Tulsi Gabbard on Russiagate Hoax Evidence and How She’s Reforming Politicized Intelligence Agencies

From Democratic congresswoman to staunch Trump supporter, both loved and heavily criticized for her independent thinking. She won't be bought. She won't be bullied. The director of national intelligence, Chelsea Gabbard.

Aloha. It's just BS. I've always been a very fiercely independent-minded person. I know exactly what I need to do here and how deep the rot is within the intelligence community. That has to be rooted out.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tulsi Gabbard.

Hello. Nice to see you, Tulsi. Thanks for coming.

Thank you for being here. Thank you. Aloha, everybody.

Aloha. We were all clamoring to frame this, and then Sacks said, “I really just need to do the kickoff,” because he really wanted to tee this up. So I’m going to cede my responsibility in introducing you because everybody knows who you are, but David—there’s just too much red meat. David’s been frothing.

Tulsi doesn’t need a big introduction, but everyone knows she’s the director of national intelligence. In the words of President Trump, she’s the hottest member of the administration. I think he means it in the sense of having released the biggest news story of the year, and specifically the files you declassified and released—a series of files related to the whole Russiagate hoax. Many of the documents are just stunning. I’ll let you speak to it, but I think there are still maybe a few holdouts out there in the world—not that many—who still don’t—

Who are you looking at right now?

Who are you talking about in particular? There are people who don’t seem to understand what this Russiagate hoax was about. Can you just—maybe this is the place to start, and then we can drill into some of the details—but at a very high level, what exactly happened? For years, we saw all these accusations that somehow Trump was an agent of Putin, of Russia. Was that all just made up, and who made it up? How did that happen?

Setting the baseline of why people should care about this really speaks to the power of the intelligence community and the power of so-called intelligence. As these headlines were turning out about “Trump is a Putin puppet” or “He is colluding with Putin in order to get elected,” going back to the 2016 election, if you’re just watching the headlines from home, you’ve got to believe that there’s some credibility here, that there’s some intelligence actually driving this. The significance of the documents that we uncovered, declassified, and released is that they show how intelligence and information can be intentionally manipulated so that it shows something that is not reflective of the truth at all, and how it can be done in a deeply impactful way by politicizing it.

What we essentially saw throughout President Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and throughout his 4 years in office was that the documents we uncovered served as the foundation for the weapon that was used to undermine his presidency, to try to undermine the outcome of that 2016 election, and really usurp the will and the voices of the people who elected Donald Trump. I’ll try to run through this timeline in the toplines.

Just to paint the picture, as you asked, David, of where and how this started: When we go back to that 2016 campaign, President Trump went through what was a very crowded primary at the time. Almost no one thought that he could win. He became the Republican nominee, going up against Hillary Clinton. During that time, Hillary Clinton seeded the allegation that there was some collusion happening between Trump and Putin and Russia—that Putin was somehow trying to get Trump elected. What we saw then play out was now known as—

What does it mean that she seeded it? How did she—

There were a lot of different ways that occurred. If you go and look at some of the documents that the FBI declassified and that Durham uncovered, now known as the Durham Annex, there were a lot of different ways that it happened. But we saw early signs of the weaponization of this when the FBI, under Comey, basically got illegal warrants through the FISA court to illegally surveil Americans—Carter Page in Crossfire Hurricane and others around President Trump and his campaign at that time.

In November 2016, President Trump shocked the world and won the election. The intelligence community’s assessments, and all the documents we’ve made public throughout this period during the campaign leading up to the general election, show that the intelligence community almost uniformly assessed that Putin did not have either the intent or the capability to hack the outcome of the U.S. election. There were different assessments that said this, but this trend was there.

President Trump won the election. Members of the intelligence community then went and briefed members of Congress post-election, and their briefing was consistent with the intelligence reports that basically said there was no evidence that—

Nothing to see.

—that Russia or Putin had any kind of impact on the outcome of the U.S. election.

