Kash Patel: Are We Setting Up Ukraine to Be Another Afghanistan? February 3, 2023 KASH'S CORNER

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Kash Patel:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Kash’s Corner. There’s tons going on this week as usual. So Jan, what are we going to talk about, and where would you like to start?

Jan Jekielek:

We have to look back at the Biden classified docs. This seems to be something that just is continuing going on. There’s the Rehoboth Beach house that’s come into play here. This is something we want to discuss. We’re going to talk about the one-year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine War. We need to look at that and the U.S. contribution to that, so to speak. Finally, something I’ve wanted to talk about for a few weeks, the DoD mandate, with the DoD basically removing the vaccine mandate. but from what we’re hearing, perhaps not at West Point.

Mr. Patel:

Jan, we’ve done episodes extensively on my time as chief of staff at DoD, on Warp Speed and the rollout. What we want to talk about today is something we were very proud of then, and I think still are today. We never made the vaccine mandatory for anyone in the Department of Defense or anywhere else in the United States government. It was an option.

When the Biden Administration came to power, they immediately reversed course and said, “If you want to serve in our armed forces in uniform or as a civilian, you have to take a vaccine.” That’s three million employees. The Department of Defense is the largest company on planet Earth, if you want to put it in that sort of perspective. So, that caused a big uproar.

The bigger uproar, the biggest offense to me was not only were they forcing people to decide between serving this country or taking a vaccine that was contradictory to their faith or their convictions, they removed active duty soldiers and active duty service members who were in the military for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and they took away their pay because they refused.

We’ve seen over the years, if you go through the court process, and we’ve known the entire time that that move by the Biden Administration was effectively unconstitutional. Now the courts have upheld that, so now the Biden Administration has finally lifted this mandate. So, I think it’s a step in the right direction. For me, the better thing would be how are you going to make all these folks whole that you kicked out of the military or that you suspended without pay?

When you suspend someone in the military and remove them, the military operates on an ordered ranking system of structure. What does that mean? It means there’s a chain of command. People get into the military to move up through that chain of command. When you’re removed, when you’re taken out of that chain of command for six months, a year, you lose the positioning you would’ve had, had you stayed. It’s not like these soldiers and service members did something bad to get court-martialed because they committed a crime to remove themselves.

They were pulled out by our government based on this effectively unconstitutional mandate. How they are going to resolve that is something I’m very interested in. In my opinion, they must give all these soldiers back pay and restore them to the position they would’ve been in had they not been suspended unlawfully. There’s still a lot of work left for the Biden Administration to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is thousands of people.

Mr. Patel:

Yes, it’s not like five guys.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes.

Mr. Patel:

You’re right, three million’s a big number, but it’s thousands of people who signed up to serve the mission of the national security of the United States of America, so we’ll see. I don’t have a lot of faith in this administration providing for and prioritizing our men and women in uniform and our civilian soldiers, so to speak. So we’ll see.

Mr. Jekielek:

A couple of things. First of all, there are these reports from John Solomon’s outfit, Just the News, that West Point has actually reinstated this travel mandate.

Mr. Patel:

Yes, and that’s problematic right off the bat. They say they’re removing the mandate. Then one of the four service academies, as we call them, West Point, the one for the Army is effectively saying, “You can’t be a cadet at West Point unless you take the mandate.” Now we’re still working through the verbiage that’s in there, but that’s the outcome.

Of course, they’ll have some sort of out by saying, “You could probably attend. But if you do, you can’t participate in all these training exercises,” meaning you can’t get your training education, you can’t actually go through the programs and become a graduate of the West Point Academy. They’ll come back and say, “You guys are not reporting that accurately. You can come to West Point,” but if you can come and not do anything, then there’s no point in going. That’s very disturbing. In my opinion, it’s completely unconstitutional.

Mr. Jekielek:

Congress has also been mulling over some kind of legislation that would help get these service members back.

Mr. Patel:

It would have to be an act of Congress. You’re talking about money that needs to be dispersed and spent. The budgeting operations of this country originate and must start in the House of Representatives, go to the Senate, pass both chambers, and then go to the president’s desk. It’s not like the president can just by fiat print money and say, “We’re going to issue these funds.” There’s pots of money he can pull from depending on the scenario and executive orders he implements. But this one has to originate in the Congress and I just hope Congress prioritizes it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Congress has been prioritizing funding Ukraine, right?

