[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “I don't think it's a coincidence that a month ago, 6 billion goes to Iran. And now their number one ally against the United States of America, writ large, Hamas, is doing a coordinated strike to America's number one ally, Israel.”
Kash Patel has previously served as Department of Defense chief of staff and is also a former terrorism prosecutor. We discuss his take on the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel as well as his new book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”
In this deep dive, Mr. Patel explains his realizations about “the deep state,” how it functions, and possible strategies to deal with it.
"The Defense–Industrial Complex, as President Eisenhower warned us 60 years ago, is the biggest behemoth in and around the swamp. I think it's worse than every lobbyist group combined,” Mr. Patel said.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/kash-patel-on-the-israel-hamas-war-the-defense-industrial-complex-and-strategies-to-curb-the-deep-state-5509088
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Kash Patel, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Kash Patel: This is awesome and I'm so thrilled to be back. I'm reminded of our fun times on Kash's Corner, so I'm looking forward to this.
Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. We're going to talk about your new book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy. First, I want to get into what's happening in Israel right now. Israel has declared war. Essentially, they were invaded by sea, by air, by land, and there were towns occupied by Hamas.
Mr. Patel: From a military standpoint, the planning, preparation, and operational preparation of the environment for an attack like this isn't a one-off. It's not a splinter group saying, "We're going to fire a couple of rockets from this location and do some damage and then we'll get some headlines." This was an air, land, and sea invasion through various vectors originating from Hamas and Hamas-funded groups as a coordinated strike plan into Israeli territories. That doesn't happen in a week. That is a lot of planning, but more importantly, that takes a ton of money.
Hamas is a Foreign Terrorist Organization [FTO] under United States law. What does that mean? They're fully sanctioned, which means they can't bank with U.S. companies, they can't do business with U.S. allies, and their access to money is sharply cut off throughout the rest of the world. We do the same thing with Iran, because the Iranian Quds Force and the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are all FTOs. A lot of other countries have sought the same recognition of Hamas. Where do they get their money? You're not talking a million dollars, you're talking hundreds of millions of dollars to mobilize this kind of effort.
Mr. Jekielek: You were very critical of this recent decision to release $6 billion back to Iran.
Mr. Patel: It was probably personal, because I was involved in hostage affairs for President Trump. I always lead with this—bringing home Americans is a great thing. It is good every time you bring one home who has been detained or held unlawfully overseas, especially by America's enemies or terrorist organizations. But you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. There are more hostages out there, and there are going to be more hostages in the future. You have to ask, “Did we harm America's ability to get those folks back, just for a headline? Did we harm future hostage-taking matters by going to our number one enemy on planet earth?”
In terms of economics, we talk about Russia and China, but when we talk about sheer terrorism, it's Iran. Like Hamas, Iran is cut off from the world funding line. They are literally funded by flying in pallets of cash to continue to operate their economy and keep their currency afloat. What happened here that I thoroughly disagreed with is that the Biden administration gave Iran $6 billion, and we got some hostages back.
Then the Biden administration lied to the world. They said, "We are going to dictate how that money is spent, and we've told them it's going to be on humanitarian affairs." Don't listen to me countering that headline. The day after the money transfer, the president of Iran, who works for the Ayatollah, said, "Iran will spend this money however we please."
Speaker 3: What is your expectation of its use? We're told that it's for humanitarian purposes, food, and medicine. Do you believe you have the right to use that money in any way that you see fit?
Speaker 4: This money belongs to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and naturally, we will decide, the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide to spend it wherever we need it.
Speaker 3: So if I hear you clearly that it will be used for more than humanitarian purposes in your view.
Speaker 4: Humanitarian means whatever the Iranian people need. So this money will be budgeted for those needs, and the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government.
Mr. Patel: They're right. There's no mechanism for the United States to control this. This $6 billion specifically came from Korean banking institutions. It was frozen for a long, long, time under all these sanctions against Iran. They released that money to the Middle East, but the Middle East is not going to be the referee.
They're not going to say, "Okay. Here's $10 million for the food bank program. Here's $50 million for the homeless." Is the U. S. going to police the use of that money in Iran where we're not allowed, where we have no access to the intelligence infrastructure, banking infrastructure, or SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications] system?
Of course, they are going to spend the money as they see fit. It's not a coincidence that a month ago, $6 billion went to Iran, and now their number one ally against the United States of America, Hamas, is doing a coordinated strike on America's number one ally, Israel. I talk about it in the book. There are no coincidences in government. At this level, there definitely are not, and I'll always stick by that.
Mr. Jekielek: You did mention the declaration of war by the Israeli defense minister. Why does that change the equation in your mind?
