Roger Stone Provides Crucial Update On Classified JFK Assassination Docs
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Summary
The FBI has just discovered 2,400 new JFK documents, 14,000 pages. The timing strikes me as odd. It comes just a few weeks after President Trump asked for a full release of all JFK documents related to the murder. Well, the man we wanted to ask to come on, who knows arguably more about this than anyone in the United States, has written a book about this, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ. And that is Roger Stone.
Transcript
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The Stone Zone, with legendary Republican strategist and political icon and pundit Roger Stone.
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Stone has served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents.
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He is a New York Times bestselling author and a longtime friend and advisor of President Donald Trump.
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As an outspoken libertarian, Stone has appeared on thousands of broadcasts, spoken at countless venues,
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and lectured before the prestigious Oxford Political Union and the Cambridge Union Society.
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Due to his four-plus decades in the political and cultural arena, Stone has become a pop culture icon.
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Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Troy Smith. I'm your regular co-host here on The Stone Zone.
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I want to welcome you to The Stone Zone and urge you, if you're not following us already on Rumble,
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that's where to find us every single day. It's where we find, it's where Roger and I do this show
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literally five days a week where you can see us talk about the latest and greatest news
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Well, folks, you're not going to go anywhere today because we have a breaking news announcement
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He helped Richard Nixon get to the White House.
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He helped Ronald Reagan get to the White House.
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And, of course, he was one of the first people, actually the first person,
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to urge President Donald Trump to seek the presidency in the 1980s.
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He's the most successful political operative in the history of American politics
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It's my honor to introduce the legendary Roger Stone,
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discussing the latest information on the JFK documents that are set to be released by President Trump.
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Roger is, of course, the author of the New York Times bestseller,
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The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ,
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and is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of the JFK truth movement,
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talking about the assassination and outlining who had the most to gain
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So the legendary Roger Stone, ladies and gentlemen.
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Well, it might come as a shock to learn that the CIA has been lying
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It only took however many years to be able to say that, Clayton.
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All in an effort, of course, to block the American people from knowing what happened on that day.
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the FBI has just discovered 2,400 new JFK documents, 14,000 pages.
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It comes just a few weeks after President Trump asked for a full release of all JFK documents
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Well, the man we wanted to ask to come on, who knows arguably more about this
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than anyone in the United States, has written a book about this,
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the man who killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ, and that is Roger Stone.
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So what do you make, first of all, before we get to what you expect to see in these documents,
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the full release here, once President Trump signs off on that, and Tulsi Gabbard being in there,
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But this new revelation, 2,400 new JFK documents, 14,000 pages.
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Well, it's far worse than that, because really, it's just the tip of the iceberg.
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You see, all of the relevant documents pertaining to John F. Kennedy's murder did not go into
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It's available in a number of other places and other agencies.
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So the president could broaden his order to say all documents in possession of any federal agency.
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And then if we're serious, and the president is quite serious, about examining the documents
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pertaining to the death of Senator Robert Kennedy, who was murdered while running for president
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on the evening he won the California primary, or Dr. Martin Luther King, well, we need to
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have the Los Angeles Police Department's records and the Memphis, Tennessee records, as well
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as the records from the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas Sheriff's Office.
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The president's committed to full disclosure, but the bureaucrats are always going to play
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Congressman Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, and Congressman Tim Burscht, who is a real fighter
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on this issue, have both co-written a letter to the president explaining where various places
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the documents could be hidden, and urging him to set up someone as a liaison to ensure that
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every single document is ultimately declassified and made available to the American people.
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Once we see that, we'll see if it's adequate to uncover all that which is covered.
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Well, obviously, our show is called Redacted, because usually the things that are redacted
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How much of it do you think that those juicy details that the public wants and is in the
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public interest to know at this point will be hidden from us under redactions?
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Well, look, I think if you go back and look at the history of this, it tells you a lot.
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The law mandating the release of all of the JFK assassination documents was passed in the
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So this decision came to President Donald Trump whether he should declassify the documents.
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In the end, he decided to declassify about 80 percent of them.
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We learned all kinds of things that we didn't know about Kennedy's assassination.
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For example, there's a memo from J. Edgar Hoover to President Lyndon Johnson saying,
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Sir, our sources tell you the KGB, their Russian intelligence agency, has conducted their own
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independent investigation, and they concluded that you, sir, are the PERP at working with
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But the part that was held back was held back at the behest of Mike Pompeo, who was the CIA
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So it would be—and his reasoning was that it would expose the methods and sources of
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Now, President Trump told me that it was Pompeo who talked him out of full disclosure.
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And then about, I don't know, 10 days ago, he told Sean Hannity.
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So that kind of tells you what piece is missing.
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If you understand, the Kennedy assassination is a puzzle.
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While I maintain in my New York Times bestselling book that Lyndon Johnson is the drum major,
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He appoints himself to the secret black box subcommittee of the Defense Appropriations
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Very rare for a majority leader to serve on any committee.
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But that's where the CIA's budget is controlled.
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In other words, Lyndon Johnson is the paymaster for the CIA.
