Fmr FBI Sniper Christopher Whitcomb: The Truth Behind the Idaho Murders - Plus Much More

Summary

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Pod Force One – Episode Summary

Episode: Fmr FBI Sniper Christopher Whitcomb: The Truth Behind the Idaho Murders – Plus Much More
Host: Miranda Devine (New York Post)
Guest: Christopher Whitcomb, ex-FBI Hostage Rescue Team, author of Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for the Truth Behind the Idaho Murders
Date: July 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the Idaho student murders with Christopher Whitcomb, former FBI Hostage Rescue Team sniper and author of the investigative book Broken Plea. Whitcomb raises probing questions about the case against Bryan Kohberger, highlighting what remains unexplained due to the absence of a trial. He and host Miranda Devine examine gaps in evidence, the forensic process, and broader failings in the justice system. The conversation also explores Whitcomb’s career at the FBI, including his direct involvement in historic events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and reflects on the evolution and public perception of federal law enforcement in America.

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Key Discussions & Insights

1. The Idaho Murders Case: Why So Many Unanswered Questions?

• Not Open-And-Shut: Whitcomb explains he initially thought the case was resolved with Kohberger's guilty plea but later discovered significant gaps (01:10–02:42).
• Loss of Public Understanding: The guilty plea ended hopes of learning motive, means, detailed evidence, or weapon whereabouts. "He did not allocate or did not explain anything at the change of plea hearing. And when that happened, we lost all hope of knowing about his motive..." (01:55–02:30).
• Implausibility of Kohberger Acting Alone: Whitcomb highlights the challenge of one man killing four active young people within five minutes and disappearing without a trace (03:34–04:53).

2. Troubling Evidence & Forensic Gaps

• Unidentified Hair in Victim's Hand: Ethan, one victim, was found with long, reddish-brown hair in his hand that did not belong to Kohberger or any other victim. This hair was not initially collected or tested for DNA (09:49–11:31).
  • "When Ethan died in bed, he had human hair... They found it to be about 6 inches in length and that it was dark blond, light brown with reddish tint. Brian Coburger's hair doesn't fit any of those characteristics." (09:49–10:45)
  • "That particular hair was not tested for DNA." (11:31)
• Knife Sheath Chain of Custody: The main physical evidence—Kohberger’s DNA on a knife sheath—suffered from questionable chain-of-custody documentation, leading to possible defense challenges if the case had gone to trial (12:05–14:23).

3. Theories and Conjectures

• No Personal Theory, Only Questions: Whitcomb asserts his book isn’t about making theories but about presenting unresolved questions for the public to consider (05:42–07:08; 17:40–18:50).
• Possibility of Accomplices: Strongly questions the idea of a single perpetrator given forensic oddities and the physical challenges of the crime. "I think it’s very, very difficult to understand many aspects of this crime with one person." (35:01–35:55)

4. The Role of Justice and Public Inquiry

• Is Justice Served Without Truth? Both Devine and Whitcomb stress the inadequacy of the plea for closure—especially for victim families—and the risk of unanswered questions spawning conspiracy theories (08:09–08:38; 23:59–24:40).
• Advocating for a Coronial Inquest: Miranda introduces the Australian tradition of a coronial inquest as a potential model for U.S. justice to provide post-trial public accountability and factual explanation, which Whitcomb strongly supports (24:40–27:58).
  • "If we could do this inquest ... I think it would be a huge move forward collectively as a culture." (26:31–27:58)

5. Forensic Mysteries and Mistakes

• Unusual Blood Evidence: Whitcomb describes diluted blood in the house’s hallways—unlike blood at the two bedroom scenes—and suggests possible post-crime cleanup or altered crime scene (29:22–32:10).
  • "The prosecution’s own analyst determined that blood was, quote, unquote, diluted with an unknown substance, never identified." (29:22)
  • "I think there's compelling evidence that somebody cleaned up, altered the crime scene..." (32:25–33:03)

6. The Broader Context: FBI’s Historic Actions & Cultural Impact

• First-Hand Account: Ruby Ridge & Waco: Whitcomb details his direct involvement, explaining decision-making under stress and the complexity of federal response and leadership, which contributed to public mistrust (42:02–47:46).
• Rules of Engagement Controversy: Unique, more permissive rules at Ruby Ridge led to tragic outcomes, a deviation from standard FBI protocols. Whitcomb reflects on the moral burden and the need for transparent, consistent guidelines (64:32–66:27).
• Transformation of the FBI: Whitcomb notes the post-9/11 shift from law enforcement to intelligence and increasing politicization, with major structural and cultural changes (67:17–69:50).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Idaho Case’s Gaps

"He did not allocate or did not explain anything at the change of plea hearing. And when that happened, we lost all hope of knowing about his motive, his means, the mechanism of the crimes, the location or even the description of the murder weapons."
— Chris Whitcomb (01:55)

"The killer in this case, Brian Coburger, was. We know that he was soaked in blood because he tracked it around the house. That's unequivocal…somehow that blood...was found nowhere on the floors on the second floor...once he left through the kitchen...not found anywhere outside."
— Chris Whitcomb (15:06)

On Unresolved Evidence

"When Ethan died in bed, he had human hair…they found it to be about 6 inches in length and that it was dark blond, light brown with reddish tint. Brian Coburger's hair doesn't fit any of those characteristics."
— Chris Whitcomb (09:49)

"That particular hair was not tested for DNA."
— Chris Whitcomb (11:31)

On Justice and Inquiry

"I think the justice system requires inquiry. We're all potential jurors, we're all investigative in a certain sense."
— Chris Whitcomb (22:30)

"If this had gone to trial, this book would not exist.... When it did not go to trial, in my opinion, we could not let this be buried and go away. These questions are compelling, and I wanted to…ask the questions."
— Chris Whitcomb (18:40)

On Ruby Ridge & Waco

"Nietzsche wrote, men who fight monsters have to be careful that they don't become monsters themselves...somehow this guy ends up with a rifle with a scope on it on a mountaintop in Ruby Ridge. Nobody is going to convince me that I was a robot for the machine. I was a free-thinking, well-educated..."
— Chris Whitcomb (55:36)

"If I shoot him now, everybody comes out. It's over. There's 86 people in that building. David Koresh dies. They're all going to come out. The kids are going to be fine...But you can't do that in civilian law enforcement. If I had pulled the trigger, I probably would have gone to jail."
— Chris Whitcomb (73:35–74:30)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• The Idaho Murders Overview: 00:00–04:53
• Gaps in Evidence, No Trial: 04:53–07:08
• Implausibility of Single Perpetrator: 03:34, 05:42–07:08, 35:01
• Uncollected Hair Evidence: 09:49–11:31
• Knife Sheath Chain of Custody: 12:05–14:23
• Forensic Inconsistencies (Blood): 29:22–33:03
• Justice and Inquest Discussion: 24:40–28:58
• Ruby Ridge & Rules of Engagement: 47:08–66:27
• Waco First-Person Account: 70:54–75:50
• Reflections on Public Mistrust & FBI Transformation: 67:17–69:50

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Further Topics Explored

The Making of a Lawman-Author

• Whitcomb’s unusual career path: ski racer, reporter, Capitol Hill speechwriter, to FBI Hostage Rescue Team, to author (37:37–41:42).
• Philosophical outlook: On being both a literary type and a “force multiplier”; on moral obligations of those with power (55:36–57:48; 79:00–80:19).

Reflections on American Societal Change

• How historic FBI actions seeded mistrust and deepened national division, reverberating through current politics and legal controversies (45:49–52:18).
• The importance of transparency, honest inquiry, and learning from mistakes in American public life and institutions (76:08–80:19).

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Final Takeaways

• Whitcomb’s investigation and book challenge the received narrative on the Idaho murders, exposing troubling gaps left by a truncated justice process.
• The conversation highlights the essential need for public scrutiny and transparency in high-profile crimes to restore public trust, prevent conspiracy theories, and serve victims’ families.
• Whitcomb’s lived history in pivotal federal law enforcement actions brings unique insight into institutional failings and the vital role of accountability—both for individuals and for government.

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For more details, read or listen to the full conversation, and check out Christopher Whitcomb’s book, Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for the Truth Behind the Idaho Murders.

Transcript

[Chris Whitcomb]

It's a very complex case. It's not open and shut. I swore an oath on the Constitution to protect the Constitution of the United States at the risk of my own life. They tell you how to use a gun. They tell you when you cannot use a gun. That rules a deadly force. They never ever tell you what's going to happen if you do.

