McGovern’s ‘Presidential’ CIA Briefing (ep. 4)

By Ray McGovern and Robert Scheer / Original to ScheerPost

In the fourth episode of “Playing President,” Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA veteran and briefer of five presidents, continues to make sense of the world to “President” Scheer, who prepared for this role through his decades as a journalist, including in-depth interviews with five presidents from Nixon to Clinton. This week the focus continues on the Middle East and what could come next from Israel as well as the future of America’s support for other military ventures overseas.

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy. 

McGovern: Good morning, Mr. President. 

Scheer: Good to see you again, Ray. You’ve been working for the CIA for 27 years, and I know we’ve had a lot of ups and downs. Isn’t this one of the craziest mornings? Here I am still the president of the United States. I do tell Netanyahu that he can’t go in there anymore, and the way he’s going in, and he don’t care. He’s got Congress on his side. He’s even got a big chunk of the media on his side. What’s happening? How bad is this? How serious is it? What’s going on? And the Gaza deal.

McGovern: Mr. President, let’s start with that. That’s what I had intended. I think probably the best way to describe the Israeli ruling leaders there, their reaction to your stopping of that one shipment with the 2, 000 pound bombs is to look at Ben Gvir, one of the highest and senior Israeli officials.

I have a picture of his reaction on the face of the Jerusalem Post, I believe. Max, could we show that one?

As we speak here the Israeli people are going into Gaza without really stopping. They have asked the Gazan — there he is, there’s Ben Gavir he’s saying, “Hamas loves Biden.” Whoa. One of the leaders– 

Scheer: Who is this guy anyway? Is he a top dog there?

McGovern: Ben Gvir, yeah. He’s the top person next to Netanyahu. I think he’s in charge of national security and Smotrich, also one of the big heavy hitters here, has made fun of your stop of this one Shipment of the 2, 000 pound bombs that can destroy a whole city. And meanwhile, of course, the other aid flows in, the other arms aid, but they’ve made a big joke out of this.

And as a matter of fact, when you look at what Blinken said yesterday on a Sunday news show, what he said was ‘we could continue that or even expand that stoppage, but right now we’re sending everything in except those two thousand pound bombs, and we’ll continue to do that.’

People are having real trouble reading what your mind is and how this is all going to come out with Ben Gavir calling you a favorite of Hamas, and the Israeli leaders going willy nilly doing what they want to. 

Scheer: But wait a minute, is this some kind of crackpot or something? He’s not speaking for Netanyahu, for Bibi, is he?

Bibi wouldn’t say something like that. I’ve been supporting these people forever, and what does it mean? 

McGovern: Yeah, Bibi is hemmed in by these extreme rightists. Yeah, Bibi would probably not say that, at least not out loud, but Ben Gavir is what you have to really contend with, because Ben Gavir could destroy the cabinet, and then Bibi himself would be left to fend for himself with three So Ben Gavir three criminal trials against him once he leaves office.

There was an interesting article in Haaretz by Ehud Olmertz, who used to be prime minister about ten years ago, and let me just read you, it’s really quite interesting what he said about what he said about Benjamin Netanyahu’s real motivation here. He says and this is a quote “it’s certainly customary to say that Netanyahu really wants to bring those hostages back, but it’s clear that what he really wants is to make sure he stays in office” and to quote here, “it’s clear, but that it’s incongruent with Netanyahu’s personal needs.”

So, freeing the hostages, to tamp down this war, to have a ceasefire is, in the words of Olmert, “incongruent with Netanyahu’s needs.” Now, that clearly means that Netanyahu will go to jail if he doesn’t stay in office. And he cares much less about what happens in Gaza than the fact that he keeps it going and therefore stays out of jail.

That’s a very bold way of putting it, but it’s not me this time. It’s a former prime minister. 

Scheer: I noticed, Ray, you keep bringing up that Haaretz paper, but that’s from that old labor party there, and they don’t even exist. They’re not even in the parliament that connects it anymore. And you got there in Israel now, you got Sheldon Adelman, he’s not with us anymore. But isn’t his paper like the real big deal there? It is, yeah. It’s more like the New York Post or something, right? What are, and are they behind this Gavir guy? 

McGovern: Yes, they are. I have to tell you that Haaretz has limited influence. It’s read by the intelligentsia or the people who really want to know what’s going on.

