WarRoom Battleground EP 918: Ben Harnwell Interview With Petr Bystron MEP (AfD, Germany)
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Welcome, Hanwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's War Room.
That footage was recorded by the War Room's favorite member of the European Parliament for the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland, Peter Beistran, who joins us again today.
Peter, thanks for coming on the show.
So how, explain to us, how did it happen?
How are you recording the American national anthem?
Yes, there was a representative of the AFD, Markus Fromayer, who is now in charge as a foreign policy speaker in the German Bundestag, which I was for four years before.
And he had a very nice speech.
He received even an award from the Young Republicans.
Now, I know one of the things that you've been following over the last Couple of weeks as closely as we have here on the war room is the US national security strategy.
And one of the things looking at a document that some people were calling for is a stronger relationship between the US administration, the Trump administration, and political parties here in continental Europe that have a natural affinity towards what Donald Trump is trying to do.
And of course, the AFD is in pride of place amongst them.
When you were there in New York, do you get the feeling now that something is changing and that the Trump administration is really in the final three years of this mandate is looking to construct a proper serious working relationship with his natural allies here in Europe?
We were not talking about anything else than the security strategy of the United States, and not only in New York.
I mean, the New York gala, it was just the last of many meetings I had.
I was the whole week in the United States.
The first days I have been in Washington, DC, I talked to a congressman, a representative of the Trump administration.
And well, of course, the new security strategy of the United States was the ground for all those talks.
Look, this document is changing the world.
And it's fixing in a new way the relationship between Europe and the United States.
And it caused also a huge boo-ho around the mainstream media and Germany, especially, because for the first time, the Trump administration publicly admitted that Trump and his people are going to support conservative parties like the AFD in Germany.
Well, this is Ed Martin, it's one of my meetings with the Trump administration.
It is the Department of Justice.
And we had several talking points.
On one side, we are very interesting in what the US government is doing with the investigation of the weaponization of justice against the opposition.
We are facing the same threat in Europe.
I mean, you are talking to a guy who had a twenty-seven home searching on myself, on my friends, in my surroundings, in my case.
And there are many, many others.
There are people like David Bendels, the chief editor of Deutschland Courier, who just got seven months in prison sentence in a trial just because his magazine published a meme with the interior minister holding up a piece of paper saying, I hate freedom of expression.
And I mean, besides that, that's true.
It's just a meme, you know, and this is absolutely unlawful to charge a chief editor of a magazine for this.
This is breaking our constitution.
This is violation of everything what used to be European values in the past.
And there are many other examples like this, so we exchange on this and how to handle it.
And we strongly We are now, we decided that we will do also investigations, parliamentarian investigations, as the US government is doing in the US.
So we will do it in the European Parliament, we will do it in the German Parliament, and this will be the start of a parliamentarian investigation on those cases.
And on the other side, and this is really very important also, the Department of Justice was very interesting on the results of our work, of our investigations in Europe, because we discovered that the European Union is heavily financing Americans' NGOs, US NGOs.
And this I can explain on two cases.
The first case is the NGO called OCCRP.
And quite nobody knows it, but it's very influential.
The boss of this NGO, Mr. Sullivan, he stated in front of TV cameras that his organization is responsible for regime changes in five or maybe six countries.
He wasn't sure if it's five or six, but he was sure that his organization is responsible for that.
And knowing this, I just have to add this: the OCCRP members are the biggest publishing houses in Europe.
And they had been secretly financed through the OCCRP over decades from US budget.
And they received information most likely from secret services.
And they were not allowed to disclose this source of information.
And they were even not allowed to disclose that they are financed from the United States.
And Donald Trump stopped the financing of this NGO through the USAID.
And guess what?
The European Union paid them 600,000 Euro just right after the election for the European Parliament.
And for what?
The members of OCCRP, those biggest publishing houses in Germany, for example, Spiegel or Sudeutschezeit on its side, those are exactly those media who were running the biggest blackmailing campaigns against all EU critics running in those EU elections.
The media who blackmailed EU critics received 600,000 Euro right after the election.
Peter, let me just, if I may, clarify what you've said, because that's really explosive, right?
