Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2447 - Mike Benz
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T18:00:31.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2447 - Mike Benz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-02-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2447 - Mike Benz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-02-03. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2447 - Mike Benz

Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day all right what a day to have you in here buddy kid in a candy
shop we hacked the
government we hacked the government's files evidently I mean this is we have
three and a
half million files that it feels like we should not have it would have been
great to have had
seven years ago in 2019 when this was being litigated but it's an incredible
moment of
transparency for how the world works how governments interact with the private
sector and funds and it's
just really cool to be a part of it what was the holdup what was the because it
seemed like there
was a lot of people that did not want these files released yeah I thought about
this a lot
what we have access to now are internal documents from the Justice Department
and the FBI that are
normally even though they're not classified they are part of a criminal
investigation and so they're
not normally disclosable to the public it could be the case that it kind of
required a congressional
bill to force this out like when you if if there's a internal investigation and
it's not a part of a
court document that's entered into evidence you can't just FOIA the Justice
Department to get dirt on
your political enemies because you think that they might be involved in
something now I don't know if
it could have been done through an executive order around Epstein transparency
around the time of the
first binders certainly it looked like there was friction between the president
and Thomas Massey
over this issue but I don't I don't know the details of what went down there
but the fact is
the bill passed 427 to 1 in the house who's the one my recollection is that it
was Randy fine but I
might be wrong on that so I don't want to smear there was one person play
anything I didn't want
it released because they thought it would compromise the victims right um I at
one point in time at
least yeah I I don't know what the what the rationale you know is and because I
don't recall offhand who
the one is I don't want to lean on that too much but the fact is is nobody
wanted to be on the other side of
this I can't think of anything that both Republicans and Democrats voted on 427
to 1 and oh I'm sorry
Clay Higgins sorry apologies to Randy fine uh yeah so um there was the I mean
there was obviously friction
because this implicates everybody Republicans and Democrats uh Americans and a
dozen different foreign
countries uh heads of major hedge funds and multinational corporations donors
to all political parties
major university and science institutions uh I mean
almost every major player in world affairs
was in some way
either either either involved in or adjacent to this network or the network
tried to reach out to them
because they were influential and so you know there was kind of a mutually
assured destruction
around the Epstein hot potato for a decade now which is that you know out of
power the republicans
said oh the democrats are don't want to disclose this because of the Clintons
and then
the trump administration gets into power and there's a very slow you know
reaction to
the kind of disclosures that culminated in what happened this week and so you
had the democrats saying
oh they're not disclosing it because of you know trump world and his associates
meanwhile they controlled the
justice department and the fbi for four years and didn't release any uh so you
know it it took in a moment
like this and what's what's really interesting about it is this bill only
compelled the disclosure this law
that passed in congress only compelled the disclosure of
justice department originated files justice department by extension fbi is the
investigative arm of the justice department
it does not compel cia originated files and one of the coolest moments of
transparency we had last year in
2025 was when tulsi gabbard as the you know odni is the head of director of
sent of national
intelligence in charge of the whole intelligence community spearheaded the uh jfk
files release and we got
basically fully unredacted documents now i know there's a contest over how
complete they are but
the fact is is it was hundreds of thousands of files that had never been seen
before or unredacted
versions of documents that had been fully or partially redacted for decades the
only reason that we have jfk files
at all is because in 1992 congress passed a bill to force the cia to start
turning over documents
the law i believe was called the jfk records collection act and it forced by
law the uh the cia to establish this
independent presidential assassination review board that would review documents
for declassification and
compel uh you know on the basis of that independent body given all of the
intelligence intrigue around
epstein and the fact that it is in my view physically impossible over epstein's
40-year career
in intelligence adjacent work that there was that there's not epstein files
that are cia originated and
we actually you know i i saw this in the files that were just released jeffrey
epstein himself twice
foiled that's the freedom of information act uh which which is a law that i
think came around in 1966 which
allows any u.s citizen to ask any government agency for all public records that
has about anything
there are certain things that get blocked in that this is there were a lot of
foia fights about covid
uh you know fauci famously there's this exchange where um you know one of the
folks in fauci world says
that they learned cool tricks from the foia lady about how to get around
requests but the fact is you can
FOIA the cia for records uh because it that foia forces the cia to give you
decl declassified or
unclassified records and if it's classified it'll issue a glomar uh we cannot