[Miranda]

Welcome to Pod Force One. And today we're joined by Chris Whitcomb, who is the author of a new book called Broken Plea, the Explorer, Explosive Search for the truth behind the Idaho Murders. He also is a former member of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, involved in a couple of pretty controversial rescues and hostage situations. So we'll talk about that and lots more. Thanks for joining us, Chris.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Hi, Miranda. Nice to meet you. Nice to join you.

[Miranda]

You too. And I always like meeting a former FBI agent, especially one like you, who was really in the thick of things, has turned author and successful author. And I'm interested to know this book particularly grabbed my fancy. My agent actually pointed me to it and said it was explosive research that you've done and it's an open and shut case. I thought Bryan Kohlberger was found guilty, took a guilty plea, that's it. He's in jail for the rest of his life. Why did you start thinking that there was something odd about it?

[Chris Whitcomb]

I agree with you. I thought it was an open and shut case. I knew almost nothing about this case until shortly before the trial and then really learned most about this case after the plea agreement. I thought the same thing. Working in law enforcement as I had. I looked at the evidence that I saw, I listened to the judge. Everything seemed completely normal. I really didn't pay any attention. He pled guilty. And then everything changed. Friends of mine in law enforcement who had access to various parts of the information reached out to me to try and explain how when Brian Kohberger pled guilty, many, many things people wanted to know about the case went away. He's going to prison. He did not allocate or did not explain anything at the change of plea hearing. And when that happened, we lost all hope of knowing about his motive, his means, the mechanism of the crimes, the location or even the description of the murder weapons. And now, almost a year ago, I think those things are very compelling. It's a very complex case. It's not open and shut.

[Miranda]

No. I think we all thought it was rather peculiar that they just went straight to the plea deal because this was such a high profile case, because the parents of those young victims wanted to get some closure in court. They wanted to know why did he do it. He never even said anything to the court about his motive. He just seemed to sit there smirking the whole time. It was such a unfathomable case that this one man could go into that multi floor building and managed to kill five young people, including a young man, a strong young man, and they were all pretty active kids and he wasn't a muscle man. So how did that happen?

[Chris Whitcomb]

You know, that's one of the first questions I asked Marin. It's a great question many people have asked ever since. All we know, and I don't want to talk in legal terms, but we all stipulate unequivocally that Bryan Kohberger pled guilty to four counts of murder and one count of burglary, that he accepted life in prison without the possibility of parole and waived a lot of his appeals. So we all know that happened. The next question, as you just said, is how? Police in their own investigation and prosecution, in a change of plea hearing, when they reviewed the evidence, they place the time frame somewhere around five minutes, five minutes or less, for various reasons. So you ask those questions. He went into the house, he went to the third floor, he found two women in bed, committed two horrific murders, went downstairs, went to another part of the house, committed two more horrific murders, somehow got back to his car, drove his car around, and that's what we see in a 11:12 video as a white Hyundai Elantra speeds away. So the timeline, depending on what the prosecution says at any given time during the course of this, is probably somewhere of less than five minutes, maybe less than four minutes. And that's, that's, that's pretty hard to, it's pretty hard to understand.

[Miranda]

And I guess because there was no trial, there was never any opportunity for the defense really to say, well, this is implausible. And the prosecution was comfortable that they had their man. But I think the theory that you put forward, and I misspoke before it was four people, of course, there was another girl in the house who sort of opened her door and peeked out and heard some noise and went back to bed. So it could have been worse. But again, what, what is it that that made people, made the prosecution so certain that there wasn't another person involved? And is that one of your theories?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Great question. I, I, I know this is odd to say because it's a 430 page book. I spent six months researching it. I don't have a theory, to be honest with you. All I do Is look and present. Things that I as an investigator, both as an investigative journalist and I've done. I've worked for NBC News, the New York Times, GQ magazine. I've worked for various publications, not always as an investigative reporter, but I've, you know, worked in major. For companies, media companies. I don't have any theories, but I present what would stand out. That just doesn't make sense. And one of those things that just doesn't make sense to me and that I talk about in the book is how one person could commit these crimes alone because the nature of the injuries and because of what the crime scenes tell us, the blood spatter, the evidence in different parts of the house, and two, how it's possible if one person did it, that he get out of the house without leaving every, almost any evidence behind. And nothing outside the house, not nothing has ever been found outside that house, in Brian Coburger's car, in his apartment, anywhere when he went back to his parents house in Pennsylvania. There are really compelling questions that I raise in the book, but I don't have the answers. I ask the reader to look at these things and the reader to weigh the evidence and come up with conclusions.

[Miranda]

Do you think he's not guilty?

[Chris Whitcomb]

No, I don't. And I mean this in all sincerity. I do not know if Brian Kohbergers took the guilty plea as many people do. He was facing the death penalty. The death penalty in Idaho at that time was the firing squad. Is it plausible because of all the preponderance of evidence and because Ann Taylor, his defense attorney, had lost in so many motions before Judge Hipler talking about the evidence? It may. It's possible. I'm not saying it's likely. I'm saying it's possible that a person facing the firing squad might say I'll take life in prison because the evidence is overwhelming. And the other, of course, is that he did it. If he did it, why did he not allocate? Why did he not explain anything? And if he did take those secrets to a life in prison and to the grave, ultimately, what will we ever know about this case? To me it seemed like we needed answers and I had an opportunity to offer some.

[Miranda]

Yes. And I think for the parents you could tell they were so. They felt so cheated after that plea. Some of them didn't even know that it was coming. And I think that, you know, you felt that Kohlberger, this was his final exertion of power over the victims and their families who he'd caused so much grief to keeping that secret to himself. You could almost see him smirking in court as he said nothing very much.

[Chris Whitcomb]

So he's a very odd guy. There was one motion in limine that his defense attorney, Ann Taylor, filed, Asking the judge to mandate that the prosecution did not refer to him as a psychopath in trial. So the discussion of Bryan kohberger's habits, his social interactions, his behaviors, is widely talked about. It's widely discussed to the point where she felt she had to mandate that, you know, correct the language in front of a jury. There's no question he's a very, very odd guy. Whether that odd behavior in any way suggests someone capable of these four horrific murders, you know, that. That's for the behavioralist decide to decide. And that's certainly a conversation.

[Miranda]

So I wanted to go through the evidence that you've uncovered that you've erased questions about the. The one to me that's the most telling or the most curious Is that one of the victims had Ethan. The young man had in his hands some hair that did not test to be Brian kohlberger's. So whose was it?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Great question. When Ethan died in bed, he had human hair. And I know it was human because of lab tests. We'll talk about. In what appeared to be a closed fist that had relaxed slightly when he was taken to autopsy, the. The labor, the. The lab analyst took the hair. They tested it, and they found it to be human hair. They found it to be about 6 inches in length and that it was dark bond, light brown with reddish tint. Brian coburger's hair doesn't fit any of those characteristics. Is it possible that he just had hair in his hand somehow? Certainly anything's possible. What really stands out is that police found, and you can track it in photographs, his hand on the bed frame. And when he was taken away, there was a blood stain. And in that blood stain on the bed was more of this hair that fit the same characteristics. And that hair was never found until more than two years later, when a defense expert went up to look at the evidence in preparation for trial and found that here it was never even taken as evidence by authorities and tested at all, ever. To this day, I believe it hasn't been. I. I believe that the. The prosecution. And because this was after the trial, I believe it's not been tested, though I'm not certain of that.

[Miranda]

So does that description, the hair, fit any of the other victims?

[Chris Whitcomb]

No, certainly not Zanna. And so the. The next question would be, how did that hair. And it's a fairly significant quality of hair quantity. It's not four or five strands. It's very visible with a human eye in the bed.

[Miranda]

And there'd be DNA on the follicle if it.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Well, that's the next question. Lauren, That's a. That's the perfect question. DNA is such a big part of this case. It's such a big part of the case. We've tracked blood flow around the house. We've tracked many, many, many components you would expect to find in a forensic analysis of a crime scene through DNA. In this case, it was not tested for DNA. That particular hair was not tested for DNA.

[Miranda]

That's incredible. There are other pieces of evidence you've questioned. The knife sheath is an important one. And you talk about a break in the chain of custody. Tell us about that.