If I've understood this correctly, you're saying that US taxpayers' money has been funneled via US aid to the European Union to the mainstream media,
German mainstream media press to run combative anti-AFD articles in Germany before the last German election.
And the money over the dollars arrived just after the election.
So it's a clear bribery.
And let me just, before you answer that, it seems very similar to me to the fact that it just emerged that via, again, US aid, they bribed Time magazine $4 million, if I've understood this correctly, to name Zelensky man of the year, which is astonishing.
Now, you have a lot of people saying, oh, it's outrageous that President Trump has suppressed this, is doing loads of good work, saving lives in Africa and all the rest of it.
And perhaps some of that is true, but the word really needs to get out, especially to the American audience, to American taxpayers, that in addition to the good work, that's just simply a pretext.
The actual motivations for President Trump sort of suppressing this is what's being going on sort of off radar behind the scenes.
So please clarify that.
Peter Beistran, you're a senior member of the European Parliament.
You spent what eight years in the German Parliament.
You understand how these things work.
Can you confirm for me that I understood you correctly?
US taxpayers' money was being funneled via USAID into the German media to run anti-AFD articles before the last election.
I do want to put the context to what Peter Beistram was saying before the break because this is so important.
You have the idea in America that money being spent by USAID around the world is working towards eliminating malaria in Africa and that sort of thing.
And some of that money is doing that.
But it is also being used to subvert the democratic process here in continental Europe and specifically to campaign against, to work against MAGA's natural allies in continental Europe at election time.
Now, Peter Bystron, come back and finish this point because my memory of this then is that the Obiza non-scandal, which effectively, I think, if memory serves me correctly, destroyed the political career of the then Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz.
And you were saying it hit the FPO very badly in the elections.
Now, the FPO, the Austrian Freedom Party, is massively anti-invasion, like the AFD.
It's a natural sister party of the AFD.
The AFD is in Germany, the FPO is in Austria.
And that scandal, inverted commerce, that manufactured synthetic scandal, worked to destroy the political momentum of a natural MAGA partner in continental Europe.
And Americans don't know this.
American taxpayers don't know this because the American media is misrepresenting the truth to them, doing what the mainstream media does naturally.
It keeps you unaware of what you don't know and misinformed about what you do know.
Peter Beystron, please continue this point because it's important to know that when President Trump moves to suppress US aid, it's not because he wants small African kids to die of malaria.
It's because that is an agency that is out of control in the United States, not only acting with US taxpayers' money to manipulate elections on continental Europe, but it's also, as we mentioned just before, being used to create pro-Zelensky propaganda.
As I say, $4 million is the figure I've seen quoted in the press to bribe Time magazine to make Zelensky their man of the year.
And we'll talk about Ukraine because there have been important developments.
We'll talk about Ukraine in a moment.
But please just finish this point because it is so important.
And what President Trump is doing now, not only with the suppression of USAID, but also with the US national security strategy.
This is so important.
And it is what we hear in continental Europe, Peter Beistran, what we have been crying out for from this administration.
Yeah, look, I think the era of mass migration is over.
Yeah.
And you said it.
Your natural partners in Europe, we AFD, or the freedoms decades, you know, the last 10 years, since 2015, very intensively.
And at that time, the Freedom Party was government.
And they were saying as well, the era of mass migration is over, as Donald Trump is saying it now.
They were even doing it.
And at that time, in the US, the official US security strategy was stating the total opposite.
It said like we have to promote migration, we should organize and so on and so on.
So they were really pushing for migration.
And now imagine what?
For tax, for American taxpayers' money.
And it went through the USAID.
They finance regime changes and blackmailing of those natural MAGA allies.
And it was, I think, JD Wentz who said only 17% of the USAID money went for what you said, the little black kids in Africa, and, you know, so they don't get malaria.
But the other 83% were used for regime changes, manipulation of election, and so on and so on.
And it happened even at the last European election.
And I know it because I was target of it, one of the targets.
And it was again with the same pattern.
Some secret services created a blackmail material like then in Ibiza.
This time it was called Voice of Europe.
And they said, there is a website in Prague created by Ukrainian refugees.