Mr. Patel:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

The U.S. contribution to Ukraine has been to the tune of something like $110 billion at last count, and we’re about one year in. What is your take on where we’re at with this contribution? Is it reasonable? Is this leading to some kind of greater conflict, which is what I’m increasingly hearing people say?

Mr. Patel:

Yes, it’s one of the biggest issues from a national security perspective that’s currently impacting America. The decision-making process has been politicized, and many people in Congress are putting their politics ahead of what America should be doing to protect itself and its citizens, and then also, what we should be doing to help others overseas. I’ve said repeatedly over and over when I go around the country and talk, America is the greatest nation in the world, and many times we are in a position to help other countries, which we do on a routine basis. That’s what makes us the United States of America.

At the same time, my biggest problem, and maybe it’s because of my background, is printing money we don’t have when we haven’t taken care of our people and our major national security issues at home. When the Biden Administration came into power, we handed off a very robust national security apparatus.

It was the best national security apparatus in modern history. We’ve talked about it on our show—how we wiped out terrorists, how we brought home hostages, how we secured the border, how we strapped the drug traffickers, the human traffickers, the sex traffickers, how we took on Iran, Russia, China, and the CCP. That was a lot of work we built. We handed it off and the Biden Administration essentially said, “Okay, we’re going to do the opposite,” and tragically, it has hurt America.

I’ve been proven right, and you can just look at the border. You can just look at the drug trade. You can look at the sex trafficking trade. You can look at how Iran and Russia and China treat us now. You can look at the situation in the Ukraine. There is now another sector of the world that’s in a war. Are we going to get there? I’ll get back to that.

But I have a major problem with issuing 110 billion plus dollars, printing it and sending it to the Ukraine. It’s not because I don’t want them to get assistance, but it’s because all of these other issues at home have not been addressed or have been intentionally ignored. Finally, because we’ve been making such a fuss about it, people are now starting to ask the question, “Where is our money going?”

I’ve analogized this too. The Ukraine is going to become the modern-day Afghanistan. Like Afghanistan, the Ukraine does not have a superior banking system. Why does that matter? It’s not like we wire money over to the Ukrainian national banks and then they disperse it throughout their government and then we can track where all those wires go. It’s the same problem we had in Afghanistan.

We were literally dropping off tons of cash. And then, we had this big rallying call years into the Afghan conflict saying, “Where is this money actually going that we’re giving in aid to the Afghan government?” When we started to track it, we found out it went to the Taliban, it went to Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations out there; not good. We have no method of tracking the money we are sending to Ukraine as of right now. We are relying on the word of Zelensky and the people that he has placed in power. I have a massive problem with that.

American taxpayers should have a huge problem with that, and the United States government should have a problem with that. In what world is it okay to send one person $100 billion and just say, “Okay, let us know how it goes.” That’s what I mean when they say they’ve politicized the process-free narrative that they want printed in the media, and to fly Ukrainian flags in America as some sort of victory that we’re helping this country. I just disagree with that fundamental premise.

The victory would be helping that country in a smart, calculated way, where through Congress we have oversight of those funds; so we know we are not funding the deaths of innocent civilians, so we know we are not funding terrorist groups, and so we know we are not giving money to the Ukrainian government to spend on arms from Russia and China. People might think, “Oh, that’s crazy talk,” but that’s what happened in Afghanistan.

Our money was being utilized against us, against American service members and against our allies there, literally. I’m afraid that’s where we’re heading right now. We haven’t even gotten to the other things that we have given the Ukraine. This is just pure cash that we’re talking about right now. I’ve asked this Congress to investigate where this money has gone. The American people are owed that answer, because it’s our money. It’s our taxpayer dollars.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s a lot of really good reasons to be concerned, because the Ukraine was known as a place of corruption, a place for money laundering.

Mr. Patel:

Yes. It’s not like we sent a billion dollars, as if that was even a small number to begin with—we’ve sent a hundred times that amount to one country. I don’t know how this Congress is allowed to get away with it. Zelensky is out there, he went on the world stage and said, “Russia fired a rocket into Poland,” which would literally be an act of war. It turned out that Russia fired no such rocket. It turned out that the rocket came from the Ukraine and was fired into Poland.

