Tim Parletori. Welcome back.

Thank you. Good to be back.

Round number three.

Yeah.

I'm pumped, man. Thank you for coming. We got a couple of topics that I want to cover with you. Two include bringing retirees back into the military, the weaponization of federal agencies in the legal system, the device massiveness that we're seeing across the country, and how people are not... I feel like people are being led around the nose in the country and being told what to think. I think a lot of people are falling right into it. You see people making excuses for political candidates, political parties on both sides of the aisle. To be honest, I just find it rather disgusting. I want to talk about how the US government might be able to get the trust back in the American people. I don't know if that's even possible at this point, but we'll find out. Tim, you're a super level-headed guy. You always have a unique and different perspective than what everybody else is saying because they all feed off of each other, right? I love the perspectives that you bring, and I respect everything you have to say. So thank you for coming. No, thank you. Looking forward to diving into these topics.

Usually, I give an introduction, but you being on for the third time, I don't feel like I need to give an introduction. But Powerhouse attorney, been involved in several huge national cases, and For anybody that is interested, all you got to do is Google the name. But I know the only reason you probably came back is for the presence.

Wonderful. My wife ate the last ones.

Hey, they're still legal in all 50 states.Thank you.Believe it or not.

You're welcome. Love the gummy bears.

But let's just I'll just take it off. One thing that we were talking about at lunch is the recruitment numbers in the military and how they are. Retention is atrocious. Recruitment is atrocious. Now, I just had my friend Scott Mann here not long ago to help me put together a different interview. It was rather complicated. And in the middle of that, he had told me how they are reaching out and contemplating bringing military retirees up to the age of 70 back into the military. What is your perspective on that?

It's an interesting issue that has a lot of facets to it. Bottom line, I think it's a good idea to make that something that is open because I think that a lot of retirees do have a lot to offer, depending on the role. I don't think we want to have somebody who's up to the age of 70, going to kick in a door at this point. But certainly from the perspective of leadership, one major problem that I've always thought in the military is there has to be this continuity up the chain of command through your career progression. And if you fall off at any one point, you can't continue to progress. And so if you haven't hit the wickets by the certain time, then you can't get promoted to the next rank, and therefore, then you have to get out. And that's a concept that I really don't think makes a lot of sense. But then once you get out, there's no way back in. And so if you look at every other industry out there, including every other branch of the federal government, people go in and out all the time. You can be an FBI agent, then go work in private industry, and apply to come back in.

But in the military, you can't really do... In the reserves, to a certain extent, but on the active duty side, not really. And so what you end up with is at the higher up positions, you have some good people, and you have some people who just decided to stay. And you have some great people who decide to leave earlier on, get experience on the outside, and if they were able to come back, and I think that this... We're talking specifically about retirees for right now, but the idea of bringing back a retiree who has tremendous experience, but also a house who has tremendous perspective from what they've done after they've gotten out to then come and bring all those lessons back in, I think it's an incredible value added. Now, obviously, the articles about this are written from a slightly different perspective of, Isn't this a sad state of affairs that we are unable to meet our recruiting goals, and so therefore we need to reach out to people up to the age of 70 to come fill these slots, which I think is a little bit of a logical misstep. Because while we can't reach the recruiting goals, that's for the lowest ranks.

We're not bringing retirees back in to fill those slots. We're bringing them back in because of retention issues. When you think about as people go up, if you have more people putting in their retirement papers at 20 years than you expected, all of a sudden, how many people do you have left to take on these bigger jobs?

I really appreciate the perspective that you bring, and I don't disagree with it. I don't think that the government or whoever is trying to get retirees back in is... I just don't feel like that's their goal.

It may not be.

I feel that their goal is when Maybe not their goal, but it's, These guys already served. We have problems. We need to get them back in. Instead of actually looking at why nobody is signing up for the military, why they can't keep anybody in the military, the old warrior mindset, I guess I can't say it's completely gone, but it's not like it used to be. No. Maybe instead of forcing retirees back into the military, because I don't feel like they would use their experience. I think that they would take a 70-year-old man who... I mean, the last war was 20 years, put a 20-year seasoned warrior back in and force him to go through pronoun training, gender training, and try to... It's trying to fit a square into a round hole.

It is definitely one of those counterintuitive things of trying to bring in these old warhorses into a a newer, evolved organization. And I think the perspective I have on it is not based on what I think their intent is, but rather what the effect could be. I think that the intent may be... The intent is probably, honestly, just desperation that we don't have enough people. I mean, you have issues, considered in the Navy, where so many people are leaving at the '05 level, that how many people do you have left to screen for major command? So all of a sudden, whereas when I came in, the idea of being the captain of a cruiser or an aircraft carrier was the highest thing that you could possibly aspire to. And yet now, to scream for major command, it's so much of a smaller group. And so it's not as rigorous or as difficult to scream for that job because so many people are leaving earlier. And the reason they're leaving earlier is various things. There's a lot of reasons why. And yes, it certainly does make sense in the long long term to identify why did people leave?

How do we get them to stay? Maybe the unintended benefit is when you start to bring some of these older men and women back in, that they can help you fix that problem and say, Okay, you know why I got out? This is why. This is how you could fix it.

They have to know why people are getting out. I mean, they sent letters with the mandatory vaccine requirement that they shoved in everybody's face. Now they're sending letters saying... Because they got... Was it dishonorable or other than honorable discharge?

So it depends on the one, but most of them did get honorable discharges, but They got honorable discharges with RE codes, reenlistment codes, that prevented them from coming back in. I've seen some of these DD214s, where they actually wrote down at the bottom, Honorable discharge, but discharge before before the end of enlistment in lieu of charges. And it doesn't specifically say charges for a vaccine. You could look at that and say, what were they going to be charged with?

Yeah. I just don't see any... I'm getting angry. I don't see any steps to actually rectify the situation or to keep retention. To me, this seems like an overstep on, Hey, we know you've spent a lifetime here serving your country. We can't get the younger generation to sign up, so we're going to need you back. Oh, and you're going to play by all these new rules that you retired early to get out and get the hell away from, whether it's vaccine mandates or whatever this week's latest agenda is. We've all seen the recruiting video Those that the Navy put out was the Navy, right? Probably. It was probably all of them. But they completely changed the culture within the military, completely changed the values, and nobody wants to sign up now because they draw from a certain demographic of people. And guess what? The people that want this other shit, they don't want to serve in the military. Well, maybe you should start the draft and draft the people that wanted this in, in there. Get them in there. Let them serve in this shit. Man, it's just such a double-edged sword, and it really just irks me.

It bothers me. I go to bed thinking about these things, and it's a double-edged sword because it's our country. Somebody's got to defend it. But it's a voluntary program, right?

It is a voluntary program. And that's one thing is the program on the table right now, and it's just the army for right now, it is voluntary. There is a mechanism where they can recall retirees to active duty. But this program, they go out and they get retirees who are willing to volunteer, and therefore, they consent to what would otherwise be an involuntary recall. So they're not forcing anybody to come back yet.

I don't think anybody believes in what we're... I can't say anybody. I can't say I don't think anybody believes because I think a lot of people that have never been to war support what we're doing right now. But everybody who's been to war is against what we're doing right now, all the proxy war in Ukraine, the way that we left Afghanistan and abandoned our allies to be murdered Wondered, raped, killed, abused. All the women's rights are gone again. It makes me wonder what the hell was my service for? A lot of guys are wondering this.

It does. And I guess for me, I look at it as one of those things of, yes, there are problems. And I could either be the angry veteran that's just sitting there saying, Oh, it's not like when I was in and they're all screwed up. Or I could go and say, Hey, I'd like to be part of the solution here. And so I think that the retirees that are going to sign up for this program, are going to be the ones who want to be part of the solution. And that's something that... I can't tell you how many clients that I've talked to where they sit there and they say, Tim, I just want to drop my papers, and I beg them not to. And oftentimes, and I tell it in two phases, please don't do it right now because I don't want to lose that leverage point in your case. But please don't do that after because the experience that you're going through now with whatever it is, sometimes it's a UCMJ thing, sometimes it's IG things, whatever it is that I'm going through with this client, if we can overcome this, you may be a great lieutenant colonel.

