Episode 5271: Iran War Opens Up Taiwan To China; Will Todd Blanche Remain AG
Stephen K. Bannon and Natalie Winters navigate a fictional April 2026 crisis, analyzing an F-15 shootdown in the Strait of Hormuz where modern jets face vulnerabilities from man-portable missiles. They debate Attorney General Pam Bondi's removal amid Epstein file mishandling and judicial resistance, while Cleo Pascal exposes Chinese infiltration in the CNMI through visa-free entry and casino corruption. Colonel Grant Newsom contextualizes Iran losses as necessary strikes against a regime that killed 45,000 citizens, aiming to dismantle coercive infrastructure before Trump meets Xi Jinping, ultimately framing these events as interconnected threats to U.S. sovereignty. [Automatically generated summary]
Joining us, former Undersecretary of State for Diplomacy, for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and MSNOW political analyst Rick Stengel, staff writer for the Atlantic and MSNOW political analyst Ashley Parker, retired four-star general and MSNOW military analyst General Barry McCaffrey, and former U.S. Army officer, captain in the JAG Corps, and former assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut.
Margaret Donovan, it's great to have all of you.
General McCaffrey, I'm going to start with you.
What is your take?
What are you watching for with this story of the downing of an F 15 fighter jet?
What does it signify to you about where this war is headed?
We have absolutely devastated the Iranian forces, General, but it also appears that it is not true, as the president has stated, that we managed to wipe out their air defenses and leave them with few options.
It's Friday, April 3rd in the year of our Lord 2026.
It's Natalie Winters hosting, filling in for Stephen K. Bannon today.
But as you can see, even from this morning's wonderful show, it seems like there's news breaking not just every hour, every minute, but every second.
Obviously, the F 15 down in the Strait of Hormuz with one of two pilots, at least now at the time of doing the show, being reportedly found.
They're still looking for the second, and it is Our belief there's reporting that was the second video that we played that during the rescue mission, likely Black Hawk helicopters that were doing those missions to try to find the downed pilot, that they were then hit, not totally downed, but by Iranian strikes.
And then we also have a separate aircraft, I believe a warthog, that was also downed around the Strait of Ramuz.
There is a lot going on.
President Trump, I believe he's meeting with his national security, you know, cabinet officials of the lake as we speak, obviously threading the needle.
Very closely, we're going to get into the broader discussion of the implications.
Also, I think, like we saw in Venezuela, obviously, Chinese air defense is not doing a very good job there, but in Iran, they use similar technologies.
But obviously, you're seeing some sort of evolution going on there.
We're going to have Cleo Pascal and I believe Colonel Grant Newsom to walk us through the China angle to all of this and give us an assessment of what is going on in the ground over there.
But, you know, we are America first here in the war room.
So we will start with what is going on here in the United States.
Obviously, a shakeup over at The DOJ.
So we thought best to bring on the one and only Julie Kelly, who has been writing wonderfully about everything that's gone down with Bondi, the weird never Trump crowd.
They're like zombies or Medusa or whatever the Greek thing is, where you cut the head off and they come back with more of a vengeance.
I thought Ron DeSantis, we agreed that wasn't going to happen, but now he's being floated for AG.
I've been enjoying your social media commentary on that.
But Julie, let's just take a step back and can you kind of give us your broader assessment of what we're seeing go down?
At DOJ, your assessment of Bondi's tenure and what you think the path forward looks like.
You know, this was, I believe, months in the making.
It was no secret, and the president himself had said so.
His dissatisfaction with Pam Bondi, I think she had some solid accomplishments that she should be proud of.
However, the Epstein matter, debacle, files, whatever you want to call it, just became a dark cloud that.
Still hangs over this administration, unfortunately, to this day.
And a lot of that was prompted early on, shortly after she was confirmed in February of 2025, claiming that, you know, with those binders had Epstein files, that this was going to be the first of an ongoing production of so called Epstein files.
Then she was kind of caught on camera, saying that they had tens of thousands of videos of Jeffrey Epstein with children and child pornography.
Kind of alluding to a client's list a few times, really amping up the expectations that were then, of course, turned around on the administration by Democrats in Congress, the never Trumpers that you're talking about,
including people like Tom Massey, who then leveraged this, I think, and made this, unfortunately, Natalie, once we look back at 2025, the Epstein files, Jeffrey Epstein, will be, unfortunately, the animating.
