All Episodes
Previous Next
May 5, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:00
GENESIS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1076
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, no tax exemption for Harvard, NPR, and PBS losing their funding.
Tulsi Gabbard's massive revelations about biolabs, U.S.-funded biolabs around the world, U.S. complicity in gain-of-function research.
I'm going to talk about all that, and former State Department official Mike Benz, director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, joins me.
We're going to look at the contours of this secret government, this state within a state.
That still remains to be fully exposed and fully rooted out during Trump's second term.
If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Hit the subscribe, the follow, the notifications button.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, there's so much happening in the news that I'm going to use this opening segment to cover a bunch of things.
And then I'm going to have for the rest of the podcast a...
A tremendous guy, Mike Benz, who is a former State Department guy, but someone who is burrowed into the belly of the bureaucracy, of the deep state, of the police state, has a lot of detailed knowledge of how these things operate and how the left and the Democrats have set up not just corrupt, not just wasteful, but really criminal, criminal-oriented operations inside of the...
So we'll be talking about that.
But let me hit a few big items that are going on, and they're all going on all over the place and simultaneously.
Number one, Mike Waltz, the national security head is out, and he is making his way to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
So Trump still trusts him.
Or at least trust him in that new job.
But this is the guy who was behind the signal leak that somehow mysteriously involved Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic.
So I think there was a breakdown of trust.
Now, the left was trying to leverage that operation to get Pete Hegset.
But of course, Pete Hegset is not responsible for the blunder that imported not just a journalist, but a hostile journalist into this private conversation.
Walsh is headed for a new task.
Now, it's interesting that Walsh's job temporarily is going to be shifted over to Rubio.
So Rubio now seems to be wearing multiple hats and taking on additional responsibility.
There was even a joke.
I think J.D. Vance put out a joke basically saying, well, you know what?
He's this and he's that and he's now the national security advisor.
Well, maybe he can also be the pope since there's an opening for that job as well.
I think what this really shows, as I think about it, is that there was an accusation against Trump, entertained even by many people on the right.
Trump is a megalomaniac.
Trump doesn't really trust anybody.
Trump is a very vengeful guy.
When people cross him and he has a conflict with somebody, they're out.
Trump will never...
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.
Because, look...
Let's take two prominent examples of people who were hostile to Trump.
Rubio, when he ran against Trump in 2016, and J.D. Vance, who had some pretty nasty things to say about Trump.
And guess what?
Both Rubio and J.D. Vance are now in the trusted inner circle of Trump.
And I think that is a measure or a mark of Trump's character, contrary to what a lot of people have said.
Here is an interesting headline in the Washington Post.
RFK Jr. will order placebo testing for new vaccines, alarming health experts.
Wait!
What?
It's the latter part of that headline that catches your attention, right?
Because you know what placebo testing is.
You want to find out if a new drug is going to work.
So you give people the new drug, but you measure it against people who are given a pill that has no medical content whatsoever.
Let's call it a water pill.
Now, why do you do that?
Because sometimes people's expectation, hey, I'm taking a drug, it's going to make me better, will alone produce some beneficial health.
In other words, the mind has a kind of magical way of working on your body and making your body better when you believe you're going to get better.
So that's to eliminate the placebo effect.
You're able to see whether the new drug actually has value in itself or if it's functioning simply as a placebo.
People think it will make them better and therefore it makes them a little better.
And we've been assured for decades that placebo testing is like the bedrock of good science.
By all the people who say, follow the science.
And yet, here we go.
RFK will order placebo testing, an absolutely accepted scientific, in fact, a required scientific practice for new vaccines.
Alarming health experts.
Another way of saying that the health experts, these are people by and large, I think, in bed with, bought over by, owned by the pharmaceutical industry, they're upset because then they can't pull a COVID on us.
They can't take drugs that have not been tested, not been proven, and nevertheless bring the entire force, not just of the...
The credibility of the health establishment, but the forcible power of the government.
Take the vaccine or you're fired.
Take the vaccine or your kid can't go to school.
We have a health industry here, or health experts, that are not merely arrogant, that are not merely on the take, but they're also tyrannical in their sensibilities.
This is really what RFK Jr. is up against.
PBS and NPR.
Great news.
And in fact, there is some credit that goes to my son-in-law, Brandon Gill.
I think his expert dissection of Catherine Marr in the oversight hearing made it kind of impossible for Republicans to defend NPR.
And by extension, PBS.
These are two kind of sister agencies.
They are captive to the far left.
If you look at their content, it's absolutely abominable.
And why should the American taxpayer be paying for any of it?
NPR says, well, we get a lot of our money from private sources.
Well, go ahead.
Do that.
