Some government failures don’t look accidental anymore. They look designed. When the same “mistakes” keep producing the same results, accountability becomes harder to ignore.

In this episode of At The Mic Thursday Deep Dive, host Keith Malinak is joined by former FBI agent Steve Friend for a wide-ranging conversation about power, institutional incentives, and what happens when speaking up from the inside carries a personal cost.

The discussion moves through recruitment practices, internal pressure, public narratives, and constitutional limits, not as a checklist, but as a growing unease. Familiar justifications repeat. Outcomes drift from stated intentions. Trust erodes through accumulation.

Rather than offering a single conclusion, the episode leaves listeners with a question: can institutions built to serve the public still tell the difference between protection and self-preservation?

Chapters:

1. 0:00 — When Institutions Stop Explaining Themselves
2. 06:45 — Speaking Up From the Inside
3. 8:30 — Malicious Compliance and Manufactured Failure
4. 34:10 — Leadership, Loyalty, and Power Inside the FBI
5. 52:40 — Recruitment, Vetting, and Internal Culture Shifts
6. 01:07:20 — Redefining Threats and Domestic Terrorism
7. 01:22:10 — Statistics, Narratives, and Public Perception
8. 01:38:00 — Entrapment, High-Profile Cases, and Accountability
9. 01:52:30 — Reform, Dissolution, or Something Else Entirely

What does it say about an institution when speaking up from the inside carries a higher cost than staying silent?

Connect With Us:

1. Guest Steve Friend: https://x.com/@realstevefriend

Keith:

1. YouTube: https://youtube.com/@AtTheMicShow
2. X (Twitter): https://x.com/KeithMalinak
3. Instagram: https://instagram.com/atthemicshow
4. Website: https://atthemicshow.com

Produced by Wes — 2nd Floor Studios

https://secondfloorstudios.co

Can me out? Can you hear me out? Can you hear me out?

wanna do it again, wanna do it again, I wanna do it again, wanna do again, wanna do it again, wanna again, do wanna again, do again, wanna do

you

In a state that's far, staying alive Will someone try, open up your eyes You must be blind, if you can't see The gaping hole, called reality Wanna do it again, I'm gonna, gonna do it again Wanna do it again, come on I'm gonna do it again, hear me out

terrified, sunning it right here we go you can make sure you're connected the writing's on the wall but if you're mind neglected stumble you might fall, stumble you might fall stumble you might fall

You're my boy

you

you

To make myself tender I suppose I'd start by removing all my clothes Tie my pantyhose around my neck I'll be that girl You wouldn't be right over If I

If I were the sun, you would be in shadow If I had a gun, there'd be no tomorrow If you will not have me as my son, perhaps as someone else

Since you, I'll be worth noticing That even a unit won't resist The magic of a kiss from such a snake I'll be that girl, and you would be right over

If I were the field, you wouldn't be in the lower. If I were the sun, you wouldn't be in shadow.

If I had a gun, then you know tomorrow It's time to kick off your shoes, my attitude's sadness It's time to throw off those chains, I don't allow braids and madness Cause we've got glory inside, and no one will die But one of my cities, baby, will be better than I have waited for you

you

When you're

I'll be that girl, you wouldn't be right over If I were a field, you wouldn't be in cold

If I were the sun, you wouldn't be in shadow If I had a gun, let me know tomorrow Let me know tomorrow Let me know tomorrow Let me know tomorrow Let me know tomorrow

It's half moon at the half moon Everybody's here today It's half moon at the half moon I guess everybody wants to stay My hand a little bit longer Hey, we all need a little more time But there's a little more sun here With a little more rhyme

You are watching, I'm watching

You

It's half moon and half moon Everybody sing hey hey hey It's half moon and half moon I guess everybody wants to play More than a little bit longer Hey now, you need a little more time But there's a little more of yours here And a little more of mine

you

And so I know tomorrow You're the one to ask me to Give me a friend to hold me in your arms

you

you

Welcome to this edition of At The Mic. I'm your host, Keith Malinak. It is a Thursday deep dive. Trying to a little different this week. If you were anticipating the show being available on YouTube, don't fear. Stand by. I'm working on that as we speak. So it should appear. If it doesn't, then, well, blame Google. You know what? had it. my gosh, y'all. I had it so ready to go.

And then I realized just now, it's telling me I can't post it because my title is too long. I thought my title was very creative. And so I'm quite proud of it. it's hurting me to see that it's not posting right now. OK, I'm still working on that. So don't give up on YouTube. I'm just trying to do 15 things at once here. Maybe it posted. Go check.

Go check over at youtube.com slash at a little shift to at the mic show. It's a little confusing at, the mic show. I will say that a YouTube channel that you definitely need to subscribe to bookmark all the things is the YouTube channel of my guest. Who's coming up here momentarily, Steve friend. He hosts the American radicals podcast. go to youtube.com slash at.

Amrad pod amrad pod if you're too confused because there's so many YouTube channels being thrown at you just come back and pause this later youtube.com slash at amrad pod because this gentleman has a lot of great information he's an honorable man and I'm honored to call him my friend and I'm bringing him up here because he has a lot we got so much we got to talk about with him before I go any further though let me say thank you to hero Wes

Follow him on X at second floor Dallas. Gabby is on X at Jeffy Apologist. Wes gets us to all the sites like Spotify and Apple. And please, if you could rate and review, share, don't forget, hey, it's a one person project. Just share the show or the website. I don't care. Share it with anybody in your life. Your mailman might need something to listen to driving around. So.

anybody, the one person project, just share the show if you would please. And of course, Gabby handles the Instagram page at the Mike Show. All right, that's enough babbling. Let me get my guest in here. This guy's awesome. His name is Steve Friend. can follow him on X at real Steve Friend. you, Steve, do you appreciate the top of the line graphics that we use here on at the Mike Show?

You're a Luddite like me Keith. I mean completely beholden to the assistance of others I couldn't even put my own background up my wife had to do it for me.

love the studio redesign. looks, I mean, it's much more mature than anything I've got going on back here. But I'll say that I mean, that that is sophisticated, man. I feel like I need a smoking jacket to go to your set.

I wanted to go with the tropical motif to remind myself that I live in the land of milk and honey that is Florida, where woke and winter storms go to die. But then it got cold on me last week and I lost my voice.

Yeah, how you feeling? It's been rough for you, man. So are you feeling better?

I'm all good now. Yep. I get the RFK voice a couple of times a year. think one time when I was on with you on at the mic, I was afflicted by it. And it's super frustrating in a post coronavirus world where you have no other symptoms other than the vocal cords don't work. And people think you have the bubonic plague. And you're like, no, I just can't talk. But it makes it difficult to do the podcast.

Thank you for all of your fun experiments on humankind, Dr. Fauci, Hand to Hand with China. Sorry, that's a different show. We'll do that some other time. So I'm glad you're feeling better. I know you're in a terrible car wreck. You cannot catch a break, And are you okay from that? Because I know you and your son were in a car and I've seen pictures. It's terrible.

Well, thank goodness for the safety of a non-American car, which I drive, a 2024 Toyota Camry. But my rear end got obliterated on the interstate by a distracted driver. My son was in the back seat and it held steady, so he was not harmed or any significantly. So, you know, we've got all limbs, all toes, and all fingers accounted for. And now it's just a question of are we in good hands or not with State Farm, which covers the other driver that doesn't like to pay out.

no, okay. Well, I'm glad you're okay because that trunk was just absolutely massacred. look, I know there's gonna be some people that are gonna roll their eyes when I say this and you might do that as well, but I'm going to say it. But it just, feels like, brother, you're almost like a modern day job with some of the stuff that you have going on.

I like Truman Show better. I sometimes feel like the rain is only falling on me and then if I step out, it'll be revealed. definitely has that feel sometimes.

I it enrages me as an American, and I say this every time you're on, what you have been through, you blew the whistle on a federal government that was overstepping its constitutional authority. You did the right thing. You came out and you said, hey, this isn't right. And you have paid dearly for it. You have lost your career.

And you have not been made whole, not even by any stretch of that definition. You have stuck your neck out for, uh, uh, and gotten a retaliation from your government, uh, as a thanks. And this is on both sides. Both parties are guilty of, of malicious behavior toward you. And, uh, I just, I, I hate it for you. I, um, I, I just, admire.

how you've been able to stay strong through all of this insanity in your world. And that's a mild word there. It has been horrible for you and your family, I'm sure. And can you give us an update? Because...

I'm trying to figure out where you want to jump in on this story. But we had an update a couple of months ago. People missed out on that. Let's go back. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's go back to last summer. There was word of reinstatement. That wasn't the truth. The government continued to drag their feet. I'm talking about this administration. And then finally, something started to happen toward the end of the year. Can you just pick it up briefly there? I want to catch everybody up. And then we have just a crap load to talk about over here.

So what happened a couple months ago,

So early December of last year, far, far beyond any sort of material breach limit that you would have had for the agreement from the DOJ, which was 30 days in August. So we were multiple months after that. I received word on a Sunday night that I had to return to work the following Monday. I went to work for a couple of days with no gun or badge, or actually, no, they gave me a badge, but no gun.

