5/21/24: Biden on drug conspiracy grows, Trump aide flees when everything goes wrong

David Pakman
Welcome, everybody. Hope you're having a good day. One of the most irresponsible narratives that we are now seeing from the hardcore MAGA right wing is that Joe Biden is on drugs. Now, if we had any serious evidence that such a drug existed that would hide the supposed Joe Biden dementia that many of these right wingers claim he is suffering from, we would have something closer to, closer to a more responsible story. However, we don't have that. And Fox News now even found a doctor, a republican congressman named Ronnie Jackson, who was formerly Donald Trump's doctor, to come on and talk about Biden being juiced on something, again, suggesting that there is a drug that Biden is taking, that is making it so that he can stumble through a speech without being unable to speak and his supposed dementia being impossible to hide. Now, as I said yesterday, there is no such drug that would do the thing they are suggesting. So we're going to look at a clip here. We will look at the baseless speculation from Ronnie Jackson, and then I'm going to do something that I, I'm intuiting many of you would want me to do, which is to say, how does Doctor Ronnie Jackson's speculation differ from that of folks like Doctor John Gartner and Doctor Harry Siegel, who were on this program looking at the behavior of Trump and Biden and making a cognitive evaluation? That's a really good question. I hope you're asking that question. I hope you're going to hold me accountable to that question. We will look at that in a moment.

Here's Doctor Ronnie Jackson yesterday on Fox talking about the juicing as a doctor. You're a White House doctor for a.

Ronnie Jackson
Good spell, 14 years.

David Pakman
Yes, sir. Now, all right, Trump is saying before the first debate they should be drug tested. He would submit to it. Mister Trump, he thinks Mister Biden be submitted to it. People are, I don't know, don't take this seriously. I think they should take it seriously. As a former presidential physician, what do you think?

Ronnie Jackson
Well, I think normally we would never suggest something like that, but I think we live in a different world now. I think President Trump's saying what everybody else in this country is thinking right now. What is going on with this man? What is he on? I mean, we see him for three years now, slur in his speech a sleepy joke, and can barely stay awake long enough to read the teleprompter. And then over the last few months, we've seen that when he comes out publicly, like he did at the State of the union, he is completely juiced up on something. I mean, he is screaming at the camera. His eyes are wide open. I mean, he's not blinking. I mean, he's got all, he looks for all the world like he's on some type of drug. The question is, what is he taking? Right.

David Pakman
Well, this is what really gets to respond. The responsibility or irresponsibility of this. What is he taking? Right? What is he taking?

He's the doctor. He should be able to tell us, here is the drug or the drugs that would do what I am wildly speculating they are doing to Joe Biden. And when you talk about Doctor Harry Siegel and Doctor John Gartner, they're evaluating behavior. They're evaluating, you know, when Biden loses his train of thought for a moment, he comes back and he recognizes that he said something that was wrong and he corrects himself. Trump on the, this is their observation. Trump, on the other hand, will steamroll right through saying, we might be heading towards World War two, or I defeated Obama in the election, or Obama's the president, or Nikki Haley was in charge of capital security.

And he just continues because he is disconnected from the things that he is saying.

And we have all these other examples. They are evaluating observational behavioral traits.

Ronnie Jackson, if this were serious, would say, hey, you know what? Here's what works. Modafinil would do what it appears it is doing to Joe Biden, or Adderall would give Joe Biden what he needs in order to hide his dementia during a 1 hour speech. The reason Doctor Ronnie Jackson isn't doing that is that there is no such tool that would do what they describe, which is Biden has dementia. He doesn't know what's going on. And for an hour, a drug can eliminate all of that. But then it starts wearing off during a 1 hour speech. Now, I'm not going to totally redo yesterday's segment because we just went through this, but as a very quick reminder, Adderall, Ritalin type stimulants don't improve cognitive function for individuals with dementia, and they risk causing anxiety and agitation, which could make it even more difficult to speak clearly, including if you're someone like Joe Biden, who struggles with a stutter. The modafinil and other, I called them nootropics. Someone told me that they are nootropics. I don't know the right pronunciation. These are drugs that claim to enhance cognitive function.

They last twelve to 15 hours. If it were true that Biden were on Mel, why would it be wearing off at the end of an hour speech. They last twelve to 15 hours. And by the way, they also don't address dementia. Then you've got the colonist erase inhibitors prescribed to manage Alzheimer's disease. They have very long half lives. They provide a steady effect, but they are very, very mild. Extremely mild. They wouldn't take a seriously demented Biden and make him what they are describing him to be during a speech and then wear off during an hour. So the point here is, is Biden having a cup of coffee, maybe not really a big smoking gun. And coffee doesn't hide dementia. Other than that, they aren't even asserting what medication or injection or juicing would do, what they claim it is doing, because it doesn't appear to exist in the medical literature. Totally irresponsible for Doctor Ronnie Jackson to do this. I think they realize they're kind of in trouble. I think they see Trump freezing for 35 seconds during a speech, almost falling off the stage at another speech, saying the wrong person is president. They see all of it. And so they are going back to this. I also want to mention one other thing related to this. I got a couple of emails over overnight from people saying, David, you know how with Trump, allegations or confessions, we should interpret Trump saying Biden should be drug tested before the debate, as Trump admitting in his own way that he plans to be taking something during the debate.

