June 25, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:50
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Major breaking news into CNN, three sources tell CNN that according to an early U.S. intelligence assessment, the U.S. military strikes on three of Iran's nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country's nuclear program and likely only set it back a few months. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So this is an assessment that actually is out from the Defense Intelligence Agency. | ||
| That is the Pentagon's intelligence arm. | ||
| And it was based on a battle damage assessment conducted by U.S. CENTCOM after the strikes, according to one of the sources. | ||
| To that question that has been asked about how much damage has been done, this is a real question. | ||
| It's also a political question that has been to something that Donald Trump has been sort of dealing with here recently. | ||
| What are you learning, Natasha? | ||
| Yeah, look, Brianna, this is the first assessment that we are getting that the U.S. intelligence community has found about the battle damage that resulted from those U.S. military strikes on these three Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. | ||
| And as you said, it was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the Pentagon's intelligence arm. | ||
| And it is worth noting that it is a very early assessment. | ||
| The strikes were only a matter of days ago, and the intelligence community is still gathering intelligence. | ||
| They are still working to come up with a full, comprehensive picture of what exactly happened here. | ||
| But based on a battle damage assessment that was carried out by U.S. Central Command, essentially looking at the images and looking at what was actually damaged, the Defense Intelligence Agency has assessed that the core components of Iran's nuclear program are largely intact and that Iran's nuclear program has essentially only been set back by months. | ||
| Now, we presented this information to the White House for comment and White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt, she did acknowledge the existence of this assessment, but she said in a statement that the administration disagrees with it. | ||
| She said, quote, this alleged assessment is flat out wrong and was classified as top secret, but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous low-level loser in the intelligence community. | ||
| The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran's nuclear program. | ||
| Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets, total obliteration. | ||
| Now, it is worth noting here that there has been dissent, I should say, within the intelligence community, within the defense community, about just how much of an impact these massive bunker buster bombs would actually have on Iran's nuclear facilities. | ||
| It was far from certain, given that these bombs had never been tested in an actual combat scenario, whether they would actually penetrate those very, very deep underground tunnels that lie underneath these nuclear facilities. | ||
| And what we are told is that as of now, this Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, it does conclude at this point, again, it is still very early, that those underground facilities, including the centrifuges, including the highly enriched uranium that everyone has been talking so much about, Those are largely intact. | ||
| Now, of course, this does stand at odds with what President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have been saying in recent days about the impact of these U.S. military strikes. | ||
| Of course, President Trump said it was totally obliterated. | ||
| And Secretary Hegset did as well. | ||
| And he actually also provided CNN with a statement. | ||
| And he said that, quote, based on everything we have seen, and I've seen it all, our bombing campaign obliterated Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons. | ||
| Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target and worked perfectly. | ||
| The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran. | ||
| So anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the president and the successful mission. | ||
| Now, our sources did emphasize here that there was severe damage that was done largely to the above-ground structures at these nuclear sites. | ||
| And so there was damage done, of course, by these massive bombs. | ||
| But the core components of the nuclear program, we are told, they are largely intact and it only set the program back by a matter of months. | ||
|
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Israel says that Iran violated the peace agreement and the ceasefire agreement. | |
| Do you believe that Iran is still committed to peace? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| They violated it, but Israel violated it too. | ||
| Are you questioning if Israel is committed to peace? | ||
| Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before. | ||
| The biggest load that we've seen. | ||
| I'm not happy with Israel. | ||
| You know, when I say, okay, now you have 12 hours, you don't go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them. | ||
| So I'm not happy with them. | ||
| I'm not happy with Iran either. | ||
| But I'm really unhappy if Israel's going out this morning because of one rocket that didn't land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn't land. | ||
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I'm not happy about that. | |
| You know what? | ||
| We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f ⁇ they're doing. | ||
| Do you understand that? | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| You're going to have not got a free shot at 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've tried 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 lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
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Waru, here's your host, Stephen K. Baff. | |
| It's Tuesday, 24 June, the year of our Lord 2025. | ||
| Of course, a bombshell, no pun intended, dropped this afternoon, predictably leaked by the deep state. | ||
| Jack Basovic, so I think Kirb Mills is going to join. | ||