And then they said that I didn't have a security clearance, so I had to be babysat and escorted around the building at all times. And then wound up being told, hey, why don't you just take some vacation time? So I took a couple of days off and then was called on a Friday evening and said, you got to come in because we have some very, very uber important documents for you to sign. And I was not available. So said, okay, come in on Monday. And then I got a text message from the New York Post that said, you're getting fired. Do you have a comment?

Because the FBI leaked that improperly, I think violated some employment laws. And then they scrambled and at seven o'clock in the morning on Saturday said, we need you to come in from out of town, drive across the state to come in and meet with us for very important paperwork, which I knew was code to be fired. And I got a autograph from Cash Patel himself firing me six days after they brought me back for things that he said. I said, well, I was not in the employee of the FBI.

I just, mean, you couldn't get them to pay attention to you for year after year after year. And then, and the restraint you showed during that time was so, I would not have been nearly, I wouldn't have been half the man that you were during that time. And then for you to just, I don't wanna get, I just don't.

We've talked about this, we've covered this. I am just so sorry that you have gone through this, continue to go through this, and I hope that you have legal options. I don't know how much of this you want to continue to talk about because I don't want to be responsible for any kind of a blowback that you might face. I would just say that I hope that someday, somehow, some way, this government does you right. Although you and I both know this government sucks.

And that's not happening. Anyway, no, I'm so sorry, Hang in there. That's all I can say. And that does nothing. That does nothing. just from one friend to another. Cheers. don't know, man. I'm sorry. Do you want to tell us what's next on this, or do you want to just let it and move on to this?

I mean, we're working through things with an attorney right now. Merit Service Protections Board stuff, know, the administrative rigmarole that they're gonna have the government assess whether the government did anything wrong and then ultimately determine the government didn't do anything wrong. So maybe we'll wind up in federal court. But then I guess at best you'll get a court ruling that says the FBI has to do something, which technically I kind of have already, which is the settlement agreement. So how do you enforce it? I just kind of really like being

of the mosquito around Cash Patel at this point, just bothering him because he's not really good at swatting mosquitoes. He just punches himself in the face and get rid of me.

I will say that one thing that has proven true, whether it's the Biden administration in the past, the last few years, or the Trump administration today, you sir have had to deal with people in authority that are much smaller men than you. And I am so sorry. Okay. And I'm talking about at the Hoover building there and the people that you report to.

and it's it's vomitous. I was listening to your awesome podcast available not only on youtube.com slash at amradpod, but it's on Spotify and everywhere else. And I was listening and used a word because I do want to come back. We have so much to talk about with Cash Patel and we will get into that, but I want to visit and it was the, actually turned out to be

You

the inspiration for today's show title that I was so proud of, like I said, and it got me in trouble because it was too long for YouTube. And what was it? was malicious compliance is the phrase that you used on your show. And I stole that for this show today. And I call today's show malicious compliance in other tales of government fails. I'm sorry.

I'm just gonna toot my horn there, because I thought that was a fun title there. But you use that phrase on your show for malicious compliance. Explain what you were talking about and what that means, because I found that just fascinating and so accurate, malicious compliance.

Well, there's the letter of the law and then there's the spirit of the law. That's sort of the frame you have to look at it through and we saw that with the Epstein file dump that came out where the Epstein Transparency Act was passed through both houses of Congress almost unanimously signed immediately and then they were in breach. They hadn't turned over anything and finally they threw their hands up in the air and just dumped allegedly all of the documents. They did, but let's just for today.

I'm so glad you said that because it's technically not compliant, but just for the sake of this conversation. Let's say it was

Let's just say it was. did the document dump like it was a giant pallet of documents. So they were in compliance with the law, but did so maliciously because the spirit of law was you're going to reveal these documents to us. You're going to lay it out in a very linear fashion in a way that's digestible in a way that the American people can look at it and understand what was going on there as opposed to just a huge trove of documents that is going to include things in it that are not relevant to the investigation.

or were not germane, or were crazy people who were calling into the FBI because they called a bit about Epstein, they were included. So it was done in compliance, but in a malicious way in the hopes that the American people would not be able to follow through, or they would grab onto something that wasn't true. And therefore, when they ran with it, they said, see, it's a conspiracy theory. You don't know what you're talking about. It's very much like a civil lawsuit where there's a subpoena for documents, and you want three particular documents. And then the opposition.

drops three million documents on you and says, you go ahead and follow through and find it. It's in there. Or take it out of a lawsuit context. It would be like when the speed limits were set on the interstate and the truckers were saying like, hey, this is going to really hurt our ability to travel because it's going to slow us down. So we're just going to line up a bunch of semi trucks in every single lane and drive exactly at the speed limit to create a giant backlog to make the point.

We're complying, you can't go after us, we're not obstructing traffic, we're driving the speed limit, and now you've made the point.

Yeah, that's well said and explains it perfectly. And what's fascinating is to see these stories just in drips and drabs just coming out and you're like, that's interesting. And it's fine if somebody has has located the story a story B story C and it's taken them forever because they're having to go through all of these documents.

And so it's brand new breaking news. It's not something that we all collectively knew three weeks ago. It was released three weeks ago or what have you. But it's just now being noticed. And you laid it out perfectly. There was no, for lack of a better way to describe this, there was no perfectly organized binder with dividers and sections that we could just flip to. It was not laid out like that at all. And here we are. OK.

malicious compliance. That's the phrase that pays. So I was, I just found that very interesting, a great description for the Epstein files and how those were released by the Department of Justice. But something else has been on your radar lately, and rightfully so, is the FBI director, the guy whose signature you have, as a matter of fact, as you mentioned there. And I want to

Let me first before we go down this road of all the stuff with Cash Patel himself that we have to talk about, I want to put up this tweet that I saw making the rounds because if people have been living under a rock, the FBI director, Cash Patel, he made an appearance and he was in the locker room after Team USA won the gold medal in Italy. And so on Sunday morning during the celebration,

grew up playing hockey, Cash Patel, big fan, and as every American should be of our Team USA. And he has every right to go and travel there. And if he wants to use his credentials to get to the locker room, so be it. Whatever. I mean, that I guess as a private citizen, if he wants to do that, and then as a public official,

can get past security, whatever. I think most Americans are kind of like that as far as this story goes. Try not to make it into an issue beyond that because he appeared there and there he was. Okay. But as I saw that, well, and I don't even want to use the word off putting. Well, it was kind of like a, I'd probably do the same thing. I was just whatever. You know, if the Falcons ever won the Super Bowl and I was the FBI director, I might do that. I could see maybe.

But the problem I had, or the question I had, which has now become a problem for me, the question I had immediately was, who paid for that trip? Was this on Cash's dime? And he said, hey, look, I'm the FBI director. I love these guys. I'm a big fan. Go in there. Get out.

Do we know?

definitively how that trip was funded to get the director of the FBI into the locker room with Team USA, Steve.

Yeah, you paid for it as a taxpayer. Yeah.

Cool. Of course I did. Of course I did. I mean, just of course I did. Okay. So I paid for it. We all paid for this.

I don't even know if he had a ticket to the game, to be honest. I think he might've just showed up there and did the whole dignitary thing. And look, they spawn and spawn to make this look like it was a legitimate trip. And on top of that, to make it look like it was a legitimate business trip because they had a range for all these different nonsensical meetings. The big thing they're hanging their hat on is that he met with some counterpart in Italy to sign an agreement where an intent to talk about cybersecurity in the future.

If you're talking about cyber security, you can do that on a Zoom call. It is cyber after all.

Hold on a second. I'm sorry. I gotta revisit this. They signed an agreement

A letter of intent. It wasn't even a treaty.

So they're going to talk about cybersecurity in the future. Is that right?

That's right. And then his schedule was revealed and it basically was all personal time and cultural activities and going to the Olympics. And then they tried to spin it and say that, well, he was there to learn about security. Well, he would done that well in advance of the Olympics. He wouldn't have showed up for the last couple of days. And then they tried to spin it and say, well, he was actually there doing security, even though he doesn't have a gun and doesn't actually do security. And again, it was the last few days of the Olympics.

You think the FBI director is actually doing investigations into election fraud and not somebody who's one of his subordinates who are the actual investigators So people are just grabbing on to whatever they can to justify it and say like well, he just loves America Look, he's a pig. He's and he's not even good at being abusive of his position Look if you if you want to be smart about abusing your position you do what you're sort of talking about there You say you show up in a suit

and then you buy a ticket, make it, you say, look, I'm gonna pay the freight on personal travel, which I can fly privately on the jet, the FBI gives me, I have to pay the round trip of commercial airline ticket. That's what I have to pay. He didn't do that. He had the American taxpayers pay for the entire thing. He was on Per Diem the entire time he was there. You show up in a suit.

take in the game and leave. And if you're that big of a jock sniffer that you want to go into a locker room and see a bunch of 20 and 30 year old naked men and party with them on a celebration for a win that you weren't part of, then you even be smart and say, hey, I'm here as a representative of the United States government. I've got the president on speakerphone and he would like to wish you congratulations. And he wasn't even smart enough to do that.