Now, again, I don't know what one could even take, but at least as far as doctor Ronnie Jackson's observations are concerned, completely irresponsible. And he should just tell us which drugs are the ones that would do the thing he claims Biden is doing. We had a disastrous attempt yesterday from Jason Miller to create a sideshow outside the courthouse at which Donald Trump's criminal trial has been taking place. Uh, Jason Miller, one of the top aides to Trump, set up an event during which the bootlickers were going to talk about how innocent Trump is and how he's being treated so unfairly. You know, the whole thing, it backfired so badly because people showed up with cowbells and whistles and were screaming. You couldn't hear a word from the bootlickers. And this is actually amazing. As Trump's bootleggers, bootlickers are trying to address the media, they are totally drowned out. And you will see, if you're watching the video, you will see Jason Miller run away when he realizes it's a disaster, wanting to avoid being photographed there, but it is too late. So you've got, there's a visual component to this, the audio is important, but if, if you're not watching as this totally crumbles, you will see Jason Miller run away from right to left on your screen.

Prosecutor as a prosecutor.

And there goes Miller just fleeing. And I'll slow it down for you. As you can see, he's holding a phone here and moving from right to left, just getting the hell out of there because it is, that is really, really something. And the bigger point that I think is important to make here from the standpoint of perception management and public relations and crisis management is this abrupt exit by Jason Miller from this press conference that was clearly planned in advance, and it was meant to project a sense of united fervor behind Donald Trump's innocence. It really underscores the disarray and the total lack of a coherent and functional strategy from Trump's aides to actually help Trump look like anything other than a whiny little kid and the failure of Trump's team to be able to spin a narrative in his favor here. I mean, listen, the, the defense rested without Trump testifying because they have no coherent alternative explanation for the facts. They have no way to rebut Michael Cohen's under oath testimony without putting someone else under oath to lie, which apparently they don't want to do, even though who the hell knows if it really is something that they, they would be morally opposed to. And then this event going completely wrong. Here's another clip in which a guy is screaming the entire time as Trump's bootlickers try to make a point, and then the whistles start, and then the cowbells start and it is a total implosion. Guilty.

Alina Habba
Guilty.

Guilty.

David Pakman
Guilty.

Alina Habba
Guilty.

David Pakman
Guilty.

Thank you, general. My name is Patrick.

Now you might be saying, oh, the event hasn't started yet. No, no, no. They're trying to deliver their statements. You can't hear a damn thing.

So you heard Michael Cohen is a. So something, something in there. The, then Fox News, I guess, deciding to mention that some of this is going on. And the bootlickers banner is actually visible on Fox News, although they muted the audio, which is just a nice touch. And for the first time, a large group of protesters converged on the courthouse and they tried to drown out a news conference of Trump supporters. Yep. Federal candidate for president. And I have an amendment. It was an amendment that was made in order by the rules committee under Speaker Johnson. All right, so the bootlicker banner front and center on Fox News. And then just one more clip here. And, and again, this is just giving you a sense of the total failure and extreme chaos that this event represents.

Speaker one, it's not even worth playing more of it because you can't hear a damn, damn thing that the bootlickers are saying. So listen, our prediction was that as we went from Trump's civil trial to the first criminal trial, his behavior would become increasingly erratic because at least theoretically, prison is possible. Prison, it's not likely, but it is possible. And we have seen that Trump unhinged before and after every single day in criminal court. The bootlickers and brown nosers showing up increasingly desperate to defend Trump. They weren't doing this at the civil trial. And the entire sort of circus like atmosphere growing to a fever pitch as we get beyond this criminal trial to the next three criminal trials, I can only imagine this is going to get even more extreme. Monday is Memorial Day. If you have the day off, I hope you have a great day off. I will remind you we are doing our first, and maybe only one day membership drive of the year. This is to claw back what we've lost as the various algorithmically based platforms have taken and taken and taken from us, excluding us from their algorithms. We're trying to fight back against all of that by just growing our direct support, which we estimate to be about half of 1% of our audience. Get on my mailing list@davidpakman.com.

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You all knew Trump wasn't going to testify.

I knew it. I've been telling you for weeks. Alina Haba and others continued to insist since the beginning, oh, Trump will testify. He's going to do it. He said he would testify. He said he would testify. In the Eugene Carroll civil trial, he never testifies. He never testifies because it would be a self inflicted disaster if he were to do so. But here is Alina Haba just humiliating herself. How she has any credibility, obviously she doesn't with us, but how she has any credibility even with the MAGA, right. This was moments before Trump's lawyers said, your honor, the defense rests without Trump testifying, insisting. Any second now, before you know it, Trump's going to be up there telling his side of the story. No, he's not. Alina, as far as where this all goes next, what would be in the, what would be in the thought process to testify or not testify on the part of the former president? Now, before we hear from Alina, I could answer that. Well, on the one hand, he could testify to stick to his word because he and I and everyone else around him have been lying and saying he's going to testify for weeks. On the other hand, he would be completely unable to control his lying and would almost certainly perjure himself endlessly if he testified. And that would be a reason maybe for him not to do it.

