Harry Litman [00:00:01] Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Litman. We return this week to the booth in the back of the Double Agent Bar and Grill, where the most knowledgeable counterterrorism and national security professionals get together for candid, in-depth discussion about the state of threats to the homeland and the measures the government is taking — or should be taking — to parry them. Talking Feds veteran-listeners know that we do this every few months and it never fails to be illuminating, if frightening, and to cover vital ground that you rarely, if ever hear about elsewhere. And the stakes of this week's discussion were brought home just this weekend with the indefinite closure of the Colonial Pipeline after the largest cyber attack on oil infrastructure in the country's history. To discuss the most pressing challenges to the homeland today, we welcome a powerhouse group of the most sophisticated experts, all of them authors of leading books with rich experience in the intelligence and national security areas. They are:.
Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, where he served 25 years as a special agent and the author of The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau's Code of Excellence. Philip Mudd, a CNN counterterrorism analyst who spent 25 years in the federal government working on national security issues and counterterrorism at the CIA, FBI and White House. He served as the deputy director of the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA and the senior intelligence adviser at the FBI. He is the author of Black Site: The CIA in the post-9/11 World. Katherine Schweit, a former FBI special agent, executive prosecutor, journalist, author and expert and active shooters, crisis management and violence prevention. Her most recent book, Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis, is set to be released in August of this year. And Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism analyst for MSNBC and a career U.S. Navy terrorism intelligence collector, code breaker and interrogator with wide-ranging field and combat experience in the Middle East, Southwest Asia and Africa. He is a four time New York Times best-selling author, his most recent book being The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It.
And the four have quite a bit on their minds this week, starting with domestic extremism and violence and the package of executive action that President Biden is set to unveil in the next two weeks. From there, they move on to the hydra-headed problem of social media as a breeding ground for extremism and the vexing problem of assaults, shootings that have spiked in recent years. Throughout, you will hear them advocating for a, quote, "whole society," close quote, solution that doesn't assign an impossibly cure-all role to federal law enforcement. So you and I, again, are flies on the wall in the back of the bar and grill, getting an intense seminar on the challenges and nuances of the most pressing national security issues in the summer of 2021. We turn on the volume, as Frank Figliuzzi is talking...
Frank Figliuzzi [00:04:05] Well, look, let's get right into it. We're going to center on the topic of domestic extremism and violence. And the news reports, at least CNN and some other outlets have reported that we expect President Biden's domestic violent extremism package, his list of action items or suggestions on what to do about the plight of America right now in domestic extremism. We expect that package to come out in about a week or two. What should be included in that package, what maybe should be not included in that package, and what realistically can a president do without the consensus of Congress about domestic extremism?
Malcolm Nance [00:04:53] Quite simply, right at the beginning, I would say open up the FBI counterintelligence division to 500 more agents. I mean, what we have is essentially a 9/11 scale response is needed from the internal security agencies of the United States. We don't need more expansion in the military, we don't need more expansion of the intelligence community, it's the FBI that is really holding the bag here. And I say the FBI because less the Department of Homeland Security, they have other responsibilities, they have other activities that they need to do and they can liaise with the FBI. I think they have more than enough resources, but this lack of focus towards the entirety of internal domestic threats that were of a non-Islamic nature, I'm actually in the process of writing a new book, which I started last August, about what I consider a coming insurgency. And I don't mean insurrection, insurrection was just the first step. And I had the unfortunate pleasure of telling Bill Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher that on November 6th, when he was like, "oh, it's all Kumbaya time, we'll all get together." And I was like, dude, you have no idea what's coming from these people. They view themselves as this wave, and so the FBI is going to be the key agency that it's going to have to handle this problem.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:06:14] I'm with you on this idea of the possibility that we're developing a semi-permanent or permanent insurgency. I'm deeply concerned about that. I'll have some thoughts about your emphasis on the bureau in a moment, but I want to turn to a bureau colleague, former Katherine Schweit. What's your view on how to approach this from the White House, how to have some meaningful either action items or suggestions come out of the Oval Office?