Hold on. right. Okay, so I looked up the salary of the FBI director and somewhere between 175 and 200,000. So I think you could afford a trip to the Olympics if you so chose. But that speakerphone thing, I want to visit that just momentarily. And I didn't, I didn't queue it up or anything like that. But I wrote down the quote from the president, because they were talking about getting the guys to the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night.

which did materialize. And in that speakerphone conversation in the locker room with Donald Trump on the phone, as Cash was saying, you know, hey, I'll get this organized, whatever, I'll get this, whatever. And the president said, quote, if Cash is doing it, I'm happy. If Cash is doing it, I'm happy. mean, okay. All right. I'm probably reading too much into this, but that was a signal to me that, again,

I'm probably the only one reading this deeply into this. And I may be way off base, but that made it sound like to me like, yeah, Trump's happy with Cash Patel. Look, if cash has got it handled, I'm happy, whatever, that I know it's in good hands, blah, blah, blah. Again, I probably read too much into that. And I'm thinking, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't trust him, no, no, no. So anyway, that was a little nugget that I extracted from that speakerphone conversation in the locker room.

I think you're on firm ground. I think the president is divested entirely from the FBI. He can't possibly be paying attention to it and take away any conclusion other than Cash Patel is a government gangster himself and completely and wholly incapable of leading the agency into any sort of de-weaponized state. And he's accepting whole cloth things that are nonsensical that are being thrown out there because he's just not digging in the details or doing any sort of like critical thinking, which is...

what Cash Mattel and others have been able to do to manipulate the man, because he just wants to hear that things are great. And that's not true.

Do we know how Cash Patel got to Italy?

Yeah, on the FBI Gulfstream jet.

Oh, is that right? Oh, because I have a clip here. just, I don't know. Maybe it's useful for this conversation. Let's just see if you can find any place to use this information here. I think this is, what do we got? I think this is December of 2023. I think if I recall, he's sitting in Glenn Beck's office and he had this to say about use of said chat.

And I'm not saying take all their funding. I'm not the defund everything guy. Okay. I'm just saying Chris Ray doesn't need a government funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane. 15,000 every time it takes off. This is odd.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Who's, who's, who's jettisee talking about? Remind us who Christopher Ray is. Okay, so I gotcha. He's not the defund everything guy.

I'm not saying take all their funding. I'm not the

former director of the FBI.

All right, so the former FBI director, whose position this guy now holds, doesn't need a government funding jet wind.

to go to vacation.

Yeah, but see he was working in Italy. Don't forget that he went there to sign that thing there.

And it's important to remember how there's a couple of things about the abuse of the jet that are worth noting. Number one, Cash Patel has leaned on John Solomon to spin for him and do a breakdown of how much he travels. And the takeaway was that James Comey traveled like a couple percent more than Cash Patel. And Christopher Wray actually traveled less than both of them. And that was the spin that was in their favor. The other thing is that

Chris Ray was a pig because he made the jet fly from Manassas, where it's housed, about 12, 15 minutes to Reagan Airport to pick him up because he didn't want to sit in traffic. And every time it did that, it had to pay a landing fee at Reagan International Airport. Cash Patel said, I am done with this. We're not doing that anymore. I make it fly from Manassas to join Andrews Air Force Base. Similar distance of flight. It doesn't have to pay a landing fee like 2,500 bucks.

but he doesn't want to sit in traffic either. Hold on. So he makes it fly to a US military base instead to pick him up as opposed to driving out to Manassas, which he could do comfortably because he's being driven by his protective detail in his brand new armored BMW that he ordered.

And I just a small, small bone of contention with you. You keep saying it has to pay the landing fee. Who's paying for that landing fee? Okay, I just want to make sure I was in a clear fight. All right, so that's fun. I love hypocrisy because it's awesome. Especially when it's people that you were one of the strongest cheerleaders for. And boy, you sit back and when story after story come out, it just feel more and more like a dope when stuff like this happens.

you

and it's your side, but we seek the truth here. So, okay. So that's fun. lot of use of the private jet. Can you remind us, because I know that there's some information that you have that maybe people have forgotten. Was there a former FBI director that you've enlightened us with from, I don't know, maybe a few presidencies ago that had to resign over something like this, or am I wrong?

William Sessions, the first FBI director ever fired in the history of the FBI, fired in 1993 during the Bill Clinton administration. They came in and delayed his firing because they didn't want to make the FBI a political agency. See if we can get some parallels here because Cash Maddow came in, Christopher Ray leaves, he resigned. It wasn't a firing. But the role of the FBI director is a 10-year appointment.

What do we got?

and is now going to be a political appointment. It's not going to last for 10 years. But William Sessions, the allegations came out of an Office of Professional Responsibilities report. They interviewed over 100 employees of the FBI and they found out that he did things like arrange for himself to be issued a firearm so that he could avoid certain taxes on his chauffeuring. Cash Patel's had guns issued to himself. He arranged for like $10,000 of security fences to be put around his property.

Cash Patel has arranged for certain security protocols for himself and other things to be built within the FBI for himself like a whiskey bar in his office and reupholstering the jet and building a podcast studio then William Sessions also got himself a Favorable mortgage the allegation was like a three hundred and seventy five thousand dollar mortgage which he was responsible for paying off cash Patel's trip to Italy cost the American taxpayer four hundred thousand dollars so apples to apples I think it goes

Wait a minute. Patel. then we have the assignment of protective details to William Sessions wife to go with her on her nail appointments or when she went grocery shopping. And we know that Cash Patel has assigned FBI SWAT teams to protect his girlfriend or as I like call her, the girl who's his friend when she's gone to sing the national anthem at events like at an NRA convention.

I don't Yeah, that's good stuff right there. That's good stuff. But don't you dare point that out because then you're a security threat if you

Oh, and that's worth also throwing in there. That was the last thing that came from Ben Williamson, who's the professional spin man for the FBI assistant director of public affairs.

That's who I think saw, I saw a Milan tweet.

He said that the news reporting on where Cash Patel was going to be was a security risk that they could potentially be charged with the crime. Well, Newsflash, your boss posted on his own personal social media account that he was going to the Olympics last July. So perhaps, perhaps you could assess whether or not he's got some operational security problems.

Yeah, yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong is the thing that got a pilot fired, right, was because he took a social media picture. What was it on the runway or something when he flew? I don't remember all the details, but I remember that it was a big stink because the pilot took a selfie or something or took a picture.

while they were traveling. Do you remember what I'm talking about?

If it's the FBI pilot, it was actually Chris Meyer, who was one of the agents involved with the Mar-a-Lago classified documents. They were flying around with Cash Patel. They found that out, they fired him. Cash Patel has been really terrible with pilots because he's abused his jet privileges so badly that there were incidents like when Charlie Kirk was assassinated or the Brown shooting happened, and they didn't have enough pilots who were fully rested to fly evidence, responses, shooting review teams out.

Okay, there are so many tentacles right now that are spread throughout this conversation. Let me just try to put a bow on some of these. I feel like if I remember correctly, the Pennsylvania thing, and if I have this wrong, I apologize. I need a fact checker. I need Gabby or somebody to post on here when I get wrong, which is gonna be plenty every show. But I feel like it was like an embarrassment that the guy posted a picture.

which gave away that Cash was where his girlfriend was singing. I don't know. I'm sorry if it was Pennsylvania.

Well, cash did that himself. put his own picture on Instagram with themselves at the total nonstop action wrestling event at Penn State that she was singing the national anthem.

Getting all my skin. I'm getting all my cash scandals mixed up I think and that's the problem and I do want to visit the Jets situation here, but But okay, think you mentioned Ben Williamson. I don't know if this is right either but somebody I swear Somebody had drafted at the FBI a tweet and had it ready to go for when the pushback on cash appearing in the locker room at in Milan

And it was that whole working trip, whatever thing. And I wonder if it was that guy. But it was just maddening how they were ready. They knew the pushback was gonna come. yeah, well, really he was doing this.

Yeah, he was going and shaking hands with a few people and then when the schedule was released I mean you were you're talking about the majority of his time was personal time cultural activities private dinners Attending the olympic hockey game and then flying back home So it was a personal trip and nobody's begrudging an individual who was a representative in the government a personal trip in fact I mean you want to do you maximum latitude?

I'm willing to even let him get away with doing like the frat boy SEC, bruskies on everybody's celebration if he was actually doing a good job at the FBI. And he's clearly not. So he gets no grace.

Both of these stories that I'm holding in my hand Headlines are from two days ago It's the same story but different headlines and then I'm gonna just read them to you and that you take it from here One headline says new FBI whistleblower allegations say cash Patel was quote has quote harmed actual Investigations with jet use you just started to allude to that the other headline here reads cash Patel's use of jet delayed FBI teams mass shooting response whistleblower tells top senator now

I have some quotes from the story that I can get to, but I'm just going to turn you loose on this. What is that all about?

Well, that is about Cash Patel abusing the jet to the point where the pilots have to have a mandatory rest period. It's like FAA law. You have to be able to ground for eight hours or something because if you don't, then you're going to be tired and then we're going to have accidents in the sky. And that's why you go to fly out originally at six o'clock in the morning. And you're like, why am I delayed? The weather's great. It's like, well, because the pilot probably got in at midnight last night. He has to, by law, rest until eight o'clock or something. Oh, yes.

The truckers I see parked on the side of the road. They're sleeping.

