May 20, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:53
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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For Europe right now, I think that I would feel pretty defeated and despondent in this moment. | |
| It has certainly become much, much more difficult for outside researchers to do the sorts of, right, of the options that you list, Samir, to actually engage directly with people at the platforms because there's simply fewer of them, right? | ||
| We spent literally years building up relationships with Good folks at all these platforms who are trying to do the right thing. | ||
| And for the most part, they're gone, right? | ||
| It's really, really difficult to know who to reach out to who to work with. | ||
| If it weren't for the European Union and the Digital Services Act, I don't know that we'd have much hope of rectifying that situation at all. | ||
| But given the sort of requirements for performing risk assessments, for sharing more transparent information with the public, and crucially for sharing data with researchers, I do think that we still have some options for leverage to continue the work that we've been doing. | ||
| And hopefully, ultimately, that leads to a sort of restaffing of some of these positions, increased focus again, as the DSA begins to come into force and the platforms feel the real pressure of actual enforcement action. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | |
| Welcome to The War Room. | ||
| It's Natalie G. Winters hosting, filling in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| I know we may have hair that is similar lengths, but it is not him today. | ||
| You got me for the 5 p.m. | ||
| Steve will be back for the 6, but in the meantime, don't go anywhere. | ||
| We have a very packed show for you, whether it's The border, the invasion that's going on there, or frankly the invasion that is going on on our social media platforms with censors and those who say everything that we spread on this show is misinformation. | ||
| I don't know if you guys caught the opening clip provided by the one and only Mike Benz. | ||
| They're not just coming after us here in the United States, the EU is cracking down with some new draconian censorship laws too. | ||
| Mike, if you want to walk the audience through Yeah, that clip was a censorship planning meeting that involved some people at the highest levels of thought leadership in the censorship industry. | ||
| what's going on here. But we'll start with the EO and then we'll bring it back home. | ||
| Yeah, that clip was a censorship planning meeting that involved some people at the highest levels of thought | ||
| leadership in the censorship industry. | ||
| Speaking there was Rebecca Tremblay, who was the head of managing toxic conversations for Twitter 1.0. | ||
| And right by her side on that panel was Dean Jackson from the National Endowment for Democracy. | ||
| The National Endowment for Democracy is probably the most prolific CIA cutout in the entire swarm army of CIA and State Department institutions. | ||
| It was created in 1983 under a letter by CIA Director Bill Colby that they wanted to reassert the same kind of soft power control powers the CIA used to have in the 1960s, but that there were too many scandals of people getting caught being funded by the CIA, so they wanted to create a National Endowment for Democracy to do it. | ||
| So it's, uh, you basically have a CIA cutout in the planning room there, and then you also add Katie Harbath there, who was from the International Republican Institute, which is the GOP branch of that same CIA cutout. | ||
| So you basically have a bunch of, uh, of censors and spooks in a room talking about how after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and after some of the scandals of, of last year, They claimed in that clip that they had spent years | ||
| staffing up the social media companies with censors who would do their bidding, who would censor | ||
| the kinds of political content they didn't want to go viral online or popular accounts. | ||
| They said, it took years for us to build that up. | ||
| And then in one fell swoop, Elon Musk fired 85 to 90 percent of them. | ||
| But fortunately, we have an ace up our sleeve, and that is something called the DSA, the | ||
| Digital Services Act, the EU Digital Services Act, or as I hope you will come to see it, | ||
| the sort of NATO censorship law. | ||
| And as the speaker said in that clip, their hope is that this new EU censorship law will | ||
| force the restaffing of the fired censors as the social media companies begin to feel | ||
| the enforcement pressure. | ||
| Now, I'll tell you, I dealt with this personally when I was at the State Department and I got phone calls from Google lobbyists telling me that the EU Digital Services Act is the number one threat to their business model, Google's business model, over the next five years. | ||
| That's a trillion-dollar company whose biggest fear is this one EU law who only the State Department can protect them from through negotiations and through bringing the diplomatic pressure of the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| And it was actually for this reason in the YouTube files that Jim Jordan actually just | ||
| unearthed about a week ago from the subpoenas under the House Judiciary Committee that YouTube | ||
| and Facebook were censoring what the White House asked because they wanted to be in the | ||
| good graces to continue to do work with them on multiple policy fronts. | ||
| And Michael Schellenberger's documents also revealed they specifically feared that if they didn't censor what the government wanted, the State Department would not protect them from the Digital Services Act. | ||
| There's a lot more here in the whole history of it, but that's just an overview. | ||
| I remember I had published a story a few years ago when I was tracking from the usaspending.gov database itemized terms, whether it was misinformation, disinformation, or conspiracy theory, and it wasn't really something that the U.S. | ||
| government was interested in funding, either in the form of educational grants or actual contracts to combat, or at least it really saw a massive uptick come 2016, especially post-Trump victory. | ||
