Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - Mike Benz Takes us Inside the Global Censorship Complex

Aug. 4, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr

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Mike Benz Takes us Inside the Global Censorship Complex | Triggered Ep264

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	Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Trigger.
	Today we'll get into all the things inside the blob with a fan favorite, Mike Benz.
	Global censorship, deep state corruption, all the behind-the-scenes details with someone who knows it better than anyone.
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	Joining me now, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, former Trump State Department official Mike Benz.
	Mike, great to have you back.
	How you doing?
	Doing well.
	Thanks for having me.
	Well, there's a lot to cover, but first off, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what's happening in Brazil.
	You know, you're obviously out there championing free speech online.
	Brazil, one of the biggest obstacles to that.
	I mean, just right here on Rumble, I know they banned them, and then they tried banning X, and they tried threatening, arresting people there.
	But what's the backstory and what's the significance of the sanctions that we put on them to try to stop some of this political persecution and online insanity?
	That's right.
	Just this week, we had the Magnitsky sanctions applied to Alexandra DeMoraeus, the Lord Voldemort judge, the chief, the censorship chief.
	He's essentially, he's the head of the electoral part of the Brazil Supreme Court.
	They have a Supreme Court, and then within that, Supreme Court members can be delegated to this subsection of it that specifically is supposed to be dealing with elections.
	It's known as the TSE, and their Supreme Court is the STF.
	And the head of the TSE has been the one who has been very much the public face of the onslaught against civil liberties, human rights, and freedom of speech.
	Just a few smattering examples of what this judge has been doing.
	Just this month, he made it a criminal penalty for Bolsonaro, the former president, to appear in interviews or to appear on social media to post on social media or for anybody else in the country to share his interviews on social media.
	They've criminalized effectively the basic practice of journalism.
	What's happening there puts North Korea to shame.
	The sheer volume of people arrested who have to flee the country because of pure political speech that they tweet.
	Morias has banned anyone alleging Lula is corrupt or any comparisons of him to other dictators like Maduro in Venezuela.
	Any breaking corruption scandal involving the President Lula is effectively deemed to be misinformation by the judge and made effectively a criminal penalty to even allege.
	So it has made the entire corrupt state of Brazil under Lula's leadership completely isolated from criticism because you have this attack dog judge who simply uses the power of the law to squeeze out anyone from challenging the lawmakers.
	And the Magnitsky sanctions are very unique in that they are targeted sanctions at the individual level, even if we don't sanction the government.
	And so this tool effectively not only wipes out the ability for targets to transact in the U.S. dollar or to use U.S. banks, but also the international partner web of banks who do business with U.S. banks are effectively skittish around housing such services for such individuals.
	So U.S. persons are also prohibited from doing trade.
	And this is very common for people in Brazil to buy property in Miami or to visit or be a part of U.S. institutions.
	In fact, the head of the Supreme Court, Bajoso, in Brazil, effectively DeMarias' boss, you can think of it.
	I mean, he's the head of the STF, which is on top of the TSE.
	He himself is a Harvard fellow.
	Bajoso, as we speak, is a fellow at the Harvard Candy School of Government, where they train foreign officials how to do effectively the dirty work of the U.S. national security state.
	And it's completely tied with the Biden-Obama-Harris mafia.
	And I have no doubt that these judges were trained by the Biden foreign policy establishment.
	In fact, I know it for a fact because I've watched the training videos.
	I can go into the backstory of this, but just to sort of put the button on this, what the Trump administration has done in the name of free speech diplomacy has been extraordinary.
	You have the Magnitsky sanctions that were just applied.
	You had the ban on travel visas for effectively the Supreme Court of Brazil.
	That was just last month.
	And then also last month, 50% tariffs were slapped on Brazil, which is the second largest population in the Western Hemisphere and the second largest military.
	I still think there's more that can be done, however, and as well as the telling of the full story around how the Biden administration really set up this ticking clock.
	And even though the clockmaker of the Biden administration is gone, this apparatus is still ticking in Brazil.
	So yeah, how does that happen?
	I mean, because I've been watching this stuff for a few years.
	I got very sort of into it when they banned Rumble.
	Obviously, this was quite a while ago, but I was one of the early guys here.