But after this experience, you're going to be an amazing colonel. You may be a great one-star admiral, but after this, this is going to give you so much more perspective to be an incredible two, three, and four-star admiral. And so I beg these people, don't put in your papers. Use this experience, overcome this experience, and then use it to turn around and make things better. You Because that's... And you haven't asked me about the reasons why there's retention problems, but I think that one of the major reasons why is because of the way that we're treating our people and the way that the legal system, disciplinary system has worked in the military that gets a lot of people just wanting to get out. The I. G. I think the Inspector General system, the way that it's set up right now, it's a necessary program, but the way that it's set up right now, it itself drives retention problems. When I was a brand new officer, we looked up at our commanding officers and thought they were gods. And these guys who were in command, men and women in command, they all seemed to be really enjoying being in command.

And I had some great COs. Captain Streeter, Captain Blake, who later became Admiral Blake. They were incredible commanders. And then when my generation gets to that age, and I'm talking to a lot of them, you know what a lot of them are saying? I can't wait to finish my command tour because I'm terrified. At any moment, I'm going to get an I. G. Complaint, and it's all going to come crashing down. Everything that I fought for for 20 years, I'm going to lose. And then the Navy looks at him and says, Good job. You survived your command tour. Would you like to scream for major command and do it again? If you want, I can get deeper into this, but I think that a lot of the way that the disciplinary and the legal system is set up in the military as a whole drives derives non-retention. And if you fix that one problem, maybe it's not the biggest factor, maybe it's only a partial factor. But even if that takes your retention numbers and moves it 5%, how many more retirees do you not now have to recall? No. And it's just The system in that way is broken, and it's something that drives me out of my mind dealing with regularly, because I sit there and I say, You know what?

Dod-wide, and I'm going to pick on the Navy because they're the ones that I was a member of and that I spend the most time with. As a Navy, we can train the greatest fighter pilots in the world, the greatest ship drivers in the world, the greatest maritime warriors in the world, submariners. But we can't train our lawyers to do basic trial skills. We can't train our lawyers to conduct basic investigations and to properly represent the client or properly figure out how to prosecute, whether we should prosecute, make good decisions. We train our physicians to be phenomenal emergency room physicians that caused so many people that in past wars would have died that today are alive because our medical community is so well-trained at piecing them back together. Our investigators are horrific. I've done cases with law enforcement agencies across this country, local, state, federal, and I've never run into investigators as bad as in DOD. And again, I'll pick on the Navy, but Army and Air Force have a similar structure, where the NCIS agents. They're special agents. They love to tell people they're the same as the FBI. They just have a TV show.

But the reality is, the way they become an NCIS agent is you want to be a federal agent. You go on usajobs. Gov, you upload your resume, you check all the boxes, and then you have to get rejected by the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, HSI, and all the three-letter agencies before now NCIS is the one that hires you. So NCIS, in my opinion, is primarily staffed with rejects from the other agencies. Then you go down to the IG level where you have investigators that are not carrying guns or badges, and how well trained are they? If you want to be an investigator, you're not going to go to DOD. You're going to go to DOJ. You're going to go to the NYPD, the LAPD. You're going to go to an agency like that, State Police somewhere. But you then have the IG, which is the next level down. And then the next I'll just level down from that, command investigations, where they'll assign some officer to do an investigation that has zero training and zero experience. And some of those do really wonderful job. Honestly, when it comes to command investigations, I haven't seen a mediocre one.

They're either really good or really bad because it's either somebody who clears their schedule and puts all their effort into trying to be as good as they can possibly be on it, Or you get something that sits there and says, Well, I think they're guilty because they refuse to answer my questions and invoke the Fifth Amendment.

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I know this is an issue that I'm passionate about, and so I've gone off on a little rant here, but I think that if you fix a lot of those problems, That's going to cause a lot of the good people who have left, they would have stayed.

If they couldn't have have impacted that while they were in, why would they think that they can come back off retirement and make the impact now?

Well, they may not. And those individuals probably wouldn't be the ones to sign up. But I think a lot of it depends on the changing climate and if they're given an opportunity to do things again. But here's the other thing, is that what opportunity do you have to make change when you are on this ladder and you know, I have to do everything just this way if I want to make the next rank. But if you come in from retirement, you don't have to worry about your next promotion anymore. That's a good point. There's an element of that. To give you an example, I represented four 05s in a single case. It was three Navy commanders, one Marine Lieutenant Colonel, aviators. Great guys. Two of them had already been screened and selected for 06 and CAG. They were going to be Commanders of Carrier Airwings. And because of this IG complaint that went completely and totally out of control, I got it all remedied, but all of them retired as 05s. That's two carrier air wing commanders taken off the board in one move. And that's just one story. But there's a lot of these.

Now, if you went to one of those guys and said, Hey, would you like to come back? And whatever the role is, and that's the The interesting thing that I noticed in this program is that the retirees can apply to come back in to fill a specific billet. They're being advertised for specific jobs. So it's not just that a retiree sits there and says, Yeah, I'll come back in and I'll let Pers decide where to put me. They would be looking at it very specifically. Okay, they need senior instructors at the flight school. They need somebody to run operations out of this Port here. They need whatever it is. And again, I know it's the Army program, and I'm using Navy terms. But if they see a job that they want to do that they feel like they can make a difference at, and they're not worried about trying to make rank, maybe they can be more effective.

Okay, I agree with you there. I still don't understand why they would consider that rather than try to figure out why everybody left at the beginning. And so it sounds like I never thought about the IG stuff. Yeah. I don't think that is the biggest reason people are No, I'm not saying it's 50 plus %, but I do think it's a percentage. Do you feel... I'm going to tell you a theory that I've had. Okay. And this happened... This crossed my mind way back when the whole defund the police movement started. And I feel that the demoralization of police and the defunding the police movement was to to change out the old guard, get rid of the old mindset, bring in the new mindset. Then I think that carried over to the military. They brought all... I mean, when you think of When you think of the guys that have been on this show that have joined, they didn't join for this.

Have a lot of clients on your show.

Good point. But these guys didn't join for this shit. They didn't join to have Vax mandates. They didn't join to go through whatever. What do you even call it? Like the inclusion or whatever you want to call it.

Diversity and inclusion planning.

They went to defend this country and to go to war, not to be told about pronouns, not to be told what to jam into their arms, not to be told any of that. They went in to become warriors and fight for this country and stand up for American values and beliefs and train our allies, which we've abandoned. And I feel that... I mean, what do you think of that? You know what I'm saying? I do. I'm saying that they wanted to get rid of the warrior mindset in the military, and they wanted to get rid of the old mindset in the police Department, completely We're going to completely revamp it. And it's almost like we're just watching a failed experiment, real-time.

Or we could take these lessons to figure out how do we apply it to Congress to get rid of all those people. Yeah, Chris. Kitting slightly, but Here's the thing. You're right. And I think that a lot of this focus on these other programs... I mean, look, the vaccine mandate was a total disaster. It was a total failure. And I think that the courts have I've been very clear on this, and the fact that we now have the army sending out letters to people saying, Hey, I know we kicked you out for not taking the vaccine, but we'd like you back, and you don't have to take the vaccine now. It's an admission that that was a total failure. As to a lot of these other initiatives, I think that they're pushing very hard on the language and everything. But the reality is, I was thinking about this the other the day. I came in in 1998, so it was during Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And I remember when they repealed it, was that '06-ish? I think it was around '06. And everybody was predicting doom and gloom and everything, everybody on the outside. But I don't remember.

