#114 Tim Parlatore - The Weaponization of 3 Letter Agencies

Tim Parlatore is a former Naval Officer and founder of Parlatore Law Group. He has represented Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher and President Donald Trump, among many other high profile cases. In this episode, Shawn and Tim discuss the falling recruitment rates of the U. S. Military and the current outlook for the armed forces as a whole. They also discuss the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ and how the country will look post the 2024 election. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://expressvpn.com/shawn Tim Parlatore Links: Website - https://parlatorelawgroup.com Twitter/X - https://twitter.com/timparlatore IG - https://www.instagram.com/parlatorelawgroup Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Tim Parlatory, welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. Round number three. Yep. I'm pumped, man. Thank you for coming. We got a couple of topics that I want to cover with you. To include bringing retirees back into the military, the weaponization of federal agencies and the legal system, the divisiveness that we're seeing across the country, and how people are kind of not kind of. I feel like people are being led around the nose in the country and not in being told what to think. And I think a lot of people are falling right into it. You see people making excuses for political candidates,

• 1:50Shawn Ryan?

  political parties on both sides of the aisle. And to be honest, I just find it rather disgusting.

• 2:01Shawn Ryan?

  And...

• 2:04Shawn Ryan?

  I want to talk about how the US government might be able to get the trust back in the American people. I don't know if that's even possible at this point, but we'll find out. I just, Tim, you just always have, you're a super level-headed guy. You always have a a unique and different perspective than than what everybody else is saying because they all feed off of each other, right? And and I just, I love the perspectives that you bring and I respect, I respect everything you have to say. And so, thank you for coming. Well, thank you. Looking forward to diving into these topics. And, you know, usually I give an introduction, but you being on for the third time, I don't feel like I need to give

• 2:49Shawn Ryan?

  an introduction, but powerhouse attorney, been involved in several

• 2:56Shawn Ryan?

  huge national cases and so for anybody that is interested, all you gotta do is Google the name, but I know the only reason you probably came back is

• 3:10Shawn Ryan?

  for the presence. Ah, wonderful. My wife hates the last ones. Hey, they're still legal in all 50 states, so. Thank you. Believe it or not. You're welcome. Love the gummy bears. But,

• 3:28Shawn Ryan?

  you know, let's just kick it off. One thing that we were kind of talking about at lunch is the recruitment numbers in the military and how they are retention is atrocious, recruitment is atrocious. Now, I just had my friend Scott Mann here not long ago to help me put together a different interview. There was, there was, there was rather complicated and and in the middle of that, he had told me how they are reaching out and contemplating bringing military retirees up to the age of 70 back into the military. What is

• 4:13Shawn Ryan?

  your perspective on that?

• 4:17Tim Parlatore?

  You know, it's an interesting issue that has a lot of facets to it. Bottom line, I think it's a good idea to make that something that is open. Because I think that a lot of retirees do have a lot to offer. Depending on the role. You know, I mean, I don't think we want to have somebody who's up to the age of 70, you know, going and kicking at a door at this point. But, you know, certainly from the perspective of, you know, leadership. One major problem that I've always thought in the military is there has to be this kind of continuity up the chain of command through your career progression.

• 5:00Tim Parlatore?

  And if you kind of fall off at any one point, you can't continue to progress. And so if you haven't hit the wickets by the certain time, then you can't get promoted to the next rank. And therefore then you have to get out. And that's a concept that I really don't think makes a lot of sense. But then, once you get out, there's no way back in. And so if you look at every other industry out there, including every other branch of the federal government, people go in and out all the time. You know, you can be an FBI agent, then go work in private industry and apply to come back in.

• 5:44Tim Parlatore?

  But in the military, you can't really do it. In the reserves, to a certain extent, but on the active duty side, not really. And so what you end up with is at the higher up positions, you have some good people and you have some people who just decided to stay. And you have some great people who decided to leave earlier on, get experience on the outside. And if they were able to come back, and I think that this, you know, we're talking specifically about retirees for right now. But the idea of bringing back a retiree who has tremendous experience.

• 6:22Tim Parlatore?

  But also a house who has tremendous perspective from what they've done after they've gotten out to then come back and bring all those lessons, you know, back in, I think it's an incredible value added. Now, obviously, the articles about this are written from a slightly different perspective of, isn't this a sad state of affairs that we are unable to meet our recruiting goals? And so therefore, we need to, you know, reach out to people up to the age of 70, he had to come fill these, you know, these slots, which I think is a little bit of a a logical misstep, because while we can't reach the recruiting goals, that's for the

• 7:03Tim Parlatore?

  lowest ranks. We're not bringing retirees back in to fill those slots. We're bringing them back in because of retention issues. And when you think about as people go up, if you have more people putting in their retirement papers at 20 years than you expected, all of a sudden, how many people do you have left to take on these bigger jobs?

• 7:31Shawn Ryan?

  I really appreciate the perspective that you bring, and I don't disagree with it.

• 7:40Shawn Ryan?

  I do, I don't think that the, the government or whoever is, whoever is trying to get retirees back in is, I don't think, I just don't feel like that's their goal.

• 7:55Tim Parlatore?

  It may not be.

• 7:56Shawn Ryan?

  I feel that their goal is, well, maybe not their goal, but it's, these guys already served, we have problems, we need to get them back in. Instead of actually looking at why nobody is signing up for the military, why they can't keep anybody in the military, the, the old warrior mindset, I guess I can't say it's completely gone, but it's not like it used to be.

• 8:24Tim Parlatore?

  No.

• 8:24Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, maybe instead of forcing retirees back into the military, because they're not gonna, I don't feel like they would use their experience.

• 8:35Shawn Ryan?

  I think that they would take a 70-year-old man who, I mean, the last war was 20 years, put 20, a 20-year seasoned warrior back in and force him to go through pronoun training, gender training, and try to... It's trying to fit a square into a round hole.

• 9:01Tim Parlatore?

  It is definitely one of those counterintuitive things of trying to bring in these old war horses into a, you know, a newer, evolved organization. And I, and I think kind of the, the perspective I have on it is not based on what I think their intent is, but rather what the effect could be.

• 9:29Tim Parlatore?

  You know, I think that the intent may be, the intent is probably, honestly, just desperation that, you know, we don't have enough people. I mean, you have issues, consider it in, in the Navy, where so many people are leaving at the O5 level, that how many people do you have left to screen for major command? So all of a sudden, you know, whereas, you know, when I came in, the idea of being, you know, the captain of a, of a cruiser or an aircraft carrier was like the highest thing that you could possibly aspire to. And yet now, to screen for major command, it's so much of a smaller group.

• 10:12Tim Parlatore?

  And so it's not as, as rigorous or as difficult to screen for that job because so many people are leaving earlier. And, you know, the reason they're leaving earlier is, you know, various things. There's a lot of reasons why, and yes, it certainly does make sense in the long term to identify why did people leave? How do we get them, you know, to stay?

• 10:38Tim Parlatore?

  Maybe the unintended benefit is when you start to bring some of these older men and women back in, that they can help you fix that problem and say, okay, you know why I got out? This is why. This is how you could fix it.

• 10:50Shawn Ryan?

  They have to know why people are getting out. I mean, they sent letters, you know, with the, with the mandatory vaccine requirement that they shoved in everybody's face. You know, now they're sending letters saying, because didn't they got, was it dishonorable or other than honorable?

• 11:09Tim Parlatore?

  So it depends on the one, but most of them did get honorable discharges, but they got honorable discharges with, you know, RE codes, reenlistment codes that prevented them from coming back in. And I've seen some of these DD 214s, but they actually wrote down at the bottom honorable discharge, but discharge, you know, before the end of enlistment in lieu of charges.

• 11:37Tim Parlatore?

  And it doesn't specifically say charges for vaccine. You could look at that and say, you know, what were they going to be charged with?

• 11:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, I just don't see any, I'm getting angry. I don't, I don't see any steps to actually rectify the situation or to, to, to keep retention. To me, this seems like a, like a, like, like an overstep on, hey, we know you've spent a lifetime here serving your country. We can't get the younger generation to sign up, so we're going to need you back. Oh, and you're going to play by all these new rules that you retired early to get out and get the hell away from, whether it's vaccine mandates or whatever the, whatever the, the, this week's latest agenda is.

• 12:28Shawn Ryan?

  We've all seen the recruiting videos that the Navy put out, was the Navy, right?

• 12:33Tim Parlatore?

  Probably.

• 12:34Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and it was probably all of them, but I mean, they completely changed the culture within the military, completely changed the values, and nobody wants to sign up now because they draw from a certain demographic of people. And guess what? The people that want this other shit, they don't, they don't want to serve in the military. Well, maybe you should start the draft and draft the people that wanted this in, in there. Get them in there. Let them serve in this shit. And, and Man, she's such a double edged sword and it really, it just irks me and it bothers me. I go to bed thinking about these things and, and it's a double edged sword because it's

• 13:19Shawn Ryan?

  our country.

• 13:20Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Shawn Ryan?

  Somebody's got to defend it and.

• 13:26Shawn Ryan?

  But it's a voluntary program, right?

• 13:28Tim Parlatore?

  It is a voluntary program and that's, that's one thing is, you know, the, the program on the table right now, and it's just the army for right now, it is voluntary. You know, there is a mechanism where they can recall retirees to active duty, but that this program, they go out and they get retirees who are willing to volunteer and therefore they consent to what would otherwise be an involuntary recall. So they're not forcing anybody to come back.

• 13:58Tim Parlatore?

  Yet.

• 14:00Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I don't, I don't, I don't think anybody believes in what we're, I can't say anybody, I can't say I don't think anybody believes, because I think a lot of people that have never been to war support what we're doing right now, but everybody who's been to war is against what we're doing right now. All these, the proxy war in Ukraine.

• 14:21Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Shawn Ryan?

  You know, the, the, the way that, that we left Afghanistan and abandoned our allies to be murdered, raped, killed, abused, all of women's rights are gone again. I mean, it's, and you know, it's, it's, it's, it makes me wonder what the, what, what the hell was my service for?

• 14:49Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of guys are wondering this.

• 14:51Tim Parlatore?

  It does.

• 14:54Tim Parlatore?

  And I guess for me, I look at it as one of those things of, yes, there are problems. And I could either be.

• 15:06Tim Parlatore?

  The angry veteran that's just sitting there saying, "Oh, it's not like when I was in and they're all screwed up." Or I could go and say, "Hey, I'd like to be part of the solution here." You know? And, and so I think that the retirees that are going to sign up for this problem, for this program, rather, are going to be the ones that want to be part of the solution. And, and that's, you know, that's something that, you know, I can't tell you how many clients that I've talked to where they sit there and they say, "You know, Tim, I just want to drop my papers." And I beg them not to.

• 15:49Tim Parlatore?

  And oftentimes, and, and I tell it kind of in two phases. Please don't do it right now because I don't want to lose that leverage point in, in your case. But please don't do that after because the experience that you're going through now with, you know, whatever it is, sometimes it's UCMJ things, sometimes it's IG things, whatever it is that I'm going through with this client. If we can overcome this, you may be a great lieutenant colonel. But after this experience, you're going to be an amazing colonel.