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And very recently, I think it was Alex Jones posted an audio that came from the great-grandson
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of Billy Sal Estes, one of Johnson's cronies, and the executive director of the Democrat
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National Committee, basically Johnson's chief political operative, in which they talk casually
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about the fact that Lyndon Johnson hired Malcolm Mack Wallace to kill John F. Kennedy.
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So we now have—and Wallace's fingerprints are found on the sixth floor of the Texas School
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There's multiple things tying Johnson to Wallace and Wallace to the assassination.
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In other words, I'm not alleging that Johnson does this alone.
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But the CIA is angry at Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs because they believe that he made a
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mistake, not understanding that the plan that Kennedy approved for the invasion of the Bay
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of Pigs included air cover from 29 Panamanian-flagged bombers flown by Cuban pilots to protect
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Kennedy only approved the plan for the Bay of Pigs on the condition that it looked like an
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indigenous Cuban uprising, not an invasion by the United States government.
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Unbeknownst to Kennedy, the CIA canceled that air cover the day before the invasion.
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The thing was, of course, a fiasco for which Kennedy suffered very badly politically.
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But it's just yet another example of their motives.
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They blame Kennedy because Curtis LeMay wanted to send in the U.S. Air Force,
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stamping this as the U.S. invasion Kennedy had never agreed to, and it was denied.
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The CIA also believes, and this is, we learned, true, the great story about the Cuban missile
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crisis that you've been told, that Jack and Bobby faced down, tough Nikita Khrushchev who
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Fifty years later, when documents are declassified, we learned that they made a deal to remove NATO
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missiles, our missiles, from Italy and Turkey, in return for a pledge by Castro to remove
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the missiles from Cuba, which included no on-site inspections.
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So the deep state, the military-industrial complex, they are very upset with John Kennedy.
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Big oil is furious because Kennedy is trying to repeal the oil depletion allowance, costing
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These are all of the entities who are—and organized crime, of course, shouldn't leave
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Remember, Joe Kennedy got the mob to give $1 million to John Kennedy's race for president,
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and in return, the Kennedy administration was supposed to drop deportation proceedings against
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Santo Traficante, the mobster who ran Florida, and Carlos Marcello, who controlled the mob
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After Kennedy was elected, Bobby becomes attorney general.
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Joe Kennedy suffers a stroke, so he can no longer keep the deal.
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So what I expect that we're going to see here is the CIA piece.
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But there are other things the government has that we need to know.
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But just to get everything out of the CIA, I think that would be a significant achievement.
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And the president's got to look at this more broadly.
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I spoke to him the other day, and I said, this was great, getting all of the data regarding
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all three assassinations, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Dr. King.
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But I also told him he should release all documents pertaining to the attempted assassination
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I'm writing a book on this subject now, because there are many, many anomalies that are hard to
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If John Kennedy Jr. is always in front of Reagan shooting upwards, which he is, there's four
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Reagan was shot from above and behind, as you will see.
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So I'd like to get the government's records on this for my own selfish reasons.
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The president told me that it was a good idea, and he would think about it.
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I see people recently, as soon as these files came out, asking about APEC and John F. Kennedy's
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move to try to have them register as a foreign agent in the United States.
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Plus his interest in the connections with Mossad and the nuclear program in Israel.
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Only days after Lyndon Johnson became president, they had approval to get the nuke.
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And we pretend we don't know that they have the nuke.
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I want to ask you, before we let you go, Roger, on Representative Luna, we just heard
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She says what she's seen clearly shows that there's two shooters.
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First of all, do you trust the congresswoman on this piece?
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And do you think this is going to be more whitewashing?
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Or we'll get some actual answers from a House of Representatives commission?
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I haven't seen the full context of what Congressman Luna said.
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A week ago, she had a bill to add Donald Trump to Mount Rushmore, and I strongly support her
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Secondarily, the president said that he would appoint a commission to examine all of these
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And at the time, he rather implied that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would head such a commission,
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although time-wise, even though Bobby's got a lot of energy, it'd be tough to be HHS secretary
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We should look at all these presidential assassinations, including the ones in Butler, Pennsylvania,
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and the one in West Palm Beach, as well as Reagan's, as I've discussed.
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And we should make sure we're learning everything there is to know about JFK, RFK, and MLK.
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People don't realize this, but there was an attempt on Carter's life by Puerto Rican nationalists.
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We were told by a member of the Manson family, that may actually be true.
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There was an attempt on Nixon's life in Miami, which got very little coverage.
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So every modern president has had attempts on their life.
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When there's a FOIL assassination, I'm not sure the government has always told us about it.
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And the involvement of the Secret Service in Trump's Butler, Pennsylvania, and Mar-a-Lago.
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But the current book, if you want to grab it, let's put it up here on the screen,
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is The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ.
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And we really, really sincerely hope we get some answers on this.
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Well, ladies and gentlemen, Roger Stone always knocks it out of the park.
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And you can best believe that he runs circles around people that are, you know, half his age,
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And this guy, Roger Stone, is somebody that I believe will go down in history as one of
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the most effective patriotic Americans in the history of our country.
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It's one of the great honors of my life to be on this show every day.
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We have more from Roger coming up, so don't go anywhere.
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We're going to start with Norm Eisen, who Roger has talked about.
