise a whole new, we’re not just using FISA on terrorists. It’s a huge foreign intelligence surveillance act. It is a massive intelligence collection tool, right?

Foreign Threats and National Security

KASH PATEL: How do we get the CCP? What about the SVR? You know, what about whatever intel service in wherever that’s against America? If it goes away, what are we going to do?

SHAWN RYAN: And if it doesn’t go away, then they’ll just continue to spy on Americans unlawfully. What do you think some of the, what do you think some of the biggest threats outside of the country are?

KASH PATEL: CCP, Russia, and Al Qaeda.

SHAWN RYAN: Why Al Qaeda?

KASH PATEL: Because they’re having a party in Afghanistan. Because of the disastrous withdrawal. I ran the withdrawal in Afghanistan when we became chief of staff with a SECDF. We didn’t have a timeline. We didn’t say we got to be out by this date. We had the, the diplomatic leaders doing the diplomatic thing. We were doing the DOD military intel thing. We lost zero Americans during our withdrawal. We handed that withdrawal off to the Biden administration because President Trump ordered us to implement the biggest DOD transition in U.S. history. And we did. The largest DOD transition, which I literally let. And I said, call it whatever you want. The Biden saving Afghanistan for the world thing. Whatever. The new incoming SECDF, the chief of staff, and all the other people were like, F you. Go away. We’re going to do it our way. And look what happened.

So because we left all that weaponry there, because our withdrawal was such a disaster, Afghanistan is the perfect example of not only our biggest failed mission set, but of our three adversaries. I got to add a fourth, Iran. Our three adversaries coming together. So Al Qaeda’s got weaponry. Russia and China went in there to mine the minerals and give them money. So now they’re all just hanging out, making money, doing stuff. And that’s the CCP and Russia. And they’re combining forces there. But Russia and the CCP are doing so much more adversarial intelligence collections against us, against our electric grids and other things. But the biggest holistic CT threat is Iran.

SHAWN RYAN: You mentioned – you just mentioned that China and Russia are in Afghanistan mining the minerals. Do you want to elaborate on what minerals they’re mining?

KASH PATEL: I’m not the minerals expert, actually.

SHAWN RYAN: Lithium, correct?

KASH PATEL: Lithium and cobalt, I thought it was.

SHAWN RYAN: Was it just – why would they be mining lithium?

KASH PATEL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

KASH PATEL: Because they want to give Elon Musk a lot of electric batteries.

SHAWN RYAN: So where I’m going with this is, yes, I’m aware of that as well. They’re mining a ton of lithium. We have this big green initiative in the country. We want to go green. But we don’t want to produce any of our own – they sell it as self-sufficiency, correct?

KASH PATEL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Self-sufficient energy. But it’s not self-sufficient energy because we’re getting all the batteries, all the solar panels, all the wind turbines, pretty much everything it takes to have green energy from China. They’re mining the minerals. They need to do that from Afghanistan, which we turned over and gave to them. So we spoke a little bit about the power grid and how vulnerable it is at breakfast. So I want to dive into that, but just kicking it off when it comes to the power grid, we’re not going to be self-sufficient, and we’re going to be extremely vulnerable because literally all of the materials that we use for the new power grid come from China.

KASH PATEL: Yeah, 100%. Look, it’s the modern-day blood diamond, lithium and cobalt. Call it what it is. You could celebrate it over here as some sort of green energy, amazing economic, environmental home run. But like you said, how are you getting out of Afghanistan? You think these camps and mines these people run are above board? The people in there working them are getting paid good wages? What about the folks in CAR in Central African Republic and Congo doing the same thing? How’s their life? It’s the modern-day blood diamond.

And the ironic thing of it all is if you ran a Ford pickup truck for 20 years, it does less damage to the environment than the creation and removal at the end of a car cycle’s life of an electric battery. That’s the reality of the economics on an environmental scale. But like you said, we’re the fools. We’re buying it from the CCP. We’re buying it from these places in Central Africa. We’re buying it from people who have all ties to al-Qaeda and whatever version of offshoot they have. And while the CCP is making a ton of money, we’re getting weaker. We’re just getting bamboozled by our adversary who’s making money off this entire process and the people around them that are participating are growing in strength.

