Episode 5150: Middle East Edges Closer To War; Counting The People Voting Is Just As Important As Hand Counting Ballots
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff led U.S. talks in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister, defying warnings from Iranian supreme leaders about targeting aircraft carriers, while Trump’s team allegedly pushed for bombing civilian/religious sites to destabilize Tehran. Parallelly, election integrity debates escalate—Christy Noam’s "right voters" rhetoric clashes with Utah’s audit proving minuscule fraud, yet 60% distrust elections amid unreconciled ballot records exposing millions of unverified votes. Conservative outlets like Gateway Pundit and War Room Texas face censorship while mainstream media downplays systemic risks, raising fears of manipulated 2026 midterms and broader erosion of democratic trust through both foreign interference and partisan overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
We saw some military posturing from both sides, Inez, ahead of these talks.
What are the leaders saying now?
Hey, Laura.
Yeah, big day of diplomacy here in Geneva as the U.S. held talks on both Iran and Ukraine.
When it comes to Iran, we know those talks went on for about three and a half hours.
They did rap.
We saw the U.S. and Iranian delegations leaving a few hours ago.
Things got a bit heated.
There were protesters on the scene yelling at the Americans, questioning why are you negotiating with terrorists?
We know that it was the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner and the special envoy Steve Witkoff that were leading the U.S. delegation.
On the Iranian side, it was the Iranian foreign minister.
And interestingly, as these talks were underway, we did get some quite defiant language from Iran's supreme leaders.
I'll just read you a couple quotes.
He said, The U.S. president keeps saying that they have the strongest military force in the world, the strongest military force in the world, may at times be struck so hard that it cannot get up again.
He went on to say, the Americans constantly say that they've sent a warship toward Iran.
So, of course, referring to the second aircraft carrier that's on its way.
Of course, a warship is a dangerous piece of military hardware.
However, more dangerous than that warship is the weapon that can send that warship to the bottom of the sea.
And in terms of what was actually said during the talk, so there's still a lot we don't know, but we did get comments from both the Iranian side and from the U.S. side that would seem to indicate that progress has been made.
So I'll read you what a U.S. official told MS Now.
He said progress was made, but there are still a lot of details to discuss.
The Iranians said they would come back in the next two weeks with detailed proposals to address some of our open, some of the open gaps in our positions.
The Iranians did suggest that there could be a third round of negotiations on the way.
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War Room.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
It's Tuesday, 17th of February in the year of the Lord, 2026.
Welcome to the 5 o'clock edition of the Warhammer Cup.
Just some logistics.
War Room Texas is going to immediately follow us.
It's an incredible show.
So make sure you stick around for that.
Right after that, at 7 p.m. Eastern, I think Eastern Standard Time, we're going to live stream the debate with the Texas AG for the Attorney General.
We did the debate the other night for the Ag Commissioner, and we've got a breakdown.
We're going to actually break that down.
Had a big, very big audience for that on Sunday night of President's Weekend.
We are going to break down some of the answers there, particularly on illegal immigrant labor and halal food.
As you know, Sharia law is on the ballot here.
A first day of early voting in Texas.
Ballot 3 March is the election day.
And Prop 10 to ban Sharia law to ban Sharia law in Texas is on the ballot.
Also, a little more logistics.
Our own Ben Harnwell has left Rome and Dr. Thay has lost the United States, left the United States.
They're en route to a defense and strategic conference.
We'll be bringing them in live on, we'll be bringing them in live on Thursday and Friday.
But every six o'clock show this week, Ben can't do a show on the road.
Every six o'clock show this week will be War Room, Texas, and also the second hour Saturday show.
So we're going to do it and probably do it every day and figure out how we juggle Ben's show.
First off, the show on Catholicism and Christianity on Wednesdays at 6.
And of course, his international news on Friday, which has been, both shows have been on fire.
But every night this week will be Warroom, Texas.
And we'll be interviewing Ben Inna Thayer from overseas at this conference.
Also, Matt Boyle tomorrow from Greece.
We've got a lot going on.
Captain Jim Finnell joins us.
Captain, so there's been, you know, we had Rabbi Walecki on this morning.
I had some technical issues, couldn't get you on, but I think it's better actually this afternoon.
We now know kind of a framework that moving forward.
Of course, as the rabbi says, and people know the Iranians or the Persians, you know, the Persians are so bureaucratic, they negotiate just to get to the next meeting and they consider that a big win.
I want to really, though, focus on the big stick.
