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March 9, 2026 - Bannon's War Room
48:50
Episode 5200: Exposing Corruption Of 2020 Election In Maricopa County; Financial Markets React To Iran

Steve Bannon and the War Room dissect Iran's new supreme leader, Mujjaba Khomeini, and the resulting oil spike above $100, which forced India to buy Russian fuel. They expose a "devil's bargain" between Evangelical Christianity and Donald Trump, warning that religious nationalism drives persecution. Simultaneously, the FBI seizes gigabytes of Maricopa County data regarding election irregularities while uncovering a hidden "Arctic Frost" investigation targeting Trump, revealing deep institutional rot requiring Kash Patel's intervention to fix. [Automatically generated summary]

Participants
Main
j
john solomon
11:46
s
steve bannon
r 14:32
Appearances
a
ali velshi
msnow 03:46
b
brian kilmeade
fox 00:39
d
david ignatius
wapo 02:25
e
eric bolling
03:49
j
jessica tisch
00:50
j
joe scarborough
msnow 01:02
p
pete hegseth
admin 02:14
Clips
b
bianna golodryga
cnn 00:24
d
dan senor
00:20
l
lindsey graham
sen/r 00:28
m
major garrett
00:24
m
mark levin
fox 00:16
|

Speaker Time Text
Religious Ideology and Ground Troops 00:12:43
pete hegseth
Trump's approach has been our interest in advancing those interests from the beginning.
And so the fact that intelligence was gathered, whether from Israelis or ours, and always checked by our intel agencies to make sure it's accurate.
A lot of times the best way to start operations is a trigger-based or condition-based moment.
And you can work together on whether that makes sense.
But we were always controlling the throttle about whether or not to go or not go and ultimately to advance American interests and protect American lives.
unidentified
Some might look at that sequence of events and say, well, then it was an opportunity more than an imminent threat.
pete hegseth
I mean, I think much of that discussion is silly and academic.
They've been killing us for 48 years, 47 years.
They have unabated nuclear ambitions.
And when we obliterated their nuclear program at the end of the 12-day war in Operation Midnight Hammer, they should have come to the table and said, okay, we get it.
You mean business.
We're not going to have nukes.
And they haven't.
And as a result, when the president looks at it, generationally, he sees a threat that would continue to gather.
I want to say, though, and the president's been clear about this, it doesn't mean they won't have some get through, as we tragically saw.
And we're going to greet those families at Dover and honor and respect the sacrifice they gave.
And the president's been right to say there will be casualties.
Things like this don't happen without casualties.
There will be more casualties.
And no one is, I mean, especially our generation, knows what it's like to see Americans come home in caskets.
But that doesn't weaken us one bit.
It stiffens our spine and our resolve to say this is a fight we will finish.
unidentified
We were born and raised in New York, and we want everyone here to stay in New York.
You don't get to come from outside and then tell everyone.
Stay back, stay back, please.
Stay over here.
Hey, what's your name?
We have to do it in our family.
Let me talk to the first time, family.
Donuts in the Samir to Berkir!
You left!
Donuts in the Samir to Berkir!
Berkir!
ali velshi
If the American people don't understand this war and haven't rallied behind it, then what exactly is driving it?
I have to step away from the scene for a moment to speculate about at least one answer to that.
You see, it wasn't that long ago that groups in parts of the Middle East invoked extremist interpretations of Islam to justify violence against the West.
Regimes like Saudi Arabia encouraged extreme interpretations of Islam that consider anyone who doesn't follow its doctrine, including other Muslims, to be infidels.
The consequences, as we all know, have been devastating.
That ideology helped give rise to movements like al-Qaeda and later its offshoot, ISIS, which not only targeted the West, but Middle Eastern regimes as well.
State-sponsored clerics routinely denounced Western civilization and framed global politics as a civilizational struggle.
Americans remember the consequences of this worldview because the violence it bred eventually landed on our shores.
But that religious extremism did not arise in a vacuum.
Crucially, it was sustained by a political bargain.
For decades, the Saudi monarchy maintained an implicit agreement with its clerical class.
The government will protect your authority and enforce your worldview so long as you legitimize the government.
Religion, in other words, became the ideological engine for maintaining political power.
And something eerily similar is now unfolding right here at home, and it's been building for some time.
More than two centuries after the framers warned about the dangers of merging faith with political power, we're now seeing a version of that same dynamic take hold at the highest levels of the American government.
It's not just creeping in, it's actively shaping how this war is being understood and justified, from those advising the president to military commanders briefing troops before their deployment.
unidentified
Is it possible to achieve the objectives President Trump has set before you if we don't locate and obtain and extract the highly enriched uranium?
pete hegseth
There's a lot of different ways we can get after that.
They've used a conventional umbrella of missiles that was growing every single day, their production capacity, to try to cover over their nuclear blackmail ambitions.