Katherine Schweit [00:06:42] I think that we saw a little bit of a preview of this, maybe people don't see it in this way, but when the Biden gun proposals came out, one of the first things mentioned was ATF improvements, changes to the way that ATF can control the types of things that right now they really don't have a big handle on. I think that has to do specifically with this idea of gun movement through the United States and one of those ATF improvements, of course, what we need to see is something that allows the ATF to do their job. And that may include more personnel, but it definitely includes making sure that we have ATF agents who go out when people right now somebody goes in, they don't get their approval for a gun purchase, they could be charged, there could be some efforts towards them and they're not. So people who fail that background can't get a gun, then they go to the next store because right now the records are purged every X number of hours. There's no consistency to look for those gun traffickers that help to fill the needs both for ammunition and for weapons. So I think we need to see some of that in addition to the other things that will have to come along. But I think we got a little peek of that ATF was — improvements were right at the top of the list.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:07:57] Interesting. So you're folding in gun enforcement and gun law enforcement into the much larger picture and question of domestic extremism and the violent ideologies. Is that what I'm hearing?
Katherine Schweit [00:08:09] Yeah. And I say that because I do work in mass shootings, that's my area of expertise now. And of course, I spent 15 years doing counterintelligence with the FBI. So when I shifted over, I could see the duplication, right? and I had worked white supremacist cases out of the Wisconsin office when I started out as a baby agent. The gun trafficking that goes on really fuels it. And let me add this other fact: I work in the Second Amendment area, too, and that's what I teach at DePaul at the law school. And the idea that we have weapons out there, a lot of people say, "oh, militia, negative, militia, negative, gun people, negative, gun people, negative." But, you know, I'm talking to some of these gun people, they're part of my client base when it comes to teaching a class on the Second Amendment. And they're clamoring too, to see a stronger, tougher ATF so people who shouldn't get guns don't get them. And I think that's a way that we can cross over and bring together a set of people who might seem like they have very divergent issues, and I'd like to see the administration do some of that.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:09:14] Yeah, you're on the money, with poll after poll saying that the guy on the street is absolutely OK with people being prevented from getting guns who should not have guns. Now, it goes south quickly there because they all have different definitions of who should have a gun taken away. And of course, Congress seems to not care about the polling right now on that issue, perhaps because of NRA money. But, Phil, on the larger question of, if you were asked to consult with the White House on violent extremism, the kind of violence that we saw play out on January six and took the shape of an insurrection, what would you recommend the president do in terms of action items and suggestions?
Philip Mudd [00:09:51] You know, Frank, one of the things I'd be thinking about, as someone who managed or used to manage people, is we've got to protect our people from being accused of violating American's rights. And you need specifically the White House and then the White House pressuring Congress to define who we're going to spy on, because if the bureau does this unilaterally, eventually somebody is going to accuse them of doing the wrong thing. You need the Congress. The big thing you've got to think about is which groups are we going to spy on, because remember, this isn't just investigations. This is what people will refer to as domestic spying. So let me close with a specific example, if you would’ve said on January 5th, we have a lot of people inserted as informants and maybe even intercepted communications of those people coming up for a political demonstration in Washington, D.C., I think people would look to you and said that's completely inappropriate. That's a political rally, you can't be collecting intelligence on a political rally. And today they're saying that's OK.
Those informants go into groups like the Oath Keepers, the proud boys, and again, you're talking about intercepted communications potentially as well in those groups. That's classically how you would collect intelligence on those groups. And you've got to go to court to get authorization to do that, which means the law, and the regulations, and the guidance from Congress and the White House have to be really clear. How do you cover that kind of group? This is why I say I would want specificity, real specificity, especially from the Congress after they get guidance on what the White House wants. Before you would tell people at the bureau or ATF or elsewhere to collect this stuff, because the people at the bureau and elsewhere are at that point going to be risking something. They're going to be risking the Congress saying, 'why are you spying on the American people?' Let me close by saying that when I was at the bureau for five years, this was the third rail. It was pretty easy to say you want to look at ISIS or al Qaeda, but when you started talking about domestic extremists, it was a different kettle of fish. You need to give people guidance to ensure that they know what they're doing and that they're protected.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:11:49] You're getting into the meat of this issue. People may know that I am a very strong advocate for passage of a domestic terrorism law. I believe we do not currently have the kind of law or sentencing abilities that mirror the gravity of what happened on January 6th. And so I hear from my FBI colleagues and I experienced it as an agent, that there is tremendous legal hesitancy to investigate things that they think they're going to get in trouble for investigating. And the line between ideology and violence, it's very easy for us to sit back and go, 'well, just investigate violence.' Well, you get into ideology almost immediately, and if you're waiting for the violence to occur, it's too late. You're cleaning up the records afterwards, so you've got to get out in front of it. In the international terrorism realm, all of that's been enabled. There's the designation of international terrorist groups that get the FBI in very early.
