Episode 5203: Counter-Intelligence Tracking President Trump; Iranians Demand Change
Bannon's War Room Episode 5203 details "Operation Epic Fury," a Trump-initiated conflict targeting Iran's nuclear and military assets, causing oil prices to surge past $100 amid Saudi production cuts and Strait of Hormuz closures. The episode also examines controversial FBI counterintelligence operations—Crossfire Hurricane, Plasmic Echo, Round River, and Arctic Frost—allegedly treating the President as a national security threat from 2016 to 2025, alongside investigations into Arizona and Georgia election administration that raise concerns about federal interference. Ultimately, these events suggest a destabilizing shift where domestic surveillance and geopolitical aggression converge to threaten global energy security and democratic norms. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the United States has struck more than 5,000 targets since the war began in Iran.
The president says in his press conference today that the operation is ahead of schedule and could be ending soon, in his words, and also said it could go further.
Today he also told CBS that the war was, quote, very complete.
Many of the administration's stated military goals appear to remain weeks away, and CNN has learned a ground operation to secure Iran's nuclear stockpile could also be on the table.
War III is now, and Donald Trump started it, but for Gulf War III, there is still no coherent explanation from the president or the White House as to what exactly this is all for.
Not even an obviously pretextual false reason like we had from George W. Bush.
The President did unveil a new purported justification for the war today in his rambling press conference at his golf thing.
He said, We're doing this for the other parts of the world.
We're doing this for the other parts of the world.
It's actually hard to argue with that one.
That one might actually be true.
The Wall Street Journal is now describing this as the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s.
CNBC calls it the biggest oil supply disruption in history.
Because there is no way to safely move it to market, Saudi Arabia has now cut its production of oil.
Iraq's production of oil is down to less than one-third what it was before Trump started this war.
In Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain, major energy companies have declared force majeure, which basically means they're saying, hey, you know, act of God, outside our control.
We can no longer be held in any contracts we previously signed as they all radically, radically scale down their oil and gas production.
And their proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, either broken, ineffective, or on the sidelines.
Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing.
On day 10 of Operation Epic Fury, we are winning with an overwhelming and unrelenting focus on our objectives, which are the same as the day I gave my first briefing here on Operation Epic Fury.
They're straightforward, and we are executing them with ruthless precision.
One, destroy their missile stockpiles, their missile launchers, and their defense industrial base, missiles, and their ability to make them.
Two, destroy their Navy.
And three, permanently deny Iran nuclear weapons forever.
It's a laser-focused maximum authority mission delivered with overwhelming and unrelenting precision.
No hesitation, no half-measures.
As President Trump declared yesterday, we're crushing the enemy in an overwhelming display of technical skill and military force.
We will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.
I want you to take a look at this graph from Bloomberg showing the steep drop in movement both in and outbound.
And according to data from Bloomberg, fuel tankers are now rerouting toward East Asia, where energy buyers there are outbidding rivals to lure fuel shipments.
Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel at one point before falling back after the president hinted that the war was very complete, whatever that means.
Meanwhile, gas prices rose to an average of $3.47 a gallon.
That is up nearly 50 cents in the last week.
But as with everything in this administration, it is not what they say, but what they do.
The president might say this war is over or close to it, but sources are telling CNBC that tomorrow, energy ministers from the G7 will hold a virtual meeting to discuss a potential release of oil reserves and that the U.S. believes a joint release of 300 million to 400 million barrels would be appropriate.
I'll introduce you to a term you've probably heard before, troop to task.
We talked about this during the Russian campaign inside of Ukraine.
How many soldiers does it need to accomplish X number of tasks?
If you haven't identified those tasks in a country that's three times as big as the country of Iraq, you know, and there are things all over this country, as we've seen with the airstrikes, how many troops is it going to take?
What's the military advantage that you get from putting people on the ground?
What are they going to be asked to do?
And then, after you talk about the fighters, who are the supporters of those?
Who are the medics that are involved?
What kind of security are the special operators going to get from conventional forces?
So it continues to build piece upon piece.
And people that don't know much about military operations will say, oh, we'll just throw special operations at it, or we'll just ask the Kurds to it.
