All Episodes
Previous Next
June 17, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:00
WarRoom Battleground EP 315: A Cyber Pearl Harbor
Participants
Main voices
b
ben harnwell
05:43
r
rebekah koffler
11:18
s
steve bannon
18:22
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Peace out yo!
I mean, every day you're out there.
What they're doing is blowing people off.
If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power.
Because this is just like in Arizona.
This is just like in Georgia.
It's another element that backs them into a quarter and shows their lies and misrepresentations.
This is why this audience is gonna have to get engaged.
As we've told you, this is the fight.
unidentified
All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth.
War Room. Battleground.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
Ukraine tonight is in a full-scale fight to take back Russian-occupied land.
Hi, Richard. Good to see you again.
How are you? A pivotal moment for our interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky at the presidential compound in Kyiv.
This must be a very critical time for you.
Critical and very busy.
For over a year, Ukraine has been fighting successfully to defend itself.
Now, going on the offensive to break through Russian front lines is proving to be challenging.
We are now in the early days of this long-anticipated counteroffensive.
How's it going?
I cannot give you all the details.
There are both defensive and offensive actions.
Things look not bad.
I would say it's generally positive, but it's difficult.
Our heroic people, our troops, who are now at the front of the front line, are facing very tough resistance.
And you understand why?
Because for Russia, to lose this campaign to Ukraine, I would say, actually means losing the war.
President Zelensky also had a dire warning.
He blamed Russia for blowing up a dam, which Russia denies, flooding dozens of villages, and tells us the next Russian target is the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
Russia does want to blow up the station.
Why would they want to do that?
Because, like with the DEM, they are not interested in Ukraine's security.
They always need instability here and want the world to pressure Ukraine to stop the conflict.
He says Russia is getting desperate as more Western military aid is coming.
Today, the U.S. and other allies agreed to train Ukrainian pilots to operate F-16s, but it's still unclear when they'll arrive and how many.
You've been talking about planes since day one.
I remember seeing you the very early days of the war in this building in the basement.
Now they're somewhere in the pipeline.
What has been the effect of having weapons rolled out like this, given slice by slice over time?
It's prolonged the war.
If we are supplied with the machinery that is currently held by our partners, we will win faster.
We also asked about comments from former President Trump and Governor DeSantis questioning American support for Ukraine.
President Zelensky invited both to come here and said, unless Vladimir Putin is stopped in this country, there'll be a wider war with NATO. Okay, there you are right there.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
That interview is going to be up all over the weekend.
Richard Engel is the chief foreign correspondent for NBC. I know Richard done interviews with him in Rome before about the Vatican.
A good guy, but clearly part of the narrative engine of this Ukraine situation.
Remember, to get to the bottom of the Biden crime family, you've got to understand Ukraine.
Early in my days at Breitbart in the first couple of years, when I brought up and decided we were going to expand and we were going to start by the expansion in London and in Jerusalem and in Rome in hiring Rahim Kassam.
The first thing Rahim told me, the very first thing, he says, I got to go to Ukraine.
I go, why you got to go to Ukraine?
He goes, there's a revolution over there, color revolution, the modern revolution, and it's going to be absolutely central to the West.
And I go, nobody cares about Ukraine.
We got so many other issues and problems.
And he says, no, I got to go.
And he went over and did amazing coverage from there.
Ukraine has been a central part of this issue in the United States since that time because As you know, Victoria Nuland and that crowd were in back of that color revolution.
So we're going to get into all of it. I want to start off with Congressman Ken Buck.
We're having a little technical problem. As soon as we get him up, I'm going to cut into our analysis of capital markets, the economy in Ukraine, and the intersectionality of those three to take Ken Buck.
Ken Buck is a legendary deficit hawk.
And he's here to talk some basic common sense to folks about exactly what's the reality in this budget, what's the reality in this deficit, the debt, and how Ukraine, the powers that be in this city, are trying to put in As we told you, a supplemental for Ukraine, an additional supplemental for Ukraine would just be another side pocket for hundreds of billions of dollars in cash for the defense contractors.
So let me go back and pull back for a second, because Zelensky is basically right there telling you, if you don't give me unlimited money, if you don't give me unlimited weapons, if you don't underwrite my government, your sons and daughters are going to come over here and die in this foreign battlefield.
