Episode 5298: Chinese Ship Passes Through Blockade; Goal Is To Choke Off Iran's Funds
Stephen K. Bass and guests analyze a U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz that successfully halted the sanctioned Chinese tanker Rich Starry, asserting this strategy effectively cuts off Iran's funds regardless of departure ports. While President Trump meets with China's ambassador to counter claims of illegitimate force, hosts John Solomon and Sam Faddis declare a strategic victory as Iran accepted a five-year nuclear moratorium versus the U.S. demand for twenty years. The episode further connects these geopolitical shifts to domestic efforts dismantling the "deep state" via indictments of former officials and highlights Justice Department sentencing disparities against pro-life advocates under the Biden administration, framing military spending increases as essential to counter adversaries like China and Iran. [Automatically generated summary]
It's Tuesday, 14 April in the year of our Lord 2026.
There's a lot going on.
John Solomon's going to join us in a moment with breaking story after breaking story about this Tulsi Gabbard DNI going after the deep state, who the whistleblower is, everything that's converging on that front, which is maybe the most landmark front President Trump will do in taking down the deep state for this country and for patriots.
We also have a Naval blockade going on in the north, in the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz.
Let's go to Captain James Fennell.
Captain, can you give us an assessment?
In fact, I think last night maybe it was a confused thing that a CCP vessel got through.
Yeah, Steve, before we get into that, I just want to correct yesterday I had said that the USS George W. Bush was heading into the Strait of Gibraltar.
Hours after that report that had been online was corrected.
And now that we know that the Bush is actually heading down through the west coast of Africa, is off of Namibia and is heading around the Cape of Good Hope and avoiding the Red Sea and the Bab el Mandeb.
Regarding this Chinese owned ship, it's called the Rich Starry.
And it's Malawi flagged.
It's under OFAC sanctions for illegal shipments.
And it was sitting at an anchorage in Oman inside the Arabian Gulf.
It had been at anchorage.
It's an oil and chemical tanker, fully laden.
And when the embargo or the blockade started yesterday at 10 Eastern Time on the 13th of April, within the hour, the rich story started moving towards the Iranian troll booth, if you will.
And she got about Halfway there from her anchorage and turned around and stopped and then turned around and went back.
Then, several hours later, she started going through the strait.
And as you can see from the graphic, she actually went through the strait of Hormuz just south of Larrack Island.
And everybody on the internet, when that happened six, eight hours ago.
And what you'll see is a yellow track going south of Kesham and south of Larick Island.
And then that yellow track goes down through the Strait of Hormuz.
And before it got to that red box, the internet exploded and said, ah, see, the blockade's failed.
Well, now, in the last four or five hours, the rich starry went to that red box and then stopped and has turned around and gone back on that red track and is headed back up towards and is now south of Larick Island, Kesham Island.
So, that's just one vessel that's been clearly turned around.
There's another report of another one or two vessels that have been turned around.
So, we're in this fog of war right now in terms of what exactly is happening.
But there is evidence that the U.S. Navy's blockade has, in effect, been effective and is starting to turn around sanctioned ships.
Now, this ship did not come out of an Iranian port, it came out of the UAE, which is on that southern peninsula there inside the Gulf at an anchorage.
There are other ships that are coming out.
There's some reports that some ships that were in Iranian ports have gone through.
That's not been confirmed yet.
So I would guess that in the first hours of this, there's going to be some leakers and things of that nature.
But the U.S. Navy looks and appears to be putting this blockade in place and doing exactly what President Trump said he was going to do.
And this, again, this ship was headed for China.
It's Chinese owned, Malawi flag, Chinese owned.
It was heading for China, and that has been turned around.
That's a tanker of oil that the Chinese will not get.
How does this work if I think, at least what I've seen, I don't know what the notice to mariners is, but what I've seen from CENTCOMs, that they are basically putting the Iranian ports, Karg Island, anything that's Iranian, and they're tracking.
If it comes out, it's going to get turned back.
But supposedly our allies, the Saudis, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and in fact, I think they were, people were very excited that one of the liquefied natural gas.
