How Fast and Furious Buried an FBI Agent | John Shipley | Ep. 444

Summary

Cleared Hot Ep. 444 – How Fast and Furious Buried an FBI Agent | John Shipley

Podcast: Cleared Hot – Powered By BRCC
Host: Andy Stumpf
Guest: John Shipley
Date: April 20, 2026
Episode Theme: A harrowing inside account of Operation Fast and Furious, the ATF’s weapon-walking scandal, and how it led to the prosecution and imprisonment of FBI Special Agent John Shipley. Shipley details systemic failures, personal fallout, and lasting consequences, while exposing deep-rooted corruption.

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Episode Overview

This episode features former FBI Special Agent John Shipley, whose life and career were upended when he was prosecuted and imprisoned in the fallout of Operation Fast and Furious. Shipley shares his personal and professional journey, from his military upbringing and career in law enforcement to his fight against internal corruption, culminating in his conviction on federal gun charges. Shipley pulls back the curtain on the intentional flaws in the Fast and Furious operation—where the U.S. government allowed guns to enter Mexico in a deliberate, failed attempt to track cartel weapons—and reveals how the system can destroy those who uphold their oaths when it becomes politically expedient.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Early Life, Military, and FBI Career

• Military Upbringing & Service

  • Shipley's father, a Vietnam vet, never spoke much about his service and discouraged guns at home:
    • “Son, I've seen enough death in my lifetime. I don't ever want a gun around me again.” – Shipley, [03:18]
  • Shipley commissioned into the military, then joined the FBI after a spinal cord injury ended his flying career.

• Law Enforcement Values

  • Shipley describes his motivation as wanting to protect others—being a “sheepdog” rather than a wolf ([18:05]–[19:37]).
  • Early FBI years spent cutting his teeth on cartel and narcotics cases at the border in El Paso.

• Cultural & Institutional Shifts in Law Enforcement

  • Discusses the post-9/11 shift away from narcotics toward counterterrorism ([13:44]).
  • Frustration over declining standards/changes in agency SWAT tryouts and discrimination issues ([23:14]–[24:13]).

The Justice System's Flaws: Telling the Truth and Facing Retaliation

• Fateful Night at the Airport – The Samantha Carrington Case

  • Shipley refused to omit exculpatory evidence from a criminal complaint, exposing efforts to prosecute an Iranian-American professor with falsified evidence.
  • He took the case to a judge, resulting in Carrington’s immediate release.
    • Shipley’s supervisor: “Write what I tell you to write, and you go swear to it, and you let the system figure this out.” – [45:25]
  • Carrington ultimately won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit; Shipley refused her offer of money, upholding his personal code ([51:15]).

• Retaliation and Targeting

  • By upholding his oath and making the prosecutor look bad, Shipley became a target:
    • False accusations of bribery and making false statements followed, with fruitless investigations doggedly pursued by the same AUSA.

Operation Fast and Furious: Context and Cover-up

• Bush-Era Attempts and Obama’s Larger Scale

  • “Operation Wide Receiver” (Bush) initiated the approach—smuggling guns with failed tracking devices ([65:13]–[67:01]).
  • Obama administration surreptitiously expanded the program, removing even the failed tracking, pressuring gun stores to sell thousands to cartel buyers with immunity ([70:09]–[71:33]).
    • “If I can’t beat ‘em, I'm gonna engineer a problem, and then I'm gonna swoop in and solve that problem, and I’m gonna be the hero... That’s exactly what President Obama did.” – Shipley, [68:57]

• The Set-Up of Lawful Gun Owners

  • ATF coerced FFL dealers into acting as straw-sellers by leveraging their licensing ([71:53]).
  • Shipley's .50 caliber rifle’s eventual path: Sold legally to a sheriff’s deputy, then on consignment with a gun dealer pressed into service as an ATF informant, and then illegally sold to a cartel buyer—with Shipley blamed ([77:19]–[78:43]).

• Institutional Self-Preservation

  • The government, under both ATF and DOJ, withheld Fast and Furious evidence in discovery, lied in search warrants, and sealed records under executive privilege to avoid exposure:
    • “President Obama claimed executive privilege... so we don’t know.” – [70:00]

The Brian Terry Murder & Whistleblowers

• Critical Turning Point

  • Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010 with a Fast and Furious gun, breaking open the scandal.
  • Fast and Furious’s scale—a minimum of 2,000 firearms—came to light only because of an ATF whistleblower, John Dodson ([166:43]).

• Systematic Deception

  • Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress, saying he learned of the operation only weeks prior, but emails proved otherwise:
    • Holder: “I didn’t lie. I simply misled you.” ([115:29])

Prosecution & Imprisonment of John Shipley

• Faulty Prosecution

  • Shipley was indicted as a “gun trafficker” for legal private sales, despite multiple steps of separation from actual traffickers ([80:10]).
  • The government manipulated evidence, victimized Shipley for political expedience, and destroyed exculpatory trial records.
    • “My judge is David Brionis...His sister was the county judge who was embezzling money and the FBI arrested her. So now I’m standing in front of her brother in federal court, and he’s my judge.” – [85:05]

• Show Trials and Prejudicial Argument

  • His defense was intentionally crippled—exculpatory stories (like Carrington’s) were blocked from trial and material from court records “disappeared” ([107:26]).
  • Jury manipulation included appeals to emotion and the presentation of legal assets (such as a licensed suppressor) as crimes.

• Life After Conviction

  • Prison experience: Immediately threatened by inmates, but ultimately isolated due to his law enforcement background ([129:38]–[134:18]).
  • After release, permanent loss of gun rights, professional limitations as an attorney, and personal/family hardship.

The System Never Admits Fault

• Absence of Accountability

  • Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his conviction despite acknowledged government lies and missing transcripts ([90:44]).
  • Shipley: “You can go into federal court, you can lie to a jury, convict an innocent person, and you have absolute immunity.” ([97:19])

• Unforgiven

  • Shipley unsuccessfully sought a presidential pardon; Biden refused, and the criminal record remains an obstacle in all facets of his life ([159:57]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I'm a sheepdog. That's what I am. I'm a protector.” – Shipley, [18:05]
• “You don't get to decide what you want to do. When I joined in ‘96, I went from Quantico to El Paso, and they said every agent must work narcotics on the border for three to five years...a proving ground.” – Shipley, [13:30]
• “There's enough bad people out there—we don't have to create criminals.” – Shipley, [49:03]
• “If you derive pleasure from taking somebody’s life, you’re a psychopath...If you derive pain from it, you’re in the wrong line of business. If you can put yourself in the middle...you’re an operator.” – [25:53] (Recounting SEAL wisdom)
• “If my team’s under fire, I’m going to eliminate the threat...A deadly threat is a deadly threat, no matter where it comes from.” – Shipley, [29:34]
• “He said…‘I'm gonna set your house on fire then save you, and pretend to be a hero’… That’s exactly what [Obama] did with Fast and Furious.” – Shipley, [68:57]
• “President Obama claimed executive privilege over [the Fast and Furious documents] and sealed all the documents.” – Shipley, [70:00]
• “They wanted those guns to go into Mexico and be found at scenes of murders and mass Killings… Then say, the problem is our current laws are not strong enough.” – Shipley, [71:53]
• “You’re asking me to go into a court of law and to lie under oath…and I said, I will never do that. I will be at trial and I will testify at trial.” – Shipley, [83:20]
• “How do you have any faith in the government that treated you like this?” – Stumpf, [147:13]
• “You did that intentionally, knowing it was possible those guns could come back and shoot our own citizens.” – Shipley, [177:56]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Military/FBI Family & Upbringing: [01:07]–[08:37]
• El Paso Early FBI Career: [12:14]–[14:58]
• Post-9/11 Law Enforcement Shifts: [13:44]–[17:28]
• Becoming a Target for Telling the Truth: [34:49]–[54:23]
• Operation Fast and Furious Detailed: [65:13]–[77:19]
• Shipley's Gun & The Scapegoat Path: [77:19]–[90:12]
• The Brian Terry Case: [75:15], [166:43]–[168:02]
• Trial, Legal Manipulation & Prison: [99:53]–[143:16]
• Presidential Pardon & the Lasting Damage: [159:01]–[162:09]
• Whistleblowers & Scandal Breaks: [164:11]–[168:02]
• Final Reflections & How to Help: [170:57]–[177:25]

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How to Support John Shipley

• Contact/Amplify
  • Shipley is open to any support; interested advocates can find him via “John Shipley attorney Fort Worth” for professional contact.
  • Spreading awareness and encouraging congressional representatives to revisit his case could make a difference.

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Episode Tone

The conversation is direct, unsparing, and emotionally charged. Shipley and Stumpf maintain a candid, sometimes darkly humorous tone while revealing institutional hypocrisy, corruption, and personal consequences. The camaraderie is grounded in shared service backgrounds; the message is a warning and a call to accountability.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode powerfully illustrates how unaccountable institutions pursue their political aims, ruin lives of those who resist unethical orders, and cover up their own misconduct—leaving individuals like Shipley and innocent victims, such as Brian Terry and his family, to pay the ultimate price. The call for justice—and a warning about unchecked government power—resonates long after the conversation ends.

Transcript

[A]

Okay, I got the red smoke.

[B]

Sun runs north or south.

[A]

West of the smoke. West of the smoke.

[B]

Okay, copy.

[A]

West of the smoke.

[B]

I'm looking at danger close now.

[A]

Oh, wait a minute. Give it to me. I mean it.

[B]

You're cleared hot. Copy. Cleared hot. Complicated topic, to say the least. When you talk about this, do you prefer to unpack it sequentially? What's the easiest way? I mean. Cause it's. There's layers upon layers, obviously. Do you go just through time, from backwards to forwards, or where do you want to enter in?

[A]

Yeah, I guess we could start talking about the beginning. How I got to where I was at the point, what happened, what Fast and Furious was.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then how it affected me. Let's do it.

[B]

Start wherever you want to.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

By all means. We're already going anyway. That's how we do it.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So go ahead, Mr. Shipley. Tell me how the FBI took great care of you after so many years of service.

[A]

Well, so I. I started in the military like you did. My father was a lieutenant colonel, retired Vietnam veteran. He's still alive. He's 83 years old. And my dad commissioned me.

[B]

How's he doing with his service? I only ask because my father's almost 80 and I look at their generation of service in man. I don't know if you could have written a polar opposite reception than my eras. Return to home, however you would describe it. And it is an injustice of injustices.

[A]

Absolutely was. When I was in law school, they had a thing called Honor Flight.

[B]

I know exactly what you talk about.

[A]

And we would go to the airport and we would make signs and say welcome home. And everyone was okay coming off the flight except the Vietnam veterans. And they were all just bawling their eyes out, saying, I wish this was the reception I got when I came back from Vietnam. And it breaks your heart as a soldier to see another soldier just wounded like that and to carry that wound for all these years.

[B]

Did your dad talk much about his service with you when you were younger? No, Same. And again, this is why I ask. It's not common for me to sit down with people who have parents of that era of service, but the stories are resoundingly the same. They're generally very quiet about their service, if talking about it at all. They oftentimes won't even involve themselves in veterans events because of the reception that they had or experiences shortly after service. And it's. Yeah, it's a travesty.

[A]

Yeah. I belong to a group called Roll Call in Fort Worth, and it's a great organization. It's all veterans from every branch that get together. And I said to my dad, I was like, dad, you need to go to this. And he was like, no, he just won't. I remember when I was growing up, I had. I really enjoyed shooting guns. When I go to my grandma and grandpa's house in Indiana, they let me shoot their BB guns and then eventually 22s and they work me up to guns. And my dad used to always say, you can never have a gun in my house. And I'd be like, why, Dad? I mean, you were in the military. The military uses guns. And he said this, son, I've seen enough death in my lifetime. I don't ever want a gun around me again.

[B]

Today's episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. I tell you what, I just got back from the grand opening of their headquarters on the western edge of Missoula, and what a fantastic evolution. Thousands of people were there. They were waiting all night long. They were getting a tour of the knife building facility. That was the opening of their Black Rifle coffee shop there. A lot of people there from Black Rifle, obviously all the staff from Montana Knife Company. But you know why everybody else? Not by everybody. Do you know why they were all there? They were supporting the brand that Josh and Brandon and so many others. Let's not forget Jess, Joss's wife. They have helped make what they have built there is spectacular. There's no reason that people would spend, and I mean, thousands of people would spend the night in line or show up at 4 o' clock in the morning for something that sucked. And let me tell you, that place didn't suck, nor do their knives. They have so much stuff going on right now. And I'm giving you a little spoiler alert. They're working on. I don't know if I'm just going to go ahead and release it now. They're working on a folding knife. Yep, that's right. I said it. I'm sorry, Josh, if I wasn't supposed to. My bad, Brandon. But it's coming. It's not here yet. What do they have? I'm looking at steak knives online right now. They do a blade drop on Thursdays and Saturdays. They have stuff that is completely in stock at all times. They have chef's knives. They have skinning knives. They have knives for cattlemen. They have apparel. It is crazy what they have built. And I'm looking forward to them outgrowing their facility that I think they thought was going to house them.

[A]

For years.

[B]

And I'm going to give them about six months before they're expanding out of it. But vertically integrating, bringing almost the entire creation process underneath one roof, bringing jobs back into America, bringing jobs into Montana, increasing quality of life, the pay for those people in the Montana, the western Missoula area, it's phenomenal. It is difficult to get one of their knives when they're the newer ones or their limited releases. So head over to montanaknifecompany.com check out what they have to offer, and just realize on those release dates, you need to act quickly on. Honestly, I recommend going on there and buying, like, a sticker or a patch so they have your information saved so you can action it as quickly as possible, because otherwise you are going to be left behind, and it sucks. This has happened to me many times. I had a knife taken out of my cart because I was manually putting in my credit card information. Don't be that guy. Learn from my mistakes. Montanaknifecompany.com Trust me, you won't regret it. Back to the show.

[A]

So, respectfully, when I graduated the FBI academy, I took my weapon off, locked it in my trunk, never took it in my father's house because I respect my father.

[B]

Yeah. So I'm glad to hear he's still alive.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Has he opened up at all, or have you asked him about it anymore? As he's maybe approaching the tail end of the lap around the track?

[A]

You know, he. He did something that was really cool. He put together a list of every unit that he served in, where it was, what the dates were. He doesn't talk about his ribbons or his medals or anything like that. I knew that. I knew that he was in Chulao. I knew that he flew Chinooks. I know the company that he was in at that time. I know all that information. But he still really doesn't talk about it. And that's okay. That's. That's his thing.

[B]

So I'm glad he made that record, though.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Because otherwise, one of the things I've done with my dad is I'll sit him down in the chair you're in. And trust me, we get well off the reservation and the rails. Michael can attest to this. He said some things that, like, oh, boy, you know, this is going on the Internet. Right. But I've also gotten him to talk about his, you know, the impact of his service on his family. His relationship with his father was strained before that, but what happened afterwards? And because my grandfather kind of separated from our life when I was about 11 years old. And I think it was the right decision to do so, but have a better understanding of why. How it impacted his relationship with my mom, because she's passed. I don't have the opportunity to talk with her. So they're good time capsules. At least have that opportunity. I can go back and watch it again at some point.

[A]

And I'm lucky my mom and dad are still both alive. So, you know, I get my mom's perspective when she was pregnant with me. And then he gets sent to Vietnam and. And he's over in Vietnam while she's in Indiana having a baby in a blizzard, and she doesn't know where her husband is. And, you know, I get to hear her stories because her story's about family. His story's about hardship. Yeah. And, you know, she told me when he came to Hawaii for R and R, she's like, your dad sat down at the table. We ordered as soon as the food got there. He ate it as fast as he could, and he said, come on, Jeanne, it's time to go. And wanted to leave. My mom's like, well, I've taken two bites. And he's like, it's time to go. We're done eating. You know, because he was in a war zone. Yeah. And he would eat as fast as he could and then go back and work on the aircraft and fly the aircraft and get things ready for the next mission.

[B]

So imagine that, going from Vietnam to Hawaii for a couple weeks.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Even if you were able to unwind, you'd be just unwound to the point where you have to go back.

[A]

And I remember, I. Before they took R and R, I was born. And so my mom brought all these pictures of his son, his firstborn son and everything else. And my father said, I. I don't even want to look at those pictures because that's one more person I'm going to miss. And if I'm up flying or I'm doing something and I'm thinking about that baby instead of thinking about my mission and how to safeguard my troops, somebody could get killed. Yeah. And my mom was hurt by that.

[B]

And I can understand why she was hurt. I can understand why he said it, too.

[A]

I do, too.

[B]

Yeah. Indeed. All right. Sorry for the detour.

[A]

Now you're good.

[B]

Please.

[A]

So, no, I started in the military. I was. I went through ROTC in college, and then I had the privilege. My dad was a lieutenant colonel at the time, still on active duty. He got to commission me he got to swear me in, and then he got to pin my butter bars on me. And that was huge, having my dad do that. And then I went to a unit in Fort Meade, Maryland. Was there. I wasn't a rated aviator yet, hadn't gone flight school. So they sent me to Fort Rucker graduate that my dad gets to come down and pin my wings on my chest. So just awesome, A blessing. Then I guess in about the second or third year, I got hurt. I got injured. I had a spinal cord injury and it was pretty bad. So they took me to Walter Reed. I had spinal cord surgery. And they told me, you're done flying, you're done. And they said you could maybe branch transfer to something else, but you're no longer going to be a pilot. And I was like, well, I've always wanted to be an FBI agent. That was if, you know, at five years old, if you asked me, john, what are you going to be? I said, I'm going to be an FBI agent. My mother used to say, oh, you know, that's, that's nice. But she never thought that was my dream job above all else. And so I told my dad, I said, dad, if I can't fly anymore, I'm going to join the FBI. And he was like, well, you better bump up your resume. So I went, became a volunteer firefighter, volunteer emt. I started doing things that I thought might punch my ticket to get me to, you know, my foot in the door to the FBI. So in 1995, I applied and then I was accepted. I entered on duty on 623 of 96. And that first date that they swear you, like, it's either the first or the second day that you're in Quantico. They swear you in. You raise your right hand and then they're like, you're now a special agent with the FBI. And you're like, well, I haven't been through any training yet. I mean, it was just crazy.

[B]

Like, you have your federal authorities at

[A]

that point, but they don't give you credentials.

[B]

That's probably.

[A]

They don't give your badge.

[B]

That's probably good.

[A]

And they don't give you a gun.

[B]

All of those are probably really good protective steps.

[A]

Yep. So for four months, you're going through the academy, you're going through tvoc, Tactical Emergency Vehicle Operators Course, High speed driving and pursuits. You learn fighting techniques, ground fighting techniques, handcuffing techniques, your marksmanship. You're out the range with an AR15, with a 870, shotgun with a 9 millimeter pistol. So you're going through all the training and then you have legal classes and you have ethics classes and all those things. At the end of four months, you graduate and you write down from number one to being the one office you want to go to, to the 56th office that you hope you don't get. And it's the needs of the Bureau.

[B]

Yeah. Similar system in the Navy as well.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. When you're in training in second phase, you fill out your dream sheet, which means these are dreams that you have. But the needs of the Navy take priority.

[A]

You pick your team. Well, you go to.

[B]

You pick eight, you put a team down. It has nothing to do with where you're gonna go. Unless I think the needs of the Navy happen to align with the student's request, I think they would facilitate it. But if there is even an inkling of them needing you somewhere else, you're gone. See you later. Yeah, it's later in your career as you get some experience and seniority, you can, of course, transfer with a little bit more of intention and control of your career. But, yeah, as a second phase student, not out of training, you're a. You're a pulse.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

See you later.

[A]

You belong to them totally. Needs of the Navy. Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Indeed.

