Uncensored - Piers Morgan - 20250319_the-ultimate-grifter-christopher-steele-takes-on-m
Aired: 2025-03-19
Duration: 58:45


=== Cutting Through Trump Hysteria (08:59) ===

[00:00:00]  Your dossier caused a firestorm, obviously, when it came out.
[00:00:04]  The Russians may have held blackmail video of Trump engaged in very unsavory activity with prostitutes and so on, which he's emphatically denied and for which no other evidence has ever emerged.
[00:00:17]  If it hadn't been for Mr. Steele, then Trump would have been able to solve the problem in Ukraine then.
[00:00:22]  This liar framed him essentially for treason.
[00:00:26]  I'm amazed that this guy's willing to show his face in public right now.
[00:00:29]  But I really think that you represent probably the ultimate grifter in the American political space.
[00:00:35]  Shame on you for the last decade trying to inject the idea that smearing President Trump as a Russian agent or a Russian asset is somehow going to take the MAGA movement.
[00:00:46]  Elon Musk SpaceX rescues stricken astronauts from outer space as protesters attack Teslas and the courts battle doge here on planet Earth.
[00:00:56]  Israel launches a brutal assault on Gaza as the U.S. broken ceasefire collapses.
[00:01:00]  So plenty to debate, but we begin with a fragile breakthrough in Ukraine.
[00:01:04]  You may not have enjoyed the way President Trump has gone about forcing an end to the war.
[00:01:08]  You may not think it's fair that Ukraine will lose whole chunks of its country in any final settlement, although Putin has been brought to the table without any repercussions for his war crimes.
[00:01:18]  I don't think any of that is fair either.
[00:01:20]  But the brutal truth is that the war must end.
[00:01:22]  And the president's marathon phone call with the Russian dictator, which has now been followed by another long call President Zelensky today, has brought that one small tentative step closer to reality.
[00:01:33]  The second brutal truth is that the Biden administration had no plan to end the war.
[00:01:37]  Their strategy was to give Ukraine just enough to survive, but never enough to win.
[00:01:42]  The obvious result was a forever war, costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
[00:01:47]  Something had to break the deadlock.
[00:01:49]  Trump said he would, and now he appears to be doing just that.
[00:01:53]  You can give credit for that while reserving judgment on what happens next.
[00:01:56]  But Trump's critics can't see past the narrative that he is Putin's puppet.
[00:02:01]  For the vast majority of his first presidency, the biggest story in U.S. politics was Russia Gate, the story that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to win power.
[00:02:08]  As claim after claim was disproven, critics shifted to the argument that Trump dislikes Putin more.
[00:02:13]  It came up again in his interview with Laura Ingram on Fox News last night.
[00:02:17]  The criticism that you've heard since really 2015 is that you have more in common with Vladimir Putin than you do with globalist leaders, maybe some NATO leaders, and in this case, with Zelensky.
[00:02:31]  You're both nationalists.
[00:02:33]  Zelensky's more of a globalist.
[00:02:35]  How do you respond to that criticism?
[00:02:37]  Well, I am a nationalist, but I'm a nationalist for the United States, not for anybody else.
[00:02:43]  And it's interesting because there's nobody been tougher on Russia than me.
[00:02:46]  I'm the one that pointed out Nord Stream 2, and I stopped it.
[00:02:49]  Nordstream is the biggest pipeline, I guess, in the world, taking care of all of Europe.
[00:02:54]  And it was being built from before I got there.
[00:02:58]  And somehow they were on the way.
[00:03:01]  It was going to be, and I stopped it.
[00:03:02]  It was just stone-cold dead.
[00:03:05]  I stopped it in its tracks.
[00:03:07]  Well, that is true.
[00:03:08]  It's also true that Russia's invasion of Georgia, Russia's first occupation of eastern Ukraine, Russia's annexing of Crimea, and Russia's full-scale invasion all took place with a Democrat in the White House.
[00:03:18]  And what about the whole big idea that Russia is Europe's problem to solve?
[00:03:21]  This apparently dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy that has torched historic alliances.
[00:03:25]  Well, that all began with this guy.
[00:03:28]  Because a few months ago, when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia.
[00:03:34]  Not Al-Qaeda.
[00:03:35]  You said Russia.
[00:03:36]  In the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.
[00:03:43]  Well, to be fair, that was before Russian troops invaded and seized Crimea.
[00:03:46]  So here's President Obama speaking a few weeks after that.
[00:03:51]  The point is that there are always going to be bad things that happen around the world.
[00:03:58]  With respect to Mr. Romney's assertion that Russia is our number one geopolitical foe, the truth of the matter is that America's got a whole lot of challenges.
[00:04:11]  Russia is a regional power.
[00:04:16]  Russia's actions are a problem.
[00:04:18]  They don't pose the number one national security threat to the United States.
[00:04:24]  A regional European problem, not America's biggest concern.
[00:04:27]  Sounds an awful lot like America first to me.
[00:04:30]  Well, joining me now, I'm the co-host of The Rest is Politics and former communication director under Donald Trump, Anthony Scaramucci, the host of Social Contract with Joe Walsh and former presidential candidate, Joe Walsh, the co-host of Steve Bannon's War Room, Natalie Winters, and the author of Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, Scott Horton, and the former MI6 officer and author of The Steele dossier, Christopher Steele, also joins us.
[00:04:55]  So thank you to all of you for joining today.
[00:04:58]  Anthony Scaramucci, great to have you back on Uncensored.
[00:05:02]  I've just written a column for the Spectator magazine here in the UK.
[00:05:07]  And I've said that amid all the mayhem, the squealing, the banshee shrieking that goes around whenever Trump opens his mouth, the hysteria in many ways, I do see a certain cold, calculated method to the madness.
[00:05:24]  I see somebody who campaigned that he would end these two wars, who is, it seems to me, edging nearer to doing that than his predecessor.
[00:05:34]  Somebody who said he sought the problem out on the southern border, seems to have done that almost immediately.
[00:05:39]  Somebody who said he'd fix America's structural economic problems.
[00:05:44]  And although it's obviously very turbulent right now, when the country is so riddled with debt, something has to be done.
[00:05:52]  And my bet is this might, over time, work better than doing nothing.
[00:05:58]  My point being that sometimes you have to cut through all the hysteria with Donald Trump, and you know him as well as anyone, and just focus on what he actually does and give it a bit of time to see if it works.
[00:06:09]  Am I being naive?
[00:06:13]  You know, listen, you're being very generous.
[00:06:15]  I guess what I would say to you is that Russia does not want to feel like a regional power, even if it is a regional power.
[00:06:23]  And I was with President Trump in December of 2016 when Dr. Kissinger was in the room with him, and he told Dr. Dr. Kissinger told President Trump to treat Putin like a superpower and you'll get more out of him.
[00:06:39]  So I'll continue your line of generosity with the president.
[00:06:43]  But we have Christopher Steele on.
[00:06:45]  I've read his book, Unredacted.
[00:06:47]  There's evidence that suggests that there's a tie there.
[00:06:50]  And so we couldn't figure it out in the White House.
[00:06:53]  McMaster couldn't figure it out.
[00:06:54]  If you bring him on, he can't answer for it.
