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Ted Rall: Hi, thanks for joining us. I’m Ted Rall, and John Kiriakou is on the other side of the screen. You’re watching the DeProgram show on Rumble and YouTube. It’s Friday, July 18th, 1 p.m. Eastern time. We are trying to get our act together here. We’ve been terrible this week. We really screwed up and threw off Wednesday’s schedule. Today we’re rescheduling, but we promise, really promise, we’ll be on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5:00 PM schedule next week for a three-day-a-week show. Thanks, everyone, for bearing with us. You know, we’re just very busy guys. But legitimately, we’re winding down the other busyness. Oh, John, you broke up a little bit there, so please check your audio.

John Kiriakou: But, what I was saying is we really are trying to wind down this other busyness so we can focus on this show. It’s totally true.

Ted Rall: All right, so today we’re going to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, the case that just won’t go away. We’re also discussing the budget cuts at NPR and PBS, how serious they are, and what their political and practical effects will be. What’s up with Iran? Are they going to go back to war with Israel? There are a bunch of other questions there. There’s also an interesting story about facial recognition software here in New York City. The cops and the fire department—oh my god—went after a Palestine protester at Columbia University. They took him to court and identified him through his prom photos from high school. Oh my god. Basically, the judge said, “No, no, no, that’s against the law. You promised you would never do that. You keep doing it, so I’m going to send you a message.” So, on Jeffrey Epstein, the case that just won’t die, the latest is that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, says some documents will be released from the case files, specifically from the grand jury indictment file.

John Kiriakou: That is not her call, actually. She did say what you said she said, but it’s not her decision. They have to file a motion for a federal judge to release the grand jury transcripts, and the judge can just as easily say no. I want to add, though, Ted, that Donald Trump’s reaction to this whole thing is inexplicable. He ran on a position of releasing all documents, and now he’s the one standing in the way of releasing whatever documents they have. He’s talking about suing Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal, and the reporter who wrote the article. Then at the White House, Kayleigh McEnany—whatever her name is, one of those 90s names—is saying they had no right to release this 50th birthday letter that Trump allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, in which he sketched a naked woman and wrote, you know, “May all your future secret wishes come true,” or some stupid, silly thing like that with innuendo. The question is, why the 180? Why the flip-flop? Unless he is somehow implicated in this, I just don’t understand.

Ted Rall: It could be him or someone he cares about, someone he cares about a lot. Yeah, right. It could be Donald himself, a close ally, or, I should say, Israel, or who knows, right? Those are the possibilities, but that’s it. Basically, he didn’t know what was in the files. He and his team looked at the files, decided, and said, “Forget it, it can’t be released. We’re not releasing them.” Yes, but they could have been released. So what about the judge in this situation? Could a judge put the kibosh on releasing that stuff anyway?

John Kiriakou: Absolutely, yes. It’s the judge’s decision, with sole discretion, but they could have requested it. They can request it. In my own case, we asked to see the grand jury transcripts, and the judge approved it. That’s how I know who ratted me out in the grand jury. So it could be a yes, it could be a no. In the interest of transparency, those transcripts are secret. I didn’t realize they were sealed.

Yes, they are sealed. If the judge says yes, the question is whether the administration actually releases them or if they will be redacted. If they are redacted, who in the world are they trying to protect?

Ted Rall: Crisis management 101, as you know, John, is not to do this. Let me put it this way: there are really only two choices if you’re in this kind of squeeze. Either you come clean and release everything, or you hope it doesn’t get released because a judge says no, but you approve it, saying, “I’m as transparent as I can possibly be.” Or you recognize you can’t handle the truth coming out, so you resign, leave, and go to Mar-a-Lago or exile in Saudi Arabia. Those are the two choices, right?

Ted Rall: That’s what the king of Spain did when he got caught embezzling money and having affairs with women. He abdicated and moved to Dubai. Those are the choices here, right?

Ted Rall: I think that’s what it is. The politics of it are super interesting. Like a lot of left-leaning people, I didn’t really care about the Epstein case at all and barely followed it until fairly recently. You know, I felt I had a moral obligation as a reporter to keep tabs on it, but it wasn’t something I personally cared about. But, like normal Democratic voters, everybody cares about it now. It’s not just because they want Donald Trump to go down—some do, for sure—but a lot of them are just saying, “No, no, now that clearly something’s up.” That something is that really rich and powerful men are probably getting away with pedophilia.

Ted Rall: That’s right. Those people should be caught. That’s something we’re not that politically polarized on.

John Kiriakou: Absolutely right. One thing the MAGA Republicans are saying, repeating over and over, is that this is about crimes against children. This is everything they’ve been yelling about for the last 12 years: crimes against children, a governmental elite trafficking in children. I always pooh-poohed the idea, saying, “No, they’re not trafficking.” Well, you know what? Maybe they were. Maybe they were trafficking in children, and we’re just now hearing about it. Of all people, Donald Trump is the one covering it up. Who knows? That’s what it seems like right now.

Obviously, the pizza—I mean, hell, we live in a world where the pizza—where’s the entrance to the basement? That’s where the children are being held. There is no basement. There are no children here. Right. But something smells to high heaven here. This isn’t right. It’s getting worse.

John Kiriakou: That’s it. This is not right. These MAGA people smell a rat. They want to know why in the world Trump is covering it up.

Richard Nixon stalled on releasing the White House tapes but ultimately had to, though he relented. He redacted a lot of stuff. But you know what? It comes back to that old adage: it’s not the crime that brings them down, it’s the cover-up of the crime. Do these guys learn nothing from history?

Ted Rall:  They don’t. They also think they’re smarter than everybody else. They think they can just say, “Shut up, focus on the economy, nothing to see here, just move along.” Nobody buys that. That doesn’t work. It never has worked.