• 16:32Tim Parlatore?

  You may be a great one-star admiral. But after this, this is going to give you so much more perspective to be an incredible two, three, and four-star admiral. And so I, I beg these people, don't put in your papers. Use this experience, overcome this experience, and then use it to turn around and make things better. Yeah, because that's, and you haven't asked me about, you know, the reasons why there's retention problems, but I think that one of the major reasons why is because of the way that we're treating our people and the way that the, you know, the legal system,

• 17:14Tim Parlatore?

  disciplinary system has worked in the military that gets a lot of people just wanting to get out. The IG, I think the inspector general system, the way that it's set up right now, it's a necessary program, but the way that it's set up right now...

• 17:33Tim Parlatore?

  It itself drives retention problems. When I was a brand new officer, we looked up at our commanding officers and thought they were gods. And these guys who were in command, men and women in command, like, they all seemed to be really enjoying being in command. And I had some great COs. Um, you know, Captain Strater, Captain Blake, who later became Admiral Blake, they were incredible commanders. And then when my generation gets to that age, and I'm talking to a lot of them, you know what a lot of them are saying?

• 18:16Tim Parlatore?

  I can't wait to finish my command tour. Because I'm terrified at any moment, I'm gonna get an IG complaint. And it's all gonna come crashing down. And everything that I fought for for 20 years, I'm gonna lose. And then the Navy looks at him and says, "Good job. You survived your command tour. Would you like to scream for major command and do it again?" So, and if you want, I can get deeper into this, but I think that a lot of the way that the disciplinary and the legal system is set up in the military as a whole, drives

• 19:00Tim Parlatore?

  non-retention. And if you fix that one problem, maybe it's not the biggest factor, maybe it's only a partial factor, but even if that takes your retention numbers and moves it 5%, how many more retirees do you not now have to recall? Yeah.

• 19:25Tim Parlatore?

  So.

• 19:29Tim Parlatore?

  And it's just, you know. The, the system, the system in that way is broken. Uh, and it's something that, that drives me out of my mind. Dealing with regularly because I sit there and I say, you know what?

• 19:44Tim Parlatore?

  DOD wide, and I'm going to pick on the Navy because they're the ones that I was a member of and that I spend the most time with. As a Navy. We can train the greatest fighter pilots in the world. The greatest ship drivers in the world, the greatest maritime warriors in the world. Submariners.

• 20:06Tim Parlatore?

  But we can't train our lawyers. To do basic trial skills.

• 20:13Tim Parlatore?

  We can't train our lawyers to, to conduct basic investigations and, and, and to properly represent the client or properly figure out how to prosecute. Whether we should prosecute. Make good decisions.

• 20:30Tim Parlatore?

  We train our physicians to be phenomenal emergency room physicians that caused so many people that in past wars would have died that today are alive. Because our medical community is so well trained at, at piecing them back together.

• 20:46Tim Parlatore?

  And our investigators. Are horrific. Yeah, I've done cases with law enforcement agencies across this country. Local, state, federal.

• 20:59Tim Parlatore?

  And I've never run into investigators as bad. As in DOD.

• 21:07Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah, and again, I'll, I'll pick on the Navy, but you know, Army and Air Force have a similar structure where, you know, the NCIS agents. They're special agents, they're, they love to tell people who are the same as the FBI. They just have a TV show. But the reality is. The way they become an NCIS agent is you, you want to be a federal agent, you go on USAjobs.gov, you upload your resume, you check all the boxes.

• 21:36Tim Parlatore?

  And then you have to get rejected by the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, HSI, and all the three-letter agencies before now NCIS is the one that hires you. So NCIS, in my opinion, is primarily staffed with rejects from the other agencies. Then you go down to the IG level where you have investigators that are not carrying guns or badges, and how well-trained are they? If you want to be an investigator, you're not going to go to DOD. You're going to go to DOJ. You're going to go to the NYPD, the LAPD.

• 22:18Tim Parlatore?

  You're going to go to an agency like that, state police somewhere. But you then have, you know, the IG, which is kind of, you know, the next level down. And then the next level down from that, command investigations, where they'll assign some officer to do an investigation that has zero training and zero experience. And some of those do really wonderful job. Honestly, when it comes to command investigations, I haven't seen a mediocre one. They're either really good or really bad. Because it's either somebody who like, you know, clears their schedule and puts all their effort into trying to, you know, be as good as they can possibly be on it.

• 23:01Tim Parlatore?

  Or you get something that sits there and says, well, I think they're guilty because they refused to answer my questions and invoke the Fifth Amendment.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 24:11Tim Parlatore?

  So, and I know this is an issue that I'm passionate about, and so I've gone off on a little rant here, but I think that if you fix a lot of those problems,

• 24:24Tim Parlatore?

  that's going to cause a lot of the people, the good people who have left,

• 24:30Tim Parlatore?

  to, they would have stayed.

• 24:33Shawn Ryan?

  If they couldn't have made, if they couldn't have impacted that while they were in, why would they think that they can come back off retirement and make the impact now?

• 24:46Tim Parlatore?

  Well, they may not, and those individuals probably wouldn't be the ones to sign up.

• 24:53Tim Parlatore?

  But I think a lot of it kind of depends on the changing climate and as, you know, if they're given an opportunity to do things again. But, you know, here's the other thing, is that

• 25:10Tim Parlatore?

  what, what opportunity do you have to make change when you are on this ladder? And you know, I have to do everything just this way if I want to make the next rank.

• 25:27Tim Parlatore?

  But if you come in from retirement, you don't have to worry about your next promotion anymore. So there's, there's an element of that. I mean, to give you an example, I represented four 05s in a single case. It was three Navy commanders, one Marine lieutenant colonel, aviators. Great guys.

• 25:50Tim Parlatore?

  Two of them had already been screened and selected for 06 and CAG. They were going to be commanders of carrier air wings. And because of this IG complaint that went completely and totally out of control.

• 26:08Tim Parlatore?

  I got it all remedied. But all of them retired as O5s. That's two carrier air wing commanders taken off the board in one, in one move. And that's just one story. But there's a lot of these. Now, if you went to one of those guys and said, hey, would you like to come back? And whatever the role is, and that's, that's the interesting thing that I noticed in this program is that the retirees can apply to come back in to fill a specific billet. They're being advertised for specific jobs. So it's not just that a retiree sits there and says, you know, yeah,

• 26:53Tim Parlatore?

  I'll come back in and I'll let PERS decide, you know, where to put me. They would be looking at it very specifically. Okay, they need, you know, senior instructors at, at the flight school. They need, you know, somebody to, um, you know, run operations out of this port here. They need whatever it is. And, and again, I know it's the Army program and I'm using Navy terms. But if they see a job that they want to do, that they feel like they can make a difference at, and they're not worried that they might, you know, they're not worried about trying to make rank.

• 27:37Tim Parlatore?

  Maybe they can be more effective.

• 27:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, I agree with you there. I still don't understand why they would consider that rather than try to figure out why everybody left at the beginning. And so it sounds like I never thought about the IG stuff.

• 27:58Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think that is the biggest.

• 28:05Shawn Ryan?

  Reason people are leaving.

• 28:07Tim Parlatore?

  No, I'm not saying it's fifty plus percent, but I do think it's a percentage.

• 28:11Shawn Ryan?

  Do you feel, I'm gonna tell you a theory that I've had.

• 28:15Tim Parlatore?

  Okay.

• 28:15Shawn Ryan?

  And this happened, I, I, this crossed my mind way back when the whole defund the police movement started. And I feel that the demoralization of police and the defunding the police movement

• 28:36Shawn Ryan?

  was to change out the old guard, get rid of the old mindset, bring in the new mindset. Then I think that carried over to the military. They brought all, I mean, when you think of,

• 28:53Shawn Ryan?

  when you think of the guys that have been on the show, you know, that have joined. They didn't join for this-

• 28:59Tim Parlatore?

  I have a lot of clients on your show.

• 29:02Shawn Ryan?

  Good point. But these guys didn't join for this kind of shit. They didn't join to be, to have vax mandates. They didn't join to go through whatever, what do you even call it? Like the inclusion or whatever you want to call it.

• 29:21Tim Parlatore?

  Diversity and inclusion.

• 29:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. They didn't, they went to defend this country and to go to war, not to be told about pronouns, not to be told what to jam into their arms, not to be, not to be told any of that. They went in to become warriors and fight for this country and, and, and, and, and stand up for American values and beliefs and, and train our allies, which we've abandoned. And I've, I feel that-

• 29:55Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what do you think of that? You know what I'm saying?

• 29:58Tim Parlatore?

  I do.

• 29:58Shawn Ryan?

  I'm saying that they wanted to get rid of the warrior mindset in the military, and they wanted to get rid of the old mindset in the police department, completely revamp it. And it's almost like we're just watching a failed experiment, real time.

• 30:14Tim Parlatore?

  Or we could take these lessons and figure out how do we apply it to Congress to get rid of all those people.

• 30:20Tim Parlatore?

  Kidding slightly, but you know, here's the thing. You're right. And I think that a lot of this focus on these other programs, I mean, look, vaccine mandate was a total disaster. It was a total failure. And I think that the courts have been very clear on this. And the fact that we now have the army sending out letters to people saying, "Hey, I know we kicked you out for not taking the vaccine, but we'd like you back and you don't have to take the vaccine." Now, it's an admission that that was a total failure.

• 30:54Tim Parlatore?

  As to a lot of these other initiatives, I think that they're pushing very hard on the language and everything. But the reality is, I was thinking about this the other day.

• 31:09Tim Parlatore?

  I came in in 1998. So it was during Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And I remember when they repealed it, was that '06-ish?

• 31:19Tim Parlatore?

  I think it was around '06.

• 31:24Tim Parlatore?

  And everybody was predicting doom and gloom and everything, everybody on the outside.

• 31:32Tim Parlatore?

  But I don't remember, I don't know if you remember what it was like on the inside, but I remember when they were talking about repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, we all thought, "Who cares?"

• 31:46Tim Parlatore?

  When they repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, one of my academy classmates, like on the effective date, he got married at one minute after midnight on the first date that he could be open about his orientation.

• 32:01Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:02Tim Parlatore?

  And you know what all of our classmates said about it? Good for him. Was anybody surprised? No. No, we all knew. Nobody cared.

• 32:13Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:16Tim Parlatore?

  Don't Ask, Don't Tell, in a weird way, was used more, at least towards the end. I mean, obviously, earlier on, it was definitely abused, but towards the end, all the time I was in, Don't Ask, Don't Tell was primarily used by people that wanted to get out. You know, young sailors who got on the ship and decided, oh, my recruiter lied to me. This is not what I really wanted to do. Let me go confess to being gay as a way of getting a simple and easy honorable discharge without any questions asked. And, you know, when that went away, they, of course, then started, you know, they turned to smoking weed instead to get out, but their DD214s looked worse.

