Kash’s Corner: Why Is the Biden Admin Still Seeking Russia’s Help to Finalize Iran Nuclear Deal?
“Can you remember the last time that the leader of the Saudi Kingdom ignored a president of the United States’ request for a phone call?”America’s traditional allies in the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates, are turning away from America, says Kash Patel. And in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Biden administration is still counting on Russia’s help to finalize a new Iran nuclear deal.Tonight, we discuss the growing Russia-China-Iran alliance, shifting alliances in the Middle East, and special counsel John Durham’s latest filing.
Jan and I are gonna kick off season four from New York City at Epoch Times headquarters, and I could not be happier to be back with everybody.
Well, Cash, we've been away for a little while, and frankly, there is a lot to talk about.
I mean, there's even just the other night, Durham has a new filing.
I think in the DeShenko case, I we need to talk about that, but let's leave that for the end.
Okay.
Um the thing that's been really concerning me over the last month as we have the Russia-Ukraine war playing out in front of our eyes, is this emergence really of a tighter Russia, China, and some other players as well, block.
And so why why don't we start with that?
What I think is happening, and we'll we'll talk through it here, is that Russia is aligning itself with um more adversaries of America, for instance, Iran.
And obviously, we know about China and Xi Jinping's pact with Putin to basically combine efforts to take on America and decrease America's sort of superiority in the world, at least in the national security front.
Russia, from their perspective, Putin is thinking, how do I continue that trend?
How do I continue to strengthen that effort?
And the way he does it is he makes more allies, he, Putin, and Russia, with people who are adversarial to the United States, such as Iran, and the an extension beyond that is if Russia is successful in making allies with our actual allies, or getting an Iran to make allies with our actual allies.
What I mean by that is folks that were traditionally American partners, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and other Middle Eastern countries, and we can walk through some of that.
But I think what he's doing should be gravely concerning to the so-called Western Alliance, the NATO front, and everything like that, because these are countries that everyone has to deal with and it's not just for oil.
When we look at this kind of well, let's call it information works.
This is a major part of this war.
Of course, Russia, Putin, they're kind of best in class in this these disinformation efforts.
I think we've known that for a long time.
Um and there's all sorts of, of course, war propaganda coming out of uh Ukraine and frankly, you know, the West, in fact, some of the same players that have been, you know, in the past have actually talked about uh, you know, Trump pushed Trump Russia collusion very hard, or you know, and and many other things, a very specific vision of COVID very hard, right?
So you have a lot of Americans actually looking at this and thinking, wow, how how can I can I really trust these people now that they're telling me that uh, you know, all these things about Ukraine and the realities there and what they're supposed to think.
Yeah, I mean, there's so much, you know, in the couple weeks we've been we've been we took a break from season three to season four.
You know, there's so much, I don't know if it's disinformation or misinformation or just areas of information that are questionable.
Uh for instance, this whole narrative that is the US funding biological programs in the Ukraine.
I don't know, I'm out of I'm out of government.
I can't speak to that.
But that's a valid question, and hopefully it's no, a simple no.
But what I think to your point, so many Americans are just split on that one issue.
Are they?
Aren't they?
Is it okay?
Is it okay?
On the heels of, you know, it took it took America and the world a little while to realize that the uh coronavirus came from China and specifically Wuhan.
And all the questions surrounding the Wuhan uh laboratory there, American funding tied to that.
There was a huge back and forth on that.
And so I think that just um, you know, when you extrapolate that pattern from one subject to the next, unfortunately leads people to continue to question what they're hearing from their government leaders, especially from the likes of Fauci.
And frankly, you know, why uh let's call it corporate media or mainstream media or choose certain ways to present information instead of just you know being able to think, okay, this is a reasonable representation.
There's a whole lot of people out there just thinking, what what can I believe?
Right?
It's hard.
And you know what they should believe is Epoch Times, but um I'm biased.
Uh But I think, you know, we, you and I try to distill through sort of the political narratives that encompass both sides of every issue and try to just present the facts and let people read it, watch it, consume it, and say, okay, this is what I think on X, Y, or Z. So let's get your thoughts here.