I will say this, I am not for designating groups domestically. I get very, very concerned about a president who decides to designate his enemies, political enemies, a domestic terror organization. I think we just lived through a president who wanted to do that. He actually tweeted that one day about Antifa. He said, I hereby designate Antifa a domestic terrorism organization. So, yeah, Phil, I'm with you on the need for clarity, law enforcement needs to know what it is they're allowed to do and what it is they're not allowed to do. The inability, as I think Katherine alluded to, to see ourselves as a threat and understand that we are a threat as well, if not more so than external threats, we've got to address that. But it also — realistically thinking, I don't think we're headed toward executive order here. I'm almost certain we're not. He can't do much without Congress being on board. Am I right?
Philip Mudd [00:13:37] Frank, one of the things you're talking about is really important. So let's break it down into a few parts. First, to be clear in terms of what's coming down from the White House and guidance, the bureau can't do this by itself. It has to have politicians say 'this is what we want you to do,' because if you don't do that rightly, civil liberties groups will be all over you. The pendulum swings eventually, and a few years down the road people forget about what happened with the proud boys of January 6th and they say, why are you spying on Americans? I would not, however, expect an executive order to get to the level of specificity that tells the bureau what they can do. That's more what you would expect from a piece of legislation from Congress, and that's where dysfunction in Congress becomes more important.
You have to have Republicans and Democrats come together, and these are occasionally people who don't like how the government was spying years ago, come together and tell the bureau what they want to do with a level of specificity. So they take the executive order and they translate it down to something the bureau can use. Eventually, if they don't do that, the Congress is going to step in to the bureau and say, I don't like what you're doing. Everybody at the bureau will know that. They will know that if they start opening investigations without guidance, the pendulum will swing. So that's why when you see the executive order, the first question I would have would not be for the bureau or for ATF or others. It would be for the Congress to say, what are you going to do to help us?
Frank Figliuzzi [00:14:56] Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. I want to weigh in here on what I'd like to see in the package. You know, we've heard the phrase 'whole of government' solution. This is a whole of society solution, and I'd like to see that acknowledged in whatever comes out of the White House. By that, I mean, there's got to be language that talks about solutions in social media. This is a large part of our problem and some form of regulation is needed. We'll talk about that in a minute. We need clergy, we need educators involved. One of the first thoughts I had on January 6th was, are these people - have they forgotten what democracy is, have they forgotten how our election system works? I don't think we're teaching it enough. I think we need to teach kids how to identify the truth, how to think for themselves, and how to find smart, accurate reporting before they believe anything that's shoved down their throats.
And lastly, I've lived through FBI experience where the FBI was seen as the solution to everything. I can recall deadbeat dads not paying their child support, and Congress saying the FBI will fix that, get them on it. I can remember carjackings in the inner cities becoming a huge problem and the Congress saying we want the FBI working carjackings in the inner city. I'm concerned that the pendulum may just say it's all the FBI's problem when this is really a societal problem. And then, Katherine, you raised a real good point about approaching this carefully. Tell us what you're thinking in terms of how to investigate domestic violent extremism.
Katherine Schweit [00:16:26] I think that if you look back at the FBI history and relative to what Phil just said about, hey, tell us who to look at, tell us what to do because we want some cover, part of that concern about cover is the FBI did what it thought it wanted to do in the 50s, in the 60s, and what that resulted in, as we know from the 70s, from the church committee hearings, was that there ended up being a disclosure that the FBI was specifically investigating groups, the Black Panther Party, the Socialist Workers Party, future Congressman John Lewis group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So Nation of Islam, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when you name an organization or you name a group, then we're suddenly investigating.
And what the FBI learned during that time period is that not everybody's going to agree that those people and organizations should be investigated, and the bureau really shifted to we investigate people. We don't investigate groups, we don't investigate the Klan, we don't investigate this group or that group, we investigate people. And so we've been living through that my whole time in the bureau, y'alls whole time in the bureau, that's what we were living through. And that was a hard lesson to learn for the FBI to say, look, we can't solve all the problems like you just mentioned, but we certainly can't also solve it in a big group organization because it's the individuals in a group that are causing the challenges.