| We're going to have Sam Fattis in the morning. | ||
| Jack Bisovic, let's make sure that we, you know, the president's right now still at the NATO meeting. | ||
| I guess maybe they're just breaking up. | ||
| So he's got the whole fiasco with Ukraine and Zelensky, who showed up, who was invited, that he's trying to lay hands on and make sure that we stop the killing over in Ukraine, the Russian-Ukraine war. | ||
| This came out today as you and I said it was going to happen. | ||
| The deep state came out. | ||
| And this is what happens when you don't put out your own preliminary battle damage assessment starting on Sunday morning, just as a first cut. | ||
| Jack, break this down for me. | ||
| This is a CENTCOM. | ||
| It's coming from CENTCOM, but obviously they reported the combatant commanders on the Intel side do have a, I guess, a lateral responsibility to the DIA. | ||
| DIA, actually, I think technically the leak came from there. | ||
| What is your assessment of their preliminary battle damage assessment, sir? | ||
| Well, Steve, to be clear, we don't know exactly where the leak came from yet. | ||
| Caroline Levitt said that it came from a low-level staffer, clearly designed to undermine President Trump's mission, President Trump's successful achievement of the commander's desired end state in his objectives with the operation over the weekend. | ||
| But what we're told at this point was that the initial battle damage assessment was done by CENTCOM and then was handed off to DIA to create their larger assessment. | ||
| So CENTCOM is collecting the intelligence. | ||
| DIA, of course, then is going to be working with NRO, Space Force, satellite assets to be able to determine other pieces of that to then take a look down deep inside and give their best guess as to what has gone on. | ||
| So the real question here, I think, is for the CENTCOM commander, and that's General Carrilla, to come out and set the record straight on all of this because it does seem like the initial sourcing for this assessment went down to the combatant commander of CENTCOM. | ||
| And CENTCOM for folks is the parlance. | ||
| That's the Middle East, right? | ||
| PACOM, we say Pacific and AFRICOM and UCOM, but CENTCOM means Central Command. | ||
| That's your Middle East command. | ||
| And this town, as we've been saying here on War Room for a while, Steve, this is a CENTCOM town, Washington, D.C. The money flows south from the CENTCOM commander, and that's General Carrilla. | ||
| And so I haven't seen yet General Carrilla come up and give a press conference. | ||
| He did not speak very notedly. | ||
| He was there, I believe, at the battle damage assessment on Sunday morning with Secretary Hegseth, as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but he did not give his assessment as well. | ||
| Look, we were told there'd be a couple of days after this. | ||
| And so now the fact that this has gone up so much, I think it's really behooven on General Carrilla to come forward and explain to the American people what exactly went down because this was a huge, huge mission for the American military, certainly in the wake of the last big military operation being this, you know, the Houthis and then Afghanistan. | ||
| So really something to put Americans' trust and credibility back in the U.S. military. | ||
| And we need to have that and America needs to hear from General Carrilla. | ||
| You know, so we started this. | ||
| You had the, obviously the Saturday evening, I think 6.40 is when they started hitting all the way through our show. | ||
| We announced it here live, Jack, you remember. | ||
| Then Pete Hegseth and General Raisin Kane gave the briefing at 8 a.m. | ||
| Real America's Voice covered that live. | ||
| It was, and you and I noted, it was strange at the time, that there was a detailed of the logistics and the inner mechanisms of the actual strike itself, which was incredible. | ||
| And you're at the scale, the distance, the difficulty. | ||
| The attack itself, Jack, and you know that as an intel officer, there's nothing short of breathtaking. | ||
| I think it behooves all of us, and we have called for this now nonstop. | ||
| Remember, I think they canceled, I think, I'm not actually sure, but I think they canceled or delayed, not canceled, they pushed back what we talked to Senator Rand Paul about today, which was the intel that drove this initially, right? | ||
| How did all of a sudden this come out of nowhere? | ||
| I think everybody's got to take a deep breath. | ||
| Clearly, you look at the strike, and President Trump, who they gave him an assessment pretty quickly, said it's obliterated, at least to the human eye, it looks obliterated. | ||
| And there's all types of technologies, which you're going to talk about, that get you there. | ||
| But I think we have to go back to the beginning. | ||
| Until you tell the battle damage assessment and what they got and what percentage, that's not the way these things are done. | ||
| What was the initial target package? | ||
| What were the combatant commanders and then the pilots all the way down through the chain? | ||
| As you know, in Intel, and particularly in Air Intel, and when you're using tomahawks, this is where you start. | ||
| This is the package. | ||
| This is what we're doing. | ||
| This is one of the reasons, Jackie, because you remember, I was startled and said, we're using tomahawks on one of them. | ||
| They haven't been taken down by Israeli military yet, by the aircraft. | ||
| Why are we using a 1970s technology? | ||
| I mean, the Tomahawk missile is a war horse for the fleet, but it's pretty shocking that a surface on the third, really the third facility had not already been taken down. | ||
| That's why, because you kind of look at these strike packages. | ||
| Don't we have to go back to the beginning? | ||
| We have to go back. | ||
| Tulsi, Gabbard, and DNI have been pretty adamant that there's not really a change to what their assessment is. | ||
| CIA and another intelligence agency, probably Mossad, that's what people are talking about, from a different source, had information that drove a sense of urgency that the initial assault had to be done. | ||
| That was still the, and they said, we have to do this because they're very close to getting a bomb. | ||