They don't really understand the numbers games, the so-called battlefield math of all this.
I mean, you know, when you look at the marine, publicly available marine traffic GPS sites, you'll still see clusters of these ships both in the Gulf of Oman and in the Persian Gulf just waiting for it to be deemed safe enough to traverse the strait.
Now, the reality is, according to an expert, it's only really open when the merchant mariners who are on these ships transporting these goods deem it safe enough to risk their lives to cross, and that clearly has not happened yet.
Steph, they can, whenever they feel safe, cross the strait.
They can do it pretty quickly.
They just hit the throttle and they go.
But the problem is the factories that produce the materials they're transporting, whether it's petroleum products, liquefied natural gas, or whether it's aluminum or fertilizer, all of these are industries that are served by ships that go through the Strait of Hormuz.
Many of those factories, those facilities, have already ramped down production because of this stoppage in the strait.
And it's not like flipping a switch to turn things back on.
Ultimately, the aftermath is going to be in America's interests, our interests.
We won't live under a nuclear blackmail scenario of conventional missiles that can target our people, which is why the objectives have been scoped from the beginning.
Missiles, missile production, defense industrial base, Navy, all in service of ensuring they don't have nuclear power projection capabilities.
That's what matters to President Trump.
That's what matters to the American people.
And ultimately, that's why we're so laser focused on ensuring those objectives and those objectives alone are met.
Okay, Tuesday, 10 March, in the year of our Lord 2026.
Welcome to the War Room.
We need every second we can get today so we can't do the long open.
I want to thank the Real America Voice team in Denver and, of course, my own young charges here on the production staff of the War Room because, folks, that was probably the best distillation of what's gone on the last 24 hours, at least 12 hours, that he could have.
John Solomon.
And John Solomon joins me.
John, I've got you here.
You've got major investigations coming out.
Morning, Joe, took a shot at your Maricopa situation.
We're going to play that in a minute.
But I got to ask you, walk us through from yesterday afternoon.
Let's go through from the president's phone call and interview to CPS to where we are after General Kane and Secretary of War Pete Hexa's briefing this morning, sir.
Yeah, well, I think at the end of the day, the president is staying the course that he's laid out, which is until the three objectives are completely achieved, we're not going to let up the military pressure.
Now, he said, we've done a lot of damage, right?
They don't have a Navy.
They don't have an Air Force.
Their missile batteries are gone.
Their leaders have been wiped out.
But the ultimate goal, as he said early on, going actually all the way back to last year, when he started talking about the long-term objectives, the American interest in Iran is for them not to have ballistic missiles that can threaten any U.S. asset, for them not to have nuclear weapons, and for them not to be in a position to harm their neighbors or their own people.
And I think right now the president is still on board with that.
As I've been saying, goal one was to diminish their air defenses, their anti-ballistic missiles.
That's been now been declared completed.
Goal two is to go after the IRGC and these very skilled warriors that are part of the Republican Guard.
And that's where you're going to see the big bombs being dropped.
They're going to hit these bunkers where the Republican Guard and their assets are trying to thin out their ranks so that when the bombing stops, the Guard is not in a position, one, to attack neighbors of the United States, but also not to attack their own people like we saw in the weeks leading up to this war.
So I think everything is right where we've been briefed it to be.
The media can say what it wants to say, but at the end of the day, it is exactly on the strategic course that the president laid out and that Pete Hegseth has laid out.
He's describing different aspects of what is achieved in those three primary principles that he's gave.
And I think if the media was being honest, they would look at that and say, what he said today about this is actually related to what he said a month ago, but they're not.
And, you know, so we have to tell the people what's really going on.
Yeah, you basically had four code-named investigations, Crossfire Hurricane, Plasmic Echo, Round River, and Arctic Frost.
And what they did is they basically continuously treated the man twice elected by the American people as president as a counterintelligence threat from July of 2016 when Crossfire opened up to January 2025 when the president was sworn in in his second inauguration.
The president, the FBI treated the president of the United States, a man twice elected president by the American people as a continuous national security threat from July of 2016 in the middle of his first campaign to January 2025 when he was sworn in for his second inauguration.
