Lawfare Daily: ‘The Fort Bragg Cartel’ with Seth Harp

[Intro]

Seth Harp: You know, there were two congressional investigations of Fort Hood, and almost the entire chain of command at Fort Hood was fired just for 38 soldier deaths in one year. Whereas absolutely nothing has been done, no one has been held accountable for 50 plus deaths every single year for three or four years on end at Fort Bragg.

Tyler McBrien: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare with Seth Harp, an investigative reporter, U.S. Army Reserve veteran, and a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Texas.

Seth Harp: I think people complacently assume that because we spend a trillion dollars in our military, you know, whatever you think of us foreign policy, it's comforting to imagine that well, we definitely unquestionably have the strongest army on Earth as strongest military on Earth, and that's just not the case.

Tyler McBrien: Today we're talking about Seth's new book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.”

Main

So Seth, for, for listeners who may not be familiar with your previous reporting, your investigations, the book itself, I was wondering if you could start by just walking us through the story that you're telling in the Fort Bragg Cartel. Also with special attention paid to where this story started for you, so curious, you know, when this piqued your interest and when you started pulling at the threads.

Seth Harp: Yeah, thank you. I first started investigating Fort Bragg in very early 2021, or the tail end of December 2020 when I just happened to read in the New York Times that two soldiers had been found murdered on Fort Bragg shots to death, their bodies dumped in a remote training range, and the only thing that the article disclosed was that officials thought that it was a, a drug deal gone wrong, is what they said.

That in itself was worth investigating, but I also saw on some blogs at the same time that one of the guys, William Levine was a member of Delta Force. And in all the time that I had been either reporting on the military or even serving in the military myself years ago, I had never once heard a case of a Delta Force operator being in the news for any reason at all, much less being involved in like a drug related shootout on Fort Bragg.

You know, it's the most secretive unit in the military, it's the most elite unit in the military dedicated entirely to black operations, and the fact that this had happened at Fort Bragg, I thought there must be something more to the story. And that was the genesis of the first Rolling Stone article that I wrote about it called the “Fort Bragg Murders,” and then it just unspooled from there

Tyler McBrien: Because I'm, I'm, I'm not familiar with disclosures around members of the unit was it even odd to you that the article disclosed the fact that that Levine was in the Delta Force, or, or is that a fairly typical for the deceased?

Seth Harp: So actually the New York Times article didn't say that he was a member of Delta Force. They always play coy with these things and kind of respect you know, the military's denial around the units very existence, so I think they said something cute, like he had deep experience in special forces. Something that signaled that the reporter knew what was going on, but wasn't gonna specify and use the term Delta Force.

But there were there was a blog, actually it was a reporter named Jack Murphy who was a former Green Beret, who is a popular podcaster in that community who disclosed, I think that it was a Delta Force soldier. However, the New York Times article did contain another very tantalizing detail that I left out, it went on to say that Levine had previously killed a guy in his house in Fayetteville, the town next to Fort Bragg. He had killed another Green Beret and the military and the civilian law enforcement there had determined that it was a case of self-defense.

So all those things to me together, I was like, none of this makes any sense, there's something going on here. And as it turned out there, there certainly was.

Tyler McBrien: And before we get any further down, down the road of the, the plot and, and what you uncovered, you began to describe the fact that Delta Forces is the most secretive unit within the special forces already the, the elite units.

So could you just describe what you know of the Delta Force in the wider context of the special forces? What kinds of missions do we know that they carry out? Why are they so secretive? Who are the, the typical members of the Delta force? Just to, to get us all on the same page.

Seth Harp: Yeah, sure. You know, one thing that I talk about in my book, it's interesting, there's never been a book written about Delta Force.

There have been a few memoirs by ex-members or ex-commanders, but they tend to be very limited not very informative and frankly, kind of cheesy. The fact that there has never been like a book length treatment of Delta Forces act-, is remarkable in itself considering that the unit has been at the bleeding edge of American military operations, certainly since 2001, and you know, more like since the 1980s.