As far as how you get at that nuclear option, we'll make sure that their nuclear ambitions are never achieved.
major garrett
Will we take it out ourselves?
pete hegseth
Oh, I would never tell you or anybody else what our options are.
See, that's another thing.
People keep asking a very fair question.
People ask boots on the ground, no boots on the ground, four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, go in, go in.
President Trump knows, I know, you don't tell the enemy, you don't tell the press, you don't tell anybody what your limits would be on an operation.
We're willing to go as far as we need to in order to be successful.
major garrett
Do we have any overt or covert forces inside Iran now?
pete hegseth
I wouldn't tell you that if we did.
unidentified
The only reason I ask is earlier this week you said no.
Is that still the answer?
pete hegseth
Yeah, that's still the answer.
But we reserve the right.
We would be completely unwise if we did not reserve the right to take any particular option, whether it included boots on the ground or no boots on the ground.
jessica tisch
This is being investigated as an act of ISIS-inspired terrorism.
I can also provide some additional information building on my remarks from Saturday evening.
At that time, we were beginning to conduct preliminary analysis of two devices that were ignited and deployed earlier that day: one in a crosswalk on East End Avenue and East 87th Street, and the other on the west side of East End Avenue between East 86th and East 87th Streets.
That testing was performed by the NYPD's bomb squad and FBI special agent bomb technicians in consultation with an FBI chemist.
Preliminary test results determined that these were not hoax devices nor smoke bombs.
They were improvised explosive devices that could have caused serious injury or death.
brian kilmeade
War in Iraq, now entering its second week, as explosions are up over Tehran while the U.S. and Israeli forces continued their relentless barrage of strikes on the terrorist regime.
unidentified
What do you want from Iran?
joe scarborough
I said unconditional.
I said unconditional.
It's where they cry, Yunko, or when they can't fight any longer.
We've wiped out their leadership numerous times already.
So what we're doing is a great thing, not only for our country, not only for Israel, not only for the Middle East, but for the world.
Where this ends, we're going to have a much safer world.
brian kilmeade
So, just hours ago, Iran choosing their new supreme leader, the son of the Ayatollah, Mujjaba Khomeini.
It comes just days after President Trump called him a lightweight and an unacceptable selection.
I just spoke to the president.
He said this: I am not happy.
Also, breaking today, a seventh U.S. service member has died from injuries sustained during the first day of attacks.
Iran's foreign minister has rejected calls for a ceasefire as Gulf states have now been caught in the crossfire.
So, what's really happening behind the scenes with our Gulf state allies?
david ignatius
So, Joe, the regime is taking a pounding.
The skies over Tehran now essentially are undefended, which means that U.S. and Israeli bombers have been able to hit targets at will.
The exploding oil tanks that you mentioned in the beginning are just one example of that.
A veteran Iran operations person I spoke with last night said that in looking at the situation now in Iran, you need to focus on the scene and the unseen.
The scene is the decision by the Iranian leadership to install basically the most hardline person possible as the new supreme leader.
It's a direct rebuff to President Trump in this talk about I'll pick the next leader.
Well, they picked somebody who is so close to the IRGC that my source said he's basically woven into the fabric of the IRGC.
So this is going to be a hardline war leader, and that's the decision they made, decided to announce it publicly, even though the risk that he's going to be killed now, as his father was, is significant.
What's unseen?
What's unseen is any sign of revolt, marches in the streets, defection from the ruling elite in any part of the country.
There is no uprising in Tehran or in any of the other provinces.
People were expecting you'd see that kind of fragmentation by now, given the intensity of the U.S. bombardment.
It isn't happening, which means that somebody like President Trump almost has to talk about use of ground troops because there's no indigenous revolt that's underway.
Personally, I think the idea of invading with ground troops is so unlikely because of memories of Iraq and just the difficulties, Joe, of this is a country much bigger than Iraq, much more difficult to invade, more mountainous.
So I tend to put the threat of ground troop invasion aside.
But there's a real problem here on both sides of a tightening, no exit scenario.
Neither side is talking about ways out at the very moment that the world economy is really beginning to hurt because of the effects of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and all the other war effects.
We're heading toward, what, a week from now, I don't know whether we'll have peace, but we're going to have financial markets significantly tighten.
ali velshi
Evangelical Christianity was one of the most powerful political forces behind Donald Trump's rise.
And this devil's bargain that religious nationalists struck with Trump looks not unlike the Saudi monarchy's bargain with extremism.
Here in America, they would overlook Trump's moral, ethical, and legal transgressions, and in return, he would hand them the keys to the kingdom.
Power over American culture, power over education, power over women's autonomy, and increasingly power over the machinery of state itself.
This is already happening here at home, and now we're seeing how that alliance is helping to shape American foreign policy.
Mike Huckabee, Trump's ambassador to Israel and a former Baptist minister, is a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist.
