The Truth & Lies About the Atlantic's Signal Controversy; EU Already Failing to Back Up its Militaristic Rhetoric; Appeals Court Rules Against Trump DOJ in El Salvador Case
The Trump administration doubles down on lies and excuses for why anti-Trump journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the infamous Signal chat. Then: European leaders cannot back up their deranged militarization goals without U.S. support. Finally: a DC Appeals Court rules against Trump's deportation policy.
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It's Wednesday, March 26. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the controversy, one might say, scandal arising out of the Signal war planning chat could and should have been a one-day story at Moe's.
Had Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, just admitted what is plainly true?
That he accidentally added the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to their war planning chat, said he made a mistake and pointed out that no harm was done, nobody would be talking about this anymore.
Hopefully we'd be focusing on the far more important question of whether Trump should have restarted Biden's war and bombing campaign in Yemen and what the outcome is likely to be, but that's not what Walsh or other Trump officials did.
They did the opposite.
Walt has been issuing a series of increasingly embarrassing and highly implausible claims to justify what he did, largely because he seems petrified of admitting that he actually did have Jeffrey Goldberg's contacts saved in his phone.
Because Goldberg is one of the most unscrupulous operatives in DC media and Trump harbors particular contempt for him.
As a result of this refusal to simply admit error and move on by Mike Waltz, we have been drowned in a series of utterly ridiculous claims from the administration as well as from Goldberg and other Trump enemies that deserve scrutiny simply because it's one of the most important jobs of a journalist to sort through claims coming from government and corporate media to discern what is true and what is not.
So that is what we will be doing along with evaluating new evidence about the bombing campaign and the evidence itself and how it's being carried out.
Then, ever since Donald Trump made clear his intentions to end the war in Ukraine and, in general, withdraw from the responsibility of financing Europe's defense, EU leaders have seemed to delight in embracing all sorts of tough-guy, warmongering rhetoric about how they intend to become a major military power without the U.S., how they will rearm, spend everything necessary to do so, and how they will even fight Russia.
Unsurprisingly, given that this is Europe, these vows are proving to be completely empty, as very few European countries actually have the ability or the political will to back up any of this tough talk with action.
We'll show you the sad and darkly hilarious reality of Europe and the Grand Canyon wide gap between their swaggering rhetoric and their impotent reality.
And then finally, we reported on Monday night about the hearing that was held at the D.C. Court of Appeals where Trump Justice Department lawyers tried to convince the appellate court to cancel or abandon the lower court judges' stay on deporting illegal immigrants to prison in El Salvador without providing due process.
At the time, we explained that the judges on the appellate court, an oral argument, seemed aggressively hostile to the Trump Justice Department's theories as to why they were permitted to do this.
Today, that three-judge appellate court issued its ruling and by a two-one-to-one decision, ordered that the injunction on these deportations to El Salvador remain in place.
And pointed out what they see as the In these deportations, even the dissenting judge acknowledged that before you can deport even an illegal alien to El Salvador, they are required to have due process.
We'll tell you all about it.
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honest, and like why wouldn't I be, I wish I didn't have to talk about this whole Signal Atlantic.
Yemen war chat scandal because I actually don't think it's particularly significant in and of itself.
I think what happened here is very obvious.
The Trump administration, particularly Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth, particularly Mike Waltz, were negligent, careless, reckless.
I think all those terms apply.
When using an unreliable app to talk about extremely sensitive War plans, a bombing campaign that they were about to initiate prior to its initiation.
And Mike Waltz accidentally went to include somebody who worked for the government in that group and by accident chose a reporter, a highly unscrupulous and aggressively anti-Trump reporter named Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, accidentally chose his number and his contacts saved on his phone and put him into the group.
And had Mike Waltz just admitted that, had he just said, look, I have a lot of reporters' names saved in my phone.
I've been in Congress for a long time.
We talk to reporters.
I have a lot of lobbyists, just like every other member of Congress.
And I don't talk to Jeffrey Goldberg much, or maybe I've never even talked to him, but I had his number saved for some reason.
I don't even remember.
Whatever. And when I created this group, I thought I was choosing somebody in the Trump administration.
Instead, I accidentally put Jeffrey Goldberg in the group.
It was definitely a mistake.
It was a bad mistake.
I'm sorry I committed it.
I'll be more careful in the future.
No harm was done.
The operation was a success.
How did he just said that?
The obvious truth.
Then there'd be nothing else to talk about with this story.
Everybody would have moved on.
Democrats would have talked about it.
MSNBC would have talked about it.
But it really would have been nothing.
But unfortunately, that's not.
What Mike Waltz did, and therefore the Trump administration in defending him, had to issue a series of statements that are blatantly, almost insultingly, untrue on their face.
And a lot of the journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, have been making false claims as well.
And the whole thing is a tsunami of false claims that we do feel now compelled to sort through, because when the government issues statements that are highly implausible or questionable, it's...
The job of a journalist to question those, to scrutinize those, to point out what we know and what is true.
But there's also, in the chats that have now been released, including new chats that were released by The Atlantic today, insights into what exactly this bombing campaign in Yemen is entailing, the strategies being used to bomb, who to kill, how many civilians can be killed.
And that is at least worth examining, probably more so.
Heard of this story, who's fortunate enough not to have heard of it.
It all started yesterday when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, again, I think one of the most unscrupulous operatives in all of DC media, published this article after the Trump bombing campaign in Yemen resumed.
The Biden administration had been bombing Yemen throughout 2024, despite during the campaign Trump saying he opposed the bombing.
Thought it was unnecessary.
He decided to resume it and even escalate it.
Jeffrey Goldberg published this article.
The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans.
U.S. national security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen.
I didn't think it could be real.
Then the bomb started falling.
So he essentially revealed and showed screenshots of the chat that he had been included by Mike Waltz.
Into what is obviously an extremely sensitive conversation that for some reason took place over the commercial app Signal that everybody uses for free.
Even though the government spends billions of dollars developing highly secure encrypted communication for national security discussions, they decided to use Signal.
And they accidentally put Jeffrey Goldberg into their planning about how they were going to bomb Yemen, which is obviously a secret.
What aircraft they were going to use to bomb Yemen, what time the bombing was going to start.
And that's what Jeffrey Goldberg revealed.
And obviously what had happened was Mike Waltz had accidentally added him to the group.
And of course that's not the sort of information to which a journalist, especially a hostile journalist, but really no journalist, this is clearly classified information, highly sensitive secret information, the government planning.
A bombing campaign.
It's actually illegal to provide that information to someone who's not authorized to receive classified information, which is Jeffrey Goldberg.
And yet, they did.
They did it by accident, presumably.
And they should have just said that.
So instead of that, the Trump administration, once Waltz came out, denied that he ever talked to Jeffrey Goldberg, didn't even think he had his contact in his phone, didn't understand how it happened, claimed that an investigation is needed to see what occurred here.
The Trump administration went on the offense.
Even though they were the ones who clearly made a mistake and began denying that there was anything sensitive about this information.
That there was nothing sensitive about planning, debating, and then planning when to start a bombing campaign in Yemen, how to start the bombing campaign in Yemen.
I just want you to think for a second about what would have happened.
Had Jeffrey Goldberg published the entire chat with all of these details we're going to show you were in the chat, operational details, prior to the U.S. going and bombing Edmund, do you really believe that a single person in the Trump administration would have said, oh, that's no big deal that Jeffrey Goldberg published these detailed war plans about when we were going to send our service members in harm's way, what aircraft they would use, what time they would start bombing?
They would probably charge Jeffrey Goldberg under the Espionage Act and arrest him immediately.
At the very least, they would have described this as an incredibly reckless and disloyal and unpatriotic, treasonous thing to do by a reporter because, of course, this information is sensitive.
It was only once they realized that Jeffrey Goldberg had it because they gave him access to it did they start trying to insult your intelligence by trying to tell you there's nothing.
