Catherine Austin Fitts exposes a $21 trillion constitutional crisis involving unaccounted DOD and HUD funds since 1998, arguing the executive branch has stolen assets while leaving liabilities like Social Security intact. She contends that proposed balanced budget amendments fail to address this root cause, which she attributes to a shadowy "Mr. Global" entity suppressing rigorous financial analysts. Fitts warns of economic harvesting by this system and urges citizens to enforce existing appropriation laws by refusing New York Fed banking and repealing constitutional convention efforts rather than rewriting the Constitution. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Missing Money and Fiscal Responsibility00:08:46
Hi, this is Dark Journalist.
Today I'm excited to welcome back to the show former Assistant Housing Secretary and the publisher of the Solari Report, Catherine Austin Fitz.
Now, Catherine's latest reports are on keeping the Constitution intact and Control 101.
At the heart of her reports is the controversial idea of missing money from government agencies.
Now, Catherine coined the term the missing trillions, referring to her own studies of over 20 trillion missing at the Department of Defense and HUD.
The question that must spring to mind for all of us is can we get that money back?
Let's go ask former Assistant Housing Secretary Catherine Austin Fitz.
If we're going to live in a society where we finance people who don't obey the law, my estimate is $50 trillion or more out the back door, but we know $21 trillion of it missing money.
The Dark Journalist Special Report The Missing Trillions, a Constitutional Crisis.
Featuring an in depth two part interview with former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Catherine Austin Fitts.
Now, let's go join Dark Journalist Daniel List.
Catherine, it's great to have you back on the show.
Now, we have a whole lot to cover, so let's start off with this.
As you've mentioned, there's now a push out there going on for this constitutional convention.
They have 28 of the 34 states that they need to convene, and they're going to need 38 to ratify.
So we have people from different ends of the spectrum, like Tea Party activist Mark Meckler, saying it's all for a balanced budget amendment, which conservatives have been behind and looking for since the 1980s.
There are also movements on the left that want the Con Con, as you've called it, for different reasons.
So, forces on the right and left coming together to get a constitutional convention.
Both sides say they'll make progress on modern issues that are pressing.
So, that's the ostensible purpose behind it.
Now, what do you see as the real aim behind the ConCon?
Okay, so the aim behind the ConCon, there's a theory that when something's wrong, what you need to do is to do something.
Right.
And, you know, for many generations, what we've seen is the leadership.
Use the instinct of good hearted people to want to do things to basically get the grassroots to engineer what they are and take things where they're trying to go.
Okay, so we look at the system and we decide, okay, well, it's not working, we need to do something.
And the reality is, it's very, very important what you need to do.
So let me use a metaphor let's say we're sailing along in the ocean in the Titanic and there's an iceberg coming up.
Okay.
You know, we need to do something.
Do we need to have a fight over the deck chairs?
No.
No, we need to turn the rudder.
So, what I used to always say in Washington is the way to get changed in Washington is to put on your wetsuit, swim underneath the Titanic, and blow bubbles on the trim tap.
That's the rudder's rudder, and turn the rudder.
But what happens in these situations is you look at things that are going on and you say, oh, well, the problem is.
For example, that Congress is not following the Constitution.
So we'll put together, they're in violation of the Appropriation Clause, and we'll put together an amendment that requires them to balance the budget.
Yes.
Now, what that reflects, first of all, is a misunderstanding of what's happening in the appropriation process.
But the reality is, you don't need to change the Constitution, you need to enforce it.
So, as you know, there's $21 trillion missing from the U.S. government started in 1998.
It's what I call the missing money.
You need to get that $21 trillion back.
Okay, so I'm definitely following you that they're planning something behind the scenes on this.
But let's take something like a balanced budget amendment, for example.
Now, what's wrong with passing something like that?
I'm going to grossly oversimplify.
Let's say you pass a balanced budget amendment.
So here's the government.
We've stolen $21 trillion, or whatever the real number is in cash terms.
So we've stolen $21 trillion of cash and assets out of the government.
But we've left the liabilities in.
We haven't stolen the liabilities to pay military pension funds or the liabilities to pay, you know, make good on all the insurance sitting on all the mortgages that are sitting in all the pension funds, Social Security, Social Security, disability.
I could go on and on.
About 50% or more of every household income is directly or indirectly related to something coming out of those liabilities in the federal budget.
So we've left the liabilities in the federal budget and then we've moved all the assets over here.
Okay.
So now we come in and say, oh my God, there's all these liabilities.
We need to be fiscally responsible.
Let's balance the budget.
So the assets are gone.
Well, where are you going to get the assets to pay the liabilities?
So we go out to Daniel and we say, Daniel, you know, you have nice savings.