President Trump has a negotiating style, and part of that is he likes to have leverage on his side, not financial leverage, but I call operational leverage.
Having been, as the audience knows, a young naval officer in our first endeavor off the coast of Iran back in 1979 and 1980 with the first of the at Camel Station and Gonzo Station, as you'll remember, with two carrier battle groups there.
Navy's Big Stick Strategy00:13:52
I have never seen it.
And if we leave out actual foot soldiers from the first Gulf War on the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, I think this is the biggest collection of American hardware put together since, I don't know, because it's bigger and more lethal than what we had in 1980 than at any time, maybe since WW2 was anything in Vietnam or Korea, anything close to this, sir?
Well, Steve, I think it's not quite as big as Desert Storm had five aircraft carriers, but again, that was a six-month buildup.
So right now, what we have, what President Trump and the Secretary of War put together is two carrier strike groups are going to be in the region.
One is already there, the USS Abraham Lincoln, with its air wing, Air Wing 9.
And then the USS Gerald R. Ford, as people know, have been ordered across the Atlantic.
So it's in a transatlantic transit right now.
So it's heading to the region.
In addition to that, over the last couple of weeks, you've seen over 250 flights from American aircraft into the region in terms of for deploying aircraft.
So for instance, from Lake and Heath in England, we have 54 F-35s, 36 F-15s.
In Jordan, we have 12 F-16s, 12 F-35s, six Prowlers, or EA-18 Growlers.
I'm an old Prowler guy, so that confused me there.
And then one squadron of A-10s.
We have a number of aircraft that were just imaged over the weekend in Jordan.
We have 12 F-35s in Saudi Arabia.
Those are just the strike aircraft.
And there's a whole load of tankers, airborne early warning and command and control aircraft, ISR and unmanned manned vehicles.
And then the naval arena, like I said, two carrier strike groups that comprise, you know, with what's afloat and in the theaters, over probably a thousand TLAMs that are now in the region that are going to be able to be brought to bear if the president decides to do so.
15 destroyers, guided missile cruiser destroyers and cruisers, at least four attack nuclear attack submarines that carry TLAMs.
The second fleet command ship, the USS Mount Whitney, is in the region to there to coordinate all the naval fires and work that with CENTCOM and UCOM.
We also have two, this is worth noting, two expeditionary mobile bases, the ESBs, and these allow for special operations forces to operate like we saw with the Operation Absolute Resolve off of Venezuela.
So there's also A-10 Warthogs that are in theater.
The 10th Mountain Division from the U.S. Army has had a rotation.
So they're in the CENTCOM AOR right now.
And then there's a number of resupply ships, oilers, refuelers, and resupply ships, because there's literally tens of thousands of sailors and Marines afloat that will need to be resupplied at sea.
And then across all these bases that we have in the region, there's nine countries that have got American forces that have some of these platforms, whether they're aircraft or ships or ISR platforms is Spain, Italy, Greece, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Croatia, and Djibouti, and the UK.
So there's a lot of force that's coming in.
You know, comparing to other times, I'm not sure that's really helpful.
Right now, though, what I would say is, in my professional estimate, is that the pieces are being moved in to strike Iran.
Now, diplomacy and negotiations are another thing, but sending the USS Gerald R. Ford, who's been on deployment since last June, is not a kind of a bluff thing.
You have sailors that have been at sea for almost 10 months.
If they stay out there through the middle of April through tax day, they'll have been at sea for 294 days.
And if they stay into May, they'll have been out there for almost a year.
So this is a really serious movement by the President and the Secretary of War.
And these are not.
I want to walk people through the Navy and how they think about deployments.
To have a carrier, obviously the largest warship we have, but to keep a carrier underway essentially for a year or looks like longer if you're going to do this.
How big a deal is that is the way the Navy thinks about its assets?
Well, in my 29 years in the Navy, I deployed a lot on aircraft carriers, especially in the first 20 years.
And for the most part, I was in the service from 86 until 2014, 2015.
And in most of that period, they were six-month deployments.
But over the last two decades, the deployment lengths have exceeded up to nine to 10 months due to the lack of maintenance and resources for our Navy, which is a whole nother topic that we have talked about and we could talk about.
But the fact is, something this long, it could exceed even the nine or ten, it's going to exceed the 10-month duration.
So this is something that we haven't seen since the Vietnam War when there used to be sometimes year-long deployments out to Gonzo State or the Gulf of Tonkin, Yankee Station.
So this is really serious.
This is not just some kind of slight, in my opinion.
