Russia’s “Secret” Payments to Right Wing Influencers with Pete Strzok
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Hey everyone, it's me, Reed Galen. As you may have noticed, I don't host the Lincoln Project podcast anymore, but I'm so excited to share with you my brand new show, The Homefront.

On the home front, you'll get the same incisive discourse about the pro-democracy movement from the smartest, most driven people in the fight today. If you're listening to this episode on the Lincoln Project podcast channel, I invite you to subscribe to the home front on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. I want to say thank you to all of you in the pro-democracy movement, and I look forward to continuing our American journey together. And now, the home front.

Welcome to the Homefront. I'm your host, Reid Galen. Today, I'm joined by Pete Strzok, former Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI. While at the Bureau, he led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and briefly worked on Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation into any links or coordination between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Russian government.

Since his time at the Bureau, he's now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, the Walsh School of Foreign Service, a New York Times bestselling author for his book Compromised, and his co-host of the podcast Clean Up on Aisle 45. I like that, Pete. Today, he's coming to us from Washington, D.C. Pete, welcome back.

Hey, Reid, thanks very much. Okay, so let's dive right into your background in particular, Pete. So this last week or so, the Department of Justice released an affidavit by an FBI agent outlining how Russia, the Kremlin, was basically funneling and funding right-wing, you

you know, talking heads such as Tim pool, Benny Johnson and others through a shell company. They set up a tenant media. I believe they called it. And these guys, Pete, we're getting paid a hundred thousand dollars a week for

to parrot Russian talking points. And there's one in particular of this guy, Tim Pool, who has this weird beanie fetish because he's bald. And Tim, if you're listening, and I'm sure you are, just let it go, man. Like everybody knows you're bald. You don't wear a hat like that because you don't need it. But Pete, take us through your experience with Russian misinformation, disinformation, meddling operations. This is a, you know,

A hundred grand a week is a lot of damn money. Right. So take us through first how you see this stuff happening. And then in your experience with the bureau, if you've seen something similar to this, you know, it felt like DOJ was going out of its way to call these people unwitting victims. But maybe I'm out of grace, but it doesn't seem like you really could be.

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, look, starting at a very high level, at a strategic perspective, this is what we saw and what DOJ alleges in both. There was an indictment, which had a series of facts, and there was also a search warrant affidavit for a series of websites which were taken down, both of which have different aspects to them, but at a very high level.

What Russia is doing now is exactly what they did in 2020 and 2016 and 1980 and 1960. And it is broadly trying to advance narratives that are friendly to Russia through, you know, illicit channels where they're not necessarily them. What's changed, you know, back in the 60s and 70s, they might spend an extraordinary amount of time

trying to plant a story in India, an Indian newspaper that would get picked up more broadly and then picked up beyond that around the world.

And then what we saw in 2016 with the advent of social media, Russia's spending a tremendous amount of money to create fake personas, right? They were going out and creating accounts on Facebook and Twitter trying to appear to be Black Lives Matter advocates or, you know, Second Amendment advocates or pro or anti-abortion advocates. But what you're seeing in this most recent iteration is they're not

creating personas anymore. They are finding existing influencers. You know, between Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, they have between, I think, you know, on YouTube and the indictment, while it doesn't name them, it lists the number of subscribers they have. And we're talking one and a half, two million subscribers.

So they don't have to create anything. They're finding people. And I agree. And so that's the first big strategic point. The second point is, you know, you've done podcasts. I've done podcasts. There's nobody out there reasonably getting $100,000 a weekly episode for a couple hours of work. I mean, that's extraordinarily high money. Now, I don't know what the likes of Joe Rogan or Rachel Maddow make, but for somebody like Tim Pool or Benny Johnson, to have some cutout,

In the form of this, I think, you know, Canadian company, you know, routing it through a company in Tennessee, it may give a little bit of a fig leaf and it may make it very hard to charge somebody saying you should have known this was coming from the Russians.

But the reality is, you know, they have been around the block long enough to know that suddenly, hey, somebody paying me an extraordinary amount of money to go after the deep state, to go after the enemies of Trump, to go forward and talk about, you know, how Ukraine is our enemy and these very pro-Kremlin narratives. Perhaps there ought to be a little bit of due diligence. And so to call them useful idiots...

You know, are they idiots or not? You know, arguably, I think you could you could argue that both of them are. But look, the reality is Tim Pool had Donald Trump on his podcast in May or June of this year and got him. They were talking about whether or not the war in Ukraine would lead to World War Three. He got Donald Trump to commit to taking a serious look at pardoning Julian Assange. So to the extent, you know, somebody is saying, oh, well, they had these preexisting ideas.