That's what he just said. The West is going to get pulled into this.
has a big headline, huge headline up, is that NATO's going on war footing about Russia.
Let me bring in Rebecca Koffer first.
I got Ben Harnwells with us in Rome.
But Rebecca, I want to start with you.
This was your line of country when you were at the Pentagon Defense Intelligence.
This war is metastasizing, and it's not just about this spring offensive.
You heard Richard Engel sitting there making the pitch.
Haven't these new weapon systems helped you?
Haven't all the stuff we've given helped you?
The kinetic conflict, and baby, it is a bloodletting right now.
And we keep saying the Western powers, the elites in Washington, D.C., Davos and London, they're going to fight.
Boris Johnson and this crowd is going to fight until the last Ukrainian soldier is dead.
And I think the Spring Offensive has proven this.
But talk to us. Give us your situation report on exactly where we stand in this conflict in mid-June at the beginning of the much-heralded, long-awaited Spring Offensive, ma'am.
rebekah koffler ▲ ● ▼
The most important thing today, Steve, is exactly what the Newsweek announced, and that is that NATO is in the process of transitioning onto a wartime footing to prepare for a direct kinetic conflict with Russia.
What does this mean?
So he is as somebody who briefed NATO many times, including Top commanders and political officials from 28 countries back then.
Now it is 30.
And as someone who actually participated in war games, stimulating a US and Russia direct conflict, That exactly we are in right now as a proxy, I can tell you that this article is correct.
Let me say specifically what Admiral Rob Baez said in May.
He's a top NATO official.
He said, we need to prepare for the fact that the conflict can present itself at any time directly with Moscow.
And here's what's going on right now within NATO. The Alliance is examining thousands of classified documents outlining regional plans for war.
Okay? This cannot be underestimated.
But when that war starts, it drags in the United States as the leader of NATO. What does this mean?
The battlefield has expanded beyond conflict in Ukraine.
And the Russians, who have preemptive doctrine, right, they're not gonna wait until NATO is gonna set its foot in Ukraine, because conventionally Russia is inferior.
They're afraid of losing this war, just like Zelensky said, and so they would preemptively attack both.
Some of the NATO countries, Starting with non-kinetic attacks, cyber, just as we see today, and the United States.
There's a specific doctrine, cyber Armageddon doctrine, right?
Space Armageddon doctrine that the Russians developed back in 2010 because they have decided that a war between Russia and the US is inevitable.
Because it has seen U.S. efforts to creep in into Russia's perceived strategic security perimeter, right?
Whether it's Ukraine or Georgia.
And the minute that the Russian intelligence has assessed whether they assessed it correctly or incorrectly due miscalculation and misinterpretation of what we call in the intelligence business indications and warnings, IAW. If they detect, if they decide that NATO is about to deploy forces, they're gonna unleash massive cyber attacks here in the homeland.
We just saw a precursor, which in my assessment, it is a shot across the bow.
The precursor is the The cyber attacks on US Department of Energy, which manages our nuclear infrastructure and dozens of other federal agencies and hundreds of US businesses.
The new ransomware attack.
This is the shot across the bow.
It's going to go from there into our power grid.
The Russians have massive capability to really disrupt and cause chaos in our society.
Attack hospitals, attack financial services, other critical infrastructure.
Again, we war-gamed all of this back in the intelligence community where I led red teams, you know, US versus Russia.
So this is all not hypothetical anymore.
Here's what Putin himself, Steve, said today.
on Friday at the St.
Petersburg Economic Forum reacting to Newsweek's announcement that NATO is transitioning onto a wartime footing.
Here's Putin's quote.
The alliance is certainly getting involved in this conflict.
They are supplying military hardware including The F-16s.
And then he said, we're gonna think about where and how we're gonna target those F-16s.
So what he is implying here is that he may not just target them in Ukraine.
He may target them outside of Ukraine before they actually hit the delivery base.
And he finalized by saying NATO is taking every single effort to achieve strategic defeat of Russia on the battlefield.
And what does it mean to them?
It means that they're going to fight like hell and they're going to preempt this because they believe the United States is out to defeat Russia kinetically.
And so they're making that assessment based on what we've been doing, you know, in Ukraine and other places around Afghanistan, coastal Libya, Syria.
And they're basing this on all the rhetoric coming out of Washington, such as Biden himself, you know, saying this man can no longer remain in power.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
He's a work criminal. Rebecca?
