Aug. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
20:03
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Good evening. | |
| Just yesterday, the Arizona Senate president, she announced that there is a discrepancy in the number of ballots. | |
| She said that the number of 2020 ballots tallied during the forensic audit does not match the official total that was given by Maricopa County. | |
| Meanwhile, over in Texas, House Democrats wanted to derail voting on an election bill. | |
| And so what they did is that they fled the state, making a quorum impossible to reach. | |
| They literally got on a plane and flew to Washington, D.C. so that the Texas legislature couldn't vote on the measure. | |
| However, it looks like their tactic might backfire as Governor Greg Abbott over in Texas, he has called on them to be arrested. | |
| And lastly, two days ago, the FBI sent out a message via Twitter encouraging Americans to both monitor as well as report their friends and family. | |
| Let's go through these stories together. | |
| This is your daily Facts Matter update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times. | |
| Now let's begin today's discussion over in Arizona. | |
| But actually, just before we do, as a super quick aside, right there at the very top of the description box is a link to Epic TV, which is our brand new no-censorship video platform where you can find all of the awesome Epoch Times video programs. | |
| Like Counter Culture with Danielle D'Souza, Cash's Corner with Cash Patel, Real Talk with Wayne Dupree, California Insider, China in Focus, Life and Times, and our show Facts Matter. | |
| And on there we publish exclusive episodes that, frankly, due to the censorship on YouTube, I don't feel comfortable publishing on this platform. | |
| So again, that link will be right there at the top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And now let's really move on over to Arizona. | |
| And in our previous episode, we discussed how the Arizona State Senate purchased two machines which will allow them to count the number of ballots over in Maricopa County. | |
| However, we now have an update, which can give us a glimpse into why exactly they are taking that course of action. | |
| That's because just yesterday, Karen Phan, who is the Arizona Senate president, she said that the number of 2020 ballots that were tallied during the forensic audit does not match the total that was documented by Maricopa County. | |
| Again, just to reiterate, she said that the auditors found a discrepancy between the number of ballots in their possession and the number of ballots that were officially reported by Maricopa County. | |
| However, she did not reveal how far off the counts actually were. | |
| Specifically, here's what she told a local news station. | |
| In that interview, she then further discussed some of the actions that the audit team is taking as the process is wrapping up. | |
| Here's what she said. | |
| We are finishing up. | |
| The vendor is finishing up what we call the aggregation, double-checking the spreadsheets against the blue tally sheets, against the scans they did in the ballots, because before we turn those ballots back to Maricopa County, they want to make sure that every one of those check and balances match before they start doing the analysis of all the data they received. | |
| And so just to reiterate exactly what she said, back in November, when the actual election took place, Maricopa County officials, they tabulated all the ballots, and they found that there were 2,089,563 votes in total. | |
| That was the first count that was made. | |
| Then, over the past two months, the audit team, led by the Cyber Ninjas, they have been recounting the ballots once again by hand. | |
| That was the second recount. | |
| And thus far, we don't know exactly what number they came up with. | |
| However, as Karen Phan mentioned, as we quoted her earlier, they did reveal that the number is different than what Maricopa County officially reported. | |
| And this is fairly critical because if you remember, Joe Biden, he officially won Arizona by a razor-thin margin, by just a little over 10,000 votes. | |
| So any discrepancy has to be looked at seriously. | |
| And that appears to be exactly what the Arizona State Senate is doing. | |
| Because after they were told that the numbers did not add up, they purchased two of their own paper counting machines to produce a third ballot count, which is a third data point, which would allow them to compare against the official count from Maricopa County, as well as against the numbers that came out of the Henry count. | |
| Here's specifically what Karen Phan said in this point. | |
| That's when we said, let's get a couple of our own independent machines, not Dominions, separate ones, and do our own independent. | |
| and all we're doing is just counting the number of ballots. | |
| It's a paper counting machine is all it does. | |
| That will help us give like a third check and balance to see if those numbers are closer to the vendor's numbers or Maricopa County's or all three could be right on target. | |
| She further said that if their count, this third count, finds a discrepancy, they will do another count to make sure. | |
| Here's what she said. | |
| We're going to run all the ballots through to see how they match up. | |
| If there ends up being a difference, we'd have another count. | |
| Likewise, Ken Bennett, who is the audit liaison, he told us here at the Epoch Times this when we asked him about the new recount. | |
| Maricopa County says there's 2,089,563 ballots. | |
| We did the hand count, and they're finalizing that number, but we just wanted a third number to tie everything together, make sure we have more. | |
| The more data points, the better. | |
| And again, it's worth noting that unlike the first two tabulations, this third count will focus exclusively on the number of ballots, not the actual votes, not who voted for who, just literally they're going to be running the ballots through a paper counting machine to see how many ballots there are. | |