Function as a private news agency, if you will, but you can't really have an agency like And then expect that half of the country to be paying and subsidized.
This is well done, Brandon, and very good news coming out of the Trump administration.
I must admit that even I was a little shocked by Trump posting this morning, or actually posting on Friday morning, that Harvard is going to lose its tax-exempt status.
Boom!
I don't think any other Republican president would have done this.
This takes enormous guts.
And this is really a declaration of war against Harvard, and one that I think is completely overdue.
In some ways, you can say the Trump administration is making Harvard an example, but it's a very good example to make because Harvard is, well, first of all, it is the most arrogant institution, academic institution, in the United States, bar none.
This sensibility, by the way, even filters down to Harvard students, and it's been there for a long time.
When Dartmouth would play football against Harvard, this is like my freshman year when I knew nothing about the Ivy League.
I'd go to these games and Dartmouth would be winning.
You know, third quarter, Dartmouth's going to pull it off by 20 points.
And then I hear this chant coming from the Harvard quarters.
You may be winning, but you're all Harvard rejects.
And I had to laugh because it is kind of witty, but it shows the mentality of Harvard.
We're better than everyone.
We're even better than everybody else.
And so, this is the way in which Harvard operates.
And so, anti-Semitism, yeah, we're going to do it.
What are you going to do about it?
And, you know, academic plots to get rid of Trump and have lawfare against him, yeah, we're doing it.
We're going to cook this in our academic laboratories, and you don't have any way to stop us.
And so, Trump has finally decided it is time to sort of...
Take down the restraints and go after these institutions in a legitimate way.
Look, the Democrats themselves set the precedent.
They went after Bob Jones University.
Their point is they're engaging in racial discrimination.
No tax exemption for you.
And guess what?
Harvard is engaging in racial discrimination.
Harvard has no intention of stopping engaging in racial discrimination.
This isn't just about antisemitism, because you can kind of corral the antisemitism.
This is systematic racial preferences.
Systematic racial segregation embedded into the whole structure of the university.
So you root all that out, and then you're in conformity with the civil rights laws and Title IX.
You don't do it.
You deserve to lose your tax status, and we'll all be better for it.
And finally, a comment about Tulsi Gabbard and her recent interview in which she talked about gain-of-function research.
Now, to me, the significance of this is the following.
It supplies a motive.
For why a guy like Fauci was so involved in COVID deception, and particularly deception not about the vaccine per se, but about the origins of COVID.
Why would Fauci go to such lengths?
Why would Fauci say, in effect, I'm going to commission, you know, I have a paper right here that's talking about COVID coming out of a natural market.
Little does he tell you, in a way, he commissioned the paper.
He asked virologists who are getting massive amounts of money from the government to...
He saw the paper beforehand.
He might have made edits and comments on it, and yet he pretends to see it for the first time.
So why go to all that trouble?
And the answer is, you've been funding gain-of-function research, not just in North Carolina.
This is the point a lot of people thought.
I thought that U.S. money is going to Ralph Baric and the North Carolina lab, and the North Carolina lab is working in conjunction with Wuhan, and that's the connection.
But what Tulsi Gabbard reveals is the connection is much bigger than that.
There are U.S.-funded secret bio labs all over the world.
There's a whole bunch of them in Ukraine.
Many of them are doing gain-of-function research.
The full extent of this is being researched now by her office and by RFK Jr. and by other aspects, other elements of the Trump administration.
So the gain-of-function research is not confined to the North Carolina-Wuhan connection.
It could be massive gain-of-function research going on in all these secret bio labs working in conjunction with Wuhan or working in conjunction with other technologies.
So the pandemic risk here is large and it is being produced by...
Not just by the US government, but it's being funded by you and by me.
It's being funded by our money, although we're not being told a word about it, and the truth about it is only now coming out.
So if all of this is true, it would be really important, I think, to hold Fauci and hold these corrupt operators inside of the US government fully to account.
And I'm talking not merely about firing them.
Obviously, in Fauci's case, he got a pardon.
And I now understand a little better why the pardon went off.
All the way back to 2014 because the criminal activity may not be merely around COVID but might go back much earlier, might go back much deeper.
This July, there's a global summit of BRICS nations in Rio de Janeiro.
The block of emerging superpowers includes China, Russia, India, Iran.
They're meeting with the goal of displacing the U.S. dollar as the global currency.
They're calling this the Rio Reset.
Now, as these BRICS nations push forward with their plans, global demand for U.S. dollars could decrease, bringing down the value of the dollars in your savings.
While this transition won't happen overnight, the Rio Reset in July marks a pivotal moment Perch Gold Group can help you to move your hard-earned savings into a tax-sheltered IRA in precious metals.