Yes. Rebecca? Yes, sir.
Hang on for one second. Just put a pin in there.
I'm going to come right back to you. We're going to go for an update on the bloodletting of the spring offensive.
So just hang on. We got Rebecca Koffler, former Defense Intelligence Agency official.
We got Ben Harnwell live in Rome.
We're going to go to all that about this Ukraine situation.
Let me bring in America's leading deficit hawk.
And an individual, the reason I admire him so much, he will give it to the American people with the bark on with no happy talk.
Congressman Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado.
Congressman Buck, there's a story today, and you're prominently featured, the lead story today in the Hill newspaper.
We talked in the morning show about this, about your appearance here.
And it's all about, you know, these kind of more games that are being played by McCarthy and some of the Republicans.
And obviously the Democrats are out of control on federal spending and government spending and how you're sitting there saying, we're not going to have any games here.
We're going to actually have a real accounting and we're going to start really cutting the budget.
Can you talk about this whole concept of 2022, 2023 rescissions?
Because, you know, our audience is not just vast.
It's an activist audience.
That wants to get up to speed.
You're revered as being, I think, one of the few serious, along with some of your colleagues in the 20, a serious deficit hawk.
So you can walk through exactly what reality is and what we're talking about on these appropriations bills.
In any reality, we don't get stuck with another CR and another omnibus on Christmas Eve this year, sir?
unidentified
Yeah, absolutely. Speaker McCarthy made a promise that he would Go back to the 2022 funding levels with discretionary spending when he was making the deals to become Speaker.
He now is talking about using the 2023 funding levels And through rescissions, getting down to the 2022 funding level.
So, in other words, we would use the ability to go in and claw back some of the COVID money or some of the other money that has been used for electric vehicle recharging stations or IRS agents.
He wants to go in and claw that money back, which is great, but then he would go from 2023 numbers down to 2022 numbers.
What we're saying, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Bob Goode, Lauren Boebert, myself, Eli Crane, some others are saying, no, you promised 2022 numbers, go to 2022 numbers, then start clawing back these billions of dollars that have been promised out there, but not spent yet, and use that money to get even further.
Steve, this debt deal that Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden made, Adds $4 trillion of debt to our national debt in the next 18 months.
$4 trillion. And what we're saying is that's absolutely unacceptable.
We've got to start at 2022 numbers and then start reducing from there.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Let me get back to that in a second.
I want to say the trailing 12 months have just come in, and I'm coming into my Goldman Sachs experience.
The projections are always great, but you look at the last 12, it's $2.1 trillion deficit.
I think it's $800 billion until May, just in this fiscal year.
And the reason is the economy's slowing.
At the current tax structure we have, the tax revenues are coming in lower.
I think particularly April and May on personal income is like a 20 % miss or something.
Let me pull back the camera.
What is it about your colleagues?
I mean, look, our audience reveres you and the others, but they're sitting there going, this is kind of basic math.
What do your colleagues miss about the financial crisis we're in and how you can't play games anymore on the margins of this federal spending, that we've got to get serious about it?
Because there are many great people that are not with you guys right now, particularly a lot of smart people.
What are they missing about this crisis that we're in?
unidentified
Well, Steve, I don't think they're missing anything.
I think they're actually playing a game that involves trying to get reelected and somebody else will have the problem eight, ten years down the road.
They hope eight, ten years down the road.
We are going to default.
I kept hearing during the debt ceiling bill negotiations, well, we don't want to default in June.
This country is going to default if we don't get our act together and we don't turn this ship around.
Very, very soon.
And it may already be too late.
We may already be in the throes of the inflationary cycle that results from all of this just absolutely irresponsible spending that's going on.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
When you go back and talk to your constituents in Colorado, what are the working class and the middle class folks that have their own lives to live that can't pay attention to politics like the War Room Posse or War Room Cadre audience?
When you're back in town halls and just meeting folks at coffee shops, do you think they have a handle on what this crisis is with our nation's debt?
unidentified
Steve, I have to tell you, every time I go into the vegetable section at my local grocery store, it's a town hall meeting.
People are coming up to me and they're asking about the debt.
And they understand. They may not understand discretionary spending versus mandatory spending.
They may not understand recessions.
But they understand that you can't spend more money than you have over a long period of time without very severe consequences.