And I try to fill that gap partially with my book and one of the things I talk about is the timing of Delta Forces’ creation because it turns out that, you know, after the CIA had its wings clipped in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, after the Church Committee required the CIA to start reporting its clandestine operations to Congress and put other restrictions on the CIA's activities, you know, Delta Force was formed like a few months after that.

And the interesting thing is that Delta Force has a lot of the same capabilities as the CIA. These are soldiers who are you know, they come up through the Rangers or through the Green Berets, or actually any part of the military can try out for Delta force, although it tends to be mostly Green Berets and Rangers.

But you know, they, these are guys who wear plain clothes, they don't wear uniforms, a lot of times they work undercover, you know, under civilian cover, either posing as embassy security officials, sometimes just posing as American businessmen working in foreign countries, you know, with fake, fully backstop, fake personas that are you know, issued to them by the U.S. government to operate under.

They do a lot of assassination missions, which are a lot of times are referred to by the euphemism night raids. They do a lot of abduction missions where they're just capturing people and then taking them to like ships, you know, in the Indian Ocean or wherever to be interrogated and God knows what else. And they also do straight up spying, like bugging operations, like in placing, bugging devices in foreign embassies and that kind of thing.

So it's a paramilitary, it's an elite raiding force, it's a paramilitary agency and they have many of the same capabilities as the CIA with which they work very closely, incidentally in the field quite often there's a, there's a liaison between Delta and, and CIA in foreign countries where they're operating.

Tyler McBrien: So given this range of activities that you just laid out, I think it's pretty self-evident that it's a hard topic or it's a hard beat to report on, given the secrecy, I'm sure the, the obfuscation that, that, that reporters face.

So take us back to when you first saw this New York Times article, you know, red flags or, or at least some sort of antenna started going up for you that piqued your curiosity. What did you do next? How did you keep unspooling the story from there?

Seth Harp: So the fact that Billy Levine had the murder, Delta Force soldier had previously killed a man who was identified as Mark Leshikar, Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar was the opening to the story because I was easily able to, or quickly able to identify Mark Leshikar’s mom, sister, and wife.

And as it turns out, ever since Mark had been murdered, they had been trying to get the attention of someone in media. They had been writing letters to CNN, to Dateline NBC, they have been writing letters to military commanders, including the commanding officer of Army CID, which is Army's criminal investigations division, to tell them like what had happened and how the military and the law enforcement, police sheriff's office DA in Fayetteville had totally covered this up and made it look like a case of justifiable homicide when the evidence would've easily supported a charge of first degree murder against Levine.

And, you know, the fact that nobody had listened to them until to date and then, you know, the, the guy who killed their son slash brother slash husband himself turned up murdered, you know, they were very willing to talk about everything that was going on. And they told me a long, long backstory about both of these guys descent into severe PTSD drug abuse and also drug dealing. And so it just went from there.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I mean the first scene, essentially the reader's thrown into this world of, of drugs and, and both use and of trafficking, opioids, cocaine, any number of, of drugs. I wanna talk a bit about, about that world.

I, I think it, it doesn't square with the popular conception of the special forces of this, of these elite units who are extremely physically fit and extremely sharp, but it, you know, it doesn't quite, I think there's some, there's some dissonance there.

So I'm curious, you know, as you were reporting on the special forces, especially Delta Force and these murders, what you found to be the biggest discrepancies between the Delta Force and the popular American imagination and in the media and in movies versus what you were actually seeing and hearing and speaking to people about.

Seth Harp: One of my sources, who knows the unit really well, told me something that was very helpful and he said the unit, unit guys kind of separate themselves into two groups. And one are the sort of teetotaling like super Christian warriors for God type of guys who don't take drugs. Vut the other half of them, you know, he said are just complete derelicts, were his words, you know, constantly doing nefarious shit is the quote. And I found that to be pretty instructive as I was, you know, proceeding through the reporting.