Each of these investigations had code names, but at the end of the day, what they were was an effort to get Donald Trump and it swept up hundreds of Americans, Charlie Kirk and his group and Rudy Giuliani and his legal work and Joe and Victoria, Joe DeGenova and Victoria Tensing, many other people, all swept up in an effort to find some dirt that they could hang on the president's house.
And I think when you look at it from that 30,000-foot perspective, you have one of the clearest pictures of what looks to be a conspiracy to deprive certain Americans of their civil liberties, much like what the Justice Department brought against the Ku Kux Klan and corrupt police departments back in the 1960s in the civil rights era.
You now have a new version of it in 2026, which looks at the FBI and associated intelligence agencies and government agencies as potentially depriving the civil rights of President Trump and those around him.
And by the way, Harmeet Dylan is quoted in the story.
She's the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights saying exactly that in the story today.
So essentially for 10 years, almost a decade, the deep state, the FBI and others believe that and treated him with four different serious investigations, that the current commander in chief and president of the United States, three times elected, as you're showing now in Maricopa Canada, three times elected by the American people, was a major national security and counterintelligence threat.
Okay, before I play the morning, Joe, and the New York Times also has a huge piece on this Arizona situation that validates what John's saying.
So it's not Breitbart and just War Room.
Okay, I want to make sure folks understand that.
John Solomon for FBI code-worded investigations, which folks should know that when they do that, that means it's real.
They're putting resources on it.
That's also an accounting function of how they allocate resources for against one individual who they never thought was coming back and the broader ecosystem around him.
The scale of that is so monumental.
How does it get rectified?
Where is the process inside the system as the system currently exists that we get accountability, authority, and make sure it can never happen again, sir?
Well, the football for criminal prosecution is clearly now in Florida under the jurisdiction of the Miami U.S. Attorney and a very skilled group of career prosecutors down there.
They're running grand jury activity down in Miami and Fort Pierce, Florida.
Now, let's keep in mind that they don't even yet have the Round River documents that I mentioned today because Kash Patel's team is just starting to find them.
They only were found a few weeks ago because they were in these prohibited access files, meaning that no one knew where they were.
They were hidden even from Kash Patel.
And so it took agents and people digging to find these records months to find them.
But as this information goes down to Miami, you see exactly what Harmeet Dillon says in my story today.
There's the potential for a conspiracy or racketeering case against government agencies, government players, private individuals to deprive the president and others around him of their civil liberties under the false color of government authority.
That's going to be the criminal case.
Now, people like Lindsey Graham, the senator whose phone records were taken and others, they're talking about private civil action.
And I think that that could be another potential area.
Let's think about this.
In the story today, I mentioned that Michael Caputo, a guy that used to work in the Trump administration, then made a movie about Hunter Biden, and then went back to the Trump campaign that helped in 2024.
He had his privacy violated.
By the way, in the letters that I have today, there's an allegation that the government seized his phone records and email records, including the advice he was giving President Trump on the 2024 campaign as a campaign staffer.
Sounds a little bit like Carter Page, deja vu, all over again.
So you could also see, and again, I don't know what Michael Caputo or other people's plans are, you could also see civil litigation, civil RICO, civil claims that people's privacy was violated.
That's a high threshold.
The government will claim immunity.
But at the end of the day, there is a double-barreled way to bring some form of accountability and to get to the bottom of what happened here because I don't think we know it all yet.
Even this story, as broad as it is, we don't know the full nature of it yet.
Today, Trump's FBI has now obtained 2020 election material from Maricopa County in Arizona related to the review that Republican lawmakers conducted of that.
He has presidential results that confirm Trump, you know, lost the state.
In Fulton County, Georgia, they have now, through subpoena, gotten access to ballots from Maricopa County.
Note they're not getting them statewide, right?
They're not seeking to get all of the Georgia ballots or all of the Arizona ballots.
They're targeting blue cities in the same way that when Donald Trump said he wanted Republicans to take over voting, what did he say next?
He said there are 15 places or so, right?
And in a later comment, he, I think, listed Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
And so the reason why this plays into it is because he is setting up the permission structure among his base and among people who are not paying attention that when he is not able to get the ballots in Detroit or Philadelphia or some other county,
because they say no or the courts won't give him what he wants, that he will then have the excuse to send in the FBI, to send in ATF, to send in CPB, to send in, you know, ICE, whoever it is, whatever federal agency it is, to seize the ballots.
The vote was counted and recounted in Arizona and Maricopa County several times.
It never changed.
There's never been any evidence whatsoever of fraud.
Yet, President Trump cannot accept that he lost 2020 and seems to be setting dangerous precedents, laying the groundwork, if you will, for potential interference in 2026 and 2028.
Remember, this follows the similar action in Georgia, where the Justice Department sees records and is in Fulton County.
So there are really two possibilities that, look, this could be a part of a plot, a plan to somehow interfere with the midterm election and or the 2028 election and somehow skew the outcome toward the way that President Trump wants it.
And so we should all be really concerned about that and I think alarmed about that.
The other possibility is that despite the fact that the votes in Vulton County were counted and recounted and counted again, and they've been counted every way you can possibly count.
And the same is true in Maricopa County in Arizona, despite all of that, the president actually believes that somehow that those counties and those votes were stolen from him.
Despite all evidence, despite the fact that Republicans have looked into this and keep coming up with zero squat, that he just believes is fantasy because he can't admit to himself that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, in which case the president is delusional, and that should worry us too.
Well, all of them have not taken the time, not surprising to me, to read the FBI affidavit in Fulton County, which lays out the predicate for what the FBI is looking at in these big city battleground state areas, Phoenix and Atlanta being the first two.
The FBI is very clear.
It says that they have corroborated, they have substantiated, that's the actual word in the affidavit, to the satisfaction of a judge, a magistrate who issued the search warrant, that certain procedures were not followed in Georgia.
And I assume we'll find something similar in Americopa when everything's unsealed, that were, in other words, they didn't follow state law in the administration of a federal election.
And under Section 152 of the statute, a federal statute, a willful and intentional act that does not follow state election law can be charged as a federal crime.
What they're trying to do here, by their own admissions, isn't me, it's the FBI saying what they're doing, which none of those Yahoos on TV apparently bothered to read.
They're not trying to relitigate 2020 and declare a new winner.
They're not trying to prove that Donald Trump won the election.
They have reason to believe that these areas did not follow election laws in the administration, and they intend to bring accountability so that in future elections, they'll do so.
And here's one of the things that those who's on TV don't want to talk about.
It will soon become obvious.
It's already obvious in my reporting yesterday.
The Trump FBI, if you want to call it that, the Kash Patel FBI, is looking at the 2024 election in Arizona.
Now, wait a second.
News flashed to everyone.
Donald Trump won that election.
He was declared the winner, right?
Republicans had a good year in Maricopa County and in Arizona in 2024.
Why would the FBI look at that?
Because it's not about who won.
The FBI is trying to hold accountable people who may not have followed the proper rules and regulations for election.
Now, that's an allegation that some people have made.
We have to wait and see what it is.
In Fulton County, it is very clear that the FBI substantiated certain irregularities.
They're saying that.
In Arizona, the grand jury subpoena and the search warrant remain sealed.
I believe when it is unsealed, we'll see some predicate there.
We'll understand why it is that they're looking at this.
This is not an effort to redeclare a new winner from the 2020 election.
It's to force these locations to make sure they're in compliance with state and federal law.
Well, listen, Harmee Dillon's already made enormous progress on this in getting the voter rolls cleaned up.
28 states are in litigation.
Several of them are in the process of cleaning up.
And when we talk about cleaning up, we're talking 50 to 100,000, 200,000 names are being cleaned off of rolls.
That is sloppy management not in compliance with state and federal laws.
So that's going to be an improvement.
George is talking about putting Fulton County under receivership.
Some senators have proposed that.
We'll see if they do that.
But the truth of the matter is a lot of the things that went on in 2020, the quick rule changes under the name of COVID, those are now people have eyes on and they're caught in real time before election day and they're litigated and resolved.
I think 26 will be a much more robust election monitoring system.
One thing I want to point out is that I broke overnight, Steve, a story that's just really interesting.
The House Admin Committee, Brian Stile, sent a couple of observers to Maricopa County in 24, when Trump won.