This is a movement that views Israel not simply as a modern state, but as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a necessary step toward the second coming of Christ.
Huckabee himself has repeatedly framed Middle Eastern politics in explicitly theological terms.
Here's where it gets interesting.
In a recent interview, responding to a question about Genesis chapter 15, verse 18's description of Israel, Huckabee suggested it would be fine if Israel controlled the entire territory stretching from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, essentially much of the modern Middle East.
Here's what the biblical verse states.
On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, to your descendants, I have given this land from the river of Egypt as far as the Great River, the river Euphrates.
This is a sitting U.S. ambassador.
But Huckabee is hardly the only figure in Trump's orbit advancing extremist religious ideas.
Senator Lindsey Graham has described the current conflict as a religious war that will determine the Middle East for a thousand years.
When religious ideology, state power, and military force merge, history tells us exactly what happens.
It leads to what James Madison called superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
The United States military was never meant to fight for religious prophecy.
Today, under Trump, Hegseth, and the Christian nationalist movement surrounding them, that line is being erased in real time.
And the price of that erasure will be paid for with the lives of innocent civilians abroad.
It may be paid for with the lives of innocent civilians here at home.
And it will surely be paid for by American soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women, many of whom are being told that they are carrying out God's command.
March 9, 2026: War and Prosperity 00:03:42
lindsey graham
And we're going to win.
The United States, you just wait to see what comes in the next two weeks.
unidentified
The next two weeks meaning what?
lindsey graham
We're going to blow the hell out of these people.
This regime is in a death row now.
It is going to be on its knees.
It's going to fall.
And when it falls, we're going to have peace like no other time.
We're going to have prosperity unlike anyone could ever imagine.
Peace brings prosperity.
You can't do it by talking.
The Democrats criticize this operation.
They didn't do a damn thing.
These men and women in the military should make us all proud.
joe scarborough
And, you know, this war may be hurting Americans, American consumers in the pomp, but one person who's doing swimmingly well and enjoying a windfall is Russia's invading autocrat Vladimir Putin.
And now the U.S. is considering lifting even more sanctions off of Russian oil as the cost of crude has surged above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022.
India refiners will now be granted a three-day waiver to purchase Russian oil.
That's according to Treasury Secretary Scott Busson.
That President Trump says rising oil prices, quote, are a very small price to pay, adding, quote, only fools would think differently.
mark levin
Let me just say this.
Go, America.
Go, president.
You got 92% of MAGA behind you, and I bet you have most of the country behind you.
We're going to destroy this enemy, free the people in Iran.
China's upset.
The Russians are upset.
And the Democrats are upset.
That's it.
I'm done.
steve bannon
Monday, 9 March, in the year of our Lord 2026.
Want to thank our team in Denver and our own team here at the war room for a magnificent cold open.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
John Solomon, Eric Bowling on the other side.
unidentified
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
steve bannon
Okay, it's Monday, 9, March, Year of Lord, 2026.
Let's do a level set here.
We're going to accomplish three objectives on today's show.
We are going to get into this expanding war and the economic implications.
And Eric Bowling, who knows an oil trader and still trades his account, is going to join us at the bottom of the hour.
Poso is going to be on later in the show.
We're going to get to much of that as we can.
A lot of our analysts and experts, we're just not going to have time for today.
Although Natalie's going to join us this afternoon, I'm going to try to get more folks in here.
Then also Caroline Rent is going to join us in the second hour, and we're going to do a very deep kind of rollout of this Cornyn-Paxson situation.
But there are many things going on, and many things that are not just important to MAGA, but most important to this country and this republic.
And part of that is the folks that are going after the deep state, many of the deep state people.
And we play clips when we do these cold opens.
And once again, I want to thank the team for putting in all the different aspects of this into a 15-minute clip, which is amazing.
You see a lot of these, Brennan, and these people up there all the time.
John Solomon, you've got nothing short of a blockbuster story on Justin News.
I think you broke overnight.
Maricopa Election Troubles 00:15:40
steve bannon
Maricopa County.
Now, you've been the tip of the spear of allowing us to understand the overall framing of what's happening in Georgia.
And we've had tons of the local people who have been fighting the fight in Georgia.
Maricopa, as Georgia is the key that probably picks the lock today because people stood in the breach and go, everybody remembers back from that night that it was really Arizona and the call by Fox News that kind of seemed like a domino effect and really disoriented many, many, many people who were not just Fox fans, but obviously Trump supporters.
And we've never really gotten steady on that.
So go through what your story says today because I think this is so important.
I wanted to lead with it this morning, sir.
john solomon
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
So Maricopa County has had more than a decade of long-term problems.
Back in the early 2000s, it was the Democrats who always cried foul that Maricopa County couldn't count votes correctly, couldn't administer the election correctly.
Then in 2024, Republicans raised the same curtains and Democrats suddenly went into a state of denial.