Claim your free information kit on gold by texting my name, Dinesh, to 989898.
Perch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Tens of thousands of happy customers.
Let Birch Gold arm you with a free, no-obligation information kit on owning gold before July and the Rio Reset.
You have nothing to lose, so go ahead, text Dinesh to 989898 today.
Mike Lindell and the MyPillow team want to say a big thank you for your continued support.
This spring, they had a huge allotment of their famous bedsheets set aside for the big box stores.
But guess what?
The stores didn't come through again, so Mike is doing what he does best.
He's passing the savings on to you.
That's right.
There's no middleman, and that means you get wholesale pricing on the top-of-the-line Giza Dream Sheets and the Percale Bedsheets.
And listen to this.
The Giza Dream Sheets, queen size, normally $139.98.
Now, just $69.99.
The percale sheets, Queen, normally $89.98.
Now, just $29.98.
All sizes are available at a discount rate, too.
These are premium sheets at prices you won't find anywhere else, but they won't last long.
When they're gone, they're gone.
So act now.
Call 800-876-0227.
The number again, 800-876-0227.
Or you can go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use the promo code.
It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast Mike Benz, well, the one and only Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and that's the website, foundationforfreedomonline.com.
Mike's a former State Department official.
He's an expert in foreign policy, but also in international communications and information technology.
He's been all over social media, and I view Mike's beat as kind of exposing the entrails, the kind of inner world.
Mike, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I want to kick things off with a post that you did this morning where you were commenting on the little Doge gang and their appearance with Jesse Waters and with Elon Musk.
And you said, hey, this is the...
Probably the first government in U.S. history that's hands open, straight talking, lets you sit in on meetings and ask it anything.
And I think your point is that we're just not accustomed to this kind of disclosure.
Will you comment on that?
Yeah, I think it's incredible.
I saw that Elon retweeted this, and I think that he's very proud of it himself, that this is the way they've organized things.
I think that in the same way that sometimes I think that Elon Musk's philosophy, when it comes to Doge, has been, this is the government he had wanted to see for probably at least the past, at least half decade of his life.
And seeing everything that he didn't like about the previous government, he...
He's made a big deal about getting government officials all on X so that there was a direct way to talk to and hear the authentic communications of not just leaders in America, but all over the world.
And he has expressed a deep aversion to teleprompter speech on X, for example.
He likes politicians like Donald Trump who just straight talk and tell you what they're feeling.
And I have to echo that and second it a thousand times.
The fact is, is authenticity is the key to credibility.
When you are reading off a teleprompter or when you are giving an official press release and nothing further than that, that is where duplicity in lies can multiply.
Because if you can't really be interrogated on something...
If you are not speaking from the heart, it tells the audience that you are guarding something, that you need to precisely wordsmith everything.
And the fact is, that Jesse Waters interview with Doge, it started, the first five, seven minutes of it was Jesse Waters saying, I'm going to do something I've never done before as an interviewer.
I'm not going to say anything.
I'm just going to let you guys have your meeting, and I'm just going to listen.
And when you guys feel that there's something I should know or point out, Let me know and I'll pipe in.
And you just saw one by one as the Doge guys all just reported to Elon what they found that week.
And it was only then that the interviewer really started the interview.
And the fact is, Trump has been doing press conferences every day, even with adversary media.
After SignalGate, he brought in Jeffrey Goldberg, the head of the Atlantic.
To give an interview straight to the people who would ask him the toughest questions.
Trump said he was doing it, quote, as a competition with myself.
And the fact is, is I myself find myself subscribing to X accounts that are official government pages because for the first time in my life, I didn't even do this under Trump 1. But I feel that we're actually getting such honest and direct feedback about what's happening that...
I'm at a very strange point where at 40 years old, I feel like I can, for the first time, trust my government.
That's a very strange feeling.
I don't know how much I like it, actually.
Well, you know, Mike, even the so-called signal gate leak, I thought was illuminating because what you heard was intelligent rival points of view being aired in a kind of colloquial, candid...
An honest way.
So that, you know, here's J.D. Vance.
He's like, hey, listen, if we do this, we're just coddling the Europeans.
And, you know, that kind of talk, which is so unexpected.
I mean, for a guy like me who went into the Reagan White House in my 20s, Republicans no less than Democrats were used to this kind of bureaucratic talk.
I think the other thing that really struck me about the Doge gang is their...
Work ethic.
And I say this because, by and large, we're accustomed to Democrats having an unbelievable work ethic and Republicans being total sluggards.
It's kind of like they believe in government, so they attack it with a certain furious intensity.
Our guys get in there, they're just happy to be there.
They, you know, they sip a Diet Coke and wait for the next election.