Well, first of all, President Biden is, I think, as we were recording here en route to speak with NATO.
Right.
Yeah.
Um, so here's the problem.
You can't trail with sanctions.
Okay.
You have to issue a paper bomb of sanctions from Jump.
What I mean by that, and let me use Iran in my time in the Trump administration as an example of how you utilize sanctions effectively.
It's a three-prong approach.
You have to issue sanctions like we did to the Ayatollah and his regime and crush their ability to access the SWIFT banking system, the European banking system, and monetary hard cash um holdings throughout the world.
We successfully did that on prong A. Prong 2, you have to have the willpower to issue kinetic operations.
That is military offensive operations, or at least the threat of, or your adversary knows they can't step too far out of line.
We did for Iran when we killed Qasim Soleimani, the head of the IRGC, the biggest state sponsor of terror, their special forces arm that has killed and caused more casualties to U.S. soldiers than any foreign terrorist organization on planet Earth.
The last prong is the diplomatic effort.
And what people don't realize about the diplomatic effort is you cannot have diplomacy unless you have the threat of a kinetic force behind it.
That's the purpose of conflict.
It's not to stay in war forever.
It's to create space so your armies and your militaries go out and create space so the diplomats get together and hopefully find a peaceful solution.
That three-prong effort worked with Iran under Trump because what do we do on the diplomatic front?
We went to our allies, because Iran doesn't talk to us, and we actually, under Trump, successfully returned American hostages being held captive in Iran.
That's how you do the trifold, as I call it, of international relations.
When a Joe Biden goes to NATO and says, I'm gonna now, a month after Putin has launched his war, issue sanctions on some Russian individuals, I think the response is gonna be the same as Putin's was before he invaded uh the Ukraine.
Oh, and by the way, apparently Joe Biden has named Russia the neutral arbiter for re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal, which I know we're gonna talk about uh in a little bit.
It's kind of bizarre to imagine that Russia in the midst of being, you know, isolated from the world, being a pariah doing all these terrible things, is now supposed to be, I guess the arbiter of the re-entry into an Iran deal.
I don't know.
Just think on that, Jan.
I mean, if our audience watches no other part of the show and has no other takeaways from the show, ask yourself this question.
Are you as an American citizen okay with Putin and Russia who started a war in Europe?
Are you okay with that adversary being at the negotiating table uh to decide whether or not America gets back into the Iran nuclear deal?
And putting aside the issue that that I think that's a terrible idea, we just hand it over to our number one adversary right now to say, okay, you go deal with Iran and bring us back uh an offer that we can allow new Iran to have nuclear weapons, access to the banking system, enrich their oil industry, and things like that.
I just think it is a shocking and pitiful um execution of leadership by this commander-in-chief.
And I think unfortunately, they continue the politicization of the national security apparatus by just saying, what did Trump do?
We're gonna do the opposite.
Trump got us out of the Iran deal for right reasons, I believe.
They want to go back in, even if the bet is made by a warmonger in Putin.
Hard to hard to conceive how these two things can work at the same time.
Uh, it's baffling.
I mean, just to just for the audience, you know, the Iran nuclear deal is more than nuclear.
Yes, it allows Iran To go back on the road to getting a nuclear weapon.
But just to remind everybody, remember, President Obama issued the JCPOA, the Iran deal, whatever you want to call it, right?
And said, okay, Iran, you can produce uranium for your energy supplies, but you can't go above X, Y or Z. And in exchange, we, the world, will lift sanctions on your economy and your access to banking so you can have monetary instruments flow through Europe and the West.
What did Iran do?
They said, thanks for that.
And we're going to break the rules of the Iran deal anyway and enrich uranium past the levels that they were supposed to.
Which is exactly why President Trump called the deal off and withdrew and put sanctions back on.
Meaning Iran did not have access to the Western banking system, they did not have access to their hard cash deposits, and their oil industry could not sell and exchange their uh petroleum products to the world.
And it suffocated the Iranian regime, which is why they did not like President Trump.
