James O'Keefe's exit from Project Veritas was supposed to have been handled internally, but was leaked to the media by the board of directors in order to protect the company from public scrutiny. Instead, it was leaked publicly to the press.
00:02:11.000I have a copy of the emergency meeting here for you guys to take a look at.
00:02:15.000It's in writing. You could read it. You don't have to be there. You can read the minutes.
00:02:20.000They're official board minutes. They're written by a lawyer.
00:02:24.000My first question on the phone to this guy, my colleague, as I was staring at this agenda,
00:02:30.000when the stewardess was asking me to get off the phone, was, quote,
00:02:35.000what are we going to tell our supporters if I'm removed from my position?
00:02:39.000I think that's the first question. I haven't had a hundred questions, but that was the first one.
00:02:43.000My colleague, who is an officer of Project Veritas, responded by saying,
00:02:47.000our supporters wouldn't have to find out.
00:02:52.000Sounds like something you would get in the Claire McCaskill campaign.
00:02:55.000It sounds like something you would expose.
00:03:00.000I was so shocked by this, and again, the stewardess was asking me to get off the phone.
00:03:05.000I guess you could say that I was in a state of complete shock.
00:03:09.000How would our supporters not be informed of such an enormous thing?
00:03:13.000It was a lapse in judgment so severe that it was itself a fireable offense to make a statement like that.
00:03:21.000It was a lapse in judgment so severe it was impossible to hide my removal from my position at Veritas to anybody.
00:03:28.000As the CEO and chief fundraiser, I have to explain the context of my role to thousands of people 300 days a year on the road while soliciting them for funds so that I can pay you.
00:03:42.000And I knew many of our supporters and donors would not like that change.
00:03:46.000If I was removed from the chief decision-maker at the organization I founded, I share who we are, our vision, our structure, our strategy with everybody.
00:03:55.000In fact, hiding something so fundamental from people is something that we stand against in principle, particularly with the amount of scrutiny that we're under.
00:04:03.000The doors closed, the plane took off, but somehow, over the next few hours, I was able to convince the board to push this emergency meeting to that Monday, February the 6th.
00:04:14.000The very next day, and this is where things get really bizarre.
00:04:59.000On Sunday, February 5th, now that's Sunday, two days after the Friday, a board member requested my presence at his home.
00:05:09.000He informed me, quote, you had nothing to do, James, with this Pfizer story, unquote.
00:05:18.000Perplexed by this, I took out my iPad and showed him a video of myself confronting the Pfizer executive, which had 11 million views on YouTube.
00:05:28.000He responded, quote, but that was after the undercover video had already been done, unquote.
00:05:34.000I pointed out that the brave journalist, and many of you know who this person is, I'm not going to name anyone, who recorded the interaction was someone that I had to sit down over a year prior.
00:07:13.000There was also some truly bizarre grievances, including my failure to record audio in one encounter at a bar in upstate New York.
00:07:22.000And an allegation that I stole a pregnant woman's sandwich in federal court.
00:07:29.000There were also discussions from a few staffers with donors in the boardroom.
00:07:34.000Donors were listening to some of this.
00:07:36.000And some of these were sent directly to donors without my consent.
00:07:39.000Donors who have no knowledge of my personal life and have no business asking questions about my personal life about girls I've dated in the past.
00:07:48.000A fundraising colleague relayed, and again, this is going to start getting really strange, but I'm...
00:07:57.000This board meeting was video recorded.
00:08:02.000A fundraising staffer relayed, quote, concerns about my behaviors regarding videos where I, quote, literally chased a Twitter executive around New York.
00:08:14.000By acclamation from all of you, in 2022, that video about the Twitter chase was one of the most successful videos.
00:08:23.000But yet, your colleagues in a boardroom were expressing concerns about it.
00:08:29.000Every board member previously communicated their love of that video, but none pushed back in that moment when the staffer criticized it.
00:10:43.000So I went off the grid as requested, went hiking with Kennedy in the mountains.
00:10:52.000Within a few days of going off the grid, I started receiving missed calls and texts from the same board members and officers who demanded I be gone.
00:11:00.000They informed the staff that they're waiting to hear from me.
00:12:00.000With the meeting's minutes reflecting that they had indefinitely suspended me from the board, by this time, they had stripped me of all of my authority as CEO.
00:12:11.000During the time I was on leave, they kicked me off the board.
00:12:14.000So, I can't be a CEO if I have no authority.
00:12:31.000In the board minutes, it says that I no longer have a paycheck and I'm indefinitely suspended from this organization.