The FBI has decided that the history of Maricopa County is problematic and that under federal law, a county or a state must administer the election the way their state laws require it.
If they don't, it is a federal legal violation.
This is why they raided Fulton County, another place with a long history of irregularities and misconduct and quite frankly, just incompetent election counting.
And so the focus in this grand jury subpoena that went in the last few days to Maricopa County, seized many gigabytes of election data is the 2024 election, which is interesting because President Trump won there.
But there is a discovery that was made by congressional observers.
Every year, the House Administration Committee sends observers, one Democrat, one Republican, to various voting centers.
One of the teams, the Republican-Democrat team that went to Maricopa County, observed something very disturbing.
They took pictures.
They wrote a long report.
Congressman Abe Hamaday hinted at this in an oversight letter recently.
The information in that report was so troubling to the FBI.
And when coupled to the things that the Arizona Senate found in 2020 that were raised as concerns and the things that Hamadai and Kerry Lake raised in 2022, they were able to get a grand jury subpoena from a federal grand jury and execute the transmission of a large amount of voter data.
They're going to go through that data, looking for some of the telltale signs that were in this congressional report.
I hope in the next couple of days to make that congressional report public so everybody can see what it was that observers on Brian Style's OS administration committee saw.
Brian Style himself acknowledged that they were working with federal authorities on this specific Arizona matter.
So you got Congress working with the FBI.
And I think this is phase two of about a five-phase look at states, particularly blue states or blue areas of states, where elections are not administered the way the law says they're supposed to be.
And as a result, the FBI may come in and prosecute people because it is a federal felony if you don't follow your state's laws.
If you don't treat everybody the same under your state law.
So that's where we're at today.
Now, over the next 10 days, Steve, we're going to have a lot more.
We are going to be able to get for the first time, I've been able to start processing these documents, a large body of evidence that's in the intelligence community that raises concerns about foreign interference in our elections.
That'll probably be the end of this week or early next week.
The documents are explosive.
They're really remarkable.
And what's most remarkable is that all this has been kept a secret from the American people, possibly President Trump in some cases, until recently, of course, when his team told him.
I think there's a lot there.
And then in between those two things, we're going to reveal another Code-named FBI investigation that targeted President Trump, one you've never heard of before, one that may be among the most troubling.
We have Crossfire Hurricane, of course.
We've got Plasmic Echo, and we have the third one that targeted the January 6th investigation, Arctic Frost.
There's another one that is really deeply troubling.
It's troubling to the FBI, it's troubling to the intelligence community.
And hopefully, between now and next week, we'll get all four of those stories out.
steve bannon
Hang on, you're telling me that they found cash in the team, and I assume so.
You're telling me they found a fourth targeting of President Trump by the deep state?
john solomon
Yeah, and it's a very serious one because it seems to involve speech delimiters.
In other words, if you said something or you spoke a certain way about a certain issue, you potentially were deemed a national security threat to the United States and you were put under an assessment in potentially criminal investigation.
So I learned of this operation because I was targeted in 2022.
I had to cooperate with the Justice Department.
When the Justice Department and I talked, they realized that their entire theory of the case was ludicrous.
But as a result of that, I've been on a two and a half, three-year mission to get these documents, to get the truth out about what happened.
Recently, FBI agents working for Kash Patel found this operation, found the SCIF that it was hiding, hidden, found the code word name for it, found the prohibited access file.
So one of the things that Chris Ray's people did is they would start these political investigations targeting Trump or even someone else.
They would keep it off the books.
Most people could not see it in the FBI Sentinel system.
This one was one of those well hidden as a result of some senior leadership that worked around Kash Patel.
You know, there were people that were in this era that knew what was going on.
In some cases, maybe even been required to work on certain things.
They knew what was going on, and they've been guiding Kash Patel to these records and helping him find these records in the labyrinth of secrecy that Chris Ray's FBI created.
So these senior executives are really helping uncover some really jaw-dropping stuff.
And I think in the next couple of days, people will see that as well.
steve bannon
John, and I'm going to ask you if you can stay through the break, and I'm going to have to back up bowling for a second because this is so disturbing.
unidentified
Sorry about that.
john solomon
I love Eric.
steve bannon
No, Let me go with the last verse.
You've been one of the biggest, I would say, defenders of the institution of the CIA and FBI and saying, look, there's bad apples, and we got to go, we got to hold people accountable.
And the way we're going to do that is these deep investigations.
Don't you think that this last goes to my point, that it's an institutional rot that's even farther beyond people?
I mean, now this one may be the most disturbing of all, even more than Arctic Frost.
john solomon
That's going to be the most disturbing.
steve bannon
And it's not just you find it the most disturbing.
We're here in the 9th of March of 2026 after Cash has been there a year investigating and going into the records, like saying, going to a skiff and they find in boxes.
We have no earthly idea.
They're probably, in all likelihood, other things, maybe not direct target of the president, but other things.