Vessels got out.
How does something leave UAE, even if it's part of this gray fleet or ghost fleet that gets turned around?
Obviously, it's CCP oil.
I mean, you want it turned around.
I want it turned around, but we're anti CCP guys.
Is that in the rules of the game?
I thought if it came out of UAE, if it came out of one of our allies' ports, it's good to go.
Or have they taken a second consideration that if it's gray shipped or they think it's going to go to China, it gets turned around?
It was because it was already an OFAC, internationally sanctioned vessel for what it had already done running illegally obtained oil.
So, coming out of Iran.
So, presumably, that ship at some point, I don't know its full history, had received Iranian oil.
So, that's why it's under sanction.
Maybe it's under sanction because it ran Russian oil sometime earlier.
I don't know all the details.
But the fact is that it was an OFAC sanctioned vessel, and that is part of the criteria that we're going to stop.
So, we're going to stop every ship.
Vessel that comes out of Iranian waters, Iranian ports.
They have six main ports that provide or supply 90% of Iran's economy and trade.
So those will be the six that will be watched the most.
And then we'll be watching for sanctioned vessels.
And then we've even said in the notice to mariners, we've even said, even neutral countries that we think may have some suspicious activities, we have the right to reserve to look at those.
And we will do that as well.
So this is going to be a fairly thorough effort.
To make sure that China cannot run oil or China, Iran cannot run oil out, buy and sell oil, and as well as we don't want to see weapons coming in.
We don't want to see ballistic missile parts or components for nuclear material or whatever it is.
We don't want that coming into Iran either.
So, what we need now is to get our allies to get engaged with this and help join the fight, our allies in the Gulf and our allies in NATO.
And let's see if that's going to happen.
But right now, at the U.S. Navy, once again, America is carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.
I mean, I think they had a meeting yesterday, but haven't they been adamant that the Royal Navy, the French Navy, the Italian Navy, three they could help right away, are not going to be part of this?
And I think it goes to show you how they have not invested.
You know, they've invested in their workers taking holidays, six week holidays in the summer, and retiring at 50 and having full pensions.
Why American workers don't have that?
We've got a $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed by President Trump that's in Scott.
Russ' vote is going to, I think, on Thursday go to the House Budget Committee, and I'm sure he's going to get some incoming on that.
But we have allies that, at best, it'd be on paper.
Yes, the Royal Navy is going to send a destroyer, the French will send a frigate, the Italians will send a corvette, so they'll make a huge deal about their part of this.
But do they really have enough wherewithal of naval forces, naval assets to actually do this, sir?
I think that the French and the Italians, and if you combined all of them, they could probably scrape together a half a dozen destroyers that would help alleviate some of that pressure.
But I think right now, and I think given President Trump's previous responses to the UK when they wanted to send carriers, I mean, they actually have two aircraft carriers that don't have any surface combatants that can escort them.
It's the strangest thing that you'd ever imagine that the Royal Navy could have aircraft carriers without escorting destroyers.
The USS Bush, that's heading down the west coast of Africa right now, she's got three destroyers with her the Cook, the Mason, and the Ross, as well as a fast refueler, the Arctic.
So there are five ships that are steaming down with the Bush.
That's how we send our carrier strike groups around.
We do that with our expeditionary strike groups.
We don't just send big decks alone by themselves.
It's an integrated air defense arrangement, and the British aren't there.
So we're doing this, and we're moving other assets.
There are two Avenger class traditional minesweepers that were in Japan.
We had commissioned a number that were in Bahrain for years.
We commissioned those in February and sent those to the west, the east coast of the United States, right before this all kicked off, which is ironic.
But now we've got two that were in Singapore, came out of Japan, went to Singapore, and on the 8th of April left Singapore and are heading into the Gulf.
We've got the USS Tripoli amphibious ready group there.
She's got a big deck that can put out helicopters and And other platforms into the water.
There's also word of an expeditionary support base that's en route as well, which will have another flight deck and special operators and people that can do boardings and seizures of ships.