[00:06:57]  But McMaster, General McMaster, went on Fox News yesterday because he knows Donald Trump, President Trump watches Fox News, and he says, look, he's going to do whatever Putin wants him to do.
[00:07:08]  And I find that hard for me.
[00:07:10]  You know, we still live in a very powerful country with the most powerful military.
[00:07:15]  And the Russian economy is crippled.
[00:07:19]  And the flex on President Trump, I don't get.
[00:07:22]  He's showing naked pictures on state television the evening of President Trump's reascent to the presidency.
[00:07:28]  He blows them off for an hour.
[00:07:30]  It puts them on hold basically for the call.
[00:07:33]  And so I guess I would push back to you and the other panelists.
[00:07:36]  And I would say, you know, what is all of that about?
[00:07:38]  Because when the windows open, Pierce, and you hear clippity clop, it's a horse.
[00:07:43]  It's not a zebra.
[00:07:44]  There's something going on.
[00:07:46]  I don't know exactly what it is.
[00:07:47]  Maybe Christopher Steele does, but there's something going on.
[00:07:51]  I would like you as a great journalist and an investigative reporter.
[00:07:54]  Let's get to the bottom of it.
[00:07:56]  Well, you know what I think.
[00:07:57]  I think, look, I think the first two years of his first term, everybody tried to get to the bottom of it.
[00:08:02]  And ultimately, the conclusion, the official conclusion, was that it was pretty much a gigantic nothing burger.
[00:08:09]  And I will come to Christopher Steele in a moment, but certainly there was no hard evidence that was established beyond any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin had helped Trump fix that election win.
[00:08:20]  And the problem with that, it seemed to me, was that because the Russia collusion narrative was taken by the mainstream media and run so aggressively for two years, pretty much 24-7, that when it turned out not to be as they had said, I think there was a huge breach of trust with the American people and outside of America, but with the American people where people were like, you know what, if that isn't true, after all you've been saying for two years, if that just isn't fundamentally true,
[00:08:50]  then what else can I believe?
[00:08:51]  So we're now in a position where it's all supposed to be a show before the other panelists.
[00:08:57]  Yeah.
[00:08:57]  See, there was no collusion.

=== The Manafort-Kalimnik Trade (11:38) ===

[00:09:00]  Listen, I sat in those things.
[00:09:01]  By the way, I told people in the Congress, we weren't even colluding with ourselves on the campaign.
[00:09:06]  How the hell were we colluding with the Russians?
[00:09:08]  So there was no collusion, and that was a specious, wrong rabbit hole to go down.
[00:09:13]  I'm more talking about the tie between President Putin and President Trump, the oligarch tie, the fact that the boys, Don Jr., Eric Trump, they said that their money came from Russia.
[00:09:28]  They said that in 2013, 14, and 15.
[00:09:31]  They then changed the tune when their dad was running for president.
[00:09:34]  So I'm not talking about the collusion issue.
[00:09:36]  You're right about that.
[00:09:38]  And they ran down the wrong rabbit hole.
[00:09:40]  And I think that put up a bigger smokescreen about the underlying Putin-Trump drama.
[00:09:46]  Which I've said enough.
[00:09:46]  I apologize for overstating that.
[00:09:48]  I think it's very interesting because you weren't there to me.
[00:09:50]  Look, you were there.
[00:09:51]  Look, Christopher Steele, I'll bring you in here.
[00:09:53]  I just think that argument, there's something there, but we don't know what it is, but it must be there by implication.
[00:09:58]  I don't really buy that.
[00:10:00]  You know, I just think if there was something there with Trump and Putin that was genuinely incriminating, and you were one of the main incriminators with that dossier, if there was something genuinely there that had been established beyond any doubt, we would know about it by now, wouldn't we?
[00:10:17]  Piers Morgan Istan is proudly independent.
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[00:11:29]  I think you have to look beyond just Trump.
[00:11:32]  I mean, the dossier itself covered not just Trump, but also other figures around him, particularly Manafort, who was the head of his campaign.
[00:11:40]  And I think the idea that Manafort and Kalimnik, if you remember the Russian intelligence officer who he worked with in Ukraine, weren't involved in some kind of corporation or collusion in 2016 is for the birds.
[00:11:52]  I mean, I think it's very clear that Manafort was probably trading campaign data and so on with Kalimnik.
[00:11:58]  And in fact, came back soon after the election, I think in the transition period, with a very sort of pro-Russian-Ukrainian peace plan, as he called it, which he presented to Trump.
[00:12:09]  There was also, of course, all the links between Mike Flynn and the Russian ambassador in the transitional period.
[00:12:15]  And if you go back before that, way back to 2008, when Trump sold one of his properties in Sunny Isles, Florida, to a Russian oligarch for assessed to be double the money that it was worth.
[00:12:28]  And that got Trump out of a difficulty in paying back and avoiding bankruptcy.
[00:12:34]  I believe at the time, Michael Cohen said that Trump had commented to him that he was indebted to Putin for getting him off that hook.
[00:12:42]  So I think there's a lot there.
[00:12:43]  And it doesn't just involve Trump.
[00:12:45]  It involves a whole range of different actors around him at the time.
[00:12:49]  Right.
[00:12:49]  But look, let's be blunt.
[00:12:51]  You know, your dossier caused a firestorm, obviously, when it came out.
[00:12:56]  It was funded by Hillary Clinton Democrats and other political opponents of Trump, leaked by BuzzFeed News just before he was sworn in as president for maximum potential damage.
[00:13:08]  And, you know, as you know, because you pend it, it contained a number of incendiary allegations, not least of which the one that the Russians may have held blackmail video of Trump engaged in very unsavory activity with prostitutes and so on, which he's emphatically denied and for which no other evidence has ever emerged.
[00:13:28]  Do you accept, Christopher Steele, that you're part of the problem here in the credibility that people attach to anything linking Trump and Putin, because so much of that dossier to this day remains unproven and much of it has been widely discredited?
[00:13:47]  I don't believe it has been widely discredited.
[00:13:49]  I would agree that some of it's been unproven.
[00:13:52]  I mean, when you dig into the real detail of this, if you look at the Mueller report, for example, we're going to go down into the detail a little bit here.
[00:14:00]  There was an exchange of emails between somebody called Rustaladze, who was working in Moscow for Agalarov, and Michael Cohen in, I think, October 2016, in which they talked about sex tapes, frankly, and about the need to suppress them.
[00:14:17]  So I think there's more to this, Piers.
[00:14:19]  If you actually look down into all the detail of the Senate report that was published, which deals particularly with Manafort and Kalimnik, and the Mueller report, as I say, which contains details, and you go back into things like the Sunny Isles deal and the Trump Tower deal and so on, there's a lot of here that isn't really understood and isn't played up.
[00:14:39]  And one of the issues with the whole collusion thing is that collusion is not a criminal offense.
[00:14:45]  And many of the investigations, particularly the Mueller investigation, were simply looking for criminal evidence for criminal prosecutions and not at the wider intelligence picture.
[00:14:54]  All right, Scott Horton, I can see you shaking your head.
[00:14:57]  And I think I saw a bit of eye rolling.