	I'm really close with Chris Blavosky, the CEO.
	I was the second verified user on the platform.
	So I knew this was going on.
	But how is it that even when Bolsonaro Was president.
	It felt like this Supreme Court and individual justices on these Supreme Courts, it's like they had more power than the president.
	I mean, I'm friendly with Erduardo Bolsonaro, the president's son.
	He's a congressman over there, I'm told, you know, from others, because they're not allowed to talk to anyone, but I'm told from others, you know, he's not even allowed to speak to his father.
	The father can't tweet or be on media.
	I mean, it's wild.
	It's like you have a president that has no power because these judges rule the roost.
	It actually seems more draconian than what we saw here for the last few months, where, hey, maybe they try to stop you from doing something, but they're not.
	They could stop you from doing anything.
	Right, right.
	And they've done a cute trick, which was prodded on by the Biden administration.
	So a lot of this started, unfortunately, under the first Trump administration without the Trump administration's, I think, understanding of some of the chess moves that were happening underneath the surface.
	So this was happening at a few different agencies.
	And I think the second Trump administration is just 100 times wiser to all this, having been put through the ringer and having to essentially learn in a trial by fire.
	But what was happening under the first administration was you had this foreign policy establishment, primarily on the Democrat side, but with a little help from their friends in the neocon world and in the never-Trump Republican world.
	But this was effectively carried out from 2018 through 2021 by USAID and rogue actors at the State Department and in the NGO space funded by USAID and the State Department.
	When Bolsonaro won the election in October 2018, immediately the Uniparty foreign policy establishment lamented that fact and did an autopsy of why they thought they lost, and they blamed the loss on free speech on social media.
	There's all manner of clips that I've posted on Foundation for Freedom Online on our website, as well as on my X account showing how places like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, which was led by Bill Burns.
	Anything but the acronyms, right?
	Sounds wonderful.
	Not the intention.
	Yes, yes.
	Well, it's the endowment for chaos, basically.
	But I mean, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace is funded by USAID and the State Department.
	It was run by Bill Burns, who went from being the head of the political section of the State Department to Central Intelligence Agency director.
	So his tenure was nestled in between those bookmarks.
	I think that gives you a good picture of what the Carnegie Endowment for Peace really does.
	But it was led by USAID and hundreds of NGOs that they funded inside of Brazil and as well as internationally that then moved into Brazil.
	In fact, the National Endowment for Democracy, which is one of the worst players in this whole scandal, and very tragically, the House Appropriations Committee, the GOP-dominated GOP Majority House Appropriations Committee, just voted to give them all of their funding that they had from last year, $315 million, even though Trump requested $0.
	So this is once again another of these intra-party GOP Civil War issues.
	But what happened was, is the National Down for Democracy, which is a CIA spinout, it was conceived by Ronald Reagan, CIA Director William Casey, and then it was set up in 1983 to wage the Cold War, essentially, when you had a kind of Reaganite CIA focused on the Cold War.
	The Democrats did not want to give the CIA its old powers back after the scandals of the late 1970s where the CIA targeted wings of the Democrat Party.
	And so the Reagan administration got cute and created this globe-spanning NGO in order to fund the organizations that the CIA was prohibited or too scandalized to fund.
	And the National Down for Democracy set up shop through its Democrat arm called the NDI, the National Democratic Institute, which was run by Bill Clinton, Secretary of State, and interestingly had Hunter Biden on its advisor to the chair.
	But effectively, Nina Jakovitz was also at NDI, the censor-in-chief at DHS.
	But NDI, the Democrat wing of the National Down for Democracy, two weeks after Bolsonaro won the election, set up SHOP, created this giant umbrella group within Brazil.
	It was called D4D, Designed for Democracy.
	And the idea was to design a digital democracy for Brazil in order to stop misinformation and disinformation and effectively pro-Bolsonaro media from being able to spread because Bolsonaro's electoral democratically elected presidency was a threat to democracy because the people voted the wrong way.
	They then proceeded through U.S. aid programs like CEPS, the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, to set up hubs of about 30 to 40 different Brazilian institutions to try to drive power into what they called the EMB, the Electoral Management Body.
	That's the TSE.
	That's Marias' court.
	What they effectively said is, we've lost control of the executive branch.
