James Comey faces federal charges over an Instagram post, while Pete Hegseth withstands Democratic attacks on troop deployments and defends the $25 billion cost of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Jerome Powell remains a Fed governor after charge dismissals, and Ambassador Carla Sands argues Democrats target officials to block Trump's reindustrialization agenda. The episode highlights H-1B visa fraud allegations and Virginia's stalled election certification due to data discrepancies, suggesting that relentless political warfare and legal chaos threaten democratic stability and national security. [Automatically generated summary]
The mobster says to one of his wonderful associates, 86 him.
That means kill him.
I think of it as a mob term.
People think of it as something having to do with disappearing, but the mob uses that term to say when they want to kill somebody, they say 86, the son of a gun.
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I want to go back to the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act.
Well, if anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86.
You know what 86 is?
It's a mob term for kill him.
You know?
You ever see the movies?
86 him.
The mobster says to one of his wonderful associates, 86 him.
That means kill him.
I think of it as a mob term.
People think of it as something having to do with disappearing, but the mob uses that term to say when they want to kill somebody, they say, 86, the son of a gun.
You didn't even do the analysis on how much it's costing the American people.
It's one thing if you said, okay, it cost the American people $5,000, but we think it's worth it.
That's what we've done in World War II and other wars.
Here's what it costs.
You've got to pay for it.
You don't even know what the average American is paying.
You don't know what we paid.
In terms of the missiles that hit the Iranian school, you don't know what we're paying in terms of gas, you don't know what we're paying in terms of food.
Well, Secretary Hegseth, if President Trump ordered you to deploy troops to polling places during the midterm elections this fall, which would violate the law I just cited, would you implement his order, yes or no?
I humbly disagree with that, but this is not a hypothetical situation that I'm inferring on.
The type of voting places was 250 years ago.
We're talking 2020.
So if the president, again, I'm asking you, orders you to break election law, violate the Constitution and the law, would you follow the orders of the president?
There's a much larger picture at play here that included integrated air defenses, bunkers, moving people off the ex to ensure that they were not part of the target.
We moved those troops and all across the theater, thousands of troops off the ex, off of their bases, because we knew what Iran was going to try to strike.
And we knew there could be a tragic moment.
There could be a tragic moment where something could get through.
It only took about five minutes to get through this hearing today.
It was an initial appearance against this new set of criminal charges.
Two charges, one including threatening the life of the president with that seashell post on Instagram a year ago.
There wasn't a pleading at this time for Comey.
He was just facing his charges for the first time in the Eastern District of Virginia court.
The case is going to move now to North Carolina.
But we got a little taste of what that might be like.
And guess what?
It's going to be a redux in some ways of the case Comey was putting on as his defense, like he did in the previous charges he faced, which were perjury counts.
That case was ultimately dismissed out of EDVA a couple months ago.
What his defense lawyers told the judge today is they're going to file a motion saying that the Justice Department has singled him out unfairly and illegally in prosecuting him this time.
They made that argument before, saying that the only reason he was facing perjury charges was because Donald Trump really hated him.
It ended up never getting ruled on because the case went away before that.
But that is the plan again.
That motion will come back into play here.
There's also an indication that Comey's team wants to make sure the Justice Department and the administration, the Trump administration, protects all of their records.
There's been some changes legally that the Justice Department has made about how they maintain presidential records.
We could see some really interesting arguments over that as Comey fights this case.
But this is going to be a different court ultimately, even though this court he was in today is one he had been in before.
They even said at one point when the Justice Department spoke up and said, You know, we want to put some bail terms on him to release him under bail conditions.
But Eastern District of North Carolina, New Bern, North Carolina, that courthouse, a very different bench, a very different set of judges, and potentially a very different jury pool if it gets to that.
Even after the obliteration of Midnight Hammer, what was clear is that the intention of Iran remained in the pursuit of nuclear weapons.
And as hard as they were hit by Israel, it created an opportunity to get rid of the conventional shield.
That's why we talked about missile production and the Navy and the defense industrial base to set them back from blackmailing the region and the world in pursuit of nuclear weapons because we understood how much they could continue to pursue them.
When I went through, There was a bipartisan civility.
Nobody attacked me.
Nobody attacked anyone else on my panel.