At all sensitive or classified about any of this information.
Here's Pete Hegsath speaking on Fox News about all this.
Full workday here as well and looking forward to it.
One question.
Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen was shared with a journalist in The Atlantic?
And were those details classified?
So you're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited So-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the...
I don't know.
The hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides hoax, or suckers and losers hoax.
So this is a guy that pedals in garbage.
This is what he does.
I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops.
I've monitored it very closely from the beginning.
And you see, we've been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration.
Our troops, our sailors, we're getting shot at.
As targets, our ships couldn't sail through.
And when they did shoot back, it was purely defensively or at shacks in Yemen.
President Trump said, no more.
We will reestablish deterrence.
We will open freedom of navigation.
And we will ultimately decimate.
The Houthis, which is exactly what we're doing as we speak from the beginning, overwhelmingly.
What are those details shared on Signal, and how did you learn that a journalist was privy to the targets, the types of weapons used?
I've heard I was characterized, nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that.
Thank you.
The NSC said it was authentic.
Nobody was texting war plans, he said.
And this has been the line from the Trump administration.
No, there was nothing in there that's sensitive.
No big deal that we shared it with the journalists.
And in fact, I agree with everything Pete Hegseth said about Jeffrey Goldberg.
I think he's one of the most fraudulent, if not the worst, most fraudulent operatives in media.
In addition to all the sins Pete Hegseth mentioned, as we've shown you before, it was Jeffrey Goldberg, single-handedly, who invented the lie that Saddam Hussein had a close alliance with Osama bin Laden.
And Al Qaeda in order to convince Americans of what they needed to be convinced of to support the war in Iraq, which was that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the planning of the 9-11 attack, and that's why we had to go in and take him out.
Without that lie that Jeffrey Goldberg spread all over The New Yorker and NPR and all the shows that he was asked to come on, he was showered with journalism awards, without that lie, it would have been much more difficult to convince Americans to support the war in Iraq.
And needless to say, none of this is...
It affected Jeffrey Goldberg's standing in corporate media because, as I said before, it's not just tolerated.
It's required, if you want to advance in corporate media, that you lie on behalf of the U.S. security state.
Nobody does that as eerily or as casually as Jeffrey Goldberg.
But given that I agree with everything Pete Hegseth said about him, that provokes the question, why is it that Jeffrey Goldberg, that journalist that Pete Hegseth says is a fraudster and a hoaxer and spreads lies, why was he included in this Very small, 16, 17 people, top echelon of national security officials.
Why was he included in this group?
And therefore made available, made aware of the war planning that took place.
Now it's true that not all of the details of the bombing operation in Yemen were included, but a lot of it was.
who actually… I was almost forced to reveal more tax because Jeffrey Goldberg had said there were details about the operation in here.
The Trump administration vehemently denied it, as you just heard Pete Hexth do, as others have done.
And because the Trump administration said there was nothing classified in there, Jeffrey Goldberg had no excuse to withhold it.
The government itself, the Trump administration, is saying this isn't classified.
So once you call the reporter a liar, And claim that what he's claiming is in there really isn't, and that there's nothing classified about it, you have no excuse not to publish it.
You're basically duty-bound to do so, and he did.
Under this headline, here are the attack plans that Trump's advisors shared on Signal.
The administration has downplayed the importance of the text messages inadvertently sent to the Atlantic's editor-in-chief.
And then here you can see the text itself.
At 11.44 a.m. Eastern Time, HEGSETH posted in the chat, in all caps, TEAM UPDATE.
The text began this way, quote, Time now.
Weather is favorable.
Just confirmed with CENTCOM we are a go for mission launch.
CENTCOM, or Central Command, is the military's command for the Middle East.
The HEGSETH text continues.
Set F-18's launch first strike package at 12.15.
13.45, trigger-based F-18's first strike window starts.
The target terrorist is, and they mentioned his name, at his known location, so should be on time.
Also, strike drones launch, MQ-9s.
And then the next set of chats.
Hegseth continued.
14.10, more F-18s launch, second strike package.
14.15, strike drones on target.
This is when the first bombs will definitely drop, pending earlier trigger-based targets.
15.36, F-18 second strike starts, also first sea-based tomahawks launched.
More to follow per the timeline, and then ironically, in retrospect, he added, we are currently clean on OPSEC.
That is operational security.
So, I'm sorry, but nobody in good faith, nobody trying to be minimally honest, nobody who is anything other than a complete partisan hack would claim that there was nothing sensitive, nothing classified in what Pete Hagsev posted to the Signal Group that included Jeffrey Goldberg.
You're talking about detailed times of an operation that has not yet begun.
The targets of their operation, the aircraft they intend to use, the sequence of events that the attack plan entails.
The U.S. government classifies everything, pretty much.
I've talked before about how I read through the Snowden Archive for two years plus.
Hundreds of thousands, if not more.
Top secret and classified documents.
They classify everything, including the most banal and ridiculous and routine documents.
Here's how you request a vacation.
Here's how you get a parking credential.
Top secret or classified.
The idea, the very idea that detailed war plans to secretly bomb a country is not information that ought to be closely held, that it's fine to share it with whomever, is just an insult to your intelligence.
Is a byproduct of the fact that Mike Waltz decided he won't tell the truth and couldn't tell the truth for reasons we'll get into.
So the administration lined up behind him to defend him and in doing so had to issue some claims that don't even pass the laugh test.
Now, I'm not pretending and I won't pretend that I'm sitting here worried about whether the government effectively or efficiently Protects its secrets.
That is not my job.
I'm a journalist.
If anything, my job is to unearth those secrets, not help the government better hide them.
I'm not—this is not—that's why I say I wouldn't even be talking about this if not for the fact that it's ongoing because the truth just wasn't admitted.
Instead, we're getting an avalanche of preposterous claims, and as I'll show you, not just from the government, but from Jeffrey Goldberg as well.
Here is a tweet from Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary.
And she essentially followed up with the same sort of denials of Pete Hegseth that's clearly part of the strategy.
She says, quote, Jeffrey Goldberg is well known for his sensationalist spin.
Here are the facts about his latest story.
Quote, no war plans were discussed.
Come on.
What I just showed you, are those war plans, attack plans by any stretch of the?
Imagination, any way to interpret those phrases is not to include that information I just cited.
And they're trying to claim that Jeffrey Goldberg one day said there were war plans and then the Atlantic were treated to attack plans.
There's no difference between those.
It's just not true that, quote, no war planes were discussed in the Signal Chat.
Number two, no classified material was sent to this thread.
How is this information not classified?
Number three, the White House Counsel's Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms for President Trump's top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible.
As the National Security Council stated, the White House is looking into how Goldberg's number was inadvertently added to the threat.
Yeah, huge mystery.
Thanks to the strong and decisive leadership of President Trump and everyone in this group, the Houthi strikes were successful and effective, terrorists were killed, and that's what matters most to President Trump.
Trump administration officials for the last two months have been issuing very flamboyant and aggressive statements about the evils of leaking classified information, saying they have zero tolerance for it, they'll punish anybody who is responsible for it, and now suddenly, because of Mike Waltz's careless mistake at best, they shared secret war plans, secret attack and bombing plans with one of the most hostile anti-Trump media operatives on the planet.
And now they resort to, oh, we don't care that much about leaking classified information.
We just care that the operation was a success.
It was a success because Jeffrey Goldberg opted not to publish what he had learned prior to the bombing campaign.
But they had no way of guaranteeing that when they let him into that group.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, and the CIA Director John Ratcliffe were testifying before Congress yesterday, and both of them took similar positions.
So I'm curious, did this conversation at some point include information on weapons packages, targets, or timing?
Not that I'm aware of.
Director Gabbard, same question.
Timing. On weapons packages, targets, or timing?
Not that I'm aware of.
