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Home » Transcript: Reporter Seth Harp’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

Transcript: Reporter Seth Harp’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

Read the full transcript of veteran investigative reporter and author Seth Harp’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show on “the Murder & Drug Trafficking Taking Place Inside America’s Largest Military Base”, premiered on August 15, 2025.

The Genesis of the Investigation

TUCKER CARLSON: So you got out of the military in 2011. This is how I understand the genesis of the book that comes out today, “The Fort Bragg Cartel.” You get out in 2011, you’re a reporter. At some point, you start to understand that there are a lot of deaths at Fort Bragg, which is America’s biggest Army base, home of the Special Forces, and you start to investigate those deaths.

SETH HARP: That’s right. I first read about a double homicide on Fort Bragg that took place at the tail end of 2020. Just an ordinary article in the New York Times that said that these two veteran Special operations soldiers, Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, have been found murdered on a remote training range at Fort Bragg.

They’d both been shot to death, and their bodies had been dumped in the wood. I also read that Billy Levine was a Delta Force operator. And in all my time reporting on the military, working as a war reporter, and then before that serving in the army myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force operator being in the news for any reason, because it’s the most secretive and elite unit in the entire military.

And the police were saying that this was believed to be a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong. And so I knew that there had to be more to the story because, you know, you can imagine if, like, let’s say a CIA agent was found shot to death and dumped in a park in Maryland or something like that, and the police were saying it was a drug deal. I mean, that’s the level of secrecy, and that’s how elite Delta Force is as a military.

Understanding Delta Force

TUCKER CARLSON: What is Delta Force?

SETH HARP: Delta Force is what’s called a Special Mission unit. It is an army unit. It’s part of what’s called the Joint Special Operations Command. It was created in the late 1970s to be an elite counterterrorism force for things like hostage rescue.

For many years, they were obsessed with the problem or the danger of loose nuclear weapons and drilled constantly for scenarios in which they would be called upon to secure a loose nuclear weapon. This is all pre-9/11.

After 2001, after the war started in Iraq and Afghanistan, Delta Force grew quite a bit and came to have a much more prominent role in US Military operations. And what they primarily specialize in are clandestine operations, covert operations, or what we might call black operations. That’s Delta Force, and it’s headquartered at Fort Bragg.

TUCKER CARLSON: They get no publicity.

SETH HARP: None. I actually looked into this when I was writing the book to see if they had ever been talked about in the 20 years that the US had been at war since 2001. And I found that, in fact, they were talked about in the context of the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal and had been implicated in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Other than that, for 20 years, they kept their name completely out of the news.

The Culture of Secrecy

TUCKER CARLSON: So there are other units, famously, that have worked with Hollywood filmmakers a lot, whose members retire and go on talk shows, including this one. And, you know, you sort of know quite a bit about the SEALs, for example, the various SEAL teams and their training, etc. But has there ever been a Delta operator in public talking about the training or the missions or anything like that?

SETH HARP: There are former Delta Force officers who I’ve seen occasionally talk on TV. But as far as the regular enlisted guys go, their culture really is… You know, the saying that they have that I’ve heard repeated is that, you know, “SEALs write books, Delta guys write history,” something to that effect. It’s very much part of their culture not to come on TV shows and not to talk and not to write books.

TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting. Thereby increasing the mystique. And I think the assumption that we all have is that because they’re the most secretive, they are the most impressive.

SETH HARP: They’re very impressive in certain ways. The level of physical fitness that you have to have to be selected to be an operator is very, very impressive. Marksmanship, you know, other skills that they have. Very tough, tough people, for the most part. But I, as I talk about extensively in the book, the unit has, I think, declined in recent years in terms of its culture.

The Murder Mystery at the Heart of Fort Bragg

TUCKER CARLSON: So let’s begin with the story of the Delta operator, Billy Levine, and the man with whom he was found dead. Who killed them and why?

SETH HARP: That’s the question that animates this book from the beginning to the end. I mean, although I talk a lot about military history, I talk a lot about foreign policy, really, it’s a murder mystery. This book is at its heart. And the question is, who killed those two guys? And the fact is that there are many, many possible suspects. And that kind of is what made it such a rich topic for exploration.

It turns out that Billy Levine, 18 months before he himself was found murdered, had killed a guy at his house in Fayetteville. In fact, he had shot and killed his best friend and fellow Green Beret, a guy named Mark Leshikar, right in front of his… Mark Leshikar’s daughter, who was about 6 years old at the time.

And the police, the local police, the sheriff’s department, the district Attorney of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and the US Army Criminal Investigation Investigations Division completely covered up that murder, and I use that word “covered up” advisedly.