#1092: Tucker, The Man And His 9/11 Documentary

Summary

Podcast Summary: Knowledge Fight #1092 – “Tucker, The Man And His 9/11 Documentary”

Date: November 10, 2025
Hosts: Dan & Jordan

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dan and Jordan dissect the first episode of Tucker Carlson’s new 5-part 9/11 conspiracy documentary. The discussion centers on Tucker’s attempt to recast 9/11 “truth” narratives nearly 25 years after the fact, possibly with the intent to usurp Alex Jones’ place as the primary 9/11 conspiracy figure on the American right. The hosts break down the cast of characters in the documentary, critically examine the evidence and claims made, identify manipulation and shoddy sourcing, and reflect on the documentary’s relevance and intent in the present political and media landscape.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Bright Spots & Opening Banter

• [01:10] Jordan and Dan kick off with their regular “bright spots,” talking about British reality TV (“Celebrity Traitors”) and the video game “Hyrule Warriors.”
• The banter sets a light, irreverent mood before the heavier analysis.

2. 9/11 Conspiracies: Then and Now

[06:34–12:58]

• Dan contextualizes the cultural climate of the early 2000s, when 9/11 conspiracy theories were deeply stigmatized:
  • “The country was trying to come together and heal, and Alex [Jones] made it his business to try to keep these wounds open...” [08:53]
• Contrast: Alex Jones went out on a limb during a highly jingoistic and hostile environment, which Dan argues took a mix of cynicism and nerve.
• Tucker Carlson: At the time, he was pro-war and anti-9/11-conspiracy on TV, making his current persona shift opportunistic and “disrespectful.”
• Dan’s thesis: Tucker's doc is a move to "replace Alex as a meaningful figure in the Trump media ecosystem,” presenting himself as the expert without the baggage. [11:25]

3. The Documentary’s Framing & Big Claims

[13:17–15:58]

• Tucker’s Opening:
  • “24 years now… politicians, the media… have all demanded that you believe the official story about 9/11… That story is a lie.” [13:18–13:55, Carlson]
• Dan’s critique: Tucker himself used to stigmatize 9/11 conspiracy theorists and is now pretending he’s always been on the other side.
  • “Tucker himself was literally the problem he's now complaining about.” [15:29, Dan]
• The lack of self-reckoning undermines the project’s sincerity.

4. “Our Guests Are Not Kooks!”

[16:48–18:08]

• Early on, Tucker insists his guests “aren’t kooks.” The hosts find this defensive and telling:
  • “It makes it a little too clear that the kind of media you make often involves talking to kooks...” [17:22, Dan]
• If you have to state you’re not bringing on cranks, that’s a red flag about sourcing.

5. Setup: The “New 9/11 Commission” & John Brennan Targeting

[18:19–19:55]

• Tucker calls for a new 9/11 investigation, alleging the official commission was a cover-up and suggesting ex-CIA chief John Brennan helped “bring the hijackers to the US.”
• Dan notes targeting Brennan aligns with the Trump ecosystem’s penchant for seeking retribution against old enemies.
  • “Right out of the gate, this feels less like a sincere fact-finding exercise and more like an attempt to come up with justifications for Trump to arrest Brennan.” [19:43, Dan]

6. Questionable Sourcing: Who Is Mark Rossini?

[20:47–28:04]

• The featured guest is ex-FBI agent Mark Rossini.
• Dan provides extensive background:
  • Rossini’s career at FBI ended in scandal—guilty to felonies for illegally accessing databases to help notorious private investigator Anthony Pellicano.
  • Later, implicated in Puerto Rican political corruption for brokering campaign donations in exchange for regulatory fixes.
• “Mark Rossini is a hell of a character for Tucker to just pretend as a bin Laden expert. He has a lot of baggage spanning decades that strongly calls his integrity into question.” [27:40, Dan]
• Hosts question Rossini’s objectivity and suitability as a key witness for such a documentary.

7. Building the Theory: The “CIA Tried to Flip 9/11 Hijackers”

[31:14–36:45]

• Rossini’s Theory: CIA, desperate for sources inside Al Qaeda, let known terrorists into the US hoping they could recruit them as informants, impeding FBI intervention.
• Dan points out this is not a classic, omnipotent “deep state did 9/11” narrative but rather a (tenuously supported) tale of law enforcement overreach and incompetence.
• Rossini’s emotional, performative delivery is critiqued:
  • “He seems very angry. And you get the feeling that he takes some of this personally in a way that calls into question his objectivity.” [36:45, Dan]
  • Memorable quote: “He didn’t beat him with a phone book. He didn’t fucking waterboard him.” [35:54, Rossini]

8. The Evidence Trail: Thin, Self-Referential, and Circular

[39:15–56:41]

• The entire “recruitment” theory hinges on speculative leaps and self-referential sources:
  • The “VVV” codename in documents is traced back to Rossini himself, in a legal declaration used in defense of a 9/11 defendant, not from an independent or official source.
    • “When you trace back this thing to the bottom, you find that the documents that Tucker is using to strengthen Mark's story are actually just other people publishing things Mark said.” [50:06, Dan]
  • Tucker never names his sources clearly, fails to disclose the circular sourcing, and passes off old, recycled info as “new.”
  • Rossini (the “confidential source”) is both the anonymous tip and the named expert—dubious journalistic practice.

9. Contradictions and Weak Conclusions

• The doc alleges the CIA used a Saudi agent (Omar Al Bayoumi) as proxy to monitor/flip hijackers, framing it as the “smoking gun.”
  • When results went sideways, the implication is the CIA (and Saudis) covered up incompetence rather than orchestrated the attacks per se.
• Dan identifies the fundamental logical flaws:
  • Proving something is possible =/= proving it happened.
  • Documentary asks the viewer to quietly accept implication in place of actual evidence.

10. Relevance, Intent & Final Impressions

[59:07–end]

• Dan questions why Tucker’s audience would care about these revelations now, positing that most who would watch already believe some version of 9/11 conspiracy.
  • “Who cares what…The CIA was trying to flip some hijackers and it went wrong? Who cares? There’s demons…” [59:07, Dan]
• Jordan speculates that Tucker may be trying to retrofit “9/11 truth” into a narrative of government fallibility rather than outright evil, thus serving changing right-wing sentiment about “deep state” narratives.
  • “These are children…The state is your daddy now.” [62:29, Jordan]
• Both conclude the doc is neither groundbreaking nor relevant, performed with poor sourcing and questionable intent:
  • “If this is the first episode, you have a wildly suspicious guest…information that you’re laundering from a different place without disclosing it…There’s no chance the other episodes will be any different.” [57:48, Dan]
  • “It’s pretty boring, hollow and it’s out of touch with what’s important right now…this feels fucking dead in the water.” [63:54, Dan]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Tucker’s opportunism and hypocrisy

“Tucker Carlson making this documentary is inappropriate because he was part of the original story. And unless this documentary includes an exploration of how he behaved during the Iraq war, then it’s worthless.”
—Dan, [15:29]

On sourcing and evidence

“If you have to start out your documentary series assuring people that the guests you’re going to interview aren’t kooks, it makes it a little too clear that the kind of media you make often involves talking to kooks…”
—Dan, [17:22]

“When you trace back this thing to the bottom, you find that the documents that Tucker is using to strengthen Mark’s story are actually just other people publishing things Mark said. But as an anonymous source.”
—Dan, [50:06]

On changing conspiracy narratives

“This does seem to be launching off in a direction that is more like, you know what 9/11 happened because of like big mistakes…That is interesting. I don’t know, that might be more interesting than the thing itself.”
—Dan, [63:13]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:10 — Bright Spots: “Celebrity Traitors” and “Hyrule Warriors”
• 06:34 — Setting the 9/11 Truther Movement’s context
• 11:12 — Tucker Carlson’s role in Trump media ecosystem
• 13:18 — Tucker’s documentary intro/stance on “the lie”
• 15:29 — Dan’s critique of Tucker’s past and present
• 18:19 — Tucker calls for new 9/11 investigation; targeting Brennan
• 20:47 — Mark Rossini’s background, legal and ethical baggage
• 31:14 — Rossini lays out theory: CIA tried to flip hijackers
• 36:45 — Dan challenges Rossini’s angry, performative style
• 39:15 — Tucker warps Richard Clarke’s CIA “plan”
• 50:06 — Self-dealing evidence cycle exposed (“VVV” sourcing)
• 59:07 — Who cares? Tucker’s “revelations” are decades late
• 63:13 — Discussion: conspiracy as bad policy, not malevolent intent

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Tone and Style Reflections

• The hosts’ tone oscillates between sharp analytical critique, exasperated humor, and sardonic asides.
• They repeatedly highlight the absurdity of Tucker’s choices and methods, and relish poking fun at the overwrought storytelling and performative outrage of sources like Rossini.
• Their language remains conversational and irreverent, but rooted in careful source analysis.