No, it doesn’t work. That’s right. It does not work. So they should move on. There’s a good question here, and I kind of like it. From Schmat: why won’t mainstream news talk about the Mossad angle? Yeah, good question. I think I know the answer. I guess they’re probably going to say it’s speculation, but you can report on speculation because when people are speculating in public, and they are, it becomes news. A lot of people think the honey trap, a Mossad or other honey trap operation, is a scenario that kind of works.

Ted Rall: Yes. I view it as a test model. It may be wrong, but when you stress test it and look at it from all angles, it seems to work.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, I think that’s right. I’m looking at the chat, and so many of our viewers are correct. This has intelligence written all over it. My guess is it has Mossad written all over it. USC, thank you for the $5. Is it possible this is being covered up because it is a dark CIA op, a joint op with Mossad, or likely covered because it’s close to this administration? Yes, yes, and yes. I’m going to add it’s probably solely Mossad, but the Israelis have been yelling on every network that they don’t spy on the United States, which we all know is just a crock, right?

We know that’s not true. So, question: Is the Diddy thing connected? I don’t think so. From Eric Huso. What do you think?

Ted Rall: I don’t see a connection beyond the fact that Comey’s daughter was a prosecutor in both cases. But I don’t know. The Barr family connection is kind of messed up. The same with the Maxwell family connection.

John Kiriakou: It’s very interesting to me that we have not heard from Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorney saying, “Hey, you want her to talk? You’re going to renegotiate her sentence, and then she’ll talk until you’re happy with it.”

Ted Rall: She might be worried that she might suddenly become overwhelmed with a sudden urge to kill herself.

John Kiriakou: May I answer Red X’s? Here’s another good question: Can Mossad operate so blatantly in the USA without CIA knowledge and then have Epstein avoid consequences the first time?

It’s not that they operate without CIA knowledge. The CIA is fully cognizant of the level of Israeli intelligence operations in the United States. The FBI is on the Israelis all the time. The problem is that many years ago, going back to the Nixon administration, the White House decided they’re not going to crack down on Israeli espionage. They’re just not going to because, in the greater scheme of things, when considering the full relationship, it’s better, easier, or whatever to just let them go.

Ted Rall:  Michael Gardner says that Maxwell’s lawyer is talking and suggesting, Oh, good, that, you know, she’s in a delicate dance, right? She has something to offer, but she’s in, as you know well, that feeling, in the jaws of the state. Until she’s actually out walking free, at least on bail or something, she’s in danger.

John Kiriakou: There’s another little thing, probably neither here nor there, but it occurred to me yesterday. As a matter of policy in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, pedophiles are not permitted to be in a minimum security work camp. You don’t put pedophiles in maximum security because they’ll get killed. You don’t put them in medium security because they’ll probably get killed. You don’t put them in minimum security because then they can run away and molest more children. So, as policy, they have to be in a low-security prison. Ghislaine is in a minimum security work camp with a 20-year sentence for pedophilia. How did that work out? How did that happen?

John Kiriakou: How come she gets to have, and we know this for a fact, her job cleaning up the beach every morning in Florida? They put them all in a van, drive them to the beach, and they clean up litter. That’s her job in the prison. Why? Why did she get a sweetheart position like that? That’s a good question.

That’s right. Rich people always get their own rules. You could say that again. I saw someone asking if we think Washington would be united enough to have carried out a psy-op on this. I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re that sophisticated. Red Access is asking if that’s what she was actually convicted of. I’m going to look it up just to be on the safe side because I don’t want to be a fool. If I’m right, I’m going to repeat this. I think it’s trafficking.

John Kiriakou: That was her conviction. I think you are right.

It’s a long one. Here it is. It’s trafficking: six counts of enticement of minors, sex trafficking of children, and perjury. So, yeah, she’s a chomo. Done and done.

John Kiriakou: So, how does she get this sweetheart position? There is also the question of why she is in prison all by her lonesome, right? The assumption here is that only Jeffrey, with his incredible voracious sexual appetite, is the only victimizer. That’s the implication. We’re not even hearing from the feds, like, “We looked into all sorts of other people, but with this one, we couldn’t build enough of a case. This other one, we didn’t have enough witnesses, or we found this person was innocent.” They’re not saying anything. It’s the deafening silence that speaks volumes here.

How hypocritical is it of both the Democrats and Republicans to be pointing the finger at each other when the Democrats did nothing to release these documents during the four years of Joe Biden’s administration?

: That’s true. Now the Democrats are pushing legislation in the House of Representatives to demand the release of the documents. They put the Republicans in a tough position. Why don’t the Republicans just vote yes? Either you’re for transparency, or you’re not for transparency.

Ted Rall: It’s all a ruse. The Democrats know they only fight when they know they’re going to lose. Republicans are like, “Oh, I’m really trying to stop the release of this. We want to release it.” It’s just not going to happen. Oh my gosh, thank you, Jordan Biffle. That was nice. I missed that.

Ted Rall: That’s nice. That’s who’s nice. They stole my image for the late show the other day, and dog on it, I put myself in for an IMDb credit for it. Really? They stole your image? What do you mean?

John Kiriakou: They had a picture of me from Fox News that they posted while John—what’s his name? The Daily Show. John Stewart, thank you—was yelling about Epstein. So yeah, nobody asked me. One thing, is there a moral standard for CIA operations? No. That’s actually part of my standard speech at universities: there is no moral guideline. None. Zero. I tell young students, if they’re considering going into the CIA, they have to go in with their own set of moral values because there will never be somebody to tell them, “No, you can’t do that. That’s unethical. That’s immoral.” They just tell you to go collect the information or make the recruitment or whatever it is. You really have to be clear in your heart.

