True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 149: BenGaetzi
Aired: 2021-04-08
Duration: 01:44:37


=== Gatesy's Gossip Politics Scandal (14:38) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, I'm Rat Gates.
[00:00:03]  I'm coming out here eating all your cheese and talking to you young mouse daughter.
[00:00:09]  I'm Mr. Rat Gates coming up from Florida.
[00:00:13]  I'm in the walls.
[00:00:15]  I'm in the walls looking at you.
[00:00:16]  Looking at you and your little mouse fucking family.
[00:00:19]  Looking at your mouse fucking daughter.
[00:00:23]  Wait, Why would the rat not?
[00:00:26]  The rat and the mouse are friends.
[00:00:29]  Yeah, it's my friend's daughter.
[00:00:33]  Yeah, mouse is a young rat, Liz.
[00:00:36]  No, that's not true.
[00:00:37]  Yeah, mice.
[00:00:38]  No, no, no.
[00:00:39]  It's like the difference between a boat and a ship.
[00:00:41]  A mouse is just a three inch or smaller rat.
[00:00:43]  Three inches or larger is an actual full-grown rat.
[00:00:47]  Also, mites are girls.
[00:00:49]  What?
[00:00:49]  Yeah.
[00:00:50]  Yeah, mice all have vaginas, but they can still approach.
[00:00:53]  Wait, what about Feifel?
[00:00:56]  It's just like a fanciful bit of Hollywood magic.
[00:01:00]  Also, you don't see Feifel's penis.
[00:01:25]  Hey, welcome to the show.
[00:01:29]  That's nice.
[00:01:30]  Yeah, thank you.
[00:01:31]  Welcome to the show.
[00:01:32]  Welcome to my show.
[00:01:33]  Did you see Hunter on Mark Marin?
[00:01:36]  Well, first of all, they'll be hearing Hunter on Mark Marin.
[00:01:38]  And no, I haven't had time to listen to it yet.
[00:01:41]  I didn't listen.
[00:01:42]  I don't think I can handle Mark Marin's voice.
[00:01:44]  I can't believe that guy hasn't killed himself yet.
[00:01:46]  I can't believe that Hunter's people were like reached out to Mark Maron and he was like, sure.
[00:01:53]  Yeah.
[00:01:53]  Well, actually, I would say like, I was a little jealous because I'm like, I fucking smoke crack, but I think Mark Maron smoked crack too.
[00:01:59]  So like, I'm like, oh, absolutely.
[00:02:02]  Yeah, I did see the Good Morning America interview Hunter did, where he's like, I was looking through, and people were making fun of this too.
[00:02:08]  Like, I was looking through the carpet, like, you know, smoking anything, thinking it was crack.
[00:02:13]  I probably smoked more parmesan cheese, which that's nasty.
[00:02:15]  I've never done that, thinking it was, like, crack or meth than anything else.
[00:02:19]  That's called carpet surfing.
[00:02:22]  Why is there like Parmesan cheese all over his carpet?
[00:02:25]  That's what's gross to me because it's gross to thought of cheese like on a hot carpet in like his weird LA bungalow.
[00:02:31]  Yeah, that's like, that's weird.
[00:02:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:34]  You have cheese all over your floor.
[00:02:36]  But sidewalk surfing and carpet surfing is a real and valid way to smoke fake crack.
[00:02:42]  I don't know about that.
[00:02:43]  I have, baby, I have put so much shit in my body that have just been like pebbles or like dreadlocks or fucking anything.
[00:02:50]  Like there's so much.
[00:02:52]  Once you're on drugs, everything looks like drugs and you'll just fucking smoke that shit.
[00:02:59]  I heard a guy last night was talking in a fucking.
[00:03:01]  I mean, I don't know if this is all right.
[00:03:02]  Well, I won't say where it happened, but a guy was talking about how he encountered a meth bong the other night, which I'm like, dude, technology has really advanced since I quit.
[00:03:10]  Yeah.
[00:03:10]  Oh my God, that's horrible.
[00:03:11]  I don't even know how you do that because you don't smoke meth like a regular fucking like weed or nothing, but you know, it's it's again, it's 2021, so I shouldn't be surprised.
[00:03:20]  All this, you know, it's probably blockchain.
[00:03:21]  Lots of advances.
[00:03:22]  Do you think the Hunter, real quick before we get into the show?
[00:03:26]  What is the future of the Hunter stuff?
[00:03:28]  We put out a book, right?
[00:03:30]  Like, I think it's like a memoir, Dreams of My Father, or whatever it's called.
[00:03:35]  I read like a small excerpt of it, and it's like, it's if he had put out like a juicy, salacious tell-all memoir, that'd be fantastic.
[00:03:42]  But he, it looks, I mean, obviously, just like completely ghost-ridden.
[00:03:46]  Yeah, it's just the kind of thing that they always put out.
[00:03:48]  But all the politicians.
[00:03:49]  I will say he, in that interview on Good Morning America, he just pretends that he like his laptop just like it could be his and maybe it disappeared and possibly Russian intelligence is behind it.
[00:04:01]  Oh, interesting.
[00:04:04]  Interesting.
[00:04:04]  New little story.
[00:04:06]  So I will say, as a person in recovery, Hunter, you are not taking responsibility for your actions.
[00:04:11]  And this is, you're only as sick as your secrets, friend.
[00:04:14]  You're only as sick as your secrets.
[00:04:18]  I think that I saw that a bunch of Republicans drafted some letter.
[00:04:22]  They're trying to, I think they're going to try and get the Hunter Gate thing going.
[00:04:25]  That's fine.
[00:04:26]  In Congress.
[00:04:26]  I'd love it.
[00:04:27]  Yeah.
[00:04:27]  I hope so.
[00:04:28]  We need another show.
[00:04:30]  We need more gates.
[00:04:32]  Morton.
[00:04:32]  Well, speaking of Gates.
[00:04:34]  Well, let's introduce ourselves.
[00:04:36]  Let's introduce ourselves.
[00:04:38]  What's your name, Liz?
[00:04:39]  My name.
[00:04:42]  I was just doing the introduction.
[00:04:45]  What's your name?
[00:04:46]  My name is Liz.
[00:04:49]  Doing falsetto now?
[00:04:50]  My name is Brace, six and a half years off of methamphetamine, and we are joined by producer Young Chomsky, 86 minutes off of Methamphetamine, and the podcast is called Truanon.
[00:05:00]  Hello, everyone.
[00:05:02]  Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was saying, speaking of Gates, we've got a Gates Gates.
[00:05:09]  We do have a Gates Gate.
[00:05:10]  The Gates of Gates, of Matt Gates.
[00:05:13]  Matt Gates Gate.
[00:05:14]  We haven't decided on a name yet.
[00:05:16]  We were just talking about this.
[00:05:17]  I don't like Gates Gate, even though it fits because he came up with that himself the day that this broke.
[00:05:22]  Ah, no.
[00:05:23]  Are you kidding?
[00:05:25]  He quote-tweeted Elon Musk, who said that if there's going to be a scandal, he wants it called Elon Gate.
[00:05:31]  And he said, if there's a, if there's a scandal with me, please call it Gates Gate.
[00:05:34]  No.
[00:05:35]  Yeah.
[00:05:36]  What about Ben Gatesy?
[00:05:37]  Ben Gatesy is fantastic.
[00:05:39]  All right, that's where we're going with it.
[00:05:40]  Ben Gatesy.
[00:05:43]  All right, Ben Gatesy.
[00:05:45]  Glad we decided.
[00:05:47]  This has been a true scandal, like an actual scandal scandal.
[00:05:52]  And I think that makes me like really love it as opposed to like a lot of these things where it's like, well, Kamal used prison labor.
[00:05:59]  Like, you know, there's like they got people in cages at the border.
[00:06:02]  Like, those aren't scandals like this is.
[00:06:05]  This is a scandal.
[00:06:07]  This is fun.
[00:06:08]  This is like old-timey like gossip politics scandal.
[00:06:12]  It's funny.
[00:06:13]  I was like, we were going through all of this and it started to kind of remind me.
[00:06:16]  I was like, oh, this is kind of like the episode we did about Hunter Biden, which we were just talking about.
[00:06:22]  And then I was like, yeah, but we actually had something to say about this.
[00:06:25]  I don't think I have anything to say.
[00:06:27]  No, there's no like lesson from this or like a very, very weird story.
[00:06:33]  I will say there is one lesson on this is if you're going to buy anything that you shouldn't be buying, don't use Apple Pay.
[00:06:43]  Oh, yeah.
[00:06:43]  No, there are definitely a lot of takeaways.
[00:06:46]  Yeah.
[00:06:46]  Okay.
[00:06:46]  Yeah.
[00:06:46]  It's a takeaway.
[00:06:47]  It's a takeaway.
[00:06:48]  And throughout the episode, we can pause and say, oh, here's a takeaway, which that'd be a fun bit.
[00:06:55]  I'll keep that in mind.
[00:07:00]  Just, you know, coming up with ideas here.
[00:07:03]  But, but, yeah, I will say my main sort of top line takeaway on this is don't meet a young girl on sugarbaby.com and make a fake ID for her and then transport her across state lines when you're a congressman.
[00:07:19]  But also, don't get involved with guys who are taking meetings with Hezbollah, probably or trying to free an Iranian hostage.
[00:07:30]  And also, if Scott Adams is learning about your personal life too, I think it's time to maybe be a little more insular.
[00:07:36]  Yeah, see, look at that.
[00:07:37]  Takeaway number one.
[00:07:39]  So what are we talking about, sweetheart?
[00:07:41]  Okay, so this story, there's a lot going on here.
[00:07:47]  It started with a little like drip, drip, drip.
[00:07:52]  Axios, which is, I don't know, this is a website a lot of people read.
[00:07:56]  I don't read this.
[00:07:57]  Who's reading Axios?
[00:07:59]  It sounds like something that would be on like a baseball hat that like a guy at the supermarket wears.
[00:08:04]  Exactly.
[00:08:05]  Or like at the airport.
[00:08:06]  It's a block.
[00:08:07]  This is my airport hat.
[00:08:08]  Yeah, precisely.
[00:08:10]  Yes.
[00:08:11]  Anyway, so Axios puts out a story.
[00:08:12]  It says, Gates has privately told confidants he's seriously considering not seeking re-election and possibly leaving Congress early for a job at Newsmax, which is known as the third tier Z-list Fox, I suppose.
[00:08:30]  Three sources with direct knowledge of the talks tell Axios.
[00:08:33]  I'm guessing that two of those sources were from Gates.
[00:08:36]  Absolutely.
[00:08:38]  Probably all three of those sources.
[00:08:39]  There was like deeper in that story, or I think it was the Daily Beast that then picked up the story.
[00:08:45]  It starts saying that, oh, you know, he's also interested in Fox and, oh, he's talking to OAN, I think.
[00:08:51]  OAN.
[00:08:52]  And yeah, so he's talking to all the big names, which I guess it's just the three of them.
[00:08:56]  Fox put out a statement saying they weren't interested in Gates, but more on that in a little bit.
[00:09:02]  So this starts coming out, and all these people are like, whoa, whoa, Gates is going to leave Congress for new media.
[00:09:08]  And, you know, a lot of hot takes about what that means for the MAGA movement and bad, All that talk kind of stops once the New York Times drops a huge story.
[00:09:20]  Same day, too.
[00:09:21]  Same day.
[00:09:21]  Yeah.
[00:09:22]  He is hit with the rather unflattering headline, Matt Gates is said to face Justice Department inquiry over sex with an underage girl.
[00:09:31]  Not overall, not great.
[00:09:32]  You know, I've been in PR for a long time now.
[00:09:35]  I've dealt with a lot of clients.
[00:09:36]  And whenever we get one of those, it's like, well, kind of show's over.
[00:09:40]  The game is up.
[00:09:41]  My suspicion is Gates was aware of what that headline was going to be when he sent out the press release that he was going to go to Newsmax.
[00:09:49]  Yes.
[00:09:50]  So the story makes clear a couple of things.
[00:09:52]  One is that Gates is under involvement with a 17-year-old girl, and that this is part of actually a wider investigation into one Joel Greenberg, who is the Pensacola, well, the former Pensacola County tax collector, who last summer was indicted on federal charges, a slew of federal charges, which he just got hit with more.
[00:10:11]  I think he has like several dozen against him now, including sex trafficking.
[00:10:17]  Yeah.
[00:10:19]  After that story comes out, this is where it gets good.
[00:10:23]  After the New York Times story comes out, Gates drops a comment via Twitter where he says, over the past several weeks, my family and I have been victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25 million while threatening to smear my name.
[00:10:44]  We have been cooperating with federal authorities in this matter, and my father has even been wearing a wire at the FBI's direction to catch these criminals.
[00:10:53]  The planted leak to the FBI tonight was intended to thwart that investigation.
[00:10:57]  No part of the allegations are true, and the people pushing these lies are targets of the ongoing extortion investigation.
[00:11:04]  I demand the DOJ immediately release the tapes made at their direction, which implicate their former colleague in crimes against me based on false allegations.
[00:11:14]  That would clearly be, yeah, a Twitter thread.
[00:11:17]  It's going.
[00:11:18]  It's a hell of a trio right there.
[00:11:22]  I will say there's a few things that are never cleared up from this, which is what leaking to the FBI means in this context, because this seems to have come from a leak from the FBI or from someone at the DOJ to the New York Times rather than someone actually leaking to them.
[00:11:39]  But he does not exactly clear things up when he goes on Tucker Carlson later that night in one of the most enthralling interviews ever given by a human being.
[00:11:51]  Again, I only know what I've read in the New York Times.
[00:11:54]  I can say that actually you and I went to dinner about two years ago.
[00:11:58]  Your wife was there, and I brought a friend of mine.
[00:12:01]  You'll remember her.
[00:12:02]  And she was actually threatened by the FBI, told that if she wouldn't cop to the fact that somehow I was involved in some pay-for-play scheme, that she could face trouble.
[00:12:13]  And so I do believe that there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to smear me.
[00:12:18]  You know, providing for flights and hotel rooms for people that you're dating who are of legal age is not a crime.
[00:12:26]  And I'm just troubled that the lack of any sort of legitimate investigation into me would then permute, would then convert into this extortion attempt.
[00:12:39]  I don't remember the woman you're speaking of or the context at all, honestly.
[00:12:43]  Tucker's expression, I will say, during this, is unwavering.
[00:12:47]  He has that down.
[00:12:48]  It's like how, I mean, if you ever watch a show, it's like that.
[00:12:51]  He always has that kind of concerned, like slightly aghast face.
[00:12:56]  Yeah, it's like he's mad and confused, but also determined.
[00:13:01]  It's a good face.
[00:13:01]  It's a good face.
[00:13:02]  Yeah, it's a good face.
[00:13:03]  Yeah, he's a pros pro.
[00:13:05]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:06]  I mean, you could fucking, you could use a, you could use a goddamn level in those eyebrows right there.
[00:13:11]  He, I will say that it's unclear what Gates was doing if he was trying to implicate Tucker.
[00:13:18]  Like, it was kind of amazing.
[00:13:20]  I don't know if he was trying to like intimidate or show his cards or be like, hey, man, you know, because Tucker's like pretty powerful in the Republican Party.
[00:13:28]  Most watching TV.
[00:13:29]  Hey, listen, I've got information about you, so you better like, you know, help me out, buddy.
[00:13:35]  You know, we're buds, we're buds in the way he tries to implicate him.
[00:13:38]  But it doesn't seem like Tucker's really phased by any of it.
[00:13:42]  Yeah, and like, it's, it's a little unclear who the girl that they had dinner with was.
[00:13:48]  I will say Tucker's response was masterful there.
[00:13:50]  People, you have no idea what you're talking about.
[00:13:52]  Because that could actually involve him in this case as a witness if that girl is the same girl that's supposedly, you know, absolutely as part of this investigation.
[00:14:03]  But yeah, handle it like a pro.
[00:14:05]  Gates, I cannot tell.
[00:14:06]  I mean, it looks like he was basically reading off like a lawyer's statement, but I can't tell if he was swinging his dick around or if he was like trying to like cling to Tucker as like in some to elicit some sort of solidarity from Mr. Carlson.
[00:14:20]  I should say, and oop, here's a takeaway.
[00:14:23]  I don't know what that means, but we're just going to say this is a takeaway.
[00:14:27]  This is the first time that Gates mentions the alleged pictures with child prostitutes.
[00:14:34]  That was not in the New York Times story.
[00:14:36]  Yeah, and it's good.
[00:14:37]  Like, I mean, here's the thing.

