Bannon gets 4 months in prison for conspiracy to commit perjury, conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy against the United States. Robert O'Brien joins the show to talk about the Kamala crash, the stock market crash, and the hostage situation.
00:03:20.000But technically, Steve should be out much earlier.
00:03:25.000So we're going to watch that situation carefully.
00:03:29.000I'm sure his lawyers are going to be very proactive about this because the Bureau of Prisons will break the law if they keep him in all 120 days.
00:04:29.000He when I was in the administration, he did like two lead editorials talking about a Navarro recession, which Paul never came, by the way, as a result of the Trump tariffs.
00:04:40.000They were good for the economy, not bad.
00:04:43.000But these SLBs at The Wall Street Journal editorialized and said that, good, they should put me in prison.
00:04:52.000Why? To show that Congress could actually have subpoena power and maintain their authority.
00:04:58.000A memo to The Wall Street Journal, the legislative branch should never have the power to subpoena senior presidential age or the president himself.
00:05:10.000Shame on you, Wall Street Journal, for editorializing to put me in prison, even as you're wringing your hands and clutching your pearls over your reporter stuck over in Russia.
00:05:22.000Now, I'm the first guy to say that guy was psychologically and probably physically tortured and had no business being in a prison in Russia.
00:05:35.000And, yeah, I mean, The Wall Street Journal did a very good job campaigning to get him back.
00:05:42.000But I haven't heard them campaign to get political prisoners here in the United States like me and Bannon and some of the J6 people out there.
00:06:00.000All right. I'm going to do this in real time.
00:06:04.000The setup here is that the first rule in hostage negotiations is that you don't negotiate for hostages.
00:06:15.000Look, it's a bad it's a bad thing to do to begin with.
00:06:19.000The second rule is if you got to do it, you at least trade equal for equal.
00:06:25.000But but but we got a situation here where.
00:06:30.000The Russians who are stuck in prisons in here in Germany and other places, really bad people, arms dealers, assassins, this, that and the other.
00:06:41.000And these are these are people that needed to be off the street.
00:06:44.000And contrast, you have the Russians scooping up innocent people and putting them in prison.
00:08:02.000An American or a German or somebody off the street who's totally innocent, put him in a prison, sentence him to like 20 years of hard labor in some gulag and then wait for the West to come crawling.
00:09:23.000It was interesting watching Erin Burnett last night try to try to spin around that.
00:09:30.000This this this uncomfortable truth that we had traded a Wall Street Journal reporter who had done nothing for a Russian assassin who had killed people.
00:09:43.000And she was she was she was like, yeah, but this was great diplomacy.
00:09:52.000He could have it's like it's beautiful when you watch these left wingers get tortured over the reality of what was what was a brutal hostage crisis.
00:10:04.000So at some point we'll get get get O'Brien on.
00:10:09.000I'm going to morph now over to the Kamala crash.
00:10:15.000I don't know if you've been watching the the markets, but this is part of your training in the posse.
00:10:24.000Every time I've ever come on, I've always urged you to study the stock and bond markets because they tell you what's going to be happening in the broader economy.
00:10:36.000And we've seen a remarkable turnover globally.
00:14:19.000Look, we've got to take a quick break.
00:14:21.000When we come back, I want to get into the implications going forward for Putin actually grabbing more innocent victims
00:14:30.000and trading them for assassins in what we call in game theory the repeatable game.
00:14:36.000So we're here for my favorite, favorite guy in the West Wing, former national security advisor, the guy who saved us from John Bolton and was just absolutely stellar.
00:14:47.000We'll be right back in the war room talking hostages, Putin, chess, checkers, Stephen K.
00:14:59.000The petrodollar is crumbling before our eyes.
00:15:02.000Saudi Arabia just declined to renew the 50 year long petrodollar agreement, which means the U.S. dollar's global dominance is now riding on fumes.
00:15:12.000How much longer until the dollar crashes in value?
00:15:15.000Nobody knows for sure, but it's always best to be prepared.
00:15:18.000I believe owning gold is the best solution.
00:16:09.000Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon.
00:16:14.000I am so pleased to be talking with the former national security advisor, one of my – actually, my favorite guy in the West Wing besides the president at the end there, Robert O'Brien.