Ted Rall: There’s nothing. Is there no equivalent in the agency for the uniform code of military conduct, where there are lots of rules: do this, you can do this, you can’t do that?

John Kiriakou: Zero. Zero rules. The only thing they ever told me, and they told everybody, is never mess with medical, security, or finance because those are the three that can land you in prison. That was it. Wow. That’s amazing.

Ted Rall: I mean, John, this is a tough question, and you can just say I’m not going to answer it. What’s going to happen?

John Kiriakou: Yeah, man, that is a tough question. I think that as tough as Donald Trump likes to be, he’s going to have to relent here because his base is breaking apart as we watch. He’s going to have to relent. Whether that means there are documents that haven’t been destroyed or there are hard drives or DVDs, that’s a different issue. I think he’s going to have to relent. Honestly, can he get away with a partial release?

John Kiriakou: I think he’s going to try to get away with a partial release. He’ll try to get away with it, but the pressure is not coming from Democrats. They can just stiff-arm the Democrats. The pressure is coming from the MAGA base. They want this done, and they want it out there, and I think he’s going to have to do it.

Ted Rall: It’s really fascinating, right? Here you have a president who, you know, is viewed, with some justification, as a threat to democracy itself, who basically started a riot inside the Capitol, who provoked a riot, right? Let’s just say that. A guy who did all sorts of terrible violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, like crazy, over the top. But this is what he’s going to go down for, this of all things. It’s like getting Al Capone on taxes.

John Kiriakou: It’s exactly what it is. The Democrats could never have made this up. It’s not based on the issues. It is kind of amazing. I want to address this: Houdini says Trump already said he doesn’t care if some of his base walks away from him. He did say that.

Ted Rall: He says that, and some is one thing, but if this disinterest in the base leads to a 50-seat turnover in the House of Representatives and maybe even loss of the Senate, which paralyzes his final two years as president, then he’s screwed. Every single president in his second term becomes obsessed with his own legacy. Every single president in his second term ends up wallowing in scandal, right? I mean, Obama was the exception, but second terms are bad. That’s when Iran-Contra broke out for Reagan, Monica Lewinsky for Clinton, Watergate for Nixon.

John Kiriakou: Absolutely right. Although this is a little bit of a different second term because there’s an interruption, right? There’s an interregnum, the Biden interregnum, kind of like Grover Cleveland having to deal with Benjamin Harrison in between.

Ted Rall: Yeah, that’s right. That’s amazing. We’ll continue to follow this. Is there anything we need to deprogram further on this point, or should we keep it moving?

John Kiriakou: No, I think we’ve given all the updates, but I don’t think we’re overestimating the import of this thing. This is a bona fide scandal, and it may not be a big deal for the Democrats, but this is just tearing the Republicans apart.

Ted Rall: The thing is, if it’s a big deal for the Republicans, it has to be a big deal for the Democrats. What’s really interesting, as a side note, is how much this highlights the cluelessness of the Democrats. The Democrats recognized the scandal that was Watergate. They understood it. The Republicans understood the import of all the Clinton scandals like Travelgate, Whitewater, and of course, Monica Lewinsky, instantaneously.

John Kiriakou: Oh, yeah. The Democrats still kind of don’t. You don’t see the feeding frenzy you would expect from the opposition party enjoying and relishing their mortal enemy really in trouble.

Yeah, I think the Democrats really are that clueless. It’s very strange. All right, let’s move over to NPR and PBS. The Senate has voted to cut $9 billion in funding from NPR and PBS. Most of this affects PBS. For people who don’t really understand how this works, all the stations are privately owned. You and I could buy an NPR station, like WSHN and Ted J&T, which would be fun. That’s how Lady Bird Johnson made millions and millions of dollars, by buying radio stations.

Ted Rall: Really? I didn’t know that.

Ted Rall: So, you buy the station, but if you want to become a public radio station or TV station, you buy programming from national groups like PRI. You hear, “This show is sponsored by PRI.” They sell that to the local station, and then you might hire some local talent, like, “Hey, let’s bring in some people from New York or Washington to do local New York and Washington stuff.” Whatever you want. Then you put together a programming schedule, and you either make money, or you don’t make money, and you beg for donations every so often. That’s the model. The big stations, like WAMU in DC, WNYC here in New York, never have any problem raking in the big bucks.

No. They make crazy amounts of money there. Like Brian Lehrer, the local guy here in New York, a very talented host, really good and a good guy. But he makes more money than the president of the United States. He makes $600,000 a year.

What? I’m thinking they could probably get someone to do as good a job for less. Hi, I’m here. It’s really crazy. But then there are the little stations out in flyover country, like northern Montana by the Canadian border, where they’re filling the gap in what’s already become a private radio desert. We already have serious problems, like flash flood warnings and tornado warnings that go out over the radio. These stations, private and public alike, get national programming piped in and aren’t able to provide emergency alerts in places like rural Alaska, as Senator Murkowski expressed concern about these cuts. Rural people are going to die, mostly in red states, because of this. I know the answer: Democrats will never be smart enough to run an ad saying, “My beautiful little daughter was swept away by a flood, and it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.” That would be great, but they’re not going to do that. On the other hand, I’m really torn about this. I see the Republicans’ beef about why conservatives should pay for liberal programming. On the other hand, every big country has state media. This is kind of state media. We’re getting rid of Voice of America, our other outward-facing state media propaganda arm. It’s a little weird. It reminds me of getting rid of the Department of Education. It may be without import, but the message it sends to the world is we’re voting to be stupid. This is idiocracy. We’re getting rid of educational programming, costume dramas, history, documentaries, and the Department of Education. What does that say about us?

