00:00:37.300I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:42.720Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:46.500If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:52.780War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:00:58.340It's Tuesday, 14 April in the year of our Lord, 2026.
00:01:02.760We know that David Perdue, who's a friend of the show, ran for a U.S. senator, long-time U.S. senator and a, I shouldn't say long-time, U.S. senator from Georgia, ran for governor.
00:01:15.860But a guy that spent his business career, I think with Puma Arditas in Hong Kong, knows China very, very well.
00:01:23.640He's actually in the Oval Office with the president.
00:01:25.560A lot of discussion on the Chinese Communist Party and the impact of this.
00:01:34.220We're going to go there momentarily and get up to speed on everything that's happening there.
00:01:38.980And maybe the president will call people in and have a chat about this.
00:01:43.260But I do not believe you're going to see any climb down from the president about this blockade,
00:01:47.760which we know already, and the media reported it incorrectly.
00:01:51.060We've, I think, turned back four or five ships.
00:01:55.020Basically, every ship that was eligible to be turned back got turned back according to the criteria that we have laid out.
00:02:01.820I've asked Philip Patrick to join us this afternoon.
00:02:03.900One was about Scott Besson's comments last night at this gathering of the Semaphore folks with all the top financial people really in the world,
00:02:13.100because I think the IMF meetings are here also this week.
00:02:15.520also um philip patrick about the blockade fortune magazine head analyst jason ma
00:02:22.000did an analysis of the current economic environment and took the reports of imf and
00:02:27.600others talking about gdp going forward his headline in the article is quite concerning
00:02:33.720u.s naval blockade on iran will trigger a currency devaluation spiral and hyperinflation
00:02:40.760and potentially ending the war more quickly.
00:02:43.680Now, this is specifically about what he says is going to happen to the Persians and to the Iranian economy.
00:02:50.820Scott Besson was already pretty far down the road of trying to do this without an instrument of like a three carrier battle groups
00:02:59.320to basically choke off any oil coming out, any cash going in.
00:03:03.920Walk us through, because one of the implications here is that if you use economic warfare on the Persians, number one, the world gets skittish that, hey, the Europeans and kind of with the Americans backing did this to the Russians in Ukraine, and now they're doing it to the Persians.0.55
00:03:24.100Why do I keep my assets in Western banks, and why do I keep them in dollar-denominated assets?
00:03:31.140Maybe I've got to get into a gold asset.
00:03:34.000That's why the IMF report for the first quarter of this year, for the first time since the IMF has been keeping score for 30 years,
00:03:41.280showed that there's more gold-related assets in these banks, these central banks, than there are dollar-denominated assets.
00:03:50.440Also, the second implication is that the world economy is still very skittish right now.
00:03:57.020A lot of growth rates are being cut because of the dramatic increase in oil and the inflation that's popping up and showing up in the inflation categories.
00:04:07.000We had E.J. and Tony on this morning, and there's not a bigger supporter of the president.
00:04:12.280And E.J., you know, was nominated to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he was the one that got it correct about all these recalibrations and how they were phony, how the Biden administration was showing millions of jobs, of new jobs created that just didn't happen.
00:04:28.300He's very concerned about the economy.
00:04:31.540He's particularly concerned about oil getting back down to a $50 barrel instead of standing at a $90 to $100 barrel.
00:04:38.040The implication of this article is you take Iran down, you don't know it's the law of unintended consequences.
00:04:45.280It's a country with 92 or 93 million people.0.53
00:04:49.160It's one of the reasons that we've never been able to really implement full sanctions because the UAE is banking them.
00:04:56.420Other countries are trying to sell for them because they're a sophisticated consumer and it's 92 million people.
00:05:02.980Your thoughts about this article, particularly the implications that we can destroy and are
00:05:08.200destroying their economy with hyperinflation, devaluation, all that. What is that going to
00:05:13.480mean for the dollar? And what is it going to mean for gold in the intermediate and long-term, sir?
00:05:20.380Yeah, look, the missiles have paused for now, but this is the more, at least for me,
00:05:25.020the more interesting fight. And that's the behind-the-scenes currency war.
00:05:28.860Look, we ended up in a quagmire. This was a very tough situation. We've talked before about the
00:05:35.060Iranians' asymmetric strategy. They understood their leverage being the Strait of Hormuz.0.99
00:05:41.060And in the short term, it gave them leverage over global trade. I don't think Trump had a choice.