So I think that there is that split that's important to keep in mind, I'm not talking about all unit guys, I'm talking about all Green Berets, but maybe as much as half of them and I, the more time I spent in Fayetteville, the more time I spent talking to people in this community, I was amazed at how, you know, how much they just took for granted that, you know, all those guys do coke and even other drugs, heroin and stuff, and how normal it was for them to just, that was just part of the, the lifestyle that they, that they were known for.

And I don't think, you know, regular Americans have any idea that that kind of like, sort of hard drinking, like hard drugs, like just super partying type of lifestyle is, is, is how these guys live. I mean, there's a much more, they have this, the, the more general impression, I think of them as a sort of like quiet, professional, sort of like, you know, this sort of serious operator type of guy. And I found it to be just much more kind of wild and unhinged than that.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, it was interesting hearing some of the justifications that they would give for needing to use certain drugs. I think there are some obvious or intuitive ones of, of heightened, you know, senses or, or reaction time or something.

But as you spoke to, to members of the special forces who did use drugs, what were some of the reasons given, you know, either, whether it's treatment for, for PTSD, which would lead to addiction problems or, or anything? Yeah, what, you know, what, what did you hear from the service members?

Seth Harp: I mean, interestingly, a lot of our, several guys told me that they did it specifically to fit in in that community. One guy I talked to who was trying to break into the sort of insular special forces clique, because it kind of goes about saying that guys who are in the airborne infantry or are younger enlisted guys, their dream is to become a special forces soldier and then maybe one day go to Delta Force. And it's very competitive, a lot of people really devote years of their life to trying to break into one of those units and get accepted.

And from what I've heard, you know, you have to look a certain way, you have to act a certain way, you have to be cool with doing, doing certain things. And you know, I interviewed one guy who knew Billy Levine and told me that, you know, the first time he did coke was when he hung out with Levine at a bar in Fayetteville. And at a certain point, Levine had told him to come with him to the bathroom and gave him, you know, a key bump. And told him, I need to make sure that you're not a narc and that's why he asked him to, and that was the first time that this young soldier had used cocaine.

So, but then I also trace, you know, this sort of, besides the obvious, you know, PTSD aspects of it, because people who, people who are mortally injured or who are traumatized, they self-medicate. I mean, that's kind of like the classic behavior. So that's certainly a part of it, but then I think from a policy perspective, most interestingly, what I found was that a lot of operators, including Levine have been prescribed dextroamphetamine—also called Adderall or Ritalin, maybe—you know, prescription amphetamines.

They had been prescribed earlier in their career to help them cope with the sleep loss, sleep loss, and to heighten awareness, you know, ward off passivity, maybe suppress empathy, you know. And Levine, when he was in one of his boards in which they were trying to determine what to do with this guy because at the time of his murder he was in the process of being kicked outta the military. And according to a source who was a member of that board, Levine, when called upon to explain himself and all of his completely outta control drug use told the board that, you know, he, he blamed it originally on having been prescribed prescription dextroamphetamine early, early in his career.

And that was a pattern that I saw again and again, including former members of the unit that I spoke to who still take ‘dex’ is what they call it. And also tramadol is an opiate that was widely prescribed in the military just as opiates were overprescribed in civilian society, they were overprescribed in the military as well, particularly among elite soldiers who are often dealing with injuries, maybe not from operations, but from training. And who also are kind of bored a lot of the times on the, when they're on deployment.

You know, some of the records that I dug up showed, you know, a drug overdose is taking place. Drug overdoses on things like tramadol taking place in Afghanistan, for example. Some of the early signs that I saw of drug use in the, in the special forces. Then as I've reported for Rolling Stone, and as I write in the book, the overdose problem really became serious around 2017 or so. And now it's just crazy how many soldiers at Fort Bragg die on an annual basis from drug overdoses, you know, especially from fentanyl.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I'm sure it calls to mind for a lot of listeners, the long history of the use of amphetamines in war, other drugs and, and made all the worse that, that you point out in this just continuous cycle of deployment during the, the forever wars, the post 9/11 wars, but I wanna get back to, to the murders and, and the, the plot at hand.