• 33:00Tim Parlatore?

  It didn't matter. And I think that if you, you can have both. You can have the warrior culture and you can have all this, you know, inclusion. Because the reality is, if you have warriors out there, do you care who they're sleeping with or what they're doing on their free time?

• 33:23Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 33:24Tim Parlatore?

  Exactly. If they can do their job and help us to go over there and kill the people that we need to kill, it doesn't matter what they do in their free time, what they, you know, how they want to dress, what their pronouns are, none of that matters. So you can do both. And I think the idea that we have to only do one or the other is something that we have to get past.

• 33:54Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:55Tim Parlatore?

  You know?

• 33:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm, I mean, I'm with you. All I'm saying is the current model is not working.

• 34:03Tim Parlatore?

  No, it's not.

• 34:04Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so if you, if, if, if...

• 34:12Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's, you know, with the, with the initiatives that we're talking about. I mean, it's, it's

• 34:24Shawn Ryan?

  it's just being forced down everybody's throat, you know? And I think that is, I personally think that is one of the main things that is affecting retention in recruiting is they don't want to hear it. They don't want to be forced to sit through the, whatever the training program is. I don't believe what it

• 34:49Shawn Ryan?

  you know, and so

• 34:51Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah, it's all that mandatory training. We, we've always had the mandatory training where you sit through the, every six months, you sit through the sexual assault prevention course and the this course and the that course. And I had a department head when I was a junior officer who said, training is valuable because training is documentation to cover somebody else's ass when it gets screwed up. And it's not so much about, did you learn something during this diversity training? It's by getting your signature on the attendance sheet so that later, if you go out and you,

• 35:32Tim Parlatore?

  you know, discriminate or you do something bad, they can say, ah, well, we trained that officer on how to do this. We told them that they should, you know,

• 35:45Tim Parlatore?

  treat all these people with, you know, their correct pronouns and everything. And so therefore, you know, it's not on the command, it's on the individual. And then they can use that as evidence in the administrative or disciplinary proceeding to show that they were that bad.

• 36:04Tim Parlatore?

  So, you know, that the training is, we've always had too much of that. You know, the lecture-based, you know, um, power, death by PowerPoint training. And, and yes, right now it's even heavier on that side of things because that's what the politicians are driving.

• 36:27Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh. That's kind of what I'm, because I do agree with what you're saying.

• 36:33Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Shawn Ryan?

  With, with everything that you're saying. It's just they've amplified it.

• 36:39Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Shawn Ryan?

  It's on the recruiting videos. It's everywhere you look.

• 36:43Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 36:43Shawn Ryan?

  It's, I mean, what do you think about, what do you think about when I said, I think this was on purpose to, to get rid of the old guard and bring in the new with the, with the defunding the police movement? Do you think there was a, a deeper agenda than?

• 37:03Tim Parlatore?

  There is always a, an agenda, I mean, throughout the history of this country, there has always been an agenda to get rid of the old, you know, the younger generation always wants to take over. Okay? They always, you know, the older generation, they're dinosaurs, they're, you know, their thinking is in the past. We know better than them. We need to push them out so we can get, you know, the next generation of generals. I think that's a constant throughout history. Is this perhaps one tactic that was used? Sure. To a certain extent, you know, it probably did work in getting a lot of people out.

• 37:46Tim Parlatore?

  But then the fact that we're now asking those exact same people to volunteer to come back might be an indication that as much as politicians refuse to ever admit that they made a mistake or they're wrong about something. Maybe they're trying to correct it in a way that doesn't require them to actually make any admissions.

• 38:08Tim Parlatore?

  I don't know. I mean, it's, it's interesting. It's throughout the history of this country, throughout the history of the world, it's been a pendulum where you swing too far over to one side, you get abuse, correction, overcorrection, abuse, correction, overcorrection, and it has been that way throughout history. And so, you know, might, you know, were things way too far over at the time when, you know, NCIS then called NIS, the Admiral's Gestapo, went out to frame people for being gay so that they could get rid of them?

• 38:50Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah, that was way too far over here. Have we now swung way too far over here to where we're foregoing marksmanship training in favor of, you know, pronoun training? Probably. Where is the right place? Right in the middle. But how do you get the pendulum to stop? Because once it starts swinging this way...

• 39:13Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think? I mean, that brings us into the divisiveness in this country. And it's so bad, I, it's so bad, I don't even...

• 39:29Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's been going on for years now, and years and years, and still, it still has not registered 100% in my head because I, I constantly think, how, how did we get here? Is this really as bad as it sounds? Is, is this real? Am I really seeing what I'm seeing? And...

• 39:56Shawn Ryan?

  And it just seems to be getting worse. And, and you know, I'm, I feel like I'm pretty center. Uh, I'm not, I don't have, at least I don't feel like I have extreme views. And, you know, I

• 40:10Tim Parlatore?

  I'm an extreme moderate.

• 40:13Shawn Ryan?

  They're, yeah, but I guess what I'm saying is, I mean, I just, I see it swinging. What do you, where, where did it start? Where did the pendulum start to get out of control?

• 40:25Tim Parlatore?

  Honestly? Probably back in 1776. I mean, or before.

• 40:33Tim Parlatore?

  Look all the way back to the beginning. Okay. The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin. Set Ben Franklin to the side for a minute. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were allies, very close friends in the fight for independence. And to convince the Continental Congress to vote for the Declaration of Independence. Their interests were perfectly aligned.

• 41:02Tim Parlatore?

  And then we fought a war. And after the war was over, one of the interesting things not a lot of people realize about the Revolutionary War. At the end of that war, we all of a sudden were sitting there like, okay, we don't have a king. Now what?

• 41:19Tim Parlatore?

  Nobody had a plan. Nobody had an idea of what do we want to create in its place? And so that's when the debates started. And John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, these close allies, became polar opposites because they each had very different ideas of how this country should be governed. They didn't speak for years. Thomas Jefferson was John Adams' vice president. Because back then, the way it worked is you have a presidential election. The first place winner gets the presidency, second place winner gets the vice presidency. And they fought and they didn't speak for years after that.

• 42:04Tim Parlatore?

  Because they just had very different ideas. They both knew they didn't want a king. They didn't know what they did want.

• 42:13Tim Parlatore?

  And that divisiveness, the only president we've ever had that's not been a member of a political party is George Washington. After him, it split into the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans. John Adams on the Federalist side, Jefferson on the Democratic Republican side. And that began this partisanship and the fighting back and forth that has continued throughout history. The parties have changed. So, you know, the way that you currently have Democrats and Republicans, I can't necessarily point to, well, this one was derived from Federalists, this one was from Democratic

• 42:56Tim Parlatore?

  Republicans, because different issues, they kind of, they move around, and sometimes parties disappear and new ones pop up. But it started then. And are we divisive today? Yes. Does this seem as bad as it's ever been? Yes. And a lot of that is because the prevalence of the media. However, is this the worst it's ever been? Well, half the states aren't putting on gray coats and picking up rifles to shoot at the other half of the states that are wearing blue coats. So, we're not there. And I think that it looks a lot worse than we think it is because of the way that the

• 43:41Tim Parlatore?

  media and social media portrays it. Because ultimately divisiveness gets you more clicks and more likes and more comments than a message of unity.

• 43:57Shawn Ryan?

  And you think this goes all the way up to the president, worried about clicks and likes?

• 44:06Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah, absolutely. It starts there. Because why does the president want clicks and likes? He wants votes.

• 44:17Tim Parlatore?

  And if you look at the way that a lot of these presidential elections are running today, they're not appealing to the undecided voters. They're appealing to the base because presidential elections are now by and large decided by whose base goes to the polls, who's more excited to go and vote. Not so much that we have these people that are reliable voters and we have to convince these people in the middle, you know, to vote for one side or the other. Now, I think that the percentage of people in this country that are sitting there today saying, "I really don't know. I would like to hear a debate because I'd like to hear

• 45:01Tim Parlatore?

  on the issues whether I like Joe Biden or Donald Trump." I think that person, that hypothetical person, there aren't many of them. There are plenty that are probably sitting there saying, "I will decide whether to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden or not at all." Or, "I'm trying to decide between Joe Biden and RFK. I'm trying to decide between Donald Trump and whatever third-party candidate, you know, they, they find." I mean, what was it, one of these states in their primary, the, you know, second place,

• 45:42Tim Parlatore?

  when an actual delegates got assigned to none of these candidates? So, yeah, I do think it goes all the way to the top. And even when we say "the top," and you assume that the president is the top, it's the parties. It's the DNC and the RNC that are really driving this.

• 46:08Shawn Ryan?

  Do you feel like the, I mean, it's, you say the pendulum began at the beginning. I'm sure it swung out of control before and then come back into...

• 46:20Tim Parlatore?

  Mid-1800s when it swung furthest out of control.

• 46:24Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm. What about in recent times?

• 46:29Tim Parlatore?

  I think it looks worse than it is. Because...

• 46:39Tim Parlatore?

  You don't have conversations with people as much that you disagree with. I'm not talking about you individually, but people don't have as many conversations with people that they disagree with as much. I like having conversations with people I disagree with. You're an attorney. That's true. It's one of the things I'm paid to do. But I mean, outside of the courtroom, I enjoy talking to somebody that's not just gonna sit there and nod their head with everything that I say. And if you can sit down, in fact, last week, I was, um, I was sitting in the cafe at my

• 47:24Tim Parlatore?

  gym, Lifetime in Clarendon, and this woman walked past me, this younger black woman, and she looked at me, she says, "Oh, I recognize you, I saw you on TV." And I said, "Yeah, it's nice to meet you and everything." And we sat down, we had a conversation. And she expected me to be this, you know, Trump lawyer, therefore must be, you know, some crazy, you know, right-wing person. But instead, you know, I didn't have any of the expected rhetoric. And so she dropped, you know, not doing any of that, you know, rhetoric from the other

• 48:07Tim Parlatore?

  side as well, and instead, we just had a conversation about things in the news. And even though, you know, she was a very liberal person, I did not, I told her, I'm an extreme moderate, that's what I, how I identify. But we had an intelligent conversation. And at the end of the conversation, you know what she said to me? She said, "People need to have more conversations like this." And she said, "You know what? I have a close friend that I haven't talked to in the past few years, because she became a Trump supporter, and we got in a fight, and I haven't spoken to her in years."

• 48:49Tim Parlatore?

  I'm gonna call her tonight and try and have a real conversation with her without saying, without starting it by, "All those people are crazy."

• 48:59Tim Parlatore?

  So I think that we're not as far apart as everybody thinks that we are. There was a really good podcast, our friend Andy Frisella had Hawk Newsom on, the head of the New York BLM chapter. And I thought it was such a fascinating podcast because two guys that were very much on the opposite ends of issues, but they decided to sit down and try and have a respectful conversation with one another and they listened to each other.

• 49:34Tim Parlatore?

  And when it came to the issue of defunding the police, Andy asked him, you know, "What do you think about the police?" "Oh, abolish them." "Yeah, but what do you replace them with?" "Social workers."