Okay, did you hear that?
I mean...
Whatever you think of the Yemen bombing campaign, however much you love President Trump, here's the CIA director testifying before the Senate.
And it's not even an effective lie because of course these chats were going to come out.
He was asked, was there anything about timing or weapons packages transmitted in this chat?
Obviously John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, read the chat.
It's right on his phone before going to testify.
He knew what was in there, and yet he still said, not to my knowledge or no?
I just read you exactly that, the weapons packages that were going to be used in the timing of the attacks in detail.
What is the justification for lying about that?
Why would you even do that?
That's what I mean.
This began as a very trivial matter, and it's become something more significant because of the refusal to tell the truth and just dig in in defense of Mike Walz.
Here's the rest of this interrogation.
Director Gabbard, same question.
Same answer and defer to the Department of Defense on that question.
Well, those are two different answers, but you're saying that was not part of the conversation.
That's my knowledge.
Precise operational issues were not part of this conversation.
Correct. Some kind of a semantic game to try and justify those answers, but they are misleading at best.
They should have just said, yes, we were talking about the operation.
We did talk about timing.
It was a mistake to include a journalist.
And period.
End of story.
It was a mistake.
It was careless.
We have to take steps to make sure it wouldn't happen.
Not going to happen again.
That would have ended the whole thing.
Mike Waltz went on Laura Ingraham last night, and I just want to give you the sense for how preposterous this has now become, how insulting so many of these explanations are.
Laura Ingraham, to her credit, wanted to know how it is that Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number ended up saved in Mike Waltz's phone and why that happened.
Now I don't know how many of you have used Signal before, but when you open the Signal app, the only people with whom you can start communicating are people who are saved in your phone.
You have to have somebody saved in your phone in order to send them a message.
You can't just type a random number in.
And then if you create a new Signal group that permits you to speak with multiple Signal users at once, You have to click add people to your group and the only options that you have are people whose contacts are saved in your phone.
If you want to add somebody whose contact is not saved in your phone, you have to first save their contact in your phone.
That's the only way you can add them to a signal group.
I understand why Mike Waltz doesn't want to admit that he had Jeffrey Goldberg's number saved in his phone.
Because Jeffrey Goldberg is one of the most dishonest and one of the most vehemently anti-Trump media people in all of Washington and Trump, Mike Walton's boss, harbors a severe hatred for Jeffrey Goldberg.
As you saw with Pete Hexap, Trump has said similar things.
They hate Jeffrey Goldberg.
And if they know that Mike Walton's chatting with Jeffrey Goldberg or has his contact information saved on his phone, why would you have that saved on your phone if you weren't actually chatting with him?
That would be something that would trigger Donald Trump's rage.
Like, you talk to Jeffrey Goldberg?
And so instead of just admitting that this is what happened, he was too scared to admit that he had Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number saved in his phone.
To Laura Ingraham's credit, and I'm not surprised at all that she did it, she's done it many times before, she quite I persistently and adversarily question Mike Waltz on this very question.
I want you to listen to the utter babbling, the preposterous defense, the attempts to justify how this could have happened that came out of Mike Waltz's mouth.
Remember, this is the National Security Advisor.
The person closest to the president on matters of national security, somebody responsible for possessing and analyzing and safeguarding the most sensitive secrets that our government possesses.
Here's his attempt to explain away how we had Jeffrey Goldberg's number in his phone.
And I know him in the sense that he hates the president, but I don't text him.
He wasn't on my phone, and we're going to figure out how this happened.
So you don't know what staffer is responsible for this right now?
Well, look, a staffer wasn't responsible.
And look, I take full responsibility.
I built the group.
My job is to make sure everything's coordinated.
But how did the number...
I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the number...
Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number there?
Oh, I never make those mistakes.
Right? You've got somebody else's number.
On someone else's contact, so of course I didn't see this loser in the group.
It looked like someone else.
Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we're trying to figure out.
So your staffer did not put his contact information?
No, no, no.
But how did it end up in your phone?
That's what we're trying to figure out.
But that's a pretty big...
Probably. That's why we've got the best technical minds, right?
That's disturbing.
And that's where, I mean, I'm sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number.
But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone?
I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious.
How's the number on your phone?
Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then somehow it gets sucked in.
Oh, someone sent you that contact.
It gets sucked in.
Was there someone else supposed to be on the chat that wasn't on the chat that you thought was on the chat?
I thought was on there, was never on there.
Who was that person?
Look, Laura, I take responsibility.
I built the group.
But look, that's the part that we have to figure out.
Oh, we have to convene all of the greatest technological minds and the scientists and the computer experts and security experts from all around the world to investigate how it possibly could be the case.
That Jeffrey Goldberg's contact information and phone number was stored in Mike Waltz's phone, sufficient to allow Mike Waltz to put him into the signal group.
And when Laura Ingraham said to him, what do you mean?
How did the number get saved in your phone if you never talked to him?
How did it get saved there?
He's like, oh, well, what happens is I'm sure you had this experience.
It's like sometimes this contact you have saved Has a totally different number of a different, has that ever happened to you?
But then she still said like, okay, even that, given that's the case, Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number and contact information ended up in your phone.
And it was identified as Jeffrey Goldberg.
The graphic in the signal chat said JG, which is Jeffrey Goldberg's initials.
And he said, oh yeah, yeah, what happens is like when this happens, the number gets sucked in.
It gets sucked in.
It's totally what happens.
Like, the iPhone, like, oh yeah, so many times, you know, there are these people who I don't want to talk to, who I'm not supposed to talk to, but my iPhone just sucks in their contact information and their name, and I'm like, oh my God, how did they get in my contacts?
How did that happen?
How do I have their phone number and their name in my, oh, yeah, the phone sucked it in.
Like, sucked it in from where?
It's laughable.
It's ridiculous.
It's insulting.
That they would continue this preposterous charade.
From the beginning, Mike Waltz says he doesn't know who Jeffrey Goldberg is.
He's never talked to Jeffrey Goldberg.
Oh, by the way, here is another image that The Atlantic released today.
Jeffrey Goldberg, in his original story, said that he was added to the chat group, that he got an invitation and added to the chat group by Mike Waltz.
And just, again, for those of you who don't use Signal, if somebody...
Who has your contact information stored in their phone, which again is a prerequisite to adding you to a signal group, tries to put you into the signal group, signal will send you a message saying, this person, Mike Waltz, has added you, wants to add you to a signal group.
Do you accept or do you reject?
And then once you hit accept, you become part of the group and the group messages, signal messages to the entire group that the person who added you is the person who Who was added by somebody else.
So here you see this is the Houthi PC small group.
And let's pull up the highlighter just to show you here.
So here's what it says.
It says, Mike Waltz added you to the group.
This is Jeffrey Goldberg's phone.
There were only 19 members.
It was intended to be a small group talking about the Houthi operation.
And there the first message is Mike Waltz says, team establishing a principals group for coordination on Houthis, particularly over the next 72 hours.
My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a Tiger team at deputies agency chief of staff level following up.
I heard a lot of Trump supporters trying to claim to pin the blame on his assistant or his staffer, Alex Wong.
Mike Waltz is willing to say anything to defend himself.
You just saw that.
But he's not willing to falsely blame Alex Wong.
Why, anyway, if you're the National Security Advisor, would you be handing out your phone, your personal telephone to staffers and they have just access to it?
They can go in and like delete contacts, add contacts, access all your personal information?
That's not something a National Security Advisor should be doing.
If that were the explanation, that might even be worse, more reckless.
But that's not what happened.
It says right here, Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg to the group.
And again, the only way you could do that is if you have Jeffrey Goldberg's number saved in your phone.
Mike Waltz has been insisting from the beginning.
I don't know Jeffrey Goldberg.
I've never met him.
I've never talked to him.
Here is a photo from October 2021 that people dug up.
