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Joining Scheer Intelligence former CIA agent and torture program whistleblower John Kiriakou talks with host Robert Scheer. Following this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Scheer and Kiriakou use the occasion to bring attention to Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI film, the deep state and the state of surveillance today.
Kiriakou addresses both the history of the intelligence community as well as their contemporary image, rife with MSNBC and CNN appearances, as Scheer points out. Though attempts to bring accountability to these agencies have crept up, like Republicans in Congress attempting to create a spin-off of the Church Committee from 1975, which sought to investigate the misconduct of intelligence agencies; Kiriakou says it is nothing like the original committee. Frank Church’s congressional committee “was bipartisan in nature with intellectual heavyweights on both sides, looking at crimes being committed by the deep state… mean[ing] the CIA, the FBI, NSA, the Department of the Army and associated intelligence organizations,” says Kiriakou.
Instead, Kiriakou contends that intelligence agencies now are even more dangerous and in need of accountability given their technological prowess. “Technology has improved. It’s improved in ways that our political figures of the 1960s couldn’t have even fathomed… We know, thanks to the Vault 7 revelations, that the CIA can take over any computer, even remotely, anywhere in the world and use it against you. They can do the same with your phone. They can, even when it’s off, turn it into a microphone to listen to anything that you’re saying.”
In regards to Martin Luther King Jr., Kiriakou points to the FBI’s sneaky surveillance practices and callousness when King was assassinated as indicators of their selfish and unlawful goals. “There are a lot of people, including African-American leaders, national leaders and family members of Martin Luther King, who believe that James Earl Ray was innocent and that the killer was either the FBI or somebody working on behalf of the FBI,” says Kiriakou.
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Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from, my guest. Otherwise, this would be a very arrogant title for a show. And no question, in fact, John Kiriakou was in the Central Intelligence Agency, what, for 12 years?
John Kiriakou:
14 years, almost 15.
Scheer:
So you are… I sometimes say this show is the poor man’s Central Intelligence Agency. But you were the real deal. And you actually were involved in the interrogation capture of the, what was said to be, the top person in Al-Qaeda before bin Laden was killed. And, you know, so you have vast experience. The reason I wanted to talk to you, I’ve talked to you before, it’s always interesting, but I am really… This is the day after we celebrate or two days after, when we’re recording this, Martin Luther King Day. And for that occasion in my class, I teach classes and discuss the movie made two years ago by Director [Sam] Pollard. And it is an incredible movie. It’s called MLK/FBI. And it’s really about the effort of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to destroy Martin Luther King, first to show some kind of communists. And then when that failed, to go after his personal life and blackmail him and basically to suicide. And they were watching him 24/7 when he, in fact, was assassinated, something I want to ask you about. But I really want to know about the deep state in relation to dissenters like Martin Luther King, now celebrated, honored with a day and so forth. But at the time we had very primitive surveillance. They had to break into his house or a hotel room or have the hotel room next door and to entrap them and to get information and then fake a letter claiming to reveal stuff and all that. You were part of that deep state. What could they do now? And you’ve watched the movie, you’ve thought about it. And I might say one of the news hooks here, the Republicans in Congress, are actually reviving a committee investigation to look at the excesses of the intelligence agencies of the FBI and so forth. And you wrote a column saying this is not the Church Committee. We need another Church Committee. Tell us about the great work of Frank Church, the senator from Idaho, who in the mid-seventies revealed so much about the evil, the chicanery of our intelligence agencies, and that directly bears on the effort to destroy Martin Luther King.