I don't know if you remember what it was like on the inside, but I remember or when they were talking about repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, we all thought, who cares? When they repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, one of my academy classmates, on the effective date He got married at one minute after midnight on the first date that he could be open about his orientation. And you know what all of our classmates said about it? Good for him. Was anybody surprised? No. No, we all knew. Nobody cared. Don't ask, don't tell, in a weird way, was used more Or at least towards the end. I mean, obviously, earlier on, it was definitely abused. But towards the end, all the time I was in, Don't Ask, Don't Tell was primarily used by people that wanted to get out. Young sailors who got on the ship and decided, Oh, my recruiter to me. This is not what I really wanted to do. Let me go to Confess to Being Gay as a way of getting a simple and easy honorable discharge without any questions asked. And when that went away, they, of course, then started... They turned to smoking weed instead to get out, but their DD214s look worse.

It didn't matter. I think that if you... You can have both. You can have the warrior culture, and you can have all this inclusion. Because the reality is, if you have warriors out there, do you care who they're sleeping with or what they're doing on their free time?

No.

Exactly. If they can do their job and help us to go over there and kill the people that we need to kill, it doesn't matter what they do in their free time, how they want to dress, what their pronouns are. None of that matters. So you can do both. And I think the idea that we have to only do one or the other is something that we have to get past. You know?

Yeah. I mean, I'm with you. All I'm saying is the current model is not working.

No, it's not.

And so if I think it's with the initiatives that we're talking about, it's just being forced down everybody's throat. I think that is... I personally think that is one of the main things that is affecting retention in recruiting is they don't want to hear it. They don't want to be forced to sit through whatever the training program is. What is... You know?

Yeah, it's All that mandatory training. We've always had the mandatory training where you sit through the... Every six months, you sit through the sexual assault prevention course, and the this course, and the that course. I had a department head when I was a junior officer who said, Training is valuable because training is documentation to cover somebody else's ass when it gets screwed up. And it's not so much about, did you learn something during this diversity training? It's by getting your signature on the attendance sheet so that later, if you go out and you discriminate or you do something bad, they can say, Well, we trained that officer on how to do this. We told them that they should treat all these people with their correct pronouns and everything. And so therefore, it's not on the command, it's on the individual. And then they can use that as evidence in the administrative or disciplinary proceeding to show that they were that bad. So the training Training is... We've always had too much of that, the lecture-based death by PowerPoint training. And yes, right now it's even heavier on that side of things because that's what the politicians are driving.

That's what I'm... Because I do agree with what you're saying, with everything that you're saying. It's just they've amplified it. It's on the recruiting videos. It's everywhere you look. What do you think about when I said, I think this was on purpose to get rid of the old guard and bring in the new with the defunding the police movement? Do you think there was a deeper agenda than...

There's always a an agenda. I mean, throughout the history of this country, there has always been an agenda to get rid of the old. The younger generation always wants to take over. The older generation, they're dinosaurs. Their thinking is in the past. We know better than them. We need to push them out so we can get the next generation of generals. I think that's a constant throughout history. Is this perhaps one tactic that was used? Sure. To a certain extent, it probably did work in getting a lot of people up. But then the fact that we're now asking those exact same people to volunteer to come back might be an indication that as much as politicians refuse to ever admit that they made a mistake or they're wrong about something, maybe they're trying to correct it in a way that doesn't require them to actually make any admissions. I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. It's throughout the history of this country, throughout the history of the world, it's been a pendulum where you swing too far over to one side, you get abuse, correction, overcorrection, abuse, correction, overcorrection. And it has been that way throughout history.

And so were things way Too far over at the time when NCIS then called NIS, the Admirals Gestapo, went out to frame people for being gay so that they could get rid of them? Yeah, that was way too far over here. Have we now swung way too far over here to where we're foregoing marksmanship training in favor of pronoun training? Probably. Where is the right place? Right in the middle. But how do you get the pendulum to stop? Because once it starts swinging this way...

Where do you think... I mean, that brings us into the divisiveness in this country. It's so bad. It's so bad. I don't even... I mean, it's been going on for years now, and years and years, and still, it still has not I just started 100% in my head because I constantly think, How did we get here? Is this really as bad as it sounds? Is this real? Am I really seeing what I'm seeing? And it just seems to be getting worse. I feel like I'm pretty center. I'm not. I don't have, at least I don't feel I have extreme views. I do.

I'm an extreme moderate.

Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying is, I see it swinging. Where did it start? Where did the pendulum start to get out of control?

Honestly? Probably back in 1776 or before. Look all the way back to the beginning. The Declaration of Independence Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin. Set Ben Franklin to the side for a minute. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were allies, very close friends in the fight for Independence and to convince the continental Congress to vote for the Declaration of Independence. Their interests were perfectly aligned. And then we fought a war. And after the war was over, One of the interesting things not a lot of people realize about the Revolutionary War, at the end of that war, all of a sudden, we're sitting there like, Okay, we don't have a king. Now what? Nobody had a plan. Nobody had an idea of what do we want to create in its place. And so that's when the debate started. And John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, these close allies, became polar opposites because they each had very different ideas of how this country should be governed. They didn't speak for years. Thomas Jefferson was John Adams' vice President because back then, the way it worked is you have a presidential election, the first-place winner gets the presidency, second place winner gets the vice presidency.

And they fought, and they didn't speak for years after that because they just had very different ideas. They both knew they didn't want a king. They didn't know what they did want. And that divisiveness, the only President we've ever had that's not been a member of a political party is George Washington. After him, it split into the federalists and the democratic Republicans. John Adams on the federal side, Jefferson on the democratic Republican side. And that began this partisanship in the fighting back and forth that has continued throughout history. The parties have changed. So the way you currently have Democrats and Republicans, I can't necessarily point to This one was derived from federalists. This one was from Democratic Republicans, because different issues, they move around. Then sometimes parties disappear, and new ones pop up. But it started then. And are we divisive today? Yes. Does it seem as bad as it's ever been? Yes. And a lot of that is because the prevalence of the media. However, is this the worst it's ever been? Well, half the states aren't putting on gray coats and picking up rifles to shoot at the other half of the states that are wearing blue coats.

So we're not there. And I think that it looks a lot worse than we think it is because of the way that the media and social media portrays it. Because ultimately, divisiveness gets you more clicks and more likes and more comments than a message of unity.

And you think this goes all the way up to the President, worried about clicks and likes?

Yeah, Absolutely. It starts there because why does the President want clicks and likes? He wants votes. And if you look at the way a lot of these presidential elections are running today, They're not appealing to the undecided voters. They're appealing to the base because presidential elections are now, by and large, decided by whose base goes to the polls, who's more excited to go and vote. Not so much that we have these people that are reliable voters, and we have to convince these people in the middle to vote for one side or the other. Now, I think that The percentage of people in this country that are sitting there today saying, I really don't know. I would like to hear a debate because I'd like to hear on the issues, whether I like Joe Biden or Donald Trump. I think that That hypothetical person, there aren't many of them. There are plenty that are probably sitting there saying, I will decide whether to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden or not at all. Or, I'm trying to decide between Joe Biden and RFK. I'm trying to decide between Donald Trump and whatever third-party candidate they find.

What was it? One of these states in their primary, the second place, when an actual delegate got assigned to none of these candidates? So yeah, I do think it goes all the way to the top. And even when we say the top, and you assume that the present is the top, it's the parties. It's the DNC and the RNC that are really driving this.

Do you feel like the... I mean, you say the pendulum began at the beginning. I'm sure it swung out of control before and then come back into...

Mid-1800s is when it swung furthest out of control.

What about in recent times?

I think it looks worse than it is because How so? You don't have conversations with people as much that you disagree with. I'm not talking about you individually, but people don't have as many conversations with people that they disagree with as much. I like having conversations with people I disagree with.

You're an attorney.

It's true. It's one of the things I'm paid to do. But I mean, outside of the I enjoy talking to somebody that's not just going to sit there and nod their head with everything that I say. And if you can sit down... In fact, last week, I was sitting in the cafe at my gym, Lifetime in Clarendon. And this woman walked past me, this younger black woman, and she looked at me. She says, Oh, I recognize you. I saw you on TV. And I said, Yeah, it's nice to meet you and everything. And we sat down and we had a conversation, and she expected me to be this Trump lawyer, therefore it must be some crazy right wing person. But instead, I didn't have any of the expected rhetoric. And so she dropped not doing any of that rhetoric from the other as well. Instead, we just had a conversation about things in the news. And even though she was a very liberal person, I did not... I told her I'm an extreme moderate. That's how I identify. But we had an intelligent conversation. And at the end of the conversation, you know what she said to me?