| And in terms of how long this process will take, well, according to Randy Pullen, who is another audit liaison, he said that the new machine count should have started yesterday, which is on Tuesday, and it will go into next week. | |
| Although it's not clear whether the state Senate would reveal the results right away or wait to do it alongside the final report, which is expected sometime next month, sometime in August. | |
| We'll just have to wait and see. | |
| And besides this ballot recount, which was just initiated, the teams are also wrapping up other portions of the audit as well. | |
| For instance, one team is working to check the signatures from the mail-in ballot envelopes against images from the county, while another team is examining high-resolution images of the ballots themselves to make sure that an actual person filled out the ballot rather than it having been photocopied or Xeroxed. | |
| We can expect to see those results in the final report, which is again going to come out likely sometime in August. | |
| Now, if you would like to read more about any of these developments, the link to those articles will be right there in the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And now, let's move on over and discuss how the FBI wants you and I to monitor our friends and family. | |
| Hello? | |
| Yeah, hey Roman, it's me. | |
| No, I'm just kidding. | |
| I wanted to take a quick second and introduce our sponsor for today's episode, which is an awesome company called American Hartford Gold. | |
| They're run by Patriots and what they do is they sell physical gold and silver that they can deliver directly to your doorstep or they can deposit it directly into your IRA account, making it super simple for you to own. | |
| Now, I don't have any qualifications to offer you financial advice, but I will tell you what I do. | |
| And for the last five years now, I just set aside a portion of my salary every single month to buying physical gold and physical silver because I think it's a phenomenal hedge against inflation. | |
| Because, I mean, with all these trillion of dollars worth of stimulus bills, with this Congress right now is debating several trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending, our national debt has ballooned to close to $30 trillion and seemingly no one is talking about this. | |
| Honestly, I don't have much faith in the future of the American dollar as the global reserve currency. | |
| However, physical gold and physical silver have withstood the test of time. | |
| I mean, they had value 5,000 years ago, they have value today, and I believe they'll have value 5,000 years into the future. | |
| That's at least what I think. | |
| And American Heart for Gold is a phenomenal company. | |
| They're one of my personal gold dealers. | |
| Super friendly staff to work with. | |
| They have an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. | |
| And right now, to viewers of Facts Matter, they're offering a special. | |
| Depending on how much you buy, they'll offer you $1,500 worth of free silver, and they'll even send you a safe so that you can keep your precious metals at home, knowing that they are safe and sound. | |
| So check them out. | |
| The link will be in the description box below, or you can give them a call at 866-242-2352, or you can text Roman to 65532. | |
| American Heart for a Gold, thank you so much for sponsoring this episode. | |
| Now, Roman in the studio, back to you. | |
| And now, let's talk about the FBI. In a tweet that they posted three days ago, the FBI suggested that Americans should both monitor and report on their family members as well as their peers. | |
| That's right. | |
| In an effort to prevent extremist activities, the FBI is asking you, the American citizen, to monitor and report on your family and friends. | |
| Here's specifically what that tweet said: "Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. | |
| Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. | |
| Visit this website there to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the FBI." Now, when you actually click on that link that's embedded in that message, it takes you to a government booklet that was initially published in 2015 and then updated in 2019, which goes through some of the signs and indications that someone might be considering violence. | |
| However, it's worth noting that the booklet mainly highlights Islamic terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. | |
| In fact, there is a heading in the booklet called Why Was This Booklet Created? | |
| and here's what it says. | |
| The United States and other Western nations face a heightened threat from homegrown violent extremists heeding the call to violence from foreign terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Asham, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other groups. | |
| In an effort to mitigate future attacks, the initial list of indicators was developed based on a review of information derived from dozens of FBI terrorism investigations. | |
| Now, very likely, if both this document and this tweet were released just a few years ago, it probably wouldn't have caused too much of a stir. | |
| But in today's political climate, where there appears to be increasing calls to label a large swath of the American population as domestic terrorists, This type of request from the FBI to both report and monitor your friends and family was not taken too well. | |
| For instance, Richard Grinnell, who was the acting director of national intelligence under President Trump, and who, by the way, I had a chance to interview over the weekend, he said that the FBI's message was outrageous, adding that the agency has a growing credibility problem and this type of sinister snitching is clearly unhelpful. | |
