Stephen K. Bannon and Boris Epstein join me in the War Room to talk about the $2 Trillion deficit monstrosity that passed the House of Representatives and the growing possibility of the Trump administration seizing millions of dollars worth of assets.
00:16:21.300MTG threw down today hard about a motion to vacate on Johnson, and people have misread this.
00:16:30.520I think she's done exactly what Mark Meadows did years ago when we removed Boehner.
00:16:36.380He dropped it at the very last second when everybody was leaving for then the August break, the August recess.
00:16:43.040People didn't come back to after Labor Day, and guess what?
00:16:46.160When I was at Breitbart with Meadows and others, we worked it 24-7 at these town halls.
00:16:51.740Back in those days, they had these big town halls at these town halls.
00:16:54.280And when Boehner returned, when Boehner returned after Memorial Day, or excuse me, after Labor Day, he said, hey, if I can stay through the Pope coming and greet him in the House as the Speaker of the House, I will step down, announce I'm stepping down shortly thereafter.
00:17:10.280So I think that that is going to be a strategy.
00:17:13.660We're going to get it directly from MTG if we can get her at the airport here momentarily.
00:17:18.220In the next hour, there's a lot going on here.
00:17:21.000Like I said, Chris Miller, I'm talking to Cash Mattel.
00:17:24.700Huge breaking news about the J-6 committee, about suppressing the testimony of the acting Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller,
00:17:31.420in those very important days before January 6th when President Trump actually ordered 10,000 National Guard to be in Washington, D.C. for protection.
00:17:40.660Cash Patel, we're trying to get Cash to join us.
00:17:43.640I hear that that is a three-part series over at the Daily Mail.
00:17:47.760So we're trying to get Chris Miller and Cash on for tomorrow's show.
00:17:51.120We have Garrett Ziegler on in the 6 o'clock hour.
00:17:55.400He and Joanna Miller were the right and left hand of Peter Navarro in the White House, the absolute hammer over at Marco Polo.
00:18:01.140He's done the best job, the single best job, of exposing the Biden crime family in detail with all this research.
00:18:09.180He's been doing 100 Biden, 100 Biden's business partners.
00:18:11.900He's going to be discussing this that came out, I guess it was yesterday, about the CIA.
00:18:16.940But I asked Mike Benz, who's been an expert in all things deep state, has kind of become the go-to guy.
00:18:22.920Mike, just enlighten me here about what's going on because the Justice Department went to the CIA and said,
00:18:29.340you've got to back off this investigation, and now there seems to be a whistleblower in Langley that's come forward to the Jordan Committee.
00:18:39.040So the Jim Jordan Judiciary Committee just put out basically testimony yesterday that a whistleblower had come to them from the CIA and said that the CIA had waived the Justice Department off an interrogation that it had wanted to do about one of the sweetheart funders of Hunter Biden.
00:19:00.160And, you know, why would the CIA be telling the DOJ to back off in an interview of the person funding Hunter Biden?
00:19:12.200Well, to my mind, and this is opinion, I should note, is there's no great mystery here.
00:19:18.560I have been screaming for the better part of two years now that the reason that Hunter Biden is untouchable is because his work in Ukraine touched on a very sensitive CIA operation.
00:19:28.780That's what, as I read the tea leaves, it seems highly likely.
00:19:32.360And I suspect that if you were to have an investigation into this by, say, the House Intelligence Committee, or there could be declassified documents about CIA analyst memos and CIA operations around Burisma,
00:19:44.440I think you would essentially have the scales around Hunter Biden completely fall off.
00:19:48.460And the reason for this is because we have had a long-range plan to bankrupt Gazprom, the state-owned Russian gas giant, which makes up a huge proportion of Russia's revenues.
00:20:01.100It's a big part of how Russia funds its war machine.
00:20:03.860Russia's war machine has been what's opposed the Pentagon around the world in a very big way over the past eight to ten years.
00:20:10.420The reason that President Obama failed to basically capture Syria and take out the Bashar al-Assad regime was because Russia militarily backstopped Syria with these S-400 missile defense systems.
00:20:24.520Russia also runs small arms to rebel groups all around the world in opposition to Pentagon interests.