It’s very outspoken though. As a matter of fact, you don’t have any broadsheets like that in the United States, just as a matter of curiosity. Haaretz says what lots of people think, and the pity is, as you, you’re right, the reason 68 percent of the Israeli populace wants to do in the rest of the Palestinians, is because they read Sheldon Adelson’s and all the hard right publications saying ‘this is okay to do because somehow we have the divine right to cleanse our country from Palestinians.’

So you’re right, but Haaretz is fairly interesting for Olmert to get in there and to say that, hey, this is the real deal here. Benjamin Netanyahu is not worried about much else than his own personal, how do you put it, his personal needs. 

Scheer: So what’s going on here? They want to finish me off so they get Trump in, and Trump will do whatever they want? Or how bad is it today now?

Come on now it’s Monday and they weren’t supposed to go in there in this way. Blinken told me they weren’t going to do this. They were going to listen to us. And then we had a threat of cutting stuff off they can’t use, but what’s going to happen? Is it all going to fall apart?

You’re talking now, 35, 000 people, everybody keeps bringing up children women, they’re comparing, they’re using this word “genocide” all the time. That’s obscene, isn’t it? That’s disrespectful. That’s anti-semitic, actually — Congress just passed that one. It’s going to be anti-semitic to say that, but still, with this election, they’re going to be telling me that I betrayed Israel, right? 

And then, if I say something against that, then the polls show I’m in trouble in these swing states where you’re actually amazing enough, we never heard about it before. You got people who are supposed to be sympathetic with the Palestinians, and a whole new group there you’re talking about.

So I’m between a rock and a hard place on this one. What do I do? What, who’s going to listen to me now? Tell me you’ve been around a long time, Ray? 

McGovern: Mr. President, I can only fill you in on some of the immediate events and some of the other things that aren’t exposed in the mainstream media.

Let me just quote a few here. I put them aside here. Let’s see. You know, of course, that Ambassador Thomas Greenfield has been disinvited from one college, Xavier University, in Louisiana, which is the oldest Black college that is also Catholic in the United States.

Also from the University of Vermont. She was invited and then disinvited. So that’s the tone of the times. 

Scheer: Bernie Sanders now, he’s cut and run on this thing here. He’s supposed to be the Jewish Senator, he was going to be the Jewish president. And he’s making life miserable for me because he says it’s a war against the Palestinians now, and then I’m looking like a bad guy here, but tell me what’s going to happen on the ground, enough about the politics, are they going to start shooting up people?

I saw something that huge numbers are getting off, but it takes you a thousand bucks to get a taxi out of there or something, to get a tent. Famine, we’re hearing all this, but is this all going to be my worst nightmare? 

McGovern: Mr. President most observers would say not crassly, but objectively that’s up to you.

In other words, if Blinken keeps saying, oh, we’re going to send all those arms except the ones that destroy whole blocks of cities and just the ones that destroy just half a block, we’re sending. The signal given to Netanyahu, Smotrich, and this Ben Gavir is, just as in the past, we will not object to their doing what they want to do.

And what they want to do, Mr. President, I hate to tell you, but there are more than a million people at the southern part of Gaza now. They’re asking them to get out of the way, but there’s no place to get out of the way. They’re going to be all killed. They’re going to be all injured. There’s no place for them to go.

And people are going to, these students are not going to stop objecting to that. And people are going to say this is a rock and a hard place. But so far, as John Mearsheimer, the prominent political scientist says it will be the Jewish lobby, the Israel lobby, that calls the shots here.

And so far with U. S. continuing support, voiced most recently yesterday by Blinken, everyone will be able to see that when you weigh the merits of this situation and you look at your election, your decisions depend on that. And not so much on what happens to these one million plus Gazans subject to, you said genocide.

That’s a United Nations term that comes from the International Court of Justice, which said there’s lots of evidence that’s going on. There’s a plausible genocide going on in Gaza and that’s three months ago. 

Scheer: Ray it’s not that easy for me to make time in the schedule for these briefings, and I know you like briefed Ronald Reagan, he wouldn’t get up most of the time and you had to brief, other folks but I talked to you because you’ve been around so long and so much of this, but people are starting to say you’re a bit soft on all this, and it’s not just, I want to do what’s right for the country and I want to do what’s right for the people in Israel there, but the fact of the matter is if you don’t like what I’m doing, you’re certainly not going to vote for Trump.