Alina Habba
Well, he's got to listen to his attorneys. It's not as much what he wants to do. We know he wants to testify. He is willing, he's able, he is nothing, nothing to hide at all. He's absolutely ready to tell the truth. Frankly, I think the truth is already spoken. He was in the White House while somebody in accounting booked a legal fee payment as a legal expense.

It's pretty quick and it would be a pretty short testimony as far as the questions that would need to be asked because he had no part in this.

The reality of the situation is that we have this judge, we have this court, and we have a DA who has been politically motivated since the minute he decided to run for office. Remember, this was not brought twice, not by Cy Vance and not by Bragg. The only time he decided to bring this case was after President Trump announced that he would be running for reelection.

David Pakman
Now, understand that Alina Haba is not telling you the truth there. She says, well, he has to listen to his lawyers. He wants to testify, but he's got to listen to his lawyers. Wrong.

Wrong.

When has Trump ever listened to his lawyers if he doesn't want to? And number two, why is it that Trump wouldn't testify if that would solve so many problems for him? Clients can say to their lawyers, I understand that you're suggesting I not testify, but I want to. In fact, this is such a critical piece of one's right to testify in their own defense if they want to. That in many trials, for example, I think this happened. In which trial was it? You know, I don't remember. In many trials, there comes a point where the judge will say to the defendant, please stand up. And they will say, do you understand that you have a right to testify if you want to? And they want to hear the defendant say, yes, your honor, I do understand that that. Has your lawyer spoken to you about you testifying? Yes, your honor, I've had a conversation with my lawyer about that. Do you feel that you understand the pros and cons of testifying in your own defense? Own defense and the law, and the judge wants to hear the defendant say, yes, I do understand that. Given all of this, is it still your choice not to testify? Yes, your honor, it is my. This is such a critical thing. It is not. He has to listen to his lawyers. Trump never listens to anyone. And it is a paramount right to be allowed to testify in your defense. The reason is, at his core, Trump must suspect it's a very bad idea to testify. And he has been convinced, and I don't say convinced in the coerced, but he, he has come to believe or share his attorney's opinions that it would be a very bad idea for him to testify, primarily because they don't have an alternative explanation for the facts.

And to contradict or attempt to impeach Michael Cohen's testimony, Trump would have to lie. He would have to commit perjury in order to do that. Ok, a couple other clips from this wacky interview with Alina Haba. She says one of Trump's biggest frustrations is anyone can say whatever they want about Trump, but he can't say anything about them. Again, ignoring the fact that he can testify if he wants to.

Alina Habba
I think the biggest frustration for the president right now is the unconstitutional gag order. He still feels frustrated by that. I know he speaks to the press, obviously, in the morning and at the end of the day, but even when he's speaking, he's limited as to what he can speak to, and that's incredibly frustrating for him. A witness could come up and say things that he knows are untrue and he can't say anything back.

David Pakman
He can't trash them in the media, he can't trash them on social media, but Trump can say something back. Trump can be put under oath just like the witnesses, and he can help tell his version of events. The idea that Trump's being silenced because a witness says something under oath under potential penalty of perjury. And Trump isn't allowed to go on truth social and say whatever he wants. That is not equivalent. Trump has a mechanism to contradict what the witnesses are saying under oath, which is to get himself under oath and tell his version of events. Now, one other funny moment. Here's a sort of, they came up to me with tears in their eyes story from Alina Haba. Alina Haba says people come up to her on the street and say, what is Trump even being charged for based on that metric?

Ronnie Jackson
How does this trial measure up?

Alina Habba
Zero.

I think that's the problem. It's, you know, we can speak as right wing media, I can speak as his spokesperson all I want, but I think this has done more good for the american people to understand just how bad it really is when you see that nobody can say what the crime is. When I walk down the street, most people ask me, Alina, can you just explain to me what he did?

David Pakman
They stopped me and they say, ma'am, explain to me, what are they doing to Trump? What is the charge and what they're.

Alina Habba
Actually charging him for? The truth is I can't because it's misdemeanor, based on some, something that is frankly civil, not criminal, and they're elevating it to federal.

David Pakman
All right? And then, of course, they continue to tell that lie, which is, these are misdemeanors. They're charging them as felonies, even though this is something done thousands of times in the very jurisdiction in which Trump is being tried. So Alina Haba, doing the best she can, Trump seemingly doing the worst he can as the trial starts to conclude. Let's get to that, next.

Yesterday, the defense rested in the criminal defense of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, on the last day, just admits to the entire thing. On his way into court at a stroke past 08:30 a.m. on the east coast, Donald Trump makes a critical, critical admission, which is to say, we called it a legal expense. Trump supposedly didn't know anything about it. Trump had nothing to do with it. It was other people who made these decisions. It didn't involve Donald Trump in any way. And yet Donald Trump says, listen, they're coming after me because we called it a legal expense.