And I think the best example to pull it out of just the lithium space a little bit but bring it back on what I should have said in the top of the cycle is Iran is, in my opinion, the biggest kinetic threat. And they’re doing the same thing, except they’re not mining for lithium. We’re just giving them money. What do I mean by that? Joe Biden literally unfroze $7 billion that we had seized from the Iranian government like 25 years ago and gave it back to them, to the mullahs in Iran. He literally turned the key and said, OK, you guys can have this money back. We’re going to trust you, Iran, not to create a nuclear weapon, not to fund the IRGC, not to kill Americans, not to launch another war in Israel via Hamas, Hezbollah. And you guys just report to us how the nuke stuff is going, because remember, these are the guys that want it back in the JCPOA, Obama’s nuclear deal.

How’s that looking today? The secretary of state for Joe Biden just said he can’t tell you how close Iran is to a nuclear weapon, but he thinks they’re pretty close. You let them do that. You know who they’re buying their weaponry and stuff from? China, Russia, Venezuela, oil. And now they’re exporting their crude overseas, and people are buying that. Now they have access to the international banking system, which we froze off. I mean, Trump’s sanctions program on Iran, just for example, was dominating. It was suffocating. And there was a reason for that, because they would not play ball on terms of shutting down their nuclear program. And now they have nuclear fissile material enough to sustain a bomb. And the Biden administration has given them free reign.

So now the biggest threat, kinetically, is armed with money and weaponry, and they’re combining forces with Russia and the CCP, who would all probably normally be battling against each other a little bit. But they’ve basically sidelined that to say, we are the same enemy, the USA. We need your INSO. We need your weaponry. We need your finances. And we’ll help you Iran in the process because you hate America. And you’ll do the most outward-leaning kinetic operations. To wit, the October 7th invasion of Israel.

Vulnerabilities in the U.S. Power Grid

SHAWN RYAN: How vulnerable is our power grid?

KASH PATEL: It’s probably the most vulnerable thing we have. And people just don’t pay attention to it because, I don’t know, because it’s not sexy or cool to talk about or cool to work on, but our power grids are like 60, 70 years old.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s going to be cool when the lights don’t go out.

KASH PATEL: Exactly. And people are like, you know, that just happens in that movie Die Hard or something, Die Hard 4, whatever it was. I’m like, no. I mean, it’s, one, not that hard to shut off a power grid through a cyber attack. And once you get it down, to get it back online, I mean, just think of it. I don’t want to get into the numbers. There’s not a lot of these things that control the electricity supply to the country.

For people who don’t know what a power grid is, it’s literally just like a switch that says, you’ve got electricity over here. We’re going to take it in and give it to you over there. Right? And it’s just a relay system. And we haven’t upgraded those in forever. And I’m not talking just physical infrastructure. I’m talking how do we protect it from cyber attacks from the CCP, from Russia and Iran and other bad actors. And we don’t really have a focus here because that’s an intel directive.

And to pull back on it, the NIPF, the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, is a president’s rack and stack of what they want the intel community to focus on. Tier 1, 2, 3, 4. For us in the Trump administration, it was terrorism, hostages, the never-ending wars, Iran, the CCP, Russia. Boom, Tier 1. And the DNI with the president changes that based on what he wants. And then the intel community says, okay, CIA, you’ve got – and I’m making up numbers. You’ve got 5,000 people on this. This is your Tier 1 for 5,000 people. Go. Same thing, NSA, DOD, FBI, given their specific lines of effort.

The NIPF now, it reads like a children’s playbook. Tier 1, DEI. You know, Tier 1, diversity, equity, and inclusion for every agency and department. Tier 1, LGBTQ stuff. Tier 1, you know, white rage. And the people doing the work can’t collect the intel that you need to secure this nation against things like electric grids because they’re not allowed to look there.

SHAWN RYAN: How vulnerable is it to outside attacks?

KASH PATEL: Big. Big. It’s big because once they hit it, we can’t fix it fast. Look, we just saw Paris during the Olympics just got blacked out. Ain’t a coincidence after the opening ceremonies. And we – again, I think President Trump has talked about this. You need to overhaul the infrastructure around these systems to safeguard us from the – what I view as one of the easier threats our adversaries can deploy against America.

And it’s also – those are harder to trace too. So that’s the other thing. The sourcing would be much harder on that than, say, a kinetic operation like a 9-11-style attack.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, is there any contingency plans up at the top on if that were to happen?

KASH PATEL: So there’s a thing called coop-cog capabilities like continuity of government, and everybody’s heard about locations around America, can’t really talk about. But there’s a continuity plan for government to keep going and for enough personnel to be around to make sure we can do all those things and supposedly defend the nation and have the commander-in-chief and his cabinet secure and do all that. But there’s no contingency plan to say if you wipe out the electricity west of the Mississippi, how are we going to turn it on? It doesn’t exist.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, that’s great that government’s still going to function, but –

KASH PATEL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: But I guess what I’m getting at is if the grid goes down, we’ll eventually just kill ourselves out of desperation. There will be no food. There will be no water. There will be no medical. There will be no communication. There will be no nothing.

