David Grusch

The conversation opens with a recap of the years since the previous appearance. The speaker describes them as a tough stretch, summed up in the line he says he gives friends: he is living in a nightmare. At the time of the last conversation he had just testified before Congress, and the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 looked like it might pass. It did not. Based on what he says he knew about the Biden administration and had heard from the White House, he chose to keep a low profile through 2024.

living in a nightmare is what I tell my friends

He then describes being hired by Representative Burleson as a professional staff member for Congress. He says he has now left that work after meeting many of his objectives, and is heading into a "next phase of operations" that starts with a break after years of going "full throttle." He calls the present a poignant moment in U.S. history, and says much of his own work has happened privately, behind the scenes.

Asked whether Congress splits between members who want disclosure and members who resist it, he describes a sharp divide between "nonbelievers" and a UAP caucus that keeps adding members. His evidence is a June press conference in front of the Capitol. Retired Brigadier General and Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania member who had served on the House Intelligence Committee, took part.

The first concrete case raised is a CIA officer who, according to the speaker, was arrested holding $40 million in gold bars after an FBI raid on his house in May. The speaker says the officer had created a fabricated continuity-of-government special access program, a program meant to move people to a sanitized hideout site if something catastrophic happens. Under its cover, the officer allegedly collected gold and Rolex watches without anyone noticing.

He made a fake continuity of government special access program.

The hosts push back on the idea that the government keeps gold on hand. The speaker says he can't go into the details. He compares it to Afghanistan, where personnel carried briefcases holding $100,000 in cash to pay for things. The other side of the conversation finds cash easier to believe than gold. The speaker says he has seen the seizure photos and gives this description:

It's approximately 303 gold bars that each way approximately one kilogram apiece.

The figures stay loose. The search for a photo turns up "only like AI photos." The pound conversion comes out garbled in the transcript, and the total is put at roughly 600 pounds of gold kept at the house along with the watches. Asked whether any of it was linked to UAPs, the speaker says not as far as he knows. Its relevance, he says, is that he "bumped into" the same ecosystem. He also says it is unclear what the gold was actually meant for.

The speaker moves from the gold case to what he calls the "deep underbelly" of the federal government. He says he has never talked about this publicly because it is terrifying. In his account, he found a criminal enterprise run out of a particular agency that raised money through "the most unspeakable type of criminal endeavors" under the cover of certain national-security programs. Asked directly whether that meant child trafficking, he says yes, and specifies that the people involved were officers of the government. He says he briefed members of Congress on the details in a classified setting.

I briefed members in a classified setting all the details.

He separates the accusation from the UAP programs as a whole. He says many people around those programs are friends of his: patriotic people doing their duty. The problem, as he puts it, is a small caste of characters within a larger ecosystem who will commit any crime to get laundered money for their cutouts.

He says he reported what he found to the Department of Justice. He has been told his work earned "a gold star" and was briefed to Kash Patel last year, though he was not at that briefing himself. He separates two things: the legal basis of the UAP-related programs, which he says rests on classified executive orders from years ago, and abuse by small groups that operate without oversight. He grants that one could argue Congress was never given enough oversight access.

But when you don't have oversight, unfortunately, certain small pockets of people start doing shit that they shouldn't have.

Iran-Contra (1986) is offered as a historical parallel: the CIA running activities that raised money for the Contras' weapons purchases and procurement, with possible links to drug trafficking. The speaker is careful about what is established. He says the government never confirmed the drug-trafficking element, but that Barry Seal's statements in the 1980s and 1990s make it "likely" it happened.

The government never confirmed that

The conversation then connects this to Freeway Ricky Ross, described as a past guest on the podcast. In this telling, Ross learned to read and became a legal expert while in prison. He found that the three-strikes rule had been misapplied to him, since it is supposed to count three separate arrests rather than three charges from a single arrest. He was released and now sells legal cannabis. The account given is that Ross had no idea his cocaine sales were funding the Contras against the Sandinistas, or that the CIA was letting him operate.

Michael Rupert, also described as a past guest, comes up next. He is identified as a Los Angeles narcotics officer who, it is said, appeared on C-SPAN during a hearing and exposed drug sales in South Central Los Angeles. In this account he had been busting dealers and was told to back off because the CIA was involved.

Coming back to his own case, the speaker draws a line. His DOJ background had exposed him to plenty of misconduct, but child trafficking, he says, was another level entirely.

The speaker stresses that he never set out to be a whistleblower. He describes himself as a 15-year Air Force intelligence and military officer who worked on some of the country's most sensitive issues, including briefing the White House and the National Security Council on space matters in his mid-20s during the Obama administration. When he joined the UAP Task Force in 2019 and was told to investigate, he says he assumed he would find dysfunction in the special access program community or reporting errors. He expected that any real U.S. program would simply get him cleared in and briefed.

And I never wanted to be a whistleblower.