[A]

It's. It's the same in the FBI.

[B]

Are all of those stations, though largely the same? So, I mean, they're all over the United States. There's a small FBI. I don't know what they would call it up here, but There's a couple FBI agents up here in California.

[A]

They call them RAs, resident agencies. So there are divisions. Like El Paso was the division that I was assigned to. But Midland, Texas, which is out to the east several hundred miles, that's an ra. So you have one senior agent that runs that office, and he has maybe eight or nine agents that work for him, but they still report back to the Special Agent Charge in El Paso, and they still are under that division. And it was kind of an interesting thing because sometimes being where El Paso is right on the border, Las Cruces, New Mexico, would have something pop off, or Albuquerque, and Albuquerque's team, their SWAT team, would have to drive all the way down to Las Cruces. So they would call us and be like, hey, can you drive 45 minutes over and handle this for us? So we did that.

[B]

Are the jobs in those duty stations, though, let's say the major ones, if you had put New York down or la, are you largely going to be doing the same job or when you get there, you figure out what you're going to specialize in.

[A]

You figure it out when you get there, okay?

[B]

So you're basically just deciding where you want to get your mail at that point.

[A]

That's it. Okay. And you don't get to decide what you want to do. When I joined in 96, I went from Quantico to El Paso, and they said every agent must work narcotics on the border for at least three to five years before you can switch.

[B]

Damn.

[A]

So it was a proving ground. Are you going to go out there and are you going to hustle and are you going to be tough enough to survive working against the cartel? And so the first couple years, you're cutting your teeth and you're learning about Title 21 authority, which is federal narcotics. You know, DEA has that authority, but a lot of people don't know. The FBI also does that. Now, that changed when 911 happened. When 911 happened, they gutted the drug squads and sent them all over to terrorism. And all of a sudden it was domestic terrorism and international terrorism. And we were doing a lot of different things because of 9 11. So that. That changed things when 911 happened. Funny story, that's the first day I took off in the FBI. I got in in 96, and now we're talking 01. And I hadn't taken a day off. And because I love being an agent, I really just did. And so I called my boss up because my wife woke me up, and she knew that I was a pilot in the military. So she woke me up. She said, hey, a plane just hit one of the trade. One of the towers. And I said, no, there's no way, because, you know, ATC would be calling them and saying, hey, you're. You're headed on this. You know, you've got to let us give you vectors to get around it.

[B]

Also, it was a clear day, and maybe you'd see it out of the windshield. Yeah, yeah, I remember I woke up shortly before the second plane went in as well. And everybody was still under the impression that it had been a horrible, horrible, likely general aviation accident of some kind.

[A]

Well, that's what my wife thought. She. She doesn't know. My wife does ultrasound of the heart. She's an echocardiographer. She's very good at what she does. But she doesn't recognize the things that we recognize because just. Just because she's not trained in the things we are. When I saw the first tower on fire, I said, that had to be a large plane. I thought for at first not being awake when it happened, I thought it was like a small plane, like a Cessna that flew into it or something like that, some private pilot, that there

[B]

wouldn't have been that much damage for sure.

[A]

That's correct. As soon as I saw it, I was like, something's wrong. And right then we saw a second one hit. And I said to my wife, sweetheart, this is terrorism. And back in those days, we had pagers. My pagers started going off and I looked at it. It was a national security code for all agents report to the office. So I immediately, I called my supervisor up and I said, hey, Kevin, what's going on? And he's like, john, just get to the office, we'll explain it. I said, yes, sir. I said, sir, I took one day off in the FBI and you let the world go to hell and just. And he goes, it's not funny, son. Get in here. I was like, yes, sir.

[B]

It's never too soon. I bet he thinks it's funny now. Yeah, but honestly, on that day, yeah, there were, there was no joking matter for sure.

[A]

So then, in typical bureau fashion, our knee jerk reaction was, okay, all the guys on SWAT will stay in Paris and protect the perimeter of the federal building. So they're like, who are our snipers? And Brad and I raised our hands and they're like, okay, you two figure out a schedule, but I want somebody on the roof 24 hours a day with your sniper rifle in case a plane comes in. So instantly I raised my hand. I said, sir, I have a bolt action.308 rifle that holds five rounds. I said, if a plane is coming in to hit our building, I will do nothing except be just one more casualty. And he's like, I don't care. You're going to be on top of the building. So we, we stayed on the perimeter of, of the FBI building on Mesa Hills for four months straight. Just 12 hours on, 12 hours off.

[B]

Was there intelligence pointing in the direction that there was like a physical infrastructure attack coming there?

[A]

Nothing.

[B]

I mean, that's how you burn your staff to the ground.

[A]

It was that knee jerk reaction of, okay, who are the, who are the most tactically trained guys we have? You protect the building now. That's your job. We had motorcycles and dune buggies, you know, the old seal dune buggies that

[B]

had the 50 cal desert patrol vehicles.

[A]

Okay, we had one of those and we would drive around the building just, you know, because it was all sand and desert around the building. So crazy time. But, but no, I, I actually I have a great love for the FBI still. And it's hard because people say to me, wait a second, they deserted you when you needed them. Why do you still have any loyalty to them? I don't know. I just. I loved being one of the good guys, being a protector. And I think it was maybe my first year in the FBI. Somebody had a little saying up on their, on their cubicle. We. Everybody thinks we get desks. No, we get cubicles. And he had a cubicle thing that said the different, the three types of people, sheep, sheepdog and wolves. And I read it and it was talking about the fact that there are people that are sheep and they go through their normal day and they never have a bad intention in their soul. They just want to be left alone and do their own thing and raise their kids and enjoy life. And then there are wolves. And the wolves will prey relentlessly on those sheep. They'll just slaughter them. And then there are sheepdogs capable of the same level of violence as, as the wolves, but would never use it against the sheep and will only use it to protect the sheep from the wolves. And on that day I was like, I'm a sheepdog. That's what I am. That's. And, and then so you're a new agent, you're coming in, you start seeing all these guys with tactical gear and you're like, oh, why don't I get that? They're like, oh, they're swat. I'm like, yeah, but they look cool. I want to be like that. And some of the neatest guys in my division that I just, I looked up to and I respected, they were on SWAT and they're like, hey, you want to run with the big dogs? Try out for swat? When I tried out and I tried out twice, so the first time that I tried out, it was a 24 hour tryout and it was just a smoke session. And people would quit and I'd look at them like, it's 24 hours.

[B]

And you knew that going in.

[A]

Yeah, you know, it started I think at 3am or 4am and it went till the next night until 4am and it was a smoke session. It was physical fitness and shooting and physical fitness and physical fitness. And they were trying to see who are the guys are going to be tough enough that they're not going to quit on a mission. That's it. And 24 hours really isn't long enough to. I mean, you went through buds. Incredible.

[B]

But I still know people that quit after that too. Yeah, I mean, there's no selection process that's perfect. No people slide through. But yeah, I mean, man, 24 hours is a manageable workload.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because El Paso, during the daytime, smoking hot.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Desert environment, very dry. And then at nighttime, very cold, which you don't really expect. So it wasn't the heat that people quit on. It was when they'd say, okay, everybody, we're former perimeter. Okay, you have this sector fire. You have that sector and lay out, and we're going to do some stuff. And they lay out there for about 30 minutes, was all it took. And people were getting cold. And because they were sweaty from the day, then that starts to set in. They're like. They're thinking to themselves, I don't get paid anything extra for being on swat. It's collateral duty. What the hell am I doing out here? I could be in bed with my wife or putting my kids to sleep tonight. Instead, I'm out here in the sand. And, you know, and these are just

[B]

the lies we tell ourselves. As a BUDS instructor, is my job to facilitate those questions, to allow them to enter into a headspace where you would start asking those things? Because the truth of the matter is the most impactful tool I had as an instructor was actually the student against the student. Not as in the two people fighting each other. One person questioning their own ability and

[A]

comparing themselves to the guy next to him.

[B]

Or just, why am I here? How long can I be this cold? Those are the questions I need people asking themselves.

[A]

And I forget who said it, but somebody said something about fatigue is one of the greatest tools that you can use against a man because it will humble you and make you a wimp.

[B]

Yeah. You know, when you start getting to the frayed edges. Yeah. That's. That's where you find out who the real person is. In relationships, personal and professional, oftentimes it's when you tell somebody no for the first time, you can watch their reaction. And that's actually the real person right there. When the mask comes down in the physical world, when you push somebody almost to that brink and you're kind of peering into their soul, you get an idea of who they are for sure.

[A]

Yeah. And 24 hours is not enough. My opinion.

[B]

Plus, apparently people are quitting. So it sounds like it might have been enough, but here's.

[A]

And is it as if this couldn't get any worse? I'm going to tell you this. So they deemed that PT or that tryout too hard, too harsh, based on

[B]

probably the Number of people who quit.

[A]

And so they changed it. No, the bureau did. They were in a. There's a what metric.

[B]

So I hate that we live in a world that your story is starting with there was a lawsuit because that is response. And by the way, you're a lawyer now, so you're responsible for this personally.

[A]

That is a. I can tell you, I can tell you that in all my years of practice of law, I've never filed one lawsuit.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

I defend people. I do criminal defense now.

[B]

Well, then you have to deal with the assholes that are filing lawsuits that sometimes shouldn't. You're in this ecosystem somewhere, so therefore completely your fault. But some of the best things, some of the most effective tools that we have have been changed because somebody files a lawsuit and an industry or organization won't say no.

[A]

So when I got onto swat, there were no females on swat. And then after a couple years, there was a female that tried out and they said, well, we're going to give her a different standard for these events. And all the guys on the team were like, no, here, for instance, the pull ups, we had to put a 35 pound vest on and we had to do pull ups. And if you didn't do above 15, you weren't getting on the team. I mean, it was just, it was kind of an unwritten rule. And so, you know, you're getting 23, 24. All right, we can, you know, that's good. They said, okay, the ladies have to do two. We're like, what?

[B]

The real world doesn't discriminate between your chromosomes.

[A]

If I need you up on that building and you can't pull yourself up with all your gear, I now don't have that tactical advantage of that oversight position.

[B]

Also get a ladder. But I mean.

[A]

Yeah, well,

[B]

I mean, let's find real world solutions to problems that present themselves on target.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So it just, it changed when I was in and I watched the change and I didn't think it was for the better, but I loved being an agent because I love thinking of myself as. I remember when I was a kid, I got bullied and I got bullied because I was smaller than everybody else and my sister was the one who stepped up to the bully and fought him. And on that day I was like, I had a whole different perspective of my sister. She suddenly was like invincible. Like, wow, I can't believe you did that. And then when I got in high school, somebody said to me, hey, well, if you, if you want to stop being bullied, go Be a wrestler, learn how to wrestle, and you'll fights go to the ground and you'll dominate. And then I started working out and then I started getting bigger and playing football and wrestling and. And then I didn't have to worry about being bullied ever again because guys knew, hey, I saw that guy wrestle and I don't want to screw with him.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But then I was like, but you're still doing it to these guys.

[B]

I was going to say, then you can do the most important step in all of that. Step in between somebody who is being bullied in the bully and kick the ever living shit out of the bully.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it needs to be done.

[B]

I completely agree.

[A]

So that's when I decided, okay, this is my path. When I was growing up, I didn't know. I always said I wanted to be an FBI agent, but I didn't know if that's what God was going to put me into. And God saw my heart and said, hey, he wants to protect people. He's. He's very capable of violence. I mean, don't join swat. Don't become a sniper if you're going to have a problem with it. I don't know who it is, but there's a Master Chief that was in the SEAL teams. He had this.

[B]

This may not. If you're going to say a large mustache. This is not narrowing it down at all, by the way. Yeah, this is a Master Chief with a handlebar mustache.

[A]

It curled around. But I heard, I was watching a show one time and he put it perfectly. He said somebody had asked him, hey, what do you think about when you have to take somebody's life during a mission? And he said, look, if you derive pleasure from taking somebody's life, you're a psychopath and something's wrong with you. And if you derive pain from it, then you're in the wrong line of business. But if you can put yourself in the middle and say, I have to do this for the mission to be successful and you take no joy and you take hopefully no pain out of it, then. Then you're an operator.

[B]

Do you remember what year it was? You saw that documentary?

[A]

No, I don't.

[B]

Because if it was pre 9 11, there's a real good chance that guy was full of SEAL teams, didn't do too much after Vietnam. I'm just saying sounds good. But at the same time, it's a real good chance he might have been talking out of his ass.

[A]

Well, there's a lot of people that do.

[B]

Indeed. So when you first got your first station again, you said? El Paso.

[A]

El Paso my whole career.

[B]

Okay, so right into narcotics then.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Just for people not maybe familiar with the geography of Texas. How far are we talking? El Paso to the southern border.

[A]

So from our office, If I took my 9 millimeter out and fired around, it would land in Mexico.

[B]

Did you guys ever test that?

[A]

No.

[B]

No office pops, no missed opportunity. Actually, that wouldn't be an office pop. I don't think that'd be an outside

[A]

pop, you know, and as a matter of fact, one SWAT mission, they said, hey, who are the snipers? And they're like, shipley's a sniper. And the. The assistant special agent in charge calls me into her office and she said, I'm going to put you as a sniper on this mission. It's right on the border. And what was happening was there was a train that would come down, it wouldn't make a 90 degree turn, so it had to go real slow or it would derail. And so the people in Mexico would cut the fence, they would walk three steps into the United States. They would break the train into emergency. There's a. There's a line that goes down through the cars, and if you pop that line, all the brakes immediately go into emergency.

[B]

Oh, they would do this as it was moving, and because it was going

[A]

so slow, they could walk up to the train and they could break it.

[B]

How do they figure this out? First off, I don't know.

[A]

They're. They're sophisticated. Yeah, a lot of people say that the. That the crime and the cartel are not sophisticated. I mean, they have special forces guys just like our government has. Yeah. They have trained killers and trained people that do their business. They are not. I mean, they have as good or better equipment than we have. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. So. But they put this train into emergency. It stops. Then they'll jump on the cars and start opening up the Conex boxes and taking out anything, refrigerators. And they're pushing it over the side of the train. They'll move it five feet into Mexico. And then when the border patrol gets there, they can't do anything because they're now on this side of the fence.

[B]

Literally, if it was an inch across the border. Yep. Nothing they can do.

[A]

Wow. So I was asked, okay, you're going to be sniper on this mission, and you're going to set up at this location. Here's your overwatch position. And she asked me this one question. She said, if your team is taking fire and you see that it's coming from Mexico, what are you going to do?

[B]

It's a good question. I feel like the answer is you can't shoot back.

[A]

My answer is, if my team is under fire, I'm going to eliminate the threat.

[B]

No, I think that's definitely what you do, but I think the legalities are not in your favor.

[A]

Correct. Yeah. And I wasn't an attorney at that point, and I didn't really know the law, but I said this. A deadly threat is a deadly threat, no matter where it comes from.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I will. I will end it. And she's like, okay, you're off the mission tonight.

[B]

Is there. So we had. And again, I don't think this is what that doctrinally what it was called, but it was essentially like hot pursuit if we were engaged. This is specifically the border of Pakistan is what I'm talking about. If they tried that, we could return fire inside of our ROEs, but not cross the border. If somebody fired at us in Afghanistan and then went across the border in an attempt to flee or entice us across, I can't remember the exact limitations, but we were still allowed. We were allowed to take actions up to a point. I remember it being called hot pursuit in the US in the law enforcement, obviously, I was playing with a different set of ROEs. Sometimes title 10, sometimes title 50. And. But for law enforcement, I mean, that. That border right there is the end. Yeah, man. So they could stand there a foot on the other side, just blasting away.

[A]

So on this particular mission, we had one agent who was drug into Mexico.

[B]

Oh, and what happens then?

[A]

So here's what happened. She was on the train. A guy jumps into the train. We were told, don't leave the train until you hear the execute order come over. From the talk, she got drug out, and somehow they pulled her into Mexico on the other side of the fence. And the two agents were like, I can't leave her alone. And some of the people either had bats or they had pipes, I'm not sure which, but they had split her skull open. And so they jump out, they get into a tussle with these guys, shots get fired, and they get all. Everybody back to the United States. Well, it's a good thing I wasn't up on that hill. Because I don't care about that border. If you're trying to kill my friends, I'll deal with the repercussions later. Yeah, so it. It happened. But she got drug into Mexico. So then what are the Asians supposed to do? Say, oh, well, by the letter of

[B]

the law, what are they supposed to do?

[A]

I don't know. Are we.

[B]

You're the. Now you're supposed to go call the embassy. I mean, like, what's going on here?

[A]

But it's a life or death situation.

[B]

I agree.

[A]

And she. She was severely injured. The two agents that were really badly injured. Sergio Barrio, I think he medically retired from the FBI because his peripheral vision was destroyed, so he couldn't see past what's right in front of him anymore. And she. They both were in the ICU for weeks, maybe even a month. Just a bad situation. But.

[B]

So what's the reality? Like as a federal agent, essentially playing chess with the cartel? Because I tell you what, if you only get your information from the mainstream media, I don't think either side is doing a very good job of painting an objective reality of what the situation actually is.

[A]

So I remember this. When I was a young agent a couple of years out of Quantico, still green and still thinking that we're winning the war on drugs, we seized 10.25 tons of marijuana. And one of the pictures that I gave you has a picture of me and I'm laying on a mountain of marijuana because we're unloading two tractor trailers just full of marijuana. And I was like, man, this is really going to hurt the cartel.

[B]

No.

[A]

And my supervisor, I know I was new. I was still, you know, like, hey, I. My supervisor said to me, he said, hey, John. He goes, I promise you that the price of marijuana on the streets tomorrow will not go up a penny from what it is today. If you think 10 tons of marijuana hurts them, it doesn't. It's a minor. It's a. It's a flesh wound. You know, it's. It's nothing. So, you know, I was naive. I had. You know, I had never seen that much marijuana in my life. And, you know, the guys that were bringing in loads like that, I was looking at them like, man, you guys are gods. Like, how. How did you get this much? How did you. You know, because my cases when I first started out were small. And when I say small, maybe a thousand, two thousand pounds of marijuana maybe,

[B]

which is a tremendous amount, three or

[A]

four hundred keys of cocaine. These guys are bringing in Thousands. And I'm like, how do you do this? And they teach you, they, you know, you've got to learn how to, how to do it. But I love my time in the Bureau. But after 14 years of serving, I had a problem. And some people ask me sometimes, how did this get started? And I'll tell you this, I got on somebody's radar that I was not able to be controlled. And what I mean by that is if somebody tells me to testify to something in federal court, my oath is to God. And so if they say, hey, I need an agent to testify at 2 o', clock, they observe this. And SWAT didn't get there till 3:30 or 4 o'. Clock. I tell the AUSA, I can't testify to that. I won't testify to that because I wasn't there.

[B]

Well, here's a better question. Why would the AUSA tell somebody, knowing that those timelines didn't align, to say something that isn't true?

[A]

Because like in every organization, the vast majority of the people that join that organization are squared away hard charging good people and they want to do things right. And there's a few that get through that don't care. And they, their only objective is to win at any cost. And that's what happened in my case was I had pissed an AUSA off because I told the truth under oath and she got mad at me.

[B]

I believe that's how that's supposed to work.

[A]

It is. And here's the thing. I took an oath when I became an officer in the army. I took the same oath as an agent, I took the same oath as an attorney. And at all three of those things I said, I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help me God. My oath is not to the FBI and it's not to the army, it's to God. And I take that serious. And so when I would have somebody tell me you're going to do this, I'd be like, I'm not.

[B]

How often would somebody come up and say something like that? Though?

[A]

Not very frequently. But we had a unique thing happening. If a crime happens on an airplane inside the United States, it's automatically FBI jurisdiction because that plane has the capability of crossing state lines.

