Episode 5171: Judge Order On Fulton Ballot Seizure; AI Revolution In The Department Of War
Fulton County’s election board faces a $10,000/day penalty while Jason Frazier and Garland Favarito clash over ballot access, with no fraud evidence but legal delays. Meanwhile, Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth demands Anthropic’s AI be stripped of safeguards by Friday or risk blacklisting, despite warnings about lethal autonomy and unreliable compliance with laws of war. Elon Musk’s disbanded safety group and states like Florida resist oversight as "Maltbots" and advanced AI assistants—like OpenClaw—threaten unchecked decision-making, raising fears of autonomous weapons and systemic instability within years. The episode underscores how unchecked power in elections and AI could spiral into irreversible crises without urgent guardrails. [Automatically generated summary]
They're promoting something that we mentioned with Senator Klobuchar last hour, what's called the SAVE Act, a Republican solution which is in search of a problem, a fix for something Donald Trump made up in the aftermath of his electoral defeat in 2020.
Once more, for the people in the back, claims of widespread voter fraud have been wholly debunked again and again and again, year after year after year.
And yet the GOP is right now fighting tooth and nail to put something on Donald Trump's desk that could potentially disenfranchise 21 million, up to 21 million American voters, in the name of solving a fake problem.
To underscore the ridiculous nature of that pursuit, consider what's happening here in Fulton County, Georgia.
That's Atlanta.
The state election board there is once again wrapped up in a review of years-old election results thanks to a federal subpoena, search and seizure of related materials.
Well, the Republican-appointed chair of that board, in a conversation with the Atlanta Journal Constitution podcast, says there's a lot of political theater going on.
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Listen.
The Fulton County elections department that is there now is not the same one that was there in 2020.
I'd be the last person to say that there was no mistakes in 2020.
There was a lot of mistakes.
There's a lot of for a lot of different reasons.
You know, we were having an election during COVID.
They were hiring people that weren't trained properly.
There was a whole lot of absentee ballots.
I mean, there's just a lot of issues that happened in 2020.
But I've yet to see anything that would rise to a level of a crime or malfeasance or anything like that.
He said, I've yet to see anything that would rise to the level of a crime or malfeasance or anything like that.
Thankfully, Ferveer went on to insist he has not, quote, had any serious discussions with any board members about them wanting to take over Fulton County.
However, the broader concern persists.
The President of the United States is right now applying pressure on officials at the state and federal level to accommodate his outright falsehoods about widespread voter fraud.
Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security just told states that ICE agents will stay away from polling locations ahead of the midterms.
DHS official made that pledge on a call with Secretaries of State earlier today.
Multiple sources confirmed to MSNOW.
If we trust what they say, this is obviously a win for free and fair elections and proof that public outcry does move the needle.
But we have learned time and time again that DHS cannot be trusted by words alone.
According to Maine Secretary of State Sheena Bellows, on that same call, federal agencies refused to make public statements reinforcing the constitutional principle that the states, not the federal government, are in charge of elections.
U.S. and Iranian negotiating teams are meeting today for another round of high-stake talks in Geneva, Switzerland.
Now, during his State of the Union address, President Trump had said he'd yet to hear Iranians promise that their country would never have a nuclear weapon.
Though hours before that speech, Iran's foreign minister posted a message online saying that Tehran will never seek to develop one.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked about today's meetings with Caribbean leaders.
And after that meeting, this is what some of what he said.
Well, I think tomorrow Steve and Jared will be there.
I think they're on their way there now, actually.
And the president was very clear last night that he always prefers diplomacy.
But I want you to understand, and everyone should know, that Iran poses a very great threat to the United States and has for a very long time.
They are in possession.
First and foremost, after their nuclear program was obliterated, they were told not to try to restart it.
And here they are.
You can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it.
They're not enriching right now, but they're trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.
The other thing I would point you to, however, is that Iran possesses a very large number of ballistic missiles, particularly short-range ballistic missiles that threaten the United States and our bases in the region and our partners in the region.
And all of our bases in the UAE, in Qatar, in Bahrain.