John Kiriakou: You know what? I don’t even have anything to say about that. I agree with every word you just said. Every major country in the world, probably every country, has a state radio station. The one in Greece is called ERT, the Hellenic Radio and Television. Most of the day, they’ve got classical music. They do the news at the top and bottom of the hour. They have weather reports or warnings about forest fires encroaching on whatever city. It’s important, and it’s really not political. They don’t even have this debate in Greece because everybody accepts that state radio is a public service.

Ted Rall: The part that annoys me about this discussion is that Republicans characterize NPR and PBS as far left. I’m like, “No, no, no, no, I’m far left.” Right? It’s like we don’t exist. Those are just liberals. Dylan is asking something that’s not related, so just pipe into it. Are we going to talk about Syria?

John Kiriakou: We should talk about Syria. We absolutely should.

Ted Rall: During Hurricane Katrina, The Onion had a headline about the National Guard saying they cannot decide whether to help or shoot people in New Orleans. Israel seems to not decide whether they want to be allied with the new government of Syria or to bomb them, which, you know, those two things seem a little inconsistent.

John Kiriakou: I have been watching, working on, or living in the Middle East since I was 16 years old, and I genuinely don’t understand what the Israeli policy is here. First, they overthrow Assad along with the Turks and probably the Americans. Then they install al-Qaeda as the leader of the country and bomb the place three times. In the meantime, not the first time we got rid of a socialist and replaced them with al-Qaeda—Afghanistan.

John Kiriakou: Oh yeah, that’s right. In the meantime, people like you and I were saying, whether you like Bashar al-Assad or not, he’s the only thing protecting the Christian community. The new guy comes in and says love and milk and honey for everybody. Between 2,000 and 3,000 Christians have been killed since Assad left, including an attack on a Syrian Orthodox church a week and a half ago that resulted in the deaths of 87 worshippers. It was a massacre. Thank you, Ruffy.

Ted Rall: The Israeli government is obviously a classic definition of what Marxists call a division in the ruling classes, right? They are, you know, the Netanyahu government is divided between the people who want to bomb to support the Druze in Syria and those who want relatively friendly relations with the new regime. I don’t know. Do you think the fault line there is between the way we generally understand it, where Netanyahu, within this construct, even though he’s far right, is the most liberal member of his cabinet? Crazy, right?

John Kiriakou: Right. I can’t figure out where the Israeli people fit into all this because, as long as I’ve been alive, the government’s always been to the right of the Israeli 50-yard line of politics, right? I guess I should say 50 meters for the metric system. But now it’s like I don’t know where the Israeli people are in all this. There’s no coherent policy in Gaza at all. It’s kind of like, at this point, you guys are just bombing for the sake of bombing.

Ted Rall: Yeah, they are. You’re out of targets. You have nothing to bomb, except that’s absolutely right. There was a poll released, I don’t know, less than a week ago, saying that October 7th galvanized the Israeli population and that support for destroying Gaza has remained consistent, which was very disappointing to me. You remember, Ted, two months before October 7th, on your show at Sputnik, on my show at Sputnik, we were talking about these major demonstrations. Thank you, GGK. Major demonstrations against Netanyahu, against his plans to reorganize the Israeli court system, against his attacks on the Supreme Court of Israel, against Netanyahu personally because he had been indicted on seven felony counts of corruption, and all of that has just gone away because everybody’s focused on Gaza. Now, with that said, where are those voices from the Israeli left that we read in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post but that don’t seem to be out there in public saying, “Wait a minute, we can’t just murder hundreds of thousands of people, right? Isn’t that what happened to them?” It’s happening now to the Palestinians, and nobody seems to care. I just don’t understand it.

Ted Rall: There definitely are tons of Jewish people, including Israelis, who care and don’t like it. Then there are people who probably don’t personally care but see how this is going to hurt Israel’s position in the world. That’s a way of caring too. It’s complicated, right? There are so many different responses to it. I think this is going to be one of those things, like after the Israeli government falls or is replaced in some way, they’re going to be writing books for years, like after Nazi Germany. What was public opinion like? What did people really think? Like that famous book, They Thought They Were Free, where they interviewed ordinary Germans about what it was like because they couldn’t express themselves in public. I think we can’t know. Israel’s become that closed of a society. That’s comparable to the Nazi experience as well.

John Kiriakou: You’re absolutely right. Just a few days ago, Ted, two former Israeli prime ministers came out and called the camp set up on the border of Gaza a concentration camp, saying if it’s a camp you are forcibly taken to and not permitted to leave, that is a concentration camp by definition. Yeah, concentration means concentration of people, right? That’s what it is.

Ted Rall: Now we should, I actually think this is worth talking about because it is confusing about the Druze. It’s spelled D-R-U-Z-E, right? Not that it really matters, but they’re not Israelis at all. I mean, well, there are Druze. There are Israeli Druze. They’re a fascinating group. There’s no such thing as an ethnic Israeli, just like there’s no ethnic American. An Israeli is just someone who lives in Israel and is a citizen of the state of Israel. They’re not Arabs, right?

Ted Rall: Right. Want to explain it?

John Kiriakou: They’re monotheists, but they’re not really Arabs or Jews. They inhabit this border area of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. They stretch up even toward the Turkish border. They’re fiercely independent. For the most part, Kurds are a good analogy, I think.

Ted Rall: Yeah, because the Kurds aren’t. They’re their own thing.

John Kiriakou: That’s right. They’re their own thing.

Ted Rall: What do I, I don’t even know the answer to this. What language do they speak? Do they have their own language?