=== Undercover Taxes and Badges (08:37) ===

[00:14:39]  Listeners, this is going to happen to you, so pay attention.
[00:14:42]  If you have to go on TV and be like, listen, I didn't have sex with a teenager.
[00:14:46]  That's fucking crazy.
[00:14:47]  Don't put more information out there.
[00:14:50]  Right, right, right.
[00:14:51]  You should be trying to.
[00:14:52]  This is my takeaway.
[00:14:53]  Exactly.
[00:14:54]  Fantastic takeaway.
[00:14:55]  Like, don't, don't, don't, this is, this is a masterclass in how not to to be interviewed, essentially.
[00:15:01]  Yeah.
[00:15:01]  Uh, which is to try to implicate everyone around you and then also mention that there's pictures of you with child prostitutes.
[00:15:07]  Yeah, the morons defense.
[00:15:09]  But, but he mentions a character by the name, a former, quote, former DOJ official by the name of David McGee as his extortionist.
[00:15:17]  Then time goes on, the day rolls even longer and turns into the next one.
[00:15:24]  More information starts to come out, but we can get to that later.
[00:15:27]  I think we got to start really from the beginning with Joel.
[00:15:31]  Yeah, so we've got to talk about his boy, Joel Greenberg, because this is basically the locus, it seems, of the entire federal investigation.
[00:15:40]  Yeah.
[00:15:43]  Brace, have you ever been to Florida?
[00:15:45]  I have been to Florida twice, I believe.
[00:15:48]  One time, my friends and I, when I was 16, we drank a liquor store's entire supply of Mad Dog 2020.
[00:15:55]  I'm not like exaggerating there.
[00:15:57]  I'm not making it.
[00:15:58]  They had a lot of mad.
[00:15:59]  It was over a four-day period.
[00:16:00]  We must have drank 100 bottles of MD 2020.
[00:16:07]  Which was a long weekend.
[00:16:12]  And then I went there again when I was a couple years older, still a teenager.
[00:16:16]  And I remember we played a show outside of Orlando.
[00:16:19]  And as our, as our bassist Max was sort of loading our stuff in, or out, I think.
[00:16:24]  I don't know.
[00:16:24]  He had something in his hands.
[00:16:25]  He was approached by a man with a gun who told us to leave town.
[00:16:29]  And we were like, what are you talking about?
[00:16:30]  And then he did indeed make us leave town at gunpoint.
[00:16:36]  I haven't really spent a lot of time in Florida, I got to say.
[00:16:39]  But I will say Joel feels Florida through and through to me.
[00:16:46]  Yeah.
[00:16:46]  And at the risk of sort of playing with clichés here, this is a very Floridian story.
[00:16:51]  And I know that's been said by probably every single person who's talked about it, but you can't get around it.
[00:16:58]  Like, I know.
[00:17:00]  It just is.
[00:17:01]  I mean, this is just something that's a good idea.
[00:17:02]  Yeah, shout out to Florida guys.
[00:17:04]  These are your guys.
[00:17:05]  These are your guys.
[00:17:06]  And Joel Greenberg is about as much of your guy as any guy can be.
[00:17:11]  So this guy runs for tax collector in 2016 in Seminole County, Florida.
[00:17:18]  So Liz, tax collectors are a little different in Florida than they are other places.
[00:17:24]  You know, I actually thought when I was first reading about this guy, because I'd heard about this guy before, that tax collector is just like a name that they give Jews down there.
[00:17:32]  Terrible.
[00:17:33]  That's terrible.
[00:17:34]  I know, it's awful, but it turns out it's an actual elected position that he ran for, which means I've canceled my plans to move to Miami.
[00:17:42]  It doesn't sound like the craziest thing in the world, but it's actually a fairly powerful office.
[00:17:47]  I mean, all things considered.
[00:17:50]  And to be, you know, a little foreshadowing here, they have many of the same duties that a DMV might have otherwise in a normal state, such as dealing with identification.
[00:18:02]  Yeah, they do that kind of stuff.
[00:18:04]  They also like they collect, they literally do like collect and assess property taxes like out of their office.
[00:18:10]  Yeah.
[00:18:10]  Which all of this was very weird to me.
[00:18:12]  This, this ain't how we do it in California, but it does seem like it's much more of a like, it plays much bigger role in the, in the county than I could understand without reading into it.
[00:18:26]  So just for people listening who don't understand, like they are, they are actually, this is actually like a real office.
[00:18:33]  Yeah.
[00:18:34]  This isn't like a goof office, like when they elected the August mayor in some of those towns or anything.
[00:18:39]  Yeah.
[00:18:40]  So they're like assessing property taxes.
[00:18:42]  They're collecting property taxes.
[00:18:43]  Like Brace said there, when you get a new driver's license, you go there, you get it, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:18:49]  Seminole County, by the way, also is about, it's like a half hour drive, like just north of Orlando, just to give you kind of a picture.
[00:18:58]  So we're outside of Orlando, outside of Disney World, Orlando Magic.
[00:19:05]  Trying to like paint a little picture here.
[00:19:07]  Well, we're also about four hours away from Matt Gates' district, which is pretty important.
[00:19:12]  Yeah.
[00:19:13]  So he like, so 2016, everyone can remember back to 2016.
[00:19:17]  This is, you know, the big year Trump runs.
[00:19:20]  All these guys are kind of running this like anti-corruption, gonna, you know, everyone's gonna drain the swamp.
[00:19:27]  Which to me in Florida sounds like a winning fucking slogan.
[00:19:30]  Yeah, totally.
[00:19:31]  And well, it works for him because he wins.
[00:19:33]  Joel wins.
[00:19:34]  And he does run on that kind of platform.
[00:19:36]  The guy that was before him was actually like pretty corrupt, it seems, which is like buying businesses and then reselling them the same day for a lot of money and pocketing that money.
[00:19:48]  Classic corruption.
[00:19:49]  So people are, the people of Seminole County who vote for Joel are, you know, I think optimistic about this new guy they're bringing in town to clean up and drain that swamp.
[00:20:01]  It's not exactly how things went.
[00:20:03]  I will say that I am, as somebody who has made a lot of mistakes in his life, astounded and impressed with the amount of things that Joel Greenberg was able to do in the few short years between, or I guess four short years between him getting elected and then him getting arrested.
[00:20:22]  Because holy shit, my man, I mean, he goes for it.
[00:20:26]  Yeah.
[00:20:27]  So I think the first thing that kind of catches everyone's eye is that he gets everyone at the tax collector's office.
[00:20:34]  He makes badges and has everyone wear badges that say tax collector on them that work out of the office.
[00:20:41]  At some point, he pulls over a lady.
[00:20:47]  He pulled like as if he was a cop and berates her for speeding.
[00:20:52]  He's never charged in that because apparently the sheriff says that he technically didn't break any laws.
[00:20:58]  He didn't like to say he was a cop, I guess.
[00:21:00]  Like he just heavily implied he was.
[00:21:03]  Because the whole thing is that I think he's his a lot of his little schemes rest on the fact that he's technically a revenue agent, like the Secret Service, which I think is sort of how he justifies it to himself.
[00:21:16]  But if you look at the badges he got, I mean, it's like a necklace with a badge on it, like undercover cops wear.
[00:21:21]  He wears it very openly.
[00:21:23]  He looks like an undercover cop.
[00:21:25]  I mean, just physically as well.
[00:21:27]  Yeah.
[00:21:28]  He is the undercover cop phenotype.
[00:21:30]  But he made pretty wide headlines also after allowing his tax collecting employees to open carry.
[00:21:41]  Yeah.
[00:21:41]  So the whole idea was we don't need security services.
[00:21:44]  We're actually going to cut that part.
[00:21:47]  And everyone is just going to open carry.
[00:21:51]  Problem solved.
[00:21:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:53]  And I got to say, it's pretty, it makes sense to me.
[00:21:57]  Yes.
[00:21:58]  Yeah.
[00:21:59]  That was eventually struck down by the state's attorney general because they're like, you can't do this at work.
[00:22:06]  But he did that.
[00:22:07]  It was not before he spent $90,000 on body armor, weaponry, and ammo for basically himself, but his tax collector office, which, by the way, the minute this guy gets in, he fires a shit ton of people who work there and hires no shit his entire wedding party.
[00:22:25]  Yeah.
[00:22:25]  You know, this is just another example of big government getting in the way of disruption entrepreneurship.
[00:22:33]  This guy is also, in a Miamian manner, obsessed with a little thing called the fucking blockchain.
[00:22:41]  Yeah, he recently started a fake company, basically Government Blockchain Systems LLC, which he used to basically like build his own office.
[00:22:54]  So contract that company that he started through his office to buy a bunch of crypto mining machines.
[00:23:03]  And I think he bought and sold a bunch of crypto through it as well.
[00:23:07]  No, he buys the machines and then research all these machines and then sells them for a higher price on Amazon.
[00:23:15]  Amazing.