Malcolm Nance [00:17:49] Yeah, I spoke to Speaker Pelosi briefly and was called before the Congressional Black Caucus where I testified and spoke with several key representatives about this very subject. Their chief concern is that this will be turned back around on innocent American citizens. And my principal way of looking at it comes from a targeteers perspective, sort of like you guys do in the bureau. We want to go after individuals, and so if we can't get a national effort to view this as hunting down on a nationwide scale, the next Oklahoma City bomber, which means you're not going to get it, right? Everyone's afraid that the bureau is going to suddenly turn into this horrible agency and they'll be using assets from other agencies. We don't want that, which is why my recommendation was give the bureau a completely new makeover. Let me put it this way, I'll tell you a quick little story. Just before the year 2000, I was giving a speech to the International Association of Bomb Techs, I was the terrorism guy. And some guy goes, 'hey, what do you know about this guy they just arrested a few minutes ago who had all this ammonium nitrate coming over from Canada?'
And I said, 'nothing. You guys are telling me this very instant.' The reason that we caught that bomber, that potential bomber was coming into Seattle was because he had it in his head that we were tagging ammonium nitrate in the United States because it had been discussed for some time. Of course, we never did it. No one has that kind of resources, but he thought we did. And he got caught because he thought we have the resources to catch him. So if I give the CI division or start giving the joint terrorism task forces and all these bureau divisions, 20, 30, 40 new dedicated officers I want the snitch effect to happen. I want the guy who's in the militia who says we're planning on kidnaping the governor of Michigan like we had up in Michigan. It may not require legislation, it may not require the bureau to do anything apart from show competence on a national scale and commit people to believe you will get them, right?
Katherine Schweit [00:20:00] Malcolm, it was a militia person, exactly what you said. It was a militia person who first tipped us off to the Michigan incident.
Malcolm Nance [00:20:06] Yeah, and we like those kind of snitches. But the point is they believed we had capabilities beyond what we believe and he didn't want to kill cops, that guy. And second to that, the Michigan plot, which I just wrote about, was an amazing thought, multistate actors meeting in clandestine ways. But it was the secondary plot of them saying they want to seize the state capital of Michigan to a hostage barricade and execute all the Democrats. That's the one that got carried out almost on January 6th. So we need a deeper capability, I think if the bureau is given more resources there, said that they're going to use the JTTFs to be these touchstones the way — what was it a year ago, they had the JTTFs going out and doing interviews of kids because they might have made a threat to be an active shooter in high schools. I mean, that's a big step.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:21:00] Yeah. Your resource point is well taken, the ability to knock and talk, the ability to put some shoeleather out there and just knock on doors and go, 'hey, did you really mean that you were going to hurt somebody when you said that on social media?' Does have an effect in concert with this is the accountability issue, which I think we're seeing in the form of the current insurrection investigation, where over four hundred people indicted and or arrested, we're going to hit five hundred, we're told, soon. And more importantly, I think we're going to see more conspiracy charges. And even groups like Oath Keepers or proud boys tackled like you would see almost in a RICO case, that's being at least looked at. That kind of accountability makes a difference, people know there's repercussions to their actions. There's a flip side to this, which is if we tackle social media, we get agents knocking on doors, snitches on each other, do we force the bad guys underground more, using encrypted applications?
I can recall playing whack a mole with al-Qaida sites and chat rooms and then thinking, 'gosh, I wish they were still up and running so we could see them and put undercover agents in those groups.' Let's talk about a large part of this problem, which is social media. And we've had some developments this week where we know that the Facebook semi-independent board made a decision that Facebook should continue the suspension of Donald Trump's account. What's the larger solution? This is a short term solution, they didn't say it's a permanent suspension, they said continue it. But you've got to have some robust and rigorous criteria when you suspend someone. What does this look like? What does it look like across the various platforms? Do we get into venue shopping for bad guys who decide, 'I can't say these words on Facebook, but I can see them on Parlor,' again, are we forcing people to encryption? What are your thoughts around the role social media plays and what to do about it when it comes to violent extremism?