| Right, and there was a lot of interlinking between censorship and these populist causes. | ||
| I'm inclined to think of a pretty infamous National Science Foundation grant that they were doling out money to U.S. | ||
| researchers to figure out how to quash populism. | ||
| So before we get into the developments on the United States front, just taking a step back, I'm just curious from your kind of meta perspective, is all of this censorship madness something that they have been planning For a very long time? | ||
| Or is this something that, with the victory of Trump, with sort of the spread, the, I would say, liberalization, in the good sense of the word, of being able to, you know, just start an account on X, right, and post stories that go against the mainstream narrative, shows like War Room, is it something that they've had to adapt? | ||
| Like, how has this been formulated? | ||
| I would say that the birth of censorship as an industry happened with the 2016 election. | ||
| In fact, in their own, in the literature of disinformation studies, they frequently sort of harken back to the 2016 election as being the catalyst for the development of disinformation studies as a field and the censorship industry by proxy. | ||
| Although I would note that this goes back sometime before it, there was a kind of primordial soup stage. | ||
| So, you know, without Offering any opinion one way or another as to the events of 9-11, there's an interesting sort of story on the origins of censorship industry infrastructure around that time. | ||
| So currently, the head of USAID is Samantha Power. | ||
| Her husband is Cass Sunstein, who is a Harvard professor and has worked in doing counterinsurgency and psychological operations work. | ||
| And he penned an essay in 2008 called Conspiracy Theories. | ||
| I think it was in the Harvard Law Review that he published this. | ||
| But this essay called Conspiracy Theories, and then a book he would come to write on it called Nudge, was in 2008. | ||
| And this was about two years after YouTube came out. | ||
| So 9-11 happened in 2001, but then YouTube came out in 2005. | ||
| It was acquired by Google in 2006. | ||
| And in that period between 2006 and 2008, there were a lot of conspiracy theories about 9-11 spreading on the Internet. | ||
| And Cass Sunstein, who is now partnered with the Department of Homeland Security and his wife, is now the head of all basically soft power influence for the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| The USAID admin has a permanent position on the National Security Council, basically on par with the CIA and the DOD. | ||
| And in this essay, he wrote that the spread of conspiracy theories about 9-11 was causing the United States to suffer international blowback, | ||
| and it was diminishing the legitimacy of the war in Afghanistan and the toppling of Iraq. | ||
| And so at that point, he basically proposed a number of ways to infiltrate the online movement. | ||
| Now, he didn't propose censorship at that time. | ||
| He was proposing a sort of these nudge tactics, some of which involved cognitive infiltration, basically having federal agents descend on, you know, into these communities and swing them, you know, towards the way the government wanted, which was... Now, this essay drew a lot of flack, but it wouldn't be until the twin events of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street in 2010 that really kind of exploded | ||
| government research into mis- and disinformation. | ||
| They were very much pro-the Arab Spring. | ||
| That was very much a CIA State Department operation through and through, organizing | ||
| rent-to-riots using Twitter hashtags and Facebook pages. | ||
| But they were very much upset about Occupy Wall Street and the use of social media in | ||
| order to galvanize these anti-banker protests here on the homeland. | ||
| And so at that point, DARPA began to take a very serious interest in the spread of misinformation online and began commissioning tens of millions of dollars of research grants to stopping the spread of misinformation. | ||
| But they didn't yet have the architecture to hook that research up to and the connections | ||
| at the social media company, the domination of their ranks to be able to actually pull | ||
| off the censorship. | ||
| That would come starting in 2014 with the loss of Crimea after the CIA coup in Maidan, | ||
| Ukraine and then the counter coup backed by Russia later that year resulted in ultimately | ||
| in the annexation of Crimea under a referendum for Crimea to join the Russian Federation. | ||
| And it was at that point that DARPA's interest in conspiracy theories and misinformation | ||
| joined up with a new infrastructure that was then seeded into the tech companies, which | ||
| is that at that when the counter coup happened and Ukraine broke apart in a civil war and | ||
| the entire eastern half of Ukraine said, we're a breakaway region, we're not a part of this | ||
| new Kiev government. | ||
| The military went into a panic that they had lost this war, not because of boots on the ground, but because they had lost the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people. | ||
| And it was at that point that the military decided to hook up this long-time interest in mis-and-dis information on the internet and conspiracy theories to actual literal control over it by this sort of NATO-wide Pan transatlantic military move into the content moderation space. | ||
| And then when the 2016 election happened here in the US, you can imagine what the reaction was to that. | ||
| It all exploded and it came home in a heartbeat. | ||
| And we've only got a few minutes, but if you want to start a little bit on what Google is doing, we know they love to outsource it to ostensibly private companies, but they're of course doing the bidding of all the censorship, or maybe it's the other way around, but what is Google doing ahead of the 2024 election? | ||
| So Google has already promised the EU that they're going to be implementing these new and improved scan and ban AI censorship techniques to remove election misinformation all across Europe. | ||
