Col. Rob Maness, a 32-year military veteran and Trump-aligned analyst, warns China controls Panama Canal ports—key to U.S. LNG exports—and accuses Beijing of exploiting antibiotic supply chains (90% reliant on China). Dismissing SignalGate leaks as politically weaponized, he slams Sen. Mark Warner’s hypocrisy while defending Trump’s appointees from DOJ probes. Maness also exposes Sen. Corey Booker’s $200K Newark graft and mocks his presidential bid, then shifts to Cuba’s Chinese spy station—90 miles from Florida—and demands Biden act. A Trump presidency, he argues, will expel China from Cuba while balancing Russia without NATO overreach, framing U.S. interests as the sole priority. [Automatically generated summary]
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And we're back in the stone zone.
Joining me now, retired Colonel Rob Manis.
Rob Manis has a lifelong record of providing dedicated service to our country.
He made the decision as a 17-year-old high school senior to enlist in the United States Air Force and has served in uniform as the country faced multiple crises around the world.
He worked his way up from the enlisted ranks to be a full colonel and retired from active duty in 2011, ending his military service of more than 32 years.
Now, we only have about 15 minutes in this segment.
If I read his entire biography and all the service he has rendered to this country, well, we'd use the whole segment and we wouldn't get to talk to Colonel Manis.
So I'm going to skip through this other than to say that Rob Manis is one of the gentlemen that I look to for analysis of any geopolitical or geomilitary question, someone who has my enormous respect.
He is, as a private citizen, also an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump and his America First Agenda.
And it is a great honor to have him today in the Stone Zone.
Colonel Manis, welcome.
Hey, Roger.
Thanks for having me.
So in our earlier segment, we focused on the strategic and commercial importance of the Panama Canal.
Now, I worked in three presidential campaigns on the staff of Ronald Reagan in 1976, when he challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination.
I was the national director of youth for Reagan, working directly for Senator Paul Laxall, the national chairman of our campaign.
In 1980, when I was the Northeastern Regional Director for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, handling New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
And then in 1984, when I handled those three states, plus all the states in New England all the way to the Canadian border, plus at the recommendation of President Nixon, the Reagan campaign also assigned me Ohio on the theory that if you took one large state and you kept it out of Walter Mondale's clutches, that he could not possibly win.
Remember it very well.
Nixon told Reagan, assign Ohio to Stone.
He said, Stone's an animal.
I always considered that a compliment.
But Ronald Reagan was right when he warned us that this day would come.
Tell us what's going on today in Panama and about the strategic importance of the canal and the canal zone.
Well, from a national security perspective, I think most people know, but especially those of us that practice that as a profession, that it's the largest choke point for Navy traffic, U.S. Navy, international Navy traffic in the world.
And we're risking lives to protect the international traffic in the Red Sea because this is a critically important shipping lane.
The Panama Canal is probably to the United States 100 times more important than that.
But it goes way beyond just Navy traffic.
China controls the companies at each end of the canal, the port companies at this point.
And every company that's Chinese has a part of it, if not wholly owned by the Communist Chinese Party or the People's Liberation Army and Navy.
So it's extremely important that we get control of that back.
And I think the president had lined up, President Trump had lined up to have a company buy those ports, but China's obviously pushing back against that deal.
But you know what else is going on?
Economically, I don't know if you guys talked about this in your last segment, but we're trying to expand our liquefied natural gas LNG marketing out to new markets.
And the Panama Canal is crucial to that because the LNG exporter capability in the United States, it's on the Gulf Coast and Louisiana and places like that.
So that canal has to be able to carry that type of energy type product for us so that we can easily get through there, get to the Pacific theater of operations and deliver that to potentially new customers.
So it's very much tied together from a national security and an economic security perspective.
And obviously with everything that's going on in the world, the more that we can have direct control over from a trade perspective, the better off our country's going to be.
And I think the president's done the exact right thing with the tariff issue.
I was pleased to see that Liberation Day yesterday.
I still have a smile on my face with that because it puts the manufacturing capability is going to come back to the United States that we have been offshoring for decades now, and it's made us weak.
You know, China controls 90% of the precursor materials for antibiotics.
We can't make antibiotics on our own without the Chinese Communist Party.
So we have to bring that type of manufacturing back.
But we also need the canal for a free flow of our goods, especially with this LNG exporting effort to expand that going on.
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Signal Gate Revelations00:07:37
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As someone who served his country at the highest levels of our military, I have to ask you about what has become known as Signal Gate.
Now, I'm amused to see senators like Mark Warner of Virginia, who I went back and looked.