00:16:29.000And to set up this discussion, we've had now a hostage exchange in which we have traded a assassin for – who was guilty for a Wall Street Journal reporter who was innocent and other folks involved in the exchange.
00:16:48.000What's beautiful about Robert O'Brien to talk about this is he was actually the hostage negotiator at the State Department at the beginning of the Trump administration.
00:17:02.000And what he's going to tell you now are two things.
00:17:06.000When he got hostages back, he never had to give up bad guys or bad things because that's the way he rolls and Trump rolled.
00:17:15.000And he's going to give you the history.
00:17:18.000It's like this one here is the third case where Putin's beaten Biden-Harris in hostage negotiations, basically getting back.
00:17:30.000The first one, an arms dealer for Brittany Griner.
00:17:35.000The second one involved a money launderer of Putin's for some corporate executives in Venezuela.
00:17:44.000And now we got the assassin for the reporter.
00:17:47.000So, Robert, tell me just how bad a precedent that Harris and Biden are setting in their shameless quest to get elected.
00:18:00.000Well, listen, Peter, we always are happy when Americans come home.
00:18:03.000And so all the Americans that came home, Brittany and Evan and others, were thrilled to have them back.
00:18:09.000But what you don't want to do, and you know, you're the economist here and know this better than I do.
00:18:14.000You don't want to create a market for hostage taking.
00:18:17.000And when you pay ransom or you get high-profile prisoners back in exchange for innocent Americans,
00:18:23.000you created a perverse incentive for the bad guys, for the Putins and the Xi Jinping's and the Ayatollahs
00:18:30.000to take innocent Americans knowing that they can trade them back and get their bond-villain bad guys back from the West.
00:18:38.000So if you're Vladimir Putin and you're asking a spy to go kill someone in West Germany or kill someone in London or kill someone in America,
00:18:46.000you can tell them, look, don't worry if you get caught, oh, just kidnap an American and trade them back for you so we'll bring you home.
00:18:53.000And so you're creating a very bad incentive, you know, process.
00:18:57.000As happy as we are to get Evan out of a bad situation in a Russian jail, which is no good place to be,
00:19:04.000you know, are we transferring the misery on to some other future American who's going to get taken, you know, to trade back for a bad guy?
00:19:12.000And let's run through the gruesome threesome of Putin's basically out chess playing the Biden.
00:19:23.000Brittany Griner, okay, the basketball star who got caught with a little pot in her bag.
00:21:55.000He killed somebody, a Chechen dissident, a political opponent of Putin, in broad daylight in the Berlin equivalent of Central Park.
00:22:05.000He gets picked up by the Germans, sentenced to the life in prison.
00:22:10.000The Germans don't want to let him go, but President Biden leaned on Chancellor Schultz to spring him so that they could get Evan back.
00:22:18.000And, again, in all these cases, Peter, you know, we're always happy to have Americans home.
00:22:23.000I mean, President Trump didn't care if anyone was black or white or what their party was.
00:22:28.000When an American was held abroad, President Trump felt that that was the essence of American First, that some other government or some terrorist organization was holding an American with a blue passport to try and leverage President Trump.
00:22:43.000And he wasn't going to have anything of that.
00:22:45.000And he'd use all tools of national power to get him back, but we weren't going to encourage more hostage-taking.
00:22:51.000So we're glad to have these Americans back, but we were paying a very, very dear price to get them back.
00:23:33.000My counterparts knew that if they couldn't come to a deal with me, they were going to have to deal with Donald Trump.
00:23:38.000And there was more than one occasion, Peter, that I picked up my briefcase and put my papers back in it and got up from the table and said,
00:24:52.000We've got diplomatic tools that we can use to leverage other governments to exceed our will when it comes to hostages.
00:25:02.000Because, look, I'm not suggesting that it might make sure that the U.S. bully other governments, but when they wrongfully detain an American, that really goes to the essence of American first.
00:25:13.000You're basically saying, we're targeting this person just because he's a U.S. citizen.
00:25:20.000And so we would, you know, I remember in one case we told a government that we were going to, you know, basically put tariffs on them and take their stock market the next day if his hostage didn't come home.
00:25:31.000We did that on more than one occasion.