Fast-forward to December 8th. One of the organizations, one of the elements under my oversight in the intelligence community, creates a product for the president every day called the President’s Daily Brief. The number of people within the cabinet who are able to access this brief is pretty small. This is built for the president, and it’s a product of contributions from across the intelligence community.

The December 8th President’s Daily Brief was consistent with all of the other assessments, essentially saying there was no interference in the outcome of the election by Russia. That brief was pulled. It was never published. It was pulled back from publishing hours before it would have hit then-President Obama’s desk.

The next day, December 9th, the Obama administration called a National Security Council meeting. All the senior leaders within the Obama administration were there, and the topic of discussion was Russia. The tasking that came from that meeting, delivered to then-Obama DNI James Clapper—we have the emails that we declassified around this—said this was a POTUS tasking on Russia meddling with the election.

What you’ll see in those documents was not President Obama asking, “Look into the intelligence and see if Russia meddled in the election.” It was, “Provide me with an assessment saying how Russia meddled in the election.” John Brennan, James Clapper, Comey, and the FBI all got their people together to start building this document that was an intelligence community assessment—

Just to paint the picture, as you asked, David, where and how did this start—when we go back to that 2016 campaign, President Trump went through what was a very crowded primary at the time. Almost no one thought that he could win. He became the Republican nominee, going up against Hillary Clinton. During that time, Hillary Clinton seeded the allegation that there was some collusion happening between Trump and Putin and Russia, that Putin was somehow trying to get Trump elected. What we saw then play out was now known as—

What does it mean that she seeded it? How did she—

There were a lot of different ways that occurred. If you go and look at some of the documents that the FBI declassified and that Durham uncovered, now known as the Durham Annex, there were a lot of different ways that it happened. But we saw early signs of the weaponization of this when the FBI, under Comey, basically got illegal warrants through the FISA court to illegally surveil Americans—Carter Page in Crossfire Hurricane and others around President Trump and his campaign at that time.

In November 2016, President Trump shocked the world and won the election. The intelligence community’s assessments, and all the documents we’ve made public throughout this period during the campaign leading up to the general election, show that the intelligence community almost uniformly assessed that Putin did not have either the intent or the capability to hack the outcome of the U.S. election. There were different assessments that said this, but this trend was there.

President Trump won the election. Members of the intelligence community then went and briefed members of Congress post-election, and their briefing was consistent with the intelligence reports that basically said there was no evidence that—

Nothing to see.

—that Russia or Putin had any kind of impact on the outcome of the U.S. election.

Fast-forward to December 8th. One of the organizations, one of the elements under my oversight in the intelligence community, creates a product for the president every day called the President’s Daily Brief. The number of people within the cabinet who are able to access this brief is pretty small. This is built for the president, and it’s a product of contributions from across the intelligence community.

The December 8th President’s Daily Brief was consistent with all of the other assessments, essentially saying there was no interference in the outcome of the election by Russia. That brief was pulled. It was never published. It was pulled back from publishing hours before it would have hit then-President Obama’s desk.

The next day, December 9th, the Obama administration called a National Security Council meeting. All the senior leaders within the Obama administration were there, and the topic of discussion was Russia. The tasking that came from that meeting, delivered to then-Obama DNI James Clapper—we have the emails that we declassified around this—said this was a POTUS tasking on Russia meddling with the election.

What you’ll see in those documents was not President Obama asking, “Look into the intelligence and see if Russia meddled in the election.” It was, “Provide me with an assessment saying how Russia meddled in the election.” John Brennan, James Clapper, Comey, and the FBI all got their people together to start building this document that was an intelligence community assessment—

And the briefing document you mentioned—the President’s Daily Brief—you can see that there was a draft written that then got pulled back—

Yes.

—and that still sits somewhere. So we know that’s what was written, and someone said, “Pull that back. We don’t want to have evidence of this going into the—”

Oh, that was “pull it back.”

Yes.

Oh, so they’re also stupid.

Would you like to apologize?

No, no, no. I mean—

No. There are a few more pieces here.

No, no, no. I mean, I’ll have the receipts. We’ll go to those in a moment.