It's from the French philosopher and warmonger Bernard-Henri Levy.
And on October 29, 2021...
He tweeted, launch of the will to see.
Thanks, Ambassador18.
Thanks for being there.
And then he goes to the people who were in this, you can see this small group of people.
It's about seven people.
Alan Arzi, Bayan Rahman, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Tafari, Michael Waltz, Sinan56, the Tom Kaplan, Emily Hilton.
And you see here, this is Mike Waltz and Jeffrey Goldberg.
They are standing right next to each other.
Now, I don't know, maybe you stood next to somebody on a stage before, and even though you work in exactly the same area, Jeffrey Goldberg is a national security reporter, Mike Waltz is a member of Congress, works in national security, who is very well known in D.C., has been around forever.
There you see the two of them and up close.
Maybe you actually just didn't talk to him.
He never remembered this.
It's a total coincidence that the person whose contact and number is saved in your phone is somebody that you were about three inches from in a small group meeting on a stage.
But the other side, you know, I said before that a lot of people are saying, wait a minute, like, why would Mike Waltz be talking to somebody like Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most anti-Trump?
fraudsters in all of Washington.
But the other side of that is it's important to realize who Jeffrey Goldberg is.
The New York Post, and I think we have this, but I'll take my word for it now, published a headline saying something like, lefty journalist was added to the tweet.
There it is.
You see at the top, Trump team accidentally It added lefty editor to secret tax group planning the MN raids.
Operation Overshare is what the Post called it.
The idea that Jeffrey Goldberg is a lefty is so funny.
Jeffrey Goldberg is an American who left college in order to go join a foreign military.
You'll never guess which country.
Never. Take one guess.
Yeah, exactly.
The IDF.
He went and joined the IDF.
He worked during the first intifada as a prison guard in an Israeli IDF prison that detained Palestinians with no due process.
It's notorious for being abusive.
He talked about abuses that he saw and helped cover up.
He wrote a book about his experience after.
So he went and joined the IDF, and then he became one of the loudest advocates of the war in Iraq.
Here's the...
Stories I referenced earlier when he was at the New Yorker in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002.
He talked about Saddam Hussein's genocidal war on the Kurds and of his possible ties to Al Qaeda.
And then here he is in October of 2002, just about five months before the invasion of Iraq began, on C-SPAN, again claiming that Saddam Hussein had an alliance with Al Qaeda, obviously implying to the American people that he must be in bed with.
Those who did 9/11 if not himself personally participating in its planning.
I'm going to get that played in just a second.
The piece of news that's come from this story that some people have been talking about is the following.
When I was in Kurdistan, I started hearing a lot about a Muslim fundamentalist terror group called the Ansar al-Islam, which means supporters of Islam, operate in the corner of Kurdistan.
Al-Qaeda influenced ideologically, theologically, run by a group of Kurds and Arabs who have cycled through Osama's training.
It's been assumed that this group has al-Qaeda influenced, even al-Qaeda directed.
What I found, and I can go into it a little bit if you want, how I found this out, is that there are serious allegations that the group is actually co-sponsored, if you will, by al-Qaeda and by Saddam's.
I heard a number of other credible allegations that Saddam and Al Qaeda have actually been working together on any number of projects.
And if these allegations are true, obviously, the implications are quite serious.
Yeah, they are quite serious.
That would mean that Saddam Hussein probably played a role in 9-11, but unfortunately, it was a complete lie.
And there was a time, for those of you who don't remember, were too young to have lived through it, that they were constantly leaking, that Mohammed Atta, one of the lead hijackers for the 9-11 attack, met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, very similar to what Russiagate was.
They just make up lies based on whatever the needs of the moment are.
Remember, they had all kinds of claims from the Steele dossier.
About close Trump associates going and meeting with the Russians in Prague.
Same kind of modus operandi, same kind of lie.
In any reasonably healthy society, this would have destroyed Jeffrey Goldberg's career.
That he lied the country into a devastating war that took the lives of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands, if not more, Iraqis.
That even Tony Blair, an advocate of this war, It says is what gave rise to ISIS because of the instability and the vacuum that we created.
This was a major, major destruction of American credibility, of American lives, of American treasure.
And I just showed you Jeffrey Goldberg going all over the place, just a tiny sample of him making up the crucial lie necessary to convince Americans.
Just saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that falsehood, that wasn't enough.
Americans wanted— To support wars against the people who did 9-11.
This was a year after 9-11.
That's what they wanted.
And the only way you could sell the Iraq war is if you convinced them that Saddam Hussein was actually in bed with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, completely ignoring the Sunni-Shia split, the Ba'athite nature of the Saddam Hussein regime, just ignoring all of that.
And Jeffrey Goldberg happily stepped forward and provided that false link.
He was showered with Journalism Award for this incredible investigation, and it didn't impede his career at all.
It helped his career.
So it's not a surprise that Jeffrey Goldberg himself, on the other side of the story, is also lying.
He went on the Bulwark, the Never Trump website, which is where he belongs, and spoke to lifelong GOP operative turned Democratic cheerleader Tim Miller.
And Tim Miller, this was before the release today of more material.
This was yesterday when Jeffrey Goldberg claimed all sorts of things about what was in the material.
The Trump administration said he's lying.
So Tim Miller was saying, pressuring him to say, you need to release this and show that it's actually in there.
And at the time, Jeffrey Goldberg was very reluctant to do so and listened to him explaining why he didn't think he could or should.
Secretary of Defense and the White House Press Secretary have said you're lying, have said there are no war plans there, have said there's no classified information.
So the obvious question is, shouldn't you now demonstrate it?
Shouldn't you publish the text?
No, because they're wrong.
They're wrong.
But how can you prove that you're wrong?
Maybe should you provide them to the House and Senate Special Committees on Intelligence, maybe?
I don't know.
Wow. Well, you want to become my lawyer?
I'm throwing this out there, Jeff.
I don't know.
I feel like...
No, no, no.
Obviously, let me just put it this way.
My colleagues and I and the people who are giving us advice on this have some interesting conversations to have about this.
But just because they're irresponsible with material doesn't mean that I'm going to be irresponsible.
With this material.
And you know what?
Whatever. I mean, you've had long history, as I have, with dealing with them.
And at moments like this, when they're under pressure because they've been caught with their hand in the cookie jar or whatever, you know, they will just literally say anything to get out of the moment, to get out of the jam.
And that's okay.
I get it.
I get the defensive reaction.
But here's the thing.
My obligation...
I feel is to the idea that we take national security information seriously.
And maybe in the coming days I'll be able to let you know that, okay, I have a plan to have this material vetted publicly.
But I'm not going to say that now because there's a lot of conversations that have to happen about that.
Makes sense.
And all of my inclinations, as you can tell, including withholding the name of the CIA undercover officer, all of my inclinations are, I have a pretty, I have a pretty clear standards in my own behavior of what I consider, information that I consider.
Now you heard him claim there, in order to escalate the seriousness of what happened.
That the name of a CIA undercover operative was included in the chat?
That is a complete lie.
The only name of anyone who worked at the CIA besides John Ratcliffe, who was mentioned in the chat, all the principals, the head of the agencies were designating who their representatives and chiefs of staff were, was the chief of staff of the CIA, the person who works for John Ratcliffe.
And manages his team.
She's not an undercover agent.
An undercover agent is someone deployed in a field in, say, like Lebanon or Syria, pretending to be a store clerk or a weapons dealer, but in reality is someone who works for the CIA.
And if you identify them as a CIA agent— You blow their cover and that puts them in danger.
That's what a CIA undercover operative is.
It would be incredibly irresponsible for John Ratcliffe to have put the name of a CIA undercover operative in this chat.
Even to do that among 17 people is reckless.
That's the thing you guard the most.
And Jeffrey Goldberg to try and justify why this is so grave.
He hates the Trump administration.
He said it there.