=== Matt Gates' Controversial Past (15:39) ===

[00:23:16]  Yeah, but he also buys a bunch of machines and sets them up in the Seminole County tax collector office in a locked closet, which only he is the key to, and then starts a fire while moving them, which, by the way, insurance refuses to pay for because they're like, this is your fault.
[00:23:32]  Also, why are you doing this?
[00:23:35]  Now, at one point, he wanted to create a specific Seminole County cryptocurrency, and he actually created a way for residents to pay the county taxes with this crypto coin, and I think with Bitcoin too, but just no one, literally, not a single person did it.
[00:23:51]  He's also alleged in the latest, I believe, charges against him to have spent $400,000 of county funds on Bitcoin, which he just, which he just took.
[00:24:02]  Yeah, so there's, he first gets indicted.
[00:24:18]  We should get into that.
[00:24:18]  So, things start going bad for Joel, even though he's got all these scandals going for him, kind of local scandals.
[00:24:24]  Things go bad for him in June of last year.
[00:24:29]  He is kind of mired in some local scandals with someone who's running against him.
[00:24:35]  And he announces his reelection campaign in early June 2020.
[00:24:41]  June, I think, 23rd, he is indicted by the feds.
[00:24:46]  This is the first of what are now four indictments for a total of, I think it's about 33 charges that he's facing.
[00:24:55]  Some very serious ones, too, including, as you'll see, sex trafficking.
[00:24:59]  Yeah.
[00:25:00]  But so explain to me exactly what are these charges that he's facing that he's looking at.
[00:25:07]  This kind of stems from him.
[00:25:09]  I will say, there's so much other shit that we didn't even mention, including him trying to get his friend to basically make ransomware for the county computers to make them pay in Bitcoin.
[00:25:21]  And that kind of gets all roped into this too.
[00:25:23]  Like, this becomes kind of a nexus for all of his scandals.
[00:25:27]  But he is running against this person who is a local high school teacher.
[00:25:31]  And he starts sending anonymous mail to the high school, including a letter that I read it earlier today.
[00:25:39]  Basically, where he's accusing this teacher of having molested students, like in very plain language.
[00:25:48]  He also makes fake Twitter accounts pretending to be the teacher.
[00:25:51]  He makes and he writes letters pretending to be concerned students.
[00:25:55]  He makes Facebook posts pretend to be concerned teachers.
[00:25:57]  I will say that his tact for getting the teacher in trouble with the fake Twitter account is making them have, and in fact, this stems from 2019, is having tweeted racist stuff from this fake account he made for his political opponent, including, I'm running for office to keep hashtag Seminole County white and segregated.
[00:26:17]  It's time we take back out to country.
[00:26:20]  And then I'm proud of America, red, white, and blue.
[00:26:24]  White.
[00:26:25]  And then this is great.
[00:26:26]  Just don't become a Jew like your kids have.
[00:26:29]  Which is, he also, he wrote, this is insane.
[00:26:33]  This is one of the Facebook posts he made.
[00:26:36]  I believe, pretending to be another teacher.
[00:26:38]  I got this in the indictment.
[00:26:39]  Multiple accusations have been made against him.
[00:26:41]  These include rape of a male student who came to a Mr. School employee to seek counsel on the student's sexuality.
[00:26:46]  Mr. School employee told the student he had his own sinful homosexual thoughts and they would together pray the gay away.
[00:26:52]  This evolved into several sexual encounters, even one involving a video of the sexual encounter, which, a little touch of irony there, this must be made known.
[00:27:00]  He is a sham.
[00:27:02]  This does not work.
[00:27:03]  And he is very quickly and very easily and very illegally caught doing this.
[00:27:10]  So he gets busted and gets sent to jail.
[00:27:14]  And I think that is really kind of where Matt Gates gets drawn into this.
[00:27:19]  Because if there's anything that I can tell from a guy like Greenberg, is that he is a fucking snitch and he starts singing.
[00:27:29]  One of the things that's sort of alleged against Greenberg, who, by the way, is married.
[00:27:33]  And once he got out on probation, excuse me, on bail, he was rearrested after having stalked his ex-wife to his mother-in-law's house where there's a body cam video of a gaunt-looking Mr. Greenberg getting basically kicked out of there by the police, but not rearrested.
[00:27:53]  He seemed to like young girls, but I think we should deal with that maybe after we get to Gates, right?
[00:28:00]  Well, so it does seem, we should say, it does seem clear that Greenberg starts implicating Gates as he's talking to the feds.
[00:28:10]  And it's been tough to find out exactly when their relationship started, but it seems like these dudes become boys literally from just like partying together in Orlando.
[00:28:23]  Yes.
[00:28:24]  Like there's no, like, I can't figure out if they met each other in college or anything.
[00:28:28]  It really does seem like 2016, like we're all, it's like the hyphi movement in Florida.
[00:28:32]  Like we're all getting together, we're all partying.
[00:28:33]  Totally.
[00:28:34]  And it's like one big MAGA party.
[00:28:37]  You know, everyone's just like, we're going to be, we're on the wave.
[00:28:40]  Trump is going to fucking build that wall.
[00:28:42]  We're going to own the libs till we die.
[00:28:45]  And like, fucking, we're, we're going to have this forever.
[00:28:50]  And these guys are seen together like constantly to the point where like local newspapers are wondering like, why is Matt Gates getting wasted with the Seminole County tax collector every fucking weekend because he lived four hours away from each other?
[00:29:03]  Yeah, totally.
[00:29:04]  It's very weird.
[00:29:09]  They're also partying with another, let's say, man of strange sexual predilections, the famous swinger, Roger Stone.
[00:29:18]  Oh, yeah.
[00:29:19]  Well, that's the thing is that Greenberg starts, is like posting on Instagram all the time he's hanging out with Gates.
[00:29:25]  There's like, they go to the White House together.
[00:29:28]  They go to Mar-a-Lago together.
[00:29:30]  There's all these, there's like so many, he is like Mr. Selfie on the Instagram.
[00:29:35]  Oh, yeah, he loves a selfie.
[00:29:37]  So there's like a great, a really good, that I'm sure people have seen, like sweaty, it looks like, absolutely looks like they're wasted and or on drugs, uh, party selfie of Gates, Greenberg, and Roger Stone.
[00:29:51]  I mean, these guys love to get fucked up.
[00:29:55]  Like, no doubt about it.
[00:29:56]  These guys are getting high as shit.
[00:29:58]  And we should say nothing happens in Florida without Roger Stone knowing.
[00:30:02]  So it does not surprise me that he shows up in the story.
[00:30:06]  But okay, so before we get into this, for people who don't know, which this might be true for some people, because I didn't know that much about him, but who is Matt Gates?
[00:30:16]  Matt Gates is a human kybella.
[00:30:22]  What?
[00:30:22]  Matt Gaetz has had fillers.
[00:30:24]  Matt Gates has had plugs.
[00:30:25]  Matt Gates has had animal cells injected to his penis to make it more girthy.
[00:30:30]  Matt Gates has had ass sculpting surgery.
[00:30:32]  I don't think any of those.
[00:30:33]  Matt Gates uses synthol.
[00:30:35]  Matt Gates uses the weird drug that Young Chomsky uses that he told me not to tell people he uses.
[00:30:39]  Matt Gaetz is juicy.
[00:30:41]  Matt Gates is himself juiced.
[00:30:42]  Matt Gates is filled with moon juice.
[00:30:46]  And I'm milking him.
[00:30:48]  He is.
[00:30:50]  I look at this guy.
[00:30:51]  I'm like, this is, he could, someone could exterminate him like a bug.
[00:30:56]  He doesn't seem very, yeah, he's all talk.
[00:31:00]  He seems like a dim-witted individual.
[00:31:03]  Yeah, he's kind of known, I guess, as a troll, right?
[00:31:06]  Yeah, yeah, very much.
[00:31:07]  He's very troll-ish.
[00:31:09]  Both him and Joel, I will say, remind, there's, this is a type.
[00:31:12]  We were talking about it.
[00:31:14]  It's a very specific kind of aggressive, annoying, people sometimes say frat boy, whatever, kind of like bully, bully type.
[00:31:26]  Yeah, there was, there was a recording someone, some Florida politician posted of like a voicemail that that Greenberg and Gates left her one night.
[00:31:34]  And like that really, hearing the two of them together and how like they were like doing this sort of, it was like a mocking taunting that, of course, myself as a bully could recognize sort of a J as a sort of horizontal also on the bully like them.
[00:31:51]  I'm a different kind of bully.
[00:31:55]  This is this is, I don't have, I don't have the, I don't know what it is, but the sickness in my soul to be this kind of bully.
[00:32:03]  But, but, but it's, yeah, they're, they're, uh, they're a particular type of like male freak.
[00:32:10]  Um, and uh, and it makes sense.
[00:32:11]  I mean, Matt Gates grew up very wealthy under his father, who we'll get to in a second, um, went to Florida State University, which is a bad school, someone told me.
[00:32:22]  I know a guy from Florida.
[00:32:23]  I was like, what's up with that?
[00:32:24]  He's like, it's not a, I mean, if he's rich, he should have not gone there.
[00:32:27]  Yeah, it's like big party school.
[00:32:29]  Yeah, okay, which makes sense.
[00:32:30]  Which, by the way, he also still hangs out, like, as a very much not in college anymore man at bars that are like frequented by FSU undergrads.
[00:32:41]  Oh, my God.
[00:32:42]  Like, to try to get a little bit of pang.
[00:32:46]  He's like that guy who's like at college, you know, like still lives in the college town, even though he's graduated.
[00:32:52]  100%.
[00:32:53]  Yeah, totally.
[00:32:55]  You know, but his dad is like sort of, you know, he's a big whig in Florida politics, although not the biggest Whig.
[00:33:01]  And he runs to be a GOP member of the Florida House of Representatives.
[00:33:06]  He actually runs to replace Ray Sansom, who you might remember had to retire in a pay-to-play scheme, which I got to say.
[00:33:14]  How are these guys all replacing guys that are doing the same thing as them?
[00:33:18]  Every single guy we talk about in this has already just been like, yeah, he's replacing a guy who was arrested for taking $800 million from like, you know, Section 8 vouchers in Miami or whatever.
[00:33:30]  You know what I will say, though, to our Floridian listeners?
[00:33:34]  Like, I see you.
[00:33:36]  I feel you.
[00:33:37]  California politicians have their own insanity and horror show.
[00:33:43]  Lee and Yee.
[00:33:44]  Yeah, I'm with you.
[00:33:46]  Be proud of this.
[00:33:46]  This is good stuff.
[00:33:48]  Florida and California have many parallels, I think, that people would rather not admit.
[00:33:53]  But, you know, he was a typical real piece of shit.
[00:33:56]  In fact, almost atypical in that he was slightly worse of a piece of shit than a lot of people in the Florida House of Representatives.
[00:34:02]  So he's actually elected with 69% of the vote.
[00:34:06]  What?
[00:34:07]  69% of the vote.
[00:34:08]  69% of the vote.
[00:34:10]  He's elected by the number that is someone giving oral sex to someone while they lay under them and also give oral sex to them.
[00:34:17]  The thing is, is that it annoys me that he probably found that to be very funny.
[00:34:24]  Can you imagine how fucking hyped that he was on election night when he found that number?
[00:34:29]  wins and he gets 69 of the vote that is like uses That's like MAGA magic right there.
[00:34:36]  Absolutely.
[00:34:37]  Yeah, that's baked Alaska sizzling like fucking, you know, dropping a little angel dust on him.
[00:34:43]  You think he's ever smoked PCP?
[00:34:44]  Absolutely.
[00:34:45]  Yeah.
[00:34:46]  Probably.
[00:34:47]  Yeah.
[00:34:48]  Yeah.
[00:34:48]  Seems like a very Florida thing.
[00:34:50]  If you ever sold Matt Gates PCP, hit the Sally because I also would like to buy some.
[00:34:55]  He's like the Trump guy in Congress.
[00:34:59]  Yeah.
[00:34:59]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:59]  He is like known as like Mr. I'm trying to come up with a nickname for him right now.
[00:35:04]  Mr. Defender.
[00:35:05]  That's a lame one.
[00:35:07]  That's horrible.
[00:35:08]  Yeah.
[00:35:08]  Well, I'm trying to think of like what the hmm.
[00:35:11]  You know what I realized?
[00:35:12]  He looks like hair.
[00:35:13]  He's just hair guy.
[00:35:14]  He's got a hair.
[00:35:16]  Yeah.
[00:35:16]  He's one of your type of guys who's just like his hair.
[00:35:19]  No, he doesn't act like the hair, but he, you know who he acts like?
[00:35:21]  He acts like Donald Trump's hair.
[00:35:23]  It's like he decided, okay, Donald Trump's hair is the brand.
[00:35:27]  Now I'm going to act like Donald Trump's hair.
[00:35:28]  Take on the avatar of that, yeah.
[00:35:30]  Absolutely, he's human bobblehead.
[00:35:32]  That's what they say.
[00:35:34]  He's in the House Freedom Caucus, which Liz, you're also a member of that, right?
[00:35:38]  Absolutely, yeah, non-voting, but yeah.
[00:35:40]  Uh, and he kind of veers like from regular, just like GOP bullshit to also like libertarian stuff.
[00:35:46]  Like, he's like pro-legalization of weed, and so he was like kind of talked about as like this new kind of GOP guy, like, loves smoking a little bit of fucking herb, man.
[00:35:56]  You can't get in trouble.
[00:35:57]  I can't you can't get mad for me for saying mon right there.
[00:35:59]  I'm not doing an accent, I'm just saying mon.
[00:36:02]  He, I will say to like a lot of these guys, by the way, like the we like the weed legalization stuff because they're being fucking funded by massive companies that are lobbying to get to get in on that.
[00:36:14]  Sweet, sweet money.
[00:36:16]  The state likes it too.
[00:36:17]  So, well, the thing is, I think Gates also has a personal stake in this because Matt Gates loves getting fucked up.
[00:36:25]  Like, and like, I don't know how any other way to phrase this, but like Matt Gates loves pussy.
[00:36:32]  Yeah, he's a big party guy.
[00:36:34]  He's like known in Congress.
[00:36:35]  I mean, all this stuff has now come out.
[00:36:37]  Um, you know, a lot of unnamed sources talking about how raucous, I almost said just how raucous his caucus is.
[00:36:46]  That's horrible.
[00:36:49]  I'm going to send through the dark web someone to come to your house and put a bullet in your fucking brain.
[00:36:54]  That is the worst thing I've ever thought in my life.
[00:36:58]  Oh, my God.
[00:36:59]  Come on, sweetheart.
[00:37:00]  No.
[00:37:02]  raucous caucus i mean it's i'm so sorry Oh, my God.
[00:37:14]  Well, he's horny.
[00:37:16]  He's horny.
[00:37:17]  We can't, there's no, there's no batting around the bush there, which is something that apparently he was rumored to like to do.
[00:37:25]  Yes.
[00:37:25]  With his penis.
[00:37:27]  So, yeah, like I said, all these stories come out about how, you know, crazy his partying stuff is.
[00:37:32]  I mean, he's like, you know, there's like stories about how he has a huge box of condoms that he leaves outside his fucking office in the Capitol, like in the trash, like displaying this huge box of condoms.
[00:37:47]  Like, he's like fucking in his office.
[00:37:49]  No, come on.
[00:37:50]  I don't know, Liz.
[00:37:52]  Like, he might be.
[00:37:54]  I mean, you think?
[00:37:55]  Well, I mean, there's the whole thing.
[00:37:56]  He seems like someone who wants people to think that, but actually isn't.
[00:38:00]  Yeah, that's what I do.
[00:38:01]  Whenever I like, in my life, have gone on dates with girls.
[00:38:04]  Like, when I was like 19, I would, I would always carry about 15 condoms like bulging in my right front pocket.
[00:38:11]  And then I would slip when I was walking up to them.
[00:38:15]  And like, all the condoms would spill out into the ground.
[00:38:18]  And I'd kind of like fall on them and be able to luge toward her and end up at her feet and give them a little kiss.
[00:38:26]  Little big toe.
[00:38:27]  Yeah, he is definitely, it's like he learned all this stuff.
[00:38:30]  Like, he seems like he was born out of the American Pie movies.
[00:38:36]  Yes, yeah.
[00:38:37]  He's a real stiffler.
[00:38:39]  Yes, totally.
[00:38:41]  You know that, like, you know, this man has, like, in his life, well, actually, I don't know, but he would be the type, except that he loves underage girls, but he does seem like the kind of MILF kind of guy, like a guy who's.

