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Jan. 30, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
22:48
In The Senate, Tulsi Brings The House Down!

Tulsi Gabbard's Senate confirmation hearing today gets off with a BANG as the former US Congresswoman from Hawaii rapid-fires past abuses and failures of the US intelligence community. Why is her confirmation so important? Also today: the true damage done by USAID is made clear as that aid is suspended

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Time Text
Senate Hearings: Gabbard Confirmation 00:02:58
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
As Chris and I mentioned yesterday, Dr. Paul will be out for the rest of the week.
So there are a couple things I wanted to share with you today.
The first, the big news of the day, obviously, are the hearings.
Yesterday it was RFK and that was a big day for the confirmation hearings, the Senate confirmation hearings.
A lot of interesting and fascinating clips from that as well.
Today we have Kash Patel for the FBI and we have Tulsi Gabbard to be the DNI, to head the National Intelligence Department of National Intelligence.
And I think that's the big story for today for our purposes and that's what we want to delve into because now Tulsi obviously is not perfect.
She's not perfect on all issues, but she has put on an amazing performance today, I think.
She went and she had to deal with a lot of knuckleheads up there in the Senate.
I won't name them, but you can watch it and you want to see who they are.
But there are some amazing clips, you know, the criticisms of Tulsi throughout her career.
She came into the Senate, came into the House in 2013 as a progressive Democrat.
She's now a Republican serving in the Trump administration.
That's a massive, massive transition for an individual across the political spectrum.
But what's interesting about the Tulsi phenomenon and how even the sort of conservative ink right-wingers have embraced her is sort of, it sort of mirrors the same shift in someone like an RFK Jr.
And that is a shift of the Republican Party, a shift in the right, a kind of sort of Cold War within the right now that's breaking out between the neoconservatives who took over the party during the first Reagan administration in about 83 or so, the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and other things, and a resurgence of what you might call an old right, which is a more non-interventionist, certainly less interested in the neocon recipe for world domination,
an ideological recipe that the end of the history will be with liberal democracy.
It's a sort of universalist utopianism that is being rejected by a larger number of Republicans.
And Dr. Paul and I talk about it a lot when we look at polling, and we can see that Americans and even Republicans are more interested in things going on at home than in starting new adventures overseas.
So what I wanted to do, I pulled out a couple of clips from today, and I didn't watch, I'm not watching the whole thing, obviously, because we're talking right now.
I didn't watch the whole thing, but there are a couple clips that everyone's talking about on X, and they're definitely worth listening to.
Now, the first one is really interesting because we're going to listen to the full clip.
It's a long clip, but the reason I'm going to listen to this is a myth, about a minute and a half.
It's worth listening to, is because she runs down everything that's been wrong with the intelligence community for years.
Revolutionary Revelations 00:06:15
And breathing this out in the open in front of the Senate, I say is nothing short of revolutionary.
So let's listen to this first segment here.
Here are just a few other examples.
The American people elected Donald Trump as their president, not once, but twice.
And yet the FBI and intelligence agencies were politicized by his opponents to undermine his presidency and falsely portray him as a puppet of Putin.
Title I of FISA was used illegally to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page using a Clinton campaign-funded false dossier as their so-called evidence.
Biden campaign advisor Tony Blinken was the impetus for the 51 former senior intelligence officials' letter dismissing Hunter Biden's laptop as disinformation specifically to help Biden win the election.
Former DNI James Clapper lied to this committee in 2013, denying the existence of programs that facilitated the mass collection of millions of Americans' phone and internet records, yet was never held accountable.
Under John Brennan's leadership, the CIA abused its power to spy on Congress, to dodge oversight, lied about doing it until he was caught, and yet has never been held responsible.
Under Biden, the FBI abused its power for political reasons to try to surveil Catholics who attend traditional Latin Mass, labeling them as quote-unquote radical traditionalist Catholics.
Personally, just 24 hours after I criticized Kamala Harris and her nomination, I was placed on a secret domestic terror watch list called Quiet Skies.
Sadly, there are more examples.
The bottom line is this: this must end.
That is an incredible minute and a half.
She goes through the serious distortions and abuses of the intelligence community in the United States for political reasons.
The Americans are the victims.
There are specific victims, such as she herself, as she points out just 24 hours within criticizing Kamala Harris.
She finds herself not able to fly, or when she does fly, I think they had three or four armed agents, dogs, and everything sniffing at her.