Issue of the president's first year in office.
And I think some of that is attributed to Pambani's handling or mishandling of it early on.
I think the mishandling of the Epstein file situation may go down truly as one of the worst political comms crises in modern, maybe all of American history from start to finish, from, you know, Binder Gate.
I think it persists to this day.
But do you think that that is emblematic?
Maybe making it less of a one off or an edge case, but of what really I think was the kind of final nail in the coffin for AG Bondi, which was this idea that I think we've seen sort of permeate through a lot of corners of the Trump administration, if we're being honest, which is there's a lot of talk, but there's not a lot of accountability.
There's some, but I don't think it's what exactly President Trump, who is, of course, in charge and has the right to hire and fire as he so pleases, ran on.
And I think once and frankly deserves.
Do you think it's fair to say that the broader department was sort of failing to meet that mark?
Or do you think that the Epstein situation was more of sort of just an aberration or an anomaly from an otherwise successful department, but he just couldn't get past that?
And look, I cautioned people early on, and I know that Steve and I talked about this, and you and I talked about this.
There was an expectation, and of course, part of this was also created by Pambani when she established that, you know, weaponization working group where, and she laid out in that memo, we are going to look at Jack Smith.
We are going to look at the persecution of J6ers.
We are going to look at the surveillance of, you know, parents protesting at school boards and this, you know, Catholic.
A Catholic memo of allegedly FBI agents surveilling people attending Catholic Mass.
So she laid out in detail what that was going to look like.
But just like our weaponization subcommittee, you'll recall that, Natalie, established by House Republicans in 2023, this all apparently went nowhere.
Now, but I did caution people early on because I covered these judges in Washington, D.C. for so long and I saw how rigged the system.
Was and you saw how these judges were flipping 180 degrees from rubber stamping anything that the Department of Justice wanted to reversing everything and overturning and blocking whatever the DOJ wanted as soon as Trump won office.
So I said, these things just are not going to happen quickly, and they weren't.
So she, to the extent that she did, and then Ed Martin as acting DC US Attorney, and then the team around her, and even we see this with Janine Pirro.
I mean, there is a locked armed judicial resistance.
Especially in the DC District Court, to sabotage anything that this DOJ wants.
And that extends even to grand juries, Natalie, where you have activist groups in Washington right after Trump won, counseling and coaching people if they were selected to serve on a grand jury.
Here is how you undermine the DOJ's speaking of a federal criminal indictment and returning a no true bill, which we now see in unprecedented numbers coming out of not just DC, but other blue cities as well.
So she faced almost insurmountable obstacles.
And we can go into detail about all of them, not just the judges, but this flood of lawsuits for the immigration policies.
I mean, it was like whack a mole at the DOJ every single day.
So I'm sure she was doing her best, but knowing that the president's priority and the MAGA's base priority was we want to see serious indictments, charges, investigations, we want raids.
Just like we saw of J Sixers, just like we saw at Mar a Lago.
We wanted FBI raids.
We got one.
John Bolton, I think, was the only one.
So were they gun shy?
Were they just shorthanded?
They were dealing with internal uprisings as well.
Saboteurs who were DOJ prosecutors, including U.S. attorneys who were resigning and quitting in dramatic fashion.
So, I want to fairly identify all of the uphill battles that Pambani and her team had from the get go.
But as time wore on, more importantly, Natalie, as time is taking away in this Congress and the first half of the president's term, I think his frustration just built every single day, and her credibility just continued to wane within the administration and among the MAGA base, especially.
I mean, it's going to be tough, whoever is put in there.
I think there are some really good names floated.
As I said, I strongly object to the suggestion that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis should be in the Trump administration, certainly as Attorney General.
I explained why on X.
But I think there are other good names and people who can, I think, I don't want to say run a tighter ship at DOJ because I know that Pambondi was.
Very well liked.
But I think, you know, instituting some more discipline and oversight as to not just what was happening at Maine DOJ, but all of these different U.S. attorneys' offices, you know, making sure that we're leveraging whatever jurisdiction we can for whatever these potential crimes are.
We do know that things are happening in Southern Florida, which is very encouraging.