[Chris Whitcomb]

You know, it's a bit esoteric for some people. It's important from my line of work when I was an FBI agent. Let me explain that. When you find evidence at a crime scene, you have to take that evidence, you have to package that evidence, and the evidence moves from the crime scene to the police department, through a via car or whatever, to a laboratory. And the defense wants to prove that went from one place to another place continuously in a way that has been documented. So anybody that touched it, anybody that could possibly have contaminated it, that there's a track record for that. In this case, the evidence was found. This knife sheath was found on the third floor variously in one of two places. It was placed in a bag and it went to the crime scene. It was. It had a barcode on the bottom, which the Moscow Police Department said was a tracking system, an electronic tracking system. The barcode, however, it was taken to the crime lab and at some point, well after the evidence was taken, they went back and put two handwritten chain of custody forms on the bag. They suggest, and people would argue that that's not the case, that the chain of custody would not have been an issue at trial. Many defense attorneys would disagree with that. In my own experience as an FBI agent prosecuting crimes, violent crimes, if I had presented a piece of evidence without a chain of custody, I would have. It would. It would not have been acceptable. It would not have been acceptable. So that's one aspect is the chain of custody that would have been contested had there been a trial, and again, there wasn't. Why was it not contested by Ann Taylor before that? And I determine and talk about in the book the fact that it was not found by her experts until just before the plea Agreement. So one might argue, and this would be. Ann Taylor could only talk about this herself. One would suppose that she just didn't see it. She just. This was a mountain, a true mountain of information that she had to go through and deal with and investigate. And this would have been a very small thing that was not discovered until her team of experts found it very, very close to the trial date. And by that time, we're almost at the change of plea.

[Miranda]

And Brian Kohlberger himself, you mentioned that there was no DNA evidence, no blood in his car at his home where he lived with his parents. He was a PhD in criminology. He, I guess knew about how to commit the perfect murder. He was wearing a mask, according to a witness in the house, the other young girl and I guess gloves and you know, maybe disposed of his clothes. I mean, there is a way, isn't there, to just disguise all DNA evidence?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Great question. And I think it's really important to point out that what the prosecution said they found of his DNA on the KA Bar knife sheath was microscopic. You're talking about a small number of human cells. And that's all, that's all it takes. I mean, all you need is a very, very small amount. But it was a very small amount that wasn't really identifiable, visible to the human eye. Okay, so we're talking about traces, tiny, tiny, microscopic traces of DNA. The killer in this case, Brian Coburger, was. We know that he was soaked in blood because he tracked it around the house. That's unequivocal. Somehow that blood tracked around the house was found nowhere on the floors on the second floor of the house. There was a trace found later after the fact with, I believe with Luminol, one of the blood identification things, but other than that, there was not. And then once he left through the kitchen, through sliding glass doors, or that's what we believe based on when this statements that he went out through the kitchen doors. One might ask the obvious question. If all of this happened in less than four minutes and this person is soaked in blood from these horrific crimes, how did he get out of the house without. He tracked it all over the house. How? Once he left the house, that was it. Not found anywhere outside. It wasn't found in the kitchen, it wasn't found on the doors. How do you open the doors? It wasn't found on the concrete outside or anyplace else. Then he ran to his car, jumped in his car. It's pretty difficult to understand how he could have taken off all his clothes without any Blood transfer whatsoever, gotten in his car, naked I would suppose, and driven away. It's not surprising they found nothing in Pennsylvania. It is surprising they didn't find anything anywhere else. Anywhere else.

[Miranda]

Well, I guess, I mean there are really only two possibilities. Three I guess. One, that it wasn't him. Two, that he, he was, he did plan and train for this, that he stripped his clothes off, he had something else underneath, put them into a bag, clean bag, tied it up, put the gloves in there, carried the bag to the car. Surely that would account for it. And then somehow disposed of that bag and it's never been found.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yes, absolutely. Very plausible. It comes down to when you look at the evidence and, and I do in great detail in this book. It's 430 page book and I use. It's all based on documents. This is not a story. This is a forensic examination of the crimes themselves based on what we now know.

[Miranda]

Which is great because nobody did it.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Nobody did it. And I've got to say this, the title of this book is the Explosive Search for Truth. And I didn't write that aspect of the title, but it has been. The problem is not the problem. One issue is that we have for the past three years talked about this case around the world. It's an international story. Everyone has an opinion, everyone thinks they know what's going on. And all of a sudden when a book comes out like this that presents evidence of specific things, it generates clamor. I mean really, it's a great deal to process. For this reason, there are very few books published in the last 20 years that build a story based on documents. The other books about this case, and I know of at least three other books about this case were pretty much based on interviews. They were based on, you know, look at the town, what people knew in the public domain. This isn't that kind of book. This book looks very specifically at law enforcement documents and things that happened along the way. And I think the discussion, the discussion that that generates, I hope my belief leads to truth beyond what we know now is the truth of Brian Coburger committed these crimes alone and he's, it's all wrapped up. If that's the truth, fantastic. We all want that to be the truth. If the truth is there's one or more other killers out there running around, in my opinion, I, as a journalist and as a former law enforcement official and FBI agent who would not want to know that if, if, who wants to say, oh, we did a great job, we got half the killers if that's the case. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think those questions, this conversation you and I are having right now, are important in the American justice system. I think we all are so involved in this case for the past three years, how do we just stop and say, okay, we don't care about motive, we don't care about means, we don't care about mechanism. We don't care where the murder weapons are. We don't care about what we don't know. If this. If this had gone to trial, this book would not exist. Nobody would have any interest. We'd know the answers to these. When it did not go to trial, in my opinion, we could not let this be buried and go away. These questions are compelling, and I wanted to. I wanted to ask the questions.

[Mike Baker]

Hey, you listen to this show, right? Because the real story. Well, is never the one on the surface. I'm Mike Baker, former CIA officer, and every day on the President's Daily Brief, I tell you what's actually happening around the world, right? The threats, the crises, the players, the details behind the headlines. It's named for the brief that lands on the president's desk every day. Right? The President's Daily Brief. Makes sense. The PDB gives it to you straight. No spin, no opinion, no rhetoric. We tell you what's happening in the world and let you decide how to think about it. If you want to be the sharpest person in the room on foreign affairs, geopolitics, and national security concerns, of course you want to be the. The sharpest person in the room. Make the President's Daily Brief a daily listen. 20 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Bob's your uncle.

[Mike Baker]

Follow the President's Daily Brief on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast stuff.

[Miranda]

No, I'm glad you've written this book because I always felt that it was abbreviated. Justice and the Family certainly behaved like that. And I think for Madison and Kayleigh and Zana and Ethan, that they deserve to have. You know, we don't want to go into gory details, but they deserve to have what happened to them be imprinted on the consciousness of the nation so that we all understand that justice was done. Brian Kohlberger. There's so much evidence leading to him. The car, you know, Cell tower.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Sorry, the cell tower. Analysis. Cell tower.

[Miranda]

Yes. But as you say, there are a lot of mysterious gaps. And on that, could it be that those gaps are just forensic mistakes?

[Chris Whitcomb]

I've got to say, I don't see a lot of Forensic mistakes. I think the law enforcement investigation was comprehensive. It was extraordinarily well done for the most part, but there are always mistakes. But I think the viewers need to understand this. In the criminal justice system, law enforcement does the investigation. They take all of the evidence gathered in the investigation and they hand it to the prosecution. In my case, the United States Attorney's office and Assistant United States Attorney, in this case, a local prosecutor who was. We all know it's Bill Thompson, right. Once the prosecutor, federal, state, or local, gets the case, they shape it into what they can make a prosecution. So the police did this investigation, they gave it to the prosecutor, they indicted Bryan Kohberger, they arrested Brian Kohberger, and they were going to try Bryan Coburger until he changes his plea. So there's a big break. What the police investigate, what the prosecution make of it, and what a jury decides to do are all components of the American justice system. But each of them has their own problems along the way, right? So you have this. This case in particular. And I say, look, I have four kids of my own. I worked. I worked murder investigations, even though it's very unusual to have that in the federal system. I testified in court in a trial of a serial killer named Oscar Ray Baldwin, who was executed. And I don't think I've ever told anybody this before. And I was a victim in a. In a case where a man went to prison for assault with a deadly weapon. And I testified in that. In that trial also. So I have been on every side of this, and I've looked from a media side in. In my opinion, and it's just my opinion, the justice system requires inquiry. We're all potential jurors. We're all investigative in a certain sense. In this case, one of the most sensationalized cases, the whole world is looking at this. Print, journalists, media, from all different angles. And when he pled guilty, that all went away. Nobody ever got those answers. And that's what I was trying to do here, provide some.