00:12:41.000When I left the office, and this is where I'm going to get emotional, so please forgive me.
00:12:45.000When I left the office on February 6th, after being stripped of all my authority, I saw my father and gave him a hug.
00:12:52.000Realizing just how honest and real of a man he is.
00:12:57.000Both my parents are as genuine and down to earth as a son could ever have.
00:13:02.000It's true you never really know someone until you go through hell with them.
00:13:05.000You see, back in the carriage house 13 years ago, the feds would come to my home to make sure that I was inside my house administering random drug tests and rifling through my expenses to make sure I wasn't lying about the strawberry ice cream I bought at 7-Eleven.
00:13:24.000I didn't have any money, but they went through my debit card statements and tried to get me to sign things to prove I wasn't lying.
00:13:33.000There were federal agents showing up at my parents' house.
00:13:36.000There were no donors, there were no supporters, and I was not trending on Twitter.
00:13:43.000My father went through this hell with me and stood up to those bullies on the front lawn and told them to stop harassing our family.
00:13:52.000And at that point, that's all I had was him.
00:15:17.000To dig our country out of this mountain of debt, every single taxpayer in America would have to write a check for $247,000, and it's only going to get worse.
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00:16:32.000After 2014, we began helping Ukraine build the military that is succeeding, and creating a mid-level corps of non-commissioned officers was a big part of it.
00:16:44.000Ukraine had had a Russian-style army in terms of tactics, in terms of the ways it used armor, in terms of under-resourced middle commanders, and that began to change.
00:16:58.000The centerpiece of that was our training of Ukrainian special forces.
00:17:02.000We're dispersed now around the country and doing all kinds of extraordinary things.
00:17:07.000Same time, we began to develop new ways to use technology and to integrate our ability to see the battle space with extraordinary fidelity and update it constantly through AIs.
00:17:19.000You know, understand what a target looks like, feed it into the system, use it for intelligence analysis, use it for targeting.
00:17:26.000And if you wonder why the Russians are always on their back foot, why they never seem to make much progress, it's because we have applied technologies for modern warfare that have never been seen.
00:19:27.000It's actually America deeply involved on the ground in Ukraine, effectively right now at war with Russia.
00:19:34.000But to your very important point, without any resolution from Congress, certainly without a declaration of war.
00:19:41.000And without even the decency to come to the American people and make the case dispassionately with facts and data to the American people why this regional struggle matters so much to the United States.
00:19:56.000You know, when David Ignatius talks about the way U.S. technology is being used, U.S. targeting about the high fidelity view of the battle space.
00:20:04.000All of that sounds like a nation that is very much at war.
00:20:07.000And in fact, I think that is the reality that this war has already begun.
00:20:10.000But it's not too late for us to draw it back, particularly now that we control the U.S. House of Representatives.
00:20:15.000Also, I'm glad you played those completely hyperbolic tapes of MSNBC trying to compare this ridiculous staged drive-by visit of Biden to JFK and to Ronald Reagan.
00:20:30.000JFK, who, whatever you think of his domestic policy, when it comes to foreign policy, was a fierce fighter for America both personally in World War II and then politically in the earliest days of the Cold War.
00:20:42.000Ronald Reagan, the man who brought the Cold War to a culmination.
00:20:46.000OK, these are two absolute statesmen and they should never, ever be compared to the feckless Joe Biden who staged a photo op complete with the ridiculous canard of air raid sirens that just coincidentally happened to ring for the first time in days and days at the moment that he stepped outside.
00:21:06.000The American people, of course, are not going to fall for this foolishness.
00:21:09.000Also, one other point, you mentioned that Xi is going to Russia.
00:21:13.000On this very date, Steve, in 1972, this is the anniversary today of Richard Nixon going to Beijing to visit China.
00:21:22.000Why did he do that after two decades of complete isolation between the U.S., almost no interactions between the U.S. and China?
00:21:28.000Why did he do that? Not because he had any admiration at all for Mao, quite the opposite.
00:21:32.000He did it because we were in an existential struggle then with the Soviet Union and he did not want the two greatest powers, both of which were communists.
00:21:40.000He did not want the two greatest powers of the Eurasian landmass to be in any way aligned.
00:21:44.000So he very smartly, very strategically drove a wedge between China and Russia.
00:21:50.000OK, that was brilliant by Richard Nixon and it set the stage for Reagan to later win the Cold War.