[00:14:59]  So your response to that.
[00:15:02]  Well, there's a few things.
[00:15:03]  First of all, the reason for Trump's policy goes to what Mr. Scaramucci said.
[00:15:11]  It was Henry Kissinger's advice to recreate the Russian-Sino split.
[00:15:16]  If they're getting too close together, we want to split the weaker off from the stronger, just the way Kissinger did with Nixon in the early 70s, making a treaty with China.
[00:15:27]  So Trump even had said that, yeah, Henry Kissinger told me I'm so smart because that's what I think that we ought to do.
[00:15:33]  So, this was a recognition that Russia is part of Europe and part of greater Christendom and the West, even if the eastern frontier of it, and that we want to keep them moving towards us, which had nominally been American policy since the end of the Cold War, even if very badly practiced.
[00:15:56]  That's what they said that they were trying to do.
[00:15:58]  And so that is Trump's motive here.
[00:16:01]  And if it hadn't been for Mr. Steele and his cohorts that pushed the Russia Gate hoax back in 2016, then Trump would have been able to solve the problem in Ukraine then.
[00:16:13]  Remember, the FBI told CNN after the plan to depose Trump through the 25th Amendment had fallen through, if you could believe that.
[00:16:24]  They said, well, at least we can still rein him in on Russia policy by launching this special counsel investigation, keeping the hoax going, preventing him from implementing his policy.
[00:16:35]  To this day, he brags.
[00:16:37]  I'm the one who sent the javelin missiles as he did then, because this is his body armor against the accusation that he's kowtowing to Putin.
[00:16:46]  And his son even said, oh, yeah, how can we bomb Assad then in Syria?
[00:16:51]  If we're in the thrall of Vladimir Putin, this kind of thing.
[00:16:55]  So it affected Donald Trump's foreign policy in his first term absolutely for the worst.
[00:17:02]  Because as you said, Pierce, the conflict had started back in 2014 after the loss of Crimea and then the launch of the war in the Donbass.
[00:17:11]  And so there was a Minsk II peace deal, but it had not been implemented.
[00:17:17]  And Trump's government, I don't know if Trump knows this or not, but his ambassador, Adam Taylor, told Ukraine not to implement the German proposal to try again to implement the Minsk II deal and put an end to the conflict in 2019.
[00:17:32]  And so there's that part of it.
[00:17:35]  On the details of the Steele dossier and all this stuff, I mean, you got to be kidding me.
[00:17:39]  I have 75 pages in my book.
[00:17:41]  I hope you're enjoying it, Pierce.
[00:17:42]  Damn, I've got it here.
[00:17:44]  Provoked.
[00:17:45]  Here it is.
[00:17:45]  There's a little plug for you.
[00:17:47]  How Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine by Scott Orders, a big meaty tome.
[00:17:54]  Yes, well, I hope you're enjoying it.
[00:17:56]  I do have 75 pages on Russia Gate in the end, including a section on the Steele dossier there.
[00:18:02]  And everything that he said about Manafort and Paige and all of these people in the Trump campaign were absolute lies.
[00:18:09]  In fact, an FBI lawyer even was convicted for censoring the CIA memo to the FBI saying Paige works for us as not an agent, but an asset, a loyal American patriot who always debriefed the CIA anytime he met with an important Russian businessman or government official.
[00:18:29]  And this liar framed him essentially for treason.
[00:18:33]  And by the way, his primary sources were a Russian named Danchenko, who had been under investigation for being a Russian spy in the past.
[00:18:42]  And the only reason they had dropped is because they mistakenly thought he left the country.
[00:18:46]  And then his partner, an American named Dolan, who actually was a registered agent of Russia.
[00:18:51]  They were the two primary sources who made up all those lies that you and I just recited, Pierce, that made it into Steele's dossier that they use.
[00:18:59]  And none of it was true.
[00:19:01]  Not the hacking of the DNC, not the Alpha Bank, not any of the Steele dossier.
[00:19:06]  I'm amazed that this guy is willing to show his face in public right now when he was nothing but a washed up spy who hadn't had contacts in Russia for years by the time that he published that pile of lies.
[00:19:18]  It's incredible.
[00:19:20]  Well, I think out of fairness, I should go back to you, Christopher Steele, briefly.
[00:19:25]  What's your response?
[00:19:26]  Nothing but a part of lies.
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=== A Feeling, Not Proof (08:57) ===

[00:20:38]  So I don't think there's any basis upon which to think that we were deliberately lying or misleading anybody.
[00:20:44]  And in fact, of course, the dossier wasn't meant to be made public at all.
[00:20:48]  So I think that that is going down the wrong path.
[00:20:51]  In terms of our source base in Russia, obviously we don't talk about that.
[00:20:55]  But I've made a successful business over the last 15 years, over running sources in Russia and China and other places, producing intelligence to meet high standards of corporate requirements.
[00:21:08]  So I think the idea that, you know, I'm out there lying and making stuff up is ludicrous.
[00:21:13]  Of course, intelligence isn't always entirely accurate.
[00:21:16]  Intelligence reflects the sources, reflects their motivations, reflects their access.
[00:21:21]  And of course, even in a system like Russia, you have people being dishonest with each other.
[00:21:27]  If you sat in a room when Putin was talking to Shoigu about the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine, you may well not be listening to the truth, but you're listening to a truth, which is upon which Putin makes his policy decisions.
[00:21:42]  And a lot of the conflict in Ukraine as it's unfolded and Putin's conduct of it has been based, I would argue, on distorted information being passed up the command chain to him and telling him things he wants to hear.
[00:21:57]  Joe Walsh, it seems to me that Trump's issued a statement saying he had a very good call with President Zelensky today, just completed a very good telephone call, lasting more than an hour, apparently.
[00:22:08]  Much of the discussion was based on the call yesterday with President Putin in order to align both Russia and Ukraine in terms of their requests and needs.
[00:22:16]  We are very much on track and said he'd instructed Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to give an accurate description of the points discussed.
[00:22:26]  And that statement will come out shortly.
[00:22:28]  I mean, this seems like real progress to me.
[00:22:30]  You know, you can hate Trump as much as you like.
[00:22:32]  You can think he's in bed with Putin, whatever, whatever.
[00:22:35]  But the fact he's spoken to both the leaders at length in the last 24 hours and is giving very positive noises about the way this is going, isn't that where we all want to get to?
[00:22:48]  Pierce, good to be with you.
[00:22:49]  Look, I generally don't pay attention to or believe anything Trump says.
[00:22:56]  And that's principally where you and I differ, because I do believe he generally lies every time he opens his mouth.
[00:23:03]  But Pierce, I've just got to go, and I loved your open, and I respect your open, but we talk about the Russia Gate hoax.
[00:23:12]  I don't know what we're referring to.
[00:23:15]  Everybody knows.
[00:23:17]  All of our intelligence people know.
[00:23:19]  Trump's, all of Trump's people knew at the time that Russia, in an unprecedented way, tried to impact the 2016 election.
[00:23:29]  That wasn't the allegation.
[00:23:30]  Yeah, but hang on.
[00:23:31]  Wasn't no no, a.
[00:23:33]  I didn't call it a hoax, by the way, but.
