The Matt Bissonnette episode is a case study is why you should never meet your heroes.

I am a passive SRS listener, but when he had Matt Bissonnette on I got really excited. I read No Easy Day shortly after it came out, and I always really respected that he wasn't trying to take credit for killing OBL himself. He was a closeish embodiment of the silent professional, but he did still write a book about it so he doesn't get full points.

He came off as incredibly naive and petty throughout the interview, blaming everyone but himself for his current situation. There are also a lot of contradictions he makes. Below are some observations and commentary from my listen. My overall takeaway from the interview, however, is that Matt really hates Barack Obama and blames him personally for most of his situation (and his former lawyer a little bit, but not as much as Obama's ego apparently).

• He blames Obama for railroading him due to being "embarrassed" and "upset" that No Easy Day came out before Zero Dark Thirty. There is literally zero evidence to support this assertion, and in fact, it goes against Obama's entire personality as well. It does not make sense that a sitting president would send the DOJ and NSW after an enlisted Green Team member over publishing a book before a movie comes out -- which Matt seems to think got Obama re-elected. This is a very childish and narcissistic take by him, assuming that killing OBL influenced the election in any way.
• Matt shows pettiness when he says Obama invited them all to the White House for a beer and follows it with "And do you think he ever followed up? NO!" Like, come on, dude take it easy. The President is a little more important than you are and there probably other reasons, if he even meant it as a real invitation at all. Matt had to throw in the line "im a-political" at least 3 times, yet he only ever said bad things about Obama and Biden. Shocker.
• Repeatedly, Matt claims that the Obama administration was behind everything. At one point his lawyer doubles down on this, then maybe 3 minutes later says something to the effect of "These people (the ones reviewing books for classified materials at the DOJ/DOD etc.) are career level GS employees, where the deep state resides." The implication is that the career level federal employees are really the ones holding up the book reviews, which is just absolutely patently wacko coo-coo absurd. He expressly says that it is NOT the political appointees. Well, which is it...is it the Obama and Biden political machine who is behind this or is it the DOJ lawyer making $85,000 who is just showing up to work? The lawyer does admit that there is a natural backlog, due to the amount of SEALs writing books. He does not stop, however, to think about all the GS employees who either resigned under the Deferred Resignation Program or were just fired by DOGE. Trust me, lawyers can make much, much more money outside of government and many of them left under the Trump Administration. This has probably more to do with the delay than anything else.

Shawn also had some pretty wild takes, like that special operations personnel are taking their lives because they cant tell their stories. What? Is it not the 13 deployments over 6 years, injuries, divorces, not seeing their children grow up, and constant exposure to violence with no mental health resources or breaks? No, its the career civil servants and the officer class who wont let them talk.

The second lawyer kind of undermines this premise and Matt's towards the end of the interview by saying " if he had just submitted the book for review, he would not have had any issues. The book would have been published after the election and he would have gotten to keep all his money." The assertion that this book or film had any effect on the election remains unproven and farcical, but YES -- if Matt had just submitted the book for review none of this would have happened. End of story. This is very standard procedure for even low level GS academics who want to speak at a conference or publish a paper -- they all have to go through security review. Yet, he didnt think that the first first-hand account (and one of the first public accounts period) of the OBL raid would need to be reviewed? Incredibly naive on his part, and I can't believe a lawyer actually would recommend that. I would like to see the admission from the first lawyer he sued for malpractice.

Do I think he probably got rail-roaded a bit? Maybe. I'll give him that the government always wins against the individual, and the outcome is rarely fair. However, he broke a cardinal rule by skipping the security review. It's pretty black and white. I can't imagine he was ostracized from the SEAL community over this, which makes me think there may be other reasons. The more we learn about these individual SEALS, the less respect I have for them as a whole. Johnny Kim is our only hope at this point.