=== Harry Potter Quidditch Scores (02:27) ===

[00:38:55]  I think he likes all every.
[00:38:57]  Yeah, yeah, fair enough.
[00:38:58]  Or any he can get, kind of.
[00:39:00]  Well, the thing is, so in the Florida House of Representatives, he and other- He also definitely really likes AOC.
[00:39:06]  Yes, yeah.
[00:39:06]  He's very horny for AOC.
[00:39:08]  He's like very obsessed with AOC.
[00:39:10]  Sometimes calls her Alex, which I think is funny.
[00:39:12]  Yeah, very, very funny.
[00:39:14]  Like when a bully likes a girl, you know what I mean?
[00:39:17]  I know.
[00:39:19]  Little kid mentality.
[00:39:20]  You can see it through and through.
[00:39:22]  Ladies, you know what I'm talking about.
[00:39:24]  Yeah.
[00:39:24]  Fellas, it works.
[00:39:26]  Anyway.
[00:39:27]  So in the Florida House of Representatives, he and his shithead friends, and like this is what Liz is saying.
[00:39:33]  Like this guy is of a fucking type of like real piece of shit, guys.
[00:39:38]  And they had a game where it was basically all these male politicians and probably some of their aides, like chief of staffs or whatever, in terms of fucking women, where they got points for scoring certain girls and then extra points if they were virgins.
[00:39:51]  But they based part of it on the game.
[00:39:54]  There's a game in the Harry Potter books called Quidditch.
[00:39:58]  Quidditch.
[00:40:00]  You know how to say it.
[00:40:01]  I don't know why you're acting like you don't know how to say it.
[00:40:03]  I thought I spelled it weird there.
[00:40:05]  But I actually say it.
[00:40:07]  That's how you never, I have never seen a Harry Potter movie and I've watched a single Harry Potter book, the first one when it came out.
[00:40:15]  I think it's very, very weird that they based a game on Harry Potter.
[00:40:21]  I don't think it's that weird.
[00:40:23]  Of all things.
[00:40:25]  I mean, I've got based a game on like football, basketball, baseball.
[00:40:32]  Yeah.
[00:40:32]  Well, I mean, is there a point?
[00:40:35]  Racecars, NASCAR.
[00:40:37]  But you can't win any of those if you have sex with a single politician.
[00:40:41]  But how does it even, it doesn't even make sense.
[00:40:43]  I don't know how you even win this score.
[00:40:45]  How does so you just keep racking up the score and then like when you're unelected or like what do you leave office?
[00:40:50]  Then you see that.
[00:40:51]  Yeah, but I'm saying it's just a game.
[00:40:52]  It has nothing to do with.
[00:40:54]  It's not like it's like specific to this Harry Potter game.
[00:40:57]  It's just they liked Harry Potter and so they linked it to Harry Potter.
[00:41:01]  It makes no, it's fucking, it's so dorky.
[00:41:04]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:41:06]  Well, they would, they would, it's not known who the Quidditch or the snitch is in this, who is the, who is the point or the, the ball or whatever that gets you the game that you win the game automatically.

=== Rick Scott's Quidditch Mystery (05:35) ===

[00:41:22]  Yeah, okay.
[00:41:22]  I think it's Rick Scott.
[00:41:24]  I think if you fuck Rick Scott, who's bisexual, by the way, then you.
[00:41:28]  Okay, wait, stop for a second.
[00:41:30]  Let me explain.
[00:41:31]  So in this game, the game, you rack up points based on girls that you fuck, I guess, going back and forth, blah, But then the game is over and everyone has to declare this one person the winner because they get a ton of points if they get this like golden goose or whatever, the snitch, which I don't know why it's called that, but Joel Greener.
[00:41:58]  And it is not yet reported who that person was, but that it was someone in Florida Republican politics.
[00:42:07]  I am guessing it's either Marco Rubio or Rick Scott.
[00:42:10]  No, it's got to be a girl.
[00:42:12]  I don't know.
[00:42:13]  I think it's a girl.
[00:42:16]  Regardless, it's not known who the snitch was or who won the game, but I think Matt Gates probably did pretty well at it.
[00:42:24]  He would also hang out, like I said, at a restaurant called the 101, or a place called the 101 Restaurant, which was like an FSU student hangout and try to pick up chicks.
[00:42:33]  Like as a congressman, not only as a Florida House of Representatives guy, like in the U.S. Congress is hanging out at a bar and be like, hey, you guys know, are you in Paulie Son?
[00:42:42]  That's crazy.
[00:42:43]  Like, oh, you live in the doors?
[00:42:44]  I got a house that we can go to.
[00:42:47]  Christian Gillibrand sleeping with Sean McElwey at that Bushwick bar.
[00:42:50]  I mean, that was insane.
[00:42:51]  First of all, that wasn't, it didn't exactly go down like that.
[00:42:54]  And second of all, I was there.
[00:42:56]  I fingered Sean McKelwey.
[00:43:00]  That Rupee Carr poem about like the honey inside me, like that's about me and Sean.
[00:43:05]  When your fingers were dipped inside me, searching for honey that would not come for you.
[00:43:14]  Yeah, I got, and like, but she lied in that.
[00:43:17]  I got that.
[00:43:17]  I got McKelwey's honey.
[00:43:22]  cut that noise i just made so while he's actually in the u.s house of representatives he is the lone no vote on an anti-human trafficking bill in the house which basically nixed an advisor committee on the issue like to which would coordinate between various federal agencies
[00:43:50]  And that's because he said he didn't want to start a new federal agency because his goal is to make government smaller, which does not, by the way, seem to be this man's goal whatsoever in any other context, just in this one.
[00:44:05]  And so that's a couple of very interesting lone no votes and hills to die on.
[00:44:10]  So you might be thinking, this guy is getting so much fucking tail and poontang that like he's got no time to settle down.
[00:44:18]  But in fact, at the beginning of the pandemic, he met a woman named Ginger Lucky, who I'm assuming is Irish because of a mixture of ginger hair color and luck, which is the leprechaun spell, who herself is not a very interesting character.
[00:44:34]  But her brother is one Palmer Lucky.
[00:44:37]  Now, Liz, you know Palmer personally, right?
[00:44:41]  Ha ha ha.
[00:44:44]  No, Palmer was a guy who created something, and I say that because Liz is addicted to something called Oculus Rift.
[00:44:50]  She spends most of her time in the virtual world in a game called Second Life, where she is a rabbit, but has four human legs.
[00:44:59]  He created something called Oculus Rift, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, and then got kicked out by Zuckerberg because he was too pro-Trump, and then fell in with a little guy that funds this podcast named Peter Thial and started in the footsteps of Peter Thiel, a company named after some bullshit from the fucking Lord of the Rings, Andaril.
[00:45:20]  So Andereil is a defense contractor that's like works on drones and is really invested on basically taking away as much of the domestic drone market from China as possible and being a really open technology company.
[00:45:31]  Like, yes, we work with DOD.
[00:45:33]  So in that way, they're a lot like Palantir.
[00:45:35]  They're like, we love the DOD.
[00:45:36]  We want government contracts.
[00:45:38]  We work with them.
[00:45:39]  They have made a battering ram drone, which looks pretty actually insanely useless.
[00:45:45]  And they have a $2 billion valuation with funding from Teal and a couple of other friends of the pod, Andreessen Horowitz.
[00:45:53]  Their main thing that they've been in the news for, they don't even have a Wikipedia page.
[00:45:57]  But the main thing they've been in the news with is a virtual surveillance tower they created for the southern border, which uses AI to identify anybody crossing over.
[00:46:07]  Why do you need AI?
[00:46:08]  You just need a camera.
[00:46:09]  It's like, hey, there's a person.
[00:46:11]  I think it's probably bullshit.
[00:46:13]  Yeah, sounds like it.
[00:46:14]  I mean, I've also, I was getting pilled this morning reading about just various drone technologies.
[00:46:19]  And I got to say, the American drone tech sucks.
[00:46:24]  Yeah.
[00:46:24]  Well, so immediately upon getting engaged to this little fucking bimbo, Gates starts going on TV and being like, within like a month of like starting to date Ginger Lucky, he starts going on Tucker and being like, the Chinese drone market in America is the greatest threat to national security.
[00:46:41]  Like this motherfucker had never thought about it before in his life, but it's become one of his main sort of like topics of interest in both his interviews and in actual his political work.
[00:46:52]  Like he sits on a like some advisory committee in Congress that deals with this kind of stuff.