00:20:30.960You also have this basically trillion-dollar windfall that NATO energy companies would earn if you could kill Gazprom and replace the energy exports to Europe with NATO stakeholders.
00:20:44.360You had Chevron signing a $10 billion deal with Naftagas in Ukraine, which is the feeder from Burisma in 2013.
00:20:52.160You had also in 2013, right before the coup, a $10 billion deal signed by Shell.
00:20:57.560You have Exxon with billions of dollars in interest there.
00:20:59.820You have Halliburton, Dick Cheney's, the company that he was the CEO and chairman of the board, who's got the processing rights for the shale fields in the Donbass, as well as for the offshore drilling in the Black Sea.
00:21:13.520So you have basically a where's Waldo, who's who of all the major players in the Chamber of Commerce, State Department, CIA blob, who are all – have vested interests in removing Russia from the European energy market.
00:21:32.760And Burisma, I believe, was a part of that long-range plan.
00:21:35.900So Hunter Biden himself was on the chairman advisory board of the NDI, the National Democratic Institute.
00:21:42.560That is the DNC wing of the National Endowment for Democracy, who even the Washington Post reported on in the 1990s as being our premier CIA cutout.
00:21:51.680You don't get to be on the chairman's advisory board of NDI unless you are linked to or vetted by the Central Intelligence Agency.
00:21:59.240At the time, Hunter Biden's father, Joe Biden, spent 30 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is the Senate's oversight of the State Department.
00:22:10.500And the covert – that has to coordinate the covert side of intelligence work.
00:22:16.320Now, you also have the fact that you have – the Atlantic Council was neck deep in Burisma.
00:22:20.880They had a formal cooperation agreement they signed in January 2017, just two weeks before Trump was inaugurated.
00:22:26.900The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board, and it gets annual funding for the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA cutout, National Endowment for Democracy.
00:22:36.340They held a three-day summit on Gazprom as an instrument of statecraft and how to remove it while simultaneously propping up the Ukrainian gas market through companies like Burisma and Naftagas.
00:22:48.240So you have basically this sweeping CIA consensus.
00:22:52.560And by the way, you even have USAID funding.
00:22:57.720USAID was – has long been one of the premier conduits for cash being flowed to clandestine CIA operations.
00:23:06.200So between the CIA cutout work through the NDI, through between the affiliation with the Atlantic Council, which has seven CIA directors on its board,
00:23:13.320through the role of USAID in this story, to the fact that right next to Hunter Biden on Burisma's board was Kofor Black, who spent 30 years in the CIA,
00:23:23.520and was Mitt Romney's Sherpa to the intelligence world in the 2012 presidential election, who won a CIA Distinguished Medal Award,
00:23:30.640was the other American on the board of Burisma there, representing the IRI side of it.
00:23:37.400So Mitt Romney is on the board of the IRI, which is the GOP side of that CIA cutout, National Endowment for Democracy.
00:23:44.860So you had this John McCain, Mitt Romney, Republican CIA interest, and you had this Hunter Biden,
00:23:51.720Atlanta Council, Democrat nexus all invested in joint spoils for switching the European gas market from Russia towards NATO.
00:24:01.660And I believe that's the reason that you have the CIA stepping in to shield who's really funding Hunter Biden from scrutiny.
00:24:11.540Wouldn't you have felt, by the way, the gas problem and to take away their natural resources,
00:24:15.780the economic war there is exactly what they were trying to do on the financial side with taking down their central bank, destroying the ruble.
00:24:22.500And now, as we talked about this morning with Jim Rickards, he says the way that the Bretton Woods post-war international rules-based order collapses
00:24:30.780is not just we've frozen their assets, but the seizing of their financial assets, the Treasury bills,
00:24:36.880convert them into dollars and give them to the Ukrainians, or to do some sort of bond off it.
00:24:41.920But you got the economic war for the pincer move on the Russians twofold.
00:24:46.780Wouldn't you think, Mike, wouldn't you hope that Jim Jordan and people on both oversight and his investigative committee at Judiciary
00:24:55.740had already had the House intel guys give them a full dump on Hunter Biden?
