Transcript.
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Tucker [00:00:00] So you were marched out of the State Department two weeks ago. You left involuntarily, and I want to hear why. But first, what did you do there? What was your job at the State?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:00:09] I was a press officer in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, started September 2024. Essentially, the main bread and butter role of a press office is twofold. One is preparing the spokesperson before they go on the podium and do their daily press briefing. Yeah. And second, reporters ask questions all the time. So a reporter with XYZ outlet submits a question and it’s our job to use cleared lines, or cleared meaning approved lines, and send them back to the reporter. And if you ever read an article that says a state department spokesperson said X, those are press officers taking those cleared lines and sharing it with that reporter.
Tucker [00:01:14] Who clears the lines?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:01:16] Good question. So the press officer will draft the lines from there. It will go up a ladder essentially. So there’ll be desk officers. Leadership in the NEA press office itself and then it goes up to the seventh floor, meaning the secretary’s policy planning office, the deputy secretary of state’s office, but it’s not them self. You’re not going to get the deputy Secretary of State looking at this, right? It’s going to just be like a staffer who represents that equity. So it becomes an inclusive process to make sure everyone has eyes on it. And if there are flags, they’ll let you know. For example, you could be driving a lion on Israel. But it involves Lebanon. But there’s another press officer and a whole other desk and leadership working on Lebanon that might have an equity that you may not be aware of that they’ll edit the line.
Tucker [00:02:09] So, describe the bureau that you work for, Near Eastern Affairs.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:02:12] Yes. What is that? It’s well, it’s an old school name. It basically means anything involved in the Middle East. So it’s Morocco to Iran.
Tucker [00:02:20] Essentially the whole Middle East, not just the Levant, like the whole middle.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:02:23] Yeah, Near East. Yeah, it’s a they need to update the name. I think people are aware. But yeah, it it’s the entire Middle East. So they use all these acronyms. So Israeli Palestinian Affairs is IPA or ISPAL. Saudi, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, that whole grouping is ARP for Arabian Peninsula. And then North Africa is its own entity as well. Morocco to Egypt goes under NA. OK, so it’s.
Tucker [00:02:51] The Levant, the Gulf, Iran, yeah, Iran, Iraq. Huh, interesting. And that’s all in the same bureau. So the State Department divides the world into bureaus. Correct. Go traffic called desks. Correct.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:03:05] Correct. So from Canada down to Chile’s WHA, Western Hemisphere Affairs, Asia’s EAP, Eastern Asia, East Asia Pacific. So we have all these divisions. And Africa, correct. EUR for Europe, Africa’s AF. Um, I was in NEA, um, and I was a press officer there originally covering Lebanon, Jordan, just for a couple of months, and I quickly shifted to, uh, ISPAL. Israel, Palestine. It’s your bow sign.
Tucker [00:03:37] Um, so that’s the hottest of all desks, I would think most scrutiny, most at stake rhetoric, most closely supervised. I would, I’m just guessing, but.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:03:50] Yes, it’s true. The press officer for Israeli Palestinian affairs, you’re on a stage constantly because you’re getting the most questions from reporters for good reason. The spokesperson is going to deal with the most question at the podium about the topic. And so it was a compliment yet difficult for me to process the fact that it was requested from various people in leadership When the administration was changing in January, they said, hey, I know you’ve only been here for a couple of months, but we’re going to put you on this, in this position. Which was surprising, but I wanted to take on the challenge at the time.
Tucker [00:04:32] That by the incoming administration, by the Trump administration.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:04:34] It was, well, it was people from leadership in NEA, which some of them were civil servants, but there were experienced people that recognized how heavy the topic was going to be coming in.
Tucker [00:04:47] How do you get current on that? How do do your research?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:04:51] So it’s, it’s multifold. So we do receive like in terms of standard mainstream media, we do get like, uh, copies of articles and coverage and it’s not necessarily politically, um, uh, isolated, at least in the beginning, it wasn’t. So I would see everything in my email inbox plus personally, right? I’m always absorbing things and you’re only going to be a good press officer if you’re reading Twitter and the standard emails are getting, um, through the inbox. Yeah. So you’re absorbing a lot of information. And it’s not just the details. Like, of course, if I have a question, I want to go to the Israel experts at the State Department. So if there’s a detail I don’t know, there might be a desk officer or someone like that that would know the numbers or the challenges that I need for a specific press line. For me though, as a press officer, my addition in those conversations is like more stylistic. Okay, if we put this line out there, We’re going to invite. These problems or it’s good if we say it this way because uh, this will help us Uh, they’ll defend us in this other way. So it was a stylistic endeavor. Um for from day to day um, and You don’t have full control because i’m obviously the personality of someone at the podium is going to say It one way even though I was hoping this line would deliver this other Way, right? You don’t you have full. Control, but you you do have a who’s the spokesman for the nearer? Well, right now it’s, it’s more the spokesperson of the entire department that I was briefing. So it was Tammy Bruce. She left, um, and then there’s, uh, deputies that are currently. Where did Tammy Bruce go? She’s going to the UN.
Tucker [00:06:33] Um, so were you given parameters? Like how do you get your orders? Like we do say this, we don’t say that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:06:43] The main day-to-day activity that I think people may not be aware of, but are probably not aware of is that I have these packets called press guidance, called PG. So on Tuesday and Thursday, which are the days that a spokesperson would go on to the podium, I would have all the sample questions. And some of them are tasked from the main press office in at the city department. But I also would come up with my own questions, like, hey. Where we’re getting this question a lot, we need to have lines for this, so we can’t leave this alone. So I’d create a packet, clear it through the building, like I was saying earlier, through the seventh floor, and then I’d present that brief to the spokesperson about two hours before she went onto the podium.
Tucker [00:07:27] How do you know what the official US position, especially on that topic, Israel-Palestine, I mean, that’s again, the most politicized area there is. And it’s the stakes are high. So how do you what the officially US position is on that conflict?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:07:43] It’s a very good question, especially in the beginning of the administration, it’s a bit of an art. You’re taking the gold for a press officer or lines from the principles. Essentially, if President Trump says something, if Special Envoy Wyckoff says something. I take those quotes and I’m like, okay, that’s policy. So if he’s talking about…
Tucker [00:08:03] And I think that’s literally true, right? I mean, the president sort of unilaterally can form our foreign policy.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:08:08] Yeah, and there’s no questioning like a quote that comes from a principal, especially President Trump or Secretary Rubio for the State Department is often the case. So I would take those lines and it would answer certain questions that would come up. Where are we with the ceasefire? Oh, Special Envoy Witkoff went on XYZ Sunday show, so I’ll pull that line and I’ll brief the spokesperson and then she or he can quote. Especially when we wake up at the podium again, because that’s the policy. That’s the easiest way of doing it. You don’t always have quotes. So what would happen instead is you kind of have.
Tucker [00:08:43] Did you ever get a question on that? Question on? Well, I mean, if you say, you know, you should respond in this way and then cite the president or Steve Wittkopf or Secretary Rubio, then that kind of that kind of ends the conversation, right?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:08:55] It should end the conversation. What was surprising, and this will go back to why, when I ended up departing and getting fired in August, was that on a specific question, one of the three events I think led up to my firing, was on a Monday, we received a question about forced displacement, which is essentially ethnic cleansing, and what our policy was about Israel intending to move Palestinians in Gaza to South Sudan. So to South Sudan, yeah, that was every, like every two or three months we had a new, um, Reporting would come out in the spring. It was they’re moving Um palestinians in gaza to libya There was a rumor about somaliland even though we don’t recognize somalilan but There was reporting about are we going to do an exchange where we recognize somali land? But they have to take on palestineans And then we had an ethiopia round and then the last last round that I witnessed before I left was a South Sudan. So, and so that appears in somewhere in the press appears somewhere in the press. And we received a question. What’s your response to this reporting? And then I, I came up the line, not, but it wasn’t a line that like, I just came out of the blue. It was something that’s President Trump and Special Envoy Witkoff had said in other words in the spring. I said, we do not support forced displacement.
Tucker [00:10:21] And why, what did they say about it? So that was your interpretation of what they said. Do you remember what they said, what Wyckoff and Trump said on that topic?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:10:29] So specifically special envoy Wittkopf said something, we’re not, said something along the lines of we’re not trying to evict anybody, right? So from, as a press officer, there’s an art to it, right. Cause you’re not you can sometimes do the exact quote, or you can just come up with a new line that reflects that quote.
