Kash Patel: Curbing the Deep State and the Defense Industrial Complex

In this deep dive, Mr. Patel explains his realizations about “the deep state,” how it functions, and possible strategies to deal with it.

“The Defense–Industrial Complex, as President Eisenhower warned us 60 years ago, is the biggest behemoth in and around the swamp. I think it’s worse than every lobbyist group combined,” Mr. Patel said.

Jan Jekielek: Kash Patel, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Kash Patel: This is awesome and I’m so thrilled to be back. I’m reminded of our fun times on Kash’s Corner, so I’m looking forward to this.

Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. We’re going to talk about your new book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy. First, I want to get into what’s happening in Israel right now. Israel has declared war. Essentially, they were invaded by sea, by air, by land, and there were towns occupied by Hamas.

Mr. Patel: From a military standpoint, the planning, preparation, and operational preparation of the environment for an attack like this isn’t a one-off. It’s not a splinter group saying, “We’re going to fire a couple of rockets from this location and do some damage and then we’ll get some headlines.” This was an air, land, and sea invasion through various vectors originating from Hamas and Hamas-funded groups as a coordinated strike plan into Israeli territories. That doesn’t happen in a week. That is a lot of planning, but more importantly, that takes a ton of money.

Hamas is a Foreign Terrorist Organization [FTO] under United States law. What does that mean? They’re fully sanctioned, which means they can’t bank with U.S. companies, they can’t do business with U.S. allies, and their access to money is sharply cut off throughout the rest of the world. We do the same thing with Iran, because the Iranian Quds Force and the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are all FTOs. A lot of other countries have sought the same recognition of Hamas. Where do they get their money? You’re not talking a million dollars, you’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars to mobilize this kind of effort.

Mr. Jekielek: You were very critical of this recent decision to release $6 billion back to Iran.

Mr. Patel: It was probably personal, because I was involved in hostage affairs for President Trump. I always lead with this—bringing home Americans is a great thing. It is good every time you bring one home who has been detained or held unlawfully overseas, especially by America’s enemies or terrorist organizations. But you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. There are more hostages out there, and there are going to be more hostages in the future. You have to ask, “Did we harm America’s ability to get those folks back, just for a headline? Did we harm future hostage-taking matters by going to our number one enemy on planet earth?”

In terms of economics, we talk about Russia and China, but when we talk about sheer terrorism, it’s Iran. Like Hamas, Iran is cut off from the world funding line. They are literally funded by flying in pallets of cash to continue to operate their economy and keep their currency afloat. What happened here that I thoroughly disagreed with is that the Biden administration gave Iran $6 billion, and we got some hostages back.

Then the Biden administration lied to the world. They said, “We are going to dictate how that money is spent, and we’ve told them it’s going to be on humanitarian affairs.” Don’t listen to me countering that headline. The day after the money transfer, the president of Iran, who works for the Ayatollah, said, “Iran will spend this money however we please.”

Speaker 3: What is your expectation of its use? We’re told that it’s for humanitarian purposes, food, and medicine. Do you believe you have the right to use that money in any way that you see fit?

Speaker 4: This money belongs to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and naturally, we will decide, the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide to spend it wherever we need it.

Speaker 3: So if I hear you clearly that it will be used for more than humanitarian purposes in your view.

Speaker 4: Humanitarian means whatever the Iranian people need. So this money will be budgeted for those needs, and the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government.

Mr. Patel: They’re right. There’s no mechanism for the United States to control this. This $6 billion specifically came from Korean banking institutions. It was frozen for a long, long, time under all these sanctions against Iran. They released that money to the Middle East, but the Middle East is not going to be the referee.

They’re not going to say, “Okay. Here’s $10 million for the food bank program. Here’s $50 million for the homeless.” Is the U. S. going to police the use of that money in Iran where we’re not allowed, where we have no access to the intelligence infrastructure, banking infrastructure, or SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications] system?

