Tulsi Gabbard on Russiagate Hoax Evidence and How She’s Reforming Politicized Intelligence Agencies
From Democratic Congresswoman to staunch Trump supporter!
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tulsi Gabbard.
Hello, nice to see you, Tulsi. Thanks for coming.
Thank you. Aloha everybody, aloha.
We were all clamoring to kind of frame this, and then Sacks said, “I really just need to do the kickoff because he really wanted to tee this up.” So I’m going to cede my responsibility in introducing you because everybody knows who you are. But David—there’s just too much red meat. David’s been frothing. Tulsi doesn’t need a big introduction, but everyone knows she’s a director of national intelligence and, in the words of President Trump, is the
“the hottest member of the administration.”
I think he means in the sense of having released the biggest news story of the year and specifically files—U, declassified and released a series of files related to the whole Russiagate hoax, and many of the documents are just stunning. I’ll let you speak to it, but I think there are still maybe a few holdouts out there in the world—not that many—who still don’t … are you looking at right now? Who are you talking about? You don’t seem to understand what this Russiagate hoax was about.
Can you just maybe—this is the place to start—that we can drill into some of the details, but just at a very high level, what exactly happened? I mean, I think we saw for years there were all these accusations that somehow that Trump was an agent of Putin, of Russia. Was that all just made up? And who made it up? How did that happen?
Yeah, I think just setting the baseline of like why should you care? Why should people at home care about this? And this really speaks to the power of the intelligence community and the power of “quote unquote” intelligence is that, as you know, these headlines returning out about, you know,
- Trump is a Putin puppet, or
- He is colluding with Putin in order to get elected.
We’re going back to the 2016 election here. If you’re just watching the headlines from home, you got to believe that there’s some credibility here—that there’s some intelligence that’s actually driving this. And that really is the significance of the documents that we uncovered, declassified, and released that shows how intelligence and information can be actually manipulated intentionally so that it shows something that is not reflective of the truth at all and how it can be done in a deeply impactful way politicizing it.
What we essentially saw throughout President Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and throughout his four years in office, the documents we uncovered really served as the foundation for the weapon that was used to:
- undermine his presidency,
- try to undermine the outcome of that 2016 election, and
- really usurp the will and the voices of the people who elected Donald Trump.
So I’ll try to run through this timeline in the top lines just to paint the picture of, as you asked David, like where and how did this start.
When we go back to that 2016 campaign, President Trump went through what was a very crowded primary at the time. Almost no one thought that he could win. He became the Republican nominee going up against Hillary Clinton, and during that time, Hillary Clinton kind of seeded the allegation that there was some collusion happening between Trump and Putin and Russia—that Putin was somehow trying to get Trump elected.
What we saw then play out was now known as—what does it mean “she seeded”? How did … what is there? There were a lot of different ways that that occurred. If you go and look at some of the documents that the FBI declassified, that Durham uncovered, is now known as the Durham Annex. There were a lot of different ways that it happened.
But we saw early signs of the weaponization of this when the FBI under Comey basically got illegal—they got warrants through the FISA court to illegally surveil Americans like Carter Page in Crossfire Hurricane and others around President Trump and his campaign at that time.
November 2016: President Trump shocks the world and wins the election. The intelligence community, and the assessments and all these documents we’ve made public already, throughout this period of time during the campaign leading up to the general election, the intelligence community almost uniformly assessed that
- Putin did not have either the intent or the capability to hack the outcome of the U.S. election.
There were different assessments that said this, but this trend was there.
President Trump wins the election. Members of the intelligence community then go and brief members of Congress post-election, and their briefing was consistent with the intelligence reports that basically said:
“there’s no evidence, nothing to see, that Russia or Putin had any kind of impact on the outcome of the U.S. election.”
Fast forward to December 8th—one of the organizations… One of the elements that’s under my oversight in the intelligence community creates this product for the president every day called the President’s Daily Brief. The number of people within the cabinet who are able to access this brief is a pretty small number. This is built for the president and it is a product of contributions from across the intelligence community.