But with the Doge characters, you got these young guys who enjoy work and don't seem...
And I think it's inspired people in other agencies as well.
I've talked to so many people from the State Department, the Pentagon, USAID, and even places in the IC where they feel the presence of Doge and that Doge is working so hard lights a fire under them.
I think it's the fact that you now need to say five things you did that week and report to Doge at all the different agencies, I think, has also led to layers of accountability that didn't exist before.
You know that you have to show that you did something the same way you do in the private sector.
I mean, this was always the big reason for that Ronald Reagan quote about, you know, the...
Well, the relative primacy of the private sector over the government, that whole Milton Friedman concept about the private sector always does it better because the incentives are more aligned in the private sector.
Well, they're aligning the incentives right now in the government, and they're working as if they were working.
You know, as investment bankers or corporate lawyers in New York, they're taking that mentality of the government on just a fraction of that paycheck.
It's incredibly inspiring to see.
And I think part of that is because Doge has a sunset of its own.
It will go away on July 4th, 2026.
There's only a very short window of time where anything can be done.
And frankly, I think part of it is the excitement.
of cracking open government secrets and being in position to do something about it.
This is really like, you know, opening Noah's Ark and being able to trace some sort of, you know, biblical backstory about the origins of the world as we now know it.
So I think that excitement is being infused through the State Department as well, through USAID, and through Tulsi Gabbard's ODNI.
I mean, these examples, Mike, just from yesterday and the day before, are so, like, stupefying, right?
I mean, they're giving money to some guy who's from the Taliban.
You know, they're creating private accounts where they can then go to Harris Casino in Vegas and spend out of a government account with no receipts, no accountability.
Now...
The Democrats have been saying, and I think this is ringing increasingly hollow, well, you know, we've got a whole apparatus in the government that is supposed to scrutinize the operations of the government.
We're supposed to have congressional oversight.
But what does this say about all these inspector generals and all these agencies, none of whom have apparently found any of this?
And what does it say about Congress that's supposed to be overseeing this spending, but evidently never seems to have gotten to this?
Well, what it says is that Congress failed in its oversight function and the inspector generals were corrupt in hiding the information from Congress and from the public at large.
And there's probably no cleaner example of that than USAID.
Senator Joni Ernst, who's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees USAID, Was told that not only was she not allowed to do her job as Senate Oversight of USAID, but that she was threatened by USAID for asking two probative questions.
She said this directly to Elon Musk as Doge was getting set up during the transition.
And we saw USAID was the most intransigent of the agencies in terms of turning over their own documents, turning over their own records, allowing Doge into the building.
And this, I think, is what ultimately ended up setting fire to the agency itself, was Doge and the White House felt, well, if they're not going to cooperate with the reforms, then they're resisting us.
They are the resistance.
And this time around, we're not going to allow this giant influence web to circumvent the chain of command that the American people voted for.
You either stop the resistance or you stop your existence.
And that is now what has happened to USAID.
But the fact is, there are a lot of ways agencies can serve as an almost intelligence function by doing this.
USAID is probably the perfect example of this.
As I've been saying for years now, when it's too dirty for the CIA, give it to USAID.
And the reason for this is because Under its democracy promotion, it can do CIA activity, but without the oversight on the CIA.
There's more oversight on the CIA than there is on USAID.
And I'll give you an example of this.
So if you are doing democracy promotion work, funding rebel groups, ceding money to media outlets, union street muscle, university thought leadership.
Politicians and parliamentarians, judges and prosecutors.
During the Cold War, much of that was done in the early Cold War directly by the Central Intelligence Agency.
And then it got in a lot of trouble in the 1950s to the 1970s, culminating in the Church Committee hearings and the Halloween massacre, where 30% of the CIA was fired in a single night after the Church Committee hearings under Carter.
And in the 1980s...
Because the Democrats were so angry at the CIA, they did not want the CIA to get its old powers back.
And so President Reagan, as part of his Cold War effort, ended up creating the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute of Peace.
The U.S. Institute of Peace published in June 2023 that the Taliban had to stop its ban on poppy cultivation in the Golden Crescent because it would have negative economic consequences for the region.
That's 95% of the world's heroin.
So while they're funding the Taliban...
They're directly telling the Taliban to keep the drugs flowing.
And the fact is, this was the sort of thing the CIA used to do when the CIA built the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, in large part through drug proceeds on the Golden Crescent and running them through CIA banks in Pakistan like BCCI.
But now it's being done by USAID, who was directly irrigating the poppy crops.
And then his partner, U.S. Institute of Peace, as we see, is...
Funding the Taliban and involved in that trade there.