| They're very close to weaponizing this. | ||
| This is so urgent. | ||
| We have to go now. | ||
| And the Israelis did. | ||
| So I'd like to know what was passed to the Americans from that that gets us the target package of what you can't assess it until you actually see what the target package is. | ||
| Am I correct on that, Jack Pasovic? | ||
| Well, Steve, that's right. | ||
| And the target package would include the facility itself. | ||
| Obviously, Ford-O is a known facility. | ||
| The Iranians have had this for years. | ||
| So this is something that if you're the CENTCOM commander, you're coming up with strike packages all day long for this and running tests again and again and scenarios as to what complete destruction would look like versus partial destruction versus breaking its operational capabilities for using various different types of munitions, ordnance, delivery vehicles. | ||
| Obviously, the president, of course, made the final call there, choosing the B-2 Spirit bombers and the bunker busters. | ||
| So the question, though, of course, I think for a lot of people, and look, I broke this earlier today on Human Events Daily, Steve, but they said Mossad leadership, we got to report the Mossad leadership was on the phone with CIA Director Ratcliffe earlier during these negotiations saying, we're going to keep going, we're going to keep going. | ||
| And Ratcliffe had to drop the hammer and say, look, if you guys continue to do this to counterman President Trump's call for the ceasefire, then we are going to cut off intelligence sharing from our end to you. | ||
| So we're going to sever this relationship right now. | ||
| Now that we broke that story, it's now going viral online between CIA, Mossad, all this intelligence sharing. | ||
| So a lot of people asking these questions right now correctly, I believe, as to what exactly was going on. | ||
| Of course, General Carrilla, being the CENTCOM commander, would have liaison with CIA as well as with Mossad. | ||
| So the questions, I think, really need to be answered by General Carrilla. | ||
| Where did the intelligence come from? | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
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And how did this get leaked? | |
| Can you stick around for a minute? | ||
| Jack Gorilla is here. | ||
| It's one day. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| The audience. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Kirk Mills is with us. | ||
| Think about President Trump. | ||
| After flying over there, getting up at the O Dark 30, having to deal with Netanyahu again and all this, he gets there, gets these huge tough names about Ukraine, and now he's got this to deal with before he goes to bed. | ||
| for a break. | ||
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Thank you. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Man. | ||
| Okay, Kurt Mills is going to join us. | ||
| Philip Patrick's a lot going on. | ||
| Big announcement about the bricks. | ||
| Pozo, but Pozo, don't rush this. | ||
| Before we get back to the bomb damage or the battle damage assessment, at least the preliminary got leaked, and we don't know how accurate this is. | ||
| It sounds like it's not particularly accurate with the deep state, you know, some junior level leaking it. | ||
| But tell me, you know, don't rush through it because this is quite controversial. | ||
| There is a real sense of, I would say, non-cooperation, to be blunt about it, in the last 24 hours. | ||
| Is it not, Mr. Pasobic, about President Trump putting together this ceasefire? | ||
| One of the reasons you should know that people I talked to said President Trump put together the ceasefire was for the people of Israel. | ||
| And what do I mean by that? | ||
| Yesterday, I'm told, was one of the worst days, if not the worst day, in this entire 12-day war. | ||
| They were getting hammered. | ||
| They're running out of ammo. | ||
| They miscalculated what the Persians will be able to hit them with. | ||
| I understand in Tel Aviv yesterday, it was quite horrific. | ||
| And I'm not sure we've even gotten all the full reports of how horrific it was on Israeli citizens. | ||
| President Trump took that into consideration in doing this with the Qataris. | ||
| And now you're telling me there was limited cooperation with Netanyahu's government. | ||
| In fact, President Trump went to bed understanding they had a strike package. | ||
| And President Trump said, as he said out there at the beginning of the show, we played it now in the morning and here, that he said, hey, you just can't go pound these people. | ||
| We're going towards a ceasefire. | ||
| And he thought he had an understanding by Netanyahu, and he gets up and they pounded him, and that's why he went ballistic. | ||
| You're saying something that actually Ratcliffe and Massad, let's be blunt, have kind of a little bit been hand in glove, right, in this whole situation. | ||
| And particularly on this kind of emergency, you know, they got new information and it's all coming from the CIA, which is different than what DNI had. | ||
| So give the audience one more time. | ||
| Take a deep breath because this is big. | ||
| You're saying that when they told them, hey, we're going to stand down here because President Trump's negotiating a ceasefire, the Mossad did not, they did not snap to attention and salute, sir? | ||
| Steve, Human Events is now reporting, according to two individuals who were briefed on this phone call between Mossad leadership and CIA director, that Mossad had indicated to the Central Intelligence Agency that they intended to press forward with various attacks, various strikes. | ||
| We know these decapitation, assassination strikes that have been going on and really indicative and emblematic of this 12-day war, certainly on day one, that initial shock and awe of the first day. | ||
| And the CIA director responded: say, wait a minute, President Trump has called for a ceasefire, and that includes anything that you have on the ground that you can stop as of right now. | ||
| Mossad indicated they wanted to push forward, and the CIA director said, if this continues, that intelligence sharing, this was the warning, that intelligence sharing, this relationship will be severed after that point. | ||