| They've already removed 35,000 YouTube videos for election misinformation, which is something of a redux of what they were doing for the 2020 election when they banned any video that delegitimized the perceived legitimacy of mail-in ballots. | ||
| But at this point, Google has tried to, after Elon Musk freed up Twitter, both Facebook and YouTube have started to relax In small ways, some other terms of services about how they can actually, what is a speech violation when it comes to election misinformation. | ||
| And right now we're waiting for these new EU censorship law regulations to be finalized. | ||
| But you can bet that whatever the trending narrative comes to be in the media or in the major think tank sphere over the next several months, Because part of this comes down to what is the op going to | ||
| be? | ||
| If this lawfare tactic against Trump fails and he ends up surviving them, what trick | ||
| are they going to use to try to, let's just say, endanger the security of the election? | ||
|
unidentified
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And now, I suspect that there will be issues around... And Mike, we're coming up against a break. | |
| I would hold you, because you're getting to the good stuff, but I know you've got to bounce. | ||
| I'll have you back on the next time I host, though. | ||
| If people want to follow you, maybe you can pick up where you left off on Twitter. | ||
| Where can they go to do all that? | ||
| Yep, on the X at MikeBenzCyber. | ||
| One word is the best place. | ||
| I'm such a boomer and a Luddite. | ||
| I keep calling it Twitter. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
|
unidentified
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I call it Twitter too half the time. | |
| Thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| We'll have you back. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Talk to you soon. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And in the meantime, you've got to go to birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| I'm sure they'd censor everything they're putting out as financial misinformation. | ||
| I don't know about you. | ||
| I would take Philip Patrick over Janet Yellen, your crazy aunt, as Steve always says. | ||
| Any day, give him a call. | ||
| He's so busy he can't come on during the week, only on the weekend shows. | ||
| But in the meantime, birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
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back. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bamm. Welcome back to the War Room. | |
| It was a busy week last week for the War Room Posse when it came to all things Congress. | ||
| You know, we got a special shout-out. | ||
| I got my own special shout-out. | ||
| I'm curious how I managed to find time to host this show in between being a congressionally certified Trump lackey and sycophant. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| But in more important news, we also had, of course, one of the leading voices on immigration, | ||
| members of the War on Poverty. | ||
| Todd Bensman testified on how Chinese nationals are invading this country, being aided and | ||
| abetted by, of course, the Biden regime, also known as business partners of the Chinese | ||
| Communist Party, a la Hunter Biden and a bunch of other Biden family members. | ||
| But Todd, before we get into what you did on the Chinese Communist Party front, I know | ||
| there's some breaking news. | ||
| You got the developing undercurrents. | ||
| You see the swamp rearing its ugly head again. | ||
| They're reintroducing the so-called bipartisan. | ||
| I say whenever you hear that word, that's always a bad sign. | ||
| That's not a selling point, especially when it comes to immigration. | ||
| But they've reintroduced a bipartisan border bill, maybe a vote on Wednesday, Senator Schumer has. | ||
| Can you just walk us through kind of what you're hearing behind the scenes on that, but more importantly, why it is such a disaster and why we should not support it? | ||
| Well, first of all, understand that the reason they're bringing this back is because they got so much political traction out of the narrative that the Republicans killed this great border control bill. | ||
| Because, theoretically, the way the narrative goes is that, you know, the Republicans don't want to fix the border because they want it as a festering political issue in time for the November Election, but the reality is that they want to bring it back again to keep that narrative going. | ||
| They did well with it. | ||
| A lot of people believe them. | ||
| The truth is that the bill is awful. | ||
| It does the exact opposite of border control. | ||
| Because it lets everyone in. | ||
| When you let everyone in, you don't control the border. | ||
| You invite more to come to get in. | ||
| Except in this case, it legislates. | ||
| It puts in place legislation that maybe a future President Trump won't be able to undo very easily. | ||
| If the Democrats were serious, they would stop blocking H.R. 2. | ||
| Which is the beautiful, impactful piece of legislation that came out of the House that the Democrats in the Senate are constantly blocking. | ||
| They will not consider it. | ||
| They won't debate H.R. | ||
|
unidentified
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2. | |
| And H.R. | ||
| 2 works, and the reason why they won't let it advance is because it detains, deports, closes all the incentivizing loopholes, actually does something real. | ||
| At the border, and that's the one, of course, they don't want. | ||
| They want this other piece of trash. | ||
| It's basically, you know, it's toilet paper, this thing. | ||
| They're going to bring that back. | ||
| So a lot of the refrain is that this is, you know, Democrats trying to position themselves as tough on the border ahead of the election. | ||
| But is that a fair, yeah, is that a fair spin? | ||
| I would think they would want to go a little bit harder if that was the course they were going for. | ||
| What they're doing really is they're relying on the fact that most Americans don't understand the complexities of illegal immigration and how border control works. | ||
| And they've succeeded in sort of harnessing that general ignorance. | ||