	We've lost control of the legislative branch.
	What powers can we wield within Brazil that can take down the Bolsonaro administration from within?
	And this is a very common tactic.
	What happened in Brazil is a dramatic example, but not a new example.
	It's a dramatic example of a phenomenon that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been doing for at least 40 years under what we call our rule of law programs.
	USAID, I don't know if you followed the American Bar Association scandals that have been playing out.
	The American Bar Association is getting tens of millions of dollars every year from the U.S. government, from USAID.
	And a lot of people think that's very strange.
	They say, American Bar Association, that's who credentials American law schools.
	Why the heck is USAID, who's not allowed to spend money here?
	They are foreign-focused in their charter.
	They're not allowed to fund American institutions.
	So why the heck is the American Bar Association doing getting all this money for it?
	And it's because the American Bar Association, as well as its spin-out of agencies like the World Justice Project and the like, go into foreign countries and secure commitments from foreign leaders and regulators and parliamentarians in order to change their laws in a way that is believed to benefit The U.S. foreign policy establishment, essentially this small cabal of insiders.
	So if we want to contort a country's internal politics, if we want them to privatize certain industries, if we want them to pass a law or to get a law killed in their country, we send in our little rule of law USAID spiders into the country and they spin a giant web of NGOs and civil society organizations.
	They get prominent leaders to effectively back this change in law, whether or not they want a bill killed or they want a bill to be passed within a foreign country.
	We send in these little spiders to spin that web.
	And if you remember, this is what happened in Ukraine.
	In Ukraine with Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, the Ukrainian prosecutor who is looking into Burisma, while Joe Biden was vice president, he traveled to Ukraine and he threatened the Ukrainian government that if they don't fire Viktor Shokin by the very next day, then the billion dollars in U.S. aid governance programs, governance and rule of law, the same thing, but that they wouldn't get the billion dollars.
	So essentially, they held up this bribe money in order to get the prosecutor removed.
	And this is how we operate.
	We operate on the prosecutors, on the courts, on the judges.
	And Morias himself was trained in disinformation seminars by USAID.
	I showed pictures of this, and I'm doing a whole presentation in Brazil this week, where Morias was brought to these multi-day training seminars with USAID's SEPS program.
	That's our consortium for elections and political process strengthening.
	Basically, when we want to go in and control a foreign country's political process, we look at our little chessboard of assets, and then we capacity build them.
	We run them money.
	We run them training.
	We give them the talking points.
	And this is what happened in Brazil beginning in late 2018.
	Brazil would set up this combating disinformation task force in the TSE under Morias.
	And who were the first people to join that?
	They were U.S.-funded NGOs like the Atlanta Council and like all these other National Endowment for Democracy-funded Brazilian entities.
	And this uniparty foreign policy establishment steered the direction of that every step of the way.
	And in 2021, they formalized this with this countering disinformation SEPS program.
	They brought Bajoso, the head of the Brazilian Supreme Court.
	They brought the Morias in at the launch event.
	They had another Brazilian Supreme Court judge.
	And they explicitly sought to control the elections through controlling the EMBs.
	And so right now, the Trump administration is a harder job because I think about the clockmaker analogy, where this thing would not have existed if a clockmaker hadn't created this clock.
	But now the clock is ticking.
	And whether or not you remove the clock maker, the clock now sort of ticks on its own.
	But this is what's been done is very powerful.
	It's a unique shot across the bow.
	But I do think more can be done.
	Well, so I guess I'd ask what more can be done.
	I mean, 50% tariff on a country is a pretty big deal, but it's a great, actually having you on because we know these things are happening, but the level of rot is actually hard to believe.
	I mean, we could talk about that for 15 minutes, just the layer upon layer upon layer of how we got here, which just shows how hard it is to dismantle to your clock maker analogy.
	It's not like, oh, this is one bad actor.
	No, this is one bad actor trained by other bad actors that are infiltrating the U.S. that are part of that deep state apparatus here that have been creating the uni party slash globalist agenda for decades.
	Like this doesn't just go away.
	There are so many levels here.
	It's a real problem.
	I mean, and I guess I'd ask is because obviously the 50% tariff is a really big deal.