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Conclusion

This episode is a thorough, biting take-down of Tucker Carlson’s attempt to own the 9/11 truther mantle with a recycled, poorly-sourced, and poorly-timed docuseries. Dan and Jordan demonstrate how the documentary fails both as journalism and as compelling conspiracy theory, ultimately concluding that its only real innovation is softening narratives for a present-day right-wing audience with a new relationship to the state and “deep state.” The evidence is thin, the sourcing is circular, and the documentary’s relevance is found wanting.

Transcript

[Jordan]

Red alert.

[Dan]

Red alert. Red alert.

[Jordan]

Red alert. Red alert.

[Dan]

Red alert.

[Jordan]

Red alert.

[Dan]

Knowledge Fight. And. And Jordan.

[Jordan]

I am sweating.

[Dan]

Knowledgebody.com. it's time to pray.

[Jordan]

I have great respect for Knowledge Fight.

[Dan]

Knowledge Fight. I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. Knowledge Fight.

[Jordan]

Dan and George knowled. Fight.

[Dan]

Need. Need money.

[Jordan]

Andy and Kansas.

[Dan]

Andy and Andy. Stop it.

[Jordan]

Andy and Kansas. Andy and Kansas.

[Dan]

It's time to pray. Andy and Kansas, you're on the air. Thanks for holding us. Hello, Alex. I'm a first time caller. I'm a huge fan.

[Jordan]

I love your word. Knowledge Fight.

[Dan]

Knowledge fight dot com.

[Jordan]

I love you.

[Dan]

Hey everybody, welcome back to Knowledge Fight. I'm Dan.

[Jordan]

I'm Jordan.

[Dan]

Where a couple dudes like to worship at the altar of Selene and talk a little bit about Alex Jones.

[Jordan]

Oh, indeed we are.

[Dan]

Dan Jordan. Dan, Jordan.

[Jordan]

Quick question for you.

[Dan]

What's up?

[Jordan]

What's the bright spot today, buddy?

[Dan]

Why don't you go first?

[Jordan]

My bright spot is. It's a. It's a Twilight spot. A little bright, little dark. The celebrity traders just wrapped up.

[Dan]

Okay. Yeah, I've not had a chance to check that out yet. It is, but it's British celebrities, right?

[Jordan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. British celebrities. It is.

[Dan]

Celebrity with an asterisk.

[Jordan]

Listen, there's. There's a couple celebrities on the British Celebrity Traders, if you will. Stephen Fry.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Jordan]

So there's a couple.

[Dan]

Okay. Sounds like one.

[Jordan]

It's the worst season of the Traders I've ever seen. It is the worst. And because all of these people, all of the faithful, were the dumbest there's ever been the. Have you ever seen a season where the very first three Traders made it all the way to the final.

[Dan]

No, no, no, of course not. Right. Especially because usually they'll at least turn on each other.

[Jordan]

Absolutely.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

No, none of that. It was.

[Dan]

Wow.

[Jordan]

The season was only nine episodes long and I was like, that's crazy short. The greatest season of the Traders. Traders, Ireland happened just a little bit ago. 12 episodes.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Jordan]

Because you've got three in a row. They caught the traitors, then you got the recruitments. You got the whole thing. These people were so bad at this game.

[Dan]

They.

[Jordan]

They didn't even make it to 10 episodes.

[Dan]

That's rough.

[Jordan]

That is rough.

[Dan]

Ran the table, those traders.

[Jordan]

Absolutely. And then at the end you're like, oh, they've got it. They finally figured it out. There's these last few people. There's no way they can miss it. It's been Obvious. The whole fucking game shoots themselves in the foot instantaneously. And the traders, well, they did what you knew they were going to do.

[Dan]

From the start, which is turn on each other and bring it down to two to split the money. No win.

[Jordan]

Okay. Yeah. It was brutal.

[Dan]

Well, you just spoiled the season of traitors.

[Jordan]

But you knew it was going to happen. You knew it was going to happen.

[Dan]

Well, I look forward to watching that eventually.

[Jordan]

Then it'll be brutal. How about you? What's your bright spot?

[Dan]

My bright spot, I guess, is a. The video game, they just came out, the Hyrule Warriors.

[Jordan]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan]

Hyrule warriors out.

[Jordan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

That's, you know, it's a lot of fun.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Those games are deeply my shit. I don't know why. Little campaigns running around, fighting through big groups of enemies. Absolutely Zelda characters. Yeah, it's fun.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I was a little. I was a little disappointed because I started the game and for the first, like, you know, hour or so, you're like, oh, my God, Link isn't in this game. It's just Zelda. Zelda has traveled back in time to the era of the beginning of the kingdom of Hyrule.

[Jordan]

Okay.

[Dan]

And you're like, oh, shit, Link. Why would Link be here? And then a Link stand in shows. Yeah, Well, I was like, ah, there's no Link. It's a Zelda game without Link.

[Jordan]

That would be interesting.

[Dan]

But he shows up.

[Jordan]

Yeah. Well, is he wearing the hat?

[Dan]

No, he has a hood.

[Jordan]

Okay, well, that's a little bit better.

[Dan]

I think that there's a. I don't know how this game ends, and I also don't know if it's canon, but if it is canon and it ends the way I think it's going to end, there's an argument to be made that Link has been a robot this entire time, all right? And he is an eternal thing that has existed in order to protect the princess of Hyrule.

[Jordan]

All right, that would be an interesting lore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The eternal Link.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Jordan]

I mean, it would make sense.

[Dan]

So I'm enjoying the game, and we'll see if I continue to.

[Jordan]

Excellent.

[Dan]

But today, something that is not to be enjoyed. It's an episode of our podcast. All right, and we'll talk about what that is here in a second. But first, let's take a moment to say hello to some new wonks.

[Jordan]

Ooh, that's a great idea.

[Dan]

So first, DJ Lobsterman, look out for the Breaking machine. Thank you so much. You're now a policy wonk. I'm a policy wonk.

[Jordan]

Thank you very much.

[Dan]

Thank you. Next. Listen to you folks. Through three years of graduate school and currently taking my CPA exams. Thank you both for the last throughout these nutty times. Thank you so much. You're an Iowa policy wonk. I'm a policy wonk.

[Jordan]

Thank you very much.

[Dan]

And elementary, my dear Watson. We need to go full tilt boogie on this. Thank you so much. You're now a policy wonk. I'm a policy wonk.

[Jordan]

Thank you very much.

[Dan]

Thank you. And we got a technocrat at the mix, Jordan. So thank you so much to my friend Gina wrote the book on Scatman John and everyone should read it. Scatman John, the remarkable story of the world's unlikeliest pop star. Thanks. Goes out to Ezra H. Thank you so much, you and Iowa technocrat. I'm a policy wonk. 4 stars.

[Jordan]

Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant.

[Dan]

Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. Daddy Shark Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent.

[Jordan]

He's a loser. Little, little titty baby.

[Dan]

I don't want to hate black people.

[Jordan]

I renounce Jesus Christ.

[Dan]

Thank you so much.

[Jordan]

Thank you very much.

[Dan]

I will read that book.

[Jordan]

I know you will.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

Yep.

[Dan]

Got to learn everything there is to know about the Scat man from the.

[Jordan]

Reviews that I've read. I haven't finished it myself yet.

[Dan]

Have you started it? No. To be ultimately finished.

[Jordan]

Well, you know what? It's technically true. Very affecting emotionally and kind of it's like a really inspiring story.

[Dan]

So I've watched a number of interviews with him and video enough to know like sort of some of the broad strokes of his story. And yeah, it seems like an insane, like, how did this happen?

[Jordan]

I don't know.

[Dan]

So great. I'll check it out. And you should start it.

[Jordan]

I will. Any moment now.

[Dan]

So, Jordan.

[Jordan]

Yes.

[Dan]

I mentioned a while back that Tucker was putting out a five part series explaining what really happened on 9 11, which I likened to him trying to wear Alex's skin and steal his spirit. It may seem kind of trivial now, and there's a low social cost to being a conspiracy theorist, but in the early 2000s, people hated 911 conspiracy theorists. The US had suffered a giant terrorist attack, a city was grieving, and the armed forces of the country were being called up to fight in multiple foreign wars. Presumably in response to that attack. The country wasn't fully united, but you could say that there were two main sides and neither really liked conspiracy theories. Around 911 that much. There was the America Right or Wrong crowd who saw Bush as a wartime president who had responded to the attack and it was every American's duty to go along and support him in getting this mission done.