| That's what's going on here. | ||
| People just don't understand, well, they're going to shorten the asylum adjudication time. | ||
| The problem is that they're releasing them for 180 days. | ||
| You can't release them for even one day because they disappear. | ||
| That's the kind of thing and people don't really, I think, in a broad way understand these kind of basic dynamics of immigration law. | ||
| And when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party migrant issue, again, that's too euphemistic a term. | ||
| We know they operate under the terms of unrestricted warfare. | ||
| These people are invaders and the Biden regime is purposely emitting questions to see whether or not these people are actually sworn members of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| I think it was also if they had firearm experience. | ||
| Can you give the audience just a little preview of what you spoke about? | ||
| But I think more importantly, Well, 50,000 Chinese nationals have now crossed our border since Biden took office because we just catch and release them immediately. | ||
| going on this issue, if there's any substantive legislation or change that you think is going | ||
| to come of it? | ||
| Well, 50,000 Chinese nationals have now crossed our border since Biden took office because | ||
| we just catch and release them immediately. | ||
| All Chinese get to stay. | ||
| And so, you know, the whole mainland knows this now and they're coming to take advantage | ||
| of it before the Americans wake up and go, oh, what have we done? | ||
| You know, this is so stupid. | ||
| And as a result, the rate of their entries has escalated to such a point that it now looks like by the end of this year, we'll have had 100,000 Chinese nationals Enter the U.S. | ||
| and that's a point of legitimate debate to have given the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, the government there is, you know, adversarial and wants to unseat and destroy the United States and replace it as a global, the global power, and that they're using rapacious espionage operations inside the United States to do it. | ||
| Now, in the past, they've been using mainly legal visa processes to fly in legally under student visas and then sneak into research institutions and steal all our stuff. | ||
| But we've cracked down on that. | ||
| Donald Trump did dozens of prosecutions, and that's hot now. | ||
| Not so easy to get in that way. | ||
| People are watching that. | ||
| All of a sudden, the administration, the Biden administration, hands out this golden ticket at the border. | ||
| Everybody gets in. | ||
| All the Chinese nationals get in. | ||
| So, of course, and I testified that, you know, there's the Chinese intelligence services undoubtedly put Chinese spies and agents of intelligence into the country this way. | ||
| Of course they would, and that was kind of the gist of what I had to say, but I also wanted to point out that the tens of thousands of Chinese nationals that may just be coming here merely to live and work because it's better here are committing mass asylum fraud. | ||
| We're finding they're broken and torn apart passports all over the borderlands. | ||
| They're tossing them because they're committing asylum fraud. | ||
| Those passports contain stamps of countries that were safe. | ||
| They passed right through them to get to our country, which is an ineligibility. | ||
| They're throwing down their Mexican asylum cards on the ground too. | ||
| They, the Mexicans just gave them asylum. | ||
| They can't get caught with those either because it's an ineligibility. | ||
| So even though the ones that are not spies are problematic and could be prosecuted under another administration wink. | ||
| Just curious, whether your testimony or from the other people who were involved in this hearing, you know, obviously we're strong adherents, or at least we understand, right, unrestricted warfare. | ||
| We think COVID-19 was a bioweapon. | ||
| Obviously, the Chinese Communist Party perpetuates economic warfare. | ||
| There's a myriad of ways that they've been waging war on the United States for decades, and our elites, frankly, have been complicit and allowed it to happen. | ||
| But why do they think the Chinese Communist Party is sort of storming the border with people? | ||
| I know it was announced, what was it, just two weeks ago that the Chinese Communist Party was again going to start collaborating with the Biden regime on deported Chinese nationals. | ||
| It was sort of a weird story. | ||
| I don't understand why the Chinese Communist Party would have any influence over American border operations. | ||
| But, you know, is there any, you know, threat or risk that these people are sleeper cells, that they pose a risk to our national security? | ||
| Well, I went into a lot of detail. | ||
| You can find my long-form written testimony at cis.org, Center for Immigration Studies. | ||
| We've got it posted up there as well as the video. | ||
| But, you know, I just default to the U.S. | ||
| intelligence community's own assessments for 2023 and 2024. | ||
| It's the ODNI, Office of the National Director of Intelligence. | ||
| And DHS intelligence and analysis, they have these assessments out there that say point blank that the Chinese Communist Party is putting operatives in here to conduct political suppression campaigns against Chinese Americans that live here. | ||
| They have these unsanctioned police stations. | ||
| that they man and they use to identify and physically assault and physically intimidate | ||
| people in the United States that are critical of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| That's in addition to the rapacious economic espionage that they've been conducting for | ||
| years already at all of our research institutes and elite universities, which plenty of those | ||
| who cross the border will eventually gravitate into and start those operations all over again. | ||
| and I'll see you then. | ||
| They are conducting renditions inside the United States, meaning they're kidnapping people they don't like and getting them out of the country and doing God knows what with them. | ||