	It's very penal, but it also probably affects the Brazilian economy a lot that a lot of regular people eventually get crushed with that, which may push them to the people who are going to give them the most free crap in the end, probably the leftists that are in charge right now.
	Do you see that playing out?
	How do you affect the appropriate kind of change without hurting the overall relationship in the long run and being able to effectuate sort of an effective trade policy to get what the U.S. needs while, again, getting rid of the apparatus that seems to be singularly left-handed controlled in Brazil?
	I think the people of Brazil very clearly see that this is not the Trump administration attacking the government of Brazil.
	People were in the streets yesterday.
	I think Brazilians were calling it Magnitsky Day, like a national holiday over this.
	I think, thank you, Trump was trending because of these sanctions.
	And half of the population voted for Bolsonaro.
	Bolsonaro probably would have won that election without U.S. interference.
	That's the direct quote of one of the U.S.-funded censors themselves, Medan, which is a U.S. censorship organization, which got $5.7 million in government funding from the Biden administration to do this censorship work.
	They created the WhatsApp tip lines to monitor WhatsApp and to allow people to instantly get things banned in private chats.
	They also did the same for Instagram and for Globo, the biggest newspaper in Brazil.
	And after the CEO of Medan won the Skull Award last year, he bragged that by far and away, the most reported content was, quote, pro-Bolsonaro news, and that but for their operation, it's likely the election would have gone the other way.
	That's what they say.
	And so, I mean, and then the absolute chutzpah of that court in Brazil to criminally investigate Eduardo Bolsonaro for talking to U.S. government officials.
	Brajoso, the head of the Supreme Court, bragged, it was in two months ago.
	It was caught on video.
	He was bragging that he asked the Charged Affairs, the head of the U.S. embassy, for help in the 2022 election, and that he met with them on three separate occasions and explicitly asked for help.
	And we know they got help in the form of tens of millions of dollars of U.S. aid money into the entire apparatus from the unions backing Lula to the media organizations to the flaggers and fact checkers to the legal advocates, the whole thing, top down.
	This is why when Marias banned X, the State Department said squat for about for almost two weeks.
	They didn't say a single word as assets were seized from Starlink and the company was and a major U.S. national champion company was shut down.
	But what we have here is this issue where it's much bigger than just Marius.
	There were 65 different NGOs who were on the advisory board to the disinformation, to his court's disinformation task force.
	They're the ones who are telling him, this is what you got to flag.
	This is how you got to justify it.
	They're the ones, they have all internal infographics about how that whole recycling bin works.
	And the House Appropriations Committee just funded effectively the top dog of that for the full funding that they had while they were rigging the Brazil election.
	Maybe one day our guys will learn, but it's going to take some time.
	But by the way, we're also, I mean, we're seeing similar lawfare in Colombia against former President Urube.
	You know, what are the parallels there?
	And are the State Department sanctions and comments on corruption in Brazil also a veiled shot at President Petro in Colombia?
	I'm going to say something, and it might be a little controversial, but I feel an obligation to articulate it publicly.
	There is a common through thread between Brazil and Colombia, which is the drugs.
	And I have Brazil is becoming a narco-state.
	Is it really?
	I'm not even, I didn't even know that.
	I would have thought, you know, obviously, you know, Mexico, you know Colombia, you know Venezuela.
	I never even thought of Brazil in that way.
	In fact, the head of the biggest narco-cartel in Brazil was caught on tape, I believe, in a police interrogation saying that his criminal enterprise would be better off if Lula wins the election in 2022.
	This is what he said, I believe it was beforehand, that he preferred Lula win over Bolsonaro, who was cracking down on the drug cartels.
	And then Morias made it a criminal penalty to share that video that the narco-cartels were backing Lula, and that Morias himself, even when he was an attorney, I believe, represented cartel-linked companies.
	The cartel money juices the politics.
	And I have very serious concerns about the blob, the UNIPARTY's utilization of narco-cartels throughout Latin and South America for statecraft purposes or for their own self-dealing,
	and that they were allowed to proliferate as a Cold War instrument at a time when you had kind of left-wing Marxist groups who were militant.
	And these drug cartels appear to play a significant role in things like the right-wing death squads in El Salvador and pumping money into Cold War paramilitary activity, the same way that the CIA pumped up the Mujahideen in Afghanistan using drugs.