[Miranda]

I think it's a service, because when there's a vacuum of information, as there is in this case and in so many others, conspiracy theories jump in or wild theories, you know, people's imaginations run, right? And, you know, with the preponderance of sort of true crime podcasts and true crime books and stories, that. That's a business now to in sort of inflame those theories. And what you've done is just some very somber, sober, you know, clinical. And from your law enforcement background, look at the actual Evidence. I. One more question about the evidence, but. And I want to go on to other things about your career in the FBI. But I also something that comes from my Australian background. I'm a dual national, so I understand both America and Australian system. But as a police reporter in Australia, there was a system there called a coronial inquest, which used to exist in America and still does exist in a couple of states, but it's really seen as an antiquated, obsolete vestige of sort of British law. But the beautiful thing about a coronial inquest is that it is an independent investigation of the facts of a murder. And you have a judge and you have police coming in and, you know, everybody coming in with their evidence for families, witnesses and so on, and the judge makes a determination of whether this should go to the prosecutors or whether this should be. Sometimes they open up cases that have been closed, homicide cases, and then those cases get opened again and someone's found guilty. All it does really in the end is it's there to tell the public, this is a terrible murder. This is what happened. This, this is the preponderance of the evidence. It's all there for you to see. And then the criminal justice system can take over. What do you think of that idea, bringing that back? Because, you know, we do have these crazy, whether it be jfk, Charlie Kirk, you name it, big, high profile murders, Nancy, Guthrie, et cetera, they just end. And it's a mystery. And no one ever explains what happened.

[Chris Whitcomb]

First of all, I think that's a brilliant perspective. I agree wholeheartedly and I say, look at what the cases that you've just brought up, Epstein, suicide, Charlie Kirk. You look at Trump's first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, you can go down a long list. When we move past those, they are sealed shut and in the world, certainly America, but the world asks those questions. There is a difference between a criminal investigation leading to prosecution and an in depth look at all of those facts. Like you talk about the inquest that you talk about. They are very different methods. It's very different when there's a time imposed on a killer of four young human beings running around the community. The timeline, the political pressure, the media pressure, this pressure cooker that descended upon Moscow, Idaho to solve this crime expeditiously. There's a difference between that and going back after the fact, as I've attempted to do here, and look at facts in ways that people have not seen them, with the background and the experience at least to know what to ask for questions My biggest problem with this whole thing is what I'm baffled at, why people don't ask questions and when they do, they, they're not the questions they should ask. If we could do this inquest like you're talking about, I think it would be a huge move forward collectively as a culture.

[Mike Baker]

Right.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Where we could look at these questions in a measured, non time sensitive, very logical, procedural way and see what's missing. Because a rush to. Not a rush to judgment. I don't mean that Brian Coburg pled guilty. I'm not disputing that. But in a, in a rush to protect the community because they didn't know they, they had a killer of four young people that could have been running around killing more people in the community.

[Miranda]

Look, they understand their finding him.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, it was, it was so, so compelling and so immediate. But now looking back, why is a culture, as a, as a society, as a human beings, do we not want to go back and figure out some of these really, really perplexing questions? And that's what I've attempted to do here. No conclusions. I say you, Miranda, you the reader, you the viewer, right now, let's look at this and see what we can find. Let's look at this and see what makes sense and what doesn't.

[Miranda]

Yeah, it's important. There was just one other piece of evidence that I forgot to ask you about, which was intriguing from the book that jumped out, which was that in the hallways you mentioned that there was a lot of blood and some of the blood the investigators found had been diluted with a foreign substance. And you drew a conclusion from that?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Well, I suppose I suggested a conclusion. I have no opinions, theories whatever, but I think this one's hard not to discuss further. The crime scene within the bedroom on the third floor looked quite typical for something this horrific. What one might explore. You know, we've all watched the shows and the movies and everything. The bedroom on the second floor looked very much the same. The mechanism of the crime, the evidence of the crime, blood spatter, things like that. The space between, from the third floor bedroom, down the stairs, across the living room, down the hallway into that bedroom looks very different. There is blood spatter all over the place. But, but the prosecution's own analyst determined that blood was, quote, unquote, quote unquote diluted with an unknown substance, never identified. If that's the case, what diluted that blood? And we're talking about walls, we're talking about base forge, we're talking about floors, we're talking about a Beer pong table. How did that get diluted? And why was it not the same in either of the two bedrooms? It looks and analyzed very, very differently. How did that happen? How long did it take to happen? And how does that fit within what we know of the rest of the house? And that is a big, big, big question, if you ask me.

[Miranda]

And do the phonographs show that someone's tried to scrub it off?

[Chris Whitcomb]

I wouldn't say the photographs show. The photographs show that it is anomalous. There's no question about it. When blood, not to be too descriptive, but when blood is shed on a surface, on a flat surface, it has an impact, and then it drifts down because it has mass. Gravity interacts on it, and it drifts down. When it does, it becomes less and less. You know, part of it is left on the wall and it drifts until the, the gravity of what remains of that blood sample runs out of steam, essentially. Right. But when it dries, you still have edges where, where it drift down the wall, and you still have a component at the end, what's left of the drop, which no longer is pulled by gravity because the adhesion to the walls, you know, getting into the physics, but it's pretty simple. And it is the basis for forensic examination of a crime scene. And this is not a new science. I mean, people know what they're talking about, and they can find direction of stain, which way it goes. You can determine many, many, many things from it. What you don't have in this particular case, in those common areas, are the characteristics you would expect of blood spatter. So if that's the case, when, why are they different? And if they are different and you found out what, you know, that they were somehow diluted or that they were washed off the walls or whatever the case may be, the next question is, who did it? Why? And when did they have time to do that in less than four minutes? They're compelling questions, and that's. That is a fairly important part of the book.

[Miranda]

Is it possible that it could have been one of the investigators who prematurely cleaned it or a roommate who was innocently cleaning it because they didn't realize what had happened?

[Chris Whitcomb]

You know, I think we can all

[Miranda]

party the night before.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, they had a big party Friday night. This obviously was after that? I don't know. The answer is I don't know. Do I think there's strongly compelling evidence, visually and chemically treated, you know, the forensic evidence from the, from the crop, from the law enforcement investigation, and, and what the prosecution had going into trial, their report. I think there's compelling evidence that somebody cleaned up, altered the crime scene, because I don't know any other way to explain that amount of blood over that large an area just mysteriously being diluted with an unknown substance.

[Miranda]

And why would there have been splatter there in the hallway? No one was killed in the hallway.

[Chris Whitcomb]

The obvious, the forensically obvious explanation would be that somebody cast the blood off from Matty Mogan and Caleb Genkova's on the third floor. We know unequivocally that blood was transferred to the second floor and that they were not, based on the prosecution's narrative that they were never on the second floor. So the question is, how did their blood get to the second floor? And when it got to the second floor, why does it look so dramatically different than the blood on the second floor, third floor? And why was it not found in the second floor bedroom? They're really, really compelling, very, very significant questions that come out of the prosecution's own report. And these things were never asked. They were never explained. They were never. Nobody even knew these things because it did not go to trial. But again, this is. You know, there are also issues with the white car. There are also issues with the cell tower analysis. Many. There's huge, huge issues. Everybody in this case thinks Brian Coburger's DNA was found on the knife sheath. There are huge problems with that, too. And those are all outlined in the book. Like I say, it's 430 pages. We don't have to go into all of it. I will say unequivocally, if you read this book and you get to the end and you think you knew about this case beforehand, I would be more than surprised. Miranda, more than surprised.

[Miranda]

Yeah, I agree. And do you think anything will come out of this? Do you think that there will be any investigations opened?

[Chris Whitcomb]

I don't know. I don't know what investigation there could be because Brian Kober's plea is pretty airtight. I mean, I don't know this. I'm not an attorney, but I don't see that this book or anything else is grounds to go back and say, hey, did you lie about this? You know, he pled guilty, his own volition.

[Miranda]

But to find an accomplice potential.

[Chris Whitcomb]

That's the question. That's the question. Is it okay to say we find compelling evidence of another. Another offender? And listen, law enforcement has said. They're saying today because talking about it, they say they found no evidence of another offender. I will disagree with that. I think it's very, very difficult to understand many aspects of this crime with one person. For example, Ethan, a 6 foot 4, 228 pound, vibrant, vivacious young man, was killed in bed about three or four feet away from his girlfriend, who fought valiantly for her life on the floor. It's very difficult for me to understand the mechanics, the, the process where somebody would lead to believe that one person could kill them simultaneously. I mean, Ethan Chapin was a stout, capable, athletic young man, and a large one at that. There were so many questions like this in this book.