| And at that point, they finally stood down, at least for now. | ||
| So you're seeing this tension play out now, Steve, between our intelligence service and Israel's intelligence service, the same way you saw it between the prime minister and the president. | ||
| A tense call. | ||
| Another tense call. | ||
| Yeah, we're big believers in each, you know, Israel first, America first, got it. | ||
| You got to do what's right for your nation. | ||
| However. | ||
| And let's be honest, it's not an ally situation. | ||
| Netanyahu was not there for Solomoni. | ||
| He backed out at the last second. | ||
| President Trump will tell you that story all the time. | ||
| We still, let's bring up an unpleasant topic. | ||
| We still don't know about October 7th, that thing. | ||
| Jack Basovic, you and I were doing that live here in the war room on the Saturday morning show when it occurred, and we had some of those questions that have not been answered today. | ||
| But, and understand, but when you're a protectorate and the individual that is protecting you, the commander-in-chief of the United States, when he says something, you should take it like a papal bull. | ||
| He's not there to have a discussion. | ||
| And with his representatives like the CIA, the Massage did an incredible job. | ||
| I mean, let's be blunt. | ||
| On the first night, Jack Basovic, that was not going for the nuclear bomb program. | ||
| How do we know that? | ||
| Nothing had been touched, essentially, maybe some engineers, but nothing of the facilities had been touched until the evening of Saturday evening on the strike, including the above ground, which took 30 Tomahawk missiles, which, you know, that's 1970s technology, 1980s technology. | ||
| So the Mossad, they've done a great job. | ||
| They've assassinated a bunch of people. | ||
| They've had killed squads. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| But when President Trump says, I'm doing a ceasefire, and that means we're going to stop killing people, and his CIA director tells you that, we're not really looking for any back chat. | ||
| It's called an order. | ||
| The United States runs the deal here. | ||
| And this is what upsets me so much. | ||
| We run the deal. | ||
| If you don't like that, then do it all on your own. | ||
| Don't come for us and don't come as a supplicant and ask for air defense. | ||
| Don't ask for the Arleigh Burke squadron to go to the eastern Mediterranean. | ||
| Don't give us a package and we've got to find out. | ||
| This is why this intelligence, and I hear today, I Think the thing on Capitol Hill was canceled or pushed back. | ||
| And it sounds like it's pushed back. | ||
| One of the reasons, Jack Vasobi, because the battle damage assessment has been leaked, and we have no idea. | ||
| It's leaked to be blunt, to make President Trump look bad. | ||
| And it's leaked at this time. | ||
| This is not random. | ||
| The New York Times has it. | ||
| It's not random. | ||
| The CNN has it because they know in Europe they're watching CNN, not MSNBC. | ||
| And it's during his dinner where he's trying to bench press these people to make sure that we can put the guns down and bring the Ukraine fiasco that they all drove. | ||
| And the Fox people like Mark, you know, Tel Aviv Mark Levin drove now with 2 million cash release. | ||
| President Trump's got that. | ||
| And now they leaked this so that at the end of his dinner, right, he doesn't give a moment's peace. | ||
| Now he's got all of them all night long. | ||
| They're just going to be sitting there going, oh, nothing happened. | ||
| This whole thing was, you know, just Trump being a fantasy autocrat. | ||
| When in fact, a lot happened and it obliterated it. | ||
| And you can see, but this is why it's so important, Jack Pasovic, to bring this intelligence forward and know what we were starting with. | ||
| What did we start with and what do we have now? | ||
| Pozo. | ||
| Well, Steve, that's why I want to, and I think it would be incumbent on the CENTCOM commander to come forward and whether he's going to give that briefing behind closed doors or in a way where it can be declassified in a way. | ||
| By the way, Steve, you remember I was calling for the declassification of these images as early as Monday morning, saying that the American people, of course, want to see the incredible bravery and skill of their pilots. | ||
| And I have no doubt when President Trump says that this thing was completely obliterated, that it in fact was. | ||
| But at the same time, with my intelligence analyst hat on, there are real questions about the technology. | ||
| We want to see if the technology, how it worked, whether this was completely destroyed. | ||
| And by the way, not only that, but we want to know were the centrifuges actually there? | ||
| Because this has been the big question of all of it. | ||
| Have they been able, were they able to get them out beforehand? | ||
| Did they leave them in? | ||
| What was there? | ||
| What do we have left? | ||
| Of course, there's real questions about this. | ||
| By the way, the IAEA, just as we're talking, Steve, the IAEA says U.S. strikes on Iran were, quote, very damaging. | ||
| The group found that two impact holes from the U.S. strikes were above the underground, remember it's two bombs per hole, were above the underground halls that had been used for enrichment as well as storage. | ||
| So they're basing their battle damage assessment just on the commercial imagery that's come out. | ||
| Obviously, the DIA and Central Command would have much more robust ability to discern what's there. | ||
| But even the IAEA says they aren't able to determine exactly what is left. | ||
| And Steve, I think what's going on here now is, look, we know that in the intelligence agencies and in the intelligence community writ large, there's no lost, love lost between them, President Trump, Secretary Hagseth, DNI Gabber, John Ratcliffe, all the rest over CIA. | ||
| And so they would do anything they can to undermine this administration the same way that this same pit nest of vipers was doing the exact same in the first administration. | ||
| And of course, they're doing it while he's meeting with the NATO meters. | ||