And why he cannot release any more information.
Just fabricated.
On the spot that there was a CIA undercover operative who was named in the chat.
Here from the Atlantic itself, they admit that that's not true.
Quote, a CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe's chief of staff, which Ratcliffe has shared in the signal chain because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified.
Radcliffe has testified yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was, quote, completely appropriate to share their name in the signal conversation.
We will continue to withhold the name of the officer.
Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.
It was just totally false that there was an undercover agent in that chat, even though Jeffrey Goldberg said it.
Now, I want to go to a part of these Releases that were about the war itself.
We had gone over some of these excerpts on Monday when they were talking about whether they should bomb Yemen.
J.D. Vance was the only person in the chat who actually raised objections to it.
He called it, quote, a mistake.
And he said, look, if this is what your decision is, I won't object publicly.
But he noted that there was very little American interest.
In the Suez Canal, maybe like 3% of the trade in the Suez Canal is American, whereas 30 to 40%, he says, is European.
If anything, this matters to Europe and to Egypt, but not to the United States.
Obviously, it benefits Israel as well, as Tom Cotton said, because the Houthis have been bombing Israel and threatening to seize their ships.
And so J.D. Vance said, we're supposed to be America first foreign policy.
Why are we going to bombing campaigns and wars again?
Salvage the interest of other people.
But he wasn't the only one who actually said that.
The other person who talked about some hesitation was the former congressional candidate, the Green Beret, whose wife was killed working for the CIA in Syria with the battle with ISIS.
And that's Joe Kent, who Tulsi Gabbard has now chosen as her chief of staff.
Or her deputy, and he was the one she designated to represent her, and he said, quote, there is nothing time-sensitive driving the timeline.
We'll have the exact same options in a month.
Jada Vance said, look, this is a mistake, but let's wait a month.
There's no reason not to, and then it'll give us more time to figure this out.
And so Joe Kent is also pushing that option, like, why do we have to do this now?
Let's wait.
He said, So there was an added voice of caution or at least pushback and hesitation on this Yemen bombing plan.
And that was Tulsi Gabbard's chief of staff, Joe Kent.
There was a segment of these chats that were about the bombing campaign itself that happened not before the bombing campaign, but as the first strikes happened.
And it started with Mike Walt saying, we just had that on the screen.
We can go back to that.
He said, Let me just pull this up.
At 1.48 p.m., Mike Waltz sent the following text containing real-time intelligence about conditions at an attack site, apparently in Sanaa.
He said, VP, building collapse, had multiple positive ID, and it was unclear what he was referring to.
The Atlantic article says Mike Waltz was referring here to Hegseth, General Michael Carrillo, the commander of Central Command in the Intelligence Community, or IC.
J.D. Vance didn't understand the message from Waltz.
It was just written in a very incoherent way, so J.D. Vance said, what?
And then Mike Waltz responded this way, typing too fast, basically, sorry, typing too fast, the first target, their top missile guy, we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building, walking into his girlfriend's building, and now it's collapsed.
And then after that, J.D. Vance responded a minute later, excellent.
And then 35 minutes after that, Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wrote, a good start.
And then Waltz followed with a series of emojis, an American flag emoji, a fist emoji, and a fire emoji.
So I just want to highlight this, that this is what the MN bombing campaign entailed to start off.
They identified someone that they claim was a top missile person for the Houthis.
They didn't kill him in his car.
They didn't kill him on a battlefield.
They waited for him to enter a residential building filled with civilians, including his girlfriend.
And the way they killed him was by collapsing the entire building.
And that first day there were many claims of civilian deaths.
And unsurprisingly, given that these were the rules of engagement.
Is that something that you think is a legitimate?
Military strategy?
To find somebody that is, in your view, a legitimate target and just blowing up whatever building they're in regardless of how many civilians you kill?
If during the Iraq War the Iraqis had identified where a military commander lived and he lived in some 47-foot, 47-floor High-rise apartment in Chicago, would the Iraqis have had the right to just blow up the entire building and said, well, there was one guy in there who was a legitimate target?
Or what if the Yemenis or the Palestinians blew up a building now in which there was located some kind of military commander and they blew up a building in Washington or they blew up an apartment building in New York?
And their excuse was, well, there was one guy in there who was a military commander and we would instantly call that terrorism.
We would say, oh, that's an act of terrorism.
You blew up an apartment building and you killed 37 American civilians along with one member of the military.
But of course, when we do it, it's not terrorism.
Somehow it becomes legitimate.
But if that's what this bombing campaign is, collapsing residential buildings.
In order to take out some mid-level missile person, or their top missile person even, who will just get replaced very easily.
It's happened throughout the entire world on terror.
We were told so many times, hey, we got the number three person of al-Qaeda.
Everyone cheered, and then like a year later, they're like, hey, we got the number three person of al-Qaeda again, because they just kept getting replenished.
That's how the war on terror went on and on.
This is the kind of endless war posture that Trump said he wanted to avoid.
Remember, Trump criticized Joe Biden for bombing Yemen.
Last year, Biden's argument was they're bombing Israel and they're attacking our ships, and Trump said bombing Yemen is totally unnecessary.
You should pick up the phone and use diplomacy to resolve it.
And now not only is Trump doing exactly what Joe Biden did, bombing Yemen, and what Barack Obama did as well when he worked with the Saudis for a full-on war with Tufi, just endless war in the Middle East, but he's loosened the rules of engagement, apparently, so that the military is free to blow up entire...
Residential apartment buildings, as long as one person that they want to kill is in there, not caring in the slightest about how many civilians or children or whoever happens to be, unfortunately, have the misfortune of being in that apartment building when it's quote-unquote collapse, how many people are killed with it.
So there's a lot going on in this story, most of it quite ugly and unnecessary and eroding of credibility for absolutely no reason.
But the most significant part by far is the fact that we now have another war in the Middle East that is going to be ongoing, that's not going to stop.
And just to remind you, the Houthis were actually attacking U.S. ships when Biden was bombing them and when Trump said that bombing campaign was unnecessary.
Once there was a ceasefire in Gaza that Trump and his envoy were able to facilitate, The Houthis stopped attacking ships and said, now that there's a ceasefire, we don't need to attack ships anymore.
And they only restarted attacking ships once, in their view, and everyone in the international community agrees that this happened, once the Israelis started blocking the humanitarian aid that the ceasefire called for, food, medicine, water, into Gaza.
And they said, Because Israel isn't abiding by the ceasefire agreement, we're only going to attack Israel-flagged or Israel-owned ships.
So they're not even attacking American ships anymore, just Israels.
And that is what prompted Trump, after saying last year that he opposed it, to restart Biden's war and to escalate it, and clearly killing a ton of civilians as usual.
And then at some point we'll be attacked and everybody will walk around saying, oh my God, what did we do?
Why did they hate us?
And I think that has to be the focus once this question of how Jeffrey Goldberg, I have it in the chat, is resolved and we can move on from that.
This is what our focus ought to be.
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One of the most bizarre things to watch over the last several years ever since the Russian invasion in February of 2022 in Ukraine is watching Europeans and European officials in Brussels.
Bureaucrats and Eurocrats start acting like they're refighting World War II or fighting World War III against Russia.
They all love to walk around.
We're going to defeat Russia.
You have German leaders talking about sending tanks for the third time in the last hundred years eastward toward Russia, which they ultimately did.
You have German leaders in outdoor rallies saying, we must defeat Russia.
We must take them down.
And you have all these tiny little countries and their tiny little prime ministers talking about like with a million people in the entire country acting like they're Winston Churchill.
And ever since the pronouncements by Donald Trump about his intentions to say, we're not going to keep paying for your defense, Europe.
Why would we pay for your defense?
You offer this very ample Welfare states, your people, and they love it, and that's understandable.
They get a lot of benefits, but why are our workers paying for your defense?
You're not impoverished.