You have a house.
You need to pony up to take care of these liabilities because we need to balance the budget.
Okay.
Now, my theory is what we need to do, or what I'm saying is we need to enforce the Constitution because.
Before we balance the budget, we need to get that $21 trillion back.
Right.
Now, if you look at how the Constitution works, Congress cannot appropriate money unless it's envisioned.
Congress cannot, or the executive branch cannot spend money unless it's envisioned in appropriation.
Now, what has been happening certainly since 1998 and probably before then is Congress has been appropriating money even though the last year money was clearly spent outside the appropriations.
And there's been no reconciliation of what happened, where it went, how much is missing, getting it back.
And so we literally have not only Congress and the executive branch, but we have the New York Fed member banks and the defense contractors running the payment systems all engaged in what is not legal under the Constitution or the financial management laws and running the largest securities operation and securities investors all over the world buying securities that are not in compliance with.
The law.
Okay.
Now, the reality is, unless you fix that, so I always liken it to a milk can.
So a farmer's milking a cow.
He's got a milk can.
It's got a hole in the bottom.
And, you know, he keeps being told there's not enough milk.
Right, right.
Well, you know, you can shoot the farmer.
You can shoot the cow.
You can change the farmer.
You can change the cow.
It doesn't matter.
Unless you plug the hole, you're never going to have enough milk.
Now, the reality is, $21 trillion is $65,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.
Okay?
So that means $65,000 has disappeared through that milk can.
And the reality is, if we're going to balance the budget without that $65 trillion, you're talking about a very different world than if that $65 trillion is on the table.
Now, let me ask you I'm sorry, $65,000.
All right.
Let me ask you a trick question.
Okay.
If we're not going to enforce the Constitution, if we are going to run the federal finances outside the Constitution, the Treasury, the New York Fed, the New York Fed member banks as depository for the U.S. government are all going to run the U.S. government outside the Constitution, the financial laws.
So if we're free to run the government in any way we want, irregardless of the Constitution, why is it so important to change it?
Right.
Okay.
Right.
Right.
Excellent point.
Right.
So, if people, you know, one of the things you'll see is activists are, you know, put out their platforms and they suddenly find themselves receiving money or not.
And what's interesting is the activists that tend to get funded are the ones who are promoting something that Mr. Global wants.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Right, right.
Wall Street Activists and Funding00:09:17
So they, you know, the more they promote what Mr. Global wants, it's amazing the amount of money.
The money shows up.
The money shows up.
It's quite amazing to watch.
And, um, It was very interesting when they targeted my company and took it down.
Literally the next week, I used to get these calls from basically CFR types, and they'd say, Oh, dear, you know, I want to have lunch or dinner.
And then you'd go have lunch and dinner, and they'd give you the royal we, we have decided you should.
And so the first thing that happened is, You know, dear, I want to have lunch, I have lunch.
We have decided you should start a not for profit and continue to do the same work and apply for a grant from Soros.
We are sure you'll get it.
And I said, wait a minute.
Source is on the executive committee and the CFR.
So the people who just targeted and destroyed my company and stole my contracts, stole my people, stole my money, are now offering to launder a little bit of it back to me as a grant where they'll own all the intellectual capital.
Yeah.
And they think I'm that stupid.
Wow.
I said, well, you know, thank you for all being so caring and considerate, but I'm not.
Interested in starting a not for profit.
Thank you very much.
Fascinating.
It's an interesting tactic.
Well, many years later, I wrote an article called Narco Dollars for Beginners that suddenly took off.
The guys at Narco News wanted me to write it, and I kept saying, You know, I don't know anything about drugs.
They said, Look, you know money.
Explain the money side of drugs.
So I wrote it, and it just went electric.
It got translated into lots of different languages, just going gangbusters.
And so what happened was all the people involved in the war on drugs started.
Objecting.
And one of the things I learned was the vast majority of them were running what I would call a modified hangout.
And there were about 10 of them that got on an email with the head of Narco News and were having a discussion.
And he sent it to me.
And it turned out what was upsetting them was the fact that they thought I was going to take their funding from Soros away.
Wow.
That basically I had attracted so much attention.
Now I was a spokesperson on war and drugs.
And then suddenly I could get the money from Soros.
So I wrote them all.
You know, the guy who ran Narco News was nice enough to send me this sort of email chat.
And I wrote them all a message and I said, I have news for you.
Taking money from Soros would destroy my brand, it would create massive conflicts of interest.
I want nothing to do with Soros' money.
Rest assured, I will not touch your Soros money.
But what I discovered is they were all funded by Soros and they were on a leash.
And the one Group that was doing significant, really good research on narcotics trafficking globally and how it intersected with the financial system was the LaRouchis, who they attacked mercilessly.