Mr. Jekielek:

It was a mistake, basically.

Mr. Patel:

If Zelensky is going to go out there and beg the world for more money and more money and come to the U.S. and sit in the well of our Congress and say, “We want more money,” and then call and demand of the new Speaker of the House provide more and more money, and call Mitch McConnell and say, “We need more and more machinery,” he needs to be more prepared about these global statements that bring us to the precipice of war, instead of doing what he did last fall with this missile launch. We just can’t have full faith and trust in giving a leader $100 billion, and then having him say, “I’m not telling you where the money went.”

Mr. Jekielek:

Another thing we’ve talked about on the show is the weaponry that is being sent to Ukraine. One of the suggestions was to make sure that it’s weaponry that the Ukrainians know how to use, because that reduces the direct involvement of the U.S. Military. But especially with these new tank deployments, it seems like this is a very different course of action being taken.

Mr. Patel:

It’s been a very different course. The unique thing about American weaponry is that only Americans know how to use it. It’s one of the national security features that goes along with what our defense-industrial complex produces. Let’s talk about the defense-industrial complex for a second, because they are the biggest problem in the swamp, more so than Congress, more so than the lobbyists, and more so than the fake news media and the law firms that surround Washington, D.C.

Why do I say that? Because they, the defense-industrial complex acts as overlords to many members of Congress in both the House and the Senate. They are their biggest campaign donors. They are their biggest employers in many, many, many, many states. I know this from the position that I used to be in as chief of staff at DoD passing a $750 billion defense budget, knowing where all of that money was allocated to, and what it was supposed to be used for.

I’ve literally seen billions of dollars worth of defense-industrial complex burn up before my eyes, because of failed production or making a faulty product or not doing their homework properly. We’re not implementing a program for the national security defense of this country appropriately, and we keep lighting money on fire, sinking the defense industrial complex to Congress and now the Ukraine. We started sending surface-to-air missiles, SAMS, to the Ukraine, and then we started sending defense missile battery systems.

We have sent seven years worth of surface-to-air missile defense systems to the Ukraine. What does that mean? It means if the companies in the defense-industrial complex who make the SAMS were to produce them for seven more years, that’s how long it would take for us, America, to be made whole again, after what we gave to the Ukraine.

That’s just one system. Then we gave him batteries. Now we’re giving them M1A1 Abrams tanks. For those that don’t know, those are like the massively wide tanks with the humongous bazooka turret that you see in the movies.

It’s not a tank, as Joe Biden said, that is for defense posturing purposes. That is a tank made for war. Let’s group these together now. Okay, what does this mean? Everybody’s saying, “Great, we’re giving the Ukrainians all of this weaponry.” Okay, who’s going to operate it? Are you just going to go over there and load them off the C-17 and give them the keys to the tank and the laptop that runs the battery system and say, “Here you go, Ukraine?”

Because that would be an even dumber move than not educating the Ukrainians on how to operate that machinery. They don’t have that training. It’s not like we go around the world and give it to everyone, because we don’t want the world to know how our defense apparatus works. It’s part of the national security of our country.

That’s not to say we don’t share it with others on many different systems and programs, but you’re talking about very specific weaponry that we have made and designed and built and trademark and patented in the United States of America for our defense. Now, who’s going to do it?

It’s like no one’s having this conversation, “Who’s going to the Ukraine and training these soldiers? What about maintenance?” This style of equipment requires a heavy-duty cycle of maintenance day-in and day-out for years on end. It’s not like you can just drop it off and say, “Okay, this thing’s going to run for the next 10 years. You just have to turn it on.”

Where are these maintenance parts coming from? What about the technicians? It’s not like the Ukraine has the ability to keep up our systems. They’re not trained on them. This is a tragic part about all of it, and it’s to your question about where are we going? In my opinion, as I’ve said before, we will see conventional U.S. forces on the ground in the Ukraine.

I said it two years ago that it would be two years, so I think it’s another maybe about a year from now that we’ll see that. That means America will have engaged in another foreign land war. I think we’re already there.

