Kelly sits down with Jake Braun who has worked at the intersection of politics, national security, and foreign policy for over two decades and appointed to prominent roles in the Obama and Biden administrations. He wrote the book “Democracy in Danger” and he has a new book: “Fentanyl: Fighting the Mass Poisoning of America and the Cartel Behind It.” 

You’re a Chicago guy. You went to Loyola. Does that prep for the kinds of jobs you had in government responding to natural disasters or the Fentanyl crisis? 

“It’s great school. I’m happy I went there. But, no, I mean, there’s not a lot of preparation for this stuff except for doing it. And particularly if you’re at somewhere like Homeland Security where I was for a large portion of the book, these disasters come up and it’s hard to prepare for withdrawing from Afghanistan when everybody thought that we were going to be there for months or years longer. It’s hard to prepare for a massive cyber-attack that shuts down oil infrastructure throughout the country and has hour long waiting lines for oil for the first time since the 70s. Nobody has any kind of plans for these in their job jar. I think one of the things – I forget if I mentioned it’s a book or if I said it you in the email – for the first several months that I was working on this, I literally couldn’t spell the word fentanyl. Like every time I typed it, a little red line would come under it because I actually didn’t know how to spell the word. But you know, when you’re in the front office at an agency like that, and some new disaster comes up, they look around, they’re like, you, you’re the point person, you know?” 

You talk in the book about being brought into the Department of Homeland Security to help Deputy Secretary John Tien ‘see around corners’ at the department. 

“I had always been a part of what were essentially startups. I started my own consulting company. I had done multiple presidential campaigns, which are startups because they go in and out of business, usually within a matter of single digit years or months. And so, part of my job was to A, bring that historical knowledge about DHS and this is how things work and don’t work and what you can get done and who’s who and what’s what. But also, with this less defined project plan, so to speak. You know, if you’re at DOD, I mean, these people plan. The military, they are planners. They plan and plan and plan, and then they plan some more. A lot of times at DHS, it’s like some crisis that we never saw coming happens, and all of a sudden, we’re all just scrambling around trying to figure it out. And I tried to bring a little bit of that sensibility into the equation when I was trying to help him see around corners, as you said.” 

So, when did you know there was a Fentanyl crisis? 

“Yeah, so at the very end of Obama, people started to realize like, gee, there’s a lot of people dying of this drug that like nobody was really using before. And then Trump, to his credit, gets President Xi to agree to basically make selling fentanyl illicitly in the US illegal in China. And  that forces fentanyl into the black market, or really forces distribution of fentanyl into the hands of cartels and, in particular, the Sinaloa cartel. That’s when it really goes through the roof. And then in 2022, we get numbers back and it had been steadily rising for a while, but we get numbers back from overdose deaths in the United States that shows that it was over 100,000 deaths directly tied to overdoses. Most of those fentanyl in just that one year. And by way of comparison, normally heroin and cocaine together combined to kill about 10,000 people a year. So, you’re talking about a 10 times increase of overdose deaths and that kind of macabre milestone, I think really hit everybody like a ton of bricks. We knew it was a problem, but once we hit that many dead, you’re just like, my God. And that’s when they start throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it.”