So it's really an amazing thing.
You talk about she debunks RussiaGate, the domestic spying program, Hunter laptop, mass surveillance of Americans, spying on Congress.
This is an incredible bill of particulars against the intelligence community and how it's been abused.
This is what Harry Truman feared when he signed the 47, 1947 creation of the CIA and the domestic, sort of the national security state that was created out of it.
This was his biggest fear, and he came to regret it afterward in his memoirs.
Now we're seeing the real abuse.
And so just for her calling out how it's been abused as she is applying for that job to take it over, that's a major, major disruption in the way Washington will operate.
And I think it's really tremendous.
So here's the next clip that we want to listen to.
Now, this is another amazing clip because here's where she runs down everything that's been wrong, really in about 42 seconds, everything that's been wrong with our interventionist foreign policy.
And she calls it as she sees it.
Let's cue up that second video because I think this is really, really quite incredible to hear.
The fact is, what truly unsettles my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet.
I have no love for Assad or Gaddafi or any dictator.
I just hate al-Qaeda.
I hate that we have leaders who cozy up to Islamist extremists, minimizing them to so-called rebels.
As Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, quote, Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.
Well, Syria is now controlled by an al-Qaeda offshoot, HTS, led by an Islamist jihadist who danced in the streets on 9-11 and who was responsible for the killing of many American service members.
Democrat senators in the past resorted to anti-Christian bigotry against some of President Trump's judiciary.
Al-Qaeda has triumphant in Syria.
The neocon game of overthrowing Assad.
I don't love Assad, but I hate al-Qaeda more.
The neocon game of overthrowing Syria and not just Syria, but Libya.
Throughout the region, all of these interventions of the past 20 years have been absolute failures and have resulted in situations much worse than when they started.
And here's Tulsi calling it out.
It's something to behold.
And again, it's not going to be perfect, but having a disruptor in there, just like with having a disruptor at AJHS with RFK, is going to be tremendous, even if it doesn't produce the exact results we want.
Now, Glenn Greenwald, if you go to that first regular clip, he has a great way of saying it, of course.
He said, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. have one primary crime, in quotes, in common.
Questioning and skepticism of DC institutions of authority.
RFK Jr. faced vicious and scathing questioning from Democrats today, and Tulsi's DNI hearing will be no different.
Absolutely true.
And it is being no different.
And I've seen a few of the clips.
You know, they want her to denounce Ed Snowden.
They want her to denounce whistleblowers, et cetera, et cetera.
What we're seeing here is, as Glenn points out perfectly, is Washington being terrified of outsiders coming in.
They don't like this.
This is the reason they did their best to undermine Trump in his first four years.
And this is not to defend a lot of dumb things he did, but nevertheless, the outsiders are not allowed in.
This was what happened to Nixon when he was elected.
He was not part of the East Coast elite.
Government Aid and Influence 00:13:10
He was a Californian.
So they don't like this.
They don't like this when it happens.
And so I think it's something that we should, even though we're not going to get all the outcomes that we want, we should be very, very optimistic about.
Now, skip that next Greenwald and go to the Snowden because Snowden understands what's going on here.
He posted this on X earlier today.
He said, Tulsi Gabbard will be required to disown all popular support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation today.
I encourage her to do so.
Tell them I harmed the national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff.
In D.C., that's what passes for the Pledge of Allegiance.
So obviously, Ed Snowden understands too what's going on here.
They don't like being challenged by outsiders.
So we'll keep an eye on this.
It's going to be very close to see if Tulsi is able to get through.
And once she does get through, if she will be able to do anything at all once she's in there.
It's going to be very, very difficult.
But at least the disruption, the disruption in the go-along to get along, the disruption in the routine of D.C. is very positive.
And that relates to our second story, too.
The disruption of the foreign aid gravy train has had massive repercussions worldwide.
And Americans don't fully understand it.
But in its absence now, we are seeing the true damage done by USAID and all of these U.S. government-funded organizations that are essentially acting as colonial powers overseas, manipulating elections, controlling governments, controlling the media.
And now we're seeing it.
Why are we seeing it?
Because all of these lavishly funded NGOs and news outlets, now that there's a 90-day pause, they're screaming and they're panicking.
They're saying, what are we going to do?
We can't keep going on.
Well, hang on.
If this is the civic sector, if this is the third sector, the non-governmental sector, why are they so beholden to governments for their very existence?