| And you got Zelensky in there. | ||
| He's up in a suit for the first time because you know he's going to be pushing for that supplemental aid package for Ukraine and all the rest of it. | ||
| It's clearly why this leak was done now to undermine the president while he's abroad meeting with NATO. | ||
| Before I let you go, and I'm going to get Kurt Mills here after the break, just before I let you go, the whole sense of urgency, I say the false sense of urgency, but the sense of urgency came off of new intelligence that essentially the Mossad and CIA had that was different than what the IC community as DNI represents otherwise. | ||
| That includes CENCOM and DIA, Defense Intelligence. | ||
| That information drove a whole series of events, including a week later or 10 days later on Saturday, a massive strike, a coordinated strike of just epic proportions. | ||
| I'd like to see, we need to see that now more than ever. | ||
| We have to understand that because that leads you then to what exactly was accomplished of that. | ||
| And that should come forward in some sort of declassified mode immediately. | ||
| And I'm of the opinion that when we see that, we're going to go, hmm. | ||
| Now, where is it that you had to start on Thursday night and do a sneak attack? | ||
| Where was that? | ||
| Jack Basopa, can you know you got a bounce? | ||
| Final thoughts, social media, your Human Events Daily has been on fire. | ||
| This is in your wheelhouse, sir. | ||
| Well, thank you, Steve. | ||
| I do appreciate that. | ||
| And it's been burning the candle at both ends a little bit here. | ||
| So we're up at Human Events Daily and humanevents.com. | ||
| You can get all the information on that report and more as we have it there. | ||
| And Steve, as you can imagine, I know you had, you were talking about the Kennedy Center a little bit earlier today. | ||
| So tonight, I think I owe Tanya Tay a little bit. | ||
| I was able to talk to some folks, and we got hooked up with some of those lay Miz tickets for tonight. | ||
| You guys have a good, you don't get enough nights out with the boys. | ||
| So Tanya Tay, who's spectacular. | ||
| Oh, no, no boys. | ||
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This is just me and the Mrs. Just saying, you guys get a date night. | |
| Jack Pesobic on date night. | ||
| Jack, you have a great time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for carving out some time for the audience today. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| Philip Patrick and Kurt Mills. | ||
| This can't get any more serious, folks. | ||
| Path to war and putting Americans in harm's way. | ||
| On next in the war room. | ||
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Battle. | |
| Kurt Mills joins. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Kurt Mills joins us. | ||
| Birch Gold, the man from Birch Gold, is going to join us in a moment. | ||
| Philip Patrick, I've asked him to come on today to kind of lay everything out. | ||
| Also talks about the BRICS. | ||
| Huge news out of China that she may actually miss BRICS. | ||
| And there's a lot going on in the Chinese Communist Party high command. | ||
| I think they made a decision not a good time to be on a plane. | ||
| We'll get to that in a moment with our guy who is going to BRICS, Philip Patrick. | ||
| So Kurt Mills, because this was a timed leaked by the deep state. | ||
| Remember I told you three most powerful institutions, I'll leave the courts aside for a second, but the three most powerful institutions that run the imperial capital, the CIA, the Fed, and CENCOM. | ||
| CENCOM is the muscle. | ||
| The combatant commander, CENCOM, is like a god on earth. | ||
| You got guerrilla now. | ||
| The initial information, and that's why Caroline Levitt came from a very junior analyst. | ||
| It started at CENCOM, got to DIA, and the deep state leaked it on Trump, and they timed it. | ||
| They timed it for the Ukraine, the most important, this is what all the media in Europe is saying. | ||
| This is the most important NATO summit. | ||
| That's why it was scheduled for three days since the end of the Cold War. | ||
| This one. | ||
| Because they're going to determine Ukraine and so much else, geopolitically and geostrategically. | ||
| So Kurt Mills, my argument is that we don't know why we had to rush into war, right? | ||
| And because we haven't been shown that. | ||
| And everything we know from DNI is that things were still normal course of business. | ||
| Netanyahu went on Brett Baer on Sunday night and said, yeah, there was a breakthrough, but it's 12 to 13 months away from a weapon. | ||
| And so we don't know what President Trump and what he signed off on in the strike, but they had a quick cut and it was obliterated. | ||
| And you can see that from even, you know, the International Atomic Energy Agency came out and gave a pretty good report on just commercial-based information. | ||
| What is your theory of the case here? | ||
| Because folks, we're not going to have another Golf of Tonking. | ||
| Okay, not going to happen. | ||
| That was before alternative media and things like that. | ||
| You're not going to have a Golf of Tonking. | ||
| And we're not going to have a situation where they're running around looking for Scuds. | ||
| We're not going to do the phony weapons of mass destruction where they lie to your face, bald face. | ||
| We're not going to let that happen. | ||
| And that's why we're like a dog with a bone with this. | ||
| We've got to go back to those days, and you must get the information, you must get the receipts, and the American people must understand this, still keeping from sources and methods. | ||
| If there's got to be some classification, that's fine, but there's a lot of this information to be let out. | ||
| So, Kurt Mills, what is your theory of the case, sir? | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, basically, you know, they're calling this the 12-day war, but I think it actually technically is the 11-day war. | ||
| And so we have seen a case now where the Israelis moved first. | ||
| Some of the early strikes were awesome in the literal sense of the word. | ||
| They evoked awe. | ||
| They seemed attractive. | ||
| And I think the president was frankly sympathetic to the glamour of them. | ||