Doesn't this hit the tripwire that finally the president, people around him, and people on Capitol Hill, particularly people that know the intelligence community, or have to come together, even on the right, and say, look, this problem is so serious.
It's so deep into the culture of what they were doing that there has to be a deeper investigation to actually starting to look at breaking these things up, sir?
unidentified
Yeah.
john solomon
Well, listen, I think that is underway.
We're not seeing a lot of it, but in the reporting I've done, I'm stumbling into really significant grand jury investigations, particularly the one down in Florida.
But it's not the only one.
Listen, I have been chronicling the abuses at the FBI all the way back to the 1990s.
I started by breaking the FBI lab scandal in the 1990s, where the FBI cheated for decades, not years, decades.
They cheated on various sciences.
They made up fake science to convict people.
Right after 9-11, I broke all the stories, including the Arizona memo and the Masawi files that showed that the FBI had all the components of the 9-11 plot, but failed to put them together in a quick way.
They even knew the pilots were training for a mission and didn't act quick enough.
And then, of course, I unraveled Russia collusion with the crossfire hurricane in there.
This institution has been sick since the day that J. Edgar Hoover first created it.
It is always going to be flawed.
The problem is there are no courageous members in the United States Senates, maybe absent Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassy, who really are doing amazing work.
By the way, they're going to be a big part of the story later this week.
The will is not there in the Republican Party to fix this.
They can't even get FISA reform done through Congress.
So you might as well forget Congress.
Congress is a dead end for anything that's going to be a fix, which what is going to have to happen is Kash Patel has to realign the agency from the inside out.
It's the only way it's going to get done.
It is starting to happen in very big ways.
Some things are not public yet because they can't talk about it.
But I think there are some improvements.
That said, the CIA and the FBI are going to always thwart the American people.
They're always going to hide the truth from the American people.
When you see these intelligence files on foreign intervention, you're going to go, how in God's name could they not have told us six years ago, five years ago, four years ago, three years ago?
And I also think that these files that come out later this week or early next week will have an impact on senators.
Those who are reluctant to pass the Save America Act will suddenly have a personal local reason to want to support the Save Act because of the fact that their state may have been a victim of some malinfluence operations by one or two foreign powers.
steve bannon
John, hang on for one second.
I know you got to bounce, but I got to hold here.
A couple more questions on this kind of blockbuster news.
What a way to start a Monday.
John Solomon.
Hang on.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
John Solomon, Eric Bowling, we're going to talk about, guess what?
Oil and gas impact on the world economy.
All next in the boardroom.
unidentified
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
steve bannon
Okay, John Solomon joins us with all signal, noise.
Solomon, how long you've been on this one, this last one?
unidentified
Yeah.
steve bannon
For a couple of three years, right?
john solomon
Yeah, about three years.
After I learned that I had been targeted by an FBI and Justice Department investigation, just because of the reporting I did, I set on a journey and I was determined to get to the truth of it.
And it led me down two avenues.
One, this operation that we'll talk about later this week.
And then the other, election integrity issues that weren't on the table.
A lot of issues have been on the table.
We know what they are and they are what they are.
But there wasn't one particular area that the intelligence community was intent on keeping from President Trump and quite frankly, from President Biden.
And drilling through that concrete, we've really gotten some real great data.
A big shout out to three people that are working against their agency's deep states, Tulsi Gabbard at DNI, John Radcliffe at CIA, and Kash Patel at FBI.
They are literally taking incoming fire every day, but they've broken through.
They've done some really jaw-dropping reviews, and they're now about to do some really important declassifications.
And they're not popular in their agencies right now, but the American people will be better off when these revelations come out.
steve bannon
This is what we mean by the deep state.
Like I said when I was in the White House, it ain't deep.
It ain't a deep state when you're there.
They're up in your grill.
They're up in your freaking grill.
And they're so powerful.
Like even Biden, they think presidents, elected officials, they're just passing through.
They're there permanently.
That's the permanent American government.
Real quickly, you said five phases and you said Maricopa was phase two.
Is that to imply that Fulton County was phase one?
john solomon
Yeah, I think they're looking at five epicenters of voting irregularities.
I don't know the other three yet.
I just know there's a total of five on the agenda based on what people have been told downstream, you know, the agents in the field that are going to work on this, the prosecutors that are getting grand jury subpoenas.
So it looks like they'll be looking at some other places.
If you look historically, you clearly have some concerns about what went on in Michigan.
All the work we did last year in Michigan on the state police uncovering this voter mill, and no one in the FBI ever going and investigating, even though the Michigan state police said, Hey, something bad happened here.
I think I'd have to assume Michigan might be on the top of the list.
Wisconsin's always had a lot of questions.
There was a famous video by James O'Keefe 10 years ago of a guy admitting that they would bust in illegal aliens to vote.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but the video was clearly true.
You can see it for your own self.