One of the reasons I was excited to talk to you is, is not only because you are a veteran and so you bring some of that experience into your reporting, but also a lawyer as well, someone who's, who's trained in the law. So by way of getting back to the plot, I'm curious if you could just distinguish between what happens in terms of a criminal investigation of a murder of a civilian versus a member of the military, either on base at Fort Bragg or say nearby in Fayetteville. How do those two investigations diverge?

Seth Harp: So Army CID has jurisdiction to investigate any crimes involving American soldiers, so they have jurisdiction over the murder of a soldier, even if it takes place off base. However, if it does take place off base, then civilian, the local sheriffs or police department, has jurisdiction as well. And then finally, the FBI has jurisdiction over any crimes that are, that take place on military land.

So in the case of the murder of Billy Levine and the other guy, Timothy Dumas, I haven't named him yet, he was the guy who found murdered next to Billy Levine, CID and the FBI both had jurisdiction over the case. Now in the murder of Mark Leshikar, which took place in Levine's house in Fayetteville, the sheriff's office and CID both had jurisdiction.

And in most cases you'll see a large degree of cooperation between these agencies, they may work it out between themselves about who's gonna take the lead, certainly if it takes place on base, you're gonna see CID take the lead. However, interestingly, in the case of the Levine/Dumas murder, I saw something exceptional, which was that the FBI swept in and completely slammed a lid shut on it, totally shut out CID.

You know, I talked to CID agents who were responsible for investigating that murder for the first month or so. You know, they had been interviewing people, they have been developing leads, and then pretty soon the FBI just showed up, seized all the evidence that they had cleaned out all their hard drives, you know, wiped all their whiteboards and like I said, just completely slammed a lid on it and made sure no more information came out about the case ever since then.

And the degree of secrecy, you know, the protection that the FBI has set up around the case is extraordinary because, you know, through FOIA I finally got, I was able to get military records in most of these cases, CID's not super un-forthcoming about some of this stuff. They don't do interviews, but they will give you documents if they're properly requested in their public records, they don't tend to fight that, which is appreciated from a reporter's perspective. FBI's totally different story, I mean, the, the hostility towards reporters that contempt for the public's right to know is really kind of breathtaking, especially in cases like this.

I mean, I, I eventually got CID to agree to turn over their files on Levine and Dumas, public records properly redacted to protect, you know, private information or classified information, but the FBI prevented them from, from disclosing it. And, you know, I really was disappointed by, you know, by all of that.

And it, it added to my suspicion around the whole case that, because the FBI has such a close working relationship with Delta Force in fact some of the former unit employees that I interviewed talked about how the FBI director is often to be seen at the Delta Force headquarters on Fort Bragg and during this time that I'm talking about the FBI director, James Comey was a, was a friend of the unit commander and would often just be like hanging out there, so it seems very buddy-buddy. And the FBI's preferential treatment of this one case involving a Delta Force soldier was very conspicuous.

Tyler McBrien: And pretty soon, you know, as you're unraveling everything, it's, it's clear that it's the problems that Fort Bragg go far beyond this one case or these two homicides. The, I think there's this, this staggering statistic that, that from 2020 to 2021 alone, 105 soldiers assigned to Fort Bragg died, but only four of them were killed in overseas combat operations so the rest being I think mostly on, on Fort Bragg itself or nearby of Fayetteville, which is, which is I think, shocking for many reasons, just given the scale.

But also, you know, you would think that a member of the military dying under suspicious circumstances would receive the utmost scrutiny from law enforcement and, and just, you know, whether or not it should be or not, I, you would just assume that it, that it would be. So I wanna, I wanna, you know, throw that back to you of, of how you, you began to report on, on just the scale of everything that was happening and how you started to, to piece together the story that would become “The Fort Bragg Cartel.”

Seth Harp: So that New York Times article that I mentioned a moment ago, it contained a very misleading statement in it. At the time, there was a lot of stuff happening at Fort Hood. I don't know if folks or call it, but it was a big deal in the news, we heard about Fort, Fort Hood every single day because there had been 38 soldiers who died at Fort Hood in 2020.