Why are they?
Because they have no popular support.
Now Bernard over UNAPA Alabama put out a great piece.
I think it was early today, and he has a great headline.
If you can go to that next clip, this is what's extremely important.
The halt of USAID exposes malign foreign influence.
Now remember, that term has always been used to describe what they claimed was Russian involvement in U.S. elections.
It turns out that malign foreign influence is the malign foreign influence of the USAID, the State Department, and all of its entities, all of the sort of tentacles of the octopus overseas.
Now here is, here's a little bit from his piece.
A few days ago, the Trump administration put a 90-day stop on foreign aid.
And here he's quoting, Friday's memo shocked the humanitarian groups and communities conducting development aid across the globe.
While the scope of the directive appears far-reaching, uncertainties linger about how it will be carried out.
The memo on Saturday offered only partial clarity.
The pause on foreign aid spending means a complete halt.
I'll leave that up, please.
A complete halt, it says.
The only exceptions are for emergency humanitarian food assistance and government officials returning to their duty stations.
Waivers allowing delivery of emergency food during this period will require detailed information and justification.
Now this is interesting.
USAID began sending notice to contractors ordering them to immediately issue stop work orders and amend or suspend existing orders.
Now go to the next one.
This is from the same article.
Now here are the immediate effects of this stoppage.
And he's quoting again.
Several major Ukrainian media outlets have asked their readers for financial support due to the suspension of American grant programs by the new President Donald Trump.
In particular, this is directly reported by Gromadskaya and Bayhus.info.
Quote, some of the projects we implement thanks to grants are temporarily stopped.
That's why we especially need the support of each and every one of you, writes Gromadsky.
Ukraine Skoprovta and Detector Media also asked for donations.
So what this shows is with the absence of money, these outlets are not able to function.
There is no media.
So what do these media do that are funded completely by the United States?
Well, they deliver the U.S. line.
They deliver the U.S. propaganda line to Ukraine.
They ensure that nobody questions this war, that nobody is allowed to have any alternative information.
And in fact, the U.S. acts here like the Soviet Union would have acted to prevent dissident media from even existing.
Now go to the next one.
This is from the same piece.
The U.S. practically owns the whole Ukrainian media scene.
Now this is a translation.
Approximately 90% of Ukrainian media outlets have become dependent on American grants since the outbreak of the war.
This was stated by Oksana Romanyuk, the head of the Institute of Mass Information, which is also a recipient of foreign grants.
Political analyst Kostia Bandarenko responded to the statement with irony in his Telegram channel, doubting the lack of engagement of the press.
Quote, almost 90% of Ukrainian media survived thanks to grants, says Oksana Rommanyuk, director of the Institute for Mass Information.
I translate it to a normal language.
90% of Ukrainian media was controlled by the West through grants.
Independent media and freedom of speech, you say?
Ha.
I added the ha.
So that means that these are not, there is no media.
This is not the free media.
This is not the independent media in Ukraine.
It's the U.S. determining what people are allowed to read and see and think.
That's malign foreign influence.
And it's not just Ukraine.
We're seeing it now in Ukraine because it's so obvious how involved, especially the Biden administration, has been in Ukraine.
But it's actually true elsewhere.
And go to the next one.
Now, this is Bolaj Orban, who is the director of the prime minister's office in Hungary.
And he points out, now there's Samantha Power.
She's the outgoing head of USAID.
And the individual, I would almost say, gentlemen, he's not a gentleman.
The individual on the left is outgoing Ambassador Pressman, who was one of the worst ambassadors in history.
He was Biden's ambassador to Hungary, a very, very thoroughly awful person.
But anyway, so here's what Bolaj Orban says.
One of the largest Hungarian opposition media outlets is upset by Trump's executive order halting U.S. foreign aid for 90 days.
As Hungary's, quote, independent press stands to lose millions of florins in funding.
Makes you wonder how independent one can be when relying on another government's funding.
So here we have Hungary, we have Ukraine.
But this is true throughout the region, indeed throughout the world.
This is almost like a totalitarian empire that's been built up in the name of propping up non-governmental organizations.
These aren't non-governmental organizations.
They are governmental organizations.
They just happen to be controlled by the United States government.
Is this the kind of government we want to have?
Do we want to be in the business of telling people what they can see or read or think overseas?
I would say no.
I would say it's a bad idea morally.