• 49:46Tim Parlatore?

  And they started having a conversation about that. Instead of just saying, "Oh, that's crazy." "Okay, what does that mean? How would it work?" And as the conversation evolved, he said, "Well, what, but there are situations out there that are dangerous and you have assaults in progress and things like that." And Hawk then responded, "Oh, I want the social workers to have guns." And Andy said, "Aren't we talking about the same thing then? We're using different words for the same solution. You want social workers with guns. I want cops with more training in social work."

• 50:28Tim Parlatore?

  And when you defund the police, they're not getting any more training.

• 50:33Tim Parlatore?

  Ultimately, don't, don't these two things, you know, come together? Military justice reform, same thing. I talked to people up on the Hill and they're so wrapped up in their individual rhetoric and their individual issues that they can't see that the solutions are the same. You have Republican members of Congress that are, you know, because of some of the work that I've been involved in, Eddie Gallagher and other things, they want to reform the system because they see how it has abused our warfighters.

• 51:08Tim Parlatore?

  You have people like Kristen Gillibrand, who want to reform the criminal justice system because they see how it has negatively impacted issues of sexual assault.

• 51:20Tim Parlatore?

  Kristen Gillibrand is never going to stand up and say Etta Gallagher was mistreated. Any more than these Republican congressmen are going to stand up and say, you know, we have a sexual assault problem in the military. And yet, if they could both get past their rhetoric, her solution is the same as theirs.

• 51:41Tim Parlatore?

  And because they can't get past it, you end up with these half-baked measures. You know, like the recent reform where they created this Office of Special Trial Counsel, which I think is a baby step in the right direction, but actually is more of lip service to the problem than an actual reform. If you could get people to get past the rhetoric and just sit down and say, okay, I'm not going to call you names. You don't call me names. What's the solution?

• 52:12Tim Parlatore?

  We're not as far apart as everybody thinks we are.

• 52:24Shawn Ryan?

  It's hard to say.

• 52:28Shawn Ryan?

  I want to agree with you. I really do. I don't, I mean, I don't see it happening here, but I live in a bubble. You know, I don't, I don't know what it's like elsewhere. But when I think about, you know, things like the border.

• 52:46Shawn Ryan?

  Is it that bad? Or is the media portraying it to be that bad? You know, I'm going down there in July to, to, I don't want to say where, but, but, because I have to see it for myself. I tried it on another section years ago, and I didn't, it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. So now I'm going to go to another section and see, see for myself. But, you know, when you, when you see things like that, or the, the Afghanistan withdrawal, you know, these, that's, that's a divisive issue.

• 53:22Tim Parlatore?

  It is.

• 53:23Shawn Ryan?

  How we left. And that isn't, that is very real.

• 53:26Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 53:27Shawn Ryan?

  You know, the fact that we are funding

• 53:32Shawn Ryan?

  Funding the Taliban forty million dollars a week.

• 53:35Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 53:36Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this.

• 53:40Shawn Ryan?

  It is that bad.

• 53:41Tim Parlatore?

  It is, but a lot of that is the politicians, not the people.

• 53:50Tim Parlatore?

  And that's, that's the difference is, is the border that bad? Probably is. I mean, I haven't been down there myself, but I've seen, you know, what impact it has on the communities, you know, in DC, in New York.

• 54:06Tim Parlatore?

  And it certainly has had a significant impact, but that is not the people. That's the politicians. And, and I think that one of the things you're seeing here, as the pendulum, you know, starts to swing a little bit more wildly. One thing that Trump is

• 54:26Tim Parlatore?

  effective at, I don't want to call him brilliant at, but effective at is drawing his opponents into polar opposite positions of where they would otherwise be.

• 54:38Tim Parlatore?

  When he took a strong position on immigration,

• 54:43Tim Parlatore?

  his opponents took a strong anti-position on immigration.

• 54:50Tim Parlatore?

  And if you look at, I love watching Bill Clinton's State of the Union addresses. Google this, go on YouTube, look up Bill Clinton's State of the Union and look what he said about immigration. And when you listen to it, you're going to sit there and shake your head and you say, I forgot that Bill Clinton was a Republican.

• 55:13Tim Parlatore?

  He didn't forget. What it was is that the positions of the parties have moved so far away from one another from back in the nineties where they weren't really that far apart. And so when you had this build the wall,

• 55:31Tim Parlatore?

  how far can we swing away from build the wall? Open border. When you have overturn Roe v. Wade, how far can you swing away from that? Partial birth, post-birth.

• 55:44Tim Parlatore?

  And again, this is the politicians that are trying to play to their base as opposed to appealing to the middle.

• 55:56Tim Parlatore?

  And swinging as far as they can, you know, out. And so I think that's really what you're seeing here. And so I believe that most Americans do want

• 56:10Tim Parlatore?

  a reasonable immigration policy. It's not build a wall and lock it down, nor is it open border. You know, one thing, in the beginning of the 2016 election cycle, when Trump first started talking about build a wall, everybody focused on build the wall, gonna get Mexico to pay for it and everything else. And everybody missed one key element of his early speeches. And because they missed it, it didn't then reappear in later speeches. He said, oh, it's gonna be a big, beautiful wall, and it's gonna have a big, beautiful door.

• 56:51Tim Parlatore?

  Nobody talks about the door. Do you even remember, remember him talking about big, beautiful door?

• 56:56Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 56:57Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 57:00Tim Parlatore?

  And I think that the American people would be okay with a wall if there was focus on what the door looks like.

• 57:11Tim Parlatore?

  We are a nation of immigrants. We need immigrants in this country. But there is a process.

• 57:21Tim Parlatore?

  And if you fix that process, focus on the door, then the wall is no longer divisive.

• 57:32Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah, my, my mother-in-law, she, she was born in Beijing. She ran away to, to Taiwan when she was like two or three years old. During the communist revolution, her, her family left. And then she came to this country legally, to go to grad school.

• 57:55Tim Parlatore?

  And she and her family went through hell

• 57:59Tim Parlatore?

  to get, to go through all the immigration processes to become a citizen.

• 58:06Tim Parlatore?

  And she did it. And so when she looks a lot of these things, one of the things she hates about the illegal immigration is that she did it the right way. And I think a lot of immigrants, legal immigrants, probably think the same thing of, we did it the right way. It was way too difficult for us to do it. But this is a swing too far to the other side. So maybe you improve the system of legal immigration and then nobody's gonna dispute the issue of illegal immigration.

• 58:48Tim Parlatore?

  And then the Democrats can, you know, dust off Bill Clinton's old speeches and use those instead.

• 58:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I've been saying that ever since I went down to the border and saw the migrant camps of people who are waiting to come in legally. Years, years and years and years they're waiting. And so that's, but that's, you know.

• 59:12Tim Parlatore?

  You incentivize people to come here illegally when you make it too difficult to come here legally. If you're gonna leave them in a migrant camp for years.

• 59:20Shawn Ryan?

  Why don't you think, why is nobody working on the immigration process and just opening the borders?

• 59:30Tim Parlatore?

  Because you have politicians on both sides.

• 59:34Shawn Ryan?

  I'm glad you brought that up. You think that the problem is the politicians and not the people.

• 59:39Tim Parlatore?

  Yes, I do.

• 59:40Shawn Ryan?

  I think the problem is both. I mean, let's talk about Congress and these numbers are off, but it's some, it isn't, they are extreme numbers, so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna use.

• 59:50Tim Parlatore?

  Congress is extreme.

• 59:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so Congress has something like a, these numbers are off, but I know they're close. Congress has, what, a, something like a 90% disapproval rating in a, or let me rephrase that.

• 1:00:11Tim Parlatore?

  People hate Congress more than they hate lawyers.

• 1:00:12Shawn Ryan?

  Congress has a 10% approval rating, but a 90% reelection rate.

• 1:00:22Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:00:23Shawn Ryan?

  That's not a problem with the politicians, that's a problem with the people.

• 1:00:28Tim Parlatore?

  It's a problem with.

• 1:00:30Shawn Ryan?

  We have a bunch of people that want to bitch, moan, complain, not take a stance on anything, not, not, not take a stance out of, if it inconveniences an American, they're not gonna do it.

• 1:00:44Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:00:45Shawn Ryan?

  They're not gonna say anything, they're not gonna make any changes, they're not gonna stop sharp shopping at certain places, they're not, they're not gonna do anything.

• 1:00:54Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:00:54Shawn Ryan?

  And that, that's a perfect example, 10% approval rating and a 90% reelection rate. That's a people problem.

• 1:01:02Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah. It's not just a people problem, though, it's a party problem. Because the prospect of anybody running for office is so daunting. You know, I, I love my job, I'm never gonna run for office, I don't want to. You know, but my wife and my daughter, my daughter likes saying, Daddy, you should be president. I'm like, no way. Not because of the job, but because of the election. Because you see what happens to people that are challenging the, I don't even wanna call it the deep state and all that kinda stuff, but the incumbents.

• 1:01:46Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah, I have two friends, both veterans, both who decided to run for office. Both of whom I recommended, maybe you don't wanna do that, because, you know, maybe this won't turn out the way that you want to. Both of whom said, you know, no, I've got a good clean record, I, you know, I wanna do this. Both of whom had to suspend their campaigns or lost the election after false allegations of child abuse came out during their primaries.

• 1:02:27Tim Parlatore?

  So why does somebody want to get into a congressional race? If we have raised the stakes to that level, that if you're not a party insider, we are going to destroy your life to make sure that you can't possibly win.

• 1:02:46Tim Parlatore?

  So is it a people problem for re-electing the incumbents? To a certain extent, yes. Is it a party problem for not allowing a real choice? Yes. Yes, it is. Because ultimately, the party and the incumbents, they have their power by the arrangement that they have. And as soon as somebody comes in that's not a party insider, that threatens their power.

• 1:03:21Tim Parlatore?

  And so whether it's a false claim of child abuse or whatever it is, they will do something, you know, to prevent that. And you don't even have to have done something wrong.

• 1:03:41Tim Parlatore?

  You know, I could sit there and say, "Do I have any skeletons in my closet? Does it matter?"

• 1:03:49Tim Parlatore?

  They'll find somebody that I went to law school with that says, "Oh yeah, he did this, he did that. Look at what happened to Brett Kavanaugh."

• 1:03:59Tim Parlatore?

  Good people are disincentivized from taking elected positions or Senate-confirmed positions because of the process of getting the job.

• 1:04:15Tim Parlatore?

  So is that a people problem? Or is that a party problem?

• 1:04:23Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's both. And I don't think that's the only reason I'm saying that we have a people problem. You know, we have, we have people that, I'm just gonna run through some examples. Sure. We have, we have people that will go on and on and on about the active shooters and how there needs to be, you know, we obviously have a problem with that in this country. And, and we have parents that will bitch, moan, whine, complain, threaten.

• 1:05:01Shawn Ryan?