00:05:47.240The US response short term, the naval blockade, I think was smart because it ultimately removes1.00
00:05:53.180the leverage the Iranians have, and it puts the pressure right back on them. And it was done at a1.00
00:05:58.820good time. Cutting off their oil revenue could trigger, as you rightly point out in the article
00:06:03.960you're referencing, rightly point out, a currency collapse in the country and potentially
00:06:09.080hyperinflation. We're already seeing early signs that prices in Tehran are just skyrocketing,
00:06:16.520reportedly up 40% in just a few weeks. As you mentioned, that was already on top of the pressure
00:06:23.340Treasury Secretary Besant did during the Realde valuation last year. So in the short term, I think
00:06:30.540the strategy is working and it's forced the Iranians back to the table. Their economy was1.00
00:06:35.760already disastrous. They cannot suffer, I think, more damage there. It's encouraging, though, to
00:06:42.740see the administration playing them at their own game. This is clear sort of Trump policy,
00:06:49.080and I think it was necessary. The Iranians' leverage over the Strait of Hormuz long term,1.00
00:06:54.960though, I don't think really existed. It doesn't benefit the world to create problems there long1.00
00:07:01.860term. China and India are included in that. Asian economies are very dependent on oil flowing0.93
00:07:07.520through the straits. So long term, I think that was going to get wrapped up. What does that mean
00:07:13.540for the bigger picture, right? De-dollarization. I don't think a huge amount has changed. We got a,
00:07:20.760you know, we were talking about this long before the Iran war. China, for example,
00:07:25.360have been building alternative payment systems since 2013. That is a completely independent
00:07:31.620financial network, it is out there and available today. So when countries like Iran or Russia
00:07:37.780can't or won't use dollars, there's an alternative waiting for them. And that's the pattern that
00:07:43.720we're seeing. So yes, I think the US will win this round of economic warfare. But longer term,
00:07:50.060as you pointed out earlier, every one of these conflicts, sanctions, blockades, they chip away
00:07:55.480at the same thing, which is global trust in a dollar-based system. What's been interesting over
00:08:01.480the last few years is to see how effective economic warfare can be. In many ways, it can be
00:08:08.040more effective than military warfare. But that is both a good and a bad thing, right? The reason
00:08:13.940sanctions and tariffs are so effective is because the dollar is still dominant. But that is also
00:08:20.100what's driving the long-term shift. Listen, if you're on the receiving end, Russia, Iran, or even
00:08:25.440China, you can't negotiate within the system. So you'll start looking for ways around it. And I
00:08:31.060think that's what's happening. I don't think anything's really changed longer term. And we're
00:08:37.500seeing it with the trends, right? Central bank gold buying is increasing. US dollar holdings
00:08:42.220broadly are reducing. And I think that trend will continue. And things like this just reinforce the
00:08:48.840idea longer term uh david purdue and this interesting thing is that purdue's not a
00:08:56.400politician he's a businessman he came from the consumer market i think it was puma and adidas
00:09:00.500that he ran in uh out of hong kong and had all of asia which is a huge huge responsibility trump
00:09:08.400is also not a politician he's a businessman and i think they're looking at when they look at china
00:09:13.940and the CCP, they look at it through the eyes of a businessman and how you complete deals.
00:09:19.400It was interesting this morning, we had EJ on, and you know he's one of the biggest supporters
00:09:25.420of Trump's economic program, although he is, and to be blunt, he said it, he says, look,
00:09:29.680I'm really getting afraid given everything we've done, everything we've done to turn
00:09:34.200around this Biden fiasco, the big, beautiful bill is all starting to click the longer this
00:09:39.720drags on because he's like me. He says, hey, the Trump economic plan soars when you have full
00:09:46.540spectrum energy dominance and oil is $50 a barrel. It soars a lot less when you're at $95 to $105 a
00:09:55.080barrel just over time. And so he's very concerned about it. But what I found interesting, he was so
00:10:00.440concerned as an economist to open up Hormuz, whether you have a blockade now and then open
00:10:06.320and then open it up, or you go in and start doing safe passage for the ships, he said, look, I don't
00:10:11.120really, he says, I'm not into geopolitics. I don't understand it, but I'm not that concerned with
00:10:16.560free navigation. I'm particularly not concerned if they're charging a $2 million toll, you know,
00:10:21.460if they're charging a $2 million toll per vessel, and it's paid in Chinese yuan or crypto, he said,
00:10:28.300in the overall scheme, I don't have a problem with that, whereas I think you or I would say
00:10:32.860That's the worst indicator I've seen in this entire situation where the CCP is making a statement with their Iranian proxy that they're prepared in the Gulf to challenge the petrodollar.