You know, another data point in the indictment lays out that one of the Russian propaganda said, hey, when there was a mall outside of Moscow that was attacked by ISIS, by radical Islamic terrorists. And what Russia tried to do for a little bit was to say, oh, this was actually caused by Ukrainians, that Ukraine was behind this attack on the mall. And the indictment lays out saying, hey, we want to push this narrative.

And they reached out and they said, oh, influencer number whatever would be happy to talk about it. And lo and behold, I think it was Tim Pool. What does he do? It was either Tim Pool or Benny Johnson. They go out and they have a whole episode talking about whether or not Ukraine was behind the mall attack. So to sit there for them to say, oh, we're victims, we were duped.

Look, I don't buy it. It is odd to me that all of these people and expand it to the Glenn Greenwalds and Matt Taibbi's and everybody else. They're so eager to find the most convoluted of conspiracies being committed by the deep state in coordination with U.S. social media companies. And at the same time, an absolute unwillingness to consider for a moment.

That Russian intelligence services and Russian government officials broadly might be using disinformation to advance their narrative. And so there's a one generously might say that's cognitive dissonance. Cynically, I think they're, I don't know if your show is, I'll try not to swear, I think they're full of crap. Right. Right. So, and wittingly, knowingly full of crap. Right. So.

I don't know. It's not new. I think I'm glad, DOJ. The other thing is I remember 2016 arguing and fighting inside the FBI with the White House and others trying to say we know Russia's doing all kinds of things on the information front, in the election interference front, say something and getting an enormous amount of pushback saying, no, we don't, from a policy, political perspective.

We don't want to do that because we don't want to be seen as interfering with the election. We don't want to be seen as trying to put our thumb on the scale for Hillary and against Trump. But think in advance, a move forward is I'm happy to see this administration, this Department of Justice,

putting that information out there, because I think it does a great service to show, you know, kind of exactly what's going on behind the scenes. So, you know, let me go back to the 1968 election, Pete, which doesn't seem to have much resonance. But with this stuff, right, the Johnson administration discovered, and I don't recall exactly what the technical means were, that the Nixon people, maybe Kissinger, were in touch with

You know, the North Vietnamese and said, like, don't come to the table until after the election. Right. Keep fighting until after the election. Johnson knew this. In fact, I think he called the publisher, maybe the Washington Star, to tell him this. And it's like this is treason. But we can't we can't say anything about it because we don't want to give up the means by which.

You know, we obtained the information, which seems a small price to pay for making sure the American people knew that, like the guy they were about to elect had, in fact, committed treason to the extent that like American soldiers and Marines were dying in Vietnam because of this. Right now you have Donald Trump who's in touch with Trump.

Benjamin Netanyahu. You know, you have an elected foreign leader in the in the form of Victor Orban coming to Mar-a-Lago. Now you have these people who are taking this foreign money. I mean, at what point to your point about 2016, like what was that was their policy decision? They didn't want to seem to be, you know, in, you know,

Involved in the election, but by definition, their omission of action was involvement right there, their lapse of, you know, their lapse of willingness to get involved was, in fact, an action that had real effects in November of twenty sixteen.

Yeah, and it's an interesting question, right? Because I was not, you know, I am not Barack Obama or Susan Rice or anybody, Dennis McDonough or anybody at the White House who is making that decision. So the question is, you know, looking at it from the outside and feeling that frustration, you know, I can see a number of potential causes of that. One was they didn't want to appear political, one. Two, they assumed like 98% of the rest of the population that Clinton's going to win and he's going to lose. So why risk this? And, you know, three, there were reasons.

were rumors that, you know, there was not necessarily the warmest of feelings between the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. And so was there a certain element of like, not only does she not really need the help, but, you know, she's on her own. I'm not going to spend any of my personal political credibility trying to help her out and tarnish my reputation. So there, you know, there could be those, there could be all kinds of other things. But I do think,

There's always a tendency. And one thing I've seen in this administration in particular, and whether that's because Bill Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, used to be secretary of state, has a long history of a diplomat, a much more willingness to use what previously I think would have been considered, no, that's classified information. We're not going to release it. But you see that in the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Right. You've seen it in the context of some things in the Middle East. And I welcome that. I mean, you know, I came from the intel side. Right.

one of the tendencies is to not only over classify things, but to say, oh, this is so sensitive. The world is going to fall if you share any of it. And the reality is, you know, the world isn't going to fall. And one of the things we're seeing through is sort of more expanded sharing is it's,

It's much more credible when you can put out detail. It's one thing if somebody, if Chris Wray goes and testifies in front of Congress or real Hanes, the director of national intelligence and says Russia's interfering people. Well, you know, of course you're going to say that you're the deep state, but if you have an indictment talking about how Tim pool and Benny Johnson are getting a hundred thousand dollars, you know, $5 million a year for 60 hours of work. I mean, that's literally what it is.

