According to a new article by Seymour Hersh, CIA Director William Burns traveled to Kiev earlier this year to ask Zelensky to stop skimming so much off the top of US aid money. Apparently his top generals were angry that he was skimming more than they were! Meanwhile Congress voted to send $60 billion MORE to the corrupt regime. With the money approved, calls are now going out for Western TROOPS to be sent to Ukraine. Also today: Trump's alleged "hush money" is "election interference"?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Pohl.
Happy Monday.
Very good.
Ready and rearing to go.
Oh, yeah.
Busy weekend.
Well, we all should rest better now that the Congress, in spite of the chaos, they got the money passed, and we will be saving Ukraine and the rest of the nonsense that would go on.
But that to me was so bad, the whole process, this go-around, to pass that bill at the last minute.
But the one part that sort of caught my attention was the timing.
You know, the timing was fake anyway, because they really didn't have a deadline.
But they played on this issue of the deadline.
And symbolically, they couldn't even, they were saying, oh, two minutes left, two minutes left, as if they really cared.
And when you think of all the things, because that's the rules.
They wanted to show that their rule followers, they follow the rules, has to be done at a certain time, even if they make up the final date to go in.
So they did that and passed it.
And there's a lot of relief among Democrats.
I guess one of the worst things was Schumber bragging about it.
We'd take them.
Yeah, took them to the cleaners.
We really took them.
So I think that Johnson's going to have a tough time from now on because they got the money and the war continued and they pretended that it was okay for Ukraine because we have always promised that we weren't going to send in the troops, so we wouldn't expose our troops.
But it's equally bad in many ways that the violence comes with against the American people.
Don't protect the borders and steal more money from the American people.
It just go on.
So this whole idea that because we're not going to put somebody in a uniform, we'll just put them as a special military officer, CIA agents, let them go in, and pretend we're not involved.
It's that hypocrisy.
But fortunately, Daniel, I think a lot of people are waking up to the hypocrisy.
And I hope we can continue to make these points so more and more people will.
And it's no easy thing because we want to change the ideology in many ways of both parties.
And just switching party under these circumstances could be helpful, move a step in the right direction, but it's still not the solution because, you know, I've said so many times, Republicans and Democrats base their philosophy on interventionism, intervention in the economy, in our personal lives, and certainly way too much intervention in the affairs of foreign countries.
Yeah, it certainly was a dark weekend.
I mean, it really was on the Hill Saturday.
And you wrote about it in this week's column, which is up on Mount PaulInstitute.org, and I encourage people to read it.
But Saturday was a really bad day.
You had these nasty four bills, three aid bills, money for Ukraine, money for Israel, money to fight China.
And then you had the fourth one, which is banning TikTok, stealing the Russians' money.
And then while they were busy, and you pointed this out well, while they were busy doing that, the Senate was passing the FISA 702, which is spy on everyone.
Turn your plumber into a spy act is what it was essentially.
So a really, really dark day, but was crazy about it.
And in fact, I didn't watch the Florida debate on Saturday.
I was standing drywall.
I was working on my house.
But I got a call from Eric Garris, our friend at antiwar.com, who called me this morning and said, did you happen to watch the debate?
I said, I didn't.
I was busy.
He said, I've never seen anything like it.
He said it was totally a railroad job.
They had the day before the Rules Committee met and adopted a very, very tight rule.
It was passed with Republican opposition.
So basically, something that's unprecedented, which is that Speaker Johnson used the Democrats on the rule committee to pass out a rule that was very, very narrow.
There was, I think, just two minutes allowed for amendment debates.
There were seven pre-accepted amendments, nothing open on the floor.
What else did Eric say?
The vote was limited to five minutes.
It was boom, boom, boom.
They had a regular debate on all four bills at once, and then it was boom, boom, boom.
The votes were just insanely tightly packed.
And, well, the opposition, the Republicans and Democrats, the people who took the time in opposition were for the bill.
He said both sides were pro-war, who controlled the debate, and there was only a very small amount of time for people who weren't in favor of us.
So he said, I've been watching the floor for years and years and years, and I've never seen anything like it.