Okay. This January 2017 assessment was published on January 6th. It was very quickly leaked to different members of the media—the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others. Then it was briefed to Congress.

The key thing here is that the most classified and compartmentalized pieces of intelligence they used as the basis for this total 180 intelligence assessment, which basically contradicted what the intelligence community had assessed leading up to the election, were hidden even from the vast majority of members of Congress. Based on intelligence community tradecraft standards, they were deemed, even at the time, to be unacceptable.

We had senior officials in the CIA who were tasked to work on this objecting to then-CIA Director John Brennan using these as sources because they were not credible. One of them was the Steele dossier, this manufactured political document that was filled with falsehoods.

So then you see, after that, this assessment was again leaked to the media and briefed to Congress. This was the document that led to everything that happened during the 4 years President Trump was in office. What we declassified and released provided further reinforcement of how politicized this document was.

It showed a few things. For example, in those sources that were hidden, Putin didn’t believe Trump would win the election in 2016. He thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. He thought, “Hey, we know who she is. We know how she operates.”

We can try to figure out a way to deal with a Hillary Clinton presidency. Russia and Putin claimed that they had extremely derogatory information about Hillary Clinton—her health, her state of mind, allegedly illegal bribery acts, and illegal activities going on. If Putin and Russia were trying to help Trump win the election, they would have done so at a critical time in October 2016 in order to try to push him over the top. They didn’t believe he could win.

There is so much evidence that disproves this manufactured, politicized intelligence assessment ordered by President Obama that was very conveniently hidden by John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey. So again, why does this matter? We have seen a trend in some of the biggest intelligence failures around politicized intelligence. I’ll just give this one example because it goes back to the creation of this organization that I lead, ODNI.

James Clapper was an intelligence community leader during the time before our country went to war with Iraq. James Clapper wrote in his book about how Dick Cheney was telling the intelligence community, “I need you to come up with intelligence, basically, that will just create the narrative for us to go to war with Iraq. That will give Colin Powell what he needed to bring to the UN as evidence of weapons of mass destruction and evidence that Saddam Hussein is colluding with al-Qaeda.” In James Clapper’s own words, he said that he and his colleagues were so eager to do what Dick Cheney told them to do that, quote, “We created something that wasn’t there.”

This is as someone who served in the Iraq War, along with so many of my brothers and sisters in uniform. You can see the devastating consequences of politicized intelligence: the difference between war and peace, the difference, in this case, for President Trump with his first administration. This threatens the integrity of our republic and the voices of the people being shown through an election.

Tulsi, you must be absolutely enraged. Absolutely, because we were lied to then. We were lied to in 2016 and 2017 and over and over again. You see how people in these positions of power act with impunity, putting themselves, their political interests, and their ambition ahead of the Constitution of the United States and the responsibility and trust that they have to the American people.

Is the ambition this sensation that they are puppet masters, that they can control and shape outcomes, yet they’re in the shadows and they’re not accountable? What is it? The lack of accountability, I think, is what drives them to believe that they can get away with anything. Because if you control information, you control intelligence, then you can control an outcome. Yeah. What was the incentive or the objective, to Chamath’s question, about doing this after the election, because it seems so destabilizing? I think that was—I don’t have paper evidence of it, but one could surmise that the intention was they all thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.

President Trump won the election. That was President Obama—you can imagine the feeling amongst the Democrats. I remember I was a Democrat in Congress at the time. Absolute devastation. What’s the reaction to that? Let’s see how we can completely undermine and destabilize and, in their minds, disarm President Trump while he’s in office.

This is some of the twisted thinking that I witnessed when I was in Congress at that time: They believed—many, many of these Democratic leaders really believed—that they were doing the right thing for our country by trying to protect the American people from the guy that they actually voted for to be president of the United States.

Right. I mean, I think part of it was to undermine Trump, and then part of it was sort of exculpatory toward the fact that they had supported Hillary, and Hillary turned out to be a bad candidate and they lost. They wanted to find a reason why she lost that didn’t blame the Democratic Party for choosing the wrong nominee. I think that was part of the motivation as well.