People have that level of common sense that this just doesn't make sense to them.
As soon as you get outside the beltway, people understand what's going on.
I tell people, we have 1,118 unauthorized programs, meaning that Congress hasn't looked at these programs to see if there's any wasteful spending.
We have a rule package in the House that says you can't appropriate to unauthorized programs.
Every appropriations bill waives that particular rule And then appropriates to unauthorized programs.
There's not a single hearing in five months of this administration in the House that will look at wasteful spending in these unauthorized programs.
People understand where we're going and why we're going there, and it's because of the selfish attitudes that we have in the U.S. House.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
That gets down to programmatically what you've got to do.
Do you think McCarthy and leadership will back you up on actually getting to these unauthorized programs?
If they're not going to be authorized, you just zero them out?
Is that something we can look forward to?
Is that going to be another fight where there's 20 or 30 of you heroes against the rest of the—forget the radical Democrats—against the rest of the caucus?
unidentified
Well, I think I don't know that they'll have a choice because at some point we've got to do exactly that.
We've got to make sure that we are going after the unauthorized programs.
We have known for decades, for example, the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, reauthorized in 1978, hasn't been reauthorized since.
No one has looked at that Endangered Species Act to determine is there wasteful spending?
Is this something we still need?
I remember Back in the day, Steve, that we were trying to save the bald eagle.
Well, the bald eagle is saved.
Let's move on. Let's cut that program down so that we can get back on a safe financial footing.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We've got about four or five minutes.
I know you've got to bounce, but since our audience thinks so highly of you, walk us through the Ken Buck plan of not playing games.
If you were in charge, right?
If Speaker McGrath said, okay, Ken, I've heard enough.
You take it. It's your deal.
Walk us through your internal logic.
How do we get our hands around this?
unidentified
Well, first, Steve, thank you for coronating me.
I appreciate that.
But the reality is we've got to get back to pre-COVID numbers.
President Trump and President Biden at the beginning of his administration spent money to try to keep this economy going.
Fine. Now that COVID is over, people should be back at work.
And we've got to get back to those pre-COVID numbers.
So we have to move back to the 2019-2018 spending levels and make sure that the great economy that President Trump created creates this revenue stream that will help us reduce the deficit.
That's the only answer is to spend less.
We also are going to have to deal at some point with the mandatory spending side.
We are going to have to address Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other mandatory programs that are out there and make sure that it only happens for those who are young workers, those under 40, under 45, and that those who are in Social Security and relying on Social Security have the comfort of knowing that that is going to be protected.
But we can change the trajectory that we're on right now if we look at mandatory spending and severely reduce the discretionary side.
Now, Steve, the other thing that we have to do is we have to look at what is a federal program.
We should not be in the business of telling school boards, local school boards, what they should be doing.
We should not be in the business of telling states how to regulate their environment.
Those are all programs that were intended for the states in our Constitution, and we're overspending in large part because we have enlarged the scope of the federal government.
The federal government should be focused on defense, it should be focused on immigration, it should be focused on customs, on maintaining the currency.
Those are federal functions.
We need to give back to the state those things that are the state's responsibility.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Two things. I noticed after this debacle over the debt ceiling and all you patriots trying to stand up, they came back after us in the Senate and said, oh, by the way, yeah, it's true, but we've got to put a pin in it.
We've got to have a Ukraine supplemental.
We're doing a special right now on Ukraine.
Is the Ukraine supplemental going to pass?
I mean, is that another couple hundred billion dollars?
Don't they realize this money just can't be created out of thin air?
unidentified
They don't realize that, Steve.
They've been creating money out of thin air for a long time, and we're feeling the effects of it right now in our economy.
So they talked about a Ukraine supplemental.
They talked about a supplemental for defense.
So in other words, McCarthy and Biden agreed to raise defense spending.
Now they want to raise it even further.
And as soon as the Republicans say, we want to raise defense spending, the Democrats come along and say, well, we want to raise social spending.
In the past, what I've witnessed is there's a dollar for dollar.
We say defense goes up one dollar.
They say these welfare programs, food stamps, other programs go up one dollar.
So that is a very serious problem that we have to address is how a supplemental is going to affect other issues.
We can't afford the supplemental, much less a dollar for dollar exchange.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Last thing, you said earlier in this interview or this conversation that we are going to default and we've got to stop the happy talk.