Mr. Patel: As you know in America, it takes an act of Congress to declare war. The president can't go out and declare war. It's not exactly the same in Israel. There, the authority that arises when you declare war gives the premier vastly expanded executive authority to conduct that war. That's his job.
It's just like it would be here. If America formally declared war, the authority given to the Commander-in-Chief is massive. The options he has become exponential, not just with money, but also with equipment, with manpower, and how we operate with our allies.
Israel is saying, "We're at war." They're probably going to look West next and say, "Europe, are you with us? America, are you with us? If so, how are you with us?" This is probably going to be the most difficult national security issue the Biden administration has dealt with to date. Of course, they will need to say, "We support Israel." The Israelis have a large hangover from how the previous Trump administration treated them. We had a very public, very global partnership with Israel.
Let's not forget the Middle Eastern peace accords. Those have been completely lit on fire by this one strike, this one act of war alone. The Iranians and Hamas are already talking to the Saudis and saying, "What are you going to do?" Our goal was to continue full-on Saudi, Israeli, Middle Eastern peace negotiations, which were still developing. That's over now, at least for as long as this war goes on.
We will be talking about this for a long time, with the amount of moving pieces that are now on the board, and have yet to even get onto the board. This is going to be for months and months and months in my opinion. I don't see a quick resolution unless one side decides to unilaterally surrender.
Mr. Jekielek: Everything is currently developing as we speak. I've heard that Iran might be very close to having a nuclear bomb. Have you been following that?
Mr. Patel: That's a great point. The police officers for the nuclear arsenal in Iran are the UN-sanctioned cops. They are allowed into Tehran and around the country to their various nuclear sites. Iran is publicly saying, "We're only making fissile material, which is nuclear, weapons-grade material, in order to power our country. I've always thought that was a total pretext sham, but let's put that aside.
Americans weren't allowed in there, so we relied on the UN inspectors to go in and check what's the percentage, what's the weapons-grade, how far along they are, what their reactors are, if they are cooling, and all these indicators of how much stuff is being made and where. They tell Iran, “If you're doing it for energy, you need this much. If you're doing it for bombs, you need this much.” Iran kicked all the inspectors out of the country the day after the $6 billion and the hostage exchange occurred.
We were not getting the full story when we had the UN inspectors in the country, and now we have nobody. It's going to be almost impossible for us to figure out how far along they have come. I've been away from the intelligence on this for a while since I've been out of government, but I've always thought this was their plan.
I've always believed they were inching closer to making that material necessary for weapons, and that is very scary. It's an issue that doesn't get talked about a lot, but maybe it will be now. This administration, by permitting the funding of this proxy war by Hamas into Israel, also just gave Iran a huge cash injection for their nuclear program.
This is Iran, and we know they lie to the world. They do it all the time. Even if they stand up and say, "No, it's only for energy," we have no way of knowing that, because we don't have anyone in there anymore.
Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts on this? Then let's dive into the book.
Mr. Patel: We talked about who Israel is going to look for in terms of public allies. Who is Hamas going to get? What are the Middle East countries going to do? What are the signatories to the Abraham Accords going to do? What is Turkey going to do? We know what Iran is going to do. Iran is going to go around and try to galvanize a group of countries to back Iran and to back Hamas because of their joint "hatred" for Israel or actions taken by the Israeli government,
What is Jordan going to do? There are massive implications for Egypt. We don't have time to get into all the things involved. Remember how the Muslim Brotherhood caused the fall of the presidency in Egypt? Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization. What are we doing with all that? The international implications are almost never ending.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about your book, Government Gangsters.
Mr. Patel: Yes, let's do it, and I can't wait to dive in. We should tell our audience that I haven't been told what you're going to ask me, so this could get interesting.
Mr. Jekielek: I have some very basic questions. As you're introducing the book, you say, "I didn't know there was a deep state until somewhat recently." You keep hearing about this deep state. Then you hear that it is a conspiracy. Some people equate it with the administrative state. Are they the same thing? What is the deep state?
Mr. Patel: The definition will change, depending on who you ask. Having written the book and looking at it historically, we got signals about the deep state from President Eisenhower when he warned the world about the defense industrial complex, the behemoths that we have today. He saw it coming. He said, "The government needs to be aware of this. The government cannot be run by private sector organizations who continue to pay people who go in and out of government in a cyclical fashion."
We'll circle back on the defense industrial complex, but that was the beginning of it. It's not like we got a deep state overnight. This is years of degradation by people in leadership service positions who failed to do the job that they signed up to do. I had personal experience being the lead prosecutor at Main Justice for Benghazi, being the guy that found Hillary Clinton's emails in the discovery process, not being able to run with that, and not being able to run that Benghazi prosecution the way I wanted to and get all of the foreign terrorists who killed Americans.