[B]

That makes sense.

[A]

So even if it's just in Texas, if it's going from San Antonio to Dallas and somebody commits a crime, because that is an aircraft, it's federal crime, it's FBI jurisdiction and they're going to get arrested by the FBI and Prosecuted by the FBI. Well, I worked. So after I came off Narcotics, I went to Special Operations Group. SOG is a team of agents and their job is to be covert. So you don't dress up like an agent. You don't go to the main office anymore. You go to a remote location. And your job is to conduct surveillance against targets for the FBI, whether it be somebody who's doing money laundering, or it could be a white collar criminal, it could be a cartel member, it could be a politician, it could be anybody. If there's an open case, they call up SOG and they say, hey, I need to know who this person's meeting with, or, hey, they're supposed to take a bribe today and I need you to get pictures of it. That's our job. So I'm working at SOG, and they decided, hey, you're a senior GS13 at the time we need to pull you off SOG and bring you to terrorism because we're getting ready to have headquarters come and inspect us. We don't have enough GS13s on the terrorism squad. And I thought, okay, I've never worked terrorism. If they ask me any questions, I don't even know what to tell them because this isn't my violation. They said, it doesn't matter. Just do this for inspection, then we'll switch you back to sog.

[B]

I said, okay, this sounds like the bureaucracy of the government I know and love. Okay, so now we're back on track with things. I understand.

[A]

Yeah. And all of this you'll identify with because it's not universal to the FBI. It happens at dea. It happens at.

[B]

What you're describing is a bureaucratic nightmare. Yeah. They're moving people around to make sure the spreadsheet looks good for the instant that they're inspected. And then they'll go back.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

As opposed to actually looking at the holistic health of the organization and fixing the problem. They'll fix it for a microsecond while it is being inspected and then go right back to the way it was.

[A]

So remind me of that because I'm going to tell you a SWAT story about that in a minute.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But I go over to the squad and they say, oh, because you're now in the office, you have to be the duty agent. And I was like, what's a duty agent? And they're like, well, that's the agent that. At 12 o'clock midnight when we get a call at the border patrol checkpoint, maybe there's a shooting or at the airport if somebody needs to be arrested, you have to respond out there. And I was like, oh, that sucks. So I have to do my normal work. And then I'm on duty all night. And they're like, yes. So I said, okay. This particular night, there was a call from the El Paso International Airport, and they said that a woman had assaulted somebody on a flight. One of the. One of the stewardesses got assaulted. So I call my partner, Jim Christensen. I say, jim, meet me out at the airport. We gotta arrest the lady for assaulting a flight crew duty. I said, she's probably drunk. And he's like, I'll meet you there. So we both drive out to the airport. We get there, she's in custody in a cell. There's several people from the flight that need to be interviewed. And so the. The case is assigned to the VCMO squad. It's just the major crime squad. They also send agents out there. So they all show up. And I'm like, okay, look, this isn't my violation. What do you want me to do? And they're like, go interview Samantha Carrington, the lady, and find out what her story is. I said, roger that. So I go do that with Jim and we go and talk to her, and she's bawling her eyes out, and she's like, look, I didn't do anything wrong. I was like. And so I got close to her to see if I could smell alcohol. I don't smell any alcohol. So I'm like, usually there's alcohol involved. There's something called gnts.

[B]

Little sky high G and T action.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So I'm talking to her and she says, look, I'm a professor at a college in California. I flew my mother out for cancer treatment. I think in Houston is MD Anderson. Houston, I think.

[B]

I do not know.

[A]

Okay. Well, she flies her out there to MD Anderson for her cancer treatment. She said, and then I was flying back. I left my mom there. I was flying back so I could teach my class. And then I get arrested. And now I'm here with you, the FBI. And I said, well, tell me what happened. And she said, look, she said, I was. I need to take some medication. So I asked the flight attendant before we took off, excuse me, can I get some water? So I take my medicine. And she said, ma', am, we don't serve drinks until we become airborne. So she's like, well, I just need some water to take some medicine. And she's like, well, then you'll have to wait until we're airborne. So she's like, okay. So she curls up in a blanket, and she, you know, tries to sleep. They get airborne, they come through, they serve drinks, and they think that she's asleep, so they don't serve her anything. And then she wakes up and says, hey, can I get some water? It's a different flight attendant. And the flight attendant's like, sure. And so she gets the water, and she goes, hey, let me ask you a question. That a flight attendant right back there. What's her name? And she's like, why? And she says, because I'm going to write a complaint to Southwest Airlines for the way she treated me. I think that she was rude. And so the other thing you need to know is Ms. Carrington is an Iranian. Okay? She's American citizen now, but she's of Iranian descent. So the flight attendant says, well, I'll do one better. I'll go get her and you can talk to her directly. And she goes, no, no, I don't want to talk to her. I just want her name. So she goes back and gets her and comes up, and she's like, lady, what's your problem? She told me, you want to file a complaint against me? And she's like, look, I just want your name so I can file a complaint. And the lady's like, you know what, lady? You're a freak, and I'm gonna get you arrested.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

So she goes and tells the captain that she's been assaulted. And so he diverts from going to California.

[B]

What.

[A]

Lands the plane in El Paso. She's immediately taken off the flight by the El Paso PD and put into a. Into a cage. And then they start bringing all the passengers off. Well, I just hear her side of the story, and I'm thinking, look, flight attendants don't call somebody a freak. That's the first thing that's glaring. The second thing is I just don't believe your story. You know, you're saying you never touched her. She goes, I never touched her. She said, in fact, I never raised my voice. I never used profanity. I was the one saying, please leave me alone. And she said. And got my face and said, lady, you're a freak. So. And Michael can pull it up. You can Google Samantha Carrington, and you'll see that she's.

[B]

Michael.

[A]

She sued. She sued Southwest Airlines.

[B]

I hope she won.

[A]

So I received a subpoena to go to her civil trial.

[B]

Did you talk to any of the other passengers?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

What did they.

[A]

I skipped over that. I apologize. So that night, I only heard her story. So I took. I went out and I said, hey, what do I do now? And they're like, hey, take her. Book her into county. We're going to finish up the interviews, the flight crew and everyone else. Tomorrow morning, we'll all get together, we'll figure out what the story is, and we'll write a criminal complaint. I go, roger that. So I drive her all the way to the El Paso County Jail. She's crying the whole way. Mr. Shipley, Mr. John, please. I did not do anything wrong. I promise you. I. I've never been arrested before. I. You know, this is going to be the end of my career. I'm a. I'm a teacher. I can't. You know, And I'm. I'm like, I've heard it a thousand times, you know, I book her into county jail. I go home, I get a good night's sleep. I wake up the next morning, I go into the office and I get together and I say, okay, who did you interview and what they tell you? And I go around the room, and I get to an agent named Henry Kamansky. And Henry says, well, I interviewed the white guy that was in the aisle right across from where Ms. Carrington was. And I said, okay. Did he see anything? Yeah, he sold the whole thing. And he heard everything, too. I said, okay, what'd he tell you? And he said, well, he told me that Ms. Carrington actually asked the lady to leave her alone. So I was like, okay. And that Ms. Carrington was not being profane, that she was being quite nice. And this lady was the one who got in her face and said, lady, you're a freak and you're going to jail. And I go, wait a second. What? He said. I said, did they have time to talk? No. The flight was diverted. She was taken off to a jail cell. He was brought out here. And I'm like. So they didn't have time to get their story straight. And he's saying the same thing she's saying. And now then, one of the questions I asked was this. This flight attendant had bruising on her arm that was already dark. And I said, wait a second. I used to be an emt, and a subcutaneous bleed takes a while to get that color. It doesn't happen within 30 minutes of

[B]

the notes a couple days later.

[A]

So my assumption was those were previous existing, whether from a domestic dispute or falling down drunk, I don't know. But it didn't happen on that flight. And I did not believe that flight attendant. So after all that's over. I went to the. I went to my supervisor and I said, hey, sir, I gotta write this criminal complaint. But there's additional information that I just found out that if I put it in this complaint, I don't think we have probable cause to keep her and she needs to be released. And he said, john, you're not a judge. You don't wear a black robe. You write what I tell you to write, and then you go swear to it, and you let the system figure this out.

[B]

Oh, nobody wants to hear that.

[A]

So I was like. He said, john, we both served in the military before we came to the FBI. You know how follow orders. I said, yes, sir. I follow lawful orders. He goes, I'm telling you, you don't want to do anything other than write what I tell you to write. And take this over there. He goes, this is after 9 11. She's Iranian. Are you catching this? And I was like, yes, sir. So he's like, go back to your desk. Write the criminal complaint. Leave out these parts. So I did. Wrote it up. I took it down to Judge Garney. His name is Norbert Garney, and he was an AUSA before he became a magistrate judge. And I'm sitting outside of his office, and I am going to puke. I just know I'm gonna throw up. And I looked at his secretary and I said, ma', am, do you have a trash can I can throw up in? And she's like, you're gonna throw up? And I said, yeah, I think I am. She's like, yes, yes, yes. And she gives me a trash can. She goes, are you sick? And I said, no, I just. Something's wrong. And she's like, do I need to call 91 1? I'm like, no. I said, could I actually talk to Judge Garney in his chambers? And she's like, yeah, I guess so. She's like, don't throw up in his office. And I was like, yes, ma'. Am. So I go inside, and when I walk in, he's like, hey, John. Because he knew me when I was an agent, he was in ausa. He's like, are you okay? And I said, no, sir, I'm not. He said, you're really pale and you're sweating. I said, yes, sir. I said, I have a problem, and I don't know what to do. And he said, well, what you should do is tell me your problem. I said, okay, sir. I said, I have a supervisor at the FBI, and I have an assistant United States attorney. They're telling me to omit things from a criminal complaint because if I put those things in there, it makes her sound innocent, but if I write it this way, it makes her sound guilty. I said, but I know that this is true, so I think it should be in that criminal complaint. So I told him everything. And he said, do you want me to fix this? I said, yes, sir, I do. He goes, okay. And he picks up the phone and he calls the ausa and he says, hey, this is Judge Garney. Tell me why Agent Shipley is sitting here in my chambers telling me this lady's innocent, and yet you're authorizing prosecution. Now, that prosecutor is the same prosecutor that started going after me and making it her life's ambition to destroy me because I went against her. I did something. I went above her head to a judge and made her look bad. So the judge writes a writ, says, go get Ms. Carrington out of the jail and take her to the airport and get her on a flight. I said, yes, sir. So I walked into the jail. Samantha was there. Her eyes. She was just. She looked horrible. She'd been crying all night. And I felt horrible because I had arrested an innocent person. And so I walked in, and she's like, john, please, you have to believe me. I did, you know. I said, hey, Samantha, right now I need you. Just be quiet. Listen to me. You're going home. She's like, what? I said, I went and I talked to the judge. All the charges are dropped. I'm taking you to the airport. But right now, you're still a prisoner. So until they get you your clothes back and we're walking out the door, you need to just follow orders from these guards. So they had a female guard take her, and they got her dressed. And, well, she came out and she said to me, I'll never forget this. She said, john, I gave up on God last night in that cell. I said, God, why do you forsake me? Because I didn't do this. And yet I'm going to have a black mark on my record for the rest of my life from the FBI arresting me for something I didn't do. And she's like, I gave up on him. And she said, you're my angel. You came and saved me. And I said, no, I'm just an FBI agent doing my job. I said, this isn't about you. It's about me and about the oath that I took. I'm not going to arrest innocent people. I don't need to. There's enough bad people out there, we don't have to create criminals. And I got her out of there, and I took her. Well, then she filed a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines. Enrique Moreno was her attorney. He's passed away now, but now the building in downtown El Paso, the courthouse, is the Enrique Moreno Building, named after him. Great attorney. Went to Harvard and very, very nice guy. So he subpoenas me to come to her trial. Now the Bureau's getting mad at me. Now that AUSA is pissed off at me. And they're like, you can't testify. I said, you. You want me to not show up when I'm subpoenaed? I'm going to get arrested. So the Bureau comes in and they have the chief's vision. Counsel look at it, and they're like, no, he has to testify. I mean, he has to. So, you know, they warned me about, you better be careful what you say. If you say anything that makes the Bureau look bad, we're going to go come after you. You're going to lose your job, you know, OPR officer, professional responsibility.

[B]

They were that clear with it?

[A]

And yes, they were clear. They were like, look, you better be careful. And I just said, look, I'm going to go and testify to the truth, and I'm going to testify to what's in my FD302s, the reports that we write in the FBI. I said, that's all I'm going to do. And they're like, you deviate this much, you're going to be in a world of trouble. So we go to trial, I testify, I leave. I don't think anything about it. Samantha Carrington Wins, I think $27.8 million. Now, that I don't know if she got 27.8. I don't know if they settled for

[B]

less or whatever else, but she's not flying Southwest.

[A]

I bet she's not. But Samantha Carrington won that money. And what she did was she called me up and she said, john, I don't need this money. You do, and I want to give it to you.

[B]

Yeah, you don't want to do that.

[A]

And I said, I can't accept it. And she's like, why not? And I said, I don't know why I can't, but it just doesn't feel right. And I don't want to, and I will not accept that money. And she said, well, what do you want me to do with it? Well, my best friend, Joe Del Vento, that was a sniper on the SWAT team, had just died of cancer. He was 42 when he passed away. Total stud. Former Navy guy. Love, Joe Del Vento. My son is named Joseph after Joe Del Vento. Joe had passed away. Her mom had passed away. So I said, donate to the cancer society. Do something good with it. Well, thank God. I went in and I talked to the chief division council, and I reported that she offered me that money. And I didn't expect accepted because that Assistant United States attorney, the first thing she did was she started a case against me, I didn't know it, for accepting a bribe of $27.8 million.

[B]

So what was the punishment for that AUSA when. So she was on the receiving end of the call. Is that like an ass chewing?

[A]

Just an ass chewing.

[B]

Okay, so you professionally embarrassed her. It wasn't as if she was removed from her position.

[A]

No.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

No. That didn't happen until just a couple years ago. She's been demoted and moved and stuff. She's had some problems because she broke the law in several cases.

[B]

And people are not going to want to hear that the institutions that are supposed to exist to enforce the law are the ones behind the scenes bending and breaking it.

[A]

Well, there's.

[B]

Badges are supposed to mean something.

[A]

They're going to hear it because that's what my case is about. And you'll see that in just a second. So she came after me for accepting bribes, and after they went through all my finances and they, you know, they looked at our tax returns and they looked at everything. They're like, yeah, this guy doesn't have any money. You know, his wife makes this amount, he makes this amount. And at this point, I don't know if we had adopted our two kids, because we adopted two kids at birth and that was super expensive. But so she went after me for accepting bribe, and once that didn't happen, then she said, well, you made false statements at the trial. And so the office of Inspector General, there was a guy that worked there named Eric Ben, and he cannot investigate his way out of a paper sack. But he. He was playing good cop, bad cop with me with his boss from Dallas. They bring me in and they're like, you're going down for this. You know, And I'm like, which one of you is a good cop? You know, it just. It was a joke. You're an FBI. It'd be like if I said to you, hey, you know what? You and I are going to have a push up contest. Uh, Andy's a Navy seal.

[B]

I would just say, no, I choose not to participate.

[A]

Somebody that doesn't Know, Jiu Jitsu says, hey, I want to roll with you.

[B]

Actually, I would say, Michael, I think I would say no to that, too, wouldn't you? The reality is, I'd love to see

[A]

it if you said yes.

[B]

Well, the reality is this, though. You're way more likely to get hurt with somebody who's unpredictable like that.

[A]

True.

[B]

Because they're going to like, I have Jiu Jitsu answers to Jiu Jitsu problems.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Somebody freaking out on the street is like, whoa, dude, that's not the right way to move. You're not supposed to move like that. That's not how you get out of that. You get an elbowed in the head by accident.

[A]

Well, it. It was crazy. This. This agent brings me in and he, you know, you did this and you did that. And I was like, no, I didn't.

[B]

This is like a bad situation. But usually, though, it's two cops and somebody who's not a cop.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That are playing this game. But you're just talking about a room full of federal agents trying to see who has the bigger dick.

[A]

And see, that's what got me, because I'm sitting there looking at this guy thinking, are you kidding me? Like. Like, I haven't been an agent for the last eight years.

[B]

You guys all pull your badges out and put it out. I assume all FBI guys have it.

[A]

No.

[B]

And it's like, just like. First move is like, boom. It's like, oh, I got a badge, too.

[A]

No. The interesting thing was when they brought me in, they called me and they said, look, you have to report over to OIG to be interviewed by Agent Ben. I said, okay, roger that. You know, no, no problem. They're like, okay, you're not allowed to take your weapon with you. I was like, what? They're like, yeah, you can't take your weapon with you. Don't take an AS baton. Don't take pepper spray or anything like that. I was like, what do you think I'm going to do? Draw my weapon against another federal agent? Like. But anyway, so I go over there, I get interviewed. They tell me, you're likely going to be fired for lack of candor. You know, that's their big thing in the fireable offense.

[B]

It is lack of candor. Do they list out what they consider to be lack of candor, or is this a subjective.

[A]

It is very subjective because we had an agent that had 19 years in the FBI. He started dating a stripper.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The boss told him, hey, that's conduct unbecoming of an agent. To date somebody in the adult entertainment industry. And he said, no, sir, it's not. I've read the Mayog and according to the manual of investigative operational guidelines, there's nothing that precludes me from doing that. And she pays taxes. It's a legal profession. And we're dating. And he's like, well, it looks bad. And I don't. I don't want that. He goes, well, I don't care, sir. I'm not going to stop dating her. And so they put a surveillance team, they brought him in from another division on TDY money for an extended period of time and paid millions of dollars of government funds to follow this agent around until finally they got something on him. So they brought him in and they said to him, oscar, have you ever used your bureau car for non official duties? Oh. And he goes, I don't think so. And they go, have you ever raped a child? They asked him a bunch of crazy questions. And he goes, no. And, you know, so then they're like, okay, well, we're firing you for lack of candor. He's like, what are you talking about? And they're like, here's a picture of you and you're picking up your mother and you took her to the grocery store, and then you drove her home. That is not official business. And you're in your government vehicle. And he looks at it and he goes, you know what? You're absolutely right. He goes, my Corvette had broken down, so my. My POV was broken. My mom had no food in her house. And she called me and said, mijo, I haven't eaten in days. I'm getting really weak. Can. Can you come over? So I drove over there, I took my mother to get groceries. And he said, I'll take 30 days on the bricks for that if that's what you want to do, because that is a violation of FBI policy. And I did it. And they're like, no, no, we're firing you because of lack of candor. We caught you in a lie. And the lie was you told us you never used your bureau vehicle for anything like that.

[B]

This post 9 11.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So.

[A]

And he was one of the best agents in. In the terrorism squad.

[B]

So they took federal assets and assigned them to a federal officer until they had some bullshit dirt. Yeah, which good on the guy for saying, yeah, man, whatever. Like, I'll take one on the chin.

[A]

I'll take my hit.

[B]

Yeah, we're going to fire you for lack of candor.

[A]

And the interesting thing was they brought that SOG Team in. And of course, all of us that are on an sog, we start seeing things that we go, I think there's another team in our division. Either that or we've got some terrorists or something's going on. And so we started raising it. So they came in and they're like, hey, we didn't want to tell you because you guys are all friends with Oscar, but we're following him, and we're actually going. You guys will have to polygraph and tell whether or not you told Oscar that there's an official investigation against him. And if you do, then you can be fired and you can face criminal charges. And also, we're like, what, the over dating a stripper? Like, really? Yeah.

[B]

Damn.