  Very few of them take action. If you don't get an armed security guard at this school, I'm gonna yank my kid out. Do they yank their kid out? No. The kid's still there today from, from, from them going on and on about this years ago. Right. You know, we have, you know, um, how many companies have come out with, with advertising that doesn't align with certain groups? Right. The woke, the woke agenda, right? And what do they, what do we hear? We hear all these people bitch, moan, whine, complain, I'm never, this is ridiculous, I'm never, you know, gonna shop there again. As they're telling you that, you look in their backseat and they got shopping bags

• 1:05:46Shawn Ryan?

  from the exact thing they're complaining about. Correct. You know, we've got people on, on, on both sides that are calling each other sheep, right? The mental gymnastics that I'm seeing people perform are, it's, it's almost impressive. You know, you'll, you'll hear people go, oh, man, the people.

• 1:06:15Shawn Ryan?

  You can, you can show them the lie. You can show them the lie and they still, they won't even look at it. I've heard this for years. And then you show them the lie about their candidate. Immediately, what do they do? They dismiss it. They make excuses for their candidate. They make excuses for their party. One being, one of them being the Bud Light fiasco, right? Whether you're, whether you're agree with what Bud Light did, whether you don't. There was a big thing on the right, right? We're gonna boycott Bud Light. Well, until Donald Trump comes out

• 1:06:56Shawn Ryan?

  and says, "Oh, Bud Light, I sent you this article in The Federalist. Oh, Bud Light actually isn't that bad. They employ a lot of veterans." Okay. Well, let's go down the list of all the companies that employ a lot of veterans. All of them. Google, YouT, Face, Meta. Everybody employs veterans. That's, that's a ridiculous statement to say. And, and, oh, what happened? Supposedly there was what? What was it? A campaign fundraiser or something that was put on by Bud Light right after he said that? You know, but you show, you show people that,

• 1:07:37Shawn Ryan?

  and what do they do? They, they immediately dismiss it. They make an excuse for their candidate. You know, and it's the same on the other side with the border stuff. You know, if you say, if you say, if you say anything, if you give Trump any constructive criticism or any criticism at all, it's, what do you hear? What are you, what are you, Biden supporter? And if, if you give Biden any criticism at all, what are you, a Trump supporter? And it's like, what, did we lose the ability to criticize, to, to?

• 1:08:17Shawn Ryan?

  To criticize or, or

• 1:08:19Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:08:19Shawn Ryan?

  Or call out corruption for our, our elected officials. They are elected officials. You don't owe them shit.

• 1:08:28Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:08:28Shawn Ryan?

  You don't owe Trump shit and you don't owe Biden shit. They owe you. We elected them.

• 1:08:34Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:08:35Shawn Ryan?

  They're supposed to represent us. And they're not doing that.

• 1:08:39Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:08:39Shawn Ryan?

  And, and now you have people who, who refuse to look at the flaws and, and on either side. And so, once again, that brings me back to, this is a people problem. They're making excuses for their candidates and for their parties. And, and instead of going, yeah, I am on this side, but this is not right. What's wrong is wrong, what's right is right. And that is not good for this country.

• 1:09:11Tim Parlatore?

  That's accurate. And, and I think that some of that may be driven by the media as well. Um, I think it's largely driven by the media. But there is this blind loyalty to candidates or politicians. That it, it shocks me sometimes when, you know, to think about this because there are no perfect people in Washington DC. Every single one of those politicians has good points, has bad points. None of them is a hundred percent wrong. None of them's a hundred percent right. And so when you sit there and every single thing Trump does is wrong, or every single

• 1:09:55Tim Parlatore?

  thing Biden does is wrong, and you don't acknowledge anything that they do that may be right. It's not honest. Okay, it's, it's dishonest. And, you know, when I sit there and I think about some of these, you know, commentators on TV talking about, for example, the, the Trump legal stuff. I'm one of the few people that goes out there and I say, okay, this is good, but this is bad.

• 1:10:28Tim Parlatore?

  They shouldn't have done this, but this is, this is okay. I hear people on there that are, you know, any decision that is issued that is, you know, negative to Trump, any judicial decision. Oh, that's airtight reasoning that will never get overturned. That's perfect reasoning. Okay, but then if the judge says something that's, you know, rules in Trump's favor, that should be instantly overturned on appeal. And I kind of sit there and, and, you know, I've been in some of these interviews, like, have you even read the decision?

• 1:11:04Tim Parlatore?

  Have you even read to see what the judge's decision was based on? Or are you saying that it's airtight because you like the result?

• 1:11:13Tim Parlatore?

  And I think that that's one problem that we have now is that Biden must be perfect because the alternative is Donald Trump. Or Trump must be perfect because the alternative is Joe Biden. And I remember I had a, a brief meeting with Tulsi Gabbard, um, while she was still in Congress, while she was still a Democrat. And she said something that was so insightful and so, you know, stuck in my mind. And she said that when she started her career in politics, her hope and some of the things that she saw was about working together to find solutions.

• 1:11:58Tim Parlatore?

  And at the time that she left, what she saw was every decision was driven by making sure the other side doesn't get a win.

• 1:12:11Tim Parlatore?

  It's not about what's best for the people, what's best for the country. It's about, we have to make sure that the other party can't claim this as a win.

• 1:12:22Tim Parlatore?

  And so when you have that...

• 1:12:26Tim Parlatore?

  And then you have the media that's kind of driving that narrative to the people. And when people only listen to one media outlet, or one side media outlet. You know, the woman I was telling you about earlier, she told me that she only listens to CNN. And I actually, I pulled out my phone and I showed her. Do it right now, I'll show you. How do I get my news? Okay? I get my news. See all those apps?

• 1:13:06Tim Parlatore?

  Fox News, CNN, Politico, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. You cannot watch just one outlet and think that you're possibly getting the truth. I have been part of many newsworthy events, whether in court or, you know, in representing people. And then I read the articles after the fact about what I allegedly did. And depending on which outlet it is, it's a totally different story. You know, during Eddie's trial, depending on which outlet it was, you'd think that there were two different trials going on.

• 1:13:49Tim Parlatore?

  But if you read both articles, now you're getting at least partially a balanced picture of things.

• 1:14:04Shawn Ryan?

  Those of you that have been around SRS for a while know that we take mental health very seriously here. So seriously that in almost every episode, you'll find a segment where we discuss how to improve your mental health. And part of improving your mental health is keeping your mind sharp. And part of keeping your mind sharp is giving it the fuel that it needs to balance energy, focus, cognition, and...

• 1:14:32Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:15:13Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:15:57Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:16:08Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:16:29Tim Parlatore?

  So people that don't diversify their media, they get that one point of view and then they get really bought into the idea that everything Biden does is wonderful or everything Trump does is wonderful. And it's, you know, Trump is the savior because Biden is trying to destroy the country or vice versa. Either way. But if you, if we can stop, sit back and be honest about it, neither one of these candidates is perfect.

• 1:17:12Tim Parlatore?

  None of these candidates is perfect. They all have good things, they all have bad things, they all have things that you should agree with, things you should disagree with. And anybody who follows perfect party orthodoxy is wrong. They're being dishonest.

• 1:17:29Shawn Ryan?

  How would you even begin to get the population of the US to, to do that? I mean, because of what I'm telling you.

• 1:17:43Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:17:43Shawn Ryan?

  You can put the facts right in their face.

• 1:17:47Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:17:49Shawn Ryan?

  And they will completely ignore it.

• 1:17:51Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:17:51Shawn Ryan?

  Look, this is what your guy did. He did this. Well, he must have, you're not, you don't understand the plan. Oh, I don't understand the plan. No, these are the facts. This is what happened.

• 1:18:06Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:18:07Shawn Ryan?

  And that, that is, that is both sides of the aisle.

• 1:18:11Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 1:18:12Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you can.

• 1:18:15Tim Parlatore?

  It's not new. It's not new. This has been throughout our history. You know, the, um, the oldest newspaper in the United States, um, the New York Post, was founded by Alexander Hamilton as a Federalist Party propaganda paper.

• 1:18:38Tim Parlatore?

  Newspapers at the beginning of this country were founded by members of the political parties specifically as a vehicle in which they could publish articles attacking mostly falsely the figures on the other side. The wars between, you know, the literary wars fought between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were legendary and all written in pseudonyms. And people would read the paper of their party and they would believe that Alexander

• 1:19:18Tim Parlatore?

  Hamilton wanted to tear up the Constitution and return to a monarchy. They would believe these things. And you take a kernel of truth and then you embellish it and then it becomes something believable. How do we break that? It all comes back to me, to the political parties. So how do we regain the trust of the American people and regain a sense of, you know, perspective? Is to get rid of the RNC and the DNC. How would you do that?

• 1:20:01Tim Parlatore?

  Preferably non-violently, but I'm not advocating that, but I think that, you know, the people, this is one of those things where there could be today, in a way that there never has been before, a popular, illegal, non-violent, popular uprising driven by, you know, some of these social media campaigns to get rid of the incumbents. And to say to these parties, you don't represent what our true beliefs are.

• 1:20:43Tim Parlatore?

  Because a lot of these political parties' positions, they don't actually represent what their constituents do believe. But nobody's standing up and saying that. And so if, if the people stood up and said, "We don't support you guys." And maybe it's through fundraising, maybe it's through, I mean, and here again, what's one thing this country does have a history of? Changing political parties. It is not something that we just sit here and say, "These are the two parties that we have. We've always had these parties." No, we haven't always had these parties.

• 1:21:27Tim Parlatore?

  We've had plenty of other parties throughout history. And I'm not talking about like, you know, minor ones, but major political parties have been disbanded and replaced. Can you give me an example? Sure, the Democratic, Republicans, and the Federalists. Look at the two original parties. You have the Bull Moose Party. You have plenty of parties that have come up, you know, throughout the history like that. And I mean, the modern Republican Party was really, you know, Abraham Lincoln. So, and even there,

• 1:22:05Tim Parlatore?

  you look at how the positions of these parties have shifted over the years. Where the Republican Party was the party of civil rights and, you know, and everything, and the Democratic Party was the party of, you know, slavery and Jim Crow and all those things, and then that switches. A couple of years ago, I was reading George W. Bush's autobiography. And there was one part in it that I did not believe. I was sure he was lying about. And it was when he was talking about running for governor. And he, he said, "I want to run for governor of Texas."

• 1:22:46Tim Parlatore?

  And he was told, "It's a waste of time. You'll never win. No Republican could ever win the governor's race in Texas."

• 1:22:56Tim Parlatore?

  And I put the book down and I went to my computer and looked it up. Because I thought, that can't possibly be true. And yet, George W. Bush was the first Republican governor of Texas in decades.

• 1:23:14Shawn Ryan?

  I did not realize that.

• 1:23:16Tim Parlatore?

  So, think about that. George W. Bush, he's not that old. And yet, prior to him, Texas was reliably deep blue.

• 1:23:30Tim Parlatore?

  People like to think that so many institutions, as they exist today, cannot be changed, and this is the way they will be forever. These two parties will not last for the next 200 years.

• 1:23:49Tim Parlatore?