Malcolm Nance [00:22:53] You guys know I'm a cryptologist, so I started out at NSA and I love terrorists over communications, right? But this is a completely different world. We saw it with ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda in the early days, transferring data over a Seiko watch. Now, we went into ISIS when they had this global social media network out there, which was great, we could collect everything. They didn't lie about whatever they were doing. But, you know, what's going on now is so pervasive with their buy into social media that you're going to get tippers to whatever activities are out there somewhere. Good case in point, we had a CO who was arrested for taking part in the capital case, and then after he was released, he was communicating to other people that something big is in the works. That person can now be because he was arrested, he can be handed off to investigation. These guys are never going back to real face to face, tradecraft based, clandestine communications like the Red Army Faction, right? Or the old European terrorists of the 1970s.
That takes too much work, that requires them to actually have to walk to places and meet people face to face. We're going to keep getting these tips from social media. But so long as they believe that we believe that we have the capability to roll them up when they do something or when they hint that something's going to happen, then social media actually works in our favor. It's where real players are going to play. If you've got a Timothy McVeigh and a Terry Nichols and they're talking to nobody, there's quietly going out in the desert and blowing up info samples, OK, and then he just rents a Ryder truck and goes to a building and sets it off. You're never going to get that. Those are dedicated class one, what we call class one terrorist guy who has dedicated himself to blowing up. A case in point, Nashville suicide bomber. He just shows up one day he blows up. And none of the resources, even if we had been there, we had been scanning his social media. Even now, the investigation hasn't really yielded why he did that, other than his target set, which was a 5G transmitting building, right? But we really have to understand that social media has its limitations, but it also has its advantages as well.
Katherine Schweit [00:25:17] Can I jump in here? When you talked earlier and you said you wanted to see a whole of society solution, a lot of the people who are going to commit crimes in the future that are going to commit these terrible acts are young people as they grow and get into their 20s and 30s, as we know. And right now, I was just on the phone with the director of one of the largest anonymous reporting systems. That's a platform that schools use, universities, high schools, and he told me that 80 to 90 percent of their tips come in by text messages. Social media can work for us if we know the way to do it, which is get the directions and figure out how to do it. Take that opportunity to fund real solid government systems that allow to pull and timely use that information coming in. 80 to 90 percent by text messages of kids. That's what we have looking forward.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:26:07] Yeah. And the social media platforms, I don't want to paint them all as some evil empire. I know that they all have very fast growing experts coming to work every single day looking for the violent talk and tendencies. Both of you mentioned the Michigan militia group and the plot to kidnap the governor. Facebook played a role in that case and tipped off law enforcement that they were seeing talk that really disturbed them about the governor and other actions. So there's a role there, but I think even if we listen to the CEOs of those platforms, they're asking for more regulation and we should be listening to them. They're telling us we can't handle this ourselves and they're looking for some kind of system in place to even rate the platform. So if you've got kids and you're trying to teach your kids, 'hey, you're on a bad site, get off of this or that's nonsense,' it would be nice to tell your kid this has been rated a C minus platform for accuracy and appropriateness, right?
The government rates the safety of airlines, and I'm wondering if we should be looking at rating the accuracy and the self-policing of platforms. I've heard the CEOs of big tech say that, it's something that needs to be considered, they can be an ally. They're trying to be an ally. The numbers just at Facebook alone of employees that come to work every day under the heading of safety and security is something like 20,000 employees, that's astounding. That's how big and massive this problem is for them, and they seem to be taking it seriously. When you go see a movie, you see ratings, right? PG, PG-13, R, G, somebody's rating those movies, and it's not censorship. It's helpful to know what I'm going to get in this movie. And I think something else needs to be done there.
Malcolm Nance [00:27:52] Like a veracity rating.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:27:54] Yeah. So, look, I'm hoping that when we see the package come out of the White House on domestic violent extremism, it includes a whole of society approach, including suggestions for further regulation and monitoring of social media platforms. But they have to be a part of that solution. And I think they're trying to be — look, there's something else that's been happening this month, the last couple of months and really the last year, and that is the topic of mass shootings. And it's in some ways it's related to domestic violent extremism and ideology, and in some ways it's not. But from a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, to spas in Atlanta, Georgia, to a FedEx facility in Indiana, we just have one after another of mass shooting events, most mass shootings defined as four or more victims. Here's the question, really, where is this going? Is there a realistic approach that would mitigate this, and what has to happen before this issue is really taken seriously? We've experienced the loss of school children in Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, high school. Where does this go, where does it end?