	And I believe that there are still very serious connections between the U.S. National Security State and the Narco cartels in Mexico, in Colombia, in Brazil.
	I think that's why nobody before Trump designated these groups as terrorists.
	I think that's why you see strange wailings from the New York Times saying that you shouldn't declare these groups terrorists.
	This is why you saw an opening.
	They kill 100,000 Americans a year, just so we're clear.
	Fentanyl kills 100,000 Americans a year, most of it coming across that southern border.
	And I mean, that's two Vietnamese.
	I mean, if you kill two Vietnamese worth of Americans every year, you're a freaking terrorist organization.
	No question.
	Full stop.
	Right.
	I think if you target the Brazilian narco cartels using any means necessary to do that, whether that's going after the banking of Brazil's narco gangs, whether that's doing the same sort of naval interceptions that have been done in the case of Cuba and in the case of other conflict territories in the Gulf,
	I think that if you go after the cartels in Brazil, you go after this, as well as in Colombia, you go after the substructure of the power of this corrupt government there.
	So, you know, I know that Scott Besson sort of made some commentary in the last week or so about that coming after the cartels and obviously the funding in the Treasury.
	And these guys, frankly, they've gotten more sophisticated than their respective country's military.
	Is that another effective way to do it?
	How do you get our guys to be able to take out those bad guys?
	Because it feels like in places like Mexico, you're either on the payroll, and if you're not on the payroll, but you come out against them, you're dead.
	So one way or the other, you're basically working for the cartels.
	I think you map out the entire senior leadership and as well as the mid-level logistics folks associated with the Brazil cartels.
	You have a joint counterterrorism task force.
	You have everything from FBI to DHS to CIA to DOD, and as well as the White House National Security Council.
	You map out the entire network and you wipe out all the banks who do business with them.
	You go through Interpol to prosecute every last one of them.
	And you go straight after the revenue streams.
	You use the international courts.
	You use any touch points they have to Miami, which are many, or to Los Angeles or to Texas.
	So much of this narco money transacts through the U.S. as well.
	It's a major customer base.
	This PCC cartel in Brazil is all over Miami.
	You seize their beachfront properties.
	I mean, this is an international crime enterprise, and I believe it was protected by the Biden administration.
	I think that these drug gangs have played a role in U.S. foreign policy and have been protected on a favors-by-favors basis.
	I find it very strange that the head of the CIA went down to Brazil personally to warn Bolsonaro, that Victoria Newland, the head of the political section of the State Department, went down, that Lloyd Austin, the head of the military, and that's another thing that needs to be renegotiated, our security posture with Brazil.
	Brazil's military depends on U.S. equipment and U.S. training and logistics.
	That was one of the leverage points that Lloyd Austin exploited when he went down months before the 2022 election and threatened any, you know, all the Bolsonaro supporting military generals.
	That can be done in reverse, too can play that game.
	And I think that I was going to say, I think that both the narco and the security cards to play should be played by this White House, and that will add to the tariff pressure.
	That will add to the Magnitsky sanctions.
	But I do think that they need to be, I just, I don't think that that has been a focus of any White House until now.
	I think that because of places like Mexico and Colombia being so much more prominent in the South American Latin American focus, I mean, think about Noriega.
	Noriega was a CIA asset with a 201 human intelligence file.
	It was a total drug lord.
	And then, you know, the moment he stopped being useful and wanted to nationalize the canal, suddenly we said, oh, we're shocked to find drugs there.
	Well, I have a strange feeling that something similar is happening in Brazil and in Colombia.
	And it's time to call that out.
	So with groups like USAID effectively gone, what does it mean as far as effectively addressing these types of issues?
	Does it streamline the ability for the State Department to actually get things done?
	Or does eliminating just the head of the snake at this point not change all that much because it's so heavily entrenched all the way down the line?
	Well, it's tough because I've led a very serious crusade around the USAID shutting it down as a government agency.
	But the USAID function still survives at state, and we are still giving out foreign assistance grants, much less than before, but we are still giving out foreign assistance grants that align with the Trump administration's foreign policy.
	And I do think if there is a continuing function for foreign assistance funds, that free speech diplomacy would be one of the clearest examples of doing that.