00:26:38.000If you are out there today celebrating in any way the return of the hostages from Russia without pointing out that Harris and Biden have simply incentivized the taking of innocent Americans, not just in Russia, but around the world.
00:27:06.000Because they are so weak and so ready for political reasons to bend the knee and exchange innocent Americans for guilty, guilty Russians and maybe now Chinese or Venice, whatever.
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00:29:39.000Stable equilibrium they've gotten the economy into.
00:29:42.000They got to keep the stock market and real estate market up through the election because it's the upper end of Americans who are powering the economy because the bottom 50% is you and I have talked about are getting crushed.
00:29:54.000The inflation is absolutely destroying our middle class, our working class, virtually every class.
00:30:02.000Inflation is a disaster in our country.
00:30:05.000Young people, young black people, they don't have the American dream anymore.
00:33:15.000And it's the seven deadly sins of Kamala Harris, who now owns everything Joe Biden has done because she says she supports it.
00:33:28.000And my thesis here is if we just go after him on policy, Donald Trump beats them by double digits on every single of the seven deadly sins that are in the heads and eyes of the voters.
00:33:47.640OK, at the top, as that clip just showed, it's the economy.
00:35:03.640Well, and we got a war on our hands, brother.
00:35:07.640And we got complacent, even though smart guys like you and me and Bannon knew that Biden
00:35:14.640wasn't going to be the nominee all along.
00:35:17.640I said that back in January, an article in The Washington Times.
00:35:20.640I don't know why we engage in such hubris, but I actually think Kamala is going to be easier to beat than Joe Biden once the dust settles.
00:35:34.640And once we flush her out on policy, because the one thing Biden had now hear this left wing.
00:35:41.640The one thing Biden had was that patina, that veneer that he was somehow the kid from Scranton that had some kind of empathy for the working class manufacturing workers.
00:35:55.640It was untrue, but somehow he was able to pull that magic trick off.
00:36:02.640You look at him and then you look and listen to Kamala Harris.
00:36:08.640She's got about as much empathy for black, brown and blue collar Americans as Putin does for Wall Street Journal reporters.
00:36:46.640And I myself have always said, you know, that she has things in her past that that make her vulnerable.
00:36:50.640But that's I mean, when we talk to voters, Peter, and we've been asking them this for months and months and months, it doesn't matter whether Kamala Harris is the nominee or Joe Biden is the nominee.
00:36:59.640The reason why voters who told us they want Trump back who are truly swing voters is because of his competency on the economy.
00:37:06.640And inflation and cost of living is going away the number one issue for voters going to November.
00:37:12.640And then the economy is number two or immigration.
00:37:18.640And then number number four has actually, you know, been this battle between abortion and to and the threats that from lawfare and, you know, to democracy and the idea of, you know, our system of government really.
00:37:33.640So that's what we have seen for months now.
00:37:56.640Are they able to successfully turn the tables on us on the lawfare thing is like we're the bad guys or or is there recognition that they're waging using the Justice Department and the tools of government to put people like me and Steve Bannon in prison and and interfere with the Trump's election?
00:38:19.640If you ask people two years ago about threats to democracy, for instance.
00:38:24.640Right. Because we do word it both ways.
00:38:26.640So we're like we're speaking the language of the left and the right.
00:38:30.640And that's the better way to get, you know, a gauge on public opinion.
00:38:33.640But if you would ask two years ago, somebody would it would have been an anti Republican or anti Trump sentiment because they would have thought in their mind about January 6th.
00:38:43.640Once they started to do this lawfare, engage in this lawfare, it flipped.
00:38:48.640And that's why Donald Trump actually leads when we ask people, who do you trust more on when it comes to, you know, lawfare, preserving democracy, corruption in the government, you know, targeting political opponents.
00:39:00.640Biden lost that. Democrats in general lost that lead.
00:39:04.640You know, I would say it was probably around eight months ago.
00:39:07.640What happened about eight months ago? Right.
00:39:09.640So that's because what's what's the spread?
00:39:35.640But, you know, when we asked the trust first issues, which is down a little bit, it's preserving democracy, threats to democracy, corruption.
00:39:46.640And that would have been, again, a negative spread for the Republicans or and Donald Trump in general in eight months.