| Then there was a strong pushback, in my opinion, by MAGA, by the base, by this program, by others, Tucker Carlson, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And I think the president took in the full raft of information. | ||
| And then he eventually moved last Saturday in the direction that he was always going to move, which is that he was going to do the strikes on the Irani nuclear sites. | ||
| I do wonder, though, as reporting is trickling in and as the frankly just open bad faith of the Israeli government led by Netanyahu is made manifest that they didn't want to honor the ceasefire, I do wonder if the fuller picture of what has transpired, | ||
| just transpired, is coming into view, which is, and there was a report just, you know, it came over the wire 30 minutes ago about a Defense Intelligence Agency report that said that, you know, even if all of the nuclear sites were destroyed, which I think remains an if, respectfully to the White House, even if they were destroyed, the Iranians would basically be able to rebuild this capacity in a matter of months, which was the incessant of many independent experts and analysts even before these strikes. | ||
| So it is setting up the situation in which the nuclear issue, the striking nuclear facilities, is a false issue. | ||
| It doesn't actually solve the problem for either side. | ||
| For those who want to avoid war, this was an unnecessary tactical move. | ||
| And for those who want war, I think the TEL is already in it. | ||
| They're already upset today. | ||
| The Mark Levins of, you know, in theory, they got what they wanted. | ||
| They got the President of the United States to bomb the Iranians on behalf of a foreign government. | ||
| And when Trump brokered a ceasefire, they screamed bloody murder because the nuclear issue is not really the issue here. | ||
| I think it should be negotiated. | ||
| I don't think Iran should be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. | ||
| And I think that offer is at the table right now, which is why Israel intervened in this conflict in the first place, to stop a peace accord. | ||
| Walk me through that again. | ||
| You're saying that the nuclear bomb making and all that was not the purpose. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons we haven't seen, and it hasn't been any even leaks to the media about what drove the urgency before we got to the upsell. | ||
| Because that's not really what this was about. | ||
| That was a misdirection play, is what you're saying, correct? | ||
| And that's where the CIA and the Mossad come in. | ||
| Look, I think there is Israel. | ||
| I think there's the Israeli government, and then there's this Israeli government led by this prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. | ||
| And what we know about Benjamin Netanyahu is that he has been claiming about an imminent Iranian nuclear program since at least the time that he was UN ambassador in the early 90s. | ||
| He said the Iranians would have a nuke within five years. | ||
| He has been claiming that it is just on the horizon for his entire political career at this point. | ||
| It is a fake issue insofar as the Israelis' goal, the prime minister's goal, is regime change in Iran. | ||
| It is very hard to say that openly. | ||
| And so they obsess over or they get the American public, they get the Murdoch Empire, they get the Republican establishment, they get an audience of President Trump to obsess over the nuclear issue. | ||
| But once the nuclear issue itself is taken off the table, they keep moving the goalpost. | ||
| The Iranians at the beginning of these negotiations, look, not trying to do the Iranians any favor here, but the Iranians came in with a certain amount of weakness and they said, look, we will agree to no nuclear weapon. | ||
| In fact, even if you don't believe them, the supreme leader has a fochwa on nuclear weapons. | ||
| They basically don't want their enemies in the region to have them either. | ||
| So they're comfortable putting it off the table. | ||
| Then the goalpost got moved to what? | ||
| Zero enrichment. | ||
| The Iranians weren't allowed to enrich any uranium, even a very low amount, because that was going to be an impossible demand or near impossible demand for the Iranians to meet. | ||
| And so once we reached to day 61, the Israelis spectacularly intervened to enforce a fake deadline to a negotiation that they weren't party to. | ||
| There were only two parties to this negotiation, Iran and the U.S. And the Israelis intervened to, quote, enforce the U.S. side. | ||
| And that's what caused this crisis. | ||
| And I think Trump, you know, this morning, in the full totality of the events, a little bit in the rear view, hopefully, has seen what has happened. | ||
| And you saw him snap. | ||
| You saw him snap on the White House lawn. | ||
| He said, I'm not happy with Iran or Israel, but he really, really reserved his ire for Netanyahu. | ||
| He seemed disgusted with the bad faith. | ||
| And frankly, the fact that, I mean, it was pretty astonishing. | ||
| They announced a ceasefire, but the ceasefire went into effect several hours later. | ||
| And it was like the armistice day in World War I. The deal was signed in the 4 a.m. | ||
| hour, and they were like World War I generals insanely throwing men over the lines to get more killing done before 11-11. | ||
| That's what it was, and that's who we're dealing with right now with the current government in Jerusalem. | ||
| The deep state's stepping in here, too. | ||
| You can see this. | ||
| This whole leak now is to try to jam up President Trump, and they're still looking for, they have not given up. | ||
| They're still looking for any, because you can see Levin and these guys, the Fox News guys, they're apoplectic that President Trump has stopped here and wanted to cease fire and says, hey, there's no more war. | ||
| It's a 12-day war. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| What do you anticipate? | ||
| What choice are they trying to force, sir? | ||
| Well, just to underline it again, that shows you the nuclear issue, it's fake in a certain sense, right? | ||
| Like Trump took it off the table, and now they're losing their minds because he doesn't care about regime change or anything else. | ||