So, you know, they have a much greater shot of.
Something happening there.
But I think just, I don't want to use the word grown up because I don't want to demean Pambani or certainly Todd Blanchard or anyone, the higher levels there.
But I mean, somebody who is going to really crack the whip every hour, every day on this.
And, you know, I really think Lee Zeldin is a tremendous, I think he's one of the unsung heroes of this administration.
And I think that he would be a guy who would go in there and do exactly that because he's already dealt with a lot of these issues at the EPA.
Back in the war room, where of course you got to be checking out birchgold.com slash Bannon or texting Bannon to 989898.
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We here in the war room think it's bad for the producers over at the Madhouse show who like to cut the ad we do here and say that we are not on Team America.
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That's why gold has always been a hedge against these crazy plans that the globalists have for this wonderful country.
That's why you've got to be checking out birchgold.comslash Bannon or texting Bannon to 989898.
And with that, welcome back to the war room.
We are going to go to Cleo Pascal, who does just wonderful work.
The, uh, very dark, very scary underbelly of PRC infiltration, not just here in the United States, but abroad.
I think you may have some charts for us, which gets me very excited.
Uh, but you are, you have some new stories, some new work, I believe from the Northern Marianas and also Diego Garcia.
So I will just tee it up to you because you know more than the PRC probably knows about the ops they got going down there.
So, we're going to go back to the story that you and I covered a while back about what's going on in the Commonwealth of Northern Marian Islands.
And there is a map, which might be helpful.
So, this is a part of the United States of America that's an eight hour flight west of Hawaii.
There it's circled there in dark blue.
So, everything in dark blue on that map is the United States of America.
So, the thing in the upper right hand corner that's Hawaii, the Hawaiian Islands.
Um, and then what's circled, uh, over on the left, that's the Commonwealth of North the Mariana Islands.
So CNMI is the, is the acronym.
And it's just north of Guam.
And what's in green is Taiwan.
So it's actually about half as close to Taiwan as it is to Hawaii.
And if the balloon goes up in Taiwan, the Chinese are going to have to take Guam and the Marianas offline.
There's a lot of different ways that that could go, but the U.S. military is building up in both Guam and the Marianas.
These are separate U.S. territories.
The island of Tinian is in the Commonwealth of North Mariana Islands.
That's where the major air base was towards the end of World War II, which had the B-29 bombers taking off for Japan.
It's where the Enola Gay took off from.
That airfield is now being rebuilt.
And of course, Guam is also seeing a lot more activity before.
So the Chinese, I look more like Like you do, the political warfare component to this.
And they're on the ground, seriously trying to destabilize the U.S. from the inside so that if there is a move on Taiwan, both Guam and the Northern Marianas won't be operational.
And one of the ways, and this has come up in the context of what's going on in the Supreme Court, is that Chinese can still arrive without a visa on U.S. soil in the Commonwealth of Northern Marian Islands.
So this has been obviously a birth tourism issue, but Also, the woman that ran the Bureau of Mortar Vehicles there was convicted of selling U.S. driver's licenses along with a Chinese co conspirator, specifically to Chinese.
The Chinese that come in without a visa aren't supposed to leave the Marianas, but at least in the hundreds, we think they've been taking the boat, illegally going by boat, from the island of Rota, which is in the south of the Marianas, to Guam, which is about 60 miles away.
They've been showing up in Guam, selling drugs, human trafficking, and wandering around the U.S. bases.
There was just a Chinese tourist who was convicted.
Of taking photos of Anderson's base in Guam.
They're also very heavily, deeply entwined into the economy of the Northern Marianas.
And this is something that's coming up again right now because they are trying to make the case, and people who are pro no visas for Chinese, which includes the woman who represents the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas in the US Congress, that this should stay.
That Chinese tourism is the bedrock of their economy and should be expanded.
And until just a few days ago, they were even pushing for unlimited direct flights on Chinese carriers from China into Guam and the Marianas.
This is how far it's gone.
They were pushing not just for visa free access for Chinese into the Marianas, but for unlimited flights on Chinese carriers into the Marianas and into Guam.
Now, they've just pulled that request.
Because they are in negotiations with the US government for money.
They say they're broke and they need a federal government bailout.
