Cliff Sims

What, you know, the TV sets that you have in your house, any electronic device that you have.

Do you have an iPhone?

All of those are made in China at this point.

I mean, go down the list of these things.

It would be a real expectation for, you know, people to take money out of their own pocket to pay a little bit more to buy American.

I 100% think that's a worthy cause to pursue, to build national consensus around these things.

My only problem with that is I'm going to look the person who's making $35,000 a year in the eye and say, you should sacrifice and do this while I'm allowing somebody in Wall Street and Silicon Valley to make billions of dollars investing in China.

One of those things has got to happen before I'm willing to do the other.

My son will very much appreciate that.

A gummy bear fanatic.

Yeah, so in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, there's a pretty small front office that are the closest advisors to the Director of National Intelligence.

And some of them have titles like Chief of Staff or Deputy Chief of Staff, and others are Deputy Directors or Assistant Directors, that kind of thing.

And so I was in kind of that first

ring of top advisors around the Director of National Intelligence.

And my focus was on a couple of things.

Number one, interfacing with the White House.

I had worked in the White House previously, so I knew all the senior staff there very well, all the folks on the National Security Council very well.

And so I interfaced a lot with our counterparts in the White House on things that we were dealing with.

And then from a communications perspective, I have to admit that before I got there,

I didn't know how much communicating you can do when all you can say is I can neither confirm nor deny.