And I think it was less contentious.
Here's the problem now they don't have the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax collusion stuff to go after and stop his agenda.
So President Trump has rolled out this magnificent agenda, working to bring down prices for Americans, working to make us more secure, to get our trade more reciprocal and fair, re industrialize us, put us on the edge of quantum and AI so that China doesn't win.
And he's reordering the global order, and the Democrats can't stand it because everything he's doing is great.
He's making the world safer for us.
And so they can't stop him.
So, what are they going to do?
They're just going to attack his soldiers.
And certainly, Pete Hegseth is front and center as one of the absolute important people in the Trump administration as far as these wars and he's executing, but also the ending of wars.
Well, I think that President Trump has done everything he can to bring back civility.
He's held out his hand to enemies and friends alike.
He went to the dinner, and that is in the lion's den because most of the press, about 93%, is negative coverage.
So they really don't want to help President Trump.
His agenda.
And many of them are leading on that leftist Democrat really takeover, which is more like communism in the U.S. People don't understand.
These people are intent on reordering our country and not letting us have the freedoms that we enjoy.
If you just think if Kamala Harris had won this last election, what our country would be like, well, that's what they want.
That's their plan for us.
So President Trump needs to win this midterm.
It's going to be really tough because just historically, it's tough to win when you're the president in that.
First midterm.
But President Trump needs to.
Otherwise, we're going to have impeachments for two years.
And that's going to make it harder for him to fulfill his agenda.
And so I hope that people will work really, really hard and double down to hold the House and to hold the House and the Senate.
The House is going to be the hard one.
But because of our magnificent Supreme Court, which is ruling constitutionally and not unconstitutionally, we now have a better chance of holding the House if some of these state houses will get busy and make sure that they have.
Maps that are conducive to equal representation, not race based representation.
No, the DEI gerrymandering getting thrown out by the Supreme Court in a day.
Alabama's attorney general came out.
We'll be on top of that again, like we were this morning.
Tomorrow morning, Ambassador Sands talking about the key thing you've got to get these special sessions called, like we just had this great special session in Florida.
Ambassador, you know a lot about NATO.
You were one of President Trump's top advisors in the first term as an ambassador.
Your assessment of the trip the king made, comments he made, and talking about the unity we've had and how we've worked together.
But also NATO's performance in the Iran war, ma'am.
Yeah, I mean, the king was here definitely projecting soft power from Great Britain to the U.S.
And we all love the U.K. because many of us have ancestors that come from there.
I'm mostly Scottish, so I have a very great fondness also for the U.K.
But the fact is that Great Britain has not done a good job with NATO.
They have a very Poor Navy.
They couldn't even send a ship to help us out in the Hormuz when they finally did offer the ship broke down.
And they couldn't prosecute the Falklands War today because they're in such poor condition.
They have to spend more and they're throttling their economy with these bad policies, especially bad energy policies.
And just in the EU writ large, they have bad energy policies and way too much regulation.
So we're losing our greatest trading partner.
NATO, it's not just NATO.
We're also a huge trading block, almost $2 trillion a year.
And that's the really biggest trading block in the world.
And we need to keep it.
But like President Trump's national security strategy late last year called out, we're losing them, not just because of demographics, but bad policy.
And so King Charles was here to patch things up.
I do feel better about the relationship because of his great visit.
And it's a full court press.
And America is shining in our 250th anniversary year.
But the fact is that It doesn't change that Kirsten Armour is in charge of the UK and that they are not helping us and didn't even let us use the Diego Garcia base during this initial Iran effort.
And so many other European allies, NATO allies, closed their airspace to us.
So I think that NATO is being rethought for real allies and not just pretend allies so that we give them Article 5 protection.
Yeah, it's so, yeah, but there's so much fraud, Steve.
It may be legal immigration, but these H 1B visas or the EB2s, where it's, you know, if they're going to offer an extraordinary benefit to the United States, so they're having people, they're paying people to write papers for them so they qualify for this.
This is cheating.
They're not writing the paper themselves, they're hiring talent for that.
Or they fake degrees.
Like there was an article in the China morning, the Daily Morning Post saying that there were 36,000.
Fake degrees sold for under $5,000 to people that wanted to come to the U.S.