[A]

It's just crazy, the levels it gets to sometimes. And it's because you have a few people that rise up to the top that have no idea what they should be doing, so they focus on the wrong things. We had. I had a SWAT mission one time where I had the asac, who's never been on a tactical team, telling me how to do tactics that are going to get people killed. And eventually I just told her, I can't do that, ma'. Am. I will not do that. She's like, okay, she takes my ops order, rips it up, throws it in the trash can. Go. Problem solved. I mean, I guess, yeah. And her solution was, well, why don't you. Instead of having the SWAT team handle this, why don't you just have the LPAC call them? Have them do a pullover out on the highway? I said, ma', am, if there's a shooting out in public instead of in a staged area with qualified operators, there's a greater chance that somebody's gonna get hurt. And she goes, well, if an El Paso PD officer gets killed, that doesn't affect me.

[B]

She said that? A federal agent said that?

[A]

Yep. And that was my boss.

[B]

Isn't that lack of candor?

[A]

That's my boss's boss.

[B]

That's some lack of candle right there.

[A]

That's a lack of integrity.

[B]

I don't actually know what the word candor means, but I plan on truthful to this. I plan on using it a lot in the future. Improperly. Michael, do you have a lack of a candor that I need to know about?

[A]

No. I'm usually pretty honest.

[B]

Usually. Interesting choice of words.

[A]

So, all right, well, so. So that happened with Samantha Carrington. So I was on the radar for that Assistant United States Attorney, and she went after me for two things, and she didn't get me. And then one day, I'm in Dallas. So remember, my office is El Paso, but we came out to Dallas to do some counterterrorism training. And we're out in Dallas, and I get a call from an ATF agent named Frank Henderson. Now, I know Frank because my son and his son played T ball together. And so I knew he was atf. He knew I was FBI. We'd see each other, you know, hey, buddy, how are you? Hey. You know, we weren't, like, hanging out buddies and friends, but he knew me, and I knew him. So he calls me one day, and he said, john, did you used to own a Barrett.50 cal? I said, well, I've owned a couple of them. Why? And he said, well, we recovered one in Mexico. The serial number is 20488. Did you still own that rifle? I said, well, I'd have to call my wife and tell her to look in my book. Because back then, when I started collecting guns, I was in the army, and I sold a gun to somebody, and then later thought, well, if that was ever used in a crime, how would I prove that I sold it? I have no receipt for it. I don't have any documentation. So as I started to collect more and more guns, as I grew my collection and I got older, I started keeping track of them. Well, I used to keep track of them on my computer until my computer crashed and I lost all those. The four years of the army. Guns, I didn't know.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

So I decided. I went into a gun store, and I said to a guy that was a federal firearms license. I said, hey, how do you track your guns? Do you do it on, like, software or something? Because I lost all of mine on my word. On my word sheet. It's gone because my computer crashed. And he goes, no, we have this thing called an A and D book. Acquisitions and dispositions. And what you do is you log it in and say, Barrett 82, a one serial number. It has a blank for everything. And you just fill it out. And then when you sell it to somebody, there's this on the other side of the page. There's who you sold it to, what the date was, all the information.

[B]

And is this just a receipt for you? Is this a legal document, or is this a way for you to keep track of personal items?

[A]

It's. This book is sold on the Internet to anybody who wants it. Okay. Okay. It's not. It's not an official government form. There's no. As a private citizen, you have no obligation to have that book. And in fact, now that's what they came after me on. And you'll. You'll hear more of the story. But so I told my wife, I said, look, go on my book. Find out if I ever owned this Barrett that said 8281 and 20488's the serial number. So she's like, all right. So she calls me back and she's like, yeah, you owned it and you sold that to Armando Rodriguez. I said, okay. Armando Rodriguez was an El Paso county deputy sheriff, and he was a friend of mine. I knew him from booking prisoners into the jail, but I also knew him because he would go to the gun shows, and he was an avid collector. And so you get to know the guys who are gun guys, especially maybe like. Like this town, there aren't a lot of gun stores.

[B]

So there's more than you would think.

[A]

Really.

[B]

It is Montana.

[A]

So El Paso has they had three or four gun stores in all of El Paso.

[B]

Those are rookie numbers.

[A]

Okay? So what I'm saying is, if you're a gun guy and you can only buy from four places, everybody gets to know you.

[B]

There might be three or four gun stores on Main Street.

[A]

Okay, so. So the guys at the gun stores not only get to know you, but they know what you do for a living. Yeah. And then they're like, oh, and do you like tactical guns? Or do you like hunting rifles? Or do you like.

[B]

Yeah, they can become conduits.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they'll say, hey, did you know that John's getting ready to sell his Barrett? Well, I'd be interested in buying that. Hey, well, here's his number. Give him a call. They do that all the time. Normal, everyday kind of thing. So I sold the gun to Armando Rodriguez. Perfect transaction in Texas.

[B]

So in Texas, what do you. What makes it a legal transaction in Texas?

[A]

Person to person sales are perfectly legal as long as you. You don't know that the person is a convicted felon, which the officer shouldn't be. And you don't know that they're mentally unstable.

[B]

Questionable. He was. You did say sheriff's deputy.

[A]

Yeah, but he's. He was a good dude. Yeah. I'll tell you something. He stood up when he was supposed to. The government went to him and said, hey, if you testify against John Shipley, you'll go to the front of the bus on cooperation. You may never have to spend a day in jail. And he said, I won't testify against him because he didn't do anything illegal. He was The. He was one of the guys that actually stood up and said, no, even though you're offering to take me out of prison and let me go home, I'm not gonna lie for you.

[B]

He ended up going to prison too.

[A]

Yes, he did. Oh, boy. Yeah. So here's. Here's what happened in our scenario, and then we'll kind of go into Fast and Furious. Well, let me go into Fast and Furious first.

[B]

Yeah. I was gonna say, because that this phone call has already wrapped us into the river of Fast and Furious.

[A]

Yep. So when President Bush was president before Obama, he had an operation going on called Operation Wide Receiver. And who comes up with that? I know.

[B]

I want. I want it to be one single person's job in an unnamed cubicle.

[A]

They're like, hey, I'll figure out a cool name.

[B]

Now they're like, we need one. Like I asked, what is it? Firearm related. He's like, wide Receiver. They're like, yep, nailed it.

[A]

So President Bush has this Operation Wide Receiver, and they actually put tracking devices into rifles like AK47s, SKs, AR15s, and they were going to let them go into Mexico so that they could start finding out the areas that the cartel, you know, were concentrated at.

[B]

Were they functional?

[A]

They were. When they went across the border, the problem was the battery wouldn't last long enough. And if.

[B]

And they sometimes fail.

[A]

Yes. And sometimes they would take them across and they'd put them in a house, and they'd wait for two or three weeks, and then they send them to another part of Mexico. Well, that battery is already gone. And now we got. We have no intel.

[B]

And meanwhile, the government is knowing or facilitating that this seal or transfer is taking place, which that is. God, that's some dirty hands.

[A]

Okay, but at least they had a clear objective and a somewhat obtainable outcome. But it failed. And the President of the United States said shut it down. And he did. To his credit, President Bush said, I tried this thinking. We get this, but it does. We can't do it right now. We don't have the technology. Shut it down. Don't. Don't give them another gun.

[B]

How many weapons past the border?

[A]

Don't know. I really don't know. We'd have to.

[B]

Michael.

[A]

We'd have to look that up.

[B]

Operation. Why? I have not heard of this. Wide Receiver.

[A]

Yep. It predated Operation Fast and Furious.

[B]

Oh, let's take a guess. 500.

[A]

I'd say that's pretty fair. 300 to 450.

[B]

Okay, I'm gonna say it was 450. Just because it makes me a little bit closer.

[A]

All right, now here's where it gets ugly. So Obama comes in. He's a Democrat and he's anti gun, and he says, well, I want to ban certain types of weapons. I want to ban 50 calibers and what we call assault weapons, these black rifles that are popular. I want to be the first president to actually pass laws that say civilians in the United States can no longer have these weapons. Come turn them in, or you become a criminal overnight.

[B]

Wasn't there an assault weapons ban in, like, 1986 or something like that?

[A]

Well, yes. So President Clinton tried it where he said, okay, well, if I can't ban the rifles themselves, I'll make. The magazines can only hold 10 rounds, or I'll make handguns that only hold this.

[B]

Is it a fully automatic ban?

[A]

Well, they've tried to do. They've done bump stocks and a bunch of different stuff.

[B]

So bump stock is just a way to try to get around the type of sear to make it so cycle faster. Yeah.

[A]

And now they have binary triggers and all kinds of stuff. But, well, President Obama said, I want to be the first president in the history of the United States to ban these guns. Civilians do not need 50 cows and they do not need assault weapons, and nothing in the law protects their right to have those guns. The problem he had was Gun Owners of America and the NRA and this little document called the Constitution.

[B]

Yeah. I was going to say, there are some things out there that buttress up against his statements.

[A]

So he said, well, if I can't beat him, then I'm gonna engineer a problem, and then I'm gonna swoop in and solve that problem, and I'm gonna be the hero. Kind of like this. Andy, you live next door to me. I come over and I set your house on fire. And then I run back to my house and I call 911 and say, Andy's house is on fire. Send everybody. And then I go over and I beat on your door. And I'm like, andy, Andy. And you come out, you're like, john, I was dead asleep. Thank God. You beat on my door. You saved my life. Am I a hero? Hell, no.

[B]

No, you're a criminal.

[A]

Yeah, I'm a criminal because I created the peril. I put you into that. That's exactly what President Obama did. I hear all these.

[B]

Intentionally?

[A]

Yes. And this is. This is what you have to understand. I hear all these people come out and say, well, he tried this program to target the cartels. And. No, that Is all fluff. That is bullshit. He did not do that.

[B]

Is the paperwork, though, that is behind Fast and Furious. Does it align with that?

[A]

We don't know, because President Obama claimed executive privilege over it and he sealed all the documents.

[B]

That's convenient.

[A]

I'll get to why he did that in a second. But what he decided to do was he said, look, we're going to take all these gun stores along the southwest border of Mexico from California all the way to Texas, and we're going to go in there with ATF agents. And the ATF agents are going to tell these gun store owners, hey, look, we want you to sell as many guns as you can to the cartel, to their people that come over. Because all the time we get people from Mexico trying to buy guns. And to date, our system has worked because we haven't had the problem of American guns going into Mexico that we know of. I'll preface that. So he creates the problem. He tells them, now imagine you're a gun store owner. I'm an ATF agent. I walk into you and I say, hey, look, we have this big undercover operation going on where we're targeting the cartel and we need your help. You're gonna be like, I don't know if I want to help you. Well, here's what you have to do. Sell a thousand guns a month to the cartel and you get to keep it all. And we're going to give you immunity from prosecution. You'll never be prosecuted. And you say to yourself, wait a second, I usually sell 500 guns a month. And you're going to let me sell an extra 2,000 guns a month if I can and I can't be prosecuted? It's a cash. It's a windfall in cash, and I have immunity.

[B]

Are they that upfront about it?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, are they having this conversation across the counter? How do you do this? Do you. Hey, man, do you guys have an office? I need to talk with you.

[A]

Guess who else holds that FFL holder's license. The atf. So the ATF can come in and say, hey, you're either going to cooperate or your next inspection, you're likely going to fail and your license is going to get pulled.

[B]

Yeah, they got some leverage.

[A]

They have tremendous leverage on a gun store owner. So President Obama said, along that border, we're going to start selling guns. They didn't put a single tracking device in one of those guns. Not one of them. They wanted those guns to go into Mexico and be found at scenes of murders and mass Killings. And then they wanted to document that with ATF agents going over there and investigating it. And then they wanted to say, the problem is our current laws are not strong enough. We have thousands of guns that. Here are the reports that show all these guns were recovered in Chihuahua, Mexico, or Sinalo or, you know, all these different places. Here's all the proof. And now we need to lock this down. No more. 50cals, no more AR15s, no more AK47s.

[B]

But doesn't that just take a few people with a conscience who are FFL owners to come out and be like, yeah, but we were also instructed by our government to increase the velocity of cells and decrease the due diligence that we were doing to the.

[A]

That's that you would think that they would have that integrity. But here's the other thing. If they went against ATF and against the government, those are the people that hold their very license. And maybe the ATF comes in and arrests them and says, you sold these guns illegally. And then they're facing, you know, the federal government has billions of dollars to get attorneys to fight things. You and I don't have the type of resources to fight it. I can tell you, when I went to trial in my case, I spent roughly 80 grand. I took every penny that we had in equity out of our house. The kids college funds were all gone. Anything I could sell, I sold because I was like, I'm innocent and I'm going to fight this. But when you realize $80,000 to the government is nothing. They had four attorneys on my case, working my case. I had one and I could barely afford the guy.

[B]

Do you really think he was that calculated?

[A]

Abs? No question about it. There is no question. Why. Just think about this. Why would you ever tell a gun store to sell guns to the cartel and allow them to walk? What is the positive part? Unless you put a tracking device or some way of.

[B]

Or you demille it slightly so it malfunctions something, and none of them did.

[A]

And in fact, there's a gentleman, his name is Brian Terry. Now you, Michael, can pull something up on Brian Terry. Let me tell you about a true hero. Brian Terry was in the Marine Corps, then became a police officer. Then he joined the border patrol and at 38 or 39, he went through selection for BORTAC. Hard, hard, hard selection phase. They bring special forces guys from the Q course in to run the selection phase. It's brutal. Yep. So that's right. You may look up Brian Terry, Border Patrol agent. There will be a good Picture of him, and there's actually a picture of him, and he's got his partner on his back and he's running through the sand. And I'll tell you that story. They would put your last name, Shipley, on tape on the back of your helmet so that they could. When they're running, they can say, you know, there's Brian. That's the picture. Well, Brian's tape had fallen off. And one of the other candidates that's going through selection phase put his name on the back of his helmet and went up to Brian and put his name accidentally. So then.

[B]

Or was it.

[A]

Well, I don't. I don't know. I wasn't there.

[B]

That is how you fuck with your friend.

[A]

So true. Yeah. So. And this is Kent. Terry is Brian's brother. And Kent told me this story, and he said, basically, Brian got in trouble for something that he didn't get, he didn't do. And he was told, you have to carry your partner for half a mile through the sand down here after they've been just smoked all day long. And so he puts his partner up on his shoulders, and he doesn't argue. He knows that he didn't do it. But he takes off running, and he gets down, and then he turns around at the turnaround point, and he runs back, and the cadre go out to him and they say, hey, we messed up. You can put him down. He goes, no, you punished me. I'll pay the debt. He ran them all the way back in. And that photo was taken. That's now a statue at one of the border Patrol museums down on the. On the border.

[B]

Fantastic.

[A]

Now, Brian was killed in the line of duty, and he was killed by a gun from Fast and Furious.

[B]

And this is what actually kind of cracked open the keys.

[A]

This is what broke it open. Because my trial happened before Fast and Furious came out. So even though my gun is involved in this whole thing, the government didn't tell us any of this stuff. And in fact, they lied in search warrants, and I have the search warrants, and I can prove they lied. They knew all about this, and they decided not to in discovery. In the state of Texas and in the federal government, you have to give inculpatory and exculpatory. They're just big words that mean evidence that makes somebody look guilty or evidence that make them look innocent. Yeah, you have to give both to the defense. They never said one word about Fast and Furious.

[B]

Was it still ongoing at the time?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Were they aware? Oh, so this guy, he was Killed after your trial.

[A]

Okay, so he gets killed in 2010. I'm already convicted. Okay, now here's where things get weird. I sold my.50 caliber to Armando Rodriguez, deputy sheriff. He then puts it on consignment with Paul Lee, the owner of a gun

[B]

store in El Paso, which is super common. I've seen that happen here quite a bit.

[A]

And all Paul Lee is going to do is sell it, and he takes a percentage of the. Of the money and then he gives him the rest of the money. That happens.

[B]

What kind of paperwork is associated with that? Because obviously, peer to peer, you still

[A]

have to fill out a 4473. If it's going from an FFL to a third party, it has to be booked. It has to.

[B]

So beyond the initial sale to you, now he's going through the gun dealer, essentially. So now we're starting to enter back into the federal system with the paperwork.

[A]

If he was not an informant for the atf, that would have happened. Now, we did not know this at the time. When my trial came up, I sold to Armando. Armando put it on consignment with Paul Lee. Paul Lee had been busted by the ATF for doing illegal things. So instead of them sending him to prison, they gave him an opportunity to be part of Fast and Furious. Hey, we could put you in federal prison and we could pull your license, but instead we're gonna let you continue to sell guns if you just do what we tell you to do. And he was like, well, I'll do whatever you say because you got me by the balls.

[B]

Yeah, you got the vig?

[A]

Yes, you've got me. So he becomes an informant for them. He sells the gun to Jonathan Lopez, and on his ID that we have the receipt, it says Chihuahua, Mexico. So an FFL dealer sells to a known Mexican that he's not allowed to, and they let the gun walk into Mexico.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know a tremendous amount about gun laws, but even here in Montana, if you come from out of state, you can purchase the gun. But they send it to an ffo.

[A]

That's correct. Yeah.

[B]

You're not leaving with the firearm. You can purchase it, but you'll.

[A]

But they have to transfer it. And if you're like 4473 in your state has to be generated or.

[B]

And if they're like, California, first off, it better be a California compliant weapon or they're not going to send it. But if they do, then you're going to have to wait whatever cool off period is associated with it. As well.

[A]

Yeah. And you know, it's interesting hindsight. They went through every gun transaction I ever did and realized that every gun I ever bought was legally purchased through an ffl. I did everything right. They. They researched everything because they were coming for me. They were trying to make it look like Armando and I were involved in supplying guns to the cartel.

[B]

So. Well, as you were describing this, Armando is the one who went through the FFL to use it as a consignment. What does that have to do with you? Were they saying that it was behind the scenes facilitating this? Like you're already a step removed?

[A]

So here's, here's the thing. If I sell a car to Michael, Michael sells it to you, and you sell it to Juan. Yeah, you're way, and Juan traffics drugs with that car, they're going to come back and say, well, you owned that piece of property. And so did he. And so did he. That's why I laughed at this whole thing when it happened. I was like, wait a second. You somehow think I'm involved in trafficking weapons to Mexico because I owned a gun and legally sold it to somebody else? Once I legally sell it to somebody else, I have no care, custody and control of that weapon. How can I be accountable for what they do if he robs a bank? Am I involved in providing material? No.

[B]

One of the things I read in one of the articles I found is they looked at your history and the volume of gun sales that you had done. It was 100 over three years or something like that. And they used that to say that you weren't a hobbyist.

[A]

Let me tell you, it gets worse than that. I sold point three guns or purchased 0.3 guns a month. That means in a three, it would take three months for either me buy or sell one gun.

[B]

I was gonna say I didn't know they come in thirds.

[A]

They don't research that. But that's.

[B]

So that's tough to put together and still have it functional.

[A]

I had. I had an IRS agent named Mike Wright. And I called Mike up because he had retired a couple years before this happened. But I trusted him. I called him up and he lives. I think at the time he was in Idaho or maybe Wyoming. But he said, john, I'm retired. What are you doing? I said, hey, bro, I'm in some trouble here. The ATF's coming for me and I need some help. And I said, you're probably one of the best investigators I've ever met. Can you come down here and look at the books? And do a financial analysis of this and see if the government, if their argument is going to have any weight when we go to trial. He said, I will, on one condition. I said, okay, Mike, what's that? He said, if I come down and I start going through your documents and I see that you broke the law, I'm out fair and you can sit your ass in jail because you're a piece of shit that's disgraced our badge.

[B]

I like this guy.

[A]

And I said, mike, come on down. So Mike comes down, retired irs. He goes through all the documents, and he's the one who came up with the. Well, according to the time and how many guns you sold or purchased, you bought or sold point three guns a month.