This December 8th President’s Daily Brief was consistent with all of the other assessments, essentially saying there was no interference in the outcome of the election by Russia. That brief was pulled; it was never published. It was pulled back from publishing hours before it would have hit then President Obama’s desk.
The next day, December 9th, the Obama administration calls a National Security Council meeting with all the senior leaders within the Obama administration. The topic of discussion was Russia. The tasks that came from that meeting were delivered to then Obama’s DNI James Clapper. We have the emails that we declassified around this, which said:
“This is a POTUS tasking on Russia meddling with the election.”
What you’ll see in those documents was not President Obama asking to look into the intelligence and see if Russia meddled in the election; it was “Provide me with an assessment saying how Russia meddled in the election.”
John Brennan, James Clapper, Comey, and the FBI all got their folks together to start building this document — an intelligence community assessment.
Just to be clear, was this in the lame duck window between the election and then President Trump taking office? That two or three month period, post November 2016, with President Obama’s last day January 20th, 2017. So this document was being created by a very small group of people within these three agencies. They got the NSA involved, and ultimately that document would state what President Obama wanted it to say:
- Russia and Putin aspired to help President Trump win the election
- Did so through cyber means
Regarding the briefing document you mentioned, the President’s Daily Brief, you can see that there was a draft written that then got pulled back. Yes, and it still sits somewhere. We know that’s what was written and someone said:
“Pull that back. We don’t want to have evidence of this going on.”
Exactly. These were some of the documents that we released. It’s all on odni.gov, where we have the draft finalized President’s Daily Brief from December 8th and then the email saying “pull this back”. It was never published until we — that was that — that was an email: “pull it back.” Yes.
So they’re… oh my. So they’re also stupid? Would you like to apologize now or do you like…
No, no. There’s a few more pieces here. So no, no, no. I’ll have the receipts. We’ll go to those in a moment.
This January 2017 assessment was published on January 6th. It was very quickly leaked out to different members of the media:
- Washington Post
- New York Times, etc.
Then it was briefed to Congress, but the key thing here is that the most classified and compartmentalized pieces of intelligence they used as the basis for this total 180 intelligence assessment, which basically contradicted what the intelligence community had assessed leading up to the election, they hid those sources even from the vast majority of members of Congress. Based on intelligence community tradecraft standards, they were deemed even at the time to be not acceptable.
We had senior officials in the CIA who were tasked to work on this who objected to then CIA Director John Brennan using these as sources because they were not credible. One of them was the Steele dossier — this manufactured political document filled with falsehoods.
Then after that, this assessment again leaked to the media and was briefed to Congress. This was the document that led to everything that happened in the four years that President Trump was in office.
What we declassified and released provided further reinforcement of how politicized this document was. It showed a few things, for example:
- In those hidden sources, Putin didn’t believe Trump would win the election in 2016
- Putin thought Hillary Clinton was going to win
- He thought, “Hey, we know who she is, we know how she operates; we can try to figure out a way to deal with a Hillary Clinton presidency.”
Russia and Putin claimed they had extremely derogatory information about Hillary Clinton —
- Her health
- Her state of mind
- Alleged illegal bribery acts
- Illegal activities going on
If Putin and Russia were truly trying to help Trump win the election, they would have done so at a critical time in October 2016 to try to push him over the top. They didn’t believe he could win. There is so much evidence that disproves this manufactured politicized intelligence assessment ordered by President Obama that was very conveniently hid by John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey.
So again, why does this matter? We have seen a trend in some of the biggest intelligence failures around politicized intelligence. I’ll just give this one example because it goes back to the creation of my organization that I lead, ODNI.