00:10:46.120Now, it's not a huge amount of money, but for the Arabs, it's incredibly symbolic, is it not, sir?
00:15:44.720If you had to ask me what was a more imminent threat, their ability over a number of years with fairly high hurdles to get to a nuclear weapon versus the ticking time, so many inside the wire crises we have.0.91
00:15:59.260And this one is big, and it seems like no one can address it because as soon as you start to address it, you get smeared, right?
00:18:47.980And I think everybody needs to be thinking, look, if we cannot get a handle on this, I've got to have a hedge in place.
00:18:55.200And precious metals have been a hedge on currency devaluation for thousands of years, and they will continue to do so for thousands of years.
00:19:02.640So I would just encourage everybody to get information, read, learn as much as you can, and the solutions will present themselves.
00:21:03.560That's where we can have these successful auctions.
00:21:05.980There's going to come a point in time, Philip Patrick, you know this, I know this, that the world's going to say you're going to come from one of these treasury auctions and go, well, you know what, I'm kind of topped off, right?
00:21:25.580And this is the complexity of what we're dealing with and the reason we try to talk geopolitics, national security and capital markets with you, because you are going to be a big decision maker in this.
00:21:35.620We just want to make sure you're not whipsault because this we're going to have a national conversation about this, regardless of the revenue and the spending.
00:21:43.600It's going to become quite evident that there is some point in time where the world's just going to say, hey, look, guys, we just can't take it.
00:21:50.640We're just not comfortable continuing to buy this at the rates we're buying.
00:21:54.020Is that essentially the argument of why people are concerned about when you talk about the dollar empire and Bretton Woods and people need our currency to transact, whether you're doing a drug trade in Thailand or you're helping give a donation to a convent in sub-Saharan Africa or an orphanage in sub-Saharan Africa, you've got to convert it into dollars, sir.
00:22:15.920And that's why we're able to sell massive amount of and Scott Besson is able to refinance this annually.
00:22:23.360Philip Patrick. Yeah, it absolutely is.
00:22:27.100And, you know, there's still demand out there.
00:22:29.640I don't see a busted Treasury auction on the horizon very short term.
00:22:33.400But what I do see and what we are seeing is higher costs to borrow.
00:22:37.320And, you know, as we've said many times, this trend, I think, is set to continue.
00:22:41.960We have, over years, done significant amounts of damage.1.00
00:22:46.880And, you know, I have to be honest, it is just less attractive for a foreign central
00:34:17.580The biggest story in the world is the blockade.
00:34:19.960And I think they're saying after early reports trying to mock the Navy and mock Trump and he's off the rails and et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:27.340I think five ships were kind of notified and five ships turned it back around.
00:34:33.980So a couple of those had OFAC warnings.
00:34:38.520This is the official kind of treasury when you're sanctioned and you're not supposed to move kind of the great fleet.
00:34:43.860And in my understanding that our great ally, UAE, filled them up in, let's say they were filled up in airports, not in Persian ports, and they're trying to head to the high seas when they got turned around.
00:34:56.520Your sense of how it's going as a former military person, also the vibe in the White House about this as we go into the second day of the blockade, sir?
00:35:08.340Yeah, the White House is very confident about the way things are going. They feel like they've
00:35:14.780flipped the script. There is some talk that Pakistan wants to reboot negotiations, and there
00:35:21.640hasn't been any final word on that. But the president did say that he wouldn't be surprised
00:35:26.720if negotiations started up again. Certainly, Vance said that the Iranians had moved towards0.99
00:35:33.000the administration in their position. The administration has proposed a 20-year ban
00:35:37.900on their nuclear program. The Iranians are at five. And so that's basically our gap right now.0.98
00:35:45.040But as for the blockade, I've seen reports that it was six ships that have been turned around.
00:35:49.960And that's all been done bridge to bridge on Channel 16. There's been no boardings. There's
00:35:56.360been no hostility, no shots across the bow. Everybody's sort of playing it calm and loose.
00:36:03.000and that blockade is very effective, and it's especially effective when you consider that the Iranians send out about 2 million barrels of oil a day through the straits,
00:36:15.640and 90% of that is going to go to China, and the other big customers of that oil is going to be India, and to a lesser extent, Indonesia.
00:36:25.700not so much for the use of indonesia but because indonesia has tremendous their their state oil
00:36:32.400company protamina they have tremendous storage and refinery facilities there and then that oil
00:36:39.440can be shipped out to other places or then further on to northeast asia steve so you bring up
00:36:45.720interesting you know david zero is all over we just were so jammed yesterday we couldn't cut to
00:36:49.680But David Zier was at the was at the Pentagon and Zier, who's got a great nose for news over there.