confirm or deny right the
you know and the existence or non-existence of you know classified information
can we before we get any
further the jfk stuff i never heard anything about it i mean i know the files
came out but there was no big
revelations there was no was was there anything that came out of that that was
significant i thought it
was huge i learned i guess people are looking at the jfk files most people are
looking at it for
clues as to who killed jfk right and i know that there are many researchers who
specialize in the jfk
assassination um that have sharpened their theories i suppose on the basis of
it in a useful way for
for whatever it's worth uh for me i you know was never expecting to see a cia
document saying uh
you know i james jesus angleton authorized the assassination of of uh of course
the united states
uh but the fact is is what it revealed were all of these tangential and ancillary
documents
that showed the structure of intelligence work at a very fine and detailed
level the kind of
revelations that really only come around once in a generation there's a there's
a video online by
michael parenti who's a cia whistleblower around the time of the iran contra
hearings in the 1980s
and he says pay attention to these hearings this may be the last time for
another
20 30 40 years that you ever get an inside look at the at the detailed but
minutiae of a covert operation
because all this was being blasted on a congressional jumbotron with hearings
and
formal congressional investigations and public testimony and there's i sort of
look at the jfk files
release like that we got a very detailed look at everything that was happening
around effectively
operation mongoose uh because do you refresh my memory what was a mongoose
again yeah so so we had so
there was operation mongoose and operation condor which were which were related
to the
nominally what you'll read is that they were related to the attempts by the cia
to for mongoose for
example to destabilize the government of cuba in order to induce a regime
change but because those
efforts proved unsuccessful they regionalized the conflict to uh do counter
communism work effectively
throughout all of latin america the caribbean south america
and uh operation condor was effectively a kind of counter counter insurgency
strategy to stop the rise
of left-wing marxist groups who were trying to throw off the yoke of american
imperialism so to speak
as they put it and so you had a massive cia operation to try to tilt the
internal politics of
basically every country south of the border and we got incredibly just detailed
i'll give you an example
of one declassified document that's really wild uh there there's one document
that uh is a cia file
with instructions to uh delete all physical copies of the document at the end
that describes how the agency
had internally authorized an attempt to assassinate
you know castro by working through
the meyer lansky syndicate and hiring two hitmen
that were in miami and then had but had contacts with the cuban exile community
liaisons within cuba and so this was a this was a formal agency file that
described how a cia case
officer made contact with people from the mob organized crime uh with offers of
pay payoffs with very
detailed logistics you can find this i did hold video on it on my the like ex
subscriber thing i'll i'll
you know uh put it on the top of my social media but the but it also describes
a really interesting
jeffrey epstein-like uh figure robert mayhew was a cia asset the jfk files they
describe how they got
they sponsored a movie to simulate i believe it was the president of indonesia
having an affair with a blonde woman they filmed a
basically like a porno that would uh and to create a tape and they had very
they describe how
they set up the the room to make it look like it was i think in in the
presidential palace or some hotel room that was
would have been in in uh in that country in order to create what's effectively
a sexual blackmail tape
that could then be uh leaked to the press in order to discredit the president
and you know you look at
these in formal agency files and on the one hand you go okay that was the 1960s
that was the that was the
early 1960s that was before there was any oversight on the cia at all it wasn't
until the church committee
hearings in 1975 1976 that we even had congressional oversight of the cia there
was no senate intelligence
committee there was no house intelligence committee at the time and at that
point assassinations had not
been outlawed i mean the cia was allowed to assassinate people there there's
since been a ban on
that so you go okay that's 60 years ago uh but the fact is they did it the fact
is is that is within
the array of options that folks in covert operations saw as on the table
working with the mob working
with the mob now but that goes back a long time i i found it totally unsurprising
it's one of these
things that's just kind of the general theme it's shocked but not surprised you
know it's like
holy crap they they put this in writing well what are we doing here guys and
then but you're like but
i'm not surprised they did it because i know they were doing all these other
things the fact is is
the cia was working with the mob before there was cia before it was done by the
cia uh work with for
for example the the italian mob was was done through the department of war in
the night really starting
in the 1930s and then especially in the 1940s because they were the central
intelligence agency
at the time it was the oss in the 1940s but it would become the cia they're one
of their main logistical
points of contact and allies for the resistance against mussolini in italy mussolini
was cracking
down both on the vatican church and on the italian mafia and so uh there were
strange bedfellas there's
a great book on this by paul williams i think it was published in 2017 it's
called operation gladio
the cia the vatican and the mob and it's i recommend this book to everyone
because it's a really really
detailed academic deep dive on this nexus between a religious institution an
intelligence agency
uh an illegal organized crime syndicate that does a