[B]

So where did the papers come up with this 100 in three years. Which would be what?

[A]

I can't even do the math on that. I'd have to get on my three

[B]

and a half per month.

[A]

3.6.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't.

[B]

How dare you, Michael?

[A]

I don't know. They. They came up with all kinds of catching crazy accusations. And let me tell you this. I thought they came to me ahead of time and they said, look, John, we know that you just adopted two kids. They're like three and four years old at the time. Well, two. No, five and four. And they said, and you're an FBI agent. Do you know what they do to FBI agents in federal prison? It's not going to be pleasant. So we'll tell you what. You pick any one of these six charges, you plead guilty to one of them, we'll drop the other five, and we will give you probation. You will never serve a day in jail.

[B]

This is your own agency saying this to you.

[A]

This is the United States Attorney's office in El Paso. And I said to them, you're asking me to go into a court of law and to lie under oath and say I did something that I didn't do. And I said, I will never do that. I will be at trial and I will testify at trial. And in fact, I testified for two full days. Now, there's a million little things about this that were just not fair. But. So they offered me probation, and I wouldn't take it. I was like, no, I'm going to trial. So I bring in Mike Wright. He looks at everything. I bring in Brad Johnson, my sniper partner. He's like, I can testify to this and that. And we had a good defense, and we were going forward. The only problem was we didn't know about Fast and Furious. And to Go into federal court and say, your honor, Mr. Shipley's not involved in illegally selling guns or dealing firearms without a license or doing any of this stuff. But the government that's doing it, they laughed us out of that courtroom. Now, here's some other things that are kind of interesting. My judge is David Brionis. You can look up Judge David Brionis in El Paso. I believe he's probably about 83 years old right now. His sister was a lady named Dolores Brionis. Dolores Brionis was the county judge who was embezzling money from Special Needs foundation funds and the FBI, the ones that arrested her. So now I'm standing in front of her brother in federal court, and he's my judge that's making the decisions on my case. And I was. Like, I said to my attorney, maybe we need to get a change of venue. There's David Brionis, and he's.

[B]

I mean, isn't that a conflict?

[A]

Even the appearance of impropriety should have been enough for him to say, yeah, I'm gonna recuse myself. And in fact, he did. Later, after I was done with my sentence, went to prison, and I filed what's called a 2255. I filed this motion, and I said, you should recuse yourself, because I was involved in this. So they went to the FBI, and they said, well, was Mr. Shipley working against Judge Brionis? Dolores Brionis? And they said, well, he wasn't the case agent. Well, no, I never said I was a case agent. I was on sog, and I followed her around and did surveillance on her.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I'm an integral part of the investigation against this guy's sister, and yet he's my judge.

[B]

That's a little rough.

[A]

Yeah. Now, the other thing is that I didn't know at the time my attorney was friends with Paul Lee. And when I got the. When I got all the discovery and I started looking through it, I found a document that was a receipt for the sale of that Barrett. And I kept looking at it, and I was like, wait a second. This handwriting here is like Chinese calligraphy. That's because Paul Lee sold the gun to Jonathan Lopez. That was trafficking in Mexico. The ATF knew that. Yet when the Mexican government recovered it and said, how did this gun get our own country? The ATF didn't want to go, oh, well, he caught us. We were sent. We're sending thousands of guns over there because the president wants to ban those guns. They're not going to fess up to that. So what do they do? They say, well, we're going to investigate that. And that's when they start looking at us. Now, when this happened, I didn't know about Fast and Furious. But now, looking back on things, I see things like the lies in the search warrant. And I couldn't understand why they were there at the time, but now I understand them. Let me explain that they did a search warrant for my house, and they wanted to come in and see how many guns I had in my house and any documents or anything else. They could have just asked me. I'd have given them consent. I've never done anything illegal, so. But they said, no, we're going to get a search warrant for your house. So I get called into the FBI office one day. The boss calls me and he says, john, I need you to take off your weapon to hand it to me. I need you to hand me your cell phone. I think we're going in the skiff or something. So I'm like, yes, sir. I hand him my stuff, and we walk into a room, and there's all these people standing around, and there's the AUSAs, and there's a couple ATF guys and couple customs guys and everything else. And I'm looking around and I see Frank Henderson. So I walk over to him and say, hey, Frank, what's going on? And he goes. He won't look at me. He turns away from me. I said, frank, what's going on? He goes, here, read this. And I look at it. It's a search warrant from my house. I said, you have a search warrant for my house? He goes, yeah. I said, what do you hope to find? And he's like, guns? I said, well, I've been collecting guns since I was 21. I've got hunting rifles. I've got AR15s. I've got some sniper rifles, because I'm a sniper. I've got tactical guns. I've got all kinds of stuff. I was like, you don't need this. And he goes, yeah, we're going to your house. Well, when I read the complaint for the search warrant, the affidavit, which is

[B]

like the justification to get it, it's

[A]

what the judge gets because he didn't know anything about the case. Yeah.

[B]

He's basically needs to be presented with something that justifies the warrant.

[A]

He has to have articulate probable cause that a crime is being committed and that this search will aid in the investigation.

[B]

Gotcha.

[A]

So he gets these documents. Well, I start reading them, and it says, john Shipley met with your affiant. Now, the affiant, or affiant, is the person that actually signs the agent, the law enforcement agent that signs their name to the warrant before the judge either approves it or disproves it. It says, john Shipley met with the affiant. And then I look on the last page, and I look at the affiant's name, and it should be Frank Henderson, and it's not. And I go, wait a second. On this day, I met with Frank Henderson, and I told him this, and it's correct, but he's saying that the affiant is Eric Ben from oig. And I go, this doesn't make sense, because I never met with Eric Ben, and I never told Eric Ben this stuff. So all these are lies because it's saying that the person that signed this. I told these things, and I couldn't figure it out. And then I realized after Fast and Furious broke, that wasn't a mistake. That was being very cunning and intelligent and deceptive. And it couldn't have been picked up unless you knew about Fast and Furious. Remember, Frank Henderson's an ATF agent in El Paso. He knows about Fast and Furious. Eric Ben's an OIG agent. He doesn't even know. He doesn't know anything. So they said. I'm assuming that. That Frank Henderson said, look, I can't sign this affidavit because I know about Fast and Furious, and I know how this gun actually got there, through our informant, Paul Lee. So I can't sign this. I'm not gonna sign this, because I could end up getting fried. So they made Eric Ben. They said, eric, hey, Frank wrote this affidavit for a search warrant on Shipley's house. Just sign this thing. He said, okay, and he signs off on it.

[B]

Isn't that illegal in and of itself right there?

[A]

Absolutely. And yet I've presented that to the court, and the court says, well, Mr. Shipley, we're not sure that's the reason you were convicted. In fact, the assistant United States Attorneys at my trial lied to the jury, and they admit that they lied to the jury. And yet the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says, we're not sure that's the reason you were convicted. We uphold all the convictions. This is how bad it was.

[B]

Could you ever be sure of the exact. I mean, I'm assuming. Was it a jury trial?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

How could you ever then be exactly sure of why anybody is committed?

[A]

You can't. And that gives them the latitude to say things that Just uphold the convictions. You got to understand, the government doesn't now want to come back and say, you know what? You're correct. The President of the United States had an illegal operation that was going on. It's absolutely against the mandate of the atf, and we did something heinous and illegal, and people got killed, including Brian Terry, a hero. We don't want to admit that. They still don't want to admit that to this day, Brian's death was because they allowed those guns to go to Mexico. Now some attorney from DOJ is going to argue, well, isn't it possible that the cartel could have had guns from some other country and he still would have gotten killed? Sure, it's possible.

[B]

It's possible. He could have gotten hit, killed in a car accident.

[A]

That's exactly it. He could have. He could have hit his head on the bottom of the pool diving off the diving board, but he didn't.

[B]

All of those hypotheticals aren't what happened. Maybe we should just focus on what we know happened.

[A]

They're so crazy that they did this. The Assistant United states attorney, Greg McDonald, gets up in federal court and says, this agent's gun killed someone in Mexico, and he needs to be held accountable for it.

[B]

Yeah, but it wasn't your gun anymore.

[A]

Okay, so you're getting that first part, but there's more. Not only is it not my gun because I sold it to Armando, and he put it on consignment, and then it went through this Jonathan Lopez guy, and then it was in Mexico and all this other stuff. Not only that, but they had a report from ATF saying the gun was never fired. And. But the Assistant United states attorney, Greg McDonald, wants to win the case, so he's willing to lie, and he has a report in the discovery that says gun was never fired. You know how devastating a Barrett.50 caliber round is if. If it would have been fired? People know. You don't. You don't shoot it on the block, and people don't go, hey, I didn't hear that. It's not a.22.

[B]

It is not.

[A]

It's a boom.

[B]

It's the most ridiculous firearm ever. And honestly, I have to question your judgment forever owning one.

[A]

You know why I wanted. You know why I wanted one?

[B]

They're unique for sure. But, yeah, carry that around and maybe five rounds for that gun, you're like, okay, that's 87 pounds. Between those two things.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The most ridiculous gun ever.

[A]

I'll tell you why I did it. We were. We were talking one day The SWAT team and our building in El Paso was on Mesa Hills. And literally, you could shoot your pistol and it would land in Mexico. And there were all these hills over there. And so one of the guys said, hey, I have a question. What would happen if one day somebody sat up in Mexico with the.50 cal and started drilling the FBI and DEA building. It would suck. Started putting holes through us. What are we going to return fire with? And I was like, I guess with my.308, because that's the most powerful thing that we have in our inventory. And I thought, well, this is kind of stupid. Why don't we have 50 cows? And they said, well, HRT, the Hostage Rescue Team, they have 50 cows, but we don't have them. And I said, okay, well, I'm going to buy one. I hope I never have to go to my house and get it, but I'm gonna go to the Barrett sniper school, which I did. I went to the Barrett sniper school. I paid two grand out of my pocket. I took vacation from the FBI. I bought a $10,000 rifle. I bought a $3,000, I think was a Night Force scope. I mean, I said, I'm doing this because if that day comes, I don't want to be the guy saying, hey, I got to bury a bunch of my friends, because I wasn't ready.

[B]

Are you allowed to use a personal weapon?

[A]

Nope. Nope. But this is how I thought of this. If somebody's hitting our building with the.50 cal from Mexico, if you're going to break the rules, I'm going to break the rules. And if I lose my job but some of my friends live through it, I'll find another job.

[B]

I can respect that. But I tell you what, based off what you just told me already about what's going on behind the scenes here,

[A]

and, you know, oh, there's no doubt that they would have. They would have crucified me.

[B]

I mean, here's the thing. Civilians to include myself. There's the reason that the statue that it denotes justice has a blindfold and scales. What you're talking about is the opposite of a blindfold and scales with people who have their fingers on them manipulating the outcome, which undermines the entire system that this country is built upon. And I don't know where that leaves us. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp Stress. Who's got some. Welcome to being a human being. Now, this type of year, time of year, I should say April. Mid April is everyone's favorite day. Tax day. What am I talking about here? Financial stress. And this year has been an interesting one in the markets. And of course, around this time period, people are oftentimes thinking about writing that big check to the government. 88% of Americans report feeling some form of financial stress at the start of 2026. Money worries often bring anxiety. Sleep disruption and even depression are one of the leading sources of conflict for couples. Struggling with money doesn't mean that you're failing. Sometimes it's just about accessing the right kind of support. Enter BetterHelp. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US there's a therapist match commitment. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right on the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time. Or you can look for a tailored recommendation. They have over 30,000 therapists. BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Cleared Hot. That's better. H E L P Hoteleco Limopapa.com Cleared Hot. Back to the show because we're talking about a federal agent on the other side of the federal agency or agencies that you either worked directly with or alongside, let alone some civilian who has no. At least you knew how the system worked. You know, and you probably could. You know, you can't play chess until you know the rules. So you at least understood the board and the pieces, but you still ended up on the wrong side of it.

[A]

But see, I didn't realize that as a federal prosecutor, you can go into federal court, you can lie to a jury, mislead that jury, convict an innocent person, and you have absolute immunity. How they do. If you look up the code books, and this is the thing, I'm sitting in law school.

[B]

Why would that ever be caught up? Why would we ever give somebody that ability?

[A]

Amen. Get this. So I'm in law school and I'm in criminal law. And the professor's teaching the class is a former assistant United States attorney. And so she knows her husband. Her husband is a DEA agent and so she knows who I am. And she knows about what happened, everything else. She voted against me coming to law school. But luckily, there it was best two out of three. And then the dean got a choice. And the dean is a guy named Gary Wade. I call him Judge Wade because he was the Chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court. So in the state government, in the court system, he is the chief justice. There is none higher. And he read my packet and he's like, john, I don't think you broke the law. I said, sir, I can tell you I didn't. I said, I can go to God, put my hand on God's Bible and say, father, I didn't do this. And he said, I believe you, and I'm going to give you an opportunity at this school. But when I'm sitting in her class, I said to her, hey, can you tell me why a federal prosecutor has immunity during the commission of their duties? When defense attorneys. If we do something wrong, we can be disbarred, we can be brought up on criminal charges. I mean, there's all we can get. Sanctions. Why do they have immunity? And she said, well, if they didn't do that, no one would want to be a prosecutor.

[B]

That's the weakest answer ever.

[A]

Amen. But she's my professor, so I can't say that because she's grading me.

[B]

You could.

[A]

Yeah. It wouldn't be wise.

[B]

I'm not saying it's a smart call. It is a call.

[A]

There are many times I have said those things and then gone. Gosh, I wish I didn't say that. Yes.

[B]

Welcome to the story of my life.

[A]

Yeah. So it just. It was a horrible situation. I thought by 14 years of service in the FBI. I was a bodyguard for the director of the FBI. I was a bodyguard for the Attorney General. I've done SWAT missions, and I went to the Olympics as a sniper. I've done all kinds of great missions and cool stuff and served and gone into harm's way. I thought, I don't have anything to worry about.

[B]

How did it not go your way at trial? How was the government able to convince the jury of your peers to go the other direction?

[A]

So. Well, a couple things. Jury of your peers is kind of a joke. In El Paso. It's a predominantly Hispanic. I'm not Hispanic. Those people come from Mexico, where every police officer is corrupt and accepts bribes and works for the cartel. And so in their opinion, all cops are corrupt.

[B]

They can't, you know, tough canvas.

[A]

The other thing is. Remember the Samantha Carrington story? Well, Brad Johnson, my sniper partner, said John, I'm going to get up there and I'm going to tell him the Samantha Carrington story. Because if you weren't Will, he goes, I'll tell. And this is my best friend, you know, tough love. He said, you're the dumbest SOB I've ever met. He goes, I'd have turned in my badge, and the next day I'd have been like, here's my routing number. Send that money on over. They can't do anything to me now. They can't even investigate. I'm no longer federal employee. I'll take that 27 million. I told Brad, that's not what I'm here to do. God gave me so many days on this earth. I want to do the right thing. I want to be the right person. I want to show my kids the right way to live. And he was like, man, you're a better man than me because I had taken that money. So what did the government do? The government filed what's called a motion in limine before my trial. And they got Judge Brionis to say, we're not going to talk about Samantha Carrington at all at trial. Because if that jury hears that this agent was willing to turn down $27 million, there's no way they're going to believe that he was involved in selling some guns and maybe making three or four hundred dollars in gun sales. So they file a motion in limine. He approves it.

[B]

Is that just his call? He's this sole.

[A]

He is. He is the senior federal judge in El Paso. It's his call. Now, some interesting things. Brad gets up there and he starts to testify. And my attorney asked him, do you think that John is an honest person? He says, yes, sir, I do. And he goes, and why would you think that? What it. What has demonstrated that to you? And he goes, well, there was one time where. Where this woman won a lawsuit. And Judge Brionna says, stop, Agent. If you say another word, you're going to jail for contempt. And Brad turned and he looked at him, and I thought for a second Brad was gonna go, I don't give a shit. Because Brad's one of the toughest guys I've ever met. And I thought he was just gonna say, f you, sir. The truth needs to come out. But they would have just declared a mistrial, dismissed that jury and brought 12 people in, then banned him from testifying.

[B]

Yeah, he would have had some downstream consequences from that.

[A]

Yeah. So they're just. There were tr. There are a lot of things you had An ATF agent, he. They bring in my guns, okay? Now, when they went to my house.

[B]

From your house, you mean?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. When they went to my house, they collected about 19 or 21 guns that I had.

[B]

It's a rookie numbers, I know, but

[A]

I was also a federal employee.

[B]

We need to really up your stats.

[A]

Well, I saw. Sold. I sold a bunch of guns off all at once because we were adopting our kids. Yeah. And you. It. The. I went to the ATF regs and it says you can liquidate all or part of a personal collection for any reason. So I. I sold a bunch of my guns so we could afford our adoptions.

[B]

But surprisingly enough, they are an asset that oftentimes increases. Yeah. Increases in value. Yeah.

[A]

So I sell those guns off and. But. But when we go to trial, they put all these guns out on the table, and the ATF agent gets up there and he's like, these old guns here belong to John's grandpa. Which is true. My grandpa lived in Indiana. He kept all his rifles and shotguns in his closet. And they still smelled like my grandpa. And every time I would open up that gun safe, that's just that smell of my grandfather would come back to me. And he was my hero.

[B]

He was.

[A]

He was bigger than life. And so those guns meant the most to me, though. They were all rusted up and you could never fire them. Those were the ones the ATF destroyed, those guns. Now they have an investigation into Mexican gun trafficking, and they're destroying my grandfather's old guns.22, a 12 gauge shotgun, a 10 gauge, you know, a 30. 30. What are you doing? Like, so we go to trial and they put all the guns out and they're like, well, these guns here belong to his grandfather, so we know why he has those. But you see these black rifles, these military style rifles, those are not collectible because they're mass produced. So they're telling the jury to dis.

[B]

They should do a little bit more research on substantially sizable communities that believe those are very collectible.

[A]

According to the atf, if a gun is mass produced, it is not collectible, which is bullshit.

[B]

What is their number?

[A]

That is there? No, they're making that up.

[B]

No, I was just curious. What's their threshold for mass produced?

[A]

Don't. Don't know that either.

[B]

Because I know people who are complete. Like, let's just use Glock.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Complete Glock nerds.

[A]

It's got a 27, a 29, a 30. Generation one, and this is generation two.

[B]

And those are the epitome of mass produced.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And there are entire glock communities or Sig or FN or 1911 or 2011. I mean, what are they talking about?

[A]

That. That kind of stuff is what ATF does at a trial to try and win the jury or push the jury their way. I'll give you another example. Do you ever hunt?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Okay, you probably know this, but some people may not. If the size of your target is a coyote, you. You don't use a.300 ultra mag.50 cal. Yeah. You're not shooting those with a.50 cal.

[B]

Well, why not? I'm saying you should. What type of hunting are we doing here? Predator hunting. I mean, going for yots.

[A]

I mean, if you're going for an elk, you're not going to take a 2, 2, 3.

[B]

Well, maybe it is Montana. I know some people who are.

[A]

You would have to really be great. Great shot.

[B]

I think it's a little western out here sometimes. I'll be honest with you.

[A]

So what this ATF agent did at my trial, it's in the transcripts. They can't even go back on this. He holds up a gun and he says, ladies and gentlemen, the jury, this is a.308 sniper rifle in the hands of Agent Shipley. He can kill you from a thousand yards with this weapon. So I bumped my attorney and I said, hey, Robert, I said, mark that piece of evidence. And he goes, what? I said, mark that piece of evidence. They didn't mark it. And I want you to mark it. He goes, why? And I said, because that's not a. That's not a.308 sniper rifle. That's my.25 odd 6 coyote gun. And it won't shoot 450 yards, let alone a thousand yards. And then you embarrass that ATF agent who is supposed to be a quote unquote expert, and you cross examine him, you make him look at the barrel and look at the stamp and tell you what the caliber is. And wait, didn't you Testify there was a.308? Want us to be an expert? Yes. And you destroy him. And he goes, john, you're an agent. You're not an attorney. Because at that time I hadn't been in law school. He said, you don't know what you're doing. You just need to be quiet.