Trump’s attacking me all over the place, right? And, I have to think about politics because I don’t want to turn the country over to Trump. And if I don’t play ball with Netanyahu now, and I agree, he’s got to survive politically. We all know about that. People are trying to survive politically.

What’s my options here? What do I do? Cut off arms? You say it’s my choice? That’s suicide, right? 

McGovern: Mr. President it comes a time when principle often overshadows politics. In my view, this is such a time, 1 million plus people being eliminated, being blown apart. That’s a lot on anyone’s conscience.

And winning an election, of course, is also very important, especially given your opponent. But I think that most people are looking at you now, and I hope that John Mearsheimer, for the first time in his life, is wrong when he says that you will always bow unequivocally to what the Israel lobby says, because that’s the only thing that matters in terms of winning an election.

Pardon me for being so frank, but it really is up to you. You could get on the telephone right now and stop the slaughter, stop the plausible genocide in Gaza. 

Scheer: How’s that? They got a lot of weapons over there in Israel. We’ve given them all this stuff. Even if I don’t send anything, they certainly got the ability to wipe out civilians.

There’s no anti aircraft force there with the Palestinians. They don’t have any Navy. What are we talking about? Israel can do whatever they want to do. And so I can’t stop that. I can go where I can force aid in there. I can cross the border. We can send people.

That’s something we’ve never done, and as I say, I’m running against a guy now. Wake up. I don’t know. How close are you to retirement, Ray? Because, you don’t, I know you’ve given advice to presidents when they had to intervene and had to be aggressive. Why don’t you man up here?

Are you really giving me the full choices or are you getting a little soft in your old age? 

McGovern: Mr. President, when I did brief president Reagan, 241 Marines were blown up in Lebanon. He had a big choice to make. Does he double down, or does he do what many of us thought the sensible thing was, pull them out of there.

Don’t have them sitting ducks. Now, there are sitting ducks in Iraq, in Syria. There are sitting ducks all over the Middle East that will be vulnerable to violence, terrorism, if you want to call it that, from Hezbollah, from Hamas, from all these insurgent groups that would have it in for the United States, were you to acquiesce in the bloodbath that is coming that seems almost certain to come absent your telephone call in Gaza?

It’s very serious. 

Scheer: And why are you bringing up Reagan? So what did he do? 

McGovern: He was bombing Lebanon. He had the battleships off the Mediterranean coast there and they were bombing the hell out of Syria. And the terrorists got through the Marine barracks and killed if memory serves, 241 Marines. The flag was up and Reagan had to figure out what to do. And what he did was not double down, but pull out. And that turned out to be a very wise move because once you’re vulnerable like that, there you go, 1983. When you’re really vulnerable like that, you have to figure out what your equities are, and his equities were to pull back and to focus on other things like arms control agreements with the Soviet Union at the time.

Scheer: So wait a minute, Reagan, you’re now telling me, would have been called a pro Russian? And Israel would be down on him and condemning him? 

McGovern: They did actually. And he faced into it. In other words, there was a very sturdy lobby at that point as well called AIPAC, the Israel lobby.

They decried what Reagan ended up doing, but he did it anyway, and it was the only sensible thing to do, many of us felt at the time. We didn’t advocate what to do. What we said was, “if you double down, X, Y, and Z is going to happen.” And that’s what we’re really suggesting to you. If you look to day two, yes, you’re right, the Israelis can pretty much get rid of all those Palestinians in Gaza.

But on day two, if there’s no more arms, they are very vulnerable as they have never been before since 1948. If the U.S. withdraws its support of armed support, economic support if it, in other words, you’re sitting in the catbird seat, Mr. President. Again, I’m not advocating anything, but I’m just spelling out your options, as we like to do in intelligence.

If you do this, what? If you do that, the other thing. And if you make that telephone call, as night follows the day, this will be the end of it because Israel cannot possibly survive without military support from the United States of America. 

Scheer: Ray, look I’m just going to be kind here, because if it was anybody else, this would be our last conversation.