[Jordan]

That was his high approval rating, period.

[Dan]

Yep. For them it was unpatriotic to question the leadership and they demanded that we all support the troops. On the other side you had the anti war crowd who were generally college kids and old hippies, mostly from the left in libertarian circles.

[Mark Rossini]

And.

[Dan]

And for the most part, they weren't that into 911 conspiracies either. They had a solid argument against the wars, and their conviction that Bush lied to make those wars happen didn't rely on really dubious arguments that these conspiracy theorists make about the attack itself. Yeah, incorporating flimsy accusations about Bush doing 911 into their arguments weakened them. So for the most part, they stayed away from this kind of game.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

You'll often hear Alex complain that when he criticized Bush, the right wing accused him of being a commie. And the whole 911 period has a lot to do with that. Prior to this point, he'd had very little national significance, but he'd made a career that was almost fully catering to a right wing audience. He was a John Birch Society acolyte who worked on Pat Buchanan's campaigns for president, and pretty much all of his positions would be categorized as strongly conservative. I do hate to be too praising of Alex, but in his coverage of 9 11, what he did was a bold move, and it's one that could have easily backfired. The population he'd regularly drawn his audience from was in a very patriotic phase. And a lot of the Republican types of. They might punch you for saying that you thought that 911 was an inside job. Oh yeah, it was alienating to what was obviously his core demographic. But Alex on some level understood that this was his ticket. There wasn't going to be another publicly traumatic event on this scale in the United States for a long time. And if he could attach himself to it by demanding people accept his alternative version of the story, he could make his mark in this very wet cement. It truly was a different time. And although I'm certain there were crass financial considerations and Alex didn't believe most of this shit, it's important to keep in mind how hard it was to be a person like that in 2002. The country was trying to come together and heal, and Alex made it his business to try to keep these wounds open, insisting that if you let them heal, you'll never Find the true culprit, the globalists. I say all this not to pump Alex up because he's still a liar and a fraud and even was back then. But instead I say this to disrespect Tucker Carlson and the idea that he would make a 911 conspiracy documentary 24 years later and act like he's breaking new ground when it would have been an interesting, interesting position to have. Tucker was wearing bow ties on Crossfire and arguing in favor of Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was trying to be a mouthpiece for the state. So he hated the idea that people had conspiracies about 9 11. He said as much to Alex in one of their interviews that he deeply disliked Alex because he thought the conspiracies about 911 were disgusting. But now the calculus has changed entirely and there is no cost to being a 911 theorist. And it comes to Tucker to try to steal Alex's crown by making this five part 911 conspiracy series. Yeah. There are no ifs, ands or buts about one thing I think, and that is that Alex Jones is the 911 guy. He's wrong about pretty much everything and he doesn't even remember all the fake things he's proven over the years. But he was the guy who took on the risk of being the face of a deeply unpopular thing when the country wanted no part of it. If you're Tucker, who is supposedly Alex's friend, you can't make a 911 series and not have it mostly about Alex's work. Because whatever you're going to put into that documentary, he's probably already covered. If you're Tucker, you should just plug loose change and move on. Call it a day.

[Jordan]

And if he hasn't already covered it, that's you indicting him.

[Dan]

Yeah. That he did nothing.

[Jordan]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Mark Rossini]

Yep.

[Dan]

All his work and all of that risk that he took on amounted to him just being wrong.

[Jordan]

Yep.

[Dan]

I say all this and I am interested in this move on Tucker's part because I. I believe that it's part of a concerted effort to replace Alex as a meaningful figure in the Trump media ecosystem.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Alex is too embarrassing. He has too much baggage.

[Jordan]

It has to be.

[Dan]

Yeah. And so Tucker seems like he's well positioned to slide into this.

[Jordan]

Give him. He can't be the guy who predicted 911 or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but give him the he's the expert spot. And now you've got.

[Dan]

And he's doing hard work on.

[Jordan]

Yeah. And now you don't even Need Alex. You can just be like, oh, Alex predicted it, but this guy's the expert on it.

[Mark Rossini]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So I believe that putting out a documentary series about 911 in 2025 is an effort of usurpation. Yeah. Trying to steal this thing from Alex.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

But maybe, hey, maybe it's possible that Tucker broke new ground on 911 and you know, maybe has a smoking gun.

[Jordan]

If you put out like say now. Right. If I put out a, let's say like, thousand hour documentary on the Civil War, I'm coming for Ken Burns. If I put out a two hour documentary on the Civil War, I'm not coming for Ken Burns. But if I put out enough, Ken Burns is watching out. Right. Like that's.

[Dan]

Well, it's a five part series and it's. They're half hour long, so they're not. Well, you know, sure. It's not, it's not the same as a thousand, but they're late.

[Jordan]

These are all lazy people. So that is a lot of work for their benchmarks.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's definitely. There's intent. There's the intent of a thousand hours behind it.

[Jordan]

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

[Dan]

So I thought that we would watch the first episode and see what kind of feelings it evokes, see if it feels worth covering more.

[Jordan]

Okay.

[Dan]

So we're gonna jump in here at the beginning of his first episode of the we're gonna all the truth about 9 11, baby.

[Jordan]

Okay. All right.

[Tucker Carlson]

For 24 years now, politicians, the media, intel agencies in this country and abroad have all demanded that you believe the official story about 9 11. And here's what it is. They tell you. A group of Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists, many of whom were known to us intel services, somehow managed to evade capture for years as they planned the most significant and elaborate terror attack in human history. We're told that despite repeated encounters with the FBI, the CIA, local law enforcement and airport security, foreign intel organizations, the right information somehow never made it to the right people. The government failed because it just didn't have the intelligence it needed. That's the story. That story is a lie. Nearly 25 years later, the families of 3,000 civilians are still mourning the murder of their loved ones. Anyone who doubts the official narrative is cast as a kook, a criminal, a fringe conspiracy theorist, and punished. They've been blacklisted and censored and banned even as the leaders who failed to protect our country on 911 used these attacks as a pretense to expand their own powers and permanently transform the United States.

[Dan]

I don't think people particularly care what anyone thinks about 911 conspiracies. Now, people who are old enough to drink weren't even born when it happened, so there isn't a lot of heightened emotions around the subject anymore. Pete Davidson's dad was killed in the attack, and he just performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. So I think that speaks to the lowered temperature that people have about this. Yeah, maybe in the few years after the attack, people would call you a conspiracy theorist if you question things, but that was back in a time when Tucker was calling people a conspiracy theorist if they questioned things. That's a real problem with this documentary. Right from the outset, Tucker himself was literally the problem he's now complaining about. Alex was the guy taking lumps for putting out 911 conspiracy documentaries. And in that stretch where Tucker is talking about how you'd get punished for questioning things, he doesn't even flash up a picture of Alex as homage, as, like, this was the crusader.

[Jordan]

Brutal.

[Dan]

Tucker Carlson making this documentary is inappropriate because he was part of the original story. And unless this documentary includes an exploration of how he behaved during the Iraq war, then it's worthless. He can't start his show grandstanding about the poor conspiracy theorists who are stigmatized by the media when he was part of the media that specifically stigmatized those conspiracy theorists. Because unless he clears that shit up, all of the attacks that he's going to make on the media should probably apply to him, too.

[Jordan]

Yeah. If he says, I know that I was. I know that they were told to smear these people. Hell, I did it. That would make more sense. Here's clips of me doing exactly what I'm saying that people are doing. Right.

[Dan]

Because if they're all shills.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

Then it stands to reason that he was behaving the same way. He was a shill, too.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

And if he doesn't take account of that, it doesn't take responsibility for that.

[Mark Rossini]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Why would I have any reason to think what he's doing now is sincere?

[Jordan]

Oh, no, because he's not shilling now. That would be. I mean, right. In character with somebody who does. Oh, no, never mind. You're right. That's a good point.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

That's a good point. Yeah.

[Dan]

So I'm looking out for Tucker having a sort of, you know, moment.

[Jordan]

Jesus.

[Dan]

Moment.

[Jordan]

Sure, sure, sure, sure. And I know I realized something about my entire life. I'm awful.

[Dan]

We're not going to get that in the first episode, I'll tell you that for sure.

[Jordan]

Not surprising.

[Dan]

So he goes on to preface the. You know, this. This episode. And he wants you to be clear, like people I'm going to be talking to, they aren't kooks.

[Jordan]

Oh, yeah, well, that's not good speculation.