| What they are trying to force here is regime change. | ||
| That is what they want. | ||
| And additionally, for Netanyahu, I think he wants the crisis to just keep going because he needs this spectacular state of exception in order for him to remain prime minister of Israel. | ||
| He needs a war footing. | ||
| He needs his own population docile and fearful and terrified for the prospects of their own lives in order to keep voting for somebody who has this level of political liability and frankly is stale in the Israeli cast of mind. | ||
| He has been around, as I mentioned, on the national scene since the early 90s. | ||
| They're sick of him. | ||
| And so he needs a crisis to keep this going. | ||
| I'm not submitting that his successor, the most likely successor, is his predecessor, Aftali Bennett, wouldn't be a conservative hawk, wouldn't be an Israeli hardliner, wouldn't perpetuate the war in Gaza in some fashion. | ||
| I think he would. | ||
| But there wouldn't be this level of intermingling with the U.S. political system. | ||
| Netanyahu is, in some senses, more interspersed into the American system than he is with the Israeli system. | ||
| And it is this weird incentivist relationship. | ||
| I mean, when Netanyahu addresses Congress, many times Republicans and Democrats both look at him like he is more and above the president of the United States. | ||
| That is not America first. | ||
| That is not nationalistic. | ||
| That is pretty gross, and it should be dismissed. | ||
| Well, I think it is going to be dismissed because now this is serious. | ||
| You put all those people in harm's way. | ||
| You obliterated what was there, what told the packages, and now it's being leaked. | ||
| And you wait till the night. | ||
| It's going to be a firestorm. | ||
| And President Trump's dealing with Ukraine, trying to get out of this Ukraine mess. | ||
| And now he's got this on top of it, got to come back. | ||
| I mean, there's never a second, never a second there's not ultimate pressure on him. | ||
| Real quickly, Kurt, before we bolt, any thoughts on the Ukraine? | ||
| Zelensky's there, and I think he's actually in a suit. | ||
| This is the most important, we got about a minute and a half, most important NATO meeting since the end of the Cold War. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
| Well, just off the top, I thought it was humorous that Trump basically said that the Israeli demands were so extreme that he can't wait to deal with NATO, whose extreme demands are less extreme. | ||
| Obviously, they are. | ||
| I think with the Russia-Ukraine situation, it exists within the shadow of Iran. | ||
| I mean, I was in Europe last week or the week before, and like, you know, this is basically what people wanted to talk about. | ||
| And the reality here is if the U.S. got involved into Iran war, the Ukrainians would be thrown into a wood chipper. | ||
| So the Russians and the Iranians are allies, but the European thinking on this, frankly, is often so blinkered and emotional. | ||
| If the U.S. put all of its resources into the Iran fight, we don't have the materiel and attention span to do both, and Zelensky would be in big trouble. | ||
| So I think that's what you see there. | ||
| And then I know you're always trying to link for the audience to China. | ||
| I don't know if this report has been covered on this program, but there was a report within the last couple of days of four Chinese ships basically going off radar and disappearing near Iranian land space. | ||
| And there's great speculation that if the U.S. got back, if it got pulled into an Israeli war with Iran, that the Chinese would try to turn this into our Ukraine, which is to say, we wouldn't lose, but we, like Vladimir Putin, would just be drawn into a quagmire in which all of our state capacity was exhausted. | ||
| And I think that's the danger here. | ||
| That's the danger of these wars of choice. | ||
| The Ukraine war is a Democrat war of choice, but the Iran war is the Republican war of choice. | ||
| Kurt, social media, where are they going to get you? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The magazine, theamericanconservative.com, and my own channel is at Kurt Mill, C-U-R T, M-I-L-S on X. I appreciate the time. | ||
| Kurt, fantastic. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to talk about the bricks in the world with Philip Patrick next. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Man. | |
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| Philip Patrick joins us. | ||
| Philip, first of all, we're going to talk about the bricks in a moment. | ||
| Give us your assessment. | ||
| The markets have been, I'm not saying this is a yawn, but they've taken this in stride, both in gold and oil in the stock market. | ||
| Is it because they don't think this is real? | ||
| They think President Trump sorted it out enough? | ||
| What's your assessment? | ||
| I think it was the Iranian response, right? | ||
| Everyone was sort of waiting to see how the Iranians responded. | ||
| The big concern was that, as they said, they were going to shut the Straits of Hormuz, which would send oil prices globally skyrocketing. | ||
| By bombing a U.S. base in Qatar, it was a much more measured approach from the Iranians. | ||
| And I think financial markets welcome that. | ||
| Obviously, oil prices dropped. | ||
| I think it was 11%, 12% in a day. | ||
| Gold dropped a little bit as well. | ||
| But again, this is short term. | ||
| This is the market saying, look, it didn't escalate beyond where it needed to be at this point. | ||
| But as you were discussing earlier, this thing isn't done yet. | ||
| We have to see how it's going to escalate. | ||
| Are the markets taken in because they also don't seem to be fully factoring in yet? | ||
| Is that because it's off the front page, given everything that's happening in DC? | ||
| The Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| We know the Big Beautiful Bill markets poorly because of its name. | ||
| People just think it's a laundry list of things, right? | ||
| So the term itself has got some negativity to it, not associated with President Trump. | ||