And you’re correct. It’s not your job to give me political. But when you say I’m in the catbird seat it’s clear you’ve never held office, let alone at this level. And AIPAC you’re mentioning, it’s not like they’re not around now, right? And it’s not just AIPAC, you’ve got the whole U.S. Congress beholden to them. Look what they’re passing these days and everything like that. You’re asking me to do something where the next resolution that passes is going to be for me to be prosecuted, and they’re going to call me anti-semitic and everything. And, what are you talking about?

What kind of dream world do you live in? That’s what’s wrong with intelligence. Intelligence has got to be practical. So tell me, of course, we’re going to have other things you got to talk about, we’re in a tense moment here now. And if you were in this so-called catbird seat, yet you want to help the country by not letting Donald Trump become president.

Cause you know, sometimes I think maybe you’re working with him or something, because the way to ensure his election is for me to follow your advice right now. You know that, right? And so what really could you do right now in the next 24 hours this week? What? 

McGovern: Mr. President, with all due respect, I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a helper of Trump before.Please. 

What I’m saying here is when you’ve been around for a while, and you know the story of Vietnam, for example. You know it, or you’ve read about it. Now, what happened there was that the president was misled. LBJ was told that we were winning and we were losing.

Whoa! Sound familiar? The same exact thing is going on in Ukraine right now, okay? And what happened was there was a countrywide offensive mounted by the Vietnamese communists in January and February of 1968 to the point where Johnson said, Oh my God, I have been misled. Westmoreland You’re not getting 206,000 more troops, I’m going to call a bombing pause, I’m going to go to negotiations, and LBJ added on the 31st of March 1968, I’m not going to run for reelection.

Now, that was because the tide was turning, Bobby Kennedy was running against him, so was McCarthy, they were gathering all kinds of, he said, the war is lost. If I hadn’t been lied to, if I believed those lies, I would have given Westmoreland 206,000 more troops. He would have gone up through North Vietnam, up to China, for God’s sake.

No, I’m calling it quits. Now, I’m not suggesting anything. All I’m saying is that experience came from the fact that Westmoreland lied to the president, just as one of his successors here, General Lloyd Austin, has lied to you about progress in Ukraine, and specifically telling the CIA director and telling you that Putin had already lost in early July of last year.

Does that strike you as odd? All of a sudden, Putin is going to win unless we give $61 billion. So anyways, you’ve been lied to, Mr. President. We know that because we’ve had that experience. We have no military analytic capability anymore in the CIA. That was ceded to the Pentagon, unfortunately, by Robert Gates. 

So what you’re getting is unadulterated fixed intelligence from a guy named Austin who, when he was CENTCOM commander he had 50 analysts from, intelligence analysts from CENTCOM and from the Defense Intelligence Agency file a formal complaint with the Pentagon IG saying Austin and the people around him were falsifying the intelligence to make it appear that the US was doing a great job in Syria.

And guess what? A year and a half later the general who was doing this investigation. No, it was largely no, it was largely not that, but it was that, that was unprecedented. 50 intelligence analysts. So the same thing has happened on Ukraine. By the same guy, yeah, and Bill Burns in the CIA doesn’t have the kind of analytic capability anymore to challenge that as we back in the day did have on Vietnam.

Scheer: So Ray I don’t quite, we got something missing here. We went from Gaza now to Ukraine. I know you got your briefing prepared there, but you basically want me to threaten to pull aid from Netanyahu from Israel that alone would destroy my election chance. But now the one thing I got against Trump is, he’s a Putin simp.

You’re now telling me that I should play ball with Putin. I should give away to one, strength here I got with the, I don’t want what you call them, the military industrial complex, I call them our national security apparatus, but there I got Trump against the wall because, he wants to cause a lot of trouble for me with, Israel and he thinks, oh, yeah, he would be tougher than anybody, but on Ukraine, that’s all his problem, right?

He created this. He was playing ball with Putin when he was president. Isn’t that what your intelligence shows? Hello? You hear me, Ray? 

McGovern: I can hear you, Bob. Yeah. Yeah. 

Scheer: We should have kept doing this in person. This thing about. Whatever we’re using here now, trying to work from home now?

Huh? Yeah, everybody Nobody came back to work. Yeah, you guys stay home all the time. So where’s that intern, Max? Can you straighten this out? I can’t hear you. I don’t know if the 

McGovern: Max we gotta 

Scheer: wrap this up anyway, I got a country to run here. But you want to wrap that up about what you’re saying?