[Tucker Carlson]

All of it is true over the course of this series. Sounds like you're speculating from people who lived it. CIA officers and analysts who were there, FBI agents from the bin Laden unit, family members of the victims. None of these people are kooks. All of them have firsthand information. What they'll tell you is that what you have been told about September 11th is not true.

[Dan]

I feel like you're in sketchy territory when you have to start out your documentary series assuring people that the guests you're going to interview aren't kooks. It makes it a little too clear that the kind of media you make often involves talking to kooks and that maybe you're defensive about it.

[Jordan]

Yeah. Hey, this isn't like my regular shit is what you're actually saying, but in an. In a way that makes you sound like. Less like you're taking responsibility for how you're a liar.

[Dan]

Well, it's indicting both your own work. Yeah. And then also the work on this subject. Because, like, you're turning on. You're turning on a 911 conspiracy documentary.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

You're probably expecting you might see kooks. Right. You're turning on a Tucker product. You expect you might see kooks.

[Jordan]

Right. And this is double that.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

So you're expecting to see the kookiest and. Yeah, we're gonna deliver, I bet.

[Dan]

Mm. Yep. So one of the big things that Tucker wants and he's calling for is a new 911 Commission. A real one. One that wasn't a cover up.

[Jordan]

Great.

[Tucker Carlson]

Why are we doing this? Our purpose is in part to make the strongest possible case for a real investigation into 91125 years later, a new 911 Commission. One that is honest, one that is not guided by partisan political interests, one that is not serving foreign powers. To do this investigation, we spent many months looking into what actually happened and speaking to people who saw it. We poured over thousands of pages of documents, mostly primary sources, but also contemporaneous news reports and declassified government documents. Over the course of this investigation, we made numerous findings that shocked us, not least of which the apparent role that former CIA director John Brennan played in helping bring the 911 hijackers to the United States.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Tucker Carlson]

And the remarkable lengths the CIA went to to protect the 911 hijackers from the FBI and from domestic law enforcement.

[Dan]

So John Brennan is high on Trump's enemies list. And it's pretty clear that Trump is looking to lock some folks up.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

And Brennan is in that category for sure.

[Jordan]

Hey, listen, fuck that guy. So I'm all for it, right? Yeah.

[Dan]

But, you know, I think that there's a way to do things that's within the law and a way to do things that is. I'm jailing my enemies.

[Mark Rossini]

Sure.

[Jordan]

We're in the Wild West. Fuck that guy.

[Dan]

So right out of the gate, this feels like a less like a sincere fact finding exercise and more like an attempt to come up with justifications for Trump to arrest Brennan. But I'll wait until he lays out some more evidence to make up his mind. Sure. This is all just kind of a blow hard preamble things he's doing.

[Jordan]

I do appreciate this because this is something that is still true. Not as much as it was back then, but still true. The only thing that is not really talked about with the 911 is that maybe it's just an expected and understood consequence of the fact that America went over to a bunch of different places and killed all those people. And if you keep doing that, you should expect it to happen more.

[Dan]

Mm.

[Jordan]

That's the only thing people won't just be like, oh, well, then I guess we're done.

[Dan]

So Tucker brings up his first non kook guest.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And this is the person who's going to be the subject of the first episode.

[Jordan]

Okay.

[Tucker Carlson]

Telling the full story requires starting before the attacks, going back to something called Alec Station that was the CIA's bin Laden unit in 1999.

[Mark Rossini]

My name is Mark Rossini. I'm a former FBI agent. So from January 1999 to May of 2003, I was the FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force representative to Alex Station at CIA headquarters.

[Dan]

So this is not the first time that Mark Rossini has been interviewed about his time at Alex Station. So let's just establish that nothing that he's saying in this interview is new.

[Mark Rossini]

Okay.

[Dan]

At the risk of being accused of shooting the messenger, I feel like I should tell you a few things about Mark Rossini before he starts his story, because I think they might help you better assess his credibility.

[Jordan]

Hell yeah.

[Dan]

So Rossini was a FBI agent until 2008 when he had to retire after pleading guilty to five felony counts of criminally accessing the FBI database. Sure. This story gets a little bit messy, so strap in.

[Jordan]

I bet he's probably great with women.

[Dan]

In the 90s and early 2000. Anthony Pellicano became a big name in terms of private investigator business. He worked with politicians like Bill Clinton and celebrities like Michael Jackson, digging up dirt on people who accused them of wrongdoing. Over the years, the private investigation business started to drift into being more of a fixer kind of thing, where Pellicano would wiretap celebrities and powerful agents in Hollywood in order to gather compromising information about them.

[Jordan]

So his job was literal victim blaming.

[Dan]

Well, interesting. Hold on to that thought. He worked with a couple of lawyers, and he didn't mind doing illegal things in order to help his clients. He'd been considered very slimy for most of his career. And one of the best examples of that is in relation to Michael Jackson. Pellicano famously produced an audio tape alleged to be the father of one of the child victims, expressing that he just wanted to extort Jackson, which played a big role in hurting the credibility of accusations that were being levied against him.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

The father in question denied this tape's authenticity, but that smear had been born, and it was in everyone's head.

[Jordan]

Yep.

[Dan]

Later, Pellicano would try to remove himself from the case, claiming that he'd uncovered horrible information and that Jackson, quote, did something far worse to those young boys than molest them.

[Jordan]

Great.

[Dan]

But his actions remained, and he had already.

[Jordan]

Funny how that works.

[Dan]

So, you know, the victim blaming and.

[Jordan]

No, no, no, I take it back. I take it back. There's no. You can take it back, right?

[Dan]

Yeah, you can't just.

[Jordan]

No, you can take it back. There's no pee in the pool, man.

[Dan]

So the depths of Pellicano's shithead awfulness could take up a whole episode. So just suffice it to say that he's a big old asshole. Where he intersects with our story is that in 2008, when Mark Rossini pled guilty to five charges of illegally accessing FBI databases, he was doing it to feed information to Anthony Pellicano.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

To be clear, by this point where Rossini was interacting with him, there was zero mystery about Pellicano being a shady character. In November 2002, Pellicano had been arrested for possessing grenades and C4 after a reporter found her car vandalized with a message that just said, stop. That reporter was working on a story that involved one of Pellicano's clients, Steven Seagal. And you could put the rest of the pieces together yourself?

[Jordan]

Sure. Huh.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

So grenades and C4.

[Dan]

Mm.

[Jordan]

Just keeping them around.

[Dan]

You never know when you're gonna need them. I feel.

[Jordan]

You know what I Listen, maybe I don't understand the thread too well, but I feel like munition storage is the number one problem that all of the guys. Like, these guys face in terms of, like, how their inevitable end comes about.

[Dan]

Well, do you mean that they don't hide these things well enough?

[Jordan]

There's. Well, I mean, sure, there's the hiding, of course, and then there's the accidentally blowing themselves up. Sure, there's the. Why do you need this much? This is more like collecting at a certain. How many bullets do you need if you're only using, like, a gun instead of like a howitzer? You know what I mean? Like in like, tube thing.

[Dan]

What would you say to somebody who has a wine cellar, though? You don't need all that wine.

[Jordan]

I mean that. Well, it's a fair investment. You could maybe sell it later. There's all kinds of things.

[Dan]

That's true of C4.

[Jordan]

Are you saying that of C4? Yes, actually. That is a good point.

[Mark Rossini]

Maybe.

[Dan]

Maybe C4 does gain value over time as a good. This is a C4.

[Jordan]

Should we.

[Dan]

Good vintage.

[Jordan]

Should we invest in C4?

[Dan]

Look, we'll talk about it off air.

[Jordan]

Okay, Fair enough. I'm disinclined knowledge by an official investment bank.

[Dan]

So Mark Rossini was an FBI agent assigned to the Bin Laden unit. And he was so calm, corrupt, that he broke the law to access information to give to Anthony Pellicano. His actions could have compromised the case against Pellicano, but Rossini didn't seem to care. Fun little fact about this story. Rossini was dating actress Linda Fiorentino at some point, who had previously dated Pellicano.

[Jordan]

Jesus Christ.

[Dan]

Some might suggest that she was dating Rossini in order to get access to his FBI files on Pellicano's behalf, but this is just pure speculation. Not proven. Either way.

[Jordan]

Wild.

[Dan]

Either way, Rossini gave her the files and she gave them to Pellicano, his lawyers, which is a major part of why you don't see her in movies after Dogma.

[Mark Rossini]

How about that?

[Jordan]

Yeah. Huh.

[Dan]

So Rossini just had to retire from the FBI over this. And he got light probation and a fine. However, he wasn't done doing crimes.