[00:23:34]  But secondly, that wasn't the central charge.
[00:23:37]  The central charge was that and the Kremlin, the Kremlin had directly colluded with Donald Trump to get him to win the election and there was no evidence for that.
[00:23:47]  It turned out to be Pierce i'm getting to that and i'll quickly get to that.
[00:23:52]  But the central thesis that Putin and Russia interfered in our election to help get Trump elected, That was accepted by all of our intelligence people, Trump's intelligent people and Obama's.
[00:24:07]  That's when Trump stood up in 2018 in Helsinki and Trump said, I don't believe my own people.
[00:24:13]  I stand with Putin.
[00:24:15]  As far as collusion, Pierce, the Mueller report is littered with collusion as there and ultimately did not conclude that Trump had colluded with Russia to fix the election.
[00:24:37]  People could keep talking about it, but the bottom line is that was the whole purpose of the investigation.
[00:24:43]  It proved Mueller and the Mueller report showed and proved collusion.
[00:24:48]  Mueller himself said it didn't rise to the level of a crime.
[00:24:53]  Right.
[00:24:53]  It was a conspiracy.
[00:24:55]  I accept that, but there was, don't say the Mueller report denied collusion.
[00:25:01]  It said the collusion we found, we couldn't prove it rose to the level of a conspiracy.
[00:25:07]  Right.
[00:25:07]  But there was collusion.
[00:25:09]  Right.
[00:25:09]  Okay, such nonsense.
[00:25:11]  That is not true at all.
[00:25:13]  Anyone can read the Mueller report for themselves and see where they come up with absolutely nothing.
[00:25:17]  They don't even have a chain of custody of the DNC leak to WikiLeaks or anything at all.
[00:25:23]  And then the Durham report is 10 times worse.
[00:25:26]  The Durham report is the investigation into the investigation and the start of it all, where John Durham, the special agent, absolutely, or pardon me, special prosecutor, absolutely debunks every shred of this hoax to the bone.
[00:25:42]  Everyone should.
[00:25:44]  Hang on, I want to bring in Natalie.
[00:25:45]  I want to bring in Natalie.
[00:25:46]  You've been waiting very patiently.
[00:25:48]  Natalie, what is your reaction to all this?
[00:25:53]  Well, I know Christopher Steele probably wanted to go down in history as someone that colluded with the Clinton campaign to take down President Donald J. Trump, but I really think that you represent probably the ultimate grifter in the American political space.
[00:26:06]  For you to even come on here, obviously you're trying to sabotage what President Trump is doing when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.
[00:26:12]  But to sit here, what is it, nearly a decade after you tried to smear President Trump as a Russian asset to then say, well, I think he's a Russian asset, but even though I'm really good at my job and create all these intelligence reports, it's just sort of a feeling that I have.
[00:26:25]  I'm sorry.
[00:26:26]  What stones do you even have left to turn over to try to corroborate your claim that President Trump is a Russian asset?
[00:26:32]  You what?
[00:26:33]  Weaponized FISA courts, surveillance, warrants, not just domestic spy agencies, international spy agencies too, the entire DNC apparatus, a bunch of political operatives and registered foreign agents here in the United States.
[00:26:46]  The American people would really appreciate it if you would stop injecting your efforts to curtail and totally tank the America First movement by smearing anyone who doesn't want to get involved in forever wars or continue the needless and ceaseless dying of Ukraine and in Russia, just so you can sit there from your nice perch and just continue to defend the globalist world order by continuing to fan the flames of conflict in Russia and Ukraine.
[00:27:13]  And you know what?
[00:27:14]  The same people that you ally yourself with here in the United States, you think you're so good at gathering intelligence.
[00:27:20]  Last time I checked, it was the 51 Intel agency officers, spies, who said that the Hunter Biden hard drive, which I've reported on firsthand, it's legitimate.
[00:27:30]  You want to talk about president sons who are involved in businesses with foreign countries?
[00:27:34]  Well, I'd like to introduce you to Hunter Biden, right?
[00:27:37]  When those 51 people that I'm sure that you know all too well, you were probably likely involved with the drafting of that letter, said that that was Russian disinformation.
[00:27:45]  Well, it turned out that that was true.
[00:27:48]  And shame on you for the last decade trying to inject the idea that smearing President Trump as a Russian agent or a Russian asset is somehow going to tank the MAGA movement.
[00:27:57]  It's about putting America first and the fact that you can still sit here and you have no actual evidence beside one random Russian meeting.
[00:28:05]  And oh, we need to just continue to get more evidence.
[00:28:07]  You're a complete political hack and grifter.
[00:28:10]  And I wish the American political scene didn't have your voice in it.
[00:28:13]  All right.
[00:28:13]  Well, Christopher Steele, you're about to leave us because you're only here for this part of the panel.
[00:28:18]  But your response finally to that.
[00:28:20]  My response is that I'm a professional intelligence officer, an expert on that part of the world.
[00:28:26]  I'm not a politician.
[00:28:27]  Was the Hunter Biden hard drive Russian disinformation then?
[00:28:30]  If you're such an expert, let him finish.
[00:28:34]  Let him finish.
[00:28:36]  So I've been a loyal and close ally of the United States for probably most of the last 40 years.
[00:28:43]  I've worked extremely closely with officials working for administrations, both Republican and Democrat.
[00:28:51]  I have a very strong U.S. client base for which I've worked and produced information over many years, none of whom have ever made any such allegation against me.
[00:29:02]  And it's palpable nonsense to claim that I'm in HOC with politicians.
[00:29:06]  The Clinton campaign didn't say that about you.
[00:29:09]  Well, I never worked for the Clinton campaign.
[00:29:12]  I never had any contact with the Clinton campaign.
[00:29:15]  That's the reality of it.
[00:29:16]  Oh, you're a contract fusion GPS investment.
[00:29:19]  I produced a report for a partner firm in Washington.
[00:29:23]  And the results of that report made me as an ally of the United States, as I would have expected an American counterpart to do, to report back in what I had found to the contacts I had in the FBI at the time.

=== Musk's Political Gamble (12:50) ===

[00:29:36]  Okay.
[00:29:36]  That was the right thing to do, and I'm proud of it.
[00:29:38]  All right, we're going to leave it there.
[00:29:41]  I think everyone's had their say about it.
[00:29:43]  I love this expert opinion.
[00:29:44]  Let's leave it there.
[00:29:45]  I want to move on to other subjects.
[00:29:46]  Christopher Still, thank you for joining us.
[00:29:47]  I appreciate it.
[00:29:48]  Hey, Mike Baker here, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast.
[00:29:52]  If you want straight talk on national security, foreign policy, and the biggest global stories going on of the day, this is the show for you.
[00:29:59]  We publish twice a day, Monday through Friday, once in the morning, again in the afternoon.
[00:30:03]  And on the weekend, we go longer with the PDB Situation Report with excellent guests, including national security insiders and foreign policy experts.
[00:30:11]  Check us out on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:30:15]  Also, on our YouTube channel at President's Daily Brief.
[00:30:19]  I'm going to let you go.
[00:30:20]  Anthony Scaramucci, I want to talk to you about Elon Musk.