Katherine Schweit [00:29:01] Well, it is a growing problem. I have to say that when I started working on this practically 10 years ago, there was one of these shootings every two months. And then five years ago there was one every month, and then three years ago there was one every two weeks, and now there's one every week. Now there's one every day. So it's definitely a huge problem, but part of it is what you were talking about just a moment ago, Frank, you were saying make sure that you consider whole of society, we can't fix this problem just by taking all the guns away. We can't fix this problem by pointing towards the mental health issues, by pointing towards video games. I think that one of the reasons why I did put that book together that's coming out, Stop the Killing, is because it does require a look at everybody's got to take their sense of responsibility. The school district has to take the threats seriously, the parents have to understand we had 48,000 people who died of suicide in the United States last year. 21,000 of those died by firearms.
Those firearms killings, we know that males tend to bring those guns to the school, kill themselves and kill other people. 40 percent of the people who do these mass shootings kill themselves. So suicide is part of the problem. So it really has to be a whole of society. We have ways in place to understand the prevention, to understand the behaviors that we're looking for. And people don't know what those behaviors are, and instead, we have somebody like we had in the White House who says, 'we're looking for a kid who's playing video games in his mom's basement.' And I can tell you right now that what we know from real research, real facts, is that we're looking for that kid's dad. That's who we're looking for. It's the kid's dad. Median age of these shooters, 35 years old, average age 32. Or vice versa, median age 30 to average age 35. We need to have people who are looking and listening and then reporting, but it has to be the whole of society.
And just one last example, we have the business shootings. I get a call every time shooting occurs and somebody wants me to come on and talk and they say, 'well, what do we know so far?' And I always end up saying, well, what we know is that they don't know who the shooter is yet, but the likelihood is that it's a person who was a former employee who was probably fired.' And we know the facts now, we see them all the time. So that goes to the businesses. What are their process for letting somebody go? So it's not just the schools, it's not just the parents. It's not just the clerics. It's the people in the tip lines, but it's also the business leaders and the H.R. policies. So it is complicated, just like we were talking about with regard to domestic terrorist situations.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:31:45] It takes a village to stop the next shooter, there's no question. I really keyed in on one of the things you said, Katherine. All of them, quite frankly, but one got my attention and it got my attention not from my FBI career, but my corporate security career following the FBI. And one of the things I was responsible for in a massive corporation was the workplace violence program. One of the first things I did when I came in was I said, we're renaming this to the Workplace Violence Prevention Program, because we saw we saw a lot of security leaders in the organization saying, 'hey, we're really good at running out of the building. We ran out of the building in five minutes during the last drill.' And I thought, well, that's great, but by the time you're running out of a building, it's a really bad situation. So we're going to prevent the need to run out of the building by teaching everyone the warning signs and indicators that someone is on the pathway to violence. If we could do that in massive corporations, we should be able to do that across society. Every American should know with the warning signs and indicators are that the guy next door, the guy down the street, the crazy Uncle Joe on social media, is moving toward a scary place. And that's one of the things I think we need to talk about.
Katherine Schweit [00:32:52] I spend a lot of my time doing just that in consulting, is trying to convince businesses that security isn't just a cost code, it's just not a cost center.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:34:04] Phil, you've been around the world and seen threat and risk, particularly in your role at CIA. What say you about the threat and risk we're facing here in the United States from ourselves, and from guns, and from the complicated world we live in, that leads to a shooting a day seemingly?
Philip Mudd [00:34:23] I think, in terms of looking at violence in America, we're in a bad place and we're going to be in a worse place. The bad place is simply analytic. All you have to do is to look at poor countries in terms of a couple of statistics, murders and suicides, along with mass shootings and access to weapons. People don't like to hear this because we like to portray ourselves as exceptional America. But if you look at statistics from poor countries, we are like standard deviations out so you can draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is simple: more access to weapons means more dead people. We don't like that answer, but it's not very complicated when you look at us compared to other countries, I would say as well, before I give you just a quick thought on the future, there's a cultural problem.