But the fact is, is all this would require a presidential finding, meaning a president's written sign-off, if it was done as a CIA covert action.
Because after the 1970s, when more guardrails were placed on the CIA, and after events like Iran-Contra and whatnot, there was a congressional mandate to say, well, listen.
You can no longer plead ignorance if the CIA does something and say you didn't know about it as president.
Every covert action requires presidential sign-off.
What USAID did is it said, well, we're not an intelligence agency.
We're not doing covert action.
We're doing discrete action.
We're doing discrete democracy promotion, which is not technically a covert action, even though we're keeping it in secret.
You're not allowed to see the grant details.
One last thing, a famous example of this in 2014 under Obama was a case called Zunzineo.
Which was USAID taking funds that in the formal USA spending database were earmarked for humanitarian relief in Pakistan and running it through Cayman Islands in a labyrinthian sprawl of offshore bank accounts to hide their origin, running it to create a fake Twitter.
In Cuba, in order to create smart mobs and street riots in Cuba to simulate what was done during the Arab Spring in 2011-2012 in Tunisia and Egypt, when this thing got busted and the Senate found out for the first time and the House found out for the first time that these humanitarian relief funds for Pakistan were actually being used to foment street revolutions in Cuba.
And doing so by creating a public-facing Twitter knockoff that they actually asked Jack Dorsey initially to run.
And not only that, the whole thing was a shell company.
They created mock advertising banners to make it look like it was funded by advertising dollars rather than covertly by USAID.
None of the people in Cuba who were actually tasked to run this company.
They thought it was coming from a separate contractor.
And anyway, when that happened, the lead staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who formerly was the top intelligence analyst for all of South America and Latin America for the intelligence community, for the CIA, he said that they were never told what...
USAID was doing.
And they were told by USAID that they were not allowed to ask questions because people could die.
They were not allowed to ask questions, quote, even in broad strokes.
So the fact is, is the inspector general covered this all up.
So what do you do in that case?
You have to get rid of the whole agency and fold it into a separate agency where there is direct oversight, such as the State Department.
And that reorganization will take effect on July 1st, just two months away.
Let's take a pause.
When we come back, Mike, what I want to ask you about is we keep hearing about waste and fraud, and there is a lot of waste and fraud, but there are obviously very bad guys behind all this, and the question is, will these people merely be reassigned, maybe at the worst case, fired, or is there actually going to be some criminal culpability?
I'm going to ask you that when we return.
Guys, if you'd like to support my work, here's the best way to do it.
Subscribe to my local channel.
Become an annual subscriber.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content you won't find elsewhere and sometimes censored on other social media platforms.
On locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You see a personal side of me.
For example, I've been posting a bunch of photos of our film shoot in Israel.
That's the only place you can see him.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A.
Every Tuesday, 8 p.m. Eastern.
No topic is off limits.
I've also got a movie page up on Locals.
It's got documentaries and feature films.
2,000 Mules is up there.
Police State, Vindicating Trump.
Recently, I put up two new films, Trump Card and the feature film, the political thriller, Infidel, starring Jim Caviezel.
If you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch this movie content for free.
It's included with your subscription.
So check out the channel.
Go to dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com Guys, I'm back with Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, foundationforfreedomonline.com Mike, I mean, you know, it's so remarkable.
We suspected a lot of this bad stuff, but you were talking about it.
But when the Biden-Harris people were in charge, it was a little difficult to penetrate what was going on inside of their operation, in part because they were running the show.
They were obviously trying to cover things up.
And the media, exactly, was not playing a frontline role in doing investigative reporting of any kind.
Now, with Trump, you get the sense that all kinds of curtains are being pulled apart, or even pulled down.
And what we're seeing is...
We're seeing a bunch of things.
I mean, we're seeing, first of all, the degree to which we have a government inside the government.
And by that, I mean secret military bases.
Tulsi Gabbard is talking about, you know, bio labs all around the world so that this COVID issue may not simply be gain of function through North Carolina, but who knows?
There are bio labs all over the place, including a bunch of them evidently in Ukraine.
And now we're seeing that inside of the federal government, You've got all these secret stashes of money.
I think at one point, Elon Musk, very shockingly, and this wasn't really even picked up very much in the media, he talked about multiple secret money printers inside the government.
In other words, it's not just the Federal Reserve that has the magic power to create money, but evidently there are bureaucrats in the federal government who had a similar kind of authority.
And my question is, it seems to me like this is...
Scandalous enough for heads to roll.
And in some ways, the Democrats can have a certain credibility if they say, well, listen, you keep calling it fraud, but why aren't you prosecuting the fraud?
You keep talking about criminal behavior.
Why aren't you putting handcuffs on the criminals?