[B]

Sounds like you kind of knew what you were doing. Yeah, I mean, I mean, if you're gonna throw an expert up there and you're gonna say some dumb shit like that, which I love it when politicians hold guns up and they start Talking about how they function. I'm like, oh, boy. Yeah, a 90 round clip and 18,000 rounds per second.

[A]

And just like, they're like, right here is the switch that makes it full auto. And they press it and the magazine drops.

[B]

There's some real, real horrible. But yeah, okay, you want to throw your expert up there? Well, then you better demonstrably be an expert.

[A]

Yeah. So I testify for two full days, and the government somehow lost an entire day of the transcripts of my testimony. And it was not just my testimony.

[B]

What does that even mean? Like the recorded record of it.

[A]

Yes. So in. In court now, it's different in different courts, but in El Paso at that time, the only recorded transcript of what's going on is the stenographer that's sitting there typing every word that's said into a. Into a machine that goes into a computer. And on that particular day, for whatever reason, there's no transcript from that day. So my attorney said, look, in order to appeal it to the next higher court, which is the fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, I have to have a substantially verbatim transcript. Now, my first attorney.

[B]

Oh, because yeah, I was thinking in my head, like the people in the room were still there that day.

[A]

They heard it. But yeah, you people at the 5th Circuit Court, they didn't hear anything.

[B]

And you're not going to have the paperwork that is the foundation for your argument.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And so my first attorney at trial, he did a horrible job. There's just no other way to say that.

[B]

You're saying that as an attorney now,

[A]

looking backwards as an attorney now, he was ineffective assistance of counsel. I told him, Paul Lee is involved in selling this gun. Questioned him on that. He said, john, I won't do that. He's a friend of mine. Wait, you have a fiduciary duty to me as my attorney to represent me, not him. He's not your client. Yeah, but he's a friend. I buy guns at his gun store.

[B]

Oh, God.

[A]

Yeah. So it just. Just a lot of bad things. I started to talk about something and I lost my track.

[B]

We were talking about the fifth Circuit in the loss.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Lost transcript.

[A]

So in the lost transcripts, they are supposed to record everything that said in the lower court so that the higher court gets a copy of that transcript and they can review it. There's established case law. Now, my second attorney was a guy named Leon Shidelauer. Leon, I believe, may still be in the Navy Reserves. He's probably a high ranking 05 or 06, but he's also a federal judge. Now he works in that building. And he works for David Brionis as the senior judge. I would trust Leon with my life. He's a phenomenal man and a phenomenal attorney. And he wrote to the 5th Circuit and said, I can't appeal this case without a substantially verbatim transcript. Well, I'm already in Colorado, in FCI Englewood, in a prison. So what do they do? Send them back on Con Air. So they shackle me up, put shackles all around me, belly band and everything else. They transport me to an airport. Con Air flies in. All these marshals are standing around with their guns. Of course, none of the prisoners on this thing know who I am. And if they did, they'd try and kill me, because a lot of them are in for life, and they get a chance at an FBI agent. So they fly me, and we bounce around. There's just. They call it diesel therapy. When they transport you from one prison to another prison to another prison, it really screws with you and kind of messes you up. But I'd been through SERE school in the military, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna make a game out of this. You're not gonna beat me. I was in solitary confinement for four months while they transported me back to El Paso because they were having a reconstruction hearing. They were gonna have a hearing to reconstruct that record because now, after Fast and Furious is out, they suddenly don't want to go to court again because we know everything.

[B]

How do you actually, though, not to interrupt your story, how do you reconstruct that hearing with any degree of accuracy?

[A]

So I didn't know at the time, but here's what happened. They send me back on Con Air. I'm at the sheriff's department in one of the counties. They put me in solitary confinement because all the prisoners there know that I'm an FBI agent. So then they transport me down to federal court. And Leon gets up there, and he puts the AUSAs on the stand, and he's like, AUSA Greg McDonald, do you remember one objection from yesterday or from that day of the missing transcript? And he goes, I don't believe there were any objections. And Leon goes, oh, well. On the following day, Judge Brionis is saying, your objections of yesterday are on the record and noted. So there were. And he goes, well, there may be. I don't really recall. And he's like, well, then shouldn't you Said you didn't recall and said there weren't. I mean, he just started hitting, hammering them. And he brought each one of the prosecutors up and they were like, do you remember one question that was asked Agent Shipley? No. Do you remember one answer he gave? No. So we go through this whole rigmaror and then he says, Leon says to Judge Brionis, your honor, we don't have a record of what happened. I can't. The government's responsible for the transcript. They failed that he is entitled under federal law to a new trial, a retrial. And the judge says, all right, listen, I don't recall what happened on that day, but I'm gonna figure out a transcript. So he went back, what? Yeah, he went back into his chambers. He came out about 30 minutes later, and he had a two paged, double spaced thing that said, John Shipley testified that these weapons were his personal collection. Agent Henderson testified that these were part of his inventory. And he sent that to the fifth Circuit. And the fifth Circuit said, if a senior federal judge says that, that's the record. That is the record. And so officially, if you go look in my file, that is the transcripts from an entire day of testimony.

[B]

Two pages.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You guys should have been done by lunch.

[A]

Yeah, we should have. I mean, like this stuff I kept saying to myself, am I living in bizarro world? What are the rules here? Well, the rules are whatever we say they are. And you're not going to, you're not going to dissuade us. I would love for somebody to say, you know what, here are the grounds for a retrial. You've got to retrial this case. The government would never go after me for a couple reasons. Number one, I've already done the punishment. They can't punish me a second time. But number two, they have exposure that Fast and Furious comes out because it doesn't matter if President Obama claimed executive privilege over Fast and Furious, my criminal defendant rights have precedence over that. They would have to unseal all that. And you would see all the emails between them concocting this thing. Another interesting thing. Eric Holder was the Attorney general. Okay, so Eric Holder gets called up on the Congress and Senator Grassley is grilling him. He is just kicking his butt. And I loved it. And he says, when did you first learn about Fast and Furious? And Eric Holder stops and thinks about it and he goes, a couple weeks ago. He's like, a couple weeks ago? He goes, yeah, that's the first time that I was read into it and told about it and everything else. So they go on and they Ask a bunch of other questions. Well, then Congress pulls his emails and finds out he lied under oath to Congress and they brought him back to impeach him because he lied. They had.

[B]

How'd that hearing go?

[A]

It didn't, and here's why. So Congress found out that he had an email that was almost a year prior to his testimony where he's talking about Fast and Furious. It's addressed to him, Attorney General Eric Holder. And he wrote back on it. So they brought him back and they put this down and they said, we're considering holding you in contempt of Congress because you testified under oath before Congress that you had only known about this two weeks prior to that day's testimony, but yet here's an email saying that you knew about it backhand. What do you have to say? You lied to Congress. And I'll never forget this. He said this. I didn't lie. I simply misled you.

[B]

Are you fucking serious?

[A]

100%.

[B]

Michael.

[A]

Police.

[B]

YouTube.

[A]

Did you say it was Eric Holder? Holder. Attorney General Eric Holder, first name Cuck. I didn't lie to you. I simply misled you.

[B]

This is like Bill Clinton up there. What does is mean?

[A]

Yes. Did you have. I did not have sexual relations with that girl. So here.

[B]

What?

[A]

So here it gets more interesting.

[B]

Congress accepted that.

[A]

No. So they were gonna, they were gonna do, they were gonna schedule an impeachment hearing and then President Obama to save Attorney General Holder. Because Holder was like, I'm sure he probably went to Obama said, hey, look, I've tried to cover this thing up as far as I can for you, Mr. President, but they're gonna smoke me. I need your help or else I'm gonna have to roll over on you. And Obama said, well, if I claim executive privilege, national security, you know, it wouldn't look good for Mexico to know that we don't care about their citizens and we're going to funnel high powered weapons in there and hope they get killed so that we can document it to change our laws. National security, Executive privilege. Fast and Furious is sealed. Now, Brian Terry's family, Josephine Terry, his mother, has been to the White House. They've talked to Donald Trump. They have tried to get all the information about Fast and Furious out. No one's letting it out.

[B]

Why do you think that is?

[A]

Because it implicates President Obama, who went to the highest level. Well, I don't know. I. Look, I'm just, I'm just a little government worker that enjoyed being an FBI agent. I have, I have no connections in the House or in The Senate or in, you know, any of that stuff. I don't play in those power circles and I don't know why they do the things. Why are all the Epstein files coming out and we're getting piecemealed and everything else. Who is protecting pedophiles? If somebody's a pedophile and they're in our government, we should out them and we should take the appropriate measures. But yet you're giving redacted. The government's given redacted copies. That's crazy. It just sickens me. But yet that's, that's their circle and they're not going to give up. Look, if one I know when I came into the FBI, I heard the rumors about J. Edgar Hoover and how he was a transvestite and how he had people.

[B]

I have not heard that one.

[A]

He had congressmen and senators followed and he found out who they were having affairs with and he would blackmail them. And that's how he stayed in, I think it was 40 years that he was the director of the FBI. It's a 10 year term term. But he got reelected.

[B]

Yeah. When he got the juice on people.

[A]

Yes. Because he knew, oh, this, this senator over here is a homosexual. And in this day and age, that's not accepted. And if I let this out, so he'd go and tell that guy, hey, I had my agents following you. I saw you the other night with Mark and that center would be like, what do you want? Well, I better get reelected. That's power.

[B]

What's the hardest? Yeah, and the hardest for me on this is I don't know if we exist anymore in a place where our institutions and systems can still function appropriately. And I'm not an advocate for burning them to the ground, but I am an advocate for legitimately exposing what they have been doing, both good and bad. Obviously we can protect things of absolute national security.

[A]

Sure. And should.

[B]

And should. However, people in the government bitching about why the citizens don't trust said government when I'm really not seeing a lot of demonstrable actions or proof that they are deserving of any level of trust puts us in a place where the citizens are now in essence edging towards a fight with the government that is supposed to exist by, with, and for the people.

[A]

You know, I remember when I was in the military and they had peer evals and you would hear what your peers truly thought of you and it was a kick right in the gut if you weren't, if you weren't carrying your weight and somebody said it and you read it, you couldn't go, oh, they're full of shit, because you knew it was true. You're like, I gotta get better. I gotta. You know, there's no accountability in our government.

[B]

The only reason, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I totally believe. I totally believe that conspiracies do exist. People do conspire, all sorts of. And the best way to actually hide a conspiracy is directly in front of people, surrounded by other things that are sticky, like a sticky idea, but completely unreasonable at the same time. Because then you can accuse people of being a crazy person for believing conspiracies at all. I can't think of a reason why things like this aren't exposed unless they show the depth and depravity of how far our institutions have fallen and are wrapped up into things like this. Or this is just a tentacle of something that is even bigger, that nobody wants to be exposed because they don't think that the citizens of this country could either understand it or tolerate it. And my answer to that is, fuck you.

[A]

Yeah. And I think that's how everybody should be. Look at Oliver North. I mean, they were saying he was such a criminal and doing all sorts of stuff, and then years later it comes out, well, he was just doing what he was told to do. And you know, I understand these people. I don't understand their ethics and their integrity because they don't have it. They lack it.

[B]

Did they ever have. And this is what I don't know either. So do you lose it when you get to this position because somebody has the juice on you or does somebody who wants to get into this position? They are malleable in nature anyway and they'll do anything for power. Like. Like, I'm gonna change everything. And then they change nothing. So then the next person comes along, I'm gonna change everything and then they change nothing. What is going on?

[A]

I don't.

[B]

Also, Michael, what is going on with your search? I've heard you typing over there furiously for this video. Don't speak into the microphone so everybody can hear your subpar performance.

[A]

I can't actually find the. I didn't lie. I simply misled you.

[B]

I am going to take your new blow dart gun away from you if you can't find this. We haven't even told the audience about that. But you will have it taken away from you.

[A]

You could maybe look up under contempt of Congress. Attorney General Eric Holder, Fast and Furious. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game. Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. I mean, you know, I've seen some horrible things through these coup. Look, this happened. I was convicted in 2010. By 2016, I was all done with my prison, and they put me on an ankle monitor and home release and halfway house, and I had to go through all that junk, get through all that. Somebody asked me the other day, john, this happened a long time ago. Why are you still fighting this? And I was like, because I'm innocent.

[B]

And it's your name and it's your. It's your legacy. Yeah.

[A]

You know, when my daughter came to me a couple years ago and she was like, dad, I really want to go hunting with you one day. She's like, I had to have a friend of mine that's in the Marine Corps teach her marksmanship because I can't go out and teach my daughter.

[B]

And are you forever prohibited from.

[A]

Forever. Unless President Trump signs a presidential pardon.

[B]

You should probably look into bow hunting or actually, in many states, a crossbow is actually considered a firearm.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Do your research before you touch one of those.

[A]

Yeah. No.

[B]

So the second that Obama exerts executive privilege, this is all. It's like the lid comes down on the cannon. That's it.

[A]

Absolutely. It is. It is like a national security secret. And all of that is put into archives and is put away. And you can't touch it with a

[B]

court subpoena unless you said your rights.

[A]

Unless there is somebody that has criminal. A criminal's rights to defend themselves are

[B]

paramount, but you can't initiate it.

[A]

I can't get my case back in front of the court because the court does. The court stopped me years ago, and I didn't understand what was going on. I filed a 2255 after I. It's just a. It's a document that gets your case back in front of the courts. And Judge Brionis said, well, I'm going to recuse myself and let somebody else make the decisions on this.

[B]

At least he finally got there.

[A]

Yeah. And I brought out a bunch of points and everything else. And they'd say things like, well, we're not sure that's why the jury found you guilty. Yes. That was prejudicial to lie to them three times. And we agree with you. Leon did a great job of saying, hey, they fabricated this. They Knew it was false, and yet they still did this to inflame a jury. They said things like this. Mr. Shipley wants you to feel sorry for him and sorry for his dad who served in the military. What about the poor children that were killed over there with his guns? There's no evidence of that ever. And my attorney just sat there, didn't object. So now I'm an attorney. Okay. When I got out of prison, my wife's like, what are you going to do now? I said, babe, what can I do now? I'm a convicted felon. I have six felonies on my record. I said, I can't work at Walmart. I can't do anything. And she's like, I've never known you to be a quitter. And it hurt when she said that. This is my best friend. I've been married to her for coming up on 30 years.

[B]

So, you know, you picked a good partner.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

She doesn't tell you what you want to hear.

[A]

She tells me what I need.

[B]

Even though most of the time, ladies just fucking tell us what we want to hear, like, half the time. All right, can we go every other time?

[A]

You're going into a much bigger problem.

[B]

Can we go two out of three?

[A]

No. I'll tell you this. If there. Look, I'm 100% innocent, but my children and my wife were hurt, and I will never get the sound out of my brain. I don't have ptsd, but if I did, it'd be from hearing my wife and my mom cry behind me when the jury said guilty. And I heard them start crying, and I just thought, my whole life is over. And I remember on the night that I had to self surrender to prison, and so my wife drove me there with our kids.

[B]

That's what it sounds like. You literally just drive to the prison

[A]

like, I'm here, turn yourself in. Yeah.

[B]

How much time between the verdict and doing that?

[A]

It was a long time because there was all kinds of problems with the transcripts, and they were trying to figure things out and. But eventually Judge Brionis decided, well, let's just go ahead and let him do his two years. And then if there's a mistake that's reversible, we'll just reverse it.

[B]

But, yeah, and we'll give him the time back, too. Yeah, we'll actually just get him in

[A]

the time machine those two years. Yeah. So she drove me up there, and while we were driving up there, Leon called and said, hey, turn around and come back to El Paso. I said, leon, I Have seven hours or whatever, more of a drive until I get to Inglewood, Colorado and I turn myself in. I was like, if I don't show up, the marshals are going to come pick me up with a warrant. And he's like, turn around and come back. And I, I was scared, thinking somebody's screwing with me. Like, what's going on? Like, yeah, do I follow my attorney's advice or do. I was told to surrender. So my wife drives me back. It broke her heart. And so the second time I have to self surrender. Once they figured out what they did, my dad and my mom have to drive me. That's the only time I've ever seen my father cry. And I walked in to prison and I told my wife when I left that night, I said, so the night before I left, my buddy Brad, my best friend, he comes over and he says, john, you're going to prison tomorrow. I go, yeah. He's like, okay, well, go knock these two years out and get your ass back here. I said, brad, I shouldn't be doing this. I shouldn't be going there and my kids shouldn't have to live through this and my wife shouldn't. He said, john, if Joe could crawl out of his grave, go to federal prison for two years, and then get an opportunity to hold his wife and his kids one more time, do you think he'd trade places with you? I said, he would. And he said, then put on your big boy pants and go to prison. When you get out, hug your kids and your wife again. Rebuild yourself and become better. And like you say, it wasn't what I wanted to hear, but I needed to hear that. So Brad's like, I love you and I'll see you when you come out. I was like, roger that. So I walked inside and my wife was just bawling her eyes out, crying, and she's like, what's going to happen? And I said, kath, I don't know. I said, but I do know this. I know that I'm innocent. I know that God knows I'm innocent. I said, if I go to prison, they try and hurt me, I'm gonna give them everything I have. And I said, I'll either come back in a body bag and you can bury me up the veterans cemetery, or I'm gonna come back the same man I am today because nobody's gonna hurt me.

[B]

But with an ankle monitor.

[A]

Yeah. You wanna talk about irony? I had to go back to the old FBI office where I used to work to take UAs every month to pee to make sure I wasn't on drugs, even though I was a narcotics agent for 14 years.

[B]

And did you ever miss the cup?

[A]

No.

[B]

Really? I would have pissed all over that wall. Be like, oh, I'm sorry, guys. Sorry I missed again. Going to 7 11, get a 64 ouncer redneck guzzler.

[A]

So crazy things happen.

[B]

How is prison, man?

[A]

So I don't want to make it out to sound worse than it was because God blessed me in certain things. The first thing was Bureau of Prisons because I was an FBI agent. They had to go through an entire, like, several different prisons. And they'd say, nope, he can't go to this one because he was involved in this case. Nope, you can't be here.

[B]

Yeah, they're not going to throw you the wolves.

[A]

Yes, you'd hope so. They found a camp in Inglewood, Colorado. And so the federal system has, like, supermaxes and all these things, but when you get down to a medium, that's still pretty bad, dudes. Then you get down to a low. Well, then there's the camp. The camp is for people that have five years or less, are not violent offenders, and are on their way out of the system. Now. That doesn't mean that. And that guy almost got killed in our. On our camp. Yeah, that guy went back into a high facility. He was coming from a high. And so he was one of those hardened criminals.

[B]

I mean, for clarity, we're not talking about s' mores and, like, bonfires, right?

[A]

No, but as soon as you say

[B]

cam, like, okay, you had a hammock,

[A]

you were doing new stuff. So they're. This will make you laugh. They're old air force billets that they've turned into prison cells.

[B]

All right?

[A]

But they're not like bars. You have an actual door. And we had a shower for five guys. There's two bunks or a double bunk. A double bunk and a single. Whoever's in the single is usually the guy that's in charge of that room. You know, he. He. You know, if you want his single bed, you're probably gonna have to fight him for it. But it's five guys, and nobody wanted me in their room. First day I get there, first day I get there, I go in and I'm getting my towels and my blankets and my pillow and all my stuff, and I hear, hey, FBI.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

And I just stop. I don't turn around, look, because I'm like, no, I'm not. You know, and then I hear, hey, FBI, you deaf?