You're perfectly capable of doing it yourself.
Ever since, they've gone completely insane, acting like, okay, now we're going to become the military superpower we were always meant to be without the United States.
The problem is Europe is a joke.
Militarily, they're an absolute joke.
France and the UK have a small nuclear arsenal, so that makes them serious on that level.
But in terms of conventional military fighting, they're laughable.
In fact, in that signal chat group that we just went over, Mike Waltz, because J.D. Vance was saying, why are we fighting this fight for Europe again?
Aren't we sending the signal that we're not going to fight their fights?
We're not going to pay for their fights?
40%. They're the ones who need the Suez Canal, not Americans.
We barely use it.
And Mike Waltz, who is eager to do the bombing, as was Pete Hegseth, said this, quote, So whether it's now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.
Per the president's request, we are working with DOD and state to determine how to compile the costs associated and levy them on the Europeans.
So according to Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, Europe doesn't even have the military capability to fight the Houthis.
Their navy is insufficient.
The Houthis have more sophisticated weaponry and more fighting capability than the Europeans.
Who nonetheless have been walking around beating their chest.
We're Europe.
We're going to build our own military.
We're going to fight Russia.
We're going to defeat them, consign them to the ash heap of history.
We don't need the United States.
All of that rhetoric is about three weeks old.
And already Europe is confronting the reality that they're Europe.
And that none of that tough talk is possible.
Even the New York Times is mocking them now.
Here's the New York Times from today.
Europe talks tough on military spending.
But unity is fracturing.
The article begins, Announced a plan for billions more for the military called Rearm Europe.
Two of the bloc's largest countries, Italy and Spain, thought that that was all a bit aggressive.
So now the plan has been rebranded as Readiness 2030.
Kaja Kallis, the former prime minister of Estonia, which has a population of about 1.1 million people, fewer than the number of people who live in Paris.
She resigned in disgrace from the prime ministership because her husband got caught doing millions of dollars in business with Russia at a time she was saying Russia is the root of all evil and we have to sanction them.
But she had a very safe landing.
She's now the chief foreign and security official for the European Union.
She has been a forceful advocate, I would call deranged, for supporting Ukraine as a first line of European defense against an aggressive, militarized Russia.
But it has been a rocky start for Ms. Callas.
Her effort to get the EU to provide up to 40 billion euros, more than $43 billion, to Ukraine through a small fixed percentage levy on each country's national income has gone nowhere.
Her backup proposal, just for an added $5 billion as a first step to providing Ukraine 2 million artillery shells this year, was also rejected by Italy, Slovakia, and even France, an EU official said.
Speaking anonymously in accordance with diplomatic practice, the countries insisted that contributions to Ukraine remain voluntary, bilateral, and not requested by Brussels.
And her recent response to Mr. Trump's effort to push Ukraine into a ceasefire without security assurances rubbed many the wrong way, both in Europe and Washington, as dangerously premature.
Quote, the free world needs a new leader, she wrote on X. It's up to us, Europeans, to take on this challenge.
But in fact, the Europeans are working hard to respond to Mr. Trump in a convincing fashion.
Ms. von der Leyen sold her rearmament of readiness plan with a headline figure of 800 billion euros.
But only 150 billion euros of that is real money available as long-term loans for countries that wish to use it for their military.
The rest simply represents a notional figure.
A four-year permission from the bloc for countries to borrow even more for military purposes out of their own national budgets.
Most of the European countries are struggling greatly with their economy.
Their populations hate them.
There's massive anti-establishment sentiment throughout all of Western Europe and even in Central Europe.
It's the reason why people in the UK voted to leave Brexit.
To leave the EU with Brexit because they didn't want to be governed by these kinds of people in Brussels.
It's the reason why right-wing populist parties that countries never thought would succeed in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, and many more places are gaining in popularity because they're channeling this anti-establishment sentiment.
And none of these Europeans want to give up.
The massive state benefits that they get, which is a crucial part of being European.
A month vacation and tons of time off for paternity and maternity leave, retiring early, working four days, not working a 40-hour work week.
These are all things essential to the Europeans.
They're not going to give that up to build a massive military, go into massive debt for it, especially when a lot of these countries like France are already in enormous amounts of debt.
And yet here is Ursula von der Leyen.
A warmonger and a German who nobody elected to become the president of the EU other than the members of the EU Parliament.
Here she is on March 4th talking so tough about her rearmament plan.
We're living in the most momentous and dangerous of times.
I do not need to describe the grave nature of the threats that we face.
Or the devastating consequences that we will have to endure if those threats would come to pass, because the question is no longer whether Europe's security is threatened in a very real way, or whether Europe should shoulder more of its responsibility for its own security.
In truth, we have long known the answers to those questions.
The real question in front of us is whether Europe is prepared to act as decisively as the situation dictates.
We are in an era of rearmament.
And Europe is ready to massively boost its defence spending, both to respond to the short-term urgency to act and to support Ukraine, But also to address the long-term need to take on more responsibility for our own European security.
One of the ironies, by the way, by the way, she said Europe is ready to rearm and build our own defense.
Evidently, they're not.
One of the ironies of all of this is that the most strident warmongers in Europe are women politicians who are on the center-left, the center.
Of European politics.
And the reason I say it's ironic is because the most belligerent, aggressive, and warmongering party in all of Europe, when it comes to Ukraine and Russia, when it comes to Israel, when it comes to a variety of other potential wars, is the German Green Party, whose figurehead is Annalina Babarik, who is the foreign minister of Germany.
And the German Greens ran.
On a platform that elevated her and the Greens to the parliament, they ran on a platform of what they called a feminist foreign policy.
They said, our party is dominated by women.
We're going to have female officials in the most important offices.
And because women are more inclined to resolve disputes through diplomacy and conciliation and not with war and aggression, a feminist foreign policy is one that's less antagonistic, less belligerent.
That's the campaign they ran on.
Now, I personally find this kind of essentializing.
Men are more aggressive and inclined to work.
Women are more whatever, conciliatory, to be extremely reductive.
And obviously you can use that same reasoning not to elevate women but to demean them.
Oh, women are more emotional.
Men are more rational.
Women don't belong in a position of power, et cetera.
That's the same exact kind of thinking.
But for whatever reason, the most Unhinged voices who practically think they're at war with Russia and are ready to build up this military are women politicians in Europe on the center and center-left.
And one of them, Kaja Kalas, who I just mentioned, the former prime minister of the crucial state of Estonia, all one million people who live there, has become so deranged that she's even starting to genuinely disturb A lot of European officials, including many who are for the war in Ukraine, but are very alarmed by the way she's speaking.
Here's Politico EU today.
Kaja Kolas is, quote, acting like a prime minister, critics of EU's top diplomats say.
Kaja Kolas's troubles started on her first day.
The EU's top diplomat was on a trip to Kiev when she tweeted, quote, the European Union wants Ukraine to win this war against Russia.
Some EU officials said they felt uneasy that the head of the European External Action Service, less than a day into her job, felt that liberty to go beyond what they considered to be settled language more than two years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The aforementioned diplomat and nine other EU diplomats and officials pointed to what they viewed as a series of missteps during Kallus' first few months on the job.
From floating heavy proposals without buy-in, To taking liberties with foreign policy statements, they told Politico.
She still has her defenders, one of whom is the Danish Prime Minister Mehdi Ferdiksen, another female politician who's extremely pro-war and backs Kajakalas.
A second diplomat anonymously said, quote, overall we are very happy with her.
It goes on, as Kallis put her stamp on the job pressuring EU countries to give more military aid to Ukraine, several diplomats chafed at her leadership style, complaining of what they described as a lack of consultation on sensitive matters.
In subsequent months, those concerns have only grown, including regarding Kallis'hawkishness on Russia, which has left her out of step with Spain and Italy, who do not share her assessment of Moscow as an imminent threat to the EU. Quote, if you listen to her, It seems we are at war with Russia, which is not the EU line, one EU official complained.