So it seems to me, over time, that that process begins, don't you think?
Yes, I think so.
It's important to note that I think a lot of the U.S. attorneys have not had their Senate confirmation take place yet within the Justice Department.
There's a famous case playing out right now in the case of Ed Martin in D.C., who is a phenomenal guy, I think will completely be a game changer within D.C., having direct jurisdiction over the Justice Department and in the home court government jurisdiction.
My understanding is it's a bit of a dogfight right now in terms of trying to get his Senate confirmation that they've sort of pushed the hearing to an indefinite date.
We're seeing chatter that there are Republicans who are going to try to hold up his nomination in the same way that they tried successfully in Matt Gaetz's case and almost successfully in Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy's case.
So the U.S. attorneys have to be confirmed still in order to fully get the Justice Department online.
I think Pam Bondi has gotten off to a solid start with the firing of many of these rogue prosecutors.
We saw just this week 15 prosecutors who were involved in these totally rogue and, frankly, criminal themselves, criminal prosecutions and over-prosecutions and political prosecutions of January 6th, folks.
Fifteen of those prosecutors have been terminated.
In terms of, and we're seeing something similar happening right now within the Civil Rights Division of DOJ under Harmeet Dillon.
We're seeing mass firings of folks who want to resist the internal chain of command.
And so I think they're doing a good job with the most immediately important thing, which is personnel, because personnel is policy.
In terms of the question about criminal indictments for rogue activity.
I think those things will be forthcoming, but they take time in order to...
There's not a lot of transparency when it comes to DOJ in the same way that there is, that I think we can expect now by the tone set, as we just discussed, by Elon and by the White House, because by its very nature, an ongoing investigation at DOJ and FBI has to be close hold.
Otherwise, the suspects themselves...
We'll be able to take various actions or hide evidence before charges are brought.
If they delete evidence or eliminate records or various things, it's not illegal, whereas once the indictments come down, then it becomes.
So I think that they are trying to get all their ducks in order, although we don't know.
Because of the nature of that secrecy, we don't know exactly the extent or scope of what those targets for criminal indictments are going to be.
Certainly, we know there's been an unbelievable glut of it.
I think there is a sensitivity around trying to restore normalcy and legitimacy to the Justice Department at a time when, after four years of Merrick Garland, who was probably...
Who is definitely the worst and most tyrannical and most evil attorney general our country has ever known without a close second in our 250-odd years.
There's no one who's been like Merrick Garland.
And the fact is, I think my sense of the tea leaves, and this is just speculation, is that this White House does not want to create a total tit-for-tat situation.
where every time there's an election, everyone from the other side gets rolled up in BS criminal indictments.
I think this is what drove Elon Musk to back Donald Trump to the extent that he did, as well as Kevin O 'Leary and many other figures who said, hey, the last straw for me was when they arrested Trump.
And I think that the Trump White House is much more ethical and wants to try to maybe extend an olive branch by saying, You guys, what you did was horrible, but we're going to try to rise above it and not arrest everyone from your side just because we can.
But I do think that there are so many layers between January 6th and the pipe bomber situation, between COVID and what happened there, between the censorship industry.
And I'll tell you one that I think is very concerning is what happened in the censorship industry with the outsourcing.
To British intelligence-linked and British government-linked organizations to censor Americans to circumvent the First Amendment.
And there's the famous case of Nina Jankovic, who was the head of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board.
After she was effectively terminated from that role, she moved straight into a censorship unit under the British government called the Center for Information Resilience, which received USAID funding.
But because it was a British government organization to influence policies and regulations and laws here in the U.S., she had to register as an agent for the British Crown, effectively, under FARA.
She had to register as a British agent.
And we saw that Hunter Biden was allowed to skate free without FARA registration, but Center for Countering Digital Hate, CCDH, Probably one of the nastiest censorship shops.
They were the ones who did the disinformation dozen under COVID-19.
It came out in leaks just a few months ago.
I think Paul Thacker published these.
The Kill Musk's Twitter was actually the number one action item in their monthly donor impact report.
But what was just underneath that...
Two things.
Trigger EU and UK regulatory action against social media companies for not censoring what CCDH1 had censored.
But the third one was to promote the STAR framework.
The STAR framework is CCDH's basically framework.
It's a four-part acronym for...
Global standards and regulations to impose on social media companies in order to stop them from allowing pro-Trump content or pro-Nigel Farage content in the UK or pro-AFD party in Germany.
And specifically to advance that framework within the US on legal and regulatory means.
And they even met with Senator Amy Klobuchar.
In their own meeting minutes, they said they met with a U.S. senator to advance that framework up the regulatory chain in Congress.
Now, they're a British organization.