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He's one of the chief architects of the Russian collusion hoax.
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Norm Eisen is also one of the chief architects of the impeachments of Donald Trump.
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Norm Eisen is one of the orchestrators of Roger Stone's persecution.
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And one of the main reasons that Roger had 29 heavily clad FBI agents storm into his home
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and point guns at his wife, himself, and his lovely dogs, who we talk about here on The
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So, Roger's life, the life of his family, has been threatened by people like Norm Eisen for
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And now, Eisen, despite the American public sending a mandate to Washington, D.C. in November
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of 2024, where Republicans won the House, the Senate, and the White House, and the national
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Long gone are the days of Hillary Clinton objecting to the election results, claiming that the
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Because the American people have awoken to a level where Republicans are now winning the
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And we should be clear, Trump Republicans are winning the national popular vote, as Trump
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has pulled off a successful remake, a rebuild of the Republican Party, the likes we have never
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Trump took the Republican Party from irrelevance.
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Irrelevance with John McCain, and irrelevance with Mitt Romney.
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And perpetual losses with people like George W. Bush, he took that party and turned it into
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the party of the working man, the party of the electrician, the party of the plumber, the
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party of the working man of this country, the working men and women of this country who work
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so diligently hard to put food on the table for their children, to pay their taxes, to cover
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their mortgage, to cover their ever-increasing prices for things like gasoline and groceries and
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So because of the accumulation of troubles that the American people have seen throughout
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the Biden presidency, whether it be through prices or risk to their security or the border
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overflowing, those risks prompted you, the American people, to go to the ballot box in
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record numbers and to elect President Trump and Republicans.
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And people like Norm Eisen simply can't stand that.
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Because for years, people like Norm Eisen, people like Andrew Weissman, they've been able to
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maneuver their way into controlling the outcome of events without actually receiving votes
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People like Norm Eisen, people like Andrew Weissman want to operate a shadow government in which
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unelected bureaucrats get to push the whim and will of radical leftist MSNBC hosts like
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Andrew Weissman and Jen Psaki and Joy Reid and Ari Melber and all these people.
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Their version of a good government is a government that does exactly what people like Rachel Maddow
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And they can't stand the fact that the American people stood up to them and said, no more inflation,
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no more wars, no more trouble for our people coming from our own country.
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We're going to do things for Americans and not against Americans, as people like Norm
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Now Eisen is claiming that he's launching 100 lawsuits against President Trump.
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So it only took two weeks, three weeks, a month for leftist people to get these lawsuits
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engaged, where they're now going to be challenging President Trump.
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You saw that the show just before this one, Lindsey Graham and others voted for a majority
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of the federal judiciary appointments of Joe Biden, 235 federal judges, if you include the
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Supreme Court justices and the appellate court justices and all these different people.
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All of these individuals only got to that judiciary, the same people challenging President Trump
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because Republican turncoats like Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted to confirm
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these individuals, a travesty for our country that is now giving way to people like Norm
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Eisen who attempt to use and abuse the judiciary to push their political will against the mandate
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of the people, against Republican politics that have been cemented in Washington under President
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Let's go to Norm Eisen explaining how he's going to stop the will of the people.
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And let's come back to it and tell the people why this is going to fail.
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We are not the only nation that has had an autocratic takeover.
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It happened where I was ambassador, Czech Republic.
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All three of those countries got to the other side.
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They ousted autocratic regimes like Trump and Musk.
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Whenever you've got a dictator, you've got an oligarch by its side.
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How can we get to the other side like those countries did and not go the way of Hungary
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There's a thousand and one things you can do, but we've done a big study and we know
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Number two, protect elections because that's how you kick them out.
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And the lawsuits we're bringing, I'm planning a hundred this year, one hundred.
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The lawsuits we're bringing are designed as part of that.
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And they're starting to work because you can't do it in the courts of law alone.
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And what did we see this week in parallel with our Treasury lawsuit, that first Treasury
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Peaceful protesters for the first time starting to show up at the Treasury building around
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Members of Congress for the first time starting to come to protests.
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And even the press, so many others have bent the knee.
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Too many corporate owners of press have bent the knee, kissed the ring, count out.
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So you trigger that immune response of the body politic.
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And that's what's on the other side, is an awakened democracy.
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Donald Trump and Elon Musk, peaceful, Donald Trump and Elon Musk can't resist that.
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He's describing how the left manipulates the media and lies in order to push their agenda,
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in order to get their stormtroopers out there, all riled up over things that really have
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This was exhibited during a recent appearance by Amy Klobuchar, who Roger funnily, you know,
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hilariously says, combs her hair with buttered toast.
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She was on a news channel, and she happened to claim that Trump was cutting cancer research.
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Now, if you're sitting at home and you're watching the mainstream media, you're probably
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saying, wow, it's terrible that Trump is cutting cancer research.
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But he's not cutting cancer research, of course.
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Just like so many of the things that these people claim that Elon Musk is cutting, oh,
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He's cutting things like LGBTQ propaganda in Bangladesh.
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He's cutting things like Sesame Street for radical Muslims in Iraq.