Donald Trump
This is why I'm here. Because we called it a legal expense.

David Pakman
Because we called it a legal expense. Listen, once more.

We called it a legal expense.

Part of the entire framing of the cross examinations has been Trump didn't know anything. Trump didn't do anything. This was done without Trump's authorization or involvement long after Trump knew anything about it. And then there were recordings that said, wait a second, it does seem that Trump was involved. And then all of a sudden Trump just says, we called it a legal expense. This is actually not a small detail.

This is a major, major aspect to this entire trial. And Trump just lying uncontrollably, including saying that he, he was called in early to the, to the court. And this is another way in which he's been treated unfairly.

Donald Trump
As you know, I was supposed to be in a very different state this morning and the judge actually decided to call it early.

And yet it looks like we're going to have a very big gap between days and it's going to be determined right now in court.

But we here about an hour early today, I was supposed to be making a speech.

David Pakman
So this is just absurd. The judge called them in 45 minutes early yesterday.

Are we supposed to believe Trump was supposed to be in another state for 45 minutes before the trial started? I mean, just none of this makes any sense. It's all hyperbole and exaggeration. And then Trump quoting the great legal scholar Bill O'Reilly, even Bill O'Reilly is saying that this is all so unfair.

Donald Trump
Adam said, liberty without virtue is tyranny. We have tyranny right now. We have tyranny right now. And we're disgracing our New York court system and we're really disgracing our country because all over the world they're watching. BiLl O'REilly Donald Trump and his family do not deserve this blatant miscarriage of justice. Don't applaud the destruction of justice because you may be on the receiving end someday.

David Pakman
All right, so the great legal scholar Bill O'Reilly talking about how it is also unfair. And then to wrap up Trump's criminal trial, as we will now move into closing arguments very soon, Trump did fall asleep again yesterday and in one of the strangest ways of the trial so far. It is totally insane what is happening daily in a criminal courtroom in New York City. It is now being reported that yesterday Donald Trump fell totally dead asleep with his head back so far that it was pointed up at the ceiling. Molly Crane Newman, who was inside the courtroom, she's a Manhattan courts reporter for the New York Daily News. She put out a tweet, some now call them excretions because it is x, it is no longer Twitter, where she says, quote, it appeared Trump was fully out a few minutes ago and just woke up. His head was tipped back. So far that he would have been looking at the ceiling when he opened his eyes. There are three major stories here, and it is not about, haha, Trump can't stay awake, but he calls Joe Biden sleepy Joe. That story. Number four, it's like not one of the major stories. It's funny. It's funny that you nickname a guy sleepy Joe and then you're asleep every day in court. There's three stories. Number one, total lack of respect for the judicial process, which they claim to champion when it benefits them. And if it doesn't, I'll just sleep through this. I don't even respect the process enough to stay awake. That's number one. Number two, this does raise questions about Trump's health and fitness to stand trial.

I hate to say it, if you can't even stay awake during critical court proceedings, that might put you in prison for the rest of your natural life. There is a question as to whether Trump can meaningfully participate in his defense or whether he is compromising his own defense. There's an incredible contrast, it's black and white between Trump's public Persona and that which his sons and others say, which is this guy is vigorous and energetic. He's effervescent. And then you look at his behavior in court and he's falling asleep. He's disengaged. He doesn't even seem to appear, even appear to understand what's going on while they claim Biden is the one that's sleepy. And then the third element of this is, will this behavior impact Donald Trump's supporters in any way and their perception of him? Will Trump supporters see Trump sleeping through trial as a sign of weakness, or will they see it as, see, this is so weak and unfair against Trump that he's sleeping through it? Will they be energized by Trump sleeping through it, or will they question Trump's vigor because he's sleeping through it? And depending on Trump's demeanor and his ability to stay awake in, in the future criminal trials, the legal strategy may actually have to be modified to account for the fact that Trump might be awake or he might be asleep. So hanging head, hanging back, totally dead asleep on the day that the defense rested. We will now move to closing statements, and we will get a verdict before we know it.

Here.

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Alina Habba
Hey, David. It's great to be here, man. It's been a while since we last.

David Pakman
It's been a while. It's been a while. We were joking. We. We both were a lot younger last time you were on.

So, listen, I mean, for people in my audience who don't know about some of your experience, give us, like, a brief overview of your role at the CIA and the sort of things you worked on.

Alina Habba
Yeah, absolutely. My name is Andrew Bustamante. I'm a former CIA intelligence officer. I served with CIA from 2007 to 2014, and I served primarily in a clandestine operations role, which is what most people call an undercover role. I left in 2014, started a business, and my business is how I currently make a living, teaching the same skills I learned at CIA to everyday people in a way of making them, teaching them how to break barriers.