| Furthermore, many Republican lawmakers criticized the FBI's message, saying that the agency is encouraging American family members to spy on one another. | |
| For instance, here's what Ted Cruz wrote on Twitter. | |
| In both Cuba and China, they also asked children to spy on their parents. | |
| Furthermore, Dan Bishop, who is a congressman from Texas, he wrote this about the FBI. These people protected Hillary, abused NSA surveillance databases against Americans, used known, unreliable, DNC-funded propaganda to spy on Trump, perpetuated the Russia hoax and lied to the FISC repeatedly. | |
| And now they tell you that you should spy on your family? | |
| Now, as I mentioned earlier, it's not exactly clear whether the FBI posted this tweet in regards to Joe Biden's campaign against domestic violent extremists or just in regards to the long-standing operations against Islamic terrorist groups. | |
| But what is clear is that the timing of this tweet coincides with a significant change in messaging from the White House. | |
| For instance, just a few months ago, during a joint session of Congress, Joe Biden said this. | |
| Make no mistake. | |
| The terrorist threat has evolved beyond Afghanistan since 2001, and we will remain vigilant against threats to the United States wherever they come from. | |
| And we won't ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined. | |
| The most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism. | |
| Furthermore, Christopher Wray, who's currently the director of the FBI, he recently made this statement. | |
| The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now. | |
| We elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority on the same level as ISIS and homegrown violent extremists. | |
| Now, we here at the Epoch Times, we reached out to officials over at the FBI for both comment as well as clarification, but we have yet to hear back. | |
| Regardless, if you would like to read more about the FBI's new message, if you would like to read their PDF document that they released, or if you would like to learn exactly how you can report your friends and family to the FBI, the links to all that will be in the description box below this video for you to check out, which, by the way, is that same description box that is right below that like button, Which I hope you take a quick moment to smash. | |
| Because it goes without saying that videos that are like this, talking honestly about what is happening in this world, are routinely censored by big tech giants like YouTube. | |
| However, when you smash that like button below this video, you are forcing the YouTube algorithm to share this video out to potentially thousands of more people, letting the truth be known far and wide. | |
| And now let's move on over to Texas, where, first of all, it was announced about two weeks ago that the Attorney General's office currently has over 500 outstanding cases of election fraud that they're working through. | |
| That announcement was made by Ken Paxton, who is the Attorney General out in Texas. | |
| And by the way, in a speech that he gave over the weekend, so just a few days ago, he further added that Texas is now investigating an additional 386 cases of voter fraud. | |
| That's 386 additional cases, which is on top of the 500 cases that he mentioned earlier. | |
| Here's part of what he said. | |
| Do not believe the narrative, because in Texas we are going to fight election fraud. | |
| Now what he's referring to there is the claim, usually made by Democrats, that voter fraud doesn't exist. | |
| However, Ken Paxton went on to call that notion a false narrative. | |
| Here's specifically what he said. | |
| "People tell you there is no election fraud. | |
| "Let me just tell you right now. | |
| "My office has 511 counts in court "because of COVID waiting to be heard. | |
| "We have another 386 that we're investigating. | |
| "If you add those together, "that's more election fraud than my office has prosecuted "since it started investigating election fraud "years and years ago." Now, surrounding these investigations into election fraud is the drama that's playing itself out over at the Texas legislature. | |
| And let me give you a bit of background on that because it gets a little convoluted. | |
| Back in May of this year, back in May of 2021, the Texas State Senate, they approved a fairly sweeping election integrity bill. | |
| Among several other things, that bill would grant more power to poll watchers by giving them better access inside of polling areas. | |
| It would establish new penalties against election officials who restrict poll watchers' movements. | |
| And it would allow a judge to void the outcome of an election if the number of fraudulent votes could have changed the result. | |
| However, when that bill made its way to the Texas House and was likely going to pass, the Democrats tried a new tactic. | |
| They literally just walked out of the legislative session, which made it impossible to establish a quorum in order to vote on the bill. | |
| That's because, according to Texas House rules, at least two-thirds of the chamber's 150 members must be present in order to conduct any kind of business. | |
| The Democrats' reasoning for walking out was that this election integrity bill was designed to suppress minority voters, and so they created a situation where the vote couldn't take place at all. | |
| Now again, that was back in May, so that was about two months ago. | |
| However, just two days ago, we had a repeat performance. | |
| What happened was that earlier this month, so earlier in July, Greg Abbott, who is the governor of Texas, he's a Republican, he called a new special legislative session. | |
| This special session lasts for a period of 30 days, and its main agenda is to work through the election reform bill. | |
| Here's what Governor Greg Abbott said after calling for this special session. | |
| Even Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives agree that as it concerns mail-in ballots, that is an area where improving the mail-in ballot system is a way to achieve greater election integrity. | |