So they did not have available pilots to fly out to the Charlie Kirk shooting and they didn't have enough pilots to fly up to the Brown shooting. They had to actually drive through a winter storm in order to get there the next day because he's so rampantly abusing his jet privileges.

So hold on. There is the shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, right? And so that takes place. have to, agents have to drive to Brown University through a snowstorm. Because why exactly?

because they couldn't fly. The plane was not available. There was not a pilot who was well rested for them to get it. It was actually in their, for time management purposes, it was better for them to drive. They would get their speed.

because Cash was using that plane on a vacay in Florida, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, he's been flying to Nashville to do booty calls with his girl who's his friend. He's been flying to big donors of private ranches in Texas to go do hunting trips. He's gone to Scotland, and now he's gone to the Olympics. Even when he does these fake business trips, he went to say that, I stopped fentanyl trafficking from China because I made them sign a letter. He was flying out to Asia, but then they couldn't land in China full time because they had

Communications intercepted so they had to fly to a safer area to go drop them off and then pick them up and I mean He's not really a good steward of that and and look even outside of just the salaciousness of him abusing the jet Can we focus on the whistleblower who came forward to dick sure and? So a whistleblower came forward in full knowledge that yours truly had his life completely destroyed and others like me had their our lives Completely destroyed and felt comfortable doing that. Why would that happen? Because it's dick Durbin

because Dick Durbin is of the left because their FBI right now is looking over the horizon at what the political prospects are and says, this guy is going to be in charge very soon and I will be protected. And also the FBI is not going to go after me as a whistleblower because the FBI does not like Cash Patel. They're not going to run cover for Cash Patel like they did for Christopher Wray. And that's not because Cash Patel has done such an awesome job at fumigating

the Hoover building over there. It's that he's an incompetent boob who embarrasses them. So they've been keeping up a journal of all the derogatory material. And that will all come out when the Democrats take back control of the House and the Senate and they're starting to hold hearings. He'll be impeached. He'll be in handcuffs because that's actually what the communists do. They get elected to power to do something, not to be something, which apparently the Republicans...

That's all that their function is at this point. Josh Hawley can get up there and have a viral moment and talk about things, but there's no arrests. There's no indictments.

Yeah, I mean, there's quotes in here. Let me just real quick. Shout out to Wes. This is I'm sure what you would like to see the Hoover building look like at point. Spirit Halloween. need to go out of business.

We even close the, you know, the Museum of the Deep State. We even move out of Washington, DC. We just moved down the street to the Reagan.

It's so depressing. It's like you thought, I'm sorry. Let me speak for myself. I thought this is the guy I want. I I wanted to, I wanted confirmations above any of them. And it was Robert Kennedy to HHS one, cash Patel FBI to shame on me. All I knew from cash Patel was what I heard from podcasts and interviews. This is the guy. is the guy. Boy, I would have made the same mistake.

Cool.

President Trump did. Okay, I've got other things here. But before I get to them, so much time, we always have so much talk. You know why we always have so much talk about because there's so much shit happening all the time. And we're always having to hold these toddlers, we're having to hold them accountable. And nothing ever comes of it. And so it just keeps it's like compounding interest, Steve. It just one thing piles on to another.

And we have.

And we're always having to go back over previous ground. So let me get to this stuff here. First, another story in the news today. A headline is at least 10 FBI staffers who worked on Mar-a-Lago documents case are fired. wow, that's good. We've got accountability. The FBI got rid of 10 staffers who were part of that terrible raid into the First Lady's garments.

And that's good news, right? That's good stuff.

Yeah, I mean, it's good if you don't actually do a little bit of thinking and realize that Cash Patel has been there for over a year. So if this is actually a good faith effort in personnel to root out the corrupt parties, it took him over a year to look up who was part of that and flesh that out as opposed to maybe it's just a snap thing to do. It's a break classic in case of emergency type of move because I'm taking too much heat over my Olympics antics.

So just give me 10, 10 is a good number, right? The top 10, the FBI 10 most wanted, the 10 commandments. That tweets really well. So we'll just pick 10 off of this list and then get rid of them and then they'll sue and get their jobs back after, of course, I've been run out of there and probably been indicted for some of the things that I did. But at this point right now, it plays really well on social media, which is exactly where this is designed to go. And it wasn't 10 people who were involved.

with the classified documents case. You're talking about hundreds of people. So what happened to the others? Were they good or they already eliminated? Why did you wait for these 10 or are more coming in the future? It's completely for optics, but that requires a little bit of extra thinking.

Yeah, well, we don't have time for that. We're too busy paying our taxes that go to fun private jet trips. So this reminds me, something that I continue to hear is that we're not really getting rid of too many people at the FBI, right? We're just kind of rearranging the deck chairs from what I understand.

Well, other than myself, looks like the Department of Justice, from what I understand, the Department of Justice was touting how they had removed like 140 people. That's the DOJ, which is the umbrella agency. A sub-agency of that is the FBI. So I don't think we're really slaying a lot of dragons who have worked within the Hoover building specifically. And even from a head count perspective, they bragged about how, you know,

We're really reducing the footprint within Washington DC. They didn't send people back to the field. They just stopped bringing them in to Washington DC, which is a rotation of every 18 months people would come in and then go back to the field. They just said, all right, we'll just cancel that program. It's always a manipulation with the numbers game. Cash Patel is one of the most nakedly obvious when it comes to numbers.

And I'm a numbers guy, so it really is a B in my bonnet. Every time he puts out numbers, I just, can read right through it and realize like that is completely garbage because I know how it works and I know what he's saying doesn't make sense. And it just takes a little bit of either inside knowledge or just the gumption to type in a fact into a search engine and realize, oh, okay, that's a lie. But that plays really well within the, 140 characters on Twitter.

Yeah, no, yeah, just sit here and I just stew and I'm just angry. Okay, so let me ask you this. Some of the things you've been talking about on your show, youtube.com, don't forget, it's at amradpod. Amradpod, American Radicals, which I continue to tell you because it's true. It is the coolest logo.

in podcasting. Wes, close your ears. It truly is. And in fact, no offense to your wife, but here's what you might just, it's my decorating tips. As you can see, I'm an interior decorating pro back here. What would be kind of, I think what's missing is over your right shoulder, up against the border there between the lamp and the border, maybe a, where's Gertrude? Come here, Gertrude. Hang on.

Maybe a picture like this size. There's a Gert. And then it's sitting there on the desk, and it's just your show logo sitting back there, huh? Yeah. Right?

You like it. I weighed a couple of things, know, and YouTube is pretty good. They put the little the logo in the corner. Unlike rumble, because YouTube is a little bit superior of a platform. The other thing that I weighed doing was one of the reasons that the reason I guess that Kashmendell fired me was because I made a comment on a podcast that if in fact he and Dan Bongino were putting an innocent person in prison so that they could impress the president that they deserve to go to prison.

It was a call back to a comedist from the gladiator movie where am I not merciful? I said, well, I'd be very merciful. I would put you in prison as opposed to, you know, a death sentence, something to that. I wanted to put a picture of comedists on the wall, but I thought it was too deep of a pull. Then I read into comedists a little bit more and like, it wouldn't have been really good.

Okay, well, but see, that's the thing, though. It's like, your, your one liners are up there with Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football. You know what saying?

It's, mean, if you don't understand a niche reference while you're breaking down a cover too, then, you know, I'm probably not the host for you.

See, in hindsight, I was a young adult when Dennis Miller had his run on Monday Night Football. And while I enjoyed him on Saturday Night Live, and I enjoyed him on Monday Night Football. Now that I'm older, I think I would enjoy Dennis Miller even more today if he were doing Monday Night Football.

Dennis Miller in an era where they have end racism on the back of the end zone.

Woody must see TV.

See, yes, yes. I don't know, I showed up to work today and I thought I'm going to be a racist. And then I looked out on the sidelines in the end zone and I thought, no, we're going to end it today. Anyway, I could totally see. OK, let's see here. What's this hiring strategy changing at the FBI? What do we got going on with that, Steve?

Well, to become an FBI agent, they have a really long drawn out process. It takes some people, you know, six, eight months if they're really fast track. It takes most people around two years. It took me four years. The most cumbersome portion to that is called phase two. Now you phase phase one is you take a academic test. And right now, I I did it when it was back in the old days when it was paper, but now it's computerized. You find out right away if you passed it, you got to have a

certain prerequisite number of skills and work experience, you got to pass a fitness test, those sorts of things are pretty straightforward. Phase two is one of the strangest portions of the process. You are flown or you have to travel to out of your area, you do a written portion where you are handed a fictional case and you have to break it down and assess it.

And then you have to sit through an interview with three FBI agents where they ask you scripted questions that are extremely hard to answer. You have no advanced notice of what the questions are going to cover. You just have to go in cold and it will be questions like, tell us about a time where you were working in a group setting and everybody in the group disagreed with you, but you were able to convince everybody in the group to your way of thinking. And then it was a successful operation. I mean, just go.

right? Hard. And it's an interagency rivalry joke in the FBI. mean, in the FBI, you're you interact with another special agent, but from the DEA and you'd be like, yeah, lucky for me, I passed phase two because I don't have to be in the DEA now. Right. I it's just it's very hard and it's really good at fleshing out some people that you don't want. People who can't cut it with the writing section. They can't think critically. They can't be good on their feet. And

That now is going to be eliminated, not for people coming from the outside like I was, like I was a police officer, I would still have to go through phase two. But for people who have already been hired by the FBI and are working in a support capacity, like an intel analyst, like an administrative person, like a tech person, anybody who's with the FBI already will not have to undergo that, which means that they're going to allow

the far left politically portion of the FBI to just tiptoe through that process. Or people who got hired by the FBI straight out of college, they were an intern, and now they're operational support technician, basically like a secretary, and they have known nothing else other than the FBI for their entire professional lives, and they think that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they're going to do whatever they're told. Or people who have been there for a really long time, and there could be compromising material on.