But just to be clear, in this Intelligence Community Assessment that you found in the documents, the career staff said there was nothing to support this theory of Trump somehow being an asset or agent of Russia. So they did their jobs.

Some of them did, some of them didn’t.

But it was the leadership—the political appointees, who are obviously hyperpartisan because they’re appointed by the president—who overruled their own career staff. Just to be clear.

That’s right. And just to—sorry, last point, just to put a bow on this: We discovered some emails that were printed out literally in the back of a safe. I think they had been sitting there since 2017. They showed an email exchange between then-President Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, and then the head of the National Security Agency, Mike Rogers.

Clapper really wanted to get the NSA to sign off on this manufactured intelligence document. Mike Rogers, at that point, wrote in his email, “Hey, you’re giving us too short of a deadline. We don’t have enough time to vet what is in this intelligence assessment in order to add our name to this. If you don’t want to give us more time, then we just won’t be a part of it.” The response that James Clapper sent, which you can find online, was essentially, “Mike, this is a team sport. This is the time where you just have to say yes and sign off on this.”

Didn’t he say, “We’re going to stand behind this report in the spirit of, quote, ‘This is our story and we’re sticking to it’”?

So, Tulsi, while I don’t believe Trump was a Russian asset, is your position that the Russians did not try to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections? Because the FBI and Trump himself, they all conceded that they did try to interfere.

The intelligence documents—and again, this is what we released—showed that their intent was to try to sow chaos.

Got it. So that was in the election, and that was throughout the assessments.

So, just to parse this, there was a group of people who believed he was an asset. Trump asked onstage during the election, “Russia, if you’re listening, please hack Hillary’s email and send them to us and release it.” Donald Trump Jr. then met with the Russians at Trump Tower, hoping to get that information. The FBI proved it, and a D.C. court indicted Russians for interfering in the election. So interference occurred. The Trump family engaged with the Russians, but Trump himself was not a plant. We all agree he’s not a Manchurian candidate, but the Russians have been, absolutely—you agree—trying to interfere in our elections. Correct?

That has not been disputed.

Okay, at all. I just want to be clear on the level. All of the other stuff you said about what happened, that stuff has all been litigated. Unfortunately, the reality is, when we say, “The FBI said this,” we were dealing with a highly politicized FBI at the time. It was so politicized that they were willing to use what they knew was false information to obtain illegal surveillance warrants from the FISA court to spy on members of the Trump administration. When you actually look through it, there was nothing actually there.

Okay. Now, if you put yourself in the FBI’s shoes, Donald Trump Jr. says, “I hope—I can’t wait to get what you have. I hope it’s what you’re saying it is.” And Trump literally asks Putin to release Hillary’s email. Would the FBI not actually take a look into it? Would you want them to? Hold on. I’m talking to Tulsi. You had your chance. Do you think you can be quiet for one moment, Sacks, and let me finish? Tulsi, would it not be the FBI’s absolute duty to look into that, yes or no?

An honest FBI? Yes. This was a dishonest FBI. Hold on. FBI, you have to look at things within the bigger context. Anyone who watches Donald Trump, he makes jokes every single day. Should the FBI look into serious issues? Yeah, of course they should. But again, we’re dealing with an FBI that has been proven time and time again during that period of time to break the law. They are supposed to enforce the law. They broke the law because of their efforts to try to undermine President Trump’s candidacy. So, they already had an objective clearly in mind.

So tell us a little bit about what you learned about Paul Manafort and his conviction, subsequent pardon, and what his role was as the campaign manager for Trump the first time, and his giving information to foreign

I’m not familiar with the Manafort case. What I have laid out is the truth of what has been uncovered through the declassification efforts.

Okay. Let me ask the generalized question. The question is about President Trump.

Trump asked the Russians to do something. I would urge everyone who actually believes that to go back and watch the video of the rally. It’s a joke. The context was that Hillary Clinton was being investigated because she had used a private email server and was supposed to be turning over thousands of emails, but she didn’t because they destroyed the hard drive and broke it with hammers. They bleached it and all the rest of it. He made a joke: “If the Russians are listening, I hope you can find the emails.”

Yeah.

Okay.

Let me ask this question.

No, I would think that the FBI was investigating the Russians and convicting them. He's going to say, “Hey, Vladimir, can you do the following?” That's not how conspiracies work. I'm sorry to break it to you.

Let me ask—what are you doing? But, Tulsi, what are you doing to clean it up? I want to look on a go-forward basis.

Well, the first step—and this is essential—is transparency and accountability. We've referred all of the documents we've uncovered to the Department of Justice because the 2 have to go together in order for there to be real change.

Let me build on Jason's question. 12 years from now, there could be a Democrat. Maybe it's AOC—4 more years of Trump and then 8 years of JD. But I'm getting to the point. Some people may not like the AOC candidate, but that doesn't mean, as you said, that some nameless, faceless person can subvert the will of the American people.

So what needs to happen so that there are checks and balances here? How do we make sure that people can't just not like somebody and then decide to try to basically destroy them? How do we make sure that doesn't happen?

It's a good and important question. Ultimately, accountability has to come from the American people and who we choose to vote for. Who we have in these positions of leadership actually matters.

The United States Senate, for example, has the responsibility of confirming people to serve in the position that I hold, and the CIA director, the FBI director, and so on. We have to be very clear-eyed about the tools and tactics that are used, which ultimately are fundamentally undermining our founding documents and the Constitution, the integrity of our republic, and ultimately our ability, as we the people, to determine who we want to serve in our government.

Unfortunately, the weaponization and politicization continue. There is still a lot of rot within our intelligence community, and there are those who believe that they know better for the American people than we do for ourselves. That's a really dangerous thing.

This is not something that's easily solved. It's not one institutional change that can occur. We have to remain vigilant on all fronts in order to protect ourselves and our democratic republic from these kinds of abuses.

How do you lead that change, Tulsi? You're going into work, and you don't know whom to trust. You don't know who is part of the institution that you were up against when you came in to take this role. How do you grapple with that, and how do you think about prioritizing and filtering the workforce, the people who report to you, and the information?

By being vigilant.

Yeah.

I've made some pretty big changes within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself, finding those pockets and places that have been weaponized and politicized, and ultimately bringing a mission focus to the organization. We've trimmed down and slimmed down our manning and personnel count so that we have the right people in the right positions who focus on the mission itself.

Ultimately, every day is just about doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and setting a culture of leadership that focuses on our responsibility to the American people and to the Constitution, and holding people accountable when they are not fulfilling the responsibility with which they have been entrusted.

When you were a congresswoman, you must have had a different mandate. You were in a different political party. When you go back home, what's the conversation like about the transition? I don't know if you've talked about this publicly much, but what's it like talking about your evolution, changing parties, and having this role today with the people you used to represent?

Hawaii has been a strong Democratic state for a very long time, but it's a unique state with a very unique culture. People tend to be a little more aloha—live and let live. “I just want to live my life, raise my family, and...” It's a mixed bag for me when I go home, but I've been pleasantly surprised at times.

I was waiting in line one day at a FedEx to ship something, and there was an older Japanese American man who was the manager. He came out, pulled me aside, and said, “I really, really love everything you're doing. Keep speaking the truth.” There are others who definitely have Trump Derangement Syndrome and can't wrap their heads around how I represented Hawaii for 8 years in Congress as a Democrat and now I'm President Trump's director of national intelligence.

That's got to warp people's brains.

It may on the surface, but the thing is—and look, I've listened to your guys' podcast for a long time—I think there are a lot of folks who are having, probably not the cerebral kinds of conversations you have, but conversations around how the Democratic Party has drastically changed. I hear you talk about it as well.

For me, I was 21 when I made the decision to join the Democratic Party in Hawaii. I was running for the state house and had to choose a party. At that time, the Democratic Party still represented the values of fighting for the little guy, fighting for working people, protecting the environment, and standing up for free speech, even if you didn't like that speech.

To fast-forward from then to now, the party is unrecognizable in just about every way. I ended up writing a book about why I left the Democratic Party because, fundamentally, it's not about, “What do you believe about health care? Should we take this approach or that approach?” It really is foundational. The Democratic Party has completely gone away from the party of JFK and Martin Luther King.

And the good news is you get to work for somebody who's a former Democrat himself: President Trump.

Exactly. There are a number of us. It's all Democrats. That's how Trump won his second term: He rallied all those moderate Democrats like yourself to become part of his cabinet, but I think there's some truth to it.

Bobby Kennedy and I traveled all across the country together for the last few months of President Trump's campaign. The final event we did together was in Wisconsin, a couple of weeks before the election. It was really incredible because it was in a district that normally votes pretty solidly Democratic.

We were in this big, beautiful barn, and there were probably at least 1,000 people there, maybe more. At a certain point, I asked the crowd, “Raise your hand if you're a Republican.” A whole bunch of hands went up. “Raise your hand if you're an independent or a libertarian.” A few hands went up. “Raise your hand if you're a Democrat.”

The reaction was so fascinating. First, 1 or 2 hands went up very timidly, and people were looking around. Then more hands went up, and more hands went up. Then the whole crowd got on their feet and started cheering and looking at each other.

People came up to me afterward and said, “I felt like I was getting a hug from everyone who was there,” and that there was no separation, no difference between us.

Thank you for your service. You spent a lot of time serving the country. You had reservations about bombing Iran, and we did it anyway. How do you reconcile that today? And did we do the right thing?

I served in a medical unit in Iraq back in 2005 and was there for all of 2005, in a position where every day I was confronted with the high cost of war. Ultimately, that's what drove me to eventually run for Congress, to be in a position where I could help influence and impact those decisions.

One of the things that I found to be true, and very detrimental to our country and our own national interest, is that very rarely did leaders in our country ask the fundamental question: What is our objective? What is our objective? What are we actually trying to accomplish?

If we're discussing a potential military operation, an act of war, or any policy for that matter, what is our objective? Is it achievable? Does it serve the best interests of the United States? If it's a military operation, what is winning? How do you define winning? What's our exit strategy?

Those are things that I've brought to every foreign-policy question and every aspect of my professional life and personal considerations of these different policies. This is where I appreciate President Trump's leadership in his approach to Iran. My position has always been that Iran cannot have a nuclear-weapons capability, period. President Trump was very clear—

But the reports were that you were not in favor of the—

There were a lot of reports out there. My job is to provide the president with intelligence so that he can make the best-informed decision.

Ultimately, what we saw in Operation Midnight Hammer was a president who made a decision and executed a very precise military operation with a very clear objective that was accomplished in the best possible way, and a very clear exit.

It seems to have turned out okay. But, Tulsi, don't worry, because Sacks also—by the way, Sacks was also against bombing Iran. He absolutely did not want Nikki Haley to become president because his fear was—and he talked about it on the podcast—that he didn't want to start a war with Iran.

Just use the precise words. I didn't want a war with Iran. I still don't want a war with Iran.

What is the condition that you can share with us, the public, on the strength and the fortitude of Iran today, with that government? What is the state on the ground that you can share, and what do you think the paths ahead are?

Their nuclear capability was destroyed, much of their infrastructure was destroyed, and much of their military capability was destroyed. When you look at Israel's actions throughout that 12-day war, Iran's economy is tanking, and its energy sector is tanking. Iran is facing a very challenging position.

What we saw is that the Iranian people, at least then and at this point, have not risen up against their own government. But you can imagine—and this is openly talked about by a lot of experts—the reaction if you're facing a failing economy, a lack of basic necessities, water, and basic infrastructure. There is legitimate concern about how people will ultimately react and how they will react to their own government.

Do you have a point of view on where that takes us? What steps into the void there? There are a lot of different factors.

Such instability in the Middle East historically has not gone as we thought it would or hoped.

Exactly, which is why it's so important to look at this while taking the history lessons learned from regime change in Iran into account. We cannot be simplistic as we look at this challenge, as well as any of the others that we face, because there are always complexities and so many different elements involved that could turn things one way.