And I said, Look, the LaRouchis took, you know, went to the brain damage of sitting down with a blank piece of paper and saying, Okay, who's doing what?
How does it work?
How does the money work?
Let's statistically try and do an almanac for the drug business and really name names and count money and everything else.
And, you know, they have the intellectual integrity to do that.
If you don't like their version, Why don't you do it?
Complete silence.
Wow.
Amazing.
Well, because they're being funded by you know who.
So, anyway, so a few little tangential stories on Soros.
Right.
Well, you illustrate a great point there, which is so much of activism is fragmented.
And that's probably by design, you know, balkanizing these different flashpoints of public interest into these small groups obsessed with their one pet issue.
And then you come along and say, actually, it's all part of a much bigger picture.
And if that doesn't relate to their funding, oh, then they shut you out.
Now, what does that tell us?
But the activists who are promoting what the top guys want are the ones who get the money.
And that's why.
In 1998, when I realized the extent of the money being stolen out of the U.S. government, I turned to my attorney and I said, You know, I'm there in Washington litigating.
The enemy of the state thing is going on.
Food is flying.
People are following me.
I'm getting run off the road.
It's wild.
And I turned to my attorney and I said, We're going to have to find a way to support ourselves at retail, meaning we can't work for corporations or governments anymore.
The corruption is too great.
And my attorney looked at me and she said, Good luck, honey.
Right, right.
Yeah, exactly.
Because for people like us, you're a wholesale person.
You're not a retail.
You just don't do retail.
Retail is a different way.
Right.
So all my transactions at the time were half a billion to a billion dollar deals.
Yeah.
And it was really funny for a long time when I started working as an investment advisor, I'd be looking at something that said millions and I would automatically add three zeros and say billion.
You know, well, you're.
You know, your space portfolio was $2 billion, and they'd say, What do you do?
Right, a million.
You made the adjustment, but it came down to Earth.
Well, it was, yeah, what was really funny was what happened was I had terrible experience with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
And it was my fake news, you know, I discovered the full extent of fake news, which is just extraordinary because those guys break the law all the time.
It's really bad.
Oh, no question.
Well, you know, of course, I worked at the Wall Street Journal and I had a real close up look at how they spin things over there.
Although I will say this on the financial side, they have the critical reach, so they always are informative on that end of the spectrum.
Well, you know, I'm a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal.
If you're an investment advisor, you have to read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
Yeah, definitely.
And I think they do a very good job.
You know, when a story is not sensitive relative to the intersection between covert and overt, it's great.
They do really great work.
If something is all over here in Disney World, they're great.
Yes, yes.
Well, they don't get into the disinformation game so much.
But as you said, if there is one of these important stories going around where the official narrative is in jeopardy, they will get their attack stories going.
There's no question.
Yeah, I remember once them writing something during the smear campaign that was just false.
Yeah.
And calling them and asking for attraction.
And they said, man, nobody cares.
Oh, unbelievable.
Well, no, in the scheme of things, that was nothing compared to the Times or the Washington Post.
Definitely.
You know, I've been enjoying your Solari report on enforcing the Constitution, and I have to say I'm really glad that we have this level of analysis available to us at this crucial time.
I think it might be interesting to reflect here on how you got started sharing this level of knowledge with us through your Solari reports.
I decided that I was going to never speak to corporate media again, I would only respond to questions from people.
So, I started doing radio shows, and then I would get question after question after question, and I would try and answer the question.
And this went on for years.
And finally, answering all the questions became such a workload that I said, look, I got to start charging for it.
And so then what happened?
I started the investment advisory company, and then I got the same 40 to 60 questions every week.
And I said, look, I've got to standardize this.
So I created the Solari report, and it really started as a way to respond to those questions.
And do it on a more professional basis.
I just needed people supporting me in the production.
And it grew from there.
And here's the thing because I would have, when I worked on Wall Street or in Washington, I would have bet you a huge amount of money that I would never, ever do.
You know, for me to be in media.
All right.
You know, well, this is an interesting point for people to understand.
You know, in your world of high finance, from your days as a partner at Dylan Reed and Company on Wall Street, you know, financial talk is usually secret.
So, you know, maybe things are shared in closed meetings or on trading floors.
But this kind of depth, just being publicly available, is remarkable, especially from someone with your background.
First time I got on a radio show and had to talk to a million people about money, I was like, oh, God.
Well, Destiny had other plans for you, obviously.
But I say, I always go, I call it Solari University, though, because it is ideas.
And I think that's important to get across, which is people can come on and talk about this is going to crash or that's going to crash.
The background that you give it, I don't see it anywhere else, you know.