James Clapper was an intelligence community leader during the time before our country went to war with Iraq. James Clapper wrote in his book about how Dick Cheney was telling the intelligence community:
“I need you to come up with intelligence basically that will just create the narrative for us to go to war with Iraq, that will give Colin Powell what he needed to bring to the UN as evidence of weapons of mass destruction, of evidence that Saddam Hussein is colluding with al-Qaeda.”
In James Clapper’s own words, he said that he and his colleagues were so eager to do what Dick Cheney told them to do that:
“We created something that wasn’t there.”
This is as someone who served in the Iraq War along with so many of my brothers and sisters in uniform. You can see the devastating consequences of politicized intelligence—the difference between war and peace.
In this case of President Trump with his first administration, this threatens the integrity of our republic and the voices of the people being shown through an election.
Tulsi, you must be absolutely enraged, absolutely, because:
- We were lied to then.
- We were lied to in 2016 and 2017.
- Over and over again, you see how people in these positions of power act with impunity, putting themselves, their political interests, and their ambition ahead of the Constitution of the United States and the responsibility and trust that they have to the American people.
Is the ambition this sensation that they are puppet masters who can control and shape outcomes, yet they’re sort of in the shadows, and they’re not accountable? What is it?
The lack of accountability, I think, is what drives them—believing that they can get away with anything because:
- If you control information,
- You control intelligence,
- Then you can control an outcome.
What was the incentive or the objective to Chamath’s question about doing this after the election, because it seems so destabilizing?
I think that was—I don’t have paper evidence of it—but one could surmise that the intention was:
- They all thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.
- President Trump won the election.
That was President Obama. You can imagine the feeling amongst the Democrats. I remember, I was a Democrat in Congress at the time—absolute devastation.
What’s the reaction to that? Let’s see how we can understand completely them. How could they completely undermine and destabilize and, in their minds, disarm a President Trump while he’s in office?
This is some of the twisted thinking that I witnessed when I was in Congress at that time. Also, they believe many, many of these Democrat leaders really believed that they were doing the right thing for our country by trying to protect the American people from the guy that they actually voted for to be President of the United States.
I think part of it was to undermine Trump, and then part of it was sort of exculpatory towards the fact that they had supported Hillary, and Hillary turned out to be a bad candidate, and they lost, and they wanted to find a reason why she lost that didn’t blame the Democratic Party for choosing the wrong nominee.
I think that was part of the motivation as well.
But just to be clear, in this national intelligence assessment that you found in the documents, the career staff said there’s nothing to support this theory of Trump somehow being an asset or agent of Russia. So they did their jobs—some of them did, some of them didn’t—but it was the leadership, the political appointees who were obviously hyper-partisan because they’re appointed by the president, so they’re the ones who overruled their own career staff.
Okay, just be clear.
That’s right. And, sorry, last point just to put a bow on this:
We discovered some emails that were printed out literally in the back of a safe. I think they had been sitting there since 2017 that showed an email exchange between then Obama’s DNI James Clapper and then the head of the National Security Agency, Mike Rogers.
The DNI Clapper really wanted to get the NSA to sign off on this manufactured intelligence document, and Mike Rogers at that point in his email was saying:
“Hey, you’re giving us too short of a deadline. We don’t have enough time to vet what is in this intelligence assessment in order to add our name to this.”
And if you don’t want to give us more… Time, then we just won’t be a part of it. The response that James Clapper sent — and you can find this again online — was he essentially said, “Mike, this is a team sport. This is the time where you just have to say yes and sign off on this.” Didn’t he say, “We’re going to stand behind this report in the best spirit of ‘this is our story and we’re sticking to it’” exactly?
So, Tulsi, while I don’t believe Trump was a Russian asset, is your position that the Russians did not try to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections? Because the FBI, and Trump himself, they all conceded that they did try to interfere. The intelligence documents — and again, this is what we released — was their intent was to try to sow chaos in the election. That was throughout the assessments.
Just to parse this:
- There was a group of people who believed he was an asset.
- Trump asked on stage during the election, “Russia, if you’re listening, please hack Hillary’s email and send them to us and release it.”