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He's cutting things that make no sense, and the American taxpayer have no reason to pay
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Now, if you want to get into semantics of it, should the United States taxpayer be forced
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to pay for life-saving medications for people around the world?
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Maybe people like Norm Eisen and people like Andrew Weissman shouldn't be the ones that
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Maybe the American people should get to decide that.
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And we just had an election where we had the choice between a candidate who wanted to dole
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out everybody's money to everyone on planet Earth, and somebody who said, look, we need
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And the people overwhelmingly elected the individual that said, let's cut.
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The American people elected Republicans to cut, and the only thing the left can do is
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lie about this and say, oh, they're cutting cancer research, just like they do every-
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Republicans are cutting Medicaid, but it never happens.
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Republicans are coming for your Social Security.
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So let's roll Amy Klobuchar telling a flat-out lie about cancer research, truly disgusting.
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You know that our policy of our government should not be giving $2 trillion in tax cuts
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to the wealthiest and paying for it by cuts to cancer research at NIH, something that has
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bipartisan support for years and years, or stopping Head Start, or freezing people who
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I know they are, but what I'm saying is, at some point, the pressure is on them.
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Amy Klobuchar is disgusting, and they're not cutting cancer research.
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And, you know, we talked about, on this show, the effects that the NIH has had, whether it
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be on their animal studies, where they put a dog into a torture device, where its face
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is fed on by fleas for hours at a time until it's dead.
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You know, we talk about so much about what the left wants to do.
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If they are given the chance, what they would like to do.
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We saw a little bit of it during Biden's presidency, because they had some power.
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But, you know, now that Trump is back in power, things are a little different.
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And we're starting to see the left kind of bemoan Trump in the same breath, you know, kind
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of admire authoritarian countries in Europe that have taken strong stands against free
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And it's important to highlight this, because the people in America that are celebrating
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Germany and others for cracking down on free speech are the same people that want to silence
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We have a video that I want to play of Rick Wilson from the Lincoln Project, a real scumbag,
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attacking President Trump and attacking America and saying that Germany has better free speech
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And then we have a clip to play right after that.
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We'll play them back to back of German police conducting a raid over a meme.
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In Germany, you can actually go to jail for posting something online that the administration
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in power doesn't like, something that the Biden administration put into, you know, a little
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And Kamala Harris was really keen on doing herself.
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I communicated with somebody from the German CSU a little while ago.
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I asked her what she thought about what had happened with Vance.
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And the degree to which they were shocked and appalled and offended that Vance came there
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daring to lecture Germany, one of the most free countries on Earth when it comes to expression,
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where America is now rated 55th in the world on freedom of expression, was appalling.
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And it's a crime to insult them online as well?
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The fine could be even higher if you insult someone in the Internet.
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If we are talking face to face, you insult me, I insult you, okay, finish.
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But if you're in the Internet, if I insult you or a politician.
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The prosecutors explain German law also prohibits the spread of malicious gossip, violent threats
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If somebody posts something that's not true and then somebody else reposts it or likes it, are they committing a crime?
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In the case of reposting, it is a crime as well because the reader can't distinguish whether you just invented this or just reposted it.
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The punishment for breaking hate speech laws can include jail time for repeat offenders.
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Rick Wilson, a disgusting liar, and the pedophilia at the Lincoln Project needs to be investigated.
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I think we need to see some indictments as far as that's concerned.
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And I guarantee you that there was at least a little bit of knowledge about some of the stuff that was going on there
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on behalf of some of these people in leadership at the Lincoln Project.
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It's a little bit of a throwback from a few years ago, but we talk about it here during the intro every day,
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Roger will be back with us in the saddle tomorrow, folks.
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I want to encourage you, wherever you're watching the show, Rumble, X, wherever, give us a follow, give us a like, leave a comment,
00:29:10.760
and we will see you back in the saddle tomorrow, Roger and I.
00:29:16.580
This is Roger at the Cambridge Union, a major event from just a few years ago.
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And watching this, you really get the sense of Roger's futuristic vision.
00:29:27.580
One of the main things that impresses me about Roger is that he's a guy that's experienced so much in his life,
00:29:32.700
and it would be so easy for him to sit there and just think about what he used to do in all the times with Nixon and Reagan and all this.
00:29:39.740
But he's also, instead of doing that, he is 100% focused on the future.
00:29:45.340
He is 100% focused on tomorrow and not yesterday.
00:29:48.660
And when you listen to him in this clip, you get the sense that this is a guy who understood where things were going long before they got there.
00:30:03.240
Good evening, everyone, and thank you very much for coming to this really exciting new addition to our term card.
00:30:20.580
As some of you may know, Roger J. Stone is an American political consultant and lobbyist with a decade-long career advising some of America's most well-known politicians and presidents, whether you like them or not.
00:30:34.080
Now, he's most famed for being a recent advisor to Donald Trump, the current U.S. president, and was the subject of an incredible documentary called Get Me Roger Stone, which is on Netflix.
00:30:43.560
And I watched it before this, and it is really interesting, so do watch it.
00:30:46.820
However, without further ado, please welcome Roger Stone.
00:31:05.280
First of all, let me thank the Cambridge Union Society for your commitment to free speech and free expression and debate.