This is the U.S. Government being too cute by half by saying, “We’re just sending money. We’re just sending tanks. We’re just sending ammo. We’re just sending battery systems. We’re just sending SAMS. We’re not sending people, so we’re not in a war with the Ukraine.”

What happens with all that equipment? Fast forward as with Afghanistan to 20 years down the road, we just gave away all that equipment because the Biden Administration didn’t want to bring it back. And you know who took it? Russia and China.

Are we setting up the Ukraine to be another modern-day Afghanistan? I think so. This is exactly the roadmap that was taken into Afghanistan by our government for two decades. It led to the death of over 5,000 American soldiers, two trillion in treasure spent there, and a disastrous withdrawal that has left Afghanistan on the precipice of going into another self-inflicted implosion, the fighting factions between the Afghan government, Taliban and Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. I’m less worried about terrorists in the Ukraine, but I still am just as worried about a global conflict, a global war that involves our American soldiers.

I just don’t see how all these people in the Senate can say it’s our moral duty to go out and fund this fight for the Ukraine. I just couldn’t disagree more. It’s our moral duty to protect American interests. If you’re the United States Congress, you’ve been sent there by the American people to do just that. I don’t know exactly where it’s going, but unfortunately, this is where I see it going because these steps that have been taken are almost identical to the steps we took that got us into Afghanistan for so long.

It’s not like this Congress is going to turn around and say, “Okay, that’s it.” Every week, or every other week, we hear about another billion going over there, another two billion going over there, another program going over there, and another system set going over there. These things can’t just travel in a vacuum. People have to go with both the money and the machinery and our people are going over there. It’s just a question of when is it going to be a uniformed soldier?

Mr. Jekielek:

There is still this question, what happens if one of these people on the ground, Americans that are doing the support work for the Abrams tanks gets killed by a Russian strike? What does that mean?

Mr. Patel:

From our definition, that’s an act of war against the United States of America, when you kill a uniformed soldier. What happens when an aid worker dies, like we lost so many in Afghanistan? What happens when charities start going into the Ukraine, American charities, and people start getting taken hostage? What happens when contractors; American, non-military, and former military who are over there in the fight get killed, like we’ve seen already? Those questions have not been answered and Congress hasn’t even prepared the American public to take on that questioning.

It’s as if they don’t want to address that just now, because they know that eventuality is coming, and they have taken these steps that lead us right to that eventuality. I don’t have any faith in the Biden Administration to keep us out of this conflict, because they’re making a decision based on politics; that is politically popular to support the Ukraine at all costs.

I just find it completely ironic that this rallying call is being led by the Democrats and a lot of RINOs, for lack of a better term. All the people that used to be against war in the first place are now the champions of the Ukraine and taking the procedural steps that we took in Afghanistan that led us into a 20-year war.

Mr. Jekielek:

One last question on this topic.You started by talking about the defense-industrial complex and how significant it is in terms of donations to Congress and lobbying. What do you see as its role in all of this?

Mr. Patel:

Look, I’ll be the first to say the defense-industrial complex is providing an invaluable service to the defense of this country, because it is required for private industry to come in and build the things we need; fighter jets, missile defense systems, ammunition, guns, helmets, and everything you can think of. It’s not like the U.S. Government produces that stuff.

We work with them and use their technology and then they provide us invaluable services. I’m saying the defense-industrial complex has gotten too big and has become such a behemoth, that it has become a large-scale political operation. I know this because as my first day at DoD, I called the CEOs of, “the big five,” as we call them in the defense-industrial complex.

Four of them called me back, and one didn’t. I said, “Look, I want to work together on ways of eliminating wasting billions of American taxpayer dollars if it’s not necessary.” To their credit, most of them agreed. They said, “Yes, we could cut some programs. We could be smarter on how we spend this money, and that pocket of money, or whatever was legislated.” But that’s a massive overhaul. That requires you to have two, what we call, under secretaries for research and analysis, and then there’s another position over there that takes them on.