And they found this warehouse where they saw live ballots in empty ballots, meaning ballots that were blank alongside of ballots that had been voted in the same location.
They were very concerned.
They used the word alarming.
A Democrat and a Republican observer together found this alarming.
That is one of the things that has been sent to the FBI that triggered the Maricopa County thing.
Everybody should take a look at that report.
You can see the sort of things that are going on that raise concern.
Maybe there's a good excuse, but the FBI is going to get to the bottom of it.
I will tell you, Jessica, I have never seen integration between the United States military and another military, not just between the United States and Israel.
Certainly that has never been the case, but the United States and any other sovereign military.
I've never seen this level of integration.
Aircraft from both countries, you know, in the skies above Iran at the same time, all feeding into a central command function, sharing the same information between those aircraft, sharing the same intelligence, sharing in some cases the same command structure and chain of command.
It's just total integration.
And don't take it from me, you can hear this from the Pentagon.
U.S. CENTCOM put out a post yesterday with the Israeli flag and the American flag talking about how these air forces are just achieving total excellence and performing with incredible excellence and success and professionalism, working together.
It's really, they're attached at the hip.
I think about the 91 Gulf War, where the U.S., the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, asked Prime Minister Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, to show restraint, that Israel couldn't get involved.
Why couldn't Israel get involved, according to the Bush administration?
Because that would fracture the coalition, which included many Arab countries.
The Israel and the Arab countries couldn't be seen in the Arab country's eyes to be fighting on the same side.
Now that is, we've completely inversed that.
Now you have Israel and the U.S. fighting side by side, totally locked in, and the Arab countries are joining that coalition.
So we are living on so many levels through truly historic times that I couldn't have even imagined in terms of the transformation in the region, potentially, and certainly the transformation in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
And everybody knows Dan Sr. is a, how do I say, former spokesman for the Iraq debacle under Bush, where he lied, baldface lied to the American people only every day.
But he's also, let's say, quite close to the Netanyahu clique in Israel.
And he's 100% correct.
They got guys.
He says it, one joint command.
It is impossible to have happened on Saturday night what happened on Saturday night with that structure.
And it's from his lips that structure to have, oh my God, the Axio story that sits there and even Lindsey Graham putting out a tweet afterwards, hey guys, we got to calm down, unless the Israeli Air Force, the IDF, and the senior command of Israel baldface lied to the Americans.
And I think right there, that was an inflection point.
I believe President Trump, because they said, oh, he's going to have a heated conversation with Netanyahu.
The Allies are not together on this at all.
Our war aims, and you just saw President Trump.
The war aims of President Trump look quite different than the war aims of B.B. Netanyahu, Kurt Mills.
And this is why I think Saturday night was an inflection point.
President Trump was adamant.
I don't want any oil assets.
I don't want any infrastructure touched, right?
I'm trying to get the Persian people on our side.
If we got to do things in Tehran, I want the bombing of like the Air Force command center that the IDF did take down, I think, on Saturday night, which is a hard target.
But I don't want to spread this war into a Dresden-type fire bombing of Tehran.
That's exactly what I don't want, because you know what?
Then the Persians will dig in and we'll be here five years from now.
This is to me the beginning of the separation that led President Trump to this podium today to kind of say, hey, thinking about this, we got a couple other things I want to do on my punch list, but we're out.
SEO has reported citing U.S. and Israeli sources that the U.S. was not happy with strikes on 30 fuel depots in Iran.
While this is anonymous sourcing, you know, it seems kind of congruent with what President Trump said yesterday, that there's certain spots they don't want to hit relating to energy infrastructure that would take a long time to rebuild.
And, you know, whether this reporting is true or not, what's your message to Americans, those who supported the president, and those who aren't really in favor of this war and who worry that Israel might be taking advantage of the U.S.'s backing?
Well, I would just state by saying Israel's been a really strong partner in this effort.
Where they have different objectives, they've pursued them.
Ultimately, we've stayed focused on ours.
But when Iran, what Iran has felt is the power of the world's two most powerful air forces, in that particular case, that wasn't our, those weren't our strikes or that objective, or that wasn't necessarily our objective.