I mean, we know about your extramarital activities here. We know that you messed up in the past here or there. Are you sure you wanna throw the flag on us? Or do you just wanna follow orders? So it's going to make things far worse than it's ever been.

Everybody's compromised up there Everybody I'm convinced everybody is compromised up there. I was I was scrambling around looking here yesterday on the I guess we're gonna call it the inaugural wild card Wednesday I had a test look like an FAA traffic air traffic control test that blew into my yard and somebody it was like a practice test or something and everything had multiple choice and all the answers and

Normally, I'll tell you what Steve normally I just dropped my show prep on the floor and it sits here for several weeks Until I decide to go I found it. This is it. Yes Okay, so so here I mean is a Here's question 11 if you're ready a taxiway blank is identify I'm sorry a taxiway blank is identified by a continuous yellow line

That is the A. You can just guess here. Let's see if you have what it takes to be an FAA and then I'll get back on track. I have ADD obviously. Is that a holding line, a parking area, a center line or closed for repair? Just guess.

center line.

All right, so you're one for one. You know what? I tell you what, I'm gonna play hiring agent for the federal government here. If you get the next two right, I'm gonna send you to the tower over here at the local airport, okay? All right. Let's see. Okay, question 14. I have not looked at just a couple of these. question 14. Taxiway edge lights are, okay, taxiway edge lights are A, white, B, amber, C, blue, D, red.

Aaaaand... Amber.

I'm sorry, you got that wrong. Dang You just gotta go study. No, it's blue. It's blue. You know, it's got the line, the blue. The only reason I know that is because I drive by an airport every morning at 3 a.m. That's the only reason I knew that answer. Aren't you proud of me, Steve? Anyway, all right. I'm gonna keep this government test close by because I just, feel like there's, you know what? I'm not gonna say anymore. I just don't know where this came from. It might be my neighbor. Let me just keep the rest of my thoughts to myself.

Darn it.

Okay, so the hiring obviously let me ask you this let's just a hypothetical just a hypothetical here Let's just say you were Emma talking about you but an individual was tapped to be the number two at the FBI, right? Yes, sir. The assistant director, right? Deputy director that's the phrase, you know what somewhere else around here is a list from Steve friend that I keep handy

the deputy director.

of all of the names because there's like an ADIC. I know there's an ADIC. All right. There's an ADIC and there's a

The A-Dick is directly over the sack.

Right, yeah, I cannot believe that the world's biggest Beavis and Butthead fan doesn't have that list of job titles. You know, somebody was playing games. Just real quick, just remind us of some of the more creative job titles at the FBI before I continue.

Well, if you're in the field versus at headquarters, if you're in the field, there's the regular agent who directs, who reports to a supervisory special agent who reports to an ASAC, the assistant special agent in charge, reports to the SAC or the SAC. The yeah. some big offices, there's an ADIC, assistant director. And then you go over to headquarters, which is a different chain of command where the program manager. Okay.

Yeah, here we go.

Yeah.

That's right, an A-Dick.

they report to the assistant unit chief, reports to the unit chief. Then you have an assistant section chief and then a section chief and then an assistant director, a associate deputy director. And then, because they did away with the executive assistant directors. Those are now a different title entirely because they just rearrange the deck chairs. So I don't know what that is.

No!

And then because above that is the associate deputy director who reports to the deputy director. But because Dan Bongino did a terrible job of that, they had to bring in a co-deputy director. So now there's two number twos and one number three, and they report to the director of the FBI. And you should know that on top of Andrew Bailey being one of the co-deputy directors, they now have Chris Rea, who they brought in. And he was the ASAC in Houston.

when the FBI was surveilling a wife of a federal air marshal for two years, even though she was paralyzed on one side of her body and was identified as being in January six, waving that side of her body.

They're all compromised.

nothing but the best investigations for our tax dollars. just want to point out here, I did find that list here and there it is. Don't forget it's an ADIC, Assistant Director in Charge and then there's the SAC right there, the Special Agent in Charge. But okay, you mentioned a name there. You mentioned a name while you were going through that. I was talking about a hypothetical. I was talking about a hypothetical. Again, let's go back to the headquarters. That was the local office. So let's just say that somebody,

anybody just just anyone rando out there wants to be deputy director certainly there's a background check on someone being considered for that position from what i understand right

There should be, but I know that Dan Bongino got a dispensation when it came to the lie detector, the polygraph. What's that? As did Marshall Yates. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you have to do a polygraph as part of your background check, but Cash Patel saw fit to give Dan Bongino a pass on that.

I why would that be, think?

I mean, he must have registered deception on one of the various topics ranging from drug abuse to marital infidelity to contact with foreign agents. Something in there, he was not able to pass the test.

Well, damn. Cash Patel, what's this thing about the FBI? He announced that they arrested 490 % more. What are these folks again?

nihilistic violent extremists.

a nihilistic violent extremist and what's this stat about

You want to have some fun with me today, Keith. This is going to be great. Ready? So national security in the FBI, they're responsible for going after those dastardly terrorists. There's just not enough of them. So they keep inventing new terrorists. So you go from looking for legitimate terrorists in the early 2000s to homegrown violent extremists, which are Americans or first generation Americans who are inspired by a foreign ideology.

Then they ran out of those guys, so they came up with domestic violent extremists, which are homegrown ideologies. Ergo, people who are militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen types, moms who go to school board meetings because they don't like the masking that's going on. People who go to radical traditional Catholics, people who go to Latin mass, you know. And then they came up with another one and that was the anti-government, anti-authority violent extremist, Agave. That was MAGA.

Those were people who had a perception of government overreach or negligence.

Sorry, I hate to interrupt, but I do it so well. And it's been a few minutes since I have. Who said, who, is there someone specific? Okay, let me back up. I don't know if you ever watched Mad Men, right? I was a big fan of that show, but they would get in a room and John Han would make his presentation and they would come up with an ad campaign, right? Who, is there one specific person at the FBI?

Is it just a couple of guys holding their junk at the stall? Who is it that stands around, sits around, and comes up with, well, not only comes up with stuff like, and thank you for paying attention. Yes, you're right, Bourn Genius. Acid, I'm sorry, A Dick over the sack. Yep, that's right. But who comes up with a lot of these terms like you just threw out there? Is there one specific?

a department that is brainstorming. Hey, let's come up with this.

description for this person. In other words, is it just a team effort? What's happening inside the walls there? And then I'll shut up for at least another minute.

It's everybody's opportunity because if you come up with a really great acronym, then you can promote off of it. So the radical traditional Catholic RTC was an invention of an intelligence analyst in Richmond, Virginia, who was just like an angry former Catholic, basically, who self deployed to parishes himself. Like he was Jason Bourne or something. and just so you know, if that Intel analyst wants to become an agent, he doesn't have to do a phase two now.

I did not know that my question was gonna lead to that answer. Holy crap. Okay, wow. So, are you emailing your supervisor to make sure it's on record? Like, hey, what if we call blah, blah, blah? What if we use this term and then it gets in the pipeline that way? Is that how?

I mean, those are a lot of times creation from the Intel shop where they're just writing term papers on things that they want to. They're responsible for writing a couple of term papers a year. That's their job. And they can just kind of shop around for anything they want, which is why they'll imbibe things like from far left sources, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Atlantic. And that'll be the inspiration to write their bulletin or their Intel product that is then imbibed by the FBI.

and then sort of laundered into its operations because they're like, well, our intelligence people are reporting X, Y, and Z. So we need to go after X, Y, and Z. And the X, and Z just happens to be moms at school board meetings. So it looks legitimate. Now, we go beyond the agave, anti-government, anti-authority, violent extremists. That's been shelved for the time being until we get President Newsom, American psycho. Try to unsee that.

As bad as it is, you had to do that to me. Yeah. Yeah. And also, what was the Catholic phrase again?

the radical traditional Catholic RTC. I'm not being so now we have the nihilistic violent extremists.

It's facetious when I ask.

Are you getting bonuses for this? Like monetary bonuses? Holy crap. Do you get a bonus for SAC if you came up with that?

Promotions, bonuses.

Whoever came up with that deserves a high five.

Right. Sorry. Now I'm going to turn my mic off. promise. Go ahead.

I mean, there's a bunch of eighth graders in the origin story of the FBI that were just like high five.

Yeah!

So nihilistic violent extremists, this is the one that Cash Patel is continually banging the drum on. So to be a terrorist, to engage in terrorism, you have to do something that is unlawful, that causes harm to people, physical harm, and it's in furtherance of a political ideology, a spiritual ideology, some sort of ideology, because terror, you're...