00:31:15.120
As you know, this is, you probably know, this is the end of a tour for me.
00:31:23.320
But I am delighted that you invited me, and I am delighted to be here.
00:31:27.720
I understand my friend General Flynn has been invited and may come along shortly.
00:31:32.460
And I understand that my good friend, Anthony Scaramucci, was just here.
00:31:38.220
And although you may judge him more articulate than I, I am taller than he is.
00:31:43.700
So, I am painfully aware of the four stages of fame, those being who is Roger Stone, get me a Roger Stone, get me a Roger Stone type, who is Roger Stone.
00:32:02.760
So, we are in the middle of that cycle, perhaps.
00:32:06.420
I have had the great honor of working for, in ten presidential campaigns, nine of them for Republicans, one of them for the Libertarian Party nominee, Governor Gary Johnson, in 2012.
00:32:21.700
I, although I am a former young Republican national chairman, my commitment was to the old Republican Party of Barry Goldwater.
00:32:32.700
That is a party of limited government, a party that is out of the bedroom and out of the boardroom, a party that supported privacy rights, that supported limited regulation in your private life, low taxes.
00:32:49.840
A strong national defense, as opposed to the neocon model of going around the world looking for trouble and inserting yourself in situations in which your inherent national interest is not clear.
00:33:18.740
So, I am a Libertarian Republican in the Goldwater mold.
00:33:25.220
I was asked last night at the Durham Union, if Trump had not run, which of the other Republicans would I have supported?
00:33:35.000
I would have supported the Libertarian Party candidate, Governor Johnson, yet again, who I worked for in 2012 and who I helped to get on the ballot in 48 of the 50 states.
00:33:48.740
Like Governor Johnson, I'm a supporter of same-sex marriage, I'm a supporter of the legalization of marijuana.
00:33:55.220
And though I am most certainly an admirer of my original political mentor, Richard Nixon, I think the war on drugs was his greatest, most ignominious failure of policy mistake.
00:34:09.700
So, I'm somewhat different than your average Republican.
00:34:14.700
Given all of those presidential campaigns, I must tell you that the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump, to me, kind of violated every single rule that I know and have trained to employ in politics.
00:34:32.700
Donald Trump was successfully elected without ever spending any money on sophisticated polling or focus group research or analytic targeting.
00:34:47.700
He held his own in three debates without ever preparing for any of those debates.
00:35:04.700
He is very much his own strategist, his own speechwriter, his own phrase maker, his own tweet master.
00:35:20.700
That is why the notion that my friend Steve Bannon would call himself chief strategist was a little misleading because the strategy, at least the issues on which Trump was elected, immigration, trade, the economy, and so on, were determined long before Steve Bannon joined the Trump entourage.
00:35:44.700
So he is unlike any other career politician that I have ever worked for.
00:35:53.700
He is not somebody who has a wet finger in the wind trying to figure out what to say to be popular.
00:36:00.700
There is no question that in the campaign, I think he would admit this, that he made mistakes, but his opponent's performance was so robotic and so programmed, so scripted, that even when Trump made a mistake, it kind of demonstrated that he was authentic, that he was genuine, that he was like a man working without a net.
00:36:22.700
It is also why he drove these enormous television ratings, why his opponents, at least in the Republican primaries, complained that they weren't getting equal coverage.
00:36:32.700
The problem was they had nothing interesting to say.
00:36:36.700
People tuned in because they had no idea what he might say, and either did we, and therefore it was entertaining.
00:36:43.700
You never knew what he might say or where he might go.
00:36:53.700
The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring, trying to write out a lead, trying to say nothing to offend the smallest number of people.
00:37:07.700
Politics is about engaging people with ideas and trying to generate support on the basis of simply understood ideas.
00:37:22.700
Politics these days in the age of mass media is about imagery.
00:37:29.700
Reporters always say, well, why don't you run more issue-oriented campaigns?
00:37:36.700
Well, the problem is nobody reads them, no one covers them.
00:37:39.700
The mainstream media, the alternative media, nobody writes about them because they're dry and they're boring.
00:37:45.700
2016 marked the end of the monopoly on political discourse by the three television networks in the United States,
00:37:54.700
and then later the two cable news networks, and the fact that more than half of the people use the internet,
00:38:03.700
go through the internet to get their political news, indeed all their news, gave rise to a vibrant alternative media.
00:38:14.700
And it took power away from the old media, the television network media.
00:38:21.700
One manifestation of this that's very interesting is men and women would come to me wanting to run for public office, run for Congress, run for the Senate, run for governor.
00:38:33.700
And they were attractive, they were articulate, they were qualified, but they couldn't raise money and they had no personal wealth.
00:38:40.700
And you had to be honest with them that when network advertising, when cable advertising were the main medium for communicating with the voters,
00:38:49.700
if you could not pay for those things, it was very hard to win.
00:38:53.700
Therefore, either people of great wealth got elected to office or people who could tap into special interests and other networks to raise millions of dollars.
00:39:06.700
The ability to geo-target people, not only in terms of their geography, district in this case, or their interests,
00:39:15.700
allows a person of modest means who can raise a more modest amount of money to effectively run for office and target voters in a way with maximum efficiency.