[00:30:24]  You're a very successful business guy.
[00:30:26]  Elon Musk runs some of the biggest, most successful businesses in the history of planet Earth, from SpaceX to Tesla to all these things.
[00:30:35]  And he's taken a sort of leave of absence from running these companies to immerse himself completely into trying to slash federal waste through the Doge campaign that he's launched.
[00:30:47]  And the backlash against him is getting increasingly ferocious, particularly with Tesla, where people have started popping up all over America, torching Tesla cars.
[00:30:59]  People are boycotting buying Teslas now.
[00:31:03]  The very people, ironically, that used to love Elon Musk, the liberals, are now saying we don't want to touch him.
[00:31:09]  He's a neo-Nazi and so on and so on.
[00:31:11]  In Germany, where he backed the far right in an election there, they literally Tesla sales are collapsing.
[00:31:17]  There's now word that Tesla sales generally are going to be way down in their next report.
[00:31:22]  And the share price has halved, I think, in the last 10 days.
[00:31:26]  So he's got real problems here.
[00:31:28]  What does he do?
[00:31:29]  If you're Elon Musk right now, do you carry on in the political arena, given the damage to your businesses, or do you get out?
[00:31:41]  Listen, Pierce, I got in trouble.
[00:31:43]  I was on CNN and I said they're going to hurt Elon Musk.
[00:31:47]  And I like Elon Musk.
[00:31:48]  I think he's a brilliant guy.
[00:31:50]  I'll quote Jamie Dimon and tell you that what Jamie said, he's the Thomas Edison of our time.
[00:31:56]  Full disclosure, I'm an investor in X privately.
[00:31:59]  I'm an investor in SpaceX.
[00:32:01]  I don't own a Tesla, but I think Elon Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur.
[00:32:06]  But all I was saying, if he goes into politics because of the 360-degree firing squad, which I experienced, and I was only there for 11 days, it's going to hurt his businesses.
[00:32:19]  And people said, oh, I was threatening him.
[00:32:21]  I'm not threatening him.
[00:32:22]  I'm just pointing out as an observer of the political system that this would be harmful to him.
[00:32:28]  And now it has been harmful to him.
[00:32:30]  But I would submit to the other people listening in: what does he do?
[00:32:33]  Does he retreat?
[00:32:35]  Is that permanent damage done to his brand?
[00:32:38]  Or is it repairable?
[00:32:39]  I don't actually know the answer to that, but I can tell you this: if the shares keep dropping, he's going to get faced with a margin call because he put up those shares as collateral to borrow debt to purchase X, Pierce.
[00:32:54]  And so there's an entangled web there, and I know he's upset about it, which is why we had the car dealership on the south portico of the White House.
[00:33:03]  And so I get it, but I'm just saying, when you are a business person and you stray into politics, and to quote Michael Jordan, Republicans buy my sneakers too, I'm staying out of it.
[00:33:15]  I don't see how he can go back, though, sir, from where he is right at this moment.
[00:33:20]  I mean, Joe Walsh, can we all agree the attacks on Tesla cars and showrooms and so on is despicable?
[00:33:28]  Can we just start from that?
[00:33:29]  Despicable.
[00:33:30]  Yeah, I have the solution here.
[00:33:33]  Listen, the military-industrial complex, they need that money.
[00:33:37]  They have to have that tax money.
[00:33:39]  They won't get real jobs.
[00:33:40]  So here's what we do: we end all the wars.
[00:33:43]  We put all the money into a one-way mission to Mars and we send all of the military-industrial complex there.
[00:33:50]  And Musk can lead the way.
[00:33:52]  And then we could be a free country again.
[00:33:54]  Well, he does.
[00:33:54]  I mean, Elon Musk has said, I'll come back to you, Joe.
[00:33:56]  I mean, Elon Musk has said that by, I think he said within 20 years, there could be 20 million humans up on Mars.
[00:34:04]  I think that's probably a bit of a stretch, but certainly it's an indication of just how big picture he thinks.
[00:34:10]  But has he overstretched himself here?
[00:34:13]  No, we can all condemn any acts of violence, of damage, the arson, and so on, is all despicable.
[00:34:20]  But he has been very deliberately and very provocatively poking his way into UK politics, demanding that the prime minister be put in prison.
[00:34:30]  He directly involved himself in the German election, aligning himself with what many believe there to be the far right, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:34:39]  And he, of course, remains an unelected official who seems to have open access to the White House.
[00:34:43]  A lot of people don't like this.
[00:34:45]  Trump is a lot more popular than Elon Musk is right now.
[00:34:49]  Well, Pierce, look, and again, I say this as someone who's in the public eye.
[00:34:54]  Elon's got to grow up.
[00:34:56]  He made this decision, as Anthony said, to get into politics.
[00:35:02]  That's not all, though, Pierce.
[00:35:04]  He chose a side, and he's free to do that.
[00:35:07]  And he chose to join Trump and MAGA.
[00:35:11]  And he chose to attack the left.
[00:35:14]  And he chose to get involved, as you said, in European elections.
[00:35:19]  He's free to make those decisions.
[00:35:22]  Because he chose to be partisan, absolutely then.
[00:35:27]  He's going to take the protests, the boycotts.
[00:35:32]  He's going to take the hate because he's jumped into the arena and he's chosen a side.
[00:35:39]  And now he's got to live with that.
[00:35:40]  Having said that, Pierce, political violence is always wrong.
[00:35:45]  Yeah.
[00:35:46]  I mean, unacceptable.
[00:35:47]  Right.
[00:35:47]  So, Natalie, I mean, it seems to me, look, there's no doubt that I kind of get the big picture here that Trump and Musk are trying to do.
[00:35:54]  I do.
[00:35:55]  And it may well turn out to work.
[00:35:57]  But there's no doubt in the short term, in the first eight weeks, Trump's popularity has dramatically reduced, as has Elon Musk even more dramatically.
[00:36:08]  You know, people want quick results.
[00:36:09]  They're not getting them.
[00:36:10]  They're seeing the stock market tanking.
[00:36:12]  They're seeing prices for most products still very high, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:36:19]  How careful do they have to be here?
[00:36:21]  Because they got a big win, Trump and the Republicans at the election.
[00:36:26]  How careful have they got to be right now?
[00:36:30]  Well, I don't necessarily know if President Trump and Elon Musk are hemorrhaging support.
[00:36:34]  I think there's been some recent poll numbers coming out showing that it's really the Democratic Party who's having a real identity crisis.
[00:36:40]  Well, they're far worse.
[00:36:41]  I agree.
[00:36:41]  They're far worse.
[00:36:42]  But there's no doubt all the polling I've seen shows Trump's polling and Musk's in particular are significantly lower than from Election Day.
[00:36:50]  Well, I think the American people are not.
[00:36:52]  Except the Democrats are completely in the tax.
[00:36:54]  I mean, the Democrats are shot to pieces.
[00:36:56]  I think we can all agree with that.
[00:36:58]  Worst polling in recorded history and thoroughly deserved for the shambolic way they've behaved in the last year.
[00:37:05]  But let's focus just on Trump and Musk.
[00:37:07]  You know, they're all in on what they're doing.
[00:37:10]  But at the moment, the public, I would describe it as they're wary.
