Do you think or do you know if the intelligence community told President George W. Bush that invading and occupying Iraq and invading and occupying Afghanistan would be fruitful? Or do you think they just confirmed his pre existing prejudices, to use one of your favorite phrases about the wisdom of these two investigations, invasions, which he then perpetrated for his own domestic political purposes? Yeah, the people that we have, a top intelligence officer, but that person is not an intelligence trained professional.

In most cases, it hasn’t been for decades. It is a politician. It is a political appointee. So it’s someone who understands what is required politically, and that person receives and presumably processes in his own mind, his or her own mind, the intelligence that has already been filtered out by a whole bunch of pressure from a whole bunch of other layers of political filters. And then that person speaks to the president or the decision maker, and it’s very watered down by that point.

And it’s understood. And this was kind of the crux of my talk. I mean, the intelligence community has a customer. That customer is not the American people. That customer is whoever the politicians are. And of course, as we saw with the Trump administration, it’s really the deep state, the existing bureaucracy, the folks that are there all the time and never leave, and really can shape any presidency as they see fit, whether by cooperating or opposing, as we just got a demonstration from 2016 to 2020 how they can control a president.

And certainly they’re doing something now because we know Biden’s not in charge. He can’t even handle his own dogs. He is not doing it. But some organization is doing it, and that organization is political. .