Tucker [00:10:43] I think forced displacement and eviction are synonyms, any fair person would say that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:10:48] And keep in mind, this had already been cleared. It was approved for about a couple of weeks before this particular question popped up because the Ethiopia rumor was like July 28th. So I put it in the PG, put it into the packet, cleared through, I briefed it multiple times. So when that question came up, I said, I actually probably had the right to just send that line because it cleared so many times. But to be extra careful, I sent it out to the spokesman. Person and that’s their staff and made sure the most important equities were re-clearing it and from my understanding now I wasn’t on the chain but from my understanding they went to the secretary’s office and they cut that line of we do not support forced displacement. The only other bullet that we have which is pretty standard is we don’t discuss private diplomatic conversations which is standard I always say you know. Ongoing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s one of those lines. So that line was there. So, that’s all we ended up providing. So there’s some sensitivity, which I found very odd because out of the three events, I can get into the other ones, but that was like number two. But the two days before I was fired, that Thursday and Friday, the only feedback that I got, Cause my bureau was confused as to why. Uh, the secretary’s office was coming down on me, right? Cause they don’t know me. They don’t interact with a random press officer at NEA, right. Maybe a little bit more because of the sensitive topic, but chances are generally low. My leadership has said, Hey, they’re asking where you got that line from. From Monday. I’m like, today’s Thursday, you four days later, they were asking me where I, where I got this line that I drafted, but they cut it. I went through the procedure, right, I cut it, they cut it and the reporter never saw that line.
Tucker [00:12:43] Did they explain why they cut it?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:12:46] All I got from, all I heard, all eyewitness, was the acting spokesperson saying.
Tucker [00:12:51] So you were paraphrasing the envoy, Steve Wicoff, and the President of the United States, Donald Trump, when you said the United State does not support a forced displacement. Yep. I don’t think we do support that, do we, by the way? I would hope so. Yeah, one would hope not. Right. And especially, we’re not going to pay for that. And they cut that out, but didn’t explain why. Right. And then your supervisors came to you and said, hey, they’re complaining about you.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:13:21] Right. And they didn’t, they only specified that line, just like the act of drafting it. And I was like, I have a track record. They asked me Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, twice in a row, which is very odd for a random bullet. I was, like, I have the evidence from July 28th of clearing this press guidance with that line. And here are the relevant quotes.
Tucker [00:13:41] Say, by the way, you may not know this, but the United States does support forced displacement. No one said that. No one’s said that, but by the way, sorry, I got it wrong. We’re all about forced displacement, okay? We want, we want, kind of want to trail a tear situation here because we’re for that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:13:58] It’s tragic because it’s such a standard. So bonkers. Yeah. That’s something you would want to advertise. You want to put out there that we’re against this. Like, hey, we still have some moral standing somewhere. And when the Washington Post piece came out like yesterday, two days ago, saying there’s some plan involving the consultations of Tony Blair of moving gauzans out, but we may pay for something, a piece of it. I’m like, why? So is this why I got fired is because I was, I was still sticking through this line and they saw me as some kind of obstacle, which I wasn’t because I was going through the exact procedures they wanted. But I knew that when I was fired as someone who was, again, close with political appointees and with civil servants and was pretty well established in NEA. Again, like I said earlier, you don’t get this role covering Israeli-Palestinian affairs on a whim and I’m suddenly pushed out. That means things are going to go into a very radical direction. Well, yeah, I should also say.
Tucker [00:14:59] Because I know that you will be attacked and I’ll be attacked for speaking to you on the following grounds. This guy’s a partisan Democrat who liked Bernie. He was a saboteur, a wrecker. I know from our conversations off camera, at least what you said to me was basically agreed with Trump’s foreign policy instincts. You know, fewer pointless wars, Like, get along with more people.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:15:24] Yeah, that’s fair. I’ve always been an advocate for ending endless war on a personal level. And so when President Trump is saying, hey, we don’t want to get into any forever wars, I’m like, that is great. And we technically started with a ceasefire in Gaza and started the administration. That was something we could have expanded on. We were speaking to the Iranians. So there’s so many chances for true peace, but things went in the wrong direction. I would say somewhere in the summer. Uh, I remember listening to president Trump’s speech in Saudi in May, where he was talking about amazing speech. Love that speech. I remember I was, I was like,
Tucker [00:16:03] I was cheering.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:16:04] Exactly. And in my, in my cubicle at the state department, I was like, this is a great speech.
Tucker [00:16:07] I was too, that was one of the best speeches I’ve ever given.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:16:10] And I was like, this is amazing. It was ballsy to the speech. Calling out neocons, like, no one calls out neocrons in DC, right? No, of course not. We brushed that under the rug. We kept moving, right. We still see them as an analyst here and there on TV. Here and there? They dominate the biggest cable news channel. Yes, Don Bavaria. Yeah. So, so glad to see that. But then why two weeks later, were we sabotaging our own talks with Iran and then bombing them? Right? So the events. Like the idea that I’m some partisan is just wrong. I guess on a personal avenue, I don’t want any more endless wars. But President Trump was in line with that. And I was doing my job in line with the procedures that were necessary every single day. Yeah, but it sounds like you agreed with him.
Tucker [00:16:56] So, I guess that’s my point. If you like that, I mean, I don’t know, you know, a lot of these, some of the labels are real, but some of them are also created and certainly sustained in order to keep people from listening to each other so they don’t discover they actually agree on a lot. And if you love the Saudi speech and I love the Saudi speech, then we’re probably not too far from each other then. Because I thought that and that was a Donald Trump speech. And by the way, if you’re such a partisan Democrat, you’re admitting on camera that you loved a Donald Trump speech. You’re not too partisan, I guess.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:17:27] I just want to see because I’m here. I’m honest these matters Yeah, it’s like it’s the it’s they it’s their issues. We have informed policy that I matter that I care about I don’t care about the labels per se
Tucker [00:17:36] Oh, I don’t either. Well, they’re clearly meaningless. Yes. If we’re both cheering on the Riyadh speech. So yes. Okay. I just wanted to establish that. So you start hearing from your bosses, like, Hey, what is this thing that you put in there about opposing forced displacement? We’ve always.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:17:51] Yeah, we’ve always, yeah, four or five days earlier, not even like the next day. There was like a delay annoyance. It was weird.
Tucker [00:17:59] So you said that there are three examples of this where they found problems with your work?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:18:05] Right. And some of this, it kind of made sense from hindsight, because I didn’t like, in the moment, I didn’t t realize. But Sunday, Israel had struck a tent with several journalists living inside, including Anas, who millions of people had watched cover the events in Gaza. They all died. I drafted a line, a few lines. And by the way, there were not… Saw some softy lines. The only thing that was there that they didn’t like was they did share condolences, which is pretty standard, uh, uh policy.
Tucker [00:18:39] What do you mean?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:18:41] So I said, we check indulgences for the families of the killed journalists.
Tucker [00:18:45] Well, that sounds, that sounds like hate speech to me. Condolences to the families of people who got killed, non-combatants killed in war.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:18:55] And what’s so disappointing, too, was that… Wait, wait, so what…
Tucker [00:19:00] What happened when you put that in there?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:19:01] I was immediately told from a senior official that we don’t know what Anas did essentially, and I was like, that’s odd. And it’s what he did. Like, we don’t know what his conduct was. Like we don’t know, we need more information. He might, it was, she or he was alluding to the fact. He may have done something or he’s a problematic actor in some way.
Tucker [00:19:30] Okay, let me just say I would be totally comfortable sharing condolences with Osama Bin Laden’s family. I hate Osama bin Laden. On the other hand, if somebody dies, it’s okay to say, I’m sorry to his family that you’re- He had a toddler. That’s what I’m saying. Yeah. That’s immaterial. I would say that to the family of an executed murderer in a prison. It doesn’t mean I support the murder or the murderer, but this is family. Like that’s okay. That’s called like human decency and anyone who’s against that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:20:02] Yeah, and it seemed that we’re setting up this constant, this is my issue that I noticed from the get-go, the constant deferring to Israel. It was like waiting for some statement, like, let them speak first. And then on Monday, Israel said, al Hamas, which is a throwaway line they’ve used. Al Hamas meaning what? They’re journalists. Were al Hamass? Yeah. Or at least with Anas, if I remember correctly. And so they brushed that away. Were they? Look, my point when I heard that… Was what does our intelligence say? If they were like being super strict and said, hey, we’re gonna triple check using our US intelligence of who these people are, maybe, maybe. Right? I still don’t agree with cutting the condolences line, but sure. But why is there, oh, Israel said this, done. We don’t have Intel services? Right, right. So what’s with the instinct to defer to Israel when we have the entire apparatus that could check that?