[B]

Bro.

[A]

And so I look at the guard, and I said to her, I said, are you gonna do anything about this? She said, I'm locking up and leaving. She locks the thing, and she walks down to the end of the hall and goes out of the building. And now it's my first day there. I don't see a guard anywhere around. So I turn around, I look at this guy, and he goes, yeah, bro, we know who you are. I said, okay. He goes, I'm gonna kill you. And I said, all right, well, just don't be a about it and come at me face to face so I have a chance. Oh, you think you're a tough guy, vato? He says, I'm gonna kill you. And I said, names, you know, let's go. And he's like, let's go out on the yard essay. I'm gonna this guy up, and he goes, walking out, and all these. All these people in the place are like, surrounding me. So I'm like, well, I guess I'm getting to my first fight. Here we go. So I put my stuff down, I went out there. I wrestled in high school. I've been taught a little bit. So I go out there, and as he comes at me, I take him down to the ground, and I start choking him out, and he starts tapping me.

[B]

No, there's no taps in prison. We're not respecting this.

[A]

I didn't know the rules, but it was one less guy I was going to have to fight. Yeah. So I took.

[B]

Plus, you don't need to add a murder charge.

[A]

No, but I took him out. Yeah, I just let him go. And then I stood up and I got ready to get killed. I mean, I knew they were going to kill me. And they all look over at one guy, and he goes, no, nobody touch FBI. Leave him alone. I was like, what the hell? And so they all walk away from me.

[B]

It's a different world, man.

[A]

And I learned that the Hispanics have one group, the blacks have one group, and the whites have one group. And they're always like, hey, you're in the white group. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm not in any group. I'm just me. I don't want to be part of gang. I'm not getting involved in this stuff. I don't see anything. And. And they told me the rules. They came to me and they're like, listen, if something happens and you talk about it, you're dead. I was like, cool. So when they assaulted somebody and they beat the I never understood this. In the prison, they gave them steel toed boots.

[B]

Well, that's a really bad idea.

[A]

So what they'd say is they go, hey, bro, go get booted up. I'd be like, what does that mean? They're like, go put on your steel toe boots. There's about to be a fight. You. You don't want to be the only one with no steel toe boots.

[B]

I was like, that is a good tip.

[A]

So they would, they would pass it around when you knew something was going to happen. They'd be like, hey, you need to get booted up. And I'd be like, okay, thank you. Yeah.

[B]

So, hey, you could have started your own group.

[A]

It wasn't.

[B]

You could have done some like, FBI merch, you know, I mean, this is a missed opportunity. You could be like, hey, does anybody want to be an informant? Torment.

[A]

Yeah, that wouldn't have gone well.

[B]

FBI, arts and crafts. Teach you how to get out of handcuffs?

[A]

Yeah. No, I was very careful because the guards knew who I was. And apparently in my Bureau of Prisons file, there's nose weapon takeaways don't come within 30ft if you're armed. Within him. There were certain rules and restrictions, and it probably saved my life one time because when I was on Conair, they flew me from Colorado. Eventually we went into Oklahoma City. Where is the main holding hub for the marshal service? Right on the airfield. They have a building and the plane goes up. You walk down this Runway and you're right into prison. Well, when I'm going in there, I know, hey, if I go into general population, there's a good chance somebody may recognize me or, you know, try and kill me. So we're going through a med check and the. They're like, if you need a medical check, stand in this line. So I jump over that line and so when it's my turn, I get up there and the nurse, the guy's like, what's wrong with you? I said, I need to talk to you privately. He goes, no, you don't, inmate. Because he doesn't know who I am. He goes, no, you don't, inmate. I said, I need to talk to you in private. He. He's like, what, do you have something stuck up your butt that needs to come out or what? I've seen it all, so just tell me what the fuck you need. And I'm like, I need to talk to you privately or I'll be dead in the morning. And he's like, did you take a bunch of drugs? And I said, no. Do you need your stomach pumped? I was like, no, I need to talk to you privately. He's like, gd, you stupid mother. And he pulls me into this room and he shuts the door and he goes, what's so fucking important? And I said, I'm a former special agent of the FBI. I can't be in general population or I'll get killed. And he's like, you dumb motherfucker, you've really screwed up. Now. He's screaming, yeah. I said, just pull my inmate ID 476-662-80. So he walks over the computer and goes, what is it again? I said, 476-662-80. I don't think it's any coincidence that 666 is in my prison number.

[B]

It probably is coincidental, but you know what I mean, we don't need to split hairs.

[A]

The reason I could remember it, I was a CH47 pilot. So 4 7. Yeah, 666 and two eight zero is the EL Paso designator.

[B]

You're easy then.

[A]

So. So he pulls it up and he goes, holy shit. He pushes me into a. Into a shower and he shuts the door. And I'm like, what now? And he's like, some guys will be coming to get you. So all of a sudden, you know, an hour or two later, these huge guys come down. They're big black guys with muscles on top of their muscles. And they're the SRT team. And they grab a hold of me and they're like, come on in, mate. They're not treating me like a federal agent.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because I'm not to them. And they make me sit down in this chair that does a body scan to see if you have anything in you. And, you know. Yeah. Thank God they didn't do body cavity searches and all that.

[B]

Missed opportunity.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I'm not going to tell people how to party.

[A]

Yeah. But. Yeah, there are crazy things. Another thing on my id, on. On the actual ID that I have. On the first day after the fight, they told me where my room was and I was like, okay. So I go into my room and I'm like, hey, which bunk is mine? And they're like, new guy, you get that one. The one that doesn't have any springs or anything. It's shitty. I was like, whatever. Okay. So I'm laying down and all of a sudden the door opens up and I look and there's a huge black man standing in our doorway. And there's only a little light coming out of each Corner. Because he fills that doorway. And they called him Big. That was his name. Like, they called me FBI. They never called me John or Ship or Shipley. They called him Big. And he walks in, he goes, who the fuck is Shipley? And I'm like, oh, God. You know, like, go to a safe place. I'm scared to death. I really. I was. Because he was humongous, and I was thinking, what can I pick up and hit him? Like, this is going to be bad. And he looks at me, he goes, are you Shipley? I go, yeah. He goes, oh, hell, you ain't no 7ft tall. I go, what are you talking about? He says, your ID says you're 7ft tall. No, I'm 70 inches. But I guess the Bureau of Prisons didn't get that right. So if I would have escaped from the camp, they'd have been looking for me being seven feet tall. Because that's what they put on my

[B]

head of the game. I like it.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Okay. So, yeah, he was just checking out the other big person. Yeah.

[A]

And he told me, well, you. No problem. I have a picture of the two of us standing together in prison. They, of course, the Bureau of Prisoners wants to make money, so they'll bring Polaroid cameras in every once in a while, allow you to take photos in the prison. It's like $8 a.

[B]

Of course it is. So how was it getting out?

[A]

Getting out was okay. It wasn't bad. For two years, it was just. I missed my family, and I had to lie to my children. At five and four years old, I didn't want to say, hey, Daddy's going to federal prison. So we told them, dad's getting deployed. They were used to that. They were just like, well, how long? And I said, I don't know. And at first, I told Kathy, I said, sweetheart, I don't want you bringing the kids. Just let me go for two years. Let me do it. I don't want them ever coming up here or anything else. And she was like, you're crazy. And, you know, again, my wife has made the best decisions. When I said I didn't want to adopt children, she said, no, God is so good that he will get us our children. We're adopting. And that's been the biggest blessing of my life. When she said. I told her, don't bring those kids to the prison. She's like, you need to still see them, and they need to see their daddy. And I was like, oh. So she brought them. And every time they'd show up, man, I just hold them and just had to lie to him. I had to tell them, hey, you know, daddy, why are you wearing a green uniform? He's got a green. Oh, he works with me, baby. We all work together. We're all in this special project, and just.

[B]

It's special. All right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Espresso project.

[A]

It was. It was hard. That was hard. Yeah. And then it was hard when I came back. You know, I went through depression and I went through anger, and I wasn't the best husband, and I wasn't the best father, and I just wasn't me. Because I was stripped of the one thing that I truly believed in, and that was our country. I was like, they're going to have to stand up. I remember going into Mr. Cuthbertson at my SAC and saying, sir, you prayed over my daughter when we thought she had cancer. And I said to him, on that day, I made a decision. I'd follow you to hell and back. I'll polygraph without an attorney present. Anybody can ask me any question because I didn't do anything wrong. And he said, john, the FBI was told not to get involved with this. Now, back when that happened, I didn't understand that, because in my world, the FBI is the top law enforcement agency. I didn't understand. Well, there's also doj, who tells FBI what to do, and all the other agencies, but then above that is the White House. And so he was told, we're not. We're not going to polygraph you. And I said, well, sir, I'm a federal agent. You have the right to polygraph me over anything at any time, and I can't refuse. He goes, we're not going to polygraph you. I never received a polygraph. I wanted one because if they would have said to me, did you deal firearms without license? No. Did you cause this FFL to have a false entry into their book? No. Did you ever tell Frank Henderson that these were all of your guns? No. There's no way I would. Because the guns that I lost in the army, the records, I didn't have those, so why would I ever represent that? This is all of my guns. It just. The case was so circumstantial and emotional, and there was so much violence that was going on in Mexico. I mean, mass graves were being found. People wanted to hold somebody accountable. And when the federal government turns on their own person and points the finger at them and says, he's a corrupt cop, his guns are killing people in Mexico, and he needs to be held accountable, those people are like guilty. And like I said, it was a Hispanic jury. And I'm not saying anything against the Hispanic culture. What I'm saying is those poor people that are over in Mexico that are being bullied by their police and by their military and they're in fear of their own police and military. That's no way to live. And they're gonna be scared. And so when they have the opportunity to strike back against the bad police and military that have oppressed people for years, they're going to.

[B]

What did they get the guy? So you sold it to the Barrett to a guy who then went on consignment. What did they get that guy for?

[A]

So Armando was, he was different. He got a two year sentence just like I did. But I'm going to give this guy credit. Armando is a gun guy. He collects guns and he bought an AR15 pistol.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so it's just like an AR15 except it doesn't have a stock on it. It has that buffer tube.

[B]

Tube?

[A]

Yeah. Okay, so Armando goes to a pistol. Yes. Still shoots a.223. Yeah. Or 5.56556. But Armando buys this pistol and it's legal. He puts it in his gun safe. Then he's at a gun show and they have these stocks and he thinks, well, that'd be cool. I'll just stick it on the end of my pistol connect. And I've got like a short barrel rifle. Not knowing that's illegal. So when they came to his house, they hit his house and my house with search warrants on the same day so that we couldn't tip each other off.

[B]

Was the butt stock on the. Oh, there you go. Yeah.

[A]

So they, they say to him, will you open these gun safes? He opens all his gun safes. And the ATF agent says, what is that right there? And he goes, well, that's a AR15 that I bought at a gun show. And they're like, yeah, but you can't put a stock on it because now it's a short barreled rifle. Do you have a class three tax stamp?

[B]

You just can't have SBRs in Texas.

[A]

Not unless you have a class three license.

[B]

We can have SBRs up here.

[A]

Yeah, well, the laws are all changing because now you can have suppressors. Now you can have all kinds of things. Funny thing. So I, I had a three. I had a dpms 308, ar15 basically. But it shot 308. It was really nice gun. I loved it. And then I had a sniper rifle made by HS Precision. Who makes the FBI sniper rifles? They had a program where they said, if you send us proof that you're an agent, we'll give it to you at the government rate. So I was like, yeah, and we'll build it the same way to your specs. Well, they threaded the barrel on the end of it, and then Also on the DPMs, you could take off that flash. Yeah. And put on a silencer. So one of my buddies is like, dude, why don't you buy a silencer? That'd be awesome to have a silence.308, you know, rifle. And. And I thought, okay. So I did. I did all the paperwork with atf, paid all my money. I waited a year for it to get cleared. Finally, they cleared me. I order one from, I think awc, and it comes in and it's like three grand, or. I can't remember how much I spent, but I have it in the box, and then I have the ATF paperwork around it. I got it from a Class 3 dealer. I filled out everything. I put it in my gun safe and never fired a single round through it.

[B]

I check, so.

[A]

So I'm just lazy. I just never got to the range to shoot it. When the ATF shows up, they're like, oh, we got you now. You've got an illegal suppressor in the commission of a felony. You're going away for a lot of years. And I was like, guys, the. The. The license is wrapped around it. There's a rubber band on it, and that piece of paper is the license that I have. And they go, no, no, no, this isn't legal. You're. You're going to prison. We got you now.

[B]

What was illegal about it?

[A]

Nothing. But they tried to say that I used a suppressor. Suppressor. During the commission of a felony. They really did. And then finally that when I first got charged, they were telling me, okay, you're involved in trafficking weapons to Mexico. That charge never solved the lie. Today. They were just throwing a bunch of stuff up to scare me because they were like, look, you're going to go to prison for, like, 35 years. Just take probation. I was like, no, I didn't break the law. I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not going to lie in a court of law. That's how we got here in the first place, is back to Samantha Carrington. I wasn't willing to lie and omit things from an affidavit so that a judge believed that she was guilty of a crime. I don't stand up for the little guy. I'm a stand up for the innocent person. That's who I am.

[B]

How do you have any level of faith in the government that treated you like this?

[A]

Well, you just have to think that this was one administration and that administration's gone, and hopefully the next one's better.

[B]

Yeah, but the administration might shift every four or eight years, but people have the ability to tick in in these sub agencies that are underneath them.

[A]

So when I was in the FBI, when I first joined the FBI in 96, I remember hearing stories about the ATF, about Ruby Ridge and Waco and how these guys were just cowboys and they wanted to kick doors in and they wanted to prove that they were badasses and they wanted to earn their reputation. Waco, there was no reason to go to David Koresh in Waco and surround it and get into a shootout because they knew that he went to the feed store once a week. And they could have just arrested him at the feed store with overwhelming odds.

[B]

Would have been far more low risk.

[A]

But that's not what makes headlines. And atf, you can still make the

[B]

headlines off the seizure or whatever it may be.

[A]

I know, but I hate saying this, but there's a joke about how the ATF is our little brother. They get into fights, they pick it, and then they can't. They can't handle it. So they call the FBI and say, bring HRT and all your guys. And this happens everywhere. It happened at Ruby Ridge. This guy, basically an ATF informant, was in trouble with the atf. He goes to Randy Weaver and says, hey, Will, you saw down the shotgun for me? And Randy's like, no, I won't do it. Well, this guy's trying to get Randy Weaver to go to prison instead of him. So he goes and saws it off himself, takes it back to ATF and says, hey, he sawed this down. They show up at his house, ATF agents, with nothing that says police, atf. And they're in cammies and they're walking up the hill, and the dog catches scent. He hears them, starts barking. And Randy thinks, there's a deer out there. So he opens up the door, the dog runs out. He says to his son, grab your rifle and go shoot this deer. So the son, 10 years old or 11 years old, runs out there too. These ATF agents are standing there in full cammies with suppressed weapons. The dogs running at them. And they go, they kill the dog. Kid sees it, levels of 30 odd six shoots. One of the ATF agents turns around Starts running back to his house, and they go and they kill him. Now, Randy comes out. He doesn't hear the suppressed weapons, but he heard the one shot from the son. So he thinks, hey, got a deer. He comes out, and he sees his. His dog is dead and his son is dead. And he sees three or four guys in cammies with nothing. They're not screaming, atf police, put up your hands. They're just standing there with machine guns. And now he's like, you're gonna die. Now, Lon Hiruchi was the HRT sniper that shot and killed Vicki at Ruby Ridge.

[B]

His wife. Yeah.

[A]

He was my sniper instructor at my first sniper school for the FBI. Wow. When he said, I'm Lon Hiruchi, former West Point, you know, And I was like, I know who you are. You shot Vicki. And he's like, yeah. He told me his version of the story. I mean, he told our whole sniper class. He told us what happened. I drank that Kool Aid until I met Randy Weaver. Randy Weaver was at a gun show. And I was like, he doesn't know I'm an FBI agent and I'm a sniper, but I want to hear his side of the story. And I went to Randy, and I was like, hey, I don't have time to read your book. I'm not that dedicated. Tell me what happened. And he's like, well, my son ran out. The dog went out. I thought it was a deer. Turns out there was ATF agents, and they killed my dog and killed my son, and I was fit to be tied, he said. So I went in and I barricaded, and I got my weapons, and there was a standoff. And eventually he goes, I'd taken my son's body and put it in a shed because I didn't want his mom to see him. He was really badly killed. And he goes. So I went out to go visit my son and pray over him. And the ATF came back, and he said, but it wasn't the atf. It was actually hrt. And Lon was off at an angle. And when he. When he realized that there were federal law enforcement agents out there or whoever, he calls to his wife, vicki, open the door. I'm going to run in there. And he takes off running. And Lon decided, well, I can try to shoot him at the steps, but a better place would be when that door opens. He didn't hear him yell. He was at a distance. When he stops to grab that doorknob, he's got to stop and pull that Door open, I'll hit him then. So he's tracking him, tracking him, tracking him. And it sends it. And as soon as he sends it, that's when Vicki opens up the door. The bullet comes through the door, hits her in the head, and kills her. She's carrying their child. Randy runs in, and now he's like, you've killed my dog. You've killed my son, you killed my wife. And now I want blood. And that was that whole situation. And it was made bad because ATF didn't do their job. They didn't vet this, and they went on to private property so that they could describe it in a search warrant. They were going to write a search warrant for that. And he's like, look, if they didn't just come to me and talk to me, this all been. It never happened. That ATF agent wouldn't have got shot. My son wouldn't got shot. My wife wouldn't be dead. And the government ended up paying him a lot of money because they couldn't hide the truth for me. I don't want money. I don't want fame. I've said this my whole life. My wife asked me, what is a successful life for you? I said, at the end of my FBI career, I want to build a log cabin somewhere in the woods where I can hunt and I can fish and I can target shoot and never bother another soul. That's all I've ever wanted. That's my dream. But as it stands right now, I can't touch a firearm. I go to my church in Georgia. So after. After El Paso blew up and we had to leave because I'm no longer an agent. The cartel knows it. I'm right there on the border. My wife. I got a death threat, and guy told me I'd put him in prison. And he told me, I'm gonna kill you. And he said, because I know you don't carry a gun anymore. He said, I do, and I'm gonna kill you. I was like, bring it on. But in the back of my head, I was like, oh, shit.

[B]

Well, he's a felon too, so he shouldn't have a firearm.

[A]

Well, you know, the felons, they. They don't.

[B]

What are you trying to say?

[A]

I was gonna commit murder. But once I heard it's illegal to shoot somebody with a firearm, I decided not to do it.

[B]

Funny how that works.

[A]

Yeah. So we moved from there to Atlanta, Georgia. And we're in Georgia, and I can't touch a firearm. I can't do anything. So I decided to go to law school then, you know, to tell people this. When you're used to carrying a gun every day, you're no longer allowed to protect your family even in your own home. That's a horrible feeling. But beyond that, I still get punished today. Let me explain. It's not just carrying a firearm that needs to be. A presidential pardon would. Correct. But it's this. So I'm licensed. I got licensed in the state of Tennessee to practice law after law school. And then I moved to 10 Texas and I got Texas license. I had to go through show cause hearings where I sat down and they grilled me for hours about wasn't it true, you're just a felon and this and that. And you know, and I explained what happened to them and eventually they gave me full licensure with nothing. But even in the building that I work in now, the courthouse, I can't go through security. I have to go through security with every normal person through the magnetometer every single time. And I don't really care about that. But where it affects me is there's chambers where the judges are and there's rooms where the district attorneys are. I can't go into their chambers because I can't get an attorney pass because I can't pass a background check. So it affects my job as an attorney. I have to go up to court staff or to somebody and say, excuse me, hey, could you buzz me in here? I forgot my card today. And they're like, Mr. Shipley, you haven't had your card for a while. What's going on? Oh, no. You know, because you can't just say, hey, I'm a convicted felon to everybody in the courthouse because some people believe that our system works and they're going to look down upon me and say, how can you be effective attorney when you have six felonies on your record? Well, actually, I'm probably more effective than everybody else because I've been screwed by the system. So I won't let my clients get screwed by that system. And I'm willing to put in the extra hours and fight because you push somebody you shouldn't have pushed.