00:39:26.700
And this, I think, opens the door to a much broader cross-section of candidates.
00:39:35.700
What I don't think is a positive development now is the fact that having had this election result,
00:39:41.700
some of the tech giants are seeking to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
00:39:57.700
Why do they censor, in some cases completely close out some people?
00:40:03.700
Yes, I've been banned for life on Twitter, but don't bet on it because early this year I will sue them.
00:40:22.700
I don't care if you're the most extreme left-wing Democrat or the most extreme right-wing Republican.
00:40:29.700
I believe in the good sense of the voters to sort out what they believe and what they don't believe,
00:40:34.700
but I believe people should decide for themselves,
00:40:37.700
not have someone else decide what they can read and not read.
00:40:41.700
This, I think, is the great challenge that we face,
00:40:46.700
to have continued debate and have everybody have access to the new media.
00:40:52.700
But it is interesting to me that in the election, particularly in the primary phase, in the nomination phase,
00:41:00.700
the cable news networks built Trump up, not because they were pro-Trump,
00:41:07.700
And when their ratings go up, they can charge more for commercial advertising.
00:41:12.700
And I think also, once he was nominated, they began to try to tear him down.
00:41:19.700
It's also true, to a certain extent, that even in the new media, he was disadvantaged.
00:41:24.700
How could it be that Google would classify a press release from the Trump campaign as a promotion,
00:41:31.700
but a press release from the Hillary Clinton campaign as an update?
00:41:35.700
That's the difference between the opens of millions and millions of individual voters.
00:41:45.700
When you look at this from the point of view of money,
00:41:49.700
because Trump won not only without benefit of polling or analytics or focus groups or survey research,
00:41:55.700
he also won without the benefit of massive doses of paid network and cable television advertising.
00:42:05.700
So that is a shock to the political system, something that no one saw coming.
00:42:12.700
I believe, best guess that I can figure, and it's a little bit of a rough estimate,
00:42:19.700
Trump and his supporters, meaning outside organizations supporting Trump,
00:42:27.700
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee,
00:42:30.700
and groups supporting her, spent close to $2 billion,
00:42:38.700
And therefore, as it turns out, most of it wasted.
00:42:45.700
in which every poll virtually showed that she would win and he would lose?
00:42:50.700
Well, in most cases I think that was an honest mistake,
00:42:53.700
meaning many of the pollsters, most I would say,
00:42:57.700
were basing what they thought would be the makeup of the electorate on the last election.
00:43:04.700
They assumed that the makeup of the electorate would be similar to the makeup in the Obama-Romney race
00:43:10.700
four years previously, and that Hillary Clinton would get the same percentage of vote among African Americans,
00:43:22.700
And in fact, the electorate looked quite different than what they expected.
00:43:31.700
They weren't, although in a few cases you would find some pollsters would oversample Democrats,
00:43:37.700
which would pad her lead a little bit, but by and large it was an honest but inadvertent error
00:43:44.700
because it didn't recognize that the volatility of the race and the coverage of the race
00:43:50.700
would change voter turnout and would render their model obsolete.
00:43:56.700
I thought that on the Friday before the election I was pretty confident Trump would run,
00:44:02.700
but I was looking at polling from the state Republican parties
00:44:05.700
because Trump himself was paying for no polling.
00:44:10.700
But you could see directionally, because a poll is a snapshot in time,
00:44:16.700
it's really only good for the episecond in which it's taken,
00:44:22.700
So you had to look for the direction, and to the extent that you can,
00:44:27.700
you look at several surveys of the same subset of voters taken over time
00:44:32.700
to see whether your candidate is going up, whether your candidate is going down,
00:44:36.700
whether the undecided is growing, whether the undecided is shrinking,
00:44:43.700
Since the election, which was such an extraordinary shock to the elites of both parties
00:44:51.700
and to the two-party duopoly that has run the country,
00:44:55.700
we've seen a number of efforts to delegitimize Trump's election and his presidency.
00:45:01.700
But before you even get there, the enormous advantages of the Democrats in this race
00:45:10.700
and the financial advantage that I just spoke of, we went through several different steps.
00:45:22.700
This kind of tickled me because I wrote an article for The Hill newspaper
00:45:27.700
about two weeks before the election in which I expressed concern
00:45:31.700
that these computerized voting machines, which are very simple and rudimentary computers,
00:45:39.700
You can get a $15 device at Best Buy, and it allows you to manipulate the results of the machines.
00:45:48.700
There are a number of studies where they took machine results
00:45:51.700
and then compared them to actual live exit polling,
00:45:55.700
and the swing would indicate that the machines had probably been tampered with.
00:46:09.700
Yet when Hillary Clinton filed for recounts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Pennsylvania,
00:46:20.700
well, these computerized voting machines are easily manipulated.
00:46:29.700
In fact, what we found out was that Trump won by slightly larger margins
00:46:36.700
Then there was a request by John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign,
00:46:41.700
that the electors be briefed on Russian collusion.
00:46:45.700
Well, that would have been a very brief briefing because there is to this day still no hard evidence
00:46:51.700
of actual collusion, conspiracy, coordination with the Russian state
00:46:57.700
or actors working for the Russian state that affected the outcome of this election.