[Miranda]

Goldberger had done his homework on who was in the house. So presumably he would go and kill Ethan first while he was asleep, sneak in. He could have just slit his throat before he had a chance to even wake up.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Well, he didn't do that. The evidence of crime or the wounds that he suffered prior to death were significant. It would have been, uh, yeah, that's. That's not the crime. There are other things like his, when police found his body, for example, without getting into the entire book, but when police found his body, he had injuries to his extremities, his arms and legs that would have been visible and quite apparent from a long distance away. They were significant wounds right when police arrived. And we see this on Officer Nunez body camera, you can see he's covered with two blankets. His torso was covered with two blankets. His lower legs were not covered because it had no wounds. And his, his neck and head were in the corner, but the rest of his body was covered with blankets, even though all of those wounds were inflicted under the blankets, meaning somebody had to have covered his body after he was dead. So what does that say about a killer? What does that say about the crime scene? What does that say about. About questions that have never been brought up, never been even. Even examined. There are so many. I mean, you know, 430 pages of various questions we've hit on, what, five or six of them maybe? But there are so many of them, and all of these now we look at and say why, how, when, where. In my estimation, in my opinion, they're compelling questions.

[Miranda]

So let's go back just to your childhood upbringing and then your entry into the FBI as a member of the hostage rescue team. Tell us a bit about where you grew up and you were a big skier and.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, I've lived a very, very unusual life, a very unusual life. And it would take a long time to go through it, but I grew up at a ski area in northern New Hampshire, Franconia. My diary in Skeria. I was a ski racer. I lived an outdoor life at a time when. When I was a kid, we played with gun. It was sticks and. Yeah, I mean, look, we. We didn't have anything.

[Mike Baker]

We.

[Chris Whitcomb]

We had one television station. I mean, people will think this is impossible, but it was. It was primitive, but it built independence and a lot of skills that helped me later in life. And then I went away to. I don't know what, the entire process. I went to college. I. I went to LA to be a rock star. I like playing music that didn't work well. However, when I was a kid, I didn't want to be an FBI agent. I didn't want to be a fry cook or a brain surgeon. I wanted to write books. I. From my earliest age, I wanted to be a writer, which was a thing in those days. You could be a writer. It's a, you know, a thing. And so I wrote for Orange coast magazine from there. I went and taught English for a couple of years. Then I was a newspaper reporter. I covered a police beat. And I covered politics, ultimately for Daily News. Two different newspapers. I went. I got hired by a congressman. I went to Washington, D.C. d.C. And wrote speeches on Capitol Hill for the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, Miranda. I used to go down every Thursday afternoon. I'd get my boss's red GTO convertible, drive down Pennsylvania Avenue, turn left and go into the Oval Offices, Oval Office for meetings with Ronald Reagan.

[Miranda]

Fantastic. Is that right? Wow.

[Chris Whitcomb]

It was fabulous. For a kid my age, it was a truly remarkable experience. The State of the Union, all of those things were fabulous. Somehow I ended up in the FBI.

[Miranda]

Hang on. Somehow, that's a pretty big segue.

[Mike Baker]

Why?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Well, because I don't have any easy stories. I was fighting Golden Gloves. I was a boxer, and I was fighting in this gym, Finley's Boxing Gym, a very, very famous boxing gym. And I got knocked out and I went home and you get knocked out, you get a bit of a concussion. And it was an envelope from the FBI. And I said to my wife, what in the world does the FBI want with me? You know, I was a good guy, you know, no problems. And it was an app she had sent away for the application. She thought maybe I'd want to be in the FBI. And then somehow I got in and I went to the FBI, went to the. Worked violent crime investigations for four and a half, five years. And then the FBI has a team called the Hostage Rescue Team, which is a counter terrorism component. They have a selection once a year. I tried out and I made It. So I went there.

[Miranda]

And what did you. What qualities did you need to have

[Chris Whitcomb]

to join that zero? I was an English major. I was a wordsmith.

[Miranda]

But you had somehow fit, didn't you? Fit.

[Chris Whitcomb]

And I was athletic.

[Mike Baker]

Right.

[Chris Whitcomb]

I was a good shot. But you know, this is another story entirely, but the US government has three, what are now known as. Well, many people refer to them as Tier 1, and there are many Tier 1 groups nowadays. But back then, and I'm talking about 1991, right, 10 years before 9, 11, the US government had three elements of that kind. They had SEAL Team 6, the people that got bin Laden. They had Delta now called Combat Applications Group or whatever. And these groups are very widely known now because of movies, like so many movies. But they. But the US Government, because of a law called the Posse Comitatus, which prevented the civilian law enforcement from being used in. In military. The military from being used in civilian law enforcement. They had to create a separate team that had arrest authority, what's called 1811 authority. So they decided to put it in the FBI. So because the FBI had helped Delta Force form Delta helped hrt, and now we had a component that had the same helicopters, the same guns, the same training, but it was on the civilian side. And that was the team that I joined.

[Miranda]

So the president then was Bush.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, when I first started working. Yeah, I guess it was. It would have been Bush. Yeah, it would have been Bush at the time.

[Miranda]

Bush the elder. And so you went through, I guess, that whole period, 9, 11. Were you still there?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, I was. And we shouldn't skip over one thing because, you know, when you do a book like this, they hit you from every imaginable angle because we live in an age of hatred and easy communications. Right. So we all in America is a very famous debacle called Waco. And not only was I a member of the hostage rescue team at Waco, but a guy named Tiller, Tiller Russell made a documentary called Waco American Apocalypse. So anybody that watches that documentary was huge on Netflix forever. I was the guy in that movie. He had four narratives. He had an FBI negotiator, he had an FBI sniper. That was me. The hostage rescue team. He had a Branch Davidian. And then he had a couple other people, a lawyer and a couple others. I was that guy.

[Miranda]

So you were the sniper at Waco who had. And you had David Koresh, who was the whack job who ended up blowing everyone up. You had him in your sights.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, and I talk about it in that documentary. So anybody you know, it's crazy. These people go, oh, there's Whitcomb guy. He never did this. He never did. I've written two books, two entire memoirs about, about those years. And then I. And I is in a documentary. But anyways, I was that and. And a couple of other controversial things. But.

[Miranda]

But go back to that because I want to talk about that and I also want to talk about Ruby Ridge and what that did to the FBI.

[Chris Whitcomb]

You know, great question. It changed the FBI. It changed law enforcement. I was at Ruby Ridge. I was one of the snipers at Ruby Ridge. All the Senate hearings, the grand juries, all of that. I was one of those guys. Be open about it. And then we went very shortly after that into Waco. They were very, very close in time. At that time, the United States government was mostly focused on domestic terrorism. When I started with this team, there were 66 foreign terrorist groups in the world. The Palestinian, the PLO, Red Brigades, there was. There were so many. Al Qaeda was one of them. But there was a huge movement based on a book called the Turner Diaries in the United States where there was a. Of domestic terrorism interest that was really, really profound at the time. And out of that movement came Ruby Ridge and came Waco. Ruby Ridge was started by the United States. The first agency involved involved the U.S. marshals Service, not the FBI. Waco was ATF, not the FBI. But there was no backstop in America at that time or today beyond my team, the Hostage Rescue team. If everything goes bad, there is nobody else that's hit. I mean, you're bringing in, you know, the 82nd Airborne, right, which you can't do under the Posse Comitatus. So both of those things were a different response. After those, the hearings and everything else, the United States government came back and said, look, no more. We've got to figure out a different plan. The FBI created the Critical Incident Response Group which now houses the Hostage Rescue team, the profilers or the behavioral analysis unit and the negotiators and various others. So it changed the way law enforcement approached crises. And for better or worse, I'm a testament to that time. I lived through and I wrote extensively. I wrote the better part of a book about Ruby Ridge and Waco. I was in the Waco documentary. And then I put out another memoir in August called Anonymous Mail about those two. So I've been very, very, very vocal and I've tried to talk, I tried to give a first person account of historical, of those events. So yes, I was involved in both of those.

[Miranda]

Ruby Reed Jan, Waco, both of them, I think they are really the origins of a lot of the mistrust of federal government, a lot of the division in this country, which I think was exacerbated under the Biden administration when they sort of made up a domestic terror threat, which was Catholics at school board meetings and so on. And that all echoed for a lot of conservatives, what happened starting out at Ruby Ridge. Can you just take us back to that? Because my understanding of it, just from what I've read, I've never written about it, but from what I've read, from what I've watched as much as I can about, seemed like real overkill. Here was a guy that was sort of coerced. He was a, you know, a kind of survivalist, wanted to go and live on his own with his wife and kids, pregnant wife and in the, in the woods, minding his own business. And he sort of got tricked into building a rifle that was against the law. Is that right? And then from then it escalated. Someone shot his kid's dog, Someone shot his kid.