Right. And I think we should remember that $400,000 a month is $5 million a year.

And not for a 40-hour-a-week job. No. Two hours a week. Right. And, you know, maybe they do a little pre-production, a little post-recording editing, but it is not a full-time job. It isn't even a half-time job or a quarter-time job. It's $5 million a year for an hour or so podcast a week. Right. 52 hours a week.

52 hours in a year for $5 million. It's interesting that you say that too, Pete, because near as I could tell looking at you and you can see me, we're in our home studios, right? I was always amazed, and if I've said this on the show before, I'm sorry, I was always amazed looking at Tim Pool's

studio set up that was that was not at his home that was at a building somewhere it was totally tricked out it had all this stuff you know these big fancy chairs that they were all sitting in and i said you know the guy does well but not that well how does he afford all this stuff and now you see this stuff like all these dots start to connect but let me ask you this and we should just note for the record that benny johnson's main claim to fame before all of this was that he kept getting fired for plagiarism and not from like normal outlets but from like

the Daily Caller, right? Like that was his that was the thing that he was most known for was that he kept stealing other people's stuff and getting fired for it. But let's let's talk about them individually. Do they have any legal liability for this? Now, obviously, if you as a federal officer come and talk to them,

Or you as a federal officer come to serve a subpoena and they lie to you or it's clear that they have attempted to obstruct some information or have destroyed some information. There are those technicalities. I think it's called a 1001 violation. Right. But do you think and again, I'm asking you to put a hypothetical on this. Do they have any hypothetical risk maybe as foreign agents that haven't that haven't registered?

I think a lot of it goes to what they knew and what the government can prove that they knew where the money was coming from. And look, full disclosure, Benny Johnson has tweeted and talked about me at Lent that I belong in prison. So A, karma's a bitch, right? Right. Gives me no small amount of personal satisfaction to see this asshole. And Adam Kinzinger, Johnson went out to say, you know, he had some tweets saying, you know, quoting scripture saying, you know, who should I fear? And Kinzinger said maybe the FBI or something like that. So I think...

But, you know, if... But just may I interrupt? Because in very dark, macabre Russian humor, it was like, don't have tea with anybody, don't go to any buildings with more than the second floor, like all of these things. Don't stay away from the windows. Right. Right. Because all of these poor people that have taken on Russia, you know, the polonium-laced tea, or a lot of guys fall out of windows. I'm sorry, Pete. Please continue. Yeah, no. And so the question is, given what the indictment said, they were not going... They did give them...

enough description in the indictment that it appears that they were victims, right? They call them victims. They're clearly not unindicted co-conspirators, which would be what if the government thought they could prove it, what I'd expect to see. What was interesting certainly was, you know, one Tim Pool said, oh, I'm going to cooperate fully, which I

my advice and may sound odd coming from an FBI, former FBI agent is if the FBI police show up and ask to talk to you voluntarily, say, I'd love to, but I need to just check in with my attorney first. Don't, you know, it just isn't, was odd to do it. And of course, Benny Johnson was much more that way. The other interesting thing was,

All of the people who weren't named, but nevertheless in the right wing ecosphere who suddenly started squealing like stuck pigs. You had Dan Bongino essentially getting out, giving a snitches get stitches speech. We're like, you know, don't talk to anybody. If somebody calls and says their friend, be careful. And he's a former federal officer too. And he's a former, yes, he's a former, you know, but it's a former secret service. Like I don't, I think he was uniformed division, but whatever he did, but like to, to own your own sort of take to the air and say, don't talk to anybody. It could be a trap. Right.