Instead of saying to the defense-industrial complex, “What do you need?” We say, “As a government, you’re getting X, and we need you to perform this duty for us at this cost, not at a blank check.” The reason the defense budget keeps ballooning and ballooning and ballooning is not just because of the Ukraine, but because the defense-industrial complex who’s building all this machinery that we talked about are saying, “Hey, you just gave away all our stuff.”
“If you want us to rebuild it, pay us more money.” It’s just this vicious circle that has been allowed to operate in Washington, D.C., and people need to realize what the defense-industrial complex does that’s good, and what we can do to cap it and oversee it from a congressional standpoint, and allow a much smarter expenditure of taxpayer dollars cash.

Mr. Jekielek:

Kash, in a future episode, we’ll have to talk about the U.S. posture vis-à-vis Ukraine, and the U.S. posture vis-à-vis Taiwan. There’s some interesting discussion to be had there.

Mr. Patel:

There is.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about the Biden classified documents and this Rehoboth Beach search.

Mr. Patel:

We’ve talked extensively about how the Hunter Biden investigation has led to what I believe is a launchpad for the Joe Biden classified document investigation. We are being proven right week in and week out. My bigger problem is not that the DOJ and FBI have corruptly hid the origins of the investigation. My bigger problem is that they have created a two-tier system of justice, which continues to be put on full display.
We’ve seen what? Four locations, five locations that classified documents have been found that Biden owned or leased or had office space, or however you want to couch it, going back some 20 years. We’ve talked about it briefly. We are literally allowing the DOJ and FBI to say, “You, the suspect, Joe Biden,” because that’s what he is, he is a suspect of a criminal investigation, “You can work privately with your attorneys through us to create a completely different system of justice as it applies to you.”

I just don’t understand the logic behind that. What I mean is, take the Rehoboth Beach house. We have said before, Congress should be subpoenaing every document in every location that Joe Biden has ever stayed in or had an office in, but the DOJ and FBI should have been doing the same very same thing. This Rehoboth Beach house search is a warrantless search. They did not go get a warrant.

Remember, you can compare it to Mar-a-Lago, where they went and got a WhatsApp warrant and then took a SWAT team and raided it. By the time this episode airs on Friday, they’ll be doing the SWAT team raid at the Rehoboth Beach House. Of course, I’m being facetious—that is never going to happen. But the fact that it’s never going to happen should highlight the biggest problem that I’m attempting to portray for our audience.

How is a criminal suspect allowed to go to the Rehoboth Beach house two weeks ago on vacation, I’m talking about Joe Biden and his family, while he was a criminal suspect in a classified document investigation, when the FBI had all researched the Biden Penn Center, his office, and his home in Delaware? Why hadn’t they gone out and already searched Rehoboth, and why had they let Joe Biden go to Rehoboth?
It’s like letting the bank robber go to every bank he’s going to rob ahead of time. Then you’re like, “Okay, we’ll come in after you and you guys tell us what we should be looking for.” The bigger problem, Jan, is if you can believe this, and we’ll put up the note for our audience, it’s now come out that Biden’s personal attorneys back in November had an agreement with the Department of Justice’s National Security Division where I used to work to keep the matter quiet before the midterm elections.
How is that acceptable? You continuously have Merrick Garland coming to the podium and saying, “We are prosecuting without fear or favor. We are doing this based on the traditions and principles of the Department of Justice.” I find that extremely hypocritical and unbelievably infuriating, because you are literally lying to the American public every time you say that.

What traditions and principles at the DOJ allow for a criminal suspect to dictate how that investigation is going to be performed? Where are the grand jury subpoenas? We are the warrants? There is no tradition in principles at DOJ that allowed the DOJ to operate like this. It’s only the weaponization and the politicization of the DOJ and FBI.

Mr. Jekielek:

We’ve discussed on the show that Congress needs to play its role here, but it seems like there’s some roadblocks in that.

Mr. Patel:

Yes, and we knew these roadblocks were going to happen. When I was running Russiagate for the House Intel Committee under then Chairman Nunes, we faced similar roadblocks. One of two things is going to happen. Either Congress is going to bend the knee and just have a paper fight for the next two years, which is going to be completely meaningless and totally a waste, or they’re going to step up like we did during Russiagate. I believe so far they’ve done it methodically.

Unlike the last Congress, which was led by the Democrats where they went straight to subpoenas on whatever committee, Jan 6th or otherwise, Jim Jordan and company have said they’ve called people. They’ve said, “Here are the letters that we are formally writing to you. We are informing the public of the scope of the investigation we want, and why we want it. Please provide it by X date.”