00:47:02.700
Then we have the Mueller inquiry, which seems to be imploding before our very eyes.
00:47:10.700
On the way here, I was following the news and the release of the memo in the U.S. House of Representatives,
00:47:17.700
in which I have a personal interest because I am among those who was placed under surveillance.
00:47:24.700
My constitutional rights were violated on the basis of a fabricated dossier
00:47:31.700
that said Donald Trump dallied with prostitutes in Russia when he was there in Moscow for a beauty passion,
00:47:37.700
which he didn't. And the genesis of that was partisan.
00:47:41.700
It was first paid for by a Republican hedge fund king,
00:47:45.700
then paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton,
00:47:51.700
and then later paid for a third time by the FBI.
00:47:54.700
One thing you can say for Christopher Steele, he's pretty smart.
00:47:57.700
He sold the same information three times to three different clients.
00:48:00.700
But it wasn't true, and it was never disclosed to the FISA court,
00:48:06.700
which ultimately, on the second go-round, allowed the surveillance of Trump and his associates.
00:48:14.700
We use the power and the authority of the state to spy on one of the two major candidates for president.
00:48:21.700
That is a gross abuse of power, abuse of authority.
00:48:27.700
Watergate pales in comparison because no one was ever actually bugged,
00:48:33.700
and whatever these guys did was done outside the confines of government.
00:48:38.700
In fact, Nixon's greatest mistake was trying to run foreign policy outside the confines of government.
00:48:46.700
But it is probably why, as president, he was able to reach a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviets,
00:48:54.700
open the door to China, which the foreign policy, the State Department, his NSA were deeply opposed to,
00:49:01.700
save Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 by airlifting lethal aid
00:49:07.700
when the Israelis had their back against the wall under attack by the Syrians and the Egyptians.
00:49:13.700
All of that because he went outside the foreign policy structure of the government
00:49:19.700
because he feared that it leaked, which it does.
00:49:29.700
I do think that, and I've said this, that Mr. Mueller doesn't have evidence of Russian collusion,
00:49:36.700
not enough to bring a charge, so he appears to be back to focusing on the termination of Mr. Comey,
00:49:42.700
Mr. Comey, who I think is being revealed today as the epically corrupt FBI director,
00:49:47.700
or the termination of General Flynn, who hopefully you can hear from shortly, in a few weeks.
00:49:53.700
And perhaps he hopes to euchre the president in some process crime, obstruction of justice or perjury,
00:50:01.700
but not in relation to Russian collusion, in relation to those terminations.
00:50:06.700
I don't know how that works, other than to say, I don't believe that Mr. Mueller can indict a sitting president.
00:50:17.700
That report would then go to the Justice Department.
00:50:20.700
The Justice Department could send it to the Congress.
00:50:23.700
The Congress could vote articles of impeachment in the House,
00:50:27.700
although it's unlikely to do so under this House.
00:50:31.700
But if we have a change of the House in the next election, that's a possibility.
00:50:37.700
But a lot of my Republican friends are wringing their hands assuming that the House will be lost.
00:50:49.700
We have African-American and Hispanic unemployment now hitting record lows,
00:51:00.700
Massive corporations like Apple coming back into the country, repatriating funds there,
00:51:17.700
So what was the perfect storm that allowed for the election of a Donald Trump,
00:51:26.700
I would argue that the two major parties working together and the elites of those parties
00:51:32.700
had produced a record of endless foreign war in which our national interests were not clear.
00:51:39.700
Erosion of our civil liberties, the reading of our email, the reading of our text messages,
00:51:47.700
General Clapper, who was the National Security Advisor under Obama, testified in the Congress
00:51:55.700
It didn't exist until Edward Snowden proved that he was a liar and that he'd perjured himself.
00:52:06.700
We also had massive debt and spending and borrowing, which my grandson will pay for,
00:52:16.700
We have trade agreements that we were promised by the Bushes and the Clintons individually,
00:52:23.700
NAFTA and so on, that would be the panacea, but which had the exact opposite effect,
00:52:29.700
pulling all the jobs out of the country, making the center part of our country, the Rust Belt, desolate.
00:52:37.700
We also had immigration policies that cheat the people who are waiting in line,
00:52:43.700
who have gone through the process to obtain their citizenship
00:52:46.700
and seem to reward those who are there illegally.
00:52:49.700
We have no path to citizenship for those who want to become citizens.
00:52:53.700
The Congress has failed to deal with this again and again and again.
00:52:57.700
I think there is, without any question, an opportunity on the table to compromise,
00:53:04.700
keep the DREAMER program, increase border security on the southern border.
00:53:14.700
I think it's the Democrats who aren't serious about it.
00:53:22.700
Anyway, taxes so high that they remove the incentive for expansion.
00:53:27.700
Tax policies that cause the biggest companies to leave town, to get outside the country
00:53:33.700
because it's cheaper to do business there and more profitable.
00:53:36.700
Trump's plan to change the tax laws, what they call inversion,
00:53:44.700
bringing these companies back in the country now to expand in the United States,
00:53:49.700
to hire in the United States is a step in the right direction.