So I think Wisconsin is a likely one, but I don't know the other three, but I'm told that there are five areas that they're looking at, five regions, five localities where election irregularities have long been an issue.
unidentified
I'm a thought.
steve bannon
Yeah, I'm going to throw it another.
I'm going to just throw at another random name, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, but we'll leave that for another day.
Oh, absolutely.
The congressional, this congressional report, Abe Hamaday's been all over this.
Do you have any idea?
You said you have it when you will be able to vet this and put it out to people.
john solomon
Yeah, I've been vetting it for a few weeks.
I got the document in the last 24 hours, but I've kind of known what it says.
And like I said, we had Brian Style on talking about it.
Well, I think we'll have it in time for tomorrow if everything goes well.
You just got to do the reporting, dot your I's, cross your T's.
But a team of my reporters and I are working on it already.
And I think we'll have it out in the next 24, 48 hours.
It'll advance and give you a better understanding of what alerted the FBI to this activity that they just took in Maricopa County.
steve bannon
Okay, so everybody, every Republican establishment figure, every people there that are all permanently, you know, drafting off the deep state, everybody's going to be in President Trump's ear that this is all nonsense.
This takes him away from his mission.
He shouldn't do this.
What is your recommendation to the president of what we have to do to drive this?
Because the resistance in this, folks, is going to be massive.
This is why we're in March of 2026 and finally now getting down to the to you know some, some real, some real information we can drive forward.
What's your recommendation to the president?
To make sure we continue to drive forward, because the forces arrayed against any action here are going to be substantial.
john solomon
Sir yeah, you know, the president doesn't often uh, follow the conventions of Washington.
He doesn't brief senators on big stuff often, unless it's really important.
I think the data that Tulsi Gabbert and John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel have found on foreign interference in the election, particularly foreign interventions in certain electronic systems by the way, not the voting machines, but other systems that can be used for mal influence and operations I think it's one of those moments.
If the president spends some time talking to senators whose states may have been targeted, I think he can move votes one by one and you only have to get to 51.
Turning Oil Glut Into Leverage 00:07:44
john solomon
Once you get to 51, we're at 49 in the Senate right now in favor of the Save America Act.
The president every day talks about it every day on truth.
He had an amazing post overnight about it.
I think this is one of those things where, hey, even if you don't agree with the president, you've been fighting with him.
Do you really want to find out that your state might have been intruded upon by a foreign power and you didn't know about it for five, six years?
And when you look at what the intrusion is, it's pretty clear what the foreign power wants to have the capability to do.
They want to do ballot box stuffing.
What's the best way to make sure that ballot box stuffing, which goes all the way back to Tammany Hall and Chicago-style politics, voter ID and citizenship really make it hard to ballot box stuff?
And so I think the president has an opportunity to go senator by senator and move that vote along.
There will be some Democrats that will be deeply concerned about what the Intel community has known.
By the way, some of the people who were most forthcoming about this were people in the Biden administration and the intelligence community said, I can't believe that the Trump people didn't know about this.
We learned about it.
Of course, they didn't say anything.
But the idea that the Biden administration knew of this for four years should concern us all.
steve bannon
John Solomon, amazing.
Where do people go to get the show, the content, your podcast, the news site?
All of it.
john solomon
Thanks, my friend.
unidentified
Yeah.
john solomon
So just thenews.com is the website.
Jay Solomon reports on all social media.
And I'm lucky enough to follow you and the amazing Eric Bowling back to back on Real America's Voice, 6 o'clock.
Just the news, no noise.
steve bannon
Not a bad run there.
And then you got Stench on the other side.
Pretty good block of programming from some wild men.
So thank you, sir.
John Solomon.
Four o'clock is Eric Bowling.
Five o'clock, the war room, six o'clock, John Solomon, seven o'clock, Grant Stinchfield.
unidentified
Wow.
steve bannon
Gruber before that, Poso before that, Charlie Kirk before that, and then back to Warroom.
It's pretty good block of programming.
John Solomon, thank you, sir.
Eric Bowling.
I'm going to play a clip after the break because I got to hold you through.
But just give your bona fides to the audience again about your expertise in this particular area.
How you, for 12 years, put your own capital to work against the best and the biggest around, and why that makes you an amazing window in which to see this not just war, but massive geopolitical potential realignment in the world's energy markets and therefore the world's economy, sir.
eric bolling
Thank you, Steve.
35 years of trading, 12 on the trading floor where I literally go over there every single day, my own money on the line, and I trade against the big boys, Saudi Aramco, all of them, Shell, ExxonMobil, the investment banks on Wall Street, the private equity guys.
And I just hand-to-hand combat every single day with these folks.
And Steve, I've traded through conflicts.
I've traded through Gulf Wars.
I've traded through things.
I've seen this so many times before.
And the reason why I was talking to you late last night into the morning was because I'm seeing the people who are advising the president and the people who are talking on CNBC and others.