She said, People need to have more conversations like this. And she said, You know what? I have a close friend that I haven't talked to in the past few years because she became a Trump supporter, and we got in a fight, and I haven't spoken to her in years. I'm going to call her tonight and try and have a real conversation with her without starting it by, All those people are crazy. So I think that we're not as far apart as everybody thinks that we There was a really good podcast. Our friend Andy Frisela had Hawk Newsom, the head of the New York BLM chapter. And I thought it was such a fascinating podcast because two guys that were very much on the opposite ends of issues, but they decided to sit down and try and have a respectful conversation with one another, and they listened to each other. And when it came to the issue of defunding the police, Andy asked them, What do you think about the police? Oh, abolish them. Yeah, but what are you replace them with? Social workers. And they started having a conversation about that. Instead of just saying, Oh, that's crazy.

Okay, what does that mean? How would it work? And as the conversation evolved, he said, Well, what? But there are situations out there that are dangerous, and you have assaults in progress and things like that. And Hawk then responded, Oh, I want the social workers to have guns. And Andy said, Aren't we talking about the same thing then? We're using different words for the same solution. You want social workers with guns. I want cops with more training and social work. And when you defund the police, they're not getting any more training. But ultimately, don't these two things come together? Together. Military justice reform, same thing. I talk to people up on the hill, and they're so wrapped up in their individual rhetoric and their individual issues that they can't see that the solutions are the same. You have Republican members of Congress that are, because of some of the work that I've been involved in, Eddie Gallagher and other things, they want to reform the system because they see how it has abused our warfighters. You have people like Kristen Gillibrand who want to reform the criminal justice system because they see how it has negatively impacted issues of sexual assault.

Kristen Gillibrand is never going to stand up and say Eddie Gallagher was mistreated any more than these Republican congressmen are going to stand up and say, We have a sexual assault problem in the military. And yet if they can both get past their rhetoric, her solution is the same as theirs. And because they can't get past it, you end up with these half baked measures, like the recent reform where they created this Office of Special Trial Council, which I think is a baby step in the right direction, but actually is more of lip service to the problem than an actual reform. If you could get people to get past the rhetoric and just sit down and say, Okay, I'm not going to call you names. You Don't call me names. What's a solution? We're not as far apart as everybody thinks we are.

It's hard to say. I want to agree with you. I really do. I don't see it happening here, but I live in a bubble. I don't know what it's like elsewhere. But when I think about things like the border, is it that bad, or is the media portraying it to be that bad? I'm going down there in July to... I don't want to say where, because I have to see it for myself. I tried it on another section years ago, and it wasn't what I thought it going to be. So now I'm going to go to another section and see for myself. But when you see things like that or the Afghanistan withdrawal, that's a divisive issue. It is. How we left. And that isn't... That is very real. The fact that we are funding the Taliban $40 million a week.

Right.

I mean, this It is that bad.

It is. But a lot of that is the politicians, not the people. And that's the difference. Is the border that bad? Probably is. I haven't been down there myself, but I've seen what impact it has on the communities in DC, in New York. And it certainly Certainly has had a significant impact, but that is not the people. That's the politicians. And I think that one of the things you're seeing here, as the pendulum starts to swing a little bit more wildly, one thing that Trump is effective at, I don't want to call him brilliant at, but effective at, is drawing his opponents into polar opposite positions of where they would otherwise be. When he took a strong position on immigration, his opponents took a strong anti-position on immigration. And if you look at I love watching Bill Clinton's State of the Union addresses. Google this. Go on YouTube, look up Bill Clinton's State of the Union, and look what he said about immigration. And when you listen to it, You're going to sit there and shake your head and you say, I forgot that Bill Clinton was a Republican. He didn't forget. What it was is that the positions of the parties have moved so far away from one another from back in the '90s, where they weren't really that far apart.

And so when you had this build the wall, how far can we swing away from build the wall? Open border. When you have Overturn Roe v Wade, how far can you swing away from that? Partial birth, post-birth. And again, this is the politicians that are trying to play to their base as opposed to appealing to the middle and swinging as far as they can out. And so I think that's really what you're seeing here. And so I believe that most Americans do want a reasonable immigration policy. It's not build a wall and lock it down, nor is it open border. One thing In the beginning of the 2016 election cycle, when Trump first started talking about build the wall, everybody focused on build the wall, going to get Mexico to pay for it and everything else. And everybody missed one key element element of his early speeches. And because they missed it, it didn't then reappear in later speeches. He said, Oh, it's going to be a big, beautiful wall, and it's going to have a big, beautiful door. Nobody talks about the door. Do you even remember him talking about big, beautiful door?

No. Right.

And I think that the American people would be okay with a wall if there was focus on what the door looks like. We are a nation of immigrants. We need immigrants in this country, but there is a process. And And if you fix that process, focus on the door, then the wall is no longer divisive. My mother-in-law, she was born in Beijing. She ran away to Taiwan when she was two or three years old. During the Communist Revolution, her family left. And then she came to this country legally to go to grad school. And she and her family went through hell to go through all the immigration processes to become a citizen. And she did And so when she looks a lot of these things, one of the things she hates about the illegal immigration is that she did it the right way. And I think a lot of immigrants, legal immigrants, probably think the same thing of, We did it the right way. It was way too difficult for us to do it. But this is a swing too far to the other side. So maybe you improve to prove the system of legal immigration, and then nobody's going to dispute the issue of illegal immigration.

And then the Democrats can dust off Bill Clinton's old speeches and use those instead.

Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I've been saying that ever since I went down to the border and saw the migrant camps of people who are waiting to come in legally. Years. Years. Years. Years and years and years they're waiting. But that's...

You incentivize people to come here illegally when you make it too difficult to come here legally. If you're going to leave them in a migrant camp for years.

Why don't you I think why is nobody working on the immigration process and just opening the borders?

Because you have politicians on both sides.

I'm glad you brought that up. You think that the problem is the politicians and not the people? Yes, I do. I think the problem is both. I mean, let's talk about Congress, and these numbers are off, but they are extreme numbers, so I'm going to use them.

Congress is extreme.

Yeah. So Congress has something like a... These numbers are off, but I know they're close. Congress has what? Something like a 90% disapproval rating. In in a... Or let me rephrase that. People hate Congress more than they hate lawyers. Congress has a 10% approval rating, but a 90% re-election rate. That's not a problem with the politicians. That's a problem with the people.

It's a problem with-We have a bunch of people that want to bitch, moan, complain, not take take a stance on anything, not take a stance out of...

If it inconveniences an American, they're not going to do it. They're not going to say anything. They're not going to make any changes. They're not going to stop shopping at certain places. They're not going to do anything. And that's a perfect example, 10% approval rating in a 90 % re-election rate. That's a people problem.

Yeah. It's not just a people problem, though. It's a party problem. Because the prospect of anybody running for office is so daunting. I love my job. I'm never going to run for office. I don't want to. Yeah, my wife and my daughter. My wife and my daughter, my daughter likes saying, Daddy, you should be President. I'm like, No way. Not because of the job, but because of the election. Because you see what happens to people that are challenging the... I don't even want to call it the deep state and all that stuff, but the incumbents. Yeah, I have two friends, both veterans, both who decided to run for office, both of them I recommend that maybe you don't want to do that because maybe this won't turn out the way that you want to. Both of them said, No, I've got a good clean record. I want to do this, both of whom had to suspend their campaigns or lost the election after false allegations of child abuse came out during their primaries. So why does somebody want to get into a Congressional race? If we have raised the stakes to that level, that if you're not a party inside insider, we are going to destroy your life to make sure that you can't possibly win.

