Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistleblower, an
American patriot. Prepare to embrace the
uncomfortable truth, because this program has no time for
comforting lies. Here is civil liberties
enthusiast, Second Amendment defender, and recovering FBI
agent Kyle Serif. Hello my friends, welcome to the
Kyle Serif show. Today is Thursday, it is May the
23rd, and we're rolling live right now on rumble.com/kyle
Serafin. You can join us over there in
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I don't know how much longer going to be able to do the
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that, it's either X right now or Rumble.
And Rumble is the preferred place because I can actually
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So definitely come over and join us on there today.
We're going to have a guest. We're going to have a guest
interview. We're going to be talking to
another former federal agent. I think you guys will get a big
kick out of this. This is going to be an episode
with Aaron Gogley. You've seen his picture on the
thumbnail. We're going to get to know the
man. He's a guy that I was following
on Twitter. Long.
Before I ever had a Twitter account, it was one of those
things that's like someone who would speak insanity.
And I always knew that he was a federal agent of some kind, but
I didn't know until after he decided to unveil himself and
after he retired. So we get a nice chance to catch
up and talk about some things that I think will be
interesting. The process.
Who are the people that are behind kind of that term Fed?
What kind of people are they? I think you'll find that more
often than not, they're guys like Aaron and they're, they're
decent human beings that that signed up for a good purpose
doesn't mean that the purpose always turns out well.
A lot of people don't stand up for the right things.
Aaron did. And we'll talk about that in
just a little bit here. Before we do, I want to say
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patriotcoolers.com promo code Kyle, should we do one more
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It's slowly getting burned away. All right, folks, we're going to
jump into this interview. I think you guys are going to
have a good time with. It Aaron's kind of a nice
smooth. Talker, he's exactly what I
expect from a Fed who worked for the IRS.
He's smooth, he's confident, he is decisive, and he is
meticulous in his speech. You guys will see that, and I
think it does give a little view behind the curtain.
That's what we're all about here.
Love seeing it. All right, stick around and
let's do it. Aaron, can I tell you something
kind of crazy? Sure, go ahead.
I just sent a text message before we went and started
recording this to my buddy who introduced me to your anonymous,
semi anonymous Twitter account. And I said, do you remember Sir
Aaron? And he said the raccoon.
And I said, no, not the raccoon. The guy, the guy that used to
mix it up with Bill Shipley online.
And he goes, yeah, what about him?
I said, well, I'm going to do an interview with him.
He's like, that's crazy. He gave me that oh face.
So anyway, you had some, you had some traction with some feds on
a anonymous Twitter account. I'm going to start from the
beginning though, before we get there.
Let's start with who you are, where you grew up, and tell us a
little bit about your family and your kind of childhood because I
want to get into a lens you see the world with.
Well, I guess maybe you should have moved backwards in time.
So I was with the IRS for IRS criminal investigation for 25
years. Retired July 2023 soon as I was
eligible. So going back in time, I went to
University of Laverne in California.
And the reason why I went there was because I always wanted to
be in law enforcement. And so my cousin is or was a
deputy US Marshall. I'm not sure where he's at now.
So he majored in criminology. So I figured I needed a major in
criminology. So that's I picked a school that
had criminology and they gave me a full ride.
So that's where I went to school.
And then I met some FBI agents and some IRS agents who told me,
hey, you need to major in accounting if you want to get
into law enforcement. Changed my major to accounting,
got a degree in accounting, graduated from there.
Going back in time, I lived all over Southern California for
most of my life. Originally was born in Anaheim,
lived in Norwalk for the first few years of my life.
My dad is a Vietnam veteran. He was a mechanic for trucking
company. So at first, he worked for ICX,
which went out of business. We wound up moving to
Victorville. If you don't know where that is,
that is in the high desert of California, a terrible place to
live, dry, dirty. But I let me know.
A lot of people like the Mojave Desert.
So my dad worked in Barstow, which is like halfway between
Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Yes.
Yellow Freight, they had a big, big center there right near the
railroad, right. So Barstow is a huge railroad.
I'm going down to Home Pass right there in Los Angeles,
right? So my dad worked there.
We lived in Victorville. Then I moved for high school
because I was apparently too smart for the local high schools
in Victorville. I was in elementary school.
I got in a lot of trouble, got suspended because I was testing
at high school level. And so that's how bad the school
system was. I was in fifth grade, testing at
high school levels, and so they wanted to put me in high school.
My parents said no, I was getting all sort of trouble.
So they homeschooled me for three years, and that worked out
so good that they decided to move to a place called Phelan,
which is right outside the mountain ranges, the San
Bernardino Mountains, right near the Cahoon Pass, right where
most of the skiing is. And I went to a high school
called Serrano High School after the Serrano Indians.
I went there sophomore through through senior year.
Always, like I said, always wanted to be in law enforcement.
Thought I want to be, you know? David Duchovny had X-Files.
Hold on, look, I'll show you this.
Look at this. Yeah, Everyone said when I was
younger, they always said I looked like David Duchovny.
So I wanted to be an FBI agent or some sort of federal agent
like my whole life. And so I got that accounting
degree and that's and I went to the first agency that was going
to take me. I was probably 22 or just turned
22 when I started the process, just turned 23 when I went off
the Flexi. So for people that know, almost
every agency goes to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
in Georgia, except for the FBI and the DEA, which which go to
Quantico and then the Secret Service has half their school in
in at Flexi and then half of it goes to their place in Maryland.
And then the Border Patrol goes to Artesia.
What's that? Our Border Patrol goes out to
Artesia after they're done. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Did you guys have follow on training too?
Or there's more flexi training centers now.
So Artesia's bigger than it was before, and now there's one I
think in South Carolina that used as well.
So yeah, so I went there. I had just turned 23, had six
weeks from turning 23, went to Flexi, graduated, got my badge
and my gun, and was hot to trot ready.
To go save the world. That's right.
And everyone at FLETI told me I wasn't going to last in the IRS.
They they told me I was going to switch agencies because I was
so, so pro law enforcement. So wanted to be.
I wanted to actually get bad guys and they were saying no,
no, no, this is this is a white collar.
You're never going to make it. You never.
IRS is like a retirement gig for some people, isn't it?
Yes, a lot of a lot of a lot of Cpas, a lot of accountants
because you have to have 12 units of accounting because they
can't teach you the accounting. So you, you get a lot of, you
know, nerds and people that aren't typical law enforcement
oriented people that, that go into that job.
I'm. So glad that you called them
nerds because that was my ongoing joke with people in the
FBI. The FBI famous for hiring Cpas,
lawyers and and now they do like linguists and cyber people.
But man, there's a lot of nerds and I don't know why they think
that's such a great it. It maybe that mindset, sort of
analytical mindset helps you to to organize federal cases, which
are very different than traditional law enforcement.
How did you fit in that 23? To analyze bank records, you
want to look at certain things, you want to look at cyber
records that you you have to have that education.
So either the FBI has to give it to you or the IRS has to give it
to you, or you have to come in already with that knowledge and
you're already at training like 20.
We were there 22 1/2 weeks. I was there from July to do
Christmas and we came back on Christmas and I didn't leave.
I was there the whole time. They didn't allow us to really
leave at that juncture in time. So you know, you're there,
you're living there. I had to file taxes from
Georgia. It's crazy.
I like, I like that's where you went with it.
You're like, yeah, I had to file taxes.
That seems like a very IRS kind of thing to to hone in on.
You you you appreciate that more when you live in Texas and
Florida. You don't have to file any state
taxes. But when I was living in
California, I had to file 2 tax returns, one for California, one
for Georgia, which I thought was ridiculous.
But I I think maybe it saved me a little money because Georgia
is a little bit cheaper on income tax.
I remember, I remember having I did a split thing when I joined
the military and I was still like I was 1/2 year resident in
California and they came for every penny of it as they always
do. And then a half year resident of
Texas. That was kind of weird.
OK, so your first assignment when it took you back to where
to? To LA?
Los Angeles. OK, so if you, if you were from
DC, New York or Los Angeles, you pretty much went back to one of
those places 'cause that's where they needed most people.
So I was from Los Angeles and processed out of Los Angeles.
So I came back to Los Angeles. I did about a third of my class.
And what kind of cases? So my first case, first cases, I
had a couple tax cases that were really interesting.
They were more like very illegal tax cases, which is, you know,
illegal tax cases, people that are doing other crimes and
you're prosecuting them for tax evasion.
But I was also on a healthcare fraud task force with the FBI,
which was a miserable experience.
And and also, it wasn't, it wasn't the FBI, it wasn't the,
well, I, I can go into a whole story about that.
We're going to get there. Yeah, we have to get there.
That's that's required reading for this class, so.
But healthcare was terrible. This is one of the reasons I can
get to later. I almost went to the FBI later
in my career, but one of the reasons why I didn't was because
I did not want to get stuck on a healthcare task force because
that's just a miserable job. And then I was also on a public
corruption. And if you think healthcare
fraud is bad, public corruption is the worst thing to
investigate is terrible, terrible.
It's it's very difficult. You're talking about like de
minimis amounts of money and everyone is a sleazeball.
It it's just, it was not not, that's not, and that's not what
I joined. Like I wanted to work like
actual criminals. So my first big case was a group
of psychics in Southern California that lived in the
beach. And did you say psychics?
Sidekicks did. They were.
Getting a little bit of feedback, but did they know you
were coming? That was the joke Jay Leno made.
It has to be right. It's so on the surface you're
investigating what, what was the fraud or what was the the crime
that they're engaged in. Well, what they would do is they
they just read people very, very well and convinced them that
they were. And I would say 90% of these
people, 95% of these people, maybe 99% of people were people
had just broken up out of a relationship.
And so they were vulnerable. And then they tell them, well,
you have an evil spirit or if you're Catholic, you need to
have holy water from Italy or, you know, something that that
appealed to that person. And then they would get them to
write them big checks for this stuff.
And that I charged them with fraud, mail fraud, but also
charged them with tax evasion. The, the mail fraud fell through
because the prosecutors were like, well, these people sort of
people are going to think they deserve what they get.
So, so we wound up getting them on tax evasion and it made all
the news at that time. And, and my SAC was very happy
because he got appear on the news and it made it made The
Tonight Show. Jay Leno made the same joke that
you made. The Manhattan Beach PD must have
leaked that we were going to arrest them because the media
was there at, you know, 6:30 in the morning waiting for us.
So it made the front page of the papers.
And yeah, the SAC was super happy that day.
That was my first big case. Let's talk about the, the
management structure within the IRS.