Kiriakou:
Yes. Where do you even start with something like this? Let’s start with the Church Committee. I wrote a piece in Consortium News that was published, I think it was published today, Wednesday, about these Republican efforts to create what they’re calling a Church Committee 2. Its formal title is the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. I am 1,000% in favor of creating a Church Committee 2. This is not a Church Committee 2, this committee is going to be chaired by Jim Jordan, he’s a far-right congressman from Ohio, the former wrestling coach at Ohio State University. He’s also the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. And he’s going to look specifically at the FBI’s targeting of conservatives. Now, these are conservative parents who are speaking out at school board meetings. He’s going to look at the FBI targeting Donald Trump or targeting anybody deemed to be conservative. That’s not what the Church Committee did. The Church Committee, which was bipartisan in nature with intellectual heavyweights on both sides, were looking at crimes being committed by the deep state. And when I say the deep state, I mean the CIA, the FBI, NSA, the Department of the Army and associated intelligence organizations. They were looking at the CIA’s international assassinations program, for example, They were looking at the Army’s program to infiltrate peace groups or anti-Vietnam War groups. They were looking at the FBI’s surveillance program and spying on Americans without any warrant or court order. They would just arbitrarily do it through a program then called COINTELPRO. They looked at the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program in which the CIA dosed unwitting American citizens with LSD just to see what their reactions would be, just to see if they would talk about things that they weren’t supposed to talk about, while under the influence of of LSD, people died in these programs. This new subcommittee isn’t going to do any such thing. And indeed, Democrats have already said that they’re not going to participate in this program. Now you’ve got a new speaker of the House in Kevin McCarthy. He appointed nine Republicans to this committee, this subcommittee. He’s allowing for six Democrats. The Democrats aren’t going to participate. The committee was created on a straight party line vote of 221, all Republicans to 211, all Democrats. Now, compare this to the actual Church Committee. It was chaired, of course, by Frank Church, an intellectual giant who ran for president in 1976. It also included Senator Phillip Hart of Michigan, the Hart Senate office.
Scheer:
Okay. Let me stop you for a minute. Okay. Can I? Because we’ve used… I mean, what you’re saying is interesting, important. Your column is good. I republished it myself on ScheerPost this morning and worth it. But the fact of the matter is, there isn’t a Democrat Frank Church right now. Frank Church challenged Democrats. And, you know, as I said at the beginning, I would like to talk about, because this is so recent after Martin Luther King Day, that the invasion of Martin Luther King’s privacy, the attempt to destroy him, was done by a Democrat president.
Kiriakou:
Yes, it was. Even the film goes into depth on that.
Scheer:
It started with JFK. It continued with a vengeance with Lyndon Johnson. They allowed J. Edgar Hoover, an obsessed, you know, fanatic of a man to go after Martin Luther King for all sorts of horrible motives, racist conceits and everything else. And the fact is, even Bobby Kennedy, somebody I actually interviewed the night he was shot and I liked him and admired his transformation. But the fact is, as attorney general, he allowed Hoover to do this. And so now the Democrats are in a position of cheerleading the FBI. Just wonderful as long as they go after Republicans, as long as they went after Trump. So what I’m trying to do is get past the partisan thing here. Yes, these committees should be better. There should be a Frank Church, but there isn’t. And in fact, we live in a time…
Kiriakou:
This is not a partisan issue.
Scheer:
And I would point out to you, MSNBC has these FBI, CIA people on all the time as great experts. Okay. I am looking at what the voter needs, what the Constitution requires. And I’m taking the Martin Luther King case as an example. It’s a film if people haven’t seen it. MLK/FBI, you get it for $0.99 or something on Amazon. Watch it and you will understand what surveillance is about. And the surveillance done on Martin Luther King is child’s play compared to what can be done on anybody right now. As somebody who has been a victim of government prosecution for telling the truth, which is you, you did what Martin Luther King did. Martin Luther King got in the crosshairs of Lyndon Johnson because he came out against the Vietnam War, was denounced for it by The New York Times and The Washington Post. You know, what’s he doing with peace? Well, the guy won the Nobel Peace Prize, he’s allowed to talk about the Vietnam War. And he said, my government is the major purveyor of violence in the world today. How do I tell kids in the ghetto to shun violence? And so he was punished, as you were, for telling the truth. And so what I want to get, though, is the perspective now of, you know, what have we learned from a film like that? What do we see in the modern society? Because after all, you were in the deep state in the modern time with modern technology. And that’s why I want to talk to you today. We don’t need a bashing of Republicans. We’re getting that all over the place.