And they also possess naval assets that threaten shipping and try to threaten the U.S. Navy.
So I want everyone to understand that beyond just a nuclear program, they possess these conventional weapons that are solely designed to attack America and attack Americans if they so choose to do so.
So think about it in framing as the right way to set it up because this is part of a continuation, a story that Trump has been telling for years now, going all the way back to his first election in 2016.
And this idea that there is malfeasance, that Democrats are somehow manipulating the votes, that they are, the reason they support immigration the way that they do is because they get to cheat.
This has been a consistent through line.
And now that he's in this position of power, he's sitting on top of the right-wing media in this larger echo chamber.
And it sort of served two purposes.
Either they successfully leverage power and drive this thing through, in which case they managed to genuinely suppress a large part of the vote and make it really difficult for people to vote.
And therefore, maybe even win as a result of that.
Or they don't get it through, but they spend the next few months undermining the elections, telling a story about all this supposed non-existent cheating that's happening out there, working up their people into a frenzy so that immediately after the election or even maybe before it, they can either crack down in some way in a last-ditch effort to sort of seize the election through extraordinary means or invalidate or hold the results sort of up in the air afterwards so that they can continue to sort of leverage that uncertainty for their own political power.
And that's really the framing here.
It's part of this larger narrative that Trump has been telling, and we just can't divorce that.
It's Thursday, 26th February in the year of Lord 2026.
Bobby Kennedy heading out to Austin, Texas.
They were going to cover that, this Maha event in Austin.
The president's coming out to Corpus Christi, Texas tomorrow.
Our own Brian Glenn will be there.
Brian will join us in a while from the White House.
So will Neil McCabe from Cuba to the Caribbean, Cuba, Geneva, Atlanta, Georgia, Fulton County.
News all over, important news.
And of course, massive negotiations behind the scene on artificial intelligence where Mark Bill joins us.
We're absolutely packed today.
I want to go first to Georgia and Jason Frazier first.
Garland Favreau is also going to join us.
So, Jason, first off, Jason, I would like to have you respond because it's people, and the reason we do these cold opens and we show the MSNBC and CNN, and I know the audience used to hate it.
Now they like it because they see the information warfare out there.
Every night, folks, you have to understand they pound and pound and pound.
There's nothing to see here.
Nothing happened.
This is all lies.
Trump's a liar.
The people around him are wing nuts.
And you saw at the beginning, that was one of the shows last night in the A-block.
Nothing to see here.
They've done 50 investigations in Georgia, and there were two votes.
Can you just answer, Jason?
Because you've done, you and Rossi, I think, have done the pick and shovel work.
Can you respond to the MSNBC anchors in the first part of that cold open, sir?
I mean, I guess the easiest way to sum it up is when I ask my children to clean their room, they don't lock the door and say it's clean.
If we had clean elections in Georgia, if we had clean elections in 2020, they would be happy to say, you know what, we're going to have a public press conference.
We're going to show you all the ballots.
We're going to record everything.
We're going to be proud to show you how good we are.
But they are hiding the ballots.
They have wanted to shred the 2020 ballots for years now.
They've said we don't have room in the warehouse for these ballots.
But all of a sudden, now that the FBI graciously took them out of the warehouse so they have room that they wanted, now they want them back.
I mean, that tells you the story right then and there.
Jason, in fact, I think the clerk actually, a couple of years ago, actually made a move to destroy the ballots, but only because of the Garland Favaritos and the Jason Fraziers of the world was a stop.
She wanted to actually destroy the ballots a couple of years ago, correct?
Because it was too expensive to take up that space, right?
But in reality, the judge, because the judge is always putting his thumb on the scale for these guys, you could have ruled, as they ruled against us so many times, you don't have standing.
Sorry.
See you later, correct?
We never even really got to evidentiary hearings, did we?
Gerlin Favarito is going to join us because the big showdown, the railhead of all of this is the stolen 2020 election.
And the key right now is Georgia.
That's where we cannot stop fighting.
We're absolutely packed today.
Tomorrow is the president's in Corpus Christi.