So they've realized that the unlimited flights was a bit of a bridge to China too far.
So they've pulled that, but they're still sticking with the unlimited visa free access for Chinese tourists.
And they're not going after the estimated $1.6 billion in funding that the late Governor Palacios from the Northern Marianas.
Said was not properly accounted for when he came into office in 2023.
Now, Viewers of War Room may remember that there was this governor who came in in 2023 who tried to pivot the Marianas away from China.
And he also repeatedly requested the federal government to come and investigate what was going on in the Marianas.
He said he had proof to hand over to the FBI about high level corruption.
He requested Treasury come in.
He requested basically anybody who would come in and help to do investigations into what was going on because The degree of Chinese money that has come into the Marianas through first the garment sector and then the casinos, and now they're looking at a stable coin and online casinos has been off the charts.
And it's completely distorted the economy of the Northern Marianas and so the politics of Northern Marianas.
And Governor Palacios, Mr. Tickton called, said, talked about people who are willing to die, to fight for what's right.
Governor Palacios was one of those.
He knew that calling for these investigations would put him at great risk.
And coincidentally or not, he died suddenly last summer.
And the War Room live streamed both the funeral and the mass.
And I was there for the funeral.
And the level of fear among the Americans remember, these are Americans living in the Northern Marianas was such that I had people coming up to me during the funeral and kind of.
Brushing past me and saying thank you in the context of thank you for the coverage, and then walking on.
They didn't want to be seen with me because it's an environment that's so dangerous.
There have been unexplained suicides that people think are suspicious.
There's such a depth of corruption and fear in this part of the United States of America, which I would argue is the part of the United States that is the most penetrated by the Chinese Communist Party, that they They feel like they can't be seen in public with people who are trying to tell their story.
So I'm very grateful to the War Room for giving time and I know to cover it, what's going on in this frontier of the United States, and to viewers of the War Room who've been very supportive individually on this story.
And I would just request to keep a very close eye on it because it is getting worse.
It still needs the investigations and maybe before sending out more money.
To these people in the Marianas who are still pushing for these Chinese entries, maybe there should be a full Treasury investigation into what happened to the over billion dollars that went there the last time, and some investigations and prosecutions would be extremely helpful.
So, Diego Garcia is this US UK base, which is in the Indian Ocean, which President Trump wanted to use as part of the planning for the Iran operation.
And the UK said no, initially at least, and along with the bases on land.
Now, the UK has been trying to offload the base onto Mauritius, which is very close to China.
And the whole thing just.
Just reeks.
It's a and it and the sort of one potential positive outcome of the Iran thing is it's called attention to the weakness of the European partners and also specifically to what may be about to happen to this base.
The legislation to sign the agreement with Mauritius is stuck in the British Parliament, and unless it's ratified by the end of the month, it may time out, which it would be a good thing.
But again, it's another area where attention needs to be paid very close attention.
That the UK, especially this Keir Starmer government, which has very unusual connections to China, doesn't try to slip it through.
But it raises this larger question because this isn't the only base.
The UK also, an Iranian drone struck a UK base in Cyprus and the UK wasn't in a position to defend it.
And reportedly, there's US NSA capabilities there as well.
So I think that not just the NATO question, but the whole partnership with Five Eyes, various Five Eyes countries is going to have to be reassessed so that you don't have these, you don't have London or Paris or others putting a chokehold on US decision making at critical times of conflict.
Colonel Grant Nuscham, I want to go to yet another wonderful China expert that we have here in the war room.
I want to get your thoughts on everything that's going down in Iran.
It seems like the doomsday scenario that everybody talks about when we are dragging our feet to ensure that this doesn't turn into another forever war is this idea of almost unintentional escalation, right?
A plane being shot down, which then spirals and snowballs.
And then the rescue team, like we're seeing now, right?
A helicopter getting, I think, struck to some extent by Iranian capabilities, air fire.
I think the Chinese air defense systems that they use there.
Evolving, certainly from what we saw go down in Venezuela.
It's allegedly an F 15, not an F 35.
Your thoughts on everything that's going down there right now?
Well, sometimes it seems as though Americans have sort of the attention span of about five year olds, really expecting a war to end in about 24 hours, 72 hours.
Sometimes it takes a little time, and also some context helps as well.