And so, very often, you see when you talk about media, they have this guy come up, he'll know about tax stuff or he'll know about this, and they'll really go into it.
Stock Market Perceptions and Control Systems00:10:30
And great, he's an expert on that.
But there's always some kind of a catch to it, you know, like there's always some crash coming or there's always some thing to it.
To not understand the larger picture behind it, I think, is a big mistake and a great failing of the financial media, in a sense.
Well, the person who finally figured out what I was really up to was you because.
You figured out the sunglasses.
So, for those who don't know what the sunglass reference in the movie They Live, there's all sorts of spooky things going on, but you can't see it until you put on the sunglasses.
Yes.
Right.
And so, you finally said, Oh, I see what you're doing.
You're trying to give people a pair of sunglasses.
Yeah.
And here's what I'm interested in.
I liken it to us having a parasite.
So, I call it the tapeworm.
So, we have a parasite, it's harvesting us economically.
And spiritually, you know, in every which way.
And what we need to do is detox the parasite.
You know, we need to get the parasite out of our heads, out of our wallets, out of our lives, and do everything we can to build our immune system against being harvesting.
And frankly, the more people who refuse to feed the parasite, the more it helps everybody else.
The thing that is making the parasite so powerful is the extent of the general population being willing to feed them.
Right.
And that's a pretty major problem.
It's a huge problem.
That's why, on the next wrap up, you know, there are two things that really come down to making or getting traction on that issue.
One is enforcing the Constitution, because if we're going to live in a society where we finance people who don't obey the law and are free to kill and steal from us, there are no solutions.
So, and we're coming into a period where they've been eating away at the fat, not the muscle.
And now they're eating away at the muscle.
And if we don't Do something, we're going to have an extraordinary change in paradigm.
And technology is going to force it one way or the other.
So, if we don't do this now, then we're going to a very different and very inhuman civilization.
And we're coming into a real inflection point with this shift of what I call 2.0 to 3.0.
So, enforce the Constitution is essential.
To do that, you need to understand the control system.
And your new report is all about that Control 101.
It's coming up real quickly here in early November.
Now, one thing that might be helpful is if you give us some idea of the nature of Of the situation and who you think the players are.
There's the general population and then there's whoever is giving these Mr. Global orders.
And the reality is, we've got two sides and they're both unreasonable.
And the smart guys in the middle can't handle it anymore.
It's moving progressively into out of control.
So, just to break this down a little bit more, what are some of the signs that we're seeing that it's moving into out of control?
You know, it's funny because last night on the Soler report, I do money and markets and go through current events.
And I looked at the wildfires in California.
I looked at sort of disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico and Houston and then the Weinstein scandal.
And basically, you're watching, it reminds me very much in the late 70s and early 80s.
The intelligence agencies and enforcement moved in and sort of wiped out the mob, and the cash flows went much more corporate.
As the stock market was going on, there was a giant sucking sound of.
Of money engineered out of the mob and into the corporations.
And because you didn't need that many layers of intermediaries.
And we're seeing the same thing with the shift of Global 2.0 to 3.0.
This whole layer of intermediaries that have been intermediating between Mr. Global and the general population are very, very expensive.
So whether it's the casino guys in Las Vegas or it's the movie guys in Hollywood, the end user.
Wants cash, and if margins are falling, they're saying, Okay, we got to cut it from the middlemen because we're not cutting.
Ah, right.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's an amazing insight.
It does feel like that is happening.
Right.
Absolutely.
The Weinstein story is a 2.0 to 3.0 story because look at it.
You know, the social media guys now are commanding the flow, not Hollywood.
And part of that is the Clintons' loss.
So Bill can't protect Harvey anymore, and Harvey can't protect Bill.
Right.
You know, so, so, yeah.
And it's absolutely 2.0 to 3.0.
And you see it in all these different squabbles because the guys at the, you know, the end user, because to me, Las Vegas is basically set up and created to launder into Area 51 and that whole operation.
You know, those guys are saying, oh, no, no.
You know, if margins are shrinking, it's not coming out of our pie, it's coming out of your pie.
So to me, one way or another, that's probably what part of this fight is about.
And, uh, You know, it really did look like a mob war.
And who knows what really happened, but.
Well, it's moving pretty fast now.
And I think the Las Vegas shooting could also be a part of this.
And so it's moving fast, but it's also looking pretty ugly.
Well, I mean, but also blunt because the MGA, you know, you have Soros somewhere between June and August literally sell part of his Adelson position.
Sell all of his win position and then sell.
He didn't have any MGM apparently, but it looks like the documents say he shorted MGM.
And then we have the MGM CEO sell most of his stock in September.