But the president has made it clear to those concerns that we're not getting pulled in any direction.
We're leading.
The president is leading.
He's determining where we want to go, what the outcome will be, what the end state is with a very keen eye.
And I understand those concerns because I've heard from a lot of people who went through, I went through 20 years of those wars myself, worried about getting dragged in, worried about mission creep, worried about nation building or democracy expansion.
That's never the perspective the president has pursued on this.
Just because previous presidents and previous secretaries have decided to just pour more resources and more people in toward something.
This is now what, and it goes back to Lindsey Graham begging the Saudis to come in here.
You're not going to get the Arab states to come in here because they understand the makeup of the war changed Saturday night.
Now you have a Persian nationalist movement.
This is why President Trump's initial objective was to support the overwhelming dissident groups in Persia that hated being under the boot of the Ayatollah and the Mullahs.
Why is that not happening?
Yes, they're still under huge threat, but one of the reasons here is this war shifted on Saturday night because the Israelis did something that the president absolutely didn't want to have happen.
And we shouldn't be trying to gloss it over.
We should be trying to address it.
And we should be trying to address it with the American people.
Trita Parsi, you join us.
Now, you are, you know, you're Iranian.
You've worked with those guys.
So this is not like a, and it shouldn't be an even-handed assessment, but give me your assessment of where we stand right now, particularly as my theory of the case is now we're into, the Israelis have managed to unite the Persian people that were not united.
And one of the central thesis of our efforts was to make sure that we had their back as they took it in their hands to overthrow the Ayatollah in this Islamic Republic, sir.
And just to clarify, I was born in Iran, but my family fled when I was four.
I've studied Iran for more than 25, 30 years.
And in that process, obviously, I've spoken to people on all sides, including people deep inside the Irani government.
Your assessment is absolutely correct.
The attack against the oil refinery was a major, major turning point in all of this.
Already prior to that, there had been signs that this war was turning in the eyes of many Iranians against Iran as a nation rather than against this theocracy.
You could see that when Trump was talking about arming the Kurds, you know, things that sounded as if the U.S. was going to support a separatist movement, fears that exist for a long time that the West is seeking Iran's dismemberment.
But the targeting of the oil refineries really hit the point home that this is not about taking out the repressive capabilities of the state, you know, the besiege the IRGC and then allow the population to rise up.
Rather, this was targeting the nation as a whole because people in Tehran cannot breathe right now.
I spoke to a person the day after.
He said that he could see many people who had chosen to stay in Tehran, they gave up.
They're leaving the city right now because they actually cannot breathe.
And he saw that on the streets spontaneously, some people, as they were packing up their stuff and leaving, were starting to chant slogans against the United States, against Israel.
And these did not look to be the usual supporters of the regime.
I mean, the 15-20% that would come out and protest on a regular basis in favor of the regime.
This looked like a completely different segment of society.
And I've heard this now from several different people.
Remember that in Iraq, in Libya, when there were these campaigns to regime, change the regime, there were never any instances in which you saw a very, very large crowd come out in support of those regimes.
And that's not to say that this specific theocracy is particularly popular.
In fact, I don't think it is at all.
But it does have a support base of 15 to 20% of the population.
And we saw massive numbers coming out from that support base yesterday celebrating their decision to name the son of the supreme leader as the next supreme leader.
We never saw any of these things in Iraq or in Libya.
And I think that tells us something.
It's a very different situation.
This is an unpopular regime, but it does have a support base.
And then the rest of the population tend to be very, very nationalistic.
And in normal circumstances, they would have been completely against any foreign invader.
In this case, there was a segment that seemed to welcome it because they were just so sick and tired of this theocracy.
But those sentiments seem to have shifted very fast as it's become clear to them.
This is a war on the country, not a war on the regime.
So where do you, what, what is, what, what are the alternatives now?
Is there any way that you can, that the United States can move this back to focus on the theocracy and let the people in Tehran and other, in the, of the Persians understand that it's not, we're not trying to destroy Persia or the Persian people.
We're trying to take off or to at least degrade.
Although I noticed Pete said today it wasn't force projection on the people.
It was forced projection on allies.
He was very specific on that.