| All of this is part of a grand strategic game that the Chinese are playing according to these public intelligence assessments, which I believe... I can't imagine why... And Todd, we're coming up against a break, so I gotta let you go, but if people want to follow you, watch the testimony, get the book, which I know you go into this in much more detail, where can they go to do all that? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| CIS.org you can find all my work and go to ToddBensman.com if you want to sign on to my newsletter and follow me on all my social media. | ||
| It's all right there on the page and I appreciate you giving me some time here today. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I'm sorry I had to cut you off. | ||
| I had to cut you and Mike Benz off just when it was getting good. | ||
| Not that it's always good, but it was getting better. | ||
| We'll have you back soon. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| It's hard for me to interrupt people. | ||
| I know Steve is much better at interrupting people. | ||
| I like to give you guys runway and let you talk. | ||
|
unidentified
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You guys should also talk to the people at Birch Gold. | |
| How's that for a segue? | ||
| Birchgold.com slash Bannon to get the latest installment of The End of the Dollar Empire. | ||
| They'll give you everything you need to know about why gold has always been a hedge, and we'll be right back after this break. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bann. | |
| Welcome back to The War Room. | ||
| We've got live coverage outside of the New York courthouse. | ||
| I know we could be in China, could be the Chinese Communist Party, what they're doing, what they're putting President Trump through, but it is the United States. | ||
| Luckily, we got Andrew Giuliani and David Zeir there. | ||
| Breaking everything down for us, guys. | ||
| We know it's been an explosive day. | ||
| Michael Cohen, I guess, admitting to stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization. | ||
| I'd say that's an unforced error. | ||
| But walk us through everything that kind of went down today and looking ahead with Costello coming up as a witness, what you think we have to look for downrange. | ||
| Well, Natalie, good afternoon. | ||
| I'm here with Andrew. | ||
| And while 545 people were raped since the beginning of the year in New York and 27,000 people almost assaulted, misdemeanor felony assaults, we're stuck in here in the courtroom. | ||
| And so is Donald Trump. | ||
| And explosive fireworks today. | ||
| Blanche Getz. | ||
| Michael Cohen to say that he stole from Trump, but it got crazier and Andrew can fill you in because I had to step out of the courtroom after Rob Costello took the stand and basically I heard him say geez and When every question that was asked to him the prosecution objected and the judge kept saying sustained So Andrew take it from there Yeah, so Natalie, we get to the end of the day here at this point and Costello gets called as a witness. | ||
|
unidentified
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We weren't expecting him to get called. | |
| We weren't sure if the defense was going to go there or if they were going to pretty much rest with Cohen being kind of the lasting image to the jury there. | ||
| But they decide to go with Robert Costello. | ||
| There was a little bit of a gasp from the media at that point. | ||
| Anyway, fast-forwarding to a point where Mershon continues to sustain the prosecution's objections, right? | ||
| After about five minutes into that, Costello says to a hot mic, as the lawyers have approached Mershon's bench, ridiculous. | ||
| Nobody says anything, but you could obviously hear that. | ||
| A couple of minutes later, after a few more sustained objections, he says, geez, The judge then looks at Costello. | ||
| I heard that. | ||
| He did a double take. | ||
|
unidentified
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He did a double take. | |
| He said, excuse me. | ||
| He said, I'm sorry. | ||
| And then after another sustained objection, a couple of minutes later, there was a deep breath, a frustrated deep breath. | ||
| And the judge then said to Costello at that point that if you went, he admonished Costello. | ||
| Costello said, yeah. | ||
| And then the judge I actually asked Costello if he was staring him down. | ||
| Similar to this. | ||
| Staring him down right there. | ||
| That's when the judge cleared the courtroom completely and basically just left the courtroom for the prosecution, for the defense, and for Costello along with him. | ||
| And admonished Costello further. | ||
|
unidentified
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I assume he did. | |
| We don't know. | ||
| That's off the record. | ||
| The judge obviously was kind of breaking the fourth rail at that point of being the judge. | ||
| But my goodness was there fireworks there. | ||
| And actually You wonder if it does in some way distract a little bit from Cohen and how terrible of a witness that he was, but Costello was obviously showing the same respect for this judge that this judge has shown for the rule of law over the last month and a half here, which is absolutely none. | ||
| Yeah, and Natalie, I just wanted to add the same thing. | ||
| The scope of questioning, the narrow questioning that the defense is allowed to ask is so limiting Just like they want to bring Brad Smith, former FEC Commissioner, who can explain why this doesn't belong in a state court, and explain the 75-10 at the state level, and that the reason why there's no crime here, and there's no predicate for what's going on, the defense is not allowed to ask any questions, right Andrew? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that's exactly right. | |
| They always limit the scope, it seems like. | ||
| And certainly with Costello, they have really, really limited the scope. | ||
| Now, what you could say is that could potentially hurt the prosecution because it then limits the scope of questions that they could ask about. | ||
| Because you could ask Robert Costello about a guy I know pretty well, Rudy Giuliani. | ||
| You could ask about Ukraine. | ||