Kiriakou:
Oh, no, no, my intent here is not to bash Republicans because the Democrats are equally guilty of all of these things. This is not a partisan issue. You know this statistic but between the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 and Barack Obama’s election in 2009, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the media. Just during the Obama presidency eight of us were charged with espionage for speaking to the media. So this is not a Democrats are good Republicans are bad situation. It’s that all of our elected officials are bad on this issue. Now, you’ve made an important point here, and that is the point that technology has improved. It’s improved in ways that our political figures of the 1960s couldn’t have even fathomed. You know, we know thanks to whistleblowers like Joshua Schulte, a CIA hacker, that the CIA, just as an example, as part of their surveillance program, can turn your smart TV into a microphone. They can remotely engineer the speaker on your TV to act as a microphone, to listen to your conversations, even when the TV is turned off. Right? We now know, thanks to the Vault 7 revelations, that the CIA can hack into the computer system of your car, take over the car and force you off a cliff, off a bridge into an abutment or a tree and kill you. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. We know, thanks to the Vault 7 revelations, that the CIA can take over any computer, even remotely, anywhere in the world and use it against you. They can do the same with your phone. They can, even when it’s off, they can turn it into a microphone to listen to anything that you’re saying. Now, can you imagine if the FBI had had that kind of capability in 1965 or in 1967? It’s incredible. In this absolutely brilliant film that you’re talking about, MLK/FBI, they talk about the FBI doing surveillance and phone taps and wiretaps on Martin Luther King and the people around him. They had to physically go into these people’s homes and unscrew the receiver on their phones and put a bug into the phone, screw it back up and say, “thank you, we just improved your phone service,” and then they leave. To the point where one of Martin Luther King’s deputies said to him, Martin, I think we’re under surveillance, I think they’ve tapped our phones. And Martin Luther King responded, the FBI has far more important things to worry about than what we’re saying. Well, in fact. He was under 24/7 coverage.
Scheer:
There were 200 agents assigned to destroy Martin Luther King.
Kiriakou:
Do you remember where they said also that when Martin Luther King would travel to different cities, all of the FBI agents in each of those cities would literally drop everything they were doing and spy on Martin Luther King. Every city that he traveled to.
Scheer:
They were particularly upset because he won the Nobel Prize. They didn’t want him to be a role model. They didn’t want him to be a hero. And they didn’t support the civil rights movement. That was one of their critiques, you know, that they were not vigorous, say, or we wouldn’t have had the problems in the South that we had. And J. Edgar Hoover was certainly not a big fan of that movement. But first he tried to brand Martin Luther King a communist, because they found some ex-communist or old time communists working in the civil rights movement and advising him at one point. But that didn’t work out so, then, oh, we got sex here. Let’s destroy him. Let’s destroy his marriage. Let’s give a tape to his wife purporting to be the noises of people making love. In those days, it was primitive, so they didn’t often have pictures to go with the tape, but they said, we know he’s in that room or what have you. It’s disgusting. And what I’m saying is what they did to him, they did worse to people around the world because maybe they ended up killing him. We haven’t talked about that. But when I watched that movie, I just kept thinking, you know, how do you have a guy under surveillance 24/7 and yet you can’t prevent his assassination? I mean, that bothered me. But even if we don’t… They certainly wanted him to commit suicide. They wanted to destroy him as a figure. Now, you think about it. This is one of the great recognized, acknowledged heroes of American life right up there, probably in the top five of American heroes. And here was the FBI, which is now celebrated by MSNBC, by the liberal establishment, as the great people to save us. Right? We want them to have more power. You know, I mean, you even have columns in The New York Times and everywhere urging more control of media and surveillance or what have you. So what’s going on? You’ve been there. What do you think about this surveillance society now?
Kiriakou:
First of all, I think that the FBI is an outlaw organization. Not only have I had my home raided by the FBI, but I’ve had my home raided by the FBI twice. Twice. I can’t tell you what it feels like to have 22 people break down your door, all wearing windbreakers that say FBI on the back of it as your neighbors come out to record everything on their cell phones, and have them remain in your home for 8 hours. In one case, smashing a hole in my kitchen wall over here with a sledgehammer, and there’s still a hole in the wall, dumping my potted plants out on the floor.
Scheer:
Can you move your camera so we could see the hole?