They're missing the whole point right here right now.
And my concern is that we're going to drive prices.
Oil prices are up $103 a barrel right now.
It was $120 a barrel at midnight last night.
Backed off a little bit.
unidentified
Well, hold on.
steve bannon
But hang on.
unidentified
The first trade.
steve bannon
When you contact me, well, hang on.
The first time you contacted me, we talked yesterday after the attack when we were talking about the attack in the next block.
The first trade was $19 up, right?
It took it up to over $109, I think.
The very first trade-off.
This thing exploded right out of the box.
eric bolling
And they jacked it up to almost $119.48 is the actual high.
Doesn't need to be here.
There are ways.
I have a solution for you, Steve.
We'll hold it off, but it will guarantee we never get ourselves into this ever again.
It's a foolproof.
No one's ever said it before.
This is unique for the war room, folks, because if Trump gets it and understands it, he has so much leverage right now.
He can pull this off.
And we will never be talking about another $100 barrel of oil, certainly in our lifetime.
But we can do it too.
steve bannon
So, everybody's running around.
The G7's running around.
They all want to start tapping strategic petroleum reserves.
The G7 met earlier today.
What exactly is going on?
You're saying, hey, we don't have a, everybody's running around saying we have a problem about this.
Eric Bowling's saying we actually don't have a problem with this.
We got a problem with that.
So walk through the Eric Bowling theory of the case.
eric bolling
We do not have a supply problem.
We have a dislocation issue.
And frankly, we don't, the United States of America doesn't have that.
So these SPR strategic petroleum releases, Obama did one in 2009.
It didn't work.
I believe Clinton did one as well.
It didn't work.
Biden did one in 2022, I want to say, when inflation was 9%.
It didn't work.
This SPR is a very short-term, more of a news hook than an actual supply resupplying any of our refineries.
We don't have an issue supplying our refineries to produce gasoline.
We have an issue of global networks looking like everyone needs to be on the same page with price.
We don't.
Steve, we use about 20 million barrels a day in this country.
We produce about 13 million barrels a day.
There's a very, very easy solution to get the other 7 million barrels, not just by drilling.
I have a solution for you, but this idea that we're going to drain an SPR, it's 720 million barrels when at its peak.
Right now, there's only 415 because of what Obama and Biden did.
They never replenished it.
Oil went down and they just never replenished it.
We're at risk when you delete your SPR from real supply disruptions, massive earthquakes or something where we can't produce our own oil.
Those are the reasons for the SPR, not to tell the world we're going to release some oil, whether here or internationally, like that's going to do anything.
Right now, there's a glut of oil.
Right now, the issue isn't producing oil.
It's building up so fast.
There's no more storage, but prices are going up because of these talking heads on TV.
My concern is, Steve, is that the folks who are advising the president have never really traded through these conflicts before, and they don't know what's on the back side of it.
I do.
I've done it many times.
steve bannon
Hang on.
You've got the storage problem.
Now, because you're not getting the relief valve of tankers going through the straits of Hormuz, what the president is talking about is putting up some reinsurance money, which the 20 billion, I think, is a fraction of what the reality is.
It's 100 billion north.
Plus, you've got a, you have to, um, you have to break off the Navy.
eric bolling
Can we just talk about that for one second?
unidentified
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
steve bannon
Hit it.
You're the expert.
I'm just a guy.
unidentified
$20 million.
eric bolling
You're Saudi Arabia.
You're a Saudi or you're a shipping company.
$20 billion.
You're not going to risk four or five hundred crew members' lives and a shipment of crude oil for an insurance fund that totally has $20 billion in it.
I don't think you need it at all, frankly.
But if you're going to do that and somehow insure, tell that captain, go ahead, risk all those lives.
And don't worry, we'll pay you off a million dollars or whatever.
No one's going to really do it.
But if you want to do it, make it legit.
Make it $200, $300 billion, not $20.
I mean, you could blow through $20 billion if they line the Gulf and three or four tankers explode.
I mean, it's not the solution either.
It's really not the solution.
There's a very, very simple solution.
Saturday Night's Strategic Leverage 00:08:50
eric bolling
I wouldn't call it simple, but with the leverage that Trump has developed, there's a win in here.
There's a big win in here.
steve bannon
When you talk about the leverage Trump's developed, before we go to break, we got about 30 seconds.
It's your turn because now we got Venezuela, Guana.
You've got just in the Western Hemisphere with hemispheric defense, we now have 10x what the Persian Gulf has.
Is that the leverage?
eric bolling
Well, you do, but that is part of the leverage.
Now I'll do it to you now or have to break your call.
steve bannon
No, Hang on, I rolled Eric Bowling out of the rack early this morning to get the answer.
So we're going to take a short commercial break.
I really appreciate you doing this.
I love experts in the pits, as only bowling can be.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
This all came about because of Saturday night.