I think something seriously is coming.
And when you combine these conventional forces that are going to be able to bring, I saw some estimates saying at least 800 tactical sorties a day, you know, combat air sorties that could be delivered against Iran and combine that with our global reach capabilities with the U.S. Air Force bombing capabilities like we saw last June in Operation Midnight Hammer to go after these key nuclear,
whatever remains, if there's anything that remains, anything in the nuclear arena that's been reconstituted or removed in, or anything that China or Russia had moved in, we're going to have absolute, I mean, we saw an absolute resolve in Venezuela.
Exquisite intelligence.
And so I would expect that the intelligence community that helped find and do the Operation Midnight Hammer are the same people that have been watching all the buildup and the post, you know, Midnight Hammer operations, watching everything that's going on in Iran.
So we're going to have a good beat on where all their Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forces are, which is their kind of their religious military infused army and forces, plus the regular mainline forces of their military, as well as the leadership.
Where is the leadership?
Where are all the key leaders?
Where have they gone?
There's been a lot of feints and moves over the last few weeks, a month, and people have been moving around in Iran based on different things that the president has said.
So intelligence was gathered in this last month to know where these people are.
So I think right now, if I was Iranian, I'd either come to the table and make a, you know, I'd open my card and say, I want a deal.
Otherwise, I think hell is coming to earth in Iran.
So hang on for a second.
One of the big holdups, Reuters had a exclusive over the President's Day weekend that said that there is a plan, if he decides to use it, that would be a multi-week bombing campaign.
This would not be like the 12-day war, one and done.
This would not be like Venezuela.
One of the issues here is President Trump, I think, has asked many times, what's the target set?
If I go do this, I want to take down the governing infrastructure and let the Persian people deal with it.
We got about a minute here, and I'm going to hold you through, obviously, the break.
Isn't that the big hang-up, the target set of action and how long it will take?
I can't imagine the president's going to want to go, will want to go two, three, four weeks of bombing Tehran, sir.
Nobody wants to plan for, nobody wants a war to go that long.
You induce risk in some sense, but you plan for a campaign and you have a systematic target list.
And the target list will go from civilian or religious government leaders, secret police, which is a big factor that's really oppressing the people of Iran.
And then the IRGC and then the regular Iranian military.
So those are four big categories that they're going to have to go after.
And when you go after the leadership and you take out leadership, both of the national government and the military, then the other pieces are going to be much easier to go after.
Captain, just hang on for a second.
You're going to stick around with us.
We're going to hold you through the break, talk about the defensive capabilities of why some of the people in the region are quite worried about these ballistic missiles.
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Short break.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
Captain Jim Finnell joins us.
Captain, you were head of naval intelligence for PAC Fleet or PAC Com?
Pacific Fleet.
Pacific Fleet.
And you were basically, you gotta administration because you warned, you came forward.
I think it was at the Naval Academy, if I remember, you came forward and warned the American people that folks were asleep at the switch on the rise of the Chinese Communist Party's People's Liberation Navy, particularly its ability to project power in places like the South China Sea, the First Island Chain, Straits of Taiwan, Taiwan, all the way out to American holdings in the Western Pacific.
Yeah, it was a speeches at the U.S. Naval Institute and Armed Forces Communication Electronic Association conference called WEST in San Diego in 2013 and 2014.
And that didn't go over too well because it's kind of the first time anybody had spoken out against the Chinese being a threat.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Not only were you correct, it's actually been worse than you even envisioned, sir.
Well, they have followed through.
They've done everything that we said they were going to do in terms of their buildup of their military.
And we're watching them use aggressive tactics against our allies, whether it's in the South China Sea, against the Philippines, against our allies in Japan and the East China Sea as we see aggressive action there.
And then they've expanded their naval operations beyond the first and second island chain into the Indian Ocean, into the Mediterranean, into the Baltic.
They were held up a bit with COVID, but they're back and they're raging again.
And their military growth is exponential.
They're building five to nine times as many ships as we do.
They have the industrial capacity to do that.
And they have a very, very capable anti-ship cruise missile fleet with an anti-ballistic missile fleet in terms of supersonic and hypersonic weapons that are designed specifically to sink the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the Western Pacific and essentially do what the Japanese tried to do to us on 7 December, 1941 in Pearl Harbor.
I'm not saying you're a senior advisor to the president or secretary of Navy, but if you look at the president talking about the fleet he wants to build, if you look at his, what he's doing for what I call hemispheric defense, which is really naval centric all the way from the Arctic to the Greenland, Iceland, UK Gap, Greenland, the Gulf of America, the Caribbean, all of it.