KASH PATEL: Yeah, I guess it will be like one of those end-of-the-world shows.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, is that – did they talk about this up there at that level? Do they even understand what will happen if the grid goes down for a –

KASH PATEL: I know we did when we were in. I know we did. And again, this is a type of lift that you’re not fixing overnight. You got to get Congress’s buy-in to budget this, to allow the agencies and department to go in and make this a priority, to allow companies to come in and rebuild the infrastructure and fix it. Same with our nuclear programs and our nuclear arsenal.

National Security and Future Threats

SHAWN RYAN: So we’re fucked.

KASH PATEL: I think we have an ability – that’s why I think this election is so important, not just for everything we’ve talked about to this point, but in terms of national security and defense, which is sort of my wheelhouse. We have an opportunity to come in and reprioritize all the things that you and I have just been talking about so that the American people are safeguarded because they’ve been neglected for too long because these are not been priorities of the current administration and some of the previous administrations.

SHAWN RYAN: How likely is that method of attack, do you think, from Russia, Iran, Korea, China?

KASH PATEL: Something’s going to happen. It’s not already. Here’s the other thing. The intel community right now is playing catch-up on half these attacks because, again, it wasn’t a priority to preemptively detect them and thwart the attack. And so not only are you playing catch-up, not only is it a deprioritization of intelligence collection and enforcement, you also don’t have a will in D.C. to fix and upgrade any of this stuff. So they’re going to – I’ve always said they’re going to come at us in some fashion during this election cycle. I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like or if we’re going to know right away.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think about what I was telling you this morning about the pristine opportunity to hit us — when I was talking about I don’t think – I wasn’t saying I don’t – it’s not a prediction. It’s what I would do. And it seems to me we would be – let’s say Trump gets in. day one of his – day one of his presidency would be the weakest possible point that they could hit us. Yeah. Correct? Because from that point forward, the way I think, the country will begin to strengthen. So it would be at the weakest point on day one of his presidency. And so if I was them, I would wait until he is elected and hit on day one. Whereas if they don’t hit and Kamala or whoever they decide to stick in there, I don’t – who knows, right? Then we’ll see four more years of weakening, which will enhance the probability of them coming out on top.

KASH PATEL: Look, I think that analysis is pretty spot on in terms of timeliness for our adversaries to decide on when’s the most opportune time for them to strike. I think there’s one other factor that we talked about at breakfast that may alter that a little bit, which is there’s so much bad stuff going on right now that our adversaries have collectively kicked off against us, whether it’s the border, whether it’s the never-ending war in Ukraine, whether it’s the war in Israel, whether it’s the CCP and what they’re doing or going to do in Taiwan, whatever’s going on in Africa, whether it’s Afghanistan and its resurgence of al-Qaeda. There’s so many things going on, and I think an adversary that traditionally might have waited to that opportune day might come in in the interim and say, these guys have no idea how to defend what we can put out there right now. So maybe they go now. Maybe they go in the interim in the next hundred and whatever it is, four days or something like that.

But they’re going to – they’ve already done two things that – three things that nobody said would ever happen. Started two new world wars in Ukraine and Israel and allowed China and the CCP to flex their muscles on Taiwan. Everybody’s like, that’s never going to happen. Well, it didn’t happen under Trump. It all happened now. And we haven’t even talked about DPRK, their new program, their rockets. That guy has been having a party this entire time. Or Venezuela, right? People forget about how bad some of these regimes are for global stability when they’re not in the news every day. And I think that’s advantageous for their leadership, and they see it. And they’re like, all right, well, let’s figure this out. Because at the end of the day, all they care about is themselves.

SHAWN RYAN: How vulnerable are we to cyber threats?

KASH PATEL: Big time.

SHAWN RYAN: What are the other vulnerabilities?

KASH PATEL: From our adversaries specifically?

SHAWN RYAN: Yes.

KASH PATEL: We talked about everything coming in from the border, huge collective threat. That’s just going to keep growing and metastasizing. And that includes a lot more of the physical stuff, right? The crime, the fentanyl, the narco-trafficking, the sex smuggling, that kind of stuff. The cyber stuff is in a different lane, but could expose us just as much, if not worse. And I think we’re very, very, very vulnerable to that. Just look at what CrowdStrike did. Shut down. That’s an American company run by James Comey’s buddy.

SHAWN RYAN: Is it really?