Tucker [00:21:02] And then by Tuesday got like 17 different intelligence services in this country that take, you know, a trillion dollars a year or whatever the actual budget is. And we don’t consult them at all. We wait for the Israeli spokesman to tell us what reality is. That what you’re saying.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:21:17] And how is that America first, right? This whole apparatus of like, of, of mirroring certain Israeli statements and waiting for them to comment first was something that I found tragic. It was, it was odd. Um, and that’s what ended up happening by the press briefing that Tuesday. We’re like, we refer you to Israel, which was a line that, um, popped up in my press guidance way too often.
Tucker [00:21:47] We were so we don’t have a position on it.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:21:50] Right. And that came up on any, any topic that was somewhat
Tucker [00:21:57] sensitive or waiting for Israel to make a move. Does the State Department have any position that contradicts the position of the Israeli government that you’re aware of? No.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:22:08] The closest, I think, for US interests we do, but in our current policy and posture, we do not. So- Not one. The closest we got-
Tucker [00:22:21] Do you love them? I love them. Do you have any sticking points with them? Is there, is there something you don’t fully agree on?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:22:26] As any siblings do.
Tucker [00:22:27] Exactly. Exactly. So loving someone or having an alliance with someone or even like sharing the same parents as somebody doesn’t mean that you have to agree on every little point.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:22:37] Would be weird if you did. It would be weird. Yeah. Agenical twins have disagreed. That’s a little odd. This is getting a little weird. Why is there nothing like this? It’s very strange. And the closest we came and there was no follow through was when I actually liked the statement which was a thousand other things I had personal issues which was irrelevant but Ambassador Huckabee when there was these type attacks against the Christians in West Bank he did put out a statement saying these attacks are unacceptable we call on Israel to investigate, but there’s no follow-through, right? What do you mean? He had a statement that said- Oh, I remember-
Tucker [00:23:12] Oh, I remembered very well.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:23:13] Very well. Yeah, there’s no, there is no follow through. And like, you’re like, oh, that’s a good statement. That’s, I’m like, wow.
Tucker [00:23:19] You can’t attack Christians with U.S. Tax dollars. Sorry. And not allowed. I don’t care who you are.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:23:24] And it was it was just it was one statement and there was no like and if we got questions, hey, what’s the size of the investigation?
Tucker [00:23:34] So no one at the State Department looked into it? This is a majority Christian country, but nobody felt like that would be a good use of American tax dollars to find out what this was or ask anybody any questions.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:23:47] And that’s the thing, each time there’s a call for investigation, a very rare opportunity that that’s in front of us. There’s no follow through the strong statement. We did the thing and you don’t hear about it for, for weeks and months. So there’s no one in the state department who cared. Look, I don’t want to speak for the entire, I think there, there were people that cared. I think that there are, I cared a lot, there are civil servants or political appointees, forest service officers that see, see all of this. And, but it’s the style of constantly deferring to Israel that’s at the forefront. So we can criticize up to a certain point. And it’s awful because if we want Israel to investigate, then we should be following up and ask, hey, what happened to the investigation? I thought you were going to investigate. Where are the prosecutions? Who did all the damage? Who did this and why? Yeah. But we’d never hear the follow up.
Tucker [00:24:48] So there’s no, as far as you’re aware, mechanism in the State Department to, because you’ve described a relationship that’s unique, there’s no other country in the world that has this relationship with the United States, and a lot of resources go into supporting that country, but there’s no mechanism in US State Department, to like follow up on this.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:25:13] In the public realm, because I was working, I work as a press officer, right? So I’m always working with reporters and how, like this, the presentation, those things matter. So if there was a system of following up, I didn’t see it. It’s possible. Personally, I kind of doubt it. Um, but on the public realm,
Tucker [00:25:33] You would have known about it because what if somebody asks you?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:25:35] Right. And you would think that if there was follow-up, you’d want to advertise it too. Like, Hey, we followed up, but they were, they were the preference was to defer and deflect and give
Tucker [00:25:49] We persecute Christians with American tax dollars, nobody cares. You’re making me mad. No, it’s just frustrating. It’s frustrating. I know, it is. Frustrating to see people get, cause it’s not a neutral situation. Like some people are winning and some people are losing. And if the losers are people that you, you know, didn’t do anything wrong, the Christians aren’t in Hamas, like what? What’s their crime?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:26:15] Look, the scenes are horrific, so on a human level, it shouldn’t matter, but if that’s the whole thing of having an ambassador out could be there, it’s like, at least maybe you’ll care about this. And then, yeah, you put a strong statement out, but don’t follow up.
Tucker [00:26:28] Care at all. Yeah, right. The self-described Christians don’t care at all about the Christians. And by the way, the whole justification for all this, you just said it, these journalists get blown up, they were Hamas. Okay, end of conversation. No one can plausibly claim that a Christian family are in Hamas, okay? So like what, tell me, you can’t claim that they’re in Hamas while simultaneously claiming that Hamas is, you know, a group of jihadis, they’re Islamic extremists, which they also claim. Constantly, which I don’t know if that’s true, by the way, it seems more like a political organization But whatever it is, they’re telling us constantly they’re al-qaeda So it can’t also be true that Christians are a member of al-Qaeda. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah So then we know they’re not in Hamas. So why did they get killed? Why was their church blown up? Why were they killed in that hospital? Like what is this? And there’s not one person in the State Department who cares enough to get to the bottom of that question
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:27:19] And all you saw, I mean, all I saw President Trump did call Prime Minister Netanyahu and Netanyah gave an apology for the church that was attacked in Gaza.
Tucker [00:27:28] One of many.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:27:31] There’s never follow-up. There’s never like, hey, this is the prosecution. This is where our investigation landed. It’s this quick two-hour brush on the rug, put a statement out, and then you don’t hear anything ever again.
Tucker [00:27:50] The third example of work that you produced that your superiors were unhappy with and led ultimately to your firing was what?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:28:00] It was a Tuesday, so that’s the press guidance day of all the sample questions. It was actually arguably, we said OBE, which meant overcome by events, which means that we’re like beyond its relevancy, but like, it was still could come up. So I put it, I left it in there was a reaction to Speaker Johnson visiting the settlements in the West Bank. Um, I had a line pretty standard and kind of not, not very specific, but it said, we support stability in the West bank stability. Yeah. We support stability. That’s all. So, and the last, well, the last piece was comma, um, which helps secure Israel. But I think the stable comment was, I don’t know, too much, because if we say we want a stable West Bank, are we accidentally being critical of something Speaker Johnson or Israel is doing?
Tucker [00:28:55] What is that? Flesh that out if you don’t mind. Sure. I mean, I know what you’re saying, but I’m not sure everyone knows. I’m not sure everyone else.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:29:00] Yeah, no, no. Yeah, it’s a good question. So.
Tucker [00:29:01] So why would the US government, so the US government is against extending condolences to the families of non-combatants killed. Correct. Okay. Correct. And the US Government is also now in favor of the forced movement of large populations. That was Monday. Right. Okay, and now you’re saying the US Government is against stability? Right. How are we against stability, why is stability a bad thing?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:29:26] Now, stability is a word that’s used a lot, and we are on paper saying we support stability in the region all the time. But in this specific context, when discussing settlements, it will sound like we’re critiquing Israel indirectly by saying we supports stability in reaction to a question about settlements. Right? So, that was how I interpreted the issue.
Tucker [00:29:48] So in other words, you might be suggesting that the US government opposes radical demographic change in the West Bank.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:29:56] Right. Now I have this line again, just like the force of displacement, it had cleared previously. This is where what was discussed when this first broke my firing in the, in the Washington post was that senior officials from embassy Jerusalem, David Milstein specifically would occasionally pop into my docs. Now it didn’t happen every single day. Like at a Google doc, right. It wasn’t a Google Doc. It was a, it was like, I don’t know, the brand doesn’t matter. Yeah. An internal system. I would share it with, um, in the morning, the equities I was mentioning, one of the equities. Is embassy Jerusalem.
Tucker [00:30:35] So inequity just for State Department speak people haven’t heard it tell us what inequity is. It’s like.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:30:39] So someone has some stake in those lines, and obviously Jerusalem does, obviously, because they’re the ones that are… The US embassy in Jerusalem. The US Embassy in Jerusalem, American diplomats posted to Israel. On those press briefing days, I would share it with them for them to review the document and be like, okay, these are our press lines for these sample questions, are you okay with them? Now, it was interesting because they often did not clear, they didn’t reject it, they just with a non-response because the press officer’s there would defer up the chain to David Milstein and Ambassador Huckabee because they didn’t want to put their name on it. Because if it’s something that they didn’t like, no one wants their name on a press guidance that wasn’t approved by these influential people. Who is David Milstain? He is the senior advisor to Ambassador Huckeby.