You believe, I think, very strongly that President Trump's probably the greatest proponent of sea power, maybe even more than President Reagan, who was great, but I mean, at the level of FDR or Teddy Roosevelt, sir?
Well, he has definitely set the agenda in this first year with creating the Office of Shipbuilding in the White House.
And then what we just saw released here with the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy in December and January here.
And then just in this last weekend, there was also released yesterday, the American Maritime Action Plan, which was what the Office of Shipbuilding was tasked to do.
And they've come out with a plan with four pillars to rebuild America's shipbuilding industry and our merchant marine fleet and our naval fleet.
And so there's an actual plan that's been put together by really smart people.
And they're not just putting pie in the sky, but they're applying, they know where the resources are and what resources need to be acquired and how to re-transform the way we build ships from high-intensity human involvement to more AI and robotics.
There's a lot of work left to be done.
So I'll withhold judgment until I actually see the 600 ships that we say that we want to have both manned and unmanned.
It's actually over 500.
But it's a great plan.
It's a good way forward.
And our president deserves a lot of credit for bringing the nation's attention to the fact that America has to be a maritime power to be great again.
Wars in the Middle East00:07:32
And we have neglected that for 40 years because of all these wars in the Middle East.
And so the sooner that we can get out of the Middle East, the better.
Well, let's go back to the wars in the Middle East.
In the first days of the 12-day war, I think it was the first 24 hours, we sent two or three Aegis-class cruisers to the Eastern Med because of the Aegis capabilities on air defense.
I'm hearing now from sources I've got over there and people I talk to that the Gulf Emirates, the Saudis, are quite concerned.
This issue of ballistic missiles is not intercontinental ballistic missiles.
They saw the pounding that Israel was taking during the 12-day war.
And now it's been admitted by the Israeli media that they were kind of suppressing talking about how pounded Tel Aviv was getting.
That David Sling and the dome don't catch anything, particularly when you have a high velocity of missiles coming.
So we sent theds, we sent patriots, but it's not simply the Israelis are quite concerned.
Even Waliki, Rabbi Waliki said today, hey, say, look, we're going to need, if we go alone, we're going to need you guys for defense.
Qatar, UAE, the Saudis are quite concerned about the Persian Gulf and about the great assets they have, particularly Qatar, the natural gas field, actually being unable to defend it.
So the first days of this war, because the Iranians, say what you want.
If this gets to a shooting war, they're going to shoot back.
Captain, your thoughts.
Well, there's no question they will.
But remember, they did go through a 12-day war and they took extensive damage there.
That's one fact.
The other fact is all the stuff that I just mentioned, all the array of forces that are coming into theater.
That's why those extra tactical jet aircraft are being brought in, the F-35s, the Strike Eagles, the FNA-18s, all of those aircraft are brought in for exactly what you're talking about, which is to essentially suppress, typically to suppress enemy air defenses.
We can extend that to say suppression of enemy ballistic missiles.
And so the idea that they're going to just be able to launch off arrays and array, you know, volume of volley after volley of ballistic missiles, I don't believe that will be achievable because we're there in such strength that anybody that comes out of the hole is going to be observed and going to be struck.
And if they do get off a wave or the first salvo, there's enough defensive capability there that they'll be able to be quite successful for the first parts of this.
So I don't downplay those people's concern.
I'd be concerned if I lived in those regions, no question.
We should have the same concerns for Taiwan and our allies in Japan and South Korea and the Philippines as well, because they're living under the same threat from the People's Republic of China.
But I think in this case, by moving these carriers in and these other aircraft, the ISR and the command and control, it's going to be very, very difficult for Iran, who's already been crippled in that 12-day war, to be able to get out and successfully launch a ballistic missile attacks.
In fact, just today, there was commercial imagery showing the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group 150 miles off the coast of Oman in the Gulf of Oman.
And it's been out there for a couple of weeks.
And there's not been any attacks from the Iranians.
So if they've got ballistic missiles and they wanted to get off a cheap shot and hurt the United States of America, I think they would have tried it.
And we already know that they've tried to get a drone out there and the drone was shot down.
So that's already happened.
And I think right now the leverage is overmatch and we're continuing to build the overmatch.
And who knows, the USS Bush is finishing up her interdeployment training cycle and is suspected to get her blue water certification here in the next few weeks, which can be accelerated.