=== Identity Theft Suspicions (14:58) ===

[00:46:58]  But yeah, he is wrapped up with this woman.
[00:47:01]  I do not believe that their engagement will make it to a marriage.
[00:47:04]  I mean, it might.
[00:47:05]  This sounds so romantic.
[00:47:07]  I'm reading this little, I just looked up this little bit, this little gossip story about her, and it was, She agreed to marry the congressman after he popped the question on December 30th at the same place they met during a holiday celebration at the resort.
[00:47:25]  I believe this means Mar-a-Lago.
[00:47:27]  It does.
[00:47:29]  It was actually duh.
[00:47:32]  Yes.
[00:47:33]  Yes.
[00:47:33]  The outlet of what she said when Gates proposed.
[00:47:35]  Can you imagine you proposed to a girl and she goes, duh?
[00:47:39]  Yeah, yeah, yes.
[00:47:41]  Well, it's crazy because I've done it like six or seven times and it's always been like, why are you doing this?
[00:47:45]  Like, are you filming a viral video?
[00:47:47]  Like, I don't know you.
[00:47:49]  And then I have to say, yeah, I'm doing a TikTok for my channel.
[00:47:52]  Oh, my God.
[00:47:53]  So here's where we get kind of to the meat of the matter.
[00:47:55]  Like, what is actually happening with Matt Gates in terms of the sex trafficking and him getting tied up with Joel Greenberg?
[00:48:02]  Because as it was mentioned before, the headlines came out that he is under investigation for potential trafficking of a minor, sex trafficking of a minor.
[00:48:11]  And to be clear, that seems like a very plausible thing you'd be under investigation for because there's a preponderance of evidence that basically shows that he and Greenberg spent quite a lot of money and time and committed a few pretty serious federal crimes in pursuit of 17-year-old girls that they were paying to have sex with them.
[00:48:31]  Because the 17-year-old girl mentioned in the Matt Gates investigation is actually one of the same girls that Greenberg himself was involved with, although not the only one.
[00:48:43]  And I think a good sort of indication of what they were doing is one night, these two men, after a long night of partying, entered into the Seminole County tax collector's office together.
[00:48:54]  So remember at the beginning of the episode when we mentioned that the tax collector's office does a lot of the same kind of functions as a DMB, where if you need a new driver's license, you show up and you're like, hey, here's my expired driver's license.
[00:49:10]  You should take it and I can get a new one and you will destroy my ID and everything's good, right?
[00:49:16]  Yes.
[00:49:18]  So the tax collector's office is the one that does that, but they were not destroying old IDs.
[00:49:24]  In fact, our friend Joel had a different plan for them.
[00:49:29]  Yeah, they were apparently cutting up or they were taking people's IDs.
[00:49:34]  And, you know, some of these IDs were expired.
[00:49:36]  Some of them were just people who moved from out of state and wanted to get a state ID, et cetera, whatever.
[00:49:41]  But they were taking people's IDs and let's say kind of rearranging the picture on them to be perhaps a picture of a 17-year-old girl or in some cases, pictures of Joel Greenberg himself.
[00:49:54]  No word yet on whether Matt Gates was doing that too, but one can imagine he might have, although he's got a pretty recognizable face.
[00:50:00]  And so one morning, a Seminole County tax collector employee comes into the office, finds a bunch of IDs scattered all across the desk, texts Joel Greenberg being like, were you in the office last night?
[00:50:11]  Like, what's going on over here?
[00:50:11]  It's a fucking mess.
[00:50:13]  Greenberg responds, yes, I was showing Matt Gates our facilities.
[00:50:18]  And they check the employee checks the surveillance tape, and it shows Matt Gates and Mr. Greenberg very late at night fucking around with IDs and making a big mess of them.
[00:50:32]  So it seems like they did get caught on camera.
[00:50:34]  At least maybe he was showing them what they could do, maybe they were making them there.
[00:50:37]  But it is a pretty insane kind of thing to think that like these two men, one of whom is a fucking congressman, like 3 a.m. or whatever in the tax collector's office, high on MDMA, fucking cutting up IDs and being like, yeah, we could put like little Susie's face in this one.
[00:50:53]  Because that's the other thing.
[00:50:55]  They were making IDs for underage girls.
[00:50:58]  And I think it's important to mention where those underage girls might have met them.
[00:51:04]  Well, it looks like, so, okay, I want to clear something up.
[00:51:08]  When we say sex trafficking charges, understand that a lot of different things can fall under that kind of charge.
[00:51:16]  So basically, anyone crossing state lines with the express purpose of perhaps having sex for having sex with someone for some kind of compensation.
[00:51:30]  It's the crossing of state lines that makes it sex trafficking, right?
[00:51:34]  Yeah, we can see this in like the Ghelan and Epstein cases, too.
[00:51:38]  Right, right, right.
[00:51:39]  But so when Gates gets hit with this and Greenberg, it looks like they were meeting girls on Seeking Arrangements, which is a website that matches young women, usually young women, and men who are interested in paying them for dates, I guess.
[00:52:03]  So they were either meeting, I don't know, underage girls on there or whatever, girls from out of state, and then, you know, promising them, saying, oh, I'm going to take you out on a date here.
[00:52:14]  It's the crossing of state lines.
[00:52:16]  It makes it sex trafficking.
[00:52:18]  And it looks like, according to a lot of news reporting on this, too, that they were paying for the hotel rooms and flights, et cetera, with Apple Pay and Venmo and PayPal.
[00:52:30]  So easily traceable things.
[00:52:32]  And that is kind of the crux of it and where a lot of the investigation comes from is whether they officially paid for sex because you also can't exchange gifts for sex either.
[00:52:41]  And like those qualify as gifts, like meals and hotel rooms and stuff like that.
[00:52:47]  And so it looks like these guys left a pretty sizable electronic payment record as well.
[00:52:52]  Yeah, you're really hung up on the Apple Pay thing.
[00:52:54]  I don't think that's that weird.
[00:52:55]  I think it's just insane to me.
[00:52:57]  Like, I mean, that's like, I don't know.
[00:52:58]  I thought a lot of people do that, and they probably shouldn't, but they do.
[00:53:02]  I think the thing that's getting Gates in trouble that the feds are really looking into is that he used campaign money to do it.
[00:53:09]  That also would be very much in line with what these guys are, what these guys' kind of modus operandi is.
[00:53:16]  But I mean, I'm just saying, it's like, I have bought a lot of illegal things in my life.
[00:53:21]  In fact, I have bought probably tens of thousands of dollars worth of heroin.
[00:53:26]  And never once was I like, hold on, let me, do you have like tap pay or whatever?
[00:53:30]  I mean, they didn't have that back then, but you know what I mean?
[00:53:32]  Like, I would have never, you know, it's like paying with a check or something.
[00:53:36]  I know, but this is like what everyone does.
[00:53:39]  I know, but like, fucking Greenberg's a Bitcoin guy.
[00:53:41]  Be like, hey, baby, let me give you 0.4% of a Bitcoin or whatever.
[00:53:45]  Like, it just, it's, it boggles the fucking mind.
[00:53:47]  But yeah, they are, uh, they are in some deep shit for this.
[00:53:50]  And also, I mean, if, if Greenberg's charges are any indication, Greenberg is getting hit with like a lot of instances of identity theft because like felony identity theft, aggravated identity theft because of the ID stuff.
[00:54:02]  And that could be something that Matt Gaetz could be looking at as well.
[00:54:19]  So you're probably thinking, wow, that was kind of a crazy hour.
[00:54:22]  That was kind of a fun little episode of True Non.
[00:54:25]  Now time for me to get on with my day.
[00:54:27]  Maybe I'm going to continue cleaning my bathtub, which I haven't finished.
[00:54:32]  Or maybe I'm going to do the dishes, which you should do.
[00:54:35]  Or maybe you're going to have a fucking meth bong.
[00:54:40]  No.
[00:54:41]  Here's the thing.
[00:54:43]  There's more to this story.
[00:54:44]  Because remember we mentioned at the beginning of the episode that Gates, shortly after the New York Times story broke on the federal investigation into him and the, and its relation to the indictment of Joel Greenberg, indictments, Joel Greenberg, he said that he was being blackmailed.
[00:55:01]  Yeah.
[00:55:02]  And that his father was working with the FBI in order to catch the criminals who are allegedly blackmailing him.
[00:55:11]  I think a lot of people, including myself, when I first read that he was saying this, because there wasn't anything to back it up at first, it was just Matt Gates on his word.
[00:55:19]  I was like, all right, he is talking out of his ass.
[00:55:21]  This is such an extraordinary story that there's no possible way this is true.
[00:55:26]  And that's, I mean, on one hand, that's correct.
[00:55:30]  He is not being what I would call extorted.
[00:55:33]  I think legally this does not fall under the auspices of extortion.
[00:55:38]  But there is a germ of, well, in fact, more than a germ of truth to that.
[00:55:43]  There are some people who are essentially offering to make his problems go away if he cooperates with them.
[00:55:51]  Yeah, when he first said that on Twitter, I just assumed he was doing the like scarface shoot him up move where it's like, fuck it.
[00:55:59]  Now I'm just going to like go balls out, say some crazy stuff, and let's see what happens.
[00:56:06]  But no, it turns out that the next day, the Washington Examiner posted a series of documents and text messages from Don Gates, Daddy Gates, Matt Gates' dad, that are, I mean, I wouldn't say they're damning, but they're interesting.
[00:56:33]  I think that we just have to read these because otherwise there's no way to get into this.
[00:56:38]  This is what was texted to Don Gates.
[00:56:43]  This is, he says that he receives these texts on March 16th, 2021.
[00:56:48]  So, you know, just a couple weeks ago.
[00:56:50]  Mr. Gates, I would like to talk with you immediately about the current federal investigation and the indictment that is about to be filed against your son.
[00:56:59]  I have a plan that can make his future legal and political problems go away.
[00:57:05]  Last summer, we located Robert Levinson in Iran and took two proof of life videos, but the U.S. government foiled our rescue attempt.
[00:57:19]  We have one more opportunity to rescue Levinson.
[00:57:22]  If you and Matt are willing to help us privately and clandestinely obtain the release of Robert Levinson, I will ensure that Matt is on the plane that delivers Levinson to his family, thus making him the most sought-after public figure in the world for his efforts to obtain Levinson's release.
[00:57:42]  Then, my partner will see to it that Matt receives a presidential pardon, thus alleviating all his legal issues.
[00:57:52]  We all know that politics make strange bedfellows.
[00:57:56]  I can assure you that we have the ability to obtain Robert Levinson's release immediately, but we cannot allow the U.S. government to be involved because they have repeatedly blocked his release since his capture.
[00:58:10]  Robert Levinson's health is failing, and if we are going to obtain his release, it must be done immediately.
[00:58:16]  Matt is more than welcome to attend the meeting, but we are fine just to meet with you as my partner knows you are a man of your word and has a great deal of respect for you.
[00:58:24]  Please call me and let me know if you are willing to meet with us immediately.
[00:58:27]  I assure you that we will not be wasting your time.
[00:58:31]  Bob Kent with Little Mobile and Signal.
[00:58:37]  So a lot going on here.
[00:58:41]  First of all, like you said, this doesn't totally sound like extortion so much as it sounds like an offer of like, hey, if you want to help us, we could probably help you.
[00:58:53]  But that's not like blackmail or extortion.
[00:58:56]  So sometime after this, they meet in person and the Gates family is given documents for something called Project Homecoming, which it's a three-page, I believe, sort of master plan to free Bob Levinson, which has some interesting kind of high-level points.
[00:59:16]  Yeah, it says Congressman Matt Gates is currently under investigation by the FBI.
[00:59:19]  The FBI became aware of compromising pictures depicting Congressman Gates, an elected and an elected official involved in a, quote, sexual orgy with underage prostitutes in Maitland, Florida, during an unrelated investigation into political corruption and public integrity in another criminal case.
[00:59:38]  So it seems very clear that that is about Joel Greenberg.
[00:59:41]  Maitland is in Seminole County, so it must have been one of the nights that they were all partying or something.
[00:59:49]  Yeah, so it's like very long.
[00:59:52]  Don Gates, Daddy Gates, I mean, he goes to meet this guy, Bob Kent, right?
[00:59:58]  That's what he says.
[01:00:02]  He gets these documents.
[01:00:04]  They basically ask that $25 million be deposited into the trust account of the Beggs and Land law firm, naming David McGee.
[01:00:17]  Like basically deposited into this guy's account at Beggs and Lane law firm.
[01:00:21]  Now, you might remember that name from the beginning of the episode.
[01:00:23]  This is who Matt Gates said is extorting them, even though Bob Kent is the guy that they go meet.
[01:00:29]  We'll get into all this.
[01:00:31]  It also says that they're going to make sure that Matt gets the credit for Bob's release and that they'll strongly advocate for Biden to pardon or instruct the DOJ to stop all investigations.
[01:00:40]  I don't know how they would.
[01:00:41]  I mean, this all seems very, very crazy.
[01:00:47]  Yeah, the team has been assured by the president that he will strongly consider such matters because he considers the release of Robert Levinson a matter of national urgency.
[01:00:55]  National urgency.
[01:00:56]  The first letter is capitalized, by the way.
[01:00:58]  But I don't really understand that too because I thought they weren't trying to involve the government.
[01:01:03]  I know.
[01:01:04]  Well, I mean, yeah.
[01:01:06]  The whole thing is very, I mean, it reads like a fucking, you know, the Prince of Nigeria has $5 million, but needs you to deposit $10 million before you can't, you know, whatever.
[01:01:18]  Don Gates says that he, I mean, he immediately contacts the FBI.
[01:01:24]  And it, you know, he has emails that basically corroborate this story.
[01:01:28]  Yeah.
[01:01:28]  He, you know, he basically smartly, and by the way, you guys, this is, you know what?
[01:01:33]  Here's a takeaway.
[01:01:35]  If you're ever doing anything like this, immediately get in paper signed in email, whatever, with everyone agreeing to what you're doing.
[01:01:43]  So you can't be implicated, right?
[01:01:45]  I will say, did not help Robert Levinson, but yes, yeah, yeah.
[01:01:48]  I will say, like, there are some things that you don't want to leave paper trails on, and then there are some things that you really should leave paper trails on, this being one of them.

