Hello from Washington, I'm Chuck Todd,

and this is the Chuck Todd cast.

So I've got one of those guests today

who has a very wide aperture to be able to talk about

a lot of things that have happened this week because this is somebody that has worked in the

Nixit administration, the Clinton administration, the Obama administration.

This is somebody who's been a Secretary of Defense, the director of the CIA, the director of the Office of Management and Budget,

a White House Chief of Staff, Chairman of the House Budget Committee,

a staffer, in a Cabinet Agency that is used to, that is now called HUD. I'm referring to Leon Panetta of

course the former the longtime California Democrat of course basically the

a consigliere of sorts for multiple presidents.

He has been in the national security space, the domestic space, so he's got, like I said, a wide

aperture for things.

But I'll be honest with what I primarily

was trying to book him for was to talk

about the intelligence failures of October 7th in Israel and Gaza and what happened there because I was

most distressed by this idea that the CIA no longer had human resources that

was able to track what was going on with Hamas that it turned out the CIA was relying heavily on partner intelligence agencies by trying to keep track and it's sort of like here we go again.

Did the US, you know, the lack of human intelligence has caused

his problems in the past. Think Iraq, weapons of mass destruction. We

have struggled to get human intelligence in North Korea, struggled to get human intelligence in Iran.

So a big part of this, our conversation, was that.

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