So we're serious about this and it's going to get done.
And again, like we said in previous episodes, the goal is to choke Iran off from access to funds.
And when that money goes away, how are they going to survive?
And let's be blunt this enforcing function with the Chinese Communist Party.
Yeah, India is part of it.
But today at 5 30, and folks, we'll be covering this live on the five to seven hour here at the dwarf.
At 5 30, the Chinese ambassador to the United States is going to be in the Oval Office.
I don't know why we give him that much, you know, gets a meeting with the president instead of the Secretary of State or some other, you know, some ambassadorial grundoon.
But he's going to be in there whining.
The Chinese already said this illegitimate.
That the United States is not going to have anything, no say so, nothing to do with blocking them, that they're China and we're not.
He's going to make a plea today, particularly prior to this meeting, President Trump in mid May, to relieve the pressure on this.
Is he not, sir?
He's not going over to have a cup of tea.
He's going over to make a case that they need the Chinese Communist Party to stop and they need it to stop immediately.
They're going to play up to the international press.
They'll use this time, this airtime, to portray themselves as the victim.
Xi Jinping met with an Emirates or one of the Gulf state princes yesterday in Beijing and came out with a four point plan.
And one of the points was we have to respect international law and we can't allow might makes right and the law of the jungle to creep into these kinds of issues.
Funny, we didn't hear Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party say anything about that when Iran illegally.
You know, started attacking vessels in the Gulf and in the Strait of Hormuz, or when they set up an illegal toll booth.
Didn't hear peep out of the Chinese Communist Party when that happened.
But now, when the United States of America is putting into effect a very effective blockade, now they're going to come crying to the international community.
And I look forward to seeing the president, you know, foot stomp this guy.
He'll be nice to him, but he's going to foot stomp him.
So there's a naval blockade and it's having an impact.
Everybody in the world is talking about it.
All the capital markets are talking about it.
The financiers are talking about it.
The United States Navy is implementing this right now.
The Chinese Communist Party has an audience at 5 30 p.m. this afternoon in the Oval Office with the President of the United States, and they're going to make their case.
Hopefully, maybe we bring up a couple of three things about the Strait of Taiwan and the South China Sea and how they're trying to muscle the Philippines and other nations, littoral nations around the South China Sea, saying that the South China Sea is an internal sea of China.
Sam Faddis is going to join us with some wisdom about the Iranian Solomons here, deep state.
But I want to start, John.
The ambassador, and it'll probably be live during your show, the ambassador from the Imperial Court in Beijing is paying a visit to the Oval Office at 5 30.
Yeah, I think the thoughts are that if we were in Broadway, we remember this old song from Oklahoma Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.
And that's what President Trump just showed Iran and China.
You want a blockade of Hormuz?
Watch this.
Nothing gets out.
Nothing gets in.
Why is that such a taking time bomb for Iran?
Obviously, they've got cash flow issues, but the real crisis, the thing that Iran would self destroy its own oil industry is within three weeks, they will be at full capacity, meaning there's nowhere else to store oil if it can't get out of the Strait of Hormuz.
In that scenario, the wells start to back up, they start to get brackish water, and they come to a grinding halt.
Iran would lose billions of dollars of infrastructure when those wells start to go to that sort of latent status.
They can't afford to let that happen with all the destruction that's already occurred.
So, President Trump has played the ultimate chicken game, which is hey, if you can't get any more oil out in a few weeks, good luck with those wells.
And I think that's what's got everybody's attention.
China's got, is coming here to see the president.
I think it's an act of deference.
They may have some rhetoric when they come to the White House oh, they're violating the law.
But at the end of the day, China's message is we need that oil.
What do we got to do to get a deal?
What's happened in the last 48 hours?
There are reports that Iran went from no, we won't give up our nuclear weapons to a five year moratorium.
Trump countered with a 20 year moratorium, and I think he'll hold out for the 20 year moratorium.
That's what the reports in the New York Times say.
That is a real sign that Iran has blinked in a big way.
And I think this strategy works.
He's not firing bombs right now, the ceasefire is held, but he's got a stranglehold on Iran and China, and by the way, India.