We may see a third aircraft carrier come out there.
So that can't be taken off the table either.
Are you concerned?
President Trump refers to this all the time as a vast armada.
Is a concern of yours that if negotiations and or economic warfare, because now you have the Iranians playing around with the straits of her moves, we still have not cut the Chinese off from the oil, which I'm saying absolutely has to happen.
Anybody that does any business with the Ayatollah needs to be cut off by the United States, that we can bring these people to the knees.
Are you concerned at all, as I am, that the building up these forces just leads decision makers sometimes to, hey, we got everybody over there?
We got to, you know, the party is on, as the British would say, sir.
That history has shown that that's been a pattern.
However, I think President Trump has also shown that he's somebody that breaks patterns and has the ability to say, okay, I got what I wanted.
The Iranian regime has left and the people of Iran are taking their country back.
If that were to happen, then I could see him making a decision to do that.
But I think right now, based on it, and I'll just mention this, you know, in October of 1983, you know, a few years after you were out there, the Iranians were responsible for killing 241 Americans in the Beirut Cobar, not Cobar Towers, but the Beirut barracks bombing.
And Iranians have been involved with killing Americans, separate from these disputes with individual nations.
Just open hatred against America.
So we have a scorecard ourselves as Americans.
And I know in my time in service, I went, you know, I was focused on the Pacific, but I made deployments out to the Persian Gulf in my career.
I spent four months in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 1994.
So I've been in the region.
That region has dominated our country for far too long.
And it's been because of the Iranians.
So the president is smarter than I am in terms of these deals.
But if we don't get the kind of deal that we need and we back out and we let them continue to murder Americans, I don't see the president doing that.
So it's going to have to be something really stupendous for the Iranians, I think, to get out from under this one this time.
We got to bounce.
We'll leave it next time.
Jim and I don't totally agree on this because I was a naval officer in the Pacific Fleet and ended up in the Persian Gulf and North Arabian Sea because of this country and its action.
President Reagan always said that the two things he regretted from this term was putting the Marines into the barracks.
He remembered we withdrew immediately and the other one was cutting that terrible amnesty deal.
Jim, Captain Finnell, you're one of the smartest guys out there about naval operations.
Where do people get your writing, sir?
I write on American Greatness, and I just had something published today about don't let the Chinese Navy into the Rim of the Pacific exercise that comes up in June of this year.
Don't let them back in.
Hey, we're going to have you on, obviously, a lot before then, but we've got to make sure President Trump knows.
He goes over a state visit to China.
I'm sure they're going to ask for that one.
Captain Finnell, the winds of war are blowing in the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf.
Captain Finnell walked us through it.
We're going to take a short break.
We're going to pivot back here now to talk about one of the central issues of this country, the stolen 2020 election.
And has it been sorted out today as we run up to these midterms?
Natasha Owens takes us out with her number one hit, the boss.
Back in a moment.
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Winds of War00:02:43
It's surely too hard to say.
What about when you took your shot at the one you called me?
Okay, I hope you appreciate one of the things we try to do here to empower you and have you be able to use your agency.
We don't try to waste your time.
When you get Jim Finnell, Finnell is known as a great briefer.
That's how it became, you have to be a great briefer, not just a brilliant guy to be in charge of the senior naval officer for intelligence for the Pacific Fleet.
Remember, the 7th Fleet, the Pacific Fleet, 7th and 3rd Fleet, 3rd out of San Diego, 7th out of Pearl, and deployed really into the Western Pacific.
Those are the fleets that won the Second World War in the Pacific.
It doesn't come any more serious than that.
And the defense of Taiwan and now the last, I don't know, 47 years since I was there as a Pacific Fleet sailor because we were in the 7th Fleet and deployed over there because we had nothing else.
You're getting the equivalent of that's kind of a mini National Security Council briefing.
That's how serious it is.
So that's what we love bringing Captain Fernand.
We don't agree with the strategy, but he's been saying you load up this much hardware in a place, stand by for heavy rolls, as they say in the Navy.
This is why I think now more than ever, gold, physical gold has been a hedge about times of financial uncertainty.
You're seeing this in this highly leveraged bet on artificial intelligence, but also geopolitical uncertainty.
President Trump is trying it today.
They're trying to solve Ukraine.
He says, hey, you got till June trying to solve Gaza, trying to solve the Persian situation.
You got three hot spots right there.
President Trump's trying to bring them all to peace.
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I've got a cold open for Harry Housy and Joe Hoff.