  It hasn't lasted, again, how long ago was George Bush governor? Not that long.

• 1:23:59Tim Parlatore?

  So, that is, to me, the best way, you know, to take it back.

• 1:24:06Tim Parlatore?

  And then also, just if people could

• 1:24:11Tim Parlatore?

  stop feeding into the narrative and stop feeding into the hate. Instead, if you sit down and you have a conversation with somebody that you don't agree with,

• 1:24:24Tim Parlatore?

  and you don't have any insults, don't sit down and say, "All right, I want to talk to you because I, because all, you know, liberals are crazy, and so I want to figure out what, why it is do you think these crazy things."

• 1:24:37Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:38Tim Parlatore?

  You're not going to have a conversation, then.

• 1:24:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, do you think that the

• 1:24:51Shawn Ryan?

  extreme moderates, middle-of-the-road, silent majority is bigger

• 1:24:58Shawn Ryan?

  now than it ever has been? Or do you think that it has dwindled away to almost nothing?

• 1:25:04Tim Parlatore?

  I don't think that it's, I, I...

• 1:25:10Tim Parlatore?

  See, none of the above. I don't think that it's dwindled away to almost nothing, but I don't think that it's bigger than it's ever been. I think that a lot of people think that they are further to the sides of one spectrum or the other than they really are. I think that, and I think a lot of that is personality driven. Um, I think that in 2020, I think a lot of people voted for Trump and a lot of people voted against Trump. And I don't think very many people voted for Biden at all. I think a lot of people voted against Trump. And I think that, you know,

• 1:25:55Tim Parlatore?

  in, you know, in November, there's going to be people that vote for Trump. And I think there are going to be a lot of people that vote against Biden. And also a lot of people that vote against Trump. So I think that personalities have really taken over more so than ideologies. And so I think that, um, you know, that's, that's an aspect of it too. And so if you can get past the personalities, which by the way, this is it. After 2024, neither one of these men are going to be candidates again. Okay, this is the last time we're going to see either one of them on the ballot. And so

• 1:26:40Tim Parlatore?

  after this election cycle, next election cycle, we're going to see two brand new candidates. So, you know, does that give you the opportunity to reset things a little bit? Maybe. But yeah, I, I think that the personalities drive people further to identify further out on the spectrum than they really are. And the lack of conversation, the lack of honest, direct conversation is what allows them to believe that they're this far out

• 1:27:24Tim Parlatore?

  on the spectrum. Because they believe that everybody has moved so far over to the other side.

• 1:27:36Shawn Ryan?

  So you think, do you think it'll be another four years before we see that pendulum start to slow down?

• 1:27:44Tim Parlatore?

  No, I think that it's going to be a little bit sooner than that.

• 1:27:50Tim Parlatore?

  Because our next president will be a lame duck president from day one.

• 1:27:59Tim Parlatore?

  And so I think that the people that are

• 1:28:03Tim Parlatore?

  supporting the candidate that's there right now,

• 1:28:09Tim Parlatore?

  because that's the best choice for them, because they're afraid of the other guy.

• 1:28:18Tim Parlatore?

  Once whoever that is becomes the lame duck president, people can start to look forward to, what are we gonna do in 2028?

• 1:28:31Tim Parlatore?

  So I think that there can be an element of, of that change sooner.

• 1:28:39Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I hope you're right.

• 1:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  I am really concerned.

• 1:28:44Tim Parlatore?

  You know, my wife always criticizes me. She says, "Tim, you've been a criminal defense attorney. You've seen the worst of society. Why are you still such an optimist? Why do you still have such faith in humanity?"

• 1:29:02Tim Parlatore?

  I don't know. I think if I didn't,

• 1:29:06Tim Parlatore?

  I wouldn't be able to function.

• 1:29:09Tim Parlatore?

  But I have to believe that things will get better. Things can get better. If they can't get better, and if they're not gonna get better, then what am I doing every day?

• 1:29:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:26Tim Parlatore?

  You know, it's, it's the same thing going back to what we were talking about with the retirees going back. You know? I'm not a retiree, so I'm not eligible for that program, but yeah. I go into military courtrooms all the time. With every intention of, how do I fix this system? How do I make this better? Not just for the client that's sitting next to me, but for every other sailor and soldier, an airman or marine out there. How can I, how can I fix this? You know, it's something that I have become over the past couple of years, just so incredibly passionate about fixing the military justice system,

• 1:30:09Tim Parlatore?

  because I believe it can. And if I lose faith that it can, then what am I doing?

• 1:30:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I'm always, I'm just always thinking about these things. You know, and going back to the silent majority, the middle of the road, moderate, you know, part of me thinks, it's like I'm split 50/50. Part of me thinks that that is completely gone. And, and because no matter where you go nowadays, the topic of conversation is generally politics. And, um, but then on the other hand,

• 1:31:01Shawn Ryan?

  I will say, this cycle around, I see almost zero campaign signs out. I don't know if that's just here. Are you seeing that where you live?

• 1:31:13Tim Parlatore?

  I haven't seen a single one.

• 1:31:16Shawn Ryan?

  I think people are checked out of these guys. And, uh, and, and in, in these parties. And I think that's another possibility as well, which I'm hoping, you know, I, I, it would be nice to see some people sit down and have some real conversations. I've been saying that also for a long time. And, and, but man, you know, even when I talk about it, it's, and I know that, you know,

• 1:31:48Shawn Ryan?

  The loudest person in the room is always the biggest shitbag, but you know, you talk about this stuff online on, on bringing people together and compromising and, and what you, what you get in the comments section is, "I'm not compl-" you know, and it's like, "Oh, man, we have completely lost it," you know, but it's, it's.

• 1:32:12Tim Parlatore?

  But where is the pendulum in the arc before it starts to go the other way?

• 1:32:20Tim Parlatore?

  It's at its most extreme position before it starts to swing.

• 1:32:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:28Tim Parlatore?

  It is always at its worst right before everybody puts their foot down and says, "This needs to be reformed."

• 1:32:37Tim Parlatore?

  We don't reform things when they're just slightly off.

• 1:32:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Tim Parlatore?

  We reform them when they get too far off.

• 1:32:53Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I don't want to see it go too far the other way either. I don't even know really what that looks like. I've thought about it, but it's, it, uh, it would be nice to see things simmer down a little bit. But let's move into, let's move into the weaponization of the Department of Justice.

• 1:33:14Tim Parlatore?

  Sure.

• 1:33:15Shawn Ryan?

  When did you start seeing that happen?

• 1:33:20Tim Parlatore?

  I have a different view on the weaponization of DOJ than a lot of other people. I believe that it's been like that for a very long time. Um, and I think that it's DOJ,

• 1:33:39Tim Parlatore?

  prosecutors, I'm not talking about cops, I'm talking about prosecutors here. They love to win and get convictions and put people in jail, especially if it's a, if it's a big and important person, that they can get the biggest headlines that they can. And they're willing to cheat to get there, in my experience.

• 1:34:04Tim Parlatore?

  Where that then intersects with politics, that's slightly more recent. Um, and...

• 1:34:14Tim Parlatore?

  You know, a lot of ways, it's more of, I don't, I don't agree with the Trump campaign when they sit there and say, oh, these are the Biden trials that, you know, that, you know, Alvin Bragg is doing this because of Joe Biden, or, um, or Fannie Willis is doing this at Biden's, or even Jack Smith's doing it at Biden's, you know, direction. I think that politicians may have restrained prosecutors in the past, but prosecutors are like hammers, where they go out there and everything to them looks like a nail, you know?

• 1:34:57Tim Parlatore?

  And I think that in certain ways, it's just been kind of unleashed in a way that before it was restrained. And I think back to 2016, all the crowds chanting, "Lock her up," when it came to Hillary's emails. And I watched all that and I thought, I personally believe that she committed a crime. I personally believe that she should not go to jail. Why? Because it is a impossible case to try.

• 1:35:38Tim Parlatore?

  When Jim Comey came out with his press, uh, press conference, I agreed with everything he said factually. I disagreed with his, I agree with his conclusion. I disagree with his reasoning. When he said, "No reasonable prosecutor bring this case," totally agree. When he then tried to say, "Because the statute doesn't really mean what the statute says," and that he was doing that whole mental gymnastics, that's, that's where he lost me. But to charge her with, you know, classified, you know, mishandling classified information,

• 1:36:20Tim Parlatore?

  you are giving her a gift-wrapped appeal before opening statements even start with the jury panel. The concept of picking a jury that can look at this case dispassionately.

• 1:36:36Tim Parlatore?

  In a situation like that, where you have a very divisive political figure, and by divisive, let's be clear, the word divisive doesn't mean people hate them. It means divisive divides. People hate them and people love them. So, the idea of picking a jury and then having any trial of Hillary Clinton maintain an image of being, you know, the fair and impartial administration of justice is a fiction. The same is true of Donald Trump. The same is true of Joe Biden.

• 1:37:18Tim Parlatore?

  That's why when I was still there, I was advocating that all of the classified document cases should end with no charges being brought against Trump or Biden. Those political prosecutions are fraught with peril. And so I didn't think that she should be prosecuted. And when Trump won, and he appointed Jeff Sessions as AJ, I was thinking, maybe he is gonna go after her now. I mean, he spent all this time campaigning on lock her up, but he didn't.

• 1:38:03Tim Parlatore?

  And I respected him for that, because he took that very divisive issue and turned down temperature on it, pushed it to the side. And I think that that principle has not held over the past four years. And so, you know, I do see more of these, you know, politically driven prosecutions, but let's be honest, the public integrity section of DOJ, which Jack Smith used to run, has always gone after political figures.

• 1:38:42Tim Parlatore?

  Certain jurisdictions where law enforcement is led by partisan officials in one-party jurisdictions, it's always ripe for corruption.

• 1:39:01Tim Parlatore?

  This has happened throughout history.

• 1:39:05Tim Parlatore?

  Again, to go back to some names I've used before, Thomas Jefferson ordered the arrest and indictment of Aaron Burr.

• 1:39:13Tim Parlatore?

  Not for killing Alexander Hamilton, but for treason.

• 1:39:20Tim Parlatore?

  After trial, Aaron Burr, the former Vice President of the United States, was acquitted.

• 1:39:26Tim Parlatore?

  But it was a politically driven prosecution because, once again, they were on opposite sides of the political aisle. He was Vice President under Thomas Jefferson. So it has happened before. But to the degree that it's happening now,

• 1:39:47Tim Parlatore?

  I think it's more of the politicians unleashing

• 1:39:53Tim Parlatore?

  a monster that's always been there with DOJ.

• 1:39:58Shawn Ryan?

  How do the agencies tie into this? Weaponization of the FBI, CIA, NSA? How do these tie in?

• 1:40:11Tim Parlatore?

  When you have leadership in agencies that are

• 1:40:19Tim Parlatore?

  tied to the partisan groups, that can lead to abuse.

• 1:40:27Tim Parlatore?