So now that could have been in theory unrelated, but it's a remarkable coincidence.
Well, they always seem to have this prescience, and all of these fast financial transactions go on behind the scenes just before the big event goes down.
So they've got the inside knowledge.
It's certainly a recurring pattern.
Right.
It's funny because when I created Hamilton, I created an analytics capability so that anytime anything like this happened, I could tell you from all the trading patterns and all the different positions who made money and how and when.
It was very high speed.
There's a reason they seized all my computers and databases and destroyed everything.
You started the year with these kind of archetypes in the leadership.
Which were, you had scorpions, pigs, scaredy cats, and Titanic Turners.
So, who has the upper hand now that we're in about 10 months later?
Well, it's funny.
The Titanic Turners have gotten eaten by the scorpions.
Sessions becoming a scaredy cat and letting Mueller happen, big mistake.
Yeah.
Because it put the, you know, from April 1st on, Trump has been much more on the Make Israel Great Again plan than.
The Make America Great Plan.
And you wonder why.
And I, you know, I mean, we'd be back to high conjecture.
But basically, between McCain and Trump, we're talking about a $700 billion defense budget and more global wars, not less.
And of course, if you look at Trump's sort of language on North Korea, it's very encouraging of war.
So, He had promised, okay, no more foreign wars.
We bring resources back, make America great again.
And I think what has happened is he and the Goldman guys basically said, okay, well, to keep the stock market up, which is our performance metric, we need more defense, more wars.
Right, right.
And of course, Israel is saying, okay, make America great again.
The neocons really got a whack on the election, but they've sort of weaseled their way back in and seem to have gotten a lot of.
Different hooks into him.
So now he's trying to balance between his constituencies and the Make America Great and whatever the hooks are, whether it's keep the stock market up or.
There's no question.
With the Dow now at a record breaking pace, over 23,000, there's major motivation to keep it going at any cost.
So do you think that's what's going on here?
I don't know how much is the stock market and how much is various hooks.
And Mueller having him in a box, I can't tell.
Yeah.
But.
I think there's a real tension, and right now the neocons are getting their way.
Now, part of the reason they're getting their way is that it is perceived to be great for the stock market.
I think, however, that's a way of, you know, what you're saying is you're going to pump the stock market up with liquidating the planet as opposed to building anything sustainable.
So, you know, I had said that the people who backed Trump were much more interested in being successful in a shift to the multipolar world.
As opposed to betting the ranch that we could maintain a unipolar empire, Trump seems to try to do both, and I don't think you can do both.
So he seems to be continuing to bet too much of the rants on being a unipolar model.
Now, whether or not you could, if you put me in his position, sort of as portfolio strategist, and said, okay, can we become a unipolar model?
The whole thing is going to come down to weaponry and space weaponry.
Can we implement a unipolar model using the financial systems and financial sanctions?
Backed up by control of the sea lanes and space weaponry.
Weaponry Ahead of the Headlines00:04:17
It's a weaponry question, Daniel.
And I don't know enough about it.
You know, I can conjecture all day long about what we may or may not have and what the Russians and the Chinese have and what Mr. Global wants.
But the reality is, I don't know if the U.S. has the leadership and the weaponry.
And the resources to achieve a unipolar model.
My guess is they don't, because even if they have the weaponry, every sign says they don't have the leadership.
If you look at the most capable leaders in the establishment, they are not on board for going full tilt for a unipolar world.
You have to be a psychopath to be on board for that.
There's no question.
And when we come back, we'll look at where this is headed and what the real motivation for such drastic action could be.
Now, we've touched on Catherine's work on the missing trillions, but coming up, we'll dive deep into these numbers and the new reality that they represent.
Final round of part one coming up here with former Assistant Housing Secretary Catherine Austin Fitz.
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You know, we need dark journalists, so just keep doing what you're doing.
And we are back.
This is Dark Journalist, and I'm speaking with former Assistant Housing Secretary Catherine Austin Fitz.
Now, Catherine's new report coming out in just about a week is called Control 101 and gets into entrainment, control files, chemtrails, assassinations.
Wow, this really looks powerful, and I can tell you honestly, Catherine's reports are years and years ahead of the headlines, and I'm always impressed when those headlines finally catch up to her cutting edge analysis.
Now, a quick note here is that we'll be doing a live broadcast on the Dark Journalist YouTube channel to deal with the JFK files released last week.
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Undocumentable Adjustments in Government Agencies00:15:06
Now, Catherine, you've brought the term the missing trillions into the public lexicon.
And the theme of missing money from government agencies into serious discussion.
Now, of course, this is work you've been doing since the 90s, so please, everyone, accept no substitutions.
This is Catherine's research.