So the New York Times article, either explicitly or implicitly referring to that stuff, said that it had been a relatively calm year at Fort Bragg up until Levine's murder, something to that effect and they were probably quoting military officials. And when I asked you know, the command about this, I, I just asked a simple question, I was like, well, how many other deaths have you had this year? And they straight up lied to me in writing. They told me something that like, it had been like 38, they told me.

Which to me was a huge number, I was shocked by the number 38. I already thought that that was a problem and it was months before through FOIA and making requests for casualty reports, I realized that that wasn't true at all, that in fact there have been 54 deaths that year either on Fort Bragg or in, like you said, in nearby Fayetteville, maybe a few in South Carolina or farther afield, but for the most part, right on Fort Bragg. That's a soldier, that's more than one a week, that's a soldier dying every week.

And granted, Fort Bragg is the largest military base, but not by that much, it’s not that much bigger than Fort Hood. It's not that much bigger than other bases. And, you know, it's easy to make per capita comparisons and show that however you slice it, Fort Bragg has the, by far, the highest rate of soldier mortality. And in fact, that's a pattern that's pre, that's continued to the present day.

After the stuff I was writing for, Rolling Stone started getting more attention, the Army Human Resources Command, some for some reason, started to really slow roll the requests that I was making, and I found it much more difficult to get casualty reports after about 2022. But I just recently got the 2023 casualty reports, and they show the same pattern I think that was 55 in 2023. So it's, this is a very long-term trend and now they're also redacting all the circumstances of death.

So as whereas before, I could say, okay, so this is primarily suicides 'cause that's the number one cause of death all across these years, second drug overdoses, that's number two, and then it goes from there, you know, accidents, homicides, things that, that kill relatively fewer soldiers. But now you can't even say how these soldiers are dying 'cause they've, they've cut off the, they've, they started redacting the circumstances of death.

So, and we haven't seen 2024 and haven't seen 2025, but, you know, I presume that the same stuff is going on and I absolutely share you know, your sense that it's just crazy that there isn't more reporting around this, especially because the national press had kind of a meltdown over Fort Hood and how horrible it was there.

And you know, there were two congressional investigations of Fort Hood, and almost the entire chain of command at Fort Hood was fired just for 38 soldier deaths in one year. Whereas absolutely nothing has been done, no one has been held accountable for 50 plus deaths every single year for three or four years on end at Fort Bragg.

Tyler McBrien: So I think it's obvious that this is something that, you know, captured your curiosity and your instinct as, as a reporter, especially, you know, someone with your experiences, so what else did you uncover? You know, keeping in mind these difficulties that you just laid out in terms of transparency and forthrightness from the military and, and other law enforcement agencies. What else did you uncover? What were your, your biggest revelations from the book?

Seth Harp: You could take that in several different directions. I mean, the, the murder investigations at the center of the book, the unsolved murder, murder mystery, probably only takes up about a third of the material, although it, it stretches from the beginning to the end, it's kind of the narrative core of the book.

I go off in a number of different directions. I, I, I definitely talk about the global war on terrorism and the role of black operations troops like Delta Force in those wars. I talk about the war in Afghanistan and drug production there, I tell the story of the war in Afghanistan from a completely new angle, I think, that was informed by the withdrawal from Afghanistan that took place while I was writing the book.

And you know, perhaps I'll just say something about that, although it, it's hard to answer your question: what are the biggest re, revelations in the book? I guess that's in the eye of the beholder. I like to think that there are revelations in every page, I try not to rehash anything that's gonna be boring.

But with respect to the war in Afghanistan, you know, I really, it's one country that I'd never worked in. I mean, worked in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Mexico, other war zones, but never Afghanistan. But the fact that Levine and some of my other characters had served repeated tours there made me feel like I had to educate myself more in that war and really dig deep on what they particularly units like Delta Force were doing there.