And Iran and India will have now every motive to fix this because they'll be dry of energy within a couple of months.
Folks know as a former naval officer and having been over there, and Captain Fanel and the people we have on here, Pasobik, et cetera, we've been a big advocate of this as a forcing function, right?
And maybe you can argue later it should have been done first.
But there's no doubt, John, that we got the ambassador burning up the phone.
She's telling him, get a meeting.
I need you in the Oval Office to get over there.
There's certainly, we've raised this, and this is why I keep saying, don't deal with intermediaries.
Let's have principle to principle.
Trump's now got the instrument he and Besson have worked out.
And what I love about what Fanel just said was, Folks, let's not bury the lead.
These are OFAC sanctioned.
That means Scott Besson's hands all over this and feeding that information to intelligence and to the fleet.
So now we have an organized process.
The Chinese get no oil and the Mullahs get no cash.
And so they're jammed up right now.
They're going to have workarounds and try to have workarounds, but the basic bottom line is we blocked them and they got to come over as supplicants.
Now they're going to talk lots of trash.
Your advice to the president would be what, John Solomon?
John, I can't tell you after your appearances now the last couple of days about the deep state and particularly about the impeachment and all this.
My phone blows up all day with people going, You and Solomon are killing me.
When are we going to get it?
When are we going to perp walk?
When is Vinman going to perp walk?
And I think the whole Swalwell thing that goes from the leading governor of the government's rights in California to out of Congress, I still think this is part of it because he was such a big part, such a loudmouth about this and being on the Intelligence Committee.
He's deep.
He's intertwined in this.
That's why they're going to game out of town.
So just get us up to date what's going on.
But when are we going to start seeing the action of perp walks for these guys?
The law defense lawyers that I'm talking to, the defense community, believe that there will be one or two major indictments this month in the weaponization out of that grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida.
The staff of the prosecutors are ramping up.
Some big name prosecutors are going to be joining that office soon.
That is an excellent sign that, and the activity is very high.
The focal point in the last few weeks in the grand jury, according to defense lawyers, has been John Brennan for potential lying to Congress or false statements to Congress.
Obstruction of a congressional proceeding.
And then there's some new evidence apparently involving the former FBI Director James Comey.
Some of that may have come from the NSA, the National Security Agency, and some testimony and documents that were recently turned over.
So there's a lot of activity.
I would keep an eye on those two big guys.
By the way, those are two big fish at the top of the food chain.
But I think this month is what most defense lawyers think will be the first major indictments.
These won't be the Virginia ones that frittered away in a few short weeks.
These are serious indictments in a district that's going to sustain them all the way to trial.
And yeah, so I think that's it.
Now, in the meantime, just a little bit ago, the president retweeted one of my stories with an admonition to the great Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz.
You should go do this.
What is he talking about?
Last night, here in Real America's Voice, Alan Dershowitz suggested that the president now had the legal right to go to either the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, who presided over the impeachment proceedings of 2019, or to Congress and ask Congress, you ready for this, to vacate.
To erase his impeachment because of the evidence that Tosi Gabbard has now made public of cheating.
What is that cheating?
They knew President Trump's chief accuser, the alleged whistleblower, the guy who filed that complaint in August of 2019, had one, misled the intelligence community in his complaint, two, had serious issues of bias, and three, knew nothing firsthand.
Everything was hearsay, first, second, and third hearsay.
Those three elements were kept from the president's defense team, the Senate jurors.
The House impeachment managers.
Alan Dershowitz said, Hey, when this happens in a criminal case, it's a Brady violation.
They usually vacate the conviction.
I think the president can go and vacate this impeachment finding in December, literally erase it from the books through a vote of Congress or by a declaration by the Supreme Court justice, who was the trial judge.
The president this morning shared that story and said, Alan, you should go do it.
I think he just hired Alan Dershowitz.
We're trying to get that confirmed, but keep a close eye on that one.
Listen, Russia collusion became Ukraine collusion.
It was one continuous operation.