John Kiriakou: My understanding is they speak Arabic. I knew a Druze. He was my chiropractor, and he said it’s so hard to be a Druze because, even in America, his parents would only allow him to marry another Druze. He said, “You know how many Druze there are? There aren’t any. There are only 50,000 in America, or 20,000, whatever it is. I think it was 50.” So it’s hard because they’re not Israelis, not Arabs, not Muslims, not Christians. They are monotheists, like Unitarians. They have their own temple, a big temple inside Israel. They try to get along with everybody and not be involved in these wars and border skirmishes. They just want to be left alone.

Ted Rall: That’s kind of like the Zoroastrians.

John Kiriakou: Very much so. Yes. Monotheistic, old religion. They have their own thing. They want to be left alone and have good relations with everyone. Or the Yazidis in Iraq, who are always called devil worshippers, but they are not. They pray to Satan to appease him, not to worship him.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, that just confirms what I said. So, yeah. Well, okay. Before we move on here, anything else we want to say about the PBS thing? You know, I have a love-hate relationship with PBS and NPR, the way I do with the New York Times.

Ted Rall: Yeah, I’m mostly hate with NPR politics. The politics are stupid. They don’t really, I mean, there are a lot of dumb things about that network. Not the least of which is they lard up the weekend with a bunch of stupid quiz shows when it’s a news network, and news happens on weekends too. Also, the take is painfully woke and mainstream. The cultural coverage makes me want to die sometimes. It’s always like, “There’s a new novel by a trans, handicapped, half-dead quadriplegic,” and it’s like, okay, okay. From time to time, it would be great to hear stuff like that, but it’s not from time to time—it’s all the time. After a while, it’s like, really, again? Just for old times’ sake, it’d be great to say, “There’s this straight dude who wrote a book, let’s talk about it.”

John Kiriakou: You never hear that. No straight white guy has an interesting book. It’s so cheesy.

Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I was asked—Steve from NPR asked me to go in one weekend and do an interview, and it was live, which they didn’t tell me. It’s fine; I do a lot of live interviews, but it was a gotcha interview. We’re live right now.

Yeah, we’re live right now. It was a gotcha interview, and I didn’t budge one inch. He was giving it to me, and I was giving it to him right back. At the end of it, we went to, you know, whatever they call their commercial breaks. He said, “Well, I didn’t expect that kind of response.” I said, “Don’t ever call me again. Don’t ever call me again.” As I walked out, I turned my phone back on, and it blew up. Friends from all over the country were saying, “Oh man, you gave it to him so good.” I was like, “I just walked out on NPR, and I will never listen to them or speak to them ever again.” I haven’t.

Ted Rall: Yeah, I know. You told me the details of that story. We don’t have to get into it here, unless you want, but it was disgusting. I’ve been ambushed at Fox News, and I was pissed off there because you’re told a specific thing. You’re basically told what this is going to be about, what you’re going to be talking about, and they don’t give you the questions because, after all, we’re not Hillary Clinton going into a presidential debate. But you’re still given the topics, right? You generally know what this is about. Then suddenly, it switches, and it’s not about that at all. That’s an ambush, and it’s unethical. You’re not supposed to do that.

Ted Rall: That’s right. When we brought Jake Tapper on the other day, we didn’t switch on him and start talking about something unrelated to his book. No way. You know, CNN or CNN’s coverage writ large. He probably would have been fine answering, but the point is, we wouldn’t have mentioned it.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, that’s right. It’s not polite, right? It’s rude. It’s wrong.

Ted Rall: NPR comes off as very polite, but maybe they’re not polite, they’re just calm. Sort of like the line from Double Indemnity where Edward G. Robinson tells Fred MacMurray, “I used to think you were really smart, but you’re just tall.”

John Kiriakou: Chris Cross. So great. Such a fantastic movie. By the way, if you’re watching and you’ve never seen Double Indemnity, watch it today. You’ll thank me. It’s a great movie. Classic.

Ted Rall: Yeah, totally classic. Let’s go to the situation in Iran, which you’re probably more up on than I am. Basically, we’re still trying to figure out what was the extent of the bombing, how much damage was done to Iran, how much enriched uranium they got out, and all that. It doesn’t look like there was that much damage.

John Kiriakou: No, an Iranian intelligence assessment is that we really didn’t do much damage. They had already gotten all the enriched uranium out in the weeks before the bombing, anticipating that the bombing was going to come.

Ted Rall: Well, we all knew it was going to come, right? Or that it might come.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, we all did. Do you think that was intentional, like, you know, it’s like I scuba dive, right? One of the things people who worry about scuba diving worry about is sharks, and they always say you should look out for sharks. I’m like, “No, you shouldn’t worry about sharks because if you see the shark, he’s not going to attack you. If he does attack you, you’ll never see it coming.” It’s like that. If we were really going to bomb Iran and catch them with their pants down, we would have done it out of a clear blue sky, right? We wouldn’t have had all this working up the tension and analysts on all the networks talking about it. Obviously, the Iranians aren’t idiots. They know what’s coming. So they’re going to move their stuff.

Ted Rall: I think this was a very elaborate effort for everybody to save face. I really think that’s what it’s been about. The Israelis killed a lot of people, which makes the Iranians very, very angry. We talked about this on the show, where the Israeli strategy—well, that’s their deal. They always do that.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, the Israeli strategy is if there’s a target in an apartment building, they’ll blow up the entire city block to get that guy. They’re going to kill 300 other people, but their target is that guy. The Iranians didn’t do that. Their targeting was far more specific, and that’s why the Israeli casualty numbers were so much lower. Now we’re learning that we really didn’t put the Iranians out of business. The U.S. attacks were not crippling. They had already gotten the enriched uranium out, and if they want to reconstitute what they had, it would be relatively easy. Another thing, the Iranians said yesterday that they are ready and willing to go back to the negotiating table. Why, I have no idea, but they’re ready to continue talking. This tells me that the Iranians are far more reasonable than the Israelis have been and will be on this issue. The Israelis just want everything destroyed.