	I think if these, to the extent that Secretary Rubio thinks in his discretion, in the president's discretion, that continued support to folks in Cuba or in Ukraine should continue to get USAID funding,
	I would think that funding institutions that put pressure on the government of Brazil would be an appropriate function in the name of free speech diplomacy, civil liberties, human rights, and that that is another potential tool that is available.
	I mean, the main thing, though, is, I mean, the National Down for Democracy, coming back to that, if that does indeed continue to get every penny of funding that it got from the Biden era, and there's been no change in leadership.
	They still have the same president.
	They still have the same structure.
	There's been no restrictions put on them whatsoever.
	Well, I mean, that's a giant U.S. aid grant.
	And that's going to continue to support these censorship networks and, frankly, these narco networks in Brazil.
	And so I don't know that we've gotten a lot of wins on USAID, but on the Brazil story, the picture is actually much less clear.
	So if we shift gears a little bit to the recent disclosures on Russia Gate, what are your top-line takeaways there?
	What do the documents show?
	What do you think happens, if anything?
	Well, where all the data points appear to be converging is that the RussiGate affair started as a Hillary Clinton campaign trick, a dirty trick to plant this false flag essentially on Donald Trump, but that they couldn't get evidence for it.
	Nothing was convincing.
	And so the Clinton campaign looped in the FBI and then the CIA and the Obama White House itself in order to provide the patina of evidence, the patina of an intelligence assessment that confirmed the allegation that Hillary Clinton had ginned up to us.
	So essentially, you had one side of the political aisle.
	I think of it like a thummy war where you had Trump versus Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Trump was winning, winning, winning.
	And so Hillary Clinton uses that dirty trick when you do the index finger.
	And they brought in the national security state the moment they started losing.
	And they created through that the legal, the financial, the media, the cultural crowbar of a national security threat from abroad in order to sabotage Trump and make sure that his entire first term was hamstrung by a special prosecutor, by impeachment probes, by criminal, potential criminal threats.
	John Brennan himself was taunting Trump that he would effectively die in prison and that he would that Brennan accused Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors and said what he's done is nothing short of treasonous.
	What did he do?
	Even Brennan's own CIA said he did Bubkiss.
	We're now learning that analysts at the CIA had their arms twisted in order to go through with this assessment to help Hillary Clinton.
	That this just came out, that the same way they cooked the intelligence with the Wuhan lab, when the CIA turned out, I think seven whistleblowers came forward saying that they did not agree with the assessment that Wuhan had nothing to do with the origins of COVID-19, but that the CIA high senior leadership threatened them with financial incentives.
	With some of them, they said, we're not going to approve your book, your book manuscript.
	Because if you have a high-level security clearance and you want to publish a book, the book has to be cleared by the State Department, the CIA.
	They said, sorry, if you want to pay for your mortgage, you're going to have to change your position on the intelligence assessment.
	We're now learning the same thing that was done there was done with RussiaGate.
	And they did it through the Steele dossier.
	You had John Brennan lie, straight up lie, telling the media, telling Congress, perjuring himself the same way Clapper did around domestic bulk surveillance with the NSA.
	His little disciple, John Brennan, did the same thing by telling the media, oh, the Steele dossier, the P dossier, had nothing to do with our intelligence assessment.
	And now we're seeing reams and reams of evidence that not only did it have something to do with it, it was the lynchpin of it, that it was the only thing that changed between the low confidence, no confidence assessment of the FBI and CIA that Russia had interfered or had any plans to interfere in the 2016 election.
	And then the Steele dossier gets introduced at the highest possible classification, mind you, so that no one in even the lower or middle ranks of the CIA could even see what the assessment was based on.
	They classify it to the highest possible compartmentalized level.
	And then they use that as the basis to say actually Russia was interfering.
	And then twisted the arms of anyone who disagreed inside the agency.
	And meanwhile, the Steele dossier was completely unsubstantiated fan fiction written by a foreign intelligence agent who himself told the FBI that he was doing it for two reasons.
	One, that he was paid to do it by his client, the DNC, Hillary Clinton.
	And two, because he thought that if Trump won the presidency, it would threaten the U.S.-UK special relationship.