Katie was alluding to it a little bit, and that is we train a boy in America that if you're a tough kid, that means you're a bad ass, that means you kick ass. There is a culture here that says a frontier culture that says violence is OK. And I personally think that has an impact on a kid who says I'm a bad ass, I'm going to go shoot somebody. I would say in terms of closing out, if you look at divides in America, people cannot sit at a table, and I don't remember this growing up in the 70s. If someone says they're a Republican, it's like before being an American. If someone says they're a Democrat, it's before being an American. The political divides, I think, are leading, and obviously we saw this on January 6th, to more violence. I don't remember it being that way 30, 40 years ago, the divides were that extreme. I remember America first, and the politicians have differences. That's not what we have today.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:35:53] Yeah, this is a fascinating linkage you're making that mass shootings, even though they don't seem to be political in nature and have a host of drivers behind them, one of the reasons they could be going up is because we are just increasingly uncivil to each other. The violence guardrails aren't there, and a symptom of that is the political polarization, but that incivility is throughout society.
Malcolm Nance [00:36:18] It's very interesting because I belong to a group called the National African American Gun Owners Association, I'm a big gun collector, and here's where the problem lies for me. There are no guardrails within the firearms industry or ownership world. These people buy guns to go lay in bed and take pictures of them, to name them Shirley, and kiss and caress these things. My guns never come out of the gun locker. They never come out of a gun locker. And when the gun lockers open, I treat it like a military weapons room. Everyone in the house is notified, I have a little chain sign that goes across. No ammunition is to be touched. So... how can I put it... iconized the weapon that we have essentially the Way of the Gun in the United States, all issues are to be resolved through firepower.
If I had my way, if they said, 'Malcolm, you're now in charge of this problem,' the first thing I would do is I would force every cable channel and every TV channel to give me PSA time. And I would take the first ghost, that scene in the movie The Sixth Sense. And that's the one where the little boy comes down the hallway and he says, 'hey, do you want to see where my dad keeps his guns?' And he turns around and you realize the back of his head is missing. I mean, we need to shock people to realize that — I say this all the time, I'm asked, 'oh, I want to buy a pistol.' The first thing I say is, do not buy a pistol. Pistol's a child killer. That's all it's for, right? If you're not trained, don't buy it!
Frank Figliuzzi [00:37:49] It's the same thing I tell, it's the same thing. I get this all the time.
Philip Mudd [00:37:53] I think Malcolm is dead on. I'm not anti-gun, I'm just anti the way we deal with guns. Just one quick comment on this that I find ironic. There are many people in this country who are more comfortable with someone open carrying a handgun into a donut shop than bringing in a cloth mask. Unbelievable. Only in America is it more acceptable to have a handgun, which is a human killer, than a mask. Unbelievable.
Malcolm Nance [00:38:19] In my long — I know you guys are all domestic intelligence kind of guys, but I remember where this all started and that was the Ruby's massacre in Texas. I was in school in the San Angelo, Texas, back in 1987. Yeah, outside of Waco I think it was. And the guy came in, shot everybody, and there was all the NRA ads of a woman who said my gun was in my car and I couldn't bring it in. Boom, domestic open carry law, concealed carry — exploded. Now in Texas, no one has to apply for a concealed carry permit. I'm from South Carolina, I have a South Carolina concealed carry permit, I have never concealed carried. There's no circumstance unless, except for all the idiots that are threatening my life. I got 50, 60 death threats a year because Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson are always saying stupid things about me personally. But you know what? I know I have law enforcement on my side, and that's another component we need to do. I trained law enforcement, these guys in intelligence and counterterrorism. And we've got to break this mindset that cops are bad.
We all know that there are bad cops out there. But again, we actually own the airwaves. We could, if we wanted to, without breaking the Hide act, actually use PSAs to show 'Lock up your guns.' Right? 'Call the police.' You see illegal guns. One last point I want to make, when I was in Iraq way back in 2003 and I was working for an NGO that was under the United Nations, I got asked by L. Paul Bremer staff in Baghdad, 'hey, what can we do about the guns that are being sold on the streets,' because they had a farmers market that was opening up and exploding because an NRA person gave the Iraqis the right to bear fully automatic AK-47s. That was one of the first laws passed in Iraq. I proposed a weapons buyback program called the Iraq Civil Demilitarization Program.