It became a political thing in the Obama administration, and I was in the room when Holder was making these decisions. I thought, "Maybe that's a one-off of a really massive event.” But then fast forward, I leave the Trump Justice Department, I go to Capitol Hill, and I run Russiagate. That's when this all solidified for me. I saw the real nature of the FBI and DOJ that I worked with. We all know what happened afterwards when I was the chief investigator exposing it all. I even went to Devin Nunes, then chairman, who had hired me to run the investigation and said, "I don't even believe this. I think that maybe I'm the one who is lying."
I remember one day specifically, and I think I put it in the book. I walked into Devin's office to give him my weekly brief on Russiagate. This was one of the big ones on the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrants and how it was unlawful. Then we were putting out the facts about it, the withholding evidence of innocence and all the biases. He turns to me and says, "If you're going to start drinking this early in the morning, get out of my office," because it was crazy. The whole story of Russiagate that we now fully know today is almost unbelievable. It's like science fiction. But to me, it's not a Republican and Democrat thing, and that's one of the hitting points of my book.
I said, "I don't care about Rs and Ds." I probably named more Republican government gangsters in the book than Democrats. I learned they were an entrenched class together. The FBI, DOJ, DOD, CIA, and NSA coupled with the media, the biggest conspirator around, that is the deep state.
It was operating in a somewhat surreptitious fashion in the initial stages of the Trump presidency. After the four years of the Trump presidency, fast forwarding now two-and-a-half years into the Biden administration, it might need a new name, Jan. It can no longer be called the deep state. They're just out there doing it in public, because there's no accountability.
That is what ticks off Americans the most. The question I get asked the most is, “Where's the accountability for these folks who held senior positions in the DOJ and the FBI that commit crimes and are rewarded for that action by the entrenched DC swamp bureaucracy, and where the media is their glorifying, ego-padding machine?” I don’t have an answer as to where that accountability is going to come from.
Mr. Jekielek: I remember reading your very succinct explanation of Russiagate. Please try to recreate that, because it is incredible when you lay it out in these broad strokes in just a few sentences.
Mr. Patel: Okay, you put me on the spot here. This is going to be a pass or fail situation. When I tell folks the following, they have to realize it took me two years to get there. Would you believe in the 21st century America, a political party would go overseas and buy fake intelligence from an overseas asset, then use campaign dollars to purchase that information, funnel it back to the FBI and DOJ here in the United States of America, appear before a federal secret court and a federal judge and knowingly present information they knew to be false, and withhold information they knew would exonerate the posed targets, all to get a surveillance warrant on their political opponent? That is Russiagate.
Again, when you hear that, you think, "This guy is crazy." But multiple congressional investigations later, and the Durham report later, along with many other things that happened have degraded America's faith in the justice system. This causes a two-tier system of justice, which I often mention in the book.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that I've been charting is the development of the disinformation industrial complex. It's the combination of government agencies working with quasi-civil society organizations and legacy media. It's unclear exactly where the lines are between some of these organizations. There is pressure being exerted, there are threats, but there is also some ideological alignment. In the end, you have suppression of all sorts of information and the elevation of other information to the point where it appears that everybody agrees on something that very few actually believe.
Mr. Patel: I was talking about the cyclical nature of Washington, DC. If you're in a leadership position in government, you can leave only to come back in to help the people that were helping you along the way that knew where you were going to land. What do I mean by that? Let me give you an example that I raised in the book.
Brennan and Clapper were the heads of the intelligence community under Obama, the CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence, the top two dogs. They were going into an election cycle, and they briefed then President Obama about this Hillary Clinton/Russiagate scandal. They knew about it, and the president knew it was coming, and he allowed it to occur. They didn't warn the incoming presidency about any of it. In fact, they got the FBI, James Comey and company, to withhold that information from the incoming Commander-in-Chief.
Why do I highlight Clapper and Brennan? Let’s fast forward and literally bring this up to a week ago. Brennan and Clapper were caught lying to Congress under oath; Brennan specifically lied to Congress about the CIA spying on Senate staffers, and Clapper specifically lied to Congress under oath about utilizing the FISA surveillance process to secretly surveil Americans. That happened and they both admitted it later. They both lied right across the street under oath in front of the whole world.
What was their reward? They have been glorified with contracts in the media. Let's put that aside. Whatever your feelings are on the border, just to bring this thing full circle, the Department of Homeland Security just rewarded Brendan and Clapper with two senior level board positions at the Department of Homeland Security to adjudicate the border crisis.