So is it a people problem for re-electing the incumbent? To a to an extent, yes. Is it a party problem for not allowing a real choice? Yes. Yes, it is. Because ultimately, the party and the incumbents, they have their power by the arrangement that they have. And as soon as somebody comes in that's not a party insider, that threatens their power. And so whether it's a false claim of child abuse or whatever it is, they will do something to prevent that. And you don't even have to have done something something wrong. I could sit there and say, Do I have any skeletons in my closet? Does it matter? They'll find somebody that I went to law school with that says, Oh, yeah, he did this, he did that. Look at what happened to Brett Kavanaugh. Good people are disincentivized from taking elected positions or Senate confirmed positions because Because of the process of getting the job. So is that a people problem or is that a party problem?

I think it's both. I don't think that's the only reason I'm saying that we have a people problem. We have people that... I'm just going to run through some examples. Sure. We We have people that will go on and on and on about the active shooters and how there needs to be... We obviously have a problem with that in this country. And we have parents that will bitch, moan, whine, complain, threaten. Very few of them take action. If you don't get an armed security guard at this school, I'm going to yank my kid out. Do they yank their kid out? No. The kid's still there today from them going on and on about this years ago. How many companies have come out with advertising that doesn't align with certain groups? The woke agenda, right? And what do we hear? We hear all these people bitch, moan, wine, complain. This is ridiculous. I'm never going to shop there again. As they're telling you that, you look in their back seat and they got shopping bags from the exact thing they're complaining about. Correct. We've got people on both sides that are calling each other sheep, right?

The mental gymnastics that I'm seeing people perform, it's It's almost impressive. You'll hear people go, Oh, man, you can show them the lie. You can show them the lie, and they still, they won't even look at it. I've heard this for years. And then you show them the lie about their candidate, immediately, what do they do? They dismiss it. They make excuses for their candidate. They make excuses for their party, one of them being the Bud Light fiasco, right? Whether you agree with what Bud Light did, whether you don't, there was a big thing on the right, right? We're going to boycott Bud Light. Well, until Donald Trump comes out and says, Oh, Bud Light... I sent you this article in The Federalist. Oh, Bud Light actually isn't that bad. They employ a lot of veterans. Okay, well, let's go down the list of all the companies that employ a lot of veterans, all of them. Google, Ute, FaceMeta. Everybody employs veterans. That's a ridiculous statement to say. And what happened? Supposedly there was what? What was it? A campaign fundraiser or something that was put on by Bud Light right after he said that.

But you show people that And what do they do? They immediately dismiss it. They make an excuse for their candidate. And it's the same on the other side with the border stuff. If you say anything If you give Trump any constructive criticism or any criticism at all, it's, what do you hear? What are you? Biden supporter? And if you give Biden didn't. Any criticism at all. What are you, a Trump supporter? And it's like, did we lose the ability to criticize or call out corruption for our elected officials? They are elected officials. You don't owe them shit. You don't owe Trump shit, and you don't owe Biden shit. They owe you. We elected them. They're supposed to represent us, and they're not doing that. And now you have people who refuse to look at the flaws on either side. And so once again, that brings me back to this is a people problem. They're making excuses for their candidates and for their parties. And instead of going, Yeah, I am on this side, but this is not right. What's wrong is wrong. What's right is right. And that is not good for this country.

That's accurate. And I think that some of that may be driven by the media as well. I think it's largely driven by the media. But there is this blind loyalty to candidates or politicians that it shocks me sometimes to think about this, because there are no perfect strict people in Washington, DC. Every single one of those politicians has good points, has bad points. None of them is 100% wrong. None of them is 100% right. And so when you sit there and every single thing Trump does is wrong, or every single thing Biden does is wrong, and you don't acknowledge anything that they do that may be right. It's not honest. It's dishonest. And when I sit there and I think about some of these commentators on TV talking about, for example, the Trump legal stuff, I'm one of the few people that goes out there and I say, Okay, this is good, but this is bad. They shouldn't have done this, but this is okay. I hear people on there that any decision that is issued that is negative to Trump, any judicial decision, Oh, that's air-tight reasoning that will never get overturned. That's perfect reasoning.

But then if the judge says something that rules in Trump's favor, That should be instantly overturned on appeal. And I got to sit there and I've been in some of these interviews. Have you even read the decision? Have you even read to see what the judge's decision was based on, or are you saying that it's air tight because you like the result? And I think that that's one problem that we have now is that Biden must be perfect because the alternative is Donald Trump, or Trump must be perfect because the alternative is Joe Biden. And I remember I had a brief meeting with Tulsi Gabbard while she was still in Congress, while she was still a Democrat. And she said something that was so insightful and so stuck in my mind. And she said that when she started her career in politics, her hope and some of the things that she saw was about working together to find solutions. And at the time that she left, what she saw was every decision was driven by making sure the other side doesn't get a win. It's not about what's best for the people, what's best for the country.

It's about we have to make sure that the other party can't claim this as a win. And so when you have that, and then you have the media that's driving that narrative to the people. And when people only listen to one media outlet or one side media outlet. The woman I was telling you about earlier, she told me that she only listens to CNN. Actually, I pulled out my phone and I showed her. I'll do it right now, and I'll show you. How do I get my news? Okay, I get my news. See all those apps? Fox News, CNN, Politico, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. You cannot watch just one outlet and think that you're possibly getting the truth. I have been part of many newsworthy events, whether in court or in representing people. And then I read the articles after the fact about what I allegedly did. And depending on which outlet it is, It's a totally different story. During Eddie's trial, depending on which outlet it was, you'd think that there were two different trials going on. But if you read both articles, now you're getting at least partially a balanced picture of things.

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So people that don't diversify their media, they get that one point of view, and then they get really bought into the idea that everything Biden does is wonderful or everything Trump does is wonderful. And it's Trump is the savior because Biden is trying to destroy the country or vice versa. Either way. But if we can stop, sit back, and be honest about it, Neither one of these candidates is perfect. None of these candidates is perfect. They all have good things. They all have bad things. They all have things that you should agree with, things that you should disagree with. And anybody who follows perfect party orthodoxy is wrong. They're being dishonest.

How would you even begin to get the population of the US to to do that? Because of what I'm telling you, you can put the facts right in their face, and they will completely ignore it. Look, This is what your guy did. He did this. Well, he must have... You don't understand the plan. Oh, I don't understand the plan. No, these are the facts. This is what happened. And that is both sides of the aisle.

It's not new. It's not new. This has been throughout our history. The oldest newspaper in the United States, the New York Post, was founded by Alexander Hamilton as a federalist party propaganda paper. Newspapers at the beginning of this country, were founded by members of the political parties, specifically as a vehicle in which they could publish articles attacking, mostly falsely, the figures on the other side. The wars between... The literary wars fought between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were legendary, and all written in pseudonyms. And people would read the paper of their party, and they would believe that Alexander Hamilton wanted to tear up the Constitution and return to a monarchy. They would believe these things. And you take a kernel of truth, and then you embellish it, and then it becomes something believable. How do we break that? It all comes back to me, to the political parties. So how do we regain the trust of the American people and regain a sense of perspective is to get rid of the RNC and the DNC.

How would you do that?

Preferably nonviolently, but... I'm not advocating that, but I think that the people... This is one of those things where there could be today in a way that there never has been before, a popular, illegal, nonviolent, popular uprising driven by some of these social media campaigns to get rid of the incumbents and to say to these parties, You don't represent what our true beliefs are. Because a lot of these political parties' positions, they don't actually represent what their constituents do believe. But nobody's standing up and saying that. And so if the people stood up and said, We don't support you guys, and maybe it's through fundraising, maybe it's through... I mean, and here again, what's one thing this country does have a history of? Changing political parties. It is not something that we just sit here and say, These are the two parties that we have. We've always had these parties. No, we haven't always had these parties. We've had plenty of other parties throughout history. And I'm not talking about, like minor ones, but major political parties have been disbanded and replaced.

Can you give me an example?