Just give me a minute of your logic on that.
We are going to default, so how to avoid it?
unidentified
Well, the only way to default it is to turn the ship around.
We have to spend less money.
We aren't undertaxed, Steve.
We are overspent.
And the sooner we get that understanding, the better.
The problem in politics is it's very difficult to take goodies away from people once you have given them.
Once they have started relying on Obamacare, once they have started relying on all of the spending that's out there, it's very difficult to start clawing that back, and that's exactly what we need to do.
If we default, the people who are most at risk, the working class Americans who are just able to make ends meet, are going to be the people who suffer the most.
The very people that the Democrats pretend that they are trying to help are the people who are going to suffer.
And as Republicans, that's our base.
We have to stick up for those people, and the way to stick up for them is to make sure that we don't go over the edge in default.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Congressman Buck, how do people get to your site to find out more about this fight that you're having as the leading deficit hawk, and what's your social media?
unidentified
Yeah, so the The best way to contact me is through our office, 202-225-4676.
The way to send us emails is buck.house.gov is the best way to send us an email.
And my Twitter handle is at 10buck.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
At Rep Ken Buck.
Okay, we'll make sure everybody loads in there and follows you closely.
Congressman, thank you for fighting this fight.
Thank you for being the leading deficit hawk in the House.
We greatly appreciate it.
unidentified
Thank you, Steve. It's been great to be with you.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Thank you. Congressman Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado.
The common sense of if we want to avoid a default and a default is going to crush the working class in this country, we got to stop the spending and we got to stop the spending now.
No more games. Okay, we're going to come back in a second.
We got Ben Harnwell in Rome.
I have Rebecca Koffler.
They're talking about a Ukraine supplemental of a couple of hundred billion dollars.
Where's that gonna go as the war in Ukraine metastasizes into the West?
NATO on war footing.
What does that mean for you? What does it mean for your sons and daughters?
unidentified
All next in The War Room.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
you Okay, one thing Rebecca Koffler talked about By the way, I want to thank Ken Buck for making time.
He's the guy that's at the tip of the spear on this.
It's going to be tough. The spending is absolutely essential.
And they're trying to play games. The rescission game, all these kind of games.
He's sitting there saying, no, we've got to go back to pre-COVID levels.
A couple of years ago, when one of the defense secretaries retired, Leanne Panetta, Panetta went to, he gave his kind of farewell address, and he had been everything, the chief of staff, all this.
He had a long line of government service.
And Panetta's, I know, he's an acquired taste, a very smart guy, obviously a progressive Democrat, done a lot of damage, but a very smart guy, and in his mind dedicated to the defense of the country.
He went to the USS Intrepid, I think it was New York City, went to Midtown on the Intrepid and gave a farewell talk, and I remember it was up in New York, and he talked about his greatest concern as he was stepping down as Secretary of Defense was a cyber Pearl Harbor.
A cyber Pearl Harbor that would be a predicate upon an expanding kinetic war.
Right now, the signals could not be stronger that something's up.
We now know, and the Biden regime has lied to you about two central things.
They lied to you about the spy balloon, or the spy craft that came over, about when it was picked up, what we knew about it.
They wanted that just to go away, and the CCP knew about it, knew we were a cow town.
They wanted that not to become a public thing.
They also lied about the same thing.
Admiral Kirby looked Andrea Mitchell in the eye and lied to her on national TV a week or so ago about the situation in Cuba.
And what the Chinese Communist Party has, and their partners, they're the senior partner with Russia, what they have is an old Russian military base there is an electronic warfare, an offensive cyber, not just an eavesdropping or can listen in, they have an offensive cyber capability.
And so what Leon Panetta was talking about is worry about a cyber Pearl Harbor on the grid, on critical infrastructure.
As Rebecca Koffler said, it was announced, hey, on Thursday, you had a massive, Wednesday and Thursday, you had a massive cyber attack, not by the CCP this time, but by the Russians.
Remember, I was telling Peter Navarro last week, this is no longer just a criminal activity.
This is state power.
These are criminals working with the state in Eastern Europe, And in Russia, and in Belarus and other places, to do these cyber attacks, as the Chinese Communist Party does also, with these hoodlum groups, and now they've formalized into a military doctrine, part of unrestricted warfare.
This is one of the reasons on Home Title Lock, and this is what concerns me.