I, I don't have a lot of familiar, the only IRS agents I
ever saw were on some CI cases we did.
So I didn't, I didn't do a ton of work with them.
What is the culture like and what is the culture going up
into the the Senior Executive Service and is it as despised
maybe as some of the FBI was? I would say no.
So it also depends a little bit on the field office.
So your bigger field offices you have, you know, obviously more
we, we call them groups, IRS calls them groups as opposed to
squats. But it's, it's very similar
concept. You have a group of eight to 12
agents. You have a supervisory special
agent that's over them. Then you have an A SAC that's
over, you know, several groups. Then you have an SAC that's in
charge of the entire field office.
The field offices have have gone down in time, so they
consolidated a few of them. But like Los Angeles would cover
like LA County, San Bernardino County, Riverside County, pretty
pretty big, different big area. New York might only cover, you
know, the New York bureau's, borough's or whatever you call
them. So and then some field offices
would have SES Sacs, right, SA CS.
So like Chicago, I think Miami or New York, they would have SES
service. And then you have you have
analysts and you have. So these are agents.
When I say analysts, these are agents that are basically
working as four teens, but they're in charge of programs.
So we call them program managers.
That was my last position when I left, I was a program manager.
Got it. So then so those are 14, you
also have 15. So you have directors and
assistant directors and all sorts of management that work
out of DC. And then you would have like our
or instead of a director at the top, we would, ours was the
chief. So we had a chief and the
assistant chief. So those would be like the
equivalent of the FBI director. Various.
I mean, sort of like the FBI, you have different divisions
within, within CI that does different things, but they don't
really affect the field so much as as they do with the FBI, like
cyber division and and the FBI is very involved with cyber.
And the FBI was like the, the divisions in the IRS criminal
investigation don't really affect like your, your programs
so much on the on the agent level as much like you just like
no one knows, like you should have know that there's an
undercover process, but you don't really know like what
section that comes out of in the IRS, right.
So, you know, it's more vague and nebulous because it's not as
big as the FBI and. And that was my next question
about size. SO we've been hearing a lot
about these numbers. The Congress is screaming about
it, whatever is 87,000. I feel like they have no idea
what they're talking about, knowing that people
misunderstand words on a regular basis, stuff like that.
If you talk about kind of the size of the agency, the number
of actual 1811, the, the, the special agent positions and then
maybe the size of the support. And so people can kind of get a
concept of what this 87,000 BS number looks like.
Investigation is teeny compared to the regular IRS.
So at our peak, I think virus criminal investigation was 3300
people, 3300 agents. That's all the, that's all 18
elevens care about, right? They, they care about how many
agents there are. So I don't know how much support
staffed it is, but we had 3300 agents.
I think we got down to 2400. That's why they're trying to
hire like gangbusters because they're they're basically
running out of people that I think at one point in time they
told me 40% of virus criminal investigation, the 18 Elevens
were eligible to retire and relieving.
So now they're hiring like 300 agency that would make IRS
criminal investigation like the third or fourth largest agency.
So you're the FBIDEA. And then I think IRS and Secret
Service ran neck and neck in size support staff.
There's, there's probably not even a 10th of support staff
compared to agents. So for each group we had like
maybe one analyst and maybe a secretary and, and of course
they changed the names over the years, but there's, there's not
that many, there's not that many support staff at all.
We do have our own labs. So we have our own forensic
labs. We have handwriting analysis, we
have computer analysis. We have those kinds of people.
But a lot of those are run by 18 elevens.
So they actually pull 18 elevens to do some of these things or
run these things or, or be in charge of these things.
So 18 elevens was the biggest, the biggest number.
That that dramatically changes the character of an agency.
And I think that's what people don't understand about why the
Bureau has gotten so sideways compared to some of the other
federal law enforcement. But what is the what are the
sexy cases? So if you're as an example, if
you're in the FBI and you get assigned CI counterintelligence,
which is not criminal investigations like you were
just saying, if you get counterintelligence out of the
Academy. I had people tell me, well, my
career is over and my life is going to be boring forever.
Nobody wants that. But if you got drugs and gangs,
like that was considered to be sort of the sexy, fun thing that
you think of as being law enforcement, where do IRS people
coming out of the Academy go? Like that's where I either want
to be or that's what I'm excited to get assigned to.
I wanted to do drugs really, really badly.
Yeah. So we have people assigned to
Haida and OSA Diff and they all, that's all they do is drugs and
they do the money laundering portion of it, but they're
basically doing a lot of the drug portion of it.
My best case was actually a kidnapping and murder case that
the FBI, So the FBI is like quick response team worked the
murder, but they weren't really prepared to work the the money
laundering aspect of it and trace the ransom proceeds.
So what had happened is these Russians in LA had kidnapped
these wealthy people. They ransomed them off and then
they would kill them and they enjoyed their killing too.
Like they would brag about like how much killing they renew.
And they drove up the bodies up to a reservoir in Fresno area,
dump the bodies. And then they would wire the
money around the world to the different fake names.
And then they bring it back home and, and spend it.
But they were, I mean, they loved, they loved their work and
they were going to do a lot more.
So the FBI caught them. But then someone needs to trace
all those ransom proceeds and try to recover them.
And so that was my my job. So I was involved in that in
that case, and I traveled all over the world doing that, went
to Russia, went to Greece, went to like 12 different countries.
It was, it was fantastic. I was like, I was living the
life, you know, I was basically doing the FBI's job, working at
the FBI, just didn't have an FBI badge.
And how did the how did the agents on the on the Bureau side
take what you were doing? Oh, they, they really liked it.
I mean, because I was doing their work from, they didn't
want to do that work. I mean, they were, they were
the, this was the like their kidnapping squad.
Whatever their squad does, it does like fast cases.
Like they didn't want to be on a case for three years.
It was a death penalty case. We were, I was on that case for
like 4 years. It was like a long time.
The trial itself, the first trial was like 6 months.
Six month trial. Yes, it was the first death
penalty case in in California since like World War 2, the
federal federal death penalty case.
Yeah. And what, what was the the death
penalty chart? Was this a, was it like like a
Rico murder? Is that where it came from?
Or how do they how do they trace it to the federal Nexus for
murder? It was, it was kidnapping and
ransom that that was what made it the federal Nexus so.
Was there, was there Interstate play there that happened and.
All the ransom was Interstate. The kidnappings weren't really
Interstate, but all the ransom payments went from.
A lot of them came from foreign bank accounts into the OR either
went to foreign bank accounts or, or, or from like foreign
people who were paying. And they came from outside the
US and paid to their bank accounts.
But yeah, most of the bank accounts, like some of them were
in Russia. Some of them were Dubai.
Yeah. So that the FBI agents got to
use like the FBI jet because because we were seeking the
death penalty, nobody would allow us to land with the with
the prisoners. Oh, so they had to use the FBI
jet so I didn't have to go get to go on that trip.
It always works out that way, doesn't it?
There's the Bureau agents did, yeah.
I'm still friends with them. So I still keep in touch with
them. We, we it was us LAPD and the
FBI agents, They, they left before I did.
But we still we still keep in touch.
What years was that? I want to say the case ended in
2006. So I think it was 2000 through
2006, somewhere in that range because I became a supervisor in
Houston in 2006. That was the year my daughter
was born. That's the only way I remember
it because we moved to Houston 2006, had my daughter.
So that was in the trial took place.
I had to fly back from Houston for part of that trial.
So that's how I remember when it ended.
So our trip to Russia must have been like 2004, 2003, somewhere
in that time frame. Maybe we, and I don't know if
there is a big thing to uncover here, but was there a change
that happened after 911 that you saw pre post with the IRS
specifically? A lot of federal law enforcement
did change. I'm curious if IRS was as well.
I don't, I don't know if there's a huge change.
We were still pretty staffed up at that point in time.
So we had people on 9/11, we had people actually do details over.
So we did. And at that point in time, too,
we were also detailing over to Secret Service.
So Secret Service did other Treasury agents for their
details, for presidential details.
But the biggest thing I remember is we had people actually go be
air marshals. And then some people actually
wound up leaving permanently to be an air Marshall, which I
didn't understand because that is another terrible job.
God. It's hard.
But you know, so when we all wanted to do something like we
wanted to be part of something
we wanted to So people volunteer.
Of course I'm going to volunteer be air Marshalls.
A big deal. Like that was how we could
serve. Like there was not a lot of ways
to do that. One of the big difference was
JTTF stood up and we were working on a lot of financial
angles for various terrorism cases.
JTTF, we started putting people on those task forces.
Vincent changed. So the Patriot Act changed like
financial reporting or about how the BSA, the Bank Secrecy Act,
So what what banks do, how what suspicious activity reports that
they're passing new laws regarding, you know, UN
unlicensed permitters. So those those things did
changes to give us more powers to go after people for certain
crimes that we didn't have before.
Well, I didn't. I don't think we saw any big
organizational change that. Makes sense.
Can you, can you break out kind of, and I know Bank Secrecy Act
is a big part of what I saw in your resume and you've got a lot
of experience investigating that sort of work.
I don't think people understand what it means and why it exists.
And there was some issues even when it was first passed that it
might actually violate some 4th Amendment.
There were some concerns about that.
Can you kind of breakdown what the what the Bank Secrecy Act is
and how it's actually used? Yeah, so the Bank Secrecy Act
was first passed in 1970. It was the first anti money
laundering bill. So originally money laundering
was not a crime. What we had was drug dealers
bringing all sorts of cash into the banking system.
And so the Bank Secrecy Act established sort of a reporting
protocols. It it established currency
transaction reports. And so when people brought in
more than $10,000 in cash, what you had is the bank would fill
out a currency transaction report saying this is we got
$10,000 from this person. There's a bunch of details they
put on this wall. So after that happened, you can
imagine what the drug dealers did they started doing with we
call smurfing now, which is they just go to different banks and
deposit less than $10,000. So eventually the Bank Secrecy
Act has been amended throughout the years, including pretty
recently to sort of evolve different reporting standards.
So they, it made structuring a crime.
So if you, if you breakdown more than $10,000 in cash and deposit
into the bank intentionally, that's actually a crime.
I prosecuted those cases, but it also did something called a
suspicious activity report. So if the bank decides that what
you're doing is suspicious, it has to, it has to, it doesn't
have any choice. It has to report that to the
federal government. And that used to be the IRS, but
that was another thing. After 911, Vincent actually took
over that power and became sort of the Regulatory agency, I
think it was after 911. So the reports used to go to the
IRS center. Now they go to Vincent, but the
banks are required to report anything suspicious.
And of course, over the years it's sort of gotten more to the
point where everything's suspicious.