Of course, they are going to spend the money as they see fit. It’s not a coincidence that a month ago, $6 billion went to Iran, and now their number one ally against the United States of America, Hamas, is doing a coordinated strike on America’s number one ally, Israel. I talk about it in the book. There are no coincidences in government. At this level, there definitely are not, and I’ll always stick by that.

Mr. Jekielek: You did mention the declaration of war by the Israeli defense minister. Why does that change the equation in your mind?

Mr. Patel: As you know in America, it takes an act of Congress to declare war. The president can’t go out and declare war. It’s not exactly the same in Israel. There, the authority that arises when you declare war gives the premier vastly expanded executive authority to conduct that war. That’s his job.

It’s just like it would be here. If America formally declared war, the authority given to the commander in chief is massive. The options he has become exponential, not just with money, but also with equipment, with manpower, and how we operate with our allies.

Israel is saying, “We’re at war.” They’re probably going to look West next and say, “Europe, are you with us? America, are you with us? If so, how are you with us?” This is probably going to be the most difficult national security issue the Biden administration has dealt with to date. Of course, they will need to say, “We support Israel.” The Israelis have a large hangover from how the previous Trump administration treated them. We had a very public, very global partnership with Israel.

Let’s not forget the Middle Eastern peace accords. Those have been completely lit on fire by this one strike, this one act of war alone. The Iranians and Hamas are already talking to the Saudis and saying, “What are you going to do?” Our goal was to continue full-on Saudi, Israeli, Middle Eastern peace negotiations, which were still developing. That’s over now, at least for as long as this war goes on.

We will be talking about this for a long time, with the amount of moving pieces that are now on the board, and have yet to even get onto the board. This is going to be for months and months and months in my opinion. I don’t see a quick resolution unless one side decides to unilaterally surrender.

Mr. Jekielek: Everything is currently developing as we speak. I’ve heard that Iran might be very close to having a nuclear bomb. Have you been following that?

Mr. Patel: That’s a great point. The police officers for the nuclear arsenal in Iran are the UN-sanctioned cops. They are allowed into Tehran and around the country to their various nuclear sites. Iran is publicly saying, “We’re only making fissile material, which is nuclear, weapons-grade material, in order to power our country. I’ve always thought that was a total pretext sham, but let’s put that aside.

Americans weren’t allowed in there, so we relied on the UN inspectors to go in and check what’s the percentage, what’s the weapons-grade, how far along they are, what their reactors are, if they are cooling, and all these indicators of how much stuff is being made and where. They tell Iran, “If you’re doing it for energy, you need this much. If you’re doing it for bombs, you need this much.” Iran kicked all the inspectors out of the country the day after the $6 billion and the hostage exchange occurred.

We were not getting the full story when we had the UN inspectors in the country, and now we have nobody. It’s going to be almost impossible for us to figure out how far along they have come. I’ve been away from the intelligence on this for a while since I’ve been out of government, but I’ve always thought this was their plan.

I’ve always believed they were inching closer to making that material necessary for weapons, and that is very scary. It’s an issue that doesn’t get talked about a lot, but maybe it will be now. This administration, by permitting the funding of this proxy war by Hamas into Israel, also just gave Iran a huge cash injection for their nuclear program.

This is Iran, and we know they lie to the world. They do it all the time. Even if they stand up and say, “No, it’s only for energy,” we have no way of knowing that, because we don’t have anyone in there anymore.

Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts on this? Then let’s dive into the book.

Mr. Patel: We talked about who Israel is going to look for in terms of public allies. Who is Hamas going to get? What are the Middle East countries going to do? What are the signatories to the Abraham Accords going to do? What is Turkey going to do? We know what Iran is going to do. Iran is going to go around and try to galvanize a group of countries to back Iran and to back Hamas because of their joint “hatred” for Israel or actions taken by the Israeli government,

What is Jordan going to do? There are massive implications for Egypt. We don’t have time to get into all the things involved. Remember how the Muslim Brotherhood caused the fall of the presidency in Egypt? Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization. What are we doing with all that? The international implications are almost never ending.