It's like, come on, dude. What do you know? And then Harmeet Dhillon, who's one of the thousands of attorneys in the Trump ecosphere and one of the more serious attorneys, just out of the blue,

That the day I think these indictments were announced, took to Twitter and just said, hey, not for nothing, but if somebody calls, be careful what you say and get an attorney. So weird things suddenly popping up unannounced from all around these various players in the sort of social media ecosphere related to Trump. So I think what's interesting in the indictment, too, are there are a couple of folks who

Chen is one of them. I forget the name of her partner. Lauren Chen, who, again, has a history. She was writing for The Blaze, which I think is Glenn Beck's little outlet, and her husband...

are not named, but in the indictment, when I read it, I'm like, why aren't they charged? Because clearly it lays out facts indicating that they knew that the money was coming from Russia, that they had more, the government had certainly had evidence that they had reason to believe. And for them not to be listed as co-conspirators, it makes me wonder, one, are charges coming or two,

Have they already been charged under sealed indictment, approached and flipped and provided some of this information that allowed, you know, kind of the broader fact pattern to come up? But Merrick Garland said when they announced this, the investigation is ongoing. It did. I forget whether it's in the indictment or in the search warrant affidavit.

It talks about how Russia was using other platforms beyond just Tenet. So, you know, what those other platforms are. And I think it may have even said some United States based. So I don't think we've heard the end of this. And again, think about it. It lays out a $10 million funding stream for this group, for Tenet, right? If you look at Ukraine, like the modern Sukhoi, you know, fighter bomber that's being used there, costs anywhere between $40 and $50 million. Right.

So I would be hard pressed to believe that for the cost of

of one fighter bomber in Ukraine at $40, $50 million. This is $10 million. And for that is short money. I mean, it's an extraordinary amount for some knucklehead podcaster, but for Russia, that's nothing. And when you look again, earlier this summer, the Europeans did a great job of publicizing how Russians were funneling money into disinformation operations targeting members of the European EU parliament. And you cannot tell me

that there is not an equal or greater amount going to other elements within the social media ecosphere and going to Congress. I would be shocked if there were not tens of millions of dollars going to the end. You see it. Marjorie Taylor Greene saying bizarre things about Ukraine. She she couldn't find Ukraine on a map. Right. But yet she has these strong opinions that just happen to line up perfectly with

with Russian geopolitical interests. And you can expand it. It's not just her. You can expand it. And you look at all the people who are lining up against aid to Ukraine, and you can't tell me there's not, in some way, shape, or form, in my opinion, Russian money and influence going into our Congress right now. And that's why it's finding it. Remember back as a 2015 or 2016 that then-minority leader Kevin McCarthy jokingly said on tape that

that he was he was convinced that both Donald Trump and then Congressman Dana Rohrabacher from California, my old congressperson, were on the take from the Russians. There was just no possible way they weren't given how they were acting. But let me ask you this. You know, you talked about fact patterns. So as a former not only FBI agent, but also national security expert,

When you see things like you were talking about how these members of Congress have these very strong opinions about something they know little about or nothing about, and then you start to see the Harmeet Dhillons and the Dan Bonginos

Is in the context of an investigation, is somebody putting down in their notebook, we saw this, we saw this, you know, they're screenshotting or they're saving that stuff. So because, you know, so much of this stuff gets deleted and there's the way back machine. But tell us a little bit about how in an ongoing national security investigation, all of those little things that start to pop. Right. What's the effect on an investigation?

Yeah.

Rather than a subpoena, I could use a subpoena, but I could also get what's called a national security letter, which is a sort of national security equivalent of a subpoena. And I could go to Verizon or to Google and say, hey, give me all the information about, you know, what Gmail accounts you have when they were formed. What, you know, what IP address was used in the case of cell phone records. Give me all toll records, which are essentially a big listing of, you know, the date and times and, you know,

to from sort of data about a phone call, all that can be done without you, the target of the investigation, knowing about it. And so there are things that you can do in the background to,

kind of builds your body of knowledge and your understanding of what a particular allegation or fact pattern is. There are also things which are alerting, right? I mean, if I go out and I interview somebody, certainly if you're the subject of an investigation and I interview you, you're going to know that I'm interested in you. But even if I go, you know, to your neighbor or to your friend or to a work

colleague, I might be, I might try and ask them, Hey, look, I'd appreciate it if you don't say anything to read that I was talking, asking about him. But at the end of the day, I can't make somebody do that. And so there are things that investigators know that if they do it, it's going to be very publicly visible to the person or people who are being investigated. And certainly if you indict somebody, if you get a search warrant,

and publicize that, that's going to have a huge alerting impact. So, you know, on the one hand, it's bad because it might cause people to stop talking, to destroy things. But on the other hand, sometimes that's good because if you have a lot of sort of like lines out in the water and people do start talking to each other or do like suddenly, you know, leave their house at 9 p.m. and head to the dump or the local trash can with a bunch of like, you know, five trash bags and dump it there, if you know to look for that,