And I mentioned it kind of sounds like the Politburo, where everything was preordained.
He said, that's exactly what it was.
It still fascinates me to try to understand people like the speaker because his credentials, you know, weren't totally offensive.
Matter of fact, he said some things that constitutionals follow the Constitution, balance the budget, no money to Ukraine.
And I imagine he was not, I guess, sending money to our borders.
And, you know, all of us just switch it.
And individuals like us do it.
And his very vague, incorrect, probably realistic statement was, well, I finally got the information I needed.
Yeah.
From the spooks.
From the people who lied to us.
We find out they steal money from us, too.
So he switches over.
But I can think psychologically, if you look at him, he's sort of half pleased with himself.
You know, we put this together.
There's no government lockdown.
My argument is we ought to teach people that a little lockdown can't be that harmful and tell them exactly what they're doing and pretending to do because the Constitution is locked down.
Why can't we lock down to Congress?
You know, and not allow the Congress to act outside of the rules of the Constitution.
But they've got to do it before midnight.
Even if it's a fake number, we've got to get to pass the bill passed.
And they did it and they were bragging about it.
But there's going to be a lot of people heartbroken about it, too.
There's more than a few of us that are concerned about how that process works.
Eric said that he was thinking it would be kind of a long, an all-day debate.
They'd have plenty of time.
No, it was boom, boom, boom.
Get in, get out, pass it, and get away.
So it was interesting.
I wanted to play a couple of audio clips.
We have our earpieces in.
First, I wanted to play the first one is Massey.
We can just show it, and let me read it before we play it.
We had some tech problems earlier, so hopefully it'll work out if we can find the—okay, so here's Massey.
He said, this is the U.S. House of Representatives under the direction of Speaker Mike Johnson.
Democrats are celebrating his total capitulation with no victory for securing our border.
And you can see them there waving Ukrainian flags on the floor of the House.
And actually, we don't need to play this because I want to play Senator Paul's, which is next.
If we can do that, let me read it first.
And okay, here we go.
So Senator Paul tweets out, Ukrainian flags fly in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives as they vote to send more of your hard-earned money to a corrupt foreign regime.
And just like that, they shout Ukraine, Ukraine.
While happily working to secure Ukraine's borders, not ours.
And I didn't believe this at first, Dr. Paul, when I read it.
And then I played it and I listened to members of the U.S. House chanting the name of a foreign country while waving its flag on the floor.
Let's listen in on this one.
If we can get our connection, maybe we can minimize it and hit it again and see if that helps.
Like refresh or something.
Sorry about that.
we go.
Ukraine, Ukraine, they're literally celebrating stealing 60 billion of our dollars and sending it overseas.
They think they've actually done a patriotic thing and they're waving a foreign flag.
You know, when I think of that scene where foreigners come in, they get to pick up their checks and they get to give speeches.
And I was involved in a very unique political thing.
It's not of great value, but it was personal.
And that is when Rand was elected to the Senate, I was still in the Congress.
We were both getting sworn in on the same day, and I remember getting sworn in.
I had time to go over to watch his swearing in.
Ukraine's Celebration of Stolen Funds00:15:37
But Rand whispered to me, he says, There's very strict rules over here.
You can't go past this lie.
I couldn't get near and near the center of the piece down there.
And he was just following the rules.
I wasn't offended by it.
But the offense is that I couldn't get any closer to his ceremony.
And look at what they do now.
They have these thieves coming in.
And it's been going on for a lot of years.
These of us would be politically beneficial.
If only you were begging for money, they probably would have welcomed you.
Come on in.
Free money over here.
So, anyway, so here's this disgraceful, disgusting display, like you mentioned, on the floor.
And here at the same time, we wanted to put this up because we saw it on Zero Hedge, but originally it was written by Seymour Hirsch, who put out a piece a couple of days ago.
And this is well known, but put this up.
Trading with the enemy.
And this came up earlier this month.
Amid rampant corruption in Kiev, and U.S. troops gather on the Ukrainian border.
Does that Biden administration have an end game to this conflict?