[Chris Whitcomb]

You know, in general terms, I think he hit it right on the head. The rifle was a shotgun, it was a long gun, and it was altered because the barrel was sawed off. It looks now, in retrospect, even court cases, he won a large judgment against the United States government. It looks like it was put together. People would call it entrapment or however you want to look at it, but it was a very, very small government action against a guy that just wanted to live up on a mountain, by all intents and purposes, separate from the US Government. But it was a very big thing at the time because that type of a movement was a focus of law enforcement, was day to day conversation in American society. So I remember.

[Miranda]

Why was that? I mean, do you think that was, again, like what Biden was sort of bodging up as, I don't know, a distraction or an attack on conservatives to paint them as if they are dangerous nuts.

[Chris Whitcomb]

I'll tell you what I think the narrative is and what the human element of this is. I've been involved in so many of these in my lifetime. I mean, we get started, but Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, East Timor. My life has been in a lot of conflict and difficult situations, but there's always the difference between what ends up on the news and what it's like to be there. So if we want to talk about Ruby Ridge, I'll talk about it this way. It was a Friday afternoon. We were eating pizza or, you know, a weekday Afternoon. It was the end of the day. We're eating pizza. Somebody comes back and says, hey, something happened in Idaho. We're not sure what it is, but we're going to fly out there and they might need us, right? This team. So we've got these cages in the back with all of our gear. So we have desert gear, we have water gear, we have Arctic gear. You know, it's anywhere in the world anytime soon.

[Miranda]

Where are you headquartered?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Quantico, Virginia. Quantico, Virginia. We had a military air transport. So we take our helicopters and we put them on a plane, and we jump on a plane and we fly to. I can't remember, maybe Spokane, Washington. And we drive all night, and we get up, you know, get there. And this is literally what it was like as we build the truth about these stories. There was no Internet. There was no DVDs. I mean, I think it was VHS or whatever. But we get there and we show up at this armory having worked all day, fly all night, drive out there. Now we have a briefing. And they say, we don't know what's going on. This is the FBI briefing. We say, we have. A United States Marshal was shot, Bill Deegan. And we. There was a gunfight on a mountain. We don't know much more than that. Go get him. Literally. I'm not even kidding. I mean, it was very much that simple. So we take all our gear, and it's a lot.

[Miranda]

So you didn't know it was a little boy or a dog.

[Chris Whitcomb]

You didn't know any of them? Zero. Nobody knew it was. Nobody knew Sammy had been killed until days into this thing. Nobody knew anything because it's on top of a mountain. There's no security, there's no Internet, there's no cell phones. There's no way to communicate with anybody. So I remember gearing up at a ghillie suit, and we climbed up a mountain. It was 33 degrees. You know, it wasn't snowing, but it was just above rain. We didn't know where they were. All we knew is there was a gunfight and a marshal had been shot and very, very little information. And we went up, set up, and then it all happened. So there was a. We now know, looking in retrospect at all of these things went wrong, and they did. They did go wrong. And I've lived with it my entire life, looking at it retrospectively. But the reality of what it's like to be you and me talking and living our lives, it looks very different when you're in it. You don't get, you know, you don't say, well, what is this person going to think about it? What's this going to look like 20 years down the line? You look and say, this is what I need to do in this immediate moment and go with those actions. Looking back now at the way we view the FBI, and so do I. I mean, things have changed. Looking back now, does it look dramatically different? Yes. Did it. Did I write about this in great detail in a book called Cold Zero? Did I write about it contemporaneous with those events? I did that as well. So I can go back now and look at those things as a historical record, not a hysterical record like we have so many in this society today. Right. And so it's, you know, Miranda, it's interesting. I've lived such a wild life. I never thought either of these events, that we would be talking about them 30 years later. Not in my wildest imagination did I think these would become archetypal stories in American history. But they have because of mistakes. And we have to learn from them.

[Miranda]

Well, because also they give you an insight into federal government overreach and particularly when it comes to the FBI against American sovereign citizens, you know, who are exercising their rights to go and whatever they're doing, you know, hide out and be independent of society.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Look, I went through the last, as a private citizen, I went through the tumult, I will say, of the last two years, right, the year leading up to the presidential elections and what we're going through now with Comey. I never, I was not in the FBI when Comey was director, but other directors and have been through this, Mueller and various directors over time. And I look at how organizations have changed. The FBI changed fundamentally on 9 11. It became much more an intelligence agency than a criminal investigative agency. They handed a lot of things, jurisdictions over to other federal agencies, the Marshals, atf, Secret Service, Treasury Department, things like that. And the FBI today, just for example, Just as an example, politics aside, I remember watching the raid on Mar a Lago and wondering and looking down and seeing people I knew and worked with carrying automatic weapons, standing outside and thinking to myself, wait a minute, the FBI is raiding the property owned by a former president of the United States. It doesn't matter if it's Biden or Obama or Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan. The President of the United States is an institution constitutionally, that we believe in. And I thought to myself, I would never, ever have anticipated that having been in the Oval Office with Ronald Reagan. I actually ate jelly beans you know, he's known for his jelly beans, actually ate jelly beans out of the bowl. So I swore an oath on the Constitution to protect the Constitution of the United States at the risk of my own life. And that has happened plenty of times. I embrace First Amendment conversations about all of these things because if you can't confront the truth, if you can't look at it in meaningful and almost always painful ways, it's not easy to go back and look at these things and say, I was part of this, I was part of that. And oh, it's okay. I've never said that. If we can't look at those things in terms, we'll never grow. And I'm not sure we're growing right now. I think it's very difficult times and

[Miranda]

it's not fair to. I mean, it's not you, as you say, like you and your team say, take Ruby Ridge. I mean, you are highly trained outfit. And you go and you get put into a place, you're a tool to do a job and that's what you do. It's not your role to figure out the whys or there's no time to do that. That's not your skill set. But what the mistake there to me was complete overkill. Having a military transport taking you these highly skilled killers, you know, warriors, counter terrorism experts and putting them on a hillside and just with no mission, just saying, go search and destroy and not giving you the full brief of what happened. And someone must have known in the marshals. They knew what had happened by then. Why did.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, but.

[Miranda]

Yeah, and who was so gung ho? I mean, was it the FBI director?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Was their political corporate. Can we take one of these at a time? Because I love, I love your curiosity and I love the frank questions. Because somebody needs to ask these questions going back. But there are frank answers. And granted to my perspective, but I would say this. Nietzsche wrote, men who fight monsters have to be careful that they don't become monsters themselves. Right. So here's what happens. I'm an English teacher, I'm a speechwriter, I'm a poet. I was literally thought I was going to be a Shakespearean theater director. That was my major. I was a Shakespearean scholar. Shakespeare scholar, right. So somehow this guy ends up with a rifle with a scope on it on a mountaintop in Ruby Ridge. Nobody is going to convince me that I was a robot for the machine. I was a free thinking, well educated. I wanted to be Holden Caufield catching the kids coming off the cliff in the rye Right. I believed in that stuff. So you just can't say, was I highly trained killer? Oh, hell, yes, I was. And is that part of the process? Yes, it is. And here's the reason why. If you, God forbid, Miranda, whatever city I'm looking at behind you, if you end up in one of those buildings and people have taken you hostage, somebody has to helicopter onto the roof, you've got to rappel down the side of the building, you got to blow the windows out, and you've got to go through that window at 4:00 in the morning, you got to kill the bad guys and save you. Somebody has to do that. And because of the laws of the United States, you can't use Delta Force. So you have to have a team that does that. Is that the same team that's going to go around and, you know, talk about, you know, decline Latin verbs and explicate poetry and whatever else? In my case, yes. In my case it was. The entire time I was on this job, I almost always kept a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets in my. In my kit, right? What guy is going to say that? I'm admitting to you that now in a public forum, and they'll go, what is this guy, nuts? But the bottom line is these are complex guys, this team. I was on this team of supposed machines and robots and two of them had PhDs, so, you know, it's not that these are robots. You've got to have a capability and.

[Miranda]

But also from my experience of, you know, reporting on guys like you, whether it be SAS in Iraq, 22nd, you are moral people. I mean, more so because you're life and death. You are delivering it. And so always, in my view, 99% are moral people. And the psychopaths get weeded out or found out eventually. So I'm not disparaging you. What I guess I'm saying is that as an entity, you are a tool. And you are put in to administer justice, to save people, whatever. And it's gotta be lethal and precise, but you were given an impossible task because you didn't.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Are you talking about Ruby Ridge in particular?

[Miranda]

Ruby Ridge in particular. Well, I mean, all of them, really. But in that one in particular, everyone's the problem when you have bad leadership.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yeah, well, you know, it's fascinating you talk about that. I'd love to talk to you. Sometimes when we're not, you know, we don't. Time constraints or whatever.