Kiriakou:
Yeah, I’ll take it over there, dumping my potted plants out on the floor, looking, allegedly, looking for weapons, taking literally all of my electronics. And then never charging me with a crime. Let’s see. Oh, right back in there. Can you see that?
Scheer:
Yeah. In the right corner.
Kiriakou:
They said that they had information that I was storing weapons back there. I said I don’t own any weapons.
Scheer:
But this is because you, who had been a leading agent in capturing terrorists, alleged terrorists in the war on terror in Afghanistan, you risked your life. You are supposed to have given the name of an open agent to a New York Times reporter. That was your great crime. Your really great crime, as you revealed the torture program.
Kiriakou:
Yes, you’re exactly right, Bob. And I’ll tell you another thing…
Scheer:
For that reason, how many were whether they broke into your house twice? 22.
Kiriakou:
There were 22 of them. Yes.
Scheer:
I won’t exaggerate 22 there were not 24. And they broke in and went through everything of somebody who had been honored by the CIA for your work, right?
Kiriakou:
I got 12 exceptional performance awards, the Sustained Superior Performance Award, the Counterterrorism Service Medal and the Meritorious Service Medal. Yes.
Scheer:
And so these agents still, when they came, they were like trying to get something on Martin Luther King or they didn’t care that he won the Nobel Prize. No, they don’t care about John Kiriakou… Because they’re ordered to go there and find something which is, after all, what the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect you against, you know.
Kiriakou:
And in fact, the FBI agent that physically put the handcuffs on me was none other than Peter Strzok, who has been, you know, implicated up to his chin in this partisan rebranding of the FBI.
Scheer:
Well you should tell us about that. He’s the one who had the what, girlfriend or wife that also had a high ranking.
Kiriakou:
Correct. Yeah. He was cheating on his wife with an attorney at the FBI. And he was the one that was exchanging these text messages with his girlfriend about Donald Trump and they’re not going to stand for Donald Trump’s election and they’re going to take him down and they’re going to block everything he tries to do. And he just made it so partisan, so stupidly, that…
Scheer:
So he’s part of an agency that went after Martin Luther King and was going to smear him for being unfaithful to his wife. But here is this top FBI agent, two of them, and they’re doing what they allege that Martin Luther King did, right?
Kiriakou:
That’s right.
Scheer:
And they’re self-righteous about it.
Kiriakou:
And just as an aside, Bob. Something that I have found to be very important over the last couple of days. Jim Bamford, who was a gifted writer and researcher who wrote, really, the definitive book on NSA years ago.
Scheer:
Definitive underestimates it. He is the first person in this country to make us aware of the surveillance state. I mean, it’s incredible.
Kiriakou:
Well, he’s out with a new book today about the FBI…
Scheer:
Do you have the title?
Kiriakou:
Yeah, I’ll find it.
Scheer:
We could be the first to push it. He does great work.
Kiriakou:
Oh, he does great work. Let’s see. It is called, let me find it. Spyfail…
Scheer:
We’re doing reality TV and radio here.
Kiriakou:
Spyfail—one word—Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence. Now what he’s saying in this book is that over the last ten years, the FBI has lost ten of its China intelligence sources. Ten people have been either killed by the Chinese government or arrested for working on behalf of the FBI. Why is that? Because Peter Strzok’s counterintelligence unit at the FBI had a Chinese mole in it. And the mole was a former CIA operations officer who was directed to go to the CIA and then later on to the FBI as a Chinese translator. This guy was arrested quietly in 2019 and is awaiting trial in Hawaii, of all places. Why isn’t this front page news? There was a Chinese mole inside the FBI and we’re now just learning about it thanks to Jim Bamford? That tells me that there’s something grossly wrong with the mainstream media here.