Tucker [00:31:26] And what’s his, how old is he? What’s his background? Is he a career diplomat or, uh, he’s a, from my understanding, he has a political
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:31:34] Believe you worked on the hill.
Tucker [00:31:37] Did he work for Ted Cruz? Yes. Yes, he worked for Ted Cruise.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:31:40] And he is the stepson of your best friend, Mark Levin.
Tucker [00:31:46] He’s Mark Levin’s stepson? Yeah. He’s working at the State Department? So, David Milstein is a political guy working now for Mike Huckabee in Jerusalem, and he was going through your lines. Okay.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:32:03] Uh, now on paper, uh, he could be, but the, the way that he would edit my docs as aggressively as he would, and we can get into this, but, the other, uh statements and pieces that were reported in the Washington Post, uh he would push certain agenda that was very aligned with Israel that I found very problematic. Now in this specific example, because we’re discussing the third example of why I was was that he changed the stability line. To we commend Speaker John’s for visiting Judea and Samaria. So we as a government.
Tucker [00:32:40] Jaya and Samaria.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:32:44] It’s a term that is like religious, it’s about Israel’s land grab of the West Bank.
Tucker [00:32:53] Are Judea and Samaria, like, administrative districts? No, it’s not. Is there a mayor of Samaria? Nope, doesn’t exist. Because there’s no actual place called Judea in Samaria. The civil authorities don’t recognize Judea or Samaria
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:33:08] Okay. Nope. It’s the more extreme wing of the, uh, elements of the Israeli government and David Milstein was in line with that language and it’s designed to erase any paucity legitimacy that this is, this is supposed to be, so the point is really
Tucker [00:33:27] By using those terms, they’re biblical terms, they refer to regions described in what Christians call the Old Testament. And the point is to remind everybody that this land was promised by God to the Jewish people, to the Hebrew people, and that, you know, anyone who’s lived there subsequently for the last 3,000 years has no right to it. Right. That’s the point. But from a sort of government perspective, Judean Samaria are not real places in that they’re not. They’re not nation states, they’re not provinces, they are not… And… Do they have clearly defined borders?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:34:04] Not from my understanding, I think they do not. And that would increase, that would give you, that opens the door. What the fuck? It opens the doors to more land grab.
Tucker [00:34:12] Okay, but if a place doesn’t have a clearly defined border, then how can the U.S. Government refer to it in any kind of official capacity? They can.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:34:24] And it’s scary too, because if you look at the airstrikes that Israel is doing in Syria, and they’re building settlements even outside the Golan Heights, it’s all part of this idea of a greater Israel that people are discussing that was beyond these borders. So it’s very scary, and it’s against the stability of the region that we’ve been calling for as a government for
Tucker [00:34:49] So certainly in the modern era, definitely since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, you’ve had clear borders between countries. In fact, we’re fighting a war against Russia right now on the premise that they violated those borders by moving into eastern Ukraine. So like the US government takes borders very seriously, obviously not including our own, but as a matter of like statecraft and diplomacy, that really, really matters. So, you would never! Use a phrase in an official communication that referred to a place whose territory you couldn’t define. That would be fucking crazy to do something like that. A hundred percent. Okay. So you think this Milstein guy, who is Mark Levin’s stepson, you say, it’s almost like you’re making this up. It’s like a joke. Who worked for Ted Cruz in the Senate. He added this to the statement. Correct. And then did it go out?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:35:46] So from that point, I cut it because I even accepted most of his edits in the, in the document because going to battle with him was a whole headache because he’ll call, he’ll push certain things. He was, he was known for doing that. Like he’ll, he will, David Milstein phone call was not the favorite thing.
Tucker [00:36:05] What was it like? Tell us for those of us who don’t work, which Mark Levin steps on at the State Department.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:36:11] Sure. So he would call and he would just push it. Why was that removed? Or why was XYZ done? Very often. And if you said no, there was a tendency to go up the chain in order for him to push the agenda of any given day. And this is something that I’ve dealt with since very early.
Tucker [00:36:30] Where’s his, is he the DCM or what’s… He’s just a senior advisor to Ambassador Huckabee. He’s like an assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Correct.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:36:39] And he, sticking with the public reporting from Washington Post, like he would push in one occasion, statements that were in the voice of Secretary Rubio, not even the spokesperson. And he drafted them. He would push them through and be like, I want this statement out. And- I want the statement out? Yeah. He would go through and he’d be like I drafted this, this is the statement I want. I would go though the process of clearing it, but he would fight for it. Like he would be in the document, getting arguments with people one by one. In order to kind of overwhelm the process and get certain his agenda out there the way he wanted. It’s very difficult.
Tucker [00:37:20] What authority? I mean, that’s pretty cheeky behavior for a guy who’s an aid to Mike Huckabee.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:37:25] It was, you would call around the building and it was very consistent and persistent.
Tucker [00:37:33] But he lives in Jerusalem. He does.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:37:37] And policy comes from DC, like this is obviously they have influence and they have discussions, but the policy comes to DC. So what do you mean call around? You would go either laterally or up the chain and call various people and say, Master Huckabee, you’ll cite Huckaby usually and say wants to stun or in for X, Y, Z reason and If that person didn’t pick up it would go to the next person So he would so even if I we’re discussing equities earlier for one particular equity said we can’t do this Then he would go up Well, I don’t care because this guy above you may clear it
Tucker [00:38:18] and how to see if everyone’s number.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:38:20] That was that’s what I was wondering
Tucker [00:38:24] But David Milstein in an assistant in the U S embassy in Jerusalem, that’s, I just want to restate having grown up grown up around this. That’s not a high level post is like zero authority to do anything.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:38:37] And it’s drafting a statement on behalf, this is very audacious, to draft a statement on behalf of Secretary Rubio. The Secretary of State. Yes, in one occasion, again, referring just to public reporting, was the statement to condemn Ireland for considering a bill that would put economic sanctions on Israel.
Tucker [00:00:00] So you were marched out of the State Department two weeks ago. You left involuntarily, and I want to hear why. But first, what did you do there? What was your job at the State?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:00:09] I was a press officer in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, started September 2024. Essentially, the main bread and butter role of a press office is twofold. One is preparing the spokesperson before they go on the podium and do their daily press briefing. Yeah. And second, reporters ask questions all the time. So a reporter with XYZ outlet submits a question and it’s our job to use cleared lines, or cleared meaning approved lines, and send them back to the reporter. And if you ever read an article that says a state department spokesperson said X, those are press officers taking those cleared lines and sharing it with that reporter.
Tucker [00:01:14] Who clears the lines?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:01:16] Good question. So the press officer will draft the lines from there. It will go up a ladder essentially. So there’ll be desk officers. Leadership in the NEA press office itself and then it goes up to the seventh floor, meaning the secretary’s policy planning office, the deputy secretary of state’s office, but it’s not them self. You’re not going to get the deputy Secretary of State looking at this, right? It’s going to just be like a staffer who represents that equity. So it becomes an inclusive process to make sure everyone has eyes on it. And if there are flags, they’ll let you know. For example, you could be driving a lion on Israel. But it involves Lebanon. But there’s another press officer and a whole other desk and leadership working on Lebanon that might have an equity that you may not be aware of that they’ll edit the line.
Tucker [00:02:09] So, describe the bureau that you work for, Near Eastern Affairs.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:02:12] Yes. What is that? It’s well, it’s an old school name. It basically means anything involved in the Middle East. So it’s Morocco to Iran.
Tucker [00:02:20] Essentially the whole Middle East, not just the Levant, like the whole middle.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:02:23] Yeah, Near East. Yeah, it’s a they need to update the name. I think people are aware. But yeah, it it’s the entire Middle East. So they use all these acronyms. So Israeli Palestinian Affairs is IPA or ISPAL. Saudi, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, that whole grouping is ARP for Arabian Peninsula. And then North Africa is its own entity as well. Morocco to Egypt goes under NA. OK, so it’s.