And now you see those reports like, oh, did they put down Mega
or they put down J6 or did they put down whatever?
Or, you know, here's some merchant codes that are
suspicious or you know, so there are different things that people
consider suspicious, but the bank is under a lot of
regulatory pressure to report stuff.
It's pretty much anything suspicious at this at this point
in time. So you're and these suspicious
activity reports come with bank records.
So all an agent has to do is call the bank and say, Hey, I
want all the records related to the suspicious activity report.
I don't, you don't need a subpoena, you don't need
warrant, you don't need anything.
You just get all that data. And now, now with all the
powerful databases, a lot of it is just being, you know, sucked
into these giant databases. Like we don't have to call the
bank because they're attaching all these, all these things to
it. And it used to be like you had
to actually, you had a database that had like is it was more
like D base right where you, you would see like the information,
but you didn't have the attachments that were harder to
get. Well, now modern databases make
all that possible. You can suck it in, you can then
it digests it and then it it spits it out into a format.
Now with AI could even summarize it for you and tell you like
what The thing is. So now you can imagine that
they're just the government can mine way more data, way faster
do. You have concerns about that?
I'm sorry. Do you have concerns about that
as a citizen now? I do, I do, I, I sort of having
concern as an agent like this is just way too much.
It was, it's, it's good for you as an agent because you're
investigating crime and and you always have good intentions,
right? But the fact of the matter is
that after J6, it sort of woke me up to like, hey, now they're
just saying like anything suspicious and they can just
search this data for anything they want whenever you want.
So if they decide that something's a crime, but you can
just search it. And there's not a lot of
accountability over what's being searched as much anymore, it
seems less accountability than before.
After something is, you know, leaked or something, maybe they
investigate it then. But it's a lot harder to keep
tabs on what is being searched because you can search so
generically and get the same results.
Whereas before you, you really have to search much more
specifically. Like if I wanted to search for,
you know, some celebrity, I wanted to search for Kryo
Serafin. Like before I have to search for
Kryo Serafin. Like I'd have to be pretty
specific and, and that might flag something.
Well, now maybe I can search your county and I can get
everything in your county. And I'm sure that might come up
with 10,000 hits, but I just have to browse down till I find
your name, right? Which is pretty easily because
you can just sort it by name, right, sorted by.
So it's pretty easy to find and that won't raise any flags at
all. In fact, that's encouraged.
That's encouraged by the IRS. Yeah, let's, let's break into
that just a little bit. I, I had never even thought of
it. So one of the and, and for
people's awareness, almost all these searches are catalogued.
I have to assume they are in the IRS.
They certainly are at the FBI. You type in something into the,
into the various databases. They know that your login is
attributed to that search and those parameters, however
specific it was. So if you're looking for your
ex-girlfriend or you want to find out how an ex-wife is doing
or you know your wife's ex-husband or any of these
things, they can come back and find you.
They won't find it right away. But if there's an allegation
that something is gone sideways, I know we, you probably know
people too. They get in trouble all the time
for personal searches. Some people are using it to, to
vet their dates on, you know, like matchmaker apps and stuff
like this. So this stuff happens.
But if you're talking about, they can literally search areas
and it's so well defined that they can Scroll down to a name.
They're essentially laundering their search through something
that is normal or, you know, it disappears into the regular
traffic of their job. Right.
And I'm not sure like what? So it used to be that they would
have very, very Clear History. But when, when Palantir first
introduced their database to us, I asked them, so are you
recording our search history? Like how who's keeping tabs on
this? There was no search history,
none. Now I presume that this probably
changed now because they probably have wised up because
I, I actually as a supervisor actually had one of my employees
run a search on his ex-wife. I wanted to kill him like that
is like, that is like textbook example within their training of
what not to do. I wanted to kill them so bad.
But it's right, right. But at least then with the
systems the way they were, they had very specific audit logs.
They could go back, but originally all these powerful
databases came in, they didn't have audit logs.
And now I presume that they do, because now they can see that
the contractors are searching the stuff and putting this stuff
out. But you're right, you could, you
can just do a search. So generally, and, and that's
sort of searching was prohibited before, like I couldn't go into
just the tax systems and just browse tax data.
Like that was not allowed. You had to fill out a form.
You had to ask, say what case it was related to and someone had
to pull it for you. Most agents did not have direct
access to tax data. You just weren't allowed to have
it. I was one of the rare ones that
did, but most agents in most field offices not allowed to
have it. So you would have to have a
justification and have to be pretty specific.
You couldn't browse it. Now with Palantir, you can
browse every single person in the United States and they
encourage it. They will actually tell us, hey,
I keep saying us like I'm still there.
It's hard. I understand you got the
retirement. Actually say to us, hey, like we
need a tax case in a particular county or a particular city and
because we haven't had one in that particular area, we need
the press. And they would say, just just go
through the system, type in that zip code and pull down everybody
and, and start doing analysis. So it's sort of expected.
And of course, if you're doing that and I'm looking, and if I'm
in Texas and I'm looking for Kyle Seraphin, like I, it would
be pretty easy to find you without having a direct tie to
you. And it doesn't tell you what you
see. It just tells you what you
search and you have these results and you can you can
download like I was, I was joking.
Hey, I could download every single person's name from this
database and take it with me and then do identity theft for when
I retire. And no one would know any better
because they they these powerful databases is just so easy to to
obscure your searches Now, I imagine like if they're really
searching for you, like someone says, OK, I leak Kyle Seraphin's
information to the media. And then, you know, some Tigda
who investigates the IRS goes in and looks at like my search
history. They could probably make a case,
say he searched on this day and time like and, and maybe do an
investigation that way. But it wouldn't do any flag.
Like it wouldn't come up with immediate flag because it
wouldn't be suspicious at first. It would only be maybe after
after second guessing and then doing an investigation and
trying to put that together. But you know how that goes.
Like my defense is going to be no, I was looking for cases.
I didn't look. I was just looking for Kyle
Seraphin. They would have to do more.
They would have to do a lot more.
Or they'd have to get you to admit it, which sometimes people
do, strangely enough, you just set them down.
That's how we made our living, right, Is everyone wants to talk
to us? Yeah, that's what I tell you.
Well, don't talk like you're stupid.
Like, even when I was investigated, I, I talked to an
attorney first. I was never going to talk to
them, like, ever. Like, that's stupid because you
say stupid stuff. Like, even if you know better,
you say stupid stuff. Yep.
It's universal. And I always tell people, I say
don't feel bad for talking even though you know better because
everybody does it. There's this human instinct,
especially people that think that they didn't do something
wrong and they end up getting caught in it.
And the people that do wrong are even weirder.
They just tell you things for no reason.
I I was telling a story one time about this guy I went to go see.
He was impersonating a federal agent online.
He was indicating that he ran a human program out of colleges
and he was doing it through his eBay account.
So he's weird. I mean, he's just not smart.
And so I went there to go talk to him about that, to say, hey,
man, are you invest, you know, are you representing yourself as
a, you know, member of the US government recruiting people for
human? And he goes like, no, I said,
have you, if people had the impression that you were a
federal agent, would you try to dissuade them of that?
And he's like, no, OK, fine. I I I don't really care.
I just wanted him to stop. But while I get there, the first
thing we do, we sit down. Hey, can I talk to you for a few
minutes? Yeah.
Come on inside. He reaches over across me, by
the way, he literally reaches across almost my lap and unplugs
his router. And I'm like, I go, hey, what
was that about? And he was like, I just thought
you were here about my Internet history, buddy.
I wasn't, but I got some more questions for you after we're
done. It's like, it's like the the
really guilty weirdos do that. But even the people that know
they didn't do anything wrong, they just want to straighten it
out. And there's a great comedian who
just says, yeah, you're going to try to straighten it out.
You're going to talk without a lawyer.
You're going to do 20 to life because I don't even know what
the case is. They're going to get you because
you're going to blow it. And everybody talks.
So you are saying it. I say it.
It's a great statement to the audience.
Don't talk to federal investigators without getting
somebody who is disinterested. That's what the attorney brings.
They're just not. They're not you.
They don't care as much and. That's exactly what they're
going to think with the more level head and and there's lots
of things that you say with your your body language and with with
just your little things you're saying.
And they're looking for like if they think you're guilty,
they're looking for these little things, right.
So, and if they don't think you're guilty, there's nothing
that you're going to tell them like that's going to change
anything. Like there's nothing that you
can tell them that your attorney can't tell them tomorrow.
So there's nothing, there's no real point in in talking to them
because it if they're there, they probably think that you're
guilty and you're just going to make them think it more no
matter what you do. I had a, a fun episode.
The ATF showed up to my house as part of my FBI harassment.
And so they came and knocked on the door, which is an
interesting move because I don't have a lot of love for the ATF.
And I had a ring Cam and I'm like, who the hell is this guy?
There's a dude at my door. I don't recognize him.
And I knew the ATF agent in my city.
I knew who he was. I'd met him and they had a
guest, a new guy who showed up and he's the one who knocked on
my door. And so he ends up calling me.
Hammer calls me on the cell phone.
I don't recognize the number, but I answer it for the fifth
time. I'm like, what's going on?
And he's like, hey, I'm with the ATF.
And I was like, oh, cool. I was like, do you need my
attorney's number or what do you need?
And he and he was like, no, I just want to like straighten
some stuff out. It's like, oh, I don't do that.
I'm not really interested. I'll tell you what, my attorney
will reach out to you. That's going to be really fun.
And my buddy basically makes a living suing the ATF and working
for different, you know, gun lobby.
So he ends up, he sends him a thing.
Hey, so excited to meet you. Looking forward to it.
Submit your questions in writing.
We'll decide whether or not we answer them, and then we'll give
you back something in writing. The guy's like, Nah, never mind.
That's the thing. Tell people don't tell people
you don't want to talk. Tell people talk to my because
that that has a different legal connotation and rules than
telling them you don't want to talk.
Because if you say I just want to talk, they can just keep
badgering you, keep badgering you.
But if you say, hey, you know, I have an attorney and I want you
to talk to my attorney that has different legal obligations,
they're not going to be able to keep bugging you about that
after that you. Want to talk about what those
what that means to the agent? Well, the the agents, you know,
like I said, if you just keep saying I don't want to talk,
they can say, OK, well, I just want you to tell your story and
they can sort of keep talking to you and eventually they're going
to convince you to talk. Whereas if you have an attorney,
that's a different legal right now you've asserted your right
to counsel and that has different legal rules and you
can't undo that once you once you say that.