Now, just go ahead to the next one.
This is from the article.
And this is the Ukraine that those people are congratulating themselves for sending our money to.
And this is Seymour Hirsch.
He writes: The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev where CIA Director William Burns was there.
His message to the Ukraine president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie.
The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky's greed.
So Burns told the Ukrainian president because he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the general.
So the generals were mad, Dr. Paul, because Zelensky was stealing more of our money than they were.
And Hirsch continues: Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government.
Zelensky responded to the American pressure 10 days later by publicly dismissing 10 of the most ostentatious officials on the list and then doing little else.
And here's the quote.
The 10 he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes, the intelligence official told me, wrote Seymour Hearst.
So this is all well known before we gave him another 60 billion.
And we can't go after CIA Chairman Burns because he was releasing some information.
I don't know what his total history is, but the whole thing is, I was thinking, well, we have to get a hold of this.
How will we have enough left for ourselves?
Yeah, the 10% for the big guy, right?
He's probably mad too.
Yeah, so it's just, it's disgusting.
The corruption there is well known.
We even send the CIA director over there to say, kind of tone it down a little bit.
And it's just crazy.
But Zelensky, for all of his corruption, Dr. Paul, he does get it.
Here's a quote from him we put on the next clip.
Here's what Zelensky said.
We do not have the $60 billion that the U.S. gave us.
This money remains in America.
It's a quote from Zelensky.
And that's absolutely true.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
It goes to buy new weapons for the ones, replace the ones we already sent them, et cetera, et cetera.
It's not going to go to Ukraine, only a little bit for a few more cars and houses on their part.
So really incredible.
Yeah, I wanted to read one sentence from Lizinsky, Zelensky.
And he gave a bigger statement here, but he says the vital U.S. aid bill passed today by the House will keep the war from expanding.
I think this whole process is always, how are we going to keep it going?
If it needs a little expansion, that's what we're for.
But they're so bold.
And of course, we don't get probably any help from mainstream media.
They don't ever really try to point out some of the nonsense going on.
And you don't, the people that have been on our side, a few libertarian types in the journalist business, you know, aren't in the regular Man Street media, and they're still out there, you know, bringing up information like that.
So fortunately, it's still, the vehicles are still available to us to try to get the truth out.
That's why we shouldn't be too discouraged.
You know, they had a big night and they were cheering.
And Schumer was leading the charge, and half of the Republicans were bowing.
Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, I wanted to do a couple more clips on this because I think now David Sachs is an entrepreneur.
I think he's very savvy.
I really enjoy reading what he writes on Twitter X.
And I think he had a really nice little pithy conclusion about what this is all about and what to expect.
If we can put up David's, go to the next one.
It's just, it's no audio.
So David Sachs writes on Twitter today or yesterday, in the not too distant future, Ukraine will be back before the Congress seeking more funding.
The arguments will be the same.
Without it, Ukraine will collapse, and we can't let Putin have a victory.
But the facts on the ground will be much worse.
More Ukrainian soldiers will have died.
More of its infrastructure will have been destroyed.
And more of its territory will be occupied by Russia.
What will Congress do then?
Very good question.
My guess is send more money.
That seems to be all they care about.
I want to do one last one.
This is the House Freedom Caucus, which held the line fairly well.
If we can put that last one up on the vote on Saturday.
And it's a good statement.
Once again, Speaker Johnson has moved massive legislation without a majority of the majority.
More Republicans voted against Ukraine aid than voted for it.
Twice as many Democrats voted for it than Republicans, which says how much of a win this was for them.
And if you look at the vote, this is the roll call vote on the Ukraine aid.
101 Republican yeses, 112 Republican noes.
All 210 Democrats, including the quote-unquote progressives, voted in favor of more war funding for Ukraine.
So this is clear just looking at that vote, Speaker Johnson is definitely not speaking for the majority of Republicans who elected him.
You know, it'd be interesting to theorize and just think about it.
What would it have been like if he had stuck with the conservatives?
You know, who's going to punish him?
But, you know, his excuse still is he became knowledgeable there.