Two cabinet secretaries committed felonies by lying to Congress under oath, thwarted an incoming presidential administration with an investigation they knew was bogus and didn't tell anyone, and allowed the media to run that disinformation campaign roughshod over half of America so that they would vote in a certain way. That's the deep state out in the open, and that's what I mean when I say they're in it for themselves.
You asked an interesting point. What is their unifier and what makes them come together? It is their get Trump attitude. I wish there was another answer, but every time we go down the road of asking why these bad actors do this, that's where the road leads. Of course, they won't publicly admit this. In some way, shape, or form, their personal dislike and their desire to "be the ones that get Trump" continue the deep state juggernaut. That is not going to stop anytime soon.
Mr. Jekielek: A number of these people deeply believe and have a deep conviction that President Trump is an existential threat to America. But maybe for them is it just purely transactional, just business, and there's no belief involved? How do you see this?
Mr. Patel: No one has ever asked me that. The deep state operators are not on a mission doing it for service. They are doing it with that as the pretext. What do I mean by that? They will say, "We are upholding the DOJ, the FBI, the DOD and the intelligence agencies," and all roads just happen to lead to Donald Trump. But these are known liars. These are people who knowingly broke the law. I'm not just talking about Brennan and Clapper, I'm talking about James Comey, Andy McCabe, Gina Haspel, and the 17 other people that got fired or relieved of duty as a result of our little congressional investigation.
The media hires them and says, "This was the deputy director of the FBI. Look at what he has to say now.” They get six, seven figure contracts, and they'll continue their disinformation narrative by saying, "We believe in full commitment to the Constitution and accountability, and that's why we think Donald Trump is a threat." They have blended this narrative together with facts that don't exist. The media wants that narrative to proceed just as much as they do. Now the counter argument is, "Look at you, Kash Patel, attacking these brave Americans."
Mr. Jekielek: There was a lot of information seeded into the system around Covid, saying, “You're supposed to use masks. These vaccines will be perfectly safe and effective.” A great number of people seem to be unable to accept new information that changes those statements. My view is they were propagandized into believing something that wasn't true.
Maybe people wanted to believe it was true. It turned out not to be true, but now they are unable to change their minds. It's a scary reality. Covid wasn't the first blast of information. Before that, Trump derangement syndrome was a real thing. There are people that deeply believe things that do not comport with reality, specifically with respect to Trump. This is the ecosystem that we're in today.
Mr. Patel: We talked about Russiagate. We now know that it happened just like you said. Half of America literally thought Donald Trump was a Russian asset. The media was pushing that and it was in the headlines over and over again. That was the justification to launch an investigation into a sitting president of the United States. That was the justification for the people that were fired and who led that operation to go to the media and say, "We did it because we thought Donald Trump was a Russian asset."
We now know unequivocally from John Durham and our investigation that there was never a lawful basis to launch any investigation into Trump or any of his associates. Do you know how powerful that statement is for a prosecutor? They're saying you couldn't have done any surveillance, have any investigation made, have any phone call sent out, or issue any subpoenas. It was totally unlawful.
That means he wasn't a Russian asset. He wasn't even close, and neither were any people in his universe. Look at the 51 Intel letter which was a similar type of operation. Three CIA directors, an NSA director, a Secretary of Defense, and senior level other intelligence officers signed the letter, knowing that a week before the election, the Biden campaign and Tony Blinken wanted the CIA to get in front of this and say, "Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation." Half of America believed it.
If you go out there and talk to many Americans like you and I do, you find that they based their vote in that presidential election on that piece of disinformation. Now you have two major events that literally led to the rigging of presidential elections. The commonality is it's the get Trump thing, and the commonality is the characters that are involved.
You see the same folks and their proteges coming up again. What do I mean by that? For example, the two individuals that are the number two and three at the Justice Department today, Lisa Monaco and John Carlin, were the heads of Homeland Security and the National Security Division when I worked at the DOJ, and they were the ones that launched Russiagate. Now, they're in charge of the DOJ.
The point that you hit on that is of such consequential importance is America doesn't find out about this until two years later. America didn't catch on about Russiagate until 2018. They didn't catch on about Hunter Biden's laptop until two years after that Intel letter. They didn't catch on about the Covid origins, which Epoch has been reporting on truthfully, and one of the only places that has been doing so. They thought it was another Donald Trump conspiracy, and that it couldn't have come from this Wuhan lab in China. The intelligence community had no information to that effect.
Whatever your belief is or thoughts are on the former president or the current president, this pattern of conduct and the people that walk through the revolving door in Government Gangsters is a reality that can only be created by this machine called the deep state.
Mr. Jekielek: Kash, this topic of how our information ecosystem affects us is very important. There's a whole bunch of people out there who deeply believe that doing unethical things is actually the right thing to do. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that.