| You could take it in all different kinds of directions that, again, further distracts the jury From actually what was one of the worst pieces of testimony I think I've seen in my life, which was Michael Cohen. | ||
| Probably in all likelihood, I'm virtually certain that he perjured himself up there when you talk about that 96 second phone call that he originally testified. | ||
| was about Stormy Daniels, that he had to change his testimony that was actually both about a 14-year-old who stalked him and Stormy Daniels, and he talked to two people in the course of 90 seconds. | ||
| David? | ||
| Yeah, and one more quick point, Natalie. | ||
| Andrew pointed out earlier, Judge Machon wants this trial to go into next week now, and maybe he's trying to get the explosive testimony of Michael Cohen kind of in the back seat so the jury doesn't, you know, they kind of forget about it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and one more thing to that point. | |
| Mershon, late last week, was trying to rush this, basically, saying, get your summations ready for Tuesday. | ||
| And now, at some point early in the day today, he said, we're going to stretch this out another week. | ||
| Now we're back here to looking at summations potentially by tomorrow. | ||
| Actually, it should be on Tuesday, right? | ||
| That was a little bit unclear in terms of the timing. | ||
| But I think the defense will probably end up wrapping up their case by tomorrow. | ||
| Back to you, Natalie. | ||
| Obviously lots of perjury going on. | ||
| What is it? Six felonies that Michael Cohen admitted to under oath. | ||
| But specifically today, you could tell there was a moment that really struck a chord. | ||
| I think you had one of the MSNBC analysts saying that actually Michael Cohen didn't steal tens of thousands of | ||
| dollars. | ||
| He was just trying to take a bonus that he felt he was owed, that he felt he deserved. | ||
| Can you walk us through that moment in the courtroom, what he admitted to, for those in the audience who don't know what I'm referencing? | ||
| Yeah, well Lawrence O'Donnell said that stealing isn't really stealing and that was really crazy because Todd Blanch did a great job of telling everyone a story in that courtroom that the only one who's ever made money from all of this, good or bad, in Trump's favor or against Trump, is Michael Cohen. | ||
| making $4.6 million since 2020, making millions of dollars under the Trump organization for nine years. | ||
| And then, you know, I think he really, really, you know, showed that he's about the money here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Natalie, you bring up MSNBC, and I have to tell you, coming down the elevator | |
| after the morning break there, I was in the elevator with an MSNBC reporter. | ||
| We'll call it a reporter. | ||
| Because they introduced themselves to me. | ||
| They asked what I thought. | ||
| I said I thought that Cohen was a disastrous witness. | ||
| They said they thought that Cohen was a disciplined witness. | ||
| I reminded them that they had to change his testimony with regard to this 96 second phone call. | ||
| From being about one subject with one person to suit two subjects with two people right there. | ||
| And they said there was no way that you could prove that before I could actually get it out and the doors closed. | ||
| I couldn't have the opportunity to remind them that it's actually President Trump who is on the stand here and it is the prosecution, I should say his defendant, and it is the prosecution's job to prove without beyond any doubt that Donald Trump actually committed these There's no way you could do this, Natalie, now, looking at Michael Cohn being the linchpin to all of this. | ||
| Yeah, and he also established, Todd Blanche was successful in establishing that Michael Cohen did a lot of legal work. | ||
| Not only did he do legal work for Trump, that was, you know, he said it was, this was just reimbursement, these 12 payments for 35k a month, but he was helping Melania Trump, he was helping Tiffany Trump, he was helping Donald Trump, and he was also making money off of clients like AT&T that Trump introduced him to, and other clients, making a lot of money, doing a lot of legal work for the Trump team, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and the point that they also pointed out, too, was just that Cohen, as you said, when he had all that money right there that he had made, But Cohen also had a motive, and has a motive, to see Donald Trump behind bars. | |
| Talking about even his merchandise, that Convict 45 gear that Michael Cohen is selling there. | ||
| Talking about how it would be beneficial for his mea culpa podcast, for the potential show that he is pitching called The Fixer, if he is the one that could put Donald Trump behind bars. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Guys, thank you so much for that analysis. | ||
| We've got to let you go. | ||
| If people want to follow the both of you, where can they go to do that? | ||
| I'm at Dave Zier on Twitter, at David Zier on everything else. | ||
| And Andrew? | ||
|
unidentified
|
At Andrew H. Giuliani. | |
| We'll be live-tweeting, live-truthing, and live-exing tomorrow from the courthouse as well. | ||
| So stay tuned. | ||
| You'll want to see the fireworks again with Bob Costello coming up first thing in the morning. | ||
| Thank you and condolences for sharing an elevator with someone from MSNBC. | ||
| You guys have a good one. | ||
| Be safe. | ||
| War room posse. | ||
| As much as every time we have Mike Davis on, I would love to cold open with his infamous interview from the BBC. | ||
| We don't have time to do that today. | ||
| But Mike Davis, your thoughts on everything that went down in New York today? | ||
| This is a train wreck of a criminal prosecution for the Soros-funded Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. | ||
| They still have not told President Trump what the legal allegations are in this case. | ||
| In week six of this trial, this is clearly a political hit. | ||
| As we've been talking about for many months, you have Matthew Colangelo deploying from the No. | ||
| 3 office in the Biden Justice Department to bring this bogus case that the prior Manhattan DA, the Manhattan U.S. | ||