And that's pretty phony.
You know, if he didn't know it, that's a crime in itself, you know, if he gets that far.
But here he is.
He switches over and with not a whimper at all and straightforward that I changed it because for national security purposes by opening, allowing the gate to be open, all illegals come in.
At the same time, the spending continues and goes to the enemy.
And then it can do this.
It is such a bewildering thing.
How does a person do this?
They must, for them to be comfortable with themselves, they have to either lie to themselves and convince them, or they have joined the nihilists.
There is no such thing as truth, so they don't sweat it.
Yeah, only power.
Well, you asked sort of a rhetorical question before we started this show, and I was going to throw it back to you because you said, I wonder how Speaker Johnson survives after doing this.
What do you think?
What's going to happen with him after having done this?
Well, he came out of this one okay.
They didn't force a vote.
And I think what they're going to get, the immediate thing, they're waiting for the election.
And then if Trump pulls it off, then the Johnsons and everybody else will be really friendly there.
But I can't believe he'll last long term.
Yeah, he's made so many enemies.
And Trump, I mean, we can talk about him, but he was definitely not forcefully against this bill.
In fact, he was patting Mike Johnson on the back the whole time, calls him MAGA Mike.
So there's another point that is not good on this.
But, you know, here's the next story that we sort of want to cover is in the same general territory.
But it really is an example of how it always ratchets up toward more interventions.
So, okay, they got the money.
They got the money.
Well, that's not enough because now we need something more.
Put on that next clip.
This is from Politico.
Money's not enough, guys.
We need more.
U.S. Ways sending additional military advisors to Ukraine as Russia gains momentum.
So now we're going to start sending more military advisors to Ukraine.
Yeah, you know, in the title there, the troops would be serving in a non-combatant role.
That's what gets to me because all the combat is against us.
You know, when they deny us our liberties and excommunicate us from the constitutional protections, and then they say, well, we're not sending foot soldiers over there.
We'll just take their uniforms off and teach them how to bomb people, you know, and make sure we participate in it.
And if they need any lunch money, they get as much as they need.
And what?
So the only limitation I see at the current point is waking up as many people as possible because hopefully we can rebuild a better system.
But that's not going to be easy, but it's still worth the effort because this thing is going to come down.
And we'll have to think about how we'll revamp it.
And right now, though, there's no way that they can, that the Johnsons of the world will put it together and say, well, things are a little bit better now.
Now we're going to have incremental steps in the other direction.
But, you know, in the short run, in a political sense, the election is pretty important.
Even though when I look at the long term, on the big issues, we'll still have the Fed and we'll still have troops overseas, but we just need a bigger conversation because people eventually will give up when they find out that it's so fruitless.
But when I think of all that, the 60s, how bad things had to get before the people rose up and said, enough is enough.
And, you know, they had a vote and they brought the troops home.
Yeah, yeah, after a while.
But, you know, this is the thing about now we're going to talk about troops.
Let's put on this next clip.
This is from the Politico article because they want to send more troops over there, but they won't be in combat.
So this is from the article.
This is the Pentagon spokesman, Pat Ryder.
They say the Pentagon, U.S. is considering sending additional military advisors to the embassy in Kiev.
The latest show of American commitment to Ukraine.
So there you have it.
Go to the next one because I highlighted a couple things in this, Dr. Paul, that I think are important.
The additional troops will support logistics and oversight efforts for the weapons U.S. is sending Ukraine, according to U.S. officials.
The new contingent will also help the Ukrainian military with weapons maintenance.
That means that's sort of an anodyne way of saying they're going to make sure that those guns continue shooting, that they continue killing Russians.
Without them being there, there would be less Russians killed.
Go to the next one.
This is a similar topic.
One of the tasks the advisors will tackle is helping Ukrainians plan sustainment of complex equipment donated by the U.S. as the summer fighting is expected to ramp up.
Again, helping the Ukrainians kill more Russians.
So how would U.S. feel if there were Russian advisors in Mexico and Mexico were fighting against us and they were helping the Mexicans have better weapons and better guns to attack us?