=== Illicit Finance Investigation (14:41) ===

[01:01:56]  Yeah.
[01:01:57]  So he says, you know, he gets his lawyer to contact the FBI.
[01:02:01]  He says, my client was approached by two individuals to make a sizable payment in what I would call a scheme to defraud.
[01:02:07]  I mean, I think that sounds more like probably the case.
[01:02:10]  I mean, definitely this would, they would not have rescued Robert Levinson for this $25 million because he's dead, but yes.
[01:02:17]  The FBI is not asking Don to voluntarily and proactively assist in their investigation, which Don is willing to do.
[01:02:24]  Please confirm that your office and the FBI would like Don's assistance in this matter and that he would be working at the government's request.
[01:02:30]  Okay, so they get all these emails.
[01:02:31]  They say the FBI responds and says, yes, we can confirm.
[01:02:34]  Don Gates is now working with the government, with the FBI, and we are going to interrupt these individuals and et cetera, right?
[01:02:43]  Matt Gates on Fox says that his dad wore a wire in order to assist in the case, which is interesting.
[01:02:51]  But that also means that he met with them again, right?
[01:02:54]  After the March 25th email.
[01:02:56]  So just to like, I was like trying to piece together this calendar because I don't totally buy the full story that Don Gates is selling.
[01:03:04]  I think some of this is fudged a little bit.
[01:03:06]  But so Don Gates first gets these texts on the 18th.
[01:03:11]  That is a full week before, and he then goes and meets with Bob Kent the next day, he says.
[01:03:17]  That's a full week before he contacts the FBI.
[01:03:21]  Right.
[01:03:21]  Must have had a lot of thinking to do.
[01:03:23]  Yeah, a lot of thinking going on.
[01:03:25]  And then again meets with them at least once, but it does seem like maybe twice after on the March 25th emails, right?
[01:03:36]  Yeah, because if he's saying he wore a wire more than once, that means he must have met.
[01:03:40]  I mean, unless they're talking about like tapping a phone, but I don't think they would really call that wearing a wire.
[01:03:46]  And that is just like, that's just what, like less than a week before the Matt Gates story breaks.
[01:03:53]  Yeah, I will say the timing on this is rather discouraging.
[01:03:58]  It does make me kind of buy Matt Gates' story about the New York Times, like someone in the FBI linking some of this to the New York Times.
[01:04:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:06]  I mean, well, someone in the FBI did leak some of this to the New York Times, but like, I think the timing, absolutely.
[01:04:10]  I mean, unless it's just.
[01:04:11]  But if they were doing it to thwart the investigation.
[01:04:14]  Yeah.
[01:04:14]  Could be.
[01:04:14]  Interesting.
[01:04:15]  Could be.
[01:04:16]  Interesting.
[01:04:17]  Because as we'll see, the FBI has not always been super proactive on getting Levinson out.
[01:04:24]  But they also have on some accounts.
[01:04:26]  It's a strange sort of saga.
[01:04:29]  Yeah.
[01:04:29]  So, I don't know.
[01:04:30]  It's all weird.
[01:04:31]  Like, Gates was supposed to, like, wire a bunch of money.
[01:04:35]  He was supposed to put down like $5 million wire payment.
[01:04:40]  And then the whole thing blows up when the New York Times story gets released, right?
[01:04:46]  Yeah.
[01:04:46]  At that point, they're like, fuck it.
[01:04:48]  These guys are fucking coming after us.
[01:04:50]  Like, this is why, you know, this is why it's happening.
[01:04:52]  It's all about freeing Robert Levinson for $25 million.
[01:04:57]  Now, you might be sitting in your little gamer chair right now, quivering like a bug because you're like, who the fuck is Robert Levinson?
[01:05:04]  And why is he in Iran?
[01:05:07]  Which you say like that to make yourself sound more cultured.
[01:05:11]  I can explain that to you.
[01:05:13]  Liz, say you're the CIA, right?
[01:05:17]  And you're like, we got to send a guy to Iran.
[01:05:19]  I say that every day.
[01:05:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:05:22]  But, you know, you're like, you know, Liz, you're like Mrs. CIA, you know, agent handler, and you're going to send someone to Iran.
[01:05:32]  Immediately, top of your roster, guy who doesn't speak Farsi and is like a late middle-aged Jewish man from Florida, right?
[01:05:40]  Absolutely.
[01:05:41]  100%.
[01:05:42]  And that is precisely what happened.
[01:05:44]  So Levinson was a private investigator who had, it was admitted, this was known for a long time, had done some contract work with the CIA.
[01:05:52]  He was a former FBI agent, been in the agency until about 1998, quit because he wanted more money.
[01:05:58]  His focus at the FBI was on the Russian mob.
[01:06:02]  And he was known for developing informants, flipping people.
[01:06:05]  Like he was a people person.
[01:06:06]  You know what I mean?
[01:06:06]  He fucking, he could convince them to maybe give him a little bit of information.
[01:06:11]  And by all accounts, he wasn't like a, he wasn't a kook.
[01:06:14]  You know, he's not like some of the other guys in the story.
[01:06:16]  He looks like he was actually okay at his job in some respects when he was at the FBI.
[01:06:22]  Later, he starts working as a private investigator.
[01:06:25]  You know, some of these intelligence kind of firms, you know, digging out stuff on people.
[01:06:32]  Moves to Coral Springs, Florida, but wants to get back in the game.
[01:06:35]  And so he meets with a lady CIA agent named Liz Francak.
[01:06:40]  Just kidding.
[01:06:41]  Just seeing if you're paying attention.
[01:06:43]  A lady CIA agent from the illicit finance group, which has nothing to do with tracking Apple Pay payments to teenage prostitutes, by the way.
[01:06:51]  This is, well, maybe they do, but this is a little different.
[01:06:55]  How can you call it that?
[01:06:56]  The illicit finance group?
[01:06:58]  I know.
[01:06:59]  Well, they're tracking illicit finance groups.
[01:07:01]  I know, but it's like the mud.
[01:07:03]  You should have a more official name.
[01:07:05]  I feel like it's like them being kind of corny.
[01:07:08]  Well, it's the CIA, baby.
[01:07:09]  So, I mean, after 9-11, of course, this group got a fucking shit ton of money.
[01:07:12]  By the way, Ryder Rips can like rebrand that for them.
[01:07:15]  He didn't do that.
[01:07:16]  That was fake.
[01:07:17]  Writer Rips should not get that credit.
[01:07:19]  Some of us actually do work for the fucking CIA, and everybody thinks that's a fucking joke.
[01:07:24]  And then Ryder Rips actually makes a joke, and then people think it's real.
[01:07:27]  It's bullshit.
[01:07:28]  Someone would find out who fucking did it.
[01:07:30]  You know what would be amazing is if it was in-house.
[01:07:33]  I'm sure, well, no, it's the CIA.
[01:07:35]  It's definitely a contractor.
[01:07:36]  No, no.
[01:07:38]  Very cute.
[01:07:39]  That's very cute.
[01:07:41]  So, you know, this guy, you know, this is the mid-2000s.
[01:07:44]  There's a lot of money, you know, flying around the CIA.
[01:07:46]  We're tracking terrorist finances.
[01:07:49]  Of course, the main focus is for some reason on the country of Iran, which doesn't seem to have much to do with the Al-Qaeda kind of thing.
[01:07:57]  But I guess, you know, the illicit finance group.
[01:07:59]  They're trying to make it happen.
[01:08:00]  Well, yeah, and Al-Qaeda's illicit finances are going through the CIA too.
[01:08:03]  So you can just walk to the other group.
[01:08:05]  Right, right, right.
[01:08:06]  But, you know, hugely swelled after 9-11.
[01:08:09]  They add all these contractors into their, into their, into the illicit finance group and basically all parts of the CIA.
[01:08:16]  Levinson gets approved for a consulting contract in 2006.
[01:08:19]  But Illicit Finance Group is not on like, they're not like a field section of the CIA.
[01:08:28]  They are analysis.
[01:08:29]  That's what they do.
[01:08:29]  They analyze things and then they give that information to other people.
[01:08:33]  But if you're a consultant, the rules are a little bit.
[01:08:38]  Yeah, they let you do it.
[01:08:39]  Exactly.
[01:08:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:42]  So they let you do it.
[01:08:44]  That's going to be my new line.
[01:08:46]  They let you do it.
[01:08:47]  I like that.
[01:08:48]  I like that.
[01:08:48]  Works for you, Liz.
[01:08:51]  So this guy, this guy, he's kind of allowed a freer reign than actual CIA officers or whatever.
[01:08:59]  But his boss is particularly big eye on Iran or Iran.
[01:09:03]  So the illicit finance group is trying to track the finances of former president Rafsanjani, who they say had stolen a bunch of money via oil funds, et cetera, and had been doing all these sort of dirty deals.
[01:09:14]  I mean, that was a big thing was to try to get the leadership of Iran in trouble.
[01:09:18]  You still see that when they talk about IRGC fucking money and all this kind of stuff.
[01:09:25]  I know.
[01:09:25]  It's like fucking leave him alone.
[01:09:27]  But Levinson thought he had sort of a break in the case because an old buddy of his, and I am not making this up, named Ira Silverman, who was a former newscaster, had actually met a guy named Dawood Saladin, who was an African-American Muslim guy who in 1980 had dressed up like a postman and killed a former member of the Shah's government in the U.S. before fleeing to Iran.
[01:09:54]  Ira had interviewed this guy for New Yorker in 2002.
[01:09:58]  I read the interview, blah, blah, blah.
[01:09:59]  He says he kept in contact with Dawood.
[01:10:01]  Dawood was unhappy with the Iranian government and actually was very unhappy specifically with corruption.
[01:10:09]  And so he could connect him on this story.
[01:10:12]  So he starts, you know, Levinson starts tracking this money.
[01:10:16]  This leads him to a Lithuanian Russian gangster in Canada who actually can't come in the U.S. who can connect him with, you know, all these other different sources too.
[01:10:25]  And around this time in 2007, he shoots his superior at the CIA, the woman Jablonski is her name, an email saying that he's actually chatting to Dubai to check out a cigarette smuggling ring, which, by the way, don't ever fucking do that.
[01:10:37]  If you snitch on cigarette smugglers, because that's how you get cheaper cigarettes, like how there's some liquor stores in New York where you can get like $10 packs of cigarettes instead of $17 packs of cigarettes, that's because they're from Indian reservations and it's really fucked up that you try to fucking make those more expensive because those taxes don't even go to cool shit anyways.
[01:10:54]  Also, cigarettes are good for you.
[01:10:56]  So he hits his superior, the CIA up.
[01:10:59]  It's like, I'm heading to Dubai, but I'm also maybe going to check out this little fucking island nearby.
[01:11:03]  First of all, no.
[01:11:06]  I don't buy it at all.
[01:11:07]  I buy that person.
[01:11:08]  You think it's cigarette smuggling?
[01:11:10]  No way.
[01:11:10]  Oh, that he was actually checking out?
[01:11:11]  I don't know.
[01:11:12]  Cigarette smuggling is actually pretty lucrative.
[01:11:14]  Like, the Kurds do it a lot.
[01:11:17]  Yeah, you think the CIA is looking into that, though?
[01:11:19]  No.
[01:11:19]  Well, this wasn't for the CIA.
[01:11:21]  This was just like, he's heading out on a non-CIA business, but then when he's out there doing a little CIA shit on the side.
[01:11:27]  But that's what I'm saying.
[01:11:28]  But why is he doing that?
[01:11:29]  I don't know.
[01:11:30]  I'm like, if you're a private investigator, who's like having you privately investigate that?
[01:11:34]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:11:35]  No one's having you look into this.
[01:11:37]  I call bullshit.
[01:11:39]  I mean, it seems, I don't know.
[01:11:41]  I think he was looking at something else or he was maybe, you know, I think he was looking at something else.
[01:11:48]  Well, it does not seem like this was particularly signed off on by the CIA because it's also an insane fucking plan.
[01:11:56]  I mean, to get this straight again, a Jewish, like a 60-year-old man from Florida, or I think he's in his mid-50s at this point, who works for the CIA and who is like openly a private investigator,
[01:12:12]  very schlubby, who does not speak the language, is going to Iran to meet with a guy who is a famous defector from America to Iran to talk about corruption in the Iranian government.
[01:12:27]  Seems like a bad fucking idea.
[01:12:28]  And I'm not saying you can't go to Iran if you're Jewish.
[01:12:31]  I'm just saying if you're sending a fucking CIA agent to Iran, you might want to send a guy who fucking maybe isn't a American Jew from Florida.
[01:12:41]  But God forbid to give my superiors any fucking good ideas, which they'll just adopt in a while and fucking blame me or whatever.
[01:12:48]  Anyways, he gets out there and immediately disappears.
[01:12:53]  He's gone in like a few hours.
[01:12:55]  DeWood says he gets arrested the night before fucking he gets there, although the timeline on that's a little weird.
[01:13:02]  Doesn't even pack up his hotel room in Dubai because he thinks he'll be back like in a day or two.
[01:13:06]  Yeah.
[01:13:07]  Also, the area he's going to.
[01:13:10]  Kush Island, baby.
[01:13:11]  Yeah, Kish.
[01:13:13]  I mean, that's like legit mob territory.
[01:13:16]  Yeah, this is not.
[01:13:18]  I mean, this is like, you know, you're going into a little Billy the Beast.
[01:13:22]  Yeah.
[01:13:23]  Yeah.
[01:13:23]  Oh, absolutely.
[01:13:24]  I mean, it's a terrible fucking idea, which that's what makes me think like this is too stupid for the CIA to actually like have planned it out.
[01:13:30]  But then again, this is the numbers crunchers of the CIA.
[01:13:34]  This isn't these top of the line guys like Bryce Belden.
[01:13:38]  He disappears, and it takes about a year for the CIA to even admit to his family that he was working for them.
[01:13:43]  And they really have to kind of wrench it out of them.
[01:13:46]  And the aftermath, a few CIA officials who are overseeing Levinson get fired, including Jablonski.
[01:13:51]  They were basically like, what the fuck were you guys doing?
[01:13:53]  They look at all his reports and they say they're all a bunch of bullshit.
[01:13:56]  I don't know if that's true or not.
[01:13:58]  But his superiors were not happy with the fact that this guy was basically being cultivated as a contract asset or agent or whatever.
[01:14:09]  But the family is like, we need to get fucking Bob back.
[01:14:12]  Like, he's in.
[01:14:13]  Yeah, they're very involved.
[01:14:14]  And we should be clear too.
[01:14:16]  Like, I mean, when this happens, if people remember, the CIA doesn't come out and say, like, oops, that's our boy.
[01:14:23]  Sorry about that.
[01:14:24]  Like, in fact, the government is just like, shit, we got to get this guy back.
[01:14:27]  This is very weird.
[01:14:29]  Ex-FBI, we don't know why he was there.
[01:14:31]  Yeah.
[01:14:32]  And like, to be honest, like, they don't really, I mean, like, it's, it's also unclear who took him because as we get to later, like, there's proof of life videos, but he doesn't, like, it doesn't seem like he's necessarily in like a prison in Iran of the government.
[01:14:50]  Um, and he certainly isn't like put on trial or anything like that.
[01:14:54]  Like, to me, it looks like he maybe was kidnapped by like an organized crime ring.
[01:15:00]  Yeah, that's really what it looks like here.
[01:15:02]  Well, the family, the family, and this makes sense sort of as you look at the family's search, the family hooks up with a former arms dealer named Sarkis Soghan Soghanis Soghanalian, who's an Armenian Syrian who'd served actually in the French army during World War II and later became an arms dealer named the Merchant of Death.
[01:15:28]  He sold weapons to the Iraqis with the U.S. blessings during the Iran-Iraq war.
[01:15:33]  By the way, there's like four guys named the Merchant of Death, and I'm hoping to one day be the fifth.
[01:15:38]  But we got him, we got Alfred Noble, we got Victor Bout, and we got Basil Zakharov and Zarkis.
[01:15:44]  So that's that's a nice.
[01:15:46]  That's a good group of Euros there.
[01:15:48]  And of course, a Syrian as well.
[01:15:51]  So basically, I mean, the family is like running all over the place, going after leads left and right that they can.
[01:15:58]  The government's really not helping them out.
[01:15:59]  Like we said, it seems unclear that they, you know, diplomatic channels to the government is one thing.
[01:16:07]  The government of Iran is one thing.
[01:16:08]  But like dealing directly with organized crime is like not something that they're gonna, you know, be forthright about.
[01:16:15]  Exactly.
[01:16:17]  So finally, the family gets like finally gets contact in Iran, right?
[01:16:24]  And they meet, they actually like meet with Dawood.
[01:16:27]  Yeah, they meet with Dawood, and Dawood has essentially no information to give them.
[01:16:32]  I mean, it's actually kind of sad because Levinson's wife like goes to Kish Island and is like passing out flyers.
[01:16:37]  Which is also scary.