00:25:02.640Or do you believe that hasn't been done yet, and that's why this alleged whistleblower is causing such a big ripple in Washington, D.C. right now?
00:25:12.020I still get the sense that many members of the House on the GOP side are optimists fundamentally in a certain respect about the government.
00:25:23.420And while some of that halo has been shattered by the absolute insanity of the corruption of this Justice Department
00:25:31.520and all of the dirty, dirty tricks that have been done to the Trump movement,
00:25:37.560I still think they don't quite grasp how deep it all goes.
00:25:41.080I mean, even Bill Barr, the head of the Justice Department under Donald Trump, started his career in the CIA
00:25:48.220and was famously credited by the Washington Post for blocking Congress from being able to investigate the CIA's role in Iran-Contra.
00:25:56.840I mean, this is something that there's a long pedigree of Congress being blocked from overseeing the very intelligence agencies
00:26:05.680I would hope that Jim Jordan is coordinating with the House intelligence folks and with Senator Marco Rubio on the Senate intelligence side.
00:30:49.260And, you know, I do consider myself a sort of long-term optimist.
00:30:53.800But, you know, the fact is, is there's no two ways to go about learning about, you know, the history and the shape and the evolution of the blob of the foreign policy establishment that exerts so much control over Washington without going fundamentally through the five stages of grief.
00:31:10.780You know, where first you have, you know, you have denial and then you've got anger and then you've got bargaining and then you've got depression and then you come to a place of acceptance.
00:31:20.740And every step of the way, I think mentally people fight that as much as they can.
00:31:25.160And they deny as much as they can to themselves.
00:32:03.360And yet you talk about them, you know, in such normalizing, legitimizing tones.
00:32:07.720And, you know, to me, that's that's not intentional.
00:32:11.320And I sort of laughed when I would hear that feedback because you get to a point, I think, that I see a lot of folks who are members of Congress who are not yet at where you have to get through the other side of it.
00:32:24.680You have to appreciate just how bad things are in order to be a realist about what you can actually do about it.
00:32:30.200And, you know, there's a lot of these sort of Candidian characters on our side, I feel, in Congress who are well-meaning and but they sort of have a Panglossian kind of, you know, Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of kind of naivete about the forces that they're up against.
00:32:48.020And I think that that allows that that allows them to be taken by surprise with every new twist and turn and every new dirty trick that's unveiled by the forces they're trying to reform.
00:32:58.520Mike, last question, and we always appreciate you coming on with President Trump and his attitude, his language about the deep state and the administrative state.
00:33:10.520And you have people like allies of him, like Tucker and Elon, you got people like General Flynn, you have yourself, you have Stephen Miller, and you got Kash Patel and Grinnell, and I can go on and on and on.
00:33:24.960And people like yourself that will staff these agencies, staff the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council.
00:33:32.760How how can it be that the deep state would allow at any price for Donald J. Trump to return at high noon on the 20th of January 2025 to the White House, sir?
00:33:45.140Well, there's two ways, you know, one is, you know, that there always is just with U.S. military counterinsurgency doctrine, there's a fine balance between legitimacy and control.
00:33:57.060So, you know, the purpose of our counterinsurgency doctrine militarily is when rule of law is insufficient to contain a rising, you know, insurgent political group who's trying to overthrow a U.S.-backed, you know, basically puppet or, you know, for example, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, you know, was being opposed.
00:34:14.960By, you know, there's a lot of corruption going on.
00:34:17.120There were these insurgent groups rising to power.
00:34:19.120You know, this happens in dozens of countries around the world that we have effective control over.
00:34:23.340And so oftentimes when rule of law is insufficient to contain that, we kick out our counterinsurgency doctrine where there's a lot of nasty things that we will do to the resident population in order to get their minds right to stop opposing the ruling regime.
00:34:39.200And the issue is, is you need legitimacy in order to govern cheaply.
00:34:45.860That is, a people who have grievances in their heart, a people who feel that the government is illegitimate are expensive to govern.
00:34:53.360In fact, you can even read the 2014 counterinsurgency official annual, you know, there's a 2014 official counterinsurgency doctrines available on the U.S. Army website that goes through all this,
00:35:03.480where they talk about how, you know, a legitimate, a perception of legitimacy in the population makes people inexpensive to govern.