[Miranda]

So just finish the story with Ruby Ridge.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Ruby Ridge, for. For better or worse has been documented wildly Just in what I wrote. I wrote parts of two books as recently as August of last year about them. But it's important for people to realize that there is a civil aspect of this where Randy Weaver sued the federal government and won millions of dollars for the wrongful death of his family members. So the system has spoken. Do I accept the responsibility delivered through the court system? Absolutely. There was a grand jury. There was a grand jury where one or more of the members of this team had to face potential murder charges. There were senate hearings. I remember very clearly standing with my teammates in Hart senate office building, these sworn hearings, where they. They actually brought the door to the cabin where the fatal shot was fired. They brought that in. There were search warrants. I mean, how was that? Pregnant.

[Miranda]

The pregnant wife of Randy Weaver.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Horrible. Yes. Yes. I mean, the whole thing was horrible. I mean, I was there. It was horrible. But the.

[Miranda]

And what happened when. I mean, when the sniper took the

[Chris Whitcomb]

shot, what happened is this. And I'm just explaining it for people. Yeah, you know, whatever. I mean, this is 30 years ago when. When you work in my trade, my chosen trade at the time, and everybody knows what a sniper is, and. But most people don't understand trajectory. When a bullet flies through the air, it has to go up and down like a football or a baseball. And I'm not using a sports metaphor. It's just the most obvious thing people understand is if you shoot, if you throw some. A projectile moving over a distance is a physics calculation of trajectory. Fair enough. A bullet is no different. Smaller, it's faster. But it's the same physics principles. Okay? So the further away, the more difficult those physics principles are to hit a target. And when you're doing that as a profession, you're looking through a scope, and the scope is very narrow field of view. You can't see what's outside it. That day, I was high above the house, looking at a downward trajectory. It was 33, 34 degrees. Pouring rain, freezing cold, soaking wet. We'd been up for 36 hours hiking up a mountain, and all of a sudden, they came running out of the house at us with weapons. And we had no clue what was going on. I thought they were. I mean, to this day, I thought they were running at me, and there was going to be a gunfight, you

[Miranda]

know, and it was a militia.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yes, I thought it was a militia. It was actually three human beings living in a cabin. I don't even know why they ran

[Mike Baker]

out of the house.

[Chris Whitcomb]

I don't think they saw us. But all I Want to explain is this. A shot was fired, this particular shot that was fired. You have to understand that you are looking through a scope and somebody and you have to shoot them. So it's very much. And I have to use this metaphor, and I'm sorry in a life of death situation, but in football, you see a receiver and a football and you run into each other at the same time. That's the idea. You're throwing a football at an empty space on the field, assuming that the speed and the pace of the person is going to lead to the catch. Right. It is the exact same physics in the sniper trade. If you're shooting a moving target, so you have to shoot at something so that the person runs into it. A moving target, does that make sense? In this particular case, that particular sniper knew where he was. The man with the gun was going, Randy Weaver. And he was running for the front door of the cabin. As he pulled the trigger, the door opened. And I mean, this is simultaneous. He's shooting from 300 yards away, pulls the trigger, the door opens because she was letting her husband into the house. He ran into the door, she stepped out the door, the door occluded the view and the bullet hit all at the same time. So was it an act of man? Yes. Were there components in this that defy any explanation at all? Yes. And you put Those together after 30 years, 32, 33 years, whatever it's been. Looking back, you can color that with the brush of any, any ideology, any perspective that you have being there, and I was there. It, it was, it was, it was different. It was immediate, it was visceral, it was human. It was all things that get lost over time.

[Miranda]

And you guys knew straight away what had happened?

[Chris Whitcomb]

No, absolutely not. At that point, we didn't even know that Sammy had been killed, the son had been killed. When that happened, nobody knew anything. In fact, the command element down in a field down at the bottom of the mountain, nobody really knew anything. And because we didn't have gear, we had to expo. We had to go back down the mountain in the pitch black. And we almost fell off a cliff that night also. And then the next day started trying to figure out what had happened. It was chaos for quite a long period of time.

[Miranda]

And it's, I mean, benefit of hindsight and everything. I still think that once you put people in that situation, anything can happen. And I think the mistake was going. It was just overkill. Whoever gave the orders, whether it was the FBI or the president or whoever it was who gave the orders to use a mallet to knock on an acorn.

[Chris Whitcomb]

You bring up a really great point. I did not anticipate this conversation, but since you brought it up. No, no, I love it. It's. You know, there's no rules. But I think the number one thing that has survived over all of these years was the rules of engagement. Like, why did we shoot? Under what circumstances? The FBI has one rule of engagement. An FBI agent shall not, shall not use deadly force unless their life or the life of another is in immediate jeopardy of death or serious bodily harm. So the FBI rules of engagement, if you graduate the academy, they give you a gun and a badge, and they say, go get them, right? They say, don't shoot ever, ever, unless you're going to die. Or somebody, an innocent person is going to die. Ruby Ridge survives because the rules of engagement were read differently. And I have them to this day. I have my original notes, and I have the written rules of engagement that were given to us in a potato field in the pouring rain as you were about to go up that mountain. And they were different.

[Miranda]

How are they different?

[Chris Whitcomb]

I can't remember the exact wording, but it basically said, if somebody comes out of that cabin with a gun and you feel threatened, deadly force can be used. And it stands out to this day 33 years later. 30, 40, whatever it's been, it stands out to this day for this reason. I can't think of another time in FBI history when the rules of engagement would change for a specific instance. And that's what people talk about to this day. Where they changed. Yes. Did they impact me? No. Because I understood fully that if I pull the trigger and shoot somebody, I suffer the consequences. They tell you they give you a gun when you join the FBI. They tell you how to use a gun. They tell you when you cannot use a gun. The rules of deadly force. They never, ever tell you what's going to happen if you do. I promise you.

[Miranda]

Let's just quickly go. I know it's another huge story, but Waco, your involvement in that. And then lastly, I wanted to ask you about. What do you think happened to the FBI? Why did it, in my view, lose its way? If you think that, and I think it's important, I know these are 30 years ago, but I do think that they still have echoes today, and they were never resolved. And it sort of comes back to your book about the Idaho murders, that here you have, you know, a great tragedy in American life. You know, even just a tragedy in a small town for four Families and it's never really explained properly. And I think with Ruby Ridge and Waco, we just all moved on.

[Chris Whitcomb]

I think to this day, I believe to this day I'm the only person at Waco and Ruby Ridge that has written about them in a first person account that is detailed. And at least my first book was timely. I mean, that book came out five or six years or something like that. After Ruby Ridge and Waco. It was fresh in my mind. I had all the notes, I still had the clothes I still was wearing. I mean, it was, it was contemporaneous, right? And then I wrote it again, more about it and the, the impact it's had on me in light, in society and things like that since then. And I would say that no matter what I say here now, it would not be nearly as detailed as, as what I went through then. I talk about the, you know, the cost of everybody involved. But I'll say this because in addressing your questions, I was an FBI agent for 15 years. 15 years. I've been out of the FBI for 25, right? So that was a long time ago. And my life has been expansive since then. I worked in the intelligence community. I've, I've started and built large businesses. I've lived in foreign countries. I've lived in Asia for seven years. I've done many, many things. I've written for publications, I've worked in television, things like that. I've done a lot of things. So looking back now, I have the perspective of an older guy, an old guy, right? I'm not even older anymore. I'm old, right? But I look back and I say, look, is that, what do I teach my kids? What do I talk about when I meet you? Like a very, very bright, introspective, fascinating person to talk about with all of your own life experiences to talk about these things. I think I can look at them now with hindsight in a way that is growth. That's what we do as human beings. We should learn from our mistakes. We should gain wisdom based on experience. In my opinion. That's been my life. So I look back on these things and I know where you're going with the FBI today. I can't really comment about the FBI today because I'm not in the FBI today. But that said, I know that it's a very different organization for one primary reason. It was a law enforcement organization until 9, 11 at that time. And this is all very widely documented. I don't think anybody would argue with it. Robert Mueller changed the direction of the FBI because of 911 to move more toward being a domestic intelligence agency. The FBI always had an intelligence community, an intelligence aspect, don't get me wrong. But it became more of that. And when that happened, it changed a lot of things. We moved to the, to the Patriot act and we look at provisions, the visa, courts and things like that. The complexion of an FBI agent's job, many FBI agents jobs changed. And then it became a continuum to what we're going to talk about now, which is allegations by the Trump administration and by the Biden administration going back and forth of what you can do with the Justice Department. And we got to remember the FBI works with the Justice Department. The Justice Department falls within the executive branch. And who's the head of the executive branch? The President of the United States. Right. There's a direct lineage. It's unequivocal. And so we look now and say what is going on? Right. We look and say how did this change during the Biden administration coming out of COVID 19 and where are we now? And it has been a profound change. So we can talk about further questions, but has it changed? It has changed a lot, yes.