00:36:55.820And what's important was saying, hey, look, this this Indonesia thing is just not some, you know, because they all have these type of honorary meetings that the heads of the military go.
00:37:04.620They shake hands. They review some troops, have a cup of coffee and get some photo op.
00:37:09.140This was not that they were actually signing an MOU.
00:37:12.000people should understand if you've got the Strait of Hormuz
00:37:17.880where all the oil and natural gas in the Persian Gulf comes out0.94
00:37:21.320and you've got the gates of fire down there by the Houthis0.86
00:37:25.940in what the Gulf of Aden, I think, leading into the Red Sea,
00:37:29.840you have the Strait of Malacca, which all of it, from Indian Ocean,
00:37:34.000the South China Sea, and before you get to the Persian Gulf
00:37:38.120and before you get to the Red Sea, you've got that
00:37:41.140And everything going to China, everything going to East Asia, everything going to Japan, Taiwan has to go through Malacca.
00:37:48.820So this was actually very strategic yesterday.
00:37:51.280And I think it shows how the team of Rubio and Hegseth and Besset and the president are thinking strategically.
00:37:59.600Because all of a sudden we've never really been that close militarily to Indonesia.
00:38:03.460Although Indonesia from the 60s has a great hatred of the Chinese Communist Party, given what happened in Indonesia.
00:38:11.140when Mao Zedong was trying to flip Indonesia and turn it into a totally Marxist country.
00:38:17.240How big a deal is this, Neil, this MOU that looks like it could be some sort of potential partnership between Indonesia and the United States?
00:38:24.620It looks like with your eye on the Straits of Malacca, sir.
00:38:30.840Right. So let's just start at the beginning.
00:38:33.080Post-Sakarno, who of course was one of the leaders of the third world movement, post-Sakarno of the institutions inside Indonesia, the Indonesian military has been extremely close to the American military.
00:38:46.460They may participate in maybe 100, 150 different training exercises and events with the U.S. military every year.
00:38:56.060You always have the Indonesian generals and officers who are training here in the U.S.
00:39:01.500And so it's a very close relationship.
00:39:03.580So what Hegseth was doing yesterday was just amping that up.
00:39:07.520And so there's going to be enhanced cooperation for special operations.
00:39:11.880There's going to be enhanced training.
00:39:13.380But most importantly, there was a letter of intent which would grant the United States overflight permission to go over Indonesian territory with our airframes.0.58
00:39:26.860And that is highly significant because, you know, Indonesia is very jealous of its sovereignty, Steve.
00:39:33.460But they're in the process of basically allowing the United States to overfly their country.
00:39:39.160And I think that's really the kicker that came out of that meeting yesterday, Steve.
00:39:44.340Mao Zedong realized, and remember, there's no love lost between the Chinese and the Vietnamese.0.60
00:39:49.500There was less love lost between Chinese and the Indonesians.
00:39:52.680But Mao realized for his revolution really to take, to get traction,
00:39:57.200he had to export it to the countries of Southeast Asia and down.
00:40:01.100And Indonesia is when he always had the target, had very bloody,0.58
00:40:04.540many years of bloody confrontation with the Chinese.0.94
00:40:09.280That military has no love for the Chinese Communist Party and kind of knows them,0.90
00:40:12.380I think, as the butchers they are, right, probably better than than anybody.0.86
00:40:18.220Neil, we're talking about the inside the wire issues.
00:40:21.140I know that you, particularly when you were there as Ed Martin's wingman, worked on a lot of election integrity,
00:40:26.960particularly when you guys were over when Ed, before the confirmation issue, over as the U.S. attorney in in in D.C.
00:40:36.960And also as Ed came back and head of weaponization and DOJ, I think we got a clip.
00:40:41.160Let's go and play that. And we'll bring Neil McCabe in. The election was rigged. The 2020 election was rigged. We found that out.
00:40:47.740What you just said is just a piece of that. It's a big piece, but minor, relatively speaking, compared to what they did.
00:40:55.400They cheated on the election. They cheated on the vote and they cheated in every way possible.
00:41:00.080And it's the only way we got an incompetent man to be a president.
00:41:03.780So Donald Trump can't get past his 2020 election loss now with less than seven months to go until the midterms, if you can believe it.
00:41:11.160Some of the same people who spread election denial conspiracies in 2020 are currently in place to oversee election security and infrastructure with the power to intervene or interfere.