You can potentially get good things because the other thing that does is demonstrates indicia of guilt. Right. Why is it that Dan Bongino feels compelled to say, don't talk to anybody, stop talking? Why are you saying that? Right. It's just not some random public service announcement. Something came to your attention that you're worried about, that you're aware of other things out there that would be potentially criminally incriminating.

you know, inculpatory. Again, my opinion, I don't know anything any more than anybody else. So investigators kind of know all that and think through all that. And before you go and do something that is alerting,

You hope to get everything that you can sort of in place or already done. Sometimes you do things to tickle the wire, to make noise, to see how people respond. And sometimes your hand gets forced, right? It's like, look, we have to do something now. We're almost two months away from the election. We need to say this now. We can't wait any longer. So

It may not be perfectly where you want it, but we got to move now. So let's do it. And the interesting thing is, too, when you look, we're now under DOJ traditionally, not by law, but has a traditional 60-day cool-off period of not doing anything which might impact an election. And those announcements of the indictments of the search warrant were made right outside of that 60-day window. So is this...

The sort of thing that DOJ would see is implicating the presidential election? That's a good question. I don't know. And they might say, well, this is election related, but it's not something targeting Trump or somebody around his campaign or Harris or somebody around her campaign.

Well, but but I think it's important, too, to understand, though, that and this is one thing that I think too often that a lot of people, you know, in party politics, Republicans and Democrats, not I'm not talking about voters, but I'm talking about people who are elected or leaders, whatever they might be, is that too often they're still seeing this fight in the context of left versus right, Republican versus Democrat, when in fact, you know,

Tim Pool reading a statement about Ukraine being our enemy and all that other stuff, you know, is, you know, might be viewed or could be viewed or described as a comment that.

On national on a national security matter, but the truth is, it is inherently political and it is inherently, you know, pushing forward a political view that happens to align with one of the major party candidates. And if not the major party candidate, the nominee, certainly the major, you know, that the GOP's vice presidential nominee is.

Right. Who said, you know, Ukraine's not our problem. So it's not explicitly like vote for Donald Trump because Ukraine is our enemy. But anybody who has half a brain in their head understands why someone would say that and to whom it is aimed, which is not core Democratic voters, but core Republican voters who need to be reminded that, you know, anybody who's taking Ukraine side is for Ukraine.

X, Y, Z, whatever the case might be, because that's you know, I mean, the idea here, you know, I'll just tell you this, Pete, you know, the idea here that we're now, I don't know, 40 years, 30 years away from the end of the Cold War. And now one American political party is pro-Russia like is beyond me, especially because it's the party of Reagan. Let me ask you one other thing.

In the context of all of this. So now we're, as you said, we're inside 60 days and Donald Trump has just put out this statement. I read it on the last podcast, so I won't read it again, but I want to get your your opinion on it. And Abigail Tracy, who was my my co-host for that show, talked about how Trump's.

attempt to divide the country, throw sand in the gears of the election. And all this is not just him being blustery. It's also part of a broader strategy. So you and I both participated in these simulations put on by the Brennan Center earlier this year, which really looked at from a nonpartisan perspective. I think we should note that what a what another Trump president

presidency would look like the first 60, 90, 120 days. And it seems to me that a lot of the stuff that we came up with in those, uh,

simulations are pretty spot on that. These are the things that they want to do, taking on political opposition, calling out donors, right, arresting political opponents. You know, we're on that list, I assume somewhere, Pete, you're probably much higher on it than I am. But that's one of those things where, again, I don't think this is speculative. I think it's yes, this is what I'm going to do. He's telling us yet again what he plans to do.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is not should not be a surprise to anyone. And I mean, as you know, in all of the sort of iterations of those simulations, there was never and they changed based on, OK, Republican or Democratic control of the House and Senate or both or neither. Right. In no running of any of those scenarios was Trump constrained in any way, shape or form. There were no checks.

And this was before, I mean, keep in mind, all these things that we did were before the Supreme Court immunity decision, which gave extraordinary latitude for Trump to do what

We assumed it would be illegal acts. The Supreme Court has said, nope, they're perfectly fine now, which is a stunning development and nothing at all positive. But again, Trump is not there's nothing hidden here. There's nothing he's not playing five dimensional chess. He is saying what he's going to do. And when he gets into power, if he gets into power, he's going to do it.