David Pakman
So I want to get to some of those skills in a moment. In terms of your work at CIA, when you talk about clandestine, give me a some or all of the above people then didn't know what you were doing. You still can't talk specifically about you were, what you were doing, family. Didn't even know generically what your job was. I mean, like, what degree of clandestine are we talking?

Alina Habba
Yeah, absolutely. So I was part of the clandestine ops corps, which is the second deepest core. The deepest core of clandestine operations is essentially a program that's. That I can't even talk about with. By. By the real name of the program. Right. And that's where you have your individuals who are so deep that there's no attribution of them at all on american records. I was one step above that, working for. It's called the national clandestine Service or the NCS.

My parents did not know what I did.

My girlfriends did not know what I did. My siblings did not know what I did. They all thought that I worked for an organization that I was attributed with, meaning my tax records, my pay stubs, my health insurance all came from a completely different organization. And that's who everybody thought I worked for, when in reality, I was working for CIA.

David Pakman
So, to be clear, not only did the people you just mentioned not know that you were part of NCS, they didn't even know you worked at CIA.

Alina Habba
Correct? Correct. That NCS, the National Clandestine Service, is essentially an office within the larger CIA, and that's how CIA is structured, just like any other government organization, only it's obviously much more interesting.

David Pakman
What can you tell us about the recruitment process where. So when you start talking about this role, the CIA, presumably they know that at the end of the rainbow, there is this level of secrecy around the role. You may or may not know that right away, but it would be normal to talk to people in your life about, I'm interviewing, or whatever the term would be. How early are you told we need secrecy, even as far as the process that is going on here?

Alina Habba
Yeah, that's an excellent question. So, because there's so much sensitivity around these clandestine roles, the first phone call that you get is a very generic phone call, the invitation or the offer to the first interview, because it's very much a recruiting type of organization. They don't wait for, you can't apply for that type of role. You can apply for a different role, but then get flagged for a clandestine role. So there's a number of different ways that they find you. But either way, a recruiter will call you, and a recruiter will basically speak in generic terms and say something along the lines of, hey, we saw your application for XYZ. We think you would be a good fit, potentially, in a different national security role. Would you be interested? And then they'll kind of outline that that national security role is managed through in person interviews, and that they will fully fund and pay for your travel and relocation for an interview at this location. And then in that first interview, they go through a very generic. I mean, everybody's been through a job interview before. They go through a very generic interview that gets more and more intense as you show the right types of behavioral tells that you would be good at a clandestine role. And then by the end of that first interview, that's where they tell you, we would like to recommend you for a clandestine role with CIA or.

Thank you very much for your time. You know, you'll hear from us a different day.

David Pakman
Yeah.

Alina Habba
Once they kind of disclose that they are recruiting for CIA, then they will tell you, if you plan to move forward with this role, we need you to, effective immediately, start telling people this different story. Right. You came to Washington, DC, because you're applying for various government jobs, or you're coming to McLean, Virginia, or you're coming to Nashville, Tennessee, or you're coming to Chicago, Illinois in order to apply to something else other than the national clandestine service.

David Pakman
Now, presumably, I've not been in this situation, but it seems to me that there would be some psychological weight to this, uh, ability or lack of ability to talk about what you do. I would guess as you get further into it, maybe you receive training or guidance about managing the psychological aspect of it. But I'm guessing that that first time you're told that these are the stakes, you don't necessarily have those skills. I mean, talk a little bit about the impact of that.

Alina Habba
Yeah, absolutely. So what you find later in your career that you don't know when you're first being recruited.

David Pakman
Right.

Alina Habba
Is that as you become a recruiter of future officers, that whole first interview is an assessment. That's all it is. It's a psychological assessment that is informal, executed by an experienced officer to determine whether or not the person who is a candidate is a suitable candidate. And then after that experienced officer's assessment, then when they introduce the idea of, hey, you are being invited to work for CIA, that's when the next interview is organized. And the next interview is the very clinical, very hard hitting, multi day psychological evaluation.

David Pakman
What are some of the maybe more either mundane or obscure things that you learn in training for the work that you did that could be surprising to some people, either because of the level of obscurity or just how mundane it might sound to the everyday person.

Alina Habba
Yeah. You know, one of the most interesting things, man, is, is how powerful questions are. And it's. It's fascinating because, you know, we all talk about questions and we read about questions, and questions are something that you covered in exhaust, ad nauseam in college, but in everyday life, in the interactions between people, questions are a very powerful thing because they control the conversation. The person asking the questions controls the conversation. However, the person answering questions is the person who feels the most fulfilled the conversation. So, in essence, when you're asking somebody a question, you're making them feel good about themselves, especially if you're asking them questions where they know the answers. You see this all the time in your work, David, because you interview experts all the time about what they're good at. So they never have, they walk, for the most part, they walk away from a conversation with you feeling very good about themselves. That applies everywhere in the world. Whether you're talking to your boss, whether you're talking to a car salesman, whether you're talking to your kid's teacher, whether you're talking to your kids themselves.