Sure. The Democratic Republicans and the federalists. Look at the two original parties. You have the Bull Moose Party. You have plenty of Parties that have come up throughout the history like that. And I mean, the modern Republican Party was really Abraham Lincoln. And even there, you look at How the positions of these parties have shifted over the years, where the Republican Party was the party of Civil Rights and everything, and the Democratic Party was the Party of Slavery and Jim Crow and all those things. And then that switches. A couple of years ago, I was reading George W. Bush's autobiography, and there was one part in it that I did not believe. I was sure he was lying about him. And it was when he was talking about running for governor. And he said, I want to run for governor of Texas. And he was told, It's a waste of time. You'll never win. No Republican could ever win the governor's race in Texas. And I put the book down, and I went to my computer and looked it up because I thought, That can't possibly be true. And yet, George W. Bush was the first Republican governor of Texas in decades.

I did not realize that.

So think about that. George W. Bush, he's not that old. And yet, Prior to him, Texas was reliably deep blue. People like to think that so many institutions as they exist today cannot be changed And this is the way they will be forever. These two parties will not last for the next 200 years. It hasn't lasted... Again, how long ago was George Bush governor? Not that long. So that is, to me, the best way to take it back. And then also just if people could stop feeding into the narrative and stop feeding into the hate. Instead, if you sit down and you have a conversation with somebody that you don't agree with, And you don't have any insults, don't sit down and say, All right, I want to talk to you because all... Liberals are crazy, and so I want to figure out why it is that you think these crazy things. You're not going to have a conversation then. Yeah.

Do you think that the extreme moderates, middle-of-the-road, silent majority is bigger now than it ever has been, or do you think that it has dwindled away to almost nothing?

I don't think that it's... C, none of the above. I don't think that it's dwindled away to almost nothing, but I don't think that it's bigger than it's ever been. I think that a lot of people think that they are further to the sides of one spectrum or the other than they really are. And I think a lot of that is personality-driven. I think I think that in 2020, I think a lot of people voted for Trump, and a lot of people voted against Trump, and I don't think very many people voted for Biden at all. I think a lot of people voted against Trump. And I think that in November, there's going to be people that vote for Trump, and I think there are going to be a lot of people to vote against Biden, and also a lot of people to vote against Trump. So I think that personalities have really taken over more so than ideologies. And so I think that that's an aspect of it, too. And so if you can get past the personalities, which, by the way, this is it. After 2024, neither one of these men are going to be candidates again.

This is the last time we're going to see either one of the ballot. And so after this election cycle, next election cycle, we're going to see two brand new candidates. So Does that give you the opportunity to reset things a little bit? Maybe. But yeah, I think that the personalities drive people further to identify further out on the spectrum than they really are. And the lack of conversation, the lack of honest direct conversation is what allows them to believe that they're this far out on the spectrum because they believe that everybody has moved so far over to the other side.

So you think Do you think it'll be another four years before we see that pendulum start to slow down?

No, I think that it's going to be a little bit sooner than that because our next President will be a lame duck President from day one. And so I think that the people that are supporting the candidate that's there right now because that's the best choice for them because they're afraid of the other guy. Once whoever that is becomes the lame duck President, people can start to look forward to what are we going to do in 2028? So I think that there can be an element of that change sooner.

Man, I hope you're right. I am really concerned.

My wife always criticizes me. She says, Tim, you've been a criminal defense attorney. You've seen the worst of society. Why are you still such an optimist? Why do you still have such faith in humanity? I don't know. I think if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to I have to believe that things will get better. Things can get better. If they can't get better, and if they're not going to get better, then what am I doing every day?

Yeah.

It's the same thing going back to what we were talking about with the retirees going back. I'm not a retiree, so I'm not eligible for that program. But yeah, I go into military courtrooms all the time with every intention of, how do I fix this system? How do I make this better? Not just for the client that's sitting next to me, but for every other sailor and soldier and airman, and Marine out there. How can I fix this? It's something that I have become over the past couple of years just so incredibly passionate about fixing the military justice system because I believe it can. And if I lose faith that it can, then what am I doing?

I'm always I'm just always thinking about these things. Going back to the silent majority, the middle of the road, moderate, part of me thinks... It's like I'm split 50/50. Part of me thinks that that is completely gone. Because no matter where you go nowadays, The topic of conversation is generally politics. But then on the other hand, I will say this cycle around, I see almost zero campaign signs out. I don't know if that's just here. Are you seeing that where you live?

I haven't seen a single one.

I think people are checked out of these guys. And in these parties. I think that's another possibility as well, which I'm hoping. It would be nice to see some people sit down and have some real conversations. I've been I've been saying that also for a long time. But, man, even when I talk about it, it's... And I know the loudest person in the room is always the biggest shit bag, but You talk about this stuff online on bringing people together and compromising, and what you get in the comment section is, I'm not comp... And it's like, Oh, man, we have completely lost it. But where is the pendulum in the arc before it starts to go the other way?

It's at its most extreme position before it starts to swing.

Yeah.

It is always at its worst right before everybody puts their foot down and says, This needs to be reformed. We don't reform things when they're just slightly off. Yeah. We reform them when they get too far off.

I don't want to see it go too far the other way either. I don't even know really what that looks like. I've thought about it, but it would be nice to see things simmer down a little bit. But let's move into the weaponization of the Department of Justice.

Sure.

When did you start seeing that happening?

I have a different view on the weaponization of DOJ than a lot of other people. I believe that it's been like that for a very long time. And I think that it's DOJ By prosecutors, I'm not talking about cops. I'm talking about prosecutors here. They love to win and get convictions and put people in jail, Especially if it's a big and important person, that they can get the biggest headlines that they can, and they're willing to cheat to get there, in my experience. Where that then intersects with politics, that's slightly more recent. And in a lot of ways, it's more of... I don't agree with the Trump campaign when they sit there and say, Oh, these are the Biden trials, that Alvin Bragg is doing this because of Joe Biden, or Fannie Willis is doing this at Biden's, or even Jack Smith is doing it at Biden's direction. I think that politicians may have restrained prosecutors in the past, but prosecutors are like hammers, where they go out there and everything to them looks like a nail. And I think that in certain ways, it's just been unleashed in a way that before it was restrained.

And I think back to 2016, all the crowds chanting, Lock her up, when it came to Hillary's emails. I watched all that and I thought, I personally believe that she committed a crime. I personally believe that she should not go to jail.

Why?

Because it is an impossible case to try. When Jim Comey came out with his press conference, I agreed with everything he said factually. I agreed with his conclusion. I disagreed with his reasoning. When he said, no reasonable prosecutor will bring this case, totally agree. When he then tried to say, Because the statute doesn't really mean what the statute says, and that he was doing that whole mental gymnastics, that's where he lost me. But to charge her with misshandling classified information, you are giving her a gift-wrapped appeal before opening statements even start with the jury panel. The concept of picking a jury that can look at this case dispassionately in a situation Situation like that where you have a very divisive political figure. And by divisive, let's be clear, the word divisive doesn't mean people hate them. It means divisive, divides. People hate them and people love them. So the idea of picking a jury and then having any trial of Hillary Clinton maintain an image of being the fair and impartial administration Procuration of justice is a fiction. The same is true of Donald Trump. The same is true of Joe Biden. That's why when I was still there, I was advocating that All of the classified document cases should end with no charges being brought against Trump or Biden.

Those political prosecutions are fraught with peril. And so I didn't think that she should be prosecuted. And when Trump won, and he appointed Jeff Sessions as AG, I was thinking, Maybe he is going to go after her now. He spent all this time campaigning on Locker Up, but he didn't. And I respected him for that because he took that very divisive issue and turned down temperature on it, pushed it to the side. And I think that that principle has not held over the past four years. And so I do see more of these politically-driven prosecutions, but let's be honest, the public integrity section of DOJ, which Jack Smith used to run, has always gone after political figures. Certain jurisdictions where law enforcement is led by partisan officials in one-party jurisdictions, it's always ripe for corruption. This has happened throughout history. Again, to go back to some names as I've used before, Thomas Jefferson ordered the arrest and indictment of Aaron Burr. Not for killing Alexander Hamilton, but for treason. After trial, Aaron Burr, the former vice President of the United States, was acquitted. But it was a politically-driven prosecution because, once again, they were on opposite sides of the political aisle.