Then Ukraine handed off to two other scandals.
The whole goal was to pin down Donald Trump with any fake narrative they could get.
And now we are unraveling that narrative.
I really want to shout out Tulsi, John Radcliffe, all the people who've been working to defeat the deep state and get me these documents.
They had to do a lot of firefights to get these documents clear.
Last night, there was a big tweet by Kash Patel's chief spokesman at the FBI.
His name is Ben Williamson, saying, We've been reviewing this evidence that Tulsi Gabbard made public.
It's the same.
In fact, he used the same analogy I did, which is, This is Russia collusion 2.0.
Why is that important?
In these documents, there is evidence that potentially impeaches the testimony of some of the witnesses at the trial.
You're going to see a story from us in a couple of days.
We're going to show you what was testified to and what now we believe the truth is.
That could lead to several people being identified as having given false testimony to Congress in an impeachment proceeding.
The statute of limitations on the specific testimonies will have expired.
That's the role that the deep state managed to succeed at.
Keep this a secret for six years.
But when you move to a conspiracy, once they can show that Russia handed off to Ukraine, Ukraine handed off to January 6th, January 6th, ended up the classified documents.
You can go back and charge some of the people with false statements.
I am told last night that the FBI identified two people from these documents that they got who testified something different than what's in the documents.
Now, whether that turns out to become part of the criminal case or the conspiracy case, we'll wait and see.
But that process is you got to get that conspiracy laid out so that you can go back and charge old crimes that the deep state managed to keep hidden.
But that's what's going on.
That's what Jason Canonis is doing.
That's what Kash Patel is doing.
That's what Todd is doing.
And I think when you look at that team right now, there's been a lot of motion since Pam Bondi left the Justice Department.
Today, they finally released the report on how the FACE Act was weaponized against anti abortion advocates or pro life people.
What are we talking about?
You had the Biden Justice Department working with anti abortion groups to target pro lifers and infringe their free speech.
You see a two to one disparity in sentencing.
If you're pro life, you got twice the sentence.
Requested by the Justice Department that you got if you were a pro abortion protester who was arrested.
That is a very serious disparity.
And today, the Justice Department, the Trump Justice Department, got right on that and told the American people the truth.
What they say is that behind closed doors, Iran appears much more eager for a deal than they do publicly because of the country's economic desperation.
The other thing that I heard was that.
Iran projects unity publicly, but also behind closed doors.
There's a lot of jockeying for power.
After the supreme leader was killed, after ruling for 37 years, there's a lot of people who are vying to be Iran's most powerful official, especially given we don't know the health of Moshe Bakhmani.
A source familiar with the negotiations telling ABC News the U.S. has now proposed a 20 year suspension to Iran's nuclear program rather than the permanent end the administration has insisted on earlier.
According to the New York Times, Iran's countered with an offer.
Of a five year suspension, though there's no word on the administration's response.
Since the start of the war, the president promised this conflict would last only four or five weeks.
Now, with the war entering its seventh week, a fragile ceasefire is in place as oil and gas prices remain high with no relief in sight.
When I spoke with this person familiar with all of these discussions, essentially, this is their hope that they could get a second round of talks.
I'm told that internally, Trump administration officials are looking at different locations and potential dates with the goal.
Of trying to have another in person meeting, again, with the top officials who were there in Islamabad on Saturday, people like the Vice President JD Vance, Jared Kushner, Steve Wyckoff, in person with the Iranians before this two week ceasefire expires next week on April 21st.
Now, again, they are preliminary talks, and I'm told that's because they need to make sure that when they meet in person a second time, when they have all of these U.S. officials go abroad to have this meeting, they want to ensure that a deal is.
Can be had.
Now, of course, we saw Saturday's talks stretch 21 hours, a marathon session.
From my conversations with Trump administration officials, Kate, they said they weren't expecting it to go that long and that there was some progress made.
But really, at the end of the day, and you kind of heard the vice president say this during that interview you shared, he felt like perhaps the Iranian officials in the room with them face to face did not have enough authority to make some of the decisions that the Trump team was really pushing on them.