So what you’re telling me is Ukraine’s falling apart? 

McGovern: Yeah. Oh, it says we’re live now. Okay. Yeah. Mr. President, it would be funny if it weren’t so serious. I talked about the misleading intelligence that General Austin or Secretary of Defense Austin has been giving. And Bill Burns has been mouthing to the President to the point where you have been saying as July last year that Putin had already been defeated in Ukraine.

There was a CNN item over the weekend, which speaks volumes. Okay maybe just the, it was written by this General Ben Hodges, who used to command NATO troops, American troops in Europe. And he’s one of the favorite CNN commentators. And the title speaks for itself. Here it is: “We have the arms authorization.What is needed now is a strategy. We need a strategy now for Ukraine.”

Wow, strategy. So in other words, we have all these arms. We have to figure out how to use them. And this comes, what two and a half years into the fray. So the experience on Ukraine, Mr. President has been a woeful one.

The intelligence you’ve been given has been given with a thought to ingratiate themselves with you. Ukraine is losing badly. There is no chance that the additional aid that has been approved will get there, and it will get there on time, and when Putin goes to Beijing, and that will be, Putin will be going to Beijing, he said, in May. Within the next two weeks, he and Xi Jinping are going to be left to decide whether or not, what to do with respect to Ukraine.

Should they keep saying, as the Russians keep saying, let’s negotiate, we’re open to negotiation, or should they go all the way to the Dnieper River and face you with a total defeat in Ukraine before the election. The stakes are very high. You should just know that the people running your policy toward Ukraine, especially the military leaders, have not been honest with you.

And you’re facing another rock and a hard place there with the proviso that nobody else probably tells you. But serious Russian leaders in every other speech they make say, let’s negotiate. And the last time this came up, the last time we were so close to World War III and a nuclear kind of exchange was in 1962.

And the big difference there, Mr. President, was we had open communications with the Russians. We were able to solve that — Kennedy and Khrushchev, it was a teletype in those days, but it worked. Okay. Now our fear is there’s no communication with Russian leaders. And so when they threatened as they did this week to do exercises, with tactical nuclear weapons, exercises by air and by sea, now our analysts will not be able to tell, “oh, is this the real deal or what,” without that kind of secure communication.

This was unprecedented that the Russians would say, “look, we’re running exercises with non-strategic, read, tactical nuclear weapons.” Now, if there’s no way to communicate when those exercises start, what are the intelligence analysts in Europe and the United States going to think, “oh my god, this may be the real thing.”

The real thing was threatened several times in the past. I could tell you it was just by luck, mostly by luck, that the right people were in the right place and did the right thing and turned the faucet off from nuclear war. 

Scheer: That’s that’s all you got, huh, Ray. Disaster in Gaza, and now World War III, if I don’t go along with what capitulation, what are we supposed to do?

I’m going to tell Congress, put up $60, what, $61 billion dollars, and that’s not going to matter? How do I handle that one? I know you don’t give political advice, but, the fact of the matter is war is the extension of politics, the failure of politics, whatever it is, and we’re in this crazy situation where I’ve given Israel everything they ever want for my whole political career.

There’s a report out now, I’ve got more money from what you call the Israel lobby than any other politician, came out today. So I saw it, and yeah, I get more than sure, I get more than anybody, now I’m going to be accused of betraying Israel because I won’t let them kill all these people or I can’t stop it.

And then on Ukraine. Where the one issue I got is that, Trump’s a simp of this guy Putin, and and I can hit him on that one, and you’re telling me no. The money we sent, what are they going to say? It’s not enough, or it came too late? Is that what I’m hearing? 

McGovern: They’ve already said it’s, they’ve already said it’s not enough.

They said on day one. I have to tell you that when Congress was briefed, and by his own admission, Mike Johnson’s mind was changed, so he cast that one vote, breaking the tie on further aid. He said, Oh, he was convinced by the intelligence briefings. I have to tell you, Mr. President, those briefings did not come from professional intelligence analysts telling the truth.