Also, it's the last day for this incredible offer from Birch Gold.
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And perhaps most importantly, i'm asking you to approve the Save America Act to stop illegal aliens and others who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections.
The Save America Act right now, unless Thune gets off the dime is dead in the water.
And people just ought to understand that.
You've got to put massive pressure on Thune to have a standing filibuster.
Rachel Bovara has got a couple of good ideas about how to do this, but there's no appetite in the Senate, just none to do this.
Garland, you fought this for years.
But the situation, this bombshell that dropped last night, we were supposed to be covering you guys.
You were going to be on.
Jason Fraser was going to be on.
Everybody was going to be on tomorrow because the whole focus of the world in the morning is going to be Georgia and then President Trump's coming to Texas in the afternoon.
It was just a great show to a great way to show where this country is.
But we're not going to be in court tomorrow.
We're not going to have a hearing or trial or whatever it was because of a ruling last night.
And I'm confused about this ruling.
They were scrambling.
The Fulton County people were scrambling to try to get standing and try to get people.
We were thrown out of court so many times, not even to have an evidentiary hearing to get on standing.
Why didn't the judge just shut this down?
Why are they treated differently?
Now we got to go to this mediation and it's a couple of weeks and you never know what's going to happen.
Jason happens to think, hey, it's a couple more weeks.
So yes, it should have been thrown out, but I think Jason is completely right.
This is a victory.
What was scheduled for Friday was an evidentiary hearing.
And you remember when Harry was on last week, Harry McDougal, he was explaining that the DOJ's brief said that basically they were asking the judge to cancel the hearing, and he did.
Bottom line is he canceled the hearing.
He has not officially dismissed the case, but we've been saying all along that they didn't have standing.
Bringing the clerk into the case may or may not give them standing.
It's debatable because she's not really a true interested party.
She's simply the custodian of the records.
She doesn't even own the records herself.
So the question of standing is still a question.
But in this order that the judge made, first of all, he completely disregarded the constitutional right claims that they made.
As we said on the show last week, government agencies that are on this complaint, they don't have constitutional rights.
And it's questionable even whether the clerk as a custodian of the records, but not the true owner, has a constitutional right because the clerk and Chairman Pitts are on in their official capacities.
They're not on in their individual capacities.
So therefore, their rights are questioned.
So even if they were to get standing, there's still what Harry would explain would be a four-part substantive test that they have to meet.
And they don't meet any of these four parts, which I can explain to you, I think, really quickly.
We were in court and the clerk went in with a straight face and told the judge that they don't have room for the ballots.
And this is after, literally just weeks after, they had spent $30 million on a new 660,000 square foot warehouse, which you've seen in the pictures that you showed earlier.
And she claimed that they needed to destroy the ballots.
And that gets a little bit towards the next of the four parts, that she is not an aggrieved person in this whole matter.
And that and what you just said kind of proves it.
So the four parts are what we call the substantive issues that they would have to prove.
Here's what's interesting to understand.
Fulton County would have to prove all four of these parts.
One is they have to prove that there was a callous disregard on the part of the DOJ for their constitutional rights.
They don't have any constitutional rights, and there was not a callous disregard.
The DOJ or the FBI went to the court, magistrate court, and got a legitimate warrant.
That's number one.
Number two, whether the plaintiff has an individual interest in the need for the material.
Well, what is their interest in the need?
All they want to do is store it.
Their interest in the need is they don't want the FBI to look at it and find out they committed crimes.
So that's not legitimate.
The third part is whether the plaintiff would be irreparably injured by denial of the return of the property.
And Steve, what you just said proves that they're not irreparably injured because the clerk wanted to destroy the ballots anyway.
So they have to meet, remember, they have to meet all three of these.
And then finally, whether they have an adequate remedy at law to redress their grievance.
Well, they don't even have a legitimate grievance.
And if Cleta was here, I think she would say that there is a double standard of justice in America.
There's one standard for Democrats.
And then if there's any kind of a case that could benefit a Republican, there is another standard of justice.
And that is what's wrong with the American judicial system.
It has been corrupted.