But it worked.
We are now on the verge of doing the opposite.
And the latest from Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who wouldn't answer the question on whether or not they're going to un-designate the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the biggest terrorism outfit on planet Earth, it's on the table for this administration to say you are no longer a terrorist organization is outrageous.
How you can go to the families of the fallen soldiers, the hundreds and hundreds that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has been responsible for killing, that Qasim Suleimani used to head, and convince any American that that's a good idea, just shows you how far I believe Joe Biden is wrong on everything Iran and basically everything Russia.
Well, and while while we're talking about Iran, I mean, there's also, and I again I I didn't really expect to hear this, but apparently Saudi Arabia is actually interested in dealing with Iran when it comes to oil.
But at the same time, they're not taking the calls from the U.S., from what I understand anyway.
And again, I mean a big shift in how these people are thinking.
Well, look, it's no surprise under President Trump, uh MBS and the Saudi regime had a great relationship with President Trump's White House on foreign policy matters and international matters.
Saudi is a big player in OPEC and the international oil trade, right?
They control a large chunk of the world's production, thus they control the price.
And we now know what happens when you make bad decisions from the top.
We've seen gas prices skyrocket in America for a number of reasons.
The problem now is our traditional ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, is now partnering with another one of our adversaries, the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, to gain access to their oil markets so they can, I believe, further control the oil industry globally, and they will then dominate what is the price and what isn't the price.
The worst part about it is they're gonna be sending Iran money, billions of dollars from this oil transaction if it's successful.
And Iran's gonna sell its oil to the rest of the world, to Russia, to China, to Venezuela or wherever you, right, to adversaries of America, and they're going to enrich themselves.
So not only is Joe Biden, if he's successful in negotiating a reentry to the Iran nuclear deer, which automatically lifts all the sanctions we put on under Trump and frees billions of dollars of money, that hard cash money that has been frozen due to those sanctions under Trump, they get that, just like they did under the JCPOA and Obama, where they got, I forget the number 10 or 15 billion dollars in hard cash.
They get all that.
Plus, we're turning on their spigot for the oil industry so they can now partner with our traditional allies like Saudi Arabia.
What is the significance, like the regional significance of this, you know, I mean, kind of dramatic change in who I guess the US allies are, right?
I think you I think you could you put it best, they don't take our phone calls.
Saudi Arabia and MBS, you know, it's reported in the media and through the Saudi regime that when President Biden puts in for a phone call request, it's denied, it's ignored.
I mean, can you remember the last time that the leader of the Saudi Kingdom ignored a president of the United States as a request for a phone call?
And not just that, here's one more uh example.
The United Amar Emirate uh the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, who has been a traditional ally in the Mideast of America as well, just received in person President Bashar al-Assad of Syria for an in-person meeting in UAE.
President Bashar al-Assad is a dictator, he is a murderer, he has committed genocide, he is no friend of America, he has kidnapped American hostages, and his country is in the middle of a what, 10-plus year civil war that's causing thousands to die every year.
We have now let another American ally partner up with another American adversary in Bashar al-Assad and Syria's regime.
Their take, they being the UAE, is you know, and I'm just guessing here is probably similar.
We don't have to take Joe Biden's request for phone calls, because we now, UAE, Saudi are looking out for UAE Saudi's best interest, but not taking any more consideration what America's interest is with those decisions.
That's the significance.
They don't seem to care how it impacts America, and that's the difference I believe between Trump's foreign policy decisions and Biden's foreign policy.
I mean, the the biggest question is, of course, why?
I mean, the most obvious thing, and this is why it gets complicated in my mind, and maybe you can help elucidate this a little bit, but you know, obviously the Iran deal, right?
That you know, Saudi is very uninterested in any prospect of uh nuclear armed Iran.
Um, that's for sure.
Yeah.
But at the same time, they're talking with Iran about you know having an energy partnership.
So I don't I don't understand that.
Well, I think it comes down to money, like everything else.
You know, this is just my take on it.
But I think you know the Saudis are very smart.