=== Oleg's Mob Connections (15:30) ===

[01:16:38]  It's like, dude, don't go to the place where you're.
[01:16:40]  My husband got kidnapped.
[01:16:41]  I know.
[01:16:42]  It's like, all right, baby.
[01:16:43]  I don't know if I would.
[01:16:44]  That was exactly what I would do.
[01:16:45]  True love.
[01:16:46]  I respect it.
[01:16:47]  Dawood's got no.
[01:16:48]  You go to the end of the earth.
[01:16:49]  You go to the end of the earth.
[01:16:50]  You know what I mean?
[01:16:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:16:51]  I mean, fuck.
[01:16:52]  I will say, like, if someone, you know, if, my, like, wife disappeared in fucking Iran.
[01:16:58]  I mean, I'd go to, I guess I'd go to her.
[01:17:00]  Absolutely.
[01:17:00]  You would.
[01:17:01]  Yeah.
[01:17:01]  I'd immediately hook up with an arms merchant.
[01:17:03]  I'd take it back.
[01:17:04]  Good for you.
[01:17:05]  Yeah, good for you, sweetheart.
[01:17:06]  And you know what?
[01:17:07]  I'd do it too.
[01:17:09]  He, uh, Dawood just doesn't really have any information to give her, except he gives her a copy of the Black Dahlia murder, which apparently had Levinson had given him, which means he did not know what he was doing.
[01:17:18]  This is fucking weird.
[01:17:19]  That is weird.
[01:17:20]  I don't like that.
[01:17:21]  I don't like an Easter egg that I can't explain.
[01:17:24]  I don't like that either.
[01:17:25]  I don't, that's not a good, that's a, it's like the book about the Black Dahlia murder.
[01:17:29]  It's, that's, I think that's strange to me.
[01:17:33]  Do you know anything about that?
[01:17:34]  Uh, no, and I'm not saying anything electronically either.
[01:17:39]  All I know is that I would gladly do it to anybody who ever insulted you, Liz.
[01:17:48]  Okay, so wait, I we need to talk about Russia Gate.
[01:17:52]  Exactly, because here's where it gets, here's where it gets a little, I mean, all right, if you're dragging along here, here's where it gets a little bit more.
[01:17:58]  He's also with us because we're about to talk about Russia Gate.
[01:18:00]  That Lithuanian gangster I mentioned before that Levinson met hooks up with the family and introduces them to a little guy named Oleg Dirapaska, or as I call him, Derpina.
[01:18:14]  I knew you were going to do that.
[01:18:17]  Who is this guy?
[01:18:19]  He is a, I would call him the aluminum king.
[01:18:23]  He is the owner of the largest aluminum firm in Russia, the second largest in the world, a multi, multi-billionaire.
[01:18:30]  They're called Rusol, which means Russian aluminum.
[01:18:33]  It's like Common Turn, except for Russia and aluminum.
[01:18:37]  This motherfucker is sanctioned six ways to fucking Saturday.
[01:18:41]  I mean, he is an oligarch's oligarch.
[01:18:43]  This guy is a real fucking son of a bitch.
[01:18:47]  But he is also banned from entering the United States.
[01:18:51]  And somebody gets a little idea that maybe a little quid pro quo here.
[01:18:57]  We scratch your back, you scratch ours.
[01:19:01]  Yeah, okay.
[01:19:01]  So I don't totally understand this story, but people allege that the FBI got Oleg Daraposka to pay for, to pay, and by the way, spend $25 million.
[01:19:17]  That shows up in the story.
[01:19:18]  $25 million of his own money.
[01:19:22]  A figure that is reminiscent of Mr. Matt Gates' alleged extortion.
[01:19:28]  Paid $25 million of his own money to fund an FBI operation to get Bob Levinson out of, you know, Iran.
[01:19:38]  So he puts together a super team of crocodile addicts, of people who cannot move unless they drink a bottle of vodka before getting out of bed, and very like big filler-lipped prostitutes from Moscow, all together, teaches them karate, and they break in to prison on Kish Island and rescue Bob Levinson.
[01:19:59]  No.
[01:19:59]  Although, you know what I'll say?
[01:20:02]  I won't stand for that anti-Russo propaganda.
[01:20:06]  Well, baby, I'm, you know, I'm Eastern European.
[01:20:09]  We can, that's, I can't.
[01:20:10]  You know what I think about the Russian military.
[01:20:12]  You think that they're so much better than they are, but they're not that good.
[01:20:17]  Yeah, I disagree with you on that.
[01:20:19]  I don't think they would lose.
[01:20:21]  I think they, okay.
[01:20:21]  Well, we'll get, we'll talk about this in the War Games episode where Liz and I.
[01:20:25]  Yeah, the U.S. military doesn't think they would lose.
[01:20:27]  Anyway, I agree with the U.S.
[01:20:30]  Well, okay.
[01:20:31]  I agree with what my own two eyes have seen in videos.
[01:20:35]  No, no, I said the U.S. military doesn't think they would lose.
[01:20:38]  Oh, well, they're wrong.
[01:20:40]  So anyway, another reason why you might know Daripaska, how the fuck do you say his name?
[01:20:46]  Dirbina is he paid for the Steel dossier.
[01:20:52]  Correct.
[01:20:52]  Yes, he did pay for the Steel dossier.
[01:20:54]  So this is like so weird to me.
[01:20:56]  So it's alleged that he worked with the FBI.
[01:20:59]  By the way, this is under Mueller.
[01:21:02]  This was the whole thing that conservatives were talking about during Russia Gate.
[01:21:05]  That when Mueller was head of the FBI, they got Daripaska, who is also the one who funded the Steel dossier.
[01:21:16]  And there's like some other thing.
[01:21:19]  He has his connection to Manafort, right?
[01:21:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:21:21]  Manafort worked for him and I think actually kind of ripped him off pretty badly.
[01:21:25]  Like I think buying a TV station in Ukraine, like for like millions of dollars.
[01:21:29]  They get this guy to fund a $25 million FBI off the books raid to get Levinson out, which is like the same thing that they're then trying to do with Matt Gates.
[01:21:46]  I don't understand this at all.
[01:21:48]  Very strange because the thing is with like Oleg is that Oleg probably has some pretty high-level mob contacts.
[01:21:55]  And like, you know, he does business in Iran, probably has a lot of contacts.
[01:21:59]  Very different than the little crew that's been assembled by Dave McGee and Bob Kent.
[01:22:05]  Although the sum for some reason is exactly the same.
[01:22:08]  So Dave McGee says like this was all ready to go.
[01:22:12]  Things were about to happen and that Clinton actually herself nixes it and the State Department says not going to happen, which seems to be a running theme.
[01:22:21]  So to remind you, Dave McGee is the lawyer for the Levinson family, and he is kind of the one who shows up in all these news stories and is also the one that Matt Gates says is the former DOJ official, a federal prosecutor, that is extorting him and his family for $25 million.
[01:22:40]  Now, this is a different attempt than the one with Oleg Durapaska and all these other different little schemes that people would come up with.
[01:22:49]  This is somehow for also $25 million, a little, let's say, a specifically middle-aged boomer scheme that is truly wonderful.
[01:23:04]  And so he's hooked up with a guy named Bob Kent and maybe, as we'll see, a few other people.
[01:23:09]  But real quick, as a little summation of the Bob Levinson thing, Robert Levinson's family was eventually given like, I think, $2.5 million care of David McGee by the CIA as sort of like payment for this.
[01:23:22]  But like Levinson was never released via any of the prisoner swaps that released other CIA and intelligence agents between the U.S. and Iran or anything like that.
[01:23:31]  In fact, Iran has never really acknowledged that he was.
[01:23:34]  They've made like vague statements about it, but they've never really acknowledged that he's actually in their prison system whatsoever.
[01:23:39]  And the last proof of life video of him came out in 2010, where he essentially doesn't say he was holding him.
[01:23:45]  I think there was one more photo or maybe short video a year after that where he's looking pretty bad.
[01:23:50]  But it's been widely believed that he's been dead for quite a while and his family actually finally accepted it in March of last year.
[01:23:58]  So keep in mind that the family that this lawyer works for says that Robert Levinson is dead.
[01:24:06]  That this guy works for a family, Robert Levinson's family, who's like, Robert Levinson is no longer alive.
[01:24:13]  He is a dead person and is still involved in this little scheme.
[01:24:17]  So the guy who sent that text message to Monsieur Daddy Gates is a fella named Bob Kent.
[01:24:25]  And Bob Kent was an Air Force special tactics/slash intelligence officer, according to his LinkedIn.
[01:24:31]  Claims he served from 2000 to 2007.
[01:24:35]  He gets out and immediately started serving in the private military industry and then moves on to a sort of adjacent industry, which is risk assessment and data analysis in Afghanistan and Iraq for a variety of companies.
[01:24:47]  He at one point appears to be the president of an anti-human trafficking organization in Iraq, but only for a year, and then works for an oil advisory group in northern Iraq that has zero online presence and now works for something called Overseas Strategic Services, OSS, LLC, which is another company with zero online presence.
[01:25:06]  But his wife, Liz and I spent like quite a while yesterday just looking at this man and his family.
[01:25:12]  Yeah, I mean, he seems real normal.
[01:25:15]  Yeah.
[01:25:16]  I kind of like a real family guy.
[01:25:18]  I kind of took a liking to him.
[01:25:20]  Yeah, me too.
[01:25:21]  He kind of, I think he really looks like a golden retriever.
[01:25:24]  Absolutely.
[01:25:25]  It's like he and his wife are like, they're both bodybuilders.
[01:25:28]  They're both like, they just seem so happy.
[01:25:31]  She's not.
[01:25:31]  I don't know how fused about it.
[01:25:32]  Well, she is for sure.
[01:25:33]  She's very cut.
[01:25:35]  I haven't seen, I don't think I've actually seen a shirtless Kent picture yet.
[01:25:38]  But, but, but yeah, they just seem like they're having such a good time in life.
[01:25:43]  So he says that he's got this like huge like network of all these agents inside Iraq and contacts in Iran.
[01:25:50]  And, you know, that he can kind of like, he's used those to obtain, he says, proof of life of Bob Levinson.
[01:26:01]  Which I don't really get because if you have proof of life, you should release that.
[01:26:06]  Like everyone thinks this guy is dead, including the family.
[01:26:09]  It doesn't look like the family's seen it, but yeah.
[01:26:12]  He says he, he, he is actually, there's a, there's a news week story on him from several years ago by this guy, Jeff Stein, who, uh, according to him, um, that uh, he reviewed a bunch of documents that that that Bob Kent sort of showed him that he said he got from his contacts.
[01:26:27]  And that he, I quote, says, they're a mix of clumsy fabrications and authentic papers of unconfirmed provenance.
[01:26:34]  Um, according to Bob Kent's LinkedIn, Bob Kent's LinkedIn is fantastic.
[01:26:38]  I mean, this guy really lays it all out there.
[01:26:40]  Yeah.
[01:26:40]  By the way, no Arabic or Farsi skills listed there.
[01:26:44]  Um, on April 15th, 2018, I asked my research team in Iran if they could locate Robert Levinson and began a project to locate Levinson in early May 2018.
[01:26:53]  So, like, very shortly after, my research manager notified me that he believed his team could rescue Levinson.
[01:26:59]  So, they not only found him, but they're like, we can get this fucking guy.
[01:27:02]  On May 20th, 2018, so very all happening in very short order, I traveled to Istanbul to meet with my research manager and plan Levinson's rescue.
[01:27:11]  My researchers found Levinson and visited him on June 4th, 2018, at a secret IRGC prison in Kwalms.
[01:27:18]  They took a 41-second video of Levinson and secured copies of his fingerprints in a bloodstead test sample, which is proof of life.
[01:27:26]  Which is, I mean, that's pretty extraordinary if it's true, but I haven't seen anything from that except from this guy's LinkedIn.
[01:27:33]  Yeah, I know.
[01:27:34]  He, it seems like he's keeping it real close to the vest, which is odd, but he also, it does seem like he, I mean, my read is that he's like kind of spooked about scaring people.
[01:27:47]  Yeah.
[01:27:48]  Like, he's kind of, he says, like, oh, I've got my team at the ready and we're ready to exfiltrate.
[01:27:53]  We don't want to spook anyone.
[01:27:54]  We don't want anything to go awry or whatever.
[01:27:57]  It's all very weird.
[01:27:58]  I don't even understand exactly.
[01:28:00]  Like, it seems like this dude is like 1,000% obsessed with this case.
[01:28:07]  Yeah.
[01:28:07]  I mean, that seems to be the case with a lot of these guys.
[01:28:11]  So Robert Levinson knew David McGee.
[01:28:13]  Like a lot of Levinson's friends from like, his earlier life including Silverman who, to be honest, kind of got him into this mess to begin with uh have formed this sort of obsession with getting Levinson out, and uh, and and Kent says that in in in 2018, 2018 he said he had about 250 000 in cash that he was ready to fly to Iran and and use to secure Levinson's release but was stopped at the airport by the FBI,
[01:28:41]  And so that explains some of the paranoia about getting the government out, because we've seen that basically, this was stopped by, at one point, the State Department when they were working with Oleg Deripaska, and then in 2017 or 2018 rather, by the FBI.
[01:28:57]  And so it seems like everyone's kind of just washed their hands of Levinson except for McGee.
[01:29:02]  I can kind of see, I bet that I bet that Kent's right that the FBI did intervene.
[01:29:09]  That's like totally going around sanctions.
[01:29:11]  You can't absolutely 50 cash from.
[01:29:13]  You got to be freaking Obama to give him all that damn plane loads of money.
[01:29:17]  Yeah?
[01:29:17]  You like that one?
[01:29:18]  A little throwback there.
[01:29:19]  That's funny.
[01:29:20]  Yeah, people don't really get mad about that.
[01:29:21]  I guess it happened a long time ago.
[01:29:40]  So the story would not be complete, because we got to round this out, without Scott Adams, Dilbert, because he also has to show up here.
[01:29:51]  Now, we thought that the story was done.
[01:29:55]  We thought, okay, we've got a handle on this kind of.
[01:29:58]  No, we were wrong.
[01:30:00]  The American Conservative drops an article that is, you know, leaked or whatever, passed over text messages between a guy named Jake Novak, who is the media director of the Israeli consulate in New York City.
[01:30:16]  But you repeat yourself.
[01:30:18]  Okay, Liz gave me a big glare for that one.
[01:30:20]  And Scott Adams of Dilbert fame and apparently now I think Substack fame.
[01:30:29]  Luminary, conservative luminary.
[01:30:32]  I love when people call each other.
[01:30:35]  He's like the inventor of Dogbert.
[01:30:37]  Oh, yeah, Dog Bert.
[01:30:39]  He was kind of cute and round, wasn't he?
[01:30:41]  Yeah.
[01:30:41]  Well, everybody.
[01:30:41]  He's round.
[01:30:42]  He's pretty round, right?
[01:30:44]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:30:45]  Anyway, so there's screenshots of text messages between Jake Novak, who, by the way, never heard of him.
[01:30:53]  He's a new guy, new character, and Scott Adams.
[01:30:56]  Novak messages Scott Adams last Saturday, and he is like talking about the Gates investigation.
[01:31:04]  This seems to be like just gossip.
[01:31:06]  My understanding is that the news of this investigation was about to drop, everyone was kind of talking about it.
[01:31:13]  Oh my god, Gates is under investigation.
[01:31:16]  You know, oh, salacious sex trafficking, minors, you know, and the guy, like we said, Gates is always talking about fucking, so it shouldn't come as any surprise, right?
[01:31:24]  Yeah.
[01:31:24]  Also, he's like, everyone hates him.
[01:31:26]  So I think there's a lot of come up ins here.
[01:31:28]  True, correct.
[01:31:31]  Scott basically responds with the which I've seen like kind of repeated throughout conservative media, which like immediately the knee-jerk reaction, which is, oh, these allegations don't sound credible.
[01:31:43]  They're just trying, you know, in the same line that Gates has now taken, which is, oh, they're trying to silence a conservative voice.
[01:31:48]  I have never seen more credible allegations in my life.
[01:31:53]  Well, it's, I do think that it is, it probably is like it was a seeking arrangements date, and he fucking paid for it on the company card.
[01:32:03]  I probably flew the girl to Washington or something.
[01:32:06]  And the ID, the ID scam seems very real, which is very funny.