Tucker [00:02:51] The Levant, the Gulf, Iran, yeah, Iran, Iraq. Huh, interesting. And that’s all in the same bureau. So the State Department divides the world into bureaus. Correct. Go traffic called desks. Correct.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:03:05] Correct. So from Canada down to Chile’s WHA, Western Hemisphere Affairs, Asia’s EAP, Eastern Asia, East Asia Pacific. So we have all these divisions. And Africa, correct. EUR for Europe, Africa’s AF. Um, I was in NEA, um, and I was a press officer there originally covering Lebanon, Jordan, just for a couple of months, and I quickly shifted to, uh, ISPAL. Israel, Palestine. It’s your bow sign.
Tucker [00:03:37] Um, so that’s the hottest of all desks, I would think most scrutiny, most at stake rhetoric, most closely supervised. I would, I’m just guessing, but.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:03:50] Yes, it’s true. The press officer for Israeli Palestinian affairs, you’re on a stage constantly because you’re getting the most questions from reporters for good reason. The spokesperson is going to deal with the most question at the podium about the topic. And so it was a compliment yet difficult for me to process the fact that it was requested from various people in leadership When the administration was changing in January, they said, hey, I know you’ve only been here for a couple of months, but we’re going to put you on this, in this position. Which was surprising, but I wanted to take on the challenge at the time.
Tucker [00:04:32] That by the incoming administration, by the Trump administration.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:04:34] It was, well, it was people from leadership in NEA, which some of them were civil servants, but there were experienced people that recognized how heavy the topic was going to be coming in.
Tucker [00:04:47] How do you get current on that? How do do your research?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:04:51] So it’s, it’s multifold. So we do receive like in terms of standard mainstream media, we do get like, uh, copies of articles and coverage and it’s not necessarily politically, um, uh, isolated, at least in the beginning, it wasn’t. So I would see everything in my email inbox plus personally, right? I’m always absorbing things and you’re only going to be a good press officer if you’re reading Twitter and the standard emails are getting, um, through the inbox. Yeah. So you’re absorbing a lot of information. And it’s not just the details. Like, of course, if I have a question, I want to go to the Israel experts at the State Department. So if there’s a detail I don’t know, there might be a desk officer or someone like that that would know the numbers or the challenges that I need for a specific press line. For me though, as a press officer, my addition in those conversations is like more stylistic. Okay, if we put this line out there, We’re going to invite. These problems or it’s good if we say it this way because uh, this will help us Uh, they’ll defend us in this other way. So it was a stylistic endeavor. Um for from day to day um, and You don’t have full control because i’m obviously the personality of someone at the podium is going to say It one way even though I was hoping this line would deliver this other Way, right? You don’t you have full. Control, but you you do have a who’s the spokesman for the nearer? Well, right now it’s, it’s more the spokesperson of the entire department that I was briefing. So it was Tammy Bruce. She left, um, and then there’s, uh, deputies that are currently. Where did Tammy Bruce go? She’s going to the UN.
Tucker [00:06:33] Um, so were you given parameters? Like how do you get your orders? Like we do say this, we don’t say that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:06:43] The main day-to-day activity that I think people may not be aware of, but are probably not aware of is that I have these packets called press guidance, called PG. So on Tuesday and Thursday, which are the days that a spokesperson would go on to the podium, I would have all the sample questions. And some of them are tasked from the main press office in at the city department. But I also would come up with my own questions, like, hey. Where we’re getting this question a lot, we need to have lines for this, so we can’t leave this alone. So I’d create a packet, clear it through the building, like I was saying earlier, through the seventh floor, and then I’d present that brief to the spokesperson about two hours before she went onto the podium.
Tucker [00:07:27] How do you know what the official US position, especially on that topic, Israel-Palestine, I mean, that’s again, the most politicized area there is. And it’s the stakes are high. So how do you what the officially US position is on that conflict?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:07:43] It’s a very good question, especially in the beginning of the administration, it’s a bit of an art. You’re taking the gold for a press officer or lines from the principles. Essentially, if President Trump says something, if Special Envoy Wyckoff says something. I take those quotes and I’m like, okay, that’s policy. So if he’s talking about…
Tucker [00:08:03] And I think that’s literally true, right? I mean, the president sort of unilaterally can form our foreign policy.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:08:08] Yeah, and there’s no questioning like a quote that comes from a principal, especially President Trump or Secretary Rubio for the State Department is often the case. So I would take those lines and it would answer certain questions that would come up. Where are we with the ceasefire? Oh, Special Envoy Witkoff went on XYZ Sunday show, so I’ll pull that line and I’ll brief the spokesperson and then she or he can quote. Especially when we wake up at the podium again, because that’s the policy. That’s the easiest way of doing it. You don’t always have quotes. So what would happen instead is you kind of have.
Tucker [00:08:43] Did you ever get a question on that? Question on? Well, I mean, if you say, you know, you should respond in this way and then cite the president or Steve Wittkopf or Secretary Rubio, then that kind of that kind of ends the conversation, right?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:08:55] It should end the conversation. What was surprising, and this will go back to why, when I ended up departing and getting fired in August, was that on a specific question, one of the three events I think led up to my firing, was on a Monday, we received a question about forced displacement, which is essentially ethnic cleansing, and what our policy was about Israel intending to move Palestinians in Gaza to South Sudan. So to South Sudan, yeah, that was every, like every two or three months we had a new, um, Reporting would come out in the spring. It was they’re moving Um palestinians in gaza to libya There was a rumor about somaliland even though we don’t recognize somalilan but There was reporting about are we going to do an exchange where we recognize somali land? But they have to take on palestineans And then we had an ethiopia round and then the last last round that I witnessed before I left was a South Sudan. So, and so that appears in somewhere in the press appears somewhere in the press. And we received a question. What’s your response to this reporting? And then I, I came up the line, not, but it wasn’t a line that like, I just came out of the blue. It was something that’s President Trump and Special Envoy Witkoff had said in other words in the spring. I said, we do not support forced displacement.
Tucker [00:10:21] And why, what did they say about it? So that was your interpretation of what they said. Do you remember what they said, what Wyckoff and Trump said on that topic?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:10:29] So specifically special envoy Wittkopf said something, we’re not, said something along the lines of we’re not trying to evict anybody, right? So from, as a press officer, there’s an art to it, right. Cause you’re not you can sometimes do the exact quote, or you can just come up with a new line that reflects that quote.
Tucker [00:10:43] I think forced displacement and eviction are synonyms, any fair person would say that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:10:48] And keep in mind, this had already been cleared. It was approved for about a couple of weeks before this particular question popped up because the Ethiopia rumor was like July 28th. So I put it in the PG, put it into the packet, cleared through, I briefed it multiple times. So when that question came up, I said, I actually probably had the right to just send that line because it cleared so many times. But to be extra careful, I sent it out to the spokesman. Person and that’s their staff and made sure the most important equities were re-clearing it and from my understanding now I wasn’t on the chain but from my understanding they went to the secretary’s office and they cut that line of we do not support forced displacement. The only other bullet that we have which is pretty standard is we don’t discuss private diplomatic conversations which is standard I always say you know. Ongoing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s one of those lines. So that line was there. So, that’s all we ended up providing. So there’s some sensitivity, which I found very odd because out of the three events, I can get into the other ones, but that was like number two. But the two days before I was fired, that Thursday and Friday, the only feedback that I got, Cause my bureau was confused as to why. Uh, the secretary’s office was coming down on me, right? Cause they don’t know me. They don’t interact with a random press officer at NEA, right. Maybe a little bit more because of the sensitive topic, but chances are generally low. My leadership has said, Hey, they’re asking where you got that line from. From Monday. I’m like, today’s Thursday, you four days later, they were asking me where I, where I got this line that I drafted, but they cut it. I went through the procedure, right, I cut it, they cut it and the reporter never saw that line.
Tucker [00:12:43] Did they explain why they cut it?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:12:46] All I got from, all I heard, all eyewitness, was the acting spokesperson saying.
Tucker [00:12:51] So you were paraphrasing the envoy, Steve Wicoff, and the President of the United States, Donald Trump, when you said the United State does not support a forced displacement. Yep. I don’t think we do support that, do we, by the way? I would hope so. Yeah, one would hope not. Right. And especially, we’re not going to pay for that. And they cut that out, but didn’t explain why. Right. And then your supervisors came to you and said, hey, they’re complaining about you.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:13:21] Right. And they didn’t, they only specified that line, just like the act of drafting it. And I was like, I have a track record. They asked me Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, twice in a row, which is very odd for a random bullet. I was, like, I have the evidence from July 28th of clearing this press guidance with that line. And here are the relevant quotes.