00:21:56.000We now have the exact opposite scenario where we are practically begging China and Russia to form an ever stronger alliance because of our needless escalation against Russia.
00:22:08.000Russia is not a material threat to the United States as long as we take a realpolitik view of Russia.
00:22:16.000China is the existential threat versus the United States.
00:22:19.000But again, we're practically begging them to form an ever closer alliance.
00:22:23.000This is the antithesis of a Nixonian approach in every way.
00:23:53.000And what they did and what Kamala Harris did on purpose to tee this up was to go to Munich and sit there and say, we have definitive proof.
00:24:02.000Have they come forward now in 72 hours and shown us one scintilla?
00:24:06.000Have the Republicans been hounding for this?
00:24:08.000If McCarthy and McCall and these neocons think they're going to get off the hook there, you're not going to get off the hook.
00:24:13.000And let me tell you how important this plays.
00:24:15.000Ron DeSantis, who's a neocons neocon, was in that fire station or wherever he was in Staten Island, the police station, giving this talk yesterday to the first responders and to the police.
00:24:42.000And this was a guy who was a neocons neocon.
00:24:45.000So right now, the base of the Republican Party, the MAGA base, who are made principally of veterans, are parents of people who are serving.
00:26:59.000It is now today, among Republican voters, 51 percent.
00:27:03.000A majority and climbing, I believe, of Republican voters believe that we are doing too much in Ukraine.
00:27:09.000So we are winning the argument for an America first approach of realism and restraint for a foreign policy of non-interventionism and de-escalation and diplomacy.
00:27:20.000We are winning the hearts and minds of all Americans.
00:27:23.000By the way, the number even of Democrats also more than doubled.
00:27:26.000It's lower than Republicans, as you might figure.
00:27:45.000He's given his live press conference in the National Press Club about, wait for it, the invasion on the southern border.
00:27:50.000That's the border that's in the national security interest of the United States, not the eastern Russian-speaking border of two Slavic nations.
00:27:57.000They've been fighting over that for 5,000 years.
00:28:00.000They're going to fight 5,000 years in the future.
00:30:07.000They're the ones that have the authority.
00:30:09.000The local coordinator, the on-scene commander for that area, has gotten back to Michael Patrick Leahy, who's writing up right now, a reporter on this show at 11 o'clock, that they are saying, wait for this one, who gave the authority for the controlled release and the controlled burn?
00:31:04.000We need Yost, the attorney general of Ohio, supposed to be a good man in MAGA.
00:31:09.000Sir, what you need to do immediately is to impanel a criminal grand jury to start to get the timeline and testimony and start with nothing sovereign.
00:31:53.000Let's get them on the record with their lies.
00:31:55.000Yost, the attorney general of Ohio, step up to the plate.
00:31:59.000Empanel a criminal grand jury and empanel that criminal grand jury today.
00:32:04.000OK, we shouldn't let this thing go long any any longer.
00:32:08.000Show the nation that Ohio, the rule of law works in the little guy's voice is heard.
00:32:14.000You're now going to dump now the EPA, the Biden regime is going to try to dump this responsibility on the folks on the decent, hardworking folks in East Palestine.
00:32:24.000And they're going to say, oh, it's your fire chief.
00:34:51.000You have a merger of the worst criminal elements in the world.
00:34:55.000The Mexican drug cartels are like junior varsity compared to these guys.
00:34:58.000You got the but you got the murderous criminal regime in Beijing that have killed hundreds of millions of their own people and could care less.
00:35:06.000You've got the criminal element in Moscow with Putin and the KGB FSB guys, right, who are the follow-ons of Stalin and these guys could care less how many they're killing.
00:35:16.000And you've got the Ayatollahs and Mullahs in Persia and Tehran who could care less of how many people they're killing.
00:36:03.000And particularly as it pertains to this debt ceiling, this showdown, which is upcoming, it's an enormous pressure point.
00:36:09.000And it can be used to achieve and demand accountability on issues like the border, the border that matters, the southern border of the United States, not the eastern border of Ukraine.
00:36:19.000And now on issues of, if you want to continue this escalation, Joe Biden and the Washington war machine, the defense contractors, K Street, all of it.
00:36:29.000If you want to continue this escalation, you are going to have to come to Congress and you're going to have to dispassionately make your case to the American people, A, why this matters so much to the United States.
00:36:42.000And then B, if it does matter, what is the actual plan?
00:36:55.000Because this is a critical point that I've repeated often, but I think it bears repeating.
00:37:00.000The reality is we are borrowing the mountain of money that we are sending over to Ukraine.