He says the turning point came in October 2020. Instead of people who knew him personally offering a defensive briefing or a nondisclosure agreement, which he says he and colleagues used to joke would eventually happen, he faced administrative retaliation. He calls this the tragedy of it: being read in would have been the easier path.

But I immediately got administratively nuked in October 2020.

He describes retaliation that spread to the people around him. He says he was walked out of National Reconnaissance Office headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia, over what he calls fabricated personal-conduct allegations. A former chief of staff and co-workers at NGA, people seen as his "enablers," were targeted too. He says his mental-health history from Afghanistan and PTSD was raised against him. He counters that he had reported it himself, was cleared, and still holds a top secret clearance.

He says things became frightening in early 2022, and that his 2023 testimony about fearing for his life referred to this, not to the criminal material he found. After noticing suspicious activity near his home, he says he received a message that "they" could reach him and his wife and knew where they were. Other people got the same message on the same day, which he takes as geographic coordination. He reported it to a federal law-enforcement and intelligence element. At first he could not rule out a foreign intelligence agency, since one had shown interest in him years earlier, and he wasn't sure the threat was tied to his investigation at all.

Asked which red line he crossed, he says he doesn't know for certain. His best guess is that his encrypted investigation notes on his classified work computer were being monitored, and that someone worried how much he had figured out.

To this day, I don't know specifically.

He adds that from early 2021, some people who were helping him reported symptoms consistent with Havana syndrome, or anomalous health incidents, a subject he says he was a government expert on. His first assumption was a foreign adversary with a grudge over past covert work, and he was reluctant to link the symptoms to UAPs. He says the likely cause was microwave directed energy, based on detection tradecraft he will not describe and on the symptoms themselves. During that period he was under investigation by three agencies. In late 2021 NGA hired him back full time as a GS-15, and he hoped the agency would protect him from elements of the CIA, NRO and DOD.

The central claim of this section is a meeting held several weeks after the threat. He says he was in Washington for a UAP conference on behalf of NGA and was called into an off-the-books Senate Intelligence Committee meeting in a SCIF. Present, he says, were individuals with strong credentials whom he had known for years, along with a dozen to a dozen and a half senior staff for Marco Rubio, Mark Warner and others. After hours on the legacy program's history, he says, someone pointed at him and told staff that two named individuals had wanted to kill him. He notes that Lou Elizondo has spoken about this.

On motive, he is careful. He cites presidential findings that allow certain actions to protect critical government assets. His assessment is that he got too close while preparing his inspector general report. He says the plot was considered and then stopped, that he knows how, and that he owes some people a debt of gratitude. He describes the senior staff as so shaken that one fetched whiskey and staff began drinking in the SCIF. He says people kept finding signs of tracking even after the meeting. He confirms an investigation is ongoing and declines to say more so as not to interfere with it.

And I know this sounds like so fucking crazy and all that, but that happened.

Asked how much of this is about UAP disclosure and how much about missing oversight, he blames "problem children" who abused standing options meant to protect critical infrastructure such as Air Force flight lines and ICBM silos, and who decided he was a threat. He says he knows more details than he will share, partly to protect sources, and that much of the history may come out through disclosure once the president decides how to release it.

The interview had been rescheduled after canceled flights, and the speaker calls the delay fortuitous because the administration is getting "really, really serious." He credits Trump with courage for ordering the government to release what it knows. When asked whether that means physical danger, he says not necessarily. He means the "deontological shock" and outrage the history may cause, which he compares to the fear and the unity of post-9/11 America.

He predicts everything he testified about will come out before Trump's term ends: a long-running study program, recovered material including intact craft, a recovered "anomalous intelligence" piloting them, and reverse engineering. He warns against demands to just "release it all" or give an "Indiana Jones warehouse tour." In his words, this is not a static ecosystem like archaeology. It involves adversarial nations with their own programs and the visitors themselves, which he says could be called NHI or ultra-terrestrial depending on one's taxonomy.

He qualifies the reverse-engineering claim. He says useful defense technology was derived, but mostly through inspiration rather than one-to-one replication. His example is noticing a material's frequency-selective surface property and applying it to aerospace. He allows that direct replication may have happened in some cases.

And so a lot of it was garnered via inspiration, not one-to-one.

Asked about the hold-up, he says he can't read the president's mind but lists several complications. Disclosure affects allies and adversaries who would have to decide what to tell their own citizens. It could cause theological distress, and he notes as a Catholic that the Vatican has studied the subject for a long time and said nothing. And there are past government think-tank assessments, reported to a previous president, that revealing certain things might trigger a response from a third party, which he calls a feared "Ghostbusters moment." He says he does not necessarily believe that last concern himself.

I don't necessarily believe in this

He also admits the limits of his predictions. He says he is not a social anthropologist or psychiatrist and cannot say exactly how society would change, for instance whether nation-state competition would ease. He still predicts a "new paradigm" before Trump leaves office, and says people will find this interview haunting in hindsight.

I'm normally a very pessimistic cynical person.