And this website is a tool of Putin's propaganda and it will influence the Hochen and the election to the European Parliament.
What they're doing is the very thing, and this always takes place, the very thing that they're accusing you of that you're not doing is what they are doing themselves.
In our case, it was that they created a blackmailing campaign.
They said they have a secret service material, like with Ibiza, but this time they even didn't show it.
No one ever saw this secret service material, but they accused, they accused a website which was created by Ukrainian refugees in Prague called Voice of Europe.
They said, oh, this website was a tool of Putin's propaganda.
And through this website, the whole elections to the European Parliament across all Europe should be manipulated.
And in addition to that, many politicians who gave an interview to this website, they had been bribed by Putin.
They received millions of Euro in cash.
I mean, this sounds already stupid, but one Czech journalist, he was just proving this, you know, and he looked on the website and said, wait a second, wait a second, how a website of Ukrainian refugees, which has like five likes on YouTube for their videos, how can they influence the whole election in the Czech Republic?
But this question, this work was not done by the OCCRP media.
The biggest media houses across Europe, they were spreading this fake news.
They did over 250 articles only about me in Germany and more other in other countries on colleagues of mine who are also EU critical and who were against the war in Ukraine.
So they blackmailed us weeks before the election to the European Parliament and it had a really tremendous effect.
It pushed us down and some of those colleagues like a colleague in the Netherlands he even didn't pass to the European Parliament because he was pushed under the 5% level.
So again, the majorities in the current European Parliament were heavily manipulated by campaigns, media campaigns done by OCCRP media.
We've got like two minutes before the break, so it'll be a quick question, quick answer.
But the largest aid agency in the world isn't the American one.
It's the one done by the European Union.
That's the European Overseas Development Budgets, the largest aid, dispersed of aid in the world.
Is there, following your conversations with the US administration and President Trump's heroic suppression of US aid, is there any movement now or are you in a position in the European Parliament now to suppress the European Union's development aid budget in the same way that President Trump has done in the United States?
We can only discover what they have done, what they have paid, what they have financed.
We can follow the money and we are doing it.
Due to the manipulated majorities in the European Parliament, we can do it.
But this is the point.
If the election wasn't manipulated, if the election wasn't stolen, we would have the majority maybe, you know, and then the things would look completely in a different way.
It's important, I think, for our American audience to realize that in exactly the same way the presidential election, President Trump's second victory in 2020 was stolen, in exactly the same way, the same people were involved in putting their thumb on the scale in the European Union for the same reasons as well.
Only the problem is that now they're not going to get away with it anymore because President Trump has won in 2024 and now he's sort of not only in the United States but also in the European Union moving to stop these outrages against democracy from taking place again.
Folks, we'll continue this theme in two minutes after this short break.
Before we pick up on this theme with Peter Beistran, I just want a quick shout out to Birch Gold.
Philip Patrick and his team are standing by still, even over this Christmas New Year holiday period for your call.
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Because if you text Bannon to 989898, they will be there.
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Back on with the show then with Peter Beistran.
So we were saying just before the break that I think one of the consequences of the positive consequences of Trump's third victory in 2024 is that he's now able to redress some of the actions of the American deep state, which is trying to has been trying successfully to alter the outcome of elections here in continental Europe.
Peter Beistran, from your perch there in the European Parliament, do you not think it is strange that the very paladins who have launched how many 2024 home invasions?
27, they've invaded your home 27 times because they say you are anti-democratic.
Is it not strange to you that the very people who are doing this themselves are involved in the anti-democratic undermining of actual election victories and using American taxpayer money to pervert the course of the democratic process?
This is a classical 2.0 we say in Germany, you know, and of course those people implemented laws in Germany against the opposition which are saying what they're called laws against the delegitimation of the state.
So if you're criticizing their bad governance, they are saying they are not that we are not criticizing them, but we would legitimate the state, the whole state, you know.
But in fact, they are legitimating the state, the whole constitution and everything that they're doing.
This is exactly what they do.
And the nice thing is that Trump experienced the same when he was not in power.
And now he learned the lesson.
And the Trump administration is very, very straight in defeating this misbehavior within the state.