When you have. When you ask questions that people can answer, they feel good about themselves. And by feeling good about themselves, they feel like they can trust you. And that gives you an incredible amount of control over where you take that relationship.

David Pakman
That's very interesting. And so this was relevant in your work insofar as you had to deal with all sorts of different people in all sorts of different situations, and understanding the way your questions to them would make them feel was relevant to your goals.

Alina Habba
Right. Because espionage is illegal. And this is something that people get. They don't understand.

Espionage, which is the fancy word for spying, is illegal everywhere, including inside the United States. The only way that CIA can execute espionage is because there is a very specific carve out in american law that says that a us citizen working at the direction of CIA is granted authorities by the president to break this law. You know what I mean?

David Pakman
Yes.

Alina Habba
When you're spying, when you're carrying out espionage, it's illegal everywhere. You never want to get caught. So everything you do is surreptitious.

When you're collecting secrets from somebody, you can't just come out and say, what's the secret? What's the code to your nuclear missile program? Iranian general. What's the plan for Taiwan? Chinese military general. You can't ask those questions. You have to have some kind of conversation where you elicit those intelligence nuggets. And the only way you can have those conversations is by asking pointed, intentional, strategic questions that make people talk about things they shouldn't talk about.

David Pakman
When you think about the work that you do did, what do you think would be most surprising to the average American about the substance of the sort of things that you were working on?

Alina Habba
The most surprising thing that I think people don't understand is that secrets are very, very boring. Very, very boring. The kinds of stuff that is truly kept secret. It's not what kind of missile Russia has in its arsenal. Right. Hypersonic missiles is not a secret, but what is a secret is the specific pressure that's maintained in the hypersonic missile's chamber for where it combusts the fuel source.

That number is a secret and a very, very well guarded secret that if the United States could get a hold of, we could essentially neutralize or sabotage the entire russian hypersonic missile force.

Right. But nobody thinks, like, you can't make a James Bond movie about James Bond trying to find out the pressure ratio inside the combustion engine of a hypersonic missile. That's not a sexy idea. So instead, we believe that secrets are sexy when really, secrets are very, very boring.

David Pakman
All right, so this is really good context, kind of, for the sort of stuff that you worked on. So in the five years since we last spoke and for disclosure to the audience, as far as I understand, you're more politically conservative than I am, and we'll see if I'm right about that, and we'll see if that kind of comes out in this conversation. Over the last five years, there has been a contingent of the american voting public, people who pay attention to what's going on, that has been increasingly hostile to american intelligence agencies. And this includes FBI. Prominently. It also applies to some degree to CIA, NSA, et cetera. Much of it was catalyzed by the investigation of Donald Trump by Robert Mueller and other events that are sort of. We are publicly aware of you, as someone who was inside this system for a while, has your opinion generically about american intelligence agencies in the context of the sort of news stories we've seen over the last five years, has your opinion changed about american intelligence agencies?

Alina Habba
It's a twofold answer, right? I would say yes and no. So my opinion about the american intelligence services has always been that their job is to protect american interests, protect national security interests. But here's the kicker. National security interests are not the american people.

And that's something that the american people misunderstand. FBI is not there to protect individuals. CIA is not there to protect individuals. It's there to protect the priorities that are set forth by Congress as national security priorities that protect the institution of the United States.

So I very much believe that the CIA of today and the CIA of the 1970s and the CIA of the two thousands was always and remains very focused on that mission, protecting national security interests as set forth by the Congress. Right. However, where I have seen my opinion change is in how they go about doing that. It used to be that the secret intelligence services, which are many. Right. The intelligence community has 16 different secret intelligence services. The army has their own service. The NSA is a service. The NGA is a service. The NRO is a service. The FBI is a service. They all have. There's multiple secret intelligence services inside the United States.

What they used to do was serve in secret.

Now they serve much more publicly. You have more and more leaks of people who anonymously give their opinions to various news sources. You have more and more people who are coming out and publicly leaving service and then publicly lambasting the administration that they served under.

So you're seeing, like, a change, and it's very similar to the change that you see culturally across the United States, where people are becoming more politically verbal, more politically active on the far extremes, whereas the silent majority in the middle is being overlooked.

David Pakman
And in what way do you see this affect the individual at the expense, as you say, of this greater apparatus that the intelligence agencies defend?

Alina Habba
Yeah. We need to understand that as individual american citizens, we have the freedom and the rights that are granted to us by our government to pursue our own happiness. But that doesn't mean that we can pursue our happiness at the cost of our neighbor's happiness. That's where the law comes into play, right? That's where our legalistic nature, our structure as a society, is built upon. It's built upon my being happy does not cost David Pakman's being happy. We have to find a way to coexist and work together.

The individual needs to understand that, because what happens at the national level is that when we start to go outside of the boundaries of the authorities or the mission set that we are given in order to share our opinion or irritate some existing challenge, like a political challenge, when you see CIA come out and comment on Donald Trump, that's not their role. That's FBI's role. FBI is supposed to investigate. Right. You see the same thing when you see the constant back and forth threats of impeachment or the ousting of the house, the speaker of the House, like, you're attempted ousting of the speaker of the House, like you're seeing here in Congress. Like, this is not your primary job. Your primary job is to keep the american people safe by protecting american national security interests and making sure our society as a whole gets stronger, not undermine the purpose and intent of your office. That ultimately weakens our societal standing.