KASH PATEL: Yeah. James Comey’s former number two is Sean Henry, the COO, whatever it is. And if this company can get as big as it did, mind you, this is the same company, CrowdStrike, that the FBI, when Donald Trump was getting to the presidency and James Comey was the director. Remember the whole DNC hack from Russia, another disinformation campaign that said the Russians hacked the DNC to try to rig the election for Donald Trump? Comey gave the servers from the DNC to CrowdStrike to exploit. Have you ever heard of a time that the FBI surrendered its investigation to a private entity and didn’t conduct its own surveillance and exploitation of that data? I interrogated Sean Henry and 65 other people in a row during Russiagate, and we were unable to declassify his testimony for years. So the narrative of the DNC was attacked by Russia was out there. What did Sean Henry say? Now it’s declassified?

We didn’t find any evidence to support that. So – and you’ve got to stitch these things together. So when you’re talking about vulnerabilities at the cyber level, who knows what other traditional areas of expertise that the government has that they’ve outsourced, right? What do they give Facebook? What do they give Google? What do they give Twitter? I mean we haven’t even talked about censorship, and we know that is just a dominant plague in modern-day media.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

KASH PATEL: And we’re paying them to do it. So you’ve got to go out there and find – hopefully if Trump wins, all of these – this is another thing. Find all these contracts that we’ve given to all these companies and pull them. Why are you making money off of your corrupt activities because your friends from government then went to work at Twitter, and then you got in bed with them and said, oh, we’re going to have an election integrity task force?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah. Well, Kash, I could – this interview could go on for hours.

KASH PATEL: Sorry.

Closing Thoughts and Future Expectations

SHAWN RYAN: We’ve got about five minutes before you’ve got to – we’ve got to catch a flight. So I just want to ask you – you’re close to Trump. And if he does get in there and win the presidency, what do you think we can expect improvement-wise in the next four years?

KASH PATEL: I think my opinion is – you almost don’t need to hear from me. I don’t know another candidate that’s put his agenda out there more in detailed, delineated fashion than Trump. His agenda 47, his RNC platform, it’s there in black and white, and it’s in super detail about what he’s going to prioritize. National security, defense, law enforcement, intelligence, the border, the never-ending wars, American hostages, economy, infrastructure, cyber and electric. I mean it’s all out there.

So I think people always talk about what’s he going to do on day one. Obviously illegal immigrants and all that. Hopefully he does it all right away because I think that’s the urgency that we need it. It will take time to implement, but hopefully he comes in and says, okay, here’s my agenda. And I think that’s what most presidents do. They’re like, here’s my agenda. Go. You go do what you do at AG. You go do what you do at DOD. You go do what you do at FBI. We’re going to do what we do at the White House. And everybody’s going 24-7. I think it would be a pretty quick fix for a lot of it. Some of it’s going to take time. But I do think he’ll end the forever wars super fast. I do think he’ll shut down the border super fast. I do think he’ll expel immigrants super fast. And I do think that will give the economy a big boost as a collateral result.

SHAWN RYAN: That would be great to see. If you had three recommendations for the show, who would they be?

KASH PATEL: To put on?

SHAWN RYAN: To put on.

KASH PATEL: Oh, man. Well, we talked about the whistleblowers. I think you’ve got to have them on.

SHAWN RYAN: You have the whistleblowers?

KASH PATEL: Yeah. I think collectively you have those guys on. And I know them personally, so I might be a little biased. That’ll be fun. Two. Well, I know the one guy you should definitely have on. Trump. Well. You know, maybe he’s two and three.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re the guy that can get that done. We’ve hit him from every angle I can possibly think of and have not had much luck.

KASH PATEL: Well, we’ll get that. We’ll put that in motion. And maybe Don Jr. I think that would be a fun one, too. But I think it’s a, you know, I appreciate what you do because I don’t know that people know how much time and effort goes into doing what you do. It’s a freaking massive lift, massive lift. And the reach you have, I know you see it, but I see it when I’m out there traveling every other day for the job. And it’s pretty widespread, man. I mean, you are, you’re out there. So I’m going to promise you that I will try my best to get Trump and you to sit down and have a chat in the near future.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I would love that.

KASH PATEL: And I need everybody to make Government Gangsters the number one film in America. Sorry, I had to put that selfish plug in there.

SHAWN RYAN: No sweat. Your book, your movie will all be linked in below and your foundation. Kash, I know you got to run. I just want to say thank you for coming in. It means the world to me and I hope to have you on again.

KASH PATEL: I’d love to do that. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it.

SHAWN RYAN: Thanks so much, man.

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