He had no problem whatsoever when Robert Malley, a high-level Biden State Department official, was sharing classified documents with the Iranians.
He actually never even got fired.
They just suspended his security clearance.
They also let his Confederates, who were involved in the transfer of these classified documents to Iran, continue in their positions at state.
He never said a word.
When Hillary Clinton got caught sending 30-plus thousand classified documents over an illegal computer server located in her bathroom, once again, not a peep from Mark Warner.
But now he's in a lather about a signal exchange in which, based on what I've seen, no classified information was exposed.
Give us your take on SignalGate, if you will.
Let's talk about the information itself.
There's been a lot of angst about that and lathering up, as you said, with Senator Warner and his ilk over that information.
None of that information was classified, not one iota of it.
There were not enough specifics in that thread for anything to be classified.
But even if Secretary Hegset, and that's the information that most people are talking about, is what he put into the chat or his phone did, is put in, he is the original classifying authority on there, just like President Trump is the overall original classifying authority for every single piece of classified.
Secretary Hegset, the Defense Secretary, is the OCA for that information.
And even if it had been classified, if he chose to put that in there, it's declassified from that perspective.
So now let's talk about Signal itself.
It's an end-to-end encrypted chat.
And this is one of the areas that I'm concerned about: the National Security team and National Security Council team, especially under Mike Waltz, they got to get that stuff together.
They have to investigate how that reporter, Goldberg, from the Atlantic, I mean, the worst fake news guy, RussiaGate, all of it, the suckers and losers lie, all of that that they tried to use to hurt President Trump and the team was due to that one guy.
So that's a major issue.
And I'm not seeing anything yet that makes me satisfied that that team is cleaned up internally and that they don't have people that have access to their information threads like the signal chat that shouldn't have access to it.
So Waltz has got to get that fixed.
Now let's talk about the senators because you didn't mention the Republican senator that has also joined in with Warner and is demanding a DOD Inspector General investigation of Hegseth over the signal thing.
You know, my Senator Roger Wicker, I agree with him on a lot of things like increasing shipbuilding and returning to peace through strength instead of being in endless war policies when it comes to China.
But I disagree with him on a lot too.
On this, I disagree with him.
It's absolutely unnecessary, number one, because the National Security Council is the team that set that chat up.
It wasn't the Department of Defense that set up.
So there's no reason whatsoever to investigate Secretary Hegseth or the Department of Defense over that particular issue.
Look, I'm all for investigating the government.
I don't trust hardly anybody in the government, but I do trust President Trump's appointees and that they need the maximum flexibility possible so we can move forward and get the president's policies that we all voted for in place and throttled up so that they're running appropriately and calling for investigations when it's not necessary.
It's just the wrong thing to do.
Yeah, I agree with that.
This is beginning to look to me like an effort to get Hegseth, to oust Hegseth.
Yeah.
That's because he was an outside-the-box anti-establishment choice.
He's the right choice.
I strongly supported the president's nominee.
When I defended this on a show with Chris Cuomo, it was amazing the way they twisted what I said.
See, I don't trust any online service, encrypted or unencrypted.
I frankly think they're all vulnerable to being hacked.
They're all vulnerable to being monitored.
So I always operate on the assumption that anything you put in writing online, you should assume that someone else is going to have the ability to see it.
So don't say stupid things online.
That's kind of my attitude.
I was defending these people, but if you read their story, it makes it appear like I was criticizing them, which I was not.
But the Democrats have spun this up because, frankly, they don't have anything else to talk about.
It was interesting to see Corey Booker, the senator from New Jersey, breaking the previously held filibuster record held by Senator Strom Thurman of South Carolina, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes without a bathroom break, I might add, back in 1957.
Corey Brooker has now broken that record.
He spoke for slightly longer, but strangely enough, with all that time, he never explained why, when he was the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, he authorized the New York City, the Newark City Water Authority, known as Watershed, to pay $200,000 to his law firm, which he then put in his pocket.
And when confronted by reporters, he said that he didn't vote for that yet, and they're hard to find, but when I found the actual formal minutes of the meeting, he was not only in the chair, but he also voted for the disbursement.
Then he came up with three different explanations as to why he got that money.
Once he said it had no connection to Watershed, that it was the buyout of his portion of the law firm.
Another point, he said it was deferred compensation.
Cuba's Strategic Missiles00:06:17
I'll tell you what it was.
It was graft.
That's what it was.
And he's never been, never answered that question.
I actually wrote a biography on him.