They have now had the letters responded to, and we’ll put one up from the DOJ, just as an example. Now, we’re at that stalemate, “Okay, who’s going to give?” This DOJ and FBI certainly are willing to drag out the fight. Is Congress willing to buck them by using the levers in Congress that they can? We’ve talked about the inherent Contempt of Congress powers, but in order to get there, you have to issue subpoenas.

That’s when it comes into play. Jim Jordan has done it appropriately where he said to certain witnesses, “If you do not come forth, we will use compulsory process to mandate your presence and production.” That’s the subpoena process. So, these things are out there.

This is not like an answer we have to wait months for, we’re going to have an answer in a week or two. The question is, we now know the DOJ’s position. They have said again in this letter, which is in my opinion, full of meaningless hot air, they have said to Jim Jordan, “The traditions and principles of the DOJ prevent us from providing you with the requested information relating to Special Counsel Hur’s investigation in the Biden document classified scandal.”

There is no law in the United States of America that prohibits the disclosure of material to Congress from the Department of Justice, just because there’s an ongoing investigation. That is a made-up fiction that the DOJ has translated into traditions and principles.

I don’t know who is allowing that form of police power to go into effect in America, but it’s hurting our overall law enforcement ability, and not just in the national criminal space that we’re talking about here, but for everyday Americans. Everybody knows that’s just not how law enforcement works. If the cops think there’s a crime somewhere, they call the prosecutors.

They get warrants, they go do a search, and they go do a raid if necessary. They put people in grand juries, they issue subpoenas, and they get documents. If it’s important enough, they share that information with Congress, because Congress is a separate but equal branch of government, not subservient to the DOJ, that has a constitutional mandate to oversee the actions of the DOJ and FBI.

We are now at basically the intersection of this fight. Let’s see what Jim Jordan does. Let’s see what Kevin McCarthy does. Remember the one lever we talked about that they haven’t pulled in a long time, which is fencing their money. You can take pockets of money from the FBI and DOJ, it’s a version of the Holman Rule that’s been out there for a while, instead of taking all their money.

I never argue that you should take all the operational funds of the FBI and DOJ. There’s lots of pockets of money you can take that will force them to produce documents, like they did for us in Russiagate when we pulled that lever one time, but that takes congressional leadership.

That’s got to come from the Speaker’s office and the chairmans of the select committees. They have to be willing to do that. Are they going to do that? Because we now know DOJs position in the sand. They’re not providing anything, and when they finally do show up to testify, they bring Garland and Wray.

By the way, here’s another point, every member of the DOJ and FBI teams that have touched this investigation must be subpoenaed, not just the leadership. We can’t hide behind this tradition and principle of, “You have to be a so-called SES or higher.” Every GS 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15; every employee that is involved in this what I call criminal cover up, must be brought forth to Congress.

There’s, again, no law in America that says they can’t. My concern is, and I’ve said this publicly when I speak around the country, even though Joe Biden is the target of a criminal investigation, he’s really not the target. The target for me is the administrative state; the actors in the U.S. government at the FBI, DOJ, the IC, the DoD that are working to undercut our legal system, because they have created a whole new set of rules to apply to Hunter Biden or to Joe Biden.

I want to fix that. The only way to fix that is to expose the corruption. The only way to do that is to produce the documents themselves to the American people, and to put the witnesses themselves on TV, on national broadcast, under oath, asking questions without time limits about every single investigation we are talking about here, and why those steps were taken. You’re going to see it is a giant paper tiger that will implode on itself if this Congress takes the necessary steps to do so.

Mr. Jekielek:

It sounds like there’ll be a lot of testimony if this actually happens. It will play out, and we’ll see.

Mr. Patel:

Yes, a lot of testimony, and a lot of production, but you know what? That means we’ll have a lot to talk about.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s time for our shout-out.

Mr. Patel:

This week’s shout-out goes to Lori Hancock. Thanks so much for your quotes on our board, and thanks so much to the thousands of people that participated in last week’s live chat. We love having live conversations during Kash’s Corner with you, and we are very thankful that you are so participative every Friday night. We hope to see you next week on Kash’s Corner.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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