- Donald Trump Jr. then met with the Russians at Trump Tower, hoping to get that information.
- The FBI proved and a DC court indicted Russians for interfering in the election.
So, interference occurred. The Trump family engaged with the Russians, but Trump himself was not a plant. We all agree he’s not a Manchurian candidate. But the Russians have been, absolutely — you agree — trying to interfere in our elections, correct?
That has not been disputed, okay, at all. I just want to be clear here on that level.
Well, all of the other stuff you said — I mean about what happened — that stuff has all been litigated, and unfortunately the reality is when we say “Oh, the FBI said this,” we were dealing with a very highly politicized FBI at the time. That was so politicized that they were willing to use what they knew was false information to obtain illegal surveillance warrants from the FISA court to spy on members of the Trump administration.
When you actually look through it, there was nothing actually there.
Okay, now if you put yourself in the FBI’s shoes: Donald Trump Jr. says, “I hope, I can’t wait to get what you have, I hope it’s what you’re saying it is,” and Trump literally asks Putin to release Hillary’s email. Would the FBI not actually take a look into it? Would you want them to?
Hold on, I’m talking to Tulsi. You had your chance. You think you can be quiet for one moment, Sacks, and let me finish.
Tulsi, would it not be the FBI’s absolute duty to look into that? Yes or no? An honest FBI?
Yes.
Okay, this was a dishonest FBI. And again, it is all of the FBI. You have to look at things within the bigger context. Anyone who watches Donald Trump, he makes jokes every single day. Should the FBI look into serious issues? Yeah, of course, they should.
But again, we’re dealing with an FBI that has been proven time and time again during that period of time to break the law. They are supposed to enforce the law — they broke the law because of their efforts to try to undermine President Trump’s candidacy. So they already had an objective clearly in mind.
So tell us a little bit about what you learned about Paul Manafort and his conviction, subsequent pardon, and what his role was as the campaign manager for Trump the first time, and his giving information to foreign…
I’m not familiar with the Manafort case.
Oh, okay. What I have laid out is the truth of what has been uncovered through the declassification efforts.
Let me ask then the generalized question. The question is about President Trump. Let’s quickly clean up, and the question is about the intelligence community asking the Russians to do something.
I would urge everyone who actually believes that to go back and watch the video of the rally — it’s a joke.
This was the context:
- Hillary Clinton was being investigated because she had used a private email server
- She was supposed to be turning over thousands of emails but she didn’t because they destroyed the hard drive
- They broke it with hammers
- They bleached it and all the rest of it
And he made a joke about, “If the Russians are listening, I hope you can find the emails.”
Yeah, I just think everybody laughed. And you have to be, I don’t know, kind of dumb or super partisan or hate Donald Trump to think that him telling a joke on stage was the basis for a grand conspiracy with Russia.
Yeah.
Okay, let me ask this question. No, I would think that the FBI investigating the Russians and us convicting them in court by…
We convicted them in 30,000 people. He’s gonna say, “Hey Vladimir, can you do the following.” That’s not how conspiracies work, I’m sorry to make it to you.
Let me, let me, let me ask that. Let me…
What are you doing? Let me try to clean it up.
She just told you she’d release the files.
So no, but so that I want to look on a go-forward basis.
Well, the first step really is — and this is an essential thing — it is about transparency and accountability. So we… Have we referred all of the documents that we’ve uncovered to the Department of Justice? Because the two have to go together in order for there to be a real, real change.
Let me build on Jason’s question. Twelve years from now, there could be a Democrat — maybe it’s AOC, you know, four more years of Trump and then eight years of JD — but I’m getting to the point. Some people may not like the AOC candidate, but that doesn’t mean, as you said, that some nameless, faceless person can subvert the will of the American people.
So, what needs to happen so that there’s checks and balances here? How do we make sure that people can’t just not like somebody and then decide to try to basically destroy them? How do we make sure that that doesn’t happen?