| So what Texas is doing is we're making it easier to vote by adding more hours in early voting than we have in current law, but also making it harder to cheat with regard to mail-in ballots. | |
| However, that is not what actually wound up taking place. | |
| Instead, what actually happened was that the Texas House Democrats, they literally fled the state. | |
| That's right. | |
| In order to break the quorum, they got on a private chartered plane and flew over to Washington, D.C. Here's where part of a joint statement from these Texas House Democrats, here's what it said. | |
| We are now taking the fight to our nation's capital. | |
| We are living on borrowed time in Texas. | |
| We need Congress to act now to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. | |
| However, it looks like these Democrat lawmakers will face consequences upon their return to Texas. | |
| That's because on Monday, Governor Greg Abbott, he said that the House Speaker has the authority to arrest these Democrat lawmakers for breaking the quorum. | |
| Here's specifically what he said. | |
| He further added that when these Democrat lawmakers return to the state of Texas, he said that they will be arrested. | |
| They will be cabined inside the Texas Capitol until they get their job done. | |
| Now, you might be wondering, is it really the case that these lawmakers can actually be arrested? | |
| Well, it looks like it is. | |
| That's because, as we already mentioned, according to the rules of the Texas House, at least two-thirds of the chamber's 150 members must be present in order to conduct any kind of business. | |
| However, that rule then goes on to say that if there are absent lawmakers for whom no sufficient excuse is made, the House members who are still present, who are still in the House, can vote to have those absent lawmakers, quote, be sent for and arrested wherever they may be found. | |
| And that looks like exactly what happened. | |
| That's because just yesterday, the House Republicans in Texas, they voted to track down the absent Democrats and potentially arrest them. | |
| And so these Democrat lawmakers who are currently in Washington, D.C. are essentially now fugitives. | |
| However, it's worth noting that Texas doesn't actually have the ability to force these lawmakers to come back to the state. | |
| Instead, the way that it works is that when they return to Texas, they could potentially be arrested. | |
| Although it's not the case that they can be arrested in Washington, D.C. and then be sent back home. | |
| In fact, on that point, here's what one of the Democrats who is currently in Washington, D.C., here's what she said. | |
| And so, we'll just have to wait and see how this all ultimately plays out. | |
| By the way, just for your reference, later this week, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be meeting with these Texas lawmakers over in Washington, D.C. Now, we here at The Epoch Times... | |
| We reached out to these Texas Democrats as well as to Governor Greg Abbott's office for comment on this matter, but we have yet to hear back. | |
| Regardless, if you would like to read more about the story, the link to that will be right there in the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And lastly, as we've already mentioned in several previous episodes, on the very same day that Joe Biden was sworn into office, YouTube made the unilateral decision to demonetize our program. | |
| We can now no longer run any ads before, during, or after episodes, and the Super Chat feature has just been disabled. | |
| Now, fortunately, occasionally we do get sponsors, who are typically companies run by patriots who support a channel like ours, who dares to speak about the facts without pushing some kind of a forced narrative. | |
| However, when YouTube demonetizes our program, we're going to be able to do that. | |
| We did not take this lying down. | |
| We took action, and we created something super cool. | |
| It's called EpicTV. | |
| It's our brand new, no-censorship video platform where you can find all of the Epic Times video programs, like Counter Culture with Danielle D'Souza, Cash's Corner with Cash Patel, Real Talk with Wayne Dupree, California Insider, China in Focus, Life and Times, American Thought Leaders, Crossroads with Joshua Phillips, and of course my show, Facts Matter, and on there we publish exclusive episodes that you just won't be finding anywhere else, especially here on YouTube because the censorship has just gotten rampant. | |
| So again, if you want to check it out, the link to it will be right there at the top of the description box. | |
| And I hope that you click on it. | |
| I hope that you subscribe. | |
| I hope that you check out all the awesome content as well as the awesome documentaries on there. | |
| And join us in this journey of exploring this beautiful world through honors journalism based in truth and tradition. | |
| Now lastly, if you haven't already, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. | |
| Subscribe to this YouTube channel if you haven't already in order to get this type of honest news content delivered directly into your YouTube feed while you still can. | |
| And also, by the way, someone mentioned, if you hit that notification bell next to the subscribe button, you'll be notified as soon as any new videos premiere. | |
| That's something that's very cool. | |
| Also, if you have an Instagram account, follow me at EpicTimesRoman. | |
| I post memes as well as behind-the-scenes research that I'm doing. | |
| And also, you can subscribe to our newsletter just in case anything ever happens here on YouTube. | |
| You can get notifications as to what new videos we're publishing. | |
| The link to that will be in the description box below. | |
| We don't spam you, but we do send you updates. | |
| And then lastly, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epoch Times. |
Export Selection