00:39:54.640So are the Democrats are the Democrats kind of behind the curve now because they keep pushing the theme of Trump as a threat to democracy?
00:40:05.640If they have they kind of like not figured out that all the attacks on Trump and people like me and Bannon have actually helped make that issue either go away, I guess, because it's a wash now or moving in Trump's favor.
00:40:19.640I think they keep pushing on that one.
00:40:22.640I think they're trying to wake their base up because their base was in a low.
00:40:26.640They were in a malaise until they dumped Biden.
00:41:27.640Let me let me give you a talking point, which my lovely fiance came up with.
00:41:33.640Because we were watching that boxing thing and then somehow another clip came on where Kamala is sitting there and she's advocating for prisoners, male prisoners to have sex change operations.
00:41:50.640And then my fiance says, oh, well, that's her her kind of prison reform.
00:41:55.640So it's kind of like, like, I mean, yeah, but it's like I was looking at that.
00:42:03.640It's like she's sitting there advocating.
00:42:06.640She's like animated saying saying we've got to get these these male prisoners the ability to have sex change operations in our prisons.
00:42:15.640It's like, what? Yeah, that's prison reform in Kamala's world.
00:45:18.640Is there a message that the Trump campaign can use to narrow that gap?
00:45:28.640Or is it simply that we beat her so badly on everything else, economy, inflation, border security, foreign policy, and so on,
00:45:43.640that that will be sufficient to offset her advantage in the abortion thing?
00:45:49.640So you're sitting around now with the boss and some of his campaign aides.
00:45:54.640What is, what is Richard Barris say at this point?
00:45:58.640I do advocate for a more aggressive strategy on abortion.
00:46:02.640I do think you really have to beat her on everything else because the gap is 14 points and you don't have that much time to turn that around.
00:46:09.640But Donald Trump is not in the position, while he is negative when it comes to that, you know, who do you trust to handle more?
00:46:16.640He's not as bad as some of the other candidates would have been, like very deep holes.
00:46:21.640Ron DeSantis, for instance, trying to win Iowa, so taking the traditional Ted Cruz position.
00:48:18.640Yeah, when you look at why people support abortion, it's very interesting.
00:48:23.640Black voters, black women specifically, they look at it as an economic issue almost because they're on that part of the socioeconomic ladder.
00:48:32.640But white women give awful reasons for why they do support abortion, even later term abortion.
00:48:39.640I mean, it's hard to listen to and complete the research, you know?
00:48:51.640But Republicans shot the moon and that hurt the overall brands, you know, the overall party's brand on that.
00:48:59.640Whereas Donald Trump is in the much more tenable position of being, you know, against late term abortion, but not being seen as someone who wants to, you know, eradicate it altogether.
00:49:10.640And you really, that's the only way to win a national election at this point.
00:49:14.640Abortion, the right has to understand, it took decades to give people these views.
00:49:20.640It's going to take decades to undo it.
00:49:22.640Where does the J.D. Vance card factor into that issue?
00:49:29.640You know, I don't think it really does at this point.
00:49:57.640I mean, look at his movie just shot to the top of Netflix again.
00:50:00.640People are trying to get to know him and get to know who he is.
00:50:03.640And the media is going after him to try to head that off because they know that's a Midwest message.
00:50:09.640So I think if you agree with this, see if you agree with this is advice for the Vance campaign.
00:50:16.640J.D. has to realize he's in a general election, not a primary.
00:50:22.640If he never mentioned family values or the choice issue again and simply focused on his core onshore manufacturing to the Midwest message and ran as a governor's race in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that would be his optimal strategy.
00:50:55.640You know, you can see the Trump, the Obama Trump counties that voted for that proposition.
00:51:01.640Abortion did, you know, and an effort to restrict abortion that much did not do well in his own state.
00:51:07.640Right. So I think the right saw an opportunity and they really jumped the gun too fast, too soon.
00:51:13.640Just stick to if you want to talk about abortion, just stick to late term abortion, because even a majority of pro-choice voters oppose late term abortion.
00:51:22.640And the right always gets sucked into this.
00:51:25.640That's why Trump is brilliant when he turns to Hillary and says, you want to rip babies out of the womb, Hillary.
00:51:30.640And when he turns to Biden and says, you're the radical one, you want to kill babies before right the day before birth.