I don't need this audience to be impoverished any more than the government's going to impoverish them.
Go to Home Title Lock right now.
You're an enemy combatant.
Just being part of this show and being not just a supporter of this show, but being one of the war room posse that we give information to and become a force multiplier.
By being a force multiplier, you're an enemy combatant.
So make sure that you go hometitlelock.com and just check that cyber criminals and nobody is taking a second mortgage out on your house, a couple hundred thousand bucks.
How would that put a crimp in your style of being a force multiplier for the war room if you had another $200,000 that you had to pay back at these interest rates?
So go check that out today.
Koffler, real quickly, because I want to get Ben on here.
Koffler, Tell me how the much-heralded...
Zelensky's just sitting there with Richard Engel on NBC, and he said it's going fine.
I can't give you a lot of details, but it's going fine.
How is the much-heralded spring offensive going as far as on the ground of what actually is happening, ma'am?
rebekah koffler ▲ ● ▼
Well, first of all, it's a bloodbath for both sides.
And Ukrainian forces have suffered tremendous losses in heavy equipment and soldiers.
They are meeting tremendous resistance from the Russian forces as they're attempting to breach the Russian line in the east of Ukraine and the south of Ukraine.
Both countries are hemorrhaging tremendous amounts of manpower.
But look at this.
Today Putin decided that he may actually try to seize more of Ukraine's territory to block this counteroffensive.
They have already used this Karhovka dam in order to significantly alter the topography of the battlefield.
And so this is another move that Putin is planning.
And my intelligence analysis tells me that he's going to try to do that in the Belgorod area.
to push forward because the Ukrainians are conducting, in addition to their counteroffensive, they're also conducting sabotage operations to destabilize the areas that are bordering Russia, the Russian territory that is bordering, rather, to Ukraine.
So this is what's going on.
But the most important thing that we are now becoming a target of non-kinetic warfare by Putin because the Russians have concluded that we are wanting to stage a strategic defeat of Russia by Putin.
Participating in this conflict that Zelenskyy is trying to use to pit us against the Russians and to defeat Russia with our own hands, with the weaponry that the U.S. taxpayer is paying for.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Is it your professional assessment?
That the objectives of the Spring Offensive, the taking back of significant territory in the Donbass, in the Eastern Russian-speaking regions, or an outright attack in the taking back of Crimea, is it your belief that those are those achievable objectives by the Ukrainian military as you see it on the 16th of June in the year of our Lord, 2023? These are not achievable objectives, and here's why, Steve.
rebekah koffler ▲ ● ▼
Even if we can provide all the military hardware in the world to Ukraine, Putin is not going to wait until the Ukrainians recapture the territory, and especially the Crimea, that not only the Russian government, but the majority of the Russian population consider Russians.
He's not gonna see what they perceive strategic security perimeter to Ukraine, and he's gonna invoke escalate to deescalate nuclear warfare in addition to cyber warfare that's going on right now, not only in Ukraine, but targeting the homeland.
And one more point I want to make is that it's not just the cyber criminals.
The Russian government is behind it.
Because what they use is they use proxy forces to attack countries like the United States in these highly complex operations for the reasons of plausible deniability.
The objective is to place pressure on the Biden regime to withdraw support from Ukraine and to show to the Americans that we're not going to sleep, you know, safely at night, that they're going to target our power grid if we do not rise up and place pressure on our leaders to withdraw support from Ukraine.
That's how the Russian doctrine works, and it's preemptive.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, hang on for a second. I want to go to Ben Harnwell.
Ben, as Rebecca's pointed out, Newsweek magazine, NATO's on war footing.
Give us your assessment. You've been going through all the media.
You've been focused on this a lot.
Tell me what's going on. Good evening, Steve.
ben harnwell ▲ ● ▼
Good evening, Rebecca. Yeah, well, the story I actually want to start with today is a scoop that was broken by Foreign Policy magazine.
And I wonder if Denver is able to put this up as I'm talking.
Because according to a named source who's speaking to Foreign Policy, their information is that Ukraine will not be invited formally to join the NATO alliance in NATO's annual summit in Vilnius in Lithuania.
Next month. Now based on what Rebecca was just saying throughout this show, I would speculate that there are some sort of territorial turf wars going on within the United States administration.
And I would posit it something like this because it's impossible to know for sure.