And so they're hoping that when a second round Could potentially happen if it potentially happens, they will be in a much closer place.
There will be a lot more preparation and pre work that could go into it to really outline the contours of what a final agreement could look like.
Now, you mentioned some of this, but some of the issues that we're told that came up during that Saturday session related to one, the moratorium on enriched uranium.
You mentioned it, but that 20 year moratorium the U.S. put forward, the Iranians coming back with a five year one.
And really, it is the enriched uranium that has been a true sticking point here.
Of course, also this commitment that they want.
From Iran to say that they would never have a nuclear weapon, all to say.
The Trump team does seem more optimistic than they had in the aftermath of that meeting on Saturday that a deal can be had.
But of course, there's so much going on here.
We have to really see how the Iranians respond, especially as we're seeing this now U.S. blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, really designed to put an economic stranglehold on the Iranians.
We'll have to see if that leverage is enough to push this forward.
That's right, the Starry Rich, which is a mid-sized oil tanker.
Interestingly, it's a Malawi-flagged ship, although it is quite clearly owned by China, and it also broadcasts its own signals as being affiliated with China.
We know that it left Dubai yesterday on Monday and actually stopped before the U.S. trade blockade was announced, and it actually went to do a U-turn, and then it continued through the Strait of Hormuz, and we know it was the first vessel to pass through the Strait since the blockade was imposed on Tuesday.
Now, interestingly, as you mentioned, it was actually sanctioned in 2023 by the U.S. for evading its sanctions on Iran.
And so, really, its passage through the Strait raises more questions than it provides answers.
First of all, was it allowed by the U.S. to pass through the Strait because it was coming from Dubai and not from Iran?
Or was its passage kind of missed by the U.S., maybe pointing to how difficult it is to enforce a blockade of that waterway?
So, I think we have to see how many more ships are able to pass and what their affiliations are.
For Chinese President Xi Jinping in the morning, he met with UAE Crown Prince, who is joined by a rather large delegation of government and industry officials.
They're here to strengthen, they say, the comprehensive strategic partnership between the UAE and China.
So we're expecting some trade deals to come out of that and behind closed doors, no doubt.
They also discussed the war in Iran.
After that, President Xi hosted Pedro Sanchez from Spain.
Now, this is the Spanish leader's fourth visit to China in just a few years.
He's been criticised by some in Europe for treating China as a sort of strategic ally rather than an adversary.
He's really spoken about strengthening the ties between Beijing and Madrid for economic reasons, but he also says that the two countries have more in common, that they both respect international law and international order.
He's actually calling on Xi Jinping to play a bigger role in the multipolar order and to do more when it comes to the war in Iran.
He said at a press conference following his lunch with Xi Jinping that no interlocutor is like China, and is like China able to play a key diplomatic role to end this conflict?
They also spoke about countries he mentioned, countries that violate international law, that they are only just subjected to threats, i.e. Israel.
So the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, there, very critical of Israel and the US, moving closer to Beijing.
First of all, I thought the nuclear war was going to be in perpetuity to get rid of, but now it's 20 years for five years.
Ba bing, ba bang, but fine.
Figure it out.
We just want to get the hell out of there.
The ambassador to China is running over, burning up the phone lines yesterday, running over to the White House today to go in front of President Trump and make the case oh, this is horrible.
These are international waters.
You're going to destroy the world's economy.
You're coming.
We're going to have a huge deal.
In mid May, don't ruin it.
You got to let us off.
Now's the time to put the screws down on them even harder.
This is why you got to go seize all their assets, including in, wait for it, the UAE, in Dubai, in the bank, Sam Fattis.
We finally now have people's attention, right?
Not under the rubble of Tehran where he bombed them.
That was part, okay?
That got part of their attention, but this is where you bring them to their knees.
What Scott Besson was doing in January.
How did you have millions of people on the streets in January when he destroyed the currency and 30,000 got slaughtered?
By the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard because he was breaking them financially.
We're beginning the process of doing that now, and all the parties that have been trading with them understand that, and the Persians themselves understand that.