Ted Rall: Yeah, well, that’s their thing, right? They’ve convinced themselves, or at least they’ve convinced the world that they are convinced, that the biggest existential threat to Israel is Iran.

I have become convinced that the biggest existential threat to Israel is the Israeli government. They’re completely dependent on international support and everybody liking them, right, at the UN, at the ICJ, at the ICC, and that’s not true anymore.

Yeah, they’re underwater in the polls. The United States is their number one benefactor, but if the citizens of the country who supply you with the most foreign aid and run interference for you in international organizations like the UN Security Council don’t like you, you’re going to pay for that. The Israelis know that. They’ve got to know that.

John Kiriakou: We should add, Rita asks a question we’ve addressed a couple of times, but we can give a little more detail here. What would the Saudi reaction be? The Saudis have been pretty public with their policy that they want to begin enriching their own uranium. The original deal, in the two weeks before the October 7th attacks, was that the Saudis would sign the Abraham Accords. They would open an embassy in Tel Aviv, not in Jerusalem, and the Israelis would open an embassy in Riyadh. In exchange, the United States would guarantee Saudi Arabia’s security and provide Saudi Arabia with its first nuclear reactor, where they could begin enriching uranium and using the nuclear reactor to generate electricity. That all fell by the wayside, of course, but it looks like that’s the deal that’s on the table.

Ted Rall: We’ll see what happens. It feels like we just go round and round and round, right? I know it’s hard to know how to negotiate with the Iranians because no one person can really sign off on anything. It’s much more like you need a collective group, right? Iran has an overlapping, very Byzantine kind of governing style. But still, the Trump administration has had a lot of trouble with diplomacy. They dropped the ball with Russia and Ukraine. What do you make of this 50-day delay? The Ukrainians are complaining that this is just giving, during the peak of fighting season, the Russians more chance to beat them up and soften them up in preparation for the ultimate peace talks.

Ted Rall: Or maybe it’s just Trump, as usual, kicking the can down the road over and over, like a college student who keeps asking for extensions on his paper.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, I think that’s it. Trump is personally offended that Putin hasn’t agreed to engage in peace talks. Now he’s going to start taking it out on the Russians by providing arms to the Ukrainians that he had previously said he would cut off. Hegseth actually did cut off aid to the Ukrainians, only to be overturned by Trump a day or two days later. I don’t see any end in sight to this Russia-Ukraine thing, Ted. In fact, if anything, the Treasury Department is coming up with new sanctions to impose on the Russians. Are there, or could there be? Only meaningless ones. We’ve talked about this before. A sanction can be, well, there’s this guy, Ted Rall, and he is not going to be allowed to open a checking account in any of our banks. That’s a sanction, right?

I don’t want to. You never would open a checking account in one of their banks. So that’s a sanction. They can say, “Well, we toughened sanctions, so we’re going to see this thing through.” I don’t know. I think it’s all silliness.

Ted Rall: So, there’s also been talk that maybe the hot war between Iran and Israel isn’t over.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, on the Iranian side, at least if Iranian YouTube channels are to be believed, they fully expect another hit from the Israelis. They don’t know when it’s going to come, of course. They don’t know whether the United States is going to be involved, but they believe the Israelis are going to hit them again. What do you think?

I don’t think they will. The Iranians have done everything right, willing to go back to the negotiating table, not really retaliating against the United States. They fired a missile at Al Udeid air base. They hit a U.S. base after providing warning, the geodesic dome with the communications equipment in it. If they were to attack the Iranians again, they’re going to have to do it without American assistance. Obviously, the Iranians have to be racing to get that nuclear weapon online, but it’s going to take a while.

Oh yeah. Even though Netanyahu has been saying since 1992 that the Iranians are six months away from a nuclear weapon.

Ted Rall: Yeah, it doesn’t work that way, right? It’s funny because it’s not like a big secret. The Progressive magazine, remember when they published the H-bomb information, how to make one, back in the 70s?

John Kiriakou: The FBI raided their offices, right?

Yep. I was, you know, I was a nuclear engineering major at Columbia, in applied physics and nuclear engineering.

Oh my god. One of the first things you learn is it’s not really that hard. But it’s time-consuming.

John Kiriakou: It’s just like making a turkey. Anyone can cook it, but it takes all day.

Ted Rall: Exactly. So, let’s talk about facial recognition software. I was really fascinated by this. There’s this company called Clearview AI that has a very strange advisory board: Richard Clarke, Floyd Abrams, Richard Clarke of all people, right? Shame on him. As of 2020, and I’m sure they’re much bigger now, they had 2,200 contracts with police departments, intelligence agencies, and government agencies in 27 countries. That was five years ago. Two of those organizations are the New York Police Department and the Fire Department of the City of New York. I was trying to figure out why the fire department would need facial recognition software. Anyway, I should point out that in New York State, there is a law that says because when this was first introduced, the NYPD said, “Hey, we can use this to catch criminals.” The concern was that Clearview would scrape, and they did this, all photos ever loaded off of Twitter. Twitter sued them to try to get them to stop, and that case is still pending in the courts. In response to that, New York said, “Okay, you can only look, you can compare photos of your suspect that you’re trying to find, but only to arrest photos and parole photos, so we already know the person’s kind of in the system.” Never mind the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing, and if you’ve committed a crime before, it doesn’t mean you’re guilty of another crime—throw that out. That’s what the state legislature did here. Apparently, the NYPD and the FDNY can’t even follow that rule, even though it gives them a lot of access. This is a really crazy story. A city fire marshal—by the way, I should point out there’s been all sorts of violations of this kind of rule. For example, we mentioned John Catsimatidis.