00:41:22.960As the director of the nonpartisan campaign legal center tells ProPublica, quote, the election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections.
00:41:36.760As you know, you know, we wanted to really take a deep look at what was happening inside the federal government.
00:41:42.160A lot of these guardrails, they held in 2020.
00:41:44.460They really bent. They bent almost to the breaking point.
00:41:47.460But Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election, they failed.
00:41:51.980But in the last year or so, the Trump administration has had a lot of time and a lot of opportunity to try to, you know, overhaul the federal system, to get ready for the midterms.
00:42:02.920And we wanted to take a very deep look behind the scenes to see what was happening as they get ready for the midterms.
00:42:11.080Now, one of those key teams, as you mentioned, is a group of people at the Department of Homeland Security.
00:42:18.200They've called themselves in the past Team America internally.
00:42:21.640And some of their members come out of a group called the Election Integrity Network, which is led by a lawyer who tried to help overturn the 2020 election.
00:42:29.500So is there any kind of effort to try to counter what these Trump appointees, his loyalists, are doing within the government?
00:42:38.660Well, so, you know, the Constitution dictates that states actually, you know, run elections.
00:42:45.120And one of the things we found as we looked at how the Trump administration was changing things behind the scenes was that a lot of both Republican state officials as well as Democratic state officials are really trying to stand up counter efforts by the Trump administration to impose their way of running elections on them.
00:43:06.060That can be Republican officials refusing to hand over voter rolls, which the Trump administration has sued them for.
00:43:14.600That can be Democratic state secretaries of states hiring more lawyers to try and fight what they believe is going to be a coming attempt to overturn potential results in the midterms.
00:43:25.780The Constitution is very clear that states have the responsibility to run their elections.
00:43:30.240What the federal government is doing, this administration is doing, is tearing apart that infrastructure because they want to influence and intimidate us into compliance with what they think is the appropriate thing to do.
00:43:43.480So take us to the to the voter level of all of this for Americans who head to the polls in November.
00:43:48.920What could be different? What could they see there? What worries you after your research and reporting?
00:43:54.040You know, so one thing that the Trump administration has really tried to do is they released a new executive order at the end of last month, which would have a which would create sort of a master list of sorts of who could be eligible to vote.
00:44:10.340You know, there's a lot of worries about, you know, what the Trump administration might do to control about who could show up at the polls, who would be able to do this.
00:44:20.540There's talk of ICE agents or other people showing up at the polls.
00:44:24.560The Trump administration has, you know, said that the election is going to be free and fair.
00:44:30.360But as we were looking behind the scenes, we found a lot of things that really broke down the old guardrails that prevented, you know, partisan influence on elections.
00:44:40.920You know, a really key moment that we found was when the Trump White House hired this lawyer named Kurt Olson.
00:44:48.760Now, Kurt Olson tried to help Trump overturn the 20 election in court, and Trump has hired him to reinvestigate the results of that election.
00:44:57.360Around the end of this year, Kurt Olson flew down to Georgia ahead of the raid to seize Georgia election materials.
00:45:06.880And, you know, Olson met with the special agent in charge, the FBI special agent in charge there, and said, you know, I have this report.
00:45:14.040You know, we've got to, you know, go and try and get these ballots.
00:45:18.080but the special agent in charge did not go along with exactly what he wanted and was eventually
00:45:24.500asked to retire. Now, that's really a key moment. Back after Watergate, we established norms,
00:45:30.820we established rules that tried to prevent the White House from leaning on law enforcement.
00:45:35.980And this seems to be a possible instance where that guardrail has broken down and is really
00:45:41.920an indication of what might be happening in the future as we get closer to the midterms.
00:45:45.420this is all the propaganda they put out there no they're trying to redo the constitution the
00:45:51.200president of the united states is the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer
00:45:54.100of the united states government full stop um kurt olson is in the executive branch he's special
00:46:00.680assistant to the president on voter integrity when they talk about i don't want to bury the
00:46:05.560lead the election integrity network and someone you know they have many people from that network
00:46:11.040They're some of the leaders in voter integrity that have been working for years on this.
00:46:21.300So they're trying to identify these patriots that have worked on election integrity for many years.
00:46:27.200Neil, you've seen this up close and personal, both at DOJ with the weaponization, also your coverage in media over since the 2020 election.
00:46:35.900I keep telling people this is going to be a massive firestorm.
00:46:39.580Todd Blanche on at CPAC being interviewed by Matt Schlapp said, hey, I have no problem at all with ICE agents being near polling stations.