00:53:52.700
The overall cut in the tax rate for all businesses, big and small,
00:53:56.700
which has not even yet gained traction, I think will turbocharge the economy.
00:54:04.700
But at the same time, the President said in his address,
00:54:08.700
which I was very heartened by, that he has a plan to rebuild our cities.
00:54:12.700
That he has a plan to rebuild our urban cities and we're going to try it in Detroit.
00:54:18.700
He promised that in the campaign, but then he also promised to get us out of Afghanistan.
00:54:22.700
And I'm disappointed that we appear to be going deeper in rather than winding down.
00:54:32.700
But you cannot judge a presidency in just one year.
00:54:38.700
There is a sharp increase in the job approval by the President.
00:54:42.700
The tone of his address was, in my opinion, correct.
00:54:46.700
It was conciliatory and uplifting without abandoning his core issues.
00:54:52.700
So, if we get to the 2018 election and Trump and the Republicans are running on jobs and prosperity
00:54:59.700
and the Democrats are running on impeachment, I think they will lose.
00:55:05.700
You just can't say, vote for us because we hate Trump.
00:55:08.700
You have to say, vote for us because here's our alternative program to what Trump proposes.
00:55:13.700
Yet, the Democrats have not yet put forward such a program.
00:55:18.700
It is always a mistake to judge the outcome of an election that's 11 months away.
00:55:27.700
Even today, I get questions about the President's re-election.
00:55:35.700
We don't know what the burning issue in the country will be.
00:55:38.700
We don't know what the state of the economy will be.
00:55:41.700
We don't know what's going to happen between now and then.
00:55:43.700
I do believe, and I said this in Durham, that the most likely Democratic nominee, who I
00:55:52.700
believe will be very strong and very formidable, would be Michelle Obama.
00:55:57.700
The Obamas are more popular at the base of the Democratic Party than the Clintons ever
00:56:06.700
His standings in the American public are still relatively strong.
00:56:09.700
He, too, is polarizing, but his wife is an accomplished attorney.
00:56:15.700
She is stepping up her speaking engagements, I notice.
00:56:18.700
Yes, I think she will be the Democratic nominee.
00:56:21.700
A hunch, but I think she'll be a strong and formidable candidate if she chooses to run.
00:56:27.700
On the other hand, look for a spate of billionaires in both parties with future aspirations,
00:56:34.700
because, to them, the Trump election means you don't have to be a career politician to
00:56:40.700
Businessmen and women are going to look at this and think about running themselves.
00:56:44.700
That's why the notion of Oprah Winfrey is not a ridiculous idea at all.
00:56:49.700
She has one of the great advantages that Trump had, universal name ID.
00:56:55.700
She has a very substantial following in the country.
00:56:59.700
I think that's probably right, but she could if she wanted to, and she would be viable,
00:57:05.700
because the pop culture now is more important than career political experience,
00:57:10.700
and, in fact, given the track record and the results of government over the last 30 years,
00:57:15.700
political experience may be a negative if you're tied to the failed policies of the past.
00:57:24.700
I think no one party could have screwed America up this much by themselves.
00:57:28.700
It took two parties working together to get us where we are,
00:57:31.700
and to create a dynamic in which an outsider, a business person,
00:57:37.700
but someone who became well-known through a network television show,
00:57:44.700
Now, I know elites will say, oh, that's entertainment, that's reality TV.
00:57:50.700
Voters don't see it that way. They see impressions.
00:57:53.700
They see the news, and they think that's fiction.
00:57:59.700
That's why I sometimes say politics is show business for ugly people.
00:58:04.700
In any event, I think you have a dynamic in which the changes are by no means permanent.
00:58:12.700
I was asked by the student press earlier about this shift in the industrial states,
00:58:19.700
Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and the fact that Trump ran marginally better,
00:58:24.700
marginally better among blue-collar Union Catholic members,
00:58:29.700
marginally better among African-American voters.
00:58:31.700
The difference between 11 and 16 percent, 11 and 14 percent, it's a small number,
00:58:36.700
but when you only win by 10,000 votes statewide, it's a significant number.
00:58:45.700
If Trump produces results, he can lock in those gains and maybe forge a new political coalition,
00:58:51.700
and if he doesn't, things can swing back the other way.
00:58:56.700
Other than to say, I think that Trump has identified a populist movement that is bigger than Trump himself,
00:59:06.700
I think the Brexit vote in your country reflects the same populist movement,
00:59:11.700
a feeling that government is not listening to people, a feeling that they are being taken advantage of,
00:59:17.700
and a rejection of the surrender of our sovereignty, a rejection of globalism and the idea of world government.
00:59:25.700
I think that trend is the same, but when you criticize it, the answer you get back is censorship.
00:59:39.700
I will be more than happy to take your questions.
00:59:42.700
A man who's gone through hell, but he's kept going, and he's smart, and he's strong, and people love him.
00:59:51.700
Not everybody, but people love him and respect him.
00:59:56.700
You're watching Worldview 2, built into 35 years of Worldview books, documentaries, research, high-profile interviews, and the radio and television broadcasts of Brannon House.