David Pakman
If you were to put a partisan filter over intelligence, agencies generically, or if you want to just focus on CIA, we can. Do you believe that these agencies are more aligned with the priorities of either of the two major political parties right now, or that that would be the wrong sort of thing?

Alina Habba
Filter to apply the filter is always changing. You are 100% right by applying a filter, because you have to understand that the CIA and the FBI and the national, the intelligence community serves at the behest of the executive branch. The executive branch is headed by the president. He is the chief or she is the chief executive. So whenever the president changes, they change all of their leadership, which means the heads of each of these IC or intelligence community partners is always at risk of being replaced or changed. And then whoever is replaced is obviously one who is sympathetic towards the party of the ruling executive. So you see this constant rotation, then it filters down and down, further and further. And if you consider presidents that run multiple terms, which is until recently, that was fairly common, you would have these eight year stints where we'd have an eight year conservative president, an eight year progressive president. So over the course of those eight years, multiple offices within the organizations, within the intelligence organizations, would then change to become sympathetic towards that ruling party.

David Pakman
Let's pause our conversation with former covert CIA officer Andrew Bustamante there. The full conversation will be on the David Pakman show, YouTube channel@YouTube.com.

slash the David Pakman show. We'll take a very quick break and then much more to get to today, including your voicemails.

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We are starting to work on a white paper about not only project 2025 specifically, but more broadly, the sort of chilling authoritarian instincts that the modern right, modern right wing now has, which, without romanticizing the Republican Party of 30 years ago. The Republican Party of 30 years ago was far less authoritarian and dictatorial than this modern perversion of it, which is maga Trumpism has become. And on that basis, ISIS. It's really important to understand that the threats that they're now making are really not empty threats. One such threat is the idea that they will prosecute legally their political enemies simply because they are their political enemies and for retribution. And we have yet another one of these horrible examples. This is Trump yesterday leaving court. We looked earlier in the show at Trump arriving in court and telling a bunch of lies. Here is Trump leaving court yesterday, and he refers to, there are many people saying that the prosecutor should be prosecuted. The prosecutor going after Trump should himself be prosecuted. This is not an empty threat. Take a listen.

Donald Trump
Yeah, that's right. You can read that. I can't read it because I'm not allowed to say it.

I see then legal commentator, the prosecutor misled this jury. So there is a case to be made because five people have stated it very professionally that the prosecutor should be prosecuted, and District Attorney Zora spec Bragg should be prosecuted because he knew when he submitted his case all about the lies, and therefore he's committed a crime.

Many people have said that.

David Pakman
Many, many people are coming up to Trump and they're saying, sir, I don't normally cry, but you've, you've got to go after the prosecution. This is not an empty threat. It should not be taken as such. Is it possible Trump might become president and fail to get anyone to actually prosecute his political enemies? It's possible. It is completely possible that Trump would get into power and then go to his attorney general and say, here's the list of the people who prosecuted me.

Charge them with something, charge Hillary, Charge Obama, charge Biden.

And it's possible that the attorney general will go, no, we're not going to do that. But this is not an empty threat because Trump has made very clear that he plans to seek retribution in his second term. He has directly called for the prosecutions of those who are legitimately prosecuting him. And so when Trump now hints at, many people have said, you know, you really got to prosecute the prosecutor. This is a direct, forward facing threat to the rule of law and the independence of the judicial system, and it completely undermines democratic principles. It exemplifies Trump's willingness to abuse presidential power for personal vendetta. This is, again, I'm not romanticizing the old Republican Party, but the old Republican Party wanted to take power from the executive branch. They felt, we don't need presidents doing much. We should take away powers.

This new MAGA, Trumpism, has perverted every single one of these values, and it highlights that they are a direct danger to the justice system wanting to scale up presidential power. For the president to be able to say to the attorney general, here's my enemies, please go after them. There's one other important aspect to this, Trump's sort of threat here about prosecuting prosecutors.

It can also be seen as an intimidation tactic aimed at dissuading legal action against him and his allies. Right. The idea that you might say, hey, look, I've got evidence against Trump or one of his allies, we should do something here legally.

But Trump is threatening that if he becomes president, he may prosecute the prosecutors, he may prosecute those who seek to go after Trump legally, and maybe that would make them think twice about doing that. And that's not even theoretical because there are three more criminal trials coming up and pending against Donald Trump. So this is extraordinarily chilling. It's not to be taken lightly. And in our forthcoming piece about project 2025 and this total reversal on authoritarianism from the right wing, we're going to dive, dive very deeply into it. I want to say a little bit about what's going on with Trump's social media company, because there does appear to be a major financial scam and scandal that is going on here. Variety is now reporting that Trump's social media company has posted a Q one revenue of $770,000 and a net loss of $327 million. It is. We really need to contextualize these numbers, because remember that Trump's media company went public and it went public with a market cap that didn't make sense to any of us who understand a little bit about how stocks and corporations work. And we looked at it and we said, billions of dollars in market cap for a company that essentially doesn't make any money. And if you hear that number, hey, they made 770,000 in revenue for the entire quarter, right? That's like two hundred fifty k a month, a huge. Let me see how I can say this. A lot of the podcasts you listen to have higher revenue than this.