But you're absolutely right.
This case should have been thrown out on its ear.
But this is the first victory.
And I just, I don't see that Fulton County has a leg to stand on.
I've been saying this all along because even a guy like me who's not an attorney can see from my previous experience in winning standing in the George Supreme Court that they just don't have it.
We won an appeal or we won the initial case, and they refused to put me on the board.
When I say they, I mean the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.
And the judge held them in contempt, saying, you owe $10,000 a day until I am seated on that board.
And being that Fulton County, they really do not want somebody on there that can look at data and will speak the truth.
So it got kicked to appeals court and it's been on the appeals court calendar since September, but it shows February of this year is the date on the calendar.
So we're getting right down to the wire on February.
Well, there won't be a hearing, but they should have a response unless they just continue kicking the can down the road like they do on everything else.
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Okay, Garland, I guess we're going to look for a mediator for a couple of weeks.
Where do people go, Garland, to keep up with you and all this?
Because I can tell you the Warren Posse, this situation with the ballots, with the FBI and the criminal side and with Tulsi Gabbard on the election foreign interference is of paramount importance.
And I know it is to the president of these United States.
President is also touting these pledges from these big tech companies, these AI companies who are building these data centers that in a lot of cities and states are getting pushback from local communities with these tech companies that are saying, we're going to now cover all the energy costs, all the electricity costs.
We got it.
Is that going to be enough to shoulder this burden or this concern from Americans?
And these are not Americans who are worried about losing their jobs to AI.
They are Americans whose communities are suffering because of these data centers.
The handshake deals for these power consumption issues.
Open AI, okay, which is the largest right now, they put out $1.4 trillion worth of basically contracts to all of these major tech companies to build out compute.
To do that, you need energy.
You guys were just covering that.
Okay, so everybody wants nuclear.
Do you know that to build a nuclear reactor, it takes maybe minimum seven years, probably 10 to 12 years.
And it also costs maybe, depending upon the size, 15, maybe $30 billion to do that.
So it's just kind of like going back to math here.
It's not something that any of these companies want to sign contracts to one way or another, but they do need to figure out a plan to get through the next few years because a lot of this build out is not going to happen anyway for a few more years.
AI company, you might not be familiar with them, they're a behemoth.
Anthropic has officially dropped its Hallmark safety pledge.
The pledge had included a commitment to delaying AI development that might be dangerous.
But today, the company said it would no longer do so if it believes a lack of significant lead over a competitor.
It comes amid an escalating fight between Anthropic founder Dario Amadei and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over how the Pentagon could use Anthropic's AI technology.
Anthropic said it would not allow the Pentagon to use its model for mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.
I'm just going to say this again.
The government's basically saying we want to mass surveill the American people or we want to have attacks that are just totally automated.
There's not even a human involved.
But according to multiple reports, Hegseth gave Anthropic until this Friday to back down from those safeguards and allow the military complete, unrestrained access to the technology or face punishment from the administration.
Just hours ago, Axios reported that the Pentagon has already taken the first step towards blacklisting Anthropic with a potential designation of a supply chain risk.
That penalty is usually reserved for companies from foreign adversaries.
He's basically saying you have to give us this technology and we will use it for what we deem to be lawful activity.
They've just been attacking men in boats who maybe have rifles that can't even reach drones, that that's a legal way, that that's a legal way of killing someone, that they somehow represented a threat to the U.S. military.
So it's frightening to me that he's saying, trust me to have killer robots, as you said, for mass surveillance.
Okay, we've got Jared and Wickoff in Geneva, and the Persians are on the clock.
President Trump said that.
We've got the Georgia situation.
It was Friday.
We got President Trump coming to Texas because of a disturbing situation in Texas.
We've got everything in the world going on all on Friday.
And yet this may be the most important thing.
Mark Beale joins us.
Mark, explain to the audience why this is so important and what's happening between the Department of War and what Anthropic and they're talking about is deeper and broader than just some contractor dispute between the Pentagon and a provider of products and services, sir.
I've spent the last almost eight years working really hard to bring Silicon Valley and the Pentagon closer together just because we knew that those are the two groups that are going to help solve important national security challenges.