And this is what led us back to the national security strategy.
One of those points which are stated there is the protection of core rights and liberties.
And the United States says, of course, we are a country of the free, but there is also a very nice sentence towards the rest of the world, towards the European Union.
And I would like to quote it.
We will oppose elite-driven anti-democratic restriction on core liberties in Europe.
And this is exactly what hits our enemies most.
They see that we have the support of Donald Trump, of his government.
And this is what created the panic around our visit in Washington, D.C. and in New York.
Now, tell me about that, because you were part of that delegation, the AFD delegation, over to America last week.
Tell me about that.
Tell me more about the meetings that you had.
Because you were saying earlier how you met with Ed Martin and followers of the war in Mullen, that Ed Martin's a great guy.
And you also went, I think, to the New York Stock Exchange and what have you.
Tell me, as far as you're able to say publicly, what are you specifically asking for from the US administration now as to how they can put the national security strategy into practice?
Did you tell us, as I say, as far as you're able to talk publicly about this, and as you were intimating just a moment or so ago, this is why the European establishment is now sort of absolutely terrified of this growing relationship between the AFD and the Trump administration, right?
Yeah, of course, because we are facing tremendous oppression of the opposition within Germany, within the European Union since years.
There are cases you wouldn't believe.
There was a guy called Michael Balvig.
He was the leader of the opposition during the Corona times.
He was organizing demonstrations against the government, which were absolutely peaceful, absolutely democratic.
It's all covered through our constitution.
But guess what?
The German government put him into jail for nine months.
Just imagine, for nine months without a trial.
There was no trial, no judge.
They put him just under arrest and they prolonged it.
And then they made six months out of it.
And afterwards, nine months.
So the guy spent nine months in jail.
And at the end, it comes out that he's completely innocent.
Of course, he was.
But this way, they cut off the head of the whole opposition, of the street opposition, during the corona time.
And, you know, if something like this would happen in Russia, you would see it on every news on CNN every evening.
Like Dictator Putin put some opposition guy into jail without the trial, blah, blah, blah.
And in Germany, nobody covered it.
You know, you don't know it.
And the most people in Germany even don't know it because the mainstream media were not saying it.
And there are other cases.
I was talking, for example, with the congressman in DC about the case Naomi Seid, who is also a born German.
She is now, but she's now living in DC.
She's an influencer.
She's on YouTube.
She's very close to Elon Musk.
She has a big account on eggs and she was very critical towards the German government.
And she was facing such an oppression in Germany that she left.
She had to leave.
Now she's living in the US and she was asking for asylum.
So we are in the moment, we have such a situation in Germany and in the European Union that our citizens are leaving the country and seeking for asylum in the United States of America.
I've seen similar cases where parents who want to homeschool their children have fled to the United States seeking political asylum for the same thing.
I just want to come back to the point that you mentioned that this guy, this opposition leader, had nine months in jail without trial and was later found to be innocent.
Is that not, does that not delegitimize the German state?
So they said, okay, he should pay some taxes to the state and he committed some fraud.
After the nine months come out that not he committed a fraud, a taxation fraud, but the state is owing him more than 200,000 euro in taxes to be paid back.
Well, of course, what else is it than a delegitimation of the whole Eurylical system of the whole state if you do something like this?
So it means if we would be in power, I think we would be able to put in jail those people who implemented those laws about the delegitimation of the state because they are all doing it.
This is, Peter, this is exactly what is taking place in America right now, because some people are saying that President Trump is using the DOJ to persecute his enemies.
In reality, what's taking place right now is a correction because it was under the Biden regime and Merrick Garland that the weaponized DOJ was used against Donald Trump and his associates.
They sent Steve Bannon to jail for four months, right?
So the argument is the people who perverted the cause of justice under Biden now need to undergo the same process, not for revenge or for vendetta, but to ensure that that corruption of the judicial process never happens again.
And it's the same thing as what you're talking about, hopefully, when the AFD will take power at the next elections in Germany.
Now it's very popular in Germany to ride people's houses just because they posted something on Facebook or on X, which is absolutely anti-constitutional.