Instilling terror in people to get to your radical ends right that that's essentially what terrorism is the problem with nihilistic violent extremist is that nihilists don't have Ideology, did you not see big Lebowski, so they're trying to come up with a nihilistic Ideology and the idea is they're people who break the law and they do violence

But mostly the violence is not violence. They're just recruiting people to do violence online because they just want to watch the world burn like the Joker from Dark Knight. So I read through a recent affidavit that came out, and I want to get to 490 % in a minute because this is hysterical. But Keith, we've gone over before the FBI playbook for terrorism and trapments, right? Where they will find a vulnerable person and they'll groom them and then they'll spring them out.

So in a recent affidavit for the latest and greatest bust out of California that the FBI was touting as a nihilistic violent extremist, they say that the NVEs will go after vulnerable people and encourage them to engage in bad activities that are destructive and record it if they can on video.

which is exactly what the FBI does for all its terrorism cases. So I think the FBI could qualify as a nihilistic violent extremist organization at this point. But what they're hanging their hat on is this 764 organization. That from what I can tell is a bunch of 16 and 17 year olds online who are pedophiles or pederasts, or they're just jerks who will go into mental health forums and try to get people to go cut themselves, right? That's not terrorism though.

And now that they're 18, we're going to go charge them for what they did, if they're possessing child pornography or trying to manufacture child pornography, or they're trying to get people to go and do some self harm. Those are violations of criminal law, but we're going to call them terrorists so that we can say we're stopping terrorists. So then we get to 490%. I mean, that's like a really specific number because Cash Patel sucks at PR.

He could say almost 500%, so it would be incapable of calculating, but he wanted to be very specific and say 490%, which means that the FBI went from 100 to 590 terrorism arrests of that specific class? No, no. They went from 10 to 59. 59 people who were arrested because that's...

As a president, he will not only reactivate the agave term, they'll just pivot the nihilistic violent extremists to something different and call it terrorism and use national security resources in order to do it.

He is a front runner for the Democrats right now.

Well, he's out there telling black audiences that he's just like them and can't read. So he's feeling pretty confident.

Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. Okay. Um You mentioned something there um And and and it reminds me that every time I have you on I want this fact repeated Uh, you alluded to it there and and and correct me as soon as I say the wrong number 90 of domestic violence or

It's in excess of 90 % of more than 90.

of domestic terrorist cases are originated with the FBI right? They set somebody up for it.

Project Salam did a study on this back in 2014. In excess of 90 % of FBI terrorism arrests involve somebody who is neither predisposed or capable of actually carrying out a terrorist attack. I mean, they might be a bad dude who has bad ideas, but they're just not capable of doing it and having bad ideas isn't illegal. And what we're seeing now increasingly is

Cool. I swear. Your government, your tax dollars at work. So now this seems like it's good news, right? Cash Patel says that the FBI has recovered 6,000 children in 2025 alone. That's good, right? That's good news, right?

Yeah, mean, let's just think through the number for a second, Keith, right? So 6,000 children.

Am I doing math here? I the calculator or something?

That would be 500 children a month. Okay. They don't work weekends. So that would be over 20 children a day who were being reunited with their parents. Do you think that Cash Patel might have put out a tweet about that? Like one photo op? One. But we don't get that because recovering a child is not what you think because you speak English.

Piss

You don't speak FBI. What recovering a child means is that Nick Mick, National Child for Missing and Exploited Children, who which is like a quasi private public entity. There are people who work all day long and view child pornography in the hope that they will find the bad guys and refer them over to law enforcement and also figure out who the kids are in the videos.

Right? And what will go on there is that there will be a video of a particular child that is passed around all the time. It's the same video over and over and over again. They can authenticate, okay, we know this video, it's confirmed. This is child pornography. You can put Nick Mick's seal of approval on it. You don't even need to view it, officer. This is child pornography. And there'll be a video series.

because they will recognize the background, they'll recognize the child, and they'll say like, oh, it's that same kid over and over and over again in this series of say 10 different videos. And they, don't know who this kid is. And we'll just, we'll name the kid. We'll say that that's little Julie. We'll just call her little Julie. And we're trying to figure out who little Julie is. And then one day they figure out that little Julie is actually named Jane Doe. And Jane lives in East Kansas. She's 32 years old.

And we've been able to identify her. And she says, yeah, that was me. My stepdad did that to me when I was three years old. And by law, Jane has to be contacted every single time someone gets arrested for possessing child pornography of her by law, unless she opts out and says, hey, look, that video's circulating around the internet. Thousands and thousands of pedophiles have access to it. I don't need to be contacted every single time in the future.

You have the child pornography. You can charge them with it. I don't need to find out about it. I just want to move on. Nick Bickite has identified little Julie as Jane Doe. The FBI says that they've recovered that child.

That's what that means.

Cool.

They don't do that at all. I mean, I had the unicorn of a case. I mean, we can't get Nancy Guthrie, right? We can't find a kidnapping victim ever because they always get killed, right? Or a lot of them are parental kidnappings or virtual kidnappings. They aren't really kidnappings. I had a legitimate runaway kid who was, you could construe it as kidnapping and I found her alive. Okay. That never happens. I mean,

Ever ever it's one of the reasons that I can look back and be like maybe that's why it was a good thing. I was in the fbi Like the one shining example That doesn't happen 6 500 a month 20 a day and the most social media obsessed presidential administration in history fbi director in history Doesn't tweet it out Because it's garbage

Boy, that's heartbreaking. mean, this is the kind of story that leads newscasts.

And he knows it. He knows it. Yeah. like, just, hey, I'm a numbers guy. Like think through that number. That doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah. They, at the state of the union, they didn't roll out one kid who got returned to mom and dad.

You know, that's the same in the same vein as the conversation that we had, which is a fascinating episode. If you want to go and find the Adam Walsh case that we did, and I won't spend the time here getting into it, but one of the things that stood out from that conversation was the complete fabrication of how many children were kidnapped in America. And when you stop.

just like you did there and you micro it down from how many kids per year, okay, well that was as many a month, a week, day, holy crap, there should be kids disappearing on my street every hour. Because nobody, you just go right for the emotion and then nobody stops the They go, no, we gotta do something, we gotta pass a law, we gotta get more bodies, got more badges and we gotta get this stuff fixed.

So this is a little bit off topic for recovery, did you ever see the movie Wind River?

get out much now.

So it's one of the main movies that people always ask me if I've ever seen because I worked on Indian reservations and it covers a woman who's murdered on the Wind River Indian reservation. The FBI is investigating. It's completely fictionalized. It's very entertaining, but it's nothing close to reality. But at the end of that movie, they throw out this giant number, which I can't recall the top of my head. It's like the missing and murdered women on an Indian reservations figure. And it's like this astronomical number.

This is an entity that gets government funding and they're trying to advocate on behalf of missing and murdered Native American women on Indian reservations. I worked on reservations and I remember being contacted and being told, hey, there's these two women that are reported missing on your reservation. I'm like, I know just about everybody on the reservation. I don't know these two women. So I went and talked to the police chief who knew more than I did. He'd been there forever. And he said, yeah, yeah, she lives.

in town in Sioux City, Iowa. She moved off the reservation and she moved here. She got married and they just moved and they left the reservation. I was like, oh, so they're okay? Like, yeah. So I called up and I said like, hey, I located your women, right? And they're like, well, if they leave the reservation, we have to put them down as missing still. We don't want to lose the number.

So, I guess it's true with absolutely everything, especially in government, but really this is kind of a universal truth. Follow the money. Follow the money. I mean, that's the bottom line of everything. If there's money at the end of the line, then that's the answer to all of these strange definitions and...

It's just, I don't know, man, just, I'm angry. Okay, so what else have you been talking to over on the, talking about over at the American Radicals podcast that maybe we haven't talked about yet, or is there something here that we need to visit? Because I'm sufficiently enraged right now. Is there something else I need to be?

Well, I mean, so today we wound up doing a breakdown of not just the director's trip to Italy and the problems with that, but what I love to do, which is looking at the FBI press releases that come out all the time.

This is some of your best stuff, Explain what you do on FBI press release day.

So I aggregate them, it's all publicly available. The FBI has a different social media, Twitter account for each one of its 56 field offices. And they will put out their helmet sticker trophies and saying like, did an awesome job. And I've gotten pretty proficient at this point where I can kind of smell a rat and I know what they do and don't typically work.

Which is why when Cash Patel says, murder rates are down in Raleigh, North Carolina, well, the FBI doesn't investigate murder. So why are you bragging about that? Or crime rates are down around the country. Well, 30 % of large police departments are not reporting their crime to the FBI. So maybe that's contributing to the lower numbers. But they will put out these press releases or a post on X and I will drill down to the DOJ press release. And typically it's around paragraph three or four where it says, according to the court documents.

you find out that the armed bank robbery that was interdicted by the FBI wound up being a patrol officer who happened upon the bank when the guy was walking out and arrested him immediately. And the FBI just waited to get all the paperwork and then took it to federal court. And then three, four, five years later, they are now touting how they had this bank robber sentence. Meanwhile, it's been on their books, on their quotas.

for five fiscal years, they've been able to boost their numbers and now they've stolen credit for the great police work that we've done. the point always is, we don't need an FBI. We have a extremely robust, very proficient law enforcement apparatus in this country at state and local levels. And we are very, very far away from the days of Bonnie and Clyde when you could do a robbery, run across state lines and Ali Ali, Oxenfree and...

We do not need the FBI. And in fact, it's not even needing them. They're actually a negative. They're not as good at investigating. mean, need no further example than the Nancy Guthrie case where they're out there and the FBI agents who are there don't work kidnappings. They don't work murders. So what are you bringing to the table other than a pocketbook of saying like, well, we'll offer a reward. Well, we don't need an $11 billion agency to offer a reward.

We don't need an agency flying a guy around private around the world in order to do that. You just want a pool of money for reward money. Okay. You can just put like one accountant in charge.

That is the word redundancy isn't even applicable here. It's just dishonesty. And I just fascinating to hear how local police work turns into a federal case. What? Because a federally insured bank was involved? Yeah.

The Nexus, many of the times, the 924 illegal guns is a big way they get involved because if you commit a crime while having a gun, that makes it a federal crime. So they'll jump in on that. You killed somebody. Well, we'll get you on the gun crime. Or after the fact, they'll get people sometimes who are in prison already. I had this, this one really offended my sensibilities quite a bit because it was in my backyard.

and it was a human trafficking case in Daytona Beach, Florida. And it was around the time that the alleged offense happened would have been when I was investigating those crimes in my area. And it never crossed my radar. So I didn't understand what had happened. And then I researched it and found out that the guy was already in prison for manslaughter. And some women came forward and said, hey, look, he was our pimp and he was doing this abusive stuff to us when we were prostitutes.

So then after the fact, while he was in prison, the FBI indicted him, got a conviction because he pled guilty, and his entire sentence would be served concurrently with his manslaughter charge. So he wouldn't do an extra day in prison at all. So what was the point? I mean, I want justice for those victims for sure, but if we're going to talk about a finite amount of resources and time, and you're not even able to get him an extra day in prison after all that, and then you have the gall, the unmitigated hubris.

to go out and brag how you've gotten a human trafficker sentenced to prison, that's a joke. The American people deserve better than that.

Yeah. Okay, so check this out. In the past, I've given you the hypothetical question that if you were the FBI director and a sane country would make you the FBI director, but we're definitely not that. That ship has sailed long ago, ladies and gentlemen, and it's not coming back into port. you stated at one time that

you if and we're in charge if you were in charge of the FBI that you would disarm it that it's an investigative body it's not a law enforcement apparatus that I don't want to put words in your mouth but but you you basically said there's no reason to be armed right is that is that accurate so far

If you're going to keep the agency, I think the best thing you could do would actually take the guns away from it. That would empower local law enforcement because they could conduct investigations and then to actually go forward with an arrest, they wouldn't be sworn law enforcement officers. They would need to get cooperation from either a federal marshal or more likely a deputized local law enforcement official, a sheriff's deputy,

police officer who is accountable to the local populace and the sheriff there would have basically have a final say and say like, appreciate how you investigated my constituent for being a radical traditional Catholic, but we're not going to arrest. And then the FBI wouldn't do those sorts of things. They would actually focus on what the sheriff needed focusing on. And they would devote the resources to those things so that they could be effective at it.

And because the sheriff is answerable to the people, he's incentivized to actually bring crime down. So that would be a good use of resources. Whereas the FBI is so removed and they're perversely incentivized to bring crime up, which is why they keep inventing new variations of terrorism so they can artificially increase the numbers and say, look how awesome we did. We need more funding.

It just feeds on itself. Like every three-letter agency. So the way I look at the FBI now is much the way John F. Kennedy looked at the CIA. And in fact, me clarify. I look at the FBI and the CIA the way JFK used to look at the CIA. You break it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.

I had hoped that it could be reformed. I readily admit that I thought Cash Patel was the guy for that job. That would have been a terrible hire by me if I were in the same position as President Trump. And so I would have made the same error. At this point, are you of that mindset? Can the FBI be reformed or is it time for the

Spirit Halloween sign to be put out front of the Hoover building, Steve Frint.

It's long past time for the spirit Halloween sign. mean, it was probably needed to go there. And that was my preference even before Casper Tell was elevated. But I recognize.

You've seen it from the inside, right? I so I mean, you're saying that as someone who is a part of that beast. That's fascinating.

Yes, yeah. And look, the people who are competent investigators and want to stay in law enforcement, they're going to land on their feet. They're going to do just fine. I'm not really worried about that. There is just not a need for it from a practical purpose. And then now it's a political entity in and of itself entirely, where it used to be the politics of the FBI were what is good for the FBI.

Well, whatever is good for the FBI is whatever the people in charge of the executive branch want because you're answerable to them. So you kind of preserve the status quo. If they say, ahead and get the Vietnam draft dodgers, well, let's just go get those guys. If they want us to go after the communists, we'll go after to get the communists. I think at the time, I mean, you could argue about whether or it was right or wrong. But for the most part, that was sort of perceived to be objectively good to go after communists. But now our

flash forward into the Biden administration, they're going after MAGA and they're calling them MGABEs. Now you've got the nihilistic violent extremists, which are under the Trump administration. And that is sort of the wool over the eyes of people because nobody's going to cry about calling a pedophile a terrorist. But the tool is still there. The ring of power is still there. There is no solution to it. It cannot be wielded. If you read Tolkien,

The only solution is to throw the ring into the volcano. And they have not come to that ultimate conclusion. And they're going to pay the price for it because when we get President American Psycho, the gun's going to be turned back around on them.

Cool. No, that's, that's good. Okay, let me, I had one more question for you here. It slips my mind now, actually. Shoot, what was I gonna ask you? Well, I will say that it's disheartening. I know what it was. I know what it was. I know what it was. Since we've got the FBI director flying to the Olympics and whatnot.

having all this free time. Surely that means that they've cracked every case that got sitting on the books, such as Butler, Pennsylvania. Are we ever going to learn any more about the Thomas Matthew Crooks,

No, I doubt that because they've said that they've briefed the president on that and that's sufficient.

He hired the private investigator. Who was behind that? Because I assumed the whole time it was Trump.

You know, I'm not sure about that. I've just always been on the theory, which I become every day increasingly more and more convinced that Thomas Matthew Crooks was in the process of being entrapped by the FBI to go do some sort of a terrorism plot. I think that the evidence is just mounting on that and the way that they reacted in the aftermath of it just shows how they wanted to cover it up. mean, look, Crooks was the tailor made.

Hold on, you think that the FBI was working with crooks for a terrorism plot, or are you saying you think the FBI was working with crooks to assassinate Donald Trump?

No, I don't think that they were looking at and track with me on this. He looks like the socially awkward loner type that they love to entrap, right? Vulnerable guy, he has no friends in the world. You introduce a confidential human source, a snitch, and then he befriends him and then starts to convince him to do his worst ideas, introduce an undercover and then you arrest him, right? I think that he fits that bill quite nicely. Now.

Again, back to the hubris, FBI doesn't work weekends. And Thomas Matthew Crooks was smarter than most of the people that they typically go after. I mean, he had some junior college. He seemed to be with it a little bit more than others. When did Butler happen? On a Saturday when nobody was working. I think he just was being led down a trail of breadcrumbs being laid for him.

And then just kind of lost patience with it and said, you know, I'm just gonna go grab my dad's rifle and go take a shot. And then there was a myth of competence that exists with Secret Service, which we saw yet another example of when the person got into Mar-a-Lago recently and was able to get a successful assassination attempt. It was successful. He got a headshot, multiple shots off. Failures of communications went there. That was all on display. He winds up being killed. Now the FBI has to scramble. Holy crap.

We have a domestic terrorism case with Crooks as our subject, and we might have radicalized him to take a shot at the president. What are we going to do? Well, firstly, we will clean up the scene right away. We will seize his device and then immediately return it to his family 24 hours later. Then we'll have the deputy director of the FBI go and testify to the Senate at a hearing where he says that we're investigating Crooks as potentially.

You already had a case open. And on top of that, now it's classified. Can't talk about it. Can't reveal that ongoing investigation. Source of the method, sir. Can't talk about it. and then we'll throw out the last little bit where we say that Iran might have been involved. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. Meanwhile, they lean on a thief merchant who was arrested the day before, conveniently, the crooks' assassination attempt. It wasn't connected, but he was the guy who was from Pakistan who was apparently

coming to America on behalf of Iran, endorsed by the FBI Dallas office, allowed to travel to the United States, then go into New York City, where he was planning to hire hit men to carry out assassination attempts, and also hire dozens of fake protesters to situate themselves outside random politicians' houses, and then have some unknown female infiltrate like she was in Mission Impossible, and steal classified material off their desks, because I guess they're all Joe Biden.

And then he was getting this all done for $5,000, which he didn't have access to, because he's a crazy person. And the FBI wanted to just get a simple, easy terrorism arrest out of it. But then they say, I ran. Ooh, terrorism. It's conveniently around the same time as the assassination attempt. Let's get this all giant stew in there, and then we will just throw it up against the wall, and people will believe it. I think that there's a pretty compelling case there that

Crooks was in the process of being entrapped and they've now scrambled it and they do not want it to come out that the FBI was doing that because they'll take the blame for maybe you radicalized a possible assassin. Plus the entire playbook that they typically use would be on the chopping block and that's what we just said. 90 % of their terrorism cases, they don't want to lose that tool.