And American employers were accepting these fake degrees.
And that's tragic because what's happening is American STEM graduates are being hired at a much lower rate than foreign STEM graduates.
It's at 90% of the new hires since COVID have been foreign born, not U.S. born citizens.
And so President Trump is trying to make America great again, and he wants American citizens to have good paying jobs.
It's part of his full court press, right?
Reindustrialized, but STEM graduates deserve to have good jobs too.
It's medical, it's tech, it's engineers.
In fact, some of the universities, I'll just name a few Emory, Indiana, Stanford, they're offering jobs available only to H 1B employees.
In other words, their own graduates don't even qualify if they're American born.
This has to stop, especially companies or universities that are getting taxpayer dollars.
They can't prefer foreigners to U.S. born citizens.
These young people.
Are getting hired, even if they go to the same university as a foreign born person, they're getting hired at a lower rate than the foreigners.
And that even goes for medical doctors.
It is unacceptable.
And so I hope that people will be aware of this and make sure that they're advocating for American citizens to get these jobs.
Eli Crane and people in the House have initiated with Rosemary Jenks, other folks, a new bill addressing H 1Bs, which is pretty, it doesn't get rid of the entire program, but it's pretty.
Well, you know, he has a lot of pressure from the tech bros that are really involved in his administration.
So it's going to be hard for him to make this change.
So I think it probably has to come from the Congress making it.
In fact, there is legislation from a Democrat senator from Arizona.
He's saying make American call centers great again.
He's saying if a company Gets grant money from the U.S. government or any kind of support from the U.S. government, they should have to hire American call center employees.
Can you imagine how many stay at home moms raising kids would love to work at home and be a call center from her home desk rather than having somebody from, say, India answering that phone?
Our own Neil McCabe, he was following, he was up on Capitol Hill and following the Pete Hegseth.
You know, Pete sometimes, as we've said when we've done the analysis of the live of his press conferences, maybe sometimes gets a little over his skis, but what he did today was magnificent.
He stood in the breach for hour after hour and took incoming.
These Democrats, they're not interested in trying to be an assistance in running the country.
What they are trying to do is just destroy people.
And they went all out today to destroy Pete Hegseth.
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Neil McCabe, as a veteran, give me your assessment of Pete Hexas today.
The Democrats, that was off the chain.
There's one thing to ask probing questions, another thing to want information and understand they come at this politically from a different angle of attack.
But that's not what this was about today.
This is about personal destruction, just attack, attack, attack.
Pete couldn't have a chance to get any information out before he was attacked again.
This is what I was trying to say earlier, but you did a better job of articulating.
The Republicans were asking, Good questions in normal times.
But this is my point about controlled opposition.
These are not normal times, and you only had to see Pete Hex's testimony today in front of the House.
This is, you see political warfare on one side, and you see kind of the good government guys on the other.
It's just, people should have come in more and more and defended Pete and started calling out the opposite members.
There should have been a much more confrontation up there.
And this is why Johnson, these guys just don't get it.
They don't get it.
And this is why.
It is a job to get grassroots to go out.
You know, we can hold the House.
I don't want to hear the doomers or the black pill guys.
We can hold the House, but it's going to take a massive grassroots effort to do that.
Obviously, there are some policies out there that the grassroots are not thrilled about, but also just the cut of the jib and the fighting spirit of the Republicans.
Today was like a tale of two cities.
They were in two different hearings.
The Republicans are asking good questions to get information.
And it was absolutely off the chain political warfare and character assassination of Pete Hegseth.
What is it going to take, Neil?
You saw it up there.
What is it going to take for the Republicans to understand what the game is here, what the game that we're playing?
There has to be a cultural shift coming down from the Republican leadership.
I mean, as a native of Massachusetts, I saw Seth Moulton and you played Keating's clip, right?
These guys from Massachusetts, right?
They knew what to do.
They came in locked and cocked.
Like they were attacking full on in the hallways, completely packed out.
You had Code Pink out there.
I didn't see them in the hearing room, but in the hallway, they were harassing every single Republican when they went to the bathroom, when they went to the elevator.
It was like there was nothing, nothing to balance that out.
It's like the Democrats seem to understand that this is for real.
We're playing for blood.