He was vice President under Thomas Jefferson. So it has happened before. But to the degree that it's happening now, I think it's more of the politicians unleashing a monster that's always been there with DOJ.

How do the agencies tie into this? The weaponization of the FBI, CIA, the NSA, how do these tie in?

When you have leadership in agencies that are tied to the partisan groups, That can lead to abuse. I believe that the vast majority of FBI special agents are professional and do their job. However, the FBI has probably one of the highest percentages of non-special agent employees of any law enforcement agency out there, and their leadership and their analysts, and their non-gun and badge-carrying people who are making these decisions, I think a lot of them are the political appointees that do steer what the priorities are. When I was dealing with Jack Smith's team, the prosecutors were definitely very focused on their angle. But I actually got along very, very well with the FBI agents on Jack Smith's team, and I thought that they, in my opinion, were honest in trying to do the right thing. Again, the one's carrying a badge and a gun, not the others. And so then when you take that over to the CIA USA, any of these other agencies, these agencies should be free from that type of political interference. Should be. Because once you get politics into it that shapes everything, not just the way that they do business, who they target, how they write up reports.

But it's not new. Has the CIA written up a report that would support invading Iraq with weapons of mass destruction? Gulf of Tonkin? To justify the entry into the Vietnam War? These things have happened throughout history. It's more public now. I remember a few years ago, it seemed like there was a significant rise in shark attacks on the New Jersey coastline. And I went and looked it up because it seemed like every week there was another report about a shark attack. And I It's what? I looked it up, and guess what? The attacks hadn't changed. The media coverage had. So it seemed like there were a lot more shark attacks, but there weren't. And the same is true here. The more you see of it, the more it seems like these things are happening. But before, you just didn't see it.

Why do you think cases like Epstein are just being whisked away into nothing?

Well, Epstein's case, I think, would have probably gone a different way had he survived the trial. That certainly is something. There's always There's pressure being brought when certain cases could reveal embarrassing things about people in power. Epstein, I think, is It's a good example, but the reason why it went away the way that it did is because he was permitted to kill himself. And yes, I said that very specifically. That's my belief, is that he was permitted to kill himself.

It's things like this, like the Epstein stuff, the not releasing the manifesto from the shooter at Covenant School. It's why? Why It appears that the FBI is not doing its job. It's the Parkland shooting. The guy was, Hey, we need to look at this guy. Hey, here, here, here, here. Nothing happened. Bam. Then the school shooting happens. It's so many things just get swept under.

Because the people that are in power want to stay in power, and therefore, they need to cover themselves. So many times, my main job is fighting against the government. Sometimes that means go into a courtroom and go toe to toe with them, and and beat them. Oftentimes, it means find a solution where we can avoid a courtroom. And so oftentimes I'm sitting here, and this is what I do in a lot of cases, is I sit there and I think, Okay, what is a resolution for this case that allows my opponent an honorable exit? I'll have a situation where the government did absolutely the wrong thing. They came to the absolute wrong conclusion. And I'll go to them. And if I just go in there and say, You screwed up. You did this. You did that. Chances are We're going to get into a fight. We're going to go into the courtroom. We're going to get into a big ugly brawl. I'm going to win. But if I instead am able to present it in a way, I'm doing this, I have done this in several cases where I say, okay, I disagree with what you have done.

However, here is a solution where you can give me what my client needs, and at the same time, you save face by saying that this This is based on new information, whatever it is. As a lawyer, I'm often strategizing on, I know the government's never going to admit that what they did was wrong. But can I present it to them of giving them, This is your way out, and this is your way of saying, We did the right thing. Make it politically acceptable for them to do the right thing and not have to admit that they did the wrong thing. And that's where I get the majority of my cases resolved, where you've never read about them. So you have to remember, with every single one of these cover-ups, the people in power want to stay in power, and therefore, they are going to do what they can to control the narrative and to make sure that don't know the truth, anything that is embarrassing to them. And if that means classifying things that shouldn't be classified, if that means putting out stories in the press or books or other things that are not true just so that they can protect themselves, it is what they do.

It is also what they have done for all of our history.

How does the government, the Department of Justice, the agencies, the politicians, the political parties, how do they even begin to gain the trust back of the people? Let me start with this. Does it even matter to them if they have the trust of the people?

As of right now, it does not matter to them because it doesn't affect them. The way that they will be incentivized to regain trust is when they have lost trust in a way that negatively affects them.

What would that be?

As much as I'm not a defund the police guy, the reality is we could abolish the FBI and not lose any capabilities. Everything they do can be done by somebody else. A lot of the organized crime investigations regulations, DEA could take that over. All the anti-terrorism stuff that can be taken over by Homeland Security investigations. There's nothing the FBI does that nobody else can do. Even if there was a concerted push to that, put these people in fear of losing their jobs. Give them a motivation to say, Okay, we need to change things. Or go after the parties, go after the incumbents, put new people into Congress. They're going to haul the FBI in and say, All right, you all didn't change. Now we're going to legislate that you have to.

How would that be done when they're weaponized? So you're a President, you're a Senator, you're a congressman, whatever, fill in the blank. How do you go after the FBI without them Coming after you?

It requires somebody with a lot of courage. It requires somebody with a lot of courage and without a basement full of gold bars. So I think that there's a certain element there of the louder you are, the less likely they can do it. If you are the member of Congress that is pushing the hardest on this, the select committee chairman, for example, It's too obvious to the American people if the FBI turns around and brings a trumped-up case against that person. I think it's relatively obvious to the American people now with some of these cases as to that type of a thing. So I've always found that the easiest way to avoid a threatening situation He used to be very open and public about it. It does require a lot of courage, though, admittedly. Yeah. It's not something that everybody would want to do.

Yeah, I think it would be... I think it would be really tough when you say to go at them hard and open, I mean, what... I feel like a lot of agencies have already crossed that line with zero repercussions, zero consequences. And so I don't know what would stop them from going after the loudest, most open person anyways. Because really, what are the American people going to do?

Here's the The trend is they're going to bitch, moan, complain, and do nothing. Herein lies some of the attraction to the Trump voters. That They believe that if Trump went back into office, that he's, at that point, a lame duck President from day one, who has been himself the target of weaponization by the FBI, who has in his hands the power to fire the entire leadership structure of the FBI and install his own people and be a dictator for one day in exacting retribution. I don't know that that is the solution. In fact, I'm not saying it is the solution, but you certainly can see why that concept becomes attractive to some people. And it is something that I think is generally attractive to people about candidates who are above that partisanship. And so somebody like a Vivek I'm not going to try to pronounce his last name. Ramuswami. Yes. He's also somebody that could be a very attractive person to get in there and not be beholden to the party. It's what made Ross Perot attractive back in the day. So there's an element of that, and I think that's honestly what a lot of people liked about Trump back in 2016.

Even though it didn't work out, in many ways, it got worse. But I don't know the answer. It's I have ideas, I have suggestions, I have hopes, but I don't know how exactly they would do it. Yeah.

Are there any other ways, ideas you have on how government would regain the trust of the people?

Trust is easily lost and very difficult to regain. And what needs to be done to regain trust is to establish a clear, visible, positive change, followed by consistent transparency and updates to show we had a problem, we addressed that problem, we are continuing to address that problem, And here's how we're doing with it. One of the reasons why you see such a debate today over this whole FISA reauthorization is that after the abuses with Carter Page, who, full disclosure, I represented, after the abuses of illegally surveilling Carter Page, we don't have any visibility on what reforms they made, if any. Did they actually fix any problems? Or did they just keep going back to Congress saying, Keep re-upping it. If you don't re-up this tool, we will lose our ability to spy on terrorists. If you have these very transparent... I mean, you come out with these IG reports, the Horowitz reports and stuff like that that say, Oh, look at all these things that are a problem. And then the news cycle is so fast that we move on to the next thing, and we never come back to, Hey, did that problem ever get fixed?