So at that point in time, that shuts down any interview and it
should. And if it doesn't, it's going to
get thrown out. Whatever you say is going to get
thrown out anyways. But that's why I always tell
people, hey, like I have an attorney and I want you to talk
to my attorney and I want to talk to my attorney and I don't
want to answer any questions until I talk to my attorney.
Don't say no, I don't want to talk to you.
They'll just keep. They will keep after you.
The other thing that it sort of tells you too is like if you
have an attorney, it says that you're serious or you're not
just some average person. And so the agent's going to get
a different, a different impression of what's going on
because they, they know that they're not going to pull
something over on an attorney, but they are going to pull
something over on you. They're trained to do that.
They're trained to convince you to talk.
I mean, that's interviewing one O 1.
You remember that guy? I don't remember if it was in, I
feel like it was in Georgia. That's just my instinct.
But they were deciding whether or not he had properly invoked
his right to an attorney. And he said, he's like, why
don't you get me a lawyer dog, right.
And then there was this whole, like there was a whole set of
nationals and the, and the judge had ruled on whether or not
somebody was entitled to a canine attorney because of the
way that he had said it. And they were, they were making
real like silly literal arguments about it.
But it wasn't a positive assertion of my right to
counsel. It was the sort of the, the,
the, the thing he, he sort of suggested, why why don't you get
me a lawyer dog? And then, you know, it's like,
well, that doesn't sound like he said he needed his attorney or
that he had an attorney and I needed to contact through that.
He just said, what if you did that?
And so they made it like they went down to the actual
verbiage, which is why what you're saying is so important.
A positive assertion. Yeah, but Even so, even in that
situation though, they're still in court battling that issue
out. So that's, you know, how serious
it is, right? So if you just say no, I don't
want to talk. And then two minutes later
they're like, here's a form. You know, that's what they do.
You slide a little form here. I want you to tell your story
like your side of it. I'm just here to hear your side
of it. Like tell me your your side.
I want to believe you. And then slide a little form
across the desk and they sign away their rights.
And then now you're good to go. You can talk to him all day, but
do you assert your right to counsel?
You know, minimum it's going to get litigated, right?
And it's probably not going to go well for the prosecution and
it the attorneys, prosecutors are probably not going to to use
that. So it's just, it's a, you want
to make it that positive assertion whenever possible.
Hey, I want to talk to my attorney.
I want my attorney and I here's, you know, call my attorney and
that's just going to change everything.
What? It just reminded me that normal
people, regular people, when they're talking about this
stuff, they're trying to round off the edges, they're trying to
smooth it, they're trying to make it comfortable.
They're dealing with some stranger, you know, IRS agent,
FBI agent. They want to make things like
conversational and regular. And that person is there to hard
to make hard edges to to to turn hard corners and to be able to
really frame things in the way that the investigation requires
them. So people have very different
goals. And it's just that disconnect I
think that most people have having if they're never been on
the other side of the coin, they just they just don't know what's
going on on the person that they're looking at.
They think it's like the same thing as running into somebody
in the supermarket and it's really not.
They're they're hunting you. Yeah.
And and we, when we showed up, when I showed up, I knew as much
as possible going in. And then you would, if, if the
conversation wasn't a confession, the best, next best
thing was to lie because it, we wouldn't charge you with lying,
but that would be evidence of intent.
And so you would lead people down primrose path and you're
always trying to get clearly defined boundaries because you
wanted something that's very clear.
That's a lie. You don't want something that's
sort of ambiguous. So you're always, you know,
letting him talk, letting him talk.
Then you ask focus questions to sort of narrow it down and it
and people just don't realize that's what's going on with an
agent. But that's what we're trained to
do. And after you've done it
hundreds, thousands of times, you get pretty good at it and
you get really good at reading people's body language.
You can tell when they're uncomfortable.
And so you just come up with different ways to to, you know,
get what you want out of them. And that's usually for you to
confess in some way, shape or form, whether it's a lie or
whether it's an actual confession, which is another
reason why I said you're not going to talk usually, usually
not going to talk yourself out. There have been a couple cases
where actually they did. One is actually was actually J6
case. That you had.
No, not that I had. I would not touch in J6 case
ever. I didn't want to be involved in
that. So, but in the news that they
did somebody, they did FBI did a warrant on somebody and it
wasn't the right person, like it wasn't the actually person in
the photo. Oh, they did that in in Alaska.
They kicked down that lady's door.
Is that the one you're thinking of?
Yeah. And she talked to them and said,
hey, like, that's not me in the photo.
Yeah. That's a different jacket.
And the fact that two people are wearing a similar jacket on the
same day, like we have different earlobes.
We're not the same person. Like, look at her face.
She's like, that's not me. Yeah, I remember.
That I mean that is just insane. That's embarrassing.
Imagine doing a SWAT raid, taking A tag team through
somebody's door and it's the person that you thought you were
going for, and that person is not who they're supposed to be.
Like you blow it. Imagine explaining that to my
SAC like that would be a bad. It's not a good office.
There's some bad stuff there. It's, it's crazy.
That's how crazy things have gotten.
Like they're doing that crap. Like that's just like who did
that investigation? Did they did they go out in
person and see them in person? Did they do anything or they
just showed up with the warrant? That's just the crazy thing, and
that's the thing that's changed. Like if you want to see a single
change in the way law enforcement has changed is that
now people basically do the investigations from their desks.
You know, you have to tell agents, no, you can't look at
Google Maps and look at the house and make a description
based on Google Maps. You actually have to go see it
in person. Yeah, but in 1998, when I
started, that was no question. You got your little Thomas guy.
We had a Thomas guy. It was a big map book.
Look at that thick right? And it had LA and Orange County
and you had a separate one for Riverside in San Bernardino
County. And it had all the streets and
you would look them up and on the warrants, you'd actually say
what page it was on. And the Thomas guy.
And you would go out there and you would take photos and you'd
go out there multiple days and you would, you would see
patterns of life and you do stuff.
Now it's like all online. You sit at your desk, you browse
databases, you look at Google Maps, you, you write a warrant.
You've never seen the place, you've never seen the person in
in real life. And that's the and that's the
biggest change I've seen. That is a fundamental
distinction that some of my buddies and I have talked about.
In fact, one of my buddies, in fact, the one who who is
familiar with your old Twitter account, we were, we were
discussing this joke because I used to do physical
surveillance. That was my gig.
Like I would literally be the guy.
I didn't have a Thomas guy, we had Agps.
But I'd sit out there and I'd take pictures of the house and
I'd see where it was and I watched how they walked and I
watched how they talked and who they interacted with.
The whole pattern of life. And also you're looking for, you
know, security threats, dogs, are there children, you know,
things that matter when you're going to go serve a warrant.
And he's like, if you've never seen your subject in person in
real life, are you really investigating that person?
Like, is that real? And.
It's crazy. And and there's other things
with warrants like what time does the school bus show up?
What time are they in the neighborhood?
Like when does the trash truck show up?
So we I actually did trash runs like what?
I was like we did trash. Runs love trash pickups.
They can do this nasty trash at 4:00 AM that they put out like I
have. I've not even heard of an agent
doing that in my office, you know, in the last decade.
That was my favorite. It like there's nothing that
feels more criminal investigatory than sneaking by
either pretending to be part of the the trash team or even
better is like creeping in the dark, pulling everything,
throwing it in a blacked out hood that you've already taped
up and you've got it all set. You've lined it with black bags
so it doesn't get stinky. And then we would roll to like a
some abandoned parking lot a couple miles away and we take it
and we go look for gold and you'd find all kinds of weird
stuff in there. People throw everything away
like it's, it's great. It's so fun to be able to just
dig through it when you know that someone's doing something
shady and you're like. I'm.
Going to find it. That's what I'm doing.
We had switches in our cars, in our G cars that actually did all
the lights out and would all the lights, like the tail lights and
everything. So we could do these trash runs
and then so and then those of us had done it for a long time, had
learned little tricks like there would be ants and stuff and bugs
and these things. So you would put it all in the
trash bag and then spray it with RAID and then close it up and
then, you know, then go to the place and, and everything would
be dead. So we wouldn't get ants all over
ourselves. But yeah, I mean, that that was
like the good times when we were out in the field at all times of
day and night. Now you're just a case manager
like now. And I was guilty of this too,
because I just wanted to go home and be with my kids.
But like, I wouldn't do surveillance.
Like I would just write a a lead and make your your FBI
surveillance unit do it. We like doing that though.
That was our gig. But you know, when I started, we
did our own surveillance like we would be out there, you know,
with guys that would tell you. Yeah, OK.
We're we're getting on the northbound ramp on the one O 1
and we all get on northbound ramp and sure enough he was on
the southbound. Yes, the the infamous bad radio
call. I I would have.
I had this guy. He was Puerto Rican.
Such a nice guy, no sense of direction, which is the worst we
had. We had all the things you
couldn't, you couldn't. This isn't Thomas Guide where
you're flipping through a map book or a maps go and trying to
figure out where you are. We had GPS, we had blue force
tracking so every single agent could see where every single
other agent was on the map on a tablet, real time.
So that's high speed stuff. And as a team leader, which was
my gig because nobody else wanted to do it.
Not because I was the best, just nobody wanted the
responsibility. I had this guy sitting out on a
house and we were in Southeast DC and Luis that's his name.
Luis would go subjects getting it coming out of the house and
that's like game on Everyone's like OK, here we go.
You know, you get got your cars started, you got your coffee in
the thing and getting in the car reverse lights are on backing
out of the driveway. Given the good play by play, we
can all picture what's happening when it's happening.
OK, now heading northbound on 1st St. and I'm looking at the
map and I'm like 7 two, 1st Street is East West Street.
And then he would, and then he would pick one, he'd be like
heading westbound. And I go, yeah, they turn right
or left out of the driveway and he's like left.
And I'm like, OK, everyone eastbound on 1st St. eastbound
on 1st St. And and then he would come to me
afterwards and he's like, sorry, man.
I was like, I know that you don't know where you are.
I don't know why you grew up. You grew up on an island.
Everything must have had directions there, but he didn't
know how to do it. But that bad call anyway, like,
oh, that's part of the the game. That's part of the the law
enforcement game of chasing bad guys and going through their
trash and finding out who they are and interviewing them.
And a lot of that is getting outsourced now.
They're not, it's not personal and they're not as, I don't
know, I feel like they're not as good at it, but it's way more
dangerous for American Civil Liberties because they never see
another human being on the end of it, maybe.
Yeah, in just everything. Even the interviews are
outsourced. Like I always travel to my
interview. So if I had an interview in Las
Vegas, I drove to Las Vegas. If I had an interview in
Oklahoma, I flew to Oklahoma. Now you just do a lead.