As the resident Greek here, you have to do this. He’s the Gristedes grocery market billionaire. He used and subscribed to Clearview AI to identify someone his daughter was dating. What? Yeah. He also used it at Gristedes to identify shoplifters and go after them. So, this is a really over-the-top firm. They’ve been using it illegally over and over again. They just can’t. In this latest case, it involves a dude named Zuhdi Ahmed. I’m wondering, by the way, if they mispronounced it, if it’s Ahmed, Zud, Zuhdi, I don’t know, but this is how they’re reporting it in a thing called The City. The city fire marshal went into the FDNY to access this facial recognition software to help out the NYPD, who were trying to identify a pro-Palestinian protester at one of the encampments at Columbia University. He’s 21 years old, premed at City College. He was at Columbia, accused of throwing a rock at a pro-Israel Zionist protester back a year ago during the April 2024 protest at Columbia. The cops identified him using his old prom photos from high school that they found on social media, which is illegal. He was charged with felony assault, third-degree assault as a hate crime, which was then reduced to misdemeanor second-degree aggravated harassment. A criminal court judge dismissed the case and was very angry about it. She said where the state routinely gathers, searches, seizes, and preserves colossal amounts of information, transparency must remain a touchstone lest fairness be lost, Judge Valentina Morales wrote. The point is they keep doing this over and over again. Is it time to ban the use entirely of this technology? By the way, NYPD officers have repeatedly downloaded it to their own private phones, tapped into the base, and used it to investigate, for example, people they suspect their wives are cheating with or whatever. They just can’t help themselves. It’s been abused so much. Should we just ban the cops from using it?

John Kiriakou: I would. I know I’m biased, but I would because I don’t trust the cops or the firemen. Even, you know, as well as I do, a lot of these cops are going to see a beautiful woman in the next car, take a picture, and put it through facial recognition software to get her phone number, address, home address, see if she’s married or whatever. First of all, there’s no probable cause, so they shouldn’t even have the right to do something like this. There are only 17 states in America that are ID-on-demand states, so in 33 states, the cops cannot come up to you and say, “Hey, you have an ID, let me see your ID.” It’s like you can only see my ID if you have articulable suspicion that I have committed a crime, am committing a crime, or am going to commit a crime. You can’t just walk up to me and ask to see my ID. Obviously, if you’re driving a vehicle, it’s different.

Ted Rall: If you’re just protesting or standing on the street corner, whatever, the cops cannot just walk up to you and demand that you identify yourself. This is circumventing that, right? I think it should be illegal. I really do. I think you have a reasonable point. It’s interesting. You don’t have an expectation of privacy legally if you walk in public, right? Like, for example, I can take your picture on the street as part of a crowd scene or whatever if I’m just taking a picture on the street.

Ted Rall: But at the same time, I do think you should be free from thinking that your photo is going to end up in a database that could then, and this is not outlandish, be fed into a drone, an assassination drone that can track you down based on your face, identify you, and then shoot you remotely, even without a human operator controlling it. That technology exists now. It’s been deployed. Also, Clearview AI doesn’t seem to be very discriminant about who they lease this to. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, for example, is one of their customers, and they claim the Ukrainians now have access to two billion images from Russian social media.

John Kiriakou: Oh my god. At their disposal. So there’s just, you know, Twitter sent a cease and desist, I mentioned that, to Clearview. I love this: the CEO of Clearview replied to the lawsuit that they have a First Amendment right to access public data. I don’t think that’s quite true, is it?

Ted Rall: No, no, no, I don’t think it is true. Basically, it’s the wild west, and it’s just, you know, if they can’t identify this guy some other way, sorry. I guess, you know, the counterargument is this could be used to catch bad people. That’s true. Great. But we have a legal memo that the cops need to use to go catch that bad person.

Ted Rall: I would rather see guilty people get away than see innocent people harmed.

John Kiriakou: Oh my god, I agree completely. So, yeah, well, I mean, this, but here we go. It’s not an issue that even the left seems particularly concerned about, although traditionally it’s always the left that’s targeted. By the way, this technology was used to ID a lot of January 6ers too, I believe that.

John Kiriakou: I believe that. Hey, I know we’re short on time, but I want to say, remember a couple of weeks ago we talked about Rahm Emanuel running for president?

Ted Rall: Yes, yes, I remember that.

John Kiriakou: Well, Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia is currently on a campaign trip in Iowa. He must have spoken to his mom, and she said, “You know what, Glenn, honey, you should be president.” So he’s off to Iowa to campaign. He said he’s not campaigning, he just wanted to give a quick talk at a dinner, and he’s really only concerned about serving the people of Virginia. Remember when Youngkin was the great Republican hope? I sure do. Is he still?

Ted Rall: No. What happened?

John Kiriakou: Oh, he ended up being Governor Veto. After a year as governor, the Democrats won both the House and the Senate in the state legislature. They did everything they could to protect education and abortion. He just vetoed, vetoed, vetoed. He vetoed everything, even stuff that the Democrats and Republicans agreed on, like budget numbers, just to throw a wrench into everything. So he ended up not accomplishing anything. The economy in Virginia is good just because it’s always good, until very recently. It’s because there have been federal layoffs for the first time since 1977. The buck has to stop somewhere. He took credit for the good economy; he’s going to have to take credit for the bad economy as well.

Ted Rall:  Ideologically, where does he fit in terms of the whole country club Republican versus MAGA populist?