Tucker [00:13:41] Say, by the way, you may not know this, but the United States does support forced displacement. No one said that. No one’s said that, but by the way, sorry, I got it wrong. We’re all about forced displacement, okay? We want, we want, kind of want to trail a tear situation here because we’re for that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:13:58] It’s tragic because it’s such a standard. So bonkers. Yeah. That’s something you would want to advertise. You want to put out there that we’re against this. Like, hey, we still have some moral standing somewhere. And when the Washington Post piece came out like yesterday, two days ago, saying there’s some plan involving the consultations of Tony Blair of moving gauzans out, but we may pay for something, a piece of it. I’m like, why? So is this why I got fired is because I was, I was still sticking through this line and they saw me as some kind of obstacle, which I wasn’t because I was going through the exact procedures they wanted. But I knew that when I was fired as someone who was, again, close with political appointees and with civil servants and was pretty well established in NEA. Again, like I said earlier, you don’t get this role covering Israeli-Palestinian affairs on a whim and I’m suddenly pushed out. That means things are going to go into a very radical direction. Well, yeah, I should also say.
Tucker [00:14:59] Because I know that you will be attacked and I’ll be attacked for speaking to you on the following grounds. This guy’s a partisan Democrat who liked Bernie. He was a saboteur, a wrecker. I know from our conversations off camera, at least what you said to me was basically agreed with Trump’s foreign policy instincts. You know, fewer pointless wars, Like, get along with more people.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:15:24] Yeah, that’s fair. I’ve always been an advocate for ending endless war on a personal level. And so when President Trump is saying, hey, we don’t want to get into any forever wars, I’m like, that is great. And we technically started with a ceasefire in Gaza and started the administration. That was something we could have expanded on. We were speaking to the Iranians. So there’s so many chances for true peace, but things went in the wrong direction. I would say somewhere in the summer. Uh, I remember listening to president Trump’s speech in Saudi in May, where he was talking about amazing speech. Love that speech. I remember I was, I was like,
Tucker [00:16:03] I was cheering.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:16:04] Exactly. And in my, in my cubicle at the state department, I was like, this is a great speech.
Tucker [00:16:07] I was too, that was one of the best speeches I’ve ever given.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:16:10] And I was like, this is amazing. It was ballsy to the speech. Calling out neocons, like, no one calls out neocrons in DC, right? No, of course not. We brushed that under the rug. We kept moving, right. We still see them as an analyst here and there on TV. Here and there? They dominate the biggest cable news channel. Yes, Don Bavaria. Yeah. So, so glad to see that. But then why two weeks later, were we sabotaging our own talks with Iran and then bombing them? Right? So the events. Like the idea that I’m some partisan is just wrong. I guess on a personal avenue, I don’t want any more endless wars. But President Trump was in line with that. And I was doing my job in line with the procedures that were necessary every single day. Yeah, but it sounds like you agreed with him.
Tucker [00:16:56] So, I guess that’s my point. If you like that, I mean, I don’t know, you know, a lot of these, some of the labels are real, but some of them are also created and certainly sustained in order to keep people from listening to each other so they don’t discover they actually agree on a lot. And if you love the Saudi speech and I love the Saudi speech, then we’re probably not too far from each other then. Because I thought that and that was a Donald Trump speech. And by the way, if you’re such a partisan Democrat, you’re admitting on camera that you loved a Donald Trump speech. You’re not too partisan, I guess.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:17:27] I just want to see because I’m here. I’m honest these matters Yeah, it’s like it’s the it’s they it’s their issues. We have informed policy that I matter that I care about I don’t care about the labels per se
Tucker [00:17:36] Oh, I don’t either. Well, they’re clearly meaningless. Yes. If we’re both cheering on the Riyadh speech. So yes. Okay. I just wanted to establish that. So you start hearing from your bosses, like, Hey, what is this thing that you put in there about opposing forced displacement? We’ve always.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:17:51] Yeah, we’ve always, yeah, four or five days earlier, not even like the next day. There was like a delay annoyance. It was weird.
Tucker [00:17:59] So you said that there are three examples of this where they found problems with your work?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:18:05] Right. And some of this, it kind of made sense from hindsight, because I didn’t like, in the moment, I didn’t t realize. But Sunday, Israel had struck a tent with several journalists living inside, including Anas, who millions of people had watched cover the events in Gaza. They all died. I drafted a line, a few lines. And by the way, there were not… Saw some softy lines. The only thing that was there that they didn’t like was they did share condolences, which is pretty standard, uh, uh policy.
Tucker [00:18:39] What do you mean?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:18:41] So I said, we check indulgences for the families of the killed journalists.
Tucker [00:18:45] Well, that sounds, that sounds like hate speech to me. Condolences to the families of people who got killed, non-combatants killed in war.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:18:55] And what’s so disappointing, too, was that… Wait, wait, so what…
Tucker [00:19:00] What happened when you put that in there?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:19:01] I was immediately told from a senior official that we don’t know what Anas did essentially, and I was like, that’s odd. And it’s what he did. Like, we don’t know what his conduct was. Like we don’t know, we need more information. He might, it was, she or he was alluding to the fact. He may have done something or he’s a problematic actor in some way.
Tucker [00:19:30] Okay, let me just say I would be totally comfortable sharing condolences with Osama Bin Laden’s family. I hate Osama bin Laden. On the other hand, if somebody dies, it’s okay to say, I’m sorry to his family that you’re- He had a toddler. That’s what I’m saying. Yeah. That’s immaterial. I would say that to the family of an executed murderer in a prison. It doesn’t mean I support the murder or the murderer, but this is family. Like that’s okay. That’s called like human decency and anyone who’s against that.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:20:02] Yeah, and it seemed that we’re setting up this constant, this is my issue that I noticed from the get-go, the constant deferring to Israel. It was like waiting for some statement, like, let them speak first. And then on Monday, Israel said, al Hamas, which is a throwaway line they’ve used. Al Hamas meaning what? They’re journalists. Were al Hamass? Yeah. Or at least with Anas, if I remember correctly. And so they brushed that away. Were they? Look, my point when I heard that… Was what does our intelligence say? If they were like being super strict and said, hey, we’re gonna triple check using our US intelligence of who these people are, maybe, maybe. Right? I still don’t agree with cutting the condolences line, but sure. But why is there, oh, Israel said this, done. We don’t have Intel services? Right, right. So what’s with the instinct to defer to Israel when we have the entire apparatus that could check that?
Tucker [00:21:02] And then by Tuesday got like 17 different intelligence services in this country that take, you know, a trillion dollars a year or whatever the actual budget is. And we don’t consult them at all. We wait for the Israeli spokesman to tell us what reality is. That what you’re saying.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:21:17] And how is that America first, right? This whole apparatus of like, of, of mirroring certain Israeli statements and waiting for them to comment first was something that I found tragic. It was, it was odd. Um, and that’s what ended up happening by the press briefing that Tuesday. We’re like, we refer you to Israel, which was a line that, um, popped up in my press guidance way too often.
Tucker [00:21:47] We were so we don’t have a position on it.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:21:50] Right. And that came up on any, any topic that was somewhat
Tucker [00:21:57] sensitive or waiting for Israel to make a move. Does the State Department have any position that contradicts the position of the Israeli government that you’re aware of? No.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:22:08] The closest, I think, for US interests we do, but in our current policy and posture, we do not. So- Not one. The closest we got-
Tucker [00:22:21] Do you love them? I love them. Do you have any sticking points with them? Is there, is there something you don’t fully agree on?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:22:26] As any siblings do.
Tucker [00:22:27] Exactly. Exactly. So loving someone or having an alliance with someone or even like sharing the same parents as somebody doesn’t mean that you have to agree on every little point.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:22:37] Would be weird if you did. It would be weird. Yeah. Agenical twins have disagreed. That’s a little odd. This is getting a little weird. Why is there nothing like this? It’s very strange. And the closest we came and there was no follow through was when I actually liked the statement which was a thousand other things I had personal issues which was irrelevant but Ambassador Huckabee when there was these type attacks against the Christians in West Bank he did put out a statement saying these attacks are unacceptable we call on Israel to investigate, but there’s no follow-through, right? What do you mean? He had a statement that said- Oh, I remember-
Tucker [00:23:12] Oh, I remembered very well.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:23:13] Very well. Yeah, there’s no, there is no follow through. And like, you’re like, oh, that’s a good statement. That’s, I’m like, wow.
Tucker [00:23:19] You can’t attack Christians with U.S. Tax dollars. Sorry. And not allowed. I don’t care who you are.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:23:24] And it was it was just it was one statement and there was no like and if we got questions, hey, what’s the size of the investigation?