You just, of course, it's FBI. So when I worked at FBI Task
Force, I had all the FBI resources at my disposal.
So I would just send FBI leads. But IRS has similar, you know,
things, we call them something else, but you would just fill it
out and have some other office do it.
Or is that never used to be the case?
We would travel, we would never let some other agent do a
critical interview on our cases. But now, now everyone's just
sort of sitting at their desk data mining.
And the crazy thing is, is the A Sacks and the Sacks who have
never used these systems because they haven't touched a case in a
decade or more, they're acting like these databases will simply
pop out a case. Like it will just come out on
your desk. It's done.
Here it is like you did it. It's there, here you.
Now you can close the case in 12 months.
Like, no, that's not how it works like that.
That's not how these systems work like, but that's what they
expect, Yeah. What is that you you mentioned
that you wouldn't touch AJ6 case and I appreciate that you had
kind of a a long 25 years of your expert witness in a various
different areas. You've done a couple of
different FBI task force if I understand correctly, is that is
that accurate? Three, I think healthcare fraud,
EUR Asian crime, which was the kidnapping and then also a cyber
task force, so did cyber Task force in Houston and cyber Task
force in Tampa, Orlando. So it's headquartered out of
Tampa and I sat in Orlando. So those were the the three
things. So I sat with the FBI for
probably a good portion of my career, maybe even the most of
it. Tell me how you saw change now
that they're doing the like. I feel like J6 was a just a
watershed moment of weirdness, but I don't have the kind of
longevity. I've got other people's
experiences, so I want to know about yours seeing that over
those years. When I was in LA, you know, the
agents were required to wear suits like they were.
The FBI was the most professionally dressed of all
the agencies except for the Secret Service when they were
doing details, but they were always required to wear a suit
in the office. They were the most professional
and they were probably the most prestigious.
Everyone wanted to be an FBI agent.
Just from my perspective, FBI agent was a very prestigious
thing. But I think overall what I've
seen is just agents investigating less.
They're more case managers. They're more willing to do
whatever the supervisors tell them to do because they're not
really investigating human beings.
They're just investigating, you know, file number it, it's just
a file number on a page. And the recruiting standards
have changed dramatically. Like to be an FBI agent, you had
to be in shape. Like, so I actually applied to
be an FBI at some at a point in my career when things were
really low. You had to be in physical shape
like before they would even consider you to like recommend
you like now I I'm like, and you had to have like some, some
background, like you had to have a like most of the FBI agents
were older. They had a lot of previous work
history. Like in my last office, a guy
had been a manager at Target. That was his last job.
We had a guy come through my Academy class who had three
years. That's the minimum work history
you have to have. There's has to be a minimum.
So that's it. Three.
And his three years was that he was an unarmed security type
person at the Detroit Zoo. He was 25 years old.
Which is incredibly young for an FBI agent.
Incredibly young. You would not.
That's one of the reasons why I went to the IRS.
They took me at 23. I mean, I started the process
before then. FBI was like minimum 23.
You had to have three years of work experience or more.
And so you weren't going to get hired until you were 27/28/20.
9:30. I'm guessing probably in in your
early 30s was not unusual at the Academy based on the people that
I worked with or people that had come out of the military and had
some sort of military background that were on spot teams and
such. But normal people, they had a
lot of work history and they were a lot older.
And now we're hiring right out of law schools, We're hiring
them right out of grad schools. They'll actually waive the work
history if you have the right grad schools.
So that's kind of bizarre. And my class was mostly under
30. I was the, I was the oldest guy
in my class, except for one dude who they wrote a waiver.
He was 49. I don't know how you could be 49
and enter into a new special agent role.
You know, that's going to screw over their retirement at some
point. So they've got a couple of them
like that. With my thing, so IRS agents,
they were always fighting to get the extensions from, you know,
from the retirement age, so 57. So in case people don't know,
57. So every, every 1811 has to
retire under 57. That's why you can't be, you
know, older than 37 when you start the job because you need
to have 20 years of law enforcement experience in order
to retire. So 1811 is 20 years as long as
you're age 50, mandatory retirement age 57 or you can
retire at any age like I did. I, I retired when I was 48.
I had 25 with 25 years of experience.
So you can retire after you have 25 years at any age.
So someone that's 49 like you can't get, I don't know how you
how you do that. You can't unless they came from
another federal agency or something.
I just don't see that works. Here's FBI support.
And so IRS agents, they always want to work past 57 because
they just love their job so much, which I think's insane
because you're working for minimum wage.
Like once you're retirement age, you're working for less than
minimum wage. Yeah, talk about that.
So IRS, not the IRS but the federal government is 1811.
You get a pension, your pensions based on a particular percentage
that you get every year for your work.
I think it's like 2% or something.
I don't remember what it is. 1.7 it's changed too because the new
people that come on pay a different amount in.
Mine was 1.7 so whatever. Like 1.7 for the first few
years. For the 20.
Three years and then 1% after that, yes.
So each year you work and that's based on that's a percentage of
your highest 36 months of consecutive pay.
So we call it the high three. It's so it's 36 months of
consecutive pay. So you take that percentage,
multiply it by the average of your high 3 and that's what your
pension is. And so you get that pension plus
you have your, your four O 1K, which is in the federal
government, your thrift savings program.
And so you're putting money in there.
The government, you're putting your maximum in there and the
government's matching, you know, the first, I think it's two or
three percent, 3% dollar for dollar in the last two percent,
$0.50 on the dollar. So, so you're getting that.
So then it's the difference between your pension.
So you, you're comparing net pay when you retire, you're looking
at, OK, what, what is my take home pay?
Because you're putting into your TSP, you're, you're paying
taxes, you're paying Social Security taxes, you're paying
all those things. And you compare that to your net
that you get from your pension, where you're not, you're not,
you're not contributing to your retirement.
You're not paying some of these taxes anymore.
So then you're looking at your net.
And the difference between your net and what you get for your
pay net is minimum wage. I mean, like for me it was like
$30,000 a year. So it makes almost no sense to
keep going. And so when you get your
pension, your pension goes up by the annual inflation rate.
So my wife, who's high three was lower than mine and had fewer
years, has a higher pension than me because she retired and she
got some crazy inflationary pension increase.
And I kept working because I had to.
I didn't have 25 years. She was older than me, so she
had to. She was able to retire when
she's 50. So then I had to kept working.
So my high three and my percentage was higher, but I get
paid less because of that percentage.
Because yours is based on whatever the federal GS rate
changes is and and hers is based on actual inflation of some
other kind. Different calculations,
different agencies. Yeah, every single person that I
saw worked past the number that they had to work to get a
retirement just basically explained to me that they didn't
understand how numbers worked. Yeah.
And I had, my wife actually joked with me that I spent more
time working in my retirement spreadsheets than I did working
standard. And I just couldn't wait.
And it didn't help that my wife had been retired and I was
watching her like, enjoy life. And I'm like, I got to go to
work today. But yeah.
So these retirement spreadsheets, they explain all
the numbers. And there's a couple of good
guys. One of them's a former FBI agent
that actually has a book first guide.
Yeah, first guy is fantastic. And anyone who's retiring has to
know that guy. But it's even close to you, all
the numbers. And then he and, and a guy named
Chris Barfield, he actually does the financials and and he's
wrote a few papers that basically like it makes sense to
retire as soon as you're eligible if you're going to keep
working. And you would be better off like
I'd be better off working at Home Depot.
Full time, then I would be continuing to work for the
federal government, But it's a, it's a scary thing.
Like when you retire, it's it's, it's a major life change and
it's a, you know, you're no longer an agent anymore.
And I think there's a, there's a part of you that that becomes
your identity, right. So I think for a lot of people,
they, that's the reason why they don't want to give it up because
it, you know, you're not law enforcement, you're, you're
changing your, who you are. And it's a big step and it's.
Yeah, I didn't, I didn't know that that's where we need to, we
need to go to, but that's where we need to go with this
particular thing. There's a because I think it's
explains a lot about why people behave the way they do and why
the retired agents behave the way that they do and how they
look at the world. You've been saying it.
Oh, you know, look, this is how we do it.
This is how, you know, when you're doing this.
This is how we do it all over and over because you're still
mentally there and, and that's fine.
You spent 25 years there. Why would you not?
That's not an indictment on you in any way.
There is an association with identity that you just said.
And I used to watch these FBI guys that were getting ready to
retire. I had a bunch of them on my
squads because they would come out to surveillance and they
would, you know, do their last couple years of just watching
bad guys, writing up reports. And when they were going to let
go of the badge, Like it was like losing something that was
part of them. And they would come back and
call us. And they want to come out and
have that, hey, can we come hang out with the squad afterwards?
They're retired. It's like, dude, go play golf or
something. Like go to Florida.
I don't know what you're doing. Like, why do you want to hang
out with a bunch of dudes that are still crushing the clock?
Because it's so enmeshed in the identity.
And also the reputation of the agency is also enmeshed in their
identity. And I think that's why so many
people defend agencies that are no longer defend defensible.
But I'm curious if you think the same.
Yes. Absolutely.
And FBI in particular. FBI extremely prestigious,
extremely prestigious and and they do a very good job of
indoctrinating people. Like I remember it wasn't that
long ago, like 3-4 years ago, we did a warrant down in Miami and
they had a New Girl who's like a computer scientist or some car
person just out of college. And she said to us like, oh, I'm
so glad to be working for the FBI.
This is the greatest agency on the planet.
This is the greatest job I could ever have.
I couldn't, I would work here for free.
I was like, whoa, like what did they do to you?
Because that's just insane. But the agents are, are very
similar to that because it, it just, it's who you are.
You've been law enforcement, you carry a badge.
It's a very powerful position. Like, I don't think people
really grasp how powerful that position is.
What you do to somebody when you show up on their doorstep.
It's, it's an incredible power and it's an incredible feeling.
It's a, you know, the rush of arresting people, of getting up
at 6:00 AM and, and donning all that gear and going in and
arresting people and doing all this law enforcement stuff.
And, and the rush of, you know, sitting in surveillance for
eight hours while you're waiting for somebody.
And then suddenly they're moving and chasing them around and, and
having to go out on foot and, and, and get close to them and
see them and ultimately concluding a case and going to
trial and testifying. It's all like enmeshed in, in
some degree who you are. And you've been doing it for,
you know, 25 years. Some of these guys who did it
for 3035 years because they stay on forever.