But my suggestion is something that the military industrial complex is pushing and pushing and pushing for further US engagement.
Viat NATO. Rebecca was mentioning the Newsweek article there about the war footing.
But on the other hand, at the apex notionally of the administration, President Biden himself, along with Germany, are deeply resisting Apparently, manoeuvres to get NATO to accept Ukraine in a month's time.
And then, of course, everything would accelerate.
And I would indicate from that the absolute importance, you know, you always say, Steve, that elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.
It really would take someone, and it took President Trump, you know, his every ounce of effort and concentration to stop the US MIC pushing the United States into wars over his four years.
And President Biden simply isn't up to that degree of resistance in facing down the generals.
So that's the first thing I would want to say.
unidentified
Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
You're saying resistance, he's part of the, he hasn't resisted this at all.
Isn't in fact Biden giving him a out to say, understand there's resistance to let him into NATO. One of the principal resistance is their corruption.
Right? Is there corruption? People, I think, in NATO, some of the allies think the more money you send these guys, the more it gets skimmed off.
They're also not ready. The military's not ready.
But isn't it Biden that's offering an alternative path now?
Some sort of not full membership or membership along the official, you know, boxes you gotta check that Finland checked and Sweden checked?
But that some sort of soft NATO where they're basically in Russia's face, the dagger at the heart of Moscow, but they're not officially in NATO, so we get all the problems that the benefits.
Remember, the central beef that we had with NATO, with President Trump, was it's not an alliance, it's a protectorate.
That the elites in Europe will not pay what it needs for their own self-defense, and the Americans underwrite that.
The 2 % of GDP has never come close to being mad because they say, well, we've got to pay for health care.
We have to pay for pensions.
If we pay for defense, we're not going to have money for that.
And they're brazen about telling you that.
So the United States underwrites it.
Now we're going to be in the worst of both worlds.
Ukraine not even being close to being regular to any kind of official acceptance into NATO, including paying 2 % of their GDP for defense, because we're underwriting the entire thing and gonna underwrite the entire thing.
But Biden's trying to get some kind of weird middle ground where we get all the accountability and responsibility and the out-of-control nature of like these Ukrainian partisans launching missile strikes into Russia, launching drone strikes into Russia, so that this war blows back on us in the worst possible way.
ben harnwell ▲ ● ▼
Ben Harnwell. Well, Steve, you're absolutely right on both of those things that you've mentioned, but I don't think it necessarily has to be either or.
It's possible that both of these things that you mentioned can be true at the same time.
That is to say, Biden has been allowing, perhaps just in a sense, pushing NATO, pushing de-escalation on the one hand.
Certainly corrupt up until his ears, that's absolutely clear.
But it is also possible that he's trying, while pushing it forward in a certain degree, to hold it back from full-on United States engagement.
And therefore, you have this no man's land, not NATO, but US and NATO underwritten security guarantees, and who knows what that's actually going to mean in practice.
We've all heard President Biden speaking And over the last couple of years, he's clearly not in the present moment.
So how much by the force of his own will he's able to guide these events and the decisions that are taking place around him?
I think that's a legitimate question and we can all speculate.
The point I wanted to make is that there seems to be contradictory signals going on with regards to NATO and Ukraine.
Given the nature that they're slightly contradictory, it's difficult to know who inside the room is pushing things in which direction.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Let me ask you, how's the perception in Zelensky's selling points?
The spring offensive was, as I said, the much-heralded, long-awaited spring offensive that now starts a week before summer, solstice, or a couple days before the summer solstice.
What What's the perception?
Everything in Pasobe is going to join us tomorrow morning here in the war room.
Everything of my reading and talking to experts in this area and all the research we do is that the Russians have put a ring of steel around the eastern provinces and In Crimea, and this is a bloodbath, and it's a bloodbath.
Obviously, the Russians are taking a pounding, but the Ukrainians are really taking a pounding, and they're launching missile strikes into Odessa.
They've launched missile strikes into Kiev.
How is this being sold to the European people right now?
Because the European people, the sooner they get tired of this fiasco, the quicker we're going to get to a resolution, sir.
ben harnwell ▲ ● ▼
Steve, things are moving in Europe and they have been moving for the last few months.
You might remember back on the 30th of March, we reported on the war room the fact that the FPO, the Austrian Freedom Party, led a walkout during The same has happened today, this time in Switzerland, and it's an astonishing state of affairs.