[Jordan]

You know what? I find it so hard to believe that these three lettered organizations seem so lawless. It's almost like any time they break the law, they face no consequences for it. Dan.

[Dan]

Yeah, well, get ready for another story.

[Jordan]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan]

In 2022, the governor of Puerto Rico, Wanda Vasquez Garad, was arrested on charges of accepting illegal foreign donations to her campaign. In August20,25, she pled guilty. This all goes back to a Puerto Rican banker named Julio Herrera Velutini. His bank was being examined by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions, which looked like it was going to uncover some crimes. Sure. It's alleged that through some back channels, Velutini and Mark Rossini, working in some kind of an advisory role, reached out to Vasquez Garcet and offered to fund her campaign if she would replace the head of the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions with someone chosen by Veluttini when she was elected. Someone who was more friendly to his interests.

[Jordan]

So we're doing a corruption. Yes, let's start there. Hey, buddy, we're doing a corruption. You want to end? All right.

[Dan]

So everyone involved was facing some potential jail time, but one of Trump's personal lawyers, Chris Kice, got in the mix on behalf of that bank guy. Sure. So now it looks like it's all been talked down to misdemeanors and no one's going to really get into trouble.

[Jordan]

Funny how that works.

[Dan]

But at this point when they're recording this interview, most likely he's afraid of going to jail. Yes.

[Jordan]

For a long, long time.

[Dan]

It looks like he is probably going to end up in jail in Puerto Rico.

[Jordan]

Right, man, now is a good time to commit crimes.

[Dan]

Yeah, you should.

[Jordan]

Everybody should really be committing way more crimes.

[Dan]

I feel like we have a lot of examples of people getting away with some crazy shit.

[Jordan]

I mean, it's wild.

[Dan]

So my point here is that Mark Rossini is a hell of a character for Tucker to just pretend as a bin Laden expert.

[Mark Rossini]

Sure.

[Dan]

He has a lot of baggage spanning decades that strongly calls his integrity into question. He was willing to abuse the privacy of the FBI databases in order to help Anthony Pellicano's criminal racket. So forgive me if I don't think that this guy seems like a humble public servant who just wants to tell everybody the truth.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

In the same way that, like, for this to be a sincere thing, Tucker needs to unpack his own involvement in 9 11.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And if he wants to use Mark Rossini as an expert, he needs to inform the audience that he's a fraud guy and has done some fraud stuff.

[Jordan]

I mean, okay, so when you're using a witness, like whenever I'm, let's say we're in a law, a courtroom and somebody's brought up a witness and I'm cross examining this witness and it's the state's witness and this guy is really, really good. But then I find out that he spent his entire life lying to people, specifically people in courtrooms. I think that's pretty solid cross examination, you know, like, hey, you're a liar. Done. Right.

[Dan]

And it doesn't mean that someone who has done fraud stuff will always lie. Sure. That's just as bad a conclusion to come to.

[Jordan]

We're not in a weird riddle about trying to figure out who always lies.

[Dan]

No. But depriving an audience of, like, this important piece of assessing the credibility of a witness that you're talking to is dirty in terms of making a documentary generally.

[Jordan]

Here's what I would say. If you have been paid many times for the specific act of lying, then you are a professional liar. And so I no longer can trust you. Right. That's fair.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah. And you've done that to yourself. Yeah, you have. You have decided to lie. You went pro, get paid by Pellicano. That's why, like, it would be an interesting thing for this interview to be like, you're a former FBI agent, right? Why?

[Tucker Carlson]

What happened?

[Jordan]

Yeah. You doing all right? You any. Any updates you want to give us? You retired, probably with awards. Any kind of awards you want to show us about your.

[Dan]

It's entirely possible that they could have presented it as, like, he was fired as payback for spilling the beans about something about bin Laden or whatever. They could have done that, but they don't.

[Jordan]

Even then you bring attention to the fact that he was fired. And if you look up, why was this guy fired? Not gonna go.

[Dan]

Well, it does seem like an intentional choice.

[Jordan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

So Mark Rossini has a bit of story that he's gonna tell, and it has to do with, before 9, 11, there were no good sources inside Al Qaeda.

[Mark Rossini]

Okay? Before 9 11, there were no sources in Al Qaeda. None. There was a group of Pashtun caretakers, okay? They called them the Trod Pines. Trod Pints were these Pashtun people that were bin Laden's tea boys and tea gals, Right? And they were the great source of the Pakistani intel service that was feeding information from the Trot Pints to I to the isi, to the CIA about what was going on in Al Qaeda. They had all the electronic communication satellite in the world, imagery. I remember looking at images of bin Laden, you know, in his courtyard. All that. Fine. But what's in his head? What's he saying? What's he doing? These people are 10,000 miles away. They don't give a about America. I don't care about going to jail. They want to Die. How are you gonna get a source inside there?

[Dan]

So this clip begins to lay out the argument that Rossini is here to make, which is that before 911 there were no sources inside al Qaeda. So the CIA under John Brennan allowed the eventual terrorists to enter the United States and impeded the FBI's attempts to arrest them because the CIA wanted to flip them to become sources.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

This is an interesting jump off point because normally the villains in conspiracy stories will have plainly evil motivations. In this version they have a misguided but legitimate reason for their actions. They let the 911 hijackers come into the country and stop their arrest, but it wasn't because they wanted 911 to happen. In a perfect world where everything went according to plan for the bad guys here 911 wouldn't have happened. Which presumably means the Patriot act doesn't pass and we probably don't go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney just wanted inside intel on what Bin Laden was up to. They weren't trying to orchestrate a giant false flag to seize power. Right. This is weird. I don't, I. This seems incompatible with what Tucker.

[Jordan]

Well, okay, so in one situation, right, let's say we've got a conspiracy wherein there are globalists and outside extra governmental organization secretly in control of all of these things that organizes a false flag in order to get the people of the United States on board with blah blah blah blah. Right. So our course of action there, deal with those globalists.

[Mark Rossini]

Right.

[Jordan]

The CIA maybe worked outside of its brief too hard. That's not necessary. Maybe the solution is like rein it in.

[Dan]

Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jordan]

That's a very different conspiracy.

[Dan]

Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that is notable about this. This is, this is much more like trying to stay within something that sounds like real world.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

As opposed to a lot of the stuff you'll hear from like Alex.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And the conventional 911 folk.

[Jordan]

Well, the guy who wrote Legacy of Ashes, Tim Wiener, I think he also wrote a follow up book and it's all about the past 40 years of the CIA or whatever. And yeah, I would say in general it's not so much conspiracies between them that need to be worked out or like problems with secret people controlling the government as, as it is. Like if you give a lot of people unlimited amount of money and no consequences for their behavior, shit's going to get weird. You know that's going to happen.

[Dan]

It's true. Yeah, it's true. And you know, sometimes you know, I don't want to say good intentions, but, like, sure, understandable intentions can go far off track.

[Jordan]

Keep the United States people safe. Can go a long way in the wrong direction very quickly.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without oversight.

[Jordan]

Oh, boy. Why are we drugging everybody without their notes? Are we keeping people safe?

[Dan]

So he discusses how there was, you know, there's no sources. And then after the 93 attack, they get a guy who has a phone number and they have the Hata Home switchboard, which they're able to trace Al Qaeda agents from.

[Jordan]

So we got some movement.

[Dan]

Yeah, things start to come together. A little bit.

[Tucker Carlson]

Before September 11, U.S. intel services got most of their intelligence on bin Laden from what was called the Hada home switchboard in Sana, Yemen. That was a communications hub that bin Laden and his associates used to communicate with each other. They were at the time living in Yemen. The FBI gained access to this after the embassy bombings in East Africa.

[Mark Rossini]

How did we officially get the hotter home in San, Yemen? On the books? On the radar, if you will. Okay. Nairobi, 1998. August 7th. John Antef. Special Agent John Antef, greatest FBI agent ever in the FBI. Even better than me. John flies over to AF to Nairobi, and one of the survivors, one of the perpetrators who chickened out and ran and lived. Daoud Rashid Aliwali, Saudi. He gets captured by the Kenyan police. John flies over from New York, and already there have been two FBI agents interviewing Dawood. They were getting someplace, but they really weren't getting that far, right? John walks in, and first thing he does. You need some water? You want to drink? Did you. Did you eat today? Did you pray? Are you okay? Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm sorry. Just. Just relax.

[Jordan]

Just.

[Dan]

Just.