So what do you

think they told the president to satisfy him about this assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

I think that they just said the same thing that they did for the guy down outside the golf course. It's a one-off. And there were security failures because Biden was in charge. And we have now got the right people at the helm. We got cash. We got the guy who was on that protective detail for you in charge of the Secret Service. His name escapes me now. Everything is great. the president's got a full agenda.

presumes that he makes the best hiring decisions and everything's fine.

What do make of the...

Return to the world of podcasting by the former deputy director, Dan Bongino and his message for people who, who dare to doubt anything that he says.

Well, he calls himself the pod father now, which I think Adam Curry might have a bone to pick with that because he actually is the pod father. But he is doing the bidding of the administration because that's what his his perceived skill set is. I went back and found it. You remember over the summer when they did the July dump at Axios and said the Epstein files were closed.

and nobody was going be charged and then he threatened to quit.

I remember where I was sitting when I read. yeah, and he kind of went dark for a little bit right after that.

Yeah, he knew his reputation was mud. He was going to quit. And then they likely said to him, you can't quit. You got to be you got to take a bite of this bleep sandwich with us, but we'll find you an exit when enough time has happened. And then he went back and now he's not talking about Epstein at all.

talking about Epstein. But he can't do it all at one time. He didn't tell us. that,

And all he's doing is interviewing people from the administration like he's Fox News,

And now he is one of those who provide nice cover. I just, wonder now. Well, let me back up here. Let's go back to July. Like you said, hey, you're, hey, you're in it, man. You're one of us. I don't know how deep the conversations went. I have no idea. I'm not privy to them, but we can speculate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But one thing I can say that's factual is I have never seen someone be so defensive just when they crack the mic, crack that mic and just go in zero to 60 on, on, on Uber defensive mode. But, but I think you're right. I think they said at the time, you got to stick around here to the end of the year. And like you said, we're going to provide that exit and

Now I want you and I'm just going to make an assumption here. Was that exit? We caught the J6 bomber and we're giving credit to you on your birthday. What happened there and what is the latest with that? My gosh, that poor young man.

you

Yes.

Yeah, so that was done so that he could have a nice press conference that was going to be his parting gift. They were trying to find a way to prepare him to exit. were originally, I believe, going to say that Operation Summer Heat, where they got all those arrests over the summer. They were saying, well, Dan Bongino architected this entire operation. The FBI does it every single year. They just renamed it. And then they had the information come forward that

there was a Capitol Police officer who fit the bill as the likely January 5th slash 6th pipe bomber and they had to scramble and they got their patsy they got Brian Cole Jr. an autistic brony My Little Pony fan and they went with this guy who is autistic and apparently was angry about the election so he built a pipe bomb that didn't work using pipe bomb parts that he bought before the election

And then after that, threw everything out, but then went back and bought more so he could conveniently have it for us. And he never changed his habit of life or movement, used his own credit cards and car and cell phone, and yet eluded us for five years. This is our guy.

multiple trips I'd like to point out to the hardware store to build this bomb over the course of several years.

And his vehicle is driving at times when the pipe bomber is walking. So yeah, not a strong case. And then Dan Bongino leaves. He went on terminal leave after that, right? He left in like late November, early December. And then he just used his leave time up and got credit for it because he wanted to get into January so he could say he was there for a year. So because the calendar went from 2025 to 2026. Meanwhile, he was only there for like nine months. Like I accrued more sick time.

in my time at the FBI, more sick time and vacation time than Dan Bongino spent at the FBI. And now he's going to talk about from from position of experience how things are. So he leaves, he goes back to doing the podcasting, but he's doing it in a completely state run media type of perspective. Right. And and then and the other thing I'll note is he just got back with Fox News, right?

He got fired by Fox and then he went and said Epstein killed himself and there's nothing to see here. We're to move on. And then they brought him back.

Again, I say, cool. What's the Brian Cole Jr. I don't know his next court date, but that man has to be. I cannot imagine mentally what he is going through.

Yeah, that's what they're hoping. They're going to hope to suicide him. The judge is in on it too. It's that Boasberg judge. They're continuing to rule in the government's favor every single time. The narrative is more important to even a communist like Boasberg that this guy was part of some sort of insurrection that rather than which is far more likely or I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't hedge that much. What is true?

is that a Capitol police officer was a pipe bomb because it was a giant government op. And they do not want to lose that legitimacy because if that comes out, there is no excuse for keeping multiple government agencies existing. If you knew nothing else about the FBI, you could totally men in black, memory wipe everything we talked about today, everything we've ever talked about. And if I said, hey, the FBI was part of a plot,

to drop fake pipe bombs in the nation's capital so that there could be a terrorism angle on people protesting outside the Capitol building on January 6th. You would say that has to go. And it never made sense to anyway, and maybe it's because I think differently than most people, maybe because I have a law enforcement investigation background. This never made sense to me, except it does make sense. And that is the pipe bombs

were married to the Capitol. Why? There was never any evidence that connected them. The pipe bombs were not at the Capitol. They were dropped the night before. They were weapons of mass destruction, not connected to any of rioting or protesting or whatever you want to characterize the Capitol. And yet they were. In fact,

The pipe bombs were used in court documents by the DOJ when they requested sentencing enhancements for January 6 years. They said, look, there was a terrorism attack. There was a bomb there. We have to enhance this. This is terrorism. To me, the comparison would be like, well, there was a carjacking in southeast DC. It's a crime of violence. Can you pin that on the January 6 people at the Capitol? It's similar. There's no evidentiary connection. And then we got an evidentiary connection.

We got a Capitol police officer who was there the night before and at the Capitol the next day taking headshots of people with pepper balls. Now we have an evidentiary connection, but it ain't good for the government. So they're going to get rid of that and try to do it separately. And that presents an interesting challenge with Brian Cole Jr. because his attorneys, if they're doing a good job, and I think some of them are trying and some of them are hurt, aren't, but they're going to zealously represent Brian Cole Jr. Just him. They don't care about a deep state.

plot, they don't care about conspiracy theory, they just want to get that guy out of jail. That's their job. Respect. Okay? So they're going to try to do things like say the pardon that was issued for January 6th should apply to Brian Cole Jr. And the government is going to be in the position of saying it doesn't apply to him. It's like, well, then why did you use it in sentencing enhancements for other people?

So it's going to be really weird to see the DOJ come back and say, no, it doesn't apply. We want to put him in jail, which is why I think ultimately we've already seen the DOJ drag its feet so that they missed a statute of limitations on some of the charges. they're going to say, dang it. It's that Biden FBI screwed us. We would have had it. it's that Bo Asberg. He would have had it. And Bo Asberg is probably going to say the pardon applies. And then they say case closed. We got our man. And that communist judge

who has a lifetime appointment, did us in again. I guess we better ask those darn Republicans to go try to impeachment when they're in the minority.

you

Cool. That's today's word, word of the day is cool. This is, mean, we're living in the damn matrix after all. Okay, I did look up and I found that the next status hearing, ironically enough, for Brian Cole Jr. is tomorrow morning at 10.30 a.m. Eastern time. Wow. We'll be looking for that. But what is so ironic, I don't know, telling, I should say, that the public

Nice.

or at least the media has made their mind up that, yep, that's the guy, is the fact that yours truly was over here searching when is the next court appearance for Brian Cole Jr. And the most recent articles written were over a month ago. I mean, these were back in December. These stories, there's been nothing written fresh in the last few weeks.

Granted, there hasn't been a court appearance in the last few weeks, but you would think there would be some mild curiosity to a terrorist pipe bomber in the nation's capital. It's almost like...

It's almost like any kind of genuine curiosity of facts around this case aren't worth pursuing because, well, it's almost like people have been taught a lesson to not ask questions of our government, regardless of who's in power. Steve Friend, I'm sorry, as always, just for what you have gone through as a patriot for this country and your honorable service to this nation.

in the FBI. I'm sorry that you continue to go through a living nightmare. And I do hope that everyone will, if they're not already familiar, they go to Spotify, Apple or wherever. And the American Radicals podcast. There's the YouTube channel at amrad pod amrad pod. I don't know why I can't speak. I haven't even been drinking. And don't forget, I'm going to hold you to it.

It's going to irritate you more so than normal. I'm looking forward to the next time I see a picture come up here of your studio, a little picture of your awesome podcast logo for the American Radicals podcast sitting on that little desk back there, sir. As always, thanks for making time. Steve Friend, also a book author. I almost haven't memorized. It's True Blue, My Journey from Beat Cop to FBI Agent. Did I get that? I?

Suspended FBI whistleblower.

And as was, yeah, it's going to be updated. Right. Bless you, Steve Friend, follow him on X at realstevefriend. Thanks to all of you for being a part of this conversation today. We'll be back about 22 hours from now. We'll do the Friday live stream. Looks like it's going to be Brad and Rebecca joining me for some of the fun here on atthemikeshow.com and on X and YouTube and wherever you are now, that's where you need to be. Don't forget the one person project. Share it with one person, please.

I would be so grateful. Thanks so much, Real Steve Friend, American Radicals podcast. I appreciate it as always,

You got it.