=== Stephan Alfred's Revelations (11:23) ===

[01:32:09]  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
[01:32:10]  They seem eminently realistic.
[01:32:15]  So then what happens is Scott Adams in these text messages, he brings up the extortion counterclaim and he's like, oh, but did you see?
[01:32:23]  Gates is saying he's being extorted.
[01:32:25]  This looks very credible, or whatever he says.
[01:32:28]  And then Jake, this guy, Jake Novak, again, media director, Israeli consulate, quote, the backstory is this is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson.
[01:32:40]  My efforts.
[01:32:42]  Gates' dad was secretly funding us.
[01:32:46]  He writes finding, but I think that's auto-correct.
[01:32:48]  Was secretly funding us.
[01:32:50]  So I'm very much wanting this to be untrue.
[01:32:54]  I've got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for wire transfers to clear.
[01:33:00]  So wait, okay, stop.
[01:33:03]  Couple things.
[01:33:05]  What he's saying is, I, and I think that he's repeating what Matt Gates is saying: like, oh my God, the New York Times reporting this, and now Gates claiming that his dad was working with the FBI to entrap us is like totally fucking up our plans to free Bob Levinson.
[01:33:28]  So he's like, this is, this is sort of like, we're actually about to free him again.
[01:33:32]  And this is fucking up.
[01:33:33]  You know what I think?
[01:33:34]  I think the commando team leader here is fucking Bob Kent.
[01:33:38]  Absolutely.
[01:33:39]  The wire transfer that he's waiting for to clear is the fucking Don Gates $4.5 million wire transfer that we talked about earlier.
[01:33:46]  Absolutely.
[01:33:47]  100%.
[01:33:48]  100%.
[01:33:49]  Turns out, Jake Novak went to college with Bob Kent.
[01:33:51]  They've known each other for like 30 years.
[01:33:54]  I was very impressed.
[01:33:55]  Liz figured that out yesterday.
[01:33:58]  I thought that was impressive because I was like, how the fuck do they know each other?
[01:34:01]  And this bitch, two seconds.
[01:34:03]  I'm great at Google, baby.
[01:34:05]  Yeah, this is what he says.
[01:34:06]  Bob Kent is my lifelong friend.
[01:34:08]  Well, he did just kind of lay it out there for us.
[01:34:10]  And the best person and patriot, always a plus.
[01:34:14]  I also highly doubt McGee extorted or promised anything to Gates.
[01:34:19]  So this, to me, also sounds like Jake is not really talking to McGee that much.
[01:34:24]  No.
[01:34:24]  No, it really.
[01:34:25]  It really seems like Bob is running this show, which is very weird.
[01:34:28]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:34:29]  Because Gates' name's McGee.
[01:34:31]  Exactly.
[01:34:32]  I mean, he seems to think McGee is sort of the mastermind behind all this.
[01:34:36]  Well, he also says the $25 million number is total BS, which, hmm.
[01:34:43]  Yeah, now the Gates have burned Kent and Levinson.
[01:34:48]  I can clear up the 50% of this story that isn't true.
[01:34:52]  And he's talking about the Project Homecoming documents that were leaked to the Washington Examiner.
[01:34:57]  So he literally is saying that Don Gates edited the text messages and the documents and that none of it's true.
[01:35:06]  Well, we do see that the text messages that we have seen provided by Matt Gates were actually Don Gates copy-pasting some text messages and then sending them to Matt Gates.
[01:35:16]  So we don't actually see the original text messages, which you can also obviously easily fake too.
[01:35:22]  Yeah, totally.
[01:35:23]  Easy.
[01:35:24]  Yeah.
[01:35:25]  He also says that they changed the numbers in the project homecoming documents, that this is fake.
[01:35:31]  Yeah, the real documents do not extort.
[01:35:32]  We only asked for 25 million as an estimate.
[01:35:35]  We came way down.
[01:35:37]  Okay, so.
[01:35:38]  Well, good for you.
[01:35:38]  Okay, well, that doesn't seem fake.
[01:35:41]  Jake's Twitter is gum private.
[01:35:43]  Yeah, and he had 20,000 followers too, which I'm sure 90,000 of those, or excuse me, 90% of those were people who got really mad at me after the fake using accidents.
[01:35:51]  Yeah, this whole thing is just very weird.
[01:35:53]  It makes nothing really adds up.
[01:35:56]  I do want to mention that Matt Gates also names this guy Stephen Alford.
[01:36:04]  And he shows a photo of his business card.
[01:36:07]  And it sounds like this is one of the associates of Bob Kent that he meets with.
[01:36:13]  He says he meets with him in person when they look handwritten.
[01:36:21]  It is handwritten.
[01:36:22]  Yeah.
[01:36:22]  And also it looks hand watercolored.
[01:36:24]  Yes, it does.
[01:36:26]  Indeed it does.
[01:36:28]  Which is nice.
[01:36:30]  You know what I'll say?
[01:36:31]  Nice handwriting.
[01:36:32]  Nice handwriting.
[01:36:33]  It is nice.
[01:36:34]  Stephen M. Alford is what's written on the business card.
[01:36:38]  I just want to say this is, I'm looking at his corrections offender network photo because Stephen M. Alford is actually out on probation for, I mean, what was it?
[01:36:53]  Real estate fraud?
[01:36:54]  Land fraud?
[01:36:55]  Incredible amount.
[01:36:56]  Like trying to basically defraud the Air Force for some like insane land deal.
[01:37:01]  He gets out of prison and then immediately does like another $6 million land deal fraud too.
[01:37:09]  So this guy is just like, and also one of these took place in a place called Niceville, Florida.
[01:37:16]  Yeah, that's where they live, Niceville, Florida.
[01:37:18]  So yeah, Stephen Alford, he lists his business as Captain Consultants LLC.
[01:37:25]  Turns out that that company was incorporated by David McGee's law firm.
[01:37:30]  There you fucking go, baby.
[01:37:32]  Yeah, so he was also Stephen Alford's lawyer.
[01:37:35]  So it seems like McGee, who again is the Levinson family lawyer, is very much involved in this extortion claim.
[01:37:43]  Absolutely.
[01:37:44]  And I'm really curious to sort of see where this will go because, again, this, I mean, this came out, what, like about a week ago?
[01:37:50]  I think all this dropped.
[01:37:51]  I think almost exactly a week ago.
[01:37:53]  And more has been coming out in dribs and drabs, mostly stuff like sort of salacious details about Matt Gates' sex life.
[01:38:01]  But I'm very curious to see where this angle of the story will go.
[01:38:05]  Maybe they'll release the proof of life.
[01:38:07]  So we pledge as Truanon to spend $25 million of our own money and money that I also stole from Bitcoin people that I did some deals for to free Robert Levinson from prison and keep whatever left over that we don't have to pay.
[01:38:25]  Here's the thing.
[01:38:27]  A lot of people focusing on all the sex stuff, which, I mean, I get it.
[01:38:30]  That's why they, you know, you focus on that because it's all crazy.
[01:38:33]  And obviously the Harry Potter thing is really funny.
[01:38:37]  Terrific.
[01:38:38]  And yes, and horrific.
[01:38:39]  And also, like, Matt Gates is a total fucking clown.
[01:38:43]  Like, he's a total clown.
[01:38:44]  But this whole extortion thing is fucking weird.
[01:38:49]  Yeah.
[01:38:50]  And I don't see anyone really, I mean, except for The Examiner.
[01:38:54]  I guess like some of the right-wing publications are covering it, but like not even Daily Beast is totally covering all of the angles here.
[01:39:02]  And they seem, they're kind of all over this story.
[01:39:04]  I think partially, part of the reason is because like I don't think Scott Adams is about to leak text messages to like, you know, anybody but the American conservative or whoever.
[01:39:15]  But I will say, if you are a middle-aged conservative man who is somehow involved in this, I will lovingly read over your text messages.
[01:39:24]  Yeah, you could totally leak it to us.
[01:39:27]  You just DM me.
[01:39:28]  Just DM.
[01:39:29]  Well, don't actually DM Liz because that's weird if you do that.
[01:39:32]  We don't want to get you in any more trouble.
[01:39:34]  But you can DM me and then I'll send it to Liz.
[01:39:37]  I'll copy paste it and send it to Liz.
[01:39:41]  Yeah, I mean, this is, I'm really excited for this.
[01:39:44]  This has been one of my favorite stories of this year.
[01:39:47]  Absolutely.
[01:39:48]  I will say that a bunch of people, like their immediate reactions are like, oh, nothing's going to happen.
[01:39:52]  Like, who cares?
[01:39:53]  Republican hypocrisy.
[01:39:55]  And I'm like, no, Matt Gates, like, maybe is going to jail.
[01:39:58]  Yeah, like, I actually think there's like a pretty good chance that he will go to jail.
[01:40:01]  I don't know if he'll stay in jail, but like, I think at some point, Matt Gates will probably get arrested.
[01:40:06]  Yeah.
[01:40:06]  Like, it looks like he left a lot of evidence.
[01:40:10]  To his credit, he says he's not going to resign.
[01:40:13]  And you know what, Matt Gates?
[01:40:14]  You know what I say to that?
[01:40:15]  Thank you because I am enjoying this story too much.
[01:40:18]  Please don't resign.
[01:40:19]  People from his office, however, including his comms director, are resigning.
[01:40:24]  And I can't imagine that many people who are working for him are really looking forward to a long career in the halls of Congress.
[01:40:32]  But yeah, I mean, yeah, keep on in there.
[01:40:34]  Keep on, keeping on, brother.
[01:40:36]  not resign did we mention hezbollah We did not mention Hezbollah.
[01:41:04]  The family did meet with Hezbollah on Cyprus in, I think, 2008.
[01:41:09]  Unfortunately, they were the guy from Hezbollah, I guess, was just really confused.
[01:41:13]  I was like, I don't know where the fuck Bob Levinson is.
[01:41:15]  Like, why are you guys meeting with me?
[01:41:17]  So, if you are in Hezbollah, please reach out to us if you know how to reach Levinson.
[01:41:24]  I will say, thumbs up.
[01:41:26]  Yeah, yeah, good for you guys.
[01:41:28]  I appreciate it.
[01:41:28]  Lebanese excellence.
[01:41:31]  One of the one thing I'll say is: like, I don't fully, I don't think people fully appreciate this story, has it all.
[01:41:40]  Absolutely.
[01:41:41]  It hits every single.
[01:41:44]  I mean, we were looking into the story, and I'm looking at Mueller report Reddit.
[01:41:48]  Yeah, there's only, and I guarantee if we had another day to work on this, there'd be a China connection.
[01:41:54]  That's the only thing that's missing is China.
[01:41:57]  Interesting.
[01:41:58]  But it's there.
[01:42:00]  We just have, oh, wait, no, Chinese drones.
[01:42:04]  You know, we didn't, we didn't talk about Don Gates, but I will say that he, um, like Daddy Gates or whatever, he made his money basically like legalizing the for-profit hospice industry, which is maybe like the most like quintessentially, like quintessential American thing you can say, for-profit end-of-life care.
[01:42:27]  That's where Matt Gates' money comes from.
[01:42:30]  Yes.
[01:42:31]  And like what he did was he like reshaped, he like petitioned Congress for all these legal exceptions as he was creating this industry because it used to be illegal, right?
[01:42:41]  Yeah.
[01:42:42]  The for like it had to be nonprofit.
[01:42:47]  And so he's like creating this industry.
[01:42:49]  But basically what they did was they figured out how they made it the law so that you could get reimbursed, paid for by the government, Medicare reimbursements, based on census numbers.
[01:43:01]  So the more people that you enrolled in hospice care, the more money you got from the government.
[01:43:06]  And that's how you made your money as a business.
[01:43:09]  So like he created all these incentives for like nurses were getting paid off to refer clients into hospice, even if they didn't need it.
[01:43:20]  And there's like questions about how people gave consent and informed consent and how families were informed and all this shit.
[01:43:26]  And this is like the first largest national, I mean, it's like a national hospice industry.

=== Gates Family Scandals (01:04) ===

[01:43:33]  I mean, it's like a fucking, one of those like Netflix shows about like some anti-hero who like scams old people.
[01:43:39]  Like that's where like Matt Gates, his money comes from.
[01:43:43]  It's like fucking just like real like multi-hundred million dollar company.
[01:43:47]  Yeah.
[01:43:48]  And yeah, he sold his company.
[01:43:49]  Don Gates sold his company for like $400 million not that long ago, like 10 years ago or something.
[01:43:57]  But it's just like, you know, these are like real, real true blue Americans is what I mean.
[01:44:04]  Yeah.
[01:44:04]  The Gates family are like absolute scumbag sickos.
[01:44:08]  You know.
[01:44:10]  So I actually have to go check out my Apple Pay history right now.
[01:44:13]  So we got to end the episode, Liz.
[01:44:17]  Yeah, if you made it this far, hello.
[01:44:18]  Thank you.
[01:44:19]  Thank you so much.
[01:44:21]  My name is Liz.
[01:44:22]  My name is Brace.
[01:44:27]  And we are joined.
[01:44:28]  You thought I was going to say the last name there, didn't you?
[01:44:29]  And we are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:44:32]  The podcast is called Truanon.
[01:44:36]  Well, see you next time.