Or what is also very popular is to charge people for weaving.
And they always say, oh, they are doing a Hitler salute.
It happened even to me.
I had to pay 11,000 Euro fine just because I published a picture, a photo of Angela Merkel who was weaving.
And they previously, more than a thousand times, the Attorney General said, no, Angela Merkel on this picture is not doing a Hitler saloon.
This is a former German chancellor and she's just weaving.
This is not a Hitler salute.
But in the moment, when I publish it, the next day said, oh, Peter Weissron is publishing it because it looks like a Hitler salute.
So we will charge him 11,000 Euro fine for publishing this picture.
And this is happening again and again.
I'm not the only one.
There are even more terrible cases.
A colleague of mine who has not really a right hand, and they charge him for doing a Hitler saloon.
Just to answer this quickly before we go to the next break, these convictions where they take place, where people actually have trials, are these jury trials in Germany, or is it simply a judge sitting on the bench and deciding a person's guilt without a jury?
The final thing I want to discuss with you today, and this was a development a short while ago, was the fact that Ursula von der Leyen's intention to confiscate some 200 about $250 billion worth of Russian assets in order to fund the Ukrainian side of the war was rejected.
And Belgium, I think, was pretty much, I mean, you have Hungary there as well.
Italy surprisingly opposed this maneuver.
I wonder whether this represents a more long-term reorientation of the Maloney government.
But Hungary, Italy, specifically Belgium had opposed this, Belgium holding most of the Russian assets in question, saying if it were to do this, it would fundamentally undermine international confidence in its financial infrastructure, quite rightly as well, because it would be extrajudicial.
Tell me your view in Germany on this.
Is the opinion starting to move against the Metz government right now with regards to Ukraine?
How are people reacting to the government's intention to reintroduce conscription, for example?
Is that popular or unpopular?
I see a number of polls which say that the German youth don't even want to fight for Germany if it were to be attacked, let alone Ukraine.
What is the view right now on regards to Ukraine and the ending of the war?
Even if Ursula von der Leyer is able to get this $105 billion loan to Ukraine, it's absolutely clear that Ukraine isn't going to be able to win this war.
So it's just A means, a technical means of making the suffering and the manslaughter go on even longer.
Tell me from your perspective now, what is happening in Germany with regards to this?
Look, the same people who destroyed completely German Bundeswehr in the last years, the same people who destroyed the national proud of whole nations for decades, you know, who were put it throwing away the German flags into the bin, they are now asking the people to defend the country with their lives.
Of course, nobody wants to do it, especially not for Ukraine, when because we know that firstly, it will change nothing.
You know, the Ukraine is losing anyway.
Second, the money we put in, a big part of it was stolen.
And as we see at the latest corruption scandal, the corrupt elites in the Ukraine both golden toilets and stuff like this for themselves from our taxpayers' money.
So the people don't want it.
And it's not just in Germany.
There are recent polls done by really very well with very reputable US institutes, which are saying that over 70%, 73% of the Ukrainians are saying they want the war stop.
And even if the Russians will keep the territories they conquered, but the Ukrainians, they don't want the war continuous.
So the Germans don't want the war continuous, the Ukrainians don't want, as well as the US citizens, they don't want the war is going on.
And European, some European leaders, they still pushing for it.
And it's Mertz and Kirstarma of Great Britain.
And they just decided to put some 90 billion of Euro, you said, how much US dollar is it?
And I don't want to celebrate this fact, you know, because this is a very high price for some points, some more percents.
We would love the war stops.
We did already 2023 a peace proposal.
And under my leadership as a foreign policy speaker in the German Bundestag, we published this paper and it's quite the same like what Donald Trump offered in his 28-point peace paper, the peace program.
So we would like the war stops.
We don't want the innocent guys dying for really nothing and nothing, you know.
So, and what happened in the last year, last two, three years, the Russians move forward.
So all those weapons, all those money we send in didn't change the result of the war in favor of Ukraine.
On the contrary, half a million young boys died and many others are injured.
So the country suffered terrible losses.
So we should stop the war as soon as possible.
And what the Mertz and Co are doing, it's absolutely terrible.