And I think that is a huge part of why people don't want to
retire. But in my case, it's really like
a little bit of it was not so much of that because I like IRS.
Like a lot of times I wouldn't even tell people I work for the
IRS. I would tell people like I work
for the zoo or like for something, something outrageous
because it was not. It's not like IRS carries a lot
of glory, right? And no one knows IRS criminal
investigations. That's right, Audit jokes and
stupid iris jokes. You know, you carry armed onto
an airplane, you get the pilots give you the jokes, you know,
the people working there give you the jokes and you're like,
OK, this is this is my third flight today.
Like this is the third time I've heard it, Guys.
Like you know. Yeah, get some new material.
Yeah. The I used to tell people that I
was a secret agent because everything at the FBI has done
on that secret side, that FBI net, you know, and, and then
they were so secretive about stupid stuff.
They're like, you can't tell people you work for the FBI.
That's the old like, did you get your paycheck from the IRS?
Did your pay stub say IRS? Department of.
Agriculture, So we all get paid through the Department of
Agriculture. Like it's some kind of a secret.
And I don't know why, if that's just because it's convenient to
go through the National Finance Center and that's Department of
AG, or if somebody was like, plausibly, if someone were to
look at your mail, they'd say you were part of agriculture.
They wouldn't know you were a special agent.
It's like, I feel like that's probably part of it.
If not, it's certainly grown into it.
But there was nothing more embarrassing to me.
So I would just be like, yeah, I'm a secret agent.
And they go, do you mean a special agent?
And they go, no, no, I don't think so.
It's a secret on everything I do, all the stuff I do, it's a
secret. I can't talk about it
theoretically, like my wife doesn't under.
I can't talk about my cases. They're dumb.
I'm my favorite would when I would try to obfuscate like I'd
be like, I work for the Department of Treasury, right,
because IRS is under Department of Treasury.
I work for the Department of Treasury.
I'm a special agent with Department of Treasury.
And then like the smart people would be like, oh, what agency?
It'd be like IRS. You know, we used to get really
pissed at the IRS guys that were on the JTTF because people would
be like, hey, we're working on this case.
We got this guy. What do we got to do to get tax
records on this? And they'd be like, yeah, we
can't help you. And then you'd be like, well,
what are you here for? Like, I understand.
Like, what are you bringing to the fight?
And they'd be like, not that about that.
I would always go up when I was working on a different kind of
case because I didn't work the, the CT stuff.
And I'd go on to the 7th floor and I'd ask him, I'd be like,
Hey, do you guys have the ability to get tax records on
this? Like do I, is there some kind of
process I can do? And they're like, no.
And I was like, no, period, not no comma, but there was no, but
there's no additional process. There wouldn't be.
So I'd just be like, all right, I guess I go back to my weird
stupid case. Databases, Now you could
actually sort of search that stuff and sort of give you like
sort of on the sly, right? Or you just couldn't even like
you couldn't get it 'cause I would have to have requested
from somebody else give a reason.
Now you just type in and you can see it and you're like, oh like,
yeah, this guy's employed at such and such place, but you
didn't. But you don't know where it came
from. But that's that's where it came
from. And, and honestly, like that
clearing House of you don't know where it came from or I'm giving
you a lead, I'm gonna kind of give you the I'll point you in
the right direction, but it didn't come from me kind of
thing. That's kind of what a lot of the
JTTF value was as an agent. And if you're going after really
bad guys, that's not the problem is you have to have really good
moral character. You have to know that when
someone tells you, hey, we're going to run after all these
like misdemeanor cases and we're going to change our entire
agency to pursue people from a riot on one day that you're
like, I don't want anything to do with that.
How do I not do that? I know you got yourself kind of
into some spicy stuff. Your, your old Twitter account
disappeared, which was very sad to me because it was my favorite
thing. I didn't have Twitter back in
the day. But what I did have was your
page and about three others bookmarked, just for your
awareness. I had Shipwreck Crew, Bill
Shipley. Yeah, they knew I had you
bookmark. You were a great source of
information. And also I was like, thank God
there's someone who who knows what's what it's really like and
is saying things that are accurate and they're not
emotional about it. And then I had Andy.
No, always bookmarked. I'd always go read Andy.
No, because I wanted to know what Antifa was doing, which
probably saved my life once or twice when I was in Portland.
So I didn't do Twitter, but I did watch Sir Aaron and I kept,
I kept track of it. And then when you disappeared,
then you popped up under your new handle and I was like, this
sounds very familiar. I feel like I know this style
of, of, of presentation. You got into hot water over that
though. I did a little bit, a little
bit. So the FBI brought me in one day
and like, hey, like, just so you know, security is is let us
know. So I was, you know, what the
task force working at the FBI full time FBI supervisor brings
me and says, Hey, security is, you know, said something about
your Twitter and, you know, said something about you're doing pro
Christian, pro Republican tweeting.
And I thought, well, that's weird because I, I don't really
think I'm very pro Republican because I'm about as critical of
them as I am with anybody else. But OK, so, but the pro
Christian was the one that really, really caught my eye
because I'm like, well, what does that have to do with, you
know, tea in China? Like, that has nothing to do
with anything, right? So he's like, but you know, the,
the, we've talked it over with the SA CS.
At that point in time, I had become a program manager.
I'd taken a spot out of program manager.
And for whatever reason, that supervisor was in a hurry to Get
Me Out of that space, as if he had somebody else that was going
to take that space. Because I was still offering
value. I was still teaching my
replacement. I was still working on cases,
but he was in a hurry to Get Me Out.
So I was like, OK, well, I'm a program manager.
I'll just leave. And so it so I, we already
discussed that I was going to transition off.
So at that point in time said, well, you're transitioning off.
So we've talked over at the SAC. We're going to, we're going to
go ahead and like do nothing about it to we're just, we're
just going to close it out. I thought, OK, well, that's odd,
but OK. So I said, well, you, are you
going to let my agency know So I know what to expect?
Oh, no, we don't think we need to do that.
OK, So I said, OK, well, I'll just close my Twitter account.
So then it doesn't cause anyone any problems and that'll be the
end of it. And he says, OK, that's a good
idea. I'll let them know that, you
know, this is not going to be any problem going forward.
Because I knew that that's one of the assessments that they
look at is like, what is this going to be like a continuing
problem, right. So I said, OK, I'll just, I'll
just get rid of it. And when I told my family,
they're like, no, you, you're on Twitter way too much.
Like they were anxious, like my kids were like, no, you're,
you're it was like a running joke.
Like we can't spend any time with you because you're on
Twitter. So I was like at that point in
time, like I realized, OK, I have two problems.
I have my work problem but also have my like, I'm just on it too
much so I need to like be off of it.
So this was a way to like be off of it, like make sure I am off
of it completely. So.
You you were on Twitter quite a bit and like I said, I I always
enjoyed the takes because it always felt like somebody was
saying the thing that at somebody choose that we have to
describe this Twitter account. By the way, it's Sir Aaron and I
think there was an under score after it, if my memory is, is
there or something like that. But I think right.
I think so. I don't remember now 'cause I
you know, I deleted it so. I'm just telling you, like I had
to type it in manually. So it was in my head for like a
like a year or two or however long you were doing that.
Followers too. I had a pretty good good, pretty
good chunk of followers that I don't have now.
Yeah, you had a couple thousand people following.
People probably don't even know they lost you.
And the thing that was good is that you had a crusader, like a
knight crusader that was on kind of the backdrop picture.
And then you just come in and, and like you said, exactly
legitimately pro Christian. And this was well before I kind
of had the sense where I'm like, I really need God to save me
from what I'm doing right now 'cause I don't understand, like
what I'm fighting. So, but I still knew that you
should be able to have Christian views and nobody should screw
with you. And so you kept bringing these
just, and they were totally fair.
That's why I liked it. It wasn't Republican or
Democrat. It was like guy in the middle
who just wants to go have 1980s rationality and understand that
things are kind of balanced and some people suck and and that
person is that person. I thought I was super pro
critical of a Republican because I, I'm registered Republican,
but I don't consider myself really Republican.
But like I worked under Trump and under the whole shutdown and
all the vaccinations and that was terrible.
I was terrible. Like I, I was super pro critical
of all that stuff and the craziness that went on in
government. Like one of my FBI buddies that
I worked with at cyber crimes, like they threatened him, like
his SAC threatened to have him arrested because he wouldn't
isolate because he had like a family wedding or something.
And he had been exposed. Like one of the guys in in work
had come in and sort of technically exposed all of us.
And so they wanted him to isolate for 10 days and he's
like, bullshit, I'm not doing that.
I'm going to my family wedding and they threatened to have him
arrested at the airport. People do not know how.
Crazy. That was what it was like.
Now I got vaccinated too, because I got the vaccination
before they had the mandates like it when it first came out.
I got vaccinated. I remember.
When the team. Came out, we were all like, man,
I wish we had like we could rip this out of our skin now because
like we hated the mandate so much and people left and lost
their jobs over that stuff. It, it was, it was crazy, crazy.
And so I, I was like, I thought I was super critical of, of
stuff because I just felt like the government had gone so far
downhill and I didn't feel like it was like, it's just the
Democrats that were the problem. So anyway, that's sort of
alongside on my Twitter account. But ultimately I got rid of it
because that the FBI supervisor thought that was a good idea and
my, and my family life. And ultimately though, they did
actually tell my agency of. Course.
Maybe he was trying to do me a solid and wait until I was close
to retirement age because they they came and told me about it
like in person, like I was a criminal at my house because at
that point I was time as a program manager and working out
of my house at the end of the time I'm like, came to my house.
Yeah, came to my house surprising, took my gun, said
hey, you're on restricted duty. And that's, and I was like,
well, like I was like a week before the end of the month.
So I was just like the next day I just did my retirement
paperwork, said I'm out of here. So.
That is incredible. Is it not incredible that they
came, they, they put you on restricted duty over a Twitter
account that I'm telling you, I read it, we knew that you were a
Fed. You made references to it on a
regular basis. It wasn't exactly hiding it like
I it wasn't a very good pseudonym.
There's a there's a guy that we don't know who he who he, what
agency he works for and he might work for the FBI based on the
contempt he has for the FBI. It's called unconvincing
Undercover and he has this account on Instagram.
And it's absolutely, it is like cuts to the bone, hilarious
stuff. Makes fun of all the things that
you really, really have to know. You either work on a task force
or he is part of the FBI and despises the job.
Like so many people have gotten to that point.
But yeah, you all the inside baseball, I would read it and
I'm like, it's the best. It's the best.