It’s a good and important question and ultimately, the ultimate accountability has to come from the American people and who we choose to vote for. Who we have in these positions of leadership actually matters.
For the United States Senate, for example, they have the responsibility of confirming people to serve in the positions that I hold — the CIA Director, the FBI Director, and so on. We have to be very clear-eyed about the tools and the tactics that are used that ultimately, fundamentally are undermining our founding documents and the Constitution, the integrity of our republic, and ultimately our ability as We the People to determine who we want to serve in our government.
The weaponization and politicization, unfortunately, continue. There is still rot within our intelligence community and those, again, who believe that they know better for the American people than we do for ourselves. That’s really a dangerous thing.
This is not something that’s easily solved. It’s not one institutional change that can occur. We have to remain vigilant on all fronts in order to protect ourselves and to protect our democratic republic from these kinds of abuses.
How do you lead that change?
Tulsi, you’re going into work and you don’t know who to trust. You don’t know who is part of the institution that you were up against when you came in to take this role. How do you grapple with that? And how do you think about prioritizing and seeking, kind of filtering, the workforce, the people that report to you, information — by being vigilant?
Yeah, you know, I’ve made some pretty big changes within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself — finding those pockets, those places that have been weaponized and politicized and really ultimately bringing a mission focus to the organization.
- Trimming down and slimming down our manning and personnel count
- Ensuring we have the right people in the right positions who focus on the mission itself
Ultimately, every day it’s just about doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do and setting that culture of leadership that focuses on our responsibility:
- The American people
- The Constitution
- Holding people accountable when they are not fulfilling that responsibility they have been entrusted with
When you were a congresswoman, you must have had a different mandate. You’re a different political party. When you go back home, what’s the conversation like about the transition? I don’t know if you’ve talked about this publicly much, but yeah, what’s it like talking about your evolution, changing parties, and having this role today with the people that you used to represent?
You know, Hawaii has been a strong Democratic state for a very, very long time, but it’s a unique state with a very unique culture. People tend to be honestly a little bit more just aloha, live and let live — I just want to live my life and raise my family.
It’s a mixed bag for me when I go home, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at times. I was waiting in line one day at like a FedEx to go ship something and there was an older Japanese American man who was the manager. He came out, pulled me aside, and just said:
“I really, really love everything you’re doing. Keep speaking the truth.”
You know, there are others who definitely have Trump derangement syndrome and can’t wrap their heads around how, you know, I represented Hawaii for eight years in Congress as a Democrat and now I’m President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.
It also, it’s got to warp people’s brains. It is maybe on its surface. But the thing is, and look, I mean, I’ve listened to your guys’ podcasts for a long time and I think there’s a lot of folks who are having probably not like the cerebral kinds of conversations you have but the conversations around how the Democratic Party has drastically changed—drastically changed.
I hear you. Talk about it as well. I mean, for me, I was 21 when I made a decision to join the Democratic Party in Hawaii. I was running for the state house and had to choose a party. For me at that time, the Democratic Party still represented the values of:
- Fighting for the little guy
- Fighting for working people
- Protecting the environment
- Standing up for free speech even if you didn’t like that speech
To fast forward from then to now, the party is unrecognizable in just about every way. I ended up writing a book about why I left the Democratic Party because fundamentally—and it’s not about well what do you believe about health care, should we take this approach or that approach—it really is foundational how the Democratic Party has completely gone away from the party of JFK and Martin Luther.
The good news is you get to work for somebody who’s a former Democrat himself—exactly, President. There are a number of us in power; it’s all Democrats. That’s how Trump won his second term: he rallied all those moderate Democrats like yourself to become his cabinet.
I was really saying that in jest, but I think there’s some truth to it. It was, you know, Bobby Kennedy and I. For the last few months of President Trump’s campaign, we went and traveled all across the country together. The final event we did together was in Wisconsin, I don’t know, a couple weeks before the election, and it was really incredible.