00:37:05.000So it's an incredibly dangerous situation from just a national security perspective.
00:37:10.000But on top of that, adding insult to injury, it is also making our economic predicament, which is dire, especially for middle class people,
00:37:19.000it is making our economic crisis all the worse here at home because we are borrowing the money to needlessly stoke a battle which should be regional
00:37:31.000and unfortunately is becoming ever more at risk of becoming a global conflagration because of the escalatory tactics of Joe Biden.
00:37:39.000By the way, too, one quick point because MSNBC and most of corporate media, they made a big deal overnight and this morning about how brave this was of Joe Biden to go to Ukraine.
00:37:49.000OK, there has been a carousel of Hollywood celebrities posing with Zelensky.
00:37:54.000OK, one of the I think the darkest figures in the world right now, Zelensky.
00:37:58.000And that doesn't make Putin any better than him, by the way.
00:38:01.000But let's just be honest about who Zelensky is.
00:38:03.000Yes. But there's been a carousel of Hollywood celebrities in and out of Ukraine, a carousel of Vogue photographers in and out of Ukraine to take pictures.
00:38:13.000I'm just glad, by the way, that Biden apparently he was able to get some time on Zelensky's schedule in between his photo shoots.
00:38:19.000But spare me the ridiculous hyperbolic talk about how brave this was.
00:38:37.000Rebecca Koffler, to this audience, how dangerous is this right now, given the fact that you know Putin and his cronies around him, these gangsters in Moscow as well as anyone?
00:39:04.000I agree with Steve that this was pure theatrics, but it was also extremely reckless for Biden to go into the combat zone.
00:39:15.000Yes, they did have to ask the Russians because the Russians own airspace over there.
00:39:22.000But remember, the Russians actually took down MH17 airliner, and back during the Cold War, they also took down KL007.
00:39:36.000And when Putin hears the rhetoric, this man can no longer remain in power, and U.S. wants to strategically defeat Russia, what do you think some of the hotlines think?
00:39:52.000I think it is extremely reckless for Biden to show up in that combat zone and do all of his, you know, he's almost as theatrically skillful as Zelensky at this point.
00:40:04.000Remember the big hug and kiss, the handwritten note, the tie that he wore, and then, of course, that siren.
00:40:14.000But going back on how extremely dangerous the situation is right now, I want to follow up on something very important that Steve Cortez just said.
00:40:26.000But I want to zero in on the second part of his statement.
00:40:30.000He said, Russia is not a material threat to the United States.
00:40:35.000I agree with that statement, especially with the caveat that came after that.
00:40:41.000So long as the United States does not further erode Russia's strategic security perimeter, which the United States has done, as you just yourself articulated.
00:40:57.000Well, what's his name? Ignatius did. And by the way, Ignatius, he he's a spokesperson, a publicist for the CIA.
00:41:07.000I have personal and direct knowledge that he is, you know, in the roller decks of the CIA people.
00:41:40.000You started talking in the first segment about tactical use.
00:41:43.000We are now in the strategic ground because that's what a start is.
00:41:48.000And if you couple Putin's action, right, with suspending start with the situation that we had last week when Russian strategic nuclear capable bombers breached the air defense identification zone in North American airspace.
00:45:39.000The book is available anywhere, really, on Amazon or in any bookstore.
00:45:44.000The title, I disagreed with the title that was chosen by my literary agent.
00:45:51.000But if you understand the premise that Steve Cortez just talked about and I amplified, as long as we do not erode Russia's strategic security perimeter, then Russia will not attack us.
00:46:06.000What we're doing right now, as you just pointed out, we have become effectively a direct party to war with the world's most powerful nuclear state, Russia.
00:46:19.000And so that will give, the Russians believe that will give them the right.
00:46:23.000So I'm on Getter, Twitter and Truth Social at Rebecca0132.
00:46:29.000Thank you for having me and God bless to everyone.
00:46:37.000Cortez, we're going to move off of this topic and onto economics, et cetera.
00:46:41.000But any closing thoughts you've got as we're sleepwalking into this and the demand has to be the MAGA Republicans have got to step up and all those people that didn't want to come to the defense on the five days that changed the country in early January have got to step up.
00:46:55.000Now, what we need is a commitment, by the way, the Associated Press is reporting under 50 percent.
00:47:44.000J.D. Vance probably being the best example.
00:47:46.000Some candidates who prevailed, I think, largely because they took a very brave, non-interventionist stance on Ukraine.