It is amazing that we have not lost any aircraft to date.
Simply impossible to imagine that.
It gives you a good idea of just how we've beaten down the Iranian slash Chinese slash Russian air defenses there.
This was bound to happen at some point, particularly when it comes to the shoulder fired surface to air missiles, the so called man pads, that are all over the place in Iran.
They must have a ton of them.
These are very hard to detect, if not impossible to detect.
And it wouldn't surprise me if somehow they got a shot off at one of the American planes, hit it, and brought it down.
It's bound to happen.
The major air defense systems, those are a little easier to take out.
But if you think of a man pad or a shoulder fired weapon, it's like having a rifle.
And they're easy to hide, hard to spot.
So it doesn't surprise me.
You can see the Americans move heaven and earth to get those pilots back.
They've got one, apparently.
I hope they certainly hope they get the other one, but they'll do everything they possibly can.
But in the grand scheme of things, the air campaign against the Iranian regime.
As I've said, it's amazing this hasn't happened earlier.
The Americans still have free run of the country and are hitting every target that they can, particularly ones related to the Revolutionary Guards, the Basid, the militia, the real street level thugs.
And they're also going after them with drones down to a very low level.
The things to watch out now for is what happens in the Straits of Hormuz?
Does oil start flowing again?
And President Trump is doing it.
In a way, nobody ever imagined.
What he's doing, I think, is letting the Europeans, the Japanese, the Koreans, and others who depend on this oil, whereas we don't, he's making them squirm.
Normally, what they would do is they would issue these muscular statements, criticize the Americans, bite our ankles, and then wait for the US Navy and Air Force to go clean out the Persian Gulf so that the oil starts flowing.
He's making them sort of, as I said, swing in the wind and figure out if they want to get involved here.
On the grounds that, well, they're the ones who benefit from this.
How this is going to play out, we should know in a few days.
So I think things are going to get very interesting after about a week down in the Straits of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf.
And also, it's very interesting to see the Gulf Arab states are the ones who are most all in on this fight, and they're the ones closest to the Iranians, and they want us to finish it off.
And always, there's so much that goes on behind the scenes that we don't know.
And no commentator knows the negotiations, for example.
Nobody's really got any good insights into that, and things are working.
We'll see how this plays out.
But it's one where you have to have a little patience and give the people in the ring who are running it a little time and some effort and the ability to actually do their jobs and get things done.
The admiral running this, Brad Cooper, is excellent.
And so far, things are moving along according to a plan.
It is important to keep in mind that it's only been about a month that this fight has been going on, and the results to date have been unbelievable and largely cost free, unless you're obviously one of the people who's gotten hurt.
But in terms of the previous wars we've had, other fights, this one is moving along.
And as I said, we do have these short attention spans.
Sometimes you wonder how our parents and grandparents' generation were able to withstand the casualties that we took and the setbacks we took in places like.
Well, World War II, just all over the place.
But that's the nature of modern society.
I think we're all wired a little differently these days.
But there's a few things to keep watching there, particularly the Persian Gulf Straits of Hormuz, hopefully get that last pilot back.
And then the negotiations and also the effort that is being taken to destroy the, as I said, the coercive infrastructure that have really tormented the Persian people, the Iranians, for so long.
The only legitimacy they had comes from having killed 45,000.
Or so Iranians a couple months ago who wanted nothing more than the right to choose who governs them.
And it is a nasty regime that has killed a lot of Americans, tortured, in the case of Bill Buckley, the CIA station chief, back in 84, 85.
They caught him in Beirut, tortured him to death, sent videos of it back to the Americans so they could watch it.
And that's the kind of regime we're dealing with.
It hasn't changed.
So I'm very interested to see how this all ends up and whether or not the regime is.
And how it will all segue with President Trump's upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping.
I think that'll be something to watch.
I'll have to get you back on to get your assessment of how what's going on there will affect that.
But unfortunately, we are running out of time.
But if people want to get your wonderful book, which I think probably has a lot of answers to that existential question, where can they go to get that?
And where can they go to follow you and keep up with everything you're working on?
And Warren Posse, it would not be a War Room show if we did not finish Good Friday with the one and only Mike Lindell, who I'm sure has a bunch of wonderful deals and probably some wonderful news for the posse.
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