Now, you've tightened the figure for the missing trillions to a hard figure for 2017 of $21 trillion from DoD and HUD.
So just amazing, as that's more than all of the debt the country owes, period.
Now, I notice in the new report that NASA is no longer included in the calculation, so let's start there.
Is this still being researched, the NASA money?
I found missing money at NASA when I first started to look at the missing money in 98 and I think somewhere between 98 and 2000.
I made a big push coming into September 2001 that was going to culminate in a huge spread that was being published in Insight magazine on September 15, 2001.
Of course, it didn't get published in Insight magazine because 9 11 happened and we were off to the races again with pumping up the defense budget.
But.
What happened was, I've kept track off and on of money going missing starting in fiscal 1998 at DOD and HUD.
Now, let me just step back for a second.
I was part of a group of people in the first Bush administration that got laws passed requiring financial, basically audited financial statements at the federal agencies.
But they had to come up with public, understandable financial statements, not just budgets, but financial statements.
And so a process began in 94 and 95 where the federal government would say, We're not, you know, we weren't able to do that.
And here's one of the reasons we have undocumentable transactions and we can't balance them.
So, and then you come into 1998.
In the spring of 1997, I was told by the head of the president of the CalPERS pension fund, largest pension fund in the country, at the time that it was too late to save the country.
They were giving up on the country.
They're moving all the money out of the country starting in the fall.
Which was, of course, October 1998, which is the beginning, I'm sorry, October 1997, which is the beginning of the fiscal 1998 year.
And that's when the money started to go missing.
And it was right in the middle of the impeachment.
All this money started to just, all these money managers were suddenly getting billions of dollars to go invest in China.
And you're like, how did they get the money?
Where did it come from?
You know, suddenly, you know, the inner players were rolling in fantastic amounts of dough.
And then money was going missing from HUD.
Which is because I was litigating with HUD, I started to notice it.
So, in the opening balance that year, you had $17 billion missing, and the next year you had $59 billion, which for HUD is a massive amount of money.
It's bigger than his whole budget.
So, you had money disappearing from here, and suddenly you had all these players who miraculously had all these revenues or money to invest, and their explanation of where they're getting the money from, Daniel, was unbelievably conceptual and made absolutely no sense.
Wow.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, that's how I got.
I started to look so hard at Enron because the people, the contractors running HUD, were also sitting on the board of Enron.
It was a remarkable thing.
And they were running HUD systems and they had the same banks.
So you had the same banks and the same payment system guys running both, is what it looked like.
And money's disappearing here and it's miraculously showing up here.
And the guy who's running the company is testifying saying, I know nothing.
It's great.
You know, and Harvard Endowment is making a fortune in both places, and you think, oh, my.
Anyway, so that's why I started to ask the question, you know, because if you're going to launder $59 billion in a year, you can't launder that through a pizza restaurant.
Right.
You need publicly traded stocks, and because the right kind of publicly traded stocks are not subject to CRT or any of the other sort of money laundering compliance issues.
Okay, so anyway, so the money started to go missing.
Well, off and on since then, I've tracked it.
9 11 sort of shut it down.
Nobody cared.
It's national security.
We need all the money we can get.
We don't need to be accountable or fiscally responsible.
Who cares about the Constitution?
Let's just go kill everybody.
So that period happened.
And then money started to go missing in vast amounts in the Iraq War.
And there are two fabulous reporters, Barrett and Steele, who used to write for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who did a big piece in Vanity Fair about all the money disappearing in Iraq.
I thought, wow, the missing money story has now hit the fashion industry.
Here we go.
So, money started to go missing.
I jumped back in, and we would periodically update the missing money page to try and show people.
And one of the things I ran into was a force field where people would say, Well, dear, you know, peace is my issue.
My issue is not missing money.
That's your issue.
So, it's not relevant to me.
Right.
You know, and I was saying, Look, the governance structure umbrellas all these different symptoms and problems.
And if they can steal $21 trillion, they can do whatever they want.
Yeah.
And that means the governance system is there is no law.
They're in charge.
They can do whatever they want.
Right.
And, you know, but it didn't seem to compute.
I can't figure out why.
I thought it was very important.
Anyway, so it kept going.
And then in 2015, DOD announced that they were missing $6.5 trillion.
And the lead payment contractor spun their IT division out of the company and put it in a new, smaller company.
And I said, oh, this is a cut and run.
Ha ha.
And suddenly, that's when the move on the Constitution started.
So, I did all these articles on Solari saying cut and run.
Well, it turned out I think there's $200 to $300 billion disappearing at HUD.
So, it was clear when the Democrats were leaving the door, there was like, suck everything out that walks, talks.