Hearing somebody else who's rational and the idea that they
thought that was threatening. I didn't know what happened to
you. Like, at some point you just
disappeared. And I'm like, no, I don't know.
Like, I don't know about social media.
People just turn it off. So I'm glad it was for family,
too. That's the good news.
The insane thing to me is that someone came and took your gun
over it. But that actually doesn't
surprise me even a little bit. And I'm really glad when you
reached out and kind of shared. Waited a long time, and I was
always waiting for that other shoe to drop.
And so then what happened was apparently they told the US
attorney's office and I was one of my old cases.
And so they told me so that he would say, he says, hey, I'm
going to. I'm not going to have you
testify in this case. And I'm like, well, that's
interesting because I'm not working cases anymore.
You need to find someone else anyways, but whatever.
Yeah. Because I saw your Twitter stuff
and I'm like, yeah. And he's like, well, this would
never go to a jury, but I just don't want to deal with it.
I was like, oh, it still doesn't make any sense to me, but
whatever, dude, I don't care. I really don't care.
So it was based on that, that ultimately it went and then I
guess Tigda opened up an investigation and then my agency
said, OK, well, he's on restricted duty.
And then it was weird those that they had to come to my house and
do that. They could have just called me
or texted me or sent me, like even my bosses didn't even tell
me. So it was, it was sort of
stupid. But then my boss was like, I
don't understand where this is going because unless you
actually threaten the president or something like this is not,
this is not an issue. Like there's nothing they can do
to you. And I, I had a very long
conversation with Bill Shipley. I called him on the phone and I
talked to Leslie McAdoo and I talked to my family and I'm
like, well, what should I do? Because my FLEOA attorney was
like, you should fight this. Like you're going to win.
Unless you're not telling me something, you're going to win
this. It's going to be good.
You wouldn't have won. Well, that's what Bill Shipley
told me. He said you would win.
What does winning mean? Because they're not going to
apologize. And so this sort of goes back to
a story when I was at Fletse. So when I was in Fletse, I got a
nasty letter, a memo from the the chief at Fletse.
So like the highest personnel accusing me of lying on my
background check because I had a collection amount due on my
credit report or something, right?
So he said you, you, I'm reminding you, you know, you
answered this question about 180 days past due and you're not
supposed to lie on this form. And it wasn't exactly accusing
me, but the undertone was basically accusing you of lying.
But we're not going to, we're going to let this slide this
time, right? And so I investigated it and
turns out I had like a 6860 day old debt from a phone company
because I was going to move in an apartment and I had asked him
to connect a phone, but didn't move there.
So I didn't actually use them. And so it was like a $50.00 bill
for connection or something. And it was only 60 days old.
So it didn't even meet the 180 day question in the 1st place.
And so I called the company and said, hey, like you didn't even
tell me there was this bill. And they looked into it and
said, yeah, you know, the, the mail that we sent to that
address came back. So we'll take it off your credit
report just. And so I paid them.
And so I wrote a memo back to them, you know, saying, hey,
this is all the stuff that's outlined.
Can you please put this in my file?
Did they put it in my file? No, they didn't care.
Did they apologize for their mistake?
No, they didn't care. So that was Bill's point was
like, yeah, OK, the investigation will close and
you'll be fine. But they're not going to
apologize. Like they're not.
You're not going to get your honor back.
Like if that's what your goal here is, is to be like, restore
your honor. Like that is not going to
happen. Like at best, they'll probably
put a little letter in your file that says, hey, you didn't do
anything wrong, but don't do that again.
This is the most likely outcome. That's the best case scenario.
Right. Well, I didn't think they, like,
it's a little different in IRS than it is in the FBI.
The IRS goes all the way up to the Merit System Protection
Board. So like there's so many layers
of appeal. But one of the things that
convinced me was basically #1 why would I sit for a tick to
interview? Like, why would I put myself
through that even Like, yeah, I did do anything.
I don't feel I did anything wrong.
But why would I do that? And it would open me up to like,
them asking me whatever they want.
And I don't want to do that. But the other thing is I had
already been planning to retire. So if I wanted, if I stayed, how
long would I have to stay in order to deal with this?
And so there was that time frame and the, and my supervisor was
like, oh, it'll be done in 30 days.
And I was like, you're, you're, you're deluded.
It's this is going to take months.
Like there's no way. But it would have been sort of
convenient for me to keep going because restricted duty meant I
could literally do nothing but sit at home and get paid.
Like it was, it would have been a sweet gig.
But ultimately my family's like, you were going to retire
anyways. Leslie McAdoo I also had a long
conversation with. So all these people basically
said, there's no question, like in a normal person mind, why
would you stay for minimum wage? Like, what's the point?
Just retire. And so that's ultimately what I
did. I'm glad you did.
I'm also, I'm really glad because you at some point we
connected maybe in a Twitter space.
And I remember we started the kind of a back and forth DM.
You were kind of opining about things and I started recognizing
some of the, the, the familiar sort of takes and or the, the
verbal. I don't know what I picked up,
but I was like, hey, where are you, Sir Aaron?
Did that surprise you when I kind of honed it on that?
No. So it was like, it wasn't
exactly like a pseudonym was like really hidden.
And I, it started telling a few people, Hey, this is Sir Aaron's
try to get some of my followers back.
But I had changed like how what my focus was and and try to be
much more limited and how much time I spend on Twitter.
So it didn't, it didn't really surprise me, but maybe it was
like, wow, this guy's like sharper because he picked up on
it where other people, I had to sort of tell them because the
only people that really knew were like Bill Shipley and
Leslie make a do. Yeah, that checks out.
I I don't know, I just, and I didn't even have Twitter.
That's the thing that was so funny to me.
There was only a few accounts that I really honed in on where
I'm like, this is what I'm about.
I dig this style of just facts, just reasonable, just cutting
down the middle here where I where I think most of America
would generally live and and you know, and some hard opinions
that people didn't want to hear, which is also good.
That's, you know, you got to do that.
No, no, the whole the whole movement of these agencies, the
idea that IRS is also weaponized and going after people for
tweets because you had a pro Christian bend.
I I feel like that's the scariest thing in the world
because what you described as like basically 25 years of not
that. And then I don't know if it's
the FBI that pushed it on them or whether the entire government
got captured post 2021. Do you have an instinct about?
That at all? It's been going on since
probably Obama, I think maybe even before then.
Just my one thing of it is that, you know, Republicans come in,
they sort of see everybody as, hey, we want the best people,
but we don't care about their political bent.
But when Democrats come in, that's the only thing they care
about. And so I keep telling people
that people are policy because we and it was like the same
thing with Lois Lerner. Did Obama have to tell Lois
Lerner to to audit people? No, they didn't have to have a
conversation. That's what she believed in.
She did it on her own and the people underneath her believed
in it. She probably didn't have to have
a ton of emails with them either.
They just all did it because that's how they they all think
the same way. And so that becomes their policy
and that becomes how behaviors happen.
And it just keeps going and going.
And then it is never reversed. So it just builds up, builds up,
builds up and eventually that's just how it is.
And I and the, the recruiting standards have gone down
tremendously, like in order to meet their quotas.
So they just, my agency signed a 30 for 30 goal, which I think
30% women, but I'm surprised that we're not 30% women
already. Like that's shocking to me, like
because it seemed like more than that, but that, you know, in
order to do that, how are they going to do that?
Like you, I mean, I certain extent you could go out and sort
of try to appeal to certain demographics more, but
ultimately when the resumes come in, you have to pick the best.
And so either you're not picking the best or you're going to have
to lower the criteria. So then you can say, OK, all
these people met the criteria. Now we can choose who we want.
But Even so, my first job that I applied for with the government,
I was told if I was the last female, I would have been hired
on the spot. That was in 1996.
That was that was for this job. It was a intern position that
converts automatically to an agent.
You do it in college. And so I went and interviewed
and the interviews told me you, you have the best interview we
have ever seen. You're not a black female like
we would. And I found out later, I found
out reason why is because they use that like the local field
offices use that as a, as a diversity way to increase their
diversity goals. And so they're hiring particular
people for these positions and I didn't fit into that
demographic. Isn't that nauseating?
It is, but it also made me better because I knew that in
order to become an agent, I had to be I.
I couldn't be just average or good.
I had to be the best. My resume had to be the best.
My criteria would be the best. I had to have the best
interview. I'd be the most prepared.
Like if they were going to hire one white guy, it was going to
be me. So I had to be the very best I
could be. So in a certain extent, like it
made me a better, made me better at my job, I think.
That's a that's an individual situation as opposed to sort of
policy or aggregate. The aggregate is horrible for
this country. Individually, yes, I can see
that it could drive somebody to exceptionalism.
That's not a big deal. But when you talk about what it
does to the culture of the agency, it's the exact opposite
of what we just said. Yes, yes, all kinds of all
sorts, all sorts of criteria come down.
You're you're not getting the like I remember one guy that got
hired, he had to like a 2.5 GPAA 2.5 GPA.
I was asking him, Hey, so like, OK, you were an athletic, right?
You, you, which is incredibly time consuming.
No, no, no. OK, so you did a lot of
extracurriculars. No, no, you had a job, you had a
full time job. So that was the reason why you
didn't do it. No, no, no, just a shitty.
Student. Our GPA, we hired you with the
2.5 GPA and you're going to get paid the same as me.
That's it. You have the same job as me and
I did all this accomplishment and you did none, and we're
going to have the same job. And Iris also doesn't have any
physical standards, so you can imagine how that goes.
Some really fit gun toters is what you're saying.
Yeah, I, I spent all my time like preparing for basic because
I thought it was going to be really, really hard.
And so I got in great shape. I was 23 and was in sports all
my life. So I, I got, it wasn't like I
was in bad shape, but I was running like five to seven miles
a day, you know, really getting in shape because I thought it
was going to be like boot camp. No, no, a mile and a half, Like
no, no, you know it could be 150 lbs overweight.
No, they don't care. Literally don't care.
That was that was the minute when the FBI died for me.
The first day I walked in and I tried to get my welcome packet
at Quantico. And so you're walking in and
you're not stepping on the SEAL, which is on the ground 'cause
you haven't earned that yet or whatever other nonsense.
That's the way I thought about it.
Military mindset. I walk up to a fat 50 something
year old black lady sitting behind a desk who's from DC and
she's worked for the government her whole life.
And she hands me a packet and she's welcome to the FBI.
And I'm like, oh, thank you very much.
And I'm watching out of the corner of my eye to get punched
or smoked or whatever's coming next.
And it never happened. And that first week happened and
nobody ever dropped me on my face and let me know how garbage
I was. And nobody ever treated me
rough. They called me Sir and they're
really polite and we had to say Sir to each other.