John Kiriakou: Very much the country club Republican. The guy is a multi-millionaire. He’s a businessman, one of the founding partners of BlackRock Finance. Plenty of money. He liked to call himself, almost four years ago, Donald Trump without the negatives. He’s not Donald Trump without the negatives. He is a down-the-line, run-of-the-mill country club Republican.

Ted Rall: I don’t see that coming back soon. It could come back at some point, but not, yeah, maybe after I’m dead. USC has a question here: What do we think about Newsom trying to expand his likability by going on shows like Shawn Ryan? I think it’s smart, you know.

John Kiriakou: But you know what, Newsom? First of all, I’m biased. I don’t like Gavin Newsom for personal reasons. What’s your personal reason? I can tell you mine. When he was running for lieutenant governor, he would specifically task his campaign manager with doing these long days, go represent me here, go represent me there. Meanwhile, he’s having an affair with the guy’s wife the whole time. They got caught, and he had to apologize: “Oh, my best friend, I betrayed my best friend, I had an affair with his wife.” Shame on him. Unforgivable, not worthy of Californians’ votes, in my view. With that said, Newsom is going to have to answer for the gigantic homeless population we’ve seen under his tenure. He’s going to have to answer for $6.50 a gallon gasoline. He’s going to have to answer for these ridiculous wildfires where the state government has done nothing to upgrade the electrical lines or do anything to stop these fires. California has so many problems right now. Highest taxes in America. His response is, “Oh, but I’m liberal, and I’m good-looking, so vote for me.” Uh-uh.

Ted Rall: Perception is reality, right? The perception is that California is a disaster. I happen to think it’s true. I lived there for years. I think, you know, it’s not like when Clinton, former governor of Arkansas, ran in ‘92, the national press didn’t go to Little Rock to look around. If they had, they might have said, “The guy who gave us this hellhole shouldn’t be president of the United States.” California is not secret. It’s not in hiding. Everyone can see it all the time. That’s his problem, right? When you’re a governor, you are judged on your state. You’re the executive.

Like I said, the buck has to stop somewhere. If Andy Beshear runs, everyone’s going to look at Kentucky. Josh Shapiro, everyone’s going to look at Pennsylvania. It’s not like that for John Fetterman, even though he’s from Pennsylvania. He’s a senator.

John Kiriakou: That’s right. It’s different, inexplicably. You still don’t understand why he’s still there.

John Kiriakou: No, I don’t either. Let’s very quickly touch base about Trump’s illness. How do you like that? He has circulatory issues, not uncommon for older people. It was pointed out that it looks like he’s probably had them for a while, and it’s only when his legs were photographed, using makeup on his hands.

Yeah. You saw the pictures?

Yeah. So he must have those black marks. Yes. He’s not, obviously, I don’t think it’s huge news to say he’s not the most physically fit dude whoever was president of the United States. He’s overweight, doesn’t eat well, doesn’t exercise. Clean living is not his thing. I guess Democrats are in no position to talk about this after what we just talked to Jake about. They’ve undergone a cover-up for four years. They can’t credibly say, “Hey, can we know more about Trump’s physical health?”

John Kiriakou: Not a chance. Nope. In fact, this week in congressional hearings about the Biden autopen and Biden’s health, everybody took the fifth.

Ted Rall: Yeah. What do you make of that? Because I was thinking, here’s my question, John. I know you’re not a lawyer, and neither am I, but I’m sure you’ve thought about this, and we both have lots of friends who are lawyers. I understood the doctor pleading doctor-patient confidentiality, but he also pled the fifth. There’s no law against covering up the failing mental acuity of the president of the United States. It’s not against the law.

So, but the only reason to plead the fifth is to avoid self-incrimination. What’s going on? Was this just to show contempt for the process?

John Kiriakou: I think it was exactly that. The Democrats, see, this is one of the reasons I hate the Democrats. They just don’t want to play this game. They’re willing to use it against the Republicans, but they don’t want the Republicans to, you know, Houdini. I said exactly the same thing when I saw the picture of his ankles. The first thing I thought was this is a renal problem.

John Kiriakou: Yes, I thought the same thing. It probably can be managed for a while.

Ted Rall: Oh, yeah, without a doubt. But full cards on the table, John, I never thought that Trump was going to finish his term. I remember you saying that a long time ago.

John Kiriakou: Who knows? That may be the plan. Who knows?

Ted Rall: We’re in a state now where most of my liberal Democratic friends are literally saying, you know, Vance wouldn’t be so bad.

John Kiriakou: I’ve said from the beginning, I’m more impressed with Vance’s wife than I am with Vance even.

Ted Rall: But you know, when someone has an impressive wife, you always think there must be more to that guy. She married him.

Yeah, right. Vance wouldn’t be terrible. I think, I don’t know. I mean, he’s a smart man. Of course, I’m highly biased, being a fellow creature from southwestern Ohio, from the rust belt. Even though his story and mine are very similar, except I don’t lie about claiming to be a hillbilly. It’s like, “Sorry, no, that was your grandma.” By that standard, I’m from Brittany, okay? So, be serious. Oh, but you went to visit. So did I. He went home in the summer, I mean, not home, he went to Kentucky in the summer. Sorry, fraud. Anyway, whatever. Okay, so, yeah. Okay, I’ll put this up.

John Kiriakou: Yeah, no, Ted, some people aren’t with the right one. Fair. Tell me about it. I’m saying some are. This is more about, like, if I have to choose between one of the two. I personally don’t like any of them.

Ted Rall: That includes the Democrats. They’re right-wing as far as I’m concerned. Okay, so, are we sufficiently deprogrammed? Anything we need to do further?

John Kiriakou: Yeah, I think so, Ted.

Ted Rall: All right then. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. It’s much appreciated. We will see you next Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5:00 PM Eastern time. We really, really, really mean it this time. Have a great weekend. Take care.