Scheer:
But let’s get back to the story of what you learned from this movie, because I was shocked. I mean, you know, I got my own files and everything, so I’m not naive about the FBI. But the idea and this is, again, I want to remind people before modern surveillance technology, you know, they allow everything, I mean, how far you read in a book and what you emailed. And people should remember, the Fourth Amendment was considered the most important addition to the Constitution by most of the founders, because they said this was how the King of England was able to destroy any independent thought in the colonies because we could do warrantless searches, come storming into your house and come into your house and find and plant and find evidence and so forth. And so Adams and all of these people, John Adams, said this is the most important. The American Revolution was born with, you know, the assertion of the right to protect your domicile, your house. That goes back to the Magna Carta. You now have a culture which takes what Hoover did. And I mean, my God, it’s like, you know, can we go across the street or can we go to the moon? They can do anything now. They can manipulate. They could make an alternative reality. They can fake sex scenes and movies and everything.
Kiriakou:
Yes, they can. They’re called deepfakes.
Scheer:
Yeah. And they could do all that. And that’s being cheered on, though.
Kiriakou:
Oh, yeah.
Scheer:
That’s the amazing thing, you know, and included by so-called liberals. So that’s why I wanted to talk to you. The irony that we now celebrate as we should, Martin Luther King, the man who, you know, everybody forgets we were in a deeply segregated society at the time, in the mid-fifties when Martin Luther King was leading the bus, you know, to be able to desegregate busses and Montgomery and all that and the movie reminds us of that. We can’t…the US Army was segregated. The Navy was only desegregated in ’47. We supposedly fought a war for democracy and freedom with a segregated military, racially segregated military. Baseball, the national pastime, was segregated until Jackie Robinson, you know. So Martin Luther King’s efforts to desegregate were pioneering and the courage involved. And the idea that at the time when he was showing the greatest courage and also as a minister telling us about the larger moral issues and the importance of nonviolence worldwide, that our secret police agency was with gusto, out to get this guy to kill himself. And some would argue maybe they sat silently by while he was killed.
Kiriakou:
Oh, I think I think they did, actually. You know, at the very end of this film, you can’t see their faces, but you hear their voices. These are the voices of two of the FBI agents who were involved in the surveillance of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where he was assassinated. And they interviewed Jim Comey, which made no sense to me. But anyway, these FBI agents are saying that they were doing the surveillance that night and saw the whole thing unfold. Now…
Scheer:
We should mention to people that Martin Luther King was at his most controversial moment because he was challenging, when he challenged the war in Vietnam, his point was, you’re spending all of these resources, you know, destroying these other people. You’re not going to have any money for your war on poverty. And without economic justice, without dealing with the root causes of poverty, of which segregation had quite a bit to do with the racial basis of poverty, you’re going to fail to bring about a freer society. So he was making this point. Lyndon Johnson was upset about his, you know, opposing the war. And suddenly he didn’t have the protection of Johnson, who had signed the change in law and was an ally of King who King was an ally of Johnson at one point. Now, by taking on the war, he broke his ties to the Johnson administration. They unleashed J. Edgar Hoover. And so here he is down there at this rally, organizing, supporting garbage workers in their strike. He is going to lead this Poor People’s Campaign to Washington embarrassing the jobs administration. The FBI had him under closer surveillance that night than they probably ever did. He was the target and they were unleashed by Johnson to do their deeds and he’s assassinated.
Kiriakou:
And, you know, that leads to a lot of other questions. They interview Andrew Young in this film. Andrew Young, of course, was a lieutenant of Martin Luther King. He was the mayor, he went on to become the mayor of Atlanta. He went on to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Andrew Young’s a giant in his own right, and he and others around King at the time, said that they never believed that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. They believed that it was the FBI or somebody working for the FBI. James Earl Ray was later arrested at Heathrow Airport in London with a false Canadian passport, actually with two false Canadian passports trying to get to Brussels. He was on the run. He at first confessed to killing King, but then later said that he was a dupe and that he didn’t have anything to do with it. There are a lot of people, including African-American leaders, national leaders and family members of Martin Luther King, who believe that James Earl Ray was innocent and that the killer was either the FBI or somebody working on behalf of the FBI.
Scheer:
We’re going to end this but I wanted to get across the point of your column, which people should read, the original source Consortium News, which is now wildly attacked and a publication started by Robert Parry, who is a very good journalist, run by journalists. But now, you know, The New York Times even celebrates, mainstream media celebrates, destroying any alternative websites, certainly Consortium News. But the whole thing is people don’t realize what the Church Commission revealed. They reveal basically the COINTEL, the dirty tricks, the setting people up, the destroying people. And that’s what was happening to Martin Luther King, trying to label him first as some kind of communist agent. That didn’t go over then as some kind of pervert or something, but destroy him. The end justifies the means. That is what the deep state is… why it’s deep.