Which is what the government wants us to do. They want us to forget it so they don't have to fix it. After Eddie's case, we exposed so many problems in the military justice system in the Navy. They ordered this blue ribbon panel, comprehensive review of the Navy Jag Corps, and they went through and they did this comprehensive report, exonerating themselves that they did a wonderful job, and there's maybe a couple of little tweaks here and there that they can do their training program. But other than that, it worked wonderfully. And I sat there and I thought, not a single person on that panel ever talked to me. To say, Hey, you were the guy in the middle of the trenches and seeing all of these failures. What did you say? What happened? The government doesn't reform Because the people don't demand it. They demand it, but then the attention span is short. That's driven by the media. And so then you don't have that long term follow up. But if you really want to regain the trust of the people, it's no different from people. If there was a reason why I had lost your trust and I want to regain your trust as an individual, the government should do the same thing that I'm doing, which is to apologize, to acknowledge I did something wrong, and then to show you how I'm fixing it, and then make it very clear to you that This problem I'm fixing, and it will never happen again.

So there is a way to do it. Will the government do it? Only if forced. And the only thing that they respond to is the fear of losing their power.

How do you think the people turn this around?

Not by wearing fuzzy hats in Storm of the Capital. People turn this around through the rejection of the party line. Through demanding accountability, through demanding that the parties take positions that actually represent the people, through the rejection of the politicians that have been there for decades. Which is not to say that they're all bad people. There's some There are some good people that have been there for a long time, but there's a lot of people that have just been there for a long time. It shouldn't be.

Yeah.

It was in a large part what happened in 2016, where the people were so fed up that they rejected what the Republican Party was pushing on them. In 2016, you think about it, both sides were so upset with the status quo that on the RNC side, they rejected Jeb Bush was the anointed person by the party. They rejected him. They rejected all the party insiders, and they chose the most extreme candidate, Donald Trump. On the Democrat side, they did the exact same thing. The DNC maybe rigged the system a little bit more to make sure Bernie Sanders didn't actually win. But you came very close there to a revolt by the people that resulted in a Trump-Sanders election. Neither one is a party insider. Two very different candidates, but... And I think that that scared the establishment, and that is why they fought so hard against Trump, January sixth protest, all these other things, to make sure that everybody understands, Hey, don't fight back against the establishment. Don't do that again. And now you're in 2024, where at least the Republican base is doing it again and electing Donald Trump. And if RFK Jr. Gets a significant percentage of the electorate, that's also rebuke on the other side.

So it's not just one side that is trying to reject the anointed party chosen and individuals. It is both sides. What would have happened if they let RFK Jr. Debate and have a real contest of primary?

I'm sure it would have been a one-sided debate.

All right. He's a very interesting guy. I don't agree with every one of his positions, but he's a very interesting guy.

Yeah, I'm hoping to get him on here.

I'd recommend that. If you're going to ask me who you should have on, I like him. I think he'd be an interesting person to talk to.

Well, we've been in touch. We'll see what happens. Yeah. But I would like to see I think the way this country gets back on track is... I think it's what I've been talking about. It is the people quit being led around by the nose, look into what your party and your candidate is actually saying, Stop the mental gymnastics. The mental gymnastics going on. There's some flexible minds out there. I'll put it that way. And to stand up for what you believe in and not just pay it lip service, because that's what I feel this country has turned into is a lot of lip service. And some of this stuff isn't even... Just go. Just do what you say you're going to do and follow through with it. And a enough of the lip service, enough of the outrage. We've got plenty of that. Just stand up for what you believe in and do what you say you're going to do. I think that You hear everybody say, We need to hold these politicians accountable. We're going to have a hell of a hard time holding any politician accountable if we can't even hold ourselves accountable.

One thing that I've noticed, depending on the media outlet, they're shifting a little bit. I appear on all of them, and I found that depending on which outlet I'm on, I can have the exact same interview about the exact same topic on the same day on two or three different networks. They're all very different. And a lot of it comes to the response that I get after. Every time I go on MSNBC, I know I'll get a bunch of calls and emails and tweets and everything talking about how I need to be murdered and disbarred and everything because I dare to question whether Trump should go to jail, things like that. On the Fox news side, I find that often people are also too willing to defend everything that he's done. And broadly, I have, and I know that not everybody's going to agree with this, but I've personally found The most intelligent conversations right now are being held on CNN because they are bringing in more differing points of Still very much of a left-leaning, particularly from their hosts, but they have more intelligent guests that don't follow what the viewers necessarily want to hear, and they are having more intelligent conversations there.

And I think that the more of that that there is, the better things will be, because the more that we challenge people people, and a lot of this maybe goes back to college campuses, too. We want to challenge people by having them hear things that they don't agree with, but then argue it. Okay? I would love to talk with some of these people who are so angry at me because, Oh, how dare you say that the Trump shouldn't go to jail? Okay, Set aside your anger. Let's have a conversation. Why? And I think that on college campuses, that's really where this thing starts, is that present people with points of view that they don't agree with and force them to respond, not with insults, not with protests, not with screaming, not with safe spaces. Force them to respond with logic and argument. And if we could teach our young people to think and be able to defend their position, Some of their positions may be valid, some of their positions may change. I've done that in legal cases where I've started by defending a certain position. Then as facts change, I realize the strategy needs to change because maybe my original argument is no longer valid.

Based on the changing circumstance, maybe I need to adjust. If we teach people to defend their positions, logically, as opposed to a tweet that says, anybody who says this, should go to hell. Don't respond with anger, respond with logic. Maybe it'll change your position. Maybe it'll change my position.

It's an interesting point. It made me think of, I think another way this starts to change is by leaving out the blame game. Just quit pointing the fingers. I've noticed that if you can have a conversation, I don't like it when I hear the left, the left, the right, the right, the Democrats, the Democrats, the Republicans, the Conservatives, the Liberals. If you can leave those adjectives out of the conversation, it forces people to think about the position that you're taking. Because people are so conditioned now to be told what to think, be told what their stance is, what their beliefs are, what their values are by immediately media outlet, a social media figure, a public figure, an influencer, whatever you want to call them. They're so used to that that it's like people become programmed for that. But if you have a conversation like this, where I would say this is a very balanced conversation, and people can't peg, whether in terms of Republican or a Democrat, or Sean's a liberal or a conservative. I think if you can leave the adjectives out, it forces people to think about what their beliefs are rather than what side is this guy on?

Correct. Okay, he's on my side. I agree with everything he says.

I'll give you a great example of that, because that's such a great point. Once you pull the labels out, you'll realize that a lot of the labels are misplaced. And if How do you all of a sudden take what would be considered classical conservative values of individual rights? A lot of people are going to say yes. You should be able to live your life without interference with the government, right? Yes. You You apply it to certain liberal priorities. And by taking the labels out and just saying, do you believe in individual freedom? And if that's what you believe in, then isn't gay rights and gun rights the same? And isn't legalized cannabis and all of these things. Don't they then become on the same side? One of my favorite songs, Scooter Brown Band. He wrote a song. It wasn't very popular, but I loved it, called Live Free. And when you listen to that song, he basically lays this exact thing out. I don't care who your lover is or what you like to smoke. If you don't like guns, don't have one, but don't take mine away. And can we just agree to disagree and live free?

So When you take the labels off, you realize that the parties have staked out positions on certain things that maybe you do agree with, maybe you don't. Do you believe that people should be coming to this country? That we need immigrants, that immigrants are important? Do you believe that we should have less convicted murderers crossing the border, less terrorists crossing the borders? Well, then don't we all agree that we should have a door? And I think when you pull the labels out, you're going to find that people agree on a whole lot more than they disagree on because the labels are gone.

Well, hopefully we start seeing more of that.

We shall see.

Well, Tim, I think that's the perfect way to end this. And so, once again, as always, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you here. And thank you for coming. And I'm sure we'll see you again.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

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