Tucker [00:23:34] So no one at the State Department looked into it? This is a majority Christian country, but nobody felt like that would be a good use of American tax dollars to find out what this was or ask anybody any questions.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:23:47] And that’s the thing, each time there’s a call for investigation, a very rare opportunity that that’s in front of us. There’s no follow through the strong statement. We did the thing and you don’t hear about it for, for weeks and months. So there’s no one in the state department who cared. Look, I don’t want to speak for the entire, I think there, there were people that cared. I think that there are, I cared a lot, there are civil servants or political appointees, forest service officers that see, see all of this. And, but it’s the style of constantly deferring to Israel that’s at the forefront. So we can criticize up to a certain point. And it’s awful because if we want Israel to investigate, then we should be following up and ask, hey, what happened to the investigation? I thought you were going to investigate. Where are the prosecutions? Who did all the damage? Who did this and why? Yeah. But we’d never hear the follow up.
Tucker [00:24:48] So there’s no, as far as you’re aware, mechanism in the State Department to, because you’ve described a relationship that’s unique, there’s no other country in the world that has this relationship with the United States, and a lot of resources go into supporting that country, but there’s no mechanism in US State Department, to like follow up on this.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:25:13] In the public realm, because I was working, I work as a press officer, right? So I’m always working with reporters and how, like this, the presentation, those things matter. So if there was a system of following up, I didn’t see it. It’s possible. Personally, I kind of doubt it. Um, but on the public realm,
Tucker [00:25:33] You would have known about it because what if somebody asks you?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:25:35] Right. And you would think that if there was follow-up, you’d want to advertise it too. Like, Hey, we followed up, but they were, they were the preference was to defer and deflect and give
Tucker [00:25:49] We persecute Christians with American tax dollars, nobody cares. You’re making me mad. No, it’s just frustrating. It’s frustrating. I know, it is. Frustrating to see people get, cause it’s not a neutral situation. Like some people are winning and some people are losing. And if the losers are people that you, you know, didn’t do anything wrong, the Christians aren’t in Hamas, like what? What’s their crime?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:26:15] Look, the scenes are horrific, so on a human level, it shouldn’t matter, but if that’s the whole thing of having an ambassador out could be there, it’s like, at least maybe you’ll care about this. And then, yeah, you put a strong statement out, but don’t follow up.
Tucker [00:26:28] Care at all. Yeah, right. The self-described Christians don’t care at all about the Christians. And by the way, the whole justification for all this, you just said it, these journalists get blown up, they were Hamas. Okay, end of conversation. No one can plausibly claim that a Christian family are in Hamas, okay? So like what, tell me, you can’t claim that they’re in Hamas while simultaneously claiming that Hamas is, you know, a group of jihadis, they’re Islamic extremists, which they also claim. Constantly, which I don’t know if that’s true, by the way, it seems more like a political organization But whatever it is, they’re telling us constantly they’re al-qaeda So it can’t also be true that Christians are a member of al-Qaeda. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah So then we know they’re not in Hamas. So why did they get killed? Why was their church blown up? Why were they killed in that hospital? Like what is this? And there’s not one person in the State Department who cares enough to get to the bottom of that question
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:27:19] And all you saw, I mean, all I saw President Trump did call Prime Minister Netanyahu and Netanyah gave an apology for the church that was attacked in Gaza.
Tucker [00:27:28] One of many.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:27:31] There’s never follow-up. There’s never like, hey, this is the prosecution. This is where our investigation landed. It’s this quick two-hour brush on the rug, put a statement out, and then you don’t hear anything ever again.
Tucker [00:27:50] The third example of work that you produced that your superiors were unhappy with and led ultimately to your firing was what?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:28:00] It was a Tuesday, so that’s the press guidance day of all the sample questions. It was actually arguably, we said OBE, which meant overcome by events, which means that we’re like beyond its relevancy, but like, it was still could come up. So I put it, I left it in there was a reaction to Speaker Johnson visiting the settlements in the West Bank. Um, I had a line pretty standard and kind of not, not very specific, but it said, we support stability in the West bank stability. Yeah. We support stability. That’s all. So, and the last, well, the last piece was comma, um, which helps secure Israel. But I think the stable comment was, I don’t know, too much, because if we say we want a stable West Bank, are we accidentally being critical of something Speaker Johnson or Israel is doing?
Tucker [00:28:55] What is that? Flesh that out if you don’t mind. Sure. I mean, I know what you’re saying, but I’m not sure everyone knows. I’m not sure everyone else.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:29:00] Yeah, no, no. Yeah, it’s a good question. So.
Tucker [00:29:01] So why would the US government, so the US government is against extending condolences to the families of non-combatants killed. Correct. Okay. Correct. And the US Government is also now in favor of the forced movement of large populations. That was Monday. Right. Okay, and now you’re saying the US Government is against stability? Right. How are we against stability, why is stability a bad thing?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:29:26] Now, stability is a word that’s used a lot, and we are on paper saying we support stability in the region all the time. But in this specific context, when discussing settlements, it will sound like we’re critiquing Israel indirectly by saying we supports stability in reaction to a question about settlements. Right? So, that was how I interpreted the issue.
Tucker [00:29:48] So in other words, you might be suggesting that the US government opposes radical demographic change in the West Bank.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:29:56] Right. Now I have this line again, just like the force of displacement, it had cleared previously. This is where what was discussed when this first broke my firing in the, in the Washington post was that senior officials from embassy Jerusalem, David Milstein specifically would occasionally pop into my docs. Now it didn’t happen every single day. Like at a Google doc, right. It wasn’t a Google Doc. It was a, it was like, I don’t know, the brand doesn’t matter. Yeah. An internal system. I would share it with, um, in the morning, the equities I was mentioning, one of the equities. Is embassy Jerusalem.
Tucker [00:30:35] So inequity just for State Department speak people haven’t heard it tell us what inequity is. It’s like.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:30:39] So someone has some stake in those lines, and obviously Jerusalem does, obviously, because they’re the ones that are… The US embassy in Jerusalem. The US Embassy in Jerusalem, American diplomats posted to Israel. On those press briefing days, I would share it with them for them to review the document and be like, okay, these are our press lines for these sample questions, are you okay with them? Now, it was interesting because they often did not clear, they didn’t reject it, they just with a non-response because the press officer’s there would defer up the chain to David Milstein and Ambassador Huckabee because they didn’t want to put their name on it. Because if it’s something that they didn’t like, no one wants their name on a press guidance that wasn’t approved by these influential people. Who is David Milstain? He is the senior advisor to Ambassador Huckeby.
Tucker [00:31:26] And what’s his, how old is he? What’s his background? Is he a career diplomat or, uh, he’s a, from my understanding, he has a political
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:31:34] Believe you worked on the hill.
Tucker [00:31:37] Did he work for Ted Cruz? Yes. Yes, he worked for Ted Cruise.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:31:40] And he is the stepson of your best friend, Mark Levin.
Tucker [00:31:46] He’s Mark Levin’s stepson? Yeah. He’s working at the State Department? So, David Milstein is a political guy working now for Mike Huckabee in Jerusalem, and he was going through your lines. Okay.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:32:03] Uh, now on paper, uh, he could be, but the, the way that he would edit my docs as aggressively as he would, and we can get into this, but, the other, uh statements and pieces that were reported in the Washington Post, uh he would push certain agenda that was very aligned with Israel that I found very problematic. Now in this specific example, because we’re discussing the third example of why I was was that he changed the stability line. To we commend Speaker John’s for visiting Judea and Samaria. So we as a government.
Tucker [00:32:40] Jaya and Samaria.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:32:44] It’s a term that is like religious, it’s about Israel’s land grab of the West Bank.
Tucker [00:32:53] Are Judea and Samaria, like, administrative districts? No, it’s not. Is there a mayor of Samaria? Nope, doesn’t exist. Because there’s no actual place called Judea in Samaria. The civil authorities don’t recognize Judea or Samaria
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:33:08] Okay. Nope. It’s the more extreme wing of the, uh, elements of the Israeli government and David Milstein was in line with that language and it’s designed to erase any paucity legitimacy that this is, this is supposed to be, so the point is really
Tucker [00:33:27] By using those terms, they’re biblical terms, they refer to regions described in what Christians call the Old Testament. And the point is to remind everybody that this land was promised by God to the Jewish people, to the Hebrew people, and that, you know, anyone who’s lived there subsequently for the last 3,000 years has no right to it. Right. That’s the point. But from a sort of government perspective, Judean Samaria are not real places in that they’re not. They’re not nation states, they’re not provinces, they are not… And… Do they have clearly defined borders?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:34:04] Not from my understanding, I think they do not. And that would increase, that would give you, that opens the door. What the fuck? It opens the doors to more land grab.