And I think the things that concern me the most are, one, he's not backing down. I mean, they tried for a moment to say, oh, we don't know. I don't know anything about Project 2025. And then when everybody pointed out, well, that's funny because, you know, 30, 40 plus people who have been involved in it have came out of your administration and presumably would be going back into your administration. And oh, by the way, all of the sort of policies laid out in Project 2025 are the things you're saying to this day on the campaign trail. Right.

Right. And there's the guy there's the guy on video in the hotel suite saying, we know he's got to do this publicly. But once we get in office, we'll be fine.

Right. Yes. And by the way, all the things that we didn't put down in emails or anything else because we specifically wanted to shield them from disclosure and a FOIA. So there are additional plans in much more detail that were not put to paper or certainly were not distributed because they wanted to keep them hidden. So presumably keep them hidden because they're so inflammatory and so outrageous that they're going to just keep those under wraps until January 21st when Trump's back in the Oval Office. But

I do worry all of the things that, you know, everything from, you know, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, who's going to decide who the illegals are, how are they going to decide that? How are they going to screen those people? I worry about, you know, Trump's attempts to weaponize the, you know, the federal people carrying guns, whether that's the FBI or DHS or border patrol. I also worry that to the extent most like FBI agents I know would not go along with

With illegal orders, most members of the military would not go along with illegal orders that if Trump comes in and pardons all these January 6 folks and says, OK, hey, I want you to go up and, you know, be part of a, you know, a militia that reports to me and you all have guns and you kind of know what I want done. And that's where these lists come in. Right. You know who the enemies are.

You know, the enemies were back in 2016. You've kept it up to date. Just go take care of it. And I'm I'm not going to officially sanction it, but I'm not going to come after you. Local law enforcement's not going to come after you. We're going to give you immunity and just go handle it. And you got his brown shirts, right? That's right. Those are the things I worry about. And he's not he's not backing away from violence in the things he is saying to this day.

And, you know, it's troubling. It's not going to get better. I don't understand why more people are not aware of it to begin with and not appalled about it. And, you know, and like the goddamn fraternal order of police just endorsed Trump. I know. Well, you know, the one thing the one thing, you know, in those simulations that I found, because there have been some discussions about what the what Trump would attempt to use the military for Pete was, to be honest with you, he doesn't need them.

Right. Like getting getting, you know, if if the people around him who I think are odious but are not idiots. Right. Like they they know better than to try and, you know, and I'm not saying not replacing leadership and generals and all that other stuff, but attempting to use the military.

And for domestic purposes, seems to create a lot more trouble for for a Donald Trump than he needs when, to your point, he's got all of these federal law enforcement officers already. And theoretically, and talking to someone I knew who had spent a lot of time, I think, in the U.S. Marshal Service, that the Marshal Service could basically deputize anybody they want to because they do it all the time.

So why why try and get, you know, the 10th Armored Brigade out of Fort Drum in upstate New York or excuse me, the 10th Armored Division out of Fort Drum, New York, when you don't need them? Right. You don't you don't need that stuff. And then let me ask you a question, because you started out on project, excuse me, on mass deportation.

Which is I asked a bunch of these questions on Twitter, you know, to your point, you know, how do you identify someone who's undocumented, someone who's got a green card, someone who's naturalized, someone who was born here, where they're from? You know, do you just throw them all on an airplane? I don't have a real sense of confidence, Pete, that they're going to determine, OK, these people are Venezuelan. These people are Guatemalan. These people are Bolivian. These people are Mexican. I just I'm worried that they would just throw them all on an airplane and fly them to, you know.

Columbia and say, okay, they're your problem now. Right. And the Colombians are going to be like, what are we supposed to do? We don't want them. Yeah. And that's the, you know, people are saying, okay, Trump, who in the press, who in what interview are going to ask Trump about specifics of how, you know, he claims he's going to do like, okay, give me, give me some details. Explain how you are going to do exactly this. And I, I think you're right that the, if they try and carry that out, it is going to be a huge, uh,

just international talk about a foreign policy problem for the United States of America. Like what do you, you know, who's going to take it? How do you get them there? But in the first instance, you know, rounding them up, are you going to create like, I can see certainly, you know, the border patrol doing some things, federal law enforcement doing some things. I can also see those entities at the end of the day being very hard to control. If you're Trump, if you're a malevolent actor in the Trump administration, what would be very easy to do? I think again,