They came from the highest officials of the intelligence apparatus, not telling the truth. And what I’m saying here is this is not the first time this has happened, and the president has been misled, and so has the Congress, and pretty soon, push will come to shove, and the Russians and the Chinese in the next couple of weeks will be deciding what to do about Ukraine because they hold the upper hand. 

And one option that I don’t think you’ve been told about is take the Russians at their word saying they’re willing to talk about what happens in Ukraine rather than have a complete embargo on contacts between foreign ministers or whatever. There’s no, nothing going on now, Mr. President. And that’s, in our view. A very dangerous situation, and we’ve seen a lot of that in the past. 

Scheer: Ray, I’m going to keep doing this with you because there is some small chance that what you’re saying makes sense and so forth. But I’m getting a lot of advice here that we are going to turn that corner in Ukraine.

I’m also getting a lot of advice here that Bibi will come to his senses and not let these, whatever you call them, this more extreme element there in Israel. I used to hear Bibi was the extreme from the old labor party people, but now you got these other people who make Bibi look like a moderate.

And so I’m going to go, obviously you’re not the only one I’m listening to. I got a whole staff here, State Department, Defense Department, everything else. But sometimes I think I just talked to you because it’s amusing. You’re an old timer. Sometimes I talk to you because, hey, you have called it right in the past.

And I need to hear this. That’s what I know. I’ve been around a long time. I know, I can be lied to by some of the best. So we’ll keep doing it. But try to listen to them a little more. It’s not like they don’t know what they’re talking about. They got a lot of information. And anyway.

The media listens to them, whether I do or not. That’s what the media listens to. And let me tell you, even the most respectable news organizations are going to tear me a new one if I don’t hang in there on Ukraine. And if I don’t, if I break any kind of relation with Israel, which, that’s the third rail, we all know that.

So let’s call it a morning here, and try to come in with a little more positive attitude the next time. Okay, I want to push, I respect 27 years. It’s a long time that you put in there, the CIA. And so I got to give it some little respect. 

McGovern: All right, president, if I could have a final word it’s simply that I don’t normally quote things about domestic intelligence or domestic polls.

But there is the other side of this that I hope you are also aware of, and that is That the students on these campuses are making quite some headway to include articles in the New York Times of all places reflecting favorably on their persistence. The other thing is that I read in the news today that five battlefields or battleground states are really turning toward that other fellow with the orange hair, and it’s because of the policy on genocide in Gaza.

So that’s the other side of it. You may get lots of support, and you do, of course. You’re distinguished for getting the most support from the Israel lobby, but there’s this other support that you have to think about. You’re losing that. And you’re losing that very quickly and I ask your forgiveness for commenting on domestic politics like this, but that needs to be mentioned as a balance for your decision making, again, as to whether you make the telephone call or not.

That’s really up to you. I dare say it will be on your conscience no matter whether you make the call or you don’t. 

Scheer: Ray, I’m going to end this now, but let me just tell you what happened there with Lyndon Johnson using that example and everything you had Richard Nixon. Who, he looks like a pinko pacifist now by comparison to this version of Trump.

Trump can come at you a lot of different ways. He could talk about, he could sit down with the leader of North Korea and make peace or something. But on the other hand, I show any weakness here, that’s the trap here, right? Think about that until we have our week. We’re back to a weekly meeting cause I can’t put this kind of time in there.

But when I see you next Monday. Think about that. That’s really the dilemma. That if Trump plays that hard line thing, sure. If he came out and said, yeah, I could just settle this. And I will, I’ll raise the question that he was willing to talk to the North Koreans and even crossed over that line, went into their territory.

My God, that’s Donald Trump. So there’s a couple of different Donald Trumps, but if he just comes at me. With this, like he’s going to make war better than I can. I got answers on that one, certainly on Ukraine. And I know Ray, you just don’t want Donald Trump to be president.

And even the New York Times, they sure don’t want them to be. You don’t understand that whole world. That’s why we got the lesser evil going here. And that’s something, you’ll have to trust me. I know how to do that. I don’t need the CIA to tell me how to play the lesser evil card.

But anyway, I’m just being friendly and honest with you because I do respect your service. And my patience is getting a little thin here. So try to come back with a more positive thing. What we can do going forward. Okay. That’s it.

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Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27 years as a C.I.A. analyst included leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and conducting the morning briefings of the President’s Daily Brief. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, an independent ScheerPost podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.

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