Would we just say, well, they're not really involved.
It's okay.
But what I worry about is there may be enough infiltration and invasion of our country that they may be the leaders and they combine it with the people who are really coming to get us.
But you know, this week I came across an interview on television and Graham was one side of the debate.
Oh, God.
And you know his position, don't you?
So it was Lindsey Graham.
And I think in a short five-minute interview, he probably said, we're at war hysterically.
We're at war.
And I keep thinking, if just one, you know, quiet question from one of the press people say, when did this happen?
I missed it.
I'm sorry, but I didn't know when the Congress declared this war.
But he was hysterical.
We're at war, we're at war, and therefore you have to do everything they want to do.
But nobody raised the question.
And people say, yeah, this is true.
We're at war, you know, and we are, but they don't know who the enemy, or they won't admit who the real enemy is.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what I thought of when I saw that we're going to send more advisors to Ukraine.
Put on this next clip, my mind went back to 1964 when the New York Times had this headline on.
Look at this.
U.S. to enlarge Vietnam force by 5,000 advisors.
Don't worry.
They're just advisors.
What could go wrong, right?
Isn't that amazing?
You know, 64.
But some were openly talking about it.
Go to this next one.
This is foreign affairs.
Some were openly saying, advisor, forget that.
This is an article in Foreign Affairs that just came out.
Europe, but not NATO, should send troops to Ukraine.
This just came out today.
Troops.
So if Germany sends troops, but they're not wearing that little NATO logo, the Russians will just turn the other way, right?
They'll just look at the other.
Oh, yeah, we're not going to take them off.
It's incredible.
You know, this idea of advisors, that's been around a long time because I think when I first heard about it, I was maybe in, I know I wasn't in politics, but they were reassuring us that Eisenhower has a handle on this, and he's sending over some advisors.
So he was the first one to send over the advisor.
And, you know, theoretically, if they were honest friends, which they weren't, and you had some advisors and you talked to them and you let the people know what they're doing, it wouldn't have been as bad.
But the advisors, it turns out, that's the warning sign.
The advisors aren't there for fun and games.
They're there to start the program, start the show.
And they certainly did.
So Eisenhower was there four years before we really sent our military out.
And, you know, a lot of the Republicans and Democrats are saying, Lindsey Graham being one of them, well, we're sending our money so we don't have to send our troops.
But now, without missing a beat, they're saying, well, we need to send our troops too.
Election Interference Tactics00:05:14
Money's not enough.
We've got to send troops.
We're out of troops.
So that's going to be the next thing they're going to do.
That's what they're moving toward.
Well, maybe the printing presses will break down and they won't be able to do it.
Except they don't have to even print the money anymore.
They just have to push the buttons.
Imaginary.
Well, let's finish up with something that is in the news this week, and we're going to keep an eye on it.
But this is also from Politico.
Put up that next clip.
Prosecutors say Trump's hush money was election interference.
Will jurors and voters believe it?
What a crazy case this is against Trump.
This is.
And they said the Bragg never even wanted to do it because it was the toughest one to pass.
And I think he was strategically saying, well, if we can't win this thing, it might be a bad omen.
It could be, you know, because it's such a farce of what they're doing there.
And if you compare what they're doing against Trump, isn't that election interference?
Yeah, like it's never been before.
I saw somebody from, I forget which country it was.
Oh, it was South Korea, a former leader in South Korea, war, and she listed three people who, once they, you know, they had this agreement, they were settling him by the legal court system.
All those three, I think, ended up getting killed.
But they ganged up on them.
So she was making the case, this is stupid for us to settle this thing, especially on a case like this.
It's switching courts, going from misdemeanor to the federal courts.
Why hasn't it been thrown out?
Yeah.
I mean, the allegation is that he made a settlement with this woman, gave her some money so she'd stop talking about an alleged affair that he had with her.
And now Bragg, as you say, she said, well, that's election interference because it helps his reputation if none of this bad stuff gets out on him.
But, you know, Jonathan Turley, and I didn't put it up, but he makes a great point.