It's called Spartacus, The Real Corey Booker Story.
It's now out of print, but I might bring it back to tell you the truth.
It may be time to put it back in truth.
By the way, what you saw there was the launch of Corey Booker's presidential campaign because he sees himself as a presidential candidate.
By the way, he is the senator from Greenwich Village.
He doesn't even live in New Jersey.
Sorry.
I hope you get a copy of that book, sir.
I got to pull it out of mothballs.
I published it when he was running for president, but his campaign was such a flop, didn't sell many copies.
But if he's going to run again, I may have to republish it again.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Colonel Manis about Cuba and the fact that the Chinese have a very sophisticated spy station set up in Cuba.
But I also want to know, do they have missiles?
And if they have missiles, are they offensive missiles or defensive missiles?
And do they pose the same danger that Russian missiles posed to this nation in 1962 when the Russians put them in Cuba?
We'll be right back with Colonel Rob Manis right here in the Stone Zone.
So don't go away.
And we're back with Colonel Rob Manis, retired.
Colonel Manus led numerous combat operations during his military service, including as a bomb squadron commander in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Colonel Manus also served as an enlisted bomb disposal technician in three assignments countering terrorism before being commissioned and selected for flight training.
He is a man who's put his life on the line for his country, and we are honored to have him with us today.
I want to focus on that question regarding Cuba that I raised before the break.
My wife is a Cuban-American.
She is one of those who fled the Castro regime, her family, and she as a child.
And therefore, I have a special interest in the regime 90 miles off of our shore.
Cuba was a great danger to the United States.
Then, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse, really, of the Russian economy, when they could no longer subsidize their comrades in Cuba, they became less of a danger to us.
But now they seem to have been scooped up by the Chinese.
It is indisputable that Joe Biden's administration knew they had a sophisticated spying operation set up on the Cuban island about which he did nothing.
And some military experts tell me that they also have missiles, and that all those missiles, although those missiles may be defensive, with a very slight technological fix, they could be offensive missiles.
What is the situation going on today between us and Cuba?
Well, I think with President Trump coming into office, you're going to see the view of the United States from an official perspective change back to one of questioning why are the Chinese armed forces allowed to have bases on the island?
Why are they being allowed to run these surveillance operations on the island?
They're so close, as you reminded us, it's 90 miles away.
So, electronic surveillance capability that we have today is much more effective than it would have been even 10 years ago.
Not just that, but there are cable lines that give them access to the digital networks inside the United States that they are able to get access to, being in such close proximity and uncontrolled.
And I think, and I hope that we're going to see the national security team start putting pressure on the Cuban government again to get those forces removed.
But, you know, one of the conflicting issues, though, is the Russia-Ukraine war, Roger.
And as the president tries to stop the killing over there, I wish it could happen tomorrow because that's going to be a conflicting issue when every time we talk about China being 90 miles away, the other side gets to talk about, well, we're letting Russia expecting Russia to allow NATO to be right up against its border.
So that kind of debate will get generated out of that.
But knowing President Trump, he'll ignore that and push through to take care of the interests of the United States of America in both of those situations.
And I'm so glad that he's in office because we're going to get the killing stopped in Europe and get that situation resolved.
Yeah, I don't think it's an illegitimate argument, by the way.
We signed the Budapest Memorandum in which we promised when the Russians united East and West Germany, or they allowed us to have it reunited, we agreed not to push Ukraine into NATO, which means not to mount NATO missiles on the ground in NATO aimed at Russia.
We reaffirmed that in the Minsk Accords.
We are in violation.
Putin has made it abundantly clear that that was his line in the sand.
No, I'm not pro-Putin.
I have many of my own family relatives mowed down by Russian tanks in Budapest in 1956.
So they'll say, oh, Roger Stone's a rollover for Putin.
He's pro-Russian.
No, not even an IOTA.
But I understand why the Russians might not want intercontinental ballistic missiles on their border pointed at their nation.
All right, we're out of time.
Thank You, Colonel00:01:06
I want to thank my special guest, retired Colonel Rob Manis.
He has a killer sub stack that you might want to check out.
But I appreciate your being with us, Colonel, and I appreciate your bringing your real world defense and national security expertise to my listeners here in the Stone Zone, my friend.
Thank you for being with us, and God bless you.
Thank you, sir.
And I hope to get you on the show to spend an hour with me talking about who killed John F. Kennedy now that all these documents have been released.
I would be most honored to do so.
For you out there listening to the Stone Zone, I want to thank you as well.
Until we meet again, God bless you and Godspeed.
And yes, God bless America.
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