Kiriakou:
Yes.
Scheer:
Because of what they’re doing, if it’s in the light of day, would be considered reprehensible. That’s what we mean by the deep state, right?
Kiriakou:
That’s right. That’s exactly what we mean by the deep state. Let me just finish on this note. The day after my arrest in 2012, there were two things that happened. One, there was an article in the The Washington Times, which is the conservative paper, it’s owned by the Unification Church, the Moonies, an FBI agent, an anonymous one of course, said that I was a bad actor. Those were the words that he used. I was a bad actor and that I was working on behalf of the terrorists. Okay? Ridiculous. I had blown the whistle on an illegal, immoral and unethical program. The other thing was that I was charged with confirming the name of his former CIA colleague. That name was never made public. But at the same time, there was a former CIA officer in Bethesda, Maryland, who had been thrown out of the CIA. He was a disgruntled former officer. He had a website in which he named seven former CIA officers and was never arrested. And then the director of the CIA, David Petraeus, confirmed the name of ten covert CIA officers to his adulterous girlfriend. He was never prosecuted for that. And I said to my lawyers at the time, well, why aren’t they charged with this crime? And the quick answer was because they didn’t blow the whistle on the torture program.
Scheer:
And you’re leaving out one of the startling examples of Panetta when he was…
Kiriakou:
I wrote a piece in the L.A. Times about that. Leon Panetta did exactly the same thing to a room full of uncleared people, including the journalist.
Scheer:
Yeah, well, also, there were people from Hollywood who were going to make…
Kiriakou:
Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow.
Scheer:
Yeah, they were going to make a movie that ended up praising the CIA and actually suggesting that torture, erroneously, lying really, suggesting that torture was critical to the capture of bin Laden.
Kiriakou:
That’s right, it was a lie.
Scheer:
And if you defend torture, then you will be given the names of the SEAL team that got bin Laden, which would be a very important secret because their lives could be threatened and so forth. But they didn’t go to jail and Leon Panetta didn’t. So that’s the point and the hypocrisy. But, you know. Do you have a last word?
Kiriakou:
No, I’m so glad that you reached out to me over this. I think this is a very important topic. And even though what happened to Martin Luther King happened some 55 years ago, it’s still just as current today. It’s just as important today as it was in 1968.
Scheer:
Because of modern technology, it’s more important you can alter reality, you can learn… And, you know, even in that situation, we don’t really know what was going on because we got FBI agents and they are putting things in the margin suggesting worse things happened and so forth, and they’re writing it and distorting it. But now, my goodness, you know what you can… And we’ve had leading politicians already have to leave office. You know, the former governor of New York allegedly was involved with some prostitute or something, boom, they’re gone, no longer a possible presidential candidate and so forth. And so it’s odd that… It’s great that Martin Luther King survived, however, I would warn people in 2027, those documents are supposed to be released.
Kiriakou:
That’s right.
Scheer:
And I suspect there will be people who use that to finally destroy the image of, unquestionably, one of the five greatest Americans of all time in terms of their positive impact on this society. They’ll be so people chomping at the bit to do him in.
Kiriakou:
You know. That’s right. That is right. It’ll never end.
Scheer:
Yeah. Sadly, but again, we’re here to warn people and so you were the real CIA, I’m the poor man’s sheer intelligence that’s where I got the word, actually given to me by the station. I want to thank you, John Kiriakou, a great American, punished for, what, almost two years in prison for really coming out and exposing the torture program. That was it. And they went after you. And what did you say, 22 of these FBI agents, they couldn’t go in there and bust up Martin Luther King’s place because that would have been too much news, what they could do. On that note, I want to thank, by the way, before we get off here, I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at the station. KCRW in Santa Monica, a great station, NPR station for hosting these podcasts. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, the JKW Foundation, and the memory of a very independent, important journalist, Jean Stein, for helping fund these shows. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence. Take care.