The vacuum was working overtime, and they took everything else they could take.
Now, there are a lot of assets you can't just move out.
So, there's still plenty of assets left.
Things on cut and run because you know, when they started sucking the money out in 98, of course, you had Monica Lewinsky, and nobody wanted to talk to me about the missing money.
They thought it was much, you know, the president's sexual habits was much more interesting.
And sure enough, when the $6.5 trillion and I'm trying to do cut and run, then of course we have this fantastically interesting campaign and everybody is talking about things akin to Monica Lewinsky.
And of course, Monica Lewinsky is even back.
So I just said, here we go, Monica Lewinsky 2.
It's a cut and run.
Anyway, so I was doing a radio interview about it and a professor of state and local finance, very, Capable, extremely intelligent scholar is listening to me.
He hears me say that DOD had $6.5 trillion of undocumentable adjustments, which is 10 times their budget.
So let me give you an example of what this means.
Let's say you belong to a church that has an annual budget of $500,000.
And for 20 years, you've been going to the church business meetings, and every year they tell you they have undocumentable adjustments, which are a very high percentage or even more than their entire budget.
And you say, well, that's okay, don't do it next year.
And this goes on for 20 years.
And then they come in and say, Our undocumentable adjustments are $5 million last year, 10 times our budget.
But we don't know what it's about.
But don't worry, we promise we won't do it next year.
What would you say?
It's just incredible.
Right, exactly.
So he heard me say this on a radio interview.
And he said to himself, She has to be wrong.
It's impossible.
You know, by accounting standards, 1% to 5% is considered not material.
But if you have more, and even in operation 1% of $600 billion is a huge amount of money.
So, you know, even tiny amounts in an operation that big, you would dig and find every penny and document it.
And you would not want systems that couldn't do that.
And I assure you, if you look at all the publicly traded companies, whether the banks, the New York Fed member banks that operate their bank accounts as a depository, or the payment contractors under the SEC law, they have to produce perfect financial statements and file them every year.
So they all know how to do it.
Anyway, so he said she has to be wrong.
So he went to the DOD website and he dug into all the documents and he discovered I was right.
Incredible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he's sitting in his office at the university saying, This can't be possible.
It's not possible.
It's not possible, but it's not only happening, but it's on their website.
Yeah.
So he called me and he wrote me an email and he said, Would you like me and my graduate students to help?
Well, what they agreed to do was go in and get every year, every document, read the documents, figure out how much undocumentable adjustments were.
And I agreed that I would collect the documents, keep copies on my server, and put up a website so that anyone, any reporter, any citizen who wants to go and audit our numbers can get every document, every number by year for the different parts of DOD, Air Force, Army, Navy, and then HUD.
So, it's every year from 98 to 2015, and it's every document.
And, you know, we say it's this number, and you can find it on page 112.
So, it takes the audit process down from something that takes hundreds of hours to, you know, very quick.
Now, here's what's interesting.
As soon as we got the documents all up, he wrote a report that's very, you know, the thing that you would expect from somebody who's a state and local government scholar.
It's very basic.
Here's what we know, which is very little.
Here's what the documents say.
Here are our questions.
And, you know, so it's very grounded, it's very dry, it's very well done.
He's a very smart guy.
His name is Dr. Mark Skidmore.
So he put in a FOIA request and tried to call the OIG offices to get his questions answered and to try and really understand what this is and why, in theory, it's not important.
And their only response has been to take down the documents.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
Right.
Now, the controller has not taken the documents down.
It's just the office and the inspector general have taken the documents down.
Okay.
You can understand why they're the auditor.
They're the people who are supposed to make sure that this doesn't happen.
The books are all balanced and clear and are in compliance with the Constitution and the financial management laws.
Clear, clear.
Yeah, now, to their credit, they've been publishing the numbers every year.
You know, there's $6 trillion of undocumentable adjustments, et cetera.
So, anyway, but they took the numbers down and there you are.
So, we're still digging.
Now, if you look at the other, what's Called covered agencies.
There used to be 21, and I'm assuming that it's approximately the same.
I've had pretty significant indications that there's money going missing at NSA.
There's money going missing at State Department.
In the old days, I looked at NASA and one year found, I think, $500 billion.
But Dr. Skidmore says the students have looked at NASA and they're not finding anything like that.
So who knows?
Well, maybe things have changed there at NASA.
I don't know.
You know, who knows?
Anyway, it's really funny because if you look at the.
NASA and HUD are in the same subcommittee and sort of pot in the budget.
And every time the space station ran out of money, HUD would get gorged.
Interestingly, you said there's a relationship between these two.
Yeah.
I think there's a direct link between NASA needing money and HUD going or money going missing at HUD.