That's why I'm so appreciative of Real America's Voice, The True in Denver, Robin Parker Sig, our own team here at the War Room, do the Sunday show.
We went to a bunch of the battle assessment yesterday.
We're going to hit on that.
Eric Bowling is going to talk to us about President Trump's leverage in a solution next in the war.
unidentified
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
steve bannon
Okay, welcome back.
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Also, Joe Allen on a tear.
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We're going to get Joe on also this afternoon or tomorrow.
Very packed with all the information.
I want to play something.
We're having this discussion because of, obviously, this war.
As we told you the other day, the center of gravity of the war to me has been really the interesting thing has been the Gulf Emirates and the Persians versus the Arabs, the Shiites versus the Sunnis, the Muslim on Muslim, right?
But something happened Saturday night that's very disturbing.
You know, you got Lindsey Graham and all these guys running around, the world's greatest ally.
Let's not want to play Dan Sr.
Dan Sr. is a guy from the Bush administration, one of their hacks, went over to Iraq.
Also, I don't want to say an agent of influence for the Israeli government, but extremely close and a mouthpiece.
Let's hear him yesterday on CNN, and then we'll talk about what happened Saturday night.
bianna golodryga
Yeah, it is quite striking to see what a blow this has been to whatever plan Iran had in thinking that they could attack the Gulf countries and have the Gulf countries put pressure on Israel and the United States to stop.
Thus far, that hasn't happened.
And it was quite striking to see NBZ walking through the walls there in the UAE to show a force of defiance there, that the country is still standing.
dan senor
David, and Biana, it's also moving and impressive to see now the IDF chief of staff in regular, almost daily communication with his counterparts at the heads of these militaries of these Arab countries.
This is what Nadav and I mean when we were watching a region be transformed.
Just that, that all these Arab states in Israel are fighting a war on the same side.
steve bannon
Okay, that's not the clip I wanted, but I will get the clip I wanted.
So, yesterday, Dan Sr. in another show on CNN said when the host asked him about the United States and Israel working together, he had never seen such integration.
He had never seen it was all one.
They have people in our command center, we have people in their command center, that the airstrikes, the coordination of the airstrikes, the missile strikes, all of it was something he had never seen before of two militaries working together.
Then, Axios, and people should understand, Axios basically gets leaks from the White House all the time.
They ain't giving them to Breitbart, and they're not giving them to Citizens Free Press, and they're not giving them to Gateway Pundit.
Not the big ones.
They always give them to Axios.
You can see Axios and they say from senior White House officials.
They're also very close.
They're members of the Axios team that are very close to the senior levels of the Israeli government and the IDF.
And so that's what they had this article yesterday about President Trump and the military were shocked and stunned.
I think the word they used was dismayed at the strike on Saturday night.
The strike on Saturday night is going to be an inflection point because the Israeli Air Force went after the oil infrastructure in Tehran.
I think mainly storage facilities, maybe some refinery capacity.
This was the fireball that was created Saturday night in Tehran.
And later, first off, it made no sense strategically.
If you see what President Trump and his team is trying to accomplish, the last thing we want to do, in fact, what they're trying to do and tone down this effort in striking the Gulf is to stop any attacks on the desalination facilities so they got water, but also make sure that there's no hits on their oil infrastructure, which will send oil markets in turmoil as they have.
The Saturday night strike, and this is what's so shocking with Dan Sr.'s basically telling us how the joint command works.
It's impossible, impossible.
And I'm talking to people behind the scenes.
It's impossible for that to have happened unless folks were misled.
The joint, and you see this from Finnell.
This targeting operation is at the most sophisticated level about exactly what we're degrading.
It is a very methodical, it's what the Air Force and the United States Navy do for a living.
This is game day.
They don't make mistakes.
You may have something go offline.
There's this issue about the striking the girls' school that's on a military base.
Yes, those things happen in war.
But the process is bulletproof because they practice over and over and over again.
This is what they do.
To understand that we had something on Saturday night that was totally outside of the operating scenario of the American military or the strategic direction of President Trump.
Actually, I was reported that President Trump was very upset and they were going to deal with the highest levels of the Israeli government to make sure everybody got on the same page.
This is so dangerous.
And it shows you what Sam Fattis was talking about yesterday.
You're an alliance, but what are the objectives of the two entities?
I would say that the American government, the American people's strategic objective here is quite different than the Israelis.
And you even had Lindsey Graham came out on a tweet with a cleanup aisle three saying, oh, we got to understand, take the big picture here.
We can't make these mistakes.
Saturday night was a major inflection point.
Understand it.
Somebody in the Israeli military and government made a decision that they were going to do it their way and not in conjunction with the United States of America.
Saturday Night Inflection Point 00:00:09
steve bannon
Full stop.
Short break.
Eric Bowling on the other side.
You know, we still need help from the boss.
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