They're not even remotely close to being publicly traded. They are not remotely close from hat to having the infrastructure around them that the Trump media company has. And their revenue is greater than what Trump's entire media company is reporting. These numbers are insane.

770k in revenue with a $327 million loss. Now, what's our concern with this? My concern is not the people who poured their money into this and now have lost a bunch of their money. That is not my concern.

Okay? Much like the right wingers say, hey, the government can't protect you from every bad decision. We can't protect these people from bad investment decisions. That's not what it is. My concern is whether the entire thing is some kind of money laundering scheme or scam to funnel money to Trump. Now, initially, when there were concerns about being a way to funnel money to Trump, one of the counterpoints was Trump's shares are locked up. Trump can't sell his shares for a long time, six months for some, maybe a year for others. So it's not a way to funnel money to Trump for his legal defense or whatever else. Well, you are able to get loans against your stock, and there are other ways to turn that market cap into money that Trump could use. So it's not at all obvious to me that that's not what this is. But if there is any new venture of sorts, a newly ipo'd company that is worthy of some investigative attention, it would be this billions in market cap on a $325 million loss. And as I've said before, if they, there are other ways that companies can be valuable, other than revenue, if they have extremely valuable intellectual property that they've developed. Trump's media company doesn't have anything. It's basically a crappy clone of how Twitter used to work before it was x so that they don't have that, an insanely large user base that even though you're not monetizing yet, you could monetize Trump's truth. Social certainly doesn't have that. There is no realistic explanation as to how you could get this sort of market cap with such a terrible, barely functioning business that it all reeks of money laundering, money scam.

Maybe someday we'll find out about it. We have a voicemail number. That number is two one nine.

To David P. Here's a caller who says my interview about bird flu was fear mongering and he didn't appreciate it.

Caller
Hey, David, heard your show today about the bird flu, that interview that you did, and proceeded to call my wife and tell her that we had to get rid of our raw goat milk that we've been getting from up the street, a farm up there. And then after her and I had a conversation today, we started doing a little bit of research and we found out that only two people since 2023 in the entire United States have contracted h five n one speaker one.

David Pakman
Well, let me tell you something. You didn't have to do research about that. That was part of the interview. In the interview we said only two people that we know of for sure have had h five n one in this recent film flare up. There are a number more that are suspected. But that was in the interview. You should, you didn't need to go and find that elsewhere. We told you that.

Caller
So anyway, I just feel like, you know, you did a lot of fear mongering today with your show and I, it's not like I think, you know, you mean well, but I think you need to add some perspective when you present a story like that.

David Pakman
You know, I love specific critiques of what I'm doing.

I think we had a lot of perspective in the interview with Rick Bright about bird flu. We talked about how we aren't aware of any human to human contagion so far. We talked about how if it were to make a jump to humans, it would probably become less deadly. We talked about the limited number of cases.

I think that there was a lot of context. And the point of that interview was to tell people, is there even anything you can or should be doing at this point? And it was very limited. And, you know, this guy's talking about, he got scared about his raw goat milk. First of all, you would have to, the concern is about birds and poultry. So goat did not even come up during the interview. You should do your own research about raw goat milk. Generally speaking, we know that there are many hospitalizations from raw milk in the United States every year. It's not something I want. I consider it playing with fire. I'm not having raw milk. You can make a call for yourself about raw goat milk, but the interview didn't talk about goat. It talk about, talked about poultry and birds. So I do think people maybe sometimes don't always listen carefully to what the content of the show is. And then they call up and they say, david, you said this. You said that you did this. And it doesn't really reflect what took place. What we are trying to do is get ahead of bird flu. It's not fear mongering. It's giving information, accurate information, and letting people make decisions for themselves. About whether they want to change their behavior in any way. What am I doing? I already only have pasteurized milk, so I'm not worried about that unless something changes. And even pasteurized milk might carry bird flu, you know, so let's be accurate in our criticisms. Let's consider what's actually being said.

And we may talk about bird flu again, and we'll do it in the same kind of sober and fact based way. We've got a great bonus show for you today. Many Senate Democrats don't buy the Biden Trump polling that we are seeing right now. I'll tell you why.

MAGa continues to push a bill to make it illegal for non citizens to vote, except it's already illegal for non citizens to vote. And so much more, all on today's bonus show. Get instant access by signing up@joinpackman.com. and we'll be back tomorrow with a new show.

5/21/24: Biden on drug conspiracy grows, Trump aide flees when everything goes wrong

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1: Biden's Drug Conspiracy

2: Trump Aide's PR Disaster

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