So it's another war aim that's kind of moved.
What do we need to do to make sure that we're focused on the theocracy and the Persian people understand that we're their ally in trying to support their strike for freedom?
I don't think it's possible, at least not in the short and the medium term.
And I don't think Trump has more than the short and the medium term.
Look, Trump himself said when asked by a reporter, he said that he thinks Iran's map is going to look different at the end of this war.
That has nothing to do with the theocracy.
That's the territorial integrity of the country.
Having said these things, not just once or twice, but repeatedly, I just don't think there's any turning back.
Think Trump should end this war as soon as he can.
This war should never have been started in the first place.
It was a mistake going in.
The good thing about Trump is that when he recognizes the mistake, he has the willpower, the flexibility of reversing course instead of doing what a lot of other American presidents have done, knowing very well that the U.S. was not winning in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, he just kicked the can down the road, hoping that the next president would have to deal with the debacle.
Trump didn't do that in Yemen.
After seven weeks, he realized this was not going anywhere and he just pulled out.
The difference this time around, though, is that the Iranians also have a vote as to whether this war ends or not.
And I'm just not convinced that they're ready to end this war.
They believe they have to fight on in order to make sure that the cost is as high as possible so that the U.S. and Israel never thinks about doing this again.
If this war ends, in their view, in a way in which it nevertheless was not too costly for the U.S. and Israel, the Iranians fear that the U.S. and Israel will attack them again in six months.
As was the case, as you remember, there was a war in June that Israel started.
The Iranians agreed to a ceasefire.
They regret it now.
They believe that the U.S. and Israel used those eight months to regroup, rearm, and then relaunch the war.
Are they coordinating with Iran to, we'll step aside, hit our oil, hit our refinery in Abu Dhabi.
I don't know, maybe hit some Saudi platforms and whatnot.
Oil prices will jump up.
We'll all look like we're upset about this, but the reality is it screws Trump.
It sticks it right to Trump.
And meanwhile, they smile to Trump, they shake his hand, they bow in the Oval Office, and they want $100 or $200 oil will be even better for them.
I don't know if it's collusion or not.
I will tell you the way to solve it.
And Steve, we've talked about this.
And since we spoke yesterday, this little idea I brought to you, and I think it should be Bowling and Bannon's idea to the administration.
I talked to EggSeth.
I sent it to Pete.
I sent it to Susie Wiles.
Pete got back to me, Susie didn't.
Trump needs to hear this.
This is right up his alley.
If he negotiates a deal with Iran and Venezuela, both, the increase in oil, they've already produced high levels.
Iran produced 8 million barrels a day a while ago.
Venezuela produced 4 million barrels a day.
Now they're three and one, right?
So there's seven or eight million barrels additional that can be produced.
All we're saying is we will do a joint venture with you, Venezuela, the way Saudi Aramco is, the way Petro Bras is in Brazil, where the country owns the actual reserves, but Americans pull the oil out of the ground and we have first dibs at a market price on the oil.
Trump would guarantee oil independence, not just during his term, for in perpetuity through his lifetime, through our lifetime, through John Jr.'s lifetime.
We would never depend on a foreign country or OPEC again for a drop of oil.
It's huge.
And this whole $100 oil price, by the way, Steve, I did very well yesterday because we were on here and it was $106, $105, $106 a barrel.
And I just knew it was going to go down.
It had the trade.
I sent your producers the trade as I get off the phone with you at whatever it was, 10:30.
And this thing exploded.
If it goes back up to $120, $130, I'm going to put the trade on again because I know it's going back to $70.
Our problem isn't oil.
It's the refining.
It's the end use of the gasoline.
And these Arabs know, and Iran knows the more conflict in the Middle East, the harder it's going to be to get gasoline produced here in America, the higher the price is going to go.
You could see a $10 gallon of gasoline in California, a $5 or $6 gallon gasoline nationally here if they keep messing around.
I know you got an episode you're going to do right now.
Thank you so much for doing this.
You need your own independence and your own way to think.
That's why we laid out this end of the dollar empire Birch Gold to give you the tools to begin the initial access to how you think of global commodity markets and how you think of global gold.
Not the price of gold, the process that drives the value of gold.