I think it's impractical.
And I think it creates resentment.
Now, Kit Clarenberg, who in my opinion is one of the best journalists, he writes for the Grey Zone, and he also has his own independent sub-stack, which I highly recommend subscribing to.
He is living in Serbia, and he has seen some of this up close as well.
Now, go to the next clip.
He put this up on X.
He said, from those within the empire's inner core, the full seismic implications of Trump's aid suspension may not be fully obvious.
But here in the Balkans, where USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy has penetrated every sphere of public, political, and even daily life, the impact is absolutely monumental.
And here's a headline he shares: Trump's suspension of U.S. foreign aid hits hundreds of Balkan projects, hundreds of projects just in the Balkans, determining what information is available and determining what the debate will look like in the public sphere.
This is what's happening.
Now, go to the next one.
Here's this is the second one from Kit.
He points out: in Bosnia, all basic functions of the state were post-war forcibly outsourced to USAID, NED, Soros, etc.
On top of enfeebling the local population, it created enormous opportunities for grift and corruption, which anyone who could took full advantage of.
And you did see media tycoons emerging out of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe who were able to take advantage of that gravy train.
I can say from personal experience, I've seen it up close.
And here is, go to the next one from Kit.
We'll just finish up with this.
In Georgia, the country, Georgia, foreign civil society penetration produces significant chilling effect in the local population.
People know if they say wrong things, there can be personal and professional consequences.
Now, what does that remind you of?
You know that if you say the wrong things in public, politically, you could have personal and professional consequences.
Doesn't that sunlight the kind of system that they escaped from in 89, 90, and 91?
Well, Here's an article that he's quoting that's written by these two.
Leave that up there, please, if you will.
These two Georgian journalists.
Activists in Georgia know all too well what is expected of them and which behaviors are punished and rewarded.
Being critical of the government on Facebook will net you more grants than being out in the community helping people.
A few short years ago, when Western donors considered the Georgia Dream Party a valuable ally, they would tell Georgian activists to stop criticizing them.
Now they want activists to speak out against Georgia's dream.
Donors even monitor activists' social media profiles, and there can be consequences for posting the wrong things.
This really exposes the malign influence, the rot that's at the heart of the system in the United States, the foreign aid system.
What would I like to see?
I would like to see USAID completely shut down.
I would like to see all of these foreign aid programs that have to do with media and self-expression completely shut down.
They should not be funded by the U.S. government.
And in fact, I would go further.
If I were in one of these countries overseas, I believe you should expel all of these NGOs, any that are funded.
And that's why they went so crazy when Georgia simply passed the transparency law, which is that if you are more than 20% funded by a foreign government, you should just declare it.
So we know who's paying the piper.
And that's why they had these demonstrations, which were, of course, themselves funded by the U.S. government, demonstrating against any kind of restriction on U.S. government funding.
So you have this problem everywhere throughout the region.
We're seeing it now because what Trump has done in suspending this aid.
I hope someone is paying attention and understands.
Now, you don't have to do it for moral ethical reasons.
I believe there's a very great case that can be made for not doing it that way.
We shouldn't be in the business of being the second Soviet Union.
We have no reason to do that.
But even if you can't oppose it for those reasons, you should simply oppose it because it creates, as Kit said, a stupefied society that can't think for itself.
And it also creates corruption overseas.
Very wealthy people who actually hate America.
Trust me.
These people hate America, but they're getting rich while hating America.
And it's also creating an enormous amount of resentment among average people who are sick and tired of having their, as we would be here, the entire debate controlled by a foreign government.
Look how they're flipping out over TikTok, which isn't even controlling a debate.
So this is a real issue.
It's a real problem.
We need to pay attention to it.
It seems like it's a minor issue overseas.
But this is a major, major thing that's now been exposed because of what's happened.
And we should be thankful for Trump stopping this 90-day aid.
I hope he keeps it stopped.
Send them all home.
That would be perfect.
Send them to Guantanamo.
I don't know.
I don't care.
But get rid of this because it's wrong and it's bad.
Anyway, quick briefing.
Watch some of the Tulsa Eclipse Go on X if you go on there.
Some really great stuff out there.
Don't know much about Kash Patel.
Seems like he's a mixed bag, some good, some bad.
He's a right-wing guy, who knows?
Worried about civil liberties under him.
Nevertheless, exciting week.
Try to pay attention.
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