Then came the infamous exchange by J.D. Vance and U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office meeting with President Zelensky.
Amid the widespread shock at the vitriol aimed at Zelensky, Callas tweeted that, quote, the free world needs a new leader, a comment that may have matched the mood of indignation in many parts of Europe, but also irked countries adamant about maintaining a bridge to the Trump White House.
Imagine... The Prime Minister of Estonia saying, we're now the leaders of the free world, not the United States.
Quote, most countries don't want to inflame things with the United States, said a sixth diplomat.
Saying the free world needs a new leader just isn't what most leaders wanted to put out there.
Just to give you the kind of rhetoric this person uses, this Kajakalas person, here she is at the...
EU Council addressing the fact that there are EU members like Hungary that don't support this foreign policy, that don't want to confront Russia, that want to try and put an end diplomatically to the war in Ukraine.
And here's the kind of language she used against them.
Actually, this is not that.
I don't know if we have that.
I think it's this.
Here is Kajakalas at the Mary Conference.
At the European Defense Agency in January.
Every day Russia continues its war, the price must go up.
Now we are working on another 16th package of sanctions.
We have started to see Russia's economy taking a serious hit.
They could not afford to continue their efforts in Syria while fighting in Ukraine.
Russia's national funds are quickly depleting.
The national interest rate is well over 20%.
And they are getting far fewer resources from gas and oil.
Gazprom and Sparebank are looking at mass layoffs.
There is absolutely no doubt that we can do more to help Ukraine.
With our help, they can also win the war.
The only language that Putin speaks is the language of strength.
The EU has strength.
Believing that Ukraine can win the war, meaning expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, requires madness at this point.
But what does she care?
She's from a tiny little country that will contribute nothing.
She's demanding that workers in Italy and Spain and France and Germany pay for the glories of this war that she wants.
I get why you Estonians don't like Russians.
I understand the history.
Of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but she has to face reality.
And she wants to be this glamorous, strong Churchillian war leader, but the EU doesn't have anywhere near the capability to back up those words.
Here is Kajakalas in May of last year at a different conference.
Russia's defeat is not a bad thing because then, you know, there could be really a change in the society.
And, you know, there are many different nations right now, part of Russia as well.
I think if you would have more, like, small nations, it's not a bad thing if the big power is actually much smaller.
She's talking about regime change in Russia, changing the government of Russia, and then breaking Russia up into a bunch of little different pieces.
That's the foreign minister of the EU engaged in utterly deranged fairytale thinking.
Here is the prime minister of Finland, Mehdi Fredriksson.
I believe it's Finland and not Denmark.
Is it Denmark or Finland?
She's Danish.
Yeah, she's the Danish prime minister.
And here's how she's speaking.
I don't think we should panic, but I think we are in a hurry.
And I think we have been in a hurry for three years, but now we really have to scale up and to speed up because Russia and Putin is not only threatening Ukraine, but all of us.
And we have to be able to defend ourselves.
My idea about Ukraine is the same as it has been now for three years that they have to win this war.
And if we allow Russia to win the war, I'm sorry to say directly to all of you, he will continue and they will continue.
And maybe we will even give them a better situation than today, because if we end this war now, with some kind of a frozen conflict, a ceasefire, it will give Russia the possibility to return to Russia, to mobilize more funds, people, and maybe to attack another country in Europe.
The reason these people live in a fantasy world is because they've had the United States financing and arming and fighting their wars for them for so many decades.
So they've gotten to simultaneously talk tough as though they're fighting wars because they contribute some troops while at the same time Not having to spend any of their people's money on it and giving them a welfare state that you can afford to give if you're not spending massive amounts on the military the way the United States has been doing.
But now they're actually having to face the reality that the United States is not going to continue to pay the military industrial complex to defend Europe and fight its wars for it.
Why should the United States do so?
And so they still want to talk this tough talk.
But the realities are they don't have the political will, nor the resources, nor anything resembling a serious military in order to back it up.
I mean, as I said, Michael Wald said in that signal group from a couple days ago, they can't even fight the Houthis.
They don't have the military sophistication or the navies to battle Yemen.
And we're seeing now that there's just zero Willingness to back up any of this rhetoric.
It was like when the British Prime Minister wanted to be all Churchillian, the British are obsessed with being Churchill, Sir Keir Starmer, and he said, we're going to go and send our troops to Ukraine to keep the peace there and prevent Russia from advancing.
And then the next day he had to come out and admit, like, actually we can't do anything without U.S. air cover.
So we're just saying that if the U.S. is willing to go to war in Ukraine— Against Russia, then we will, but we can't do it without the U.S. And that's the reality of what and who Europe is, including the U.K. Just want to show you one bizarre article that came out today that gives you a sense for just how far gone the Europeans are in terms of the unreality in which they're living.
It's from the Financial Times.
The headline is, EU Calls for Households.
To stockpile 72 hours of food amid war risks.
Quote, So even as every country around her is telling this unelected person, That they can't fund this massive military rearmament that she envisions.
They won't.
They won't go into greater debt for it.
Their populations won't tolerate it.
She's basically now telling European citizens, you're in a war.
You have to stock up and make sure you have 72 hours worth of food because she envisions that Europe is at war with Russia.
This is how they think.
And while I'm very critical of things the Trump administration has done in the first two months of the presidency, One of which we're about to get to, others of which involve censorship, the resumption of the war in Ukraine, the continuation of the destruction of Gaza.
Trump is making progress in facilitating a peace deal with Russia and Ukraine.
And on some level, you can make the argument that in terms of world security, and given the utter insanity of how the Europeans are thinking and speaking, that there may be nothing more important than putting an end to this war.
Diplomatically, which Trump ran on a promise of doing the American people want, and Trump has now made significant strives in achieving.
We reported previously last week on the controversy surrounding the fact that the Trump administration during the campaign promised to mass deport illegal people in the United States illegally.
And deportations typically means, in fact always means, picking people up.
Who are in your country illegally and sending them back to their country of origin.
They get a very quick hearing in a basically a quasi-court, a deportation court inside the Justice Department.
As long as the government can show they don't have the legal papers to be in the United States and the person can't show they have the legal documents, the deportation is approved and they get sent back to their home country.
And the Trump administration is doing some of that, not nearly at the level's promise, but they're doing some of it.
But they're doing something much, much different, which is that they're picking people up, primarily Venezuelans up until now, and they're not sending them back to Venezuela.
They're sending them to a third country that these people have nothing to do with, that they're not citizens of, that in most, if not all cases, they've never visited, which is El Salvador.
And the United States government is paying the government of El Salvador not to Accept them, but to incarcerate them in one of the most horrific prisons that exist in the world, to film them being humiliated and dehumanized, all based on the accusation that the Trump administration refuses to prove that these people are members of a violent gang, Trendera, Agua.
Based on the invocation of war powers that has only been used three times previously in actual wars, the war in 1812, The War of 1812, World War I, World War II.
But even then, the people who were ordered under the Alien Enemies Act to be deported got a hearing.
And yet the Trump administration is sending these people, including people who have obviously compelling cases that they're not part of this gang, that they've been mistaken for gang members, just like the U.S. Told us during Guantanamo, the war on terror, that only the worst of the worst were there, and it turned out many of the people there had nothing to do with terrorism.
They were innocent.
They were part of mistaken identity, any number of reasons why.
That's what happens when you don't give people due process.
You imprison people unjustly.
And a federal district court judge ordered that this stop, that no detainees be delivered to El Salvador without first getting a hearing.
And the Trump administration rushed to move them there, brought 237 of them there, refused to turn the plane around.
And a lot of Trump supporters have been complaining, oh, this is just a single federal judge?