I'm not sure what the Republicans thought.
I thought maybe they were playing four level battleship.
I'm not really sure, but it's a cultural change and it has to come from the top because, frankly, The House leadership maintains the same kind of culture that we had under Boehner, where as soon as something gets difficult, they just say, all right, let's just get off, dip this off the table and move on to something else.
I was really keyed up to hear the emphasis on war production and getting the industrial base going.
$50 billion in new industrial facilities.
They talked about the munitions problem.
They said that the war production or the munitions production was too slow and too low.
And, you know, I completely agree.
And, you know, I'm well aware that the Army pre position stock in Kuwait was gutted and sent to Ukraine.
And that's been done at other APS facilities.
And so, you know, our warfighters, if they wanted to do a ground offensive, first they have to restock because everything that was being held in Kuwait and Jordan has been given away to Ukraine.
As of yesterday, Steve, thanks for having us on, by the way.
As of yesterday, according to the Supreme Court of Virginia, they declined to issue a stay of a Taswell Circuit Court judge's voiding of the entire election and it enjoined the Department of Elections and localities and you name it from certifying and redrawing maps.
Basically, said this election is void.
And all of that's being appealed up to the Supreme Court.
And the Attorney General, Jay Jones, had filed a motion saying, Could you let us just go ahead and draw the maps while this is being adjudicated and appealed?
And the Supreme Court said, No, we declined one sentence.
We declined to issue a stay.
So there is no certifying of the vote.
And that bodes very well for people who watched the appeals on Monday of the Republicans who were challenging how the majority Democrats at the assembly.
Sort of just ran through this constitutional amendment.
And so it bodes well, and people are kind of encouraged by it based on how the questioning went, and then how the judges basically said, no, we're going to keep the stay in place.
Because if they were thinking of lifting the injunction and letting the votes go through, they would have said, yeah, go ahead, get started.
But so that's what happened Tuesday, and we'll see what happens from there.
But frankly, from our standpoint as a data company that follows voter data and who qualifies to look at Virginia's voter list, The votes have been so off this time around.
And I'll go back to what I said the last time I was on your shows because this was so rushed.
The localities, 133 localities across Virginia, had about a week and a half, maybe two weeks to get ready.
Normally, they take about six months to get ready for an election.
They had two weeks to get ready for this election.
Now, granted, it was only one question, but they had to order ballots.
They had to test the machines.
They had to know who was voting.
They had to figure out who was going to work these elections.
So it was a scrambly mess.
And we've seen that in the voter data.
As we explained to you, the numbers are still off.
We've counted up all the localities and we've counted up all the precincts inside those localities, about thousands of precincts.
And the no votes are still off by about 30,000 and the yes votes are still off by about 60,000.
So there's just a lot of votes that have to be filtered out and figured out.
But as it stands now, Steve, it's looking like none of these votes will get counted, or at least not now, maybe at a later date.
So we took the Department of Elections' own summary data.
That's the data that they put out to the public on their website on election night.
It's in what's known as a JSON feed.
That's a geek talk for Java object notation, JavaScript object notation, JSON, J S O N is the acronym.
And that gives you the election night summary data.
They give you the numbers, and then they roll in the 45 days of early voting, which represents about a third of the total vote, a third of the 3 million or so votes that were cast or ballots that were cast.
And those numbers still don't add up.
John LaRoe, our executive director, he's a brilliant data scientist, does this as a volunteer.
He added up the yes votes between localities and the actual precincts in those localities.
Like Fairfax, for example, has over 200 voting precincts.
Richmond City, for example, has probably, I think, 85 different neighborhoods where you vote.
So each of those are a precinct.
And we see a 67,364 ballot difference in the yes votes between localities.
And precincts, and about a 29,930 ballot difference in the no votes.
So, our theory is that many of the localities just haven't figured out their votes yet, or they haven't uploaded into the feed that Virginia Department of Elections puts out to the public.
And that's in addition to the counts that keep going down from early voting that we still see since we discovered that Chesterfield had put an extra 70,000 votes in their count, which they later corrected.
So, my point is that this was one of the most rushed elections we've seen in years.
We've been doing this for about four years now as a nonprofit.
And we've never seen sloppy years.