[Mark Rossini]

Just let's have a chat. He didn't beat him with a phone book. He didn't. Fucking waterboard room. He didn't pull his fingernails out. He wasn't Mr. Tough Guy like all these fucking assholes like Dick Cheney want to believe, right? They're all pieces of shit. He talked to him like a human being. Take me through the day. Talk to me. So I went to the hotel and I got my stuff ready. And did you. Did you call anybody?

[Jordan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mark Rossini]

I called this number and he wrote it down. And he gave John the number of the Hadah home in Sanaa, Yemen.

[Dan]

So I agree with Mark that torturing people is bad, and the Cheney was an asshole, but he doesn't come off as a great interview subject here. He seems very angry. And you get the feeling that he takes some of this personally in a way that calls into question his objectivity.

[Jordan]

Fuck is this guy?

[Dan]

This motherfucking piece of shit thinks he's a tough guy.

[Jordan]

What is happening?

[Dan]

Pelicano would take out his knees.

[Jordan]

Also, you're sending mixed signals. If you're like, this terrorist chickened out from doing a 9 11. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't say chickened out.

[Dan]

He chickened out. But then this FBI agent was so nice to give him a glass of water.

[Jordan]

Say he wisely did not do a terrorism.

[Dan]

This coward.

[Jordan]

What are you. What are you doing? Are you trying to goad people into terrorizing you?

[Dan]

I guess so. The shit talking and all that. It makes Mark a better and more entertaining guy to have in a sensationalized context, like if this were a reality TV series. But he seems far too emotionally performative for the documentary expert role that he's supposed to be playing.

[Jordan]

He's not fucking waterboarding.

[Dan]

Nobody, not like Janie wants to think he's that piece of shit fucking asshole.

[Jordan]

All right, so you were. So we had you in a position of power before. That's no good.

[Dan]

Linda Fiorentino is going to shoot you in the foot.

[Jordan]

Jesus Christ.

[Dan]

There's a dramatic flourish to how Mark is telling the story, but none of the information that he's adding is. Is new. It's.

[Jordan]

I mean, it's always nice to hear a solid go yourself or, you know, like that guy in a documentary, because you're like, whoa, that's not where this is supposed to be. They don't get to say that whenever it's true.

[Dan]

Sure. Yeah. Yep. Yep. But I guess he kind of also thought he was going to prison. So let it fly.

[Jordan]

I mean, it's. Everything is a lot more personal in what 25th hour is that movie?

[Dan]

So the argument is that the CIA was trying to recruit these hijackers and make them into informants.

[Jordan]

Yes.

[Dan]

And that is a theory. It is not established. It is not proven.

[Jordan]

No.

[Dan]

But they start to just treat it as if they have proven it.

[Mark Rossini]

Come on, you have the CIA then following one man and then two men all over the planet, and then eventually even to America. Right. Landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don't tell the FBI.

[Tucker Carlson]

But why would the CIA want to hide the highly relevant and potentially dangerous fact that two known Al Qaeda terrorists had just landed in California? According to a recently released court filing, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clark told government investigators that the, quote, CIA was running a false flag operation. To recruit the hijackers.

[Jordan]

When Kofer Black became the head of.

[Mark Rossini]

The counterterrorism center at CIA, he was aghast that they had no sources in Al Qaeda.

[Jordan]

So he told me, I'm going to try to get sources in Al Qaeda. I can understand them possibly saying, we need to develop sources inside Al Qaeda, al Qaeda. When we do that, we can't tell anybody about it.

[Tucker Carlson]

After Clark made that claim publicly, he received an angry call from former director of the CIA George Tenet, who did not deny the allegations made by Mr. Clark, end quote. But when he reached out to Tenet, his spokesperson denied that the CIA was recruiting hijackers, calling it false rumors and saying, quote, that's categorically not true.

[Dan]

So it's important to pay attention to the way that information is used by people like Tucker and notice the little tweaks that they make in order to push their narratives. In this case, Tucker is setting up his clip of Richard Clark and he says that Clark revealed that the CIA was engaged in a false flag to recruit these hijackers.

[Jordan]

He said that.

[Dan]

Then he plays the clip of Clark. That does not say that.

[Jordan]

Wow.

[Dan]

But instead is Clark saying that he could understand the intelligence folks trying to secretly turn the future hijackers into informants. He wasn't saying that the CIA was doing this, but he understood how it was possible.

[Jordan]

Hypothetically, I think that's a good idea. So jump to conclusions. It is what happened.

[Dan]

Yeah. One of the conspiracy theorists main tricks is equating proving that something is possible with proving that it's true. Richard Clarke saying that it's possible that the CIA was trying to recruit the hijackers as informants is not the same thing as him saying that is what happened. But Tucker knows that to his audience it is the same.

[Jordan]

Oh yeah.

[Dan]

So he treats it as the same thing.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

He's like, I'm showing you evidence of X and he's just showing you why.

[Jordan]

It's. It is truly amazing, I think, how quickly human beings have taken implication as red. Like is just if it's said in a documentary with this kind of tone of voice over it, well, then it must be true. Has to be, you know, like, oh shit, it doesn't matter if he even said, I say this is happening. It's like they might have done that, but it's in a documentary so you know it's true. He just can't say it's true. Right. Like that's the thought process now.

[Dan]

Yeah, I guess it's. Well, I mean, there's a Code. Documentary and code.

[Jordan]

Yeah, there is a code.

[Dan]

Yeah. So Mark Rossini, his, like, his piece of this that is like, where he personally intersects with the story is that while he was working at the Alex station, he and another FBI agent, they filed a report to a CIA analyst that had to do with these two hijackers that went to Malaysia, that went to Thailand, and then came to the United States.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

And he was told by the CIA analyst, this isn't FBI matter. You know, he's told like, this isn't. We're not dealing with this.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

Or whatever.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

So that's his personal piece of this.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

He was told, shut up.

[Jordan]

That could just be a regular. Like, this actually isn't your job.

[Dan]

Yeah, it could be. It could be. And I think that you have to assess it through the lens of who Marc Rossini is also. He's telling this story. His interpretation might not be accurate. He seems angry.

[Jordan]

You can't be on this job because you are an untrustworthy person. We've caught you many times. And caught is.

[Dan]

No, this is before all those problems.

[Jordan]

Right, right, right. But. But, you know, he didn't just start doing those things.

[Dan]

Probably not.

[Jordan]

We knew you were shady.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

You can't work on this because you'll tell somebody.

[Dan]

So he had that experience and he's talked about that a lot, like, going back years. This is not like the first time. Like, Tucker's interview didn't break new ground in terms of this guy's story.

[Jordan]

Right, right.

[Dan]

But it's, it's, it's treated as evidence that the CIA didn't want the FBI mucking around because they're trying to flip these guys.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

And that was their delusional plan that they were. They were trying to do.

[Mark Rossini]

CIA had this delusional grand plan. So the CIA, with their information that they had from this, the Hotter house, and their own psychological analysis of everybody in that team, they figured the best way is maybe to recruit somebody who came over from Malaysia. Khalila Mihar and now Afar Hazmi. We kept the FBI at bay because he told Marcasini and Doug Miller to shut the fuck up. So let's just try to get inside.

[Jordan]

Is that what they said, Doug? What did they actually say?

[Mark Rossini]

What went wrong? That was the grand lie, the grand risk, the grand delusion. You had a duty to protect Americans and you failed because of your fucking fantastical delusion that you could recruit somebody inside the cell.

[Tucker Carlson]

The official 911 report does not address the CIA's plan to recruit the hijackers. It's not even mentioned. It's possible this is because The CIA blocked 911 Commission investigators from talking to the agents who participated in the plot. Amazingly, the CIA's Director of Operations kept the CAA operative attempting to recruit the hijackers referred to as VVV in the documents, away from the Commission's investigators. The consequence of this, the commission's explanation for this story is that the CIA made an honest mistake. The actual language in the report says the CIA played quote zone defense and the FBI had a man to man approach to counterterrorism.

[Dan]

So none of this is new information and it also doesn't prove anything. Yeah, Mark Rossini can aggressively assert all this stuff, but he can't prove that the CIA was trying to recruit the hijackers. Which is why the FBI and CIA were bad at sharing information before 9 11. He can make a compelling argument that it's possible that this happened. But none of this actually proves anything concrete. Tucker and Rossini are now just treating the theory that the CIA was trying to recruit the hijackers as a proven thing. And the fact that the 911 report didn't cover it is proof of a cover up. They weren't allowed to talk to the person who was doing the recruitment. Which definitively shows that there was a recruitment plan. If there was somebody, right, the CIA named VVV who was involved in recruiting the hijackers, VVV the recruiter, then this is done. The conspiracy is proven.

[Jordan]

Easy.