| Attorney, the Federal Election Commission, and Barack himself declined to bring, even after Brad campaigned on getting Trump, this | ||
| case was so bad that Brad didn't want to bring it. | ||
| The star witnesses are Stormy Daniels, a Bimbo porn star who has changed her story many times, | ||
| who has as her pinned tweet, her porn site, where she's raising money from this trial. | ||
| You have Michael Cohen, this disbarred, disgraced serial perjurer and convicted felon who's | ||
| changed his story many times. | ||
| He's raising money on TikTok, trashing Trump. | ||
| We just learned today he admitted to embezzling funds from President Trump, $60,000 from President | ||
| They don't have a case here. | ||
| The problem is, is this, this process is so rigged. | ||
| You have a Manhattan Democrat, Judge Juan Marchand, whose adult daughter, he donated to Biden. | ||
| He donated to another anti-Trump cause. | ||
| He just got reprimanded, we learned, from the New York judicial system several months ago. | ||
| It just came out, but he didn't step down. | ||
| He didn't step aside. | ||
| He didn't recuse even after we learned his daughter, Lauren Michaud, is raising millions of dollars as a Democrat fundraiser and consultant for Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, many other Democrats. | ||
| She's raising money off this case requiring his recusal because guess what? | ||
| If he does not, if Judge Michaud does not Deliver a guilty verdict and a conviction, then his daughter stands to lose a lot of business from these Biden Democrats. | ||
| And so he's clearly convicted under New York statute. | ||
| He refuses to recuse. | ||
| Instead, he expanded this illegal unconstitutional gag order. | ||
| He retaliated against President Trump for merely raising the fact that he has a conflict | ||
| of interest with his daughter's financial stake in this criminal prosecution. | ||
| He's corrupt. | ||
| He is, this is a corrupt judge with these partisan prosecutors and these lying witnesses. | ||
| Trump can't even talk about the fact that this Manhattan jury pool voted 87% for Joe | ||
| Biden. | ||
| If Trump mentions that, he goes to jail. | ||
| If Trump's campaign mentions that, Trump goes to jail. | ||
| Trump's campaign can't even post a New York Times story, for example, that mentions Colangelo | ||
| or Lauren Michon or Stormy Daniels or Michael Cohen or 87% Democrat jury pool or Trump goes | ||
| They rigged the jury selection process. | ||
| Colangelo, Bragg and Judge Michon rigged the jury selection process to weed out Trump The people who follow Trump on social media, so the three people in Manhattan who follow Trump on social media, but they didn't weed out people who followed Biden. | ||
| And I would say this. | ||
| Senator John Thune from South Dakota was just asked today about this trial and he said, quote, we'll see how the trial comes out. | ||
| I'm not weighing in on that. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| This is the guy who is being tapped to be the Senate majority leader. | ||
| If President Trump wins back the White House, John Thune is going to be the Senate majority leader. | ||
| And this guy doesn't have the balls to weigh in right now in week. | ||
| Six of this unprecedented criminal prosecution of the Republican nominee, the leading presidential candidate, the former president of the United States, and John Thune can't weigh in. | ||
| We don't need leaders like this in the Senate. | ||
| We do not need cowards in the Senate who are going to undermine President Trump every step | ||
| of the way like these senators did. | ||
| I think the Posse is going to have to step in and give his office some calls to let them | ||
| know what they think. | ||
| Mike Davis, if people want to follow you, support the Article 3 Project, where can they | ||
| go for all that? | ||
| And much more. | ||
| You're a good follow on Twitter. | ||
| Article3project.org, article number 3project.org. | ||
| You can take action, donate, and find us on social media on there. | ||
| You're still right in the high of that BBC interview. | ||
| You had some wonderful shots fired, I would say, at your counterpart over the weekend or last week with her. | ||
| Mike Davis, thank you for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll have you back soon, I'm sure, and we'll be right back. | |
| Welcome back to the War Room. | ||
| I'm honored to be joined by Kurt Mills, a true intellectual here in the War Room. | ||
| He does great work and I thought he'd be the perfect person to bring on to walk through everything that is going on in Iran. | ||
| Obviously, you guys have seen the death, right, in a helicopter. | ||
| Some mixed reporting. | ||
| I know it seems like the West is suddenly embracing this guy. | ||
| The way they're mourning his death, you would think the guy was a hero. | ||
| I guess they forget Iran is what, one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism. | ||
| But hey, if you look at what they're funding on college campuses here, it's no surprise | ||
| that they would probably support that. | ||
| But before we get into the geopolitical ramifications, I know you have some thoughts on sort of the | ||
| succession, how this is all going to play out. | ||
| Your thoughts, what you're seeing, speculation, Riha's death, you know, was there foul play | ||
| involved? | ||
| Was it truly an accident? | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, obviously, in such a momentous year, nobody really had the Iranian president falling out | ||
| So this is quite the tariff card to emerge here. | ||
| I think what is important to remember is that President Raisi was functionally the second | ||
| most important person in Iran. | ||
| The Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is the person who ostensibly calls the shots | ||
| in the country. | ||
| And there was a view that Raisi was the next man up. | ||
| The only problem was that his chief competition was Khamenei's son, Mushtafa Khamenei. | ||
| And so if there was to be foul play, and I think, again, base case here, there was not. | ||
| It's a sort of rough part of the world. | ||
| Helicopters, sort of notoriously unsafe, not super clear why very important people ride | ||