It was in a district that normally votes pretty solidly Democrat. We were in this big beautiful barn and there were probably at least a thousand people there, maybe more. At a certain point, I asked the crowd:
“Raise your hand if you’re a Republican.”
A whole bunch of hands went up.
“Raise your hand if you’re an Independent or Libertarian.”
A few hands went up.
“Raise your hand if you’re a Democrat.”
The reaction was so fascinating because first, there was like one or two hands that went up very timidly and they were kind of looking around. Then more hands went up, and then more hands went up, and then the whole crowd got on their feet and just started cheering and looking at each other.
Folks came up to me after and just said things like:
“I felt like I was getting a hug from everyone that was there.”
There was no separation or difference between us.
Thank you for your service, and you spent a lot of time serving the country. You had reservations about bombing Iran and we did it anyway. How do you reconcile that today and did we do the right thing?
I served in a medical unit in Iraq back in 2005. I was there for all of that year and was in a position where every day I was confronted with the high cost of war. Ultimately, that’s what drove me to eventually run for Congress: to be in a position where I could help influence and impact those decisions.
Ultimately, one of the things I found to be true and very detrimental to our country and national interest is that very rarely did leaders in our country ask the fundamental question:
- What is our objective?
- What are we actually trying to accomplish?
- If we’re discussing a potential military operation or an act of war or any policy for that matter, what is our objective?
- Is it achievable?
- Does it serve the best interests of the United States?
- If it’s a military operation, what is winning? How do you define winning?
- What’s our exit strategy?
Those are the things I’ve brought to every foreign policy question in every aspect of my professional life and personal considerations of these different policies.
This is where I appreciate President Trump’s leadership in his approach to Iran. My position has always been that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapons capability, period. President Trump was very clear, but the reports were that you were not in favor. There were a lot of bullshit reports out there.
My job is to provide the president with intelligence so that he can make the best-informed decision. Ultimately, what we saw in that Operation Midnight Hammer was a president who made a decision and executed a very precise military operation with a very clear objective that was accomplished in the best possible way—and a very clear exit.
Seems to have turned out okay, but…
Tulsi, don’t worry because Sacks also…
By the way, Sacks also was against bombing Iran. He absolutely did not want Nikki Haley to become president because his fear was, and he talked about it on the podcast, that he didn’t want to start up with Iran. To speak just using his precise words:
“I didn’t want a war with Iran. I still don’t want a war.”
But what is the condition that you can share with us? The public on the strength, the fortitude in Iran today with that government—what is the state on the ground that you can share, and what do you think the paths ahead are? Well, I mean, you know, their nuclear capability was destroyed, much of their infrastructure destroyed, much of their military capability destroyed. When you look at Israel’s actions throughout that 12-day war, their economy is tanking, their energy sector is tanking. So, it’s a, it, Iran is facing a very challenging, unstable position.
What we saw is that the Iranian people, at least then and at this point, have not risen up against their own government, but you can imagine—and this is openly talked about by a lot of experts—is when you’re facing a failing economy, lack of basic necessities like water, basic infrastructure, there is legitimate concern about how people ultimately react and how they will react to their own government.
And what—sorry—do you have a point of view on where that takes us? What steps into the void? There are a lot of different factors. Such instability in the Middle East historically has not gone as we thought it would or hoped.
“Exactly right, exactly,” which is why it’s so important to look at this from taking the regime change in Iran kind of history lessons learned into account. But really recognize that these things—we cannot be simplistic as we look at this challenge as well as any of the others that we face because there are always complexities and so many different elements that are involved that could turn things one way.
I would like to ask a question: I was in favor, I was in favor of that strike if it was strategic because I do not think they should be allowed to have a bomb. I was in favor of it.
Great questions, guys. Go ahead.
I want to talk about the southern border for a second. Very early into the administration you guys declared cartels as terrorist organizations. Can you walk us through the logic of making that transition, what it enables America to do, and why we did it? What the goal of that is?