But we have not looked at the other agencies.
And frankly, I think if we were, Yes, we'd probably find another 100, couple hundred billion, but I think the HUD and DOD is sufficient.
Now, one of the things I should say is I'm extremely knowledgeable about HUD and HUD finances.
Now, clearly my knowledge is dated because I left, I stopped serving, or my company stopped serving as lead financial advisor in 97, so that's 20 years ago.
But the mortgage world and accounting hasn't changed that much.
I'm not anywhere near as knowledgeable about DOD, but given what I understand, About how HUD has been run and the complicity of the Treasury Department, Department of Justice, CIA, the New York Fed member banks, the payment contractors, all the matrix structure that runs the money at HUD.
You know, if they're doing what they're doing and what I know they're doing at HUD in terms of securities fraud and other things, they're absolutely, you know, how can DOD be clean?
Yeah, right, right.
Absolutely.
It's the same.
Financial operation, you know, it's one financial operation that runs a lot of the money for all the agencies.
Anyway, so the reality is that if we want the country to work, we need the finances to be run according to the law.
And then if we want the country to be run according to the law, we need to stop financing lawlessness out of the money that is being run outside the law.
I mean, basically, what we're doing is we're sending money into an operation.
Which is not only not following the law with respect to the money, but it's then turning around and using that money, I believe, in a variety of different lawless ways.
Certainly, that's what I saw in the mortgage market during the bubble.
That's what I saw when I worked at HUD.
And so the question for each one of us is how do we enforce?
Now, it's funny, starting in 1998, I tried to persuade people to stop banking at the banks that are doing this.
Bailouts Empowering Banking Giants00:04:29
And what is astonishing is if you talk with.
Most people, they are banking directly or indirectly, whether their bank account or their credit cards, with the banks that are doing this.
So we have the power to shun all the banks that are doing this and all the banks that would love to chip us and run everything with digital cash.
So, you know, the bailouts made these banks much more powerful.
The New York Fed member banks are much more powerful as a result of the bailouts.
I'm assuming they're much more powerful as the result of the missing money.
I mean, let's face it, who made Donald Trump?
President, if anybody made Donald Trump president, Goldman Sachs did.
Their stock started trading up the week before.
No question.
Well, Catherine, this is just fascinating.
And before we end part one, one thing you outlined so well at Solari is how we get to solutions.
So, what is a good idea to take action around the missing money?
There are lots of great ideas.
One of them, in addition to switching your bank away from the people who are doing this, of course, is start talking and dialoguing with your state legislators.
You know, don't let them approve a con con if they have.
Some of the states have reversed it and repealed it.
So reverse and repeal it.
But start talking with them, not just about, you know, let's not have a con con, let's enforce the Constitution.
Imagine, you know, tell the state legislature, look, $65,000 a person for every man, woman, and child in your state.
You know, we can do, we can reverse that.
And here's the thing, you know, even if you could argue with me that you can't get the money back, and you can't argue with that with me because I believe you can.
With offsets and all sorts of other strategies.
But even if you can't, the policy discussion that we're going to have about how do we meet these obligations is very different if we're silent on the $21 trillion than if we're not.
Yes.
If I'm in a negotiation with you in public and I can be clear that you just stole $21 trillion, that changes the power equation between us and the discussion.
And you can't say, oh, you, the general population, have been.
Profligate, and that's why there's no money.
You're irresponsible.
You're unproductive.
That's why there's no money.
You can't say that.
Wait a minute.
You just stole trillions on the bailout and you just stole 21 trillion and refused to publish the book.
So you have no credibility here.
You're lawless.
So even if you're only talking about the impact on the spin, this is essential for purposes of how we spin this.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a great point.
And if they get that kind of a line going, as we saw during the bailouts in 2008, oh, it was those subprime loans.
Average people were abusing the system.
And Goldman Sachs, well, they were just helping, they were trying to bail everybody out.
You didn't need that house.
Goldman saved you.
Shameless.
Catherine, incredible information.
Thank you so much.
And for Dark Journalist subscribers, we're going right into part two.
And you'll get that in your inbox this weekend.
So don't miss it.
Subscribe at darkjournalist.com.
We're going deeper than ever on this one.
Thank you, Catherine.
Just amazing information.
The site is solari.com, the latest report in the first week of November coming up.
I really advise everyone to go there and get it.
And now, on to part two.
And everyone, keep in mind that we have the JFK special coming up this week.
It's a live special.
So stay tuned and make sure you're signed up for the newsletter.
Catherine, stay right there.
Don't move.
Thank you for joining me for this fascinating episode with former Assistant Housing Secretary Catherine Austin Fitz on the missing trillions, a constitutional crisis.
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