Tucker [00:34:12] Okay, but if a place doesn’t have a clearly defined border, then how can the U.S. Government refer to it in any kind of official capacity? They can.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:34:24] And it’s scary too, because if you look at the airstrikes that Israel is doing in Syria, and they’re building settlements even outside the Golan Heights, it’s all part of this idea of a greater Israel that people are discussing that was beyond these borders. So it’s very scary, and it’s against the stability of the region that we’ve been calling for as a government for
Tucker [00:34:49] So certainly in the modern era, definitely since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, you’ve had clear borders between countries. In fact, we’re fighting a war against Russia right now on the premise that they violated those borders by moving into eastern Ukraine. So like the US government takes borders very seriously, obviously not including our own, but as a matter of like statecraft and diplomacy, that really, really matters. So, you would never! Use a phrase in an official communication that referred to a place whose territory you couldn’t define. That would be fucking crazy to do something like that. A hundred percent. Okay. So you think this Milstein guy, who is Mark Levin’s stepson, you say, it’s almost like you’re making this up. It’s like a joke. Who worked for Ted Cruz in the Senate. He added this to the statement. Correct. And then did it go out?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:35:46] So from that point, I cut it because I even accepted most of his edits in the, in the document because going to battle with him was a whole headache because he’ll call, he’ll push certain things. He was, he was known for doing that. Like he’ll, he will, David Milstein phone call was not the favorite thing.
Tucker [00:36:05] What was it like? Tell us for those of us who don’t work, which Mark Levin steps on at the State Department.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:36:11] Sure. So he would call and he would just push it. Why was that removed? Or why was XYZ done? Very often. And if you said no, there was a tendency to go up the chain in order for him to push the agenda of any given day. And this is something that I’ve dealt with since very early.
Tucker [00:36:30] Where’s his, is he the DCM or what’s… He’s just a senior advisor to Ambassador Huckabee. He’s like an assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Correct.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:36:39] And he, sticking with the public reporting from Washington Post, like he would push in one occasion, statements that were in the voice of Secretary Rubio, not even the spokesperson. And he drafted them. He would push them through and be like, I want this statement out. And- I want the statement out? Yeah. He would go through and he’d be like I drafted this, this is the statement I want. I would go though the process of clearing it, but he would fight for it. Like he would be in the document, getting arguments with people one by one. In order to kind of overwhelm the process and get certain his agenda out there the way he wanted. It’s very difficult.
Tucker [00:37:20] What authority? I mean, that’s pretty cheeky behavior for a guy who’s an aid to Mike Huckabee.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:37:25] It was, you would call around the building and it was very consistent and persistent.
Tucker [00:37:33] But he lives in Jerusalem. He does.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:37:37] And policy comes from DC, like this is obviously they have influence and they have discussions, but the policy comes to DC. So what do you mean call around? You would go either laterally or up the chain and call various people and say, Master Huckabee, you’ll cite Huckaby usually and say wants to stun or in for X, Y, Z reason and If that person didn’t pick up it would go to the next person So he would so even if I we’re discussing equities earlier for one particular equity said we can’t do this Then he would go up Well, I don’t care because this guy above you may clear it
Tucker [00:38:18] and how to see if everyone’s number.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:38:20] That was that’s what I was wondering
Tucker [00:38:24] But David Milstein in an assistant in the U S embassy in Jerusalem, that’s, I just want to restate having grown up grown up around this. That’s not a high level post is like zero authority to do anything.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:38:37] And it’s drafting a statement on behalf, this is very audacious, to draft a statement on behalf of Secretary Rubio. The Secretary of State. Yes, in one occasion, again, referring just to public reporting, was the statement to condemn Ireland for considering a bill that would put economic sanctions on Israel.
Tucker [00:38:59] Condemn Ireland as you can imagine folks. So David Milstein was demanding in effect that the secretary of state condemn Ireland because Ireland offended the government of Israel.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:39:12] Actually, I remember correctly, strongly condemned, which doesn’t really, in table mics speak, you don’t have strongly. But yes, strongly condemn Ireland. As a nation? The government, I guess, I don’t remember the language, but.
Tucker [00:39:26] Did Rubio read it?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:39:29] That was a rare occasion where it went up the ladder and it was eventually killed, but it required the European Affairs Bureau and NEA and everyone to, it took a lot of effort because you were so laser focused on getting that through. And who is it- Would that be good for the United States condemning Ireland? It would be good Israel. Could use our political and diplomatic capital on this statement. Would punish Ireland for considering something.
Tucker [00:40:00] Did you ever see, it sounds like you had a lot of contact or could see David Milstein at work a lot. It sounds like he was a pretty big figure in your office in D.C., though he’s an assistant to them.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:40:10] It was very sudden. It was like, oh, you don’t hear from three days. All of a sudden you’re getting a phone call and a bunch of edits on something and they disappear again.
Tucker [00:40:16] Did he have your cell? It works though. Yeah, he did. How’d he get your number?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:40:21] Well, at that point, early on, I think someone asked that I share with them. So that was, that was on my end.
Tucker [00:40:29] But did you ever see David Milstein, like, thinking about what’s good for the United States or getting aggressive on behalf of what our interests might be as distinct from Israel’s interests?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:40:41] I perceived a lot of his actions as very Israel first, from my point of view, because that statement didn’t make sense. Those edits to the press lines didn’t makes sense. And in particular with Judea and Samaria, that not only would not make sense for how dangerous it is for what that means, because as you discussed, there’s no land barrier to that, but it hurts our relationships to the region. For example, we rely on Jordan for so many things. But if we start calling a journey of some area. It that undermines our military relationship, our relationship dealing with refugees in Jordan. Also, some of that land is in Jordan
Tucker [00:41:21] Right. So, I mean, you can’t, I mean, if yeah, that would cause problems.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:41:28] And that’s one example, like the whole region.
Tucker [00:41:29] So these are not, this is diplomacy. This is the State Department of the United States of America, which is still a global superpower even now. And so Jordan, Jordanian economy relies on USAID. We proffer that aid at the request of Israel because Jordan is filled with refugees in the 1948 war that created Israel and subsequent refugees, 67, and filled with the refugees including from Syria, a war that we fought on behalf of Israel. So we pay Jordan, we also pay Egypt to keep them calm. And now you’re saying he wanted to issue a statement saying to Jordan, by the way, part of your territory and what you thought was a sovereign nation actually doesn’t belong to you.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:42:12] And just so terrible. And so we can go back to that day three because I cut that line. And by the way, this isn’t a unilateral action by me, there are others who agree with me. So I’m not doing it with the backing of of my own thoughts.
Tucker [00:42:31] Well, that’s not a hard one. Judea and Samaria, I mean, isn’t there, I mean it’s been a long time sitting around the State Department, but I mean I always thought there was like a, like there’s a protocol to things, which in some cases is silly, but some cases it’s real. Like, do we refer to that region as Judea in Samaria or don’t we? Like this is something that’s been gone over before, correct?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:42:52] Yeah, no, we don’t, and we don t, we never have. Secretary Rubio did not use it, President Trump did not use it. Ambassador Huckabee has. Now that was, that’s difference.
Tucker [00:43:04] Did anyone ever ask Ambassador Huckabee, what land specifically are you referring to when you say that? Not from what I’ve seen. Because reporters are morons. That’s why. But someone asked like an obvious question like Judea and Samaria. Where’s that? Can you draw it for me on a map? Show me the boundaries of this place you’re talking about.
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:43:19] Well, even if they did ask, the lines wouldn’t even answer the question directly, right? Because in person they should have asked him, yes, I agree.
Tucker [00:43:26] What, what, what are you talking about? Where is that?
Shahed Ghoreishi [00:43:29] No one will ever ask that question. And Ambassador Huckabee always had extreme comments, either in person or on his Twitter account. But for most of my time at the State Department, the response would be, well, those are Ambassador Huckeby’s words. We do this dance. But now, now that I’ve especially after firing me, you’re getting an unleashed embassy Jerusalem, because who’s going to do anything to stop them? Because they already had so much influence to begin with. But when I’m used as an example, they fire me as someone who did the very basic thing of cutting a line that did not make sense.
Tucker [00:44:08] It’s also inconsistent with long-standing U.S. Policy.
Continues,,,
Count Folke Bernadotte in his headquarters on the island of Rhodes, Greece, 19 July 1948. Source: United Nations audiovisual bookshop.