[00:37:13]  They're like, we're nervous about this.
[00:37:17]  Well, I think the way that the media has depicted what they're doing is contributing to that.
[00:37:20]  I think overwhelmingly, the American people support the idea of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse.
[00:37:25]  Be my guest if you want to find me a Democrat or an American citizen who wants to send millions and at the end of the day, billions of taxpayer dollars, not just to fund the weird transgender musicals in foreign countries, but really weird, perverse bioweapon research in countries like China.
[00:37:40]  I don't think that that's something that the American people support.
[00:37:43]  I do think there is overwhelmingly a lot of support for the Doge efforts.
[00:37:47]  I think there's sort of this maniacal focus on these protests against Elon Musk.
[00:37:51]  I don't necessarily share your victim-blaming idea that just because someone waves into the political space, that therefore their companies should be attacked, there should be brutal demonstrations, cars set on fire.
[00:38:03]  I think people can oppose Tesla by choosing not to buy those cars.
[00:38:06]  But what you're seeing is extremely well-funded and coordinated demonstrations targeting really him from the vantage point where I think Democrats for the last four years, they used lawfare, they used over-regulation.
[00:38:16]  Frankly, they used censorship because they had all the levers of the government to do so.
[00:38:21]  And now that they don't, they're desperate.
[00:38:23]  They're flailing like the polling we were just talking about.
[00:38:25]  So they're acting out like petulant children and trying to burn down cars and attack not just Elon Musk, but attack his supporters.
[00:38:32]  But I just reject your premise that Doge is something that is not popular with the American people.
[00:38:39]  Debates about the Medicaid Medicare.
[00:38:40]  Yeah, yeah, listen.
[00:38:41]  So I think you slightly mischaracterize what I said.
[00:38:44]  I don't think Doge is particularly unpopular.
[00:38:48]  I think what's happened, and I'll come to Scott for this, it's just the personal approval ratings for Trump and Musk in particular have fallen significantly and are continuing to fall.
[00:38:59]  What do you make of this?
[00:39:00]  Because it's a very unusual way they're going about a presidency.
[00:39:03]  Like I said, my gut feeling is they're on to the right thing, but it may take a significant amount of time to realize itself and they may not get enough time.
[00:39:14]  Well, I don't know about his poll numbers and what's really behind all that.
[00:39:19]  I hope it's because a huge part of the MAGA right is trying to hold him to his word about America first, not Israel instead.
[00:39:27]  And I guess that goes to our next topic or one of our topics today is the horrible war there and Donald Trump acting just like Joe Biden, just like Kamala Harris would in his position, giving Netanyahu a blank check to cancel the peace deal and bomb whoever he feels like, including a hell of a lot of children.
[00:39:45]  If you look at X.com and the feed there at the horrific pictures coming out of Palestine there.
[00:39:52]  And that's it's the most obvious contradiction.
[00:39:57]  You can't be America first and Israel instead.
[00:40:01]  It's got to be one or the other.
[00:40:02]  And I know the American right is almost solidly on the side of Israel in almost all cases, but everybody's got their limit.
[00:40:12]  And, you know, the American right used to really believe in George W. Bush in the Iraq war until they decided they didn't anymore.
[00:40:19]  And I think there's a big crackup coming on the right because what we're supporting there is just absolutely horrific.
[00:40:26]  I mean, they're talking about, oh, well, maybe we'll just transfer the population to Syria so they can go live under the rule of al-Qaeda that America and Turkey just helped install in power there and Israel helped install in power there.
[00:40:37]  I mean, this is completely insane, what they're talking about and what they seem to have in mind.
[00:40:42]  I don't know if they have an idea of how they mean to accomplish it, but I was having a good time watching Elon Musk fire government employees.
[00:40:51]  And I'm angry at the judges every time that they turn back these firings.
[00:40:55]  And I don't extend that to the immigration thing.
[00:40:57]  That's different.
[00:40:58]  But I mean, specifically those guys who were just deported to El Salvador, whether they'd ever been there before in their lives.
[00:41:05]  But a lot of these judge rulings drive me crazy.
[00:41:08]  I love seeing the death of U.S. aid, or at least, you know, its massive diminishment and a lot of the rest of this stuff.
[00:41:15]  Yeah, and I would also say, Joe, I will come to you, Joe.
[00:41:18]  I would say, just in Elon Musk's, to his credit, you know, we're seeing the best of him as well this week with the return of the NASA astronauts from the international space station situation they got themselves into.
[00:41:32]  You know, that is Elon Musk at his absolute best, you know, doing what he does best.
[00:41:38]  Yeah, Joe.
[00:41:39]  No, Pierce, to what Scott just said, these judges drive me crazy.
[00:41:44]  Well, I'm sorry.
[00:41:45]  That's our constitutional system that's driving you crazy.
[00:41:50]  And this is part of Elon's and Trump's problem: is that the vast majority of what they're doing is unconstitutional.
[00:41:59]  A judge just came out yesterday and said everything they've been doing with USAID is not constitutional.
[00:42:06]  That matters.
[00:42:08]  That doesn't mean Trump and Musk don't have recourse.
[00:42:11]  They can appeal that judge's rulings, but you don't do what Musk and Trump do and just scream that, oh, these judges must be impeached.
[00:42:21]  Excuse me.
[00:42:22]  That's part of the system.
[00:42:24]  This constitution is the system.

=== Israel vs Hamas Buffer Zones (14:19) ===

[00:42:26]  Well, look, I agree with that.
[00:42:28]  And really, they should be going to Congress for as much of this as they possibly can.
[00:42:31]  On the other hand, you notice that the president can do anything he wants.
[00:42:35]  Obama can announce the launch of a war against Libya while he's on vacation in Brazil.
[00:42:40]  He announced the war in Yemen in 2015 by having a State Department spokeswoman just put out a press release.
[00:42:48]  So the American president is the emperor of the world.
[00:42:51]  You can do just about anything except fire government employees and stop executive branch employees from abusing their power and wasting our money.
[00:43:00]  The moment he tries to do that, the whole government acts like anti-bodies fighting a germ against their own president, just the same as last time when they framed him for treason with Russia to keep him from exercising power of his own government.
[00:43:12]  You know what they said?
[00:43:13]  They said, Trump is like the captain of a ship.
[00:43:16]  He's holding the wheel, but it's not attached to anything because his whole government is in rebellion against him, even though he's the one who stood for election and won the right to sit in that chair behind that desk, not them.
[00:43:28]  Okay.
[00:43:28]  Let me, Anthony, I think you've got a slight hard out today, but I just wanted to talk to you about what's happening with Israel.
[00:43:35]  The IDF, as we've been talking, says it's launched a new limited ground invasion in Gaza.
[00:43:41]  The Israeli government says it's to retake part of a key corridor into Gaza.
[00:43:46]  Obviously, this follows extensive airstrikes in the last two days.
[00:43:50]  You know, we have to go on the Palestinian, the Health Authority, which is Hamas run on the death toll.
[00:43:58]  But it's believed up to 1,000 people may have been killed in the last two days in this new offensive, which has obviously shattered the ceasefire.