And I was just so shocked by what I learned about, 'cause I consider myself relatively you know, educated news read, consuming person, I, I kind of follow the news and kind of know what's going on in the world, but I really didn't understand the meaning of the war in Afghanistan. I mean, Afghanistan was all about drugs from the beginning to the end and it's just incredible the extent to which the, the mainstream media missed that story.

There were occasionally, you know, to the extent that it surfaced from time to time, it was invariably portrayed as the work of the Taliban. So the Taliban were told, was the ones that were producing this drugs. And I'm kind of in awe of the ability of sort of the U.S. government and centrist media to tell the exact opposite of the truth with a straight face and get away with it for 20 years, because as it turns out, not only was the Taliban never responsible.

Lemme put it more precisely, there is no evidence that any Taliban figures of any importance were ever involved in the drug trade in Afghanistan to any significant degree. There may have been independent operators, warlords, what have you, who are allegedly affiliated with the Taliban who were involved in the drug trade, but as for the core regime itself, the one that actually ruled Afghanistan before the invasion and then that took over again in 2021. They were not involved in the drug trade.

And in fact, they actually had a strong anti-drug agenda in their ideological DNA from the first time that they emerged. And in fact, they first emerged specifically to combat drug traffickers who had been armed and funded by the CIA to fight the Russians. And then when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they teamed up with the exact same, you know, narco-warlords that had been displaced with the Taliban.

And as soon as they had once again got, or as soon as they had gotten rid of the Taliban they, one of their first acts was to legalize poppy production and it just went on from there. The U.S. sponsored client state led by Hamid Karzai was basically a giant drug cartel. I mean, they legalized poppy cultivation, it exploded everywhere 'cause the Taliban had eradicated it completely when they took over in, in 1999, 2000 and even through 2001, I think just four months before 9/11 is when the DEA certified that the Taliban had completely eliminated drugs from Afghanistan.

I don't wanna get too bogged down on this subject, but the point is that for 20 years, Karzai, people close to him, the warlords, police chiefs, and militia commanders that were allied with this government, they were propped up by the CIA, JSOC, Green Berets, Delta Force in various regional parts of Afghanistan, they were the ones producing the drugs, and we knew it, and we were supporting them anyway.

And the amount of drugs that they produce is absolutely staggering, you know, we're talking about 90%, 95% of the world's heroin and opiates, and this had a catastrophic effect all over the world. I mean, it wasn't just the United States that had a terrible heroin crisis during this time that was fueled by the incredible potency of Afghan heroin and its abundant supply. It was also, you know, Australia, all of Europe, Russia, Pakistan and Iran that are right next to Afghanistan developed terrible drug problems.

So this whole drug crisis, this global drug crisis, really emerged out of the war in Afghanistan and the fact that that story was never told was just incredible. And I think that what happened while I was writing the book, that enabled me to tell that story from an original and truthful perspective for the first time, was not only that the U.S. withdrew 'cause that took place in 2021, right as I started writing.

But over the next year and a half, the Taliban actually did the exact, an exact repeat of what they had done before and eliminated all drug production in Afghanistan, I mean, all of it. They got rid of all of it except in the few areas in the north that they don't really control. And so that was when I saw, when I saw that is when it kind of clenched my understanding of what the war was really about and I realized that we had never really been told the truth about drugs in Afghanistan.

Tyler McBrien: I'm really glad you brought that up because this is the exact direction I wanted to go next, which is the fact that the, the post nine 11 wars, the, the forever wars, the Global War on Terrorism have been discussed and litigated and re-litigating ad nauseum on this podcast and many others.

And I think a, a novel intervention that your book makes is to really illustrate how, how some of the, the war always comes home, you know, and, and you, you do this really well through especially the, the, the connection with, with drug trafficking and, and drug addiction. But I wanted to throw it open if there are any other ways that you're hoping the book will help people think about this period of recent history, if we can even call it history in a new way or reframe it. How do you, you know, place your book and your, the story that you're telling in this sort of, you know, in the wider context of the post 9/11 wars?