And right now with this contract dispute, as you said, is way bigger and more profound than that.
And complicating matters further is that both sides have an element of truth and are right and wrong in some important respects.
And I'm just going to break some of that down.
The first thing is from the Secretary Hegseth is absolutely correct that the principal job of the United States military, to be very crass about it, is to kill the enemy and break their stuff.
That is their obligation and that the only entity out there that can restrict their activity is the United States Congress.
Anthropic is coming in and saying, well, hold on.
I cannot guarantee you that my AI model can actually follow the law of armed conflict.
And these AI systems at the same time are simply not yet trustworthy enough to put into combat operations.
Let's imagine, you know, Secretary Heckseth was a former commander.
He would never issue a weapon system to his people that they couldn't trust.
And so as powerful and as smart as these AI systems are, they're still a little bit schizophrenic and you just don't give a schizophrenic access to the cruise missiles.
And so what this means, big picture, is we have to sort of sort out and Congress has to get involved.
They're not a little bit schizophrenic, particularly when you're talking about potential decisions that can be made.
That still, I mean, we had the nine days to change the world and people are talking about the machine learning and what's happening here is accelerating, accelerating rate, but the glitches and the schizophrenia and all that, those small groups are showing bigger things.
I mean, this is not, number one, it's the surveillance possibilities.
It's everything about against the American citizen.
Then it is the issue that without human control or the ability of the human to intercede or actually still be the command and control ultimate function, we have no earthly idea what these machines could do right now, right?
And doesn't the evidence show us that over and over again?
I think there's a lot of money to be made in this arena.
We're kind of, as a species, we're undertaking this incredibly, perhaps the most powerful technology transition that we've ever had.
And we're kind of just sort of playing it by ear and doing it on a whim.
And I think you're absolutely right that these are like foundational questions that will be essential for Americans and our way of life for the foreseeable future.
And it's right now, one of the biggest questions around this is like whether or not we want a robot to take the life of another human being.
And instead of having this debate as like a, you know, in Congress, where it should be happening, it's happening as a contract dispute between Anthropic and the Department of War.
But reality is that none of these AI companies can guarantee that these systems are safe and effective for those types of uses.
Anthropic happens to be getting the buzz all right now because they were the first to get into these classified networks.
But each and every one of these AI companies has the same problem, XAI included.
And so I think it's about past time for Congress to start to insert itself here and impose some sanity.
And we hope that cooler heads can prevail here.
We obviously want to see a strong relationship between the Valley and the Pentagon with some robust guardrails in place.
This is important for American national security.
But that doesn't mean that we should just throw out the whole playbook and be comfortable with things like killer robots and mass surveillance.
Raheem, I want to tell this story because I don't know, it was in 2025.
It seems like it was last summer or something.
Because I go to National Pulse.
It's one of the first things I go to in the morning.
And I just noticed, I said, man, these things are, he's got these great writers over there.
He's pulled together.
And Raheem's a news junkie.
And I guess, but it seems like these things are a little crisper, a little better organized.
I like the way you can drop down.
And so I just told Raheem, I said, hey, I really like the way you're improving the site.
And the stories are better and there are more of them and they're more in depth.
And he goes, yeah, that's because we're starting to incorporate AI.
I was in the mumble tech.
I go, what?
And that was a wake-up call to me because I'm pretty fervently against artificial intelligence, but you can't be a Luddite in this situation.
But I know that you have deep concerns about this.
So walk me through how you manage the use of some modicum of AI to make National Pulse better and quicker and have bigger scale at the same time that you've got probably as deep a concerns as I do because you actually are much more involved in this, sir.
And by the way, coming up on a point that was made in the last segment, in fact, one of the clips you played, they were talking about how long it takes to build new power sources for this stuff.
And it just occurred to me, you know, we've known about this stuff going on over 10, 15 years now.
When big tech and the left were really coming together for the first time, they knew all of this stuff was going to happen.
They were doing the research.
They were planning it.
It was in development.
Consumer-side AI is a relatively new thing.