They know Iran's been producing and enriching uranium and breaking their uh you know, so-called commitments to the original Iran deal.
Uh they know they've blown past that.
They know we, under President Trump, significantly can curtail those efforts.
And they know President Trump is no longer president anymore.
So they, I think, assess the situation that's in the best, you know, in their best interest and say, look, we, the Saudis can't stop Iran, right?
And they're not afraid to uh of alienating America at this point.
No, that's and I think that's the biggest um negative consequence of Joe Biden's foreign policy.
The Saudis, the Emiratis are no longer uh considering how it impacts American global security or American relations with them.
And I think that's why Saudi, it's so striking to see that Saudi's willing to partner monetarily with an Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terror, um, and just brush aside the Iran nuclear deal.
Um, because I think they assess that their best way forward, they being Saudi Arabia right now, is to at least in the oil markets make a partnership with Iran so they can control more of the world's oil.
And from a Saudi perspective, I think that's smart, but it's not good for America and the rest of the world.
You know, so this is a really uh very significant reconfiguration.
I mean, we alluded to this to this earlier.
Now, okay, so jumping back to Russia, you know, I think one of the perhaps big successes of Russian disinformation or misinformation is um I don't know, this perception, and I think this actually has even made it into the kind of US uh messaging for the lack of a better term,
is that of course Russia is a nuclear power, and that makes it significant, but economically it's small, it's like a quarter of Germany or something, something like that, right?
It's not a huge power, right?
But of course it does have these, it does have these.
But there's this kind of perception, I don't know, do you people seem to think Russia is, you know, kind of massive on the stage, is the big global threat right now.
Do you do you do you perceive this?
Uh you know, I hate to answer questions yes and no, but I'm gonna go with yes and no here, and here's why.
So I think Vladimir Putin has been unbelievably successful in taking charge of the Russian propaganda machine and forcing it on the world stage.
And now we think, many think that Russia is this big bad actor with hat that has all these tentacles and all these lines of efforts going and all this money coming in when in reality, as you pointed out, clearly, they don't.
But so many people have been misinformed by Russia's, you know, disinformation, misinformation campaigns, which Putin, and I remind people, a GRU intelligence officer who was very good at that job, is continuing to run those types of misinformation, disinformation campaigns while launching a war.
And look, Russia isn't one of the world's premier economic powerhouses, but they're also not the poorest.
But what they're doing, and I think this circles back nicely to the beginning of our conversation is they're partnering with people who have great access to money, China and Xi Jinping.
They completed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is going to pay Russia billions of dollars from Germany for energy that Russia provides to Western Europe, which is why Germany has been so reticent to engage in anything regarding this conflict.
Those are just two examples of the relationships they're creating.
The Russians are probably talking to the Iranians, of course they are, and seeing how they can uh make money and also ally with another adversary of America.
So it's both monetarily that Putin's taken advantage of other countries who are traditionally American allies.
He's taking advantage of other countries that are normally American adversaries.
He's taking advantage of the disinformation campaign because he controls the entire narrative because there's no one in the West to rebut it, because no one's taking Joe Biden's phone calls.
And he's putting it all together and he launched a war.
And there's no signs of him stopping.
So and speaking about messaging, it seems to be, you know, one of the themes of our show today.
We were talking offline a bit about, you know, kind of curious messaging you're seeing on the US side from the Defense Department.
Yeah, one of the one of the most upsetting things that I saw come out of the Defense Department was from the Secretary of Defense, who during an interview in the last uh over the last week or so basically referenced Russia's war into the Ukraine as a botched invasion.
That's his quote, botched invasion.
And I couldn't disagree more.
Thousands have been murdered, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been displaced.
There's a generational refugee crisis that we and I have talked about, and he can he Putin continues to wage a war into another country's sovereign territory.
I don't call that a botched invasion.
Unfortunately, he's six he Putin is somewhat succeeding.
And so for our Secretary of Defense to just message the world that it's a botched invasion, by saying it and by leap being the supposed leader of the world's greatest fighting force, where I was a civilian leader of, um, is just a shocking detachment from reality for our Secretary of Defense to sort of glance over what's actually happening it,
and it this seems to be a common narrative for the Biden foreign policy, is if we just say what we want it to be, and we repeat it over and over again, the mainstream media will carry our water.
So what do you think is happening?
I mean, ostensibly Putin isn't getting everything that he's wanting.
He's started a war, he's taken over areas of the Ukraine.
You know, he hasn't taken over Kyiv and Ukraine writ large, but certain cities, certain sections in the east and the south, that's a win for him.
Any territorial land gain for one sovereign nation of another is a win, especially in wartime.
And he has a propaganda machine, which we talked about earlier.
And the other thing is he's shown America to not only be on the defensive, but to have lost footing and power and national security prowess that we had under the Trump administration.
He has shown that global leaders in Saudi Arabia in the United Emirates Arab Emirates will no longer care uh what America thinks that will not be in their calculus.
And Russia will align with both America's allies and our adversary, our traditional adversaries.
And I think that is a tectonic shift in global national security from an American perspective.
So I do think that's another win for Vladimir Putin under President Biden's watch.
Let's talk a little bit about China.
Okay, because I can't help but thinking about this.
There's again about messaging.
I see this messaging that China's sort of on the fence or something.
But I'm that's not what I'm seeing at all.
China's made it very clear, I think that by taking the posture that it has that it's essentially, you know, s supporting the agreement they made at the at the genocide games, let's call it, right?
The genocide games pack, as you and I call it.
Yeah.
You know, where Biden, excuse me, where uh Putin and Xi Jinping stood together, made a pact, said they were going to combine efforts basically against to take on America.
And from their perspective, that's a smart geopolitical decision because you know, while they both probably have interests that conflict against each other, their greater conflicting interest is all things America.
So I think that's hugely problematic.
Here's another example of where I think Biden has tremendously failed America.
A week or two ago, um President Biden provided or it came out that Biden had provided Xi Jinping with classified intelligence about troop locations in and around the Ukraine.
What did Xi Xin Bing do?
He turned around and gave it to Putin.
As if that were a surprise.
The fact that our commander-in-chief could not see that uh sleight of hand coming is uh cons more than concerning and shows that China is not allied with anything America is doing.
Uh and there's also this two-hour phone call that's been talked about a lot, again in the media and in the messaging, but you know, curiously um uh the American administration has not provided any kind of information about what happened during this phone call, whereas the Chinese state media are offering uh a number of suggestions, but of course they're not known for for being particularly particularly truthful.
Yeah, yeah.
I'd say they're they're they're known for lying constantly.
That's what they do.
Um you're referring to the two-hour phone call that Biden had with Xi Jinping, I think in the last uh few days here.
Um that came on the heels of that classified intelligence sharing that we just discussed.
It's ironic and hypocritical, that's my view, of this of the majority in the current media here in America to not demand the entirety of that call transcript when we have a country partnering with another country that's at war, China and Russia.
Um, when they demanded the call transcript of President Trump and his cult phone call with uh President Zelensky um in the Ukraine a couple years ago.
And President Trump provided it.
And if you read the transcript, you know, it speaks for itself.
The Biden administration was asked to provide this transcript, and they said no, and the media just glossed over it.
What are they hiding?
What was the contents of that conversation?
Why are we allowing, as you said, uh so poignantly, why are we allowing a regime, the CCP that lies for a living to message on a global scale about a conversation that our commander-in-chief had?
It's just another example of where we've lost footing on the global stage.
Yeah, to me, that's the biggest problem.
I think it's very fair for calls in general to be, you know, these types of calls to be private.
I don't I don't think every call needs to be public called.
But but in a situation like this where uh the Chinese Communist Party is taking advantage of it to basically message entirely along its own lines, whether it's true or not, who knows?
Again, adding to this morass of confusion of confusing uh in information.
And frankly, you know, sometimes I wonder if this isn't like isn't the purpose because it's just really hard to know what's up and what's down in this information environment.
Coupled with the morass of information we can't weed through, unfortunately it's directly connected to information we do have, such as the president of the United States providing classified information to China so he can provide it to Russia.
Is that what happened on this two-hour phone call?
Was there more of that?
Was there less of that?
Was there capitulations regarding the Iran nuclear deal?
Um is China going to provide monetary aid to an Iran?
What are they doing with Russia?
Are they propping up uh the Russian ruble with their currency because we know the Russian ruble is on the drastic decline?
Were those conversations at least tell us, I agree with you, especially after serving in the White House.
Most phone calls between presidents and premieres and presidents and leaders should be should be kept between the two for diplomatic relations.
But at least generally tell us what the conversation was about, don't allow China to dictate it.
And another example is Wendy Sherman, our deputy secretary of state, not willing to answer a direct question on are are you, under the Biden administration, putting on the table uh an un-designation of the IRGC, one of the world's largest foreign terrorist organizations.
To me, in diplomatic speak, what that means, and I'm borrowing from my friend Rick Rennell here, if you are if you're not willing to deny it publicly when asked, that means it's on the table.
That means it's being discussed.
Was that discussed with Xi Jinping in this two-hour phone call too?
You know, I think we have a right to know at least some generalities.
As we finish up, let's jump to, you know, this new Durham filing.
And again, you know, so the theme being messaging.
Of course, special counsel Durham has been using these filings to do all sorts of messaging, right?
Um, at least that's how we've been reading it.
Um this one doesn't have so much messaging in it, but it does have a few curiosities which I certainly wouldn't have picked up, but you and you with your uh you know prosecutors hat on did notice.
Yeah.
Uh so as promised, uh, as we promised on Truth Social, we would talk Durham, and you know you and I love talking Durham.
So I'm glad uh we have a few minutes here to discuss his latest filing.
Which was only a page and a half long.
So really any of our viewers can go read it in about three minutes.
This is more of a procedural filing than it is a substantive filing like we've talked about on last on previous episodes.
But I think it has a very telling story behind it, being a former terrorism prosecutor who utilized um uh sensitive information of prosecute terrorists.
So what John Durham did was basically say to the judge, hey, I've got a lot of discovery I gotta get out.
Unclassified and classified.
And what governs that is this thing called CEPA, CIPA, Classified Information Procedures Act.
It's a federal statute.
It's fancy for basically like, okay, if you as a federal prosecutor have classified information, how do you get it to the defense?
So do you satisfy your discovery obligations?
How do you tell the court?
Because the court has to know everything, and also what filings do you need to make under CEPA?
There's various sections, section four and whatnot, to say we need to use some of this sensitive information in a prosecution.
And as our audience knows, you can never use classified information in a federal prosecution.
You have to go through a declassification process, which is exhausting and lengthy for every piece you want.
Then you have to present it to the judge, and the judge has to sign off on it.
So what John Durham has said is because of this cumulative effect of unclassified information, classified information, SEPA filings that he has to make regarding sensitive information he wants to use during his prosecution of Igor Denchenkov.
He and the defense have agreed they need more time.
So it's likely that the judge will grant them more time.
He laid out, you know, a timeline from May to July to provide sequentially certain pieces of this information, this discovery, this evidence, um, over the course of the next couple of months.
To me, that's pretty telling because in a prosecution, if you're not using classified information, you don't use SEPA.
He just told the world, and we kind of knew that.
I mean, at least, you know, us former National Security prosecutors kind of knew that when you're dealing with um Igor Danchenkov, a source to a former FBI source, Christopher Steele, who now the world knows is a total fraud in my opinion.
Um of course would have lived in the classified realm of things, and a prosecution involving a source who is providing information truthfully or untruthfully to Steele, to the Democratic Party, to the FBI, is going to be um covered, masked in classified um markers.
So it means to me, John Durham has gone all the way down the rabbit hole and said, I got a lot of work to do because I know what it takes as a as a former terrorism prosecutor to declassify one sentence of information in a federal prosecution.
I've spent five months declassifying one sentence.
Then that's only step one.
Then I have to convince the judge that I've satisfied all the discovery obligations and due process obligations with the defendant rightly has under the Constitution.
That's step two.
And then if you satisfy the judge, then you can come up with either what's called a declassified version of that classified document, or if the information is too sensitive, you have to come up with what's called a sub SIPA substitution, which basically says, here's a document or here's a witness, and they they say X, Y, and Z, and it's it's very squirrely classified information.
But here's a summary of it.
And you go to the judge ex parte, and uh, and and thanks for bringing this up.
John Durham said there are ex parte filings he needs to make with the court.
What that means is he, the prosecutors alone go to the judge.
No defense counsel present during that portion of those filings.
And you do that when you're bringing national security prosecutions when you have sensitive, very sensitive classified information that you can't even show the defense yet, whether or not they're cleared.
Um is irrelevant.
You have to go to the judge and say, Judge, we've got something that we are either going to use in our case in chief or we have an obligation to turn over to the defense, but there are certain national security overriding conditions that we need to discuss with you.
You know, hear us out and then see if our, and I'm speaking, you know, as a prosecutor, our US government DOJ representation to the court is sufficient so that due process is achieved.
So in those four or five bullets that John Durham issued on his one pager, that is a mountain of work behind each one of those little bullets.
And that's why I think when people keep asking me, why is it taking so long?
Why is it taking so long?
This is why.
This is one case, which is one of his three indictments.
Um, and it's just dealing with a fraction of the discovery obligations he has in that case.
So it's we're gonna be in it for a little while longer.
Um the Danchenko case, the trial date isn't set till October.
And realistically, even if there were a plea agreement, it couldn't happen before discovery is satisfied at the end of May, pursuant to this new timeline.
So we got a ways to go.
Fascinating.
And so, you know, this this very interesting, very sensitive classified information scenario where the prosecutor goes alone to the judge, basically.
Um, how common is that?
It's it's rare.
I've done it.
Um you remember you only do it in national security cases when you have classified information, and the statute speaks on the process and the procedure you're supposed to apply.
But it's it's important because there were cases I brought throughout America.
Um, we charged terrorists that I could not have brought unless I use CEPA and I went ex parte with the judge uh to get a very sensitive piece of information declassified and the appropriate substitute submitted before the jury and the defense uh during trial.
So And the substitute, just to be clear, is something that represents the information from the judge's perspective sufficiently that the jury can basically use it as a data point to make decisions.
Well, more importantly than that, yes, that's that's I shouldn't say more importantly, but equally as important, the judge has to determine that the defendant's rights, and me as a former federal public defender, you who speak into those rights a lot in federal court, the defendant's due process rights, the defendant's discovery obligations, the Brady obligations, is there exculpatory information in there?
Is there impeachable evidence in there?
All of that information must also be balanced by the judge to say, okay, your your substitution in this in this scenario satisfies due process and all discovery obligations, and is in a format that a jury can hear it in an unclassified manner.
Because once a jury hears it, it's it's public.
It's for the world to see.
That's why you have to go through that process.
And just to give you a quick vignette, not to get down uh into you know Roger Rabbit's hole on this one, but to get a piece of information declassified from the intelligence community.
It's not just one agency, say for the instance the FBI that signs off on it.
Every intelligence community agency or department that has an equity in that classified information has to sign off on every piece of information you need to classify.
So it could be the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, um, the secret uh the Department of Defense, it could be Homeland Security and a myriad of other agencies that you have to get their head, their cabinet secretary level to say, okay, we agree for purposes of this prosecution.
The attorney general's got to get involved.
It is a process.
All right.
Well, Cash, I mean, absolutely fascinating.
And I know we'll we'll we'll be learning more and in coming shows.
So I think it's time for a shout-out.
Thanks for helping Jan and I kick off season four of Cassius Corner.
Uh today's shout-out for me goes to the entire Epoch Times crew and the Epoch TV crew.
They have done three seasons of Cassius Corner, which is awesome and surprises no one more than me.
Um I'm very thankful for their dedicated effort to the show.
So this show is dedicated to them.
Thank you, all of you, and we need to start hearing your comments again.