They've been on this situation about data and what exactly happened in 2022.
And have we got to sort out it?
Let me play the cold open.
Well, there's two things to look for.
One is what happens prior to the election, right?
Christy Noam is hinting at it, but you can see, and you've already seen to a degree, Department of Justice, Department of Home and Security making plays to, for instance, take a look at state voter rolls, to have people on the ground at voting locations, to launch investigations into fraudulent accusations of fraud.
That's the pre-vote element.
Then there's the post-vote element, which is: are they going to try to have a federal presence in the countering of the ballots?
Are they going to try to seize ballots?
Will they do what you saw Donald Trump try to do in 2020, which is question the sanctity of the results, mired in litigation, and then have a compliant House speaker say, well, we can't seat these people until we get to the bottom of this.
Those are all real, real possibilities.
I don't think we should treat them as impossible hypotheticals because they're openly talking about this stuff and now making moves to actually implement some of these reforms.
But I think part of the play here is to just continue to make people uncertain about American elections.
And I think he's banking on the idea that simply sowing those seeds of doubt ultimately will benefit him.
I believe so.
I think they're trying to cast out for the 2026 midterm elections because they know the results are not going to be in their favor.
Historically, midterm elections are never good for the sitting president.
But I think that if I am reading the tea leaves, it's going to be a massive blue wave.
I think that people are upset that Trump has not gotten through or not followed through on any of his campaign promises, whether it be to bring down prices.
They're looking at things like the ICE murdering American citizens in the streets.
And they're like, this is not what I signed up for.
ICE has gone too far.
And so he's already trying to cast out.
We saw him do it in 2020 in the lead up to the election with Joe Biden and him going after mail-in voting and all of these things.
And I think too, now they've seemed to tailor the message to include illegal immigrants.
And they're saying that illegals are voting.
And of course, we all want citizens to be the only ones voting in our elections, but that is what is happening.
They're acting like this is some widespread issue.
In Utah, they did an audit of their registered voters of over 2 million voters, and they found one illegal immigrant registered, and the person had never even voted.
So this is not some widespread issue like they're trying to make it out to be, but they're trying to use that to justify their what I would call voter suppression.
And that's where you have Christy Noam saying that we only want the right people showing up and voting for the right leaders.
And it just feeds into this pattern of everything that they're already doing to try to control the upcoming election, whether it be Trump calling for nationalizing elections, seizing the ballots in Georgia, wanting to end mail-in voting.
And I think that it follows a pattern that they are definitely looking at future elections, whether it's 2026 or 2028 and trying to manipulate the outcome.
Republicans might doubt the election.
It's that everybody is doubting the election.
That number that I just cited, 60% of people don't trust the system.
That's bad news.
It is, Katie, but that's exactly what the president wants.
I mean, let us not forget in 2021, the president asked the Secretary of State in Georgia to find him 11,000 extra votes.
On the record, said that, setting the play for this moment.
He continues even to this day to bemoan the results of the 2020 election, even though he is the sitting president.
You know, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
And so the Republicans here have a good story.
Let's recap just quickly what Secretary Noam said.
She said a lot, but these two things struck me.
We need to have the right people voting for the right candidates.
I mean, if that's not giving a signal that if things don't go the way that they want, meaning no longer should we allow voters to elect the people they want to represent them, we want to let the people who are running select their voters.
And so this frenzy.
And then my final point, Katie, the stats that you laid out from all kinds of institutes that study this, from more right-leaning ones to more left-leaning ones, have come to the same conclusion.
And the Brennan Center's seminal report, the truth about voting fraud, you know, less than 1%.
And a lot of the impersonation-type fraud that people think is happening is actually due to some type of clerical era, but is non-existent.
The Brennan Center went as far to say that an individual voter has, you have a greater likelihood to be struck by lightning than you do to have people trying to impersonate somebody else when they go to vote.
Why is Christy Noam even talking about this?
What purview, Doug, does she have over elections?
Look, I think it's a very fair question.
This is, you know, when we set up the Department of Homeland Security, it was a reaction to 2000 to 9-11, 2001, and really about protecting all of our safety.
It wasn't about elections, and I don't think this is proper for the Secretary to have this role.
I think that that Wall Street Journal piece, remember, there was a Wall Street Journal piece out on Friday, which was a very dishy piece with a lot.
Josh Dossi piece, we had him on you.
Right.
And it talked about the missing blanket, the fired pilot, all sorts of dysfunction and a lot of problems within the agency.
It also talked about how when after the killing, the second killing of a United States citizen, she made, she went to the Oval Office to have a visit with Trump, a two-hour visit.
And she's trying, remember, you see members of this administration do things like this when they want to win back favor with Trump.
To get on his good side.
Right.
Because he knows that this is an issue that he cares about and she wants to get out in front of it, even though she has no authority over it.
Well, we saw Tulsi Gabbard do that recently, and she has no authority over that.
Okay, let me get, I was going to get Joe Hoffin in here first, but I got to go to Harry.
This cold open was so great.
Harry Housey, I want to address that issue straight on.
Before we talk about your dad or anything like that, why is they're going nuts that Christy Noam as DHS is involved?
They're actually going more nuts on Tulsi Gabbard.
So please answer the question, sir.
What right does Tulsi Gabbard have as the head of Director of National Intelligence to be directly engaged in this topic in the state of Georgia and quite soon in the state of Arizona?
Well, her job, quite simply, is to defend the United States of America, and we use our intelligence resources from satellite to human to monitor and try to understand what's happening.
There's ample evidence in 2020 and 2022 of direct connections, if not penetration, by foreign entities.
We actually have seen a number of things that would suggest foreign interference, not the least of which were direct connections during elections to our systems, the use of systems that were built in China rather than in the United States as required by the Code of Federal Regulations, unless there's a Cepheus review.
The fact is that Obama himself declared elections to be a critical national infrastructure, which brings in the entire defense establishment with regard to making sure our elections are safe from foreign penetration.
So when they go into Fulton County, you have a situation where there's evidence of electronic fraud that was undercovered by Garland Favaritos people and some of the analysts that he has working for them.
I had the opportunity to help Garland map some of that.
Arizona has some of the same indications.
We can think of things like the unexplained pallets of ballots being delivered to Sky Harbor Airport in Arizona, the Beth Page, New York matter that never gets investigated because of Justice Department at the Times interference at the top of both the FBI and the DOJ.
And then you have the Connick arrest, which was never fully investigated and suppressed by the Biden administration.
But there are many other instances of this too, individual tracers that have been put out on the connections.
Hang on, I got to go to break.
I just want to make sure.
As a, because you're an intelligence analyst, there's no doubt in your mind, as you look at the information you've been looking at and others, that both Director of National Intelligence and the head of Department of Homeland Security, since it's critical infrastructure, have a requirement and a duty to be engaged in this, correct?
Absolutely, including the FBI counterintel people.
Harry, just hang on for one second.
Big Announcements Ahead00:07:50
We're going to take a short commercial break.
I'm going to get Joe Hoff.
You see the meltdown.
The cable news of CNN and particularly MSNBC or MS Wow, Sham Wow, whatever it is, they are obsessed with this topic.
Why are they obsessed with this topic?
They understand to get to the bottom of 2020 is to reveal all.
And they're sitting there going, oh, this is to steal the 2026 election.
This is to get to the bottom of the stolen election of 2020.
And that will make us so much smarter, so much tougher, and impervious to their stealing 2026 because they intend to steal 2026.
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Okay, just some logistics.
Following us is going to be War Room Texas.
You're not going to want to miss this explosive court ruling today on a capital crime that jury, essentially jury nullification on a trend day Aragora.
It's really shocking.
Ben Burkholm is going to join us.
Peter McElvin, also from England.
We're going to talk about a lot, and we're going to break down the Department of Agriculture Commission's debate, particularly on illegal immigration labor and halal food.
You're going to want to stick around and hear all that.
It was an intense debate that we covered live.
The Attorney General's debate for the state of Texas will follow War Room Texas.
We'll cover that in its entirety.
Also, just logistically, as I said, Ben Harnwell and Dr. Thayer are en route to a big conference.
We're going to have them live Thursday and Friday.
But the entire week at six o'clock this week, we won't be doing Ben's show because Ben is out of the country.
We'll be doing War Room Texas.
And like I said, I think we got Matt Boyle tomorrow from Greece.
Then we got Thayer and Hornwell on Thursday and Friday from overseas at a big strategic defense conference that they're at.
Joe Hoft, you and your brother Jim and the Gateway Pundit crew, they've tried to bankrupt you, vilify you.
You have covered this as well as, or better than any other media group out there, you've dug in hard and they're going to come again because 2026, folks, it's going to be a battle of the Titans here.
Your thoughts as you see that cold open and the intensity of what Jim Hoft and Joe Hoff and the Gateway Pundit crowd had to go through.
Yeah, thanks, Steve.
You're absolutely right.
We're already seeing it now.
I had Google, for example, ads on my website, joehoff.com, and was notified a week ago.
No, we can't continue advertising with you because your articles are dangerous.
And one of the articles I put up was basically a copy almost of one of President Trump's team's messages about how great the economy is going or something like that.
That was one of their examples of how my reporting was dangerous.
So it doesn't matter what you write or what you say to these guys.
They just want to shut you down if you're really effective.
And that's the thing that these guys are upset about too, Steve.
I look at that.
It's really hard to stomach that cold open that you had there for myself because I just feel like it's so full of errors, omissions, and falsities.
It's just unbelievable.
But we learned a year after the 2020 election that, according to Rasmussen, 30 or 62% of Americans believe the election was stolen.
And so they weren't getting it from these guys anymore.
We see this media stuff and it makes your stomach turn.
But the great news is people aren't getting their information from them anymore.
And that's what's frustrating them the most.
They're getting it from Gateway Pundit and the War Room and other great sites out there on the right.
And that's why the American people are informed and people, I think, inherently want the truth.
So, yeah, we've uncovered so much in 2020.
As you know, I mentioned this yesterday on the show.
I wrote three books about it.
And my background, as I mentioned as well, is in corporate.
I spent decades in the corporate finance and auditing functions, landed in Hong Kong for almost a decade overseeing a multi-billion dollar block of business, the auditing function there.
I'd done the financial reporting function on a multi-billion dollar block of business.
I know how things work in the corporate world.
And so when I came back and I started seeing this 2020 election, these results, we were dropping bombs.
You're bringing us on about every day to just send those bombs in the middle.
It's just unbelievable.
And the bombs have paid out.
Harry, we just got a couple of minutes.
You're going to be releasing big announcements every day.
What do you got for us today?
Because the one the other day we're still resonating.
People are talking about Colorado.
They want to march in that prison and free Tina Peters.
What do you got for us today that you found out?
Another bomb.
The one we released today was the vote-to-voter discrepancy report over the last three elections.
The fact is that the election officials are not bothering to reconcile their books at all.
We see in 2022 over 2 million.
We're right at 2 million vote.
The difference between the number of voters counted and the number of ballots counted is around 2 million.
But what people don't know is in 2024, they managed to inject 3.5 million ballots into this system.
There's two reflections to this.
Some people will say it's just administrative procedure, and there are some aspects of that.
But the fact is that they're certifying the elections without knowing how many people voted.
So if that isn't preposterous, I don't know what is.
But, you know, imagine, you know, but we have, we only got a minute.
I just want to go through.
We have all this chain of command of people, as Jim says.
Maybe they're not corporate auditors, but you do have a structure that's supposed to certify these at every level.
I think what people are pulling their hair out is saying, how are these elections at state secretary of state?
They come up and they have these big announcements.
Election's been certified.
And we find out from you that it's not certifiable.
So the fact is that we've now got 50 elected officials and sometimes appointed officials across the country that can declare everything by the wave of their hands to be okay.
So certification has become, you know, a nuance, I suppose, in the information warfare space.
But the fact of the matter is certification is supposed to mean something's accurate and compliant.
Most states have a law that say the number of voters has to reconcile to the number of votes counted.
And the governors, the secretaries of state, the state board of elections are ignoring it, threatening to put people like Tina Peters in jail because they are concerned about that's where they got her in prison.
Okay, where do they go for United for Freedom?
Unite For Freedom00:01:15
I want everybody to get this day.
We're linking to it.
Where do they go?
Unite, the number fourfreedom.com.
You can find all of our stuff on Unite for Freedom.
We need your help.
We need volunteers.
We obviously can use donations.
We spend it mainly for lawyers and that type of thing because we are an all-volunteer organization.
100 data analysts with Harry Housing.
Okay, I want everybody to jump onto that site now.
Joe Hoft, where they go?
Your site and your social media, brother.
Yeah, joehoft.com is where you can get the information.
A lot of that we're moving on to the Gateway Pundit, some of these great articles.
And then also, you can follow me pretty much at joehoft.com, but I also, I'm on social media as well, very sites.
The unanswered question.
The unanswered question is, which Hoff brothers handsomer and which Hoff brothers smarter?
The twins.
Thank you, brother.
War Road, Texas is upon us.
Right afterwards, we're going to do the Attorney General debate in the great state of Texas.
Stick around.
Natasha Owens takes us out with her number one hit.