He talked about, if you remember when John Edwards had a similar problem, he was running for president, and the same payment was made, the same kind of thing, although it was worse because the lady had a baby, you know, so it really was something must have happened most likely.
And there's no evidence in this case, but they basically just dropped it all.
They wouldn't, nothing happened to Edwards.
Everything was dropped because they realized at the time this kind of a case is so flimsy, but here they are.
Yeah.
Well, and it may come up pretty soon.
I don't know whether they're going to carry this out for the full length of time.
But, of course, if they get one person to resist, then that delays things, and maybe that will discourage them.
Because this ends up costing a couple dollars, too, for their fun and game.
But Turley made a good point, which is that New York hates Donald Trump.
So they're going to have a hard time.
Trump's going to have a hard time with the jury.
They're going to find people that hate Trump, and they're going to say, you know.
Well, maybe he'll take all his business to Florida.
Yeah, he should.
That's probably why they hate him even more.
I always thought that Trump has gotten into trouble because it's a lot of hate.
You know, I thought at first they had a little jealousy.
How could this guy become president?
So there was jealousy because he outdid them and he was in the presidency and they were just hysterical over it.
So they could not use issues.
They're incapable of that.
So they turned it into hate and criminalizing our court system and law enforcement.
And they've been pretty successful with this.
How could they get how many charges?
180.
And that'll go down in history as one of the most, that's the interference.
But I think, I don't know whether I said it on the air, but I've said it before, and that is, if the opposition, especially it's the opposition to Trump right now, if they accuse Trump of something, this happened under Hillary, too.
If they start accusing their opposition of doing something like Russia gave, they're the ones you better look because they deflect it and turn the charges against the people that had nothing to do with it.
And they've gotten away with it.
But hopefully common sense will come along one of these days.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, I'm going to close out and just thank our viewers for tuning in on a Monday.
We had a good live audience today.
And we appreciate that.
If you can take a second to hit thumbs up, and if you're not already following or subscribed on whatever platform you're watching, if you'd please do that, that would help us much, and we would appreciate it.
Also, encourage you to check out RonPaulInstitute.org if you want to read some of the articles that we post that inform some of our debate and things that we're doing.
I think it's a good resource.
We don't post a ton of articles every day.
Moral Obligation to Police the World00:02:22
We just pick a couple that we think are important.
So it's not too hard to digest it.
So thanks again for tuning in.
Dr. Paul, over to you.
A lot of people, when I'm talking to them, they say, well, we need to have these changes and reform the system.
It's overwhelming, and we can't possibly do it.
In truth, it's overwhelming for maybe political reasons and the way people have gathered up power and we have allowed them to do it.
But really, the correction is not difficult at all.
Most of the corrections and a real help to our system is just getting away from all the rules and regulations that wars are involved with, the counterfeiting of money and the perpetual militarizing and the internationalism that we have.
You just get rid of that, the problems would go away.
Of course, they're not going to do that because they believe that we have this moral obligation that we have to police the world and make peace and create and maintain the peace, which is just a cover for them.
But, you know, it is, it's a mess.
And I think the solution, I just mentioned all the things that we should get rid of, but really about all you need to have, if I only had one law that I could pass, people understood it from a moral viewpoint, and they would enforce it as an individual because they believe in it.
And that would be non-aggression.
You don't have any right to steal from people or hurt people or take their property.
And that in itself would solve all the problems.
But what's happened is the government has set a standard where they're the chief stealers and the chief counterfeiters and the key warmongers.
And therefore, it justifies all the violence that goes on.
So morally speaking, well, the government does this all the time.
Why can't I do this?
I need something like this.
I better take it from somebody.
Oh, yeah, I used to ask my congressman, but they're fussing and fuming.
They don't have enough money, and it's complex, and it's very corrupt.
So it isn't complicated.
Just nonviolence.
Don't initiate it.
And don't initiate lawlessness with lying, cheating, or stealing.
And I'll tell you what, you would solve a lot of problems.
And that is what we should work for.
And that is what we work for at the Liberty Report, is to promote peace and prosperity through the promotion of liberty.