And to me, and this is America First Legal who first pointed this out, it did not appear to America First Legal when they first reported the story that there were any FAR registrations.
Even Nina Jankovic registered one.
This, to me, If that reporting is accurate, would be an immediate action item for the Department of Justice.
It would send a shot across the bow to all the different censorship organizations around the world who hate Trump and have been pushing for a system of censorship in the United States to stop Trumpism.
And to me, it's a target that would not necessarily continue this tit-for-tat type...
You know, targeting of first families type thing that the previous administration did.
And so I think that level of action from the Justice Department would be huge if it's moved on quickly.
And to me, there are also some other cases that just spring to mind that are just extremely blatant.
I mean, let me give you a few.
All these mortgage shenanigans by Letitia James, right?
Where she's claiming to be living in Virginia and she gets benefits there.
She's obviously not living in Virginia.
Now, what's clean about this case is it's not obscure.
People don't need to know about Farah and what the registration requirements are.
It's very clear that she is above the law in this regard and she probably thinks that she has immunity because she's a Democrat.
So this would seem to be, you know what, boom!
Because it's gotcha.
It's handed the cookie jar.
Similarly, if Doge is right, that you've got all these people who have been cashing, let's just say, COVID checks, Social Security checks, I mean, for years, somebody's cashing those checks, right?
And they're knowingly doing it because the other guy is dead, or they've signed up a one-year-old to get Social Security.
And so some prosecutions there would seem to be in order, if only to send a message, Guys, this kind of looting of the taxpayer has got to stop.
That's absolutely correct.
And exactly what you said about prosecutors and judges who have thought themselves to be above the law because they think they are the law, because they've been tasked by the American people to administer the law.
I think, as you said in the case of Letitia James, if the facts alleged are true, then that absolutely...
My understanding is that there has been a criminal referral to the Justice Department to pursue an indictment, although I don't think we've seen an indictment come down yet, but I think that that's absolutely true, and I think we're seeing now two different judges who are harboring criminals that were trying to be deported by ICE.
I think in one case, ICE agents came to the courtroom, and the judge allegedly, according to the...
You know, indictment documents used the jury door to have a criminal gang member, a legal alien, evade ICE by effectively getting special access to a jury door.
And so in that case, an indictment was brought.
We saw...
An unbelievable outcry, a sort of total phalanx, uniform messaging from, it seems, every major figure in the Democrat Party saying, oh, they're arresting judges, they're arresting judges.
And of course, they were arresting the judge for breaking the law that those facts alleged are true.
And I think the same thing is true of the prosecutors, especially the ones who themselves prosecuted Donald Trump.
If they understand that they are not above the law...
And they are prosecuted for their own criminal actions.
I think that will have a chilling effect on future prosecutors and future judges who think that they can do these insanely punitive, rogue judgments and not have any scrutiny into themselves for their own violations of the law.
So I think that you're exactly right, Dinesh.
I mean, if I can also add what I would think would be the mother of all prosecutions.
I mean, if you look at what was happening on the border.
It was quite clearly a massive collusion.
Between the cartels on the other side of the border, a whole bunch of organizations, whether it's Catholic charities, these NGOs, people running caravans all the way down to Central and South America to the U.S. border.
And then, of course, the people in the Biden regime who were at the very least fully aware of what's going on and more likely operating almost like the two parts of a scissor.
The cartels do their part and the Biden...
Biden people do their part and the net effect is to have all these children trafficked across the border, these criminals coming.
I mean, it seems to me this is a classic conspiracy RICO case because what you've got is multiple actors who may not be doing daily Zoom calls with each other, but they are nevertheless working in a coordinated fashion toward manifestly illegal ends.
I mean, child trafficking is against the law.
Bringing in illegal drugs is against the law.
So this would be something that would, I think, impose real accountability on these organizations that have had it their way and have been running this massive criminal operation.
Absolutely.
And I think that what you just put your finger on is at the heart of, I think, what is happening at State and USAID and ODNI in terms of getting to the bottom of what our own National Security State has been doing to protect narco networks in Latin and South America and their relationship with the NGOs.
The fact is USAID and the State Department jointly gave $1.4 billion to the very NGOs who were bringing up these migrant caravans of illegal immigrants.
Doing it expressly and deliberately facilitating that.
Samantha Power at USAID and her husband, Cass Sunstein, who moved over to a role at DHS Immigration Policy.
So while the wife was funding the NGOs to bring everyone here, the husband was setting DHS policy.
To not enforce any action at DHS about those illegal migrants.
And then DHS, the Disinformation Governance Board, one of the things that they targeted was so-called disinformation about irregular migration, saying if you talk about the open border online, it sends a message to the cartels that they can come up here if they think there's an open border.