I asked for fifty million dollars to buy AK-47s back at one hundred dollars per weapon. Do you know what - his banker, his chief banker was like, 'this is the most brilliant idea I've ever heard.' They were like, 'we're not buying guns. We're going to offer what Saddam offered, fifty dollars a gun.' And I'm like, 'no, you offer three hundred dollars a gun.' Right now, an AR-15 in the United States, if you can get it at a shop, is between $795 and $2000. A Colt is solidly $2000 bucks right now. AR-15 ammunition's up to a dollar -between eighty five cents and a dollar twenty five around. Now these people are hoarding on a massive scale, and we have to break this idea that the NRA has put into everybody's mind that you've got to go buy all your guns now. They're waiting for civil war, but I think we should take back the airwaves.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:41:15] Yeah, I can recall very effective PSAs on cigarettes. 'You're going to get cancer.' It does have an impact. Katherine, have you given any thought in your line of work on the possible impact of lawsuits, some pending right now against gun manufacturers, where do you think that's going? Should they be producing guns that require biometric identification, a fingerprint before you can fire it, something like that? Where's that going, the whole civil solution to this thing?
Katherine Schweit [00:41:41] Well, I think the legal aspects of it, you know, we went through a time period as soon as the NRA kind of took control of lobbying in the 1970s. But I think that's the same kind of protections that the NRA is going to continually fight. In the last five elections, the NRA spent $144 million in lobbying when the gun control people spent $40 million. So I think that the possibility of getting legislation through, especially in the time period that we have that might put some liability on the gun manufacturers would be great because it would give us the same type of precautions that we have against automobile manufacturers, for example.
I mean, I come from Detroit, and because there isn't this absolute protection, you don't have that protection for the manufacturers that just allows them to just do and do and do. And they're not going to go ahead and put fingerprints and things like that on unless there's some compelling way to do it, because it's just very expensive. They're making their money on the manufacture of guns, but it's really the ammunition. I'd rather see marking on the ammunition and the casings. And if we saw the markings on the casings, you'd be hesitant to fire a lot of bullets when you couldn't find your casings. And I think we'd be able to trace a lot better in that way, than we can and just some random gun that can be taken apart.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:42:51] Interesting. So we've covered a lot of ground and we've wrapped up with the horrible problem of mass shootings. And that leads us to something that Harry's instituted across his Talking Feds podcast programs, which is something called Five Words or Fewer, where I get to ask a question and we need to answer it in five words or fewer. It's going to relate to mass shootings and it's really the age old nature or nurture question. And I know this is a tough one to limit to five words or less, but let's give it a shot. Are mass shootings more about guns or more about mental health? Five words or fewer, Katherine, go ahead.
Katherine Schweit [00:43:34] Don't discourage mental health self-care.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:43:37] And if self-care has a hyphen in it, you've made the limit.
Katherine Schweit [00:43:40] Exactly. That's how I was counting it.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:43:42] OK, I'm with ya. Phil, go ahead.
Philip Mudd [00:43:44] Ask countries with fewer killings. And I think you're going to get the answer that this is about guns, not about nurture.
Frank Figliuzzi [00:43:51] Yeah, what you're implying is there's an equal percentage of the population with mental health issues, but they don't have a problem with guns. Yeah, I agree. And Malcolm?
Malcolm Nance [00:44:01] That's a tough challenge. Mental health and guns, death,
Frank Figliuzzi [00:44:06] it's an equation, right? That plus equals...I'm going to err on the side of mental health and I'll respond with: it's more about mental health.
Harry Litman [00:44:17] Thank you very much to Frank, Katherine, Malcolm and Philip, and thank you very much, listeners, for tuning in to Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts, and please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You can follow us on Twitter, @TalkingFedsPod to find out about future episodes and other Feds-related content. You can check us out on the web, talkingfeds.com , where we have full episode transcripts, and you can look to see our latest offerings on Patreon, where we post discussions about special topics exclusively for supporters. Submit your questions to questions@talkingfeds.com , whether it's for Five Words or Fewer, or general questions about the inner workings of the legal system for our Sidebar segments. Thanks for tuning in. Don't worry: as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking.
Talking Feds is produced by Jennifer Bassett and Rebecca Lowe Patton. Our editor is Justin Wright. David Lieberman and Rosie Dawn Griffin are our contributing writers. Production assistance by Matt McArdle. Our consulting producer is Andrea Carla Micheal's. Our gratitude, as always, goes to the amazing Philip Glass, who graciously lets us use his music. Talking Feds is a production of Dalito, LLC. I'm Harry Litman, see ya next time.