Who is he to order the president to stop some policy based on his belief that it's unconstitutional or illegal, even though, as we showed you on Monday night, that's how our system works.
Conservatives have often got injunctions from single district court judges to stop.
Biden policy to stop Obama policy to stop Clinton policy.
But the DOJ appealed that injunction, so it's not before just a single district judge now.
It's before the U.S. Court of Appeals, which is the highest appellate court in the country.
It's right below the Supreme Court in terms of prestige.
And they held an oral argument on Monday, and we played a lot of that for you or some of it, in which we showed you how antagonistic, how adversarial.
How aggressive the judges on the panel are being toward the Trump Justice Department's arguments about why they have the legal authority to do this and made quite clear that it's extremely likely that the appellate court would uphold that injunction so that now it's not just a single federal court judge, it's the most prestigious appellate court in the country right below the Supreme Court that's doing so.
And the three judges were an Obama appointee, a George H.W. Bush appointee and a Trump appointee.
And the decision that they issued today was a two-to-one decision, which upheld this injunction that the federal district court issued, ordered the Trump administration not to deport anyone else back to El Salvador, at least not without hearings.
And even the judge in dissent, the Trump judge, emphasized that every single illegal alien People inside the United States illegally that the Trump administration proposes to send to a prison a foreign country has a right to a habeas corpus hearing, to an opportunity to prove that he's being unjustly accused.
The only reason he dissented was he said that the case should have been brought where they were detained and not in Washington.
But on the substance of whether they have a due process right, the dissenting judge agreed.
It was essentially 3-0 on that question.
Here you see the ruling.
It says, it is further ordered that the emergency motions for stay be denied.
Separate concurring judgments of Judge Henderson, that's the Bush 41 judge, and Judge Millett, the Obama judge, and a dissenting statement of Judge Walker are attached.
And this was from the ruling of Judge Henderson.
The Bush 41 judge who ruled against the Trump DOJ.
She wrote, quote, the Alien Enemies Act, AEA, contains two provisions, a conditional clause and an operative clause.
The conditional clause limits the AEA's substantive authority to conflicts between the United States and a foreign power.
Specifically, there must be, quote, there must be one, a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government.
Or two, an invasion of predatory incursion, perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.
And three, a presidential public proclamation of the event.
She went on, a central limit to this power is the act's conditional clause, that the United States be at war or under invasion or predatory incursion.
And she talked about how the only times it had ever been enacted was during traditional wars.
The War of 1812, World War I, World War II.
How the founders enacted it specifically to confront a possible war than the quasi war that they ended up fighting with the French.
And everything in the record of this law was that it needed to be invoked or needed to be available solely in the case of an actual war.
And she went on to say that she's not issuing an opinion about whether or not There can be an invasion, but that the likelihood of victory is with the plaintiffs because she doesn't believe the AEA is applicable to fighting a few hundred members of a violent gang.
That's not what the Alien Enemies Act is for.
And that's an important limitation on the law because this law gives the president enormous powers, very extraordinary powers.
And that's why we have to be very careful about the president's ability to just declare war.
Otherwise, the Constitution has no purpose.
Bush and Cheney claimed war powers because they were fighting the war on terror.
Any president could just say, oh, we're at war, and now I have the ability to do everything.
But Judge Millett, the Obama judge, emphasized that even under the AEA, the people who are ordered by the president deported always have A due process right and always did, even the people accused of being Nazi sympathizers in World War II.
Here's what she wrote.
Judicial review has always been available to non-citizens detained or removed under the AEA.
During the War of 1812, Chief Justice John Marshall and Federal District Judge St. George Tucker offered a British subject released.
Ordered a British subject released because the local marshal had acted beyond his delegated authority by detaining the plaintiff without proper notice.
And then she cites the histories of these cases in which even people, we can go on, even people who are detained under these laws have been given due process.
She then went on, the Supreme Court The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, we can go on.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court later agreed with the Chief Justice that those subject to the AEA are entitled to judicial review, and she cited a 1813 case from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that during the war in 1812, people ordered by the president, removed, have a right to a hearing to contest the accusations against them, that they are really a threat.
The judge went on, quote, these early cases set a precedent and followed during the 20th century.
Review was available during World War I, cites a 1919 case and a federal district judge, as well as World War II, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1948 that stated, quote, hearings are utilized by the executive to secure an informed basis for the exercise of summary power.
She went on, quote, indeed, during World War II, a former member of the Nazi party, Not only received a hearing on his eligibility for removal, but also had his case heard by the Supreme Court.
And she ruled that this removal is unconstitutional because as the Supreme Court ruled, even for detainees in Guantanamo, you cannot consign people to prison, even if they're in your country illegally, even if they're not citizens, you cannot put people in prison.
Based on an allegation that they're terrorists, they're involved in a terrorist organization, that they're a member of a violent drug gang, without giving the accused, the person you want to put in prison, the opportunity to demonstrate that the accusations are false, that they've gotten the wrong person, or to present evidence that convinces a court that they've been wrongly accused.
This is foundational to the American system, even in wartime.
Now, what's interesting is the Trump-appointed judge, Judge Walker, did dissent.
But as I said, he dissented mostly on the grounds of where the case was brought.
He said it shouldn't have been brought in Washington but in Texas.
You have to bring it in the place where the people are detained, not where the government officials are.
And in his dissent, he said this, quote, the two sides of this case agree on very little.
But what is at this point uncontested...
Is that, quote, individuals identified as alien enemies may challenge that status in a habeas petition.
And as I said, he went on to say that should have been brought in Texas, not Washington.
Therefore, he would have dismissed the case.
He also said that there's delicate diplomacy, according to the government, going on between Venezuela and El Salvador and the United States, and that a ruling like this might disrupt.
Those diplomatic relations and therefore the equities are on the side of lifting the injunction.
But all three of these judges agreed with the court point that you cannot send people to an unrelated country based on an accusation that you haven't proven or given them an opportunity to contest.
And as we've gone over, there's 150 years of Supreme Court history that says that the Bill of Rights is not a list of Protections given solely to a small group of people called American citizens.
It is intended to be a constraint on what the US government does and can do with respect to everyone under their control.
If the Trump administration wants to do mass deportation, they convinced Americans to vote for that.
Polls show people favor that.
And if they were deporting people back to their home country, none of this would be an issue.
But when you change that to something far more radical, sending people, based on interpretations of their tattoos or the flimsiest evidence that you haven't even presented to a court, and you accuse people of being violent criminals and send them to a prison designed to be one of the worst and most destructive and humiliating and dehumanizing prisons in the entire world, where the El Salvadoran government has said they may never leave.
They may be here for life.
Not just basic human rights, but our Constitution, our laws, our precedent, as all three judges agreed, including the Trump-appointed judge, require that they be given an opportunity to contest the charges against them.
This should not even be controversial.
And yet, it has become such, because if you sufficiently dehumanize people, and this is what we saw in the war on terror, if the government just labels them terrorists without proving it, even if it's wrong, Enough people will say, oh, these people are animals.
They're not even humans.
They deserve no rights.
Kill them, torture them, kidnap them, put them in prison for life.
They don't need a trial.
And that is always what the founders feared most, was that the government would raise the fear level sufficiently so that people would give away their own liberties.
Remember, Benjamin Franklin, and this is an apocryphal, this is documented, when he left the Constitutional Convention, was asked by a woman, what is it that you did in there?
And he said, we created a republic if you can keep it.
Knowing that, the biggest danger to...
The Bill of Rights would be that citizens, the population, would be manipulated or fear-mongered into giving up those rights.
And that's what typically happens.
We see this all the time, and that's what's happening now.
And now the appellate court, it's not just one judge, it's a three-judge appellate court, has ruled that doing this without a hearing or even invoking the law to justify it is likely to fail on the merits, and therefore these deportations are Still enjoying not by one judge but by a three-judge panel.
All right, that concludes our show for this evening.
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