00:35:11.560That is, they will, they'll pay their taxes.
00:35:15.620They won't try, you know, they, they won't engage in the kind of civil disobedience that is materially expensive to exert the resources to control.
00:35:23.740So you want people to essentially have nothing and be happy with it rather than having nothing and being angry and having all these grievances.
00:35:31.240But in a counterinsurgency situation, you are starting off the, the, the chess game essentially with them already having those grievances.
00:35:38.440And you need to exert control over that population in order to force them to get to a state where they are compliant and then perceive legitimacy.
00:35:46.100And the issue is, is there's a trade-off between legitimacy and control.
00:35:49.420The more control you exert, the more illegitimate people perceive things to be.
00:35:53.760So you create 10, you know, more, more insurgents with every one insurgent that you persecute.
00:35:59.940In fact, we're seeing this right now, I think, reflected in the polling numbers for Donald Trump in this election cycle,
00:36:04.220where the more they're persecuting him, the more his numbers are going up, you know, which is, which was much to their surprise.
00:36:09.760But anyone who would read a U.S. military doctrine would, you know, on counterinsurgency would see that immediately.
00:36:15.260But, you know, the other way, so, so there's only so far they can go.
00:36:19.060And now they may go full authoritarian.
00:36:21.860I mean, I believe they already have with what they've done, breaking two and a half centuries of precedent with every,
00:36:27.120everything they've done with the Justice Department, the bankrupting folks, going after everyone around,
00:36:32.520around the populist universe, including yourself.
00:36:35.560But, you know, the other way is if a, if a certain node within the blob itself can be convinced that it's not worth going full control,
00:36:47.900that it would, that would be too far, you know, in terms of creating international perceptions of illegitimacy if their crackdown is too hard.
00:36:56.160And there are certain concessions that Trump world makes to the blob.
00:36:59.620So, for example, I heard it floated that Marco Rubio, you know, who knows who the vice president pick is going to be, right?
00:37:07.340But, you know, there's, you know, that name was floated this week quite publicly.
00:37:11.060And, you know, Mark, you know, Senator Rubio is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
00:37:14.460You know, he's, he's a person who, who, a little bit like Ted Cruz has tried to position himself as not a never Trumper,
00:37:23.320but, you know, very much like with the foreign policy side, you know, as, but sort of straddling those two worlds,
00:37:28.640but, but very definitively being, you know, sort of pro blob consensus.
00:37:34.180A figure like Marco Rubio, for example, might be able to convince a critical, you know, a critical node within the blob that while we don't like Trump,
00:37:42.560you know, we're, and we're going to do a little bit of election rigging, we're going to put our thumb on it as much as we can get away with it.
00:37:48.060But if he has to be in office, we've got these insurance policies like Peter Strzok contemplated.
00:37:52.840If he gets out of hand, we can rev up the FBI on him this way.
00:37:56.280We've got, we've got buffers in the White House because of pre-commitments he's made on personnel, including on the vice president thing.
00:38:02.180So, you know, there's, there's lots of ways that it could play out where they might find it, you know, acceptable.
00:38:08.620And the other part is, is, is no matter what happens, you know, Trump will only have four years, you know, there's,
00:38:14.500there's going to be a succession issue at some point and they may argue, well, listen, there's only so much damage that can be done in four years.
00:38:20.580There's no clear line of succession right now in Trump world.
00:38:24.240If we have bumper cars on his ability to govern and the, and the bureaucracy is still fundamentally in control,
00:38:30.580then it might not be such a bad thing or it might not be worth what, you know, the kind of, you know, very dark, you know,
00:38:39.400what James Carville just described yesterday on, on TV is the kind of, you know, he used the term wet work.
00:38:45.220Now, I think he was using it allegorically, but, you know, this is, they're not too far from that right now with Trump facing 700 years in prison.
00:38:54.820No, I think Robert Kagan, when he did the Red Caesar, he did the huge piece in the Washington Post that went back and made the justification
00:39:00.960why Brutus was correct or what was happening to the Republic at the time in the assassination, putting together the assassination of Caesar.