	Of course, at that time, the U.K. was getting skittish about losing Ukraine after the 2014 Crimea War and Trump statements on NATO.
	And UK wanted the U.S. to fight its war for it.
	And so they had a British intelligence agent working with Hillary Clinton and our own CIA to pull it off.
	What does accountability look like in all of this to you?
	A criminal conspiracy indicting John Brennan.
	Only John Brennan?
	I think that there are many other actors in this, but Brennan appears to be at every leg of this story.
	I mean, Brennan was the one who spearheaded the CIA side of the intelligence assessment.
	Brennan was the one who was pressuring Congress to indict and put Trump in prison on the basis of intelligence that he personally cooked.
	You had Brennan having foreknowledge of a plot by Hillary Clinton.
	It was John Brennan's handwritten notes on August 3rd, 2016, of Hillary Clinton approving a plan to vilify Trump by stirring up a scandal that Trump was backed by Russian security services.
	That's almost the direct quote of John Brennan's handwritten notes just five days after Hillary Clinton's alleged approval of that plan.
	He knew it was BS.
	And then he ran the intelligence assessment that conformed the intelligence assessment to make the BS so that Hillary Clinton could get away with the BS because now it had the backing of the Central Intelligence Agency.
	And now you're going to have, I think, a fight in court around state of mind, which is basically, I think, what some of these documents now are searching for was self-awareness by senior leaders.
	Because what we have right now with these disclosures are all the different lower and middle ranks of the CIA and FBI saying, hell no, this stinks to high heavens.
	We've never done anything like this.
	We've never included a foreign dossier as the basis of an intelligence assessment.
	I don't agree with this.
	I haven't even seen it.
	And you're asking me to sign off on this.
	What we do not have is, I guess, right now is the note to self from John Brennan and James Comey and Barack Obama saying, I know this is wrong as I'm, I know this is bullshit as I'm doing it.
	But that's the sort of thing that court battles turn on all the Time.
	When you prosecute someone, if someone kills someone, there's a question about whether or not they did it with intent.
	Did they do it with malice aforethought?
	Did they do it with, was it a premeditated murder?
	Was it first degree?
	It wasn't premeditated, but they did in the heat of the moment.
	Was it second-degree to murder?
	Was it unintentional, but they still murdered the person that's manslaughter?
	But that person, if you kill someone, still is in court having to defend themselves.
	And one of the things that's frustrating, though, is how long it takes to actually even get these documents public.
	I mean, Russia Gate goes back, I mean, nearly a decade.
	I mean, does our government just have an over-classification problem, or is it very much intentional?
	Can this actually be fixed?
	Well, you've got a 10-year statute of limitations for criminal conspiracy, I believe.
	And so, you know, we're within the window.
	But the fact is, is it's natural that these things were hidden.
	They were completely self-aware of what they were doing and how scandalous it was at the time.
	Peter Strzok, you look at his messages with Lisa Page.
	Peter Strzok was the counterintelligence chief of the FBI.
	That is the exact part of the FBI that works with the CIA.
	This is how CIA operations get laundered in the domestic homeland: through the FBI counterintelligence office, because intelligence is what we do abroad, but counterintelligence is intelligence operations against our own homeland to stop a foreign intelligence threat.
	They ran that through Peter Strzok, who was the one who said we have an insurance plan, who was the one who was texting with Lisa Page.
	Thank God that the search was only superficial or else we'd be in deep trouble.
	They knew what they were doing, which is why you had an Obama statement, as we've seen, that everything needs to be by the book.
	Now, why would you have to say that in an email that this time we got to do it by the book?
	We got to make sure it's by the book.
	Because they were never doing it by the book.
	I don't need to tell my accountant, hey, this year let's do it by the book.
	That presupposes that they're not doing it by the book, and they need to make it look like it's by the book.
	And then they burned the books.
	It turns out we're now finding thousands of documents in burn bags so that we couldn't even get the fake book that they wrote.
	But what I'm getting at here with the John Brennan story is that whether it's first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or manslaughter, that is for a jury to decide.
	A crime has been committed.
	They cooked the intelligence and they destroyed an entire democratically elected presidency, White House.
	They destroyed the democracy.
	When the CIA and the National Security Council and the FBI, when this had the impremature of the full faith and confidence of the U.S. 17 intelligence agencies, every institution in American society got weaponized from there.
	Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed to the universities, flowed to Harvard and MIT and Berkeley and Stanford to focus on Russian disinformation and Russian intelligence threats taking over hearts and minds in the homeland.
	Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed to defense contractors to stop Russian hacking attempts.
	And we got to pay CrowdStrike.
	We got to pay CISA.
	We got to stand up CISA as a whole new government agency based on bullshit.
	Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the NGOs.
	The National Down for Democracy is focused on it.
	The U.S. Institute of Peace is focused on it.
	The Carnegie Endowment is focused on it.
	The Atlanta Council is focused on it.
	Every instrument of our society, from the academic institutions to the media institutions to the rule of law institutions, they all got warped because of what John Brennan and his cronies did.
	They committed a murder of American democracy.
	And what degree of murder that is is for a court to decide.
	So I guess the open question I have is: why didn't any of this come out during the Durham investigation, the special counsel looking into all these things?
	Are there any insight on why he didn't get to the bottom of any of this?
	I have speculation, so I can't, you know, I'm as much of an outsider on that conversation as anybody else.
	But I have, here's my concern about why it didn't come out before.
	You had a Trump in term one that inherited almost no friends inside the American Congress, almost no friends inside the FBI or CIA or DHS or Justice Department.
	What you had, though, was a bipartisan fixation on seizing Eurasia as a matter of U.S. foreign policy.
	In the course of doing that, having to take out Russia.
	And the problem was this Russia Gate narrative was very helpful in going after Russia on the Democrat side and on the Republican side, on the John McCain side, on the Mitt Romney side, and potentially on the Mike Pompeo side.
	There were lots of Republicans.
	The only Republican friends that Trump appeared to have with any significant level of senior leadership within the National Security State or Congress were friends who were caught between Iraq and a hard place.
	They might like what Trump is doing on domestic policy.
	They might like his foreign policy on Venezuela.
	But on Russia, they were always at odds.
	Trump wanted peace.
	And Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Mitt Romney and almost five-sixths of the Republican Congress wanted infinite war spending pre-war, mind you.
	This is post-2014.
	But we were, I mean, make no mistake about it.
	We were at war in Ukraine since the Maidan coup in February 2014.
	We funded a paramilitary coup and then we funded a military army inside of Ukraine to seize Crimea and to seize the Donbass.
	That was why Trump was impeached the first time was because he dared to potentially change U.S. foreign policy as he was entrusted to do so by the American voters.
	And then they were rear-ended again by another CIA DOD, Eric Ciarmarella, Vinmin, and then Congressional Coup.
	But I think that folks who knew on the Republican side that Russia Gate was BS did not want how BS Russia Gate was to come out because it would undermine the support for going after Russia.
	And so they did not want to be publicly revealed how bullshit the intelligence assessment about Russian interference was because then you've got the American public saying, oh, well, why are we sending billions of dollars in military equipment to Ukraine?
	Russia's not interfering.
	Russia's not a threat to us.
	Russia didn't interfere in the 2016 election.
	Russia didn't hack the DNC server.
	Russia didn't interfere on U.S. social media.
	They didn't do squat to us.
	And it turns out our intelligence assessment was a complete lie.
	If anyone should be defunded, it should be our own intelligence agencies is what people will feel after that.
	And they're going to lose the war funding.
	So I think they wanted to blunt it by, but not reveal just how crooked it was.
	And thank God, elections matter.
	And we now have a very different task force on the inside.
	Well, Mike Benz, thank you so much for being here.
	Really appreciate it.
	A lot of insight.
	It's almost scary because, again, we understand these things peripherally.
	We talk about them on the show all the time.
	But when you really get down into just how bad it is, it's truly scary.
	But I guess this is the window of opportunity to actually do something about it.
	So thanks as always for being here.
	Where can folks find you on social media and stuff like that?
	Because I think you're an important person to follow for all of the details.
	Well, thanks likewise, and thank you for your leadership.
	I can find me on X at MikeBenz Cyber, also on Rumble and YouTube.
	Awesome, man.
	Thanks a lot, Mike.
	We'll talk to you soon.
	Talk to you soon.
	So thank you guys very much for tuning in.
	I really appreciate it.
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