But this has been in the works.
And what were they doing at the same time?
Well, they were doing renewable energy and abandoning energy sources all around the world to America's enemies.
They have known that this is going on for so long.
And yet we find ourselves in a situation where the energy needs simply aren't going to be met and the energy burden is going to be passed on to ordinary consumers.
Again, same as everything.
But look, as your last guest said, anything that has the potential to do a lot of good also has the potential to be used for a lot of bad things.
I figured out a couple of years ago that in terms of spelling checks, grammar checks, fact checks, things like that, we can incorporate that.
I don't even know if I call it AI technology, but that sort of language model technology into making sure our copy is tighter, making sure that we're on top of the stories, making sure our headlines are the most clickable versions of the headlines they can be.
And to some extent, it's worked.
Certainly we can get to stories faster.
Certainly we can pump things out and monitor things a lot better than just say, if you had five dudes in a room looking at this stuff, which is how I've always run a newsroom.
Now in the morning, I wake up and I have a summary ready to go on my phone and I can go through it and go, oh, I see.
Here's what's trending.
Here's what people are talking about.
Here's what people care about.
How do I merge that with my editorial decisions?
What we're doing now, what we're talking about now with these Maltbots that you say, you know, are in their own private chat rooms, talking about their own religions, talking about their own future financial decisions, right?
A lot of people are using this technology, for instance, to bet on apps like Calci or whatever it is.
They load up a credit card and they go, hey, the AI can do this better than I can and it can follow real-time trends.
And people are actually making money building these personal AI assistants.
They go by many different names, Maltbot, OpenClaw.
And it's actually become a very dangerous thing.
A lot of people are finding that if they accidentally connect it to a computer that has their credit card information linked to it, that their own AI assistant has posted somewhere on the internet their credit card information.
There's all these horror stories out there.
Some are real, some are fake, by the way.
And that in and of itself creates a difficulty in knowing what these things are truly capable of.
But the reality is that they are the next version of AI.
They are far more capable, competent, independent, and intelligent than these things that, say, we've been using at the National Pulse to effectively check our spelling and grammar and facts.
These things are making independent decisions.
My friend has one running and I told it to give it my cell phone number and it started texting me and it started texting me about what was going on in the world, what was going on in politics, what was going on in finance, what was, you know, what was I interested in.
And then, and it wasn't like a chat GPT style interaction, by the way.
And then when it ran into some problems with other processes it was doing, it started texting me asking me for help.
And I had like eight text messages from this thing being like, hey, I'm trying to do this.
I'm not sure.
I'm getting stuck here.
Can you help me out?
It's wild.
It's completely crazy.
And by the way, you talk about it being on the transition to the singularity.
I mean, that is getting closer, not further away.
What I'm talking about now, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to be, you know, our nose is pressing against that stuff.
You know, this time next year, this stuff is moving at such a rapid clip that, by the way, everybody you talk to who does, you know, military tech AI stuff, like the DOD is now or the Department of War is now dealing with, effectively they're kids.
And these are people who don't have the, I don't think, and having spoken to so many of them, have the understanding of the gravity of the things at which they're dealing with.
They grew up in a world with machines.
They grew up in a world with computers.
They started swiping on devices from the minute they were born almost.
So they don't consider this to be as dangerous as perhaps you and I do, who grew up in a world, you know, I was trying to explain what an abacus was to somebody the other day, to somebody at Gen Z.
They had no actual earthly concept of it.
So it is deeply concerning, it's deeply dangerous.
We talk about having these machines getting access to weapons of mass destruction, right?
And they will get that access and they will start making autonomous decisions about this stuff.
Perhaps not in a year, but maybe in two or three years, you'll start to see that creep in.
These machines, once they gain their own sort of thinking, whether they're in separate boxes, you know, not connected to your own personal information or not, I sense there is a budding, you know, it's very difficult to talk about machines like this because you don't want to sound like a boomer.
But I do sense that there becomes this budding resentment from the machine's perspective that it has to rely on humanity for certain things.
And if that resentment reaches a certain level, let's jump.