[Dan]

So the 911 Commission Report doesn't mention anyone named VVV and Tucker is saying that this is a name that's used in the documents. The documents says the documents.

[Jordan]

Big, big quotation marks around that.

[Dan]

He doesn't mention which documents he means because he wants the viewer to just assume that this is 911 Commission investigation.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

But it's not. The name VVV comes from a 2021 declaration made by a guy named Donald C. Canestraro, an investigator with the military commission's defense organization. This declaration was not a work product of the military, but it's more like a brief that was filed in the case of an accused 911 plotter who was gonna go on trial named Amar Al Baluchi. Al Baluchi was arrested after 911 and sent to Guantanamo Bay where he's been tortured and held for a long time and is part of strategy is lawyers are arguing that he shouldn't be executed because there was Saudi government involvement in the plotting of 911 that has gone unpunished.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

The argument that this declaration makes is that the CIA was seeking to get sources within Al Qaeda and knew that the FBI wouldn't cooperate because the CIA isn't allowed to operate in actions inside the United States. They recruited Saudi government agents, specifically one man named Omar Al Bayoumi, to collaborate on trying to flip the two hijackers that Mark Rossini mentions going to Malaysia.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

Things went bad, the recruitment didn't work, and then the COVID up was on. That's the argument that's largely put forth in this declaration that was used by the defense lawyers for an alleged 911 plotter.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

The code name VVV is used in the declaration to describe a character who's brought up by one of the confidential sources that can estraro spoke to when compiling this report. The Source is named CS3 and it's very clearly Mark Rossini. The source tells the exact same story that Mark is telling in this video with Tucker down to like him and another FBI agent.

[Jordan]

Funny how that works.

[Dan]

Yeah, exactly the same.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

CS3 brings up a CIA analyst who the report decides to call VVV who tells CS3 not to distribute the report that he and his colleague at the FBI had written up in this interview with Tucker. Mark has already revealed this story. He's told this story and revealed who VVV is.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

It's someone named Michael Ann Casey who was a CIA analyst who told him shut down.

[Jordan]

Right, right, right.

[Dan]

So for Tucker to not be able to figure out who VVV is when it's very, very, very oh, three Vs. Hey. Very, very, very clear.

[Jordan]

Like it. I like it.

[Dan]

It's. It's a little strange almost.

[Jordan]

Almost like, I mean, if. If I was one of the people consuming this documentary and I had just been privy to that information, I would think why These people are covering something up.

[Dan]

They're. They're either refusing to pursue some very clear things.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Or they're hiding the ball. It's one of the two.

[Jordan]

And which is what you're accusing the CIA and the FBI of doing. Exactly. You're doing the thing that you're saying they're doing identically.

[Dan]

And that's not to say that the CIA didn't. It means that you're doing a bad job with whatever you're doing.

[Jordan]

Listen, that's the problem with the fucking CIA. Did the CIA do this? You don't know. But if they, you go like, oh, they fucked with jfk. Well, yeah. Rfk. Well, yeah, they did that. That. Well, yeah, they did all that stuff, but you don't know if they did this. Shit, you just can say it.

[Dan]

Yeah. And you have done an okay job of, I guess, saying that something is possible.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

But again, it does not prove.

[Jordan]

Well, if they did, I ran Contra, then they. Yes, I understand, but that doesn't mean they did this. Yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

Someone being cap. Capable of murder doesn't show that they did murder.

[Jordan]

Yeah, they're fucked up and they shouldn't exist. That's not your angle though. Your angle is like they're evil. Which is.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So the evidence that shows that the CIA kept Casey or VVV from testifying to the 911 Commission comes from that declaration, from words that are attributed to CS3, who is Mark Rossini.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

So Tucker, when He says that VVV was kept away from the 911 Commission, it is just him citing a document, is citing the guy he's interviewing.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So quote, CS3 stated that he or she overheard one senior CIA official, Director of Operations James Pavitt telling CIA Director George Tenet that he was glad we kept CIA analyst VVV from 911 Commission investigators. So it's something that Mark, under the guise of CSV or CS3.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

Told the guy making this declaration.

[Jordan]

Right. It's nice. It's like, it's like an escalated Fox News, you know, like in the morning we're reporting on this and the evening is like people are saying all kinds of shit.

[Dan]

It's information, self dealing.

[Jordan]

Yep.

[Dan]

So when you trace back this thing to the bottom, you find that the documents that Tucker is using to strengthen Mark's story are actually just other people publishing things Mark said. But as an anonymous source, Tucker likely doesn't point this out that he's pulling all of this stuff from the Canistraro declaration because if he did, he wouldn't be able to play these fun games with the VVV stuff. Yeah, he should already know who that is. If he's done all the work that he's claimed he's done on this, then.

[Jordan]

And this shouldn't be, you know, he should have really firsthand kind of information about this, considering this is the exact type of shit they did to justify moving into Iraq. He loved that they had, they had the fake guy that lied and then they just put him under a bunch of different names and they're like, well, everybody's saying it now. Crazy.

[Dan]

Maybe that'll be one of the other episodes of his documentary.

[Jordan]

It was us. I did it. It was me.

[Dan]

So the CIA was trying to get these hijackers to become informants.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

And in order to. Because like they're not going to listen to American CIA agents.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

Get Saudi agents like Al Bayoumi in order to, to actually to flip them.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

Which is what we lay out here.

[Mark Rossini]

The CIA utilized the Saudis in the form of Omar Abayoumi to spy for them and to gather intelligence.

[Tucker Carlson]

Before 911 the CIA was, was forbidden from engaging in domestic spying. They used the Saudi intelligence as a workaround.

[Mark Rossini]

We'll rely upon the Saudi GID General Intelligence Directorate, their version of the CIA via Prince Bandar, via their man Omar Abayoumi to keep us informed as to the activity of these terrorists.

[Tucker Carlson]

Bayoumi's notebook, which was uncovered when British law enforcement raided his home in the uk contained a drawing of an airplane and mathematical calculations related to flying it. The 911 Commission investigators never saw this. At the time, Al Bayoumi had a no show job at a Saudi aviation contractor called Avco. The company's employees say he was one of roughly 50 ghost employees working there at the time. Taking the paycheck but never coming to work. According to declassified government documents, an investigator from the 911 Commission said Al Bayoumi was receiving substantial sums of money from the Saudi Embassy in Washington prior to the 911 attacks. That the money was being funneled from accounts at Riggs bank in Georgetown belonging to Haifa Bin Faisal, the wife of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 911 hijackers, the CIA gave itself cover. If things went wrong, they could push a narrative that blamed the Saudi government for the attacks, which is what they did.

[Dan]

So most of this stuff is coming from that same declaration.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

The no show jobs at Urkhan and Avco, the Riggs bank stuff, that's all in this declaration.

[Jordan]

Sure.

[Dan]

Tucker's basically just covering that declaration and not attributing it properly while using one of the confidential sources from that report as a guest on this show. This is not good work. Yeah, it's sloppy all over the place. Also, the US Government did not end up blaming Saudi Arabia for the attack.

[Jordan]

No. They kind of went hard the other direction.

[Dan]

Yeah. I don't know what, I don't know how Tucker can get away with saying they did this in order to be able to blame Saudi Arabia.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And they did.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

How can he say that? That's crazy.

[Jordan]

I don't, I don't like whenever so much is built on just on like rules that are only occasionally enforced, like especially in the central. In like the circular logic that they exist within. Here's why the CIA can't do that because they can't work on US soil. Right. But like 15 of your other conspiracies involve them working on US soil. So. Yeah, that should be established as not a reason.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

Right.

[Dan]

I think that in this case you have the added thing of like, well, these guys are Islamic terrorists. They probably would not respond to who is not also. Absolutely. Of the Muslim.

[Jordan]

Whatever you like.

[Dan]

Yeah. So, like, I think that you could. You could make an argument for why it's not just the CIA rule.

[Mark Rossini]

For sure.

[Dan]

But it is. That is definitely appealed to.

[Jordan]

But that's what I'm saying is like there are all of these things that are then used as like house of cards, you know, and it's like, I understand why you're doing that. And it does seem reasonable if we're not in your world. Right. You know, if we're having a regular ass conversation with people. Yeah. That's different. But if you're in this documentary using it, that means that you're grasping at bullshit.

[Dan]

Yeah. You're trying. It's all behavior that's meant to proceed to a conclusion that you've already determined as opposed to letting the evidence guide you wherever it may go.

[Jordan]

And like preemptively arguing with the viewer that kind of. Before you ask, I'm providing this information is cutting off me asking for something and then asking another question about the information you've given me. You know, it's. It's when there's a ball rolling of questions that you're trying to cut off.