[B]

How long have you been a lawyer Now?

[A]

I graduated in 2019 and passed the bar.

[B]

So seven years. At some point here this year. Looking back now at your case, as a lawyer with your experience, what would you have done differently?

[A]

Well, the first thing is if I would have been the attorney on this, you have a duty to your client to investigate and to question everybody to the full Extent Paul Lee. You know, here's one of the reasons I know Paul Lee was an informant working for them. He got up on the stand and said, yes, I work for the atf. I provide them information. I do this and that.

[B]

It's a pretty good way to know.

[A]

Yeah. And so I know he's an informant for them. But think about this. We have a document and I can pull it up and I can give you a copy of it. It's the receipt from Paul Lee to the Mexican gun trafficker. It has his driver's license on it that says Chihuahua, Mexico. Jonathan Lopez. There's no way he can be involved. Paul Lee says, oh, yeah, yeah, he came in my store and so I just made a receipt for him and. But I was not involved in that transaction. Okay, wait a second. So either ATF told you to do it and they gave you immunity. That's scenario number one. Or scenario number two is you did it behind ATF's back without their authority and they now know about it. Now, what do you think would happen to a gun, a licensed gun dealer that owns a gun shop if they were an informant for the ATF and they sold a.50 caliber to a known and under investigation by ATF member of the cartel. If you did that behind their back without telling them, do you think that that store would still be open today?

[B]

I would hope not.

[A]

It still is if you go on Mesa Hills or not Mesa. If you go on Mesa, you can go to Collector's Gun Exchange. And Paul Lee, his wife is now the name on the ffl. But they still own that store. And yet they sold that gun to a gun trafficker that was under ATF investigation and it walked into Mexico. There is no gun store in the United States unless the ATF authorizes it that can sell a.50 cal to a cartel member, not fill out a 4473.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There's a violation, but he's still in business. That tells me the ATF knew way back then when he did it, they knew all about it. It's either one or the other. She's either pregnant or she's not pregnant. There is no middle ground here. You're the atf. Did you know that your informant did this? Yes. Then you lied in your search warrants when you tried to tell a judge, we need to go into John Shipley's house to determine how this gun got to Mexico. You lied, case over, you guys go to jail. Now, they don't want that. So they're going to continue say well, we're, we're not sure about that. It's cloudy.

[B]

Cloudy is not an acceptable answer when it comes to that.

[A]

Not for me, it's not. It's, it's, it's hard to stomach this stuff. And, you know, when I submitted my presidential pardon, I submitted it the first time when President Trump was in his first term and Kent Terry, Brian Terry's brother, had actually talked to the President about it. And I thought, wow, maybe that something will happen. And then he didn't get elected and he's gone. So Biden comes in. President Biden denied my pardon. Now, let me explain what that means, because a lot of people don't understand the pardon. When you submit a pardon to the federal government, there's three outcomes. The first is it's approved and you get a pardon and the president signs it. The second is.

[B]

Does he, though?

[A]

Yeah, well, I don't know. Auto pen.

[B]

Just saying. Previous administration.

[A]

Yeah, I have some questions about that as well.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The second is they do nothing. It just sits there and sits there

[B]

like they never even see it.

[A]

Well, somebody in the pardon office sees it, but it never, but it never gets denied or it never gets approved. The third one is you can deny it, and if you deny it, then you have to wait five years to resubmit one. President Biden actually denied my presidential pardon, and that's because he was the vice president when Obama was the president. So you're asking the man who's involved in this conspiracy to traffic weapons in New Mexico, hey, you want to give an innocent FBI agent that we threw under the bus to cover up what we're doing, he'd like a pardon from you now? No. And he, he did not give me a pardon.

[B]

I don't think it puts him at any risk if he does sign it, because again, it's not like you're opening

[A]

up, but the Democrats are anti gun to a large scale. And I'm not, I'm not saying every Democrat is, but they still, they run on that.

[B]

It. Yeah, but it doesn't open up the Fast and Furious vault, though, you know what I mean? Of information.

[A]

If he gives you a pardon, and that's what I don't understand, because if they would just give me a presidential pardon, I go away. Yeah, I'm done. Like, I'm never going to get those two years back for my wife and my kids. I'm never going to get back all the money. I made $120,000 a year as an FBI agent. If you multiply that by 15 years. It's over $2 million. I don't care about that money. I never came into this world for money. I really don't. If I didn't take Samantha Carrington's offering, I don't really care about that. What I would like is, I'd like President Trump to say, hey, you know what they did? That administration screwed this guy. He's a patriot. And I'm going to restore by this presidential pardon. And then I'd like Cash PATEL to say, Mr. Shipley, we're going to reinstate you for one day and then retire you so that you're allowed to carry a firearm for the rest of your Life under the HR 218. Yeah. And I will go and disappear and you'll probably never hear from me again.

[B]

I would like another step in that, and that is to rip the lid open on the Fast and the Furious program so we can actually see what our government that is supposed to work for, with, through by the people, for the people.

[A]

What.

[B]

What have you been up to?

[A]

I would like that, but I don't think that that will ever happen. I don't think that'll happen until somebody in power decides it's going to happen. And whether that's a congressman, a senator,

[B]

a president, they have the juice, though, I don't know. Because what can they do? Again, if it's executive privilege, I mean, what can Congress force?

[A]

I'm going to tell you this. There's a gentleman, his name's Bob Barr and it's B A R, R Bob, if you want to look Bob Barr up, he was a Republican congressman in Georgia. And Bob Barr, I don't know how he first heard my story or whatever, but he wrote letters to the President on congressional letterhead. He went and talked to Barry Loudermilk and Barry Loudermilk, that's him, powerful mustache. I appreciate it. And, and In, I think 2024 or 2025, he was the president of the NRA. He is a big Second Amendment guy, a great. I mean, he's just such an outstanding guy that when he read my stuff, he was like, son, you've served this country and you got thrown underneath the bus for a political agenda. And he said, now you're not the first and you won't be the last, but I really want to help you. That man has taken. Every time I've called him, he takes my calls. Every time I email him, he sends me back something.

[B]

He's.

[A]

I mean, I've tried getting a lot of people involved. I, I have friends that went to West Point. My nephew graduated from there. I have a friend that works at the Pentagon. They said, well, let me talk to this person. Let me talk to that person. And it never goes anywhere. I've talked to media people. I talked to the lady that broke Fast and Furious, Cheryl Atkinson. She was working for cbs. And I went and I met with her at Brian Terry's memorial Foundation. It was a function. And I talked to her, and she said, look, I'm getting fired from CBS because I told the truth.

[B]

How did.

[A]

What.

[B]

How did she break? Like, how did it finally break?

[A]

Story break?

[B]

Yeah. How did. What. Flipped it through.

[A]

I'm going to tell you that story. So Brian Terry gets killed, I think, in December of 2010. At first, the ATF says, hey, these guns that were found by his body don't have anything to do with it. The problem is, anytime a federal agent get killed in the line of duty, it's an AFO assault on a federal officer. FBI has jurisdiction. So FBI comes in and they start looking at it, and they're like, wait a second, what's going on here? And the ATF is lying through their teeth. We're, you know, we don't have anything to do with this. This is, you know, the cartel, blah, blah, blah. They don't say, oh, by the way, that gun right there, we sold that to the cartel. And that's what they killed Brian with. They shot him through his femoral artery with an AK47 that ATF allowed go to go to Mexico. So what happens is there's a guy named John Dodson, and John Dodson, if you want to look him up, he's the whistleblower. He was the whistleblower in Fast and Furious. John Dodson, atf? Yes. Okay. And he went through hell. They came after him, tried to fire him. They just. Horrible stuff for telling the truth. Because the truth made the ATF look bad. Because the ATF is bad. And you can't. The one thing, you can do a lot of things in federal law enforcement, but you better never make your agency look bad, because they will chop your head off. But John Dotson, he had had enough. He said, basically, look, Brian Terry was a Marine, then a local police officer up in Michigan. Then he goes to the Border Patrol, and then he gets on Bor Tack, and he's out there trying to intercept these drug traffickers, and you guys give him shotguns with beanbags in them, and he gets shot and killed by a gun that's linked back to this. So he took all those Documents and photocopied them before they disappeared. And he went to Senator Grassley and said, I'm a whistleblower. We've been running this operation Fast and Furious. We known to date, over 2,000 firearms have been given to the cartel and drafted into Mexico. And he gave them all the documents, including the one that linked the gun next to Brian as an ATF gun. And Grassley started kicking butts. He started just going after everybody. And then you have all this. You have some ATF direct assistant director. Something says, well, you know, if you want to make an omelette, you got to crack a few eggs. And I was like, good job, buddy.

[B]

Wow. So when did they finally admit it? What forced them to admit it?

[A]

They. What forced them to it is John Dodson taking those documents about Brian. And now his family started making waves. Josephine Terry is his mom, his sister, his brother. They all were like. They were showing up at events and saying, well, what about Brian Terry, the border patrol agent, was killed with an ATF gun. And people were like, what are you talking about? That's a conspiracy. That's not true. And da, da, da. Well, here's the documents and this and that. And they are, to this day, 15 years later, 16 years later. I just talked to Brian a couple. Or not Brian. Excuse me, Kent, a couple days ago, and he's still like, I just want justice for my brother. That's all I want. I want them to come out and tell the truth and to release the information, because that administration. That's why my brother's dead. That's why you went to prison, John. That's why you lost your job and you're in. I didn't lose my honor or my integrity. They didn't give those to me, so they can't take them from me. My father gave those to me. But it hurts when you go to a party and somebody says, shipley, aren't you the FBI agent that was trafficking guns at a cartel? And I want to come across the table.

[B]

People are idiots, man.

[A]

I know. And I just. You know, it's. It's like the driver that cuts you off, and then he flips you off. And I just go, whatever, dude. Like, yeah, I don't have time for that kind of crap in life. But, you know, it hurt me when my. When my wife's friend said to her, hey, my husband's a DEA agent, and so we can't, like, be friends anymore. My wife is the nicest person on this earth.

[B]

It doesn't say anything about you guys. It Says everything you need to know about them.

[A]

But she's like this, hi, I'm Kathy Shipley. And she hugs everybody. And I'm like, hey, I'm John, and until I determine your threat level, you stay back there. And, you know, I can't tell you how bad it hurt her. She. You know, she said to me, when I had to turn myself in the second time, she's like, I cannot drive you there with the kids.

[B]

Yeah, that's. That's a tough ass.

[A]

And there's. There's a one. One of the pictures is me going away, and the kids are in the back of the van, and they're just bawling their eyes out, and they don't even know why they're crying, but they're feeding off my wife and off her emotions. I mean, it hurt me in ways that I. You know, we all want to think that we're badasses and we're tough.

[B]

Michael is.

[A]

Well, look at that below.

[B]

Dart gun right behind him.

[A]

Yeah, that's right.

[B]

Peter's Piper.

[A]

But you're only as tough as you think you are. I mean, it. It rocked me, the core.

[B]

Trust me, I get it.

[A]

I never thought, like, I saw these soldiers come back with ptsd, and I couldn't really understand it because I was like, you know what? If you have a mission to do, you do the mission and deal with it later. But I'm sure that this has caused trauma in my family. I mean.

[B]

Oh, without a doubt. What you've already. What you just described mere seconds ago is exactly what you're talking about.

[A]

So it's. It's tough to live with every single day. It's. It's also. This is tough, too. You almost feel like a fraud sometimes. Because I don't have a problem telling anybody on this earth about my case, but yet there are going to be some people down in Johnson County Courthouse, some of the officers that know, hey, he's a former FBI agent and he's. He's one of the good guys and everything else. And then they're going to find out and be like, why didn't you tell me? I'm not afraid to tell anybody the story. That's why I'm here today, because I want it to come out. I want the truth to come out. But there are going to be some guys that are like, man, I didn't know you were a convicted felon. And I may lose some friends from church, and I may lose some professional contacts or whatever else. I've never had a problem telling Anybody. What happened? Because I know that I can put my hand on God's Bible and say, father, I didn't do this. But there's still going to be people that, like my professor at law school that said, well, my husband's a DEA agent. He said, if the FBI threw you under the bus, you're a bad apple. I'm like, well, no, I'll go back

[B]

to the conversation where not everybody's created equal, you know?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

How can people. How can people help you? Is this a matter of spreading the word, getting the right people to pay attention? What would be the. What's the optimal path to the presidential pardon?

[A]

I don't know the answer to that question, or I'd have already done it. That's just the true response. I actually, you know, before I came here and I talked to you, I prayed about this, and I said, father, if this is the conduit for me to get this story out, so, you know, I would love for somebody that's a. That's on Netflix or Hulu or somebody to say, wow, this is a incredible story. I can't believe it. Let me look all this stuff and vet this guy. And once I have, I want to do a documentary on it or I want to do something to help you tell your story. Yeah, I. I did sign a contract for a book deal and a movie deal, and it really hasn't gone the way I thought.

[B]

What are you gonna call the movie? So obviously Too Fast, Too Furious. But, I mean, that's a working title.

[A]

I actually thought of this injustice for

[B]

all I would get Steven Seagal for that lead role. I would have him play you, not Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris died today.

[A]

I know. Too soon.

[B]

I mean, he's going to carry his own casket to his funeral. So. Yeah, I don't know if it's ever too soon for him. I don't think Steven Seagal can come back into the United States. I think he might get. Have a little conversation with some of your old. So work buddies.

[A]

One year, the NRA said to me, hey, we're having an occasion convention out in Charlotte, North Carolina. We want you to come out. I said, okay. So I went out there, and Congressman Barr was there and everything, and the NRA actually donated $40,000 to my defense fund for my first trial. They were very gracious. They said, look, you didn't break the law. It's not fair. The ATF's going after you on this, and we want to support you. So they brought me out to this national convention, and I'LL never forget this. Chuck Norris is walking down the hallway. I was like, oh, my God, that's Chuck Norris.

[B]

Like, that's the appropriate response.

[A]

Yes. I was like, oh, my God, that guy could kill me with his fingers.

[B]

Like, I don't know if it's all

[A]

true is the legend of Chuck Norris,

[B]

but I choose to believe it.

[A]

I do, too. I love the guy. So then we go into this room and my dad, he was in there and he was getting something like a Coke to drink or something. And he's standing there and I'm standing next to him. And my dad is my hero. He was my best man at my wedding. He's the one man I don't want to disappoint on this earth. And so we're standing there together and Magnum PI Tom Selleck walks in the room.

[B]

Also a mustache to write home about.

[A]

Every girl in the room go. It doesn't matter if they're 16 or they're 80. They all go, oh, my gosh.

[B]

Just so you know, that's the appropriate response for a man or a woman. If you are ever in the presence of Magnum PI God help you if he's wearing the shorts that he wore during the show.

[A]

Hey, you wore those shorts.

[B]

Not consensually.

[A]

I watched your podcast where you talked about that. You were like, what were we thinking? We didn't have a choice.

[B]

We didn't have a choice. It was non consensual. But Magnum P.I. Mr. Selleck, well done, sir.

[A]

Well, he walked in the room and every girl just turned into a 16 year old girl. Like, hi, Tom. And I was just. And my dad goes, who's that guy? I said, dad, that's Magnum PI like, do you know who that is?

[B]

First off, how dare you? We're gonna talk about this later. Are you on social media? How can people reach out to you? We've been at it for almost three hours. So I want to get you out of here.

[A]

So, yeah, you can look up on social media on Shipley. You can see it if anybody wants to find me, if they have a, you know, a possible solution or I

[B]

want to help you people or anybody interested in helping you tell your story too.

[A]

Because you can Google John Shipley, attorney, Fort Worth, and you'll see my website. It has my office number and somebody can call me there.

[B]

I'll.

[A]

I'll put out my number and no,

[B]

okay, we're not going to do that. It's either I stop you now or I'm like, michael, mark that on the video. We're not putting out phone numbers.

[A]

The receptionist will be like, we had

[B]

14,000 calls today, and 15,000 of them were not serious ones. So, yeah, I'll stop you short there.

[A]

You know, I don't know what the solution to this problem is. Yeah. I really don't. I'm hoping there's a congressman in Texas that says, wait a second. You know, I don't know if, you know, Ted Cruz hears this and says, wait a second. This is something I want to get involved in. This is, you know, I'm 100% disabled veteran. I've served this country, and all I'm asking is for somebody to make an injustice. Right. I don't care who it is. And I'm not here to point fingers at the ATF and at these people. I don't care anymore. They've already taken the pound of flesh from me, and I can never get it back. If I could just have my rights back so I can do my job as an attorney. When I went to law school, I couldn't rent an apartment because I'm a convicted felon. So they told me, well, why don't you just lie on your application, put your wife's name on there instead of yours? And I'm like. And then I'm gonna face a board for integrity to get a license.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

As a. I'm not doing that stuff. So it's still, you know, car insurance and home insurance can cancel you if you're. USAA dropped us. They were our car and our home, and they said, well, you're a convicted felon now. We don't. We no longer will allow you to be a client. So there's a lot of things that people don't know about. That moniker of being a convicted felon that goes with you everywhere. I can't get TSA PreCheck. I have to stand in all the lines.

[B]

There's too many people in TSA PreCheck anyway. Just get in the line with the rest of us pavos.

[A]

That's right. Yeah.

[B]

Just come in line with the rest of us peasants.

[A]

I remember. I remember the days when I used to be able to walk up and be like, hi, I'm Agent Shipley. Yeah, here's your LEO paperwork. I'd fill it out, and I'd be like, I'll be armed on the flight. And they're like, yes, sir. What are you sitting in 13C? Okay, we got you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And.

[B]

And then you. Yeah, we don't need to talk about how you get past the.

[A]

Nah.

[B]

Yeah, but, yeah, you Just show up on the other side of the X rays.

[A]

Yeah. I used to tell my wife, I'll see you down there. By.

[B]

Yeah, people don't know too much. Yeah, I have a couple buddies who are able to utilize that and, like, hate everything about you, especially because it's like, oh, you don't have to show up an hour early. They're like, no, not. Not really.

[A]

No. We just walk on.

[B]

Thank you for making the trip out and sharing the story, man. I really appreciate it.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

Sorry for what you went through. That sounds like absolute hell on earth for sure.

[A]

Yeah. People have been through worse. I think, you know, Brian's. Brian's dead?

[B]

Yeah, he.

[A]

He died in the line of duty, honorably. And I. I believe if he's standing up in heaven and he looks down and says, I was killed in the line of duty because my government lacked the integrity and intentionally trafficked weapons to Mexico to give to the cartel so they could. That's the disgusting thing.

[B]

It's the Trojan horse aspect of it.

[A]

It's bad that you trashed them to Mexico so their people could get killed with it. What's worse is this. You did that intentionally, knowing it was going to happen and knowing it was possible that those guns could come back and shoot our own citizens. And yet you wanted gun control so bad that you're willing to let people die to facilitate the death of people.

[B]

That Trojan horse aspect of it is the worst part for me for sure, too.

[A]

It. It's hard.

[B]

Yeah. We'll leave it at that. Thank you.

[A]

Thank you very much.

[B]

Yeah, of course.

[A]

I appreciate you. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.