militias say, hey, Eric Prince, you know, you've done a lot of good stuff for, you know, contracting work overseas. We need you to build, you know, deportation centers and detention centers in the United States. So here's, you know, a few hundred million dollars, set up some big internment camps in the middle of Texas or Oklahoma somewhere, Nebraska, and then we'll round up all these people and we'll figure out what we're going to do. But in the meantime, you know, you all just, we want to

turnkey solution, right? Go gather all these people, put them all together, and then come back to us in 90 days with how you're going to figure out who's what. That is something you much more, you could have a much greater level of control over and to the point of like, well, somebody would go to court and we did this, this came up in the tabletop that you and I did. Somebody will go to court and say, we're going to get an injunction to prevent you from doing that. Well,

Who, at the end of the day, who enforces court orders? Judges don't have guns and handcuffs. They use the marshal service to do that. Who does the marshal service report to? The marshal service reports to the president of the United States. So some judge, some court can say, I'm holding you in contempt. I've got a warrant for your arrest. I've got an injunction. Who cares if you're Trump? Right. Great. That's a pretty piece of paper. Go f*** yourself.

Yeah. And I'm going to go ahead and do this anyway. Well, and I think that's the other part, too, is that, you know, it might start with undocumented immigrants, but it doesn't stop there because pretty soon you can use this same group of people to your point, either in targeted fashion or random fashion to round up whoever you feel like.

And then it's, you know, or it's an IRS audit. Right. Or or suddenly now, you know, the you know, we talk about, you know, donors, as Trump mentioned. Well, you know, they don't collect 501. They don't collect information on donors to 501 C for organizations anymore. But they could certainly subpoena their bank accounts and see where the wires came from. Right. And my guess is, is that the banks are going to give it to them.

Because they don't want trouble because they're regulated entities, right? That's a regulated industry. They don't want the trouble either. And so that was the other part I thought that was concerning was,

And I saw, you know, there's the show Hard Knocks, you know, about the preseason in the NFL. And Nick Saban went to visit the Chicago Bears, who were the the subject this this year. And he said, you know, most people are average. Most people are looking to stay out of trouble. Most people are looking to not stick their necks out. And and I don't fault anybody for that, Pete. But that's also the downfall of.

when a democracy falls at the ballot box is that you want to believe that everybody's going to take to the streets and go to the barricades. But the truth is, whether or not it's a civil servant who's 24 months, 24 years and six months in or somebody who's just trying to get through the day and get their kids off to school, they're like, do I really need the trouble?

And the answer for most people, again, I don't fault them for this because it's human nature, is the answer is going to be no, I don't want the trouble. If you need me to do something so I can work six more months and make my pension and I can afford to send my kids to college and pay off my house and go on vacation with my wife, that's the normal reaction. The abnormal reaction is to say, no, sir, I will not do this and I'm out of here.

Right. And I think that the trick, and again, it's where the particularly malevolent geniuses like Steve Bannon come in, is if you're Trump, you do not want to do something that is going to cause mass rioting and an uprising that is going to result in you getting thrown out of power because the things you've done are so egregious that people overcome that natural self-preservation instinct to keeping their head down and say, I can't tolerate this. I have to do something. Right.

If they're smart, what they will do is rather than some massive overplay of their hand, selectively make examples out of people in all these realms where you want to control. So whether it is something in terms of political opposition, whether it is somebody who within the federal government, particularly the law enforcement intelligence community, might pose a threat, whether it's somebody in the...

You know, the abortion rights arena makes selective examples of people so that it's not so egregious that the population as a whole say we have to rise up and break the bonds of tyranny. That the reaction is like, holy cow, I don't want a part of that. I can be okay if I keep my head down. Life is all right. I mean, my stocks have gone to crap. The economy is in trouble and a problem, but I'm okay. That's where you want to like.

hit the mark and not overdo it. Now, will Trump overdo it? I don't think he has any ability to control himself and, you know, surrounded by even greater mediocrity than he was the first time around. I, I, who knows, who knows what it'll look like. I just, I don't, I don't know what unbounded and unleashed looks like. And from the tabletop, what seemed to be the, for all the private entities, particularly the business side, uh,

It when the economy started going south, when profits started getting hit, that's when they felt like, OK, I can I have some room to be able to say or do something because the profit is taking a hit. And so, you know, I think that's probably true of not just business, but most folks. Well, also, I mean, it's it.