| in them. | ||
| But if there was some sort of subterfuge going on, the question really would anchor around | ||
| who would stand to benefit the most, which is potentially this man's rivals in Iran itself. | ||
| And I think it's important to note that the ones within the country that are around Khamenei, | ||
| the Sun, the impression is that they are actually rather hardline. | ||
| You remember the missile attack, the barrage of missile attacks that occurred a couple | ||
| weeks ago on Israel. | ||
| Well, actually Iran essentially telegraphed the attack ahead of time. | ||
| Ninety-nine percent of the missiles were intercepted. | ||
| It was basically an entirely cosmetic strike from Iran. | ||
| That has real consequences, that there are those in the country itself, particularly, | ||
| of course, the regime, that wants to see something more akin to a holy war with the West. | ||
| And they have not gotten it, right? | ||
| Donald Trump took out Qasem Soleimani in early 2020, basically an entirely cosmetic response | ||
| from the Iranians. | ||
| We have not seen the real bite from this country in some time. | ||
| And begs the question, is this the moment where that could actually happen? | ||
| So what are the ramifications for this from the United States' perspective? | ||
| Do you think you're going to see Iran double down, become more radical? | ||
| Is there going to be, you know, when it comes to Israel, how do you think this is going to play out? | ||
| We only got a few minutes. | ||
| We'll have you back to walk through it more. | ||
| But just kind of from a bird's eye view, how do you think this is going to affect the region? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think the real question here is, does the calculus change where these actors are no longer waiting for the election? | |
| I think the base case was that Netanyahu in Israel was waiting to see the result of the election. | ||
| The base case was that Putin was waiting to see the result of the American election. | ||
| And the base case was the Iranians themselves were trying to figure out if they even had an American administration to negotiate with. | ||
| But, you know, six months or five and a half months is a long time. | ||
| And if the Supreme Leader were to die and there were to be a succession crisis, and initially the Iranians have every reason to believe that Trump would be bad news for them, although potentially not as bad news as a more hawkish Republican or a more neoconservative Republican would be. | ||
| Do they want to reshuffle the deck now? | ||
| And this kind of event does raise the question of whether or not we would see rapid escalation in the region ahead of November. | ||
| Kurt, if people want to follow you, read your work, like I said, we'll have you back. | ||
| Sorry we got cut short. | ||
| But if people want to do all that, support your work, where can they go to do all that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please check out the website, theamericanconservative.com, a great magazine founded 22 years ago. | |
| You can read my work at at C-U-R-T-M-I-L-L-S on X slash Twitter. | ||
| You know, I think if you really want to understand the sort of ideological balances, the debates that are going on in the Trump right in any kind of in-depth way, we're your resource. | ||
| Before I ever had you on the show, I first came to you through your epic takes on Twitter, so I highly recommend following him. | ||
| Kurt, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it, Natalie. | |
| Of course. | ||
| Someone else who always has hot takes and hot deals for us in the War Room is, of course, Mike Lindell. | ||
| Mike, if you want to let the posse know, I never know, you always have election integrity updates, so feel free to give those, or if you have promo code and pillow updates, I'm sure they would equally love to hear those. | ||
| Well, today it's going to be an offer everybody because we've got a, we had a box store actually cancel on a sheet or a bed sheet or our percale sheets that came in. | ||
| For the Spring Summer here, these cool, awesome sheets. | ||
| So what we've done, I said, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to offer them just to the War Room Posse. | ||
| Once they're gone, they're gone. | ||
| It's a very limited supply. | ||
| You get them for their wholesale price of $26.98 for the Queen, $29.98 for the King. | ||
| Look at those regular prices, $99.98 and $119.98. | ||
| This is a War Room exclusive. | ||
| When they're gone, they're gone. | ||
| And by the way, you can still get free shipping options available on the website. | ||
| Go to the website, too, and you're going to get that. | ||
| All the other specials, the MyPillow 2.0. | ||
| Buy one, get one free. | ||
| The $25 MyPillows to go with your brand new sheets, everybody. | ||
| King or queen, just $25. | ||
| We have all the $25 extravaganza specials there. | ||
| The dishcloths, the towel sets, it all came in now. | ||
| They're ready to go. | ||
| Call my operators 800-873-1062. | ||
| We recently finally beat the IRS on that where they can work from home on commission now. | ||
| anywhere pills the American flags there for $25 so anything you get call my | ||
| operators 800-873-1062 we recently finally beat the IRS on that where they | ||
| can work from home on Commission now so you're helping these moms and dads | ||
| working from home across the country on Commission call 800-873-1062 Tell them you want those percale sheets for the wholesale. | ||
| Wardroom costs $26.98 for the Queen, $29.98 for the King. | ||
| Once they're gone, they're gone, though. | ||
| There's a very limited supply this retailer was ordering, so... Their loss is the wardroom posse's gain! | ||
| I like that. | ||
| That's a good spin. | ||
| We're always positive here in the War Room. | ||
| Mike Lindell, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| And War Room Posse, thank you for hanging with me. | ||
| Like I said, Steve is back for the 6 p.m. | ||
| so make sure you go watch that. | ||
| Go to warroom.org. | ||
| We've got some new stories, some analysis up there. | ||
| So take a look, read it, get informed, get educated. |
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