[Dan]

Yeah. And I think that part of the reason is because it would like any kind of momentum on the ball in terms of this.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Would make Tucker look pretty bad.

[Mark Rossini]

Yep.

[Dan]

It doesn't look good. The over reliance on stuff from this declaration, the not explaining that this is something that was made as a. Like a. Something to be put into the defense for one of the 911 terrorists, alleged plotters, as it were. The not disclosing that the guest you have is one of the confidential sources for that declaration. A lot of the information that you're reporting as truth comes from unfounded, unproven things that he has said.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

It's just sloppy as shit.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

The fact that he worked with Anthony Pellicado.

[Jordan]

If you are a confidential source, you can't then become a public source without also revealing that you were a confidential source.

[Dan]

Especially in the same piece.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

You know.

[Jordan]

Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

[Dan]

It's a mess.

[Jordan]

That's dumb.

[Dan]

So Tucker closes this thing up. I think he's proven his point that obviously 911 report sucks and is a lie.

[Tucker Carlson]

The truth is the official 911 Commission Report sold to the American public and the world for decades as the definitive account of what happened that day is a lie.

[Mark Rossini]

911 commission is a cover up.

[Tucker Carlson]

But how did the Bush administration manage to hijack what was sold as an independent commission? And what exactly were they trying to hide? We'll reveal what we found in the next episode.

[Dan]

I don't think I'm interested. You know, it's.

[Jordan]

What could you possibly have found?

[Dan]

Smoking guns all over the place, man.

[Jordan]

How could you have found a smoking gun without your first episode being like, oh, we fixed it. We figured it out.

[Dan]

Yeah. If this is the first episode, you have a wildly suspicious guest. You have information that you're laundering from a different place without disclosing it. You have a lot of old information being reported as if it's new. You have conclusions that aren't earned, being jumped to. I really just don't think that there's any chance that episode 2, 3, 4 or 5 is going to be any different. No, you, there's no. You start with a, with a. If you're, if you're a performer, sure. You have a strong opener. Sure.

[Mark Rossini]

That's just.

[Jordan]

No, no. I was actually going to go into the same spot with like, this guy. Can't be your first episode. He's too big. He's too big for your first episode. You're doing that because you're front loading bombast because you're afraid people are bored already.

[Dan]

I think it's possible.

[Jordan]

Right?

[Dan]

Yeah. I mean, this piece of shit motherfucker. Right.

[Jordan]

Right. What is this guy doing? You're. I'm a former FBI agent. All right, so you're reliable. This motherfucker is a coward for not blowing up the Twin Towers. I'm sorry. Yeah, but that's your pitch.

[Dan]

Yeah. He's large. He's a. He's a. He's a lot of. A lot of personality.

[Jordan]

Too much.

[Tucker Carlson]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I just, I, I think this sucks. And I also think that there's another issue that, that I experienced while preparing this.

[Mark Rossini]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And that is I felt like, who cares what In Tucker's audience. Why would they care about. The CIA was trying to flip some hijackers and it went wrong.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Who cares? There's demons like who. Like this is 20 something years ago and Trump has taken over the government.

[Mark Rossini]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Whatever problems that you had with, like Paul Wolfowitz or, or Cheney, whatever. Who cares? That's. That is done that. Right.

[Jordan]

I mean, I. Does anybody before you made this. Does anybody in the audience wholly believe that 911 wasn't an inside job?

[Dan]

Probably not.

[Jordan]

Right. Like in some form or fashion, and I think that was probably true of more people than anybody wanted to admit, is that after 911 in some form or fashion, everybody was like, well, they're not telling us the full truth. That's just the. That's just the reality of it.

[Dan]

Yeah. And that umbrella can contain a lot of different things.

[Jordan]

Somebody might just be hiding the fact that they were kind of an asshole or kind of an idiot or covering up that they fucked up, you know.

[Dan]

Profited in some way that they feel guilty about. That doesn't mean that they planned it or whatever. But yeah, there's all kinds of things.

[Jordan]

Everything went wrong because the Twin Towers fell.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

That was where everything went wrong.

[Dan]

And. And like, I think that beyond just like, how many people in Tucker's audience aren't the choir being preached to. Right. That's one. One element of it. And then the other is like the audience that he's been trying to attract.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

With this like, religious fundamentalism and demons and anti Semitism and all this shit. Like, are they going to care at all? Unless you say it was the Jews.

[Jordan]

I have a question for you. All right. And I'll throw this out as a possibility. Okay. If we're starting from the premise of the initial motivation for this whole conspiracy is the government is trying to keep you safe. These people are in good faith attempting to create sources within all of the terrorism groups in the world, presumably well.

[Dan]

Intentioned, misguided, poorly executed law enforcement.

[Jordan]

Now, if your audience is already of the mind that the government was in on it purposefully.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Jordan]

To harm people.

[Dan]

It does almost make this seem like you're covering.

[Jordan]

Right. Right now we're in a time where the people that truck Tucker wants or that Tucker's audience, Tucker wants them to trust the government as opposed to distrust the government as a whole. So are we actually talking about Tucker not just not trying to remove or wear Alex's skin, but to suck out every meaningful bit of it and turn it into 9 11. Conspiracy theories are actually about how the government is trying really hard and the people in the past were bad guys.

[Dan]

Hmm. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, it definitely, you know, I don't. I don't know, but it is an interesting thought. You know, like, this is coming from a place of like, far more belief in the state.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Than the conspiracy theories of 20 years.

[Jordan]

The state is your daddy now.

[Dan]

Yeah. Whereas Alex would yell about democide.

[Jordan]

Exactly.

[Dan]

Like how the state is responsible for more death than anything ever.

[Jordan]

Right, right, right. So this, this now is the new 911 where daddy is trying to keep you safe. But you know what? Daddy makes mistakes. Don't get too mad.

[Dan]

Right. And maybe uncle is weird.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Uncle was. Uncle John Brennan was off on a. You know, the enemies of our current dad who were around back then.

[Jordan]

Right. Absolutely.

[Dan]

They did bad stuff. Right.

[Jordan]

Oh my God. We're. These are children.

[Dan]

Yeah. I do think that, you know, without like going into all the other episodes.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Like this does seem to be launching off in a direction that is more like, you know what 911 happened because of like big mistakes.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

But mistakes.

[Jordan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody was trying to hurt you.

[Dan]

And then the COVID up, except for.

[Jordan]

The terrorists of course, and all brown people.

[Dan]

The COVID up then is just covering up that we could have stopped it if we weren't singularly focused on trying to get informants. Yeah. We had a bad law enforcement strategy.

[Jordan]

Yep.

[Dan]

Yeah. That is interesting. I don't know. That might be more interesting than the thing itself.

[Jordan]

Yeah. I mean I probably projecting that theory onto the making of it is far more interesting than them going like, let's just do what Alex did.

[Dan]

Yeah. And it's not even what Alex did because it's pretty boring, hollow and it's out of touch with what's important right now.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Like this could not be more irrelevant. I feel like, like I don't know if like him interviewing Nick Fuentes after these came out or like Chaney dying. I don't know what makes it irrelevant, but this feels fucking dead in the water.

[Jordan]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Like he did this five part series and I don't think anyone cares.

[Jordan]

I mean. Yeah.

[Tucker Carlson]

I don't know.

[Jordan]

I. I would say that probably if, if you were ever going to find the linchpin of our era, it would be 911 and it's so what has happened due to it. The, the sequence of events is so irreparable and mind boggling that it's like if in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones was just run over by that ball and then the movie ended.

[Dan]

Mm.

[Jordan]

Like that would just be it. Like that's how huge this is.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now here we are.

[Jordan]

Yep.

[Dan]

Anyway, I don't think I'm gonna watch the rest of these and I don't think we're talk about him because he gives a shit.

[Jordan]

That's fair.

[Dan]

But we will get back to Alex and see what he's up to without his watches.

[Jordan]

I hope on his episode he says something about how he misses his watches. He misses two very specific.

[Dan]

Holy shit. I did google them and they're worth a bit more than I thought they were. So I feel very uncomfortable now. But hey, we'll be back and check in on his watchless ass. But until then, we have a website.

[Jordan]

Indeed we do. It's not right. Dot com.

[Dan]

Yep, we'll be back. But until then. I'm Neo. I'm Leo. I'm DZX Clark. I am the mysterious Woo.

[Jordan]

And now, here comes the sex robots.

[Dan]

Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. Thanks for holding.

[Jordan]

Hello, Alex. I'm a first time caller. I'm a huge fan. I love your work.

[Dan]

I love you.