  I believe that the majority, vast majority, of FBI special agents are professional and do their job. However, the FBI has probably one of the highest percentages of non-special agent employees of any law enforcement agency out there. And their leadership,

• 1:40:53Tim Parlatore?

  and their analysts, and their non-gun and badge carrying people

• 1:41:00Tim Parlatore?

  who are making these decisions, I think a lot of them are the political appointees that do steer what the priorities are.

• 1:41:13Tim Parlatore?

  You know, I mean, when I was dealing with Jack Smith's team,

• 1:41:18Tim Parlatore?

  the prosecutors were definitely, you know, very focused on their angle.

• 1:41:27Tim Parlatore?

  But I actually got along very, very well with the FBI agents on Jack Smith's team. And I thought that they, in my opinion, were honest and trying to do the right thing.

• 1:41:41Tim Parlatore?

  Again, the ones carrying a badge and a gun, not the others.

• 1:41:47Tim Parlatore?

  And so then when you take that over to CIA, NSA, any of these other agencies, these agencies should be free from that type of political interference, should be. Because once you get politics into it, that shapes everything. Not just the way that they do business, who they target, how they write up reports.

• 1:42:19Tim Parlatore?

  But it's not new. You know, has the CIA written up a report that would support invading Iraq with weapons of mass destruction?

• 1:42:33Tim Parlatore?

  Gulf of Tonkin?

• 1:42:36Tim Parlatore?

  To justify the entry into the Vietnam War?

• 1:42:41Tim Parlatore?

  These things have happened, you know, throughout history.

• 1:42:46Tim Parlatore?

  It's more public now.

• 1:42:52Tim Parlatore?

  I remember a few years ago, it seemed like there was a significant rise in shark attacks on the New Jersey coastline.

• 1:43:01Tim Parlatore?

  And I went and looked it up because it seemed like every week there was another report about a shark attack. And I looked it up, and guess what? The attacks hadn't changed, the media coverage had. So it seemed like there were a lot more shark attacks, but there weren't. And the same is true here. The more you see of it, the more it seems like these things are happening.

• 1:43:28Tim Parlatore?

  But before, you just didn't see it.

• 1:43:37Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think cases like Epstein are just being whisked away into nothing?

• 1:43:52Tim Parlatore?

  Well, Epstein's case, I think, would have probably

• 1:43:57Tim Parlatore?

  gone a different way had he survived the trial.

• 1:44:03Tim Parlatore?

  You know, that's certainly is something. You know, there's always, you know, pressure being brought when, you know, certain cases could reveal embarrassing things about, you know, people in power.

• 1:44:18Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah, Epstein, I think, is...

• 1:44:22Tim Parlatore?

  It's a good example.

• 1:44:25Tim Parlatore?

  But the reason why it went away the way that it did is because he was permitted to kill himself. And yes, I said that very specifically.

• 1:44:38Tim Parlatore?

  That's my belief, is that he was permitted to kill himself.

• 1:44:45Shawn Ryan?

  It's things like this, like the, you know, the Epstein, you know, stuff. The...

• 1:44:57Shawn Ryan?

  Not releasing the manifesto from the shooter at Covenant School. It's... It's... Why? Why are we... Why... It appears that the FBI is not doing its job. It's the Parkland shooting.

• 1:45:16Shawn Ryan?

  Guy was, you know, "Hey, we need to look at this guy. Hey, here, here, here, here."

• 1:45:21Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Shawn Ryan?

  "Nothing happened." Bam. You know? Then the school shooting happens. It's so many things just get swept under.

• 1:45:29Tim Parlatore?

  Because the people that are in power want to stay in power, and therefore they need to cover themselves.

• 1:45:39Tim Parlatore?

  So many times, you know, my main job is fighting against the government. Sometimes that means go into a courtroom and go toe to toe with them and beat them. Oftentimes, it means find a solution where we can avoid a courtroom. And so oftentimes, I'm sitting here, and this is what I do in a lot of cases, is I sit there and I think, okay, what is a resolution for this case that allows my opponent an honorable exit? Like, I'll have a situation where, you know, they did, the government did absolutely the wrong thing.

• 1:46:24Tim Parlatore?

  They came to the absolute wrong conclusion. And I'll go to them, and if I just go in there and say, "You screwed up. You did this. You did that." Chances are, we're going to get into a fight. We're going to go into the courtroom. We're going to get into a big, ugly brawl. I'm going to win. But if I instead am able to present it in a way, I'm doing this, you know, I've done this in several cases, where I say, "Okay, I disagree with what you have done. However, here is a solution where you can give me what my client needs, and at the

• 1:47:03Tim Parlatore?

  same time, you save face by saying that this is based on new information," you know, whatever it is. As a lawyer, I'm often strategizing on, I know the government's never going to admit that what they did was wrong. But can I present it to them of like, giving them, "This is your way out, and this is your way of saying, 'We did the right thing.'" Make it politically acceptable for them to do the right thing and not have to admit that they did the wrong thing.

• 1:47:42Tim Parlatore?

  And that's where I get the majority of my cases resolved, where you've never read about them. So you have to remember with every single one of these cover-ups, the people in power want to stay in power. And therefore, they are going to do what they can to control the narrative and to make sure that you don't know, you know, the truth, anything that is embarrassing to them. And if that means classifying things that shouldn't be classified, if that means, you know, putting out stories in the press or books or other things that are not true,

• 1:48:26Tim Parlatore?

  just so that they can protect themselves, it is what they do. It is also what they have done for all of our history.

• 1:48:44Shawn Ryan?

  How does the government, the Department of Justice, the agencies, the politicians, the political parties, how do they even begin to gain the trust back of the people? Does it, let me start with this. Does it even matter to them if they have the trust of the people?

• 1:49:17Tim Parlatore?

  As of right now, it does not matter to them because it doesn't affect them. The way that they will be incentivized to regain trust is when they have lost trust in a way that negatively affects them.

• 1:49:34Shawn Ryan?

  What would that be?

• 1:49:40Tim Parlatore?

  We could.

• 1:49:43Tim Parlatore?

  As much as I'm not a defund the police kind of guy, the reality is

• 1:49:50Tim Parlatore?

  we could abolish the FBI and not lose any capabilities.

• 1:50:00Tim Parlatore?

  Everything they do can be done by somebody else.

• 1:50:05Tim Parlatore?

  You know, a lot of the organized crime investigations DEA could take that over. All the anti-terrorism stuff that can be taken over by Homeland Security Investigations.

• 1:50:17Tim Parlatore?

  There's nothing the FBI does that nobody else can do.

• 1:50:25Tim Parlatore?

  Even if there was a concerted push to that.

• 1:50:31Tim Parlatore?

  Put these people in fear of losing their jobs.

• 1:50:37Tim Parlatore?

  Give them a motivation to say, okay, we need to change things.

• 1:50:45Tim Parlatore?

  Or

• 1:50:48Tim Parlatore?

  go after the parties, go after the incumbents.

• 1:50:53Tim Parlatore?

  Put new people into Congress. They're gonna haul the FBI in and say, all right.

• 1:51:00Tim Parlatore?

  Y'all didn't change. Now we're gonna legislate the have to.

• 1:51:08Shawn Ryan?

  How would that be done when they're weaponized? So

• 1:51:13Shawn Ryan?

  you're a president, you're a senator, you're a congressman, whatever, fill in the blank. How do you go after the FBI without them coming after you?

• 1:51:26Tim Parlatore?

  It requires somebody with a lot of courage.

• 1:51:31Tim Parlatore?

  You know?

• 1:51:33Tim Parlatore?

  It requires somebody with a lot of courage and without, you know, a basement full of gold bars.

• 1:51:40Tim Parlatore?

  So

• 1:51:43Tim Parlatore?

  I think that there's a certain element there of the louder you are, the less likely they can do it.

• 1:51:55Tim Parlatore?

  You know, if you are the member of Congress that is pushing the hardest on this, you know, the Select Committee Chairman, for example.

• 1:52:09Tim Parlatore?

  It's too obvious to the American people if the FBI turns around and brings a, you know, a trumped up case against that person. I think it's relatively obvious to the American people now with some of these cases as to, you know, that type of a thing. So I've always found that the easiest way to avoid a threatening situation is to be very open and public about it.

• 1:52:48Tim Parlatore?

  Does require a lot of courage, though, admittedly.

• 1:52:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Tim Parlatore?

  It's not something that everybody would want to do.

• 1:52:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think it would be, I mean, I think it would be really tough. And, you know, when you say to go at them hard and, and, and open, I mean, what?

• 1:53:14Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like a lot of agencies have already crossed that line with zero repercussions, zero consequences. And so I don't know what would stop them from going after the loudest, most open person anyways. Because really, what are the American people gonna do?

• 1:53:36Tim Parlatore?

  Here's the.

• 1:53:37Shawn Ryan?

  The trend is they're gonna bitch, moan, complain, and do nothing.

• 1:53:44Tim Parlatore?

  Herein lies some of the attraction to the Trump voters. That they believe that if Trump went back into office, that he's at that point a lame duck president from day one, who has been himself the target of weaponization by the FBI, who has in his hands the power to fire the entire leadership structure of the FBI and install his own people and be a dictator for one day in exacting retribution. I don't know that that is the solution. In fact, I'm not saying it is the solution,

• 1:54:27Tim Parlatore?

  but you certainly can see why that concept becomes attractive to some people.

• 1:54:34Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:35Tim Parlatore?

  And it is something that I think is generally attractive to people about candidates who are above, you know, that partisanship. And so, and somebody like a Vivek, I'm not gonna try to pronounce his last name.

• 1:54:54Shawn Ryan?

  Ramaswamy.

• 1:54:55Tim Parlatore?

  Yes. He's also somebody that could be a very attractive person to get in there and not be beholden to, you know, the, the party. It's what made Ross Perot attractive back in the day. So, there's an element of that, and I think that's kind of, honestly, what a lot of people liked about Trump back in 2016. Even though it didn't work out in many ways, it, it got worse. But I don't know the answer.

• 1:55:36Tim Parlatore?

  You know, it's, I, I have ideas, I have suggestions, I have hopes, but I don't know what, how exactly they would do it.

• 1:55:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Are there any other ways, ideas you have on how, how government would regain the trust of the people?

• 1:56:04Tim Parlatore?

  Trust is easily lost and very difficult to regain. And what needs to be done to regain trust is to establish a clear, visible, positive change, followed by consistent transparency and updates to show, we had a problem, we addressed that problem, we're continuing to address that problem, and here's how we're doing with it.

• 1:56:41Tim Parlatore?

  One of the reasons why you see such a debate today over this whole FISA reauthorization is that after the abuses with Carter Page, who, full disclosure, I represented, after the abuses of illegally surveilling Carter Page, we don't have any visibility on what reforms they made, if any. Did they actually fix any problems? Or did they just keep going back to Congress saying, "Keep re-upping it. If you don't re-up this tool, we will lose our ability to spy on terrorists."

• 1:57:22Tim Parlatore?