And you're like, I don't think I signed up for what I thought I
was getting into here. This is not the right animal.
And even the FBI is like that. I actually went out for the, my,
my surveillance team actually added a, a fitness standard,
which was not common for most surveillance teams because we
were trying to up the standard of the people we brought in.
I said, if you want to recruit, better make it harder.
And my boss was like, huh. And I'm like, dude, you were on
HRT, you were on the tactical team, you were a Ranger, you
went to West Point. You make things harder, you get
better applicants and more people want to be because it's
elite. People want to be part of elite.
They don't want to be part of mediocrity, and they definitely
don't want to be part of castaways.
And he was like, huh, OK, so we created a standard.
So we're out running our fitness test as a team, which is not
common, and we're not doing this.
And I saw kids from the Academy and I out sprinted them on
purpose at like 40 years old. They're all in their early 20s.
And I out sprinted them. They're like pulling muscles and
stuff like that. And I'm making fun of them and
I'm running with a coffee cup in my hand just to show that I was
faster than them. And I thought they were weak
because I was like, what are we doing?
But that's the standard lowering.
And those people don't want to go out and meet their subjects.
They don't want to go out there and put eyes on.
They don't want to go out and do that hard work.
So they've, they've degraded what used to be really
prestigious and it doesn't matter if it's your badge or my
badge or any other's 'cause that's, that's crazy to me.
Yeah, it's we, you know, the IRS actually tried to implement a, a
fitness standard wish they would.
And they tried to make everyone do it.
And it it was, it was a panic. There was a panic across the
agency. Love that.
Panic. Suddenly everyone trying to get
in shape, which, and I was, I was one of the physical fitness
instructors. So they, and so they, first of
all, they spend a lot. The government spends tons of
money sending you to training. So I've gone to, I've gone to
training for two weeks to be a physical fitness instructor.
Then they had to change. So they did a million millions
of dollars they spent doing a study because they couldn't just
implement like the standards of a mile and a half, do it in 10
minutes or whatever. They had to do a study showing
why we and they had to be job based tasks, right?
So we came up with these ridiculous system of testing.
They sent me back to Flexi for another week to learn how to
implement this stuff. We started implementing this.
Of course, lots of people started failing and then
eventually it just evaporated. Just goes away because it's just
not going to work the most, I think the most important maybe
even single line that you said. And it's something I also
believe it's something I've come to independently and and I I
want to just maybe close out on that thought.
You said people are policy and you said that you don't have to
tell the people you hire if they're already ideologically
driven, what to do because they already know what to do.
And you gave the example of Lois Lerner.
But that's across the entire government right now.
That's what I when I say deep state or we say deep state, I
think of administrative state. I think it's you chose people
that meet your criteria and they don't need to be told they're
automatically going to be activists for that thing.
Is that something you see across all government?
Yes. And you got to realize all
governments working together, it's not like IRS is doing their
own thing and FBI is doing their own thing.
No, like the the heads of these agencies are meeting, they're
all part of a bigger FBI, part of the Department of Justice,
which is giving them their marching orders.
IRS is part of Department of Treasury.
And it's not like these these are all siloed out.
Sure, they have their own individual missions, but they're
all part of task forces. They're all, they're all
meeting, they all have their heads, which we, which report
to, you know, the, the secretaries of these, of these
various bureaus like it, it's common across it.
And it's going to be, you know, it's going to be shared.
It's not like you can say, oh, the IRS is the problem.
You could create some other agency tomorrow to replace the
IRS. You're going to have the exact
same problems. It it's not going to change.
It's, it's because it's, it's all the way across in
government. And so a lot of people are like,
oh, you need to get rid of the IRS.
Well, you're, you have to have someone that collects taxes
somewhere. And if you think the IRS is bad,
you should see the Franchise Tax Board of California like they're
terrible, like they are, they are much worse than the IRS.
And so you're, you're going to have agencies that have to do
some of this stuff. And when you put in the people
that that creates the policy in these agencies and you could
destroy the agencies. And but if what soon as you
plant them with something else, with the same people and these
people move around inside government because that's what
they, they build up their resumes and they get these SES
positions and then they go to private sector.
And then the private sector comes in and does takes over
these, you know, these heads of treasury, the Treasury Secretary
and stuff like that. And then they go back like this.
It's sort of a incestuous things.
And as long as you have that, you're going to have the same
policies throughout the government, no matter what
agency you're in or you're talking about whether you get
rid of that, that because someone's going to take that
function. You know, someone's going to,
you know, collect taxes. Someone's going to the IRS has
warehouses, like a warehouse the size of a city block.
It's like an airplane hangar. And there's just people.
It's like a Costco. It's just people cubicles, just
imagine little cubicles of people, hundreds of people.
And all they do is open the mail like you, you're going to have
people that do that. So you're going to have an
agency that does these basic functions and they're going to
be led by somebody. And as long as those people are
led by these government agencies, and I think normal
people don't want to live in DC and, and work there, it's very,
you know, it changes you too, like the farther you are from
the field. I, I felt that as a supervisor
and I was a supervisor in Houston.
And then even as a program manager, you, you start thinking
differently because your priorities are different and
you, the longer you're away from the field, it changes you.
It, it just does. And so I think when you're in
executive management, and these guys are in executive management
for longer than they've been an agent in many cases, I was
promoted to a supervisor after like five years, six years,
maybe it was like 8 years as a, as an agent.
And if I had stayed in the management track, I would have
been in management far, far longer than I was an agent.
And you forget it and things change.
And and that's, you know, that's ubiquitous across government and
that's how the government policies come into a into being.
It's really important because it's not just that one agency
that people keep seeing. Everybody wants to call out my
former agency, my ex-girlfriend, which is totally valid, but
every single one of them have the exact same thing.
Is there a, is there a cross the board solution that you see
that's easy or are we just in for some bumpy, bumpy weather
coming in? We're going to get some
turbulence. The only solution is really a
political one, like you're going to have to remove these people
from these positions and change the policies and, and restrict
you still start restricting the scope of government.
The more programs you have, the more government involvement
you're going to have. And you know, you, you create a
policy like the the IRS is, is a great example.
One of the things that we don't like that I didn't like was that
the IRS is basically, you know, they, they're handing out
entitlements, they're handing out, you know, welfare.
It's not simply bringing in taxes.
You're getting all sorts of credits that are given to
certain people. There's tax policies related to
certain to certain programs that they want, certain incentives.
There are, you know, we handed out the COVID money that's bad.
So the the more stuff that you have in the agency, there's
somebody has to administrate that and then there's going to
be fraud. So then somebody has to
investigate that and then you just create more and more and
more government. So I'm not sure what the
solution is in the short term. Long term, people need to
realize that less government means less intrusion.
And, and one of the reasons why I supported that as an agent is
because I felt that bigger government made my job less
special. Like I wanted to be an agent
because, and I built my whole life to be in law enforcement
because I thought that was like serving your country and, and
going after criminals. And the more people that I met
that did this job, the less special I felt like the more
crazy laws that we investigated, the less special I felt like I,
I thought my position should be rare and that it should be
something a, a huge accomplishment.
And the the more of them that you have, like in investigating
all sorts of stuff, the less special it felt to me.
And so I think limited government, you know, if
everyone's the sheriff, then being the sheriff is not, is not
a special thing. So limited government I think is
better all around. It's better, it's better for law
enforcement. And you know, I also tell
people, look, if you, if you make a sheriff, you if you pass
a law, someone has to enforce it.
And ultimately that's going to be the police.
Police don't want to do that. So, you know, police really
like, I wanted to investigate actual crime, like actual
criminals. I think at least it used to be
that that's what police really wanted to do.
They didn't want to do all these brace measures.
I got who wants to give out seat belt tickets?
But when you're incentivizing that the federal government
actually incentivizes police departments to do that.
But you know, then police wind up having to do it.
It changes their mentality. You know, you get comfortable,
you you want to keep your job, you start doing that stuff.
So you you have to reduce, you know, the number of laws and the
scope of government. And then, you know, those jobs
will will be fewer, but they'll also be better.
It's very insightful and I hadn't thought of it that way,
so I appreciate that sort of insight.
It takes a lot of time thinking about things that are the
problem to really come up with the the real novelty and then
also how it actually applies down the road.
Most people can't, they can just see, I hate this.
That's not a solution and it's not really a reason either.
So Aaron, I appreciate you spending that time get.
Rid of the federal government like you're going to get rid of
the FBI. There's going to be somebody
that does investigation. Sure.
Just stop getting rid of it. That sounds really good but
ultimately, well what about the ATF?
Or people don't know the EPA has their own CID so.
Get rid of all that too. Those ones I think we could
sacrifice. There's a pretty good reason for
it. That could be very, very small.
Make them very, very special. So there's only a few going
after big offenders. You're not doing Twitter as
much. Do you want people to follow you
somewhere and check in? Because I know you engage still.
Twitter quite a bit, but just not like I used to.
So I still and I do spaces with Leslie and Shipwreck and I I
just changed my focus to be a little bit more narrow, not out
of scope, but that's definitely where you should follow me is on
Twitter at Aaron Goggly is my handle.
I will throw that up on the screen here in the in the edit
and people will be able to see that.
Do you do a true social as well or no?
I do not. OK, just one social media and
that's the that's the only place I have.
Personal Instagram accounts that I use for like my kids
volleyball and stuff like that. So, but yeah, so you can
certainly if you are interested in sporting events in my kids
athletic career. I hate Instagram so much.
I can't even tell you how much I hate it.
I hate that I have it all right. Thanks for spending that.
Thanks for attending the time chatting with us about this.
I think there's some really good insight there and I think people
will go, hopefully we'll have another one of these chats.
And I look forward to doing a space with you too, because I I
like that measured approach. There's a very IRS nature.
Maybe that's the 25 years. Maybe you were like that to
begin with. There's a very methodical way
that you think through things. It's what I always thought about
your Twitter account to following that that thought
process. I appreciate that.
Yeah. Ask me anytime.
I'll be happy to be on Enjoy. I enjoy doing spaces too.
I really enjoy it. And that is our.
Show for today, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining
us for a little little chat, a little look behind the scenes of
what the IRS law enforcement end does.
As you guys know, not 87,000 agents are going to be armed.
Ones that are are probably a lot more like Aaron and more like
guys like Gary Shapley and Ziegler, the people you saw that
were testifying for the weaponization now almost a year
ago, folks that do it right. I don't know.
I'm less worried about the IRS than I am just about any of the
other agencies out there. Go figure.
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