[00:44:07]  Now, I get the argument from the Israeli side that if Hamas is suspending the process of releasing the hostages, there's still nearly 60 who are being held, they believe, you know, who are still alive.
[00:44:20]  But if it is doing that, then obviously at some point, Israel is going to have to do something to try and force them to release them.
[00:44:26]  Is it, though, the right course of action to go out and create a thousand more deaths, whatever it may be, including God knows how many children, because half the population is under 18.
[00:44:40]  I just think the optics of this for Israel are terrible.
[00:44:43]  And I also think that their central point, which is the whole war is about eliminating Hamas, at the moment, there's no sign they've done that at all.
[00:44:52]  In fact, by releasing hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as part of this hostage deal, they're running back, presumably many of them aligned ideologically with Hamas.
[00:45:03]  We've seen with the release of the hostages so much support for Hamas on the ground in Gaza still.
[00:45:09]  So they don't seem to be achieving the central aim of the war.
[00:45:13]  What they're doing is just killing more and more people, which I have always felt at some stage would just start to fuel rather than kill off the ideology.
[00:45:25]  Well, listen, this is going to be a controversial statement.
[00:45:29]  I'm sure I'm going to inflame everybody that's on the panel with me.
[00:45:32]  But I always thought that they needed to create a buffer zone there, and they should have done that with some level of cooperation in the Arab world.
[00:45:41]  I think that the president actually hurt the situation by saying he was going to, I guess, move 1.8 million people out of the region.
[00:45:49]  Obviously, his allies in the Gulf rejected that out of hand, and he had a reverse course last week by saying, of course, he's not going to do that.
[00:45:57]  But to me, I think what they're doing is actually hardening opposition against Israel.
[00:46:03]  And I'm obviously a strong proponent for Israel, and I'm a supporter of Israel, but I don't think we can support indiscriminate death.
[00:46:12]  I think it's just something that, you know, imagine if Winston Churchill guys or any of our allies during the war, you know, we killed 400,000 German civilians through the bombings.
[00:46:24]  And the bombing of Dresden, Piers, I know you know a lot about it.
[00:46:28]  Curtis LeMay is obviously a war criminal based on what he did in Dresden, but it wasn't well reported.
[00:46:35]  Just imagine if these people had this type of reporting or your show going on during the Second World War.
[00:46:40]  So to me, the- Yeah, but that was one of the reasons why we created things like the Geneva Convention.
[00:46:45]  I mean, there was a widespread acceptance that there were horrific crimes committed during the war, which should not be allowed to happen again.
[00:46:52]  I thought Dresden was appalling and should not be allowed to have happened.
[00:46:56]  But that was why they set up the Geneva Convention and other instruments to avoid.
[00:47:01]  So I just want to make this point then.
[00:47:03]  So why didn't we have an international coalition of people?
[00:47:07]  There's a lot of willing people to create a strategic buffer zone in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Gaza.
[00:47:17]  And then, you know, the issue related to the political support around Hamas, we could address that by taking the security concern away from Israel.
[00:47:30]  And so what Israel is saying right now is that we're threatened by Hamas.
[00:47:33]  Hamas has lots of political support.
[00:47:35]  We're going to continue to bomb them until morale improves.
[00:47:39]  And that has never worked, Pierce.
[00:47:42]  I can answer that.
[00:47:44]  First of all, I think it's important, and everyone on this panel and in this audience has heard Israeli officials invoke Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the precedent for why they can bomb this Indian reservation the way America took it out on Hitler and Tojo, which is completely insane and, as noted, completely illegal, because that's why they wrote the Geneva Conventions in the first place.
[00:48:06]  Secondly, Mr. Scaramucci, the thing is, there is a buffer zone around Gaza.
[00:48:11]  There has been for a very long time.
[00:48:13]  That's why we call October 7th, October 7th, not the second week of October or, you know, the autumn of 2023.
[00:48:22]  It lasted one day because what happened essentially was people broke out of their pen because the Israeli security forces were completely negligent in their so-called duty to keep those people locked in there.
[00:48:35]  They literally had automatic machine guns like idiocracy on remote control, and they got caught with their pants down on a Saturday morning, but the whole thing was over by midnight.
[00:48:46]  Okay, so there is a buffer zone.
[00:48:48]  In other words, they don't have to do this at all.
[00:48:51]  They never did.
[00:48:52]  And when it comes to the entire history of Israel-Palestine since the creation of the state, their special operations forces and spies have shown that they can reach out and touch someone one at a time.
[00:49:04]  They do it all the time when that's what they want to do.
[00:49:07]  Instead, what they've done here is level the place, invoking Dresden, level the place to make it uninhabitable because they want to steal it.
[00:49:16]  They want to drive the Palestinians out of there.
[00:49:18]  If they can't push them into Egypt, now they're promoting, pushing them into Syria.
[00:49:23]  The Wall Street Journal even let a couple of Israeli officials run an article in our paper saying, you take them.
[00:49:29]  You love the Palestinians so much.
[00:49:31]  And this is their plan.
[00:49:32]  And what's worse is they don't even really care that much about the Gaza Strip.
[00:49:36]  It's the West Bank that they want.
[00:49:38]  But they're going to go ahead and try to take care of this while they can.
[00:49:41]  And that's why they broke the ceasefire.
[00:49:43]  They don't want a ceasefire.
[00:49:46]  I want to give Anthony the chance to respond before we go.
[00:49:48]  You don't have time for me to respond to that, but that does deserve a response.
[00:49:53]  Go ahead.
[00:49:54]  Sure.
[00:49:54]  No, Anthony, before you go, just respond to that.
[00:50:01]  Listen, you could go back to 9-11.
[00:50:04]  The way the Americans responded was very aggressive in 9-11, and it was an overreach to go into Iraq.
[00:50:10]  So we're in agreement that there's an overreach going on right now.
[00:50:14]  But if you're telling me you're in a seat of political leadership and there's an attack like that, and I've seen the 47-minute IDF film, and I just ask you to put yourself in the shoes of an Israeli political leader, you're in a very, very tough spot in terms of how you're going to protect your country.
[00:50:32]  You're right about the dereliction of duty at the border on that Sunday morning.
[00:50:38]  But I'm just telling you, they were in a tough spot.
[00:50:41]  What I'm saying is that they had to respond.
[00:50:45]  I mean, I would add this point, which is...
[00:50:47]  I would add this point.
[00:50:48]  Scott, I would say this.
[00:50:50]  I would say this.
[00:50:50]  The scale of what Hamas did that day, 3,000 of them in three ways coming over the border, committing mass, horrific acts of terrorism against anyone that could get the capitation.
[00:51:03]  1,200 were murdered, at least.
[00:51:06]  250 odd were kidnapped, including babies, Holocaust survivors, and so on.
[00:51:11]  Nearly 7,000 more were wounded.
[00:51:13]  The idea that Hamas launched such an enormous attack on Israel without knowing for an absolute certainty as they did so, the scale of Israel's response was going to be equally enormous, if not a lot more so, I think is for the birds.
[00:51:30]  And listen, you can go back in any political argument.
[00:51:33]  I agree with you, by the way, about the argument they broke out of the pen.
[00:51:37]  I get all this.