I was in favor of that strike if it was strategic, because I do not think they should be allowed to have a bomb. I was in favor of it.

Great questions, guys. Go ahead.

I want to talk about the southern border for a second. Very early into the administration, you guys declared cartels to be terrorist organizations. Can you walk us through the logic of making that transition, what it enables America to do, why we did it, and what the goal of that is?

President Trump saw very clearly—as anybody who attended even a single one of his rallies during the election heard—the devastating effect that MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and these other cartels were having in our communities and on our streets in this country, making the American people less safe and exacting a kind of violence and criminal activity that was only getting worse.

This was the main thing that drove his decision to designate the worst of the worst cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, because of their activities here within our own country. This opens the door to using different authorities to protect the safety and security of the American people. Obviously, the trafficking of fentanyl is a huge issue.

Within my organization, we have the National Counterterrorism Center, which for the last 20-plus years has been focused on Islamist terrorism—ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, and others who may be plotting against America, our people, and our interests. Now that has been expanded to look at the counternarcotics and counter-cartel efforts.

What it's doing is bringing in and focusing on how we're engaging with Customs and Border Protection and the DEA, but also with your local police and sheriffs who are on the ground in these border states and dealing with the very real effects of these cartels.

I remember I was in Texas visiting one of these border communities with the vice president a few months back, and the local ranchers came in and talked to us. Secretary Hegseth was there as well, and they were talking about how these cartels are using such sophisticated weaponry—the kind of stuff that, yes, we've experienced with IEDs. There was an IED planted on one of the roads on this guy's ranch in Texas, and one or two of his ranch hands were killed because of this.

We're seeing that these cartels have intelligence-collection capability, counterintelligence capability, and the use of drones for both surveillance and armed attacks against those who are threatening their operations. They're a serious adversary that is highly adaptable and ultimately will do what they feel is necessary to continue their illegal activities, to the harm of the American people.

We lost 3,000 people on 9/11, tragically, from al-Qaeda. We're losing 100,000 Americans to fentanyl. If they're not a terrorist organization, please tell me what one is. I am 100% in favor of you crossing the border and immediately, with prejudice. I applaud the administration for doing that. It's far too many.

When we talked about this issue with Rick Caruso, the people who are on the street over here are on the street because of fentanyl, not because they can't get a home. I applaud you guys for doing that. It takes true courage to do it.

The historical context of this is that, if you look back at what happened with Britain and China in the 1800s, there was a period when Britain desperately wanted to weaken China. What they did was start the Opium Wars.

It's incredibly analogous to this moment, where you see all of these foreign actors trying to weaken the United States from within. This is why I think the cartel issue is not talked about enough. Closing the southern border was critical, but designating these organizations as the organizations that they are allows, exactly as you said, a really 360-degree view of what is going on, because they are sophisticated and have incredible capability.

They have an unlimited balance sheet.

Bad intent.

Do you think this is a strategic issue in China? Are they making this decision to support fentanyl supply chains because it's destabilizing to the United States?

I'm reviewing in my mind what I can say and what I can't say with regard to classified intelligence. I have not seen intelligence that reflects the statement that you just made. The precursor issue coming out of China with regard to fentanyl continues to be a point of negotiation in the president's ongoing negotiations with China.

Ultimately, getting after that issue—and China is not the only one providing precursors—is important. What we're seeing is a downtick in fentanyl coming across our borders, as well as the cartels in Mexico struggling to create fentanyl because they're not able to access these precursors as easily as they have been over the last several years.

When you look at President Trump going after the precursor issue, as well as securing our borders, the significance and the impact of that really cannot be overstated in how it's positively affecting the ability for people to live here in our own country more safely.

Folks, on that, I just want to thank Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, people. Thanks, Tulsi.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

We've got a lot of Tulsi fans out there.

You have to stay standing up.

Thank you. Well done, Tulsi.

Thank you.

I appreciate you. That was awesome. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

Absolutely incredible.