President Trump saw, as you heard anybody who attended even a single one of his rallies during the election, he saw very clearly the devastating effect that MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and these other cartels were having in our communities and on our streets in this country—making the American people less safe and exacting a kind of violence and criminal activity that was only getting worse.
This was the main thing that drove his decision to designate the worst of the worst of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations because of their activities here within our own country. So this then opens up the door for the ability to use different authorities to be able to protect the safety and security of the American people.
You look at the, obviously, the trafficking of fentanyl is a huge thing. Within my organization, we have the National Counterterrorism Center, which for the last 20 plus years has been focused on Islamist terrorism—ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, and others who may be plotting against America and our people and our interests. Now, that has been expanded to look at the counter-narcotics effort, the counter-cartels effort.
What it’s doing is actually bringing in and focusing on:
- How are we engaging with Customs and Border Protection?
- The DEA?
- Your local police and sheriffs who are on the ground, working in these border states and dealing with the very real effects of these cartels?
I remember I was in Texas visiting one of these border communities with the Vice President a few months back. The local ranchers came in and talked to us. Secretary Hegseth was there as well. They were talking about how these cartels are using such sophisticated weaponry—the kind of stuff that, yes, we experienced some of IEDs for example. There was an IED that was planted on one of the roads on this guy’s ranch, and one or two of his ranch hands were killed because of this.
We’re seeing that these cartels:
- Have intelligence collection capability
- Counterintelligence capability
- Use of drones for both surveillance and armed drones to go after those who are threatening their operations
It’s a serious adversary that is highly adaptable and ultimately will do what they feel is necessary in order to continue their illegal activities at the harm of the American people.
If we lost 3,000 people on 9/11 tragically from Al-Qaeda, we’re losing 100,000 Americans to fentanyl.
If they’re not a terrorist organization, please tell me what one is. I am 100% in favor of you crossing the border and… fucking killing them immediately with prejudice. I applaud the administration for doing that. It’s far too many. When we talked about this issue with Rick Caruso, of the people who are on the street over here, they’re on the street because of fentanyl, not because they can’t get a home.
I applaud you guys for doing that; it takes true courage to do it.
The historical context of this is, if you look back at what happened with Britain and China in the 1800s, there was a period where Britain wanted to desperately weaken the Chinese. What they did was start the Opium Wars, and it’s incredibly analogous to this moment where you see all these foreign actors trying to weaken the United States from within.
This is why I think the cartel thing is not talked about enough. Closing the southern border was critical, but designating these organizations as what they are allows, exactly as you said, a really 360-degree view of what is going on. They are sophisticated; they have incredible capability and an unlimited balance sheet—it turns out, bad intent.
Do you think this is a strategic issue in China? Are they making this decision to support fentanyl supply chains because it’s destabilizing to the United States?
I’m reviewing in my mind what I can say and what I can’t say with regard to classified intelligence. This is a point… So, I have not seen intelligence that reflects the statement you just made.
The precursor issue coming out of China with regards to fentanyl continues to obviously be a point of negotiation in the president’s ongoing negotiations with China. Ultimately, China is not the only one providing precursors, but what we’re seeing is a downstream—or maybe like a downtick—in fentanyl coming across our borders, as well as the cartels in Mexico struggling to create fentanyl because they are not able to access these precursors as easily as they have been over the last several years.
So when you look at that, President Trump going after the precursor issue as well as securing our borders, the significance and impact of that really cannot be overstated in how it’s positively affecting the ability for people to live here in our own country more safely.
Folks, on that, I just want to thank Tulsi Gabbard, amazing Director of National Intelligence.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Got a lot of Tulsey fans out there. You got to thank you. Thank you, thank you. You got to stand alone. Thank you, well done. Thank you, appreciate you. Good to see you—that was awesome. Thank you, thanks everybody.
Absolutely incredible.