[Miranda]

And so just going back to Waco, so you were the sniper. You had David Koresh in your gun sights before he blew up everyone. What happened? Why did you not pull the trigger?

[Chris Whitcomb]

It's a great question. Again, I talk about this in that documentary Waco, American Apocalypse. I talk about it fairly bluntly. Very bluntly. I knew my job and a little framework. So everybody remembers the Branch viridian compound, this huge building in the middle of a cow field. There was a building in the front called Sierra 1 which was a sniper team. And there was a building in the back called Sierra 2 which is sniper, a sniper position, two teams each. And I was in the back, Sierra too. And our job was to provide surveillance of the building. Like somebody comes to a window and we provide all that information via radio back to the command element. They would make the decisions based on the information we gave them. Right. And I was there for 57 days. I know it's almost 60 days, almost two months. So it just becomes a job over and over again. But. But one night at two, we would do two hours shifts on. Because you stare at a right through a rifle scope for two hours and there's a, there are various issues. So you do a two hour shift that particular day. My shift was sometime in the middle of the morning, like 2 to 4, something like that. And I remember I was watching from window. It Was like a movie where you go. You see, shot, shot, shot. Oh, wait a minute. Let's go back to this shot. It was very much like that. And.

[Miranda]

And you could see people moving around in space.

[Chris Whitcomb]

Saw it. Oh, yes. Yeah. I mean, things that you wouldn't talk about. I'm not trying to sidetrack the story, but, for example, there was this one guy that would come to a window every day, and there was this. He had a little kid in a little red puffy down jacket with blonde hair, and he would hold the kid up in the window and look out so they could see what was going on, because they thought we wouldn't shoot a kid. I'm thinking, I'm not going to shoot you either.

[Miranda]

Awful thing to say.

[Chris Whitcomb]

It's awful. But that's a daily. That was a daily thing. You know, it was. It's complex talking about what it was like to be there and how it was. But there was this one moment, and, you know, it was quiet, it was cold. There was fog, There was a little breeze. I like jazz. So I was listening to Miles Davis. I had this little trans. Like this little cassette deck, and I'm sitting behind a sniper rifle and I'm listening to Miles Davis, Bitches Brew that one particular song. And I'm looking in this window, and I move on, and I go, wait a minute. And I go back, and it's him, right? And he's standing in this window, and I know he can see me. He's looking right at me. He couldn't see me, but he knew where I was, and he knew I was out there. Didn't know me, obviously, or anything about me, but he knew what I was, and he knew what I was there for. And we just had this very odd moment that's so hard to explain unless you do that for a job where you. It was so intimate, Miranda. When I'm literally. It seems like you're, you know, right in his face and the glasses and the face that everybody's seen all this time. And I think to myself, if I shoot him now, everybody comes out. It's over. There's 86 people in that building. David Koresh dies. They're all going to come out. The kids are going to be fine. Everybody's going to be good. We're going to go home. It's over. Right, but you can't do that in civilian law enforcement. If I had pulled the trigger, I probably would have gone to jail. I think it's most likely. But looking back on it now, you look back and say, this is the college philosophy. You're in an ethics class and the professor asks you, if you had the opportunity to kill one person and save 86 lives, would you do it? And I lived it. I mean, I made that decision. I made the right decision. But.

[Miranda]

But, well, you were within your rules of engagement, of course.

[Chris Whitcomb]

No, no, no. I could not have, you know, could I have made something up? Could I have said he pointed a gun at me? And whatever else, a human being could have made that decision. I think based on my training, the reasons I joined the FBI, what I, you know, offered to sacrifice my life, I personally couldn't have made that decision because I was morally, ethically unsound in every man of every imaginable way. But we still have to look at the conversation. The conversation is, if I could take that chance at my own sacrifice and save 86 people's lives, should I have done it? There's a lot of kids in Amaranda, suffered a horrific death. So those are the things that come with living this life with Ruby Ridge and Waco and a million other things that I've done in my life. And can we, you know, you talk about them in a TikTok comment on somebody's show, and it's easy to make assumptions when you do it and you're there over a long period of time. To me personally, it seems like, you know, it was a little bit different, of course, but just one quick anecdote. I just going to say this really quickly. So the Waco thing came up and I said, yeah, the guy that had David Koresh in his sights and this guy that I knew that was on the team, he called me up and said, whitcomb, you blank? He said, we all had him in our sights. And I said, okay. I said, that was my experience. I don't know what yours was. That was my experience.

[Miranda]

So anyways, and what sort of an impact did. I mean, those two incidents. But everything that you saw in really, it's like being in combat, but in your own country. What impact did that have on you?

[Chris Whitcomb]

I don't know the answer, except that I'm sitting here talking to you now and I'm writing books and I've moved on in life and I've done 50 things that you and I have not discussed that were far more perilous, far more perilous. I mean, I got stuck in the second best airport in Mogadi in south of Mogadishu, Somalia, with no technical, no money and no passport. That was a bad day. But Anyways, I think my point is that, you know, slipping into a conversation like, with. Like this with you is. Is easy because it's. It's well thought, it's insightful, and it's measured with somebody who has life experiences. And as a thinker and a writer and your perspectives, it doesn't always translate. It's oftentimes somebody just saying, well, he's this or he's that, and we're human beings. There's a human being behind all of these stories, and that led to this book. The human being behind this story, at least I think of myself, was in search of truth. I could have done a million things besides this book. There's no reason that I did this book. Do I wish I hadn't done this book? Oh, hell, yes, I do. I wish I had not done this book.

[Miranda]

Really?

[Chris Whitcomb]

Yes, because. Because at this stage in my life, I have a great life. Why would I suddenly want to be a lightning rod for the 300 different narratives that's spinning out of control around this thing?

[Mike Baker]

Right.

[Chris Whitcomb]

I. I win in no way on this thing. I felt compelled that it was the right thing to do, but that's just my decision. I'm not saying people agree with me, but that's interesting.

[Miranda]

I understand why. Because of the life you've lived. That it troubles you when there are, you know, stories untold and unexplained that mean something to people. And I do think that is corrosive to our society and in general, to have all these questions and these mysteries that lead to suspicions and that can also be preyed upon by people wanting to make money or cause trouble or whatever, because there's a vacuum of real information. So you've been a witness, for whatever reason, to some pretty important historical events that really have led us to, I think, a lot of the division that we have today and the mistrust. You were a witness, and you were part of those, but for some reason you have that knowledge. And so I think it's. I love that you are driven. You have a compulsion to satisfy that curiosity, because I think that's the most. That's the most logical, rational thing I think you could do.

[Chris Whitcomb]

I appreciate that, Miranda. I really do. I'm not a gun. It's a side thing, but it's kind of a metaphor. I'm not a gun guy. I'm not a gun nut, but I carry a gun. And people say, well, why do you carry a gun? I mean, whatever. And I say, because if something happened in a violent society and I didn't have one. I would feel negligent. I would feel like I'm a force multiplier, that I would make the right decision and that I should always be able to do the right thing. I should. I want to die. Holden Caulfield, right? I want to die. The Catcher in the Rye. I want to die. Feeling I've got a savior complex. Let's be honest. I got a savior complex. I can't cook. You know, maybe I don't have any emotions, but I want to save people. I always have. My whole life I've wanted to. And I look at what I do now and say, I hope that's what led to this book. I truly believe that's the case because I could write books about anything. I could play guitar with my band. I could do different things. I felt a personal conviction to tell this story for those reasons that you are the first human being that I've talked to ever. That gave me an opportunity to fill in some of the background that goes into this. And I'm really, truly grateful. I didn't know you were going to do this, Marina. I didn't know what we were going to talk about. But I'm surprised and I'm truly grateful.

[Miranda]

Well, I'm glad, so glad that I had this opportunity to talk to you. And I'd love to keep in touch and talk to you more. I think you have the keys to a lot that sort of troubles all of us. I think at the moment, I'm troubled, too.

[Chris Whitcomb]

We share this. I know.

[Miranda]

I think we all do. I think anyone who cares about this country and, you know, the future does, is troubled by something we can't quite understand. But I think you have some keys to understanding. And I think the book is a service. So thank you and wonderful to talk to you.

[Chris Whitcomb]

I so enjoyed it. So enjoyed it.

[Miranda]

Thanks so much for watching and listening today. Please subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes of Pod Force One.