Seth Harp: So other than the idea, I mean, the main thing that I hope people take away from it is just what you just said, that these forever wars, they have domestic blowback and it's really severe. Beyond that, I would say, you know, it's interesting Harper's Magazine sent me to Washington D.C. to cover Trump's military parade last month, and most of those troops are from Fort Bragg, or were from Fort Bragg.

It was the 250th anniversary of the Army, was the occasion, it happened to coincide with Trump's birthday. But it was really the, the semi-quincentennial of the, of the Army's founding. And during that time, because of the parade, because of the, what I'd researched in the book, it really started to sink into me just how sort of hollowed out and debilitated a force the Army is.

I mean, the Army is really doing poorly right now. And I don't think people have any idea just how messed up conditions are in, in the military for so many reasons. It's not just the, it is just the, the suicides, and it's not just the drugs, it's not just the criminality that you see among soldiers that's indicative of low morale and a sort of mercenary attitude where there's just not a lot of ideological cohesion, not a lot of belief in the mission.

It's also just that their equipment is incredibly antiquated. You know, all this money that Trump, we spend on our military Trump's trillion dollar budget. I mean, it's just such a joke if you look at the actual armor vehicles that the, and helicopters that the Army is using, they're all from the 1980s, they don't, perform poorly. Their aircraft sucks, they have their pilots you know, are very inexperienced, most of the experienced ones have retired.

We saw that Army helicopter crash over the Potomac River into a, a regional jet in January was the biggest airline disaster since 2001. That was another symptom of the problems that I'm talking about. And I think people complacently assume that because we spend a trillion dollars in our military, you know, whatever you think of U.S. foreign policy, it's comforting to imagine that, well, we definitely unquestionably have the strongest army on Earth, strongest military on Earth, and that's just not the case.

I mean, if you look at it, you see that the money is just being pocketed by these oligarchs who own Congress. And they have, through pure neglect and complacency, they have allowed the military to become this incredibly sort of rotted out and hollowed force and the stuff that I write about in the book is just, just one symptom or manifestation of that.

Tyler McBrien: Now that was already a fairly bleak assessment, so I hesitate to ask you how things are about to get worse, but how might things get worse? So I'm, I'm speaking specifically about looking down, you know, the, the next three and a half years of the second Trump administration, which followed a, a, a first Trump administration known for increasing secrecy around special forces operations, loosening rules of engagement, pardoning war criminals in, in some cases.

Can we expect that to continue and, and how might that affect some of these dynamics that you were just describing affect the U.S. special forces, et cetera?

Seth Harp: Yeah, unfortunately, I think that we can expect to see it continue and every president since 2000, has pretty much done the same thing, which is increase the secrecy around special operations, loosen the rules of engagement, increase their funding, increase their role, you know, part of their sort of political persona is to identify with special operators.

I mean, you know, even under the Ob, I mean, I shouldn't say even particularly under the presidency of Barack Obama, I think you saw the greatest aggrandizement of special operations. And that's obvious if you talk to anyone in the community, they, they have the highest respect for Obama, Obama's their favorite president.

Trump came in, in a typical Trumpian fashion, did the same thing as, as, as his predecessors, but just in a particularly gauche sort of way. You know, he also loosened the rules again. I mean, the rules around assassination are insane and most people don't even know that the U.S. has an assassination program or that Delta Force operators are right now, as we speak, assassinating scores of people per month in places like Iraq, Syria, Somalia.

But the rules around it are, are classified, so we don't know exactly what they are, but the best information I have is that there's just some really fuzzy requirement that's like if a person is found by unilaterally by JSOC or CIA analyst, pose a threat to Americans, then they're green lit for assassination, not only them, but anyone who's considered their financiers or facilitators or enablers.

Basically, it allows 'em to kill anybody that they want without any oversight or even reporting around it because the only reason I know that they're assassinating, you know, 20 plus people a month in, in Syria, Somalia, and Iraq right now is because Trump offhandedly boasted about that in one of his speeches that he gave earlier this year.