It continues to amaze me that how little history either we teach our children or ourselves and how even less we remember that these kinds of governments, these kinds of authoritarian regimes never work out well for business. Never, never work out well for the economy. They always tank the economy.

me because it becomes the whole thing becomes a Ponzi scheme, making sure the people at the top get all the money they need and all the money they want, all the power and turf and glamour and everything else they want. Everybody else is screwed. I just again, this is it's almost as regular as the sun coming up in the east, Pete. But for some reason, humans have to continue to learn lessons the hard way. OK, so.

Before I let you go, just what's one other thing that you think that folks that are listening to this, the people in the pro-democracy movement, people that are going to share our conversation with others, what's one thing you think that needs to be looked at a little bit harder that's not? It's a great question. I think people now need to start building relationships and networks that you have people and

that you've talked about and thought about so that if Trump wins come November, that you're not suddenly struggling. What are we going to do? What is this going to look like? So, you know, in terms of like red teaming it or worst casing it, you know, think about, think about if things go horribly wrong and I, you know, a lot of it for a lot of us, it's going to be a very sort of like individual decision, but there's time now to sort of think about like, okay, what does the worst case look like? And what does that mean personally for me? And what things should I be doing now? Um,

Putting on, you know, and that's kind of my civics hat, putting on my national security hat, I'm very worried that we are appropriately focused on the Russian disinformation space.

But I don't think we're focused enough on the actual physical access, the cyber hacking, the intrusions that Russia could do to voting systems. And, you know, we know in 2016 they probed all 50 states voting infrastructure. We know they got into multiple states systems. Florida, the federal government didn't say who. Florida raised their hand and said we were one of them. I'm really worried that Russia has the capability and certainly the intent to

To do the same. And if they're able to get into voting machines and databases and swing states and change or delete data and, you know, coverage on Election Day of a swing county in the state of Pennsylvania or several of them and people saying I showed up and I'm not registered and that's being broadcast and legitimate, not not disinformation, but, you know, some real voter, some nonpartisan just saying I can't vote.

And that happening again and again and again could take a very close and problematic election and really throw it into chaos. And so I hope we're looking at malign influence outside of the context of disinformation. And I think my worry is we didn't really see that much of it in 2020, nor in the midterms in 2022. And so the tendency is like, well…

You know, the primary threat comes, again, in the information space. And I'm not certain that's entirely correct. Well, you know, the good news, and this is why when, you know, we were working in 2022, we said, OK, what are the races most important?

You know, who which have the most effect on American democracy. And that's why we focused on the governor's races and secretary's state races in those key electoral college states, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Because even if the secretary of state wasn't elected in a place like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, the governor appointed that person. And now we have pro-democracy people, the likes of Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, who I'm sure, you know, and they've suffered personally for this, too. I know that Secretary Benson has been doxed at least once.

that, you know, they are working hard on that. And I think also it's important to remind everybody that so much of this stuff that happens at the county level and at the precinct level, Pete, right. Is of, I don't want to call it mom and pop because that's an insult to the people that are doing it, but it is a, it is a re it is not a full-time job for a lot of these folks, right? They are volunteers. They come because they believe it's their civic duty. And so, you know, and in places like Texas, right.

Right. A poll worker has been severely constrained in the actions they're able to take in the face of an election observer who they have basically taken the strictures off of and said, you can basically do whatever you want. And a poll worker can't tell, you know. And so I think you're I think you're absolutely right. But that's also one reason why, again, you know, get down, vote, run.

organize, do everything you can so that it's such an electoral blowout on November 5th, right? That, you know, as I say, you know, when you're going against a team that's got the refs on their side, right, Pete, you got to win by enough that they can't steal it from you. So before I let you go, Pete, tell everybody where they can find you online and where we can find your work.

Yeah, so work-wise, you can tune in to the Clean Up on Off 45 podcast wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, but elsewhere. Online, I am at Pete Strzok, whether that's on Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram, that's my handle across all those platforms. Although I've been trying to take a step back from social media, we'll see if I remain successful at that, particularly as we get closer and closer to the election. But that's where I'm at.

I know it's like Al Pacino in The Godfather Part Three. Every time I get out, they pull me back in. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen USA on Substack at the home front. And for those of you listening on the Lincoln Project podcast feed, thank you so much. Please go on over to the home front.

Follow us. Listen. Rate five stars. Thank you so much for everything you're doing. And join the union dot us. Everybody go to join the union dot us. Get involved in American democracy. It doesn't matter where you live. We've got 2000 volunteer opportunities. You can get involved today. Pete Strzok, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. And everybody else. We'll see you next time.