Filmmaker and war correspondent Scott Kesterson of the Bards of War podcast is joined by Nate Cain, FBI whistleblower, who leaked incriminating documents about Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation.
In 2016, Cain was hired as a cybersecurity contractor by the FBI to provide vulnerability assessments for the FBI’s field offices.
As someone who’d had a security clearance for a couple of decades, he avoided sticking his nose where it didn’t belong but this changed after he overheard his supervisor’s conversation, while at work.
When he confronted his supervisor, “He admitted to me that [he knew of] transcripts of an internal FBI discussion about Hillary Clinton and her case…There was some big discovery.
“Words like ‘treason’ were being thrown around and they were fearful and they didn’t know what to do, so there were discussions about potentially burying this because, the other phrase that really sticks out in my memory was that, ‘This could bring the government down.’ That was one the the fears.
“For me, that was unacceptable. But at that point, I didn’t know if it was true, it was just a rumor. So, I had access to the FBI Net, which is their internal network. It’s classified and I did some simple searches and I came across a trove of information that, at first glance, I was shocked. I was totally blown away.
“There were numerous documents that were evidentiary, that pointed to – and these were documents that had analysts’ notes on them, they had case files assigned to them – and it appeared that there was a major investigation that was going on.
“It involved four basic categories. It involved 1. money-laundering, 2. securities and exchange fraud, 3. public corruption and 4. terrorism financing.
“At that point, I was pretty upset by it but there were case numbers assigned, so I figured that, ‘The FBI’s investigating this, so I don’t have anything to worry about.’
“So I sat on it. And I sat on it for probably several months…
“The whole email scandal thing was a problem, in and of itself and these files that I found had nothing to do with the email scandal…A lot of people have talked about the Uranium One thing but this was so much bigger than that! This involved a lot of countries, which I won’t name, let’s just say that some of them, you don’t want to see money coming into our system from.
“There’s a lot of money running through different shell corporations and shell NGOs and 501 (c) 3s…it was clear that something big was going on, it involved hundreds of millions of dollars, so it was pretty serious.
“Going back to the Hillary email situation, because that plays a part in the story, I was following that pretty intently because in the 22 years that I’d worked with government, I’d had 3 or 4 cases, where I had received an…[interdepartmental] email saying, ‘Don’t delete your emails,” it was basically a subpoena order, saying there were penalties if we deleted our emails and that we couldn’t delete them because there was an ongoing investigation. None of these cases had anything to do with me but they were making everybody in the Command or everybody in that unit hold their emails, as part of a subpoena.
“So, I was very familiar with the subpoena process and understood that if you get a subpoena, you don’t delete those emails – you just don’t. That is Obstruction of Justice.
“I was pretty convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to get charged with something. All the evidence was there. What shocked me was when Comey went out – and this was right after a meeting with Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac – and then, shortly thereafter, Comey goes out and exonerates Hillary Clinton, saying that, ‘No reasonable prosecutor would go after her for that.’
“And I just – I was completely shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Especially, because somebody in her position would’ve been trained in classification handling…classification authority.
“They have the right to, at that level, to make things classified and certainly they’re derivative classifiers; they know how to do these things, they know how to handle these things and I saw her give testimony up on Capitol Hill, I’ll never forget, one of the questions that she was asked about wiping her computer and she said, ‘Oh, what, with a cloth?’
“So, she was playing dumb and trying to pretend like she didn’t know what she was talking about and then, Comey, he supported that, talking about how she was unsophisticated with technology and whatever. And so I wasn’t buying it.
“I was pretty upset at that point. I realized at that point, that the highest levels of the FBI – specifically, Comey and McCabe – and I didn’t know who Peter Strzok was at that time…but I knew at that point that there was a cover-up going on and that they had no intention of following through with any of this.
“So, at the time, I decided that I needed to blow the whistle. I thought long and hard about it. I prayed about it. To be honest with you, I was pretty frightened about it, because this was not a trivial matter. I wasn’t blowing the whistle on an EO complaint or something like that, I was blowing the whistle on the very people who could then, turn right around and put me in prison for the rest of my life…
“I was blowing the whistle on information that was related to Hillary Clinton and the reality is, whether it’s a conspiracy or not, there’s an awful lot of people who have been scheduled to testify against the Clinton Foundation or knew information about the Clintons that have mysteriously died, ‘committed suicide’ or had an ‘accident’.
“So, I ain’t gonna lie but the thought did cross my mind, ‘Am I insane?’ because this is gonna put me at serious risk…
Cain then tells the gripping story of how he obtained official whistleblower status with IG Michael Horowitz under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act and he legally transmitted the files to the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
This did nothing to stop 16 FBI agents from raiding his home for six hours on the morning of November 19, 2018 via an illegally-issued court order signed on November 15, 2018 by federal magistrate judge Stephanie A. Gallagher in the US District Court for Baltimore and falsely charging him with illegal possession of stolen federal property.
For weeks, the FBI proceeded to harass Cain and his neighbors, straight out of the Khmer Rouge or the purges of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, determined to get his community to rat him out. His children’s friends’ parents were told they shouldn’t allow their kids to come to Cain’s house, as he was not a “safe” person. These parents were surveilled and their personal emails were read.
Cain says, “They insinuated that I was part of some international conspiracy against the US Government and they specifically brought up Q and asked if they had ever me talking about Q…So now, not only do I feel violated, but all these people who the FBI is visiting and intimidating, they feel violated too.
“They tried to ostracize me from my own community, they tried to destroy my family…I had done this thing that was extremely scary to do; what I believed was the right thing to do and I was treated like a terrorist, treated like an anti-government extremist.
“Mind you, I’ve never been charged with anything to this day. I still have my clearance, it’s never been suspended, not even a flag – because I didn’t do anything wrong, yet these people destroyed my life. I ended up in debt, all of my credit cards racked up and in debt to my eyeballs, all of my savings.
“And it doesn’t even compare to what has happened to Flynn. This is what they do. They force you into a position, to where you can’t even afford to keep fighting them anymore.
“If we as Americans don’t have a right to question our government, then we really are in a police state.”
The one positive to come out of all this, he says his his increased faith in God.