  If you have these very transparent, I mean, you come out with these IG reports, the Horowitz reports and stuff like that, that say, "Oh, look at all these things that are a problem." And then the news cycle is so fast that we move on to the next thing and we never come back to, "Hey, did that problem ever get fixed?" Which is what the government wants us to do. They want us to forget it so they don't have to fix it. After Eddie's case, we exposed so many problems in the military justice system in the Navy. They ordered this blue ribbon panel, comprehensive review of the Navy JAG Corps.

• 1:58:07Tim Parlatore?

  And they went through and they did this comprehensive report, exonerating themselves that they did a wonderful job and there's maybe a couple of little tweaks here and there that they can do with their training program. But other than that, it worked wonderfully. And I sat there and I thought, not a single person on that panel ever talked to me to say, "Hey, you were the guy in the middle of the trenches and seeing all of these failures." What'd you say? What happened?

• 1:58:47Tim Parlatore?

  The government doesn't reform because the people don't demand it. They demand it, but then the attention span is short. A lot of that's driven by the media. And so then you don't have that long-term follow-up. But if you really want to regain the trust of the people, it's no different from people. You know, if I wanted to, you know, if there was a reason why, you know, I had lost your trust and I want to regain your trust as an individual, the government should do the same thing that I'm doing, which is to apologize, to acknowledge I did something wrong,

• 1:59:31Tim Parlatore?

  and then to show you how I'm fixing it. And to make it very clear to you, this problem I'm fixing and it will never happen again. So there is a way to do it. Will the government do it? Only if forced. And the only thing that they respond to is the fear of losing their power. How do you think the people turn this around?

• 2:00:12Tim Parlatore?

  Not by wearing fuzzy hats and storming the Capitol. People turn this around through the rejection of the party line. Through demanding accountability, through demanding that the parties take positions that actually represent the people. Through the rejection of politicians that have been there for decades. Which is not to say that they're all bad people. There's some great, you know, there are some good people that have been there for a long time,

• 2:00:55Tim Parlatore?

  but there's a lot of people that have just been there for a long time and shouldn't be. Yeah.

• 2:01:07Tim Parlatore?

  It was in a large part what happened in 2016, where the people were so fed up that they rejected what the Republican Party was pushing on them. Yeah, in 2016, you think about it. Both sides were so upset with the status quo that on the RNC side, they rejected Jeb Bush was the anointed person by the party. They rejected him. They rejected all the party insiders and they chose the most extreme candidate, Donald Trump.

• 2:01:49Tim Parlatore?

  On the Democrat side, they did the exact same thing. The DNC maybe rigged the system a little bit more to make sure Bernie Sanders didn't actually win. But you came very close there to a revolt by the people that resulted in a Trump-Sanders election. Neither one is a party insider. Two very different candidates, but... And I think that that scared the establishment. And that is why they fought so hard against Trump,

• 2:02:32Tim Parlatore?

  January 6 protesters, all these other things to make sure that everybody understands, hey, don't fight back against the establishment. Don't do that again. And now you're in 2024 where at least the Republican base is doing it again and electing Donald Trump.

• 2:02:59Tim Parlatore?

  So it, and if RFK Junior gets a significant percentage of the electorate, that's also rebuke on the other side. So it's not just one side that is trying to reject the, um, the anointed, party-chosen individuals. It is both sides. Yeah? What would have happened if they let RFK Junior debate? I'd have a real contested primary.

• 2:03:34Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure it would have been a one-sided debate.

• 2:03:37Tim Parlatore?

  Right. He's a very interesting guy. Yeah, I don't agree with every one of his positions, but he's a very interesting guy.

• 2:03:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm hoping to get him on here.

• 2:03:51Tim Parlatore?

  I'd recommend that. If you're gonna ask me who you should have on, I like him. I think he'd be an interesting person to talk to.

• 2:03:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we've been in touch. We'll see what happens.

• 2:04:00Tim Parlatore?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, you know, I would just, I would like to see, I think the way this country gets back on track is, I think it's, it's, it's what I've been talking about. It is the people, quit being led around by the nose, you know, look into what your party and your candidate is actually saying, "Stop the mental gymnastics." The mental gymnastics going on are, are, uh, there's some flexible minds out there. I'll put it that way.

• 2:04:38Tim Parlatore?

  It's, uh,

• 2:04:39Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and to stand up for what you believe in and not just pay lip service. Because that's what I've, that's what I feel this country's turned into is a lot of lip service.

• 2:04:50Tim Parlatore?

  Hmm.

• 2:04:51Shawn Ryan?

  And, and some of this stuff isn't even, just go, just, just do what you say you're gonna do and, and, and follow through with it, you know, and, and enough of the lip service, enough of the outrage, we've got plenty of that. Just stand up for what you believe in and do what you say you're going to do. I think that...

• 2:05:24Shawn Ryan?

  You hear everybody say, "We need to hold these politicians accountable and we need in, in, man, we're gonna have a hell of a hard time holding any politician accountable if we can't even hold ourselves accountable."

• 2:05:36Tim Parlatore?

  One thing that I've noticed, depending on the media outlet, they're shifting a little bit.

• 2:05:45Tim Parlatore?

  I appear on all of them, and I've found that depending on which outlet I'm on, I can have the exact same interview about the exact same topic on the same day on two or three different networks, and they're all very different.

• 2:06:06Tim Parlatore?

  And a lot of it comes to the response that I get after, you know? Every time I, you know, every time I go on MSNBC, I know I'll get a bunch of calls and emails and tweets and everything talking about how I need to be murdered and disbarred and everything because I dared to, you know, question whether Trump should go to jail, things like that.

• 2:06:33Tim Parlatore?

  On the Fox News side, you know, I find that often people are also too willing to defend everything that he's done. And oddly, I have, and I know that not everybody's gonna agree with this, but I've personally found the most intelligent conversations right now are being held on CNN.

• 2:07:00Tim Parlatore?

  Because they are bringing in more differing points of view. Still very, you know, much of a left-leaning, you know, particularly from their, from their hosts, but they have more intelligent guests that don't follow what the viewers necessarily want to hear, and they are having more intelligent conversations there. And I think that the more of that that there is, the better things will be. Because the more that we challenge people, and a lot of this maybe goes back to college

• 2:07:39Tim Parlatore?

  campuses too, we want to challenge people by having them hear things that they don't agree with.

• 2:07:50Tim Parlatore?

  But then argue it. Okay? I would love to talk with some of these people who are so angry at me because, oh, how dare you say that, you know, that Trump shouldn't go to jail. Okay. Set aside your anger. Let's have a conversation. Why?

• 2:08:15Tim Parlatore?

  And I think that on college campuses, that's really where this thing starts, is that present people with points of view that they don't agree with. And force them to respond not with insults, not with protests, not with screaming, not with safe spaces. Force them to respond with logic and argument.

• 2:08:43Tim Parlatore?

  And if we could teach our people, our young people to think and be able to defend their position. Some of their positions may be valid. Some of their positions may change. I've done that in legal cases, where I've started by defending a certain position. Then as facts change, I realize the strategy needs to change because maybe my original argument is no longer valid. And based on the changing circumstance, you know, maybe I need to adjust.

• 2:09:21Tim Parlatore?

  If we teach people to defend their positions logically, as opposed to a tweet that says, anybody who says this, you know, should go to hell.

• 2:09:41Tim Parlatore?

  Don't respond with anger. Respond with logic. Maybe it'll change your position. Maybe it'll change my position.

• 2:09:52Shawn Ryan?

  It's an interesting point and made me think of, you know,

• 2:09:58Shawn Ryan?

  I think another way this starts to change is by leaving out the blame game. Just quit pointing the fingers. I've noticed that if you can have a conver- I get really, I don't like it when I hear

• 2:10:19Shawn Ryan?

  the left, the left, the right, the right, the Democrats, the Democrats, the Republicans, the Republic- the conservatives, the liberals. If you can leave those adjectives out of the conversation,

• 2:10:34Shawn Ryan?

  it forces people to think about the position that you're, that you're taking.

• 2:10:38Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 2:10:39Shawn Ryan?

  Because people are so conditioned now to, to be told what to think, be told what their stance is, what their beliefs are, what their values are by a media outlet, a social media figure, a public figure, an influencer, whatever you want to call them, they're so used to that that it just, it's like, uh, it's like people become programmed for that.

• 2:11:08Tim Parlatore?

  Right.

• 2:11:08Shawn Ryan?

  But if you have a conversation like this where I would say this is a very balanced conversation and people can't peg whether Tim's a Republican or a Democrat or Sean's a liberal or a conservative. I think if you can leave the adjectives out, it forces people to think about what their beliefs are rather than what's, what side is this guy on?

• 2:11:37Tim Parlatore?

  Correct.

• 2:11:37Shawn Ryan?

  And okay, he's on my side. I agree with everything he says.

• 2:11:41Tim Parlatore?

  I'll give you a great example of that because that's such a great point. Once you pull the labels out, you'll realize that a lot of the labels are misplaced. And if-

• 2:11:54Tim Parlatore?

  Do you believe in people's individual rights? A lot of people are gonna say yes. You should be able to live your life without interference with the government, right? Yes. You should be allowed to, you know, marry whoever you wanna marry, right? You should be allowed to dress however you wanna dress. You should be allowed to be called whatever you wanna be called. You should be allowed to smoke whatever you wanna smoke. You should be allowed to carry whatever gun you wanna carry. You should be allowed to... You all of a sudden take what would be considered classical conservative values of individual freedom unless government interference,

• 2:12:36Tim Parlatore?

  but then you apply it to, you know, certain liberal priorities. And by taking the labels out and just saying, "Do you believe in individual freedom?" And if that's what you believe in, then isn't gay rights and gun rights the same? And isn't, you know, legalized cannabis and all of these things, don't they then become the same... on the same side?

• 2:13:18Tim Parlatore?

  You know, one of my favorite songs, Scooter Brown Band. He wrote a song, it wasn't very popular, but I loved it, called "Live Free." And when you listen to that song, he basically lays this exact thing out. You know, "I don't care who your lover is or what you like to smoke. If you don't like guns, don't have one, but don't take mine away. And, you know, can we just agree to disagree and live free?"

• 2:13:51Tim Parlatore?

  So when you take the labels off, you realize that the parties have staked out positions on certain things that maybe you do agree with, maybe you don't. Do you believe that people should be coming to this country, you know, that we need immigrants, that immigrants are important? Do you believe that we should have less convicted murderers crossing the border, less terrorists crossing the borders? Well, then, don't we all agree that we should have a door? You know?

• 2:14:26Tim Parlatore?

  And I think when you pull the labels out, you're going to find that people agree on a whole lot more than they disagree on because the labels are gone.

• 2:14:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well, hopefully, we start seeing more of that.

• 2:14:45Tim Parlatore?

  We shall see.

• 2:14:47Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Tim, I think that's the perfect way to end this. And so, once again, as always, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you here. And thank you for coming. And I'm sure we'll see you again.

• 2:15:02Tim Parlatore?

  Thank you so much for having me.