This time it's the the Swiss People's Party with its 53 out of 200 They boycotted the entire speech.
Interesting, Steve. I just want to, if I may, I just want to say exactly what the principal cause of this is.
We all know that Switzerland has been a neutral country for 500 years and that's in its constitution.
The reason that they boycotted Zelensky's speech is that they said that Zelensky is interfering inside their domestic And it's not appropriate because Zelensky in his address to the Swiss parliament is urging them to change their constitution to allow Switzerland to give permission to countries that buy its arms to re-export them to other countries,
which Switzerland, because of its utilitarian Currently prohibits only exports arms for countries to use in their own personal defense and won't let those countries further export on.
Zelensky went in and said, you know, that the Swiss need to change their constitution and, you know, I think, you know, each time there's a walkout, each time There's a refusal, the tenor of the refusal increases incrementally.
And this time I think to hear the Swiss argument that they walked out and they boycotted Zelensky's address because he is interfering in their domestic political affairs, which of course he is doing, I think shows here in continental Europe that the degree of wide flexibility that European capitals have given to Zelensky is now over.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Hang on for one second.
Let me go back to Rebecca Koffler.
Rebecca, if we cut off the money from the U.S., and it'll be cut off if there's no supplemental granted, and this is going to be, folks, get ready for it.
This is going to be another huge fight this summer because they're going to try to come back quickly.
Zelensky's going to cry crocodile tears on this NBC interview because he's interfering directly in American politics.
If we cut off this supplemental, how long could this war go on for?
Would this force Zelensky to the negotiating table?
rebekah koffler ▲ ● ▼
I believe it will force Zelensky to capitulate because we are 100 % providing the entire warfighting capability to Ukraine.
Without our help, they would just capitulate within 24 hours to two weeks, I would say.
But the bigger problem is this.
If we continue the support and Putin is now driven by fear because he is fearing that Ukraine is actually using the United States to destabilize Russia and to conduct regime change.
Similar to what the U.S. has done in the Middle East, right?
Because Putin is prone for a worst-case scenario assessment psychologically.
And on top of that, he's hearing all of these, you know, rhetoric about war criminals.
And so this is why he is trying to expand the battlefield into the U.S. And so that is why he decided that unless we stop All of the financial flows, you know, military hardware flows and cash to pay actually for Ukrainian bureaucrats' salaries on their healthcare plan.
He is preparing for kinetic warfare on U.S. I'm sorry, non-kinetic.
Don't let me make this mistake because that would sound very scary.
Non-kinetic warfare on U.S. homeland.
But yes, if we stop funding this war, the war will stop very, very, very soon.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Rebecca, where do people go to get your writings?
rebekah koffler ▲ ● ▼
I am on social media at RebeccaCoffley0132, on Getter, Twitter, Truth Social, and also catch me on my website, CutToTheNews.com, for the latest top news and my analysis on Russia, China, cyber warfare, space warfare, and artificial intelligence.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Thank you for having me. Thank you, Rebecca.
Thank you for doing this for having time out today.
We're going to be back at 10 a.m.
tomorrow. Jack Basovic's going to be with me.
We're going to do a deeper drill down, another layer on this entire situation as this war in Ukraine metastasizes.
What would be great if you went to birchgold.com and read the debt trap, because we're going to combine capital markets, economics, geopolitics, The war in Ukraine and, of course, the Chinese Communist Party's expanding unrestricted warfare against the US. Ben Harnwell in Rome, where do people go to get all your information, Ben?
ben harnwell ▲ ● ▼
Thank you so much, Steve. I'm on GitHub, and my profile is simply my surname.
It's at Harnwell, and I'm also pushing out articles.
I should have one over the weekend, which you can get via subscribing on warroom.org.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Worm.org. Thank you very much, Ben.
Appreciate it. Have a good night and a good weekend.
Thank you for pitching in here.
Okay, we're going to come back.
We'll be back at 10 a.m.
tomorrow morning. I'll be with Jack Basovic, maybe a couple other surprises, too.
We're going to drill down on the war against the administrative state, the expanding war in Ukraine, the Chinese Communist Party, economics, capital markets, all of it, tomorrow morning, 10 a.m.
on our always special Saturday show.
▲
Export Selection