I mean, 2020 still ranks as pretty off the charts, but we've seen sloppier years.
We've seen better years.
We have seen actually a steady progression of improvement in data quality.
This one was just crazy.
I mean, we saw votes coming in that were date stamped November 2025.
We saw some ballots in the system from data provided by the Department of Elections of ballot stamp 2022.
This is highly suggestive that they didn't finish testing the machines in time and didn't catch some of these glitches before.
Before they fired up the machines and got people early voting.
They will certify what they can no matter what and then hope that things figure out, that they figure it out in the provisional and in other canvases.
But yes, the short answer is yes, that they'll just go with a number.
Now, Fairfax County's numbers add up.
A lot of the big counties' numbers do line up, their locality numbers and the precinct numbers.
So, and of all the vote differences we see, the yes votes are still squeaking out a win.
Interesting point, though, Steve, in front of the Supreme Court on Monday, one of the chief justices, one of the justices rather, asked the Solicitor General for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that would have been for the Spamberger administration, does the yes vote or the squeaker of a yes vote, because it's very close, does that matter in these legal proceedings?
We need the Republican Party to understand this war that we're in.
You didn't see it today on Capitol Hill.
In defense of Pete Hegseth, are the administration's policies in this war?
And I've got big questions about some of the policies in the war, but that's different than trying to destroy people and try to destroy President Trump and everything that the MAGA movement stands for.
Also, huge decisions today in Florida, decisions made in the Supreme Court, but people got to get in there and fight for that.
Remember, DeSantis got nothing but grief for this and going 24 to 4 in Florida.
Also, the Supreme Court, they're up to nine.
Axis reporting up to 19 seats in play, at least 12.
But we need Republican governors and state legislators to get on it right now.
Start calling special sessions.
We got to fight for this.
Aaron Joyce, I want everybody to go to your site and check the data out.
We're going to have you back on as we get to Friday, but whether they can certify or not.
There's the Commonwealth of Virginia, a lot in play there.
And these arguments went so well on Monday, people are keeping out hope.
But hey, those judges got to be, they have to be certified by now a state legislature that is Democrat, thanks to Youngkin and the Republican establishment that basically cratered and crashed.
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So let's get on it today.
Considering those guys doing a great job.
Steve Stern, you have a precinct strategy meeting tomorrow.
I want to make sure all the, we're going to carry it here on War Room, but I want to make sure all the War Room posse knows about and puts on their calendar.
It's going to be two o'clock tomorrow, Eastern time.
It'll be on Stern American Rumble, as well as 100 podcasters.
We are going to have terrific speakers.
It's been going to call Precinct.
ProjectUSA.org.
We want everybody to join PrecinctProjectUSA.org.
And why is that important?
Because we're going to have monthly newsletters.
There's going to be staff there around the clock to let you know where to join, how to join.
You're going to learn how to recruit new members.
Now, we have 400,000 slots, 200,000 people involved.
Just recently, over the last three months, we started this in just one state.
They've got 2,720 new members.
Nancy Pelosi is going to talk about that from Colorado tomorrow, of all places, Colorado.
Jeff Davis, Is going to speak from South Carolina.
Now, why I love him, myscgop.com.
Every day he sends out a newsletter to everybody in South Carolina.
Andy Mahon from Butler, Pennsylvania, is going to be talking about what's there.
He's going to be talking about his guides.
We're going to have a girl from Florida call on there, Karen Leonardo.
She's going to be talking about her handbooks.
We're going to let people know how to get involved because we could have all the states reassign, you know, Republicans, but if we don't come out to vote, it's not going to happen.
And next Wednesday, we're going to have our election security call with a special guest, John Goodman, who's going to give you information that you're going to want to know about.
And Steve Bannon, you're going to want to know about this too.
Tomorrow at 2, we're going to stream it on all of our platforms here on War Room.
Steve Stern, great job.
Stern's absolutely correct.
Just because we're having these victories in Florida at the Supreme Court, got all these districts that have been DEI or gerrymandered by the Democrats, it's still dependent upon the grassroots to turn out.
But the grassroots understand this is political warfare.
Maybe this.
The Republican Party doesn't, but the grassroots definitely do.
Trevor Comstock, let's end on a positive, upbeat note.