[00:51:38]  I get the argument that, you know, the Palestinians have been oppressed for a long period of time, that they should have equal rights.
[00:51:45]  I agree with all this.
[00:51:46]  There should be a two-state solution, everything.
[00:51:48]  But anyone that tries to in any way mitigate or downplay the scale of what Hamas did, and that is why it runs so deep, I think, on the Israeli side.
[00:51:59]  I think that is part of the problem here.
[00:52:02]  I didn't say anything to diminish.
[00:52:04]  No, no, I'm not saying you did.
[00:52:06]  I'm just saying there's something.
[00:52:09]  We've got to let the mooch go.
[00:52:11]  Anthony, I really appreciate you joining us.
[00:52:12]  I know you've seen me.
[00:52:15]  I've stolen six more minutes than I was supposed to from you, Anthony.
[00:52:18]  Every minute is gold.
[00:52:19]  You know that.
[00:52:20]  I just said radio.
[00:52:21]  I know you do.
[00:52:22]  And I really appreciate it.
[00:52:24]  Thank you for having me on.
[00:52:25]  I really appreciate joining you.
[00:52:26]  And I'm loving your show.
[00:52:28]  Thank you very much.
[00:52:29]  Great to see you.
[00:52:30]  Let's just pick up with the rest of the panel.
[00:52:32]  I mean, Natalie, it seems to me that Israel is not achieving its aim.
[00:52:37]  It can level as much of Gaza as it wants, but ultimately it is not, according to all independent studies of what's happening there, it is not eliminating Hamas or its ideology.
[00:52:49]  If anything, it might be fueling even more hate towards Israel.
[00:52:55]  No, exactly.
[00:52:56]  I mean, it looks like it's shaping up to be another forever war.
[00:52:59]  And I really take the viewpoint that I care about this from the America first perspective.
[00:53:04]  I don't think the United States should be continuing to fan the flames of war anywhere, let alone when you look at the atrocities that have been committed on both sides.
[00:53:12]  Obviously, it's a very heated issue.
[00:53:13]  But to that point, I think when you look at the college campus demonstrations that we had or even the advocacy of people like Mahmoud Khalil, right?
[00:53:20]  That's a case that's really in the forefront of everyone's mind right now.
[00:53:24]  You know, he hates Israel and by extension, the United States of America because of a conflict that's going on very, very, very far away from us that we're entangled in because of, I would argue, along with, you know, political influence and stuff, but also it has to do with energy dominance and oil.
[00:53:39]  That's also what's going on in Russia and Ukraine.
[00:53:40]  And when I see conflicts like this, my first and foremost priority, obviously, is putting America first, but it's also the importance, I think, of American energy independence and frankly, American energy dominance.
[00:53:51]  So we're not so embedded with whatever country it may be, Ukraine, or in this case, it's Israel, and having to support countries for reasons that are not explicitly or demonstrably beneficial to Americans that lead us to essentially importing a bunch of people, if not homegrown Americans, who sort of have an affinity or an allegiance to Hamas because they really dislike what Israel's doing.
[00:54:12]  Yeah, you know, it's very interesting, Joe, I think the way the Republicans, a lot of Republicans view Ukraine as a very different situation to Israel and Hamas.
[00:54:23]  You know, I had a big argument with Tucker Carlson about this because I said, well, what's, I don't understand.
[00:54:28]  If the reason for getting out of Ukraine and not helping Ukraine is America first, you don't want to get involved in foreign wars many, many thousands of miles away from America's border.
[00:54:38]  It's not in American national interest.
[00:54:40]  Okay, it's a perfectly reasonable argument you can have, particularly as America's been involved in so many wars that you cannot point to much victory in the last 70, 80 years.
[00:54:51]  But what is the distinction then, ideologically, between them getting involved in helping Israel in a war over in the Middle East?
[00:54:59]  And they sort of, they go through a real set of hoops trying to explain to me why one is okay and the other one isn't.
[00:55:07]  When it seems to me you're either against both of it or you probably seem to be support both.
[00:55:14]  Pierce, that's a great point.
[00:55:16]  And look, I say this as someone who is most everybody on this panel would think I'm idiotically pro-Israel.
[00:55:23]  I am.
[00:55:25]  But the Israel caucus.
[00:55:28]  Israel has great influence on my former party, the Republican Party.
[00:55:33]  Israel also, Pierce, though, is a great, great, long ally of ours.
[00:55:38]  You beautifully, Pierce, described what October 7th was.
[00:55:44]  And again, I know we have to find a solution, but October 7th changed everything for Israel.
[00:55:52]  The days of them living next door to a terrorist group like Hamas, not acknowledging Israel's right to exist, those days are done.
[00:56:04]  So yeah, there needs to be some sort of big, broad solution here, and the moderate Arab world needs to get involved damn quickly.
[00:56:13]  But we're never going back to the world where Hamas is ruling Gaza.
[00:56:17]  Those days are done.
[00:56:18]  No, but I mean, I think the concern is that the ideology behind Hamas, the American intelligence seems to suggest for every Hamas terrorist who's been killed, they've already replaced them with somebody that shares that ideology.
[00:56:32]  If that is true, and you add all the hundreds of prisoners being released, many of whom will, I'm sure, be sympathetic, if not active supporters of Hamas, it's hard to see how the mission statement of this war is going to be achieved.

=== Thanking Our Supporters (01:59) ===

[00:56:46]  We've got to end it there, but Scott, I want to give you a chance to plug your book, this meaty tome, as I said earlier.
[00:56:52]  For those who are not familiar with you or your work, just very quickly summarize the book and why they should buy it.
[00:56:59]  Well, thank you very much for that, Pierce, and for having me on again.
[00:57:02]  The book is, again, called Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
[00:57:08]  And it starts with the end of the last Cold War under H.W. Bush.
[00:57:12]  And then each chapter is an American president all the way through Joe Biden and explaining shock therapy, the Balkan Wars, the color-coded revolutions, the so-called revolution of dignity in 2014 and the war in eastern Ukraine.
[00:57:28]  And all of the foreign policy wonks who admitted they knew better all along while they all did it anyway.
[00:57:35]  And I have 6,000 footnotes, 7,900 citations, almost 8,000 citations for you there, including all first-hand sources for you.
[00:57:45]  And it's been number one in War and Peace on Amazon for four months straight now, except for about a week when Jimmy Carter died.
[00:57:52]  But it's doing real well, and it's endorsed by the great Ron Paul.
[00:57:56]  So I don't know what more I could say about it than that.
[00:57:58]  Hey, Scott, Scott, I haven't read it yet.
[00:58:01]  It'll probably piss me off, but I'm going to read it.
[00:58:04]  And I'd love to have you on my podcast to talk about it.
[00:58:07]  Thanks.
[00:58:08]  Okay, sure thing.
[00:58:09]  There you go.
[00:58:10]  I'm getting you extra work, Scott.
[00:58:11]  What more can a host do?
[00:58:13]  I want to thank you all.
[00:58:14]  A very interesting debate today.
[00:58:16]  Thank you very much.
[00:58:16]  I appreciate it.
[00:58:17]  Thanks, Pierce.
[00:58:18]  Good luck with the book, Scott.
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