Birchgold.com, promo code Bannon, end of the dollar empire.
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It's not too late.
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Okay, go there.
Or I want you to call today if you're nervous about filing.
Also, this is fantasy out there.
There's an article about it.
I'm trying to get Cameron on Kinsey maybe tonight or tomorrow because tomorrow's filing day.
Tomorrow's the 15th, right?
Today's fourth.
Okay, got it.
The Ides of April.
There's this fantasy out there because Besson, there's been so many layoffs and guys leaving and Doge here and Doge there that there's not enough agents to go collect their money.
Okay, let me be blunt.
Russ Vogt, one of our former contributors here, ran CRA, is now Office of Management and Budget, one of the best guys out there.
He's going to get lit up like a Christmas tree on Thursday.
I think he goes to the House budget.
The Democrats are going to come all over him.
And there are significant deficits.
We're going to talk about increasing military spending.
Now, there are going to be some offsets or talk about offsets in social programs, but of course, the Democrats never agree to that.
What does that mean?
Bigger deficits means we've got to figure out every potential piece of revenue that the government thinks they're owed.
That's the bid in the ass between what they think you owe them and what you think they owe them.
In the middle, there is where you can have a negotiation.
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Sam Faddis, you mentioned surrender.
You've dealt with these guys.
You were in the country for a decade.
I mean, you've dealt with them.
Is their mindset right now, hey, they took one of the most brutal bombing campaigns in mankind's history under the rubble in Tehran and other places?
There are a lot of dead, bad hombres that these guys used to be colleagues of.
But hey, They've kind of gotten field promotions.
So the world's not that bad.
Now they're shut down by the Americans by sea.
We're trying to stop overland incursions in there to rearm them and to get the fuel out.
Also, you said, hey, I'm sure there's an air already, nothing to fly in or out that the American either naval air force or air force can't stop.
Do they believe that they are defeated to they would surrender?
Are they trying to do the old Persian trick of the market negotiations and figure out something and get the best they can get now, sir?
I mean, look, you know, hope is not a plan, and refusing to face reality doesn't take us to victory.
We thought they were going to apparently believe they were going to collapse immediately.
They didn't.
They published a 10 point plan in advance of the Islamabad meetings that was a surrender document.
You and I talked about that.
We went to Islamabad when we sat down with them in that context, having them ridden out the offensive and still standing and still threatening the Gulf and closing.
The straits, they absolutely believe they're winning.
Now, we walked away.
We've now taken a major positive step by closing the straits.
My concern, now we're once again in this mode of, well, it's about over and they're about to quit.
Certainly now they will surrender.
You know, I'm the happiest guy in the world if they announce, as while you and I are talking here, that that's in fact the case.
Wonderful, it's over.
Assuming that, thinking that suddenly we transformed this, I think is very ill advised.
Pour on the pressure and move right now to counter the things that they may do as they lash out.
Because that's cyber attacks.
That's every U.S. embassy in the world.
That's all the desalination plants in the Gulf.
I mean, don't assume that these guys are getting ready to quit.
Again, if it happens, fabulous.
But don't get caught off guard again, thinking that it's all over, but the shouting and we win.
We may be a long way from there.
We really just turn the screws on them.
I mean, that's what you do when you're talking to these guys and it's obvious that they sat down in the room with you and they think you can play you.
You don't.
Make nice with them.
You get up and walk away from the table and then lay waste to them.
That's, and then maybe we can talk.
And you're just really clear about it.
Like, I'm going to put, you know, I've had conversations where I've said to the guy I'm talking to, this is the deal.
And if you don't take the deal, we're putting a JDAM through the roof of your building and it's blowing up on your desk.
That's where we are.
Now, do you want to talk or not?
I mean, you know, not to be melodramatic, that is the way you have to approach it.
I'll bug you, see if you can come on tomorrow because there's a piece on War on the Rocks that talks about a tactical victory in a strategic defeat for the United States of America right now in the Iran war.
So, I'll get your thoughts on it to wean showing it today and get you back on tomorrow.