| But we had Rand Paul on this morning, the senator, and he said, look, you know, this thing he thinks is going to get to the president's desk by the 4th, but he says there's still some big fights. | ||
| Number one for him is going to be the debt ceiling. | ||
| He just says, look, if we pass $5 trillion, we're going to go to $5 trillion pretty quickly. | ||
| Are the markets not taking the, because of everything focused on this war, that they're not calculating in some of the, I mean, the spending here is pretty big, and Ron Johnson has not been able to rally enough interest in the town to really have some massive cuts. | ||
| So you're still going to have these deficits, sir. | ||
| Look, the markets have a very short attention span. | ||
| And like you said, I think things right now, the focus is on what's happening in the Middle East and how that will escalate and how that will affect international trade. | ||
| What is being affected is currency markets, right? | ||
| And this has been started with Biden, right? | ||
| Demand for U.S. debt has started to wane, but it's been escalating since Trump's been in office. | ||
| And I think sort of the real hope for financial markets was Trump would address deficit spending. | ||
| They're trying to do it through growth, but this bill, obviously, as we know, increases deficits and it's led to an escalation in de-dollarization. | ||
| I think financial markets, like I said, they've got a short attention span. | ||
| Once this comes in and gets voted on, we might start to see the markets or financial markets reacting more directly. | ||
| If this bill passes as roughly it is, will this continue the path for de-dollarization, both in Europe and in Asia that will say, hey, we want to be stuck with as few dollar-denominated securities as possible? | ||
| Look, it's hard for me to say it because, like I said, I support President Trump and I believe in his ability to grow the economy longer term, but the question has always been time. | ||
| My answer is yes, right? | ||
| Obviously, if we expand deficits, it makes our debt more attractive at an international level and it will ultimately accelerate de-dollarization longer term. | ||
| We have to remember what we're banking on here is not guaranteed and that is economic growth. | ||
| The one thing that is guaranteed is this additional debt burden as it grows, as the interest on the debt grows, as we start to print money to meet debt liability, that's a debt trap. | ||
| And that's not attractive for foreign investors. | ||
| Factor in sort of weaponization, all the tricks that Biden played. | ||
| You know, once you fire that bullet, you can't put it back. | ||
| So it's the perfect storm right now for de-dollarization. | ||
| I don't think expanding the deficit is going to help our case domestically at all, unfortunately. | ||
| Okay, when Scott Besson says this is the last shot for a supply-side method to solve the financial and economic problems of the country. | ||
| What he's saying, the debt to deficit, I think, is close to 6.5%, 7%. | ||
| He said you've got to get that down to 3%. | ||
| I think Ray Dalio concurs with that. | ||
| We've been talking about that now for over a year, how Biden didn't do it. | ||
| It's 6.5%, 7%, maybe even higher. | ||
| What Besson and President Trump are doing on the supply side, they are basically betting on or assuming or looking at math in these models. | ||
| And that's why I think the models got to be put out more. | ||
| I think we need more math, more backup to these models. | ||
| They're saying we're actually through the supply side tax cut, we will grow the economy. | ||
| We will grow GDP at a higher percentage than we'll grow the debt or the deficit and debt, and that will pay down. | ||
| Then the deficit will start coming down because we'll have more tax revenues, even at the lower tax structure. | ||
| Is that essentially the bet we're making collectively here? | ||
| That is exactly the bet we're making. | ||
| It is a tough one. | ||
| Listen, since the 70s, debt has averaged 8.5% growth a year. | ||
| GDP has averaged a little over 3%. | ||
| So, you know, we would have to massively boost GDP in order for that to happen. | ||
| There's a lot of things. | ||
| Listen, these guys are smarter than I am, right? | ||
| And you said putting the modeling forward is a smart thing. | ||
| I agree with that vehemently. | ||
| For me, I struggle to see how we do it. | ||
| You know, I say all the time, we're 25% of the world's GDP. | ||
| We attract 60% of the world's capital. | ||
| We are prime. | ||
| We are not an emerging market to grow at this level from where we are is a tough task. | ||
| I've said it before. | ||
| There isn't a better team to do it. | ||
| But, you know, without dramatic changes, it's going to be difficult. | ||
| That's why I think, and again, this is not my area of expertise, but this AI race may be crucial here, right? | ||
| Because whoever gets there first, I think, can grow exponentially. | ||
| There's a lot of things benefiting us. | ||
| The U.S. has incredible natural resources. | ||
| We're very blessed by geography. | ||
| Longer term, I'm rooting for the U.S. How this shapes out short to medium term is tough. | ||
| But that's the gamble. | ||
| That's always been the gamble. | ||
| Philip, can I hold you just for a minute or two through the break into the second hour? | ||
| Because I do want to get back to the situation with the BRICS and particularly the Chinese finance minister talking about an alternative, right? | ||
| And now that she has said, hey, I've met with Lula a couple times and it sounded like, hey, Lula's on board, whatever we want to do. | ||
| So we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to leave you with the right stuff. | ||
| It's that kind of day. | ||
| It's a hot, miserably hot June day, late afternoon when it really gets hot and muggy here in Washington, D.C. in the Imperial Capitol. | ||
| I think 100 today? | ||
| Close to 100, over 100 tomorrow. | ||
| Miserable. | ||
| Feels like a July or August here in the Imperial Capital. | ||
| Philip Patrick, he's not sweltering here in this heat. | ||
| He's living large. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| The second hour will be as lit as the first. | ||
| Stick around. |
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