00:47:53.000But now that the situation has escalated so much because of Joe Biden, I think it's going to be a primary issue, not just an important one,
00:48:00.000but a primary issue into twenty twenty four primaries, whether for president or any other federal office.
00:48:06.000Right. Because of the danger that you're talking about.
00:48:08.000I think it's also important for us to draw this contrast, of course, because these ridiculous comparisons from corporate media are going to persist,
00:48:14.000pretending that Joe Biden is somehow Reagan-esque or that he's Kennedy, either one of them going to Berlin.
00:48:21.000It's very important to draw this contrast.
00:48:23.000The Soviet Union was a powerful empire and a global menace that was on the march all over the world.
00:48:31.000OK, an empire that put missiles 90 miles away from the United States.
00:48:37.000That's the kind of existential struggle we faced in the Cold War, which required such extraordinary means from the United States.
00:48:44.000When we look at Russia today, markedly different, of course, from the Soviet Union.
00:48:49.000Russia today has trouble even controlling its near influence, its near border influence.
00:48:56.000OK, it is not on the march all over the world.
00:49:00.000Now, they do have an ultimate weapon in powerful nuclear weapons.
00:49:04.000But other than that, they're really not very potent and they don't need to be an adversary of the United States.
00:49:10.000If we if we take a realpolitik view and if we follow that kind of foreign policy agenda of realism and restraint, Russia is largely immaterial to the United States,
00:49:22.000whereas China is now what the Soviet Union used to be.
00:49:25.000China is the existential threat to the United States economically, militarily, cyber, you name it in every single sense.
00:49:34.000And again, to just reemphasize this point on the anniversary of Richard Nixon's overture to China, which was brilliant in 1972.
00:49:41.000On this day, we are pursuing an exactly opposite of the the anti Nixonian policy of practically compelling Beijing and Moscow to form an ever more powerful alliance because of this recklessness.
00:49:57.000You know, let me throw in one other unfortunate anniversary today, Steve, about the consequences.
00:50:02.000Right. Of a rush to war and of a lack of seriousness and of a of a unfortunately a rush to escalation today in 1916 began the Battle of Verdun,
00:50:14.000one of the most brutal and bloody battles in all of human history.
00:50:17.000It lasted almost the entire year of 1916 during World War One.
00:50:22.000Three hundred thousand people were killed in the Battle of Verdun, ultimately seven hundred fifty thousand total casualties.
00:50:30.000One of the gravest mistakes in world history, World War One.
00:50:34.000Let's think about that as we sleepwalk toward potentially a global war because of an eastern border of a country that is not relevant to the national security of the United States.
00:50:47.000That's the reality here. I implore the American people to think about this in a very sober and dispassionate way and realize that our problems are not five thousand miles away.
00:50:56.000Our problems are here at home economically and regarding our very own border, which is totally unguarded.
00:51:03.000We're going to get to all that here momentarily. We're going to take a 90 second break.
00:51:07.000We've got Joe Reese going to join us. Cortez is going to go through some economics everybody has to hear.
00:51:11.000We're going to go to East Palestine. We've got we've got Michael Patrick Leahy with breaking news there.
00:51:17.000To Cortez's point, as a young naval officer in the mid to late 70s, I was on a destroyer in the 7th Fleet, the Western Pacific Fleet.
00:51:25.000We were an anti-submarine platform to defend the carrier, the carrier battle group.
00:51:30.000Our task and purpose with Soviet submarines in the Western Pacific, South China Sea, Straits of Taiwan, East China Sea, Indian Ocean, all that.
00:51:39.000OK, not Chinese submarines, Soviet submarines. They were a global power and a global enemy.
00:51:45.000OK, and now we're sleepwalking right into a war where people are throwing around these terms like tactical nuclear weapons like this is some sort of garden party talk.
00:51:55.000OK, short commercial break, 90 seconds. We're going to come back. We've got Joe Reese going to join us for my Patriot Supply.
00:52:01.000We've got Cortez. We've got a bunch of economics to go through. We're going to get Michael Patrick Leahy and Jeff Clark.
00:52:06.000The EPA has announced they found the culprit. They have found the villain.
00:52:11.000And the villain is the fire chief of East Palestine, Ohio.
00:52:18.000Does he have the authority? Does he have the authority?
00:52:21.000Does he have the authority with a $6 trillion federal budget in the EPA, the Nazis over the EPA?
00:52:27.000Echo Nazis? Does he have the authority?
00:52:30.000That's where they're trying to stick it on. All next in the war room.
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