But for the most part, it never gets reported on at all unless someone at the Pentagon decides to pick up the phone and call Eric Schmidt or some, another, another New York Times reporter and just tell him, hey, we killed this one guy, write about it. And then they do, and then they will make a mention about how there's Delta Force Commandos doing, you know, kill capture emissions in, in, in Syria. But for the most part, it's just not reported on at all.

But to bring it back to what you're asking about, you know where the trend lines are going, I really identify, so I criticize all of these presidential administrations, including Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. But I can't help be the, the hardest on Trump because of the way he's just so openly sort of identified himself with the most toxic elements of the special forces community and elevated the worst people in that community.

People who are actually the black sheep or pariahs for their own conduct like Eddie Gallagher, turned in by his own teammates, the Naval Special Warfare Command tried to take away his, I mean, he's just a, a total disgrace to that institution and nobody there likes him, but Trump, you know, held him up, you know, as a, as this hero. And so that all trickles down.

I mean they, the sort of good guys that I was talking about at the beginning, the sort of warriors for God or who see themselves, that in that way at least they're straight laced, at least they're not actual criminals. Those guys get depressed and demoralized with what's going on and they get out and then the sort of worst guys, you know, ascend to higher ranking positions.

And so it's all trickling down, and I think that unfortunately, you know, we're just not even one year into the new Trump presidency, especially around stuff related to Israel, I think that's gonna have further demoralizing effect the way that Trump has just totally capitulated to Israel and the neocons. I think you'll see a worsening of all the trends that identify in the book, unfortunately.

Tyler McBrien: As we look forward, and I'm not sure if that's the right term, is as we continue into the, the Trump administration. You've been already reporting on this beat for, for years. The book is out now, but I assume you have more investigations, more threads that you're pulling. What questions are you, are you now looking forward to pursuing now that this book is already out? Sort of what's you know, what are the next steps in your investigations that you're curious about?

Seth Harp: So, I don't wanna spoil the last chapters of the book, but recently the Department of Justice indicted somebody for the murders of Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas. And what I can say three things about the person they indicted 'cause like I said, I don't wanna spoiler alerts.

So it is completely unexpected the person that they indicted a lot of my sources, or I can say all of my sources really struggle to understand how it's possible that this person could have come onto Fort Bragg and killed two guys who are, whatever else you might say about them, they are not easy people to kill. These are guys who have spent years in combat, who are the highest trained operators in the U.S. military, who have personally killed countless people who are armed at all times, who just have an itchy trigger finger, you know.

And how this person could have been responsible for taking out these two guys, my sources struggle and I also personally, I don't have to be coy about it, I also struggle to understand how this person can be guilty. The DOJ hasn't disclosed any other evidence like I said, the FBI has kept really tight wraps on this case, in fact, the indictment against this person only refers to the victims by their initials, which is something as an attorney I've never seen before.

So that trial is scheduled to begin in January 2026, or it may have just been postponed a little bit more, so the next step of the investigation is certainly gonna be covering that trial. And also continuing to explore you know, some of the other people who in my book, you know let's say, I'm trying to choose my words carefully because this is a death penalty case, these are serious allegations.

You know, I, I interview people who admit that they had a, a motive to kill Billy Levine and who admit that they have a motive to kill Timothy Dumas, and I interview a person who admits that he was suspected by a lot of people as having done it. So covering that murder case is, is the next step.

Tyler McBrien: I also will refrain from giving away any spoilers, but suffice to say, I also struggled to think of how this person had either the motive or the capacity to, to do this, so I will certainly be following your reporting on the, on the trial should it proceed in 2026 and I wanna thank you so much for, for taking the time.

It's a really gripping read, I encourage everyone to go out and buy it and read it and, and congratulations again on the book. And, and thanks for, for sharing with me.

Seth Harp: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.

Tyler McBrien: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts, including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. Check out our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja and our audio engineer for this episode was Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. As always, thanks for listening.