So you're not allowed to criticize it.
But the fact is, This goes back a very, very long time, and I think the real reason behind this is something the American people are going to be completely terrified about if this ever comes up.
But go back to something like Fast and Furious, coming back to the Justice Department and its rogue activities in the halls of secrecy and the criminal actions happening within the Justice Department.
I would say the second worst attorney general in U.S. history is Eric Holder.
Close buddy of Merrick Garland when they were coming up together through the Justice Department in the 1990s.
Both of them played very interesting roles in the Oklahoma City investigations and PATCON, which targeted conservative patriotic groups.
But the fact is, is Eric Holder jumped on the...
The only reason he was no longer Attorney General in the latter parts of the Obama administration is because he was held in contempt by Congress and forced to step down when he jumped on the grenade.
To protect the Obama administration for secrecy around gun running to the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, a formal program administered by the FBI and ATF to do the very thing that they ban Americans from doing, which is easy access to guns.
They infiltrated through back-channel conversations with gun shop owners all over the border towns in Arizona.
To allow people to purchase firearms without a photo ID, without any background check, no nothing in a deliberate program to have their own mules buy those guns and run them to a drug cartel in Mexico, which then was only discovered because these very guns and their serial numbers turned up in murders.
Of U.S. Border Patrol agents.
And it turned out, the facts as they've been pieced together, is there was a narco war going on in Mexico.
The Los Zetas gang was stealing money from U.S. oil companies by cutting open oil pipelines, and they had gone rogue.
And so we were pumping up one drug cartel in Mexico to fight another cartel in Mexico.
Because the Obama administration felt like it couldn't do what the Trump admin is doing, which is to literally go into Mexico with CIA drones and special forces to bomb, you know, residents of Mexico.
Now, it looks like Claudia Scheinbaum, the Mexican president, has worked out an agreement with Trump to be able to do some limited actions there.
But the fact is, is that was something that was not on the table before.
And so we were funding one drug network to so-called fight another one.
But how deep does that go?
Is that situation happening with the FARC in Colombia?
Is that situation happening with MS-13?
Is that situation happening with the PCC gangs in Brazil?
How deep is the penetration of senior leadership of the Sinaloa cartel with CIA and FBI counterintelligence and DEA?
And these stories are all related.
You mentioned at the top of this that the U.S. Institute of Peace just yesterday On Fox News, they talked about how they gave $130,000 to a Taliban official.
Now, we have OFAC reporting requirements that would technically make that sort of thing illegal, but U.S. Institute of Peace and USAID famously circumvents that.
It's never prosecuted.
But the fact is, is the U.S. Institute of Peace was also telling the Taliban to keep those drug networks open.
While they were working with and funding them, so in the position to influence them, and they're using their influence to keep the drug game going.
And we know that this is something the CIA was involved with.
We said we did this narco-trafficking to support the Cold War efforts against communism.
But hey, the Cold War is over, so now you're just selling drugs.
And the fact is, I think that this is a powerful cudgel for the Justice Department.
To use this war on drugs against fentanyl and the renegotiation of our security posture with Mexico and other parts of the world to get to the bottom of the extent of the U.S. government's protection of the drug trade.
And frankly, I don't think anyone can argue with a prosecution around the drug trade.
It's apolitical.
It's scandalizing.
It's Democrat communities and Democrat cities, frankly.
Who in large part are hardest hit by this epidemic, even though it obviously affects rural areas and the country at large.
But this is an extremely bipartisan, apolitical, nonpolitical pursuit.
The problem is, is the CIA, is the NSA, is our aspects within the ODNI going to allow you to actually get to the bottom of that story?
Will they turn over the documents?
Will they fight every agency?
Will they destroy evidence in order to block that, knowing that if that becomes public, it's fodder for the Justice Department to indict themselves?
All this stuff, Mike, I mean...
It's really disturbing and terrifying.
I mean, I come out of a libertarian tradition where we see the government as incompetent, as buffoonish, as not paying attention to our bottom line.
But the picture we're getting, I think, under Trump, particularly Trump too, is that you're dealing with a corrupt and wicked, I mean, almost diabolical operation, and it needs to be understood and viewed as such.
These are not well-intentioned people who are goofing it up.
These are very bad people who have set up a very corrupt Thank you, Dinesh.
And just, if I can say, thank you for being the tip of the spear on many of these issues.
I know...
That the ODNI has announced that they're looking into election integrity issues and issues with voting machines.
And you paid a heavy price being first through the door on a lot of those things.
And I hope that we can get justice for those abuses in the years ahead.
That means a lot.
Mike Benz, guys.
And Mike, thank you very much.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection